Thurley Precore—Come take tea with me at half-past four. Bliss says we are to know each other.Ernestine Christian.
Thurley Precore—
Come take tea with me at half-past four. Bliss says we are to know each other.
Ernestine Christian.
Here at least was a breathing space from lessons. Some one had asked her to tea who would, one would assume, be willing to answer questions. She called a cab and drove to the address.
Thurley had no calling cards—not every detail can be achieved in a magical space of time—so she told the maid to say it was Miss Precore and that she was expected. At which she was shown into the strangest living-room, to her untutored eyes, that she could imagine. It had a black and white tiled floor and green Pompeiian furniture with oddly shaped cushions in still odder places and distinctive mirrors hung on dull, green chains. The piano was in the center of the room and all about the walls were bizarre black and white etchings and some fascinating marines. At the end of the room, the light striking it in excellent manner, was the portrait of a man. As Thurley looked at it, she wondered if she was to go from strange room to stranger room seeing portraits which fascinated her and then meet their originals only to gaze on another portrait equally strange and winsome.
This man was noticeable for his well-shaped head with its short, dark hair and fine, large eyes, hazel she would judge, slightly mocking and lying-in-wait in their expression. They were encased with spectacles of scholarly aspect. He had a womanish chin and the tortured, lined brow of the apostle. Dressed in riding togs, he was sitting on the bench of an old garden, one hand betraying slim, artistic fingers as it rested on the head of a grizzled dog.
Thurley was settling herself in a nearby chair, trying to become accustomed to this very different sort of “scenery,” when a woman began saying in a deep, rich voice,
“Poor youngster, tired out, aren’t you? Was it scales? How I hated them! Don’t worry, I shall not ask you to sing. Put this cushion behind you—ah, here we are.”
Thurley stared at her hostess, the same scarlet-lipped, clever-faced woman of the portrait, her blue-black hair combed high to-day and her spatulate hands clasping her knee in boy fashion. She wore no jewelry, but a frock the consonance of copper and silver. It gave the effect of sunset over still water and a silver-coated Persian cat stalked out to settle himself in the fold of her skirt.
“It was very good of you to ask me,” Thurley began, feeling rather ill at ease.
“I never ask any one I don’t want. So don’t feel obligated. Every one says I’m selfishness personified. Bliss says you’re to be one of our family and I want to be sort of elder sister—anyway, don’t you approve of tea and scandal at the same time?” Her smile softened her face. She reached over to a smoking stand and found a cigarette.
Encouraged, Thurley leaned forward to say, “I’m afraid I don’t know about the family. You see I’m quite raw, as they say. And dreadfully confused. I find I have to acquire so many things besides singing exercises.”
“I look back fourteen years and see myself as I look at you. I was droll for a year or so. But Bliss claims you have a sense of humor, so everything else will follow like sheep. You don’t understand, do you?” she said kindly. “Let’s see what the ‘family’ can do for you. Bliss is such a bear at explaining that he has really turned you over to me. You see, Thurley, there are so many hundreds of the near-famous and so many truly-great persons who abuse the name that a select little coterie of us—myself and five others—after rather depressing and humorousexperiences have formed what we call the family, and we are going to adopt you. It’s quite a recommendation, but you’ll realize it more five years from now. By the way, I shall not ask you to smoke—bad for tender throats.”
“How beautiful,” Thurley said softly, “a family!”
“Just a title, of course, but we have our parties and our times together and we talk of what we like in the manner we like—rather hard to plunge headlong into the real meaning of things. I think Bliss was precipitate in asking you to the Thursday dinner party.”
“He hasn’t.”
“But he will—that’s his way. He’s such a busy dear that he never does things properly. Now in the family are myself and Polly Harris, whom you’ll know better after seeing than I can tell you. Remember she has a Packard personality in that Lizzie Ford body of hers. Then Collin Hedley—”
“The artist who did your picture?”
“The same. And Mark Wirth, as great a dancer as you will ever see,” her lips folded into a displeased expression but she did not explain the reason, “and Bliss and there will be yourself. Then there are Sam Sparling, the English actor, and the original of that portrait,” she pointed to the man who had interested Thurley. “His name is Caleb Patmore.”
“Why, he writes stories,” Thurley said. “Even Birge’s Corners has become aware of him.”
“Bless his wicked heart!” Ernestine said swiftly.
Thurley began to wonder why Caleb Patmore ever used any other woman as a model for heroines or Collin Hedley for his paintings. Perhaps it was Ernestine’s unusual fashion of dress which made every one feel that she had worn only the least beautiful of her gowns or thecareless, homely way she dressed her hair or her unjewelled, ugly hands which could coax from the pianoforte such music as Thurley had never dreamed could exist—or her sarcastic worldliness tempered with a girlish idealism which made her face bright with smiles. Then there was the strange, restless sadness in her eyes and the way the scarlet mouth had of dropping into hurt little curves, symbolic of many things of which Thurley was still ignorant. Ernestine Christian was indifferent, even insolent, regarding her fame, but jealously proud of her theories about it. And when she mentioned Bliss Hobart a few moments later, she said enthusiastically,
“He is such a wonderful idealist, so tremendously sincere and fearless! Most idealists lack the courage to express themselves and they live and die with the world no wiser, but Bliss—! some day, when you, too, have become worldly wise and a bit tired ’way inside, you will understand.”
To which Thurley innocently replied, “Is Caleb Patmore an idealist?”
Ernestine began playing with the fringe of her sash. “Now what do you think?”
Thurley looked at the portrait and then at her hostess. “I don’t know,” she evaded.
“Tut-tut, tell me what you think! Never mind what you know.”
“His novels, even though they sell in as small towns as the Corners, are rather—rather—” She floundered piteously.
Ernestine came to the rescue, her scarlet lips curving down in hurt fashion as she answered, “His novels for the most part comprise tattling on blondined art models—and brides! Caleb believes that art must be on a strictly commercial basis and that no art should be enduring,‘any more than a bath,’ as he explains, ‘but quite as necessary and frequent.’”
“Oh, he is wrong!” Instinctively Thurley was displeased.
“May you always think so, but when the distressingly rich wheeze up in satin-lined cabs and ask you to accompany them to a distressingly vulgar palace and have you sing a song or two at a thousand dollars each; when every one comes salaaming and saluting you, and you, too, begin to have visions of acquiring a vulgar palace all your own and are, therefore, pompous and impossible as so many of us foolish children of light allow ourselves to become; when you look about the salon to select the richest husband or admirer and deliberately neglect your voice for your coiffure and your repertoire for your wardrobe—well, perhaps you may withstand it, but it is a rare happening! Bliss says he has yet to find it otherwise.”
“A thousand dollars a song.” Thurley recalled that day—how many lifetimes ago—that Dan engaged her to sing at his circus in connection with “the great swinging man” and had emptied his spending-money pocket into her ragged lap. “Oh, no, they only pay a thousand dollars a song in one of Mr. Patmore’s novels.”
“Mr. Patmore,” continued the woman who loved him more dearly than she did herself, “takes his copy from friends, like a bee flitting here and there and returning to the hive honey-laden. We have all accused him of hiding behind screens to gain conversation.”
Thurley laughed. “Do they never tip over?”
“They do if we suspect he is behind them,” Ernestine replied with a smile.
“What does he do with all his money? He must be very rich if the reports are true. Why even at the Corners we sold a hundred copies of ‘Victorious Victoria,’and it was stupid, even the description of a new way for Victoria to be kissed.”
“‘Victorious Victoria’! It is engraven on my heart. I tried harder to make him burn the manuscript than I did to play well before Queen Mary and King George,” she said in a dull voice. “Yet she was ‘Victorious Victoria,’ for she gave her sponsor a new motor and a lot of foolish jewelry and a Japanese valet and some first editions that he boasted of having wrenched from a millionaire at an auction sale! You see, Caleb thinks there is no need to sacrifice for one’s ideals or to be above a purchase price for mediocre work. He says, ‘Writing is a trade. We must all come in on a time clock or be taken to an insane asylum. Give the public what it wants and with their money we can buy what we want. Let the public take the consequent softening of the brain. Younger generations will always be appearing like spring violets and measles to save us authors’ and artists’ bacon!’ There is the alpha and omega of his philosophy. One might as well throw oneself against a stone fortress as to make him reason otherwise. Blind, blind as an adder!” She broke off abruptly to call Thurley’s attention to some pottery she had picked up in Dutch Guiana which could not be obtained save as one became a friend of the natives.
Then a maid came in with the tea-cart and Ernestine began asking as to “one lump or two—cream or sugar or lemon.”
“Your dress is so interesting,” Thurley remarked to break the lull.
“Thanks. I loathe clothes, yet have to have those dreadful creations when I go on tour—the critics always expect it. They put notices in the social columns, too! My revenge will come when I am in the perilous forties.I shall be constantly clad in black chiffon and steel embroideries with ermine and broadcloth for the outer layers. I aspire to be the sort of older-than-I-look-but-not-yet-ancient person who has the proper air of mystery, always an asset, the sure, fine lines of a Helleu dry point, you know.”
“No, I don’t know,” Thurley admitted drolly.
Ernestine clapped her hands. “Fine, we are coming on! Take some more marmalade. Please don’t let them spoil you, Thurley, you’re so nice as you are. I mean the army of make-overs who assail any one with ability. They have not begun attacks as yet. Wait until you are asked for written recommendations and some one invents a Thurley perfume. Oh, that you might be spared!” She held up her hands in horror.
“Does Mr. Hobart really think I shall be a great singer?” Thurley was experiencing her first stage fright, hence the repetition.
“No one sees him the second time unless he does,” Ernestine informed her. “Tell me about yourself. Remember I’m a cross pianist who dislikes having ability and yet would die if I did not. You can trust me, because no one ever comes near me!”
“Don’t you adore your work?” Thurley asked in reproach.
Ernestine shook her head. “Really, I think genius is something no other member of your family would countenance, something your ancestors have saved up to hand you unawares. I cannot help playing the piano. They say I even make peoplelikeBach, but I wish I could, for it is life to me, after a fashion, and death after another. You cannot mix house-and-garden living and a career any more than oil and water. It must be the choice absolute of one or the other. If a big person marries, she oftenmarries some one inferior and therein lies disaster. Moral, do not marry.”
Thurley’s fingers stole inside her pocket to clutch at the corner of Betsey’s letter. “But you can be happy, if you do not marry,” she said uneasily.
“Has it begun to worry so soon? Wake up, Silver Heels! Tell her there is much else besides the little hope-chest crowded with pink-ribboned nighties and cook books.” She stirred the Persian kitten with her slipper toe.
“I—I’ve been engaged,” Thurley announced, not knowing why.
“Of course you have, living in a small town and with those eyes! Who was he—not the constable? I could believe anything of you, Thurley, but that!” Ernestine was kindly and teasing all in one.
“Just a nice boy,” she said with an effort, “but I gave him up.”
“You did wisely. It is the trying to delude ourselves to clutch with one hand for a laurel wreath and for orange blossoms with the other. That is what makes us failures on both sides of the question. You must see Collin’s lovely country place up the Hudson, and we must go to some lectures together. Besides, you have all Europe to exclaim over. I’m going to walk through Spain next summer. Come along?”
“I’d love to if—if I have the money—”
“We’ll find the money. You must do these things. Bliss is making a little machine out of you with his blessed, idealistic self, hidden like a monk under his habit. Never mind—bright days for Young America—want to hear me play?”
“Would you, really?”
“Listen!” Rising, she went to the piano and began“The Two Larks,” gliding from that into some things of Grieg.
When she finished, Thurley, ruthlessly scattering cake crumbs, came beside her. The timid country girl had vanished. She was the wild-rose Thurley with the “fire, dash, touch of strangeness.”
“Let me sing for you! You can tell me the truth, better than Mr. Hobart. Oh, but you can!” she begged.
Ernestine pointed to the shelves of music, but Thurley shook her head.
“I’ll play for myself,” sitting on the bench beside her hostess.
The chords were few and far between, but the girl’s voice rose high and clear with the ethereal quality of a child’s, as she sang an old Scotch ballad.
Ernestine Christian drew her to her with a sudden, deft gesture. “Shall I pity or congratulate you?” she asked, her sallow cheeks flushed with excitement.
Then they fell to talking, as women will, of lighter things, and by degrees Thurley found herself in Ernestine Christian’s bedroom—a striking affair in yellow lacquered furniture with Chinese designs in gold, ivory walls and huge, black fur rugs which she had brought from Russia. There was point de venise and fillet lace over gray silk for the furniture coverings and a veritable sheath of photographs, among which Thurley found Bliss Hobart’s.
Then Thurley found herself taking note of Ernestine’s gowns, learning many things which she resolved to put into practice. She discovered that Ernestine Christian had just celebrated her thirtieth birthday and was indifferent to the fact in any way; that Bliss Hobart had had a fever when a lad and hence the grayish hair; that Polly Harris was as good a treat as a fairy pantomime but she carried a heartbreak bravely concealed, for she lovedCollin Hedley, the childish, irresponsible artist, and she had not the greatness of genius in herself for which she so longed. Also, there was a Madame Lissa Dagmar whom Ernestine disapproved of but spoke no open ill concerning. This Madame Dagmar threatened the welfare of Mark Wirth, the dancer, for she had fallen in love with him and turned his head with strange notions, and, lastly, this Thurley’s woman heart told her, Ernestine Christian loved the popular, irreverent novelist, Caleb Patmore, but she believed marriage would interfere with his work as well as her own, so she steadfastly stood him off in that tantalizing fashion common to women of brilliant attainments and childish, hungry hearts.
When Thurley left her, the sting as to Lorraine and Dan’s engagement had been spirited away—she knew not how. Perhaps it was the graceful way in which Ernestine had welcomed her, the new surroundings, the music, the confidences about these “stars in the artistic firmament,” as Birge’s Corners would have expressed it, the knowledge she was to be one of the sacred family which had hidden its existence even from press agents, or, thrilling thought, that she was to be famous and rich—or was it none of these? Was it that Thurley learned more about Bliss Hobart?—that he was an idealist who seldom expressed ideals, lest they become trampled upon and return to him in cynical disguise; that he was not old but young in fact and unmarried, and, as yet, interested in no woman personally save as his two friends, Polly and Ernestine, amused him; and, best of all, that he told Ernestine to be particularly nice to Thurley Precore, nicer than she had been to any other girl he had trained and presented to the public!
Hobart did invite Thurley to the family dinner party. With customary tardiness the invitation did not reach her until the afternoon of the day, late afternoon in fact, after a fatiguing round of “polishings off,” as she dubbed them, and an hour with Miss Clergy during which she had read aloud from an archaic little romance and had listened to the ghost-lady murmur her opinions.
Very swiftly it was becoming clear to Thurley that fame, even the great, dazzling fame of which the workaday world reads with awe, merely meant one had a different standard of values; that all emotions such as joy, sorrow, anger, renunciation, cowardice, heroism and so on were relative. Tom Jones and wife and child in Skiddeoot, Missouri, might attain as great joy over acquiring a terrifically green-colored bungalow and veneered mahogany to decorate the parlor, while Mrs. Tom was to have a woman to wash, and Mr. Tom membership in the Skiddeoot bowling club—quite as much joy as Ernestine Christian when she stayed at Buckingham Palace an honored guest and had on her dressing table the miniatures of the young princes and a certain jewelled box given her by the king of Italy. The lives of these luminaries, when one came to know them on equal footing, were composed of a multitude of trivial details, the same as were the Joneses’ of Skiddeoot—the proper breakfast food, annoyance of a thunder shower, the wrong-sized-gaiters, the intense dislike of parsnips, the fondness for Japanese prints, the staunch conviction as to when the world was toend, the way to eat one’s melons (in Skiddeoot it would be porridge), the best style of spring motor car (in Skiddeoot it would be whether to have the Ford wheels red or yellow)—and so on through an endless list of things about which physical and mental existence is centered.
Thurley had been exceptionally spared the grind and slow advancement of the average artist. On the other hand, she had experienced both grind and decidedly depressing experiences during her travels in the box-car. She was now placed, as it were, in the front ranks of the artistic world and allowed to gaze about, investigate, presume, acquire knowledge, as much as her own possibilities would permit. Her possibilities being above the average, Thurley, inside of the few months in New York, had come to the settled conviction that folks were really just folks no matter how they were dressed, and the artists quite the same as the population of Birge’s Corners, only in a different setting and with a different set of values.
It was rather disappointing to come to the conclusion, not at all romantic and stimulating or in keeping with the conclusions Caleb Patmore’s “Victorious Victoria” had arrived at in an amazingly short space of time. It was like a child’s suddenly being put on everyday relations With Santa Claus himself and finding out, besides his ability to ride reindeer skyward, and, toy-laden, shoot down narrow chimneys, that he had a gouty foot the same as Oyster Jim’s, was rather caustic if his eggs were overdone, was a Republican, body, boots and breeches, the same as Ali Baba, and, if he lost three games of cribbage straight running, was distinctly “peeved.”
So Thurley advanced beyond the illusions of the uninitiated. Before she came into Bliss Hobart’s dominion she had been one of the public, the sort of public whobelieve newspaper reports of opera singers having frolicsome boa-constrictors as family pets, to welcome them when they stagger home under van-loads of orchids from the evening’s work! She saw now with the clear, innocent eyes of youth, which is so often wiser than dictatorial and narrow middle age, that the common lot was the universal lot and that in the sum total of all things the famous ones were spared no more nor less nor given greater qualities of endurance or supreme power.
Had the invitation to the “family” dinner come a week ago, Thurley would have hesitated before accepting. But Ernestine Christian’s personality—as yet it was not Ernestine Christian’s real self since she betrayed that to no one—had woven a big-sister armor about Thurley’s wild-rose self. She was eager to become one of the family, unconscious of the honor for which many had sighed and bribed for in vain. She showed the note to Miss Clergy and became very flapperlike on the subject of her costume.
“Wear any you like,” Miss Clergy said fondly. “Dear me, I sha’n’t go. I’m an old lady, sleepy as an infant by half after eight.”
“Must I always be alone?” Thurley protested.
Miss Clergy, whose girlhood had been bounded on all sides by the “Polite Letter Writer” and “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” hesitated. “Take a maid,” she urged.
“For protection? Goodness, no! Why, I’ve walked at midnight in the darkest road at home, when Philena would be taken very ill and we had to have the north end doctor. I’ll go alone—and wear my green velvet.”
“If you want more dresses—” began Miss Clergy cheerily. When one had a wild-rose girl with the voice of a lark, revenge just naturally lost its grim and ugly aspects.
But Thurley shook her head and vanished, singing snatches of her exercises and finding out that she was not so tired as she had fancied; the languor had magically vanished. She propped Hobart’s tantalizing note on her dressing table as she did her hair.
Thurley—Come and be christened at seven-thirty. The family must know the baby.B. H.
Thurley—
Come and be christened at seven-thirty. The family must know the baby.
B. H.
Thurley deliberately powdered her face and added a soupçon of superfluous rouge. She was thinking, “Now I shall know the real man, the real Bliss Hobart,” dropping into a hum instead of singing aloud, always a symptom of rare joy.
Presently she appeared to say good night to Miss Clergy, a radiant young person looking, as Caleb Patmore said afterwards, “an up-to-date historical romance bound in green velvet and silver lace.” But she was disappointed in Hobart’s apartment, for she realized at a glance it was only more of his “setting”; that here he existed as Bliss Hobart the critic and master, not Bliss Hobart the man. It was equally as awesome as his studio offices, but in a more distinguished, definite style. There was rare, decorative wall paper, with shellacked panels set in the yellow, marbleized walls reproducing the design made by David for the great Napoleon. Black, velvety carpet covered the tiled floors, the chairs were of deep mouse color edged with gold fringe, there were pale gray hangings against shell pink satin screens and a tiled Portuguese mantel of blue and yellow.
She found Ernestine Christian and Caleb Patmore waging a lively argument, with Bliss Hobart enjoying ithugely. Nor did they stop after Thurley’s bashful entrance and Hobart’s introduction,
“The family infant! Remember, ‘children should be seen and not heard.’ There’s the chair for you, and if you are very ‘pie’ and don’t contradict your elders, you’ll be rewarded later.”
Thurley accepted the rôle gladly. It was evident they considered her a promising infant. Some day she would be able to tell them the same half-patronizing things or be introducing some other prodigy into the family in equally clever, blasé fashion. That first and memorable dinner party was more of an education than all the lessons Thurley had endured since her New York advent. Here she saw the demonstration of the theories taught her regarding form, cleverness and so on. Long before the evening was ended, she felt she could now dispense with the social secretary, the beauty doctor and the gymnast. She had only to observe her “family” and practise the results of the observation before her mirror.
“We are waiting for Polly Harris and Collin Hedley,” Hobart remarked during a lull in the battle. “Polly is as punctual as an alarm clock, but Collin would not be on time at his own funeral, if it were possible. We always give him a half hour leeway and never mind because Polly is such fun when she rages.”
Thurley murmured some reply, and then Caleb Patmore, who had been looking at her almost rudely, began anew his argument. Despite his depraved ideas regarding novel writing, Thurley liked him. He had the clean-cut business air which she admired, rather than the air of the proverbial long-haired novelist with a hemstitched neck scarf.
“Of course we respect Daphne,” he said grudgingly. “For five years she has made her living writingpoetry—POETRY—and how many can say as much? No bribes of the corset makers for limerick advertisements ever tempted her, but now she has sensibly surrendered in favor of marrying one Oscar Human, Indiana plumber at large. The only remarkable thing about it is that Oscar Human would marry a failure poetess who must have forgotten how to cook a boiled dinner or be interested in the new style nickel fittings! Well, luck to Daphne Rhodes, but what good was it all? A starved, embittered space filler, she admitted, soothing a makeup man’s difficulties by rounding out the page with a plump sonnet.”
Ernestine walked over to the mantel in order to look as majestic as possible, so Hobart called out. She was very lovely in her crystal colored satin with silvery panels and those interesting, homely hands of hers clasped awkwardly.
“You do love fleshpots, Caleb, no matter whether an Indiana plumber or an editor bestows them. You’ll have Daphne taking orders for your next novel, I dare say—a premium with every new kitchen sink Oscar installs! You wretch! I’ve no doubt Daphne is going to be happy, at least her experience as a poetess will mercifully teach her never to let this Oscar know how commonplace he is. Therein will lie the success of the union. As soon as Polly comes, we’ll decide on the wedding present. For my part, I think Daphne has done a brave thing to hold to the best in herself, and, when she saw she was unable to attain her goal, to drop back gracefully into the house-and-garden rank and file.”
Caleb shrugged his shoulders. “Well, long ago I became tired of being a literary chameleon and trying to match up every editor’s bark! I found out what the reading public wanted and I have given it to them—greathunks of it! I haven’t come out so badly, eh? Now, Daphne could have done the same.” He leaned back in his chair looking defiantly at Ernestine.
“You are trying to make me the man in the divorce case; his wife took the furniture and the five children and he took the blame. But I challenge you, Caleb, to prove that you have ever really written a good story—a story you felt and loved and were willing to fight for until it was printed.”
“You’ve never gone through my attic trunks,” he reminded. “Besides, the public doesn’t like highbrow stories. They like stories about people who are capable of wearing pink underwear, and a villain must be a villain if found carrying a riding crop. Just when I am settled in my mind concerning my next heroine, Ernestine breaks out with uplift, as annoying as to have a motor stuffed with relatives drive up to the door at dinner time,” he informed Hobart. “Can’t you lend a hand?”
“How can I, when I want to stay friends with you both? By Jove, there’s the bell; they’ve arrived.”
Ernestine blew Caleb a kiss and murmured, “If one cannot writeau naturel, I presume it must beau gratin!”
Then there swept into the room two of the strangest and most delightful persons Thurley had ever seen. Collin Hedley came first, a fair-haired, boyish man with eyes so joyous and brilliant one could not look at them for long, and the bristly head of the plebeian with deep incurvation of the temples. He was most carelessly dressed, but no one would have noticed that as long as his eyes smiled; he had a mad Van Dyke beard and a lovable yet combative mouth which might or might not prophesy many things.
But it was Polly Harris who captivated Thurley’s heart and made her forget her shyness. Polly had the fashionof bombarding one’s self-consciousness. She could have changed the saying, “A cat may look at a king” to “a cat may order a king.” Even Bliss Hobart lost dignity in her presence.
“Polly can teach you to writevers libreon your cuff and tell a Chicago art patron from a Pittsburg coal dealer at a distance of fifty yards,” was Hobart’s universal recommendation. But Polly Harris could do a great deal more.
She reminded one, although her age was less than Ernestine’s, of October sunshine, partly because she was a tiny, wood-brown thing, an oddity, a fact she well knew, flat-chested as a boy, with tanned skin, eyes like topazes, if she were happy, and her brown hair bobbed like a child’s and fastened with a ridiculous velvet bow. Her dresses were inevitably the same—since her income was likewise—Polly’s regimentals, they called them, brown corduroy for winter, made in semi-smock, semi-Eton-jacket style with an abbreviated skirt and stout little boots laced as if for a walking tour. In the summer Polly appeared in brown cotton made in similar fashion and when she was dragged to some formal affair she would be induced to wear her “heirloom,” a brocaded brown velvet which Ernestine had brought from Paris. Polly was just Polly with her crisp little voice, a heart of gold and a tongue which could be sharp as a battle lance or as tender as pink rosebuds.
“The only sprite in captivity,” the family dubbed her, pitying her impossible aim—to write grand opera—and never hinting what tragedy lay before her when the tanned face would wrinkle and the bobbed hair turn gray. It was as probable that Polly Harris could write a grand opera as that Betsey Pilrig could lead the Russian ballet—but Polly, as so often happens in the caseof “captured sprites,” saw none of the absurdity encasing her ambitions.
No one knew just how she lived, for she had the fierce pride of failures. “Sure ’nuff” successes or “comers” are always more amenable to loans and helping hands. In her sky parlor, the tiptop room in a bohemian New York rooming house, Polly somehow wrested from fate and the world at large a living. Limericks and hack work of hideous monotony and starvation wage with the pride of her family behind her! Her father had been an Ohio judge and her grandfather a senator, while Polly, alone and without resources, had wilfully burned family bridges some years before and drifted to New York to write her operas.
Even Polly admitted the first operas were hopeless, bravely burning them as one does old love letters. But grand opera remained her goal; nothing less would or could satisfy her. After seven desperate years of work and insufficient means, Polly had become one of the family of the very great and was envied by all; it meant, however, that she took from this family not one jot of aid or influence nor permitted them to know whether “we are eating to-day or we are moving our belt strap into the next hole.”
Sometimes the family outwitted Polly Harris and helped her in spite of herself, but more often they knew it was kindest to not try. So they did the finest thing of all because the girl’s fine self deserved and demanded it—they took her in as one of them and talked of the day her operas should be sung, listening to her pitiful dreams as kindly as they would have listened to Wagner could he have been among them telling of his Rhinegold! Polly had become a character in artistic New York and when the near-great enviously urged her to make use ofthe truly great, to accept some easy position as secretary or companion to this celebrity or that, Polly’s eyes would change to angry, storm things and she would turn on them with the threat that they would still see her win out, some day the great theme would come to her and the world admit her success! Then she would repay the beloved family for their kindness in not forcing old clothes and baskets of food, loans of money—as one tipped a maid. Polly would be famous, as famous as Ernestine Christian or Bliss or the lazy deceiver of a Caleb or Collin Hedley whom Polly loved in strange fashion although he was honestly unconscious of the fact.
Until then painting lamp shades at night, writing wretched verse for some wretched publication, doing a child’s song cycle for almost the cost of the music paper, harmonizing impossible marching songs, substituting at a Harlem movie house as the piano player—none of these was too mean for Polly to do since they sustained her until the day the great theme should whisper itself!
“The thing which keeps Polly afloat,” Ernestine had declared, “is that she is glad for every one else who wins out—it has made her so sunny hearted she just can’t go under.”
Polly approached Thurley with open arms, saying in her crisp fashion, “Bliss tells me you have never known father, mother nor telephone number and we can baby you all we like,” bending down unexpectedly to kiss her.
Before Thurley answered, Polly whirled around to demand, “Listen, every one, I’ve come to the conclusion we should all be thankful for anything that makes cold chills go up and down our spines,” dashing into some nonsensical adventure told in her own fashion.
Hobart waited until the conclusion, after which heoffered Thurley his arm and led the way into the dining room which proved to be an enclosed sort of terrace with wonderfully imitated flowering shrubs, green striped awnings, a lily pool fountain giving a touch of the unreal and illusive. Wicker chairs, artificial ascension lilies and Canterbury bells were in profusion. The room was called the “village green,” Caleb whispered to Thurley, and on nights when the thermometer skidded below zero, Hobart delighted to come into this exquisite little oasis of almost tropical heat and make his guests forget the sleet and frost without. Two chairs were tipped against their well appointed places, one for Mark Wirth, the dancer, and one for Sam Sparling, the actor, Thurley learned, a family custom always observed.
As they sat about the table, Thurley between Polly and Collin, Polly remarked naïvely:
“I’m trying to get Collin to tell me why women who dabble in water colors always paint ‘Pharaoh’s Horses’ with chests like inflated, tuppenny balloons?”
“How can a mere painter of fried egg sunsets answer?” he retorted. “Oh, I say, about Daphne’s wedding present—Polly doesn’t want to send it.”
At which a chorus of “why nots” issued, to which Polly said forcibly:
“Because it will remind her of what she can never have. Pick out some nice, golden oak and green plush article which will do credit to the establishment of one Oscar Human, plumber at large. It will be salve on a throbbing wound. Daphne will think, bless her amateurish old heart, that it isourchoice and being typical of the golden oak and green plush atmosphere which must always be hers, she’ll still feel one of us! But that green metal desk set with silver trim—horrors, think of its shivering with loneliness in Oscar’s back parlor!”
“Right,” Hobart added, “I’ll get the picture of a wistful tabby cat staring at oysters fairly shivering in their shells and a battenberg doily underneath—no, that would be too broad—we’ll get—I say, here’s our infant fresh from Birge’s Corners and Birge’s Corners’ brides—nearly one herself if the truth were known! What ho, Thurley, what would you propose to give a Birge’s Corners’ bride that would meet the town’s approval?”
Flushing as she thought of Lorraine’s chest of linens, the new house which was to cost twenty thousand dollars—and then of Ernestine’s necklace which cost that alone—Thurley, without hesitation, answered, “Why, a cut glass punch bowl with the silver hooks all around it for the little glasses!”
“The infant is christened,” Hobart pronounced after the applause ended. “I nominate a shopping committee of Ernestine Christian and Thurley Precore.”
During the rest of the supper party Thurley remained a spectator until Hobart whispered that she sing for them and she rose, for the first time in her life, reluctant to obey.
“She has not done well,” she heard Hobart saying as she finished, “stage fright—too few of us—too small a room—the opera stage, five thousand people and she would sing as if her throat were copper lined—however—”
Polly Harris finished the sentence for him. “However, if Ernestine wisely realizes the limitations of the pianoforte, Thurley Precore will never have to realize the limitations of her voice.”
Caleb took Ernestine and Thurley home in his machine, Collin and Polly following in the former’s roadster. Being the infant, Thurley was left at her hotel firstof all with fond good nights and quips about the sandman’s speedy arrival! She regretted that she was not allowed to whirl about taking Polly home and then Collin and then Ernestine and, finally, to be left alone with this rich, willful novelist-slacker and have him tell about his world even as Ernestine had hinted of hers.
As she undressed, the memories of the evening being rehearsed by her dramatic self and shamedly admitting she had been a stupid country lass who had not sung one-tenth as well as she could, Thurley realized another valuable thing, one which the public does not take the pains to decipher, that artists, in order to be successes, must,per se, acquire definite and almost narrow ways and methods of living such as dressing, recreation and so on,their personalities must crystallize and become impenetrable to the onslaught of the personalities which they will undertake to interpret or create. Here, in part, lies the secret of fame. Once one has one’s own self quite modelled and secure from invasion, the tortures of creation and interpretation become but the day’s work just as the man with grimy hands polishes the most expensive limousine body and returns homeward via a street car.
The members of the family had distinct and original personalities—true, they did not seem to be the complement of their forms of artistic achievement; Collin’s pictures never reminded one of Collin nor Ernestine’s programs have many of her own favorites, but back of their work, a haven to temperament, stood these people’s personalities which carried them bravely on the tidal wave of success. Whether or not something else stood behind these personalities and formed the universal trinity of expression was to be determined later—when one did not suggest cut glass punch bowls with hooks as wedding gifts!
But as Thurley lay down to sleep, too excited to remember Birge’s Corners, she determined with amusing worldliness to set to work developing her own personality, to both pamper and crystallize it, pitting it against this wild rose Thurley who blushed and who sneezed—unpoetic truth—just when she should not!
Instead of the Christmas season making Thurley homesick, it lent a vivacious joy that caused Ernestine Christian and Polly Harris to marvel at her development. The atmosphere of the city had its foothold. She thought, if at all, of the Christmas preparations in Birge’s Corners, with passing scorn.
Thurley’s thoughts had been rather well regulated by routine until she was left with but scant time for reminiscence. No lesson had been done away with but more added. She spent twice as much time at Hobart’s studio, either with him or with the Bohemian singing teacher whom she loathed but who knew how to guide her voice into unsurpassed channels.
Then there were hateful languages to conquer and, if she disliked the social secretary or the gymnast or the corps of other workers who were making her “ready” to sing for her supper on the opera stage, they continued to appear at regular intervals until Thurley realized that Bliss Hobart had had method in his madness, for he had seen the need of curbing a rebellious and turbulent spirit, one that tired too quickly of routine for its own good. In reality, he was teaching her the grind, which most artists never escape, in a condensed and merciful fashion.
Thurley was beginning to realize even more of this great question of “values.” In the old days at the Corners when gray, sullen moods conquered her sunny self, she had been wont to take refuge within the box-carwagon or the hilly cemetery, to sob without reason or plan rebellions of which neither Dan nor Betsey Pilrig could have had the slightest understanding! Now she called a taxi and drove through the parks or out suburban roads, thinking the same quality of thoughts with different and widely varied guises and returning, as she had done from the box-car wagon or cemetery, light hearted, dangerously glad for every one, singing like a meadow lark and insisting on doing things for whosoever might come her way almost to the extent of exaggeration.
Formerly, when saddish longings and presentiments would sweep over the wild rose Thurley, she had tramped through the pine woods as sturdily as a soldier under his captain’s orders, tramping, tramping, tramping up through the amphitheater of hills which lay outside the town. Finally, she would come upon a pasture clearing and here she would sit, exhausted but filled with sweet contentment, at the “top of the world” she fondly called it, looking down at the little village which seemed a cardboard play-town and dreaming of the day when she should stand at the top of the world to sing and all the cardboard towns in the universe should listen and applaud.
In New York, Thurley took another method when pessimism interrupted common sense routine. She went to the piano and practised until her throat gave warning to cease and she could again face the world as the wild-rose-with-a-prophecy-of-the-hothouse-variety Thurley, baby of the great “family,” an interesting young goddess who seldom voiced an opinion but who could sweep away opinions if she sang a ballad (unbeknownst to her present audience) with thoughts of Dan or Philena or the old days in the wagon as the inspiration!
During those effervescent moods of abandon which fairly intoxicated all those who saw Thurley under their spell—back in the Corners—she had always rushed down to the emporium and coaxed Dan away on a frolic—a picnic, if summer, or skating, if winter. They would sit, these two, on the porch of a deserted lake mansion dreaming dreams of a lyric quality with a sincerity which made both the boy and the girl the better for having dreamed them! Thurley would weave garlands of wild flowers—Dan gathering them—and she would come home to Betsey Pilrig, her cheeks like roses and her eyes like stars, singing a spring song and causing Betsy to lapse into Ali Baba’s favorite expression, “Land sakes and Mrs. Davis—Thurley, be you from another world?”
The joyous moods, these days, came very seldom. To some degree they happened when Ernestine told her that Hobart was pleased with her progress or when Polly Harris kissed her and said she was a little sister to the great; some faint imitation of them was experienced when Caleb took her motoring and told her his humorous troubles or when she went with Miss Clergy and Hobart to the first opera—“Rigoletto”—and saw with the grave, conceited eyes of youth herself outshining the presentGilda—herself standing with outstretched arms to acknowledge the applause. The wild joy was felt for half an instant when Collin Hedley said he would paint the infant before her début—there would be no fun at all in painting her when she was famous and unapproachable, waving engagement tablets at a mere artist.
Thurley came to realize clearly the difference in the inspiration of her joy—the joy which had been her solace during the gray, hungry days of childhood. InBirge’s Corners supreme mirth came from smell of new mown hay, with sunshine sparkling all about, or the summer breeze kissing the little curls at the delicious nape of her white, soft neck—it was generated by the discovery of the first violets or the exhilaration of a skating party with Dan, by some baby’s laughing face or Betsey’s pleased smile—and most of all by Dan’s ardor. Thurley told herself with almost shamed admission that her values had changed.
But if Thurley changed quickly during the winter, Miss Clergy stayed the same feeble, at times querulous, ghost lady, always willing for Thurley to go to places without her, trusting the girl as one would trust a matron, content, now that she had roused from her neurotic lethargy, to lapse into a semi-doze with a vigilant eye for only two things—to have Thurley succeed as aspinsterand to have no one become personally acquainted with her own withered self lest memories be unearthed over which she mourned in vain.
So Thurley came and went at will and the family became used to the fact that the infant’s benefactress was a “character.” For that matter the family themselves were characters with pet “phobias” and hobbies and theories, to say nothing of scars, cotton-wooled and well protected from the bromidic world.
It was Christmas week when Thurley experienced a savage mood—anger really the stimulus—for she had bought a supply of frocks and hats preparatory to the “family’s” Christmas festivities when Ernestine wrote her a note from Chicago, where she was playing engagements, saying that she would not be home until January and she was writing before Christmas purposely because she never had believed in the holiday and neither gave nor accepted gifts; therefore she wished the child-Thurleyall good things and to work as hard as she could; she would see her within a few weeks.
The savage mood began to manifest itself as Thurley read the careless note. Like the writer, its force and decision were unquestionable. Thurley had prepared gifts for all members of the family in the same impulsive fashion as for every one she had loved back at the Corners. She went to the bureau drawer and opened it to examine them—they seemed garish and absurd. She was not yet at the topnotch of fame which allows one to do whatsoever one will and have it accepted. If she had made her début and chosen to present Ernestine Christian with one of those gilded rolling pins with a regiment of hooks which hung on the doors of many of the best families in the Corners, it would have been received in resigned silence. As it was, the purse she had chosen for Ernestine was probably not at all what she would have liked; Thurley would give it to the room maid instead. She would think it quite wonderful and carry it for shopping or Sunday mass!
She looked at the handkerchiefs she had for Polly Harris—but Polly would probably make some sarcastic squib at their expense and never be seen with one protruding from her smock pocket. No, the handkerchiefs would do for the social secretary and the antique leather box for Caleb she would press upon the gymnast, while the book on art originally intended for Collin would be relegated to the scrap heap! Thurley laughed aloud as she thought of giving Collin a book on art—when Collin, foremost portrait painter in America, had written a book on art which was used as an authority by the younger school ... well, it had not been so very long since she had bought her gifts at Dan’s store with Dan refusing her money and had done them up in white tissueand the reddest of red ribbon, flying about like a good fairy on Christmas Eve to leave them at doorsteps! After re-reading Ernestine’s note, Thurley came to the conclusion that Christmas was not for those afflicted with exaggerated ego but merely for those who held good jobs.
She had bought no present for Sam Sparling or Mark Wirth, the latter still abroad, and as for Bliss Hobart, her fingers fearfully touched the carved idol—a metal Buddha mounted on teakwood. Why she had selected it, after endless excursions to endless shops, Thurley did not know—perhaps it was because she had never seen one in his office where there was everything else under the sun from a Filipino kris to a bibelot which had belonged to Marie Antoinette. Or perhaps there was another reason—at any rate, she had recklessly bought the idol and sacrificed her spending money for a month to come, blushing furiously each time she planned what to write on the accompanying card.
She could hardly give the Buddha to a bellboy and she had purchased black gloves for Miss Clergy, the presents for Betsey, Ali Baba and Hopeful being on their way.
She pushed the Buddha back in the drawer and went to her lesson with Hobart with a reserved, patronizing manner which amused him and his amusement, in turn, angered Thurley.
Fame seemed something which would strangle everything commonplace and joyous, Thurley thought, as she mechanically did her exercises. These persons were soultra, so fond of “mytaste in dress”—“the way I eatmyartichokes”—“the sort of wall paper inmystudio”—so over developed and emphasized that they made clever, well bred fun of the “pastoral joys,” as Ernestinenamed them, all the while amusingly unconscious of the whine of conceit which crept into their voices whenever they made a drastic statement.
There ought to be a refined, sulphitic, fumigated holiday just for this sort of people, Thurley thought. She was driving home and watching the crowds of shoppers laden with packages who tried to make their way across the street. They were good-natured crowds because they were buying something for some one else and she longed to leave the cab and be one with them, to jostle and sway together until the traffic signal was given and then to dash across to reach a crosstown car and to end, breathless, disordered of hat and hair but happy, in some small home where the packages were relegated to the top shelf and a recital of the day’s happenings told to the master of the household over a supper of steak, coffee and baker’s pie!
Up to this moment Thurley had not experienced homesickness, but as the cab shot on in patrician fashion she began recalling the fattened turkey they would have at Birge’s Corners and the way Betsey had made her pudding and Christmas cakes days before, as well as the nights Dan had called for her to have her aid in trimming the store windows with make-believe fireplaces and tinsel stars; the way the boys and girls went into the woods for the smallest fir trees and decorated the church until it was “a bower of beauty,” according to theGazettereport; how the choir would practise the Christmas anthem and carols night after night with Thurley directing, playing the organ and singing. On Christmas morning would come the service with Thurley, the envy of every girl in town because of her new pin or bracelet or chain which Dan had given her, singing “The Birthday of a King” in a glorious, clear voice—likesome one permitted to sing down from the clouds for an instant!
Oh, it was good to remember—good?—Thurley’s eyes filled with tears. She told the man to drive on until she ordered him to turn back to her hotel. She laughed as she snuggled down in the machine, drawing a robe over her lap and prepared to dream-remember. As she did so, she recalled Caleb Patmore’s saying to Ernestine one afternoon at tea,
“I’m going into the ooze again.” To which Ernestine answered,
“Jolly lark, isn’t it? Don’t make it a habit or you may slip into it altogether—then you would be helpless.”
“Take the advice for yourself,” he had retorted, to which she nodded her head and the subject was dropped. When Thurley asked her about it, Ernestine said with a trace of confusion,
“You child, you’re not ready for any ‘ooze’ game yet; you are still in it in actuality to an extent. When you begin to want to go to nerve specialists and are not hungry enough for bread and butter but keen on frosted cake as it were, knowing nothing but work and wanting to know nothing but play, when your day’s program—not the one written by your press agent—is as impossible as a typewritten love letter, you’ll find the ooze. I’ll show you how to find it.”
But Thurley had insisted, like a true Pandora, upon knowing and so Ernestine good-naturedly tried to explain.
“My nice creature, when people are so famous they experience loneliness because they are quite shut away from those who are quite famous, they cannot exist on work no matter in what line their talent may be—noron lollipop praise of the public nor carping criticisms. They must have an antidote. Yet they cannot sacrifice their relentless system of life which takes a first mortgage on their time and energy. So while you hear of us as having huge poultry farms and see our pictures taken in the act of garroting a red pepper from Madame So and So’s truck farm where she spends most of her time when not—and so on, or read an interview in which one of us declares a submarine boat to be our favorite siesta spot, please know it is not true. But throughout the years of endless work and surrender of the mystical force constituting genius, we have just to be children—and pretend. There, that is the whole thing in a nutshell—pretend just as children fancy themselves policemen, motormen, kings and fairy queens all the while swallowing the mortification of domineering nurses and bibs. We live with our memories, many times, if they are pleasant. How rich a confession Caleb could wring out of us, if he were not so sluggish! We dream-play, fancy, create a world within a world. Bliss Hobart in a fit of cynicism—I noticed he began taking pepsin the following week—named it ‘the ooze’—and it became our trade name for it. The ooze, the unreal, really unimportant and absurd, yet ready to be lived with and yet to vanish, the state of mind which we people as we wish and live house-and-garden lives for as much as half an hour at a time! You may not give this credence, but it is quite as real as my piano or Collin’s brush. And heaven grant you won’t need the ooze, Thurley, for a little! Still, it is a lovely, plastic state of thought—like those lavender and gold butterflies you find lingering in the corners of Whistler’s paintings or that flutter in the margins of special editions.”
“Why don’t you have the—the ooze be real—livea fifty-fifty sort of existence?” Thurley borrowed Dan’s slang.
“It would be like blending chilblains and poetry or mosquitoes and mahogany—impossible! That is why they say all genius is a trifle mad. Remember, the ooze is your best friend! Why, after a fatiguing concert, I’ve played I was the bustling, happy mother of half a dozen youngsters, the type of American housewife who does all her work except the washing and whose hands grow red and hardened yet are sparkling with diamonds, whose children grow up and adore her—I’ve lived in a red brick house with those diamond-shaped panes at the front windows and dotted muslin curtains criss-crossed—you know—and I’ve entertained bridge clubs galore, making mayonnaise and maple parfait myself while the baby was napping—” and when Thurley had clamored for a clearer understanding, Ernestine ordered her off to study her French and forget she shared the secret of the “ooze.”
“What is Bliss Hobart’s ooze?” she had insisted.
“I think he plays he runs an ice cream soda fountain in Harlem,” Ernestine had answered to be rid of her. At the time Thurley had seriously questioned Ernestine’s sanity.
But this snowy December night the ooze became very real to her and, unknowingly, Thurley passed a telling boundary line of progress. She dreamed on of Birge’s Corners—she saw the Christmas entertainment taking place. There was the awful make-believe chimney which the Sunday-school superintendent, invariably the thinnest man in town, was to descend, fragments of his cotton beard floating about the stage after the feat was accomplished. She could see the primary class waving the red satin banner symbolic of the best attendance—strange,how excellent is the Sunday-school attendance during holiday season—and then marching on the stage to sing in a series of mouse-like squeaks, “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” while their teacher, in love with Jo Drummer, the Santa Claus, stood below to direct them and wonder if Jo was properly impressed with her maternal devotion and her new hat.
Then the minister “delivered” a few remarks and Lorraine came on the stage to hand out tarlatan stockings with nuts and hard candies which accompanied the gifts. After laborious recitations by tortured boys with slicked-back hair and freckles pale because of the excitement, the town elocutionist let loose with “How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent” or “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and about at this juncture the stage chimney would crash down and reveal the truth—it was nothing but a lot of brick-paper pasted on Dan Birge’s store boxes!
Well, it was fun to play that one was taking part in the entertainment and showing off a little, as every one else did, including the minister, to smell, in imagination, the pines and evergreens and to visualize Dan Birge, the handsomest lad in the assemblage, winking at her during the minister’s address!
The river wind swept in through the lowered taxicab window-pane and Thurley leaned forward to say, “Home, please”—the ooze drifting obediently away. She was Thurley Precore, the Thurley with rejected Christmas gifts and the prospect of a hotel holiday dinner in company with Miss Clergy who would nap most of the day!
Yet the ooze had stimulated Thurley; she could always go slipping back to the Corners to relive the homey things which had made her a wild rose. It appearedto be tremendously comforting and she went a step further in self-analysis, telling herself, as she was going up to the hotel rooms, that the thing which made great people lapse into the ooze for tangled up nerves and snarly frames of mind was the thing which made sarcastic, aloof Ernestine Christian play a gypsy dance with the wild fire its author intended it to have or gave Caleb the power to invent an entirely new setting for the same old, “Will you love me?” or told Collin how to forget the ingrowing chin of his subject and make it strong and masterful stilllooking likethe ingrowing original—here, Thurley took the lesson home for she, too, was crystallizing her personality. It gave Thurley the ability to feel that she was Juliet in the tomb or Rosina having that delightful music lesson with her masquerading lover, it was temperament, psychic masquerading! There, that was a much nicer name than the ooze and when she was famous enough she would tell Bliss Hobart so and make him admit his clumsiness of nomenclature.
After which exhilaration came the hint of a warning—Miss Clergy’s years of uselessness were the result of just such “psychic masquerading” fed by revenge and disappointment. After all, was this ooze merely confined to the great? Would they not have to yield a point and admit they had much in common with their neighbors?