“Please—”
But she didn’t please in the least. She didn’t want to hear arguments. “Oh, Lanny!” she exclaimed. “We could be so happy! Really, we are made for each other!”
“But I am already in love!” he blurted out.
“Oh, I know, but it can’t be like this. I am Isadora!” She said it in a tone of awe, as he ought to have said it, as if it had been: “I am the goddess Diana!”—or possibly Venus, pro tem.
“I know, dear—”
“Lanny, it would be so wonderful! I had given up hope that I could ever be so happy with a man as I have been with you. You have thrilled me to my deepest recesses!”
“I am honored, of course; but I am really very much in love, and I’m bound in honor.”
“Who is this woman?”
“I am afraid I oughtn’t to tell.”
“A married woman?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear, how very annoying! Is she the type that would be jealous?”
“I have never tried her; and I mustn’t.”
“Oh, but this is humiliating! No man has ever turned me down—excepting only Stanislavsky!” There was a story there, he guessed, but she didn’t stop to tell it. “Think what you are doing, Lanny! I have so much to offer you!”
“I know, Isadora; don’t think I am ungrateful—”
“Am I not attractive to you?”
“You are one of the loveliest beings I have ever known.”
“Oh, I am losing my charm!” There was a look of woe in the lovely brown eyes. “I am becoming an old woman!”
“You are an angel—and they are ageless and deathless, I believe.”
“You are trying to make it easy for me—but you are refusing to love me!”
Tears were coming into her eyes, and he knew that pity moves the soul to love. “Listen, dear,” he said, quickly. “You have known real love, I am sure. Haven’t you been in love so that you just couldn’t think of anybody else—not even a greater and perhaps more desirable person? Love isn’t altogether rational, you know.” He was doing his very best in a ticklish situation.
“I know, I know,” she said. Perhaps he had stirred some memory in her soul. “Love is blind, love is crazy, often.”
“Yes, that is it! That is the way with me.”
“But, oh, Lanny, it is such a pity! I thought we were going to have a delightful time together! You understand me marvelously—and while your playing is far from perfect, it serves for practice.”
“Thank you,” he said, humbly. “Let me go on and play for you now.”
“Oh, it isn’t the same thing, it can’t be! When you play and I dance, our souls flow together, they become one; yours gives me inspiration, and mine does the same for you. But when I have to think: ‘He does not love me; he will not love me; he loves somebody else,’ then all the fire goes out of me, and I think: ‘I am an old and tired and discouraged woman, and the time has come that I have dreaded—when no man will be interested in me, and I am alone for the rest of my days.’”
V
Carrying the burden of that heavy sorrow, Isadora Duncan put her embroidered Chinese robe about her shoulders and led him out to the loggia from which you looked over the gardens and park in the rear of the gray stone chateau. There was an artificial lake, and steps leading down an embankment which resembled a dock for ships and had two towers like lighthouses from which the lake could be illumined at night. On both sides were gardens, and behind them a background of beech trees, the extensive forests for which the place was named. It was melancholy to think of all the unknown soldiers who were buried among those trees; and Isadora was in a melancholy mood.
She wanted this sympathetic youth to understand the soul need which had caused her to try to kidnap him—and was still causing it, for she couldn’t believe that he wasn’t going to change his mind and cry suddenly: “Let us go for that motor-ride!” She told him about the musician—“much better than you, Lanny!”—who had been her accompanist for many years. He was tall and slender, with a high forehead topped with hair like burnished copper; she had met him in Paris during the war, and amid the booming of the Big Berthas he had played Liszt’s Thoughts of God in the Wilderness, St. Francis speaking to the birds. “I composed new dances, made all of prayer and sweetness and light. My spirit came back to life, and we became lovers, intense and passionate lovers—” She told Lanny about it, hoping to attract him by her vivid images, but only making him think about Marie.
Isadora always had to have romantic names for her lovers. The sewing-machine man who had financed her school for many years and had bought the Bellevue hotel for her—he had been “Lohengrin”; now this pianist became “the Archangel.” They had moved to Cap Ferrat, not far from Lanny’s home, and during the days when Lanny had been visiting the Budd family in Connecticut, Isadora had been dancing before the war-wounded or for their benefit.
After the war she had brought her pupils from their refuge in New York. “Perhaps I made a mistake,” she said. “They had been children when I sent them there, and I forgot that they would come back young women. I took them with me to Athens, and the government gave us the Zeppeion for our school, and the Archangel played and I taught them new dances. All day we worked hard, and in the evening we would wreathe our brows with circlets of white jasmine flowers and stroll down to have supper by the sea.”
But then had come the dreadful serpent crawling into that Eden. Isadora began to notice significant glances being exchanged between her Archangel and one of her lovely pupils. She had thought that intellect and soul had been dominant in his love for her, but now she learned that this was not so, and had the painful experience of watching the development of his intimacy with the young girl. A fury of jealousy seized her, and she wandered over the hills for a whole night.
“A frightful situation!” she exclaimed. “I could not turn this girl away from the school which had been her home. I had to go on teaching her, and pretend to be serene, devoted to the spirit of harmony, when it was as if I had some fierce creature gnawing at my vitals.”
The episode was ended by a strange accident, the young King of Greece being bitten by a pet monkey and dying of infection; at least, that was the story, but everyone wondered, had he been poisoned? The country was thrown into political turmoil, Venizelos fell, and Isadora’s school came to an end. She returned to Paris, and fell into a quarrel with her pupil, who took the Archangel away and blamed the teacher for having failed to live up to the doctrine she had taught.
“Maybe she was right,” said Isadora, sadly. “We are not always strong enough to follow our own ideals. Anyhow, here I am, desolate, with an empty heart. Many women will say it is my folly to dream of holding a man’s love at my age, but I cannot see it that way. There are spring flowers and there are autumnal flowers, and both have their beauties. I know that I have much to give—but, oh, Lanny, why is it that I have never been able to find a love that will last? What is the curse that rests upon me, that I can give happiness to millions of other people but cannot find it for myself?”
A profound question to put to one who had spent such a short time on earth—half Isadora’s time. Lanny could only say what he had observed, that artists didn’t seem a happy tribe; perhaps it was that they were meant to suffer so that they might turn it into beauty. Maybe the right thing to say was, not that artists suffered, but that people suffered, and thus became artists. Only desperate need of some sort would drive anyone to try as hard as they had to in order to excel. “That’s what’s the matter with me,” said the young philosopher. “I’ve never really had to do anything, so I remain an amateur.”
“Oh, don’t let anybody change you!” exclaimed the daughter of the Muses. “Go on and be happy! Somebody has to, if we are not to forget the possibility!”
VI
Their hostess came back with a load of newly purchased music, and Lanny played and Isadora danced; but it was as she had said: the fire had gone out of her, and what ha
d been play was now hard work. They all felt it, and Lanny was relieved when a cablegram came and changed the atmosphere at Les Forêts. The most marvelous cablegram that anyone had ever received, declared the artiste with the broken heart. It was from Moscow, sighed by the name of Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education in the Soviet government. It said: “The Russian government alone can understand you. Come to us; we will make your school.”
It took Isadora about two minutes to write a reply to that message: “Yes, I will come to Russia, and I will teach your children, on one condition, that you will give me a studio and the wherewithal to work.”*
Lanny had never seen so quick a transformation in a human being. It was the rolling away of storm-clouds and the breaking of rainbows and bird-songs in the Pastoral Symphony. She began to dance; she danced all the spring songs that Lanny knew; all the bird music and the wind music and the fire music. She was sure what the answer would be, and she was going to Russia and make over the life of a hundred and forty million people—or whatever part of them were left after war and revolution.
She wanted Lanny to play revolutionary music, but he didn’t know much of it, and there wasn’t much in the Chateau les Forets. Lanny didn’t even know the Internationale—oh, shame, shame, not to know the Internationale! Isadora sang it, and he followed her, and learned it quickly; he played it with crashing chords, and their hostess, the formal and proper salonnière, watched, fascinated and perhaps a little horrified, while Isadora with her flaming red scarf rehearsed the tramping of the awakened and triumphant proletariat. She would produce it with ten thousand boys and girls wearing red tunics in the great square in front of the Kremlin; so she declared, while Lanny pounded out the prophecy that the international army would be the human race. “Oh, Lanny, don’t you want to come to Russia with me?”
Fortunately the phone rang just then. It was Marie de Bruyne, telling him that she was leaving for Paris with her husband and would meet him at his hotel in a couple of hours. He said that he would be there, and hung up. Wishing to leave no uncertainty in the mind of his friend Emily, he remarked in the presence of both ladies: “That was a call from the woman I love, so I must go.”
He kissed the warm perspiring hand of the new Terpsichore, and assured her that the memory of their revels would shine like a precious jewel in his heart forever. He told her that she was first among all women geniuses of this or any other time, and that he was sure she would be happy in the workers’ republic, building a new culture untarnished by the evils of capitalism. And so “Au revoir.”
VII
After that eagle flight, the lady of Lanny’s heart seemed like a plain little domestic brown wren. But she was restful, and he was ready to rest! On the long drive south he told how it felt to be so high in the clouds, and moving so fast. He told the whole story—this was no disloyalty to Isadora, for she would tell Emily all about it, just as she had told Lanny about heartaches and ecstasies with her Archangel. She would find a romantic name for the son of an American munitions manufacturer: “Sir Galahad” or maybe “Young Joseph” or “my Anchorite.” According to the laws of her being she would see it under some poetical aspect; it would become a sad little love that had died before it was born, and she would dance it to Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante Defunte.
The youth was surprised at Marie’s reaction to the narrative. “Oh, Lanny, what a dreadful woman! If anything like that ever happens to you again, don’t tell me, because it makes me ashamed of my sex!”
“But it isn’t as bad as that, dear!”
“It seems to me as bad as it can be. A woman like that talks about love, but what does she know about it? What did she really know about you—your character, your soul, even your mind?”
He saw that he was treading on dangerous ground, and became cautious. “Mayn’t she have intuitions? She’s a genius, you know.”
“She’s a woman who changes her love as she does her shoes and no high-sounding names can make that any the less repugnant to me. Do you really think that great art can come out of such behavior?”
He wanted to say: “But it has!” Instead he asked: “Have you ever seen her dance?”
“Some years ago, and I thought she was lovely. But what I have heard about her wildness repelled me, and I haven’t cared to see her again.”
“It doesn’t seem to have changed her art,” argued Lanny; “at least so everyone agrees: She dances springtime and nature, grief and revolt, but no one ever saw her do a sex-dance of any sort.”
It was plain that he wouldn’t get anywhere with a defense of free-love artistes. It was the first tiny rift between Marie and himself, and he hastened to close it. He laid his hand upon hers and said: “Don’t forget, darling, it is you I am driving, and not Isadora!”
She responded to his smile. “I thank you for that. But I don’t thank her!”
They were silent for, a long while, and when she began speaking again, her voice was trembling. “Lanny, that was a woman older than I; but some day there will be a woman younger!”
“That won’t make any difference, dear.”
“Some day I shall have to see what Isadora saw in Greece.”
“Don’t be silly, dear!”
“Let me say what I’m trying to say. I want you to know, whatever happens, all my life I am going to think about what is best for you, not for myself. No matter how much it may hurt, that is what I shall act on.”
“All right, dear heart,” he replied. “You think what is best for me, and I’ll think what is best for you, and all will be well.” Because it isn’t safe to kiss while driving, he drew up by the side of the road for a few minutes.
VIII
When he got home he told both these stories to his mother; the story of the artist-soul whose cravings would never be satisfied, and the story of the mother-soul who thought about what she could give to a man instead of what she could get. Beauty said yes, there were those two kinds of women, and there was eternal deadly war between them. Beauty didn’t give any fancy names to them; what she said was that a woman who really loves a man merges her life with his and tries to help him make something of himself; she chooses to express herself through him and through their children; she gives her youth and perhaps her health and her good looks, everything she has, to wifehood and motherhood; and then, when she has reached middle age and has nothing but that man and that family, and no chance of getting any other, then along comes some fresh little chit, thinking about nothing but the gratifying of her vanity, amusing herself by carrying a man off and breaking up a home—
Lanny couldn’t keep from laughing. “Isadora isn’t exactly a chit!”
“There are two periods when they do their raiding,” answered the woman of the world; “when they’re young fillies, first feeling their oats, and when their racing days are over and they’re ready to be retired to the pasture. It’s hard to say which is the more dangerous, but every wife hates them both and would like nothing better than to turn them over to the Apache Indians and have them roasted over a slow fire.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors,” grinned the youth. “The Apaches didn’t torture horses!”
“I’m not mixing my women!” declared Beauty, grimly. “Take my advice and don’t let anybody fool you with toplofty words—soulmates and affinities, ecstasies and yearnings and romantic raptures. Burglary is burglary, and a woman suffers torment even to think about it; and when she tells you that she won’t or don’t, she’s already doing it. The misery in her life is that she can never be sure what is going to happen to her man the next time he goes out of the house.”
Beauty seemed unusually vehement on the subject of unmanageable men, and Lanny began to wonder about it. She explained herself very soon; her voice sank, and she said: “There doesn’t seem to be any place for love in this world of ours—mine any more than the others’.”
“What’s the matter?” For a moment he thought she meant that Kurt was interested in some other woman, and he was shocked.
&n
bsp; “It’s the old, old story; I don’t believe I’m going to be able to keep Kurt out of mischief. He gets letters from his family, and then he has fits of depression. He tries to hide them from me, but of course he can’t.”
“But what’s wrong now? I thought he was so happy, because Germany won the plebiscite.”
“He doesn’t think the Poles will obey; and he doesn’t think the Allies will make them. You talk to him, Lanny. I can’t, without making myself a scold and a shrew!”
IX
The elections in Upper Silesia had been held in the month of March, with the result that a majority of the districts had voted to remain with Germany. That didn’t include Stubendorf, which had been given to Poland by the treaty; but it would save most of the industrial regions, and the coal and iron mines desperately needed by Germany if it was to resume as an industrial nation. Kurt had felt a great burden lifted from his spirit; but now had come that terrible Korfanty, organizing the young Polish patriots, arming them and drilling them all over Poland and even in Stubendorf. It was plain that they meant to seize the plebiscitary provinces.
Lanny went to Kurt, who showed him the letters he had received, and extracts from newspapers with accounts of the turmoil prevailing. It was undeniably terrible, with organized gangs raiding the homes of German patriots at night, carrying people away and beating them dreadfully. Poles and Germans just couldn’t and wouldn’t mix. Kurt drew harrowing pictures of the superstition and filth in which the Polish peasants lived; so of course they fell prey to demagogues and agitators—especially when these were secretly provided with arms and money by the Polish government. What was supposed to be an uprising of the Silesian peasants was clearly a raid by Warsaw, and a challenge to the fumbling and hesitant Allies.
Lanny couldn’t say: “Kurt, you are under obligations to my mother, and you haven’t the right to go off and leave her.” No; but he could say: “Kurt, you always insisted that art comes before politics, the Idea before the Thing. In fact, it was you who taught me that, and I have shaped my life on it. I too have seen cruelty and wrong, and have impulses to leap in and stop it; but I’ve thought: No, Kurt is right; I am going to help to make beauty in the world, and prepare the minds of people for something wiser than fighting and robbing.”