Judith Moore; or, Fashioning a Pipe

by Joanna E. Wood

CHAPTER V.

"Sweet Spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My Musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die."

Judith Moore, the operatic singer, was not an ailing woman usually. In fact, she had very sweet and well-balanced health, but in her make-up the mental and physical balanced each other so well, and were so closely allied that any joy or grief—in short, any emotion—reacted strongly upon her physical organism. Heart and brain, sense and spirit were close knit. Delicately strung as an Æolian harp, she vibrated too strongly to the winds that swept over her. As strings grow lax or snap from being over-taut, so her nerves had failed under the tension of excitement, and effort, and triumph. Two years before she had made her début upon the operatic stage in Germany, stepping from the strictest tutelage to an instant and unquestioned success. Even yet when she thought of that night her cheeks would flush, her eyes dilate, her head poise itself more proudly. She recalled it so well. Her manager's eagerness, that made his dark face almost livid: her own fright: the mascot thrust hastily into her hand by an old attaché of the play-house. She remembered all the details of this performance better than any other—the orchestra and the people: the peculiar, loving droop of the shoulder with which one of the 'cello players bent above his sonorous instrument. Then came her effort, and it seemed the next moment the thunderous applause, the flowers, the deep-throated Hoch! Hoch! and the joyous cursing of her manager behind the scenes.

Yes, that was life.

And as she lived her triumphs over again, she felt the supreme exaltation of a genius in a great gift, the God-like thrill of mastery, the glorious certainty of capacity, the birth-pang of creation. There is no gift so marvellous, so maddening, so divine as the gift of song—none so evanescent, none so sad.

This woman inhaled the common ether of a prosaic world, mingled it with her breath and sent it forth glorified as sound—sound such as nothing made with men's hands in all the world can produce. She created something divine, which died even as it was born, and passed into the silence—silence that has absorbed so many sweet and terrible things. She sang; she sent forth her heart, her being, her soul from her lips, like a beautiful unseen dove seeking a sign; and there returned to her—silence. From all the glorious "choir invisible" that had gone before there came back no word. And the wonder, and triumph, and pity of it grew upon her, so that she began to eat her heart out with loneliness.

Her voice lifted her up to the gods; when she returned to earth, there was no loving breast for her to rest upon, no strong hands to sustain her, no lips to kiss the pain of music from her own, none to seal the bliss of singing into abiding joy.

Two years of this, and Judith Moore left it all, and came, in the summer preceding her American début, to this little Canadian village. She had told her manager, the only person she knew well enough to write to, that he was not to write. He knew where she was: she would let him know if she needed him. Let her rest, for just a little, she pleaded. And he agreed.

She owed everything she was to this man, who had been a friend of her father's. Passing through the little town where they were, he had come to visit them. He found his old friend's funeral leaving the house. He came back to see the desolate girl. Then followed the discovery of her voice, and his investment in her as a good speculation. It was going to prove one, too, though the anxiety of it had given him a grey hair or two in his black head. Yes, it had been a good speculation already, for the two years' singing abroad had recouped him for all his outlay of money. The American season would repay his patience, and the South American tour, and the winter in Russia—the impresario's plans stretched far into the future through golden vistas of profit. That Judith might have other dreams he never considered.

She herself had no well-defined thought but to excel in her art. She did not in the least understand what was amiss with her. Not but what in many dreams by night, and visions by day, she had thought of a passion that was to transfigure her life; but so used was she to passing from the reality of life to the dream on the stage, that the visions and the verities became sadly confused, and so she grew day by day more eager to attain, more anxious to achieve the highest in her art, more unsparing of her own efforts, always trembling just on the threshold of the unknown, always feeling one more upward effort of her wings would take her to the very pinnacle of song. There surely grew the balm of sweet content, of satisfaction, of peace. Poor Judith! For her the real content lay in a green valley, far, far below these perilous peaks upon which she tottered; whereon no woman may safely stand, it seems, without a stronger soul beside her to sustain in time of need. Her happiness lay in a valley where love springs and happiness flows in streams about the feet, and as she aspired higher and higher, and rose farther and farther into the rarefied air which solitary success breathes, she left the Happy Valley farther and farther behind.

Had she been less evenly balanced, had her soul been less true, her heart less tender, she might in time have frozen the woman completely, and crystallized into the artiste only—or—but to think of Judith Moore sullying her wings is sacrilege.

She was full of womanly tenderness and womanly vanities. She had a thousand little tricks of coquetry and as many balms to ease their smart. She took a good deal of satisfaction out of her pretty gowns and her finger nails, and the contemplation of her little feet becomingly shod had been known to dry her tears. She was essentially the woman of the past, the woman who created a "type" distinct from man: the womanly woman, not the hybrid creature of modern cultivation; the woman of romance. To balance this (for nowadays this doubtless needs excuse) she had a fund of sympathy great enough to endow every living thing that suffered with pity. She had certainly that charity without which all other virtues are as "sounding brass." She sent away those who came in contact with her the better for their meeting, and from her eyes there shone a purity of soul that had abashed some men whose eyes had long forgotten shame.

Such was Judith Moore.

When Andrew approached the Morris house, the next day after the apple-tree episode, he saw from afar a figure in white sitting perched upon the weather-beaten rail fence which separated his woodland from the Morris farm. He hastened his steps, his heart beating hotly. Judith was in a repentant and somewhat shame-faced mood. Upon reflection it had occurred to her that her behaviour the day before had been little less than bold. Judith had felt badly over it, and had even cried a bit, as foolish women will. She was, of course, prepared to make Andrew suffer for her misdeeds if he in any way showed a recollection of the incident, and had decided to assume a very haughty mien if he dared say "feet."

Andrew's intuitions were not slow, even if he was only a farmer, and when he greeted her, and she suddenly, sweetly, strangely blushed and looked up at him half inquiringly, he interpreted it aright. He had been amused, perhaps aroused, by her impertinence; he was touched by her unexpressed penitence.

Miss Judith had on an artful frock: most of her frocks were artful and well put on, too, which is this great thing. Judith never considered time thrown away that was spent adorning her "perishing person." This particular frock was of sheer white wool, and because she had a waist of the unhygienic type (and rejoiced thereat exceedingly, be it told, for she was thoroughly unregenerate), she had it girdled with a ribbon, wound round and round her. It had huge loose sleeves of a kind not known in Ovid. "Sort of night-gowny looking," Andrew said afterwards, in describing her appearance to his aunt. How Miss Moore would have raged at that! Paquin, no less, had made those sleeves.

She was careful to keep her very toes out of sight this morning, and when she thought Andrew was not looking, she gave anxious little tugs at her skirt to cover them yet more securely. Every one of these tugs Andrew saw, and they raised within him a spirit of deep indignation. "I wish that skirt would come off in her hand—serve her right if it did," he said to himself, aggrievedly, whilst apparently listening to Miss Moore's prophecies regarding the weather.

"Going to rain in three days?" he said. "How do you know?"

"Oh," said Miss Moore, with an indescribable look of wisdom, "there was a big ring round the moon last night, enclosing three stars. That means in three days it will storm—of course, rain—you'd hardly expect snow, would you?" Miss Moore spoke a little resentfully as she concluded, for Andrew did not look impressed.

"Well, no," agreed Andrew. "Did Mr. Morris tell you that?"

"Yes: we're going to shear sheep to-morrow."

"What?" Andrew was amused at the "we."

"That," said Judith, who in spite of her air of knowledge was somewhat nervous and not quite certain whether she had put it rightly or not. ("Shear sheep" did sound queer.)

"Oh, you are. What else?"

"I'm going to learn to make butter. Mrs. Morris says I have real 'butter hands.' They're so cool. Feel." She laid her hand on his.

"Yes, lovely," said Andrew, fervently: "but don't you think you ought to get well before you do all this? Stick to prophesying for a while. It's easier."

"Oh, if you're going to laugh at me—"

"No, indeed." (Miss Moore's brows were knitted.) "I'm not really, honestly: never thought of such a thing." Then, persuasively, "Don't you want to come and see a bird's nest?"

Miss Moore's attempt at bad temper collapsed.

"I should think I did," she said.

"Come on, then," said he.

"Oh, is it on that side? How do I get over?"

"Let me lift you."

"No, indeed! Turn your back, and I'll jump."

"Let—"

"No!"

Andrew wheeled on his heel. There was a soft thud and a scramble. He turned like a flash, but Miss Moore had regained her feet, and stood waiting with an expression of exaggerated patience on her face.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

"Oh, waiting," she answered, with emphasis.

That walk was the first they ever had together. Neither of them ever forgot it. At the moment, it seemed to pass in light-hearted chatter: but beneath all this there was a substratum of eagerness—Judith trying to get in touch with this new creature at her side, this strong, unconventional, natural soul, so different from the artificial creatures she had known; and Andrew feeling his heart going out beyond control to this girl who walked so unsteadily at his side, stumbling every now and then from the unaccustomed roughness of the way. These little feet had evidently had all paths smoothed to them. (He could not guess how chill those carven pathways were.) How tender her eyes grew over the wild flowers, and how sweet her lips when, for a moment, a serious thought came to her!

The wild flowers were in full luxuriance, and Judith gathered an armful. They passed a dogwood tree that stood sheeted in its white blossoms, their petals of the texture of white kid. Andrew got her some great branches of it, and she insisted upon carrying it herself, holding all her spoil against her breast with one hand, using the other to lift her gown now and then, or to pluck more flowers.

Her face looked out from the flowers with a kind of rapt eagerness upon it that illumined it like a light. Her enjoyment was so intense as to be almost painful. They had gone quite a distance from the Morris house, half the length of Andrew's woods, when they came to a little hollow. A stream ran through it, but so blocked was its way by the burrows of moles that it zigzagged across and across the hollow, seeming almost to form loops at some points. All along its course grew the tall, pale-mauve water-flag, its spikes of bloom rising from clumps of sword-like leaves that grew in the stream's edge. At the farther side of the hollow a mass of wild crab-apple trees were covered with their fragile pink blooms, and heaped up at one end of the hollow was a great mass of loose stones, piled there as they had been gathered from the fields. Dog-tooth violets, which love moisture, grew thickly about their feet, their yellow and brown blossoms springing from between pairs of spotted leaves. Where the leaves grew singly, there were no flowers. Here and there could be seen a blossom of the rarer white variety, the back of its recurved petals delicately tinged with pink. Close by the roots of some stumps there were velvety cushions of the thick green moss so often found in Canadian woods; bryony vines strayed over these, making a rich brocade in tones of green. Tufts of coarse ferns grew in the clefts of the stumps, their last year's fronds withering beside them, the fresh ones just beginning to uncurl. And framing all this in, there was the curtain of trees in the first freshness of foliage.

For a moment, in Judith's mind dream and reality became confused. The little glade so exactly simulated a well-set scene. There was something artificial in the piled-up stones: in the stream which made so much of itself in going such a short distance. It was so usual for her to stand before the footlights with her arms full of flowers. And the man at her side—she looked at him, and in a moment realized how completely and artistically he was in accord with his environment. His strong, bronzed face, his lithe, tall form, his expression, his dress, the look of utter comprehension with which his eyes took in the scene, over which her eyes lingered in detail—all this was apparent to her at once. She was well used to considering the "value" of this or that upon the scene, and she told herself the unities were surely satisfied now.

"Are you pleased?" he asked.

"I'm simply charmed," she said. "It is too beautiful to be real."

"Ah," he said, "that's where you make a mistake. It is only beautiful enough to be real."

She looked at him.

"You are tired," he went on, without waiting for an answer. "I've brought you too far. Will you sit down?"

"Yes, I think so. I really am awfully strong, only I soon get tired."

"Exactly; one of the signs of great strength. Oh, come, don't get cross."

"I hate being laughed at; you're bad to me," she said pettishly.

Andrew was smitten to the heart. He began to think he'd been a brute.

He took off his coat, making no apology therefor. It did not occur to him that there was anything wrong in shirt sleeves. He spread it at the foot of a stump.

"You sit down there and rest," he said, "and I'll go get you some more flowers."

"Don't you want to rest?" she inquired solicitously.

"No, I'm not tired," he answered gravely. He wouldn't laugh at her again in a hurry!

"Well, hurry back."

So she watched him pick his way across the little hollow to the twisted and gnarled crab trees. And as she watched there stole over her eager spirit the first whiff of that peace which was soon to settle so sweetly upon her heart—a restful recognition of the joy of calm; and all was blended with the bitter sweet scent of the crab blossoms and the ineffable savour of spring woods.

Andrew was soon back at her side with a sheaf of flag lilies and big branches of apple blooms; and Judith for the first time held real crab-apple blossoms in her hands, with their perfume, that mingling of Marah and myrrh, rising to her as incense from a censer. She had long known the distilled perfume; how different this living fragrance was. Something of this she told Andrew.

"Yes," he said, "I understand you exactly. You won't like the manufactured stuff any more. I never could eat canned salmon after eating the real article fresh from the stream where I'd caught it."

Miss Moore looked at him.

He laughed outright at her expression of disgust.

"Was it very awful to liken crab blooms to salmon? They're much of the same colour."

"Don't dare say another word," said Miss Moore. "You're horrid."

Andrew reddened and looked a little stiff.

Miss Moore eyed him furtively. "Mr. Cutler?"

"Yes."

"Would you like me to sing to you?"

Like a child Miss Moore proffered her biggest bribe first.

"Rather," said Andrew, with emphasis, forgetting his dignity. "I should think I would."

Seeing him so eager, Miss Moore was minded to postpone his pleasure a bit. "What shall I sing?" she asked.

"Anything—your favourite, anything you like, only sing." And she sang a song by Rosetti, beginning—

"A little while, a little love
The hour yet bears for thee and me
Who have not drawn the veil to see
If still our heaven be lit above."

And which ends—

"Not yet the end; be our lips dumb
In smiles a little season yet,
I'll tell thee, when the end is come,
How we may best forget."

When it was over he turned and looked at her as at a marvel. What manner of woman was this? The one moment a curious child, the next a proud woman; again, a poor, little tired girl, and then—how should he name this singing angel.

Miss Moore was used to homage and applause, and wont to see people moved by her singing, but never a tribute had been more sweet to her than the look in this countryman's eyes.

"I will sing again," she said, and began a little Scotch song.

Afterwards Miss Moore was sorry about this, and thought bitterly that she could not, even for an hour, put aside the rôle of the opera singer seeking to play upon her public. For she had been taught the value of appealing to sentiment as a factor towards success, and many a night, after singing the most intricate operas, she had responded to the encore by singing "Home, Sweet Home" or "Annie Laurie," or some other simple peasant ballad that touches the heart. It is a trick prima donnas all have.

The song she sang Andrew was "Jock o' Hazeldean": the story of the high-born girl who loved Jock o' Hazeldean. Who was he, we wonder. This fascinating Jock, of Hazeldean, smacks more of the Merrie Greenwood than of broad domains. But at any rate he must have been right worthy to be loved, else such a leal, brave-hearted, beautiful girl had not loved him. Torn, too, she was between two thoughts—her family, her plighted troth, riches and—Jock—so that

"Whene'er she loot
The tears doon fa'
For Jock o' Hazeldean."

For she had made up her mind evidently to give him up, but these treacherous tears betrayed themselves whenever she bent her head, and when a woman's heart is breaking she cannot always hold her head high. And in the end they nearly married her to the "Lord of Errington." But—

"The kirk was decked at morning tide,
The tapers glimmered fair,
Both priest and bridegroom wait the bride,
And dame and knight were there.
They sought her then by bower and ha';
The lady wasna seen—
She's ower the border, and awa
With Jock o' Hazeldean."

Well Judith Moore sang the words of the song, but she did more. Her vibrant voice expressed all the pathos, the romance, the tenderness, that lives between the words; and in the last two lines there was a sort of timorous triumph, as of one who has gained victory over the world, her family, her own fears, and won to her lover's breast, and yet trembles in her triumph. Women do not give themselves even to their best beloved without tears.

This was in reality the great charm of Judith's singing—a charm no perfection of method, no quality of tone could have produced. She felt the full significance of everything she sang, and had that sympathetic magnetism which creates its own moods in others. That is fascination. That is the secret of these women at whose power the world has wondered, whose loves have been the passions of history, whose whims have legislated the affairs of kingdoms.

"Don't sing any more," Andrew said when she finished. "I've had enough for one day. I—"

"You feel my music as I do myself," she said softly. "It is almost pain."

Presently they went back through the woods, more silently than they had come, and yet happier. Judith looked up at him once or twice with no veil of laughter on her eyes. He was thrilled with the expression he found there; now it seemed a steadfast ray of unselfish resolution, again a yearning so poignant that it almost unnerved him. He showed her the nest on the furrows.

"In a little while there will be birds in the nest," he said.

"Oh, I'll come and watch it every day."

"You must not come too often or stay too long," he said, "or the bird will get frightened and forsake her nest—fly away and never come back."

"Oh, surely not fly away from that nest," Judith cried. To her that rough little wisp of coiled grass and horsehair represented the perfection of bird architecture.

"If you would only come to the house—my house over there on the hill," said Andrew, flushing a little and very eager; "my aunt would like you to so much, and I would show you a lot of nests. We have more birds there" (suddenly feeling very proud of this fact) "than anywhere else in the county."

"Oh, I'd like to ever so much," said Judith. "Your aunt?"

"Suppose I send my aunt over to see you?" said Andrew, quite ignorant of the etiquette of calls, but hitting it off well in his ignorance. "She'll come to visit Mrs. Morris, and then, of course, if you care to see her, she'll be so glad to ask you to come over."

"Does your aunt visit the Morrises?" asked Judith, with some surprise.

"Why, of course: we only live a mile away," said Andrew, entirely oblivious of the compliment to himself.

"Oh, yes, of course," said Judith, hastily, feeling mean.

Finally they said "Good-bye." Andrew had gone but a few steps when she called him.

"Wait a moment. When do you think your aunt will come?"

"Soon; not to-morrow, she's going to town. Perhaps next day. Why?"

"Oh, I want to put on a pretty frock," she said candidly.

"Well," said Andrew, with conviction, "you can't beat that one."

Miss Moore went back to the house. A weather-beaten frame house it was, with a weather-vane in the shape of a horse on top. When the horse's nose pointed over Judith's window, the wind was east; when it seemed to gallop in the direction of the kitchen, it was west; when it made for the village, it was south, and when it looked with a longing eye, apparently, at the stables, it was north. Mr. Morris explained this to Judith on an average once a day, but she always got it mixed.

Mrs. Morris was vigorously making pies when Judith entered.

"Baking?" said Judith.

"Yes," said Mrs. Morris, breaking the crisp stalks of rhubarb into little pieces. "Yes, I'm sure I'm going to have company" (she broke the last piece of rhubarb with a snap and commenced rolling out her paste with soft thuds). "Yes, company's coming sure. I dropped my dishcloth three times this morning, and then the old brahma, he just stood on that doorstep and crowed for all he was worth. I never knowed that bird to crow on that doorstep without strange feet soon stood on it."

Mrs. Morris covered her pie, and then holding the pie plate upon the fingers of one hand, dexterously ran a knife around the edge, trimming off a ring of paste that fell on her arm; then she dabbed it with a fork and put it in the oven.

"I want something to put my flowers in," said Judith. "May I take some of those big earthen jars out there?" pointing to the open door of the pantry, within which stood some old-fashioned, rough, grey crocks.

"Yes," said Mrs. Morris, absent-mindedly, as she carefully "tried" a cake with a straw from the broom to see if it was done; "yes"—then coming back to sublunary matters as she shut the oven door, "But sake's alive, child, you don't want them things to put them in! I'll get you the scissors and some string so you can cut the blows off them apple branches and make good round bunches, and there's some posy pots I bought in town one day. I'll get them to put them in."

Judith's heart sank. She was too afraid of hurting Mrs. Morris' feelings to say anything, but when that busy woman appeared with some hideous blue and green and gilt atrocities, a bright thought struck her.

"Oh, Mrs. Morris," she said, "those are too nice altogether. Just let me use the jars; those might get broken."

"Well," said Mrs. Morris, pausing in the door of the sitting-room, "they be only wild crabs and dogwood blows. It would be a pity to risk it, maybe." So she took back the vases and replaced the bouquets of everlastings in them, feeling she had done her duty to her boarder, but glad that matters had arranged themselves as they had.

So Judith got out the jars and filled them with great bunches of the dogwood, which gives such a Japanesque effect of blossom on bare branch, and with the apple blossoms, the wild iris mingling its dainty mauve equally well with each. Then she leaned back against the door jamb (she was sitting on the doorstep), and dreamily listened to Mrs. Morris.

What a strange medley of criticism, information, prophecy and humour the talk of such a woman is, all given forth with no coherence, no sequence of ideas, the disjecta membra of a thousand gossipy stories, the flotsam and jetsam of the slow-flowing stream of country life; now and then hitting off, as if by chance, a word or two which is a complete characterization of a person or place; now and then piercing to the heart of some vital human truth; now and then sowing a seed of scandal to bring forth bitterness; now and then by a pause, a sigh or a word revealing the griefs of a homely heart, and always perpetuating a hundred harmless conceits of fancy, signs, warnings, and what Mrs. Morris called, "omings that mean something."

Mrs. Morris was popularly considered the most talkative woman in Ovid, always excepting Bill Aikins' wife who had so far distanced the others as to fairly outclass them. Sometimes Mrs. Morris wearied Judith to death with her tongue, but out of the resources of her generous heart, which always could furnish excuses for everybody, Judith found palliation for Mrs. Morris' fault. There was a certain plot in the unkempt little graveyard in Ovid, wherein were five tiny graves; over each was a coverlet of straggly clove pinks, and each of the little sleepers had been borne away from the farm-house by the woods. Now and then, but rarely, Mrs. Morris spoke of these babies. Their united ages would not have numbered half a dozen years; but Mrs. Morris, with the strange divination of motherhood, had seen in their infantile ways the indications of distinctive character, so that each of these dead children had as individual a place in her memory as though it had worked and wept and wearied itself into old age. And to Judith this seemed excuse enough for poor chattering Mrs. Morris. All the breath other mothers use in speaking to their children, all the time they spend in silent thought about them and for them, was barren to this lonely old woman. "Who could wonder then that she wants to talk a bit?" Judith one day said to Andrew, wistfully, when he was laughing at Mrs. Morris' tongue. Indeed, Judith's tender eyes pierced deep down into the depths of these people's hearts. The ugly gossip, the sneering spite, the malignant whisperings she heard, filled her with a pity divine enough to drown the disgust which their backbiting and meanness awakened. The pity of it! she thought, looking at the miracle of the summer fields beneath the summer sky: the upward aspiration of every blade of grass, of every tiny twig, of every little Morning Glory seedling, striving to lift itself up, stretching forth its tendrils towards anything that would bear it higher: everything reaching towards the light. And these people, surrounded by the strong silent stimulus of nature, going with their eyes fixed upon the clods, or at most raised but to the level of their own heads, striving to grasp some puny self-glorification, letting the real gold of life run through their fingers like sand, whilst with eager palms they snatched at the base alloys which corroded their hands!

When Judith heard one woman say of another, "She's a most terrible nice woman. She works like a horse," she did not feel as much like laughing at the narrowness of the vision which pronounced such judgment, as weeping, that life had ways which people trod wherein brutish physical exertion seemed the highest good. It will be seen that Judith had a tender and discerning eye to penetrate the pains and sorrows of others, but she could not decipher her own heart yet. It is hard to get one's self in true perspective. It would indeed be a gift from the gods if we could see ourselves.