The cunning writer will choose an indefinable subject; for he can
then set down his theory of what it is; and next, at length, his
conception of what it is not—and lo! his paper is covered. Therefore let
us follow the prolix and unmapable trail into the mooted country, Bohemia.
Grainger, sub editor of Doc's Magazine, closed his roll top desk, put
on his hat, walked into the hall, punched the "down" button, and waited
for the elevator.
Grainger's day had been trying. The chief had tried to ruin the
magazine a dozen times by going against Grainger's ideas for running it. A
lady whose grandfather had fought with McClellan had brought a portfolio
of poems in person.
Grainger was curator of the Lion's House of the magazine. That day he
had "lunched" an Arctic explorer, a short story writer, and the famous
conductor of a slaughter house expose. Consequently his mind was in a
whirl of icebergs, Maupassant, and trichinosis.
But there was a surcease and a recourse; there was Bohemia. He would
seek distraction there; and, let's see—he would call by for Mary Adrian.
Half an hour later he threaded his way like a Brazilian orchid hunter
through the palm forest in the tiled entrance hall of the "Idealia"
apartment house. One day the christeners of apartment houses and the
cognominators of sleeping cars will meet, and there will be some jealous
and sanguinary knifing.
The clerk breathed Grainger's name so languidly into the house
telephone that it seemed it must surely drop, from sheer inertia, down to
the janitor's regions. But, at length, it soared dilatorily up to Miss
Adrian's ear. Certainly, Mr. Grainger was to come up immediately.
A colored maid with an Eliza crossing the ice expression opened the
door of the apartment for him. Grainger walked sideways down the narrow
hall. A bunch of burnt umber hair and a sea green eye appeared in the
crack of a door. A long, white, undraped arm came out, barring the way.
"So glad you came, Ricky, instead of any of the others," said the eye.
"Light a cigarette and give it to me. Going to take me to dinner? Fine. Go
into the front room till I finish dressing. But don't sit in your usual
chair. There's pie in it—meringue. Kappelman threw it at Reeves last
evening while he was reciting. Sophy has just come to straighten up. Is it
lit? Thanks. There's Scotch on the mantel—oh, no, it isn't—that's
chartreuse. Ask Sophy to find you some. I won't be long."
Grainger escaped the meringue. As he waited his spirits sank still
lower. The atmosphere of the room was as vapid as a zephyr wandering over
a Vesuvian lava bed. Relics of some feast lay about the room, scattered in
places where even a prowling cat would have been surprised to find them. A
straggling cluster of deep red roses in a marmalade jar bowed their heads
over tobacco ashes and unwashed goblets. A chafing dish stood on the
piano; a leaf of sheet music supported a stack of sandwiches in a chair.
Mary came in, dressed and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black
fabric whose name through the change of a single vowel seems to summon
visions ranging between the extremes of man's experiences. Spelled with an
"e" it belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams: with an "a" it
drapes lamentation amid woe.
That evening they went to the Cafe Andre. And, as people would confide
to you in a whisper that Andre's was the only truly Bohemian restaurant in
town, it may be well to follow them.
Andre began his professional career as a waiter in a Bowery ten-cent
eating house. Had you seen him there you would have called him tough—to
yourself. Not aloud, for he would have "soaked" you as quickly as he would
have soaked his thumb in your coffee. He saved money and started a
basement table d'hote in Eighth (or Ninth) Street. One afternoon Andre
drank too much absinthe. He announced to his startled family that he was
the Grand Lama of Tibet, therefore requiring an empty audience hall in
which to be worshiped. He moved all the tables and chairs from the
restaurant into the back yard, wrapped a red tablecloth around himself,
and sat on a step ladder for a throne. When the diners began to arrive,
Madame, in a flurry of despair, laid cloths and ushered them, trembling,
outside. Between the tables clothes lines were stretched, bearing the
family wash. A party of Bohemia hunters greeted the artistic innovation
with shrieks and acclamations of delight. That week's washing was not
taken in for two years. When Andre came to his senses he had the menu
printed on stiffly starched cuffs, and served the ices in little wooden
tubs. Next he took down his sign and darkened the front of the house. When
you went there to dine you fumbled for an electric button and pressed it.
A lookout slid open a panel in the door, looked at you suspiciously, and
asked if you were acquainted with Senator Herodotus Q. McMilligan, of the
Chickasaw Nation. If you were you were admitted and allowed to dine. If
you were not, you were admitted and allowed to dine. There you have one of
the abiding principles of Bohemia. When Andre had accumulated $20,000 he
moved uptown, near Broadway, in the fierce light that beats upon the
thrown down. There we find him and leave him, with customers in pearls and
automobile veils, striving to catch his excellently graduated nod of
recognition.
There is a large round table in the northeast corner of Andre's at
which six can sit. To this table Grainger and Mary Adrian made their way.
Kappelman and Reeves were already there. And Miss Tooker, who designed the
May cover for the Ladies' Notathome Magazine. Mrs. Pothunter, who never
drank anything but black and white highballs, being in mourning for her
husband, who—oh, I've forgotten what he did—died, like as not.
Spaghetti weary reader, wouldst take one penny in the slot peep into
the fair land of Bohemia? Then look; and when you think you have seen it
you have not. And it is neither thimbleriggery nor astigmatism.
The walls of the Cafe Andre were covered with original sketches by the
artists who furnished much of the color and sound of the place. Fair woman
furnished the theme for the bulk of the drawings. When you say "sirens and
siphons" you come near to estimating the alliterative atmosphere of
Andre's.
First, I want you to meet my friend, Miss Adrian. Miss Tooker and Mrs.
Pothunter you already know. While she tucks in the fingers of her elbow
gloves you shall have her daguerreotype. So faint and uncertain shall the
portrait be:
Age, somewhere between twenty seven and high neck evening dresses.
Camaraderie in large bunches—whatever the fearful word may mean.
Habitat—anywhere from Seattle to Tierra del Fuego. Temperament
uncharted—she let Reeves squeeze her hand after he recited one of his
poems; but she counted the change after sending him out with a dollar to
buy some pickled pigs' feet. Deportment 75 out of a possible 100. Morals
100.
Mary was one of the princesses of Bohemia. In the first place, it was a
royal and a daring thing to have been named Mary. There are twenty Fifines
and Heloises to one Mary in the Country of Elusion.
Now her gloves are tucked in. Miss Tooker has assumed a June poster
pose; Mrs. Pothunter has bitten her lips to make the red show; Reeves has
several times felt his coat to make sure that his latest poem is in the
pocket. (It had been neatly typewritten; but he had copied it on the back
of letters with a pencil.) Kappelman is underhandedly watching the clock.
It is ten minutes to nine. When the hour comes it is to remind him of a
story. Synopsis: A French girl says to her suitor: "Did you ask my father
for my hand at nine o'clock this morning, as you said you would?" "I did
not," he replies. "At nine o'clock I was fighting a duel with swords in
the Bois de Boulogne." "Coward!" she hisses.
The dinner was ordered. You know how long the Bohemian feast of reason
keeps up with the courses. Humor with the oysters; wit with the soup;
repartee with the entree; brag with the roast; knocks for Whistler and
Kipling with the salad; songs with the coffee, the slapsticks with the
cordials.
Between Miss Adrian's eyebrows was the pucker that shows the intense
strain it requires to be at ease in Bohemia. Pat must come each sally,
mot, and epigram. Every second of deliberation upon a reply costs you a
bay leaf. Fine as a hair, a line began to curve from her nostrils to her
mouth. To hold her own not a chance must be missed. A sentence addressed
to her must be as a piccolo, each word of it a stop, which she must be
prepared to seize upon and play. And she must always be quicker than a
Micmac Iridian to paddle the light canoe of conversation away from the
rocks in the rapids that flow from the Pierian spring. For, plodding
reader, the handwriting on the wall in the banquet hall of Bohemia is "laisser
faire." The gray ghost that sometimes peeps through the rings of smoke is
that of slain old King Convention. Freedom is the tyrant that holds them
in slavery.
As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper cruet rather than for
the shaker of Attic salt. Miss Tooker, with an elbow to business, leaned
across the table toward Grainger, upsetting her glass of wine.
"Now, while you are fed and in good humor," she said, "I want to make a
suggestion to you about a new cover."
"A good idea," said Grainger, mopping the tablecloth with his napkin.
"I'll speak to the waiter about it."
Kappelman, the painter, was the cut up. As a piece of delicate Athenian
wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room with a waiter. The
dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous, worthy, tax paying art
despising biped, released himself from the unequal encounter, carried his
professional smile back to the dumbwaiter and dropped it down the shaft to
eternal oblivion. Reeves began to make Keats turn in his grave. Mrs.
Pothunter told the story of the men who met the widow on the train. Miss
Adrian hummed what is still called a chanson in the cafes of Bridgeport.
Grainger edited each individual effort with his assistant editor's smile,
which meant: "Great! but you'll have to send them in through the regular
channels. If I were the chief now—but you know how it is."
And soon the head waiter bowed before them, desolated to relate that
the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so out all
trooped into the starry midnight, filling the street with gay laughter, to
be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed by the dull inhabitants
of an uninspired world.
Grainger left Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of the
Idealia. After he had gone she came down again carrying a small handbag,
'phoned for a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station, boarded a 12.55
commuter's train, rode four hours with her burnt-umber head bobbing
against the red plush back of the seat, and landed during a fresh,
stinging, glorious sunrise at a deserted station, the size of a peach
crate, called Crocusville.
She walked a mile and clicked the latch of a gate. A bare, brown
cottage stood twenty yards back; an old man with a pearl white,
Calvinistic face and clothes dyed blacker than a raven in a coal mine was
washing his hands in a tin basin on the front porch.
"How are you, Father?" said Mary timidly.
"I am as well as Providence permits, Mary Ann. You will find your
mother in the kitchen "
In the kitchen a cryptic, gray woman kissed her glacially on the
forehead, and pointed out the potatoes which were not yet peeled for
breakfast. Mary sat in a wooden chair and decorticated spuds, with a
thrill in her heart.
For breakfast there were grace, cold bread, potatoes, bacon, and tea.
"You are pursuing the same avocation in the city concerning which you
have advised us from time to time by letter, I trust," said her father.
" Yes, " said Mary. "I am still reviewing books for the same
publication. "
After breakfast she helped wash the dishes, and then all three sat in
straight back chairs in the bare-floored parlor.
"It is my custom," said the old man, "on the Sabbath day to read aloud
from the great work entitled the 'Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of
Liturgy,' by the ecclesiastical philosopher and revered theologian Jeremy
Taylor."
"I know it," said Mary blissfully, folding her hands.
For two hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the
notes of an oratorio played on the violin-cello. Mary sat gloating in the
new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden chair brought
her. Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's.
Jeremy's minor chords soothed her like the music of tom tom. "Why, oh
why," she said to herself, "does some one not write words to it?"
At eleven they went to church in Crocusville. The back of the pine
bench on which she sat had a penitential forward tilt that would have
brought St. Simeon down, in jealousy, from his pillar. The preacher
singled her out, and thundered upon her vicarious head the bar of
judgement. An ant crawled upon her neck, but she dared not move. She
lowered her eyes before the congregation – a hundred-eyed Cerberus who
watched the gates through which her sins were fast thrusting her. Her soul
was filled with a delirious, almost a fanatic joy. For she was out of the
cllutch of the tyrant. Freedom. Dogma and creed pinioned her with
beneficent cruelty, as steel braces bind up the feet of a crippled child.
She was hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, straight-jacketed, silenced,
ordered. When they came out, the minister stopped to greet them. Mary
could only hang her head and answer "Yes, sir," and "No, sir," to his
questions. When she saw that the other women carried their hymn books at
their waists with their left hands, she blushed and moved hers there, too,
from her right.
She took the three o'clock train back to the city. At nine she sat at
the round table for dinner in the Cafe Andre. Nearly the same crowd was
there.
"Where have you been to day?" asked Mrs. Pothunter. "I 'phoned to you
at twelve."
"I have been away in Bohemia," answered Mary, with a mystic smile.
There! Mary has given it away. She has spoiled my climax. For I was to
have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in
which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the
court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away
beyond the hills. It is a hillside that you turn your head to peer at from
the windows of the Through Express.
At exactly half past eleven Kappelman, deceived by a new softness and
slowness of riposte and parry in Mary Adrian, tried to kiss her. Instantly
she slapped his face with such strength and cold fury that he shrank down,
sobered, with the flaming red print of a hand across his leering features.
And all sounds ceased, as when the shadows of great wings come upon a
flock of chattering sparrows. One had broken the paramount law of sham
Bohemia—the law of "Laisser aire " The shock came not from the blow
delivered, but from the blow received. With the effect of a schoolmaster
entering the playroom of his pupils was that blow administered. Women
pulled down their sleeves and laid prim hands against their ruffled side
locks. Men looked at their watches. There was nothing of the effect of a
brawl about it; it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the
ax of the fly cop. Conscience, hammering at the gambling house doors of
the Heart.
With their punctilious putting on of cloaks, with their exaggerated
pretense of not having seen or heard, with their stammering exchange of
unaccustomed formalities, with their false show of a light hearted exit I
must take leave of my Bohemian party. Mary has robbed me of my climax; and
she may go.
But I am not defeated. Somewhere there exists a great vault miles broad
and miles long—more capacious than the champagne caves of France. In that
vault are stored the anti climaxes that should have been tagged to all the
stories that have been told in the world. I shall cheat that vault of one
deposit.
Minnie Brown, with her aunt, came from Crocusville down to the city to
see the sights. And because she had escorted me to fishless trout streams
and exhibited to me open plumbed waterfalls and broken my camera while I
Julyed in her village, I must escort her to the hives containing the
synthetic clover honey of town.
Especially did the custom made Bohemia charm her. The spaghetti wound
its tendrils about her heart; the free red wine drowned her belief in the
existence of commercialism in the world; she was dazed and enchanted by
the rugose wit that can be churned out of California claret.
But one evening I got her away from the smell of halibut and linoleum
long enough to read to her the manuscript of this story, which then ended
before her entrance into it. I read it to her because I knew that all the
printing presses in the world were running to try to please her and some
others. And I asked her about it. "I didn't quite catch the trains," said
she. "How long was Mary in Crocusville?"
"Ten hours and five minutes," I replied.
"Well, then the story may do," said Minnie. "But if she had stayed
there a week Kappelman would have got his kiss."
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