Thurley did not see much of Lissa or Mark for the next few weeks. Perhaps Lissa deemed it wiser not to encourage Thurley’s becoming one of her protégées because of Mark,—at least, until Thurley was a prima donna and her mind busied with many things. At the present time Thurley was amenable to all new faces and suggestions. Had she permitted her to be more with Mark than was customary who knows but what the result would spell disaster for Lissa’s contentment. Let Thurley taste of fame as Lissa had, for a short time, tasted, and she knew no mere individuals could claim her attention as they might now.
Neither did Thurley see Sam Sparling nor Ernestine for they were on tour. Sam sent her a doll, a wonderful, fluffy-skirted young lady doll with her brown hair combed modishly, bits of kid gloves reaching to the dimpled, wax elbows and a paste brilliant necklace. The accompanying card read, “Thurley Precore, prima donna, from an old beau!” And when Thurley audaciously took the doll to Hobart’s studio the next lesson hour, Hobart pretended to give the lesson to the doll and not Thurley, saying in conclusion,
“As no one else is here, Thurley, I can lecture you all I like and say what I really think—how charming you look in that costume—but please don’t listen to Lissa’s nonsense, you’ll hear enough of it presently. Kid gloves, too! I declare if Sam hasn’t lost his old heart—”
“Why not listen to Lissa?” asked Thurley, imitating a doll’s shrill voice.
“Because you must choose the straight, narrow path of hard work and a terrific loneliness of soul if your success is to be lasting and independent of others. You may bestow your affections on some one as a gracious favor—after you have made for yourself your public place—but never listen to what such women as Lissa chatter about—or such women as you will meet in the opera house. You will see them come and go, quickly appearing and more rapidly disappearing and that is because they have followed Lissa’s logic.”
“But please,” still imitating the doll’s voice, “what in the world am I to do? I’ve promised never to marry any one and I’m sure I won’t love any one I cannot marry. I’m not keen on slum work and I don’t choose cigarettes and Persian kitties for my home atmosphere as Ernestine does—nor attics like Polly.”
Hobart’s face was grave. “Some day, we will talk about things and I will tell my secrets—but not yet, you are too young and flushed with dreams.” He stopped speaking to the doll as he added, “You must tramp abroad with Ernestine this summer; Miss Clergy may go or not as she wishes. But when you return you are to start rehearsals for your début.”
Thurley looked at him for a long, glorious moment. After all, it had been worth the winter’s work and bewildering experiences. To make her début—would she ever forget the day in the stableyard of the Hotel Button when Dan engaged her to sing at his circus, rival to the “great swinging man”—and she had told him then that some day she was to sing before great audiences—maybe earning as much as a dollar a night!
“I’m not ready,” she began.
“You will be—stage directions, a good maid, a press agent, Santoza’s coaching and a little polishing here and there. I told you the first day you sang for me that God had taught you how to sing, man merely teaching you what.”
“Abroad—London—Paris—Spain—” Thurley began to whisper. “It’s true—isn’t it?—say that it is—,” dancing up to him, her eyes like stars.
“Don’t be too happy,” he suggested almost testily, “I can’t bear to see it!”
“Why not?” she was the aggrieved, wild-rose child speaking her mind regardless of the person who was listening. “Becauseyouare not happy?”
“No, because you must find out sooner or later that each life is given so much happiness, pain, cowardice, bravery, all attributes and emotions, the same as we are physically endowed with so much eyesight, hearing, power of locomotion, and when you realize that and know that when you burn up all the joy and ecstasy of unthinking youth, there is nothing, nothing that can ever cause such joy to exist again or give one such an abandon of mirth—all the rest of life snails on in gray patterns—I’d like to have you save your joy for things more worth while than this, distribute it so it will last through the gray days, Thurley!”
Looking at him, Thurley saw that his face was a dangerous, shiny white as if he had been ill a long time and his eyes were deadish, burnt-out things.
“I am sorry,” she began impulsively, “that you’ve no joy left—”
Hobart recalled himself and began pointing out errors in her last song. They did not go beneath the surface again during the lesson. When it was finished, Hobart said November would probably be the month of her début,—notin “Faust” as she had fondly imagined but as the vivaciousRosinain “The Barber of Seville”; protest all she liked,Rosinait was to be.
“That is nearly seven months away,” he said, looking out at the April sky. “Ernestine writes she will be home by June and you will start soon after. You must be back by the middle of September—however, that gives you quite a holiday. From now on, Thurley, I shall not see you—” he held out his hand but she did not seem to notice.
“Where are you going?”
“London, to superintend some pantomime things and opera. I’ll be back in June but not until you have sailed; we’ll almost be ships passing in the night. But I’ll be here in September to hear you tell of the Old World as seen by two very blue eyes. To-morrow you will please go to Santoza for coaching. You don’t like him and he likes no one save his gnarled old self—he has seen too many women play hob with too many men ever to like the loveliest of beginners. But he will teach you all you need to know and Antone will take you for the singing hour. If Lissa suggests that she coach you, ward her off. Now, my little prodigy, good-by and a happy summer.”
Still Thurley did not take his hand. “Where do you go from June until September?” she demanded.
Hobart neither glowered nor started as she anticipated. He laughed and patted her shoulder, whispering, “Ah, that would be telling—”
Some one tapped at his door and Thurley, perforce, tore herself away.
She would not see Bliss Hobart for nearly seven months ... seven months ... then she would make her début! Well, if she could glean from Ernestine bitsof her philosophy and from Polly her contagious jollity and add a trifle of Lissa’s purring loveliness—and she became as famous as her own voice could make any one—perhaps even Bliss Hobart might be tempted to say where he disappeared each year!
Thurley was planning a startling series of events between herself and Bliss Hobart as she left the building, trying not to let tears crowd her blue eyes or betray she was perturbed.... Santoza, hateful ogre with dirty, yellow hands, absurd, striped clothes and long, greasy hair, always mumbling to himself in Italian—she must study with Santoza and have those yellow, soiled fingers whirl angrily in the air as he tried to explain wherein she was in error and with Antone, that cynical little dandy with no more heart than flint, who stared at her through half-closed lids and only ridiculed, never praised!
Then Thurley resolved a dangerous but very feminine thing. Had she but known, many other younger and lovelier women than herself had resolved the same thing regarding Bliss Hobart. She would make himcarefor her! Not even Miss Clergy’s vow should prove an obstacle. She would make him care ... after that was an undetermined stage of rapture, a new and alluring sort of ooze in which to take refuge after hateful hours with Santoza and Antone and wondering moments as to what Hobart was doing and where he hid for his summer holiday! Thurley would make him care. Having achieved that, she would then employ Lissa’s theories as a vaulting pole to take her well over the handicap which Miss Clergy fancied she had forever placed in the way of romantic love.
No woman had yet succeeded. This Thurley did not know; like all the others she was sure that she was to prove the exception.
She worked with Antone and Santoza cultivating an attitude of indifference to offset their unpleasant personalities. Miss Clergy, in her squirrel cage of a world, looked on with pleased but feeble eyes and told Thurley she must go abroad with Ernestine Christian.
“You’ll come, too?” Thurley begged. “You must not stay so alone. All you do is to drive and read—and you do read the same books over and over—and talk with me a little and sleep a great deal. When I drag you into a shop you are as timid as can be and you won’t meet people though I’ve coaxed and begged. Please come with us—think of France, Spain, Italy,” Thurley hurried on to produce many new and tempting arguments.
Miss Clergy shook her head. “He came from Italy,” she said. “I could not bear it.”
Remorseful, undecided what was best to say, Thurley stood back abashed. “Oh, don’t let it hurt for so long—you’ve burnt up all your joy,” recalling Hobart’s words.
Miss Clergy waved Thurley off. “I’ll go to a rest cure,” she decided. “Now be off, my head is starting to ache.”
Still Thurley hesitated. “You won’t go back to the Corners?” she asked.
Miss Clergy gave a cackling laugh. “Don’t worry, Thurley, I’d not go back even to dance at Dan Birge’s wedding.”
Thurley left the room. She tried Ernestine’s antidote for heart stirrings as she practised scales, louder and louder in more and more glorious a voice until Miss Clergy fell asleep, happy at heart—for had she not at the eleventh hour saved a genius from mediocrity and secured revenge for her withered tragedy?
The first Sunday morning in May, Polly Harris appeared to carry Thurley off, first to her attic to retrieve something she had forgotten, and next to Collin Hedley’s garden and château a few miles up the Hudson.
“I knew this wasn’t lesson day and so I was sure you would come along. Wear something old because Collin’s place is one of those shabby-elegant affairs where new costumes seem vulgar. I think the only time when Lissa is ever uncomfortable is at Collin’s garden parties, but she has to come because she is jealous of Mark and there she is, a great, painted doll among real things.”
Polly audaciously danced about Miss Clergy’s rooms while Thurley hurried into her blue serge with a flat, black sailor. Polly kept up a pleasing conversation with Miss Clergy as to Thurley’s début and the proposed trip abroad, the wonderful things Bliss had been doing in London and what a jolly world it was anyhow, actually tucking an extra pillow behind Miss Clergy’s back and leaving her the last issue of a shocking art journal as her proper Sabbath reading. Hobart had truly prophesied that when Polly went to heaven she would be given the position of keeping every one chirked up when things promised to be a trifle ponderous.
“Let’s be ordinary critters and fly down to my sky parlor on a Fifth Avenue ’bus,” she proposed. “I pay the fares,” jingling her coin purse.
“Oh, no, Polly,” Thurley interposed. Thurley did not comprehend what Ernestine had tried to impress so carefully upon her—that Polly was not yet defeated, that she must be careful lest she hint of the opinions of the family which were that defeat for Polly was inevitable.
Polly pursed up her mouth crossly. “Do, Thurley, this is my party,” she insisted, after which Thurley gaveway and let Polly spend two precious dimes in lordly fashion.
As they proceeded down the Avenue, seated on the top of a Washington Square ’bus and quite as happy as when Ernestine had taken them out in her motor, Polly said,
“I haven’t had the chance of really doing anything for you, Thurley—”
“You have, too; there was Sam Sparling—”
“Yes, but no one is like Collin.” Her face was illumined from within. Thurley’s dramatic sense caught the wonderful hopelessness of the expression, cold-bloodedly resolving to copy it in any rôle which should demand a similar emotion. “Collin is the most wonderful person in the world, besides being the most wonderful painter. I’m so glad he asked us out for Sunday. He’d have done so before but he’s terrifically busy. All the world crowds his doorstep to be painted. Fancy, Collin has no New York studio—if people wish his work they must come to him and come they do. When you see Parva Sed Apta, you’ll understand why it is the only place in the world of its kind and how beautiful and good is Collin’s own self.” Polly was unconscious of her betrayal.
“Is he as wonderful as Bliss Hobart? Ernestine says Collin painted Mr. Hobart’s portrait and it made him.”
Polly was loath to give up her argument. “Well, Bliss is wonderful—no one denies that—but in a different way. There are so many sides to Bliss; one day he is a hermit, the next a schoolboy, then a stern master, a diplomat, a sarcastic critic, a taskmaster—sometimes, very rarely of late, he is a dreamer, as idealistic as the tints of the skies in Collin’s pictures. But Collin is always Collin, a child with a talent so huge he does not comprehend it himself and, therefore, he can never be spoiled.”
“Has he never married?” Thurley asked innocently.
“Oh, no,” Polly’s answer was made in breathless haste, “he never thinks of such a thing—he is absorbed in work ... why, if one is his friend, it is all one should expect ... it is enough,” she added bravely.
“Do you think Caleb Patmore will marry?” Thurley braced her little boots against the front board of the ’bus as they rounded a bump in the pavement.
“Not unless some one makes Ernestine realize she has a heart tucked away in that austere bosom of hers.... I could beat Ernestine for not loving that boy,” and the thought of Polly, so tiny and gentle in her brown garb, and of Ernestine, stately and unapproachable, in some smoky drapery, made Thurley give way to a chuckle.
“Don’t try it unless you take a course of jiu-jitsu,” she advised.
But Polly was rambling on in a new vein. “When Ernestine returns, she will take you to Caleb’s house; then you’ll see how a famous novelist who has commercialized himself lives—and you won’t like it! Every June Ernestine visits Caleb and generally takes me as ballast—sort of grand duchess conferring a favor, you know. The rest of the year, unless Caleb entertains, he has to come to her whenever she will have him, starved of heart, yet loyal. (Of course if people care they do stay loyal) ... but wait until you see Caleb’s sleek establishment and contrast it with Collin’s transplanted paradise.”
They jumped off the ’bus steps and made their way down a narrow side street which was most distressingly dirty to Thurley’s mind, reaching a dilapidated brownstone-front house with “Rooms for Rent” in the parlor windows. Skipping up a fire escape on the outside, with Thurley toiling after, Polly opened a bit of a window on the top floor, jumped down inside while the boardscreaked perilously and then assisted Thurley to do likewise.
“I never go up the inside way unless it is winter,” she explained, “because every poor devil would stop to ask for a loan. I can’t refuse unless I’m stony broke and I can’t afford to part with the little I have. Of course they can’t pay back, poor dears! So the fire escape affords an excellent subterfuge and no one’s feelings are hurt. I want to take Collin a book on woodcuts; I found it at an old bookstore the other day.” She was prowling about a dusty secretary, opening drawers and failing to close them.
Thurley stood in the center of the room aghast at Polly’s attic. Ernestine and Caleb had prepared her for it, saying with almost reproach that she, Thurley, was missing the glorious camaraderie with failures, she was the proverbial jewel in the rough who was taken to an expert lapidary, cut, polished and placed in platinum without any transitional stage! And she would do well to learn more of Polly’s life so as to glean the atmosphere of optimistic struggle, humorous cares and sometimes indescribable pathos. So much Thurley did in the moment she waited for Polly to find the book—a book costing a week’s earnings!
The room was badly in need of repair; the roof sloped down so Thurley had to crouch if she moved but a foot either way—it reminded her of Betsey Pilrig’s attic. There was a cot made into a divan with a turkey red covering and pillows, a scrap of a rag rug, an easel, for Polly did commercial drawings fairly well, a table one confusion of doll furniture and china dolls dressed in wisps of silk, satin and burlap. Polly explained this was her “tryout”—when she was planning scenes in her opera, she had the puppets assume positions so as togauge the effect. She was so serious about the matter that Thurley was forced to conceal a laugh as she said the idea was excellent.
“I have no typewriter; did have last winter, but I played in hard luck and left it at ‘uncle’s.’—I scribble almost as swiftly and so it’s of no consequence,” she added contentedly. “Just last week I had an idea and I think it is a real idea, Thurley—as you are to sing the title rôle I’ll tell it to you. Instead of havingTHEAmerican opera founded on the landing of Columbus and a romance of an Indian girl with one of his knights and so on—of course I’ll finish it and have it produced later,” she supplemented in all seriousness—“I have decided to do a series of operas dealing with American wars. First, the Revolution—you are to be Moll Pitcher—then 1812—then the Mexican War—the Civil War—the Spanish-American—pray heaven there will be no other. Don’t you see how great it will be—great—great?” her body swaying with excitement. “Yesterday, I did two arias.” She fumbled about the secretary and unearthed music paper covered with startling black notes. “Oh, Thurley, I must succeed—I must. I won’t take no from either gods or half-gods. I’ll defy them! I won’t slink away and become an upstate saleswoman for victrolas! There!”
“I hope you will,” Thurley said gently.
“You say that as if you’d like to add, ‘Here, my pore gel, take this quarter and wear a cap the next time you meet me!’ Wait—wait until you fail.”
Thurley’s spirit was roused. “But I won’t—not in my work.”
“There are other ways than work—love, for instance?”
“I won’t fail in love,” the defiant, wild-rose Thurley was always on hand to meet a challenge.
“Don’t promise yourself everything,” was Polly’s sage advice, “and now, I believe we are ready to decamp.”
She found Collin’s place more than Polly said, since Polly viewed it through adoring eyes and was blind to tiny flaws.
Their approach was anything but conventional. They had raced up from the station, Polly winning by a nose, hilarious young persons with flushed faces.
They found the famous Collin, in an artist’s smock of gray chambray, sweeping off his front steps! Upon seeing them, he called out,
“Cook left last night with a case of champagne—there are all the dishes to wash ... and the boy left yesterday morning with my two best suits—oh, ho, art is merely incidental,” continuing his sweeping in vigorous fashion.
Then he dropped the broom and came down the walk to meet them.
His garden had the air of age and mystery. The famous statue of Aphrodite attributed to Praxiteles was in a monolith of white marble lined with brass and surrounded by a small fountain which paid her homage. As soon as midsummer came, he explained to Thurley, there would be yellow lilies with heavy sweetness, the clean fragrance of shy heliotrope, creamy, bending tassels of spiræa forming an aisle up to the white stucco house with its contrasting dark, wooden trimmings.
But when they entered the hall, Thurley gasped with amused dismay, for she had seldom seen such conglomeration and disorder. It was true there were pink marbleizedwalls, tall lapis lazuli pillars capped with gold and an emerald malachite cornice with a black baseboard in the big studio. In addition to the collection of rare eighteenth century furniture with needlepoint chairs and blue and silver hangings, the growing plants and endless bird cages filled with twittering English bullfinches, there were strewn carelessly rare Greek vases and Etruscan fragments, an ugly easel and modelling stand, spotted canvases carelessly lying about. On chairs, but more often on the floor, were jars of brushes, rare lithographs by Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes’ drawings, Meryon’s etchings and Conder’s painted silks. Half finished portraits and charcoal outlines of figures were pinned relentlessly on the walls, and a shaggy Airedale answering the name of Fencer came muzzling the guests in suspicious welcome and walked without concern on all of the treasures.
The only books the room contained were a well worn Bible and a Human Anatomy. The curtains were twisted back into hideous shapes, some fastened with twine, others with artist’s thumb-tacks, and one was thrown over the cornice in gay disregard.
“You see,” said Collin, “I never should have yielded to Caleb’s plea to have an artistic studio. By degrees, I have managed to move out some stuff and send it over to his lodge. He thrives on such things—color schemes and doing rooms over. But some fine day there will be a bonfire at Parva Sed Apta and, hoop-la, I’ll build a log cabin with nothing but glass for the roof and sit in the midst of the débris to paint the most wonderful pictures of women.”
“Poor women, posing in your log cabin.” Polly pretended to be cross. “Now we must get this room to rights.”
“Never.” He pushed her aside. “I’ll not allow a thing to be straightened. The rest of the house is like a bandbox and I spend as little time there as I can. But here is where I live.”
Fencer lay down to roll over an etching as if emphasizing the statement.
“Here,” corrected Collin, “is wherewelive.”
“Show Thurley Bliss’s portrait and then we’ll do up the dishes and cook our dinner—a fine sort of host you are.”
“Cook had been meditating an elopement some time—a gentleman who works in a roundhouse, I believe, has been carrying the wedding ring in his pocket for days. The boy always envied my suits—and as he was offered more wages to go to Bermuda, I presume he thought the suits a bonus for having endured an artistic atmosphere ... oh, well, I’ll call up the agency to-morrow and order a fresh supply; they’ll stay a week anyhow and that takes me through the dinner I’m supposed to give on Wednesday—well, Thurley, are you much amused?”
They were walking down the hall into his drawing-room, spick and span by contrast, done in the coolest of grays with long, glimmering curtains of silver damask, the furniture of polished magnolia wood with a yellow-topped Italian marble console and many-branched silver candlesticks. The only ornament in the room was Hobart’s portrait; it stood on a great easel on a platform, curtains halfway veiling it.
Thurley’s heart began an annoying pit-a-pat as she sought the correct light in which to view it. Polly and Collin each taking a curtain threw them back together and for a long instant Thurley was silent as she looked with eyes, as betraying of her love as Polly’s had been, at the wonderful face of a man. It was a man who hadrecently left happy youth behind because he had discovered it to be disillusioning and had taken up manhood with no disgruntled attitude of resentment nor aggressive determination to win by trickery but with ideals—ideals impossible to defeat but hidden so safely from the world at large that they were incapable of practical expression. The lips smiled of love and sighed for regret and prayed for all the universe—there was that much painted into the picture. The eyes were shining, gray eyes showing the art of putting a bad ending to the purpose of becoming a good and fresh beginning. He was one who would try to practise some ancient but forgotten unity of the human race. As Thurley stared at the strange face with its rare smile of understanding, she recalled the Scotch legend of the Wells of Peace which an old circus clown had told her of years ago.
The Wells of Peace, so the clown had said, were Love, Beauty, Dreams, Endurance, Compassion, Rest, Love Fulfilled! All the “little people” of the hills and forest, even the peewits who had been baseborn children, were searching endlessly for the Wells of Peace—for he who found them and drank of the water could wish for anything in the world and it would be his!
“Kiss her, Collin; that will make her speak! Are you turning into a statue, Thurley?”
Thurley stirred at the sound of Polly’s voice.
Collin was holding back the curtain and laughing at her. “Never knew I could hold a pose so long,” he said as he dropped it. “Why, Thurley, are you so susceptible to an old brigand like Bliss? Fancy him, now, walking down Piccadilly and humming,
“‘I’m going back to Lunnon,“‘To tea and long frock coats’
“‘I’m going back to Lunnon,“‘To tea and long frock coats’
“‘I’m going back to Lunnon,
“‘To tea and long frock coats’
—and a bevy of peeresses trailing afterwards!”
Thurley let the actress in her shield the woman. She made laughable comments about the portrait, vowing that the color scheme of the room had given her new ideas for costumes, going through the rest of Parva Sed Apta with a careless demeanor.
The dining-room should have been a charming spot with its green English Chintz, dead white walls and red and gold furniture, but it was heaped with soiled dishes and curious cooking utensils piled high with “concoctions.”
“I had a fearful appetite the moment cook left,” Collin explained, “so I thought I’d try my luck.... They all tasted queer—like mixtures of carpet tacks and modelling clay. The way I explain it is the excess paprika and I had been modelling and neglected to wash my hands.”
“Oh, good,” Polly interrupted. “Show us what you were doing,” making him return to the studio to rescue the clay model of a bird with a newly broken wing.
“Splendid,” Polly declared. “There is a force—a stirring—il y a quelque chose,” turning to Thurley for approval.
“It hurts to look at it, poor little thing! It must have been from a gun and not an accident.”
Collin actually blushed. “You really feel that, too?”
“Of course—see how the wing drags—oh, why not model it complete?”
Polly gave a triumphant whistle. “Always told him so. I wish now that he’s oodles of money, he’d stop painting fat dowagers and silly men in broadcloth and model—model what he dreams.”
Collin wrapped the bird in the moist cloth. “You are partial. I cannot model—nor can I tear myself away from color. I dream color, woo it, I could eat it—now,maybe that was the trouble with the cooking! I was trying to put taupe shadows in the picture of the Hooker children ... anyway, Thurley, I worked as ‘ghost’ for the great Constantin and, after seeing his modelling, I never even fancied I could do likewise. It is merely remembering my days with him when I take up the clay, sentimental tribute—artistic fashion of drinking a toast. He had but one rule: ‘When you can model a human hand as large as the top of your thumb, you can model anything,’ he told us.... One day, when I tried, he said in his carping old fashion, ‘Hein, what is that, Hedley? A hand? So! I would mark it assaulted toad!’ And I never tried modelling again.”
He seemed anxious to dismiss the subject and show them his last portrait. As he talked in his sweet, light voice, Thurley watched the childlike, tyrannical way in which he waited for praise and believed all they said of his work. He was seemingly unconscious of Polly’s hungry heart—and empty purse—and as Thurley studied him she realized that Collin possessed a great virtue—and a great fault.
The virtue was expressed by his brilliant, joyous eyes which told her his was the sixth sense—the ability to look at his subject and say, “Ah, I won’t paint in the heartbreak, it would be too cruel! Just pleasant shadows,” or “Shall I show the greed which made you play the cad? I think I shall—it needs to be exploited even if you did buy off the press,” or “There is a promise of good things and you shall have them painted clearly so that when you look at yourself you will feel the need of living up to that promise—a sort of jacking-up, old man—with your slightly weak mouth but glorious forehead,” or “You are young and beautiful and you’ve theworld before you, but I shall find that gray-gold seriousness of your woman’s soul and make it illumine your face; then you won’t go getting too light of heart and careless of tongue—as you might with the flurry of dimples!” So the world had come to speak of a Hedley portrait as something to be almost fearful of—it was so real—and yet, with this ability, Thurley admitted as the day wore on with their playing at housekeeping or romping in the garden, drinking black coffee while Collin and Polly played guitar and ukelele duets, Collin remained a child. Whether this was purposely achieved or a strange whim of Mother Nature was yet to be proved. But a child he was, whimsical, lovable, worth while but unstable—and he skillfully shut away the duties of maturity by this very fact. Collin shirked responsibility! So did Ernestine, but in a cynical, combative fashion. Collin did it with studied innocence! As the child has imagination as its greatest charm and asset, so did Collin claim it for his own, at the same time retaining that opinion of women which the child possesses: A woman has but two possibilities—tyrant or slave, therefore she can never be his equal. The child regards his nurse or mother as a guardian angel or an unfair oppressor of rights, and so Collin chose to regard women—staying aloof from entangling romance!
He called Polly his pal, said with admiration that she had never passed out of that flapper period when every woman wishes she had been born a boy, therefore, Polly was a delight to know! He helped her when she least suspected it, liked and admired her, but he kept that armor of childish irresponsibility about his famous, selfish self and no matter how keenly he might gaze into the souls of those he painted, his own soul was wrapped in nursery eiderdown and labelled, “Unwrap me and youdestroy genius!” Polly, like all women who love but once, understood and was content with crumbs.
“I shall go abroad when Ernestine does,” Thurley heard him saying when she had lured Fencer into the garden to play retrieve.
“I’m so glad—do get rested, you will be rushed with orders next winter,” Polly answered. Thurley knew just the look in those stabbed brown eyes!
“What will you do, pal mine?”
“Be tremendously busy, my opera scores, naturally, and for a pot-boiler I’ve hired out as proofreader during the regulars’ vacations. I’m to have a famous summer.” She picked up the ukelele and began strumming.
“I’ll find you the prettiest mantilla in Spain,” he promised, “but don’t worry if you have no letters—I can’t write letters any more than a woman can understand banking. But you’ll write to me, won’t you, Polly?”
“Of course—we’ll all write,” she answered bravely.
Thurley paused, unmindful of Fencer’s bark, and pondered on many things, the portrait of the real Bliss Hobart, the man who was worth winning, as she thought with new logic, on Miss Clergy’s vow which cheapened any love no matter how many Lissas might argue to the contrary—unrequited love such as Polly’s—on Caleb, smug and amusing and much in need of Ernestine Christian’s heart, on Ernestine, busy with scales and cigarettes and pessimistic utterances, on Sam Sparling, who had told her during one of their happy talks, “Be a woman first, my child,” on November, with the prospect of the début ... well, had Dan married Lorraine and was it true that a man was nothing short of a hero who married a brilliant woman? What a world it was and wouldn’t it be a relief to have had Ali Baba say it all for her with his usual: “Land sakes and Mrs. Davis, butsome folks are going to be mighty nervous when it comes Judgment Day!”
At that identical moment in Birge’s Corners, Dan and Lorraine were driving through the Boston Valley hills. It had been a hateful Sunday, to Dan’s mind; service in the morning and himself dancing attendance on the minister’s daughter when all the time he longed to bolt from the church to escape the nasal tones of Milly Crawford, the new soloist from Pike. He wanted to sit on the step of the box-car wagon in sulky retrospect. But instead, he meekly followed Lorraine into the parsonage and ate the dinner she had carefully prepared, smoking on the porch while Lorraine “did up the work,” and now they had driven the best part of the afternoon, returning for the monotonous evening service, the cold meat and jelly tea and the customary Sunday night courtship on the vine-covered porch.
“Dan,” said Lorraine timidly, one hand reaching over to feel the solitaire on the other;—it gave her courage;—“is the new house getting on all right?”
He turned to look at her; she was such a frail, pretty thing in her silk dress—three summers old and homemade at that—her eyes were raised to his as if she were a good heathen looking at a shrine to ask the granting of a boon.
“Yes,” he said with dangerous gentleness. “Why?”
She dropped her head. “I was just wondering—”
Dan smiled; the savage, buoyant Dan had vanished. Fine, hard lines were about his mouth and his eyes were staring, non-expressive. Every one in the Corners knew what Lorraine had “put up with” since Thurley Precore had given him the mitten and he had engaged himself for spite—the weeks when Dan drank, Lorraine forgivingand praying over him, the times when he deliberately ogled other girls—not the nice girls, either—those women with hard, bold eyes who always live at the outskirts of any small town, coming in Saturday nights to prance along the streets arm in arm, making every one clear out of their way, who laugh loudly and make humorous comments when they pass travelling men. Dan had not only talked with these persons—he had taken them driving in his car.
Still Lorraine had refused to believe the reports. She had wept her tears and said her prayers in the solitude of her room with only the hope chest as confidant. Then the minister talked to Dan—with the result that Lorraine, with unheralded defiance, came into the room during the scene and told her father she was Dan’s bespoken wife; she would always be willing to “bear with him.”
“Seems as if there’s nothing he can do to get rid of her except hang himself,” was the village verdict.
“’Course he’s sweet on Thurley—and whatever is she doing all this time? I guess Miss Clergy has spent enough money to teach her how to sing,” would be the answer.
Almost indifferently Dan had resigned himself to his fate and the new house began to near completion.
“I hope he won’t break out wild after they’re married,” Ali Baba said.
“A Birge never married no woman with spirit; they all die and leave a son,” Hopeful used to answer.
“Well, Thurley knew her mind, no matter if it was right or wrong,” would be Betsey’s consolation.
“Would you like to be married this fall?” Dan finally asked Lorraine on this Sunday afternoon.
“It’s a little soon, but I guess I could be ready,” she fibbed according to feminine custom.
“Well, I suppose we may as well! Say when.”
Lorraine’s cheeks were crimson with excitement. “November?”
His face clouded. November was a semi-sacred month, Thurley’s birth month—but then, was not all the village sacred because Thurley had lived there? Where could he turn without a haunting memory, what person could he pass without recalling some incident in their life together?
“All right—about the fifteenth; I’ll be ready to get away then. We’ll go to New York for a couple of weeks. Would you like that?”
Lorraine nodded. They were both thinking the same thing: suppose fate should cause them to meet Thurley Precore?
When Dan left her that night, kissing her dutifully and saying some polite thing about being a lucky fellow, Lorraine went upstairs to the little hope chest and began counting over her woman’s trifles.
“Poor Thurley,” she said out loud, “he’s mine now ... and he will learn to care.”
Dan returned to the Hotel Button and went up to his rooms. He sat at his desk, scribbling on a bit of paper. Then he took a fresh sheet and wrote: “Dear Thurley”—but nothing else suggested itself.
“She wouldn’t give a hoot, you poor fool,” he told himself.
Finally he tore the paper up and whistling with utmost cheeriness tramped about the room and tried to take an interest in planning the decorations of the twenty-thousand-dollar house. It was Thurley’s house no matter what all the ministers and marriage licenses might try to prove to the contrary.
Ernestine returned in June nervously overwrought and almost petulant at having to wait for her sailing reservations. Thurley saw a new sort of Ernestine Christian, prophetic hint as to her own future if she continued with her work.
“Don’t speak to me until we’ve been out at sea for a day,” Ernestine commanded, “then I’ll be a lovely, rosything, the jolliest big sister ever, and I’ll play the rest of the summer. Ask Collin—he knows. Collin, Bliss and I have often crossed together, and when we went aboard the boys seriously considered asking the steward not to place us at the same table. By the time we reached Havre they were making violent love to me, wondering if their own eyes had played them false in the beginning of the trip,” after which she unceremoniously bundled Thurley out of her apartment.
Thurley accepted the hint, as she had plenty to do in getting Miss Clergy’s summer wardrobe completed and accompanying her to a rustic lodge in the Adirondacks where she would drone away the golden summer as she wished. Thurley had assumed, perforce, a maternal attitude towards Miss Clergy; she was even dictatorial and bullied her a trifle about being nice to other elderly persons who invited Miss Clergy for tea—Thurley had found this demeanor to have excellent results.
Although it was with relief that she left the ghost-lady at her summer’s boarding-place, it was with regret as well. Thurley had begun to feel that Miss Clergy“belonged” to her as she had always tried to fancy some one somewhere must belong to her if she would only be patient long enough.
“I sha’n’t worry about you,” Miss Clergy had told her. “You’re the most satisfactory thing I ever owned.” Unconsciously she had spoken the truth. She did regard Thurley as a beautiful, talented sort of unsexed person dependent upon her for existence. Unselfish affection never entered the partnership. She wondered why Thurley had turned away so abruptly as she spoke and pretended she had an errand outside the room.
“‘The most satisfactory thing,’” Thurley kept repeating as the car wheels turned her nearer New York and the coveted trip abroad. “‘The most satisfactory thing’—and I’m an ‘amusing thing’ to Ernestine, almost as amusing as Silverheels, only she loves Silverheels. And I’m an ‘interesting young thing’ to Bliss Hobart, some one who came to earth knowing how to sing and so he is spared the trouble of teaching me. And I’m a ‘lucky young thing,’ as Polly says, because I’ve the chance she has not, and I’m a ‘dangerous young thing’ to Lissa because Mark Wirth likes me—oh, if she knew how often he sends flowers—and I suppose Caleb thinks me a ‘worth while young thing’ because he gains hints for a new heroine.... I want just to be some one’s Thurley!” She looked at the hills without but she could not see them distinctly for tear-blurred eyes.
When she reached New York she telephoned Ernestine, only to be told she could not sail for at least another week, nor did Ernestine wish to be disturbed,—Silverheels had been accidentally killed and Ernestine had suffered a nervous collapse.
Thurley heard the news rather carelessly. “Too bad,” she had said, “I would rather he went out quicklythan to be one of those blind little creatures that are a burden to themselves.”
“You don’t understand,” Ernestine answered sharply. “You don’t know anything about it. I am taking him west to an animal cemetery and I shall pick out a handsome headstone.”
Thurley wondered if this was a strained sort of joke. “Really?” she asked.
At which came a volley of reproaches over the wire to the effect that most assuredly would there be a memorial for Silverheels as well as a headstone; no other animal could ever take his place nor would she ever allow any other animal to make inroads into her heart. She wished his name never to be mentioned; perhaps Thurley would develop sufficiently within the next few years to comprehend that animal tragedies were the hardest to bear!
Which left Thurley feeling like a smacked infant not at all knowing the reason for the smacking.
The hotel suite seemed musty and in bad taste as she wandered about restlessly. She must wait now until Ernestine chose to sail; she must keep away from her and amuse herself. She did not want to worry Miss Clergy with writing of the delay and she had closed her lesson books with an eager hand. Polly was busy doing some sort of hack work, and she supposed Collin would go off to Europe on the steamer they had planned to take. Anyway, she felt a shy reserve in calling him up to find out.
She was halfway angered at being forced into this submissive attitude. When she was a prima donna earning her own money she resolved that she would lead her own life in no half tones. It was all very well to know interesting, famous persons but to be at the mercy of their thousand and one peculiar notions and erratic actions wasanother matter. She noticed that Collin respected Ernestine’s wishes and Ernestine also respected Collin’s. Save for Caleb’s being in love with Ernestine and thus being rendered somewhat helpless, he followed his own inclinations and permitted Ernestine to do likewise. No one dreamed of telling Bliss Hobart what to do and what not to do and never did any one, although disapproving of Lissa, contemplate trying to reform her. Mark danced as he would and lived as he wished and there was an end of it. And who in the wide world had more latitude than Sam Sparling, who flirted with a duchess one day and had a shop girl driving in his car the next, giving midnight orgies for “the boys” and sending them packing when his nerves gave warning—Sam who flew off to Lake Louise one day, recklessly cancelling engagements, and returning very keen for the green room and the footlights to play for weeks at a time and then “hop across,” as he said, to Paris to rent some crumbling château and have it put in the pink of condition while he was engrossed in reading and rehearsing a new repertoire like a veritable savant. Lucky Sam, Lissa, Mark, Ernestine, Collin, Caleb—all of them for that matter! Thurley’s lips were rebellious of expression as she sat that warm June morning before the window, looking at the Avenue which throbbed with personalities each bent on its own way.
She registered a vow that she, too, would acquire a personality, a hobby, a “phobia,” an intricate set of nerves and a color scheme—dear, yes, there should be no end to her “dew-dabs,” as Hobart named them. She would even have her own perfume, she would “recommend” a certain fabric and have her picture taken in a gown of it and printed in a leading fashion journal. She would rule over her apartment as rigorously as these others ruledover theirs; she would evolve a distinctive form of entertainment—to say nothing of openly indulging in moods and sulks and wild bursts of joy—and cigarettes and liquors if they did not harm her voice. This should be the reward for these snubbed months of being the spectator, dependent on some one else’s bounty.
There likewise came an impulse not worthy of the real Thurley—nevertheless it came as strongly and with as much temptation as all the rest of her tempestuous plans. When she was rich and famous and still beautiful, she would return to the Corners to haunt Dan Birge as he had never dreamed a woman could haunt him. She would have some sort of romantic interest in her life even if she had given her pledge to Miss Clergy never to make the hideous mistake of marriage.
As she sat there, some one tapped at the door and, running to open it, she found Caleb Patmore dressed in motor togs, his goggles pushed up on his forehead and a linen duster buttoned to his chin.
“I suppose you’re in mourning,” he said whimsically, “or have you insulted Ernestine by suggesting it is madness to swelter in town another week while she interviews all the monument makers as to the most fetching feline memorial?”
Thurley gave him a grateful expression. “It does seem foolish.”
“I’ve been banished forever from her presence—because I sent no flowers,” he laughed. “However, she told me to get you and take you out for the day—she can’t keep her June day custom of visiting me at the lodge and you are appointed proxy. Come along, you look ready for a frolic.”
Thurley raced into her bedroom and tilted her hat over one eye. “My word, it will be good to go somewhere.Imagine coming back from the mountains bubbling with excitement and finding the trip delayed for days. If it had been hours I would not have minded—but days—”
“And you’ve never been across, have you?” he asked sympathetically.
“Oh, never,” she answered in despair. “You don’t think Ernestine will give up the trip, do you?”
“Not as bad as that, because she has persuaded Collin to wait the week as well. It might be worse. All set, are you? First, I’ve some errands and then we’ll shoot out to the lodge and I’ll feed you the best strawberries floating in the richest cream you ever tasted.”
Thurley found bromidic enjoyment in Caleb’s country place. It was refreshing in its air of order. She felt that to be a commercialized artist had compensations, at least it enabled one to acquire what one wished of true art and appreciate it all the more by contrast with one’s own attempts!
Returning to the hotel, she found a note from Ernestine saying she had “come out of it” sufficiently to engage passage for the following Tuesday and she hoped Thurley would never mention Silverheels to her nor invite tragedy herself by acquiring a pet.
Thurley lay awake that hot summer’s night—the nearness of the vacation did not delight her over-much. Instead, she was thinking of herself as contrasted with Bliss, Collin, Ernestine, Caleb—even Polly. For there was a difference of birthright between these persons and herself. With a burning sense of discontent yet enforced honesty, Thurley realized that she had in herself a strain of sturdy peasantry; these others were more gently born—there was a difference in the way they spoke, dressed—she felt too superlative and over-insisting in comparison.She wondered whether in time she would acquire the atmosphere of gentle breeding which these persons possessed. Lissa had somewhat the same strain as herself—and she prayed she would not become like Lissa.
The difference between the peasant and the patrician, Thurley concluded, after restless reflection, was that the peasant cannot endure pain, physical or mental, as well as he can stand hardships, lack of the niceties of existence, whereas the patrician can endure anguish but he cannot tolerate discomfort. A poorly fitting or coarse gown would prevent Ernestine from playing her best, whereas Thurley could sing in calico, standing on the steps of her old box-car wagon. Ernestine could “rescue” herself from suffering, a sort of diking away of any too engulfing emotion, whereas, if Thurley’s heart was aching or her mental state disturbed, she would not sing—she was like a wood beastie wanting to dart into deep forests and hide indefinitely.
Thurley had begun to long for ancestors, she admitted with a sigh; to possess portraits of spinsters with crumbling lace fichus and slim, white hands—Aunt so-and-so or Grandmother and Grandfather Precore! She wanted heirlooms, some tangible evidence of a family. Winter circus quarters with the pretended family recalled themselves to her with scant comfort. She was so young and promising and she was to spend her life singing for the world and not for any one loved person! There had been Dan who wanted her to sing for just himself. Had she loved Dan as Lorraine did, she would have been content to have it so. She would have married Dan by now, the new house would be glowing with rosy shaded lamps, passers-by would halt their teams to listen to Thurley singing to her husband ... but that was not the way it was to be. If only some kind spiritwith the power to release vows and wave a wand to change things about could do so and create such a house as Dan planned for her and yet have Bliss Hobart be its master and Thurley its mistress—how very silly and stupid would New York and opera seem, all these over-smart and cynical persons with self-consciousness their dominating note and selfish egotism their guardian angel! She would sing for her husband and work to please him. And how simple was the big rule of life, Thurley thought, as she sat up among the pillows, sleep the furthest from her thoughts: Love some one and have some one love you and make everything else resultant and interdependent! She sank back slowly—for she had promised never to marry and in so doing it had come about that she should meet the person whom she would have married had he been a steam-riveter! Ernestine and Europe seemed phantoms—she was not interested. Nor was she interested in Dan and Lorraine and their future. She was unconscious of everything except that Bliss Hobart treated her for the most part impersonally, disappearing without explanation although the Buddha still stayed on his desk.
Mark, Lissa, Polly, Sam and Caleb saw the trio set sail—as gay a farewell as one could imagine, with Lissa in a costume indicating that she had achieved social distinction and Polly with her funny epigrams and humorous antics, clever mask for her aching heart. Mark had sent Thurley a basket of roses which were to be delivered that evening, but which the steward stupidly hauled to light before Lissa’s eyes.
“You better play safe,” Caleb murmured to Mark who was hanging over Thurley’s chair and refusing to notice Lissa’s efforts to get him away.
“One doesn’t see a girl like Thurley off for her firsttrip across every day,” Mark answered. “Anyway, she’ll not be bothering with any of us in a year’s time; she’s destined to have a coronet on her handkerchief.”
Sam Sparling had made Thurley count inkstains on his fingers, which he had obtained by writing letters of introduction to his friends scattered in France and England. Collin, who was in a fearful stew about having left behind his pet kit of brushes, fumed up and down the deck with Caleb reminding him that there were shops in Paris.
Polly stood towards the rear of the group as they were given their shore warning.
“Good-by, Polly—a world of luck!” Collin said easily.
“Good-by, Collin—the same to you!”
“Good-by,” Ernestine called out. “When you see me next, I’ll be known as Thurley’s chaperone—I’m submerging my personality!”
“Good-by—America,” a sudden childish fear took possession of Thurley.
A chorus of jeers answered her. “Really? Well, nothing like being impersonal first to last.... I say, Thurley, if you’re not more polite, we’ll go buy a locket and each chop off a lock of hair and stick inside. How would you like that for an albatross?”
“Good-by, Americans,” she corrected, “it’s just—just—”
“Sing it,” suggested Polly.
Without ado, Thurley began “Auld Lang Syne,” causing waving handkerchiefs to be pressed to eyes and every one aboard to ask who the tall girl was with the glorious voice and if she was to sing at ship’s concert?
Ernestine shrugged her shoulders as the song endedand Thurley, abashed at the furore, sank down in her steamer chair. Harsh tug whistles took up the burden of noise.
“You’ll learn not to waste your songs,” was all Ernestine said.
Thurley’s début was the night of November sixteenth, nor was itMargueriteas she fondly hoped but asRosinain “The Barber of Seville,” the rôle which she had so often sung during her lessons with Hobart and in which she felt scant interest.
Returning with breathless memories of the beloved Old World as skilfully shown her by her famous couriers, Thurley had waited with equal breathlessness to find Bliss Hobart who had not sent her so much as a penny post card during her weeks abroad.
She found him keen, alert, the personification of energy but as noncommittal as to his summer as the sphinx, annoyed at some of Thurley’s mistakes, a hint of nervousness at daring to bring her out so soon—in short, a taskmaster with scant time for jokes or confidences. Indeed, Thurley found herself snubbed by the entire family; they had their parties without her, explaining that she needed her time for study and preparation. Even Miss Clergy, who was refreshed from her summer, became a mild sort of “goader-on.” As the hour for her triumph drew near, she was irritable and impatient if Thurley wandered away for a walk, was five minutes late or said her headache prevented a lesson.
It was annoying to have a grownup, cynical world suddenly center its interest on Thurley, the wild-rose Thurley who had basked in the Old-World beauties, responding to French vivacity, “toning in,” as Collin said, to the mellowed charms of Spain and feeling at home directlyupon reaching London. Thurley longed to tarry on in Europe a year, she had told Ernestine.
“It makes me feel unprepared; I see how very new and crude I am.” But Ernestine had planned their schedule without thought as to Thurley’s wishes, so on they went with Thurley learning how to travel and speak her French, to dress, to practise all the things the social secretary had labored to impart. She sent back impractical trifles to the inhabitants of the Fincherie, writing to Miss Clergy dutifully, and mentally writing whole volumes to Bliss Hobart yet seldom mentioning his name aloud.
So passed her summer. And after the weeks of preparation there came a reaction, a bored languor, indifference to her success. Dreams seemed dead and visions vanished; the girl Thurley who had exchanged love for a career was some one else; surely, she had never heard tell of her. At the present moment she was in a veritable squirrel cage, racing after what seemed unattainable fame; she had so many persons to suit, so many persons waited to hear and criticize her and yet there was only one person whom she really wished to please. He had told her quite forcibly,
“As soon as you are nicely launched, Thurley, I’ve a contralto from Argentine whom Baxter has in tow—stocky build and will have to bant, but she has an organlike voice and can do wonders in Wagner—only she’ll take time which, thank fortune, you did not.”
This Thurley took as a personal expression of relief and she went away more bored and numbed than ever, thoroughly insolent to all who crossed her path that day. Ernestine herself could not have achieved it better.
There was the introduction to the stage itself and her future associates. Thurley thanked heaven for blaséindifference at that time. She conducted herself at rehearsals with the poise of a diplomat and when she sang the impassioned love scene in the singing lesson of “The Barber of Seville” she almost laughed at the famous tenor who irritably accepted this rôle with a “so-great-nobody,” as he mockingly informed Thurley, rushing off to meet his last affinity and be properly comforted.
She began to see the truth of Lissa’s prophecy regarding the life of opera singers. Yet this anesthesia of indifference spared her harsh emotions or critical judgments. She was merely keeping her pledge, she told herself night after night when she was finally alone with her thoughts.
All of which won her the title of conceited and spoiled and certain to fail. Bliss Hobart saw her ruse and kept his own counsel; Miss Clergy thought it her eternal triumph over personal affection and whispered to Thurley of her satisfaction. And when the great night of nights came and Thurley, as unconcernedly as if she were at the old meeting house on a Sunday morning, stood and accepted curtain calls and baskets of flowers, trying not to remember the tenor’s repeated comment, “You so-great-nobody, you been drinking witches’ broth,”—Thurley knew she had succeeded. Her début was ended. Hereafter she was free to command her own life—life was really beginning for her anew, since it had temporarily stopped the day she left the Corners and these strange people had lived it for her in a vicarious fashion. Now that she had won fame—with the loss of love—she had won freedom and she was Thurley Precore, prima donna!
After the last act, when Thurley’s dressing-room was a buzz of animated conversation and the scent of the flowers almost sickish, when her new maid fluttered nervouslyabout and Bliss Hobart came in to say, “I knew you would—so there’s nothing to exclaim about, is there?”—and all the sisters of the press clamored for “a word,” with others crowding about and looking properly animated and delighted, Miss Clergy whispered,
“My darling, how proud I am,” and Thurley recoiled, she knew not why.
“A finer bridegroom than Dan Birge,” the ghost-lady was murmuring, “fame! He is the finest bridegroom of all—fame, Thurley—and I’m so proud of you!”
Naturally there was a “party” which Thurley actually dreaded since she felt she could not yet assert her independence. She was like a gay young eaglet chained and longing to soar where she would! Yet she must sit quietly and be praised and petted, the object of excessive sentiments, just as family birthday dinners are a signal for numberless indulgences. Thurley was eager to have done with the unusual, to live as she wished to live.
That first opera was a distinct blur, just as the rehearsals were blurs as soon as they ended. She realized she had jeopardized her liberty in a psychic fashion and given her word to certain things. She had finally served her apprenticeship and was now liberated. Why, she had sungRosinajust as she had often sung lullabies to tired children or for Philena. Stupid world—God gave her a voice as He did brown hair and blue eyes, to herself belonged no credit. Yet here they sat about Bliss Hobart’s elegant supper table—Ernestine in her blue and gold and leopard skin gown and Caleb beside her, Lissa in startling cerise and jet trying to call Thurley “my darling child” and honeycomb her jealousy of Mark who ogled her in silly fashion. There was Miss Clergy, the real perpetrator of it all, who kept staring at herprotégée in almost rude fashion, trying to realize that she had finally achieved her revenge! That was food and drink enough. Bliss Hobart was at Thurley’s right hand, a manager at her left; there were some critics and society satellites who had succeeded in being invited; Sam Sparling appeared with a girl on each arm, as he flippantly explained; while Thurley was a radiant but indifferent goddess, “the yellow peril,” according to Caleb’s description, in her brocaded frock with trimmings of silver. So they drank her health and sang her praises and all the time the wild-rose part of her laughed at them because she had not done her best nor anything to her mind which was unusual. In a different fashion, she had merely “sung for her supper” as she had once done in Birge’s Corners!
When she reached the hotel, Miss Clergy wanted to talk and gloat, in truth, over the evening’s event.
But Thurley shook her head. “I’m tired; even nightingales do nest,” she said, picking up some letters.
They were mostly begging for trade from modistes and milliners but one in a scraggling writing was post-marked “Birge’s Corners.”
Thurley opened it. After a moment she said in an even voice, “They are well and Ali Baba has made a new stormshed for the front.... Dan and Lorraine were married two days ago.” Then she went into her room, blowing Miss Clergy a hypocritical kiss.
She was ashamed, as she lay down to sleep, that instead of thinking of her newly acquired freedom and success she was envying Dan Birge and Lorraine. Not even the sob sisters of the press would have guessed what the new and incomparable prima donna thought on the night of her début. It concerned neither her throat troubles nor her complexion, her possible suitors nor hercoming wealth. But the question asked itself time without end: “Is it better to spoil one’s youth than to do nothing with it?”
That same evening Dan and Lorraine, ill at ease in their overpowering hotel suite eight squares away from Thurley’s hotel, had faced somewhat the same query. For they had come to New York directly following their wedding to spend a restless day with Thurley’s memory pursuing them like a ghost.
Then Lorraine dared to voice the matter. “The paper says Thurley will sing to-night,” she ventured.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go,” Dan answered.
They dropped the subject and spoke of the bromidic details concerning the wedding gifts, what to do with duplicates and the color of the living-room tapestry suite and the beauty of the Queen Anne walnut dining room furnishings which every one said were in better taste than mahogany, the new house with the wonderful fixtures, the electric plugs for lamps, the revolving ice box, the white range, the pergola and sun parlor and the iron deer which was ordered but not yet arrived. How happy two young mortals could have been! Besides, there was the butler’s pantry—heaven knows why it was dubbed butler’s pantry in the Corners—and the garage with a washing rack, if you please! Then there was the wedding itself—a proper chrysanthemum wedding with three bridesmaids, a matron of honor and a ringbearer. Lorraine’s father had married them—“so sweet” as every one agreed—and the church was a bower of blossoms while the wedding cake was in white boxes with the initials of the bride and groom entwined in gold. Lorraine’s wardrobe had been the only meagre thing and that, Dan generously said, would soon beremedied. He had ordered a shower of orchids for her to carry and given her a sunburst of diamonds, while her wedding ring broke all Birge’s Corners’ precedents, for it was a platinum circlet dotted with diamonds. The Corners did not know whether or not to approve this last. It was “going some,” the younger generation said, and the recently married girls boasting of plain and a trifle ponderous gold bands said that they wouldn’t feel respectably married with that funny kind of a ring, but then Lorraine’s father being a minister and every one present at the church, they supposed it was all right—every one had her own ideas.
Lorraine wore a new dress to the opera, one she had bought that morning. Not yet accustomed to her husband’s generosity, she had visited a second-rate shop to obtain the slimsy blossom pink silk with cheap trimming. She had only her travelling coat of dark wool for a wrap and a stupid hat breathing of home millinery.
She knew Dan was not pleased. As she looked at him in his tuxedo she realized that she was not yet “used to being rich”; she would buy the goods for dresses and make them herself, she could then have so many more.
“Will I do for to-night?” she asked timidly, knowing the contrast between herself and Thurley would be cruelly unfair. She winced from it as any woman would wince from having to sit beside the man she loved while he watched the woman of his heart appear in beautiful triumph! Besides, Lorraine had never been to a theater, her father not approving; she was nervous lest she make some embarrassingfaux pas.
“Yes, no one knows us in New York,” he said carelessly.
Then they watched Thurley in all her loveliness come on the stage in herRosinacostume of red, yellow andblack lace. Lorraine glanced at Dan as Thurley sang and triumphed and sang again and triumphed more and the people near them kept asking who she was. Lorraine, with her pitiful bargain frock, her unpowdered face and awkward bonnet, knew that a shadow had fallen between Dan and herself—Thurley’s shadow—no longer a wild rose, generous and kindly of heart, but a prima donna, the woman that Dan would love hopelessly forever and a day.
She applauded Thurley generously, turning her wistful face to Dan’s to say, “She is lovely, isn’t she?” But Lorraine knew that not even the new house with its furnishings nor her wedding ring nor the diamond sunburst could still all the pain of knowing that she had been “married for spite”; she might be the most tender wife and excellent housekeeper in the world yet she was not Thurley, lovely, tyrannical! And as she watched the opera with Thurley its dominating note and Dan’s moody face now defiant, now almost glad, she recalled the superstition about women who married Birge men,—meek little creatures they were who lived only long enough to bear a son and then smiled contentedly and were snuffed out into the unknown!