Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

"Oh, this is too much," he angrily exclaimed: "you tell me of men who chase you"--"a man Wenceslaus," she corrected him earnestly--"you tell me all this and you know I love you; without your love I shall throw up sculpture and go to sea as a sailor. Meg, Meg, have you no heart?" "Why, you little boy, what have I said to offend you? Why are you so cynical when I know you to be so sentimental?" Her voice was arch, an intimate voice with liquid inflections. He began pacing the chilly floor of the studio.

"Let us be frank. I've only known you two months, since the day we accidentally met, leaving Paris for Bayreuth. You have written your mother nothing of our engagement--well, provisional engagement, if you will--and you insist on sticking to the operatic stage. I loathe it, and I confess to you that I am sick with jealousy when I see you near that lanky, ill-favored German tenor Burgmann." "What, poor, big me!" she interjected, in teasing accents. "Yes, you, Fridolina. I can quite sympathize with what you tell me of your mother's dislike for the rôle of Isolde. You are not temperamentally suited to it; it is horrible to think of you in that second act." "How horrible? My figure, you mean?" "Yes, your figure, too, would be absurd." He was brutal now. "And you haven't the passion to make anything of the music. You've never loved, never will, passionately--" "But I'll sing Isolde all the same," she cried. "Not with my permission." "Then without you and your permission." She hastily arose and was about to step down from her pedestal when the door opened.

"Mother! Why, mamma, you said you weren't coming until Sunday." Mrs. Fridolin could not see very well in the heavy shadows after the blinding sunlight without. "What are you doing here, Margaret, and of all things alone up there on a throne! Is this a rehearsal for the opera?" "I'm not alone, mother. This is Wenceslaus--Mr. Wenceslaus Arthmann, the sculptor, mamma, and he is doing me in clay. Look at it; isn't it sweet? Mr. Arthmann, this is my mother--and who is the young lady, mamma?" "Oh, I forgot. I was so confused and put out not finding you at the station I drove at once to Villa Wahnfried--" "Villa Wahnfried!" echoed two voices in dismayed unison. "Yes, to Frau Cosima, and she directed me here." "She directed you here?" "Yes, why shouldn't she? Is there anything wrong in that?" asked the stately, high-nosed lady with the gray pompadour, beginning to peer about suspiciously. "Oh, no, mamma, but how did Frau Cosima know that I was here?" "I don't know, child," was the testy answer. "Come, get down and let me introduce you to my charming travelling friend, Miss Bredd." "Miss Saïs Bredd," put in the Western girl; "I was named Saïs after my father visited Egypt, but my friends call me Louie."--"And Miss Bredd, this is Mister--" "Arthmann, madame," said the sculptor. They all shook hands after the singer had released her mother from a huge, cavernous hug. "But Meg, Meg, where is your chaperon?" Fridolina looked at the young man: "Why, mamma, it was the _Hausfrau_ who let you in, of course." Miss Bredd smiled cynically.

III

Up the Via Dolorosa toiled a Sunday mob from many nations. The long, nebulous avenue, framed on either side by dull trees, was dusty with the heels of the faithful ones; and the murmur of voices in divers tongues recalled the cluttering sea on a misty beach. Never swerving, without haste or rest, went the intrepid band of melomaniacs speaking of the singers, the weather and prices until the summit was reached. There the first division broke ranks and charged upon the caravansary which still stood the attacks of thirsty multitudes after two decades. Lucky ones grasped Schoppen of beer and Rhine wine hemmed in by an army of expectant throats, for the time was at hand when would sound Donner's motive from the balcony: music made by brass instruments warning the elect that "Rheingold" was about to unfold its lovely fable of water, wood and wind.

Mrs. Fridolin went to the theatre and longed with mother's eyes for the curtains to part and discover Fricka. She took her seat unconcernedly; she was not an admirer of Wagner, educated as she had been in the florid garden of Italian song. The darkness at first oppressed her. When from mystic space welled those elemental sounds, not mere music, but the sighing, droning, rhythmic swish of the waters, this woman knew that something strange and terrible was about to enter into her consciousness. The river Rhine calmly, majestically stole over her senses; she forgot Bellini, Donizetti, even Gounod and soon she was with the Rhine Daughters, with Alberich.... Her heart seemed to stop. All sense of identity vanished at a wave of Wagner's wand, as is absorbed the _ego_ by the shining mirror of the hypnotist. This, then, was the real Wagner--a Wagner who attacked simultaneously the senses, vanquished the strongest brain; a Wagner who wept, wooed, sang and surged, ravished the soul until it was brought lacerated and captive to the feet of the victorious master magician. The eye was promise-crammed, the ears sealed with bliss, and she felt the wet of the waters. She breathed hard as Alberich scaled the slimy steeps; and the curves described by the three swimming mermaids filled her with the joy of the dance, the free ecstatic movements of free things in the waves. The filching of the Rheingold, the hoarse shout of laughter from Alberich's love-foresworn lips, and the terrified cries of the luckless watchers were as real as life. Walhall did not confuse her, for now she caught clues to the meaning of the mighty epic. Wotan and Fricka--ah, Meg did not look so stout, and how lovely her voice sounded!--Loki, mischief-making, diplomatic Loki; the giants, Fafner and Fasolt; Freia, and foolish, maimed, malicious Mime--these were not mere papier-maché, but fascinating deities. She saw the gnomes' underworld, saw the ring, the snake and the tarnhelm; she heard the Nibelungs' anvil chorus--so different from Verdi's--saw the giants quarrelling over their booty; and the sonorous rainbow seemed to bridge the way to a fairer land. As the Walhall march died in her ears she found herself outside on the dusky, picturesque esplanade and forgot all about Meg, remembering her only as Fricka. With the others she slowly trod the path that had been pressed by the feet of art's martyrs. Mrs. Fridolin then gave tongue to her whirring brain:

"Oh! the magic of it all," she gasped.

"I'm afraid I rather agree with Nordau, Mrs. Fridolin--the whole affair reminds me of a tank-drama I once saw in Chicago." It was the cool voice of Miss Bredd that sounded in the hot, humming lane punctuated by vague, tall trees....

Mrs. Fridolin and her party went to Sammett's for dinner that evening. This garden, once Angermann's and made famous by Wagner, is still a magnet. The Americans listened calmly to furious disputes, in a half-dozen tongues, over the performance to the crashing of dishes and the huddling of glasses always full, always empty. Arthmann ordered the entire menu, knowing well that it would reach them after much delay in the inevitable guise of veal and potatoes. The women were in no hurry, but the sculptor was. He drummed on the table, he made angry faces at his neighbors--contented looking Germans who whistled themes from "Rheingold"--and when Herr Sammett saluted his guests with a crazy trombone and crazier perversion of the Donner motive, Arthmann jumped up and excused himself. The two hours and a half in the theatre had made him nervous, restless, and he went away saying that he would be back presently. Mrs. Fridolin was annoyed. It did not seem proper for three ladies to remain unaccompanied in a public garden, even if that garden was in Bayreuth. Suppose some of her New York friends should happen by!... "I wonder where he has gone? I don't admire your new friend, Margaret. He seems very careless," she grumbled.

"Wenceslaus!"--Mrs. Fridolin looked narrowly at her daughter--"Mr. Arthmann, then, will be back soon. Like all sculptors he hates to be cooped up long." "I guess he's gone to get a drink at the bar," suggested the practical Miss Bredd. "How did you like my Fricka--oh, here's Mr. Dennett--Caspar, Caspar come over here, here!" The big girl stood up in elephantine eagerness, and a jaunty, handsome young man, with a shaven face and an important chin, slowly made his way through the press of people to the Fridolin table. It was Caspar Dennett, the conductor. After a formal presentation to the tall, thin Mrs. Fridolin, the young American musician settled himself for a talk and began by asking how they liked his conducting. He had been praised by the Prince Imperial himself--praise sufficient for any self-doubting soul! Thank heaven, _he_ had no doubt of his vocation! It was Miss Bredd who answered him:

"I enjoyed your conducting immensely, Mr. Dennett, simply because I couldn't see you work those long arms of yours.... I wrote lots about you when you visited the West with your band. I never cared for your Wagner readings." He stared at her reproachfully and she stared in return. Then he murmured, "I'm really very sorry I didn't please you, Miss Bredd. I didn't know that you were a newspaper woman." "Journalist, if you please!" "I beg your pardon, journalist. I'm so sorry that Mrs. Dennett is visiting relations in England. She would have been delighted to call on you;"--Miss Bredd's expression became disagreeable--"and now, Mrs. Fridolin, what do you think of your daughter, your daughter Fricka Fridolina, as we call her? Won't she be a superb Isolde some day?" "I hope not, Mr. Dennett," austerely replied the mother. Margaret grasped his hands gratefully, crying aloud, "You dear! Isn't he a dear, mamma? Only think of your daughter as Isolde. Ah! there comes the deserter. You thoughtless man!"

The sculptor bowed stiffly when presented, and the two men sat on either side of Miss Fridolin, far away from each other.

"Mr. Arthmann," fluted the singer--she was all dignity now--"Mr. Dennett thinks I'm quite ready for Isolde." "You said that to me this afternoon," he answered in a rude manner. The conductor glanced at him and then at Margaret. She was blushing. "What I meant," said Dennett, quickly turning the stream his way, "What I meant was that Miss Fridolina knows the score, and being temperamentally suited to the rôle--" "Temperamentally," sneered Arthmann. "Yes, that's what I said," snapped the other man, who had become surprisingly pugnacious--Fridolina was pressing his foot with heavy approval--"temperamentally." "You know Caspar"--the brows of the mother and sculptor were thunderous--"you know that Mr. Arthmann is a very clever sculptor, and is a great reader of faces and character. Now he says, that I have no dramatic talent, no temperament, and ought to--" "Get married," boomed in Arthmann with his most Norwegian accent. The bomb exploded. "I'd rather see her"--"in her grave, Mrs. Fridolin"--"Oh, you wicked, sarcastic Louie Bredd. No, not in her grave, but even as Isolde. Yes, I admit that I am converted to Wagnerism. Wagner's music is better for some singers than marriage. Prima donnas have no business to be married. If their husbands are not wholly worthless--and there are few exceptions--they are apt to be ninnies and spongers on their wives' salaries." Then she related the story of Wilski, who was a Miss Willies from Rochester. She married a novelist, a young man with the brightest possible prospects imaginable. What happened? He never wrote a story after his marriage in which he didn't make his wife the heroine, so much so that all the magazine editors and publishers refused his stuff, sending it back with the polite comment, Too much Wilski!

"That's nothing," interrupted Louie. "She ought to have been happy with such a worshipping husband. I know of a great singer, the greatest singer alive--Frutto"--they all groaned--"the _greatest_, I say. Well, she married a lazy French count. Not once, but a hundred times she has returned home after a concert only to find her husband playing cards with her maid. She raised a row, but what was the use? She told me that she'd rather have him at home with the servant playing poker than at the opera where he was once seen to bet on the cards turned up by Calvé in the third act of 'Carmen.' I've written the thing for my paper and I mean to turn it into a short story some day." Every one had tales to relate of the meanness, rapacity, dissipation and extravagance of the prima donna's husband from Adelina Patti to Mitwindt, the German singer who regularly committed her husband to jail at the beginning of her season, only releasing him when September came, for then her money was earned and banked.

"But what has this to do with me?" peevishly asked Fridolina, who was tired and sleepy. "If ever I marry it must be a man who will let me sing Isolde. Most foreign husbands hide their wives away like a dog its bone." She beamed on Wenceslaus. "Then you will never marry a foreign husband," returned the sculptor, irritably.

IV

"You must know, Mr. Arthmann, that my girl is a spoilt child, as innocent as a baby, and has everything to learn about the ways of the world. Remember, too, that I first posed her voice, taught her all she knew of her art before she went to Parchesi. What you ask--taking into consideration that we, that _I_, hardly know you--is rather premature, is it not?" They were walking in the cool morning down the green alleys of the Hofgarten, where the sculptor had asked Mrs. Fridolin for her daughter. He was mortified as he pushed his crisp beard from side to side. He felt that he had been far from proposing marriage to this large young woman's mother; something must have driven him to such a crazy action. Was it Caspar Dennett and his classic profile that had angered him into the confession? Nonsense! The conductor was a married man with a family. Despite her easy, unaffected manner, Margaret Fridolin was no fool; she ever observed the ultimate proprieties, and being dangerously unromantic would be the last woman in the world to throw herself away. But this foolish mania about Isolde. What of that? It was absurd to consider such a thing.... Her mother would never tolerate the attempt--

"Don't you think my judgment in this matter is just, Mr. Arthmann?" Mrs. Fridolin was blandly observing him. He asked her pardon for his inattention; he had been dreaming of a possible happiness! She was very amiable. "And you know, of course, that Margaret has prospects"--he did not, and was all ears--"if she will only leave the operatic stage. Her career will be a brilliant one despite her figure, Mr. Arthmann; but there is a more brilliant social career awaiting her if she follows her uncle's advice and marries. My brother is a rich man, and my daughter may be his heiress. Never as a singer--Job is prejudiced against the stage--and never if she marries a foreigner." "But I shall become a citizen of the United States, madame." "Where were you born?" "Bergen; my mother was from Warsaw," he moodily replied. "It might as well be Asia Minor. We are a stubborn family, sir, from the hills of New Hampshire. We never give in. Come, let us go back to the Hotel Sonne, and do you forget this foolish dream. Margaret may never leave the stage, but I'm certain that she will never marry _you_." She smiled at him, the thousand little wrinkles in her face making a sort of reticulated map from which stared two large, blue eyes--Margaret's eyes, grown wiser and colder.... "Now after that news I'll marry her if I have to run away with her!"--resolved the sculptor when he reached his bleak claustral atelier, and studied the model of her head. And how to keep that man Dennett from spoiling the broth, he wondered....

In the afternoon Arthmann wrote Margaret a letter. "Margaret, my darling Margaret, what is the matter? Have I offended you by asking your mother for you? Why did you not see me this morning? The atelier is wintry without you--the cold clay, corpse-like, is waiting to revive in your presence. Oh! how lovely is the garden, how sad my soul! I sit and think of Verlaine's 'It rains in my heart as it rains in the town.' Why won't you see me? You are mine--you swore it. My sweet girl, whose heart is as fragrant as new-mown hay"--the artist pondered well this comparison before he put it on paper; it evoked visions of hay bales. "Darling, you must see me to-morrow. To the studio you must come. You know that we have planned to go to America in October. Only think, sweetheart, what joy then! The sky is aflame with love. We walk slowly under the few soft, autumn, prairie stars; your hand is in mine, we are married! You see I am a poet for your sake. I beg for a reply hot from your heart. Wenceslaus." ...

He despatched this declaration containing several minor inaccuracies. It was late when he received a reply. "All right, Wenceslaus. But have I _now_ the temperament to sing Isolde?" It was unsigned. Arthmann cursed in a tongue that sounded singularly like pure English.

V

That night, much against his desire, he dressed and went to a reception at the Villa Wahnfried. As this worker in silent clay disliked musical people, the buzz and fuss made him miserable. He did not meet Fridolina, though he saw Miss Bredd arm-in-arm with Cosima, Queen Regent of Bayreuth. The American girl was eloquently exposing her theories of how Wagner should be sung and Arthmann, disgusted, moved away. He only remembered Caspar Dennett when in the street. That gentleman was not present either; and as the unhappy lover walked down the moonlit Lisztstrasse he fancied he recognized the couple he sought. Could it be! He rushed after the pair to be mocked by the slamming of a gate, he knew not on what lonely street....

The next afternoon the duel began. Fridolina did not return for a sitting as he had hoped; instead came an invitation for a drive to the Hermitage. It was Mrs. Fridolin who sent it. Strange! Arthmann was surprised at this renewal of friendly ties after his gentle dismissal in the Hofgarten. But he dressed in his most effective clothes and, shining with hope, reached the Hotel Sonne; two open carriages stood before its arched doorway. Presently the others came downstairs and the day became gray for the sculptor. Caspar Dennett, looking like a trim Antinous with a fashionable tailor, smiled upon all, especially Miss Bredd. Mrs. Fridolin alone did not seem at ease. She was very friendly with Arthmann, but would not allow him in her carriage. "No," she protested, "you two men must keep Margaret company. I'll ride with my bright little Louie and listen to her anti-Wagner blasphemies." She spoke as if she had fought under the Wagner banner from the beginning.

Margaret sat alone on the back seat. Although she grimaced at her mother's suggestion, she was in high spirits, exploding over every trivial incident of the journey. Arthmann, as he faced her, told himself that he had never seen her so giggling and commonplace, so unlike an artist, so bourgeois, so fat. He noticed, too, that her lovely eyes expanded with the same expression, whether art or eating was mentioned. He hardly uttered a word, for the others discussed "Tristan und Isolde" until he hated Wagner's name. She was through with her work at Bayreuth and Frau Cosima had promised her Isolde--positively. She meant to undergo a severe _Kur_ at Marienbad and then return to the United States. Mr. Grau had also promised her Isolde; while Jean de Reszké--dear, wonderful Jean vowed that he would sing Tristan to no other Isolde during his American tournée! So it was settled. All she needed was her mother's consent--and that would not be a difficult matter to compass. Had she not always wheedled the mater into her schemes, even when Uncle Job opposed her? She would never marry, never--anyhow not until she had sung Isolde--and then only a Wagner-loving husband.

"And the temperament, the missing link--how about that?" asked Arthmann sourly; he imagined that Dennett was exchanging secret signals with her. She bubbled over with wrath. "Temperament! I have temperament enough despite my size. If I haven't any I know where to find it. There is no sacrifice I'd not make to get it. Art for art is my theory. First art and then--the other things." She shrugged her massive shoulders in high bad humor. Arthmann gloomily reflected that Dennett's phrases at the Sammett Garden were being echoed. Mrs. Fridolin continually urged her driver to keep his carriage abreast of the other. It made the party more sociable, she declared, although to the sculptor it seemed as if she wished to watch Margaret closely. She had never seemed so suspicious. They reached the Hermitage.

Going home a fine rain set in; the hoods of the carriage were raised, and the excursion ended flatly. At the hotel, Arthmann did not attempt to go in. Mrs. Fridolin said she had a headache, Miss Bredd must write articles about Villa Wahnfried, while Dennett disappeared with Margaret. The drizzle turned into a downpour, and the artist, savage with the world and himself, sought a neighboring café and drank till dawn....

He called at the hotel the following afternoon. The ladies had gone away. How gone away? The portier could not tell. Enraged as he saw his rich dream vanishing, Arthmann moved about the streets with lagging, desperate steps. He returned to the hotel several times during the afternoon--at no time was he very far from it--but the window-blinds were always drawn in the Fridolin apartment and he began to despair. It was near sunset when his _Hausfrau_, the disappearing chaperon, ran to him red-faced. A letter for Herr Arthmann! It was from her: "I've gone in search of that temperament. _Auf Wiedersehen._ Isolde." Nothing more. In puzzled fury he went back to the hotel. Yes, Madame Fridolin and the young lady were now at home. He went to the second landing and without knocking pushed open the door. It was a house storm-riven. Trunks bulged, though only half-packed, their contents straggling over the sides. The beds were not made, and a strong odor of valerian and camphor flooded the air. On a couch lay Mrs. Fridolin, her face covered with a handkerchief, while near hovered Miss Bredd in her most brilliant and oracular attitude. She was speaking too loudly as he entered: "There is no use of worrying yourself sick about Meg, Mrs. Fridolin. She's gone for a time--that's all. When she finds out what an idiotically useless sacrifice she has made for art and is a failure as Isolde--she can no more sing the part than a sick cat--she will run home to her mammy quick enough."

"Oh, this terrible artistic temperament!" groaned the mother apologetically. The girl made a cautious movement and waved Arthmann out of the room. Into the hall she followed, soft-footed, but resolute. He was gaunt with chagrin. "Where is she?"--he began, but was sternly checked:

"If you had only flattered her more, and married her before her mother arrived, this thing wouldn't have happened."

"What thing?" he thundered.

"There! don't be an ox and make a stupid noise," she admonished. "Why, Meg--she is so dead set on getting that artistic temperament, that artistic thrill you raved about, that she has eloped."

"Eloped!" he feebly repeated, and sat down on a trunk in the hallway. To her keen, unbiassed vision Arthmann seemed more shocked than sorrowful. Then, returning to Isolde's mother, she was not surprised to find her up and in capital humor, studying the railway guide.

"He believes the fib--just as Dennett did!" Miss Bredd exclaimed, triumphantly; and for the first time that day Mrs. Fridolin smiled.

THE RIM OF FINER ISSUES

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.

II

If, as her friends asserted, Ellenora Vibert's ugliness had softened I did not notice it. She was one of those few women in the world that marriage had not improved. Her eyes were colder, more secret; her jaw crueller, her lips wider and harder at the edges. She welcomed me with distinguished loftiness, and I soon felt the unpleasant key in which the household tune was being played. It was amiable enough, this flat near Mount Morris Park in Harlem. The Viberts had taste, and their music-room was charming in its reticent scheme of decoration--a Steinway grand piano, a low crowded book-case with a Rodin cast, a superb mezzotint of Leonardo's Mona Lisa after Calmatta, revealing the admirable poise of sweetly folded hands--surely the most wonderful hands ever painted--while the polished floor, comforting couches and open fireplace proclaimed this apartment as the composition of refined people.

I am alive to the harmonies of domestic interiors, and I sensed the dissonance in the lives of these two.

Soon we three warmed the cold air of restraint and fell to discussing life, art, literature, friends, and even ourselves. I could not withhold my admiration for Ellenora's cleverness. She was transposed to a coarser key, and there was a suggestion of the overblown in her figure; but her tongue was sharp, and she wore the air of a woman who was mistress of her mansion. Presently Arthur relapsed into silence, lounged and smoked in the corner, while Mrs. Vibert expounded her ideas of literary form, and finally confessed that she had given up the notion of a novel.

"You see, the novel is overdone to-day. The short story ended with de Maupassant. The only hope we have, we few who take our art seriously, is to compress the short story within a page and distil into it the vivid impression of a moment, a lifetime, an eternity." She looked intellectually triumphant. I interposed a mild objection.

"This form, my dear lady, is it a fitting vehicle for so much weight of expression? I admire, as do you, the sonnet, but I can never be brought to believe that Milton could have compressed 'Paradise Lost' within a sonnet."

"Then all the worse for Milton," she tartly replied. "Look at the Chopin prelude. Will you contradict me if I say that in one prelude this composer crowds the experience of a lifetime? When he expands his idea into the sonata form how diffuse, how garrulous he becomes!"

I ventured to remark that Chopin had no special talent for the sonata form.

"The sonata form is dead," the lady asserted. "Am I not right, Arthur?"

"Yes, my dear," came from Arthur. I fully understood his depression.

"No," she continued, magnificently, "it is this blind adherence to older forms that crushes all originality to-day. There is Arthur with his sonata form--as if Wagner did not create his own form!"

"But I am no Wagner," interrupted her husband.

"Indeed, you are not," said Mrs. Vibert rather viciously. "If you were we wouldn't be in Harlem. You men to-day lack the initiative. The way must be shown you by woman; yes, by poor, crushed woman--woman who has no originality according to your Schopenhauer; woman whose sensations, not being of coarse enough fibre to be measured by the rude emotion-weighing machine of Lombroso, are therefore adjudged of less delicacy than man's. What fools your scientific men be!"

Mrs. Vibert was a bit pedantic, but she could talk to the point when aroused.

"You discredit the idea of compressing an epic into a sonnet, a sonata into a prelude; well, I've attempted something of the sort, and even if you laugh I'll stick to my argument. I've attempted to tell the biological history of the cosmos in a single page.... I begin with the unicellular protozoa and finally reach humanity; and to give it dramatic interest I trace a germ-cell from eternity until the now, and you shall hear its history this moment." She stopped for breath, and I wondered if Mrs. Somerville or George Eliot had ever talked in this astounding fashion. I was certain that she must have read Iamblichus and Porphyry. Arthur on his couch groaned.

"Mock if you please," Ellenora's strong face flushed, "but women will yet touch the rim of finer issues. Paul Goddard, who is a critic I respect, told me I had struck the right note of modernity in my prose poem." I winced at the "note of modernity," and could not help seeing the color mount to Arthur's brow when the man's name was mentioned.

"And pray who is Mr. Paul Goddard?" I asked while Mrs. Vibert was absent in search of her manuscript. Arthur replied indifferently, "Oh, a rich young man who went to Bayreuth last summer and poses as a Wagnerite ever since! He also plays the piano!"

Arthur's tone was sarcastic; he did not like Paul Goddard and his critical attentions to his wife. The poor lad looked so disheartened, so crushed by the rigid intellectual atmosphere about him, that I put no further question and was glad when Mrs. Vibert returned with her prose poem.

She read it to us and it was called

FRUSTRATE

O the misty plaint of the Unconceived! O crystal
incuriousness of the monad! The faint swarming toward the
light and the rending of the sphere of hope, frustrate,
inutile. I am the seed called Life; I am he, I am she. We
walk, swim, totter, and blend. Through the ages I lay in the
vast basin of Time; I am called by Fate into the Now. On
pulsing terraces, under a moon blood-red, I dreamed of the
mighty confluence. About me were my kinsfolk. Full of dumb
pain we pleasured our centuries with anticipation; we
watched as we gamed away the hours. From Asiatic plateaus we
swept to Nilotic slime. We roamed in primeval forests, vast
and arboreally sublime, or sported with the behemoth and
listened to the serpent's sinuous irony; we chattered with
the sacred apes and mouthed at the moon; and in the Long Ago
wore the carapace and danced forthright figures on
coprolitic sands--sands stretching into the bosom of the
earth, sands woven of windy reaches hemming the sun.... We
lay with the grains of corn in Egyptian granaries, and saw
them fructify under the smile of the sphinx; we buzzed in
the ambient atmosphere, gaudy dragon-flies or whirling motes
in full cry chased by humming-birds. Then from some cold
crag we launched with wings of fire-breathing pestilence and
fell fathoms under sea to war with lizard-fish and narwhal.
For us the supreme surrender, the joy of the expected....
With cynical glance we saw the Buddha give way to other
gods. We watched protoplasmically the birth of planets and
the confusion of creation. We saw hornéd monsters become
gentle ruminants, and heard the scream of the pterodactyl on
the tree-tops dwindle to child's laughter. We heard, we saw,
we felt, we knew. Yet hoped we on; every monad has his
day.... One by one the billions disintegrated and floated
into formal life. And we watched and waited. Our evolution
had been the latest delayed; until heartsick with longing
many of my brethren wished for annihilation....

At last I was alone, save one. The time of my fruition was
not afar. O! for the moment when I should realize my
dreams.... I saw this last one swept away, swept down the
vistas toward life, the thunderous surge singing in her
ears. O! that my time would come. At last, after vague
alarms, I was summoned....

The hour had struck; eternity was left behind, eternity
loomed ahead, implacable, furrowed with Time's scars. I
hastened to the only one in the Cosmos. I tarried not as I
ran in the race. Moments were precious; a second meant æons;
and crashing into the light--Alas! I was too late.... Of
what avail my travail, my countless, cruel preparations? O
Chance! O Fate! I am one of the silent multitude of the
Frustrate....

When she had finished reading this strange study in evolution she awaited criticism, but with the air of an armed warrior.

"Really, Mrs. Vibert, I am overwhelmed," I managed to stammer. "Only the most delicate symbolism may dare to express such a theme." I felt that this was very vague--but what could I say?

She regarded me sternly. Arthur, catching what I had uttered at random, burst in:

"There, Ellenora, I am sure he is right! You leave nothing to the imagination. Now a subtile veiled idealism--" He was not allowed to finish.

"Veiled idealism indeed!" she angrily cried. "You composers dare to say all manner of wickedness in your music, but it is idealized by tone, isn't it? What else is music but a sort of sensuous algebra? Or a vast shadow-picture of the emotions?... Why can't language have the same privilege? Why must it be bridled because the world speaks it?"

"Just because of that reason, dear madame," I soothingly said; "because reticence is art's brightest crown; because Zola never gives us a real human document and Flaubert does; and the difference is a difference of method. Flaubert is magnificently naked, but his nakedness implicates nothing that is--"

"As usual you men enter the zone of silence when a woman's work is mentioned. I did not attempt a monument in the frozen manner of your Flaubert. Mr. Goddard believes--" There was a crash of music from the piano as Arthur endeavored to change the conversation. His wife's fine indifference was tantalizing, also instructive.

"Mr. Goddard believes with Nietzsche that individualism is the only salvation of the race. My husband, Mr. Vibert, believes in altruism, self-sacrifice and all the old-fashioned flummery of outworn creeds."

"I wonder if Mr. Vibert has heard of Nietzsche's 'Thou goest to women? Remember thy whip'?" I meekly questioned. Ellenora looked at her husband and shrugged her shoulders; then picking up her manuscript she left the room with the tread of a soldier, laughing all the while.

"An exasperating girl!" I mused, as Vibert, after some graceful swallow-like flights on the keyboard, finally played that most dolorously delicious of Chopin's nocturnes, the one in C sharp minor.

That night in my studio I did not rejoice over my bachelorhood, for I felt genuinely sad at the absence of agreeable modulations in the married life of my two friends.

I thought about the thing for the next month, with the conclusion that people had to work out their own salvation, and resolved not to visit the Viberts again. It was too painful an experience; and yet I could see that Vibert cared for his wife in a weak sort of a way. But she was too overpowering for him and her robust, intellectual nature needed Nietzsche's whip--a stronger, more passionate will than her own. It was simply a case of mismating, and no good would result from the union.

Later I felt as if I had been selfish and priggish, and resolved to visit the home in Harlem and try to arrange matters. I am not sure whether it was curiosity rather than a laudable benevolence that prompted this resolve. However, one hot afternoon in May, Arthur Vibert entered my room and throwing himself in an easy-chair gave me the news.

"She's left me, old man, she's gone off with Paul Goddard." ...

I came dangerously near swearing.

"Oh, it's no use of your trying to say consoling things. She's gone for good. I was never strong enough to hold her, and so it's come to this disgraceful smash."

I looked eagerly at Arthur to discover over-mastering sorrow; there was little. Indeed he looked relieved; his life for nearly a year must have been a trial and yet I mentally confessed to some disappointment at his want of deep feeling. I saw that he was chagrined, angry, but not really heart-hurt. Lucky chap! he was only twenty-two and had all his life before him. I asked for explanations.

"Oh, Ellenora always said that I never understood her; that I never could help her to reach the rim of finer issues. I suppose this fellow Goddard will. At least she thinks so, else she wouldn't have left me. She said no family could stand two prima-donnas at the same time: as if I ever posed, or pretended to be as brilliant as she! No, she stifled me, and I feel now as if I might compose that romanza for my concerto."

I consoled the young pianist; told him that this blow was intended as a lesson in self-control; that he must not be downcast, but turn to his music as a consolation; and a whole string of such platitudes. When he left me I asked myself if Ellenora was not right, after all. Could she have reached that visionary rim of finer issues--of which she always prated--with this man, talented though he was, yet a slender reed shaken by the wind of her will? Besides, his chin was too small.

He could not master her nature. Would she be happy with Paul Goddard, that bright-winged butterfly of æstheticism? I doubted it. Perhaps the feminine, receptive composer was intended to be her saving complement in life. Perhaps she unconsciously cared for Arthur Vibert; and arguing the question as dispassionately as I could my eyes fell upon "Thus Spake Zarathustra," and opening the fat unwieldy volume I read:

"Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of an ardent woman?"

"Pooh!" I sneered. "Nietzsche was a rank woman-hater;" then I began my work on Mrs. Beacon's portrait, the fashionable Mrs. Beacon, and tried to forget all about the finer issues and the satisfied sterility of its ideals.

AN IBSEN GIRL

I

As Ellenora Vibert quietly descended the stairs of the apartment house in Harlem where she had lived with her husband until this hot morning in May, she wondered at her courage. She was taking a tremendous step, and one that she hoped would not be a backward one. She was leaving Arthur Vibert after a brief year of marriage for another man. Yet her pulse fluttered not, and before she reached the open doorway a mocking humor possessed her.

Her active brain pictured herself in the person of Ibsen's Nora Helmer. But Nora left children behind, and deserted them in hot blood; no woman could be cold after such a night in the Doll's House--the champagne, the tarantella, the letter and the scene with Torvald! No, she was not quite Nora Helmer; and Paul, her young husband, was hardly a Scandinavian bureaucrat. When Ellenora faced the cutting sunshine and saw Mount Morris Park, green and sweet, she stopped and pressed a hand to her hip. It was a characteristic pose, and the first inspiration of the soft air gave her peace and hardihood.

"I've been penned behind the bars too long," she thought. Arthur's selfish, artistic absorption in his musical work and needless indifference to the development of her own gifts must count no longer.

She was free, and she meant to remain so as long as she lived.

Then she went to the elevated railroad and entered a down-town train, left it at Cortlandt Street, reached the Pennsylvania depot before midday, and in the waiting-room met Paul Goddard. A few minutes later they were on the Philadelphia train. The second chapter of Ellenora Vibert's life began--and most happily.

II

Paul Goddard, after he had returned from Bayreuth, gave his musical friends much pain by his indifference to old tastes. His mother, Mrs. Goddard of Madison Square, was not needlessly alarmed. She told her friends that Paul always had been a butterfly, sipping at many pretty arts. She included among these fine arts, girls. Paul's devotion to golf and a certain rich young woman gave her fine maternal satisfaction. "He stays away from that odious Bohemian crowd, and as long as he does that I am satisfied. Paul is too much of a gentleman to make a good musician."

During the winter she saw little of her son. His bachelor dinners were pronounced models, but the musical mob he let alone. "Paul must be going in for something stunning," they said at his club, and when he took off his moustache there was a protest.

The young man was not pervious to ridicule. He had found something new and as he was fond of experimenting and put his soul into all he did, was generally rewarded for his earnestness. He met Mrs. Arthur Vibert at the reception of a portrait-painter, and her type being new to him, resolved to study it.

Presently he went to the art galleries with the lady, and to all the piano recitals he could bid her. He called several times and admired her husband greatly; but she snubbed this admiration and he consoled himself by admiring instead the intellect of the wife.

"I suppose," she confided to him one February afternoon at Sherry's, "I suppose you think I am not a proper wife because I don't sit home at his feet and worship my young genius?"

Paul looked at her strong, ugly face and deep iron-colored eyes, and smiled ironically.

"You don't go in for that sort of thing, I suppose. If you did love him would you acknowledge it to any one, even to yourself--or to me?"

Ellenora flushed slightly and put down her glass.

"My dear man, when you know me better you won't ask such a question. I always say what I mean."

"And I don't." They fell to fugitive thinking.

"What poet wrote 'the bright disorder of the stars is solved by music'?"

"I never read modern verse."

"Yes, but this is not as modern as that cornet-virtuoso Kipling, or as ancient as Tennyson, if you must know."

"What has it to do with you? You are all that I am interested in--at the present." Paul smiled.

"Don't flatter me, Mr. Goddard. I hate it. It's a cheap trick of the enemy. Flatter a woman, tell her that she is unlike her sex, repeat to her your wonderment at her masculine intellect, and see how meekly she lowers her standard and becomes your bondslave."

"Hello! you have been through the mill," said Paul, brightly. "If I thought that it would do any good, be of any use, I would mentally plump on my knees and say to you that Ellenora Vibert is unlike any woman I ever met." Ellenora half rose from the table, looking sarcastically at him.

"My dear Mr. Goddard, don't make fun. You have hurt me more than I dare tell you. I fancied that you were a friend, the true sort." She was all steel and glitter now. Paul openly admired her.

"Mrs. Vibert, I beg your pardon. Please forget what I said. I do enjoy your companionship, and you know I am not a lady-killer. Tell me that you forgive me, and we will talk about that lovely line you quoted from--?"