Instead of the Christmas season making Thurley homesick, it lent a
vivacious joy that caused Ernestine Christian and Polly Harris to marvel
at her development. The atmosphere of the city had its foothold. She
thought, if at all, of the Christmas preparations in Birge’s Corners,
with passing scorn.
Thurley’s thoughts had been rather well regulated by routine until she
was left with but scant time for reminiscence. No lesson had been done
away with but more added. She spent twice as much time at Hobart’s
studio, either with him or with the Bohemian singing teacher whom she
loathed but who knew how to guide her voice into unsurpassed channels.
Then there were hateful languages to conquer and, if she disliked the
social secretary or the gymnast or the corps of other workers who were
making her “ready” to sing for her supper on the opera stage, they
continued to appear at regular intervals until Thurley realized that
Bliss Hobart had had method in his madness, for he had seen the need of
curbing a rebellious and turbulent spirit, one that tired too quickly
of routine for its own good. In reality, he was teaching her the grind,
which most artists never escape, in a condensed and merciful fashion.
Thurley was beginning to realize even more of this great question
of “values.” In the old days at the Corners when gray, sullen moods
conquered her sunny self, she had been wont to take refuge within the
box-car wagon or the hilly cemetery, to sob without reason or plan
rebellions of which neither Dan nor Betsey Pilrig could have had the
slightest understanding! Now she called a taxi and drove through the
parks or out suburban roads, thinking the same quality of thoughts with
different and widely varied guises and returning, as she had done from
the box-car wagon or cemetery, light hearted, dangerously glad for
every one, singing like a meadow lark and insisting on doing things for
whosoever might come her way almost to the extent of exaggeration.
Formerly, when saddish longings and presentiments would sweep over the
wild rose Thurley, she had tramped through the pine woods as sturdily as
a soldier under his captain’s orders, tramping, tramping, tramping up
through the amphitheater of hills which lay outside the town. Finally,
she would come upon a pasture clearing and here she would sit, exhausted
but filled with sweet contentment, at the “top of the world” she fondly
called it, looking down at the little village which seemed a cardboard
play-town and dreaming of the day when she should stand at the top of the
world to sing and all the cardboard towns in the universe should listen
and applaud.
In New York, Thurley took another method when pessimism interrupted
common sense routine. She went to the piano and practised until her
throat gave warning to cease and she could again face the world as the
wild-rose-with-a-prophecy-of-the-hothouse-variety Thurley, baby of the
great “family,” an interesting young goddess who seldom voiced an opinion
but who could sweep away opinions if she sang a ballad (unbeknownst to
her present audience) with thoughts of Dan or Philena or the old days in
the wagon as the inspiration!
During those effervescent moods of abandon which fairly intoxicated all
those who saw Thurley under their spell—back in the Corners—she had
always rushed down to the emporium and coaxed Dan away on a frolic—a
picnic, if summer, or skating, if winter. They would sit, these two, on
the porch of a deserted lake mansion dreaming dreams of a lyric quality
with a sincerity which made both the boy and the girl the better for
having dreamed them! Thurley would weave garlands of wild flowers—Dan
gathering them—and she would come home to Betsey Pilrig, her cheeks
like roses and her eyes like stars, singing a spring song and causing
Betsy to lapse into Ali Baba’s favorite expression, “Land sakes and Mrs.
Davis—Thurley, be you from another world?”
The joyous moods, these days, came very seldom. To some degree they
happened when Ernestine told her that Hobart was pleased with her
progress or when Polly Harris kissed her and said she was a little
sister to the great; some faint imitation of them was experienced when
Caleb took her motoring and told her his humorous troubles or when she
went with Miss Clergy and Hobart to the first opera—“Rigoletto”—and saw
with the grave, conceited eyes of youth herself outshining the present
_Gilda_—herself standing with outstretched arms to acknowledge the
applause. The wild joy was felt for half an instant when Collin Hedley
said he would paint the infant before her début—there would be no fun
at all in painting her when she was famous and unapproachable, waving
engagement tablets at a mere artist.
Thurley came to realize clearly the difference in the inspiration of her
joy—the joy which had been her solace during the gray, hungry days of
childhood. In Birge’s Corners supreme mirth came from smell of new mown
hay, with sunshine sparkling all about, or the summer breeze kissing
the little curls at the delicious nape of her white, soft neck—it was
generated by the discovery of the first violets or the exhilaration of a
skating party with Dan, by some baby’s laughing face or Betsey’s pleased
smile—and most of all by Dan’s ardor. Thurley told herself with almost
shamed admission that her values had changed.
But if Thurley changed quickly during the winter, Miss Clergy stayed the
same feeble, at times querulous, ghost lady, always willing for Thurley
to go to places without her, trusting the girl as one would trust a
matron, content, now that she had roused from her neurotic lethargy, to
lapse into a semi-doze with a vigilant eye for only two things—to have
Thurley succeed as a _spinster_ and to have no one become personally
acquainted with her own withered self lest memories be unearthed over
which she mourned in vain.
So Thurley came and went at will and the family became used to the fact
that the infant’s benefactress was a “character.” For that matter the
family themselves were characters with pet “phobias” and hobbies and
theories, to say nothing of scars, cotton-wooled and well protected from
the bromidic world.
It was Christmas week when Thurley experienced a savage mood—anger really
the stimulus—for she had bought a supply of frocks and hats preparatory
to the “family’s” Christmas festivities when Ernestine wrote her a note
from Chicago, where she was playing engagements, saying that she would
not be home until January and she was writing before Christmas purposely
because she never had believed in the holiday and neither gave nor
accepted gifts; therefore she wished the child-Thurley all good things
and to work as hard as she could; she would see her within a few weeks.
The savage mood began to manifest itself as Thurley read the careless
note. Like the writer, its force and decision were unquestionable.
Thurley had prepared gifts for all members of the family in the same
impulsive fashion as for every one she had loved back at the Corners.
She went to the bureau drawer and opened it to examine them—they seemed
garish and absurd. She was not yet at the topnotch of fame which allows
one to do whatsoever one will and have it accepted. If she had made her
début and chosen to present Ernestine Christian with one of those gilded
rolling pins with a regiment of hooks which hung on the doors of many of
the best families in the Corners, it would have been received in resigned
silence. As it was, the purse she had chosen for Ernestine was probably
not at all what she would have liked; Thurley would give it to the
room maid instead. She would think it quite wonderful and carry it for
shopping or Sunday mass!
She looked at the handkerchiefs she had for Polly Harris—but Polly would
probably make some sarcastic squib at their expense and never be seen
with one protruding from her smock pocket. No, the handkerchiefs would
do for the social secretary and the antique leather box for Caleb she
would press upon the gymnast, while the book on art originally intended
for Collin would be relegated to the scrap heap! Thurley laughed aloud
as she thought of giving Collin a book on art—when Collin, foremost
portrait painter in America, had written a book on art which was used
as an authority by the younger school ... well, it had not been so very
long since she had bought her gifts at Dan’s store with Dan refusing
her money and had done them up in white tissue and the reddest of red
ribbon, flying about like a good fairy on Christmas Eve to leave them
at doorsteps! After re-reading Ernestine’s note, Thurley came to the
conclusion that Christmas was not for those afflicted with exaggerated
ego but merely for those who held good jobs.
She had bought no present for Sam Sparling or Mark Wirth, the latter
still abroad, and as for Bliss Hobart, her fingers fearfully touched the
carved idol—a metal Buddha mounted on teakwood. Why she had selected it,
after endless excursions to endless shops, Thurley did not know—perhaps
it was because she had never seen one in his office where there was
everything else under the sun from a Filipino kris to a bibelot which
had belonged to Marie Antoinette. Or perhaps there was another reason—at
any rate, she had recklessly bought the idol and sacrificed her spending
money for a month to come, blushing furiously each time she planned what
to write on the accompanying card.
She could hardly give the Buddha to a bellboy and she had purchased black
gloves for Miss Clergy, the presents for Betsey, Ali Baba and Hopeful
being on their way.
She pushed the Buddha back in the drawer and went to her lesson with
Hobart with a reserved, patronizing manner which amused him and his
amusement, in turn, angered Thurley.
Fame seemed something which would strangle everything commonplace and
joyous, Thurley thought, as she mechanically did her exercises. These
persons were so _ultra_, so fond of “_my_ taste in dress”—“the way I
eat _my_ artichokes”—“the sort of wall paper in _my_ studio”—so over
developed and emphasized that they made clever, well bred fun of the
“pastoral joys,” as Ernestine named them, all the while amusingly
unconscious of the whine of conceit which crept into their voices
whenever they made a drastic statement.
There ought to be a refined, sulphitic, fumigated holiday just for this
sort of people, Thurley thought. She was driving home and watching the
crowds of shoppers laden with packages who tried to make their way across
the street. They were good-natured crowds because they were buying
something for some one else and she longed to leave the cab and be one
with them, to jostle and sway together until the traffic signal was given
and then to dash across to reach a crosstown car and to end, breathless,
disordered of hat and hair but happy, in some small home where the
packages were relegated to the top shelf and a recital of the day’s
happenings told to the master of the household over a supper of steak,
coffee and baker’s pie!
Up to this moment Thurley had not experienced homesickness, but as
the cab shot on in patrician fashion she began recalling the fattened
turkey they would have at Birge’s Corners and the way Betsey had made
her pudding and Christmas cakes days before, as well as the nights Dan
had called for her to have her aid in trimming the store windows with
make-believe fireplaces and tinsel stars; the way the boys and girls went
into the woods for the smallest fir trees and decorated the church until
it was “a bower of beauty,” according to the _Gazette_ report; how the
choir would practise the Christmas anthem and carols night after night
with Thurley directing, playing the organ and singing. On Christmas
morning would come the service with Thurley, the envy of every girl in
town because of her new pin or bracelet or chain which Dan had given her,
singing “The Birthday of a King” in a glorious, clear voice—like some
one permitted to sing down from the clouds for an instant!
Oh, it was good to remember—_good?_—Thurley’s eyes filled with tears. She
told the man to drive on until she ordered him to turn back to her hotel.
She laughed as she snuggled down in the machine, drawing a robe over her
lap and prepared to dream-remember. As she did so, she recalled Caleb
Patmore’s saying to Ernestine one afternoon at tea,
“I’m going into the ooze again.” To which Ernestine answered,
“Jolly lark, isn’t it? Don’t make it a habit or you may slip into it
altogether—then you would be helpless.”
“Take the advice for yourself,” he had retorted, to which she nodded
her head and the subject was dropped. When Thurley asked her about it,
Ernestine said with a trace of confusion,
“You child, you’re not ready for any ‘ooze’ game yet; you are still in
it in actuality to an extent. When you begin to want to go to nerve
specialists and are not hungry enough for bread and butter but keen on
frosted cake as it were, knowing nothing but work and wanting to know
nothing but play, when your day’s program—not the one written by your
press agent—is as impossible as a typewritten love letter, you’ll find
the ooze. I’ll show you how to find it.”
But Thurley had insisted, like a true Pandora, upon knowing and so
Ernestine good-naturedly tried to explain.
“My nice creature, when people are so famous they experience loneliness
because they are quite shut away from those who are quite famous, they
cannot exist on work no matter in what line their talent may be—nor on
lollipop praise of the public nor carping criticisms. They must have
an antidote. Yet they cannot sacrifice their relentless system of life
which takes a first mortgage on their time and energy. So while you hear
of us as having huge poultry farms and see our pictures taken in the
act of garroting a red pepper from Madame So and So’s truck farm where
she spends most of her time when not—and so on, or read an interview
in which one of us declares a submarine boat to be our favorite siesta
spot, please know it is not true. But throughout the years of endless
work and surrender of the mystical force constituting genius, we have
just to be children—and pretend. There, that is the whole thing in a
nutshell—pretend just as children fancy themselves policemen, motormen,
kings and fairy queens all the while swallowing the mortification of
domineering nurses and bibs. We live with our memories, many times, if
they are pleasant. How rich a confession Caleb could wring out of us, if
he were not so sluggish! We dream-play, fancy, create a world within a
world. Bliss Hobart in a fit of cynicism—I noticed he began taking pepsin
the following week—named it ‘the ooze’—and it became our trade name for
it. The ooze, the unreal, really unimportant and absurd, yet ready to be
lived with and yet to vanish, the state of mind which we people as we
wish and live house-and-garden lives for as much as half an hour at a
time! You may not give this credence, but it is quite as real as my piano
or Collin’s brush. And heaven grant you won’t need the ooze, Thurley,
for a little! Still, it is a lovely, plastic state of thought—like those
lavender and gold butterflies you find lingering in the corners of
Whistler’s paintings or that flutter in the margins of special editions.”
“Why don’t you have the—the ooze be real—live a fifty-fifty sort of
existence?” Thurley borrowed Dan’s slang.
“It would be like blending chilblains and poetry or mosquitoes and
mahogany—impossible! That is why they say all genius is a trifle mad.
Remember, the ooze is your best friend! Why, after a fatiguing concert,
I’ve played I was the bustling, happy mother of half a dozen youngsters,
the type of American housewife who does all her work except the washing
and whose hands grow red and hardened yet are sparkling with diamonds,
whose children grow up and adore her—I’ve lived in a red brick house
with those diamond-shaped panes at the front windows and dotted muslin
curtains criss-crossed—you know—and I’ve entertained bridge clubs galore,
making mayonnaise and maple parfait myself while the baby was napping—”
and when Thurley had clamored for a clearer understanding, Ernestine
ordered her off to study her French and forget she shared the secret of
the “ooze.”
“What is Bliss Hobart’s ooze?” she had insisted.
“I think he plays he runs an ice cream soda fountain in Harlem,”
Ernestine had answered to be rid of her. At the time Thurley had
seriously questioned Ernestine’s sanity.
But this snowy December night the ooze became very real to her and,
unknowingly, Thurley passed a telling boundary line of progress. She
dreamed on of Birge’s Corners—she saw the Christmas entertainment taking
place. There was the awful make-believe chimney which the Sunday-school
superintendent, invariably the thinnest man in town, was to descend,
fragments of his cotton beard floating about the stage after the feat
was accomplished. She could see the primary class waving the red satin
banner symbolic of the best attendance—strange, how excellent is the
Sunday-school attendance during holiday season—and then marching on
the stage to sing in a series of mouse-like squeaks, “Jolly Old Saint
Nicholas” while their teacher, in love with Jo Drummer, the Santa Claus,
stood below to direct them and wonder if Jo was properly impressed with
her maternal devotion and her new hat.
Then the minister “delivered” a few remarks and Lorraine came on the
stage to hand out tarlatan stockings with nuts and hard candies which
accompanied the gifts. After laborious recitations by tortured boys with
slicked-back hair and freckles pale because of the excitement, the town
elocutionist let loose with “How They Brought the Good News from Aix to
Ghent” or “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and about at this juncture the
stage chimney would crash down and reveal the truth—it was nothing but a
lot of brick-paper pasted on Dan Birge’s store boxes!
Well, it was fun to play that one was taking part in the entertainment
and showing off a little, as every one else did, including the minister,
to smell, in imagination, the pines and evergreens and to visualize Dan
Birge, the handsomest lad in the assemblage, winking at her during the
minister’s address!
The river wind swept in through the lowered taxicab window-pane and
Thurley leaned forward to say, “Home, please”—the ooze drifting
obediently away. She was Thurley Precore, the Thurley with rejected
Christmas gifts and the prospect of a hotel holiday dinner in company
with Miss Clergy who would nap most of the day!
Yet the ooze had stimulated Thurley; she could always go slipping back to
the Corners to relive the homey things which had made her a wild rose. It
appeared to be tremendously comforting and she went a step further in
self-analysis, telling herself, as she was going up to the hotel rooms,
that the thing which made great people lapse into the ooze for tangled
up nerves and snarly frames of mind was the thing which made sarcastic,
aloof Ernestine Christian play a gypsy dance with the wild fire its
author intended it to have or gave Caleb the power to invent an entirely
new setting for the same old, “Will you love me?” or told Collin how to
forget the ingrowing chin of his subject and make it strong and masterful
still _looking like_ the ingrowing original—here, Thurley took the lesson
home for she, too, was crystallizing her personality. It gave Thurley the
ability to feel that she was Juliet in the tomb or Rosina having that
delightful music lesson with her masquerading lover, it was temperament,
psychic masquerading! There, that was a much nicer name than the ooze and
when she was famous enough she would tell Bliss Hobart so and make him
admit his clumsiness of nomenclature.
After which exhilaration came the hint of a warning—Miss Clergy’s years
of uselessness were the result of just such “psychic masquerading” fed by
revenge and disappointment. After all, was this ooze merely confined to
the great? Would they not have to yield a point and admit they had much
in common with their neighbors?