MISS HARRIS is going to appear in a concert. She came glowing and
beaming into my room to tell me. Vignorol, her teacher, had arranged
it--with a violinist and a baritone--in Brooklyn.
“Why not New York?” I asked.
“Not _yet_,” said Miss Harris, moving about the room with a jubilant
dancing step, “but after this is over--wait and see!”
Great things are expected to come of it. The public’s attention is
to be caught, then another concert, maybe an engagement in one of
the American opera companies--just for experience. It is to be the
opening of a career which will carry her to the Metropolitan Opera
House. The baritone is another of Vignorol’s pupils, Berwick, a New
Englander--nothing much, just to fill up. The violinist is a Mrs.
Stregazzi, who also fills up, and little Miss Gorringe accompanies. I
was shown a pencil draft of the program with Liza Bonaventura written
large at the top--“Yes, it’s to be Bonaventura; I had a superstition
about it,” and the dress is to be white, or, with a sudden bright air:
“I might borrow your green satin--but of course I couldn’t. You’re too
small.”
Since then the house has resounded with practising from the top floor.
Heavy steps and light feminine rustlings have gone up and down the
stairs. Once the strains of a violin came with a thin whine through the
register as if some melancholy animal was imprisoned behind the grill.
In the dusk of the lower hall I bumped into a young man with tousled
hair and frogs on his coat, whom I have since met as Mr. Berwick.
The star is in a state of joyful excitement which has communicated
itself to the rest of us. When in the evening she goes over her
repertoire, the Westerners and Miss Bliss sit on the bottom steps of
their stairs, Mr. Hamilton and the count on the banisters of theirs and
I on the top step of mine. A Niagara of sound pours over us, billowing
and rushing down through the well, buffeted between the close confining
walls. When each piece is ended Miss Harris comes out on her landing,
leans over the railing and calls down:
“How was that?”
Then our six faces are upturned and we express our approbation,
according to our six different natures.
Our mutual hopes for her success have drawn us together and we have
suddenly become very friendly. Mr. Hazard drops in upon me in a
paint-stiffened linen blouse and Mr. Weatherby has confided to me the
money to pay for his laundry. Mr. Hamilton has smoked a large black
cigar in my dining-room, and Miss Bliss has come shivering with hunched
shoulders and clasped red arms to “borrow a warm” (her own expression)
at my fire.
In my excursions to the top floor I have met Mrs. Stregazzi and Miss
Gorringe. Mrs. Stregazzi is a large blond lady with an ample figure
and a confidential habit. On our first meeting she called me “dearie”
and told me all about her divorce from Mr. Stregazzi, who, I gathered,
was her inferior, both in station and the domestic virtues. In his
profession--the stage--he was something called “a headliner”, and
appeared to be involved mysteriously with trained animals. Since his
divorce he has married another “headliner”. It’s like that story of the
Frenchman in Philadelphia: “He _is_ a Biddle, she _was_ a Biddle, they
are _both_ Biddles.” I must ask Lizzie Harris what it is. Miss Gorringe
is a thin sallow girl with an intelligent face, and Mr. Berwick a
bulky silent New Englander, in the early twenties, who bears a strong
resemblance to the bust of Beethoven over Schirmer’s music store.
They are strange people, artless as children, and completely absorbed
in themselves and their work. They appear to have no points of
contact with any other world, and the real part of their world is the
professional part. They don’t say much about their homes or their lives
away from it.
A few days ago they took tea with me, and as they talked I had a series
of glimpses, like quickly shifted magic lantern slides, of their life
on trains, in hotels, behind the scenes and on the stage. It seemed
to me a sort of nightmare of hurry and scramble, snatched meals, lost
trunks, cold dressing-rooms. Maybe the excitement makes up for the
rest. It must be exciting--at least that’s the impression I got as I
sat behind the teacups listening.
Lizzie Harris seemed to find it enthralling, everything they said
interested her. Mrs. Stregazzi told some anecdotes that I didn’t
like--I don’t want to be a prig, but they really were _too_ sordid and
scandalous--and our prima donna hung on the words of that fat made-up
woman as if she spoke with the tongues of men and of angels. The more
I know of her the less able I am to get at the core of her being, to
place her definitely in my gallery of “women I have known.” I had
finally decided that in spite of her tempests, her egotism and her
weather-cock moods, there was something rare and noble in her, and here
she was drinking in cheap gossip about a set of people she didn’t know,
and who seem to be a mixture of artist, mountebank and badly brought-up
child.
As I sat pouring the tea I felt again that curious aloofness in her.
But before it was more a withdrawal of her spirit into herself, a
retreating into an inner citadel and closing all the doors. This time
it was the spirit reaching toward others and shutting me out, like a
child who forgets its playmate when a circus passes by. She listened
hungrily, now and then commenting or questioning with a longing, almost
a homesick note. When they rose to go, with a scraping of chair-legs
and a concerted clamor of farewells, she was reluctant to lose them,
followed them to the hall and leaned over the banister watching their
departing heads.
She made me feel an outsider, almost an intruder. I was willing to
efface myself for the moment and stood by the table waiting for her to
come back and reestablish me in her regard. She said nothing, however,
but brushed by the door and went up-stairs. In a few minutes Musetta’s
song filled the house. The next morning she came in while I was at
breakfast and asked me to lend my green satin dress to Miss Gorringe,
and when I agreed kissed me with glowing affection.
That all happened early in the week. Yesterday afternoon I was witness
to a scene, the effect of which is with me still, at midnight,
scratching this down in my rose-wreathed back room. It was a hateful
scene, a horrible scene--but let me describe it:
Calls of my name descending from the top floor in Miss Harris’ voice,
took me out to my door.
“I am going over some of my things,” the voice cried. “Come up and
listen.” Then, as I ascended, “It’s the scene between Brunhilda and
Siegmund in _Die Walkuere_, the _piéce de résistance_ of the evening.”
I didn’t find Miss Gorringe as I expected, but Mr. Masters, sitting
on the piano stool and looking glum. He rose, nodded to me, and
sinking back on the stool, laid his hands on the keys and broke into a
desultory playing. With all my ignorance I have heard enough to know
that he played uncommonly well.
The future Signorita Bonaventura was looking her best, a slight color
in her cheeks, confidence shining in her eyes.
“We’ve been trying it over. Did you hear?”
The weather had been warm, the register closed, so I had only heard
faintly.
“Well, it’s going to be something great,” said the prima donna.
“Is it?” said Mr. Masters with his back to us.
The sneering quality was strong in his tone and I began to wish I
hadn’t come.
“Go across the room, Mrs. Drake,” he said curtly. “Sit where you can
see her.”
I obeyed, sitting in the corner by the window. She faced me and Mr.
Masters was in profile.
My friends tell me I am completely devoid of the musical sense. It must
be true, for I can not sit through _Meistersinger_, and there are long
reaches of _Tristan and Isolde_ that get on my nerves like a toothache.
But I _have_ some kind of appreciation, do derive an intense pleasure
from certain scenes in certain operas. It was one of these scenes they
were now giving, that one in the second act of _Die Walkuere_ when
Brunhilda appears before Siegmund.
It has always seemed to me that the drama rose above the music,
overpowered it. I supposed this to be the fancy of my own ignorance and
never had the courage to say it. But the other day I read somewhere
the opinion of Dujardin, the French critic, and he expressed just what
I mean--“It is not the music, no, it is not the music, that counts in
the scene, but the words. The music is beautiful--of course it is, it
couldn’t be otherwise--but Wagner was aware of the beauty of the poetry
and allowed it to transpire.”
That is exactly what I should have said if I had dared.
Masters struck the opening notes and she began to sing.
“Siegmund sieh’ auf mich! Ich bin’s der bald du folgst--
Siegmund, look on me. I come to call thee hence.”
What a greeting!
A stir of irritation passed through me. She looked at Masters with a
friendly air and sang the lines with an absence of understanding and
emotion that would have robbed them of all meaning if anything could. I
wanted to shake her.
Then I forgot--Masters began.
If I was surprised at his playing his singing amazed me. He had almost
no voice, but he had all the rest--the wonderful thing, imagination,
the response to beauty, power of representing a state of mind. I don’t
explain well, I am out of my province, perhaps it’s better if I simply
say he became Siegmund.
As he played he turned and looked at her. His whole face had changed,
transformed by the shadow of tragedy. To him Lizzie was no longer
Lizzie, she was the helmed and armored daughter of Wotan delivering his
death summons. I can pay no higher tribute to him than to say I forgot
him, the burlap walls, the thin tones of the piano and saw a vision of
despairing demigods.
“Wer bist du, sag’
Die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?”