Visionaries Part 6

Money to spend as idiotically as it is garnered. The world is crazy, I tell you, crazy, to toil as it does. How much cleverer are the apes who won't talk, because, if they did, they would be forced to abandon their lovely free life, put on ugly garments, and work for a living. These animals, for which we have such contempt, are freer than men; they are the Supermen of Nietzsche--Nietzsche whose brain mirrored both a Prometheus and a Napoleon." Quell listened to this speech with indifference. Arved continued:--

"Nor was Nietzsche insane when he went to the asylum. His sanity was blinding in its brilliancy; he voluntarily renounced the world of foolish faces and had himself locked away where he would not hear its foolish clacking. O Silence! gift of the G.o.ds, deified by Carlyle in many volumes and praised by me in many silly words! My good fellow, society, which is always hypocritical, has to build lunatic asylums in self-defence. These polite jails keep the world in countenance; they give it a standard. If _you_ are behind the bars--"

"Speak for yourself," growled Quell.

"Then the world knows that you are crazy and that _it_ is not. There is no other way of telling the difference. So a conspiracy of fools, lawyers, and doctors is formed. If you do not live the life of the stupid: cheat, lie, steal, smirk, eat, dance, and drink--then you are crazy! That fact agreed upon, the hypocrites, who are quite mad, but cunning enough to dissemble, lock behind bolted doors those free souls, the poets, painters, musicians--artistic folk in general. They brand our gifts with fancy scientific names, such as Megalomania, Paranoia, _Folie des grandeurs_. Show me a genius and I'll show you a madman--according to the world's notion."

"There you go again," cried Quell, arising to his knees. "Genius, _I_ believe, is a disease of the nerves; and I don't mind telling you that I consider poets and musicians quite crazy."

Arved's eyes were blazing blue signals.

"But, my dear Quell, are not all men mad at some time or another? Madly in love, religiously mad, patriotically insane, and idiotic on the subject of clothes, blood, social precedence, handsome persons, money?

And is it not a sign of insanity when one man claims sanity for his own particular art? Painting, I admit, is--"

"What the devil do you know about painting?" Quell roughly interposed; "you are a poet and, pretending to love all creation,--altruism, I think your sentimental philosophers call it,--have the conceit to believe you bear a star in your stomach when it is only a craving for rum. I've been through the game."

He began to pace the sward, chewing a blade of gra.s.s. He spoke in hurried, staccato phrases:--

"Why was I put away? Listen: I tried to paint the sun,--for I hate your moon and its misty madness. To put this glorious furnace on canvas is, as you will acknowledge, the task of a G.o.d. It never came to me in my dreams, so I wooed it by day. Above all, I wished to express truth; the sun is black. Think of an ebon sun fringed with its dazzling photosphere! I tried to paint sun-rhythms, the rhythms of the quivering sky, which is never still even when it seems most immobile; I tried to paint the rhythms of the atmosphere, s.h.i.+vering as it is with chords of sunlight and chromatic scales as yet unpainted. Like Oswald Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts, my last cry will be for 'the sun.' How did my friends act? What did the critics say? A black sun was too much for the world, though astronomers have proven my theory correct. The doctors swore I drank too much absinthe; the critics said a species of optical madness had set in; that I saw only the peripheral tints--I was yellow and blue crazy. Perhaps I was, perhaps I am. So is the fellow crazy who invented wireless telegraphy; so is the man off his base who invents a folding bird cage. We are all crazy, and the craziest gang are our doctors at the Hermitage." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Arved rolled his handsome head acquiescingly.

"You poets and musicians are trying to compa.s.s the inane. You are trying to duplicate your dreams, dreams without a hint of the sun. The painter at least copies or interprets real life; while the composer dips his finger in the air, making endless sound-scrolls--noises with long tails and whirligig decorations like foolish fireworks--though I think the art of the future will be pyrotechnics. Mad, mad, I tell you! But whether mad or not matters little in our land of freedom, where all men are born unequal, where only the artists are sad. They are useless beings, openly derided, and when one is caught napping, doing something that offends church or State or society, he is imprisoned. Mad, you know! No wonder anarchy is thriving, no wonder every true artist is an anarch, unavowed perhaps, yet an anarch, and an atheist."

"Not so fast!" interrupted Arved. "I'm an anarchist, but I don't believe in blowing up innocent policemen. Neither do you, Quell. You wouldn't hurt a bartender! Give an anarchist plenty to drink, and he sheds his anarchy like a s.h.i.+rt. There are, I have noticed, three stages in the career of a revolutionist: destruction, instruction, construction. He begins the first at twenty, at forty he is teaching, at sixty he believes in society--especially if he has money in the bank." Quell regarded the speaker sourly.

"You are a wonder, Arved. You fly off on a wild tangent stimulated by the mere sound of a word. Who said anything about dynamite-anarchy?

There's another sort that men of brains--madmen if you will--believe and indirectly teach. Emerson was one, though he hardly knew it. Th.o.r.eau realized it for him, however. Don't you remember his stern rebuke when Emerson visited him in Concord jail: 'Henry, why art thou here?' meekly inquired the mystic man. 'Ralph, why art thou _not_ here?' was the counter-question. Th.o.r.eau had brave nerves. To live in peace in this malicious swamp of a world we must all wear iron masks until we are carted off to the _domino-park_; pious people call it the cemetery. Now, I'm going to sleep. I'm tired of all this jabbering. We are crazy for sure, or else we wouldn't talk so much."

Arved grumbled, "Yes, I've noticed that when a man in an asylum begins to suspect his keepers of madness he's mighty near lunacy himself."

"You have crazy blue eyes, Arved! Where's that flask--I'm dry again!

Let's sleep."

They drained the bottle and were soon dozing, while about them buzzed the noon in all its torrid splendour.

When they awoke it was solid night. They yawned and d.a.m.ned the darkness, which smelt like stale india-rubber, so Quell said. They cursed life and the bitter taste in their mouths. Quell spoke of his thirst in words that startled the easy-going Arved, who confessed that if he could rid himself of the wool in his throat, he would be comparatively happy. Then they stumbled along, b.u.mping into trees, feeling with outstretched arms, but finding nothing to guide them save the few thin stars in the torn foliage overhead. Without watches, they could catch no idea of the hour.

The night was far spent, declared Arved; he discovered that he was very hungry. Suddenly, from the top of a steep, slippery bank they pitched forward into the highroad.

Arved put out his hand, searching for his comrade. "Quell, Quell!" he whispered. Quell rose darkly beside him, a narrow lath of humanity.

Locking arms, both walked briskly until, turning a sharp, short corner, they beheld, all smiling in the night, a summer garden, well lighted and full of gay people, chattering, singing, eating, drinking--happy! The two fugitives were stunned for a moment by such a joyful prospect. Tears came slowly to their eyes, yet they never relaxed their gait. Arriving at an outlying table and seats, they bethought themselves of their appearance, of money, of other disquieting prospects; but, sitting down, they boldly called a waiter.

Luckily it was a country girl who timidly took their order for beer and sandwiches. And they drank eagerly, gobbling the food as soon as it came, ordering more so noisily that they attracted attention. The beer made them brave. As they poured down gla.s.s after gla.s.s, reckless of the reckoning, insolent to the servant, they began wrangling over the subject that had possessed their waking hours.

"Look here, Quell!" Arved exclaimed crustily, "you said I had crazy blue eyes. What about your own red ones? Crazy! Why, they glow now like a rat's. Poets may be music-mad, drunk with tone--"

"And other things," sneered the painter.

"--but at least their work is great when it endures; it does not fade away on rotten canvas."

"Now, I know you ought to be in the Brain-College, Arved, where your friends could take the little green car that goes by the grounds and see you on Sunday afternoons if weather permits."

His accent seemed deliberately insulting to Arved, who, however, let it pa.s.s because of their mutual plight. If they fell to fighting, detection would ensue. So he answered in placatory phrases:--

"Yes, my friend, we both belong to the same establishment, for we are men of genius. As the cat said to Alice, 'We must be mad or else we shouldn't be here.' I started to tell you why my people thought I had better take the cure. I loved the moon too much and loathed sunlight. If I had never tried to write lunar poetry--the tone quality of music combined with the pictorial evocation of painting--I might be in the bosom of my family now instead of--"

"Drinking with a crazy painter, eh?" Quell was very angry. He shouted for drinks so rapidly that he alarmed the more prudent Arved; and as they were now the last guests, the head waiter approached and curtly bade them leave. In an instant he was dripping with beer thrown at him--gla.s.s and all--by the irate Quell. A whistle sounded, two other waiters rushed out, and the battle began. Arved, aroused by the sight of his friend on the ground with three men hammering his head, gave a roar like the trumpeting of an elephant. A chair was smashed over a table, and, swinging one-half of it, he made a formidable onslaught. Two of the waiters were knocked senseless and the leader's nose and teeth crushed in by the rude cudgel. The morose moon started up, a tragic hieroglyph in the pa.s.sionless sky. Quell, seeing its hated disk, howled, his face aflame with exaltation. Then he leaped like a hoa.r.s.ely panting animal upon the poet; a moment and they were in the gra.s.s clawing each other.

And the moon foamed down upon them its magnetic beams until darkness, caused by a coa.r.s.e blanket, enveloped, pinioned, smothered them. When the light shone again, they were sitting in a wagon, their legs tightly bound....

They began singing. The attendant interrupted:--

"Will you fellows keep quiet? How can a man drive straight, listening to your cackle?"

Arved touched his temple significantly and nudged Quell.

"Another one of us. Another rebel of the moon!"

"Shut up or I'll gag you both!" imperiously commanded the doctor, as the wheels of the ambulance cut the pebbly road. They were entering the asylum; now they pa.s.sed the porter's lodge. In the jewelled light of a senescent moon, his wife and little daughter gazed at them curiously, without semblance of pity or fear. Then, as if shot from the same vocal spring-board, the voices of poet and painter merged into crazy rhythmatic chanting:--

"Rebels of the moon, rebels of the moon! We are, we are, the rebels of the moon!"

And the great gates closed behind them with a brazen clangour--metal gates of the moon-rebels.

V

THE SPIRAL ROAD

There can be nothing good, as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient.--_Oriental Proverb._

I

THE STRAND OF DREAMS

"I must see him if only for a minute. I can't go back to the city after coming so far. Please--" but the girl's face disappeared and the rickety door, which had been opened on a chain, was slammed after this imperative speech, and Gerald Shannon found himself staring exasperatedly at its rusty exterior. To have travelled on foot such a distance only to be turned away like a beggar enraged him. Nor was the prospect of returning over the path which had brought him to Karospina's house a cheering one. He turned and saw that a low, creeping mist had obliterated every vestige of the trail across the swamp lands. There was no sun, and the twilight of a slow yellow day in late September would soon, in complicity with the fog, leave him totally adrift on this remote strand--he could hear the curving fall and hiss of the breakers, the monotonous rumour of the sea. So he was determined to face Karospina, even if he had to force his way into the house.

Two hours earlier, at the little railway station, they had informed him that the road was easy flatland for the greater part of the way. He had offered money for a horse or even a wheel; but these were luxuries on this bleak, poverty-ridden coast. As there was no alternative, Gerald had walked rapidly since three o'clock. And he had not been told the truth about the road; where the oozing, green, unwholesome waters were not he stepped, sometimes sinking over his ankles in the soft mud. Not a sign of humanity served him for comfort or compa.s.s. He had been a.s.sured that if he kept his back to the sun he would reach his destination. And he did, but not without many misgivings. It was the vision of a squat tower-like building, almost hemmed in by a monster gas reservoir, fantastic wooden galleries, and the gigantic silhouettes of strange machinery, that relieved his mind. But this house and its surroundings soon repelled him. His reception was the final disenchantment.

He played a lively tattoo with his blackthorn stick on the panels of the door. For five minutes this continued, interspersed with occasional loud calls for Karospina. At last the siege was raised. After preliminary unboltings, unbarrings, and the rattling of the chain, Gerald saw before him a middle-aged man with a smooth face and closely shaven head, who quietly asked his name and business.

"I have a letter for you, Mr. Karospina--if you are that gentleman--and as I have put myself to much trouble in getting to you, I think I deserve a little consideration."

"A letter, my worthy sir! And for me? Who told you to come here? How do you know my name?" This angered the young man.

"It is from Prince K. _The_ Prince. Now are you satisfied?" he added, as his questioner turned red and then paled as if the news were too startling for his nerves.

"Come in, come in!" he cried. "Mila, Mila, here is a guest. Fetch tea to the laboratory." He literally dragged Shannon within doors and led him across a stone corridor to a large room, but not before he had bolted and barred the entrance to his mysterious fortress. Seeing the other's look of quiet amus.e.m.e.nt, he laughed himself:--