The Purple Palette of Life

by Achmed Abdullah

 

THE PURPLE PALETTE OF LIFE

By Achmed Abdullah

THERE are times when Life is only acted psychology. There are other times when Life seems an illogical deduction killed by a crassly logical and horribly thumping fact. And finally there are those rare and gray-misted moments when Life is just nilly-willy submission—and then the two actors make their exits from opposite corners of the stage.

Now the man of this story was called Cesare Durando, and he came from Northern Italy; while the girl’s name was Anne Lesueur, and she was a native of Boston. Presently we are going to hear about another man (not to mention the fleeting shadow of another girl), but let us leave him nameless for the present and keep him in reserve. For what is the good of spoiling the Purple Palette of Life with gray and sad blotches before you have to? Also why prolong the agony of suspense by forcing an alien soul to bawl aloud in the market-place?

Cesare Durando came from a land which has been called the Honey-Pot of Races, to wit: Lombardy.

The Brillat-Savarinized gourmet can taste a tiny suspicion of the bitterness of the bee’s sting in a mouthful of wild honey, and so it is with the plain of Northern Italy. Suppose a land where, grafted on the original stock of sun-loving, golden-souled, unmoral and very pagan child-men, there is a cutting from another race, a bitter race, with the mystery and the blessed purity of the blue-eyed North calling, calling backwards, and the ancient message of swishing swords when they were wet and sticky with blood, and the green rustling of the cold-zoned oak forests, and the hairy, shouting, blond gods who slept in dragon-girdled, steel-fashioned Valhalla, and ate giants and monsters for breakfast and supper, and then, many thousands of years later, awakened from their Christ-made slumber, thought of the Souls of Man and the Many Gods, and hurled Richard Wagner forth into the gaping world.

Such is Lombardy: first the aboriginal race of laughter-hearted, treason-souled, silken-voiced Italians, and then the invasion from beyond the passes of the bitter North, from beyond the height-striving Alps: massive-thewed, tender-chorded, blond giants, Goths and Vandals and Visigoths, Teutons all, launched forth on the olive-treed plain of that smiling, blue-tented Lombardy, and mixing the pure and ruthless strength of their race with the poisonous seed of the race which they conquered.

Mix port wine and heather-smoked Scots whisky in equal doses for a year or two and then write a pamphlet for the Lancet about the marvels of your psychic digestion and the coating of your moral stomach.

The treacherous sweetness, the sweet unmorality of the South, and the blessed, god-travailed, chaste, and purifying bitterness of the North, the North of Souls and Men and clean Fighting- Gods: the Honey-Pot, in other words.

And then, many, many centuries later, the Man, Cesare Durando, conceived and born and bred in this pot.

He was a fine-looking man, as straight as a lance at rest, with billows of that bluish-sable hair which crisps under a sun-beaming sky, and the gold-and-onyx eyes of a Greek god, also the length of limb and the profile which Praxiteles loved. His character was altogether of the negative order, for he was neither vicious nor virtuous; neither stupid nor clever, neither lazy nor industrious.

He was an artist, a musician. In his exceptional case Nature had not been so cruelly careless as to waste the chiselled exquisiteness of her handicraft on a bovine-minded, horny-souled laborer of the fields, pregnant with the sodden glebe of ancient serfdom.

Cesare Durando lived the Life of Man, neither better nor worse. Let us skip the details, the plot, the action of his Life, for this story should be read with the eyes of the soul, and not with those of the body.

He took no special delight in putting his foot on one-tenth of the Decalogue, for he lived the sinning Life of Man unconscious of himself, simply obeying his instincts—because until he had been away from Italy for several years, the purifying strains of Teuton blood had never had a chance to make themselves understood and heard. For you cannot be pure and live beneath a blue sky: thus has Allah mixed beauty and ugliness, being the Most High God, All-Merciful and All-Understanding.

Being an Italian, he naturally went to America, first to Chicago. There he foregathered with countrymen of his, musicians who played ragtime with a Verdi rhythm at many eating-places, and so he was never touched or influenced by the strong genius of that throbbing, healthy, screaming Anglo-Saxon life around him, and he knew America only as a large block of real estate where the Jews are liked and the Irish respected, where Italians are cursed, the French ridiculed, and the English hated with a peculiar, cousinly, sympathizing hatred; a land of astounding, shiny, white bathtubs, free-lunches, politicians, and well-corseted, elderly ladies dressed in spotless white all during the summer months; a land of many and big dollars which did not seem to buy any more than five liras, but which were more easily annexed.

Then along came the Girl, Anne Lesueur.

She was Boston-English on her Father’s side, Devon stock of the old mastiff breed which formerly combined religion and gold-lust and still keeps part of the religion and all of the gold, which blended cool sense with emotional Anglo-Saxon idealism and made a good and very lasting thing out of it, the breed of Raleigh and Oxenham and Dick Grenville and Salvation Yeo. Her Mother was a German; not of the bristly, stiff-souled, Prussian martinet type, but a German from the South, from Bavaria, where a remnant of Celtic blood and perhaps the light loves of Napoleon’s grenadiers, perhaps also the close vicinity of warm-scented, delicious Vienna, created a man and a woman who are free and broad-minded and lovable and democratic and many other fine things.

She was a clever girl who had read a lot and who had also traveled; and if she had a somewhat extravagant fondness for Continental manners and literature, we must remember that after all it is the old Anglo-Saxon teachableness and wide-heartedness which has enabled America to profit by the wisdom of all ages and all civilizations. Also the girl’s fondness for Continental manners and literature never weakened her strong, virile Yankee traits.

Now this girl was also an artist, a splendid musician, who could not only play Debussy and Richard Strauss with understanding, but could even dance a Tango Argentin with truly South American abandon, and is there a happier blending, a more difficult combination?

She had that strange, haunting beauty which refuses to centre itself on one particular point, the sort of beauty which is not abstract beauty in itself, but an impression of beauty; and she had a little trick of arranging her hair which screamed “Paris, Paris.” She had, of course, the small feet of the native-born, the quick wit of the native-born, and just that little, tiny Mayflower hypocrisy of the native-born, that peculiar, evasive, and unconscious hypocrisy which rhymes with lettuce-sandwiches and Hawthorne and mince-pie.

Altogether she was entirely flesh and blood and fine, free spirit, only she made the mistake that she imagined herself to be the Executive Committee for the Society for the Idealization of Human Emotions and Carnal Desires—which was deliciously foolish and a splendid waste of time. She had fits of Christianity.

She was blind to obvious things; liking men, she gave them hope without realizing it, and when hope emboldened men to offer house and home and automobile and a respectable wedding-ring, she calmly cast them aside, hailed Love as a strictly spiritual thing, read Ibsen, and proclaimed her intention of becoming a nun ... which she never did, because she had a long cheval-glass in her dressing-room which showed her a curling length of brown hair shot with gold, and two small feet.

I suppose it is needless to say that our Lombard with the Greek profile left Chicago, went to Boston, and somehow or other became the girl’s music-teacher.

The effects were immediate to all the members of the inner Circle of Culture in that delightful city. For the Girl, though she was a much finer musician than the Man, and in former years had made her morning prayers with her face toward Debussy, Wagner, and Brahms, suddenly declared her unwavering loyalty and allegiance to Verdi, Mascagni and Puccini, which proves that a Praxitelean profile can even influence the hallowed hall of sounds. She also ruthlessly obliterated from her calling-list the names of several young New Yorkers of ancient name and lineage, because they had the crude habit of referring to Italians as Dagoes and Wops, and did not know the difference between a white-souled Lombard and a black-handed Sicilian ... which served them right.

Then they fell in love with each other, and she wanted him to propose to her. She did not own up to it, not even to herself. She only felt that she liked the smell of his crisp, black hair, that she wanted to be near him, to arrange his music, to dust his piano, to be his spiritual soul-mate, to darn his socks, to teach him how to eat oysters without making a noise like a sponge, and to learn from him the ancient Italian Renaissance art how to wind tomato-soaked spaghetti around a fork held in the right hand with a spoon held in the left hand and then inhale the monumental result.

But he did not propose to her, which astonished her; for she knew that he loved her, too. Indeed, he looked at her in a soulful and ... oh ... sticky sort of manner, but how can a man help looking soulful if he has masses of tossing black hair, chiselled features, and onyx-and-gold eyes? It is true that he improved his English and cultivated quite a charming little cool Boston accent. It is also true that he wrote little notes to her when she was visiting in Florida, beginning them with “My dear Miss Anne,” and shamelessly ending them with a term of affection which he carefully left in the original Italian. But all that is not simon-pure, nickel-plated, all-wool proposing.

Why didn’t he?

Now we must remember that Cesare had lived a Man’s Life and had never thought about purity as such. When he met the Girl he suddenly commenced to think about it as every decent man does in a similar case. But being an artist he felt instinctively that the Girl had built around him an imaginary temple of translucent sardonyx and emerald, quite flawless and pure to the last spire, newly laundered and cool-scented.

What he did NOT say was the following:

“Thus and thus. This I have done, and that I have undone. I am of the blood which is mixed. The sinister pages in my Book of Life are but the fault of the black-haired generations from the sun-kissed lands which stream and riot in my blood. These I shall now cast aside and denounce, and I shall only remember the silver-souled men from the North, the men with the blue eyes of the North, the men with the purity and the good, clean, wise conscience of the North. For I love you with all my heart, and you love me. And so you must help me...”

Instead of saying such words, he remained silent. For his soul was a tinselly and gaudy and cowardly thing, the tinkling shell of an empty husk, and he continued to look soulful. Of course the Girl thought that he was silent, not because he did not know how to confess and promise and do all that regular before-marriage stuff, but because she imagined that he was so pure, so spiritual, so altogether Parsifalesque that crude exclamations like “I love you; kiss me, honey; let’s hunt up a minister,” would be forever alien to his pink-and-white soul.

And so she became nervous and anemic; and she had to take nasty tonics, and go to bed early and visit relatives in the West.

Meanwhile Cesare, who in his own benighted language had heard the parable of the sparrow in the hand and the broiler on the roof, stuck to his little sparrow, by name Carlotta Giovanni, because she was faithful and kind and pretty, darned to perfection, never bothered about wedding-ring and padre, and knew exactly how to make a long, deep cut through the top-fat of a saddle of mutton and to insert therein a clove or two of spring-scented garlic. As for the sinfulness of such behavior he of course thought no more of that than any Southern European would have done, nor as the moral Anglo-Saxons had done in the days of the Stuarts.

Now for the other man, the villain.

He was a nice, clean, thin-lipped young New Englander, called John Yale Breckenridge. He had money, education, breeding, good blood, and did not look the least bit like a villain. He hated all Italians, but most of all did he hate Cesare Durando. He would have liked to boast of the strong Anglo-Saxon and the weak, effeminate Italian, but then he only weighed one hundred and thirty pounds, while the Signor, even without his long hair, tipped the scales at over one hundred and eighty pounds.

Thus John Yale Breckenridge was forced to turn villain.

Fate decreed that he should see Cesare and Carlotta together. The instinct of witch-burning Presbyterian ancestors screamed in his soul, and he shadowed the couple to their flat. And then, being an amateur water-colorist, he rented a studio in the building across the street.

There was, of course, a tea-party to which Anne came, a villainous invitation to admire the view from the window, and there was Cesare in the flat across the street, reading his paper in a nice, bourgeois, pater-familias manner, and Carlotta sitting at his feet and busily engaged in stuffing sweet red peppers.

What was the result? Did she curse Continental manners and literature, Verdi, Mascagni and Puccini? Did she hereafter play Nevin and MacDowell? Did she marry John Yale Breckenridge? Did she denounce Cesare as a fake, a humbug, a Bulgarian, and a near-Brahmin?

She did not.

Did she forgive Cesare? Did she weep on his shoulder, and do the Little-Mother, inside-out Mary Magdalen stunt? Did she finally cease to cut spaghetti with a silver-knife and learn how to wind them around a fork?

Again: she did not.

She wrote to an office of Heraldic Reconstruction in Chicago and discovered that she was the direct descendant of Sir Humphrey de la Poer Sueur-Lesueur and that her escutcheon was a bean-rampant on a field azure, and then she married an elderly Englishman who answered to the name of Lord Tudor Vavassour Brabasson Fitz-Battleaxe. And she did not marry him for his title, nor did he marry her for her money, because he had thirty thousand pounds a year of his own. And Anne, Lady FitzBattleaxe, is a very happy woman, an anemic no more. And Cesare did not get religion and marry Carlotta, but married an Irish girl called Bridget O’Callahan, who had once been Juliette, Anne’s French maid, and was very happy and contented. And John Yale Breckenridge became also happy and contented, for he acquired large and tainted wealth and glories today in the distinction of the ruling rich: Diabetes.

So altogether this story is very true to life, and just as it should be.