Iole
PREFACE
DOES anybody remember the opera of The Inca, and that heartbreaking episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the sake of practise?
If I recollect, his dismal confession runs something like this:
“It was in a bleak November
When I slew them, I remember,
As I caught them unawares
Drinking tea in rocking-chairs.”
And so he talked them to death, the subject being “What Really is Art?” Afterward he was sorry—
“The squeak of a door,
The creak of the floor,
My horrors and fears enhance;
And I wake with a scream
As I hear in my dream
The shrieks of my maiden aunts!”
Now it is a very dreadful thing to suggest that those highly respectable pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their polygamous chastity (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to be wedded to his particular art)—I repeat, it is very dreadful to suggest that these impeccable old ladies are in danger of being talked to death.
But the talkers are talking and Art Nouveau rockers are rocking, and the trousers of the prophet are patched with stained glass, and it is a day of dinkiness and of thumbs.
Let us find comfort in the ancient proverb: “Art talked to death shall rise again.” Let us also recollect that “Dinky is as dinky does”; that “All is not Shaw that Bernards”; that “Better Yeates than Clever”; that words are so inexpensive that there is no moral crime in robbing Henry to pay James.
Firmly believing all this, abjuring all atom-pickers, slab furniture, and woodchuck literature—save only the immortal verse:
“And there the wooden-chuck doth tread;
While from the oak trees’ tops
The red, red squirrel on thy head
The frequent acorn drops.”
Abjuring, as I say, dinkiness in all its forms, we may still hope that those cleanly and respectable spinsters, the Sister Arts, will continue throughout the ages, rocking and drinking tea unterrified by the million-tongued clamor in the back yard and below stairs, where thumb and forefinger continue the question demanded by intellectual exhaustion: “L’arr! Kesker say l’arr?”
I
I AIN’T never knowed no one like him,” continued the station-agent reflectively. “He made us all look like monkeys, but he was good to us. Ever see a ginuine poet, sir?”
“Years ago one was pointed out to me,” replied Briggs.
“Was yours smooth shaved, with large, fat, white fingers?” inquired the station-agent.
“If I remember correctly, he was thin,” said Briggs, sitting down on his suit-case and gazing apprehensively around at the landscape. There was nothing to see but low, forbidding mountains, and forests, and a railroad track curving into a tunnel.
The station-agent shoved his hairy hands into the pockets of his overalls, jingled an unseen bunch of keys, and chewed a dry grass stem, ruminating the while in an undertone:
“This poet come here five years ago with all them kids, an’ the fust thing he done was to dress up his girls in boys’ pants. Then he went an’ built a humpy sort o’ house out of stones and boulders. Then he went to work an’ wrote pieces for the papers about jay-birds an’ woodchucks an’ goddesses. He claimed the woods was full of goddesses. That was his way, sir.”
The agent contemplated the railroad track, running his eye along the perspective of polished rails:
“Yes, sir; his name was—and is—Clarence Guilford, an’ I fust seen it signed to a piece in the Uticy Star. An’ next I knowed, folks began to stop off here inquirin’ for Mr. Guilford. ‘Is this here where Guilford, the poet, lives?’ sez they; an’ they come thicker an’ thicker in warm weather. There wasn’t no wagon to take ’em up to Guilford’s, but they didn’t care, an’ they called it a lit’r’y shrine, an’ they hit the pike, women, children, men—’speshil the women, an’ I heard ’em tellin’ how Guilford dressed his kids in pants an’ how Guilford was a famous new lit’r’y poet, an’ they said he was fixin’ to lecture in Uticy.”
The agent gnawed off the chewed portion of the grass stem, readjusted it, and fixed his eyes on vacancy.
“Three year this went on. Mr. Guilford was makin’ his pile, I guess. He set up a shop an’ hired art bookbinders from York. Then he set up another shop an’ hired some of us ’round here to go an’ make them big, slabby art-chairs. All his shops was called “At the sign of” somethin’ ’r other. Bales of vellum arrived for to bind little dinky books; art rocking-chairs was shipped out o’ here by the carload. Meanwhile Guilford he done poetry on the side an’ run a magazine; an’ hearin’ the boys was makin’ big money up in that crank community, an’ that the town was boomin’, I was plum fool enough to drop my job here an’ be a art-worker up to Rose-Cross—that’s where the shops was; ’bout three mile back of his house into the woods.”
The agent removed his hands from his overalls and folded his arms grimly.
“Well?” inquired Briggs, looking up from his perch on the suit-case.
“Well, sir,” continued the agent, “the hull thing bust. I guess the public kinder sickened o’ them art-rockers an’ dinky books without much printin’ into them. Guilford he stuck to it noble, but the shops closed one by one. My wages wasn’t paid for three months; the boys that remained got together that autumn an’ fixed it up to quit in a bunch.
“The poet was sad; he come out to the shops an’ he says, ‘Boys,’ sez he, ‘art is long an’ life is dam brief. I ain’t got the cash, but,’ sez he, ‘you can levy onto them art-rockers an’ the dinky vellum books in stock, an’,’ sez he, ‘you can take the hand-presses an’ the tools an’ bales o’ vellum, which is very precious, an’ all the wagons an’ hosses, an’ go sell ’em in that proud world that refuses to receive my message. The woodland fellowship is rent,’ sez he, wavin’ his plump fingers at us with the rings sparklin’ on ’em.
“Then the boys looked glum, an’ they nudged me an’ kinder shoved me front. So, bein’ elected, I sez, ‘Friend,’ sez I, ‘art is on the bum. It ain’t your fault; the boys is sad an’ sorrerful, but they ain’t never knocked you to nobody, Mr. Guilford. You was good to us; you done your damdest. You made up pieces for the magazines an’ papers an’ you advertised how we was all cranks together here at Rose-Cross, a-lovin’ Nature an’ dicky-birds, an’ wanderin’ about half nood for art’s sake.
“‘Mr. Guilford,’ sez I, ‘that gilt brick went. But it has went as far as it can travel an’ is now reposin’ into the soup. Git wise or eat hay, sir. Art is on the blink.’”
The agent jingled his keys with a melancholy wink at Briggs.
“So I come back here, an’ thankful to hold down this job. An’ five mile up the pike is that there noble poet an’ his kids a-makin’ up pieces for to sell to the papers, an’ a sorrerin’ over the cold world what refuses to buy his poems—an’ a mortgage onto his house an’ a threat to foreclose.”
“Indeed,” said Briggs dreamily, for it was his business to attend to the foreclosure of the mortgage on the poet’s house.
“Was you fixin’ to go up an’ see the place?” inquired the agent.
“Shall I be obliged to walk?”
“I guess you will if you can’t flutter,” replied the agent. “I ain’t got no wagon an’ no horse.”
“How far is it?”
“Five mile, sir.”
With a groan Mr. Briggs arose, lifted his suit-case, and, walking to the platform’s edge,