CHAPTER IX
Thefollowing morning at nine-thirty, Signor Jacobelli stood bowing on the threshold of Casanova’s small sanctum in the Opera building. Armed with Ogden Ward’s influence and his own reputation, his welcome was assured. Casanova, lean and dark, beamed on his visitor like some comradely Mephisto luxuriating in dolce far niente.
“Come in, my friend,” he called. “You release me from the duty of perusing the new opera of the great, unknown composer who insists that I shall discover him. Do you bring me a new sensation?”
But Jacobelli was mysterious and secretive. For over an hour he sat in the famous, three-cornered office, dilating upon the beauty and genius of Paoli’s granddaughter until he knew he held the interest of the impresario. Suddenly Alphonse, the slender, solicitous secretary, peered around the door.
“Mrs. Carrington Nevins,” he whispered tentatively. “She is alone.”
“You will wait,” Casanova urged, as he nodded assent. “She is very wealthy, one of our best subscribers. She wishes to secure somegood singers for her Italian fête. One cannot refuse, and then she has a daughter whom she thinks is a Galli-Curci handicapped by position and money.”
“I fly,” answered Jacobelli shortly, but as he turned about, he encountered Mrs. Nevins. Somehow, with her elaborately arranged gray hair, fine aquiline profile, and costume of gray velvet trimmed in silver fox, she brought a memory of Marie Antoinette, or was it merely the reminder of some famous actress in the part? The old maestro paused before her, a half-comic air of having been captured on the point of flight.
“I have heard often of you,” she said graciously. “My daughter Nathalie sings. She is a wonderful child, and even you, signor, must recognize genius, though you meet it handicapped.”
Casanova’s half-closed eyes twinkled at the inference, but Jacobelli was in a mellow mood.
“I shall be charmed to hear her some time, madame. Let her not choke her voice upon her golden spoon.”
“You must hear her soon,” insisted Mrs. Nevins. “I am getting up a programme for my Italian fête, the milk fund for the children, you know, a wonderful cause. Don’t you think Signor Jacobelli might be a help to us, SignorCasanova? I do want to have everything in harmony, authentic and still startling. I want a little operetta for Nathalie’s sake, and have been talking over the libretto with a young composer I just met, Griffeth Ames; perhaps you may know him.”
But Jacobelli was in a hurry to leave, and protesting his utter ignorance of Mr. Ames’s existence, he departed, not realizing how the grim sisters of fate had tangled his thread of life that moment with Griffeth Ames’s destiny.
At the same moment Ames sat perched on the seat in the slanting dormer window, staring down moodily at the street below. It was nearly eleven. Sometimes she came in the morning, and they would have lunch together after her lesson. He had not realized how deep an interest she had become in his life until two days had elapsed without her. Ptolemy kept vigil with him through the long evenings, while he smoked and told himself all sophists and philosophers were bachelors and liars. Love was a terrible, disconcerting truth. And he saw Carlota’s face in the vanishing rings of his smoke.
At the corner stood a pushcart piled high with California grapes, turned into a shrine of Bacchus. Upreared on a wooden framework festoons of clusters dangled temptingly, andvine leaves were twined about the base of the cart. The boy who tended it bartered with an old sibyl-faced Sicilian grandmother, naming her a price, and whistling until she came around to it. And suddenly Ames caught sight of Carlota as she walked across the Square from the ’bus terminus, her slim, youthful figure conspicuous among the vari-clad denizens of the park. She paused at the stand and bought plentifully, not only of the grapes, but of late rich-toned pears and golden-russet apples. He leaned far out the window, watching her longingly, Ptolemy rubbing against his arm as though he, too, sensed the return of Columbine.
At the foot of the last flight of stairs Carlota hesitated, listening. From the studio came a new melody, a haunting, yearning strain that she remembered. Ames had played it at the Phelpses that first night when their eyes had met. He had named it the “Quest of Love,” “Cerca di Amore.” As it ended, she opened the door softly, without knocking.
“I have come to prepare lunch, signor,” she said demurely, but with a flash of mischief in her eyes. “If you are still angry, then Ptolemy and I will eat it together.”
“Is it a lasting peace or merely an armistice?” he demanded, sweeping the papers fromthe table. “You are afraid to look at me for fear you will surrender.”
“It is an armistice,” she said sedately. “It is beneath your dignity as a composer to take pupils who have not real genius. I still hold to that. And I shall need celery and romaine and tomatoes and grapefruit and almonds for my salad, so you may go out and find them.”
She tied a strip of drapery around her for an apron, and started preparations for lunch. Ames leaned from a back window and hailed a small and willing neighbor to go to the market, after the needs of the queen, as he said.
They did not speak to each other for some time. Ames watched her as the sunlight poured down on her bowed head. He held a melon in one hand, uplifted absently, a length of scarlet and black art burlap around his waist.
“You look exactly like one of the melon-sellers on the quay at Naples,” she told him, with a little smile. “When the boat stops there, they crowd around begging you to buy from them. Lift up your arm and call out.”
“I will do no such thing,” responded Ames buoyantly. “I decline to pose for your majesty. Will you deign to name your castle habitat, that I may call on your most royal parents and interest them in my humble self?”
She was serious in an instant.
“I have no people, signor. If you could go with me to the Villa Tittani, you would find a very little village high up on the rocks above the Campagna. You know where I mean? See?”
She dipped her finger-tips in the dregs of chianti remaining in the bowl beside her where she had used it in the salad dressing, and traced a map for him on the bare table-top.
“Here is the winding road from the shore, and here at the very top there is a villa with rose-tinted stone walls all about it, very high walls overgrown with flowers and vines. That is where the nobility live.” Her eyes were sparkling with mischief. “Often when I was little I have seen the Contessa walking on the terraces. She was so stately and handsome, and her daughter Bianca was like a real princess should be, a princess of dreams and fairy-tales, tall and slender and with eyes like stars. Then, if you walk on, down through the ilex avenue, you will come to a very quiet spot where the old tombs face the sea, and there are my people, all of them.”
“I’m a brute!” exclaimed Ames, holding her hands in his with quick, understanding tenderness. “The way I have let you come and go without showing any real interest after all you have done for me.”
“What have I done? Come down here and let you teach me and in return told you some fairy-tales.”
He stared down at her, puzzled as always. He was twenty-four, and the coasts of chance and illusion were far more tangible to him than any of Life’s ports of call. He wondered if he could make her understand all that she had become to him. He wheeled about and found his pipe with sudden disgust at his own impotence.
“Carlota, do you know, I’ve just discovered something about myself. I’m a beastly poor amateur at making love. I want to tell you just how I feel about you slipping in here like a sunbeam, or—or Ptolemy. You know, I found him on the fire escape one morning, and he’s stayed here ever since. There was a sparrow, too, last winter. I left my window open there, and it flew in out of the storm and perched on the curtain rod. Fought me every time I tried to feed it. You seemed to belong to their crowd, the sunbeam and the sparrow and Ptolemy. You just came and stayed, and I was a fool; I took you for granted.”
“You asked me to come, after we first met,” Carlota corrected him. “I would not come without the invitation first.”
He bowed low before her.
“And I am honored by the royal presence. I have learned these last two days the strangest thing. When you are here and we are friends, I can work at my best, and when you are angry with me, it goes just like that, all my inspiration. So you see you have me at your mercy.” He turned and rummaged among the mass of papers and score-sheets on the piano-top. “I’m going to finish my operetta in a week if you’ll stand by me and not get temperamental, dear. The big chance is coming now. Mrs. Nevins says she can get me an immediate hearing from Casanova if she presents it first at her fête. Isn’t that great?”
Carlota’s lips pressed together firmly at the name. She did not answer.
“You must be glad with me because you gave me the idea for it. I had been tormented with a mass of harmonies and tunes that would not shape into anything. Remember how I played that first night you met me? Listen to this and see if you remember it.”
He leaned over the piano towards her, reading aloud the synopsis of the libretto.
“Fiametta is the lonely princess of the Castle Tittani. She loves Peppino, a fisher-boy. There is a fête in the village. She disguises herself to go down and mingle with the people, scaling the walls of Tittani with love’smagic. She dances with Peppino, who does not know that she is the princess. He is disguised as Harlequin. His sweetheart stabs her through jealousy when Peppino avows his love for her. She dies in his arms as the people recognize her as their princess. It is the tragedy of youth’s eternal quest for love beyond all barriers.”
Her head was bent over the salad bowl as she listened.
“I call it ‘Fiametta.’ Do you like it?” he asked eagerly. “You don’t mind my using the little story you told me, do you, Carlota? I may make it immortal.”
“Why must she die, your princess?” she said wistfully. “I love it all but that. How could you write it when you had not seen our beautiful Tittani or known my people.”
“I had seen and known you. That’s the answer. Listen to this.” He flung himself down at the piano, head back, striking into the melody that had been his call to her. “This is your motif.”
Suddenly there came an imperative tap at the door.
“Open. My arms are full.”
“That’s only Dmitri. You met him at the Phelpses that night.” Ames threw wide the door. “Enter and join the happy throng. Comes a Greek bearing gifts.”
At sight of Carlota, Dmitri dropped his bundles and made obeisance with sedate ceremony.
“I had not dreamt that any but myself would ever climb those stairs to the house of Ptolemy.”
“I’m the luckiest man in the world. Listen, Dmitri; quit bowing and understand. This is—” Ames hesitated and laughed. “I don’t even know your last name, Carlota. You tell him. You met each other at Phelps’s.”
Carlota looked at the newcomer in her grave, measuring way. She had not remembered him at all. He was older than Ames, and without any claims whatever to good looks. Swarthy, thin, slight, stoop-shouldered, careless in dress, there was still something indefinably distinguished and reassuring about him. He might have sat for a bust of the youthful Socrates with his blunt, uneven profile. A perpetual smile perched on his wide mouth; not a propitiatory smile, but rather a tolerant one. Here was a spirit that might have waited æons on the edge of chaos, believing absolutely in the ultimate birth of cosmic harmony, even on earth.
“Please! I beg you not to.” He interrupted her. “I do not wish to know your name. Identity is the cloak of selfishness. They numberconvicts and name hapless infants. Human consciousness is a universal lottery where the lucky numbers win by drawing personality in lots of genius. Griffeth is a genius. I am one. You, too, with that face, do not have to be a genius. You are Woman, incarnate Love and Inspiration to us poor devils.”
“Give him work to keep him quiet,” advised Ames.
But Dmitri picked up his bundles and began opening them with the air of a high priest at his ritual.
“I shall prepare a feast for you to-day, a treat. The brigand stew of Bulgaria. I have eaten it on mountain heights where even the goats die of starvation.”
“I think I will go,” Carlota said in her quick, aloof way, and Dmitri turned to her eagerly, his face full of a strange, beseeching charm.
“See, I have disappointed you!” he declared; “when for weeks I have hoped to catch you here on one of your flights of passage. First when I saw you at Mr. Phelps’s, you overlooked me absolutely for him.” He nodded at Ames. “He is merely spectacular. He had no more vision, no wider horizons than a mole. When he told me yesterday that you would never come here again, I understood perfectly.I told him you would surely return, but I knew also why you were angry with him. He stands outside our range of perspective, so you must forgive him. He blunders like a baby lamb; you know the kind with large knees and prodigious ears, utterly hopeless.”
“Grand old Diogenes; all he needs is a tub and lantern to go into business.” Ames patted him affectionately. “Put your old lamb on to stew and stop spouting if we are to eat it to-day. What do you do first, braise it?”
“Let it alone. He is become the plaything of the privileged classes.” Dmitri seized his bundles and made for the kitchenette, where he declaimed just the same. “How many times in three days have you motored down to Long Island? Confess.”
Ames avoided Carlota’s questioning, accusing eyes.
“Twice, to give lessons.”
“Twice for lessons, and then you stay all the afternoon and have dinner also there. The truth ye cannot bear.”
“When I believed that you were working hard on your opera and were sorry I did not come back to you,” Carlota said softly.
“Son of discordance!” Ames flung a cushion headlong over the partition. “You only want to set Carlota against me and seize her yourself.”
“See?” Dmitri’s head showed around the curtain delightedly. “He has already the little social tricks. To be petty. Still, I like him, so I will save him. You shall not become the Harlequin boy of the nouveaux riches. They will but monopolize your time until a new warrior of ennui shall appear and grasp the golden bough from your hand. They will permit you to loll in their beautiful playgrounds until you imagine yourself indispensable. You will think you are succeeding, getting in on the inside, as they say. You will gain patronage. You are young and might be popular, but time is your treasure, and they waste it as nothing.”
Out of doors spring dallied in the old square, and Jacobelli, stepping from the interior of a green motor ’bus just beyond the Arch, lingered to regard almost paternally the toddling, black-eyed babies and fluttering, dancing youngsters that played around the dry fountain. A flock of pigeons swerved down from the Judson Memorial Tower and he smiled at them benignly, seeing those that fed at noon below the Campanile.
He had tried to induce Casanova to join him at luncheon down at the Brevoort, but the director had another engagement and Jacobelli had been forced to come alone, somethinghe innately disliked. There was the genial, gregarious instinct of the old Roman feaster in the maestro. He loved to treat himself to a carefully chosen meal in a favorite corner, with a friend opposite, and a chef on duty who knew his name.
The beauty of the Square lured him. In late October it seemed to rest like some gypsy dancer, garbed in rich attire of red and gold, but silent and tense with expectation of the next twirl. He strolled towards the south side leisurely, intending to circle the Square on his way back to the hotel, trying to reason with himself on his duty to Carlota. His experience with women had taught him the usual causes of their temperamental moods. Something had undoubtedly aroused Carlota’s nature into sudden and unexpected sensitiveness. It could not be merely her dislike and resentment towards Ward. If this had been so, then why had she not reacted under the stimulus during the past two years. No, he mused, with toleration, somehow, the contagion of Love had touched her in spite of their care, and lo, the walls of Tittani tumbled at the magic bugle of some Childe Roland. Even so, it was nothing serious, he told himself. Maria’s health was better now. She could watch her closer. At eighteen a girl’s imagination will clothe somedistant object with all the splendor of heroism. Doubtless she was under the spell of her own natural yearning for love.
And suddenly, even while he rambled and reasoned, the demigod of Misrule wakened drowsily and took note of the excellent juxtaposition of certain humans. Jacobelli stopped dead short, head uplifted like a horse scenting fire as a voice floated out on the midday air singing Mimi’s duet with a lilting, impetuous tenor for company. He could have sworn it was Carlota. Never could there be two such voices in New York. He tried to locate the sound, but it seemed to float from him elusively. He cut hastily across the southwest end of the park, seeking it, and gazed up at the row of brownstone old studio buildings across Fourth Street.
At the same moment a young Bulgarian, smoking a thin long cigarette in the exact center of his lips, rose from a seat and followed him. When Jacobelli crossed the street, intent and purpose in every move of his rotund figure, the boy waited, his seal-brown eyes mere slits, half-lifted lids showing gleams of high lights as he stared fixedly after him. Outside the narrow flagged plots, the old teacher hesitated, then entered the dusty hallway of the house next to Ames’s abiding-place. The Bulgariansmiled and followed after him, lingering at the corner.
Up in the studio luncheon was over. So successful and opulent it had been, this brigand feast, that Dmitri announced they were all suffering from the ennui of satiety, that bête noire of the rich. Carlota was happy once more. She had read over the libretto of the operetta while the two argued over points in the score, had sat at the piano, trying bits here and there of Fiametta’s rôle until, somewhere down on Bleecker Street, a church chime reached her ears, and she rose hurriedly. Maria would be home at two.
“I must leave you,” she said regretfully. “And all the dishes to wash!”
“I’ll do them gladly.” Dmitri donned an apron promptly. “Griff, you take your inspiration to the ’bus while I do your work for you.”
“How do you know that I take the ’bus to my home?”
She looked back at him teasingly. He waved both hands comprehensively, dismissing the query as superfluous.
“Everybody who comes down here takes the ’bus. It is part of the thrill, the experience of the unusual. They are the land ferries that cross the gulf between fact and fancy.”
He began the duet plaintively as he fished for a strip of drapery and tossed it about his shoulders for a cloak. Carlota took up the reply of Mimi while she pulled a black-velvet student cap over her close, glossy ripples of hair. Out on the landing Ames waited for her eagerly.
“Listen. You will come again soon, won’t you, dear? Dmitri’s a curious sort, but he’s all gold, no alloy. He thinks your voice is great.”
“I like him very much,” she said naïvely. “Much better than Mrs. Nevins and her daughter. How many times must you go to see them this week?”
“Oh, don’t! It isn’t anything at all, her interest in my work. She’s giving some sort of a fête for the Italian Relief Fund, a sort of glorified musicale as I understand it, and she wants me to give my operetta so her daughter can sing the mezzo part, Pippa. I intend that you shall sing Fiametta, the princess.”
“Impossible!” exclaimed Carlota in hushed alarm. “I never, never could do that, Mr. Ames.”
“You call me Griffeth,” he swung back happily. “You are going to sing it just the same, and it may make your fortune. I know it will mine. Dmitri’s all wrong, you know. He’s got some sort of a brain kink over this hatred ofthe rich. I don’t dare tell him even who my father is for fear he may cut my acquaintance.”
“Is your father, then, rich?” Her gaze never left his face.
“Well, they call him so where we live out in Colorado. You’re in the bondholder class there after you pass fifty thousand, but I don’t think Dad’s in danger of being counted an enemy of the people yet; just comfortably dusted.”
He laughed down at her as they crossed the Square towards the ’bus terminus. And at exactly the same instant Signor Jacobelli was bursting without warning or ceremony into a studio on the second floor where a model posed. He emerged, nonplussed and furious. On the third floor the door was locked. He shook the handle imperatively, and a disturbed but pleasantly modulated voice answered:
“Sorry, old man. Come Monday, will you?”
“It is impossible,” exclaimed the maestro to himself, when he reached the street, and stood wiping his forehead with a sense of baffled uncertainty. “Yet there are not two voices like hers in the world. I shall not wait. Love is a madness.”
He retraced his steps towards the Brevoort, determined now to tell Maria his suspicions.Up at the dormer window of the studio, Dmitri leaned out, placing bread crumbs on the fire escape for the sparrows.
“Go to, greedy one,” he said gravely, to one brown vagrant struggling after the largest piece. “You elbow for room in the bread-line. Beware the Infinite overlooks your falling.”
He glanced at the picture ensemble of the Square, one eye half closed to catch the light-and-shade effect and found a hindrance suddenly to his enjoyment of life. Sauntering across the street and into the park entrance was the Bulgarian. He paused to drink at the little iron fountain, and Dmitri leaned forward, giving a low, peculiar whistle. The boy lifted his head with a jerk and stared about him. He forgot his thirst. The crafty, self-contained air fell from him. Dmitri laughed down at him and waved his hand, beckoning him to come up. The other shook his head and waited.
“Another sparrow,” Dmitri said to himself as he closed the studio and went to join him. “He is too thin, much too thin.”