Happy singers, like happy nations, have no history. Easter was a happy
singer, but she had plenty of histories, though they would never be
engraved on deathless tablets. Volition being her strongest asset,
and pleasure-loving her weakness, she spent her nights singing, her
days trifling. She called it happiness, a reaction from the passionate
tension of interpreting Isolde, Brunnhilde, Kundry, Norma for the
delight of huge audiences. The morning saw her briskly walking through
the park. Her apartment was on Central Park West, near 72nd Street. Her
robust physique daily demanded many cubic feet of fresh air. In the
afternoon she rode about in her car; there now were two at her service,
one, an electric brougham for the city visits, the shops. She was
fairly prudent in diet, though she drank too much champagne, smoked
too many cigarettes. Punctual at rehearsals, she was out of bed earlier
on those days. So the opera didn't interfere with hygiene. An admirable
artiste, and with the moral sense to be observed in a barnyard.
Paul was the present incumbent in her House of Life. His wealth,
social position, above all, his amiable personality, fitted her
like a glove. Easter disliked broils or bother. After the tragic
happenings of her nightly work, the very sight of a lover pulling a
long face, exasperated her. Ulick drove her into fits of rage with
his importunings, his complaints that she wasn't treating him on the
level. "Very well," she would retort, "I'm not. What are you going
to do about it? You know what Paul is, and what I think of him. I'm
fond of you, Jewel, but Paul pleases me more. He has tact. He lets
me alone. I'm quite sure if he had been mixed up in that horrid mess
up in New Hampshire--where was it anyhow?--he wouldn't consider it
any claim on me. I don't. But you do--yes, you do, Ulick Invern. You
seem to think that you are a sort of a guardian, a lover, perhaps a
husband"--she laughed. The idea of a husband having any authority over
her tickled her rib risible. Ulick gloomed. What could he say or do in
face of such barbed-wire opposition? The only thing he achieved was
to neglect, and grossly, Mona Milton. He discontinued his visits, if
not altogether, at least spaced them at wide intervals. Mona did not
complain. Occasionally she went to luncheon with him at Martin's. The
opera and Easter tempted her curiosity. At first the sheer vitality of
the glorious singing woman repelled her, but she, too, was eventually
trapped. The first act of Tristan and the swan song of Isolde stirred
her very entrails. It was conceded, however, by the cognoscenti that
Istar's second act lacked the exquisite tenderness of Olive Fremstad--
she had arrived--whose Sieglinde was a masterly exposition of the
pitiful, charming woodland creature. But in the Immolation Scene of
the Twilight of the Gods Istar trod dramatic heights. That chronic
fault-finder, Alfred Stone, confessed that since Lilli Lehmann and
Milka Ternina, no one had so touched him. Materna and the earlier
Wagnerian singers were only bawlers in comparison. But Istar--!
When he heard from her lips the terms that she had imposed on the
management without singing a note in advance, he threw up his hands.
"In the heart of every prima-donna there is a pawnbroker," he asserted,
and the mot rapidly gained currency. Easter only smiled. She liked
Alfred. He was the first man who had been kind to her in the big city
that depressing night of her arrival. And he had stood by her at the
première; to be sure, he couldn't have done anything else without
stultifying his critical powers. She was not ungrateful, but that
was a secret. Her triumph had been authentic. No preliminary blasts
of advertising trumpets. Philip Hale, who came over from Boston for
the event, had summed up the situation when wiring to his newspaper
"When Istar sings she is her own passionate press-agent." Edgar Saltus
compressed it in an epigram: "Istar may be a Daughter of Sin, but she
has no vocal vices." It was all true.
For Mona the singer presently became an obsession. She concealed
her feelings concerning the palpable defection of Ulick. She was as
cordial as ever in her conduct toward him, but she no longer spoke of
their dream-children. Grane and Shamus had died the swift death of all
poetic conceptions confronted by harsh reality. Her love for him seemed
diverted to Easter. As the lustre of an electric lamp attracts the
night-moth so the glittering personality and fame of the prima-donna
drew within its warm zone the feebler will of Mona. The two girls
became close companions. With growing disquietude Ulick noticed this;
but he was powerless. He had kept to himself his early adventure with
Easter. And Easter had never heard from him a hint of his relations
with Mona. Yet he was certain that if she didn't precisely know the
facts she surmised them. She would fix her brilliant eyes on the girl
and Mona, blushing, would hang her head. How much did Easter know? How
much had Alfred told her? He was a gossip, a tattler of mean tales, an
amateur in the art of scandalous insinuation. Nevertheless, the others
were pleased when he appeared. He saw more clearly than any of them,
and he had the disagreeable gift of telling truths. It was a wonder he
maintained his unpopularity.
... One sunny afternoon in midwinter they went to the old Vienna Café
next to Grace Church to drink coffee and chatter about eternity and
the town-pump. It was Alfred's beloved stamping-ground. The white
suavities of Grace Church, the twist of the street where Broadway
debouches into Union Square, aroused in him the fancy that in no other
spot of the planet is the tempo of living faster, or any place where
the human pulse beats more quickly. The tumults and alarums of the day
are more exciting than a Cycle in Cathay. Vitality is at its hottest.
We are like a colony of ants disturbed by a stranger, he ruminated.
We are caught in eddies and whirlpools; and on the edges of foaming
breakers we are dumped upon densely populated sands. Childe Roland,
if he came to New York, would not be heard, so many other knights
are blowing their horns; besides, he might be puzzled to find his
eagerly sought-for Dark Tower. Our surfaces are hard, boastful, the
rhythms of our daily life abrupt, over-emphatic. There are few timid
backwaters left for sensitive folk who dislike the glare and rumble
of modern traffic. We appear to be making some unknown goal, as in
the streets we seem to be running to a fire or a fight that we never
reach. Alternately hypnotic and repellant, New York is often a more
stony-hearted step-mother than the Oxford street of De Quincey. Alfred
admitted to himself that our city would not be considered beautiful
in the old order of aesthetics. Its specific beauty savours of the
monstrous. The scale is epical. Too many buildings are glorified
chimneys. But what a picture of titanic energy, of cyclopean ambition!
Look over Manhattan from Washington Heights. The wilderness of flat
roofs in London; the winning profile of Paris; the fascination of Rome
as viewed from Trinatà dei Monti; of Buda from across the Danube at
Pest--those are not more startlingly dramatic than New York, especially
when the chambers of the west are filled with the tremendous opal
of a dying day, or when the lyric moonrise paves a path of silver
across the hospitable sea we call our harbour. With all his ingrained
hostility to America and things American (he despised the uncouth
Bartholdi statue as an emblem of liberty, saying that its torch was
in reality a threatening club: "Get to work," it commanded) he was
forced to acknowledge the supremacy of New York. Two European cities
only were more dramatic; Toledo, Prague. And during a summer sunrise
the reverberations of our parent-planet, of that blazing white disk
which made the sky a metallic blue, evokes Africa, rather than Italy;
Enfin--the true firmament of North America.
Easter and Mona, escorted by Paul and Ulick, entered. They were in high
spirits. They surrounded Alfred, forcing him to drop his newspaper. The
habitués were sipping coffee and playing chess. Some were celebrities.
Alfred named them. One and all they stared at the singer. Several came
over to the table and paid their way with extravagant compliments.
She took all without a trace of the pose of the pampered prima-donna.
It was her due. It was also in the day's work. When the others had
gone, the party fell to arguing. A chance word of Ulick's had sent
Easter up into the air. What! if women were such cowardly cows, the
slaves of their husbands, and their dress-makers, the dupes of their
lovers and children, was that sufficient reason why a level-headed
woman should follow the call of these sheep! A woman should listen
to her inward promptings. Easter said she didn't propose to be a
shop-girl trying to live on the wage doled her by some self-advertising
philanthropists--she gave a list that jarred Alfred's cynicism--those
humbugs who drove thousands of girls into the ranks of prostitutes.
Supposing, she continued, I had no voice, only my looks, what then!
The stage, of course. What matters envious backbiting. A nun immured
doesn't escape calumny. Hamlet knew. A girl who had an ounce of beauty
or brains, practical brains, not moonshine rhapsody, can always make
her way. Marry, forsooth! And beget a lot of brats for some cheap
clerk, who stints her expenses! Pooh! Short-lived as is the good time
of a cocotte despite her inevitable chance of poverty and disease,
isn't her existence in a show-down about as useful, or as useless? That
depends on the angle of moral incidence--or the chill, gray life of a
servant, a factory worker, or the wife of a workman, with the horrors
of frequent child-bearing, the hideous drunkenness, abuse and grinding
poverty? Many a girl has remained virtuous because she was too plain
to be tempted.
"You sweet duckling!" she exclaimed turning to Mona and embracing
her energetically, "what will you ever know of the submerged lives
about you? You were reared in cotton-wool and have been spared the
sight of such agonizing." Mona shivered, and timidly returned the
embrace. The three young men exchanged glances. Suddenly Easter took
a new tack. "Jewel," she said meditatively regarding him, "Jewel, why
don't you write a novel?" "Good heavens, old girl, I have hardly the
energy to pencil my allotted newspaper paragraphs. Novels nowadays
mean either the naked truth and that spells disaster, or slimy sensual
sentimentality. Your heroine to make an impression, must resist
seduction, though longing for carnal satisfaction; or, if she happens
to be a professional prostitute--led from the sloppy paths of a
still sloppier virtue when very young--then she must be converted in
the limelight to the sound of pharasaical trumpets. The chief thing
is to combine voluptuous description with hypocritical repentance.
To dissect the sex emotions calmly is the one unforgivable offence.
Foam at the mouth, you may, in presenting the details of nymphomania
or satyriasis, if you only piously turn up your eyes at the close.
Sex is as sane, as clean as any other physical function; in fact,
it's cleaner. Eating, drinking, and digestion are not particularly
attractive. Fornication, conception, child-bearing are natural. Treat
them naturally. Don't slop over them. Don't tell about blasted lives,
blackened souls, because your heroine assumes a horizontal attitude
and sees the moon over the shoulder of her lover. Don't gasbag about
sin, when the sexual act is no more sinful than eating. Good God! how
long are the emasculated ideals of ancient Asiatic fanatics to check
the free exercise of a woman's nature? Calling a natural process like
copulation a sin doesn't make it so. I am a feminist, as you girls
know, but I don't give a rap for the suffrage if it doesn't free woman
from her sexual slavery. If a man can run around, having a good time,
and not be reproached with his loose-living, why, by the same token,
can't a woman?" He was unusually animated.
"Bravo Ulick!" cried Easter. Mona shivered again. She knew. Paul
giggled; when in doubt he always giggled, but he was thoroughly shocked
by Ulick's banal defence of immorality. Alfred shook his head; he,
too, knew the mainspring of this verbiage. "Ulick, my lad, you write
your novels in the air. You will never publish one. You are 'veule' as
they in your beloved language and 'veule' means something more than
soft or weak. The truth is--" "Alfred and his truths," sniffed Easter
--"is Ulick, you are rotten, morally rotten. Even your not drinking or
smoking is only cowardice. Back to the boulevards for you!"
"Besides," pursued Alfred, thoroughly aroused, "isn't it time to give
literature a breathing-spell from this infernal sex-humbuggery? Today
everything is referred to sex, from religion to dreams. Childhood
is trapped by psychiatrists searching for sex-documents. And, then,
doesn't all this interest in a woman's chastity sicken you? It makes
me think that men are still Turks buying female flesh by weight.
It's simply disgusting, that's what it is. Why not her liver or her
lungs! I'd as soon ask if a woman were constipated as ask if she were
chaste. The world is hag-ridden by sexuality. And the worst of it is
that with their 'new freedom', as they call it, women are becoming
more polyandrous. They, too, needs must have a staff of males for
their individuality! Music is to blame a lot, Wagner's music in
particular. What else is Tristan and Isolde but a tonal orgasm? Think
of the Prelude--never mind the love-music in Act II. That is avowedly
voluptuous, as it should be--but just see with what savant art Wagner
has built up from the sighing, yearning bars at the opening of the
Prelude a perfect chart, dynamic, emotional, evoking physical images;
then developing a crescendo without parallel in music the climax
subsiding into a melancholy close like two felines caterwauling on a
back fence. Musical erethism, I tell you...."
Easter's eyes snapped. "Disgusting, Alfred. I fancy you prefer the
parsiphallic repulse of Kundry, when Wagner had become anti-natural,
denying womanhood, thanks to his epicene patron, crazy King Ludwig
of Bavaria." Alfred sniggered. Ulick never moved a muscle. It was
vieux jeu, this lecturing from Alfred; at least it didn't stir him
to the depths as did the burning phrases of Milt. "I'd like to meet
your brother, Mona, if he is anything like you." "He isn't, Istar,"
she replied, "he has a beautiful nature, pure as the stars." "Listen
to her. You might suppose, Mona, that you were leading, or had led--"
Easter significantly paused--"a wicked life. You fast! Oh! As for your
beautiful souls! Pooh! Men are all alike! Beasts! The soutane checks,
no doubt; but I shouldn't like to tempt your brother too far." She
became reflective. The men were uneasy. Where was all this vain talk
leading to? Easter exploded another little bombshell. "I repeat, I'd
like to meet your brother some time, Mona." The other girl nodded.
"What's become of Dora that Paul used to rave over, or was it you,
Jewel?" "Oh, by Jove, I say," remonstrated Paul. "For God's sake, if we
are going to discuss brothels I'm off," said Alfred, and he left in a
huff. The party broke up.
Easter often went to concerts with Ulick. One afternoon, after a
performance of Vincent D'Indy's masterpiece, "Istar" she told Ulick
that these Symphonic Variations had given her the cue for her operatic
name. Istar wasn't so different from Easter. Maliciously Ulick pointed
out the seventh variation called in the critical notes The Seventh
Gate. She read:
"At the seventh gate, the warder stripped her; he took off the last
veil that covers her body"....
"You reversed the order of disrobing with me, didn't you, Easter?" She
regarded him as if from her tallest tower of disdain and frigidly
answered: "Don't be too sure, Jewel. Not even of the Holy Yowlers
romance at Zaneburg." He was infuriated. What did she mean? And how
well she remembered names, when she wished to. What next--?