You Can't Go Home Again (30 page)

And, like all of these, Mr. Piggy Logan and his art demanded their own vocabulary. To speak of them correctly one must know a language whose subtle nuances were becoming more highly specialised month by month, as each succeeding critic outdid his predecessor and delved deeper into the bewildering complexities, the infinite shadings and associations, of Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.

True, at the beginning there had been those among the cognoscenti—those happy pioneers who had got in at the very start of Mr. Piggy Logan’s vogue—who had characterised his performance as “frightfully amusing”. But that was old stuff, and anyone who now dared to qualify Mr. Logan’s art with such a paltry adjective as “amusing” was instantly dismissed as a person of no cultural importance. Mr. Logan’s circus had ceased to be “amusing” when one of the more sophisticated columnists of the daily press discovered that “not since the early Chaplin has the art of tragic humour through the use of pantomime reached such a faultless elevation.”

After this, the procession formed on the right, and each newcomer paid his tribute with a new and more glittering coin. The articles in the daily press were followed by others in all the smarter publications, with eulogistic essays on Mr. Logan and pictures of his little dolls. Then the dramatic critics joined the chorus, and held up the offerings of the current stage to a withering fire of comparative criticism. The leading tragedians of the theatre were instructed to pay special attention to Mr. Logan’s clown before they next essayed the role of Hamlet.

The solemn discussions broke out everywhere. Two eminent critics engaged in a verbal duel of such adeptive subtlety that in the end it was said there were not more than seven people in the civilised world who could understand the final passages at arms. The central issue of this battle was to establish whether Mr. Piggy Logan, in his development, had been influenced more by the geometric cubism of the early Picasso or by the geometric abstractions of Brancusi. Both schools of thought had their impassioned followers, but it was finally conceded that the Picassos had somewhat the better of it.

One word from Mr. Logan himself might have settled the controversy, but that word was never spoken. Indeed, he said very little about the hubbub he had caused. As more than one critic significantly pointed out, he had “the essential simplicity of the great artist—an almost childlike
naďveté
of speech and gesture that pierces straight to the heart of reality.” Even his life, his previous history, resisted investigations of the biographers with the impenetrability of the same baffling simplicity. Or, as another critic clearly phrased it: “As in the life of almost all great men of art, there is little in Logan’s early years to indicate his future achievement. Like almost all supremely great men, he developed slowly—and, it might almost be said, unheeded—up to the time when he burst suddenly, like a blazing light, upon the public consciousness.”

However that may be, Mr. Piggy Logan’s fame was certainly blazing now, and an entire literature in the higher aesthetics had been created about him and his puppets. Critical reputations had been made or ruined by them. The last criterion of fashionable knowingness that year was an expert familiarity with Mr. Logan and his dolls. If one lacked this knowledge, he was lower than the dust. If one had it, his connoisseurship in the arts was definitely established and his eligibility for any society of the higher sensibilities was instantly confirmed.

To a future world—inhabited, no doubt, by a less acute and understanding race of men—all this may seem a trifle strange. If so, that will be because the world of the future will have forgotten what it was like to live in 1929.

In that sweet year of grace one could admit with utter nonchalance that the late John Milton bored him and was a large “stuffed shirt”. “Stuffed shirts”, indeed, were numerous in the findings of the critical gentry of the time. The chemises of such inflated personalities as Goethe, Ibsen, Byron, Tolstoy, Whitman, Dickens, and Balzac had been ruthlessly investigated by some of the most fearless intellects of the day and found to be largely filled with straw wadding. Almost everything and everybody was in the process of being debunked—except the debunkers and Mr. Piggy Logan and his dolls.

Life had recently become too short for many things that people had once found time for. Life was simply too short for the perusal of any book longer than two hundred pages. As for
War and Peace
—no doubt all “they” said of it was true—but as for oneself—well, one had tried, and really it was quite too—too—oh, well, life simply was too short. So life that year was far too short to be bothered by Tolstoy, Whitman, Dreiser, or Dean Swift. But life was not too short that year to be passionately concerned with Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.

The highest intelligences of the time—the very subtlest of the chosen few—were bored by many things. They tilled the waste land, and erosion had grown fashionable. They were bored with love, and they were bored with hate. They were bored with men who worked, and with men who loafed. They were bored with people who created something, and with people who created nothing. They were bored with marriage, and with single blessedness. They were bored with chastity, and they were bored with adultery. They were bored with going abroad, and they were bored with staying at home. They were bored with the great poets of the world, whose great poems they had never read. They were bored with hunger in the streets, with the men who were killed, with the children who starved, and with the injustice, cruelty, and oppression all round them; and they were bored with justice, freedom, and man’s right to live. They were bored with living, they were bored with dying, but—they were
not
bored that year with Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.

And the Cause of all this tumult? The generating Force behind this mighty sensation in the world of Art? As one of the critics so aptly said: “It is a great deal more than just a new talent that has started just another ‘movement’: it is rather a whole new universe of creation, a whirling planet which in its fiery revolutions may be expected to throw off its own sidereal systems.” All right;
It
, then—the colossal Genius which had started all this—what was It doing now?

It was now enjoying the privacy of one of the lovely rooms in Mrs. Jack’s apartment, and, as if It were utterly unaware of the huge disturbance It had made in the great world, It was calmly, quietly, modestly, prosaically, and matter-of-factly occupied in peeling off Its own trousers and pulling on a pair of canvas pants.

While this momentous happening was taking place, events were moving smoothly to their consummation in other quarters of the house. The swinging door between the dining-room and the kitchen domain kept slatting back and forth as the maids passed in and out to make the final preparations for the feast. Janie came through the dining-room bearing a great silver tray filled with bottles, decanters, a bowl of ice, and tall, lovely glasses. As she set the tray down upon a table in the living-room, the shell-thin glasses chimed together musically, and there was a pleasant jink of bottles and the cold, clean rattle of cracked ice.

Then the girl came over towards the hearth, removed the big brass screen, and knelt before the dancing flames. As she jabbed at the logs with a long brass poker and a pair of tongs there was a shower of fiery sparks, and the fire blazed and crackled with new life. For just a moment she stayed there on her knees in a gesture of sweet maiden grace. The fire cast its radiance across her glowing face, and Mrs. Jack looked at her with a softened glance, thinking how sweet and clean and pretty she was. Then the maid arose and put the screen back in its place.

Mrs. Jack was arranging anew a vase of long-stemmed roses on a small table in the hall and glancing briefly at herself in the mirror above, turned and walked briskly and happily down the broad, deep-carpeted hallway towards her own room. Her husband was just coming from his room. He was fully dressed for the evening. She looked him over with an expert eye, and saw how well his clothes fit him and how he wore them as if they had grown on him.

His manner, in contrast to hers, was calm and sophisticated, wise and knowing. One knew just to look at him that he took excellent care of himself. Here was a man, one felt, who, if he was experienced in the pleasures of the flesh, knew how far to go, and beyond what point lay chaos, shipwreck, and the reef. His wife, taking all this in with a swift and comprehensive glance that missed nothing, despite her air of half-bewildered innocence, was amazed to see how much he knew, and a little troubled to think that he knew even more, perhaps, than she could see or fathom.

“Oh, hello,” he said, in a tone of suave courtesy as he bent and kissed her lightly on one cheek.

For just the flick of an instant she was conscious of a feeling of distaste, but then she remembered what a perfect husband he had been, how thoughtful, how good, how devoted, and how, no matter what the unfathomed implications of his eyes might be, he had said nothing—and for all that anyone could prove, had seen nothing. “He’s a sweet person,” she was thinking as she responded brightly to his greeting:

“Oh, hello, darling. You’re all ready, aren’t you?...Listen”—she spoke rapidly—“will you look out for the bell and take care of anyone who comes? Mr. Logan is changing his costume in the guest room—won’t you look out for him if he needs anything? And see if Edith’s ready. And when the guests begin to come you can send the women to her room to take off their wraps—oh, just tell Nora—she’ll attend to it! And you’ll take care of the men yourself—won’t you, dear? You can show them back to your room. I’ll be out in a few minutes. If only everything!”—she began in a worried tone, slipping the ring quickly from her finger and slipping it back again. “I do hope everything’s all right!”

“But
isn’t
it?” he said blandly. “Haven’t you looked?”

“Oh, everything looks perfect!” she cried. “It’s really just too beautiful! The girls have behaved wonderfully—only”—the little furrow of nervous tension came between her eyes—“do keep an eye on them, won’t you, Fritz? You know how they are if somebody’s not round. Something’s so likely to go wrong. So please do watch them, won’t you, dear? And look out for Mr. Logan. I do hope—” she paused with a look of worried abstraction in her eyes.

“You do hope what?” he said pointedly, with just the suggestion of an ironic grin round the corners of his mouth.

“I do hope he won’t”—she began in a troubled tone, then went on rapidly—“He said something about—about clearing away some of the things in the living-room for his show.” She looked at him rather helplessly; then, catching the irony of his faint grin, she coloured quickly and laughed richly. “God! I don’t know what he’s going to do. He brought enough stuff with him to sink a battleship!...Still, I suppose it’s going to be all right. Everyone’s been after him, you know. Everyone’s thrilled at the chance of seeing him. Oh, I’m sure it’ll be all right. Don’t you think so—hah?”

She looked earnestly at him with an expression of such droll, beseeching inquiry that, unmasked for a moment, he laughed abruptly as he turned away, saying:

“Oh, I suppose so, Esther. I’ll look after it.”

Mrs. Jack went on down the hall, pausing just perceptibly as she passed her daughter’s door. She could hear the girl’s voice, clear, cool, and young, humming the jaunty strains of a popular tune:

“You’re the cream in my coffee—you’re the salt in my stew-w----”

A little smile of love and tenderness suffused the woman’s face as she continued down the hall and entered the next door, which was her own room.

It was a very simple, lovely room, hauntingly chaste, almost needlessly austere. In the centre of one wall stood her narrow little wooden bed, so small and plain and old that it seemed it might almost have served as the bed of a medieval nun, as perhaps it had. Beside it stood the little table with its few books, a telephone, a glass and a silver pitcher, and in a silver frame a photograph of a girl in her early twenties—Mrs. Jack’s daughter, Alma.

Beside the door as one entered there was an enormous old wooden wardrobe, which she had brought from Italy. This contained all her beautiful dresses and her wonderful collection of winglike little shoes, all of them made by hand to fit her perfect little feet. On the opposite wall, facing the door, between two high windows, stood her writing-desk. Between the bed and the windows there was a small drawing-table. It was a single board of white, perfect wood, and on it, arranged with faultless precision, were a dozen sharpened pencils, a few feathery brushes, some crisp sheets of tracing paper on which geometric designs were legible, a pot of paste, a ruler, and a little jar of golden paint. Exactly above this table, hanging from the wall in all the clean beauty of their strength and accuracy, were a triangle and a square.

At the foot of the bed there was a chaise-longue covered with a flowered pattern of old faded silk. There were a few simple drawings, on the walls, and a single painting of a strange, exotic flower. It was such a flower as never was, a dream flower which Mrs. Jack had painted long ago.

Along the wall opposite the bed stood two old chests. One of them, a product of the Pennsylvania Dutch, was carved and coloured in quaint and cheerful patterns, and this contained old silks and laces and the noble Indian saris which she often loved to wear. The other was an old chest of drawers, with a few silver toilet articles and a square mirror on its top.

Mrs. Jack crossed the room and stood before the mirror looking at herself. First she bent forward a little and stared at her face long and earnestly with an expression of childlike innocence. Then she began to turn about, regarding herself from first one angle, then another. She put her hand up to her temple and smoothed her brow. Obviously she found herself good, for her eyes now took on an expression of rapt complacency. There was open vanity in her look as she brooded with smouldering fascination on the thick bracelet around her arm—a rich and sombre chain of ancient India, studded with dull and curious gems. She lifted her chin and looked at her neck,, tracing out with her finger-tips the design of an old necklace which she wore. She surveyed her smooth arms, her bare back, her gleaming shoulders, and the outlines of her breasts and figure, touching, patting, and half-unconsciously arranging with practiced touches the folds of her simple, splendid gown.