Horsechestnut
Compilers’ Note
The subjoined paper, so happily cast in narrative form, could not have been omitted from this compilation without gravely lessening at once the charm and value of the work; its inclusion, however, has been arranged only after extraordinary efforts on the part, not only of the compilers, but also, they are happy to testify, on that of the talented author herself—a figure as impressive and delightful among antiquers as her name, among critics and patrons of the modern American novel, is authoritative and inspiring. Her charming little story, although read by her in person at the March session of the Academy, in 1923, seemed for a time to be impossible of republication here; her contract with her publisher, a person of highly developed commercial instincts, restrains her from publishing through any other channel, and in the face of united persuasion on the part of Professor Kilgallen and the author herself, this gentleman has stood firmly on the precise letter of his bargain. Fortunately, however, the advice of counsel was procured, with the result that the compilers are permitted to reproduce the paper, although denied the pleasure and privilege of accrediting it to the author by name.
This prohibition would cause them a distress far more acute, nevertheless, were they not wholly confident that the identity of the author will be transparently evident to every antiquer and to all lovers of her colorful literary art.
I
The room was subtly instinct with—James Femms admitted to an inchoate, egocentric admonition—default. Tormented by an awareness of distress, alien, vicarious, yet poignantly perceptible, his consciousness opposed, almost with petulance, his endeavors to confine it to—in fulfilment of his trust and purpose—spleening.
Loss; separation; sundering—the words formed themselves in characters feathery and funereal as the cross-stitch letter of a Garfield wall-motto; they contrived to make themselves, above the florid, valiant persuasions of the auctioneer, audible. There was, James Femms informed himself, even an overtone, as of an adscititious dolor, inexpressible by any clumsy symbolism of syllables; he seemed, indeed, to experience, at second-hand, those first lingual explorations, incredulous and baffled, of the wistful void where but the ache and memory of the tooth remain.
James Femms put forth the power of his will against his habit of thinking in such intorted, raffled inversions as these. Confronted by a problem, he resolved to ratiocinate straightforwardly, in a manner as candidly unintricate as the spleened finials of the porte-chapeaux which, at the moment, engaged the brazen eloquence of the vendor. He would not think, he decided, in the style of an Empire girandole, but in the direct and honest simplicity of, say, that spleened and half-groined becket.
This was James Femms, not as he had been, but as he had come to be, a man colored by the years, so that his glass—a walnut caracole, wonderfully woodmarked—seemed to invest him with a patina, so that, indeed, he resembled one of those Victorian antiques, ornately ruinous, which were the dominant, as it were, of his existence. His passion for the lost art of the period had come to affect him in cunning, secret ways, to inform his spirit with a cold flame of rebellion against himself and his environment; he detested his body, designed, he reflected bitterly, after the Roycroft manner and as innocent of decorative values; he abandoned, in his moments of surrender, the artless names which had been foisted on his helpless infancy; he ceased to think of himself as James Femms, and softened, mellowed, ornamented the harsh, stern sounds with Gallic fancies. In his dreams he became a figure of romance, pinch-waisted, nobly whiskered, an illustration from a time-stained page of “Godey’s Lady’s-Book,” a man who could bear, with corseted grace, a name like Jambes des Femmes!
He became, for the time being, this Jambes des Femmes; he looked about him with the very elegance and grace of a des Femmes. The salon, he observed, was filled by people for whom Jambes des Femmes must feel no more than a gently supercilious distaste; there were faces familiar enough to James Femms: Kitchler, the bulbous, raffish dealer, one sienna eye cocked contemptuously at the porte-chapeaux, a fleshpot finger lifted in token of a careless bid; there were others as foreign to the mood of Jambes des Femmes—sly, chaffering professionals and the inevitable scattering of amateurs. Here, he concluded, there was no one capable of setting up in him those telepathic vibrations of which, baffled and distrait, he was obstinately aware.
His glance moved back to the porte-chapeaux. He had examined it, of course, before the sale and decided, with a lingering regret, to make no offer for it. Horsechestnut—he discarded the coarse term; James Femms must use it, when he spoke, but Jambes des Femmes might think in more gracious wise: noisette à cheval—it was a fine piece, des Femmes admitted, a magnificent affair, save for but the one fatal defect. And he had always, he reflected, adored noisette à cheval.
Again he was pervaded by the haunting awareness of an elusive, poignant melancholy. His eyes moved to the spurious becket—to the discerning scrutiny of James Femms a palpable counterfeit, a thing so obvious and crude that even Kitchler, with the three originals to scream their warning, might have noticed it—not even hand-wrought groining, des Femmes pronounced, a clumsy fraud, grouted, at a guess, and bench-gammoned to trick the eye of ignorance!
It seemed to des Femmes that his atrabilious depression found its focus here. He lifted himself to see more clearly; was it—could it be—that he felt the yearning of those sundered parts, the shame and longing of the porte-chapeaux for that ravished becket? Had his sympathy, his passion for noisette à cheval refined his perceptions to a delicacy so incredible, so splendid? He dallied wistfully with the thought and put it from him. Not even Jambes des Femmes could have attained a receptivity so exquisite.
Suddenly, as the voice of the auctioneer became premonitory, James Femms moved in his chair. He remembered Sonoff!
As if hours instead of years were overlaid upon the recollection he could see that porte-chapeaux in Sonoff’s entresol, its lovely amber tone warmed by the crimson wall! It was Sonoff’s!
Jambes des Femmes saw him, as he had been—Sonoff the debonair, high on the crest of his wave, Sonoff, the greatest artist of his time! And now—abruptly, ineludibly, came the thought—and now, even the art was dead!
Dead. Since that day of Sonoff’s greatness men had been born, lived out their lives, died, without knowing that the art had ever lived! Jambes des Femmes tasted the bitterness of it; he saw Sonoff, behind the great râtelier of bells, his hands flashing like the lustres of bobèches on a girandole, from the elfin-tinkling tinniness of the soprano to the rugent clamor of the bass! Sonoff, a Russian, had taught the Swiss their place!
“Grandes fromages,” Sonoff would say. “Let them yodel!”
And now—!
Sonoff, beggared, reduced to the shrewd torment of testing the timbre of telephone bells for a niggard pittance, and Sonoff’s porte-chapeaux, degraded and disfigured by that pinchbeck becket, going, for the last, third time to Kitchler!
James Femms lifted his catalogue.
II
The bassines, at least, James Femms admitted, were good. Sound bronze—he stiffened as memory quickened in him. Gently his finger-nail tapped their margins and a hushed whispering resonance seemed to bring an audible perfume into the chamber. James Femms nodded. It had been Sonoff’s whimsy to have these bassines cast and toned in bell-metal—one to sound the low A flat and the other the D that Sonoff had loved best of all his bells.
The bassines, at least, were possible under James Femms’s roof. But the porte-chapeaux itself, with a fraudulent becket? James Femms negated the suggestion with a resolute, peremptory movement of his head. He set his shoulder to the task of thrusting the piece before him to the open porch. He closed the door upon it. Except for the bassines, it would have been better, after all, to let Kitchler have it; perhaps, even now, he could let Kitchler persuade him to part with it—not too easily, of course; it would be simple to pick up another pair of bassines, in place of these. There were two in Reading, Femms remembered, and, he thought, another pair in a junk-shop on the edge of Camden.
Yes, he would let Kitchler have it, at a price. He lifted the two bassines and brought their edges softly together, inclining his head to catch the moonlit fragrance of their conjoined note. He carried them to his bedroom; he would keep them here, on either side of the Benjamin Harrison bureau. He set them on the twin plackets that jutted out from the mirror-frame.
III
Sleep eluded James Femms. Isolated in umbrageous stillness, the grosser sensory reactions no longer obstructed the reception of what, he now conceded, must be the telepathic apperceptions of sixth or seventh sense. Below the coverlet his body, resentful under mysterious reproaches from without, expressed its unrest in gyratory saltations; his mind ached and quivered in sympathy with baffling emotions of which his awareness was so acute that it all but equalled experience itself.
He was cognizant, dimly but with certitude, of a relation between these sufferings and the presence, the propinquity, at least, of the porte-chapeaux that had been Sonoff’s. Again he contemplated the hypothesis that understanding and affection had established between James Femms and the inanimate objects of his passion, a rapprochement, a rapport analogous to, if not identical with, the sympathy that unites the sundered halves of a spiritual union. Below, from the doorstep, the porte-chapeaux of Mikail Sonoff seemed, to James Femms, to upraise a muted ululation, a sound of exquisite desire, as pitiful and penetrant as the call of the widowed wood-dove. He came, at last, to the window, a panel of translucent pressed glass surrounded by a bordure of plaquettes, each of a different primary color, now delicately diminished in the pallor of a moon as cold, Femms thought, as the belly facet of a flounder.
He slept with the window, after the mode which he sensed intuitively would have been that of Jambes des Femmes, closed. Lifting it, now, and shivering in the humid inrush of nocturnal airs, he identified the crooning note; the leprous, unchaste cry of feline concupiscence. Femms’s sibilant ejaculation motivated a flitting shadow; the gashed silence seemed to lick its wounds; there was stillness, but not, for James Femms, peace.
Rising, later in the night, convinced at last that his spirit was troubled by the yearning of the bassines to be reunited to their original source, he bore them down and left them in the embrace of the porte-chapeaux.
Sleep coquetted with him, now, a sleep of caprice, through which, more remotely, James Femms continued to respond to that inanimate yearning, palliated but still passionately unsatisfied.
IV
A dawn of gusts, with spurts of disingenuous rain, revived James Femms; dressing, he avoided the candor of his glass, harried now by a recurrent thought of Sonoff.
He seemed, indeed, to see the old sonneur, abroad in this malicious weather, his battered parapluie, its proper service forgotten, serving him but as a staff, his garments maculate with party-colored inlays, his glorious hair unhatted.
Distantly, elusively, James Femms sensed, now, a relationship between his inchoate mental gropings and that whimsy of Mikail Sonoff. He knew that the old musician, his ears envenomed by the clack of telephone bells, suffered hideously from headache, but did he, James Femms demanded of himself, walk bareheaded in the rains to cool that throbbing capital, or was it, perhaps, because of some sentiment less practical—because of some profound attachment to a hat, too deeply loved, which, lost at last, had moved Sonoff to vow, in this respect, perpetual celibacy? Or was it...?
James Femms, percipient though he was, must have failed to draw that gossamer inference; it was an inspiration worthy of the finesse of Jambes des Femmes himself! He saw, now, with a sudden utter certitude, that Sonoff bared his splendid finial to the elements because a hat, any hat, must have revived and deepened his yearning for the porte-chapeaux, the porte-chapeaux of noisette à cheval that symbolized all the grace and splendor of Sonoff’s ravished youth!
And, as if the ghostly emanations of the porte-chapeaux had sought him out in whatever beggar’s den now harbored his decay, had called him forth and guided him hereward, Sonoff himself passed before James Femms’s window, a figure of compassion, a spectacle as insidiously saddening as that Wagner Palace Car which James Femms had once beheld degraded to the indignity of a nocturnal, nickel restaurant.
James Femms cried out to him, the sacrifice already made. Sonoff should have it for his own again, without money and without price!
V
“Headache? And what head would not ache, good little Jambes des Femmes?”
James Femms remembered that it was Sonoff’s quaint pronunciation of his detested name that had first suggested the thought of changing it, in his secret meditations, to the softened grace, the Parisian flavor, of Jambes des Femmes. A rush of gratitude welled in him.
“Sonoff—I have guessed.” He laid his hand horizontally above the pocket where he carried his priceless stylograph, filigreed in the very flower of the Rutherford B. Hayes manner. “It is the heart that aches. And I have found the cure. Come!”
Silently he led the antique sonneur through the entresol and to the porch.
“There!” He flung his hand in a wide, fine gesture.
Sonoff blinked.
“Mon porte-chapeaux.” He spoke with no zest, no vestige of his quondam joie de vivre. “I tired of it, Jambes.”
“Take it. I give it back to you!” James Femms repeated the wide arc of his flourish.
“But I no longer want it.” Sonoff shook his head and raised a hand to it as if in sudden pain. “I wear no ’at, mon brave Jambes. The pain—ah!”
Again his features were intorted.
“You won’t take it?” James Femms disbelieved. Surging up in his consciousness, innegable, compelling, he felt that conviction of mute, poignant yearning for reunity which had obsessed him from the first.
“I cannot. It saddens me to behold it. It stirs, mon vieux, memories. Ah—the pain—the pain.” He pressed spatulate fingers to his temples and a groan forced passage between his teeth. “It comes back to me at the sight.”
“It makes your head ache—the porte-chapeaux?” James Femms regarded him incredulously.
“But yes. It was then that they began, the headaches—the night that the becket lost itself. I woke, that day, happy; they had listened, enfin, those adder-deaf imbeciles of the telephone; the bells were tuned at last to the F sharp; I was free from the ignominy of the E—— I sang, that day, my friend. I was gaie! I laughed as I snatched up my hat from the becket where, of old habit, I had hung it. Lightly, as a schoolboy is light, I placed it on my head; I tilted it; I was myself, the self that took them by storm that night in Philadelphia when I rang the overture from ‘Wilhelm Tell,’ using my feet for the basso profundo! All day among my new bells I was that self. And at night, returning with song in my heart and a tin of caviare and a carache of vodka below my arms, I was that self. But ah, when I would have slept—the pain—the pain, mon Jambes! I shudder at the thought of it! I walked the floor in torment, as how often I have walked it since.”
He pressed his temples again.
“And it was while I walked that I observed the vanishment of the becket. It was gone. I do not know where, nor how—I only know that the sight of the porte-chapeaux was hateful. I could not endure to behold it. I sold it, and the pain, if no less, was easier to bear.”
James Femms heard him as one who listens to the opaque ventriloquial speech of dreams. Dimly, remotely, but with a dawning fervor of conviction, understanding burst in upon him. He lifted his hands in a swift, furtive movement; his fingers penetrated the plush-like silky depths of Sonoff’s hair. They closed upon a surface that James Femms knew as intimately by touch as if his eyes beheld it through his worm-hole lens. Delicately, with the merciful cruelty of the surgeon, disregarding the anguished shriek of his patient, he drew forth the missing becket. A profound, shuddering sigh came from Sonoff.
With hands that thrilled voluptuously at the delicious caress of that spleened surface, but still were swift and sure to their task, James Femms replaced the becket in its emplacement and stood back, his eyes intoxicated with the charm of the perfect spleen-craft, the cool, proud beauty of the hand-groined base.
The ether, like a restless, moaning sea upon which an instant calm descends, was permeated with a vast, abiding peace.
Sonoff clasped James Femms to him, kissed his cheeks.
“The pain! It is gone! Ah, mon cher Jambes des Femmes—what can I say to you—how shall I repay you?”
James Femms said nothing. His eyes, held and fascinated, drank in the fragrant loveliness of the amber noisette à cheval, thrilled under the thin, silvery aroma of its melodious oneness.
He was but distantly aware of a voice, Sonoff’s voice, far-away, elfin-sweet with the echoes of a hundred blending bells.
“Keep it, Jambes des Femmes, keep it always in proof and token of my gratitude! Keep it, des Femmes, in memory of Mikail Sonoff Sonoffovitch!”
James Femms did not know that he had gone.
A WORD ON POONING
By
Augustula Thomas