Chapter XV: Book SIX: Wilson Avenue (11)

He found the players assembled on their tiny stage, hardly larger than the one in the children’s theatre at Community House. The house would seat ninety-nine people only; one more seat, and the Artists’ Theatre would have come within the theatre ordinance and been required to pay a theatre-tax. Officially then, as a theatre, it did not exist. The actors, Felix knew, received no pay; they were lawyers and doctors, painters and poets, business men’s wives and ambitious young women just out of school. The authors of the plays would receive no royalty; the income from seat-sales would not cover the rent of the theatre itself, and the deficit would have to be made up by enthusiasts.... In a manner of speaking, it wasn’t a theatre at all—it was a dream.

As soon as he entered the theatre Felix felt its irresistible dream quality. Upon the stage, walking up and down, was the slight, striking, dramatic figure of Gregory Storm—the dreamer whose dream all this was, the man who still, in the years of maturity, was trying to achieve a childish, absurd and delightful impossibility. It was he who had named this enterprise “The Artists’ Theatre”; no one else in Chicago would have been so brave, or so foolish....

He turned, saw Felix, nodded at him, and clapped his hands. “Cast of ‘The Dryad’!” he cried.

Three men and a girl stood up. The others left the stage. Felix clambered up over the place where the footlights would have been if Gregory Storm had not passionately disbelieved in footlights.

Gregory Storm shook Felix’s hand hastily, and turned to the others. “This is the author, Mr. Fay. Miss Macklin, Mr. Ferguson, Mr. Whipple, Mr. Deedy.” Felix bowed. “We’ll have the scenery.” He clapped his hands again. “Set for ‘The Dryad’!”

A man whom Felix recognized as an enterprising young architect appeared at the back, struggling with a tall painted canvas frame.... As the set was put together, Felix felt a genuine thrill of pleasure; it was so completely, and so startlingly, in the spirit of his play. He had feared that he would be given a realistic woodland setting—and that would have shown up the utter artifice of his play. But this was a wood as some artist of the Yellow Book in his gayest mood might have pictured it—a wood that was, after all, a fashionable drawing-room or a perfumed boudoir, set for the graceful and heartless loves of shepherds and shepherdesses dressed in silks and satins.... The young architect grinned at him. “Like it?” he whispered. “I did it myself. Pretty good, I think!”

“We had a good deal of difficulty with that little song in your play,” said Gregory Storm. “The one the fat man sings.” He smiled appreciatively. “We set it to two or three old ballad tunes before we got the right one. Would you mind, Mr. Deedy, trying it for us?”

Mr. Deedy, who was to take the part of the Banker in the play, stepped forward and sang in a mournful voice:

“_Do you remember when first we met,
How, in that April weather,
Chasing a butterfly, we ran,
Over the hills together!_”

“Good!” said Gregory Storm. “Now the last stanza.”

“_But shall we then withhold our hands
And stay our foolish feet
When next illusion flutters by?
I wonder, O my sweet!_”

The effect was quite as droll as Felix had desired.

“Mr. Whipple,” said Gregory Storm, “is the Advertising Man. Mr. Deedy is the Guide. And Miss Macklin, of course, is the Dryad. Are you ready?” He clapped his hands again.

Miss Macklin stepped back into the wings; the three men lay down, in attitudes of sleep, beside what was supposed to be a camp-fire in a forest, and Felix’s play had begun.

Felix was looking at the girl in the wings. He had never taken the performance of his play very seriously; he had never supposed that any group of people would ever be able to enter into its spirit. He had misjudged Gregory Storm. No fantasy was too quaint and absurd for him to understand, it seemed: and moreover, he had conveyed to these men on the stage his own zest in the fantasy—they really succeeded in transporting one into this realm of pseudo-reality in which anything might happen.... And that girl: she was, of all persons in the world, the one to play that part. She had an elvish look, the very air and gesture of one of those soulless, ever-living creatures of the wood, who have in one form or another haunted and tormented the imagination of masculine mankind. There was something about the shape of her mouth, a delicate sharpness of contour, which made it look inhuman, as though not made for mortal kisses; and the way her forehead went up and back on each side in strange receding planes to the roots of her tangled black hair—there was foreignness, and remoteness, and mystery, in that face.... He took his eyes from her.

These men were doing very well indeed. But what would an audience think? That was a different matter.

He waited for the Dryad’s entrance. He wanted to hear her speak—she had not as yet uttered a single word.... Yes, her voice was all that it should be—low, deep, cool, clear, and as if from far away, beautiful and emotionless, the voice of an elf.... And really, it was amusing, this absurd discussion of morals that ensued, when the Dryad offered to accompany these men to Chicago—the discussion of what their wives would think, and her naïve questions, and their laboured explanations of marriage, and morality, and clothes, all the civilized things which a poor Dryad would find it so hard to understand and a Banker and an Advertising Man so difficult to explain. And then the Guide, the very Shavian Guide with a philosophy of his own—not a bad touch!

When Felix left the Artists’ Theatre that night, he had a feeling that he had been away from the real world for a long time—like Rip Van Winkle coming back from a brief stay in the Troll’s Garden to find his friends all dead or grown old.... It was too deep an allurement. He must not go to any more rehearsals. They could get along well enough without him.

“How did the rehearsal go?” Rose-Ann waked up to ask.

“Beautifully,” he said. “But the theatre is too much for me. I feel as though if I went behind the scenes again I would never come back.”

“Would that be so terrible?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“But—I might go, too.... I’d like to play a part like your Dryad—if I could.”

He remembered her suddenly as he had seen her among the children at the Community House Theatre. Yes, she could play such a part. But ... he didn’t want her to—for some reason which he could not understand. She must stay here in the world of reality—and keep him here.

“They said something about a ball—to make some money for the theatre,” he remarked. “I suppose we’ll have to go?”

“I’d like to go,” she said, and commenced planning their costumes with enthusiasm.

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XXLVII. The Fortunate Youth

1

ON the occasion of the opening bill of the Artists’ Theatre, a young man who had just joined the staff of the Chronicle was delegated to attend and criticize the performance; what he said in praise or blame would not matter either way.... The play came off very well, was generously applauded, and there was an excited little supper afterward at which Felix and Rose-Ann and Clive and Phyllis and the cast of “The Dryad” drank a good deal of wine, and many compliments were bandied back and forth. And that, Felix thought, was the end of the matter.

But it seemed not. Of course, the young man who criticized the play for the Chronicle had to make a fool of himself and Felix by hailing him as “our new Barrie”; but that did not do any real harm. Most of the critics were sensible, and treated the event with casual indifference. But old Jennison, the “dean of the fraternity,” had gone the second night, and given the play a most astonishing commendation, well-calculated to turn any young playwright’s head—besides remarking privately to Felix on the street that he was wasting his time fooling with amateurs—why didn’t he aim for Broadway, he had the stuff in him, and so forth.... And the bill was going so well, on account, it was said, of Felix’s play, that the original run of two weeks had been extended to three.

Success? So his friends called it lightly, and though he made an effort to see it in its true perspective, Felix felt a glow of elation. Perhaps he had really shown that he could do something!

In this frame of mind, on the final night of the bill, which had managed to eke out a four weeks’ run, he went to another little supper party, with Rose-Ann, Clive and Phyllis, and the players, and heard—with somewhat less sense of being “guyed”—their extravagant praises.... Besides, he knew something that they did not know—not even, as yet, Rose-Ann: an actor-manager-playwright from New York, who happened to be in town, had seen “The Dryad,” liked it, and said that it could be made into a successful three-act play—had, in fact, offered to collaborate with him upon it! That sounded like the real thing. Perhaps these praises were not the absurdities they seemed....

That evening Clive was in a difficult mood; he and Phyllis had been tormenting each other of late to the point of exacerbation. Clive’s ironies lacked tonight the quality, whatever it was, that made them agreeable. He managed by some satirical remark to offend Miss Macklin, to whom he had been paying special attentions. He commenced to drink recklessly. Phyllis refused contemptuously to speak to him. And then suddenly he disappeared.

Phyllis came home with Felix and Rose-Ann. At the studio they made coffee, and talked about the ball and their costumes. At last Felix told them about the actor-manager and his offer.

“Well,” Phyllis asked, “how does it feel to have everything you want?”

“It feels,” Felix said, “unreal—disturbing. It can’t be true. Do you remember the story of Polycrates?”

“No,” said Phyllis.

“Herodotus tells about it—and I was thinking about it only today, and I made up a little rhyme about it. I’ll tell you the story....”

2

Phyllis, sitting on the floor, with her coffee beside her, was looking up at him with eager eyes, eyes full of pride greater even than Rose-Ann’s. Rose-Ann was a realist. She knew all this did not amount to so much. This story was addressed to Phyllis. Rose-Ann, reclining on the settle, seemed a little outside the circle of its intention, someone accidentally looking on.

“He was a Persian king—very rich, very powerful, very happy. And there came to visit him a Greek philosopher. The Persian king asked him, ‘What is the use of philosophy?’ And the Greek philosopher answered. ‘It serves to reconcile us to the unhappiness of our lot.’ ‘Then what use is it to me?’ the king asked. ‘I am not unhappy. I am the happiest of mortals.’ ‘Yes,’ said the philosopher, ‘you are too happy. You had better beware!’ ‘Of What?’ asked the king. ‘Of the jealousy of the gods,’ said the philosopher.

“That sounded reasonable enough to the king. He had nothing to fear from men; but the gods—they might well be jealous of him. ‘What shall I do to appease their wrath?’ he asked.

“Take the most precious thing you own, and throw it into the sea!” was the advice of the philosopher.

“Now the king had a certain ring, which at the beginning of his reign he had taken from the hand of a conquered monarch, and which he had always cherished as the symbol of his victorious career. It seemed to him the most precious of all his possessions, and so he went and threw it into the sea.

“But the next evening as the king and the philosopher sat down to dinner, the cook came running in with the ring, which he had that moment found in the entrails of a fish which was going to be the king’s dinner. The king took it with great satisfaction, saying, ‘The gods have given me back my ring.’

“But the philosopher turned pale, and said, ‘The gods have rejected your gift,’ and immediately went home, fearing to be in that kingdom when the wrath of the gods descended upon it.

“And when he had returned to Greece, he heard that the king’s enemies had descended upon the kingdom and overthrown it, and sacked the palace, and carried away the king’s wives, and built a great pyre of the palace furnishings and set the king on top of it on his golden throne, to be burnt....

“The story ends happily after all, in Herodotus. But it was a narrow squeak, and the gods only relented at the last minute, by softening the hearts of his conquerors and sending a rain to put out the fire. But the gods are capricious—and perhaps the next time they wouldn’t change their minds.”

“And the rhyme you made up about it?” Phyllis asked.

“Well, it points the moral of the tale:

“_When there is nothing left to wish,
And Earth’s too much like Heaven,
Throw away some lovely gift
Of all the gods have given!_

“_Too happy, like that king of old
Who gave the sea his ring—
Find out if there’s in store for you
The fate of that old king!_”

Rose-Ann sat up and smiled at him. “But Felix,” she said, “you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t understand the moral of that old fable at all!”

“No?”

“No!” said Rose-Ann. “The gods were angry at that old king because he didn’t appreciate what they had done for him.... It was because he threw away some of the loveliness that they had given him, that they punished him. He was a coward—and the gods don’t like cowards!”

“No?” ... Felix was realizing now consciously what he had meant by the story. Those evenings in his work-room, with the door open between him and Phyllis, and Phyllis come in to sit on the floor beside him in some interval of his work—intervals that grew longer and longer—all the sweetness of that friendship, so much more than friendship that it was almost like love ... it was this that he was going to throw away. He was going to give up his room, and get another, or return to the studio to work. It was this intention that he had unconsciously in mind when he wrote—

“_Throw away some lovely gift
Of all the gods have given!_”

“No, Felix,” Rose-Ann was saying, “there’s no use being afraid of good fortune. When the gods give us beauty, we must take it—not run away from it.”

“So!...” he said. “I’m afraid the Greeks thought differently.”

“They were so much less Greek, then,” said Rose-Ann.

3

“It’s late,” said Phyllis. “I must go home. Will you take me, Felix?”

He put on his hat and went out with her silently.

They walked along the empty streets without a word until they reached the door of the house in which she lived. Then she lifted her face up to him, and said,

“You know that I love you, Felix.”

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XLVIII. Dream-Tryst

1

THE foundations of Felix’s existence seemed to crack and fall apart, the whole edifice of thought and emotion in which he lived to topple and tumble in ruins.

“No,” he said slowly, “——I didn’t know.”

They turned, and walked down the street toward the corner, side by side. At the corner they paused, and looked at each other helplessly.

“Yes, I do too know,” Felix said. “I must have always known.”

They stood looking at each other for a moment, and then turned back, walking along the street in silence, past the door of the house, to the corner, where they stopped again.

“I couldn’t stand it,” Phyllis said, “not to tell you. It hurt so—to have to keep it a secret, as if it were something to be ashamed of. And I thought—if there is anything in this modernism—this talk—if it really means anything, if it isn’t all just a damned fake—I could tell you. I wanted to. I had to, Felix.”

Yes ... of course. That was the meaning of it all....

“You aren’t angry at me, Felix, for telling you?”

No——he wasn’t angry. It seemed to him magnificent——the simplicity, the bravery, the candour of that confession. She was to him in that moment a person more quietly sure of herself, more nobly honest, than anything in all this tangled insincerity of modern life——a creature out of some poem of the world’s youth. Beside him, as she walked, her very person seemed magnified—her soft brown hair, her dark quiet eyes, her serene mouth, seemed the features of an epic heroine, who faced life strong-limbed, clear-eyed and unafraid. She was the embodiment of that calm, serene, strong girl-goddess who had been with him a recurring love-dream since childhood. The beauty, the simplicity, of that confession of love stirred him to the depths of his emotions.... And he realized that he had something to confess in return—something that this honesty of hers required of him. But they had turned again and walked back to the other corner before he could say it. It came with difficulty, with an effort that took all his courage, all his strength. And yet it must be said....

“I love you, too, Phyllis.”

She looked up at him, as if puzzled, startled, incredulous.

“I didn’t know it till just this moment—but it’s true.”

“But—why?” She put her hand as if defensively to her bosom, to ward off a danger she had not apprehended.

“Why should you love _me_?”

He pondered. “I don’t know. Why do people love each other? I don’t know.”

“_You love me!_” she repeated, as if it were a problem for which she were seeking the answer.

“Yes,” Felix said soberly.

“But then—”

She did not finish her sentence, and they turned and walked again slowly back to the other corner.

“That makes a difference,” she said. “I never thought of that. It was all so simple before.”

“Are you sorry I—love you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. I don’t dare realize it. Of course I’m glad—and sorry, too—and frightened. Oh, Felix, what shall we do?”

She looked at him with grave, awed eyes.

“I—” Felix began, and stopped; and they resumed their walk, not touching each other....

Felix had no sense of the street upon which he walked. He was detached from everything, except the knowledge of what had happened—that little cleared space of certainties, about which was a whirling chaos in which all things fell confusedly into nothingness....

He realized that he had to adjust this thing that had happened, to all the rest of his life, to Rose-Ann, to his marriage, to his career. The sense of those things, even of Rose-Ann, came slowly; his mind was reluctant to face them. He wanted to stay here, in this cleared space in which one thing was beautifully true. But already that moment was passing. With the sense of those other things, this that had happened was no longer beautiful, but terrible—a burden, a problem....

He shook his head as if to free it from heaviness, the intolerable weight of thought. But he _must_ think.... Was it true that he cared for nothing but this moment of mad beauty? Rose-Ann, his marriage, his home, his plans, his future—was it true that these things meant nothing to him? Could he forget them all in an instant? Had a word, a phrase, shattered the whole edifice of his life? Was all this elaborate structure of plans and ambitions, this sober adjustment to the world of solid reality, a bubble that vanished at a touch?

That was what he had been afraid of, that day in the hospital, when he had tried to tell Rose-Ann about himself. He had wanted to tell her what a fool he was. He had wanted to assure her that he would be such a fool no longer. And he had not had the courage. She had taken him as he was. She had exacted no promises.... Well, this was what he was like—this!

No—he must be sane. Just because this moment seemed the only thing in the world worth holding to, just because he wanted to stay in this dream-world, just because he cared about nothing else, he must fight his way back to reality. He must not surrender. This was the test: whether he could be a sane man, or must spend his whole life in the following of disconnected impulses, a vagabond and a fool. He wanted to keep this beauty: well, then, he must give it up.

They had stopped again, at the other corner. Phyllis regarded him quietly with troubled eyes. “Rose-Ann....” she said.

“Yes. I know. Rose-Ann. And everything.”

“No. We can’t,” she said.

“No. We mustn’t.”

They looked at each other bravely, and a little pitifully, and recommenced their silent promenade along the deserted street.

At the door, she stopped firmly, and held out her hand. “You must go,” she said. “Good night. I’m—glad, in spite of everything. Good night.”

He held her hand in his, desperately anxious to keep this moment’s beauty a little longer, before he returned to the world of reality. “Will you—kiss me?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Not even in good-bye?” he urged.

She laughed, with a sudden resumption of lightness. “A good-bye kiss? There’s no such thing, Felix! A kiss is always the beginning of things.—Good night!” She held his hand a moment, and added in the most friendly way, as if they were almost strangers, “I shall see you at the ball tomorrow night?”

2

He turned away, glad that she had been so sane—and sorry. Angry at her, for no reason. Happy that he was going home to Rose-Ann—to Rose-Ann, lovely and real now in his mind—out of all this madness!

He commenced to whistle tunelessly....

And then, as if brought by the night-breeze, a breath of dream-nostalgia overwhelmed him, making him dizzy and faint. He stopped, trembling all over....

By God, he must get over this.... He must get back to reality.

And Rose-Ann must help him. He would tell her everything.... He opened the door of the studio and cried out her name, like a frightened child come back to its mother.

“Yes?” she called back. She was sitting up in bed, sewing spangles on her costume for the ball tomorrow night.

He suddenly realized that everything was all right—that there was nothing to tell.

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XLIX. A Matter of Convention

1

NO—nothing to tell!... They talked about the ball, and the costumes they were to wear; and in the profound reassuring consciousness that life is something that need only be lived, that need not be discussed and understood, he fell asleep.

The next morning he was sorry he had not told Rose-Ann. But the moment to tell had passed.... Life was going on as usual, ignoring these private crises. Yes—he and Rose-Ann and Phyllis, just as if nothing had happened, were going to the Artists’ Theatre Ball! Rose-Ann was going in a Spanish dress with a wonderful shawl for which she had long awaited the proper occasion, and Felix as a pirate, in green sash and orange shirt.... They were going to dance—instead of, as would have seemed most fitting to Felix, to discuss their destinies.

2

It was precisely this mere matter of dancing that now incongruously troubled him.

Felix was not a dancing man. And that would have been all right, if he had not wanted to dance. But he did want to dance! Even at this moment, with so much more important things to think about, it began to occupy all his thoughts. He wanted to dance. It was annoying not to be able to.... He had more than once gone through the excruciating agony of trying to learn. He had, in fact, learned, so far as one can learn anything against which there operates some mysterious inward paralysis. He knew the steps as well as he knew the multiplication table. But just as sometimes in school there had come upon him a fatal helpless confusion in which he was unable to remember whether nine times seven was eighty-one or sixty-four, so it was when he tried to put his knowledge in practice in a ballroom. He reminded himself of nothing so much as the hapless hero of that old joke, who said, “Yes, I can dance, except that the music bothers me and the girl gets in my way!”

And he might have accepted his inability to dance as a fact, and let it go at that—except that it wasn’t a fact! Somehow, heaven only knew how, half a dozen times in his adult life he _had_ been able to dance—and not badly. But what were the circumstances which magically operated to liberate him from this mysterious paralysis, he did not know. He never knew whether he was going to be able to dance or not. He always went fearing the worst, and generally it happened. Rose-Ann could not understand it, because once when there had been impromptu dancing to a phonograph after a dinner party at some one’s home, he had danced with her without the slightest awkwardness; but when, while dancing with her a second time, she whispered to him to ask some of the other girls to dance, he became embarrassed, and made protestations of his inability. She knew that he _could_ dance, and she at first regarded his attitude as a kind of stupid stubbornness. But no scoldings, nor any patient gentleness for that matter, was able to change it.

Tonight Felix knew from the beginning that he was not going to be able to dance. He sat in the box with Rose-Ann and Phyllis and Clive and several of the players, utterly miserable. They had arrayed themselves for the ball at the Artists’ Theatre, and that preliminary part of the affair had been, as it always was, delightful. He wished one could dress up to go to a ball, and then not go. The dressing, the showing off of costumes, the banter, the laughter, the drinking of cocktails and black coffee, all the preparations, had been good fun; but now commenced the evening’s misery. Rose-Ann looked at him inquiringly as the orchestra struck up a two-step, and he shook his head. No—he couldn’t do it tonight. And so she stepped off in the arms of Clive. Phyllis—he had never danced with Phyllis—was waiting, he thought, for him to ask her. He doggedly leaned over the edge of the box and watched the dancers. Why, he asked himself, had he come? He saw Phyllis a minute later, dancing with a man in a pseudo-monkish costume, one of the actors. Elva Macklin—had she taken that name Elva because she knew she was elvish, or had the prevision of parents bestowed it upon her?—was dancing with Gregory Storm. The box was vacated, except for Felix, who sat looking on the scene with a jealous and angry eye.

A few pieces of coloured cloth, a bangle, some rouge, a military coat, a shawl, a sash, a bit of lace, a strain of music, and these people were transformed, one and all, out of their accustomed workaday mood, gone happily into an atmosphere of fantasy such as with infinite labour was created in the theatre. They were acting, all of them—not paying any attention to what part any one else was acting, but content to be in an environment in which their own play-impulses were released. They went as in a dream—smiling, moved by the music as the leaves of a tree are moved by the wind, surrendering themselves utterly to its influence. They were not here, not here in this plush and gilt room, amid commonplace mortals decorated with coloured cloth, but in some dreamland, some fairyland of their own wishes. The person whom one held in one’s arms was not a real person, in whom one was really interested, not a person to love or hate, but a part of the dream. A wand had been waved over this assemblage, commanding them to forget, to dream, to be free and happy and young. And all of them, except himself only, had obeyed. Why could he not surrender himself to this influence? Why must he remain, in spite of his sash and coloured shirt, so obstinately and awkwardly and unhappily himself? Why did not that music touch some secret spring in his soul, too, to make him its creature, a leaf wind-blown on the tree of life? Why did his eyes still see the persons underneath their costumes—the girls not as dancing partners but as “personalities”? Personalities, indeed!—these men and women had left their personalities gladly behind in the cloakroom; they were free of them for the evening; tomorrow they would go back to being lawyers and wives, clarks and poets and college students; tonight they were—

Well, what were they? If one chose to think so, bodies, merely that, bodies surrendering themselves to each other as shamelessly and frankly as to the music which swayed them.... But no, he knew better than that: they were—if ever, now, precisely now—immortal souls; this spectacle was spirit triumphing over flesh and using it for its own beautiful uses, the magic uses of a dream. These arms and bosoms and bodies were the instruments of a poetry which these couples created in a magnificently impersonal way—the poetry of beauty met with strength; it was not Dick and Jane, it was essential man and woman, in love with some eternal beauty in themselves and each other of which they were, as persons, the fleeting and mortal agents.

But why the devil couldn’t _he_ feel that way? Each time that the girls of his party returned to the box, flushed and laughing in an interim between the dances, he felt their presence as a demand upon him, a demand which it was disgraceful not to meet. Every glance of Rose-Ann’s was a look, or so he interpreted it, of inquiry or reproach. She _knew_ he could dance; that was the worst of it. He could dance—with her—easily enough; he would dance with her now, if there was no one else around that they knew. But if he danced with her, he would have no excuse for not dancing with the others—his last defence would be gone.... He fled from the box in the direction of the bar, was pulled down into a chair by Eddie Silver, who was buying drinks for a group of men and girls, and asked what he would have. “Whiskey straight,” he said humbly. Why, after all, should he despise this time-honoured refuge from the hardships of life, from problems too complex to be solved and responsibilities too great to be borne?

3

He could not, it seemed, get drunk. The whiskey only made him think with a preternatural clearness; and the more clearly he thought upon himself, as a straggler here in the bar-room from the battle-field of life out there on the dancing floor, the more he despised himself.... But he seemed to be despising some one else named Felix Fay, from whom he felt utterly detached and for whom he felt no responsibility. Funny Felix! In a way he could understand the poor devil.... He had been brought up in a puritanical way, and then had acquired a lot of romantic notions from poetry-books; and in spite of all his fine intellectual theories he was still just a romantic boy-prude, to whom the idea of taking a strange girl in his arms and walking her around the room to music would naturally be upsetting.... A funny boy, that Felix Fay! Why, he had been thinking quite seriously of making love to another girl besides his wife—and he would be quite equal to it, too ... after arguing it out theoretically and finding that it was his sociological duty or something of that sort!... He wanted things to be plain and straightforward, black and white; either he was making love to a girl or he wasn’t—it was the in-between things that confused and appalled him. To this Felix Fay person it would be simple enough to defy the conventions; what he couldn’t do was adjust himself to them like everybody else. He could intellectually conceive, and if it came to that, undertake to carry into practice, some preposterous theory of free-love that he had read about in Havelock Ellis or Ellen Key; but he couldn’t dance with a girl he liked! No, that was too difficult; it wasn’t a theory, and he hadn’t read about it in a book.... If people _didn’t_ dance, and some one wrote a book and proved that they ought to, Felix Fay would believe it, and argue about it, and finally do it in a mood of stern conscientious futuristic morality—if they killed him for it! But do something that everybody else did—no. Not Felix. Somebody else would have kissed Phyllis long ago, and said nothing about it. If somebody else had thought of having a love-affair with Phyllis, the last person in the world he would have thought of discussing it with would have been his own wife. The world forgave people who kissed in corners, who had secret love-affairs while pretending to believe—while actually believing—in the ten commandments and the laws of the state of Illinois. If you accepted what everybody believed, you could have the same freedom as everybody else. It was only if you believed in freedom, really believed in it, that you couldn’t have any. Why couldn’t Felix Fay understand that?... Poor devil, he was going to get in trouble some time....

The being who thus in a state of utter detachment scornfully and sadly criticized Felix Fay, floated back airily, or at least with no sense of treading any actual floor with mortal feet, to the ballroom. Across the room he saw some one coming toward him, smiling. It was Elva Macklin; but it was not by that name, nor as the actress who had taken a part in his play, that he identified her; it was rather as a childhood playmate—a girl with whom he had once danced, long years ago, in a garret. She was dressed as a dryad, disguised in a leafy covering, but he recognized her well enough. It was clear to him that they had an engagement to dance together—an engagement that had waited all these years. The music struck up, he held out his arms, and she walked into them without a word. They floated off across the room, into the maze of dancers, threading their way among the others with that ease which comes of senses quickened with music, pausing and turning, drawing upon the floor an intricate pattern of movement born of fancy. The others in the room did not exist for him, save as shadows, bright shadows cast by the music. They were alone, in a dream, in a soft wordless dream; they did not so much listen to the music as create it by their own movements. They had left the world of reality, as if for ever, they were in some realm of golden light, a land of fruits and flowers, a place of quiet, triumphant happiness. This girl with him was no real girl, but a part of the dream; he had always known her; she was the companion of many wanderings through the lands of reverie; they understood each other too well to need words; she was his dream comrade. Not a girl, not any one that one must love or not love, fight for and work for, but a shadow like himself in this place of bright shadows, in this peaceful and happy realm beyond life and beyond death....

The music stopped, and he awoke with some astonishment to find that he, Felix Fay, had been dancing. Elva Macklin smiled, gave his hand a grateful pressure, and turned to the young man who came up asserting that the next dance was his.

Suddenly alarmed, Felix turned to flee from the ballroom; but it was too late. Phyllis had detached herself from her partner, and came over to him. “Aren’t you going to dance with me?” she asked. The handclapping died away as the musicians took up their instruments again. Phyllis faced him confidently—a lovely and to him at this moment a terrifying figure. All the sweetness of the love that might have been—that might be—his, kindled for him in her grave eyes. Dance with her? No, he couldn’t. But he must. Self-consciously, ashamed of himself, hating her, he took her hand, put his arm about her, and listening intently to the music, stepped off. But something was wrong; he could not get the rhythm; he stopped. She had surrendered herself to his guidance utterly, but now that that was at fault she began to try to guide him. That made him angry; he paused once more, listened to the music, and said, “Oh, confound it—it’s a waltz. I’m sorry—I can’t waltz.” She regretfully walked back with him to the edge of the dancing floor, where he tried desperately to think of something to say to her. It was shameful to be thus at a loss. Did she despise him? She ought to.... Some one else came along, and she danced off, leaving Felix furious and relieved. He went back to the box.

Rose-Ann was there, resting from innumerable dances, talking with Clive. “I see you’ve been dancing!” she said. “Yes,” he told her, “I don’t know how it happened. Will you try the next one with me?” At least, if he made a failure of it with Rose-Ann, she would forgive him.

“Yes,” she said. “Just this one more dance, and then we’ll go home.”

Because it was the last dance, because he need fear nothing more tonight, and because he had secretly resolved never to subject himself to this torment again, the demon in his mind that argued and discussed and made him awkward and afraid, went to sleep. His last dance, his last dance ever—and then ... back to a desk, where he belonged!

“Why!” said Rose-Ann, “you dance beautifully!” She said it in a puzzled tone.

Felix was annoyed. He lost the rhythm and stepped on her foot.

“It’s my fault!” she said. But he knew it wasn’t. Why did he try to dance when he couldn’t? Wouldn’t that music ever stop?

He wanted to tell Rose-Ann about—about Phyllis. She would understand.

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L. Babes in the Wood

1

HE told her that night; they talked till dawn. She did understand; and so, it seemed to him, did he—for the first time. Everything became simple and clear again—a final proof, if the doubting mind required such proof, that candour was a medicine for all the ills of love.

Things like this—emotional upsets—occurred in all marriages; the trouble was that the disturbed emotions were left to fester in secret. Talking with Rose-Ann had put the incident in its true light. Yes—of course he and Phyllis loved each other; that was not strange. There was an element of love in every friendship between man and woman; and that it should be here in this friendship of his and Phyllis’s was right and natural. It was not a thing to be afraid of, to run away from—it was something rather to be glad about. It had been there between them all this while, enriching their two lives, his and Phyllis’s, making their friendship one full of tenderness and understanding; it had done them no harm, certainly! Civilization meant the possibility of such friendships, instead of a timid restricting of the emotions to a single person. The world was full of men and women friends who were in this sense lovers; only they did not usually confess it to each other. Sometimes they were afraid to let each other know the truth; sometimes afraid to face the truth themselves. But was there anything terrible in such a truth? Phyllis and he had faced it, that was all. They had spoken out what was usually left unspoken. And why should that change their lives?

It was the fault of Romance, that suave peddler of spiritual poisons; and of Puritanism, that maniacal purveyor of chains and padlocks—it was the fault of these two that the situation should ever for a moment have seemed alarming. Over the scene, as he and Phyllis had stood together telling each other a secret that any one else in the world could have read at a glance, there had brooded these two antique and ridiculous fantasms—Romance and Puritanism. Romance had whispered to them: “This is a moment such as comes only once in a lifetime—a moment beautiful and tragic! You were born for this! You cannot escape! You are Paris and Helen, Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guenevere, Tristram and Iseult! You are the hero and heroine of all myths, all dreams! Your love is doomed and beautiful! Some death will run its sudden finger round this spark and sever you from the rest.... Kiss now, and die!” And on the other side that gibbering lunatic Puritanism had cried out: “No! no! Put on these chains. Blindfold your eyes so that you cannot see beauty, stop up your ears against all sweet voices! Tie your hands together lest they touch what is not yours, and put a chain upon your feet lest they stray from the accustomed path. Padlock your lips, lest they say what is in your heart, and seal up your heart so that no tenderness, no generous faith, no natural affection may escape! Be blind and deaf and dumb, become as one dead, for only in this is safety!” And between these two fantastic ghosts they had stood and trembled, finding it hard to discover of themselves the obvious and simple thing to do, but reading it at last in each other’s eyes—to go on being in love with each other and behave exactly as before!

So it seemed to Felix as he lay and talked with Rose-Ann till dawn.... He felt that he was something of a simpleton, but that life itself was easy enough to live if one could only learn to deal with it directly and see it as it was.

2

It was strange that after that beautiful discovery Felix should have waked to a sense of dull unhappiness, of loss, of grief.... He tried to conceal these feelings from Rose-Ann. It was as if he had not been sincere in giving up the possibility of happiness with Phyllis—that possibility which had seemed to exist so long as he left his secret untold, but which he had killed with his confession. Was it so simple a matter, after all? He sometimes suspected that he would be content with nothing less than the impossible....

The first afternoon that he had not had to work at the office, an afternoon when ordinarily he would have gone to his work-room, and met Phyllis there when she came home from her work, and stopped writing to talk with her—that afternoon he stayed in his studio. And he asked himself—was it because he did not believe that things were as he and Rose-Ann had told each other? Was it because he would feel conscious of a chain of duty, and preferred to wear it, if at all, here at home? Yes, what was the use of being hypocritical about the situation? Why pretend that love was so docile, so manageable and good-natured, so tame a beast? It was a creature of the jungle—or was it, really? Perhaps the reason he did not trust himself with Phyllis was that he feared to discover that they were merely good friends after all!

He stayed at home and was restless and discontented. If he could really believe—his incorrigible utopianism demanded that—in his freedom, he could be content. He loved Rose-Ann. But why this sham, this lie—that he could love Phyllis, too, and no harm done? Of course he wanted Phyllis—and was willing to give her up, if it were understood that that was what he was doing. But it was intolerable, this pretence that he could do as he pleased. Could he? Yes, suppose it had pleased him to say—

Rose-Ann interrupted his thoughts, the fifth evening. She was sitting at her desk, and Felix at his. Suddenly she rose.

“Felix,” she said. Her voice had a ring of painful resolution in it. He turned, with a feeling of fear. She stood leaning back against her desk, resting her hands on it.

“Felix! I have made up my mind.... Don’t talk, I want to say what I have to say.... I’m not mistaken this time. I’ve seen you. You’re unhappy.... I know you don’t believe I meant what I said—that you could have your freedom. But it’s true.... You love Phyllis. Don’t you?”

It was a challenge. This thing had to be settled now. Did he love Phyllis? The devil only knew. But for the purposes of this damned argument—

“Yes!” he said defiantly. “I do!”

His mind went back to the time when they had innocently rehearsed this scene in farce.... Now it was happening in deadly earnest. Yes—in deadly earnest.

“The thing I can’t stand,” he said, between clenched teeth, “is hearing you say such things and not believing you mean them....”

“You can believe me, Felix.... I want you to be happy, more than anything else in the world. I don’t care.... You’ve been wanting her all week. Go to her.... And—don’t worry about me, Felix. Everything will come out all right.”

They stared solemnly at each other, trying to realize what was happening—bracing themselves to meet a moment which they had lightly envisaged in theory, in discussion, but which in reality had an air of terribleness about it. That conversation should have taken place against a background of thunders and lightnings. It was as if with these words they had pushed aside the dear, familiar walls of everyday reality, and were face to face with naked, elemental forces—as if they were suddenly alone and helpless in the midst of a huge, impersonal, indifferent and awful universe.

3

“Go to her,” Rose-Ann repeated softly; and with the feeling of one strangely doomed, one who rested under the burden of a frightful duty not to be flinched from, Felix went quietly out of the studio.

He could still see Rose-Ann’s eyes in his imagination: those eyes, not tearful now, but grave and brooding, full of courage.... Yes, at last he believed her.

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LI. “Bienfaits de la Lune”

1

ON the sidewalk, the branches and leaves of a tree made an enchanting pattern of shadow—cast it seemed by the moonlight, though it was only by the electric arc on the corner. But, as Felix looked up, he saw, past that false light, the moon itself, above the low roofs. It seemed to spring free from an encumbering wrack of grey clouds, and stay poised, alone and splendid, in the blue depths of sky. Felix’s gaze went to that far white beacon with a sense of return to his own world—and with a sense of profound release in that return.... For there was a world besides the world of daylit reality; a world not of work and wages, of code and custom, of law and habit; another world besides that in which men and women customarily dwelt—yes, there was this world lit by the changing and ranging moon! Though people turned their backs upon it, and hid within their houses, and sought to escape its disturbing influences, it was there. It always had been there, it always would be there. It was as real as the workaday world. And it was his world. He had tried to renounce it, to shut it out, to flee from its magic. He had tried to believe that there was nothing in life except that routine of daily reality in which he was immersed. A world of debts, and promises to pay; a world of roofs, owned and dwelt under and ever returned to. There was something close and cloying about that world; something of the fetid odour of toil hung about its very pleasures. It was slavery; its laughter and kisses were the gilt upon the chains. Believing in that slavery, men had built the four walls of the world, stone upon stone. And yet, outside, was freedom....

Felix became aware of himself, standing bareheaded a few steps from the door of his studio, gazing at the moon. He was aware of the absurdity of that moment of moonstruck vision. He remembered the errand he was upon, and how weighted with tragedy it had seemed a minute since. He realized the symbolic character of his departure from the studio. Yes—symbolic! For he knew now that he did not care two pins for Phyllis—as a person. What Rose-Ann had said of him was utterly true. He did not care for persons—not even for Rose-Ann. He lived in a world of ideas. And because he had found the idea of Rose-Ann as his jailor intolerable, he had taken her at her word, accepted his liberation, gone out of the door. But not—he smiled at the foolish thought—not into another captivity, not into the warm, constraining, anxious arms of Phyllis, or any other! No—he was free now of the idea of that tyranny; and Rose-Ann was free of it. With her gesture motioning him to go, she had broken the intolerable chain that had irked their lives. Free now, his own master, drawing his breath without permission from any other living being, once more able to call his soul his own, he could enjoy at last the companionship, in a common love of beauty, of the one being on earth who loved beauty as he loved it—and who understood freedom and the need of freedom better, indeed, than he had ever understood it! She had never lied to herself or to him. From the first she had disdained to accept the promises which he had been so eager to make. She was a true child of the moon, blessed with its gifts, no staid denizen of the sober realm of day, but fleet of soul and changeable and free like her immortal mother and mistress!

No—he realized it now—no mere woman could hold his love; it had been folly to hope and pretend so; not Rose-Ann, not Phyllis, not any woman. But one who could be more and less than woman, who did not, as mortal women do, want to own and be owned; who possessed herself with a divine aloofness, who had her own orbit that nothing could deflect—in her he could find a companionship deeper than any mortal love.

Even to himself, as he conned over these thoughts, standing bareheaded on the sidewalk, with a mind confused as by the splendour of a revelation, they seemed wanting in final definite clearness. He was happy in a profound discovery, which he sought to put into words to carry back to Rose-Ann. Not that she did not know already; for had she not forced this discovery upon him? She had known all along! And when he returned, there would be no words needed. But still he must seek for the words.... But any way he tried to put it to himself sounded so damned mystical, like some cryptic sentence of William Blake’s. And it was all so obvious! _They were free._ Yet that meant nothing. Foolish people like Clive Bangs were always talking about “freedom.” They were free, one might put it that way, free _not_ to love each other! A blessed freedom.... One might love any woman. But here was something greater than love. To know that there was something in themselves still uncaptured, ever unattainable—something which could not be yielded, by whose inviolable having they moved secure and serene among a world of emotional bond-slaves, like the moon among the shattered vainly-grasping clouds! More beautiful in her than any bodily beauty was that ultimate self-possession, that unshaken and unshakeable identity, of which that gesture of hers, pointing him to the door, had been the symbol. Not because they needed each other, not because they were so poor in spirit that each must lean upon the other—no, not in poverty of soul, but in a sublime indifference, their love had its origin. Because they did not need each other, because they could do without each other, this was added unto them, this happiness of being together. Felix saw himself and Rose-Ann like mountain-climbers, high on some chill peak above a coward, sleepy world that dozed and battened beneath its coverlets. Or like two eagles, circling in the austere upper air. Theirs should be no common happiness....

He turned to re-enter the studio.

2

The door was locked, and he had to use his key. He did so only half-consciously, and blinked at the blaze of light inside. It was a few seconds before he saw.