7

  AS LUCY HAD been lost by a song, so she was very nearly saved by one. Two weeks before Christmas a travelling opera company, on their way to Denver to sing for the holiday season, gave a single performance in Haverford. Lucy had noticed the posters as she came and went about the town, but she hadn’t even stopped to read them. One evening at the supper table her father took three blue tickets from his pocket.

  “Girls, I think we must go to hear The Bohemian Girl next week.”

  From his manner Lucy could see that he was looking forward to this entertainment. He began asking her to tell him about the operas she had heard in Chicago. Pauline remarked that the “local talent” was to give Pinafore in February.

  “That Gilbert and Sullivan stuff, I can’t see much in it,” said Mr. Gayheart. “If you want something light and amusing, now, there is Die Fledermaus. Or La Belle Helene. You never heard it, Lucy? I was crazy about that opera when I was a boy. The Bohemian Girl is a little old-fashioned, maybe, but it’s very nice.”

  On the evening of the performance Mr. Gayheart came home early. He took a bath and shaved very carefully, put on his best black suit, a white waistcoat, and his patent-leather shoes. When he came downstairs before supper, his daughters knew he expected to be admired.

  “Do put on your new evening dress, Lucy. It will please him,” Pauline whispered as they went to their rooms.

  Lucy had meant never to wear that dress again, but she relented. Her father had so little to make him feel gay.

  When they were getting ready to start, a light snow began to fall, and Mr. Gayheart was fearful for his patent leathers. He put his hand affectionately on Lucy’s bare shoulder. “A little shawl or something, maybe, to carry along? I don’t want you to take cold down there.”

  Lucy straightened his black necktie and slipped her arm around his neck for a moment, remembering the days in his shop when he used to keep his ear on her practising while he looked through a glass into the insides of watches.

  Mr. Gayheart set off through the snow flurry, a daughter on either arm. He liked to reach the Opera House early and watch the people come in. (The theatre in every little Western town was then called an opera house.) On the way he told Lucy the manager of the house had put in folding chairs in place of the old straight-back wooden ones; otherwise she would find the hall just the same as when she played on the stage for her own commencement exercises, nearly four years ago.

  When the conductor, who was also the pianist, appeared, Mr. Gayheart settled back with satisfaction, and the curtain rose on the hunting scene. The chorus was fair, the tenor had his good points; but before the first act was over, the three Gayhearts were greatly interested in the soprano. She was a fair-skinned woman, slender and graceful, but far from young. She sang so well that Lucy wondered how she had ever drifted into a little road company like this one. Her voice was worn, to be sure, like her face, and there was not much physical sweetness left in it. But there was another kind of sweetness; a sympathy, a tolerant understanding. She gave the old songs, even the most hackneyed, their full value. When she sang: “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,” she glided delicately over the too regular stresses, and subtly varied the rhythm. She gave freshness to the foolish old words because she phrased intelligently; she was tender with their sentimentality, as if they were pressed flowers which might fall apart if roughly handled.

  Why was it worth her while, Lucy wondered. Singing this humdrum music to humdrum people, why was it worth while? This poor little singer had lost everything: youth, good looks, position, the high notes of her voice. And yet she sang so well! Lucy wanted to be up there on the stage with her, helping her do it. A wild kind of excitement flared up in her. She felt she must run away tonight, by any train, back to a world that strove after excellence — the world out of which this woman must have fallen.

  It was long before Lucy got to sleep that night. The wandering singer had struck something in her that went on vibrating; something that was like a purpose forming, and she could not stop it. When she awoke in the morning, it was still there, beating like another heart. Day after day it kept up in her. She could give her attention to other things, but it was always there. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of something, about to take some plunge or departure.

  8

  THE DAY BEFORE Christmas opened with a hard snow-storm. When the Gayhearts looked out of their windows the ground was already well covered, the porches and the hedge fence were drifted white. At breakfast Mr. Gayheart said that when he went down to make the furnace fire at six o’clock, the snow must have been falling for some time.

  Lucy spent the morning tramping about in the storm on errands for Pauline. She took boxes of Christmas cakes to all their old friends, carried a pudding in its mould out to the Lutheran pastor’s house at the north end of town, where there was no sidewalk and she had to wade through deep snowdrifts. The storm brought back the feeling children have about Christmas, that it is a time of miracles, when the angels are near the earth, and any wayside weed may suddenly become a rose bush or a Christmas tree.

  Pauline was delighted to see Lucy so like herself again. She invented errands to keep her going. But late in the afternoon she thought her sister looked tired, and sent her upstairs to her own room to rest until supper time.

  Lucy did not feel tired, she was throbbing with excitement, and with the feeling of wonder in the air. She put the blinds up high and sat down in a rocking-chair to watch the bewildering, silent descent of the snow, over all the neighbours’ houses, the trees and gardens. She was alone on the upper floor. The daylight in her room grew greyer and darker. Lights in the house across the street began to shine softly through the storm. She tried to feel at peace and to breathe more slowly, but every nerve was quivering with a long-forgotten restlessness. How often she had run out on a spring morning, into the orchard, down the street, in pursuit of something she could not see, but knew! It was there, in the breeze, in the sun; it hid behind the blooming apple boughs, raced before her through the neighbours’ gardens, but she could never catch up with it. Clement Sebastian had made the fugitive gleam an actual possession. With him she had learned that those flashes of promise could come true, that they could be the important things in one’s life. He had never told her so; he was, in his own person, the door and the way to that knowledge.

  Tonight, through the soft twilight, everything in her was reaching outward, straining forward. She could think of nothing but crowded streets with life streaming up and down, windows full of roses and gardenias and violets — she wanted to hold them all in her hands, to bury her face in them. She wanted flowers and music and enchantment and love, — all the things she had first known with Sebastian. What did it mean, — that she wanted to go on living again? How could she go on, alone?

  Suddenly something flashed into her mind, so clear that it must have come from without, from the breathless quiet. What if — what if Life itself were the sweetheart? It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities — across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her. She opened the window softly and knelt down beside it to breathe the cold air. She felt the snowflakes melt in her hair, on her hot cheeks. Oh, now she knew! She must have it, she couldn’t run away from it. She must go back into the world and get all she could of everything that had made him what he was. Those splendours were still on earth, to be sought after and fought for. In them she would find him. If with all your heart you truly seek Him, you shall ever surely find Him. He had sung that for her in the beginning, when she first went to him. Now she knew what it meant.

  She crouched closer to the window and stretched out her arms to the storm, to whatever might lie behind it. Let it come! Let it all come back to her again! Let it betray her and mock her and break her heart, she must have it!

  *

  On Christmas Day Lucy wrote to Paul Auerbach to wish him a happy New Year, and to tell him that she wanted to go back to him, if he had any work for her to do. “I have found out that I can’t run away from my own feelings,” she wrote. “The only way for me, is to do the things I used to do and to do them harder.”

  An answer came from him the following week; a long, kind letter which must have taken most of his Sunday morning. He and Mrs. Auerbach were greatly relieved to hear that she felt this change. The young man who had taken over Lucy’s pupils when she left so suddenly had been promised his position until the first of April, when he was going abroad to study. If Lucy would come on about the middle of March, she could stay with them, and Mrs. Auerbach would help her to find a room and get comfortably settled before she went to work. “You will have a warm welcome in the house of your old friend and teacher, Paul Auerbach.”

  Lucy had hoped she could go at once. Perhaps by March she would have lost her courage and be sunk in apathy again. But she could not ask her father for money, not with Pauline’s narrow eyes always watching. She must look out for herself from now on, and she could do it. She must wait.

  9

  LUCY THOUGHT SHE ought to begin to study again, so she tried going to her father’s shop every day and working on the sample piano. But Jacob Gayheart did not keep his ear open as he used to. He had gone backward in his music: he neglected it for chess. Soon after Christmas he had fallen away from playing duets with Lucy in the evening. He said he had to stay later at the shop, but his daughters knew that he was playing chess by telephone with a celebrated player who was visiting a cousin in North Platte. To be sure, he didn’t often have a chance to match his skill with such an opponent.

  Mr. Gayheart had let the shop get so dusty that it wasn’t a pleasant place to practise in. The space round the piano was full of broken music-stands and brass instruments that were never cleaned, and the walls were hung with dusty band uniforms. It embarrassed Lucy when people came in for watches and clocks that should have been repaired weeks ago.

  If she stayed at home to practise, there were so many things to put her out. She was restless now, and trifles got on her nerves. No matter how orderly she managed to keep her own room, she couldn’t help being aware that just on the other side of that thin partition her sister’s room was in confusion. There was no doubting it, for Pauline left her door open. It was Pauline’s custom not to make her bed until noon; she managed to get out of it in the morning without throwing off the blankets, leaving it like a mole-hill, with the very shape of her body.

  “Lucy,” she said one morning, “what’s got into you, to be turning your mattress and sweeping your room every day? You never used to be so fussy.”

  “A little Italian showed me how a sleeping-room ought to be kept. I learned something besides music last winter,” Lucy replied as she went downstairs.

  Pauline squinted. That remark nettled her, really hurt her feelings. She kept recalling it for days afterwards.

  Lucy did what she could on the shop piano in the morning, and every afternoon she walked; through the town, and out the road to the north, where the land lay high and she could look down over the Platte valley. She began to notice things about the country that she had never taken much heed of before. She believed she was bidding the country good-bye this winter, and that made her eye more searching. One thing she watched for, every afternoon. Long before sunset an unaccountable pink glow appeared in the eastern sky, about half-way between the zenith and the horizon. It was not a cloud, it had not the depth of a reflection: it was thin and bright like the colour on a postcard. On sunny afternoons it was sure to be there, a pink rouge on the hard blue cheek of the sky. From her window she could watch this colour come above the tall, wide-spreading cottonwood trees of the town park, where her father led the band concerts in summer. Did that pink flush use to come there, in the days when she was running up and down these sidewalks, or was it a new habit the light had taken on?

  If there was anyone in Haverford who could tell her, it would be Harry Gordon. He was the only man here who noticed such things, and he was deeply, though unwillingly, moved by them. When she used to go duck-shooting with him she had found that he knew every tree and shrub and plant they ever came upon. Harry kept that side of himself well hidden. He could feel things without betraying himself, because he was so strong. If only she could have that strength behind her instead of against her! It was more than physical strength; it was something that could keep up to the bitter end, that could take hold and never let go. She was so without any such power that even to think of it heartened her a little. Perhaps some day they would be friends again. He was conceited and hard to teach, but she believed he would go on learning about life; because he had more depth than the people around him, and never pretended to like anything he didn’t like. Quite the other way; he played at being a common fellow, and he wasn’t. He was full of that energy which moves quietly, but always moves. It might get a man almost anywhere, she thought. And the people who hadn’t it, even those with nice tastes, like her father, never got anywhere.

  10

  THE WEEKS CAN be very long in the Platte valley, Lucy found. She began to feel trapped, shut up in a little town in winter. That long, soft, brooding autumn had been like a kind companion. Now the hard facts of country life were upon her. The weather grew windy and bitter cold; the town and all the country round were the colour of cement. The tides that raced through the open world never came here. There was never anything to make one leap beyond oneself or to carry one away. One’s mind got stuffy, like the houses.

  Toward the end of January came another heavy snowfall; then a thaw, followed by a week of biting cold. The street, the roads, the yard, the orchard, were stretches of lumpy ice and frozen snow. Why didn’t Professor Auerbach send for her now? If she could only walk past the Arts Building once again, see the hall porter, and George, the elevator man! If she could go to the concert hall where she had first heard Sebastian; sit in a corner, and remember! Some day she would be able to rent his old studio, and she would live there always. There must be ways of making money in this world; she had never seriously tried, but now she would.

  One morning Pauline went to help the Methodist women get the basement of the church ready for a chicken-and-waffle supper, so Lucy practised at home. She had found she could, if she were alone in the house. At noon Pauline came in, resolutely cheerful (her sister was a hard person to live with just now). When they sat down to lunch, she announced what she believed to be good news.

  “Lucy, my dear, I’ve done pretty well for you this morning. I’ve got two piano pupils for you.”

  Lucy looked up and grew red.

  “Pupils? I don’t want any. I am not going to teach in Haverford.”

  Pauline didn’t flush; she grew paler. “But seriously, Lucy, don’t you think you ought to be doing something? You must know that Father gets deeper into debt all the time. We made a great sacrifice to send you away to study. I always supposed you’d want to pay back at least part of what it cost us.”

  “I will, some time. I can’t see that anybody made a great sacrifice. It was Father’s own idea that I should study music. I was never extravagant, certainly. I got along on less than most of the students.”

  Her careless tone made her sister indignant.

  “More than sixteen hundred dollars you cost us in those first two years. I have the cheque stubs, and I know.”

  “So much as that?” Lucy asked in the same indifferent manner.

  “That is a great deal, for us. You might have sent back just a little after you began to earn something, to show good intentions.”

  “I thought of it, but I bought clothes instead. When I was teaching I had to be decently dressed.”

  Both the sisters had stopped eating and both were making a pretence of drinking coffee. Pauline went on to say, as mildly as she could, that she had thought Lucy would like to take a few pupils, now that she was feeling better. “People here have always appreciated you. I wonder you haven’t had applications before this. I’m afraid some of Fairy Blair’s talk must have got around.”

  Lucy knew that she could go away and avoid a scene, but she didn’t care.

  “Just what do you mean?” she asked coldly.

  The same thing happened to Pauline’s face that happened to sour milk when she poured boiling water into it to make cottage cheese; it clabbered, the flesh curdled.

  “The stories about you and that singer. Such things will get out, and Fairy isn’t one to keep them. Now people are saying that when Harry Gordon went to Chicago last spring and saw how things were, he threw you over.”

  Lucy laughed disagreeably. “Threw me over, did he? Well, one story’s as good as another. I don’t care what they say. So you kept Father’s cheque stubs, Pauline? How like you! You needn’t worry. I’m going back to teach under Auerbach again. It’s been arranged for weeks. The date is set for March, but I can easily go sooner.” She had risen and was standing against the light of the window.

  Pauline broke out bitterly. “Lucy, why are you so mean! Why do you hide things from us, and treat us like strangers?”

  “I suppose I feel that way,” Lucy said as she went up the back stairs.

  While Pauline was washing the dishes she cried a little, shed a few waxy tears that came hard. You brought a child up, slaved for her and dressed her prettily, did all the work and let her have all the holidays (the parlour cat and the kitchen cat!) — and this was what came of it. You coddled her as if she were a superior being, and she treated you like the housekeeper. And she used to be so proud of her little sister!

  When Pauline left the kitchen and came into the sitting-room, she looked out of the window to see who might be passing. Why, there was Lucy! In her hat and coat, out of doors, out in the road, hurrying away from the house and walking toward the country. And she was carrying something, in a black bag. Could it be her skating-shoes?