The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather [rosie project .txt] 📗

week. Consider me dead until Saturday, Dr. Archie. I invite you both to dine with me on Saturday night, the day after Rheingold. And Fred must leave early, for I want to talk to you alone. You’ve been here nearly a week, and I haven’t had a serious word with you. Tad for mad, Fred, as the Norwegians say.” VIII

The Ring of the Niebelungs was to be given at the Metropolitan on four successive Friday afternoons. After the first of these performances, Fred Ottenburg went home with Landry for tea. Landry was one of the few public entertainers who own real estate in New York. He lived in a little three-story brick house on Jane Street, in Greenwich Village, which had been left to him by the same aunt who paid for his musical education.

Landry was born, and spent the first fifteen years of his life, on a rocky Connecticut farm not far from Cos Cob. His father was an ignorant, violent man, a bungling farmer and a brutal husband. The farmhouse, dilapidated and damp, stood in a hollow beside a marshy pond. Oliver had worked hard while he lived at home, although he was never clean or warm in winter and had wretched food all the year round. His spare, dry figure, his prominent larynx, and the peculiar red of his face and hands belonged to the choreboy he had never outgrown. It was as if the farm, knowing he would escape from it as early as he could, had ground its mark on him deep. When he was fifteen Oliver ran away and went to live with his Catholic aunt, on Jane Street, whom his mother was never allowed to visit. The priest of St. Joseph’s Parish discovered that he had a voice.

Landry had an affection for the house on Jane Street, where he had first learned what cleanliness and order and courtesy were. When his aunt died he had the place done over, got an Irish housekeeper, and lived there with a great many beautiful things he had collected. His living expenses were never large, but he could not restrain himself from buying graceful and useless objects. He was a collector for much the same reason that he was a Catholic, and he was a Catholic chiefly because his father used to sit in the kitchen and read aloud to his hired men disgusting “exposures” of the Roman Church, enjoying equally the hideous stories and the outrage to his wife’s feelings.

At first Landry bought books; then rugs, drawings, china. He had a beautiful collection of old French and Spanish fans. He kept them in an escritoire he had brought from Spain, but there were always a few of them lying about in his sitting-room.

While Landry and his guest were waiting for the tea to be brought, Ottenburg took up one of these fans from the low marble mantel-shelf and opened it in the firelight. One side was painted with a pearly sky and floating clouds. On the other was a formal garden where an elegant shepherdess with a mask and crook was fleeing on high heels from a satin-coated shepherd.

“You ought not to keep these things about, like this, Oliver. The dust from your grate must get at them.”

“It does, but I get them to enjoy them, not to have them. They’re pleasant to glance at and to play with at odd times like this, when one is waiting for tea or something.”

Fred smiled. The idea of Landry stretched out before his fire playing with his fans, amused him. Mrs. McGinnis brought the tea and put it before the hearth: old teacups that were velvety to the touch and a potbellied silver cream pitcher of an Early Georgian pattern, which was always brought, though Landry took rum.

Fred drank his tea walking about, examining Landry’s sumptuous writing-table in the alcove and the Boucher drawing in red chalk over the mantel. “I don’t see how you can stand this place without a heroine. It would give me a raging thirst for gallantries.”

Landry was helping himself to a second cup of tea. “Works quite the other way with me. It consoles me for the lack of her. It’s just feminine enough to be pleasant to return to. Not any more tea? Then sit down and play for me. I’m always playing for other people, and I never have a chance to sit here quietly and listen.”

Ottenburg opened the piano and began softly to boom forth the shadowy introduction to the opera they had just heard. “Will that do?” he asked jokingly. “I can’t seem to get it out of my head.”

“Oh, excellently! Thea told me it was quite wonderful, the way you can do Wagner scores on the piano. So few people can give one any idea of the music. Go ahead, as long as you like. I can smoke, too.” Landry flattened himself out on his cushions and abandoned himself to ease with the circumstance of one who has never grown quite accustomed to ease.

Ottenburg played on, as he happened to remember. He understood now why Thea wished him to hear her in Rheingold. It had been clear to him as soon as Fricka rose from sleep and looked out over the young world, stretching one white arm toward the new Gotterburg shining on the heights. “Wotan! Gemahl! erwache!” She was pure Scandinavian, this Fricka: “Swedish summer!” he remembered old Mr. Nathanmeyer’s phrase. She had wished him to see her because she had a distinct kind of loveliness for this part, a shining beauty like the light of sunset on distant sails. She seemed to take on the look of immortal loveliness, the youth of the golden apples, the shining body and the shining mind. Fricka had been a jealous spouse to him for so long that he had forgot she meant wisdom before she meant domestic order, and that, in any event, she was always a goddess. The Fricka of that afternoon