I
There seemed to be a fitting dispensation in the marriage of Arthur
Vibert and Ellenora Bishop. She was a plain looking girl of
twenty-four--even her enemies admitted her plainness--but she had
brains; and the absence of money was more than compensated by her love
for literature. It had been settled by her friends that she would do
wonderful things when she had her way. Therefore her union with Arthur
Vibert was voted "singularly auspicious." He had just returned from
Germany after winning much notice by his talent for composition. What
could be more natural than the marriage of these two gifted persons?
Miss Bishop had published some things--rhapsodic prose-poems, weak in
syntax but strong in the quality miscalled imagination. Her pen name was
George Bishop: following the example of the three Georges so dear to the
believer in sexless literature--George Sand, George Eliot and George
Egerton. She greatly admired the latter.
Ellenora was a large young woman of more brawn than tissue; she had
style and decision, though little amiability. Ugly she was; yet, after
the bloom of her ugliness wore off, you admired perforce the full
iron-colored eyes alive with power, and wondered why nature in dowering
her with a big brain had not made for her a more refined mouth. The
upper part of her face was often illuminated; the lower narrowly escaped
coarseness; and a head of rusty red hair gave a total impression of
strenuous brilliancy, of keen abiding vitality. A self-willed New York
girl who had never undergone the chastening influence of discipline or
rigorously ordered study--she averred that it would attenuate the
individuality of her style; avowedly despising the classics, she was a
modern of moderns in her tastes.
She had nerves rather than heart, but did not approve of revealing her
vagaries in diary form. Adoring Guy de Maupassant, she heartily disliked
Marie Bashkirtseff. The Frenchman's almost Greek-like fashion of
regarding life in profile, his etching of its silver-tipped angles, made
an irresistible appeal to her; and she vainly endeavored to catch his
crisp, restrained style, his masterly sense of form. In the secrecy of
her study she read Ouida and asked herself why this woman had not gone
farther, and won first honors in the race. Her favorite heroines were
Ibsen's Nora, Rebecca and Hedda. Then, bitten by the emancipation craze,
she was fast developing into one of the "shrieking sisterhood" when
Arthur Vibert came from Berlin.
A Frenchman has said that the moment a woman occupies her thoughts with
a man, art ceases for her. The night Ellenora Bishop met the young
pianist in my atelier, I saw that she was interested. Arthur came to me
with letters from several German critics. I liked the slender, blue-eyed
young fellow who was not a day over twenty-one. His was a true American
type tempered by Continental culture. Oval-faced, fair-haired, of a
rather dreamy disposition and with a certain austerity of manner, he was
the fastidious puritan--a puritan expanded by artistic influences.
Strangely enough he had temperament, and set to music Heine and
Verlaine. A genuine talent, I felt assured, and congratulated myself on
my new discovery; I was fond of finding lions, and my Sunday evenings
were seldom without some specimen that roared, if somewhat gently, yet
audibly enough, for my visitors. When Arthur Vibert was introduced to
Ellenora Bishop, I recognized the immediate impact of the girl's brusque
personality upon his sensitized nature.
She was a devoted admirer of Wagner, and that was bond enough to set
reverberating other chords of sympathy in the pair. I do not assert in
cold blood that the girl deliberately set herself to charm the
boyish-looking composer, but there was certainly a basking allurement
in her gaze when her eyes brushed his. With her complicated personality
he could not cope--that was only too evident; and so I watched the
little comedy with considerable interest, and not without misgiving.
Arthur fell in love without hesitation, and though Ellenora felt
desperately superior to him--you saw that--she could not escape the
bright, immediate response of his face. The implicated interest of her
bearing--though she never lost her head--his unconcealed adoration, soon
brought the affair to the altar--or rather to a civil ceremony, for the
bride was an agnostic, priding herself on her abstention from
established religious forms.
Her clear, rather dry nature had always been a source of study to me.
What could she have in common with the romantic and decidedly shy youth?
She was older, more experienced--plain girls have experiences as well as
favored ones--and she was not fond of matrimony with poverty as an
obbligato. Arthur had prospects of pupils, his compositions sold at a
respectable rate, but the couple had little money to spare;
nevertheless, people argued their marriage a capital idea--from such a
union of rich talents surely something must result. Look at the
Brownings, the Shelleys, the Schumanns, not to mention George Eliot and
her man Lewes!
They were married. I was best man, and realized what a menstruum is
music--what curious trafficking it causes, what opposites it
intertwines. And the overture being finished the real curtain arose, as
it does on all who mate....
I did not see much of the Viberts that winter. I cared not at all for
society and they had moved to Harlem; so I lost two stars of my studio
receptions. But I occasionally heard they were getting on famously.
Arthur was composing a piano concerto, and Ellenora engaged upon a
novel--a novel, I was told, that would lay bare to its rotten roots the
social fabric; and knowing the girl's inherent fund of bitter cleverness
I awaited the new-born polemic with gentle impatience. I hoped, however,
like the foolish inexperienced old bachelor I am, that her feminine
asperity would be tempered by the suavities of married life.
One afternoon late in March Arthur Vibert dropped in as I was putting
the finishing touches on my portrait of Mrs. Beacon. He looked weary and
his eyes were heavily circled.
"Hello, my boy! and how is your wife, and how is that wonderful concerto
we've all been hearing about?"
He shrugged his shoulders and asked for a cigarette.
"Shall I play you some bits of it?" he queried in a gloomy way. I was
all eagerness, and presently he was absently preluding at my piano.
There was little vigor in his touch, and I recalled his rambling wits by
crying, "The concerto, let's have it!"
Arthur pulled himself together and began. He was very modern in musical
matters and I liked the dynamic power of his opening. The first subject
was more massive than musical and was built on the architectonics of
Liszt and Tschaïkowsky. There was blood in the idea, plenty of nervous
fibre, and I dropped my brushes and palette as the unfolding of the work
began with a logical severity and a sense of form unusual in so young a
mind.
This first movement interested me; I almost conjured up the rich
instrumentation and when it ended I was warm in my congratulations.
Arthur moodily wiped his brow and looked indifferent.
"And now for the second movement. My boy, you always had a marked gift
for the lyrical. Give us your romanza--the romanza, I should say, born
of your good lady!"
He answered me shortly: "There is no romance, I've substituted for it a
scherzo. You know that's what Saint-Saëns and all the fellows are doing
nowadays, Scharwenka too."
I fancied that there was a shade of eager anxiety in his explanation,
but I said nothing and listened.
The scherzo--or what is called the scherzo since Beethoven and
Schumann--was too heavy, inelastic in its tread, to dispel the
blue-devils. It was conspicuous for its absence of upspringing delicacy,
light, arch merriment. It was the sad, bitter joking of a man upon whose
soul life has graven pain and remorse, and before the trio was reached I
found myself watching the young composer's face. I knew that, like all
modern music students, he had absorbed in Germany some of that
scholastic pessimism we encounter in the Brahms music, but I had hoped
that a mere fashion of the day would not poison the springs of this
fresh personality.
Yet here I was confronted with a painful confession that life had
brought the lad more than its quantum of spiritual and physical
hardship; he was telling me all this in his music, for his was too
subjective a talent to ape the artificial, grand, objective manner.
Without waiting for comment he plunged into his last movement which
proved to be a series of ingenious variations--a prolonged
passacaglia--in which the grace and dexterity of his melodic invention,
contrapuntal skill and symmetrical sense were gratifyingly present.
I was in no flattering vein when I told him he had made a big jump in
his work.
"But, Arthur, why so much in the Brahms manner? Has your wife turned
your love of Shelley to Browning worship?" I jestingly concluded.
"My wife, if she wishes, can turn Shelley into slush," he answered
bitterly. This shocked me. I felt like putting questions, but how could
I? Had I not been one of the many who advised the fellow to marry
Ellenora Bishop? Had we not all fancied that in her strength was his
security, his hope for future artistic triumphs?
He went on as his fingers snatched at fugitive harmonic experimentings:
"It's not all right up town. I wish that you would run up some night.
You've not seen Ellenora for months, and perhaps you could induce her to
put the brake on." I was puzzled. Putting the brake on a woman is always
a risky experiment, especially if she happens to be wedded. Besides,
what did he mean?
"I mean," he replied to my tentative look of inquiry, "that Ellenora is
going down-hill with her artistic theories of literature, and I mean
that she has made our house a devilish unpleasant place to live in."
I hastily promised to call in a few days, and after seeing him to the
door, and bidding him cheer up, I returned to the portrait of Mrs.
Beacon, and felt savage at the noisiness of color and monotony of tonal
values in the picture.
"Good Lord, why will artists marry?" I irritably asked of my subject in
the frame. Her sleek Knickerbocker smile further angered me, and I went
to my club and drank coffee until long after midnight.