Читать книгу Mary Wollaston - Henry Kitchell Webster - Страница 7

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.

"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. But as he turned back to the piano and struck another chord or two, she could see that his sense of outrage was mounting steadily all the time.

"You can't tune a piano like this."—He pushed up the cover and stared gloomily at the strings. "A mincing sickly thing like this. It's all wrong. The scale is all wrong. The man who designed it ought to be hung. But he called it a piano and sold it for a piano and I'm expected to come in and tune it. Slick and smear it over and leave it sounding sicklier and tubbier and more generally disgusting than ever. You might as well take a painted harlot off the streets"—he glared at the ornate extravagance of the case—"and expect to make a gentlewoman of her with one lesson in deportment. I won't tune it. It's better left as it is. In its shame."

"Well," said Paula, letting go a long breath, "you've said it."

Then she dropped into a chair and began to laugh. Never again, she felt sure, would the drawing-room piano be able to cause her a moment's irritation. This astonishing piano tuner of Lucile's had converted it, with his new christening, into a source of innocent merriment. "The painted harlot" covered the ground. Clear inspiration was what that was. The way he went on glowering at it, digging every now and then a new and more abominable chord out of its entrails made her mirth the more uncontrollable.

"It isn't funny, you know, a thing like this," he remonstrated at last.

"It's serious."

"It would be serious," she retorted with sudden severity, "if you had said all that or anything in the least like that to Miss Wollaston. Because she really loves it. She has adopted it."

"Was she the lady who spoke to me in the park?" His evident consternation over this aspect of the case made Paula smile as she nodded yes.

"That was an act of real kindness," he said earnestly. "Not mere good nature. It doesn't grow on every bush."

To this she eagerly agreed. "She is kind; she's a dear." But when she saw him looking unhappily at the piano again, she said (for she hadn't the slightest intention of abandoning him now), "There's another one, quite a different sort of one, in the music room up-stairs. Would you like to come along and look at that?"

He followed her tractably enough, but up in her studio before looking at the piano, he asked her a question or two. Had he the name right? And was the lady related to Doctor Wollaston?

"She's his sister," said Paula, adding, "and I am his wife. Why, do you know him?"

"I talked with him once. He came out to the factory to see my father and

I happened to be there. Two or three years ago, that was. He did an

operation on my sister that saved her life. He is a great man." He added,

"My name's Anthony March, but he wouldn't remember me."

He sat down at the instrument, went over the keyboard from bottom, to top and back again with a series of curious modulations. Then opening his bag and beginning to get out his tools, he said, "Before I went into the army, there was a man named Bernstein in these parts, who used to perpetrate outrages like this on pianos."

"Yes," said Paula, "he tuned this one two weeks ago."

Without so much as a by your leave, Anthony March went to work.

It was Paula's childlike way to take any pleasurable event simply as a gift from heaven without any further scrutiny of its source; with no labored attempt to explain its arrival and certainly with no misgivings as to whether or not she was entitled to it. Anthony March was such a gift. By the time he had got to work on her own piano, she knew he was pure gold and settled down joyously to make the most of him.

It was not until she attempted to give an account to the Wollastons at dinner that night, of the day they had spent together—for they had made a day of it—that she realized there was anything odd, not to say astonishing, about the episode. How in the first place did it happen that it was Paula's piano he tuned instead of the one in the drawing-room? This was, of course, inexplicable until she could get John by himself and tell him about it. One couldn't report to Lucile his phrase about the painted harlot. She had to content herself with stressing the fact that he intended to tune the drawing-room piano after he had finished with hers and then somehow he hadn't got around to it.

But why had an unaccredited wanderer whom Lucile had found in the park even been given a chance at the piano up-stairs? Well, he had looked to Paula like an artist when she had let him in the door. You could tell, with people like that, if you had an eye for such matters. And then his recognition of Bernstein's nefarious handiwork had clenched her conviction. Certainly she had been right about it; he had absolutely bewitched that piano of hers. She didn't believe there was another such tuner in the United States. If they would come up-stairs after dinner, she'd show them. They had always thought she was unnecessarily fussy about it, but now they should see they were mistaken. It was like unveiling a statue. The poor thing had been there all the time, covered up so that you couldn't hear it. She was so excited about it she could hardly leave it alone.

And he had been as delighted with the results as she herself. After he had played it a while for her (oh, he didn't play well, atrociously badly really, but that didn't matter; it only made it all the more exciting) he made her play for him. Paula smiled reminiscently when she added that he had sat all the while she was playing, on the bare floor under the piano where he could feel the vibrations as well as hear them. He had paid her an odd sort of compliment too, when he came crawling out, saying that he had assumed from the scores on the piano that she was a singer but that she played like a musician—only not a pianist!

He was a genius, absolutely a genius of the first water, when it came to tuning pianos. Whether his talent as a composer ran to any such lengths as that she, of course, didn't know. If what he had played for her had been his own, any of it, it was awfully modern and interesting, at least. You could tell that even though it kept him swearing at himself all the time for not being able to play it. And from something he said at lunch …

"Lunch!" Miss Wollaston gasped (she had been away from home all day). "Do you mean you had lunch with him?"

"Why not?" Paula wanted to know. "Me to have gone down-stairs and eaten all alone and had a tray sent up for him? That would have been so silly, I never even thought of it. He's a real person. I like him a lot. And I don't know when I've had such a nice day."

Here was where Paula's difficulties began. Because when they asked her who he was, where he lived, where he came from, what his experiences in the army had been, and whether he had been to France or not, she had to profess herself upon all these topics totally uninformed. His name she happened to know; it was Anthony March. He told her that, somehow, right at the beginning, though she couldn't remember how the fact had cropped out.

As to the other matters her husband and his sister were seeking information about she simply hadn't had time to get around to things like that. She thought he might have been a farmer once or some such sort of person. He liked the country anyway. He had spent a lot of time, he told her, tramping about in Illinois and Iowa, earning his way by tuning farmers' pianos.

He hated Puccini and spoke rather disrespectfully of Wagner as a spell-binder. He liked Wolf-Ferrari pretty well; the modern he was really crazy about was Montemezzi. But he had made her sing oceans of Gluck—both the Iphigenia and Euridice. It was awfully funny too because he would sing the other parts wherever they happened to lie, tenor, bass, contralto, anything, in the most awful voice you ever heard, though his speaking voice was lovely. Let John just wait until he heard it. It was almost as nice as his own. Oh, he was coming back again some time. He had promised to bring over some songs of his own composing for her to try.

It was at this point or thereabouts that John precipitated a crisis by asking how much this paragon of a piano tuner had charged her for his professional services. Paula stared at him, stricken.

"Why," she said, "I don't believe I paid him anything. I know I didn't. I never thought of it at all. Neither did he, for that matter though, I'm sure of it."

This provoked Lucile into an outburst, rare with her, of outspoken indignation. The man, delinquent as he had been in the matter of the drawing-room piano, became once more her protégé, her soldier whom she had found in the park and attempted to do a kindness to. Paula had kept him fussing over her piano all day and then let him go without, for all she knew, money enough to buy his supper or procure a lodging for the night.

John, though he made less commotion about it, took his wife's negligence even more seriously for he set about attempting to repair it. "You're quite sure," he asked in his crisp, consulting-room manner—a manner Paula was happily unfamiliar with—"You're quite sure he told you nothing about himself beyond his bare name? You've got that right, haven't you? Anthony March?"

"Yes," said Paula uncertainly, "I'm absolutely sure of that."

Had he any insignia on his uniform?—little bronze numerals on his collar—anything like that that she could remember? That would tell them what organization he belonged to and might give them a clue.

Here Lucile got drawn into the inquisition. She had seen him and talked to him. Had she noticed anything of the sort? But Lucile had not. She had, naturally, deferred all inquiries until he came to tune the piano; and had she been called as she felt she should have been. …

But John, it appeared, was not interested in pursuing that line. He turned back to Paula. "I wish you'd begin at the beginning, my dear, at the time you let him into the house, and try to remember as nearly as you can everything that you said to him and that he said to you. He may have said something casually that you didn't remark at the time which would be of the greatest help to us now."

Paula wasn't very hopeful of obtaining any result in this way, but she dutifully went to work trying to think. She was perfectly amiable about it all. Presently her husband prompted her. "How did he happen to tell you what his name was? Can you remember that?"

After a minute, she did. "Why," she cried, lighting up, "he said he knew you but you wouldn't remember him. He said you did an operation on his sister once—that saved her life."

"An unmarried sister?" he asked.

"What difference … Oh, I see, because if she was married her name wouldn't be March. No, he didn't say anything about that. He did say something, though, about a factory. You went out to the factory to see his father and he was there."

John Wollaston's face went blank for a minute and his eyelids drooped shut. Then a quick jerk of the head and a sharp expulsion of breath announced success. "That's all right," he said. "Thank the Lord, I've got it now."

It would have seemed absurd to Paula, had she been capable of regarding anything he did in that light, that he should take a trivial matter like this so seriously. He couldn't have looked more relieved over the successful finish of a difficult operation.

"That happens to be a case I'll never forget," he went on to explain. "Professionally speaking, it was unique, but it had points of human interest as well. The girl was a patient in one of the wards at the Presbyterian. I didn't get a look at her until the last minute when it was desperate. Her father was opposed to the operation—a religious scruple, it turned out. Didn't want God's will interfered with. He was a workman, a skilled workman in a piano factory. There was no time to lose so I drove out there and got him; converted him on the way back to the hospital. I remember the son, now I think of it; by his speech, too. I remember thinking that the mother must have been a really cultivated woman. Well, it's all right. I've got the address in the files at the office. I'll send a letter there in the morning and enclose a check. How much ought it to be?"

Once more Paula did not know. Hadn't, she protested, an idea; and when

John asked her how much she paid Bernstein, she didn't know that either.

It all went on the bill.

"Well, that's easy," said John. "I've got last month's bills in my desk.

All right, I'll look into it. You needn't bother about it any more."

An approximation to a sniff from Miss Wollaston conveyed the comment that Paula hadn't bothered appreciably about it from the beginning, but neither of the others paid any attention to that.

As it fell out, John might have spared his labors because at eight o'clock or thereabouts the next morning just as he was sitting down to breakfast, Anthony March came back to repair his omission of the day before and tune the drawing-room piano.

A minor domestic detail of that sort would normally have fallen within

Lucile's province, but John decisively took it away from her.

"When I finish breakfast," he said, "I'll write him a check and take it in to him." He added, "I'm curious to see what this new discovery of Paula's looks like."

That was exactly what he felt, an amused comfortable curiosity. Nothing in the least like that flash of jealousy he had felt over Novelli. If it had occurred to him to try to explain the difference to himself and had he taken the trouble to skim off the superficial explanation—that Portia Stanton's husband belonged in Paula's world and that a tramp genius who came around to tune pianos did not—he might have got down to the recognition of the fact that the character Paula had sketched for him last night was a grotesque and not therefore to be taken seriously. You could not, at least, do anything but smile over a man who sat on the floor under Paula's piano while she played and came crawling out to express surprise that a singer should be a musician as well.

So the look of the man he found in the drawing-room stopped him rather short. Anthony March had taken off the ill-fitting khaki blouse and the sleeves of his olive-drab uniform shirt were rolled up above the elbows. He was sitting sidewise on the piano bench, his left hand on the keyboard, his right making imperceptible changes in the tension of one of the strings. His implement, John's quick eye noticed, was not the long-handled L shaped affair he had always seen tuners use but a T shaped thing that put the tuner's hand exactly above the pin.

"It must take an immense amount of strength," he observed, "to tune a piano with a wrench like that."

March turned and with a pleasant sort of smile wished him a good morning. But he finished ironing the wave out of a faulty unison before he replied to John's remark. He arose from the bench as he spoke. "It does; but it is more a matter of knack really. A great tuner named Clark taught me, and he learned it from Jonas Chickering himself. Old Jonas wouldn't allow any of his grand pianos to be tuned with an L head wrench."

"My wife," said John, "recalled you to me last night, in the effort to remedy her omission to pay you for your services yesterday. I remember your sister's case very distinctly. I hope she is … "

"She is quite well, thank you," March said. Oddly enough his manner stiffened a little.

John hastily produced his check. It had struck him as possible that March might suspect him of hinting that one gratuitous service ought to offset the other.

"I hope the amount is satisfactory," he said.

March glanced at the check and smiled. "It's rather more than satisfactory; I should call it handsome. Thank you very much." He tucked the check into the pocket of his shirt.

"My wife's immensely pleased over what you did to her piano. I'm sure she will be glad to do all she can in the way of recommending you among her musical friends."

March looked at him in consternation. "Oh, she mustn't do that!" he cried. "I hope she won't—recommend me to any one."

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." He added thoughtfully, "I dare say you understand that, sir."

John Wollaston nodded. He understood very well indeed. He checked on his tongue the words, "Only I have to earn a lot of money." "You are a composer, too, my wife tells me."

"Yes," March said, "but that isn't the point exactly. Put it that I enjoy traveling light and that I don't like harness. Though this one,"—he glanced down at his uniform—"hasn't been so bad." He turned toward the piano with the evident idea of going back to work.

"Well," John said, "I must be off. You've a good philosophy of life if you can make it work. Not many men can. Good-by. We'll meet again some time, I hope."

"I hope so too," said Anthony March.

John went out and closed the drawing-room door behind him. Then he left the house without going up-stairs and saying hello to Paula and sitting down on the edge of her bed, as he had meant to do, and telling her all about his talk with the piano tuner.

It really was late and he must be getting started. Only why had he closed the drawing-room door so carefully behind him? So that his wife shouldn't be disturbed by the infernal racket those fellows always made tuning pianos? Or so that she mightn't even know, until he had finished his work and gone, that Anthony March had come back at all? And not knowing, should not come down en negligée and ask whether he had brought his songs for her. Had he brought them? Certainly John had given him a good enough chance to say so. And if he had brought them and Paula did not come, would he leave them for her with Nat? Or would he carry them away in his little black satchel?

All the way out to the hospital John kept turning Anthony March over in his mind and the last thing to leave it was what had been the first impression of all. The fine strength of that hand and wrist which tuned grand pianos with a T wrench.

He hated himself for having shut the door.

And as it happened this act did not prevent Paula from finding March. The tyrant who looked after her hair had given her an appointment that morning at ten. So, a little before that hour and just as March was finishing off his job, she came down, dressed for the street. She came into the drawing-room and with good-humored derision, smiled at him.

"I knew you'd come and do it," she told him.

"It isn't going to be so bad," he answered. "Moszkowski, Chaminade—quite a little of Chopin for that matter—will go pretty well on it."

"Did you bring my songs?" she asked.

From the chair that he had thrown his blouse upon, he produced a flat package neatly wrapped in brown paper. And as she went over to the window with it, tearing the wrappers away as she walked, he went back to his work at the piano.

"Don't do that," she said, as he struck a chord or two. "I can't read if you do." But almost instantly she added with a laugh, "Oh, all right, go ahead. I can't read this anyway. Why, it's frightful!" She came swiftly toward the piano and stood the big flat quires of score paper on the rack. "Show me how this goes," she commanded, but he pushed back a little with a gesture almost of fright.

"No," he protested sharply. "I can't. I can't begin to play that stuff."

She remained standing beside his shoulder, looking at the score.

"They're strange words," she said, and began reading them to herself, half aloud, haltingly.

"'Low hangs the moon. It rose late,

It is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love.'"

"Walt Whitman," he told her. "They're all out of a poem called Sea-Drift."

She went on reading, now audibly, now with a mere silent movement of the lips, half puzzled, half entranced, and catching—despite her protest that she could not read the music—some intimations of its intense strange beauty.

"' … do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers? … Loud I call to you, my love … Surely you must know who is here … O rising stars! Perhaps the one I want so much will rise … with some of you … O trembling throat! Sound clearer through the atmosphere … '"

With a shake of the head, like one trying to stop the weaving of a spell, she turned the pages back to the beginning.

"This means Novelli," she said. "I'll get him. I'll get him this morning.

He's the best accompanist in Chicago. We'll go to work on them and when

we've got them presentable, I'll let you know and sing them to you.

Where do you live?"

He got up for a paper and pencil and wrote out an address and a telephone number. She was still staring at that first page of the score when he brought it back to her.

"I've never heard any of those songs myself," he told her.

At that she looked around at him, looked steadily into his face for a moment and then her eyes filled with tears. She reached out both hands and took him by the shoulders. "Well, you're going to hear them this time, my dear," she said. As she moved away, she added in a more matter-of-fact tone, "Just as soon as we can work them up, in a few days perhaps. I'll let you know."