The Dominant Strain

by Anna Chapin Ray

"God knows," he said drearily.

Bobby spoke truly, for already it seemed that the divine plan was made to take the imperfect little life back into its keeping. A sudden chill, a sudden cold, and then the grim word, pneumonia! For days, Beatrix and the nurse hung over the child, struggling almost against hope to conquer the disease. Then it was that Beatrix realized how truly she had loved her little son, how she would miss even the constant pain of his presence. He was her very own, the one being in the world who belonged absolutely to her; and she fought for his life with the fierceness of despair. Then, just as it seemed that she had triumphed and the child was out of danger, the same insidious foe which had ended Lorimer's life, attacked the life of his child.

Alone in the dusky room, Beatrix was sitting on the edge of the bed, her arm around the boy who had just snuggled down for the night. Drowsily his lids drooped; then he opened his eyes, met her eyes and struggled up to reach her face.

"Mamma, kiss!" he begged.

That was all. Weakened by disease, the heart had been powerless to bear the strain of the sudden motion, and the boy fell into his final sleep, cradled in his mother's arms.

That night, Thayer sang The Flying Dutchman in the same city where, four years before, he had sung St. Paul. He had not been there, during the intervening time; but his public had been faithful to his memory, and the little opera house was packed to its utmost limits to do honor to its former favorite, as well as to its one-night opera season. For some unaccountable reason, Thayer had liked the place. Both the house and the audience had pleased him, and it had been at his own request that the manager had put on The Flying Dutchman, for that night.

During the last few months, The Dutchman had become Thayer's favorite rôle. Even Valentine had palled upon him in time. Lingering deaths become monotonous. When one dies them, four or five times a week, he longs to hasten the course of events, to change the Andante to a Prestissimo. To Thayer's later mood, it seemed that, psychologically speaking, Valentine belonged to the ranks of the tenors. His riper manhood demanded something a little more robust.

Thayer never admitted to himself that his liking for The Dutchman came from the personal interpretation which he put upon the story. In some moods, he would have scoffed at the idea that there could be any connection between himself, the successful artist whose single surname on the bill boards could suffice to fill a house, and the wretched Dutchman whose one defiance hurled at fate had condemned him to life-long wandering over the face of the deep. Of course, he wandered, too; but it was by easy stages and by means of Pullmans. The parallelism failed utterly. Still, there was the possibility of ultimate salvation gained through the faithful love of a woman. Nevertheless, Thayer's analysis always brought him to the conclusion that he liked the opera because his death scene was consummated in the brief space of two measures.

Thayer was feeling uncommonly alert and content, that night, and, moreover, he liked his audience. Accordingly, he gave them of his best. Never had his voice been richer, never had it rung with more dramatic power than when, in his aria of the first act, he had ended his lament with the declaration of his inevitable release on the slow-coming Judgment Day. Then he stood waiting, a huge, lonely, brooding figure, square-shouldered, square-jawed, defiant of fate, while softly the chorus of sailors in the hold below echoed the closing phrase of his song.

Even into Thayer's experience, no such ovation had ever come before. At first, the audience sat breathless, as if stunned by the might of his tragedy. Then the applause came crashing down from the galleries, up from the floor, in from the boxes, focussing itself from all sides upon that single, lonely, dominant figure before it. And Cotton Mather Thayer, as he listened with a quiet, impassive face, felt his heart leaping and bounding within him. He knew, by an instinct which he had learned to trust completely, that in the years to come, he would never reach a greater height of artistic success than he had done just then. One such experience could justify many a year of halting indecision. Puritan to the core, he yet had proved true to his Slavonic birthright.