Cressida was approaching with the new Spanish soprano, Mme. Bartolas, who
was all black velvet and long black feathers, with a lace veil over her
rich pallour and even a little black patch on her chin. I beckoned them.
"Tell me, Cressida, isn't Ruzenka an Austrian?"
She looked surprised. "No, a Bohemian, though I got her in Vienna."
Bouchalka's expression, and the remnant of a cake in his long fingers,
gave her the connection. She laughed. "You like them? Of course, they are
of your own country. You shall have more of them." She nodded and went
away to greet a guest who had just come in.
A few moments later, Horace, then a beautiful lad in Eton clothes,
brought another cup of tea and a plate of cakes for Bouchalka. We sat
down in a corner, and talked about his songs. He was neither boastful nor
deprecatory. He knew exactly in what respects they were excellent. I
decided as I watched his face, that he must be under thirty. The deep
lines in his forehead probably came there from his habit of frowning
densely when he struggled to express himself, and suddenly elevating his
coal-black eyebrows when his ideas cleared. His teeth were white, very
irregular and interesting. The corrective methods of modern dentistry
would have taken away half his good looks. His mouth would have been
much less attractive for any re-arranging of those long, narrow,
over-crowded teeth. Along with his frown and his way of thrusting out his
lip, they contributed, somehow, to the engaging impetuousness of his
conversation. As we talked about his songs, his manner changed. Before
that he had seemed responsive and easily pleased. Now he grew abstracted,
as if I had taken away his pleasant afternoon and wakened him to his
miseries. He moved restlessly in his clothes. When I mentioned Puccini,
he held his head in his hands.
"Why is it they like that always and always? A little, oh yes, very nice.
But so much, always the same thing! Why?" He pierced me with the
despairing glance which had followed us out of the restaurant.
I asked him whether he had sent any of his songs to the publishers and
named one whom I knew to be discriminating. He shrugged his shoulders.
"They not want Bohemian songs. They not want my music. Even the street
cars will not stop for me here, like for other people. Every time, I wait
on the corner until somebody else make a signal to the car, and then it
stop,--but not for me."
Most people cannot become utterly poor; whatever happens, they can right
themselves a little. But one felt that Bouchalka was the sort of person
who might actually starve or blow his brains out. Something very
important had been left out either of his make-up or of his education;
something that we are not accustomed to miss in people.
Gradually the parlour was filled with little groups of friends, and I
took Bouchalka back to the music-room where Cressida was surrounded by
her guests; feathered women, with large sleeves and hats, young men of no
importance, in frock coats, with shining hair, and the smile which is
intended to say so many flattering things but which really expresses
little more than a desire to get on. The older men were standing about
waiting for a word _à deux_ with the hostess. To these people Bouchalka
had nothing to say. He stood stiffly at the outer edge of the circle,
watching Cressida with intent, impatient eyes, until, under the pretext
of showing him a score, she drew him into the alcove at the back end of
the long room, where she kept her musical library. The bookcases ran from
the floor to the ceiling. There was a table and a reading-lamp, and a
window seat looking upon the little walled garden. Two persons could be
quite withdrawn there, and yet be a part of the general friendly scene.
Cressida took a score from the shelf, and sat down with Bouchalka upon
the window seat, the book open between them, though neither of them
looked at it again. They fell to talking with great earnestness. At last
the Bohemian pulled out a large, yellowing silver watch, held it up
before him, and stared at it a moment as if it were an object of horror.
He sprang up, bent over Cressida's hand and murmured something, dashed
into the hall and out of the front door without waiting for the maid to
open it. He had worn no overcoat, apparently. It was then seven o'clock;
he would surely be late at his post in the up-town restaurant. I hoped he
would have wit enough to take the elevated.
After supper Cressida told me his story. His parents, both poor
musicians,--the mother a singer--died while he was yet a baby, and he
was left to the care of an arbitrary uncle who resolved to make a priest
of him. He was put into a monastery school and kept there. The organist
and choir-director, fortunately for Blasius, was an excellent musician, a
man who had begun his career brilliantly, but who had met with crushing
sorrows and disappointments in the world. He devoted himself to his
talented pupil, and was the only teacher the young man ever had. At
twenty-one, when he was ready for the novitiate, Blasius felt that the
call of life was too strong for him, and he ran away out into a world
of which he knew nothing. He tramped southward to Vienna, begging and
playing his fiddle from town to town. In Vienna he fell in with a gipsy
band which was being recruited for a Paris restaurant and went with them
to Paris. He played in cafés and in cheap theatres, did transcribing for
a music publisher, tried to get pupils. For four years he was the mouse,
and hunger was the cat. She kept him on the jump. When he got work he
did not understand why; when he lost a job he did not understand why.
During the time when most of us acquire a practical sense, get a
half-unconscious knowledge of hard facts and market values, he had been
shut away from the world, fed like the pigeons in the bell-tower of his
monastery. Bouchalka had now been in New York a year, and for all he knew
about it, Cressida said, he might have landed the day before yesterday.
Several weeks went by, and as Bouchalka did not reappear on Tenth Street,
Cressida and I went once more to the place where he had played, only to
find another violinist leading the orchestra. We summoned the proprietor,
a Swiss-Italian, polite and solicitous. He told us the gentleman was not
playing there any more,--was playing somewhere else, but he had forgotten
where. We insisted upon talking to the old pianist, who at last
reluctantly admitted that the Bohemian had been dismissed. He had arrived
very late one Sunday night three weeks ago, and had hot words with the
proprietor. He had been late before, and had been warned. He was a very
talented fellow, but wild and not to be depended upon. The old man gave
us the address of a French boarding-house on Seventh Avenue where
Bouchalka used to room. We drove there at once, but the woman who kept
the place said that he had gone away two weeks before, leaving no
address, as he never got letters. Another Bohemian, who did engraving
on glass, had a room with her, and when he came home perhaps he could
tell where Bouchalka was, for they were friends.
It took us several days to run Bouchalka down, but when we did find him
Cressida promptly busied herself in his behalf. She sang his _"Sarka"_
with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra at a Sunday night concert, she got
him a position with the Symphony Orchestra, and persuaded the
conservative Hempfstangle Quartette to play one of his chamber
compositions from manuscript. She aroused the interest of a publisher in
his work, and introduced him to people who were helpful to him.
By the new year Bouchalka was fairly on his feet. He had proper clothes
now, and Cressida's friends found him attractive. He was usually at her
house on Sunday afternoons; so usually, indeed, that Poppas began
pointedly to absent himself. When other guests arrived, the Bohemian and
his patroness were always found at the critical point of discussion,--at
the piano, by the fire, in the alcove at the end of the room--both of
them interested and animated. He was invariably respectful and admiring,
deferring to her in every tone and gesture, and she was perceptibly
pleased and flattered,--as if all this were new to her and she were
tasting the sweetness of a first success.
One wild day in March Cressida burst tempestuously into my apartment and
threw herself down, declaring that she had just come from the most trying
rehearsal she had ever lived through. When I tried to question her about
it, she replied absently and continued to shiver and crouch by the fire.
Suddenly she rose, walked to the window, and stood looking out over the
Square, glittering with ice and rain and strewn with the wrecks of
umbrellas. When she turned again, she approached me with determination.
"I shall have to ask you to go with me," she said firmly. "That crazy
Bouchalka has gone and got a pleurisy or something. It may be pneumonia;
there is an epidemic of it just now. I've sent Dr. Brooks to him, but I
can never tell anything from what a doctor says. I've got to see
Bouchalka and his nurse, and what sort of place he's in. I've been
rehearsing all day and I'm singing tomorrow night; I can't have so much
on my mind. Can you come with me? It will save time in the end."
I put on my furs, and we went down to Cressida's carriage, waiting below.
She gave the driver a number on Seventh Avenue, and then began feeling
her throat with the alarmed expression which meant that she was not going
to talk. We drove in silence to the address, and by this time it was
growing dark. The French landlady was a cordial, comfortable person who
took Cressida in at a glance and seemed much impressed. Cressida's
incognito was never successful. Her black gown was inconspicuous enough,
but over it she wore a dark purple velvet carriage coat, lined with fur
and furred at the cuffs and collar. The Frenchwoman's eye ran over it
delightedly and scrutinized the veil which only half-concealed the
well-known face behind it. She insisted upon conducting us up to the
fourth floor herself, running ahead of us and turning up the gas jets in
the dark, musty-smelling halls. I suspect that she tarried outside the
door after we sent the nurse for her walk.
We found the sick man in a great walnut bed, a relic of the better days
which this lodging house must have seen. The grimy red plush carpet, the
red velvet chairs with broken springs, the double gilt-framed mirror
above the mantel, had all been respectable, substantial contributions to
comfort in their time. The fireplace was now empty and grateless, and an
ill-smelling gas stove burned in its sooty recess under the cracked
marble. The huge arched windows were hung with heavy red curtains, pinned
together and lightly stirred by the wind which rattled the loose frames.
I was examining these things while Cressida bent over Bouchalka. Her
carriage cloak she threw over the foot of his bed, either from a
protective impulse, or because there was no place else to put it. After
she had greeted him and seated herself, the sick man reached down and
drew the cloak up over him, looking at it with weak, childish pleasure
and stroking the velvet with his long fingers. "_Couleur de gloire,
couleur des reines!_" I heard him murmur. He thrust the sleeve under his
chin and closed his eyes. His loud, rapid breathing was the only sound in
the room. If Cressida brushed back his hair or touched his hand, he
looked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration, naive and
uninquiring, as if he were smiling at a dream or a miracle.
The nurse was gone for an hour, and we sat quietly, Cressida with her
eyes fixed on Bouchalka, and I absorbed in the strange atmosphere of the
house, which seemed to seep in under the door and through the walls.
Occasionally we heard a call for "_de l'eau chaude_!" and the heavy trot
of a serving woman on the stairs. On the floor below somebody was
struggling with Schubert's Marche Militaire on a coarse-toned upright
piano. Sometimes, when a door was opened, one could hear a parrot
screaming, "_Voilà, voilà, tonnerre!_" The house was built before 1870,
as one could tell from windows and mouldings, and the walls were thick.
The sounds were not disturbing and Bouchalka was probably used to them.
When the nurse returned and we rose to go, Bouchalka still lay with his
cheek on her cloak, and Cressida left it. "It seems to please him," she
murmured as we went down the stairs. "I can go home without a wrap. It's
not far." I had, of course, to give her my furs, as I was not singing
_Donna Anna_ tomorrow evening and she was.
After this I was not surprised by any devout attitude in which I happened
to find the Bohemian when I entered Cressida's music-room unannounced,
or by any radiance on her face when she rose from the window-seat in the
alcove and came down the room to greet me.
Bouchalka was, of course, very often at the Opera now. On almost any
night when Cressida sang, one could see his narrow black head--high
above the temples and rather constrained behind the ears--peering from
some part of the house. I used to wonder what he thought of Cressida as
an artist, but probably he did not think seriously at all. A great voice,
a handsome woman, a great prestige, all added together made a "great
artist," the common synonym for success. Her success, and the material
evidences of it, quite blinded him. I could never draw from him anything
adequate about Anna Straka, Cressida's Slavic rival, and this perhaps
meant that he considered comparison disloyal. All the while that Cressida
was singing reliably, and satisfying the management, Straka was singing
uncertainly and making history. Her voice was primarily defective, and
her immediate vocal method was bad. Cressida was always living up to her
contract, delivering the whole order in good condition; while the Slav
was sometimes almost voiceless, sometimes inspired. She put you off with
a hope, a promise, time after time. But she was quite as likely to put
you off with a revelation,--with an interpretation that was inimitable,
unrepeatable.
Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what a
great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme.
Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that he
managed to impress his idea upon Cressida herself. She began to see
herself as he saw her, to try to be like the notion of her that he
carried somewhere in that pointed head of his. She was exalted quite
beyond herself. Things that had been chilled under the grind came to life
in her that winter, with the breath of Bouchalka's adoration. Then, if
ever in her life, she heard the bird sing on the branch outside her
window; and she wished she were younger, lovelier, freer. She wished
there were no Poppas, no Horace, no Garnets. She longed to be only the
bewitching creature Bouchalka imagined her.
One April day when we were driving in the Park, Cressida, superb in a
green-and-primrose costume hurried over from Paris, turned to me smiling
and said: "Do you know, this is the first spring I haven't dreaded. It's
the first one I've ever really had. Perhaps people never have more than
one, whether it comes early or late." She told me that she was
overwhelmingly in love.
Our visit to Bouchalka when he was ill had, of course, been reported, and
the men about the Opera House had made of it the only story they have the
wit to invent. They could no more change the pattern of that story than
the spider could change the design of its web. But being, as she said,
"in love" suggested to Cressida only one plan of action; to have the
Tenth Street house done over, to put more money into her brothers'
business, send Horace to school, raise Poppas' percentage, and then with
a clear conscience be married in the Church of the Ascension. She went
through this program with her usual thoroughness. She was married in June
and sailed immediately with her husband. Poppas was to join them in
Vienna in August, when she would begin to work again. From her letters I
gathered that all was going well, even beyond her hopes.
When they returned in October, both Cressida and Blasius seemed changed
for the better. She was perceptibly freshened and renewed. She attacked
her work at once with more vigour and more ease; did not drive herself so
relentlessly. A little carelessness became her wonderfully. Bouchalka was
less gaunt, and much less flighty and perverse. His frank pleasure in the
comfort and order of his wife's establishment was ingratiating, even if
it was a little amusing. Cressida had the sewing-room at the top of the
house made over into a study for him. When I went up there to see him, I
usually found him sitting before the fire or walking about with his hands
in his coat pockets, admiring his new possessions. He explained the
ingenious arrangement of his study to me a dozen times.
With Cressida's friends and guests, Bouchalka assumed nothing for
himself. His deportment amounted to a quiet, unobtrusive appreciation of
her and of his good fortune. He was proud to owe his wife so much.
Cressida's Sunday afternoons were more popular than ever, since she
herself had so much more heart for them. Bouchalka's picturesque presence
stimulated her graciousness and charm. One still found them conversing
together as eagerly as in the days when they saw each other but seldom.
Consequently their guests were never bored. We felt as if the Tenth
Street house had a pleasant climate quite its own. In the spring, when
the Metropolitan company went on tour, Cressida's husband accompanied
her, and afterward they again sailed for Genoa.
During the second winter people began to say that Bouchalka was becoming
too thoroughly domesticated, and that since he was growing heavier in
body he was less attractive. I noticed his increasing reluctance to stir
abroad. Nobody could say that he was "wild" now. He seemed to dread
leaving the house, even for an evening. Why should he go out, he said,
when he had everything he wanted at home? He published very little. One
was given to understand that he was writing an opera. He lived in the
Tenth Street house like a tropical plant under glass. Nowhere in New York
could he get such cookery as Ruzenka's. Ruzenka ("little Rose") had,
like her mistress, bloomed afresh, now that she had a man and a
compatriot to cook for. Her invention was tireless, and she took things
with a high hand in the kitchen, confident of a perfect appreciation. She
was a plump, fair, blue-eyed girl, giggly and easily flattered, with
teeth like cream. She was passionately domestic, and her mind was full of
homely stories and proverbs and superstitions which she somehow worked
into her cookery. She and Bouchalka had between them a whole literature
of traditions about sauces and fish and pastry. The cellar was full of
the wines he liked, and Ruzenka always knew what wines to serve with the
dinner. Blasius' monastery had been famous for good living.
That winter was a very cold one, and I think the even temperature of the
house enslaved Bouchalka. "Imagine it," he once said to me when I dropped
in during a blinding snowstorm and found him reading before the fire. "To
be warm all the time, every day! It is like Aladdin. In Paris I have had
weeks together when I was not warm once, when I did not have a bath once,
like the cats in the street. The nights were a misery. People have
terrible dreams when they are so cold. Here I waken up in the night so
warm I do not know what it means. Her door is open, and I turn on my
light. I cannot believe in myself until I see that she is there."
I began to think that Bouchalka's wildness had been the desperation which
the tamest animals exhibit when they are tortured or terrorized.
Naturally luxurious, he had suffered more than most men under the pinch
of penury. Those first beautiful compositions, full of the folk-music of
his own country, had been wrung out of him by home-sickness and
heart-ache. I wondered whether he could compose only under the spur of
hunger and loneliness, and whether his talent might not subside with his
despair. Some such apprehension must have troubled Cressida, though his
gratitude would have been propitiatory to a more exacting task-master.
She had always liked to make people happy, and he was the first one who
had accepted her bounty without sourness. When he did not accompany her
upon her spring tour, Cressida said it was because travelling interfered
with composition; but I felt that she was deeply disappointed. Blasius,
or Bla[vz]ej, as his wife had with difficulty learned to call him, was
not showy or extravagant. He hated hotels, even the best of them.
Cressida had always fought for the hearthstone and the fireside, and the
humour of Destiny is sometimes to give us too much of what we desire. I
believe she would have preferred even enthusiasm about other women to his
utter _oisiveté_. It was his old fire, not his docility, that had won
her.
During the third season after her marriage Cressida had only twenty-five
performances at the Metropolitan, and she was singing out of town a great
deal. Her husband did not bestir himself to accompany her, but he
attended, very faithfully, to her correspondence and to her business at
home. He had no ambitious schemes to increase her fortune, and he carried
out her directions exactly. Nevertheless, Cressida faced her concert
tours somewhat grimly, and she seldom talked now about their plans for
the future.
The crisis in this growing estrangement came about by accident,--one of
those chance occurrences that affect our lives more than years of ordered
effort,--and it came in an inverted form of a situation old to comedy.
Cressida had been on the road for several weeks; singing in Minneapolis,
Cleveland, St. Paul, then up into Canada and back to Boston. From Boston
she was to go directly to Chicago, coming down on the five o'clock train
and taking the eleven, over the Lake Shore, for the West. By her schedule
she would have time to change cars comfortably at the Grand Central
station.
On the journey down from Boston she was seized with a great desire to see
Blasius. She decided, against her custom, one might say against her
principles, to risk a performance with the Chicago orchestra without
rehearsal, to stay the night in New York and go west by the afternoon
train the next day. She telegraphed Chicago, but she did not telegraph
Blasius, because she wished--the old fallacy of affection!--to "surprise"
him. She could take it for granted that, at eleven on a cold winter
night, he would be in the Tenth Street house and nowhere else in New
York. She sent Poppas--paler than usual with accusing scorn--and her
trunks on to Chicago, and with only her travelling bag and a sense of
being very audacious in her behaviour and still very much in love, she
took a cab for Tenth Street.
Since it was her intention to disturb Blasius as little as possible and
to delight him as much as possible, she let herself in with her latch-key
and went directly to his room. She did not find him there. Indeed, she
found him where he should not have been at all. There must have been a
trying scene.
Ruzenka was sent away in the morning, and the other two maids as well. By
eight o'clock Cressida and Bouchalka had the house to themselves. Nobody
had any breakfast. Cressida took the afternoon train to keep her
engagement with Theodore Thomas, and to think over the situation. Blasius
was left in the Tenth Street house with only the furnace man's wife to
look after him. His explanation of his conduct was that he had been
drinking too much. His digression, he swore, was casual. It had never
occurred before, and he could only appeal to his wife's magnanimity. But
it was, on the whole, easier for Cressida to be firm than to be yielding,
and she knew herself too well to attempt a readjustment. She had never
made shabby compromises, and it was too late for her to begin. When she
returned to New York she went to a hotel, and she never saw Bouchalka
alone again. Since he admitted her charge, the legal formalities were
conducted so quietly that the granting of her divorce was announced in
the morning papers before her friends knew that there was the least
likelihood of one. Cressida's concert tours had interrupted the
hospitalities of the house.
While the lawyers were arranging matters, Bouchalka came to see me. He
was remorseful and miserable enough, and I think his perplexity was quite
sincere. If there had been an intrigue with a woman of her own class, an
infatuation, an affair, he said, he could understand. But anything so
venial and accidental--He shook his head slowly back and forth. He
assured me that he was not at all himself on that fateful evening, and
that when he recovered himself he would have sent Ruzenka away, making
proper provision for her, of course. It was an ugly thing, but ugly
things sometimes happened in one's life, and one had to put them away and
forget them. He could have overlooked any accident that might have
occurred when his wife was on the road, with Poppas, for example. I cut
him short, and he bent his head to my reproof.
"I know," he said, "such things are different with her. But when have I
said that I am noble as she is? Never. But I have appreciated and I have
adored. About me, say what you like. But if you say that in this there
was any _méprise_ to my wife, that is not true. I have lost all my place
here. I came in from the streets; but I understand her, and all the fine
things in her, better than any of you here. If that accident had not
been, she would have lived happy with me for years. As for me, I have
never believed in this happiness. I was not born under a good star.
How did it come? By accident. It goes by accident. She tried to give good
fortune to an unfortunate man, _un miserable_; that was her mistake. It
cannot be done in this world. The lucky should marry the lucky."
Bouchalka stopped and lit a cigarette. He sat sunk in my chair as if he
never meant to get up again. His large hands, now so much plumper than
when I first knew him, hung limp. When he had consumed his cigarette he
turned to me again.
"I, too, have tried. Have I so much as written one note to a lady since
she first put out her hand to help me? Some of the artists who sing my
compositions have been quite willing to plague my wife a little if I make
the least sign. With the Española, for instance, I have had to be very
stern, _farouche_; she is so very playful. I have never given my wife the
slightest annoyance of this kind. Since I married her, I have not kissed
the cheek of one lady! Then one night I am bored and drink too much
champagne and I become a fool. What does it matter? Did my wife marry the
fool of me? No, she married me, with my mind and my feelings all here, as
I am today. But she is getting a divorce from the fool of me, which she
would never see _anyhow_! The stupidity which excuse me is the thing she
will not overlook. Even in her memory of me she will be harsh."
His view of his conduct and its consequences was fatalistic: he was meant
to have just so much misery every day of his life; for three years it had
been withheld, had been piling up somewhere, underground, overhead; now
the accumulation burst over him. He had come to pay his respects to me,
he said, to declare his undying gratitude to Madame Garnet, and to bid
me farewell. He took up his hat and cane and kissed my hand. I have never
seen him since. Cressida made a settlement upon him, but even Poppas,
tortured by envy and curiosity, never discovered how much it was. It was
very little, she told me. "_Pour des gâteaux,_" she added with a smile
that was not unforgiving. She could not bear to think of his being in
want when so little could make him comfortable.
He went back to his own village in Bohemia. He wrote her that the old
monk, his teacher, was still alive, and that from the windows of his room
in the town he could see the pigeons flying forth from and back to the
monastery bell-tower all day long. He sent her a song, with his own
words, about those pigeons,--quite a lovely thing. He was the bell tower,
and _les colombes_ were his memories of her.