"The Eternal Womanly!" he sneered.
"The Eternal Simpleton, you mean. In _that_ swamp of pettiness, idiocy, and materialism, a man of your nature could not long abide. Religion--it has not yet responded to your need. And without faith your sins lose their savour. The arts--you don"t know them all, the Seven Deadly Arts and the One Beautiful Art!" She paused. Her voice had been as the sound of delicate flutes. He was aflame.
"Is there, then, an eighth art?" he quickly asked.
"Would you know it if you saw it?"
"Of course. Where is it, what is it?"
She laughed and took his arm.
"Why did you look at me in church?"
"Because--it was mere chance--no, it may have been the odour of iris. I am mad over perfume. I think it a neglected art, degraded to the function of anointment. I have often dreamed of an art by which a dazzling and novel synthesis of fragrant perfumes would be invented by some genius, some latter-day Rimmel or Lubin whom we could hail as a peer of Chopin or Richard Strauss--two composers who have expressed perfume in tone. Roinard in his Cantiques des Cantiques attempted a concordance of tone, light, and odours. Yes--it was the iris that attracted me."
"But I have no iris about me. I have none now," she simply replied. He faced her.
"No iris? What--?"
"I _thought_ iris," she added triumphantly, as she guided him into one of the side streets off Madison Avenue. He was astounded. She must be a hypnotist, he said to himself. No suggestion of iris clung to her now.
And he remembered that the odour disappeared after they left the church.
He held his peace until they arrived before a brown-stone house of the ordinary kind with an English bas.e.m.e.nt. She took a key from her pocket and, going down several steps, beckoned to him. Baldur followed. His interest in this modern Ca.s.sandra and her bizarre words was too great for him to hesitate or to realize that he would get himself into some dangerous sc.r.a.pe. And was this truly the Mrs. Whistler whose tricks of telepathy and other extraordinary antics had puzzled and angered the wise men of two continents? He did not have much time for reflection. A grilled door opened, and presently he was in a room furnished very much like a physician"s office. Electric bulbs, an open grate, and two bookcases gave the apartment a familiar, cheerful appearance. Baldur sat down on a low chair, and Mrs. Whistler removed her commonplace headgear.
In the bright light she was younger than he had imagined, and her head a beautifully modelled one--broad brows, very full at the back, and the mask that of an emotional actress. Her smoke-coloured eyes were most remarkable and her helmet of hair blue black.
"And now that you are my guest at last, Mr. Baldur, let me apologize for the exercise of my art upon your responsive nerves;" she made this witch-burning admission as if she were accounting for the absence of tea. To his relief she offered him nothing. He had a cigarette between his fingers, but he did not care to smoke. She continued:--
"For some time I have known you--never mind how! For some time I have wished to meet you. I am not an impostor, nor do I desire to pose as the G.o.ddess of a new creed. But you, Irving Baldur, are a man among men who will appreciate what I may show you. You love, you understand, perfumes.
You have even wished for a new art--don"t forget that there are others in the world to whom the seven arts have become a thrice-told tale, to whom the arts have become too useful. All great art should be useless.
Yet architecture houses us; sculpture flatters us; painting imitates us; dancing is pure vanity; literature and the drama, mere vehicles for bread-earning; while music--music, the most useless art as it should have been--is in the hands of the speculators. Moreover music is too s.e.xual--it reports in a more intense style the stories of our loves.
Music is the memory of love. What Prophet will enter the temple of the modern arts and drive away with his divine scourge the vile money-changers who fatten therein?" Her voice was shrill as she paced the room. A very sibyl this, her crest of hair agitated, her eyes sparkling with wrath. He missed the c.u.maean tripod.
"There is an art, Baldur, an art that was one of the lost arts of Babylon until now, one based, as are all the arts, on the senses.
Perfume--the poor, neglected nose must have its revenge. It has outlived the other senses in the aesthetic field."
"What of the palate--you have forgotten that. Cookery, too, is a fine art," he ventured. His smile irritated her.
"Yes, Frenchmen have invented symphonic sauces, they say. But again, eating is a useful art; primarily it serves to nourish the body. When man was wholly wild--he is a mere barbarian to-day--his sense of smell guarded him from his foes, from the beasts, from a thousand dangers.
Civilization, with its charming odours of decay,--have you ever ventured to savour New York?--cast into abeyance the keenest of all the senses.
Little wonder, then, that there was no art of perfume like the arts of vision and sound. I firmly believe the Hindoos, Egyptians, and the Chinese knew of such an art. How account for the power of theocracies?
How else credit the tales of the saints who scattered perfumes--St.
Francis de Paul, St. Joseph of Cupertino, Venturini of Bergamo?"
"But," he interrupted, "all this is interesting, fascinating. What I wish to know is what form your art may take. How marshal odours as melodies in a symphony, as colours on a canvas?" She made an impatient gesture.
"And how like an amateur you talk. Melody! When harmony is infinitely greater in music! Form! When colour is infinitely greater than line! The most profound music gives only the timbre--melodies are for infantile people without imagination, who believe in patterns. Tone is the quality _I_ wish on a canvas, not anxious drawing. So it is with perfumes. I can blend them into groups of lovely harmony; I can give you single notes of delicious timbre--in a word, I can evoke an odour symphony which will transport you. Memory is a supreme factor in this art. Do not forget how the vaguest scent will carry you back to your youthful dreamland. It is also the secret of spiritual correspondences--it plays the great role of bridging s.p.a.ce between human beings."
"I sniff the air promise-crammed," he gayly misquoted. "But when will you rewrite this Apocalypse? and how am I to know whether I shall really enjoy this feast of perfume, if you can simulate the odour of iris as you did an hour ago?"
"I propose to show you an artificial paradise," she firmly a.s.serted. In the middle of the room there was a round table, the top inlaid with agate. On it a large blue bowl stood, and it was empty. Mrs. Whistler went to a swinging cabinet and took from it a dozen small phials. "Now for the incantation," he jokingly said. In her matter-of-fact manner she placed the bottles on the table, and uncorking them, she poured them slowly into the bowl. He broke the silence:--
"Isn"t there any special form of hair-raising invocation that goes with this dangerous operation?"
"Listen to this." Her eyes swimming with fire, she intoned:--
As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: Lo you there, That hillock burning with a brazen glare; Those myriad dusky flames with points aglow Which writhed and hissed and darted to and fro; A Sabbath of the serpents, heaped pell-mell For Devil"s roll-call and some fete in h.e.l.l: Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear.
He did not seem to hear. From out the bowl there was stealing a perfume which overmastered his will and led him captive to the lugubrious glade of the Druids....
III
THE CIRCUS OF CANDLES
Comme d"autres esprits voguent sur la musique, Le mien, o mon amour! nage sur ton parfum.
--BAUDELAIRE.
He was not dreaming, for he saw the woman at the bowl, saw her apartment. But the interior of his brain was as melancholy as a lighted cathedral. A mortal sadness encompa.s.sed him, and his nerves were like taut violin strings. It was within the walls of his skull, that he saw--his mundane surroundings did not disturb his visions. And the waves of dolour swept over his consciousness. A mingling of tuberoses, narcissus, attar of roses, and ambergris he detected in the air--as _triste_ as a morbid nocturne of Chopin. This was followed by a blending of heliotrope, moss-rose, and hyacinth, together with dainty touches of geranium. He dreamed of Beethoven"s manly music when whiffs of apple-blossom, white rose, cedar, and balsam reached him. Mozart pa.s.sed roguishly by in strains of scarlet pimpernel, mignonette, syringa, and violets. Then the sky was darkened with Schumann"s perverse harmonies as jasmine, lavender, and lime were sprayed over him. Music, surely, was the art nearest akin to odour. A superb and subtle chord floated about him; it was composed of vervain, opoponax, and frangipane. He could not conceive of a more unearthly triad. It was music from Parsifal. Through the mists that were gathering he savoured a fulminating bouquet of patchouli, musk, bergamot, and he recalled the music of Mascagni. Brahms strode stolidly on in company with new-mown hay, cologne, and sweet peas. Liszt was interpreted as ylang-ylang, myrrh, and marechale; Richard Strauss, by wistaria, oil of cloves, chypre, poppy, and crab-apple.
Suddenly there developed a terrific orchestration of chromatic odours: ambrosia, ca.s.sia, orange, peach-blossoms, and musk of Tonkin, magnolia, eglantine, hortensia, lilac, saffron, begonia, peau d"Espagne, acacia, carnation, liban, fleur de Takeoka, cypress, oil of almonds, benzoin, jacinth, rue, shrub, olea, clematis, the hediosma of Jamaica, olive, vanilla, cinnamon, petunia, lotus, frankincense, sorrel, neroli from j.a.pan, jonquil, verbena, spikenard, thyme, hyssop, and decaying orchids.
This quintessential medley was as the sonorous blasts of Berlioz, repugnant and exquisite; it swayed the soul of Baldur as the wind sways the flame. There were odours like winged dreams; odours as the plucked sounds of celestial harps; odours mystic and evil, corrupt and opulent; odours recalling the sweet, dense smell of chloroform; odours evil, angelic, and anonymous. They painted--painted by Satan!--upon his cerebellum more than music--music that merged into picture; and he was again in the glade of the Druids. The huge scent-symphony dissolved in a shower of black roses which covered the ground ankle-deep. An antique temple of exotic architecture had thrown open its bronze doors, and out there surged and rustled a throng of Baccha.n.a.lian beings who sported and shouted around a terminal G.o.d, which, with smiling, ironic lips, accepted their delirious homage. White nymphs and brown displayed in choric rhythms the dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, and their goat-hoofed mates gave vertiginous pursuit. At first the pagan gayety of the scene fired the fancy of the solitary spectator; but soon his nerves, disordered by the rout and fatigued by the spoor of so many odours, warned him that something disquieting was at hand. He felt a nameless horror as the sinister bitter odour of honeysuckle, sandalwood, and aloes echoed from the sacred grove. A score of seductive young witches pranced in upon their broomsticks, and without dismounting surrounded the garden G.o.d. A battalion of centaurs charged upon them. The vespertine hour was nigh, and over this iron landscape there floated the moon, an opal b.u.t.ton in the sky. Then to his shame and fear he saw that the Satyr had vanished and in its place there reared the Black Venus, the vile shape of ancient Africa, and her face was the face of Lilith.
The screaming lovely witches capered in fantastic spirals, each sporting a lighted candle. It was the diabolic Circus of the Candles, the infernal circus of the Witches" Sabbath. Rooted to the ground, Baldur realized with fresh amazement and vivid pain the fair beauty of Adam"s prehistoric wife, her luxurious blond hair, her shapely shoulders, her stature of a G.o.ddess--he trembled, for she had turned her mordant gaze in his direction. And he strove in vain to bring back the comforting vision of the chamber. She smiled, and the odours of sandal, coreopsis, and aloes encircled his soul like the plaited strands of her glorious hair. She was that other Lilith, the only offspring of the old Serpent.
On what storied fresco, limned by what worshipper of Satan, had these accursed lineaments, this lithe, seductive figure, been shown! Names of Satanic painters, from h.e.l.l-fire Breughel to Arnold Bocklin, from Felicien Rops to Franz Stuck, pa.s.sed through the halls of Irving Baldur"s memory.
The clangour of the feast was become maddening. He heard the Venus ballet music from Tannhauser entwined with the acridities of aloes, sandal, and honeysuckle. Then the aroma of pitch, sulphur, and a.s.saftida cruelly strangled the other melodic emanations. Lilith, disdaining the shelter of her nymphs and their clowneries, stood forth in all the hideous majesty of aenothea, the undulating priestess of the Abominable Shape. His nerves macerated by this sinful apparition, Baldur struggled to resist her mute command. What was it? He saw her wish streaming from her eyes. Despair! Despair! Despair! There is no hope for thee, wretched earthworm! No abode but the abysmal House of Satan!
Despair, and you will be welcomed! By a violent act of volition, set in motion by his fingers fumbling a small gold cross he wore as a watch-guard, the heady fumes of the orgy dissipated....
He was sitting facing the bowl, and over it with her calm, confidential gaze was the figure of Lilith Whistler.
"Have I proved to you that perfume is the art of arts?" she demanded. He rushed from the room and was shaking the grilled gate in the hallway like a caged maniac, when with a pitying smile she released him. He reached the street at a bound....
... "the evil of perfume, I repeat, was one against which the venerable Fathers of the Church warned the faithful." The preacher"s voice had sagged to a monotone. Baldur lifted his eyes in dismay. Near him sat the same woman, and she still stared at him as if to rebuke him for his abstraction. About her hovered the odour of iris. Had it been only a disturbing dream? Intoxicated by his escape from d.a.m.nation, from the last of the Deadly Arts, he bowed his head in grateful prayer. What ecstasy to be once more in the arms of Mother Church! There, dipped in her l.u.s.tral waters, and there alone would he find solace for his barren heart, pardon for his insane pride of intellect, and protection from the demons that waylaid his sluggish soul. The sermon ended as it began:--
"And the Seven Deadly Sins, beloved brethren, are: Pride, Covetousness, l.u.s.t, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth. _Oremus!_"
"Amen," fervently responded Baldur the Immoralist.
III
THE PURSE OF AHOLIBAH
Lo, this is that Aholibah Whose name was blown among strange seas....
--SWINBURNE.