Mr. Nevins once said to Mariana: "You are as elusive as thistle-down
whipped up with snow."
Mariana smiled that radiating, indescribable smile which dawned
gradually from within, deepening until it burst into pervasive wealth of
charm.
"Why snow?" was her query.
Mr. Paul, who apparently had been engrossed in his dinner, glanced up
grimly. "The only possible reason for a metaphor," he observed, "is lack
of reason."
Mr. Nevins dismissed him with a shrug and looked in sentimental
perplexity at Mariana.
"Merely because it is impossible to whip up ice with anything," he
replied.
"I should have supposed," interrupted Mr. Paul, in unabashed
disapproval, "that the same objection would apply to thistle-down. It
would certainly apply to a woman."
Miss Ramsey, who sat opposite, turned her tired eyes upon him.
"Life is not of your opinion, Mr. Paul," she said. "It whips us up with
all kinds of ingredients, and it never seems to realize when we have
been reduced to the proper consistency."
She looked worn and harassed, and had come in to dinner later than
usual. It was the first remark she had made, and, after making it, she
relapsed into silence. Her small red hands trembled as she lifted her
fork, the rebellious lines between her brows grew deeper, and she ate
her dinner with that complete exhaustion which so often passes for
resignation in the eyes of our neighbors. Nervous prostration has
produced more saints than all the sermons since Moses.
Mariana watched her sympathetically. She wondered why the gravy upon
Miss Ramsey's plate congealed sooner than it did upon any one else's,
while the sobbiest potatoes invariably fell to her share.
"A false metaphor!" commented Mr. Paul. "Most metaphors are false. I
don't trust Shakespeare himself when he gets to metaphor. I always skip
them."
"Oh, they have their uses," broke in the cheery tones of the optimist.
"I'm not much on Shakespeare, but I've no doubt he has his uses also. As
for metaphor, it is a convenient way of saying more than you mean."
"So is lying," retorted Mr. Paul, crossly, and the conversation
languished. Mariana ate her dinner and looked at the table-cloth. Mr.
Nevins ate his dinner and looked at Mariana. He regarded her as an
artistic possibility. Her appearance was a source of constant interest
to him, and he felt, were he in the position of nature, with the palette
and brush of an omnipotent colorist, he might blend the harmonious lines
of Mariana's person to better advantage. He resented the fact that her
nose was irregular and her chin too long. He wondered how such a subject
could have been wilfully neglected.
As for himself, he honestly felt that he had wasted no opportunities.
Upon their first acquaintance he had made a poster of Mariana which
undeniably surpassed the original. It represented her in a limp and
scantily made gown of green, with strange reptiles sprawling over it,
relieved against the ardor of a purple sunset. The hair was a marvel of
the imagination.
Mariana had liked it, with the single exception of the reptilian
figures.
"They have such an unpleasant suggestion," was her critical comment. "I
feel quite like Medusa. Couldn't you change them into nice little
butterflies and things?"
Mr. Nevins was afraid he could not. The poster satisfied him as it was.
Miss Musin could not deny, he protested, that he had remodelled her nose
and chin in an eminently successful job, and if the hair and eyes and
complexion in the poster bore close resemblance in color, so did the
hair and eyes and complexion in the original. He had done his best.
Mariana accepted his explanation and went complacently on her way, as
enigmatical as a Chinese puzzle. She was full of swift surprises and
tremulous changes, varying color with her environment; gay one moment,
and sad before the gayety had left her lips--cruel and calm, passionate
and tender--always and ever herself.
Twice a week she went to Signor Morani's for a vocal lesson. Signor
Morani was small and romantic and severe. In his youth he had travelled
as Jenny Lind's barytone, and he had fallen a slave to her voice. He had
worshipped a voice as other men worship a woman. Unlike other men, he
had been faithful for a lifetime--to a voice.
When Mariana had gone to him, an emotional and aspiring soprano of
nineteen, he had listened to her quietly and advised patience.
"You must wait," he said. "All art is waiting."
"I will not wait," said Mariana. "Waiting is starvation."
He looked at her critically.
"More of us starve than the world suspects," he answered. "It is the
privilege of genius. This is a planet, my dear child, where mediocrity
is exalted and genius brought low. It is a living fulfilment of the
scriptural prophecy, 'The first shall be last and the last shall be
first.'" Then he added: "Sing again."
Mariana stood up and sang. His words had depressed her, and her voice
trembled. She looked at him wistfully, her hands hanging at her sides,
her head thrown back. It was an aria from "Faust." He shook his head
slowly.
"You will never be great," he said. "I can give you technique, but not
volume. Your voice will never be great."
With a half-defiant gesture Mariana broke forth again. This time it was
a popular song, with a quick refrain running through it. As she sang she
acted the accompaniment half unconsciously.
Signor Morani frowned as she commenced, and then watched her
attentively. In the fragile little girl, with the changeable eyes of
green and the aureole of shadowless hair, he scented possibilities.
"Your voice will never be great," he repeated; "but you may make men
believe so."
"And you will take me?" pleaded Mariana. She stretched out her beautiful
hands. Her eyes prayed. Her flexible tones drooped.
Signor Morani took her hands in his with kindly reassurance.
"Yes," he said--"yes; it will keep you out of mischief, at least."
And it had kept her out of mischief. It had opened a channel for her
emotions. Like a tide, the romanticism of her nature veered towards art.
She became the most fanatical of devotees. She breathed it and lived it.
In her heart it transplanted all other religions, and the aestheticism of
its expression gained a marvellous hold upon her faith. Above the little
mosaic altar at her bedside she enshrined a bust of Wagner, and she
worshipped it as some more orthodox believer had once worshipped an
enshrined Madonna. At midnight she held devotional services all alone,
sitting before the piano, bending to the uses of a litany the
intellectual rhapsodies of Beethoven or the sensuous repinings of
Chopin, while the little red flame sent up praise and incense from dried
rose leaves and cinnamon to the memories of dead musicians. She
introduced a rare, sensuous beauty into this new worship, as she had
introduced it into the old. She typified the Church when, in its fresh
young passion, and suffused with the dying splendors of paganism, it
turned from the primitive exercises of its founders and revived the
worship of the gracious Madonna of Old Egypt in the worship of the
Madonna of Nazareth, and the flower-scented feasts of Venus in the
Purification of the Virgin. There existed in the girl an unsatisfied
restlessness of self, resulting in the desire for complete submergence
of soul in idea. Her nature veered constantly from extreme to extreme;
there was no semblance of a saner medium, and as a system must have
exponents, the high priests and priestesses of art became her lesser
divinities.
She began to haunt the Metropolitan Opera-house. From the fifth gallery
she looked down every evening upon an Italian or German landscape. She
herself trembled like a harp swept by invisible fingers; she grew pale
with Marguerite, wept over the dead Juliet, and went mad with the
madness of Lucia.
When the voice of that fair Bride of Lammermoor who sang for us that
season was borne to her on the notes of a flute which flagged beneath
the exceeding sweetness of the human notes they carried, Mariana grasped
the railing with her quivering hands and bowed her head in an ecstasy of
appreciation. It was the ecstasy with which a monk in mediaeval days must
have thrilled when he faced in a dim cathedral some beautiful and
earthly Virgin of the great Raphael. It was the purest form of sensuous
self-abnegation. Then, as the curtain fell, she would rise and step
gropingly towards the door, cast into sudden darkness. Wrapped in that
mental state as in a mantle, she would descend the stairs and pass out
into the street. At such times she was as far removed from the existence
to which she was returning as was the poor mad Lucia herself. And then
in the night she would awake and sing softly to herself in the
stillness, lying with seraphic eyes and hands clasped upon her breast,
until the morning sun flashed into her face and the day began.
There was also a tragic side to her emotions. Her past inheritance of
ages of image-worshippers laid hold upon her. From being merely symbols
of art the singers became divinities in their own right. She haunted
their hotels for fleeting glimpses of them. She bought their photographs
with the money which should have gone for a winter hat. She would gladly
have kissed the dust upon which they trod. After her first hearing of
"Tristan and Isolde," she placed the prima donna's photograph beneath
the bust of Wagner, and worshipped her for weeks as a bright particular
star.
In the evening she attended the opera alone. Returning when it was over,
she crossed Broadway, boarded a car, and, reaching The Gotham, toiled up
to the fourth landing. She was innocent of prudery, and she went
unharmed. Perhaps her complete absorption in something beyond herself
was her safeguard. At all events, she brushed men by, glanced at them
with unseeing eyes, and passed placidly on her way.
Mariana was famished for romance, but not for the romance of the street.
She had an instinctive aversion to things common and of vulgar intent.
Her unsatisfied desire was but the craving of a young and impressionable
heart for untried emotion. It was the poetry of living she thirsted
for--poetry in aesthetic proportions, with a careful adjustment of light
and shade. She desired harmonious effects and exquisite schemes of
color, all as appropriate settings to a romance which she could arrange
and blend in treatment as an artist arranges models of still life. So,
for a time, she expended herself upon great singers. A new tenor
appeared as Edgardo. Upon the stage he was dark and fierce and
impassioned. He made an adorable lover. He sang to Lucia, not to the
audience, and he threw half his arias into his eyes. Mariana was
enraptured. She fell desperately in love. During the day she went about
in meditative abstraction; during the night she turned upon her little
cotton pillow-slip, and wept to think how far below him she must ever
remain. She even wished herself a chorus girl, that she might intercept
his glances. She grew frantically jealous of the prima donna, whom,
also, she adored. She imagined innumerable romances in which he enacted
upon the stage of life the part of Edgardo. Then, through the kindness
of Signor Morani, she was introduced to the object of her regard, and
the awakening was abrupt. He was fat and commonplace. He proved to be
the faithful husband of a red-faced little German wife, and the devoted
father of a number of red-faced German children. He possessed no
qualities for romantic development, and Mariana recovered.
For a period her susceptibilities abated. The wave of activity spent its
violence. Life flowed for her like a meadow stream, sensitive to faint
impressions from a passing breeze, but calm when the breeze was afar.
Upon a night of "Carmen" she saw from the fifth gallery a velvet rose
fall from the prima donna's bosom to the stage. When the curtain fell
she rushed madly down and begged it of an usher. She carried it home,
and hung it upon the wall above her bed. At night, before falling
asleep, she would draw the curtains aside, and, in the electric light
that flooded the room, cast her eyes upon the vivid bit of color. In the
early morning she would awake, and, raising herself upon her elbow,
touch it reverently with her hand. It was homage rendered to her own
ambition.
At The Gotham, her bare little chamber, with its garish wall-paper, was
a source of acute discomfort to her. Once, after a long spell of
pneumonia, she had fallen into a fit of desperation, and had attacked
the paper with a breakfast-knife. The result was a square of whitewashed
wall above the bureau. An atmosphere of harmony was so necessary to her
growth that she seemed to droop and pine in uncongenial environment. In
the apartment-house, with its close, unventilated halls, its creaking
elevator, its wretchedly served dinners, she had always felt strangely
ill at ease. Her last prayer at night was that the morrow might see her
transplanted to richer soil, her first thought upon awakening was that
the coming day was pregnant with possibilities. Life in its entirety,
life with passionate color and emotional fulfilment, was the food she
craved.
Of Mariana, Mr. Ardly had made a laborious and profound analysis.
"That young person is a self-igniting taper," he had concluded. "If some
one doesn't apply the match, she will go off of her own accord--and she
will burn herself out before time has cast a wet blanket upon her."
He himself was a self-contained young fellow, who, like a greater before
him, followed with wisdom both wine and women. His life was regulated by
a theory which he had propounded in youth and attempted to practice in
maturer years. The theory asserted that experience was the one reliable
test of existing conditions. "I refused to believe that alcohol was an
intoxicant," he had once said, "until I tested it."
When Mariana first arrived, he surprised in his heart an embryonic
sentiment concerning her, and proceeded to crush it as coolly as he
would have crushed a fly that encroached upon the private domain of his
person.
"I have no dissipations," he explained, when discussing the affair with
Mariana. "I neither drink nor love."
"Which is unwise," retorted Mariana. "I do both in moderation. And a man
who has never been in love is always a great school-boy. I should be
continually expecting him to tread upon my gown or to break my fan.
Sentiment is the greatest civilizer of the race. If I were you I would
begin immediately."
"I dislike all effort," returned Ardly, gravely, "and love is cloying.
Over-loving produces mental indigestion, as over-eating produces
physical. I have suffered from it, and experience has made me
abstemious. I shall abstain from falling in love with you."
"What a pity!" sighed Mariana, lifting her lashes.
"Well, I can't agree with you," argued Ardly, "and I don't regret it. I
am very comfortable as I am."
"I am not," retorted Mariana. "I detest the dinners. Who could be
comfortable on overdone mutton and cold potatoes?"
"Even in the matter of food I am without prejudices," declared the
other. "I had as soon want a good dinner and have a poor one as have a
good one and want none. These are the only conditions with which I am
acquainted. There may be estates where things are more equally adjusted,
but I know nothing of them; I have not experienced them."
Mariana sighed. "You are as depressing as Mr. Paul," she complained.
"I only speak of what I know," explained Ardly, complacently. "Upon
other matters I have no opinions, and I calmly repeat that I have found
appetite and gratification to be situated upon opposite sides of a
revolving globe. When one's up the other's down."
"I shall cut a passage through," said Mariana. "If life doesn't equalize
things, I will."
"And I will watch the process," remarked Ardly, indolently.
It was shortly after this that Mariana went to Long Island for a
holiday, spending a couple of weeks in the cottage of an acquaintance,
who, by dint of successive matrimonial ventures, had succeeded in
reaching the equilibrium to which Mariana aspired.
Upon returning to New York the girl found her distaste for The Gotham to
have trebled. When she had toiled up the dingy stairway and installed
herself in her old place, she sat upon her trunk and looked about her.
Never had the room appeared so dull, so desperately plain. The close
odor caused by lack of ventilation offended her nostrils, and yet she
hesitated to fling back the shutters and reveal the rusty balcony with
its spindling fire-escape, beyond which stretched the sombre outlook,
the elevated road looming like a skeleton in the foreground. The door
into the hall was ajar, and she could see a dull expanse of corridor,
lighted day and night by a solitary and ineffectual electric jet.
A sob stuck in her throat, and, crossing to the window, she raised it
and threw back the shutters, letting in a thin stream of dust and
sunshine. Her geranium stood where she had left it, and its withered and
yellow leaves smote her with accusing neglect.
"Oh, you poor thing!" she cried, in an impulsive burst of pity.
Then she saw that it had been freshly watered, and that its famished
leaves were unfolding. Turning her eyes, they encountered a row of small
pots containing seedlings which lined her neighbor's window, encroaching
slightly upon her own possession. Before them a man was standing, a
watering-can in one hand, a small trowel in the other. As Mariana
stepped upon the fire-escape he turned in evident resentment, glanced at
her indifferently, and resumed his task of invigoration.
The afternoon sun shone full upon him, and Mariana saw him plainly. He
was young, with stooping shoulders, and he wore a cheap and shabby suit
of clothes, with apparent disregard of their quality. His face was thin
and cleanly shaven, there was a nervous tension about the mouth, and the
hair, falling dark and heavy upon the temples, lent a haggardness to his
colorless and burned-out profile. It was a face in which the poetic
principle was obscured by an ascetic veneering. In his whole appearance
was borne out the suggestion flashing from the eyes--a suggestion of
mental sustentation upon physical force.
Mariana regarded him mutely. Her gaze was almost tragic in its
intensity. For a moment her lips quivered and her fingers interlaced.
Then she retreated into her room, slamming the shutters after her.
Throwing herself into a chair, she buried her face in her hands.
"I--I can't have even that to myself!" she said, and burst into tears.