The Dominant Strain Part 4

"And then?" Sally persisted.

Thayer spoke with some reluctance.

"Then they found him an engagement that paid a better salary, and they bullied him into accepting a little loan, until the first week's payday came around."

"That was so good of you!" Beatrix said impulsively.

He raised his brows.

"I wasn't the only American in Berlin at the time, Miss Dane."

"No; you said there were two of you. But there is no use in your denying that you were the one who sang _The Erl-King_."

"Circ.u.mstantial evidence convicts you, Thayer," Bobby said, coming to the support of his cousin. "You sang; you also fed him. Likewise, you brought him to America. Then wherefore deny?"

"There's no reason I should deny. I like Arlt, and for weeks I had been trying to get him as accompanist, so I gained by the affair. The other fellow didn't, though. He was no musician; but the case interested him.

He not only backed Arlt financially, but he hunted up the mother and sister and did no end of nice things for them, the things that count: rolling chairs and extract of beef and all that stuff. He had nothing to make by the transaction."

"Were they properly grateful?" Bobby inquired.

"Yes, to the point of enthusiasm. The mother insisted upon doing his mending all the next winter, and the sister embroidered him a pair of huge antimaca.s.sars and a smoking-cap. It sounds funny; but it was grim, earnest tragedy mixed with pathos. He did it all with such tact that the poor creatures never half realized how for a fact they never came into the middle of his life at all. Arlt realizes it, though. That is one of the most pathetic phases of the whole situation. By the way, Dane, you know the fellow, I think."

"I wish I did." Beatrix spoke impetuously. "Plenty of people will give generously, but not many of them are willing to give humanely."

Thayer smiled.

"Old Frau Arlt used to call him her _Lieber Sohn_, and fuss over him as if he were in dire need of her motherly care. He took it just as it was given. The two women lived too quietly to have heard of him. Otto never told them the truth; but outside the house his deference made up for the familiarity at home. It has been a pretty story to watch, and it has meant a comfortable life for two half-starved women."

"Who was the man?" Bobby asked idly.

"Lorimer. Sidney Lorimer."

CHAPTER THREE

Of course, as Bobby Dane had said, with such a name, Thayer's family tree had sprouted in Ma.s.sachusetts. His Puritanism was hereditary and strong; it tempered the artistic side of his nature, but it could not destroy it. In the musical sense of the word, Cotton Mather Thayer possessed Temperament; but his Temperament was the battle-field where two warring temperaments were at constant strife.

In the year of grace sixteen hundred and thirty-five, Richard Thayer, freeman, landed in America. From Plymouth Rock, he strode straight towards a position of colonial fame. His children and his children's children kept up the family tradition and name until one of them, of a more theological bent than his cousins had been, annulled the custom of his ancestors and named his oldest son for the grim divine, Cotton Mather Thayer, and during the next one hundred and fifty years, Cotton Mathers and Richards had flourished side by side among the Thayers of eastern Ma.s.sachusetts. They were strong men, one and all, quiet and self-contained in years of peace, grim fighters in seasons of war, and prominent citizens at all times, a G.o.dly, gritty, and prosperous race.

Of such is the greatness of New England.

Their records, like the records of all good things, were slightly monotonous. They were born into orderly nurseries; they were graduated from the vicissitudes of teething and mumps into orderly, peaceful adolescence. They invariably married the most suitable damsel of their own cla.s.s, and they pa.s.sed from an orderly old age through an orderly churchyard into a heaven which the imagination of their surviving kin peopled with orderly ranks of angels, playing gilt harps in perfect accord. Their artistic ideals were bounded by _Coronation_ and the pictures in _The New England Primer_ and _G.o.dey_. Blackberry shrub, to their minds, was the medium of riotous dissipation.

Under such fostering conditions, ancestral traits strengthened from generation to generation, until the race of Puritan Thayers culminated in one Cotton Mather who was born in the early decades of the last century, a grim deacon, a shrewd lawyer, and the owner of two or three s.h.i.+ps which sailed from his own seaport town. Shrewd as he was, however, his logic failed him at one point. When his first child, Cotton Mather Thayer, was a tiny boy, the youngster was allowed and even invited to toddle about the wharves, clinging to the paternal thumb. On the other hand, when the boy Cotton was fourteen, he received a round dozen of canings for lounging about among the s.h.i.+pping. The thirteenth caning was one too many. It was more severe than the others, and it cracked the long-strained situation. The caning occurred in his father's office, after hours, one June night. The _Thankful_ was booked to sail, the next morning at eight. When, at eight-ten, it slipped down the harbor, it bore away as cabin-boy and general drudge the stiff and sore, but unrepentant sinner, Cotton Mather Thayer, age fourteen.

His later adventures have little concern with the story of his son's life. He sailed over many seas, he visited many lands, mellowing by contact with many peoples the unyielding temper of his race. The possibility of failure never once entered into his mind. The Thayers always had succeeded, for they always had worked. In consequence, he took it quite as a matter of course that, at twenty-three, he should be commander of the _Presidenta_, stationed in the Baltic for a year of chilly inaction. St. Petersburg was near, and St. Petersburg, as the young commander found, held for him the focal point of the world, in the person of the pretty daughter of one of the court musicians. Twelve years later, while the _Presidenta_ was stationed in the Mediterranean, its young captain died, leaving behind him in Russia a fragile wife and a little son who had inherited the name and character of the Thayers, curiously mingled with the artistic, emotional temperament and the rare musical ability of his mother's race.

It was no common combination. Russian art and Puritan morals are equally grim; yet the one yields to every pa.s.sing emotion, the other is girded up by unyielding strength. Throughout his little boyhood, the child's nature seemed borne hither and thither by these two counter currents in his blood, now pa.s.sing days of quiet, st.u.r.dy self-control, now swept by black gusts of pa.s.sion which carried all things before them. Then, four years after his father's death, there came two events into his life: his mother's death, and the discovery that he had a voice. The one taught him the meaning of utter, absolute loneliness, for the alien blood of the Thayers had never been able to win many friends in the land of his mother's kin. The other proved to be at once a rudder to guide him over the uncharted future of his life, and an outlet for the pent-up pa.s.sion within him. His voice was totally untrained, and as yet it broke into all manner of distressing falsetto fragments. Nevertheless, it gave him a cause for living, and it enabled him, the descendant of a taciturn race, to give utterance to the doubts and questionings which accompanied his growth to manhood. Bereft of his mother and without his voice, he might easily have become an ascetic or a criminal.

To a boy of sixteen, trained to a life of strict economy, his slight income from his father's investments seemed enough for his needs, and he felt a boyish disgust when, one day, word came to him that his grandfather had died, leaving him the only heir to the large property laid up by eight generations of Thayers. His grandfather had refused to become reconciled to his son; then why should he a.s.sume post-mortem friends.h.i.+p with his son's son? However, by the time he was launched into German student-life, dividing his time fitfully between his university and his music, young Cotton Mather was forced to admit that an ancestral fortune was no despicable addition to the stock in trade of a man starting in life. He only needed to watch the grinding existences of some of his comrades to realize the value of money in shaping a broad artistic career. Instead of wasting his gray matter over details of ways and means, he could let that side of life take care of itself, while he gave his whole attention to developing the best that was in his mind and his voice.

Of course, he was extravagant; of course, he learned, among other things, some of the blacker lessons of the student world. However, the Puritanism of his ancestors stood him in good stead. It enabled him to come into close contact with the seamy side of life; but it decreed that the friction should never leave a sore spot behind it. It only hardened the fibre. When he ended his studies, he knew the world at its best and at its worst, but with this distinction: the best was an integral part of his life; the worst was an alien, a foe to be recognized and downed, however often it should face him.

From Gottingen, where he had met Lorimer casually, Thayer went to Berlin to devote his time entirely to music. Lorimer joined him there, more because he had nothing to call him back to America than because he had anything to call him to Berlin. During the next winter, the two men, as unlike as men could be, had shared a bachelor apartment, the one working industriously, the other playing just as industriously. It was during this winter that Lorimer had come into contact with the Arlts. It was during this winter also that Thayer finally decided to give up his other plans and make his profession centre in his voice. He had battled against the idea with the fervor of a race to whom "the stage" offered no distinction between vaudeville and grand opera, but inclined to the characteristics of the one and the scope of the other. For years, he had fought against the temptation; he yielded, one night, during the second act of _Faust_, and, in after time, he could always identify the chord which had punctuated his decision. Three hours later, he was studying that fraction of Baedeker which concerns itself with Italy.

He was in Italy for two years. Then he went back to Berlin for another year of grinding work, of pa.s.sing discouragements, and of ultimate success. There had been many and many a day when his pluck had failed him, when he had questioned whether his voice was really good, whether, after all, it were possible to make an artist out of gritty Puritan stock; whether, in fact, he was not a thing of fibre, rather than a man of temperament. His progress was great; but his ideals kept pace with it.

It was one dazzling June morning when he took his final lesson. He had gone onward and upward until, for months, he had been in the hands of the _maestro_ universally acknowledged to be the dean of his art. The _maestro_ was an old man and chary of his words; yet even he was stirred to enthusiasm.

"My son, it is time for you to go," he said, as he rose from the piano and took Thayer's hands into his own fragile, elderly fingers. "I can teach you nothing more. It is now for you to work out your own reputation. Not much more of life is left in me; but, before it is ended, I shall hear your name spoken, both often and with praise. While I live, my house will hold a welcome to you. _Auf wiedersehen!_"

As Thayer went out into the suns.h.i.+ne, the glitter and the brightness of it all, of the day and of the future, dazzled him and made him afraid.

Then of a sudden the blood of the Thayers, in abeyance during those mad, sad, glad years of study and of striving, a.s.serted itself again. Obeying its behest, he turned abruptly from the street where he was seeking the impresario to whom his master had sent him. In that instant, he turned his back for many a long month upon opera and upon all that followed in its train.

One clean, cold night in mid-February, Thayer came down the steps of his club, where he had been dining with Bobby Dane. At the foot of the steps he halted long enough to b.u.t.ton his coat to the chin and pull his hat over his eyes, preparatory to facing the cutting wind. Then, turning southward, he went striding away down the Avenue with the vigorous, alert tread of the well-fed, contented man. It was still early, so early that the pavements were dotted with theatre-going groups. He strode through and beyond them, along the lower end of the Avenue, and came under the arch, standing in chill, austere dignity at the edge of the wind-swept square. Over its fretted surface the electric lights shone coldly, and the deserted benches beyond brought to Thayer, fresh from the glow and good-fellows.h.i.+p of the club, a sudden depressing sense of his own aloofness from his kind. The club and Bobby were incidental points of contact, pleasant, but not permanent. Like the arch, he was alone, outside the rus.h.i.+ng life of the busy town, something to be watched and commented upon, but never destined to be really in the heart of things. Bobby was a part of it, and Bobby had held out to him a welcoming hand. He had taken the hand, and had dropped it again. It was of no use. He did not belong. The sensation was not a new one to him.

He had met it before and in many places. It came to him suddenly and unbidden, and it lay, a chilly weight, over all his consciousness. It always left him wondering whether he would ever become fully adjusted to his environment, whether it would ever be possible for him to come into perfect contact with his fellow-men.

As if the depression had brought with it a physical chill, he shook his broad shoulders and plunged his hands into the side pockets of his overcoat. Then, facing westward, he went on for a block or two and stopped at the door of a shabby boarding-house.

"Mr. Arlt?" he said to the maid, in brief interrogation.

She nodded and stood aside to let him pa.s.s. Thayer's tread on the dim stairway showed his familiarity with the place, as did the prompt calling of his name which answered his knock.

Without laying down his pipe, Arlt rose to greet his guest.

"You were so late that I was afraid you were not coming."

Thayer took off his fur-lined coat and tossed it into a chair.

"Haven't you learned that I always get around?" he asked. "I was dining with a friend, and we took things lazily."

"And now you expect to sing?" Arlt's accent was rebuking.

"Yes. I walked down here to get myself into condition. How is it? Are you feeling nervous over the prospect?"

Arlt had seated himself at the grand piano which completely filled one end of the dreary room. Now he drew a protesting arpeggio from the black keys and shook his head.

"Oh, that is a terrible woman, that Mrs. Lloyd Avalons! She was here again, to-day, to tell me about the programme. What does she know of music? She refuses the Haydn Variations and demands a Liszt Rhapsodie.

If you are not firm with her, she will end by making you sing _The Holy City_ with a flute obligato."

Thayer laughed unfeelingly.

"She is a Vandal, Arlt; but the world will be at her musicale, they tell me; and you will find it a good place to make your bow to an American public. Mrs. Dana told me, over in Berlin, that Mrs. Lloyd Avalons gave the best private recitals in New York."

"What does she know about music?" Arlt grumbled.

"Nothing, apparently; but the new-rich must have some sort of a fad, if they are to make themselves count for anything, and people will go to hear good music, even when they know it is a mere social bribe. Hofman could fill a Bowery dance-hall with the elect; you only have to lead them to the latest architectural vagary on Fifth Avenue. They are bound to be there, for, even while they scoff, they like to keep an eye on Mrs. Lloyd Avalons for fear she may prove to be worth knowing after they have snubbed her; so play your best. It may lead to other engagements to come."