As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper cruet rather than for the shaker of Attic salt. Miss Tooker, with an elbow to business, leaned across the table toward Grainger, upsetting her glass of wine.
«Now while you are fed and in good humor,» she said, «I want to make a suggestion to you about a new cover.»
«A good idea,» said Grainger, mopping the tablecloth with his napkin. «I'll speak to the waiter about it.»
Kappelman, the painter, was the cut–up. As a piece of delicate Athenian wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room with a waiter. That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous, worthy, tax–paying, art–despising biped, released himself from the unequal encounter, carried his professional smile back to the dumb–waiter and dropped it down the shaft to eternal oblivion. Reeves began to make Keats turn in his grave. Mrs. Pothunter told the story of the man who met the widow on the train. Miss Adrian hummed what is still called a chanson in the cafés of Bridgeport. Grainger edited each individual effort with his assistant editor's smile, which meant: «Great! but you'll have to send them in through the regular channels. If I were the chief now—but you know how it is.»
And soon the head waiter bowed before them, desolated to relate that the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so out all trooped into the starry midnight, filling the street with gay laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed by the dull inhabitants of an uninspired world.
Grainger left Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of the Idealia. After he had gone she came down again carrying a small hand–bag, 'phoned for a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station, boarded a 12.55 commuter's train, rode four hours with her burnt–umber head bobbing against the red–plush back of the seat, and landed during a fresh, stinging, glorious sunrise at a deserted station, the size of a peach crate, called Crocusville.
She walked a mile and clicked the latch of a gate. A bare, brown cottage stood twenty yards back; an old man with a pearl–white, Calvinistic face and clothes dyed blacker than a raven in a coal–mine was washing his hands in a tin basin on the front porch.
«How are you, father?» said Mary timidly.
«I am as well as Providence permits, Mary Ann. You will find your mother in the kitchen.»
In the kitchen a cryptic, gray woman kissed her glacially on the forehead, and pointed out the potatoes which were not yet peeled for breakfast. Mary sat in a wooden chair and decorticated spuds, with a thrill in her heart.
For breakfast there were grace, cold bread, potatoes, bacon, and tea.
«You are pursuing the same avocation in the city concerning which you have advised us from time to time by letter, I trust,» said her father.
«Yes,» said Mary, «I am still reviewing books for the same publication.»
After breakfast she helped wash the dishes, and then all three sat in straight–back chairs in the bare–floored parlor.
«It is my custom,» said the old man, «on the Sabbath day to read aloud from the great work entitled the 'Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgy,' by the ecclesiastical philosopher and revered theologian, Jeremy Taylor.»
«I know it,» said Mary blissfully, folding her hands.
For two hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the notes of an oratorio played on the violoncello. Mary sat gloating in the new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden chair brought her. Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's. Jeremy's minor chords soothed her like the music of a tom–tom. «Why, oh why,» she said to herself, «does some one not write words to it?»
At eleven they went to church in Crocusville. The back of the pine bench on which she sat had a penitential forward tilt that would have brought St. Simeon down, in jealousy, from his pillar. The preacher singled her out, and thundered upon her vicarious head the damnation of the world. At each side of her an adamant parent held her rigidly to the bar of judgment. An ant crawled upon her neck, but she dared not move. She lowered her eyes before the congregation—a hundred–eyed Cerberus that watched the gates through which her sins were fast thrusting her. Her soul was filled with a delirious, almost a fanatic joy. For she was out of the clutch of the tyrant, Freedom. Dogma and creed pinioned her with beneficent cruelty, as steel braces bind the feet of a crippled child. She was hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, strait–jacketed, silenced, ordered. When they came out the minister stopped to greet them. Mary could only hang her head and answer «Yes, sir,» and «No, sir,» to his questions. When she saw that the other women carried their hymn–books at their waists with their left hands, she blushed and moved hers there, too, from her right.
She took the three–o'clock train back to the city. At nine she sat at the round table for dinner in the Café André. Nearly the same crowd was there.
«Where have you been to–day?» asked Mrs. Pothunter. «I 'phoned to you at twelve.»
«I have been away in Bohemia,» answered Mary, with a mystic smile.
There! Mary has given it away. She has spoiled my climax. For I was to have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills. It is a hillside that you turn your head to peer at from the windows of the Through Express.
At exactly half past eleven Kappelman, deceived by a new softness and slowness of riposte and parry in Mary Adrian, tried to kiss her. Instantly she slapped his face with such strength and cold fury that he shrank down, sobered, with the flaming red print of a hand across his leering features. And all sounds ceased, as when the shadows of great wings come upon a flock of chattering sparrows. One had broken the paramount law of sham–Bohemia—the law of «Laisser faire.» The shock came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received. With the effect of a schoolmaster entering the play–room of his pupils was that blow administered. Women pulled down their sleeves and laid prim hands against their ruffled side locks. Men looked at their watches. There was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it; it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the ax of the fly cop, Conscience hammering at the gambling–house doors of the Heart.
With their punctilious putting on of cloaks, with their exaggerated pretense of not having seen or heard, with their stammering exchange of unaccustomed formalities, with their false show of a light–hearted exit I must take leave of my Bohemian party. Mary has robbed me of my climax; and she may go.
But I am not defeated. Somewhere there exists a great vault miles broad and miles long—more capacious than the champagne caves of France. In that vault are stored the anticlimaxes that should have been tagged to all the stories that have been told in the world. I shall cheat that vault of one deposit.
Minnie Brown, with her aunt, came from Crocusville down to the city to see the sights. And because she had escorted me to fishless trout streams and exhibited to me open–plumbed waterfalls and broken my camera while I Julyed in her village, I must escort her to the hives containing the synthetic clover honey of town.
Especially did the custom–made Bohemia charm her. The spaghetti wound its tendrils about her heart; the free red wine drowned her belief in the existence of commercialism in the world; she was dared and enchanted by the rugose wit that can be churned out of California claret.
But one evening I got her away from the smell of halibut and linoleum long enough to read to her the manuscript of this story, which then ended before her entrance into it. I read it to her because I knew that all the printing–presses in the world were running to try to please her and some others. And I asked her about it.