Mary Wollaston Part 17

It had been a terrible week for them all, she said. Especially for Rush and for his Aunt Lucile, who had been here from the beginning. Even the few hours since her own return this morning had been enough to teach her how nearly unendurable that sort of helplessness was.

It must have been in this connection that he told her what had not got round to her before, the case of his sister Sarah whom they had watched as one condemned to death until John Wollaston came and saved her. "He simply wouldn't be denied," March said. "He was all alone; even his colleagues didn't agree with him. And my father, having decided that she was going to die and that this must, therefore, be the will of G.o.d, didn't think it ought to be tampered with.

"I remember your father said to him, 'Man, the will of G.o.d this morning is waiting to express itself in the skill of my hands,' and it didn't sound like blasphemy either. He carried father off in his ap.r.o.n, just as he was, to the hospital and I went along. I sc.r.a.ped an acquaintance afterward with one of the students who had been there in the theatre watching him operate and got him to tell me about it. They felt it was a historic occasion even at the time; cheered him at the end of it. And that sort of virtuosity does seem worthier of cheers than any sc.r.a.ping of horsehair over cat-gut could ever come to. I wonder how many lives there are to-day that owe themselves altogether to him just as my sister does.--How many children who never could have been born at all except for his skill and courage. Because, of course, courage is half of it."

Upon Mary the effect of this new portrait of her father was electrifying; eventually was more than that--revolutionary. These few words of March's served, I think, in the troubled, turbid emotional relation she had got into with her father, as a clarifying precipitant.

But that process was slower; the immediate effect attached to March himself. The present wonder was that it should have been he, a stranger, equipped with only the meagerest chances for observation, who, turning his straying search-light beam upon the dearest person to her in the world, should thus have illuminated him anew. Even after he had gone it was the man rather than the things he had said that she thought about.

Amazingly, he had guessed--she was sure she had given him no hint--at the part Paula was playing in their domestic drama. It had come pat upon what he had told her of the lives her father had plucked from the hand of death, the ironic, "he saved others, himself he can not save," hanging unspoken in their thoughts.

"Paula will be fighting for his life," he said. "Magnificently. That must be one of your hopes."

She had confirmed this with details. She got the notion, perhaps from nothing more than his rather thoughtful smile, that he comprehended the whole thing, even down to Aunt Lucile. Though wasn't there a phrase of his,--"these uninhibited people, when it comes to getting things _done_ ..." that slanted that way? Did that mean that he was one of the other sort? Wasn't your ability to recognize the absence of a quality or a disability in any one else, proof enough that you had it yourself? It would never, certainly, occur to Paula to think of any one as "uninhibited."

But the opposed adjective didn't fit him. She couldn't see him at all as a person tangled, helpless, in webs of his own spinning;--neither the man who had written that love song nor the man who had sat down in his chair again after Rush had slammed the door.

He wasn't even shy but he was, except for that moment when a vivid concern over John Wollaston's illness brought him back, oddly remote, detached. He might have been a Martian, when in response to her leading he discussed Paula with her; how good a musician she was; how splendidly equipped physically and temperamentally for an operatic career. "She has abandoned all that now, I suppose," he said. "Everything that goes with it. She would wish, if she ever gave us a thought, that LaChaise and I had never been born."

Mary would have tried to deny this but that the quality and tone of his voice told her that he really knew it and that, miraculously, he didn't care. She had exclaimed with a sincerity struck out of her by amazement, "I don't see how you know that."

"Paula's a conqueror," he had answered simply, "a--compeller. 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-cla.s.s 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 a.s.sure 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 a.s.surance 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 ma.n.u.script 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 but he can't."

"I suppose I made an infernal fool of myself," he remarked, after a little silence.

She blew, for answer, an impudent smoke ring up into his face.

He continued grumpily to cover his relief that she had not been more painfully explicit,--"I suppose I shall have to make up some sort of d.a.m.ned apology to him."

"I don't know," she said. "That's as you like. I don't believe he'd insist upon it. He understood well enough."

He looked at her intently. "Has there been any better news from father since I went out?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Except that there's been none. Every hour now that we aren't sent for counts. What made you think there might have been?"

He said he didn't know. She looked a little more cheerful somehow, less--tragic. Evidently her visit to the Corbetts had done her good.

His eye fell once more on the ma.n.u.script. "Did he go off and forget that?" he asked. "Or did he mean to leave it for Paula? And what shall we do with it,--hand it over to her or send it back?"

Thoughtfully Mary straightened the sheets and closed the cover. "I'll take care of it for him," she said.