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A New York Night
I. Chez Sherry
Baudelaire says of the man who has eaten hashish that he thinks himself a god who has dined ill; but I am only eating bécasse flambée, and already I am a god who has dined well. For I am sitting on the balcony at Sherry's, and I am one of the superior gods. Yes, this is a temple, and the maitre d'hotel is the high priest of my cult. But they do not know my secret. I have a god of my own—the God of Sunset whom the old Egyptians worshipped by his name of Tum. I am moved always to sly sacrilegious jests like this by that unusual Corton. With the second bottle the world becomes visible to my eyes: I see my friends about me, every one with a quick smile, a pleasant word, a deferential bow, or a glance of secret understanding. Majestical they sit among the napery and the silver and the crystal under the lamps, my friends delectable.
There is the dapper banker, who slips me the sufficient word of Wall Street; there the grey dowager, to whose goodwill I owe so perfect a last week of August; beyond her, with a gay crowd of sparkling girls, sits the King of Tact, young, handsome, and urbane, telling a delicately witty story. At the next table is the strong, stern face, lit kindly, of the great lawyer, who plays politicians for pawns, and defies empires as a lesser man might defy cockroaches.
But mostly I am shamming; I pretend to greet the world: in truth my eyes flash furtive to a certain corner, where, like a fairy peeping from a cornflower, amid her crepitating silk and whispering lace, laughs the rose-gold and ivory of a wine-flushed Bacchanal face, tiny and yet terrible, framed in faint flames of hair.
Nobody knows as yet that we are eng —— hush! I will not tell it even to myself; I will signal it in sips of Burgundy, and get her answer in champagne!
I like dining alone, for a change; I can perceive what, when I dine with others, I could only feel. The restaurant is not only a temple made with hands; it is the true temple, the universe. The stately swirl, ideally solemn and merry at once, is but a presentation in the form of art, of the birth of a nebula.
But silence! what are they about to sacrifice at my altar? It is my own dish—a truffle wrapped in red pepper and a sage leaf, stewed in champagne, then baked in the shortest crispest dumpling that delight could dream; each dumpling set upon a pyramid of foie gras. Besides them is an eggshell china dish of caviar with stalks of young onions finely chopped—moistened with vodka. It is that which gives one appetite for the salad of vanilla and alligator pear!
I do not know any music like the murmur of a thousand hushed voices; I do not know any sight fairer than love and friendship—the flowers of philosophy—incarnate among men and women. And here I see them at the culmination. All harshness, all distress, all things that mar the measure, these no longer exist for us who dine. Without, the wind may howl, and fearful things of darkness menace our joy: does not the blackness, the cold of space, encompass every star and every system?
Do not be melancholy; have you not heard the tale of the philosopher who made the experiment of intoxicating himself with ether, and after a little while said solemnly "NOTHINGNESS, with twinkles." Then, after applying himself yet a little to the vial of madness, raised his venerable head, lofty with the purity and passion that informed it, to remark "Nothingness with twinkles—BUT WHAT TWINKLES!"
That (for I have finished the salad) is my identical stake: nothing else is worth a word; bring the profiteroles au chocolat! The frozen cream within, a core of coolness; the spongy sweetness that engirdles it, the boiling chocolate sauce splashed over it—it is like the purity of love that masks itself in sweetness, strength, and passion.
But love is not the end of life; beyond it is true worship, symbolized by coffee that makes vigilant, cognac that intoxicates, and the cigar that marries these in equipollence of peace.
No, do not think, blasphemer, that I have dines! I have been god and worshipper, not in one temple only, but in every temple, of the universe. I have passed from the abyss to the abyss, and sounded every lyre of heaven, and heard its far-off fallen echo on every drum of hell. I have seen the great made one with the small, and known how that which is below is like that which is above. The aeons have roared past, and the angels of the aeons sounded their silver trumpets in mine ears; they have summoned me to no mortal banquet, but to the sacrament of nectar and ambrosia in the abode of the All-silence.
If I am exhausted, it is not with wine, but with ineffable rapture—for it is almost kin to suffering, this delight wherein one is lost and overwhelmed. The chariots of eternity and the horsemen thereof, o my father! They course upon my soul; they trample my humanity; they leave me crushed and bleeding, so that, radiant and immortal, my pure, my passionate, my imperishable, impenetrable soul may seize the sceptre and acclaim itself imperial, heir of its celestial halidom, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, a unit conscious of its identity with all, a concentration of knowledge, being, and bliss armed against change and sorrow and illusion. . . .
(The check please.)
It is the psychological moment to go on to the Russian ballet.
II. The Ballet Russe
Sadko Till Evlenspiegel le Spectre de la Rose Schererusade
The hunt is up. Color shall chase through the rainbow of the spectrum, sound spur upon sound from octave to octave. The great hound love shall leap from the broken leash, his deep and dreadful bark awakening to alarm the deer of innocence as she dips her muzzle upon the waters of the wooded upland pool. Death shall lurk like a boar amid the rushes, keen to ensanguine jutting tusks. The hunt is up.
We thrill to fate and consequence. Let us hie away to lands of faery, that lie somber beneath the measureless laughter of old Ocean. There lie monstrous and fantastic kingdoms, where beauty matches her magic against creatures of nightmare; there love dances all unconscious of the sad symphonies of wisdom, and there the cadence of ripple, and the clash of storm pass overhead unheeded, while giant polyps, and starfish like a battle of crocodiles, and anemones like volcanoes in eruption, dispute the mastery of that silence that broods sterile thoughts weighed down by the proud and perpetual body of the sea. Stranger than dream, this antiphone of happiness and horror! Yet like a dream the pageant vanishes. Oblivion unrolls its fatal veil—look! we are in a market place, a smiling mouth of plenty with the frowning brows of lofty castles beetling over it. Who is that mocker that intrudes upon the simple folk that throng the streets? Who, masked in mockery, flouts their staid worth or their harmless happiness? Who is it that calls forth the spirit of perverse glee, conspires with youth against time, raises the banner of anarchy in the house of order? We see fatality in every impish gesture; each prank is played upon the precipice-edge; for there, shrouded and sinister, is the stern angel of retribution, the weight of the world's woe incarnate in that hooded man that stands apart, nor breaks his silence for all the extravagance of the masquers; he knows his hour must come. And so we witness the steady stride of the soldiery, the firm step of the catastrophe without a pang, even as we acquiesce in our own tragic destiny, we, ephemeral jesters with eternal jealousies! Come, there is the great gallows; the ropes creak; the mock king sprawls in mid-air under the lurid crimson of the executioners' lanterns. About him stand the frightful brotherhood like vultures—and the dance of delight reawakens with moon-pale lamps swung high by merry men and maidens! We start—the dream shakes us as a terrier shakes a rat—we sink into a deeper lethargy. It is a maiden's room of white and blue. Against the mighty open doors she stands, awake and dreaming, while on the balcony the night is thwarted by roses, souls of sunset incarnate in the world of flowers. At her throat is one red rose; she plucks it forth. She sinks into a chair; she sleeps; she dreams. The spirit of the rose bewitches her; her heart's love formulates itself in flesh. Even as sunrise sheds its bloom upon the snows of the Jungfrau, so her dream-lover breaks into her slumbers, dances through every portal of her heart. Every gesture is a caress. Life flows in her limbs; he carries her from measure to measure—to beyond measure. For all is lost and won; her limbs relax; the dream is over; sleep claims her last allegiance. Ah no! she cannot so forget. The dream being gone, she must awaken. Alas! She only clasps a crimson rose, a soul deciduous, null, incapable! Quick! let us wake, we also; we cannot endure the melancholy of our disillusion. We too were dreaming; life must be real, must be vivid—or—or? The anguish and the passion of our souls create a new illusion in accordance with our desire; fierce and full-blooded, our imagination runs amuck. This is a formulation of our will as monstrous as an afrite; as horrible as the demon-queen of hashish, and as furious in fascination. The Orient submerges us. The green and red of love and war; the vivid blue of passion star-strewn, grim arches opening on the abyss of death. And death indeed shall issue thence in gusty guise of lust, black-limbed and silver-sandalled. See power—fawned on by beauty, smiling and complaisant! A moment's inattention, O king, beware of it! Take but thine eye from that beast beauty, it will bite! Thine happiness is but thine own creation and reflection; its price is vigilance. Trust not the guards; they are corrupt. Turn not thy back upon them that say they love thee; they can strike up between the ribs to the heart; they only wait for the moment. What avails thy vengeance? Will the dead rise to caress thee as of old? Thou art twice beggared—ah! this time we wake indeed. Life tricks us all; love, justice, death, the event, all stand mocking around us in our pillories, the scarlet letter of our shame that we are men branded upon our foreheads. Ah, in our very shame we are heroic—for we willed our own doom when we accepted the ordeal of life.
Where am I? What wave of sleep has overwhelmed me? I do not see the swift, enormous limbs of Nijinsky, like the threshing of the flail of Time; I do not hear the savage cunning of the clashing harmonies of Rimsky-Korsakoff. I only see the soul of Russia as I have known and loved her—the Kremlin, passionlessly pallid, like the face of a brave man under the surgeon's knife; for in its heart are knotted the torment of the basilica writhing in damnation, and among them, more awful than they, the eyes of Ivan the Terrible as he struck down his only son to death; I only hear over the frozen steppes tumultuous and inevitable, the joy of the myriad bells of Moscow.
III. Aux Beaux-Arts
Enough of the madness of Moscow—let us go find the fascination of France! Is there no café hard by, with marble tables, where one may compass the Eleusinian mystery of absinthe? Yes, there will be women with scarred lives and faces, like the fair soil of France herself, pitted with howitzer-craters until the surface is desert and volcanic as the moon's.
Deep melancholy seizes on my soul as I drop the icy water upon my sugar, and watch the dull green iridesce to opal. To me the art id hieratic; it is as if I symbolized the wonder of the world, how the waters of death made sweet by the dissolution of the crystals of the mind, and the stagnant green of life made rainbow by the pearl-pure glory of resurrection.
Ah, but madness lurks in the draught. Indeed, is it not so? Is not all life a species of intoxication or insanity? Is not our consciousness a dim and distorted reflexion of some half-hinted glory? Come, let us therefore drink! When we are sober the universe is a pointless puzzle, a stale, silly jest, a word of ordure, a denegation of all sense. To drink may kindle in us some true sanity, some power to comprehend the universe: we may find some clue to lead us to the labyrinth's heart (does a Minotaur wait to devour us?) or we may see at last, seated in the centre of the webs of our lives, some spider "that taketh hold with her hands, and is in King's palaces", the cunning and indefatigable creator of it all.
—Ah! there at least is a poor fly. See the tired eyes of yonder girl! She looks like a gambler after a long spell of bad luck. How pluckily she plays! Oh yes! she wins often enough—but she does not realize how terrible is the invisible percentage of the bank. Secret and persistent, life takes its toll of all of us; we buy our most precious treasures far too dear. My uncle added twenty thousand to his "wealth" last week in Wall Street—the anxiety aged him half a year. A fool's game! Better, maybe, with the saint, to give up all, to abide, the spirit tranquil, the soul fixed in constant meditation upon eternal things!
Decidedly, absinthe is a most melancholy beverage! I seem to remember having been extraordinarily happy all the evening—now I could swear it was some other life, so long ago it seems.
The trouble is that I am not content with my blond baby Lulu. I am haunted by those Irish lips and eyes of Margaret, their infinite sadness, and the passion that burns beneath the veil of her modesty. Her russet hair is a perfect foil for her grey eyes. She is autumnal in her fullness and solemnity; she is more seductive that the spring-tide air of Lulu, with her chirping! I an suddenly grown old and serious; the world appears a piteous masque; and Margaret is both passion and compassion. Lulu does not understand sorrow. The wounded body of my dear France is nothing to her; to Margaret it is sacred beyond all speech. This absinthe is like the eyes of Margaret, grey-green; and therein lie turmoil and bitterness as well as glory and intoxication. If Lulu were here, she would clasp her baby hands and call me her clever boy: Margaret would find no words. Oh, the silence of those grey-green eyes! Thus did she come to me—we talked rapidly of foolish things because we did not dare to invoke silence. Then our minds revolted; voice would not come—and we too each other without a word.
Lulu—we prattled each other into an engagement—the froth of a week-end in the country! We had to find something to do. And now—well, outside the Avenue Lulu doesn't exist—while Margaret pervades the universe; she is, for me, its meaning and its soul.
Now, how much of me is mood, and how much of mood is absinthe? A Bronx cocktail might have reminded me of Lulu, and reversed my English! But then, a Bronx is the drink of the chicken and the tired business man, while absinthe is the noble, maddening, murderous drink of Gautier and van Gogh!
My heart's love lies in Paris with these tables of marble, this informality, this Pan-pipe shrillness of staccato conversation, not with the shallow suavity of Sherry's. I have found better friends and warmer hearts among the battered veterans of life than among those who have made it their first care to be nothing, their second to know nothing, and their third neither to do nor suffer anything.
Yes, I am melancholy. It is my nature. I have suffered enough. I have made myself suffer, delighting alike in giving and receiving pain. Let me pass then from this café, with its memories of spiritual Verduns. It is just the time to go to the Follies. They will chase away the blues. . . .
IV. Broadway
I came into Broadway at 45th Street; a few minutes had to pass before my midnight assignation with Fun. So I moved idly in the multitude, and gave the mood of the moment to taste to the tongue of my grave soul, my too clear- seeing soul. I saw these people formicacious and futile; all that they lacked of ants was order. On them all was the great load of humanity. Each bore his soul like an old soldier with an ever-aching wound. In every eye I saw the fearful hunger which is the heritage of man. Some needed economic independence; some needed love; and fate had slowly doled out mere orts of money and pleasure. Some, glutted with those false meats, drunk on those vain delusions, thought themselves happy—then why so restless, so intent? Surely if there be happiness, its symbol must be peace. And this street—
It is like a mining camp; the tawdry flashing lights, the rotten planking of Broadway full of deep holes where stagnant pools reflect the glare, the insane traffic, the vulgarity and shouting, the coarse appeal of charity, the apish mimicking of trade, cheap imitation jewelry, cheap imitation women—Stop! where is Rita Gonzales? She was a real woman; she was a woman of gold! So simple, so innocent, so gay, yet so profoundly passionate—I would envy De Quincey his leisure and his opium, that I might haunt eternally this street where first I saw her, dawn of two miraculous months, where last I saw her before the eternal curse drew her away from me, hiding her under the empurpled robe of silence. I cannot ever weep. Such is our life; under the silence of inexorable might we jostle and splash to artificial lights and sounds; we struggle and show, going no whither, not understanding anything, not even that when all is said naught may remain but the silence of inexorable night.
I am not moved by social inequality; the rich man in his furs, the poor man drawing his worn coat about him, the successful prostitute, the starving artist, fat props of drama, shrill haters of society, burgess and parasite and worker—high and low, all are so terribly equal in the eyes of inexorable night. Even on earth there is not so much to choose between the lots of fate; weigh Franz Joseph 68 years an Emperor against that old woman selling potions on the curb. Who can measure the ways of Fate?
And Fate is—seems—to me—tonight—on Broadway. The idea of purpose, of intelligence, in the universe, becomes incredible; if I be wrong, then it proves that I at least have no intelligence—the Cretan paradox!
It is strange how few of the passers-by have any business. Some are going to or from some place of amusement or refreshment; but most are merely flies; drawn by the dazzle. They do not know why they are there. I too feel something of the fascination; or why do I linger? May it be that once—when Fire was new on earth—the light, the company of men, even strange men, were symbols of safety? Are we still half-brutes, hunted by old growling instincts no longer reasonable, no longer intelligible? It seems as if it might be so; for here are all the primitive passions peering from these animal faces. Civilization? I look for lofty brow, for grave calm eyes, for tightened mouth and strongly-jutting jaw. I see only greed and cunning and brutality and lust—and that awful hunger of the half-human soul, struggling to grow, and starving by reason that its brother the body hates it. Oh folly—oh homicidal race! These men and women do not even understand that they are destroying their bodies also when they neglect their souls!
"What do you want to be in life?"
"What do you want to be in life?"
On Broadway the only answer begins, I want to have——
What can one get? Food, drink, women, poverty, money—and then more money. So soon it tires, this game! Death is certainly the friend of those whose orbit is no wider than this. Weariness would annihilate them as disease does not; what else have they invoked?
We teach them to read, and what do they read? Music—and for what do they clamour? Science—and how do they use it but to destroy each other and themselves? Was it not better in the "dark ages" of humanity?
One light has dazzled us, destroyed us, moths in the flame!
Oh, men, you were right, perhaps, to kill your great ones!
Now you have spared us; you have let us give all power into your hands—you will not accept our greater gifts, love under will, freedom and peace—Virtue, and wisdom, and multiscient truth!
Ah! the adepts were wrong who lifted the bar of silence from inexorable night—but they invoked the abuse of knowledge without understanding, whose name is madness, whose badge is universal suicide. And yet how else may man attain? And—to what?
We must go on—
But we must compel the acceptance of new aims, invoke light—then knowledge, the light of love and will—
En avant, mes enfants!
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