Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers/Voke Easeley and His New Art
VOKE EASELEY AND HIS NEW ART
FOR my acquaintance with Voke Easeley—
- (Hermione's reporter, and not Hermione herself, is speaking now.)——
For my acquaintance with Voke Easeley and his new art, I am indebted to Fothergil Finch.
Fothergil is a kind of genius hound. He scurries sleuthing around the town ever on the scent of something queer and caviar. He is well trained and never kills what he catches himself; he takes it to Hermione; and after Hermione has tired of it I am at liberty to do what I please with it.
The most remarkable thing about Voke Easeley at a casual glance is his Adam's apple. It is not only the largest Adam's apple I have ever seen, and the hardest looking one, and the most active one, but it is also the most intelligent looking one. Yoke Easeley's face expresses very little. His eyes are small and dull and green. His mouth, while large, misses significance. His nose, indeed, is big; but it is mild; it is a tame nose; one feels no more character in it than in a false nose. His chin and forehead retreat ingloriously from the battle of life.
But all the personality which his eyes should show, all the force which should dwell in his nose, all the temperamental qualities that should reveal themselves in his mouth and chin, all the genius which should illumine his brow—these dwell with his Adam's apple. The man has run entirely to that feature; his moods, his emotions, his thoughts, his passions, his appetites, his beliefs, his doubts, his hopes, his fears, his resolves, his despairs, his defeats, his exaltations—all, all make themselves known subtly in the eccentric motions of that unusual Adam's apple.
When I saw him first in action I did not at once get it. He stood stiffly erect in the center of Hermione's drawing-room, surrounded by the serious thinkers, with his head thrown back and his Adam's apple thrust forward, and gave vent to a series of strange noises. Beside him stood a very slender lady, all dressed in apple green, with a long green wand in her hand, and on the end of the wand was an artificial apple blossom. This she waved jerkily in front of Voke Easeley's eyes, and his Adam's apple moved as the wand moved, and from his mouth came the wild sounds in response to it.
Soon I realized that she was conducting him as if he were an orchestra. But still I did not get it. For it was not words, it was nothing so articulate as speech, that Yoke Easeley uttered. Nor was it, to my ear, song. And yet, as I listened, I began to see that a wild rhythm pervaded the utterance; the Adam's apple leapt, danced, swung round, twinkled, bounded, slid and leapt again in time with a certain rough barbaric measure; the sounds themselves were all discords, but discords with a purpose; discords that took each other by the hand and kicked and stamped their brutal way together toward some objective point.
I led Fothergil into a corner.
"What is it?" I whispered. It is always well, at one of Hermione's soul fights, to get your cue before the conversation officially starts. If you don't know what is going to be talked about before the talk starts the chances are that you never will know from the talk itself.
"A New Art!" said Fothergil. And then he led me into the hall and explained.
What Gertrude Stein has done for prose, what the wilder vers libre bards are doing for poetry, what the cubists and futurists are doing for painting and sculpture, that Yoke Easeley is doing for vocal music.
"He is painting sound portraits with his larynx now," said Fothergil. "And the beautiful part of it is that he is absolutely tone deaf! He doesn't know a thing about music. He tried for years to learn and couldn't. The only way he knows when you strike a chord on the piano is because he doesn't like chords near as well as he does discords. He has gone right back to the dog, the wolf, the cave man, the tiger, the bear, the wind, the rock slide, the thunder and the earthquake for his language. He interprets life in the terms of natural sounds, which are discords nearly always; but he has added brains to them and made them tell all the moods of the human soul!"
"And the lady in green?"
"That is his wife—he can do nothing without her. There is the most complete psychic accord between them. It is beautiful! Beautiful!"
When we returned the lady in green was announcing:
"The next selection is a Yoke Easeley impression of the Soul of Wagner gazing at the sunrise from the peak of the Jungfrau."
The wand waved; the Adam's Apple leapt, and they were off. What followed cannot be indicated typographically. But if a cat were a sawmill, and a dog were a gigantic cart full of tin cans bouncing through a stone-paved street, and that dog and that cat hated each other and were telling each other so, it would sound much like it.
It was well received. Except by Ravenswood Wimble. He always has to have his little critical fling.
"The peak of the Jungfrau!" he grumbled. "Jungfrau indeed! It was Mont Blanc! It was very wonderfully and subtly Mont Blanc! But the Jungfrau—never!"
"Hermione," I said, "what do you think of the New Art?"
"It's wonderful!" she breathed, "just simply wonderful! So esoteric, and yet so simple! But there is one thing I am going to speak to Mrs. Voke Easeley about—one improvement I am going to suggest. His ears, you know—don't you think they are too large? Or too red, at least, for their size? They catch the eye too much they take away from the effect. Before he sings here again I will have Mrs. Easeley bob them off a little."