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

to admit that he's a musical genius. Paula considered the opera, but gave it up after she had kept him working over it for weeks because the soprano part wasn't big enough. It would be just the thing for Fournier."

Jimmy raised the language difficulty. "The book's in English, I suppose," he said.

"It's been translated into French," Mary said, and then admitted authorship by adding, "after a fashion; as well as an amateur like me could do it." She didn't mind a bit how much Jimmy knew. Not that he wasn't capable of very acute surmises but that whatever he brought up he wouldn't have the flutters over.

"Does Fournier like it himself?" he wanted to know. "Does he see the personal possibilities in it, I mean?"

"I haven't shown it to him yet," Mary said. "I want him to hear about it in just the right way first. If Paula would only say just the right thing! She means to but she forgets. LaChaise would back her up, I think, if she took the lead. Otherwise ... well, he isn't looking for trouble, I suppose, and of course, it would mean a lot."

"Somebody has to put his back into an enterprise of that sort," Jimmy observed.

"I can't, directly," she said, "not with LaChaise nor with Mr. Eckstein. But you see," she went on, "if Violet happened to hear, from somebody who was in the way of getting inside information, about a small opera that had a sensational part for a baritone, she'd work it and make her husband too, and since he's one of the real backers and a friend of Mr. Eckstein's, they'd be likely to accomplish something."

"Lead me to it," said Jimmy. "Give me your inside information and leave Violet to me."

He got a little overflow from the fulness of her heart at that that would have rewarded him amply for a more arduous and less amusing prospect than he was committed to. It was always touch and go whether this summer plunge into musical criticism wouldn't bore him frightfully. Pretentious solemnities of any kind were hard for him to tolerate and an opera season is, of course, stuffed with these, even a democratized blue-penciled out-of-doors affair like this. It was a great relief to find him a mind as free from sentimental resonances as Mary Wollaston's swimming about in it. They saw eye to eye over a lot of things.

They were in whole-hearted agreement for example about a certain impresario, Maxfield Ware, who created a sensation among the company and staff by turning up ostentatiously unaccounted for from New York and looking intensely enigmatical whenever any one asked him any questions. He was a sufficiently well-known figure in that world for surmises to spring up like round-eyed dandelions wherever he trod.

It wasn't long before everybody knew, despite the concealments which his ponderous diplomacy never cast aside, that his objective was Paula. She divined this before he had made a single overt move in her direction and pointed it out to Mary with a genuine pleasure sounding through the tone of careless amusement she chose to adopt.

"You wouldn't have anything to do with a person like that, would you?" Mary was startled into exclaiming. "Of course, if he were genuinely what he pretends to be and the things he boasts were true...."

"Oh, he's genuine enough," said Paula. "A quarter to a half as good as he pretends and that's as well as the whole of that lot will average. Though he isn't the sort you and John would take to, for a fact."

It was not the first time Mary had found herself bracketed with her father in just this way. It wasn't a sneering way, hardly hostile. But Mary by the second or third repetition began reading an important significance into it. Paula in her instinctive fashion was beginning to weigh alternatives, one life against the other, a thing it wasn't likely she had ever attempted before.

There was a tension between John and Paula which Mary saw mounting daily over the question of his next visit to Ravinia. Paula wanted him, was getting restless, moody, as nearly as it was possible for her to be ill-natured over his abstention. Yet it was evident enough that she had not invited him to come; furthermore, that she meant not to invite him. Once Mary would have put this down to mere coquetry but this explanation failed now to satisfy altogether. There was something that lay deeper than that. Some sort of strain between them dating back, she surmised, to the talk her father had referred to down in North Carolina in the jocular assertion that he had told Paula she would have to begin now supporting the family. Had the same topic come up again during his visit to Ravinia?

The perception of this strain in their relation increased Mary's reluctance to bring the topic up herself, in default of a lead from Paula, out of nowhere. It almost seemed as if Paula consciously avoided giving her such a lead, sheered away whenever she found they were "getting warm" in that direction.

There were hours when the undertaking she had committed herself to with Wallace Hood seemed fantastic. Between two persons like her father and Paula a meddler could make such an incalculable amount of mischief. All the current maxims of conduct would support her in a refusal to interfere. It was exclusively their affair, wasn't it? Why not let them settle it in their own way?

Yet there were other hours when she put her procrastinations down to sheer cowardice. This occurred whenever she got a letter from her aunt at Hickory Hill.

Miss Wollaston was a dutiful but exceedingly cautious correspondent, but beneath the surface of her brisk little bulletins were many significant implications. Rush had made two or three trips to town for consultations with Martin Whitney ... Doctor Steinmetz, presence unaccounted for, had been a guest one day at lunch... Graham's father had come out one Saturday and after he had been exhaustively shown over the place the men had talked until all hours.... The building program was to be curtailed for the present; to be resumed, perhaps when prices weren't so high nor labor so hard to get.... The new Holstein calves had come. Mary had been told, hadn't she, of the decision to constitute the herd in this manner instead of buying all milking cows.... Sylvia, declaring that Rush and Graham had got too solemn to live with, had finally obeyed her mother and gone home to the Stannards' summer place at Lake Geneva.

Mary read these letters to Paula as they came in the hope of provoking some question that would make it possible to tell John Wollaston's wife the tale of his necessities, but nothing of the sort happened. Paula did observe (a little uneasily?) apropos of Steinmetz' visit:

"John says he's taken quite a fancy to him. He told me he was going to get him to come out if he could."

The other casts brought up nothing whatever.

As it happened Mary paid dear for her procrastination. Paula sent her into town one day with a long list of errands, a transparently factitious list, which, taken in connection with an unusual interest she displayed in the item of lunch, made it more than sufficiently plain to Mary that for the day she wasn't wanted at Ravinia.

She concealed, successfully she thought, the shock she felt at these new tactics of Paula's, studied the list and said she thought she should be able to return on the three o'clock train. She made a point however of not coming back until the four-fifteen. It was nearly six before she got back to the cottage, but the contented lazy tone in which Paula from up-stairs answered her hail, made it plain that her tardiness had not been remarked. However Paula had spent her day, the upshot of it was satisfactory.

"Shall I come up?" Mary asked.

"Come along," Paula answered. "I'm not asleep or anything and besides I want to talk to you."

"I think I got everything you want," Mary said from Paula's doorway, "or if not exactly, what will do just about as well."

Paula, stretched out on the bed rather more than half undressed, with the contented languor of a well fed lioness yet with some passion or other smoldering in her eyes, made no pretense at being interested in Mary's success in executing her commissions.

"I had Max to lunch to-day," she said. "I knew you hated him and then it was complicated enough anyway. I suppose it might have been better if I'd told you so right out instead of making up all those things for you to do in town, but I couldn't quite find the words to put it in somehow and I had to have it out with him. He's been nagging at me for a week and he's going away to-morrow. He's given me until then to think it over."

There was no use trying to hurry Paula. Mary took off her hat, lighted a cigarette and settled herself in the room's only comfortable chair before she asked, "Think what over?"

"Oh, the whole thing," said Paula. "What he's been harping on for the last week.--He _is_ a loathsome sort of beast," she conceded after a little pause. "But he's right about this. Absolutely."

Was her father ever fretted, Mary wondered, by this sort of thing? Did his nerves draw tight, and his muscles, too, waiting for the idea behind these perambulations to emerge?

"I can imagine a lot of things that Mr. Maxfield Ware would be right about," she observed. "Which one is this?"

"About me," said Paula. "About what I'd have to do if I wanted to get anywhere. He thinks I've a good chance to get into the very first class, along with Garden and Farrar and so on. And unless I can do that, there's no good going on. I'd never be happy as a second rater. Well, that's true. And my only chance of getting to the top, he says, is in being managed just right. I guess that's true, too. He says that if I take this Metropolitan contract that LaChaise has been talking about, go down to New York as one of their 'promising young American sopranos' to sing on off-nights and fill in and make myself generally useful, I simply won't have a chance. They wouldn't get excited about me whatever happened. They'd go on patronizing me and yawning in my face no matter how good I was. I'd do just as well, he says, so far as my career is concerned, to stay right here in Chicago and get Campanini to give me two or three appearances a season;--make a sort of amateur night of it for the gold coast to buzz about. I'd have a lot easier time that way and it would come to the same thing in the end. And he says that unless I want to go in for his scheme, that's what I'd better do. Well, and he's right. I can see that, plainly enough."

Mary refrained from asking what Max's scheme was. She'd learn, no doubt, in her stepmother's own good time. She nodded a tentative assent to Max's general premises and waited.

"He certainly was frank enough," Paula went on after a while. "He wants to make a real killing he says. Something he's never quite brought off before. He says the reason he's always failed before is that he's had to go and mix a love-affair up with it somehow. He's either fallen in love with the woman or she