I would almost
have thought of Medusa or Berenice myself without having such things
suggested to me, upon seeing and studying that hair. "Sometimes I thought it moved slightly of itself, and tended to arrange
itself in distinct ropes or strands, but this may have been sheer
illusion. She brushed it incessantly, and seemed to use some sort of
preparation on it. I got the notion once, a curious, whimsical notion,
that it was a living thing which she had to feed in some strange way. All nonsense--but it added to my feeling of constraint about her and
her hair. "For I can't deny that I failed to like her wholly, no matter how hard
I tried. Something about her repelled me subtly, and I could not help
weaving morbid and macabre associations about everything connected
with her. Her complexion called up thoughts of Babylon, Atlantis,
Lemuria, and the terrible forgotten dominations of an elder world; her
eyes struck me sometimes as the eyes of some unholy forest creature
or animal-goddess too immeasurably ancient to be fully human; and her
hair--that dense, exotic, overnourished growth of oily jet--made one
shiver as a great black python might have done. There was no doubt but
that she realized my involuntary attitude, though I tried to hide it,
and she tried to hide the fact that she noticed it. "Yet the boy's infatuation lasted. He positively fawned on her, and
overdid all the little gallantries of daily life to a sickening
degree. She appeared to return the feeling, though I could see it
took a conscious effort to make her duplicate his enthusiasms and
extravagances. For one thing, I think she was piqued to learn that we
weren't as wealthy as she had expected. "It was a bad business all told. I could see that sad undercurrents
were arising. Denis was half hypnotized with puppy-love, and began to
grow away from me as he felt my shrinking from his wife. This kind of
thing went on for months, and I saw that I was losing my only son, the
boy who had formed the center of all my thoughts and acts for the past
quarter of a century. "Marceline seemed to be a good wife enough in those early months, and
our friends received her without any quibbling or questioning. I was
always nervous, though, about what some of the young fellows in Paris
might write home to their relatives after the news of the marriage
spread around. Despite the woman's love of secrecy, it couldn't remain
hidden forever; indeed Denis had written a few of his closest friends,
in strict confidence, as soon as he was settled with her at Riverside. "I got to staying more and more alone in my room with my failing health
as an excuse. It was about that time that my present spinal neuritis
began to develop. Denis didn't seem to notice the trouble, or take any
interest in me and my habits and affairs; and it hurt me to see how
callous he was getting. I began to get sleepless, and often racked my
brain in the night to try to find out what really was the matter--what
it really was that made my new daughter-in-law so repulsive and even
dimly horrible to me. "Oddly, the only ones who seemed to share my uneasiness were the
servants. The darkies around the house seemed very sullen in their
attitude toward her, and in a few weeks all save the few who were
strongly attached to our family had left. These few--old Scipio and
his wife Sarah, the cook Delilah, and Mary, Scipio's daughter, were
as civil as possible, but plainly revealed that their new mistress
commanded their duty rather than their affection. They stayed in their
own remote part of the house as much as possible. McCabe, our white
chauffeur, was insolently admiring rather than hostile; and another
exception was a very old Zulu woman, said to have come from Africa over
a hundred years before, who had been a sort of leader in her small
cabin as a kind of family pensioner. Old Sophonisba always showed
reverence whenever Marceline came near her, and one time I saw her kiss
the ground where her mistress had walked. Blacks are superstitious
animals, and I wondered whether Marceline had been talking any of her
mystical nonsense to our hands in order to overcome their evident
dislike. "Well, that's how we went on for nearly half a year. Then, in the
summer of 1916, things began to happen. Toward the middle of June
Denis got a note from his old friend Frank Marsh, telling of a sort of
nervous breakdown which made him want to take a rest in the country. It
was post-marked New Orleans, for Marsh had gone home from Paris when he
felt the collapse coming on, and seemed a very plain though polite bid
for an invitation from us. Marsh, of course, knew that Marceline was
here, and asked very courteously after her. Denis was sorry to hear of
his trouble and told him at once to come along for an indefinite visit. *       *       *       *       *

"Marsh came, and I was shocked to notice how he had changed since I
had seen him in his earlier days. He was a smallish, lightish fellow,
with blue eyes and an undecided chin; and now I could see the effects
of drink and I don't know what else in his puffy eye-lids, enlarged
nose-pores, and heavy lines around the mouth. I reckon he had taken
his pose of decadence pretty seriously, and set out to be as much
of a Rimbaud, Baudelaire, or Lautremont as he could. And yet he was
delightful to talk to, for like all decadents he was exquisitely
sensitive to the color and atmosphere and names of things; admirably,
thoroughly alive, and with whole records of conscious experience in
obscure, shadowy fields of living and feeling which most of us pass
over without knowing they exist. "I was glad of the visit, for I felt it would help to set up a normal
atmosphere in the house again. And that's what it really seemed to
do at first; for, as I said, Marsh was a delight to have around. He
was as sincere and profound an artist as I ever saw in my life, and
I certainly believe that nothing on earth mattered to him except the
perception and expression of beauty. When he saw an exquisite thing,
or was creating one, his eyes would dilate until the light irises went
nearly out of sight, leaving two mystical black pits in that weak,
delicate, chalk-like face; black pits opening on strange worlds which
none of us could guess about. "When he reached here, though, he didn't have any chances to show this
tendency; for he had (as he told Denis) gone quite stale. It seems he
had been very successful as an artist of a bizarre kind--like Fuseli or
Goya or Sime or Clark Ashton Smith--but had suddenly become played out. The world of ordinary things around him had ceased to hold anything he
could recognize as beauty of enough force and poignancy to arouse his
creative faculty. He had often been this way before, but this time he
could not invent any new, strange, or outré sensation or experience
which would supply the needed illusion of fresh beauty or stimulating
adventurous expectancy. He was like a Durtal or a des Esseintes at the
most jaded point of his curious orbit.