Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 455
Some of the language was unusual. For instance, Biljor told Lide, before she had her misfortune, that his heart was flesh stretched over the stars, and she beat upon it, so he said, like a bone pounding the taut cat-skins stretched upon a tom-tom. And she told him something equally peculiar. “i am starvation” she said, using a small letter for the pronoun; I couldn’t see why, myself. “i am pangs and slavering and my slavering is like the hot yellow slime on the cobblestones of a chinese slum.”
Well, of course I knew Enid was advanced in her ideas on art and literature and I was afraid she’d get nervous with me if I asked her why she’d paid three dollars and a half for “Biljor”, especially as the author’d been too economical with capital letters and punctuation, I thought, to warrant any such outlay. So I tried to be tactful and just told her I seemed to be as ordinary-minded about it as Eddie Bullfinch had been. “Another thing that bothers me,” I went on, “I don’t seem to get the plot quite straight. For instance, Crogg appears to state that he’s in love with this Lide; but there are other statements to the effect that Lide is his mother, so I don’t — —”
Enid interrupted me, looking impatient. “Certainly!” she told me. “He has a mother fixation.”
“Oh,” I said, and, although I’d never heard the expression before, the idea it seemed to convey struck me as morbid; but I wanted to go on being tactful so I just asked her in a friendly way what pleasure or improvement she’d got out of “Biljor”.
“Pleasure?” she said. “One doesn’t read great dramatic poetry for mere pleasure.”
This surprised me, mainly because I hadn’t caught any idea of its being poetry at all, and I told her I hadn’t.
“Certainly, it’s poetry,” she said. “You don’t think mere cheap jingle and rhyme and capital letters make a thing poetry, do you? That’s as absurd as thinking one reads for the sake of pleasure. ‘Biljor’ is brutal beauty. It’s a welling of damnation and the forbidden out of the soil. It’s abysmal reality. It’s an engulfment of the human in the psychical demonism of the soil, expressed in masculine verse.” Enid talks this way when she gets roused on literature or art, and I think I’m quoting her pretty correctly — because there was something a good deal like what she said on the back paper cover of the book, and I read it over several times, trying to get it. “It’s stark elemental actualism,” she said.
“I don’t understand you exactly,” I told her. “If I get you anywhere at all near right, you mean that there are real people outside of asylums quite a lot like these people in ‘Biljor’, and such things happen as are supposed to happen in this book?”
“Certainly,” she said. “ ’Biljor’ is the drama of the souls of people in close contact with the soil — of primitive, elemental people who sweat and labor close to the soil.”
“My goodness!” I said, “I’ve known a good many farm-hands and suchlike; I never dreamed they were like that. For instance,” I went on, “look yonder.” We were sitting on the piazza, and Zebias Flick was grubbing around over the lawn on his hands and knees; he had an old case-knife, and he was rooting up weeds and dandelions out of the grass. Zebias usually seems to have been in fairly close contact with the soil, if you judge by looking at him. He certainly was in close contact with it when I pointed him out to Enid and he filled her other conditions, too, because he was laboring some and perspiring quite a little. “Do you suppose,” I asked Enid, “do you suppose Zebias Flick ever told anybody that his heart was flesh stretched over the stars like taut cat-skins over a tom-tom?”
She began to look sensitive. “He might have,” she told me. “You don’t pretend to know what he might say if he were alone with a woman he had a passion for, do you?”
“Well, let’s ask him,” I said. “Unless maybe you’d prefer me to inquire of Mr. Sweetmus instead?”
Right there she asked me a question — a terribly disrespectful one; but I expect everybody understands about the young people being different nowadays. “Are you trying to play the Tomfool?”
“I see your point,” I told her. “You mean it would occupy too much of our day if we asked him. We’ll stick to Zebias.”
So I called him. He heard me of course; but at first the only sign he gave was to stop working and look at the ground for a while. Then he hunted around, still on his hands and knees, till he found a blade of grass that was longer than the one he already had in his mouth. He introduced the longer one and took the shorter one out, got up pretty slowly, scratched his head and the back of his overalls; then he walked over toward us, stopped about ten feet away from the piazza and chewed his piece of grass a while.
“Breeze droppin’,” he said. “She’s shiftin’ to sou’west.”
“Zebias,” I asked him, “did you ever tell any woman you had a passion for that your heart was flesh stretched across the stars like the taut cat-skins of a tom-tom, and that she was beating on it like a bone?”
He wasn’t looking at us; he was staring out at the Atlantic ocean; but the grass he was chewing stopped wagging out through his scattered mustache for a minute. Then it began to move again. “Mebbe she’s shifted a mite west o’ sou’west,” he said.
Enid got up, and it wasn’t hard to see she was pretty cross with me; she gave me one of those looks I’ve mentioned as painful for a parent to endure when being put in his place on such subjects as art or antiques or biology. “I wonder how long,” she said over her shoulder as she went into the house, “I wonder how long I’ve got to live among sparkless literal-minded people?”
CHAPTER X
OF COURSE ENID feels a good deal of intellectual loneliness sometimes; anyhow she tells her mother she does, and her mother tells me. Well, she’d already heard there was an Art Colony — that’s the way it was spoken of — over at Mount Jasper, which is a little settlement about fifteen miles back in the country, and, when she came out of the house again, after the discussion between us I’ve just mentioned, she got her runabout and drove over there. The Jasperites must have cheered her right up because she didn’t get back to Mary’s Neck until after dark and was all enlivened and enthusiastic. The “Jasper movement”, she told us, was the most advanced outpost of the best in literature, art and music. “Modernistic” was her word for the Jasperites; she’d had a glorious afternoon with them and one of them was coming over to dinner with us the next night because she’d invited him.
He turned up early and Enid was pleased, though we could see she was worried about the impression we’d make on him and bothered by Eddie Bullfinch’s being at the cottage and keeping on staying — I suppose it was a little unfortunate that Eddie hung around so long he had to be asked in to the table, too. The young man from the Jasper Art Colony was named Carlos Prang; but he wasn’t a foreigner. He was from Springfield, Ohio, I found by asking, though he’d lived for the last two or three years in New York. He wasn’t homely and he wasn’t eccentric-looking, either, and he was dressed like anybody else; he didn’t even wear those big spectacles, and the only thing noticeable about him — except that he was pretty sallow and had what you might call burning eyes — was that he began smoking cigarettes with his soup. Of course to me his conversation seemed peculiar; but it wasn’t any more so than Enid’s, and, after all, I don’t know that the word “peculiar” is exactly the best way to express it.
I think I’ve mentioned in connection with antiques and the fine arts that Enid had a way sometimes of looking as though she knew secrets most other people could never hope to learn, and that in a lesser degree her mother and Clarissa now and then put on a little of this look, too. There seems to be something in all these artistic matters that isn’t intended for us men — I mean us customary American business men — and when we try to share in such subjects with our wives and daughters they appear kind of mysterious to us and they’re apt to look on us as pretty much dummies. Probably they’re right and the way we’re constituted doesn’t permit us to enter into their feelings in the manner some kinds of foreigners, for instance, can.
Take music: it’ll make a man’s own wife a perfect stranger to him sometimes. Women are liable to behave as though one of these Frenchmen or Spaniards or Yiddish could do something for them more important than any American husband could ever hope to accomplish. Why, when this Esjago, or what-you-call-him, played at Mozart Hall in Logansville, Mrs. Massey hung around there with about forty or fifty other of the nicest married women in our city to watch him come out — and I wish you’d seen what they were looking for! I did, because I happened to be in the hotel lobby that afternoon when he came in, and my, my! She just couldn’t talk to me when I got home; she always says music takes it out of her. She was sort of queer, and if this Esjago had come up to her right after he was playing and told her he had a longing to settle down somewhere and just play to her always, I don’t know, I don’t know! What I’m getting around to, in saying that young Mr. Carlos Prang’s conversation wasn’t exactly peculiar, it’s that he seemed more or less like that class of foreigners I’m speaking of who appear to have a private understanding with women on their artistic sides, you might say.
Not that either Mrs. Massey or Clarissa understood what Enid and young Mr. Prang were talking about much better than Eddie Bullfinch or I did, and when any of us tried to put in with some remark or even a simple question we got what you might call a polite sitting-on. Enid and Mr. Prang didn’t insult us exactly; they’d just look reticent and answer in a hurried, troubled manner pretty briefly, then go on talking to each other. What they said was mainly about people with names I’d never heard, and I couldn’t make out very well what the two of ’em were really telling each other about these people.
For instance, they began speaking of somebody who seemed to be named Raffeeny, and the way they spoke of him kind of scared the rest of us and made us feel uneducated — except Eddie Bullfinch of course. “Do you feel with Raffeeny?” Enid asked this young Carlos Prang.
“Beyond anything,” he told her. “Raffeeny is inevitable. You feel inevitableness with him. It’s elemental inevitableness.”
“Yes,” Enid agreed, “it’s stark. And don’t you feel groping, too, with Raffeeny?”
“Immensely,” Mr. Prang said. “I put that into my own composition in three dimensions — the one I showed you at the studio, called ‘Subsoil’. Didn’t you feel it expressed something of that?”
“Immensely,” she told him. “I think there’s more of that in it than in anything else you’ve done. It has more that of Raffeeny than Raffeeny himself.”
Mrs. Massey was anxious to be polite to Enid’s new friend. “Are you a painter, Mr. Prang?” she asked him.
“Well,” he said, “I feel for things in color sometimes. At least I feel for them.”
I was going to ask honestly and inoffensively what he felt for them; but Enid was probably afraid I’d say something out of the way because she spoke up quickly and didn’t give me a chance. “He’s not only a painter,” she explained to us, “he’s one of the very most important modernistic sculptors. He composes music and writes the most searching things in a new type of prose that he’s invented, himself. Everybody in the colony is tremendously proud of Mr. Prang.”
It was then that Eddie Bullfinch began to make things uncomfortable. “Well, isn’t that nice!” he said. “My goodness! Isn’t that nice!”
He didn’t say it in a way that would let anybody come right out and accuse him of intending to be disagreeable, and yet we all knew perfectly well that he had some such intention, and Mrs. Massey tried to keep him from being too jarring. “Indeed it’s wonderful!” she said. “I think it’s perfectly wonderful that anyone of Mr. Prang’s age could be a painter and musician and sculptor and poet all at the same time.”
“Wonderful!” Eddie said. “I should say it is wonderful! If he paints pictures and carves sculptuary and writes poetry and plays the piano all at the same time, he must be a centipede or something!” And he broke into a loud, boorish laugh in order to applaud himself properly.
Enid got red and gave him a pretty fierce look; but young Mr. Prang didn’t seem to notice anything, and we got up from the table just then and went into the living-room, so Eddie’s rudeness appeared to be passed over and covered up. He was wearing the bitterest kind of expression on his face, and it was pretty incongruous, because Eddie’s complexion is a fresh pink and, as I’ve said, his nose hasn’t grown up and settled down yet but has the look of being left over from when he was about ten years old. His eyebrows are so light, too, that they aren’t very distinct; and when he frowned in this bitter manner with them I had to look away from him, myself, because I was afraid I’d laugh and hurt his feelings more.
He went over to a chair pretty nearly halfway across the room from the rest of us and slumped himself down there, alone, making some clucking noises in his throat, while Mrs. Massey and the girls grouped themselves around young Mr. Prang and made a polite little fuss over him and asked him if he wouldn’t play something for us. He was modest about it and said he hardly felt up to it; but, when Enid asked him if he wouldn’t play one of his own compositions, he made up his mind rather suddenly that he would.
“I’ll play a thing I call ‘Remnants’ for you,” he told her. “I felt it out yesterday after our talk in the studio.”
Then he sat down at the piano and lifted his hands above the keys; but waited until we’d seated ourselves so there would be complete silence. He was just going to begin when Eddie made some more clucking noises in his throat and kept on until Enid stopped him by looking at him in a way that would have hushed anybody. Then all at once young Mr. Prang hit the lower part of the keyboard with a crash almost startling enough to bounce me out of my seat. For about two minutes, he banged the bass notes, with his foot on the loud pedal; you never heard such a noise in a private house, and just when I thought my ears couldn’t stand any more of it he quit as suddenly as he’d begun and commenced to tweedle two of the highest treble keys. He went on tinkling those two keys, without touching any of the others, for about as long as he’d banged the bass; then he swept the whole keyboard up and down a few times with both hands. After that, his arms dropped down to his sides, he leaned back, and I could see that Mrs. Massey, though she’s mighty susceptible to music ordinarily, didn’t get what he’d been doing at all; but she wanted to be polite, so she said, “Perfectly wond — —” But this was a mistake, because he wasn’t through.
He rubbed both hands over his head, mussing his hair up considerably, shook himself all over as if he’d just been in the water, then lifted his hands pretty high and brought them down again with another crash; then he put them up again and crashed again and kept on crashing for a while; then he tweedled the high keys some more till a person could hardly make out to bear it, and, after that, he more or less settled down to calisthenics with all parts of the keyboard. It went on for seven or eight minutes, I should say, and I couldn’t make head or tail of it, myself, try as I would to understand what he was up to.
There wasn’t any doubt that he meant something and that what he was doing had significance for him and for Enid, too. Her face wore what you might call a rapt expression, though she couldn’t have been hearing anything that I’d been brought-up to regard as music. Of course I knew the world wasn’t standing still, and that just as only a few people can understand the Einstein theory, so there might be art that ordinary people like myself would probably be ignorant about because it had gone so far beyond the standards of my youth that it couldn’t be understood by the multitude, so to speak. Certainly it isn’t modest, and usually it isn’t wise, either, for a person to set himself up as a judge of what he doesn’t understand, and when we try to sweep away everything we don’t understand by just booing at it and calling it nonsense we’re liable to show our own ignorance and get into as much trouble as Eddie Bullfinch did that night.
So, when young Mr. Carlos Prang stopped playing and sat a minute or two with his towsled head bent forward over the keyboard, showing he was almost exhausted, as was certainly natural after all he’d been doing, I didn’t say anything and neither did Mrs. Massey or Clarissa. We thought best to leave comments to Enid, who’d be equal to the occasion.
She gave a great sigh. “It’s enormous!” she said. “I like it better than anything you played for me yesterday. ‘Remnants’ is the perfect title for it. One feels precisely that mood in nature absolutely expressed in your music — the reverberations of that thunder-shower yesterday among the hills of Jasper and the little frightened twitterings of the birds scarcely daring to think that it is over — thunder and crashing winds, and then the little cheepings in the underbrush — —”
She was going on; but he swung around on the piano-bench, and his face began to look a little red. “Well, yes, possibly”, he said. “But what I meant was more my own mood after you’d gone — strong mental and emotional reactions in me — then little thoughts — —”
“Yes, of course,” Enid said hurriedly, and she turned a little red, herself. “I meant that. More like the reverberations of an emotional strain — the stronger feelings, and then the little wandering imaginings, like birds’ cheepings — —”
“Well, no,” he said, and he was getting redder, “not exactly like birds’ cheepings — —”
“No, not like that,” she put in. “By birds’ cheepings, I meant just the emotions that have that detached feeling about them. Of course it’s all mental — —”
