PIGGY LOGAN

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At this moment the buzzer of the bell rang sharply. Mrs. Jack clapped her little hand up sharply to her deaf right ear, looked rosily, inquiring around her as she always did when she was not certain whether she had heard, and said quickly: “Hah? Did the bell ring, Janie? Is there someone at the door?”

“Yes’m,” said Janie, coming to the door of the maids’ sitting room. “I’ll go, Mrs. Jack.”

“Yes, you’d better, Janie, I wonder who—” she cast a puzzled look up at the clock up on the wall, and then at the little shell of platinum on her wrist. “It’s only 8:15! I don’t think any of them would be this early. Oh!—” as illumination came—“I think, perhaps, it’s Mr. Logan. If it’s Mr. Logan, Janie, show him in. I’ll be right out.”

“Yes, Mrs. Jack,” said Janie, and departed. And Mrs. Jack, after another quick look about the kitchen, another smile of thanks and approbation for Cookie and her arts, followed her.

It was Mr. Logan. Mrs. Jack encountered him right away in the entrance hall where he had just paused to set down two enormous black suit cases each of which, from the bulging look of them, carried enough weight to make strong muscles ache. This impression was justified by Mr. Logan’s own appearance at the moment. He had seized the biceps of one muscular looking arm with the fingers of another, and with a rueful look upon his face was engaged in flexing and bending the aching member up and down. As Mrs. Jack approached he turned, a thickset, rather burly looking young man of about thirty years, with bushy eyebrows of coarse black, a round and heavy face smudged darkly with the shaven grain of a heavy beard, a low corrugated forehead and close cropped hair of stiff black bristles mounting to a little brush-like pompadour in front.

“Gosh!” said Mr. Piggy Logan, for by such affectionate title was he known to his more intimate acquaintance—“Gosh!”—the expletive came out somewhat windily, a steamy expiration of relief. At the same moment he released his aching arm and shook hands firmly with his hostess with a muscular and stubby hand, haired thickly on the back up to the very fingertips with fuzzy black.

“You must be simply dead!” cried Mrs. Jack. “Why didn’t you let me know you had so much to carry? I’d have sent our driver—he could have handled everything for you.”

“Oh, it’s quite all right,” said Piggy Logan. “I always handle everything myself. You see, I carry everything right here—my whole equipment—” he indicated the two ponderous cases. “That’s it,” said Piggy Logan, “everything I use—the whole show. That’s all there is, so naturally,”—he smiled at her quickly and quite boyishly—“I don’t like to take any chances. It’s all I’ve got. If anything went wrong—well, I’d just rather do it for myself and then I know where I am!”

“I know!” said Mrs. Jack, nodding her head with a look of quick understanding—“I feel the same way about everything I do. You simply can’t depend on people. If anything went wrong—and after all the years you must have put in making them! People who’ve seen it said it’s simply marvelous,” she went on, “Everyone is so thrilled to know you’re going to be here and that at last they’re going to have a chance to see it. We’ve heard so much about it—really, all you hear around New York these days is—”

“Now—,” said Mr. Logan abruptly, in a manner that was perfectly courteous but that indicated he was no longer paying any attention to her, as indeed he wasn’t: he had become all business and while she talked had been making a quick appraisal of the place. He walked over to the entrance of the living room, was looking all about the room with thoughtful speculation. “Now—,” he continued, “I suppose it’s going to be in here, isn’t it?”

“Yes—that is, if you like it here. If you prefer, we’ll use another room—but this is the largest one we have—”

“No, thank you,” crisply, absently. “This is quite all right. This will do very nicely. Hm!” meditatively, as he pressed his full lower lip between two hairy fingers—“best place, I should think, would be over there—” briefly he indicated the opposite wall, “facing the door here, the people all around on the other three sides. Hm! Yes—just about the centre there, I should think posters on the book shelves—we can clear all this stuff away, of course—” he made a quick but spacious gesture with his thick hand which seemed to dispose of a large part of the furnishings with a single movement. “Yes! That ought to do it very well! Now, if you don’t mind”—All business now, he turned to her rather peremptorily and said: “Have you got a place where I can change my clothes? I’ll have to change to costume—if you have a room—”

“Oh, yes,” she answered quickly, “here, just down the hall, the first room on the right. But won’t you have a drink and something to eat before you start—You must be terribly—”

“No thank you,” said Mr. Logan crisply. “It’s very nice of you but—” He smiled swiftly, winningly at her under the beetling collectivism of his bushy brows—“I never take anything before a performance. Now,—” he crouched, gripped the handles of the big cases with his hairy fingers and heaved mightily—“if you’ll just excuse me—,” he grunted.

“If there is anything we can do—” Mrs. Jack began helpfully.

“No, thank you—nothing—” Mr. Logan somewhat gruntingly replied and began to stagger down the hall with his tremendous freight. “I can get along—quite—nicely—thank you,” he groaned as he staggered through the door of the room to which she had directed him. “Nothing—at—all—” his grunts came back more faintly now. She heard the two ponderous baggages hit the floor with a leaden thump and then Mr. Logan’s long expiring “whush” of exhausted relief.

For a moment after the young man’s lurching departure from the scene his hostess continued to look after him with somewhat overwhelmed expression touched faintly with alarm. She felt a little dazed. His businesslike dispatch and the rather spacious nonchalance with which he had suggested indefinite but widespread alterations in her beloved room touched her with vague apprehension. But—she shook her head and reassured herself on the sharp decision—it was bound to be all right! She had heard so many people speak of him: he was really all the rage this year, everyone was talking of his show, there had been write-ups of him everywhere. He was the darling of all the smart society crowd—of all those “rich” Long Island and Park Avenue people—here the lady’s nostrils curved again in a faint dilation of patronizing scorn. Nevertheless, she could not help feeling a pleasurable sense of triumph, a kind of satisfying glow that she had landed him.

Mr. Piggy Logan was the rage that year. He was the owner and creator of a kind of puppet circus of wire dolls, and the enthusiasm, the excitement, the applause with which this curious entertainment had been greeted was astonishing. In fact, it was not enough to say that Mr. Piggy Logan had a vogue: he was one. Not to have read about him, not to know about him, not to be able to discuss him and his little wire dolls with some show of intelligence was, in smart circles, akin to never having heard of Jean Cocteau, to never having heard of Surrealisme, to being completely at a loss when such names as those of Picasso and Brancusi, of Utrillo and of Gertrude Stein were mentioned. Mr. Piggy Logan and his art was spoken of with the same animated reverence that the knowing used when they spoke of one of these.

And, like all of these, Mr. Piggy Logan and his art demanded their own special vocabulary. To speak of him correctly one must know a kind of special language, a language whose delicate phrasings whose subtle nuances were becoming more highly specialized month by month, as each succeeding critic outdid his predecessor, as each succeeding critic delved deeper in the bewildering complexities, the infinite shadings and associations of Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.

It is not too much to say that an entire literature in the higher aesthetics had by this time been created by Mr. Logan and his puppet dolls. It is by no means too much to say that entire critical reputations had that season been made or ruined by Mr. Logan and his dolls. It is furthermore a certainty that the last criteria of fashionable knowingness that year was an expert knowledge of Mr. Logan and his dolls and that if one lacked this knowledge he was lower than the dust, and if one had it his connoisseurship in the arts was definitely established, his eligibility for any society of the higher sensibilities was instantly confirmed.

One could, in fact, in that sweet year of grace and in that great and chosen citadel of this earth’s fashion and its art, admit with utter nonchalance that the late John Milton bored him and was in fact a large “stuffed shirt.” “Stuffed shirts” indeed were numerous in the findings of the critical gentry of the time. The chemises of such inflated personalities as Goethe, Ibsen, Byron, Tolstoy, Whitman, Dickens, and Balzac had been ruthlessly investigated by some of the most fearless intellects of the time and found to be largely composed of straw wadding. Almost everything in fact was in a process of debunking. Almost everyone was being fearlessly debunked except debunkers and Mr. Piggy Logan and his dolls.

And life had recently become “too short” for many things that people once found time for. One could blithely admit that “life was simply too short” for the perusal of any book longer than two hundred pages, and that, as for War and Peace—no doubt all that “they” said of it was true—and all of that—but as for one’s self—well, one had tried, and really it was quite too—too—Oh, well, life simply was too short.

And life that year was far too short to be bothered by Browning and by Arnold; by Whitman, Dickens, Mr. Dreiser or Dean Swift. But life was not too short that year to be passionately concerned with Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.

To a future world, no doubt, a less acute and understanding race of men all this may seem to be a trifle strange. To the future historians of that year of grace it may seem somewhat strange that the subtle-souled psychologists and aesthetes of that period, the privileged flower of the time should have been bored by quite so much and passionately concerned with so curiously little. And yet it was indubitably a fact: the highest intelligence of the time—the very subtlest of a chosen few—were bored by many things. They tilled the waste land, and erosion had grown fashionable. They were bored with love; and they were bored with hate. They were bored with men who worked, and with men who loafed. They were bored with people who created something and with people who created nothing. They were bored with marriage and with single blessedness; they were bored with chastity and they were bored with adultery. They were bored with going abroad and they were bored with staying at home. They were bored with most of the great poets of the world who had lived and died and about whom they knew nothing. They were even bored with the great poems which had been written and which they had never read.

They were bored with hunger in the streets, with the injustice, cruelty and oppression all around them, with the men who were killed, with the children who starved, with justice, freedom and man’s right to live. Finally, they were bored with living, they were bored with dying but!—they were not bored that year with Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.

War, death and famine, the surge of chaos, all of the grief, the sweat, the labor, anguish and defeat that left their scar upon the suffering and tormented soul of man could only fill the minds and spirits of these gentry with the languors of unuttered boredom. They had heard about it all so often. It was old stuff now. Life was “too short.” They simply could not be bored. And so they turned their spirited and enthusiastic interest to a contemplation of Mr. Piggy Logan and his works.

There had been those at first among the cognoscenti—those happy pioneers who had got in at the very start of Mr. Logan’s vogue—who had characterized his performance as “frightfully amusing.” But that too was old stuff now and anyone who now dared to qualify Mr. Logan’s art with such a paltry adjective as “amusing” was instantly dismissed as a person of no cultural importance. He was annihilated with the contempt that such insensitive appraisal richly warranted. Mr. Logan and his circus had long since ceased to be “amusing.” He had ceased to be “amusing” when one of the more sophisticated columnists of the daily press had discovered that “not since the early Chaplin has the art of tragic humor through the use of pantomime reached such a faultless elevation.”

This, in more modern phrase, was the “payoff.” After this, the procession formed upon the right, and each newcomer paid his tribute with a new and glittering coin. The articles in the daily press were followed by others in the smarter publications. There was a whole page of pictures in Vanity Fair, a Profile in The New Yorker. The dramatic critics took it up, the offerings of the current stage were held up to barbed shafts of ridicule, the withering fire of admonitory criticism. Unfortunate actresses enjoying a long run were admonished to view Mr. Logan and his dolls and take seriously to heart the miming of the barebacked rider. Young actors were solemnly enjoined to observe the conduct of the dashing young doll on the flying trapeze, and to learn something from him in the arts of balance. The leading tragedians of the theatre were instructed to pay special attention to Mr. Logan’s clown before they next essayed the role of Hamlet.

The solemn discussions broke out everywhere. There were articles about Mr. Logan and his dolls in every publication of any standing. Two eminent critics engaged in a rapier-like duel which reached a culmination of such adaptive subtlety that in the end it was said there were not over seven people in the modern world who could understand the final passages at arms. The central issue of this battle was to establish whether Logan in his development had been influenced more by the geometric cubism of the early Picasso or by the geometric abstractions of Brancusi. Both schools of thought had their impassioned followers, but in the end it was generally conceded that the Picassos had somewhat the best of it.

And the Centre of the storm? The Cause of all this tumult? The generating Force behind this mighty revolution in the world of art—which, as one critic had so aptly put it, was a great deal more than just another “movement,” a great deal more than just a new “development,” the expression of a new and individual talent in modern art: it was rather a whole new universe of creation, a whirling planet which in its fiery revolution may throw off the generation of its own sidereal system—and It!—The colossal Talent which had done all this—What was It doing now? It (under the care of her gracious hospitality) was now enjoying the privacy of one of the lovely rooms in Mrs. Jack’s apartment, and, as if It was utterly unaware of the huge disturbance It had made or the towering position It now enjoyed in the great world—It was calmly, quietly, modestly prosaically and matter-of-factly occupied in pulling off Its own trousers and pulling on a pair of canvas pants.

What did It think and say and feel about the cataclysmic commotion It had thus occasioned? Well,—lt, from all that one could see and tell, said and thought and felt and did very little about it. Indeed, as more than one critic significantly pointed out—lt had “the essential simplicity of the great artist: an almost childlike naiveté of speech and gesture that pierces straight to the heart of reality.” Essentially, lt—in critic phrase—had an “intelligence that sees things in large masses. Its vision is universal, hence elliptical—It sees life and the universe simply in essences of Mass Matter. Its creations thus are whole and instant, the fusion of planetary substances.”

Even the life of lt, Its previous history, resisted investigations of the biographers with the impenetrability of the same baffling simplicity. Or, as one critic clearly phrased it: “As in the life of almost all great men of art there is little in Logan’s early years to indicate his future achievement. Like almost all supremely great men his development was slow—it might almost be said, unheeded—up to the time he burst suddenly, like a blazing light, upon the public consciousness.”

This states it very fairly. To state the facts, however, a trifle more concretely, the naked biography of It was as follows: It had come from quite an old, distinguished family in New England. It had been sent to St. Paul’s School where It had been generally known among Its fellows by the name of Piggy. It had then gone to Harvard and It had left Harvard at the end of two years when It had handsomely failed to qualify for Its succeeding year. It had then gone to Yale and remained a year with no greater progress than It had known before. Then It had gone to Paris where It had stayed for the next five years and—save for Its final burst of glory—the rest was almost silence.

It had been seen regularly and constantly about the cafes of the Left Bank for the next five years. It had been well known and a great favorite there. It had made the acquaintance of Mr. Ezra Pound and during the last year of Its sojourn in the capital of Art it had given first performance of Its wire dolls. The performance had been largely attended by Its friends and by Its enemies, by Its partisans and by Its opponents, by Its two schools of thought of which there were in those days almost thirty-seven in this fair city by the Seine.

And during the course of Its famous first performance, while Its enemies were loudly united in booing It and all Its works into oblivion, Its fiery champion, Mr. Pound, had leaped to his feet, brandished his fist and screamed: “Assassins!”—after which, of course, the affair broke up in a general brawl, and the career and fame of It were thus gloriously established.

Since then Its career had been a chain of unbroken constantly growing triumphs. When It had returned to Its native shores the autumn before, the adepts of the arts were already ripened for idolatry. And now, at this very moment, in this very place, on this very spot, in the month of April of this year of grace, It Itself was here in Mrs. Jack’s apartment, under the care of her gracious hospitality, was now enjoying the privacy of one of the lovely rooms in Mrs. Jack’s apartment, and, as if It was utterly unaware of the huge disturbance It had made or the towering position It now enjoyed in the great world—It was calmly, quietly, modestly, and matter-of-factly pulling off its own trousers prosaically and pulling on a pair of canvas pants.