Iole

When he obtained command of himself the poet was saying, “It is my hour for withdrawal. It were insincere and artificial to ask your indulgence–”

He rose to his rotund height.

“You are due to sit in your cage,” stammered Wayne, comprehending.

“My den,” corrected the poet, saturating the air with the sweetness of his smile.

Wayne arose. “About that business—” he began desperately; but the poet’s soft, heavy hand hovered in mid-air, and Wayne sat down so suddenly that when his eyes recovered their focus the poet had disappeared.

A benumbed resentment struggled within him for adequate expression; he hitched his chair about to command a view of the meadow, then sat motionless, hypnotized by the view. Eight girls, clad in pink blouses and trousers, golden hair twisted up, decorated the landscape. Some were kneeling, filling baskets of woven, scented grasses with wild strawberries; some were wading the branches of the meadow brook, searching for trout with grass-woven nets; some picked early peas; two were playing a lightning set at tennis. And in the center of everything that was going on was Briggs, perfectly at ease, making himself agreeably at home.

The spectacle of Briggs among the Hamadryads appeared to paralyze Wayne.

Then an immense, intense resentment set every nerve in him tingling. Briggs, his friend, his confidential business adviser, his indispensable alter ego, had abandoned him to be tormented by this fat, saccharine poet—abandoned him while he, Briggs, made himself popular with eight of the most amazingly bewitching maidens mortal man might marvel on! The meanness stung Wayne till he jumped to his feet and strode out into the sunshine, menacing eyes fastened on Briggs.

“Now wouldn’t that sting you!” he breathed fiercely, turning up his trousers and stepping gingerly across the brook.

Whether or not Briggs saw him coming and kept sidling away he could not determine; he did not wish to shout; he kept passing pretty girls and taking off his hat, and following Briggs about, but he never seemed to come any nearer to Briggs; Briggs always appeared in the middle distance, flitting genially from girl to girl; and presently the absurdity of his performance struck Wayne, and he sat down on the bank of the brook, too mad to think. There was a pretty girl picking strawberries near-by; he rose, took off his hat to her, and sat down again. She was one of those graceful, clean-limbed, creamy-skinned creatures described by Briggs; her hair was twisted up into a heavy, glistening knot, showing the back of a white neck; her eyes matched the sky and her lips the berries she occasionally bit into or dropped to the bottom of her woven basket.

Once or twice she looked up fearlessly at Wayne as her search for berries brought her nearer; and Wayne forgot the perfidy of Briggs in an effort to look politely amiable.

Presently she straightened up where she was kneeling in the long grass and stretched her arms. Then, still kneeling, she gazed curiously at Wayne with all the charm of a friendly wild thing unafraid.

“Shall we play tennis?” she asked.

“Certainly,” said Wayne, startled.

“Come, then,” she said, picking up her basket in one hand and extending the other to Wayne.

He took the fresh, cool fingers, and turned scarlet. Once his glance sneaked toward Briggs, but that young man was absorbed in fishing for brook trout with a net! Oh, ye little fishes! with a net!

Wayne’s brain seemed to be swarming with glittering pink-winged thoughts all singing. He walked on air, holding tightly to the hand of his goddess, seeing nothing but a blur of green and sunshine. Then a clean-cut idea stabbed him like a stiletto: was this Vanessa or Iole? And, to his own astonishment, he asked her quite naturally.

“Iole,” she said, laughing. “Why?”

“Thank goodness,” he said irrationally.

“But why?” she persisted curiously.

“Briggs—Briggs—” he stammered, and got no further. Perplexed, his goddess walked on, thoughtful, pure-lidded eyes searching some reasonable interpretation for the phrase, “Briggs—Briggs.” But as Wayne gave her no aid, she presently dismissed the problem, and bade him select a tennis bat.

“I do hope you play well,” she said. Her hope was comparatively vain; she batted Wayne around the court, drove him wildly from corner to corner, stampeded him with volleys, lured him with lobs, and finally left him reeling dizzily about, while she came around from behind the net, saying, “It’s all because you have no tennis shoes. Come; we’ll rest under the trees and console ourselves with chess.”

Under a group of huge silver beeches a stone chess-table was set embedded in the moss; and Iole indolently stretched herself out on one side, chin on hands, while Wayne sorted weather-beaten basalt and marble chess-men which lay in a pile under the tree.

She chatted on without the faintest trace of self-consciousness the while he arranged the pieces; then she began to move. He took a long time between each move; but no sooner did he move than, still talking, she extended her hand and shoved her piece into place without a fraction of a second’s hesitation.

When she had mated him twice, and he was still gazing blankly at the mess into which she had driven his forces, she sat up sideways, gathering her slim ankles into one hand, and cast about her for something to do, eyes wandering over the sunny meadow.

“We had horses,” she mused; “we rode like demons, bareback, until trouble came.”

“Trouble?”

“Oh, not trouble—poverty. So our horses had to go. What shall we do—you and I?” There was something so subtly sweet, so exquisitely innocent in the coupling of the pronouns that a thrill passed completely through Wayne, and probably came out on the other side.

“I know what I’m going to do,” he said, drawing a note-book and a pencil from his pocket and beginning to write, holding it so she could see.

“Do you want me to look over your shoulder?” she asked.

“Please.”

She did; and it affected his penmanship so that the writing grew wabbly. Still she could read:

(Telegram)

To Sailing Master, Yacht Thendara, Bar Harbor:

Put boat out of commission. I may be away all summer.

Wayne.

“How far is it to the station?” asked Wayne, turning to look into her eyes.

“Only five miles,” she said. “I’ll walk with you if you like. Shall I?”

IV

WEALTH,” observed the poet, waving his heavy white hand, “is a figure of speech, Mr. Wayne. Only by the process of elimination can one arrive at the exquisite simplicity of poverty—care-free poverty. Even a single penny is a burden—the flaw in the marble, the fly in the amber of perfection. Cast it away and enter Eden!” And joining thumb and forefinger, he plucked a figurative copper from the atmosphere, tossed it away, and wiped his fingers on his handkerchief.

“But—” began Wayne uneasily.

“Try it,” smiled the poet, diffusing sweetness; “try it. Dismiss all thoughts of money from your mind.”

“I do,” said Wayne, somewhat relieved. “I thought you meant for me to chuck my securities overboard and eat herbs.”

“Not in your case—no, not in your case. I can do that; I have done it. No, your sacred mission is simply to forget that you are wealthy. That is a very precious thought, Mr. Wayne—remain a Crœsus and forget it! Not to eliminate your wealth, but eliminate all thought of it. Very, very precious.”

“Well, I never think about things like that except at a directors’ meeting,” blurted out the young fellow. “Perhaps it’s because I’ve never had to think about it.”

The poet sighed so sweetly that the atmosphere seemed to drip with the saccharine injection.

“I wish,” ventured Wayne, “that you would let me mention the subject of business”—the poet shook his head indulgently—“just to say that I’m not going to foreclose.” He laid a packet of legal papers in the poet’s hand.

“Hush,” smiled Guilford, “this is not seemly in the house beautiful.... What was it you said, Mr. Wayne?”

“I? I was going to say that I just wanted—wanted to stay here—be your guest, if you’ll let me,” he said honestly. “I was cruising—I didn’t understand—Briggs—Briggs—” He stuck.

“Yes, Briggs,” softly suggested the poet, spraying the night air with more sweetness.

“Briggs has spoken to you about—about your daughter Vanessa. You see, Briggs is my closest friend; his happiness is—er—important to me. I want to see Briggs happy; that’s why I want to stay here, just to see Briggs happy. I—I love Briggs. You understand me, don’t you, Mr. Guilford?”

The poet breathed a dulcet breath. “Perfectly,” he murmured. “The contemplation of Mr. Briggs’ happiness eliminates all thoughts of self within you. By this process of elimination you arrive at happiness yourself. Ah, the thought is a very precious one, my young friend, for by elimination only can we arrive at perfection. Thank you for the thought; thank you. You have given me a very, very precious thought to cherish.”

“I—I have been here a week,” muttered Wayne. “I thought—perhaps—my welcome might be outworn–”

“In the house beautiful,” murmured the poet, rising and waving his heavy white hand at the open door, “welcome is eternal.” He folded his arms with difficulty, for he was stout, and one hand clutched the legal papers; his head sank. In profound meditation he wandered away into the shadowy house, leaving Wayne sitting on the veranda rail, eyes fixed on a white shape dimly seen moving through the moonlit meadows below. Briggs sauntered into sight presently, his arms full of flowers.

“Get me a jug of water, will you? Vanessa has been picking these and she sent me back to fix ’em. Hurry, man! She is waiting for me in the garden.” Wayne gazed earnestly at his friend.

“So you have done it, have you, Stuyve?”

“Done what?” demanded Briggs, blushing.

“It.”

“If you mean,” he said with dignity, “that I’ve asked the sweetest girl on earth to marry me, I have. And I’m the happiest man on the footstool, too. Good Heaven, George,” he broke out, “if you knew the meaning of love! if you could for one second catch a glimpse of the beauty of her soul! Why, man of sordid clay that I was—creature of club and claret and turtle—like you–”

“Drop it!” said Wayne somberly.

“I can’t help it, George. We were beasts—and you are yet. But my base clay is transmuted, spiritualized; my soul is awake, traveling, toiling toward the upward heights where hers sits enthroned. When I think of what I was, and what you still are–”

Wayne rose exasperated:

“Do you think your soul is doing the only upward hustling?” he said hotly.

Briggs, clasping his flowers to his breast, gazed out over them at Wayne.

“You don’t mean–”

“Yes, I do,” said Wayne. “I may be crazy, but I know something,” with which paradox he turned on his heel and walked into the moonlit meadow toward that dim, white form moving through the dusk.

“I wondered,” she said, “whether you were coming,” as he stepped through the long, fragrant grass to her side.

“You might have wondered if I had not come,” he answered.

“Yes, that is true. This moonlight is too wonderful to miss,” she added without a trace of self-consciousness.

“It was for you I came.”

“Couldn’t you find my sisters?” she asked innocently.

He did not reply. Presently she stumbled over a hummock, recovered her poise without comment, and slipped her hand into his with unconscious confidence.

“Do you know what I have been studying to-day?” she asked.

“What?”

“That curious phycomycetous fungus that produces resting-spores by the conjugation of two similar club-shaped hyphæ, and in which conidia also occur. It’s fascinating.”

After a silence he said:

“What would you think of me if I told you that I do not comprehend a single word of what you have just told me?”

“Don’t you?” she asked, astonished.

“No,” he replied, dropping her hand. She wondered, vaguely distressed; and he went on presently: “As a plain matter of fact, I don’t know much. It’s an astonishing discovery for me, but it’s a fact that I am not your mental, physical, or spiritual equal. In sheer, brute strength perhaps I am, and I am none too certain of that, either. But, and I say it to my shame, I can not follow you; I am inferior in education, in culture, in fine instinct, in mental development. You chatter in a dozen languages to your sisters: my French appals a Paris cabman; you play any instrument I ever heard of: the guitar is my limit, the fandango my repertoire. As for alert intelligence, artistic comprehension, ability to appreciate, I can not make the running with you; I am outclassed—hopelessly. Now, if this is all true—and I have spoken the wretched truth—what can a man like me have to say for himself?”

Her head was bent, her fair face was in shadow. She strayed on a little way, then, finding herself alone, turned and looked back at him where he stood. For a moment they remained motionless, looking at one another, then, as on some sweet impulse, she came back hastily and looked into his eyes.

“I do not feel as you do,” she said; “you are very—good—company. I am not all you say; I know very little. Listen. It—it distresses me to have you think I hold you—lightly. Truly we are not apart.”

“There is but one thing that can join us.”

“What is that?”

“Love.”

Her pure gaze did not falter nor her eyes droop. Curiously regarding him, she seemed immersed in the solution of the problem as he had solved it.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“With all my soul—such as it is, with all my heart, with every thought, every instinct, every breath I draw.”

She considered him with fearless eyes; the beauty of them was all he could endure.

“You love me?” she repeated.

He bent his head, incapable of speech.

“You wish me to love you?”

He looked at her, utterly unable to move his lips.

“How do you wish me to love you?”

He opened his arms; she stepped forward, close to him.

Then their lips met.

“Oh,” she said faintly, “I did not know it—it was so sweet.”

And as her head fell back on his arm about her neck she looked up at him full of wonder at this new knowledge he had taught her, marvelous, unsuspected, divine in its simplicity. Then the first delicate blush that ever mounted her face spread, tinting throat and forehead; she drew his face down to her own.

The poet paced the dim veranda, arms folded, head bent. But his glance was sideways and full of intelligence as it included two vague figures coming slowly back through the moon-drenched meadow.

“By elimination we arrive at perfection,” he mused; “and perfection is success. There remain six more,” he added irrelevantly, “but they’re young yet. Patience, subtle patience—and attention to the little things.” He pinched a morsel of air out of the darkness, examined it and released it.

“The little things,” he repeated; “that is a very precious thought.... I believe the sea air may agree with me—now and then.”

And he wandered off into his “den” and unlocked a drawer in his desk, and took out a bundle of legal papers, and tore them slowly, carefully, into very small pieces.

V

THE double wedding at the Church of Sainte Cicindella was pretty and sufficiently fashionable to inconvenience traffic on Fifth Avenue. Partly from loyalty, partly from curiosity, the clans of Wayne and Briggs, with their offshoots and social adherents, attended; and they saw Briggs and Wayne on their best behavior, attended by Sudbury Grey and Winsted Forest; and they saw two bridal visions of loveliness, attended by six additional sister visions as bridesmaids; and they saw the poet, agitated with the holy emotions of a father, now almost unmanned, now rallying, spraying the hushed air with sweetness. They saw clergymen and a bishop, and the splendor of stained glass through which ushers tiptoed. And they heard the subdued rustling of skirts and the silken stir, and the great organ breathing over Eden, and a single artistically-modulated sob from the poet. A good many other things they heard and saw, especially those of the two clans who were bidden to the breakfast at Wayne’s big and splendid house on the southwest corner of Seventy-ninth Street and Madison Avenue.

For here they were piped to breakfast by the boatswain of Wayne’s big seagoing yacht, the Thendara—on which brides and grooms were presently to embark for Cairo via the Azores—and speeches were said and tears shed into goblets glimmering with vintages worth prayerful consideration.

And in due time two broughams, drawn by dancing horses, with the azure ribbons aflutter from the head-stalls, bore away two very beautiful and excited brides and two determined, but entirely rattled, grooms. And after that several relays of parents fraternized with the poet and six daughters, and the clans of Briggs and of Wayne said a number of agreeable things to anybody who cared to listen; and as everybody did listen, there was a great deal of talk—more talk in a minute than the sisters of Iole had heard in all their several limited and innocently natural existences. So it confused them, not with its quality, but its profusion; and the champagne made their cheeks feel as though the soft peachy skin fitted too tight, and a number of persistent musical instruments were being tuned in their little ears; and, not yet thoroughly habituated to any garments except pink sunbonnets and pajamas, their straight fronts felt too tight, and the tops of their stockings pulled, and they balanced badly on their high heels, and Aphrodite and Cybele, being too snugly laced, retired to rid themselves of their first corsets.

The remaining four, Lissa, now eighteen; Dione, fifteen; Philodice, fourteen, and Chlorippe, thirteen, found the missing Pleiads in the great library, joyously donning their rose-silk lounging pajamas, while two parlor maids brought ices from the wrecked feast below.

So they, too, flung from them crinkling silk and diaphanous lace, high-heel shoon and the delicate body-harness never fashioned for free-limbed dryads of the Rose-Cross wilds; and they kept the electric signals going for ices and fruits and pitchers brimming with clear cold water; and they sat there in a circle like a thicket of fluttering pale-pink roses, until below the last guest had sped out into the unknown wastes of Gotham, and the poet’s heavy step was on the stair.

The poet was agitated—and like a humble bicolored quadruped of the Rose-Cross wilds, which, when agitated, sprays the air—so the poet, laboring obesely under his emotion, smiled with a sweetness so intolerable that the air seemed to be squirted full of saccharinity to the point of plethoric saturation.

“My lambs,” he murmured, fat hands clasped and dropped before him as straight as his rounded abdomen would permit; “my babes!”

“Do you think,” suggested Aphrodite, busy with her ice, “that we are going to enjoy this winter in Mr. Wayne’s house?”

“Enjoyment,” breathed the poet in an overwhelming gush of sweetness, “is not in houses; it is in one’s soul. What is wealth? Everything! Therefore it is of no value. What is poverty? Nothing! And, as it is the little things that are the most precious, so nothing, which is less than the very least, is precious beyond price. Thank you for listening; thank you for understanding. Bless you.”

And he wandered away, almost asphyxiated with his emotions.

“I mean to have a gay winter—if I can ever get used to being laced in and pulled over by those dreadful garters,” observed Aphrodite, stretching her smooth young limbs in comfort.

“I suppose there would be trouble if we wore our country clothes on Broadway, wouldn’t there?” asked Lissa wistfully.

Chlorippe, aged thirteen, kicked off her sandals and stretched her pretty snowy feet: “They were never in the world made to fit into high-heeled shoes,” she declared pensively, widening her little rosy toes.

“But we might as well get used to all these things,” sighed Philodice, rolling over among the cushions, a bunch of hothouse grapes suspended above her pink mouth. She ate one, looked at Dione, and yawned.

“I’m going to practise wearing ’em an hour a day,” said Aphrodite, “because I mean to go to the theater. It’s worth the effort. Besides, if we just sit here in the house all day asking each other Greek riddles, we will never see anybody until Iole and Vanessa come back from their honeymoon and give teas and dinners for all sorts of interesting young men.”

“Oh, the attractive young men I have seen in these few days in New York!” exclaimed Lissa. “Would you believe it, the first day I walked out with George Wayne and Iole, I was perfectly bewildered and enchanted to see so many delightful-looking men. And by and by Iole missed me, and George came back and found me standing entranced on the corner of Fifth Avenue; and I said, “Please don’t disturb me, George, because I am only standing here to enjoy the sight of so many agreeable-looking men.” But he acted so queerly about it.” She ended with a little sigh. “However, I love George, of course, even if he does bore me. I wonder where they are now—the bridal pairs?”

“I wonder,” mused Philodice, “whether they have any children by this time?”

“Not yet,” explained Aphrodite. “But they’ll probably have some when they return. I understand it takes a good many weeks—to–”

“To find new children,” nodded Chlorippe confidently. “I suppose they’ve hidden the cunning little things somewhere on the yacht, and it’s like hunt the thimble and lots and lots of fun.” And she distributed six oranges.

Lissa was not so certain of that, but, discussing the idea with Cybele, and arriving at no conclusion, devoted herself to the large juicy orange with more satisfaction, conscious that the winter’s outlook was bright for them all and full of the charming mystery of anticipations so glittering yet so general that she could form not even the haziest ideas of their wonderful promise. And so, sucking the sunlit pulp of their oranges, they were content to live, dream, and await fulfilment under the full favor of a Heaven which had never yet sent them aught but happiness beneath the sun.

VI

NEITHER Lethbridge nor Harrow—lately exceedingly important undergraduates at Harvard and now twin nobodies in the employment of the great Occidental Fidelity and Trust Company—neither of these young men, I say, had any particular business at the New Arts Theater that afternoon.

For the play was Barnard Haw’s Attitudes, the performance was private and intensely intellectual, the admission by invitation only, and between the acts there was supposed to be a general causerie among the gifted individuals of the audience.

Why Stanley West, president of the Occidental Trust, should have presented to his two young kinsmen the tickets inscribed with his own name was a problem, unless everybody else, including the elevator boys, had politely declined the offer.

“That’s probably the case,” observed Lethbridge. “Do we go?”

“Art,” said Harrow, “will be on the loose among that audience. And if anybody can speak to anybody there, we’ll get spoken to just as if we were sitting for company, and first we know somebody will ask us what Art really is.”

“I’d like to see a place full of atmosphere,” suggested Lethbridge. “I’ve seen almost everything—the Café Jaune, and Chinatown, and—you remember that joint at Tangier? But I’ve never seen atmosphere. I don’t care how thin it is; I just want to say that I’ve seen it when the next girl throws it all over me.” And as Harrow remained timid, he added: “We won’t have to climb across the footlights and steal a curl from the author, because he’s already being sheared in England. There’s nothing to scare you.”

Normally, however, they were intensely afraid of Art except at their barbers’, and they had heard, in various ways as vague as Broad Street rumors, something concerning these gatherings of the elect at the New Arts Theater on Saturday afternoons, where unselfish reformers produced plays for Art’s sake as a rebuke to managers who declined to produce that sort of play for anybody’s sake.

“I’ll bet,” said Harrow, “that some thrifty genius sent Stanley West those tickets in a desperate endeavor to amalgamate the aristocracies of wealth and intellect!—as though you could shake ’em up as you shake a cocktail! As though you’d catch your Uncle Stanley wearing his richest Burgundy flush, sitting in the orchestra and talking Arr Noovo to a young thing with cheek-bones who’d pinch him into a cocked hat for a contribution between the acts!”