The Price She Paid Part 39

"But for that, would you dare presume to touch me, to question me?"

said she.

He lowered his gaze, stood panting with the effort to subdue his fury.

She went back to her own room. A few hours later came a letter of apology from him. She answered it friendlily, said she would let him know when she could see him again, and enclosed a note and a check.

VIII

MILDRED went to bed that night proud of her strength of character. Were there many women--was there any other woman she knew or knew about--who in her desperate circ.u.mstances would have done what she had done? She could have married a man who would have given her wealth and the very best social position. She had refused him. She could have continued to "borrow" from him the wherewithal to keep her in luxurious comfort while she looked about at her ease for a position that meant independence. She had thrust the temptation from her. All this from purely high-minded motives; for other motive there could be none. She went to sleep, confident that on the morrow she would continue to tread the path of self-respect with unfaltering feet. But when morning came her throat was once more slightly off--enough to make it wise to postpone the excursion in search of a trial for musical comedy. The excitement or the reaction from excitement--it must be the one or the other--had resulted in weakness showing itself, naturally, at her weakest point--that delicate throat. When life was calm and orderly, and her mind was at peace, the trouble would pa.s.s, and she could get a position of some kind. Not the career she had dreamed; that was impossible. But she had voice enough for a little part, where a living could be made; and perhaps she would presently fathom the secret of the cause of her delicate throat and would be able to go far--possibly as far as she had dreamed.

The delay of a few days was irritating. She would have preferred to push straight on, while her courage was taut. Still, the delay had one advantage--she could prepare the details of her plan. So, instead of going to the office of the theatrical manager--Crossley, the most successful producer of light, musical pieces of all kinds--she went to call on several of the girls she knew who were more or less in touch with matters theatrical. And she found out just how to proceed toward accomplis.h.i.+ng a purpose which ought not to be difficult for one with such a voice as hers and with physical charms peculiarly fitted for stage exhibition.

Not until Sat.u.r.day was her voice at its best again. She, naturally, decided not to go to the theatrical office on Monday, but to wait until she had seen and talked with Keith. One more day did not matter, and Keith might be stimulating, might even have some useful suggestions to offer. She received him with a manner that was a version, and a most charming version, of his own tranquil indifference. But his first remark threw her into a panic. Said he:

"I've only a few minutes. No, thanks, I'll not sit."

"You needn't have bothered to come," said she coldly.

"I always keep my engagements. Baird tells me you have given up the arrangement you had with him. You'll probably be moving from here, as you'll not have the money to stay on. Send me your new address, please." He took a paper from his pocket and gave it to her. "You will find this useful--if you are in earnest," said he. "Good-by, and good luck. I'll hope to see you in a few weeks."

Before she had recovered herself in the least, she was standing there alone, the paper in her hand, her stupefied gaze upon the door through which he had disappeared. All his movements and his speech had been of his customary, his invariable, deliberateness; but she had the impression of whirling and rus.h.i.+ng haste. With a long gasping sigh she fell to trembling all over. She sped to her room, got its door safely closed just in time. Down she sank upon the bed, to give way to an attack of hysterics.

We are constantly finding ourselves putting forth the lovely flowers and fruit of the virtues whereof the heroes and heroines of romance are so prolific. Usually nothing occurs to disillusion us about ourselves.

But now and then fate, in unusually brutal ironic mood, forces us to see the real reason why we did this or that virtuous, self-sacrificing action, or blossomed forth in this or that n.o.bility of character.

Mildred was destined now to suffer one of these savage blows of disillusionment about self that thrust us down from the exalted moral heights where we have been preening into humble kins.h.i.+p with the weak and frail human race. She saw why she had refused Stanley, why she had stopped "borrowing," why she had put off going to the theatrical managers, why she had delayed moving into quarters within her diminished and rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng means. She had been counting on Donald Keith. She had convinced herself that he loved her even as she loved him. He would fling away his cold reserve, would burst into raptures over her virtue and her courage, would ask her to marry him.

Or, if he should put off that, he would at least undertake the responsibility of getting her started in her career. Well! He had come; he had shown that Stanley had told him all or practically all; and he had gone, without asking a sympathetic question or making an encouraging remark. As indifferent as he seemed. Burnt out, cold, heartless. She had leaned upon him; he had slipped away, leaving her to fall painfully, and ludicrously, to the ground. She had been boasting to herself that she was strong, that she would of her own strength establish herself in independence. She had not dreamed that she would be called upon to "make good." She raved against Keith, against herself, against fate. And above the chaos and the wreck within her, round and round, hither and yon, flapped and s.h.i.+ed the black thought, "What SHALL I do?"

When she sat up and dried her eyes, she chanced to see the paper Keith had left; with wonder at her having forgotten it and with a throb of hope she opened and began to read his small, difficult writing:

A career means self-denial. Not occasional, intermittent, but steady, constant, daily, hourly--a purpose that never relaxes.

A career as a singer means not only the routine, the patient tedious work, the cutting out of time-wasting people and time-wasting pleasures that are necessary to any and all careers. It means in addition--for such a person--sacrifices far beyond a character so undisciplined and so corrupted by conventional life as is yours. The basis of a singing career is health and strength. You must have great physical strength to be able to sing operas. You must have perfect health.

Diet and exercise. A routine life, its routine rigidly adhered to, day in and day out, month after month, year after year. Small and uninteresting and monotonous food, nothing to drink, and, of course, no cigarettes. Such is the secret of a reliable voice for you who have a "delicate throat"--which is the silly, shallow, and misleading way of saying a delicate digestion, for sore throat always means indigestion, never means anything else. To sing, the instrument, the absolutely material machine, must be in perfect order. The rest is easy.

Some singers can commit indiscretions of diet and of lack of exercise.

But not you, because you lack this natural strength. Do not be deceived and misled by their example.

Exercise. You must make your body strong, powerful. You have not the muscles by nature. You must acquire them.

The following routine of diet and exercise made one of the great singers, and kept her great for a quarter of a century. If you adopt it, without variation, you can make a career. If you do not, you need not hope for anything but failure and humiliation. Within my knowledge sixty-eight young men and young women have started in on this system.

Not one had the character to persist to success. This may suggest why, except two who are at the very top, all of the great singers are men and women whom nature has made powerful of body and of digestion--so powerful that their indiscretions only occasionally make them unreliable.

There Mildred stopped and flung the paper aside. She did not care even to glance at the exercises prescribed or at the diet and the routine of daily work. How dull and uninspired! How grossly material! Stomach!

Chewing! Exercising machines! Plodding dreary miles daily, rain or s.h.i.+ne! What could such things have to do with the free and glorious career of an inspired singer? Keith was laughing at her as he hastened away, abandoning her to her fate.

She examined herself in the gla.s.s to make sure that the ravages of her attack of rage and grief and despair could be effaced within a few hours, then she wrote a note--formal yet friendly--to Stanley Baird, informing him that she would receive him that evening. He came while Cyrilla and Mildred were having their after, dinner coffee and cigarettes. He was a man who took great pains with his clothes, and got them where pains was not in vain. That evening he had arrayed himself with unusual care, and the result was a fine, manly figure of the well-bred New-Yorker type. Certainly Stanley had ground for his feeling that he deserved and got liking for himself. The three sat in the library for perhaps half an hour, then Mrs. Brindley rose to leave the other two alone. Mildred urged her to stay--Mildred who had been impatient of her presence when Stanley was announced. Urged her to stay in such a tone that Cyrilla could not persist, but had to sit down again. As the three talked on and on, Mildred continued to picture life with Stanley--continued the vivid picturing she had begun within ten minutes of Stanley's entering, the picturing that had caused her to insist on Cyrilla's remaining as chaperon. A young girl can do no such picturing as Mildred could not avoid doing. To the young girl married life, its tete-a-tetes, its intimacies, its routine, are all a blank.

Any attempt she makes to fill in details goes far astray. But Mildred, with Stanley there before her, could see her life as it would be.

Toward half-past ten, Stanley said, shame-faced and pleading, "Mildred, I should like to see you alone for just a minute before I go."

Mildred said to Cyrilla: "No, don't move. We'll go into the drawing-room."

He followed her there, and when the sound of Mrs. Brindley's step in the hall had died away, he began: "I think I understand you a little now. I shan't insult you by returning or destroying that note or the check. I accept your decision--unless you wish to change it." He looked at her with eager appeal. His heart was trembling, was sick with apprehension, with the sense of weakness, of danger and gloom ahead. "Why shouldn't I help you, at least, Mildred?" he urged.

Whence the courage came she knew not, but through her choking throat she forced a positive, "No."

"And," he went on, "I meant what I said. I love you. I'm wretched without you. I want you to marry me, career or no career."

Her fears were clamorous, but she forced herself to say, "I can't change."

"I hoped--a little--that you sent me the note to-day because you-- You didn't?"

"No," said Mildred. "I want us to be friends. But you must keep away."

He bent his head. "Then I'll go 'way off somewhere. I can't bear being here in New York and not seeing you. And when I've been away a year or so, perhaps I'll get control of myself again."

Going away!--to try to forget!--no doubt, to succeed in forgetting!

Then this was her last chance.

"Must I go, Mildred? Won't you relent?"

"I don't love you--and I never can." She was deathly white and trembling. She lifted her eyes to begin a retreat, for her courage had quite oozed away. He was looking at her, his face distorted with a mingling of the pa.s.sion of desire and the pa.s.sion of jealousy. She shrank, caught at the back of a chair for support, felt suddenly strong and defiant. To be this man's plaything, to submit to his moods, to his jealousies, to his caprices--to be his to fumble and caress, his to have the fury of his pa.s.sion wreak itself upon her with no response from her but only repulsion and loathing--and the long dreary hours and days and years alone with him, listening to his commonplaces, often so tedious, forced to try to amuse him and to keep him in a good humor because he held the purse-strings--

"Please go," she said.

She was still very young, still had years and years of youth unspent.

Surely she could find something better than this. Surely life must mean something more than this. At least it was worth a trial.

He held out his hand. She gave him her reluctant and cold fingers. He said something, what she did not hear, for the blood was roaring in her ears as the room swam round. He was gone, and the next thing she definitely knew she was at the threshold of Cyrilla's room. Cyrilla gave her a tenderly sympathetic glance. She saw herself in a mirror and knew why; her face was gray and drawn, and her eyes lay dully deep within dark circles.

"I couldn't do it," she said. "I sent for him to marry him. But I couldn't."

"I'm glad," said Cyrilla. "Marriage without love is a last resort. And you're a long way from last resorts."

"You don't think I'm crazy?"

"I think you've won a great victory."

"Victory!" And Mildred laughed dolefully. "If this is victory, I hope I'll never know defeat."

Why did Mildred refuse Stanley Baird and cut herself off from him, even after her hopes of Donald Keith died through lack of food, real or imaginary? It would be gratifying to offer this as a case of pure courage and high principle, untainted of the motives which govern ordinary human actions. But unluckily this is a biography, not a romance, a history and not a eulogy. And Mildred Gower is a human being, even as you and I, not a galvanized embodiment of superhuman virtues such as you and I are pretending to be, perhaps even to ourselves. The explanation of her strange aberration, which will be doubted or secretly condemned by every woman of the sheltered cla.s.ses who loves her dependence and seeks to disguise it as something sweet and fine and "womanly"--the explanation of her almost insane act of renunciation of all that a lady holds most dear is simple enough, puzzling though she found it. Ignorance, which accounts for so much of the squalid failure in human life, accounts also for much if not all the most splendid audacious achievement. Very often--very, very often--the impossibilities are achieved by those who in their ignorance advance not boldly but unconcernedly where a wiser man or woman would shrink and retreat. Fortunate indeed is he or she who in a crisis is by chance equipped with neither too little nor too much knowledge--who knows enough to enable him to advance, but does not know enough to appreciate how perilous, how foolhardy, how harsh and cruel, advance will be. Mildred was in this instance thus fortunate--unfortunate, she was presently to think it. She knew enough about loveless marriage to shrink from it. She did not know enough about what poverty, moneylessness, and friendlessness mean in the actuality to a woman bred as she had been. She imagined she knew--and sick at heart her notion of poverty made her. But imagination was only faintest foreshadowing of actuality. If she had known, she would have yielded to the temptation that was almost too strong for her. And if she had yielded--what then? Not such a repulsive lot, as our comfortable cla.s.ses look at it. Plenty to eat and drink and to wear, servants and equipages and fine houses and fine society, the envy of her gaping kind--a comfortable life for the body, a comfortable death for mind and heart, slowly and softly suffocated in luxury. Partly through knowledge that strongly affected her character, which was on the whole aspiring and sensitive beyond the average to the true and the beautiful, partly through ignorance that veiled the future from her none too valorous and hardy heart, she did not yield to the temptation.

And thus, instead of dying, she began to live, for what is life but growth in experience, in strength and knowledge and capability?

A baby enters the world screaming with pain. The first sensations of living are agonizing. It is the same with the birth of souls, for a soul is not really born until that day when it is offered choice between life and death and chooses life. In Mildred Gower's case this birth was an agony. She awoke the following morning with a dull headache, a fainting heart, and a throat so sore that she felt a painful catch whenever she tried to swallow. She used the spray; she ma.s.saged her throat and neck vigorously. In vain; it was folly to think of going where she might have to risk a trial of her voice that day. The sun was brilliant and the air sharp without being humid or too cold. She dressed, breakfasted, went out for a walk. The throat grew worse, then better. She returned for luncheon, and afterward began to think of packing, not that she had chosen a new place, but because she wished to have some sort of a sense of action. But her unhappiness drove her out again--to the park where the air was fine and she could walk in comparative solitude.