by Willa Cather
Connie laughed mournfully.
“If the Grand Duke Paul had a son, any old rag of a son, the provinces of Moscow and Tula couldn’t hold him. He may, for aught I know, actually pretend to have a son. It would be very like him.” She looked at her fingertips and her rings disapprovingly for a moment. “Do you know, I’ve been thinking that I would rather like to lay hands on that youngster. I believe he’d be interesting. I’m bored with the world.”
Tevis looked up and said quickly:
“Would you like him, really?”
“Of course I should,” she said indignantly. “But, then, I like other things, too, and one has to choose. When one has only two or three things to choose from, life is hard; when one has many, it is harder still. No, on the whole, I don’t mind that story. It’s rather pretty except for the grand duke. But not all of them are pretty.”
“Well, none of them are very ugly; at least I never heard but one that troubled me, and that was long ago.”
Connie looked interested.
“That is what I want to know; how do the ugly ones get started? How did that one get going and what was it about? Is it too dreadful to repeat?”
“No, it’s not especially dreadful; merely rather shabby. If you really wish to know, and won’t be vexed, I can tell you exactly how it got going, for I took the trouble to find out. But it’s a long story, and you really had nothing whatever to do with it.”
“Then who did have to do with it? Tell me; I should like to know exactly how even one of them originated.”
“Will you be comfortable and quiet and not get into a rage, and let me look at you as much as I please?”
Connie nodded, and Tevis sat watching her indolently while he debated how much of his story he ought not to tell her. Connie liked being looked at by intelligent persons. She knew exactly how good looking she was, and she knew, too, that, pretty as she was, some of those rather sallow women in the Simon painting had a kind of beauty which she would never have. This knowledge, Tevis was thinking, this important realization, contributed more to her loveliness than any other thing about her; more than her smooth, ivory skin or her changing gray eyes, the delicate forehead above them, or even the heady smile, which was gradually becoming too bright and too intentional, out in the world, at least. Here by her own fire she still had for her friends a smile less electric than the one she flashed from stages. She could still be, in short, intime, a quality which few artists keep, which few ever had.
Connie broke in on her friend’s meditations.
“You may smoke. I had rather you did. I hate to deprive people of things they like.”
“No, thanks. May I have those chocolates on the tea-table? They are quite as bad for me. May you? No, I suppose not.” He settled himself by the fire, with the candy beside him, and began in the agreeable voice which always soothed his listener.
“As I said, it was a long while ago, when you first came back to this country and were singing at the Manhattan. I dropped in at the Metropolitan one evening to hear something new they were trying out. It was an off night, no pullers in the cast, and nobody in the boxes but governesses and poor relations. At the end of the first act two people entered one of the boxes in the second tier. The man was Siegmund Stein, the department-store millionaire, and the girl, so the men about me in the omnibus box began to whisper, was Connie Ayrshire. I didn’t know you then, but I was unwilling to believe that you were with Stein. I could not contradict them at that time, however, for the resemblance, if it was merely a resemblance, was absolute, and all the world knew that you were not singing at the Manhattan that night. The girl’s hair was dressed just as you then wore yours. Moreover, her head was small and restless like yours, and she had your coloring, your eyes, your chin. She carried herself with the critical indifference one might expect in an artist who had come for a look at a new production that was clearly doomed to failure. She applauded lightly. She made comments to Stein when comments were natural enough. I thought, as I studied her face with the glass, that her nose was a trifle thinner and cleaner-cut than yours, a prettier nose, my dear Connie, but stupider and more inflexible. But I was troubled until I saw her laugh, and then I knew she was a counterfeit. I had never seen you laugh, but I knew that you would not laugh like that. It was not boisterous; indeed, it was consciously refined, mirthless, meaningless. In short, it was not the laugh of one whom our friends in there”—pointing to the Simon painting—“would honor with their affection and admiration.”
Connie rose on her elbow and burst out indignantly:
“So you would really have been hoodwinked except for that! You may be sure that no woman, no intelligent woman, would have been. Why do we ever take the trouble to look like anything for any of you? I could count on my four fingers”—she held them up and “‘The throng began closing in upon me’” shook them at him—“the men I’ve known who had the least perception of what any woman really looked like, and they were all dressmakers. Even painters”—glancing back in the direction of the Simon picture—“never get more than one type through their thick heads; they try to make all women look like some wife or mistress. You are all the same; you never see our real faces. What you do see is some cheap conception of prettiness you got from a colored supplement when you were adolescents. It’s too discouraging. I’d rather take vows and veil my face forever from such abominable eyes. In the kingdom of the blind any petticoat is a queen.” Connie thumped the cushion with her elbow. “Well, I can’t do anything about it. Go on with your story.”
“Aren’t you furious, Connie! And I thought I was so shrewd. I’ve quite forgotten where I was. Anyhow, I was not the only man fooled. After the last curtain I met Villard, the press man of that management, in the lobby, and asked him whether Connie Ayrshire was in the house. He said he thought so. Stein had telephoned for a box, and said he was bringing one of the artists from the other company. Villard had been too busy about the new production to go to the box, but he was quite sure the woman was Ayrshire, whom he had met in Paris.
“Not long after that I met Dan Cutter, a classmate of mine, at the Harvard Club. He’s a journalist, and he used to keep such eccentric hours that I had not run across him for a long time. We got to talking about modern French music, and discovered that we both had a very lively interest in Connie Ayrshire.
“‘Could you tell me,’ Dan asked abruptly, ‘why, with pretty much all the known world to choose her friends from, this young woman should flit about with Siegmund Stein? It prejudices people against her. He’s a most objectionable person.’”
“‘Have you,’ I asked, ‘seen her with him, yourself?’”
“Yes, he had seen her driving with Stein, and some of the men on his paper had seen her dining with him at rather queer places down town. Stein was always hanging about the Manhattan on nights when Connie sang. I told Dan that I suspected a masquerade. That interested him, and he said he thought he would look into the matter. In short, we both agreed to look into it. Finally, we got the story, though Dan could never use it, could never even hint at it, because Stein carries heavy advertising in his paper.
“To make you see the point, I must give you a little history of Siegmund Stein. Any one who has seen him never forgets him. He is one of the most hideous men in New York, but it’s not at all the common sort of ugliness that comes from overeating and automobiles. He isn’t one of the fat horrors. He has one of those rigid, horselike faces that never tell anything; a long nose, flattened as if it had been tied down; a scornful chin; long, white teeth; flat cheeks, yellow as a Mongolian’s; tiny, black eyes, with puffy lids and no lashes; dingy, dead-looking hair—looks as if it were glued on.
“Stein came here a beggar from somewhere in Australia. He began by working on the machines in old Rosenthal’s garment factory. He became a speeder, a foreman, a salesman; worked his way ahead steadily until the hour when he rented an ol
d dwelling-house on Seventh Avenue and began to make misses’ and juniors’ coats. I believe he was the first manufacturer to specialize in those particular articles. Dozens of garment manufacturers have come along the same road, but Stein is like none of the rest of them. He is, and always was, a personality. While he was still at the machine, a hideous, underfed little whippersnapper, he was already a youth of many-colored ambitions, deeply concerned about his dress, his associates, his recreations. He haunted the old Astor Library and the Metropolitan Museum, learned something about pictures and porcelains, took singing lessons, though he had a voice like a crow’s. When he sat down to his baked apple and doughnut in a basement lunchroom, he would prop a book up before him and address his food with as much leisure and ceremony as if he were dining at his club. He held himself at a distance from his fellow-workmen and somehow always managed to impress them with his superiority. He had inordinate vanity, and the care of his homely person took a great deal of his time. There are many stories about his foppishness. After his first promotion in Rosenthal’s factory, he bought a new overcoat. A few days later, one of the men at the machines, which Stein had just quitted, appeared in a coat exactly like it. Stein could not discharge him, but he gave his own coat to a newly arrived Russian boy who had none. He was already magnificent.
“After he began to make headway with misses’ and juniors’ cloaks, he became a collector—etchings, china, old musical instruments. He had a dancing master, and engaged a beautiful Brazilian widow—she was said to be a secret agent for some South American republic—to teach him Spanish. He cultivated the society of the unknown great, poets, actors, musicians. He entertained them sumptuously, and they regarded him as a deep, mysterious Jew who had the secret of gold, which they had not. His business associates thought him a man of taste and culture, a patron of the arts, a credit to the garment trade.
“One of Stein’s many ambitions was to be thought a success with women. He got considerable notoriety in the garment world by his attentions to an emotional actress who is now quite forgotten, but who had her little hour of expectation. Then there was a dancer; then, just after Gorky’s visit here, a Russian anarchist woman. After that the coat-makers and shirtwaist-makers began to whisper that Stein’s great success was with Connie Ayrshire.
“It is the hardest thing in the world to disprove such a story, as Dan Cutter and I discovered. We managed to worry down the girl’s address through a taxi-cab driver who got next to Stein’s chauffeur. She had an apartment in a decent-enough house on Waverly Place. Nobody ever came to see her but Stein, her sisters, and a little Italian girl from whom we got the story.
“The counterfeit’s name was Ruby Mohr. She worked in a shirtwaist factory, and this Italian girl, Margarita, was her chum. Stein came to the factory when he was hunting for living models for his new department store. He looked the girls over, and picked Ruby out from several hundred. He had her call at his office after business hours, tried her out in cloaks and evening gowns, and offered her a position. She never, however, appeared as a model in the Sixth Avenue store. Her likeness to the newly arrived prima donna suggested to Stein a new act in the play he was always putting on. He gave two of her sisters positions as saleswomen, but Ruby he established in an apartment on Waverly Place.
“To the outside world Stein became more mysterious in his behaviour than ever. He dropped his Bohemian friends. No more suppers and theater-parties. Whenever Connie sang, he was in his box at the Manhattan, usually alone, but not always. Sometimes he took two or three good customers, large buyers from St. Louis or Kansas City. His coat factory is still the biggest earner of his properties. I’ve seen him there with these buyers, and they carried themselves as if they were being let in on something; took possession of the box with a proprietory air, smiled and applauded and looked wise as if each and every one of them were friends of Connie Ayrshire. While they buzzed and trained their fieldglasses on the prima donna, Stein was impassive and silent. I don’t imagine he even told many lies. He is the most insinuating cuss, anyhow. He probably dropped his voice or lifted his eyebrows when he invited them, and let their own eager imaginations do the rest. But what tales they took back to their provincial capitals!
“Sometimes, before they left New York, they were lucky enough to see Connie dining with their clever garment man at some restaurant, her back to the curious crowd, her face half concealed by a veil or a fur collar. Those people are like children; nothing that is true or probable interests them. They want the old, gaudy lies, told always in the same way. Siegmund Stein and Connie Ayrshire—a story like that, once launched, is repeated unchallenged for years among New York factory sports. In St. Paul, St. Jo, Sioux City, Council Bluffs, there used to be clothing stores where a photograph of Connie Ayrshire hung in the fitting-room or over the proprietor’s desk.
“This girl impersonated you successfully to the lower manufacturing world of New York for two seasons. I doubt if it could have been put across anywhere else in the world except in this city, which pays you so magnificently and believes of you what it likes. Then you went over to the Metropolitan, stopped living in hotels, took this apartment, and began to know people. Stein discontinued his pantomime at the right moment, withdrew his patronage. Ruby, of course, did not go back to shirtwaists. A business friend of Stein’s, a man who was not romantic, took her over, and she dropped out of sight. Last winter, one cold, snowy night, I saw her once again. She was going into a saloon hotel with a tough-looking young fellow. She had been drinking, she was shabby, and her blue shoes left stains in the slush. But she still looked amazingly, convincingly like a battered, hardened Connie Ayrshire. As I saw her going up the brass-edged stairs, I said to myself—”
“Never mind that.” Connie rose quickly, took an impatient step to the hearth, and thrust her shining porcelain slipper out to the fire. “The girl doesn’t interest me. There is nothing I can do about her, and of course she never looked like me at all. But what did Stein do without me?”
“Stein? Oh, he chose a new rôle. He married with great magnificence—married a Miss Mandelbaum, a California heiress. Her people have a line of department stores along the Pacific Coast. The Steins now inhabit a great house on Fifth Avenue that used to belong to people of a very different sort. To old New Yorkers, it’s a historic house.”
Connie laughed, and sat down on the end of her couch nearest her guest; sat upright, without cushions.
“I imagine I know more about that house than you do. Let me tell you how I made the sequel to your story.
“It has to do with Peppo Amoretti. You may remember that I brought Peppo to this country, and brought him in, too, the year the war broke out, when it wasn’t easy to get boys who hadn’t done military service out of Italy. I had taken him to Munich to have some singing lessons. After the war came on we had to get from Munich to Naples in order to sail at all. We were told that we could take only hand luggage on the railways, but I took nine trunks and Peppo. I dressed Peppo in knickerbockers, made him brush his curls down over his ears like doughnuts, and carry a little violin-case. It took us eleven days to reach Naples. I got my trunks through purely by personal persuasion. Once, at Naples, I had a frightful time getting Peppo on the boat. I declared him as hand-luggage; he was so travel-worn and so crushed by his absurd appearance that he did not look like much else. One inspector had a sense of humor, and passed him at that, but the other was inflexible. I had to be very dramatic. Peppo was frightened, and there is no fight in him, anyhow.
“‘Per me tutto e indifferente, Signorina,’ he kept whimpering. ‘Why should I go without it? I have lost it.’”
“‘Which?’ I screamed. ‘Not the hat-trunk?’”
“‘No, no; mia voce. It is gone since Ravenna.’”
“He thought he had lost his voice somewhere along the way. At last I told the inspector that I couldn’t live without Peppo, and that I would throw myself into the bay. I took h
im into my confidence. Of course, when I found I had to play on that string, I wished I hadn’t made the boy such a spectacle. But ridiculous as he was, I managed to make the inspector believe that I had kidnapped him, and that he was indispensable to my happiness. I found that incorruptible official, like most people, willing to aid one so utterly depraved. I could never have got that boy out for any proper, reasonable purpose, such as giving him a job or sending him to school. Well, it’s a queer world! But I must cut all that and get to the Steins.
“That first winter Peppo had no chance at the opera. There was an iron ring about him, and my interest in him only made it all the more difficult. We’ve become a nest of intrigues down there; worse than the Scala. Peppo had to scratch along just any way. One evening he came to me and said he could get an engagement to sing for the grand rich Steins, but the condition was that I should sing with him; the barcarole from ‘Hoffman’ and a duet from ‘Pagliacci.’ They would pay, oh, anything. And the fact that I had sung a private engagement with him would give him other engagements of the same sort. As you know, I never sing private engagements; but to help the boy along, I consented.
“On the night of the party, Peppo and I went to the house together in a taxi. My car was ailing. At the hour when the music was about to begin, the host and hostess appeared at my dressing-room, upstairs. Isn’t he wonderful? Your description was most inadequate. I never encountered such restrained, frozen, sculptured vanity. It’s not childish like an artist’s vanity; it’s a sort of grim, inflexible purpose. My hostess struck me as extremely good natured and jolly, though somewhat intimate in her manner. Her reassuring pats and smiles puzzled me at the time, I remember, when I didn’t know that she had anything in particular to be large-minded and charitable about. Her husband made known his willingness to conduct me to the music-room, and we ceremoniously descended a staircase blooming like the hanging-gardens of Babylon. From there I had my first glimpse of the company. They were strange people. The women glittered like Christmas-trees. When we were halfway down the stairs, the buzz of conversation stopped so suddenly that some foolish remark I happened to be making rang out like oratory. Every face was lifted toward us. My host and I completed our descent and went the length of the drawing-room through a silence which somewhat awed me. I couldn’t help wishing that one could ever get that kind of attention in a concert-hall. In the music-room Stein insisted upon arranging things for me. I must say that he was neither awkward nor stupid, not so wooden as most rich men who rent singers. I was probably affable. One has, under such circumstances, to be either gracious or pouty. Either you have to stand and sulk, like an old-fashioned German singer who wants the piano moved about for her like a tea-wagon, and the lights turned up and the lights turned down, or you have to be a trifle forced, like a débutante trying to make good. The fixed attention of my audience affected me. I was aware of unusual interest, of a thoroughly enlisted public. When, however, my host at last left me, I felt the tension relax to such an extent that I wondered whether by any chance he, and not I, was the object of so much curiosity. But, at any rate, their cordiality pleased me so well that after Peppo and I had finished our numbers I sang an encore or two, and I stayed through Peppo’s performance because I felt that they liked to look at me.