IX
Yesterdaywas the concert day and I couldn’t go—a bad cold. The house lamented from all its floors, for it was going en masse, even the trained nurse with a usurped right to the sun-dial.
The only way I could add to the festivity of the occasion was to distribute my possessions among that section of the audience drawn from Mrs. Bushey’s light housekeeping apartments. It began with the Signorita Bonaventura, who wore my mother’s diamond pendant, then went down the line:— Miss Gorringe my green satin (she said it would be horribly unbecoming, but the audience wouldn’t notice her), Miss Bliss my black lynx furs, Mrs. Phillips, the nurse, my evening cloak, Mr. Hazard my opera glasses, Mr. Weatherby my umbrella—his had a broken rib and it looked like snow. We were afraid the count couldn’t find anything suitable to his age and sex, but he emptied my bottle of Coty’s Jacqueminot on his handkerchief and left, scented like a florist’s. Mrs. Bushey came last and gleaned thefield, a gold bracelet, a marabou stole and a lace handkerchief she swore she wouldn’t use.
Much noise accompanied the passage of the day and some threatening mishaps. At eleven we heard Berwick was hoarse, but at one (by telephone through my room) that raw eggs and massage were restoring him. At midday Miss Gorringe sent a frantic message that the sash of the green satin wasn’t in the box. Gloom settled at two with a bulletin that Mrs. Stregazzi’s second child had croup. It was better at five. Mr. Hazard’s dress suit smelled so of moth balls that the prima donna said it would taint the air, and Emma, the maid, hung it out on the sacred sun-dial. There was a battle over this. For fifteen minutes it raged up two flights of stairs, then Mr. Hazard conquered and the sun-dial was draped in black broadcloth.
At intervals Lizzie came down to see me and use the telephone. She was in her most aloof mood, forbidding, self-absorbed. On one of her appearances she found a group of us congregated about my steam kettle. Our chatter died away before her rapt and unresponsive eye. Even I, who was used to it, felt myself fading like a photographic proof in a too brilliant sun. As for the others they looked small andfrightened, like mice in the presence of a well-fed lioness, who, though she might not want to eat them, was still a lioness. They breathed deep and unlimbered when the door shut on her.
In the late afternoon Roger came to see me. He brought a bunch of violets and a breath of winter into my bright little room. The threatening snow had begun to fall, lodging delicately on eaves and ledges, a scurry of tiny particles against the light of street-lamps. We stood in the window and watched it, trimming the house-fronts with white, carpeting the steps, spreading a blanket ever so softly and deftly over the tin roof. How different to the rain, the insistent ruthless rain. The night when the rain fell came back to me. How different that was from to-night!
There was a hubbub of voices from the hall and then a knock. They were coming to see me before they left. They entered, streaming in, grubs turned to butterflies. The house was going cheaply in cars over the bridge; only the prima donna and Miss Gorringe were to travel aristocratically in a cab.
Strong scents from the count’s Jacqueminot mingled with the faint odor of moth balls that Mr. Hazard’s dress suit still harbored. Miss Gorringehad rouged a little and the green satin was quite becoming. Miss Bliss had rouged a good deal and had had her hair marcelled. In the doorway the trained nurse hung back, sniffing contemptuously at Mr. Hazard’s back. Mrs. Bushey, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Weatherby grouped themselves by the fireplace.
“Where’s the prima donna?” I asked.
“Coming,” cried a voice from the stairs, and the air was filled with silken rustlings.
It was like an entrance on the stage, up the passage and between the watching people, and I don’t think any actress could have done it with more aplomb. In her evening dress she was truly superb—a goddess of a woman with her black hair in lusterless coils and her neck and shoulders as white as curds. Upon that satiny bosom my mother’s pendant rose and fell to even breathings. Whatever anybody else may have felt, the star of the occasion was calm and confident.
Her appearance had so much of the theatrical that it must have made us suddenly see her as the professional, the legitimate object of glances and comments. Nothing else could explain why I—a person of restrained enthusiasms—should havebroken into bald compliments. She took them with no more self-consciousness than a performing animal takes the gallery’s applause, smiled slightly, then looked at Roger, the stranger. I did so, too, childishly anxious to see if he admired my protégée. He evidently did, for he was staring with the rest of them, intent, astonished.
Her glance appeared to gather up his tribute as her hands might have gathered flowers thrown to her. He was one of the watching thousands that it was her business to enthrall, his face one of the countless faces that were to gaze up at her from tier upon tier of seats.
When the door shut on the last of them, laughter and good nights diminishing down the stairs, he turned to me with an air that was at once bewildered and accusing.
“Why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me she was so good-looking?”
“I did and you wouldn’t believe me,” I answered gaily, for I was greatly pleased. It was a little triumph over Roger with his hypercritical taste and his rare approvals.
The next morning I waited anxiously for news.I thought Lizzie would be down early, but the others came before her, dropping in as the morning wore away. With each entrance I grew more uneasy.
Mr. Hazard was first, in a gray sweater.
“Well, she looked great. I wish I could have painted her that way. But—” he tilted his head, his expression grown dubious. “You know, Mrs. Drake, I don’t know one tune from another—but—”
“But what?” I said sharply.
“Well, it seemed to me Berwick got away with it.”
“Do you mean the audience liked him better?”
He nodded, a grave agreeing eye on me.
“He got them when he sang that thing aboutThe Three Grenadiers. It made your heart swell up.”
He leaned nearer, lowering his voice. “And he got them in that German duet, too.”
He drew back and nodded again darkly, as if wishing me to catch a meaning too direful for words.
An hour later Miss Bliss blew in in a blue flannel jacket and the remnants of her marcelle wave. By contrast with her flushed and blooming appearance of the evening before, she looked pinched and pallid. She cowered over the fire, stretching her little chapped hands to the blaze and presenting a narrow humped back to my gaze.
“She didn’t seem to catch on some way or other. I don’t know why but—”
She stopped and leaned forward for the poker.
“But what?”
“Well—” She poked the fire, the edge of the flannel jacket hitched up by the movement, showing a section of corset laced with the golden string that confines candy boxes. “She doesn’t give you any thrill. I’ve heard people without half so much voice who could make the tears come into your eyes. I tell you what, Mrs. Drake,” she turned round with the poker uplifted in emphasis, “Iwouldn’t spendmygood money to hear a woman sing that way. If I shell out one-fifty I want to get a thrill.”
She was still there when the count came in. He sat between us gently rocking and eying her with a pensive stare. She pulled down her jacket and patted solicitously at the remains of her marcelle.
“She looked,” said the count, pausing in his rocking, “she looked like a queen.”
“Good gracious,” I cried crossly, “dodrop her looks. I saw her.”
The count, unmoved by my irritation, answered mildly:
“One can’t drop them so easily.”
“But her singing, her performance?”
“Her performance,” murmured the young man, and appeared to look through Miss Bliss at a distant prospect. “It was good, but—”
I had to restrain myself from screaming, “But what?”
“It was not so good as she is, had none of the—what shall I say—air noblethat she has.” He screwed up his eyes as if projecting his vision not only through Miss Bliss, but through all intervening objects to a realm of pure criticism. “It has a bourgeois quality, no distinction, no imagination, and she—” Words were inadequate and he finished the sentence with a shrug.
Miss Bliss leaned forward and poked the fire, once more revealing the golden string. The count looked at it with a faint arrested interest. I was depressed, but conventions are instinctive, and I said sternly:
“Miss Bliss, let the count poke the fire.”
The count poked and Miss Bliss slipped to the floor, and sitting cross-legged, comfortably warmed her back.
The count was gone when Mrs. Bushey entered. Mrs. Bushey says she understands music even as she does physical culture.
“It was a frost,” she explained, dropping on the end of the sofa.
“I know that,” I answered, “the paper this morning said the thermometer was twenty-two degrees.”
“Not that kind of a frost, a theatrical frost for her. She hasn’t got the quality.”
“No thrill,” murmured Miss Bliss, and no men being present, stretched out her feet and legs in worn slippers and threadbare stockings to the blaze.
I fought against my depression—Mrs. Bushey did not like Bonaventura.
“She hasn’t got the equipment,” said Mrs. Bushey with a sagacious air. Her eye roamed about the room and lighted on Miss Bliss’ legs. “Areyou cold?” she asked, as if amazed.
“Frozen,” answered Miss Bliss crossly.
“How can that be possible when I’ve done everything to make your room warm, spent all my winter earnings on coal?”
Miss Bliss cocked up her chin and replied:
“You must have had very poor business this winter.” Then to me very pointedly: “I wanted to ask you, Mrs. Drake, if you’d lend me your Navajo blanket, just for a few nights. It would look so bad for the house if I was found frozen to death in bed some morning.”
I agreed with alarmed haste, but Mrs. Bushey did not seem inclined for war. She smiled, murmuring, “Poor girl, you’re anemic,” and then, her eye lighting on Marie Antoinette’s mirror:
“Yes, Miss Harris’ll never get anywhere till she gets some color into her voice. It’s the coldest organ I ever heard. Would you mind if I took that mirror away? I have a new lodger, a delightful woman from Philadelphia, and I’ve no mirror for her—I can’t, I literallycan’t, buy one with my finances the way they are. I suppose after this failure Miss Harris’ll be late with her rent.”
Thus Mrs. Bushey. When she had gone—taking the mirror—Miss Bliss lay flat before the fire and reviled her.
Miss Gorringe came next with the green satin dress. It was upon Miss Gorringe I was pinning my hopes. None of the others knew anything. Miss Gorringe, lifting out the dress with cold and careful hands, looked solemn:
“No, I can’t say it was a success. I’d like to because she’s certainly one of the most lovely people I’ve ever played for, but—” She depressed the corners of her mouth and slowly shook her head.
I sat up in my shawls and did scream:
“But what?”
Miss Gorringe, used to the eccentricities of artists, was unmoved by my violence. She placed the dress carefully over the back of a chair.
“She doesn’t get over,” she said.
“Get over what?”
I had heard this cryptic phrase before, but didn’t know what it meant.
“The footlights—across, into the audience. And she ought to, but they were as cold as frogs till Berwick woke them up withThe Three Grenadiers.Hecan do it. He hasn’t got any better voice or method but,” she gave a little ecstatic gesture, “temperament—oh, my!”
“Has she got no temperament at all?” I asked.
“I’ve never played for anybody who had less.” Miss Gorringe held up the green scarf. “Here’s the sash.”
“Not a bit of thrill,” Miss Bliss chanted, prone before the fire.
“Can’t a person get temperament, learn it in some way?”
Miss Gorringe pondered:
“They can teach them rôles, hammer it into them. When a person’s got the looks she has they sometimesdo it. But I guess they’ve done all they can for her. She’s been with Vignorol for two years. He wouldn’t have taken her unless he thought there was something in it. And John Masters has been training her besides, and I’ve heard people say there’s no one better than Masters for that. You see they can teach her how to walk and stand and make gestures, but they can’t put the thing into her head or her voice. She doesn’t seem to understand, she doesn’t feel.”
I was silent. She did feel, I knew it, I’d seen it. There was some queer lack of coordination between her power to feel and her power to express.
Miss Gorringe administered the coup de grâce.
“She sang the duet fromThe Valkyrieas if she was telling Siegmund to put on his hat and come to supper.”
“It’s imagination,” I said.
“It’s temperament,” Miss Gorringe corrected. “And without it, the way she is, she’d better go in for church singing, or oratorio, or even teaching.”
The dusk was gathering and I was alone when she came down. She threw herself into the wicker chair beside my sofa. Her face looked thinner and two slight lines showed round her mouth.
“Well?” I said, investing my voice with a fictitious lightness. “Where have you been all day?”
“I’m tired or I’d have been down earlier. Have you seen the others?”
With her deadly directness she had gone straight to the point I dreaded.
“Yes, they’ve been in.”
“Did they like it?”
One of the most formidable things about this woman is the way she keeps placing you in positions where you must either lie and lose your self-respect or tell the truth and incur her sudden and alarming anger. I was not afraid of that now, but I couldn’t hurt her. I tried to find a sentence that would be as truthful and painless as the circumstances permitted. The search took a moment.
“They didn’t,” she answered for me.
She turned her face to the window and drummed on the chair-arm with her fingers, then said defiantly:
“They don’t know anything.”
“Of course they don’t,” I cried. “An Italian count, an artist, a model, a woman who rents floors.”
Her eye fell on the green dress.
“Miss Gorringe has been here.”
I nodded.
“What didshesay?”
I got cold under my wrappings. Had I the courage to tell her? She looked at me and gave a slight wry smile.
“Did she tell you that Berwick got away with it?”
“Some one did. I think it was Mr. Hazard, but he’s a painter and—”
She interrupted roughly.
“That’s nothing—a big bawling voice singing popular songs. If they’d let me singOh, Promise MeI’d have had the whole house.”
For the first time in my experience of her I saw she was not open with herself. I knew that she had realized her failure and refused to admit it. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, frowning, haggard and miserable.
“I’ll get the notices to-morrow,” she said in a low voice.
It was horribly pitiful. There would be no friendly deception about the notices.
“Vignorol’s arranged for several good men to go. He wanted their opinions. They’ll give me a fine notice onThe Valkyrieduet.”
“Did that go well?” I asked just for something to say.
“Oh, splendidly,” she answered, without looking up. “It’s one of the things I do best.”
The room was getting dim and I was thankful for it. The dusk hid the drooping and discouraged face, but it could not shut out the voice with its desperate pretense. It was worse than the face.
“Well,” she said suddenly, straightening up, “I’ll see Masters to-morrow. He’s coming to bring me the notices.”
There was fear in the voice. I knew what the interview with Masters would be, and she knew, too. In a moment of insight I saw that she had been fighting against her dread all day, had come down to me for courage, was trying now to draw it from my chill and depressing presence. It was like a child afraid of the dark, hanging about in terror and unwilling to voice its alarm.
I sat up, throwing off my wraps and laid my hand on hers.
“Lizzie, don’t mind what he says.”
Her hand was cold under mine.
“He knows,” she answered almost in a whisper, “heknows.”
“I can get backers for you”—it was rash, but I know how to manage Betty—“better than he ever was, the best kind of backers.”
She jerked her hand away and glared at me.
“What do you mean by that? Do you think he’s going to give me up? Why, you must be crazy.” She jumped to her feet looking down at me with a face of savage anger. “Do you think I haven’t made good? Have they,” with a violent gesture to the door, “told you so? They’re fools, idiots, imbeciles. Masters give me up—ah—” She turned away and then back. “Why he’s never had any one with such promise as I have. He’s banking on me. I’m going to bring him to the top. He borrowed the money to send me to Vignorol. Throw me down now, just when I’m getting there, just when I’m proving he was right? Oh, I can’t talk to you. You’ve no sense. You’re as big a fool as all the rest.”
And she rushed out of the room, banging the door till the whole apartment shook.
I lay thinking about it till Emma came to get me my supper. She was right in one thing—Iwasa fool. In my blundering attempt at encouragement I had gone straight to the heart of her fear, dragged it out into the light, held up in front of her the thing she was trying not to see—that Masters would give her up. Fool—it was a mild name for me. AndpoorLizzie—tragic Bonaventura!
It’s night again and I am dressed in my best with a fur cloak on to keep off the chill. I’ve got to write, not a sudden visitation of the Muse, but to ease my mind. If you haven’t got a sympathetic pair of ears to pour your troubles into, pouring them out on paper is the next best thing.
It’s two days since I have seen Lizzie. Yesterday I was in my room all day nursing my cold and expecting her, but she didn’t come. Neither did she to-day, and all I could surmise was that she was angry with me for being a fool. As I feel I was one and yet don’t like to hear it from other people, I made no effort to get into communication with her.
This evening I was well enough to go out in a cab with all my furs and a foot warmer, to dine with Roger’s widowed sister, Mrs. Ashworth. I was a good deal fluttered over the dinner, guessed why it had been arranged. It was a small affair, the Fergusons, Roger and I. Preceded by a call from Mrs. Ashworth, it had a meaningful aspect, a delicate suggestion of welcoming me into the family. I blush as I write it. I don’t know why I should, or why love and marriage are matters surrounded by self-consciousness and shame. Who was it explained the embarrassment of lovers, their tendency to hidethemselves in corners, as an instinctive sense of guilt at the prospect of bringing children into a miserable world? I think it was Schopenhauer. Sounds like him—cross-grained old misanthrope.
Mrs. Ashworth is Roger’s only near relation and he regards her as the choicest flower of womanhood. I don’t wonder. In her way she is a finished product, no raw edges, no loose ends. Everything is in harmony—her thin faintly-lined face, her silky white hair, her pale hands with slightly prominent veins, her voice with its gentle modulations. Nothing cheap or second rate could exist near her. She wouldn’t stamp them out—I can’t imagine her stamping—they would simply wither in the rarified atmosphere. Her friends are like herself, her house is like herself. When I go there I feel strident and coarse. As I enter the portal I instinctively tune my key lower, feel my high lights fading, undergo a refining and subduing process as if a chromo were being transmuted into a Bartolozzi engraving.
As my cab crawled down-town—I need hardly say Mrs. Ashworth lives in a house on lower Fifth Avenue, built by her father—I uneasily wondered if the Bohemian atmosphere in which I dwelt had left any marks upon me. I tried to obliterate themand made mental notes of things I mustn’t mention. Memories of Miss Bliss’ golden corset string rose uneasily, and Lizzie Harris, and oh, Mr. Masters! I ended by achieving a sense of grievance against Mrs. Ashworth. No one had any right to be so refined. It was all very well if you inherited a social circle and large means, but— The cab drew up with a jolt and I alighted. All unseemly exuberance died as the light from the door fell on me. I spoke so softly the driver had difficulty in hearing my order and when I walked up the steps I minced daintily.
But it was a delightful dinner. Harry and I were on one side, Betty and Roger on the other. At the foot of the table was Mrs. Ashworth’s son, Roger Clements Ashworth, a charming boy still at college. It was all perfectly done, nothing showy, nothing in the fashion. Betty’s pearls looked a good deal too large beside the modest string that Mrs. Ashworth wore, which was given to her great, great grandmother by Admiral Rochambeau. The dining-room walls were lined with portraits, with over the fireplace, that foundation stone of the family’s glory, Roger Clements, “The Signer.”
I thought of my apartment and my late associates and felt that I was leading a double life.
When I came home the house was very silent. Mounting the dim dirty stairs with the smell of dead dinners caught in the corners, I wondered how Mrs. Ashworth could countenance me. But after all, it was part of her fineness that she had no quarrel with the obscure and lowly. If she could not broaden the walls of her world—and you had only to talk to her ten minutes to see that she couldn’t—within those walls all was choice and lovely. I would have to live up to it, that was all.
I had got that far when I heard a heavy step and Mr. Masters loomed up on the flight above. The stairs are very narrow and I looked up smiling, expecting him to retreat. He came on, however, not returning my smile, staring straight before him with an immovable, brooding glance. I can’t say he didn’t see me, but he had the air of being so preoccupied that what his eye lighted on did not penetrate to his brain. As at our first meeting I received an impression of brutal strength, his broad shoulders seeming to push the walls back, his flat-topped head upheld on a neck like a gladiator. I intended asking him about the concert and the notices, but his look froze me, and I backed against the wall for him to pass.
As he brushed by he growled a word of greeting. He was in the hall below when I broke out of the consternation created by his manner, leaned over the rail and called down:
“Mr. Masters, how is Miss Harris?”
“All right,” he muttered without stopping or looking up and went on down the lower flight to the street.
They had had the interview.
The house was as silent as a tomb. I stole to the foot of the upper flight, looked up and listened. Not a sound. The rustling of my dress as I moved startled me. Whathadhe said to her? I couldn’t read his face—but his manner! I wavered and waited, the street noises coming muffled through the intense stillness. Then I decided I’d not intrude upon her, and came in here. Whatever happened she’ll tell me in her own good time, and the quietness up there is reassuring. Her anger is apt to take noisy forms. If she had been throwing oranges out of the window I would have heard her. But I do wish I might have seen her to-night.