TWELFTH NIGHT.

As the big car drew itself up over the brink
of the canyon the mountain appeared before their eyes,
twelve miles away, black and violet, with fold on fold
of its flanks full of snow. The peak was white with deep
white snow that was now flushed a fiery rose, and at its
base hung a long layer of pale blue smoke from the fires
in the pueblo.

Utterly quiet and serene, the broad desert stretched
away brooding - with mauve shadows on the white snow under
the sage bushes. Not a sound anywhere save the crunch of
snow under the clogged wheels - not a movement anywhere
except where here and there a rabbit whisked down its hole,
or a hawk dipped above in the blue and orange sky.

Irrevocably the machine sped along and it wasn't many
minutes before they were drilling their way up the short,
slippery hill to where the long adobe house lay quietly
like a stationary train, with the smoke cheerily pounding
in gusts from a dozen different chimneys.

"Oh ! I'm so glad you're back." cried Ricks, running
through the snow to meet them as the motor stopped before
the portal. She was a tall girl in black velveteen breeches,
a little unsteady on her high-heeled cowboy boots. She wore
a broad brimmed hat that framed her round, pink cheeks and
her round bright eyes in a circle of tan beaver. Her face
was all alight with joy, and something like relief made her
eyes misty as she grabbed Mary with one hand while she pushed

2

the red setter puppy away with the other." I've been so
**lonely** ! I half thought you'd never turn up again."

"Well, here we are - and this is Mr. VanderComp -" Mary
answered very loudly, turning to the tall man who was un-
folding himself from the crowded interior of the car." And
Agnes and Arthur are coming up tomorrow - and Spindler is
coming too." she cried into the girl's deafness.

Mary's husband drove the car away to the garage and
the three of them made their way into the house.

The familiar room ! A flickering fire lighted up the
orange curtains and played among some great dried boughs of
silver aspens that spread their branches through the centre
of the large place from where they were stuck out of a fat
black jar from Santa Clara. Chinese lillies in three earthen
plates on a round table filled the air with fresh perfume
that mixed sweetly with the hot pinon wood. There were pictures
from Italy, a hanging from Bulgaria, books from England and
France, candy from New York and San Francisco, and cigarettes
from Russia.

VanderComp looked about him. His head, projected downwards
from rather round shoulders, was covered with silvery white
hair, but his face was strangely young and smooth. His brown
eyes looked kind and his small Dutch nose was sensitive, but
when it came to his mouth - ah, there was the trouble ! It
was coarsely unformed and his teeth jutted straight out from
his gums, with great wide spaces between them, giving him almost
a brutal appearance. They say nowadays that babies spoil their
mouths if they are allowed to suck their fingers. Surely here

3

was one who had sucked his fingers overlong.

It was quite an experiment bringing him out here
for he scarcely ever left New York. In his comfortable
flat, surrounded by his hundreds of books in gay bindings
he was contented to stay month after month, working several
hours a day on his own novels and musical essays, and
entertaining the miscellaneous people who passed through
his rooms: musicians, poets and poetesses, Mexicans, Negroes,
actors and actresses, publishers - a little of everything.
Fanchia Martilovna, his Russian Wife, was sometimes there and
sometimes not. She was small and dark with beautiful eyes
fringed with lashes a quarter of an inch long. She had sold
matches for a living when she was five years old, and was
supposed to have prompt responses to everything. If one took
her to a picture-show she screamed with delight; if some one
gave her a new kind of cake she screamed with joy. Her voice
had grown much too strong and heavy for her little body from
her habit of showing a prompt response. As the years went on,
one suspected her reactions of being rather studied, for
surely no one could go on reacting so violently for so long
without the process becoming automatic.

Whenever one went or came there in the afternoon, Louis
begged them to be announced first from the telephone by the
porter in the entrance hall below. One wondered somewhat over
this. Upstairs in the softly lighted apartment there was
always a gathering from five o'clock on. Louis stood before
a table of bottles and cracked ice and shook cocktails in a
silver shaker that held two quarts. The piano was covered with

4

a blue and crimson embroidery. The great comfortable divan was upholstered in scarlet brocade, chosen one guessed as a background for the black, clipped head of Fanchia. There were imitation Louis XVI Venetian painted chairs about and several caricatures of Louis and Fanchia by noted jokers with modern tendencies.

The place looked costly, comfortable, and not quite good. That is, not quite genuine in taste either good or bad.

Louis always kept passing drinks - one - two - three - four - no thanks - well, just one more. His face grew redder and redder. He had on red morocco slippers, comfortable in his easy way. His shoulders were round, his head always hanging forward.

Over his belt his belly protruded somewhat, and his eyes grew small as pin points in the gaiety about him. His teeth stuck out and queer adolescent squeals of cracked tenor laughter broke through them painfully. Never a round full laughter, always the cracked and broken explosions of a crooked outlet for his mirth. And his white hair, so digne, shining over it all.

"I know your secret, my dear," he was saying one afternoon in the dusk, to the porcelain authoress of "Jennifer Lorn." She looked affrighted but curious and jumped up from the warm divan to seize his cocktail arm in both her little hands. "What? What, Louis? Tell me!"

In the soft babel of voices he lowered his voice to reach her ear. "Oh - you! How did you know that? No one knows that but Bill." And she threw a pretty look towards her big boy husband. "Pursuit - pursuit - pursuit" murmured Louis teasingly.

5

She relapsed into the soft red divan again in a mockery
of _accablement_.

His neice, Dryan, asked for Fanchia and was told she
was at her dancing lesson. "She's learning the Black
Bottom," Louis told the company, with an arch and dreadful
smile that drew up one side of his misshapen mouth into
a grimace.

"Oh, won't Mr. Johnkins play us his Black Bottom ?"
someone pleaded, throwing an exaggeratedly begging smile
at a black man who sat rather stiffly on one of the painted
chairs.

"Will you, Johnkins ?" asked Louis, politely.

"Well, you all know ah aint no musician," replied the
negro. "Ah just _writes_ music. "But he moved to the piano
and ran his fingers over the keys. He stumbled through the
notes, missing many of them, but never the rhythm. While he
played the outer door opened and Fanchia sprang into the
room.

"Oh-h! My Black Bottom!" she cried in a loud heavy
voice, and, picking up her skirts in both hands, she flung
herself into the midst of the group, throwing up her heels
and uttering sharp cries. Louis poured out a drink and held
it ready for her. Kronk, his publisher, stood chatting
with the Mexican artist whose book of drawings was soon to
come out.

"Dear little Fancha ! How close to the source...." The
music -shattered into bits by the untrained fingers on the
keyboard - stopped.... and someone asked the time ..and someone

6

else asked for another drink .. and someone new came in
from the hall as someone else went away. So it went on,
day after day - year after year.

So it was really quite an experiment to Bring Louis
here, away from all that. But it was his idea. He wanted
to come. Besides, he was on his way to Hollywood where he
had to go to see about selling a novel for a picture.

"How has everything been ? It seems *wonderful* here
after the East !" Mary was rolled up in a ball on the
end of Rick's bed. Ricks reached for her battered old ear
trumpet, her eyes full of happy light.

"Oh, it's been wonderful," she declared. "Wonderful
things in the air, and wonderful feeling among the Indians
these Christmas days, and last night I heard the stars sing !"

"Well, she looks as though she could hear things," thought
Mary, "Things she wants to hear."

Ricks' face was extremely vivid and seemed charged with
some fine, electrical, elemental energy. "Yes, I heard them
singing, but I couldn't quite make out if they were happy.
Sometimes when I hear them they are *very* happy, and sometimes
they are quite sad. Usually when I hear them, someone has died
or is going to die. Last night - well it was different...."

"Have you had any bothers ?" Mary asked her.

"No, but of course these days the Indians have been away
a lot and I had to watch the fires so the pipes wouldn't
freeze, and then the new dog came and he is a beauty but such

7

a handful... How was it at your mother's ?'

Mary told her.

Then, "And who is VanderComp ?" Ricks asked.

"Oh, he's that man I've known for ages. He _can_ be very nice. I hope he will be; he was on the train."

"Well, I'm sure he can't be anything _but_ nice here. It's all so lovely - the snow and the perfect days one after another. You know, I believe this place makes people _good_...except, of course, when it makes them bad." And at that they both laughed.

Louis VanderComp looked like a large well-behaved school boy all through that evening. Sitting in the quiet large room in the firelight, his face was solomnly full of good intentions. Now and then he stole a glance at Mary who was knitting a sweater, or at Ricks who, stretched out her long legs and, continually tossing a lock of soft tan hair from her eyes, tried to do the Buzzle Peg Mary had brought home from Christmas somewhere else. Mary's husband was away, as was so often the case. The others, for whom he kept up a constant care out in the Pueblo, had to be seen that first night of his return. So only the three of them sat together in the firelight.

"Mary" began Louis, in a low, rather impressed voice, "who is Ricks ?" He had learned at once that people could talk all around her and she would never hear a word.

"Oh, she's an English girl who came over here when the Ballisters came." answered Mary in a non-committal way.

"There's something rather sweet about her," said Louis in a Sunday School tone. He was very good. "How nice he can be," thought Mary, "He has a good heart." When they got up to go

8

to bed he took Mary's hand and the muscles of his big,
red, smooth face sagged and his young brown eyes drooped
in the lower lids as he said, "What time shall I come in
to breakfast? Now I don't want to give you any trouble.
I think it's simply wonderful out here but of course I knew
beforehand that any place you had stayed in so long would
be marvellous. "He leaned on one foot and raised one eyebrow.
He was without mobility, an awkward overgrown schoolboy on
his very best behavior and Mary was grateful and relieved.

Next day the others came laughing and joking. They had
plunged up the long canyon - seventy five miles of ice and
snow - in three hours and were eager for tea. Arthur Drew was
full of a wintry energy as he rubbed his cold hands together.
Agnes, his wife, seemed artificially galvanized into a brittle
gaiety, rather unlike her usual melancholy lethargy, and as for
Spindler, he roared a loud and somewhat hollow sounding good-
fellowship towards everyone. "Yet," thought Mary, almost at once,
"there's a peevish look on Arthur, and Agnes isn't natural a
bit, and, oh dear, Spindler has the same dismal devil lurking
behind his eye." But it was going to be alright - it would be.

The room was crowded with the six of them - there was a
lot of loose energy running in the air. And after tea Mary
saw Louis' face had lost its portentously good look, and a
kind of mischief was trying to creep into it.

"I've got a new one for you, Louis," said Spindler, drawing
him to the end of the room. They muttered together and in a
moment the air was impregnated with the old well-known dark,
loose flood. The same old, sad, evil charges of poison drenching

9

the place, brought from beyond the rim of the canyon,
spoiling everything. Mary knew it well. She was intensely
inimical to it. True, it wasn't always happy in that room,
but at least it had been clean.

She went upstairs in silence and she heard them roaring
the loud, hollow laughter that follows upon filth. Agnes
came up and lay beside her on the bed. "Oh," she exclaimed,
"Spin told such a <u>dreadful</u> story about China !" She covered
her face with both hands." <u>Oh</u>, it was <u>too</u> awful ! How
they caught a robber...oh dear ! It was just <u>too</u> terrible."
Mary kept silent. She felt strangled and she hoped Agnes
wasn't going to tell her the story.

When they went downstairs again, she found them all
together giggling. Ricks was with them too, holding her ear
trumpet hopefully to first one and then another, but they
were only speaking together in slips and slides, their faces
red and bursting.

Mary's eyes fell on that scene and then travelled to a
long vile liquidness on the carpet, away at the end of the
room from where they sat. "What is this ?" she exclaimed,
her anger breaking from her.

"Your new dog did that." said Arthur lazily.

"It's too bad someone wouldn't do something about it"
she retorted, going for a shovelful of ashes.

"What was that, Agnes said about the Chinese ?" queried
Louis.

"She always knew they were a backward people." Spin said,
with a chortle.

10

Would the evening never end ? There was Ricks looking so
ready for fun or anything that was going, and never seeming
to catch the drift of the thing. Her eyes were bright and
happy. She was glad to have _people_ about after being alone
in the big house. And every time she opened her mouth she
seemed by some fatality to make a break the nature of which
was meat and drink to the hungry. Every English term that
has an equivocal sense in America seemed to fall from her
lips. The muffled laughter grew more irrepressible. "I think
you should tell Ricks that people aren't 'Screwed' in America
in the same way they are in England." remarked Louis to Mary
in mock sententiousness.

She felt helpless for the moment, her anger piling up
in her. Finally they all went off to bed, save Ricks, who
said in some mystification : "I can't quite make them out
this time. What is it ?" But Mary continued to feel helpless
and knew nothing to answer.

The next day Louis and Arthur laid in a supply of moon-
shine from Dr. Paul. They felt they were going to need it. And
the cook sent word she was ill in bed and couldn't come. What
a party it was turning out ! Now they had to go down to the
hotel for their meals, had to be herded together to the long
table reserved for them. Mary wished an earthquake would open
and swallow them up.

After an afternoon in the Indian village where from a
roof she watched her guests angrily, they found themselves again
shut up together in the long firelighted living room. The men

11

were flushed and exchanging secret looks and laughing together, and still Ricks was happy and hopeful and wanted to make the best of everything, and Mary's anger and distaste grew inside her. At nine, she suddenly announced: "Since Emelia can't come back, I think I'll send you all home tomorrow. It's too hard like this and no fun having to go out for all our meals."

"Oh, no! We can all cook here, ourselves," exclaimed Agnes impractically.

"You can't cook for all of us and the three servants besides," Mary told her acidly. Out of the murky atmosphere of innuendo and suppressed forces that the room contained, she felt an inner nausea overcoming her, and bidding them good-night she left them.

No one appeared but Ricks the next morning - nine o'clock - nine thirty. "Where are they all?" cried Ricks setting up her trumpet.

Mary went out to see. Lying in bed, side by side, fast asleep, lay Arthur and Agnes. "Are you all sick?" she asked.

"No. Come in. What time is it? We didn't go to sleep till three, and we've decided we aren't going home today even if you did tell us to. We came to stay till Saturday and we're going to stay. "This from Agnes, quite decisively.

"Do you want me to go away or anything?" asked Louis from behind her. He had issued from his room. His face was red and swollen and he had a mock of obedient submission in his lowered eyes and drooping lips. He was full of malice and moonshine. Mary felt completely helpless.

12

"No." she answered, and departed.

They lived together through the day somehow. Agnes took Ricks away to lunch at an inn up the canyon, and when they came back, Mary saw Ricks' eyes resting on her with an expression of indignation.

"How do you feel now ?" Agnes asked.

"Feel ?" questioned Mary.

"Yes, are you over your nerves ? If you hadn't been nervous you wouldn't have acted as you did last night. Telling us to go home ! My dear, that simply isn't done ! After we came all the way up here ! I can't see how you can act like that."

"I didn't think the party was any good." said Mary, feeling numb.

"Well, even if the cook is sick, you can stand it for two days, can't you ?" went on Agnes. But Mary's eyes were on Ricks. She was tiptoeing up to Spindler who appeared at the end of the porch, and in a voice she supposed was inaudible she was saying loudly:

"I say : I just went and got a bottle from Dr. Paul. I thought it would cheer us all up a bit. Put some pep into us :"

"Oh, Holy Idiot !" thought Mary. "When and where is it going to end ?" But she forced a smile and said, as Ricks approached with her happy smile -secreting her errand from Mary :" Aren't you going to give me some too, Ricks ?"

"Oh, did you hear ! Yes, you shall have some too ! Isn't it a good idea !"

13

That night there was a dance in the studio, wholly
cheerful and successful, for the Indian boys were in a
good mood and wiped away all the miasma and innuendos and
malice. Not even Louis could find anything louche in the
dances. It was like a respite from evil thinking.

After Agnes and Spindler left the next morning, Arthur
settled with a compact and cruel fraternization with Louis.
They dwelt in each other's glances, slyly. At lunch Arthur
began it alone.

"Did you know Ricks was found playing pool in the pool
hall when you were away, Mary ?

"Oh, Ricks ! You didn't ?" Exclaimed Mary. She visualised
it all. The delight of the villagers at a new incongruity -
the innocent Ricks, thinking no evil, started jLINGuEs waggIng.

"Why shouldn't I ? That's the way we did in Mexico. Why
bother about <u>people</u> ?" cried Ricks pointing her brassy trumpet
here and there, her eyebrows raised. She looked so far from
the <u>kind</u> of people who had seen her and told Arthur about her
that Mary despaired of ever making her see "Why". "What's the
matter with the pool hall ?" asked Louis with an imitation
innocence.

"They're filthy, low places here. That's what's the matter
with them." Mary answered angrily.

"Well, some people <u>like</u> low places. I do. And I think
Ricks does too." replied Louis with a kind of righteous
air.

"Nonsense ! Don't be ridiculous." Mary said, and closed
the conversation. But Arthur persisted slyly, his eyes shining
with a delight in malice. "Who did you play pool with Ricks ?"

14

"With Bill" she answered amiably.

"And who is Bill ?" asked Louis, exchanging a look with Arthur.

"A boy I know. He's a very good player and likes me to play with him when he comes to town."

"Very nice, I'm sure," from Louis, with an air of approval that hid depths of cruel sophistication.

Coming into the living room some time later, Mary interrupted a lively chat between this troublesome trio. Ricks had ( Oh Fate !) been telling the other two what bad dreams she had had all night, and Louis' voice rose in sinister kindliness :" Yes, go on Ricks, a man with no head and only a big bone in its place."

Whereupon Mary strode up and exploded : "Please cut out that sort of thing Louis. I won't have it here. I won't have you people doing it any more !"

"Doing what ? I don't know what you mean, Mary." Louis said, his eyes wicked, his big teeth shining on his lower lip.

"You know what I mean very well, and you'll be good enough to stop it." Mary was dignified but she was shaking inside.

Arthur was shaking outwardly, but with pleasure and laughter. With exaggerated politeness he invited Ricks to accompany him down to the movie and they departed together, while Mary rolled her eyes in despair.

A long, silent evening between Louis and her followed, until, at nine o'clock he rose and prepared to take a formal departure to his room.

"I'm sorry if I was brusque." said Mary, "But I don't like to see you people so mean to Ricks. She's under such a disadvantage. I should think you could see that she's perfectly

15

innocent, and while I'm looking after her I can't have you
going on that way."

"Maybe there's something in what you say," he assented,
but his eyes were hard and angry. "Are you going to tell her
not to go to the pool hall ?"

"Yes, I am."

"Well, she'll do something worse."

"No, she won't. Not while I'm here. Can't you understand what it means for her to put herself in a position like that where the "poor white trash" here can laugh at her ? It's not the Mexicans; it's the <u>artists</u> I object to."

"Oh, really." said Louis politely, retiring after kissing
Mary's hand.

Mary told Ricks what she felt about it next day. "You <u>mustn't</u> give them a chance to jeer," she told her, "They're only too glad to find one in an equivocal position. <u>Never</u> give them a chance. Do what you like at home, but not down there."

"I never thought anything of it," expostulated Ricks. "I only go in the morning anyway."

"Well, don't go any more, will you ?"

"No, I won't. If that's the way it is."

"Well, that's how it is." Mary said.

Then, as though Mary had merely egged them on, Louis and
Arthur had a kind of three-ringed circus with Ricks in all
three rings and they on the centre, snapping long whipe. Louis
began to shake his finger at her and murmur: "Naughty! Naughty!"
While Arthur shook with laughter. A species of flirtatious

15

attention was showered on her, though innuendos were
left out except when Mary was not there, and then, Ricks said,
she couldn't make out *what* was going on, but all kinds of
talk about old men and tribal customs and kivas and so on.

"Ricks," exclaimed Louis one evening, "don't you know
some good old English customs? Can't we bob for apples or
anap the whip or something? Nothing osculatory - just nice
old English customs."

Ricks had been coached by Mary not to pay any attention
to them, so she went on reading her book, though she
flickered nervously.

"Ricks!" shouted Arthur, "Let's go over to Adams' house and have a party." Mary frowned on that, though Ricks was dying to be a sport and do her share if every one was going to be jolly, and was ready to go. So the two men went alone and came back in the small hours.

The next day Mary was sick in bed, out of sheer strain,
but she made Ricks come up and report to her at intervals.

The game went on all the time now, she said, - at Breakfast
at lunch and at dinner at all kinds of things. She couldn't
understand. "Why <u>do</u> they treat me like a baby ?" she asked.
"And what <u>are</u> they getting at about the Indians ? All sorts
of jokes about the old men, and the river, and the kivas :
Really, if they'd only be <u>witty</u> ! Now, Gertler was so <u>witty</u>
when he was like that."

That night she was asked out to dine. "Thank God !" thought
Mary, who lay in peace upstairs. But next morning :

"When I came home last night we all went over to Adams'"

17

Ricks told her.

"Who?" Mary asked faintly.

"Those two and I, and then Riggins came in and
McGalmont. It was quite nice. They all sat around a table
drinking some lovely hot drinks and not talking loud but
laughing a good deal, and at half-past eleven we came
home."

Mary wondered in a kind of misery at what horrors she
had sat through, never suspecting them. She prayed for the
next day to hurry - then these two over-grown schoolboys
would go home and cease heckling this child.

Finally it was over. But then Ricks was flushed with
fever and delirious in the night, and Mary knew that all the
time she had known, and resisted and defended herself even
though she had not seemed to know what was going on about
her.

The next day a postcard came from Louis addressed to
Ricks -that she could read as she lay in bed cosy and comforted.
It bore the picture of an Indian leaping in a wild dance -
and in Louis' handwriting :

"It's an old Tribal Custom. All the old men do it."

But Ricks didn't care. The air was all clear again, and
likely enough that night she would hear the stars singing.

Carl Van Veckten was a Santa Fe visitor for a week on his way from Taos to California. A house party for him was arranged in Taos by Mr. and Mrs. Antonio Luhan, the other guests being Ida Rauch, Andrew Dasburg and Walter Bynner. Mr. Van Veckten was disappointed in the Taos deer dance, given the sixth of January, not finding in it the emotional excitement which he feels is so great a force in the dances of Harlem.