Of Time and the River (49 page)
And such occasions were not lacking at Miss Potter’s Friday afternoons. For even if the entire diplomatic corps had gathered there in suavest mood, that good grotesque old woman, with her unfailing talent for misrule, would have contrived to set every urbane minister of grace snarling for the other’s blood before an hour had passed. And with that museum collection of freaks, embittered ćsthetes and envenomed misfits of the arts, that did gather there, she never failed. Her genius for confusion and unrest was absolute.
If there were two people in the community who had been destined from birth and by every circumstance of education, religious belief, and temperament, to hate each other with a murderous hatred the moment that they met, Miss Potter would see to it instantly that the introduction was effected. If Father Davin, the passionate defender of the faith and the foe of modernism in all its hated forms, had been invited to one of Miss Potter’s Friday afternoons, he would find himself shaking hands before he knew it with Miss Shanksworth, the militant propagandist for free love, sterilization of the unfit, and the unlimited practice of birth control by every one, especially the lower classes.
If the editor of The Atlantic Monthly should be present, he would find himself, by that unerring drawing together of opposites which Miss Potter exercised with such accuracy, seated next to the person of one Sam Shulemovitch, who as leader and chief editorial writer of an organ known as Red Riot or The Worker’s Dawn, had said frequently and with violence that the sooner The Atlantic Monthly was extinguished, and its writers, subscribers, and editorial staff embalmed and put on exhibition in a museum, the better it would be for every one.
If the radical leader who had just served a sentence in prison for his speeches, pamphlets, and physical aggressions against the police, or members of the capitalist class, should come to one of Miss Potter’s Friday afternoons, he would find himself immediately debating the merits of the present system and the need for the swift extinction of the wealthy parasite with a maiden lady from Beacon Street who had a parrot, two Persian kittens, and a Pekinese, three maids, a cook, a butler, chauffeur and motor car, a place at Marblehead, and several thousand shares of Boston and Maine.
And so it went, all up and down the line, at one of Miss Potter’s Friday afternoons. There, in her house, you could be sure that if the lion and the lamb did not lie down together their hostess would seat then in such close proximity to each other that the ensuing slaughter would be made as easy, swift, and unadorned as possible.
And as the sound of snarl and curse grew louder in the clamorous tumult of these Friday afternoons, as the face grew livid with its hate, as the eye began to glitter and the vein to swell upon the temple, Miss Potter would look about her with triumphant satisfaction, seeing that her work was good, thinking with delight:
“How stimulating! How fine it is to see so many interesting people together—people who are really doing things! To see the flash and play of wit, to watch the clash of brilliant intellects, to think of all these fine young men and women have in common, and of the mutual benefits they will derive from contact with one another!— ah-ha! What a delightful thing to see—but who is this that just came—” she would mutter, peering toward the door, for she was very near-sighted—“who? WHO?—O-oh! Professor Lawes of the Art Department—oh, Professor Lawes, I’m so glad you could come. We have the most INTERESTING young man here today—Mr. Wilder, who painted that picture everyone’s talking about—“Portrait of a Nude Falling Upon Her Neck in a Wet Bathroom”—Mr. Wilder, this is Doctor Lawes, the author of Sanity and Tradition in the Renaissance—I know you’re going to find SO much in common.”
And having done her duty, she would wheeze heavily away, looking around with her strange fixed grin and bulging eyes to see if she had left anything or anyone undone or whether there was still hope of some new riot, chaos, brawl, or bitter argument.
And yet there was a kind of wisdom in her too, that few who came there to her house suspected: a kind of shrewdness in the fixed bulging stare of her old eyes that sometimes saw more than the others knew. Perhaps it was only a kind of instinct of the old woman’s warm humanity that made her speak to the fragile little man with burning eyes more gently than she spoke to others, to seat him on her right hand at the dinner table, and to say from time to time: “Give Mr. Ten Eyck some more of that roast beef. Oh, Mr. Ten Eyck, DO—you’ve hardly eaten anything.”
And he, stretched out upon the rack of pride and all the bitter longing of his hunger, would crane convulsively at his collar and laugh with a note of feeble protest, saying, “Well—I don’t know . . . I really think . . . if you want me to. . . . Oh! all right then,” as a plate smoking with her lavish helping was placed before him, and would straightway fall upon it with the voracity of a famished wolf.
When Ten Eyck reached Miss Potter’s on that final fateful Friday, the other guests were already assembled. Miss Thrall, a student of the woman’s section of Professor Hatcher’s course, was reading her own translation of a German play which had only recently been produced. Miss Potter’s reception rooms—which were two large gabled rooms on the top floor of her house, ruggedly festooned with enormous fishing nets secured from Gloucester fishermen—were crowded with her motley parliament, and the whole gathering was discreetly hushed while the woman student read her play.
It was a scene to warm the heart of any veteran of ćsthetic parties. The lights were soft, shaded, quietly and warmly subdued: the higher parts of the room were pools of mysterious gloom from which the Gloucester fishing nets depended, but within the radius of the little lamps, one could see groups of people tastefully arranged in all the attitudes of rapt attentiveness. Some of the young women slouched dreamily upon sofas, the faces and bodies leaning toward the reader with a yearning movement, other groups could be vaguely discerned leaning upon the grand piano, or elegantly slumped against the walls with tea-cups in their hands. Mr. Cram, the old composer, occupied a chosen seat on a fat sofa; he drew voluptuously on a moist cigarette which he held daintily between his dirty fingers, his hawk-like face turned meditatively away into the subtle mysteries of the fishing nets. From time to time he would thrust one dirty hand through the long sparse locks of his grey hair, and then draw deeply, thoughtfully on his cigarette.
Some of the young men were strewn about in pleasing postures on the floor, in attitudes of insouciant grace, gallantly near the ladies’ legs. Ten Eyck entered, looked round like a frightened rabbit, ducked his head, and then sat down jack-knife fashion beside them.
Miss Thrall sat on the sofa with the old composer, facing her audience. The play that she was reading was one of the new German Expressionist dramas, at that time considered one of “the most vital movements in the world theatre,” and the young lady’s translation of the play which bore the vigorous title of You Shall Be Free When You Have Cut Your Father’s Throat, ran somewhat in this manner:
Elektra: (advancing a step to the top of the raised dais, her face blue with a ghastly light, and her voice low and hoarse with passion as she addresses the dark mass of men below her.) Listen, man! To you it is now proper that I speak must. Do you by any manner of means know who this woman who now before you speaking stands may be? (With a sudden swift movement she, the purple- reddish silk-stuff of the tunic which she wearing is, asunder in two pieces rips, her two breasts exposing.)
(A low swiftly-growing-and-to-the-outer-edges-of-the-crowd-thunder- becoming mutter of astonishment through the great crowd surges.)
Elektra: (Thunder louder becomes, and even with every moment growing yet) Elektra! (The sound to a mighty roar arisen has, and now from every throat is in a single shout torn.) ELEKTRA!
Elektra: (quietly) Ja! Man, thou hast said it. I am Elektra!
The Crowd: (with from their throats an even-stronger roar yet) ELEKTRA. It is Elektra!
Elektra: (her voice even lower and more hoarse becoming, her eyes with the red blood-pains of all her heart-grief with still greater love-sorrow at the man-mass gleaming.) Listen, man. Slaves, workers, the of your fathers’ sons not yet awakened—hear! Out of the night-dark of your not yet born souls to deliver you have I come! So, hear! (Her voice even lower with the low blood-pain heart-hate hoarse becoming.) To-night must you your old with- crime-blackened and by-ignorance-blinded father’s throat cut! I have spoken: so must it be.
A voice, Homunculus: (from the crowd, pleadingly, with protest.) Ach! Elektra! Spare us! Please! With the blood-lust malice- blinded your old father’s throat to cut not nice is.
Elektra: (raising her arm with a cold imperious gesture of command.) As I have spoken, must it be! Silence!
(Homunculus starts to interrupt: again she speaks, her voice more loud and stern becoming.) Silence! Silence!
At this moment there was a loud and sibilant hiss from the door. Miss Potter, who had been on the point of entering the room, had been halted by the sight of Miss Thrall’s arm uplifted in command and by the imperious coldness of her voice as she said “Silence!” Now as Miss Thrall stopped and looked up in a startled manner, Miss Potter, still hissing loudly, tiptoed ponderously into the room. The old woman advanced with the grace of a hydropic hippopotamus, laying her finger to her lips as she came on, looking all around her with her fixed grin and bulging eyes, and hissing loudly for the silence she had thus violently disrupted every time she laid her finger to her lips.
Every one STARED at her in a moment of blank and horrible fascination. As for Miss Thrall, she gaped at her with an expression of stupefaction which changed suddenly to a cry of alarm as Miss Potter, tiptoeing blindly ahead, barged squarely into the small crouched figure of Oswald Ten Eyck, and went plunging over him to fall to her knees with a crash that made the fish-nets dance, the pictures swing, and even drew a sympathetic resonant vibration from the polished grand piano.
Then, for one never-to-be-forgotten moment, while everyone STARED at her in a frozen paralysis of horrified astonishment, Miss Potter stayed there on her knees, too stunned to move or breathe, her eyes bulging from her head, her face turned blindly upward in an attitude of grotesque devotion. Then as she began to gasp and cough with terror, Ten Eyck came to life. He fairly bounded off the floor, glanced round him like a startled cat, and spying a pitcher on a tray, rushed toward it wildly, seized it in his trembling hands, and attempted to pour a glass of water, most of which spilled out. He turned, still clutching the glass in his hand, and panting out “Here! Here! . . . Take this!” he rushed toward Miss Potter. Then, terrified by her apoplectic stare, he dashed the contents of the glass full in her face.
A half-dozen young men sprang to her assistance and lifted her to her feet. The play was forgotten, the whole gathering broke into excited and clamorous talk, above which could be heard Miss Flitcroft’s tart voice, saying sharply, as she whacked the frightened and dripping old woman on the back:
“Nonsense! You’re not! You’re no such thing! . . . You’re just frightened out of your wits; that’s all that’s the matter with you— If you ever stopped to look where you were going, these things would never happen!”
Whack!
Both Oswald and Miss Potter had recovered by the time the guests were assembled round the table. As usual, Oswald found he had been seated on Miss Potter’s right hand: and the feeling of security this gave him, together with the maddening fragrance of food, the sense of ravenous hunger about to be appeased, filled him with an almost delirious joy, a desire to shout out, to sing. Instead, he stood nervously beside his chair, looking about with a shy and timid smile, passing his fingers through his hair repeatedly, waiting for the other guests to seat themselves. Gallantly, he stood behind Miss Potter’s chair, and pushed it under her as she sat down. Then, with a feeling of jubilant elation, he sat down beside her and drew his chair up. He wanted to talk, to prove himself a brilliant conversationalist, to surprise the whole gathering with his wit, his penetration, his distinguished ease. Above all, he wanted to eat and eat and eat! His head felt light and drunk and giddy, but gloriously so—he had never been so superbly confident in his life. And in this mood, he unfolded his napkin, and smiling brightly, turned to dazzle his neighbour on his right with the brilliant effervescence of wit that already seemed to sparkle on his lips. One look, and the bright smile faded, wit and confidence fell dead together, his heart shrank instantly and seemed to drop out of his very body like a rotten apple. Miss Potter had not failed. Her unerring genius for calamity had held out to the finish. He found himself staring into the poisonous face of the one person in Cambridge that he hated most—the repulsive visage of the old composer, Cram.
An old long face, yellowed with malevolence, a sudden fox-glint of small eyes steeped in a vitriol of ageless hate, a beak of cruel nose, and thin lips stained and hardened in a rust of venom, the whole craftily, slantingly astare between a dirty frame of sparse lank locks. Cackling with malignant glee, and cramming crusty bread into his mouth, the old composer turned and spoke:
“Heh! Heh! Heh!”—Crunch, crunch—“It’s MISTER Ten Eyck, isn’t it? The man who wrote that play Professor Hatcher put on at his last performance—that mystical fantasy kind of thing. That was YOUR play, wasn’t it?”
The old yellow face came closer, and he snarled in a kind of gloating and vindictive whisper: “Most of the audience HATED it! They thought it very BAD, sir—very bad!” Crunch, crunch. “I am only telling you because I think you ought to know—that you may profit by the criticism.”
And Ten Eyck, hunger gone now, shrank back as if a thin poisoned blade had been driven in his heart and twisted there. “I—I--I thought some of them rather liked it. Of course I don’t know—I can’t say—” he faltered hesitantly, “but I—I really thought some of the audience—liked it.”
“Well, they DIDN’T,” the composer snarled, still crunching on his crust of bread. “Everyone that I saw thought that it was terrible. Heh! Heh! Heh! Heh! Except my wife and I—” Crunch, crunch. “We were the only ones who thought that it was any good at all, the only ones who thought there would ever be any HOPE for you. And we found parts of it—a phrase or sentence here and there—now and then a scene—that we LIKED. As for the rest of them,” he suddenly made a horrible downward gesture with a clenched fist and pointing thumb, “it was THUMBS DOWN, my boy! Done for! No good. . . . That’s what they thought of YOU, my boy. And that,” he snarled suddenly, glaring round him, “THAT is what they’ve thought of ME all these years—of ME, the greatest composer that they have, the man who has done more for the cause of American music than all the rest of them combined—ME! ME! ME! the prophet and the seer!” he fairly screamed, “THUMBS DOWN! Done for! No good any more!”