Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers
D >>
Don Marquis >> Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7
And one doesn't dare NOT to laugh, does one?
It's really quite unfair and unkind sometimes!
Don't you think so?
We took up a volume on The Analysis of Humor
one winter -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers,
you know and read it completely through, and
before the winter ws over it got so there wasn't
a one of us that dared NOT to laugh at anything
any other one said and -- well, it got rather ghastly
before spring. Because even if someone wanted to
know if a person needed an umbrella someone else
would laugh.
Well, I must be going now. I have a committee
meeting at three this afternoon. We're going in
for this one-day Women's Strike, you know -- our
little group is.
VOKE EASELEY AND HIS NEW ART
FOR my acquaintance with Voke Easeley -- --
(Hermione's reporter, and not Hermione
herself, is speaking now.) -- --
For my acquaintance with Voke Easeley and his
new art, I am indebted to Fothergil Finch.
Fothergil is a kind of genius hound. He scurries
sleuthing around the town ever on the scent of
something queer and caviar. He is well trained and
never kills what he catches himself; he takes it to
Hermione; and after Hermione has tired of it I
am at liberty to do what I please with it.
The most remarkable thing about Voke Easeley
at a casual glance is his Adam's apple. It is not
only the largest Adam's apple I have ever seen, and
the hardest looking one, and the most active one,
but it is also the most intelligence looking one. Voke
Easeley's face expresses very little. His eyes are
small and full and green. His mouth, while large,
misses significance. His nose, indeed, is big; but
it is mild; it is a tame nose; one feels no more
character in it than in a false nose. His chin
and forehead retreat ingloriously from the battle
of life.
But all the personality which his eyes should
show, all the force which should dwell in his
nose, all the temperamental qualities that should
reveal themselves in his mouth and chin, all the
genius which should illumine his brow -- these dwell
with his Adam's apple. The man has run entirely
to that feature; his moods, his emotions, his
thoughts, his passions, his appetites, his beliefs, his
doubts, his hopes, his fears, his resolves, his de-
spairs, his defeats, his exaltations -- all, all make
themselves known subtly in the eccentric motions
of that unusual Adam's apple.
When I saw him first in action I did not at once
get it. He stood stiffly erect in the center of Her-
mione's drawing-room, surrounded by the serious
thinkers, with his head thrown back and his Adam's
apple thrust forward, and gave vent to a series of
strange noises. Beside him stood a very slender
lady, all dressed in apple green, with a long green
wand in her hand, and on the end of the wand
was an artificial apple blossom. This she waved
jerkily in front of Voke Easeley's eyes, and his
Adam's apple moved as the wand moved, and from
his moth came the wild sounds in response to it.
Soon I realized that she was conducting him as
if he were an orchestra.
But still I did not get it. For it was not words,
it was nothing so articulate as speech, that Voke
Easeley uttered. Nor was it, to my ear, song. And
yet, as I listened, I began to see that a wild rhythm
pervaded the utterance; the Adam;'s apple leapt,
danced, swung round, twinkled, bounded, slid and
leapt again in time with a certain rough barbaric
measure; the sounds themselves were all discords,
but discords with a purpose; discords that took each
other by the hand and kicked and stamped their
brutal way together toward some objective point.
I led Fothergil into a corner.
"What is it?" I whispered. It is always well, at
one of Hermione's soul fights, to get your cue be-
for the conversation officially starts. If you don't
know what is going to be talked about before the
talk starts the chances are that you never will know
from the talk itself.
"A New Art!" said Fothergil. And then he led
me into the hall and explained.
What Gertrude Stein has done for prose, what
the wilder vers libre bards are doing for poetry,
what cubists and futurists are doing for paint-
ing and sculpture, that Voke Easeley is doing for
vocal music.
"He is painting sound portraits with his larynx
now," said Fothergil. "And the beautiful part of
it is that he is absolutely tone deaf! He doesn't
know a thing about music. He tried for years to
learn and couldn't. The only way he knows when
you strike a chord on the piano is because he doesn't
like chords near as well as he does discords. He
has gone right back to the dog, the wolf, the cave
man, the tiger, the bear, the wind, the rock slide,
the thunder and the earthquake for his language.
He interprets life in the terms of natural sounds,
which are discords nearly always; but he has added
brains to them and made them all the moods of
the human soul!"
"And the lady in green?"
"That is his wife -- he can do nothing without
her. There is the most complete psychic accord be-
tween them. It is beautiful! Beautiful!"
When we returned the lady in green was an-
nouncing:
"The next selection is a Voke Easeley impression
of the Soul of Wagner gazing at the sunrise from
the peak of the Jungfrau."
The wand waved; the Adam's Apple leapt, and
they were off. What followed cannot be indicated
typographically. But if a cat were a sawmill, and
a dog were a gigantic cart full of tin cans bounc-
ing through a stone-paved street, and that dog and
that cat hated each other and were telling each
other so, it would sound much like it.
It was well received. Except by Ravenswood Wimble.
He always has to have his little critical fling.
"The peak of the Jungfrau!" he grumbled.
"Jungfrau indeed! It was Mont Blanc! It was very
wonderfully and subtly Mont Blanc! But the Jung-
frau -- never!"
"Hermione," I said, "what do you think of the
New Art?"
"It's wonderful!" she breathed, "just simply
wonderful! So esoteric, and yet so simple! But
there is one thing I am going to speak to Mrs. Voke
Easely about -- one improvement I am going to
suggest. His ears, you know -- don't you think they
are too large? Or too red, at least, for their size?
They catch the eye too much -- they take away from
the effect. Before he sings here again I will have
Mrs. Easeley bob them off a little."
HERMIONE ON SUPERFICIALITY
AREN'T you just crazy about the Moral Uplift?
It's coming into every department of life
now and one just simply HAS to keep up with it in
order to talk intelligently these days.
Not that one can talk too freely about it in mixed
company, you know.
There are getting to be the awfullest lot of moral
subjects that one can't talk about generally, aren't
there?
Eugenics and sex hygiene and all these plays and
books with a moral purpose, you know.
Of course lots of people DO talk about them gen-
erally. I did myself for quite a while. And then
another girl and I got some books and studied up
what the things we had been talking of really were
and it shocked us horribly!
Mamma has been trying to get me to give up the
moral uplift entirely, but you've just simply GOT to
talk it or be out of date.
Of course the whole thing depends upon whether
you are a serious thinker -- if you're sincere, REALLY
sincere, you can take up anything and get good out of it.
The loveliest man talked to us last night -- to our
Little Group of Advanced Thinkers, you know.
He said the curse of the age and the country was
superficiality. People aren't thorough, you know.
He said the curse of the age and the country was
superficiality. People aren't thorough, you know.
I've noticed that myself and I agree with him.
If one is going to take things up and show a serious
interest in them one must not limit one's self to a
few phases.
One must be broad. One must be thorough.
One must cover the whole field of thought.
Our little group this winter has been trying to
do that. So far we've take up Bergson, socialism,
psychology, Rabindranath Tagore, the meaning of
welfare work, culinary science, the new movements
in art -- and ever so many more things I can't re-
member now.
For the rest of Lent we're going to take up the
Cosmic Consciousness.
One of the girls thought it would be a nice sort
of thing to take up during Lent -- a quiet kind of
thing, you know; not like feminism or chemistry.
Have you seen any of the new parti-colored boots
yet?
Isn't it an absurd idea?
And yet, you know -- if it made for Beauty!
That is what one must always say to one's self
must one not? I mean: Does it make for Beauty?
That's the reason I left the Suffrage Party, you
know. They wanted me to wear one of those hor-
rid yellow sashes. And my complexion can't stand
yellow. So I quit the Suffrage Party right there.
ISIS, THE ASTROLOGIST
WE'RE taking up astrology quiet seriously --
our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you
know -- and we've hired the loveliest lady
astrologer to cast our horoscopes and give us a talk
and get us started right.
She wrote a letter to me--the most perfectly fas-
cinating letter -- and I told her to call, and we
looked her over. She wore a beautiful sky-blue
gown with gold stars on it -- one of those Greek
ones, you know, like poor, dear Isadora Duncan
wore -- and a gold star in the middle of her fore-
head.
It makes her look like a unicorn, that star,"
Ravenswood Wimble said. But then nobody ever
pleases Ravenswood Wimble completely. He is
so -- if you get me.
"If a unicorn, then a celestial unicorn," Fothy
Finch said. Fothy is too dear for anything; he is
always hunting for the good in people, like Apollo,
or Euripides -- which was it? -- when they gave him
the basket full of wheat and chaff, and he separated
them. Or maybe it was Diogenes.
She has six sisters, and they are all astrologers,
and they call them the Pleiades.
Although Voke Easeley, in his horrid slangy way,
said: "Pleiades? She's a Bear!"
Don't you just utterly loathe slang?
Bit I was going to tell you about the lovely letter
she wrote -- that's what attracted me to her at the
first.
"Have you never asked yourself," it began
"'Why was I born?'"
Fancy knowing that about one! If there is one
question I have asked myself thousands and thou-
sands of times it is, "Why was I born?"
And then the letter went on to talk about horo-
scopes and the Inevitable.
"We may not overcome the inevitable," it said,
"but it is ours to see that the Inevitable does not
overcome us."
Oh, the Inevitable! The Inevitable!
How often I have thought of the Inevitable with
despair!
And it has never occurred to me before that one
could take it and use it as one pleased. But it seems
one can if one knows about it beforehand. It is
like Destiny that way. If one is ignorant of one's
Destiny, it comes upon one with a surprise. But
if one knows beforehand what one's Destiny is to
be, one can make onself the master of it. That is
where the horoscope comes in handy, you know.
After dipping into Astrology I will never again
be afraid of the Inevitable.
As the Letter says: "Every woman with her
horoscope before her, and her Soul back of her,
should be able to solve any problem and meet any
situation that may occur in her life."
Ravenswood Wimble wanted to know, when he
met the lady -- did I tell you that her professional
name is Isis? -- what would happen if her Soul was
before her and her horoscope back of her. But Isis
just simply froze him with a look.
Don't you think that levity is horrid in the midst
of vital affairs like that?
But I suppose every little group has someone in
it that thinks he or she has to be quippy and face-
tious at times.
Not but what I have a sense of humor myself.
I think a sense of humor is the saving grace, if
you get what I mean.
But no one should try to use it unless he is per-
fectly sure that everyone understands he is being
humorous.
We are going to take up the sense of humor --
our Little Group of Thinkers, you know -- in a seri-
ous way soon.
But the Swami doesn't like Isis. Poor, dear
Swami! She is a charlatan, he says. And she
doesn't like him. "My dear," she said to me, "are
you SURE he really goes into the Silences? Or does
he just PRETEND to?"
Isn't it awful about geniuses that way -- how jeal-
our they ARE of each other? Especially psychics!
We had two mediums the same evening a year or
two ago who actually quarreled over which one of
them a certain spirit control belonged to.
THE SIMPLE HOME FESTIVALS
DON'T you just love the simple old festivals,
like Thanksgiving Day and Christmas?
That's is one thing that Papa and Mamma
and I agree about. And this year we had a very
simple sort of Thanksgiving Day.
Of course, it's rather a bore if you have to invite
a lot of relations.
But one must always sacrifice something to gain
the worth-while things, mustn't one?
And what is more worth while than simplicity?
Simplicity! Simplicity! Isn't it truly WONDERFUL!
Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask my-
self: "have I been simple and genuine today? Or
have I FAILED?
Papa always has two maiden aunts to Thanks-
giving dinner. Dear old souls, I suppose, but
frumps, you know.
And Fothergil Finch was there, too. I asked
poor dear Fothy, because otherwise he would have
had to eat in some restaurant.
I tried to be agreeable to Papa's aunts -- of
course. I suppose they are my great-aunts, but I
never felt REALLY related to them -- but how could he
know how terribly unadvanced they are?
Fothy's only real interests center about Art, you
know. And if he had talked of Art is would have
been better.
But, as he told me later, he thought he should
try to meet my people on their own ground and
talk of something practical.
Something with a direct bearing on life, you know.
So he asked Aunt Evelyn what she thought of
Trial Marriages.
She didn't know exactly what he meant at first,
but Aunt Fanny whispered something to her and
she turned white and said, "Mercy!"
Poor dear Fothy saw he must be on the wrong
track, so he changed the subject and began to tell
Aunt Fanny the plot of a new problem play. One
of the sex ones, you know.
"Heavens," said Aunt Fanny, and began to trem-
ble.
And they drew their chairs nearer together and
each one took a bottle of smelling salts out of a
little black bag, and they sat and trembled and
smelled their salts and stared at him perfectly fas-
cinated.
This embarrassed Fothy, but he though his mis-
take had been in talking about anything artistic,
like a play, so he changed the subject again. He
told me afterward that he felt if he could get onto
a really PRACTICAL subject all would go well.
So he asked Aunt Evelyn what she thought about Genetics.
"What are they?" asked Aunt Evelyn, her teeth chattering.
"Why, Eugenics," said Fothy. And then he had
to explain all about Eugenics.
They sat perfectly still and stared at him, and he
felt sure he ahd them interested at last, and he
talked on and on about Eugenics and the Future
Race, you know, and that led him back to Trial
Marriages, and then he go onto the Twilight Sleep.
And, as he said himself afterward, what could
be more practical?
But, you know, commonplace people never appre-
ciate the efforts that serious thinkers make for
them, and Aunt Evelyn refused to come to the
table at all when dinner was announced. She said
she had lost her appetite and felt faint.
But Aunt Emmy came. She asked the blessing.
Papa always has her do that on Thanksgiving Day
and Christmas and New Year's. And she made a
regular prayer out of it -- prayed for Fothy, you
know, right before him; and prayed for me too. It
was awful.
And afterward poor dear Fothy said he wished
he had talked about Art.
"It's safe," I said; "then people can't get
offended, for nobody knows what you mean at all."
"Oh," said Fothy, "nobody does?" And he went
away quite melancholy and injured.
CITRONELLA AND STEGOMYIA
WE were talking bout famous love affairs
the other evening, and Fothergil Finch
said he was thinking of writing a ballad
about Citronella and Stegomyia.
And, of course, everybody pretended they knew
who Citronella and Stegomyia were. Mrs. Voke
Easeley -- You've heard about Voke Easeley and his
New Art, Haven't you? -- Mrs. Voke Easeley said:
"But don't you think those old Italian love affairs
have been done to death?"
"Italian?" said Fothy, raising his eyebrows at
Mrs. Voke Easeley.
You know, really, there wasn't a one of them
knew who Citronella and Stegomyia were; but they
were all pretending, and they saw Mrs. Voke Ease-
ley was in bad. And she saw it, too, and tried to
save herself.
"Of course," she said, "Citronella and Stegomyia
weren't Italian lovers THEMSELVES. But so many of
the old Italian poets have written about them that
I always think of them as glowing stars in that
wonderful, wonderful galaxy of Italian romance!"
Fothy can be very mean when he wants to. So he said:
"I don't read Italian, Mrs. Easeley. I have been
forced to get all my information about Citronella
and Stegomyia from English writers. Maybe you
would be good enough to tell me what Italian poet
it is who has turned out the most recent version of
Citronella and Stegomyia?"
Mrs. Voke Easeley answered without a moment's
hesitation: "Why, D'Annunzio, of course."
That made everybody waver again. And Aurelia
Dart said -- she's that girl with the beautiful arms,
you know, who plays the harp and always has a
man or two to carry it about wherever she goes --
somebody else's husband, if she can manage it --
Aurelia said:
"D'Annunzio, of course! Passage of it have
been set to music."
"Won't you play some of it?" asked Fothy, very
politely.
"It has never been arranged for the harp," said
Aurelia. "But if Mrs. Easely can remember some
of the lines, and will be good enough to repeat them,
I will improvise for it."
That put it up to Mrs. Easeley again, you know.
She hates Aurelia, and Aurelia knows it. Voke
Easeley carried Aurelia's harp around almost all
last winter. And the only way Mrs. Easeley could
break Voke of it was to bring their little girl along
the one that has convulsions so easily, you know.
And then when Voke was getting Aurelia's harp
ready for her the little girl would have a convul-
sion, and Mrs. Easeley would turn her over to Voke,
and Voke would have to take the little girl home,
and Mrs. Easeley would stay and say what a family
man and what a devoted husband Voke was, for an
artist.
Well, Mrs. Easeley wasn't stumped at all. She
got up and repeated something. I took up Italian
poetry one winter, and we made a special study of
D'Annunzio; but I didn't remember what Mrs.
Easeley recited. But Aurelia harped to it. Im-
provising is one of the best things she does.
And everybody said how lovely it was and how
much soul there was in it, and, "Poor Stegomyia!
Poor Citronella!"
The Swami said it reminded him of some pas-
sages in Tagore that hadn't been translated into
English yet.
Voke Easeley said: "The plaint of Citronella is
full of a passion of dream that only the Italian
poets have found the language for."
Fothy winked at me and I made an excuse and
slipped into the library and looked them up -- and,
well, would you believe it! -- they weren't lovers at
all! And I might have known it from the first, for
I always use citronella for mosquitoes in the country.
They were still pretending when I got back, all
of them, and Aurelia was saying: "Citronella dif-
fers psychologically from Juliet -- she is more like
poor, dear Francesca in her feeling of the cosmic
inevitability of tragedy. But stegomyia had a strain
of Hamlet in him."
"Yes, a strain of Hamlet," said Voke Easeley.
"A strain of Hamlet in his nature, Aurelia -- and
more than a strain of Tristram!"
"It is a thing that Maeterlinck should have writ-
ten, in his earlier manner," said Mrs. Voke Easeley.
"The story has its Irish counterpart, too," said
Leila Brown, who rather specializes, you know, on
all those lovely Lady Gregory things. "I have al-
ways wondered why Yeats or Synge hasn't used it."
"The essential story is older than Ireland," said
the Swami. "It is older than Buddha. There are
three versions of it in Sanskrit, and the young men
sing it to this day in Benares."
Affectation! Affectation! Oh, how I abhor af-
fectation!
It was perfectly HORRID of Fothy just the same.
ANYONE might have been fooled.
I might have been myself, if I were not too in-
tellectually honest, and Fothy hadn't tipped me
the wink.
HERMIONE'S SALON OPENS
I
Perchance last night you felt the world careen,
Leap in its orbit like a punished pup
Which hath a hornet on his burning bean?
Last night, last night -- historic yestere'en! --
Hermione's Salon was opened up!
II
Without, the night was cold. But Thought, within,
Roared through the rooms as red and hot as Sin.
Without, the night was calm; within, the surge
And snap of Thought kept up a crackling din
As if in sport the well-known Cosmic Urge
with Psychic Slapsticks whacked the dome and
Shin
Of Swami, Serious Thinker, Ghost and Goat.
From soup to nuts, from Nut to Super Freak,
From clams to coffee, all the Clans were there.
The groggy Soul Mate groping for its Twin,
The burgling free verse Blear, the Hobo Pote,
Clairvoyant, Cubist bug and Burlapped Greek,
Souse Socialists and queens with bright green hair,
Ginks leading barbered Art Dogs trimmed and
Sleek,
The Greenwich Stable Dwellers, Mule and Mare,
Pal Anarchs, tamed and wrapped in evening duds,
Philosophers who go wherever suds
Flow free, musicians hunting after eats,
And sandaled dames who hang from either ear
Strange lumps -- "art jools" -- the size of pickled
beets,
Writers that write not, hunting Atmosphere,
Painters and sculptors that ne'er paint nor sculp,
Reformers taking notes on Brainstorm Slum,
Cave Men in Windsor Ties, all gauche and glum,
With strong iron jaws that crush their food to
Pulp,
And bright Boy Cynics playing paradox,
And th' inevitable She that knitteth Belgian socks --
A score of little groups ! -- all bees that hum
About the futile blooms of Piffledom.
III
A wan Erotic Rotter told me that
The World could not be Saved except through Sin;
A she eugenist, sexless, flabby, fat,
With burst veins winding through unhealthy skin,
With loose, uncertain lips preached Purity;
A Preacher blasphemed just to show he dared;
A dame praised Unconventionality
In words her secretary had prepared;
A bare-legg'd painter garbed in Leopard hide
Quarreled with a Chinese lyre and scared the dogs;
A slithering Dancer slunk from side to side
In weird, ungodly, Oriental togs;
A pale, anemic, frail Divinity
Confided that she thought the great Blond Beast
Himself was Art's own true Affinity;
An Anarch gloomed; "The Mummy at the Feast
Gets all the pleasure from the festive board!"
I know not what they meant; I only wunk
Within myself, and praised the great god Bunk.
A Yogi sought the Silences and snored.
IV
But 'twas Hermione that Got the Hand!
Ah, yes, she talked! Of Purpose, and of Soul,
And how Life's parts are equal to its Whole.
And Thought -- and do the Masses Understand?
She lightly touched on Life and Love and Death,
And Cosmic Consciousness, and on Unrest,
Substance and Shadow, Solid Things and Breath,
The New Art movements her sweet voice caressed,
Philanthropy, Genetics, Social Duty,
The Mother-Teacher claimed a passing smile,
And she made clear we all must worship Beauty
And Concentrate on Things that are Worth While.
"Each night," she said, "each night ere I retire
Into the Depths I peer, and I inquire,
"Have I today some Worth-while Summit scaled?
Or have I failed to climb? Oh, have I failed?
These little talks between the Self and Soul --
Oh, don't you think? -- still help us toward the Goal;
They help us shape the Universal Laws
In sweet accordance with our glorious Cause!"
"Hermione," said I, "they do! They do!"
"Thank you," said she, "I KNEW you'd understand!"
I said to her, the while I pressed her hand,
"All, all, my interest I owe to you!"
And then I left, and following my feet
Soon found that they had led me to the street.
V
And there I found a burly Garbage Man
Who through bleak winter nights from can to can
Goes on his ashy way, sans rest or pause,
Goes on his way, still faithful to his Cause.
"Tell me," said I, "if now across the verge
Of night should come the kindly Cosmic Urge,
Strong-armed and virile, full of vim and help,
And offer you with thee here cans to help,
Would you accept the Cosmic Urge's aid,
Or would you rise up free and unafraid
And say, 'My restless Personality
Bids me return a negative to thee!'"
"Old scout," says he, "I've never really brought
My intellects to bear on that there though!
I gets no help, I asks no help from none --
But I have noticed, bo, that one by one,
And soon or late, and gradual, day by day,
Most things in life eventual comes my way!
Into the Ashes Can the whole world goes,
Old hats, old papers, toys and styles and clo'es,
Eventual they dump "em down the bay!"
VI
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7