The Book of Susan: A Novel

[Firmly inserted note, by Susan: "Rubbish! It's only when we think we know it all, and don't really, that we are bored."]

I had taken Susan for dinner that night to a quiet hotel uptown where I knew the dining-room, mercifully lacking an orchestra and a cabaret, was not well patronized, though the cooking was exceptionally good. At this hotel, by a proper manipulation of the head waiter, it is often possible to get a table a little apart from the other diners – an advantage, if one desires to talk intimately without the annoyance of being overheard. It troubled me to find Susan's appetite practically nonexistent; I had ordered one or two special dishes to tempt her, but I saw that she took no pleasure in them, merely forcing herself to eat so as not to disquiet me. She was looking badly, too, all gleamless shadow, and fighting off a physical and mental languor by a stubborn effort which she might have concealed from another, but not from me. It was only too plain to me that her wish was to keep the conversation safely away from whatever was busying and saddening her private thoughts. In this, till the coffee was placed before us, I thought best to humor her, and we had discussed at great length the proper format for her first book of poems, which was to appear within the next month. Also, we had discussed Heywood Sampson's now rapidly maturing plans for his new critical review.

"He really wants me on his staff, Ambo, and I really want to be on it – just for the pleasure of working with him. It's an absolutely unbelievable chance for me! And yet – "

"And yet – ? Is there any reason why you shouldn't accept?"

"At least two reasons, yes. I'm afraid both of them will surprise you."

"I wonder."

"Won't they? If not, Ambo, you must suppose you've guessed them. What are they?"

Susan rather had me here. I had not guessed them, but wasn't willing to admit even to myself that I could not if I tried. I puckered my brows, judicially.

"Well," I hesitated, "you may very naturally feel that 'Dax' is too plump a bird in the hand to be sacrificed for Heywood's slim bluebird in the bush. Any new publication's a gamble, of course. On the other hand, Heywood isn't the kind to leave his associates high and dry. Even if the review should fail, he'll stand by you somehow. He has a comfy fortune, you know; he could carry on the review as a personal hobby if he cares to, even if it never cleared a penny."

Susan smiled, gravely shaking her head: "Cold, dear; stone cold. I'm pretty mercenary these days, but I'm not quite so mercenary as that. Now that I've discovered I can make a living, I'm not nearly so interested in it; hardly at all. It's the stupid side of life, always; I shouldn't like it to make much difference to me now, when it comes to real decisions. I did want a nice home for Sister, though. As for me, any old room most anywhere will do. It will, Ambo; don't laugh; I'm in earnest. But what's your second guess?" she added quickly.

"You've some writing you want to do – a book, maybe? You're afraid the review will interfere?"

"Ah, now you're a tiny bit warmer! I am afraid it will interfere, but in a much deeper way than that; interfere with me."

"I don't quite follow that, do I!"

"Good gracious, no – since you ask. It's simple enough, though – and pretty vague. Only it feels important – here." For an instant her hand just touched her breast. "I hate so to be roped in, Ambo, have things staked out for me – spiritually, I mean. Mr. Sampson's a darling; I love him! But he's a great believer in ropes and stakes and fences – even barbed wire. I'm beginning to see that the whole idea of his review is a scheme for mending political and moral and social fences, stopping up gaps in them made by irresponsible idealists – anarchists, revolutionary socialists – people like that. People like me, really! – There! Now you do look surprised."

I was; but I smiled.

"You've turned Red, Susan? How long since? Overnight?"

"Not red," answered Susan, with bravely forced gayety; "pinkish, say! I haven't fixed on my special shade till I'm sure it becomes me."

"It's certain to do that, dear."

She bobbed me a little bow across the cloth, much in the old happy style – alas, not quite. "But I never did like washed-out colors," she threw in for good measure.

"You are irresponsible, then! Suppose Phil could hear you – or Jimmy. Jimmy'd say your Greenwich Village friends were corrupting you. Perhaps they are?"

"Perhaps they are," echoed Susan, "but I think not. I'm afraid it goes farther back, Ambo. It's left-over Birch Street; that's what it is. So much of me's that. All of me, I sometimes believe."

"Not quite. You'll never escape Hillhouse, either, Susan. You've had both."

"Yes, I've had both," she echoed again, almost on a sigh, pushing her untasted demi-tasse from her.

Suddenly her elbows were planted on the cloth before her, her face – shadowed and too finely drawn – dropped between her hands, her eyes sought and held mine. They dizzied me, her eyes..

"Ambo," she said earnestly, "I suppose I'm a dreadful egotist, but more and more I'm feeling the real me isn't a true child of this world! I love this world – and I hate it. I don't know whether I love it most or hate it most. I bless it and damn it every day of my life – in the same breath often. But sometimes I feel I hate it most – hate it for its cold dullness of head and heart! Why can't we care more to make it worth living in, this beautiful, frightful world! What's the matter with us? Why are we what we are? Half angels – and half pigs or goats or saber-toothed tigers or snakes! Each and every one of us, by and large! And oh, how we do distrust our three-quarters angels – while they're living, anyway! Dreamers – mad visionaries – social rebels – outcasts! Crucify them, crucify them! Time enough to worship them – ages of to-be-wasted time enough – when they're dead!" She paused, still holding my eyes, and drawing in a slow breath, a breath that caught midway and was almost a sob; then her eyes left mine.

"There – that's over. Saying things like that doesn't help us a bit; it's – silly… And half the idealists are mad, no doubt, and have plenty of pig and snake in them, too. I've simply coils and coils of unregenerate serpent in me – and worse. Oh, Ambo dear – but I've a dream in me beyond all that, and a great longing to help it come true! But it doesn't – it won't. I'm afraid it never will – here. Will it there, Ambo? Is there a there?.. Have we got all of Sister that clean fire couldn't take, shut up in that tiny vase?"

"We can hope not, at least," I replied.

"Hope isn't enough," said Susan. "Why don't you say you know we haven't! I know we haven't. I do know it. It's the only thing I —know!"

A nervous waiter sidled up to us and softly slipped a small metal tray before me; it held my bill, carefully turned face downward.

"Anything more, sir?" he murmured.

"A liqueur?" I suggested to Susan. She sat upright in her chair again, with a slight impatient shake of the head.

I ordered a cigar and a fine champagne. The waiter, still nervously fearful of having approached us at a moment when he suspected some intimate question of the heart had grown critically tense, faded from us with the slightest, discreetest cough of reassurance. He was not one, he would have us know, to obtrude material considerations when they were out of place.

"No; I can't go with Mr. Sampson," Susan was saying; "and he'll be hurt – he won't be able to see why. But I'm not made to be an editor – of anything. Editors have to weigh other people's words. I can't even weigh my own. And I talk of nothing but myself. Ugh!"

"You're tired out, overwrought," I stupidly began.

"Don't tell me so!" cried Susan. "If I should believe you, I'd be lost."

"But," I blundered on, "it's only common sense to let down a little, at such a time. If you'd only take a real rest – "

"There is no such thing," said Susan. "We just struggle on and on. It's rather awful, isn't it?" And presently, very quietly, as if to herself, she said over those words, surely among the saddest and loveliest ever written by mortal man:

From too much love of living,From hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives forever,That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.

"To sea," she repeated; "to sea… As if the sea itself knew rest! – Now please pay your big fat bill from your nice fat pocketbook, Ambo; and take me home."

"If I only could!" was my despairing thought; and I astounded the coat-room boy, as I tipped him, by muttering aloud, "Oh, damn Jimmy Kane!"

"Yes, sir – thank you, sir – I will, sir," grinned the coat-room boy.

On our way downtown in the taxi Susan withdrew until we reached her West Tenth Street door. "Good-night, Ambo," she then said; "don't come with me; and thank you for everything – always." I crossed the pavement with her to the loutish brownstone front-stoop of the boarding house; there she turned to dismiss me.

"You didn't ask my second reason for not going on the review, Ambo. You must know it though, sooner or later. I can't write any more – not well, I mean. Even my Dax paragraphs are falling off; Hadow Bury mentioned it yesterday. But nothing comes. I'm sterile, Ambo. I'm written out at twenty. Bless you. Good-night."

"Susan," I cried, "come back here at once!" But she just turned in the doorway to smile back at me, waved her hand, and was gone.

I was of two minds whether to follow her or stay. Then, "A whim," I thought; "the whim of a tired child. And I've often felt that way myself – all writers do. But she must take a vacation of some kind – she must!"

She did.

IX

I woke up the next morning, broad awake before seven o'clock, a full hour earlier than my habit. I woke to find myself greatly troubled by Susan's parting words of the night before, and lay in bed for perhaps twenty minutes turning them over fretfully in my mind. Then I could stand it no longer and rose, bathed, dressed and ate my breakfast in self-exasperating haste, yet with no very clear idea of why I was hurrying or what was to follow. I had an appointment with my lawyer for eleven; I was to lunch with Heywood Sampson at one; after lunch – my immediate business in town being completed – I had purposed to return to New Haven.

Susan would be expecting me for my daily morning call at half-past nine. That call was a fixed custom between us when I was stopping in New York. It seldom lasted over twenty minutes and was really just an opportunity to say good-morning and arrange conveniently for any further plans for the day or evening. But it was now only a few minutes past eight. No matter, Susan was both a nighthawk and a lark, retiring always too late and rising too early – though it must be said she seemed to need little sleep; and I felt that I must see her at once and try somehow to encourage her about her work and bring her back to a more reasonable and normal point of view. "Overstrain," I kept mumbling to myself, idiotically enough, as I charged rather than walked down Fifth Avenue from my hotel: "Overstrain – overstrain.."

However, the brisk physical exertion of my walk gradually quieted my nerves, and as I turned west on Tenth Street I was beginning to feel a little ashamed of my unreasonable anxiety, was even beginning to poke a little fun at myself and preparing to amuse Susan if I could by a whimsical account of my morning brainstorm. I had now persuaded myself that I should find her quietly at work, as I so usually did, and quite prepared to talk things over more calmly. I meant this time to make a supreme effort, and really hoped to persuade her to do two sensible things: First, to accept Heywood Sampson's offer; second, to give up all other work for the present, and get a complete rest and change of scene until her services were needed for the review. That would not be for six or eight weeks at the very least.

And I at last had a plan for her. You may or may not remember that Ashton Parker was a famous man thirty years ago; they called him "Hyena Parker" in Wall Street, and no doubt he deserved it; yet he faded gently out with consumption like any spring poet, having turned theosophist toward the end and made his peace with the Cosmic Urge. Mrs. Ashton Parker is an aunt of mine, long a widow, and a most delightful, easy-going, wide-awake, and sympathetic old lady, who has made her home in Santa Barbara ever since her husband's death there. Her Spanish villa and gardens are famous, and her always kindly eccentricities scarcely less famous than they. I could imagine no one more certain to captivate Susan or to be instantly captivated by her; and though I had not seen Aunt Belle for more than ten years, I knew I could count on her in advance to fall in with my plan. Her hospitality is notorious and would long since have beggared anyone with an income less absurd. Susan should go there at once, for a month at least; the whole thing could be arranged by telegraph. Why in heaven's name hadn't I thought of and insisted upon this plan before!

Miss O'Neill, in person, opened the front door for me.

"Oh, Mr. Hunt!" she wailed. "Thanks to goodness you're here early. I can't do nothing with Togo. He won't eat no breakfast, and he won't let nobody touch him. He's sitting up there like a – I don't know what, with his precious tail uncurled and his head sort of hanging down – it'll break your heart to look at him! I can't bear to myself, though I'd never no use for the beast, neither liking nor disliking! He's above his station, I say. But what with all – And I've got to get that room cleared and redone by twelve, feelings or no feelings, and Gawd knows feelings will enter in! Not half Miss Susan's class either, the new party just now applied, and right beside my own room, too, though well recommended, so I can't complain!"

I broke through her dusty web of words with an impatient, "What on earth are you talking about, Miss O'Neill?"

"You don't know?" she gasped. "You don't – "

"I most certainly do not. Where's Miss Susan?"

"Oh, Mr. Hunt! If I'd-a knowed she hadn't even spoke to you! And you with her all evening – treating to dinner and all! But thank Gawd it's a reel lady she went away with! Miss Leslie, in her big limousine, that's often been here! That I can swear to you with my own eyes!"

Susan was gone, and gone beyond hope of an immediate return. There is no need to labor the details of her flight. A letter, left for me with Miss O'Neill, gives all the surface facts essential.

"Dear Ambo: Try not to be angry with me; or too hurt. When I left you last night I decided to seize an opportunity which had to be seized instantly, or not at all. Mona Leslie has been planning for a long European sojourn all winter, and for the past two weeks has been trying to persuade me to go with her as a sort of overpaid companion and private secretary. She has dangled a salary before me out of all proportion to my possible value to her, but – never feeling very sympathetic toward her sudden whims and moods – that hasn't tempted me.

"Now, at the eleventh hour, literally, this chance for a complete break with my whole past and probable future has tempted me, and I've flopped. You've been urging my need for rest and change; if that's what I do need this will supply it, the change at least – with no sacrifice of my hard-fought-for financial independence. It was the abysmal prospect, as I came in, of having to go straight to my room – with no Sister waiting for me – and beat my poor typewriter and poorer brains for some sparks of wit – when I knew in advance there wasn't a spark left in me – that sent me to the telephone.

"Now I'm packed – in half an hour – and waiting for Mona. The boat sails about three a. m.; I don't even know her name: we'll be on her by midnight. Poor Miss O'Neill is flabbergasted – and so I'm afraid will you be, and Phil and Jimmy. I know it isn't kind of me simply to vanish like this; but try to feel that I don't mean to be unkind. Not even to Togo, though my treachery to him is villainous. It will be a black mark against me in Peter's book forever. But I can't take him, Ambo; I just can't. Please, please – will you? You see, dear, I can't help being a nuisance to you always, after all. And I can't even promise you Togo will learn to love you, any more than Tumps – though I hope he may. He'll grieve himself thin at first. He knows something's in the air and he's grieving beside me now. His eyes – If Mona doesn't come soon, I may collapse at his paws and promise him to stay.

"Mona talks of a year over there, from darkest Russia to lightest France; possibly two. Her plans are characteristically indefinite. She knows heaps of people all over, of course. I'll write often. Please tell Hadow and Mr. Sampson I'm a physical wreck – or mental, if it sounds more convincing. I'm neither; but I'm tired – tired —tired.

"If you can possibly help Phil and Jimmy to understand —

"Here's Mona now. Good-by, dear.

"Your ashamed, utterly grateful

"Susan.

"P. S. I'm wearing your furs."

THE SIXTH CHAPTER

I

SO Togo and I went home. My misery craving company, I rode with him all the way up in the baggage-car, on the self-deceptive theory that he needed an everpresent friend. It is true, however, that he did; and it gratified me and a little cheered me that he seemed really to appreciate my attentions. I sat on a trunk, lighting each cigarette from the end of the last, and he sat at my feet, leaned wearily against the calf of my right leg and permitted me to fondle his ears..

II

"Spring, the sweet spring!" Then birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding – and so on… Sweet lovers love the spring… Jimmy, Phil and I saw little of each other those days. Jimmy clouded his sunny brow and started in working overtime. Phil plunged headlong into what was to have proved his philosophical magnum opus– "The Pluralistic Fallacy; a Critical Study of Pragmatism." I also plunged headlong into a series of interpretative essays for Heywood Sampson's forthcoming review. My first essay was to be on Tolstoy; my second, on Nietzsche; my third, on Anatole France; my fourth, on Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw; my fifth, on Thomas Hardy; and my sixth and last, on Walt Whitman. From the works of these writers it was my purpose to illustrate and clarify for the semicultured the more significant intellectual and spiritual tendencies of our enlightened and humane civilization. It is characteristic that I supposed myself well equipped for this task. But I never got beyond my detached, urbane appreciation of Nietzsche; just as I had concluded it – our enlightened and humane civilization suddenly blew to atoms with a cliché-shattering report and a vile stench as of too-long-imprisoned gas..

III

During those first months of Susan's absence, which for more than four years were to prove the last months of almost world-wide and wholly world-deceptive peace, several things occurred of more or less importance to the present history. They marked, for one thing, the auspicious sprouting and rapid initial growth of Susan's literary reputation. Her poems appeared little more than a month after she had left us, a well-printed volume of less than a hundred pages, in a sober green cover. I had taken a lonely sort of joy in reading and rereading the proof; and if even a split letter escaped me, it has not yet been brought to my attention. These poems were issued under a quiet title and an unobtrusive pen-name, slipping into the market-place without any preliminary puffing, and I feared they were of too fine a texture to attract the notice that I felt they deserved. But in some respects, at least, Susan was born under a lucky star. An unforeseen combination of events suddenly focused public attention – just long enough to send it into a third edition – upon this inconspicuous little book.

Concurrently with its publication, The Puppet Booth opened its doors – its door, rather – on Macdougal Street; an artistic venture quite as marked, you would say, for early oblivion as Susan's own. The cocoon of The Puppet Booth was a small stable where a few Italian venders of fruit and vegetables had kept their scarecrow horses and shabby carts and handcarts. From this drab cocoon issued a mailed and militant dragon-fly; vivid, flashing, erratic; both ugly and beautiful – and wholly alive! For there were in Greenwich Village – as there are, it would seem, in all lesser villages, from Florida to Oregon – certain mourners over and enthusiasts for the art called Drama, which they believed to be virtually extinct. Shows, it is true, hundreds of them, were each season produced on Broadway, and some of these delighted hosts of the affluent, sentimental, and child-like American bourgeoisie. Fortunate managers, playsmiths and actors, endowed with sympathy for the crude tastes of this bourgeoisie, a sympathy partly instinctive and partly developed by commercial acumen, waxed fat with a prosperity for which the Village could not wearily enough express its contempt.

None of these creatures, said the Village – no, not one – was a genuine artist! The Theater, they affirmed, had been raped by the Philistines and prostituted to sophomoric merrymakers by cynical greed. The Theater! Why, it should be a temple, inviolably dedicated to its peculiar god. Since the death of religion, it was perhaps the one temple worthy of pious preservation. Only in a Theater, sincerely consecrated to the great god, Art, could the enlightened, the sophisticated, the free – unite to worship. There only, they implied, could something adumbrating a sacred ritual and a spiritual consolation be preserved.

Luckily for Susan, and indeed for us all – for we have all been gainers from the spontaneous generation of "little theaters" all over America, a phenomenon at its height just previous to the war – one village enthusiast, Isidore Stalinski – by vocation an accompanist, by avocation a vorticist, by race and nature a publicist – had succeeded in mildly infecting Mona Leslie – who took everything in the air, though nothing severely – with offhand zeal for his cause. The importance of her rather casual conversion lay in the fact that her purse strings were perpetually untied. Stalinski well knew that you cannot run even a tiny temple for a handful of worshippers without vain oblations on the side to the false gods of this world, and these imply – oh, Art's desire! – a donor. And of all possible varieties of donor, that most to be desired is the absentee donor – the donor who donates as God sends rain, unseen.

At precisely the right moment Stalinski whispered to Mona Leslie that entre them– though he didn't care to be quoted – he preferred her interpretation of Faure's Clair de Lune to that of – , the particular diva he had just been accompanying through a long, rapturously advertised concert tour; and Mona Leslie, about to be off on her European flight, became the absentee donor to The Puppet Booth.

The small stable was leased and cleansed and sufficiently reshaped to live up to its anxiously chosen name. Much of the reshaping and all of the decorating was done, after business hours, by the clever and pious hands of the villagers. Then four one-act plays were selected from among some hundreds poured forth by village genius to its rehabilitated god. The clever and pious hands flew faster than ever, busying themselves with scenery and costumes and properties and color and lighting – all blended toward the creation of a thoroughly uncommercial atmosphere. And the four plays were staged, directed, acted, and finally attended by the Village. It was a perfectly lovely party and the pleasantest of times was had by all.

And it only remains to drop this tone of patronizing persiflage and admit, with humblest honesty, that the first night at The Puppet Booth was that very rare thing, a complete success; what Broadway calls a "knockout." Within a fortnight seats for The Puppet Booth were at a ruinous premium in all the ticket agencies on or near Times Square.

I happened to be there on that ecstatic opening night. Susan, in her first letter, from Liverpool, had enjoined me to attend and report; Mona would be glad to learn from an unprejudiced outsider how the affair went off. But Susan did not mention the fact that one of the four selected plays had been written by herself.