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

It's her instinct to compel. That's what makes her the artist she is. Without her voice she might have been a tamer of wild beasts. And, of course, a great audience that has paid extravagantly for its pleasure is a wild beast, that will purr if she compels it, snarl at her if she doesn't manage to. She's been hissed, howled at. And that's the possibility that makes cheers intoxicating. Left too long without something to conquer, she feels in a vacuum, smothered. Well, she's got something now; the greatest thing in the world to her,--her husband's life. She's flung off the other thing like a cloak."

Without, at the moment, any sense of its being an extraordinary question, Mary asked, "Are you glad? That she has forgotten you, I mean."

She was not able, thinking it over afterward, to recall anything that could have served as a cue for so far-fetched a supposition as that. It could have sprung from nothing more palpable than the contrast suggested between Paula, the compeller, the _dompteuse_, and the man who had just been so describing her. He was so very thin; he was, if one looked closely, rather shabby, and beyond that, it had struck her that a haggard air there was about him was the product of an advanced stage of fatigue,--or hunger. But that of course, was absurd. Anyhow, not even the sound of her question startled her.

Nor did it him. There was something apologetic about his smile. "It _is_ a reprieve," he admitted. "I left her a week ago," he went on to explain,--"it must have been the day Doctor Wollaston fell ill--on a promise not to come back until I had got this opera of mine into the shape she wants. I came back to-day to tell her that it can't be done--not by me. I have tried my utmost and it isn't enough. I haven't improved it even from her point of view let alone from mine. She isn't an easy person to come to with a confession of failure."

"She's spoiling it," Mary said. "Why do you let her?"

But March dissented from that. "If we agree that the thing's an opera--and of course that's what it is if it's anything--then what she wants it made over into is better than what I wrote. She's trying to put the Puccini throb into it. She's trying to make better drama out of it. LaChaise agrees with her. He said at the beginning that I relied too much on the orchestra and didn't give the singers enough to do. And, of course, it's easy to see that what a woman like Paula said or did would be more important to an audience than anything that an oboe could possibly say. When I'm with her, she--galvanizes me into a sort of belief that I can accomplish the thing she wants, but when I go off alone and try to do it...." He blinked and shook his head. "It has been a first-class nightmare, for a fact, this last week."

But Mary demanded again. "Why do you let her?"

"I made a good resolution a while ago," he said. "It was--it was the night she sang those Whitman songs. You see I've never been tied to anything; harnessed, you know. Somehow, I've managed to do without. But I've had to do without hearing, except in my own head, any of the music I've written. There was an old tin trunk full of it, on paper, that looked as if it was never going to be anywhere else. Well, I came to a sort of conviction after I went away from here that night, that those two facts were cause and effect; that unless I submitted to be harnessed I never would hear any of it. And it seemed that night that I couldn't manage to do without hearing it. Keats was wrong about that, you know,--about unheard melodies being sweeter. They can come to be clear torment. So I decided I'd begin going in harness. I suppose it was rather naive of me to think that I could, all at once, make a change like that. Anyhow, I found I couldn't go on with this. I brought it around to-day,--it's out there in the hall--to turn it over to Paula to do with as she liked. That's why it was so--incredible, when you came down the stairs instead."

He sprang up then to go, so abruptly that he gave her the impression of having abandoned in the middle, the sentence he was speaking. This time, however, rising instantly, she released him and in a moment he was gone. There had been a word from him about her father, the expression of "confident hopes" for his recovery, and on her part some attempt, not successfully brought off she feared, to assure him of his welcome when he came again. She didn't shake hands with him and decided afterward that it must have been he who had avoided it.

She was glad to have him go so quickly. She wanted him to go so that she could think about him. It was with a rather buoyant movement that she crossed the room to the piano bench and very lightly with her finger-tips began stroking the keys, the cool smooth keys with their orderly arrangement of blacks and whites, from which it was possible to weave such infinitely various patterns, such mysterious tissue.

A smile touched her lips over the memory of the picture her fancy had painted the night Paula sang his songs, the sentimental notion of Paula's inspiring him with an occasional facile caress to the writing of other love songs. She might have been a boarding-school girl to have thought of that. She smiled, too, though a little more tenderly, over his own attempt--naive he had called it--to go in harness, like a park hack, submissive to Paula's rein and spur. Pegasus at the plow again. She smiled in clear self-derision over her contemplated project of saving him from Paula. He didn't need saving from anybody. He was one of those spirits that couldn't be tied. Not even his own best effort of submission could avail to keep the harness on his back.

It was most curious how comfortable she had been with him. During the miserable month she had spent at home before she went to Wyoming with the Corbetts, she had dreaded a second encounter with March and had consciously avoided one. To meet and be introduced as the strangers they were supposed by the rest of the family to be, to elaborate the pretense that this was what they were--they who had shared those flaming moments while Paula sang!--would be ridiculous and disgusting. But anything else, any attempt to go on from where they had left off was unthinkable. In the privacy of her imagination she had worked the thing out in half a dozen ways, all equally distressing.

She had not made good her resolution to quit thinking about him. She was not able and did not even attempt to dismiss her adventure with him as a mere regrettable folly to be forgotten as soon as possible. It had often come back to her during sleepless hours of the long nights and had always been made welcome. She didn't wish it defaced as she had felt it necessarily must be by the painful anti-climax of a second meeting.

The impulse upon which she had taken him out of old Nat's hands was perhaps a little surprising now she looked back on it, but it had not astonished her at the time. Of course, there, there was something concretely to be done, an injustice to be averted from a possibly innocent head. She doubted though if it had been pure altruism.

Whatever its nature, the result of it had been altogether happy. She _was_ glad she had come down to see him. There need be no misgiving now about the quality of their future encounters, were there to be any such. They were on solid ground with each other.

How had that been brought about? How had they managed to talk to each other for anyway fifteen or twenty minutes without either a reference to their adventure or a palpable avoidance of it? It wasn't her doing. From the moment when she got to the end of the lines she had rehearsed coming down the stairs, the lead had been in his hands. Indeed, to the latter part of the talk, what she had contributed was no more than a question or two so flagrantly personal that they reminded her in review of some of her childish indiscretions with Wallace Hood. How had he managed it?

He hadn't been tactful. She acquitted him altogether of that. She couldn't have endured tact this afternoon from anybody. Of course, the mere expressiveness of his face helped a lot. The look he had turned on Rush for example, that had stopped that nerve-racked boy in full career. Or the look he gave her when he first learned of her father's illness. That sudden coming back from whatever his own preoccupation might have been to a vivid concern for her father.

Well, there, at last, it was. That was his quality. A genius for more than forgetting himself, for stepping clean out of himself into some one else's shoes. Wasn't that just a long way of saying imagination? He had illuminated her father for her and in so doing had given her a ray of real comfort. He had interpreted Paula--in terms how different from those employed by Aunt Lucile! He had comprehended Rush without one momentary flaw of resentment. Last of all, he had quite simply and without one vitiating trace of self-pity, explained himself, luminously, so that it was as if she had known him all her life.

One thing, to be sure, she didn't in the least understand--the very last thing he had said. "That's why it was so incredible when you came down the stairs instead." That had been to her, a complete non sequitur, an enigma. But she was content to leave it at that.

Such a man, of course, could never--belong to anybody. He was not collectable. There would always be about him, for everybody, some last enigma, some room to which no one would be given the key. But there was a virtue even in the fringe of him, the hem of his garment.

Was she getting sentimental? No, she was not. Indeed, precisely what his little visit had done for her was to effect her release from a tangle of taut-drawn sentimentalities. She hadn't felt as free as this, as comfortable with herself, since she came home with Rush from New York.

She had no assurance that he'd come to the house again of his own accord or that Paula would send for him. But she was in no mood to distress herself just now, even with that possibility.

She crossed the room and got herself a cigarette, and with it alight she returned to her contemplation of the piano keyboard. She didn't move nor speak when she heard Rush come in but she kept an eye on the drawing-room door and when presently he entered, she greeted him with a smile of good-humored mockery. He had something that looked like a battered school atlas in his hand.

"What do you suppose this is?" he asked. "It was lying on the bench in the hall."

She held out a hand for it and together they opened it on the lid of the piano and investigated.

"It's the manuscript of his opera," she said. "He brought it around to leave with Paula. To tell her he had done with it. He's been trying to spoil it for her