The Red Book Magazine/Volume 40/Number 4/The Laughing Woman

by Melville Davisson Post

The
Laughing Woman

By ⁠ Melville Davisson Post

The celebrated author of “The Corrector of Destinies,” “Uncle Abner,” “The Sleuth of St. James Square” and many other brilliant achievements here contributes something highly imaginative and wholly unusual.

 

THE reader read, as he has been taught to read, with the modulated chant which the Church of England had adapted from the great Latin service. But the spirit of the man who listened was standing apart from the words he heard; it was standing in repose, in reflection.

It was a morning of early autumn. The huge, fashionable church was crowded to the very doors. Beyond the exquisite memorial windows, the sun, like a caress, lay on the fragment of parked country which had been selected by this exclusive social colony for its summer residence, and which had been pruned, beautifully, like a vine.

The man who sat on one of the altar benches of the church, with the secretaries of the British Embassy, was profoundly impressed. He looked like a fair-haired, sun-tanned English youth in the clerical dress of a novitiate of the Church of England, but he was in fact the very strangest of all those strange wards which the British Empire undertakes to train under English institutions to its will; having finished with Eton and Oxford, he was here as a summer guest of the Embassy at the country place it had taken some distance across the hills from the fashionable resort.

He sprang from the romance of a Buddhist crusade. When Dorjine, in the years before the Great War, persuaded the Dalai Lama that he could convert the Czar and all Russia to Buddhism, it was arranged for a Russian prince of the royal house to visit Tibet. This prince was given a young sister of the Lama for wife, and this son was born. And the English government, always far sighted, undertook to shape this youth, under its influence, for the head of the Tibetan government, or Dalai Lama, in its high, celibate, monastic order—the oldest, the most rigid monastic order in the world, excluding women, excluding the thought of woman.

Fair-haired and sun-tanned, in his clerical dress of the Church of England, the youth was of today and Western in his physical aspect; but within he was of yesterday and Oriental; and this Song of Solomon, rich with the sensuous imagery of the East, profoundly impressed him.

About the man within the cool spaces of the church, the symbols of this vast Western religion were displayed—of brass, of silver, of gold, of silk softened like ivory, and wonderfully embroidered.

Old, studied in the moods of human emotion, and wise were the great religious orders that had put together this majestic symbolism—as though no sense could be omitted from this worship. It stood, with its devices, before every doorway to the human heart.

Peace, an immense security, was the promise of this service to the soul of man confused by emotions. And it appalled the soul that it would soothe and comfort. Its serene pronouncement, on every ecstasy of the senses, put the soul in fear.

Vanity! Even as the priests of Buddha had assured him.

As though the whole of all human experience had been examined!

Age, crippled with failure, accepted the pronouncement; but Youth forever resisted, its white eager shoulder crowding against the door.

It resisted on this morning—not in vigor, but in a vague reflection. The man who listened to the service—the man in the first maturity of youth—was concerned with the experience of life about to be denied him.

What was this thing that he was giving up?

His confirmation into the celibate order of his Buddhist religion had been long planned, and was now, in reality, only a little way ahead. Until now he had not thought about it. He had gone carelessly, it seemed to him, like a child sentenced to a prison, with no thought, until the wall loomed at a turn of the road.

Vanity! How did he know that?

He had no experience of life. He had lived surrounded by Buddhist tutors, sequestered, like the virgins of the pagan rituals. The atmosphere of his great Oriental religious order had enveloped him—his acts, his will, the very imaginings of his heart. How did he know?

And as the voice advanced pronouncing the great love-song, human and sensuous, here, in the sacred books of this religion, the spirit of the man idled, curious, before the actual physical mystery that inspired these vivid extravagancies.

What was this love of women?

Upon it the sacred text fell back when it would seek an extreme expression; the language of this passion provided that text with its ultimate simile. And the expressions in this Oriental love-song were hot and dripping with life, fragments of the human heart.

Men using words like these had hold of something unknown in his experience—and to remain unknown! The fact, as though unrealized until this moment, suddenly appalled him. To remain unknown!

And all at once, as though the human mystery had but now suddenly appeared before him, as though until this hour he had never thought to examine it closely, he looked eagerly over the great audience.

Two persons, midway of the church, seated near the center aisle, arrested his attention. His eager glance passed before these two persons, lingered—remained: a man at middle life and a girl.

Here in its golden lure was the mystery he renounced. And the spirit of the man, standing apart from the deep, even, level voice that filled the remote spaces of the church, profoundly regarded her.

The girl, in every aspect of her, was distinguished: the white, smartly cut gown, the filmy hat, like a web in a frame of suggested color—every detail.

And her features were alluring and exquisite: her cloud of dark hair, beautifully outlining the symmetrical forehead; the line of the eyebrow above the clean-cut arch; the chiseled nose; the lovely mouth with its dainty color, and the short upper lip incomparably exquisite and sensitive, as though divinely fashioned for the ecstasy of every human emotion. And the rich color, vaguely shadowed out, under the transparent skin, sown, as appeared to the eye, with gold flecks, was beyond any descriptive word.

She was the substance of everything lovely and distinguished. And the spirit of the man, awakened and entranced, suddenly realized that it stood here, on this morning, before an ultimate perfection of Nature.

A perfection of Nature!

The words instantly assumed an immense meaning. To produce this exquisite creature, the creative energies of Nature had been at work from the beginning, for so long a time that the human under standing staggered at the thought of it, and with an endless patience.

A perfection of Nature! But why had Nature labored to this perfection? And her great method was the mystery upon which the words of his Oriental order would presently, forever, close the door.

To some other man, under the lure of such an immense conception, this divine creature would go smiling, her arms extended.

The realization, sudden and vast, descended upon him as with the impact of a blow, and the heart in him staggered with a desolation. Exiled, excluded from this ecstasy, the life of his monastic order seemed a night of black loneliness.

If the other was vanity, what thing, appalling and awful, was this!

 

AND he was a man not at all lacking in attractiveness. He had the fine blond beauty of the Russian at his best. He was strong and virile, not unlike the fine figures of the Old Testament in their golden youth—David when he stood between the assembled armies with his sling; the sons of Jacob in the fields; or that one, choice and goodly, of which the Lord spoke apart in the ear of Samuel: “Tomorrow about this time I will send thee a man out of the land of Benjamin—”

He had the curled yellow hair, the clean-cut features, the strong, proportioned body, the wide gray eyes and the serenity of these vague figures in the majestic legend. It was not possible for him to be unconscious of it. The glance, the arrested attention of women, everywhere, as with a pressure, reminded him.

He had been reminded on this very morning.

His way here lay through one of the towns to the south, and on the edge of it, in a wide meadow, a great circus with all its mammoth gilded paraphernalia was unloading—as though the wonders of fairyland were in exodus, the creatures of the Thousand and One Nights traveling out of Bagdad: a hundred white horses with their attendants; beasts, mammoth and dusky; and bespangled women.

They regarded him! And one he himself had regarded.

She lay in the thin morning sun on the top of a gilded wagon, her body prone, a bare arm extended over the border of the carved wagon-top. She too was dark, after the manner of this girl now exquisitely before him in the cool spaces of the church that the reader’s voice filled. But the dark was rich and tropical, a wild, gypsy, passionate coloring—a flower of some soft southern country, hot-blooded and impulsive, not restrained, not bred out—luxuriant and free.

She lay close to the flat top of the gilded wagon as though her body caressed it, every contour soft and pressed into the lines of the carved top as into a mold that by some sorcery lovingly received it, lovingly longed for it and held it tenderly and firm as in the gestures of a caress.

Her hair was a cloud about a face that laughed, softly with no sound, a dimpled, luminous smile packed with deviltry.

By chance, it seemed to the man, as by the sudden invisible pull of a heavenly magnet, he had looked up at her. There had been no sound, no motion, nothing to attract his eye as he passed below her in the dust of the road. And yet, suddenly, as at a command of Nature, he had looked up!

And she had laughed that laugh without a sound, without, as it seemed to him, the slightest visible evidence of a motion, as one in some fabled garden might catch the face of a bronze, above a flowering vine, that laughed ..... He had not paused in his stride, nor spoken; there had been no word, no gesture. And yet the laughing face that followed him, regarded him; and his head, half turned, had remained her way until the wagon of the circus had as by a curtain removed her.

He had gone on in his long walk to join the secretaries of the Embassy at the morning service of this great, impressive, fashionable Western church.

And on his way here, like Judah on his way to Timnath to shear his sheep, he had met a lure. But unlike Judah he had gone on, leaving the lure smiling by the way.

But he had not gone on in peace.

It was the deviltry of the laugh that troubled him! Out of the inconceivable charm of what hidden mystery did this laugh issue? It moved something obscure and amorphous nesting in the very fibers of his body. The man was young; the taste of the apple of the Garden was unknown to him. But from the most mysterious, the most subtle impulse in the world, this cloistered innocence could not protect him.

Nature was greater than the Buddhist ritual. What amulet had his monastic order to stand against the deviltry of this laugh?

The activities of the mind cannot be measured by the ticking of a clock. These reflections, these vivid alluring pictures, these troubled memories, passed before him in a brief, a limited portion of time.

The Oriental in him vividly realized the imagery of the greatest love-song in any language known to us.

“How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter!”

And to this man with the blood of Asia in him, these words had an object and a meaning. The prince’s daughter was before him, here, wonderfully to the eye, this incomparable girl lovely and distinguished..... Or was it that other, gorgeous and tropical on the top of the gilded wagon, the daughter of an Oriental nomad prince?

“Thy neck is as a tower of ivory.”

Wonderful imagery, how it fitted to the lure! A tower of ivory! The white throat under the distinguished head, the sun-browned column under the face that laughed. How well the hedonist of Syria knew the word!

The reader’s voice went on:

“And the hair of thine head like purple!”

Beautiful conception of an eye morbid for detail.

But it was true! Amazingly, inconceivably, it was true! He recalled it. Against the thin morning sun, the cloud of hair above the gilded wagon-top had a faint purple haze in it. And the hair of the heavenly creature before him, banked about her distinguished face, had a vague purple background in the light softened by the colored windows.

“How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!”

And with a great upward sweep the imaginings of his heart raced forward. What mysterious knowledge, hidden and packed with ecstasy, had inspired this sentence, this comment crowning the appraisal!

Night would soon come on.

 

THE man had returned through the hills, avoiding the road that he had followed on his morning journey. He wished, like every human creature, profoundly disturbed, to be alone. But he had not wandered in the open. He lay in the deep grasses at the wooded border of a hilltop. Beyond him, obscured by a forest, was the town that he had tramped through; and below was the bend of the great river, wide, marking the sweep of a vast arc of silver around the big shoulder of the forest extending like a giant’s arm to the north.

It was hot—the sudden oppressive heat of an autumn afternoon. The air was heavy. It enervated the senses like a drug. And it remained hot as the night came on, as though the world had entered a stellar space occupied by an atmosphere heated and sensuous.

He lay at full length in the hot dried grass like one overpowered by an opiate. He seemed to lie without thought and without motion. But it was merely the illusion of inertia. The lotus-eater, his hands under his relaxed head, his limbs extended, and pressing the earth beneath him like a dead weight, gives to the eye this impression of serenity, of a lifeless indolence, that his heated fancy, burning within him, awfully negatives.

The man had not found peace in the open places of the hills.

Passion carried into a solitude is elevated to a tyranny. Nature, the great enchantress, presents her drugged cup, and after it is drunken leaves the victim in the sacred groves to his fancy.

And on this day her drugged cup had been swallowed brimming. The man’s fancy awfully assailed him. They appeared, these two exquisite women, in alluring visions. And so potent is the ancient drugged cup that in the man’s fancy they had the aspect and the realities of life.

They were here!

If he turned his head, one of them came and stood behind him. And if he closed his eyes, the leaves falling on his face were soft hands that touched him. They changed, these two alluring women, blended, became one exquisite creature, the distinction of the one added to the golden deviltry of the other.

And very nearly that heavenly thing appeared!

Almost, to sight and hearing, it appeared!

With a supreme effort of the will, the man stumbled to his feet. In a moment he would see her, and his mind would go.

It was night. The world as by some trick of sorcery was in a blue hazy darkness. The man hurried, stumbling down the long wooded hill to the river, to the tiny boat in which he had crossed this morning when he had followed the faint path along the river to the highway skirting the town. Now returning through the hills, he descended to cross the river.

He was a long time, in the blue haze of the night, on his way down; he was haunted, followed; and confused, he kept losing the way.

The moon rose. He found the boat, released it and pulled out into the river. There was a form of light—the deep blue haze, dense and palpable, illumined by the moon as behind a cloud, enveloped the world.

He fled from an illusion that multiplied itself as in the facets of a brilliant, and peopled the night. And he fled in vain!

His boat was still obscured by the thick wooded growth that extended here into the river, when suddenly, with a great backward stroke of the oars, he stopped.

Laughter reached him!

His body lifted rigid, his fingers like steel. It was close beyond him, this laughter on the silver surface of the open water toward which his back was set. He trembled internally with panic. He knew the thing that had happened. These illusions pressing for reality had finally won a way through to forms and voices. The thing that had happened to the saints was, by some briefly recovered vigor of evil, about to happen to him!

The hot air of the autumn night lay on the river like the fume of a distillation.

He knew from whence the laughter rose, and wherefore it was multiplied. It was the illusion, manifold, confused and varied, of the girl in the church, of the girl on the top of the gilded wagon; and that golden silent laughter had got now the lure of voices.

They laughed, these divine illusions; and beyond in the bend of the river they awaited him.

He would drive the boat across, with great strokes, and escape this sorcery. Perhaps they had not yet won a way into the forms of life. Disembodied voices—perhaps the thing was that!

It was not that!

His mighty thrust drove the little boat out into the open river. And the amazed man, releasing the oars in the locks, put up his arm across his face like one who would ward off a blow.

The whole sweep of the silver river flashed with the white bodies of Nereides; they were everywhere, extending through the blue moon-haze to the rocks of the shore beyond. The boat under the impetus of the powerful oar-strokes had glided almost noiselessly into the very nest of them. For a moment, as though disconcerted by this thing of a fixed reality, they cried out and withdrew, but almost immediately they returned, and a great burst of laughter rippled like a wave over the silver surface of the river.

The man sat motionless, his arm in the defensive posture across his face. And the naked creatures, with their golden laughter, swarmed down upon him. A babble confused and extending itself in every direction, rose—cries, voices, words that the amazed man was too shaken to distinguish.

They enveloped him, these siren creatures. They seized the boat, convoyed it. It went on without the stroke of an oar. The reality of these white bodies, panting in this golden babble of sound, in this immense sweep of silver water, was beyond any conception of the human fancy. He was mad, the man stammered in his heart—or it was real.

And reality it could not be!

When could the whole water of a river be peopled with Nereides, save out of the womb of the mind?

The boat continued to advance. A hand, cool, dripping with water, touched his arm, moved along it as though it fingered upward from the throbbing peak of his heart and drew him down to the gunwale of the boat. And his eyes, released from the shield of his arm, saw a head weighted with dark hair, wet and massed like the heavy foliage of a vine, about a face that laughed.

With an immense effort the man rose, balanced himself an instant on the unsteady seat and sprang far out into the water. The moving boat had very nearly reached the opposite shore, and the long leap carried the man into the shallows. He plunged forward, gained the cover of the wood and escaped, the burst of golden laughter following him like the mingling notes of a siren chorus.

But the security which the man expected in his house did not await him.

 

HE seemed to arrive, awakened, in a place which he had hitherto inhabited in a sort of somnambulism. The severity of the ancient monastic order was, in a measure, maintained in this house which he occupied, situated on the grounds ad joining the summer residence of the Embassy—the wooden table, the bench, the shelf for the sacred texts. But the spiritual essence of these things had changed; the place was desolate!

He sat down on the bench before the table. And Nature, the great enchantress, the divine guardian of life, had her mighty will with him. From the tension that had peopled the night with Nereides he felt that he had escaped. But he had, in fact, escaped from nothing. It was, only, that the Enchantress turned him a little in her drugged hands.

And a sense of loss, complete and utter, like the darkness of the pit, descended on him. The one thing, he now desperately saw it, the one only thing for which he was born and suckled, and for which he ate bread and became a man—a thing hidden until now—had on this day stepped out into the light and beckoned.

And if he failed it, the reason for his being here was ended, all the care, the patience, the endless labors of Nature, bringing him in strength to the fullness of his life, were barren; all the agony that he had given to his mother, the milk that he had drunk, the fruits of the earth that he had eaten, were wasted; he would be a thing of no account, useless to the great plan, to be broken up by the eternal forces in disgust.

And slowly, a little farther, in her drugged hands the Enchantress turned him.

And it seemed to him that his fathers sleeping in the earth approached and condemned him. The gift of life handed down to him must be passed on. To this life-line the dead clung; they reached to immortal ity with it. Did he break it, they would be, all, adrift to the farthest ancestor—flung off to be derelict forever in the wash of some outer darkness! They crowded around him in their awful anxiety!

And yet a little farther under the hands steeped in Lotus!

Why should the ecstasy of life be denied him?

“Joy cometh in the morning,” it is written.

At any rate, the will to joy came. He would return into the world and claim what Nature had shown him.

 

THE sun gilding the hilltops found him on the way. And as though the will drew what the heart longed for, it appeared. At a turn of the road in a cool deep of the wood, he came, with the abruptness of a vision, upon the girl and the man who had been before him yesterday in the church. They rode in the early morning—smart, elegant, distinguished, the horses traveling almost without a sound in the dust.

And the lure of this heavenly creature, in the dress of a boy, was even more divinely visioned: the black boots with the silver spurs, the white breeches, the shirt confined at the waist with the broad webbed belt, and the cool, beautiful, distinguished face under the polo-helmet with its chin-strap. Lovely, beyond any thing that the mind could imagine, was the exquisite body of this girl.

They passed him.

The girl did not even look, but for an instant the man regarded him. And it was this glance that extinguished the hope within him. It put him immeasurably down. And he saw clearly, what he had not yesterday considered, the strength and the iron vigor of this man, the determined will, to be stopped by nothing. To take from this man what he possessed, one must pry open his dead clinched fingers.

There were men in the world, then, ruthless and determined, whose resistance he had not considered. This granite fact, with which the bubbles of his fancy must inevitably collide, he had wholly failed to realize. One passed him with the thing he wished, and he could not meet, even, the cold sweep of his eye!

Trampled under, beaten down and perplexed, the youth went on.

He had been a fool. He reflected.

This girl of wealth, of distinction, was of course inaccessibly beyond him. But the other was not. She was the nomad of a gypsy caravan, and he could win his way to her.

He went on, his heart climbing again.

This other he would search out and possess. She awaited him; he had only to find her; that golden laugh descending on him like the sun had disclosed her heart. He had been blinded and for a moment a fool! She, this other, had been the prepotent influence. She, Nature’s mysterious agencies, laboring to the purpose of her plan, had selected for him. She had dominated his imaginings, peopled the silver river, in his fancy, with a horde of white bodies tumbling in the mood of a golden laugh..... He went on.

 

IT was midmorning when he reached the town. Crowds of people blocked the way. Determined with his great purpose, he shouldered through.

The one long street was the theater of a barbaric pageant. Elephants, spangled riders, caparisoned horses and immense bands of music advanced. And there fol lowed, reproduced here an inconceivable age after its reality, the visit of an Oriental beauty, in every gorgeous extravagance, to the court of that exquisite voluptuary who had immortalized, in his Song, the charms of women.

The man, winning his way through to the curb, remained a moment uncertain. The vast splendor of the pageant confused him.

On an immense float covered with a cloth of gold lay a woman fanned by two half-naked Numidian girls, under a great canopy of striped silk supported on gilded standards. And beside the float a nimble creature dressed in a riot of color and covered with bangles of brass, leaped in the abandon of a wild dance. There followed hordes of women, in every spectacular costume that a crude fancy, endeavoring to reproduce the visit of the Queen of Sheba, could imagine.

Then the fans, immense, downy and soft, moving as in rhythm above the Oriental beauty, for a moment revealed her.

And the man on the curb,—this Buddhist novitiate in the clerical dress of the Church of England, this youth,—straining forward on his toes, sprang into the street, crossed in a stride and leaped onto the float. He seized the girl’s wrist in his hand and began to pour out all the confused longings of his heart—a tumbling, passionate torrent of words.

For a moment the girl, whom he had first seen on the gilded wagon-top, was startled. Then she half rose and turned toward the gorgeous dancing woman beside the float, her face radiant with that beautiful noiseless laugh:

“Hey, Mabel!” she called, her voice crude and strident. “The pulpit Johnny that we si-reened last night, in the big wash, wants to wed me. Can you beat it!”

 

AND before the man—flung back, bruised, numb, as by the battering of a wave—there appeared in fancy a vast, immobile image of Buddha, over beyond this pageant: serene in an eternal calm, as though abominably indifferent to the soul of man, bewildered by emotions and drugging itself with dreams.