Kitabı oku: «Rose of Dutcher's Coolly», sayfa 13
The mystery of human genius came also to Rose as Mr. Harvey pointed out to her the city's most noted men and women. They were mere dabs of color – sober color, for the most part – upon this flood of humankind. She was to Mason, probably, only a neutral spot in the glorious band of color, which swept in a graceful curve back from the footlights. It was wonderful, also, to think that these smiling men were the millionaire directors of vast interests – they seemed without a care in the world.
At last the stage chairs were all filled by a crowd of twanging, booming, sawing, squeaking instrumentalists. Then the leader, a large man of military erectness, came down to the leader's desk and bowed, amidst thunderous applause. Then rapping sharply on his desk he brought orderly silence out of the tumult, and the concert began.
The music did not mean much to Rose during the first half-hour, for the splendor of the whole spectacle dominated the appeal of the instruments. Such music and such audiences were possible only in the largest cities, and that consideration moved her deeply. It seemed too good to be true that she sat here securely, ready to enjoy all that came. It had come to her, too, almost without effort, almost without deserving, she felt.
But there came at last a number on the programme which dimmed the splendor of the spectacle. The voice of Wagner came to her for the first time, and shook her and thrilled her and lifted her into wonderful regions where the green trees dripped golden moss, and the grasses were jeweled in very truth. Wistful young voices rose above the lazy lap of waves, sad with love and burdened with beauty which destroyed. Like a deep-purple cloud death came, slowly, resistlessly, closing down on those who sang, clasped in each other's arms.
They lay dead at last, and up through the purple cloud their spirits soared like gold and silver flame, woven together, and the harsh thunder of the gray sea died to a sullen boom.
When she rose to her feet the girl from the coulé staggered, and the brilliant, moving, murmuring house blurred into fluid color like a wheel of roses.
The real world was gone, the world of imagined things lay all about her. She felt the power to reach out her hand to take fame and fortune.
In that one reeling instant the life of the little coulé, the lonely, gentle old father, and the days of her youth – all her past – were pushed into immeasurable distance. The pulling of weeds in the corn, the driving of cattle to pasture were as the doings of ants in a dirt-heap.
A vast pity for herself sprang up in her brain. She wanted to do some gigantic thing which should enrich the human race. She felt the power to do this, too, and there was a wonderful look on her face as she turned to Isabel. She seemed to be listening to some inner sound throbbing away into silence, and then her comprehension of things at hand came back to her, and Isabel was speaking to her.
"Here's Mr. Mason coming to speak to us," interrupted Mr. Harvey.
She turned to watch him as he came along the aisle behind the boxes; her head still throbbed with the dying pulsations of the music. Everybody seemed to know and greet him with cordial readiness of hand. He came along easily, his handsome blonde face showing little more expression at meeting her than the others, yet when he saw her rapt and flushed face he was touched.
"I came to see how Miss Dutcher was enjoying the evening."
Rose felt a sudden disgust with her name; it sounded vulgarly of the world of weeds and cattle.
In some way she found herself a few moments later walking out through the iron gate into the throng of promenaders back of the seats. It was the most splendid moment of her life. She forgot her fear of Mason in the excitement of the moment. She walked with hands clenched tightly and head lifted. The look on her face, and the burning color in her face made scores of people turn to look at her.
Mason perceived but misinterpreted her excitement. He mistook her entire self-forgetfulness for a sort of vain personal exaltation or rapture of social success.
She saw only dimly the mighty pillars, the massive arches, lit by stars of flame. She felt the carpet under her feet only as a grateful thing which hushed the sound of feet.
They made one circuit with the promenaders, Mason bowing right and left, and talking disjointedly upon indifferent subjects. He felt the tormenting interest of his friends in Rose, and drew her out of the crowd.
"Let us stand here and see them go by," he said. "You liked the music, did you?"
His commonplace question fell upon her like the scream of a peacock amid songs of thrushes. It showed her in a flash of reasoning of which he could not know, that it was possible to be ennuied with glorious harmonies. Her mind asked, "Shall I, too, sometimes wish to talk commonplaces in the midst of such glories?"
"O, it was beyond words!" she said. And then Mason was silent for a little space. He divined her mood at last, but he had something to say which should be said before she returned to her box.
He began at once:
"Let me say, Miss Dutcher, that while the main criticism of your work, which I made in my note this morning, must hold, still I feel the phraseology could be much more amiable. The fact is, I was irritated over other matters, and that irritation undesignedly crept into my note to you."
"I haven't received it," she said looking directly at him for the first time.
"Well then, don't read it. I will tell you what I think you ought to do."
"O, don't talk of it," she said, and her voice was tense with feeling. "All I have written is tonight trash! I can see that. It was all somebody else's thought. Don't let's talk of that now."
He looked down at her face, luminous, quivering with excitement – and understood.
"I forgot," he said gently, "that this was your first concert at the Auditorium. It is beautiful and splendid, even to an habitué like me. I like to come here and forget that work or care exists in the world. I shall enjoy it all the more deeply now by reason of your enthusiasm."
In the wide space back of the seats a great throng of young people were promenading to the left, round and round the massive pillars, in leisurely rustling swing, the men mainly in dress suits, the ladies in soft luminous colors; the heavy carpet beneath their feet gave out no sound, and only the throb of laughter, the murmur of speech and the soft whisper of drapery was to be heard.
It was all glorious beyond words, to the imaginative girl. It flooded her with color, beauty, youth, poetry, music. Every gleaming neck or flashing eye, every lithe man's body, every lover's deferential droop of head, every woman's worshipful upturned glance, came to her with power to arouse and transform. The like of this she had not dreamed of seeing.
Nobody had told her of this Chicago. Nobody could tell her of it, indeed, for no one else saw it as she did. When Mason spoke again his voice was very low and gentle. He began to comprehend the soul of the girl.
"I've no business to advise you. I've come to the conclusion that advice well followed is ruinous. Genius seldom takes advice, and nobody else is worth advising. I took advice and went into a newspaper office twenty years ago. I've been trying ever since to rectify my mistake. I would be a literary if I were not forced to be a newspaper man, just when my powers are freshest. I want to write of today. I want to deal with the city and its life, but I am forced to advise people upon the tariff. I come home at night worn out and the work I do then is only a poor starveling. Now, see this audience tonight! There are themes for you. See these lovers walking before and behind us. He may be a clerk in a bank; she the banker's daughter. That man Harvey, in whose box you sit tonight, was a farmer's boy, and his wife the daughter of a Methodist preacher in a cross-roads town. How did they get where they are, rich, influential, kindly, polished in manner? What an epic!"
"Are you advising me now?" she asked with a smile.
Her penetration delighted him.
"Yes, I am saying now in another way the things I wrote. I hope, Miss Dutcher, you will burn that packet without reading. I would not write it at all now."
They were facing each other a little out of the stream of people. She looked into his face with a bright smile, though her eyes were timorous.
"Do you mean manuscript and all?"
His face was kind, but he answered firmly:
"Yes, burn it all. Will you do it?"
"If you mean it."
"I mean it. You're too strong and young and creative to imitate anybody. Burn it, and all like it. Start anew tonight."
His voice compelled her to a swift resolution.
"I will do it."
He held out his hand with a sudden gesture, and she took it. His eyes and the clasp of his hand made her shudder and grow cold, with some swift, ominous foreknowledge of distant toil and sorrow and joy.
The lights were dimmed mysteriously, and Mason said:
"They are ready to begin again; we had better return."
He led her back to the box, and Mrs. Harvey flashed a significant look upon him, and said in a theatrical aside:
"Aha! at last."
Isabel said:
"Come and see us tomorrow at six – a 'pow-wow.'"
The music which came after could not hold Rose's attention. How could it, in the face of the tremendous changes which were in progress in her brain? What had she done? To an almost perfect stranger she had promised to burn all the work of her pen thus far.
And an hour before she had almost hated, certainly she had feared, that man. While the music throbbed and wailed and clashed, she sat with blood throbbing in her ears and at her throat, longing to cry out, to sing and to weep. She had said little of late to any one, but she had finally settled upon one ambition – to write, to be a great poetess. After vicissitudes and false enthusiasm she had come back to the first great ambition which she had confessed to Thatcher years before, in the little coulé school-house. And now, at the bidding of a stranger, she had made a promise to burn her work and start again.
But had not the music and the splendid spectacle before her almost determined her before he had spoken?
Then she came back to the wondrous gentleness which was in his voice, to the amazing change in his eyes. The man who had held her hand was not the worn, cynical man she had feared. He was younger and handsomer, too. She shuddered again, with some powerful emotion at the thought of his calm, compelling, down-thrusting glance into her eyes. His mind appeared to her to have a shoreless sweep.
The music rose to a pounding, blaring climax, and the audience, applauding, began to rise to go home, breaking into streams and pools and whirling masses of color.
"Well, my dear, how have you enjoyed the evening?" asked Mrs. Harvey, cordially.
"Very much, indeed. I never can thank you enough."
"It has been a pleasure to feel your enthusiasm. It makes us all young again. I've asked Dr. Herrick to bring you to see us; I hope you will come."
The hearty clasp of her hand moved the motherless girl deeply, and her voice trembled with emotion as she replied:
"It will be a great pleasure to me, Mrs. Harvey."
Mrs. Harvey clutched her in her arms and kissed her.
"You splendid girl! I wish you were mine," she said, and thereafter Rose felt no fear in her presence.
"I don't care whether she's a genius or not," Mrs. Harvey said to Isabel, as they walked out to the carriage. "She's a good girl, and I like her, and I'll help her. You figure out anything I can properly do and I'll do it. I don't know another girl who could have carried off that cheap little dress the way she did. She made it look like a work of art. She's a wonder! Think of her coming from a Wisconsin farm!"
Isabel rejoiced.
"I knew you'd like her." She leaned over and said in a low voice: "I'd like Elbert to see her."
Mrs. Harvey turned a quick eye upon her.
"Well, if you aren't a matchmaker!"
As they came out in the throng it seemed as if everybody knew the Harveys and Isabel. Out in the street the cabs had gathered, like huge beetles, standing in patient rows in the gaslight.
The bellowing of numbers, the slam of carriage doors, the grind of wheels, the shouts of drivers, made a pandemonium to Rose, but Mr. Harvey, with the same gentle smile on his face, presented his ticket to the gigantic negro, who roared enormously:
"Ninety-two! Ninety-two!"
"Here we are!" Mr. Harvey called finally, and handed the women in with the same unhurried action, and the homeward ride began. There was little chance for talk, though Mrs. Harvey did talk.
Rose sat in silence. This had been another great period of growth. She could still feel the heat and turmoil in her brain. It was as if upon a seed-bed of quick-shooting plants a bright, warm light had been turned, resulting in instant, magical activity. At her door they put her down, and once more she thanked them.
"It's nothing at all, my dear; we hope to do more for you," said Mrs. Harvey. "I want you to come to dinner soon. You'll come?"
"With pleasure," Rose responded, quite as a man might have done.
CHAPTER XX
ROSE SETS FACE TOWARD THE OPEN ROAD
When Rose reached her room, she found the packet of poems lying on her desk. It had come in the afternoon mail.
She sat down by the toilet table with a burning flush on her face. A world seemed some way to lie between her present self and the writer of those imitative verses. She wished to see, yet feared to see what he had written, and taking up the packet she fingered the string while she meditated. She had not absolutely promised not to read the letter, though she had pledged herself to burn the poems.
Her life was so suddenly filled with new emotions and impulses, that she was bewildered by them. The music, the audience-room, the splendid assemblage, and some compelling power in Mason – all of these (or he alone) had changed her point of view. It was a little thing to the great city, a little thing to him probably, but to her it was like unto the war of life and death.
What, indeed, was the use of being an echo of passion, a copy? She had always hated conformity; she hated to dress like other girls; why should she be without individuality in her verse, the very part where, as Mason had intimated, she should be most herself?
She had the chance to succeed. The people seemed ready to listen to her if she had something to say; and she had something to say – why not say it?
She arose, tense and white with resolution, and opened the stove door and dropped the packet in, and closed the door and held it as if she feared the packet might explode in her face, or cry out at her. In her poems she would have had the heroine fling it in the grate and snatch it out again, but having no grate the stove must serve, and there could be no snatching at the packet, no remorseful kisses of the charred body. It was gone in a dull roar.
She sat down and waited till the flame died out, and then drew up to her desk and wrote swiftly for an hour. She grew sleepy at last, as the tumult of her brain grew quieter. Just before she went to sleep all her lovers came before her: Carl, in the strawberry-scented glade; William de Lisle, shining of limb, courtesying under the lifting canvas roof; Dr. Thatcher, as he looked that afternoon in the school-room; then Forest Darnlee, with the physical beauty of William De Lisle, but vain and careless; then Professor Ellis, seated at his desk in the chalk-laden air, or perched on the ladder beneath the great telescope, a man who lived in abstract regions far from sense and sound; then Tom Harris, lithe, graceful, always smiling – Tom, who had the songs of birds, the smell of flowers, the gleam of sunset-water leagued with him – who almost conquered, but who passed on like a dapple of purple shadow over the lake.
And now she faced two others, for she could see that Owen was turning to her from Mary, and he had great charm. He was one of the cleanest-souled men she had ever known; he had, also, a strange touch of paganism, of mystery, as of free spaces and savage, unstained wildernesses, and he could give her a home, and he would allow her freedom. He would be her subject, not her master.
Then there was Mason – of him what? She did not know. He was outside her knowledge of men. She could neither read his face nor understand his voice. He scared her with a look or a phrase. Sometimes he looked old and cynical, but tonight how tenderly and sympathetically he had spoken! How considerately silent he had been!
When she awoke, Mary was standing looking down at her.
"If you're going to have any breakfast, Rose, you'd better be stirring. It's nine o'clock, and everything's ready to clear away. What kind of time did you have?"
Rose resented her question, but forced herself to answer:
"Beautiful!"
"I saw you in the box. Owen and I were in the second balcony. You were just scrumptious! I wanted to throw a kiss at you." She fell upon Rose and squeezed her, quilt and all, in her long arms. "My stars! I wish I was lovely and a poet."
She had nothing but joy over her idol's good fortune, and it made Rose feel guilty to think how resentful and secretive she had become. There was coming into her friendship with Mary a feeling which prevented further confidence – a feeling that Mary was not a suitable confidant, and could not understand the subtleties of her position, in which Rose was quite correct.
With Mary, procedure was always plain sailing. Either she was in love and wanted to marry, or she wasn't. Her ideals changed comparatively little, and were healthily commonplace. Her friendships were quick, warm and stable. She was the country girl in the city, and would be so until death. If she felt disposed, she chewed gum or ate an apple on the street like a boy, and she walked on the Lake Shore Sunday evening with Owen, unconscious (and uncaring) of the servant-girls and their lovers seated on every bench.
So Rose had grown away from her friend. She felt it dimly the first week. She felt it vividly on the morning after the concert, and it troubled her. Her life was too subtle, too complicated and too problematic for honest, freckle-faced, broad-cheeked Mary to analyze.
Then, too, there was the question of Owen. Soon Mary must see how he set face toward her, but she felt quite equal to answering him when Owen came to speak, because his appeal to her was not in the slightest degree sensuous, as Tom Harris' had been.
She spent the day in deep thought, writing some lines which came to her, and writing a letter home. She filled it full of love and praise for "pappa John," as if in remorse for growing so far away from him.
That done she fell back upon her group of friends; upon the concert, upon thought of that wonderful promenade with Mason.
The world of art seemed so secure and reposeful, so filled with splendor of human endeavor. She drew her breath in a mighty inspiration, and resolved to be a part of it. Art had always seemed to her so far off, something European, and now she seemed to be in immediate contact with it, and soared into exultation for a day, falling soon into dreary doubt.
Her literary ideals were so hopelessly confused. She had lost the desire to write as she had been writing, and there seemed nothing left for her to do. She had so few convictions and so little experience! The door had closed upon her old forms of action, and yet the way Mason had pointed out to her was dark and utterly bewildering. She felt great things moving around her; themes, deeds that were enormous but not defined. She could not quite lay hold upon them.
She went down the street to Dr. Herrick's house, feeling that she was committing herself to something. She knew that Isabel had taken her case in hand, and that she was to meet other young men there. She could not resent it, for the zeal of her new-found friend was manifestly from the heart – it could not be otherwise. Of what advantage to Dr. Herrick could it be to take her up – a poor country girl?
In fact, she was puzzled by this overpowering kindness. There was so little apparent reason for it all. She could not, of course, understand the keen delight of introducing a powerful and fresh young mind to the wonders of the city. She had not grown weary of "sets" and "circles," and of meeting the same commonplace people again and again, as Mrs. Harvey had. Isabel's position was different, but she had an equal delight, more subtle and lasting, in seeing the genius (as she believed) of the girl win its way, and besides, the girl, herself, pleased her mightily.
Isabel Herrick's life was one of deep earnestness and high aims. She was the daughter of a physician in an interior city. She had worked her way up from the bottom in the usual American fashion by plucky efforts constantly directed to one end, and was the head of the house of Herrick, which consisted of her young sister, a brother at college and her aged mother, now an invalid.
She had been one of the first three girls to enter the medical school, and she had been their shield and fortress in the storm which followed their entrance into the dissecting room. The battle was short but decisive. Her little head was lifted and her face white as she said:
"Men – I won't say gentlemen – I'm here for business, and I'm here to stay. If you're afraid of competition from a woman you'd better get out of the profession."
In the dead silence which followed a lank country fellow stepped out and raised his voice.
"She's right, and I'm ready to stand by her, and I'll see she's let alone."
Others shouted: "Of course she's right!" by which it appeared the disturbance was of the few and not the mass of students, a fact which Isabel inferred. She spoke a grateful word to the lanky student, and Dr. Sanborn found his wife right there.
There was little for Isabel to learn of the sordid and vicious side of men. She knew them for what they were, polygamous by instinct, insatiable as animals, and yet she had been treated on the whole with courteous – often too courteous – kindness. Her dainty color and her petite figure won over-gallant footway everywhere, though she often said:
"Gentlemen, I have studied my part. I know what I am doing and I ask only a fair field and no favors."
Thatcher and Sanborn had been her close companions in the stern, hard course they set themselves; each had said with vast resolution to the other: "I'm not to be left behind." And each had sworn to take no mediocre position. Thatcher had made apparently the least mark in the world, but he was writing a monograph which was expected to give important facts to the medical profession. He had written to Sanborn several times: "You have the advantage of association with the 'Little Corporal.'"
They called her "Little Corporal" among themselves. Her sternly sweet face had a suggestion of Napoleon in it, and then she ordered them about so naturally and led them so inevitably in everything she undertook.
It was into the hands of the "Little Corporal" that Rose had fallen, and all Isabel's enthusiasm was roused in her behalf. Her own little sister was a sweet, placid little thing, who had inherited the body, and spirit as well, of her mother, while Isabel had inherited the mind of her father in the body of her mother.
Something of this Thatcher had told Rose, part of it Isabel had told, and it made only one definite impression on Rose – this, that a woman could succeed if she set her teeth hard and did not waste time.
She found Isabel already surrounded by company. She made every other Sunday evening an informal "at home," and certain well-known artists and professional people dropped in to talk awhile, or to sit at her generous table. It was a good place to be and Rose had perception enough to feel that.
"O, you dear child! I'm glad to see you. There's some one here you'll be glad to see."
Rose flushed a little, thinking of Mason.
"It's an old friend – Dr. Thatcher."
Rose clapped her hands: "O, is he? I'm so glad; it's almost like seeing the folks."
"I've asked Elbert Harvey and Mr. Mason also; I didn't want you to think I had no friends but doctors. It must seem to you as if the world is made up of doctors. But it isn't."
Thatcher greeted Rose quietly but with a pressure of the hand which made up for his impassivity of countenance. He trembled a little as he sat down and watched her greeting Sanborn and Mason.
Fear and admiration were both present in her heart as Mason took her hand.
She forced herself to look into his face, and started to find his eyes so terribly penetrating.
"I burned the packet," she said with a constrained smile.
His eyes grew softer and a little humorous.
"Did you indeed. Without opening it?"
"Yes."
"Heroic girl!"
"Am I not?" she said over her shoulder as Isabel dragged her toward a tall, smooth-faced young fellow who stood talking with Etta.
"Elbert, this is Miss Dutcher – Rose, young Mr. Harvey, son of our hostess at the concert."
Young Harvey seemed much taken back as he faced Rose, and shook hands in current angular fashion. His mind formulated these opinions:
"She's a stunner! Caroline was dead right!" By "Caroline" he meant his mother.
Rose placed him at once. He was another college man. Paul and Etta joined them and they made a fine group. They were soon as free as schoolmates, laughing, telling stories, and fighting over the East and the West.
Rose stoutly defended the western colleges; they had their place, she said.
"So they have," Elbert said, "but let them keep it."
"Their place is at the head, and that's where we'll put them soon," she said.
Elbert told a story about hazing a western boy at Yale. He grew excited and sprang up to dramatize it. He stood on one foot and screwed up his face, while the rest shrieked with laughter, all except Rose, who thought it unjust.
Mason looked on from his low chair with a revealing touch of envious sadness. He had gone past that life – past the land of youth and love – past the islands of mirth and minstrelsy. He was facing a cold, gray sea, with only here and there a grim granite reef gnawing the water into foam.
It made him long to be part of that again, therefore he valued Rose more at that moment than ever before. "The girl has imagination, she has variety. She is not a simple personality. At the concert she was exalted, rapt, her eyes deep. Tonight she is a school-girl. Then it was Wagner – now it is college horse-play."
Isabel came up to sit a moment by him.
"Isn't she fine? I think I surprised young Harvey. I thought I'd like to have her meet him – he's such a fine fellow. She should meet someone else beside us old fogies."
Mason winced a little.
"Well now, that's pleasant! Do you call me an old fogy?"
She laughed:
"O, we're not old in years, but we're old in experience. The bloom of the grape is lost."
"But the grape is ripe, and we still have that. The bloom – what is it? A nest for bacteria."
"But it is so beautiful with the bloom on," she said wistfully. "I'd take it again, bacteria and all. See those young people! The meeting of their eyes is great as fame, and the touch – the accidental touch of their hands or shoulders, like a return of lost ships. I am thirty-three years of age and I've missed that somewhere."
Mason lifted his eye-brows:
"Do you mean to say that the touch of Sanborn's hand does not hasten your blood?"
"I do – and yet I love him as much as I shall ever love anybody – now."
Mason studied her, and then chanted softly:
"'Another came in the days that were golden,
One that was fair, in the days of the olden
Time, long ago!'
You've never told me about that."
She smiled. "No, but I will some time – perhaps."
She led the way out to supper with Dr. Thatcher, and the rest followed without quite breaking off conversation, a merry, witty procession.
Rose was conscious of a readjustment of values. Dr. Thatcher had less weight in the presence of these people, but Mason – Mason easily dominated the table without effort. Indeed, he was singularly silent, but there was something in the poise of his head, in the glance of his eyes, which showed power and insight into life.
The young folks, led by young Harvey took possession of the table, and laughter rippled from silence to silence like a mountain stream. Young Harvey aided at the chafing-dish with the air of an adept, and Isabel was almost as light-hearted in laughter as he.
Thatcher and Mason seemed to sit apart from it, and so it was Mason found opportunity to say:
"You knew our young friend of the coulé – discovered her, in fact?"
"Yes, as much as any one could discover her. It's a little early to talk of her as if she had achieved fame."
"Dr. Herrick thinks she's on the instant of going up higher, and so we're all hanging to her skirts in hopes of getting a rise."
Thatcher didn't like Mason's tone.
"Rose is a hard worker. If she rises any higher it will be by the same methods which put her through college." He spoke with a little air of proprietorship.
Mason felt the rebuff, but he was seeking information about Rose, therefore he ignored it.
"She's an only child, I believe."
"Yes; her father is a hard-working, well-to-do farmer in a little 'coolly' in Wisconsin."
"It's the same old story, I suppose; he doesn't realize that he's lost his daughter to the city of Chicago. We gain at his expense."
Mason's mind had something feminine about it, and he saw as never before how attractive to a girl a fine young fellow like Harvey could be. Being rich he was lifted above worry. His activity was merely wholesome exercise, and his flesh was clean and velvety as a girl's. He was strong, too, as it was the fashion of college men of his day to be. He had never known want or care in his beautiful life. He was, moreover, a clean boy. Money had not spoiled his sterling nature. It was no wonder that Rose's eyes grew wide and dark as they rested on him. They were physically a beautiful pair and their union seemed the most inevitable thing in the world.
Isabel leaned over to say:
"Aren't they enjoying themselves? I wish Mrs. Harvey could see them."
