STRINGENDO
A crisis of this sort was just what the Wollastons needed to tune them
up. The four of them, for Lucile had to be counted in, met the
enemy--which is to say their arriving guests--with an unbroken front.
They explained Paula's non-appearance with good-humored unconcern. She
was afraid if she sat down to Lucile's dinner that she would forget her
duty and eat it and find herself fatally incapacitated for cutting loose
on Mr. March's songs afterward. They must be rather remarkable songs that
required to be approached in so Spartan a manner. Well, Paula assured us
that they were. The family declined all responsibility in the matter, not
having themselves heard a note of them, but if you wanted to you might
ask Mr. Novelli, over there. He'd been working over them with Paula for
days. As for the composer, he was as much a mystery as his songs. He
wasn't coming to the dinner but was expected to appear from somewhere
afterward.
Novelli, as it happened, was not very productive of information. Half an
hour before the dinner, his wife had telephoned Lucile to ask if he
might bring a guest of his own, a certain Monsieur LaChaise, who was one
of the conductors at the Metropolitan and was to have the direction of
the summer opera out here at Ravinia this year. Portia added with the
falsely deprecatory air of a mother apologizing for a child's prank,
that Pietro had in fact, already invited him to the dinner and had only
just informed her of the fact. Lucile had assured her, of course, that
this addition to the company would cause not the slightest
inconvenience, served on the contrary to bring it up to the number that
had originally been counted upon.
When LaChaise arrived the discovery that he talked no English at all
beyond a few rudimentary phrases, a fact which normally would have seemed
calamitous, was now merely treated as an added feature of the evening. He
and Novelli were in the midst of an animated discussion when they
arrived. They stuck together in the drawing-room as if locked in the same
pair of handcuffs and seating arrangements were hastily revised so that
they might go on talking in untroubled mutual absorption straight through
the dinner. Rush being placed handily by, where he could come to the
rescue in case of need.
It was only the extremest surface of Mary sitting at the head of the
table in Paula's place (which once had been her own) that was engaged
with her unforeseen duties as hostess. And yet in a way, the whole of her
consciousness had been drawn to the surface. The strong interior
excitement that had been burning in her during all this day of her
home-coming, the rising conviction that life at home might turn out to be
something very different indeed from the thing that it had, down in New
York, looked like, the blend of foreboding with anticipation that
accompanied it, and finally a sense of the imminence of something
important, not quite to be accounted for by the quarrel between her
father and his wife,--all this emotional reaction found its outlet during
the long dinner in a quite unusual vivacity. Her sphere of influence
spread down the table until it embraced a full half the length of it on
both sides and those just beyond the reach of it, aware that they were
missing something, listened but distractedly to the talk of their more
remote partners. And while she was doing all this she managed with her
left hand, as it were, to, keep going a vivid little confidential
flirtation with the Stannard boy, Graham, a neighbor and a contemporary
of hers just back from service on a destroyer.
The thing that stimulated her to all this was a consciousness of her
father's intense awareness of her. She had been deliberately evasive of
him since his quarrel with Paula. What he wanted of her she knew as well
as if he had expressed the need of it in so many words. He had turned to
her for it as soon as Paula had gone up-stairs and Rush had accompanied
the thoroughly demoralized Wallace into the hall. She had found a certain
hard satisfaction in denying it to him, in not nestling up into the arms
that happened, for the moment, to be vacant of Paula. This was so
imperative an instinct that she had not even reproached herself for it,
though she supposed she would later.
The sense that something in some way or other decisive was going to
happen to-night, quickened her pulse as she mounted, along with the last
of their guests to the music room, in response to Paula's message that
Mr. March had come and that the "rehearsal" was about to begin. She
looked about eagerly for a man who might be March but could not discover
him anywhere. Was he, perhaps, she absurdly wondered, sitting once more
under the piano?
Novelli drooped over the keyboard. LaChaise was half hidden in a deep
chair in one of the dormers. Paula, her back to the little audience,
stood talking to Novelli. Mary allowed herself a faint smile over the
expression in those faces that Paula wouldn't look at. The half-concealed
impatience, the anticipatory boredom, showed through so unfaltering a
determination to do and express to the end the precisely correct thing.
Even her father's anger looked out through a mask like that.
LaChaise, from his corner said something in French that Mary didn't
catch. Novelli straightened his back. And in that instant before a note
was sounded, Mary's excitement mounted higher. The absorption of those
three musicians, the intensity of their preoccupation, told her that the
something she had expected was going to happen--now. But she did not know
that it was going to happen to her.
Long ago the family had acquiesced in Mary's assertion that she was not
in the least musical and in her stubborn refusal to "take" anything, even
the most elementary course of lessons on the piano. She had been allowed
to grow up in an ignorance almost unique in these days, of the whole
mystery of musical notation and phraseology, an ignorance that might be
reckoned the equivalent of a special talent.
Later, indeed, she had made the discovery--or what would have been a
discovery if she had fully admitted it to herself--that music sometimes
exerted a special power over her emotions. Whether it was a certain sort
of music that created the mood or a certain sort of mood that was capable
of responding to music, she had never seriously inquired. The critical
jargon of the wiseacres always irritated her. She supposed it meant
something because they seemed intelligible to each other but she rather
enjoyed indulging the presumption that it did not. When she went to
concerts, she liked to go alone, or at least to be let alone, to sit back
passively and allow the variegated tissue of sound to envelop her spirit
as it would. If it bored her, as it frequently did, there was no harm
done, no pretense to make. If, as more rarely happened, it stole somehow
into complete possession, floated her away upon strange voyages, she was
at least immune from analysis and inquisition afterward.
So it was with no critical expectancy that she listened when Novelli
began to play; indeed, in the active sense, she did not listen at all.
She forgot to be amused by the composed faces about her; she forgot,
presently, whose music it was and whose voice she heard. What she felt
was a disentanglement, an emergence into more open, wider spaces,--cold
ethereal spaces. It seemed, though, that it was her own mood the music
fitted into, rather than the other way about.
She heard the talk that followed the polite rustle of applause at the
first intermission, without being irritated by it, without even
listening to what it meant, though here and there a phrase registered
itself upon her ear. Henry Craven's "Very modern, of course. No tonality
at all, not a cadence in it," and Charlotte Avery's "No form either. And
hardly to be called a song. A tone poem, really, with a part written
into it for the voice."
The music began again, and now was given ungrudging credit for the
recreation of her mood. Only its admitted beauty created a longing which
it did not serve to satisfy. The cold open sky with its mysterious
interstellar spaces, the flow of the black devouring clouds, the
reemergence of the immortal Pleiades, remote, inhuman, unaware, brought
no tranquillity but only a forlorn human loneliness.
On that note it ended, but Paula, with a nod to Novelli, directed him to
go straight on to the love song. The two do not form a sequence in the
poem; indeed the love song occurs very early in it and the Burial of the
Stars comes afterward, nearly at the end. But I think, as March did, that
Paula's instinct was sound in using the unearthly Schubert-like beauty of
the Burial of the Stars as a prelude to the purely human passion of the
love song.
It is, I suppose, one of the supreme lyric expressions in the English
language of the passion of love. Furthermore, Whitman's free unmetered
swing, the glorious length of his stride, fell in with March's rhythmic
idiom as though they had been born under the same star.
The result is one of those happy marriages so rare as to be almost
unique, in which the emotional power of a great song is enhanced by its
musical setting, and where, conversely, a great piece of lyric music
gains rather than loses by its words.
March did not use the whole poem. His setting begins on the line "Low
hangs the moon," and ends with the "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!"
Why he elected not to go on with it, I don't know. Possibly, because his
own impulse was spent before Whitman's; possibly, because he did not wish
to impose the darker melancholy of the latter stanzas upon the clear
ecstasy of that last call.
It lost something, of course, from the inadequacy of the piano
transcription, for it was conceived and written orchestrally. Paula, too,
has given finer performances of it;--indeed, she sang it better a little
later that same evening. But spurred as she was by the knowledge that the
composer was listening to it and by her determination to win a victory
for it, she flung herself into it with all the power and passion she had.
I doubt whether any other auditor ever is more completely overwhelmed
by it than Mary was. It was so utterly her own, the cry of it so verily
the unacknowledged cry of her own heart, that the successive stanzas
buried themselves in it like unerring arrows. The intensity of its
climax was more poignant, more nearly intolerable, than anything in all
the music she had ever heard. Limp, wet, breathless, trembling all
over, she sat for a matter of minutes after that last ineffable
yearning note had died away.
There was a certain variety in the emotions of the rest of the audience,
but they met on common ground in the feeling of not knowing where to look
or what to say. Their individualities submerged in a great crowd, they
might--most of them--have allowed themselves to be carried away,
especially if they'd come in the expectation--founded on the experience
of other audiences--that they would be carried away. But to sit like
this, all very much aware of each other while a woman they knew, the
wife of a man they had long known, proclaimed a naked passion like that,
was simply painful. What they didn't know you see--there was no program
to tell them--was whether the thing was inspired or merely dreadful, and
when it was over they sat in stony despair, waiting, like the children of
Israel, for a sign.
It was LaChaise who broke the spell by crossing the room and
unceremoniously displacing Novelli at the piano. He turned back to the
beginning of the score and began reading it, at first silently, then
humming unintelligible orchestral parts as he was able to infer them from
the transcription; finally with noisy outbursts upon the piano, to which
din Novelli contributed with one hand reached down over the conductor's
shoulder. Paula standing in the curve of the instrument, her elbows on
the lid, followed them from her copy of the score. It got to the audience
that an alert attitude of attention was no longer required of them. That
in fact, so far as the three musicians were concerned, nothing was
required of them, not even silence. As an audience they ceased to exist.
They were dissolved once more into their social elements and began a
little feverishly to talk.
The realization broke over Mary with the intensity of panic that some one
of them might speak to her. She rose blindly and slipped out into the
hall, but even there she did not feel safe. Some of them, any of them,
might follow her. She wanted to hide. There was a small room adjoining
the studio--it had been the nurse's bedroom when the other had been the
nursery--and its door now stood ajar. She slipped within and closed it
very softly behind her.
Here in the grateful half-dark she was safe enough although the door into
the studio was also part way open. There was nothing in here but
lumber--an old settee, a bookcase full of discarded volumes from the
library and an overflow of Paula's music. No one would think of looking
for her in here.
But as she turned her back upon the door that she had just closed, she
saw that some one was here, a man in khaki sitting on the edge of that
old settee, leaning forward a little, his hands clasped between his
knees. She had come in so quietly he had not heard her.
It seemed to her afterward that she must have had two simultaneous and
contradictory ideas as to who he was. She knew,--she must have known,
instantly--that he was Anthony March, but his uniform suggested Rush and
drew her over toward him just as though she had actually believed him to
be her brother. And then as he became aware of her and glanced up, Paula
in the other room began singing the last song over again, her great broad
voice submerging the buzz of talk like the tide rushing in over a flat.
Without a word Mary dropped down beside him on the settee.
In the middle of a phrase the music stopped.
"A vous le tour!" they heard LaChaise say to Novelli. "Je ne suis pas
assez pianiste. Maintenant! Recommencons, n'est-ce-pas?"
The song resumed. March's frame stiffened.
"Oh night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the
breakers?
What is that little black thing I see there in the white?"
"Now then," March whispered. "Quicker! My God, can't they pick it up?"
Like an echo came LaChaise's "Plus vite! _Stringendo_, jusque au bout!"
and with a gasp the composer greeted the quickened tempo. Then as the
song swept to its first tempestuous climax he clutched Mary's arm.
"That's it," he cried. "Can't you see that's it?"
"Loud! loud! loud!
Loud I call to you, my love!
High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,
Surely you must know who is here, is here,
You must know who I am, my love."
He let go her arm. The song went on.
"Low-hanging moon!
What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
O it is the shape, the shape of my mate!
Oh moon, do not keep me from her any longer."
From there, without interruption it swept along to the end.
It was during the ecstatic pianissimo just before the final section
that their hands clasped. Which of them first sought the contact
neither of them knew but they sat linked like that, tingling,
breathless during the lines:--
"... somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint I must be still, be still to listen,
But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to
me."
On the last "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!" the clasp tightened,
convulsively. But it was not until the circuit was broken that the spark
really leaped across the gap.
There was no applause in the other room when the song ended for the
second time, but it won a clear half minute of breathless silence before
the eddies of talk began again. During that tight-stretched moment the
pair upon the settee, their hands just unclasped, sat motionless, fully
aware of each other for the first time, almost unendurably aware,
thrilling with the just-arrived sense of the amazing intimacy of the
experience they had shared. Neither of them was innocent but neither had
ever known so complete a fusion of his identity with another as this
which the spell of his music had produced.
They sat side by side but not very close, not so close that there was
contact anywhere between them and neither made any move to resume it.
Both were trembling uncontrollably and each knew that the other was.
The hum of talk in the other room rose louder and finally became
articulate in Charlotte Avery's crisp, "Good night, my dear Paula,
we've had a most interesting evening. I shall hope to hear more of
your discovery. And see him too sometime if you make up your mind to
exhibit him."
March started from his seat at that. "Don't make any noise," Mary
whispered, rising too, and laying a detaining hand on him. "Nobody will
come in here. They'll all go now. We must wait."
He obeyed tractably enough, only turned toward her now and gazed at her
with undissimulated intensity; not, though, as if speculating who she
might be, rather as if wondering whether she were really there.
"Don't you want them to find you, either?" he asked.
"N-not after that," she stammered; and added instantly, "We
mustn't talk."
So silent once more, they waited while the late audience defiled in
irregular, slow moving groups down the hall toward the stairs. Mary
distinguished her father's voice, her brother's, her aunt's, all taking
valiantly just the right social note. They were covering the retreat in
good order. And she heard Portia Stanton taking her husband home. But the
music room was not yet deserted. There were sounds of relaxation in
there, the striking of a match, the sound of a heavy body--that of
LaChaise, probably--dropping into an easy chair.
"And now," Mary heard him say to Paula--"Now fetch out your composer.
Where have you had him hidden all this while?"
"He's in there. I was just waiting until they were really gone. I'll get
him now, though. No, sit still; I'd rather, myself."
March, however, didn't move; not even when they could hear Paula coming
toward the door. He stood gazing thoughtfully at Mary, his eyes luminous
in the dark. It occurred to her that the conversation in the other room
had been in French and that he had not understood it.
"Oh, go--quickly!" she had just time to breathe. Then she crowded back,
close against the partition wall. The door opened that way, so that when
Paula flung it wide it screened her a little.
The singer stood there, a golden glowing thing in the light she had
brought in with her. "Where are you?" she asked. Then she came up to
March and took him by the arms. "Was it good?" she asked. "Was it--a
little--as you meant it to sound?"
When he did not speak, she laughed,--a rich low laugh that had a hint of
tears in it, pulled him up to her and kissed his cheek. "You don't have
to answer, my dear," she said. "Come in and hear what LaChaise has got to
say about it."
Without effort, irresistibly, she swept him along with her into the
music room.
Mary, when they were gone, let herself out by the other door as softly as
she had come in. She fled down one flight of the stairs and a moment
later had locked the door of her own room behind her. She switched on the
light, gave a ragged laugh at Sir Galahad; then lay down, just as she
was, on the little white bed, her face in the pillow, and cried.