"He told Crossley! I wonder why." She was so interested in this new
phase that she did not see his outstretched hand, or the look of bitter
irony that came into his eyes at this proof of the subordinate place
love and he had in her thoughts.
"I'm nervous and anxious," she said apologetically. "Moldini told me he
had some scheme about getting the money. If he only could! But no
such luck for me," she added sadly.
Keith hesitated, debated with himself, said: "You needn't worry.
Moldini got it--from Crossley. Fifty dollars a week for a year."
"You got Crossley to do it?"
"No. He had done it before I saw him. He had just promised Moldini
and was cursing himself as 'weak and soft.' But that means nothing.
You may be sure he did it because Moldini convinced him it was a good
speculation."
She was radiant. She had not vanity enough where he was concerned to
believe that he deeply cared, that her joy would give him pain because
it meant forgetfulness of him. Nor was she much impressed by the
expression of his eyes. And even as she hurt him, she made him love
her the more; for he appreciated how rare was the woman who, in such
circumstances, does not feed her vanity with pity for the poor man
suffering so horribly because he is not to get her precious self.
It flashed upon her why he had not offered to help her. "There isn't
anybody like you," said she, with no explanation of her apparent
irrelevancy.
"Don't let Moldini see that you know," said he, with characteristic
fine thoughtfulness for others in the midst of his own unhappiness. "It
would deprive him of a great pleasure."
He was about to go. Suddenly her eyes filled and, opening the outer
door, she drew him in. "Donald," she said, "I love you. Take me in
your arms and make me behave."
He looked past her; his arms hung at his sides. Said he: "And
to-night I'd get a note by messenger saying that you had taken it all
back. No, the girl in the photograph--that was you. She wasn't made
to be MY wife. Or I to be her husband. I love you because you are
what you are. I should not love you if you were the ordinary woman,
the sort who marries and merges. But I'm old enough to spare
myself--and you--the consequences of what it would mean if we were
anything but strangers to each other."
"Yes, you must keep away--altogether. If you didn't, I'd be neither
the one thing nor the other, but just a poor failure."
"You'll not fail," said he. "I know it. It's written in your face."
He looked at her. She was not looking at him, but with eyes gazing
straight ahead was revealing that latent, inexplicable power which,
when it appeared at the surface, so strongly dominated and subordinated
her beauty and her sex. He shut his teeth together hard and glanced
away.
"You will not fail," he repeated bitterly. "And that's the worst of
it."
Without another word, without a handshake, he went. And she knew that,
except by chance, he would never see her again--or she him.
Moldini, disheveled and hysterical with delight and suspense, was in
the drawing-room--had been there half an hour. At first she could
hardly force her mind to listen; but as he talked on and on, he
captured her attention and held it.
The next day she began with Moldini, and put the Lucia Rivi system into
force in all its more than conventual rigors. And for about a month
she worked like a devouring flame. Never had there been such energy,
such enthusiasm. Mrs. Belloc was alarmed for her health, but the Rivi
system took care of that; and presently Mrs. Belloc was moved to say,
"Well, I've often heard that hard work never harmed anyone, but I never
believed it. Now I know the truth."
Then Mildred went to Hanging Rock to spend Saturday to Monday with her
mother. Presbury, reduced now by various infirmities--by absolute
deafness, by dimness of sight, by difficulty in walking--to where
eating was his sole remaining pleasure, or, indeed, distraction, spent
all his time in concocting dishes for himself. Mildred could not
resist--and who can when seated at table with the dish before one's
eyes and under one's nose. The Rivi regimen was suspended for the
visit. Mildred, back in New York and at work again, found that she was
apparently none the worse for her holiday, was in fact better. So she
drifted into the way of suspending the regimen for an evening now and
then--when she dined with Mrs. Brindley, or when Agnes Belloc had
something particularly good. All went well for a time. Then--a cold.
She neglected it, feeling sure it could not stay with one so soundly
healthy through and through. But it did stay; it grew worse. She
decided that she ought to take medicine for it. True, starvation was
the cure prescribed by the regimen, but Mildred could not bring herself
to two or three days of discomfort. Also, many people told her that
such a cure was foolish and even dangerous. The cold got better, got
worse, got better. But her throat became queer, and at last her voice
left her. She was ashamed to go to Moldini in such a condition. She
dropped in upon Hicks, the throat specialist. He "fixed her up"
beautifully with a few sprayings. A week--and her voice left her
again, and Hicks could not bring it back. As she left his office, it
was raining--an icy, dreary drizzle. She splashed her way home, in
about the lowest spirits she had ever known. She locked her door and
seated herself at the window and stared out, while the storm raged
within her. After an hour or two she wrote and sent Moldini a note: "I
have been making a fool of myself. I'll not come again until I am all
right. Be patient with me. I don't think this will occur again." She
first wrote "happen." She scratched it out and put "occur" in its
place. Not that Moldini would have noted the slip; simply that she
would not permit herself the satisfaction of the false and
self-excusing "happen." It had not been a "happen." It had been a
deliberate folly, a lapse to the Mildred she had buried the day she
sent Donald Keith away. When the note was on its way, she threw out
all her medicines, and broke the new spraying apparatus Hicks had
instructed her to buy.
She went back to the Rivi regime. A week passed, and she was little
better. Two weeks, and she began to mend. But it was six weeks before
the last traces of her folly disappeared. Moldini said not a word,
gave no sign. Once more her life went on in uneventful, unbroken
routine--diet, exercise, singing--singing, exercise, diet--no
distractions except an occasional visit to the opera with Moldini, and
she was hating opera now. All her enthusiasm was gone. She simply
worked doggedly, drudged, slaved.
When the days began to grow warm, Mrs. Belloc said: "I suppose you'll
soon be off to the country? Are you going to visit Mrs. Brindley?"
"No," said Mildred.
"Then come with me."
"Thank you, but I can't do it."
"But you've got to rest somewhere."
"Rest?" said Mildred. "Why should I rest?"
Mrs. Belloc started to protest, then abruptly changed. "Come to think
of it, why should you? You're in perfect health, and it'll be time
enough to rest when you 'get there.'"
"I'm tired through and through," said Mildred, "but it isn't the kind
of tired that could be rested except by throwing up this frightful
nightmare of a career."
"And you can't do that."
"I won't," said Mildred, her lips compressed and her eyes narrowed.
She and Moldini--and fat, funny little Mrs. Moldini--went to the
mountains. And she worked on. She would listen to none of the
suggestions about the dangers of keeping too steadily at it, about
working oneself into a state of staleness, about the imperative demands
of the artistic temperament for rest, change, variety. "It may be so,"
she said to Mrs. Brindley. "But I've gone mad. I can no more drop this
routine than--than you could take it up and keep to it for a week."
"I'll admit I couldn't," said Cyrilla. "And Mildred, you're making a
mistake."
"Then I'll have to suffer for it. I must do what seems best to me."
"But I'm sure you're wrong. I never knew anyone to act as you're
acting. Everyone rests and freshens up."
Mildred lost patience, almost lost her temper. "You're trying to tempt
me to ruin myself," she said. "Please stop it. You say you never knew
anyone to do as I'm doing. Very well. But how many girls have you
known who have succeeded?"
Cyrilla hesitatingly confessed that she had known none.
"Yet you've known scores who've tried."
"But they didn't fail because they didn't work enough. Many of them
worked too much."
Mildred laughed. "How do you know why they failed?" said she. "You
haven't thought about it as I have. You haven't LIVED it. Cyrilla, I
served my apprenticeship at listening to nonsense about careers. I want
to have nothing to do with inspiration, and artistic temperament, and
spontaneous genius, and all the rest of the lies. Moldini and I know
what we are about. So I'm living as those who have succeeded lived and
not as those who have failed."
Cyrilla was silenced, but not convinced. The amazing improvement in
Mildred's health, the splendid slim strength and suppleness of her
body, the new and stable glories of her voice--all these she knew
about, but they did not convince her. She believed in work, in hard
work, but to her work meant the music itself. She felt that the Rivi
system and the dirty, obscure little Moldini between them were
destroying Mildred by destroying all "temperament" in her.
It was the old, old criticism of talent upon genius. Genius has always
won in its own time and generation all the world except talent. To
talent contemporaneous genius, genius seen at its patient, plodding
toil, seems coarse and obvious and lacking altogether in inspiration.
Talent cannot comprehend that creation is necessarily in travail and in
all manner of unloveliness.
Mildred toiled on like a slave under the lash, and Moldini and the Rivi
system were her twin relentless drivers. She learned to rule herself
with an iron hand. She discovered the full measure of her own
deficiencies, and she determined to make herself a competent lyric
soprano, perhaps something of a dramatic soprano. She dismissed from
her mind all the "high" thoughts, all the dreams wherewith the little
people, even the little people who achieve a certain success, beguile
the tedium of their journey along the hard road. She was not working
to "interpret the thought of the great master" or to "advance the
singing art yet higher" or even to win fame and applause. She had one
object--to earn her living on the grand opera stage, and to earn it as
a prima donna because that meant the best living. She frankly told
Cyrilla that this was her object, when Cyrilla forced her one day to
talk about her aims. Cyrilla looked pained, broke a melancholy silence
to say:
"I know you don't mean that. You are too intelligent. You sing too
well."
"Yes, I mean just that," said Mildred. "A living."
"At any rate, don't say it. You give such a false impression."
"To whom? Not to Crossley, and not to Moldini, and why should I care
what any others think? They are not paying my expenses. And
regardless of what they think now, they'll be at my feet if I succeed,
and they'll put me under theirs if I don't."
"How hard you have grown," cried Cyrilla.
"How sensible, you mean. I've merely stopped being a self-deceiver and
a sentimentalist."
"Believe me, my dear, you are sacrificing your character to your
ambition."
"I never had any real character until ambition came," replied Mildred.
"The soft, vacillating, sweet and weak thing I used to have wasn't
character."
"But, dear, you can't think it superior character to center one's whole
life about a sordid ambition."
"Sordid?"
"Merely to make a living."
Mildred laughed merrily and mockingly. "You call that sordid? Then
for heaven's sake what is high? You had left you money enough to live
on, if you have to. No one left me an income. So, I'm fighting for
independence--and that means for self-respect. Is self-respect sordid,
Cyrilla!"
And then Cyrilla understood--in part, not altogether. She lived in the
ordinary environment of flap-doodle and sweet hypocrisy and
sentimentality; and none such can more than vaguely glimpse the
realities.
Toward the end of the summer Moldini said:
"It's over. You have won."
Mildred looked at him in puzzled surprise.
"You have learned it all. You will succeed. The rest is detail."
"But I've learned nothing as yet," protested she.
"You have learned to teach yourself," replied the Italian. "You at
last can hear yourself sing, and you know when you sing right and when
you sing wrong, and you know how to sing right. The rest is easy. Ah,
my dear Miss Gower, you will work NOW!"
Mildred did not understand. She was even daunted by that "You will
work NOW!" She had been thinking that to work harder was impossible.
What did he expect of her? Something she feared she could not realize.
But soon she understood--when he gave her songs, then began to teach
her a role, the part of Madame Butterfly herself. "I can help you only
a little there," he said. "You will have to go to my friend Ferreri
for roles. But we can make a beginning."
She had indeed won. She had passed from the stage where a career is
all drudgery--the stage through which only the strong can pass without
giving up and accepting failure or small success. She had passed to
the stage where there is added pleasure to the drudgery, for, the
drudgery never ceases. And what was the pleasure? Why, more
work--always work--bringing into use not merely the routine parts of
the mind, but also the imaginative and creative faculties. She had
learned her trade--not well enough, for no superior man or woman ever
feels that he or she knows the trade well enough--but well enough to
begin to use it.
Said Moldini: "When the great one, who has achieved and arrived, is
asked for advice by the sweet, enthusiastic young beginner, what is the
answer? Always the same: 'My dear child, don't! Go back home, and
marry and have babies.' You know why now?"
And Mildred, looking back over the dreary drudgery that had been, and
looking forward to the drudgery yet to come, dreary enough for all the
prospects of a few flowers and a little sun--Mildred said: "Indeed I
do, maestro."
"They think it means what you Americans call morals--as if that were
all of morality! But it doesn't mean morals; not at all. Sex and the
game of sex is all through life everywhere--in the home no less than in
the theater. In town and country, indoors and out, sunlight,
moonlight, and rain--always it goes on. And the temptations and the
struggles are no more and no less on the stage than off. No, there is
too much talk about 'morals.' The reason the great one says 'don't' is
the work." He shook his head sadly. "They do not realize, those eager
young beginners. They read the story-books and the lives of the great
successes and they hear the foolish chatter of common-place
people--those imbecile 'cultured' people who know nothing! And they
think a career is a triumphal march. What think you, Miss Gower--eh?"
"If I had known I'd not have had the courage, or the vanity, to begin,"
said she. "And if I could realize what's before me, I probably
shouldn't have the courage to go on."
"But why not? Haven't you also learned that it's just the day's work,
doing every day the best you can?"
"Oh, I shall go on," rejoined she.
"Yes," said he, looking at her with awed admiration. "It is in your
face. I saw it there, the day you came--after you sang the 'Batti
Batti' the first time and failed."
"There was nothing to me then."
"The seed," replied he. "And I saw it was an acorn, not the seed of
one of those weak plants that spring up overnight and wither at noon.
Yes, you will win." He laughed gayly, rolled his eyes and kissed his
fingers. "And then you can afford to take a little holiday, and fall in
love. Love! Ah, it is a joyous pastime--for a holiday. Only for a
holiday, mind you. I shall be there and I shall seize you and take you
back to your art."
In the following winter and summer Crossley disclosed why he had been
sufficiently interested in grand opera to begin to back undeveloped
voices. Crossley was one of those men who are never so practical as
when they profess to be, and fancy themselves, impractical. He became a
grand-opera manager and organized for a season that would surpass in
interest any New York had known. Thus it came about that on a March
night Mildred made her debut.
The opera was "Faust." As the three principal men singers were all
expensive--the tenor alone, twelve hundred a night--Crossley put in a
comparatively modestly salaried Marguerite. She was seized with a cold
at the last moment, and Crossley ventured to substitute Mildred Gower.
The Rivi system was still in force. She was ready--indeed, she was
always ready, as Rivi herself had been. And within ten minutes of her
coming forth from the wings, Mildred Gower had leaped from obscurity
into fame. It happens so, often in the story books, the newly
gloriously arrived one having been wholly unprepared, achieving by
sheer force of genius. It occurs so, occasionally, in life--never when
there is lack of preparation, never by force of unassisted genius,
never by accident. Mildred succeeded because she had got ready to
succeed. How could she have failed?
Perhaps you read the stories in the newspapers--how she had discovered
herself possessed of a marvelous voice, how she had decided to use it
in public, how she had coached for a part, had appeared, had become one
of the world's few hundred great singers all in a single act of an
opera. You read nothing about what she went through in developing a
hopelessly uncertain and far from strong voice into one which, while
not nearly so good as thousands of voices that are tried and cast
aside, yet sufficed, with her will and her concentration back of it, to
carry her to fame--and wealth.
That birdlike voice! So sweet and spontaneous, so true, so like the
bird that "sings of summer in full throated ease!" No wonder the
audience welcomed it with cheers on cheers. Greater voices they had
heard, but none more natural--and that was Moldini.
He came to her dressing-room at the intermission. He stretched out his
arms, but emotion overcame him, and he dropped to a chair and sobbed
and cried and laughed. She came and put her arms round him and kissed
him. She was almost calm. The GREAT fear had seized her--Can I keep
what I have won?
"I am a fool," cried Moldini. "I will agitate you."
"Don't be afraid of that," said she. "I am nervous, yes, horribly
nervous. But you have taught me so that I could sing, no matter what
was happening." It was true. And her body was like iron to the touch.
He looked at her, and though he knew her and had seen her train herself
and had helped in it, he marveled. "You are happy?" he said eagerly.
"Surely--yes, you MUST be happy."
"More than that," answered she. "You'll have to find another word than
happiness--something bigger and stronger and deeper."
"Now you can have your holiday," laughed he. "But"--with mock
sternness--"in moderation! He must be an incident only. With those
who win the high places, sex is an incident--a charming, necessary
incident, but only an incident. He must not spoil your career. If you
allowed that you would be like a mother who deserts her children for a
lover. He must not touch your career!"
Mildred, giving the last touches to her costume before the glass,
glanced merrily at Moldini by way of it. "If he did touch it," said
she, "how long do you think he would last with me?"
Moldini paused half-way in his nod of approval, was stricken with
silence and sadness. It would have been natural and proper for a man
thus to put sex beneath the career. It was necessary for anyone who
developed the strong character that compels success and holds it. But--
The Italian could not get away from tradition; woman was made for the
pleasure of one man, not for herself and the world.
"You don't like that, maestro?" said she, still observing him in the
glass.
"No man would," said he, with returning cheerfulness. "It hurts man's
vanity. And no woman would, either; you rebuke their laziness and
their dependence!"
She laughed and rushed away to fresh triumphs.