A HEDONIST
Rupert K. Vaness remains freshly in my mind because he was so fine and large, and because he summed up in his person and behaviour a philosophy which, budding before the war, hibernated during that distressing epoch, and is now again in bloom.
He was a New Yorker addicted to Italy. One often puzzled over the composition of his blood. From his appearance it was rich; and his name fortified the conclusion. What the K. stood for, however, I never learned; the three possibilities were equally intriguing. Had he a strain of Highlander with Kenneth or Keith; a drop of German or Scandinavian with Kurt or Knut; a blend of Syrian or Armenian with Khalil or Kassim? The blue in his fine eyes seemed to preclude the last, but there was an encouraging curve in his nostrils and a raven gleam in his auburn hair, which, by the way, was beginning to grizzle and recede when I knew him. The flesh of his face, too, had sometimes a tired and pouchy appearance, and his tall body looked a trifle rebellious within his extremely well-cut clothes—but, after all, he was fifty-five. You felt that Vaness was a philosopher, yet he never bored you with his views, and was content to let you grasp his moving principle gradually through watching what he ate, drank, smoked, wore, and how he encircled himself with the beautiful things and people of this life. Presumably he was rich, for one was never conscious of money in his presence. Life moved round him with a certain noiseless ease or stood still at a perfect temperature like the air in a conservatory round a choice blossom which a draught might shrivel.
This image of a flower in relation to Rupert K. Vaness pleases me because of that little incident in Magnolia Gardens, near Charleston, South Carolina.
Vaness was the sort of man of whom one could never say with safety whether he was revolving round a beautiful young woman or whether the beautiful young woman was revolving round him. His looks, his wealth, his taste, his reputation, invested him with a certain sun-like quality; but his age, the recession of his locks, and the advancement of his waist were beginning to dim his lustre; so that whether he was moth or candle was becoming a moot point. It was moot to me watching him and Miss Sabine Monroy at Charleston throughout the month of March. The casual observer would have said that she was ‘playing him up’ as a young poet of my acquaintance puts it; but I was not casual. For me Vaness had the attraction of a theorem, and I was looking rather deeply into him and Miss Monroy. That girl had charm. She came, I think, from Baltimore, with a strain in her, they said, of old Southern Creole blood. Tall and what is known as willowy, with dark chestnut hair, very broad dark eyebrows, very soft quick eyes, and a pretty mouth—when she did not accentuate it too much with lip-salve—she had more sheer quiet vitality than any girl I ever saw. It was delightful to watch her dance, ride, play tennis. She laughed with her eyes; she talked with a savouring vivacity. She never seemed tired or bored. She was—in one hackneyed word—‘attractive.’ And Vaness, the connoisseur, was quite obviously attracted. With professional admirers of beauty who can tell whether they definitely design to add a pretty woman to their collection, or whether their dalliance is just matter of habit? But he stood and sat about her, he drove and rode, listened to music, and played cards with her; he did all but dance with her, and even at times trembled on the brink of that. And his eyes—those fine lustrous eyes of his—followed her about.
How she had remained unmarried at the age of twenty-six was a mystery till one reflected that with her power of enjoying life she could not yet have had the time. Her perfect physique was at full stretch for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four each day. Her sleep must have been like that of a baby. One figured her sinking into dreamless rest the moment her head touched pillow, and never stirring till she sprang up into her bath.
As I say, for me, Vaness, or rather his philosophy, erat demonstrandum. I was myself in some philosophic distress just then. The microbe of fatalism, already present in the brains of artists before the war, had been considerably enlarged by that depressing occurrence. Could a civilisation basing itself on the production of material advantages do anything but ensure the desire for more and more material advantages. Could it promote progress even of a material character except in countries whose resources were still much in excess of their populations? The war had seemed to me to show that mankind was too combative an animal ever to recognise that the good of all was the good of one. The coarse-fibred, pugnacious, and self-seeking would, I had become sure, always carry too many guns for the refined and kindly. In short, there was not enough altruism to go round—not half, not a hundredth part enough. The simple heroism of mankind, disclosed or rather accentuated by the war, seemed to afford no hope—it was so exploitable by the rhinoceri and tigers of high life. The march of science appeared on the whole to be carrying us backward, and I deeply suspected that there had been ages when the populations of this earth, though less numerous and comfortable, had been proportionately more healthy than they were at present. As for religion, I had never had the least faith in Providence rewarding the pitiable by giving them a future life of bliss; the theory seemed to me illogical, for even more pitiable in this life appeared to me the thick-skinned and successful, and these, as we know in the saying about the camel and the needle’s eye, are consigned wholesale to hell. Success, power, wealth—those aims of profiteers and premiers, pedagogues and pandemoniacs, of all, in fact, who could not see God in a dewdrop, hear Him in distant goat-bells, and scent Him in a pepper-tree—had always appeared to me akin to dry-rot. And yet every day one saw more distinctly that the holders of the ‘power’ philosophy were the hub of a universe which, with the approbation of the majority they represented, they were fast making uninhabitable. It did not even seem of any use to help one’s neighbours; all efforts at relief just gilded the pill and encouraged our stubbornly contentious leaders to plunge us all into fresh miseries. So I was searching right and left for something to believe in, willing to accept even Rupert K. Vaness and his basking philosophy. But, then, could a man bask his life right out? Could just looking at fine pictures, tasting rare fruits and wines, the mere listening to good music, the scent of azaleas and the best tobacco, above all the society of pretty women, keep salt in my bread, an ideal in my brain? Could they? That’s what I wanted to know.
Everyone who goes to Charleston in the spring, soon or late, visits Magnolia Gardens. A painter of flowers and trees myself, I specialise in gardens, and freely assert that none in the world is so beautiful as this. Even before the magnolias come out it consigns the Boboli at Florence, the Cinnamon Gardens of Colombo, Concepcion at Malaga, Versailles, Hampton Court, the Generaliffe at Granada, and La Mortola to the category of ‘also ran.’ Nothing so free, gracious, so lovely and wistful, nothing so richly coloured, yet so ghostlike, exists planted by the sons of men. It is a kind of paradise which has wandered down, a miraculously enchanted wilderness. Brilliant with azaleas, or magnolia-pale, it centres round a pool of water overhung by tall trunks festooned with the grey Florida moss. Beyond anything I have ever seen it is other-worldly. And I went there day after day, drawn as one is drawn in youth by visions of the Ionian Sea, of the East, or the Pacific Isles. I used to sit paralysed by the absurdity of putting brush to canvas in front of that dream-pool. I wanted to paint of it a picture like that of the fountain, by Helleu, which hangs in the Luxembourg. But I knew I never should.
I was sitting there one sunny afternoon with my back to a clump of azaleas watching an old coloured gardener—so old that he had started life as an ‘owned’ negro they said, and certainly still retained the familiar suavity of the oldtime darkie—I was watching him prune the shrubs when I heard the voice of Rupert K. Vaness say, quite close: “There’s nothing for me but beauty, Miss Monroy.”
The two were evidently just behind my azalea clump, perhaps four yards away, yet as invisible as if in China.
“Beauty is a wide, wide word. Define it, Mr. Vaness.”
“An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory—it stands before me.”
“Come now, that’s just a get-out. Is beauty of the flesh or of the spirit?”
“What is the spirit as you call it? I’m a Pagan.”
“Oh! So am I. But the Greeks were Pagans.”
“Well, spirit is only the refined side of sensual appreciations.”
“I wonder!”
“I have spent my life in finding that out.”
“Then, the feeling this garden rouses in me is purely sensuous?”
“Of course. If you were standing there blind and deaf, without the powers of scent and touch, where would your feeling be?”
“You are very discouraging, Mr. Vaness.”
“No, madam—I face facts. When I was a youngster I had plenty of fluffy aspiration towards I didn’t know what—I even used to write poetry.”
“Oh! Mr. Vaness, was it good?”
“It was not, and I very soon learned that a genuine sensation was worth all the uplift in the world.”
“What is going to happen when your senses strike work?”
“I shall sit in the sun and fade out.”
“I certainly do like your frankness.”
“You think me a cynic, of course; I am nothing so futile, Miss Sabine. A cynic is just a posing ass proud of his attitude. I see nothing to be proud of in my attitude, just as I see nothing to be proud of in the truths of existence.”
“Suppose you had been poor?”
“My senses would be lasting better than they are; and when they at last failed I should die quicker from want of food and warmth—that’s all.”
“Have you ever been in love, Mr. Vaness?”
“I am in love now.”
“And your love has no element of devotion, no finer side?”
“None. It wants.”
“I have never been in love. But, if I were, I think I should want to lose myself rather than to gain the other.”
“Would you? Sabine, I am in love with you.”
“Oh! Shall we walk on?”
I heard their footsteps and was alone again, with the old gardener lopping at his shrubs.
But what a perfect declaration of hedonism; how simple and how solid was this Vaness theory of existence! Almost Assyrian—worthy of Louis Quinze!
And just then the old negro came up.
“It’s pleasant settin’,” he said in his polite and hoarse half whisper; “dar ain’t no flies yet.”
“It’s perfect, Richard. This is the most beautiful spot in the world.”
“Sure,” he answered, softly drawling. “In de war time de Yanks nearly burn d’house heah. Sherman’s Yanks. Sure dey did, po’ful angry wi’ ole Massa dey was, ’cos he hid up d’ silver plate afore he went away. My ole father was de factotalum den. De Yanks took’m, suh; dey took’m; and de major he tell my fader to show’m whar de plate was. My ole fader he look at’m an’ say: ‘Wot yuh take me foh? Yuh take me for a sneakin’ nigger? No, suh, yuh do wot yuh like wid dis chile he ain’t goin’ to act no Judas. No, suh!’ And de Yankee major he put’m up against dat tall live-oak dar, an’ he say: ‘Yu darn ungrateful nigger. I’se come all dis way to set yuh free. Now, whar’s dat silver plate or I shoot yuh up, sure!’ ‘No, suh,’ says my fader, ‘shoot away. I’se never goin’ t’tell.’ So dey begin to shoot, and shot all roun’m to skeer’m up. I was a lil’ boy den, an’ I see my ole fader wid my own eyes, suh, standin’ thar’s bold’s Peter. No, suh, dey didn’t never get no word from him; he loved de folk heah; sure he did.”
The old man smiled; and in that beatific smile I saw not only his perennial pleasure in the well-known story, but the fact that he too would have stood there with the bullets raining round him sooner than betray the folk he loved.
“Fine story, Richard. But—very silly obstinate old man, your father, wasn’t he?”
He looked at me with a sort of startled anger, which slowly broadened into a grin; then broke into soft hoarse laughter.
“Oh! yes, suh, sure! Berry silly obstinacious ole man. Yes, suh, indeed!” And he went off cackling to himself.
He had only just gone when I heard footsteps again behind my azalea clump and Miss Monroy’s voice:
“Your philosophy is that of faun and nymph. But can you play the part?”
“Only let me try.” Those words had such a fevered ring that in imagination I could see Vaness all flushed, his fine eyes shining, his well-kept hands trembling, his lips a little protruded.
There came a laugh, high, gay, sweet.
“Very well then; catch me!” I heard a swish of skirt against the shrubs, the sounds of flight; an astonished gasp from Vaness, and the heavy thud thud of his feet following on the path through the azalea maze. I hoped fervently that they would not suddenly come running past and see me sitting there. My straining ears caught another laugh far off, a panting sound, a muttered oath, a far-away coo-ee! And then, staggering, winded, pale with heat and with vexation, Vaness appeared, caught sight of me and stood a moment—baff! Sweat was running down his face, his hand was clutching at his side, his stomach heaved—a hunter beaten and undignified. He muttered, turned abruptly on his heel, and left me staring at where his fastidious dandyism and all that it stood for had so abruptly come undone.
I know not how he and Miss Monroy got home to Charleston; not in the same car, I guess. As for me, I travelled deep in thought, conscious of having witnessed something rather tragic, not looking forward to my next encounter with Vaness.
He was not at dinner, but the girl was—radiant as ever; and though I was glad she had not been caught I was almost angry at the signal triumph of her youth. She wore a black dress with a red flower in her hair and another at her breast, and had never looked so vital and so pretty. Instead of dallying with my cigar beside cool waters in the lounge of the hotel I strolled out afterwards on the Battery and sat down beside the statue of a tutelary personage. A lovely evening: from some tree or shrub close by emerged an adorable faint fragrance, and in the white electric light the acacia foliage was patterned out against a thrilling blue sky. If there were no fireflies abroad there should have been. A night for hedonists, indeed!
And suddenly there came before me two freaks of vision—Vaness’s well-dressed person, panting, pale, perplexed; and beside him the old darkie’s father, bound to the live-oak, with the bullets whistling past and his face transfigured. There they stood alongside—the creed of pleasure, which depended for fulfilment on its waist measurement; and the creed of love devoted unto death!
‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘which of the two laughs last?’
And just then I saw Vaness himself beneath a lamp; cigar in mouth and cape flung back so that its silk lining shone. Pale and heavy, in the cruel white light, his face had a bitter look. And I was sorry—very sorry, at that moment, for Rupert K. Vaness.
1920.