OPERA AT HEART'S DESIRE
_Telling how Two Innocent Travellers by mere Chance collided with a
Side-tracked Star_
Many miles of sand and silence lay between Heart's Desire and Sky Top,
by the winding trail over the high plateau and in among the foot-hills
of the Sacramentos. The silence was unbroken by any music from the
"heavenly maid," which lay disused beneath the wagon seat; nor did the
two occupants of Tom Osby's freight wagon often emerge from the
reticence habitual in a land where spaces were vast, men infrequent,
and mountains ever looking down. The team of gnarled gray horses kept
on their steady walk, hour after hour, and day after day; and bivouac
after bivouac lay behind them, marked by the rude heap of brush piled
up at night as an excuse for shelter against the wind or by the tiny
circle of ashes where had been a small but sufficient fire. At last
the line of the bivouacs ended, far up toward the crest of the heavily
timbered Sacramentos, after a weary climb through miles of mountain
cañons.
"We'll stop at the lowest spring," said Tom Osby, who knew the country
of old. "That'll leave us a half mile or so from where they've built
their fool log hotel. It beats the dickens how these States folks,
that lives in cities, is always tryin' to imertate some other way of
livin'. Why didn't they build it out of boards? They've got a
saw-mill, blame 'em, and they're cuttin' off all the timber in these
mountings; but they got to have logs to build their house with. Folks
that builds real log houses, and not toys, does it because they ain't
got no boards. But these States folks always was singerler."
By this time Tom Osby was unhitching and feeding his team, and throwing
out the blanket rolls upon the ground. "Go easy on the 'Annie Laurie'
machine there," called out Dan Anderson, hearing a suspicious rattling
of brass against the wagon box. But his companion heeded him little,
casting the phonograph at the foot of a tree, where the great horn
swung wide, disconsolately.
"A imertation," said Tom, "is like I was just sayin'. It ain't the
real thing.
"Now look here, friend," he went on a moment later, "you've got to do
like you said you would. Of course, I know melons don't grow up here
in the pine mountains, even if they was ripe yet; but you said you was
comin' along to see fair play, and you got to do it."
Dan Anderson looked at him queerly. "Wait," said he; "it'll be night
before long. Then you go on up to the house, and prospect around a
little. If you get scared, come back, and I'll--I'll take care of you.
I'll be around here somewhere, so you needn't be afraid to go right on
in alone, you know. Tell her you know her preserved songs, and liked
them so much you just had to come down here. Tell her about the
watermelons. Tell her--"
"You're actin' a _leetle_ nervous your own self, man," said Tom Osby,
keenly. "But you watch Papa. I been married four times, or maybe
five, so what's a woman here or there to me? What is there to any
woman to scare a feller, anyway?"
"I'm damned if I know!" replied Dan Andersen;--"there isn't--of course
there isn't, of course not. You're perfectly safe. Why, just go right
on up. Have your sand along!"
"Sure," said Tom Osby. "All right; I'll just mosey along up the trail
after a while."
And after a while he did depart, alone, leaving Dan Anderson sitting on
the wagon tongue. "You come up after a while, Dan," he called back.
"If you don't hear nothing from me, you'd better stroll along up and
view the remains."
Madame Alicia Donatelli paced up and down the long room in the somewhat
dismal hotel building which constituted the main edifice of Sky Top.
She was in effect a prisoner. El Paso seemed like a dream, San
Francisco a figment of the brain, and New York a wholly imaginary spot
upon some undiscovered planet, lost in the nebulous universe of space.
She trod the uneven floor as some creature caged, on her face that
which boded no good to the next comer, whoever he might be.
The next comer was Signer Peruchini, the tenor. Unhappy Peruchini! He
started back from the ominous swish of the Donatelli gown, the deep
cadence of the Donatelli voice, the restless Donatelli walk, now
resumed.
"How dare you!" cried the _diva_. "How dare you intrude on me?"
"The saints!" cried Signer Peruchini. "What service is zere here? I
knock, but you do not hear. Madame, what horror is zis place!"
"Ah, that Blauring!" cried Madame Donatelli, in her rage. "The beast!
How dare he bring me here--_me_!" (she smote her bosom)--"who have
sung in the grand in the best houses of the Continent--in Italy, Paris,
London, St. Petersburg! I shall not survive this!"
"_Perfide_!" cried Peruchini, in assent. "_Perfide_! R-r-rascal!
_Cochon_! Pig unspikkab'!"
"But, madame," he resumed, with gestures and intonations suitable for
the scene. "Behole! It is I who have lofe you so long. To lofe--ah,
it is so divine! How can you riffuse?"
Madame Donatelli withdrew with proper operatic dignity. "Never!" she
cried. "You have sufficiently persecuted me ere this. I bid you go.
Begone!"
"Vooman, you mad meh!" cried Peruchini, rushing forward, his hands
first extended with palms upward, then clenched, his hair properly
tumbled, his eyes correctly rolling. "I vill not be teniet! Your
puty, it is too much! Vooman, vooman, ah, have you no harret? Py
Heaven, I--"
With a swift motion he grasped her wrists. Color rose to the Donatelli
cheek. Her eyes flashed. She was about to sing. She checked herself
in time. "Unhand me, sir!" she cried.
The two wrestled back and forth, their hands intertwined. And now the
log fire, seeing the lack of better footlights, blazed up loyally to
light for them this unusual stage. They did not hear the door open
behind them, did not hear the click of high bootheels on the floor, as
there came toward them an unbidden spectator, who had by some slack
servant been directed thither.
The door did open. In it stood Tom Osby, unannounced. He was dressed
in his best, which was not quite so picturesque as his worst, but which
did not disguise him nor the region which was his home. His boots were
new, sharp at toe and heel. His hat, now removed, was new, but wide
and white. His coat was loose, and under it there was no waistcoat,
neither did white collar confine his neck.
A quick glance took in the scene before him. A little dark man was
contending with a superb female of the most regally imperious beauty
that he had ever seen or dreamed. Tom Osby stepped a swift pace into
the room. There had come to his ear the note of a rich, deep voice
that brought an instant conviction. This--this was the Voice that he
had worshipped! This was that divine being whom he had heard and seen
in so many sweet imaginings in the hot days and sweet, silent nights
afar in the desert lands. She was assailed. She was beset. There
swept over him the swift instinct for action which was a part of life
in that comer of the world. In a flash his weapon leaped from its
scabbard, and an unwavering, shining silver point covered the figure of
this little, dark man, now obviously guilty of sacrilege unspeakable.
"Git back, you feller'" cried Tom Osby. "Leggo! What are you doin'
there? Break, now, and git out. This ain't right."
And that was all he ever knew of Signer Peruchini, for the latter
sprang back and away into an immediate oblivion. Tom Osby from that
instant was himself swept on by the glory of this woman's presence.
Confronting her, he stood half trembling, at once almost longing for
warlike action rather than that now grown needful.
Madame Donatelli, for the first time in years jarred from the standards
of her artificial life, and so, suddenly, become woman rather than
actress, fell into a seat, turning toward the newcomer a gaze of
wide-eyed astonishment. She had read in certain journals wild stories
of doings of wild men. Was that sort of thing actually true?
"Sir," she said, "how dare you!" At this, Tom Osby stood upon one leg.
"I beg your pardon, ma'am," said he, at length. "I didn't know anybody
was in here. I just come in lookin' for somebody."
She did not answer him, but turned upon him the full glance of a deep,
dark eye, studying him curiously.
"I don't live here, ma'am," resumed Tom. "I'm camped down the hill by
the spring. I left my _compadre_ there. I--I belong to Heart's
Desire, up north of here. I--I come along in here this mornin'. They
said there wasn't any one in the parlor--they said there might be some
one in the parlor, though, maybe. And I was--I was--ma'am, I was
lookin'--I reckon I was lookin' for you!"
He laid his hat and gun upon the table, and stood with one hand against
its edge. "Yes, I come down from Heart's Desire," he began again.
"From where?" broke in a low, sweet voice. "From Heart's Desire? What
an exquisite name! Where is it? What is it? That sounds like
heaven," she said.
"It might be, ma'am," said Tom Osby, simply, "but it ain't. The water
supply ain't reg'lar enough. It's just a little place up in the
mountains. Heaven, ma'am, I reckon is just now located something like
a hundred miles south of Heart's Desire!" And he laughed so sudden and
hearty a man's laugh at this that it jostled Alicia Donatelli out of
all her artificiality, and set the two at once upon a footing. It
seemed to her that, after all, men were pretty much alike, no matter
where one found them.
"Sit down," she said, ceasing to bite at her fingertips, as was her
habit when perturbed. "Tell me about Heart's Desire."
"Well, Heart's Desire, ma'am," said Tom Osby, "why, it ain't much.
It's mostly men."
"But how do you live? What do you do?"
"Well, now, I hadn't ever thought of that. But now you mention it, I
can't say I really know. The fellers all seem to get along, somehow."
"But yourself?"
"Me? I drive a freight wagon between Las Vegas and Heart's Desire.
There is stores, you know, at Heart's Desire, and a saloon. We held a
co'te there, onct. You see, along of cattle wars and killings, for a
good many years back, folks has been kind of shy of that part of the
country. Most of the men easy scared, they went back home to the
States. Some stayed. And it's--why, I can't rightly explain it to
you, ma'am--but it's--it's Heart's Desire."
The face of the woman before him softened. "It's a beautiful name,"
said she. "Heart's Desire!" She said it over and over again,
wistfully. The cadence of her tone was the measure of an irrevocable
loss. "Heart's Desire!" she whispered--"I wonder--
"Tell me," she cried at length, arising and pacing restlessly, "what do
you do at Heart's Desire?"
"Nothing," said Tom Osby. "I just told you, I reckon."
"Do you have any amusements? Are there ever any entertainments?"
"Why, law! no, ma'am!"
She threw back her head and laughed. There rose before her the picture
of a primitive world, whose swift appeal clutched at her heart,
saturated and sated with unreal things grown banal.
"Besides," went on Tom Osby, "if we had an op'ry house, it wouldn't do
no good. Why--I don't want to be imperlite, but I've heard that op'ry
singers cost as high as ten dollars a night, or maybe more. We
couldn't afford it. Onct we had a singin'-school teacher. Fellow by
the name of Dawes come in there from Kansas, and he taught music. He
used to sing a song called the 'Sword of Bunker Hill.' Used to have a
daughter, and she sung, too. Her favoright song was 'Rosalie, the
Prairie Flower.' They made quite a lot of money holdin'
singin'-school. The gal, she got married and moved to Tularosa, and
that broke up the singin'-school. There ain't been any kind of show at
Heart's Desire for five years. But say, ma'am," he interrupted, "about
that feller that had hold of you when I come in. Did he hurt you any?"
"That's our leading tenor, Signer Peruchini! He's a great artist."
She laughed, a ripple of soft, delicious laughter. "No, don't bother
him. We'll need him out on the Coast. Don't you know, we are just
here in the mountains for a little while."
"Don't you like these mountings, ma'am?" asked Tom Osby, sinking back
into his seat. "I always did. They always remind me of the Smokies,
in Car'lina, back South."
"You came from the South?"
"Georgy, ma'am."
"Georgia! So did I! We should be friends," she said, and, smiling,
held out her hand. Tom Osby took it.
"Ma'am," said he, gravely, "I'm right glad to see you. I've not been
back home for a good many years. I've been all over."
"Nor have I been home," said she, sadly. "I've been all over, too.
But now, what brought you here? Tell me, did you want to see me?"
"Yes!" Tom Osby answered simply. "I said that's why I come!"
"You want me to come up to Heart's Desire to sing? Ah, I wish that
were not impossible."
"No, there's no one sent me," said Tom Osby. "Though, of course, the
boys would do anything for you they could. What we want in Heart's
Desire--why, sometimes I think it's nothing, and then, again,
everything. Maybe we didn't want any music; and then, again, maybe we
was just sick and pinin' for it, and didn't know it."
She looked at him intently as he bent his head, his face troubled.
"Listen," said he, at length, "I'll tell you all about it. Up at Vegas
I heard a funny sort of singin' machine. It had voices in it. Ma'am,
it had a Voice in it. It--it sung--" he choked now.
"And some of the songs?"
Strangely enough, he understood the question of her eyes. She flushed
like a girl as he nodded gravely. "'Annie Laurie,'" he said.
"I am very glad," said she, with a long breath. "It reconciles me to
selling my art in that way. No, I'm very glad, quite outside of that."
Tom Osby did not quite follow all her thoughts, but he went on.
"It was 'Annie Laurie,'" said he. "I knew you sung it. Ma'am, I
played her all the way from Vegas down."
"But why did you come?" She was cruel; but a woman must have her toll.
The renewed answer cost courage of Tom Osby.
"Ma'am," said he, "I won't lie to you. I just come to see you, or to
hear you, I can't rightly tell which. It must have been both." Now he
arose and flung out a hand, rudely but eloquently. "Ma'am," he went
on, "I knowed you come from Georgy onct, the same as me. And I knowed
that a Georgy girl, someway, somewhere, somehow, would have a soft spot
in her heart. I come to hear you sing. There's things that us fellers
want, sometimes."
The woman before him drew a deep, long breath.
"I reckon you'll have to sing again," the man went on. "You'll have to
sing that there song, 'Annie Laurie,' like I heard it more than onct,
before I went away from home."
The soft Georgia speech came back to his tongue, and she followed it
herself, unconsciously.
"My friend," said she, "you're right. I reckon I'll have to sing."
"When?" said Tom Osby.
"Now," said Alice Strowbridge. She rose and stepped toward the piano
open near the fire.
The color was full on her cheek now; the jewels glanced now above a
deep bosom laboring in no counterfeit emotion. A splendid creature,
bedecked, bejewelled, sex all over, magnificent, terrible, none the
less, although the eyes of Alice Strowbridge shone sombrely, her hands
twined together in embarrassment, as they did the first time she sang
in public as a child. The very shoulders under the heavy laces caught
a plaintive droop, learned in no role of Marguerite in any land. The
red rose at her hair--the rose got from some mysterious source--half
trembled. Fear, a great fear--the first stage fright known in
years--swept over Alice Strowbridge, late artist, and now woman. There
sat upon her soul a sense of unpreparedness for this new Public, this
lone man from a mysterious land called Heart's Desire--a place where
men, actual men, earnest men, were living, vaguely yearning for that
which was not theirs. She felt them gazing into her soul, asking how
she had guarded the talents, how she had prized the jewels given her,
what she had done for the heart of humanity. Halfway across the floor
she stopped, her hand at her throat.
"I know this here is right funny," said Tom Osby, misunderstanding,
"for me to do this-a-way. It's right embarrassin' for a lady like you
to try to oblige a feller like me. But, ma'am, all I can say is, all
the boys'll be mightily obliged to you."
She flashed upon him a smile which had tears in it. Tom Osby grew more
confident, more bold.
"Ma'am," said he, clearing his throat, "I want you to forgive me; but I
reckon how, when you great people sing different things, you-all sort
of dress up, different like, at different times, accordin' to the
things you are singin' right then. Ain't that so?"
"We have many costumes," said she, simply. "We play many parts.
Sometimes we hardly know we are ourselves."
"And when you sung that 'Annie Laurie' song, did you have any coschume
to go along with that?"
"You mean--"
"Well, now, ma'am, when us fellers was talkin' it over, it always
seemed to us, somehow, like the Annie Laurie coschume was right
_white_." He blushed and hastened to apologize. "Not sayin' anything
against that dress you've got on," he said. "I never saw one as fine
as that in all my life. I never saw any woman, never in all my life,
like you. I--I--ma'am"--he flushed, but went on with a Titanic
simplicity--"I _worship_ you, right where you stand, in that there
dress; but--could you--"
"You are an artist yourself!" cried she. "Yes! Wait!"
In an instant she was gone from the room, leaving Tom Osby staring at
the flickering fire, now brighter in the advancing shades of evening.
In perhaps half an hour Alice Strowbridge reappeared. The rich black
laces, and the ripe red rose, and the blazing jewels, all were gone.
She was clad in simple white--and yes! a blue sash was there. The
piled masses of her hair were replaced by two long, glossy braids. By
the grace of the immortal gods all misdeeds were lifted from her that
night. For once in many years she was sincere. Now she was a girl
again, and back at the old home. Those were the southern mountains
half hidden in the twilight; and yonder was the moon of the old days,
swinging up again. There was the gallery at the window of the old
Georgia home, and the gate, and the stairs, and the hedgerow, and the
trailing vines, and the voices of little birds; and Youth--Youth, the
unspeakable glory of Youth--it all was hers once more! The souls of a
thousand Georgia mocking-birds--the soul of that heritage which came to
her out of her environment--lay in her throat that hour.
And so, not to an audience, but to an auditor--nay, perhaps, after all,
to the audience of Heart's Desire, an audience of unsated souls--she
sang, although of visible audience there was but one man, who sat
crumpled up, shaken, undone.
She could not, being a woman, oblige any man by direct compliance; she
could not deprive herself of her own little triumph. Or perhaps,
deliberately, she sought to give this solitary listener that which it
would have cost thousands of dollars for a wider public to hear. She
sang first the leading _arias_ of her more prominent operatic roles.
She sang the Page's song, which had been hers in her first appearance
on a critical stage. "_Nobil signors_," she sang, her voice
lingering. And then presently there fell from her lips the sparkling
measures of Coquette, indescribably light, indescribably brilliant in
her rendition. Melody after melody, score after score, product of the
greatest composers of the world, she gave to a listener who never
definitely realized what privilege had been his. She slipped on and
on, forgetting herself, revelling, dreaming; and it was proof at least
of the Alice Strowbridge which might have been, that there came to her
fingers and her throat that night no sound of cheap sensuous melody, no
florid triviality from any land. With a voice which had mastered the
world, she sang the best of the masters of the world. So music, with
all its wooing, its invitation, its challenge, its best appeal, for a
time filled and thrilled this strange auditorium, until forsooth later
comers might, as was the story, indeed have found jewels caught there
in the chinks of the rude-hewn walls.
All at once the voice of the artist, the subsidiary voice of the piano
broke, dropped, and paused. And then, with no more interlude, that
great instrument, a perfect human voice, in the throat of a perfect
human woman, swept gently into the melody of the old song of "Annie
Laurie." At the beginning of it there was a schoolgirl of Georgia, and
a freighter of the Plains, and at the end of it there was a woman with
bowed head, and a man silent, whose head also was bowed.
Neither of the two in the great room heard the footfalls of one who
approached in the dusk across the puncheon floor of the wide gallery.
Dan Andersen, for reasons of his own, had also come on up the trail to
the hotel. Perhaps he intended to make certain inquiries; but he never
got even so far as the door. The voice of Donatelli caught and held
him as it had her other auditor. He stopped midway of the gallery,
listened to the very last note, then turned and quietly stole away,
returning to the lonely bivouac beneath the pines. He started even at
the whisperings of the trees, as he threw down his blankets beside the
little fire. He could not sleep. A face looked at him out of the
dark, eyes gazed down at him, instead of stars, out of the heavens.
The night, and the stars, and the pines, and the desert wind reproached
him for his faithlessness to themselves as comforters; but abjectly he
admitted he could make no plea, save that he had heard once more of a
Face that was the Fairest.
He heard the sound of slow footsteps after a time. It was Tom Osby,
who came and sat down by the fire, poking tobacco into his pipe with a
crooked finger, and smoking on with no glance at the recumbent figure
on the camper's bed. Yet the outdoor sense of Tom Osby told him that
his companion was not asleep.
"I was just thinking" said Tom Osby, at length, scarce turning his head
as he accosted Dan Anderson, "that since watermelons don't grow very
much up here in the mountings, we might take a load of passengers back
home with us."
"Passengers?" A voice came from the blankets.
"Yes. Whole bunch of them railroad folks comin' up on the mornin'
train from El Paso. Old man and the girl both, and a lawyer fellow,
Barkley, I believe his name is. I reckon he's attoreney for the road."
Deep silence greeted this. Tom reached forward and picked up a brand
to light his pipe more thoroughly.
"I just want to thank you," said he, "for comin' along down here to
take care of me."