Phases of an Inferior Planet

The girl nodded good-evening, took her seat, and unfolded her napkin. The first gentleman passed her the butter, the second the water-bottle. The first was named Nevins. He was fair and pallid, with a long face that would have been round had nature supplied gratification as well as instinct. His shoulders were high and narrow, suggesting the perpetual shrug with which he met his fate. He was starving upon an artistic career. The second gentleman – Mr. Sellars – was sleek and middle-aged. Providence had intended him for a poet; life had made of him a philosopher – and a plumber. He was still a man of sentiment.

At the head of the table sat Mr. Paul – an apostle of pessimism, whose general flavor marked the pessimist rather than the apostle. The peculiarity of his face was its construction – the features which should have gone up coming down, and the features which should have come down going up. Perhaps had Mr. Paul himself moralized upon the fact, which is not likely, he would have concluded that it was merely a physical expression of his mental attitude towards the universe. He had long since arrived at the belief that whatever came in life was the thing of all others which should have kept away, and its coming was sufficient proof of its inappropriateness. He had become a pessimist, not from passion, but from principle. He had chosen his view of the eternal condition of things as deliberately as he would have selected the glasses with which to survey a given landscape. Having made his choice, he stood to it. No surreptitious favors at the hands of Providence were able to modify his honest conviction of its general unpleasantness.

The remaining persons at this particular table were of less importance. There was Miss Ramsey, the journalist, who was pretty and faded and harassed, and who ate her cold dinner, to which she usually arrived an hour late, in exhausted silence. Miss Ramsey was one whom, her friends said, adversity had softened; but Miss Ramsey herself knew that the softness of adversity is the softness of decay. There was Mr. Ardly, a handsome young fellow, who did the dramatic column of a large daily, and who regarded life as a gigantic jag, facing failure with facetiousness and gout with inconsequence. There was Mr. Morris, who was thin, and Mr. Mason, who was fat, and Mr. Hogarth, who was neither.

The restaurant consisted of a long and queerly shaped room. It had originally been divided into two apartments, but when the house had passed into the present management the partition had been torn down, and two long and narrow tables marked the line where the division had been. The walls were dingy and unpapered. Where the plaster was of an unusual degree of smokiness, several cheap chromos, in cheaper frames, had been hung, like brilliant patches laid upon a dingy background. Above the chromos lingered small bunches of evergreen – faded and dried remnants of the last holiday season – and from the tarnished and fly-specked chandelier hung a withered spray of mistletoe.

The room was crowded. There was not so much as a vacant seat at the tables. The hum of voices passed through the doors and into the rumble of the street without. In a far corner a lady in a blouse of geranium pink was engaged in catching reckless flies for the sustenance of the chameleon upon her breast; nearer at hand a gentleman was polishing his plate and knife with his napkin. It was warm and oppressive, and the voices sounded shrilly through the glare. The girl whom they had called "Miss Musin" looked up with absent-minded abruptness.

"I had as soon wear wooden shoes as eat with a pewter fork!" she remarked, irritably.

Mr. Nevins shook his flaxen head and laid down his spoon.

"So long as it remains a question of forks," he observed, "let us give thanks. Who knows when it may become one of food?" Then he sighed. "If it is only a sacrifice of decency, I'm equal to it, but I refuse to live without food."

"The audacity of youth!" commented Mr. Sellars, the philosopher. "I said the same at your age. But for taking the conceit out of one, commend me to experience."

"From a profound study of the subject," broke in Mr. Paul, grimly, "I have been able to calculate to a nicety that each one of these potatoes, taken internally, lessens an hour of one's existence. As a method of self-destruction" – and he proceeded to help himself – "there is none more efficacious than an exclusive diet of Gotham potatoes. Allow me to pass them." He looked at Miss Musin, but Mr. Nevins rose to the occasion.

"After such an analysis, my gallantry forbids," and he intercepted the dish.

The girl glanced up at him.

"Extinction long drawn out is boring," she said. "And is food the only factor of human life? It may be the most important, I admit, but important things should not always be talked of."

"I declare it quite staggers me," interrupted a cheerful individual, who was Mr. Morris, "to think of the number of things that should not be talked of – some amazingly interesting things, too! Do you know, sometimes I wonder if social intercourse will not finally be reduced to a number of persons assembling to sit in silent meditation upon the subjects which are not to be spoken of? One so soon exhausts the absolutely correct topics."

"We are a nation of prudes," declared Mr. Paul, with emphasis, "and there is no vice that rots a people to the core so rapidly as the vice of prudery. All our good red blood has passed into a limbo of social ostracism along with ladies' legs."

"I was just thinking," commented Mr. Hogarth, who aspired to the rakish and achieved the asinine, "that the last-named subject had been particularly in evidence of late. What with the ballet and the bicycle – " He blushed and glanced at Miss Musin.

She was smiling. "Oh, I don't object," she said, "so long as they are well shaped."

Mr. Nevins upheld her from an artistic stand-point.

"I hold," he said, authoritatively, "that indecency can only exist where beauty is wanting. All beauty is moral. I have noticed in regard to my models – "

"On the contrary," interrupted Mr. Paul, "there is no such thing as beauty. It is merely the creation of a diseased imagination pursuing novelty. We call nature beautiful, but it is only a term we employ to express a chimera of the senses. Nature is not beautiful. Its colors are glaringly defective. It is ugly. The universe is ugly. Civilization is ugly. We are ugly – "

"Oh, Mr. Paul!" said Miss Musin, reproachfully.

"Our one consolation," continued Mr. Paul, in an unmoved voice, "is the knowledge that if we could possibly have been uglier we should have been so created. Providence would have seen to it."

"When Providence provided ugliness," put in Mr. Morris, good-naturedly, "it provided ignorance along with it."

Mr. Ardly, who was eating his dinner with a copy of the Evening Post spread out upon his knees, looked up languidly.

"We are becoming unpleasantly personal," he remarked. "Personalities in conversation should be avoided as sedulously as onions in soup. They are stimulating, but vulgar."

Mr. Paul seized the bait of the unconscious thrower with avidity.

"Vulgarity," he announced, with ringing emphasis, "is the most prominent factor in the universe. It is as essential to our existence as the original slime from which we and it emanated. If there is one thing more vulgar than nature, it is civilization. Whatever remnant of innocence nature left in the mind of man civilization has wiped out. It has debased the human intellect – "

"And deformed the human figure," interpolated Mr. Nevins, with a sigh. "Oh, for the days of Praxiteles!"

The emotionless tones of Mr. Paul flowed smoothly on.

"And if there is one thing more vulgar than civilization, it is art."

Mr. Nevins retorted in a voice of storm.

"Sir," he cried, "art is my divinity!"

"A vulgar superstition," commented Mr. Paul, calmly; and he pointed to a poster beside Mr. Nevins's plate. "You call that art, I suppose?"

Mr. Nevins colored, but met him valiantly. "No," he returned; "I call that bread and meat."

As the girl next him rose from her chair she bestowed upon him an approving smile, which he returned with sentimental interest.

"You haven't finished," he remonstrated, in an aside. "My posters aren't only bread and meat; they are pie – principally pie."

The girl laughed and shook her head.

"And principally pumpkin," she returned. "No, thank you!"

She left the dining-room and mounted the stairs to the fourth landing. Her room was in the front of the house, and the way to it lay through a long and dimly lighted corridor, the floor of which was covered with figured oil-cloth.

As she slipped the key into the lock the door swung back, and a blast of damp air from the open window blew into her face. She crossed the room and stood for a moment with her hand upon the sash, looking down into the street. A train upon the elevated road was passing, and she saw the profiles of the passengers dark against the lighted interior. Clouds of white smoke, blown rearward by the engine's breath, hovered about the track, too light to fall. Then, as the wind chased westward, the clouds were torn asunder, and stray wreaths, deepening into gray, drifted along the cross street leading to the river.

The girl reached out and drew in a can of condensed milk from the fire-escape. Then she lowered the window and turned on the steam-heater in the corner, which set up a hissing monotone.

The room was small and square. There was a half-worn carpet upon the floor, and the walls were covered with cheap paper, the conspicuous feature of which was a sprawling design in green and yellow cornucopias. In one corner stood a small iron bedstead, partially concealed by a Japanese screen, which extended nominal protection to the wash-stand as well. On the wall above the screen an iron hook was visible, from which hung a couple of bath-towels and a scrubbing-brush suspended by a string. Nearer the window there was an upright piano, with a scarf of terra-cotta flung across it and a row of photographs of great singers arranged along the ledge. Here and there on the furniture vivid bits of drapery were pinned over barren places.

But with the proof of a sensuous craving for color a latent untidiness was discernible. Her slippers lay upon the hearth-rug where she had tossed them when dressing for the street; a box of hair-pins had been upset upon the bureau, and a half-open drawer revealed a tangled mass of net veiling.

Throwing her hat and coat upon the bed, the girl turned up the lights, selected a score of "Lucia" from a portfolio under the piano, and, seating herself at the music-stool, struck the key-board with sudden fervor. The light soprano notes rang out, filling the small room with a frail yet penetrating sweetness. It was a clear and brilliant voice, but it was a voice in miniature, of which the first freshness was marred – and it was not the voice for Lucia.

With quick dismay the girl realized it, and rising impatiently, tossed the score upon the carpet and left the piano.

Standing before the long mirror on the wall, she slipped off her walking-gown, letting it fall in a black heap to her feet. Then stepping over it, she kicked it aside and stood with gleaming arms and breast in the flickering gas-light. She loosened her heavy hair, drawing the pins from it one by one, until it fell in a brown mane upon her shoulders.

Doffing her conventional dress, she doffed conventionality as well. She was transformed into something seductive and subtle – something in woman's flesh as ethereal as sea-foam and as vivid as flame.

She smiled suddenly. Then to a humming accompaniment she twirled upon her toes, her steps growing faster and faster until her figure was obscured in the blur of action and her hair flew about her face like the hair of a painted witch.

The words of the air she hummed came with a dash of bravado from between her lips:

" – Ange ou diable,