The World is a Beautiful Place – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"The world is a beautiful place"
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn’t half so bad
if it isn’t you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs of having
inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
‘living it up’
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician
Marjorie Rawlings
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August
8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an author who lived in rural Florida and wrote
novels with rural themes and settings.
Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy
who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was
later made into a movie of the same name. The book was written long before the
concept of young adult fiction but is now commonly included in teen-reading
lists.
In 1928, with a small inheritance
from her mother, the Rawlingses purchased a 72-acre orange grove near
Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek for its location between
Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake.
She was fascinated with the
remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Creek residents, her "Florida
cracker" neighbors, and felt a profound and transforming connection to the
region and the land.
Wary at first, the local
residents soon warmed to her and opened up their lives and experiences to her.
Marjorie actually made many visits to meet with Calvin and Mary Long to observe
their family relationships. This relationship ended up being used as a model
for the family in her most successful novel, The Yearling. The Longs lived in a
clearing named Pat's Island, but Marjorie renamed the clearing "Baxter's
Island." Marjorie filled several notebooks with descriptions of the
animals, plants, Southern dialect, and recipes and used these descriptions in
her writings.
Her first novel, South Moon
Under, was published in 1933. The book captured the richness of Cross Creek and
its environs in telling the story of a young man, Lant, who must support
himself and his mother by making and selling moonshine, and what he must do
when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him in. Moonshiners were the subject
of several of her stories, and Rawlings lived with a moonshiner for several
weeks near Ocala to prepare for writing the book. South Moon Under was included
in the Book-of-the-Month Club and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
She found immense success in 1938
with The Yearling, a story about a Florida boy and his pet deer and his
relationship with his father, which she originally intended as a story for
young readers. It was selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it won the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939. MGM purchased the rights to the film
version, which was released in 1946, and it made her famous. In 1942, Rawlings
published Cross Creek, an autobiographical account of her relationships with
her neighbors and her beloved Florida hammocks. Again it was chosen by the
Book-of-the-Month Club, and it was even released in a special armed forces
edition, sent to servicemen during World War II.
Rawlings' final novel, The
Sojourner, published in 1953 and set in a northern setting, was about the life
of a man and his relationship to his family: a difficult mother who favors her
other, first-born son and his relationship to this absent older brother. To
absorb the natural setting so vital to her writing, she bought an old farmhouse
in Van Hornesville, New York and spent part of each year there until her death.
The novel was less well-received
critically than her Florida writings and did little to enhance her literary
reputation. She published 33 short stories from 1912–49. As many of Rawling's
works were centered in the North and Central Florida area, she was often
considered a regional writer. Rawlings herself rejected this label saying,
"I don't hold any brief for regionalism, and I don't hold with the
regional novel as such … don't make a novel about them unless they have a
larger meaning than just quaintness."
In her memoir Cross Creek first
published in 1942, Rawlings described how she owned 72 acres of land and also
hired a number of people over the years to help her with day-to-day chores and
activities. An entire chapter of the book is dedicated to one woman she hired,
whose name was Beatrice, but who was affectionately known as
"GeeChee", because the woman was ethnically part of the GeeChee
people. In the book Rawlings said GeeChee's mother lived in nearby Hawthorne,
Florida and that GeeChee was blind in one eye from a fight in which she had
been involved. GeeChee was employed by Rawlings on and off for nearly two years
in which GeeChee dutifully made life easier for Rawlings. GeeChee revealed to
Rawlings that her boyfriend named Leroy was serving time in prison for
manslaughter, and asked Rawlings for help in gaining his release. She arranged
for Leroy to be paroled to her and come work for her farm and had a wedding on
the grounds for Beatrice and Leroy. After a few weeks, Leroy aggressively
demanded more earnings from Rawlings and threatened her. She decided he had to
leave, which caused her distress because she did not want GeeChee to go with
him, which she was sure she would. GeeChee eventually decided to stay with
Rawlings, but then began to drink heavily and abandoned her. Weeks later,
Rawlings searched for GeeChee, found her, and drove her back to the farm,
describing GeeChee as a "Black Florence Nightingale". GeeChee was
unable to stop herself from drinking, which led a heartbroken Rawlings to
dismiss her. Rawlings stated in her autobiography "No maid of perfection —
and now I have one — can fill the strange emptiness she left in a remote corner
of my heart. I think of her often, and I know she does of me, for she comes
once a year to see me".
When Cross Creek was turned into
a 1983 film, actress Alfre Woodard was nominated for the Academy Award for Best
Supporting Actress for her performance as GeeChee.
In 1943, Rawlings faced a libel
suit for Cross Creek, filed by her neighbor Zelma Cason, whom Rawlings had met
the first day she moved to Florida. Cason had helped to soothe the mother made
upset by her son's depiction in "Jacob's Ladder".
Cason claimed Rawlings made her
out to be a "hussy". Rawlings had assumed their friendship was intact
and spoke with her immediately. Cason went ahead with the lawsuit seeking
$100,000 US for invasion of privacy (as the courts found libel too ambiguous).
It was a cause of action that had never been argued in a Florida court.
Rawlings used Cason's forename in
the book, but described her in this passage:
Zelma is an ageless spinster
resembling an angry and efficient canary. She manages her orange grove and as
much of the village and county as needs management or will submit to it. I
cannot decide whether she should have been a man or a mother. She combines the
more violent characteristics of both and those who ask for or accept her
ministrations think nothing at being cursed loudly at the very instant of being
tenderly fed, clothed, nursed, or guided through their troubles.
Cason was represented by one of
the first female lawyers in Florida, Kate Walton. Cason was reportedly profane
indeed (one of her neighbors reported her swearing could be heard for a quarter
of a mile), wore pants, had a fascination with guns, and was just as extraordinarily
independent as Rawlings herself.
Rawlings won the case and enjoyed
a brief vindication, but the verdict was overturned in appellate court and
Rawlings was ordered to pay damages in the amount of $1. The toll the case took
on Rawlings was great, in both time and emotion. Reportedly, Rawlings had been
shocked to learn of Cason's reaction to the book and felt betrayed. After the
case was over, she spent less time in Cross Creek and never wrote another book
about Florida, though she had been considering doing a sequel to Cross Creek.
The books illustrations were done
by Newell Convers Wyeth (October 22, 1882 – October 19, 1945), known as N. C.
Wyeth. During his lifetime, Wyeth created more than 3,000 paintings and
illustrated 112 books, 25 of them for Scribner's, the Scribner Classics, which
is the work for which he is best known. Wyeth was a realist painter at a time when the
camera and photography began to compete with his craft. Sometimes seen as
melodramatic, his illustrations were designed to be understood quickly. Wyeth,
who was both a painter and an illustrator, understood the difference, and said
in 1908, "Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from
one into the other." In October 1945, Wyeth and his grandson (Nathaniel C.
Wyeth's son) were killed when the automobile they were riding in was struck by
a freight train at a railway crossing
near his Chadds Ford home
I can only imagine having the vision and discipline to create this
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
American Folk music: Pete Seeger. The thing to remember about this guy, is that he was a car carrying member of America's elite.
Pete Seeger remains
one of the most prolific artists in folk
music. From his time with the Almanac Singers to the Weavers, he was an instrumental force in the '60s folk revival
and the peace movement. He's written some of the most covered tunes in folk
history.
Government Troops Firing on Demonstrators, Corner of Nevsky Prospect and Sadovaya Street, St. Petersburg, Russia] by Karl Karlovich Bulla
Bloody
Sunday Massacre in Russia
Well on its way to losing a war
against Japan in the Far East, czarist Russia is wracked with internal
discontent that finally explodes into violence in St. Petersburg in what will
become known as the Bloody Sunday Massacre.
Under the weak-willed Romanov
Czar Nicholas II, who ascended to the throne in 1894, Russia had become more
corrupt and oppressive than ever before. Plagued by the fear that his line
would not continue—his only son, Alexis, suffered from hemophilia—Nicholas fell
under the influence of such unsavory characters as Grigory Rasputin, the
so-called mad monk. Russia’s imperialist interests in Manchuria at the turn of
the century brought on the Russo-Japanese War, which began in February 1904.
Meanwhile, revolutionary leaders, most notably the exiled Vladimir Lenin, were
gathering forces of socialist rebellion aimed at toppling the czar.
To drum up support for the
unpopular war against Japan, the Russian government allowed a conference of the
zemstvos, or the regional governments instituted by Nicholas’s grandfather
Alexander II, in St. Petersburg in November 1904. The demands for reform made
at this congress went unmet and more radical socialist and workers’ groups
decided to take a different tack.
On January 22, 1905, a group of
workers led by the radical priest Georgy Apollonovich Gapon marched to the
czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to make their demands. Imperial forces
opened fire on the demonstrators, killing and wounding hundreds. Strikes and
riots broke out throughout the country in outraged response to the massacre, to
which Nicholas responded by promising the formation of a series of
representative assemblies, or Dumas, to work toward reform.
Internal tension in Russia
continued to build over the next decade, however, as the regime proved
unwilling to truly change its repressive ways and radical socialist groups,
including Lenin’s Bolsheviks, became stronger, drawing ever closer to their
revolutionary goals. The situation would finally come to a head more than 10
years later as Russia’s resources were stretched to the breaking point by the
demands of World War I.
Edvard Grieg – Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46: In the Hall of the Mountain King
Grieg's music drew on the
Norwegian folk tunes of his homeland. ... Grieg's 'Peer Gynt Suite' tells the story
of a young boy – Peer Gynt, who falls in love with a girl but is not allowed to
marry her. He runs away into the mountains but is captured by trolls who take
him to their King.
Destruction—Joanne Kyger
First of all do you remember the
way a bear goes through
a cabin when nobody is home? He
goes through
the front door. I mean he really
goes through it. Then
he takes the cupboard off the
wall and eats a can of lard.
He eats all the apples, limes,
dates, bottled decaffeinated
coffee, and 35 pounds of granola.
The asparagus soup cans
fall to the floor. Yum! He chomps
up Norwegian crackers
stashed for the winter. And the
bouillon, salt, pepper,
paprika, garlic, onions,
potatoes.
He rips the Green Tara
poster from the wall. Tries the
Coleman Mustard. Spills
the ink, tracks in the flour.
Goes up stairs and takes
a shit. Rips open the water bed,
eats the incense and
drinks the perfume. Knocks over
the Japanese tansu
and the Persian miniature of a
man on horseback watching
a woman bathing.
Knocks Shelter, Whole Earth
Catalogue,
Planet Drum, Northern Mists,
Truck Tracks, and
Women's Sports into the oozing
water bed mess.
He goes down stairs and out the
back wall. He keeps on going
for a long way and finds a good
cave to sleep it all off.
Luckily he ate the whole medicine
cabinet, including stash
of LSD, Peyote, Psilocybin,
Amanita, Benzedrine, Valium
and aspirin.
Germaine Luise Krull
Germaine Luise Krull ( November
1897 – July 1985) was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner.
Her nationality has been
categorized as German, French, and Dutch. Described as "an especially
outspoken example" of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who
"could lead lives free from convention", she is best known for
photographically-illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio Métal.
Krull was politically
active between 1918 and 1921. In 1919 she switched from the Independent Socialist
Party of Bavaria to the Communist Party of Germany, and was arrested and
imprisoned for assisting a Bolshevik emissary's attempted escape to Austria.
She was expelled from
Bavaria in 1920 for her Communist activities, and traveled to Russia with lover
Samuel Levit. After Levit abandoned her in 1921, Krull was imprisoned as an
"anti-Bolshevik" and expelled from Russia.
She lived in Berlin
between 1922 and 1925 where she resumed her photographic career. Among other photographs
Krull produced in Berlin were a series of nudes.
In Paris between 1926 and
1928, Krull became friends with Sonia Delaunay, Robert Delaunay, Eli Lotar,
André Malraux, Colette, Jean Cocteau, André Gide and others; her commercial
work consisted of fashion photography, nudes, and portraits. During this period
she published the portfolio Métal (1928) which concerned "the essentially
masculine subject of the industrial landscape."
Krull shot the
portfolio's 64 black-and-white photographs in Paris, Marseille, and Holland
during approximately the same period as Ivens was creating his film De Brug "The
Bridge") in Rotterdam, and the two artists may have influenced each other.
The portfolio's subjects range from bridges,
buildings (e.g., the Eiffel Tower), and ships to bicycle wheels; it can be read
as either a celebration of machines or a criticism of them
Many of the photographs
were taken from dramatic angles, and overall the work has been compared to that
of László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko. In 1999–2004 the portfolio was
selected as one of the most important photobooks in history.
Closest ever, mysterious 'fast radio burst' found 30,000 light-years from Earth
Magnetar SGR 1935+2154
was discovered in 2014, but April 2020 was when scientists saw it become active
again
By Chris Ciaccia
Fast radio bursts (FRBs)
are often mysterious in nature, but not an uncommon observation in deep space.
However, researchers have discovered the first FRB to emanate from the Milky
Way galaxy, according to a newly published study.
The research details magnetar SGR 1935+2154,
which was discovered in 2014, but it wasn't until April 2020 when scientists
saw it become active again, shooting out radio waves and X-rays at random intervals.
“We’ve never seen a burst
of radio waves, resembling a Fast Radio Burst, from a magnetar before,” the
study's lead author, Sandro Mereghetti of the National Institute for
Astrophysics (INAF–IASF), said in a statement.
This FRB likely comes
from a neutron star, approximately 30,000 light-years from Earth in the
Vulpecula constellation, LiveScience reports. A light-year, which measures
distance in space, is approximately 6 trillion miles.
Mereghetti and the other
researchers detected the FRB using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Integral
satellite on April 28.
The "Burst Alert
System" sent out an alert about the discovery around the world "in
just seconds," which Merghetti said enabled "the scientific community
to act fast and explore this source in more detail.”
Astronomers around the
globe also spotted the "short and extremely bright burst of radio
waves" via the CHIME radio telescope in Canada also on April 28.
Subsequent confirmations came from California and Utah the following day.
“This is the first ever
observational connection between magnetars and Fast Radio Bursts," Mereghetti
added. "It truly is a major discovery, and helps to bring the origin of
these mysterious phenomena into focus.”
The study has been
published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
It's unknown how common
FRBs actually are and why some of them repeat and others do not; most of their
origins are also mysterious in nature.
Some researchers have
speculated they stem from an extraterrestrial civilization. But others,
including the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, or SETI, have
said that explanation "really doesn't make sense."
They come from all over
space "and arranging cooperative alien behavior when even one-way
communication takes many billions of years seems unlikely — to put it gently,"
SETI wrote in a September 2019 blog post.
First discovered in 2007,
FRBs are relatively new to astronomers and their origins are mysterious.
According to ScienceAlert, some of them can generate as much energy as 500
million suns in a few milliseconds.
In July 2018, an FRB that
hit Earth was nearly 200 megahertz lower than any other radio burst ever
detected.
Jackson Carey Frank
Edited from Wikipedia
Jackson Carey Frank
(March 2, 1943 – March 3, 1999) was an American folk musician. He released his
first and only album in 1965, produced by Paul Simon. After the release of the
record, he was plagued by a series of personal issues, and was diagnosed with
schizophrenia and protracted depression that prevented him from maintaining his
career. He spent his later life homeless and destitute, and died in 1999 of
pneumonia. Though he only released one record, he has been cited as an
influence by many singer-songwriters, including Paul Simon, Sandy Denny, Bert
Jansch and Nick Drake. Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke called Frank
"one of the best forgotten songwriters of the 1960s."
His eponymous 1965 album,
Jackson C. Frank, was produced by Paul Simon while the two of them were living
in England immersed in the burgeoning local folk scene. The album was recorded
in six hours at Levy’s Recording Studio, located at 103 New Bond Street in
London.
Frank was so shy during the recording that he
asked to be shielded by screens so that Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and Al
Stewart could not see him, claiming: 'I can't play. You're looking at me.'
The best-known track from
the sessions, "Blues Run the Game", was covered by Simon and Garfunkel,
and later by Wizz Jones, Counting Crows, John Mayer, Mark Lanegan, Headless
Heroes, Colin Meloy, Bert Jansch, Eddi Reader, Laura Marling and Robin Pecknold
(as White Antelope), while Nick Drake also recorded it privately.
The song was also heard
in the 2018 film The Old Man & the Gun, while his song "Milk and
Honey" was heard in the 2003 film The Brown Bunny. "Milk and
Honey" was also covered by Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and Sandy
Denny, whom he dated for a while. During their relationship, Jackson convinced
Sandy to give up her nursing profession to concentrate on music full time.
Although Frank was well
received in England for a while, in 1966 things took a turn for the worse as
his mental health began to unravel. Frank's mental health declined so
noticeably and completely that in early 1966 he entered St. John’s Hospital in
Lincoln for an evaluation. At the same
time he began to experience writer's block. As his insurance payment was on the
verge of running out he decided to go back to the United States for two years.
When he returned to England in 1968 he seemed a different person to his
friends. His depression, stemming from the childhood trauma of the classroom
fire, had grown worse, and he had completely lost whatever little self-confidence
he once possessed. Al Stewart recalled: He [Frank] proceeded to fall apart
before our very eyes. His style that everyone loved was melancholy, very
tuneful things. He started doing things that were completely impenetrable. They
were basically about psychological angst, played at full volume with lots of
thrashing. I don't remember a single word of them, it just did not work. There was
one review that said he belonged on a psychologist's couch. Then shortly after
that, he hightailed it back to Woodstock again, because he wasn't getting any
work.
While in Woodstock, he
married Elaine Sedgwick, an English former fashion model. They had a son and
later a daughter, Angeline. After his son died of cystic fibrosis, Frank went
into a period of even greater depression and was ultimately committed to a
mental institution. By the early 1970s Frank began to beg aid from friends. In 1975,
Karl Dallas wrote an enthusiastic piece in the British weekly music newspaper
Melody Maker, and in 1978, Frank's 1965 album was re-released as Jackson Again,
with a new cover sleeve, although this did not in the end make his music much
more popular outside of a small number of his fans.
Frank lived with his
parents in Elma, New York, for a few years in the early 1980s. In 1984, his
mother, who had been in hospital for open-heart surgery, returned home to find
Frank missing with no note or forwarding address. Frank had gone to New York
City in a desperate bid to find Paul Simon, but ended up homeless and sleeping
on the sidewalk. During this time he found himself in and out of various
psychiatric institutions.
Frank was treated for
paranoid schizophrenia, a diagnosis that was denied by Frank himself (he
maintained that he was suffering from depression caused by the trauma he had
experienced as a child). Just as Frank's prospects seemed to be at their worst,
a fan from the Woodstock area, Jim Abbott, discovered him in the early 1990s.
Abbott had been discussing music with Mark Anderson, a teacher at the local
college he was attending.
Though he never achieved
fame during his lifetime, his songs have been covered by many well-known
artists.
The Mount
"The
Pelican."
A short
story by Edith Wharton
SHE was very pretty when I first knew her,
with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity,
humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said
which possessed the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality.
For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the
real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic
problem.
I do not think that nature had meant her to
be "intellectual"; but what can a poor thing do, whose husband has
died of drink when her baby is hardly six months old, and who finds that her
coral necklace and her grandfather's edition of the British Dramatists are
inadequate to the demands of the creditors?
Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte
Pratt, had written a poem in blank verse on "The Fall of Man"; one of
her aunts was dean of a girl's college; another had translated Euripides --
with such a family, the poor child's fate was sealed in advance. The only way
of paying her husband's debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be
intellectual; and, after some hesitation as to the form that her mental
activity was to take, it was unanimously decided that she was to give lectures.
They began by being drawing-room lectures.
The first time I saw her she was standing by the piano, against a flippant
background of Dresden china and photographs, telling a roomful of women
preoccupied with their spring bonnets all that she thought she knew about Greek
art. The ladies assembled to hear her had given me to understand that she was
"doing it for the baby," and this fact, together with the shortness
of her upper lip and the bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to
listen leniently to her dissertation. Happily, at that time Greek art was
still, if I may use the phrase, easily handled; it was as simple as walking
down a museum-gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses and Apollos. All the
later complications -- the archaic and archaistic conundrums; the influences of
Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting attributions and the wrangles of the
erudite -- still slumbered in the bosom of the future "scientific
critic." Greek art in those days began with Phidias and ended with the
Apollo Belvedere; and a child could travel from one to the other without danger
of losing its way.
Mrs. Amyot had two fatal gifts: a capacious
but inaccurate memory, and an extraordinary fluency of speech. There was
nothing that she did not remember -- wrongly; but her halting facts were
swathed in so many layers of cotton-wool eloquence that their infirmities were
imperceptible to her friendly critics. Besides, she had been taught Greek by
the aunt who had translated Euripides; and the mere sound of the ais and ois
which she now and then not unskilfully let slip (correcting herself, of course,
with a start, and indulgently mistranslating the phrase), struck awe to the
hearts of ladies whose only "accomplishment" was French -- if you
didn't speak too quickly.
I had then but a momentary glimpse of Mrs.
Amyot, but a few months later I came upon her again in the New England
university town where the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt lived on the summit of
a local Parnassus, with lesser muses and college professors respectfully grouped
on the lower ledges of the sacred declivity. Mrs. Amyot, who, after her
husband's death, had returned to the maternal roof (even during her father's
lifetime the roof had been distinctively maternal), Mrs. Amyot, thanks to her
upper lip, her dimple, and her Greek, was already ensconced in a snug hollow of
the Parnassian slope.
After the lecture was over it happened that
I walked home with Mrs. Amyot. Judging from the incensed glances of two or
three learned gentlemen who were hovering on the door-step when we emerged, I
inferred that Mrs. Amyot, at that period, did not often walk home alone; but I
doubt whether any of my discomfited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was
ever treated to so ravishing a mixture of shyness and self-abandonment, of sham
erudition and real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to enjoy. Even at the
incipience of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender eye for strangers, as
possible links with successive centres of culture to which in due course the torch
of Greek art might be handed on.
She began by telling me that she had never
been so frightened in her life. She knew, of course, how dreadfully learned I
was, and when, just as she was going to begin, her hostess had whispered to her
that I was in the room, she had felt ready to sink through the floor. Then
(with a flying dimple) she had remembered Emerson's line -- wasn't it
Emerson's? -- that beauty is its own excuse for seeing, and that had made her
feel a little more confident, since she was sure that no one saw beauty more
vividly than she -- as a child she used to sit for hours gazing at an Etruscan
vase on the bookcase in the library while her sisters played with their dolls
-- and if seeing beauty was the only excuse one needed for talking about it,
why, she was sure I would make allowances and not be too critical and
sarcastic, especially if, as she thought probable, I had heard of her having
lost her poor husband, and how she had to do it for the baby.
Being over-abundantly assured of my sympathy
on these points, she went on to say that she had always wanted so much to
consult me about her lectures. Of course, one subject wasn't enough (this view
of the limitations of Greek art as a "subject" gave me a startling
idea of the rate at which a successful lecturer might exhaust the universe);
she must find others; she had not ventured on any as yet, but she had thought
of Tennyson -- didn't I love Tennyson? She worshipped him so that she was sure
she could help others to understand him; or what did I think of a
"course" on Raphael or Michaelangelo -- or on the heroines of
Shakespeare? There were some fine steel-engravings of Raphael's Madonnas and of
the Sistine ceiling in her mother's library, and she had seen Miss Cushman in
several Shakespearian roles, so that on these subjects also she felt qualified
to speak with authority.
When we reached her mother's door she begged
me to come in and talk the matter over; she wanted me to see the baby -- she
felt as though I should understand her better if I saw the baby -- and the
dimple flashed through a tear.
The fear of encountering the author of
"The Fall of Man," combined with the opportune recollection of a
dinner engagement, made me evade this appeal with the promise of returning on
the morrow. On the morrow, I left too early to redeem my promise; and for
several years afterward I saw no more of Mrs. Amyot.
My calling at that time took me at irregular
intervals from one to another of our larger cities, and as Mrs. Amyot was also
peripatetic it was inevitable that sooner or later we should cross each other's
path. It was therefore without surprise that, one snowy afternoon in Boston, I
learned from the lady with whom I chanced to be lunching that, as soon as the
meal was over, I was to be taken to hear Mrs. Amyot lecture.
"On Greek art?" I suggested.
"Oh, you've heard her then? No, this is
one of the series called 'Homes and Haunts of the Poets.' Last week we had
Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, to-day we are to have Goethe and Weimar. She is
a wonderful creature -- all the women of her family are geniuses. You know, of
course, that her mother was Irene Astarte Pratt, who wrote a poem on 'The Fall
of Man'; N. P. Willis called her the female Milton of America. One of Mrs.
Amyot's aunts has translated Eurip -- "
"And is she as pretty as ever?" I
irrelevantly interposed.
My hostess stared. "She is excessively
modest and retiring. She says it is actual suffering for her to speak in
public. You know she only does it for the baby."
Punctually at the hour appointed, we took
our seats in a lecture-hall full of strenuous females in ulsters. Mrs. Amyot
was evidently a favorite with these austere sisters, for every corner was
crowded, and as we entered a pale usher with an educated mispronunciation was
setting forth to several dejected applicants the impossibility of supplying
them with seats.
Our own were happily so near the front that
when the curtains at the back of the platform parted, and Mrs. Amyot appeared,
I was at once able to establish a rapid comparison between the lady placidly
dimpling to the applause of her public and the shrinking drawing-room orator of
my earlier recollections.
Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there
was the same curious discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the
staleness of her theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness
with which she had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that
the shots were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that,
for her purpose, the bull's-eye was everywhere, so that there was no need to be
flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated the flow of her
circumlocutious diction that, as I listened, I had a curious sense that she was
performing a trick analogous to that of the conjuror who pulls hundreds of
yards of white paper out of his mouth. From a large assortment of stock
adjectives she chose, with unerring deftness and rapidity, the one which taste
and discrimination would most surely have rejected, fitting out her subject, as
it were, with a whole wardrobe of slop-shot epithets irrelevant in cut and
size. To the invaluable knack of not disturbing the association of ideas in her
audience, she added the gift of what may be called a confidential manner -- so
that her fluent generalizations about Goethe and his place in literature (the
lecture was, of course, manufactured out of Lewes's book) had the flavor of
personal experience, of views sympathetically exchanged with her audience on
the best way of knitting children's socks, or of putting up preserves for the
winter. It was, I am sure, to this personal accent -- the moral equivalent of
her dimple -- that Mrs. Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational success. It
was her art of transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions that so
endeared her to her feminine listeners.
To anyone not in search of
"documents" Mrs. Amyot's success was hardly of a kind to make her
more interesting, and my curiosity flagged with the growing conviction that the
"suffering" entailed upon her by public speaking was at most a
retrospective pang. I was sure that, as a matter of fact, she had reached the
point of measuring and enjoying her effects, of deliberately manipulating her
public; and there must indeed have been a certain exhilaration in attaining
results so considerable by means involving so little conscious effort. Mrs.
Amyot's art was simply an extension of coquetry: she flirted with her audience.
In this mood of enlightened skepticism I
responded but languidly to my hostess's suggestion that I should go with her
that evening to see Mrs. Amyot. The aunt who had translated Euripides was at
home on Saturday evenings, and one met "thoughtful" people there, my
hostess explained: it was one of the intellectual centres of Boston. My mood
remained distinctly resentful of any connection between Mrs. Amyot and
intellectuality, and I declined to go; but the next day I met Mrs. Amyot in the
street.
She stopped me reproachfully. She had heard
that I was in Boston; why had I not come last night? She had been told that I
was at her lecture; and it had frightened her -- yes, really, almost as much as
years ago in Hillbridge. She never could get over that stupid shyness, and the
whole business was as distasteful to her as ever; but what could she do? There
was the baby -- he was a big boy now, and boys were so expensive! But did I
really think she had improved the least little bit? And why wouldn't I come
home with her now, and see the boy, and tell her frankly what I had thought of
the lecture? She had plenty of flattery -- people were so kind, and every one
knew that she did it for the baby -- but what she felt the need of was
criticism, severe, discriminating criticism like mine -- oh, she knew that I
was dreadfully discriminating!
I went home with her and saw the boy. In the
early heat of her Tennyson-worship Mrs. Amyot had christened him Lancelot, and
he looked it. Perhaps, however, it was his black velvet dress and the
exasperating length of his yellow curls, together with the fact of his having
been taught to recite Browning to visitors, that raised to fever heat the
itching of my palms in his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had reason
to think that he would have preferred to be called Billy, and to hunt cats with
the other boys in the block: his curls and his poetry were simply another
outlet for Mrs. Amyot's irrepressible coquetry.
But if Lancelot was not genuine, his
mother's love for him was. It justified everything -- the lectures were for the
baby, after all. I had not been ten minutes in the room before I was pledged to
help Mrs. Amyot to carry out her triumphant fraud. If she wanted to lecture on
Plato she should -- Plato must take his chance like the rest of us! There was
no use, of course, in being "discriminating." I preserved sufficient
reason to avoid that pitfall, but I suggested "subjects" and made
lists of books for her with a fatuity that became more obvious as time attenuated
the remembrance of her smile; I even remember thinking that some men might have
cut the knot by marrying her, but I handed over Plato as a hostage, and escaped
by the afternoon train.
The next time I saw her was in New York,
when she had become so fashionable that it was a part of the whole duty of
woman to be seen at her lectures. The lady who suggested that of course I ought
to go and hear Mrs. Amyot, was not very clear about anything except that she
was perfectly lovely, and had had a horrid husband, and was doing it to support
her boy. The subject of the discourse (I think it proved to be on Ruskin) was
clearly of minor importance, not only to my friend, but to the throng of
well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late, dropped their muffs
and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves in the study of each
other's apparel. They received Mrs. Amyot with warmth, but she evidently
represented a social obligation like going to church, rather than any more
personal interest; in fact, I suspect that every one of the ladies would have
remained away, had it been ascertainable that none of the others were coming.
Whether Mrs. Amyot was disheartened by the
lack of sympathy between herself and her hearers, or whether the sport of
arousing it had become a task, she certainly imparted her platitudes with less
convincing warmth than of old. Her voice had the same confidential inflections,
but it was like a voice reproduced by a gramophone: the real woman seemed far
away. She had grown stouter without losing her dewy freshness, and her smart
gown might have been taken to indicate either the potentialities of a settled
income, or a politic concession to the taste of her hearers. As I listened I
reproached myself for ever having suspected her of self-deception in declaring
that she took no pleasure in her work. I was sure now that she did it only for
Lancelot, and judging from the size of her audience and the price of the
tickets I concluded that Lancelot must be receiving a liberal education.
I was living in New York that winter, and in
the rotation of dinners I found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot's side. The
dimple came out at my greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock and I
detected the same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual
pretty demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs.
They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a moment
after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed.
Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called upon
her, was living in a pleasant flat, with a sunny sitting-room full of flowers
and a tea-table that had the air of expecting visitors. She owned that she had
been ridiculously successful. It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot's
account. Lancelot had been sent to the best school in the country, and if
things went well and people didn't tire of his silly mother he was to go to
Harvard afterward. During the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat
in New York, and radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her now
and then, always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more automatic:
she had become a lecturing-machine.
I went abroad for a year or two and when I
came back she had disappeared. I asked several people about her, but life had
closed over her. She had been last heard of as lecturing -- still lecturing --
but no one seemed to know when or where.
It was in Boston that I found her at last,
forlornly swaying to the oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car.
Her face had so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time
that had elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of
my hurried calculation, and conscious that in five years she ought not to have
altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed to set it down
to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a gown that asked only
to be concealed, and shrank into a vacant seat behind the line of prehensile
bipeds blocking the aisle of the car.
It was perhaps because she so obviously
avoided me that I felt for the first time that I might be of use to her; and
when she left the car I made no excuse for following her.
She said nothing of needing advice and did
not ask me to walk home with her, concealing, as we talked, her transparent
preoccupations under the mask of a sudden interest in all that I had been doing
since she had last seen me. Of what concerned her, I learned only that Lancelot
was well and that for the present she was not lecturing -- she was tired and
her doctor had ordered her to rest. On the doorstep of a shabby house she
paused and held out her hand. She had been so glad to see me and perhaps if I
were in Boston again -- the tired dimple, as it were, bowed me out and closed
the door upon the conclusion of the phrase.
Two or three weeks later, at my club in New
York, I found a letter from her. In it she owned that she was troubled, that of
late she had been unsuccessful, and that, if I chanced to be coming back to
Boston, and could spare her a little of that invaluable advice which -- . A few
days later the advice was at her disposal.
She told me frankly what had happened. Her
public had grown tired of her. She had seen it coming on for some time, and was
shrewd enough in detecting the causes. She had more rivals than formerly --
younger women, she admitted, with a smile which could still afford to be
generous -- and then her audiences had grown more critical and consequently
more exacting. Lecturing -- as she understood it -- used to be simple enough.
You chose your topic -- Raphael, Shakespeare, Gothic Architecture, or some such
big familiar "subject" -- and read up about it for a week or so at
the Athenaeum or the Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had
read. Now, it appeared, that simple process was no longer adequate. People had
tired of familiar "subjects"; it was the fashion to be interested in
things that one hadn't always known about -- natural selection, animal
magnetism, sociology and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the
demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold had
introduced the habit of studying the "influence" of one author on
another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well as long
as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such obvious influences as that
of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on the English
drama; but such investigations had soon lost all charm for her
too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the
influenced should be absolutely unknown, or that there should be no perceptible
connection between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of
ingenuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two people who
had probably never heard of each other, much less read each other's works. A
pretty Miss Williams with red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great
success on the influence of the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while
somebody else had given a "course" on the influence of St. Thomas
Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.
Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my evident
participation in her distress, went on to say that the growing demand for
evolution was what most troubled her. Her grandfather had been a pillar of the
Presbyterian ministry, and the idea of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert
Spencer was deeply shocking to her mother and aunts. In one sense the family
had staked its literary as well as its spiritual hopes on the literal
inspiration of Genesis: what became of "The Fall of Man" in the light
of modern exegesis?
The upshot of it was that she had ceased to
lecture because she could no longer sell tickets enough to pay for the hire of
a lecture-hall; and as for the managers, they wouldn't look at her. She had
tried her luck all through the Eastern States and as far South as Washington;
but it was of no use, and unless she could get hold of some new subjects -- or,
better still, of some new audiences -- she must simply go out of the business.
That would mean the failure of all she had worked for, since Lancelot would
have to leave Harvard. She paused, and wept some of the unbecoming tears that
spring from real grief. Lancelot, it appeared, was to be a genius. He had
passed his opening examinations brilliantly; he had "literary gifts";
he had written beautiful poetry, much of which his mother had copied out in
reverentially slanting characters upon the pages of a velvet-bound volume which
she drew from a locked drawer.
Lancelot's verse struck me as nothing more
alarming than growing-pains; but it was not to learn this that she had summoned
me. What she wanted was to be assured that he was worth working for, an
assurance which I managed to convey by the simple strategy of remarking that
the poems reminded me of Swinburne -- and so they did, as well as of Browning, Tennyson,
Rossetti, William Morris, and all the other poets who supply young authors with
original inspirations.
This point being satisfactorily established,
it remained to be decided by what means his mother was, in the French phrase,
to pay herself the luxury of a poet. It was obvious that this indulgence could
be bought only with counterfeit coin, and that the one way of helping Mrs.
Amyot was to become a party to the circulation of such currency. My fetish of
intellectual integrity went down like a ninepin before the appeal of a woman no
longer young and distinctly foolish, but full of those dear contradictions and
irrelevances that will always make flesh and blood prevail against a syllogism.
When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had promised her a dozen letters to Western
universities and had half-pledged myself to sketch out for her a lecture on the
reconciliation of science and religion.
In the West she achieved a success which for
a year or more embittered my perusal of the morning papers. The fascination
which lures the murderer back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every
paragraph celebrating Mrs. Amyot's last brilliant lecture on the influence of
something upon somebody; and her own letters -- she overwhelmed me with them --
spared me no detail of the entertainment given in her honor by the Palimpsest
Club of Omaha or of her reception at the University of Leadville. The college
professors were especially kind: she assured me that she had never before met
with such discriminating sympathy. I winced under the adjective, which cast a
sudden light upon the vast machinery of fraud that I had set in motion. All
over my native land, men of hitherto unblemished integrity were conniving with
me in urging their friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot lecture on the
reconciliation of science and religion! My only hope was that, somewhere among
the number of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find one who would marry her in
the defense of his literary convictions.
None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures;
for about two years later I was startled by the announcement that Mrs. Amyot
was lecturing in Trenton, N. J., on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas.
The following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the light of
recent psychology. The week after that I was on the deck of an ocean steamer,
reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot's triumphs with the impartiality with
which one views an episode that is being left behind at the rate of twenty
knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a mother to educate her son.
The next decade of my life was spent in
Europe, and when I came home the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as
inoffensive as one of those pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to
make themselves visible to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no
longer heard her spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of
memory.
A year or two after my return I was
condemned to one of the worst punishments that a worker can undergo -- an enforced
holiday. The doctors who pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should
be worked out in the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my
thermometer and my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In
the vast and melancholy sea of my dis-occupation I clutched like a drowning man
at any human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory
interest in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my
fellow-sufferers; but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with
undiscriminating enthusiasm.
In no other way can I explain, as I look
back upon it, the importance which I attached to the leisurely confidences of a
new arrival with a brown beard who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda
hung with roses, imparted to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past.
There was nothing in the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and
though the man had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably from
the shrill inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that under
different conditions his discursive history of successful business ventures in
a Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner of a lullaby.
Even at the time I was not sure that I liked
his agreeable voice. It had a sonorous assertiveness out of keeping with the
humdrum character of his recital, as though a breeze engaged in shaking out a
table-cloth should have fancied itself inflating a banner. But this criticism
may have been a mere mark of my own fastidious humor, for the man seemed a
simple fellow, satisfied with his middling fortunes, and already (he was not
much past thirty) deep-sunk in conjugal content.
He had just entered upon an anecdote
connected with the cutting of his eldest boy's teeth, when a lady whom I knew,
returning from her late drive, paused before us for a moment in the twilight,
with the smile which is the feminine equivalent of beads to savages.
"Won't you take a ticket?" she
said, sweetly.
Of course I would take a ticket -- but for
what? I ventured to inquire.
"Oh, that's so good of you -- for the
lecture this evening. You needn't go, you know; we are none of us going; most
of us have been through it already at Aiken and at Saint Augustine and at Palm
Beach. I've given away my tickets to some new people who've just come from the
North, and some of us are going to send our maids, just to fill up the
room."
"And may I ask to whom you are going to
pay this delicate attention?"
"Oh, I thought you knew -- to poor Mrs.
Amyot. She's been lecturing all over the South this winter; she's simply
haunted me ever since I left New York -- and we had six weeks of her at Bar
Harbor last summer! One has to take tickets, you know, because she's a widow
and does it for her son -- to pay for his education. She's so plucky and nice
about it, and talks about him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody
is sorry for her, and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope that
boy's nearly educated!"
"Mrs. Amyot? Mrs. Amyot?" I
repeated. "Is she still educating her son?"
"Oh, do you know about her? Has she
been at it long? There's some comfort in that, for I suppose when the boy's
provided for the poor thing will be able to take a rest -- and give us
one!"
She laughed and extended her hand.
"Here's your ticket. Did you say tickets -- two? Oh, thanks. Of course you
needn't go."
"But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old
friend of mine."
"Do you really? That's awfully good of
you. Perhaps I'll go too if I can persuade Charlie and the others to come. And
I wonder" -- in a well-directed aside -- "if your friend -- ?"
I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk
that my friend was of too recent standing to be drawn into her charitable
toils, and she masked her mistake under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to
be late, and to be sure to keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her
mind to go even if Charlie and the others wouldn't.
The flutter of her skirts subsided in the
distance, and my neighbor, who had half turned away to light a cigar, made no
effort to reopen the conversation. At length, fearing that he might have
overheard the allusion to himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the
lecture that evening.
"Much obliged -- I have a ticket,"
he said, abruptly.
This struck me as in such bad taste that I
made no answer; and it was he who spoke next.
"Did I understand you to say that you
were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot's?"
"I think I may claim to be, if it is
the same Mrs. Amyot whom I had the pleasure of knowing many years ago. My Mrs.
Amyot used to lecture too -- "
"To pay for her son's education?"
"I believe so."
"Well -- see you later."
He got up and walked into the house.
In the hotel drawing-room that evening there
was but a meagre sprinkling of guests, among whom I discovered my brown-bearded
friend sitting alone on a sofa, with his head against the wall. It was
certainly not curiosity to see Mrs. Amyot which had impelled him to attend the
performance, for it would have been impossible for him, without shifting his
position, to command the improvised platform at the end of the room. When I
looked at him he seemed lost in contemplation of the chandelier.
The lady from whom I had purchased my
tickets fluttered in late, unattended by Charlie and the others, and assuring
me that she should scream if we had the lecture on Ibsen -- she had heard it
three times already that winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it
informed us (in the lecturer's own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to
lecture on the Cosmogony.
After a long pause, during which the small
audience coughed and moved its chairs and showed signs of regretting that it
had come, the door opened, and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor
lady!
Someone said "Hush!" the coughing
and chair-shifting subsided, and she began.
It was like looking at one's self early in
the morning in a cracked mirror. I had no idea that I had grown so old. As for
Lancelot, he must have a beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without
knowing why I glanced across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly
enough he was looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; and
as our glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that he was
Lancelot.
I don't remember a word of the lecture; and
yet there were enough of them to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The
stream of Mrs. Amyot's eloquence had become a flood: one had the despairing
sense that she had sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was
nothing to be done about it.
The plumber came at length, in the shape of
a clock striking ten; my companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in
search of Charlie and the others; the audience scattered with the precipitation
of people who had discharged a duty; and, without surprise, I found my brown-bearded
acquaintance at my elbow.
We stood alone in the big bare-floored room,
under the flaring chandelier.
"I think you told me this afternoon
that you were an old friend of Mrs. Amyot's?" he began awkwardly.
I assented.
"Will you come in and see her?"
"Now? I shall be very glad to, if --
"
"She's ready; she's expecting
you," he interposed.
He offered no further explanation, and I
followed him in silence. He led me down the long corridor, and pushed open the
door of a sitting-room.
"Mother," he said, closing the
door after we had entered, "here's the gentleman who says he used to know
you."
Mrs. Amyot, who sat in an easy-chair
stirring a cup of bouillon, looked up with a start. She had evidently not seen
me in the audience, and her son's description had failed to convey my identity.
I saw a frightened look in her eyes; then, like a frost flower on a
window-pane, the dimple expanded on her wrinkled cheek, and she held out her
hand to me.
"I'm so glad," she said, "so
glad!"
She turned to her son, who stood watching
us. "You must have told Lancelot all about me -- you've known me so
long!"
"I haven't had time to talk to your son
-- since I knew he was your son," I explained.
Her brow cleared. "Then you haven't had
time to say anything very dreadful?" she said, with a laugh.
"It is he who has been saying dreadful
things," I returned, trying to fall in with her tone.
I saw my mistake. "What things?"
she faltered.
"Making me feel how old I am by telling
me about his children."
"My grandchildren!" she exclaimed,
with a blush.
"Well, if you choose to put it
so."
She laughed again, vaguely, and was silent.
I hesitated a moment, and then put out my hand.
"I see that you are tired. I shouldn't have
ventured to come in at this hour if your son -- "
The son stepped between us. "Yes, I
asked him to come," he said to his mother, in his clear self-assertive
voice. " I haven't told him anything yet; but you've got to -- now. That's
what I brought him for."
His mother straightened herself, but I saw
her eye waver.
"Lancelot -- " she began.
"Mr. Amyot," I said, turning to
the young man, "if your mother will allow me to come back to-morrow, I
shall be very glad -- "
He struck his hand hard against the table on
which he was leaning.
"No, sir! It won't take long, but it's
got to be said now."
He moved nearer to his mother, and I saw his
lip twitch under his beard. After all, he was younger and less sure of himself
than I had fancied.
"See here, mother," he went on,
"there's something here that's got to be cleared up, and as you say this
gentleman is an old friend of yours it had better be cleared up in his
presence. Maybe he can help explain it -- and if he can't, it's got to be
explained to him."
Mrs. Amyot's lips moved, but she made no
sound. She glanced at me helplessly and reseated herself. My early inclination
to thrash Lancelot was beginning to reassert itself. I took up my hat and moved
toward the door.
"Mrs. Amyot is certainly under no
obligation to explain anything whatever to me," I said, curtly.
"Well! She's under an obligation to me,
then -- to explain something in your presence." He turned to her again.
"Do you know what the people in this hotel are saying? Do you know what he
thinks -- what they all think? That you're doing this lecturing to support me
-- to pay for my education! They say you go round telling them so. That's what
they buy the tickets for -- they do it out of charity. Ask him if it isn't what
they say -- ask him if they weren't joking about it on the piazza before
dinner. The others think I'm a little boy, but he's known you for years, and he
must have known how old I was. He must have known it wasn't to pay for my
education!"
He stood before her with his hands clenched,
the veins beating in his temples. She had grown very pale, and her cheeks
looked hollow. When she spoke her voice had an odd click in it.
"If -- if these ladies and gentlemen
have been coming to my lectures out of charity, I see nothing to be ashamed of
in that -- " she faltered.
"If they've been coming out of charity
to me," he retorted, "don't you see you've been making me a party to
a fraud? Isn't there any shame in that?" His forehead reddened.
"Mother! Can't you see the shame of letting people think that I was a d --
-beat, who sponged on you for my keep? Let alone making us both the
laughing-stock of every place you go to!"
"I never did that, Lancelot!"
"Did what?"
"Made you a laughing-stock -- "
He stepped close to her and caught her
wrist.
"Will you look me in the face and swear
you never told people that you were doing this lecturing business to support
me?"
There was a long silence. He dropped her
wrist, and she lifted a limp handkerchief to her frightened eyes. "I did
do it -- to support you -- to educate you" -- she sobbed.
"We're not talking about what you did
when I was a boy. Everybody who knows me knows I've been a grateful son. Have I
ever taken a penny from you since I left college ten years ago?"
"I never said you had! How can you
accuse your mother of such wickedness, Lancelot?"
"Have you never told anybody in this
hotel -- or anywhere else in the last ten years -- that you were lecturing to
support me? Answer me that!"
"How can you," she wept,
"before a stranger?"
"Haven't you said such things about me
to strangers?" he retorted.
"Lancelot!"
"Well -- answer me, then. Say you
haven't, mother!" His voice broke unexpectedly and he took her hand with a
gentler touch. "I'll believe anything you tell me," he said, almost
humbly.
She mistook his tone and raised her head
with a rash clutch at dignity.
"I think you had better ask this
gentleman to excuse you first."
"No, by God, I won't!" he shouted.
"This gentleman says he knows all about you and I mean him to know all
about me too. I don't mean that he or anybody else under this roof shall go on
thinking for another twenty-four hours that a cent of their money has ever gone
into my pockets since I was old enough to shift for myself. And he sha'n't
leave this room till you've made that clear to him."
He stepped back as he spoke and put his
shoulders against the door.
"My dear young gentleman," I said,
politely, "I shall leave this room exactly when I see fit to do so -- and
that is now. I have already told you that Mrs. Amyot owes me no explanation of
her conduct."
"But I owe you an explanation of mine
-- you and every one who has bought a single one of her lecture tickets. Do you
suppose a man who's been through what I went through while that woman was
talking to you in the porch before dinner is going to hold his tongue, and not
attempt to justify himself? No decent man is going to sit down under that sort
of thing. It's enough to ruin his character. If you're my mother's friend, you
owe it to me to hear what I've got to say."
He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his
forehead.
"Good God, mother!" he burst out
suddenly, "what did you do it for? Haven't you had every thing you wanted
ever since I was able to pay for it? Haven't I paid you back every cent you
spent on me when I was in college? Have I ever gone back on you since I was big
enough to work?" He turned to me with a laugh. "I thought she did it
to amuse herself -- and because there was such a demand for her lectures. Such
a demand! That's what she always told me. When we asked her to come out and
spend this winter with us in Minneapolis, she wrote back that she couldn't
because she had engagements all through the South, and her manager wouldn't let
her off. That's the reason why I came all the way on here to see her. We
thought she was the most popular lecturer in the United States, my wife and I
did! We were awfully proud of it too, I can tell you." He dropped into a
chair, still laughing.
"How can you, Lancelot, how can
you!" His mother, forgetful of my presence, was clinging to him with
tentative caresses. "When you didn't need the money any longer I spent it
all on the children -- you know I did."
"Yes, on lace christening dresses and
life-size rocking-horses with real manes! The kind of thing that children can't
do without."
"Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot -- I loved them
so! How can you believe such falsehoods about me?"
"What falsehoods about you?"
"That I ever told anybody such dreadful
things?"
He put her back gently, keeping his eyes on
hers. "Did you never tell anybody in this house that you were lecturing to
support your son?"
Her hands dropped from his shoulders, and
she flashed round upon me in sudden anger.
"I know what I think of people who call
themselves friends and who come between a mother and her son!"
"Oh, mother, mother!" he groaned.
I went up to him and laid my hand on his
shoulder.
"My dear man," I said, "don't
you see the uselessness of prolonging this?"
"Yes, I do," he answered,
abruptly, and before I could forestall his movement he rose and walked out of
the room.
There was a long silence, measured by the
decreasing reverberations of his footsteps down the wooden floor of the
corridor.
When they ceased I approached Mrs. Amyot,
who had sunk into her chair. I held out my hand and she took it without a trace
of resentment on her ravaged face.
"I sent his wife a seal-skin jacked at
Christmas!" she said, with the tears running down her cheeks.