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 pet.i.te!_" 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 a.s.sure 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-gla.s.s 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 _pet.i.t souper_, you see; I often think of it when I a.s.sist 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 _Ada_ 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 _Ada_ 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 _Ada_ (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 _Ada"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 _Brunhilde_ 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 _Brunhilde_, 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 _Ada_ was almost Madame"s own, for she had learned, then, and besides, did not understand the character; her _Brunhilde_ was herself, trained and a.s.sisted 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!
CHAPTER XXVIII
ARABIAN NIGHTS IN ENGLAND
I had much to reconstruct that season in regard to Margarita. I had found her once before, in Paris, no longer a child, but a woman; I found her now no woman merely, but a woman of the world. It seems incredible, indeed, and I have puzzled over it many an hour when the demon of sciatica has clawed at my hip and Hodgson"s faithful hands have dropped fatigued from his ministrations. How she did it, how an untrained, emotional little savage, with hands as quick to strike as the paws of a cub lioness, with tongue as unbridled as the tongue of a four-year-old, with no more religion than a Parisian _boulevardier_, with not one-tenth the instruction of a London board-school child--how such a creature became in two years an (apparently) finished product of civilisation, I am at a loss to comprehend. That she did it is certain. My own eyes have seen Boston Brahmins drinking her tea gratefully; my own ears have heard New York fashionables babbling in her drawing-room. As for London, she dominated one whole season, and not to be able to bow to her, when she rode on her grey gelding of a morning, was to argue oneself unbowed to! Paris can never forget her, for did she not invent an entirely new _Marguerite_? And the Republic of Art is not ungrateful. She would have been a social success in Honolulu or Lapland, the witch!
Whether her ancestor the prince or her ancestress the actress made her development possible, whether her Connecticut grandfather or her Virginia grandmother taught her, how much she owed her bandit father who defied the world and her mother, the nun, who won it--both for love--who shall say?
When I look back on those wonderful months I find that the fanciful sprite whose province it is to tint imperishably the choice pictures that shall brighten the last grey days, has selected for my gallery not those hours when the footlights stretched between us, though one would suppose them beyond all doubt the most brilliant, but quaint, unexpected bits, sudden, unrehea.r.s.ed scenes that stand out like tiny, jewelled landscapes viewed through a reversed telescope, or white sudden statues at the end of a dark corridor.
There is that delicious afternoon when we went, she and I and Sue Paynter and an infatuated undergrad, to Oxford together, and ate strawberries and hot b.u.t.tered tea-cake and extraordinary little buns choked with plums, and honey breathing of clover and English meadows, and drank countless cups of strong English tea with blobs of yellow, frothing cream atop. Heavens, how we ate, and how we talked, and how tolerantly the warm, grey walls, ivy-hung and statue-niched, smiled through the long, opal English sunset at our frivolous and ephemeral chatter! They have listened to so much, those walls, and we shall perish and wax old as a garment, and still the tea and strawberries shall brew and bloom along the emerald turf, and infatuated youths shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice of their charmer. Not the pyramids themselves give me that sense of the continuity of the generations, the ebb and flow of youth and youth"s hot loves and hot regrets and the inexorable twilight that makes placid middle age, as do those grey walls and blooming closes of what I sometimes think is the very heart"s core of England. My mother"s countrymen may fill London with their national caravanseries and castles with their nation"s lovely (if somewhat nasal) daughters, but Oxford shall defy them forever.
The infatuated undergrad was the owner of a banjo, an instrument hitherto unknown to Margarita and in regard to which she was vastly curious, and at her request he and three of his mates blushingly sang for her some of the American negro melodies then so popular among them. She was delighted with them and soon began to hum and croon unconsciously, the velvet of her voice mingling most piquantly with their sweet throaty English singing. By little and little her tones swelled louder and more bell-like: theirs softened gradually, till the harmony, so simple, yet so inevitable, dwindled to the nearest echo and barely breathed the quaint, primitive words:
_"Nellie was a lady-- Last night she died ..."_
Those deep tones of hers, stolen from envious contraltos, turned in our ears to a mourning purple; a sombre, tender gloom haunted us, and the sorrow of life, that alone binds us together who live, hung like a lifting cloud over all who came within the magic radius of her voice.
The people gathered like bees to a honeycomb from all sides; black caps and pale clear draperies drifted into a wondering circle; the clink of cups, the murmur of gentle English voices died softly away and the silence that was always her royal right spread around her.
_"Toll the bell for lovely Nell, My dark ... Virginia ... bride!"_
Who they were, those listening hundreds, I could not say for my life.
I suppose they must have been some garden party--I distinctly recall the gaiters of a bishop and the coloured linings of more than one doctor"s hood among them. They are as sudden, as unexplained in my memory, as those crowds in dreams, so definite, so individualised, where haunting, special faces stand out and hands clasp and shoulders touch--and all fades away. Around the vivid emerald lawn they group themselves, and Margarita, a pearl in pearly trailing laces, sits on a stone bench, defaced and mossy, in the centre, at the back; the lads adore at her feet, the banjo drops tinkling handfuls of chords at intervals, the birds flutter through the ivy overhead, the watered turf smells strong and sweet in the fanlike rays of the slow sun; bright pencils of yellow light fall like stained gla.s.s among the immemorial ivy; the day goes, softly, pensively....
_"Toll the bell for lovely Nell ..."_
"Ah-h-h!" they sigh and melt, and I see nothing more. But the picture is safe.
Then there was the famous house-party down in Surrey, whither the elect of England, for some reason or other, seem to gravitate; whether because the long midsummer Surrey days appear to them the last stage on the way to a peaceful, well-ordered heaven, in case they expect to spend eternity there, or a temporary solace, in case they don"t! Sue, to whom all musical Europe opened its doors on poor Frederick"s account, had taken Margarita, to whom the said doors were gladly opening on her own, to one of the famous country houses of a county famous for such jewels, and when Roger and I turned up there, who should our host be but one of my old schoolmates at Vevay--younger son of a younger son, then, and unimportant to a degree, but advanced since by one of those series of family holocausts that so change English county history, to be the head of a great house and lord of more acres than seems quite discreet--until one is in a position to slap the lord on the shoulder!
To Sue and me the soft-shod luxury, the studious, ripe comfort of the great, hedged establishment, were frankly marvellous, accustomed as we were to the many grades and stages of domestic prosperity between this rose-lined ease and little-a-year; but Margarita, to whom the old red jersey of the Island was no more real than the barbaric trappings of _Ada_, who accepted sh.e.l.ls from Caliban or diamonds from _Mephistopheles_ with equal _sang-froid_, displayed an indifference to her surroundings as regal as it was sincere. Indeed, the two simplest people at that party (famous for years in country-house annals as the most brilliant gathering of well-mixed rank and talent that ever fought with that arch-enemy of the leisured cla.s.ses, _Ennui_, and throttled him successfully for seventy-two hours) were the wife of an American attorney-at-law and the eldest son of England"s greatest duke--the most eligible _parti_ in the United Kingdom, a youth of head-splitting lineage and fabulous possessions.