"Look," he cried, in the midst of a game of leapfrog in which a number of the younger guests had plunged with desperate glee, "there is the moon. How pitably weak she seems, against this brilliance here! It bears out the theory that art is always finer than nature, and that the theatre is more picturesque than life. Look at what we are doing, this moment! We are imitating pleasure. And will you show me any unconscious pleasure that is so delightful as this?"
By the time people had begun to feel a polite hunger Vane had completed his scheme of having several unwieldy barges brought alongside the Beaurivage. There were two of the clumsy but roomy decks on either side of the slender, shapely yacht. Over this now quite wide space the tables were arranged. While the supper went on, Orson Vane did a little monologue of his own. Nobody paid any attention, but everyone applauded.
"What a scene for a comedy," he explained, proudly surveying the picture of the gaiety before him, "what a delicious scene! It is almost real. I must write a play around it. I have quite made up my mind to devote my life to the theatre. It is the only real life. It touches the emotions at all points; it is not isolated in one narrow field of personality. Have I your permission to put you all in my play? How sweet of you! I shall have a scene where we all race in automobiles. We will be quite like dear little children who have their donkey-races. But I think automobiles are so much more intelligent than donkeys, don't you? And they have such profound voices! Have you ever noticed the intonation of the automobiles here? That one of Mrs. Barrett Weston has a delicate tenor; it is always singing love-songs as if it were tired of life. Then we have bassos, and baritones, and repulsive falsettos. My automobile has a voice like a phonograph. When it bubbles along the avenue I can hear, as plainly as anything, that it is imitating one of the other automobiles. Some automobiles, I suppose, have the true instinct for the theatre. Have you noticed how theatric some of the things are, how they contrive to run away just when everyone is looking?"
"Just like horses," murmured one of his listeners.
"Oh, no; I wouldn't say that. Horses have a merely natural intelligence; it is nothing like the splendidly artificial reasoning of the automobile. The poor horse, I really pity him! He has nothing before him but polo. But how thankful he should be to polo. He was a broncho with disreputable manners; now he is a polo-pony with a neat tail. In time, I dare say, the horse can learn some of the higher civilization of the automobile, just as society may still manage to be as intelligent as the theatre."
The conclusion of that entertainment marked the height of Orson Vane's peculiar fame. The radical newspapers caught echoes of it and invented what they could not transcribe. The young men who owned newspapers had not been invited by Orson Vane, because, in spite of his theatric mania, he had no illusions about the decency of metropolitan journalism. He avowed that the theatre might be a trifle highflavored, but it had, at the least, nothing of the hypocrisy that smothers the town in lies to-day and reads it a sermon to-morrow. The most conspicuous of these newspaper owners went into something like convulsions over what he called the degeneracy of our society. Himself most lamentably in a state of table-d'hotage, this young man trumpeted forth the most bitter editorials against Orson Vane and his doings. He frothed with anarchistic ravings. Finally, since the world will always listen if you only make noise loud enough and long enough, the general public began to believe that Vane was really a dreadful person. He was a leader in the smart set; he stood for the entire family. His taste for the theater would debauch all society. His egoisms would spoil what little of the natural was left in the regions of Vanity Fair. So went the chatter of the man-on-the-street, that mighty power, whom the most insignificant of little men-behind-the-pen can move at will.
One may be ever so immersed in affairs that are not of the world and its superficial doings, yet it is almost impossible to escape some faint echo of what the world is chattering about. Professor Vanlief, who had betaken himself and Jeanette, for the summer, to a little place in the mountains, was finally routed out of his peace by the rumors concerning Orson Vane. The give and take of conversation, even at a little farm-house in the hills, does not long leave any prominent subject untouched. So Augustus Vanlief one morning bought all the morning papers.
He found more than he had wanted. The editorials against the doings of the smart set, the reports of the sermons preached against their goings-on, were especially pregnant that morning.
In another part of the paper he found a line or two, however, that brought him sharply to a sense of necessary action. The lines were these:
"Mr. Arthur Wantage is still seriously ill at Framley Lodge. Unless a decided turn for the better takes place very shortly, it is doubtful if he can undertake his starring season at the usual time this year."