Henry Kitchell Webster

“ The look of power about Paula, inseparable from her beauty, was not one of Miss Wollaston's feminine ideals. It spoke in every line of her figure as well as in the lineaments of her face; in the short, rather broad, yet cleanly defined nose; in the generous width of her mouth; in the sculpturesque poise of her neck upon her shoulders.
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. ”

“ It was as if March had followed his train of thought step by step.
"Miss Wollaston isn't here either," he said. "She was detained by a broken spring in the car. I believe she expects to arrive this morning."
A faint amusement showed in his face and presently brightened into a smile. "I'm really very relieved," he added, "that it was you who got here first."
And then the smile vanished and his voice took a new timbre, not of challenge, certainly not of defiance, but all the more for that of authority. "The only other person in the house is Mary." ”

“ March from Paula amounted to.
What a hypocrite she had been to use that phrase even in her thoughts. Save him from Paula, indeed! Paula could give him, even if she gave only the half loaf, all he needed. She could inspire his genius, float it along on the broad current of her own energy. Compared to that, what could Mary give? What would it, her one possible gift, amount to?
She pulled herself up short. Wallowing again! No more of that. She'd leave March alone, and on that resolution she'd stop thinking about him. She'd think about Rush and Graham and the farm. ”

“ Some of those moments with March down-stairs had been like blows from a bludgeon. But his daughter's sleepy attempt to concern herself about his breakfast and the perfunctory caress of that slack unconscious hand had the effect of the climax of it all.
She'd just been through the crisis of her life. She'd been down chin-deep in the black waters of tragedy (he didn't yet know, he told himself, what the elements of the crisis were nor the poisonous springs of the tragedy) and all her father meant to her was a domestic responsibility, some one that breakfast must be provided for! ”

“ She was more like a mother brooding over the first love-affair of an adolescent son. It was so young of him, younger, she believed, than any act she herself could be capable of, to have come to Paula's performance without letting her know and waited shyly alone in the dark while the herd of her acquaintances crowded in and monopolized her. Pathetically young, almost intolerably pathetic in a man in his middle fifties. She wondered if he had come up for Tosca the night before and gone away without a word. ”

“ March said dryly. "It won't occur again." He straightened up and faced John Wollaston squarely. "I've persuaded Mary to marry me," he said.
"To marry—you!" John echoed blankly. For a moment before his mind began to work, he merely stared. The first thought that struggled through was a reluctant recognition of the fact that there was a sort of dignity in the man which not even the stale look, inevitable about one who has just slept in his clothes, could overcome. No more than his pallor and the lines of fatigue deeply marked in his face could impeach his air of authority. ”

“ The strong interior excitement that had been burning in her during all this day of her home-coming, the rising conviction that life at home might turn out to be something very different indeed from the thing that it had, down in New York, looked like, the blend of foreboding with anticipation that accompanied it, and finally a sense of the imminence of something important, not quite to be accounted for by the quarrel between her father and his wife,—all this emotional reaction found its outlet during the long dinner in a quite unusual vivacity. ”

“ It was a possibility that Mary had contemplated as early as that first night of all, when Paula, having sung his song, had come herself to find him in Annie's old bedroom where she had him hidden and with a broken laugh had pulled him up in her arms and kissed him, unaware that she was not alone with him. One kiss, as an isolated phenomenon, didn't mean much, Mary allowed, but when a man and a woman who were going to be left alone together a lot, started off that way, they were likely to—get somewhere. ”

“ Not the new Rush with two palms to his Croix de Guerre and his American D.S.C.; and the scars in his soul from the experiences those decorations must represent; but the Rush she had said good-by to in the autumn of 1914 when he set out to be a freshman at Harvard, the kid brother she had counciled and occasionally admonished, in the vicarious exercise of her father's authority. And in his panic-stricken gaze at her, she had recognized his instinctive acceptance of that position. Exactly so would he have looked five interminable years ago if she had caught him in mischief. ”

“ The music began again, and now was given ungrudging credit for the recreation of her mood. Only its admitted beauty created a longing which it did not serve to satisfy. The cold open sky with its mysterious interstellar spaces, the flow of the black devouring clouds, the reemergence of the immortal Pleiades, remote, inhuman, unaware, brought no tranquillity but only a forlorn human loneliness.
On that note it ended, but Paula, with a nod to Novelli, directed him to go straight on to the love song. ”

“ Was this relief, Mary wondered—at learning that she was not at this moment engaged less domestically somewhere with Anthony March? But she doubted whether this was a good guess. If he did feel any such relief, it was not, at all events, from a personal jealousy; for the illuminating conviction had come over her that Wallace could not possibly be one of Paula's conquests. A man still capable of cherishing as the most beautiful event of his life, that sentimental platonic friendship he had enjoyed with her mother, would be immune against Paula's spells. ”

“ John's sudden unwelcome surmise must have been legible in his face because March then said earnestly and quite as if the doctor had spoken his thought aloud, "Oh, it isn't that. I mean, I haven't done anything disgraceful. It's only that I know too many musicians as it is—professional pianists and such. If they find out I'm back, they'll simply make a slave of me. I don't need to earn much money and I like to live my own way, but it's hard to deny people what they are determined to get." ”

“ She couldn't see him at all as a person tangled, helpless, in webs of his own spinning;—neither the man who had written that love song nor the man who had sat down in his chair again after Rush had slammed the door.
He wasn't even shy but he was, except for that moment when a vivid concern over John Wollaston's illness brought him back, oddly remote, detached. He might have been a Martian, when in response to her leading he discussed Paula with her; how good a musician she was; how splendidly equipped physically and temperamentally for an operatic career. ”

“ That's a—physiological fact, Paula."
She flushed hotly at that and looked away from him.
"I don't know exactly what a soul is," he went on. "But I do know that a body—the whole of the body—is the temple of it. It impenetrates everything; is made up of everything. Well, this illness of mine has, for these weeks, made an old man of me. And I'm grateful to it for giving me a chance to look ahead, before it's too late. I want to make the most of it. Because you see, my dear, in ten years—or thereabouts—the course of nature will have made of me what this pneumonia has given me a foretaste of. ”

“ Mary said. "We are all by ourselves."
He rose unsteadily to his feet. "I've got to get out of here quick. If anybody came in ..."
"Rush, dearest!" she entreated. "Don't be silly. Lie down again—Well, then take that easy chair. Nobody will come in." Then over his air of resolute remorse she cried, on the edge of tears herself, "Oh, please don't be so unhappy. Do let's settle down and be comfy together. I don't have to go to the office to-day. My job's just about played out. But nobody ever comes here to see me in the daytime. ”

“ 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.
"What a piano!" he said. "What a damned piano!" He made a sort of effort to pull himself up; apologized (she thought that was what he meant to do) for the damn. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He uttered a tentative and rather incredulous "Come in" as one just awakened speaks, humoring the illusion of a dream.
But the door opened and the Dumb Princess stood there, pallid, wistful, just as she had looked before her true lover climbed the precarious ivy to her tower and tore away the spell that veiled her.
March sat debating with himself,—or so it seemed to him afterward; it was a matter of mere seconds, of course,—why, since she was a vision, did she not look as she had on one of the occasions when he had seen her. The night of the Whitman songs ”

“ She looked about eagerly for a man who might be March but could not discover him anywhere. Was he, perhaps, she absurdly wondered, sitting once more under the piano?
Novelli drooped over the keyboard. LaChaise was half hidden in a deep chair in one of the dormers. Paula, her back to the little audience, stood talking to Novelli. Mary allowed herself a faint smile over the expression in those faces that Paula wouldn't look at. The half-concealed impatience, the anticipatory boredom, showed through so unfaltering a determination to do and express to the end the precisely correct thing. ”

“ She got the notion, perhaps from nothing more than his rather thoughtful smile, that he comprehended the whole thing, even down to Aunt Lucile. Though wasn't there a phrase of his,—"these uninhibited people, when it comes to getting things done ..." that slanted that way? Did that mean that he was one of the other sort? Wasn't your ability to recognize the absence of a quality or a disability in any one else, proof enough that you had it yourself? It would never, certainly, occur to Paula to think of any one as "uninhibited." ”

“ He got hold at last of something that he could be articulate about, and demanded to know why, in these circumstances, Mary hadn't come straight to them at Hickory Hill instead of camping out, for the night, all by herself in the Dearborn Avenue house.
"She has an idea she must find a job for herself," Wallace said, feeling awkwardly guilty as if he had betrayed her; but the way Rush leaped upon him, demanding in one breath what the deuce he meant and what sort of job he was talking about, made it impossible to pull up. ”

“ Mary took real comfort in her companionship; found an immense release from emotional pressure in it. One might quarrel furiously with Paula (and it happened Mary very nearly did, as shall be related presently, before they had been in the cottage three days) , but one couldn't possibly worry one's self about her, couldn't torture one's self feeling things with Paula's nerves. That was the Wollaston trick. What frightful tangles the thing that goes by the name of unselfishness, the attempt to feel for others, could lead a small group like a family into! ”

“ But that's the last thing in the world it would be possible for Paula to do. She must see a great career on one side,—see herself as Geraldine Farrar's successor,—and on the other side she must see a perfect unflawed life with you. So that whichever she chooses she will have a sense of making the greatest possible sacrifice. She couldn't have said to you what she did over the telephone if Mr. Ware hadn't convinced her that a great career was open to her and she couldn't have signed his contract if it had not involved sacrificing you. ”

“ 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. ”