‘Forty miles from wood,Forty miles from water,Forty miles from hell—God bless our home!’”
‘Forty miles from wood,Forty miles from water,Forty miles from hell—God bless our home!’”
‘Forty miles from wood,
Forty miles from water,
Forty miles from hell—
God bless our home!’”
Lorraine knew Dan had visited with Thurley, so did the village. She wisely kept her counsel and consented toDan’s stammering request that she call on Thurley—“after all, it might look queer if she did not.”
So she went, as much of a martyr as she had been when she brought Thurley the blue set for an engagement present. This time she passed into the parlors of the old-fashioned house aglow with their pretty trifles and cut flowers, the grand piano in the center like a precocious and not to be ignored child, and met Thurley in timid, dignified manner, taking count of her Parisian costume, her new mannerisms and accent, her rather flippant opinions of the topics of the day, promising her thumping little heart that when she was alone, in the peace of her own house, she would struggle to regain her poise and contentment of mind which this astonishingly charming yet affected person fairly wrested from her!
In fact Birge’s Corners called on Thurley prepared to ask curious and mortifying questions, only to make a hurried exit in quite a different frame of mind. For with a perfectly cordial manner Thurley met all alike. She had a faculty of making them feel their own selves quite impossible; they were ill at ease before her—nor did they ask her to sing, she forestalled that before the subject of the weather was exhausted. They left saying that “Thurley had a way with her—and Dan could thank his lucky star he had been saved from the marriage.” Thurley repaid no calls—not even to Lorraine, although the latter had asked her from a sense of duty. She lived in her own way at the Fincherie with Miss Clergy nodding approval on whatsoever she did or demanded. In a short time, when she flooded the town with what the village dubbed as lunatics, no one was over-keen to have her call.
The “lunatics” were men with bangs, wearing broad scarlet sashes and going without hats in the sun, sketchingunder white umbrellas and talking “some queer language”; the women had bobbed their hair and possessed more gowns than brains; they slept away half the morning and danced away half the night while Thurley was the gayest of all the strange company, turning the Fincherie lawn into a stage to have tableaux and folk dances, and all her guests, bobbed-haired or banged or what not, scowled at the natives curiously and commented upon them audibly as if they were insensible of understanding.
Dan Birge was seen driving with Thurley, drinking tea on the Fincherie lawn, being a spectator at the entertainments. Lorraine grew more fragile-looking but kept her own counsel and Owen Pringle failed to secure an autograph or an order for a bonnet, while Josie, Cora and Hazel found no encouragement or interest shown in their dramatic, musical or matrimonial futures!
Presently, the Corners said it would be a blessing if Thurley Precore would choose some other place to spend her summers. Whatever made her pa and ma drive into the town in the first place? She would get her “comeupment” for this smartness, to say nothing of a real white slave dance which she gave, at which she was auctioned off to a big fat man with white hair and a tucked, crêpe de chine shirt, who made his living playing on a little penny whistle! The devil did not have all the good times in the world—neither would Thurley Precore. The older generation had felt from the first it was not boding good luck to have so great a spirit develop suddenly via a partly demented recluse. Here was proof enough! For Thurley and her friends neither went to church nor patronized church social affairs. They lived “like they tell of,” was the report, “just as like to get up at three o’clock in the morning to go on hollerin’ and yellin’ like to wake the dead or else sleep like logs until noon ...and if Miss Clergy thought she had done a smart thing in makin’ so much out of Thurley because Thurleyusedto be able to carry a tune, she had an awful awakening ahead of her!”
“She’ll never get her married off to no one,” the village further commented, when Thurley in a tight fitting black habit had cantered up and down the streets on a snowy white mare, while a moving picture man from New York patiently lurked along the roadside to catch a few poses. “Dan Birge ought to go down on his knees to thank Lorraine for marryin’ him ... but does he? Oh, no, when he gets down on his knees it’s only to tie up Thurley’s shoe latches! Never mindin’ his business nor his wife’s fadin’—nor the sport they make of him right to his face—he’s a worse fool than they are!”
When the Corners became aware that Thurley’s terrier, Taffy, had several sets of harness and sweaters, they decided it was far more depraved than Dan Birge’s buying a dog and having him ride in the front seat of the car. Following on the heels of this discovery, the terrier had a birthday party with a frosted cake and three candles, and the newspaper editor admitted that they had sent in a paragraph describing the event, fully expecting it would be published. Upon being pressed for the details, the editor said the sum total of the description read,
“Taffy Precore was the proud recipient of many handsome gifts, including a set of white rubbers from Madame Lissa Dagmar and an unusually attractive travelling coat from Collin Hedley. Covers were laid for fourteen and special out-of-town guests were Woofie Airedale, whose guardian is Siri Mantenelli, the opera singer, and Ogre, foster child of Ernestine Christian!”
But even this atrocity was matched—Dan Birge had given Taffy an expensive feed tray and was present atthe party. Hazel Mitchell took the day off to circulate the rumor which developed into the report that the tray was not aluminum but Haviland china with a hand-painted monogram in the center! Had Dan been seen kissing Thurley he could not have been more bitterly condemned. Truly, Thurley Precore must get her “comeuppance.”
Ali Baba summarized it one late summer’s day as he watched Caleb, Polly and Thurley play tennis against Collin, returned from Bliss’s hermitage, Mark and Lissa.
“Well, Betsey,” he said, leaning on his lawn-mower handle, “these women covered with lady powder and their dresses cut so low as to leave a fust rate advertisin’ space and these fellers a-whangin’ and a-bangin’ at their fiddles or tryin’ to paint a pretty little blue lake to look like a green icicle and none of ’em mendin’ a sock or drivin’ a nail or carin’ about anything except who can eat the most or laff the loudest, all of ’em thinkin’ ‘what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own’—I want to tell you Thurley’s got to get rid of the whole bunch, if she’s goin’ to be worth a pinch of snuff. This way she’ll neither be fish nor flesh nor good red herring!”
After a busy but personally unsatisfactory winter, the war clouds for America gathering without pause, Thurley admitted to Ernestine that she now understood the need for nerve specialists, that she agreed fully with him who has said, “a state of emotion without some action as an outlet is immoral,” and she proceeded to drink more black coffee and light wine than was good for her, jeopardize her eyes by midnight reading of morbid Russian novels and to carry on half a dozen affairs with Mark as a sort of everlasting threat in Lissa’s direction. Yet in her work Thurley had increased in ability and interpretation; herJuliet,OpheliaandLa Toscawere each welcomed as superb achievements.
“Because, my child, you are burning up your personal habits and tastes and nice Jersey cow nerves,” Ernestine said with delicious melancholy. “I knew it was inevitable—you could never stay the rosy-cheeked schoolgirl. You’ll keep on using up your personal endowments. Fame is a cruel stepmother to personal happiness and you’ll be like the rest of us—quite impossible except when you are before the public.”
At which decree Thurley fled to engage in a rousing afternoon of ice skating with Mark, only to have Lissa dart down on them with her purring, dangerous smile and rescue Mark. She then sent him on an errand and drove Thurley home in order to bestow a few feminine scratches.
“I’m quite shocked, dearie,” Lissa began as theybowled through the park, “to think you’d take up with the country bumpkin—really, with your career and looks and the way you’ve been keeping your hand in with Mark—” a bit of a pause here—“it seems to me you ought to play for bigger stakes than that funny storekeeper from Birge’s Corners ... aha, you are blushing! I’m glad you admit guilt. All well enough when you lived in that queer place and he was the richest man in it. It is always well enough when one knows the richest man, no matter how queer the place! But now, Thurley, with the desirables you could—”
“Dan is an old friend—nothing more,” Thurley defended.
“Then keep your sentiment in check until you go back to that queer place, for you’ve let him come to town to see you—twice that I know about.” Lissa’s eyes danced with delight.
“He comes to buy things for his store.” Thurley was strangely alarmed at the secret being discovered.
“Does it mean he must see you? I suppose, poor lad, he spends half his profits on you. What sort of a bonnet will his wife have for spring? Oh, Thurley, if only Bliss and Ernestine hadn’t tried to make you a nun and an opera singer at once—wrong—all wrong as can be.”
Thurley felt it was her turn to scratch. “Anyway, Lissa, Dan is harmless; he’s only a shopkeeper and I’m not stopping his career.”
“You allude to Mark?” this with dangerous sweetness.
“Of course, you make him a mediocre dancer when he’s the ability to be something fine and big—I don’t know what, but I’m saying it is wrong for him to merely dance and if you’d prod him the other way, I’m sure he’d go. Besides, there’s no way out for you two, is there?I can’t imagine your marrying any one and it isn’t fair to Mark—he’ll be dry rot before he knows it.”
“I married a mild person a long time ago; he let me gain my freedom in my own way—it is more satisfactory to be Madame Dagmar than plain Miss. I advise a marriage for the sole reason that the world always takes more interest in you; they are determined to find out what made the marriage go awry. When critics begin to harpoon, Thurley, get married, be divorced and you’ll find a sympathetic welcome from the public.” She lifted her gold chain with its dangling pencils, rouge boxes, tiny brandy flasks and other trifles, swinging it back and forth with a clinking sound.
“But Mark—is so young—”
“And I am so old? What an amiable little girl it is! I can stay young as long as youth loves me.” She seemed a wicked person hiding under a girl’s mask. “Don’t worry about Mark—unless you happen to be in love with him.”
When Thurley came home that afternoon, she found a basket of flowers from Dan and a note saying he would be in New York before June. Trips to New York were not ordinary, easily managed affairs for Dan. He must plan to be away without being suspected. Then he would come to town and stay at a hotel, restless, eager and thoroughly ashamed if he would but admit it, until Thurley permitted him to see her, drove with him, entertained him at her apartment, treating him in a half patronizing, half genuine manner—not quite clear herself either as to her motives or emotions. It was as impossible to think of an actual intrigue with Dan Birge as to associate schoolboys in the lower forms with being regular brigands. True, they play at it—it is often their pet pastime—but there is a prompt ending of it when thesupper bell rings, wooden swords and false faces are willingly left in the woodshed and plain Tommies and Jacks cluster around the table!
So it was with Dan. Thurley, talking to him of this or that, of anything save the things she would have liked to talk of, now scolding him, threatening to send him home, playing now that she was annoyed, now that she was sentimental, now pensive or even angry,—Thurley was doing a simple and a natural thing, proof of what Ernestine had prophesied. Thurley was using Dan as her whipping boy, outlet for her repressed and lonely self. Dan was the ooze, some one human to whom she could vent her whims and moods; some one wholesome and clean-minded with whom she was entirely at ease. She selfishly refused to think of the apparent indiscretion, the lack of honor which she incurred when she let him come from the Corners to stay in New York a week while she showed him her restless woman’s self, and let his own man’s heart learn to want her in new, dangerous fashion.
Yet Dan was “playing” too. After all, Lorraine was his wife and he had grown fond of her—used to her would be more truthful and less romantic. She was “mighty good to have about.” It was a relief to return from New York with memories of Thurley as the great opera singer, aloof, coquettish, temperamental, useless save for her own work, and find the sunny little home with Lorraine who never questioned his absence nor shirked in her tasks. And if the tapestry furniture, Queen Anne walnut and mahogany pedestals with plaster statues got on Dan’s nerves when he recalled Thurley’s strangely beautiful apartment, and Lorraine’s dowdy frocks made him visualize Thurley in some wonderful swirl of satin and lace—Dan realized that a man maybe happily married and yet partly in love with some one else at the same time. After this realization, he re-ordered his life to fit the situation and his generosity to Lorraine, like his manner, was dangerously kind and thoughtful. The town, which would never exhaust Thurley’s return as a topic for debate, said, fooling its narrow little self, “I guess Dan is sorry for how he acted!”
Sometimes Thurley wondered if Bliss Hobart knew of Dan’s visits. Once she was determined to make him speak to her about something save her voice and decided to tell him, but he forestalled her by saying that the “songbirds” were giving him an album as a present and although he did not care which picture most of them selected for his gift, he had an idea he wanted Thurley as her own self and not in any costume rôle—did she mind?
They were in his office when he made the request, Bliss sitting at his desk, as he had been sitting the first time she had seen him, his fingers touching the little mascot she had shyly presented that initial and wretched Christmas.
“Of course not,”—knowing she blushed unbecomingly. “What sort of a ‘myself’ picture will your majesty have?”
“Oh, just Thurley—when you blush do you know you leave the rouge boundaries far behind? Please don’t do your hair like oyster shells—Lissa is the only person sufficiently vulgar to do so—and wear a close fitting white turban besides!”
Emboldened by his request Thurley ventured further, “What makes you order me about so? Am I always to be a novice in your eyes?”
“I like to remember you as you were that first Christmas. I do think, Thurley, Christmas is the only time Iever allow myself to be sentimental. Remember how you looked in your blue serge, bright red coat with silver buttons and an ermine tam tumbling off your head—a splendid, real thing you were.”
“I’ve a picture taken then,” she said softly.
“Say it is mine and I’ll tell you a secret—the greatest sculptor in the world is to be my guest very shortly. He is here from his native land, Alsace-Lorraine, to gather funds. He will speak to us because I’m going to give him a party and at the same time Collin will have the surprise of his life!”
“Not going to be married?”
“You women! Worse luck. I say—his picture, ‘Cupid and the Peacock,’ has been given the French medal—and the master will announce it to him.”
“I’ll send the picture up to-morrow,” Thurley promised.
Hobart’s eyes were twinkling and tender all in one. “Well, well, I’m more important than the great sculptor or Collin’s success! Thurley, you are becoming dangerous! Some day we shall have a great reckoning, you and I,” and before she could tell him of Dan he had bustled her out of the room, teasing her until she wished she had refused him a photograph of her own self.
When Thurley sat at Hobart’s supper-table to listen to the old master speak of Collin’s brilliant but heartless picture, as he aptly described it, and then a little of his treasure trove of art knowledge, as she saw his stooped and wasted body wrapped humorously in a gay shawl despite social custom, his face dark and dotted with bumps and wrinkles as a New England field is with granite boulders, wild white hair like white flames leaping from his skull ... she missed the beauty and the wisdom of his words. Instead, her young and attractiveself recoiled from the physical appearance of this genius—the price the master paid in order to concentrate, shut out the things of romance, everyday diversion. As she looked at the faces so intent on the great man’s words—words like a benediction, it seemed, for he knew his days were numbered—it seemed to Thurley she saw naught but distorted, repressed or self-indulged expressions and she must rise and leave the room, go into the world a young, untalented girl doing some senseless, regular thing and let those who should love her for her own self speak out and prove their worth; that this drowsy hum about fame and genius was nothing but a sedative the unloved adopt to still the ache. She did not want to sing better than any one else, better than Jenny Lind, so the world told her, she wanted to sing poorly—and have one man say, “I love you—”
Her hands clenched together under the cobwebby tablecloth, as she realized that she had pledged to remain aloof from such possibilities and, by so doing, she had met the man whom she would always love ... she wondered if she had betrayed her lack of interest in the master. He was saying slowly,
“The two great influences helping me to attain my mark were, first, my mother was my friend; then, when middle age waned and inspiration seemed to have taken flight, I heard Bliss Hobart sing, and so I went on.” He was droning now over some technical thing but Thurley kept hearing the words, “I heard Bliss Hobart sing,” and with redoubled determination she promised herself to rouse the man in him to speak to her, to give her fresh inspiration, new courage—to go on alone.
“Everything is symbol,” the master was concluding, “and there must be unity about all artists no matter how disconnected and illogical they may appear on the surface.The artist must not trust anything but his eyes, for they shall see the inner truth of whatever he is choosing to depict. Ugliness to the vulgar becomes beauty to the artist, for he sees the inner meaning of it and knows that by portraying it faithfully he can destroy it. Take the picture, statue, word description or acted part of the drunkard, prostitute, the fool, the pervert—do they not cause the sane yet inartistic person to turn away in horror, resolved a thousand times more strongly to live right?”
... Here Thurley’s mind wandered back to the old man’s confession, “I heard Bliss Hobart sing,” and she was lost in reverie until she caught again the master’s earnest voice as he advised all young artists to see statuary by lamplight in order to find the ivory shades of light and dark shadows that daytime never reveals, not to put more color in the sunrise than did Dame Nature nor carmine on young lips nor fat greens in the summer foliage.
“For then,” he said, smiling wisely, “you cease to be artists, but become dreamy and conceited liars! Be sincere; no matter what you may believe, be sincere.” After which he sat down as confused as a schoolboy, protesting against the applause, admitting in an undertone to Ernestine Christian that “America was too wonderful, her food too sophisticated, her women too daring.” Then Lissa tried to attack him from the other side with some silly question which caused the old man to lapse into his Alsatian jargon,
“Tè, Matame, je ne sais pas—”
Thurley left the party early; Caleb told her afterwards that Bliss was disappointed for he wanted the master to hear her sing. She took a delight in having cheated him of the request. She went to her bedroom to rummage among her belongings until she found an overposed stagepicture of herself asViolettein “Traviata” and she inscribed it to Bliss Hobart, sealing it in an envelope and marking it, “For the album—could not find the other.”
She said her dutiful good night to Miss Clergy, looking with magnanimous pity at the frail ghost lady who patted her white, ringed hand and said as she had done so many hundreds of times,
“How lovely you are, Thurley—and how proud I am! You have never given me any anxiety—not for a moment.... What a girl you are and what a joy it has been!”
To-night, Thurley lingered a moment longer than usual. “Do you think I shall never love?” she asked nervously.
Miss Clergy sat up in bed, clutching her cashmere shawl in excitement. “Love a man?” she asked breathlessly. “Oh, my child, it would only bring harm!”
Thurley soothed her as if she were a child. “I won’t break my promise—not even after I repay you—and I’ll never repay you if I keep on buying pretties, will I? What an extravagant goose I’m getting to be, vying with every one else for the brightest trifles!” She was talking more to herself.
Miss Clergy misunderstood her meaning. “Never repay me, Thurley! What do I want with money? All I have will be yours, now do you understand? All I have!” she whispered hoarsely.
“Go to sleep, there’s a dear,” Thurley said swiftly, “and when you watch my flirtations, remember they are only to make the stage loves the more real.” Turning off the light she left the ghost lady to her haunted memories.
Half the night Thurley searched among her possessions, finding and destroying notes from admirers, Dan’s boyish, imploring letters, her own childish diary she hadkept the first year in New York, Bliss Hobart’s few mementoes—the crayon sketches Collin had made of her abroad, Ernestine’s letters. She reread her press clipping book, her expense accounts, personal memoranda; she added and deducted figures as if she were a scientific accountant. Then she walked into her clothes room and looked at all the lovely, rainbow things of becoming richness; she opened her jewel case and stared at the glittering bits of beauty within. It was as though she were taking a complete inventory of one Thurley Precore, prima donna.
She undressed herself slowly, never taking her eyes from her image in the glass, plaiting the brown hair into two braids, each as thick as her own arm. Then she rose and quoted quickly the master’s telling command,
“Be sincere—no matter what you may believe,” adding, “so that’s decided—no matter what comes,” startled at the insolent assurance of her eyes. If one could have seen her face as she slept one would have noticed foremost of all that a permanent sneer seemed painted on the scarlet lips.
Whatever Lorraine thought concerning Dan’s frequent absences and his attitude regarding his home and what happened therein, she still followed the path of the Victorian era and kept her own counsel. Nor did any one try to disturb her gentle self by the agony of doubts. For one reason the “genteel grafters,” such as Cora, Hazel, Josie and Owen of the art shoppe fame, came to Lorraine’s home only for what advantages could be obtained. Why then disturb her who gave them the advantages? There might be an end of them if they did. To be sure they gossiped among themselves and the societies and lodges with vivid imagination and a generous manner of embellishing a truly innocent but unique situation—a high-minded, spirited man too high for his town yet too undisciplined for the city who haunted the footsteps of a high-minded, spirited woman who had become big enough in abilities for the entire world and who was dying inwardly of ennui and heart-lonesomeness, who took this mild sort of affair as the one genuine and refreshing thing in her hurried,de luxeexistence. Neither of these young people realized the harm it incurred. They cheated themselves into believing it “merely palship” or “an expression of individuality”—a very nice sort of garden and not wild oats affair!
Sometimes Thurley met Dan with a zest for his boyish mannerisms, his telling of the rise in wool goods, what a splendid housewife Lorraine was—only she didn’t understand things—how jealous he was of the basso whomade love to Thurley on the opera stage. Sometimes she looked at him in disdain, the strange sneer on her lips as she thought of what a dull existence was Dan’s, what a lark it was to see him strive to make as good a showing as the young millionaire who was hopelessly infatuated with this Thurley Precore, boasting at his club that she would wear his necklace or his flowers before the season ended. The vampire which is in all women and which is not a sinister quality only to be raved about as “a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,” had for the time being become supreme in Thurley. Dan did not understand this—any more than he understood why he was unhappy when he was near Thurley and always thinking about Lorraine and why, when he returned home, fortified a thousand times by the blessed memories of Thurley’s beauty and the stolen moments he had claimed, he was unhappier still.
Dan would return to his immaculate, prosaic living-room where Lorraine would greet him and inform him all in the same breath that Lydia Hoyt was engaged and Lorraine would give a kitchen shower—and did Dan notice how the veranda posts sagged, hadn’t he better have a man come up and see about them?—oh, yes, there was something wrong with her car, well—she had let Owen drive it because he had deliveries to make ’way out in the country—beefsteak was three cents higher a pound than last week and two of the church deacons had resigned because they couldn’t have their way about the music.
After which Dan would slip away to unpack his bag and Lorraine to prepare his supper. There would be an abundant, well cooked meal on the prosaic table with its nightmares of hand painted peppers and salts and cut glass monstrosities, the water pitcher heavily banded withgilt. After eating his fill, Dan would depart to smoke in peace and wonder what Lorraine would think of Thurley’s new frocks and the baskets of flowers which forever adorned her rooms, of the bizarre friends and their weird ways—he would end, however, with the somewhat hopeless consolation that Lorraine had about as much imagination or capacity for artistic enjoyment as the old lady who, upon seeing mountains for the first time, merely said querulously,
“Dear me, if any one ever started to roll—”
For Lorraine would have probably remarked, after viewing Thurley’s apartment, “How in the world does she ever get the work done!” letting the panorama of joys and possibilities sweep on uncomprehended.
Therefore, Dan had decided, after very arduous sophistry, it was not wrong to see Thurley, to keep her in his bewildered heart as a sort of lovely idol, something set apart from the Corners and his house-and-garden life—something as different as the scarlet tanager or the jewelled dragon-fly is different from the barn-swallow or the field-daisy! Each has its own place.
But when spring began to hint of its appearance and Dan had been in New York over Easter, while the Corners gossiped about his absence, although Lorraine bravely occupied the front church pew and wore her new silk gown, Dan came home prepared to tell Lorraine that he would probably be away very often during the summer.
He waited until the work was “done up” and Lorraine brought her everlasting handiwork to join him in the den. The den itself was sufficient to make Dan’s nerves rebel—it had been furnished a few months after their marriage, an upstairs bedroom transformed into an inquisition chamber, as he told Thurley.
Dens in such hamlets as the Corners offer noraison d’êtresave when a cartoonist gets a peek at them or the family scapegoat turns up unawares and is made to occupy the combination divan and folding lounge.
Lorraine fondly pictured the den as an ideal place for Dan to come and rest—“A real man’s room,” she explained, “where they smoke and play cards—and talk about things!” It was adorned by Indian heads, an oak table with a prim scarf done in poppies and maidenhair fern, a lounge with pillows made from cigar ribbons and college pennants, all placed in undying positions of rectitude, glass candlesticks with pink shades, a shining little ash tray and match box, a shelf of detective stories and old magazines, an easy chair in old rose velours, two fragile rocking chairs, some grinning lithographs of cowboys, African savages, Christy girls and bulldogs placed at exact intervals about the pink flowered walls and dimity curtains criss-crossed and crisp from recent washing to shut out the light!
Seated here, this April evening, a hundred thoughts clamoring for consideration before the task of telling Lorraine he was to be in New York a great deal, Dan pretended to play solitaire and keep up a desultory conversation about the way a neighbor trained a pumpkin vine over his woodshed and captured the village improvement prize!
The absence of sympathy between them seemed a relentless, chilly wind whipping on his treasonous speech, all the more so because Dan had no truly logical excuse. On the face of it, what more could a man demand? That is, if one were magnanimous about the Indian heads and sofa pillows, what right had he, a small town shopkeeper, to wail his heart out for a genius?
“Oh, ’Raine,” he said abruptly, shuffling the cards with a fillip, “I may have to run off for a few days in a couple of weeks—all right?”
Lorraine did not answer; she bent her head over her work.
Dan looked at her sharply. “Isn’t it all right?” His voice had that dangerous gentleness at which she always winced.
“Is she coming back this summer?” She dropped the sewing.
Dan put aside the cards and came beside her. Under the flare of the reading light her face seemed thinner and more childish. There was a miraculous subtlety of features, a hidden delicate something which he could not analyze; he felt boorish, brutal, as absurd as when he was one of Thurley’s guests at a party and every one really made polite game of him.
He kept looking at Lorraine, wondering why this change had come about; tired purple shadows were under her eyes, the eyes themselves were soft, shining things seeming to look far beyond him.
She raised her hand, crumpling the sheer, white slip on which she was sewing.
“You mean Thurley,” he stammered, “well—I—I don’t know, dear, you see the Fincherie is Miss Clergy’s house and of course ... oh,’Raine... now, I understand,” his eyes staring at the tiny, gossamer dress!
With an armful of projects under way, Hobart had little time for Thurley during the winter. He met her with a sort of “You’ve got beyond me but I don’t think I’ll bother to chase after” attitude, praising her when she did well or keeping his silence when she did some showy, foolish thing, food for press agents. He was noncommittal as to Dan Birge’s visits—as Miss Clergy had been, since the latter looked upon them as a particularly choice part of her revenge, for here was a man debarred from marrying the woman he loved, yet following her hopelessly whenever she permitted, Pied Piper fashion.
When Lissa had hinted of unsavory things to him, Hobart dismissed the matter with a careless speech and a shrug of the shoulders. This he had learned to do long ago, whenever Lissa came prattling of some imaginary scandal which pleased her tarnished mind. There had been the time she tried to convince Hobart that Collin really did not paint his own pictures, but hypnotized Polly into doing it and thus kept her starving in a garret, hopelessly in love with Collin and Collin playing a modern Svengali. Lissa had endeavored for many days to make Ernestine believe that Caleb was the storm center of a liaison with a Broadway actress, thus ferreting out Ernestine’s state of mind concerning Caleb and promptly running to Caleb to tell him, ever so confidentially, that Ernestine was in danger of drinking herself to death, poor woman,—too bad she loved that wretched gypsy violinistwho had played with her in concert work—could nothing be done about it? The world had soon learned not to value Lissa’s information, paying no heed to her hints of Sam Sparling’s dreadful actions or that Bliss Hobart did not go to his hermitage in the Maine woods—why, there was the silliest little movie actress at San Diego—living in a perfect castle, too—
So Hobart, well versed in tactics, when Lissa approached him on the subject of Dan and Thurley, managed to switch the conversation on to the information that Mark had danced so poorly his position as premier was threatened and Lissa had better adopt the diet of a Belgian refugee if she still wished to look her best in tailored things! Lissa, ousted for the time being, would depart to vent her wrath on the shoulders of her maid or Mark, who was, in truth, dancing poorly because he was bored and he felt dancing was not a man’s life-work when other things kept whispering themselves to him—and, hang it all, why did a clean cut, wonder girl like Thurley let Lissa pull her around by the nose anyway?
In a spirit of half earnest, half flippant revenge for Hobart’s neglect, Thurley sang poorly at a salon concert at which Hobart was the host. She so resorted to Lissa’s mannerisms that Caleb took notes on his cuff for future use.
Thurley knew the concert was a failure since she was to be the one to make it a success. She refused to meet Hobart’s disappointed gaze, pretending to be engrossed in listening to a Russian agitator telling of his escape over the frontier.
The next morning, when Thurley was debating whether or not it would be convenient to have Dan visit her so soon again, if this summer was to be spent in shocking the natives or, as Caleb had urged, selecting asite for a permanent country home and seeing it well on its way to completion by fall, she lifted the telephone receiver to answer its ring and heard Bliss Hobart’s voice—his teacher voice—saying,
“Come over at ten, Thurley, you’ve a lot to answer for.”
“Suppose I won’t come?” she retorted, delighted at the prospect.
But he had disconnected. She deliberately made herself late by overdressing. A mad hatter’s model of a bonnet in blue and a frock of rose taffeta with a coat to match furnished her with the proper scenery, she admitted to herself. She slipped in to where Miss Clergy industriously sat knitting army socks and told her she was off for a coaching lesson.
“A coaching or a dancing lesson?” Miss Clergy asked mischievously.
“Both,” Thurley declared.
She found Hobart in his inner study; he was playing an old gavotte and greeting her with a curt nod.
“Well—is a luncheon to follow the lesson? You must have thought I’d keep you all morning. I’ve a pupil at eleven.”
Thurley sat on one of the little peasant chairs and pouted becomingly.
“I dress to suit my mood. Some mornings I have a desire for a winding sheet; this morning I wanted rose taffeta and sapphire velvet.”
Hobart smiled. “Does Miss Clergy ever row about your adorers?”
Thurley flushed, saying in a more natural voice, “Not exactly. To her mind it is the more enhancing—keeping mankind at bay. And it settles a distressing question for me.... I daresay I’d make a cropper of marriage,most of us do. This way, I do as I like,” turning to contemplate the empty fireplace. “Must I be coached this morning?” she added. “My throat feels scratchy and I have a benefit concert to-night.”
“It wasn’t your voice—but yourself.” He ended the song and, rising, took an opposite chair before the fireplace. “I am going away earlier than usual this year because of some work in England; making art aid the war. If I don’t see you again, let me give you a little moral coaching which is all you need to set you right.”
She would have interrupted, but he held up a protesting hand. “Age before camouflage,” he pleaded. “For a long time, Thurley, I have been watching you. You have come now to where you feel that an utter disregard of morals is really preparation and a necessary frame of mind in order to win the violet crown—”
“What do you mean by the violet crown?” She did not look at him.
“One of my pet names.” He became boyish in manner as he always did when prevailed upon to speak of the things nearest his heart. “I’ve a lot of pet names—and secrets—tucked under this salt and pepper hair of mine. A long time ago, I sang rather well,—nice people have said I sang as well as yourself, with as much ease and as little training. That was why I understood you. My mother was an Italian and my father an American, but we lived in Italy to please my mother and, after my father died, she felt she could not bear to leave the blessed memories, for they had been ideally happy.” He seemed lost in a reverie from which he roused himself with an effort to continue:
“After my mother was gone and I was singing as well as yourself and every one making quite a fuss over me and wanting me to tour America,” he seemed to dreadeven the saying of the words, “I loved a woman who was older than myself and who sang, too, but not well—more like Lissa. I loved her very dearly and, of course, I believed in her. But she was an art intriguer and not a worker and she said she loved me merely because my golden voice meant real gold—for her to spend.... After awhile,—I suppose I became a tedious, dreamy lad too occupied with ideals,—she found a man with a great deal of money and no more knowledge of music or art than a lapdog has.... Without telling me, she went up to Paris and they were married and she laughed at my moonings and made fun of my ideals.... For a long time I was ill, absurdly so, and when I was well, my voice was gone,” he tried to speak lightly, “but in its stead I had a vision.... Does that sound too superlative? It does to myself, for it is one of the things words spoil the full meaning of; it would take music to express it, a sonata inspired by the three oldest sounds in the world—”
“What are they?” Thurley asked, feeling the simple girl from Birge’s Corners again, ade luxeTopsy!
“The wind, the death cry of a warrior and a woman’s sobs,” he answered so quickly she knew it had been clear to him for a long time. “No one will ever write the sonata, so words must do their best. At least, I choose to whom they shall be said. For it is as if you were looking into the very soul of me, as a mother does when she first sees her newborn child, the instant when the mysterious bond between them is formed for all time, despite all happenings.”
Thurley leaned forward in her chair, her blue eyes serious. “I shall understand,” she promised.
“I have never told any one all I shall tell you to-day, because I could not bear to have them jangle and disagree in silly, stupid ways—like an auctioneer trying toprove that the contents of a shrine were not of intrinsic value but merely worth while as souvenirs! Because I think it is worth while, I shall tell you. All the others,” he shook his head, “were not worth it! Nor could I have told you at the beginning—you could not have understood. Now, you are at the crossroads, flirting with each direction, undecided which way you are going to travel.”
“I shall understand you,” she repeated. To herself she added, “Because I love you!”
“It seemed to me as I pulled myself together after the fever and cast about for another way of being useful, that true art was not symbolized by a laurel wreath but by a violet crown—I daresay the notion started from my admiration of the wonderful enamelled cups used in cathedrals—lavender and sapphire. So I named the symbol for genius, the crown typifying supremacy, violet, as the ecclesiastics interpret it—humbleness, for those who possess true genius must be ever mindful of the sparrow’s fall. It has seemed to me the violet crown could be, figuratively, won only by such a nation as America, which, like the Child in the temple, commanded respect and consideration of the elders—or the Old World with its shallow reasonings as to art. For the Old World has, to my mind, treated art and its artists somewhat after the fashion of Barmecide’s Feast—the Arabian Nights’ tale of the prince who bade the beggar sit at the snowy table a-glitter with golden service and, lo, when the platters were lifted, the plates were devoid of food! So it is with true art—we have had wonderful achievements, but we have not yet made ourselves realize the moral significance and responsibility of art and artists, that has been as devoid of justice as the golden plates of Prince Barmecide were of food—” He paused.
Thurley was eager to speak. “Why, then, can I understand your vision?” hoping for but one reply.
“Because you are one of the vanguard! Another of my secrets! There are never many of the vanguard, and we are not always rich or great or talented. Sometimes the vanguard of civilization are humble and their earthly record most uninteresting. But have you never thought to yourself there were just a few, rare souls who—who understand? Who can smile at the trials the world seeks to escape from and sometimes sob at the vapid joys for which the world strives so unceasingly? The vanguard can make the most out of little and belittle the most. They seem to glimpse the coming trials of the nation and her resultant triumphs; they are never given to cowardice of flesh or spirit. As a general’s military vanguard moves further along the battleline, so we, the altruistic vanguard, must be ever ahead of the times in thought, deed and prophecy. It is not always a pleasant rôle—to blaze the trail. The vanguard are usually misjudged, ridiculed and never idle—”
“So the first vanguard was the group at Calvary who gave defiance to the mob.” Thurley forgot the personal issue between them.
He nodded, well pleased. “In science, theology, economics, art, so on, we always find a few members allying themselves distinctly with each great cause and these few dare to see and to say wherein lie the errors of the past and the possibilities of the future. Let you and me, Thurley, as artists help America as a nation to the winning of the violet crown.”
“This war—” she began.
“Ah, not this physical war, for it will be over within a short time—so to speak. America will enter and soon surface peace will result. But long, long afterwards—whenart assumes fairly normal proportions and consideration and the world lapses back into the old ways—what then? Some one has said the French have taken this war as an immortal martyrdom and the British as a bully, well worth while game—then let our nation take it as the chance to win the violet crown—first by the necessary sacrifice and change in extravagant, thoughtless living which will prepare our minds to be ready for the great moral battle long after the fields of Flanders are recreated into fragrant orchards.”
“Then you did not want to preach to me,” Thurley sighed with relief.
“This is all a part of it,” he warned, “for you have strayed far from the vanguard. First, to finish about myself. For I have been glad the world lost an excellent tenor because he might have been a foolish one. I am better placed as I am; but you, Thurley, are running amuck. Why this shallow flippancy? This false basis of theories, mistaking shadow for substance? Because you hear such and such a greatdivabore a child for a crown prince—that this artist acts under the influence of morphine and that one paints only when addled from absinthe—you must not pursue these phantoms of self-indulgence—and you who sit there looking confused yet combative, you are at this very moment halfway inviting an intrigue with an honest country lad—Dan Birge! Can you not remember that scullery maids as well as prima donnas dabble their virtue in cheap stains; there is nothing distinctive about it?”
Instantly at war with herself, yet happy because Hobart was speaking to her, Thurley, of her personal tangles, she began a spirited defence, using Lissa’s blasé theories.
He waved them aside, answering in a brusque manner,a contrast to his dreamy fashion of a moment ago, “You say, ‘I am different—on an independent train!’ Then so are we all, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.
“Why applaud, throw gold, even title a man or a woman who, despite remarkable ability, has betrayed every simple tenet of faith and mocked at the very subject matter which gives them their laurel wreath? We need a new standard for art, Thurley.
“As the air has been conquered for a flight, a dozen things of science, a broader version of theology, let us make the standards of personality of importance in considering genius. Ultimately we should not lose. The artists themselves would be the spiritual gainers, if forced to live up to the ideals they so conscientiously and glibly prescribe for every one else. You hear of a tradesman who abuses his family and his business invariably falls off as a result. Yet we encore a man who has cynically betrayed a young girl and laugh indulgently when reading of his drunken escapades. ‘But what a Romeo!’ we say. ‘We must excuse him—an artist, you know.’ There is an end of it. Is it not true that in politics nothing damns a candidate more than a whisper against his good name—his name, mark you, not his abilities? In religion, what ruins a clergyman more than the rumor of the little choir girl—? In everything else the world has attempted to deal out justice regarding the equation of personal and professional life, but at the mere mention of talent, genius—temperament—even a bobbed-haired musical comedy actress—the public sinks giggling like a schoolgirl into an orchestra chair and becomes ineffectual, blind, duped—immoral!”
Thurley made no comment, but she rose and showed her nervous tension by walking rapidly up and down the floor.
After a pause Hobart added, “If we are to make American art permanent, we must make American artists hold to the best in themselves. That, Thurley, is my vision! That is what you must do, for you are of the vanguard and you have true genius. Of course there would be a time of temporary disillusionment for art, with every one scrambling about and crying, ‘Help-ho—surely, notme!’ After the readjustment, when the craft of artists realize that the public demands clean-breathed lives of them and the surplus of amateurs have been beaten back into the ranks, I see an art so ennobling and enduring that all other glories pale beside it—an art of which America alone is capable—virile, innocent not ignorant, mystical yet practical. In truth America’s sixth race can be the inspiration of the bleeding, older world. That, Thurley, by degrees, must be our part in reconstruction—the winning for America of the violet crown.”
Thurley paused in her walking of the floor.
“But when one is so young and—when—” She faltered, all the wild-rose self of her returning, like a child reluctant to confess its misdoings.
Hobart took her hands in his. “The personal twist to any problem is for the person to solve; no one else can estimate it as well. Only to you have I told my vision, confided my hopes. Do not disappoint me,” he would have added more but the rap at the door recalled him to the eleven o’clock lesson.
“Au revoir,” he said gaily, “and if I do not see you until fall—”
“You must see me; you cannot leave me at the crossroads.”
“You are making yourself walk backwards to them,” he contradicted.
“You did not finish about yourself,” she refused to be conscious of his appointment, “the woman you—loved—that part of the story—”
“I told you all I have ever allowed myself to remember,” he corrected, the inner illumination vanishing and the rather cynical man of the world in elegant morning dress remaining.
Thurley went directly home instead of keeping a luncheon engagement with Ernestine. She wanted to spend the afternoon in remembering all he had said. The greatness of his vision and the new standard for art had not impressed her as much as the moment when he had taken her hands—or told of his false love. Then Miss Clergy’s promise crossed the clearness of her reflection, blurring it badly; Dan’s bucolic letter on her desk marred her thoughts as well—so did the flowers from Mark, the handsome gift book from some one else; a myriad of incidents and engagements came to spoil the reverie. As sacred to her as the vision which had been shared with her, Thurley kept telling herself, “I am of the vanguard ... and I love him ... no other man can tempt me ... I love him, therefore I can live up to his vision and help him ... for he is sadly limited. He merely expresses what some one else must do.... I love him,” and when the charming question hinted itself to her,—“Suppose this man of a great vision and grave purpose, burned clean of youthful tragedy, should loveyou—what then?”—Thurley admitted that vows were brittle things and that if the circumstances so fell out she would not hesitate to prove the statement.
The next morning when she was writing Hobart a note trying to express something of all she felt towards his vision and his influence, as Dante said of Virgil, “theirguide, their master and their friend,” Lissa dropped in for a call.
“Bliss sails at noon for England,” she informed Thurley. “Isn’t it wonderful to be all important, war or no war? They want him to patch them all up with patriotic art—I suppose he’ll come back an earl in spite of himself—”
Whereat Thurley felt as heartbroken as a girl deserted by her bona fide lover, as she tried to chat pleasantly and not betray her disappointment. She entered again the squirrel cage of doubts and subterfuges until she felt as absurd at having seriously considered being one of the vanguard as one who admits having won a husband through a matrimonial agency.
Lissa’s way was quite comfortable—uneasy lies a head which does not wear a becoming hat was the greatest depth of her philosophy!
So Thurley dragged the summer through, wondering why Dan had ceased to write to her, imploring her to return to the Corners or permit him to visit her in New York. In the true sense Thurley was glad Dan had not written, although no woman can ever quite forgive a man whose interest in her ceases. She was piqued, on her mettle to sing her best and disprove Hobart’s flowery vision, as she had told herself it was, to sing so well and live so flippantly that she could say to him with truth, when he returned, “Your vision is impractical,” and when a certain multi-millionaire, a chewing-gum king he was, to make it the more humorous, made love to Thurley and plied her with attentions, Thurley did not hesitate to flirt with him publicly until Sunday newspapers, despite the war, devoted a page of pictures and lurid writing with repeated exclamations about “the youngdivawhose vow never to marryhas not kept her from being soul mate to the chewing-gum king!”
The chewing-gum king was boresome after a little; horse-racing, good wine, pretty women without brains, clothes trees upon which to display his wealth, were the extent of his possibilities. And Thurley, without hesitation, proceeded to pass him over to willing rivals who had watched the apparent progress of the affair with scantily concealed envy.
Miss Clergy had not gone to the mountains but stayed with Thurley, who flitted restlessly from one watering spot to another, appearing at the private affairs for war charities, now and then running into Caleb or Ernestine or Collin who, likewise, seemed to be having a table d’hôte vacation, a little of everything and none of it satisfying.
Hortense Quinby, again in charge of Thurley’s apartment, and Polly Harris proved the only exciting events in the long holiday. Without warning Hortense left Thurley as suddenly as she had attached herself to the retinue, a desertion which brought Thurley into town to see why this sudden resignation of a now valued member of her staff.
She found Hortense in a khaki uniform with innumerable brass buttons and a mock knapsack across her chest, her restless eyes sparkling with a new eagerness as when she had pleaded to become necessary to some one who was already famous. Hortense was to do land duty in behalf of the French war orphans, only, as she told Thurley forcibly, until America entered the war and overseas duty confronted her. At last she could prove her worth to the world! The land duty in behalf of the orphans, as nearly as Thurley could make out, was to appear publicly as often as possible to solicit subscriptions from allwho passed by,—a more exciting form of the occupations of old men to be seen on side streets, a restaurant sign harnessed on both chest and back, announcing the wonders of pot roast and noodles for fifty cents—pie extra.
“But just when you’ve learned to be of such use to me,” Thurley urged, “the way you keep everything going—why, Hortense, weren’t you happy?”
At which Thurley was treated to the initial outburst of Hortense’s emotional spree.
Briefly, it was this: The chance for the great adventure was presenting itself to women whose lives had had neither adventure nor romance. And if romance and adventure had not been theirs, it was their duty as individual souls to create it, woo it, pursue it, anything to obtain some smart and stinging knowledge of the world at large. It was better to wear out than to rust out, this strange, middle-aged rebel said, her long, thin hands fondling the buttons of her toy uniform.
“Ah, but I thought it was for the orphans,” suggested Thurley, who had, unostentatiously, paid for the support of half a dozen of them.
Well, itwasthe orphans, true enough—but the orphans were a means to an end—there, that was the situation! Being third rail to fame was not satisfactory, it was like leading a hungry man outside a restaurant window wherein are displayed three-inch steaks flanked by asparagus and keeping him there, close to the food it is true, but separated by a window glass which, if he breaks it, means jail!
Being associated with genius had merely whetted her appetite for expression, nor was she alone, she added, all over America were women realizing that the opportunity for self-expression, freedom of speech and action wastheirs; they would proceed on the quest for adventure, something to be an everlasting antidote against the drab pattern of their ladylike lives! Few suspected this rebel germ was quickening in the flat, thin chests of conscientious, rubber heeled librarians, middle aged, a trifle unwholesome spinsters like Hortense—but it was true. Whether or not it was milk for French orphans, which was a worthy cause playing into the hands of the restless searchers, a cause was being given them and take it they would!
So Hortense, for the time being, passed from Thurley’s life with Thurley pondering after she had stamped from the room with a ringing, military tread and given Thurley her headquarters address, adding that she would see trench life or commit suicide!
When Thurley sought out Polly to beseech her to come and look after things, particularly now that Thurley was to begin coaching for her new title rôle in Liszt’s “Saint Elizabeth,” she found Polly giving a party royal in her attic, celebrating being left a small legacy by a maiden aunt. The aunt had also left Polly a letter expressing her opinion that her niece had been nothing if not a fool to have left a good home with a decent furnace for a tenement and a daily diet of macaroni.
As Thurley looked at the hilarious feast, well under way, she laughed in spite of herself and wondered whether or not the aunt’s shade was walking restlessly! For Polly in a new frock as brown as Spanish fish nets on the Santander sands, was pouring out claret with a lavish hand and pressing alligator pear salad and jellied chicken on her nearest guest, the table abundantly strewn with every eatable known to luxury.
“Polly’s pretending her opera has been a success, I do believe,” a more practical guest whispered to Thurley.“She’s determined to burn her money up as fast as she can; she’s loaned us all ten dollars—”
Thurley found Polly quite determined to pay no heed to her aunt’s letter.
“Why should I remember I come of gentle people?” she asked, her brown eyes sparkling naughtily. “I’d rather have one or two glorious parties, treat myself to all the music I want for a season than to go snailing back to Painted Post and live in a cottage completely surrounded by neighbors. I’ve run wild too long, Thurley dear—don’t look so disappointed. Why, you beautiful, lovely thing, what right have you to show me the error of my ways, you with a king’s ransom on your fingers this minute? Yet, Thurley, when I look at you and summon my Scotch second sight to lend me wisdom, you seem fey to me, fated as the Scotch know the world. Shall I tell you yourpossibilities?”
“It’s the claret,” Thurley insisted. She did not want to talk about herself because she did not seem a struggling, interesting human being like the rest.
“No, it’s not claret but second sight. Bliss knows I have second sight; he’s often asked me for opinions—for everything but my operas,” she added a trifle bitterly. “Now you do seem fey, as if you ought to become a rosy-cheeked matron, the sort that has a big, brick house just packed with young people who all confide in you, and a nice, gentle sort of relatives, linen closets with lavender bags between the snowy piles, jam closets, rooms with old, soft rugs and mellowed furniture, all kinds of books and pictures and nothing so wonderful that art dealers would ever employ burglars to borrow. Just the kind of things that years afterwards would cause your children to say, ‘Oh, that was mother’s—I shall never give it up,’ or ‘Here is her shawl. How she laughed at herself forhuddling so eternally in it! Let’s keep it in the cedar chest she had as a bride, she’d like to have it so, I’m certain!’ You understand, Thurley dear, the lovely common things inspired by some one not common! There, that’s quite as smart as Caleb himself could have said it.”
Forgetting her errand and Hortense, Thurley repeated, “It’s the claret, Polly—and you’re quite mad....”
She rushed home to practise scales diligently, remembering with every thump of the keys that she was never to marry—tum-tum-tum, and that Bliss Hobart was a visionary dreamer—tum-tum, art never could be placed on a moral, idealistic basis, never—ti-ti, she had no idea of trying to be one of the vanguard because how useless it would be when one was tied to a ghost lady—tum-tum-ti, that wretched bohemian of a Polly had unsettled her—ti-ti-ti, anyway, Bliss had said he would not consider a vow to a ghost lady as binding—tra-la-la, yet after confiding his great secret, why did he rush off without a good-by, expecting her to do what? Why didn’t he go scold Ernestine or Caleb or Collin, some one besides herself—ta-ta-tum, she finished with a final thump and a superbly clear note which brought Miss Clergy to the door to applaud.
For the first time Thurley turned from her in recoil. She seemed a jailer preventing Polly’s vision from coming true—and what a lovely vision it had been!...
“Thurley, are you ill?” Miss Clergy was asking.
“I’m tired of everything,” she answered, without controlling her temper, “of singing and New York and myself—and you,” like a walli-walli windstorm she swept out of the room, remaining alone until she could laugh off her outburst by a light, humorous explanation of a tight slipper or the alarming story told by the weekly weight on undeniably uniform scales!
When Hobart did return, he was a tired and not easily enlivened man whose summer had been spent overseas planning things calculated to counteract the effects of “military poison ivy,” so he said enigmatically. He met Thurley with seemingly weary interest and a disapproving shake of the head when she tried again to convince him that her way and Lissa’s way was the best—as well as the easiest—and the chewing-gum king only one of a handful of “pet robins!”
Then he looked at her in her sophisticated maze of gold cloth and gave a boyish laugh. “If you told me you were totally depraved, I should only laugh,” he said. “You are trying to fool yourself into thinking yourself a first water adventuress, so how can you expect to fool me? Come, come, what terrific things have you allowed to happen to your voice! We shall have to send you to the nursery to begin again! So Lissa coached you! I knew the voice assassin’s marks of violence.”
He busied himself with getting Thurley’s voice in shape for her opening night. They did not talk again of the vision or Thurley’s snap judgment regarding life. Once Thurley ventured to say he looked tired and he answered that when a man is used to really ‘living’ for three months of the year, to be shunted into another channel tells on his disposition, but he would weather it all right and he was very glad to have been of service.
“I think one of the hardest things in the world,” he added, “is to be the man highest up! To have no one to whom you can go and dump your budget of woes and worries. Sometimes I long for a limited, brainless task, devoid of responsibility, sure of an uninterrupted lunch hour and a sick benefit.”
Wondering over his words, Thurley reached her apartment to find a letter from Dan, hesitating before sheopened it to wonder what had made him break the long and unexplained silence. Then she found her answer.
Dan and Lorraine had a son! Dan had written Thurley to tell her he loved his wife as he had never loved any one before—not even Thurley. He had confessed to Lorraine his unloyal, wayward impulses and she had forgiven him. Their joy over Boy was so great that he wanted Thurley to be friends “with the family.” He ended almost naïvely, he hoped that she would understand and be happy for them all!
So a new, engulfing envy, seconded by Polly’s little prophecy, beset her and during the winter and spring there was but one outcome, Thurley worked as she had never worked before, deaf to pleas about her health, bitter towards her admirers, aloof from Hobart and the others of the family, working without pausing, as if to drown the very whisper of the things nearest her heart.
With the declaration of war came a multitude of surprises and readjustments regarding the family. To Thurley’s surprise her own interest was poised, critical as if the war were past history and not in the making. Miss Clergy was “not interested,” the Civil War had written itself for all time on her ghost heart. Mark was not going, he declared; Collin took the rôle of a misguided pacifist; Caleb plunged headlong into a war novel, “The Patriotic Burglar,” upon which he was to realize a fortune and retrieve some very asinine losses on the stock exchange. “The Patriotic Burglar” was to be called upon to pay his income tax, and how explain the income of a hundred thousand a year, partly obtained by the theft of Clementine Van Schaick’s pearl necklace! Now Clementine was a little volunteer worker at the income tax office—enter High Ike, the patriotic burglar, they meet—and here romance fairly skidded under the speed ofCaleb’s typewriter. No soldier was to be without a copy, commissioned officers would be expected to carry five at least, and that was as far as the war affected him!
Ernestine took the pessimistic view one would have expected of her. The country was going to the dogs, she declared, really mistaking her own intensive selfishness for the failure of the country.
Hobart, who had already been fighting “art battles” abroad, had little time in which to express opinions and Thurley, having word from Hortense Quinby that she expected to sail for overseas shortly, began to reflect on the social readjustment which would result from the needed advertising of charities, loans, what not, since the only logical advertisers and workers would be the hitherto domestic women who would now step beyond the firesides and lift up their voices.
Thurley came to think more concerning Hobart’s vision, the final victory for America in establishing a new morale for permanent art than she did of the need for guns and men, although she generously wrote checks and sang gratis. As for Lissa, she believed in having things to do credit to her patriotism and her complexion simultaneously. A toque of blue poppies, a red tulle veil worn à la odalisque and a besashed and bepleated bit of white scenery for a frock, the American version of Nanette and Rintintin, faithful mascots who saved Paris from the Hun, worn on a silver cord, these completed her opinion of the war and in this outfit, to Thurley’s surprise and amusement, she appeared one warm May day to say languidly,
“Being meatless day, I’ve taken the rat from the cat and am here for a cocktail. There’s a dear! Oh, hum, all my pupils are rushing off to be motor corps girls or kitchen drudges or something like that. When I have toappear enthusiastic and call them all little Joans of Arc, I feel like saying, ‘How can I conserve a cup of mush spilled on the kitchen oil cloth?’ and let them go forth properly shocked to the last bit of braided uniform! What does Bliss say about the opera? I should think with all those horrid German singers sent packing there would be a big opportunity for us home-growns. Bliss has always been obstinate about my appearing. I’m as sure of success as you are.”
Before she left, Thurley understood the part Lissa meant to take in the war—to go overseas apparently to sing for the boys and in reality discover and capture a widower duke for her second husband.
“Why not?” she asked. “I’m sure women have the right to seek their fortune?”
“Not at such a time. They should be sure they are needed before they go across to eat up sugar and beef and wheat—even to take up space. There should be an examining bureau where every one could be proved a hundred per cent needed.”
“Ridiculous! Think of the chance to know titled women. I wouldn’t wonder if I went to London after the war—a few titled patronesses and one is established! Of course you are bound to meet them over there, when they are all scrubbing floors and cooking. It’s so easy to become socially elevated these days! Look at the people right in America who have slaved at the Red Cross rooms to become socially exposed! Oh, I know the majority are self-sacrificing, but the other side is worth a place in history, too.”
After she left and Thurley opened the window to banish Lissa’s heavy and synthetic perfume, she thought of her cold-blooded determination to find a duke, a disabled duke would do if his title was sound, and marryhim or become friendly with blue-blooded women of England who welcomed all who came to serve!
To condemn a class is not only useless but ethically a grave error. No one has ever given it credence save fanatics or disgruntled, long-haired socialists. But to argue both sides of the question, giving each fair representation and admit the errors and the virtues of both—that is common sense.