Chapter IV: THE GREAT SUCCESS: The Singer

Yesterday I happened to read an editorial on careers for women, and when I had finished I sat back and thought about the strange case of Peggy Wentworth. That of course is not the name she has made famous, but it happens to be her own.

Not that Peggy’s case was typical. I know of a good many women who have been able to reconcile a substantial family life with distinguished success in their own particular lines; who have reared creditable families, been artists, wives and mothers at the same time, and apparently were able to succeed in the one as well as in the other.

But for one I know who has been able to do this, ten have failed. The younger generation is making better going of it, apparently, for the younger generation of men has less of the old and now outgrown idea that a man is not fully a man unless his wife is entirely dependent on him for money. It is the older generation which has had to go through the re-adjustment period, and Jim Wentworth belonged to that generation.

Even the older generation, of course, was more easily reconciled when the woman earned while remaining in her home. The writing women, for instance, have been able to manage their houses and raise their children, and to get to their desks during school hours or after the family bedtime, and apparently the only difference it has made in the home life is that a good many of them have burned the candle at both ends. Which explains, perhaps, why there are no great women writers. They have had to give to their work the rag tag and bobtail of their time.

But the theatrical women and the successful singers are different. Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that writers are always more or less anonymous figures; it is not themselves, but their work that counts. The actress and the singer, when successful, achieve a personal popularity. They belong, in a curious way, to the public.

This story of Peggy Wentworth’s covers a considerable space of years. It is the story of a great success, with its rewards and penalties. But it is, I have always felt, primarily a love story.

I met Peggy first in a _pension_ in Berlin—a bare place with cold porcelain stoves and old furniture rubbed to the last degree of polish; and she used to sing for us once in a while in the evenings, while the two _fräuleins_ who ran the _pension_ knitted, and Peggy’s older sister, Anne, sat with her hands folded in a sort of depressed silence.

Anne must have been almost forty at that time, a drab woman always badly dressed, and with a curiously unhealthy looking skin. Peggy once told me that Anne had been quite a pretty girl, but it was hard to believe.

“We were a big family,” Peggy said, “and when mother died Anne took hold and raised us. She had a chance to get married once, but she felt she shouldn’t leave.”

So it appeared that Anne had become the family martyr. Most families can boast of one.

It appeared, too, that Anne had determined that there should be only one martyr in the family, and that Peggy should have her chance. Just what fierce saving had achieved it no one can know, but when Peggy’s voice outgrew her local teachers Anne had somehow managed to take her abroad.

By the time I met them, however, Anne was beginning to doubt the wisdom of her course. Peggy’s voice was doing all and more than had been expected, and she was likely to get a chance to sing at the Munich Opera House, with a prospect of Berlin later. But Anne was getting along in life, and her ideas of what constituted happiness were changing.

In a word, out of her starved and impoverished years she had dreamed of success and wealth for Peggy. But as time went on she began to feel less sure that they would be enough.

I remember going into her room one night to find her sitting up in bed, almost barricaded behind one of the thick, red-covered feather mattresses which the _pension_ served out in cold weather, and which covered either the legs or the body, but never both. She looked dreary and old.

We talked of Peggy’s undeniable future, and Anne showed no enthusiasm whatever.

“I brought her over,” she said, “but sometimes I’m sorry I did it.”

“Why?”

“Where is it going to take her?”

I said that if things went on as they were going, I believed that she would be the greatest all-American prima donna; that she would, in that case, earn vast sums of money, and that Anne herself would be extremely proud of her. But Anne only looked at me from under eyelids that already showed the fine wrinkles of her age.

“It depends on what you want out of life. Happiness, I should say.”

“Different people find happiness in different ways, Anne. With Peggy it may be that to give pleasure to thousands—”

“Nonsense,” she broke, in bitterly. “I’m not talking about giving. What’s she to get?” And before I could reply: “There are just three courses open to a woman. There used to be only two. I’m a product of the two period. I couldn’t go out and earn a living, so I stayed at home and dried up.” She swept me with unhappy eyes. “I didn’t want Peggy to do that, so I brought her over here. And I’m sorry I did.”

I remember that she said the three courses were marriage, a career, and what she savagely termed “drying up.” And for reasons which she gave in her monotonous voice, she had chosen the career course for Peggy.

“I represent the drying up,” she said. “And as to marriage—I’d seen my own mother drudged to death with a house and children. I can look back and see her, cooking and washing endless dishes. I’ve seen her beating a heavy Brussels carpet. I’ve seen her hanging curtains at night while my father read the newspaper, and putting the ladder into the cellar herself afterwards. She used to mend after he’d gone to bed. After she died, I did the same thing.”

“Then,” I objected, going back to careers, “you see only three courses open for women, and all of them are unhappy?”

I was writing myself at that time, small inoffensive stories for the cheaper magazines, and I felt called upon to defend both careers and marriage, and even a combination of the two. But she remained unmoved.

“You’re different,” she said. “You’ve got your family already. And you can work at home. A singer’s different, or an actress. If they get to the top they stay in New York most of the time and have too much money. Men don’t like that. And if they don’t succeed they have to travel most of the time, and make a home in a hotel room. When they’re away too much, their husbands are unfaithful.”

She had, you see, reduced it to a formula.

“There’s no trouble if a woman doesn’t want to marry,” she said. “It’s when she tries to be two things at once that the trouble comes.”

“Peggy may not want to marry.”

She smiled grimly.

“With my example before her? Never. She wants to marry, and to have a lot of children. But she wants to sing, too . . .”

Peggy made her American début at the Metropolitan in the early fall five years later, and I need say nothing of her success. Only the other night, while the family was away, I got out one of her records and played it quietly. And suddenly I was back in the old _pension_, with Peggy at the piano, and Anne sitting with her hands folded, watching her with inscrutable eyes.

I wrote and asked Anne to spend the following Christmas with us, and she accepted. Peggy’s five years in Europe since I had seen them had been earning years, and the Anne I met at the station was a smarter Anne, not with more assurance, for she had never lacked that, but with more poise. She looked no older than before, and it was rather surprising to find that she sometimes hesitated for a word, and then used its German equivalent.

But she was very tired. The début had been a strain, and since Peggy’s enormous success they had no privacy whatever.

“Of course, she belongs to the public now. She doesn’t particularly need me now.”

“She always needs you. You know that.”

She gave me an odd glance, and changed the subject.

Anne fell into our quiet ways quickly, and with what seemed like relief. She took what we felt was a rather pitiful pleasure in trimming the tree on Christmas eve, and afterwards we sat in her room and talked. She had brought an enormous photograph of Peggy in a silver frame, and it was on her toilet table.

“She has grown very beautiful, Anne,” I said.

“Yes. That doesn’t do her justice.”

“I suppose she is very happy.”

“She’s rather—triumphant,” Anne said slowly; and after a pause: “She’s going to be married.”

Her tone made me look up.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Do you like the man?”

“I do. That’s the trouble.” She smiled when she saw my face. “Not that way; don’t worry. But I’m anxious. He’s a strong man, a—a real person. And he’s madly in love with her. That will help for a while, but after that—”

Her voice trailed off. “She’s making a lot of money,” she said after a time, apropos of nothing.

“More than he does?”

“She will make more than he does. But it isn’t that; he has a good bit. It’s that she belongs to the public pretty much now. She always will, as long as she sings. He—you know what I mean. He’ll have to share her.”

“The money thing’s important, too, Anne.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “They like their women dependent.”

But she changed the subject soon. Peggy’s prosperity was a wonderful thing for them all. She had bought her father a house, “a little place, but it’s his, you know.” And a young brother still at home was to go to Columbia, living at Peggy’s apartment while he did so.

“In that way I’m glad,” was Anne’s comment. “She’s giving us all a leg up.”

It appeared that Peggy could afford to. She had already signed a contract with a company, making phonograph records, and it meant a considerable amount of money. Later, as she became even better established, it would bring in a fortune. But Anne was not greatly interested in the money end of Peggy’s success.

“The only value of money,” she said, “is independence. But of course to father and Harry, and to me, it means dependence. I don’t resent it, but it’s a fact.”

During the remainder of Anne’s visit I was able to gather a little, here and there, as to Peggy’s love affair. I learned, for instance, that Peggy had offered to abandon her career, but that Mr. Wentworth—Jim, as Anne called him—had been unwilling to ask that sacrifice. Others had made a go of it, he said, and they were going to put two above-the-average minds to it. He seemed to have no anxiety whatever. . . .

From its very nature, this record must be episodic. At intervals I saw Anne or Peggy. Then, for long periods at a time I had to rest content with newspaper knowledge. But with each period of contact the story took a step forward.

For instance, the next one was at Peggy’s wedding. I had finished a novel, and was in New York for a round of theatres and concerts, when the invitation was forwarded to me. And I promptly accepted.

Peggy had taken a summer place up the Hudson, and they were married there, outdoors. The full development of her beauty struck me when I first saw her in her wedding dress, and there were a certain steadiness and maturity about the eyes. Both their responses were clear and solemn, and I noticed that that sort of reverential attitude persisted in them both during the reception afterwards.

All of important musical America was there, and a scattering of substantial business men and their families. The two groups did not mix, however; after the ceremony the musical people, prosperous, a trifle foreign, either by birth or affectation, noisily and demonstratively enjoyed themselves, by themselves. Equally prosperous, militantly native and rather ostentatiously quiet, Wentworth’s relatives and friends likewise remained together. They were as far apart as the poles; two worlds between which the orchestra pit was a gulf as wide as stellar space.

Peggy and her husband moved hospitably between them, but I had an odd impression that when they met it was as two emissaries, each from his own camp, to which when the parley was over each would retire again.

Peggy sent for me when she went in to change into her travelling things, sending the message by Anne, and I followed her into the house. Anne had looked different to me throughout the afternoon; I could not tell just how. But in the sunny hall, before we went upstairs, I discovered what it was, and it rather shocked me. Anne had had her hair dyed.

She caught my eyes on it and gave her grim smile.

“Yes, my dear,” she said. “You’re right. How do you like it?”

“I don’t, very much, Anne dear.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Peggy nearly had a fit,” she told me. “I rather like it, myself. There are a good many dyed heads out there.” She nodded through the open door. “I’m just beginning to learn that age is an unnecessary liability.” But she added, as we went up the stairs: “It’s frightfully expensive to keep up.”

Looking back, I can see how symbolic that dyed hair of Anne’s actually was. Up to that time she had been too busy, too anxious, too serious, to think very much of herself. If she had regretted the passing of her youth she had buried her regret. But now she was in a world which worshipped youth and beauty, and which demanded of its women their nearest approach to one or the other.

In the sheer instinct for survival Anne was beginning to think of herself.

Probably nothing that day pointed the difference in Peggy’s worldly affairs so clearly as her bedroom suite upstairs, compared with her _pension_ room on the Alserstrasse. In the _pension_ there had been a bare high room, cold and bleak even in summer; a narrow wooden bed; a wardrobe; a washstand with bowl and pitcher, placed on a strip of brown oilcloth; a chair or two, and leading into Anne’s chamber, a door covered with wall paper to match the rest of the wall. Now—

* * * * *

In a large boudoir-dressing room, lined with built-in wardrobes with glass doors, Peggy stood. Her toilet table was a litter of gold and ivory. On a great _chaise longue_ a toy dog lay on a satin pillow, and lounging beside him, cigarette in hand, was Mazzari, the tenor. Flowers and bright cushions, tables with lamps, photographs in silver frames, her wedding veil with its coronet of orange blossoms over the back of a chair, made a luxurious litter.

Peggy herself was on the hearth rug, wrapped in a loose robe of quilted rose satin. A maid in uniform was hovering over a dressing case, and Peggy, quite oblivious of Mazzari, was dictating notes of thanks for gifts to a secretary at a desk. She smiled at me and went on.

Anne sat down beside the tenor and borrowed a cigarette from him, eyeing me with a sort of amused defiance.

“I’m on the downward path,” she told me, nonchalantly.

I had an impression that Anne was deliberately emphasizing to me the least attractive side of her new environment; as if, recalling our talk in Berlin, she was saying: “You saw us then and you see us now. This is success. How do you like it?”

She was not jealous, at that period, of Peggy and the fulness of her life. She was cynical, however, and somehow disillusioned, if she had ever had any illusions.

“Mazzari has been married four times,” she said coolly. “That’s what a voice can do.”

Peggy stopped dictating and saw Anne’s cigarette.

“Anne, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why? It can’t hurt _my_ voice.”

There was something in her tone, a faint acidity, a new note from her to Peggy, that worried me. Anne had changed a great deal in her attitude toward her sister. It was as though she said: “Don’t try any of the _diva_ stuff on me. I know you. I remember Indiana, if you forget it, and I made you what you are. Remember that.”

I was sorry for Anne, and angry with her. What was it? Jealousy? I have said that it was not, but I am not so sure. Consider that the very clothing Anne wore Peggy had paid for; remember Peggy’s success and the fruits of that success; her beauty; the clamorous crowd that overran the house and the garden; the gifts, ranged in rows of gold and silver and what not on their long white-draped tables; the reporters and camera men waiting below; the maid and the secretary; and Mazzari, the great, the golden, sitting at his ease on the _chaise longue_, and figuratively at the _Prima donna’s_ feet.

But eliminate all those, and remember only that in a room across the hall Peggy’s husband was changing into his travelling clothes, and that Peggy herself was about to enter that world Anne was denied, the mysterious realm of love.

I began to see that while Peggy’s success had not touched her, it had touched Anne, and on the raw.

Peggy finished her letters, and turned to Mazzari.

“Run away now, Luigi,” she said briskly. “I want to dress, and I want to talk to an old friend.”

He got up slowly, for he was a corpulent man, and waddled to her.

“I am a very sad man to-day, my Peggy,” he said. “You should have chosen me.” He took her hand and held it. “At least we speak the same language, think the same thoughts.”

Peggy laughed.

“Language, yes. Thoughts! Don’t dare to say we think the same thoughts.”

He looked slightly flattered, and with a magnificent sort of gesture he bent and kissed her hand.

“No,” he said, when he straightened. “Not the same thoughts. My best are less than your worst. That is why I love you.”

He stooped over her hand again with a sort of ludicrous solemnity, bowed and went with heavy dignity out of the room. Peggy looked at me and smiled.

“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “He doesn’t care for me, but he loves to dramatise himself. He will go down now and drink a great deal of champagne and eat enormously. Anne.” She looked at her sister. “Where is Harry?”

“Wherever the wine is,” Anne replied briefly.

“Can’t you get him away from it?”

“You would have it. It’s all over the place by now, anyhow. I can’t lock him up.”

Peggy made her strange helpless gesture again, and turned to me.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Jim and I talked it over, but people do expect wine at a wedding, especially—” Whatever she was going to say, she checked herself. “A good many of my musical friends are Europeans, and of course a festivity to them means wine.”

When she was dressed she got Anne and the others out of the room and came over and sat down near me.

“You’ve made a success of your marriage,” she said. “That’s why I sent for you. I want so terribly to have this go right. How can it be done? _How can it be done?_”

And while I tried to co-ordinate my own ideas, she went on:

“You saw the crowd downstairs. They didn’t mix. They never will mix. But Jim and I have got to live in a common world. He can’t have his friends and I mine.”

“It’s a sort of compromise,” I said. “Of course, things are different with us. We don’t live in New York. I don’t see many literary people.”

“Then it is you who have given up your own people, the ones who talk your language, as Mazzari said?”

“No. The difference is that I can carry on my work alone. I need them, of course, but only once in a while. You have to have them all the time.”

She sat without speaking for a time, smoothing her gloves in her hands. “Jim doesn’t like them, much,” she said at last. “He doesn’t understand them. They are fine and wonderful, but of course they are different.

“He’s very conventional,” she added, after another pause. “He wouldn’t have come in, for instance, while I was changing my things. Mazzari—”

She did not follow that line. She went to the window and looked out, and then called me to her side. The grounds, beautiful with the midsummer colours of the borders and the light green of new cut lawns, lay below, and the two camps were clearly outlined. Near the tennis court lounged and laughed Peggy’s musical friends and associates from the opera, while Jim Wentworth’s family and his guests were decorously talking close to the sunken garden. The tennis court group was far the more lively and colourful. And just then Mazzari, standing with a wine glass in his hand, commenced to roll out in Italian what I took to be a love song. His voice rose to us, clear and mellow, and Peggy drew a long breath.

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Apart. Doing different things. Thinking different thoughts. . . .”

Anne spent the following Christmas with us again. She was very smart by that time, and Peggy’s Christmas gift to her had been a wonderful set of sables. She was living with Peggy and Jim, and so was Harry, she said. But Harry had left the university and was looking around for something to do. The father was in Florida.

“Isn’t he working?” I asked.

“Peggy allowances him. He didn’t make much, you know. Tax collector in a poor county. And he can’t stand the northern winters.”

“Peggy stands them,” I said, rather sharply.

“She doesn’t know it’s winter,” Anne said, with a return of the acidity I had noticed before. “From steam-heated dressing room in a closed theatre to a warm house. Flowers everywhere—usually sent, but if not she buys them. Who couldn’t stand her sort of winters?”

I began to get a picture of Peggy, gradually. Not at once. The first picture was of Anne. She asked for breakfast in her room, and looked at me in amazement when I asked her not to smoke before the children.

“How provincial you are!” she said.

But she managed somehow, and a certain hardness in her seemed to melt away gradually during the week that followed. So it was from her that I finally got my picture of Peggy. She trailed into my room one night in a negligée, and sat down by my fire.

“I’d give a good bit to know just what you think of Peggy and the rest of us,” she said, out of a clear sky.

“I’m very fond of you all.”

“Not that. The way we hang onto her. She’s done so much for us that now if she tried to do less we’d have a grievance. But I’m not concerned with her just now. She gets a lot of pleasure out of giving. That’s not it. It’s what it is doing to the rest of us.”

And after a silence, when she sat lost in thought and staring at the fire.

“I used to be a self-respecting human being. I wasn’t happy, but I was myself. Now I’m happy, if a cat on a warm hearth is happy—and I’m nothing. Take Harry, too. I’d like to wager that he won’t take a job unless it’s exactly to his taste. He doesn’t have to. Do you suppose father has lived seventy years in Indiana without learning to bear up under its winters? Nonsense.”

“What about Jim?”

“Oh, that doesn’t touch him. He has plenty of money. But he’s not happy. Take an average day. He’s gone before she’s awake, if she’s sung the night before, and he says good-morning over the telephone to her from the office. If she’s studying a part she works a part of the day, but he’s downtown, so that does not matter. But if she’s singing that night, and you’ve seen how many nights she has been singing, what happens? She has a light supper at five o’clock. Jim gets home about six. She’s off at seven and whom does he dine with? Harry and me. I tell you there are weeks when he hardly sees her, except from the box in the opera house.”

She was more talkative than I had ever seen her, and she gave a very faithful picture of the conditions. The house was never empty, and somehow the attempt to mix Jim’s world with Peggy’s had not worked. They always divided off, “like a children’s party,” Anne explained. And whereas Peggy’s friends stood ready to take Jim Wentworth whole-heartedly to them, his friends stood aloof from Peggy. For all the crowd, Peggy was often very lonely.

Anne got up at last.

“I suppose most successes mean some failures,” she said. “Well, don’t worry. It may work out all right. We’re none of us absolutely yellow, and Peggy may come to her senses and throw us out.” She moved to the doorway and stopped there. “But it’s not a good arrangement when a wife has to leave another woman to be her husband’s hearth-mate.” She saw my face and laughed. “Oh, good heavens,” she exclaimed, “it’s not what you’re thinking. He never sees me.”

I studied Anne during the remainder of her visit, and an impression gained just before she left the room that night was strengthened as time went on.

I do not know certainly that Anne knew she cared for Jim Wentworth. I do know that neither Jim himself or Peggy ever suspected it. Possibly Anne knew, for I could see at times in her a bitterness, not against the world or her people, although she always railed more or less, but against herself. The explanation, if she did care for him, was simple enough to me. Anne was greatly maternal, and for years she had lavished her aborted maternity on Peggy; she had never cared much for her brother. The time had come, however, when Peggy no longer needed her and Jim somehow did. She had to love somebody.

In all of this I am aware that Jim himself has been rather a shadowy figure. I did not know him well, and my chief recollection was of a square and solid figure, over middle height and faultlessly dressed for his marriage, submitting after the wedding with amused reluctance to being photographed with his famous wife.

“You fellows don’t want _me_,” he said, cheerfully enough. “Come on, Peggy. Stand out.”

He had a sort of steadiness and dependability, and he stood with his feet planted pretty squarely on the ground. There has never been any doubt in my mind but that he went into marriage soberly and after much thought, and that he cared intensely for Peggy. He was a serious sort of person, but he had humour and a most engaging smile. His main characteristic, however, was a sort of quiet strength.

It was a year or so before I went to New York again. I don’t know exactly what I had expected, but certainly I had not anticipated the change I found in Peggy. She was thin and fine-drawn, and her girlish look had gone. In her make-up on the stage, with borders and lights, the change escaped detection. She even looked, because of her slimness, younger, and her voice had certainly gained something. I am no musician, so I don’t know what, unless it was depth and maturity.

I sat with Jim in their box that night, and since from the moment she entered he never took his eyes from her, I had a good chance to study him. I have heard of hungry eyes, have even written of them, but I had never really seen them until then. It gave me a queer feeling, rather as though life was separating them and that he felt that she was only his when, as now, she sang to him.

Sing to him she certainly did. Perhaps she felt the same thing he did, that in their home they were somehow drifting apart, but that here, in that great auditorium, for a little space they were together. All the crowd, but really only the two of them.

When she finished, he was very pale, and he got out a handkerchief and mopped his face.

I stayed with them for several days, and saw that they were almost never alone together. On off nights Mazzari and others of the company would lounge in, bringing with them visitors to meet her. There was a welter of music, tobacco and food, and then more music. Peggy was always surrounded; and since they kept late hours and Jim had to rise fairly early, at midnight or thereabouts he would slip quietly away. It is a tragic fact that no one ever inquired for him or seemed to miss him.

Not once while I was there did any of Jim’s people or friends appear.

It was after one of those crowded evenings that I had a short talk with him. The guests had gone, but Anne, Harry and the father, who was there for a day or two, were still in the drawing room. I got an impression that some question was at stake; Harry, perhaps, or that the old man wanted something—he usually did—and I left them together.

On the way to my room I passed Jim’s study to see him sitting alone in front of the fire. I believe he thought I was Peggy, for he turned eagerly when he heard me; then his face settled again into a sort of apathy. He got up.

“May I come in?”

“Certainly.”

He drew a chair to the fire for me, and settled himself.

“Family love feast still going on?” he inquired.

“Yes. You don’t have her much to yourself, do you?”

“Much?” His voice was savage. “Never.”

“Couldn’t that be arranged, Jim? I think she misses it, too.”

He said nothing to that for a moment, but sat staring at the fire. Then:

“Once, perhaps. Not now. Her life is too crowded. The plain truth is that she doesn’t need me. She’s got her people, and her following, and her success. She doesn’t even need me to support her.”

I had an answer to that last, and gave it to him promptly. I said that a good many marriages had survived in the past because women were financially dependent on their men. But that when a woman who was economically free elected to marry and stick by her husband, it was because she wanted to. In other words, because she loved him. He seemed to think that over.

“You leave out an important element,” he said finally. “Habit. She has formed the habit of being married to him.”

He was rather determinedly withdrawing himself from her. The idea that she did not need him had grown, in his sensitive state, to a belief that she did not want him; and the result was a sort of proud coldness on his part that left her hurt and bewildered.

She was having trouble enough without that, too. For Harry was drinking pretty steadily, and was out of a position again.

“He’ll never amount to a row of pins,” Anne said to her once rather brutally. “There was a time when fifteen dollars a week and a chance to go to night school was the best thing he could think of. But he’s like the rest of us. Our ideas of money have changed. He’s worth about twenty-five dollars a week right now, but he goes downtown with Jim in an expensive car. He lives here, to the tune of— I don’t know what you spend, but it’s a fortune. And the salary he’s worth looks like a joke to him.”

“I can’t throw him out.”

“No,” Anne said slowly. “No, you can’t. But you’d save his immortal soul if you did.”

Peggy herself gave me no confidence whatever. Once or twice I thought she was going back to our talk the day of her wedding, but she never did. The nearest she came was when, apropos of my own children, she said suddenly:

“Sometimes I think if we had children it would help. They would be one thing in common.”

But Anne was there, and she said nothing further. By that time I saw that the old intimacy between the sisters was almost gone; that Anne resented her own dependence, and let Peggy see it. But she made no move to go away, and as far as that goes, she had no place to go. She hated her father.

Peggy, on the other hand, undoubtedly saw that, with every other element to drag them apart, her own family also stood between Jim and herself. They were never alone together. Harry went about, living his own probably not very creditable masculine life, but Anne was always there.

And Anne always would be there, ghastly relic of an outworn system which made its own martyrs; the helpless dependent, the unfortunate parasite.

In view of the situation that developed later on, undoubtedly Peggy had already begun to distrust her voice. If she had not buried that distrust things might have been different, but she would not talk even to me. She saw, helplessly, that Anne was somehow lost to her, and bitterly unhappy into the bargain, and that Jim, whom she wildly loved, was drifting away. And that her voice was somehow responsible.

With Anne her method was precisely the wrong one. She tried to win her back by acts and gifts of external generosity, but these only served to increase Anne’s sense of dependence. As for Jim, she cared too much, was too much hurt, to make any overtures. Probably she knew, subconsciously at least, that the only thing to do there was to surrender her work, and she was not prepared to do that. It was a part of her. Not only the applause, but the work itself, the hard study, the hours with her accompanist, when the servants walked about with stealthy feet, and her maid waited to spray her throat—all that was a part of her, and a vital part.

Peggy had employed a housekeeper by that time, and Anne’s last small pretence at usefulness had gone when she ceased to run the city and country houses. She had nothing whatever to do. . . .

For two years I heard little or nothing of them except through the newspapers. Then, one day, to my surprise, I received a letter from Anne.

_I hardly know why I am doing this_, she wrote, _except that I
must talk to some one. Things really are about as usual, and yet
somehow we seem to be moving on toward a catastrophe of some
sort. I don’t know what._

_Peggy is pretty tired, for one thing. Tired of the everlasting
crowds and of work, and tired of Harry and me. Harry has been
doing very badly. As for me—well, I am always around, and I
haven’t the strength of character any more or any training to
start out for myself. I have made the effort, asked Peggy to
give me a small allowance and begged Harry to go with me to a
boarding-house somewhere. But he won’t do it._

_I know Jim would be happier without us. He could have her to
himself once in a while, and a lot of things would clear up, I
think. But perhaps I am morbid about this. The real truth is not
only that Peggy’s family has been ruined by her success, but
that it has come between her and her husband. I told you once
that men like their women dependent, but it is deeper than that.
A good many of them resent any outside interest, except what
occupies the time they are in their offices, and they want the
main interest to be themselves._

_When I tell you that Jim is often at his club now on Peggy’s
evenings at home, you will see what I mean. The whole question
is whether she sacrifices one or the other, Jim or her work._

_As for myself, I don’t see much ahead. If I was brought into
the world to produce a great artist, I have done my work. And
that has failed, too, for what is her success without happiness?
Quite frankly, I would deliberately let go of life if I felt
sure there was something to come after._

I wrote to Anne and to Peggy too. Both letters were frank, and Peggy’s was almost brutally so.

_Every successful woman_, I wrote, _sooner or later finds
herself at the forks of the road. Perhaps this will not always
be, for men will learn to make for the wife’s affairs the same
understanding allowance women have always made for the business
interests of their men. But the fault is also with the women.
They cannot apparently reconcile the two, the home and the
career, but, they must somehow learn to do it._

_You asked me once how we managed, and I replied that it was by
mutual compromise. I might have added, and I do now, that it was
only possible by detaching my work from my family life, and by
putting the family life first. I might have gone higher, the
other way about, but it would not have been worth the cost._

I advised her strongly, too, to find something for Anne to do, and to face the fact that generosity may be a vice and a self-indulgence. That it could wreck lives and character.

Her reply was prompt and very humble.

_I know it is true, but what can I do? I have watched it coming
until I am almost desperate. But the plain truth is that when I
make overtures to Jim he thinks I am sorry for him, and draws
into a shell of pride. As for Anne, all my life I have looked
forward to making things easy and happy for her, and you must
see that I cannot turn her out. My home must be her home, so
long as we both live. She deserves that, at the very least._

Within the next year or two things moved rather rapidly. The old father suddenly re-married and I got a bitterly cynical letter from Anne. Then Harry got into some sort of trouble and had to leave the country. Peggy and Mazzari went on a concert tour just after that, and she stayed with me when they came to our city. Her obsessing idea was that she had wrecked every one she loved, without seeing how.

“Even Anne,” she finished. “And I depended so on Anne to see me through.”

Mazzari came out to an early dinner that night, and he had not been in the house five minutes before I saw that he was a new and possibly important element in the situation. On her wedding day I had laughed at him, but I could not do that now. He had a sort of new dignity about him, an almost—it sounds queer, but it was true—an almost majestic pride in the sheer hopelessness of his devotion.

He drew me aside after dinner, while Peggy was upstairs, and opened up his heart with an engaging abandon.

“She is a wonder-woman,” he said. “And I love her. You know that. But she loves only that—that business man of hers.” I cannot hope to reproduce the scorn in his voice for Jim. “Me, I speak her language, I am of her people, we have the same God. He? He does not even love her.”

I protested, but he held up a dramatic hand.

“It takes a big man to love a big woman,” he announced. “I am a big man. He is not.”

Curiously enough, Peggy did not return to the confidential tone of her letter, and during that brief visit we had only one talk. She was always surrounded, even in the house; her accompanist, a secretary, a maid, one or the other was always with her.

I began to see that, no matter what she intended, there was not much time for a husband in her life. But, although she was never alone, I thought her very lonely, a sort of loneliness of the heart. Queens must have it sometimes.

But she did open up once.

“You mustn’t take Mazzari too hard,” she said. She was having her hair brushed at the time, and I had a distinct feeling of shock over such a subject before her maid. But I found that she did not think of the woman at all; I daresay she was always about, and Peggy had grown to think of her as a sort of toilet article.

“I certainly won’t, unless you do.”

She laughed a little.

“I’m used to him,” she said. “He’s like a comfortable fire; he burns, but he doesn’t blaze too much.” She took her hand mirror, and examined her face absently. “I have to have some affection,” she said. “Even a dog has to be loved.”

“You have Jim.”

“Jim doesn’t care any more.”

“I don’t believe it. And you have Anne.”

“Anne hates me,” she said bitterly. “I can understand Jim. Or I try to. But I can’t understand Anne.” And a moment later: “I’ve got everything, and nothing.”

There was a sort of blessed hush after they had all gone. . . .

In looking about for an explanation of the desperate act by which Anne finally solved her problem, I find myself wondering if her love for Jim did not enter into it very largely. That he never knew of it I am certain, but I am also certain that it existed.

In that case, I daresay the sort of pseudo-domesticity of their life together while Peggy was away was finally too much for her. But even eliminating that, Peggy’s absence was surely a contributory cause, and Peggy must have known it. Always when she was there she was justifying Anne to herself. “You did this for me, Anne,” or “Anne is my second mother.” “Do come to-night, Anne; I want your opinion—” on anything, from an aria to a costume.

But Peggy’s constantly upholding hand had been withdrawn, and Anne slipped down and down. She killed herself.

I have sat back and looked at the words, and they seem horrible to me even now. It was so unnecessary and so—so final. Do women really kill themselves because they have nothing worth while to do? And if so, was having something worth while to do the answer? Because Peggy had had that, and she had not found happiness. Was the only safe way then a sort of comfortable mediocrity? A little love, a little work, a little play?

Was it that men were satisfied with less, that they could so easily live their lives of double interest, home and work, and that women demanded more, all of love and all of success?

Are the great of the world among women always a little lonely? Is there the element of tragedy in all genius? Or was Anne, and later Peggy herself, a victim of a changing order of things, to which women have reacted more quickly than men?

Just what crisis finally precipitated Anne’s suicide I do not know. Probably, indeed, there was no crisis. She had, I think, simply reached the end of the hopeful trail.

I had a heartbroken note from Peggy. The idea that she was somehow wrecking everything she valued was noticeable through it, and she quoted Wilde about men always killing the thing that they loved. She had forgotten Anne’s later bitterness, and had gone back to the days when Anne had been the only mother she knew.

She did not mention Jim. She said she had fixed up Harry’s affairs, and he was back with them. . . .

From a psychological point of view, Anne’s suicide was a distinct milestone in Peggy’s condition. She could not face what she felt as to her own part in it. For months after she would not even speak Anne’s name.

It rested for Harry, however, to deliver the final psychological blow, and again her voice was the agent. It appears that he heard Peggy, in the early dramatic days of the war, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic from the steps of the public library. He went home that night and told her that she had profoundly moved him, and that he had gone off at once and enlisted.

Later I heard from Jim that she had remained quite steady and said that she was very proud. But she had gone to her bedroom and fainted.

Harry was killed at Château-Thierry.

I imagine that, along with that blow, there came the frightful conviction that she had sent, not only Harry, but other boys; that she saw her dead laid out in rows; that she began to see herself as a thing of wrath, an agent of destruction. She began to have a steady insomnia.

I saw Jim in Washington not long after that, and the change in his appearance was very marked. His hair was quite grey, and he was less carefully dressed than usual. We lunched together at the Shoreham, and it developed that since he was too old for the army he had been trying to get some sort of war work. But he had failed.

“Where is Peggy?”

“She’s not very well. Of course Harry’s death— She’s singing at the camps.”

And a moment later, with a ghastly sort of smile: “You see how it is. She’s got a job to do for the war. _Morale_, you know. I can’t even do that.”

A day or so later I saw him lunching with a young woman. She looked eminently respectable, and I surmised that he was actuated by sheer loneliness. Still, it worried me. I wondered if Mazzari was also singing at the camps.

There was a long time when I heard nothing of Peggy or Jim after that. My husband and two sons were in the army, and I myself had a government mission abroad. While I was in Paris, shortly before the Armistice, I learned that Peggy was singing along the front, and later on that she had been giving a concert in a hospital when it was struck by a shell and almost demolished, but that she had not been hurt.

I did not know what had happened to her until I met her.

It was on Armistice Day, and I was on the balcony of the Crillon. Underneath a procession of war cripples was going by; in the square the crowd was separating to make way for an informal parade—first the mounted hussars, in helmet and full regalia once more, then “Papa” Joffre, generals and the cabinet, a vast formless jubilation.

There was a woman in front of me, heavily veiled and dressed in black. Now and then she lifted her veil to put a handkerchief to her eyes, and so at last I knew her. It was Peggy. But a changed and older Peggy. She was thinner than ever and quite colourless and she was, something which must have been rare with her, quite alone. I touched her on the shoulder, and she gave a little cry and threw herself at me.

“My dear, my dear!” she said. “I have wanted you so.”

But she did not say it. _She whispered._

Her voice was entirely gone. She told me, in the taxi going back to her hotel, that she had not been able to speak since the time of the bombardment at the front. Of course she had had time to get accustomed to the idea, but I was profoundly shocked and moved.

“It’s a form of paralysis,” she whispered. “They tell me I’ll get over it, only not to try too much. I don’t know.” She sat looking ahead of her, her hands smoothing the gloves she had taken off, an old and familiar trick of hers, and I tried to think what this would mean to her. I couldn’t. She had always, to me, been a vehicle of her wonderful voice, and now without it she seemed a sort of empty vessel, a—

“I keep wondering,” she whispered, “how Jim will feel. He cared for my voice before he cared for me. Of course,” she added, after a pause, “it won’t last, but—suppose it does?”

Later on I asked about Mazzari, but she did not know where he was, or care, I gathered. She even smiled a little. “He only cared for the singer, anyhow,” she said. “I always knew that.”

Her main, her only concern, was Jim. She went back to him again and again, watching me wistfully as I reassured her.

“I don’t think you know how far we have drifted apart,” she said.

It was, it always had been, probably, as inevitable as fate. Now that we know more of the mind, I can pick out one by one the milestones she had passed, each one leading on to catastrophe, even while or because she had buried them. Buried they had been, deep in the unconscious, which forgets nothing, and kept down there by a violent effort of her conscious will. But then had come the bombardment, the shock, the temporary paralysis of her powers of resistance. . . .

The unconscious took hold. It said to her, in effect: “You have wrecked and ruined, lost and suffered, through your voice. It is better dead. Better dead.”

I see that now, but at the time I did not understand.

I had been astonished to find her in a modest hotel, with no trace of her customary _entourage_, and no doubt she saw that, for she explained that she had spent money almost as fast as she had earned it, and that she felt obliged to be careful.

“But Jim—” I protested.

“I have never gone to Jim for money,” she said proudly. But her face twitched a little. “I can’t ask him to keep me now.”

She had something, of course, but I was aghast at the distance that had evidently come between them. That she still cared I was positive, but how far had Jim drifted? I remembered the girl in the restaurant.

I cabled Jim that night without telling her, and for four days no reply came. I was angry and frightened, but on the fifth day he cabled.

_Have moved heaven and earth for passport. Can’t get one. Will you bring her home?_

She was like a ghost on the steamer. She was afraid of being recognised, and only after night was I able to get her out on deck for a breath of air. At first I thought that she was grieving over her condition, for the fall from supreme greatness is harder than for those who have not reached the top. But I began to see after a time that she had waved that aside as of no importance whatever, and that her whole mind was on Jim.

Out of all that life had held out to her, only Jim was left.

Would Jim see that too? I could not get to him first to warn him, and yet, in her psychological condition, I did not know what would happen if he failed her.

She was dressed, veiled and on deck long before we were ready to dock. She had even, a rare thing for her, put some rouge on her cheeks. I found her, however, scrubbing it off.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “He must see me just as I am.”

She had lost a great deal of her beauty, and she looked almost old. I confess that I was worried, but I need not have been. I saw Jim on the pier before she did, and he had the same hungry look in his eyes that I had seen in the box at the opera.

He just took her into his arms and held her there. . . .

The answer? There is no answer, except perhaps that success passes, one way or another, and that the only thing that matters is a strong, warm, human hand to hold to in the dark.

But there is a brief sequel to this story, and I do not know what it teaches. Perhaps that it does not require failure to teach a woman perspective. To some, of course, success is enough in itself, but there are others who, not through calamity but because they will not pay the cost, prefer love to success when, as sometimes happens, they cannot have both.

We came through the war safely, and last summer I went out to Montana, where Jim had bought a summer ranch. Three years had passed and more, and all the world knew that the great _diva_ would never sing again. It was true that she no longer whispered, but her singing voice was gone.

I found them brown and happy, and inseparable. The old look had gone from both of them, and Peggy was doing most of the work, with a Chinaman in the kitchen. There was not even a piano, nor one of the photographs which used to litter up whatever Peggy was calling home at the moment.

I asked Jim once if she ever tried to sing, but he said she did not.

“It’s gone,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the loss it must be to her, I’d say frankly that I’m glad. You never knew it, but it had come between us, somehow. Not the singing, but all that it brought with it.”

I was not much of a rider, and Jim was busy about the ranch during most of the day. Peggy rode off alone rather often, and would come in toward evening tired but very happy. After those rides I always thought there was something rather wonderful in her attitude toward Jim, something solicitous and tender and almost mysterious.

I had ventured out alone into the mountains one day, going further than I knew, and finally losing my way. After considerable wandering my horse found the trail again, and we headed toward home. It was mid-afternoon, and the peaks overhead were brilliant with sunshine. And on a rock, above, suddenly I saw Peggy.

She was standing there, immobile, looking down toward the ranch. She had not seen me, and as I looked she threw her hands out and began to sing. I had never heard her sing like that. It was all back, and more.

I sat on my horse and cried; cried for the sheer pathos of it. Just how long it was since her voice had come back I did not know. I do not know now, for she still carries out the program she set for herself. Jim has never guessed. But what is important is that somehow, somewhere she had reached the forks of the road, and had turned to Jim.

No, it isn’t an answer. It is plain surrender. I suppose whether it pays or not depends on the Jims of the world. And it depends, too, on what a woman really wants. I daresay it will always be love, unless we develop a new type of women. Which God forbid.

V
THE SECRET HOUSE: The Wife