Part 9 (1/2)
”True ones. If this keeps on, I shall begin using you as critic for all my new songs.”
”Like the fabled dog? I wish you would. But, truly, I am not joking. You are quite spoiling me for my usual diet of recitals. Do you realize that, for the past two months, you have sung to me on an average of two hours a week?”
Thayer smiled contentedly down at her, as he sat by the piano, with one muscular arm thrown across the rack.
”Well, what of it?” he inquired.
”Nothing, except that people say you are refusing engagements.”
”A fellow must have a little time to enjoy his friends,” he returned coolly. ”I can't be expected to sing, six nights a week.”
”Your logic betrays your artistic nature. You have sung at five recitals, this week. This is the sixth night; but you've not been silent.”
”You know you wanted to hear _Faust_ sung again.”
”Yes, and so did Mrs. Stanley want you to sing at her house.”
He looked up sharply.
”Who told you?”
”Mr. Arlt.”
”Arlt shouldn't tell tales. But I had three good reasons for refusing: I don't like Mrs. Stanley; she doesn't treat Arlt as well as she treats her pug dog, and moreover you had asked me to dinner. I never sing after a good dinner.”
”But you mustn't refuse engagements.”
”I didn't. I kept one.”
”Engagements to sing, I mean. You seem to forget that you are a star.”
”All the more reason I should stop twinkling now and then. I can't be on duty, the whole time. Besides, Miss Gannion,” he rose from the piano and came forward to her side; ”we can't give out, all the time. We must stop occasionally to take something in, else our mental fuel runs low. I wonder if you realize that this is the one place in New York City where I can be entirely off my guard, entirely at home. A place like this means a good deal to an isolated man.”
”I am very glad,” she said quietly.
”Most people forget that a public singer has a private personality,” he went on thoughtfully. ”We are supposed to divide our time into even thirds, practising, singing and receiving compliments. It gets to be a positive delight to discuss the weather and the fas.h.i.+on in neckties.”
”And to sing by the hour for your friends?” she inquired.
”It is our easiest way of speaking to them.”
She laughed.
”But, on the other hand, you are demoralizing me completely. You have no idea what empty, formal affairs recitals seem to me now; they are so impersonal. I feel like grumbling, because I can't talk over each item of the programme with the one who does it. I said something of the sort to Miss Dane, the other day; but she told me she always dreaded the sound of a speaking voice after one of your songs.”
”She might have a species of choral service evolved for social use,”
Thayer suggested dryly. ”The Gregorian tones would lend dignity even to conventionalities, and they are quite within the powers of any amateur.”
There was an interval of silence which Miss Gannion employed in bringing herself back to the physical world around her. Thayer's singing always swayed her profoundly; it gave her the impression of the ultimate satisfaction of a wish which had haunted her whole life. During the past two months, she and Thayer had established relations of cordial friends.h.i.+p. They had met frequently in the world which already was clamorous for Thayer's appearing, and Thayer was a frequent guest at Miss Gannion's home. He always sang to her; it had become so much a matter of routine that now he never waited for an invitation. Once seated at the piano, talking and singing by turns, she allowed him to follow out the bent of his mood; but, wherever it led him, she was always conscious of the insistent, throbbing note which told her that, underneath his self-control, there pulsed a fiery nature which was curbed, but not yet tamed, that the day might come when the Puritan would meet the Russian face to face, and the Russian would be dominant, if only for one brief hour. And then? Often as she asked herself the question, Margaret Gannion never swerved from her original answer. In the end, the Puritan would rule. No man could so dominate others and fail to dominate himself.