Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster (best story books to read txt) 📕

my mind whether to take this with me to-day or not. If she's the musician I think she is, she'll tell me to carry it out to the ash can."

"Well, that will be better than putting it in the stove yourself," she observed, going back with an air of placidity to her sewing, "because then you'll know it's bad and if you burn it up now, you won't. You haven't even heard it."

"I heard it before I wrote it," he argued. "I hear it again when I read it. That's a silly argument. Of course I know it."

"You said a little while ago that you'd never heard any of your music until Mrs. Wollaston sang those songs. They sounded better than you thought they would."

"That's different," he protested. "I knew they were good, damned good. Only I didn't quite realize how good they were. I suppose I won't realize until I hear her sing this how rotten it is. But I don't need to. I know well enough right now."

He went on turning the pages back and forth with gloomy violence, reading a passage here and another there and failing to get the faintest ray of comfort out of any of it, even out of the old soiled quires which belonged obviously to the original score.

"Is it all bad?" she asked. "Or just the new part."

"The whole thing," he grunted.

"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 damned 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 God, 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 hell 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 damned 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 God, 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--superstition 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 assurance 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 reassure 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 asserted, and sent