WE BRING OUR PEARL TO MARKET
I did not hear Margarita sing in opera till the night of her _debut_
in _Faust_. Roger, on the contrary, was allowed to attend the last
rehearsals: Margarita honestly wished for his criticism, which she
knew from the very fact of his utter aloofness from her professional
interests would be perfectly unbiased and sincere. It was not without
a secret thrill of pleasure through my disappointment that I
acquiesced in her decree; I knew that she would be nervous with me,
from my very sympathy with her.
I can see the _Opera_ now--the lights, the jewels, the moustaches, the
white shirt-bosoms, the lorgnettes, the fat women with programmes, the
great, shrouding curtain.
Sue was there, pallid with excitement, and Tip Elder, who had come
over for a much-needed holiday, and Walter Carter, who had been on an
errand to Germany, and who had (of all unexpected people!) convinced
Madam Bradley that her own hard pride should no longer be forced to
regulate her children's enmities, and come to extend the olive-branch
to Roger.
I was as nervous as could be and Roger, I think, was not quite so calm
as he seemed and gnawed his lower lip steadily.
But Margarita, one would suppose, had not only no nerves but not even
any self-consciousness. She told us afterward that before the curtain
rose she was nearly paralysed with terror and was convinced that her
voice had gone--it caught in her throat. She could not remember the
words of the _Jewel Song_ and her stomach grew icy cold--if Roger had
been there, she said, she would have begged him to take her away and
hide her on the Island! But he was not there. No one was there but
Madame and her maid, and she could not run away alone.
When she sat spinning at her wheel behind the layers of gauze, and
_Faust_ saw her in his dream, her legs shook so that she could not
work the treadle. But when she paced slowly onto the scene in her grey
gown all worked with tiny, nearly invisible little butterflies--they
had made her put aside the big ones--she was as calm and composed as
the chorus around her and her voice was as beautiful as I have ever
heard it.
"The child was born for the stage, there is no doubt!" Sue whispered
to me excitedly, and I nodded hastily, not wishing to lose a note or a
movement.
It was her best-known part and she was very lovely and magnetic in it,
but I do not think it really suited her so well as the Wagner dramas
would have, later. It is with _Marguerite_ as a great English
comedienne expressed it to me some years later, of _Juliet_: one must
be forty to play it properly--and then one is too old to play it
properly!
But what a gait she had! Her stride just fitted the stage, her
carriage of neck and head was such as great artists have worked years
to attain--and she was unconscious of it. Her eyes looked sky-blue
under the blonde wig, and the blonde tints were lovely, if not so
fascinatingly surprising as her own.
When she stopped, fixed her great eyes upon _Faust_ reproachfully and
sang, like a sweet, truthful child,
_Non, monsieur, je ne suis belle!
Ni belle, ni demoiselle...._
a little sigh of pleasure ran through the audience: she won them then
and there. It seemed incredible that she was acting--it seemed that
she must be real and that the others were trying to surround her with
the reality she expected, as best they could. She had the sweet
purity of tone--the candour, if I may so call it, often associated
with delicate, small voices and singers of cool, rather inexpressive
temperaments. But _Bruenhilde_ was the part for her, and _Bruenhilde_
was not cool and anything but inexpressive.
The only _Marguerite_ I have ever seen since that resembled hers was
Mme Calve's, and the French artist seemed studied and conscious beside
Margarita. You see, she _was_ young, she _was_ sincere and ingenuous,
she _was_ slender and beautiful--and she had a fresh and lovely voice,
well trained, into the bargain. She would never have made a great
coloratura soprano. Neither her voice nor her temperament inclined to
this. She belonged, properly speaking, to the advance guard of the
natural method, the school of intelligence and subtle dramatic skill.
I cannot imagine Margarita a stout, tightly laced, high-heeled
creature, advancing to the footlights, jewelled finger-tips on massive
chest, emitting a series of _staccato_ fireworks interspersed with
trills and scales apropos of nothing in this world or the next.
Such performances constituted Roger's main objection to the opera, and
though he was considered Philistine once, it is amusing to see how the
tide of even popular opinion is setting his way, now.
So in the great final trio, Margarita did not show at her best,
perhaps; the situation seemed strained, unreal, and the final shriek a
little high for her. But oh, what a lovely creature she was, alone in
her cell! What lines her supple figure gave the loose prison robe,
what poignant, simple, cruelly deserted grief, poured from her big,
girlish eyes! And I do not believe anyone will ever again make such
exquisite pathos of the poor creature's crazed return to her first
meeting with her lover. So clearly did she picture to herself this
early scene that we all saw it too, and lived it over again with the
poor child.
_"Ni belle, ni demoiselle ..."_
[Illustration: IT WAS AFTER THE GARDEN LOVE-SCENE THAT SHE WON HER
RECALLS]
It was the whole of love betrayed, abandoned, yet loving and
forgiving, that little phrase; and I staunchly insist that the good
Papa Gounod deserves credit for it, sentimentalist though he be!
It was after the garden love-scene that she won her recalls, over and
over again. Above the great sheaf of hot-house daisies I sent up to
the footlights she bowed and bowed and bowed again and smiled, and the
jewels flashed on her white shoulders and the yellow braids shook at
her deep, triumphant breaths, as she beamed out over us all, the
wonderful, all-embracing smile of the born artist, that cannot be
taught. Part of that brilliant smile came straight into my misted
eyes, back in the loge, and so extraordinary is the power of such a
success, so completely does that row of footlights cut off the victor
from us who applaud below, that I, even I, who had literally taught
this girl some of the ordinary reserves of decent society, who had
found her a savage (socially speaking) only two years ago, now bowed
low to her, dazed, humble as the man beside me who never saw her
before.
How they pounded and cried, those amusing, sophisticated, babyish
Parisians!
"_Brava, la petite!_" I hear the old gentleman now that turned to me
in amazement, chattering like a well-preserved, middle-aged monkey;
"but it is that it is an American, they tell me? _Ca y est, alors!_ It
is extraordinary, then, _impayable! Je n'en reviens pas!_"
"And why, Monsieur?" I asked.
"For the reason, simply, that it is well known how they are cold,
those women, cold as ice, every one. But this one--Monsieur, I have
seen many _Marguerites_, I who speak to you, but never before has it
arrived to me to envy that fat _Faust_!"
And I (to whom he spoke) believed him thoroughly, I assure you. Though
I doubt if the portly tenor was much flattered, for he had accepted
the role with the idea of carrying off the honours of the evening,
and exhibited, in the event, not a little of that acrimony which is so
curiously inseparable from any collection of the world's great
song-birds. Ever since Music, heavenly maid, was young, she has been
so notoriously at variance with her fellow-musicians as to force the
uninitiated into all sorts of cynical conclusions! Such as the
necessity for some kind of handicap for all these harmonies, some
make-weight for these unnaturally perfect chords. And it is but due to
the various artists to admit that they supply these counter-checks
bravely.
Well I suppose they would be too happy if it were all as harmonious as
it sounds, and we should all (the poor songless rest of us) kill
ourselves for jealousy! And if the fat _Faust_ had really been as
supremely blissful as he should have been when Margarita, with that
indescribably lovely bending twist of her elastic body, drooped out of
her canvas, rose-wreathed cottage window and threw her white arms
about his neck in the most touching and suggestive abandon I have ever
seen on the operatic stage--why, we should have been regretfully
obliged to tear him to pieces, Roger and I and Walter Carter (I am
afraid) and the well-preserved Frenchman!
She was not so philosophical as Goethe nor so saccharine as Gounod,
our Margarita, and I don't know that I am more sentimental than
another; but when the poor child in all her love and ignorance and
simple intoxication with that sweet and terrible brew that Dame Nature
never ceases concocting in her secret still-rooms, handed her white
self over so trustfully to the plump and eager _tenore robusto_, a
sudden disgust and fury at the imperturbable unfairness of that same
inscrutable Dame washed over me like a wave and I could have wept like
the silly Frenchman.
Do not be too scornful of that sad and sordid little stage story, ye
rising generation--it is not for nothing that the great stupid public
of older days, ignorant alike of Teutonics and chromatics, but wise in
pity and terror, as old Aristotle knew, took it to their commonplace
hearts! Do not trouble yourselves to explain to me that Gretchen was
but an episode in a great cosmic philosophy; I knew it once, when I
was young like you. But I am nearly sixty now--worse luck!--and I see
why the cosmic philosophy has been quietly buried and the episode
remains immortal! And so will you some day.
It was a great success for Madame and she basked in it; she had even a
compliment for Roger. In our gay little supper, afterward, we had all
a kind word--an almost pathetically kind word--for Roger. Margarita
herself had never been so attentive to him, so eager for his
ungrudging praise, so openly affectionate with him. He was very kind,
very gentle, but in a quiet way he discouraged her demonstrative
sweetness and led her to talk of her professional future. In her eyes
as she looked at him over her wine-glass I seemed to see something I
had never seen before, a sort of frightened pity; not the terror of a
child cut off by the crowd from its guardian, but rather the fear of
one who sees a one-time comrade on the other side of a widening flood,
and regrets and fears for him and pities his loss and loneliness, but
is driven by Destiny and cannot cross over. I wondered if the others
saw it too, but dared not discover.
It was not altogether a happy _petit souper_, you see; I often think
of it when I assist at similar gatherings, and wonder to myself if in
all the glory and under all the triumph there is not some dark spot
unknown to us flattering guests, some tiny gulf that is growing
relentlessly, though we throw in never so many flowers and jewels to
fill it. The wheel turns ever, and no pleasure of ours but is built on
the shifting sand of some one's pain, even as Alif told me.
We had the _Valentin_ of the opera, a dapper little Frenchman, with us
(I forget his name: he had been very kind to Margarita and stood
between her and the senseless jealousy of the big, handsome tenor more
than once) and I heard him as we left the table remark significantly
to Mme. M----i, with a glance at Roger,
"Monsieur is not artiste, then?"
"Surely that sees itself?" returned the famous teacher with a shrug.
"_Un mari complaisant, alors?_" said the baritone lightly.
Madame had never liked Roger, and was, moreover, a somewhat prejudiced
person, but even her feelings could not prevent the irrepressible
chuckle that greeted this.
"Do not think it, my friend--_jamais de la vie!_" she answered
quickly, with a frank grimace as she caught my eye and guessed that I
had overheard.
No, one could not image Roger as the "husband of his wife." It simply
couldn't be supposed.
I had very little to say to him that night, myself. I felt clumsy and
tactless, somehow, and certain that what I might say would be too much
or too little.
It was Tip whose cheery, "How wonderfully fine she was, Roger! How
proud you must be of her!" saved the day and gave us a chance to shake
hands and leave them in the flower-filled coupe.
Well, after that it was all the same thing. Exercise, practice,
performance, success; then sleep, and exercise again, _da capo_.
She was a prima donna now, our little Margarita, a successful artist,
a public character. "Margarita Josepha," Madame had christened her,
for twenty years ago simple American surnames found no favour with the
impressario, and "_cette charmante Mme. Josepha_," "_artiste vraiment
ravissante_," etc., etc., the critics called her.
As _Juliet_ she looked her loveliest, as _Marguerite_ she acted her
best, as _Aida_ she sang most wonderfully. Indeed it was this last
that captured London and gave rise to the much exaggerated affair of
the Certain Royal Personage. She sang _Aida_ twelve times in one
season (going to London from Paris) and the boys whistled the airs
through the streets and the bands played from it whenever she rode in
the Park. I myself saw the diamond bracelet Miss Jencks returned to
the Duke of S---- (we did not tell Roger, by mutual consent, till much
later) and the Queen's pearl-set brooch when she sang at Windsor
marked at least one satisfying unanimity among members of the royal
family.
I took Mary, long afterward, to hear Mme. G----i in the part Margarita
made famous in London, and when the tears rolled down the child's face
as poor _Aida_ (that barbaric romanesque) dies in melody, portly
though starving, and unconvincingly pale, I wished she might have seen
her mother. There was a death! Nothing in _Aida's_ life could possibly
have become her like Margarita's leaving of it, I am sure.
Roger ceased to go after the first performances, and indeed he was
very busy, and crossed the ocean more than once in the American
interests of his French and English _clientele_. But whoever stopped
at home or went, whoever applauded or yawned, whoever approved of the
present status of the Bradley family or disapproved, one gaunt figure
never left Margarita's side from the moment she left her door till she
returned to it (except for the inevitable separations of the actual
stage-scene, and I think she regretted the necessity for these!) This
figure was Barbara Jencks's, and hers were the cool, uncompromising
eyes into which the enraptured devotee gazed when he followed his card
into the drawing-room, hers the strong and knuckly hands that put his
flowers into water and his more valuable expressions of regard back
into their velvet cases, previous to re-addressing them. She drove
with Margarita, when Sue Paynter did not, and would have ridden with
her, I verily believe, had not Carter and I volunteered to supply that
deficiency.
It was she who received that astonished and, I fear, disappointed kiss
from the German officer at Brussels, when the students drew
Margarita's carriage home from the opera house after her astonishing
triumph in the last act of _Siegfried_. It was an absurd part for
her--she had never done _Elsa_ nor _Elizabeth_, and Mme. M----i was
very angry with her. Herr M----l, the great director, spent the
summer in Italy and Switzerland and was with our party nearly all of
the time. Purely to please himself he taught Margarita the role of
_Bruenhilde_ in _Siegfried_ and insisted on her singing it that winter
in Brussels under him. It was wonderful, and showed me what her real
_forte_ was to be. She was _Bruenhilde_, she did not need to act it.
How the Master himself would have revelled in her!
She was very teachable--one of the most certain indications of her
great capacities. Her _Marguerite_ was almost entirely her own, for
she had not learned how to use dramatic instruction; her _Aida_ was
almost Madame's own, for she had learned, then, and besides, did not
understand the character; her _Bruenhilde_ was herself, trained and
assisted into the best canons of interpretation by a loyal Wagnerian.
It is a short part, of course, but it showed what she could have done
with the rest of it. At thirty-five she could have done the whole
_Ring_; at forty I believe no one could have equalled her.
Carter got himself snarled hopelessly into a tangle with the
government officials in Berlin (he was no diplomat, though a good
fellow, and wild about Margarita, so that poor little Alice had more
than one bad quarter-hour, I'm afraid) and it took Roger a great deal
of Bradley influence with the American consul and a lot of patient
correspondence to unravel his unlucky brother-in-law. This gave Roger
a good excuse for being in and near Germany; whether he would have
stayed without it, I don't know.
The work on Napoleon was done: he had laboured over it in Rome during
the summer, and Margarita had been very sweet, refusing more than one
invitation (at Sue Paynter's earnest request) to stay with him. But it
was only too evident that she did not wholly wish to stay and that
such a situation could not last long. Herr M----l kept her interested,
and Seidl, whom he sent for to hear her practising for _Siegfried_,
was most enthusiastic about her and displayed his admiration a little
too strongly for our peace of mind. His was a developing, forcing
influence, and Margarita showed the effect of it wonderfully; he
inspired her to her best efforts, and Mme. M----i was terribly jealous
of him. Personally, I could not but feel that his undoubtedly great
influence upon her mind and methods represented one of his many
invaluable contributions to the musical history of America--but I
speak as an observer, merely, of an American artist, not as a husband!
Roger and he had what must be confessed was a quarrel (though the
newspaper accounts of a duel were, of course, absurd) over the
advisability of her singing privately for a young German princeling
whom Seidl was very anxious to honour--he was then introducing the
Wagnerian dramas into America and had not been long director of the
Metropolitan Opera House, New York. It all smoothed over and we agreed
to forget it, all of us, but Seidl's pride was hurt and Roger had done
what I had not seen him do for fifteen years--lost his temper badly.
He was not pleasant in a temper, old Roger, like all men of strong,
controlled natures, and Margarita learned a lesson that day that she
never forgot, I suppose. I believe if on the strength of that
impression he had carried her off bodily--flung her over his
saddle-bow, as it were, and ceased to respect her rights for
twenty-four hours, we should all have been spared much strain and
suffering. But he regretted his violence and told her so, which was
fatal, or so it seemed to me. There are occasions when not to take
advantage of a woman is to be unfair to her, and Margarita was very
much a woman.
Well, well, it's all over now, and we have no need to regret that we
did not try a different way. It may be we should have had to pay a
greater price--for nothing lacks its price-mark on life's counter,
more's the pity, and if we are deceived by long credit-accounts, the
more fools we!