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Book 1Six
The next morning Lucy was walking across the city toward Michigan Avenue. She was happy, she was frightened,--couldn`t keep her attention on anything. Her mind had got away from her and was darting about in the sunlight, over the tops of the tall buildings. Exactly at ten o`clock she went into the Arts Building and told the hall porter she had an engagement with Mr. Sebastian. He rang for the elevator, and she was taken up to the sixth storey. When she lifted the brass knocker, Sebastian himself opened the door.
"I was expecting you," he said with a nod. "I knew you were in town, for I saw you in my audience last night, hiding behind a pillar. Did you like the concert?" He took her coat from her and hung it up. "Better take off your hat, too; you`ll be more comfortable."
The music room opened directly off the entry hall, with only a doorway between. As she walked into it, Lucy noticed it was a big room, full of sunlight, and that the general colour was dark red; the rugs and curtains and chairs. The piano stood at the front, between two windows.
Sebastian saw that she was not looking at anything; probably she was frightened again.
"Shall we begin? We can talk afterwards. We`ll work a little on the Elijah. I have to go to St. Paul to sing it with an oratorio society very soon, and I`ve not looked at it for a long while."
When she sat down at the piano, he put the music on the rack, turning over the pages. "Before we begin with my part, we might run through the tenor`s aria, here. It`s much too high for me, of course, but I like to sing it." He pointed to the page and began: "If with all your heart you truly seek Him."
"That`s a nice introduction to the whole thing, isn`t it? Now we`ll take it up just here," he leaned over her and indicated with his finger.
He walked up and down in his elkskin shoes as he sang, his hands in the pockets of his smoking-jacket. Lucy had no thought for anything but the score in front of her. An hour and a half went by very quickly. Just when she thought things were going better, he put his hand on her shoulder.
"Enough for today, Miss Gayheart. Very good for a first trial. Shall we begin at the same hour tomorrow? And don`t become agitated when you make mistakes. What I most want is elasticity. You must learn to catch a hint quickly in the tempi. When I`m eccentric, catch step with me. I have a reason, or think I have. Now suppose we sit down over here by the fire and have a glass of port and a biscuit. We`ve been working very hard."
She rose and went to the chair he pointed out. She suddenly felt tired. Sebastian lowered the heavy window-shades a little, until the sunshine fell only on the rugs and the brass fire-irons. He brought a tray with a decanter and glasses and sat down opposite her, lounging back in his chair with his feet to the fire.
"Have you ever heard the Elijah well given, Miss Gayheart?"
Lucy told him she had never heard it given at all.
He smiled indulgently. "Mendelssohn is out of fashion just now. Who is the fashion? Debussy, I suppose? You`ve noticed that people are interested in music chiefly to have something to talk about at dinner parties?"
Lucy murmured she couldn`t say as to that; she didn`t go to dinner parties, and she didn`t know anyone in Chicago except Professor Auerbach and a few of his students.
"And in your own part of the country isn`t it so?"
"I think my father is the only person in our town who is much interested in music. He leads the town band and gives lessons on the clarinet."
"Your father is a music-teacher?"
"Not exactly. He`s a watchmaker by trade, but he plays the clarinet and flute very well, and the violin a little."
"German, of course? That`s good. A German watchmaker who plays the flute seems to me a comfortable sort of father to have."
He asked her how she happened to come to Chicago, and to study with Auerbach. She felt that his questions were not perfunctory, that he really wanted to know something about her life, and she got over her shyness.
While they were talking, the outer door opened softly, and a little man in a stiffly starched white jacket and noiseless tennis shoes, carrying several coats on hangers, darted through the room and disappeared into the sleeping-chamber beyond.
"That is Giuseppe, my valet," Sebastian explained. "Come in and see how well he does for me." He opened the door and took Lucy into his sleeping-room. "Giuseppe, this is the Signorina who is coming to play for me until Mr. Mockford is better. I want her to see how we live."
"Si, si, signore." Giuseppe smiled eagerly and stepped back from the clothes-closet, pointing to the rows of coats and trousers very much as if he were a guide in a picture gallery. When he thought she had observed them sufficiently, he flourished his hand toward the dressing-table and toward a bed of faultless contour.
"Yes, he keeps everything very neat. If you went through my bureau drawers, you`d find them just like your own. He makes my breakfast too, and brings it up to me."
Giuseppe stood holding his hands clasped in front of his stomach, smiling like a little boy being praised. His face seemed almost like a boy`s. But his hair, Lucy noticed, was thin and faded, and his high red forehead (shaped like a bowl) was seamed by deep lines from left to right. A moment later, when he had gone to the far end of the music room to put fresh coal on the fire, Lucy asked Sebastian whether Giuseppe had been with him long.
"I picked him up in London, on the way over. He used to be valet de chambre in an hotel in Florence. I`ve never had better service. Think of it, he has got all those lines on his forehead worrying about other people`s coats and boots and breakfasts. I haven`t a friend in the world who would do for me what that little man would."
Something in the way he said this made Lucy feel a trifle downcast. She almost wished she were Giuseppe. After all, it was people like that who counted with artists--more than their admirers.
When she left the studio a few moments later she found the Italian in the little entrance hall, before a table drawer which was divided into compartments. Into these he was putting away gloves; into one white gloves, into another tan, into another grey. A man must be rich and successful indeed to live in such beautiful order, she thought.
When she reached her own room after lunch, she looked about it with affection and compassion. She pulled down the shades, opened the window a little, and threw herself upon the bed, too tired to sit up and too much excited to sleep. Things she had scarcely noticed at the time came rushing through her mind: the dressing-gown thrown on a chair, the silver on the dressing-table, the spongy softness of the rose-coloured blankets the valet was smoothing on the bed, and those gloves in the table drawer. Evidently nothing ever came near Sebastian to tarnish his personal elegance. She had never known a man who lived like that.
Harry Gordon was rich, to be sure; he owned carriages and blooded horses, sleighs and guns, and he had his clothes made in Chicago. But his things stood out, and weren`t a part of himself. His overcoats were harsh to touch, his hats were stiff. He was crude, like everyone else she knew. An upstanding young man, they called him at home, easy and masterful in his own town, but in a big city he took on a certain self-importance, as if he were afraid of being ignored in the crowd. She remembered just how Sebastian looked when he stood against the light in his heelless shoes and old velvet jacket. He would be equal to any situation in the world. He had a simplicity that must come from having lived a great deal and mastered a great deal. If you brushed against his life ever so lightly it was like tapping on a deep bell; you felt all that you could not hear.
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