Читать книгу Visionaries - James Huneker - Страница 11

Je cherche des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus larges, des plaisirs inéprouvés.—Flaubert.

"It may be all a magnificent illusion, but—" he began.

"Everything is an illusion in this life, though seldom magnificent," she answered. They slowly walked up the avenue. The night was tepid; motor cars, looking like magnified beetles, with bulging eyes of fire, went swiftly by. The pavements were almost deserted when they reached the park. He felt as if hypnotized, and once, rather meanly, was glad that no one saw him in company of his dowdy companion.

"I wonder if you realize that we do not know each other's name," he said.

"Oh, yes. You are Mr. Baldur. My name is Mrs. Lilith Whistler."

"Mrs. Whistler. Not the medium?"

"The medium—as you call it. In reality I am only a woman, happy, or unhappy, in the possession of super-normal powers."

"Not supernatural, then?" he interposed. He was a sceptic who called himself agnostic. The mystery of earth and heaven might be interpreted, but always in terms of science; yet he did not fancy the superior manner in which this charlatan flouted the supernatural. He had heard of her miracles—and doubted them. She gave a little laugh at his correction.

"What phrase-jugglers you men are! You want all the splendours of the Infinite thrown in with the price of admission! I said super-normal, because we know of nothing greater than nature. Things that are off the beaten track of the normal, across the frontiers, some call supernatural; but it is their ignorance of the vast, unexplored territory of the spirit—which is only the material masquerading in a different guise."

"But you go to church, to a Lenten service—?" It was as if he had known her for years, and their unconventional behaviour never crossed his mind. He did not even ask himself where they were moving.

"I go to church to rest my nerves—as do many other people," she replied; "I was interested in the parallel of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Deadly Arts."

"You believe the arts are sinful?" He was curious.

"I don't believe in sin at all. A bad conscience is the result of poor digestion. Sins are created so that we pay the poll-tax to eternity—pay it on this side of the ferry. Yet the arts may become dangerous engines of destruction if wrongfully employed. The Fathers of the early Church, Ambrose and the rest, were right in viewing them suspiciously."—He spoke:—

"The arts diabolic! Then what of the particular form of wizardry practised so successfully by the celebrated Mrs. Whistler, one of whose names is, according to the Talmud, that of Adam's first wife?"

"What do you know, my dear young man, of diabolic arts?"

"Only that I am walking with you near the park on a dark night of April and I never saw you before a half-hour ago. Isn't that magic—white, not black?"

"Pray do not mock magic, either white or black. Remember the fate of the serpents manufactured by Pharaoh's magicians. They were, need I tell you, speedily devoured by the serpents of Moses and Aaron. Both parties did not play fair in the game. If it was black magic to transform a rod into a snake on the part of Pharaoh's conjurers, was it any less reprehensible for the Hebrew magicians to play the same trick? It was prestidigitation for all concerned—only the side of the children of Israel was espoused in the recital. Therefore, do not talk of black or white magic. There is only one true magic. And it is not slate-writing, toe-joint snapping, fortune-telling, or the vending of charms. Magic, too, is an art—like other arts. This is forgotten by the majority of its practitioners. Hence the sordid vulgarity of the average mind-reader and humbugging spiritualist of the dark-chamber séance. Besides, the study of the super-normal mind tells us of the mind in health—nature is shy in revealing her secrets."

They passed the lake and were turning toward the east driveway. Suddenly she stopped and under the faint starlight regarded her companion earnestly. He had not been without adventures in his career—Paris always provided them in plenty; but this encounter with a homely woman piqued him. Her eye he felt was upon him and her voice soothing.

"Mr. Baldur—listen! Since Milton wrote his great poem the English-speaking people are all devil-worshippers, for Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost. But I am no table-tipping medium eager for your applause or your money. I don't care for money. I think you know enough of me through the newspapers to vouchsafe that. You are rich, and it is your chief misery. Listen! Whether you believe it or not, you are very unhappy. Let me read your horoscope. Your club life bores you; you are tired of our silly theatres; no longer do you care for Wagner's music. You are deracinated; you are unpatriotic. For that there is no excuse. The arts are for you deadly. I am sure you are a lover of literature. Yet what a curse it has been for you! When you see one of your friends drinking wine, you call him a fool because he is poisoning himself. But you—you—poison your spirit with the honey of France, of Scandinavia, of Russia. As for the society of women—"

"The Eternal Womanly!" he sneered.

"The Eternal Simpleton, you mean. In that swamp of pettiness, idiocy, and materialism, a man of your nature could not long abide. Religion—it has not yet responded to your need. And without faith your sins lose their savour. The arts—you don't know them all, the Seven Deadly Arts and the One Beautiful Art!" She paused. Her voice had been as the sound of delicate flutes. He was aflame.

"Is there, then, an eighth art?" he quickly asked.

"Would you know it if you saw it?"

"Of course. Where is it, what is it?"

She laughed and took his arm.

"Why did you look at me in church?"

"Because—it was mere chance—no, it may have been the odour of iris. I am mad over perfume. I think it a neglected art, degraded to the function of anointment. I have often dreamed of an art by which a dazzling and novel synthesis of fragrant perfumes would be invented by some genius, some latter-day Rimmel or Lubin whom we could hail as a peer of Chopin or Richard Strauss—two composers who have expressed perfume in tone. Roinard in his Cantiques des Cantiques attempted a concordance of tone, light, and odours. Yes—it was the iris that attracted me."

"But I have no iris about me. I have none now," she simply replied. He faced her.

"No iris? What—?"

"I thought iris," she added triumphantly, as she guided him into one of the side streets off Madison Avenue. He was astounded. She must be a hypnotist, he said to himself. No suggestion of iris clung to her now. And he remembered that the odour disappeared after they left the church. He held his peace until they arrived before a brown-stone house of the ordinary kind with an English basement. She took a key from her pocket and, going down several steps, beckoned to him. Baldur followed. His interest in this modern Cassandra and her bizarre words was too great for him to hesitate or to realize that he would get himself into some dangerous scrape. And was this truly the Mrs. Whistler whose tricks of telepathy and other extraordinary antics had puzzled and angered the wise men of two continents? He did not have much time for reflection. A grilled door opened, and presently he was in a room furnished very much like a physician's office. Electric bulbs, an open grate, and two bookcases gave the apartment a familiar, cheerful appearance. Baldur sat down on a low chair, and Mrs. Whistler removed her commonplace headgear. In the bright light she was younger than he had imagined, and her head a beautifully modelled one—broad brows, very full at the back, and the mask that of an emotional actress. Her smoke-coloured eyes were most remarkable and her helmet of hair blue black.

"And now that you are my guest at last, Mr. Baldur, let me apologize for the exercise of my art upon your responsive nerves;" she made this witch-burning admission as if she were accounting for the absence of tea. To his relief she offered him nothing. He had a cigarette between his fingers, but he did not care to smoke. She continued:—

"For some time I have known you—never mind how! For some time I have wished to meet you. I am not an impostor, nor do I desire to pose as the goddess of a new creed. But you, Irving Baldur, are a man among men who will appreciate what I may show you. You love, you understand, perfumes. You have even wished for a new art—don't forget that there are others in the world to whom the seven arts have become a thrice-told tale, to whom the arts have become too useful. All great art should be useless. Yet architecture houses us; sculpture flatters us; painting imitates us; dancing is pure vanity; literature and the drama, mere vehicles for bread-earning; while music—music, the most useless art as it should have been—is in the hands of the speculators. Moreover music is too sexual—it reports in a more intense style the stories of our loves. Music is the memory of love. What Prophet will enter the temple of the modern arts and drive away with his divine scourge the vile money-changers who fatten therein?" Her voice was shrill as she paced the room. A very sibyl this, her crest of hair agitated, her eyes sparkling with wrath. He missed the Cumæan tripod.

"There is an art, Baldur, an art that was one of the lost arts of Babylon until now, one based, as are all the arts, on the senses. Perfume—the poor, neglected nose must have its revenge. It has outlived the other senses in the æsthetic field."

"What of the palate—you have forgotten that. Cookery, too, is a fine art," he ventured. His smile irritated her.

"Yes, Frenchmen have invented symphonic sauces, they say. But again, eating is a useful art; primarily it serves to nourish the body. When man was wholly wild—he is a mere barbarian to-day—his sense of smell guarded him from his foes, from the beasts, from a thousand dangers. Civilization, with its charming odours of decay—have you ever ventured to savour New York?—cast into abeyance the keenest of all the senses. Little wonder, then, that there was no art of perfume like the arts of vision and sound. I firmly believe the Hindoos, Egyptians, and the Chinese knew of such an art. How account for the power of theocracies? How else credit the tales of the saints who scattered perfumes—St. Francis de Paul, St. Joseph of Cupertino, Venturini of Bergamo?"

"But," he interrupted, "all this is interesting, fascinating. What I wish to know is what form your art may take. How marshal odours as melodies in a symphony, as colours on a canvas?" She made an impatient gesture.

"And how like an amateur you talk. Melody! When harmony is infinitely greater in music! Form! When colour is infinitely greater than line! The most profound music gives only the timbre—melodies are for infantile people without imagination, who believe in patterns. Tone is the quality I wish on a canvas, not anxious drawing. So it is with perfumes. I can blend them into groups of lovely harmony; I can give you single notes of delicious timbre—in a word, I can evoke an odour symphony which will transport you. Memory is a supreme factor in this art. Do not forget how the vaguest scent will carry you back to your youthful dreamland. It is also the secret of spiritual correspondences—it plays the great rôle of bridging space between human beings."

"I sniff the air promise-crammed," he gayly misquoted. "But when will you rewrite this Apocalypse? and how am I to know whether I shall really enjoy this feast of perfume, if you can simulate the odour of iris as you did an hour ago?"

"I propose to show you an artificial paradise," she firmly asserted. In the middle of the room there was a round table, the top inlaid with agate. On it a large blue bowl stood, and it was empty. Mrs. Whistler went to a swinging cabinet and took from it a dozen small phials. "Now for the incantation," he jokingly said. In her matter-of-fact manner she placed the bottles on the table, and uncorking them, she poured them slowly into the bowl. He broke the silence:—

"Isn't there any special form of hair-raising invocation that goes with this dangerous operation?"

"Listen to this." Her eyes swimming with fire, she intoned:—

As I came through the desert thus it was,

As I came through the desert: Lo you there,

That hillock burning with a brazen glare;

Those myriad dusky flames with points aglow

Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro;

A Sabbath of the serpents, heaped pell-mell

For Devil's roll-call and some fête in Hell:

Yet I strode on austere;

No hope could have no fear.

He did not seem to hear. From out the bowl there was stealing a perfume which overmastered his will and led him captive to the lugubrious glade of the Druids. …