THE TERROR
Graham Stannard made his well-meant but disastrous proposal to Mary at
half past five or so on a Friday afternoon. It was a little more than
twenty-four hours later, just after dark on Saturday evening, that she
came in, unheralded, more incredibly like a vision than ever, upon
Anthony March in his secret lair above the grocery.
He was sitting at his work-table scoring a passage in the third act of
_The Dumb Princess_ for the wood-wind choir when her knock, faint as it
was, breaking in upon the rhythm of his theme, caused his pen to leap
away from the paper and his heart to skip a beat. But had it actually
been a knock upon his door? Such an event was unlikely enough.
He uttered a tentative and rather incredulous "Come in" as one just
awakened speaks, humoring the illusion of a dream.
But the door opened and the Dumb Princess stood there, pallid, wistful,
just as she had looked before her true lover climbed the precarious ivy
to her tower and tore away the spell that veiled her.
March sat debating with himself,--or so it seemed to him afterward; it
was a matter of mere seconds, of course,--why, since she was a vision,
did she not look as she had on one of the occasions when he had seen her.
The night of the Whitman songs; the blazing afternoon in the hay field.
She was different to-night, and very clearly defined, in a plain
little frock of dark blue--yet not quite what one ordinarily meant by
dark blue--cut out in an unsoftened square around the neck, and a
small hat of straw, the color of the warmer sort of bronze. These
austerities of garb, dissociated utterly with all his memories, gave
her a poignancy that was almost unbearable. Why had the vision of her
come to him like that?
She smiled then and spoke. "It is really I. I've come with a
message for you."
Until she spoke he could do nothing but stare as one would at an
hallucinatory vision; but her voice, the first articulate syllable of it,
brought him to his feet and drew him across the room to where she stood.
He was almost suffocated by a sudden convulsion of the heart, half
exultation, half terror. The exultation was accountable enough. The high
Gods had given him another chance. Why he should be terrified he did not
at the time know, but he was--from that very first moment.
He came to her slowly, not knowing what he was to do or say. All his
mental powers were for the moment quite in abeyance. But when he got
within hand's reach of her it was given to him to take both of hers and
stoop and kiss them. He'd have knelt to her had his knees ever been
habituated to prayer. Then he led her to his big hollow-backed easy chair
which stood in the dormer where the breeze came in, changed its position
a little and waited until, with a faintly audible sigh, she had let
herself sink into it.
How tired she was! He had become aware of that the moment he touched her
hands. Whatever her experience during the last days or weeks had been, it
had brought her to the end of her powers.
He felt another pang of that unaccountable terror as he turned away, and
he put up an unaddressed prayer for spiritual guidance. It was a new
humility for him. He moved his own chair a little nearer, but not close,
and seated himself.
"I can conceive of no message,"--they were the first words he had
spoken, and his voice was not easily manageable,--"no message that would
be more than nothing compared with the fact that you have come." Rising
again, he went on, "Won't you let me take your hat? Then the back of that
chair won't be in the way."
It was certainly a point in his favor that she took it off and gave it to
him without demur. That meant that there would be time; yet her very
docility frightened him. She seemed quite relaxed now that her head could
lie back against the leather cushion, and her gaze traveled about the
dingy littered room with a kind of tender inquisitiveness as if she were
memorizing its contents.
He gazed at her until a gush of tears blinded his eyes and he turned,
blinking them away, to the untidy quires of score paper which he had
tried to choose instead. It could not be that it was too late to alter
that choice. The terror, for a moment, became articulate. She believed
that it was too late. That was why she had come.
She spoke reflectively. "It would be called an accident, I suppose, that
I came. I wrote to you but there was more to the message than would go
easily in a note so I took it myself to your house. There was just a
chance, I thought, that I'd find you there. I didn't find you, but I
found Miss MacArthur. That was the only thing about it that could be
called accidental. Your mother and sister were worried about you. They
said it had been much longer than such periods usually were since they
had heard from you. So I left my note and was coming away. Miss
MacArthur said she would come with me and offered to drive me back to
town. When we got into her car she said she thought she knew where you
were and would take me to you. She did not say anything more nor ask any
questions until she had stopped outside here at the curb, when she
looked up and saw the lighted windows and said you were surely here.
Then she pointed out the place in the dark where the stairs were and
told me how to find your door. She waited, though, to make sure before
she drove away. I heard her go."
He had no word to say in the little pause she made there. He felt the
pulse beating in his temples and clutched with tremulous hands the wooden
arms of his chair. Until she had mentioned Jennie MacArthur's name it had
not occurred to him to wonder how she had been enabled to come to him. It
could only have been through Jennie, of course. Jennie was the only
person who knew. But why had Jennie disclosed his secret (her own at the
same time, he was sure; she never would have expected Mary's clear eyes
even to try to evade the unescapable inference)--why had she revealed to
Mary, whom she had never seen before, a fact which she had guarded with
so impregnable a loyalty all these many years?
The only possible answer was that Jennie had divined, under the girl's
well-bred poise, the desperation which was now terrifying him. It was no
nightmare then of his own overwrought imagination. Jennie had perceived
the emergency--the actual life-or-death emergency--and with courageous
inspiration had done, unhesitatingly, the one thing that could possibly
meet the case. She had given him his chance. Jennie!
He arrived at that terminus just as Mary finished speaking. In the pause
that followed she did not at first look at him. Her gaze had come to rest
upon that abortive musical typewriter of his. Not quite in focus upon it,
but as if in some corner of her mind she was wondering what it might be.
But as the pause spun itself out, her glance, seeking his face, moved
quickly enough to catch the look of consternation that it wore. She read
it--misread it luckily--and her own lighted amazingly with a beam of pure
amusement.
"I suppose it is rather overwhelming," she said; "a conjunction like
that. I mean, that it should have been she who brought me here. But
really, unless one accepts all the traditional motives and explanations
that one finds in books, it shouldn't be surprising that she should
undertake a friendly service for some one else she saw was fond of you,
too. Not when one considers the wonderful person she is."
If his sheer adoration of her were enough to save her then she was safe,
whatever the peril. But he doubted if it would be enough.
"Jennie and I were lovers once," he said. "But that came to an end for
both of us a good while ago. Two or three years. And the last time she
came to this room--one day in April it was--I told her about you and
about _The Dumb Princess_." He laid his hand upon the stack of
manuscript. "This. I had come home from that night at your father's house
when you and I heard that song together, with my head full of it. I went
nearly mad fighting it out of my head while I tried to make over that
other opera for Paula."
"_The Dumb Princess_...?"
He nodded. "You see you hardly spoke that night, only at the end to say
we mustn't talk. So I came away thinking of some one under a spell. A
princess, the fairy sort of princess who could not speak until her true
lover came to her. But instead of that I tried to go on working at that
Belgian horror and stuck at it until it was unendurable. And then, when I
came to the house to tell Paula so, it was you who came to me again, the
first time since that night."
There had come a faintly visible color into her cheeks and once more she
smiled, reflectively. "That's what you meant then," she mused. "I
couldn't make it out. You said just before you went away, 'That's why it
was so incredible when you came down the stairs instead.'"
She had remembered that!
"I ran away," he confessed, "the moment I had said it, for fear of
betraying myself. And I went to work on _The Dumb Princess_ that day."
"You've done all that, a whole opera, since the fourteenth of May?"
"I worked on it," he said, "until I had to stop for the little vacation
that--that ended at Hickory Hill. And I came straight back to it from
there. I've been working at it all the time since. Now, except for the
scoring in the second part of the third act, it's finished. I thought it
was the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world. Just to get
it written down on paper, the thing which that moment with you up in that
little anteroom started. I've pretty well done it. As far as the music
itself is concerned, I think I have done it."
He paused there and pressed his lips together. Then he went on speaking,
stiffly, one word at a time. "And I was saying to myself when you knocked
that I would tear it up, every sheet of it, and set it alight in the
stove yonder if it would take me back to that hour we had together at
Hickory Hill."
The tenderness of her voice when she replied (it had some of the
characteristic qualities of his beloved woodwinds) did not preclude a
bead of humor, almost mischief, from gilding the salient points of
its modeling.
"I know," she said. "I can guess what that feeling must be; the perfect
emptiness and despair of having a great work done. I suspect there aren't
many great masterpieces that one couldn't have bought cheap by offering
the mess of pottage at the right moment. Oh, no, I didn't mean a sneer
when I said cheap. I really understand. That very next morning out in the
orchard, thinking over it, I managed to be glad you'd gone--alone. Your
own way, rather than back with me to Ravinia. But--I'm glad I came
to-night and I'm glad I know about--_The Dumb Princess_."
Watching her as her unfocused reminiscent gaze made it easy for him to
do, he saw her go suddenly pale, saw the perspiration bead out on her
forehead as if some thought her mind had found itself confronting
actually sickened her. He waited an instant, breathless in an agony of
doubt whether to notice or to go on pretending to ignore. After a moment
the wave passed.
"I know that was a figure of speech," she resumed,--her voice was
deadened a little in timbre but its inflections were as light as before.
"But I wish--I'd really be ever so much--happier--if you'd give me a
promise; a perfectly serious, solemn,"--she hesitated for a word and
smiled,--"death-bed promise, that you never will burn up _The Dumb
Princess_. At least until she's all published and produced. And I wish
that as soon as you've got a copy made, you'd put this manuscript in a
really safe place."
He turned away from her, baffled, bewildered. She had evaded the issue he
had tried to confront her with. She had taken the passionate declaration
of his wish to retrieve the great error of his life as a passing emotion
familiar to all creative artists at certain stages in their work. It was
a natural, almost inevitable, way of looking at it! He sat for a moment
gazing abstractedly at his littered table, clutching the edges of it with
both hands, resisting a momentary vertigo of his own.
She left her chair and came and stood beside him. She picked up one of
the quires of manuscript, opened it and gazed a while at the many-staved
score. He was aware of a catch in her breathing, like an inaudible sob,
but presently she spoke, quite steadily.
"I wish I could sit here to-night and read this. I wish it made even
unheard melodies to me. I'm not dumb but I am deaf to this. _There's_ a
spell beyond your powers to lift, my dear."
She laid her hand lightly upon his shoulder and at her touch his
taut-drawn muscles relaxed into a tremulous weakness. After a
little silence:
"Now give me my promise," she said.
He did not immediately answer and the hand upon his shoulder took hold.
Under its compulsion, "I'll promise anything you ask," he said.
She spoke slowly as if measuring her words. "Never to destroy this work
of yours that you call _The Dumb Princess_ whatever may conceivably
happen, however discouraged you may be about it."
"Very well," he said, "I won't."
"Say it as a promise," she commanded. "Quite explicitly."
So he repeated a form of words which satisfied her. She held him tight in
both hands for an instant. Then swiftly went back to her chair.
"Don't think me too foolish," she apologized. "I haven't been sleeping
much of late and I couldn't have slept to-night with a misgiving like
that to wonder about."
His own misgiving obscurely deepened. He did not know whether it was the
reason she had offered for exacting that promise from him or the mere
tone of her voice which was lighter and more brittle than he felt it
should have been. She must have read the troubled look in his face for
she said at once and on a warmer note:
"Oh, my dear, don't! Don't let my vagaries trouble you. Let me tell you
the message I came with. It's about the other opera. They want to put it
on at once up at Ravinia. With Fournier as the officer and that little
Spanish soprano as 'Dolores.' Just as you wrote it without any of the
terrible things you tried to put in for Paula. It will have to be sung
in French of course, because neither of them sings English. They want you
there just as soon as you can come, to sign the contract and help with
the rehearsals."
Once more with an utterly unexpected shift she left him floundering,
speechless.
He had forgotten _The Outcry_ except for his nightmare efforts to revamp
it for Paula; had charged it off his books altogether. What Mary had told
him at Hickory Hill about her labors in its behalf had signified simply,
how rapturously delicious it was that she should have been so concerned
for him. The possibility of a successful outcome to her efforts hadn't
occurred to him.
She said, smiling with an amused tenderness over his confusion, "I
haven't been too officious, have I?"
He knew he was being mocked at and he managed to smile but he had
to blink and press his hand to his eyes again before he could see
her clearly.
"It's not astonishing that you can work miracles," he said. "The wonder
would be if you could not."
"There was nothing in the least miraculous about this," she declared. "It
wasn't done by folding my wings and weaving mystic circles with a wand.
Besides making that translation,--oh, terribly bad, I'm afraid,--into
French, I've cajoled and intrigued industriously for weeks like one of
those patient wicked little spiders of Henri Fabre's. I found a silly
flirtation between Fournier and a married woman I knew and I encouraged
it, helped it along and made it useful. I've used everybody I could lay
my hands on."
What an instrument of ineffable delight that voice of hers was,--its
chalumeau tenderness just relieved with the sparkle of irony. But he was
smitten now with the memory of his own refusal to go to Ravinia so that
Paula would remember him again. He blurted out something of his
contrition over this but she stopped him.
"It was only because I wanted you there. I would not for any conceivable
advantage in the world have let you--oh, even touch these devices that
I've been concerned with. But I've reveled in them myself. In doing them
for you, even though I could not see that they were getting anywhere.
"Everything seemed quite at a standstill when I left Ravinia Thursday,
but on Thursday night the Williamsons dined with Mr. Eckstein and went to
the park with him; and they all went home with father and Paula
afterward, Fournier and LaChaise, too; and everything happened at once. I
got a note from Paula this morning written yesterday, asking where my
translation was, but not telling me anything. And as she wasn't at home
when I telephoned to answer her question I didn't know until to-night.
"But about six o'clock James Wallace telephoned from the park and told
me all about it. He wanted you found and sent to Ravinia at once. Having
wasted half the season and more, they're now quite frantic over the
thought of losing a minute. And Jimmy says immensely enthusiastic. So,
all you have to do now is to go up there and lord it over them. You'll
hear it sung; you'll hear the orchestra play it. You will make a
beginning toward coming into your own, my dear. Because even if you
don't care for it as you did, it will be a step toward--the princess,
won't it?"
She dropped back against the cushion as from weariness, and sudden tears
brimmed into her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. He came to her at that
in spite of the gesture that would have held him away.
"You must believe--it's nothing--but happiness," she gasped.
He sat down upon the arm of the chair and a little timidly took her in
his hands, caressed her eyes and her wet face until at last she met his
lips in a long kiss and sank back quieted.
He stayed on the chair arm however and their hands remained clasped
through a recollecting silence. She said presently:
"There are two or three practical things for you to remember. You mustn't
be irritated with Violet Williamson. She has let herself become a little
more sentimental about Fournier than I think in the beginning she meant
to be and you may find her under foot more than you like. You mustn't
mind that. And you'll find a very friendly helper in James Wallace. There
is something a little caustic about his wit, and he suspects musicians on
principle; but he will like you and he's thoroughly committed to _The
Outcry_. He is a very good French scholar and over difficulties with the
translation, where passages have to be changed, he'll be a present help."
He took her face in both his hands and turned it up to him. "Mary," he
demanded when their eyes met, "why are you saying good-by to me?"