These four ... Lily, Madame Gigon, Criquette and Michou ... were the
permanent tenants of Numero Dix. There were two others who came and
went, spending now a week’s holiday, now a whole month or more. They
even paid visits frequently to the lodge at Germigny l’Evec in the park
of the Baron, where Lily spent the spring and the autumn of every year,
taking a house during the summer at Houlgate where she lived as a
Frenchwoman in the very heart of the small American colony. The
transients in the establishment of Madame Shane were her son Jean and
her cousin Ellen Tolliver. They flitted in and out like birds of
passage, less regular in their arrival and departure, though no less
spirited and noisy.
The Ellen Tolliver of the pompadour and starched shirt waists had become
the Lilli Barr whom crowds packed concert halls to see and hear, whom
music critics found themselves bound to commend--the same Lilli Barr
whose photograph seated beside a great composer appeared in the Sunday
supplements of American newspapers. This of course, the public never
knew. It knew only that she was a fine pianist with a sensational
presence and a vitality which reached out and engulfed them through the
medium of surging music. It knew nothing of her past. Indeed there were
few who knew she was an American. Her name might have been Russian or
Austrian, Hungarian or German. It carried with it the glamor sought by
the public which will receive the most sublime artist with indifference
if her name happened to be Mary Smith and her origin Evanston, Indiana.
This she realized. She shrewdly explained to Lily the evolution of her
name.
“Barr,” she said, “is the name of my grandfather. I have a perfect right
to it. Alone and unadorned it is not thrilling. Therefore I have chosen
Lilli. That, my dear, is a tribute to you, because if it had not been
for you I should probably be an old maid giving music lessons at fifty
cents an hour to the daughters of mill clerks.” She laughed noisily.
“Lilli Barr.... A great name, don’t you think? It will suit everybody.
It will suit those who believe American musicians should be encouraged
and it will suit those who must have a little exotic European sauce with
their fowl. Lilli Barr.... It might be anything at all.”
“Lilli Barr” was a name which betrayed nothing of a rather materialistic
elopement with a traveling salesman called Clarence Murdock. It betrayed
nothing of Clarence’s quiet passing out of this life from a weakened
heart too greatly tried by life with a robust and ambitious wife. It had
nothing to do with a father, ruined by honesty, who wore away his middle
age as clerk in an industrial bank. It gave no hint of a mother who, in
an effort to follow her ambitious, migratory offspring, had kept a
Manhattan rooming house for five years past. Decidedly, emphatically, it
was an exotic name. There were even people who believed that she was the
protegee of a German Baron named Unschaff (they had his name and the
history of his amours) whom she repaid in the usual way. And this story
Ellen would have been the last to deny, for she knew its value. She
understood that the people who paid money for concerts must have
something beside music. And she understood the value of money in a
fashion never imagined by Lily. The critics might call her playing
sensational, bordering even upon charlatanism, she would not deny it.
The public liked an artist who understood the value of a gesture, who
came upon the concert stage with air of a queen, who played with gusto
and the sweep of a hurricane. She understood all that. It was not that
she was insincere. There were those for whom she played exquisitely and
with all the distilled beauty of a sensitive artist, with the same
curious passion which had engulfed her music on that last night in the
drawing-room at Cypress Hill. She was a clever woman, far more
intelligent than Lily, and having been nourished in the midst of poverty
and failure, her one God was success, a sort of embittered success which
played upon the silliness and affectation of the world.
Certainly she had kept the promise made to Lily. She fitted no pattern,
least of all the pattern of the Town. She had her own ruthless law,
founded upon consideration for friends alone. She had her own thoughts
and beliefs. Indeed she hated the pattern bitterly, so bitterly that she
made a vow never to play in the Town no matter what the fee offered her.
In appearance she resembled curiously her grandaunt, Lily’s mother.
About her features there was the same bold carving. Her face was too
long and her eyes a shade too green. Her figure held none of the
voluptuous curves that softened her cousin’s beauty; on the contrary it
was slim and strong. She walked with a fine free swing that carried in
it a hint of masculinity. Beside Lily she was not beautiful at all; yet
on the concert stage under the glow of the lights her beauty was
infinitely more effective than Lily’s would have been.... Her energy was
the energy descended directly from Hattie Tolliver. It crackled through
her whole being. She was not like Lily, a woman of the world; there was
a quality of directness and naivete, a breeziness springing from her
background and her ancestry, which all the courts of Europe might never
overcome. She was, above all else, herself, incapable of affectation or
pretense. And this, she also understood, was a thing of great value
because one expected it of the artistic temperament. An artist made no
compromises.