The Project Gutenberg eBook ofMary WollastonThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Mary WollastonAuthor: Henry Kitchell WebsterRelease date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11161]Most recently updated: December 23, 2020Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY WOLLASTON ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Mary WollastonAuthor: Henry Kitchell WebsterRelease date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11161]Most recently updated: December 23, 2020Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Title: Mary Wollaston
Author: Henry Kitchell Webster
Author: Henry Kitchell Webster
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11161]Most recently updated: December 23, 2020
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY WOLLASTON ***
Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.
1920
Miss Lucile Wollaston was set to exude sympathy, like an aphid waiting for an overworked ant to come down to breakfast. But there was no sympathizing with the man who came in from a doctor's all-night vigil like a boy from a ball-game, gave her a hard brisk kiss on the cheek-bone, and then, before taking his place at the table, unfolded the morning paper for a glance at the head-lines.
If there was something rigorous about the way she lighted the alcohol lamp under the silver urn and rang for Nathaniel, the old colored butler, it was from a determination not to let this younger brother of hers put her into a flurry again as he so often did. A very much younger brother indeed, he seemed when this mood was on him.
Miss Wollaston was born on the election day that made James Buchanan president of the United States and Doctor John within a few days of Appomattox. But one would have said, looking at them here at the breakfast table on a morning in March in the year 1919, that there was a good deal more than those ten years between them. He folded his paper and sat down when the butler suggestively pulled out his chair for him and his manner became, for the moment, absent, as his eye fell upon a letter beside his plate addressed in his daughter, Mary's, handwriting.
"I want a big platter of ham and eggs, Nat, sliced thick. And a few of Lucartha's wheat cakes." He made some sort of good-humored, half articulate acknowledgment of the old servitor's pleasure in getting such an order, but one might have seen that his mind was a little out of focus, for it was not exactly dealing with the letter either. He sliced it open with a table knife with the precise movement one would have expected from a surgeon and disengaged it in the same neat way from its envelope. But he read it as if he weren't very sharply aware of what, particularly, it had to say and he laid it beside his plate again without any comment.
"Did you have any sleep last night, at all?" Miss Wollaston asked.
It brought him back like a flash. "Not a wink," he said jovially.
This was a challenge and the look that went with it, one of clear boyish mischief, was one that none of John Wollaston's other intimates—and among these I include his beautiful young wife and his two grown-up children by an earlier marriage—ever saw. It was a special thing for this sister who had been a stately young lady of twenty when he was a bad little boy of ten. She had watched him, admiring yet rather aghast, ever since then.
To the world at large his social charm lay in—or was at least inseparable from—his really exquisite manners, his considerateness, the touch of old-fashioned punctilio there was about him. His first wife would have agreed with her successor about his possession of this quality though they would have appraised it rather differently. Only this elderly unmarried sister of his felt the fascination of the horrible about him.
This was to some extent inherent in his profession. He had a reputation that was growing to amount to fame as a specialist in the very wide field of gynecology, obstetrics and abdominal surgery. The words themselves made Miss Wollaston shudder.
When he replied to her question, whether or not he had had any sleep at all, with an open grin and that triumphant "Not a wink," she had a prophetic sense of what was going to happen. She was going to ask him more questions and he was going to tell her something perfectly ghastly.
She felt herself slipping, but she pulled up. "What's in Mary's letter?" she asked.
She knew that this was not quite fair, and the look that it brought to his face—a twinge of pain like neuralgia—awakened a sharp compunction in her. She did not know why—at least not exactly why—his relation with his daughter should be a sore spot in his emotional life, but she knew quite well that this was true. There was on the surface, nothing, or nowhere near enough, to account for it.
He had always been, Miss Wollaston felt, an adorer to the verge of folly of this lovely pale-blonde daughter of his. He had indulged her outrageously but without any evident bad results. Upon her mother's death, in 1912 that was, when Mary was seventeen years old, she had, to the utmost limit that a daughter could compass, taken her mother's place in the bereaved man's life. She had foregone the college course she was prepared for and had taken over very skillfully the management of her father's household; even, in a surprisingly successful way, too, the motherly guidance of her two-years-younger brother, Rush. Miss Wollaston's testimony on these two points was unbiased as it was ungrudging. She had offered herself for that job and had not then been wanted.
Two years later there had been a quarrel between John and his daughter. She fell in love, or thought she did—for indeed, how could a child of nineteen know?—with a man to whom her father decisively and almost violently objected. Just how well founded this objection was Miss Wollaston had no means of deciding for herself. There was nothing flagrantly wrong with the man's manners, position or prospects; but she attributed to her brother a wisdom altogether beyond her own in matters of that sort and sided with him against the girl without misgiving. And the fact that the man himself married another girl within a month or two of Mary's submission to her father's will, might be taken as a demonstration that he was right.
John had done certainly all he could to make it up with the girl. He tried to get her to go with him on what was really a junket to Vienna—there was no better place to play than the Vienna of those days—though there was also some sort of surgical congress there that spring that served him as an excuse, and Mary, Miss Wollaston felt, had only herself to blame for what happened.
She had elected to be tragic; preferred the Catskills with a dull old aunt to Vienna with a gay young father. John went alone, sore from the quarrel and rather adrift. In Vienna, he met Paula Carresford, an American opera singer, young, extraordinarily beautiful, and of unimpeachable respectability. They were in Vienna together the first week in August, 1914. They got out together, sailed on the same ship for America and in the autumn of that year, here in Chicago, in the most decorous manner in the world, John married her.
There was a room in Miss Wollaston's well ordered mind which she had always guarded as an old-fashioned New England village housewife used to guard the best parlor, no light, no air, no dust, Holland covers on all the furniture. Rigorously she forbore to speculate upon the attraction which had drawn John and Paula together—upon what had happened between them—upon how the thing had looked and felt to either of them. She covered the whole episode with one blanket observation: she supposed it was natural in the circumstances.
And there was much to be thankful for. Paula was well-bred; she was amiable; she was "nice"; nice to an amazing degree, considering. She had made a genuine social success. She had given John a new lease on life, turned back the clock for him, oh—years.
Mary, Miss Wollaston felt, had taken it surprisingly well. At the wedding she had played her difficult part admirably and during the few months she had stayed at home after the wedding, she had not only kept on good terms with Paula but had seemed genuinely to like her. In the spring of the next year, 1915, she had, indeed, left home and had not been back since except for infrequent visits. But then there was reason enough—excuse enough, anyhow—for that. The war was enveloping them all. Rush had left his freshman year at Harvard uncompleted to go to France and drive an ambulance (he enlisted a little later in the French Army). Mary had gone to New York to work on the Belgian War Relief Fund, and she had been working away at it ever since.
There was then no valid reason—no reason at all unless she were willing to go rummaging in that dark room of her mind for it—why John should always wince like that when one reminded him of Mary. It was a fact, though, that he did, and his sister was too honest-minded to pretend she did not know it.
He answered her question now evenly enough. "She's working harder than ever, she says, closing up her office. She wants some more money, of course. Andshe'sheard from Rush. He's coming home. He may be turning up almost any day now. She hopes to get a wire from him so that she can meet him in New York and have a little visit with him, she says, before he comes on here."
It was on Miss Wollaston's tongue to ask crisply, "Why doesn't she come home herself now that her Fund is shutting up shop?" But that would have been to state in so many words the naked question they tacitly left unasked. There was another idea in her brother's mind that she thought she could deal with. He had betrayed it by the emphasis he put on the fact that it was to Mary and not to himself that Rush had written the news that he was coming home. Certainly there was nothing in that.
"Why," she asked brightly, "don't you go to New York yourself and meet him?"
He answered instantly, almost sharply, "I can't do that." Then not liking the way it sounded in his own ear, he gave her a reason. "If you knew the number of babies that are coming along within the next month…."
"You need a rest," she said, "badly. I don't see how you live through horrors like that. But there must be other people—somebody who can take your work for you for a while. It can't make all that difference."
"It wouldn't," he admitted, "nine times out of ten. That call I got last evening that broke up the dinner party,—an intern at the County Hospital would have done just as well as I. There was nothing to it at all. Oh, it was a sort of satisfaction to the husband's feelings, I suppose, to pay me a thousand dollars and be satisfied that nobody in town could have paid more and got anything better. But you see, you never can tell. The case I was called in on at four o'clock this morning was another thing altogether." A gleam had come into his eyes again as over the memory of some brilliantly successful audacity. The gray old look had gone out of his face.
"I don't altogether wonder that Pollard blew up," he added, "except that a man in that profession has got no business to—ever."
The coffee urn offered Miss Wollaston her only means of escape but she didn't avail herself of it. She let herself go on looking for a breathless minute into her brother's face. Then she asked weakly, "What was it?"
"Why, Pollard…." John Wollaston began but then he stopped short and listened. "I thought I heard Paula coming," he explained.
"Paula won't be down for hours," Miss Wollaston said, "but I do not see why she shouldn't hear, since she is a married woman and your own wife…."
Her brother's "Precisely" cut across that sentence with a snick like a pair of shears and left a little silence behind it.
"I think she'll be along in a minute," he went on. "She always does come to breakfast. Why did you think she wouldn't to-day?"
This was one of Miss Wollaston's minor crosses. The fact was that on the comparatively rare occasions when Doctor John himself was present for the family breakfast at the custom-consecrated hour, Paula managed about two times in five to put in a last-minute appearance. This was not what annoyed Miss Wollaston. She was broad-minded enough to be aware that to an opera singer, the marshaling of one's whole family in the dining-room at eight o'clock in the morning might seem a barbarous and revolting practise and even occasional submissions to it, acts of real devotion. She was not really bitterly annoyed either by Paula's oft repeated assertion that she always came to breakfast. Paula was one of those temperamental persons who have to be forgiven for treating their facts—atmospherically. But that John, a man of science, enlisted under the banner of truth, should back this assertion of his wife's, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, really required resignation to put up with; argued a blindness, an infatuation, which seemed to his sister hardly decent. Because after all, facts were facts, and you didn't alter them by pretending that they did not exist.
So instead of answering her brother's question, she sat a little straighter in her chair, and compressed her lips.
He smiled faintly at that and added, "Anyhow she said she'd be along in a minute or two."
"Oh," said Miss Wollaston, "you have wakened her then. I would have suggested that the poor child be left asleep this morning."
Now he saw that she had something to tell him. "Nothing went wrong last night after I left, I hope."
"Oh, not wrong," Miss Wollaston conceded, "only the Whitneys went of course, when you did and the Byrnes, and Wallace Hood, but Portia Stanton and that new husband of hers stayed. It was his doing, I suppose. You might have thought he was waiting all the evening for just that thing to happen. They went up to Paula's studio—Paula invited me, of course, but I excused myself—and they played and sang until nearly two o'clock this morning. It was all perfectly natural, I suppose. And still I did think that Paula might have sung earlier, down in the drawing-room when you asked her to."
"She was perfectly right to refuse." He caught his sister up rather short on that, "I shouldn't have asked her. It was very soon after dinner. They weren't a musical crowd anyway, except Novelli. It's utterly unfair to expect a person like Paula to perform unless she happens to be in the mood for it. At that she's extremely amiable about it; never refuses unless she has some real reason. What her reason was last night, I don't know, but you may be perfectly sure it was sufficient."
He would have realized that he was protesting too much even if he had not read that comment in his sister's face. But somehow he couldn't have pulled himself up but for old Nat's appearance with the platter of ham and eggs and the first installment of the wheat cakes. He was really hungry and he settled down to them in silence.
And, watching him between the little bites of dry toast and sips of coffee, Miss Wollaston talked about Portia Stanton. Everybody, indeed, was talking about Portia these days but Miss Wollaston had a special privilege. She had known Portia's mother rather well,—Naomi Rutledge Stanton, the suffrage leader, she was—and she had always liked and admired Portia; liked her better than the younger and more sensational daughter, Rose.
Miss Wollaston hoped, hoped with all her heart that Portia had not made a tragic mistake in this matter of her marriage. She couldn't herself quite see how a sensible girl like Portia could have done anything so reckless as to marry a romantic young Italian pianist, ten years at least her junior. It couldn't be denied that the experiment seemed to have worked well so far. Portia certainly seemed happy enough last night; contented. There was a sort of glow about her there never was before. But the question was how long would it last. How long would it be before those big brown Italian eyes began looking soulfully at somebody else; somebody more….
It was here that Miss Wollaston chopped herself off short, hearing—this time it was no false alarm—Paula's step in the hall. She'd have been amazed, scandalized, profoundly indignant, dear good-hearted lady that she was, had some expert in the psychology of the unconscious pointed out to her that the reason she had begun talking about Portia was that it gave her an outlet for expressing her misgivings about her own brother's marriage. Paula, of course, was a different thing altogether.
What a beautiful creature she was, even at eight o'clock in the morning at the end of an abruptly terminated night's sleep. She looked lovelier than ever as she came in through the shadowy doorway. She wasn't a true blonde like Mary. Her thick strong hair was a sort of golden glorification of brown, her skin a warm tone of ivory. Her eyes, set wide apart, were brown, and the lashes, darker than her hair, enhanced the size of them. The look of power about Paula, inseparable from her beauty, was not one of Miss Wollaston's feminine ideals. It spoke in every line of her figure as well as in the lineaments of her face; in the short, rather broad, yet cleanly defined nose; in the generous width of her mouth; in the sculpturesque poise of her neck upon her shoulders.
Paula's clothes, too, worried her elderly sister-in-law a little, especially the house-dresses that she affected. They were beautiful, heaven knew; more simply beautiful perhaps than it was right that clothes should be. There was nothing indecent about them. Dear Paula was almost surprisingly nice in those ways. But that thing she had on now, for instance;—a tunic of ecru colored silk that she had pulled on over her head, with a little over-dress of corn colored tulle, weighted artfully here and there that it mightn't fly away. And a string of big lumpish amber beads. She could have got into that costume in about two minutes and there was probably next to nothing under it. From the on-looker's point of view, it mightn't violate decorum at all; indeed, clearly did not. But Miss Wollaston herself, if she hadn't been more or less rigidly laced, stayed, gartered, pinched, pried and pulled about; if she could have moved freely in any direction without an admonitory—"take care"—from some bit of whalebone somewhere, wouldn't have felt dressed at all. There ought to be something perpetually penitential about clothes. The biblical story of the fall of man made that clear, didn't it?
John sprang up as his wife came into the room; went around the table and held her chair for her. "My dear, I didn't know I was robbing you of half a night's sleep," he said. "You should have turned me out."
She reached up her strong white arms (the tulle sleeves did fall away from them rather alarmingly, and Miss Wollaston concentrated her attention on the spiggot of the coffee urn) for his head as he bent over her and pulled it down for a kiss.
"I didn't need any more sleep. I had such a joyous time last night. I sang the whole ofMaliela, and a lot ofThais. I don't know what all. Novelli's a marvel; the best accompanist I've found yet. But, oh, my darling, I did feel such a pig about it."
He was back in his own chair by now and his sister breathed a little more freely.
"Pig?" he asked.
"Oh, because you weren't there," said Paula. "Because I didn't sing before, when you asked me to."
"Dearest!" John remonstrated,—pleased though with the apology, you could see with half an eye,—"it was inexcusable of me to have asked you. It was a dull crowd from a musical point of view. The only thing I minded was having, myself, put you into a position where you had to refuse. I am glad you were able to make it up to yourself after."
"That was not why I didn't," Paula said. She always spoke rather deliberately and never interrupted any one. "I mean it wasn't because the others weren't especially musical. But I couldn't have sung without asking Novelli to play. And he couldn't have refused—being new and a little on trial you know. And that drawing-room piano, so badly out of tune, would have been terrible for him. There's no knowing what he mightn't have done."
John's face beamed triumph. "I might have known you had an unselfish reason for it," he said. He didn't look at his sister but, of course, the words slanted her way.
It was perfectly characteristic of Miss Wollaston that she did not, however, make any immediate attempt to set herself right. She attended first very competently to all of Paula's wants in the way of breakfast and saw her fairly launched on her chilled grapefruit. Then she said, "A man is coming to tune the piano this morning."
It was more than a statement of fact. Indeed I despair of conveying to you all the implications and moral reflections which Miss Wollaston contrived to pack into that simple sentence.
The drawing-room piano was what an artillerist would speak of as one of the sensitive points along the family front. It had been a present to the Wollaston household from the eldest of John's brothers, the unmarried one Miss Wollaston had kept house for so many years before he died; the last present, it turned out, he ever made to anybody. Partly perhaps, because it was a sacred object, the Wollaston children took to treating it rather irreverently. The "Circassian grand" was one of its nicknames and the "Siamese Elephant" another. It did glare in the otherwise old-fashioned Dearborn Avenue drawing-room and its case did express a complete recklessness of expense rather than any more austere esthetic impulse.
Paula ignored it in rather a pointed way; being a musician she might have been expected to see that it was kept in tune. She had a piano of her own up in the big room at the top of the house that had once been the nursery and over this instrument, she made, Miss Wollaston felt, a silly amount of fuss. Supposedly expert tuners were constantly being called in to do things to it and nothing they did ever seemed to afford Paula any satisfaction.
The aura that surrounded Miss Wollaston's remark included, then, the conviction that the drawing-room piano, being a sacred memory, couldn't be out of tune in the first place; that Paula, in the second, ought to have attended to it; and third (this is rather complex but I guarantee the accuracy of it) the fact that it was to be tuned this morning, really made it a perfectly possible instrument for Mr. Novelli to have played upon last night.
John missed none of that. He hadn't been observing his sister during half a century for nothing. He glanced over to see how much of it his wife took in; but the fact, in this instance, was all that interested Paula.
"It was awfully clever of you," she said, "to get hold of a tuner. Who is he? Where did you find him?"
"I found him in the park," said Miss Wollaston brightly, responding to the little thrill you always felt when Paula focused her attention upon you. "He was sitting on a bench when I drove by just after lunch. I don't know why I noticed him but I did and when I came back hours later, he was still sitting there on the same bench. He was in uniform; a private, I think, certainly not an officer. It struck me as rather sad, his sitting there like that, so I stopped the car and spoke to him. He got his discharge just the other day, it seemed. I asked him if he had a job and he said, no, he didn't believe he had. Then I asked him what his trade was and he said he was a piano tuner. So I told him he might come this morning and tune ours."
It was Paula's bewildered stare that touched off John's peal of laughter. Alone with his sister he might have smiled to himself over the lengths she went in the satisfaction of her passion for good works. But Paula, he knew, would just as soon have invited a strange bench-warming dentist to come and work on her teeth by way of being kind to him.
Miss Wollaston, a flush of annoyance on her faded cheeks, began making dignified preparations to leave the table and John hastily apologized. "I laughed," he said,—disingenuously because it wouldn't do to implicate Paula—"over the idea that perhaps he didn't want a job at all and made up on the spur of the moment the unlikeliest trade he could think of. And how surprised he must have been when you took him up."
"He did not seem surprised," Miss Wollaston said. "He thanked me very nicely and said he would come this morning. At ten, if that would be convenient. Of course if you wish to put it off…."
"Not at all," said John. He rose when she did and—this was an extra bit, an act of contrition for having wounded her—went with her to the door. "It was a good idea," he said; "an excellent way of—of killing two birds with one stone."
Paula was smiling over this when he came back to her. "It doesn't matter, does it?" he asked.
She shook her head. "It isn't that it's out of tune, really; it's just—hopeless."
It was strange how like a knife thrust that word of hers—hopeless—went through him. Perfectly illogical, of course; she was not speaking of his life and hers but of that ridiculous drawing-room piano. Somehow the mere glow she had brought into the room with her, the afterglow of an experience he had no share in producing, had become painful to him; made him feel old. He averted his eyes from her with an effort and stared down at his empty plate.
A moment later she came around the table and seated herself, facing him, upon the arm of his chair; clasped his neck with her two hands. "You're tired," she said. "How much sleep did you have last night?" And on his admitting that he hadn't had any, she exclaimed against his working himself to death like that.
No memory, though he made a conscious effort to recover it, of his audacious success during the small hours of that morning in bringing triumphantly into the world the small new life that Pollard would have destroyed, came back to fortify him; no trace of his own afterglow that had so fascinated and alarmed his sister. "I shall sleep fast for an hour or two this morning and make it up," he told Paula.
"I do wish you might have been there last night," she said after a little silence. "I don't believe I've ever sung so well;—could have, at least, if there had been room enough to turn around in. It was all there; it's getting bigger all the time. Not just the voice, if you know what I mean, darling, but what I could do with it."
"It was partly Novelli, I suspect," he said. "Having him for an accompanist, I mean. He's very good indeed, isn't he?"
"Oh, yes, he's good," she assented absently. "Awfully good. And he is a nice furry little enthusiastic thing; like a faun, rather; exciting to play with of course. But it wasn't that. It's you, really—being in love with you the way I am. I suppose that's the very best thing that could possibly have happened to me. I'm another person altogether from that girl you found in Vienna. Just where she left off, I begin."
She uttered a little laugh then of sheer exuberance and with a strong embrace, pressed his head hard against her breast. He yielded passively, made no response of his own beyond a deep-drawn breath or two. A moment later when she had released him and risen to her feet, he rose too.
"Would Novelli be procurable?" he asked. "Could he be engaged regularly, as an accompanist for you and so on?"
She looked at him rather oddly. "Why, I don't need him," she said, "as long as I am just playing. Of course, if I were to go regularly to work, somebody like him would be almost necessary."
There was a tight little silence for a few seconds after that, he once more evading her eyes. "It seems to me you work most of the time as it is," he said. Then he announced his intention of going up-stairs to take a nap. He wasn't going to the hospital until eleven.
He did go up to his room and lay down upon his bed and, eventually, he slept. But for an hour, his mind raced like an idle motor. That nonsense of Lucile's about Portia Stanton's folly in marrying a young musician whose big Italian eyes would presently begin looking soulfully at some one else. Had they already looked like that at Paula? Jealousy itself wasn't a base emotion. Betraying it was all that mattered. You couldn't help feeling it for any one you loved. Paula, bending over that furry faun-like head, reading off the same score with him, responding to the same emotions from the music…. Fantastic, of course. There could be no sane doubt as to who it was that Paula was in love with. That embrace of hers, just now. Curious how it terrified him. He had felt like a mouse under the soft paw of a cat. An odd symptom of fatigue.
What a curious thing life was. How widely it departed from the traditional patterns. Here in his own case, that Fate should save the one real passion of his life for the Indian summer of it. And that it should be a reciprocated passion. The wiseacres were smiling at him, he supposed; smiling as the world always smiled at the spectacle of infatuate age mating with tolerant, indifferently acquiescent youth. Smiled and wondered how long it would be before youth awoke and turned to its own. Well, he could afford to smile at the wiseacres. And at the green inexperienced young, as well, who thought that love was exclusively their affair—children the age of Mary taking their sentimental thrills so seriously!
Four years now he had been married to Paula and the thing had never chilled,—never gone stale. How different from the love of his youth that had led to his former marriage, was this burning constant flame. Paula was utterly content with him. She had given up her career for him.—No. She hadn't done that. He had not asked her to do that. Had not, on the contrary, her marriage really furthered it? Was she not more of a person to-day than the discouraged young woman he had found singing for pittances the leading dramatic soprano rôles in the minor municipal operas of Germany and Austria? Wasn't that what she had said this morning—that falling in love with him was the best thing that could possibly have happened to her? He had taken it wrong when she said it, as if she were regarding him just as an instrument that served her purpose, a purpose that lay beyond him; outside him.
That was what had given him that momentary pang of terror. Fatigue, of course. He ought to go to sleep. Paula was refraining from her morning practise just so that he could. Or was that why? Was she dreaming, up in the music room where she was never to be disturbed,—of last night—of Novelli? Damnation….
Paula went up to the music room after breakfast, stood at one of its open windows for a few minutes breathing in the air of an unusually mild March and then abruptly left it; dressed for the street and went out for a walk.
She was quite as much disturbed over the scene in the dining-room as her husband had been. His flash of jealousy over the little Italian pianist, instantly recognizable through its careful disguise, had only endeared John Wollaston to her further, if that were possible. She had laughed and hugged his worried old head tight against her breast.
But his refusal to face facts about her musical career was another thing altogether. Once more he had, patently and rather pitiably, evaded the subject of her going seriously to work. Did he think that she could go on indefinitely parading a parlor accomplishment for his society friends,—singing nice little English songs for Wallace Hood? It was too ridiculous! That hadn't been their understanding when she married him.
What she had been sure of last night as never before, she had tried down there in the dining-room to convey to him; that her powers were ripe, were crying out for use. She had failed simply because he had refused to see what she was driving at. It was just another form of jealousy really, she supposed.
She was not an introspective person, but this, clearly, was something that wanted thinking over. It was to "think" that she went out for the walk. Only, being Paula, the rhythm of her stride, the sparkle of the spring air, the stream of sharp new-minted sensations incessantly assailing eye and ear, soon swamped her problem; sunk it beneath the level of consciousness altogether. Long before ten o'clock when she came swinging along Dearborn Avenue toward her husband's house, she had "walked off" her perplexities.
A block from the house she found herself overtaking a man in uniform and slackened her pace a little in order not to pass him. There was something unmilitary about the look of him that mildly amused her. It was not that he slouched nor shuffled nor that he was ill-made, though he was probably one of those unfortunates whom issue uniforms never fit. He carried a little black leather satchel, and it broke over Paula that here perhaps was Lucile's piano tuner. She half formed the intention to stay away another hour or two until he should have had time to finish. But he interfered with that plan by stopping in front of the house and looking at it as if making up his mind whether to go in.
It was an odd look he had, but distinctly an engaging one. He was not criticizing the architecture, if so it could be called, of the house-front. Yet there was a sort of comfortable detachment about him which precluded the belief that it was a mere paralyzing shyness that held him there.
Paula abandoned her intention of walking by. She stopped instead as she came up to him and said, "Are you coming in here? If you are, I'll let you in." She fished an explanatory latch-key out of her wrist-bag as she went up the steps.
"Why," he said, "I believe this is the house where I'm expected to tune a piano."
In the act of thrusting home her key, Paula stopped short, turned irrepressibly and stared at him. She was one of that very small number of American-born singers who take the English language seriously and she knew good speech when she heard it. It was one of the qualities which had first attracted her to Doctor John. This man's speaking voice would have arrested her attention pleasantly anywhere. Coming from the private soldier Lucile had told to come round to tune the piano, it really startled her. She turned back to the door and opened it.
"Yes," she said, "they're expecting you. Come in and I'll show you the piano."
She might, of course, merely have indicated the drawing-room door to him with a nod and gone up-stairs, but she was determined now to wait and hear him say something more. So she led the way into the drawing-room and quite superfluously indicated the Circassian grand with a gesture. Then she looked back at him quickly enough to surprise the expression that flickered across his face at the sight of it. A mere cocking of one eyebrow it was, but amusingly expressive. So, too, was the way he walked over toward it, with an air of cautious determination, of readiness for anything, that made Paula want to laugh. He dropped down sidewise on the bench, turned up the lid and dug his fingers into the keyboard.
At the noise he evoked from that pampered instrument she did laugh aloud. It was not a piano tuner's arpeggio but a curiously teasing mixed dissonance she couldn't begin to identify. She thought she heard him say, "My God!" but couldn't be sure. He repeated his chord pianissimo and held it down, reached up and echoed it in the upper half of the keyboard; then struck, hard, two octaves in the bass.
"What a piano!" he said. "What a damned piano!" He made a sort of effort to pull himself up; apologized (she thought that was what he meant to do) for the damn. But as he turned back to the piano and struck another chord or two, she could see that his sense of outrage was mounting steadily all the time.
"You can't tune a piano like this."—He pushed up the cover and stared gloomily at the strings. "A mincing sickly thing like this. It's all wrong. The scale is all wrong. The man who designed it ought to be hung. But he called it a piano and sold it for a piano and I'm expected to come in and tune it. Slick and smear it over and leave it sounding sicklier and tubbier and more generally disgusting than ever. You might as well take a painted harlot off the streets"—he glared at the ornate extravagance of the case—"and expect to make a gentlewoman of her with one lesson in deportment. I won't tune it. It's better left as it is. In its shame."
"Well," said Paula, letting go a long breath, "you've said it."
Then she dropped into a chair and began to laugh. Never again, she felt sure, would the drawing-room piano be able to cause her a moment's irritation. This astonishing piano tuner of Lucile's had converted it, with his new christening, into a source of innocent merriment. "The painted harlot" covered the ground. Clear inspiration was what that was. The way he went on glowering at it, digging every now and then a new and more abominable chord out of its entrails made her mirth the more uncontrollable.
"It isn't funny, you know, a thing like this," he remonstrated at last."It's serious."
"It would be serious," she retorted with sudden severity, "if you had said all that or anything in the least like that to Miss Wollaston. Because she really loves it. She has adopted it."
"Was she the lady who spoke to me in the park?" His evident consternation over this aspect of the case made Paula smile as she nodded yes.
"That was an act of real kindness," he said earnestly. "Not mere good nature. It doesn't grow on every bush."
To this she eagerly agreed. "She is kind; she's a dear." But when she saw him looking unhappily at the piano again, she said (for she hadn't the slightest intention of abandoning him now), "There's another one, quite a different sort of one, in the music room up-stairs. Would you like to come along and look at that?"
He followed her tractably enough, but up in her studio before looking at the piano, he asked her a question or two. Had he the name right? And was the lady related to Doctor Wollaston?
"She's his sister," said Paula, adding, "and I am his wife. Why, do you know him?"
"I talked with him once. He came out to the factory to see my father andI happened to be there. Two or three years ago, that was. He did anoperation on my sister that saved her life. He is a great man." He added,"My name's Anthony March, but he wouldn't remember me."
He sat down at the instrument, went over the keyboard from bottom, to top and back again with a series of curious modulations. Then opening his bag and beginning to get out his tools, he said, "Before I went into the army, there was a man named Bernstein in these parts, who used to perpetrate outrages like this on pianos."
"Yes," said Paula, "he tuned this one two weeks ago."
Without so much as a by your leave, Anthony March went to work.
It was Paula's childlike way to take any pleasurable event simply as a gift from heaven without any further scrutiny of its source; with no labored attempt to explain its arrival and certainly with no misgivings as to whether or not she was entitled to it. Anthony March was such a gift. By the time he had got to work on her own piano, she knew he was pure gold and settled down joyously to make the most of him.
It was not until she attempted to give an account to the Wollastons at dinner that night, of the day they had spent together—for they had made a day of it—that she realized there was anything odd, not to say astonishing, about the episode. How in the first place did it happen that it was Paula's piano he tuned instead of the one in the drawing-room? This was, of course, inexplicable until she could get John by himself and tell him about it. One couldn't report to Lucile his phrase about the painted harlot. She had to content herself with stressing the fact that he intended to tune the drawing-room piano after he had finished with hers and then somehow he hadn't got around to it.
But why had an unaccredited wanderer whom Lucile had found in the park even been given a chance at the piano up-stairs? Well, he had looked to Paula like an artist when she had let him in the door. You could tell, with people like that, if you had an eye for such matters. And then his recognition of Bernstein's nefarious handiwork had clenched her conviction. Certainly she had been right about it; he had absolutely bewitched that piano of hers. She didn't believe there was another such tuner in the United States. If they would come up-stairs after dinner, she'd show them. They had always thought she was unnecessarily fussy about it, but now they should see they were mistaken. It was like unveiling a statue. The poor thing had been there all the time, covered up so that you couldn't hear it. She was so excited about it she could hardly leave it alone.
And he had been as delighted with the results as she herself. After he had played it a while for her (oh, he didn't play well, atrociously badly really, but that didn't matter; it only made it all the more exciting) he made her play for him. Paula smiled reminiscently when she added that he had sat all the while she was playing, on the bare floor under the piano where he could feel the vibrations as well as hear them. He had paid her an odd sort of compliment too, when he came crawling out, saying that he had assumed from the scores on the piano that she was a singer but that she played like a musician,—only not a pianist!
He was a genius, absolutely a genius of the first water, when it came to tuning pianos. Whether his talent as a composer ran to any such lengths as that she, of course, didn't know. If what he had played for her had been his own, any of it, it was awfully modern and interesting, at least. You could tell that even though it kept him swearing at himself all the time for not being able to play it. And from something he said at lunch…
"Lunch!" Miss Wollaston gasped (she had been away from home all day). "Do you mean you had lunch with him?"
"Why not?" Paula wanted to know. "Me to have gone down-stairs and eaten all alone and had a tray sent up for him? That would have been so silly, I never even thought of it. He's a real person. I like him a lot. And I don't know when I've had such a nice day."
Here was where Paula's difficulties began. Because when they asked her who he was, where he lived, where he came from, what his experiences in the army had been, and whether he had been to France or not, she had to profess herself upon all these topics totally uninformed. His name she happened to know; it was Anthony March. He told her that, somehow, right at the beginning, though she couldn't remember how the fact had cropped out.
As to the other matters her husband and his sister were seeking information about she simply hadn't had time to get around to things like that. She thought he might have been a farmer once or some such sort of person. He liked the country anyway. He had spent a lot of time, he told her, tramping about in Illinois and Iowa, earning his way by tuning farmers' pianos.
He hated Puccini and spoke rather disrespectfully of Wagner as a spell-binder. He liked Wolf-Ferrari pretty well; the modern he was really crazy about was Montemezzi. But he had made her sing oceans of Gluck,—both theIphigeniaandEuridice. It was awfully funny too because he would sing the other parts wherever they happened to lie, tenor, bass, contralto, anything, in the most awful voice you ever heard, though his speaking voice was lovely. Let John just wait until he heard it. It was almost as nice as his own. Oh, he was coming back again some time. He had promised to bring over some songs of his own composing for her to try.
It was at this point or thereabouts that John precipitated a crisis by asking how much this paragon of a piano tuner had charged her for his professional services. Paula stared at him, stricken.
"Why," she said, "I don't believe I paid him anything. I know I didn't. I never thought of it at all. Neither did he, for that matter though, I'm sure of it."
This provoked Lucile into an outburst, rare with her, of outspoken indignation. The man, delinquent as he had been in the matter of the drawing-room piano, became once more her protégé, her soldier whom she had found in the park and attempted to do a kindness to. Paula had kept him fussing over her piano all day and then let him go without, for all she knew, money enough to buy his supper or procure a lodging for the night.
John, though he made less commotion about it, took his wife's negligence even more seriously for he set about attempting to repair it. "You're quite sure," he asked in his crisp, consulting-room manner—a manner Paula was happily unfamiliar with—"You're quite sure he told you nothing about himself beyond his bare name? You've got that right, haven't you? Anthony March?"
"Yes," said Paula uncertainly, "I'm absolutely sure of that."
Had he any insignia on his uniform?—little bronze numerals on his collar—anything like that that she could remember? That would tell them what organization he belonged to and might give them a clue.
Here Lucile got drawn into the inquisition. She had seen him and talked to him. Had she noticed anything of the sort? But Lucile had not. She had, naturally, deferred all inquiries until he came to tune the piano; and had she been called as she felt she should have been….
But John, it appeared, was not interested in pursuing that line. He turned back to Paula. "I wish you'd begin at the beginning, my dear, at the time you let him into the house, and try to remember as nearly as you can everything that you said to him and that he said to you. He may have said something casually that you didn't remark at the time which would be of the greatest help to us now."
Paula wasn't very hopeful of obtaining any result in this way, but she dutifully went to work trying to think. She was perfectly amiable about it all. Presently her husband prompted her. "How did he happen to tell you what his name was? Can you remember that?"
After a minute, she did. "Why," she cried, lighting up, "he said he knew you but you wouldn't remember him. He said you did an operation on his sister once—that saved her life."
"An unmarried sister?" he asked.
"What difference … Oh, I see, because if she was married her name wouldn't be March. No, he didn't say anything about that. He did say something, though, about a factory. You went out to the factory to see his father and he was there."
John Wollaston's face went blank for a minute and his eyelids drooped shut. Then a quick jerk of the head and a sharp expulsion of breath announced success. "That's all right," he said. "Thank the Lord, I've got it now."
It would have seemed absurd to Paula, had she been capable of regarding anything he did in that light, that he should take a trivial matter like this so seriously. He couldn't have looked more relieved over the successful finish of a difficult operation.
"That happens to be a case I'll never forget," he went on to explain. "Professionally speaking, it was unique, but it had points of human interest as well. The girl was a patient in one of the wards at the Presbyterian. I didn't get a look at her until the last minute when it was desperate. Her father was opposed to the operation—a religious scruple, it turned out. Didn't want God's will interfered with. He was a workman, a skilled workman in a piano factory. There was no time to lose so I drove out there and got him; converted him on the way back to the hospital. I remember the son, now I think of it; by his speech, too. I remember thinking that the mother must have been a really cultivated woman. Well, it's all right. I've got the address in the files at the office. I'll send a letter there in the morning and enclose a check. How much ought it to be?"
Once more Paula did not know. Hadn't, she protested, an idea; and whenJohn asked her how much she paid Bernstein, she didn't know that either.It all went on the bill.
"Well, that's easy," said John. "I've got last month's bills in my desk.All right, I'll look into it. You needn't bother about it any more."
An approximation to a sniff from Miss Wollaston conveyed the comment that Paula hadn't bothered appreciably about it from the beginning, but neither of the others paid any attention to that.
As it fell out, John might have spared his labors because at eight o'clock or thereabouts the next morning just as he was sitting down to breakfast, Anthony March came back to repair his omission of the day before and tune the drawing-room piano.
A minor domestic detail of that sort would normally have fallen withinLucile's province, but John decisively took it away from her.
"When I finish breakfast," he said, "I'll write him a check and take it in to him." He added, "I'm curious to see what this new discovery of Paula's looks like."
That was exactly what he felt, an amused comfortable curiosity. Nothing in the least like that flash of jealousy he had felt over Novelli. If it had occurred to him to try to explain the difference to himself and had he taken the trouble to skim off the superficial explanation,—that Portia Stanton's husband belonged in Paula's world and that a tramp genius who came around to tune pianos did not,—he might have got down to the recognition of the fact that the character Paula had sketched for him last night was a grotesque and not therefore to be taken seriously. You could not, at least, do anything but smile over a man who sat on the floor under Paula's piano while she played and came crawling out to express surprise that a singer should be a musician as well.
So the look of the man he found in the drawing-room stopped him rather short. Anthony March had taken off the ill-fitting khaki blouse and the sleeves of his olive-drab uniform shirt were rolled up above the elbows. He was sitting sidewise on the piano bench, his left hand on the keyboard, his right making imperceptible changes in the tension of one of the strings. His implement, John's quick eye noticed, was not the long-handled L shaped affair he had always seen tuners use but a T shaped thing that put the tuner's hand exactly above the pin.
"It must take an immense amount of strength," he observed, "to tune a piano with a wrench like that."
March turned and with a pleasant sort of smile wished him a good morning. But he finished ironing the wave out of a faulty unison before he replied to John's remark. He arose from the bench as he spoke. "It does; but it is more a matter of knack really. A great tuner named Clark taught me, and he learned it from Jonas Chickering himself. Old Jonas wouldn't allow any of his grand pianos to be tuned with an L head wrench."
"My wife," said John, "recalled you to me last night, in the effort to remedy her omission to pay you for your services yesterday. I remember your sister's case very distinctly. I hope she is …"
"She is quite well, thank you," March said. Oddly enough his manner stiffened a little.
John hastily produced his check. It had struck him as possible that March might suspect him of hinting that one gratuitous service ought to offset the other.
"I hope the amount is satisfactory," he said.
March glanced at the check and smiled. "It's rather more than satisfactory; I should call it handsome. Thank you very much." He tucked the check into the pocket of his shirt.
"My wife's immensely pleased over what you did to her piano. I'm sure she will be glad to do all she can in the way of recommending you among her musical friends."
March looked at him in consternation. "Oh, she mustn't do that!" he cried. "I hope she won't—recommend me to any one."
John's sudden unwelcome surmise must have been legible in his face because March then said earnestly and quite as if the doctor had spoken his thought aloud, "Oh, it isn't that. I mean, I haven't done anything disgraceful. It's only that I know too many musicians as it is—professional pianists and such. If they find out I'm back, they'll simply make a slave of me. I don't need to earn much money and I like to live my own way, but it's hard to deny people what they are determined to get." He added thoughtfully, "I dare say you understand that, sir."
John Wollaston nodded. He understood very well indeed. He checked on his tongue the words, "Only Ihaveto earn a lot of money." "You are a composer, too, my wife tells me."
"Yes," March said, "but that isn't the point exactly. Put it that I enjoy traveling light and that I don't like harness. Though this one,"—he glanced down at his uniform,—"hasn't been so bad." He turned toward the piano with the evident idea of going back to work.
"Well," John said, "I must be off. You've a good philosophy of life if you can make it work. Not many men can. Good-by. We'll meet again some time, I hope."
"I hope so too," said Anthony March.
John went out and closed the drawing-room door behind him. Then he left the house without going up-stairs and saying hello to Paula and sitting down on the edge of her bed, as he had meant to do, and telling her all about his talk with the piano tuner.
It really was late and he must be getting started. Only why had he closed the drawing-room door so carefully behind him? So that his wife shouldn't be disturbed by the infernal racket those fellows always made tuning pianos? Or so that she mightn't even know, until he had finished his work and gone, that Anthony March had come back at all? And not knowing, should not come downen negligéeand ask whether he had brought his songs for her. Had he brought them? Certainly John had given him a good enough chance to say so. And if he had brought them and Paula did not come, would he leave them for her with Nat? Or would he carry them away in his little black satchel?
All the way out to the hospital John kept turning Anthony March over in his mind and the last thing to leave it was what had been the first impression of all. The fine strength of that hand and wrist which tuned grand pianos with a T wrench.
He hated himself for having shut the door.
And as it happened this act did not prevent Paula from finding March. The tyrant who looked after her hair had given her an appointment that morning at ten. So, a little before that hour and just as March was finishing off his job, she came down, dressed for the street. She came into the drawing-room and with good-humored derision, smiled at him.
"I knew you'd come and do it," she told him.
"It isn't going to be so bad," he answered. "Moszkowski, Chaminade,—quite a little of Chopin for that matter,—will go pretty well on it."
"Did you bring my songs?" she asked.
From the chair that he had thrown his blouse upon, he produced a flat package neatly wrapped in brown paper. And as she went over to the window with it, tearing the wrappers away as she walked, he went back to his work at the piano.
"Don't do that," she said, as he struck a chord or two. "I can't read if you do." But almost instantly she added with a laugh, "Oh, all right, go ahead. I can't read this anyway. Why, it's frightful!" She came swiftly toward the piano and stood the big flat quires of score paper on the rack. "Show me how this goes," she commanded, but he pushed back a little with a gesture almost of fright.
"No," he protested sharply. "I can't. I can't begin to play that stuff."
She remained standing beside his shoulder, looking at the score.
"They're strange words," she said, and began reading them to herself, half aloud, haltingly.
"'Low hangs the moon. It rose late,It is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love.'"
"Walt Whitman," he told her. "They're all out of a poem calledSea-Drift."
She went on reading, now audibly, now with a mere silent movement of the lips, half puzzled, half entranced, and catching—despite her protest that she could not read the music,—some intimations of its intense strange beauty.
"' …do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?… Loud I call to you, my love … Surely you must know who is here … O rising stars! Perhaps the one I want so much will rise … with some of you … O trembling throat! Sound clearer through the atmosphere…'"
With a shake of the head, like one trying to stop the weaving of a spell, she turned the pages back to the beginning.
"This means Novelli," she said. "I'll get him. I'll get him this morning.He's the best accompanist in Chicago. We'll go to work on them and whenwe've got them presentable, I'll let you know and sing them to you.Where do you live?"
He got up for a paper and pencil and wrote out an address and a telephone number. She was still staring at that first page of the score when he brought it back to her.
"I've never heard any of those songs myself," he told her.
At that she looked around at him, looked steadily into his face for a moment and then her eyes filled with tears. She reached out both hands and took him by the shoulders. "Well, you're going to hear them this time, my dear," she said. As she moved away, she added in a more matter-of-fact tone, "Just as soon as we can work them up, in a few days perhaps. I'll let you know."