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The Golden House By: Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900) |
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By Charles Dudley Warner
I It was near midnight: The company gathered in a famous city studio were
under the impression, diligently diffused in the world, that the end of
the century is a time of license if not of decadence. The situation had
its own piquancy, partly in the surprise of some of those assembled at
finding themselves in bohemia, partly in a flutter of expectation of
seeing something on the border line of propriety. The hour, the place,
the anticipation of the lifting of the veil from an Oriental and ancient
art, gave them a titillating feeling of adventure, of a moral hazard
bravely incurred in the duty of knowing life, penetrating to its core.
Opportunity for this sort of fruitful experience being rare outside the
metropolis, students of good and evil had made the pilgrimage to this
midnight occasion from less favored cities. Recondite scholars in the
physical beauty of the Greeks, from Boston, were there; fair women
from Washington, whose charms make the reputation of many a newspaper
correspondent; spirited stars of official and diplomatic life, who have
moments of longing to shine in some more languorous material paradise,
had made a hasty flitting to be present at the ceremony, sustained by
a slight feeling of bravado in making this exceptional descent. But
the favored hundred spectators were mainly from the city groups of
late diners, who fluttered in under that pleasurable glow which the red
Jacqueminot always gets from contiguity with the pale yellow Clicquot;
theatre parties, a little jaded, and quite ready for something real and
stimulating; men from the clubs and men from studios representatives of
society and of art graciously mingled, since it is discovered that it is
easier to make art fashionable than to make fashion artistic. The vast, dimly lighted apartment was itself mysterious, a temple of
luxury quite as much as of art. Shadows lurked in the corners, the ribs
of the roof were faintly outlined; on the sombre walls gleams of color,
faces of loveliness and faces of pain, studies all of a mood or a
passion, bits of shining brass, reflections from lustred ware struggling
out of obscurity; hangings from Fez or Tetuan, bits of embroidery,
costumes in silk and in velvet, still having the aroma of balls a
hundred years ago, the faint perfume of a scented society of ladies
and gallants; a skeleton scarcely less fantastic than the draped wooden
model near it; heavy rugs of Daghestan and Persia, making the footfalls
soundless on the floor; a fountain tinkling in a thicket of japonicas
and azaleas; the stems of palmettoes, with their branches waving in the
obscurity overhead; points of light here and there where a shaded lamp
shone on a single red rose in a blue Granada vase on a toppling stand,
or on a mass of jonquils in a barbarous pot of Chanak Kallessi; tacked
here and there on walls and hangings, colored memoranda of Capri and of
the North Woods, the armor of knights, trophies of small arms, crossed
swords of the Union and the Confederacy, easels, paints, and palettes,
and rows of canvases leaning against the wall the studied litter, in
short, of a successful artist, whose surroundings contribute to the
popular conception of his genius. On the wall at one end of the apartment was stretched a white canvas; in
front of it was left a small cleared space, on the edge of which, in the
shadow, squatting on the floor, were four swarthy musicians in Oriental
garments, with a mandolin, a guitar, a ney, and a darabooka drum. About
this cleared space, in a crescent, knelt or sat upon the rugs a couple
of rows of men in evening dress; behind them, seated in chairs, a group
of ladies, whose white shoulders and arms and animated faces flashed
out in the semi obscurity; and in their rear stood a crowd of
spectators beautiful young gentlemen with vacant faces and the elevated
Oxford shoulders, rosy youth already blase to all this world can offer,
and gray headed men young again in the prospect of a new sensation... Continue reading book >>
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Fiction |
Literature |
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