Mary Wollaston Part 14

"That's that Belgian thing, isn't it?"

"That's the one."

"Well," she pointed out to him, "you thought that was good once. If it all looks alike to you this morning, perhaps what you've just been writing is as good as that, and it's just your mood to-day that makes it look rotten."

He closed the score and slapped his hand down upon it with a gesture of dismissal. Then he rose and leaned back against the edge of the table.

"That's good logic, my dear," he conceded, "but it doesn't cover the ground. The old stuff was good in a way. I really meant it and felt it and I managed to get it down on paper. And the new stuff is like it, in that it's a d.a.m.ned clever imitation of it. I had to do it that way because I couldn't get back into the old mood. I'm sick of atrocities and horrors--everything that's got the name of war in it, even though I was never under fire myself. Well, writing the imitation has made me hate the thing I was trying to imitate. I stuck at it for the reason I told you this morning. But, good G.o.d, when it results in stuff like this...!

Jennie, what shall I do about it? Shall I take this thing now and chuck it into the stove and then tell La Chaise and Mrs. Wollaston to go to the devil? Or shall I tuck it under my arm like a good little boy and see if I can get away with it?"

She looked at him thoughtfully. "What is the new thing you want to write?" she asked.

He smiled. "You're a wonder, Jennie," he said. "There is a new thing.

I'm simply swamped in it. It won't let me alone. It's been driving me pretty nearly crazy. That's why it's been such perfect h.e.l.l sticking to this other thing. Jennie, it's another opera. A big one, full size. A romantic fairy opera. I haven't got it in order yet. It isn't fit to talk about. But it's about a princess, a little blue-eyed, pale-haired princess, who is under a spell. She's dumb. She's dumb except in the presence of her true lover. Do you see? They are trying to cure her and they can't. But mysteriously in the night they hear her singing. Her lover is with her, and they try to solve the mystery. Maybe they kill him, I don't know. Or maybe they make him faithless to her. I don't know whether there is a fairy story like that or whether I just made it up.

And I haven't worked it out at all. I haven't any words for it, no book, nor anything. But I tell you it comes in waves, whole scenes from it.

I'd like a hundred hands to write it down with. I'd like to take one header into it and never come up. And meanwhile I'm slugging away at that other d.a.m.ned thing because Mrs. Wollaston and LaChaise want it,--because it's the main chance."

She asked why he didn't tell them about the new idea and get them to adopt it instead, but he greeted this suggestion with an impatient laugh.

"It would be absolutely impossible for Ravinia in the first place," he said. "The thing would need as big a production as, oh, _Pelleas and Melisande_. And then this woman could never sing it. She isn't the type.

This is different altogether from anything she could do. Oh, no, it's quite hopeless until after I've succeeded with something else. But, oh, my G.o.d, Jennie, if you could hear it!"

She had finished her repairs on his coat and rising now held it up to him. While he was groping for the sleeves, she asked quietly, "Who is the princess, Tony? The dumb little princess with the blue eyes."

For a second he stood just as he was, like one suddenly frozen, then he settled into his coat, walked over to his work chair and dropped into it, leaning forward and propping up his head with his hands. "Yes," he said.

"In a way, perhaps, there is some one. That's what I was going to tell you about. She came in as quiet as a little ghost, just as Mrs.

Wollaston was beginning to sing and she sat down beside me without a word. And somehow while we listened, we--we were the same person. I can't make you understand that. It never happened to me before, nothing in the least like it, nothing so--intimate. I felt that song go vibrating right through her. She didn't speak at all, even after it was over, except to say that we mustn't talk--while we were waiting for the people in the other room to go away. And then Mrs. Wollaston came and got me. She didn't see her at all. She had disappeared somehow by that time."

He stopped but Jennie, it seemed, had nothing to say just then. She turned away to her outdoor wrap but she laid it down again and stood still when he went on.

"You don't want to run away with the idea that I'm in love with her," he said. "That isn't it. That's particularly--not it. I haven't an idea who she is nor any intention of trying to find out. Even if I knew the way to begin getting acquainted with her, I'm inclined to think I'd avoid it.

But as an abstraction--no, that's not what I mean--as a symbol of what I'll find waiting for me whenever I get down to the core of things ...

I've got a sort of--superst.i.tion if I don't do anything to--to break the spell, you know, that sometime she'll come back just the way she came that night."

With a little exaggeration of the significance of the act, she put on the coat she had crossed the room to get. He got up and came over to help her but he stopped with a sudden clenching of the hands, and a wave of color in his face as he saw the look in hers. At that she came swiftly to meet him, pulled him up in a tight embrace and kissed him.

"Good luck, my dear," she said. "I must be running and so must you. I'd take you with me only we go different ways. Carry your score along to the Wollastons. That's the first step to the princess, I guess."

CHAPTER IX

IN HARNESS

The episode upon which March had built the opera he called _The Outcry_, was one that was current during the autumn of 1914. A certain Belgian town had been burnt and it had been officially explained that this was done because the German officer who was billeted upon the burgomaster had been shot. The story was that the burgomaster's son shot him because he had raped his sister. The thing got complete possession of March's mind.

At first just the horror of it and later its dramatic and musical possibilities. He saw, in orchestral terms, the sodden revelry in that staid house--with its endless cellars of Burgundy. He saw the tight-drawn terror in the girl's room where she lay in bed. He saw the room lighted fitfully by the play of searchlights over the city; the sinister entrance from a little balcony through the French widow, of the officer in uniform, his shadow flung ahead of him by the beam of the searchlight. He saw the man, blood--as well as wine--drunk, garrulous and fanatic with the megalomania of the conquering invader. He saw the man's intention made clear from the first, but the execution of it luxuriously postponed.

Safely postponed because of the terrified girl's acceptance of his a.s.surance that if anything happened to him, if a hand were raised against him, her father and a dozen more hostages would be shot and the town burned to the ground. Then came the girl's irrepressible outcry when he first touched her; the brother's knock at the door; her frantic effort to rea.s.sure him frustrated by the officer's drunken laugh; the forcing of the door and the fight half in the dark; the killing of the girl and then of her ravisher.

The thing that wouldn't let March alone, that forced him into the undertaking, was the declaration of the brutal philosophy of the conqueror made by the officer while he gloated over the girl who was to be his prey; the chance to put into musical terms that paranoiac delusion of world conquest. One recognized in it, vaguely, some of 'Wagner's themes and some of Straus', distorted and grown monstrous.

The thing had haunted March, as I have said, and he had tried to find somebody who would write him the book, the indispensable preliminary to his getting to work. Failing here, he had audaciously made up his mind to write it himself. It was not his first attempt to do, in the mere light of nature, a thing commonly supposed to be impossible except at the end of painful instruction. He had once experimented at painting in oils, he had tried his hand at the stylus, he had made a few figurines in modeling-wax. He wrote his play, then, by the simple process of building first with painstaking accuracy, a model of his stage, the girl's room in that burgomaster's house with the French windows giving upon the little balcony. He modeled the furniture in plastiscene. He bought three little dolls to represent his characters. And then he reported what he saw happening in that room; what his characters did and what they said. By the time he had finished this work, the music was all in his head. He couldn't write it down fast enough.

It had been one of the great experiences of his life, writing that opera.

Jennie's reminder that he had once believed it good, was a conservative statement. LaChaise and Paula were deeply impressed by the power, both of its music and its drama and saw possibilities in it for a sensational success. The drawback, fatal unless it could be overcome, lay in the fact that the dominant role in it was that of the baritone. Dramatically the soprano's part was good enough, but there was nowhere near enough for her to sing. There was no reason though, they both a.s.serted, and sent March away from their conference at least half convinced, why the girl's part could not be greatly amplified. There were various expedients;--a preliminary scene between the girl and her brother; an apostrophe to an absent lover; a prayer. Also instead of being frozen into terror-stricken silence by her ravisher's monstrous purpose, she could just as well be represented as making a desperate resistance. She could plead with him, denounce him; attempt to take advantage of his drunkenness and trick him.

It could be made as good a woman's part as the big act of _Tosca_.

March had a.s.sented to all this and gone to work.

Paula did not tell him, as he had gloomily prophesied to Jennie, to take the new first scene he brought her that Sunday out to the ash can. And, indeed, it sounded so much better when they read it over together, that he was for the moment rea.s.sured. But her att.i.tude toward the opera was different from the one she had taken toward the group of Whitman songs, and this difference grew more marked at their subsequent sessions over it. There had been about the songs the glamour of discovery. One does not hasten to apply the a.s.sayer's acid to treasure trove. And, too, it was an altruistic impulse which had prompted her to take up the songs.

There aren't many people who can travel steadily, or very far, on that motivation, and Paula was not one of them. From the moment when she took the plunge, ignored--all but defied--her husband's wishes, and signed the Ravinia contract, she ceased to be concerned for anything, broadly speaking, but her own success. March's opera, then, was not, to her, the expression of his genius but a potential vehicle for hers. She was acutely critical of it. She knew what she wanted and it was not thinkable that she should put up with anything less.

She was not aware of this change of att.i.tude. She was blessed with a vigorous non-a.n.a.lytical mind that asked no awkward questions, suggested no paralyzing doubts. The best thing that could possibly happen to March's opera was that it should be made to fit her; that it should demand precisely all her resources and nothing that was beyond them. Obviously, since it was going to be her opera, a thing she was going to wear.

Had she been, as many eminent persons in her profession are, a mere bundle of insensate egotisms complicated by a voice, she would have driven March to flat rebellion in a week, all his good resolutions notwithstanding. What made it tolerable was that she had a good musical intelligence of her own, and a real dramatic sense. He could recognize, what she wanted as an intelligible thing, consistent with itself. Only, it was not his thing-not the thing he saw. By reason of its very consistency it was never the thing he saw.

"She wouldn't do it that way," he would protest.

"I would," Paula would tell him. "I wouldn't lie there, whimpering."

He was always arguing with her--wrangling, it almost came to, sometimes--in defense of his own conception. For a sample:

"Look at what she is; a burgomaster's daughter. That means prosperous, narrow-minded, middle-cla.s.s people. She's convent-bred, devout. She's still young or she'd be married. She's altogether without experience.

She's frightened just as a child would be over what's going on in the house. And the prayer she says when she goes to bed would be just the nice little prayer a child would say, an Our Father or a Hail Mary, whatever it might be. As simple as possible, on the surface, but with an undertone of overmastering terror. The sort of Promethean defiance you're talking about would be inconceivable to a child like that."

"I suppose it would, to most of them," she admitted, "but this one's going to be different. After all, it's the exceptional ones that usually have operas written about them. I don't believe all the dancers in Alexandria were like Thais, nor all the gipsy cigar-makers in Seville like Carmen. I don't believe many little j.a.panese girls would feel about Pinkerton the way Cio Cio San did. Why can't our Dolores be an exception, too?"

The only answer he could make to that was that it spoiled the other figure, reduced him from a sort of cosmic monster to the mere custom-made grand-opera villain.

"What if it does?" she retorted. "This isn't being written for Scotti or Vanni Marcoux. It's being written for me." That was the tonic chord they always came back to. It was Paula's opera.

March presently began to feel, too, that he was growing to be nothing more than Paula's composer. It was important to the success of their enterprise that his reputation should be intensively exploited among the rich and influential who figured as patrons of the Ravinia season. She went at the task of building it as ruthlessly as she remodeled his opera.

Her demands upon him were explicit. In the first place he was to bring her all his music, early as well as late, trivial as well as important, in order that she might select from it what, if anything, might be exploited at once. She had promised to give a recital just before Easter, in aid of one of the local charities--it was one that boasted an important list of patronesses--and if she could make an exclusive program of his songs she would like to do so. Then, while it was too late to get any of his compositions performed by the orchestra this season, it would be a good thing to get Mr. Stock to read something in the hope of his taking it for next year. An announcement, even a mere unofficial intimation, that Anthony March (whose opera ... and so on)--was to be represented on the symphony programs next season, would help a lot.

What dismayed him most was her insistence--she was clear as a bell about this--that he himself get up the accompaniments to some of the simpler of his songs so that when she took him out to meet people who wanted to hear a sample of his music then and there, they could manage, between them, some sort of compliance. He nearly got angry, but decided to laugh instead, over her demand that he be waiting, back stage, when she gave her recital of his songs (which she did with great success) to come out at the end and take his bow in his now discarded uniform. It was the only reference she ever made to his shabby appearance.

(It was steadily growing shabbier, too, since she left him hardly any time at all for tuning pianos. She would have been utterly horrified had she known what tiny sums he was living on from week to week. And it never occurred to her when she suggested that a certain score of his ought to be copied, that he could not afford to take it out to a professional copyist and so sat up nights doing it himself. He did it rather easily, to be sure, since it was one of the numerous things at which he had earned a living.)

There was only one of her many demands that he persistently refused to comply with. And she took this refusal rather hard; acted more hurt than angry about it, to be sure, but came back to it again and again. When she discovered that he made no pretense of living at his father's house, she asked for his real address so that she could always be sure of getting at him when she wanted him. This he would not give her. If he did, he said, it would only result in his staying away from there and doing his work somewhere else. It was one of his simple necessities to know that he couldn't be got at. He would make every possible concession. Would go, or telephone, at punctiliously regular and brief intervals, to his father's house to learn whether she had sent for him, but give up the secrecy of his lair he would not. It wasn't possible.

I think she compensated herself for this refusal by sending for him sometimes when she did not really need him, just to be on the safe side, and, on the same basis, engaged his attendance ahead from day to day.

Anyhow, she occupied, in one way or another, practically the whole of his time; and the dumb little blue-eyed princess knocked at his door in vain.

Only in those hours when sheer fatigue had sent him to bed had she any opportunity of visiting him. Sometimes she made white nights for him by haunting those hours, refusing to go away; sometimes, by not coming at all, she filled him with terror lest she had gone for good--would not come back even when he was ready for her. When that panic was upon him he hated Paula with a devouring hatred.

Of the human original of his blue-eyed princess, he saw during those weeks, nothing. On that first Sunday when he lunched at the house he heard them speak of a member of the family, a daughter of John Wollaston, named Mary, who had been living in New York and had recently returned but was not lunching at home that day. He got the idea then that she might be the girl who had so mysteriously come in and sat beside him while Paula sang; and without any evidence whatever to support this surmise, it became a settled conviction. But an odd shrinking, almost superst.i.tious, as he had confessed to Jennie, from doing anything that might break the spell kept him from asking any questions.

During the first week of his almost daily visits to the house, he got repeated intimations of her, a glimpse once through an open door on the third floor into a room that struck him as being, probably, hers. The impression, once more, when he was coming down from the music room that this was the door which he had just heard softly shut as if some one, the princess herself, of course, who had stood listening to the music for a while, had withdrawn there when she heard his step on the stairs. Once on the settee in the hall he saw a riding crop and a small beaver hat that he felt a curious certainty belonged to her and once out of a confusion of young voices in the drawing-room, and a dance tune going on the Victrola, he heard some one call out her name, hers he was sure though he didn't hear her answer. Perhaps she had answered without speaking. The dumb princess again.