Chapter IX: Part 9

The girl plucked at her father's arm imploringly. With her grave, cold expression she answered the other's salutation and fixed him with her wonderful eyes so inquiringly that Ferval began a hasty explanation. "English was rarely spoken here ... and then the pleasure of the music!" The old man burst into scornful laughter.

"The music!" he exclaimed. "The music!" echoed his daughter. Ferval wished himself down in Rouen. But he held his position.

"Yes," he continued, "your music. It interested me. And now I find you speaking my own tongue. I must confess that I am curious, that my curiosity has warrant." Thus was he talking to beggars as if they were his social equals. Unconsciously the tone he adopted had been forced upon him by the bearing of his companions, above all by their accent, that of cultivated folk. Who and what were they? The musician no longer smiled.

"You are a music-lover, monsieur?" he asked in a marked French _patois_.

"I love music, and I am extremely engaged by your remarkable combination of instruments," answered Ferval. Baki regarded his wretched orchestra on the grass, then spoke to his daughter.

"Debora," he said in English, and his listener wondered if it were Celtic or Scotch in its unusual intonations, "Debora, you must sing something for the gentleman. He loves our art,"--there was indescribable pathos in this phrase,--"so sing something from Purcell, Brahms, or Richard Strauss."

These words were like the sting of hail; they seemed to drop from the sky, so out of key were they with the speaker's ragged clothes and the outlandish garb of his daughter. Purcell! Brahms! Strauss! What could these three composers mean to such outcasts? Believing that he was the victim of a mystification, Ferval waited, his pulses beating as if he had been running too hard. The girl slowly moved her glorious eyes in his direction; light as they were in hue, their heavy, dark lashes gave them a fantastic expression--bright flame seen through the shadow of smoke. He felt his own dilating as she opened her throat and poured out a broad, sonorous stream of sound that resolved into Von ewiger Liebe by Brahms. He had always loved deep-voiced women. Had he not read in the Talmud that Lilith, Adam's first wife, was low of voice? And this beggar-maid? Maybe a masquerading singer with a crazy father! What else could mean such art wasted on the roads, thrown in the faces of a rabble! Ferval kindled with emotion. Here was romance. Brahms and his dark song under the bowl of the troubled blue sky strongly affected him. He took the lean, brown hand of the singer and kissed it fervently. She drew back nervously, but her father struck her on the shoulder chidingly.

"A trifle too dreary," he rumbled in his heavy bass. "Now, Purcell for the gentleman, and may he open his heart and his purse for the poor."

"Father," she cried warningly, "we are not beggars, _now_!" She turned supplicatingly to the young man and made a gesture of dismissal. He gently shook his head and pretended that he was about to leave, though he felt that his feet were rooted in the earth, his power of willing gone.

"Ay, ay, my girl!" continued the musician, "you can sing as well as the best of them, only you love your sinful old father so much that you have laid aside your ambitions, to follow him in his pilgrimage of expiation about this wicked globe. Ah, sir, if you but knew--I _will_ speak, Debora, for he is a gentleman and a lover of music! If you but knew our history, you would not be surprised at us. Have ye ever been in Wales?"

Ferval stumbled in his answer. It was overlooked; the old man continued: "If ye have, ye must have heard of the sin-eaters. I am one of them, I am an eater of sin--"

Again the girl exclaimed, this time piteously, "Oh, father, remember your vow!"

"Poor lass! Yes, I was a doer of evil, and I became an eater of sin. Some day my sins will be forgiven--this is my penance." He pointed to his instruments. Ferval kept silence. He feared a word would blow away the cobweb foundations of the narrative. The girl had turned and was watching a young tilted moon which with a single star made silvery dents low in the western horizon.

"I am an eater of sin. We still have a few such in Wales. They put a piece of bread and cheese on the breast of a dead man and when the sin-eater eats it, the sins of the dead are passed into the bread and cheese and the soul of the dead is shrived of them. Ay, ay, but it's a grave duty, my friend, to take upon your own soul the crime of another. If you are free from sin yourself, you may walk through life a brave creature; but ... I took his sins, sins, the sins of the wickedest composer of our century, God rest his soul. And for the wicked things he put into his symphonies I must march through life playing on this terrible collection of instruments the Tune of Time--" His daughter faced him.

"Father, we must go; you are only keeping the gentleman." Again she signalled Ferval, but he disregarded her warning. He would not stir. The story and the man who told it, a prophet shorn of his heaven-storming powers, fascinated him.

"I took his sins to myself and they were awful. Once every night I play the Tune of Time in which the wickedness of the dead man is spread out like dry rot in a green field. This man kept his genius so long stagnant that it decayed on his hands, and then into his pestilential music he poured his poison, and would have made the world sick. Oh, for delivery from the crushing transgressions of another! His name? Ah, but that is my secret! I ate his sin, and truth, my son, is stranger than theology! Listen!"

Before his daughter could check him he had hastily donned his armament of instruments and, tramping slowly the broad, smooth path, began playing. Ferval, much disappointed, was about to disappear, for he remembered the racking noises of the previous day. But this music, this Tune of Time!...

III

It was like the flare of lightning which illuminates strange regions beyond the borders of the soul. Ferval no longer heard, he felt; he felt no more, he saw. The white veil was torn asunder, and it showed him a melodious thunder-pool wherein tapering tiny bodies swam, whose eyes were the eyes of Debora. They split and coalesced into other creatures, and to the drummings of spheric harmonies resolved themselves scaly and monstrous. Never did they cease changing. As the music buzzed he saw the great ladder of life, the lowermost rungs resting in lakes of melted amber, the top threatening the remotest rims of the universe. And still the Tune of Time whirred on, as facet after facet of the Infinite wheeled toward creation. Numberless legions of crumpled nightmare shapes modulated into new, familiar forms. Ferval saw plasmic dew become anthropoidal apes, fiercely roaming primeval forests in search of prey. The music mounted ever upward, for the Tune of Time is the Tune of Love--love and its inseparable shadow, hate, fashion the firmament. The solid, circular earth shivered like a mighty harp under this lyric burden of love. The very stars sported in their orbits; and from the fulgurating ovens of the Milky Way there shot forth streams of audible light that touched the heart-strings of the hairy, erect primates and set them chanting; thus were the souls born which crowned them men. This space-bridging music ranged from sun to sun, and its supernatural symphony had no beginning and never shall end.

But the magician or devil who revealed this phantasmagoria of the Cosmos--how had he wrested from the Inane the Tune of Time that in a sequence of chromatic chords pictured the processes of the eternal energy? Was this his sin, the true sin against the Holy Ghost? How had he blundered upon the secret of the rhythmic engine which spun souls through the ages? No man could live after this terrific peep at the Ancient of Days. Debora's eyes peered into Ferval's, filled with the music that enmeshes. And now sounded the apocalyptic trumpets even unto the glittering edges of eternity....

Amid this vertiginous tempest of tones Debora danced the Dance of Space. She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes staring and full of broken lights. As her gaze collided with her companion's he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous gestures were transformed into shivering intensities. She danced like the wine-steeped Noah; she danced as danced David before the Ark of the Covenant. And she was Herodias pirouetting for the price of John's head, and her brow was wreathed with serpents. Followed the convulsive curvings of the Nautch and the opaque splendours of stately Moorish slaves. Debora threw her watcher into a frenzy of fear. He crouched under a sky that roofed him in with its menacing blackness; the orbs of the girl were shot with crescent lightnings. Alien in his desolation, he wondered if her solemn leaps, as the music dashed with frantic speed upon his ear-drums, signified the incarnation of Devi, dread slayer of men! The primal charmers affrighted his vision: Lilith, Ourania, Astarté, Ashtaroth, Belkis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Cotytto, and many immemorial figures from before the Flood streamed by and melted into the woven paces of Debora--this new Jephtha's daughter dancing to her doom as her father fingered the Tune of Time. In the whirling patterns of her dance, Ferval discerned, though dimly, the Veil of Maya, the veil of illusion called Space, on the thither side of which are embroidered the fugacious symbols of Time....

... As the delirious music faltered and fainted, he watched the tragic eyes of Debora yellowing cat-like. His senses and imagination had been hypnotized by all this fracas and by the beauty of the girl. With such a mate and such formidable music, he could conquer the earth! His brain was afire with the sweetness of the odour that enveloped them, an odour as penetrating as the music of the nocturnal Chopin.

"Debora," he whispered, "you must never go away from me." She hung her head. The old man was not to be seen; the darkness had swallowed him. Ferval quietly passed his arm about the waist of the silent woman and slowly they walked in the tender night. She was the first to speak:--

"You did not hear a madman's story," she asserted in her clear, candid voice, which had for him the hue of a cleft pomegranate. "It is the history of my father's soul. It is his own sin he expiates."

"But you, you!" Ferval cried unsteadily. "Why must your life be sacrificed to gratify the bizarre egotism of such a--" He cut short the phrase, fearful of wounding her. He felt her body tremble and her arm contract. They reached the marble staircase of the Jeanne d'Arc memorial. She stopped him and burst forth:--

"Would you be willing to share his burden? Would you take upon your shoulders his sin? He may have committed the one unpardonable sin, for he discovered the true philosopher's stone, that can transmute metals, make mountains nod, the stars to stop, and command the throne of Jehovah--oh, what blasphemy has been his in his daring music! If he could persuade one other soul besides mine to help him, he might be released from his woe. Will you be that other?"

She put this question as if she were proposing a commonplace human undertaking. Ferval in his confusion fancied that she was provoking him to a declaration. To grasp his receding reason he fatuously exclaimed:--

"Is this a Salvation Army fantasy?"

With that she called out, in harsh resentment:

"Not salvation for you!"

She then thrust him from her so violently that he tumbled backward down the steps to the very bottom, where, unnerved by the ferocity of the attack and his head bruised by the fall, he felt his consciousness escape like gas from a punctured balloon. When found the next morning, he was barely covered by the old sin-eater's rags, while near by was scattered the entire orchestra of that eloquent wizard. Shudderingly he realized that it had been no dream; shudderingly he wondered if upon his soul had been shifted the unknown crime of the fanatic! The witching, enigmatic Debora haunted his memory; and with dismay he recalled the blistering vision evoked by the music, through which she had glided like some tremulous Lamia. Decidedly his imagination had carried him far. He cursed his easy credulity, he reviled his love of the exotic....

Ferval made inquiry of the authorities, but received little comfort. Salvation Army people they were not, this father and daughter; the tambourine, assumed garb, and prophet's beard had deceived him. Impostors! But of what incredible caliber, of what illusion-creating power! For years he could not see a Salvation Army girl without a sense of cerebral exaltation. If he could have met Debora again, he would have forgiven her sibylline deceptions, her father's chicanery. And how did they spin their web? Ferval, student of the occult, greedy of metaphysical problems, at first set it down to Indian Yogi magic. But the machinery--the hideously discordant human orchestra, the corybantic dancing! No, he rejected the theory. Music is sometimes hypnotic, but not such music; dancing is the most alluring of the spatial arts, and Debora's miming was a delight to the eye; but could it have so obscured his judgments as to paint upon the canvas of his fancy those prodigious frescoes of time and space?

In the iron solitude of his soul he tortured himself with these questions. His stupor lasted for days--was it the abrupt fall or was it the result of his absinthe-like dreams? He was haunted by an odour that assailed his brain like one tune persistently played. The odour! Whence did it come with its sickly sweetness? Perhaps therein lay the secret of his hallucinating visions. Perhaps a drug had perverted his brain. But within the week the dangerous perfume had become dissipated, and with it vanished all hope of solving the riddle. Oh, to sense once more the enchantments of its fragrance, once more revel in the sublimated intoxication of mighty forces weaving at the loom of life! By the cadences of what infernal art had he been vouchsafed a glimpse of the profiles of the gods? Henceforth Ferval became a lover of shadows.

XIX

NADA

The tenderness of the growing night disquieted the dying woman.

"Aline!" she called. But it was only the name that reverberated within the walls of her brain, harrowed by fever. A soft air rustled the drawn curtains of lawn; and on the dressing table the two little lamps fluttered in syncopated sympathy. One picture the room held. It was after a painting by Goya, and depicted a sneering skeleton scrawling on his dusty tomb, with a bony fore-finger, the sinister word, _Nada_--nothing! The perturbation of the woman increased, though physical power seemed denied her. "Aline, my child!" This time a clucking sound issued from her throat.

The girl went to the bedside and gently fanned. Her aunt wagged her head negatively. "No, no!" she stuttered. Aline stopped, and kneeling, took the sick hands in her own. Their eyes met and Aline, guided by the glance, looked over at the picture with its sardonic motto.

"Shall I take it away, Aunt Mary?" The elder woman closed her eyes as if to shut out the ghoulish mockery. Then Aline saw the tabouret that stood between the windows--it was burdened with magnolias in a deep white bowl.

"Do you wish them nearer?"

"No, no," murmured her aunt. Her eyes brightened. She pushed her chin forward, and the young girl removed the flowers, knowing that their odour had become oppressive. She was not absent more than a few seconds. As she returned the maid touched her arm.

"The gentlemen are waiting below, miss. They won't leave until they see you."

"How can I go now? Send them away, send them away!"

"Yes, miss; but I told them what you said this afternoon about the danger of Holiest Mother--"

"Hush! she is calling." Aline slipped into the room on hurried feet, her eyes dilated, her hair in anxious disorder. But the invalid made no signal. She lay with closed eyelids, the contraction of her nostrils a faint proclamation of life. Again the niece took her place at the headboard, and with folded fingers watched the whispering indications of speedy flight. The maid soon beckoned her from a narrowed door. Aline joined her.

"They say that if you don't go down, they will come up."

"Who says?" was the stern query.

"The Second Reader and the Secretary. I think you had better see them; they both look worried. Really I do, Miss Allie."

"Very well, Ellen; but you must stay here, and if Holiest Mother makes the slightest move, touch the bell. I'll not be gone five minutes."

Without arranging her hair or dress, Aline opened the folding doors of the drawing-room. Only the centre lamp was lighted, but she recognized the two men. They were sitting together, and arose as she entered. The burly Second Reader wore a dismayed countenance. His cheeks were flabby, his eyes red. The other was a timid little man who never had anything to say.

"How is Holiest Mother?" asked the Reader.

"Dying."

"Oh, Sister Aline! Why such a blunt way of putting it? _She_ may be exchanging her earthly garb for a celestial one--but die! We do not acknowledge death in the Church of the New Faith." He paused and blandly stroked his huge left hand, covered with red down.

"Holiest Mother, my aunt, has not an hour to live," was the cool response of the girl. "If you have no further question, I must ask you to excuse me; I am needed above." She stepped to the door.

"Wait a moment, sister! Not so fast. The situation is serious. Hundreds of thousands of the faithful depend on our report of this--of this sad event. We may tell them that the female pope of our great religion"--he bent his big neck reverently--"was wafted to her heavenly abode by the angels. But there are the officers of the law, the undertaker, the cemetery people, to be considered. Shall we acknowledge that our founder has died like any other human--in bed, of a fever? And who is to be her successor? Has she left a will?"

"Poor Aunt Mary!" muttered the girl.

"It must be a woman, will or no will," continued the Second Reader, in the tone of a conqueror making terms with a stricken foe. "Now Aline, sister, you are the nearest of kin. You are a fervent healer. _You_ are the Woman."

"How can you stand there heartlessly plotting such things and a dying woman in the house?" Aline's voice was metallic with passion. "You care only for the money and power in our church. I refuse to join with you in any such scheme. Aunt Mary will die. She will name her successor. Then it will be time to act. Have you forgotten her last words to the faithful?" She pointed to a marble tablet above the fireplace, which bore this astounding phrase: "My first and forever message is one and eternal." Nothing more,--but the men cowered before the sublime wisdom uttered by a frail woman, wisdom that had started the emotional machinery of two continents.

"But, great God! Miss Aline, you mustn't go off and leave us in this fix." Drops of water stood on the forehead of the Second Reader. His hands dropped to his side with a gesture of despair. His companion kept to the corner, a scared being.

"You know as well as I do that _somebody_ has to take the throne seat after--after your Aunt Mary dies--I mean, after Holiest Mother is translated to eternity. Ask her, beg her, for some advice. We can't let the great undertaking go to pieces--"

"You have little faith, brother," replied Aline. "If that message means anything, then the New Faith will take care of itself--"

"Yes, yes, I know," was the testy interruption; "but the world is not so easily led in matters of religion. The message, as you say, is divine; but it may sound like meaningless twaddle to the world at large. If we are to heal mankind and dispel the heresy of disease and death, why can't Holiest Mother save herself? Mind you, I am looking at this thing with the eyes of the sceptics--"

"You are an unbeliever, a materialist, yourself," was the bold retort. "Do as you please, but you can't drag me into your money calculations." The swift slam of the door left them to their fears.

Her aunt, sitting as upright as a candle, was conducting an invisible orchestra when Aline returned. The frightened maid tried to hold the lean, spasmodic arms as they traced in the air the pompous rhythm of a march that moved on silent funereal pinions through the chamber. The woman stared threateningly at the picture on the wall, the picture of the skeleton which had come from nothingness to reveal nothingness to the living. The now distraught girl, her nerves crisped by her doubts, threw herself upon the bed, her fears sorely knocking at her heart.

"Aunt, Aunt Mary--Holiest Mother, in Christ's name, in the name of the New Faith, tell me before you go--tell me what is to become of our holy church after you die--after you pass over to the great white light. Is it all real? Or is it only a dream, _your_ beautiful dream?--What is the secret truth? Or--or--is there no secret--no--" her voice was cracked by sobs. The stately, soundless music was waved on by her aunt. Then Holiest Mother fell back on her pillow, and with a last long glance at the picture, she pointed, with smiling irony at the picture.

_Nada, Nada ..._

The night died away in tender complicity with the two little lamps on the dressing table, and the sweet, thick perfume of magnolias modulated into acrid decay as day dawned. Below, the two men anxiously awaited the message from the dead. And they saw again upon the marble tablet above the fireplace her cryptic wisdom:--

"My first and forever message is one and eternal."

XX

PAN

For the Great God Pan is alive again.

--DEAN MANSEL.

I

The handsome Hungarian kept his brilliant glance fixed upon Lora Crowne; she sat with her Aunt Lucas and Mr. Steyle at a table facing the orchestra. His eyes were not so large as black; the intensity of their gaze further bewildered the young woman, whose appearance that evening at the famous café on the East Side was her initial one. The heat, the bristling lights, the terrific appealing clamour of the gypsy band, set murmuring the nerves of this impressionable girl. And the agility of the _cymbalom_ player, his great height, clear skin, and piercing eyes, quite enthralled her.

"It is the gypsy dulcimer, Lora; I read all about it in Liszt's book on gypsy music," said Aunt Lucas, in an airy soprano.

Mr. Steyle was impressed. Lora paid no attention, but continued to gaze curiously at the antics of the player, who hammered from his instrument of wire shivering, percussive music. With flexible wrists he swung the felt-covered mallets that brought up such resounding tones; at times his long, apelike arms would reach far asunder and, rolling his eyes, he touched the extremes of his _cymbalom_; then he described furious arpeggios, punctuated with a shrill tattoo. And the crazy music defiled by in a struggling squad of chords; but Aŕpad Vihary never lifted his eyes from Lora Crowne....

The vibration ceased. Its withdrawal left the ear-drums buzzing with a minute, painful sensation, like that of moisture rapidly evaporating upon the naked skin. A battalion of tongues began to chatter as the red-faced waiters rushed between the tables, taking orders. It was after eleven o'clock, and through the swinging doors passed a throng of motley people, fanning, gossiping, bickering--all eager and thirsty. Clarence Steyle pointed out the celebrities with conscious delight. Over yonder--that man with the mixed gray hair--was a composer who came every night for inspiration,--musical and otherwise, Clarence added, with a laugh. And there was the young and well-known decadent playwright who wore strangling high collars and transposed all his plays from French sources; he lisped and was proud of his ability to dramatize the latest mental disease. And a burglar who had written a famous book on the management of children during hot weather sat meekly resting before a solitary table.

The leader of the Hungarian band was a gypsy who called himself Alfassy Janos, though he lived on First Avenue, in a flat the door of which bore this legend: _Jacob Aron_. The rest of the band seemed gypsy. Who is the _cymbalom_ player? That is not difficult to answer; the programme gives it.

"There you are, Miss Lora."

She looked. "Oh, what a romantic name! He must be a count at least."

"Lora, dear, gypsies never bear titles," remarked Aunt Lucas, patronizingly.

"How about the Abbé Liszt?" triumphantly asked her charge.

Aunt Lucas laughed coldly. "Liszt was Hungarian, not Romany. But your artist with the drumsticks certainly is distinguished-looking. If he only would not wear that odious scarlet uniform. I wonder why he does not sit down, like the rest of his colleagues."

Aŕpad Vihary leaned against the panelled wall, his brow puckered in boredom, his long black mustaches drooping from sheer discouragement. His was a figure for sculpture--a frame powerfully modelled, a bisque complexion. Thin as a cedar sapling, he preserved such an immovable attitude that in the haze of the creamy atmosphere he seemed a carved, marmoreal image rather than a young man with devouring eyes.

The three visitors ate sandwiches and pretended to relish Munich beer served in tall stone mugs. Aunt Lucas, who was shaped like a 'cello, made more than a pretence of sipping; she drank one entirely, regretting the exigencies of chaperonage: to ask for more might shock the proper young man.

"It's horrid here, after all," she remarked discontentedly. "So many people--_such_ people--and very few nice ones. The Batsons are over there, Lora; but then you don't care for them. O dear, I wish the band would strike up again."

It did. A vicious swirl of colour and dizzy, dislocated rhythms prefaced the incantations of the Czardas. Instantly the eating, gabbling crowd became silent. Alfassy Janos magnetized his hearers with cradling, caressing movements of his fiddle. He waved like tall grass in the wind; he twisted snakewise his lithe body as he lashed his bow upon the screaming strings; the resilient tones darted fulgurantly from instrument to instrument. After chasing in circles of quicksilver, they all met with a crash; and the whole tonal battery, reënforced by the throbbing of Aŕpad Vihary's dulcimer, swept through the suite of rooms from ceiling to sanded floor. It was no longer enchanting music, but sheer madness of the blood; sensual and warlike, it gripped the imagination as these tunes of old Egypt, filtered through savage centuries, reached the ears. Lora trembled in the gale that blew across the Puzta. She imagined a determined Hungarian prairie, over which dashed disordered centaurs brandishing clubs, driving before them a band of satyrs and leaping fauns. The hoofed men struggled. At their front was a monster with a black goat-face and huge horns; he fought fiercely the half-human horses. The sun, a thin scarf of light, was eclipsed by earnest clouds; the curving thunder closed over the battle; the air was flame-sprinkled and enlaced by music; and most melancholy were the eyes of the defeated Pan--the melancholy eyes of Aŕpad Vihary....

Aunt Lucas was scandalized. "Do you know, Lora, that the impudent dulcimer virtuoso"--she prided herself on her musical terms--"actually stared you out of countenance during the entire Czardas?" And she could have added that her niece had returned the glance unflinchingly.

Mr. Steyle noticed Lora's vacant regard when he addressed her and insisted on getting her away from the dangerous undertow of this "table d'hôte music," as he contemptuously called it. He summoned the waiter.

Lora shed her disappointment. "Oh, let's wait for the _cymbalom_ solo," she frankly begged.

Her aunt was unmoved. "Yes, Mr. Steyle, we had better go; the air is positively depressing. These slumming parties are delightful if you don't overdo them--but the people!" Up went her lorgnon.

They soon departed. Lora did not dare to look back until she reached the door that opened on the avenue; as she did so her vibrant gaze collided with the Hungarian's. She determined to see him again.

II

Nice Brooklyn girls always attend church and symphony concerts. This dual custom is considered respectable and cultured. Lora's parents during their lifetime never missed the Theodore Thomas concerts and the sermons of a certain famous local preacher; but there were times when the young woman longed for Carmen and the delights of fashionable Bohemia. Carefully reared by her Aunt Lucas, she had nevertheless a taste for gypsy bands and "Gyp's" novels. She read the latter translated, much to the disedification of her guardian, who was a linguist and a patron of the fine arts. This latter clause included subscriptions to the Institute Course and several scientific journals. If Lora were less romantic, all would be well. Once the careful chaperon had feared music and its disturbing influences; but after she had read an article about its healing effect upon the insane she felt that it could work no evil in Lora; indeed, it was an elevating art. She was fond of music herself, and, as dancing was strictly tabooed, there seemed little likelihood of the noble art of "sweet concordance"--Aunt Lucas had picked this quotation up somewhere--doing mischief to her impressionable niece.

Nearly all dwelling-houses look alike in Brooklyn, even at midday. The street in which the Crownes lived was composed of conventional brown-stone buildings and English basements. Nielje, the Dutch maid, stood at the half-opened door, regarding with suspicion the big, dark man who had pulled the bell so violently. Aunt Lucas was in New York at the meeting of a society devoted to Ethical Enjoyment. Though Nielje had been warned secretly of an expected visitor, this wild-looking young man with long black hair, wearing a flaring coat of many colours and baggy Turkish trousers, gave her a shock. Why did he come to the basement as if he were one of the cook's callers? She paused. Then the door was shoved in by a muscular arm, and she was pushed against the wall.

"Don't try that again, man," she protested.

He answered her in gibberish. "Mees, Mees Lora," he repeated.

"Ach!" she exclaimed.

Aŕpad Vihary gloomily followed her into the dining-room, where Lora stood trembling. This was the third time she had met the Hungarian, and fearing Prospect Park,--after two timid walks there, under the fiery-fingered leaves of early autumn,--she had been prevailed upon to invite Aŕpad to her home. She regretted her imprudence the moment he entered. All his footlight picturesqueness vanished in the cold, hard light of an unromantic Brooklyn breakfast-room. He seemed like a clumsy circus hero as he scraped his feet over the parquetry and attempted to kiss her hand. She drew away instantly and pointed to a chair. He refused to sit down; his pride seemed hurt.

Then he gave the girl an intense look, and she drew nearer.

"Oh, Aŕpad Vihary," she began.

He interrupted. "You do not love me now. Why? You told me you loved me, in the park, yesterday. I am a poor artist, that is the reason."

This speech he uttered glibly, and, despite the extraordinary pronunciation, she understood it. She took his long hand, the fingers amazed her. He bent them back until they touched his wrist, and was proud of their flexibility. He walked to the dining-table and tossed its cover-cloth on a chair. Upon his two thumbs he went around it like an acrobat. "Shall I hold you out with one arm?" he softly asked. Lora was vastly amused; this was indeed a courtship out of the ordinary--it pleased her exotic taste.

"Hungarian gypsies are very strong, are they not?" she innocently asked.

"I am not gypsy nor am I Hungarian; I am an East Indian. My family is royal. We are of the Rajpoot tribes called Ranas. My father once ruled Roorbunder."

Lora was amazed. A king's son, a Rana of Roorbunder! She became very sympathetic. Again she urged him to sit down.

"My nation never sits before a woman," he proudly answered.

"But I will sit beside you," she coaxed, pushing him to a corner. He resisted her and went to the window. Lora again joined him. The man piqued her. He was mysterious and very unlike Mr. Steyle--poor, sentimental Clarence, who melted with sighs if she but glanced at him; and then, Clarence was too stout. She adored slender men, believing that when fat came in at the door love fled out of the window.

"They put me in a circus at Buda-Pesth," remarked Aŕpad Vihary, as if he were making a commonplace statement about the weather.

She gave a little scream; he regarded her with Oriental composure. "In a circus! You! Did you ride?"

"I cannot ride," he said. "I played in a cage all day."

"Because you were wild?" She then went into a fit of laughter. He was such a funny fellow, though his ardent gaze made her blush. So blond and pink was Lora that her friends called her Strawberry--a delicate compliment in which she delighted. It was this golden head and radiant face, with implacably blue eyes, that set the blood pumping into Aŕpad's brain. When he looked at her, he saw sunlight.

"Do you know, you absurd prince, that when you played the Czardas the other night I seemed to see a vision of a Hungarian prairie, covered with fighting centaurs and satyrs! I longed to be a _vivandière_ among all those fauns. You were there--in the music, I mean--and you were big Pan--oh, so ugly and terrible!"

"Pan! That is a Polish title," he answered quite simply.

"Stupid! The great god Pan--don't you know your mythology? Haven't you read Mrs. Browning? He was the god of nature, of the woods. Even now, I believe you have ears with furry tips and hoofs like a faun."

He turned a sickly yellow.

"Anyhow, why did they put you in a cage? Were you a wild boy?"

"They thought so in Hungary."

"But why?"

He stared at her sorrowfully, and was about to empty his soul; but she turned away with a shudder.

"I know, I know," she whispered; "your hands--they are like the hands of--"

Aŕpad threw out his chest, and Lora heard with a curiosity that became nervous a rhythmic wagging sound, like velvet bruised by some dull implement. It frightened her.

"Do not be afraid of me," he begged. "You cannot say anything I do not know already." He walked to the door, and the girl followed him.

"Don't go, Aŕpad," she said with pretty remorse.

The fire blazed in his eyes and with a single swift grasp he seized her, holding her aloft like a torch. Lora almost lost consciousness. She had not counted upon such barbarous wooing, and, frightened, cried out, "Nielje, Nielje!"

Nielje burst into the room as if she had been very near the keyhole. She was a powerful woman from Holland, who did not fear an army.

"Put her down!" she insisted, in her deepest gutturals. "Put her down, you brute, or I'll hurt you."

Lora jumped to the floor as Nielje struck with her broomstick at Aŕpad's retreating back. To the surprise of the women he gave a shriek of agony and ran to the door, Nielje following close behind. Lora, her eyes strained with excitement, did not stir; she heard a struggle in the little hall as the man fumbled at the basement entrance. Again he yelled, and then Lora rushed to the window. Nielje, on her knees, was being dragged across the grassy space in front of the house. She held on, seemingly, to the coat-tail of the frantic musician; only by a vigorous shove did he evade her persistent grasp and disappear.

A policeman with official aptness went leisurely by. Nielje flew into the house, locking and bolting the door. Her face was red as she rolled on the floor, her hands at her sides. Lora, alarmed, thought she was seriously hurt or hysterical from fright; but the laughter was too hearty and appealing.

"Oh, Meeslora! Oh, Meeslora!" she gasped. "He must be monkey-man--he has monkey tail!"

Lora could have fainted from chagrin and horror.

Had the great god Pan passed her way?

BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER

What Maeterlinck wrote:

Maurice Maeterlinck wrote thus of James Huneker: "Do you know that 'Iconoclasts' is the only book of high and universal critical worth that we have had for years--to be precise, since Georg Brandes. It is at once strong and fine, supple and firm, indulgent and sure."

The _Evening Post_ of June 10, 1915, wrote of Mr. Huneker's "The New Cosmopolis":

"The region of Bohemia, Mr. James Huneker found long ago, is within us. At twenty, he says, he discovered that there is no such enchanted spot as the Latin Quarter, but that every generation sets back the mythical land into the golden age of the Commune, or of 1848, or the days of 'Hernani.' It is the same with New York's East Side, 'the fabulous East Side,' as Mr. Huneker calls it in his collection of international urban studies, 'The New Cosmopolis.' If one judged externals by grime, by poverty, by sanded back-rooms, with long-haired visionaries assailing the social order, then the East Side of the early eighties has gone down before the mad rush of settlement workers, impertinent reformers, sociological cranks, self-advertising politicians, billionaire socialists, and the reporters. To-day the sentimental traveller 'feels a heart-pang to see the order, the cleanliness, the wide streets, the playgrounds, the big boulevards, the absence of indigence that have spoiled the most interesting part of New York City.' But apparently this is only a first impression; for Mr. Huneker had no trouble in discovering in one café a patriarchal figure quite of the type beloved of the local-color hunters of twenty years ago, a prophet, though speaking a modern language and concerned with things of the day. So that we owe to Mr. Huneker the discovery of a notable truth, namely, that Bohemia is not only a creation of the sentimental memory, but, being psychological, may be located in clean and prosperous quarters. The tendency has always been to place it in a golden age, but a tattered and unswept age. Bohemia is now shown to exist amidst model tenements and sanitary drinking-cups."

IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS

_WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF DOSTOÏEVSKY_

12mo. $1.50 net

* * * * *

NEW COSMOPOLIS

12mo. $1.50 net

* * * * *

THE PATHOS _of_ DISTANCE

A Book of a Thousand and One Moments

12mo. $2.00 net

* * * * *

PROMENADES _of an_ IMPRESSIONIST

12mo. $1.50 net

"We like best such sober essays as those which analyze for us the technical contributions of Cézanne and Rodin. Here Mr. Huneker is a real interpreter, and here his long experience of men and ways in art counts for much. Charming, in the lighter vein, are such appreciations as the Monticelli, and Chardin."--FRANK JEWETT MATHER, JR., in _New York Nation_ and _Evening Post_.

* * * * *

EGOISTS

A Book of Supermen

STENDHAL, BAUDELAIRE, FLAUBERT, ANATOLE FRANCE, HUYSMANS, BARRÈS, HELLO, BLAKE, NIETZSCHE, IBSEN, AND MAX STIRNER

_With Portrait and Facsimile Reproductions_

12mo. $1.50 net

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ICONOCLASTS:

A Book of Dramatists

12mo. $1.50 net

CONTENTS: Henrik Ibsen--August Strindberg--Henry Becque--Gerhart Hauptmann--Paul Hervieu--The Quintessence of Shaw--Maxim Gorky's Nachtasyl--Hermann Sudermann--Princess Mathilde's Play--Duse and D'Annunzio--Villiers de l'Isle Adam--Maurice Maeterlinck.

"His style is a little jerky, but it is one of those rare styles in which we are led to expect some significance, if not wit, in every sentence."--G.K. CHESTERTON, in _London Daily News_.

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OVERTONES:

A Book of Temperaments

_WITH FRONTISPIECE PORTRAIT OF RICHARD STRAUSS_

12mo. $1.50 net

"In some respects Mr. Huneker must be reckoned the most brilliant of all living writers on matters musical."--_Academy, London_.

* * * * *

MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC

BRAHMS, TSCHAÏKOWSKY, CHOPIN, RICHARD STRAUSS, LISZT, AND WAGNER

12mo. $1.50 net

"Mr. Huneker is, in the best sense, a critic; he listens to the music and gives you his impressions as rapidly and in as few words as possible; or he sketches the composers in fine, broad, sweeping strokes with a magnificent disregard for unimportant details.... A distinctly original and very valuable contribution to the world's tiny musical literature."--J.F. RUNCIMAN, in _London Saturday Review_.

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FRANZ LISZT

_WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS_

12mo. $2.00 net

* * * * *

CHOPIN:

The Man and His Music

_WITH ETCHED PORTRAIT_

12mo. $2.00 net

* * * * *

VISIONARIES

12mo. $1.50 net

CONTENTS: A Master of Cobwebs--The Eighth Deadly Sin--The Purse of Aholibah--Rebels of the Moon--The Spiral Road--A Mock Sun--Antichrist--The Eternal Duel--The Enchanted Yodler--The Third Kingdom--The Haunted Harpsichord--The Tragic Wall--A Sentimental Rebellion--Hall of the Missing Footsteps--The Cursory Light--An Iron Fan--The Woman Who Loved Chopin--The Tune of Time--Nada--Pan.

"In 'The Spiral Road' and in some of the other stories both fantasy and narrative may be compared with Hawthorne in his most unearthly moods. The younger man has read his Nietzsche and has cast off his heritage of simple morals. Hawthorne's Puritanism finds no echo in these modern souls, all sceptical, wavering and unblessed. But Hawthorne's splendor of vision and his power of sympathy with a tormented mind do live again in the best of Mr. Huneker's stories."--_London Academy_ (Feb. 3, 1906).

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MELOMANIACS

12mo. $1.50 net

"It would be difficult to sum up 'Melomaniacs' in a phrase. Never did a book, in my opinion at any rate, exhibit greater contrasts, not, perhaps, of strength and weakness, but of clearness and obscurity."--HAROLD E. GORST, in _London Saturday Review_.

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CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK