THE DUMB PRINCESS
None of his own family knew quite what to make of Anthony March. All of
them but his mother disapproved of him, on more or less mutually
contradictory grounds. Disapproved of him more than they did of one
another, though he occupied a sort of middle ground between them. It is a
possible explanation to the paradox that each of them regarded him as a
potential ally and so spent more time trying to change his ways, scolding
at him, pointing out his derelictions and lost opportunities, than it was
worth while spending on the others who were hopeless.
I shall be a little more intelligible, perhaps, if I tell you briefly
who they were. The father, David March, and Eveline, his wife, were New
Englanders. They both came, as a matter of fact, from within ten miles
of Glastonbury, Connecticut, though they didn't discover this fact until
after they'd met a number of times in the social and religious
activities of the Moody Institute. The lives of both had been woven in
the somber colors of Evangelical religion. With him this ran close to
fanaticism and served as an outlet for a very intense emotional life.
She was not highly energized enough to go to extremes in anything, but
she acquiesced in all his beliefs and practises, made him in short, a
perfectly dutiful wife according to the Miltonian precept, "He for God
only, she for God in him."
Back in New England she probably would not have married him for she was a
cut or more above him socially, the played-out end of a very fine line,
as her beautiful speech would have made evident to any sensitive ear. But
in Chicago, the disheveled, terrifying Chicago of the roaring eighties,
to all intents and purposes alone, clinging precariously to a
school-teacher's job which she had no special equipment for, she put up
only the weakest resistance to David March's determination that she
should be his wife.
He was a skilled artisan, a stringer and chipper in a piano factory
(chipping, if you care to be told, is the tuning a piano gets before its
action is put in). One would hardly have predicted then, considering the
man's energy and intelligence, that he would remain just that, go on
working at the same bench for thirty-five years. But, as I have said, his
energy found its main outlet in emotional religion.
Their first child, born in 1886, was a girl whom they named Sarah.
Anthony came two years later and for twelve years there were no more.
Then came the late baby, whom they appropriately named Benjamin and
allowed a somewhat milder bringing up than the iron rule the elder ones
had been subjected to.
It was the dearest wish of David's life to make a preacher of Anthony
and he must have got by way of answers to his prayers, signs which
reconciled him to the sheer impossibility of this project. The boy's
passion for music manifested itself very early and with this David
compromised by training him for the higher reaches of his own craft. He
got employment for Anthony in the piano factory for a year or two after
his graduation from high school and then sent him on for a liberal two
years in a school in Boston where the best possible instruction in piano
tuning was to be had.
Sarah was half-way through high school when her brother Benjamin was born
and for two years after she graduated, her mother's ill health, the
familiar breakdown of the middle forties, kept her at home. Then she
defied her father and took a job in a down-town office. What he objected
to, of course, was not her going to work but the use she made of the
independence with which self-support provided her. The quarrel never came
to a real break though often enough it looked like doing so, and except
for the brief period of her marriage Sarah always lived at home.
When Anthony came back from Boston, he revolted, too. He had not been a
prodigal; indeed, during his second year in the East, he had in one way
or another, earned his own living and he had learned even beyond his
father's hopes to tune pianos. But he did it at an incredibly small
expense in time and energy. What his heart went into during those two
years was the study of musical theory and composition, and, thanks to a
special aptitude which rose to the pitch of genius, he managed to make
the comparatively meager training he could get in so short a time,
suffice to give him the technical equipment he needed.
He came home armed, too, with a discovery. The discovery that a man not
enslaved by a possessive sense, a man whose self-respect is not dependent
upon the number of things he owns, a man able therefore to thumb his nose
at all the maxims of success, occupies really a very strong position.
He didn't like the factory, though he gave it what he considered a fair
trial. He didn't like the way they tuned pianos in a factory. The dead
level of mechanical perfection which they insisted upon was a stupid
affront to his ear. And, of course, the strict regimentation of life at
home, the, once more, dead level of the plateau upon which life was
supposed to be lived, was distasteful to one with a streak of the nomad
and the adventurer in him.
Thanks to his discovery he was able to construct an alternative to a life
like that. A skillful piano tuner could earn what money he needed
anywhere and could earn enough in a diligent week to set him free, his
simple wants provided for, for the rest of the month.
But even a wanderer needs a base, a point of departure for his
wanderings, and his father's house could not be made to serve that
purpose, so Anthony domiciled himself, after a long quest, in the half
story above a little grocery just off North LaSalle Street and not far
from the river.
It happened when Anthony had been living there a year or more that the
grocer, with whom he was on the friendliest of terms, got, temporarily,
into straits at precisely the time that Anthony had three hundred
dollars. He had won a prize of that amount offered by a society for the
encouragement of literature for the minor orchestral instruments, with a
concerto for the French horn. The grocer offered his note for it, but
Anthony thought of something better. He bought his room. It was to be his
to live in, rent free, for as long as time endured.
He took a childlike pleasure in this lair of his. It accumulated his
miscellaneous treasures like a small boy's pocket. He made a mystery of
it. He never gave it as his address. Not even his family knew where it
was, nor, more than vaguely, of its existence. The address he had given
Paula was the one he gave every one else, his father's house out on the
northwest side, just off Fullerton Avenue. This room, in a sense seldom
attained, was his own. When he came back from France, the day Lucile saw
him sitting on the bench in the park, he found it exactly--save for a
heavy coating of dust--as he had left it, in 1917, when he went down to
Camp Grant.
A good philosophy, so John Wollaston with a touch of envy had
admitted--if you can make it work. Where it breaks down with most young
men who set out so valiantly with it, is the point where one sees the
only girl in the world and recognizes the imperious necessity of winning
her, of holding out lures for her, of surrounding her, once won, with the
setting her superlative worth demands. That this did not happen to
Anthony March was due to the fact that the young woman he--not so much
saw as gradually perceived, was his sister Sarah's friend, Jennie
MacArthur.
Independence had been forced upon Jennie so early that she never was
called upon to decide whether she liked it or not. She had an inquiring
mind--perhaps experimental would be the better word for it--abundant
self-confidence and a good stiff backbone. It was easy to make the
mistake of thinking her hard. She was not a pretty woman, with her
sandy hair and rather striking freckles, but she was well formed, she
dressed always with that crisp cleanliness which is the extravagant
standard of young women who work in good offices, and her voice had an
attractive timbre.
To Sarah March (who, having fought for independence, was a little at a
loss what to do with it) Jennie's experience and her rather interesting
range of friends were a Godsend. It was at one of Jennie's parties in the
tiny pair of rooms where she lived alone that Sarah met Walter Davis, a
mechanical draftsman by day and an ardent young Socialist by night, whom
she afterward married.
On the other hand, the home which Sarah was sometimes rather dubious
about the advantage of possessing, was to Jennie a delightful place to be
a familiar visitor in. She liked old David, who was a surprisingly
charming person when he had no authority over you, she liked Mrs. March,
she adored little Ben--young Ben he was now rapidly growing up to be--and
finally, she began taking an interest which eventually outweighed all the
rest, in the family black sheep, Anthony.
The intimacy between them which began around the time of Sarah's marriage
continued intermittently for nearly four years. It had not, indeed, been
definitely broken off when he went into the army.
When the attraction faded as it had definitely begun to do some months
before he went to Camp Grant, it left their friendship unimpaired,
enriched on the contrary. He could talk to her more easily, confide his
thoughts to her more freely than to any one else he knew.
This ability to be confided in and depended upon was one of her special
talents. She had emerged, years before, from the crowded stenographers'
room in a big engineering concern into the private office of the chief.
He was an erratic genius, brilliant, irritable, exacting, tireless, all
but impossible to maintain any consistent relation with but one of bitter
enmity. He had about made up his mind that a fresh stenographer every
morning was all he could hope for, when Jennie became his Scheherazade.
By the time the war broke out she was as indispensable to him as his
hands. He had made her an officer of the company and paid her a salary of
six thousand dollars a year, but she went on remembering his engagements,
writing his letters and soothing the outraged feelings of his clients
just as she had done in humbler days. She was, in the good, old-fashioned
sense, his better half. Her amusement was the stock market and she played
it cannily and with considerable success with his rather diabolic
encouragement.
She was in New York when March got home, and he saw her for the first
time since his return at his father's house on a Sunday morning more
than a fortnight after the evening at the Wollastons' when Paula had
sung his songs.
It was his first appearance anywhere since the afternoon in Novelli's
studio when he had shown his opera to La Chaise and Paula. It had been
agreed among them that with certain important changes, it would make an
admirable vehicle for Paula's return to the operatic stage, and being a
small affair from the producer's point of view, involving only one
interior set, would be practicable for production during the summer at
Ravinia in case the project for Paula's singing there went through. March
had agreed to the changes and withdrawn into his stronghold over the
grocery store with a determination not more than to come up for air until
he had worried the thing into the shape they wanted.
He didn't know it was Sunday--having attributed the peacefulness he
found pervading Fullerton Avenue to his own good conscience, a purely
subjective phenomenon--until in the parlor of his father's house the
sight of his brother Ben at the piano playing a soundless tune upon
the tops of the keys, brought it home to him. When he inquired for the
rest of the family, he learned that they were up-stairs getting ready
for church.
"I hope," he said, with a grin at his younger brother, "that you aren't
suffering from that old hebdomadal sore throat of yours."
"No, it's all right," Ben said, declining though to be amused. "I've got
a gentleman's agreement with Sarah. Every other Sunday. Father's well
enough satisfied now if he gets one of us. When they're all gone, I can
slip out and buy a Sunday paper--jazz up the piano--have a regular orgy.
Every other Sunday! Gee, but it's fierce!"
"It's pathetic," March said. "Poor father! I don't suppose there's any
help for it."
What struck him was the pitiful futility of his father's persistence in
trying to impose his ways, his beliefs, his will, upon one so rapidly
growing into full independence. The only sanction he had was a tradition
daily becoming more fragile. He was in for the bitterness of another
disappointment. That was what there was no help for.
Naturally young Ben didn't interpret it this way. "You're a nice one
to talk like that," he said resentfully. "You've always done whatever
you pleased."
"There's nothing to prevent you from doing the same thing if you look at
it that way," Anthony observed. "You've got a job a man could live on,
haven't you?"
"Live on? Fifteen dollars a week?"
And it may be admitted that Ben's sense of outrage had some foundation.
Years ago he had made up his small young mind that he would never work in
the factory and he settled the question by getting himself a job in one
of the piano salesrooms on Wabash Avenue. He wasn't precisely a salesman
yet, he might perhaps have been spoken of by an unkind person as an
office boy. But it was essential that he look like a salesman and act
like a salesman, even in the matter of going to lunch. Some day soon, he
was going to succeed in completing a sale before some one else came
around and took it out of his hands, and he could then strike for a
regular commission.
In the meantime with shoes and socks and shirts and neckties costing what
they did, the suggestion that his salary was adequate to provide a
bachelor's independence was fantastic and infuriating.
"Yes," he grumbled, "if I wanted to live in a rat hole and look
like a tramp."
"My rat hole isn't so bad to live in," Anthony said, "but I'd be sorry to
think I looked like a tramp. Do I, for a fact? I haven't had this suit on
since I went into the army but I thought it looked all right."
"Oh, there's a big rip in the back of the shoulder where the padding is
sticking through and your cuffs are frayed and your necktie's got a hole
worn plumb through it where the wing of your collar rubs. You don't look
like a tramp, of course, because you look clean and decent. It would be
all right if you had to be like that. Only it's all so darned
unnecessary. You could make good money if you'd only live like a regular
person. Every day or two, somebody telephones to know if you aren't home
and if there isn't some way we can get word to you, and it's kind of
humiliating to have to say there isn't;--that we don't know where you
are, haven't seen you for a week,--things like that. Of course, it's none
of my business, but _I'm_ trying to pull out of this. I'd like to _be_
somebody someday and it would be a darn sight easier if you were trying
to pull the same way instead of queering us all the time."
"Yes, I know," Anthony said thoughtfully. "But then there's Sarah on the
other hand who can't forgive me for not putting on a red necktie and
going Bolshevik. She'd have me put in my time trying to upset the
bourgeois applecart altogether."
Ben grinned. "You ought to have heard her go on about the limousine that
came and left a note for you the other day. Lady inside, chauffeur in a
big fur coat. He came up to the door and asked whether you were home and
left the note when Sarah said you weren't. Last Thursday, I think that
was, just before supper. It's over there on the mantel, I guess. Sarah's
afraid you're going to turn into a little brother of the rich."
"You tell Sarah," Anthony said off the top of his mind, the rest of it
obviously engaged with the note,--"you tell Sarah there's nothing
capitalistic about this. This is from her Doctor Wollaston's wife.
Certainly he earns his living if anybody does."
"Do they want their piano tuned again?" Ben asked.
"They don't mention it. They want to know if I'll come to lunch to-day.
I'm going to telephone to see if the invitation has expired."
"Good lord!" said Ben, "what have you got to wear? You can't go looking
like that!" He meant to go into particulars when his brother came back
from the telephone. But by that time he had something of nearer concern
to himself to think about. Anthony found him staring out the window with
an expression of the liveliest dismay.
"Oh, look who's here!" he said. "Can you beat it?"
Anthony looked and saw a little Ford coupé pulling up to the curb in
front of the house; looked more closely at the person at the wheel
and blinked.
"Jennie MacArthur! I thought she was still in New York. But what's she
doing in that car?"
"Oh, she bought it last fall," Ben said. "She's getting rich. But can't
you see what it means? She's coming around to see Sarah and that'll give
Sarah an excuse for staying home from church. And that means that _I'll_
have to go."
"Don't worry about that," Anthony said, catching up his hat. "I'll head
her off. Tell mother I'll be around to-night."
He intercepted Jennie at the car door, caught both her hands and pressed
them tight, pushed her back into her seat as he did so, climbed in and
sat down beside her. "I'm supposed to be saving Ben from the horrible
fate of getting dragged to church when it's really Sarah's Sunday," he
said. "If you'll just drive me around the corner, I'll explain."
But she prevented him with a little laugh when he would have begun. "This
is good enough for me. I don't want any explanation."
"It's pretty good," he agreed. "Stop a minute now we're safely around the
corner and let me have a look at you."
She obeyed him, literally, pulling up to the curb again, accorded him the
look he wanted and took, meanwhile, one of her own at him. Neither of
them, however, seemed to find just the phrase in which to announce the
result of this scrutiny. She started on again presently and he relaxed
against the cushion. "This is more like being home again than anything
that's happened yet," he said. "Are we to have a real visit?"
She was free till lunch she told him, and he, after saying "Well, that's
something," admitted his own engagement. "However, that's the best part
of two hours. The thing is not to waste any of it."
Naturally enough they wasted a good deal of it. They talked about the
little car they were riding in, how she had learned to drive, why she had
bought it; how Mr. Ferris, her boss, had said he wouldn't be any good for
the day after coming down-town in a tight jammed elevated train and how,
having tried the new method of transportation she had agreed with him;
how it was as easy to run as a typewriter.
A few minutes more of that, she thought, and she'd begin telling Ford
jokes, so she wrenched around to a new subject and asked him how much
he'd seen of France; what he thought of the French; how long he'd been
home; and what it seemed like to be in civilian clothes again;--topics
upon which he enlarged as well as he could. She had driven meanwhile,
north to Diversey Boulevard and had then turned west, around the ring.
They were out in the middle of Garfield Park when she said after a hard,
tight silence, "Isn't this perfectly ghastly?"
"It's awful," he agreed. "I don't know what's the matter with us--or
whose fault it is. But I certainly didn't mean to get started like this."
"I expect that's it," she told him. "Haven't you been trying to treat
me just exactly right? Make me feel perfectly comfortable? Haven't you
been--being tactful, with all your might, ever since we started?
Because I have."
"Well, then, for heaven's sake," he said, "let's quit! Quit trying so
infernally hard, I mean. It's too nice a morning to spoil. You know, if
the sun manages to come out, as it's trying to, it will be a very
handsome April day."
"I don't think talking about the weather is much of an improvement," she
commented. "Tony, let's give it up, for to-day I mean. We'll try again
sometime from a fresh start. This is perfectly hopeless."
He tried to pretend that she didn't mean it but she made it clear even
with a touch of asperity that she did. "Oh, all right," he growled and
reached for the handle to the door.
"Don't be silly," she commanded. "I'm not going to leave you out here in
the wilds of Garfield Park. Where do you want to go? Is it too early for
your lunch?"
"Mrs. Wollaston told me to come at one," he said. "You aren't supposed to
be ahead of time for a thing like that, are you? Anyhow, I've got to go
back to my room first."
She caught up the name. "Sarah told me about your going there. First to
tune the piano and then the evening when she sang your songs. Sarah's
quite eloquent about it."
"Yes, poor Sarah, I know. Ben was quoting her this morning. However, that
won't make the least difference with what I'm going to do."
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Why, I suppose," he said, "that I'm going to do what people speak of as
settling down. What they mean by that is taking an interest in
consequences--more of an interest in what things lead to than in what
they are. Well, that's what I'm at now."
"That's a change, all right, for you," she said.
He agreed with her. "I knew when it happened," he added. "It happened
when I heard Paula Carresford sing one of my songs. Do you remember the
story that used to be in the school reader about the tiger that tasted
blood and ate up the princess? You know, Jennie, it's practically true
that up to that night I'd never heard any of my music at all--except
mutilated fragments of it as I played it myself. And I'll tell you it was
a staggering experience. The queerest experience I ever had in my life,
too. I'll tell you about that sometime. But I changed right there, just
the way the tiger did. I don't happen to want a fur overcoat nor an
automobile nor an apartment on the Drive. I honestly don't want them.
They aren't a part of my dreams--never were. But I do want to hear my own
music. I want to hear it done for all it's worth. I want to hear
orchestras play it and singers as good as Paula Carresford sing it. And
in order to do that I've got to look ahead a little. I've got to stop
doing always exactly as I damned please. I've got to do things because
somebody besides myself wants them done."
"Have you got something like that to do to-day--with an eye to the
consequences?" she asked.
He looked sharply around at her. She was very intent on her driving just
then. "That's a remarkably good guess in a way," he said. "I dread going
to that house to lunch. A month ago I'd have refused--or pretended I
hadn't got the invitation until too late. And I'd have pretended to
myself that it was because I didn't care to play the social game; didn't
want to take on obligations of a kind I couldn't meet. But now I've told
Mrs. Wollaston I'd come, I know the real reason why I don't want to.
"I said just now I didn't want a fur overcoat nor an automobile, and
that's eighty percent true. And yet, there's a crawly little snob
inside me that's in a panic right now because I haven't got proper
clothes to wear and because I'm going to have to sit down in front of a
lot of funny shaped forks that I don't know the special uses of.
"Oh, there's more to it than that of course. It's rather a cross-grained
situation. Wollaston doesn't like me. He thinks I'm responsible for his
wife's having kicked over the traces and signed up to sing at Ravinia
this summer. In a way, I suppose I am. She's planning to use that opera
of mine, you remember,--_The Outcry_ we called it--for a novelty,
provided they like the way I've padded up her part. The big rôle in it is
really for the baritone, of course. That's what I've been slaving over
for the last two weeks. If she makes a hit with it, she'll take it to the
Metropolitan next winter. Of course, there's no reason in God's world why
she shouldn't do that if she can get away with it. She hasn't any
children to look after; she told me she didn't even keep house for her
husband. All the same he regards me as a sort of potential homewrecker."
"You can't quite blame him for that, can you?" Jennie suggested. "If you
began reading a story about a beautiful young opera singer who left her
husband to go back on the stage again and sing an opera by a musical
genius she'd discovered, wouldn't you expect them to fall in love with
each other?"
"That shows what nonsense stories are," he said. "That couldn't happen to
us in a thousand years. She's beautiful, and kindly, and affectionate.
She's got temperament enough to blow the cork out of any bottle you tried
to hold it down in. But I couldn't fall in love with her if I tried. It
doesn't happen on that basis. Besides which, it's my belief that she's
altogether in love with her husband. All the same, she's taken me up. She
means to push me for all she's worth and let her husband like it or lump
it as he pleases. She's got some plans, I don't know just what, for
showing me off to one or two of the 'right' people to-day. You can
imagine what it will be like, can't you?"
"I should think it would be rather good fun--that sort of game," she
commented.
"That's where the forks come in," he said. "And not having a proper
coat. That sort of social skill is the suit of armor those people wear.
I've got to go back to my room and sew up the rip Ben told me about and
trim my cuffs and try to tie my necktie so that the worn-out spots won't
show-and make them do."
It was but a few minutes later--they had been silent ones--that she
stopped her car in front of the little grocery store where the rickety
outside stair led up to his door.
"I'll come in with you and sew up the rip in your coat," she said.
She wouldn't have made that offer, indeed would hardly have driven him up
to his own door, if she had not been a young woman with steady nerves and
a level head, and an abundant confidence in both. Because that dingy
little wooden building with its outside stair to his attic, was the
nucleus of memories that had by no means lost their poignancy. It was
not, after all, so many years ago that she had mounted that stair for the
first time, and it couldn't be considered strange that her heart
quickened a little as she climbed it now.
The room startled her by being so utterly unchanged. Not only the major
articles in it; the stove, the iron bed, the deal table he wrote at, the
carpenter's bench, the half invented musical typewriter that he had once
attempted to convert an old square piano into, the hollow-backed easy
chair,--but the quite minor and casual trifles as well. On top of the set
of home-made shelves that served for his music and his books was a sort
of still-life composed of a meerschaum pipe with a broken stem and an
empty goblet of pressed glass, standing upon a yellow paper-covered copy
of Anatole France's _Thais_, that had been just like that the last time
she was here. She had stuck a bunch of sweet peas she was wearing into
that goblet. It made an uncannily short bridge to the past, a trivial
reminder like that.
Evidently he felt it, too. Perhaps he had followed her glance toward that
dusty shelf corner. Because, a moment after he had shut the door behind
them, opened a window and taken a look at the fire, he came hesitantly
and a little awkwardly up to her and took her by the shoulders as if to
draw her into an embrace. He was very gentle about it.
Also he was ludicrously tentative. If she'd wanted to let herself go she
could have laughed rather hysterically about that. She disengaged herself
from his hands, decisively, indeed, yet without any air of pique.
"Oh, no, my dear," she said. "Take off your coat and let me get to work.
Where's your sewing kit?"
He produced it instantly (the room was not in real disorder; it only
looked like that to one who did not understand its system), gave her his
coat, wandered restlessly about for a few minutes and presently came to
rest at the deal table where he had spent the greater part of the last
fortnight, turning over, discontentedly, the sheets of score paper he had
left there.
Over her sewing she let her mind run free, forgetting this present Sunday
with its problems, mixing a pleasant amalgam of the past. She wasn't
heartbroken, you know, hardly regretful. She had life about as she wanted
it. She never had been in love with March in the accepted meaning of the
phrase--she had never even thought she was--and it is altogether probable
that if she had found him eager to resume the old relation, she would
have felt a certain reluctance about taking it up again. Life changed
with the years and some of its old urgencies quieted down--for the time
anyhow. Still the night when she had worn those sweet peas remained a
fragrant memory. She was recalled to the present by the violent gesture
he made over the score on his work table.
"This damned thing is rotten," he said with angry conviction. "I knew
it,--I knew it while I wrote it. It may be what they want, but it's
rotten. Straight into the stove is where it ought to go."
"Is that what you're writing for Mrs. Wollaston?" she asked.
He nodded. "I was trying to make up my mind whether to take this with me
to-day or not. If she's the musician I think she is, she'll tell me to
carry it out to the ash can."
"Well, that will be better than putting it in the stove yourself," she
observed, going back with an air of placidity to her sewing, "because
then you'll know it's bad and if you burn it up now, you won't. You
haven't even heard it."
"I heard it before I wrote it," he argued. "I hear it again when I read
it. That's a silly argument. Of course I know it."
"You said a little while ago that you'd never heard any of your music
until Mrs. Wollaston sang those songs. They sounded better than you
thought they would."
"That's different," he protested. "I knew they were good, damned good.
Only I didn't quite realize how good they were. I suppose I won't realize
until I hear her sing this how rotten it is. But I don't need to. I know
well enough right now."
He went on turning the pages back and forth with gloomy violence, reading
a passage here and another there and failing to get the faintest ray of
comfort out of any of it, even out of the old soiled quires which
belonged obviously to the original score.
"Is it all bad?" she asked. "Or just the new part."
"The whole thing," he grunted.
"That's that Belgian thing, isn't it?"
"That's the one."
"Well," she pointed out to him, "you thought that was good once. If it
all looks alike to you this morning, perhaps what you've just been
writing is as good as that, and it's just your mood to-day that makes it
look rotten."
He closed the score and slapped his hand down upon it with a gesture of
dismissal. Then he rose and leaned back against the edge of the table.
"That's good logic, my dear," he conceded, "but it doesn't cover the
ground. The old stuff was good in a way. I really meant it and felt it
and I managed to get it down on paper. And the new stuff is like it, in
that it's a damned clever imitation of it. I had to do it that way
because I couldn't get back into the old mood. I'm sick of atrocities and
horrors--everything that's got the name of war in it, even though I was
never under fire myself. Well, writing the imitation has made me hate the
thing I was trying to imitate. I stuck at it for the reason I told you
this morning. But, good God, when it results in stuff like this...!
Jennie, what shall I do about it? Shall I take this thing now and chuck
it into the stove and then tell La Chaise and Mrs. Wollaston to go to the
devil? Or shall I tuck it under my arm like a good little boy and see if
I can get away with it?"
She looked at him thoughtfully. "What is the new thing you want to
write?" she asked.
He smiled. "You're a wonder, Jennie," he said. "There is a new thing.
I'm simply swamped in it. It won't let me alone. It's been driving me
pretty nearly crazy. That's why it's been such perfect hell sticking to
this other thing. Jennie, it's another opera. A big one, full size. A
romantic fairy opera. I haven't got it in order yet. It isn't fit to
talk about. But it's about a princess, a little blue-eyed, pale-haired
princess, who is under a spell. She's dumb. She's dumb except in the
presence of her true lover. Do you see? They are trying to cure her and
they can't. But mysteriously in the night they hear her singing. Her
lover is with her, and they try to solve the mystery. Maybe they kill
him, I don't know. Or maybe they make him faithless to her. I don't know
whether there is a fairy story like that or whether I just made it up.
And I haven't worked it out at all. I haven't any words for it, no book,
nor anything. But I tell you it comes in waves, whole scenes from it.
I'd like a hundred hands to write it down with. I'd like to take one
header into it and never come up. And meanwhile I'm slugging away at
that other damned thing because Mrs. Wollaston and LaChaise want
it,--because it's the main chance."
She asked why he didn't tell them about the new idea and get them to
adopt it instead, but he greeted this suggestion with an impatient laugh.
"It would be absolutely impossible for Ravinia in the first place," he
said. "The thing would need as big a production as, oh, _Pelléas and
Melisande_. And then this woman could never sing it. She isn't the type.
This is different altogether from anything she could do. Oh, no, it's
quite hopeless until after I've succeeded with something else. But, oh,
my God, Jennie, if you could hear it!"
She had finished her repairs on his coat and rising now held it up to
him. While he was groping for the sleeves, she asked quietly, "Who is the
princess, Tony? The dumb little princess with the blue eyes."
For a second he stood just as he was, like one suddenly frozen, then he
settled into his coat, walked over to his work chair and dropped into it,
leaning forward and propping up his head with his hands. "Yes," he said.
"In a way, perhaps, there is some one. That's what I was going to tell
you about. She came in as quiet as a little ghost, just as Mrs.
Wollaston was beginning to sing and she sat down beside me without a
word. And somehow while we listened, we--we were the same person. I can't
make you understand that. It never happened to me before, nothing in the
least like it, nothing so--intimate. I felt that song go vibrating right
through her. She didn't speak at all, even after it was over, except to
say that we mustn't talk--while we were waiting for the people in the
other room to go away. And then Mrs. Wollaston came and got me. She
didn't see her at all. She had disappeared somehow by that time."
He stopped but Jennie, it seemed, had nothing to say just then. She
turned away to her outdoor wrap but she laid it down again and stood
still when he went on.
"You don't want to run away with the idea that I'm in love with her," he
said. "That isn't it. That's particularly--not it. I haven't an idea who
she is nor any intention of trying to find out. Even if I knew the way to
begin getting acquainted with her, I'm inclined to think I'd avoid it.
But as an abstraction--no, that's not what I mean--as a symbol of what
I'll find waiting for me whenever I get down to the core of things ...
I've got a sort of--superstition if I don't do anything to--to break the
spell, you know, that sometime she'll come back just the way she came
that night."
With a little exaggeration of the significance of the act, she put on the
coat she had crossed the room to get. He got up and came over to help her
but he stopped with a sudden clenching of the hands, and a wave of color
in his face as he saw the look in hers. At that she came swiftly to meet
him, pulled him up in a tight embrace and kissed him.
"Good luck, my dear," she said. "I must be running and so must you. I'd
take you with me only we go different ways. Carry your score along to the
Wollastons. That's the first step to the princess, I guess."