From _Harper's Magazine_.
We were listening to Leila Burton's music--her husband, and Dick
Allport, and I--with the throb of London beating under us like the surge
of an ocean in anger, when there rose above the smooth harmonies of the
piano and the pulsing roar of the night a sound more poignant than them
both, the quavering melody of a street girl's song.
Through the purpling twilight of that St. John's Eve I had been drifting
in dreams while Leila had gone from golden splendors of chords which
reflected the glow on westward-fronting windows into somber symphonies
which had seemed to make vocal the turbulent soul of the city--for Dick
Allport and I were topping the structure of that house of life that was
to shelter the love we had long been cherishing. With Leila playing in
that art which had dowered her with fame, I was visioning the glory of
such love as she and Standish Burton gave each other while I watched
Dick, sensing rather than seeing the dearness of him as he gave to the
mounting climaxes the tense interest he always tendered to Leila's
music.
I had known, before I came to love Dick Allport, other loves and other
lovers. Because I had followed will-o'-the-wisps of fancy through
marshes of sentiment I could appreciate the more the truth of that flame
which he and I had lighted for our guidance on the road. A moody boy he
had been when I first met him, full of a boy's high chivalry and of a
boy's dark despairs. A moody man he had become in the years that had
denied him the material success toward which he had striven; but
something in the patience of his efforts, something in the fineness of
his struggle had endeared him to me as no triumph could have done.
Because he needed me, because I had come to believe that I meant to him
belief in the ultimate good of living, as well as belief in womanhood, I
cherished in my soul that love of him which yearned over him even as it
longed for him.
Watching him in the dusk while he lounged in that concentrated quiet of
attention, I went on piling the bricks of that wide house of happiness
we should enter together; and, although I could see him but dimly, so
well did I know every line of his face that I could fancy the little
smile that quivered around his lips and that shone from the depths of
his eyes as Leila played the measures we both loved. I must have been
smiling in answer when the song of the girl outside rose high.
Not until that alien sound struck athwart the power and beauty of the
spell did I come to know how high I had builded my castles; but the
knocking at the gate toppled down the dreams as Leila swept a discord
over the keyboard and crossed to the open window.
In the dusk, as she flung back the heavy curtains, I could see the bulk
of Brompton Oratory set behind the houses like the looming back-drop of
a painted scene. Nearer, in front of a tall house across the way, stood
the singer, a thin girl whose shadowy presence seemed animated by a
curious bravery. In a nasal, plaintive voice she was singing the words
of a ballad of love and of loving that London, as only London can, had
made curiously its own that season. The insistence of her plea--for she
sang as if she cried out her life's longing, sang as if she called on
the passing crowd not for alms, but for understanding--made her for the
moment, before she faded back into oblivion, an artist, voicing the
heartache and the heartbreak of womankind; and the artist in Leila
Burton responded to the thrill.
Until the ending of the song she stood silent in front of the window,
unconscious of the fact that she, and not the scene beyond her, held the
center of the stage. Not for her beauty, although at times Leila Burton
gave the impression of being exquisitely lovely, was she remarkable, but
rather for that receptive attitude that made her an inspired listener.
In me, who had known her for but a little while, she awakened my deepest
and drowsiest ambition, the desire to express in pictures the light and
the shade of the London I knew. With her I could feel the power, and the
glory, and the fear, and the terror of the city as I never did at other
times. It was not alone that she was all things to all men; it was that
she led men and women who knew her to the summits of their aspirations.
Even Standish Burton, big, sullen man that he was, immersed in his
engineering problems, responded to his wife's spiritual charm with a
readiness that always aroused in Dick and myself an admiration for him
that our other knowledge of him did not justify. He was, aside from his
relationship to Leila, a man whose hardness suggested a bitter knowledge
of dark ways of life. Now, crouched down in the depths of his chair, he
kept watching Leila with a gaze of smouldering adoration, revealing that
love for her which had been strong enough to break down those barriers
which she had erected in the years while he had worked for her in
Jacob's bondage. In her he seemed to be discovering, all over again, the
vestal to tend the fires of his faith.
Dick Allport, too, bending forward over the table on which his hands
fell clenched, was studying Leila with an inscrutable stare that seemed
to be of query. I was wondering what it meant, wondering the more
because my failure to understand its meaning hung another veil between
my vision and my shrine of belief in the fullness of love, when the
song outside came to an end and Leila turned back to us.
Her look, winging its way to Standish, lighted her face even beyond the
glow from the lamps which she switched on. For an instant his heavy
countenance flared into brightness. Dick Allport sighed almost
imperceptibly as he turned to me. I had a feeling that such a fire as
the Burtons kindled for each other should have sprung up in the moment
between Dick and me, for we had fought and labored and struggled for our
love as Standish and Leila had never needed to battle. Because of our
constancy I expected something better than the serene affectionateness
that shone in Dick's smile. I wanted such stormy passion of devotion as
Burton gave to Leila, such love as I, remembering a night of years ago,
knew that Dick could give. It was the old desire of earth, spoken in the
street girl's song, that surged in me until I could have cried out in my
longing for the soul of the sacrament whose substance I had been given;
but the knowledge that we were, the four of us, conventional people in a
conventional setting locked my heart as it locked my lips until I could
mirror the ease with which Leila bore herself.
"I have been thinking," she said, lightly, "that I should like to be a
street singer for a night. If only a piano were not so cumbersome, I
should go out and play into the ears of the city the thing that girl put
into her song."
"Why not?" I asked her, "It would be an adventure, and life has too few
adventures."
"It might have too many," Dick said.
"Not for Leila," Standish declared. "Life's for her a quest of joy."
"That's it," Dick interposed. "Her adventures have all been joyous."
"But they haven't," Leila insisted. "I'm no spoiled darling of the gods.
I've been poor, poor as that girl out there. I've had heartaches, and
disappointments, and misfortunes."
"Not vital ones," Dick declared. "You've never had a knock-out blow."
"She doesn't know what one is," Standish laughed, but there sounded a
ruefulness in his laughter that told of the kind of blow he must once
have suffered to bring that note in his voice. Standish Burton took life
lightly, except where Leila was concerned. His manner now indicated,
almost mysteriously, that something threatened his harbor of peace, but
the regard Leila gave to him proved that the threat of impending danger
had not come to her.
"Oh, but I do know," she persisted.
"Vicariously," I suggested. "All artists do."
"No, actually," she said.
"You're wrong," said Standish. "You're the sort of woman whom the world
saves from its own cruelties."
There was something so essentially true in his appraisal of his wife
that the certainty covered the banality of his statement and kept Dick
and myself in agreement with him. Leila Burton, exquisitely remote from
all things commonplace, was unquestionably a woman to be protected.
Without envy--since my own way had its compensations in full measure--I
admitted it.
"I think that you must have forgotten, if you ever knew," she said, "how
I struggled here in London for the little recognition I have won."
"Oh, that!" Dick Allport deprecated. "That isn't what Stan means. Every
one in the world worth talking about goes through that sort of struggle.
He means the flinging down from a high mountain after you've seen the
glories, not of this world, but of another, the casting out from
paradise after you've learned what paradise may mean. He spoke with an
odd timbre of emotion in his voice, a quality that puzzled me for the
moment.
"That's it," said Standish, gratefully. "Those are the knock-out blows."
"Well, then, I don't know them"--Leila admitted her defeat--"and I hope
that I shall not."
Softly she began to play the music of an accompaniment. There was a
familiar hauntingness in its strains that puzzled me until I associated
them with the song that Burton used to whistle so often in the times
when Leila was in Paris and he had turned for companionship to Dick and
to me.
"I've heard Stan murder that often enough to be able to try it myself,"
I told her.
"I didn't know he knew it," she said. "I heard it for the first time the
other day. A girl--I didn't hear her name--sang it for an encore at the
concert of the Musicians' Club. She sang it well, too. She was a queer
girl," Leila laughed, "a little bit of a thing, with all the air of a
tragedy queen. And you should have heard how she sang that! You know the
words?"--she asked me over her shoulder:
"And because I, too, am a lover,
And my love is far from me,
I hated the two on the sands there,
And the moon, and the sands, and the sea."
"And the moon, and the sands, and the sea," Dick repeated. He rose,
going to the window where Leila had stood, and looking outward. When he
faced us again he must have seen the worry in my eyes, for he smiled at
me with the old, endearing fondness and touched my hair lightly as he
passed.
"What was she like--the girl?" Standish asked, lighting another
cigarette.
"Oh, just ordinary and rather pretty. Big brown eyes that seemed to be
forever asking a question that no one could answer, and a little pointed
chin that she flung up when she sang." Dick Allport looked quickly
across at Burton, but Stan gave him no answering glance. He was staring
at Leila as she went on: "I don't believe I should have noticed her at
all if she hadn't come to me as I was leaving the hall. 'Are you Mrs.
Standish Burton?' she asked me. When I told her that I was, she stared
me full in the face, then walked off without another word. I wish that
I could describe to you, though, the scorn and contempt that blazed in
her eyes. If I had been a singer who had robbed her of her chance at
Covent Garden, I could have understood. But I'd never seen her before,
and my singing wouldn't rouse the envy of a crow!" She laughed
light-heartedly over the recollection, then her face clouded. "Do you
know," she mused, "that I thought just now, when the girl was singing on
the street, that I should like to know that other girl? There was
something about her that I can't forget. She was the sort that tries,
and fails, and sinks. Some day, I'm afraid, she'll be singing on the
streets, and, if I ever hear her, I shall have a terrible thought that I
might have saved her from it, if only I had tried!"
"Better let her sort alone," Burton said, shortly. He struck a match and
relit his cigarette with a gesture of savage annoyance. Leila looked at
him in amazement, and Dick gave him a glance that seemed to counsel
silence. There was a hostility about the mood into which Standish
relapsed that seemed to bring in upon us some of the urgent sorrows of
the city outside, as if he had drawn aside a curtain to show us a world
alien to the place of beauty and of the making of beauty through which
Leila moved. Even she must have felt the import of his mood, for she let
her hands fall on the keys while Dick and I stared at each other before
the shock of this crackle that seemed to threaten the perfection of
their happiness.
From Brompton came the boom of the bell for evensong. Down Piccadilly
ran the roar of the night traffic, wending a blithesome way to places of
pleasure. It was the hour when London was wont to awaken to the thrill
of its greatness, its power, its vastness, its strength, and its glory,
and to send down luminous lanes its carnival crowd of men and women. It
was the time when weltering misery shrank shrouded into merciful gloom;
when the East End lay far from our hearts; when poverty and sin and
shame went skulking into byways where we need never follow; when painted
women held back in the shadows; when the pall of night rested like a
velvet carpet over the spaces of that floor that, by daylight, gave
glimpses into loathsome cellars of humanity. It was, as it had been so
often of late, an hour of serene beauty, that first hour of darkness in
a June night with the season coming to an end, an hour of dusk to be
remembered in exile or in age.
There should have come to us then the strains of an orchestra floating
in with the fragrance of gardenias from a vendor's basket, symbols of
life's call to us, luring us out beneath stars of joy. But, instead, the
bell of Brompton pealed out warningly over our souls, and, when its
clanging died, there drifted in the sound of a preaching voice.
Only phrases clattering across the darkness were the words from
beyond--resonant through the open windows: "The Cross is always ready,
and everywhere awaiteth thee.... Turn thyself upward, or turn thyself
downward; turn thyself inward, or turn thyself outward; everywhere thou
shalt find the Cross;... if thou fling away one Cross thou wilt find
another, and perhaps a heavier."
Like sibylline prophecy the voice of the unseen preacher struck down on
us. We moved uneasily, the four of us, as he cried out challenge to the
passing world before his voice went down before the surge of a hymn.
Then, just as the gay whirl of cars and omnibuses beat once more upon
the pavements, and London swung joyously into our hearts again, the bell
of the telephone in the hall rang out with a quivering jangle that
brought Leila to her feet even as Standish jumped to answer its summons.
She stood beside the piano as he gave answer to the call, watching him
as if she expected evil news. Dick, who had moved back into the shadow
from a lamp on the table, was staring with that same searching gaze he
had bestowed on her when she had lingered beside the window. I was
looking at him, when a queer cry from Standish whirled me around.
In the dim light of the hall he was standing with the instrument in his
hands, clutching it with the stupidity of a man who has been struck by
an unexpected and unexplainable missile. His face had gone to a grayish
white, and his hands trembled as he set the receiver on the hook. His
eyes were bulging from emotion and he kept wetting his lips as he stood
in the doorway.
"What is it?" Leila cried. "What's happened, Stan? Can't you tell me?
What is it?"