Margaret, it is sad to relate, was much less concerned about the two
men who were in love with her than is considered becoming in a woman of
heart. She confessed to herself, without excess of penitence, that she
had flirted abominably with them both, she consoled her conscience with
the reflection that they were both alive and apparently very well, and
she put all her strength, which was great, into preparing for her
_debut_.
Men never love so energetically and persuasively as when they are
fighting every day for life, honour or fame, and are already on the
road to victory; but a woman's passion, though true and lasting, may be
momentarily quite overshadowed by the anticipation of a new hat or of a
social battle of uncertain issue. How much more, then, by the near
approach of such an event as a first appearance on the stage!
Logotheti bribed the doorkeeper at the small theatre where Margaret was
rehearsing. Whenever there was a rehearsal he was there before her,
quite out of sight in the back of a lower box, and he did not go away
until he was quite sure that she had left. He knew women well enough to
be certain that if anything could make Margaret wish to see him it
would be his own strict observance of her request not to show himself;
and in the meantime he enjoyed some moments of keen delight in watching
her and listening to her. He felt something of the selfish pleasure
which filled that King of Bavaria who had a performance of _Lohengrin_
given for himself alone. But the pleasure was not unmixed, nor was the
delight unclouded.
Even Schreiermeyer had given up coming to the rehearsals, for he was
now sure of Margaret's success and had passed on to other business. In
the dim stalls there appeared only the shabby relations and rather
gorgeous friends of the other members of the company. There was the
young painter who loved the leading girl of the chorus, there was the
wholesale upholsterer who admired the contralto, and a little apart
there was the middle-aged great lady who entertained a romantic and
expensive passion for the tenor. The tenor was a young Italian, who was
something between a third-rate poet and a spoilt child when he was in
love and was as cynical as Macchiavelli when he was not, which was the
case at present, at least so far as the middle-aged woman of the world
was concerned. His friends could always tell the state of his
affections by the way he sang in _Rigoletto_. When he was hopelessly in
love himself, he sang 'La donna e mobile' with tears in his voice, as
if his heart were breaking; when, on the contrary, he knew that some
unhappy female was hopelessly in love with him, he sang it with a sort
of laugh that was diabolically irritating. At the present time he
seemed to be in an intermediate state, for he sometimes sang it in the
one way and sometimes in the other, to the despair of the poor foolish
lady in the stalls. The truth was that at irregular intervals he felt
that he was in love with Margaret.
Leading singers are very rarely attracted by each other. Perhaps that
is because they receive such a vast amount of adulation which pleases
them better, and of course there have been famous instances of the
contrary, such as Mario and Grisi. As a rule singers do not meet much
except at the theatre; it is only during rehearsals that they have a
chance of talking, and then, as everybody knows, they show the worst
side of themselves and are often in a very bad temper indeed.
Margaret had not reached that stage yet, for she had met with no
disappointments and could not complain of her manager, and moreover she
was not at all above learning what she could from her fellow-artists.
She was therefore popular with them in spite of the fact that she was a
lady born. They overlooked that, because she could sing, and the tenor
only remembered it when he tried to patronise her a little. He had
often sung with Melba, and she did this or that, and he had sung with
Bonanni and knew exactly how she sang the difficult passages, and he
reeled off the precepts and practice of half-a-dozen other lyric
sopranos, giving Margaret to understand that he was willing and able to
teach her a good deal. But she only smiled kindly, and did precisely
what Madame De Rosa told her to do, seeing that the little Neapolitan
had taught most of them what they knew. It was clear that Margaret
could not be patronised, and the other members of the company liked her
the better for it, because the tenor patronised them all and gave them
to understand that they were rather small fry compared with a man who
could hold the high C and walk off the stage with it.
From the darkness of his lower box Logotheti looked on and approved of
Margaret's behaviour. At the same time he abstracted himself from her
life and saw how she lived with respect to other men and women, and a
great change began to take place in his feelings, one of those changes
which are sometimes salutary because they may hinder an act of folly,
but which humiliate a man in his own eyes, in proportion as they are
unexpected, and tend to contradict something which he has believed to
be beyond all doubt. To many men the loss of a noble illusion feels
like a loss of strength in themselves, perhaps because such men can
never keep an ideal before them without making an unconscious effort
against the material tendency of their natures.
The change in Logotheti during the next three weeks was profound; and
it was humiliating because it deprived him all at once of a sort of
power over himself which had grown up with his love for Margaret and
depended on that for its nourishment and life; a power which had
perhaps not been an original force at all, but only a chivalrous
willingness to do her will instead of his own. He looked on and did not
betray his presence, and she, on her side, began to wonder at his
prolonged obedience. More than once she felt a sudden conviction that
he must be near, and he saw how she peered into the gloom of the empty
house as if looking for some one she expected. It was only natural, and
no theory of telepathy was needed to explain it. She had so often seen
him there in reality! But he would not show himself now, for he was
determined that she should send for him; if she did not, he could wait
for her _debut_; and little by little, as he kept to his determination
and only saw her from a distance in the frame of the stage, the woman
who had dominated him in a moment when he was beside himself with
passion, became once more an animated work of art which he
unconsciously compared with his Aphrodite and his ancient picture, and
which he coveted as a possession.
It did not at first occur to him that Margaret had really changed since
he had met her, and not exactly in the way he might have wished.
Instead of showing any inclination to give up the stage, as he had
hoped that she might, she seemed more and more in love with her future
career.
When he had first met her he had made the acquaintance of a strikingly
good-looking English girl, born and brought up a lady, full of talent
and enthusiasm for her art, but as yet absolutely ignorant of
professional artistic life and still in a state of mind in which some
sides of it were sure to be disagreeable to her, if not absolutely
repulsive.
Hidden in his box, and watching her as well as listening to her, he
gradually realised the change, and he remembered many facts which
should have prepared him for it. He recollected, for instance, her
perfect coolness and self-possession with Madame Bonanni, so absolutely
different from the paralysing shyness, the visible fright and the
pitiful helplessness at the moment of trial, which he had more than
once seen in young girls who came to Madame Bonanni for advice. They
had good voices, too, those poor trembling candidates; many of them had
talent of a certain order; but it was not the real thing, there was not
the real strength behind it, there was not the absolute self-reliance
to steady it; above all, there was not the tremendous physical
organisation which every great singer possesses.
But Margaret had all that; in other words, she had every gift that
makes a first-rate professional on the stage, and as the life became
familiar to her, those gifts, suddenly called into play, exerted their
influence directly upon her character and manner. She was born to be a
professional artist, to face the public and make it applaud her, to
believe in her own talent, to help herself, to trust to her nerves and
to defend herself with cool courage in moments of danger.
This was assuredly not the girl with whom Logotheti had fallen in love
at first sight, whom he, as well as Lushington, had believed far too
refined and delicately brought up to be happy in the surroundings of a
stage life, and much too sensitive to bear such familiarity as being
addressed as 'Cordova,' without any prefix, by an Italian tenor singer
whose father had kept a butcher's shop in Turin.
No doubt, the refinement, the sensitiveness, the delicacy of manner
were all there still, for such things do not disappear out of a woman
in a few days; but they belonged chiefly to one side of a nature that
had two very distinct sides. There was the 'lady' side, and there was
the 'actress' side; and unfortunately, thought Logotheti, there was now
no longer the slightest doubt as to which was the stronger. Margaret
Donne was already a memory; the reality was 'Cordova,' who was going to
have a fabulous success and would soon be one of the most successful
lyric sopranos of her time.
'Cordova' was a splendid creature, she was a good girl, she had a
hundred fine qualities not always found together in a great prima
donna; but no power in the world could ever make her Margaret Donne
again.
Logotheti watched her and once or twice he sighed; for he knew that he
no longer wished to marry her. It is not in the nature of Orientals to
let their wives exhibit themselves to the public, and in most ways the
prejudices of a well-born Greek of Constantinople are just as strong as
those of a Mohammedan Turk.
As an artistic possession, 'Cordova' was as desirable as ever in
Logotheti's eyes; but she was no longer at all desirable as a wife. The
Greek, in spite of the lawless strain in him, was an aristocrat to the
marrow of his very solid bones. An aristocrat, doubtless, in the
Eastern sense, proud of his own long descent, but perfectly indifferent
to any such matter as a noble pedigree in the choice of a wife; quite
capable, if he had not chanced to be born a Christian, of taking to
himself, even by purchase, the jealously-guarded daughter of a
Circassian horse-thief, or of a Georgian cut-throat, a girl brought up
in seclusion for sale, like a valuable thoroughbred; but a man who
revolted at the thought of marrying a woman who could show herself upon
the stage, and for money, who could sing for money, and for the
applause of a couple of thousand people, nine-tenths of whom he would
never have allowed to enter his house. He was jealous of what he really
loved. To him, it would have been a real and keen suffering to see his
marble Aphrodite set up in a hall of the Louvre, to be admired in her
naked perfection by every passing tourist, criticised and compared with
famous living models by loose-talking art students, and furtively
examined by prurient and disapproving old maids from distant countries.
He prized her, and he had risked his life, not to mention the just
anger of a government, to get possession of her. If he could feel so
much for a piece of marble, it was not likely that he should feel less
keenly where the woman he loved was concerned; and circumstance for
circumstance, point for point, it was much worse that Margaret Donne
should stand and sing behind the footlights, for money, and disguise
herself as a man in the last act of _Rigoletto_, than that the
Aphrodite should go to the Louvre and take her place with the Borghese
Gladiator, the Venus of Milo and the Victory of Samothrace. It was true
that he would have given much to possess one of those other treasures,
too, but even then it would not have been like possessing the
Aphrodite. The other statues had been public property and had faced the
public gaze for many years; but he had found his treasure for himself,
buried safe in the earth since ages ago, and he had brought her thence
directly to that upper room where few eyes but his own had ever seen
her. Perhaps he was a little mad on this point, for strong natures that
hark back to primitive types often seem a little mad to us. But at the
root of his madness there was that which no man need be ashamed of, for
it has been the very foundation of human society--the right of every
husband to keep the mother of his children from the world in his own
home. For human society existed before the Ten Commandments, and a
large part of it seems tolerably able to survive without them even now;
but no nation has ever come to any good or greatness, since the world
began, unless its men have kept their wives from other men. Yet nature
is not mocked, and woman is a match for man; she first drove him to
invent divorce for his self-defence, and see, it is a two-edged sword
in her own hands and is turned against him! No strong nation, beginning
its life and history, ever questioned the husband's right to kill the
unfaithful wife; no old and corrupt race has ever failed to make it
easy for a wife to have many husbands--including those of her friends.
Logotheti belonged to the primitives. As he had once laughingly
explained to Margaret, his people had dropped out of civilisation
during a good many centuries; they had absorbed a good deal of wild
blood in that time, and, scientifically speaking, had reverted to their
type; and now that he had chosen to mingle in the throng of the
moderns, whose fathers had lost no time in the race, while his own had
remained stationary, he found himself different from other people,
stronger than they, bolder and much more lawless, but also infinitely
more responsive to the creations of art and the facts of life, as well
as to the finer fictions of his imagination and the simple cravings of
his very masculine being.
Men who are especially gifted almost always seem exaggerated to average
society, either because, like Logotheti, they feel more, want more and
get more than other men, by sheer all-round exuberance of life and
energy, or else because, as in many great poets, some one faculty is
almost missing, which would have balanced the rest, so that in its
absence the others work at incredible speed and tension, wear
themselves out in half a lifetime and leave immortal records of their
brief activity.
There had been a time when Margaret had appealed only to Logotheti's
artistic perceptions; at their second meeting he had asked her to marry
him because he felt sure that until he could make her his permanent
possession, he could never again know what it was to be satisfied.
There had been a moment when she had risen in his estimation from an
artistic treasure to the dignity of an ideal, and had dominated him,
even when the human animal in him was most furiously roused.
Again, and lastly, the time had come when, by watching her unseen,
instead of spending hours with her every day, by abstracting himself
from her life instead of trying to take part in it, he had lost his
hold upon his ideal for ever, and had been cruelly robbed of what for a
few short days he had held most dear.
Moreover, after the ideal had withered and fallen, there remained
something of which the man felt ashamed, though it was what had seemed
most natural before the higher thought had sprung up full-grown in a
day, and had blossomed, and perished. It was simply this. Margaret was
as much as ever the artistic treasure he coveted, and he was tormented
by the fear lest some one else should get possession of her before him.
He remembered the sleepless nights he had spent while his marble
Aphrodite had lain above ground, before he was ready to carry her off,
the unspeakable anxiety lest she should be found and taken from him,
the terror of losing her which had driven him to make the attempt in
the teeth of weather which his craft had not been fit to face; and he
remembered, too, that the short time while she had lain at the bottom
of the bay had not passed without real dread lest by a miracle another
should find her and steal her.
He felt that same sensation now, as he watched Margaret from a
distance; some one would find her, some one would marry her, some one
would take her away and own her, body and soul, and cheat him of what
had been within his grasp and all but his; and yet he was ashamed,
because he no longer wanted her for his wife, but only as a
possession--as Achilles wanted Briseis and was wroth when she was taken
from him. He felt shame at the thought, because he had already honoured
her in his imagination as his wife, and because to dream of her as
anything as near, yet less in honour, was a sort of dishonour to
himself. Let the subtle analyst make what he can of that; it is the
truth. But possibly the truth about a man very unlike his fellow-men is
not worth analysing, since it cannot lead to any useful generality; and
if analysis is not to be useful, of what use can it possibly be? It
would be more to the purpose to analyse the character of Margaret, for
instance, who represents a certain class of artists, or of Madame
Bonanni who is an arch-type, or of poor Edmund Lushington, a literary
Englishman, who was just then very unhappy and very sorry for himself.
Margaret and Lushington, and the elderly prima donna, and even Mrs.
Rushmore, are all much more like you and me than Constantine Logotheti,
the Greek financier of artistic tastes, watching the woman he covets,
from the depths of his lower box during rehearsal.
He watched, and he coveted; and presently he fell to thinking of the
wonderful things which money can do, when it is skilfully used; and he
fell to scheming and plotting, and laying deep plans; and moreover he
recalled the days when Margaret had first appeared to him as an
animated work of art, and he remembered why he had persuaded
Schreiermeyer to change the opera from _Faust_ to _Rigoletto_. He had
regretted the change later, when she had risen to the higher place in
his heart, because it required her to wear a man's disguise in the last
act; but now that she was again in his eyes what she had been at first,
he was glad he had made the suggestion, and that the manager had taken
his advice, for there was something in that last act which should serve
him when the time came.