Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

By permission of Hachette et Cie, Paris PLAN SHOWING THE CONSTRUCTION OF A SHADOW-PICTURE THEATER

visage of the lion with a woman's head towers aloft, permanent and immutable, while the joyous procession of Egyptian dancers and soldiers and priests celebrates the completion of the statue itself. Then we are witnesses of the fierce invasion of the Assyrians, with the charge of their chariots and their horsemen, and we behold the rout of the natives while their capital burns in the distance. Next we gaze at the departure of the Jews, led by Moses, and laden with the spoils of the Egyptians. After the Hebrews have gone, Sesostris appears, to be greeted by a glad outpouring of the populace. Yet soon the Persians descend on Egypt with their castellated elephants and their immense hordes of fighting men. Still the Sphinx looks down, implacable and immovable, and the Greeks in turn take the valley of the Nile for their own. One of their daughters, Cleopatra, floats past in her galley by night; and in the morning she extends her hospitality to the Roman, Casar or Antony. And while the Latins are the rulers of the land of Egypt, the Virgin and her Son, with the patient ass that bears a precious burden, skirt the sandy waste and go on their way to the Holy Land, leaving the Sphinx behind them as they journey forward in the green moonlight. After long centuries the Arabs break in with their brilliant bands of horsemen; and a little later the Crusaders

come to give them battle. More long centuries elapse, and suddenly Napoleon emerges at the head of the troops of the French republic. Then we have the Egypt of to-day, with the British soldiers parading before the feet of the Sphinx; and finally the recumbent statue appears to us once more and for the last time, when the light of the sun is going out, and the world

is emptied of its population again, and the ice is settling down on the Sphinx, alone amid freezing desolation. And this last vision is projected upon the screen by the magic lantern alone, without the aid of any profile figures, since man has ceased to be.

Here we have a true epic poem, simple, yet grandiose, and possible only to the improved shadow-pantomime of France at the end of the nineteenth century, even if this art is only a logical evolution from the gallanty-show of Séraphin. "This humble black profile," said M. Jules Lemaître, "which had been thought fit at best of a few comic effects to amuse little children only, has been diversified and colored; it has been made beautiful, serious, tragic; by the multiplication of the devices it has been rendered capable of giving us a powerful impression of collective life; and the artists who have developed it have known how to make it translate to our eyes the great spectacles of history and the sweeping movement of multitudes."

[graphic][merged small][merged small]

TOM

EGG-SHELL CHINA

BY KATE JORDAN

Author of "The Creeping Tides," "Time, the Comedian," etc.

OMMY PERKINS was out of Princeton only six months, and was beginning life in a stock-broker's office. His time there was spent before a small sliding-window with brass bars, where he took in and put out insignificant, oblong slips of paper, wrote in a small hand in a big book, and kept constantly glancing up at the round clock. He was twenty-two and, as it happened, he received the exact sum of his years in dollars every Saturday afternoon. Tommy felt this to be a melancholy coincidence, and often said so, but always added that, unlike millionaires, he had "both his health and his hair."

He could have managed very well if he had not been so incurably hospitable. It was sometimes ghastly having the tastes of a prodigal on "twenty-two per." It was also a terrifying sort of impudence for him to try to rig up a counterfeit of "chambers" instead of ingloriously boarding, or having a furnished room, with meals anywhere. His men friends, who were either unimaginative economists or rich, told him so, and Tommy would reply after this fashion:

"There 's only one way I can explain my craze to get rid of cash. Although I'm only five feet six and a tow-headed, raspberry blond, I guess I 'm the reincarnation of one of those lavish Roman emperor Johnnies who melted pearls in vinegar and all that sort of thing; for I assure you that to have my friends sitting around my own mahogany, while they watch me stir something in my own chafing-dish and touch glasses of fairly good stuff at my own expense, is the only thing that makes my life worth living. To balance this madness, for a week after a spree I fill up in places that are all white tiles and nickel, like a well-fitted bath-room, and where the juggling of dishes has the noise of a ton of coal rushing down a shaft. You can't change me. As the bad lady says in erotic fiction, 'I am-what I am.'"

Tommy did not know that this craving for his own things about him was really the home instinct in him struggling to live against the ugly and expedient. It took Clarissa Van Doorn to find this out and tell him so. We may as well start with a definite idea of Clarissa, because, although a girl of to-day, she had not even the shakiest foothold on the present scheme of things. To meet her at a romping subscription dance was like stepping from a ballet, all red light and brass band, into a Dutch garden as still as a church in a late, yellowing afternoon.

Clarissa's family was old-so very old it was a wonder that it still managed to live. It did so only in a tottering way, in the debilitated Van Doorn mansion on Stuyvesant Square to which in the thirties her grandfather had brought his bride, and which Clarissa's aunt now rented out in furnished floors to professors and Anglican clergymen. Clarissa was a stenographer, but a stenographer de luxe. She had four patrons, all wealthy society women who had been her mother's friends, and every day from ten to four she wrote their letters on thick, crested paper. It will be understood now how Clarissa, though a working-girl, went to dances where she met young men like Tommy, who, though poor, was some day to inherit the considerable fortune of his grandfather, Admiral Perkins.

The fine and ancient quality of the Van Doorns, who had been too proud to marry any but own cousins for generations, showed in Clarissa's type. She was like a faded sampler. She was like a breath of lavender that steals from a long-closed chest. She was like a tune on a spinet whose orange-colored keys have gone flat. She was like a sedate, chintzy room, with windows looking east, where nothing is ever disturbed, that every one admires, but few would presume to live in.

Tommy, from sheer amazement, had,

as he expressed it, "fallen for her" at their first meeting. The demureness of her sprigged mull dancing-gown; the sleekness of her dust-pale, parted hair; the dove-like peace in her vaguely colored eyes; the luminous delicacy of her skin all down her egg-shaped face; the bonelessness and smallness of her narrow hands, with nails of unpolished and convex perfection-all these things operated on Tommy their fairy-like spell.

When he said to her, "Shall we take a turn?" and she had answered, "I should be most pleased," he had guided her about with a religious feeling. She was so frail he held hardly anything. He found himself wondering where her digestive apparatus could possibly find room, but checked the thought as unseemly. She smelled faintly of old rose-leaves. Her breath was like musk. She kept her bluewhite eyelids down. Tommy went into a dream as he danced. It was the year 1840. He was his own grandfather, wearing a stock and side-whiskers, and he was dancing with Queen Victoria when she

was seventeen.

"I thank you sincerely, Mr. Perkins," he heard Clarissa say as he led her back to the aunt who kept the lodging-house de luxe. "You dance with such exquisite grace."

It was unfitting that Tommy should have given a jolt like a calf, and said to this merely, "Do I-honest?" But he did, and all the way home could have kicked himself. As he kept thinking, he had had his chance to register on her memory a gem like, "Oh, Miss Van Doorn, you compliment my poor efforts too effusively!" But he did n't-he did n't, and there was an end to it.

He began cultivating Clarissa. From the beginning his English grew purer and purer. When he knew her very well he told her of his rooms and how he had enjoyed "picking up stuff here and there" for them. It was then that she confided to him that she likewise had an adoration for furniture and old, egg-shell china. This became a bond between them. She told him she would inherit only some of the colonial, family pieces in the Stuyvesant Square house, so that in the meanwhile all her savings went on bargains at auctions. She could tell and pick sagaciously, for she had become a connoisseur.

More than that, she had hired a room in a ramshackle storage-house not far from where she lived, and in that she was slowly placing one by one her secret trea

sures.

It was with inward tremblings that Tommy asked her to visit him for the first time, for tea at his "diggings," one Sunday afternoon. Sunday afternoon. This was after his engagement to her. How this, by the way, had come about Tommy never clearly knew. But on a holiday when she had taken him to the Metropolitan Museum, and they were sitting before Bastien-Lepage's "Jeanne d'Arc," he had told her that she was an ennobling influence in his life. Then he had seen a tear tremble on her lowered lashes, and had said:

"I love you. But I don't suppose you

could love me!"

"I do," she had sighed. "How much?"

"Oh, sincerely."

"But I'd have a cheek to ask you to become engaged," Tommy had begun to explain. "You see, I only get twentytwo per-"

She had looked shocked. mild eyes sought his fully.

Her large,

"Are you not asking me to become your wife, Mr. Perkins?" she had said, and he felt her tremble.

"What else?" Tommy had twittered. with agility, conquering a feeling of stagefright. "Only-w we 'll have to wait."

"That will not be hard," Clarissa had said with meek happiness, and leaning back with a sigh of content. "It will give us a chance to collect befitting furniture and china for our home."

So on this Sunday she was coming to Tommy's "chambers" accompanied by two Van Doorn cousins. The address was really a rooming-house on lower Madison Avenue, but the "top floor front," which had formerly held the regulation iron bed, oak bureau, and so forth, had been changed into a "den." In the middle of this, at four o'clock, Tommy stood looking about while trying to pull thoughtfully at a modicum of white fuzz next to the dimpled corner of his mouth. He felt satisfied with what he and the negro house-man had done in touching up and getting tea ready. What Tommy called his "etiolated facial effect" did not extend to his mouth, of a healthy coral, which

now smiled broadly; nor to his eyes, which under the long, white lashes were surprisingly, charmingly violet, now glowing with satisfaction.

"No one could help liking this," he said to the servant. "Could they, Sam?" "I like it, suh," Sam said, and blinked so fast in approval that only his eyeballs showed. "Nothing like color, suh, for making a room tasty."

Clarissa, in new spring finery, came with the cousins. She was like a tight, small bunch of pale-mauve primroses, and her eyes had a candle-light beaming. This was when she entered. She looked around, and the smile went out. Not suddenly. It went out in a slow, well-bred way, as light melts unimpressively into dusk. She was polite, but quiet. The quiet deepened until she was absolutely mute. Toward the close of the visit she looked distinctly sick, but this, too, in a saintly, refined way that you felt she would somehow achieve if stretched in agony in the retiring-cabin of a channel steamer.

"You don't like it," Tommy gulped to her when the cousins went into the adjoining room to look over his book of college photographs. He seemed to have half swallowed a knife.

"Oh, Pierpont, I'm so sorry!" Clarissa sighed.

This name applied to the disappointed hero must be briefly explained. All derivations seemed undignified to Clarissa, while in this case, unfortunately, the baptismal name Thomas suggested a footman to her. She had unearthed her lover's aristocratic middle name, and felt that the situation was not only saved, but improved.

"What don't you like?" Tommy asked wistfully.

"Can't you see, Pierpont, that you have not achieved a consistent picture? The place is typical of nothing-neither class, period, nor style. It is a conglomeration. One thing affronts the other."

"Don't you like the lamp?" Tommy asked in a sort of horror as he remembered what it cost him.

"In its way it's not bad," Clarissa murmured; "but it's Burmese, and its light shines on two Bristol plates-"

"I thought you liked old china?" he wailed.

"I do, but not in juxtaposition to at

Burmese lamp. Then, see," she continued, the color strong in her cheek in the way it came when she talked of old furniture and not at any other time, "your cups are cheap Japanese-'

"Sixty cents apiece," Tommy said resentfully.

"Pierpont,"-Clarissa made a dainty grimace, as if her teeth were on edge,"spare me! They were turned out by the thousands in New York. The only Japanese china to be tolerated is the very ancient, at prices almost prohibitive, and of course to be used in a Japanese setting. I am only saying this," she added gently, sweetly, as her hand rested on his like a butterfly, "to help you. Now, who-who suggested this excruciating wall-paper ?"

"Red?" Tommy asked meekly. "Plain red? A solid color and cheerful." Clarissa did not think this worth an argument.

"Let us see," she said, as she sat up straight, "just what you have gathered here. Your table is a mahogany reproduction. On it is a Mexican jar. That mirror, though it never saw France, is French in style. Your revolving-bookcase belongs in an office. That's a jute rug. That's a Dutch tankard beside that awful Bagdad portière. That's a Swiss clock. You have a few excellent old prints, but mixed with Spanish dancers. and college photographs they are lost."

"Well, I must say I thought the whole business made rather a fetching little getup," said Tommy, who himself now looked vague, like the faded prints, and wan, like the fragile china, which were all she had really liked. "I guess you'll have to take me in hand in earnest, Clarissa."

She did. Fervid, obsessed times began for Tommy Perkins. He gave the Burmese lamp away to a friend, whose joy at getting it seemed, in the light of his own new knowledge, a pitiful exhibition; sold the revolving-bookcase to the German landlady; kicked out the jute rug; and gave the Spanish dancers to Sam. When all was done, he seemed to himself like a room that had been disinfected after a dangerous fever. Economy made the hectic walls remain, though, for the life of him, he could not help liking that red paper. But he hoped for an eventual, full

conversion that would make him shiver at it as Clarissa did.

He watched for auctions of old furniture as the customers in the office watched the ticker. His evenings with Clarissa were spent poring over the catalogues of approaching sales. Their home was to be strictly Georgian, and in the details of this chaste period Tommy soon qualified as an expert. He talked of Adam, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton as formerly he had talked of comic-opera queens. He grew to love egg-shell china, in its place; little brass knobs on doors; small, square window-panes; newel-posts; high, shelf-like mantels; glazed cretonnes; Sheffield candlesticks; waxed, darkly shining floors.

He and Clarissa would meet after business hours in dingy auction-rooms, go carefully over the exhibition, pick out what they fancied, and mark opposite them their ultimate price. Afterward, one or the other would manage to attend the sale, and at times some of the things they desired went to swell the collection in Clarissa's store-room.

Now and then a mistake occurred, as, on one very rainy day, when neither had expected the other at a sale where they had marked for possible purchase a luster jug and an old Minton platter. It was unfortunate that Tommy, at the back of the crowd near the door and in a mackintosh that sounded like a wet whale, should have kept feverishly raising the bid on these items against some stubborn woman who sat far down near the dais; for afterward, when to his amazement he saw Clarissa among the home-going bidders, and said jubilantly: "I got the china. Had to bid against some creature in the front row, so paid a good bit for it," she had answered through almost shut lips: "I was the creature. Thanks to your carelessness in not telephoning me that you were coming, Pierpont, we are the poorer on this purchase by about eight dollars."

Sometimes Tommy was aware of a lonesome feeling. Sometimes, as he bent over the big account-book, writing in his small hand, he found himself wishing that there was more love and less old china in his romance. Clarissa permitted but little embracing, and the occasional touches of her lips were as cool as they were fragrant. Her delicacy and demureness continued to possess an immaterial enchant

ment for him; but he had a human longing that sometimes she would let herself go, fling herself into his arms, and kiss him in a way to make his head spin.

The thought was blasphemy. He remembered the once that he had tried a passionate show of his affection upon her. They were in her aunt's Victorian parlor, on a horsehair sofa, and his ten-o'clock adieu was imminent. A mad impulse made him unloosen the thin, smooth plaits of her hair, give her a hungry, pulsating kiss, and burrow his cheek against the speck of throat showing above her high, whaleboned collar.

"Oh, love," Tommy murmured, his lips against her ear, "won't it be rapture when we never part-day or night?"

Clarissa told him that such conduct was "common," that such a question was degrading. A flood of gentle tears made her look a martyr, and she melted from his sight. It had taken three long letters of apology in which he had called himself many harsh names before Clarissa permitted him to be tête-à-tête with her again.

His grandfather, the retired admiral, had come from Albany for his annual spring holiday. Tommy loved the old sailor-loved the way he fought gout; his fog-horn laugh; his plain-speaking; his shock of angry white hair, fine and glistening, like spun-glass, above his pouting face, which was the color of an egg-plant. To him he brought Clarissa, and with anxiety watched the meeting. The admiral had been attentive at first, then plainly chilled, then quite as plainly bored. The next day, with glances that twisted into Tommy like a gimlet, he said some disquieting things.

"That's a delicate bit of old china you 're thinking of appropriating, Tom."

"Clarissa would like hearing herself described that way," said Tommy. "She's nuts on old china.”

"Not easy to handle," the admiral suggested. "Not suitable for every-day use. Think it over, my boy, before you marry an egg-shell-china woman. No red-blooded man ought to. The experiment is apt to turn him into a secret devil or into a milkand-water, sick cat of a Nancy, which is worse."

"Why, gran'-dad, you really think-" "Answer me this!" the admiral thun

« AnkstesnisTęsti »