CHAPTER V
Mariawas still indisposed on the following day. She asked many questions about the evening before, who the guests had been, and which ones had impressed Carlota. Always her eyes sought the girl’s, testing her answers.
“I should have been happier if you had been there, tanta,” Carlota told her tenderly. “You’re not worrying still, are you? Nobody carried me away.”
Maria closed her eyes as if to shut out any telltale gleam they might have held.
“I blame myself whatever happens,” she sighed dramatically. “I should never have shown you the jewels. The ancient Hindoos are perfectly right. They claim the evil spirits, when imprisoned in the earth, produced gold and gems to ensnare the souls of mankind, especially women. Ah, mia carina, I am growing old and careless. You have made no further engagements?”
“The Marchese did not ask me to go anywhere else.” Carlota bent over a low jar of cyclamen, her face turned away.
“Assuredly not. I am an old fool. Do not speak of the jewels to anybody, not even Jacobelli.I must place them in a safety-deposit vault; not keep them here. And while I am ill, you will not walk through the Park to the studio. I prefer to have you ride always. Come here to me.” She half raised herself as Carlota knelt beside the couch, and framed her face in her palms. “You must not think I am harsh, my dearest one, or trying to keep you from pleasures you should have. It will all come to you in richest measure later on. Now we must be careful of you. You understand it is only because of our great love for you, do you not?”
“I know, surely, I understand.”
“Has no one ever spoken to you on your way to the studio?” Maria’s voice trembled with eager insistence. “Have you ever imagined you were followed? No, no, of course not. Do not be frightened at all. It is only Maria’s old love of the extravagant, the dramatic situation,” she laughed softly, sinking back. “But remember to ride always when you are alone, and speak to no one.”
Wonderingly, guiltily, too, Carlota reassured her, but when she reached the street she looked about her that day, with the first caution she had ever felt since their arrival in New York. What could Maria have meant? They knew no one in the city who could possibly have had any sinister intent towardsthem, yet there had been a lurking, secret fear in the eyes of the old signora.
At the corner of Fifth Avenue she hailed a taxicab, and arriving at the studio pleaded a headache as an excuse for a short lesson. Jacobelli was in a trying mood. Over and over again he railed at her, telling her that after his months of training, she was not putting her whole heart and soul into her singing. And suddenly Carlota leaned her chin on her palms at the back of the old grand piano, and asked:
“I wonder, maestro, if I were poor and unknown, and came to you, would you give me lessons because you had faith in my voice?”
“Certainly not,” exclaimed Jacobelli positively. “I could never give you enough to win you the highest fame. The teaching is not sufficient. The great artiste must have peace of mind. We do not exist upon air; not even a bird with a celestial voice like yours. No, my dear, I would have told you to forget your pride and do exactly as you have done. Secure the financial backing of a man like Ogden Ward. I worship art. It has always been my life, but I recognize, like a sensible man, that in the times we live in we artists must still seek the patron even as Angelo and Raphael did. The public is not strong enough to sustain us. It cannot sustain itself, what wouldyou? Some day, when the world is all golden with peace and plenty and brotherhood, then the singer will be the beloved prophet once again, and we shall delight in all the milk and honey and oil and burnt offerings we require, without the commonplace formality of contracts.” He laughed at her heartily, leaning over to pat her hands. “Come early to-morrow; Mr. Ward will be here.”
She left the studio with a sense of suffocating rebellion. They were all the same, Jacobelli, Ward, even Maria. Only the gentle, chivalrous old Marchese warmed her faith with his tender, hopeful philosophy, and were not his friends like him, even Dmitri Kavec? What was it this group had seemed to find in the fields of scarlet poppies that lifted idealism and faith in humanity above the creed of success and individual self-seeking?
As she stepped from the old red-brick building, a Greek flower vender wheeled his pushcart to the curb. She looked over the brilliantly tinted asters and chrysanthemums longingly, but purchased merely a spray of autumn leaves and hurried to the corner where the Riverside autobuses passed on their way crosstown to the Avenue.
Following after her leisurely came the man who had picked up her gloves in the vestibulesome nights before. It would have been difficult to guess his age or nationality. He was slender, undersized, yet with a strongly knit, athletic frame that told of military training. Swarthy-skinned, dark-haired, with the brilliant black eyes of the southern races, he seemed merely a boy until one saw the somber, detached experience in his expression and eyes. As Carlota, almost trembling at her own temerity, stepped into the interior of a Washington Square ’bus, he followed her, swinging lightly up the narrow, winding staircase to the top.
The number which Griffeth Ames had given her was on the south side of the Square near MacDougal Street. It was an old four-story brownstone building, the last of five of the same kind sitting back in small flagged yards from the sidewalk. The paint which had scaled from its iron portico and balconies merely imitated the stucco front which had crumbled off in large patches. There were many names written on soiled cards and slips of white paper above the rows of bells in the entrance, and among them she found his. Just within the dim hall a young Italian girl knelt on a marble-topped table, polishing the brass ornaments on the old oval hall mirror. She smiled down absently as Carlota asked the way.
“At the very top of the house. You have to knock hard or he won’t hear you.”
She climbed the three flights quickly. The door at the top was ajar. It was surprising to find such spaciousness here under the gabled roof. As she hesitated on the threshold, her swift glance noticed how he had tried to partition off his private life from his professional with burlap draperies. It must have been a bleak place once, but Ames had taken it and had performed all of the customary artistic marvels to conceal its barrenness. Draperies dipped in eastern dyes, that he had picked up in the Syrian quarter on Washington Street, softened the angles of corners. The unsightly wooden partitions and beams below the peaked ceiling had acquired under his deft touch a deep rare old oaken hue the Pre-Raphaelites might have rested under. On the exterior of the low door he had even placed a brass knocker, a real antique from a shop uptown. Nobody, as Dmitri often said, but Fame would ever recognize it, and she, the willful damosel, would never climb those three flights of stairs unless she came en masquerade as a lark to tantalize him.
There was no fire in the deep, black grate. The windows above the broad seats in the gable inglenooks were wide open. The viewand the old grand piano that stood crosswise in the room compensated for all other lacks. Ames was visibly embarrassed at her unannounced descent upon his quarters. He sat at a large, plain table drawn up before the south light, coatless, collarless, his hair ruffled into a crest, and ashes everywhere within his arm’s-length radius. Upon one corner of the table there dozed a large yellow tomcat, palpably a nomad.
“I hope I have not come too soon?” she asked hesitantly.
He swept a pile of magazines and papers from a chair for her, but she chose the high window-seat.
“It isn’t that, only I meant to set the stage for you,” he said ruefully. “I wouldn’t have had you find me like this for anything. When Ptolemy and I are alone here working, we just run a bachelor shop, and forget there are any other beings in the world.”
“Make it a dress rehearsal, then. I like it up here very much.” She looked out at the Square, the vivid autumn foliage accentuating the red and gold of the foliage and the vari-colored dresses of the Italian children playing there. It looked like some reckless, impressionistic painting, worked out merely in effective, daring splashes of color laid on with a paletteknife. From the windows of Maria’s chosen abode uptown, one gazed down upon an indefinite row of closed, chill, characterless dwellings, with no gleam of color from street to street.
“I would like to live down here too,” she said thoughtfully. “It is very different from anything I have seen in New York before.”
Ames watched her with eager appreciation. Her glossy, luxuriant hair waved back from her low forehead into a loose knot at the nape of her neck. Her face held the elusive appeal of La Cigale’s. The memory of the old painting occurred to him with its appealing beauty and he felt a sudden protective tenderness towards this waif of summer’s idleness.
“It is lonely; that’s the only thing about it,” he said, coming near her. “If it wasn’t for Dmitri and the Phelpses I’d throw up the game sometimes and go West to the smelter.”
“The smelter; what is that?” she asked curiously.
“Where they separate the ore from the quartz, you know, the real from the slag.”
“Slag?” she repeated slowly. “Like the crucible? I know what you mean. I think you are in it now, here, don’t you?”
“Dmitri would love you for that,” he exclaimed eagerly. “It’s all he talks about, theinner meaning of things. Like the crucible, the winepress, anything you like that means the big fight where you either make good or go under. I hate to think it’s just chance. Sometimes when we were over in France, you couldn’t help feeling that it was hit or miss. No matter how clever you were or well trained, you might be killed by any chance fragment of shell that strayed your way. It sort of wiped out the old idea of the plan. Know what I mean?” He quoted slowly, half under his breath:
“Our times are in His hand,Who said, ‘A whole I planned,See all, be not afraid.’”
“Our times are in His hand,Who said, ‘A whole I planned,See all, be not afraid.’”
“Our times are in His hand,
Who said, ‘A whole I planned,
See all, be not afraid.’”
Then, turning quickly to the cat, he lit a cigarette.
“Ptolemy, she comes in here and demoralizes us, old man. I’m getting sentimental.”
He sat down to the piano carelessly, striking low minor chords, and then, unlike Jacobelli, he slipped into the first protesting strains of the duet from “Bohème.” There was an enthusiasm and impulsive buoyancy about him that inspired Carlota to sing even as she had not when she had stood before the great maestro, Ames carrying Rudolpho’s answer.
“Look at me when you sing,” he commanded, and she shook her head in confusion.
“Does she not look at the candle?” she asked. “I—I forget when I look at you.”
But when she had finished, he was almost humble in his supreme gratitude to whatever fate had sent her to his lone garret. With boyish fervor and earnestness he told her the whole world lay at her feet if only he could find a way to teach her.
“I can show you only the first steps of the way, and your voice is so glorious now, so perfect. Who taught you how to use it?”
“Every one sings in Italy,” Carlota said evasively. “Even the girls at the fountains and the boys when they go out in the fishing fleet. I took only a few lessons there.”
Inwardly, she felt overjoyed at the success of her ruse, and agreed to come to him twice a week for lessons if he would accept in payment whatever she was able to give. But he would not listen to this.
“It’s enough to have you as my pupil. When other people hear you sing and know that I have taught you, it will bring me all sorts of other work. I know. Besides, you inspire me. Yes, you do. I don’t know what it is.” He drew in a deep breath, watching her. “Guess we were just a couple of old lazy dubs here, weren’t we, Ptolemy? I’ve wanted to work. It’s all been here in my head, till I couldn’tsleep nights with the themes rampant, but I couldn’t catch them. They were like fireflies. Ever try to get them at night? I did when I was a little chap out West. I always wanted to train them. Must you go so soon? I didn’t get your full name the other night. Carlota, the Marchese called you, didn’t he?”
“Just call me that,” she told him gravely. “I would not be allowed to come here if my people knew. They are very conservative.”
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” he said confidently. “You’ll never use it in your work. I don’t care just so long as you come. Dmitri said you never would. He walked down here last night with me. Queer chap, isn’t he? Did you like him?”
“I didn’t notice him,” Carlota spoke thoughtfully, not realizing the purport of her own words as she looked up at him on the threshold of the stairs. “I only remembered you.”