When Caroline Noble's friends learned that Raymond d'Esquerre was to
spend a month at her place on the Sound before he sailed to fill his
engagement for the London opera season, they considered it another
striking instance of the perversity of things. That the month was May,
and the most mild and florescent of all the blue-and-white Mays the
middle coast had known in years, but added to their sense of wrong.
D'Esquerre, they learned, was ensconced in the lodge in the apple
orchard, just beyond Caroline's glorious garden, and report went that
at almost any hour the sound of the tenor's voice and of Caroline's
crashing accompaniment could be heard floating through the open windows,
out among the snowy apple boughs. The Sound, steel-blue and dotted with
white sails, was splendidly seen from the windows of the lodge. The
garden to the left and the orchard to the right had never been so
riotous with spring, and had burst into impassioned bloom, as if to
accommodate Caroline, though she was certainly the last woman to whom
the witchery of Freya could be attributed; the last woman, as her
friends affirmed, to at all adequately appreciate and make the most of
such a setting for the great tenor.
Of course, they admitted, Caroline was musical--well, she ought to
be!--but in that, as in everything, she was paramountly cool-headed,
slow of impulse, and disgustingly practical; in that, as in everything
else, she had herself so provokingly well in hand. Of course, it would
be she, always mistress of herself in any situation, she, who would
never be lifted one inch from the ground by it, and who would go on
superintending her gardeners and workmen as usual--it would be she who
got him. Perhaps some of them suspected that this was exactly why she
did get him, and it but nettled them the more.
Caroline's coolness, her capableness, her general success, especially
exasperated people because they felt that, for the most part, she
had made herself what she was; that she had cold-bloodedly set about
complying with the demands of life and making her position comfortable
and masterful. That was why, everyone said, she had married Howard
Noble. Women who did not get through life so well as Caroline, who could
not make such good terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did
not find their health so unfailingly good, or hold their looks so well,
or manage their children so easily, or give such distinction to all they
did, were fond of stamping Caroline as a materialist, and called her
hard.
The impression of cold calculation, of having a definite policy, which
Caroline gave, was far from a false one; but there was this to be said
for her--that there were extenuating circumstances which her friends
could not know.
If Caroline held determinedly to the middle course, if she was apt to
regard with distrust everything which inclined toward extravagance, it
was not because she was unacquainted with other standards than her own,
or had never seen another side of life. She had grown up in Brooklyn,
in a shabby little house under the vacillating administration of her
father, a music teacher who usually neglected his duties to write
orchestral compositions for which the world seemed to have no especial
need. His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile
self-commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labor that
brought him bread and in pitiful devotion to the labor that brought him
only disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the
orchestra everything under heaven except melody.
It was not a cheerful home for a girl to grow up in. The mother, who
idolized her husband as the music lord of the future, was left to a
lifelong battle with broom and dustpan, to neverending conciliatory
overtures to the butcher and grocer, to the making of her own gowns
and of Caroline's, and to the delicate task of mollifying Auguste's
neglected pupils.
The son, Heinrich, a painter, Caroline's only brother, had inherited all
his father's vindictive sensitiveness without his capacity for slavish
application. His little studio on the third floor had been much
frequented by young men as unsuccessful as himself, who met there to
give themselves over to contemptuous derision of this or that artist
whose industry and stupidity had won him recognition. Heinrich, when he
worked at all, did newspaper sketches at twenty-five dollars a week. He
was too indolent and vacillating to set himself seriously to his art,
too irascible and poignantly self-conscious to make a living, too much
addicted to lying late in bed, to the incontinent reading of poetry, and
to the use of chloral to be anything very positive except painful. At
twenty-six he shot himself in a frenzy, and the whole wretched affair
had effectually shattered his mother's health and brought on the decline
of which she died. Caroline had been fond of him, but she felt a certain
relief when he no longer wandered about the little house, commenting
ironically upon its shabbiness, a Turkish cap on his head and a
cigarette hanging from between his long, tremulous fingers.
After her mother's death Caroline assumed the management of that
bankrupt establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid, and Auguste's
pupils had been frightened away by the shock of successive disasters and
the general atmosphere of wretchedness that pervaded the house. Auguste
himself was writing a symphonic poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory
of his son. Caroline was barely twenty when she was called upon to face
this tangle of difficulties, but she reviewed the situation candidly.
The house had served its time at the shrine of idealism; vague,
distressing, unsatisfied yearnings had brought it low enough. Her
mother, thirty years before, had eloped and left Germany with her music
teacher, to give herself over to lifelong, drudging bondage at the
kitchen range. Ever since Caroline could remember, the law in the house
had been a sort of mystic worship of things distant, intangible and
unattainable. The family had lived in successive ebullitions of generous
enthusiasm, in talk of masters and masterpieces, only to come down to
the cold facts in the case; to boiled mutton and to the necessity of
turning the dining-room carpet. All these emotional pyrotechnics had
ended in petty jealousies, in neglected duties, and in cowardly fear of
the little grocer on the corner.
From her childhood she had hated it, that humiliating and uncertain
existence, with its glib tongue and empty pockets, its poetic ideals and
sordid realities, its indolence and poverty tricked out in paper roses.
Even as a little girl, when vague dreams beset her, when she wanted to
lie late in bed and commune with visions, or to leap and sing because
the sooty little trees along the street were putting out their first
pale leaves in the sunshine, she would clench her hands and go to
help her mother sponge the spots from her father's waistcoat or press
Heinrich's trousers. Her mother never permitted the slightest question
concerning anything Auguste or Heinrich saw fit to do, but from the
time Caroline could reason at all she could not help thinking that many
things went wrong at home. She knew, for example, that her father's
pupils ought not to be kept waiting half an hour while he discussed
Schopenhauer with some bearded socialist over a dish of herrings and a
spotted tablecloth. She knew that Heinrich ought not to give a dinner on
Heine's birthday, when the laundress had not been paid for a month and
when he frequently had to ask his mother for carfare. Certainly Caroline
had served her apprenticeship to idealism and to all the embarrassing
inconsistencies which it sometimes entails, and she decided to deny
herself this diffuse, ineffectual answer to the sharp questions of life.
When she came into the control of herself and the house she refused
to proceed any further with her musical education. Her father, who had
intended to make a concert pianist of her, set this down as another
item in his long list of disappointments and his grievances against
the world. She was young and pretty, and she had worn turned gowns and
soiled gloves and improvised hats all her life. She wanted the luxury of
being like other people, of being honest from her hat to her boots, of
having nothing to hide, not even in the matter of stockings, and she was
willing to work for it. She rented a little studio away from that house
of misfortune and began to give lessons. She managed well and was the
sort of girl people liked to help. The bills were paid and Auguste went
on composing, growing indignant only when she refused to insist that
her pupils should study his compositions for the piano. She began to
get engagements in New York to play accompaniments at song recitals.
She dressed well, made herself agreeable, and gave herself a chance.
She never permitted herself to look further than a step ahead, and set
herself with all the strength of her will to see things as they are and
meet them squarely in the broad day. There were two things she feared
even more than poverty: the part of one that sets up an idol and the
part of one that bows down and worships it.
When Caroline was twenty-four she married Howard Noble, then a widower
of forty, who had been for ten years a power in Wall Street. Then, for
the first time, she had paused to take breath. It took a substantialness
as unquestionable as his; his money, his position, his energy, the big
vigor of his robust person, to satisfy her that she was entirely safe.
Then she relaxed a little, feeling that there was a barrier to be
counted upon between her and that world of visions and quagmires and
failure.
Caroline had been married for six years when Raymond d'Esquerre came
to stay with them. He came chiefly because Caroline was what she was;
because he, too, felt occasionally the need of getting out of Klingsor's
garden, of dropping down somewhere for a time near a quiet nature, a
cool head, a strong hand. The hours he had spent in the garden lodge
were hours of such concentrated study as, in his fevered life, he seldom
got in anywhere. She had, as he told Noble, a fine appreciation of the
seriousness of work.
One evening two weeks after d'Esquerre had sailed, Caroline was in the
library giving her husband an account of the work she had laid out for
the gardeners. She superintended the care of the grounds herself. Her
garden, indeed, had become quite a part of her; a sort of beautiful
adjunct, like gowns or jewels. It was a famous spot, and Noble was very
proud of it.
“What do you think, Caroline, of having the garden lodge torn down and
putting a new summer house there at the end of the arbor; a big rustic
affair where you could have tea served in midsummer?” he asked.
“The lodge?” repeated Caroline looking at him quickly. “Why, that seems
almost a shame, doesn't it, after d'Esquerre has used it?”
Noble put down his book with a smile of amusement.
“Are you going to be sentimental about it? Why, I'd sacrifice the whole
place to see that come to pass. But I don't believe you could do it for
an hour together.”
“I don't believe so, either,” said his wife, smiling.
Noble took up his book again and Caroline went into the music room to
practice. She was not ready to have the lodge torn down. She had gone
there for a quiet hour every day during the two weeks since d'Esquerre
had left them. It was the sheerest sentiment she had ever permitted
herself. She was ashamed of it, but she was childishly unwilling to let
it go.
Caroline went to bed soon after her husband, but she was not able to
sleep. The night was close and warm, presaging storm. The wind had
fallen, and the water slept, fixed and motionless as the sand. She rose
and thrust her feet into slippers and, putting a dressing gown over
her shoulders, opened the door of her husband's room; he was sleeping
soundly. She went into the hall and down the stairs; then, leaving the
house through a side door, stepped into the vine-covered arbor that led
to the garden lodge. The scent of the June roses was heavy in the still
air, and the stones that paved the path felt pleasantly cool through the
thin soles of her slippers. Heat-lightning flashed continuously from the
bank of clouds that had gathered over the sea, but the shore was flooded
with moonlight and, beyond, the rim of the Sound lay smooth and shining.
Caroline had the key of the lodge, and the door creaked as she opened
it. She stepped into the long, low room radiant with the moonlight which
streamed through the bow window and lay in a silvery pool along the
waxed floor. Even that part of the room which lay in the shadow was
vaguely illuminated; the piano, the tall candlesticks, the picture
frames and white casts standing out as clearly in the half-light as
did the sycamores and black poplars of the garden against the still,
expectant night sky. Caroline sat down to think it all over. She had
come here to do just that every day of the two weeks since d'Esquerre's
departure, but, far from ever having reached a conclusion, she had
succeeded only in losing her way in a maze of memories--sometimes
bewilderingly confused, sometimes too acutely distinct--where there was
neither path, nor clue, nor any hope of finality. She had, she realized,
defeated a lifelong regimen; completely confounded herself by falling
unaware and incontinently into that luxury of reverie which, even as
a little girl, she had so determinedly denied herself, she had been
developing with alarming celerity that part of one which sets up an idol
and that part of one which bows down and worships it.
It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d'Esquerre to come
at all. She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in
self-defiance, to rid herself finally of that instinctive fear of him
which had always troubled and perplexed her. She knew that she had
reckoned with herself before he came; but she had been equal to so much
that she had never really doubted she would be equal to this. She had
come to believe, indeed, almost arrogantly in her own malleability and
endurance; she had done so much with herself that she had come to think
that there was nothing which she could not do; like swimmers, overbold,
who reckon upon their strength and their power to hoard it, forgetting
the ever-changing moods of their adversary, the sea.
And d'Esquerre was a man to reckon with. Caroline did not deceive
herself now upon that score. She admitted it humbly enough, and since
she had said good-by to him she had not been free for a moment from
the sense of his formidable power. It formed the undercurrent of her
consciousness; whatever she might be doing or thinking, it went on,
involuntarily, like her breathing, sometimes welling up until suddenly
she found herself suffocating. There was a moment of this tonight,
and Caroline rose and stood shuddering, looking about her in the blue
duskiness of the silent room. She had not been here at night before, and
the spirit of the place seemed more troubled and insistent than ever it
had in the quiet of the afternoons. Caroline brushed her hair back from
her damp forehead and went over to the bow window. After raising it
she sat down upon the low seat. Leaning her head against the sill, and
loosening her nightgown at the throat, she half-closed her eyes
and looked off into the troubled night, watching the play of the
heat-lightning upon the massing clouds between the pointed tops of the
poplars.
Yes, she knew, she knew well enough, of what absurdities this spell was
woven; she mocked, even while she winced. His power, she knew, lay not
so much in anything that he actually had--though he had so much--or
in anything that he actually was, but in what he suggested, in what he
seemed picturesque enough to have or be and that was just anything
that one chose to believe or to desire. His appeal was all the more
persuasive and alluring in that it was to the imagination alone, in that
it was as indefinite and impersonal as those cults of idealism which
so have their way with women. What he had was that, in his mere
personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that something
without which--to women--life is no better than sawdust, and to the
desire for which most of their mistakes and tragedies and astonishingly
poor bargains are due.
D'Esquerre had become the center of a movement, and the Metropolitan
had become the temple of a cult. When he could be induced to cross the
Atlantic, the opera season in New York was successful; when he
could not, the management lost money; so much everyone knew. It was
understood, too, that his superb art had disproportionately little to do
with his peculiar position. Women swayed the balance this way or that;
the opera, the orchestra, even his own glorious art, achieved at such a
cost, were but the accessories of himself; like the scenery and costumes
and even the soprano, they all went to produce atmosphere, were the mere
mechanics of the beautiful illusion.
Caroline understood all this; tonight was not the first time that she
had put it to herself so. She had seen the same feeling in other people,
watched for it in her friends, studied it in the house night after night
when he sang, candidly putting herself among a thousand others.
D'Esquerre's arrival in the early winter was the signal for a feminine
hegira toward New York. On the nights when he sang women flocked to
the Metropolitan from mansions and hotels, from typewriter desks,
schoolrooms, shops, and fitting rooms. They were of all conditions
and complexions. Women of the world who accepted him knowingly as they
sometimes took champagne for its agreeable effect; sisters of charity
and overworked shopgirls, who received him devoutly; withered women who
had taken doctorate degrees and who worshipped furtively through prism
spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt
afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all
entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues
of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped
upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of shouldering
the pack again.
There were the maimed, even; those who came on crutches, who were pitted
by smallpox or grotesquely painted by cruel birth stains. These, too,
entered with him into enchantment. Stout matrons became slender girls
again; worn spinsters felt their cheeks flush with the tenderness of
their lost youth. Young and old, however hideous, however fair, they
yielded up their heat--whether quick or latent--sat hungering for the
mystic bread wherewith he fed them at this eucharist of sentiment.
Sometimes, when the house was crowded from the orchestra to the last row
of the gallery, when the air was charged with this ecstasy of fancy,
he himself was the victim of the burning reflection of his power. They
acted upon him in turn; he felt their fervent and despairing appeal to
him; it stirred him as the spring drives the sap up into an old tree;
he, too, burst into bloom. For the moment he, too, believed again,
desired again, he knew not what, but something.
But it was not in these exalted moments that Caroline had learned to
fear him most. It was in the quiet, tired reserve, the dullness, even,
that kept him company between these outbursts that she found that
exhausting drain upon her sympathies which was the very pith
and substance of their alliance. It was the tacit admission of
disappointment under all this glamour of success--the helplessness of
the enchanter to at all enchant himself--that awoke in her an illogical,
womanish desire to in some way compensate, to make it up to him.
She had observed drastically to herself that it was her eighteenth year
he awoke in her--those hard years she had spent in turning gowns and
placating tradesmen, and which she had never had time to live. After
all, she reflected, it was better to allow one's self a little youth--to
dance a little at the carnival and to live these things when they are
natural and lovely, not to have them coming back on one and demanding
arrears when they are humiliating and impossible. She went over tonight
all the catalogue of her self-deprivations; recalled how, in the light
of her father's example, she had even refused to humor her innocent
taste for improvising at the piano; how, when she began to teach, after
her mother's death, she had struck out one little indulgence after
another, reducing her life to a relentless routine, unvarying as
clockwork. It seemed to her that ever since d'Esquerre first came into
the house she had been haunted by an imploring little girlish ghost that
followed her about, wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of
life.
The storm had held off unconscionably long; the air within the lodge was
stifling, and without the garden waited, breathless. Everything seemed
pervaded by a poignant distress; the hush of feverish, intolerable
expectation. The still earth, the heavy flowers, even the growing
darkness, breathed the exhaustion of protracted waiting. Caroline felt
that she ought to go; that it was wrong to stay; that the hour and the
place were as treacherous as her own reflections. She rose and began to
pace the floor, stepping softly, as though in fear of awakening someone,
her figure, in its thin drapery, diaphanously vague and white. Still
unable to shake off the obsession of the intense stillness, she sat down
at the piano and began to run over the first act of the _Walkure_, the
last of his roles they had practiced together; playing listlessly and
absently at first, but with gradually increasing seriousness. Perhaps it
was the still heat of the summer night, perhaps it was the heavy odors
from the garden that came in through the open windows; but as she played
there grew and grew the feeling that he was there, beside her, standing
in his accustomed place. In the duet at the end of the first act she
heard him clearly: _“Thou art the Spring for which I sighed in Winter's
cold embraces.”_ Once as he sang it, he had put his arm about her,
his one hand under her heart, while with the other he took her right
from the keyboard, holding her as he always held _Sieglinde_ when he
drew her toward the window. She had been wonderfully the mistress of
herself at the time; neither repellent nor acquiescent. She remembered
that she had rather exulted, then, in her self-control--which he had
seemed to take for granted, though there was perhaps the whisper of a
question from the hand under her heart. _“Thou art the Spring for which
I sighed in Winter's cold embraces.”_ Caroline lifted her hands quickly
from the keyboard, and she bowed her head in them, sobbing.
The storm broke and the rain beat in, spattering her nightdress until
she rose and lowered the windows. She dropped upon the couch and began
fighting over again the battles of other days, while the ghosts of the
slain rose as from a sowing of dragon's teeth, The shadows of things,
always so scorned and flouted, bore down upon her merciless and
triumphant. It was not enough; this happy, useful, well-ordered life
was not enough. It did not satisfy, it was not even real. No, the other
things, the shadows--they were the realities. Her father, poor Heinrich,
even her mother, who had been able to sustain her poor romance and keep
her little illusions amid the tasks of a scullion, were nearer happiness
than she. Her sure foundation was but made ground, after all, and the
people in Klingsor's garden were more fortunate, however barren the
sands from which they conjured their paradise.
The lodge was still and silent; her fit of weeping over, Caroline
made no sound, and within the room, as without in the garden, was the
blackness of storm. Only now and then a flash of lightning showed a
woman's slender figure rigid on the couch, her face buried in her hands.
Toward morning, when the occasional rumbling of thunder was heard no
more and the beat of the raindrops upon the orchard leaves was steadier,
she fell asleep and did not waken until the first red streaks of dawn
shone through the twisted boughs of the apple trees. There was a moment
between world and world, when, neither asleep nor awake, she felt her
dream grow thin, melting away from her, felt the warmth under her heart
growing cold. Something seemed to slip from the clinging hold of her
arms, and she groaned protestingly through her parted lips, following
it a little way with fluttering hands. Then her eyes opened wide and she
sprang up and sat holding dizzily to the cushions of the couch, staring
down at her bare, cold feet, at her laboring breast, rising and falling
under her open nightdress.
The dream was gone, but the feverish reality of it still pervaded her
and she held it as the vibrating string holds a tone. In the last hour
the shadows had had their way with Caroline. They had shown her the
nothingness of time and space, of system and discipline, of closed doors
and broad waters. Shuddering, she thought of the Arabian fairy tale in
which the genie brought the princess of China to the sleeping prince
of Damascus and carried her through the air back to her palace at dawn.
Caroline closed her eyes and dropped her elbows weakly upon her knees,
her shoulders sinking together. The horror was that it had not come
from without, but from within. The dream was no blind chance; it was the
expression of something she had kept so close a prisoner that she had
never seen it herself, it was the wail from the donjon deeps when the
watch slept. Only as the outcome of such a night of sorcery could the
thing have been loosed to straighten its limbs and measure itself with
her; so heavy were the chains upon it, so many a fathom deep, it was
crushed down into darkness. The fact that d'Esquerre happened to be on
the other side of the world meant nothing; had he been here, beside her,
it could scarcely have hurt her self-respect so much. As it was, she was
without even the extenuation of an outer impulse, and she could scarcely
have despised herself more had she come to him here in the night three
weeks ago and thrown herself down upon the stone slab at the door there.
Caroline rose unsteadily and crept guiltily from the lodge and along the
path under the arbor, terrified lest the servants should be stirring,
trembling with the chill air, while the wet shrubbery, brushing against
her, drenched her nightdress until it clung about her limbs.
At breakfast her husband looked across the table at her with concern.
“It seems to me that you are looking rather fagged, Caroline. It was a
beastly night to sleep. Why don't you go up to the mountains until this
hot weather is over? By the way, were you in earnest about letting the
lodge stand?”
Caroline laughed quietly. “No, I find I was not very serious. I haven't
sentiment enough to forego a summer house. Will you tell Baker to come
tomorrow to talk it over with me? If we are to have a house party, I
should like to put him to work on it at once.”
Noble gave her a glance, half-humorous, half-vexed. “Do you know I am
rather disappointed?” he said. “I had almost hoped that, just for once,
you know, you would be a little bit foolish.”
“Not now that I've slept over it,” replied Caroline, and they both rose
from the table, laughing.