Star-Dust Part 35

"Auchinloss discovered Paula Anchutz!"

"He decided her greatness after a few bars. Some day I'll read you Millie's letter home about her audition in Vienna. After about six bars of the 'Jewel Song' he leaped up over the footlights, screamed at her, kissed her, drew up a chair, and began to plan out the entire campaign of her future, so rapidly that the poor child said everything was swinging in circles before her."

Her eyes two flaming orbits, Lilly sat staring, her lips slightly open.

"And that was the beginning."

"Yes, that was the beginning of--everything," said Miss Neuga.s.s, with a twist on her lips.

"Oh, I--Even to hear it thrills me so that I--Thrills me so! But what, Miss Neuga.s.s--what if he hadn't--"

"That is where you must make up your mind to take your medicine. There's an article about him in this month's _Musical Gazette_. If he thinks you've the stuff great singers are made of, it's a repet.i.tion of his scene with Millie every time. But this article goes on to say, if he rubs his hands together and says, 'Very nice,' and walks off, that means he thinks you will probably make a better bookkeeper or baby dandler than you will a prima donna. Millie used to write that around the opera house in Vienna, when Auchinloss started rubbing his hands together after an audition, everybody used to have the smelling salts ready."

"Miss Neuga.s.s--you've heard me practice. Tell me the truth! Do you think my ambition is bigger than my voice? Tell me as you would your sister."

The veil of a pause hung between them, Miss Neuga.s.s unfolding her legs and letting them hang over the side of the bed, as if she would flee the moment.

"Why, I'm no critic, Miss Parlow. All I inherit is some of my father's natural musical instinct."

"You're evading me, like Ballman does! Tell me! You may save me as you saved yourself. Am I chasing a phantom?"

"I swear to you I don't know. I like your voice. I think it has a beautiful rich quality. I agree with Ballman, it has fine timbre."

"Timbre--I'm tired hearing that--"

"That counts in voice almost as much as range."

"No, no, don't evade. You think it lacks range?"

"I don't know. It lacks something--as if--well, if you'll pardon my saying it, as if it didn't reach as far as your temperament could fling it."

"That's it exactly! I feel that about myself in everything--almost as if--as if it would take another generation of me to complete me--if--if you get what I mean."

"There is something in that."

"I know what you think in your heart. I'm a vaudeville product with a grand-opera aspiration."

"I'm not capable of judging."

"You judged your sister."

"Ah, but Millie's voice there was no mistaking. Her talent needed hardly to be developed. It opened naturally, like a rose. Nine voices out of ten have to be drilled for like precious ore. Just you study on.

I'll have Auchinloss hear you when he comes over."

"You're sure, Miss Neuga.s.s, they're coming?"

"That's what the papers keep saying. She's to sing three operas in January, with Auchinloss conducting. We're expecting daily to hear from my sister, verifying it."

"You don't know--exactly?"

"No."

"If only--You don't think it will be this side of January? You see, after January my--my plans may be uncertain."

"I understand. He's to conduct his own symphony in December, to be played the first time in this country, somewhere around Christmas in Boston, I think."

"Will you be wanting this room then?"

Miss Neuga.s.s swung her face with its considerable dip of nose toward Lilly.

"You don't think this place will hold Millie any more? You don't think, for instance, the great Du Ga.s.s could receive the reporters--here!"

"But, after all, it's her home."

A levelness of expression came down over the face of Miss Neuga.s.s, as if a shade had been lowered across it, her voice, too, leveled of any inflection.

"Of course," she said, "you know about my sister and--Auchinloss."

"You mean--"

"Oh, I realize everybody knows--that is, everybody except my parents."

"I didn't--"

"That's because you don't belong yet! Wait until you've worked your way in a bit. I've known it long enough. Two years."

"Then she--you--"

"She was a baby when she left, Miss Parlow. Even if there had been the money to send me along with her, we wouldn't have felt the need of it. I could have staked my life on that child. Not that I'm blaming her, only I--G.o.d! I could have staked my life."

"He's--"

"Already married. She wrote me the whole story two years ago. It's an old one. So old it's got barnacles. I sometimes wonder it came to me with the terrible shock it did. She was so young--too young to get ahead so quickly even with her gifts. He has a son almost her age. He's forty and she's twenty. The wife in an insane asylum somewhere outside of Paris. Our Millie! I don't think I even realize it yet. Beauty and the Beast they call them in Milan."

"Horrible!"

"That baby. The whole world before her. It was all with her or nothing, she wrote, and she chose all. She sang six leading roles that first year. It made her. I--I don't blame her, somehow--that baby. It's him I hate. Sometimes I wonder how I'm going to hold back, when I lay hands on him, from--killing. But I won't. I'll grin and bear it just as if her beautiful little white self were no more to me than an alabaster vase after it's cracked."

"And your parents?"

"That's all she writes of, now that she thinks she is coming, to keep it from them! I wake up nights in a cold sweat over it. Wringing wet with the fear of my job."

"Your mother and sweet little old father!"

"That's it; they're like two babes in the woods morally. They don't know any gradation except black and white. Virtue and sin. A woman is good or a woman is rotten bad. She falls or she doesn't."

"Oh, I know the relentlessness of that single-track code of right and wrong."