CHAPTER II.
"I will tell you what you are," began Moncreith, "to I the eye of theaverage beholder. Here, in the most splendid town of the western world,at the turning of two centuries, you are possessed of youth, health andwealth. That really tells the tale. Never in the history of the worldhave youth and health and wealth meant so much as they do now. Thesethree open the gates to all the earthly paradise. Your forbears didtheir duty by you so admirably that you wear a distinguished namewithout any sacrifice to poverty. You are good to look at. You are ayoung man of fashion. If you chose you could lead the mode; you have theinstincts of a beau, though neither the severe suppression of Brummellnor the obtrusive splendor of D'Aurevilly would suit you. Our age seemsto have come to too high an average in man's apparel to permit of anysingle dictator; to be singled out is to be lowered. Yet there can be nodenying that you have often, unwittingly, set the fashion in waistcoatsand cravats. That aping has not hurt you, because the others never gavetheir raiment the fine note of personal distinction that you wear. Youare a favorite in the clubs; people never go out when you come in; youlisten to the most stupid talk with the most graceful air imaginable;that is one of the sure roads to popularity in clubdom. When it is thefashion to be artistic, you can be so as easily as the others; whensport is the watchword your fine physique forbids you no achievement.You play tennis and golf and polo quite well enough to make women splittheir gloves in applause, and not too well to make men sneer at you fora 'pro.' When you are riding to hounds in Virginia you are never farfrom the kill, and there is no automobilist whom the Newport villagersare happier to fine for fast driving. You are equally at home in acotillon and on the deck of a racing yacht. You could marry whenever youliked. Your character is unspotted either by the excessive vice thatshocks the mob, or the excessive virtue that tires the smart. You havemeans, manners and manner. Finally, you have the two cardinal qualitiesof smartness, levity and tolerance." He paused, and gave a smile ofsatisfaction. "There, do you like the portrait?"
"It is abominable," said Vane, "it is what I see in my most awfuldreams. And the horror of it is that it is so frightfully true. I ammerely one of the figures in the elaborate masquerade we call society. Imake no progress in life; I learn nothing except new fashions andfoibles. I am weary of the masquerade and the masks. Life in the smartworld is a game with masks; one shuffles them as one does cards. As forme, I want to throw the whole pack into the fire. Everyone wears thesemasks; nobody ever penetrates to the real soul behind the make-up."
"It is a game you play perfectly. One should hesitate long about givingup anything that one has brought to perfection. These others dabble andsquabble in what you call the secondary imitations of life; you, at anyrate, are giving your imitation at first hand."
"Yes, but it no longer satisfies me. Listen, Luke. You must promise notto laugh and not to frown. It will seem absurd to you; yet I am terriblyin earnest about it. When first I came out of college I went in forscience. When I gave it up, it was because I found it was leading meaway from the human interest. There is the butterfly I want to chase;the human interest. I attempted all the arts; not one of them took mefar on my way. My failure, Luke, is an ironic sentence upon the vauntedknowledge of the world."
"Your failure? My dear Orson; come to the point. What do you mean by thehuman interest?"
"I mean that neither scientist nor scholar has yet shown the way to oneman's understanding of another's soul. The surgeon can take a body anddissect its every fraction, arguing and proving each function of it. Thepainter tries, with feeble success, to reach what he calls the spirit ofhis subject. So does the author. He tries to put himself into the placeof each of his characters; he aims, always, for the nearest possibleapproach to the lifelike. And, above all the others, there is the actor.In this, as in its other qualities, the art of acting is the crudest,the most obvious of them all; yet, in certain moments, it comes nearestto the ideal. The actor in his mere self is--well, we all know the storyof the famous player being met by this greeting: 'And what art thouto-night?' But he goes behind a door and he can come forth in a seriesof selves. A trick or so with paint; a change of wig; a twist of theface-muscles, and we have the same man appearing as _Napoleon_, as_Richelieu_, as _Falstaff_. The thing is external, of course. Whetherthere shall be anything more than the mere bodily mask depends upon theactor's intelligence and his imagination. The supreme artist sosucceeds, by virtue of much study, much skill in imitating what he hasconceived to be the soul of his subject, in almost giving us a lifelikeportrait. And yet, and yet--it is not the real thing; the real soul ofhis subject is as much a mystery to that actor as it is to you or me.That is what I mean when I say that science fails us at the mostimportant point of all; the soul of my neighbor is as profound a mysteryto me as the soul of a man that lived a thousand years ago. I can knowyour face, Luke, your clothes, your voice, the outward mask you wear;but--can I reach the secrets of your soul? No. And if we cannot know howothers feel and think, how can we say we know the world? Bah! The worldis a realm of shadows in which all walk blindly. We touch hands everyday, but our souls are hidden in a veil that has not been passed sinceGod made the universe."
"You cry for the moon," said Moncreith. "You long for the unspeakable.Is it not terrible enough to know your neighbor's face, his voice, hiscoat, without burdening yourself with knowledge of his inner self? It ismerely an egoistic curiosity, my dear Orson; you cannot prove that thehuman interest, as you term it, would benefit by the extension in wisdomyou want."
"Oh, you are wrong, you are wrong. The whole world of science undergoesrevolution, once you gain the point I speak of. Doctors will have themind as well as the body to diagnose; lovers will read each othershearts as well as their voices; lies will become impossible, or, atleast, futile; oh--it would be a better world altogether. At any rate,until this avenue of knowledge is opened to me, I shall call all therest a failure. I imitate; you imitate; we imitate; that is theconjugation of life. When I think of the hopelessness of the thing,--doyou wonder I grow bitter? I want communion with real beings, and I meetonly masks. I tell you, Luke, it is abominable, this wall that standsbetween each individual and the rest of the world. How can I love myneighbor if I do not understand him? How can I understand him if Icannot think his thoughts, dream his dreams, spell out his soul'ssecrets?"
Moncreith smiled at his friend, and let his eyes wander a trifleironically about his figure. "One would not think, to look at you, thatyou were possessed of a mania, an itch! If you take my advice you willcontent yourself with living life as you find it. It is really a verydecent world. It has good meat and drink in it, and some sweet women,and a strong man or two. Most of us are quite ignorant of the fact thatwe are merely engaged in incomplete imitations of life, or that there isa Chinese wall between us and the others; the chances are we are all thehappier for our innocence. Consider, for instance, that rosy little facebehind us--you can see it perfectly in that mirror--can you deny that itlooks all happiness and innocence?"
Vane looked, and presently sighed a little. The face of the girl, as hefound it in the glass, was the color of roses lying on a pool of clearwater. It was one of those faces that one scarce knows whether to thinkfiner in profile or in full view; the features were small, the hairglistened with a tint of that burnish the moon sometimes wears on summernights, and the figure was a mere fillip to the imagination. A clusterof lilies of the valley lay upon her hair; they seemed like countlesslittle cups pouring frost upon a copper glow. All about her radiated anineffable gentleness, a tenderness; she made all the other folk abouther seem garish and ugly and cruel. One wondered what she did in thatgallery.
"To the outer eye," said Vane, as he sighed, "she is certainly a flower,a thing of daintiness and delight. But--do you suppose I believe it, fora moment? I have no doubt she is merely one of those creatures whom Godhas made for the destruction of our dreams; her mind is probably ascorrupt as her body seems fair. She is perhaps--"
He stopped, for the face in the mirror had its
eyes thrown suddenly inhis direction. The eyes, in that reflex fashion, met, and something akinto a smile, oh, an ever so wistful, wonderful a smile, crept upon thelips and the eyes of the girl, while to the man there came only a suddensilence.
"She is," continued Vane, in another voice altogether, and as if he werethinking of distant affairs, "very beautiful."
The girl's eyes, meanwhile, had shifted towards Moncreith. He felt theradiance of them and looked, too, and the girl's beauty came upon himwith a quick, personal force that was like pain. Vane's spokenapprobation of her angered him; he hardly knew why; for the first timein his life he thought he could hate the man beside him.
The girl turned her head a little, put up her hand and so hid her facefrom both young men, or there is no telling what sudden excuse the twomight not have seized for open enmity. It sounds fantastic, perhaps, butthere are more enmities sown in a single glance from a woman's eyesthan a Machiavelli could build up by ever so devilish devices. Neitherof the two, in this case, could have said just what they felt, or why.Moncreith thought, vaguely enough perhaps, that it was a sin for so faira flower to waste even a look upon a fellow so shorn of faith as wasOrson Vane. As for Vane--
Vane brought his hand upon the table so that the glasses rocked.
"Oh," he exclaimed, "if one could only be sure! If one could see pastthe mask! What would I not give to believe in beauty when I see it, totrust to appearances! Oh, for the ability to put myself in the place ofanother, to know life from another plane than my own, to--"
But here he was interrupted.