It is difficult to tell the story of Irish folk intimately and
convincingly, the bare truths concerning their splendid recklessness,
their unproductive ardor, their loyalty and creative memories, sounding
to another race like a pack of lies.
When, therefore, I recall "The Singing Woman," Katrine; her beauty, her
fearlessness, her loyalty, her voice of gold--it seems as if only one
lost to caution and heedless of consequence would undertake her history
expecting it to be believed. But there is this advantage: the
newspapers, recording much of her early life, are still extant, her
Paris work discussed by Josef's pupils to this day, and her divine
forgetfulness the night she was to sing at the Metropolitan a known
thing to people of two continents; but unrecorded of her, till now, is
that, for love, like brave, mad Antony, she threw a world away.
It is impossible to tell the tale of Katrine without narrating side by
side the story of Dermott McDermott; and here trouble begins, for
Ireland would never allow anything written concerning him that was not
flattering, and the Irish people, especially in the regions of Kildare
and Athlone, have combined to make a saint of him. A saint of Dermott
McDermott! Heaven save the mark!
But of Frank Ravenel's life I can speak with truth and authority. I had
the story from his own lips under the pines and the stars of North
Carolina, fishing the Way-Home River, or sitting together on the
Chestnut Ridge, where Katrine and he first met. This was before he
became--before Katrine made him--the great man he is to-day.
* * * * *
And two things linger with me--the first a conversation between Dermott
and Katrine at the Countess de Nemours'.
"Tell me," said Katrine: "do you think any woman ever married the man
who was kindest to her?"
"It's unrecorded if it ever occurred," Dermott answered.
* * * * *
And a second, the truth of which is less open to dispute.
"Nora," Katrine asked, "could you ever have loved any but Dennis-your
first love?"
"No," answered Nora. "To an Irishwoman the drame comes but the wance."