FULL MEASURE
Ravinia is one of Chicago's idiosyncrasies, a ten-weeks' summer season of
grand opera with a full symphony orchestra given practically
out-of-doors. Its open pavilion seats from fifteen hundred to two
thousand people and on a warm Saturday night, you will find twice as many
more on the, "bleachers" that surround it or strolling about under the
trees in the park. The railroad runs special trains to it all through the
season from town, and crammed and groaning interurbans collect their toll
for miles from up and down the shore.
It had begun as an amusement park with merry-go-rounds, Ferris-wheels and
such--to the scandalized indignation of numerous super-urban persons
whose summer places occupied most of the district roundabout. They took
the enterprise into their own hands, abolished the calliope, put a
symphony orchestra into the bandstand and, eventually, transformed the
shell into a stage and went in for opera; opera popularized with a blue
pencil so that no performance was ever more than two hours long, and at
the modest price of fifty cents.
Its forces, recruited chiefly from among the younger stars at the
Metropolitan, give performances that want no apologetic allowance from
anybody. It has become an institution of which the town and especially
the North Shore is boastful.
Paula foresaw no easy conquest here. Her social prestige, part of which
she enjoyed as John Wollaston's wife and part of which she had earned
during the last four years for herself, counted as much against her as it
did in her favor. It was evident from the way the announcements of her
prospective appearance at Ravinia had been elaborated in the society
columns of the newspapers that it would arouse a lot of curiosity. It
would be one of the topics that everybody, in the social-register sense
of the word, would be talking about and in order to talk authoritatively
everybody--four or five hundred people this is to say--would have to
attend at least one of her performances.
Nothing less than a downright unmistakable triumph would convince them.
She was a professional in the grain and yet in this adventure she would
be under the curse of an amateur's status, a thing she hated as all
professionals do.
It was evidently from an instinct to cut herself off as completely as
possible from these social connections of hers that she rented for the
summer, a furnished house in the village of Ravinia, within a mile or so
of the park. John was rather disconcerted over this when she told him
about it. She greeted him with it as an accomplished fact upon his
return to Chicago with Mary. She made a genuine effort to explain the
necessity, but explanations were not in Paula's line and she didn't
altogether succeed.
She made it clear enough, though, that she didn't want to be fussed by
the attentions of friends or family, of her husband least of all. She
didn't want to be congratulated nor encouraged. She didn't want to be
asked to little suppers or luncheons nor to be made the objective of
personally conducted tourist parties back stage. She didn't want to be
called to the telephone, ever, except on matters of professional business
by her Ravinia colleagues.
All of this, John pointed out, could be accomplished at home. He,
himself, could deal with the telephoners and the tourists. This was about
all apparently that he was going to be good for this summer; but a
watchdog's duties he could perform in a highly efficient manner.
"But a home and a husband are the very first things I've got to forget
about," cried Paula. "Oh, can't you see!"
Darkly and imperfectly, he did. The atmosphere of the home in which one
has been guarded and pampered as a priceless possession was--must
be--enervating, and to one who was screwing up her powers to their
highest pitch for a great effort like this, it would be
poisonous--malarial! He would have been clearer about it, though, but for
the misgiving that, consciously or not, Paula was punishing him for
having insisted that she carry her contract through. Or--if that were too
harsh a way of putting it,--that she was coquetting with him. Having told
her down there in the South that he didn't care for her in a loverlike
way, he might now have an opportunity of proving that he did--over
obstacles!
It gave him a twinge, for a fact, but he managed to ask good-humoredly if
this meant that he was to be barred from the whole show, from
performances as well as from rehearsals and the Ravinia house.
"I won't care," she said with a laugh of desperation, "after I've once
got my teeth in. But until then... Oh, I know it sounds horrible but I
don't want even to--feel you; not even in the fringe of it.
"I'll tell you who I would like, though," she went on over a palpable
hesitation and with a flush of color rising to her cheeks. "I can't live
all alone up there of course. I could get along with just a maid, but it
would be easier and nicer if I could have some one for a--companion. And
the person I'd choose, if she'd do it, is Mary."
He said, not quite knowing whether to be pleased or not, that they could
ask her about it at all events. They were rather counting on her out at
Hickory Hill but he didn't know that that need matter. Only wasn't
Mary--family, herself, a reminder of home?
"Not a bit," said Paula, with a laugh. "Not but what she likes me well
enough," she went on, trying to account for her preference (these
Wollastons were always concerned about the whys of things) "but she
stands off a little and looks on; without holding her breath, either. And
then, well, she'd be a sort of reminder of you, after all."
Put that way, he couldn't quarrel with it, though there was a
challenge about it that chilled him a little. Watched over by his own
daughter (this was what it came to) Paula would be beyond
suspicion--even of Lucile.
Mary, when the scheme was put up to her was no less surprised than
John had been, but she was pleased clear through, and with a
clean-cutting executive skill he had hardly credited her with, she
thought out the details of the plan and revised the rest of their
summer arrangements to fit.
The Dearborn Avenue house should be closed and her father should move out
to the farm. The apple house was now remodeled to a point where it would
accommodate him as well as Aunt Lucile very comfortably. The boys and the
servants could live around in tents and things. She'd want only one maid
for the cottage at Ravina and the small car which she'd drive herself.
The sum of all the activities that Mary proposed for herself added up to
a really exacting job; housekeeper, personal maid, chauffeur, chaperon
and secretary. It was with a rather mixed lot of emotions that John
thought of delivering her over to be tied to Paula's chariot wheels like
that. One of the two women who loved him serving the other in a capacity
so nearly menial! The thought of it gave him an odd sort of thrill even
while he shrank from it. Certainly, he would not have assented to it, had
it not been so unmistakably what Mary herself wanted. Her reasons for
wanting it he couldn't feel that he had quite fathomed.
There was, as a matter of fact, nothing fine-spun about them. It was a
job in the first place and gave her, therefore, she mordantly told
herself, an excuse for continuing to exist. It was an escape from Hickory
Hill. (Clear cowardice this was, she confessed. That situation would have
to be met and settled one way or the other before long; but her dread of
both the possible alternatives had mounted since her frustrated attempt
to confide in her father.) The third reason which she avowed to
everybody, was simple excited curiosity for a look into a new world. The
mystery and the glamour of it attracted her. Paula's proposal gave her
the opportunity to see what these strange persons were like when they
were not strutting their little while upon the stage.
Paula, of course, was, fundamentally, one of them. It was remarkable how
that simple discovery interpreted her. When you saw her surrounded by
them, working and quarreling with them, talking that horrible polyglot of
French, Italian and English, which she slipped into so easily, you
realized how exotic the environment of the Dearborn Avenue house must
have been to her and how strong a thing her passion for John Wollaston,
to enable her to endure five years of it,--of finikin social
observances,--of Aunt Lucile's standards of propriety!
Mary took real comfort in her companionship; found an immense release
from emotional pressure in it. One might quarrel furiously with Paula
(and it happened Mary very nearly did, as shall be related presently,
before they had been in the cottage three days), but one couldn't
possibly worry one's self about her, couldn't torture one's self feeling
things with Paula's nerves. That was the Wollaston trick. What frightful
tangles the thing that goes by the name of unselfishness, the attempt to
feel for others, could lead a small group like a family into!
Another thing that helped was that during the fortnight of rehearsal
before the season opened, there wasn't time to think. They were pelted
by perfectly external events, a necessity for doing this, an appointment
to do that, an engagement somewhere else. It was like being caught out
in a driving rain. You scuttled along-snatched a momentary shelter where
you could.
Even getting the clothes Paula needed would have filled the time of a
woman of leisure to the brim. A bridal trousseau would have been nothing
to it. But with Paula these activities had to be sandwiched in with daily
rehearsals,--long ones, too,--hours with Novelli while she memorized
half-forgotten parts, interviews with reporters, struggles with
photographers, everything that the diabolic ingenuity of the publicity
man could contrive. He, by the way, regarded Paula as his best bet and
lavished his efforts upon her in a way that stirred her colleagues
(rivals, of course), to a frenzied exasperation, over his sinister
partiality to this "society amateur."
(They all but enjoyed a terrible revenge, for as poetic justice narrowly
missed having it, the extent of her advance publicity and the beauty of
her clothes proved to be the rocks she went aground on. Only a lucky wave
came along and floated her off again.)
Mary's quarrel with Paula, though it never came off,--never for that
matter got through to Paula's consciousness, even as an approach to
one,--had, all the same, a chain of consequences and so deserves to be
recorded. The opera management was supposed to supply Paula with a piano
and they found one already installed in the Ravinia house when they moved
in, a small grand of a widely advertised make. Paula dug half a dozen
vicious arpeggios out of it and condemned it out of hand. Then in the
midst of a petulant outburst which had, nevertheless, a humorous savor
(the management would promise and pretend till kingdom come. They'd even
take real trouble to get out of complying with her simple request for a
new piano), she pulled herself up short and stared at Mary.
"What idiots we are! I am, anyhow. I'd forgotten all about March. He can
make a piano out of anything. When he's tuned this, I won't want another.
I've got his telephone number somewhere. You don't happen to remember it,
do you?--Why? What makes you look like that?"
For Mary was staring at her--speechless. Paula's affairs had driven her
own pretty well out of her mind. She had stopped thinking about Graham.
She'd given over worrying about Rush. But she had not forgotten Anthony
March. The alternative possibility that Paula might have gone on with his
opera, that he might have been, but for what her father spoke of as rough
justice, attending rehearsals of it, hearing that big orchestra making a
reality of its unheard melodies, had been much in her mind. She had
wondered whether it was not really in Paula's. Along with a regret for
his downcast hopes. He was, in a way, the ladder she had climbed by.
Hearing her sing those wonderful songs of his was what had led LaChaise
to offer her this opportunity. And Paula didn't know, Mary was sure, of
anything that mitigated his disappointment. To her, he was merely one who
had tried and, pitiably, failed. She must, it seemed, have felt sorry
about it and Mary had considerately avoided all reference to him.
Now it appeared that Paula had blankly forgotten all about him.
Remembered him only when she wanted him to tune the piano. She callously
proposed to exact this service of him, and if possible, over the
telephone!
"I suppose," Mary said, when she had found her voice, "that I look the
way I feel. Paula, you _wouldn't_ do that!"
"Why not?" Paula demanded. And then with a laugh, "I wouldn't forget to
pay him this time. And it would be nice to see him again, too. Because I
really liked him a lot."
"Well, if you do like him, you wouldn't, would you, want to do
anything--cruel to him? Anything that he might take as--a willful insult?
Because it could be taken like that, I should think."
She spoke with a good deal of effort. Paula's surprise, the
incredulous way she had echoed the word cruel, the fact that there was
still an unshaken good humor in the look of curiosity that she
directed upon her stepdaughter, all but overwhelmed Mary with a sudden
wave of helpless anger.
What could one do with a selfishness as insolent as that? What was
there to say?
Paula got up, still looking at her in that puzzled sort of way, came over
to her chair, sat down on the arm of it and took her by the shoulders.
"You're trembling!" she said. "I suspect I am working you too hard. You
mustn't let me do that, you know. John will never forgive me if I do.
Why, about March, did you mean because I wouldn't sing his opera? He knew
all the time I wouldn't unless he could get it right. And he knew he
wasn't getting it right. He wanted to give it up long before he did, only
I wouldn't let him. But as for being insulted, bless you, he isn't like
that. And perhaps if he came I could get him all the pianos out here to
keep in tune. There must be dozens!"
At that Mary laughed in a recoil of genuine amusement. She could imagine
that Anthony March would laugh himself. In one particular Paula was
unquestionably right. He wouldn't feel insulted. He was just the last
person in the world to be accessible to such a petty emotion.
She returned Paula's hug and extricated herself from the chair.
"You needn't worry about me, at all events," she said. "I'm not tired a
bit. But could we worry a little about Mr. March? About his opera, I
mean? Don't you suppose we could get Mr. LaChaise to put it on? The way
he originally wrote it.--I mean for somebody else to sing."
"Fournier could sing it in a rather interesting way," Paula remarked
speculatively. "Only I don't believe he'd sing in English. Certainly
there's nobody else."
"Perhaps if he saw the score ..." Mary began.
"Gracious!" Paula broke in, a little startled, not much. "I haven't an
idea where that score is. I may have sent it back to him, but I don't
believe I did."
"No," Mary told her. "It's here. When I closed up the house, I brought it
along. He might be interested enough in it I should think," she
persisted, "if you and Mr. LaChaise told him how good it was,--to learn
it in English. Or it might, I suppose,--the whole thing I mean,--be
translated into French. There might, anyhow, prove to be something we
could do."
"Good heavens, child!" Paula said, "we're up to the eyes now, all three
of us. Will be for weeks as far as that goes. We simply couldn't think of
it." Through a yawn she added, "Not that it wouldn't be a nice thing to
do if we had time."
Paula's notion of getting March to come up and tune her piano was not
damped at all by the wet blanket of Mary's objection to it. From town
that day, Mary having driven her in for more fittings and photographers,
Paula telephoned to the Fullerton Avenue house and later told Mary in an
acutely dissatisfied manner that she had got simply nowhere with the
person with whom she had talked. "She pretends,--oh, it was his sister
or his mother, I suppose,--that they don't know anything whatever about
him. Haven't seen him for ever so long. Haven't an idea how to get word
to him. If only I had time to drive out there ... But I haven't a minute
of course."
Mary observed that she didn't see what good it would do to be told in
person what Paula had just learned over the telephone. She could drive
out there herself if there was any point in it, during the hour when
Paula was engaged with her dressmaker.
Paula jumped at this suggestion. She was one of those persons whom
telephones never quite convince. So Mary, rather glad of the errand,
though convinced of its futility so far as Paula's designs were
concerned, drove out to the Fullerton Avenue house and presently found
herself in a small neat parlor talking to a neat old lady who was not,
perhaps, as old as she looked, about Anthony March.
For anything that bore upon the obtainability of his service for the
Ravinia piano the telephone conversation would have done as well. His
mother had seen him for only a short time, a little more than a week ago
and judged from what he then said that he was upon the point of going
away, though not for a long absence--a month, perhaps. She had not asked
where he meant to go and he had volunteered nothing. It was possible that
he did not know himself.
Mary remained in doubt, for the first five minutes or so of her call,
whether the stiff guarded precision of this was a mark of hostility to
the whole Wollaston clan or whether it was nothing but undiluted New
England reserve. She ventured a tentative, "I suppose he didn't say
especially why he was going," and on getting a bare negative in reply,
went on, a little breathlessly:--"I didn't mean that impertinently;--only
all of us were very much interested in him and we liked him too well,
especially father and I, to be content to lose track of him. I hope he
wasn't ill;--didn't go away because of that."
"He told me that he was not," Mrs. March answered. "Though if I might
have had my way with him, I would have put him to bed for a week.
However," she added, with a fine smile, "I never did have my way with him
and neither has his father had his. And I judge it to be as well that we
have not."
No, there was no hostility about it. She perceived the genuineness in her
visitor's concern and was perhaps really touched by it. But even so she
was sparing of details. Anthony had never lived a life regulated by rule
and habit. He worked at his music much too hard when the call, as she
termed it, was upon him, and obviously quite forgot to take proper care
of himself. And then he went away, as on this occasion, to recuperate in
his own manner.
Mary adventured again just as she was getting up to take her leave. "It
must want a good courage," she said, "to let him go like that; not to
keep trying, at least, to hold him back in sheltered ways."
She got a nod of acknowledgment of the truth of this, but no words at
all. But she found herself, afterward, in possession of an impression so
clear that one would think it must have needed a long exchange of
unreserved confidences to have produced it. The man's mother loved him,
of course; one might take that for granted. And was proud of him; of
course--perhaps--again. But beyond all that, she rejoiced in him; in his
emancipation from the line and precept which had so tightly confined her;
in his very vagabondage.
She was not much in his confidence, though. Mary had made that out from
the way she had received her own resume of the status of his opera. His
mother had known nothing of his hopes, neither when Paula raised them
up nor later when she cast them down. It was odd about that--and rather
pitiable. She would have welcomed her son's confidences, Mary was sure,
with so real a sympathy, if he could only have believed it. But the
crust of family tradition was too thick, she supposed, to make even the
attempt possible.
This failure of his fully to understand the person traditionally the
nearest and dearest to him in all the world had, upon Mary's mind, the
effect of, somehow, solidifying him; making him more completely human to
her--where it might have been expected to work the other way. It proved
the last touch she needed to quicken the concern she had from the
beginning felt for him into an entirely real thing, a motivating
principle. If it was possible to get that opera of his produced, she was
going to do it.
She stopped at the Dearborn Avenue house on her way down-town to get her
little portable typewriter and carry it out to Ravinia with her. In the
odd hours of the next few days she copied March's libretto in English,
triple spaced, out of his score and this, with a lead pencil, she took to
carrying around with her to Paula's rehearsals, to her dressing-room,
everywhere. A phrase at a time, syllable by syllable, she began putting
it into French.
On the last Saturday night in June the Ravinia season opened with _Tosca_
sung in Italian; Paula singing the title part and Fournier as "Scarpia."
A veteran American tenor, Wilbur Hastings, an old Ravinia favorite, sang
"Cavaradossi." Taken as a whole, the performance was quite as good as any
one has a right to expect any opening night to be. The big audience which
went away good-naturedly satisfied, had had its moments of really
stirring enthusiasm. Fournier scored a well deserved triumph with a
"Scarpia" that was characterized by a touch of really sinister
distinction. Hastings, incapable as he was of subtleties or refinements,
did as usual all the obvious things pretty well and got the welcome he
had so rightly counted upon. But Paula fell unmistakably short of winning
the smashing success she had so ardently hoped for.
She did not, of course, fail. Wallace Hood, to take him for a sample of
her admiring friends, went home assuring himself that her success had
been all he or any of the rest of them could have wished. And he wrote
that same night a letter to John Wollaston out at Hickory Hill saying as
much. Her beauty, he told John, had been a revelation even to him and
there could be no doubt that the audience had been deeply moved by it.
Her acting also had taken him by surprise. It was a talent he had not
looked for in her and he was correspondingly delighted by this
manifestation of it. In the great scene with Fournier when he stated the
terms of his abominable bargain to her, Wallace had hardly been able to
realize it was Paula that he saw on the stage.
When it came to her singing (he knew John would want his most impartial
honest judgment)--here where he had been surest of her, she came nearest
to disappointing him. It was a shame, of course, to subject a lovely
voice like hers to singing in the great vacancy of all outdoors, to say
nothing of forcing it into competition with a shouter and bellower like
Hastings. But he felt sure when she was a little better accustomed to her
surroundings, she would rise superior even to these drawbacks.
This was somewhere near the facts, though stated with a strong friendly
bias. Paula was nervous, never really got into the stride of her acting
at all. The strong discrepancy between Fournier's methods and Hastings'
served perhaps to prevent her getting into step with either. And she sang
all but badly. There had been only one rehearsal in the pavilion and at
that she had been content merely to sketch her work in, singing off the
top of her voice. When she really opened up at the performance, the
unfamiliar acoustics of the place frightened her into forcing, with the
result that she was constantly singing sharp.
Paula herself, though disappointed, didn't feel too badly about it,
knowing that all her difficulties were merely matters of adjustment,
until she read what the critics said about her in the papers the next
morning. What they said was not on the face of it, severe;--came, indeed,
to much the same thing as Wallace Hood's verdict. But the picture between
the lines which they unanimously presented, was of a spoiled beauty,
restless for the publicity that private life deprived her of, offering in
a winning manner to a gullible public, a gold brick.
Paula was furiously angry over this, justifiably, too. Her work had
been professional even in its defects and deserved professional
judgment. The case was serious, too, for if that notion of her once got
fairly planted in the minds of her public, it would be almost
impossible to eradicate it.
But Anthony March had not been mistaken when he spoke of her as a
potential tamer of wild beasts. Her anger was no mere gush of emotions,
to spend itself and leave her exhausted. It was a sort that hardened in
an adamantine resolution. The next chance she got, she'd show them!
Unluckily, she wasn't billed to sing again until toward the end of the
week. It happened, however, that the Sunday papers, taking away with one
hand, gave in a roundabout but effective fashion with the other.
The opera billed for that night was _Pagliacci_. A young American
baritone with a phenomenal high A, was to sing "Tonio" and a new Spanish
soprano was cast for "Nedda." When this young woman saw the Sunday papers
she, too, went into a violent rage. Her knowledge of English was not
sufficient to enable her to draw any comfort from the subtle cruelties
which the critics had inflicted on Paula in the news section. But the
music and drama supplements which had been printed days before, devoted
as they were to the opening of the season, simply made Paula the whole
thing. The Spanish young lady's rage was of a different quality from
Paula's. She wept and stormed. She demanded like Herodias, the head of
that press agent on a charger. Simply that and nothing more. And when she
failed to get it, she went to bed.
The management, disconcerted but by no means at the end of its resources,
decreed a change of the bill to _Lucia_. They were ready to go on with
_Lucia_ which had been billed for Tuesday night. All they needed was to
bring the scenery out from town in a truck. This they ordered done; but
at five o'clock, about two miles south of the park, the truck went
through a bridge culvert and rolled all the way to the bottom of a
ravine. The driver escaped with his life but the production of _Lucia_
was smashed to splinters.
Mary chanced upon this piece of information and brought it straight to
Paula. "Tell them to go ahead with _Pagliacci_, then," Paula said. "I'll
sing 'Nedda' myself. Get LaChaise on the phone and let me talk to him."
She did sing it without any rehearsal at all. And she gave a performance
which for most of the persons who saw it, made her the, and the only,
"Nedda"; though--or perhaps, because--she didn't give the part quite its
traditional characterization; adapted it with the unscrupulousness of the
artist to her own purpose.
Paula's "Nedda" was a sulky slattern, indifferent, lazy, smoldering with
passion,--dangerous. The sensuous quality of her beauty had never been
more apparent than it was in the soiled cheap mountebank fineries which
she had worn for so many performances of the part in Europe. And this
beauty, of course, did a lot of the work for her. Explained the tragedy
all by itself. And, indeed, tragedy hung visibly over her from the moment
of her first entrance upon the stage in the donkey cart. She was the sort
of woman men kill and are killed for.
She played the part with an extreme economy of movement, with a kind of
feline stillness which made her occasional explosions into action, as
when she attacked Tonio with the whip, literally terrifying. She sang it
carelessly and therefore in a manner absolutely gorgeous. She swept them
all, critics as well as the immense audience, clean off their feet.
Also, by way of a foot-note, the managerial announcement that Madame
Carresford had volunteered for the part at six o'clock, to rescue them
from the necessity of closing the park and was to sing it absolutely
without rehearsal, exploded for all time the notion that there was
anything of the amateur about her.
"You can do anything," LaChaise told her as she came out into the wings.
And he kissed her on both cheeks rather solemnly, in the manner of one
conferring a decoration. In full measure pressed down and running over,
that was how Paula's success came to her.