The Price She Paid Part 52

Mildred toiled on like a slave under the lash, and Moldini and the Rivi system were her twin relentless drivers. She learned to rule herself with an iron hand. She discovered the full measure of her own deficiencies, and she determined to make herself a competent lyric soprano, perhaps something of a dramatic soprano. She dismissed from her mind all the "high" thoughts, all the dreams wherewith the little people, even the little people who achieve a certain success, beguile the tedium of their journey along the hard road. She was not working to "interpret the thought of the great master" or to "advance the singing art yet higher" or even to win fame and applause. She had one object--to earn her living on the grand opera stage, and to earn it as a prima donna because that meant the best living. She frankly told Cyrilla that this was her object, when Cyrilla forced her one day to talk about her aims. Cyrilla looked pained, broke a melancholy silence to say:

"I know you don't mean that. You are too intelligent. You sing too well."

"Yes, I mean just that," said Mildred. "A living."

"At any rate, don't say it. You give such a false impression."

"To whom? Not to Crossley, and not to Moldini, and why should I care what any others think? They are not paying my expenses. And regardless of what they think now, they'll be at my feet if I succeed, and they'll put me under theirs if I don't."

"How hard you have grown," cried Cyrilla.

"How sensible, you mean. I've merely stopped being a self-deceiver and a sentimentalist."

"Believe me, my dear, you are sacrificing your character to your ambition."

"I never had any real character until ambition came," replied Mildred.

"The soft, vacillating, sweet and weak thing I used to have wasn't character."

"But, dear, you can't think it superior character to center one's whole life about a sordid ambition."

"Sordid?"

"Merely to make a living."

Mildred laughed merrily and mockingly. "You call that sordid? Then for heaven's sake what is high? You had left you money enough to live on, if you have to. No one left me an income. So, I'm fighting for independence--and that means for self-respect. Is self-respect sordid, Cyrilla!"

And then Cyrilla understood--in part, not altogether. She lived in the ordinary environment of flap-doodle and sweet hypocrisy and sentimentality; and none such can more than vaguely glimpse the realities.

Toward the end of the summer Moldini said:

"It's over. You have won."

Mildred looked at him in puzzled surprise.

"You have learned it all. You will succeed. The rest is detail."

"But I've learned nothing as yet," protested she.

"You have learned to teach yourself," replied the Italian. "You at last can hear yourself sing, and you know when you sing right and when you sing wrong, and you know how to sing right. The rest is easy. Ah, my dear Miss Gower, you will work NOW!"

Mildred did not understand. She was even daunted by that "You will work NOW!" She had been thinking that to work harder was impossible.

What did he expect of her? Something she feared she could not realize.

But soon she understood--when he gave her songs, then began to teach her a role, the part of Madame b.u.t.terfly herself. "I can help you only a little there," he said. "You will have to go to my friend Ferreri for roles. But we can make a beginning."

She had indeed won. She had pa.s.sed from the stage where a career is all drudgery--the stage through which only the strong can pa.s.s without giving up and accepting failure or small success. She had pa.s.sed to the stage where there is added pleasure to the drudgery, for, the drudgery never ceases. And what was the pleasure? Why, more work--always work--bringing into use not merely the routine parts of the mind, but also the imaginative and creative faculties. She had learned her trade--not well enough, for no superior man or woman ever feels that he or she knows the trade well enough--but well enough to begin to use it.

Said Moldini: "When the great one, who has achieved and arrived, is asked for advice by the sweet, enthusiastic young beginner, what is the answer? Always the same: 'My dear child, don't! Go back home, and marry and have babies.' You know why now?"

And Mildred, looking back over the dreary drudgery that had been, and looking forward to the drudgery yet to come, dreary enough for all the prospects of a few flowers and a little sun--Mildred said: "Indeed I do, maestro."

"They think it means what you Americans call morals--as if that were all of morality! But it doesn't mean morals; not at all. s.e.x and the game of s.e.x is all through life everywhere--in the home no less than in the theater. In town and country, indoors and out, sunlight, moonlight, and rain--always it goes on. And the temptations and the struggles are no more and no less on the stage than off. No, there is too much talk about 'morals.' The reason the great one says 'don't' is the work." He shook his head sadly. "They do not realize, those eager young beginners. They read the story-books and the lives of the great successes and they hear the foolish chatter of common-place people--those imbecile 'cultured' people who know nothing! And they think a career is a triumphal march. What think you, Miss Gower--eh?"

"If I had known I'd not have had the courage, or the vanity, to begin,"

said she. "And if I could realize what's before me, I probably shouldn't have the courage to go on."

"But why not? Haven't you also learned that it's just the day's work, doing every day the best you can?"

"Oh, I shall go on," rejoined she.

"Yes," said he, looking at her with awed admiration. "It is in your face. I saw it there, the day you came--after you sang the 'Batti Batti' the first time and failed."

"There was nothing to me then."

"The seed," replied he. "And I saw it was an acorn, not the seed of one of those weak plants that spring up overnight and wither at noon.

Yes, you will win." He laughed gayly, rolled his eyes and kissed his fingers. "And then you can afford to take a little holiday, and fall in love. Love! Ah, it is a joyous pastime--for a holiday. Only for a holiday, mind you. I shall be there and I shall seize you and take you back to your art."

In the following winter and summer Crossley disclosed why he had been sufficiently interested in grand opera to begin to back undeveloped voices. Crossley was one of those men who are never so practical as when they profess to be, and fancy themselves, impractical. He became a grand-opera manager and organized for a season that would surpa.s.s in interest any New York had known. Thus it came about that on a March night Mildred made her debut.

The opera was "Faust." As the three princ.i.p.al men singers were all expensive--the tenor alone, twelve hundred a night--Crossley put in a comparatively modestly salaried Marguerite. She was seized with a cold at the last moment, and Crossley ventured to subst.i.tute Mildred Gower.

The Rivi system was still in force. She was ready--indeed, she was always ready, as Rivi herself had been. And within ten minutes of her coming forth from the wings, Mildred Gower had leaped from obscurity into fame. It happens so, often in the story books, the newly gloriously arrived one having been wholly unprepared, achieving by sheer force of genius. It occurs so, occasionally, in life--never when there is lack of preparation, never by force of una.s.sisted genius, never by accident. Mildred succeeded because she had got ready to succeed. How could she have failed?

Perhaps you read the stories in the newspapers--how she had discovered herself possessed of a marvelous voice, how she had decided to use it in public, how she had coached for a part, had appeared, had become one of the world's few hundred great singers all in a single act of an opera. You read nothing about what she went through in developing a hopelessly uncertain and far from strong voice into one which, while not nearly so good as thousands of voices that are tried and cast aside, yet sufficed, with her will and her concentration back of it, to carry her to fame--and wealth.

That birdlike voice! So sweet and spontaneous, so true, so like the bird that "sings of summer in full throated ease!" No wonder the audience welcomed it with cheers on cheers. Greater voices they had heard, but none more natural--and that was Moldini.

He came to her dressing-room at the intermission. He stretched out his arms, but emotion overcame him, and he dropped to a chair and sobbed and cried and laughed. She came and put her arms round him and kissed him. She was almost calm. The GREAT fear had seized her--Can I keep what I have won?

"I am a fool," cried Moldini. "I will agitate you."

"Don't be afraid of that," said she. "I am nervous, yes, horribly nervous. But you have taught me so that I could sing, no matter what was happening." It was true. And her body was like iron to the touch.

He looked at her, and though he knew her and had seen her train herself and had helped in it, he marveled. "You are happy?" he said eagerly.

"Surely--yes, you MUST be happy."

"More than that," answered she. "You'll have to find another word than happiness--something bigger and stronger and deeper."

"Now you can have your holiday," laughed he. "But"--with mock sternness--"in moderation! He must be an incident only. With those who win the high places, s.e.x is an incident--a charming, necessary incident, but only an incident. He must not spoil your career. If you allowed that you would be like a mother who deserts her children for a lover. He must not touch your career!"

Mildred, giving the last touches to her costume before the gla.s.s, glanced merrily at Moldini by way of it. "If he did touch it," said she, "how long do you think he would last with me?"

Moldini paused half-way in his nod of approval, was stricken with silence and sadness. It would have been natural and proper for a man thus to put s.e.x beneath the career. It was necessary for anyone who developed the strong character that compels success and holds it. But-- The Italian could not get away from tradition; woman was made for the pleasure of one man, not for herself and the world.

"You don't like that, maestro?" said she, still observing him in the gla.s.s.

"No man would," said he, with returning cheerfulness. "It hurts man's vanity. And no woman would, either; you rebuke their laziness and their dependence!"

She laughed and rushed away to fresh triumphs.