Read Ebook: Mary Wollaston by Webster Henry Kitchell

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Ebook has 929 lines and 116687 words, and 19 pages

Paula's clothes, too, worried her elderly sister-in-law a little, especially the house-dresses that she affected. They were beautiful, heaven knew; more simply beautiful perhaps than it was right that clothes should be. There was nothing indecent about them. Dear Paula was almost surprisingly nice in those ways. But that thing she had on now, for instance;--a tunic of ecru colored silk that she had pulled on over her head, with a little over-dress of corn colored tulle, weighted artfully here and there that it mightn't fly away. And a string of big lumpish amber beads. She could have got into that costume in about two minutes and there was probably next to nothing under it. From the on-looker's point of view, it mightn't violate decorum at all; indeed, clearly did not. But Miss Wollaston herself, if she hadn't been more or less rigidly laced, stayed, gartered, pinched, pried and pulled about; if she could have moved freely in any direction without an admonitory--"take care"--from some bit of whalebone somewhere, wouldn't have felt dressed at all. There ought to be something perpetually penitential about clothes. The biblical story of the fall of man made that clear, didn't it?

John sprang up as his wife came into the room; went around the table and held her chair for her. "My dear, I didn't know I was robbing you of half a night's sleep," he said. "You should have turned me out."

She reached up her strong white arms for his head as he bent over her and pulled it down for a kiss.

He was back in his own chair by now and his sister breathed a little more freely.

"Pig?" he asked.

"Oh, because you weren't there," said Paula. "Because I didn't sing before, when you asked me to."

"Dearest!" John remonstrated,--pleased though with the apology, you could see with half an eye,--"it was inexcusable of me to have asked you. It was a dull crowd from a musical point of view. The only thing I minded was having, myself, put you into a position where you had to refuse. I am glad you were able to make it up to yourself after."

"That was not why I didn't," Paula said. She always spoke rather deliberately and never interrupted any one. "I mean it wasn't because the others weren't especially musical. But I couldn't have sung without asking Novelli to play. And he couldn't have refused--being new and a little on trial you know. And that drawing-room piano, so badly out of tune, would have been terrible for him. There's no knowing what he mightn't have done."

John's face beamed triumph. "I might have known you had an unselfish reason for it," he said. He didn't look at his sister but, of course, the words slanted her way.

It was perfectly characteristic of Miss Wollaston that she did not, however, make any immediate attempt to set herself right. She attended first very competently to all of Paula's wants in the way of breakfast and saw her fairly launched on her chilled grapefruit. Then she said, "A man is coming to tune the piano this morning."

It was more than a statement of fact. Indeed I despair of conveying to you all the implications and moral reflections which Miss Wollaston contrived to pack into that simple sentence.

The drawing-room piano was what an artillerist would speak of as one of the sensitive points along the family front. It had been a present to the Wollaston household from the eldest of John's brothers, the unmarried one Miss Wollaston had kept house for so many years before he died; the last present, it turned out, he ever made to anybody. Partly perhaps, because it was a sacred object, the Wollaston children took to treating it rather irreverently. The "Circassian grand" was one of its nicknames and the "Siamese Elephant" another. It did glare in the otherwise old-fashioned Dearborn Avenue drawing-room and its case did express a complete recklessness of expense rather than any more austere esthetic impulse.

Paula ignored it in rather a pointed way; being a musician she might have been expected to see that it was kept in tune. She had a piano of her own up in the big room at the top of the house that had once been the nursery and over this instrument, she made, Miss Wollaston felt, a silly amount of fuss. Supposedly expert tuners were constantly being called in to do things to it and nothing they did ever seemed to afford Paula any satisfaction.

The aura that surrounded Miss Wollaston's remark included, then, the conviction that the drawing-room piano, being a sacred memory, couldn't be out of tune in the first place; that Paula, in the second, ought to have attended to it; and third the fact that it was to be tuned this morning, really made it a perfectly possible instrument for Mr. Novelli to have played upon last night.

John missed none of that. He hadn't been observing his sister during half a century for nothing. He glanced over to see how much of it his wife took in; but the fact, in this instance, was all that interested Paula.

"It was awfully clever of you," she said, "to get hold of a tuner. Who is he? Where did you find him?"

"I found him in the park," said Miss Wollaston brightly, responding to the little thrill you always felt when Paula focused her attention upon you. "He was sitting on a bench when I drove by just after lunch. I don't know why I noticed him but I did and when I came back hours later, he was still sitting there on the same bench. He was in uniform; a private, I think, certainly not an officer. It struck me as rather sad, his sitting there like that, so I stopped the car and spoke to him. He got his discharge just the other day, it seemed. I asked him if he had a job and he said, no, he didn't believe he had. Then I asked him what his trade was and he said he was a piano tuner. So I told him he might come this morning and tune ours."

It was Paula's bewildered stare that touched off John's peal of laughter. Alone with his sister he might have smiled to himself over the lengths she went in the satisfaction of her passion for good works. But Paula, he knew, would just as soon have invited a strange bench-warming dentist to come and work on her teeth by way of being kind to him.

Miss Wollaston, a flush of annoyance on her faded cheeks, began making dignified preparations to leave the table and John hastily apologized. "I laughed," he said,--disingenuously because it wouldn't do to implicate Paula--"over the idea that perhaps he didn't want a job at all and made up on the spur of the moment the unlikeliest trade he could think of. And how surprised he must have been when you took him up."

"He did not seem surprised," Miss Wollaston said. "He thanked me very nicely and said he would come this morning. At ten, if that would be convenient. Of course if you wish to put it off...."

"Not at all," said John. He rose when she did and--this was an extra bit, an act of contrition for having wounded her--went with her to the door. "It was a good idea," he said; "an excellent way of--of killing two birds with one stone."

Paula was smiling over this when he came back to her. "It doesn't matter, does it?" he asked.

She shook her head. "It isn't that it's out of tune, really; it's just--hopeless."

It was strange how like a knife thrust that word of hers--hopeless--went through him. Perfectly illogical, of course; she was not speaking of his life and hers but of that ridiculous drawing-room piano. Somehow the mere glow she had brought into the room with her, the afterglow of an experience he had no share in producing, had become painful to him; made him feel old. He averted his eyes from her with an effort and stared down at his empty plate.

A moment later she came around the table and seated herself, facing him, upon the arm of his chair; clasped his neck with her two hands. "You're tired," she said. "How much sleep did you have last night?" And on his admitting that he hadn't had any, she exclaimed against his working himself to death like that.

No memory, though he made a conscious effort to recover it, of his audacious success during the small hours of that morning in bringing triumphantly into the world the small new life that Pollard would have destroyed, came back to fortify him; no trace of his own afterglow that had so fascinated and alarmed his sister. "I shall sleep fast for an hour or two this morning and make it up," he told Paula.

"I do wish you might have been there last night," she said after a little silence. "I don't believe I've ever sung so well;--could have, at least, if there had been room enough to turn around in. It was all there; it's getting bigger all the time. Not just the voice, if you know what I mean, darling, but what I could do with it."

"It was partly Novelli, I suspect," he said. "Having him for an accompanist, I mean. He's very good indeed, isn't he?"

"Oh, yes, he's good," she assented absently. "Awfully good. And he is a nice furry little enthusiastic thing; like a faun, rather; exciting to play with of course. But it wasn't that. It's you, really--being in love with you the way I am. I suppose that's the very best thing that could possibly have happened to me. I'm another person altogether from that girl you found in Vienna. Just where she left off, I begin."

She uttered a little laugh then of sheer exuberance and with a strong embrace, pressed his head hard against her breast. He yielded passively, made no response of his own beyond a deep-drawn breath or two. A moment later when she had released him and risen to her feet, he rose too.

"Would Novelli be procurable?" he asked. "Could he be engaged regularly, as an accompanist for you and so on?"

She looked at him rather oddly. "Why, I don't need him," she said, "as long as I am just playing. Of course, if I were to go regularly to work, somebody like him would be almost necessary."

There was a tight little silence for a few seconds after that, he once more evading her eyes. "It seems to me you work most of the time as it is," he said. Then he announced his intention of going up-stairs to take a nap. He wasn't going to the hospital until eleven.

He did go up to his room and lay down upon his bed and, eventually, he slept. But for an hour, his mind raced like an idle motor. That nonsense of Lucile's about Portia Stanton's folly in marrying a young musician whose big Italian eyes would presently begin looking soulfully at some one else. Had they already looked like that at Paula? Jealousy itself wasn't a base emotion. Betraying it was all that mattered. You couldn't help feeling it for any one you loved. Paula, bending over that furry faun-like head, reading off the same score with him, responding to the same emotions from the music.... Fantastic, of course. There could be no sane doubt as to who it was that Paula was in love with. That embrace of hers, just now. Curious how it terrified him. He had felt like a mouse under the soft paw of a cat. An odd symptom of fatigue.

What a curious thing life was. How widely it departed from the traditional patterns. Here in his own case, that Fate should save the one real passion of his life for the Indian summer of it. And that it should be a reciprocated passion. The wiseacres were smiling at him, he supposed; smiling as the world always smiled at the spectacle of infatuate age mating with tolerant, indifferently acquiescent youth. Smiled and wondered how long it would be before youth awoke and turned to its own. Well, he could afford to smile at the wiseacres. And at the green inexperienced young, as well, who thought that love was exclusively their affair--children the age of Mary taking their sentimental thrills so seriously!

Four years now he had been married to Paula and the thing had never chilled,--never gone stale. How different from the love of his youth that had led to his former marriage, was this burning constant flame. Paula was utterly content with him. She had given up her career for him.--No. She hadn't done that. He had not asked her to do that. Had not, on the contrary, her marriage really furthered it? Was she not more of a person to-day than the discouraged young woman he had found singing for pittances the leading dramatic soprano r?les in the minor municipal operas of Germany and Austria? Wasn't that what she had said this morning--that falling in love with him was the best thing that could possibly have happened to her? He had taken it wrong when she said it, as if she were regarding him just as an instrument that served her purpose, a purpose that lay beyond him; outside him.

That was what had given him that momentary pang of terror. Fatigue, of course. He ought to go to sleep. Paula was refraining from her morning practise just so that he could. Or was that why? Was she dreaming, up in the music room where she was never to be disturbed,--of last night--of Novelli? Damnation....

SEA DRIFT

Paula went up to the music room after breakfast, stood at one of its open windows for a few minutes breathing in the air of an unusually mild March and then abruptly left it; dressed for the street and went out for a walk.

She was quite as much disturbed over the scene in the dining-room as her husband had been. His flash of jealousy over the little Italian pianist, instantly recognizable through its careful disguise, had only endeared John Wollaston to her further, if that were possible. She had laughed and hugged his worried old head tight against her breast.

But his refusal to face facts about her musical career was another thing altogether. Once more he had, patently and rather pitiably, evaded the subject of her going seriously to work. Did he think that she could go on indefinitely parading a parlor accomplishment for his society friends,--singing nice little English songs for Wallace Hood? It was too ridiculous! That hadn't been their understanding when she married him.

What she had been sure of last night as never before, she had tried down there in the dining-room to convey to him; that her powers were ripe, were crying out for use. She had failed simply because he had refused to see what she was driving at. It was just another form of jealousy really, she supposed.

She was not an introspective person, but this, clearly, was something that wanted thinking over. It was to "think" that she went out for the walk. Only, being Paula, the rhythm of her stride, the sparkle of the spring air, the stream of sharp new-minted sensations incessantly assailing eye and ear, soon swamped her problem; sunk it beneath the level of consciousness altogether. Long before ten o'clock when she came swinging along Dearborn Avenue toward her husband's house, she had "walked off" her perplexities.

A block from the house she found herself overtaking a man in uniform and slackened her pace a little in order not to pass him. There was something unmilitary about the look of him that mildly amused her. It was not that he slouched nor shuffled nor that he was ill-made, though he was probably one of those unfortunates whom issue uniforms never fit. He carried a little black leather satchel, and it broke over Paula that here perhaps was Lucile's piano tuner. She half formed the intention to stay away another hour or two until he should have had time to finish. But he interfered with that plan by stopping in front of the house and looking at it as if making up his mind whether to go in.

It was an odd look he had, but distinctly an engaging one. He was not criticizing the architecture, if so it could be called, of the house-front. Yet there was a sort of comfortable detachment about him which precluded the belief that it was a mere paralyzing shyness that held him there.

Paula abandoned her intention of walking by. She stopped instead as she came up to him and said, "Are you coming in here? If you are, I'll let you in." She fished an explanatory latch-key out of her wrist-bag as she went up the steps.

"Why," he said, "I believe this is the house where I'm expected to tune a piano."

In the act of thrusting home her key, Paula stopped short, turned irrepressibly and stared at him. She was one of that very small number of American-born singers who take the English language seriously and she knew good speech when she heard it. It was one of the qualities which had first attracted her to Doctor John. This man's speaking voice would have arrested her attention pleasantly anywhere. Coming from the private soldier Lucile had told to come round to tune the piano, it really startled her. She turned back to the door and opened it.

"Yes," she said, "they're expecting you. Come in and I'll show you the piano."

She might, of course, merely have indicated the drawing-room door to him with a nod and gone up-stairs, but she was determined now to wait and hear him say something more. So she led the way into the drawing-room and quite superfluously indicated the Circassian grand with a gesture. Then she looked back at him quickly enough to surprise the expression that flickered across his face at the sight of it. A mere cocking of one eyebrow it was, but amusingly expressive. So, too, was the way he walked over toward it, with an air of cautious determination, of readiness for anything, that made Paula want to laugh. He dropped down sidewise on the bench, turned up the lid and dug his fingers into the keyboard.

At the noise he evoked from that pampered instrument she did laugh aloud. It was not a piano tuner's arpeggio but a curiously teasing mixed dissonance she couldn't begin to identify. She thought she heard him say, "My God!" but couldn't be sure. He repeated his chord pianissimo and held it down, reached up and echoed it in the upper half of the keyboard; then struck, hard, two octaves in the bass.

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