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CHAPTER III – THE BLAIRTOWN SOLOIST
Blairtown had a population of some eight thousand. There was a Presbyterian church to which Dan and his father went regularly, sitting in the bare pew when the winter’s storms beat and rattled on the panes, or in the summer sunshine, when the flies thronged the window casings, when the smell of the pews and the panama fans and the hymn-books came strong to them through the heat.
One day there was a missionary sermon, and for the first time in its history a girl sang a solo in the First Presbyterian Church. Dan Blair heard it, looked up, and it made a mark in his life. A girl in a white dress trimmed with blue gentians, white cotton gloves, and golden hair, was the soloist. He knew her, that is, he had a nodding acquaintance with her. It was the girl at the drug store who sold soda-water, and he had asked her some hundreds of times for a “vanilla or a chocolate,” but it wasn’t this vulgar memory that made the little boy listen. It was the girl’s voice. Standing back of the yellow-painted rail, above the minister’s pulpit, above the flies, the red pews and the panama fans, she sang, and she sang into Dan Blair’s soul. To speak more truly, she made him a soul in that moment. She awakened the boy; his collar felt tight, his cheeks grew hot. He felt his new boots, too, hard and heavy. She made him want to cry. These were the physical sensations – the material part of the awakening. The rest went on deeply inside of Dan. She broke his heart; then she healed it. She made him want to cry like a girl; then she wiped his tears.
The little boy settled back and grew more comfortable and listened, and what she sang was,
“From Greenland’s icy mountains,
From India’s coral stra – ands.”
Before the hymn reached its end he was a calm boy again, and the hymn took up its pictures and became like an illustrated book of travels, and he wanted to see those pea-green peaks of Greenland, to float upon the icebergs to them, and see the dawn break on the polar seas as the explorers do… He should find the North Pole some day! Then he wanted to go to an African jungle, where the tiger, “tiger shining bright,” should flash his stripes before his eyes! Dan would gather wreaths of coral from the stra – ands and give them to the girl with the yellow hair! When he and his father came out together from the church, Dan chose the street that passed the soda-fountain drug store and peeped in. It was dark and cool, and behind the counter the drug clerk mixed the summer drinks: and the drug clerk mixed them from that time ever afterward – for the girl with the yellow hair never showed up in Blairtown again. She went away!
CHAPTER IV – IN THE CORAL ROOM
“Mandalay” had run at the Gaiety the season before and again opened the autumn season. Light and charming, thoroughly musical, it had toured successfully through Europe, but London was its home, and its great popularity was chiefly owing to the girl who had starred in it – Letty Lane. Her face was on every post-card, hand-bill, cosmetic box, and even popular drinks were named for her.
The night of the Osdene box party was the reopening of Mandalay, and the curtain went up after the overture to an outburst of applause. Dan Blair had never “crossed the pond” before this memorable visit, when he had gone straight out to Osdene Park. London theaters and London itself, indeed, were unexplored by him. He had seen what there was to be seen of the opera bouffe in his own country, but the brilliant, perfect performance of a company at the London Gaiety he had yet to enjoy.
The opening scene of Mandalay is oriental; the burst of music and the tinkling of the silvery temple bells and the effect of an extremely blue sea, made Dan “sit up,” as he put it. The theatrical picture was so perfect that he lifted his head, pushed his chair back to enjoy. He was thus close to the duchess. With invigorating young enthusiasm the boy drew in his breath and waited to be amused and to hear. The tunes he already knew before the orchestra began to charm his ear.
On landing at Plymouth Dan had been keen to feel that he was really stepping into the world, and at Osdene Park he had been daily, hourly “seeing life.” The youngest of the household, his youth nevertheless was not taken into consideration by any of them. No one had treated him like a junior. He had gone neck to neck with their pace as far as he liked, furnished them fresh amusement, and been their diversion. In all his rare unspoiled youth, Blair had been suddenly dropped down in an effete set that had whirled about him, and one by one out of the inner circle had called him to join them; and one by one with all of them Dan had whirled.
Lord Galorey had talked to him frankly, as plainly as if Dan had been his own father, and found much of the old man’s common sense in his fine blond head. Lady Galorey had come to him in a moment of great anxiety, and no one but her young guest knew how badly she needed help. He had further made it known to the lady that he was not in the marriage market; that she could not have him for any of her girls. And as for the Duchess of Breakwater, well – he had whirled with her until his head swam. He had grown years older at the Park in the few weeks of his visit, but now for the first time, as the music of Mandalay struck upon his ears, like a ripple of distant seas, he felt like the boy who had left Blairtown to come abroad. He had spent the most part of the day in London with a man who had come over to see him from America. Dan attended to his business affairs, and the people who knew said that he had a keen head. Mr. Joshua Ruggles, his father’s best friend, whom Dan this afternoon had left to go to his room at the Carlton, had put his arm with affection through the boy’s:
“Don’t look as though it were any too healthy down to the place you’re visiting at, Dan. Plumbing all right?”
And the boy, flushing slightly, had said: “Don’t you fret, Josh, I’ll look after my health all right.”
“There’s nothing like the mountain air,” returned the Westerner. “These old fogs stick in my nostrils; feel as though I could smell London clean down to my feet!”
From the corner of the box Dan looked hard at the stage, at the fresh brilliant costumes and the lovely chorus girls.
“Gosh,” he thought to himself, “they are the prettiest ever! Dove-gray, eyes of Irish blue, mouths like roses!”
Leaning forward a little toward the duchess he whispered: “There isn’t one who isn’t a winner. I never struck such a box of dry goods!”
The duchess smiled on Dan with good humor. His naïve pleasure was delightful. It was like taking a child to a pantomime. She was wearing his flowers and displaying a jewel that he had found and bought for her, and which she had not hesitated to accept. She watched his eager face and his pleasure unaffected and keen. She could not believe that this young man was master of ten million pounds.
When Letty Lane appeared Blair heard a light rustle like rain through the auditorium, a murmur, and the house rose. There was a well-bred calling from the stalls, a call from the pit, and a generous applause – “Letty Lane – Letty Lane!” and as though she were royalty, there was a fluttering of handkerchiefs like flags. The young fellow with the others stood in the back of the box, his hands in his pockets, looking at the stage. There wasn’t a girl in the chorus as pretty as this prima donna! Letty Lane came on in Mandalay in the first act in the dress of a fashionable princess. She was modish and worldly. For the only time in the play she was modern and conventional, and whatever breeding she might have been able to claim, from whatever class she was born, as she stood there in her beautiful gown she was grace itself, and charm. She was distinctly a star, and showed her appreciation of her audience’s admiration.
At the end of the tenor solo the Princess Oltary runs into the pavilion and there changes her dress and appears once more to dance before the rajah and to prove herself the dancer he has known and loved in a café in Paris. Letty Lane’s dress in this dance was the classic ballet dancer’s, white as the leaves of a lily. She seemed to swim and float; actually to be breathed and exhaled from out her filmy gown; and the only ray of color in her costume was her own golden hair, surmounted by a small coral-colored cap, embroidered in pearls. The actress bowed to the right and left, ran to the right, ran to the left; glanced toward the Duchess of Breakwater’s box; acknowledged the burst of applause; began to dance and finished her pas seul, and with folded hands sang her song. Her beautiful voice came out clear as crystal water from a crystal rock, and her words were cradled like doves, like boats on the boundless seas…
“From India’s coral strand…”
But there was no hymn tune to this song of Letty Lane’s in Mandalay! To the boy in the box, however, the words, the tune, the droning of the flies on the window-pane, the strong odor of the hymn-books and panama fans, came back, and the clear sunlight of Montana seemed to steal into the Gaiety as Letty Lane sang.
The Duchess of Breakwater clapped with frank enthusiasm, and said: “She is a perfect wonder, isn’t she? Oh, she is too bewitching!”
And she turned for sympathy to her friend, who stood behind her, his face illumined. He was amazed; his blue eyes ablaze, his head bent forward, he was staring, staring at the Gaiety curtain, gone down on the first act.
He laughed softly, and the duchess heard him say:
“Good! Well, I should say she was! She’s a girl from our town!”
When the duchess tried to share her enthusiasm with Dan he had disappeared. He left the box and with no difficulty made his way as far as the first wing.
“Can you get me an entrance?” he asked a man he had met once at Osdene and who was evidently an habitué.
“I dare say. Rippin’ show, isn’t it?”
Dan put his hand on ducal shoulders and followed the nobleman through the labyrinth of flies.
“Which of ’em do you want to see, old man?”
Dan, without replying, went forward to a small cluster of lights in one of the wings. He went forward intuitively, and his companion caught his arm: “Oh, I say, for God’s sake, don’t go on like this!”
But without response Dan continued his direction. A call page stood before the door, and Dan, on a card over the entrance, read “Miss Lane.” The smell of calcium and paint and perfume and the auxiliaries hung heavy on the air. The other man saw Dan knock, knock again and then go in.
Unannounced Dan Blair opened the door of the dressing-room of the actress. Miss Lane’s dressing-rooms were worth displaying to her intimate friends. They were done with great taste in coral tint. She might have been said to be in a coral cave under the sea, as far as young Blair was concerned. As he came in he felt his ears deaden, and the smoke of cigarettes grew so thick that he looked as through a veil. The dancer was standing in the center of the room, one hand on her hip, and in the other hand a cigarette. Her short skirt stood out around her like a bell, and over the bell fell a rain of pinkish coral strands. She wore a thin silk slip, from which her neck and arms came shining out, and her woman knelt at her feet strapping on a little coral shoe.
Blair shut the door behind him, and began to realize how rude, how impertinent his entrance would be considered. But he came boldly forward and would have introduced himself as “Dan Blair from Blairtown,” but Miss Lane, who stared at the entrance through the smoke, burst into a laugh so bright, so delightful, that he was carried high up on the coral strands to the very beach. She crossed her white arms over her breast and leaned forward, as a saleswoman might lean forward over a counter, and with her beautifully trained voice, all sweetly she asked him:
“Hello, little boy, what will you take?”
Blair giggled, quick to catch her meaning, and answered: “Oh, chocolate, I guess!”
And Letty Lane laughed, put out her white hand, the one without the cigarette, and said: “Haven’t got that brand on board – so sorry! Will a cocktail do? All sorts in bottles. Higgins, fix Mr. Blair a Martini.”
As the dresser rose from her stooping position, the rest of Letty Lane’s dressing-room unfolded out of the mist and smoke. On a sofa covered with lace pillows Blair saw a man sitting, smoking as well. He was tall and had a dark mustache. It was Prince Poniotowsky, whom Dan had already met at the Galorey shoot.
“Prince Poniotowsky,” Miss Lane presented him, “Mr. Blair, of Blairtown, Montana. Say, Frederick, give me my cap, will you? It is over by your side. I’ve got to hustle.”
The man, without moving, picked up a small red cap with a single plume, from the sofa at his side. In another second Letty Lane had placed it on her head of yellow hair, real yellow hair and not a doubt of it, like sunshine – not the color one gets from inside bottles. Her arms, her hands flashed with rings, priceless flashes, and the little spears pricked Dan like sharp needles.
“It’s the nicest ever!” she was saying. “How on earth did you get in here, though? Have you bought the Gaiety Theater? I’m the most exclusive girl on the stage. Who let you in?”
Her accent was English, and even that put her from him. As he looked at her he couldn’t understand how he had ever recognized her. If he had waited for another act he wouldn’t have believed the likeness real. The girl he remembered had both softened and hardened; the round features were gone, but all the angles were gone as well. Her eyes were as gray as the seas; she was painted and her lids were darkened. Seen close, she was not so divine as on the stage, but there was still a more thrilling charm about the fact that she was real.
“To think of any one from Montana being here to-night! Staying very long, Mr. Blair?” Between each sentence she directed Higgins, who was getting her into her bodice. “And how do you like Mandalay? Isn’t it great?”
She addressed herself to Dan, but she smiled on both the men with extreme brilliance.
“You bet your life,” he responded. “I should think it was great.”
Poniotowsky rose indolently. He had not looked toward the new-comer, but had, on the other hand, followed every detail of Miss Lane’s dressing.
“Better take your scarf, Letty. Hand it to Miss Lane,” he directed Higgins. “It is so damned drafty in these beastly wings.”
He drew his watch out, gathered up his long coat, flung it over his arm and picked up his opera hat which lay folded on Letty Lane’s dressing-table.
The call page for the third time summoned “Miss La – ne, Miss La – ane,” and she took the scarf Higgins handed her and ran it through her hands, still beaming on Dan.
“Come in to see me at the Savoy on any day at two-thirty except on matinée days.”
“Put on your scarf.” Poniotowsky, taking it from her hands, laid it across her white shoulders, and she passed out between the two men, light as a bird, smiling, nodding, followed by the prince and the boy from Montana. The crowds began to fill the lately empty wings – dancers, chorus girls with their rustling gowns. Letty Lane said to Dan:
“Guess you’ll like my solo in this act all right – it’s the best thing in Mandalay. Now go along, and clap me hard.”
It gave him a new pleasure, for she had spoken to him in real American fashion with the swift mimicry that showed her talent. Dan went slowly back to his party. As he took his seat by the duchess she said to him:
“You went out to see Letty Lane. Do you know her?”
“Know her!” And as Dan answered, the sound of his own voice was queer to him, and his face flushed hotly. “Lord, yes. She used to be in the drug store in Blairtown. Sold soda-water to me when we were both kids. Whoever would have thought that she had that in her!” He nodded toward the stage, for Letty Lane had come on. “She sang in our church, too, but not for long.”
“Who was with her in her dressing-room?” the duchess asked. Blair didn’t answer. He was looking at Letty Lane. She had come to dance for the rajah and in her arms she held four white doves; each dove had a coral thread around its throat. It was a number that made her famous, The Dove Song. Set free, the birds flew about her, circling her blond head, surmounted by the small coral-colored cap. The doves settled on her shoulders, pecked at her lips.
“Was it Poniotowsky?” the duchess repeated.
And Dan told her a meaningless lie. “I didn’t meet any one there.” And with satisfaction the duchess said:
“Then she has thrown him over, too. He was the latest and the richest. She is horribly extravagant. No man is rich enough for her, they say. Poniotowsky isn’t a gold mine.”
The doves had flown away to the wings and been gathered up by the Indian servants. The actress on the stage began her Indian cradle song. She came, distinctly turning toward the box party. She had never sung like this in London before. There was a freshness in her voice, a quality in her gesture, a pathos and a sweetness that delighted her audience. They fairly clamored for her, waved and called and recalled. Dan stood motionless, his eyes fastened on her, his heart rocked by the song. He didn’t want any one to speak to him. He wished that none of them would breathe, and nearly as absorbed as was he, no one did speak.
CHAPTER V – AT THE CARLTON
There are certain natures to whom each appearance of evil, each form of delinquency is a fresh surprise. They are born simple, in the sweet sense of the word, and they go down to old age never of the world, although in a sense worldly. If Dan Blair’s eyes were somewhat opened at twenty-two, he had yet the bloom on his soul. He was no fool, but his ideals stood up each on its pedestal and ready to appear one by one to him as the scenes of his life shifted and the different curtains rose. He had been trained in finance from his boyhood and he was a born financier. Money was his natural element; he could go far in it. But woman! He was one of those manly creatures – a knight – to whom each woman is a sacred thing: a dove, a crystal-clear soul, made to cherish and to protect, made to be spoiled. And in Dan were all the qualities that go to make up the unselfish, tender, foolish, and often unhappy American husband. These were some of the other things he had inherited from his father. Blair, senior, had married his first love, and whereas his boy had been trained to know money and its value, how to keep it and spend it, to save it and to make it, he had been taught nothing at all about woman. He had never been taught to distrust women, never been warned against them; he had been taught nothing but his father’s memory of his mother, and the result was that he worshiped the sex and wondered at the mystery.
With Gordon Galorey and the others he had ridden, shot better than they, and had played, but with Lady Galorey and the Duchess of Breakwater he was nothing but a child. As far as his hostess was concerned, on several occasions she had put to him certain states of affairs, well, touchingly. Dan had been moved by the stories of sore need among the tenants, had been impressed by the necessity of reforms and rebuildings and on each occasion had given his hostess a check. She had asked him to say nothing about it to Gordon, and he had kept his silence. Dan liked Lady Galorey extremely: she was jolly, witty and friendly. She treated him as a member of the family and made no demands on him, save the ones mentioned.
In the time that he had come to know the Duchess of Breakwater she, on her part, had filled him full of other confidences. Into his young ears she poured the story of her disappointment, her disjointed life, from her worldly girlhood to her disillusion in marriage. She was beautiful when she talked and more lovely when she wept. Dan thought himself in love with the Duchess of Breakwater. His conversations with her had brought him to this conclusion. They had motored from Osdene Park together, and he had been extremely taken with the pleasure of it, and with the fact of their real companionship. Two or three times the words had been on his lips, which were fated not to be spoken then, however, and Dan reached the Gaiety still unfettered, his duchess by his side. And then the orchestra had begun to play Mandalay, the curtain had gone up and Letty Lane had come out on the boards. But her apparition did not strike off his chains immediately, nor did he renounce his plan to tell the duchess the very next day that he loved her.
When with sparkling eyes Lady Galorey raved about Mandalay, Dan listened with eagerness. Everybody seemed to know all about Letty Lane, but he alone knew from what town she had come!
They went for supper at the Carlton after the theater.
“Letty,” Lady Galorey said, “tells it herself how the impresario heard her sing in some country church – picked her up then and there and brought her over here, and they say she married him.”
Dan Blair could have told them how she had sung in that little church that day. Dan was eating his caviare sandwich. “Her name then was Sally Towney,” he murmured. How little he had guessed that she was singing herself right out of that church and into the London Gaiety Theater! Anyway, she had made him “sit up!” It was a far cry from Montana to the London Gaiety. And so she married the greasy Jew who had discovered her!
Dan glanced over at the Duchess of Breakwater. She was looking well, exquisitely high bred, and she impressed him. She leaned slightly over to him, laughing. He had hardly dared to meet her eyes that day, fearing that she might read his secret. She had told him that in her own right she was a countess – the Countess of Stainer. Titles didn’t cut any ice with him. At any rate, she would be able to “buy back the old farm” – that is the way Dan put it. She had told him of the beautiful old Stainer Court, mortgaged and hung up with debts, as deep in ruins as the ivy was thick on the walls.
As Dan looked over at the duchess he saw the other people staring and looking about at a table near. It was spread a little to their left for four people, a great bouquet of orchids in the center.
“There,” Galorey said, “there’s Letty Lane.” And the singer came in, followed by three men, the first of them the Prince Poniotowsky, indolent, bored, haughty, his eye-glass dangling. Miss Lane was dressed in black, a superb costume of faultless cut, and it enfolded her like a shadow; as a shadow might enfold a specter, for the dancer was as pale as the dead. She had neither painted nor rouged, she had evidently employed no coquetry to disguise her fag; rather she seemed to be on the verge of a serious illness, and presented a striking contrast to the brilliant creature, who had shone before their eyes not an hour before. Her dress was a challenge to the more gay and delicate affairs the other women in the restaurant wore. The gown came severely up to her chin. Its high collar closed around with a pearl necklace; from her ears fell pearls, long, creamy and priceless. She wore a great feathered hat, which, drooping, almost hid her small, pale face and her golden hair. She drew off her gloves as she came in and her white, jeweled hands flashed. She looked infinitely tired and extremely bored. As soon as she took her seat at the table intended for her party, Poniotowsky poured her out a glass of champagne, which she drank off as though it were water.
“Gad,” Lord Galorey said, “she is a stunner! What a figure, and what a head, and what daring to dress like that!”
“She knows how to make herself conspicuous,” said the Duchess of Breakwater.
“She looks extremely ill,” said Lady Galorey. “The pace she goes will do her up in a year or two.”
Dan Blair had his back to her, and when they rose to leave he was the last to pass out. Letty Lane saw him, and a light broke over her pallid face. She nodded and smiled and shook her hand in a pretty little salute. If her face was pale, her lips were red, and her smile was like sunlight; and at her recognition a wave of friendly fellowship swept over the young man – a sort of loyal kinship to her which he hadn’t felt for any other woman there, and which he could not have explained. In warm approval of the actress’ distinction, he said softly to himself: “That’s all right – she makes the rest of them look like thirty cents.”
