Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  He was surprised to discover that Jay Regan was completely absorbed in the music. The satirical cruel face, with its shining bald head, was entranced. Behind his reserve something entirely foreign to Ernest’s knowledge looked out, unguarded. The long white slender hands, the pickpocket hands, were clasped together on the balustrade, and the attitude of them was both exquisite and arresting. As the music proceeded the jaw dropped and softened, the hooded eyes blinked, the mouth twitched. So, he’s got that behind his mask, thought Ernest. He’s less invulnerable than I thought. And his anxiety about the French loan relaxed triumphantly, and with more than a little contempt.

  The symphony moved on, infinitely moving, almost terrible in its beauty. Feeling warm, Ernest mopped his face and moved his neck uncomfortably in his collar.

  He began to think of what he had accomplished that day. He chuckled. He was unaware that Regan glanced at him with a fury suddenly become like the rage of a disturbed wolf. Mrs. Regan looked at him with distressed surprise. May, almost weeping, bit her lip.

  At length, after eons, the symphony swelled to a close. There was wild and prolonged applause. Possibly a dozen people in the audience had understood the music.

  The lights were brightening, and the orchestra stood in the pit, bowing in response to an applause becoming scattered as the audience rose to rush into the lobby for the intermission. The aisles were choked, the backs of the audience teeming and uproarious. Before rows and rows of empty seats and surging backs the musicians bowed and bowed.

  Ernest left the box with Regan for the intermission. Regan was surly, and disinclined to talk. As the two men stood in the lobby, hiding themselves in a corner, Regan kept glancing at Ernest with an almost threatening eye. They did not return until the orchestra was tuning up again.

  Ernest found Mozart had less perfection than Beethoven, and did not like him. Besides, though he would not admit it even to himself, he was becoming infected with the excitement of the others in the box. His discomfort grew; he gnawed the nail of his right index finger. His pale eyes moved restlessly in their sockets.

  The lights went up again. May, suddenly as white as paper, suddenly as rigid as ice, dropped her fan with a clatter upon the floor and leaned forward. Her hands clutched the red plush of the balustrade, and the veins rose in her throat. Sympathetically, Mrs. Regan laid her hand on the other woman’s arm, but May did not feel it. She was looking at the manager who had come in from the wings.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the manager in a high and lilting voice. “the orchestra will next play for you the First Symphony, the ‘Mountain Symphony,’ of Mr. Godfrey Barbour.” He paused; there was a ripple of polite applause. “I am not going to take your time to tell you of this symphony. You are the audience; you are the judges. On you the fame and fortune of this young American composer rest.”

  “No American ever composed anything fit to listen to,” said a woman’s clear piercing voice below the Regan box. “Except, perhaps, Stephen Foster.”

  “O God,” whispered May. She was shaking visibly. Gertrude leaned toward her mother, put her slender arm about her shoulders. May shook her off as if in agony. “Where is Frey? Where is my boy?” she whispered over and over.

  The lights dimmed, the conductor raised his baton. The symphony began.

  The first movement, the allegro, was disappointing. It was a perfect movement; the technique was faultless. It was as brilliant as the cold shooting of stars on a winter’s midnight, but as completely without fire or significance. A purely intellectual movement, one to delight a mathematician. The best and the worst of Godfrey Barbour’s music was in it: it was bad and good simultaneously, for the same reason. It was as beautiful and as dead as a crystal image, swift and lifeless, intellectuality without splendor, perfection without glory. Its very intellectuality betrayed its lack of substance. It was abstract mechanics without a meaning.

  May listened to it without hearing it; her bare back was moist with cold sweat; a constant tremor agitated her diamonds. Regan sat with his elbow on the balustrade, his hand covering his secret mouth. He listened with intent and polite attention. He heard the icy pyrotechnics of the movement and was amazed at the minuteness of detail.

  But Ernest was dumfounded. The technician was astonished at this technique. He did not hear the emptiness of it; he heard only the precision. What a mind for detail! he thought. Ernest felt quite an unusual excitement, a gratified pleasure. His son was not a fool, after all! What a delicate mechanic! What an exquisite inventor! He came close to being as happy as he had ever been, in this realization.

  The first movement ended. Regan turned to Ernest. “It’s perfection,” he said quietly, “but it’s not music.” His wife looked puzzled, but Ernest understood.

  “It is perfect,” echoed Gertrude, turning to May. But May’s eyes were closed; there were tears on her cheeks, and her lips were white. Elsa, who had been bored to the dozing point, giggled.

  “But, it is not music,” repeated Jay Regan.

  “Well, what is it then, Papa?” asked Miss Regan, considering her father extremely rude. He glanced at her over his shoulder. “It’s a problem in abstract mathematics, brilliantly solved,” he answered.

  But the largo was beginning. The audience had listened to the allegro in perfunctory silence, as they might have listened to a lecture that had not touched them. But after a few minutes of the largo they became interested, glanced surprisedly at each other, sat up. Even those who did not understand music nor care particularly about it were jolted upright.

  There was no technique here, no careful pruning and polishing and mechanical lighting; no brilliancy without warmth. There was no perfection. The allegro movement, the first in the Mountain Symphony, brought to mind nothing whatsoever pertaining to mountains, except, perhaps, icicles glittering in the sun and patches of glazed snow, which was not, however, what Godfrey Barbour had meant to convey. But from out the dark-and-light chaos of his uncertainty, the frightened lack of discipline, the gigantic loss of control (as though he were trying to manipulate forces too great for his feebleness), had emerged a colossal form. He had become an involuntary rider of Titan’s horses, a dainty and precise dancer whose sparkling platform had become an earthquake. All through this dark-and-light, these shifting bases, these thunders and rolls and flame-drenched oceans, these abysses struck open with the hammer of Thor, these burstings apart of space and explosions of matter, the white and terrified face of Godfrey Barbour seemed to shine. He was a child who had involuntarily evoked ruin.

  When the movement reached its conclusion, the audience sat, a little stupefied. They had accepted the splendor of Beethoven indifferently, as one accepts a sunset or a majestic panorama to which one has become apathetic through familiarity. They took Beethoven for granted, even his glory. But here was something new, someone close to them, someone alive, and not in legendary time. Nothing that a god can do astonishes, but a man who approaches the gods is an object for marvelling and worship. The orchestra was actually beginning the scherzo when the audience broke out into a delirious riot of applause, stamping, shouting, waving of fans, cries and shouts. Many stood up, clapping madly, laughing with feverish excitement.

  May, in the Regan box, wept hysterically. Gertrude and Elsa put their arms about her. Mrs. Regan twittered incoherently to her daughter. Jay Regan said nothing, and now his hand was completely over his mouth as he stared at the orchestra. “My son! My son!” May sobbed over and over. But Ernest sat in silence, his heavy face as impassive as ever, his fingers slowly playing with his watch-chain. He knew, now, that he would never own his son again. Not with that in him! The young devil! he thought, and listened contemptuously to the uproar of the audience.

  The audience became quiet enough to listen eagerly to the scherzo. They were not too disappointed. A dozen dainty dancers moved prettily over glassy mirrors and bowed elegantly to their own images. There was no sprightliness here; the dancers formed angles and rectangles and triangles and precise circles
all in the best and most intellectual taste. If there was any lifting of skirts it was to form a glittering parallelogram. An equation was worked out in tights and spangles. True sportiveness was absent in this studied prettiness.

  “How delicate, like lace!” exclaimed the kind-hearted little Mrs. Regan. Elsa, who had no liking for tiny shoes twinkling with paste, made a grimace. The audience, gratefully and emotionally remembering the largo, applauded vociferously.

  When the manager was finally shouted onto the stage, he could not make himself heard for the roaring. He pleaded; he gesticulated. Finally, laughing, waving his arms, he returned to the wings and dragged out of them a slender, smallish young man, blond and terror-stricken, pulling-away, confused and scarlet. “Maestro!” screamed some young men in the balcony. May stood up in spite of the hands that tugged at her. She leaned over the balustrade. “Frey! My darling, my darling! Frey, it’s Mama! Frey, dearest, Frey, Frey!” But Godfrey, overcome, bowing, his handsome face twisted with his terror-blighted smile, did not hear her. May beat her hands on the balustrade, she laughed and shrieked together, she sobbed. People in the rows below looked up at her, and many of them smiled and cried in sympathy. All at once the heat in the vast auditorium became intense, and agitated as though by scorching winds.

  It was an ovation. The audience went completely mad. The orchestra climbed up beside the young man and stood around him like priests about their high-priest. Many of them, true artists themselves, had privately thought the symphony very bad, but they were infected by the general insanity and uproar. They joined in, the applause. No one knew just when Godfrey disappeared, but when the musicians left the stage Godfrey was no longer on it.

  CHAPTER LXXXVI

  When the Barbours finally fought their way through the crowds to the back of the stage, they were pounced upon by the manager, who greeted them with a mixture of rude excitement, obsequiousness, rage and hysteria. He screamed something incoherent to the effect that Mr. Godfrey Barbour had left without a word, just disappeared, and a thousand people clamoring to meet him, really important people who were donors and patrons, and this was insupportable and not to be countenanced, this insult to the donors and the patrons, and a large deficit last year, and didn’t he understand that an artist, no matter how acclaimed and great, must be polite and ingratiating to the donors—

  Ernest remained at least four feet from the excited and infuriated and despairing man, but when his eye finally caught that wandering and glittering eye the uproar stopped, and the manager stood in a state of suddenly suspended animation, his mouth hanging open, a photograph snapped in the midst of wild activity.

  “Did my son leave any message for his mother, or me?” asked Ernest calmly.

  The photograph resumed life, but in a more subdued form. “No! Yes! I don’t know! Oh, this is not to be explained or forgiven! There has been arranged a party for him, one hundred distinguished guests, who can raise the Academy to magnificent heights or close it in bankruptcy, and Mr. Godfrey Barbour, a newcomer, a stranger, an unknown, dared insult these guests who could help him and the Academy so, and now everything is in ruins, everything lost—” He sobbed aloud. May stood watching him like one in a dream, her dry lips parted.

  “A message?” repeated Ernest in a loud and commanding voice.

  The clamor stopped. The four Barbours and the manager stood in the cold and shabby dressing room, the door closed. In the hall outside was the deep roar of an impatient mob.

  The manager put his hand to his head. “A message!” he muttered. He lifted his head and stared at Ernest wildly. “Yes, he gave me a little note! Before the performance! Perhaps it is for you. O my God, how could he do this thing to me, to all of us, who have brought him forward, introduced him—” He fumbled in his pocket and withdrew a crushed envelope, which he fiercely pushed into Ernest’s hand.

  The three women crowded about him as he opened it. May leaned against his arm, overcome. There were only a few lines, and they were addressed to May. “Mama, darling,” Godfrey had written, “I don’t want to see you at the Academy after the performance, whether it is good or bad. There will be too many people, too much of a crowd. But I want all of you who attend the performance to come to my rooms on Seventh Avenue immediately after. You will understand why when you arrive.”

  “The young fool,” said Ernest irately. He thrust the paper back into his pocket. “Well, I suppose the only thing to do is to call the carriage and drive over to his rooms.”

  “Oh, dear,” murmured May faintly. She was very white. Elsa supported her with her strong arm. Gertrude stood in silence, the long folds of her ermine cloak falling over her dark green velvet gown, her pale face without expression.

  The door opened, showing a mass of moving heads and excited, curious faces. Lucy appeared, stout and competent, escorted by the disheveled Percival. The pressure outside catapulted them into the room.

  “Dears!” exclaimed Lucy with vigor. “What a time we had leaving the orchestra, struggling with the crowds! But where is Frey?”

  “Frey,” said Gertrude quietly, “has invited us to his rooms on Seventh Avenue. He wanted to avoid the people, and no wonder! Will you come with us?”

  Lucy stared, her eyes shining like bits of black raspberry jelly. “How odd! Certainly Percy and I will come! But then, all artists are modest! Gracious, he’ll make a fortune out of this! Or do artists ever make fortunes?”

  “You’ll have to ask an artist,” said Ernest. “Ladies, if you are ready, we will go.”

  The snow was falling when they went outside, thick and soft as cotton batting. Most of the people were still inside the Academy, and the street was almost deserted. The Van Eyck carriage was called, and the family got in. Lucy and her husband followed in the Regan carriage, which had courteously been offered to them. They rolled without a sound on the soft white cushion of new snow to Seventh Avenue. The streets were quiet and empty, almost every window dark and bleakly reflecting the flickering street lights. No one spoke. May leaned back in her seat under the fur rug, and her eyes were closed. Even Elsa was silent.

  May was thinking with bitter fear: It is not like Frey, my little Godfrey, to want the family about when I am there. It must be that he knows Ernest will be there, too, and has something to show us or tell us, and he believes he will be safer among a lot of us than just alone with Ernest and me. It is Ernest he is afraid of. He must have seen him in the box.

  By the time the carriage reached the shabby neighborhood of Seventh Avenue and Twelfth Street, May was physically ill with apprehension and anxiety. When the vehicle stopped before a gloomy narrow house, four stories tall, with narrow windows like slits in the red brick walls, and a cluttered half-dozen of steps hemmed in by brownstone sides, May was hardly able to leave the carriage. The snow still fell, steadily, with a sort of implacable indifference. On the very top floor a feeble light or two burned expectantly. Ernest pushed open a shabby oak door with stained glass insets about a dirty uncurtained panel of plain glass, and they trooped into a gritty hallway with bare floor and narrow dirty stairway winding upwards in a dimly lit silence. The stairs were uncarpeted; their boots echoed on the bare wood. The ladies lifted their heavy velvet skirts and climbed laboriously. Elsa’s feather had been liberally snowed upon, and curved back over her big head ludicrously. Ernest followed in gloomy speechlessness, his lower lip thrust out, his cane tucked under his arm like a sword-sheath.

  They seemed to climb indefinitely in that dreary, partially lighted silence. May began to pant. Ernest offered his arm, but she refused it with an exhausted motion of her head. When they reached the fourth floor a door opened and threw a beam of yellow light into the narrow hallway. Godfrey, still in his overcoat, but with no hat on his bright and handsome young head, greeted them with a smile. He seemed unable to speak. The smile on his narrow long face was fixed and twisted with fright. May saw at once. Everything else was forgotten: her darling was terrified.

  “Frey!” she cried in a heartbreaking voice
as she reached the doorway. She threw her arms about his neck, pulled his face down to hers, burst into broken cries. “Frey! How you have frightened us! Frey, darling, why did you run away? When it was all so beautiful, and everyone was so glad! My darling, let me see you, let your Mama see you, after so long!”

  “Let us go inside, first,” said Ernest ironically.

  “Mama!” cried Godfrey, and there was as much fear as affection in his voice. He clung to his mother as they all went inside the drab and chilly apartment.

  It was a dreary place in a dreary house in a dreary neighborhood patronized mostly by unarrived young artists and those who would never arrive. The dull red paper on the wall, the scarred oak woodwork, the Brussels rug on the floor with its faded roses and leaves, the small coal stove smoking in the center of the room, the mended curtains, the old-fashioned worn horsehair furniture, the table with its china-globed lamp and feeble light, the books heaped helter-skelter on the floor under the windows with their torn shades, the dusty and rickety old piano heaped with paper and portfolios, all were dusted over with the gray patina of poverty and the hopelessness of dozens of others who had lived here before Godfrey.

  Nobody could speak for a minute except Elsa. “Well!” she ejaculated. “I must say this is a terrible place, Frey!” She turned to her cousin, who was still shrinking behind his mother, and her large handsome face lightened, became radiant. “What on earth possessed you to come here! Dear, how extremely odd!”