Carriages lined the sidewalk for blocks in every direction. There was a
slight sprinkle of rain falling, and the shining rubber coats and hats
of the coachmen caught the electric light in fantastic streaks. Horses
were stamping, and chafing the bit. From every direction came a stream
of humanity, all making for the Auditorium. Carriages were arriving
every moment; the bystanders and ticket scalpers caught glimpses of
light hose and dainty opera shoes and skirts that were lifted for an
instant. Men in black capes were hurrying about busily. The cable cars
emptied load after load of well-dressed men and women. All the world and
his wife was going to the opera.
Dick Lancaster, as he got out of his hansom, looked appreciatively at
the picture that all this hurrying throng made, and shaking some of the
rain drops off his coat, entered the opera house. As he looked about him
at the richly caparisoned human animals all on pleasure bent, at the
nonchalance that the mirrors told him he himself was displaying, it came
over him with something of amusement that there had been decided changes
in Richard Lancaster since that young person first came to town.
Impressionable as wax, the town had already cast its fascinations over
him; he was in the charmed circle. He had been put up at one of the best
of the clubs; he had been made much of, socially, by the select set that
allowed the preferences of Mrs. Annie McCallum Stewart to dictate the
distinction between the Somebodies and the Nobodies; he had been
successful enough, professionally, to enable him to move in the world as
befitted his tastes. It is to be confessed that his tastes, now that
they had been whetted by the approach of opportunities, were not of the
most economical. He was fond of all things that show the intellectual
aristocrat; he liked to look well, to dine well, to talk well, and to
enjoy good music. He liked the comfort, the remoteness from the mere
vagaries of the weather, that this town life afforded. Here was a night
such as in the country would be dismal unspeakably; yet nothing but
brilliance and enjoyment was evident in his present surroundings.
He threw his shoulders back with something of proud pleasure in his own
well-being, as he handed his cape and opera-hat to the caretaker. Yes,
life was good! It tasted well, and he was young, and there would yet be
many long, delicious draughts of it!
Mrs. Stewart was in her box. Several girls, whose low-cut dresses seemed
to be longing for something more worth showing, were seated on the
chairs that surrounded the central figure, Mrs. Stewart. In the
background of this, as of all other boxes, was a phalanx of white
shirt-fronts. It looked like the fore-front of an attacking army; first
the flash of bayonets, as they are to be found in woman's eyes, and then
the heavier artillery, the stolid force of masculinity. In the wide
corridors behind the boxes, in the foyers, and up and down the marble
stairways, the stream of people flowed back and forth. Presently the
conductor of the orchestra took his seat. There was a hastening toward
seats and boxes, and the overture of the "Cavalleria Rusticana" floated
out in echoes.
Young Lancaster reached the Stewart box just as the first bars were
streaming forth. Mrs. Stewart leaned her head gracefully back over her
right shoulder, and smiled up at him. She stretched up a beautifully
gloved hand, and whispered a "Glad you came through the rain, after all.
Awfully disappointed if you hadn't!" at him. He nodded to the other
women, and shook hands with Mr. Stewart and some of the other members of
the white-shirted, blank-faced phalanx.
"Ah," whispered Mrs. Stewart with a languid show of interest, and
putting her lorgnette up, "there is Calve!"
There was a flutter of hand-clappings that went like a light wave from
the stalls to the upper balconies. And then began that exquisite,
dramatic exposition of rustic jealousy that Mascagni has so wonderfully
set to music. As Santuzza, Calve was magnetic. Actress as much as singer
she riveted all attention. Her face was the picture of agony the while
she was contemplating: the inner vision of her betrayal by Turiddu.
Then, the jealous hatred flashing out at Lola, her rival; and lastly the
self-accusing sorrow that covered her when she saw the effect of her
tale-bearing against her former lover. In the interval there was the
marvellous Intermezzo. Mrs. Stewart leaned back in her chair and closed
her eyes. When it was over she said, "There is something of the world's
joy and something of its pain in that melody. It appeals to me
wonderfully."
Lancaster put in, "One of the men at the club declared that it was the
only thing that had given him real emotion for--oh, years."
"He must have been a very blasé creature," said one of the other women.
"He is," assented Lancaster.
Their further conversation was interrupted by the rising of the curtain.
When it came down again there was a general movement toward the foyers.
Some of the tall and pale young men strolled out to smoke cigars and
talk of the boxing match that was going to come off at the club in a day
or so. With much fluttering of fans and swishing of skirts the angular
girls betook themselves from Mrs. Stewart's box to see if they "could
see any of the other girls." Mrs. Stewart and Dick Lancaster were left
in sole possession. He took a chair beside her and looked over into the
stalls.
"Only fair," she said, noting his visual measurement of the size of the
audience.
"Yes. These people don't want the New. They want 'Faust' and 'Aida,' and
they think 'Tannhäuser' is the very last in music. It will be years
before they see the gem-like beauty of this new Italian school."
"And yet--it's a return to the old."
"That is why. The old things are the best, if you only go far enough
into the past. We are never really modern, we are merely old in a new
way."
"Do you know--" she leaned her white elbow on the cushioned chair-back
and placed her forefinger just under her ear, so that from the elbow up
her arm formed a white, beautiful rest for the attractive face, and
looking young Lancaster smilingly in the eyes, tapped her foot
caressingly to the floor--"do you know that I think I shall have to cut
you off my list very soon? You have--h'm--changed a great deal in the
few months I have known you. You occasionally make speeches that sound
almost cynical. You were always clever; you always talked brightly, but
you never used to believe some of the sharp things you said; now I think
you are beginning to. I liked you because you were different; you are
not different any more, at least not different in the same way. You will
never be as stupid as most of the others; but I am afraid, too, that you
will never be quite as genuine as you were."
He sighed as he looked at her. He smiled very faintly as he answered,
"Yes, I am afraid you are right. I am not as I was." His gaze swept out
over the stalls, the crowded foyer, the brilliance everywhere. "But how
could I have done anything else than let all this affect me a little? I
am pliable, I suppose, and I bend easily to the wind. I came here to
taste life. As soon as I began to sip the cup I found that I was going
to like it immensely. I trod the way of the world that I might see what
manner of men walk there, and what sort of a road it was. Presently, I
found that I liked that path so much that I preferred it to the bypaths
of solitude and asceticism. And what has it mattered as long as I have
not neglected the work there is for me to do? No one can say I have
changed in that respect. I work harder than ever. It's not fair of you
to upbraid me. A great deal of it is your own doing."
"Yes?"
"Of course it is. You have been my pilot out of the land of the Narrows.
When I came up here I was narrow. I thought about things dogmatically,
and applied hard and fast rules to every sort of conduct. Now I am
broader. I know that where the world moves at lightning speed you cannot
apply the same tenets that hold good in a village where life is lived at
a cripple's gait and where routine is the reigning deity."
"You would not have called it a 'cripple's gait' a little while ago,"
interposed Mrs. Stewart.
He flushed slightly but went on: "I realize now that since we have but
one life to live, we should live it as fully as we may. I could not have
seen the life that all of you here are living without realizing that it
was a fuller life than the one the country afforded me. So, cost what it
may, I must needs live it also."
She looked at him curiously. "Yes," she repeated, half to him and half
to herself, "cost what it may."
"Besides," he went on, looking away from her, and with something of
regret in his voice, "I have grown worldly because I loved a worldly
woman. You--you have made me love you."
She lifted her eyebrows a trifle, turned her head, with the eyelids
drawn down over her eyes, toward him, and opened the lids slowly, with a
smile on her lips. Then she looked past him to where her husband was
leaning over a chair in one of the other boxes.
"Don't you think John is looking very handsome tonight?" she asked
softly.
Lancaster, who had gone red and pale in waves, answered, through set
lips, "Very."
Then the curtain went up on "Pagliacci."
* * * * *
It was the first time that Lancaster had heard Leoncavallo's opera. In
its novel charm his shame and mortification--shame at having spoken
those words to Mrs. Stewart and mortification at the rebuff they had
only naturally brought him--were for the time being swallowed up. With
eager eyes and attentive ears he watched and listened to the play within
the play. First the arrival of the mountebanks. Amid the laughs and
rejoicings of the villagers the theater-tent is set. Then the effort of
the clown to make love to Canio's wife; the slash of the whip from her,
the muttered curses from him. But the woman is fickle, after all; the
villager, Silvio, is more successful than the clown was. The sudden
approach of Canio, the husband, led hither by the vengeful clown, still
smarting under the whip; the escape of Silvio, and the woman's refusal
to tell the name of her lover. And so, to the wonderful second act,
where tragedy is so dexterously woven into comedy; where, under the
guise of a drama that the mountebanks proffer the villagers on their
little stage, the greater drama of Canio's jealousy is spun out to its
tragic ending. In between the lines of the dialogue intended for the
village audience come lines wrung from Canio's heart that sear their way
into his wife's breast, spite of her stage-smiles and graces. And when,
at the last, Canio, in his baffled rage, would strike her, and Silvio,
her lover, rushes from the audience in rescue, only to be stabbed by the
finally exultant husband, young Lancaster involuntarily shuddered. There
was something griping in the wonderful display of human rage and
jealousy that this young tenor gave in Canio; in the final words, full
of tragic, double, ironical meaning, "La comedie e finita!" there was
something of a sentence of death. And somehow, in Silvio there seemed to
be something of himself: that lover's terrible fate was fraught for him,
in the conscience-stricken state he found himself in, with warning and
protest. While the applause, reaching curtain-call after curtain-call,
surged all about him, young Lancaster was lost in rêverie. He was
changed, yes. He had adapted himself to the manners of the town; but he
still had a most nervous conscience, sharp, unblunted. He sat still,
with his chin hiding his upper shirt stud.
Mrs. Stewart's voice roused him. Her husband was already engaged in
putting her cloak about her shoulders. "Wonderful, wasn't it?" she said
sweetly. "We shall see you Wednesday, shall we not?"
He bowed and stammered something, he hardly knew what.
The opera was over.
* * * * *
That night, before he took off his dress' clothes, Dick sat down and
wrote to his mother. It was a thing he had not been so steadfast in of
late as once he had been.
In one place he wrote: "You ask me, mother mine, how I like the town now
that it is no longer strange to me. Oh, I like it only too well. The old
place, the old friends, the sweet gentle tenor of all the old life out
there in Lincolnville, all seem like some far-off dream to me. My ears
and eyes are full of the many sounds and sights of the town; the
multifarious vistas, and the ever-changing face of the street. I like
the town and yet I fear it. Sometimes its might oppresses me, and I feel
as if I wanted to get out in the woods near our home and lie down at
full length on the mossy bank, where the creek sings soothingly and the
sun hangs like a golden ball in a clear sky. I want to hear the
crickets, and the deep silence of the nights, and the echoes of
detached laughter floating over the meadows. I want to watch the
sun-light as it comes through the leaves and plays hide-and-seek on the
lawn; I want to watch the hawk circling in the air, the chickens
scurrying fearfully at the sight of him. And then again the feverish
itch to be in the very middle of this maelstrom, the town, seizes me. I
long for the very thick and foremost of the struggle, and the picture of
Lincolnville fades away. At this present time of the year, though, I can
really prefer the town without seeming a slave to it.
"It is in the winter, or in the early spring, when country places are
chiefly seas of mud and slush that one most deeply realizes the delights
of dwelling in town. Modern invention has put the town dweller beyond
the weather's jealous bites. We step into a hansom, we drive to the
club, we have dinner; behind club doors, and in club comfort we are
above all the slings and arrows of the elements; we drive to the
theatre, and the black-and-white splendor of our men, as well as the
fur-decked rosiness of our women, is only enhanced by contrast against
the frowny murkings of the sky. I have noticed that the finale, the
curtain-fall of any important public event, such as a dinner, a dance,
or an opera, is always a more picturesque thing when the carriages have
to drive away through the sleet. Whereas, the country! The weather is
the world and all that therein is; you can't get away from it. Mud is
king!
"I am doing something in paint now, just to feed this terrible ambition
of mine. The pen-and-ink work is all very-well, and it does bring the
bread and butter, but it is not what I want for ever and ever. And I
think I am going to have for my subject just such a scene as I wrote of
a moment ago: the moment before the carriages drive away through the
rain, with everybody in gala attire and scintillant with brightness and
insincerity. For the town is insincere, mother, and cruel. Some day,
perhaps I, too, will become insincere. I do not know. I pray it may not
be so. But I am alarming you causelessly. I am only a little tired and
unnerved tonight. I have been to the opera, and it was just a little
affecting. So don't mind what I said just now. * * * * I am getting
rather tired and will say good-night. * * *"