“Seymour!” she called again, but not much louder. She had succumbed to a flash of uncanny suspicion. When there was no answer to her second call she stood terror-stricken at the top of the stairs. Then she seized her ruffled train in one hand and the banister in the other and pattered softly down the stairs. Her fear of the halls and stairs and the world outside her own room was swept aside by her greater fear of what they might be doing to her. Where was Seymour? Where was the carriage? In the second floor hall she paused, peered into the empty library and again bleated “Seymour!” All she heard was a noise of running water, which had no meaning to her. Seymour must be downstairs. She ran down the next flight; once on her way panic overrode everything else. Driven by frenzy she swept through the house. Where was Seymour, what was happening? Lily stood in the dark, draughty front hall, staring at her reflection in the old hatrack mirror by the flickering light of the single gas-jet. “Seymour!” she cried again softly, for now she was cunningly intent that Mrs. Gerrity should not hear her. There was no answer. From the mirror there stared at Lily a grey, ghastly face. For a moment she peered at it. Then she pointed, she saw the trembling arm go up, the loose kid glove flapping round it. “Ashamed!” she moaned. “They’re ashamed. They don’t mean to take you to Randall’s concert.”
She paused. Then she cried, “No! Seymour!” and turned like a snake to the front door. She opened it and was out on the snow-covered stoop. She peered down the walk, looking for the carriage. I’m too far, she thought, I can’t see from here, I must go closer. Grasping her long train in both hands she slithered down the buried steps, plunged and stumbled to the gate. There was no carriage at the curb. There was not a living thing in sight. There was not a sound. “Seymour!” she screamed now, forgetting Mrs. Gerrity. “Where’s my carriage? Where are you?” She looked right and left, up and down the street. She began to waver on her feet, whining and mewing. “My carriage. Grogan’s carriage, my concert, my baby, I’ll be late, what are they doing …” All the while she was running, weaving and floundering through the deep snow. “Ninth Avenue,” she gasped, bringing up great groans from her exhausted lungs. “Grogan’s, Ninth Avenue, why haven’t they sent my carriage, how dare they, what’s … where’s … stables how can they … stables I’m going … carriage two bay horses … Randall…”
An instinct to take cover must have seized her as her legs gave out, for when Seymour and Mrs Gerrity, shouting and pounding through the street, found her a little later she was lying in an areaway half buried in a drift of snow.
When she died of pneumonia a week later Randall was in a state of collapse. All alone Seymour dragged through six haunted days, drowning in self-condemnation, wretched, sometimes envying Randall the profound lethargy which had followed his single terrifying burst of hysteria as he left his mother’s deathbed. He had gone quite wild, screaming at Seymour, beating and clawing the air, sobbing, “You killed her, you knew it would kill her, you and that murderer of a doctor, you let her die …”
“I didn’t, Ran. We didn’t.” Seymour tried to put his arm round Randall’s shoulder, tried to grasp his flailing hands. He looked helplessly at Slade who stood at the window measuring a dose of some drug into a hypodermic syringe. The doctor came over to Randall, who tried to fight him off, while Seymour said, “Please, Ran. I’m suffering too. Have pity on me, for God’s sake. I was only trying to do the best thing, trying to keep her going. Listen to the doctor.”
Randall said, “No, no, send him away, I won’t listen.” But it was only a few minutes until he turned slack and apathetic and the doctor treated him and told Seymour to keep him in bed and not allow him to go to the funeral.
Seymour decided not to let notice of his mother’s death be published until after her funeral. Alone he rode in the single shrouded black carriage to the burial-place in Brooklyn. Alone he stood in the mired, melting snow, staring at the hideous, frozen yellow earth, the more hideous black granite shafts marking the graves of the Holts for a century past. Names and the dim grey faces which had belonged to them, many Holts, and Whetstone and Jones and Seymour and Randall, wives condemned to lives more awful than their awful deaths … are we damned, thought Seymour, against the obbligato of the clergyman’s perfunctory murmuring, are we all damned? I too, my brother, are we damned? Do we live, do we live in any sense, or will we die more awfully than these? He looked up from his dreadful reverie because the murmuring noise had stopped, because the shiny black glove of an attendant had put something in his hand. Seymour looked at it, shrinking, narrowing his dizzy eyes. It was a lump of rock, no, of earth, that frozen yellow earth. Turning a little so as not to look, Seymour dropped it upon the coffin in the grave, and pushing past the shocked clergyman he ran, in a wavering course, to the gate where he had left the carriage.
Warned by that moment of dreadful prescience, as if swaying on the brink of a forbidding but irresistible gulf, Seymour pulled himself together within a few days and decided to tackle the warren which his mother’s years of occupation had made of the third floor. Sooner or later the house must be cleared out anyway. Even if they could never get rid of the place, Seymour was beginning to feel that he and Randall must get away from it. What they would do, and how they would live were questions still darkly veiled. It was easier to try to foresee a future for Randall than to face the unfaceable about himself. For the moment he thought it best to begin with the nearest thing at hand. Randall was quite calm, still deeply lethargic, and had rested quietly in bed for several days past. Leaving him asleep in the early afternoon, Seymour went upstairs. He was determined to get through his task without yielding to the emotions which would have undermined and demoralized him had he not sworn beforehand to abjure that. He opened the door of his mother’s room and lighted the feeble gas-jet hanging over the marble-topped bureau. Then he stood appalled more than ever before by the frightful mess and clutter. Lily Holt herself had detracted from the impact of this sight, with her intensity and her insistence. Now it was as if her silence and her absence had ceded to all these crazily amassed objects the articulation and the identity which she had given up. Not only where to begin, thought Seymour, but how? Look at that, and that, and that—what did one do with such things if one merely moved them from where they were?
He stood in the centre of the cramped room, dwarfed and feeling like a mouse when he looked at the piles of boxes and albums and ornaments and cases spilling out faded ruffles, ribbons, laces, baby-clothes, yellowed collars and faded fancy waistcoats of his father’s, tarnished souvenirs of gaieties of long ago. My God, he muttered, my God, I never knew it was as bad as this. He made his way with the greatest difficulty across the room to the windows, pushing and moving things piled up on every side to obstruct him. He must begin by baring the windows and airing the room; he wondered, conscious of the suffocating atmosphere, how many years since that had been done. When he grasped the cord of the first pair of curtains the rope broke in his hand. He was standing there wondering how to reach the short end dangling far above his head, when he heard a sound behind him. He turned quickly, knocking over a pile of boxes. Randall stood barefoot in the doorway in his nightshirt.
“What are you doing?” he cried. His voice was shrill and grating. This was the first time he had spoken in a week.
“Why—you can see. I was about to air the room. You oughtn’t to be out of bed, Ran. You’ll catch cold.”
“You stop that. Don’t you touch anything here.”
Seymour clambered over the clutter strewn in his way and got across the room to Randall. He put his arm round Randall’s thin shoulders. “There’s nothing to be excited about,” he said, in the most soothing tone he could manage. “Don’t be so upset, Ran. I just thought I ought to get on with this—you can see we’ll have to clear all this out.”
“No!” Randall’s blue eyes glittered. “No. You leave her poor things alone, don’t you touch her things.”
“But—” Seymour tried to lead him away.
“No!” Randal
l stood shivering. “You get out of here. You leave her things alone.”
Seymour sighed. “Very well,” he said softly. The immediate thing was to get Randall back to bed. “All right. Come on downstairs, Ran. We’ll just leave the room shut up for a while until you feel better.”
He turned out the gas, shut and locked the door, and tenderly led Randall away.
CHAPTER 8
The Rector of St. Timothy’s wanted the Stabat Mater of Rossini sung in Holy Week. He was extremely proud of the music at St. Timothy’s and indifferent to the minority of his parishioners who chafed at his High Church practices and his ardent promulgation of the music of Rome. However, even the most disgruntled of the dissenters were gradually coming round to the view that there was something to be said for anything which drew crowds to St. Timothy’s and brought it fame. After all, they reasoned, we only have these Roman Masses and Cantatas at festival seasons. Much of our everyday fare is Bach and he was a perfectly proper Protestant.
The Stabat Mater would mean the usual intensive extra rehearsing, long hours of work with the choir, and the engagement of soloists from the outer darkness of the operatic and concert world. This was Randall Holt’s second year as assistant organist and choirmaster, in charge of the detail of preparing the choral works. He loved the job, but had no idea just how he had actually been chosen for it. Seymour took great care that he should not know. The idea had been Doctor Slade’s. Randall ever since his mother’s death had insisted that the tragedy had been the doctor’s fault, and had refused to see or speak to the man.
“You mustn’t talk like that,” Seymour often told him. “Or really believe what you say. It amounts to putting the blame on me too.”
“Well, why not? And between you you’ve both made a worse villain of me.”
Randall turned with relief to an honest job and the satisfaction of knowing he could do it well. He liked the calm detachment of the choir-room in the parish house, the organ practice beneath the dim vaults of the church roof, the gentle personality and deep musical scholarliness of Merion Fitzhugh, the church’s celebrated organist who had studied at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig and at Notre Dame in Paris. Looking back on his own tempestuous experience in Vienna Randall regretted his ineptitude which had stood in the way of his doing what he was suited for and had mixed him up with a crew of theatrical savages. Some of this he had timidly related to Dr. Fitzhugh, as his shyness began to wear off; and Fitzhugh said, laughing, “I’m very glad you had those months at the Hofoper, Holt. You’re better equipped than I am to deal with these bohemians when we have to use them here.”
Randall was not so sure of that when he met for the first time with the quartet of soloists engaged to sing the Stabat Mater. The two women and the tenor were from the Opera. The basso was Edward Ricker, a specialist in oratorio and sacred music. He was an Ohioan who had sung all over the world and learned in each place the choicest of its vices. He was as fat as Ho-Tai, he smoked strong cigars, he sometimes came to rehearsals straight from luncheon at Mouquin’s or Delmonico’s, belching a proud description of the meal which made Randall feel ill. The man should have dropped dead of gluttony. Instead he stood up and sang like the Angel Gabriel. When he was not singing he sat with his enormous belly spread over his lap, eyeing the pretty soprano whom the Opera had recommended (and of whose modest fee it would take its cut, as was the custom.) Her name was Renata Tosi. “She doesn’t speak much English,” the manager’s assistant had explained, “but she’s a fresh young voice, nice texture, just what you want. She knows the music. We brought her over last fall for small lyric parts and she’s all right.”
From the looks and gestures of Ricker and the shock-headed young Milanese tenor, Randall thought she must be more than ‘all right’. The three apparently had some convulsing joke among themselves, for an aside from either man seemed enough to set the soprano’s brown eyes dancing and once Randall saw her go scarlet and hiss “Taci!” at the tenor, who turned aside with a snicker. The only unconcerned member of the quartet was the mezzo-soprano, a heavy, fortyish Italian woman who looked like a very good cook and, in fact, was. Between her numbers she sat like a patient cow waiting for her next cue. Randall was flabbergasted when, as the second rehearsal was breaking up, she went over to him, expertly felt his bony arms and shoulders and said in her rich voice, “Poveretto! Bisogna mangiare!”
“Si,” boomed Ricker, nodding fatly. “Take her up on it quick, Mr. Holt. She makes the most glorious risotto in the world. Vero, Monguzzi?”
Monguzzi shrugged comfortably. Randall was wondering whether she really meant to invite him to dinner when they were startled by a shriek of laughter from Renata Tosi behind them. She was leaning on the piano in peals of mirth, holding her handkerchief to her face. Beside her the tenor was whispering into her ear and though she flapped one hand at him to shut him up, she laughed louder and louder.
Randall was embarrassed. This kind of hilarity was highly unseemly in St. Timothy’s parish house and he supposed he ought to put a stop to it at once. But he could no more have summoned the authority to do so than he could have pitched Edward Ricker through a window. He bit his lip and looked uneasily at Tosi and the tenor, then at Ricker, perhaps hoping that as the only American present, he might understand and for the sake of propriety, help Randall out. But Ricker himself had joined the joke, whatever it was, and when he let out a great blast of mirth Randall paled. Between guffaws Ricker translated in gusts. “He says—Dino says—if she keeps on—tchk tchk—doing in American churches—what they have castrati do—tchk tchk—in Rome—tchk tchk—where is she going to—tchk—end up?” He wiped his huge moon face. “Only he says it in detail.”
“But,” said Randall, blushing yet anxious not to seem a hopeless prude, “they don’t have—er—them—any more. I really think—”
“Drop it, Dino. Stop!” Ricker was coughing and blowing into his handkerchief, shaking all over. “Go,” he said, giving the tenor a push. “Via, go home. Basta ‘sta porcheria. Now he’s talking about ragazzi instead. Boys.”
Oh, Lord, thought Randall, are all opera-singers alike? He looked forward longingly to the peaceful weeks after the Rossini, when these licentious scamps should have gone back to their lair and left him to recapture the cloistered serenity in his work which he had grown to love. He was not to be allowed that, as he learned when Renata Tosi arrived for the next rehearsal. She was in no laughing mood, in fact she seemed upset. Her English was so limited that in her agitated state it consisted of isolated words strung between streams of Italian which Randall had to overlook since he could not understand it. He could follow her, though, when she said and repeated many times, “You help, yes? You help me?”
She thrust at him a slip of pink paper which he found to be a performance-notice from the Opera, with orders to report in some ten days for rehearsal. They had cast her as The Forest Bird in Siegfried.
“Me!” She clasped her hands across her lacy breast. “I tell no, I tell impossibile, non parlo tedesco, non canto tedesco, why they tell Wagner for me? Pazzi! Cretini!” She was even prettier angry than laughing, her large eyes swimming with unshed tears, her cheeks pink and her lips parted over exquisitely white teeth. She put her gloved hand on Randall’s arm and pleaded, “You help, yes?”
“But what can I do?”
He found that she had been cast because of the manager’s stubborn determination to mount a Wagner opera although he had only a few leading singers to put into it. He proposed to fill the smaller parts with anybody else and there was indeed no good reason why not. Any lyric soprano, he said, could sing The Bird, and he was right. When Tosi protested that she had never sung a note of German music he told her to report for coaching to the German director he had hastily hired to put on his one venture into Wagner. Tosi, who had just seen the fat-necked brutto porco (in her words) bellowing at the luckless Italian who had been tapped for Alberich, indignantly refused. She was told to submit or quit. She retorted that she would sing the part only if
she were left alone to study it—here she made eloquent, flattering gestures which Randall tried shyly to deprecate—with somebody who really knew something, a cultivated person, her own correpetiteur who had worked in Vienna for Schalk and Mahler, un artista molto raffinato e gentile.
“Oh, no,” Randall protested, scarlet with embarrassment. “I—really—”
“No? Perchè no? You know well this music, eh?”
“But, but—you say you don’t know any German.”
Renata Tosi threw back her head scornfully. “For such a part I learn that porca lingua?”
“No, but you have to learn enough words to sing this Bird.”
“Va bene—va bene. You tell me noises, I make the same like you. Such a part nobody notice what I tell. I am hidden—” she winked at him. “Must be, how is facile?— easy.”
“Then why,” blurted Randall with hopeless simplicity, “did you make all this fuss?”
“Madonna santa! How I keep my—how you say?” She made impatient gestures to indicate pride. “Sono una donna-basta!” she cried.
Randall laughed. She said again, “You help, yes?”
“I suppose so,” he said reluctantly. They made an appointment for the morning of Easter Monday. Like most of the operatic colony, she lived at the Ansonia Hotel. On the long ride in the street car up Broadway from Twenty-third Street to Seventy-third, Randall had plenty of time in which to wonder just what he was letting himself in for. There was an air of alarming frivolity about Signorina Tosi. Against his will he thought uneasily about Seymour’s remarks an hour ago. They had left the house together, which was unusual, for Randall ordinarily did not go out in the mornings. He had drifted into the habit of making breakfast for Seymour and himself, since charwomen’s coffee was undrinkable and their slovenliness a hateful setting in which to begin the day. After breakfast Randall usually practised for a couple of hours before going over to St. Timothy’s to work at the organ there. So today when he started out with Seymour to walk to the street-car, it had been only natural to explain his errand. Seymour thought it a fine idea.
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