The Country Of Elusion
The cunning writer will choose an indefinable subject, for he can
then set down his theory of what it is; and next, at length, his
conception of what it is not--and lo! his paper is covered.
Therefore let us follow the prolix and unmapable trail into that
mooted country, Bohemia.
Grainger, sub-editor of Doc's Magazine, closed his roll-top desk,
put on his hat, walked into the hall, punched the "down" button, and
waited for the elevator.
Grainger's day had been trying. The chief had tried to ruin the
magazine a dozen times by going against Grainger's ideas for running
it. A lady whose grandfather had fought with McClellan had brought a
portfolio of poems in person.
Grainger was curator of the Lion's House of the magazine. That day
he had "lunched" an Arctic explorer, a short-story writer, and the
famous conductor of a slaughter-house expose. Consequently his mind
was in a whirl of icebergs, Maupassant, and trichinosis.
But there was a surcease and a recourse; there was Bohemia. He would
seek distraction there; and, let's see--he would call by for Mary
Adrian.
Half an hour later he threaded his way like a Brazilian orchid-
hunter through the palm forest in the tiled entrance hall of the
"Idealia" apartment-house. One day the christeners of apartment-
houses and the cognominators of sleeping-cars will meet, and there
will be some jealous and sanguinary knifing.
The clerk breathed Grainger's name so languidly into the house
telephone that it seemed it must surely drop, from sheer inertia,
down to the janitor's regions. But, at length, it soared dilatorily
up to Miss Adrian's ear. Certainly, Mr. Grainger was to come up
immediately.
A colored maid with an Eliza-crossing-the-ice expression opened the
door of the apartment for him. Grainger walked sideways down the
narrow hall. A bunch of burnt umber hair and a sea-green eye
appeared in the crack of a door. A long, white, undraped arm came
out, barring the way.
"So glad you came, Ricky, instead of any of the others," said the
eye. "Light a cigarette and give it to me. Going to take me to
dinner? Fine. Go into the front room till I finish dressing. But
don't sit in your usual chair. There's pie in it--Meringue.
Kappelman threw it at Reeves last evening while he was reciting.
Sophy has just come to straighten up. Is it lit? Thanks. There's
Scotch on the mantel--oh, no, it isn't,--that's chartreuse. Ask
Sophy to find you some. I won't be long."
Grainger escaped the meringue. As he waited his spirits sank, still
lower. The atmosphere of the room was as vapid as a zephyr wandering
over a Vesuvian lava-bed. Relics of some feast lay about the room,
scattered in places where even a prowling cat would have been
surprised to find them. A straggling cluster of deep red roses in a
marmalade jar bowed their heads over tobacco ashes and unwashed
goblets. A chafing-dish stood on the piano; a leaf of sheet music
supported a stack of sandwiches in a chair. Mary came in, dressed
and radiant. Her gown was of that thin, black fabric whose name
through the change of a single vowel seems to summon visions ranging
between the extremes of man's experience. Spelled with an "^e" it
belongs to Gallic witchery and diaphanous dreams; with an "e" it
drapes lamentation and woe.
That evening they went to the Cafe Andre. And, as people would
confide to you in a whisper that Andre's was the only truly Bohemian
restaurant in town, it may be well to follow them.
Andre began his professional career as a waiter in a Bowery ten-cent
eating-house. Had you seen him there you would have called him
tough--to yourself.
Not aloud, for he would have "soaked" you as quickly as he would
have soaked his thumb in your coffee. He saved money and started a
basement table d'hote in Eighth (or Ninth) Street. One afternoon
Andre drank too much absinthe. He announced to his startled family
that he was the Grand Llama of Thibet, therefore requiring an empty
audience hall in which to be worshiped. He moved all the tables and
chairs from the restaurant into the back yard, wrapped a red table-
cloth around himself, and sat on a step-ladder for a throne. When
the diners began to arrive, madame, in a flurry of despair, laid
cloths and ushered them, trembling, outside. Between the tables
clothes-lines were stretched, bearing the family wash. A party of
Bohemia hunters greeted the artistic innovation with shrieks and
acclamations of delight. That week's washing was not taken in for
two years. When Andre came to his senses he had the menu printed on
stiffly starched cuffs, and served the ices in little wooden tubs.
Next he took down his sign and darkened the front of the house. When
you went there to dine you fumbled for an electric button and
pressed it. A lookout slid open a panel in the door, looked at you
suspiciously, and asked if you were acquainted with Senator
Herodotus Q. McMilligan, of the Chickasaw Nation. If you were, you
were admitted and allowed to dine. If you were not, you were
admitted and allowed to dine. There you have one of the abiding
principles of Bohemia. When Andre had accumulated $20,000 he moved
up-town, near Broadway, in the fierce light that beats upon the
thrown-down. There we find him and leave him, with customers in
pearls and automobile veils, striving to catch his excellently
graduated nod of recognition.
There is a large round table in the northeast corner of Andre's at
which six can sit. To this table Grainger and Mary Adrian made their
way. Kappelman and Reeves were already there. And Miss Tooker, who
designed the May cover for the Ladies' Notathome Magazine. And Mrs.
Pothunter, who never drank anything but black and white highballs,
being in mourning for her husband, who--oh, I've forgotten what he
did--died, like as not.
Spaghetti-weary reader, wouldst take one penny-in-the-slot peep into
the fair land of Bohemia? Then look; and when you think you have
seen it you have not. And it is neither thimbleriggery nor
astigmatism.
The walls of the Cafe Andre were covered with original sketches by
the artists who furnished much of the color and sound of the place.
Fair woman furnished the theme for the bulk of the drawings. When
you say "sirens and siphons" you come near to estimating the
alliterative atmosphere of Andre's.
First, I want you to meet my friend, Miss Adrian. Miss Tooker and
Mrs. Pothunter you already know. While she tucks in the fingers of
her elbow gloves you shall have her daguerreotype. So faint and
uncertain shall the portrait be:
Age, somewhere between twenty-seven and highneck evening dresses.
Camaraderie in large bunches--whatever the fearful word may mean.
Habitat--anywhere from Seattle to Terra del Fuego. Temperament
uncharted--she let Reeves squeeze her hand after he recited one of
his poems; but she counted the change after sending him out with a
dollar to buy some pickled pig's feet. Deportment 75 out of a
possible 100. Morals 100.
Mary was one of the princesses of Bohemia. In the first place, it
was a royal and a daring thing to have been named Mary. There are
twenty Fifines and Heloises to one Mary in the Country of Elusion.
Now her gloves are tucked in. Miss Tooker has assumed a June poster
pose; Mrs. Pothunter has bitten her lips to make the red show;
Reeves has several times felt his coat to make sure that his latest
poem is in the pocket. (It had been neatly typewritten; but he has
copied it on the backs of letters with a pencil.) Kappelman is
underhandedly watching the clock. It is ten minutes to nine. When
the hour comes it is to remind him of a story. Synopsis: A French
girl says to her suitor: "Did you ask my father for my hand at nine
o'clock this morning, as you said you would?" "I did not," he.
replies. "At nine o'clock I was fighting a duel with swords in the
Bois de Boulogne." "Coward!" she hisses.
The dinner was ordered. You know how the Bohemian feast of reason
keeps up with the courses. Humor with the oysters; wit with the
soup; repartee with the entree; brag with the roast; knocks for
Whistler and Kipling with the salad; songs with the coffee; the
slapsticks with the cordials.
Between Miss Adrian's eyebrows was the pucker that shows the intense
strain it requires to be at ease in Bohemia. Pat must come each
sally, mot, and epigram. Every second of deliberation upon a reply
costs you a bay leaf. Fine as a hair, a line began to curve from her
nostrils to her mouth. To hold her own not a chance must be missed.
A sentence addressed to her must be as a piccolo, each word of it a
stop, which she must be prepared to seize upon and play. And she
must always be quicker than a Micmac Indian to paddle the light
canoe of conversation away from the rocks in the rapids that flow
from the Pierian spring. For, plodding reader, the handwriting on
the wall in the banquet hall of Bohemia is "Laisser faire." The gray
ghost that sometimes peeps through the rings of smoke is that of
slain old King Convention. Freedom is the tyrant that holds them in
slavery.
As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper eruct 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 cafes 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, falling 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 straigh-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 Cafe Andre. 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.
"I didn't quite catch the trains," said she. "How long was Mary in
Crocusville?"
"Ten hours and five minutes," I replied.
"Well, then, the story may do," said Minnie.
"But if she had stayed there a week Kappelman would have got his
kiss."
-THE END-
[William Sydney Porter]O Henry's short story: The Country Of Elusion
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