In the warm, subdued light of a double lamp with apricot glass shades
Howat Penny was turning over the pages, stiff with dry paste, of an
album filled with opera programmes. The date of the brief, precisely
penned label on the black cover was 1883-84; it was the first of a
number of such thick, recording volumes he had gathered; and the operas,
the casts, were of absorbing interest. At once a memento of the heroic
period of American music and of his first manhood, the faded crudely
embellished strips of paper, bearing names, lyric tenors and sopranos of
limpid, bird-like song long ago lost in rosy and nebulous clouds of
fable and cherished affection, roused remembered pleasures sharper than
any calm actuality of to-day. He paused with a quiet exclamation, the
single glass adroitly held in his left, astigmatic, eye fastened on the
announcement of a famous evening, a famous name. His sense of the leaf
before him blurred in the vivid memory of Patti, singing Martha in the
campaign brought by Mapleson in the old Academy of Music against the
forces of the new Metropolitan Opera House. He had been one of a
conservative number that had supported the established opera, declaring
heatedly that the Diva and Mapleson were an unapproachable musical
combination, before which the shoddier magnificence of its rival,
erected practically in a few summer months, would speedily fade.
Nevertheless, he recalled, the widely heralded performance had been
coolly received. Patti, although she had not perceptibly failed in
voice, had been unable to inspire the customary enthusiasm; and the
scene at the evening's end, planned to express her overwhelming triumph
and superiority, when the horses had been taken from her carriage and it
had been dragged by hand to the portal of the Windsor Hotel, had been no
better than perfunctory. The wily Mapleson had arranged that beforehand,
Howat Penny realized, with a faint, reminiscent smile on his severe
lips--the "enthusiastic mob" had been coldly recruited, at a price, from
the choristers. Another memory of Patti, and of that same performance,
flooded back--the dinner given her in the Brunswick. He saw again the
room where, on a divan, she had received her hosts, the seventy or more
men of fashion grouped in irreproachable black and white, with her suave
manager, the inevitable tea rose in his lapel, on a knee before Adelina,
kissing her hand. The dinner had been laid in the ball room, lit with a
multitude of wax candles. The features, appearance, of the more
prominent men, of Mahun Stetson and Daly and William Steinway, were
clear still. The original plan had been to include ladies at the
dinner, but the latter, affecting outrage at the Diva's affair with the
Marquis de Caux, had refused to lend their countenance to the singer's
occasion. His smile broadened--this was so characteristic of New York in
the eighties. How different it had been; but it was no better, he added
silently, now.
It was mid-August, and the air floating in through an open door was
ladened with the richness of ultra-luxuriant vegetation, the persistent,
metallic whirring of locusts, the mechanical repetition of katydids. One
of the owls that inhabited the old willow tree before the house cried
softly.... How different! He straightened up from the book open on his
knees, and the glass fell with a small clatter over his formal, starched
linen, swinging for an instant on its narrow ribbon. The unwavering lamp
light was deflected in green points through the emeralds of his studs.
The thought of bygone, gala nights of opera fastened on him with a
peculiar significance--suddenly they seemed symbolic of his lost youth.
Such tides of impassioned song, such poignant, lyric passion, such
tragic sacrifice and death, were all in the extravagant key of youth.
The very convention of opera, the glorified unreality of its language,
the romantic impossibility of its colour, the sparkling dress like the
sparkling voices and blue gardens and gilded halls, were the authentic
expression of the resplendent vagaries of early years.
The winter of eighty three and four; his first season of New York
music. The autumn before he had returned from the five years spent in
Europe, in Paris practically, with Bundy Provost, related to him by a
marriage in the past generation, through the Jannans. He had gone abroad
immediately after his graduation as a lawyer; and in the indolent
culture of the five Parisian years, he now realized, he had permanently
lost all hold on his profession. At his return he had drifted
imperceptibly into an existence of polite pleasure. It had been
different with Bundy; he had gone into the banking house of Provost,
lately established in New York; and, with the extraordinary pertinacity
and acumen sometimes developed by worldly and rich young men, he had
steadily risen to a place of financial importance. An opening had, of
course, been offered to Howat Penny when he had definitely decided not
to settle in Philadelphia, where the Pennys had always been associated,
and pursue the law. And, at first, he had occupied a desk in the Provost
counting rooms. But he had soon grown discontented, he disliked routine
and a clerk's condition; and, after two years of annoyed effort,
withdrew to lead a more congenial existence on a secure, adequate
income.
"It was a mistake," he said aloud, in a decided, clearly modulated
voice, gazing blankly into the warm stillness of the room. It had come
partly from his innate impatience with any inferior state whatever, and
part from the old inability to identify himself with the practicalities
of existence. He had always viewed with distaste the apparently
necessary compromises of successful living; the struggle for money,
commercial supremacy, seemed unendurably ugly; the jargon and
subterfuges of financial competition beneath his exacting standard of
personal dignity. That had been his expression at the time--permeated by
an impatient sense of superiority; but now he felt that there was
something essential lacking in himself. An absence of proper balance.
Solely concerned with the appearance, the insignificant surface, of such
efforts as Bundy Provost's, their moving, masculine spirit had evaded
him. Yes, it had been a mistake. He had missed the greatest pleasure of
all, that of accumulating power and influence, of virile achievement.
Well, it was over now; he was old; his life, his chance, had gone; and
all that remained were memories of Patti smiling disdainfully in the
flare of oil torches about her carriage; the only concrete record of so
many years the scrap books such as that on his knees.
It had been an error; yet there had been, within him, no choice, no
intimation of a different, more desirable, consummation. Bundy had gone
one way and himself another in obedience to forces beyond their
understanding or control. They had done, briefly, what they were. There
was no individual blame to attach, no applause; spare moralizing to
append. He returned to the pages before him, to the memories of the
radiant Ambre and Marimon, the sylvan echoes of Campanini singing
Elvino.
Now his recovered glass was intent on a programme of the rapidly
successful Metropolitan forces, of the new German Opera, with
Seidl-Krauss singing Elizabeth, and Brandt in _Fidelio_. Even here,
after so long, he vibrated again to the exquisite beauty of Lenore's
constancy and love. Then Dr. Damrosch dead, the sonorous funeral in the
Opera House ... That had been changed with the rest; the baignoires were
gone, the tiers of boxes newly curved; gone the chandeliers and Turkey
red carpet and gold threaded brocade that had seemed the final
expression of luxury. Lehmann in the premier of _Tristan und Isolde_,
with the vast restrained enthusiasm and tensity when, at the end of the
third act, Niemann bared his wounded breast. Eames' rise; but that, and
what followed, were in successive books. He closed the one under his
hand.
As the years drew nearer the present their features became larger, more
indistinct, their music grew louder, dissonant. He had retired further
and further from an opera, a life, with which he was increasingly out of
harmony. Or rather, he added, life moved away from the aging. It was as
if the surrounding affair became objective; as if, once a participant in
a cast--a production, however, less than grand--he had been conducted to
a seat somewhere in the midst of a great, shadowy audience, from which
he looked out of the gloom at the brilliant, removed spectacle. The
final fact that had taken him from the setting of so many of his years
had been the increasing expense of a discriminating existence in New
York. Again his distaste for anything short of absolute nicety had
dictated the form and conditions of his living. When the situation of
his rooms had definitely declined, and the cost of possible
locations--he could not endure a club--became prohibitive; when his once
adequate, unaugmented income assumed the limitations of a mere
sufficiency; and when, too, the old, familiar figures, the swells of his
own period and acquaintance had vanished one by one with their vanishing
halls of assembly--he had retreated to the traditional place of his
family. He had gone back to the home of the Pennys in America.
Not, however, to Myrtle Forge itself, the true centre of his
inheritance. The house there had been uninhabited since his father's
early years; it was a closed and melancholy memento; he had reanimated a
comfortable stone dwelling at Shadrach Furnace; its solid grey façade
drawn out by two happy additions to the original, small square. It had
been, traditionally, at first, the house of the head furnacemen;
sometime after that, perhaps a hundred years, Graham Jannan, newly
married, had lived there while occupied with the active manufacture of
iron; and three summers back he, Howat Penny, the last Penny now, had
returned to the vicinity of Jaffa.