Part 4

The morrow found Joy more at home in her new quarters, as her luggage had come and she was refreshed by sleep that was not disturbed until late in the morning. Sarah appeared in her kimono, her hair in a dead-looking braid, while Jerry and Joy were picking up a sketchy breakfast in the kitchenette. Jerry had explained the big club-room—the partition between an already large living-room and the dining-room had been removed. Hence there was no dining-room, and as Jerry said, they didn’t really need one. When they were home, they ate in the kitchen, and as for having guests: “most men hate to eat formally, anyway. They like to come out in the kitchen, and then we have chafing-dish parties or sent-up spreads in the living-room.”

Sarah expressed a moderate amount of pleasure at seeing Joy, permitting a line or so to cross her brow at the same time. Her attention was diverted as she seemed on the point of making additional remarks, by Jerry’s information: “Packy was here last night, by the way.”

“Packy was here? Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Oh, I forgot to. He didn’t bring it back to my memory, either. He saw Joy first.”

Sarah’s look was not amiable. She turned and left the kitchen, muttering something about dressing.

“Oh, Jerry, what did you say that for?” Joy demanded. “Is she in love with him?”

“In love with Packy?” Jerry laughed noisily. “Don’t strain yourself so, Joy. That girl never was in love with anything. She’s somewhat dashed about Packy because he’s the ideal playmate—lots of income and a thoughtful disposition—the combination gets rarer all the time.”

The doorbell interrupted them. “I hope no more blades to sleep off a jag,” said Jerry as they went down the hall. “This is no hotel.”

But it was a special messenger boy to whom they opened the door, who extended two boxes to Joy and a receipt book to Jerry. Jerry signed in a blurred scribble and the two darted to the living-room with the boxes, one of which was addressed to Jerry, and one, to Joy’s surprise, marked with her name. Jerry made short work of hers, tearing it open in one swift motion. All Jerry’s motions were swift—whether she exhausted a cigarette in less time than some people take in lighting, or leaped into her clothes. She held up before her one of the most beautiful negligées Joy had ever seen—a shimmering purple brocaded satin, with folds of chiffon floating away from it.

“I knew Packy’d do that,” said Jerry; “but I must say it’s quick work. What’s your little keepsake?”

“Joy’s little keepsake” was a huge mass of American Beauties, with a note which read: “I suppose you’re used to this sort of thing, but I feel gay just to add myself onto the crowd. From—the only man who ever loved you the way I do.”

“Mine has Twink’s card, with ‘Part Payment for Hotel Bill’ written on it,” said Jerry. “This is what I meant, Joy, when I said Packy was thoughtful.”

Joy could not help being thrilled—despite the fact that she thought she never could be thrilled again. It was the first time in her life she had received American Beauties, and the accompanying note was in tune with the roses.

“Sal will be fretful,” said Jerry; “we’d best get under way before she comes out.”

“Why, where are we going?”

“To find you a singing teacher. Put on your hat and fade away quietly with me.”

There was a pause while Joy put the roses in the umbrella stand, and then the two stole out of the flat and down to the car line.

“Father has the address of a teacher I was to go to, you know,” said Joy.

Jerry threw up her hands, whereat a car stopped and they got on before she could speak. Then she exploded: “Getting the right kind of a singing teacher is more important than a safe doctor! An address that you don’t know anything about may be all right, but the chances are that the person isn’t as good as the one I’ve got lined out for you.”

“You have one all picked out, then?”

“Well, you can try him. Pa Graham is considered pretty good, but you’ll have to see for yourself. _Any_ teacher may be all right for a voice that’s just a voice. But your voice isn’t going to be just a voice. It’s going to be pearls and tears and bliss and agony and all that stuff—if you start on the right road and no one hammers that quality out of you.”

Presently they descended from the car and walked through Beacon Street past innumerable tall, narrowly-wedged-in brown stone houses to one near Dartmouth Street. They were admitted to a tiny waiting room by a colored man-servant, and waited fifteen minutes before a haughty young lady, who, Jerry had whispered, was the occasional accompanist, informed them that Mr. Graham could see them now.

A high, wide room, with busts and pictures and beautiful rugs; two pianos; and Pa Graham standing at one end. The picture was one that Joy was to see so often that it would become a part of her. Just now the picture dissolved as Pa came forward with an old-fashioned bow. A little man, with high forehead and silvery hair well kept on his still gallant head; piercing light eyes which might once have been blue; a little old man who smiled when he bowed. Joy could not respond to the smile; she was going through her first attack of stage fright.

“So you have brought me someone, Jerry,” he was saying in a resonant voice that sounded oddly younger than he. “She is young and beautiful; that adds greatly; others may contradict me at leisure. But let us hear what she can do; after all, one cannot sing with golden hair and azure eyes, although sometimes it comes near to it.” He whirled upon her. “What did you bring?”

Scarlet, she opened her music roll and brought forth the two arias that she had attempted under Miss Bessie’s instruction: “Depuis le Jour,” from Louise, and “Plus Grand Dans Son Obscurité,” from the Queen of Sheba.

“Always they bring grand opera—no matter if they are sixteen or sixty. H’m—one is for a lyric, one for dramatic. Well, I take it you are a soprano, anyway; let us hope so, at least. Come and sing; best get it over with. I am discouraged already. With that face, one cannot expect much else.”

Joy felt what little spirit she had left oozing away. “How could anyone learn anything from a man who said he was discouraged before she had set free a single note?”

The accompanist, with a resigned look that spoke of the thousands of beautiful airs she must have heard suffering, whipped the Louise air to the rack of one of the pianos. This piano was on a raised platform, and Pa Graham motioned to Joy to go and stand by it. As she stumbled up the steps, he went off to the darkness of the other end of the room, and Jerry sat down near by with a reassuring wink.

“Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée . . . L’âme encore grisée De ton premier—baiser!”

Poor Louise with her “soul yet drunk from thy first kiss.” A shiver ran through the words that should have been ecstatic. Joy knew that Louise didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she pulled herself together, floating a long, soft high note that left the air palpitant and hushed. She ought to try to be Louise—but somehow she couldn’t, with that man off in the shadows, and Jerry sitting so near, and such a cross accompanist, and such unpleasant memories disturbing the thought of her song.

As far as interpretive value went, the song was a failure. But the lovely floated high notes, and the golden middle register, led the song through to its soaring climax. Then on the whispered repetition, “je tremble délicieusement,” Joy broke down. She simply could not bring forth another note. The accompanist put in a few chords and stopped: Pa Graham came out of the shadows and walked up to Joy. He took her face in his hands and turned it gently to the window.

“Life and work—those are all you need, my child,” he said. “You are going to learn to sing so that the tears will flow or the smiles will dance, at your will.”

“Then you’re no longer discouraged, Pa?” Jerry demanded triumphantly from her seat.

“I do not know her well enough to say that. The greater a voice, the more work there is to do, to reach the perfection that voice demands. And there is one thing, Louise——Oh, yes, child, I’ll make you into a Louise, and many other things—it is not from lack of voices that there are so few great singers—it is because so few are willing to pay the price—the heartbreak of the years of toil and self-denial.”

Jerry rose, pulling out a box of cigarettes. It had been a great self-restraint on her part not to light up before. “Then you think it would be worth it for her to try?”

“Worth it!” He turned almost fiercely to Joy. “It’s not worth it if the years of labor will not seem pleasure—if you do not enjoy every step along the way.”

Joy felt heady with excitement. Enjoy it? Well—she had never thought so before; but with the wail of a wronged Louise air still in her ears, the magical atmosphere of music, busts, pictures, and the eager faces around her, the voices of her heritage tore her soul with their insistence. Almost as if she were mesmerised, she heard the words leave her lips: “I—would—enjoy—every step along the way.”

And then, with the familiar puffing of Jerry’s cigarette, things seemed to quiet down. The accompanist, wearing a slightly altered demeanour, left the room, and Joy and Pa came down from the platform.

“Your voice is young, of course,” said Pa, “and tender. But it will grow. It is bigger to start with than most, but do not be deceived by its volume and think you are a dramatic soprano. You are a lyric; and you shall learn to sing colorature in golden, matched tones. Just now you have no nasal resonance—and not much point. Don’t believe you can run a scale. But your legato is not bad, your high notes are good. Come to-morrow at this time for your first lesson.”

He bowed them out, and they stood in the little waiting room while Jerry finished her cigarette and threw it away. They did not speak until they were on a street car bound for home. Then Joy asked Jerry what a lyric soprano was.

“Dunno’s I can explain,” said Jerry; “a lyric soprano sings most of the snappy opera—I’ll say you’re in luck. Of course you can do Louise, as he said, and Manon and all the Puccini stuff, and one of your type will sing Rigoletto and Traviata thrown in. Never Aida—that’s for a dramatic and would tear your lungs out. And colorature is super-runs and super-trills—like Melba and Galli-Curci. Do you follow me? If not, I’ll fill in the blanks.”

“Jerry,” she asked timidly, after some minutes had gone by; “how do you know about him? I—I wish you’d tell me a little about yourself.”

Jerry’s red lips took a downward quirk. When she spoke, it was in a queer voice that sagged and paused. “I will, Joy—sometime when I feel like it. I—I really—am going to. I’ll tell you about Pa now, though. He was a big teacher in New York a few years ago, and only came to Boston to retire. He says coming to Boston in itself is retiring—but he still takes a few pupils. He couldn’t live unless he did—it’s been his life for so long, and he’s so bound up in music. I met him first in New York through a friend of mine who was studying with him. I even studied with him myself, until——Oh, yes, I used to do—a lot of singing.”

What had Jerry said at Prom that was faintly reminiscent of this last? “I used to do—a lot of sewing.” And then again: “I used to do—a lot of making-up.” Jerry was what one might call a girl of mystery. The thought was pleasantly exciting. Joy speculated, and silence stayed between them until they descended from the street car in front of the apartment house. A dashing blue Marmon was poised in the road, with Sarah and a youth in the front seat—Sarah now resplendent, cheeks flaring pink under an alluring veil, and dressed in a way to make men look at her and women look at her clothes. She shrieked to them:

“Wigs and Davy just went up to leave a note saying we’d come back—come on—we’re going down the Cape somewhere for luncheon and somewhere else for dinner and somewhere else to dance!”

Joy did not have time to write her father that day—and only barely time the following noon. She found herself started on a round of gaiety which she had never pictured in her most riotous moments, a routine such as she had never dreamed existed outside of fiction—with Jerry and Sarah it was just one youth after another, with an abundance over and to spare, although this abundance was never spared. Continually they streaked around, always making up new things to do, with an airy disregard of selection of hours by day or night. The men who made all this possible were nearly all college boys but not nearly all Harvard. There were New Haven men who “ran up,” and Joy was constantly meeting men from the smaller colleges who had met Jerry and Sarah at house-parties and never failed to call them up when they were in town. There was also another, smaller class, non-college men who seemed to be “men about town.” Joy did not like them as well as the college youths. They lacked the humour for the most part that the college boys possessed to superfluity, and their idea of a good time travelled along fixed and set lines.

Joy welcomed everything with an eager excitement that wore her out more than the steep hours that were taken for granted by Jerry and Sarah. She had been sleeping in Foxhollow Corners all her life—storing up her energy for youth’s playtime; playtime which might never have come if her father had not taken the initiative; playtime which might never have come if somebody had not whistled ragtime on the street. If she was white and tired, she applied Sarah’s rouge with a liberal hand and drank a “prescription” of Sarah’s from the cellarette in the club-room. Jerry objected to these “prescriptions,” but since she drank more than either of them, her word did not carry much weight. Jerry drank as she smoked; thirstily, and in long pulls, like a man who needed it, while Sarah drank and smoked daintily, as a girl does to be devilish.

When finally the answer to her hurried morning’s scrawl came from California, she was thrown into a guilty joy. Evidently her father had not read her letter with care. She had scribbled somewhat incoherently, it was true, of her change in address to the “rooms of two older girls” whom she had met before—but she had honestly not intended that he should misinterpret, or to scrawl so hastily that he would overlook the salient points in the matter. But the fact remained that he had merely made a note of her changed address, as if she had been placed in another Students’ Annex, and then proceeded to the business of the letter, which came to the information that complications would postpone his return for possibly a month longer. Adjuring her to let him know constantly of her health and progress, he was her affectionate father.

There was no seesawing of decisions, no teetering from one course to another when she read that letter. Beneath her relief she might feel guilty, but it was the triumphant guilt as of the stout lady who takes chocolate while sighing “I ought not to take this!” She would stay—for a month longer. And then—then she would see!

Strangely enough, Packy did not appear for a long time after that first day. He called up promptly, and as Jerry had expressed it, “reneged” on his invitation to the ball game. He had invited a girl, Class Day, and it seems, he explained, that one had to take one’s Class Day girl to the game. “Perhaps it’s just as well, though,” he said, “because when I see you, I want to see you, and not necessarily in a howling mob where I might forget and pound you in the frenzy of the moment. I’d much rather pound my Class Day girl!”

When Joy told Jerry, she turned up her snub nose. “I thought he’d give you a rain-check on that. It’s their Commencement game, you see—families thick all round—maybe he got faint at the thought.”

“What do you mean?” Joy had demanded.

Jerry shrugged her shoulders and took another cigarette. “Merely that never in all my intercollegiate activity, have I been asked to a Commencement, or any affair where all the proud families have come to gaze on their angel sons—and neither has Sal—and he probably thought you followed suit!”

Nevertheless, in spite of Packy’s “rain-check,” hardly a day passed without some reminder from him whether it was more flowers or tickets to some show, with always a scrawly note enclosed. Sarah waxed acidulous at these times, but Jerry remained amused.

Her lessons she attended regularly, and found herself an increasing eagerness to do so. There was some sort of fascination in going to the studio and having Pa do things to her voice. Before two weeks had passed it was hard to believe that she had not always been interested in song. Not that there was much song about it. The scales and exercises that Pa made her go through were horrible to her, as they plainly showed the imperfections in her voice. She pled for songs, and he gave her old Italian airs which required even, smooth perfection of tone and discouraged her deeply. And then it was impossible for her to run up and down a scale with any degree of swiftness, and this inability made her almost weep at times.

“Colorature!” she said bitterly to Jerry, one time when Jerry had come in and found her sitting in despair at the piano, her head in her hands. “When I can’t run up and down eight notes without sliding!”

“You’ve got to begin slowly,” said Jerry. “_Walk_ up and down the scale, and when you’ve got it evenly matched and pointed, you’ll run like everything! Good God, Joy, if you get so down-in-the-mouth over a little scale work, what will you do when you get on a trill? I prophesy a nervous decline!”

“But when I hear of Tetrazzini—studied seven months or so——”

“That’s a thing you don’t hear about very many. And anyway, Pa mentioned colorature to you in an unguarded moment. With a lyric, it’s not born, but acquired—these stories about voices that are discovered one day and conquer the world the next, make me laugh.”

One day late in July, Packy finally called her up. He said he wanted to see her at once—to take her to a dance that night, down on the seashore. It happened that both Sarah and Jerry were going out and as Joy for once had not arranged to accompany them, she gladly accepted. Jerry put a few skilful touches to a deep midnight blue satin of Joy’s, and when Joy had supplied her rouge—she had some of her own by this time—the effect was entrancing. Sarah would not wait to greet Packy, still cherishing resentment at his desertion, and so Joy was left alone before he arrived.

He greeted her as if there had been no lapse of time in between, and they went down in the elevator to a waiting closed car.

“Where are we going?” she asked him as he began to fuss with the self-starter.

“Down to one of those summer-hotel dances, where I’m staying. It may be pretty stiff and boring, after Jerry’s parties; but on the other hand the novelty might appeal to you, and I’ve got rather an urge to see you in that sort of a place.”

“It won’t bore me,” said Joy; “you’re not a boring type.”

He laughed. “It’s awful to be in love with you and not know a thing about you. Of course I know you’re Jerry’s pal, and a singer—how did you happen to connect up with Jerry, anyway? Of course, she’s an international character, but——”

“But what?” Joy combatted. “I met her at a Prom. Then when I came to Boston—I looked her up. Staying with her is lots more fun than a boarding-house. Sarah and I don’t get on very well together—but I don’t see her much.”

“H’m.” There was a pause. “H’m—I don’t know just how to take you now. Maybe you like being an enigma. Do you?”

“I suppose every girl likes being _told_ she is an enigma.”

“Well, you are one. I never had any trouble sizing up a girl before—maybe I can’t size you up because I’m in love with you.”

“I wish,” said Joy, irritated, “that you would stop talking about love so—so fluently. I object to taking its name in vain just to make conversation.”

He screeched the horn derisively. “What do you want to talk about? Politics? What do other men talk to you about? The weather? Besides, I really am in love with you. Lord knows I’ve said it enough—and written it—and said it with flowers—I thought I’d paved the way quite neatly!”

“If you think you’re—in love with me—well, you just plain don’t know what love is.”

“Well, do you?” She was silent. “I’ve got my own little working idea that’s large enough for me. I’d show you some of it right now if I didn’t have to drive this car.”

“That isn’t love!” she cried sharply.

“Maybe not the whole of it. I see your point. There are many girls that could get me going without falling for ’em. Sal’s that kind. But there’s something more with you—I’m really interested in you as a person, besides wanting to kiss you and all that.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re interested in me as a person, because you’re not going to kiss me and all that,” Joy retorted.

“Oh yes, I am. Don’t fool yourself.”

“Oh, no, you’re not. Don’t fool yourself.”

The conversation resolved itself into a spirited argument along this theme with variations. An old theme, but one which never fails to keep the debaters keyed to a white-hot pitch of concentration. In this case Joy and Packy were so intent that they nearly passed the Ocean House, the long line of automobiles parked on the shore-drive arresting their attention just in time.

“Well, we can continue this in our next,” said Packy as they climbed out.

Joy had never been in a summer hotel, a fact that she did not tell Packy. There was an assortment of all ages in the ball room, with a predominance of the “younger set.” Pretty girls with healthily-flushed or tanned faces and sunburnt necks which ended before their evening gowns began, spoke to Packy as they whirled by on the arms of equally tanned youths, and looked wonderingly at Joy, whose white skin proclaimed her no member of the summer band. She watched the dancers over his shoulder. The young girls all seemed so wholesome—as innocent and adorable as kittens——

“You’re not peeved, are you, Joy?” asked Packy. “You haven’t spoken a word since we got on the floor.”

“I was thinking about something else,” she said—marking the close scrutiny bent on her by an older woman sitting on the side lines. She was rather an attractive woman—but her eyes were chill, and they rested on Joy as if there was something wrong with her. It was the Boston frigidity she had heard so much about, she supposed.

The music stopped, and he led her across the floor. “The girls are losing an eye on you,” he said, “so I might as well satisfy them first as last.” They went to a corner where two sunburned couples were seeing which could hang out of the window the farthest, and he effected a somewhat informal introduction.

“Come in out of the night, Betty Grey,” he added as one of the girls was still hanging over the sill and shrieking back that she had won—“here’s a singer—you’re always saying you never meet any interesting people.”

The waving feet righted themselves, and a brown, eager face turned to Joy. “Oh, are you _really_ a singer?” Betty cried breathlessly. “That’s what’s been the dream of my life—to be a singer—but I can’t even keep on the key! What do you sing?”

“Nothing, yet,” said Joy; “I’m just studying.”

“You ought to hear her sing,” put in Packy. “She’s got everyone I ever heard surrounded.”

Betty fairly wriggled with excitement. “I _must_ hear you! When will you sing for me?”

Joy had no time to expostulate, as the music struck up again and Packy whirled her off.

“Betty’s a crazy kid,” said Packy paternally. “Seems to me a girl between sixteen and eighteen has got absolutely no sense at all. I like ’em when they’ve had enough experience to—well, to be interesting.”

“How much experience does it take to make a girl interesting?” Joy asked.