The episode between Leo Stenak and Patricia Fentriss was headlong as a
torrent. She heard him before she saw him; heard, rather, his violin,
expression and interpretation of his innermost self. The raucous
sweetness of his tone, which he overemphasises and sentimentalises, and
which is the cardinal defect of his striking and uneven style, floated
out to her as she stood, astonished, in the exterior hallway of Edna
Carroll's flat.
When it died into silence, she supposed that the number was over and
entered just as he was resuming. Her first impression was of a plump,
sallow, carelessly dressed youth with hair almost as shaggy as her own,
and the most wildly luminous eyes she had ever looked into, who turned
upon her an infuriated regard and at once pointedly dropped his bow.
His savage regard followed her while she crossed the room to speak to
her hostess.
This was no way to treat high-spirited Pat. Quite deliberately she took
off gloves and wrap, handed them to the nearest young man and remarked
to the violinist:
"It's very nice of you to wait. I'm quite fixed now, thank you."
A vicious snort was the only response. The accompanist who had trailed
along a bar or two before appreciating the interruption, took up his
part, and the melody again filled the air. In spite of her exacerbated
feelings, Pat recognised the power and distinction of the performance.
Nevertheless, she refrained from joining in the applause which followed
the final note.
At once the musician crossed to her, which was exactly what she had
intended.
"You don't like music," he accused, glowering.
"I love it," retorted Pat.
"Then you don't like my music."
"Better than your manners."
"I care nothing for manners. I am not a society puppet."
"If you were, perhaps you would have waited to be presented."
"I am Leo Stenak," said he impressively.
If not unduly impressed, Pat was at least interested. She remembered
the name from having heard Cary Scott speak of a youthful violinist
named Stenak who had appeared at a Red Cross concert the year before
and for whom he had predicted a real career, "if he can get over his
cubbish egotism and self-satisfaction."
"I've heard of you," she remarked.
"The whole world will hear of me presently," he replied positively.
"Where did you hear?"
"From a friend of mine, Cary Scott."
Stenak searched his memory. "I never heard of him. An amateur?"
"Yes."
"Amateurs don't count," was his superb pronouncement.
"Any friend of mine counts," said Pat coldly, and turned her back upon
him. He flounced away exactly like a disgruntled schoolgirl.
"Don't mind Leo, Pat," said her hostess, coming over to her with a
smile of amusement. "He's a spoiled child; almost as much spoiled as
you are."
"I don't mind him," returned the girl equably, but inside she was
tingling with the sense of combat and of the man's intense and salient
personality. She was sure that he would come back to her.
Late in the evening he did, with a manifest effect of its being against
his judgment and intention, which delighted her mischievous soul. Most
of the others had left.
"They tell me you sing, Miss Fentriss," he began abruptly.
"A little," replied Pat, who had been devoting what she regarded as
hard and grinding work to her music for a six-month.
"Rag-time, I suppose." Contemptuously.
"_And_ others!"
"Know the _Chanson de Florian_?"
"Of course."
"Well, it's light sort of trash, but it has a melody. I've written my
own obbligato to it. If you like I'll play it with you."
"I don't like, at all, thank you."
"You owe me something for spoiling my andante when you came in. I
played wretchedly after that. You did something to me; I was too
conscious of you to get back into the music. Won't you sing for me?"
His manner was quite amenable now; his splendid eyes held and made
appeal to her.
"But I'm an amateur," she answered, still obdurate. "And amateurs don't
count."
"It isn't every amateur I'd ask. Come on!" He caught up his violin.
"Ready, Carlos?" he said to the accompanist.
Pat gave her little, reckless laugh. "Oh, _very_ well!"
She sang. It seemed to her that she was in exceptionally good voice,
inspired and upheld by the golden stream of counter-melody which
surged from the violin. At the close he looked at her intently and in
silence.
"Well?" queried Pat, thrilling with expectancy of merited praise.
"You sing rottenly," he replied with entire seriousness.
"Thank you!" Pat's sombre eyes smarted with tears of mortification.
"But you have a voice. Some of the notes--pure music. Your
method--horrible. You should practice."
"I've been practicing. A terrible lot."
"Pffooh! Fiddle-faddling. You amateurs don't know what work is!"
"Do you think my voice is worth working with?"
"Perhaps. It has beauty. You are beautiful, yourself. Where do you
live?"
Pat laughed. "What's the big idea, Mr. Stenak?"
"I will take you home when you go. I wish to talk to you."
"I'm not going home. I'm staying with friends downtown."
"Then I will take you there. May I?"
"Yes; if you'll play once more for me first."
Though it was quite a distance to her destination, Stenak did not offer
to get a taxi. He observed that as the night was pleasant, it would
be nice to walk part way, to which Pat, somewhat surprised, assented.
Immediately, and with no more self-consciousness than an animal, he
became intimately autobiographical. He told her that he was a Russian,
a philosophic anarchist, with no belief in or use for society's
instituted formulas: marriage, laws, government--nothing but the
eternal right of the individual to express himself to the utmost in his
chosen medium of life. All his assertiveness had left him; he talked
honestly and interestingly. Pat caught glimpses of a personality as
simple and, in some ways, as innocent as a child's; credulous, eager,
resolute, confident, trusting, and illumined with a lambent inner fire.
"I was rude to you at first," he confessed. "I am sorry. But I could
not help it. I am like that."
"You shouldn't be," she chided.
"Tell me what I should be and I will be it," he declared. "You could
make me anything. When you came into the room, even though I was angry,
there was a flash of understanding between us. You felt it, too?"
"I felt something," admitted she. "But I was angry, myself. How silly
of you to give yourself the airs of genius!"
"I have genius," he averred quietly.
Such profound conviction was in his tone that Pat was ready to believe
him. As they turned to the elevated stairs he asked:
"Will you come to my studio soon for music?"
"Who else will be there?"
"Nobody. Just you and I."
"No. I couldn't do that. Ask Mrs. Carroll and I'll come."
"Why should you not come alone? Are you afraid of me? That would be
strange."
"Of course I'm not afraid of you. But----"
"I will not make love to you. I will only make music to you."
Pat reflected that it might well prove to be much the same thing. When
she left him it was with a half promise.
Before the week was out she had gone to his studio. Within the
fortnight she had been there half a dozen times. She was drawn back
to him by the lure of his marvellous music--"I play for no one as I
play for you," he said--and by the fascination of his strange and
single-minded personality. Not only did he play for her, but he made
her sing, experimenting with her voice, pointing out her errors,
instructing her, laughing to shame her impatiences and little mutinies,
himself patient with the endurance and insight of the true artist. Ever
responsive to genuine quality of whatever kind, Pat let herself become
more and more involved in imagination and vagrant possibilities.
In the matter of love-making he was faithful to his word. While she
was his guest he never so much as offered to kiss her, rather to her
resentful disappointment, to tell the truth. But when, one November
afternoon, he was walking with her to where her car was waiting, he
said without preface:
"Colleen, I love you." He had taken to calling her Colleen after
hearing her sing an Irish ballad of that title. Pat liked it.
She gave her veiled and sombre glance. "Do you _really_ love me?"
"You know it. And you?"
"I don't know."
"I think you do."
"I think it would be very stupid of me to fall in love with you."
"Why?"
"We're not the same kind at all. Some day I shall marry and settle down
and be good and happy and correct, ever after. You don't believe in
marriage."
"I believe in love. And in faith to be kept between two who love. Don't
you?"
"When you play to me I do. You could make me believe anything then."
"Then come back, Colleen, and let me play to you."
"No," said Pat, in self-protective panic. She could not make herself
look at him.
"When are you coming again?"
"I don't know," she answered, and popped into her car as if it were
sanctuary. Wayward thoughts of his flame-deep eyes, his persuasive
speech, the subtle passion of his music made restless many nights for
her thereafter. Edna Carroll, suspecting the progress of the affair,
questioned her.
"What are you up to with Leo?"
"Just playing around."
"With fire?"
"He's got it all right, the fire. I wonder if it's the divine fire?"
"How seriously are you thinking of him, Pat?" Edna's piquant face was
anxious. "You wouldn't marry him?"
"Are you afraid for me?"
"No. For him."
"You're too flattering!"
"I'm in earnest. You'd ruin him. You're too selfish and too capricious
to be the mate of a genius. And he's going to be a great genius, Pat,
if he keeps himself straight and undivided. You'd divide him. He's
quite mad over you; told me so himself."
"How do you know I'm not mad over him?"
"God forbid! It would never last with you. Because he isn't your kind,
you'd grow away from him and he'd be wretched and that would react on
his music."
"And you think more of his music than of me," pouted Pat.
The artist in Edna Carroll, humble and slight in degree though it were,
spoke out the true creed of all artistry which is one. "Not of him. Of
his genius. Where you find genius you have to think of it and cherish
it above everything."
"Above love?" said Pat. She understood enough of this pure passion to
be a little daunted.
"Above everything," reaffirmed the other.
"You needn't be afraid. He doesn't want to marry me."
"Whether he does or not, it's a dangerous fascination for both of you."
Vacillating days followed for Pat. There was a week in which she did
not trust herself to see Leo. He telephoned and wrote frantically.
She did not answer his letters. But one day she met him fortuitously
on the street, and went to the studio with him. There he broke all
bounds, poured out the fire of his heart upon her: he loved her, wanted
her, needed her; she was part of his genius, without her he could
never reach his full artistic stature. She loved him, too; he felt it;
he knew it; he defied her to deny it, and she found that, under the
compulsion of his presence, she could not. He was going to Boston on
the following day, for a week. Would she come and join him, if only
for a day? She could make up some tale for her family; pretend to be
staying with a friend. And he would take her to a great singing-master,
the greatest, a friend of his whom he wanted to hear and try her voice.
Wouldn't she trust herself to him and come?
Pat denied him vehemently. But she was stirred and troubled to her own
passionate depths by his stormy yet controlled passion. He had not so
much as touched her hand.
In the hallway, as they went out, she turned to him and yielded herself
into his arms.
"Oh, _well_!" she murmured, her voice fluttering in her throat. "I
don't care. I'll come. Only--don't rush me. Give me time."
They parted with the one kiss of that embrace. Instantly she had
agreed, the spirit of adventure rose within her. She was recklessly
jubilant.
Three days of alternating morbid self-examination and flushed
excitement followed. She looked forward to the meeting not so much with
conscious physical anticipation as with the sense of something vivid
and bold and new coming, as relief, into the too monotonous pattern of
life.
The rendezvous was arranged by letter. She was to take a late afternoon
train, and he was to be at the Back Bay to meet her.
Looking from the window as the train pulled in she saw him restlessly
pacing the platform on the wrong side. He had on a new overcoat which
did not fit him and was incongruously glossy as compared with his
untidy hair and rumpled soft hat. As his coat slumped open, she was
conscious of an unpressed suit underneath. Probably greasy! At the
moment he dropped one of the brand new gloves in his hand--she could
not recall ever having seen him wear gloves--and bent awkwardly to
recover it. His head protruded; his collar, truant from its retaining
rear button, hunched mussily up, and she looked down with a dismal
revulsion of the flesh, upon an expanse of sallow, shaven neck.
Unbidden, vividly intrusive, there rose to the eyes of her quickening
imagination the image of Cary Scott, always impeccable of dress and
carriage, hard-knit of frame, exhaling the atmosphere of smooth skin
and hard muscle. In fancy she breathed the very aroma of him, clean,
tingling, masculine, and felt again the imperative claim of his arms.
From the groping figure below her, glamour fell like a decaying
garment. She forgot the genius, the inner fire; beheld only the outer
shell, uncouth, pulpy, nauseous to her senses.
With cheeks afire and chin high, she walked up the aisle, turned into
the ladies' room and found safe refuge there, until the train moved
on. At the South Station she took the next train back to New York. The
image of Cary Scott bore her unsolicited company. She went straight to
Edna Carroll with the story. Edna was alarmed, relieved, puzzled.
"But, after going so far, why--why--why?" she demanded.
In response Pat delivered one of those final and damning sentences upon
man which women express only to women:
"When I saw him that way I knew that his socks would be dirty."