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

have welcomed her son's confidences, Mary was sure, with so real a sympathy, if he could only have believed it. But the crust of family tradition was too thick, she supposed, to make even the attempt possible.

This failure of his fully to understand the person traditionally the nearest and dearest to him in all the world had, upon Mary's mind, the effect of, somehow, solidifying him; making him more completely human to her--where it might have been expected to work the other way. It proved the last touch she needed to quicken the concern she had from the beginning felt for him into an entirely real thing, a motivating principle. If it was possible to get that opera of his produced, she was going to do it.

She stopped at the Dearborn Avenue house on her way down-town to get her little portable typewriter and carry it out to Ravinia with her. In the odd hours of the next few days she copied March's libretto in English, triple spaced, out of his score and this, with a lead pencil, she took to carrying around with her to Paula's rehearsals, to her dressing-room, everywhere. A phrase at a time, syllable by syllable, she began putting it into French.

On the last Saturday night in June the Ravinia season opened with _Tosca_ sung in Italian; Paula singing the title part and Fournier as "Scarpia." A veteran American tenor, Wilbur Hastings, an old Ravinia favorite, sang "Cavaradossi." Taken as a whole, the performance was quite as good as any one has a right to expect any opening night to be. The big audience which went away good-naturedly satisfied, had had its moments of really stirring enthusiasm. Fournier scored a well deserved triumph with a "Scarpia" that was characterized by a touch of really sinister distinction. Hastings, incapable as he was of subtleties or refinements, did as usual all the obvious things pretty well and got the welcome he had so rightly counted upon. But Paula fell unmistakably short of winning the smashing success she had so ardently hoped for.

She did not, of course, fail. Wallace Hood, to take him for a sample of her admiring friends, went home assuring himself that her success had been all he or any of the rest of them could have wished. And he wrote that same night a letter to John Wollaston out at Hickory Hill saying as much. Her beauty, he told John, had been a revelation even to him and there could be no doubt that the audience had been deeply moved by it. Her acting also had taken him by surprise. It was a talent he had not looked for in her and he was correspondingly delighted by this manifestation of it. In the great scene with Fournier when he stated the terms of his abominable bargain to her, Wallace had hardly been able to realize it was Paula that he saw on the stage.

When it came to her singing (he knew John would want his most impartial honest judgment)--here where he had been surest of her, she came nearest to disappointing him. It was a shame, of course, to subject a lovely voice like hers to singing in the great vacancy of all outdoors, to say nothing of forcing it into competition with a shouter and bellower like Hastings. But he felt sure when she was a little better accustomed to her surroundings, she would rise superior even to these drawbacks.

This was somewhere near the facts, though stated with a strong friendly bias. Paula was nervous, never really got into the stride of her acting at all. The strong discrepancy between Fournier's methods and Hastings' served perhaps to prevent her getting into step with either. And she sang all but badly. There had been only one rehearsal in the pavilion and at that she had been content merely to sketch her work in, singing off the top of her voice. When she really opened up at the performance, the unfamiliar acoustics of the place frightened her into forcing, with the result that she was constantly singing sharp.

Paula herself, though disappointed, didn't feel too badly about it, knowing that all her difficulties were merely matters of adjustment, until she read what the critics said about her in the papers the next morning. What they said was not on the face of it, severe;--came, indeed, to much the same thing as Wallace Hood's verdict. But the picture between the lines which they unanimously presented, was of a spoiled beauty, restless for the publicity that private life deprived her of, offering in a winning manner to a gullible public, a gold brick.

Paula was furiously angry over this, justifiably, too. Her work had been professional even in its defects and deserved professional judgment. The case was serious, too, for if that notion of her once got fairly planted in the minds of her public, it would be almost impossible to eradicate it.

But Anthony March had not been mistaken when he spoke of her as a potential tamer of wild beasts. Her anger was no mere gush of emotions, to spend itself and leave her exhausted. It was a sort that hardened in an adamantine resolution. The next chance she got, she'd show them! Unluckily, she wasn't billed to sing again until toward the end of the week. It happened, however, that the Sunday papers, taking away with one hand, gave in a roundabout but effective fashion with the other.

The opera billed for that night was _Pagliacci_. A young American baritone with a phenomenal high A, was to sing "Tonio" and a new Spanish soprano was cast for "Nedda." When this young woman saw the Sunday papers she, too, went into a violent rage. Her knowledge of English was not sufficient to enable her to draw any comfort from the subtle cruelties which the critics had inflicted on Paula in the news section. But the music and drama supplements which had been printed days before, devoted as they were to the opening of the season, simply made Paula the whole thing. The Spanish young lady's rage was of a different quality from Paula's. She wept and stormed. She demanded like Herodias, the head of that press agent on a charger. Simply that and nothing more. And when she failed to get it, she went to bed.

The management, disconcerted but by no means at the end of its resources, decreed a change of the bill to _Lucia_. They were ready to go on with _Lucia_ which had been billed for Tuesday night. All they needed was to bring the scenery out from town in a truck. This they ordered done; but at five o'clock, about two miles south of the park, the truck went through a bridge culvert and rolled all the way to the bottom of a ravine. The driver escaped with his life but the production of _Lucia_ was smashed to splinters.

Mary chanced upon this piece of information and brought it straight to Paula. "Tell them to go ahead with _Pagliacci_, then," Paula said. "I'll sing 'Nedda' myself. Get LaChaise on the phone and let me talk to him."

She did sing it without any rehearsal at all. And she gave a performance which for most of the persons who saw it, made her the, and the only, "Nedda"; though--or perhaps, because--she didn't give the part quite its traditional characterization; adapted it with the unscrupulousness of the artist to her own purpose.

Paula's "Nedda" was a sulky slattern, indifferent, lazy, smoldering with passion,--dangerous. The sensuous quality of her beauty had never been more apparent than it was in the soiled cheap mountebank fineries which she had worn for so many performances of the part in Europe. And this beauty, of course, did a lot of the work for her. Explained the tragedy all by itself. And, indeed, tragedy hung visibly over her from the moment of her first entrance upon the stage in the donkey cart. She was the sort of woman men kill and are killed for.

She played the part with an extreme economy of movement, with a kind of feline stillness which made her occasional explosions into action, as when she attacked Tonio with the whip, literally terrifying. She sang it carelessly and therefore in a manner absolutely gorgeous. She swept them all, critics as well as the immense audience, clean off their feet.

Also, by way of a foot-note, the managerial announcement that Madame Carresford had volunteered for the part at six o'clock, to rescue them from the necessity of closing the park and was to sing it absolutely without rehearsal, exploded for all time the notion that there was anything of the amateur about her.

"You can do anything," LaChaise told her as she came out into the wings. And he kissed her on both cheeks rather solemnly, in the manner of one conferring a decoration. In full measure pressed down and running over, that was how Paula's success came to her.


CHAPTER XVII

THE WAYFARER

By the time Paula had got back to her dressing-room after the long series of tumultuous curtain calls was over, the rush of her friends to express their congratulations in person had begun. After the _Tosca_, performance she had been adamant about seeing anybody but to-night with a laugh she said, "I don't care. For a few minutes. If they're people I really know."

So Mary took her station beside the Rhadamanthus at the stockade gate--in a proper opera-house, he would have been the stage door-keeper--to pick out the sheep from the goat-like herd of the merely curious who, but for firm measures, would have stormed the place. Those who came down again, pushed out by the weight of new arrivals, lingered about the gate talking things over with Mary. It amused her to see how radically their attitude had changed. Such people as the Averys, the Cravens and the Byrnes, who in a social way had known Paula well, seemed to regard her now as a personage utterly remote, translated into another world altogether. And when they asked about John Wollaston, as most of them did, there was an undertone almost of commiseration about their inquiries, though on the surface this didn't go beyond an expressed regret that he hadn't been here to witness the triumph.

Mary drove them all away at last, even the lingerers in Paula's dressing-room, left her safely in the hands of her dresser and went out into the automobile park to get her car. Coming up softly across the grass and reaching in to turn on the lights, she was startled to discover that there was a man in it. But before she had time more than to gasp, she recognized him as her father. "I didn't want to push my way in with the mob," he explained, after apologizing for having frightened her. "The car, when I spotted it, seemed a safe place to wait. And the privacy of it," he added, "will be grateful, too, since I'm not perfectly sure that Paula won't refuse outright to see me."

Mary smiled at this and said she hoped he hadn't missed the performance.

"No," he told her somberly, "I didn't miss--any of it." Then on a different note, "Now we'll see whether those dogs of critics won't change their tune."

"Paula herself changed the tune," Mary observed. Then, "She's longing to see you, of course. And there's no reason why you should wait. No one's with her now except her dresser."

She led the way, without giving him a chance to demur, to the gate to the stockade and turned him over to the gatekeeper.

"Please take Doctor Wollaston up to his wife's dressing-room," she said. And with a