As I walked up Pine Street to Van Diemen's Avenue the air was opaque and silent, while the thick, soft flakes that touched my face like chill fingers clung to my coat and balled under my feet. Winter, as we know it not in England, was come at last.
CHAPTER XIII
Miscellany
It has struck me often enough of late that, for an artistic and literary colony, ours is not very acute. For it is a sad and undeniable fact that, now the Carvilles are gone away to live on Staten Island, they seem to have ceased to exist as far as Netley is concerned. We alone seem to have attained to some small knowledge of Mr. Carville's peculiar record and essentially individual philosophy. We alone know the relationship with the celebrated and unfortunate Icarus who achieved international fame by crossing the Atlantic, only to crash to earth, as so often happens, in a comparatively trivial enterprise. Mr. Carville and his family never became the talk of the country club. They roused no interest at the soda-counter of Pakenham's drug-store or in the room behind the bar of Slovitzsky's Hotel on Chestnut Street. Our literary club makes no mention in its List of Authors who have lived in Netley, of Mr. Carville and his Cameos of the Sea. Happy the nations who have no history, they say, and no doubt the aphorism may be applied to families as well. Certainly, if Mr. Carville proposed, as no doubt he did, that his family should attain to felicity by a profound obscurity, he has attained his desire. It is left for Time to show whether Benvenuto Cellini and Giuseppe Mazzini, when they grow up, will emerge from that obscurity and astonish the world with some novel manifestations of the family genius.
But this is to anticipate. The immediate point is that none of our neighbours—not even our own friends, like Williams nor Eckhardt, nor Wederslen nor Confield, which last has a sort of vested interest in Europe which is attested by his much-travelled bag—had any inkling of the story to which they saw us listening as they passed our porch on certain afternoons that fall. How little does Mrs. Wederslen think, for example, that her surmise about the burnt aeroplane was grotesquely wrong! How little does Williams, when he brings us his water-colours, done in that fall-vacation at Bar Harbor, appreciate at its real value our etching of an aeroplane lying across an English hedgerow! Even Miss Fraenkel, I think, has no clear knowledge of Mrs. Carville's part in the tragedy of that New Year's Night. I remarked early in this narrative that Miss Fraenkel's importance in it was of the slightest. Her charming enthusiasm was ever an ignis fatuus leading her into unprofitable bye-ways of conjecture. We have, therefore, the superior position as regards the vanished family who lived next door. We know, as I have said, where they are gone; but we do not tell. It gives us a certain rare æsthetic pleasure to keep our own counsel.
And I think I may say we are qualified, after New Year's Day, to keep any secret, for we kept it from the Metropolitan Press when they invaded us, a dozen strong, to "take our statements." We laugh over it now, that sudden descent of New York "leg-men," breezy, businesslike, well-dressed young gentlemen of the "clean-cut" type; but we were glad enough when they were through asking for facts and photographs and impressions, and had gone, leaving the porch rather mussed-up and the snow in front as though a herd of buffaloes had trampled it. But even this is to anticipate a little.
I have mentioned, somewhere, that our devotion to the purer and less remunerative branches of our respective arts led us occasionally to take a holiday. With a subconscious deference to the advice of our local doctor, that "sedentary folks should sell their automobiles and take long walks," our day's vacation sometimes took us into the country. We had no automobile to sell, unfortunately; but otherwise we carried out the venerable gentleman's instructions by starting early and returning home late in a condition approaching collapse. We thus came to know certain tracts of Passaic and Bergen Counties in a manner quite impossible to the motorist. We struck off roads and took to the wooded hills of the Deer Foot Range. We spent forenoons losing ourselves and then, having eaten our sandwiches and drained our flasks, would pass the rest of the day trying for a predetermined point, but generally emerging into some unknown and delightfully unsuspected valleys of quietness; Sleepy Hollows down which no headless horsemen had ever thundered to startle the wild-fowl sailing low in the evening twilight, and over which the moon would later pour her serene, unearthly radiance; while we, footsore, hungry, thirsty, and quite absurdly elated at our success, would press on towards some twinkle of light in the distance, which told us of refreshment, and possibly a welcome railroad journey home.
It was only natural that, on those rambles which we took after Mr. Carville had begun his story and while he himself was rambling more extensively about the Western Ocean, my friend and I would discuss him and the highly stimulating outlook upon life which his original mind working in a novel medium had engendered. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that he monopolized our interest to the exclusion of Art. Or rather he, as a living and concrete example, became a kind of test, to which we brought a great deal we had thought and seen and read. To me he became significant of even more, for he contravened, in his own life and philosophy, so much that is generally taken for granted in fiction, that I grew doubtful both of him and the conventions he flouted. It had been obvious to me for some years that any advance in imaginative work seemed impossible inasmuch as the most advanced men had found nothing ahead but a stone wall, against which they advanced in vain. The theory that there was a hole in this wall somewhere, through which we could get into a freer air and less trammelled conditions, was attractive enough. We were all looking for this hole, but somehow it had eluded us. I, in my humble way, had groped and analyzed and plotted to find it, but without success, when suddenly it seemed to me I heard a voice from the other side, Mr. Carville's voice, telling us not only what the world looked like out there, but also how he got there. This is no doubt a fanciful picture; but one of Mr. Carville's salient points was the way he, the least fanciful of men, appealed to the fancy of others and painted pictures without the use of violent colours and futile superlatives. And the impersonal note which he maintained did really give to his story the effect of a voice coming over a wall.