Peter opened the polished oak wardrobe and extracted therefrom a bottle of Christopher's Finest Old White Scotch Whisky and he began to speak of the advantage of allowing spirits to retain their natural colour, which rarely happens in the case of whisky, although gin is ordinarily to be distinguished in this manner.
Chapter VII
Edith Dale had returned to New York after three years in Florence. Near the old renaissance city, she had purchased an ancient villa in the mountains and had occupied herself during her sojourn there in transforming it into a perfect environment for the amusing people with whom she surrounded herself. The villa originally had been built without a loggia; this was added, together with a salone in the general style of the old house. The lovely Italian garden was restored. Cypresses pointed their dark green cones towards the sky and gardenias bloomed. White peacocks and statues were imported. Then, with her superlatively excellent taste at her elbow, Edith rushed about Italy in her motor, ravishing prie-Dieu, old pictures, fans, china dogs, tapestries, majolica, and Capo di Monte porcelains, carved and gilded renaissance boxes, fantastic Venetian glass girandoles, refectory tables, divans, and divers bibelots, until the villa became a perfect expression of her mood. When every possible accent had been added, she entertained in the evening. Eleanora Duse, a mournful figure in black velvet, stood on the loggia and gazed out over the hills towards Certosa; Gordon Craig postured in the salone; and Gertrude Stein commemorated the occasion in a pamphlet, printed and bound in a Florentine floral wall-paper, which today fetches a good sum in old bookshops, when it can be found at all. To those present at this festa, it seemed, doubtless, like the inauguration of the reign of another Lorenzo the Magnificent. There was, indeed, the prospect that Ease and Grace, Beauty, Wit, and Knowledge, would stroll through these stately and ornate chambers for indefinite months, while hungry artists were being fed in the dining-room. But to Edith, this culminating dreary festivity was the end. She had decorated her villa with its last china dog, and the greatest actress in the world was standing on her loggia. Under the circumstances, further progress in this direction seemed impossible. She was even somewhat chagrined to recall that it had taken her three years to accomplish these things and she resolved to move more quickly in the future. So, packing enough of her treasures to furnish an apartment in New York, she shut the villa door without looking behind her, and booked a passage on the next boat sailing from Genoa.
In New York she found the top floor of an old mansion in Washington Square exactly what she wanted and installed green glass, lovely fabrics, and old Italian furniture against the ivory-white of the walls and the hangings. She accomplished the setting in a week; now she required the further decoration which the human element would afford. Art, for the moment, was her preoccupation and, with her tremendous energy and her rare sagacity and taste, she set about, quite spontaneously, arranging for an exhibition, the first great exhibition of the post-impressionist and cubist painters in New York. This show has now become almost a legend but it was the reality of that winter. It was the first, and possibly the last, exhibition of paintings held in New York which everybody attended. Everybody went and everybody talked about it. Street-car conductors asked for your opinion of the Nude Descending the Staircase, as they asked you for your nickel. Elevator boys grinned about Matisse's Le Madras Rouge, Picabia's La Danse à la Source, and Brancusi's Mademoiselle Pogany, as they lifted you to the twenty-third floor. Ladies, you met at dinner, found Archipenko's sculpture very amusing, but was it art? Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 Gallery had nourished similar ideas for years, spouted like a geyser for three weeks and then, after a proper interval, like Old Faithful, began again. Actresses began to prefer Odilon Redon to Raphael Kirchner. To sum up, the show was a bang-up, whale of a success, quite overshadowing the coeval appearance of the Irish Players, chaperoned by Lady Gregory. It was cartooned, it was caricatured, it was Dr. Frank Craned. Scenes in the current revues at the theatres were devoted to it; it was even mentioned in a burlesque at the Columbia. John Wanamaker advertised cubist gowns and ladies began to wear green, blue, and violet wigs, and to paint their faces emerald and purple. The effects of this æsthetic saturnalia are manifest even today.
Fresh from the quieter insanity of Florence, Edith was intensely amused by all this. It seemed so extraordinarily droll to find the great public awake to the excitement of art. She surrounded herself with as many storm centres as possible. The crowds flocked to her place and she made them comfortable. Pinchbottles and Curtis Cigarettes, poured by the hundreds from their neat pine boxes into white bowls, trays of Virginia ham and white Gorgonzola sandwiches, pale Italian boys in aprons, and a Knabe piano were added to the decorations. Arthur Lee and Lee Simonson, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, Max Weber, Charles Demuth, Bobby Jones—just out of college and not yet a designer of scenery—, Bobby Parker, all the jeunes were confronted with dowagers from the upper East Side, old family friends, Hutchins Hapgood, Ridgely Torrence, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and pretty women. Arguments and discussions floated in the air, were caught and twisted and hauled and tied, until the white salon itself was no longer static. There were undercurrents of emotion and sex.
Edith was the focus of the group, grasping this faint idea or that frail theory, tossing it back a complete or wrecked formula, or she sat quietly with her hands folded, like a Madonna who had lived long enough to learn to listen. Sometimes she was not even at home, for the drawing-room was generally occupied from ten in the morning until midnight. Sometimes—very often, indeed—, she left her guests without a sign and went to bed. Sometimes—and this happened still oftener—, she remained in the room without being present. Andrew Dasburg commemorated this aspect in a painting which he called The Absence of Edith Dale. But always, and Dasburg suggested this in his flame-like portrait, her electric energy presided. She was the amalgam which held the incongruous group together; she was the alembic that turned the dross to gold.
When dulness, beating its tiresome wings, seemed about to hover over the group, she had a habit of introducing new elements into the discussion, or new figures into the group itself, and one day it must have occurred to her that, if people could become so excited about art, they might be persuaded to become excited about themselves too, and so she transferred her interest to the labouring man, to unions, to strikes, to the I.W.W. I remember the first time I saw her talking earnestly with a rough member of the garment-maker's union. Two days later, Bill Haywood, himself, came in and the tremendous presence of the one-eyed giant filled the room, seeming to give it a new consecration. Débutantes knelt on the floor beside him, while he talked simply, but with an enthralling intensity, about the things that interested him, reinforcing his points by crushing the heels of his huge boots into the Shirvan rug or digging his great hands into the mauve tapestry with which the divan was upholstered. Miners, garment-workers, and silk-weavers were the honoured guests in those days. The artists still came but the centre of interest had shifted. Almost half of every day, Edith now spent in Paterson, New Jersey, where the strike of the hour was going on, attending union meetings and helping to carry pickets back and forth in her motor. She continued to be diverted by the ironies and complexities of life.
Recruits to the circle arrived from Europe—for Edith knew half of Europe—; solemn celebrities, tramps, upper Fifth Avenue, Gramercy Park, Greenwich Village, a few actresses—I took Fania Marinoff there several times—were all mixed up with green glass vases, filled with fragrant white lilies, salmon snapdragons, and blue larkspurs, pinchbottles, cigarette stubs, Lincoln Steffens, and the paintings of Marsden Hartley and Arthur B. Davies. Over the whole floated the dominant odours of Coty's chypre and stale beer.
Edith herself was young—about thirty-four—and comely, with a face that could express anything or nothing more easily than any face I have ever seen. It was a perfect mask. She wore lovely gowns of clinging turquoise blue, spinel, and jacinth silks from Liberty's. When she went out, she wrapped herself in more soft silks of contrasting shades, and donned such a hat as Donatello's David wears, graceful with its waving plumes and an avalanche of drooping veils.
I spent whole days at Edith's and was nearly as much amused as she. To be truthful, I dare say I was more amused, because she tired of it before I did. But before these days were over I brought in Peter. I had telephoned Edith that we were coming for dinner and, when we arrived, the rooms were nearly empty, for she found it as easy to rid herself of people as to gather them in. Neith Boyce was there, I remember, her lovely red hair caught in a low knot and her lithe body swathed in a deep blue brocade. There were two young men whose names I never knew, for Edith never introduced anybody and these young men did not interest me sufficiently to compel me to converse with them and they interested Edith so little that they were never allowed to appear again. The dinner, as always, was simple: a soup, roast beef and browned potatoes, peas, a salad of broccoli, a loaf of Italian bread, pats of sweet butter, and cheese and coffee. Bottles of whisky, red and white wine, and beer stood at intervals along the unclothed refectory table. The cynical Tuscan butler, who had once been in the service of Lady Paget, never interrupted the meals to serve these. You poured out what you wanted when you wanted it. The dinner was dull. The young men tried to make an impression on Edith, with a succession of witty remarks of the sort which would have made them exceedingly popular in anything like what Ward McAllister describes as Society as I Have Found It, but it was apparent that their hostess was unaware of their very existence. Neith and I exchanged a few inconsequential phrases concerning D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Peter, dressed as he had been when I met him in the Chinese shop, and even dirtier, was utterly silent. Long before coffee was served, Edith left the table and went into the salon to write letters.