Chapter 12

Mildred looked at him; he looked at her. Her lip trembled, the hot tears flooded and blinded her eyes. She went unsteadily to the music-stand and tried to see the notes of the exercises. Jennings closed the door and seated himself at the far end of the room. She began--a ridiculous attempt. She stopped, gritted her teeth, began again. Once more the result was absurd; but this time she was able to keep on, not improving, but maintaining her initial off-key quavering. She stopped.

"You see," said she. "Shall I go on?"

"Don't stop again until I tell you to, please," said he.

She staggered and stumbled and somersaulted through two pages of DO-RE-ME-FA-SOL-LA-SI. Then he held up his finger.

"Enough," said he.

Silence, an awful silence. She recalled what Mrs. Belloc had told her about him, what Mrs. Brindley had implied. But she got no consolation. She said timidly:

"Really, Mr. Jennings, I can do better than that. Won't you let me try a song?"

"God forbid!" said he. "You can't stand. You can't breathe. You can't open your mouth. Naturally, you can't sing."

She dropped to a chair.

"Take the book, and go over the same thing, sitting," said he.

She began to remove her wraps.

"Just as you are," he commanded. "Try to forget yourself. Try to forget me. Try to forget what a brute I am, and what a wonderful singer you are. Just open your mouth and throw the notes out."

She was rosy with rage. She was reckless. She sang. At the end of three pages he stopped her with an enthusiastic hand-clapping. "Good! Good!" he cried. "I'll take you. I'll make a singer of you. Yes, yes, there's something to work on."

The door opened. A tall, thin woman with many jewels and a superb fur wrap came gliding in. Jennings looked at the clock. The hands pointed to eleven. Said he to Mildred:

"Take that book with you. Practice what you've done to-day. Learn to keep your mouth open. We'll go into that further next time." He was holding the door open for her. As she passed out, she heard him say:

"Ah, Mrs. Roswell. We'll go at that third song first."

The door closed. Reviewing all that had occurred, Mildred decided that she must revise her opinion of Jennings. A money-maker he no doubt was. And why not? Did he not have to live? But a teacher also, and a great teacher. Had he not destroyed her vanity at one blow, demolished it?--yet without discouraging her. And he went straight to the bottom of things--very different from any of the teachers she used to have when she was posing in drawing-rooms as a person with a voice equal to the most difficult opera, if only she weren't a lady and therefore not forced to be a professional singing person. Yes, a great teacher--and in deadly earnest. He would permit no trifling! How she would have to work!

And she went to work with an energy she would not have believed she possessed. He instructed her minutely in how to stand, in how to breathe, in how to open her mouth and keep it open, in how to relax her throat and leave it relaxed. He filled every second of her half-hour; she had never before realized how much time half an hour was, how use could be made of every one of its eighteen hundred seconds. She went to hear other teachers give lessons, and she understood why Jennings could get such prices, could treat his pupils as he saw fit. She became an extravagant admirer of him as a teacher, thought him a genius, felt confident that he would make a great singer of her. With the second lesson she began to progress rapidly. In a few weeks she amazed herself. At last she was really singing. Not in a great way, but in the beginnings of a great way. Her voice had many times the power of her drawing-room days. Her notes were full and round, and came without an effort. Her former ideas of what constituted facial and vocal expression now seemed ridiculous to her. She was now singing without making those dreadful faces which she had once thought charming and necessary. Her lower register, always her best, was almost perfect. Her middle register--the test part of a voice--was showing signs of strength and steadiness and evenness. And she was fast getting a real upper register, as distinguished from the forced and shrieky high notes that pass as an upper register with most singers, even opera singers. After a month of this marvelous forward march, she sang for Mrs. Brindley--sang the same song she had essayed at their first meeting. When she finished, Mrs. Brindley said:

"Yes, you've done wonders. I've been noticing your improvement as you practiced. You certainly have a very different voice and method from those you had a month ago," and so on through about five minutes of critical and discriminating praise.

Mildred listened, wondering why her dissatisfaction, her irritation, increased as Mrs. Brindley praised on and on. Beyond question Cyrilla was sincere, and was saying even more than Mildred had hoped she would say. Yet-- Mildred sat moodily measuring off octaves on the keyboard of the piano. If she had been looking at her friend's face she would have flared out in anger; for Cyrilla Brindley was taking advantage of her abstraction to observe her with friendly sympathy and sadness. Presently she concealed this candid expression and said:

"You are satisfied with your progress, aren't you, Miss Stevens?"

Mildred flared up angrily. "Certainly!" replied she. "How could I fail to be?"

Mrs. Brindley did not answer--perhaps because she thought no answer was needed or expected. But to Mildred her silence somehow seemed a denial.

"If you can only keep what you've got--and go on," said Mrs. Brindley.

"Oh, I shall, never fear," retorted Mildred.

"But I do fear," said Mrs. Brindley. "I think it's always well to fear until success is actually won. And then there's the awful fear of not being able to hold it."

After a moment's silence Mildred, who could not hide away resentment against one she liked, said: "Why aren't YOU satisfied, Mrs. Brindley?"

"But I am satisfied," protested Cyrilla. "Only it makes me afraid to see YOU so well satisfied. I've seen that often in people first starting, and it's always dangerous. You see, my dear, you've got a straight-away hundred miles to walk. Can't you see that it would be possible for you to become too much elated by the way you walked the first part of the first mile?"

"Why do you try to discourage me?" said Mildred.

Mrs. Brindley colored. "I do it because I want to save you from despair a little later," said she. "But that is foolish of me. I shall only irritate you against me. I'll not do it again. And please don't ask my opinion. If you do, I can't help showing exactly what I think."

"Then you don't think I've done well?" cried Mildred.

"Indeed you have," replied Cyrilla warmly.

"Then I don't understand. What DO you mean?"

"I'll tell you, and then I'll stop and you must not ask my opinion again. We live too close together to be able to afford to criticize each other. What I meant was this: You have done well the first part of the great task that's before you. If you had done it any less well, it would have been folly for you to go on."

"That is, what I've done doesn't amount to anything? Mr. Jennings doesn't agree with you."

"Doubtless he's right," said Mrs. Brindley. "At any rate, we all agree that you have shown that you have a voice."

She said this so simply and heartily that Mildred could not but be mollified. Mrs. Brindley changed the subject to the song Mildred had sung, and Mildred stopped puzzling over the mystery of what she had meant by her apparently enthusiastic words, which had yet diffused a chill atmosphere of doubt.

She was doing her scales so well that she became impatient of such "tiresome child's play." And presently Jennings gave her songs, and did not discourage her when she talked of roles, of getting seriously at what, after all, she intended to do. Then there came a week of vile weather, and Mildred caught a cold. She neglected it. Her voice left her. Her tonsils swelled. She had a bad attack of ulcerated sore throat. For nearly three weeks she could not take a single one of the lessons, which were, nevertheless, paid for. Jennings rebuked her sharply.

"A singer has no right to be sick," said he.

"You have a cold yourself," retorted she.

"But I am not a singer. I've nothing that interferes with my work."

"It's impossible not to take cold," said Mildred. "You are unreasonable with me."

He shrugged his shoulders. "Go get well," he said.

The sore throat finally yielded to the treatment of Dr. Hicks, the throat-specialist. His bill was seventy-five dollars. But while the swelling in the tonsils subsided it did not depart. She could take lessons again. Some days she sang as well as ever, and on those days Jennings was charming. Other days she sang atrociously, and Jennings treated her as if she were doing it deliberately. A third and worse state was that of the days when she in the same half-hour alternately sang well and badly. On those days Jennings acted like a lunatic. He raved up and down the studio, all but swearing at her. At first she was afraid of him--withered under his scorn, feared he would throw open his door and order her out and forbid her ever to enter again. But gradually she came to understand him--not enough to lose her fear of him altogether, but enough to lose the fear of his giving up so profitable a pupil.

The truth was that Jennings, like every man who succeeds at anything in this world, operated upon a system to which he rigidly adhered. He was a man of small talent and knowledge, but of great, persistence and not a little common sense. He had tried to be a singer, had failed because his voice was small and unreliable. He had adopted teaching singing as a means of getting a living. He had learned just enough about it to enable him to teach the technical elements--what is set down in the books. By observing other and older teachers he had got together a teaching system that was as good--and as bad--as any, and this he dubbed the Jennings Method and proceeded to exploit as the only one worth while. When that method was worked out and perfected, he ceased learning, ceased to give a thought to the professional side of his profession, just as most professional men do. He would have resented a suggestion or a new idea as an attack upon the Jennings Method. The overwhelming majority of the human race--indeed, all but a small handful--have this passion for stagnation, this ferocity against change. It is in large part due to laziness; for a new idea means work in learning it and in unlearning the old ideas that have been true until the unwelcome advent of the new. In part also this resistance to the new idea arises from a fear that the new idea, if tolerated, will put one out of business, will set him adrift without any means of support. The coachman hates the automobile, the hand-worker hates the machine, the orthodox preacher hates the heretic, the politician hates the reformer, the doctor hates the bacteriologist and the chemist, the old woman hates the new--all these in varying proportions according to the degree in which the iconoclast attacks laziness or livelihood. Finally we all hate any and all new ideas because they seem to imply that we, who have held the old ideas, have been ignorant and stupid in so doing. A new idea is an attack upon the vanity of everyone who has been a partisan of the old ideas and their established order.

Jennings, thoroughly human in thus closing his mind to all ideas about his profession, was equally human in that he had his mind and his senses opened full width to ideas on how to make more money. If there had been money in new ideas about teaching singing Jennings would not have closed to them. But the money was all in studying and learning how better to handle the women--they were all women who came to him for instruction. His common sense warned him at the outset that the obviously easygoing teacher would not long retain his pupils. On the other hand, he saw that the really severe teacher would not retain his pupils, either.

Who were these pupils? In the first place, they were all ignorant, for people who already know do not go to school to learn. They had the universal delusion that a teacher can teach. The fact is that a teacher is a well. Some wells are full, others almost dry. Some are so arranged that water cannot be got from them, others have attachments of various kinds, making the drawing of water more or less easy. But not from the best well with the latest pump attachment can one get a drink unless one does the drinking oneself. A teacher is rarely a well. The pupil must not only draw the water, but also drink it, must not only teach himself, but also learn what he teaches. Now we are all of us born thirsty for knowledge, and nearly all of us are born both capable of teaching ourselves and capable of learning what we teach, that is, of retaining and assimilating it. There is such a thing as artificially feeding the mind, just as there is such a thing as artificially feeding the body; but while everyone knows that artificial feeding of the body is a success only to a limited extent and for a brief period, everyone believes that the artificial feeding of the mind is not only the best method, but the only method. Nor does the discovery that the mind is simply the brain, is simply a part of the body, subject to the body's laws, seem materially to have lessened this fatuous delusion.

Some of Jennings's pupils--not more than two of the forty-odd were in genuine earnest; that is, those two were educating themselves to be professional singers, were determined so to be, had limited time and means and endless capacity for work. Others of the forty--about half-thought they were serious, though in fact the idea of a career was more or less hazy. They were simply taking lessons and toiling aimlessly along, not less aimlessly because they indulged in vague talk and vaguer thought about a career. The rest--the other half of the forty--were amusing themselves by taking singing lessons. It killed time, it gave them a feeling of doing something, it gave them a reputation of being serious people and not mere idlers, it gave them an excuse for neglecting the domestic duties which they regarded as degrading--probably because to do them well requires study and earnest, hard work. The Jennings singing lesson, at fifteen dollars a half-hour, was rather an expensive hypocrisy; but the women who used it as a cloak for idleness as utter as the mere yawners and bridgers and shoppers had rich husbands or fathers.

Thus it appears that the Jennings School was a perfect microcosm, as the scientists would say, of the human race--the serious very few, toiling more or less successfully toward a definite goal; the many, compelled to do something, and imagining themselves serious and purposeful as they toiled along toward nothing in particular but the next lesson--that is, the next day's appointed task; the utterly idle, fancying themselves busy and important when in truth they were simply a fraud and an expense.

Jennings got very little from the deeply and genuinely serious. One of them he taught free, taking promissory notes for the lessons. But he held on to them because when they finally did teach themselves to sing and arrived at fame, his would be part of the glory--and glory meant more and more pupils of the paying kinds. His large income came from the other two kinds of pupils, the larger part of it from the kind that had no seriousness in them. His problem was how to keep all these paying pupils and also keep his reputation as a teacher. In solving that problem he evolved a method that was the true Jennings's method. Not in all New York, filled as it is with people living and living well upon the manipulation of the weaknesses of their fellow beings--not in all New York was there an adroiter manipulator than Eugene Jennings. He was harsh to brutality when he saw fit to be so--or, rather, when he deemed it wise to be so. Yet never had he lost a paying pupil through his harshness. These were fashionable women--most delicate, sensitive ladies--at whom he swore. They wept, stayed on, advertised him as a "wonderful serious teacher who won't stand any nonsense and doesn't care a hang whether you stay or go--and he can teach absolutely anybody to sing!" He knew how to be gentle without seeming to be so; he knew how to flatter without uttering a single word that did not seem to be reluctant praise or savage criticism; he knew how to make a lady with a little voice work enough to make a showing that would spur her to keep on and on with him; he knew how to encourage a rich woman with no more song than a peacock until she would come to him three times a week for many years--and how he did make her pay for what he suffered in listening to the hideous squawkings and yelpings she inflicted upon him!

Did Jennings think himself a fraud? No more than the next human being who lives by fraud. Is there any trade or profession whose practitioners, in the bottom of their hearts, do not think they are living excusably and perhaps creditably? The Jennings theory was that he was a great teacher; that there were only a very few serious and worth-while seekers of the singing art; that in order to live and to teach these few, he had to receive the others; that, anyhow, singing was a fine art for anyone to have and taking singing lessons made the worst voice a little less bad--or, at the least, singing was splendid for the health. One of his favorite dicta was, "Every child should be taught singing--for its health, if for nothing else." And perhaps he was right! At any rate, he made his forty to fifty thousand a year--and on days when he had a succession of the noisy, tuneless squawkers, he felt that he more than earned every cent of it.

Mildred did not penetrate far into the secret of the money-making branch of the Jennings method. It was crude enough, too. But are not all the frauds that fool the human race crude? Human beings both cannot and will not look beneath surfaces. All Mildred learned was that Jennings did not give up paying pupils. She had not confidence enough in this discovery to put it to the test. She did not dare disobey him or shirk--even when she was most disposed to do so. But gradually she ceased from that intense application she had at first brought to her work. She kept up the forms. She learned her lessons. She did all that was asked. She seemed to be toiling as in the beginning. In reality, she became by the middle of spring a mere lesson-taker. Her interest in clothes and in going about revived. She saw in the newspapers that General Siddall had taken a party of friends on a yachting trip around the world, so she felt that she was no longer being searched for, at least not vigorously. She became acquainted with smart, rich West Side women, taking lessons at Jennings's. She amused herself going about with them and with the "musical" men they attracted--amateur and semi-professional singers and players upon instruments. She drew Mrs. Brindley into their society. They had little parties at the flat in Fifty-ninth Street--the most delightful little parties imaginable--dinners and suppers, music, clever conversations, flirtations of a harmless but fascinating kind. If anyone had accused Mildred of neglecting her work, of forgetting her career, she would have grown indignant, and if Mrs. Brindley had overheard, she would have been indignant for her. Mildred worked as much as ever. She was making excellent progress. She was doing all that could be done. It takes time to develop a voice, to make an opera-singer. Forcing is dangerous, when it is not downright useless.

In May--toward the end of the month--Stanley Baird returned. Mildred, who happened to be in unusually good voice that day, sang for him at the Jennings studio, and he was enchanted. As the last note died away he cried out to Jennings:

"She's a wonder, isn't she?"

Jennings nodded. "She's got a voice," said he.

"She ought to go on next year."

"Not quite that," said Jennings. "We want to get that upper register right first. And it's a young voice--she's very young for her age. We must be careful not to strain it."

"Why, what's a voice for if not to sing with?" said Stanley.

"A fine voice is a very delicate instrument," replied the teacher. He added coldly, "You must let me judge as to what shall be done."

"Certainly, certainly," said Stanley in haste.

"She's had several colds this winter and spring," pursued Jennings. "Those things are dangerous until the voice has its full growth. She should have two months' complete rest."

Jennings was going away for a two months' vacation. He was giving this advice to all his pupils.

"You're right," said Baird. "Did you hear, Mildred?"

"But I hate to stop work," objected Mildred. "I want to be doing something. I'm very impatient of this long wait."

And honest she was in this protest. She had no idea of the state of her own mind. She fancied she was still as eager as ever for the career, as intensely interested as ever in her work. She did not dream of the real meaning of her content with her voice as it was, of her lack of uneasiness over the appalling fact that such voice as she had was unreliable, came and went for no apparent reason.

"Absolute rest for two months," declared Jennings grimly. "Not a note until I return in August."

Mildred gave a resigned sigh.

There is much inveighing against hypocrisy, a vice unsightly rather than desperately wicked. And in the excitement about it its dangerous, even deadly near kinsman, self-deception, escapes unassailed. Seven cardinal sins; but what of the eighth?--the parent of all the others, the one beside which the children seem almost white?

During the first few weeks Mildred had been careful about spending money. Economy she did not understand; how could she, when she had never had a lesson in it or a valuable hint about it? So economy was impossible. The only way in which such people can keep order in their finances is by not spending any money at all. Mildred drew nothing, spent nothing. This, so long as she gave her whole mind to her work. But after the first great cold, so depressing, so subtly undermining, she began to go about, to think of, to need and to buy clothes, to spend money in a dozen necessary ways. After all, she was simply borrowing the money. Presently, she would be making a career, would be earning large sums. She would pay back everything, with interest. Stanley meant for her to use the money. Really, she ought to use it. How would her career be helped by her going about looking a dowd and a frump? She had always been used to the comforts of life. If she deprived herself of them, she would surely get into a frame of mind where her work would suffer. No, she must lead the normal life of a woman of her class. To work all the time--why, as Jennings said, that took away all the freshness, made one stale and unfit. A little distraction--always, of course, with musical people, people who talked and thought and did music--that sort of distraction was quite as much a part of her education as the singing lessons. Mrs. Brindley, certainly a sensible and serious woman if ever there was one--Mrs. Brindley believed so, and it must be so.