Tante Part 1

Tante.

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick.

PART I

CHAPTER I

It was the evening of Madame Okraska's concert at the old St. James's Hall. London was still the place of the m.u.f.fled roar and the endearing ugliness. Horse-'buses plied soberly in an unwidened Piccadilly. The private motor was a curiosity. Berlin had not been emulated in an altered Mall nor New York in the facades of giant hotels. The Sat.u.r.day and Monday pops were still an inst.i.tution; and the bell of the m.u.f.fin-man, in such a wintry season, pa.s.sed frequently along the foggy streets and squares. Already the epoch seems remote.

Madame Okraska was pausing on her way from St. Petersburg to New York and this was the only concert she was to give in London that winter. For many hours the enthusiasts who had come to secure unreserved seats had been sitting on the stone stairs that led to the balcony or gallery, or on the still narrower, darker and colder flight that led to the orchestra from Piccadilly Place. From the adjacent hall they could hear the strains of the Moore & Burgess Minstrels, blatant and innocuously vulgar; and the determined mirth, anatomized by distance, sounded a little melancholy. To those of an imaginative turn of mind it might have seemed that they waited in a tunnel at one far end of which could be perceived the tiny memory of tea at an Aerated Bread shop and at the other the vision of the delights to which they would emerge. For there was no one in the world like Madame Okraska, and to see and hear her was worth cold and weariness and hunger. Not only was she the most famous of living pianists but one of the most beautiful of women; and upon this restoring fact many of the most weary stayed themselves, returning again and again to gaze at the pictured face that adorned the outer cover of the programme.

Illuminated by chill gas-jets, armed with books and sandwiches, the serried and devoted ranks were composed of typical concert-goers, of types, in some cases, becoming as extinct as the m.u.f.fin-man; young art-students from the suburbs, dressed in Liberty serges and velveteens, and reading ninepenny editions of Browning and Rossetti--though a few, already, were reading Yeats; middle-aged spinsters from Bayswater or South Kensington, who took their weekly concert as they took their daily bath; many earnest young men, soft-hatted and long-haired, studying scores; the usual contingent of the fashionable and economical lady; and the pale-faced business man, bringing an air of duty to the pursuit of pleasure.

Some time before the doors opened a growing urgency began to make itself felt. People got up from their insecurely balanced camp-stools or rose stiffly from the stone steps to turn and stand shoulder to shoulder, subtly transformed from comrades in discomfort to combatants for a hazardous reward. The field for personal endeavour was small; the stairs were narrow and their occupants packed like sardines; yet everybody hoped to get a better seat than their positions ent.i.tled them to hope for. Hope and fear increased in intensity with the distance from the doors, those mute, mystic doors behind which had not yet been heard a c.h.i.n.k or a shuffle and against which leaned, now balefully visible, the earliest comers of all, jaded, pallid, but insufferably a.s.sured. The summons came at length in the sound of drawn bolts and chains and a peremptory official voice, blood-tingling as a trumpet-call; and the crowd, shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot, with rigid lips and eyes uplifted, began to mount like one man. Step by step they went, steady and wary, each pressing upon those who went before and presenting a resistant back to those who followed after. The close, emulous contacts bred stealthy strifes and hatreds. A small lady, with short grey hair and thin red face and the conscienceless, smiling eye of a hypnotized creature, drove her way along the wall and mounted with the agility of a lizard to a place several steps above. Others were infected by the successful outlawry and there were some moments of swaying and striving before the crowd adjusted itself to its self-protective solidity.

Emerged upon the broader stairs they ascended panting and scurrying, in a wild stampede, to the sudden quiet and chill and emptiness of the familiar hall, with its high-ranged plaster cupids, whose cheeks and b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thighs were thrown comically into relief by a thick coating of dust. Here a permanent fog seemed to hang under the roof; only a few lights twinkled frugally; and the querulous voice of the programme-seller punctuated the monotonous torrent of feet. Row upon row, the seats were filled as if by tumultuous waters entering appointed channels, programmes rustled, sandwiches were drawn from clammy packets, and the thin-faced lady, iniquitously ensconced in the middle of the front row in the gallery, had taken out a strip of knitting and was blandly ready for the evening.

"I always come up here," said one of the ladies from Kensington to a friend. "One hears her pianissimo more perfectly than anywhere else.

What a magnificent programme! I shall be glad to hear her give the Schumann Fantaisie in C Major again."

"I think I look forward more to the Bach Fantaisie than to anything,"

said her companion.

She exposed herself to a pained protest: "Oh surely not; not Bach; I do not come for my Bach to Okraska. She belongs too definitely to the romantics to grasp Bach. Beethoven, if you will; she may give us the Appa.s.sionata superbly; but not Bach; she lacks self-effacement."

"Liszt said that no one played Bach as she did."

Authority did not serve her. "Liszt may have said it; Brahms would not have;" was the rejoinder.

Down in the orchestra chairs the audience was roughly to be divided into the technical and the personal devotees; those who chose seats from which they could dwell upon Madame Okraska's full face over the shining surfaces of the piano or upon her profile from the side; and those who, from behind her back, were dedicated to the study of her magical hands.

"I do hope," said a girl in the centre of the front row of chairs, a place of dizzy joy, for one might almost touch the G.o.ddess as she sat at the piano, "I do hope she's not getting fat. Someone said they heard she was. I never want to see her again if she gets fat. It would be too awful."

The girl with her conjectured sadly that Madame Okraska must be well over forty.

"I beg your pardon," a ma.s.sive lady dressed in an embroidered sack-like garment, and wearing many strings of iridescent sh.e.l.ls around her throat, leaned forward from behind to say: "She is forty-six; I happen to know; a friend of mine has met Madame Okraska's secretary. Forty-six; but she keeps her beauty wonderfully; her figure is quite beautiful."

An element of personal excitement was evident in the people who sat in these nearest chairs; it const.i.tuted a bond, though by no means a friendly one. Emulation, the irrepressible desire to impart knowledge, broke down normal barriers. The ma.s.sive lady was slightly flushed and her manner almost menacing. Her information was received with a vague, half resentful murmur.

"She looks younger," she continued, while her listeners gave her an unwilling yet alert attention. "It is extraordinary how she retains her youth. But it tells, it tells, the tragic life; one sees it in her eyes and lips."

The first girl now put forward with resolution her p.a.w.n of knowledge.

"It has been tragic, hasn't it. The dreadful man she was married to by her relations when she was hardly more than a child, and the death of her second husband. He was the Baron von Marwitz; her real name is von Marwitz; Okraska is her maiden name. He was drowned in saving her life, you know."

"The Baron von Marwitz was drowned no one knows how; he was found drowned; she found his body. She went into a convent after his death."

"A convent? I was reading a life of her in a magazine the other day and nothing was said about a convent."

The ma.s.sive lady smiled tolerantly: "Nothing would be. She has a horror of publicity. Yes, she is a mystic as well as an artist; she only resigned the religious life because of what she felt to be her duty to her adopted daughter. One sees the mystical side in her face and hears it in her music."

Madame Okraska was one of those about whose footsteps legends rise, and legend could add little to the romantic facts of her life;--the poverty of her youth; her _debut_ as a child prodigy at Warsaw and the sudden fame that had followed it; the coronets that had been laid at her feet; her private tragedies, cosmopolitan friendships, her scholarship, caprices and generosities. She had been the Egeria, smiling in mystery, of half a dozen famous men. And it was as satisfactory to the devotee to hear that she always wore white and drank coffee for her breakfast, as that Rubinstein and Liszt had blessed her and Leschet.i.tsky said that she had nothing to learn. Her very origin belonged to the realm of romantic fiction. Her father, a Polish music-master in New Orleans, had run away with his pupil, a beautiful Spanish girl of a good Creole family. Their child had been born in Cracow while the Austrians were bombarding it in 1848.

The lights were now all up and the stalls filling. Ladies and gentlemen from the suburbs, over early, were the first comers; eager schoolgirls marshalled by governesses; scrupulous students with music under their arms, and, finally, the rustling, shining, chattering crowd of fashionable London.

The ma.s.sive lady had by now her little audience, cowed, if still slightly sulky, well in hand. She pointed out each notability to them, and indirectly, to all her neighbours. The d.u.c.h.ess of Bannister and Lady Champney, the famous beauty; the Prime Minister, whom the girls could have recognized for themselves, and Sir Alliston Compton, the poet. Had they read his sonnet to Madame Okraska, last year, in the "Fortnightly"?

They had not. "I wonder who that odd looking girl is with him and the old lady?" one of them ventured.

"A little grand-daughter, a little niece," said the ma.s.sive lady, who did not know. "Poor Sir Alliston's wife is in a lunatic asylum; isn't it a melancholy head?"

But now one of her listeners, a lady also in the front row, leaned forward to say hurriedly and deprecatingly, her face suffused with shyness: "That nice young girl is Madame Okraska's adopted daughter. The old lady is Mrs. Forrester, Madame Okraska's great friend; my sister-in-law was for many years a governess in her family, and that is how I come to know."

All those who had heard her turned their eyes upon the young girl, who, in an old-fashioned white cloak, with a collar of swansdown turned up round her fair hair, was taking her place with her companions in the front row of the orchestra-stalls. Even the ma.s.sive lady was rapt away to silence.

"But I thought the adopted daughter was an Italian," one girl at last commented, having gazed her fill at the being so exalted by fortune.

"Her skin is rather dark, but that yellow hair doesn't look Italian."

"She is a Norwegian," said the ma.s.sive lady, keeping however an eye on the relative of Mrs. Forrester's governess; "the child of Norwegian peasants. Don't you know the story? Madame Okraska found the poor little creature lost in a Norwegian forest, leaped from her carriage and took her into her arms; the parents were dest.i.tute and she bought the child from them. She is the very soul of generosity."

"She doesn't look like a peasant," said the girl, with a flavour of discontent, as though a more apparent rusticity would have lent special magnanimity to Madame Okraska's benevolence. But the ma.s.sive lady a.s.sured her: "Oh yes, it is the true Norse type; their peasantry has its patrician quality. I have been to Norway. Sir Alliston looks very much moved, doesn't he? He has been in love with Madame Okraska for years."

And she added with a deep sigh of satisfaction: "There has never been a word whispered against her reputation; never a word--'Pure as the foam on midmost ocean tossed.'"

Among the crowds thronging densely to their places, a young man of soldierly aspect, with a dark, narrow face, black hair and square blue eyes, was making his way to a seat in the third row of stalls. His name was Gregory Jardine; he was not a soldier--though he looked one--but a barrister, and he was content to count himself, not altogether incorrectly, a Philistine in all matters aesthetic. Good music he listened to with, as he put it, unintelligent and barbarous enjoyment; and since he had, shamefully, never yet heard the great pianist, he had bought the best stall procurable some weeks before, and now, after a taxing day in the law courts, had foregone his after-dinner coffee in order not to miss one note of the opening Appa.s.sionata; it was a sonata he was very fond of. He sometimes picked out the air of the slow movement on the piano with heavy deliberation; his musical equipment did not carry him as far as the variations.

When he reached his seat he found it to be by chance next that of his sister-in-law, his brother Oliver's wife, a pretty, jewelled and jewel-like young woman, an American of a complicatedly cosmopolitan type. Gregory liked Betty Jardine, and always wondered how she had come to marry Oliver, whom he rather scorned; but he was not altogether pleased to find her near him. He preferred to take his music in solitude; and Betty was very talkative.

"Well, this is nice, Gregory!" she said. "You and Captain Ashton know each other, don't you. No, I couldn't persuade Oliver to come; he wouldn't give up his whist. Isn't Oliver dreadful; he moves from the saddle to the whist-table, and back again; and that is all. Captain Ashton and I have been comparing notes; we find that we have missed hardly any of Madame Okraska's concerts in London. I was only ten when I heard the first she ever gave here; my governess took me; and actually Captain Ashton was here on that day, too. Wasn't she a miracle of loveliness? It was twenty years ago; she had already her European reputation. It was just after she had divorced that horrible first husband of hers and married the Baron von Marwitz. This isn't your initiation, of course, Gregory?"

"Actually my initiation," said Gregory, examining the portrait of Madame Okraska on the cover of the programme.

"But you've seen her at Mrs. Forrester's? She always stays with Mrs.

Forrester."

"I know; but I've always missed her, or, at all events, never been asked to meet her."

"I certainly never have been," said Betty Jardine. "But Mrs. Forrester thinks of me as frivolity personified, I know, and doesn't care to admit anything lower than a cabinet minister or a poet laureate when she has her lion domiciled. She is an old darling; but, between ourselves, she does take her lions a little too seriously, doesn't she. Well, prepare for a _coup de foudre_, Gregory. You'll be sure to fall in love with her. Everybody falls in love with her. Captain Ashton has been in love with her for twenty years. She is extraordinary."

"I'm ready to be subjugated," said Gregory. "Do people really hang on her hands and kiss them? Shall I want to hang on her hands and kiss them?"

"There is no telling what she will do with us," said Lady Jardine.

Gregory Jardine's face, however, was not framed to express enthusiasm.

It was caustic, cold and delicate. His eyes were as clear and as hard as a sky of frosty morning, and his small, firm lips were hard. His chin and lower lip advanced slightly, so that when he smiled his teeth met edge to edge, and the little black moustache, to which he often gave an absent upward twist, lent an ironic quality to this chill, gay smile, at times almost Mephistophelian. He sat twisting the moustache now, leaning his head to listen, amidst the babel of voices, to Betty Jardine's chatter, and the thrills of infectious expectancy that pa.s.sed over the audience like breezes over a corn-field left him unaffected. His observant, indifferent glance had in it something of the schoolboy's barbarian calm and something of the disabused impersonality of worldly experience.

"Who is the young lady with Mrs. Forrester?" he asked presently. "In white, with yellow hair. Just in front of us. Do you know?"