Mary Wollaston Part 9

Long ago the family had acquiesced in Mary's a.s.sertion that she was not in the least musical and in her stubborn refusal to "take" anything, even the most elementary course of lessons on the piano. She had been allowed to grow up in an ignorance almost unique in these days, of the whole mystery of musical notation and phraseology, an ignorance that might be reckoned the equivalent of a special talent.

Later, indeed, she had made the discovery--or what would have been a discovery if she had fully admitted it to herself--that music sometimes exerted a special power over her emotions. Whether it was a certain sort of music that created the mood or a certain sort of mood that was capable of responding to music, she had never seriously inquired. The critical jargon of the wiseacres always irritated her. She supposed it meant something because they seemed intelligible to each other but she rather enjoyed indulging the presumption that it did not. When she went to concerts, she liked to go alone, or at least to be let alone, to sit back pa.s.sively and allow the variegated tissue of sound to envelop her spirit as it would. If it bored her, as it frequently did, there was no harm done, no pretense to make. If, as more rarely happened, it stole somehow into complete possession, floated her away upon strange voyages, she was at least immune from a.n.a.lysis and inquisition afterward.

So it was with no critical expectancy that she listened when Novelli began to play; indeed, in the active sense, she did not listen at all.

She forgot to be amused by the composed faces about her; she forgot, presently, whose music it was and whose voice she heard. What she felt was a disentanglement, an emergence into more open, wider s.p.a.ces,--cold ethereal s.p.a.ces. It seemed, though, that it was her own mood the music fitted into, rather than the other way about.

She heard the talk that followed the polite rustle of applause at the first intermission, without being irritated by it, without even listening to what it meant, though here and there a phrase registered itself upon her ear. Henry Craven's "Very modern, of course. No tonality at all, not a cadence in it," and Charlotte Avery's "No form either. And hardly to be called a song. A tone poem, really, with a part written into it for the voice."

The music began again, and now was given ungrudging credit for the recreation of her mood. Only its admitted beauty created a longing which it did not serve to satisfy. The cold open sky with its mysterious interstellar s.p.a.ces, the flow of the black devouring clouds, the reemergence of the immortal Pleiades, remote, inhuman, unaware, brought no tranquillity but only a forlorn human loneliness.

On that note it ended, but Paula, with a nod to Novelli, directed him to go straight on to the love song. The two do not form a sequence in the poem; indeed the love song occurs very early in it and the Burial of the Stars comes afterward, nearly at the end. But I think, as March did, that Paula's instinct was sound in using the unearthly Schubert-like beauty of the Burial of the Stars as a prelude to the purely human pa.s.sion of the love song.

It is, I suppose, one of the supreme lyric expressions in the English language of the pa.s.sion of love. Furthermore, Whitman's free unmetered swing, the glorious length of his stride, fell in with March's rhythmic idiom as though they had been born under the same star.

The result is one of those happy marriages so rare as to be almost unique, in which the emotional power of a great song is enhanced by its musical setting, and where, conversely, a great piece of lyric music gains rather than loses by its words.

March did not use the whole poem. His setting begins on the line "Low hangs the moon," and ends with the "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!"

Why he elected not to go on with it, I don't know. Possibly, because his own impulse was spent before Whitman's; possibly, because he did not wish to impose the darker melancholy of the latter stanzas upon the clear ecstasy of that last call.

It lost something, of course, from the inadequacy of the piano transcription, for it was conceived and written orchestrally. Paula, too, has given finer performances of it;--indeed, she sang it better a little later that same evening. But spurred as she was by the knowledge that the composer was listening to it and by her determination to win a victory for it, she flung herself into it with all the power and pa.s.sion she had.

I doubt whether any other auditor ever is more completely overwhelmed by it than Mary was. It was so utterly her own, the cry of it so verily the unacknowledged cry of her own heart, that the successive stanzas buried themselves in it like unerring arrows. The intensity of its climax was more poignant, more nearly intolerable, than anything in all the music she had ever heard. Limp, wet, breathless, trembling all over, she sat for a matter of minutes after that last ineffable yearning note had died away.

There was a certain variety in the emotions of the rest of the audience, but they met on common ground in the feeling of not knowing where to look or what to say. Their individualities submerged in a great crowd, they might--most of them--have allowed themselves to be carried away, especially if they'd come in the expectation--founded on the experience of other audiences--that they would be carried away. But to sit like this, all very much aware of each other while a woman they knew, the wife of a man they had long known, proclaimed a naked pa.s.sion like that, was simply painful. What they didn't know you see--there was no program to tell them--was whether the thing was inspired or merely dreadful, and when it was over they sat in stony despair, waiting, like the children of Israel, for a sign.

It was LaChaise who broke the spell by crossing the room and unceremoniously displacing Novelli at the piano. He turned back to the beginning of the score and began reading it, at first silently, then humming unintelligible orchestral parts as he was able to infer them from the transcription; finally with noisy outbursts upon the piano, to which din Novelli contributed with one hand reached down over the conductor's shoulder. Paula standing in the curve of the instrument, her elbows on the lid, followed them from her copy of the score. It got to the audience that an alert att.i.tude of attention was no longer required of them. That in fact, so far as the three musicians were concerned, nothing was required of them, not even silence. As an audience they ceased to exist.

They were dissolved once more into their social elements and began a little feverishly to talk.

The realization broke over Mary with the intensity of panic that some one of them might speak to her. She rose blindly and slipped out into the hall, but even there she did not feel safe. Some of them, any of them, might follow her. She wanted to hide. There was a small room adjoining the studio--it had been the nurse's bedroom when the other had been the nursery--and its door now stood ajar. She slipped within and closed it very softly behind her.

Here in the grateful half-dark she was safe enough although the door into the studio was also part way open. There was nothing in here but lumber--an old settee, a bookcase full of discarded volumes from the library and an overflow of Paula's music. No one would think of looking for her in here.

But as she turned her back upon the door that she had just closed, she saw that some one was here, a man in khaki sitting on the edge of that old settee, leaning forward a little, his hands clasped between his knees. She had come in so quietly he had not heard her.

It seemed to her afterward that she must have had two simultaneous and contradictory ideas as to who he was. She knew,--she must have known, instantly--that he was Anthony March, but his uniform suggested Rush and drew her over toward him just as though she had actually believed him to be her brother. And then as he became aware of her and glanced up, Paula in the other room began singing the last song over again, her great broad voice submerging the buzz of talk like the tide rus.h.i.+ng in over a flat.

Without a word Mary dropped down beside him on the settee.

In the middle of a phrase the music stopped.

"A vous le tour!" they heard LaChaise say to Novelli. "Je ne suis pas a.s.sez pianiste. Maintenant! Recommencons, n'est-ce-pas?"

The song resumed. March's frame stiffened.

"Oh night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?

What is that little black thing I see there in the white?"

"Now then," March whispered. "Quicker! My G.o.d, can't they pick it up?"

Like an echo came LaChaise's "Plus vite! _Stringendo_, jusque au bout!"

and with a gasp the composer greeted the quickened tempo. Then as the song swept to its first tempestuous climax he clutched Mary's arm.

"That's it," he cried. "Can't you see that's it?"

"Loud! loud! loud!

Loud I call to you, my love!

High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves, Surely you must know who is here, is here, You must know who I am, my love."

He let go her arm. The song went on.

"Low-hanging moon!

What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?

O it is the shape, the shape of my mate!

Oh moon, do not keep me from her any longer."

From there, without interruption it swept along to the end.

It was during the ecstatic pianissimo just before the final section that their hands clasped. Which of them first sought the contact neither of them knew but they sat linked like that, tingling, breathless during the lines:--

"... somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me, So faint I must be still, be still to listen, But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me."

On the last "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!" the clasp tightened, convulsively. But it was not until the circuit was broken that the spark really leaped across the gap.

There was no applause in the other room when the song ended for the second time, but it won a clear half minute of breathless silence before the eddies of talk began again. During that tight-stretched moment the pair upon the settee, their hands just unclasped, sat motionless, fully aware of each other for the first time, almost unendurably aware, thrilling with the just-arrived sense of the amazing intimacy of the experience they had shared. Neither of them was innocent but neither had ever known so complete a fusion of his ident.i.ty with another as this which the spell of his music had produced.

They sat side by side but not very close, not so close that there was contact anywhere between them and neither made any move to resume it.

Both were trembling uncontrollably and each knew that the other was.

The hum of talk in the other room rose louder and finally became articulate in Charlotte Avery's crisp, "Good night, my dear Paula, we've had a most interesting evening. I shall hope to hear more of your discovery. And see him too sometime if you make up your mind to exhibit him."

March started from his seat at that. "Don't make any noise," Mary whispered, rising too, and laying a detaining hand on him. "n.o.body will come in here. They'll all go now. We must wait."

He obeyed tractably enough, only turned toward her now and gazed at her with undissimulated intensity; not, though, as if speculating who she might be, rather as if wondering whether she were really there.

"Don't you want them to find you, either?" he asked.

"N-not after that," she stammered; and added instantly, "We mustn't talk."

So silent once more, they waited while the late audience defiled in irregular, slow moving groups down the hall toward the stairs. Mary distinguished her father's voice, her brother's, her aunt's, all taking valiantly just the right social note. They were covering the retreat in good order. And she heard Portia Stanton taking her husband home. But the music room was not yet deserted. There were sounds of relaxation in there, the striking of a match, the sound of a heavy body--that of LaChaise, probably--dropping into an easy chair.

"And now," Mary heard him say to Paula--"Now fetch out your composer.

Where have you had him hidden all this while?"

"He's in there. I was just waiting until they were really gone. I'll get him now, though. No, sit still; I'd rather, myself."

March, however, didn't move; not even when they could hear Paula coming toward the door. He stood gazing thoughtfully at Mary, his eyes luminous in the dark. It occurred to her that the conversation in the other room had been in French and that he had not understood it.

"Oh, go--quickly!" she had just time to breathe. Then she crowded back, close against the part.i.tion wall. The door opened that way, so that when Paula flung it wide it screened her a little.

The singer stood there, a golden glowing thing in the light she had brought in with her. "Where are you?" she asked. Then she came up to March and took him by the arms. "Was it good?" she asked. "Was it--a little--as you meant it to sound?"

When he did not speak, she laughed,--a rich low laugh that had a hint of tears in it, pulled him up to her and kissed his cheek. "You don't have to answer, my dear," she said. "Come in and hear what LaChaise has got to say about it."