One Sunday morning early in the month of May, Starwick and Eugene had crossed the bridge that led to the great stadium, and turned right along a path that followed the winding banks of the Charles River. Spring had come with the sudden, almost explosive loveliness that marks its coming in New England: along the banks of the river the birch trees leaned their slender, white and beautiful trunks, and their boughs were coming swiftly into the young and tender green of May.
That spring — which, for Eugene, would be the third and last of his years in Cambridge — Starwick had become more mannered in his dress and style than ever before. During the winter, much to Professor Hatcher’s concern — a concern which constantly became more troubled and which he was no longer able to conceal — the darling protégé on whom his bounty and his favour had been lavished, and to whom, he had fondly hoped, he would one day pass on the proud authorities of his own position when he himself should become too old to carry on “the work,” had begun to wear spats and carry a cane and be followed by a dog.
Now, with the coming of spring, Frank had discarded the spats, but as they walked along beside the Charles, he twirled his elegant light stick with an air of languid insouciance, interrupting his conversation with his friend now and then to speak sharply to the little dog that frisked and scampered along as if frantic with the joy of May, crying out to the little creature sharply, commandingly, and in a rather womanish tone from time to time:
“Heel, Tang! Heel, I say!”
And the dog, a shaggy little terrier — the gift of some wealthy and devoted friends of Frank’s on Beacon Hill — would pause abruptly in its frisking, turn its head, and look towards its owner with the attentive, puzzled, and wistfully inquiring look that dogs and little children have, as if to say: “What is it, master? Are you pleased with me or have I done something that was wrong?”
And in a moment, in response to Frank’s sharper and more peremptory command, the little dog, with a crestfallen and somewhat apologetic look, would scamper back from its wild gaieties along the green banks of the Charles, to trot meekly along the path behind the two young men, until its exuberant springtime spirits got the best of it again.
From time to time, they would pass other students, in pairs or groups, striding along the pleasant path; and when these young men saw Starwick twirling his stick and speaking to the little dog, they would grin broadly at each other and stare curiously at Starwick as they passed.
Once Starwick paused to call “Heel!” sharply to the little dog at the very moment it had lifted its leg against a tree, and the dog, still holding its leg up, had looked inquiringly around at Starwick with such a wistful look that some students who were passing had burst out in hearty laughter. But Starwick, although the colour of his ruddy face deepened a shade, had paid no more attention to these ruffians than if they had been scum in the gutter. Rather, he snapped his fingers sharply, and cried “Heel!” again, at which the little dog left its tree and came trotting meekly back to its obedient position.
Suddenly, while one of these episodes was being enacted, Eugene heard the bright wholesome tones of a familiar voice, and turning round with a startled movement, found himself looking straight into the broad and beaming countenance of Effie Horton and her husband Ed.
“WELL!” Effie was saying in her rich bright voice of Iowa. “Look who’s here! I THOUGHT those long legs looked familiar,” she went on in her tone of gay and lightsome, and yet wholesome, banter, “even from a distance! I told Pooly —” this, for an unknown reason, was the affectionate nickname by which Horton was known to his wife and all his friends from Iowa —“I told Pooly that there was only one pair of legs as long as that in Cambridge. ‘It MUST be Eugene,’ I said. — Yes sir!” she went on brightly, shaking her head with a little bantering movement, her broad and wholesome face shining with good nature all the time. “It IS Eugene — and MY! MY! MY! — I just wish you’d look at him,” she went on gaily, in her tones of full rich fellowship and banter in which, however, a trace of something ugly, envious, and mocking was evident —“all dressed up in his Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes out for a walk this fine morning just to give the pretty girls a treat! Yes, sir!” she cried again, shaking her head in wondering admiration, and with an air of beaming satisfaction, “I’ll BET you that’s JUST what he’s going to do.”
He flushed, unable to think of an apt reply to this good-natured banter, beneath whose hearty good-fellowship he felt the presence of something that was false, ugly, jeering and curiously tormented, and while he was blundering out a clumsy greeting, Horton, laughing with lazy good-nature at his confusion, slapped him on the back and said:
“How are yuh, kid? . . . Where the hell have you been keeping yourself, anyway?”
The tone was almost deliberately coarse and robust in its hearty masculinity, but beneath it one felt the same false and spurious quality that had been evident in the woman’s tone.
—“And here is MISTER Starwick!” Effie now cried brightly. “— And I WISH you’d LOOK!” she went on, as if enraptured by the spectacle — “all dressed up with a walking-stick and a dog — and yes, SIR!” she exclaimed ecstatically, after an astonished examination of Frank’s sartorial splendour —“wearing a BEE-YEW-TEEFUL brown tweed suit that looks as if it just came out of the shop of a London tailor! . . . MY! MY! MY! . . . I tell YOU!” she went on admiringly —“I just wish the folks back home could see us now, Pooly —”
Horton laughed coarsely, with apparent good nature, but with an ugly jeering note in his voice.
“— I just wish they could see us now!” she said. “It’s not everyone can say they knew two London swells — and here they are — Mr. Starwick with his cane and his dog — and Eugene with his new suit — yes, SIR! — and talking to us just as if we were their equals.”
Eugene flushed, and then with a stiff and inept sarcasm, said:
“I’ll try not to let it make any difference between us, Effie.”
Horton laughed coarsely and heartily again, with false good nature, and then smote the boy amiably on the back, saying:
“Don’t let her kid you, son! Tell her to go to hell if she gets fresh with you!”
“— And how is Mr. Starwick these fine days!” cried Effie gaily, now directing the artillery of her banter at his unworthy person — “Where is that great play we’ve all been waiting for so eagerly for, lo! these many years! I tell YOU!” she exclaimed with rich conviction —“I’m going to be right there on the front row the night it opens up on Broadway! — I know that a play that has taken anyone so many years will be a masterpiece — every word pure gold — I don’t want to miss a WORD of it.”
“Quite!” said Starwick coldly, in his mannered and affected tone. His ruddy face had flushed crimson with embarrassment; turning, he called sharply and coldly to the little dog, in a high and rather womanish voice: “Heel, Tang! Heel, I say!”
He snapped his fingers and the little dog came trotting meekly toward him. Before Starwick’s cold and scornful impassivity, Effie’s broad and wholesome face did not alter a jot from its expression of radiant goodwill, but suddenly her eyes, which, set in her robust and friendly countenance, were the tortured mirror of her jealous, envious, possessive, and ravenously curious spirit, had grown hard and ugly, and the undernote of malice in her gay tones was more apparent than ever when she spoke again.
“Pooly,” she said, laughing, taking Horton affectionately by the arm and drawing close to him with the gesture of a bitterly jealous and possessive female, who, by the tortured necessity of her own spirit, must believe that “her man” is the paragon of the universe, and herself the envy of all other women, who lust to have him, but must gnash their teeth in vain —“Pooly,” she said lightly, and drawing close to him, “maybe that’s what’s wrong with us! . . . Maybe that’s what it takes to make you write a great play! . . . Yes, SIR!” she said gaily, “I believe that’s it! . . . I believe I’ll save up all my spending money until I have enough to buy you a bee-yew-teeful tailored suit just like the one that Mr. Starwick has on. . . . Yes, SIR!” She nodded her head emphatically in a convinced manner. “That’s just EXACTLY what I’m going to do! . . . I’m going to get Mr. Starwick to give me the address of his tailor — and have him make you a BEE-YEW-TEEFUL new suit of English clothes — and then, maybe, you’ll turn into a great genius like Mr. Starwick and Eugene!”
“The hell you will!” he said coarsely and heartily. “What’s wrong with the one I got on? I only had it three years — why, it’s as good as the day I bought it.” And he laughed with hearty, robust masculinity.
“Why, Poo-o-ly!” she said reproachfully. “It’s turning GREEN! And I do so want you to get dressed up and be a GENIUS like Mr. Starwick!”
“Nope!” he said in his tone of dominant finality. “I’ll wear this pair of pants till it falls off me. Then I’ll go into Filene’s bargain basement and buy another pair. Nope! You can’t make an ?sthete out of me! I can write just as well with a hole in the seat of my breeches as not.” And laughing coarsely, with robust and manly good nature, he smote Eugene on the back again, and rasped out heartily:
“Ain’t that right, kid?”
“Oh, POOLY!” cried Effie reproachfully —“And I do SO want you to be a genius — like Mr. Starwick!”
“Now, wait a minute! Wait a minute!” he rasped, lifting a commanding hand, as he joined with her in this ugly banter. “That’s different! Starwick’s an artist — I’m nothing but a writer. They don’t understand the way we artists work — do they, Starwick? Now an artist is sensitive to all these things,” he went on in a jocose explanatory tone to his wife. “He’s got to have the right ATMOSPHERE to work in. Everything’s got to be just right for us artists — doesn’t it, Starwick?”
“Quite!” said Starwick coldly.
“Now with me it’s different,” said Horton heavily. “I’m just one of those big crude guys who can write anywhere. I get up in the morning and write, whether I feel like it or not. But it’s different with us artists, isn’t it, Starwick? Why, with a real honest-to-God-dyed-inthe-wool ARTIST like Starwick, his whole life would be ruined for a MONTH if his pants didn’t fit or if his neck-tie was of the wrong shade. . . . Ain’t that right, Starwick?”
And he laughed heavily, apparently with robust fellowship, hearty good nature, but his eyes were ugly, evil, jeering, as he spoke.
“Quite!” said Starwick as before; and, his face deeply flushed, he called sharply to his dog, and then, turning inquiringly to Eugene, said quietly: “Are we ready?”
“Oh, I SEE, I SEE!” cried Effie, with an air of gay enlightenment. “That’s what everyone is all dressed up about! — You’re out for a walk, aren’t you? — all among the little birdies, and the beeses, and the flowers! MY! MY! How I wish I could go along! Pooly!” she said coaxingly, “why don’t you take ME for a walk sometime? I’d love to hear the little birdies sing! Come on, dear. Won’t you?” she said coaxingly.
“Nope!” he boomed out finally. “I walked you across the bridge and I walked to the corner this morning for a paper. That’s all the walking that I’m going to do today. If you want to hear the little birdies sing, I’ll buy you a canary.” And turning to Eugene, he smote him on the shoulder again, and laughing with coarse laziness, said:
“You know me, kid. . . . You know how I like exercise, don’t you?”
“Well, then, if we can’t go along to hear the little birdies sing to Mr. Starwick and Eugene, I suppose we’ll have to say good-bye,” said Effie regretfully. “We’ve got no right to keep them from the little birdies any longer — have we, dear? And think what a treat it will be for all the little birdies. . . . And you, Eugene!” she cried out gaily and reproachfully, but now with real warmth and friendship in her voice. “We haven’t seen you at our home in a-a-ages! What’s WRONG with you? . . . You come up soon or I’ll be mad at you.”
“Sure,” Horton came out in his broad Iowa accent, putting his hand gently on the boy’s shoulder. “Come up to see us, kid. We’ll cook some grub and chew the rag a while. You know, I’m not coming back next year —” for a moment Horton’s eyes were clear, grey, luminous, deeply hurt, and full of pride and tenderness. “We’re going to New Hampshire with Jim Madden. So come up, kid, as soon as you can: we ought to have one more session before I go.”
And the boy, suddenly touched and moved, felt a genuine affection, the real friendliness — an animal-like warmth and kindliness and affection that was the truest and most attractive element in Horton’s personality.
And nodding his head, suddenly feeling affection for them both again, he said:
“All right, Ed. I’ll see you soon. So long, Effie. Good-bye. Goodbye, Ed.”
“Good-bye, kid. So long, Starwick,” Horton said in a kindly tone. “We’ll be looking for you, Gene — So long!”
Then they parted, in this friendly manner, and Starwick and Eugene continued their walk along the river. Starwick walked quietly, saying nothing; from time to time he called sharply to the little dog, commanding him to come to “heel” again.
The two young men had not seen each other for two months, save at Professor Hatcher’s class, and then their relations had been formal, cold, and strained. Now Starwick, with a quick friendly and generous spontaneity, had broken through the stubborn and resentful pride of the other youth, had made the first advance toward reconciliation, and, as he was able to do with everyone when and where he pleased, had instantly conquered his friend’s resentful feelings and won him back with the infinite grace, charm, and persuasiveness of his own personality.
Yet, during the first part of their walk along the river their conversation, while friendly, had almost been studiously detached and casual, and was the conversation of people still under the constraint of embarrassment and diffidence, who are waiting for the moment to speak things in which their lives and feelings are more intimately concerned.
At length they came to a bending in the river where there was a bank of green turf on which in the past they had often sat and smoked and talked while that small and lonely river flowed before them. Seated here again, and provided with cigarettes, a silence came between them, as if each was waiting for the other one to speak.
Presently when Eugene looked towards his companion, Starwick’s pleasant face with the cleft chin was turned towards the river in a set stare, and even as the other young man looked at him, his ruddy countenance was contorted by the animal-like grimace swift and instant, which the other boy had often seen before, and which had in it, somehow, a bestial and inarticulate quality, a kind of unspeakable animal anguish that could find no release.
In a moment, lowering his head, and staring away into the grassy turf, Starwick said quietly:
“Why have you not been in to see me these last two months?”
The other young man flushed, began to speak in a blundering and embarrassed tone and then, angered by his own confusion, burst out hotly:
“Look here, Frank — why have you got to be so damned mysterious and secretive in everything you do?”
“Am I?” said Starwick quietly.
“Yes, you are! You’ve been that way ever since I met you.”
“In what way?” Starwick asked.
“Do you remember the first time I met you?” the other one demanded.
“Perfectly,” Starwick said. “It was during your first year in Cambridge, a few days after you arrived. We met for dinner at the ‘Cock Horse Tavern’.”
“Yes,” the other said excitedly. “Exactly. You had written me a note inviting me to dinner, and asking me to meet you there. Do you remember what was in that note?”
“No. What was it?”
“Well, you said: ‘Dear Sir — I should be pleased if you will meet me for dinner at seven-thirty, Wednesday evening, at the “Cock Horse Tavern” on Brattle Street.’ And the note was signed, ‘Francis Starwick.’”
“Well?” Starwick demanded quietly. “And what was wrong with that?”
“Nothing!” the other young man cried, his face flushing to a darker hue and the excitement of his manner growing. “Nothing, Frank! Only, if you were going to invite a stranger — someone you had never met before — to dinner — why the hell couldn’t you have told him who you are and the purpose of the meeting?”
“I should think the purpose of the meeting was self-evident,” said Starwick calmly. “The purpose was to have dinner together. Does that demand a whole volume of explanation? No,” he said coldly, “I confess I see nothing extraordinary about that at all.”
“Of course there wasn’t!” the other youth exclaimed with vehement excitement. “Of course there was nothing extraordinary about it! Why, then, did you attempt, Frank, to make something extraordinary out of it?”
“It seems to me that you’re the one who’s doing that!” Starwick answered.
“Yes, but, damn it, man,” the other cried angrily “— don’t you see the point? You’re that way with everything you do! You try to surround the simplest act with this great air of mystery and secrecy,” he said bitterly. “Inviting me to dinner was all right — it was fine!” he shouted. “I was a green kid of twenty who knew no one here, and I was scared to death. It was wonderful to get an invitation from someone asking me to dinner. But when you sent the invitation, why couldn’t you have added just a word or two by way of explanation? Why couldn’t you have stated one or two simple facts that would have made the reason for your invitation clear?”
“For example?” Starwick said.
“Why, Frank, simply that you were Professor Hatcher’s assistant in the course, and that this thing of inviting people out to dinner was just a way you and Professor Hatcher had of getting acquainted with the new people,” the other youth said angrily. “After all, you can’t get an invitation to dinner from someone you don’t know without wondering what it’s all about.”
“And yet you came,” said Starwick.
“Yes, of course I came! I think I would have come if I had never heard of you before — I was so bewildered and rattled by this new life, and so overwhelmed by living in a big city for the first time in my life that I would have accepted any kind of invitation — jumped at the chance of meeting anyone! However, I already knew who you were when your invitation came. I had heard that a man named Starwick was Hatcher’s assistant. I figured therefore that the invitation had something to do with your connection with Professor Hatcher and the course — that you were inviting me to make me feel more at home up here, to establish a friendly relation, to give me what information you could, to help the new people out in any way you could. But when I met you, what happened?” he went on indignantly. “Never a word about the course, about Professor Hatcher, about your being his assistant — you pumped me with questions as if I were a prisoner in the dock and you the prosecuting lawyer. You told me nothing about yourself and asked a thousand questions about me — and then you shook hands coldly, and departed! — Always this air of secrecy and mystery, Frank!” the boy went on angrily. “That’s always the way it is with you — in everything you do! And yet you wonder why people are surprised at your behaviour! For weeks at a time I see you every day. We get together in your rooms and talk and argue about everything on earth. You come and yell for me in my place at midnight and then we walk all over Cambridge in the dead of night. We go over to Posillippo’s place in Boston and eat and drink and get drunk together, and when you pass out, I bring you home and carry you upstairs and put you to bed. Then the next day, when I come round again,” the boy cried bitterly, “what has happened? I ring the bell. Your voice comes through the place as cold as hell —‘Who is it?’ you say. ‘Why,’ I say, ‘it’s your old friend and drunken companion, Eugene Gant, who brought you home last night.’—‘I’m sorry,’ you say, in a tone that would freeze a polar bear —‘I can’t see you. I’m busy now’— and then you hang up in my face. The season of the great mystery has now begun,” he went on sarcastically. “The great man is closeted in his sanctum COMPOSING,” he sneered. “Not WRITING, mind you, but COMPOSING with a gold-tipped quill plucked from the wing of a Brazilian condor — so, out, out, damned spot — don’t bother me, Gant — begone, you low fellow — on your way, burn! — the great master, Signor Francis Starwick, is upstairs in a purple cloud, having a few immortal thoughts today with Amaryllis, his pet muse —”
“Gene! Gene!” said Starwick laughing, a trace of the old-mannered accent returning to his voice again. “You are MOST unfair! You really are, you know!”
“No — but, Frank, that’s just the way you act,” the other said. “You can’t see enough of someone for weeks at a time and then you slam the door in his face. You pump your friends dry and tell them nothing about yourself. You try to surround everything you do with this grand romantic air of mysterious secrecy — this there’s-more-to-this-than-meets-the-eye manner. Frank, who the hell do you think you are, anyway, with these grand airs and mysterious manners that you have? Is it that you’re not the same as other men?” he jeered. “Is it that, like C?sar, you were from your mother’s womb untimely ripped? Is it that you are made from different stuff than the damned base clay of blood and agony from which the rest of us have been derived?”
“What have I ever done,” said Starwick flushing, “to give you the impression that I think of myself that way?”
“For one thing, Frank, you act sometimes as if the world exists solely for the purpose of being your oyster. You sometimes act as if friendship, the affection of your friends, is something that exists solely for your pleasure and convenience and may be turned on and off at will like a hot-water faucet — that you can use their time, their lives, their feelings when they amuse and interest you — and send them away like whipped dogs when you are bored, tired, indifferent, or have something else it suits you better to do.”
“I am not aware that I have ever done that,” said Starwick quietly. “I am sorry if you think I have.”
“No, but, Frank — what can you expect your friends to think? I have told you about my life, my family, the kind of place and people I came from — but you have told me nothing. You are the best friend I have here in Cambridge — I think,” the boy said slowly, flushing, and with some difficulty, “one of the best friends I have ever had. I have not had many friends — I have known no one like you — no one of my own age to whom I could talk as I have talked to you. I think I enjoy being with you and talking to you more than to anyone I have ever known. This friendship that I feel for you has now become a part of my whole life and has got into everything I do. And yet, at times, I run straight into a blank wall. I could no more separate my friendship for you from the other acts and meetings of my life than I could divide into two parts of my body my father’s and my mother’s blood. With you it’s different. You seem to have all your friends partitioned off and kept separate from one another in different cells and sections of your life. I know now that you have three or four sets of friends and yet these different groups of people never meet one another. You go about your life with all these different sets of people in this same secret and mysterious manner that characterizes everything you do. You have these aunts and cousins here in Cambridge that you see every week, and who, like everyone else, lay themselves out to do everything they can to make your life comfortable and pleasant. You know these swells over on Beacon Hill in Boston, and you have some grand, mysterious and wealthy kind of life with them. Then you have another group here at the university — people like Egan, and Hugh Dodd and myself. And at the end, Frank,” the boy said almost bitterly —“what is the purpose of all this secrecy and separation among your friends? There’s something so damned arrogant and cold and calculating about it — it’s almost as if you were one of these damned, wretched, self-centred fools who have their little time and place for everything — an hour for social recreation and an hour for useful reading, another hour for healthy exercise, and then four hours for business, an hour for the concert and an hour for the play, an hour for ‘business contracts’ and an hour for friendship — Surely to God, Frank, you of all people on earth are not one of these damned, smug, vain, self-centred egoists — who would milk this earth as if it were a great milk cow here solely for their enrichment, and who, at the end, in spite of all their damned, miserable, self-seeking profit for themselves remain nothing but the God-damned smug, sterile, misbegotten set of impotent and life-hating bastards that they are — Surely to God, you, of all people in the world, are not one of these,” he fairly yelled, and sat there panting, exhausted by the tirade, and glaring at the other youth with wild, resentful eyes.
“Eugene!” cried Starwick sharply, his ruddy features darkened with an angry glow. “You are being most unjust! What are you saying simply is not true.” He was silent a moment, his face red and angry-looking, as he stared out across the river —“If I had known that you felt this way,” he went on quietly, “I should have introduced you to my other friends — what you call these separate groups of people — long ago. You may meet them any time you wish,” he concluded. “It simply never occurred to me that you would be interested in knowing them.”
“Oh, Frank, I’m not!” the other boy cried impatiently, with a dismissing movement of the hand. “I don’t want to meet them — I don’t care who they are — or how rich and fashionable or ‘artistic’ they may be. The thing I was kicking about was what seemed to me to be your air of secrecy — the mysterious manner in which you go about things: it seemed to me that there was something deliberately calculating and secretive in the way you shut one part of your life off from the people who know and like you best.”
Starwick made no answer for a moment, but sat looking out across the river. And for a moment, the old grimace of bestial, baffled pain passed swiftly across his ruddy features, and then he said, in a quiet and weary tone:
“Perhaps you are right. I had never thought about it in that way. Yes, I can see now that you have told me much more about yourself — your family, your life before you came here — than I have told you about mine. And yet it never occurred to me that I was being mysterious or secretive. I think it is easier for you to speak about these things than it is for me. There is a great river of energy in you and it keeps bursting over and breaking loose. You could not hold it back if you tried. With me, it’s different. I have not got that great well of life and power in me, and I could not speak as you do if I tried. Yet, Gene, if there is anything you want to know about my life before I came here, or what kind of people I came from, I would tell you willingly.”
“I have wanted to know more about you, Frank,” the other young man said. “All that I know about your life before you came here is that you come from somewhere in the Middle West, and yet are completely different from anyone I ever knew who came from there.”
“Yes,” said Starwick quietly. “From Horton, for example?” his tone was still quiet, but there was a shade of irony in it.
“Well,” the other boy said, flushing, but continuing obstinately, “— yes, from Horton. He is from Iowa; you can see, smell, read, feel Iowa all over him, in everything he says and does —”
“‘It’s — a — DARN— GOOD— YARN,’” said Starwick, beginning to burble with laughter as he imitated the heavy, hearty, sonorous robustiousness of Horton’s voice when he pronounced his favourite judgment.
“Yes,” said Eugene, laughing at the imitation, “that’s it, all right —‘it’s a DARN GOOD YARN.’ Well, Frank, you couldn’t be more different from Horton if you had come from the planet Mars, and yet the place you came from out there in the Middle West, the kind of life you knew when you were growing up, could not have been so different from Ed Horton’s.”
“No,” said Starwick quietly. “As a matter of fact, I know where he is from — it’s not over fifty miles from the town I was born in, which is in Illinois, and the life in both places is much the same.”
He was silent a moment longer, as he stared across the river, and then continued in a quiet voice that had a calm, weary, and almost inert detachment that characterized these conversations with his friend, and that was almost entirely free of mannered speech:
“As to the kind of people that we came from,” he continued, “I can’t say how different they may be, but I should think it very likely that Horton’s people are much the same kind of people as my own —”
“His father is a Methodist minister,” the other young man quickly interposed. “He told me that.”
“Yes,” said Starwick in his quiet and inert voice —“and Horton is the rebel of the family.” His tone had not changed apparently in its quality by an atom, yet the quiet and bitter irony with which he spoke was evident.
“How did you know that?” the other youth said in a surprised tone. “Yes — that’s true. His wife told me that Ed and his father are scarcely on speaking terms — the old man prays for the salvation of Ed’s soul three times a day, because he is trying to write plays and wants to get into the theatre. Effie Horton says Ed’s father still writes Ed letters begging him to repent and mend his ways before his soul is damned for ever: she says the old man calls the theatre the Devil’s Workshop.”
“Yes,” said Starwick in his quiet and almost lifeless tone that still had curiously the cutting edge of a weary and detached sarcasm —“and Horton has bearded the Philistines in their den, hasn’t he, and given all for art?”
“Isn’t that a bit unjust? I know you don’t think very highly of Ed Horton’s ability, but, after all, the man must have had some genuine desire to create something — some real love for the theatre — or he would not have broken with his family and come here.”
“Yes. I suppose he has. Many people have that desire,” said Starwick wearily. “Do you think it is enough?”
“No, I do not. And yet I think a man who has it is better off — will have a better life, somehow — than the man who does not have it at all.”
“Do you?” Starwick answered in a dead tone. “I wish I thought so, too.”
“But don’t you, Frank? Surely it is better to have some kind of talent, however small, than none at all.”
“Would you say, then,” Starwick answered, “that it was better to have some kind of child — however puny, feeble, ugly, and diseased — as King Richard said about himself, brought into the world ‘scarce half made up’— than to have no child at all?”
“I would not think so. No.”
“Have you ever thought, Eugene, that the great enemy of life may not be death, but life itself?” Starwick continued. “Have you never noticed that the really evil people that one meets — the people who are filled with hatred, fear, envy, rancour against life — who wish to destroy the artist and his work — are not figures of satanic darkness, who have been born with a malignant hatred against life, but rather people who have had the seeds of life within themselves and been destroyed by them? They are the people who have been given just enough to get a vision of the promised land — however brief and broken it may be-”
“But not enough to get there? Is that what you mean?”
“Exactly,” Starwick answered. “They are left there in the desert, maddened by the sight of water they can never reach, and all the juices of their life then turn to gall and bitterness — to envy and malignant hate. They are the old women in the little towns and villages with the sour eyes and the envenomed flesh who have so poisoned the air with their envenomed taint that everything young and beautiful and full of joy that lives there will sicken and go dead and vicious and malignant as the air it breathes. They are the lecherous and impotent old men of the world, those foul, palsied creatures with small rheumy eyes who hate the lover and his mistress with the hate of hell and eunuchry — who try to destroy love with their hatred and the slanderous rumour of their poisoned tongues. And, finally, they are the eunuchs of the arts — the men who have the lust, without the power, for creation, and whose life goes dead and rotten with its hatred of the living artist and the living man.”
“And you think that Horton will be one of these?”
Again Starwick was silent for a moment, staring out across the river. When he spoke again, he did not answer his companion’s question directly, but in a quiet and inert tone in which the cutting edge of irony was barely evident, he said:
“My GOD! Eugene”— his voice was so low and wearily passionate with revulsion that it was almost inaudible —“if ever you may come to know, as I have known all my life, the falseness in a hearty laugh, the envy and the malice in a jesting word, the naked hatred in a jeering eye, and all the damned, warped, poisonous constrictions of the heart — the horrible fear and cowardice and cruelty, the naked shame, the hypocrisy, and the pretence, that are masked there behind the full hearty tones, the robust manliness of the Hortons of this earth . . .” He was silent a moment longer, and then went on in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone —“I was the youngest in a family of nine children — the same kind of family that you will find everywhere. I was the only delicate flower among them,” he went on with a cold impassive irony. “We were not rich people . . . a big family growing up with only a small income to support us. They were all good people,” he said quietly. “My father was superintendent of a small farm-machinery plant, and before that they were farming people, but they sent me to school, and after that to college. I was the ‘bright boy’ of the town”— again the weary irony of his voice was evident —“the local prodigy, the teacher’s pet. . . . Perhaps that is my destiny; to have something of the artist’s heart, his soul, his understanding, his perceptions — never to have his power, the hand that shapes, the tongue that can express — oh, God! Eugene! is THAT to be my life — to have all that I know and feel and would create rot still-born in my spirit, to be a wave that breaks for ever in mid-ocean, the shoulder of a strength without the wall — my God! My God! to come into this world scarce half made up, to have the spirit of the artist and to lack his hide, to feel the intolerable and unspeakable beauty, mystery, loveliness, and terror of this immortal land — this great America — and a skin too sensitive, a hide too delicate and rare —” his voice was high and bitter with his passion —“to declare its cruelty, its horror, falseness, hunger, the warped and twisted soul of its frustration, and lacking hide and toughness, born without a skin, to make an armour, school a manner, build a barrier of my own against its Hortons —”
“And is that why —?” the other boy began, flushed, and quickly checked himself.
“Is that why — what?” said Starwick, turning, looking at him. Then as he did not answer, but still remained silent, flushed with embarrassment, Starwick laughed, and said: “Is that why I am an affected person — a poseur — what Horton calls a ‘damned little ?sthete’— why I speak and act and dress the way I do?”
The other flushed miserably and muttered:
“No, I didn’t say that, Frank!”
Starwick laughed suddenly, his infectious and spontaneous laugh, and said:
“But why not? Why shouldn’t you say it? Because it is the truth. It really is, you know,” and almost mockingly at these words, his voice assumed its murmured and affected accent. Then he said quietly again:
“Each man has his manner — with each it comes for his own reason — Horton’s, so that his hearty voice and robust way may hide the hatred in his eyes, the terror in his heart, the falseness and pretence in his pitiable warped small soul. He has his manner, I have mine — his for concealment, mine for armour, because my native hide was tender and my skin too sensitive to meet the Hortons of the earth — and somewhere, down below our manner, stands the naked man.” Again he was silent and in a moment he continued quietly:
“My father was a fine man and we never got to know each other very well. The night before I went away to college he ‘took me to one side’ and talked to me — he told me how they had their hearts set on me, and he asked me to become a good and useful man — a good American.”
“And what did you say, Frank?”
“Nothing. There was nothing I could say. . . . Our house stands on a little butte above the river,” he went on quietly in a moment, “and when he had finished talking I went out and stood there looking at the river.”
“What river, Frank?”
“There is only one,” he answered. “The great slow river — the dark and secret river of the night — the everlasting flood — the unceasing Mississippi. . . . It is a river that I know so well, with all my life that I shall never tell about. Perhaps you will some day — perhaps you have the power in you — And if you do —” he paused.
“And if I do?”
“Speak one word for a boy who could not speak against the Hortons of this land, but who once stood above a river — and who knew America as every other boy has known it.” He turned, smiling: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”
In a moment he got up, and laughing his infectious laugh, said:
“Come on, let’s go.”
And together they walked away.