Phebe, Her Profession / A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book

by Anna Chapin Ray

Phebe looked at her hostess, shut her teeth, jerked the knot tight, and was silent; but there was a dangerous gleam in her eyes, as she mounted and rode away, with her three-dollar skeleton clattering on the handle-bars before her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

There is a certain inconvenience coupled with being called upon to pose as a genius at the comparatively early age of twenty-six. Popular theory to the contrary, notwithstanding, it is easier to plod slowly along on the path to fame. Greatness does not repeat itself, every day in the week. But fate had overtaken Gifford Barrett, and had hung a wreath of tender young laurels about his boyish brow. He deserved the wreath, if ever a boy did. Two years before, fresh from the inspiration of his years in Germany and of his German master, he had composed his Alan Breck Overture. It would have been well done, even for a man many years his senior, and it quickly won a place on the programmes of the leading orchestra's of the country. He had known what it was to be called out from his box at the Auditorium or Carnegie Hall to bow to the audience, while the orchestra thumped their approval on their music racks. He had been hailed even as the American Saint Saens, and it was small wonder that he began to feel the wreath too tight a fit for his brows.

His family was well known and, from the first, society had claimed him for her own. He had the gift of talking well, of dancing better; and he had found it easy to drift along from day to day, neglecting his music for the sake of the invitations that poured in upon him. In his more conscientious moments, he told himself that he would do all the better work as the result of seeing the life of his native city; but so far its influence had been only potent to move him to write a triplet of light songs and to dedicate them to three of the prettiest girls in his set, no one of whom was able to sing a note in tune.

At the end of the second season, a reaction set in. The public was clamorous for a new work from him; he was tired of being lionized by people who called his beloved overture pretty. The madness of the spring was upon him, the spirit of work had seized him, and the middle of May found him and his long-suffering piano installed in the "north chamber" of the Sykes homestead at Bannock Bars.

He had chosen the place with some degree of care, in order to be sufficiently remote from society to work undisturbed, sufficiently near civilization to be able to buy more music paper in case of need. Ten miles of even a bad road is not an impassible barrier to an enthusiastic bicyclist; yet the place was as rustic and countrified as if it had been, not ten, but ten hundred miles from an electric light. His digestion was good enough to cope even with Eulaly Sykes's perennial doughnuts, and it was in a mood of supreme content that he settled into his quarters in the wilderness. It was years since he had watched the on-coming of the New England summer; he watched it now with the trained sense, the inherent quickness of perception of the true artist who realizes that the simplest facts of the day's routine by his touch can be transmuted into glowing, vivid material for his work.

It must be confessed that Eulaly Sykes occasionally mourned to her friends over the irregularities of her boarder. His hours of work passed her comprehension, his work itself filled her soul with wonder and disgust. In his moments of inspiration when he was evoking the stormy chords of the introduction to his symphonic poem, Bisesa he never dreamed that his landlady was craning her head up from her pillows in a vain effort to discover the tune, or to reduce it to the known terms of short metre rhythm. His broken, irregular measures troubled her, as did also his broken, irregular hours of work. There were days when he rode far afield, or was seen lying on his back under the pines by the brookside, listening to the splash of the water, the hissing of the air through the boughs above him. After such days, his piano was wont to sound far into the night, and Eulaly, as she slept and waked and still heard her boarder's fingers crashing over the keys, reproached herself bitterly.

"Them last doughnuts was too rich," she used to say to her old-fashioned bolster, set up like a grim idol by the bedside; "and the poor feller can't sleep. I mustn't put so much shortenin' in the next ones. My, but that was an awful scrooch! I wish he'd shut his windows a little mite tighter, and not pester the whole neighborhood."

This state of things had endured for two weeks, and the symphonic poem was progressing as well as its composer had any reason to expect. Already it was bidding fair to rival the Alan Overture and Mr. Barrett began to carry his nose tilted at an angle higher than ever, as if in imagination he already scented the fresh laurels in store for him. Pride goeth before destruction. A long day under the pines resulted not in inspiration, but in an uninspiring cold in his head; his temper suffered together with his nose, and Eulaly Sykes, below stairs, chafed her hands together at the sounds of musical and moral discord which floated down upon her ears. All the morning long, he smote his brows and his piano by turns. The new motif he was seeking, refused to be found.

Later, fortified by Eulaly's fried chicken and rhubarb pie, he tried it again, invitingly playing over the preceding motif in every possible key and tempo. It was of no use. He slammed down the top of his piano, tore across a half-finished page, caught up his cap, mounted his bicycle and rushed away up the road, quite regardless of the clouds lying low in the western sky.