A Fortnight of Folly. Maurice Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ more sharply his absurd grotesqueness of appearance than the peculiar waddling gait he assumed as he descended the steep place and passed out of sight, a fish basket bobbing beside him and a red kerchief shining around his throat.

      Everybody looked at his neighbor and smiled inquisitively. Now that they had discovered his name, the question arose: What had Gaspard Dufour ever done that he should be accorded the place of honor in Hotel Helicon. No one (save Crane, in a shadowy way) had ever heard of him before. No doubt they all felt a little twinge of resentment; but Dufour, disappearing down the ravine, had in some unaccountable way deepened his significance.

IV.

       Table of Contents

      Everybody knows that a mountain hotel has no local color, no sympathy with its environment, no gift of making its guests feel that they are anywhere in particular. It is all very delightful to be held aloft on the shoulder of a giant almost within reach of the sky; but the charm of the thing is not referable to any definite, visible cause, such as one readily bases one’s love of the sea-side on, or such as accounts for our delight in the life of a great city. No matter how fine the effect of clouds and peaks and sky and gorge, no matter how pure and exhilarating the air, or how blue the filmy deeps of distance, or how mossy the rocks, or how sweet the water, or how cool the wooded vales, the hotel stands there in an indefinite way, with no raison d’etre visible in its make-up, but with an obvious impudence gleaming from its windows. One cannot deport one’s self at such a place as if born there. The situation demands—nay, exacts behavior somewhat special and peculiar. No lonely island in the sea is quite as isolated and out of the world as the top of any mountain, nor can any amount of man’s effort soften in the least the savage individuality of mountain scenery so as to render those high places familiar or homelike or genuinely habitable. Delightful enough and fascinating enough all mountain hotels surely are; but the sensation that living in one of them induces is the romantic consciousness of being in a degree “out of space, out of time.” No doubt this feeling was heightened and intensified in the case of the guests at Hotel Helicon who were enjoying the added novelty of entire freedom from the petty economies that usually dog the footsteps and haunt the very dreams of the average summer sojourner. At all events, they were mostly a light-hearted set given over to a freedom of speech and action which would have horrified them on any lower plane.

      Scarcely had Gaspard Dufour passed beyond sight down the ravine in search of a trout-brook, than he became the subject of free discussion. Nothing strictly impolite was said about him; but everybody in some way expressed amazement at everybody’s ignorance of a man whose importance was apparent and whose name vaguely and tauntingly suggested to each one of them a half-recollection of having seen it in connection with some notable literary sensation.

      “Is there a member of the French institute by the name of Dufour?” inquired R. Hobbs Lucas, the historian, thoughtfully knitting his heavy brows.

      “I am sure not,” said Hartley Crane, “for I met most of the members when I was last at Paris and I do not recall the name.”

      “There goes that Bourbon again,” muttered Laurens Peck, the critic; “if one should mention Xenophon, that fellow would claim a personal acquaintance with him!”

      It was plain enough that Peck did not value Crane very highly, and Crane certainly treated Peck very coolly. Miss Moyne, however, was blissfully unaware that she was the cause of this trouble, and for that matter the men themselves would have denied with indignant fervor any thing of the kind. Both of them were stalwart and rather handsome, the Kentuckian dark and passionate looking, the New Yorker fair, cool and willful in appearance. Miss Moyne had been pleased with them both, without a special thought of either, whilst they were going rapidly into the worry and rapture of love, with no care for anybody but her.

      She was beautiful and good, sweet-voiced, gentle, more inclined to listen than to talk, and so she captivated everybody from the first.

      “I think it would be quite interesting,” she said, “if it should turn out that Mr. Dufour is a genuine foreign author, like Tolstoï or Daudet or——”

      “Realists, and nobody but realists,” interposed Mrs. Philpot; “why don’t you say Zola, and have done with it?”

      “Well, Zola, then, if it must be,” Miss Moyne responded; “for, barring my American breeding and my Southern conservatism, I am nearly in sympathy with—no, not that exactly, but we are so timid. I should like to feel a change in the literary air.”

      “Oh, you talk just as Arthur Selby writes in his critical papers. He’s all the time trying to prove that fiction is truth and that truth is fiction. He lauds Zola’s and Dostoieffsky’s filthy novels to the skies; but in his own novels he’s as prudish and Puritanish as if he had been born on Plymouth Rock instead of on an Illinois prairie.”

      “I wonder why he is not a guest here,” some one remarked. “I should have thought that our landlord would have had him at all hazards. Just now Selby is monopolizing the field of American fiction. In fact I think he claims the earth.”

      “It is so easy to assume,” said Guilford Ferris, whose romances always commanded eulogy from the press, but invariably fell dead on the market; “but I am told that Selby makes almost nothing from the sales of his books.”

      “But the magazines pay him handsomely,” said Miss Moyne.

      “Yes, they do,” replied Ferris, pulling his long brown mustache reflectively, “and I can’t see why. He really is not popular; there is no enthusiasm for his fiction.”

      “It’s a mere vogue, begotten by the critics,” said Hartley Crane. “Criticism is at a very low ebb in America. Our critics are all either ignorant or given over to putting on English and French airs.”

      Ferris opened his eyes in a quiet way and glanced at Peck who, however, did not appear to notice the remark.

      “There’s a set of them in Boston and New York,” Crane went on, “who watch the Revue de Deux Mondes and the London Atheneum, ready to take the cue from them. Even American books must stand or fall by the turn of the foreign thumb.”

      “That is a very ancient grumble,” said Ferris, in a tone indicative of impartial indifference.

      “Take these crude, loose, awkward, almost obscene Russian novels,” continued Crane, “and see what a furor the critics of New York and Boston have fermented in their behalf, all because it chanced that a coterie of Parisian literary roués fancied the filthy imaginings of Dostoieffsky and the raw vulgarity of Tolstoï. What would they say of you, Ferris, if you should write so low and dirty a story as Crime and Its Punishment by Dostoieffsky?”

      “Oh, I don’t know, and, begging your grace, I don’t care a straw,” Ferris replied; “the publishers would steal all my profits in any event.”

      “Do you really believe that?” inquired Peck.

      “Believe it? I know it,” said Ferris. “When did you ever know of a publisher advertising a book as in its fiftieth thousand so long as the author had any royalty on the sales? The only book of mine that ever had a run was one I sold outright in the manuscript to George Dunkirk & Co., who publish all my works. That puerile effort is now in its ninetieth thousand, while the best of the other six has not yet shown up two thousand! Do you catch the point?”

      “But what difference СКАЧАТЬ