IN HARNESS
The episode upon which March had built the opera he called _The Outcry_,
was one that was current during the autumn of 1914. A certain Belgian
town had been burnt and it had been officially explained that this was
done because the German officer who was billeted upon the burgomaster had
been shot. The story was that the burgomaster's son shot him because he
had raped his sister. The thing got complete possession of March's mind.
At first just the horror of it and later its dramatic and musical
possibilities. He saw, in orchestral terms, the sodden revelry in that
staid house--with its endless cellars of Burgundy. He saw the tight-drawn
terror in the girl's room where she lay in bed. He saw the room lighted
fitfully by the play of searchlights over the city; the sinister entrance
from a little balcony through the French widow, of the officer in
uniform, his shadow flung ahead of him by the beam of the searchlight. He
saw the man, blood--as well as wine--drunk, garrulous and fanatic with
the megalomania of the conquering invader. He saw the man's intention
made clear from the first, but the execution of it luxuriously postponed.
Safely postponed because of the terrified girl's acceptance of his
assurance that if anything happened to him, if a hand were raised against
him, her father and a dozen more hostages would be shot and the town
burned to the ground. Then came the girl's irrepressible outcry when he
first touched her; the brother's knock at the door; her frantic effort to
reassure him frustrated by the officer's drunken laugh; the forcing of
the door and the fight half in the dark; the killing of the girl and then
of her ravisher.
The thing that wouldn't let March alone, that forced him into the
undertaking, was the declaration of the brutal philosophy of the
conqueror made by the officer while he gloated over the girl who was to
be his prey; the chance to put into musical terms that paranoiac delusion
of world conquest. One recognized in it, vaguely, some of 'Wagner's
themes and some of Straus', distorted and grown monstrous.
The thing had haunted March, as I have said, and he had tried to find
somebody who would write him the book, the indispensable preliminary to
his getting to work. Failing here, he had audaciously made up his mind to
write it himself. It was not his first attempt to do, in the mere light
of nature, a thing commonly supposed to be impossible except at the end
of painful instruction. He had once experimented at painting in oils, he
had tried his hand at the stylus, he had made a few figurines in
modeling-wax. He wrote his play, then, by the simple process of building
first with painstaking accuracy, a model of his stage, the girl's room in
that burgomaster's house with the French windows giving upon the little
balcony. He modeled the furniture in plastiscene. He bought three little
dolls to represent his characters. And then he reported what he saw
happening in that room; what his characters did and what they said. By
the time he had finished this work, the music was all in his head. He
couldn't write it down fast enough.
It had been one of the great experiences of his life, writing that opera.
Jennie's reminder that he had once believed it good, was a conservative
statement. LaChaise and Paula were deeply impressed by the power, both of
its music and its drama and saw possibilities in it for a sensational
success. The drawback, fatal unless it could be overcome, lay in the fact
that the dominant rôle in it was that of the baritone. Dramatically the
soprano's part was good enough, but there was nowhere near enough for
her to sing. There was no reason though, they both asserted, and sent
March away from their conference at least half convinced, why the girl's
part could not be greatly amplified. There were various expedients;--a
preliminary scene between the girl and her brother; an apostrophe to an
absent lover; a prayer. Also instead of being frozen into terror-stricken
silence by her ravisher's monstrous purpose, she could just as well be
represented as making a desperate resistance. She could plead with him,
denounce him; attempt to take advantage of his drunkenness and trick him.
It could be made as good a woman's part as the big act of _Tosca_.
March had assented to all this and gone to work.
Paula did not tell him, as he had gloomily prophesied to Jennie, to take
the new first scene he brought her that Sunday out to the ash can. And,
indeed, it sounded so much better when they read it over together, that
he was for the moment reassured. But her attitude toward the opera was
different from the one she had taken toward the group of Whitman songs,
and this difference grew more marked at their subsequent sessions over
it. There had been about the songs the glamour of discovery. One does not
hasten to apply the assayer's acid to treasure trove. And, too, it was an
altruistic impulse which had prompted her to take up the songs.
There aren't many people who can travel steadily, or very far, on that
motivation, and Paula was not one of them. From the moment when she took
the plunge, ignored--all but defied--her husband's wishes, and signed the
Ravinia contract, she ceased to be concerned for anything, broadly
speaking, but her own success. March's opera, then, was not, to her, the
expression of his genius but a potential vehicle for hers. She was
acutely critical of it. She knew what she wanted and it was not
thinkable that she should put up with anything less.
She was not aware of this change of attitude. She was blessed with a
vigorous non-analytical mind that asked no awkward questions,
suggested no paralyzing doubts. The best thing that could possibly
happen to March's opera was that it should be made to fit her; that it
should demand precisely all her resources and nothing that was beyond
them. Obviously, since it was going to be her opera, a thing she was
going to wear.
Had she been, as many eminent persons in her profession are, a mere
bundle of insensate egotisms complicated by a voice, she would have
driven March to flat rebellion in a week, all his good resolutions
notwithstanding. What made it tolerable was that she had a good musical
intelligence of her own, and a real dramatic sense. He could recognize,
what she wanted as an intelligible thing, consistent with itself. Only,
it was not his thing-not the thing he saw. By reason of its very
consistency it was never the thing he saw.
"She wouldn't do it that way," he would protest.
"I would," Paula would tell him. "I wouldn't lie there, whimpering."
He was always arguing with her--wrangling, it almost came to,
sometimes--in defense of his own conception. For a sample:
"Look at what she is; a burgomaster's daughter. That means prosperous,
narrow-minded, middle-class people. She's convent-bred, devout. She's
still young or she'd be married. She's altogether without experience.
She's frightened just as a child would be over what's going on in the
house. And the prayer she says when she goes to bed would be just the
nice little prayer a child would say, an Our Father or a Hail Mary,
whatever it might be. As simple as possible, on the surface, but with an
undertone of overmastering terror. The sort of Promethean defiance you're
talking about would be inconceivable to a child like that."
"I suppose it would, to most of them," she admitted, "but this one's
going to be different. After all, it's the exceptional ones that usually
have operas written about them. I don't believe all the dancers in
Alexandria were like Thais, nor all the gipsy cigar-makers in Seville
like Carmen. I don't believe many little Japanese girls would feel about
Pinkerton the way Cio Cio San did. Why can't our Dolores be an
exception, too?"
The only answer he could make to that was that it spoiled the other
figure, reduced him from a sort of cosmic monster to the mere custom-made
grand-opera villain.
"What if it does?" she retorted. "This isn't being written for Scotti or
Vanni Marcoux. It's being written for me." That was the tonic chord they
always came back to. It was Paula's opera.
March presently began to feel, too, that he was growing to be nothing
more than Paula's composer. It was important to the success of their
enterprise that his reputation should be intensively exploited among the
rich and influential who figured as patrons of the Ravinia season. She
went at the task of building it as ruthlessly as she remodeled his opera.
Her demands upon him were explicit. In the first place he was to bring
her all his music, early as well as late, trivial as well as important,
in order that she might select from it what, if anything, might be
exploited at once. She had promised to give a recital just before Easter,
in aid of one of the local charities--it was one that boasted an
important list of patronesses--and if she could make an exclusive program
of his songs she would like to do so. Then, while it was too late to get
any of his compositions performed by the orchestra this season, it would
be a good thing to get Mr. Stock to read something in the hope of his
taking it for next year. An announcement, even a mere unofficial
intimation, that Anthony March (whose opera ... and so on)--was to be
represented on the symphony programs next season, would help a lot.
What dismayed him most was her insistence--she was clear as a bell about
this--that he himself get up the accompaniments to some of the simpler of
his songs so that when she took him out to meet people who wanted to hear
a sample of his music then and there, they could manage, between them,
some sort of compliance. He nearly got angry, but decided to laugh
instead, over her demand that he be waiting, back stage, when she gave
her recital of his songs (which she did with great success) to come out
at the end and take his bow in his now discarded uniform. It was the only
reference she ever made to his shabby appearance.
(It was steadily growing shabbier, too, since she left him hardly any
time at all for tuning pianos. She would have been utterly horrified had
she known what tiny sums he was living on from week to week. And it never
occurred to her when she suggested that a certain score of his ought to
be copied, that he could not afford to take it out to a professional
copyist and so sat up nights doing it himself. He did it rather easily,
to be sure, since it was one of the numerous things at which he had
earned a living.)
There was only one of her many demands that he persistently refused to
comply with. And she took this refusal rather hard; acted more hurt than
angry about it, to be sure, but came back to it again and again. When she
discovered that he made no pretense of living at his father's house, she
asked for his real address so that she could always be sure of getting
at him when she wanted him. This he would not give her. If he did, he
said, it would only result in his staying away from there and doing his
work somewhere else. It was one of his simple necessities to know that he
couldn't be got at. He would make every possible concession. Would go, or
telephone, at punctiliously regular and brief intervals, to his father's
house to learn whether she had sent for him, but give up the secrecy of
his lair he would not. It wasn't possible.
I think she compensated herself for this refusal by sending for him
sometimes when she did not really need him, just to be on the safe side,
and, on the same basis, engaged his attendance ahead from day to day.
Anyhow, she occupied, in one way or another, practically the whole of his
time; and the dumb little blue-eyed princess knocked at his door in vain.
Only in those hours when sheer fatigue had sent him to bed had she any
opportunity of visiting him. Sometimes she made white nights for him by
haunting those hours, refusing to go away; sometimes, by not coming at
all, she filled him with terror lest she had gone for good--would not
come back even when he was ready for her. When that panic was upon him he
hated Paula with a devouring hatred.
Of the human original of his blue-eyed princess, he saw during those
weeks, nothing. On that first Sunday when he lunched at the house he
heard them speak of a member of the family, a daughter of John Wollaston,
named Mary, who had been living in New York and had recently returned but
was not lunching at home that day. He got the idea then that she might be
the girl who had so mysteriously come in and sat beside him while Paula
sang; and without any evidence whatever to support this surmise, it
became a settled conviction. But an odd shrinking, almost superstitious,
as he had confessed to Jennie, from doing anything that might break the
spell kept him from asking any questions.
During the first week of his almost daily visits to the house, he got
repeated intimations of her, a glimpse once through an open door on the
third floor into a room that struck him as being, probably, hers. The
impression, once more, when he was coming down from the music room that
this was the door which he had just heard softly shut as if some one, the
princess herself, of course, who had stood listening to the music for a
while, had withdrawn there when she heard his step on the stairs. Once on
the settee in the hall he saw a riding crop and a small beaver hat that
he felt a curious certainty belonged to her and once out of a confusion
of young voices in the drawing-room, and a dance tune going on the
Victrola, he heard some one call out her name, hers he was sure though he
didn't hear her answer. Perhaps she had answered without speaking. The
dumb princess again.
Then suddenly even these faint hints of her presence ceased, and he
remarked their absence with a troubled wonder until one day Paula
volunteered the statement that Mary had gone away on a visit for a month
or two, out to Wyoming, where a great friend of hers, Olive Corbett, and
her husband had a ranch.
By asking a few intelligent questions, he could have found out a lot
more about her from Paula for she was disposed to talk freely enough
about the family life she was so oddly enclosed in, and their perpetual
quarrels about the opera never carried over into their breathing spells.
In the long hours of their almost daily sessions the occasional rests
made up quite a total and March accumulated a lot of information about
Paula herself.
Indeed it was not quite as idle as that sounds. Paula talked to him
thirstily, gave him somehow the impression that she had had no one for a
good many years with whom she could converse without reservation in her
own idiom.
She came, he learned, of a Virginia family which had migrated during her
early childhood to California. It was obvious that they were well-bred,
but equally so that they were not very competent. The victims, he judged,
of a lot of played-out southern ideas and traditions. They were still
living and March allowed himself to guess that they were one of the minor
reasons why Doctor John had to earn a lot of money.
Paula with her splendid physique and gorgeous voice must have looked to
them like the family hope. They had managed at considerable sacrifice to
send her abroad, but evidently without any idea of the time and the money
it takes to erect even the most promising material into a genuine
success. After a year or two, she had been abandoned to make her way as
best she could.
Even now that they were safely consigned to the past, Paula could not
talk about the shifts and hardships of that time with any relish. The
discouragements must have sunk in pretty deep. She hinted--it was not
the sort of topic she could discourse candidly about--that the
blackest of those discouragements had come from the amorous advances
of men who had it in their power to open opportunities to her but
wanted a _quid pro quo_.
He asked her in that connection whether during those hard times she had
never felt inclined to fall in love on her own account.
"I never cared a snap of my fingers for any man," she said with obvious
sincerity, "until I saw John."
This slowness of her erotic development surprised him rather until he
evoked the explanation that her energies had been concentrated upon her
musical ambition. Music, since she was a real musician, had been a
genuine emotional outlet for her.
March speculated rather actively upon the relation between Paula and her
husband. There was no dark room in the composer's mind. He was the other
pole from Aunt Lucile. All human problems set his mind at work. He was
not widely read in the literature of psychology and he had a rough
working theory which he regarded as his own, a dynamic theory. People got
started off in life with a certain amount of energy. It varied immensely
between individuals, of course, but one couldn't alter the total of his
own. Upon that store you ran until you were spent. What channels this
stream of energy cut for itself was partly a matter of luck, partly one
of self-determination. The important fact was that there was only so much
and that what went down one way did not also go down another. It might be
a hundred rivulets or one river, it couldn't be both. This philosophy was
largely responsible for the ordering of his own life, for his doing
without possessions, for the most part without friends, for his keeping
the brake set so tightly upon his sex impulses.
John must have come into Paula's life, he reflected, at a time when the
musical outlet to her energies had been dammed up. Her main stream, like
that of the Mississippi, had cut a new channel for itself. Had there
been, he wondered, some similar obstruction in the main channel of John
Wollaston's emotional life? Anyhow, there was no doubt that for the five
years since this cataclysm had occurred, the course of true love had run
smooth and deep. But suppose now that, through LaChaise's intervention,
Paula's musical career was again opened to her, would the current turn
that way? Would John be left stranded? Had Paula herself any misgivings
to this effect?
That she was deeply troubled about her present relation with John and in
general about John himself, would have been plain to a less penetrating
eye than Anthony's. There was no open quarrel between them. Wollaston
dropped into the music room sometimes, late in the afternoon, to ask how
the opera was getting along. His manner to March on these occasions was
one of, perhaps, slightly overwrought politeness, but the intention of it
did not seem hostile. Toward Paula he presented the image of humorous,
affectionate concern, the standard behavior of the perfect husband.
It was Paula, on these occasions, who gave the show away, betraying by a
self-conscious eagerness to make him welcome, the fact that he was not.
She made the mistake of telling him he looked tired and worried, facts
too glaringly true to be bandied about in the presence of a stranger. He
looked to March as if he were approaching the elastic limit of complete
exhaustion. That it looked pretty much like that to Paula herself was
made evident from the way she once spoke about him, her eyes full of
tears, after he had left the room.
"He's working so insanely hard," she said. "Nights as well as days. I
don't believe he's had five hours' consecutive sleep this week."
When March wanted to know why he did it, she hesitated, but gave him, at
last, a candid answer. No one else would have answered it at all.
"I don't think it can be because he feels he has to," she said. "To earn
the money, I mean. Of course, he's been buying a big farm, half of it,
for Rush. But he said the other day that if I needed any extra money for
this"--she nodded toward the score on the piano--"I was to let him know.
Of course, he isn't happy about it and I suppose it makes him take
things harder."
Naturally enough, March agreed with her here. John Wollaston was clearly
a member of the gold coast class. It wasn't thinkable that his financial
difficulties could be real. The unreality of them was, of course, the
measure of the genuineness of his fear of losing Paula,--of seeing the
main current of her life shift once more to its old channel. Did Paula
see that, March wondered? What was it she foresaw?
He got a partial answer one day in the course of one of their quarrels
about the opera. He had unguardedly given expression to his growing
despondency about it.
"This thing can't go," he had said. "It's getting more lifeless from week
to week. We're draining all the blood out of it and this stuff we're
putting in is sawdust."
She whipped round upon him in a sudden tempest. "It's got to go," she
said. "It's got to be made to go. If what you're putting into it is
sawdust, take it out. Put some heart into it."
He had been staring gloomily at the score. Now he turned away from it.
"That's what I don't seem able to do," he said.
She came up and took him by the shoulders so violently that it might
almost be said she shook him. "You can't let go like that. It's too late.
Everything I've got in the world is mixed up in it." She must have read
his unspoken thought there for she went on, "Oh, I suppose you'd say I'd
still have John if I did fail. Well, I wouldn't. He's mixed up in it,
too. He'd never forgive me if I failed. It's the fear I'll fail and make
myself look cheap and ridiculous that makes him hate it so. Well, I'm not
going to. Make up your mind to that!"
Later, when he was leaving, under a promise to improve some of the
passages they had been arguing about, she reverted to this aspect of the
matter and added something. "John can see what a failure would mean. But
what the other thing--the big real success--would mean to both of us, he
hasn't the faintest idea of. He won't till I get it."
"He's a famous person, himself, of course," March observed, not without a
gleam of mischief.
She echoed the word quite blankly, and he went on to amplify.
"That European Medical Commission that was out here a few weeks ago
attended some of his clinics in a body. I don't suppose there's a
first-class hospital anywhere in this country or in Europe where his name
isn't known. That operation he did on Sarah turned out to be a classic,
you know. He used a new technique in it which has become standard since."
But it seemed to him that she still looked incredulous when he went away,
incapable of really digesting that idea at all. No, he wouldn't have bet
much on the chance that any great success of hers could reunite them. The
love life that they had been enjoying this last five years hadn't thrown
out any radicles to bind them together--children for instance.
March wondered why there had been no children. He was not inclined to
accept the obvious explanation that she hadn't wanted any. She had spoken
once of her childlessness in a tone that didn't quite square with that
explanation. Nor had she said it quite as she would, had she felt that
her husband shared equally in her disappointment. It was all very
intangible, of course, just the way she inflected the sentence, "You see,
I haven't any children." Was it John that didn't want them? Well, he had
two of his own, of course. Had he shrunk from having this new passion of
his domesticated? And then he was a gynecologist. Was he, perhaps, afraid
for her? That explanation had a sort of plausibility about it for Anthony
March. If that were true, his caution had only brought him face to face
with a greater risk. March felt sorry for John Wollaston.
But it quite truly never occurred to him to hold himself in the smallest
degree responsible for the husband's troubles. To a man with a better
developed possessive sense, it might have occurred that he was poaching
in another's preserves. When a husband made it plain that he chose to
keep a particularly rare and valuable possession such as a wife like
Paula must be considered, in the tower of brass LaChaise had talked
about, it became the duty of every other well-disposed male to take pains
to leave no keys, rope ladders or files lying about by which she might
effect her escape. But a consideration of this sort would not even have
been intelligible to March, let alone troublesome.