My first recollections of Cressida Garnet have to do with the Columbus
Public Schools; a little girl with sunny brown hair and eager bright
eyes, looking anxiously at the teacher and reciting the names and
dates of the Presidents: "James Buchanan, 1857-1861; Abraham Lincoln,
1861-1865"; etc. Her family came from North Carolina, and they had that
to feel superior about before they had Cressy. The Garnet "look," indeed,
though based upon a strong family resemblance, was nothing more than the
restless, preoccupied expression of an inflamed sense of importance. The
father was a Democrat, in the sense that other men were doctors or
lawyers. He scratched up some sort of poor living for his family behind
office windows inscribed with the words "Real Estate. Insurance.
Investments." But it was his political faith that, in a Republican
community, gave him his feeling of eminence and originality. The Garnet
children were all in school then, scattered along from the first grade
to the ninth. In almost any room of our school building you might chance
to enter, you saw the self-conscious little face of one or another of
them. They were restrained, uncomfortable children, not frankly boastful,
but insinuating, and somehow forever demanding special consideration and
holding grudges against teachers and classmates who did not show it them;
all but Cressida, who was naturally as sunny and open as a May morning.
It was no wonder that Cressy ran away with young Charley Wilton, who
hadn't a shabby thing about him except his health. He was her first
music teacher, the choir-master of the church in which she sang. Charley
was very handsome; the "romantic" son of an old, impoverished family. He
had refused to go into a good business with his uncles and had gone
abroad to study music when that was an extravagant and picturesque thing
for an Ohio boy to do. His letters home were handed round among the
members of his own family and of other families equally conservative.
Indeed, Charley and what his mother called "his music" were the romantic
expression of a considerable group of people; young cousins and old aunts
and quiet-dwelling neighbours, allied by the amity of several
generations. Nobody was properly married in our part of Columbus unless
Charley Wilton, and no other, played the wedding march. The old ladies of
the First Church used to say that he "hovered over the keys like a
spirit." At nineteen Cressida was beautiful enough to turn a much harder
head than the pale, ethereal one Charley Wilton bent above the organ.
That the chapter which began so gracefully ran on into such a stretch of
grim, hard prose, was simply Cressida's relentless bad luck. In her
undertakings, in whatever she could lay hold of with her two hands, she
was successful; but whatever happened to her was almost sure to be bad.
Her family, her husbands, her son, would have crushed any other woman I
have ever known. Cressida lived, more than most of us, "for others"; and
what she seemed to promote among her beneficiaries was indolence and envy
and discord--even dishonesty and turpitude.
Her sisters were fond of saying--at club luncheons--that Cressida had
remained "untouched by the breath of scandal," which was not strictly
true. There were captious people who objected to her long and close
association with Miletus Poppas. Her second husband, Ransome McChord, the
foreign representative of the great McChord Harvester Company, whom she
married in Germany, had so persistently objected to Poppas that she was
eventually forced to choose between them. Any one who knew her well could
easily understand why she chose Poppas.
While her actual self was the least changed, the least modified by
experience that it would be possible to imagine, there had been,
professionally, two Cressida Garnets; the big handsome girl, already
a "popular favourite" of the concert stage, who took with her to Germany
the raw material of a great voice;--and the accomplished artist who came
back. The singer that returned was largely the work of Miletus Poppas.
Cressida had at least known what she needed, hunted for it, found it, and
held fast to it. After experimenting with a score of teachers and
accompanists, she settled down to work her problem out with Poppas. Other
coaches came and went--she was always trying new ones--but Poppas
survived them all. Cressida was not musically intelligent; she never
became so. Who does not remember the countless rehearsals which were
necessary before she first sang _Isolde_ in Berlin; the disgust of the
conductor, the sullenness of the tenor, the rages of the blonde
_teufelin_, boiling with the impatience of youth and genius, who sang her
_Brangaena_? Everything but her driving power Cressida had to get from
the outside.
Poppas was, in his way, quite as incomplete as his pupil. He possessed a
great many valuable things for which there is no market; intuitions,
discrimination, imagination, a whole twilight world of intentions and
shadowy beginnings which were dark to Cressida. I remember that when
"Trilby" was published she fell into a fright and said such books ought
to be prohibited by law; which gave me an intimation of what their
relationship had actually become.
Poppas was indispensable to her. He was like a book in which she had
written down more about herself than she could possibly remember--and
it was information that she might need at any moment. He was the one
person who knew her absolutely and who saw into the bottom of her grief.
An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
Poppas knew all the simple things that were so desperately hard for
Cressida, all the difficult things in which she could count on herself;
her stupidities and inconsistencies, the chiaroscuro of the voice itself
and what could be expected from the mind somewhat mismated with it. He
knew where she was sound and where she was mended. With him she could
share the depressing knowledge of what a wretchedly faulty thing any
productive faculty is.
But if Poppas was necessary to her career, she was his career. By the
time Cressida left the Metropolitan Opera Company, Poppas was a rich
man. He had always received a retaining fee and a percentage of her
salary,--and he was a man of simple habits. Her liberality with Poppas
was one of the weapons that Horace and the Garnets used against Cressida,
and it was a point in the argument by which they justified to themselves
their rapacity. Whatever they didn't get, they told themselves, Poppas
would. What they got, therefore, they were only saving from Poppas. The
Greek ached a good deal at the general pillage, and Cressida's
conciliatory methods with her family made him sarcastic and spiteful. But
he had to make terms, somehow, with the Garnets and Horace, and with the
husband, if there happened to be one. He sometimes reminded them, when
they fell to wrangling, that they must not, after all, overturn the boat
under them, and that it would be better to stop just before they drove
her wild than just after. As he was the only one among them who
understood the sources of her fortune,--and they knew it,--he was able,
when it came to a general set-to, to proclaim sanctuary for the goose
that laid the golden eggs.
That Poppas had caused the break between Cressida and McChord was another
stick her sisters held over her. They pretended to understand perfectly,
and were always explaining what they termed her "separation"; but they
let Cressida know that it cast a shadow over her family and took a good
deal of living down.
A beautiful soundness of body, a seemingly exhaustless vitality, and a
certain "squareness" of character as well as of mind, gave Cressida
Garnet earning powers that were exceptional even in her lavishly rewarded
profession. Managers chose her over the heads of singers much more
gifted, because she was so sane, so conscientious, and above all, because
she was so sure. Her efficiency was like a beacon to lightly anchored
men, and in the intervals between her marriages she had as many suitors
as Penelope. Whatever else they saw in her at first, her competency so
impressed and delighted them that they gradually lost sight of everything
else. Her sterling character was the subject of her story. Once, as she
said, she very nearly escaped her destiny. With Blasius Bouchalka she
became almost another woman, but not quite. Her "principles," or his lack
of them, drove those two apart in the end. It was of Bouchalka that we
talked upon that last voyage I ever made with Cressida Garnet, and not of
Jerome Brown. She remembered the Bohemian kindly, and since it was the
passage in her life to which she most often reverted, it is the one I
shall relate here.