THE DRAMATIST
Mary returned to Ravinia--went on duty, as she put it to Wallace--the
following afternoon rather taut-drawn in her determination to have things
out with Paula at once. But the mere attitude and atmosphere of the
place, as before, let her down a little.
It was restful to have her days filled up with trivial necessary duties;
an hour's errand running in the small car; a pair of soiled satin
slippers to clean with naptha; a stack of notes to answer from such
unknown and infatuate admirers as managed to escape the classification
feebleminded and were entitled therefore to have the fact recognized
(this at a little desk in the corner while Novelli at the piano and Paula
ranging about the room, ran over her part in half-voice in the opera she
had rehearsed yesterday with the orchestra and was to sing to-night), a
run to the park for a visit to Paula's dressing-room in the pavilion in
order to make sure, in conference with her dresser, that all was in order
for to-night; a return to the cottage in time to heat Paula's milk (their
maid of all work couldn't be trusted not to boil it); then at seven,
driving Paula to the park for the performance, spending the evening in
her dressing-room or in the wings chatting sometimes with other members
of the force whom she found it possible to get acquainted with;
occasional incursions into the front of the house to note how something
went or, more simply, just to hear something she liked; driving Paula
home again at last, undressing her; having supper with her--the most
substantial meal of the day--talking it over with her; and so, like Mr.
Pepys--to bed.
It might shock Wallace Hood, a schedule like that, but there were days
when to Mary it was a clear God-send.
She decided within the first twenty-four hours to wait for some sort of
lead from Paula before plunging into a discussion of her father's
affairs. It would take the edge off if the thing weren't too glaringly
premeditated. Paula just now was doing all she could. Mary opened all her
mail and would know if any offer came in that involved future plans. She
accepted the respite gratefully.
She had a use to put it to. For the first two or three days after her
return, she had not been able to turn to anything that associated itself
with Anthony March without such an emotional disturbance as prevented her
from thinking at all. The mere physical effect of those sheets of score
paper was, until she could manage to control it, such as to make any
continuance of the labor of translating his opera, impossible.
By a persistent effort of will she presently got herself in hand however
and went on not only with her translation but with the other moves in her
campaign to get _The Outcry_ produced. Her first thought was that
something might be accomplished directly through LaChaise. Her simple
plan had been to make friends with him so that when she urged the
arguments for producing this work, they'd be--well--lubricated by his
liking for her.
She began saying things to him on a rather more personal note, things
with a touch of challenge in them. There was no gradual response to this
but suddenly--a week or ten days after her return from Hickory Hill this
was--he seemed to perceive her drift. He turned a look upon her, the
oddest sort of look, startled, inquiring, lighted up with a happy though
rather incredible surmise. It was an exclamatory look which one might
interpret as saying, "What's this! Do you really mean it!"
Mary got no further than that. She didn't mean it, of course, a serious
love-affair with LaChaise, and she tried for a while to feel rather
indignant against an attitude toward women which had only two categories;
did she offer amorous possibilities or not. An attitude that had no half
lights in it, no delicate tints of chivalry nor romance. LaChaise would
do nothing for the sake of her blue eyes. He had no interest whatever in
that indeterminate, unstable emotional compound that goes, between men
and women, by the name of friendship.
She tried to call this beastly and feel indignant about it, but somehow
that emotion didn't respond. She had more real sympathy for and
understanding of an attitude like that than she had for one like
Graham's. It was simpler and more natural. It involved you in no such
labyrinths of farfetched absurdities and exasperating cross-purposes as
Graham's did.
It was characteristically,--wasn't it?--a Latin attitude; or would it be
fairer to say that its antithesis as exemplified by Graham was a northern
specialty? She extracted quite a bit of amusement from observing some of
the results of individual failures to understand this fundamental
difference, all the more after she had Jimmy Wallace to share
observations with. He was a dramatic critic, but he consented to take a
fatherly, or better avuncular, interest in the Ravinia season during the
month of his musical colleague's vacation.
The special episode they focused upon was Violet Williamson's flirtation
with Fournier. She was a pretty woman, still comfortably on the east side
of forty, socially one of the inner ring, spoiled, rather, by an
enthusiastic husband but not, thanks to her own good sense, very
seriously. James Wallace was an old and very special friend of hers and
she commandeered his services as soon as he appeared at Ravinia, in her
campaign for possession of the French baritone.
Mary had reflected over this and talked it out pretty thoroughly with
Jimmy before it occurred to her that she might be able to turn it to her
own account--or rather to her lover's. For that matter, why not, while
she had him under her hand, recruit Jimmy as an aid in the campaign?
"Do you mind being used for ulterior purposes?" she asked him.
He intimated that he did not if they were amusing, as any of Mary's were
pretty sure to be.
"I'm interested in an opera," she told him, "or rather, I'm very much
interested in a man who has written one. Father and I have agreed that
he's a great person and everybody seems willing to admit that he's a
musical genius. Paula considered the opera, but gave it up after she had
kept him working over it for weeks because the soprano part wasn't big
enough. It would be just the thing for Fournier."
Jimmy raised the language difficulty. "The book's in English, I
suppose," he said.
"It's been translated into French," Mary said, and then admitted
authorship by adding, "after a fashion; as well as an amateur like me
could do it." She didn't mind a bit how much Jimmy knew. Not that he
wasn't capable of very acute surmises but that whatever he brought up he
wouldn't have the flutters over.
"Does Fournier like it himself?" he wanted to know. "Does he see the
personal possibilities in it, I mean?"
"I haven't shown it to him yet," Mary said. "I want him to hear about it
in just the right way first. If Paula would only say just the right
thing! She means to but she forgets. LaChaise would back her up, I think,
if she took the lead. Otherwise ... well, he isn't looking for trouble,
I suppose, and of course, it would mean a lot."
"Somebody has to put his back into an enterprise of that sort,"
Jimmy observed.
"I can't, directly," she said, "not with LaChaise nor with Mr. Eckstein.
But you see," she went on, "if Violet happened to hear, from somebody who
was in the way of getting inside information, about a small opera that
had a sensational part for a baritone, she'd work it and make her husband
too, and since he's one of the real backers and a friend of Mr.
Eckstein's, they'd be likely to accomplish something."
"Lead me to it," said Jimmy. "Give me your inside information and leave
Violet to me."
He got a little overflow from the fulness of her heart at that that would
have rewarded him amply for a more arduous and less amusing prospect than
he was committed to. It was always touch and go whether this summer
plunge into musical criticism wouldn't bore him frightfully. Pretentious
solemnities of any kind were hard for him to tolerate and an opera season
is, of course, stuffed with these, even a democratized blue-penciled
out-of-doors affair like this. It was a great relief to find him a mind
as free from sentimental resonances as Mary Wollaston's swimming about in
it. They saw eye to eye over a lot of things.
They were in whole-hearted agreement for example about a certain
impresario, Maxfield Ware, who created a sensation among the company and
staff by turning up ostentatiously unaccounted for from New York and
looking intensely enigmatical whenever any one asked him any questions.
He was a sufficiently well-known figure in that world for surmises to
spring up like round-eyed dandelions wherever he trod.
It wasn't long before everybody knew, despite the concealments which his
ponderous diplomacy never cast aside, that his objective was Paula. She
divined this before he had made a single overt move in her direction and
pointed it out to Mary with a genuine pleasure sounding through the tone
of careless amusement she chose to adopt.
"You wouldn't have anything to do with a person like that, would you?"
Mary was startled into exclaiming. "Of course, if he were genuinely what
he pretends to be and the things he boasts were true...."
"Oh, he's genuine enough," said Paula. "A quarter to a half as good as he
pretends and that's as well as the whole of that lot will average. Though
he isn't the sort you and John would take to, for a fact."
It was not the first time Mary had found herself bracketed with her
father in just this way. It wasn't a sneering way, hardly hostile. But
Mary by the second or third repetition began reading an important
significance into it. Paula in her instinctive fashion was beginning to
weigh alternatives, one life against the other, a thing it wasn't likely
she had ever attempted before.
There was a tension between John and Paula which Mary saw mounting daily
over the question of his next visit to Ravinia. Paula wanted him, was
getting restless, moody, as nearly as it was possible for her to be
ill-natured over his abstention. Yet it was evident enough that she had
not invited him to come; furthermore, that she meant not to invite him.
Once Mary would have put this down to mere coquetry but this explanation
failed now to satisfy altogether. There was something that lay deeper
than that. Some sort of strain between them dating back, she surmised, to
the talk her father had referred to down in North Carolina in the jocular
assertion that he had told Paula she would have to begin now supporting
the family. Had the same topic come up again during his visit to Ravinia?
The perception of this strain in their relation increased Mary's
reluctance to bring the topic up herself, in default of a lead from
Paula, out of nowhere. It almost seemed as if Paula consciously avoided
giving her such a lead, sheered away whenever she found they were
"getting warm" in that direction.
There were hours when the undertaking she had committed herself to with
Wallace Hood seemed fantastic. Between two persons like her father and
Paula a meddler could make such an incalculable amount of mischief. All
the current maxims of conduct would support her in a refusal to
interfere. It was exclusively their affair, wasn't it? Why not let them
settle it in their own way?
Yet there were other hours when she put her procrastinations down to
sheer cowardice. This occurred whenever she got a letter from her aunt at
Hickory Hill.
Miss Wollaston was a dutiful but exceedingly cautious correspondent, but
beneath the surface of her brisk little bulletins were many significant
implications. Rush had made two or three trips to town for consultations
with Martin Whitney ... Doctor Steinmetz, presence unaccounted for, had
been a guest one day at lunch... Graham's father had come out one
Saturday and after he had been exhaustively shown over the place the men
had talked until all hours.... The building program was to be curtailed
for the present; to be resumed, perhaps when prices weren't so high nor
labor so hard to get.... The new Holstein calves had come. Mary had been
told, hadn't she, of the decision to constitute the herd in this manner
instead of buying all milking cows.... Sylvia, declaring that Rush and
Graham had got too solemn to live with, had finally obeyed her mother
and gone home to the Stannards' summer place at Lake Geneva.
Mary read these letters to Paula as they came in the hope of provoking
some question that would make it possible to tell John Wollaston's wife
the tale of his necessities, but nothing of the sort happened. Paula did
observe (a little uneasily?) apropos of Steinmetz' visit:
"John says he's taken quite a fancy to him. He told me he was going to
get him to come out if he could."
The other casts brought up nothing whatever.
As it happened Mary paid dear for her procrastination. Paula sent her
into town one day with a long list of errands, a transparently factitious
list, which, taken in connection with an unusual interest she displayed
in the item of lunch, made it more than sufficiently plain to Mary that
for the day she wasn't wanted at Ravinia.
She concealed, successfully she thought, the shock she felt at these new
tactics of Paula's, studied the list and said she thought she should be
able to return on the three o'clock train. She made a point however of
not coming back until the four-fifteen. It was nearly six before she got
back to the cottage, but the contented lazy tone in which Paula from
up-stairs answered her hail, made it plain that her tardiness had not
been remarked. However Paula had spent her day, the upshot of it was
satisfactory.
"Shall I come up?" Mary asked.
"Come along," Paula answered. "I'm not asleep or anything and besides I
want to talk to you."
"I think I got everything you want," Mary said from Paula's doorway, "or
if not exactly, what will do just about as well."
Paula, stretched out on the bed rather more than half undressed, with the
contented languor of a well fed lioness yet with some passion or other
smoldering in her eyes, made no pretense at being interested in Mary's
success in executing her commissions.
"I had Max to lunch to-day," she said. "I knew you hated him and then it
was complicated enough anyway. I suppose it might have been better if I'd
told you so right out instead of making up all those things for you to do
in town, but I couldn't quite find the words to put it in somehow and I
had to have it out with him. He's been nagging at me for a week and he's
going away to-morrow. He's given me until then to think it over."
There was no use trying to hurry Paula. Mary took off her hat, lighted a
cigarette and settled herself in the room's only comfortable chair before
she asked, "Think what over?"
"Oh, the whole thing," said Paula. "What he's been harping on for the
last week.--He _is_ a loathsome sort of beast," she conceded after a
little pause. "But he's right about this. Absolutely."
Was her father ever fretted, Mary wondered, by this sort of thing? Did
his nerves draw tight, and his muscles, too, waiting for the idea behind
these perambulations to emerge?
"I can imagine a lot of things that Mr. Maxfield Ware would be right
about," she observed. "Which one is this?"
"About me," said Paula. "About what I'd have to do if I wanted to get
anywhere. He thinks I've a good chance to get into the very first class,
along with Garden and Farrar and so on. And unless I can do that, there's
no good going on. I'd never be happy as a second rater. Well, that's
true. And my only chance of getting to the top, he says, is in being
managed just right. I guess that's true, too. He says that if I take this
Metropolitan contract that LaChaise has been talking about, go down to
New York as one of their 'promising young American sopranos' to sing on
off-nights and fill in and make myself generally useful, I simply won't
have a chance. They wouldn't get excited about me whatever happened.
They'd go on patronizing me and yawning in my face no matter how good I
was. I'd do just as well, he says, so far as my career is concerned, to
stay right here in Chicago and get Campanini to give me two or three
appearances a season;--make a sort of amateur night of it for the gold
coast to buzz about. I'd have a lot easier time that way and it would
come to the same thing in the end. And he says that unless I want to go
in for his scheme, that's what I'd better do. Well, and he's right. I can
see that, plainly enough."
Mary refrained from asking what Max's scheme was. She'd learn, no doubt,
in her stepmother's own good time. She nodded a tentative assent to Max's
general premises and waited.
"He certainly was frank enough," Paula went on after a while. "He wants
to make a real killing he says. Something he's never quite brought off
before. He says the reason he's always failed before is that he's had to
go and mix a love-affair up with it somehow. He's either fallen in love
with the woman or she with him or if it was a man he was managing, they
both went mad over the same woman. Something always happened anyhow to
make a mess of it. But he says he isn't interested in me in the least in
that way and that he can see plainly enough that I'm not in him. But
imagine five years with him!"
She broke off with a shudder, not a real shudder though. The sort one
makes over a purely imaginary prospect. Some expression of her feeling
must have betrayed itself in Mary's face, for Paula, happening to look at
her just then, sat up abruptly.
"Oh, I know," she said. "It's all very well, but that's the sort of
person you have to go in with and that's the sort of scheme you have to
go into if you're going to get anywhere. Something of the sort anyhow,--I
never heard of one exactly like this. But this is what he proposes: we're
each to put up twenty thousand dollars. That's easy enough as far as I'm
concerned because what I put up isn't to be spent at all. It's just to be
turned over to somebody--some banker like Martin Whitney--as a guarantee
that I won't break my contract. He says he wouldn't take on anybody in my
position without a guarantee like that. He's to spend the money he puts
up for publicity and other things but he's to get paid back out of what I
earn. He's to be my manager absolutely. I'm to go wherever he says; carry
out any contracts he makes for me. He's to pay my expenses and guarantee
me ten thousand a year beyond that. If he doesn't pay me that much, then
it's he that breaks the contract. And of course, he can't make me do
anything that would ruin my voice or my health. He says he's going to
work me like a dog. That's what he thinks I need. He says he can get me
in with the Chicago company for their road tour before their regular
season opens here. He won't let me sing either in Chicago or New York
until I've landed, but he wants me to go to New York this winter and
coach with Scotti, if we can get him. Then go to Mexico City in the
spring and then down to Buenos Aires for their winter season there.
That's July and August, of course, when it's summer up here. By that time
he thinks we'll be ready for Europe; London or Paris. He's rather in
favor of London. He knows all the ropes and he'll buy the people that
have to be bought and square the people that have to be squared and work
the publicity. He says he's the best publicity man in the world and I
guess he knows. Then after a year or two over there, he thinks we'll be
ready to come back to the Metropolitan and clean up."
"And what," asked Mary, "is his share of the clean-up to be?"
"Oh, a half," said Paula; "we'd be equal partners. That's fair enough, I
suppose. I sat there all through lunch while he was talking, hating him;
hating his big blue chin, and his necktie and his great shiny
finger-nails and the way he ate, and feeling, of course, perfectly
frightfully unhappy. I told him I'd let him know what I would do sometime
before to-morrow noon, and as soon as I could I got rid of him. And then
I came up here and cried and cried. And that's something I haven't done
for a long while. I felt as if he was a big spider that had been running
about all over me tying me up in his web. And as if I was a fly and
couldn't get out. There is something spidery about him, you know. The way
he goes back and forth and the way he's so patient and indirect about it
all. It seemed like the end of the world to me before he finished, as if
I never was going to see John again. Oh, I cried my eyes out. Well, and
then about an hour ago I came to. I realized that I hadn't signed his
horrible contract and that I needn't. And that when this beastly season
was over,--and it isn't going to last much longer, thank goodness,--I
could go home to John and lock up the piano and never look at a score
again. It was like coming out of a nightmare."
Mary dared not stop to think. She took the plunge.
"There's something about father you've got to be told. I promised Wallace
Hood weeks ago that I'd tell you. I guess he and Martin Whitney think you
know about it by now."
"Something I've got to be told about John?" Paula echoed incredulously.
"Why, I was talking with him over the telephone not ten minutes before
you came in."
"Oh, I know. It's nothing like that," Mary said. "But they say he has
tuberculosis. Not desperately, not so that he can't get well if he takes
care of it. If he lives out-of-doors and doesn't worry or try to work.
But if he takes up his practise again this fall, they say,--Doctor
Steinmetz says,--that it will be--committing suicide. That's one thing.
And the other is that he's practically bankrupt. Anyhow, that for a year
or two, until he can get back into practise, he'll need help. That's why
Wallace and Mr. Whitney wanted you told about it."
There hadn't been a movement nor a sound from Paula. Mary, at the end of
that speech was breathless and rather frightened.
Finally Paula asked, "Does he know about it?--his health I mean."
"He's been told," Mary answered, "but he doesn't believe it. They nearly
always are skeptical, Doctor Steinmetz says."
"He's probably right to be. He's a better doctor than six of Steinmetz
will ever be."
Another pause; then, once more from Paula, "Did he tell you about the
other thing,--about his money troubles,--when you were down in North
Carolina with him?"
Mary flushed at the hostile ring there was to that. "He told me a
little," she said, "but not much more, I thought, than he had already
told you."
"Told me?" Paula swung herself off the bed and on to her feet in one
movement. "He told me nothing."
"He urged you to carry out your Ravinia contract, didn't he?" Mary asked,
as steadily as she could.
Paula stood over her staring. "Oh," she exclaimed, and, a moment later
she repeated the ejaculation in a drier tone and with a downward
inflection. She added presently, "I'm not clever the way you are at
taking hints. That's the thing it will be just as well for you both to
remember." She began bruskly putting on her dressing-gown. "I'm going
down-stairs to telephone to Max," she explained. "He's got the paper all
drawn up, not the final contract but an agreement to sign one of the sort
I told you about. I'm going to tell him that if he will bring it back
with him now, I'll sign it."
Mary stood between her and the door. "Don't you think it would be--fairer
to wait?" she asked; "before you signed a thing like that. Until at
least, you were no longer angry with me for having told you too much or
with father because he had told you too little."
Paula pulled up at that and stood looking at her stepdaughter with a
thoughtful expression that was almost a smile. "I am angry," she
admitted, "or I was, and just exactly about that. It's queer the way you
Wollastons, you and your father, anyhow, are always--getting through to
things like that. What you say is fair enough. I guess you're always
fair. Can't help being, somehow. But I can't put off telephoning to Max.
You see I called up John at Hickory Hill an hour ago. I told him I had
made up my mind to stop singing. I told him I didn't want any career.
That I just wanted to--belong to him. And I asked him to come to me as
fast as he could. He's on the way now. So it's important, you see, that
Max should get here first."