James Cabell: The Cords of Vanity. A Comedy of Shirking

When I first knew Stella she was within a month of being fifteen, which is for womankind an unattractive age. There were a startling number of corners to her then, and she had but vague notions as to the management of her hands and feet. In consequence they were perpetually turning up in unexpected places and surprising her by their size and number. Yes, she was very hopelessly fifteen; and she was used to laugh, unnecessarily, in a nervous fashion, approximating to a whinny, and when engaged in conversation she patted down her skirts six times to the minute.

It seems oddly unbelievable when I reflect that Rosalind—"daughter to the banished Duke"—and Stella and Helen of Troy, and all the other famous fair ones of history, were each like that at one period or another.

As for myself, I was nine days younger than Stella, and so I was at this time very old—much older than it is ever permitted anyone to be afterward. I cherished the most optimistic ideas as to my impendent moustache, and was wont in privacy to encourage it with the manicure-scissors. I still entertained the belief that girls were upon the whole superfluous nuisances, but was beginning to perceive the expediency of concealing this opinion, even in private converse with my dearest chum, where, in our joyous interchange of various heresies, we touched upon this especial sub-division of fauna very lightly, and, I now suspect, with some self-consciousness.

All this was at a summer resort, which was called the Green Chalybeate. Stella and I and others of our age attended the hotel hops in the evening with religious punctuality, for well-meaning elders insisted these dances amused us, and it was easier to go than to argue the point. At least, that was the feeling of the boys.

Stella has since sworn the girls liked it. I suspect in this statement a certain parsimony as to the truth. They giggled too much and were never entirely free from that haunting anxiety concerning their skirts.

We danced together, Stella and I, to the strains of the last Sousa two-step (it was the Washington Post ), and we conversed, meanwhile, with careful disregard of the amenities of life, since each feared lest the other might suspect in some common courtesy an attempt at—there is really no other word—spooning. And spooning was absurd.

Well, as I once read in the pages of a rare and little known author, one lives and learns.

I asked Stella to sit out a dance. I did this because I had heard Mr. Lethbury—a handsome man with waxed mustachios and an absolutely piratical amount of whiskers,—make the same request of Miss Van Orden, my just relinquished partner, and it was evident that such whiskers could do no wrong.

Stella was not uninfluenced, it may be, by Miss Van Orden's example, for even in girlhood the latter was a person of extraordinary beauty, whereas, as has been said, Stella's corners were then multitudinous; and it is probable that those two queer little knobs at the base of Stella's throat would be apt to render their owner uncomfortable and a bit abject before—let us say—more ample charms. In any event, Stella giggled and said she thought it would be just fine, and I presently conducted her to the third piazza of the hotel.

There we found a world that was new.

It was a world of sweet odors and strange lights, flooded with a kindly silence which was, somehow, composed of many lispings and trepidations and thin echoes. The night was warm, the sky all transparency. If the comparison was not manifestly absurd, I would liken that remembered sky's pale color to the look of blue plush rubbed the wrong way. And in its radiance the stars bathed, large and bright and intimate, yet blurred somewhat, like shop-lights seen through frosted panes; and the moon floated on it, crisp and clear as a new-minted coin. This was the full midsummer moon, grave and glorious, that compelled the eye; and its shield was obscurely marked, as though a Titan had breathed on its chill surface. Its light suffused the heavens and lay upon the earth beneath us in broad splashes; and the foliage about us was dappled with its splendor, save in the open east, where the undulant, low hills wore radiancy as a mantle.

For the trees, mostly maples of slight stature, clustered thickly about the hotel, and their branches mingled in a restless pattern of blacks and silvers and dim greens that mimicked the laughter of the sea under an April wind. Looking down from the piazza, over the expanse of tree-tops, all this was strangely like the sea; and it gave one, somehow, much the same sense of remote, unbounded spaces and of a beauty that was a little sinister. At times whippoorwills called to one another, eerie and shrill; and the distant dance-music was a vibration in the air, which was heavy with the scent of bruised growing things and was filled with the cool, healing magic of the moonlight.

Taking it all in all, we had blundered upon a very beautiful place. And there we sat for a while and talked in an aimless fashion. We did not know quite how one ought to "sit out" a dance, you conceive….

Then, moved by some queer impulse, I stared over the railing for a little at this great, wonderful, ambiguous world, and said solemnly:

"It is good."

"Yes," Stella agreed, in a curious, quiet and tiny voice, "it—it's very large, isn't it?" She looked out for a moment over the tree-tops. "It makes me feel like a little old nothing," she said, at last. "The stars are so big, and—so uninterested." Stella paused for an interval, and then spoke again, with an uncertain laugh. "I think I am rather afraid."

"Afraid?" I echoed.

"Yes," she said, vaguely; "of—of everything."

I understood. Even then I knew something of the occasional insufficiency of words.

"It is a big world," I assented, "and lots of people are having a right hard time in it right now. I reckon there is somebody dying this very minute not far off."

"It's all—waiting for us!" Stella had forgotten my existence. "It's bringing us so many things—and we don't know what any of them are. But we've got to take them, whether we want to or not. It isn't fair. We've got to—well, got to grow up, and—marry, and—die, whether we want to or not. We've no choice. And it may not matter, after all. Everything will keep right on like it did before; and the stars won't care; and what we've done and had done to us won't really matter!"

"Well, but, Stella, you can have a right good time first, anyway, if you keep away from ugly things and fussy people. And I reckon you really go to Heaven afterwards if you haven't been really bad,—don't you?"

"Rob,—are you ever afraid of dying?" Stella asked, "very much afraid—Oh, you know what I mean."

I did. I was about ten once more. It was dark, and I was passing a drug-store, with huge red and green and purple bottles glistening in the gas-lit windows; and it had just occurred to me that I, too, must die, and be locked up in a box, and let down with trunk-straps into a hole, like Father was…. So I said, "Yes."

"And yet we've got to! Oh, I don't see how people can go on living like everything was all right when that's always getting nearer,—when they know they've got to die before very long. Because they dance and go on picnics and buy hats as if they were going to live forever. I—oh, I can't understand."

"They get used to the idea, I reckon. We're sort of like the rats in the trap at home, in our stable," I suggested, poetically. "We can bite the wires and go crazy, like lots of them do, if we want to, or we can eat the cheese and kind of try not to think about it. Either way, there's no getting out till they come to kill us in the morning."