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Thomas Carlyle - "History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 9"

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Together

R >> Robert Herrick (1868 1938) >> Together




So the progress to the elevators was slow, for the Colonel stopped to
introduce his son to every man whose desk they passed or whose eye he
caught.

"My boy, Vickers, Mr. Slason--Mr. Slason is our credit man, Vick--you'll
know him better soon.... Mr. Jameson, just a moment, please; I want you to
meet this young man!"

"If he's got any of your blood in him, Colonel, he's all right," a beefy,
red-faced man jerked out, chewing at an unlighted cigar and looking Vickers
hard in the face.

Even the porters had to be introduced. It was a democratic advance! But
finally they reached the "upstairs" quarters, where in one corner was the
Colonel's private den, partitioned off from the other offices by ground
glass,--a bare space with a little old black walnut desk, a private safe,
and a set of desk telephones. Here Vickers stood looking down at the
turmoil of traffic in the street below, while his father glanced over a
mass of telegrams and memoranda piled on his desk.

The roar of business that had begun to rumble through the streets at
daybreak and was now approaching its meridian stunned the young man's
nerves. Deadened by the sound of it all, he could not dissociate from the
volume that particular note, which would be his note, and live oblivious to
the rest.... So this was business! And what a feeble reed he was with which
to prop it! Visions of that other life came thronging to his mind,--the
human note of other cities he had learned to love, the placid hours of
contemplation, visions of things beautiful in a world of joy! Humorously he
thought of the hundreds of thousands of dollars this busy hive earned each
year. A minute fraction of its profits would satisfy him, make him richer
than all of it. And he suspected that the thrifty Colonel had much more
wealth stored away in that old-fashioned iron safe. What was the use of
throwing himself into this great machine? It would merely grind the soul
out of him and spit him forth.

To keep it going,--that was the reason for sacrificing his youth, his
desire. But why keep the thing going? Pride, sentiment? He did not know the
Colonel's feeling of fatherhood towards all the men who worked for him, his
conviction that in this enterprise which he had created, all these human
beings were able to live happier lives because of him, his leadership.
There was poetry in the old man, and imagination. But the young man, with
his eyes filled with those other--more brilliant--glories, saw only the
grime, heard only the dull roar of the wheels that turned out a meaningless
flood of gold, like an engine contrived to supply desires and reap its
percentage of profits.

"Father!" he cried involuntarily.

Hot words of protest were in his throat. Let some other young man be found
to run the machine; or let them make a corporation of it and sell it in the
market. Or close the doors, its work having been done. But give him his
life, and a few dollars!

"Eh, Vick? Hungry? We'll go over to the club for luncheon in just a
minute." And the old Colonel smiled affectionately at his son over his
glasses.

"Not now--not just yet," Vickers said to himself, with a quick rush of
comprehension.

But the "now" never seemed to come, the right moment for delivering the
blow, through all those months that followed, while the young man was
settling into his corner of the great establishment. When the mother or
Isabelle confessed their doubts to the Colonel, the old man would say:--

"It will do him no harm, a little of it. He'll know how to look after your
money, mother, when I am gone." And he added, "It's making a man of him,
you'll see!"

There was another matter, little suspected by the Colonel, that was rapidly
to make a man of his engaging young son.




CHAPTER XV


When Vickers Price raised his eyes from his desk and, losing for the moment
the clattering note of business that surged all around him, looked through
dusky panes into the cloud of mist and smoke, visions rose before him that
were strange to the smoky horizon of the river city....

From the little balcony of his room on the Pincio, all Rome lay spread
before him,--Rome smiling under the blue heaven of an April morning! The
cypresses in the garden pointed to a cloudless sky. Beyond the city roofs,
where the domes of churches rose like little islands, was the green band of
the Janiculum, and farther southwards the river cut the city and was lost
behind the Aventine. And still beyond the Campagna reached to the hills
about Albano.

Beneath he could see the Piazza del Popolo, with a line of tiny cabs
standing lazily in the sunlight, and just below the balcony was a garden
where a fountain poured softly, night and day. Brilliant balls of colored
fruit hung from the orange trees, glossy against the yellow walls of the
palazzo across the garden. From the steep street on the other side of the
wall rose the thin voice of a girl, singing a song of the mountains, with a
sad note of ancient woe, and farther away in the city sounded the hoarse
call of a pedler.... This was not the Rome of the antiquary, not the tawdry
Rome of the tourist. It was the Rome of sunshine and color and music, the
Rome of joy, of youth! And the young man, leaning there over the iron
railing, his eyes wandering up and down the city at his feet, drank deep of
the blessed draught,--the beauty and the joy of it, the spirit of youth and
romance in his heart....

From some one of the rooms behind a neighboring balcony floated a woman's
voice, swelling into a full contralto note, then sinking low and sweet into
brooding contemplation. After a time Vickers went to his work, trying to
forget the golden city outside the open window, but when the voice he had
heard burst forth joyously outside, he looked up and saw the singer
standing on her balcony, shading her eyes with a hand, gazing out over the
city, her voice breaking forth again and again in scattered notes, as
though compelled by the light and the joy of it all. She was dressed in a
loose black morning gown that rippled in the breeze over her figure. She
clasped her hands above her bronze-colored hair, the action revealing the
pure white tint of neck and arms, the well-knit body of small bones. She
stood there singing to herself softly, the note of spring and Rome in her
voice. Still singing she turned into her room, and Vickers could hear her,
as she moved back and forth, singing to herself. And as he hung brooding
over Rome, listening to the gurgle of the fountain in the garden, he often
listened to this contralto voice echoing the spirit within him....
Sometimes a little girl came out on the balcony to play.

"Are you English?" she asked the young man one day.

"No, American, like you, eh?" Vickers replied.

They talked, and presently the little girl running back into the room spoke
to some one: "There is a nice man out there, mother. He says he's American,
too." Vickers could not hear what the woman said in reply....

The child made them friends. Mrs. Conry, Vickers learned, was his
neighbor's name, and she was taking lessons in singing, preparing herself,
he gathered, for professional work,--a widow, he supposed, until he heard
the little girl say one day, "when we go home to father,--we are going
home, mother, aren't we? Soon?" And when the mother answered something
unintelligible, the little girl with a child's subtle tact was silent....

This woman standing there on the balcony above the city,--all gold and
white and black, save for the gray eyes, the curving lines of her supple
body,--this was what he saw of Europe,--all outside those vivid Roman weeks
that he shared with her fading into a vague background. Together they
tasted the city,--its sunny climbing streets, its white squares, and dark
churches, the fields beyond the Colosseum, the green Campagna, the vivid
mornings, the windless moonlight nights! All without this marvellous
circle, this charmed being of Rome, had the formlessness of a distant
planet. Here life began and closed, and neither wished to know what the
other had been in the world behind.

That she was from some Southern state,--"a little tiny place near the Gulf,
far from every civilized thing," Mrs. Conry told him; and it was plain
enough that she was meagrely educated,--there had been few advantages in
that "tiny place." But her sensuous temperament was now absorbing all that
it touched. Rome meant little to her beyond the day's charm, the music it
made in her heart; while the man vibrated to every association, every
memory of the laden city....

Thus the days and weeks slipped by until the gathering heat warned them of
the passing of time. One June day that promised to be fresh and cool they
walked through the woods above the lake of Albano. Stacia Conry hummed the
words of a song that Vickers had written and set to music, one of a cycle
they had planned for her to sing--the Songs of the Cities. This was the
song of Rome, and in it Vickers had embedded the sad strain that the girl
sang coming up the street,--the cry of the past.

"That is too high for me," she said, breaking off. "And it is melancholy. I
hate sad things. It reminds me of that desolate place at the end of the
earth where I came from."

"All the purest music has a strain of sadness," Vickers protested.

"No, no; it has longing, passion! ... I escaped!" She looked down on the
cuplike lake, shimmering in the sun below. "I knew in my heart that _this_
lived, this world of sunshine and beauty and joy. I thirsted for it. Now I
drink it!"

She turned on him her gray eyes, which were cool in spite of her emotion.
She had begun again the song in a lower key, when at a turn in the path
they came upon a little wooden shrine, one of those wayside altars still
left in a land where religion has been life. Before the weather-stained
blue-and-red madonna knelt a strangely mediaeval figure,--a man wasted and
bare-headed, with long hair falling matted over his eyes. An old sheepskin
coat came to his bare knees. Dirty, forlorn, leaning wearily on his
pilgrim's staff, the man was praying before the shrine, his lips moving
silently.

"What a figure!" Vickers exclaimed in a low voice, taking from his pocket a
little camera. As he tiptoed ahead of Mrs. Conry to get his picture before
the pilgrim should rise, he saw the intense yearning on the man's face.
Beckoning to his companion, Vickers put the camera into his pocket and
passed on, Mrs. Conry following, shrinking to the opposite side of the way,
a look of aversion on her mobile face.

"Why didn't you take him?" she asked as they turned the corner of the road.

"He was praying,--and he meant it," Vickers answered vaguely.

The woman's lips curved in disgust at the thought of the dirty pilgrim on
his knees by the roadside.

"Only the weak pray! I hate that sort of thing,--prayer and penitence."

"Perhaps it is the only real thing in life," Vickers replied from some
unknown depth within him.

"No, no! How can you say that? You who know what life can be. Never! That
is what they tried to teach me at school. But I did not believe it. I
escaped. I wanted to sing. I wanted my own life." She became grave, and
added under her breath: "And I shall get it. That is best, best, best!" She
broke into a run down the sun-flecked road, and they emerged breathless in
an olive orchard beside the lake. Her body panted as she threw herself down
on the grass. "Now!" she smiled, her skin all rose; "can you say that?" And
her voice chanted, "To live,--my friend,--to LIVE! And you and I are made
to live,--isn't it so?"

The artist in Vickers, the young man of romance, his heart tender with
sentiment, responded to the creed. But woven with the threads of this
artist temperament were other impulses that stirred. The pilgrim in the act
of penitence and ecstatic devotion was beautiful, too, and real,--ah, very
real, as he was to know....

They supped that afternoon in a little wine shop looking towards the great
dome swimming above Rome. And as the sun shot level and golden over the
Campagna, lighting the old, gray tombs, they drove back to the city along
the ancient Latin road. The wonderful plain, the most human landscape in
the world, began to take twilight shadows. Rome hung, in a mist of sun,
like a mirage in the far distance, and between them and the city flowed the
massive arches of an aqueduct, and all about were the crumbling tombs, half
hidden by the sod. The carriage rolled monotonously onwards. The woman's
eyes nearly closed; she looked dreamily out through the white lids, fringed
with heavy auburn lashes. She still hummed from time to time the old
refrain of Vickers's song. Thus they returned, hearing the voice of the old
world in its peculiar hour.

"I am glad that I have had it--that I have lived--a little. This, this!--I
can sing to-night! You must come and sit on my balcony and look at the
stars while I sing to you--the music of the day."

As the Porta San Paolo drew near, Vickers remarked:--

"I shall write you a song of Venice,--that is the music for you."

"Venice, and Paris, and Vienna, and Rome,--all! I love them all!"

She reached her arms to the great cities of the earth, seeing herself in
triumph, singing to multitudes the joy of life.... "Come to-night,--I will
sing for you!"...

On the porter's table at the hotel lay a thick letter for Mrs. Conry. It
bore the printed business address,--THE CONRY CONSTRUCTION COMPANY. Mrs.
Conry took it negligently in her white hand. "You will come later?" she
said, smiling back at the young man.

* * * * *

Sitting crowded in front of Arragno's and sipping a liqueur, Fosdick
remarked to Vickers: "So you have run across the Conry? Of course I know
her. I saw her in Munich the first time. The little girl still with her?
Then it was Vienna.... She's got as far as Rome! Been over here two or
three years studying music. Pretty-good voice, and a better figure. Oh,
Stacia is much of a siren."

Vickers moved uneasily and in reply to a question Fosdick continued:--

"Widow--grass widow--properly linked--who knows? Our pretty country-women
have such a habit of trotting around by themselves for their own
delectation that you never can tell how to place them. She may be
divorced--she may be the other thing! You can't tell. But she is a very
handsome woman."...

Mrs. Conry herself told Vickers the facts, as they sat at a little
restaurant on the Aventine where they loved to go to watch the night steal
across the Palatine.

"... He offered me my education--my chance. I took it. I went to the
conservatory at Cincinnati. Then he wanted to marry me, and promised to
send me abroad to study more."... Her tone was dry, impartially recounting
the fact. Then her eyes dropped, and Vickers's cigarette glowed between
them as they leaned across the little iron table.... "I was a child
then--did not know anything. I married him. The first years business was
poor, and he could not let me have the money. When times got better, he let
me come--kept his promise. I have been here nearly three years, back two or
three times. And now," her voice dropped, "I must go back for good--soon."

Nothing more. But it seemed to Vickers as if a ghost had risen from the
river mist and come to sit between them. That the woman was paying a price
for her chance, a heavy price, he could see. They walked back to the city
between the deserted vineyards. As they crossed the river, Mrs. Conry
stopped, and remarked sombrely, "A bargain is a bargain the world over, is
it not?"

Vickers felt the warm breathing woman close to him, felt her brooding eyes.
"One pays," he murmured, "I suppose!"

She threw up her hand in protest, and they walked on into the lighted city.

* * * * *

Occasionally Fosdick joined their excursions, and after one of them he said
to Vickers:--

"My friend, she is wonderful; more so every time I see her. But beneath
that soft, rounded body, with its smooth white skin, is something hard. Oh,
I know the eyes and the hair and the throat and the voice! I, too, am a
man. Paint her, if you like, or set her to music. She is for _bel canto_
and moonlight and the voice of Rome. But there is a world outside this all,
my friend, to which you and I belong, and _you_ rather more than I....
Stacia Conry doesn't belong at all."

"Which means?" demanded Vickers steadily of the burly Fosdick.

"Take care that you don't get stuck in the sea of Sargasso. I think
something bitter might rise out of all that loveliness."

Nevertheless, instead of going to the Maloya with Fosdick, Vickers stayed
on in Rome, and September found him there and Mrs. Conry, too, having
returned to the city from the mountain resort, where she had left the
little girl with her governess. They roamed the deserted city, and again
began to work on the songs which Mrs. Conry hoped to give in concerts on
her return to America. Very foolish of the young man, and the woman, thus
to prolong the moment of charm, to linger in the Sargasso Sea! But at least
with the man, the feeling that kept him in Rome those summer months was
pure and fine, the sweetest and the best that man may know, where he gives
of his depths with no thought of reward, willing to accept the coming
pain.... Little Delia, who had seen quite as much of Vickers as her mother,
said to him the day she left with her governess:--

"We're going home soon--before Thanksgiving. I'm so glad! And you'll be
there, too?"

"I suppose not, Delia," the young man replied. But as it happened he was
the first to go back....

That late September day they had returned from a ramble in the hills. It
was nearly midnight when the cab rattled up the deserted streets to their
hotel. As Vickers bade his companion good-night, with some word about a
long-projected excursion to Volterra, she said:--

"Come in and I will sing for a while. I don't feel like sleep.... Yes,
come! Perhaps it will be the last of all our good times."

In the large dark apartment the night wind was drawing over the roofs of
the hill through the open windows, fluttering stray sheets of music along
the stone floor. Mrs. Conry lighted a candle on the piano, and throwing
aside her hat and veil, dropping her gloves on the floor, struck some heavy
chords. She sang the song they had been working over, the song of Venice,
with a swaying melody as of floating water-grasses. Then she plunged into a
throbbing aria,--singing freely, none too accurately, but with a passion
and self-forgetfulness which promised greater things than the concert
performer. From this on to other snatches of opera, to songs, wandering as
the mood took her, coming finally to the street song that Vickers had woven
into his composition for Rome, with its high, sad note. There her voice
stopped, died in a cry half stifled in the throat, and leaving the piano
she came to the window. A puff of wind blew out the candle. With the
curtains swaying in the night wind, they stood side by side looking down
into the dark city, dotted irregularly with points of light, and up above
the Janiculum to the shining stars.

"Rome, Rome," she murmured, and the words sighed past the young man's
ears,--"and life--LIFE!"

It was life that was calling them, close together, looking forth into the
night, their hearts beating, the longing to grasp it, to go out alone into
the night for it. Freedom, and love, and life,--they beckoned! Vickers saw
her eyes turn to him in the dark....

"And now I go," he said softly. He found his way to the door in the dark
salon, and as he turned he saw her white figure against the swaying
curtain, and felt her eyes following him.

In his room he found the little blue despatch, sent up from his banker,
which announced his brother's death, and the next morning he left by the
early express for the north to catch the Cherbourg boat. As he passed Mrs.
Conry's salon he slipped under the door the despatch with a note, which
ended, "I know that we shall see each other again, somewhere, somehow!" and
from the piazza he sent back an armful of great white _fleur-de-lys_. Later
that morning, while Vickers was staring at the vintage in the Umbrian
Valley and thinking of the woman all white and bronze with the gray eyes,
Mrs. Conry was reading his note. A bitter smile curved her lips, as she
gathered up the white flowers and laid them on the piano.




CHAPTER XVI


One winter day while Vickers Price was "selling nails," as he still
expressed his business career, there came in his mail a queer little
scrawl, postmarked Pittsburg. It was from Delia Conry, and it ran:--

"We've been home a month. We live in a hotel. I don't like it. The bird you
gave me died. Mother says she'll get me a new one. I wish I could see you.
Love from Delia."

But not a word from Mrs. Conry! Fosdick, drifting through Rome on his way
to Turkestan, wrote:--

"... What has become of the Conry? She has disappeared from the cities of
Europe with her melodious songs and beautiful hair. Are you touring the
States with her? Or has she rediscovered Mr. Conry--for a period of
seclusion? ... To think of you serving hardware to the barbarians across
the counter enlivens my dull moments. From the Sargasso Sea to St.
Louis,--there is a leap for you, my dear."...

While he "served hardware to the barbarians" and in other respects
conformed to the life of a privileged young American gentleman, Vickers
Price dreamed of those Roman days, the happiest of his life. If that night
they two had taken life in their hands? ... Could the old Colonel have read
his son's heart,--if from the pinnacle of his years filled with ripe deeds
he could have comprehended youth,--he might have been less sure that the
hardware business was to be "the making of Vick"!

What had come to her? Had she accepted her lot, once back in the groove of
fate, or had she rebelled, striking out for her own vivid desire of joy and
song, of fame? Vickers would have liked to hear that she had rebelled, was
making her own life,--had taken the other road than the one he had accepted
for himself. His tender, idealizing heart could not hold a woman to the
sterner courses of conduct.

For, as Fosdick had told him in Rome, the young man was a Sentimentalist
with no exact vision of life. His heart was perpetually distorting whatever
his mind told him was fact. This woman, with her beauty, her love of music,
had touched him at the lyric moment of life, when reality was but the
unstable foundation for dream. Life as might be, glowing, colored, and
splendid,--life as it was within him, not as this hideous maelstrom all
about him reported. And why not the I, the I! cried the spirit of youth,
the egotistic spirit of the age. For all reply there was the bent, gray
head of the Colonel at his desk in the office beside him. "One sentiment
against another," Fosdick might say....

Finally Stacia Conry wrote, a little note: she was to be in St. Louis on
the fourteenth for a short time and hoped that he would call on her at the
hotel. A perfectly proper, colorless little note, written in an unformed
hand, with a word or two misspelled,--the kind of note that gave no
indication of the writer, but seemed like the voice of a stranger. However,
as Vickers reflected, literary skill, the power to write personal little
notes did not go necessarily with a talent for music--or for life. Nannie
Lawton wrote intimate notes, and other women, single and married, whom
Vickers had come to know these past months. But their cleverest phrases
could not stir his pulses as did this crude production.

The woman who was waiting for him in the little hotel parlor, however, gave
him a curious shock,--she was so different in her rich street costume from
the woman in black and white, whose picture had grown into his memory. She
seemed older, he thought, thus accounting for that strange idealizing power
of the mind to select from a face what that face has specially given it and
create an altogether new being, with its own lineaments graven in place of
actual bone and tissue. It takes time to correct this ideal misreport of
the soul, to accept the fact! Except for the one glance from the gray eyes
which she gave him as they shook hands, Stacia Conry did not stir the past.
But she was voluble of the present.

"You did not expect this! You see my husband had some work to attend to
near here, and I thought I would come with him.... No, we left Delia in
Pittsburg with his mother,--she wanted to see you, but she would be in the
way."

They came soon to her singing, and her face clouded.

"I haven't been able to get an opening. I wanted to sing the Cycle with an
orchestra. But I haven't succeeded,--our Pittsburg orchestra won't look at
any talent purely domestic. It is all pull over here. I haven't any
influence.... You must start with some backing,--sing in private houses for
great people! We don't know that kind, you see."

"And concerts?" Vickers inquired.

"The same way,--to get good engagements you must have something to show....
I've sung once or twice,--in little places, church affairs and that kind of
thing."

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