EPILOGUE
Thishas been a day of coincidences. They began in the afternoon and ended an hour ago. And now, past midnight, in my sitting-room looking out on the lights of the Rond Point, like Bret Harte’s heroine, “I am sitting alone by the fire, dressed just as I came from the dance”—only it wasn’t a dance, it was the opera.
But to get to the coincidences: This afternoon I was unpacking an old trunk full of odds and ends that I brought when we came to Paris last autumn, and at the bottom of it I found the manuscript I had written four years ago at Mrs. Bushey’s. I laid it on the top to read over in some idle moment when Roger wouldn’t catch me. For though we’ve been married three years and talked over everything that ever happened to either of us, Roger doesn’t know the whole story of that winter.
Of course Ihaveasked him if he wasn’t really in love with Lizzie, and he always laughs and says he wasn’t, that he was attracted by her and interested in her as a type. I don’t contradict him—it’sbest to let men rest peacefully in their innocent self-delusions. Besides, if I pressed the subject we might have to go on to Lizzie and Masters, and that’s the part of the story he doesn’t know. Sometimes I’ve thought I’d tell him and then I’ve always stopped. Why should I? It’s all come out right. Lizzie has traveled along the line of least resistance in one direction and reached success, and Roger has done the same thing in another and reached me. Shemustbe happy if fulfilled ambitions can do it, and weare, with each other and last year—to crown it all—our boy.
Well, I won’t go into that—I get too garrulous. When a woman of thirty-six has a baby she never gets over the pride and wonder of it.
We came over to Paris last autumn for Roger to do some reading in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and took this charming apartment near the Rond Point. On bright mornings I can look into the little park and see Roger Clements IX sitting out there in his perambulator studying Parisian life. The day suddenly strikes me as unusually fine and I go out and sit on the bench beside him and we study Parisian life together, while hisnou-nouknits on a camp-chair near by.
Bother—I keep losing sight of the coincidences which are the only reason I began to write this. To resume:
During these four years we have tried to keep track of Lizzie. It was difficult because, of course, after the first few months, she stopped writing. If it hadn’t been for Betty we should have lost her entirely, but Betty, being the source of supplies, did know, at least, her whereabouts. I may add, en passant, that Mrs. Ferguson stood by her contract to the end and now is enjoying the fruits thereof. If she isn’t known as the patron of the greatest living prima donna, she is known as a lady who made a career possible to one of the rising singers of Europe.
It was two years before Liza Bonaventura made her first hit, as Elizabeth inTannhäuserat Dresden. Then we could follow her course in the papers. I was as proud as if I’d done it myself when I read of the excitement her Tosca created in Berlin. After that there was a series of triumphs in the smaller cities of Germany. She sang Carmen at a special performance where the royal family of something or other (I never can remember those German names, if I did I couldn’t spell them)were present, and the kinglet or princeling of the palace gave her a decoration.
After that the papers began to print stories about her, which is the forerunner of fame. Some of them were very funny, but most of them sounded true. I don’t think her press-agent had to do much inventing. All sorts of distinguished and wonderful men were in love with her, but she would have none of them. There were some anecdotes of her temper that I am sure were genuine: how she once slapped a rival prima donna in the face, and threw her slipper at the head of a German Serene Highness who must have lost his serenity for the moment.
When we came over here we had first-hand accounts of her, from Americans who had been traveling in Germany and were bursting with pride and enthusiasm, and foreigners, who knew more and were more temperate, but admitted that a new star had risen on the horizon. “The handsomest woman on the operatic stage since Malibran,” an old French marquis, who had heard her as Tosca, told me one night at dinner. Then some Italians who had seen her Carmen were quite thrilled—such temperament—such passion! Only Calve in her prime had given such a dramatic portrayal of the fiery gipsy.Opinions were divided about her Brunhilda. A man Roger and I met at the house of a French writer, where we sometimes go, told us that in majesty and nobility she was incomparable, but that her voice was inadequate. Still, she was young, hardly in her full vigor, with care and study, aided by her magnificent physique, she might yet rise to the vocal requirements and then—he spread out his hands and rolled up his eyes.
To-night I have come from the opera after hearing her inCarmenand the effect is with me still—the difficulty of shaking off the illusion and getting back into life.
When I looked round from my seat in the orchestra and saw that house, tier upon tier of faces, hundreds of small pale ovals in ascending ranks, all looking the same way, all waiting to hear Lizzie, I couldn’t believe it. The great reverberating shell of building held them like bees in a hive, buzzing as they found places whence they could see the queen bee. Through my own quivering expectancy I could sense theirs, quieter but keen, and hear, thrown back from the resonant walls and hollow dome, the sounds of fluttered programs, rustling fabrics, seats dropping and the fluctuant hum ofvoices—the exhilarating stir and bustle of a great audience gradually settling into stillness. They couldn’t have come to see Lizzie—so many people? I was dreaming, it was somebody else.
The curtain lifted, the illuminated stage was set in the gloom like a glowing picture. Figures moved across it, voices sang, and then Carmen came with the red flower in her mouth and itwasLizzie.
She was changed, matured, grown fuller and handsomer, much handsomer—her beauty in full flower. Her voice, too, was immensely improved; a fine voice, full, clear and large, not, as she had once said to me, one of the world’s great voices, but enough for her, sufficient for what she has to do with it. It is she, her personality, her magnetic and compelling self, that is the potent thing.
Just as she used to seize upon and subdue us at Mrs. Bushey’s, she seized upon and subdued those close-packed silent ranks. From the brilliant picture, cutting the darkness in front of us, she reached out, groped for and grasped at every consciousness, waiting to receive its impression. The other singers lost their identity, faded into a colorless middle distance, as we used to fade when Lizzie came among us. She held the house, not so muchcharmed as subjugated, more as the conqueror than the enchantress. As the opera progressed I, with my intimate knowledge of her, could see her gaining force, could feel her fierce exhilaration, as she realized her dominance was growing secure. Her voice grew richer, her performance more boldly confident. To me she reached her highest point in the scene over the cards, her face stiffened to a tragic mask, the cry of “La Mort” imbued with horror. I can’t get it out of my mind—the Gitana, terrible with her lust of life, suddenly looking into the eyes of death.
I don’t know how to write about music, but it wasn’t all music. It was the woman, the combination of her great endowment with her power of vitalizing an illusion, of putting blood and fire into an imaginary creation, that made it so remarkable. Her portrayal had not the vocal beauty or sophisticated seduction of Calve’s. It was more primitive, farther from the city and closer to the earth. It seemed to me more Merimée’s Carmen than Bizet’s. Of its kind, I, anyway—and Roger agreed with me—thought it superb.
When it ended and she came before the curtain there were bursts upon bursts of applause and“bravas” dropping from the galleries. I dare say I will never again see a dream so completely realized. Then the house began to empty itself down that splendid stairway, a packed, slow-moving, voluble crowd, praise, criticism, comment, flung back and forth in the excited French fashion. I was silent, holding Roger’s arm. A short fat Frenchman behind me puffed almost into my ear, “Quelle femme, mais, quelle femme!” A woman in front in a Chinese opera cloak, leaned back to say over her shoulder to a man squeezing past Roger, “La voix est bonne, mais n’est pas grande chose, mais c’est une vraie artiste.” And an angular girl at my elbow, steering an old lady through cracks in the mass, murmured ecstatically to herself, “Mon Dieu, quelletemperament!” That was the word I heard oftenest, temperament.
So in a solid brilliant throng we descended the stairs, all engaged with Lizzie, discussing her, lauding her, wondering at her—Lizzie, whom I had seen in the making, learning to be thevraie artiste, wounded, desperate and despairing that this might be.
At the stair-foot—this is the last of the coincidences—the crowd broke into lines and clumps, scatteringfor the exits, and through a break I saw a man standing by a pillar. He was looking up at the descending people, but not as if he was interested in them, in fact by the expression of his face I don’t think he saw them. It was John Masters.
If he hadn’t been so absorbed he would have seen me for I was close to him. But his eyes, set in that fixity of inner vision, never swerved. He looked much older, more lined, his bald spot grown all over the top of his head. Though the glimpse I had of him was fleeting, the crowd closing on him almost directly, it was long enough for me to see that the change was deeper than what the years might have wrought. It was spiritual, diminished will power, self-reliance grown weak. Shabby, thin, discouraged, he suggested just one word—failure.
My hand involuntarily shut on Roger’s arm and I whispered to him to hurry. I could not bear the thought of meeting Masters—not for my sake but for his. I couldn’t bear to look into his face and see him try to smile.
It is nearly one. Roger is writing in his study and Roger Clements IX is sleeping in his crib by my bed. How strange it all is. Four years ago not one of us, except Lizzie, the impossible and irresponsible,had the least idea that any of us would be where we are now. It was Lizzie, fighting out her destiny, who crowded and elbowed us all into our proper places, Lizzie, rapt in her vision, who brought us ours.
This is the real end of my manuscript. Ithasgot somewhere after all. I can write “finis” with a sense of its being the fitting word. But before I do I want to just say that I made up my mind to-night, while we were driving home in the taxi, that I’ll never tell Roger now.
FINIS
Transcriber’s Notes:On page 66, déracincée has been changed to déracinée.All other spelling, hyphenation and non-English has been retained as typeset.Some illustrations in this ebook have been moved to avoid occurring in the middle of a paragraph.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Transcriber’s Notes:
On page 66, déracincée has been changed to déracinée.
All other spelling, hyphenation and non-English has been retained as typeset.
Some illustrations in this ebook have been moved to avoid occurring in the middle of a paragraph.