Thurley’s début was the night of November sixteenth, nor was it
_Marguerite_ as she fondly hoped but as _Rosina_ in “The Barber of
Seville,” the rôle which she had so often sung during her lessons with
Hobart and in which she felt scant interest.
Returning with breathless memories of the beloved Old World as skilfully
shown her by her famous couriers, Thurley had waited with equal
breathlessness to find Bliss Hobart who had not sent her so much as a
penny post card during her weeks abroad.
She found him keen, alert, the personification of energy but as
noncommittal as to his summer as the sphinx, annoyed at some of Thurley’s
mistakes, a hint of nervousness at daring to bring her out so soon—in
short, a taskmaster with scant time for jokes or confidences. Indeed,
Thurley found herself snubbed by the entire family; they had their
parties without her, explaining that she needed her time for study and
preparation. Even Miss Clergy, who was refreshed from her summer, became
a mild sort of “goader-on.” As the hour for her triumph drew near, she
was irritable and impatient if Thurley wandered away for a walk, was five
minutes late or said her headache prevented a lesson.
It was annoying to have a grownup, cynical world suddenly center its
interest on Thurley, the wild-rose Thurley who had basked in the
Old-World beauties, responding to French vivacity, “toning in,” as Collin
said, to the mellowed charms of Spain and feeling at home directly upon
reaching London. Thurley longed to tarry on in Europe a year, she had
told Ernestine.
“It makes me feel unprepared; I see how very new and crude I am.” But
Ernestine had planned their schedule without thought as to Thurley’s
wishes, so on they went with Thurley learning how to travel and speak her
French, to dress, to practise all the things the social secretary had
labored to impart. She sent back impractical trifles to the inhabitants
of the Fincherie, writing to Miss Clergy dutifully, and mentally writing
whole volumes to Bliss Hobart yet seldom mentioning his name aloud.
So passed her summer. And after the weeks of preparation there came a
reaction, a bored languor, indifference to her success. Dreams seemed
dead and visions vanished; the girl Thurley who had exchanged love for
a career was some one else; surely, she had never heard tell of her. At
the present moment she was in a veritable squirrel cage, racing after
what seemed unattainable fame; she had so many persons to suit, so many
persons waited to hear and criticize her and yet there was only one
person whom she really wished to please. He had told her quite forcibly,
“As soon as you are nicely launched, Thurley, I’ve a contralto from
Argentine whom Baxter has in tow—stocky build and will have to bant, but
she has an organlike voice and can do wonders in Wagner—only she’ll take
time which, thank fortune, you did not.”
This Thurley took as a personal expression of relief and she went away
more bored and numbed than ever, thoroughly insolent to all who crossed
her path that day. Ernestine herself could not have achieved it better.
There was the introduction to the stage itself and her future associates.
Thurley thanked heaven for blasé indifference at that time. She
conducted herself at rehearsals with the poise of a diplomat and when she
sang the impassioned love scene in the singing lesson of “The Barber of
Seville” she almost laughed at the famous tenor who irritably accepted
this rôle with a “so-great-nobody,” as he mockingly informed Thurley,
rushing off to meet his last affinity and be properly comforted.
She began to see the truth of Lissa’s prophecy regarding the life of
opera singers. Yet this anesthesia of indifference spared her harsh
emotions or critical judgments. She was merely keeping her pledge, she
told herself night after night when she was finally alone with her
thoughts.
All of which won her the title of conceited and spoiled and certain to
fail. Bliss Hobart saw her ruse and kept his own counsel; Miss Clergy
thought it her eternal triumph over personal affection and whispered to
Thurley of her satisfaction. And when the great night of nights came
and Thurley, as unconcernedly as if she were at the old meeting house
on a Sunday morning, stood and accepted curtain calls and baskets of
flowers, trying not to remember the tenor’s repeated comment, “You
so-great-nobody, you been drinking witches’ broth,”—Thurley knew she had
succeeded. Her début was ended. Hereafter she was free to command her own
life—life was really beginning for her anew, since it had temporarily
stopped the day she left the Corners and these strange people had lived
it for her in a vicarious fashion. Now that she had won fame—with the
loss of love—she had won freedom and she was Thurley Precore, prima donna!
After the last act, when Thurley’s dressing-room was a buzz of animated
conversation and the scent of the flowers almost sickish, when her new
maid fluttered nervously about and Bliss Hobart came in to say, “I knew
you would—so there’s nothing to exclaim about, is there?”—and all the
sisters of the press clamored for “a word,” with others crowding about
and looking properly animated and delighted, Miss Clergy whispered,
“My darling, how proud I am,” and Thurley recoiled, she knew not why.
“A finer bridegroom than Dan Birge,” the ghost-lady was murmuring, “fame!
He is the finest bridegroom of all—fame, Thurley—and I’m so proud of you!”
Naturally there was a “party” which Thurley actually dreaded since she
felt she could not yet assert her independence. She was like a gay young
eaglet chained and longing to soar where she would! Yet she must sit
quietly and be praised and petted, the object of excessive sentiments,
just as family birthday dinners are a signal for numberless indulgences.
Thurley was eager to have done with the unusual, to live as she wished to
live.
That first opera was a distinct blur, just as the rehearsals were blurs
as soon as they ended. She realized she had jeopardized her liberty
in a psychic fashion and given her word to certain things. She had
finally served her apprenticeship and was now liberated. Why, she had
sung _Rosina_ just as she had often sung lullabies to tired children
or for Philena. Stupid world—God gave her a voice as He did brown hair
and blue eyes, to herself belonged no credit. Yet here they sat about
Bliss Hobart’s elegant supper table—Ernestine in her blue and gold and
leopard skin gown and Caleb beside her, Lissa in startling cerise and
jet trying to call Thurley “my darling child” and honeycomb her jealousy
of Mark who ogled her in silly fashion. There was Miss Clergy, the real
perpetrator of it all, who kept staring at her protégée in almost rude
fashion, trying to realize that she had finally achieved her revenge!
That was food and drink enough. Bliss Hobart was at Thurley’s right hand,
a manager at her left; there were some critics and society satellites
who had succeeded in being invited; Sam Sparling appeared with a girl
on each arm, as he flippantly explained; while Thurley was a radiant
but indifferent goddess, “the yellow peril,” according to Caleb’s
description, in her brocaded frock with trimmings of silver. So they
drank her health and sang her praises and all the time the wild-rose part
of her laughed at them because she had not done her best nor anything to
her mind which was unusual. In a different fashion, she had merely “sung
for her supper” as she had once done in Birge’s Corners!
When she reached the hotel, Miss Clergy wanted to talk and gloat, in
truth, over the evening’s event.
But Thurley shook her head. “I’m tired; even nightingales do nest,” she
said, picking up some letters.
They were mostly begging for trade from modistes and milliners but one in
a scraggling writing was post-marked “Birge’s Corners.”
Thurley opened it. After a moment she said in an even voice, “They are
well and Ali Baba has made a new stormshed for the front.... Dan and
Lorraine were married two days ago.” Then she went into her room, blowing
Miss Clergy a hypocritical kiss.
She was ashamed, as she lay down to sleep, that instead of thinking of
her newly acquired freedom and success she was envying Dan Birge and
Lorraine. Not even the sob sisters of the press would have guessed what
the new and incomparable prima donna thought on the night of her début.
It concerned neither her throat troubles nor her complexion, her possible
suitors nor her coming wealth. But the question asked itself time
without end: “Is it better to spoil one’s youth than to do nothing with
it?”
* * * * *
That same evening Dan and Lorraine, ill at ease in their overpowering
hotel suite eight squares away from Thurley’s hotel, had faced somewhat
the same query. For they had come to New York directly following their
wedding to spend a restless day with Thurley’s memory pursuing them like
a ghost.
Then Lorraine dared to voice the matter. “The paper says Thurley will
sing to-night,” she ventured.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go,” Dan answered.
They dropped the subject and spoke of the bromidic details concerning
the wedding gifts, what to do with duplicates and the color of the
living-room tapestry suite and the beauty of the Queen Anne walnut dining
room furnishings which every one said were in better taste than mahogany,
the new house with the wonderful fixtures, the electric plugs for lamps,
the revolving ice box, the white range, the pergola and sun parlor and
the iron deer which was ordered but not yet arrived. How happy two young
mortals could have been! Besides, there was the butler’s pantry—heaven
knows why it was dubbed butler’s pantry in the Corners—and the garage
with a washing rack, if you please! Then there was the wedding itself—a
proper chrysanthemum wedding with three bridesmaids, a matron of honor
and a ringbearer. Lorraine’s father had married them—“so sweet” as every
one agreed—and the church was a bower of blossoms while the wedding cake
was in white boxes with the initials of the bride and groom entwined in
gold. Lorraine’s wardrobe had been the only meagre thing and that, Dan
generously said, would soon be remedied. He had ordered a shower of
orchids for her to carry and given her a sunburst of diamonds, while her
wedding ring broke all Birge’s Corners’ precedents, for it was a platinum
circlet dotted with diamonds. The Corners did not know whether or not to
approve this last. It was “going some,” the younger generation said, and
the recently married girls boasting of plain and a trifle ponderous gold
bands said that they wouldn’t feel respectably married with that funny
kind of a ring, but then Lorraine’s father being a minister and every one
present at the church, they supposed it was all right—every one had her
own ideas.
Lorraine wore a new dress to the opera, one she had bought that morning.
Not yet accustomed to her husband’s generosity, she had visited a
second-rate shop to obtain the slimsy blossom pink silk with cheap
trimming. She had only her travelling coat of dark wool for a wrap and a
stupid hat breathing of home millinery.
She knew Dan was not pleased. As she looked at him in his tuxedo she
realized that she was not yet “used to being rich”; she would buy the
goods for dresses and make them herself, she could then have so many more.
“Will I do for to-night?” she asked timidly, knowing the contrast between
herself and Thurley would be cruelly unfair. She winced from it as any
woman would wince from having to sit beside the man she loved while he
watched the woman of his heart appear in beautiful triumph! Besides,
Lorraine had never been to a theater, her father not approving; she was
nervous lest she make some embarrassing _faux pas_.
“Yes, no one knows us in New York,” he said carelessly.
Then they watched Thurley in all her loveliness come on the stage in her
_Rosina_ costume of red, yellow and black lace. Lorraine glanced at Dan
as Thurley sang and triumphed and sang again and triumphed more and the
people near them kept asking who she was. Lorraine, with her pitiful
bargain frock, her unpowdered face and awkward bonnet, knew that a shadow
had fallen between Dan and herself—Thurley’s shadow—no longer a wild
rose, generous and kindly of heart, but a prima donna, the woman that Dan
would love hopelessly forever and a day.
She applauded Thurley generously, turning her wistful face to Dan’s to
say, “She is lovely, isn’t she?” But Lorraine knew that not even the new
house with its furnishings nor her wedding ring nor the diamond sunburst
could still all the pain of knowing that she had been “married for
spite”; she might be the most tender wife and excellent housekeeper in
the world yet she was not Thurley, lovely, tyrannical! And as she watched
the opera with Thurley its dominating note and Dan’s moody face now
defiant, now almost glad, she recalled the superstition about women who
married Birge men,—meek little creatures they were who lived only long
enough to bear a son and then smiled contentedly and were snuffed out
into the unknown!