THE DECADENT: BEING THE GOSPEL OF INACTION: WHEREIN ARE SET FORTH IN ROMANCE FORM CERTAIN…

PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR MDCCCXCIII

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I.

HE 3.20 train from Boston slowed up as it drew into a way station, and Malcolm McCann, grim and sullen from his weary ride in the dirt and cinders, the coal-smoke and the fœtid air, the fretting babies and hot, worrying men, that characterise a railway journey in August, hurried out with a grunt of relief.

It was not a pretty station where he found himself, and he glared ill-naturedly around with restless, aggressive eyes. The brick walls, the cheaply grained doors bearing their tarnished legends, "Gents," "Ladies," "Refreshment Saloon," the rough raftered roof over the tracks,—everything was black and grimy with years of smoke, belching even now from the big locomotive, and gathering like an ill-conditioned thunder-cloud over the mob of scurrying, pushing men and women, a mob that swelled and scattered constantly in fretful confusion. A hustling business-man with a fat, pink face and long sandy whiskers, his silk hat cocked on one side in grotesque assumption of jauntiness, tripped over the clay-covered pick of a surly labourer, red of face and sweaty, blue of overalls and mud-coloured of shirt, and as he stumbled over the[Pg 2] annoying implement scowled coarsely, and swore, with his cigar between his teeth.

Ragged and grimy children, hardly old enough to walk, sprawled and scrambled on the dirty platform, and as McCann hurried by, a five-year old cursed shrilly a still more youthful little tough, who answered in kind. Vulgar theatre-bills in rank reds and yellows flaunted on the cindery walls; discarded newspapers, banana-skins, cigar-butts, and saliva were ground together vilely under foot by the scuffling mob. Dirt, meanness, ugliness everywhere,—in the unhappy people no less than in their surroundings.

McCann strode scornfully to the rear of the station and looked vaguely around to see if Aurelian had sent any kind of a conveyance to take him to his home,—of the location of which, save that it was to be reached from this particular station, McCann knew nothing. The prospect was not much better outside than in. The air was thick with fine white dust, and dazzling with fierce sunlight. On one side was a wall of brick tenements, with liquor saloons, cheap groceries, and a fish-market below, all adding their mite to the virulence of the dead, stifling air. Above, men in dirty shirt-sleeves lolled out of the grimy windows, where long festoons of half-washed clothes drooped sordidly. On the other side, gangs of workmen were hurriedly repairing the ravages of a fire that evidently had swept clear a large space in its well-meant but ineffectual attempts at purgation. Gaunt black chimneys wound[Pg 3] with writhing gas-pipes, tottering fragments of wall blistered white on one side, piles of crumbling bricks where men worked sullenly loading blue carts, mingled

with new work, where the walls, girdled with yellow scaffolding, were rising higher, uglier, than before; the plain factory walls with their rows of square windows less hideous by far than those buildings where some ignorant contractor was trying by the aid of galvanised iron to produce an effect of tawdry, lying magnificence. Dump-carts, market-waggons, shabby hacks, crawled or scurried along in the hot dust. A huge dray loaded with iron bars jolted over the granite pavement with a clanging, clattering din that was maddening. In fact, none of the adjuncts of a thriving, progressive town were absent, so far as one could see.

McCann turned away from this spectacle of humiliating prosperity, and ran his eyes over the vehicles about the station, searching for some indication of his friend. He had thought that perhaps Aurelian might come himself; but he saw no sign of a familiar figure, no indication even of any conveyance that might belong to Aurelian Blake. The greater part of the carriages had gone, and now only remained an express-waggon or two, a decrepit old hack, an old-fashioned chaise, one or two nondescript country conveyances, and a particularly gorgeous victoria, drawn by a pair of splendid grey horses, a liveried driver sitting on the box in Ethiopian state. None of these vehicles could possibly belong to the fastidious but democratic[Pg 4] Aurelian, and McCann almost thought his telegram must have miscarried.

A black footman in fawn-coloured livery, wearing a small cockade of scarlet and silver, touched his hat to the sulky traveller.

"Beg yo pahdon, suh, but ah yo Mistuh McCann, Mistuh Malcolm McCann, of Boston, suh?"

"That is my name," said McCann, shortly.

"I have the honnoh to be Mistuh Blake's footman, suh," and he touched the cockade in his hat again. "Will yo have the kindness to follow me, suh?"

There was a touch of servile imperiousness in the voice, and McCann followed in bewildered surprise. "Aurelian Blake's footman"—that did not sound well. Could his pupil have become a backslider in the last two years? "Aurelian Blake's footman"—the idea was surprising in itself; but the fact of the big victoria with its luxurious trappings where he soon found himself being whirled swiftly on through the screaming, clattering city was more surprising still, and not a little disquieting.

The carriage threaded its way through the roaring crowd of vehicles, passing the business part of the city, and entering a tract given over to factories, hideous blocks of barren brick and shabby clapboards, through the open windows of which came the brain-killing whir of heavy machinery, and hot puffs of oily air. Here and there would be small areas between the buildings where foul streams of waste from some[Pg 5] factory of cheap calico would mingle dirtily with pools of green, stagnant water, the edges barred with stripes of horrible pinks and purples where the water had dried under the fierce sun. All around lay piles of refuse,—iron hoops, broken bottles, barrels, cans, old leather stewing and fuming in the dead heat, and everywhere escape-pipes vomiting steam in spurts. Over it all was the roar of industrial civilisation. McCann cast a pitying look at the pale, dispirited figures passing languidly to and fro in the midst of the din and the foul air, and set his teeth closely.

Presently they entered that part of the city where live the poor, they who work in the mills, when they are not on strike, or the mills are not shut down,—as barren of trees or grass as the centre of the city, the baked grey earth trodden hard between the crowded tenements painted lifeless greys, as dead in colour as the clay about them. Children and goats crawled starvedly around or huddled in the hot shadow of the sides of the houses. This passed, and then came the circle of "suburban residences," as crowded almost as the tottering tenements, but with green grass around them. Frightful spectacles these,—"Queen Anne" and colonial vagaries painted lurid colours, and frantic in their cheap elaboration. Between two affected little cottages painted orange and green and with round towers on their corners, stood a new six-story apartment-house with vulgar front of brown stone, "Romanesque" in style, but with long flat sides of cheap[Pg 6] brick. McCann caught the name on the big white board that announced "Suites to let," "Hotel Plantagenet," and grinned savagely.

Then, at last, even this region of speculative horrors came to an end, giving place to a wide country road that grew more and more beautiful as they left the town far behind. McCann's eyebrows were knotted in a scowl. The ghastly nonsense, like a horrible practical joke, that the city had been to him, excited, as it always did, all the antagonism within his rebellious nature. Slowly and grimly he said to himself, yet half aloud, in a tone of deliberation, as though he were cursing solemnly the town he had left: "I hope from my soul that I may live to see the day when that damned city will be a desolate wilderness; when those chimneys shall rise smokeless; when those streets shall be stony valleys between grisly ridges of fallen brick; when Nature itself shall shrink from repairing the evil that man has wrought; when the wild birds shall sweep widely around that desolation that they may not pass above; when only rats and small snakes shall crawl through the ruin of that 'thriving commercial and manufacturing metropolis;' when the very name it

bore in the days of its dirty glory shall have become a synonym for horror and despair!" Having thus relieved himself he laughed softly, and felt better.

Presently a flash of recollection passed over his face, and he eagerly dropped his hand into a side pocket, pulling therefrom a brierwood pipe, discovered with[Pg 7] a sigh of satisfaction that a sweet heel of "Dills Best" still lurked in the bottom of the bowl, and, regardless of the amazement of the immaculate footman, lighted it, and sank back in the cushions, well content. As he smoked, his thoughts went back to Aurelian with some uneasiness. "I am afraid he is a backslider," he mused seriously. "Now, when I went over to England a couple of years ago, he was a good socialist, the best pupil I ever had. He would rail at the world in good set terms, better than I myself. And now he runs a trap like this, with a coon slave for a driver and a footman beside him. Now, I can't lose a man like that; he was a born leader of men, when leaders are what we lack. Besides, he had a lot of money, and we need money as badly as we need leaders. I must get him back some way, if gone he is; and I very much expect bad news from the boy when I get to—Now, what did he

call his place?" he pulled a letter from his pocket, shaking tobacco ashes out of its folds. "Oh, yes, 'Vita Nuova.' Now, why the devil did he name his place that?"

The stubby pipe sucked and sputtered, and McCann knocked the ashes into the road. They had driven already nearly an hour, and he was growing impatient; "how much farther had they to go?" He asked the coachman, who only replied, "Just a fractional bit further, suh," which was indefinite. They left the highway and struck into a hilly road where the hedgerows grew thick on either side, with rough pastures beyond, on the one hand, and on the other thick and[Pg 8] ancient pine forests, where the low sunlight struck under the sighing branches and rested on mossy boulders and level patches of golden ferns. Now and then a grey farmhouse appeared in its orchard, and once they passed a dingy white meeting-house, with pointed wooden spikes on the four corners of its belfry, its green blinds faded a sickly yellow. Just beyond they met the country milk-team with its cantering horses and clattering cans, the driver nodding on his seat, with a watchful collie beside him. Then the pastures on the right ended, and they plunged into deep forests, black,

almost lightless, where the road wound like the bed of a dry torrent in a vast green cañon. The carriage climbed steeply up the rocky road, with no sound around but the rattle of pebbles under the feet of the horses, and the melancholy calling of the wood thrushes. On the crown of the hill heavy wrought-iron gates closed their passage, gates that swung back slowly as the footman whistled twice. They passed through, turned sharply to the left, and in a flash were out of the forest.

Malcolm McCann had not a very keen sense of beauty, but even to him the vision that lay before him startled him into sudden enthusiasm. They were riding along the comb of a ridge of high hills thick with ink-black pine forests to the left, while to the right they swept down in gracious undulations into a basin-shaped valley, the level floor of which was, it may be, something over a thousand acres in extent, shaped like an elongated ellipse, with lofty hills rising on all sides.

[Pg 9]

The sun dropped down and lay on the edge of the world; from the farther side of the valley it poured a suave, golden glory of molten light down over the purple, serrated hills, that lay in the valley like amber wine. Smooth fields of ripening grain and velvet meadow-land chequered the valley irregularly, slim elms and dark, heavy oaks rising among them. In the midst, curling like level smoke, wound a narrow river with black poplars and golden chestnut-trees leaning above. In all the valley was no sign of a dwelling save far away at the distant end, where from the midst of thick foliage rose dark roofs and towers and chimneys, as of some château on the Loire.

McCann caught his breath. "Is that the place?" he said quickly.

"Suh, that is Vita Nuova," answered the footman.

II.

HIS," said Eveleth, languidly, turning his head in the valley of silken pillows until he could see the long figure of Aurelian drooping in the Mexican hammock across the big room through the dim strata of blue smoke that, in the silence, lay almost motionless, swirled now and then into subtle curlings and windings as some drowsy smoker breathed more white vapour into the slowly moving and rising tide,—"This is the[Pg 10] peace of the land of Proserpina, the faultless content of perfect possession. Philistinism is not without honour, for behold! it has conceived and brought forth—the Decadence."

said Aurelian, softly. "It is only a dream after all, even a dream of the land of endless afternoon. There is lotos mingled with the tobacco, but we wake easily."

A deeper voice came from a motionless figure prone on a tiger skin before the crumbling fire. "Opium and Burgundy are not faultless substitutes for the true lotos after all, but—they do very well—for the time."

Murmurs of inarticulate assent rose and faded in the opium-heavy air, and then the smoke grew still again. Now and then a bit of wood fell in the fireplace. Aurelian's narghileh gurgled and sighed in slow cadence. These things were only a modulation of the silence.

The room was vast and dim, seemingly without bounds, save on that side where the violet flames of a drift-wood fire flickered quiveringly, making a centre, a concentration of dull light; for the rest, a mysterious wilderness of rugs and divans, Indian chairs and hammocks, where silent figures lay darkly, each a primal cause of one of the many thin streams of smoke that curled heavily upward;—smoke from[Pg 11] strange and curious pipes from Lahore and Gualior; small sensitive pipes from Japan; here and there the short thick stems of opium-pipes, and by the motionless Mexican hammock a splendid and wonderful hookah with writhing stem. As the thin flames of the dying fire flashed into some sudden brightness, they revealed details unseen in the general gloom,—a vast and precious missal gorgeous with scarlet and gold and purple illumination, open, on a carved oak lectern, spoil of some Spanish monastery; the golden gloom of a Giovanni Bellini reft from its home in Venice, and as yet unransomed; the glint of twisted and gilded glass in an ebony cabinet; great folios and

quartos in ancient bindings of vellum and ivory and old calf-skin, heavily tooled with gold, and with silver and jewelled medallions and clasps, stacked in heaps in careless indifference; the flash and sparkle of a cabinet of gems, the red splendour of old lacquer; the green mystery of wrought jade. And everywhere a heavy atmosphere that lay on the chest like a strange yet desirable dream; the warm, sick odour of tobacco and opium, striving with the perfume of sandal-wood, and of roses that drooped and fluttered in pieces in the hot air.

Around a brazier of green bronze, on the floor, before the fire, lay the three men who were gently breathing in the bland opium, their dark figures radiating from the queer brazier wrought of two ugly dragons chasing each other around a great globe of[Pg 12] Japanese chrystal, the firelight gleaming on the tall glasses of champagne where the little column of gold bubbles rose steadily. The fire fell together, and a leaping flame cast a fitful light on heavy tapestry curtains wrought with the story of the loves of Cupid and Psyche. Its two halves parted slowly, and a flush of red light fell through as, in the midst, appeared a dark figure with closed eyes, swaying softly as it leaned forward, and, while the curtains closed, fell with a long sweep gently toward the brazier,—not as men fall, but as a snake with its head lifted high might advance slidingly, and as it came, droop lower and lower until it rested prone on the uncrushed flowers. So Enderby, heavy with the suave sleep of haschish, came among the smokers and dropped motionless in the midst of the cushions. The movement

set a tall glass quivering until it fell to one side, and the yellow wine sank slowly into the silky fur of a leopard skin.

Aurelian lifted his hand to a gold cord that hung over the hammock. Presently a slim girl with flesh like firelight on ivory, clad in translucent silk of a dusky purple that made no sound as she came, appeared in the darkness of the farther doorway. She came to the hammock where Aurelian was lying.

"Will the honourable master be served with the august saké?" she asked with a voice that was like the fluttering of cherry blossoms in Yoshiwara.

"No, O Shiratsuyu," said Aurelian, drawing the[Pg 13] slim figure toward him, kissing the scarlet mouth that drooped above as he lay full length, looking sleepily upward. "No, O Shiratsuyu, but fill the glasses of the honourable guests with the wine, there on the table."

The girl glided among the drowsy figures, filling the glasses. As she knelt by the brazier to lift the overturned glass, her slim fingers lingered; a head turned sleepily, and, as the lips fell on the little hand, kissed it softly.

At a movement of Aurelian's eyes the girl vanished.

Eveleth half rose to look after her with delight. "Where did you find that bauble, Aurelian?" he said.

Aurelian neither moved nor opened his eyes as he replied, "In Kioto."

"She is more precious than your Delhi topaz."

"She cost me more."

"What is she called?"

"The Honourable White Dew."

"I have never seen her before."

"Nor any other than myself."

"I think she is a dream."

"No, only part of a dream."

"How long will the dream last?"

"Until dawn."

"What is the dawn?"

"Death."

The word roused ungracious thoughts in Eveleth, and he turned his face to the wall, falling into a half[Pg 14] dream. When next he looked toward his host it was at the instigation of low voices. A servant was standing by the hammock,—not the mysterious Japanese girl, but a black boy in a red fez. Aurelian looked toward Eveleth sleepily.

"One is without and craves entrance," said he. "What shall I say to him? He has come as my guest; shall I receive him here?"

"Is he an 'Elect'?"

"No, he is not an 'Elect.'"

"A Philistine then."

"Neither a Philistine, wholly."

"What then?"

"A product of Philistinism, an Agitator."

Eveleth looked vaguely around over the silent room,—at Wentworth, throned in a stately chair of mahogany and brass that had belonged to the great Napoleon, still crowned with the garland of gold bay leaves he had placed on his head after dinner, half in defiance, half in jest, now sleeping, his chibouk lying between his knees; at the abandoned figures motionless about the bronze brazier; at Aurelian, clothed gloriously in a sleeveless gaberdine of blood-red silk over a white crêpe kimono heavy with embroidery; at his own figure half wrapped in a big mantle of rose-coloured damask. And everywhere the stillness of Oriental sleep. As he looked he said dubiously, "An agitator? Do you think an agitator would do—here? Isn't there rather too much to agitate?"

[Pg 15]