MR. HIRSCH WAS WOUNDED SORROWFULLY

•   •   •

Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully, but he could wait.

He did not seem to follow her. It was just that one always knew he was there. She wove through the complications of that brilliant crowd the lavish undulation of her opulent behind. And Mr. Lawrence Hirsch—he did not follow her. But he was always there:

“Oh absolutely!”—the tone was matter-of-fact and undisturbed: It carried the authority of calm conviction—“We have positive proof of their innocence—evidence that was never allowed to come to light. The Federalist is publishing it in the next issue. It proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Vanzetti could not have been within fifty miles of the crime—”

Mr. Lawrence Hirsch spoke quietly, and did not look at her.

“But how horrible!” cried Mrs. Jack with a flushed, indignant little face. “Isn’t it dreadful to know that things like that could happen in a country like this?”

She turned to Lawrence Hirsch with a flaming face and with round righteous anger blazing up in her: “I think the whole thing’s the most damnable—the most dastardly—the most disgraceful thing I ever heard!” she cried. “These—these miserable people who could be guilty of such a thing!—These despicable horrible rich people!—It’s enough to make you want a Revolution!” cried Mrs. Jack—

“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Hirsch with a cool irony—“you may have your wishes gratified—It’s not beyond the realm of possibility—and it if comes that case may still return to plague them yet. The trials, of course, were perfectly outrageous and the judge should have been instantly dismissed. The men were put to death without a fair trial.”

“But these terrible old men!” cried Mrs. Jack. “To know that there are people living who could do a thing like that!” At the bottom of her heart she had always been convinced that she was a “radical”—a revolutionary! As she now said, turning to another member of the group and speaking earnestly, and with a quiet pride: “You know I have always been a Socialist. I vote for Norman Thomas every time he runs—You see,” she spoke very simply and with honest self-respect, “I’ve always been a worker. All my sympathy is on their side.”

Suddenly she held her small strong hands out before her, looked at them and their firm swift shape with pride, turned them over with palms upward, turned them back again, and said quietly: “Look at those hands. You can see that they have worked. How strong and deft and sure they are!”

Mr. Hirsch did not seem to be following anybody. Not really. However, there was now a very strong sense—a feeling that he knew someone was there. His manner had become a trifle vague, detached, as if he were no longer paying strict attention.

“It is a cause célèbre,” said Mr. Lawrence Hirsch, and, as if rather liking the sound of the words he repeated them portentously: “A cause célèbre.” And, distinguished, polished, and contained, he moved away towards the next group and in the general direction of that lavish undulance, those weaving buttocks. And yet he did not seem to follow her.

For Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.

*   *   *   *   *

“Oh Beddoes! Beddoes!”

Miss Mandell had woven her undulant voluptuous charms toward Robert Ahrens, and his exultant words had been uttered in response to some remark of hers.

Mr. Ahrens was a connoisseur of books, a collector of editions, an aesthete of rare letters. Almost his whole time since he had entered the room with Miss Roberta Heilprinn and paid his cheerful duties to his hostess, Mrs. Jack, had been spent in a cherubic investigation of that lady’s books. And never before or since Erasmus’ time, was there a more cheerful, a more mellow investigator. Just to look at him as he browsed around—yes, that was the word for it!—Mr. Ahrens was a browser, if there ever was one—was enough to make one’s mouth water for a good book, a cheerful nook or corner by the blazing fire, a pipe—oh, by all means, a pipe! A pipe!—And a bottle of old port—or, a crusty flagon, say, of Nut Brown Ale. This was the effect Mr. Ahrens had on people when they saw him with a book. He made one think of bowered cottages in the English country-side—of the one we heard about last week in Sussex, which could be had for sixteen bob a week—(our informant was completely English)—and which was simply charming.

Mr. Ahrens revived man’s wistful yearnings for such a life, his desires to “get away from all of this,” to spend the remainder of his days in charming rustication, in peaceful gossip with the cook, the maid, the vicar, and the old men at the pub, and his evenings in his cottage by the fire with a pipe, a bottle of old port, a shaggy dog, and a volume of Charles Lamb. Mr. Robert Ahrens thus became in the maelstrom of the vexed tormented city, a kind of living wish-fulfillment—if not the answer to a maiden’s prayer, at least a kind of embodiment of many a jaded mortal’s secret hope.

Miraculously, Mr. Robert Ahrens, in the feverish torment of the city’s life seemed to have achieved somehow for himself the things that other men think they will have to go to Sussex for—the pipe, the port, a collie, the charming cottage, and the book. Mr. Robert Ahrens seemed to carry these things around with him. Here, in the strident and uncertain life of this great city, among the brilliant glitter, the fine nerves, the complicated lives of this sophisticated gathering, Mr. Ahrens alone seemed to carry about with him the furniture of his own content. He was his pipe, his port, his collie, and his cheerful hearth, his English cottage and his volume of Charles Lamb. He didn’t need to travel anywhere to find them because he had them there inside him all the time.

He was a cheerful, pleasant, and distinguished looking man in his mid-forties, an engaging combination of gentleness and happy exuberance, of energy and gay good humor, of fastidiousness and of casual ease. Unlike the remainder of the gathering he was not in evening dress. He wore grey English flannels—“Oxford bags” as they were called by the more knowing kind—a shaggy coat of grey-brown tweed, thick English shoes with heavy soles, woollen socks, a soft white shirt and a red tie.

In appearance, he was fairly tall, something over middling height, in figure rather slight and graceful. He had fine hands and his face was very healthy looking. He was somewhat bald and his high forehead and bald head were pleasantly browned and freckled as if he had spent much time out of doors in the wind and sun. His face also was healthy, ruddy, and pleasant looking. His blue eyes twinkled with gaiety and good humor, and his pleasant face really did have a cherubic look, especially when his elated spirits would rise up in him and he would cry out exuberantly as he now did: “Oh Beddoes! Beddoes! By all means, you must read Beddoes!”

He had been looking at a book as Miss Mandell approached him, thumbing the pages with loving fingers, pausing from time to time to take a puff at an immensely long, fastidious, and very costly amber cigarette holder. His features suffused with a cherubic glow, he was as completely absorbed in his pleasant investigation, even in the midst of this brilliant and sophisticated throng, as if he had been in his study in an Oxford College. He seemed in fact to have just come in from a long walk across the country-side, or on the moors, and now to be quietly looking forward to an evening with his books—and with a pipe. As Miss Mandell approached him, he looked up, and in response to her question, “Have you ever read anything by a man named Beddoes?”—he but answered in the way, and in the tone, described.

It was, by the way, a habit of Miss Mandell’s always to preface a man’s name no matter how famous that name might be, by the qualifying phrase “a man named.” Why she did this is hard to say, unless she felt instinctively it was another sop to arrogance—a kind of concession to her own snobbishness and pride, a way of saying that if she was bending her stiff neck a little, she was doing it indifferently.

Thus, if she were discussing her literary acquaintanceship, particularly among the rarer coteries of precocity, which was large, she might say: “Did you ever read a book called ‘To the Lighthouse’ by a woman named Virginia Woolf. I know her rather well. I just wondered if you had read anything of hers and what you thought of it.”

Or, “I wonder if you’ve read a poem called The Waste Land’ by a man named T. S. Eliot. I used to see a good deal of him in London. I just wondered if you had never heard of him and what you thought of his work.”

Or, “I wonder if you ever read a piece called ‘Tender Buttons’ by a woman named Gertrude Stein. She lives in Paris. I used to see a lot of her while I was there. She’s quite a fascinating person—a good deal of a charlatan, but enormous charm. I just wondered if you’d ever read anything she’d written and what you thought of it.”

Or, more simply, sleepily, with a smouldering look of her dark face: “Have you read anything by a man named Proust?” This simpler method was even more effective. By not admitting anything herself, simply by asking such a question with a kind of casual indirection, and a smouldering look on her dark untelling face she managed to convey an impression not only of enormous erudition but of very superior critical reserve. It was as if she were accustomed to hold conversations with Mr. T. S. Eliot in which the greater part of knowledge—what the common cry of letterly mankind: the professors, Ph.D’s, book reviewers, and average critics spend a life-time in laboriously gathering and expanding—was a matter of such tedious commonplace, as to be regarded entirely in conversations of such succinct allusiveness and such connotative subtlety that the results were distillations of the rarest gold, to be revealed only at intervals of ten years in volumes of no more than forty pages at a time.

When she was in this vein there was an air of “more to this than meets the eye” to everything she said. And the impressed and flattered questionee would not only hastily blurt out that he not only had heard of a man named Proust but had actually read something that he had written, and would then proceed to lay out with great eloquence his critical opinion.

The manner in which this ill-timed outburst was received was decidedly depressing to the unhappy victim. For, at the conclusion of his harangue, Miss Mandell would just look at him searchingly for a moment with a kind of lingering contempt, murmur “um-m,” non-committally and then turn arrogantly away, weaving her way through the crowd with lavish undulance as if in search of some likelier material for her deep searchingness.

So stranded, the unfortunate person who had been duped into these critical loquacities would not only feel that he had made a fool of himself, but also that what he had to say must seem to be the most infantile and driveling stuff to an intelligence which, after he had done his best, could only look at him a long moment with a smouldering stare, murmur “Um,” and undulate away.

Mr. Robert Ahrens, however, was made of different stuff—if not of sterner stuff, at least of stuff too exuberantly assured, too cherubically concerned with its own interests to be very seriously perturbed by any look that Miss Mandell might give him, whether smouldering or not, or by anything she might or might not say. Besides, they had known each other for years; and they were both theatrical people, he in his actual practice and profession, she in the conduct of her life.

So when the lady approached and smouldered at him, and then said, “Have you ever read anything by a man named Beddoes?”—Mr. Ahrens immediately took the long amber holder from his mouth, looked up at her with a face fairly glowing with cherubic warmth, and elatedly cried: “Oh Beddoes! Beddoes!”—The name seemed to give him such exuberant satisfaction that he actually shook his head a little and chortled—“Ah, ha-ha-ha! Beddoes! Oh by all means, Beddoes!” cried Mr. Ahrens. “Everyone should be compelled to read him! I love Beddoes!”

And, with these words, he lifted his cherubic face which by this time was positively glowing with delight as if he had just consumed a whole quart bottle of port wine, put the enormously long amber holder in his mouth again and drew on it a long fastidious inhalation, let it trickle out in a long luxurious exhalation, and then shook his head again with a short strong movement and cried exultantly: “Oh Beddoes, by all means!”

“He was mad, wasn’t he?” inquired Mr. Lawrence Hirsch at this moment. He had just casually seemed to wander up, as if attracted by the noises of these cultural enthusiasms, and without appearing to follow anyone:—“I mean, didn’t he die in an asylum?—in Switzerland, I believe. Really a fascinating case of misplaced identity, wasn’t it?” Polished, casual, imperturbable, he turned for the first time toward Miss Mandell in an explanatory manner—“I mean, the man was really born out of his time. He should have been an Elizabethan, shouldn’t he?”

Miss Mandell said nothing for a moment. She just looked at Mr. Lawrence Hirsch with a long smouldering stare of lingering contempt. Then she murmured “Um-m,” in a non-committal tone, and moved undulantly away. And Mr. Hirsch did not follow her.

For Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully—but he could wait.

He never seemed to follow her. Instead, he stayed there for some moments talking about—Beddoes! He was informed and imperturbable, authoritatively assured, on his aesthetic toes—the very model of what a distinguished leader of enlightened thought—a modern Federalist—should be. There was a little Sacco and Vanzetti here, a little first hand secrecy from Washington there, a sophisticated jest or so, an amusing anecdote of what happened only last week to the President, a little about Russia with a shrewd observation culled from the latest cry in Marxian economy and a little Beddoes now and then. And it was all so perfectly informed, all so suavely contained, all so alertly modern that it never for a moment slipped into a cliché, always represented the very latest mode in everything—art, letters, politics, and economics—and Beddoes!

It was a remarkable accomplishment!—An inspiring example of what the busy modern man of affairs, the great captain of finance, can really accomplish if he only applies himself—not for fifteen minutes, but for fifteen hours, a day.

And in addition to all this there was Miss Mandell. He never seemed to follow her.

Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.

He did not beat his breast, or tear his hair, or cry out “Woe is me!” If he had, he might have found some easement of his agony, some merciful release for his swart pain. But instead, Mr. Hirsch remained himself, the captain of his soul, the man of many interests, the master of immense authorities. And he could wait.

And so he did not follow her by so much as a glance. And yet one always knew that he was there. He did not speak to her in any way, nor say to her, “Beloved, thou art fair, beloved, thou art fair: thou hast dove eyes,” nor did he say, “Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest,” nor did he compare her to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots, nor say to her, “Also our bed is green.” He did not remark to her that she was beautiful as Tirzah or comely as Jerusalem or terrible as an army with banners, nor that her teeth were as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, nor that her navel was like a round goblet which wanteth nor liquor, nor that her belly was like a bag of wheat set about with lilies.

In fact he did not even speak to her in any way, nor ask anyone to stay him with flagon or comfort him with wine, or confess that he was sick of love. And as for confessing to anyone that his beloved put her hand in at the hole of the door and that his bowels were moved by her, the idea probably never occurred to him.

For Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.

He did not cry out to her in his agony: “Flaunt me with your mockery and scorn, spurn me with your foot, lash me with your tongue, trample upon me like the worm I am, spit upon me like the dust of which I am composed—revile me to your friends and ridicule me to your lovers, make me crawl far and humbly, if you like, to pimp for you, to act as your procurer, to act as willing cuckold and as pander to the systems of your transient and adulterous lovers—do anything you like, I can endure it—but oh, for God sake, notice me! Look at me for just a moment—if just with scorn! Speak to me with just a word—if just with hate! Be near me for just a moment, make me happy with just a touch—even if the nearness is but loathing, and the touch a blow! Do anything you like! Treat me in any way you will!—But, in the name of God, I beg you, I implore you—oh beloved as thou art—” Out of the corner of his steady but tormented eye he followed for a moment the lavish undulations of that opulent behind—“In God’s name, let me see you know that I am here!”

And yet he did not seem to follow—anyone. For Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.

“Hm! Interesting!” Mr. Hirsch murmured politely. He craned a little at the collar and ran attentive fingers underneath the collar’s rim. The eyeballs of his weary eyes were shot with red.—“I had not realized the real facts were so interesting—Oh absolutely! I agree with you entirely—He was an Elizabethan out of place, if ever there was one.”

And distinguished and assured he moved on, following the weaving undulations of that lavish form, without ever seeming so to follow it. It was grotesquely, in that brilliant gathering of fashion, talent, and of wit, a brutal comedy: a hunt that dogs could follow even in these best of men. But though the eye might burn and redden, yet the tongue was cool—“Oh really?—Absolutely—You’re looking awfully well.” And Beddoes! Beddoes!—But the hunt was on.

For Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.

*   *   *   *   *

There was a sound of music in one corner of the room. Teddy Samuels, Amy Van Leer’s most recent lover, had been playing some of the songs he had written for his last revue: he was seated at the grand piano in the corner, running through the scores, playing a few bars of the deft, neat music lightly, then changing swiftly into something else. Meanwhile, the young people gathered around him—Amy, Ernest, Jack, and Alvin, the gay Japanese, and two or three of the young people from the repertory theatre leaned on the polished leaf of the great piano humming the catchy airs and in a graceful and engaging group keeping time to their brisk rhythm with tapping feet, light drumming fingers, and moving shoulders.

At this moment there was a burst of laughter from the group: someone had looked up and espied Roy Farley who had gone out and returned and was now standing in the door, looking languorously over the crowd, with deep violet-lidded eyes and the drowsy arrogance of a prima donna. Samuels stopped playing suddenly, and looked up laughing, and Amy’s hoarse excited voice could be heard, laughing, saying quickly: “There’s Roy!—But look at him! Isn’t he the most!—I mean!—you know!” Thus encouraged, Roy Farley took full advantage of the moment: It was, he knew, “Good theatre” and he “played it up” for all that it was worth. The drowsy arrogance of his prima donna manner deepened perceptibly: he burlesqued the role absurdly, slowly looking around the room with eyes that were now so heavy-lidded that they were almost closed. He had to hold his head far back even to see out of them at all. Finally, pretending to see someone in the crowd he knew, he waved his hand with a kittenish gesture, at the same time saying, “Oh, hello,” in a tone half-way between a greeting and a croon, and then, lidding his eyes still further, and making his voice yield the last atom of lewd suggestiveness he could put into the words, he said: “You must come over.”

With these words, simpering like an ancient whore, he advanced into the room, now closing his eyes and lifting his head with a tragic mien, at the same time saying in the husky and melodramatic monotone of a famous actress: “That’s all there is. There isn’t any more.”

The gathering apparently found this curious performance hilariously amusing: there were little shrieks of laughter from the women, coarser guffaws from the men, as Mr. Farley made his calculated entrance.

The comedian was a frail young man with lank reddish hair, a thin face of unnatural whiteness—it looked indeed, as if it had been coated with white powder—and a thin, ruined mouth. He was by profession an actor but his greatest celebrity had come from his impersonation of female parts in which at the moment he enjoyed a considerable minor reputation, and he was also on occasions of this sort in considerable demand as a kind of court jester.

It was the spirit of the time. People of Mr. Farley’s type and gender enjoyed a perverse celebrity. There was scarcely a fashionable hostess of the period or a smart gathering which did not have their own accredited Mr. Farley as an essential functionary of the feast. He was a kind of privileged comic personality, a cross between a lapdog and a clown.

The homosexual had in fact usurped the place and privilege of the hunchback jester of an old king’s court. It was a curious analogy: his own deformity had become, like the crooked backs of royal clowns, a thing of open jest and ribaldry. And his mincing airs and graces, his antics and his gibes, the spicy sting of his feminine and envenomed wit, were like the malicious quips, the forked tongues of the clowns of ancientry, approved and privileged by the spirit of the time and given license that is given only to a clown—or a king. It was, perhaps, an aspect of those times that the great, full throat of laughter, the huge side-shaking humor of the belly, the full, free, commonality of hearty mirth, wise, simple, deep, affectionate and all-embracing, were so rarely heard.

These were more piping times: the world had grown older, subtler, more aware—such ribaldry as made their fathers laugh, or as enlivened coarse breeds of human clay were not for gentry such as these. Their palates now were more adept and jaded, it took a subtler sauce, a more cunning chef to stir the appetites of these sophisticates.

Therefore, in that great citadel of wealth and power and loveliness and sky-flung faery to which the lowly of the earth so yearningly aspire, there was small laughter in those years of grace that did not have the serpent’s fangs behind it, and little mirth that was not omened by the rattles of the snake. And for such splendid folk as these, such jests as shook the ribs of Rabelais and filled the taverns of Elizabeth with lusty mirth were not enough. These gentle folk had grown wise and fine beyond all reckoning in their wits’ demand. They could no longer be prodded into laughter by the coarser thumbs of Fielding, Dickens, or of Swift—apparently their risible refinements could only be aroused by the humors of a mincing whore.

The subtlety of this celebrated performance was now being graciously unveiled by Mr. Farley in its full and finest flower for the benefit of the admiring host. He made his entrance opportunely, with all eyes fixed upon him and faces already half upon the grin as they waited for the latest flowering of his genius. So encouraged, so inspired—for Mr. Farley like all his precious tribe and others of the Thespian cult—could do nothing unless the eyes and ears of men were fixed upon him—made an impressive entrance. His wit apparently depended largely upon the arts of mimicry—and the art of mimicry where Mr. Farley was concerned depended solely upon impersonation of the female sex.

And this impersonation, to judge from the effect it immediately produced upon the audience, was—in common phrase—“simply killing.” Mr. Farley minced forward delicately with a languorous and exaggerated movement of the hips. As he did so he kept one frail and slender hand arched gracefully upon his thigh as with the other he pawed daintily at the air with plucking fingers as if reaching timidly for an unseen flower.

Meanwhile, he kept his head, the powdered whiteness of his parchment face, held languidly to one side, the weary eyes half closed and heavy-lidded—with an expression of simpering coyness at the lewd confines of his ruined and sunken mouth. And, as he minced along in this position he paused from time to time to wave maidenly at various people of his acquaintance in different parts of the big room saying, as he did so, “Oh, hello!—There you are!—How are you?—You must come over!”—in such an irresistibly mincing and ladylike manner that the effect upon that distinguished gathering was convulsing.

The ladies shrieked with laughter, the gentlemen spluttered and guffawed. As for Mrs. Jack, her rosy face grew almost purple. She was fairly overcome, she shrieked faintly: “Honestly!—isn’t he the most killing—” and was unable to continue.

The celebrated wit now came mincing up to her, took her hand and kissed it, and taking full advantage of the expectant silence that had fallen, he said, quite loudly in a throaty, languid and effeminate tone that could be heard in every corner of the room: “Oh, Esther, darling! I have news for you! …”

He paused and waited, and thus forewarned she clapped her little hand up to her deaf ear, turned her jolly little face half away from him with the expression and manner of a child listening eagerly and gleefully for the first time to the music coming from a gramophone, and said quickly: “Hah? Yes? What is it—What did you hear, Roy?”

“Well,” he said languidly in a voice, however, of great carrying power, “you know the Hotel Manger there on Broadway?”

“Yes? What about it, Roy?”

“They’re going to change its name,” he said.

“Hah?”—eagerly, almost gleefully—“Why? Why are they going to change its name, Roy?”—with her own theatrical training she was the good trouper now and played right into his hands to give full point and flavor to his jest.

“Because of what people have to say,” said Mr. Farley.

“Hah? What have they begun to say, Roy?”

“Why,” said he with lewd insinuation, “you know?—If it’s good enough for Jesus it’s good enough for me?”

In the roar of laughter that followed this splendid sally he sauntered mincingly away as one adept in the “timing” of the stage, waving his hand girlishly at various guests and speaking to them as if he were completely, nonchalantly unaware of the humorous sensation he had created.

But now the doorbell rang again. Mrs. Jack looked around doubtfully, inquiringly, a little startled, as if she were not certain whether she had heard its sharp ring. Then she saw Molly going towards the door: she looked quickly at the little watch upon her wrist. It was after ten o’clock. In a moment the door from the centre vestibule was opened, and a woman and a man came into the hall. It was Saul Levenson and his wife, Virginia. He had been a true and devoted friend of Mrs. Jack’s since childhood, but one would never have suspected it from the sneering arrogance of the look which he now gave her. Even as he stood there in the hall waiting for his wife to return, and arrogantly surveying the crowd within the room, the tragic fact of an incurable distemper in the man was instantly apparent. It stuck out all over him. He was a mass of sore thumbs. He had gnawed his own liver for so long a time that it had colored his whole life. Even his flesh seemed to have been soaked in bile; he was dyed through with the pigments of his own distemper, a kind of tragic stain of his own torment that could never be got out. And yet—and this was also apparent—he was a richly talented man. Just lacking genius, he had many shining gifts. He wrote brilliantly, he was a subtle and a penetrating critic, he was deep in the history of the arts, and an authority on modern painting, and he had a true and just appreciation of literature. Furthermore, he was one of the leaders of the modern theatre and one of its most eminent designers.

With gifts like these, with talents of such extraordinary variety, and with an accomplishment of work that had crowned his career with recognition and success for many years, it might be inferred that Levenson was a very happy man. Such, unhappily, was not the case. He was a very extraordinary man, he was often, where appreciation of true merit, or recognition of the good work of other people was concerned, a very generous and fine spirited man. But he was not a happy man. He was a tormented, wretchedly inverted, complicated man.

The result was grotesque but it was also terrible. The man’s face was simply unbelievable. One’s first and involuntary impulse on seeing him for the first time was to burst out in an explosive and uncontrollable laugh in which incredulity was mixed with amusement. But such a laugh was swiftly checked when one saw what inconceivable anguish of the mind and spirit it must have taken to wreak such anguish on the features of a high and sensitive man.

His face was a kind of living crazy-quilt of obnoxious and distressful colors. Or, rather, with its naturally oriental and Hebraic swarthiness, it was now a kind of Turkish rug into which every color of distemper and spiritual distress had been ruthlessly and grotesquely poured.

It was purple, it was green, it was dingy yellow, it was crimson, it was black. It seemed to have in it, in about equal proportions, the mixtures of jaundice and of apoplectic strangulation. It was, as Mrs. Jack thought instantly and with a momentary tendency toward explosive mirth, “the damnedest face you ever saw”—and then, with the instant repercussion of overwhelming sympathy: “Poor thing! Poor thing!”

To say that Levenson carried this grotesque patchquilt of a visage proudly like a flaming banner would be a modest understatement of the truth. He not only carried it, he brandished it. And as if those gargoyle features were not in their unhappy state of nature enough to do him vengeful service had he wished—to frighten little children with, had he so willed, to startle strangers and to shock his friends—he made it do a double duty in repulsion by conforming it to every eloquent expression that contempt and scorn can know.

It was an outrageously arrogant face. The quality of its arrogance was so exaggerated, so extravagant, so insultingly enlarged and emphasized that by comparison the expression of the celebrated Pooh Bah was ingenuous in its sweet democracy.

Even before Levenson spoke to anyone, even before he greeted a stranger, those jaundiced eyes and that chromatic gargoyle of a face looked his unhappy victim up and down with such hyperbole of sneering contempt and disdain that if he had at the same time emitted a mocking laugh and snarled: “Really, who is this low fellow anyway? Do I have to be bored by such a clodhopper or will not some good Samaritan come and rescue me from having to endure any more of the drivel of this bourgeois num-skull”—his arrogance and scorn could not have been more plainly uttered.

And this really was the way he often felt. His was a tragic paradox of the gifted intellectual of his race. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Gifted by nature and by inheritance not only with an artist’s talent, but with an artist’s love and appreciation of beauty, and of the gifts and talents of other people, no one could be more quick and warm and selfless in his generous and intelligent recognition of the work of other men. And yet he could also be torn by feelings of envy. He could writhe with a torment of jealousy and scorn.

Likewise, endowed by nature with a brilliant mind, a fine intelligence and with a critical faculty that sought and loved the truth for its own sake, these high intellects were being constantly twisted and perverted from their clear purposes, their grand detachments, and their nobler impersonality, by the corrosive vanities of the intellectual. As a result, he was constantly getting embroiled in picayune and acrid arguments with other people of this sort, the total effect of which too often was that both sides failed to see the woods because there were so many trees. “What precisely I said in my last letter to your columns and what precisely Mr. Katzstein said in his reply is now a matter of record—” etc., etc.,—and so on back and forth until all that was left of the original issue, had there been one, was the sordid spectacle of two embittered egotisms crossing useless t’s and dotting worthless i’s.

All these unhappy and conflicting qualities in this tormented and yet exceptional and distinguished spirit were now evident as he made his entrance at the party at Jack’s. While his wife, a plain featured, and rather ugly little New Englander whom he loved devotedly and for whom he had felt such a consuming passion that he had turned all colors of the rainbow until his face positively resembled an outbreak of the plague, and for whom he had left a beautiful and voluptuous spouse of his own race, had undergone a complete physical collapse and an eight months’ period of reconstruction at Zurich under the enlightened eye of Dr. Jung—while this quiet little lady, who had been the cause of so much shipwreck and so many rainbow hues was divesting herself of her wraps in the room that had been given over to the women, Levenson remained in the outer corridor, removed his hat, took off his light spring overcoat and slowly and disdainfully unwound from his collar an outrageous scarf which was a confusion of so many violent and distempered colors that it seemed almost that he must have chosen it in a deliberate effort to outdo his face.

He waited until his wife came back before entering the crowded living room. She entered first and for a moment Levenson remained standing in the door, slowly and insolently turning upon the combined assemblage the small-pox battery of his bubonic face. The look of scorn and revulsion upon his astounding features was now so eloquent in its violence that people turned and stared at him appalled. If he had chosen that moment to break into a loud and sneering laugh and say: “So! It has come to this, hey? I have taken all this trouble to get here—and this—ha, ha, ha,—is what I find.”—His contempt could not have been more explicit than it now seemed to be, and few people would have been surprised.

In a moment, however, his wife, feeling his absence and sensing from the lull that had descended upon the gathering that something was amiss, turned quickly, saw him, and gave him a quiet, quick, and warning look. This swift warning glance of his small guardian angel toned him down at once. He immediately composed himself, came into the room, and began to greet people in a natural tone of voice. Then he spoke to Mrs. Jack with the quiet affection of an old and valued friend.

“Esther, I’m sorry that we’re late,” he said, “We stopped in to look at your new show. I wanted to see your set.”

“Oh, did you see it, Saul?” she cried, clapping her hand to her ear and bending forward a little to hear better as her rosy face flushed deeper with excitement and interest: “Did you like it? Hah?”

For a moment his face was again distempered by its old look of arrogance and scorn:

“Oh, I suppose it will pass very well as an example of La Jack in one of her better moments. Of course, nothing anyone could do could hurt a piece of tripe like that play anyway. So I suppose it doesn’t matter much what the set is like. If they haven’t got sense enough to come to me in the first place it doesn’t matter who designs it.”

She was not annoyed. She had known him too long. She knew too much about him. She laughed and said: “God! You hate yourself don’t you?”—At the same time taking him in—the whole discolored pamphlet of his face—in one swift glance, thinking a trifle cynically, but good-humoredly and utterly without rancour:

“That fellow thinks he’s hell, doesn’t he? And, my God!”—for a moment as she looked at the polychromia of his astounding face the old swift impulse to explosive and incredulous mirth rose up in her and almost choked her—“What a face! Would anyone believe it! It’s—it’s—it’s like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tale!”—she thought, and then immediately, with a swift and overwhelming sense of pity: “Poor Saul! Poor thing!”

More quietly now, her face still flushed with laughter, her wise eyes twinkling shrewdly and good-naturedly, she looked at him and said: “Well, Saul, I’ll tell you something. No one’s ever going to get a swelled head from staying around you.”

“Don’t listen to him, Esther,” Levenson’s wife said quietly. “He’s crazy about your set—he told me so. And I thought it was beautiful,” she added simply.

Levenson’s voice, when he spoke again, was also quiet, his face and manner had lost all their former arrogance and there was now no doubt whatever about his complete and utter seriousness.

“Esther,” he said, “you are one of the best designers in the world! The set tonight was lovely. At your best,” he said. “There’s no one else who can touch you.”

Mrs. Jack’s face now really did flush deeply with happiness and joy. A wave of warm swift feeling, of gratefulness and affection, filled her being: “How generous and good!” she thought. “What a fine high man he really is!”

When she answered him her voice too was quiet, the voice of a person talking to an old friend at such a moment, stripped free of mirth or any playful pleasantry, when there is nothing but plain speech to say:

“Well, Saul,” she said. “You know the saying: ‘Praise from Sir Topas is praise indeed.’ That’s the way I feel now.”

He turned away from her, having resumed his former manner, saying arrogantly and disdainfully as he did so: “Not that there’s not room for a lot of improvement! And when I think you’re lousy—as you frequently are—I’ll tell you so!”

She laughed richly: “I’ll bet you will.”—And then her rosy little face, twinkling with good humor, she raised her hands, palms upward, Jewishly, shrugged her shoulders, and said plaintively: “I vont even have to esk”—a comicality that so delighted her by its quick spontaneity that she shook hysterically with helpless appreciation of her own humor, putting a handkerchief to her mouth and saying quickly: “I know—but it was funny, wasn’t it!”—although no one said it wasn’t.

Levenson grinned a little, then moved away and joined the crowd. He could be seen moving from group to group, his amazing patchwork of a face arrogantly contorted in the full and swarthy volutes of dark oriental scorn.

Anyone who might have been present on this famous evening, would undoubtedly have noted, among the crowd of brilliant and distinguished people, most of whom seemed to know one another with the familiarity of long acquaintanceship, a weird little group, which seemed to be marooned, to be sorrowfully enisled there in the crowd in the lonely isolation of a lepers’ colony, and which provided the most bizarre and disturbing touch to an otherwise distinguished gathering.

This was a man named Krock, a sculptor, his wife, who had been a girlhood friend of Mrs. Jack’s, and who was the reason for their being present, and his mistress, a young, buxom, and fullblown whore.

It was an astounding and unhappy little party. Krock was a Germanic kind of man with a carnal face, a little blond goatee that tufted out of the deep hollow below his sensual mouth and an unpleasant habit of moistening his full red lips and rubbing his hands, tenderly along his heavy thighs, at the same time, murmuring intimately as he did so that he had varicose veins and that his legs were very tired, and couldn’t “they” go off quietly somewhere to another room away from all this noise and sit down—this last remark being made invariably to any attractive woman that he met as he eased gently toward her with a straddling movement.

His wife looked like someone who had been struck by lightning. She was a blown shell of a woman with a fragile face—a wisp of life with sunken, brightly staring eyes. And the mistress, whom he introduced as his “model,” was like something out of one of the drawings of Felician Rops. She had carnal lips, eyes and lashes that had been weirdly stained with some nocturnal dye, and blondish hair combed down and cut in a straight bang across her forehead. She was a bold featured and bold figured girl with full outstanding breasts, and although she was dressed in a street costume, her blouse was low. It was a shocking little group, strange mixture of flaunting carnality and frail surrender, of Madonna and of Mary Magdalene, of the Twentieth Century and the Moulin Rouge.

And although such liaisons were certainly not unknown to this gathering, although such carnal triangles were familiar to them all, and the forms even present here tonight, of conventional concealment had been here so ruthlessly violated, the naked fact was here so ruthlessly revealed, that the other people at the party evidently felt the circumstance a little shocking and perhaps, like sinners gone to church, enjoyed the luxury of feeling virtuous.

The little group was somewhat isolated—a fact which seemed to trouble the painter and his mistress not at all—and from time to time people would glance at them with speculative looks—at the wife with wonder and commiseration, at the man and the young woman with distaste and a kind of cynical amusement.

The carnal history of the whole group was written with such brutal nakedness that men would stare at them for a moment heavily, then turn away with a short ejaculative laugh that summed up everything, and women, after staring at them with a curiosity mixed of wonder and repulsion, would turn away, saying with a kind of helpless and astounded laugh: “Isn’t it the most?—” It was only when people looked at the frail and tragic-looking wife that their expressions would soften into kindly interest. Men looked at her with quiet sympathy, and women with a more active and aroused compassion would say involuntarily:

“The poor thing!”

Well, here they were then, three dozen of the highest and the best, with shimmer of silk, and ripple of laughter, with the tumultuous babel of fine voices, with tinkle of ice in shell-thin glasses, and with silvern clatter, in thronging webs of beauty, wit and loveliness—as much passion, joy, and hope, and fear, as much triumph and defeat, as much anguish and despair and victory, as much sin, viciousness, cruelty and pride, as much base intrigue and ignoble striving, as much unnoble aspiration as flesh and blood can know, or as a room can hold—enough, God knows, to people hell, inhabit heaven, or fill out the universe—were all here, now, miraculously composed, in magic interweft—at Jack’s!