In town she returned to preoccupations which, for the moment, had
the happy effect of banishing troublesome thoughts. The Welly
Brys, after much debate, and anxious counsel with their newly
acquired friends, had decided on the bold move of giving a
general entertainment. To attack society collectively, when one's
means of approach are limited to a few acquaintances, is like
advancing into a strange country with an insufficient number of
scouts; but such rash tactics have sometimes led to brilliant
victories, and the Brys had determined to put their fate to the
touch. Mrs. Fisher, to whom they had entrusted the conduct of the
affair, had decided that TABLEAUX VIVANTS and expensive music
were the two baits most likely to attract the desired prey, and
after prolonged negotiations, and the kind of wire-pulling in
which she was known to excel, she had induced a dozen fashionable
women to exhibit themselves in a series of pictures which, by a
farther miracle of persuasion, the distinguished portrait
painter, Paul Morpeth, had been prevailed upon to organize.
Lily was in her element on such occasions. Under Morpeth's
guidance her vivid plastic sense, hitherto nurtured on no higher
food than dress-making and upholstery, found eager expression in
the disposal of draperies, the study of attitudes, the shifting
of lights and shadows. Her dramatic instinct was roused by the
choice of subjects, and the gorgeous reproductions of historic
dress stirred an imagination which only visual impressions could
reach. But keenest of all was the exhilaration of displaying her
own beauty under a new aspect: of showing that her loveliness was
no mere fixed quality, but an element shaping all emotions to
fresh forms of grace.
Mrs. Fisher's measures had been well-taken, and society,
surprised in a dull moment, succumbed to the temptation of Mrs.
Bry's hospitality. The protesting minority were forgotten in the
throng which abjured and came; and the audience was almost as
brilliant as the show.
Lawrence Selden was among those who had yielded to the proffered
inducements. If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom
that a man may go where he pleases, it was because he had
long since learned that his pleasures were mainly to be found in
a small group of the like-minded. But he enjoyed spectacular
effects, and was not insensible to the part money plays in their
production: all he asked was that the very rich should live up to
their calling as stage-managers, and not spend their money in a
dull way. This the Brys could certainly not be charged with
doing. Their recently built house, whatever it might lack as a
frame for domesticity, was almost as well-designed for the
display of a festal assemblage as one of those airy
pleasure-halls which the Italian architects improvised to set off
the hospitality of princes. The air of improvisation was in fact
strikingly present: so recent, so rapidly-evoked was the whole
MISE-EN-SCENE that one had to touch the marble columns to learn
they were not of cardboard, to seat one's self in one of the
damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it was not painted against
the wall.
Selden, who had put one of these seats to the test, found
himself, from an angle of the ball-room, surveying the scene with
frank enjoyment. The company, in obedience to the decorative
instinct which calls for fine clothes in fine surroundings, had
dressed rather with an eye to Mrs. Bry's background than to
herself. The seated throng, filling the immense room without
undue crowding, presented a surface of rich tissues and jewelled
shoulders in harmony with the festooned and gilded walls, and the
flushed splendours of the Venetian ceiling. At the farther end of
the room a stage had been constructed behind a proscenium arch
curtained with folds of old damask; but in the pause before the
parting of the folds there was little thought of what they might
reveal, for every woman who had accepted Mrs. Bry's invitation
was engaged in trying to find out how many of her friends had
done the same.
Gerty Farish, seated next to Selden, was lost in that
indiscriminate and uncritical enjoyment so irritating to Miss
Bart's finer perceptions. It may be that Selden's nearness had
something to do with the quality of his cousin's pleasure; but
Miss Farish was so little accustomed to refer her enjoyment of
such scenes to her own share in them, that she was merely
conscious of a deeper sense of contentment.
"Wasn't it dear of Lily to get me an invitation? Of course
it would never have occurred to Carry Fisher to put me on
the list, and I should have been so sorry to miss seeing it
all-and especially Lily herself. Some one told me the ceiling was
by Veronese--you would know, of course, Lawrence. I suppose it's
very beautiful, but his women are so dreadfully fat. Goddesses?
Well, I can only say that if they'd been mortals and had to wear
corsets, it would have been better for them. I think our women
are much handsomer. And this room is wonderfully becoming--every
one looks so well! Did you ever see such jewels? Do look at Mrs.
George Dorset's pearls--I suppose the smallest of them would pay
the rent of our Girls' Club for a year. Not that I ought to
complain about the dub; every one has been so wonderfully kind.
Did I tell you that Lily had given us three hundred dollars?
Wasn't it splendid of her? And then she collected a lot of money
from her friends--Mrs. Bry gave us five hundred, and Mr. Rosedale
a thousand. I wish Lily were not so nice to Mr. Rosedale, but she
says it's no use being rude to him, because he doesn't see the
difference. She really can't bear to hurt people's feelings--it
makes me so angry when I hear her called cold and conceited! The
girls at the dub don't call her that. Do you know she has been
there with me twice?--yes, Lily! And you should have seen their
eyes! One of them said it was as good as a day in the country
just to look at her. And she sat there, and laughed and talked
with them--not a bit as if she were being CHARITABLE, you know,
but as if she liked it as much as they did. They've been asking
ever since when she's coming back; and she's promised me---oh!"
Miss Farish's confidences were cut short by the parting of the
curtain on the first TABLEAU--a group of nymphs dancing across
flower-strewn sward in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli's
Spring. TABLEAUX VIVANTS depend for their effect not only on the
happy disposal of lights and the delusive-interposition of layers
of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision.
To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement
of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive
fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between
fact and imagination. Selden's mind was of this order: he could
yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the
spell of a fairy-tale. Mrs. Bry's TABLEAUX wanted none of
the qualities which go to the producing of such illusions, and
under Morpeth's organizing hand the pictures succeeded each other
with the rhythmic march of some splendid frieze, in which the
fugitive curves of living flesh and the wandering light of young
eyes have been subdued to plastic harmony without losing the
charm of life.
The scenes were taken from old pictures, and the participators
had been cleverly fitted with characters suited to their types.
No one, for instance, could have made a more typical Goya than
Carry Fisher, with her short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated
glow of her eyes, the provocation of her frankly-painted smile. A
brilliant Miss Smedden from Brooklyn showed to perfection the
sumptuous curves of Titian's Daughter, lifting her gold salver
laden with grapes above the harmonizing gold of rippled hair and
rich brocade, and a young Mrs. Van Alstyne, who showed the
frailer Dutch type, with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes
and lashes, made a characteristic Vandyck, in black satin,
against a curtained archway. Then there were Kauffmann nymphs
garlanding the altar of Love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny
textures, pearl-woven heads and marble architecture; and a
Watteau group of lute-playing comedians, lounging by a fountain
in a sunlit glade.
Each evanescent picture touched the vision-building faculty in
Selden, leading him so far down the vistas of fancy that even
Gerty Farish's running commentary--"Oh, how lovely Lulu Melson
looks!" or: "That must be Kate Corby, to the right there, in
purple"--did not break the spell of the illusion. Indeed, so
skilfully had the personality of the actors been subdued to the
scenes they figured in that even the least imaginative of the
audience must have felt a thrill of contrast when the curtain
suddenly parted on a picture which was simply and undisguisedly
the portrait of Miss Bart.
Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of
personality--the unanimous "Oh!" of the spectators was a tribute,
not to the brush-work of Reynolds's "Mrs. Lloyd" but to the flesh
and blood loveliness of Lily Bart. She had shown her artistic
intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could
embody the person represented without ceasing to be
herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into,
Reynolds's canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by
the beams of her living grace. The impulse to show herself in a
splendid setting--she had thought for a moment of representing
Tiepolo's Cleopatra--had yielded to the truer instinct of
trusting to her unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen a
picture without distracting accessories of dress or surroundings.
Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which
she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that
swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble
buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace,
revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always
felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with
her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he
seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the
trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a
note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.
"Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad,
there isn't a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she
wanted us to know it!"
These words, uttered by that experienced connoisseur, Mr. Ned Van
Alstyne, whose scented white moustache had brushed Selden's
shoulder whenever the parting of the curtains presented any
exceptional opportunity for the study of the female outline,
affected their hearer in an unexpected way. It was not the first
time that Selden had heard Lily's beauty lightly remarked on, and
hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured his
view of her. But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt.
This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by
which she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a
judgment on Miranda?
In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel
the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus
detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out
suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had
once met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing
to be with her again.
He was roused by the pressure of ecstatic fingers. "Wasn't she
too beautiful, Lawrence? Don't you like her best in that simple dress?
It makes her look like the real Lily--the Lily I know."
He met Gerty Farish's brimming gaze. "The Lily we know," he
corrected; and his cousin, beaming at the implied understanding,
exclaimed joyfully: "I'll tell her that! She always says you
dislike her."
The performance over, Selden's first impulse was to seek Miss
Bart. During the interlude of music which succeeded the TABLEAUX,
the actors had seated themselves here and there in the audience,
diversifying its conventional appearance by the varied
picturesqueness of their dress. Lily, however, was not among
them, and her absence served to protract the effect she had
produced on Selden: it would have broken the spell to see her too
soon in the surroundings from which accident had so happily
detached her. They had not met since the day of the Van Osburgh
wedding, and on his side the avoidance had been intentional.
Tonight, however, he knew that, sooner or later, he should find
himself at her side; and though he let the dispersing crowd drift
him whither it would, without making an immediate effort to reach
her, his procrastination was not due to any lingering resistance,
but to the desire to luxuriate a moment in the sense of complete
surrender.
Lily had not an instant's doubt as to the meaning of the murmur
greeting her appearance. No other tableau had been received with
that precise note of approval: it had obviously been called forth
by herself, and not by the picture she impersonated. She had
feared at the last moment that she was risking too much in
dispensing with the advantages of a more sumptuous setting, and
the completeness of her triumph gave her an intoxicating sense of
recovered power. Not caring to diminish the impression she had
produced, she held herself aloof from the audience till the
movement of dispersal before supper, and thus had a second
opportunity of showing herself to advantage, as the throng poured
slowly into the empty drawing-room where she was standing.
She was soon the centre of a group which increased and renewed
itself as the circulation became general, and the individual
comments on her success were a delightful prolon
gation of
the collective applause. At such moments she lost something of
her natural fastidiousness, and cared less for the quality of the
admiration received than for its quantity. Differences of
personality were merged in a warm atmosphere of praise, in which
her beauty expanded like a flower in sunlight; and if Selden had
approached a moment or two sooner he would have seen her turning
on Ned Van Alstyne and George Dorset the look he had dreamed of
capturing for himself.
Fortune willed, however, that the hurried approach of Mrs.
Fisher, as whose aide-de-camp Van Alstyne was acting, should
break up the group before Selden reached the threshold of the
room. One or two of the men wandered off in search of their
partners for supper, and the others, noticing Selden's approach,
gave way to him in accordance with the tacit freemasonry of the
ball-room. Lily was therefore standing alone when he reached her;
and finding the expected look in her eye, he had the satisfaction
of supposing he had kindled it. The look did indeed deepen as it
rested on him, for even in that moment of self-intoxication Lily
felt the quicker beat of life that his nearness always produced.
She read, too, in his answering gaze the delicious confirmation
of her triumph, and for the moment it seemed to her that it was
for him only she cared to be beautiful.
Selden had given her his arm without speaking. She took it in
silence, and they moved away, not toward the supper-room, but
against the tide which was setting thither. The faces about her
flowed by like the streaming images of sleep: she hardly noticed
where Selden was leading her, till they passed through a glass
doorway at the end of the long suite of rooms and stood suddenly
in the fragrant hush of a garden. Gravel grated beneath their
feet, and about them was the transparent dimness of a midsummer
night. Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the depths of
foliage, and whitened the spray of a fountain falling among
lilies. The magic place was deserted: there was no sound but the
splash of the water on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of
music that might have been blown across a sleeping lake.
Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene
as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have
surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or
to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a
starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than
the sweetness of being alone in it together. At length Lily
withdrew her hand, and moved away a step, so that her white-robed
slimness was outlined against the dusk of the branches. Selden
followed her, and still without speaking they seated themselves
on a bench beside the fountain.
Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a
child. "You never speak to me--you think hard things of me," she
murmured.
"I think of you at any rate, God knows!" he said.
"Then why do we never see each other? Why can't we be friends?
You promised once to help me," she continued in the same tone, as
though the words were drawn from her unwillingly.
"The only way I can help you is by loving you," Selden said in a
low voice.
She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft
motion of a flower. His own met it slowly, and their lips
touched. She drew back and rose from her seat. Selden rose too,
and they stood facing each other. Suddenly she caught his hand
and pressed it a moment against her cheek.
"Ah, love me, love me--but don't tell me so!" she sighed with her
eyes in his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped
through the arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the
room beyond.
Selden stood where she had left him. He knew too well the
transiency of exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but
presently he reentered the house and made his way through the
deserted rooms to the door. A few sumptuously-cloaked ladies were
already gathered in the marble vestibule, and in the coat-room he
found Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor.
The former, at Selden's approach, paused in the careful selection
of a cigar from one of the silver boxes invitingly set out near
the door.
"Hallo, Selden, going too? You're an Epicurean like myself, I
see: you don't want to see all those goddesses gobbling terrapin.
Gad, what a show of good-looking women; but not one of
'em could touch that little cousin of mine. Talk of
jewels--what's a woman want with jewels when she's got herself to
show? The trouble is that all these fal-bals they wear cover up
their figures when they've got 'em. I never knew till tonight
what an outline Lily has."
