Some of Us Are Married/The Song of Courage
THE SONG OF COURAGE
PRELUDE
It was in Milan, the day after the wonderful operatic success of the new singer—that triumph which has since become so assured! and I had sought the interview.
We had but just met that morning, and I was leaving for New York on the morrow. … She lay on the bed in the high-windowed, heavily curtained hotel bedroom, a strangely motionless little heap in a brown dressing gown, with relaxed arms and hands; the eyes shining out of her small, deeply worn face revealed, by a startling contrast with her physical exhaustion, the eagerness and energy of an indomitable spirit.
The business of the interview had gradually merged into the unexpected meeting of two souls. … I found myself telling all my desires and perplexities to a comprehension that seemed inimitably embracing—embracing is the word; it was as if she had her arms around me, to give me such tender yet helpful comfort as I'd never had before. Her sympathy led to my involuntary questions. She seemed something wonderful and precious that I couldn't let go of before some further insight was vouchsafed me, in penalty else of eternal regret afterward for the loss.
After she once began to speak—slowly and tentatively at first—we both, I think, lost count of time. … it was only a month later that the news of her death reached me.
THE SONG OF COURAGE
NOW that the triumphant end has really come, or the beginning—whichever you choose to call it—now that my great song has been sung at last, it does seem a relief to speak, and to a stranger. I couldn't tell it all to my darling Erla, it would hurt her too much. After all, we often tell the deepest things about us only to strangers, because they seem in a way just disembodied interest and sympathy; our friends know us, and the people we are telling about, too well to be able to see clearly. And it makes it different, doesn't it, meeting this way in a foreign country?
You seem so young and so pretty to be earning your living alone here; I have always loved pretty people, though even in my best days I have never been anything but a plain little thing myself. That is what I heard my husband say about me to a friend of his a couple of months after we were married:
"She's a plain little thing; but she's a dear."
My husband himself was a very handsome man—perhaps that was really one reason that I married him. And I knew I wasn't pretty, but oh, I would have liked him to think that I was!
Many people's lives, if you may judge from what they say, seem to have consciously begun on a grown-up plane when they reached a certain age, or a higher school, or were given responsibilities in the world. Before that they were just children, thinking and understanding as such; a period railed off in those ways from the after-part of their existence.
It was different with me. My life—that conscious life that is a part of me now—began when I was a very little girl; I can't remember myself without it. I led a very ordinary, normal existence on the farm, but I had always thoughts and feelings, perceptions and divinations, that are not expected of a child and that no one suspected in me—the kind of thoughts and perceptions I have now.
I was brought up to believe that my father and mother were the source, under Providence, of all wisdom and goodness; but I knew perfectly well at the age of six that my father and mother were often cross and unjust, and that to be cross and unjust was just as bad in a grown person as in a child. And although we were a household brought up in the daily reading of the Bible—perhaps for that very reason, for children who are brought up on the Book get perforce a different outlook on life—I knew perfectly well that we were all encompassed by a great mystery, and that if I had the courage to jump off the cliff I would find out something I could never discover if I lived on top of ground for a thousand years.
And at that same age I promised myself that if I were ever grown up and had children of my own, that no matter how much work I had to do I would always look at my little boys and girls as if I were glad to see them when they ran into the room, even if they brought mud on their shoes; and that, no matter how tired I was, I would never say sharply: "Go away, I can't attend to you now," when they came up to me trustingly.
I'm not one of those women whom you'd call naturally fond of children, but I can say that among all the things I did or didn't do for mine later on, they never, at least, missed being mothered when they wanted it. Many a time when I've been as tired out as ever my poor mother was, that effort toward a child has rested me anew, I got back so much more for the little that I gave!—but that's a thing lots of mothers don't know.
Our farm life was the kind that you've always heard about—work not only from morning until night, but almost from morning until morning. Long after even the last of the hired men had been fed and the dishes washed and the fields lay quiet under the moon, there were always "critters" to be seen to, chores done, fires kept up, and endless sewing on my mother's part with her worn and knotted fingers—the thousand and one little ways of toil, beginning again long before daylight; and there was always a sense of irritated depression in the air in all this unending effort of the elders, because at the best there was no money in it, and at the worst there was a bottomless loss.
Yet there was the daily routine to keep things together—existence, even with this shadow, wasn't aimless. We children—there were five of us—were busy enough with "chores," but we had our schooling; we were not too hard worked.
And though I was a plain little brown, round-cheeked, freckled-face child, I always had a separate life of my own—perhaps set in motion by the daily Bible reading in our household; the magnificent words in it sometimes touch strange chords beyond our knowing. I used to go off by myself with a doll or a book or a bit of sewing for a pretence—so clever children are at hiding themselves!—and sit in the corner of a little wood down the slope with a green "fairy ring" in front of me. We had an old Irish woman working for us once, and she had told me that round green places in the grass were "fairy rings." It was a fairy ring, but God made it.
When I stood there, it was as if I were miles away from everyone. I sang to the leaves and the blades of grass and the little white clouds far, far above; I sang songs to them, in words I made up myself, perfectly disconnected and unmeaning, yet that had a strange and deep connection with some great and unknown power in myself—something I didn't know how to express; something—I put it as I felt it then childishly—something that was just between me and God; the same God that the children of Israel talked to. It was a comfort to feel that He knew. It was a joy to get off by myself and play, childlike, with the fanciful, yet real, consciousness of that power. People said that I grew absent-minded, carelessly indifferent—I wondered sometimes that they couldn't see that I had another world to live in.
I could always sing, even as a baby. My parents were proud of this, and when I was very little I performed at all the school celebrations and at the concerts of the Methodist Church. One day when I was about eleven years old, I heard a woman, a boarder from the city, say after one of the school performances:
"That child has a wonderful voice. If she is trained she will make a great singer."
I shall never forget the words—it was like having a door opened into heaven. Music had always set me quivering with a sense of beauty that was almost too great to bear. After that all my dreams, all my talks to myself were of singing—in a wonderful, great hall, filled with rows on rows of people, a glittering crowd, with princes and princesses among them, and in that final intoxication of joy, when my voice should soar and soar far up above, carrying the souls of all that crowd with it, I would feel the meeting with something that was Divine. As I grew, the dream grew; I filled it out with details; I planned for the means toward it, no matter what the difficulties in the path.
In that strange way that sometimes happens, the very difficulties themselves seemed to make opportunities. My poor, hard-worked mother died; when I was seventeen my father married again; before another year was over he sold the farm and moved to the far West. His new wife did not want me with them, and said so; I was old enough to look after myself.
My two brothers were already married, living at a distance and struggling to make a living; my older sister had gone as a missionary to Japan. I had not known before how to leave the nest; but when I was pushed out I learned to fly. Young and inexperienced as I was I had dreamed to some purpose; I got the address of the lady from New York who had praised my voice six years before, and, by some enormous stroke of good fortune, found her.
No one could ever have looked less like a possible great singer than I!—a little country girl with a round face and a shabby black hat and jacket. But Mrs. Stanford had friends among great musicians; she took me to the greatest conductor of the day—I have never known any one so much a part of music as he, a man as kind as he was great—and made me sing for him. I was terribly afraid as I began, but as I went on I came suddenly into my other world: I stood with my feet in the fairy ring, singing up to the blue sky above me, and to the Power of which I was a part. When I finished, the two who were listening said nothing, but the great man held out his hand and shook my friend's hand, and they looked into each other's eyes.
After that my work was cut out for me. My brothers—poor boys, they had little enough!—sent me the tiny sum each week that they could spare—enough to pay for a dingy hall room for me; my musical education was provided for.
Life was very different for girls alone in town thirty-odd years ago from what it is now. There were comparatively very few living that way, so few that there was little chance for one of finding comrades easily; there was none of the conventionalized Bohemianism that obtains so largely at the present day.
The landlady of the boarding place which Mrs. Stanford had found was a good soul who was supposed to look out for me—and did, as well as she could. I met some women, mostly older than I, at my classes, but I was shy and not attractive looking—I never became really a city person, I was always just a little country girl—and our intercourse never became anything permanent. And I needed no companionship in those days; I was music-mad, drunk with it, filled with that sense of it that leaves room for nothing else. I lived gloriously in my inner world; I practised interminably; when I was not practising I was studying the theory and history of the great masterpieces of my art. I became used to the fact that when I sang even those women who didn't like me became silent, and that people pointed me out when I entered the conservatory.
At the end of three years I had made one of the grand triumphant steps of my dreams—I won a prize, and was sent to Paris to complete my course for grand opera.
But before that something had happened to take away from that joy of achieving—as is so often, so very often the case, when we have at last attained what we have planned for!—so that it is the same and not yet the same.
I had met Paul.
II
Paul was from Vermont; he had come to New York about the same time that I had, but it was only the year before I left that he happened to take a room in the same house where I boarded and we got acquainted with each other. He was a small clerk in a downtown wholesale house. He was an extremely dignified, a very handsome young man, with dark, flashing eyes, a low white forehead under his thick dark hair, and very white teeth.
He sang in the chorus of a large amateur singing society of great vogue in those days, and as I sang in it also for practice, he fell into the habit of escorting me to and from the rehearsals.
I think most of the girls there were ready to fall in love with him, on the strength of his looks, but he always seemed, at least, to be quite unconscious of the stir and flutterings that his presence caused; if he noticed them, it was only to increase a sort of country-bred shyness that mingled with a country-bred conceit under his dignified exterior. He felt uneasily that they expected attentions from him that he didn't know how to give. I alone expected nothing.
From the first I became his confidante. He was very lonely, my poor Paul! He told me about the home and the good food that he missed; about the small makeshifts, laughable and otherwise, that his small salary necessitated; about his aspirations in a business way and the set-backs and jealousies which he had already encountered. He was morbidly afraid of criticism. Did I say that people always confide in me? My dear, I have been the recipient of more personal histories and of more troubles than I could ever begin to sum up.
But from the first, although I didn't realize it, I think Paul fell in love with me. What agitations, what whirling-brained, sleepless, yet not unhappy nights I went through the month before I sailed! Often as he had told me that he loved me, I had been so bent on my career, I was so much a part of music, that I hadn't wanted to listen to the suggestion that I was giving way to anything else. And he wouldn't hold me back from my career. It was all very harrowing and delicious and high-minded and young, but he suffered more than I—far more!
I sailed, and left him standing on the dock looking after me. Yet though I cried so hard after I had seen the last of him, something in me was glad to get away, too. The strain had been too much—I couldn't have stood it any longer. And though Paul had confided so much to me, he had never had any of my confidences, because I knew secretly—but so well—that he hadn't wanted any of them. No one had ever cared to hear anything of that inner life of mine, and Paul was no exception.
When I could touch the keys of the piano and let my voice blend with them, there would come at strange, unexpected moments that exulting sense of being mysteriously isolated with the Highest, and part of the Highest, and part of the harmony which I had heard even as a little child. … I have always wondered how people live who have no fairy ring to stand in.
Those three years in Paris—golden years! Homesick as I was at times for Paul I was glad I had them—so glad! But for them I would never have known in the flesh the possibilities of my art. They were immortal years; they filled me with an insatiate flame. How I worked and how I sang! I made my small body strong; I lived frugally, I bathed, I exercised, I worked with that absolute precision and ardour of routine which alone makes for the highest purpose, the highest power.
There was almost always a disappointment visible in everyone when they first saw me—I was used to that!—and then the sudden, swift attention when I began to sing, and the silence after I had ended. I was to be the greatest singer yet. My masters made only one proviso: I could take no liberties with my voice nor with my strength; I had no large and naturally robust frame to fall back on. I must live within the strict limitations that encompassed me now.
And all the time I wrote every week to Paul, trying to help and comfort and sympathize, to be everything I could. I loved him dearly and carried always with me a sense of responsibility for his welfare. The month was fixed for my appearance as Marguerite in Gounod's "Faust"; I had been kept back strictly from the public, and only rumours of my wonderful voice—that's the way they put it, as beautiful in its quality as in its strength—carefully circulated. I tasted all the preliminary sweets of success in the anxious excitement of the masters and the manager who was responsible for my appearance. One can never foretell what may make for failure in even the most promising prima-donna; no one could foretell here, I least of all! …
The week before my contract was signed I had a letter from my poor Paul—a last, despairing appeal to me to come to him; he was ill, alone, he needed me now. It was a bitter, anguished appeal from the heart to one slipping finally out of reach; a call to consider the things of the heart before it was too late for both of us. Couldn't I love and sing, too? And what was any song without love?
Well! I did not sign the contract. I passed through a terrible week of storming fury on the part of those who had built their hopes on my career, and had given their work toward it—Mrs. Stanford telegraphed me sternly from Italy—she had a right to be angry, Heaven knows!
Many people tell me how differently they would have lived their lives if they had known what they know now; I'm not sure that I can say that; I can't assert that I would have decided differently even if I had known—for I did know!—although apparently and to myself I was only abdicating for the moment. I couldn't think that my career was really given up for all time; it should be taken up without fail later. And I was horribly worked up, emotional, unbalanced by excitement and Paul's need of me—yet through all, away underneath everything, I think I knew. And even if I had really. … My life has been a succession of what Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney—I read her books and loved them when I was a girl—calls "the next things." My going to Paul came imperatively "next."
You know the quotation: "O Art, my Art, thou'rt much, but Love is more!" I don't think I could ever have said that; I don't think the kind of love I felt at the time was more. It was simply that Paul loved and needed me and I was young and a woman; suddenly I, who had held out so easily, couldn't remain stone to his appeal any longer; something in me responded whether I would or not, something I had never reckoned on; I just went. If I had stayed—well, who can tell? I might have had no more of an artistic career even then; I might have taken diphtheria as one poor girl I knew did, and died in a week. We never know what our "next thing" may be.
Paul was somehow strangely older, strangely thinner, strangely less someway than I had imagined him—that was my first half-sinking, half-frightened impression before Love entered and absorbed the field of vision.
III
People have such different ways of happiness, haven't they? Mine didn't consist in a daily continuously happy state, such as one reads about and such as is the experience of some sheltered souls. Most of us have to be satisfied with those single brilliant flashes of happiness that leave a reflected glow on the way ahead after they've passed by. And for that first year—well, I had some of those sweetly illuminative flashes, although just after our marriage Paul lost his position, and it was a long, long time before he got another.
There began soon after our honeymoon was over a struggle that has never ended until now; a mighty struggle that always—until now—seemed pitifully disproportionate to the result.
We lived in a little bit of a two-story house in a row in a straggling, unimportant suburb. I was terribly sorry for his disappointment in the collapse of his firm and the loss of his position, and was anxious to show him how little I minded the temporary stress. I threw myself into the breach with ardour. I got a place to sing in a church choir—Paul had an invincible dislike to my having anything to do with the stage—and gave singing lessons at a low price to a few pupils whom I managed to get through the good offices of the organist.
It bothered me somewhat that there was a slight huskiness in my voice, brought on by the dampness of the cottage when we first went into it, and the lapse of my regular routine. It bewildered me to have my own expensive musical education bring such a small return.
Like most girls brought up on a farm, I had never been trained to cook properly or do housework well. I had done only "chores," odd jobs that led to no further accomplishment in the same line. I could bring the flour and set out the pie board, but I couldn't make the bread or pie. Then in the six years of my musical education I had done nothing whatever in this line. I kept house, therefore, very badly at first, with an immense amount of misdirected exertion; but I learned.
Paul was always sweet and good-natured over my mistakes; he ate burnt food cheerfully, and went without my coffee uncomplainingly if I forgot to order it; his deprivations didn't worry him, but neither did it distress him in the least that I was also obliged to eat burnt food and go without coffee after my unavailing toil.
There are some things that give me a strange and awful wonder when I think of them—things I could not bear to own to myself without that strained wringing of the heart; it's only because you are a stranger that I am speaking now—for the first time. My husband was sweet and kind and unfailingly gentle, unfailingly loving, but it never, then or afterward, seemed to distress him that it was I who bore the burden of the household as well as of our maintenance. Home was naturally the place for a woman.
Once a man he had invited to the house was amazed to find that I was a girl he had known at the Conservatory in Paris; he said: "You, here!" as one might speak to a queen who had given up her throne. Paul never seemed to realize that I had given up anything. He took it as simply that I should like to work for him as that he would have liked to work for me; that was fine, in a way; but in the years that followed there were three consecutively in which he could get no regular position whatever, and, except for a few odd jobs at bookkeeping, contributed nothing to our subsistence.
He was always willing enough to work—or he was at first—but he didn't know how to ask for it; he sat around home most of the day and read the papers or played with the children. Then for two years he was ill and helpless, and though he got about again he never really recovered his strength. Although I didn't realize it then, I think now that he had never been strong and that this accounted for his seeming lack of initiative.
I gave more lessons than ever; I was fortunate in getting pupils. I not only did the cooking and the housework, but I shovelled the snow and tended the furnace and planted and hoed our tiny garden, and I had three children who lived and buried two when they were tiny babies.
I say that I gave lessons at home, charging more for them than before, but I no longer sang in the choir. My voice, my real voice, was gone—you don't have to have a real voice to teach singing! After Pauline's birth I got up too soon and caught cold in some way. Well, it did something to my vocal cords—a sort of partial paralysis. It was well that I had no time to realize it.
There was another thing that made life harder at first—I wasn't naturally a mother. I have found many women since with the same experience as mine in that regard, but I thought I must be a monster. Those days and nights when I held Pauline in my too-tired, aching young arms—she was a delicate, crying little thing—I used to wonder, like many another young mother before and since, if this was the rapture people wrote about and pictured. It was even strange and agonizing not to be able to be comfortable and happy unless that unresponsive, irresponsible little mite were happy and comfortable also, to feel my soul wrung with solicitude for her whether I was giving a lesson, or whether I had her in my arms; never to have her off my weary mind, day or night.
But after a time this acute stage passed; I loved my little girl—some of those flashes of happiness came to me with her.
A woman I know who isn't married says that women who do not naturally love children often make the best mothers, because they don't take them easily as just children, to be played with and caressed, but because of their own conscious limitations make a real effort to understand and provide for them as little human beings. Perhaps in a way she was right; at any rate, that was the way I considered mine. I did really try to make them happy, those sweet little guests in my home who had come there without their asking. I tried never to take advantage of them because they were children; I never asked them to do things because I didn't want to do the things myself. I remembered the promise of my own early days, and when they came to me for bread I tried never to give them a stone. I tried; one can never know if one has succeeded; children are such deep, deep mysteries, it is hard to know what goes on in their minds; they see with such an awful, instinctive clearness.
Jack was born a little more than a year after Pauline, and there were two babies to take care of before I had learned how to look after one. Then those other times—but I can't speak of them. The worst of it was, perhaps, that even in the midst of my grief it seemed despairingly best that those two little new-born souls should escape at once from such a hard-pressed life. I did not see how I could possibly tend them, or keep them from harm.
But one thing I must stop and say right here: All this sounds a sordid, wretched recital, as if I, who had the chief part in this domestic drama, were soaked in a sort of hopeless misery. My dear, we live our own lives so gradually, from day to day … do you know, I never once thought this was the way my life was being lived; these were only temporary phases and situations of grinding stress. My voice, even, was only gone temporarily. I never, even to myself, in my darkest moments, thought: "This is all; it is all I am ever going to have." Always I knew that there was more! Why, I should have died outright if I had thought the other!
That feeling of something very great that was mine to express some day came to me at moments, bringing that exquisite uplifting, inexpressibly dear; a very little thing could bring it to me, as when I struck certain chords on the piano and dreamed into them, singing softly in harmony, or when I saw the harmony of a rosy cloud floating across the blue sky, or the sunlight sparkling across ice-clad branches or shining through the first spring budding of the yellow-flowered bush in our yard. There was a something in me beyond and apart from my life as a wife or a mother or a wage-earner—something that was as truly I, yet which nobody knew!—something, as I felt when a child, between me—and God. Always, in the old childish speech, there were times still when I could stand with my feet in the fairy ring.
And then—what strange ways God has of making real mothers of us!—and then—Erla came.
Never had I so nearly lost my place in the fairy ring as in those months before she was born. Never had I felt so passionately protesting. It was the impossible thing to happen at that particular time. My poor Paul had fallen ill again before she came; I had everything I could do, and far far more. I had moments of actual frenzy, amounting almost to madness.
It happens so often to us stupid, stupid mortals that that against which we protest beforehand the most vehemently turns out to be one of our greatest blessings. Like many another woman, the child whose coming was the most intensely repudiated was the one who afterward brought me the most exquisite pleasure. In a sense I loved no one of my children more than another; in illness my anxiety was the same for each, my care for health and happiness always as unremitting. Both Pauline and Jack had been nervous, delicate babies, ever more of a care than a refreshment, their small, precious existences always haunting me with a dread fear. But Erla from the first was different; she was such a healthy, happy little thing, she would lie in her crib for hours at a time as good as gold, when I was busy; whenever she saw my face she smiled.
From a tiny little thing her love for me was different from that which the other two showed; if I were out late she feared that "something might happen to mamma"; she had strange little endearing, voiceless ways of showing care and sympathy for me. Erla, by some divine intuition, always knew what mamma wanted—it was so strange to have any one look out for me, to have any one see when I was tired. It was Erla who brought me my slippers when I came in from giving a lesson, and tried to unbutton my shoes.
When Erla, with those baby-angel eyes of hers resting on my worn face, climbed up into my lap and patted my cheeks with her soft hands, saying: "Dear, pretty Mamma! Mamma is so beau-ty-ful!" she brought an exquisite wonder and refreshment to my heart. I have never been beautiful to any one but Erla.
Isn't it strange, no matter how great, or fortunate, or miserable a woman is, to be beautiful to someone makes such a difference! We want that so much. When Erla stroked my cheek it was as if I had touched the most exquisite chord on the piano and my voice had carried it up to heaven.
She was only a year and a half old when her father died; he loved his children, he was as gentle with them as with everybody—with me most of all. I am thankful that in those last years, at least, I tried to lay no burdens on him—I don't think I did. Mine were the shoulders to bear them; whether it was right or wrong that the part was mine instead of his was mercifully settled for me by his illness—then it was right. It is terrible to have to see that those we love are in the wrong; no matter how wrong we know ourselves to be in many things, we want them to be perfect.
When Paul died, something went out of my life with his spirit and his unfailing gentleness—youth, perhaps you might call it, for want of a better name. He and I had been young together. I found myself going back in my mind, past all that had happened since, to those first years when we had been young together. I was gladder than I had ever been before that I had come back from Paris to him. The children were his as well as mine—and I had Erla!
No one, except those who have experienced it, knows how strange it is to have one's husband taken away—it seems always the kind of thing that cannot happen, it leaves one lost in the world, with no accredited place. There is no one else with whom one has any right to be first.
People were very kind to me in those early days of my bereavement. My brothers, whom I had not seen for years, came to the funeral; they were changed almost into strangers, grown apart from me, yet for that moment of grief, oddly my brothers still.
Death is a concrete thing, it is a tangible and accredited reason for sorrow. Sorrow that comes from God brings its own comfort; it is not like those terrible, self-brought seasons of mental incapacity and depression in which the will becomes flaccid—seasons in which one is ready to snatch at a straw to save oneself from drowning, only that on those occasions there is never even a straw to catch at.
When one cries out for help in one's weakness, no one wants to help at all—at least I've always found it so! It is only when one is inwardly strong that others stretch out their hands to help us along. Spiritual weakness antagonizes—people fear it, it is such an ugly thing. We have to try and raise ourselves to the plane above to come into communication with our kind. My God! How hard we have to try sometimes! Even our daily repeated strengthening catch-words wear themselves out in course of time; we have to seek others to pump up the power of living into us.
There were always those chords on the piano that I could strike that might bring the sense of power back into me—and for every time in which I struggled out of the slough of despondency, I reached a still higher ground; I had visions. Oh, my fairy ring was still there, that feeling of that inner self in me leaped toward the light more exultingly than ever; that desire for expression—the need, yes, the power of it—was mine, in a greater degree than ever. I thanked God for the unfulfilled joy of it; in those moments I knew, without questioning, that some day my voice would come back.
IV
It was no new thing for me to have to support the family. When I look back it seems impossible that I could have done so much and in such different kinds of ways—if it were not that so many of us do impossible things. My musical training, my life of routine, had at any rate given me the power and the habit of concentration. But the anguish of all the working lately had been to have to take the time for it from an invalid who needed me. I was free to work as hard as I wanted to now.
I not only had classes in the house; I went to other places, other towns, even. I was lucky at getting and keeping pupils. Pauline and Jack and Erla helped in the house in little ways, as they had for some time, but they had to be educated.
You don't need to be told about those years, sweet years in spite of everything. And—I can't exactly explain it—but much that had hurt in my married life faded away for ever, and left only the sense of love; what was good and sweet in Paul stayed by me. I realized, too, that I might have helped him differently. You see God has always given me the power to enjoy, if I was only strong enough to stand up and hold the gift!
Erla, though the youngest, was the little mother of the family; she was Jack's companion, her quick perception went ahead of Pauline's slower wit; she took care of me always. She had her father's beauty, his thick, curling dark hair, and his clear complexion; she grew up very tall. But though both Jack and Pauline had sweet voices, Erla never would sing; apart from that she was the most sensitive to music of them all.
We think our children belong to us.—When my pretty, delicate, flower-like Pauline was eighteen, she married a man more than forty who was here on a visit from Denver. It was one of those blows—it came upon me like a blow—that are out of all expectancy. Yes, he was well off … Pauline was made to be guarded. Yes, he loved her—she has always been happy, I think. I have seen her just six times in twelve years. You might think it strange that when she was rich I should still keep on working hard … she was so young when she married, she was only used to taking things, child-fashion, from mother, not giving. It is I, since, who have kept on sending her the little love-presents—trifles that I make myself, pretty collars and ties that can't be bought where she is. At Christmas and on my birthday Pauline and her husband send me a handsome present—a silken down quilt or a fur cloak. Pauline always says:
"I do hope if you want for anything at any time, Mother, that you'll let me know."
Want for anything! And Pauline has come on here to buy Chippendale furniture and thousand-dollar curtains for her house in Denver, and has seen the way I live! No, I am wrong, she doesn't see; she has the eyes of a child still, to whom mother and mother's house are apart from the rest of the world, complete as they are. It is my fault, I should have taught her better. Erla was the only one of my children who ever saw—but that is no credit to me; it was a divine quality in herself that I couldn't take away. So much that we lack afterward in our children, it is a strange, self-stabbing sort of comfort to think must be our own fault.
Jack, my poor Jack, never had any business sense; I haven't either, for that matter, I can only work! Jack wanted to leave the position in which he was getting a few dollars a week to go away as a missionary. I suppose it was a higher aspiration than just helping me. I have never looked forward to a time when my children would take care of me, as many parents do, it seemed as if I must always provide for them; yet this gave me a strange sort of shock.
I told you that I had a sister who was a missionary in Japan; well, she managed it that Jack went out there as a lay-helper; she had been writing to him for some time. I believe he has done much good; they say people love him—my little Jack! He sends me enthusiastic letters, occupied entirely with what he is doing. … There's a sort of excitement in working for people when you're not obliged to do it. So I was left alone with Erla.
I've skipped the greatest part of it all, you see. One day, when Erla was about fifteen, I heard her sing.
IV
I remember it all so vividly! She thought I was out of the house, but I had come in again without her knowing. Late one February afternoon I sat in my bedroom with its shabby, ragged rugs, its mean, yellow-painted furniture, knitting a pair of gray mittens for Jack—he was driving a grocery wagon at the time.
I was unusually tired that afternoon. Jack's minor position in the business world always necessitated an excruciatingly early breakfast, and this had been my morning to get up; Erla insisted on seeing to it on other days, though I did not want her to. My lovely child was growing too fast and studying too late at night for the high school; she was fitting herself to be a teacher.
I had taught all day in town, with but a brief interval for lunch, and with the information that two of my best pupils were to leave unexpectedly. It is singular how one may have all the outward manifestations of success, with the knowledge of the same old ache and anxiety, and the same old grinding strain to bear. I still had pupils, but I had begun lately not to get so much for teaching as I used. My methods had grown old-fashioned, I had no time to keep up with the newer music; it took more to live, and there was always something unforeseen to drag back just as one began to get ahead.
The furnishings of my bedroom had never been replenished since my marriage; they had an indescribably sordid look. I sat by the window; opposite was a row of mean, contracted, shabby white houses, the front yards sodden, but just above was a patch of blue, blue sky with white clouds around it. Anything very beautiful could always set my feet, momentarily at least, in the fairy ring. I have often wondered why most people—in cities, at any rate—look at the sky so little, or seem to get so little pleasure from the sight. And at that moment I heard someone in the room below singing—that voice!—I sat up straight and said: "God in heaven, what is that?"
I slid out of my room and down the stairs noiselessly, and through the open doorway of our little parlour I saw my Erla. She was singing from an old English book of songs, open on the piano: "Phyllis has such charming graces." You know it, perhaps. She stood there in her short plaid frock with her back to me, her head held high, the thick braid of her dark hair falling below her knees, and her hands clasped behind her.
That golden voice! Whether low or swelling high, so round, so full, with such a divine quality—even in the light shades and trills of the song, still round and full—but you have heard it! Nothing could ever add to the quality of it—she has learned confidence—she was so timid at first that she couldn't sing a note if she knew any one was listening; she has learned many things, but nothing has ever added to that wonderful quality. It was a voice that came straight from the highest. Once in centuries there is a voice like that.
I crept upstairs again and fell to weeping; I wept in torrents. Oh, I couldn't begin to tell you how I felt. It was like dying and being resurrected, the same and yet not the same, and not being used to the strange new body. I realized, as never, never before, what I had lost! I seemed to be equally torn for myself and for the child who had the Gift. And I made a vow then
When Erla came upstairs and saw me face downward on the bed, she flung herself down beside me, holding me tight in her young arms, with her cheek pressed against mine.
"Why do you cry, Mother?" she whispered pitifully. "Why do you cry? I didn't want you to hear me sing, I thought you were out." And then: "Oh, Mother, you'll get your own voice back some day, I know you will; I've prayed for it ever since I was a little bit of a girl."
My little Erla! But even to her I couldn't speak of that.
That night we talked it all out together. It was only within a year that she had found her voice; but always—so strange it is that we may live so close to a child, and never know the child's inner heart!—since she was very little she had sung all the songs she heard me teaching, "in her mind"—it was the only way she could explain it, but it must have been to her something like practising with one's fingers on a clavier which makes no sound. She couldn't get courage to make the sounds with her voice, she was so afraid someone would hear it; she had an agonizing shyness about being heard; but after awhile she had sung whenever she was alone. When one is timid about playing on any instrument, the consciousness may affect the execution, but the instrument remains the same. With the voice it is different; it is itself the instrument to be affected, to lose its tone, its power with anything that affects the singer. When I sang I forgot myself entirely, whatever voice I had could be counted on without fail, but with Erla it was always the opposite.
Well, the plan of her studying to be a teacher in the public school was abandoned at once, though she fought against giving up; in a few more years she might be earning forty dollars a month, and she had so longed to be a help to me! The very idea of singing in public terrified her. "In half a dozen years you may be earning four thousand a month, or even a week, " I told her.
My dear, I found that times were different than when I was a girl; there were so few American-born singers then that one with a real voice had some prominence. I was a rarity; Mrs. Stanford and my dear Master felt that in me they had a concealed treasure. But there are far too few patrons now for the hundreds of girls with voices to exploit; there was nobody to make Erla's way for her but me.
When Pauline came on from her home she was interested, as much as the child could be, in something that wasn't her own child-life—and she gave Erla twenty-five dollars for her birthday to help on with the lessons; the lessons cost me eighty dollars a quarter. Pauline was proud of Erla, but she didn't understand. It was natural that mother should look after her girlies. You may think it foolish, as well as strange, that I never asked Pauline for a penny in all those years, either toward Erla's musical education or for my living. I think maybe I have been unjust to Pauline in not asking, in defrauding her of the giving—but I couldn't—I was too proud. Everything was there for her to see if she would have seen it and if she didn't. …
It is hard for many people to see that others may be in need if they themselves are not. It was, after all, my fault; I was too proud to do what would have been really best for her, even if it hurt me. I sometimes get at least that stabbing comfort of knowing that it was partly my own fault.
VI
It was strangely like and yet unlike my old life over again, those years when Erla was learning to sing. But she was in no boarding house alone; she was with me, her mother. She went to town every day for her lessons and practising; I didn't pretend to teach her. But every night she came home to me, except those nights when I met her in town and took her to the opera, and we came out together, past midnight, to our house and bed.
I sometimes caught sight of our two selves in a big mirror in the foyer, as we walked through—Erla, tall and beautiful, with her long dark hair wound around her lovely head, her long throat, her young swelling figure in her tight-fitting dark blue "tailor" suit—that I'd cut and sewed with my own fingers and I, the plain, thin little woman in the black skirt and jacket. I heard someone speak of me once as "that little middle-aged woman with the young eyes."
It gave me a curious feeling as if I'd been found out. I knew, that in myself, in spite of love and birth and death, and care and sorrow, and grinding work for all these years, I knew that in myself I was as young as that look in my eyes, as eager for expression as ever, as eager to live my own life as I dreamed it. Even if you're a mother, it's strange how much you keep on being your own self still.
We women, we talk all our days—we talk too much! We are always trying to say something, to get at something; there is so much in us that we never can express, we wonder what use it is, and why the desire is given us.
Those years when Erla and I were alone together we both worked tensely at our different tasks. She was not actively demonstrative, but she had all the little ways of love and understanding; she pulled the blind down to shade my eyes before I realized that the sun was shining in; she walked to and from the train when she was in town so that she might save her carfare to buy me a little package of chocolates, or a flower; she wouldn't get a new hat for herself until I could buy one, too; and when she dressed or undressed, I had to go and stay in the room with her so that we might have those precious minutes at least in which to talk over all that had happened since we had talked last. She told me every word of praise her masters gave her religiously; she knew that that was what my soul lived on. Erla had all the little ways of love that feed the heart.
It distressed her that I had still to be the wage-earner; I had to keep her purpose inflexibly before her or she would have given up the future many times for the present need. For the rest, we pinched and saved in every way we could. I trained her in the routine that had been mine in Paris, and let no household duties interfere with it, that she might have the highest measure of health and strength with which to back up her voice.
Her greatest stumbling block was her constitutional shyness. To get confidence, and the ease and repose that come from it, was the thing she had to strive most for. There is always something to stand in the way; with me it was always my plainness, my insignificance, my utter lack of any presence. Erla had presence; but it was a question whether she would ever be able really to sing alone in public—that is, sing as she could. Many voices have gone to pieces under that strain before now—they haven't been able to fulfil the heavenly promise they gave; we have all known that. And afterward, when they sing, the voice isn't there the same as before the failure; something that seemed to be in it goes after it has been smirched by the powers of Fear and of Weakness.
So that was our only uneasiness. If after all this tremendous uphill effort there was to be another failure, though of a different kind, at the end of it—if Erla was to suffer as I had done! I think no matter what I was doing I was invariably praying, praying, praying in all kinds of ways; as the humblest, most needy, most undeserving of sinners, and then again with the confident, proud claiming of one's intention with that of the Highest; praying, as I said, in all kinds of ways, as if by chance to catch His attention by one method if not by another—to catch the Omnipotent coöperation that alone makes our striving competent. One cannot be daily in communication with a great force without acquiring power oneself. From that inner intensity I gained an outer calm, a sureness, a repose. There was a life at stake, and I must not falter.
VII
When it was ultimately arranged, after long consideration and preparation, that Erla should go abroad to Vienna to study, with a couple of other young women, she wept and implored me piteously to go with her; she couldn't bear to leave me behind. It was a terribly hard thing to send her away so far, but I had to stay home and earn the money. I could see no way of earning it over there.
In those last four years I had saved a little; I borrowed the rest—enough to take Erla over, and to begin on—from the grocer in our suburb, now grown to a large place, whose children I once taught, and one of whom had since died. Among all the people I have known in musical circles, or of social prominence, I have never met one who seemed to realize that I ever needed any special help, even when we went through our most crucial seasons of poverty, except this one man. I think I had a quiet manner that seemed self-sufficient; I never talked of my own affairs. But Mr. Dalton once, when it had been difficult for me to pay his bill, had come forward and in the plain matter-of-fact way which shows the most delicate kindness, had suggested that everyone in the business world was apt to get into difficulties once in awhile, and that if I needed money at any time he would be glad to lend it to me—if he had it—with no security but my word. I had never taken advantage of his offer until now, but the mere fact of his kindness and faith in me had been indescribably heartening.
I was glad, for one reason, to have Erla go, because I had to work so much harder than I had let her know, and it began to be more and more difficult to keep things from her.
You know how conditions that seem to be permanent change. After my pupils had gradually melted away, I had lectured on music in a couple of schools, and I held the post of secretary to a musical society. I had picked up typewriting, and that helped. If you once get in the way of earning a living, there is always something you can find to do—you get used to burrowing through any narrow tunnel, mole-like, forcing a further opening as you proceed. In spite of doubts and hesitancies, and obstacles and impossibilities, and the almost constant feeling of failure, I have always managed to keep on.
Before Erla left I knew—though she did not—that one of those periods of wholesale change had begun; the musical society was about to disband; one school gave up the musical lectures and the other engaged a man for the next season in my place. I tried for nothing more of the kind. When Erla left I took lodgers; I cooked, swept, scrubbed; I took in plain sewing and fine washing; I made cake and salad dressing for exchanges, and in odd moments knitted baby socks. Many a night I have worked until two o'clock in the morning that Erla's cheques might go to her regularly, and I hardly felt whether it was dawn or dark.
And I had in that time some of my most exquisite flashes of happiness; it was almost as if I had a premonition of what was to happen. I had always been fond of beautiful things, but I took a fresh joy in sunsets, in the shimmering of lights across the snow, in the swaying of green leaves, and white clouds in a blue sky—things that come in the way of everyone—full of a beauty that raises the strain of courage in one's heart. I couldn't listen to music any more—it tore at something in me.
I had never been much of a reader, but I took to reading a couple of books over and over. One of them was "Walden," by Thoreau—that was almost like being out under the sky; and one was "Kidnapped," by Stevenson; I suppose you know it. You may think it was an odd kind of a book for me to like! But the people in it were always brave—simply brave, through all discouragements, as if it were the only thing to be. I seemed to get a new means of life out of it all. Some of my youth with Paul seemed to have come back again. My brothers wrote to me, briefly and awkwardly, yet as brothers still. There was a sweetness in the relationship.
I had my children's letters—dear letters from my dear children, Pauline and Jack—full of all that they were doing. Pauline had no children, but her husband was very good to her; bless him for that! She was a happy child herself. Sometimes I had the joy of sending tiny cheques to Jack. And I had my letters from Erla, not only filled with what she was doing, but with thought for me. She was succeeding—though not quite sure enough of herself yet. Sometimes she couldn't help being afraid that after all But I never wavered in my thought of her.
Those months, those years—they flew; but when the time drew near for her first appearance in grand opera in Milan—when the date was really set—all of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I found I could work no longer. Almost as swiftly as I am telling about it I arranged to leave the house with another woman, and go over myself, without letting Erla know. I spare you the details. I hadn't meant to do it, but I had to go—it was as if I were "called." Yes, and I was called!
I didn't even tell Erla when I arrived; the ship was late and I reached Milan only the last evening, a couple of hours before the performance. I had cabled for a seat in the front row in the opera house the day I sailed. It was as if I were on fire!
You saw Erla last night and the crowded, glittering house, the King and Queen in the royal box. It was a triumph when she first came forward on the stage, and her loveliness seemed to make an atmosphere around her; why, she was so beautiful that the audience applauded involuntarily, didn't they? They were kind and encouraging when she began to sing. But she was frightened, you could see her tremble—her voice trembled, too. Erla couldn't sing off the note if she tried, but her voice trembled—it wasn't sure.
I suffered in those moments—that next half hour. … I couldn't begin to tell you how I suffered! What availed all my life, all thy love, all my struggles, all my prayers if I couldn't help her now? To be a mother, and not to be able to help! It is criminal not to know how to help one's children in their need!
I had feared that my presence might distract Erla, unnerve her, make her conscious, if she saw me. But now I wrote a little note on a slip of paper torn from my play bill and got an usher to take it for me to Erla. He was going to refuse, but he took it when I said I was her mother. I told her where to look for me.
And when she came on again—you were there—you heard her, but you didn't see her eyes leap to mine, you didn't know that in all that glittering, gorgeous house she was singing for a little brown old woman with wrinkled face and knotted hands, wrapped in a white silk cloak. … She sang—her voice uncertain still at first—then gaining, gaining in strength, in tone, in volume, in some heavenly, unspeakable quality—God in heaven! You only heard her, but it was I who sang! She and I knew. From that first moment my voice had leapt to meet and blend with hers, to sustain it, to carry it up, up, up to the Gates Above, in ecstasy. My lips did not move, but it was my voice that carried. … I stood with my feet in the fairy ring at last, in the consciousness of that fullness of created power. I stood in the fairy ring at last, with my voice going up to God!
THE END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK