Ainslee's Magazine/The Woman With a Past/A Matter of Standard
III.—A MATTER OF STANDARD.
Look at the woman here with the new soul,
Fresh upon her lips
Alit, the visionary butterfly
Waiting my word to enter to make bright,
leave all
Or flutter off and blank as first.—Pippa Passes.
VERY few beautiful things came into Olaf Nilsson's life—very few beautiful real things, that is. His violin gave to him many lovely illusions born of the delicate tones that a great German master had taught him how to produce. And the poet's soul, unquenchable within him, showed him other fair things—a glimpse of sunset red over the gray and smoke-wreathed roof tops on which his window looked; a spray of fresh green in the square just a block or two beyond; sometimes a flight of birds; on hot nights the cooling splendor of the moon. Oh, yes—these sweet, chary beauties of the city were his; to no man were they more free. But extraneous beauty, beauty that other people called beauty—the graces of life, the charms of women, the color and magic of things—these stayed afar from Olaf Nilsson like the Blue Bird of Happiness.
He was of the fiber of which artists are made—artists in life, as well as in art. Under different conditions he could have appreciated the poetry of perfect food, and the harmony of rich surroundings. As things were, he rarely had enough to eat, and he lived in one of the cheapest upper rooms of Mrs. Levinsky's cheap lodging house. Fate is curiously wasteful in this fashion—or is it willful wantonness? Does she, indeed, find a malicious content in gathering walnuts for the toothless, and feeding dyspeptics with cakes and ale? The cheap attic room would have done quite well enough for Mr. Goldrocks, who was losing his eyesight, and had a fad against a temperature above fifty. And Olaf Nilsson could have got drunk on Mr. Goldrocks' Gobelin tapestries and the sweet, languorous breath from his conservatories. So much for Fate, the only lady with a sense of humor and a bitter humor at that! In a mood even more freakish and more intentionally heartless than usual, she brought Pippa Carpenter into Olaf Nilsson's gray life—a life in which the only color came from the paint box of dreams.
Mrs. Carpenter was a woman whom no man could describe ten minutes after he had met her. He would have no idea whether she was short or tall; he would not know how old she was; he could not tell the color of her eyes. The masculine being did not live who could note definitely the way she did her hair, or the kind of clothes she wore. But every man, married or unmarried, young or old, amorous or ascetic, could remember the curious timbre of her voice, with its elusive foreign intonation; the way her red mouth drooped at the corners, as if a sort of weariness of the spirit clung to it; and the marvelous, deep red of her hair. Such hair!—with tones as rich as wine, and as soft as autumn leaves. Her eyes, as a matter of fact, were gray with a purple glamour about them somehow, but all that the man she was talking to ever recalled about them was their curiously sweet, deep look—which always gave him the fatuous impression that she was really and for the first time studying a Kindred Soul.
She liked Olaf Nilsson, from the first day she met him on Mrs. Levinsky's ramshackle stairs. She had gone there on one of her restless, impulsive visits of benevolence. Like most unsatisfied women, she filled her life with a thousand interests, and chief among them was the interest in other women, an almost passionate wish to protect them from sundry buffets of outrageous fortune which, along with some unessential material luxuries, had been her own portion. She was always seeking out obscure sisters who were in precarious situations, and giving them the one little tug needed to keep them from going fairly over the precipice. She had come to the dingy lodging house on one such errand. The girl she came to see was sordid and unappreciative, but Pippa came several times persistently—and, after she had met Olaf Nilsson, and grown to know him in a swift, bohemian fashion, she came oftener, and even stopped sometimes at his studio. There were advantages in having no longer a conventional reputation to lose.
Olaf Nilsson had a poet's face, dreamy, yet not effeminate, topped by a mane of flaxen-fair hair, and starred by eyes as blue as his own mountain lakes. He was from far Norway, and something of the brooding poetry and mysticisms of his country lingered in his rather wistful smile.
“What a boy!” said Philippa Carpenter to her heart. “What an exquisite, hopeful, wonderful boy!”
They talked together like old friends—odd talk that leaped across formal preliminaries, and went at once to the heart of the things for which they both cared. He told her his brief and simple history, and it was touching to note that to him it seemed neither brief nor simple. He dwelt on the early childhood memories quite seriously and reverently; his account of how the great German musician had carried him away to Munich to study was palpably to him the recital of a miracle. Those years in the German city, days of work and ambition, and a few friends—years that a less ingenuous youth would have dismissed in a few casual words—he described breathlessly. To him they had been notable, magical, not comparable to any other's experiences.
Then there was America, where he had had such fair prospects, and where he had been so sure of making his fortune and bringing the world to his feet. Here again he was absurdly, touchingly intense. There was no lack of courage in him, but there was an almost too poignant realization of failure and disappointment. As his days of study in Munich had comprised for him all hope and glamorous ambition, so his year in America spelled for him the whole of the limitless tragedy of defeated genius. He had gone down into the depths, he and his passionate intensity of soul, and he had come back with the exaltation of suffering glimmering about him like a nimbus. His face had become etherealized, his look was fanatical, abstracted. And he had written a symphony. It was a tragical symphony—that of course. With the egotism which is too simple to be arrogant, he had called it “Geistschmers'”—'Soul Pain”—and doubtless he believed that in its poignant harmonies he had for the first time voiced the anguish of humanity that is broken on the wheel.
One day he told Mrs. Carpenter that he had sent his symphony to the director of a great orchestra famous on two continents. So might a Japanese father speak of sending his son to war, or a mother announce the marriage of a beloved daughter. Both pain and heartbroken ecstasy filled him. His blue eyes were full of hot tears. The beloved thing, the music into which he had poured himself and his dreams, all that he was and wished to be, had left him, had spread great, shining wings and flown into the storm of the world. What would be its fate? Yet he never really doubted that it would be received with reverence and honor. It was a great symphony—so he believed it. Why should not the world be glad to get it, and grateful to him for making so beautiful a thing?
But Pippa's heart ached for him.
“It is very difficult to get a symphony performed by that orchestra,” she said to him gently. “Many very distinguished composers have had to wait for many years”
Olaf Nilsson smiled at her with the divine assurance of a child.
“Ah, yes!” he said. “But with me, it is different. Doubtless they—those great composers—wrote very fine symphonies. But there is no symphony like mine. The Herr Direktor he is a great and a wise man, a true musician. He will know. He cannot fail to know that there could be only one such symphony!”
Pippa could not find it in her heart to tell him that every young composer in the world thought just this of his first big composition. Some of them were not naïve enough to say so, but they all felt so. Did she not know? Had she not studied genius in youth and in maturity—studied it rather scornfully, and dismissed it as not vastly different from other phases of humanity, only, occasionally, more exacting?
At an address in the east sixties, Philippa Carpenter was most exquisitely chez elle. It was not a very gorgeous abode, nor was it strictly what we Anglo-Saxons call a home; but it was a very charming place, and expressed Pippa delightfully, if inadequately. That is to say, it expressed one side of her—the highly developed, beautifully cared-for side—the side that found pleasure in rare things, and occupation in existing perfectly. Although she lived a life more or less insecure and dubious, and had, indeed, no fixed orbit in the cosmos of society, she kept about her always an aura made out of the finer tones of life—the delicacies, and the supreme civilizations.
One evening—it was midwinter, and the coldest time of the year held the city in its grip—she rose suddenly in her bijou drawing-room, and looked about her at the dainty, luxurious things that furnished it, a wild glance such as prisoners throw upon the walls of their cells. Then she walked out into the night. In her heart beat strange words: “No one needs me here, but he needs me—that poet boy with the violin and the divine disregard for money and the world—he needs me! I will give up everything else. I will go to him—I will go to him!”
She did not love Olaf Nilsson, but it seemed to her that what she had to give him was better than love. She had left not only her jewels, but her furs behind, and the wind struck cold against her throat. She felt a curious joy in the chill. It seemed to her that every step was carrying her farther out of her meaningless life, into some other life which was as yet new to her, and yet which she seemed to know marvelously well. It was like a return to some lost young country of dreams to climb the long, rickety stairway to Olaf Nilsson's room.
He opened the door, and wonder and joy filled his pale face. The studio was very dim and bitter cold. A single candle flickered on the table.
“Oh—but you are beautiful!” said Olaf Nilsson softly, and he closed the door. They were alone in the candle-light.
For the first time he saw Pippa without her furs. The toque that inclosed her cream-white face was as simple as one that any shopgirl might have worn. If the angle at which it was set disclosed a great wave of red hair in most gracious fashion, it was no fault of the toque, and detracted in no sense from its simplicity. Her gown was dark, and and plain. There was nothing soft, radiant about her now—not even her face. Brow and chin were cool and grave of line and tint; the gray eyes were even more full of purple than usual, The lips were folded quietly. There was no provocation, nor coquetry, in the still and lovely countenance. Very gently and simply, like a girl, Pippa came forward with her wonderful hands, slim and ungloved, held out before her.
Olaf Nilsson did not know that she was differently dressed from usual. He only knew that she was utterly and unbelievably lovely. He did not dare to speak, after that first breathless feeling; he was afraid she would melt away, like the thousand other perfect visions that came to him at night in the cold studio. He had been playing on his violin all the evening, and in his exalted mood he almost believed that she was really nothing but an ineffable dream. He kissed the exquisite hands, and then stood—waiting.
“You see,” said Philippa gently, “I have come. I had to come.” She broke off irrelevantly, looking with a curious content at the one little candle. “I am so glad,” she said, as if talking to herself, “that you have just a candle! I love candles.”
Still he did not speak, but gazed at her, his soul in his eyes.
“Have you ever thought,” she said dreamily, “how much lovelier the idea of candlelight is than lamps, or gas, or anything else? It isn't just that the light itself is softer—it's the association, the poetry.”
“In Norway,” said Olaf Nilsson, “candlelight meant—home. My mother spinning, my sister sounding the kur, to call down the cows from the upper slope.”
“Candles for merrymakings and marriages, and night vigils, and altars,” said Pippa, staring at the one little flame that flickered in the draft, “and corpse candles for the dead. Oh, no wonder nearly every one loves candlelight!”
He had been very patient, but now, trembling very much, he took a step nearer.
“Tell me,” he managed to say, under his breath, “is this candle to be—an offering of thanksgiving?”
She loved his way of putting it—oh, he was a natural poet in every heart throb. And he needed her! She looked about the bare, cold room. How he needed her! She would fill his heart so full of dreams that he would not feel the cold; he should play for her, and in listening to his music she would find that lost golden country into which she had looked with such dazzled, wistful eyes when she was a little girl.
“Oh,” she cried, with a little catch in her breath, “do you want me? Do you care for me, Olaf Nilsson?”
“Want you? Care for you?” His voice was as amazed as if she had asked him if he loved music. “I would die for you,” he said simply.
So she began to speak, and there were two voices speaking through her—one that could be heard, and one that was silent. In everything that she said there was an unsaid echo.
“I have thought it all over,” was what she actually said, “and I know that we are two derelicts, you and I—two lonely souls, and—and if we can give each other companionship and—and happiness” The unheard voice added—pulsing on the unlit pause that held between them: “All that I have touched has been empty, and hard, and cruel. I have had no joy of my life. I want to give, and, in giving, to gain the peace that is better and dearer than joy. I can lift you up, and make you a man. It is better than a life of dreams, and regrets, and fretfulness.”
Aloud she said, “Neither of us cares for money, but we both love the big and true things that life has to give to her lovers. Let us, side by side, start out on the highroad. We owe life nothing, and life is not our debtor.”
In her heart she added: “He will have a bitter defeat here and soon, when he finds that his symphony has been declined. He will find his castle in the air crushed, and his dreams dispelled. Could my wretched and unfinished existence know a higher destiny of fulfillment than to save him in the hour of his failure? And, for the rest, I want nothing more of life myself. I have proved that happiness is not for me. But, hand in hand with this dreaming boy, is it not possible”
But Olaf Nilsson's eyes were full of pain—haggard and tragic in his young, white face. It dawned slowly and strangely on Pippa that he was less utterly and weakly a boy than she had thought. A man's renunciation was struggling with his young, warm ardor.
“I cannot take your sacrifice!” he cried painfully. “You are offering me too much.”
Pippa shook her head. There was a curious bitterness in her voice as she answered: “No! I am only offering you—myself.” Olaf Nilsson did not understand.
“It is—too much,” he muttered huskily.
“No,” said Mrs. Carpenter quietly, “it is not too much. It is all that I have to give, but that is not—too much. It is quite possible that it is not enough.”
The boy looked as if he could have knelt. His blue eyes were wide and remote with their passion of dreams.
“Most Beautiful,” he whispered, “I shall not forget! I shall never forget. And yet—I cannot take your sacrifice. Poverty has made me a poor thing, but not so poor as that!”
Pippa, with a strange and wonderful pang, realized that he did not know at all the quality of her sacrifice. To him it was no mess of pottage that she was giving up, but an exquisite birthright.
“You—so high and so perfect,” the young voice went on brokenly, incoherently—“to stoop to me! Dear one, what have I done to deserve so much? But you were made to walk on flowers and wear white velvet—do you dream that I would let you come to me—here?”
“I have come to you,” she said, very gently.
Olaf Nilsson went to her and bent above her hands, kissing first one and then the other reverently, as if they were holy things.
“Yes, you sweet lady,” he whispered, “you have come to me! God thank you for it, for I have no words. But—I will not take you. I will send you away. Do you hear? I, who love you, who adore you, will send you out of my life.”
“Forever?” she said quietly. She knew the potency of the word. Olaf hesitated, and pain drew his face into fine, hard lines.
“Not forever,” he breathed, and a light came into his eyes—“only until I have won success.”
Pippa smiled a little scornfully. “Is it possible,' she said, “that you want to wait, like a shipping clerk or a brewer's man, until you can support me?”
“Dear” he broke in, but she went on, in the same soft, disdainful tone:
“I came to offer you dreams—and what you want is a bank account! I came to share my heart with you, and you are only thinking of sharing a furnished flat with me!”
But Olaf Nilsson shook his head. “Lovely Beloved,' he said quaintly, “you know better than that.”
And so they stood, facing one another, each amazed by the ideals and the nobility of the other—closer, as a matter of fact, to true affinity than ever before. So do our moments of bodily parting become most truly moments of spiritual meeting. It is a paradox as old as love and life.
“Some day,” he said softly, “I will conquer the world and bring it to you, and lay it at your dear feet—some day!”
“Some day?” echoed the woman, and the twist of her lips was of irony as well as of pain. “Some day I shall be old, Olaf Nilsson!”
He laughed at the thought. There was, indeed, something ageless and immortal about Pippa Carpenter. For fifteen years, time—as women recognize time, the time of fading lips, silvering hair, deepening lines—had stood still for her, dispassionately, not kindly, but like one indifferent to her. Yet “some day” sounded sinister and chill. She had a sting of revolt as she stared at the boy's beautiful face in the flickering candlelight. He was better and braver than she had thought; and yet—and yet Was she disappointed to find, at the test, the poet and dreamer melt like mist wreaths, leaving simple man? Suddenly he seemed all man—elemental, working man, who knew by tradition and inheritance that, if man does not live by bread alone, neither does he live on visions or raptures.
A knock sounded at the door, and mechanically Olaf Nilsson went to it and opened it. A fellow lodger handed him a square of white.
“Found it downstairs,” he said briefly, and went on up yet another rickety flight to a yet cheaper attic room. Olaf Nilsson, as if in a daze, took the letter to the table and stared at it by the light of the candle. Philippa stood perfectly still, looking at him. The boy lifted startled eyes to her, then looked again incredulously at the envelope. After a moment he opened it with hands that shook. The sensitive, delicate violinist's fingers were suddenly clumsy. It seemed that he would never get the folded sheet
“Oh, my God!” said Olaf Nilsson, not irreverently, but softly and wonderingly. He suddenly crushed the letter into a ball, and it dropped at his feet. Pippa saw his face working in the candlelight; there were tears on his cheeks.
“It is true!” he gasped hoarsely. “They are going to do my symphony. It is all right—all right. The Herr Direktor says But read what he says!” He stooped, groping excitedly for the crumpled letter.
“Another time,” said Pippa. Her voice was kind and steady. There was no tremble in it as she added: “I am so glad—for you. So thankful—for you.”
Olaf Nilsson turned to her with a radiant look. The chill, dark room was suddenly warm with the light of his face.
“And now, Beautiful Beloved,” he cried, “we can be happy. It is not quite the world that I have to offer you”—he laughed joyously—“but it is a piece of it—a piece of the bright, splendid, golden world! There will be money—see, the Herr Direktor says I have only to ask—there will be hundreds—many hundreds of dollars, dear heart—think of it! I can buy you dainty things almost worthy of you!”
Pippa looked down at her slim, lovely hands. The rings that she had left behind her when she came to-night were worth many thousands of dollars. Was it possible that he did not know? Was it conceivable that he really believed he could give her some material pleasure with which she was not satiated? Alas, he could find no jewels to give her that would be new—she had wanted only his dreams; and it was too late for them.
“Let us go out and celebrate,” went on the boy eagerly. “I have the rent money saved up. We can use that, and to-morrow I shall see the Herr Direktor. Oh, Most Dear, we will go to a restaurant where there are flowers, and lights, and—yes, I will even endure their execrable music to-night—and we will have a wonderful dinner!”
Pippa put her hand to her throat.
Oh, those “wonderful dinners” that she had had with other men! She knew that if she went into a restaurant with Olaf Nilsson, and saw his poet's face in the light of a little, red-shaded lamp, she would die!
She fastened her jacket quietly and turned to the door.
“Where are you going?” he exclaimed in affright. “Pippa! You are not going to leave me now? You came to me”
“That was different,” she said steadily, as she opened the door. “It is all,” she smiled faintly in the candlelight, “all a matter of standard. We were two derelicts—two souls groping toward each other. Now you are a successful composer, and I am—Pippa Carpenter. It is all a matter of standard,” she repeated. “I couldn't stay now—you don't need me, and so I couldn't stay.”
She was passing through the doorway when she paused, and looked back rather wistfully.
“Do you know,” said Pippa gently, “I almost wish that letter had not come, Olaf Nilsson.”
So she went away and left him in the candlelight.