The Book of Susan: A Novel

Jimmy was with me. Phil, who saw more of him than I did, thought he was going stale from overwork, so I had made a point of hunting him up and dragging him off with me for a night in town. He hadn't wanted to go; said frankly, he wasn't in the mood. I'm convinced it was the first time he had ever used the word "mood" in connection with himself or anybody else. Jimmy and moods of any kind simply didn't belong together.

We had a good man's dinner at a good man's chop-house that night, and, once I got Jimmy to work on it, his normal appetite revived and he engulfed oysters and steak and a deep-dish apple pie and a mug or so of ale, with mounting gusto. We talked, of course, of Susan.

Jimmy, inclined to a rosier view by comfortable repletion, now maintained that perhaps after all Susan had done the natural and sensible thing in joining Miss Leslie. He emphasized all the obvious advantages – complete change of environment, freedom from financial worry, and so on; then he paused..

"And there's another point, Mr. Hunt," he began again, doubtfully this time: "Prof. Farmer and I were talking about it only the other day. We were wondering whether we oughtn't to speak to you. But it's not the easiest thing to speak of – it's so sort of vague – kind of a feeling in the air."

I knew at once what he referred to, and nodded my head. "So you and Phil have noticed it too!"

"Oh, you're on then? I'm glad of that, sir. You've never mentioned anything, so Prof. Farmer and I couldn't be sure. But it's got under our skins that it might make a lot of trouble and something ought to be done about it. It's hard to see what."

"Very," I agreed. "Fire ahead, Jimmy. Tell me exactly what has come to you – to you, personally, I mean."

"Well," said Jimmy, leaning across the table to me and lowering his voice, "it was all of three weeks ago. I went to a dance at the Lawn Club. I don't dance very well, but I figure a fellow ought to know how if he ever has to, so I've slipped in a few lessons. I can keep off my partner's feet, anyway. Well, Steve Putnam took me round that night and introduced me to some girls. I guess if they'd known my mother was living in New Haven and married to a grocer, they wouldn't have had anything to do with me. Maybe I ought to advertise the fact, but I don't – simply because I can't stand for my stepfather, and so mother won't stand for me. Mother and I never could get on, though; and it's funny, too – as a general rule I can get on with 'most everybody. I told Prof. Farmer the other night there must be something wrong with a fellow who can't get on with his own mother – but he only laughed. Of course, Mr. Hunt, I'm not exactly sailing under false pretenses, either; if any girl wanted to make real friends with me – I'd tell her all about myself first."

"Of course," I murmured.

"And the same with men. Steve, for instance. He knows all about me, and his father has a lot of money, but he made it in soap – and Steve's from the West, anyway, and don't care. Gee, I'm wandering – it's the ale, I guess, Mr. Hunt; I'm not used to it. The point is. Steve introduced me round, and I like girls all right, but Susan's kind of spoiled me for the way most of them gabble. I can't do that easy, quick-talk very good yet; Steve's a bear at it. Well – I sat out a dance with one of the girls, a Miss Simmons; pretty, too; but she's only a kid. It was her idea, sitting out the dance in a corner – I thought she didn't like the way I handled myself. But that wasn't it. Mr. Hunt, she wanted to pump me; went right at it, too.

"'You know Mr. Hunt awfully well, don't you?' she asked; and after I'd said yes, and we'd sort of sparred round a little, she suddenly got confidential, and a kind of thrilled look came into her eyes, and then she asked me straight out: 'Have you ever heard there was something —mysterious– about poor Mrs. Hunt's death?'

"'No,' I said.

"'Haven't you!' she said, as much as to tell me she knew, all the same, I must have. 'Why, Mr. Kane, it's all over town. Nobody knows anything, but it's terribly exciting! Some people think she committed suicide, all because of that queer Miss Blake… She must be —you know! And now she's run away to Europe! I believe she was just afraid to stay over here, afraid she might be found out or arrested – or something!'

"That's the way she went on, Mr. Hunt; and, well – naturally, I pooh-poohed it and steered her off, and then she lost interest in me right away. But she's right, Mr. Hunt. There's a lot of that kind of whispered stuff in the air, and I'm mighty glad Susan's off for a year or two where she can't run into it. It'll all die out before she's back again, of course."

"I hope so," was my reply; "but the source of these rumors is very persistent – and very discreet. They start from Mrs. Arthur; they must. But it's impossible to trace them back to her. Jimmy, she means to make New Haven impossible for me, and I've an idea she's likely to succeed. Already, three or four old acquaintances have – well, avoided me, and the general atmosphere's cooling pretty rapidly toward zero. So far as I'm concerned, it doesn't much matter; but it does matter for Susan. She may return to find her whole future clouded by a settled impression that in some way – indirectly – or even, directly – she was responsible for my wife's sudden death."

"It's a damned outrage!" exclaimed Jimmy. "I don't know Mrs. Arthur, but I'd like to wring her neck!"

"So would I, Jimmy; and she knows it. That's why she's finding life these days so supremely worth living."

Jimmy pondered this. "Gee, I hate to think that badly of any woman," he finally achieved; "but I guess it doesn't do to be a fool and think they're all angels – like Susan. Mother's not."

"No, Jimmy, it doesn't do," I responded. "Still, the price for that kind of wisdom is always much higher than it's worth."

"Women," began Jimmy – But his aphorism somehow escaped him; he decided to light a cigarette instead..

And on this wave of cynicism I floated him off with me to The Puppet Booth.

IV

From the point of view of eccentric effectiveness and réclame wonders had been wrought with the small, ancient, brick stable on Macdougal Street; but very little had been or could be done for the comfort of its guests. The flat exterior wall had been stuccoed and brilliantly frescoed to suggest the entrance to some probably questionable side-show at a French village fair; and a gay clown with a drum, an adept at amusing local patter, had been stationed before the door to emphasize the funambulesque illusion. Within, this atmosphere – as of something gaudy and transitory, the mere lath-and-canvas pitch of a vagabond banquiste– had been cleverly carried out. The cramped little theater itself struck one as mere scenery, which was precisely the intention. There was clean sawdust on the floor, and the spectators – one hundred of them suffocatingly filled the hall – were provided only with wooden benches, painted a vivid Paris green. These benches had been thoughtfully selected, however, and were less excruciating to sit on than you would suppose. There was, naturally, no balcony; a false pitch-roof had been constructed of rough stable beams, from which hung bannerets in a crying, carefully studied dissonance of strong color, worthy of the barbaric Bakst. The proscenium arch was necessarily a toylike affair, copied, you would say, from the Guinol in the Tuileries Gardens; and the curtain, for a final touch, looked authentic – had almost certainly been acquired, at some expenditure of thought and trouble, from a traveling Elks' Carnival. There was even a false set of footlights to complete the masquerade; a row of oil lamps with tin reflectors. It was all very restless and amusing – and extravagantly make-believe..

Jimmy and I arrived just in time to squeeze down the single narrow side-aisle and into our places in the fourth row. We had no opportunity to glance about us or consult our broad-sheet programs, none to acquire the proper mood of tense expectancy we later succumbed to, before the lights were lowered and the curtain was rolled up in the true antique style. "Gee!" muttered Jimmy, on my left, with involuntary dislike. "Ah!" breathed a maiden, on my right, with entirely voluntary rapture. Someone in the front row giggled, probably a cub reporter doing duty that evening as a dramatic critic; but he was silenced by a sharp hiss from the rear.

The cause for these significant reactions was the mise en scène of the tiny vacant stage. It consisted of three dead-black walls, a dead-black ceiling, and a dead-black floor-cloth. In the back wall there was a high, narrow crimson door with a black knob. A tall straight-legged table and one straight high-backed chair, both lacquered in crimson, were the only furniture, except for a slender crimson-lacquered perch, down right, to which was chained a yellow, green and crimson macaw. And through the crimson door presently entered – undulated, rather – a personable though poisonous young woman in a trailing robe of vivid yellow and green.

The play that followed, happily a brief one, was called – as Jimmy and I learned from our programs at its conclusion – "Polly." It consisted of a monologue delivered by the poisonous young woman to the macaw, occasionally varied by ad lib. screams and chuckles from that evil white-eyed bird. From the staccato remarks of the poisonous young woman, we, the audience, were to deduce the erratic eroticism of an âme damnée. It was not particularly difficult to do so, nor was it particularly entertaining. As a little adventure in supercynicism, "Polly," in short, was not particularly successful. It needed, and had not been able to obtain, the boulevard wit of a Sacha Guitry to carry it off. But the poisonous young woman had an exquisitely proportioned figure, and her arms, bare to the slight shoulder-straps, were quite faultless. Minor effects of this kind have, even on Broadway, been known to save more than one bad quarter hour from complete collapse… No, it was not the author's lines that carried us safely through this first fifteen minutes of diluted Strindberg-Schnitzler! And the too deliberately bizarre mise en scène, though for a moment it piqued curiosity, had soon proved wearisome, and we were glad – at least, Jimmy and I were – to have it veiled from our eyes.

The curtain rolled down, nevertheless, to ecstatic cries and stubbornly sustained applause. Raised lights revealed an excited, chattering band of the faithful. The poisonous young woman took four curtain calls and would seemingly, from her parting gesture, have drawn us collectively to her fine bosom with those faultless, unreluctant arms. And the maiden on my right shuddered forth to her escort, "I'm thrilled, darling! Feel them – feel my hands – they're moon-cold! They always are, you know, when I'm thrilled!"

"You can't beat this much, Mr. Hunt," whispered Jimmy, on my left. "It's bughouse."

In a sense, it was; in a truer sense, it was not. A careful analysis of the audience would, I was quickly convinced, have disclosed not merely a saving remnant, but a saving majority of honest workmen in the arts – men and women too solidly endowed with brains and humor for any self-conscious posing or public exhibition of temperament. The genuine freaks among us were a scant handful; but it is the special talent and purpose of your freak to – in Whitman's phrase – "positively appear." Ten able freaks to the hundred can turn any public gathering into a side show; and the freaks of the Village, particularly the females of the species, are nothing if not able. Minna Freund, for example, who was sitting just in front of Jimmy; it would be difficult for any assembly to obliterate Minna Freund! She was, that night, exceptionally repulsive in a sort of yellow silk wrapper, with her sparrow's nest of bobbed Henner hair, and her long, bare, olive-green neck, that so obviously needed to be scrubbed!

Having strung certain entirely unrelated words together and called them "Portents," she had in those days acquired a minor notoriety, and Susan – impishly enjoying my consequent embarrassment – had once introduced me to her as an admirer of her work, at an exhibition of Cubist sculpture. Minna was standing at the time, I recalled, before Pannino's "Study of a Morbid Complex," and she at once informed me that the morbid complex in question had been studied from the life. She had posed her own destiny for Pannino, so she assured me, at three separate moments of psychic crisis, and the inevitable result had been a masterpiece. "How it writhes!" she had exclaimed: but to my uninstructed eyes Pannino's Study did anything but writhe; it was stolidly passive; it looked precisely as an ostrich egg on a pedestal would look if viewed in a slightly convex mirror… How far away all that stupid nonsense seems!

And, suddenly, Jimmy leaped on the bench beside me as if punctured by a pin: "Oh, good Lord, Mr. Hunt!" he groaned. "Look here!"

He had thrust his program before me and was pointing to the third play of the series with an unsteady finger.

"It's the same name," he whispered hoarsely; "the one she's used for her book. Do you think – "

"I'll soon find out," was my answer. "We must know what we're in for, Jimmy!" And just as the lights were lowered for the second play I rose, defying audible unpopularity, and squeezed my way out to the door. That is why I cannot describe for you the second play, a harsh little tragedy of the sweatshops – "Horrible," Jimmy affirmed, "but it kind of got me!" – written by an impecunious young man with expensive tastes, who has since won the means of gratifying them along Broadway by concocting for that golden glade his innocently naughty librettos – "Tra-la, Thérèse!" and "Oh, Mercy, Modestine!"

Having sought and interviewed Stalinski – I found him huddled in the tiny box-office, perspiring unpleasantly from nervousness and many soaring emotions – I was back in my seat, more unpopular than ever, in good time for Susan's – it was unquestionably Susan's – play.

But most of you have read, or have seen, or have read about, Susan's play..

It was the sensation of the evening, of many subsequent evenings; and I have often wondered precisely why – for there is in it nothing sensational. Its atmosphere is delicately fantastic; remote, you would say, from the sympathies of a matter-of-fact world, particularly as its fantasy is not the highly sentimentalized make-believe of some popular fairy tale. This fantasy of Susan's is ironic and grave; simple in movement, too – just a few subtle modulations on a single poignant theme. And I ask myself wherein lies its throat-tightening quality, its irresistible appeal? And I find but one answer; an answer which I had always supposed, in my long intellectual snobbery, an undeserved compliment to the human race; a compliment no critic, who was not either dishonest or a fool, could pay mankind.

But what other explanation can be given for the success of Susan's play, both here and in England, than its sheer beauty? Beauty of substance, of mood, of form, of quiet, heart-searching phrase! It is not called "The Magic Circle," but it might have been; for its magic is genuine, distilled from the depths of Nature, and it casts an unescapable spell – on poets and bankers, on publicans and prostitutes and priests, on all and sundry, equally and alike. It even casts its spell on those who act in it, and no truer triumph can come to an author. I have never seen it really badly played. Susan has never seen it played at all.

On the first wave of this astonishing triumph, Susan's pen-name was swept into the newspapers and critical journals of America and England, and a piquant point for gossip was added by the revelation that "Dax," who for several months had so wittily enlivened the columns of Whim, was one and the same person. Moreover, it was soon bruited about that the author was a slip of a girl – radiantly beautiful, of course; or why romance concerning her! – and that there was something mysterious, even sinister, in her history.

"A child of the underworld," said one metropolitan journal, in its review of her poems. Popular legend presently connected her, though vaguely, with the criminal classes. I have heard an overdressed woman in a theater lobby earnestly assuring another that she knew for a fact that – (Susan) had been born in a brothel – "one of those houses, my dear" – and brought up – like Oliver Twist, though the comparison escaped her – to be a thief.

And so it was that the public eye lighted for a little hour on Susan's shy poems. Poetry was said to be looking up in those days; and influential critics in their influential, uninfluenced way suddenly boomed these, saying mostly the wrong things about them, but saying them over and over with energy and persistence. The first edition vanished overnight; a larger second edition was printed and sold out within a week or two; a still larger third edition was launched and disposed of more slowly. Then came the war..

V

If I can say anything good of the war, it is this: Since seemingly it must have come anyway, sooner or later, so far as Susan is concerned it came just in time. A letter from Phil to Susan, received toward the close of July, 1914, at the château of the Comtesse de Bligny, near Brussels, will tell you why.

"Dear Susan: If the two or three notes I've sent you previously have been brief and dull, I knew you would make the inevitable allowances and forgive me. In the first place, God didn't create me to scintillate, as you've long had reason to know; and since you left us I've been buried in a Sahara of work, living so retired a life in my desert that little news comes my way. But Jimmy breaks in on me, always welcomely, with an occasional bulletin, and last night Hunt came over and we had a long evening together. He's worried, Susan, not without great cause, I fear; he looks tired and ill; and after mulling things over, with my usual plodding caution – I've thought best to explain the situation to you.

"It can be put in very few words. The deserved success of your play and the poems, following a natural law that one too helplessly wishes otherwise, has led to a crisis in the gossip – malicious in origin, certainly – which has fastened upon you and Hunt; and this gossip lately has taken a more sinister turn. More and more openly it is being said that the circumstances surrounding Mrs. Hunt's death ought to be probed – 'probed' is just now the popular word in this connection. The feeling is widespread that you were in some way responsible for it.

"I must use brutal phrases to lay the truth before you. You are not, seemingly, suspected of murder. You are suspected of having killed Mrs. Hunt during a sudden access of mental irresponsibility. It is whispered that Hunt, improperly, in some devious way, got the matter hushed up and the affair reported as an accident. As a result of these absurd and terrible rumors, Hunt finds himself a pariah – many of his oldest acquaintances no longer recognize him when they meet. It is a thoroughly distressing situation, and it's difficult to see how the mad injustice of it can be easily righted.

"The danger is, of course, that some misguided person will get the whole matter into the newspapers; it is really a miracle that it has not already been seized on by some yellow sheet, the opportunity for a sensational story is so obviously ripe. Happily" – oh, Phil! oh, philosopher! – "the present curious tension in European politics is for the moment turning journalistic eyes far from home. But as all such diplomatic flurries do, this one will pass, leaving the flatness of the silly season upon us. This is what Hunt most fears; and when you next see him you will find him grayer and older because of this anxiety.

"He dreads, for you, a sudden journalistic demand for a public investigation, and feels – though in this I can hardly agree with him – that such a demand could end only in a public trial, in view of the peculiar nature of all the circumstances involved – a veritable cause célèbre.

"How shocking all this must be to you. The sense of the mental anguish I'm causing you is a horror to me. Nothing could have induced me to write in this way but the compulsion of my love for Hunt and you. It seems to me imperative that your names should be publicly cleared, in advance of any public outcry.

"So I urge you, Susan – fully conscious of my personal responsibility in doing so – to return at once and to join with Hunt and your true friends in quashing finally and fully these damnable lies. It is my strong conviction that this is your duty to yourself, to Hunt, and to us all. If you and Hunt, together or separately, make a public statement, in view of the rumors now current, and yourselves demand the fullest public investigation of the facts, there can be but one issue. Your good names will be cleared; the truth will prevail. Dreadful as this prospect must be for you both, it now seems to me – and let me add, to Jimmy – the one wise course for you to take. But only you, if you agree with me, can persuade Hunt to such a course.."

It is unnecessary to quote the remaining paragraphs of Phil's so characteristic letter.

No doubt Susan would have returned immediately if she could, but, less than a week after the receipt of Phil's letter, the diplomatic flurry in Europe had taken a German army through Luxemburg and into Belgium, and within less than two weeks Susan and Mona Leslie and the Comtesse de Bligny were in uniform, working a little less than twenty-four hours a day with the Belgian Red Cross..

It is no purpose of mine to attempt any description of Susan's war experience or service. Those first corroding weeks and months of the war have left ineffaceable scars on the consciousness of the present generation. I was not a part of them, and can add nothing to them by talking about them at second hand. It might, however, repay you to read – if you have not already done so – a small anonymous volume which has passed through some twenty or thirty editions, entitled Stupidity Triumphant, and containing the brief, sharply etched personal impressions of a Red Cross nurse in Flanders during the early days of Belgium's long agony. It is now an open secret that this little book was written by Susan; and among the countless documents on frightfulness this one, surely, by reason of its simplicity and restraint, its entire absence of merely hysterical outcry, is not the least damning and not – I venture to believe – the least permanent.

There is one short paragraph in this book of detached pictures, marginal notes, and condensed reflections that brought home to me, personally, war, the veritable thing itself, as no other written lines were able to do – as nothing was able to do until I had seen the beast with my own eyes. It is not an especially striking paragraph, and just why it should have done so I am unable to say. Certain extracts from the book have been widely quoted – one even, I am told, was read out in Parliament by Arthur Henderson – but I have never seen this one quoted anywhere; so I am rather at a loss to explain its peculiar influence on me. Entirely individual reactions to the printed word are always a little mysterious. I know, for example, one usually enlightened and catholic critic who stubbornly maintains that a very commonplace distich by Lord De Tabley is the most magical moment in all English verse. But here is my paragraph – or Susan's – for what it is worth:

"This Pomeranian prisoner was a blond boy-giant; pitifully shattered; it was necessary to remove his left leg to the knee. The operation was rapidly but skillfully performed. He was then placed on a pallet, close beside the cot of a wounded German officer. After coming out of the ether his fever mounted and he grew delirious. The German officer commanded him to be silent. He might just as well have commanded the sun to stand still, and he must, however muzzily, have known that. Yet he was outraged by this unconscious act of insubordination. Thrice he repeated his absurd command – then raised himself with a groan, leaned across, and struck the delirious boy in the face with a weakly clenched fist. It was not a heavy blow; the officer's strength did not equal his intention. 'Idiot!' I cried out; and thrust him back on his cot, half-fainting from the pain of his futile effort at discipline. 'Idiot' was, after all, the one appropriate word. It was constantly, I found, the one appropriate word. The beast was a stupid beast."