Peter Whiffle

by Carl Van Vechten

I explained that I was doing nothing at all and introduced him to my friends. Jennings had an engagement. He explained that he had to talk at some socialist meeting, called our waiter, paid for his pile of saucers, and took his departure. Richards confessed that he was burning too.

What shall we do? asked the artist.

There's plenty to do, announced Peter, confidently; almost too much for one night. But let's hurry over to Serapi's, before he closes his shop.

We asked no questions. We paid our saucers, rose, and strolled along with Peter across the Place in front of the Opéra and down the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin until we stood before a tiny shop, the window of which was filled with bottles of perfume and photographs of actresses and other great ladies of various worlds and countries, all inscribed with flamboyant encomiums, relating to the superior merits of Serapi's wares and testifying to the superlative esteem in which Serapi himself was held.

Led by Peter, in the highest exuberance of nervous excitement but still, I thought, looking curiously tired, we passed within the portal. We found ourselves in a long narrow room, surrounded on two sides by glass cases, in which, on glass shelves, were arranged the products of the perfumer's art. At the back, there was a cashier's desk without an attendant; at the front, the show-window. In the centre of the room, the focus of a group of admiring women, stood a tawny-skinned Oriental—perhaps concretely an Arabian—with straight black hair and soft black eyes. His physique was magnificent and he wore a morning coat. Obviously, this was Serapi himself.

Peter, who had now arrived at a state in which he could with difficulty contain his highly wrought emotion—and it was at this very moment that I began to suspect him of collecting amusements along with his other objects—, in a whisper confirmed my conjecture. The ladies, delicately fashioned Tanagra statuettes in tulle and taffeta and chiffon artifices from the smartest shops, in hats on which bloomed all the posies of the season and posies which went beyond any which had ever bloomed, were much too attractive to be duchesses, although right here I must pause to protest that even duchesses sometimes have their good points: the Duchess of Talleyrand has an ankle and the Duchess of Marlborough, a throat. The picture, to be recalled later when Mina Loy gave me her lovely drawing of Eros being spoiled by women, was so pleasant, withal slightly ridiculous, that Richards and I soon caught the infection of Peter's scarcely masked laughter and our eyes, too, danced. We made some small pretence of examining the jars and bottles of Scheherazade, Ambre, and Chypre in the cases, but only a small pretence was necessary, as the ladies and their Arab paid not the slightest attention to us.

At length, following a brief apology, Serapi broke through the ranks and disappeared through a doorway behind the desk at the back of the room. As the curtains lifted, I caught a glimpse of a plain, business-like woman, too dignified to be a mere clerk, obviously the essential wife of the man of genius. He was gone only a few seconds but during those seconds the chatter ceased abruptly. It was apparent that the ladies had come singly. They were not acquainted with one another. As Serapi reentered, they chirped again, peeped and twittered their twiddling tune, the words of which were Ah! and Oh! In one hand, he carried a small crystal phial to which a blower was attached. He explained that the perfume was his latest creation, an hermetic confusion of the dangers and ardours of Eastern life and death, the concentrated essence of the unperfumed flowers of Africa, the odour of their colours, he elaborated, wild desert existence, the mouldering tombs of the kings of Egypt, the decaying laces of a dozen Byzantine odalisques, a fragrant breath or two from the hanging gardens of Babylon, and a faint suggestion of the perspiration of Istar. It is my reconstruction, the artist concluded, of the perfume which Ruth employed to attract Boaz! The recipe is an invention based on a few half-illegible lines which I discovered in the beauty-table book of an ancient queen of Georgia, perhaps that very Thamar whose portrait has been painted in seductive music by the Slav composer, Balakireff.

The ladies gasped. The fascinating Arab pressed the rubber bulb and blew the cloying vapours into their faces, adjuring them, at the same time, to think of Thebes or Haroun-Al-Raschid or the pre-Adamite sultans. The room was soon redolent with a heavy vicious odour which seemed to reach the brain through the olfactory nerves and to affect the will like ether.

He is the only man alive today, whispered Peter, not without reverence, who has taken Flaubert's phrase seriously. He passes his nights dreaming of larger flowers and stranger perfumes. I believe that he could invent a new vice!

Serapi went the round of the circle with his mystic spray, and the twitterings of the ladies softened to ecstatic coos, like the little coos of dismay and delight of female cats who feel the call of pleasure, when suddenly the phial fell from the Arab's unclasped hand, the hand itself dropped to his side, the brown skin became a vivid green, all tension left his body, and he crumbled into a heap on the floor. The ladies shrieked; there was a delicious, susurrous, rainbow swirl and billow of tulle and taffeta and chiffon; there was a frantic nodding and waving of sweet-peas, red roses, dandelions, and magenta bell-flowers; and eight pairs of white-gloved arms circled rhythmically in the air. The effect was worthy of the Russian Ballet and, had Fokine been present, it would doubtless have been perpetuated to the subsequent enjoyment of audiences at Covent Garden and the Paris Opéra.