Loe raamatut: «Short Sixes»
THE TENOR
It was a dim, quiet room in an old-fashioned New York house, with windows opening upon a garden that was trim and attractive, even in its Winter dress – for the rose-bushes were all bundled up in straw ulsters. The room was ample, yet it had a cosy air. Its dark hangings suggested comfort and luxury, with no hint of gloom. A hundred pretty trifles told that it was a young girl’s room: in the deep alcove nestled her dainty white bed, draped with creamy lace and ribbons.
“I was so afraid that I’d be late!”
The door opened, and two pretty girls came in, one in hat and furs, the other in a modest house-dress. The girl in the furs, who had been afraid that she would be late, was fair, with a bright color in her cheeks, and an eager, intent look in her clear brown eyes. The other girl was dark-eyed and dark-haired, dreamy, with a soft, warm, dusky color in her face. They were two very pretty girls indeed – or, rather, two girls about to be very pretty, for neither one was eighteen years old. The dark girl glanced at a little porcelain clock.
“You are in time, dear,” she said, and helped her companion to take off her wraps.
Then the two girls crossed the room, and with a caressing and almost a reverent touch, the dark girl opened the doors of a little carven cabinet that hung upon the wall, above a small table covered with a delicate white cloth. In its depths, framed in a mat of odorous double violets, stood the photograph of the face of a handsome man of forty – a face crowned with clustering black locks, from beneath which a pair of large, mournful eyes looked out with something like religious fervor in their rapt gaze. It was the face of a foreigner.
“O Esther!” cried the other girl, “how beautifully you have dressed him to-day!”
“I wanted to get more,” Esther said; “but I’ve spent almost all my allowance – and violets do cost so shockingly. Come, now – ” with another glance at the clock – “don’t let’s lose any more time, Louise dear.”
She brought a couple of tiny candles in Sèvres candlesticks, and two little silver saucers, in which she lit fragrant pastilles. As the pale gray smoke arose, floating in faint wreaths and spirals before the enshrined photograph, Louise sat down and gazed intently upon the little altar. Esther went to her piano and watched the clock. It struck two. Her hands fell softly on the keys, and, studying a printed programme in front of her, she began to play an overture. After the overture she played one or two pieces of the regular concert stock. Then she paused.
“I can’t play the Tschaikowski piece.”
“Never mind,” said the other. “Let us wait for him in silence.”
The hands of the clock pointed to 2:29. Each girl drew a quick breath, and then the one at the piano began to sing softly, almost inaudibly, “les Rameaux” in a transcription for tenor of Faure’s great song. When it was ended, she played and sang the encore. Then, with her fingers touching the keys so softly that they awakened only an echo-like sound, she ran over the numbers that intervened between the first tenor solo and the second. Then she sang again, as softly as before.
The fair-haired girl sat by the little table, gazing intently on the picture. Her great eyes seemed to devour it, and yet there was something absent-minded, speculative, in her steady look. She did not speak until Esther played the last number on the programme.
“He had three encores for that last Saturday,” she said, and Esther played the three encores.
Then they closed the piano and the little cabinet, and exchanged an innocent girlish kiss, and Louise went out, and found her father’s coupé waiting for her, and was driven away to her great, gloomy, brown-stone home near Central Park.
Louise Laura Latimer and Esther Van Guilder were the only children of two families which, though they were possessed of the three “Rs” which are all and more than are needed to insure admission to New York society – Riches, Respectability and Religion – yet were not in Society; or, at least, in the society that calls itself Society. This was not because Society was not willing to have them. It was because they thought the world too worldly. Perhaps this was one reason – although the social horizon of the two families had expanded somewhat as the girls grew up – why Louise and Esther, who had been playmates from their nursery days, and had grown up to be two uncommonly sentimental, fanciful, enthusiastically morbid girls, were to be found spending a bright Winter afternoon holding a ceremonial service of worship before the photograph of a fashionable French tenor.
It happened to be a French tenor whom they were worshiping. It might as well have been anybody or any thing else. They were both at that period of girlish growth when the young female bosom is torn by a hysterical craving to worship something – any thing. They had been studying music, and they had selected the tenor who was the sensation of the hour in New York for their idol. They had heard him only on the concert stage; they were never likely to see him nearer. But it was a mere matter of chance that the idol was not a Boston Transcendentalist, a Popular Preacher, a Faith-Cure Healer, or a ringleted old maid with advanced ideas of Woman’s Mission. The ceremonies might have been different in form: the worship would have been the same.
M. Hyppolite Rémy was certainly the musical hero of the hour. When his advance notices first appeared, the New York critics, who are a singularly unconfiding, incredulous lot, were inclined to discount his European reputation.
When they learned that M. Rémy was not only a great artist, but a man whose character was “wholly free from that deplorable laxity which is so often a blot on the proud escutcheon of his noble profession;” that he had married an American lady; that he had “embraced the Protestant religion” – no sect was specified, possibly to avoid jealousy – and that his health was delicate, they were moved to suspect that he might have to ask that allowances be made for his singing. But when he arrived, his triumph was complete. He was as handsome as his pictures, if he was a trifle short, a shade too stout.
He was a singer of genius, too; with a splendid voice and a sound method – on the whole. It was before the days of the Wagner autocracy, and perhaps his tremolo passed unchallenged as it could not now; but he was a great artist. He knew his business as well as his advance-agent knew his. The Rémy Concerts were a splendid success. Reserved seats, $5. For the Series of Six, $25.
***
On the following Monday, Esther Van Guilder returned her friend’s call, in response to an urgent invitation, despatched by mail. Louise Latimer’s great bare room was incapable of transmutation into a cosy nest of a boudoir. There was too much of its heavy raw silk furniture – too much of its vast, sarcophagus-like bed – too much of its upholsterer’s elegance, regardless of cost – and taste. An enlargement from an ambrotype of the original Latimer, as he arrived in New York from New Hampshire, and a photograph of a “child subject” by Millais, were all her works of art. It was not to be doubted that they had climbed upstairs from a front parlor of an earlier stage of social development. The farm-house was six generations behind Esther; two behind Louise.
Esther found her friend in a state of almost feverish excitement. Her eyes shone; the color burned high on her clear cheeks.
“You never would guess what I’ve done, dear!” she began, as soon as they were alone in the big room. “I’m going to see him– to speak to him – Esther!” Her voice was solemnly hushed, “to serve him!”
“Oh, Louise! what do you mean?”
“To serve him – with my own hands! To – to – help him on with his coat – I don’t know – to do something that a servant does – any thing, so that I can say that once, once only, just for an hour, I have been near him, been of use to him, served him in one little thing, as loyally as he serves OUR ART.”
Music was THEIR art, and no capitals could tell how much it was theirs or how much of an art it was.
“Louise,” demanded Esther, with a frightened look, “are you crazy?”
“No. Read this!” She handed the other girl a clipping from the advertising columns of a newspaper.
“I saw it just by accident, Saturday, after I left you. Papa had left his paper in the coupé. I was going up to my First Aid to the Injured Class – it’s at four o’clock now, you know. I made up my mind right off – it came to me like an inspiration. I just waited until it came to the place where they showed how to tie up arteries, and then I slipped out. Lots of the girls slip out in the horrid parts, you know. And then, instead of waiting in the ante-room, I put on my wrap, and pulled the hood over my head and ran off to the Midlothian – it’s just around the corner, you know. And I saw his wife.”
“What was she like?” queried Esther, eagerly.
“Oh, I don’t know. Sort of horrid – actressy. She had a pink silk wrapper with swansdown all over it – at four o’clock, think! I was awfully frightened when I got there; but it wasn’t the least trouble. She hardly looked at me, and she engaged me right off. She just asked me if I was willing to do a whole lot of things – I forget what they were – and where I’d worked before. I said at Mrs. Barcalow’s.”
“‘Mrs. Barcalow’s?’”
“Why, yes – my Aunt Amanda, don’t you know – up in Framingham. I always have to wash the teacups when I go there. Aunty says that everybody has got to do something in her house.”
“Oh, Louise!” cried her friend, in shocked admiration; “how can you think of such things?”
“Well, I did. And she – his wife, you know – just said: ‘Oh, I suppose you’ll do as well as any one – all you girls are alike.’”
“But did she really take you for a – servant?”
“Why, yes, indeed. It was raining. I had that old ulster on, you know. I’m to go at twelve o’clock next Saturday.”
“But, Louise!” cried Esther, aghast, “you don’t truly mean to go!”
“I do!” cried Louise, beaming triumphantly.
“Oh, Louise!”
“Now, listen, dear, said Miss Latimer, with the decision of an enthusiastic young lady with New England blood in her veins. ‘Don’t say a word till I tell you what my plan is. I’ve thought it all out, and you’ve got to help me.’”
Esther shuddered.
“You foolish child!” cried Louise. Her eyes were sparkling: she was in a state of ecstatic excitement; she could see no obstacles to the carrying out of her plan. “You don’t think I mean to stay there, do you? I’m just going at twelve o’clock, and at four he comes back from the matinée, and at five o’clock I’m going to slip on my things and run downstairs, and have you waiting for me in the coupé, and off we go. Now do you see?”
It took some time to bring Esther’s less venturesome spirit up to the point of assisting in this bold undertaking; but she began, after a while, to feel the delights of vicarious enterprise, and in the end the two girls, their cheeks flushed, their eyes shining feverishly, their voices tremulous with childish eagerness, resolved themselves into a committee of ways and means; for they were two well-guarded young women, and to engineer five hours of liberty was difficult to the verge of impossibility. However, there is a financial manœuvre known as “kiting checks,” whereby A exchanges a check with B and B swaps with A again, playing an imaginary balance against Time and the Clearing House; and by a similar scheme, which an acute student of social ethics has called “kiting calls,” the girls found that they could make Saturday afternoon their own, without one glance from the watchful eyes of Esther’s mother or Louise’s aunt – Louise had only an aunt to reckon with.
“And, oh, Esther!” cried the bolder of the conspirators, “I’ve thought of a trunk – of course I’ve got to have a trunk, or she would ask me where it was, and I couldn’t tell her a fib. Don’t you remember the French maid who died three days after she came here? Her trunk is up in the store-room still, and I don’t believe anybody will ever come for it – it’s been there seven years now. Let’s go up and look at it.”
The girls romped upstairs to the great unused upper story, where heaps of household rubbish obscured the dusty half-windows. In a corner, behind Louise’s baby chair and an unfashionable hat-rack of the old steering-wheel pattern, they found the little brown-painted tin trunk, corded up with clothes-line.
“Louise!” said Esther, hastily, “what did you tell her your name was?”
“I just said ‘Louise’.”
Esther pointed to the name painted on the trunk,
Louise Lévy
“It is the hand of Providence,” she said. “Somehow, now, I’m sure you’re quite right to go.”
And neither of these conscientious young ladies reflected for one minute on the discomfort which might be occasioned to Madame Rémy by the defection of her new servant a half-hour before dinner-time on Saturday night.
***
“Oh, child, it’s you, is it?” was Mme. Rémy’s greeting at twelve o’clock on Saturday. “Well, you’re punctual – and you look clean. Now, are you going to break my dishes or are you going to steal my rings? Well, we’ll find out soon enough. Your trunk’s up in your room. Go up to the servants’ quarters – right at the top of those stairs there. Ask for the room that belongs to apartment 11. You are to room with their girl.”
Louise was glad of a moment’s respite. She had taken the plunge; she was determined to go through to the end. But her heart would beat and her hands would tremble. She climbed up six flights of winding stairs, and found herself weak and dizzy when she reached the top and gazed around her. She was in a great half-story room, eighty feet square. The most of it was filled with heaps of old furniture and bedding, rolls of carpet, of canvas, of oilcloth, and odds and ends of discarded or unused household gear – the dust thick over all. A little space had been left around three sides, to give access to three rows of cell-like rooms, in each of which the ceiling sloped from the very door to a tiny window at the level of the floor. In each room was a bed, a bureau that served for wash-stand, a small looking-glass, and one or two trunks. Women’s dresses hung on the whitewashed walls. She found No. 11, threw off, desperately, her hat and jacket, and sunk down on the little brown tin trunk, all trembling from head to foot.
“Hello,” called a cheery voice. She looked up and saw a girl in a dirty calico dress.
“Just come?” inquired this person, with agreeable informality. She was a good-looking large girl, with red hair and bright cheeks. She leaned against the door-post and polished her finger-nails with a little brush. Her hands were shapely.
“Ain’t got onto the stair-climbing racket yet, eh? You’ll get used to it. ‘Louise Lévy,’” she read the name on the trunk. “You don’t look like a sheeny. Can’t tell nothin’ ’bout names, can you? My name’s Slattery. You’d think I was Irish, wouldn’t you? Well, I’m straight Ne’ York. I’d be dead before I was Irish. Born here. Ninth Ward an’ next to an engine-house. How’s that? There’s white Jews, too. I worked for one, pickin’ sealskins down in Prince Street. Most took the lungs out of me. But that wasn’t why I shook the biz. It queered my hands – see? I’m goin’ to be married in the Fall to a German gentleman. He ain’t so Dutch when you know him, though. He’s a grocer. Drivin’ now; but he buys out the boss in the Fall. How’s that? He’s dead stuck on my hooks, an’ I have to keep ’em lookin’ good. I come here because the work was light. I don’t have to work – only to be doin’ somethin’, see? Only got five halls and the lamps. You got a fam’ly job, I s’pose? I wouldn’t have that. I don’t mind the Sooprintendent; but I’d be dead before I’d be bossed by a woman, see? Say, what fam’ly did you say you was with?”
This stream of talk had acted like a nerve-tonic on Louise. She was able to answer:
“M – Mr. Rémy.”
“Ramy? – oh, lord! Got the job with His Tonsils? Well, you won’t keep it long. They’re meaner ’n three balls, see? Rent their room up here and chip in with eleven. Their girls don’t never stay. Well, I got to step, or the Sooprintendent’ll be borin’ my ear. Well – so long!”
But Louise had fled down the stairs. “His Tonsils” rang in her ears. What blasphemy! What sacrilege! She could scarcely pretend to listen to Mme. Rémy’s first instructions.
The household was parsimonious. Louise washed the caterer’s dishes – he made a reduction in his price. Thus she learned that a late breakfast took the place of luncheon. She began to feel what this meant. The beds had been made; but there was work enough. She helped Mme. Rémy to sponge a heap of faded finery – her dresses. If they had been his coats! Louise bent her hot face over the tawdry silks and satins, and clasped her parboiled little finger-tips over the wet sponge. At half-past three Mme. Rémy broke the silence.
“We must get ready for Musseer,” she said. An ecstatic joy filled Louise’s being. The hour of her reward was at hand.
Getting ready for “Musseer” proved to be an appalling process. First they brewed what Mme. Rémy called a “teaze Ann.” After the tisane, a host of strange foreign drugs and cosmetics were marshalled in order. Then water was set to heat on a gas-stove. Then a little table was neatly set.
“Musseer has his dinner at half-past four,” Madame explained. “I don’t take mine till he’s laid down and I’ve got him off to the concert. There, he’s coming now. Sometimes he comes home pretty nervous. If he’s nervous, don’t you go and make a fuss, do you hear, child?”
The door opened, and Musseer entered, wrapped in a huge frogged overcoat. There was no doubt that he was nervous. He cast his hat upon the floor, as if he were Jove dashing a thunderbolt. Fire flashed from his eyes. He advanced upon his wife and thrust a newspaper in her face – a little pinky sheet, a notorious blackmailing publication.
“Zees,” he cried, “is your work!”
“What is it, now, Hipleet?” demanded Mme. Rémy.
“Vot it ees?” shrieked the tenor. “It ees ze history of how zey have heest me at Nice! It ees all zair – how I have been heest – in zis sacré sheet – in zis hankairchif of infamy! And it ees you zat have told it to zat devil of a Rastignac – traitresse!”
“Now, Hipleet,” pleaded his wife, “if I can’t learn enough French to talk with you, how am I going to tell Rastignac about your being hissed?”
This reasoning silenced Mr. Rémy for an instant – an instant only.
“You vood have done it!” he cried, sticking out his chin and thrusting his face forward.
“Well, I didn’t,” said Madame, “and nobody reads that thing, any way. Now, don’t you mind it, and let me get your things off, or you’ll be catching cold.”
Mr. Rémy yielded at last to the necessity of self-preservation, and permitted his wife to remove his frogged overcoat, and to unwind him from a system of silk wraps to which the Gordian knot was a slip-noose. This done, he sat down before the dressing-case, and Mme. Rémy, after tying a bib around his neck, proceeded to dress his hair and put brilliantine on his moustache. Her husband enlivened the operation by reading from the pinky paper.
“It ees not gen-air-al-lee known – zat zees dees-tin-guished tenor vos heest on ze pob-lic staidj at Nice – in ze year – “
Louise leaned against the wall, sick, faint and frightened, with a strange sense of shame and degradation at her heart. At last the tenor’s eye fell on her.
“Anozzair eediot?” he inquired.
“She ain’t very bright, Hipleet,” replied his wife; “but I guess she’ll do. Louise, open the door – there’s the caterer.”
Louise placed the dishes upon the table mechanically. The tenor sat himself at the board, and tucked a napkin in his neck.
“And how did the Benediction Song go this afternoon?” inquired his wife.
“Ze Bénédiction? Ah! One encore. One on-lee. Zese pigs of Américains. I t’row my pairls biffo’ swine. Chops once more! You vant to mordair me? Vat do zis mean, madame? You ar-r-r-re in lig wiz my enemies. All ze vorlt is against ze ar-r-r-teest!”
The storm that followed made the first seem a zephyr. The tenor exhausted his execratory vocabulary in French and English. At last, by way of a dramatic finale, he seized the plate of chops and flung it from him. He aimed at the wall; but Frenchmen do not pitch well. With a ring and a crash, plate and chops went through the broad window-pane. In the moment of stricken speechlessness that followed, the sound of the final smash came softly up from the sidewalk.
“Ah-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ah!”
The tenor rose to his feet with the howl of an anguished hyena.
“Oh, good gracious!” cried his wife; “he’s going to have one of his creezes – his creezes de nare!”
He did have a crise de nerfs. “Ten dollair!” he yelled, “for ten dollair of glass!” He tore his pomaded hair; he tore off his bib and his neck-tie, and for three minutes without cessation he shrieked wildly and unintelligibly. It was possible to make out, however, that “arteest” and “ten dollair” were the themes of his improvisation. Finally he sank exhausted into the chair, and his white-faced wife rushed to his side.
“Louise!” she cried, “get the foot-tub out of the closet while I spray his throat, or he can’t sing a note. Fill it up with warm water – 102 degrees – there’s the thermometer – and bathe his feet.”
Trembling from head to foot, Louise obeyed her orders, and brought the foot-tub, full of steaming water. Then she knelt down and began to serve the maestro for the first time. She took off his shoes. Then she looked at his socks. Could she do it?
“Eediot!” gasped the sufferer, “make haste! I die!”
“Hold your mouth open, dear,” said Madame, “I haven’t half sprayed you.”
“Ah! you!” cried the tenor. “Cat! Devil! It ees you zat have killed me!” And moved by an access of blind rage, he extended his arm, and thrust his wife violently from him.
Louise rose to her feet, with a hard, set, good old New England look on her face. She lifted the tub of water to the level of her breast, and then she inverted it on the tenor’s head. For one instant she gazed at the deluge, and at the bath-tub balanced on the maestro’s skull like a helmet several sizes too large – then she fled like the wind.
Once in the servants’ quarters, she snatched her hat and jacket. From below came mad yells of rage.
“I kill hare! give me my knife – give me my rivvolvare! Au secours! Assassin!”
Miss Slattery appeared in the doorway, still polishing her nails.
“What have you done to His Tonsils?” she inquired. “He’s pretty hot, this trip.”
“How can I get away from here?” cried Louise.
Miss Slattery pointed to a small door. Louise rushed down a long stairway – another – and yet others – through a great room where there was a smell of cooking and a noise of fires – past white-capped cooks and scullions – through a long stone corridor, and out into the street. She cried aloud as she saw Esther’s face at the window of the coupé.
She drove home – cured.
