CHAPTER III

IN WHICH EUTERPE IS CALLED UPON TO PLAY THE PART OF INTERPRETER

The concert was over. Coming out of the Rotunda--a domed and pinnacled building of glass and iron, half conservatory, half theater, set on the hillside against a crown of evergreen-trees--the audience poured in a dark stream down the steep garden walks to where, flanked by red and yellow wooden kiosks, the turnstiles and entrance gates open on to the public road.

Joanna Smyrthwaite was among the last to leave the auditorium. She did so in a dazed and almost sleep-walking condition, exhausted and enervated by the tumult of her own sensations. But that enervation was singularly pleasant to her, since, by reducing the claims of her overdeveloped intellectual and moral nature, it left the emotional element in undisputed ascendancy. She was, indeed, jealous of any interruption or curtailment of this condition. Therefore she lingered, unwilling to leave the place where so much inward felicity had been procured her, and fearing to meet any of her acquaintance. Dr. and Mrs. Norbiton and Mrs. Paull had, she believed, occupied stalls a couple of rows behind her. She wished to avoid conversation with them, and still more to avoid offering--her carriage was waiting at the entrance gates--to drive them to their respective homes. Their comments upon the performance, however intelligent and appreciative, must, she knew, jar upon her in her present frame of mind. Felicity would be extinguished in irritation, and for such deplorable downfall she should, she knew, hold her good neighbors responsible. It was wiser to avoid occasion of offense since she so wanted, so really needed, to be alone.

Her sister Margaret's musical requirements went no further than the modern English ballad. For preference of the description in which roses, personal pronouns, cheap erotic sentiment, endearing diminutives, and tags of melody appropriated--without acknowledgment--from the works of early masters go to make up so remarkably meritricious a whole. Of this Joanna, while duly deploring Margaret's artistic limitations, was really very glad. It enabled her to attend the weekly Wednesday and Friday classical concerts, at the Rotunda, by herself. She had always wished to attend these concerts, but only since her father's demise had she felt free to gratify her wishes in respect of them. Since that event, they had become first a permitted pleasure, then an indulgence crying aloud for gratification, and finally a duty of a semi-religious character on no account to be omitted. To-day the religious sentiment was conspicuously present, as the programme consisted of excerpts from Wagner's operas. Reared in a creed which sublimates the deity to an inoperative abstraction, Joanna's thought reacted just now toward an exaggerated anthropomorphism. In her mind, as in those of many persons deficient in the finer and more catholic musical instinct, the titanic quality of so much of the great composer's work excited feelings of astonishment and awe which resulted in an attitude closely akin to worship. The elevation of primitive human passions--desire, remorse, anger, revenge, blood-hunger--to regions of portent and prodigy, so that they stalk, altogether phantasmal and gigantic clothed in rent garments of amazing and tormented harmonies across the world stage, their heads threatening the integrity of the constellations while their feet are made of, and squarely planted upon, very common clay, is, undoubtedly, a spectacle calculated at once to flatter human pride and provoke a species of idolatry. For some reason, moreover, lust is less readily conceivable in the neighborhood of the pole than in that of the equator; so that the bleak Northern atmosphere, in which the Wagnerian dramas move, procures for them an effect of austerity, not to say of chastity, almost amusingly misleading.

Humor, however, is indispensable to the recognition of the above little truths, and Joanna's composition was innocent of the smallest admixture of that merrily nose-pulling ingredient. She took her emotions quite seriously; not only nursing them when present, but finding in them later assurance of the reality of certain fond dreams, vehement hopes and longings, which possessed her. Therefore, standing under the glazed marquise of the Rotunda she watched, with strained face and pale, anxious eyes, until the little company of her acquaintance--she could distinguish Dr. Norbiton by his height and the green felt hat, cleft in the crown, which he wore--reached the turnstiles and passed out toward the animated open space of The Square.

This last, like the flat of the valley, lay in shadow; faint pearl-gray mist veiling the modest stream whence Stourmouth derives its name, and the lawns and borders--now gay with spring flowers--of the well-kept ornamental grounds through which it flows. But, across the valley, the fir plantation upon the opposite slope, and the houses and big hotels--the streaming flags of which supplied a welcome note of crude color in the landscape--rising behind the dark bar of it, along with the upward curve of shops and offices in Marychurch Road, and the three tall church spires--two of buff-gray stone, the third red-tiled and elegantly slender--were flooded with steady sunshine. Thrushes sang loud in the grove at the back of the Rotunda. Perched on the outstanding ironwork of the dome, starlings creaked and whistled. A grind of tram wheels, hooting of motor horns, barking of dogs, and sound of voices, borne on the easterly breeze, arose from The Square. The bell of an Anglican church called to evensong. From the bandstand, situated at the far end of the public gardens, came the strains of a popular march; while with these, in a soft undertone, mingled the murmur of the many trees and hush of the sea.

Seeing and hearing all of which, in her present highly sensitized condition, realization of the inherent beauty of things, the inherent wonder and delight of Being, pierced Joanna Smyrthwaite's understanding and heart. Her whole nature was fused by the fires of a limitless tenderness and sympathy. And, being thus delivered from the tyranny of words and empty phrases, from the false standards of thought and conduct engendered by her upbringing, and from ever-present consciousness of her own circumscribed and discordant personality, for the first time in her experience she tasted the strong wine of life, pure and undiluted. During a few splendid moments she knew the joy of genius' sixth sense--becoming one with the soul and purpose of all that which she looked upon. Hot tears rose to her eyes. She was broken by a mute ecstasy of thanksgiving.

But it was impossible this happy state should continue. The malady of introspection was too deeply ingrained in her. Tormenting fears and scruples again arose. Innate pessimism laid its paralyzing influence upon her. She felt as one in whose hands a gift of great value has been placed; but whose muscles being too weak to grasp it, the precious lovely thing falls to the ground and is shattered. Whereat tears of enraptured sensibility turned to tears of bitter humiliation. Drawing a black-bordered handkerchief from the silver-mounted bag hanging at her waist, she pressed it against her wet, yet burning, face and hurried down the hill.

At the gates the well-appointed barouche and pair of fine brown horses awaited her--Johnson, the coachman, rotund and respectful, in his black livery, upon the box; Edwin the footman, elongated and respectful, her rugs and wraps over his arm, at the carriage door. The spring evenings still grew chill toward sundown; and Joanna's circulation was never of the best. She stood silent and abstracted while Edwin put her cloak--a costly garment of Persian lamb lined with ermine--about her thin shoulders; nor, until she was seated in the carriage, the fur rug warmly tucked round her, had her agitation subsided sufficiently for her to speak. She would not go the short way home by Barryport Road. She disliked the traffic. The trams made her nervous. She would go by the new drive along the West Cliff, and across Tantivy Common.

Obediently the carriage turned to the left through the shadow, up the steep hill behind the Rotunda. The horses climbed, straining at the collar. Then, the top of the ascent being reached, they bowled along the broad, even road, snorting in the sparkle of the upland air and recovered sunshine. Joanna sat stiffly upright, shivering a little and blinking in the strong light. She still held her handkerchief in her hand, and it was through a blur of again up-welling tears that she saw the uninviting red and gray terraces and large, straggling boarding-houses, set in a sparse fringe of fir-trees, on either side the road. This quarter of Stourmouth, declining from fashion, is given over to cheap _pensions_, nursing-homes, and schools. The footwalks were infested by hospital nurses and bath-chairs, while long files of girls, marching two and two, meandered home and seaward. Some of these maidens stared enviously at the young lady, wrapped in furs, driving along in her smart carriage, and sighed for the glorious days when mistresses and lessons would have no more dominion over them. But Joanna remained unconscious of the interest she excited. Her thoughts had returned upon a subject which now constantly and all too exclusively occupied them--a subject to which even the admirable playing of the Rotunda orchestra and noble singing of the young dramatic soprano--though she had listened to both in a fervor of reverential emotion--supplied, after all, little more than a humble accompaniment.

In the silver-mounted velvet bag hanging at her waist, neatly filed and dated, encircled by elastic bands to keep them perfectly flat and prevent their edges from crumpling, were all the letters she had received from Adrian Savage. Even the thin French envelopes, cross-hatched with blue inside to secure opacity, had been carefully preserved. Even the telegram she had received from Adrian, in response to the announcement of her father's death, found a place there. The letters in question were discreet, even ceremonious epistles, dealing with business and plans, expressing regret at the delays in his return to England caused by "our good Challoner's" slowness in preparing documents and accounts, and making civil inquiries as to Joanna and her sister's health and well-being. Quaint turns of phrase and vivacity of diction gave these letters a flavor of originality; but, taken as a whole, less intimate or more uncompromising effusions it would be difficult to conceive. By this fact, however, Joanna was in no wise daunted. As all his many friends agreed, Adrian Savage was a dear, delightful, and very clever fellow, who would assuredly make a name for himself. But Joanna went far beyond that, endowing him with enough virtues, graces, and talents to people this naughty old earth with sages and stock all heaven with saints. Consequently in the graceful lightness and polite restraint of his letters, alike, she found food for admiration and security of hope--namely, consideration for the difficulties of her unprotected position, delicacy in face of her recent bereavement, a high-minded determination in no way to hurry her to a decision.

At night Joanna placed the slender packet in a Russia-leather wallet beneath her pillow. By day she carried it in the bag at her waist. Often, when alone, she drew it forth from its hiding-place and fondled it tremulously. She had done so this afternoon during the concert more than once. It was unnecessary for her to re-read the letters. She knew their contents by heart. Adrian had touched them. He thought of her when writing them, when folding the thin sheets of paper, when stamping and addressing the envelopes. Thus they constituted a direct material, as well as mental, link between herself and him. Perpetually she dwelt on this fact, finding in it a pleasure almost painful in its intensity. Only for a few minutes at a time, indeed, could she dare to hold or look at the packet. Then, replacing it in the wallet or bag, she struggled to regain her composure, merely to take it out at the first favorable opportunity, and repeat the whole process again.

In the same way, although longing for the young man's return, to the point of passion, she hailed each obstacle which postponed that return. To see him, to hear his voice and footsteps, meet his gallant and kindly eyes, to watch him come and go about the house, to listen to his clever and sympathetic talk, would constitute rapture, but a rapture from which she shrank in terror. She felt that she could hardly endure his presence. It would drain her of vitality.

Now, sitting upright in the carriage, while the horses carried her forward at a spanking pace through the sea and moorland freshness and the delights of the spring sunshine, a new form of these fears tortured her. Adrian's love, constant association with him, participation in the varied interests and activities of his daily life and in that of the brilliant society in which he moved--this, and nothing less than this, in sum and in detail, constituted the lovely precious gift placed in her, till now, so sad and empty hands by a strange turn of Fortune's wheel. Were those poor hungry hands strong enough to close upon and hold it? Or would they, weakly faltering and failing, let it fall to the ground and be shattered? The shame of such prospective failure agonized her. To renounce a crown may be heroic, but to have it incontinently tumble off, when you are straining every nerve, exerting every faculty, to keep it safely balanced on your head, is feeble, as she felt, to the point of ignominy.

At last the schools, _pensions_, nursing-homes, and lodging-houses were left behind. The carriage reached the open common. Tracts of gorse, thick-set with apricot-yellow blossom, broke up the silvery brown expanse of heather. In sharply green, grass-grown hollows ancient hawthorns, their tops clipped by the sea wind into quaint shapes, compact and ruddy, were dusted over by opening leaf-buds. High in air screaming gulls circled. The shadows were long, for the sun drew down toward its setting. Then, as once before to-day, the happy appeal of outward things--in which, as in glass, man may, if he will, catch some faint reflection of God's glory--made its voice heard, awakening Joanna Smyrthwaite from the fever-dreams of her almost maniacal egoism.

Obeying a sudden impulse, she stopped the carriage, alighted, and walked out on to the little promontory the neck of which the road crosses. Here the sand cliffs, dyed all shades from deepest rusty orange to palest lemon-yellow and glistening white, descend, almost perpendicularly in narrow water-worn shelves and ledges to the beach nearly a hundred feet below. Looking eastward, up the wind, the sea horizon, Stourmouth, its many buildings and its pier, and all the curving coastline away to Stonehorse Head--the dark mass of which guards the entrance to Marychurch Haven--showed through a film of fine gray mist. Westward, the colors of both land and sea, though opaque, were warmer. Across the golden gorse of the common in the immediate foreground Joanna saw the great amphitheater of the Baughurst Park Woods extending far inland, the rich blue-purple of the pines and firs pierced here and there by the living sunlight of a larch plantation. Beyond Barryport Harbor, only the farthest coves and inlets of whose gleaming waters were visible, the quiet, rounded outlines of the Slepe Hills pushed seaward in blunt-nosed headland after headland, softening from heliotrope to ethereal lavender in the extreme distance, under a sky resembling the tint and texture of a pink pearl.

Joanna, her fur cloak gathered closely about her, stood a lonely black figure amid the splendor of the scented gorse. There is an exciting quality in the east wind. The harsh tang of it galvanized her into an unusual physical well-being, making her chest expand and her blood circulate more rapidly.

A new thought came to her. To doubt her power of meeting the demands of Adrian's affection and of rising to his level was really to doubt the vivifying power of that affection, to doubt his ability to raise her to his own level. Her doubt of her own worthiness was, in point of fact, an accusation against his intelligence and his judgment.

Joanna slipped one hand inside the velvet bag under her cloak and clasped the thin packet of letters. With the other she momentarily covered her eyes, as though in apology and penitence.

"Ah! how miserably faithless I am," she murmured in her flat, toneless voice. "How wickedly ungrateful it is not to trust him. As though he were not capable of supplying all that is wanting in me--as though he did not know so far, far best!"

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