Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  At five minutes of the hour, when Corthell was announced, there was still no sign of her husband. But as she was crossing the hall on her way to the drawing-room, one of the servants informed her that Mr. Jadwin had just telephoned that he would be home in half an hour.

  “Is he on the telephone now?” she asked, quickly. “Where did he telephone from?”

  But it appeared that Jadwin had “hung up” without mentioning his whereabouts.

  “The buggy came home,” said the servant. “Mr. Jadwin told Jarvis not to wait. He said he would come in the street cars.”

  Laura reflected that she could delay dinner a half hour, and gave orders to that effect.

  “We shall have to wait a little,” she explained to Corthell as they exchanged greetings in the drawing-room. “Curtis has some special business on hand to-day, and is half an hour late.”

  They sat down on either side of the fireplace in the lofty apartment, with its sombre hangings of wine-coloured brocade and thick, muffling rugs, and for upwards of three-quarters of an hour Corthell interested her with his description of his life in the cathedral towns of northern Italy. But at the end of that time dinner was announced.

  “Has Mr. Jadwin come in yet?” Laura asked of the servant.

  “No, madam.”

  She bit her lip in vexation.

  “I can’t imagine what can keep Curtis so late,” she murmured. “Well,” she added, at the end of her resources, “we must make the best of it. I think we will go in, Mr. Corthell, without waiting. Curtis must be here soon now.”

  But, as a matter of fact, he was not. In the great dining-room, filled with a dull crimson light, the air just touched with the scent of lilies of the valley, Corthell and Mrs. Jadwin dined alone.

  “I suppose,” observed the artist, “that Mr. Jadwin is a very busy man.”

  “Oh, no,” Laura answered. “His real estate, he says, runs itself, and, as a rule, Mr. Gretry manages most of his Board of Trade business. It is only occasionally that anything keeps him down town late. I scolded him this morning, however, about his speculating, and made him promise not to do so much of it. I hate speculation. It seems to absorb some men so; and I don’t believe it’s right for a man to allow himself to become absorbed altogether in business.”

  “Oh, why limit one’s absorption to business?” replied Corthell, sipping his wine. “Is it right for one to be absorbed ‘altogether’ in anything — even in art, even in religion?”

  “Oh, religion, I don’t know,” she protested.

  “Isn’t that certain contribution,” he hazarded, “which we make to the general welfare, over and above our own individual work, isn’t that the essential? I suppose, of course, that we must hoe, each of us, his own little row, but it’s the stroke or two we give to our neighbour’s row — don’t you think? — that helps most to cultivate the field.”

  “But doesn’t religion mean more than a stroke or two?” she ventured to reply.

  “I’m not so sure,” he answered, thoughtfully. “If the stroke or two is taken from one’s own work instead of being given in excess of it. One must do one’s own hoeing first. That’s the foundation of things. A religion that would mean to be ‘altogether absorbed’ in my neighbour’s hoeing would be genuinely pernicious, surely. My row, meanwhile, would lie open to weeds.”

  “But if your neighbour’s row grew flowers?”

  “Unfortunately weeds grow faster than the flowers, and the weeds of my row would spread until they choked and killed my neighbour’s flowers, I am sure.”

  “That seems selfish though,” she persisted. “Suppose my neighbour were maimed or halt or blind? His poor little row would never be finished. My stroke or two would not help very much.”

  “Yes, but every row lies between two others, you know. The hoer on the far side of the cripple’s row would contribute a stroke or two as well as you. No,” he went on, “I am sure one’s first duty is to do one’s own work. It seems to me that a work accomplished benefits the whole world — the people — pro rata. If we help another at the expense of our work instead of in excess of it, we benefit only the individual, and, pro rata again, rob the people. A little good contributed by everybody to the race is of more, infinitely more, importance than a great deal of good contributed by one individual to another.”

  “Yes,” she admitted, beginning at last to be convinced, “I see what you mean. But one must think very large to see that. It never occurred to me before. The individual — I, Laura Jadwin — counts for nothing. It is the type to which I belong that’s important, the mould, the form, the sort of composite photograph of hundreds of thousands of Laura Jadwins. Yes,” she continued, her brows bent, her mind hard at work, “what I am, the little things that distinguish me from everybody else, those pass away very quickly, are very ephemeral. But the type Laura Jadwin, that always remains, doesn’t it? One must help building up only the permanent things. Then, let’s see, the individual may deteriorate, but the type always grows better.... Yes, I think one can say that.”

  “At least the type never recedes,” he prompted.

  “Oh, it began good,” she cried, as though at a discovery, “and can never go back of that original good. Something keeps it from going below a certain point, and it is left to us to lift it higher and higher. No, the type can’t be bad. Of course the type is more important than the individual. And that something that keeps it from going below a certain point is God.”

  “Or nature.”

  “So that God and nature,” she cried again, “work together? No, no, they are one and the same thing.”

  “There, don’t you see,” he remarked, smiling back at her, “how simple it is?”

  “Oh-h,” exclaimed Laura, with a deep breath, “isn’t it beautiful?” She put her hand to her forehead with a little laugh of deprecation. “My,” she said, “but those things make you think.”

  Dinner was over before she was aware of it, and they were still talking animatedly as they rose from the table.

  “We will have our coffee in the art gallery,” Laura said, “and please smoke.”

  He lit a cigarette, and the two passed into the great glass-roofed rotunda.

  “Here is the one I like best,” said Laura, standing before the Bougereau.

  “Yes?” he queried, observing the picture thoughtfully. “I suppose,” he remarked, “it is because it demands less of you than some others. I see what you mean. It pleases you because it satisfies you so easily. You can grasp it without any effort.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she ventured.

  “Bougereau ‘fills a place.’ I know it,” he answered. “But I cannot persuade myself to admire his art.”

  “But,” she faltered, “I thought that Bougereau was considered the greatest — one of the greatest — his wonderful flesh tints, the drawing, and colouring.”

  “But I think you will see,” he told her, “if you think about it, that for all there is in his picture — back of it — a fine hanging, a beautiful vase would have exactly the same value upon your wall. Now, on the other hand, take this picture.” He indicated a small canvas to the right of the bathing nymphs, representing a twilight landscape.

  “Oh, that one,” said Laura. “We bought that here in America, in New York. It’s by a Western artist. I never noticed it much, I’m afraid.”

  “But now look at it,” said Corthell. “Don’t you know that the artist saw something more than trees and a pool and afterglow? He had that feeling of night coming on, as he sat there before his sketching easel on the edge of that little pool. He heard the frogs beginning to pipe, I’m sure, and the touch of the night mist was on his hands. And he was very lonely and even a little sad. In those deep shadows under the trees he put something of himself, the gloom and the sadness that he felt at the moment. And that little pool, still and black and sombre — why, the whole thing is the tragedy of a life full of dark, hidden secrets. And the little pool is a heart. No one can say how deep it is, or what dreadful thing
one would find at the bottom, or what drowned hopes or what sunken ambitions. That little pool says one word as plain as if it were whispered in the ear — despair. Oh, yes, I prefer it to the nymphs.”

  “I am very much ashamed,” returned Laura, “that I could not see it all before for myself. But I see it now. It is better, of course. I shall come in here often now and study it. Of all the rooms in our house this is the one I like best. But, I am afraid, it has been more because of the organ than of the pictures.”

  Corthell turned about.

  “Oh, the grand, noble organ,” he murmured. “I envy you this of all your treasures. May I play for you? Something to compensate for the dreadful, despairing little tarn of the picture.”

  “I should love to have you,” she told him.

  He asked permission to lower the lights, and stepping outside the door an instant, pressed the buttons that extinguished all but a very few of them. After he had done this he came back to the organ and detached the self-playing “arrangement” without comment, and seated himself at the console.

  Laura lay back in a long chair close at hand. The moment was propitious. The artist’s profile silhouetted itself against the shade of a light that burned at the side of the organ, and that gave light to the keyboard. And on this keyboard, full in the reflection, lay his long, slim hands. They were the only things that moved in the room, and the chords and bars of Mendelssohn’s “Consolation” seemed, as he played, to flow, not from the instrument, but, like some invisible ether, from his finger-tips themselves.

  “You hear,” he said to Laura, “the effect of questions and answer in this. The questions are passionate and tumultuous and varied, but the answer is always the same, always calm and soothing and dignified.”

  She answered with a long breath, speaking just above a whisper:

  “Oh, yes, yes, I understand.”

  He finished and turned towards her a moment. “Possibly not a very high order of art,” he said; “a little too ‘easy,’ perhaps, like the Bougereau, but ‘Consolation’ should appeal very simply and directly, after all. Do you care for Beethoven?”

  “I — I am afraid—” began Laura, but he had continued without waiting for her reply.

  “You remember this? The ‘Appassionata,’ the F minor sonata just the second movement.”

  But when he had finished Laura begged him to continue.

  “Please go on,” she said. “Play anything. You can’t tell how I love it.”

  “Here is something I’ve always liked,” he answered, turning back to the keyboard. “It is the ‘Mephisto Walzer’ of Liszt. He has adapted it himself from his own orchestral score, very ingeniously. It is difficult to render on the organ, but I think you can get the idea of it.” As he spoke he began playing, his head very slightly moving to the rhythm of the piece. At the beginning of each new theme, and without interrupting his playing, he offered a word, of explanation:

  “Very vivid and arabesque this, don’t you think? ... And now this movement; isn’t it reckless and capricious, like a woman who hesitates and then takes the leap? Yet there’s a certain nobility there, a feeling for ideals. You see it, of course.... And all the while this undercurrent of the sensual, and that feline, eager sentiment ... and here, I think, is the best part of it, the very essence of passion, the voluptuousness that is a veritable anguish.... These long, slow rhythms, tortured, languishing, really dying. It reminds one of ‘Phedre’— ‘Venus toute entiere,’ and the rest of it; and Wagner has the same. You find it again in Isolde’s motif continually.”

  Laura was transfixed, all but transported. Here was something better than Gounod and Verdi, something above and beyond the obvious one, two, three, one, two, three of the opera scores as she knew them and played them. Music she understood with an intuitive quickness; and those prolonged chords of Liszt’s, heavy and clogged and cloyed with passion, reached some hitherto untouched string within her heart, and with resistless power twanged it so that the vibration of it shook her entire being, and left her quivering and breathless, the tears in her eyes, her hands clasped till the knuckles whitened.

  She felt all at once as though a whole new world were opened to her. She stood on Pisgah. And she was ashamed and confused at her ignorance of those things which Corthell tactfully assumed that she knew as a matter of course. What wonderful pleasures she had ignored! How infinitely removed from her had been the real world of art and artists of which Corthell was a part! Ah, but she would make amends now. No more Verdi and Bougereau. She would get rid of the “Bathing Nymphs.” Never, never again would she play the “Anvil Chorus.” Corthell should select her pictures, and should play to her from Liszt and Beethoven that music which evoked all the turbulent emotion, all the impetuosity and fire and exaltation that she felt was hers.

  She wondered at herself. Surely, surely there were two Laura Jadwins. One calm and even and steady, loving the quiet life, loving her home, finding a pleasure in the duties of the housewife. This was the Laura who liked plain, homely, matter-of-fact Mrs. Cressler, who adored her husband, who delighted in Mr. Howells’s novels, who abjured society and the formal conventions, who went to church every Sunday, and who was afraid of her own elevator.

  But at moments such as this she knew that there was another Laura Jadwin — the Laura Jadwin who might have been a great actress, who had a “temperament,” who was impulsive. This was the Laura of the “grand manner,” who played the role of the great lady from room to room of her vast house, who read Meredith, who revelled in swift gallops through the park on jet-black, long-tailed horses, who affected black velvet, black jet, and black lace in her gowns, who was conscious and proud of her pale, stately beauty — the Laura Jadwin, in fine, who delighted to recline in a long chair in the dim, beautiful picture gallery and listen with half-shut eyes to the great golden organ thrilling to the passion of Beethoven and Liszt.

  The last notes of the organ sank and faded into silence — a silence that left a sense of darkness like that which follows upon the flight of a falling star, and after a long moment Laura sat upright, adjusting the heavy masses of her black hair with thrusts of her long, white fingers. She drew a deep breath.

  “Oh,” she said, “that was wonderful, wonderful. It is like a new language — no, it is like new thoughts, too fine for language.”

  “I have always believed so,” he answered. “Of all the arts, music, to my notion, is the most intimate. At the other end of the scale you have architecture, which is an expression of and an appeal to the common multitude, a whole people, the mass. Fiction and painting, and even poetry, are affairs of the classes, reaching the groups of the educated. But music — ah, that is different, it is one soul speaking to another soul. The composer meant it for you and himself. No one else has anything to do with it. Because his soul was heavy and broken with grief, or bursting with passion, or tortured with doubt, or searching for some unnamed ideal, he has come to you — you of all the people in the world — with his message, and he tells you of his yearnings and his sadness, knowing that you will sympathise, knowing that your soul has, like his, been acquainted with grief, or with gladness; and in the music his soul speaks to yours, beats with it, blends with it, yes, is even, spiritually, married to it.”

  And as he spoke the electrics all over the gallery flashed out in a sudden blaze, and Curtis Jadwin entered the room, crying out:

  “Are you here, Laura? By George, my girl, we pulled it off, and I’ve cleaned up five — hundred — thousand — dollars.”

  Laura and the artist faced quickly about, blinking at the sudden glare, and Laura put her hand over her eyes.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to blind you,” said her husband, as he came forward. “But I thought it wouldn’t be appropriate to tell you the good news in the dark.”

  Corthell rose, and for the first time Jadwin caught sight of him.

  “This is Mr. Corthell, Curtis,” Laura said. “You remember him, of course?”

  “Why, certainly, certainly,” declared
Jadwin, shaking Corthell’s hand. “Glad to see you again. I hadn’t an idea you were here.” He was excited, elated, very talkative. “I guess I came in on you abruptly,” he observed. “They told me Mrs. Jadwin was in here, and I was full of my good news. By the way, I do remember now. When I came to look over my mail on the way down town this morning, I found a note from you to my wife, saying you would call to-night. Thought it was for me, and opened it before I found the mistake.”

  “I knew you had gone off with it,” said Laura.

  “Guess I must have mixed it up with my own mail this morning. I’d have telephoned you about it, Laura, but upon my word I’ve been so busy all day I clean forgot it. I’ve let the cat out of the bag already, Mr. Corthell, and I might as well tell the whole thing now. I’ve been putting through a little deal with some Liverpool fellows to-day, and I had to wait down town to get their cables to-night. You got my telephone, did you, Laura?”

  “Yes, but you said then you’d be up in half an hour.”

  “I know — I know. But those Liverpool cables didn’t come till all hours. Well, as I was saying, Mr. Corthell, I had this deal on hand — it was that wheat, Laura, I was telling you about this morning — five million bushels of it, and I found out from my English agent that I could slam it right into a couple of fellows over there, if we could come to terms. We came to terms right enough. Some of that wheat I sold at a profit of fifteen cents on every bushel. My broker and I figured it out just now before I started home, and, as I say, I’m a clean half million to the good. So much for looking ahead a little further than the next man.” He dropped into a chair and stretched his arms wide. “Whoo! I’m tired Laura. Seems as though I’d been on my feet all day. Do you suppose Mary, or Martha, or Maggie, or whatever her name is, could rustle me a good strong cup of tea.