"You like him, yes?" said Cook. "You think he is nice?"
"Oh, Cook!" cried Mrs. Jack in a tone of such childlike earnestness that Cook smiled this time a little more broadly than before. "It is the most beautiful--the most wonderful!--" She turned away with a comical shrug of despair as if words failed her.
Cook laughed gutturally with satisfaction, and Nora, smiling, said:
"Yes, Mrs. Jack, that it is! It's just what I was after tellin' her meself."
Mrs. Jack glanced swiftly at Nora and saw with relief that she was clean and plain and sober. Thank heaven she had pulled herself together! She hadn't taken another drink since morning--that was easy to see. Drink worked on her like poison, and you could tell the moment that she'd had a single one.
Janie and May, passing back and forth between the kitchen and the maid's sitting-room in their trim, crisp uniforms and with their smiling pink faces, were really awfully pretty. Everything had turned out perfectly, better than she could possibly have expected. Nothing had been forgotten. Everything was in readiness. It ought to be a glorious party.
At this moment the buzzer sounded sharply. Mrs. Jack looked startled and said quickly:
"The door-bell rang, Janie." Then, almost to herself: "Now who do you suppose--?"
"Yes'm," said Janie, coming to the door of the maids' sitting-room. "I'll go, Mrs. Jack."
"Yes, you'd better, Janie. I wonder who--" she cast a puzzled look up at the clock on the wall, and then at the little shell of platinum on her wrist. "It's only eight-fifteen! I can't think any of them would be this early. Oh!"--as illumination came--"I think, perhaps, it's Mr. Logan. If it is, Janie, show him in. I'll be right out."
"Yes, Mrs. Jack," said Janie, and departed.
And Mrs. Jack, after another quick look about the kitchen, another smile of thanks and approbation for Cookie and her arts, followed her.
It was Mr. Logan. Mrs. Jack encountered him in the entrance hall where he had just paused to set down two enormous black suitcases, each of which, from the bulging look of them, carried enough weight to strain strong muscles. Mr. Logan's own appearance confirmed this impression. He had seized the biceps of one muscular arm with the fingers of his other hand, and with a rueful look upon his face was engaged in flexing the aching member up and down. As Mrs. Jack approached he turned, a thickset, rather burly-looking young man of about thirty, with bushy eyebrows of a reddish cast, a round and heavy face smudged ruddily with the shaven grain of his beard, a low, corrugated forehead, and a bald head gleaming with perspiration, which he proceeded to mop with his handkerchief.
"Gosh!" said Mr. Piggy Logan, for by this affectionate title was he known to his more intimate acquaintance. "Gosh!"--the expletive came out again, somewhat windy with relief. At the same time he released his aching arm and offered his hostess a muscular and stubby hand, covered thickly on the back up to the very fingernails with large freckles.
"You must be simply dead!" cried Mrs. Jack. "Why didn't you let me know you had so much to carry? I'd have sent a chauffeur. He could have handled everything for you."
"Oh, it's quite all right," said Piggy Logan. "I always manage everything myself. You see, I carry all of it right here--my whole equipment." He indicated the two ponderous cases. "That's it," he said, "everything I use--the whole show. So naturally," he smiled at her quickly and quite boyishly, "I don't like to take any chances. It's all I've got. If anything went wrong--well, I'd just rather do it myself and then I know where I am."
"I know," said Mrs. Jack, nodding her head with quick understanding. "You simply can't depend on others. If anything went wrong--and after all the years you must have put in making them! People who've seen it say it's simply marvellous," she went on. "Everyone is so thrilled to know you're going to be here. We've heard so much about it--really all you hear around New York these days is----"
"Now--" said Mr. Logan abruptly, in a manner that was still courteous but that indicated he was no longer paying any attention to her. He had become all business, and now he walked over to the entrance of the living-room and was looking all about with thoughtful speculation. "I suppose it's going to be in here, isn't it?" he said.
"Yes--that is, if you like it here. If you prefer, we'll use another room, but this is the largest one we have."
"No, thank you," crisply, absently. "This is quite all right. This will do very nicely...Hm!" meditatively, as he pressed his full lower lip between two freckled fingers. "Best place, I should think, would be over there," he indicated the opposite wall, "facing the door here, the people all round on the other three sides...Hm! Yes...Just about the centre there, I should think, posters on the bookshelves...We can clear all this stuff away, of course," he make a quick but expansive gesture with his hand which seemed to dispose of a large part of the furnishings. "Yes! That ought to do it very well!...Now, if you don't mind," he turned to her rather peremptorily and said: "I'll have to change to costume. If you have a room----"
"Oh, yes," she answered quickly, "here, just down the hall, the first room on the right. But won't you have a drink and something to eat before you start? You must be terribly----"
"No, thank you," said Mr. Logan crisply. "It's very nice of you," he smiled swiftly under his bushy brows, "but I never take anything before a performance. Now"--he crouched, gripped the handles of the big cases, and heaved mightly--"if you'll just--excuse me," he grunted.
"Is there anything we can do?" Mrs. Jack asked helpfully.
"No--thank you--nothing," Mr. Logan somewhat gruntingly replied, and began to stagger down the hall with his tremendous freight. "I can--get along--quite nicely--thank you," he grunted as he staggered through the door of the room to which she had directed him; and then, more faintly: "Nothing--at all."
She heard the two ponderous bags hit the floor with a leaden thump, and then Mr. Logan's long, expiring "Whush!" of exhausted relief.
For a moment after the young man's lurching departure, his hostess continued to look after him with a somewhat dazed expression, touched faintly with alarm. His businesslike dispatch and the nonchalance with which he had suggested widespread alterations in her beloved room filled her with vague apprehension. But--she shook her head and reassured herself with sharp decision--it was bound to be all right. She had heard so many people speak of him: he was really all the rage this year, everyone was talking of his show, there had been write-ups of him everywhere. He was the darling of all the smart society crowd--all those "rich" Long Island and Park Avenue people. Here the lady's nostrils curved again in a faint dilation of patronising scorn; nevertheless, she could not help feeling a pleasant sense of triumph that she had landed him.
Yes, Mr. Piggy Logan was the rage that year. He was the creator of a puppet circus of wire dolls, and the applause with which this curious entertainment had been greeted was astonishing. Not to be able to discuss him and his little dolls intelligently was, in smart circles, akin to never having heard of Jean Cocteau or Surrealism; it was like being completely at a loss when such names as Picasso and Brancusi and Utrillo and Gertrude Stein were mentioned. Mr. Piggy Logan and his art were spoken of with the same animated reverence that the knowing used when they spoke of one of these.
And, like all of these, Mr. Piggy Logan and his art demanded their own vocabulary. To speak of them correctly one must know a language whose subtle nuances were becoming more highly specialised month by month, as each succeeding critic outdid his predecessor and delved deeper into the bewildering complexities, the infinite shadings and associations, of Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.
True, at the beginning there had been those among the cognoscenti--those happy pioneers who had got in at the very start of Mr. Piggy Logan's vogue--who had characterised his performance as "frightfully amusing". But that was old stuff, and anyone who now dared to qualify Mr. Logan's art with such a paltry adjective as "amusing" was instantly dismissed as a person of no cultural importance. Mr. Logan's circus had ceased to be "amusing" when one of the more sophis
ticated columnists of the daily press discovered that "not since the early Chaplin has the art of tragic humour through the use of pantomime reached such a faultless elevation."
After this, the procession formed on the right, and each newcomer paid his tribute with a new and more glittering coin. The articles in the daily press were followed by others in all the smarter publications, with eulogistic essays on Mr. Logan and pictures of his little dolls. Then the dramatic critics joined the chorus, and held up the offerings of the current stage to a withering fire of comparative criticism. The leading tragedians of the theatre were instructed to pay special attention to Mr. Logan's clown before they next essayed the role of Hamlet.
The solemn discussions broke out everywhere. Two eminent critics engaged in a verbal duel of such adeptive subtlety that in the end it was said there were not more than seven people in the civilised world who could understand the final passages at arms. The central issue of this battle was to establish whether Mr. Piggy Logan, in his development, had been influenced more by the geometric cubism of the early Picasso or by the geometric abstractions of Brancusi. Both schools of thought had their impassioned followers, but it was finally conceded that the Picassos had somewhat the better of it.
One word from Mr. Logan himself might have settled the controversy, but that word was never spoken. Indeed, he said very little about the hubbub he had caused. As more than one critic significantly pointed out, he had "the essential simplicity of the great artist--an almost childlike naïveté of speech and gesture that pierces straight to the heart of reality." Even his life, his previous history, resisted investigations of the biographers with the impenetrability of the same baffling simplicity. Or, as another critic clearly phrased it: "As in the life of almost all great men of art, there is little in Logan's early years to indicate his future achievement. Like almost all supremely great men, he developed slowly--and, it might almost be said, unheeded--up to the time when he burst suddenly, like a blazing light, upon the public consciousness."
However that may be, Mr. Piggy Logan's fame was certainly blazing now, and an entire literature in the higher aesthetics had been created about him and his puppets. Critical reputations had been made or ruined by them. The last criterion of fashionable knowingness that year was an expert familiarity with Mr. Logan and his dolls. If one lacked this knowledge, he was lower than the dust. If one had it, his connoisseurship in the arts was definitely established and his eligibility for any society of the higher sensibilities was instantly confirmed.
To a future world--inhabited, no doubt, by a less acute and understanding race of men--all this may seem a trifle strange. If so, that will be because the world of the future will have forgotten what it was like to live in 1929.
In that sweet year of grace one could admit with utter nonchalance that the late John Milton bored him and was a large "stuffed shirt". "Stuffed shirts", indeed, were numerous in the findings of the critical gentry of the time. The chemises of such inflated personalities as Goethe, Ibsen, Byron, Tolstoy, Whitman, Dickens, and Balzac had been ruthlessly investigated by some of the most fearless intellects of the day and found to be largely filled with straw wadding. Almost everything and everybody was in the process of being debunked--except the debunkers and Mr. Piggy Logan and his dolls.
Life had recently become too short for many things that people had once found time for. Life was simply too short for the perusal of any book longer than two hundred pages. As for War and Peace--no doubt all "they" said of it was true--but as for oneself--well, one had tried, and really it was quite too--too--oh, well, life simply was too short. So life that year was far too short to be bothered by Tolstoy, Whitman, Dreiser, or Dean Swift. But life was not too short that year to be passionately concerned with Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.
The highest intelligences of the time--the very subtlest of the chosen few--were bored by many things. They tilled the waste land, and erosion had grown fashionable. They were bored with love, and they were bored with hate. They were bored with men who worked, and with men who loafed. They were bored with people who created something, and with people who created nothing. They were bored with marriage, and with single blessedness. They were bored with chastity, and they were bored with adultery. They were bored with going abroad, and they were bored with staying at home. They were bored with the great poets of the world, whose great poems they had never read. They were bored with hunger in the streets, with the men who were killed, with the children who starved, and with the injustice, cruelty, and oppression all round them; and they were bored with justice, freedom, and man's right to live. They were bored with living, they were bored with dying, but--they were not bored that year with Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.
And the Cause of all this tumult? The generating Force behind this mighty sensation in the world of Art? As one of the critics so aptly said: "It is a great deal more than just a new talent that has started just another 'movement': it is rather a whole new universe of creation, a whirling planet which in its fiery revolutions may be expected to throw off its own sidereal systems." All right; It, then--the colossal Genius which had started all this--what was It doing now?
It was now enjoying the privacy of one of the lovely rooms in Mrs. Jack's apartment, and, as if It were utterly unaware of the huge disturbance It had made in the great world, It was calmly, quietly, modestly, prosaically, and matter-of-factly occupied in peeling off Its own trousers and pulling on a pair of canvas pants.
While this momentous happening was taking place, events were moving smoothly to their consummation in other quarters of the house. The swinging door between the dining-room and the kitchen domain kept slatting back and forth as the maids passed in and out to make the final preparations for the feast. Janie came through the dining-room bearing a great silver tray filled with bottles, decanters, a bowl of ice, and tall, lovely glasses. As she set the tray down upon a table in the living-room, the shell-thin glasses chimed together musically, and there was a pleasant jink of bottles and the cold, clean rattle of cracked ice.
Then the girl came over towards the hearth, removed the big brass screen, and knelt before the dancing flames. As she jabbed at the logs with a long brass poker and a pair of tongs there was a shower of fiery sparks, and the fire blazed and crackled with new life. For just a moment she stayed there on her knees in a gesture of sweet maiden grace. The fire cast its radiance across her glowing face, and Mrs. Jack looked at her with a softened glance, thinking how sweet and clean and pretty she was. Then the maid arose and put the screen back in its place.
Mrs. Jack was arranging anew a vase of long-stemmed roses on a small table in the hall and glancing briefly at herself in the mirror above, turned and walked briskly and happily down the broad, deep-carpeted hallway towards her own room. Her husband was just coming from his room. He was fully dressed for the evening. She looked him over with an expert eye, and saw how well his clothes fit him and how he wore them as if they had grown on him.
His manner, in contrast to hers, was calm and sophisticated, wise and knowing. One knew just to look at him that he took excellent care of himself. Here was a man, one felt, who, if he was experienced in the pleasures of the flesh, knew how far to go, and beyond what point lay chaos, shipwreck, and the reef. His wife, taking all this in with a swift and comprehensive glance that missed nothing, despite her air of half-bewildered innocence, was amazed to see how much he knew, and a little troubled to think that he knew even more, perhaps, than she could see or fathom.
"Oh, hello," he said, in a tone of suave courtesy as he bent and kissed her lightly on one cheek.
For just the flick of an instant she was conscious of a feeling of distaste, but then she remembered what a perfect husband he had been, how thoughtful, how good, how devoted, and how, no matter what the unfathomed implications of his eyes might be, he had said nothing--and for all that anyone could prove, had seen nothing. "He's a sweet person," she was thinking as she responded brightly to his greeti
ng:
"Oh, hello, darling. You're all ready, aren't you?...Listen"--she spoke rapidly--"will you look out for the bell and take care of anyone who comes? Mr. Logan is changing his costume in the guest room--won't you look out for him if he needs anything? And see if Edith's ready. And when the guests begin to come you can send the women to her room to take off their wraps--oh, just tell Nora--she'll attend to it! And you'll take care of the men yourself--won't you, dear? You can show them back to your room. I'll be out in a few minutes. If only everything!"--she began in a worried tone, slipping the ring quickly from her finger and slipping it back again. "I do hope everything's all right!"
"But isn't it?" he said blandly. "Haven't you looked?"
"Oh, everything looks perfect!" she cried. "It's really just too beautiful! The girls have behaved wonderfully--only"--the little furrow of nervous tension came between her eyes--"do keep an eye on them, won't you, Fritz? You know how they are if somebody's not round. Something's so likely to go wrong. So please do watch them, won't you, dear? And look out for Mr. Logan. I do hope--" she paused with a look of worried abstraction in her eyes.
"You do hope what?" he said pointedly, with just the suggestion of an ironic grin round the corners of his mouth.
"I do hope he won't"--she began in a troubled tone, then went on rapidly--"He said something about--about clearing away some of the things in the living-room for his show." She looked at him rather helplessly; then, catching the irony of his faint grin, she coloured quickly and laughed richly. "God! I don't know what he's going to do. He brought enough stuff with him to sink a battleship!...Still, I suppose it's going to be all right. Everyone's been after him, you know. Everyone's thrilled at the chance of seeing him. Oh, I'm sure it'll be all right. Don't you think so--hah?"