Part 27

So they talked, rather stupidly, fencing with each other, making no progress. It was clear that Sabine had not called at such an hour simply through politeness, nor was it likely that she called because she sought to renew an old acquaintance. Both women were too intelligent to have misunderstood each other. As for Ellen, she found herself excited by the consciousness of a shadowy struggle; there was a devilish satisfaction in finding herself with an advantage over so experienced a woman as Sabine. The visitor wanted something; beneath all her indifference, she was clearly excited and nervous. Once Ellen caught her pulling a button from her gray gloves.

It occurred to her suddenly to be bold and strike at what might be the root of the matter.

“How is Mr. Callendar?” she asked, amused at the thought of speaking thus of him.

“He is well,” Sabine replied with a terrible quietness, and then, after a little pause. “Do you see him frequently?”

For an instant Ellen was very near to losing her temper, a thing she might easily have done now that she found herself a match for Sabine. But she did not; instead she waited and said, “What do you mean? How could I have seen him? I have not seen him since I came to Paris.”

The answer was so honest, so obviously true, that even Sabine was discountenanced. She looked at the floor and murmured, “I didn’t know. I thought perhaps you had.”

“Why didn’t you ask him?” suggested Ellen.

“It would have done no good. Besides he would have thought me jealous.” There was something pitiful in the terrible control exercised by the woman. Even Ellen forgot suddenly the strange sense of enmity. She kept silent and it was Sabine who spoke.

“Besides,” she said. “You never spoke of him or of Mrs. Callendar to Madame de Cyon. That made me think you might have seen him.”

“It would only have made complications,” replied Ellen. “If you knew Madame de Cyon, you would understand.” Her voice suddenly grew cold. “Did you think,” she asked, “that he had brought me to Paris? Did you think I was carrying on an affair ... secretly?”

The more they talked, the clearer grew the likeness of the one to the other. They were in both the same restraint, the same watchfulness, the same determination that the world should not hurt her.

When Ellen looked at her visitor again she saw that she had been weeping, silently; she was putting a handkerchief, stealthily, to her eyes, ashamed clearly that she should have so revealed her unhappiness.

“I have been wretched all day,” she said. “You see little Thérèse and I ... that’s my little daughter, she’s three years old ... found a starving kitten yesterday. It had fleas and we washed it with carbolic soap. It’s sick. I’m afraid we’ve hurt it and it may die. Little Thérèse is very fond of it.”

Then, quite silently, the tears began to stream down her face. It was the only sign she gave. She did not sob. Her hands did not tremble. She simply wept.

It was a terrible sight, because Ellen understood plainly that the kitten had nothing to do with the tears.

* * * * *

Presently, after she had had a glass of port, Sabine took Ellen’s hand and murmured, “You must forgive me. I was spiteful and rude ... and unjust too. But you see there were so many things. You knew my husband a little, so you can guess perhaps something of the story.”

Then pressing her hand to her head, she was silent for a time. “You see I have had a child ... a daughter ... and I can never have another. Mrs. Callendar and Richard want a son ... I know that.... The old woman wants some one to care for all her money. You see, he’s no good at it. They’ve never said anything, but I know she wants me to divorce him so that he can marry again. I can feel all their will working against me.... It’s horrible. It’s sinister. It’s always concealed by smiles and smooth words. I can’t do that.... I can’t.... Not yet ... perhaps some day.” The tears began to flow again, for even Sabine could not keep from pitying herself. “And I know there are other women.... I think I am a little mad to behave in this fashion ... to come to you, like this.” She coughed nervously. “You were always so strong and so independent. So was I ... once.”

She rose and dried her eyes and powdered her nose. “Now,” she said, “I look presentable again.” Then she took Ellen’s hand and murmured: “You’ll forgive me, won’t you? I’ve been a fool.... And you’ll say nothing?”

Ellen moved with her toward the long stairs that led up to the door opening upon the street. Together they climbed them, quite close to each other in the friendliest fashion, and from the doorway Ellen watched her, composed once more, chic and worldly, step into her tiny motor and drive away.

As she turned from the door and descended the stairs, it occurred to her suddenly that save for chance she might have been the unhappy woman entering the motor. It was amazing what Callendar had done to Sabine. Last night she had been envying her, and to-day Sabine had come to her almost, one might say, seeking help.... Sabine who had been so cold and impregnable and aloof.

And in a strange way, in spite even of Sabine’s insults, she had given her sympathy. It was as if they had, tacitly, become allies in the battle against him.

45

Aunt Lina did not interrupt the plans, for she spent only two weeks in Paris and left declaring that it had changed for the worse during the twenty-five years that had passed since her last visit. The new houses looked just like the houses in Vienna; her friends had died or gone away; in fact she could see no reason at all for ever having left Vienna. So Rebecca went over to London to make the arrangements and Schneidermann did what he could in Paris.

Between them, they set in motion a caravan of gossip and small talk which found its way through devious channels into Berlin, Munich, London, Rome and New York. Sometimes news of this new pianist (who was so remarkable) was carried by word of mouth; sometimes it was relayed by letter to the members of Rebecca’s tribe scattered across the face of Europe. After a conference in the Rue Raynouard, attended by Lily, Schneidermann, Rebecca, Ellen and César (who took part resentfully until it occurred to him that if Ellen could be made famous he might be free of her forever), a name was chosen. “Ellen Tolliver” was commonplace and carried no implications that were not solid, respectable and bourgeois. The name which emerged after three hours of frantic argument was “Lilli Barr,” a name compounded out of Lily’s name and the name of old Jacob Barr ... a name that might be anything, a name that had a slight turn toward the Hungarian, a name that was abundant of implications. A musician called Lilli Barr could have no past that was not glamorous and romantic; and between them, Rebecca and Schneidermann proceeded to invent just such a past by creating out of nothing the most amazing tales.

In all the hubbub and preparations Sabine was forgotten, but the memory of Callendar remained. Ellen, now Lilli Barr, prayed that he might reappear for just one night.

The success of the concert in Wigmore Street is now a part of musical history. In London Rebecca drafted the services of an immense family connection; fully one half the seats were taken by Bettelheims, Rakonitzes, Czelovars, Schönbergs and Abramsons; there were even one or two Rothschilds present in a box. Schneidermann recruited another group, less numerous but more cynical and hostile, from the musical world. Pictures of Lilli Barr (who photographed splendidly) appeared in the illustrated papers, and the critics, instead of sending their second or third assistants to the concert, appeared in person.

It was all admirably managed. The shrewd brain of Rebecca forgot nothing. In those busy days the friendly little Jewess with the red hair and ferrety eyes stood forth for the first time in all the glory of her rôle as impresaria; and when the concert was over and the notices read, it was clear that she had been right in the instinct that had led her to speak to the pale, disagreeable girl in black who had paced the deck of the _City of Paris_ five years before. Rebecca had loved music always; she had wished earnestly all her life to be an artist of one sort or another; she had spent years in rushing madly from one capital to another in search of diversion or occupation, and now she was settled. She had found her place as “the exploitress,” as Schneidermann expressed it, of Lilli Barr, the new star upon the horizon of music.

But there was one thing of which Rebecca knew nothing and which Ellen chose to keep a secret because it could have been of interest to none save herself. After she had played the first group on her program and returned to the platform in response to the applause, she caught a glimpse among the shadows in the back of the hall of a dark, familiar face. It astonished her that she should have noticed it at all, and once she had seen it, the rest of the audience failed to trouble her; it no longer had any existence. From that moment there had been a strange lift apparent in her music, a wild sort of ecstasy which carried every one with it. She played for one person. Among the shadows at the back of the hall Callendar sat, listening, his dark sleek head bent forward a little. He was alone.

It was Rebecca who saw to it, in the months which followed, that Ellen was seen at the proper places, dressed with just a touch of fantasy so that she might attract notice and yet not be taken for a demi-mondaine; it was Rebecca who saw to it that Ellen’s fierce dark beauty (so confident now in her triumph so arrogant) was set down for posterity by the most fashionable portrait painter in England, a man with a romantic reputation whom the gullible public would in time connect with Lilli Barr in some hazy intrigue which had never existed. It was Rebecca who saw to it that Ellen was photographed beside this composer and that one, and that the photographs, skilfully made with an eye to public attention, fell into proper hands and traveled to America where they looked forth from the pages of the Sunday supplements into the startled, proud faces of Charles and Hattie Tolliver and Fergus and Robert. They even found their way, after the rest of the family had exhausted the possibilities of the papers, into the cell of Gramp Tolliver who chuckled with wicked satisfaction over the spectacle of the ruthless granddaughter who had, after all, escaped.

And they found their way back to the Town where Mrs. Herman Biggs (née Seton and now the mother of three children) clipped them and showed them to the neighbors and to her brother Jimmy, a spindly, nervous youth of nineteen, who in his childhood had been honored more than once by cuffs from the hands of Lilli Barr which the newspapers said (via Miss Schönberg) were insured for one hundred thousand dollars.

In her boarding house, Cousin Eva Barr, last of the family, dominated the greasy meals for more than a week by the stories of the childhood of Lilli Barr. Under the spell of the reflected glamour, she forgot even the charities she administered so grimly, and spent most of her day at meetings and walking along streets where she would be likely to encounter people who would ask about her cousin. For in all the excitement, it seemed that in some way she herself had at last escaped the tradition that made a vigorous, unmarried woman into a grim, forbidding dreadnought.

Miss Ogilvie too shared the triumph though in a different fashion. It was she, after all, who had discovered Lilli Barr; but it was not this which warmed her fluttering heart so much as the old secret of the missing five hours, which even now she shared with no one. It was Miss Ogilvie--poor, timid, Miss Ogilvie--trapped like Cousin Eva Barr in the tradition of an earlier generation, who had helped this Lilli Barr to escape. And in her thoughts (she being a sentimental creature and knowing nothing of the truth) the little parlor took on a new glow of romance and glamour. At times, when her secret seemed almost too difficult to keep, she fancied that some day, after she herself was dead, they might place on the front of her house a little tablet with an inscription which read, “It was from this house on the Fifth of January, 1903, that Lilli Barr (then Ellen Tolliver) eloped ... etc. etc.”

* * * * *

So, in the first years of her fame, Ellen remained a little dazed by her success. She moved, terrified always on the eve of a concert, going between concerts her hard-working, secretive way, so that there grew up about her, in addition to all Rebecca’s marvelous lies, a legend of mystery. Few people knew her or anything at all of her real life. There were only the gaudy stories of Rebecca’s fabrication which people believed and yet did not believe because there were so many of them and they were all so conflicting. In place of the old coldness and restraint, which melted only when Ellen’s fingers touched the keyboard of a Bechstein or a Steinway, Rebecca managed to create such a sense of splendor and unmorality that presently the newspapers, as old Sanson had done long ago, came to speak of her as a second Teresa Carreño.

She caught too from Rebecca something of the latter’s contagious sense of showmanship and came to understand presently that if one wished to be sensationally successful it was necessary not only to be a fine musician but something of a charlatan as well. She learned not simply to walk out upon the platform; she made an entrance. In Paris, where Rebecca managed to buy up most of the press, she had a great following. Women came to the concerts for no other reason than to see her clothes and to study the youthful perfection of her figure.

Success and triumph flared up in her path in whatever direction she turned, yet there were times when the old doubts, the old self-reproach, assailed her bitterly.

One night, as she left the Salle Gaveau after a concert, and stood waiting with Rebecca for Schneidermann’s motor to come up, the sight of an _affiche_ bearing the name LILLI BARR in great letters filled her with a kind of terror. Silently she gazed at it, fascinated by the name and the program in small letters beneath it ... Bach, Schumann, Moussorgsky, Chopin, Debussy ... all the great names dwarfed beneath the gigantic LILLI BARR. She knew that on the sidewalk, almost within arm’s length of her, there stood students, hungry and a little threadbare, who waited by the door to catch a glimpse of her as she left the hall. She knew that this Lilli Barr, whose name was set forth in letters so gigantic, had every reason to be content. Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr.... She stared at the name with a curious sensation of strangeness, of detachment. Lilli Barr was herself now, and Ellen Tolliver was dead, swallowed up by a fantastic creature whom Rebecca and Schneidermann between them had created. To the world Ellen Tolliver had no existence; she had never lived at all, and she had now to play a rôle--to put on a false face--that the world might not discover it had been deceived. She was still playing the mountebank, the charlatan, as she had done in the drawing-room on Murray Hill behind a painted screen with a Russian tenor and a Javanese dancer. For a moment she hated Lilli Barr with a passionate hatred. She had lost possession forever of Ellen Tolliver. In the midst of her pride there had always been the grain of humility, fiercely hidden from the world, which made her in spite of everything an artist.

The voice of Rebecca, shrewd and sleek with her success as an “exploitress,” sounded in her ear.

“Here’s the motor.... We’ll be late and the others will have arrived without you.” (Always hustling ... Rebecca ... always pushing from one thing to another.)

César, for all his hopes, had not yet lost her. At that very moment the house in the Rue Raynouard was filled with people whom Schneidermann and Rebecca had called in ... actresses, writers, rich bankers with a fancy for art, musicians, perhaps even a demi-mondaine or two ... all the rag, tag and bobtail gathered from a dozen cities of Europe. What was she doing among them? She? Ellen Tolliver? Had she lost possession of herself?--that precious self she had guarded always with such secrecy?

It was not Ellen Tolliver who was going to this noisy party. It was Lilli Barr, a creature who had been made out of nothing. Ellen Tolliver would have gone to her room and wept a little over her loneliness.

The voice of Rebecca again....

“Ravel is coming to-night. He wants to speak with you about the new suite he has done.... It is important. Be nice to him.”

It was all a long way from Walker’s Pond.

* * * * *

For two years she lived, thus, almost in public, sustained always by the glorious vitality descended to her from Hattie Tolliver and guided by Rebecca who allowed her to miss no opportunity. She was tireless. She appeared everywhere. Yet there was a remoteness about her which none penetrated, save perhaps Callendar whose dark face appeared now and then in the back of some concert hall, now in Paris, now in London, now in Rome, wherever his path chanced to cross that of Lilli Barr. Sometimes as she came upon the stage she caught a fleeting glimpse of him, watching her as he had watched on that first awful evening in Wigmore Street, when so much had hung in the balance. He was always alone.

During the second summer she set out with Rebecca to visit Vienna and exploit Aunt Lina and her friends, and to play in Salzburg; but they never arrived, for on the day they left Paris the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Serajevo.

On the same day Fergus sailed for London.

46

It was Fergus who first called Gramp The Everlasting. The name was not original; he found it in one of the seed catalogues which his father brought into the apartment; for Charles Tolliver, shut up all day in a government office and all night in a city flat, led vicariously a life which in happier times had been a reality. The living room was cluttered with the catalogues of gardening houses and journals which dealt with agriculture, stock breeding and horses. The outward life of the gentle man was scarcely more than an illusion; a man with Charles Tolliver’s face and dressed in Charles Tolliver’s clothes lived at an address in the east Seventies of New York City; the same man worked at the Customs House, eating his lunch modestly in one of the little restaurants where Clarence and Mr. Wyck had once taken their gloomy meals. But the real Charles Tolliver was not to be found in any of these places. He lived perpetually among the farms of a county in the Midlands, or in the hotel bars and parlors of the Town, talking endlessly of the Grand Circuit races. And sometimes he was to be found seated with a fishing rod on the banks of a clear stream a thousand miles from the greasy current of the North River. When he was not in such places, he could be found among the catalogues which displayed gay colored pictures of gigantic beets and ears of sweet corn, or in the pages of journals which had splendid pictures of prize cows and great herds of cattle grazing knee deep in alfalfa. Sometimes he found pictures of his old friend Judge Wilkins’ prize shorthorns and on such occasions he grew sentimental and talked of the county as an old man talks of the love affairs of his youth. One would have thought that the triumph of each new blue ribbon won by Judge Wilkins’ prize bull, Herkimer Sextant, was a personal triumph of Charles Tolliver. The city had for him no reality; it was a dreary episode, a nightmare from which he would in time awake as he awaked reluctantly from the pleasant dreams he had when, carefully tucked in on the divan by Hattie’s capable hand, he escaped for a little while from the ugliness of the hard, unreal city. Since he had come from the Town, the habit of sleep had grown upon him: it was a drug ... hashish or opium.

It was in one of his garden catalogues that Fergus found the name. Seizing the booklet in hilarious triumph, he bore it to his mother and, holding it open, he showed her a large picture in color of a gigantic raspberry advertised as bearing throughout the season. Underneath in bold letters there stood forth in an amazing coincidence the name--TOLLIVER’S EVERLASTING. The name stuck and from then on the family referred to Gramp with humorous disrespect by that name. At length the old man himself overheard it and was delighted. He resolved then to see his hundredth birthday. In the solitude of his room, he felt amazingly brittle and young. Time rushed past him; tremendous things happened to the family, but he remained passive, unchanged because he had no emotions left to exhaust him.

* * * * *

The war that trapped Ellen and Rebecca Schönberg somewhere in the neighborhood of Trieste dawned upon the Tollivers in the most conventional fashion. At first they talked of it as impossible and absurd, and for the first time in years Gramp emerged from his seclusion to discuss with Robert (for whom he had an intense dislike) the Siege of Paris, which he had lived through in his youth. Indeed his interest attained such a magnitude that he very nearly revealed a secret hope that one day he might be taken, a millstone about his daughter-in-law’s neck, back to the city where he had spent what she would have called “a profligate youth.” But he took care not to mention the wish for fear that Hattie, in revenge for so many defeats over so many years, would do all in her power to thwart it. At ninety he wanted to see Paris again. He developed a passion for the military maps which appeared in the newspapers and used up all the pins in the house tracing the advance of the Germans toward the Marne.

As for Hattie, she gave small heed to his eccentricities, for she was occupied with other things. Her son, her best-beloved, was in England; she could not trust him. He might join in the war. She knew him well enough to know that he would not stop to weigh the chances of death; such a spectacle would fascinate him. And she knew that her daughter, in the company of an unearthly creature called Rebecca Schönberg (whom she had come to regard darkly as a sort of procuress), was lost somewhere in Austria. Until now, these foreign nations had meant little to her save that they were in the part of the world from which came the hordes of aliens who jostled her in the street. But now all was changed; a great war was no longer a distant affair to be treated with indifference. Her children were involved. She fancied Fergus already ill and wounded. She saw Ellen taken for a spy and immured in the sort of a dungeon one saw in the lurid pictures of the Sunday papers.

The news that came at last into the midst of her frantic anxiety brought her no peace. The two letters arrived by the same mail. The one from Fergus contained the information that he had gone to France, that vaguely he was trying to find a place where he might see the war. He was all right, he wrote. She must remember his excellent luck. It was all terrible, tragic, incredible ... the sights he had already seen, the things he had already heard. Yet it was magnificent too; somehow between the lines of a letter which he had meant to be reassuring and a little cold, she caught a sense of his reckless enthusiasm. She understood that he saw the war as a great spectacle. She remembered him as a little boy, wild with excitement at the glitter and pomp of a circus parade, intoxicated by the splendor, captured by the romance.