Mary Wollaston Part 29

CHAPTER XIX

THE DRAMATIST

Mary returned to Ravinia--went on duty, as she put it to Wallace--the following afternoon rather taut-drawn in her determination to have things out with Paula at once. But the mere att.i.tude and atmosphere of the place, as before, let her down a little.

It was restful to have her days filled up with trivial necessary duties; an hour's errand running in the small car; a pair of soiled satin slippers to clean with naptha; a stack of notes to answer from such unknown and infatuate admirers as managed to escape the cla.s.sification feebleminded and were ent.i.tled therefore to have the fact recognized (this at a little desk in the corner while Novelli at the piano and Paula ranging about the room, ran over her part in half-voice in the opera she had rehea.r.s.ed yesterday with the orchestra and was to sing to-night), a run to the park for a visit to Paula's dressing-room in the pavilion in order to make sure, in conference with her dresser, that all was in order for to-night; a return to the cottage in time to heat Paula's milk (their maid of all work couldn't be trusted not to boil it); then at seven, driving Paula to the park for the performance, spending the evening in her dressing-room or in the wings chatting sometimes with other members of the force whom she found it possible to get acquainted with; occasional incursions into the front of the house to note how something went or, more simply, just to hear something she liked; driving Paula home again at last, undressing her; having supper with her--the most substantial meal of the day--talking it over with her; and so, like Mr.

Pepys--to bed.

It might shock Wallace Hood, a schedule like that, but there were days when to Mary it was a clear G.o.d-send.

She decided within the first twenty-four hours to wait for some sort of lead from Paula before plunging into a discussion of her father's affairs. It would take the edge off if the thing weren't too glaringly premeditated. Paula just now was doing all she could. Mary opened all her mail and would know if any offer came in that involved future plans. She accepted the respite gratefully.

She had a use to put it to. For the first two or three days after her return, she had not been able to turn to anything that a.s.sociated itself with Anthony March without such an emotional disturbance as prevented her from thinking at all. The mere physical effect of those sheets of score paper was, until she could manage to control it, such as to make any continuance of the labor of translating his opera, impossible.

By a persistent effort of will she presently got herself in hand however and went on not only with her translation but with the other moves in her campaign to get _The Outcry_ produced. Her first thought was that something might be accomplished directly through LaChaise. Her simple plan had been to make friends with him so that when she urged the arguments for producing this work, they'd be--well--lubricated by his liking for her.

She began saying things to him on a rather more personal note, things with a touch of challenge in them. There was no gradual response to this but suddenly--a week or ten days after her return from Hickory Hill this was--he seemed to perceive her drift. He turned a look upon her, the oddest sort of look, startled, inquiring, lighted up with a happy though rather incredible surmise. It was an exclamatory look which one might interpret as saying, "What's this! Do you really mean it!"

Mary got no further than that. She didn't mean it, of course, a serious love-affair with LaChaise, and she tried for a while to feel rather indignant against an att.i.tude toward women which had only two categories; did she offer amorous possibilities or not. An att.i.tude that had no half lights in it, no delicate tints of chivalry nor romance. LaChaise would do nothing for the sake of her blue eyes. He had no interest whatever in that indeterminate, unstable emotional compound that goes, between men and women, by the name of friendship.

She tried to call this beastly and feel indignant about it, but somehow that emotion didn't respond. She had more real sympathy for and understanding of an att.i.tude like that than she had for one like Graham's. It was simpler and more natural. It involved you in no such labyrinths of farfetched absurdities and exasperating cross-purposes as Graham's did.

It was characteristically,--wasn't it?--a Latin att.i.tude; or would it be fairer to say that its ant.i.thesis as exemplified by Graham was a northern specialty? She extracted quite a bit of amus.e.m.e.nt from observing some of the results of individual failures to understand this fundamental difference, all the more after she had Jimmy Wallace to share observations with. He was a dramatic critic, but he consented to take a fatherly, or better avuncular, interest in the Ravinia season during the month of his musical colleague's vacation.

The special episode they focused upon was Violet Williamson's flirtation with Fournier. She was a pretty woman, still comfortably on the east side of forty, socially one of the inner ring, spoiled, rather, by an enthusiastic husband but not, thanks to her own good sense, very seriously. James Wallace was an old and very special friend of hers and she commandeered his services as soon as he appeared at Ravinia, in her campaign for possession of the French baritone.

Mary had reflected over this and talked it out pretty thoroughly with Jimmy before it occurred to her that she might be able to turn it to her own account--or rather to her lover's. For that matter, why not, while she had him under her hand, recruit Jimmy as an aid in the campaign?

"Do you mind being used for ulterior purposes?" she asked him.

He intimated that he did not if they were amusing, as any of Mary's were pretty sure to be.

"I'm interested in an opera," she told him, "or rather, I'm very much interested in a man who has written one. Father and I have agreed that he's a great person and everybody seems willing 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 repet.i.tion 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 a.s.sertion 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 const.i.tute 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 fact.i.tious 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 pa.s.sion 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?"