TANTE
by
ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
(MRS. BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT)
Author of "Franklin Winslow Kane," "A Fountain Sealed," "Amabel
Channice," "The Shadow of Life," Etc.
New York
The Century Co.
1912
Copyright, 1911, by
The Century Co.
Published, December, 1911.
TANTE
PART I
CHAPTER I
It was the evening of Madame Okraska's concert at the old St. James's
Hall. London was still the place of the muffled roar and the endearing
ugliness. Horse-'buses plied soberly in an unwidened Piccadilly. The
private motor was a curiosity. Berlin had not been emulated in an
altered Mall nor New York in the façades of giant hotels. The Saturday
and Monday pops were still an institution; and the bell of the
muffin-man, in such a wintry season, passed frequently along the foggy
streets and squares. Already the epoch seems remote.
Madame Okraska was pausing on her way from St. Petersburg to New York
and this was the only concert she was to give in London that winter. For
many hours the enthusiasts who had come to secure unreserved seats had
been sitting on the stone stairs that led to the balcony or gallery, or
on the still narrower, darker and colder flight that led to the
orchestra from Piccadilly Place. From the adjacent hall they could hear
the strains of the Moore & Burgess Minstrels, blatant and innocuously
vulgar; and the determined mirth, anatomized by distance, sounded a
little melancholy. To those of an imaginative turn of mind it might have
seemed that they waited in a tunnel at one far end of which could be
perceived the tiny memory of tea at an Aerated Bread shop and at the
other the vision of the delights to which they would emerge. For there
was no one in the world like Madame Okraska, and to see and hear her was
worth cold and weariness and hunger. Not only was she the most famous of
living pianists but one of the most beautiful of women; and upon this
restoring fact many of the most weary stayed themselves, returning again
and again to gaze at the pictured face that adorned the outer cover of
the programme.
Illuminated by chill gas-jets, armed with books and sandwiches, the
serried and devoted ranks were composed of typical concert-goers, of
types, in some cases, becoming as extinct as the muffin-man; young
art-students from the suburbs, dressed in Liberty serges and velveteens,
and reading ninepenny editions of Browning and Rossetti--though a few,
already, were reading Yeats; middle-aged spinsters from Bayswater or
South Kensington, who took their weekly concert as they took their daily
bath; many earnest young men, soft-hatted and long-haired, studying
scores; the usual contingent of the fashionable and economical lady; and
the pale-faced business man, bringing an air of duty to the pursuit of
pleasure.
Some time before the doors opened a growing urgency began to make itself
felt. People got up from their insecurely balanced camp-stools or rose
stiffly from the stone steps to turn and stand shoulder to shoulder,
subtly transformed from comrades in discomfort to combatants for a
hazardous reward. The field for personal endeavour was small; the stairs
were narrow and their occupants packed like sardines; yet everybody
hoped to get a better seat than their positions entitled them to hope
for. Hope and fear increased in intensity with the distance from the
doors, those mute, mystic doors behind which had not yet been heard a
chink or a shuffle and against which leaned, now balefully visible, the
earliest comers of all, jaded, pallid, but insufferably assured. The
summons came at length in the sound of drawn bolts and chains and a
peremptory official voice, blood-tingling as a trumpet-call; and the
crowd, shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot, with rigid lips and eyes
uplifted, began to mount like one man. Step by step they went, steady
and wary, each pressing upon those who went before and presenting a
resistant back to those who followed after. The close, emulous contacts
bred stealthy strifes and hatreds. A small lady, with short grey hair
and thin red face and the conscienceless, smiling eye of a hypnotized
creature, drove her way along the wall and mounted with the agility of a
lizard to a place several steps above. Others were infected by the
successful outlawry and there were some moments of swaying and striving
before the crowd adjusted itself to its self-protective solidity.
Emerged upon the broader stairs they ascended panting and scurrying, in
a wild stampede, to the sudden quiet and chill and emptiness of the
familiar hall, with its high-ranged plaster cupids, whose cheeks and
breasts and thighs were thrown comically into relief by a thick coating
of dust. Here a permanent fog seemed to hang under the roof; only a few
lights twinkled frugally; and the querulous voice of the
programme-seller punctuated the monotonous torrent of feet. Row upon
row, the seats were filled as if by tumultuous waters entering appointed
channels, programmes rustled, sandwiches were drawn from clammy packets,
and the thin-faced lady, iniquitously ensconced in the middle of the
front row in the gallery, had taken out a strip of knitting and was
blandly ready for the evening.
"I always come up here," said one of the ladies from Kensington to a
friend. "One hears her pianissimo more perfectly than anywhere else.
What a magnificent programme! I shall be glad to hear her give the
Schumann Fantaisie in C Major again."
"I think I look forward more to the Bach Fantaisie than to anything,"
said her companion.
She exposed herself to a pained protest: "Oh surely not; not Bach; I do
not come for my Bach to Okraska. She belongs too definitely to the
romantics to grasp Bach. Beethoven, if you will; she may give us the
Appassionata superbly; but not Bach; she lacks self-effacement."
"Liszt said that no one played Bach as she did."
Authority did not serve her. "Liszt may have said it; Brahms would not
have;" was the rejoinder.
Down in the orchestra chairs the audience was roughly to be divided into
the technical and the personal devotees; those who chose seats from
which they could dwell upon Madame Okraska's full face over the shining
surfaces of the piano or upon her profile from the side; and those who,
from behind her back, were dedicated to the study of her magical hands.
"I do hope," said a girl in the centre of the front row of chairs, a
place of dizzy joy, for one might almost touch the goddess as she sat at
the piano, "I do hope she's not getting fat. Someone said they heard she
was. I never want to see her again if she gets fat. It would be too
awful."
The girl with her conjectured sadly that Madame Okraska must be well
over forty.
"I beg your pardon," a massive lady dressed in an embroidered sack-like
garment, and wearing many strings of iridescent shells around her
throat, leaned forward from behind to say: "She is forty-six; I happen
to know; a friend of mine has met Madame Okraska's secretary. Forty-six;
but she keeps her beauty wonderfully; her figure is quite beautiful."
An element of personal excitement was evident in the people who sat in
these nearest chairs; it constituted a bond, though by no means a
friendly one. Emulation, the irrepressible desire to impart knowledge,
broke down normal barriers. The massive lady was slightly flushed and
her manner almost menacing. Her information was received with a vague,
half resentful murmur.
"She looks younger," she continued, while her listeners gave her an
unwilling yet alert attention. "It is extraordinary how she retains her
youth. But it tells, it tells, the tragic life; one sees it in her eyes
and lips."
The first girl now put forward with resolution her pawn of knowledge.
"It has been tragic, hasn't it. The dreadful man she was married to by
her relations when she was hardly more than a child, and the death of
her second husband. He was the Baron von Marwitz; her real name is von
Marwitz; Okraska is her maiden name. He was drowned in saving her life,
you know."
"The Baron von Marwitz was drowned no one knows how; he was found
drowned; she found his body. She went into a convent after his death."
"A convent? I was reading a life of her in a magazine the other day and
nothing was said about a convent."
The massive lady smiled tolerantly: "Nothing would be. She has a horror
of publicity. Yes, she is a mystic as well as an artist; she only
resigned the religious life because of what she felt to be her duty to
her adopted daughter. One sees the mystical side in her face and hears
it in her music."
Madame Okraska was one of those about whose footsteps legends rise, and
legend could add little to the romantic facts of her life;--the poverty
of her youth; her _début_ as a child prodigy at Warsaw and the sudden
fame that had followed it; the coronets that had been laid at her feet;
her private tragedies, cosmopolitan friendships, her scholarship,
caprices and generosities. She had been the Egeria, smiling in mystery,
of half a dozen famous men. And it was as satisfactory to the devotee to
hear that she always wore white and drank coffee for her breakfast, as
that Rubinstein and Liszt had blessed her and Leschetitsky said that she
had nothing to learn. Her very origin belonged to the realm of romantic
fiction. Her father, a Polish music-master in New Orleans, had run away
with his pupil, a beautiful Spanish girl of a good Creole family. Their
child had been born in Cracow while the Austrians were bombarding it in
1848.
The lights were now all up and the stalls filling. Ladies and gentlemen
from the suburbs, over early, were the first comers; eager schoolgirls
marshalled by governesses; scrupulous students with music under their
arms, and, finally, the rustling, shining, chattering crowd of
fashionable London.
The massive lady had by now her little audience, cowed, if still
slightly sulky, well in hand. She pointed out each notability to them,
and indirectly, to all her neighbours. The Duchess of Bannister and Lady
Champney, the famous beauty; the Prime Minister, whom the girls could
have recognized for themselves, and Sir Alliston Compton, the poet. Had
they read his sonnet to Madame Okraska, last year, in the "Fortnightly"?
They had not. "I wonder who that odd looking girl is with him and the
old lady?" one of them ventured.
"A little grand-daughter, a little niece," said the massive lady, who
did not know. "Poor Sir Alliston's wife is in a lunatic asylum; isn't it
a melancholy head?"
But now one of her listeners, a lady also in the front row, leaned
forward to say hurriedly and deprecatingly, her face suffused with
shyness: "That nice young girl is Madame Okraska's adopted daughter. The
old lady is Mrs. Forrester, Madame Okraska's great friend; my
sister-in-law was for many years a governess in her family, and that is
how I come to know."
All those who had heard her turned their eyes upon the young girl, who,
in an old-fashioned white cloak, with a collar of swansdown turned up
round her fair hair, was taking her place with her companions in the
front row of the orchestra-stalls. Even the massive lady was rapt away
to silence.
"But I thought the adopted daughter was an Italian," one girl at last
commented, having gazed her fill at the being so exalted by fortune.
"Her skin is rather dark, but that yellow hair doesn't look Italian."
"She is a Norwegian," said the massive lady, keeping however an eye on
the relative of Mrs. Forrester's governess; "the child of Norwegian
peasants. Don't you know the story? Madame Okraska found the poor little
creature lost in a Norwegian forest, leaped from her carriage and took
her into her arms; the parents were destitute and she bought the child
from them. She is the very soul of generosity."
"She doesn't look like a peasant," said the girl, with a flavour of
discontent, as though a more apparent rusticity would have lent special
magnanimity to Madame Okraska's benevolence. But the massive lady
assured her: "Oh yes, it is the true Norse type; their peasantry has its
patrician quality. I have been to Norway. Sir Alliston looks very much
moved, doesn't he? He has been in love with Madame Okraska for years."
And she added with a deep sigh of satisfaction: "There has never been a
word whispered against her reputation; never a word--'Pure as the foam
on midmost ocean tossed.'"
Among the crowds thronging densely to their places, a young man of
soldierly aspect, with a dark, narrow face, black hair and square blue
eyes, was making his way to a seat in the third row of stalls. His name
was Gregory Jardine; he was not a soldier--though he looked one--but a
barrister, and he was content to count himself, not altogether
incorrectly, a Philistine in all matters æsthetic. Good music he
listened to with, as he put it, unintelligent and barbarous enjoyment;
and since he had, shamefully, never yet heard the great pianist, he had
bought the best stall procurable some weeks before, and now, after a
taxing day in the law courts, had foregone his after-dinner coffee in
order not to miss one note of the opening Appassionata; it was a sonata
he was very fond of. He sometimes picked out the air of the slow
movement on the piano with heavy deliberation; his musical equipment did
not carry him as far as the variations.
When he reached his seat he found it to be by chance next that of his
sister-in-law, his brother Oliver's wife, a pretty, jewelled and
jewel-like young woman, an American of a complicatedly cosmopolitan
type. Gregory liked Betty Jardine, and always wondered how she had come
to marry Oliver, whom he rather scorned; but he was not altogether
pleased to find her near him. He preferred to take his music in
solitude; and Betty was very talkative.
"Well, this is nice, Gregory!" she said. "You and Captain Ashton know
each other, don't you. No, I couldn't persuade Oliver to come; he
wouldn't give up his whist. Isn't Oliver dreadful; he moves from the
saddle to the whist-table, and back again; and that is all. Captain
Ashton and I have been comparing notes; we find that we have missed
hardly any of Madame Okraska's concerts in London. I was only ten when I
heard the first she ever gave here; my governess took me; and actually
Captain Ashton was here on that day, too. Wasn't she a miracle of
loveliness? It was twenty years ago; she had already her European
reputation. It was just after she had divorced that horrible first
husband of hers and married the Baron von Marwitz. This isn't your
initiation, of course, Gregory?"
"Actually my initiation," said Gregory, examining the portrait of Madame
Okraska on the cover of the programme.
"But you've seen her at Mrs. Forrester's? She always stays with Mrs.
Forrester."
"I know; but I've always missed her, or, at all events, never been asked
to meet her."
"I certainly never have been," said Betty Jardine. "But Mrs. Forrester
thinks of me as frivolity personified, I know, and doesn't care to admit
anything lower than a cabinet minister or a poet laureate when she has
her lion domiciled. She is an old darling; but, between ourselves, she
does take her lions a little too seriously, doesn't she. Well, prepare
for a _coup de foudre_, Gregory. You'll be sure to fall in love with
her. Everybody falls in love with her. Captain Ashton has been in love
with her for twenty years. She is extraordinary."
"I'm ready to be subjugated," said Gregory. "Do people really hang on
her hands and kiss them? Shall I want to hang on her hands and kiss
them?"
"There is no telling what she will do with us," said Lady Jardine.
Gregory Jardine's face, however, was not framed to express enthusiasm.
It was caustic, cold and delicate. His eyes were as clear and as hard as
a sky of frosty morning, and his small, firm lips were hard. His chin
and lower lip advanced slightly, so that when he smiled his teeth met
edge to edge, and the little black moustache, to which he often gave an
absent upward twist, lent an ironic quality to this chill, gay smile, at
times almost Mephistophelian. He sat twisting the moustache now, leaning
his head to listen, amidst the babel of voices, to Betty Jardine's
chatter, and the thrills of infectious expectancy that passed over the
audience like breezes over a corn-field left him unaffected. His
observant, indifferent glance had in it something of the schoolboy's
barbarian calm and something of the disabused impersonality of worldly
experience.
"Who is the young lady with Mrs. Forrester?" he asked presently. "In
white, with yellow hair. Just in front of us. Do you know?"
Betty had leaned forward to look. "Don't you even know her by sight?"
she said. "That is Miss Woodruff, the girl who follows Madame Okraska
everywhere. She attached herself to her years ago, I believe, in Rome or
Paris;--some sort of little art-student she was. What a bore that sort
of devotion must be. Isn't she queer?"
"I had heard that she's an adopted daughter," said Captain Ashton; "the
child of Norwegian peasants, and that Madame Okraska found her in a
Norwegian forest--by moonlight;--a most romantic story."
"A fable, I think. Someone was telling me about her the other day. She
is only a camp-follower and _protégée_; and a compatriot of mine. She is
an orphan and Madame Okraska supports her."
"She doesn't look like a _protégée_," said Gregory Jardine, his eyes on
the young person thus described; "she looks like a protector."
"I should think she must be most of all a problem," said Betty. "What a
price to pay for celebrity--these hangers-on who make one ridiculous by
their infatuation. Madame Okraska is incapable of defending herself
against them, I hear. The child's clothes might have come from Norway!"
The _protégée_, protector or problem, who turned to them now and then
her oddly blunted, oddly resolute young profile, had tawny hair, and a
sun-browned skin. She wore a little white silk frock with flat bows of
dull blue upon it. Her evening cloak was bordered with swansdown. Two
black bows, one at the crown of her head and one at the nape of her
neck, secured the thick plaits of her hair, which was parted and brushed
up from her forehead in a bygone school-girlish fashion. She made
Gregory think of a picture by Alfred Stevens he had seen somewhere and
of an archaic Greek statue, and her appearance and demeanour interested
him. He continued to look at her while the unrest and expectancy of the
audience rolled into billows of excitement.
A staid, melancholy man, forerunner of the great artist, had appeared
and performed his customary and cryptic function. "Why do they always
screw up the piano-stool at the last moment!" Betty Jardine murmured.
"Is it to pepper our tongues with anguish before the claret?--Oh, she
must be coming now! She always keeps one waiting like this!"
The billows had surged to a storm. Signs of frenzy were visible in the
faces on the platform. They had caught a glimpse of the approaching
divinity.
"Here she is!" cried Betty Jardine. Like everybody else she was clapping
frantically, like everybody, that is, except Gregory Jardine; for
Gregory, his elbow in his hand, his fingers still neatly twisting the
end of his moustache, continued to observe the young girl in the front
row, whose face, illuminated and irradiated, was upturned to the figure
now mounting to the platform.