The Dominant Strain

by Anna Chapin Ray

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Beatrix's principles extended even to the point of observing her day at home. Society was bidden, the next afternoon, to a tea at Mrs. Stanley's, and Beatrix was absolutely certain that none of her friends would cross the intervening forty blocks in order to look in upon her, going or coming. In her secret heart, she longed to follow society; instead, she was sitting in solitude, when Thayer was announced.

She rose to greet him with a cordial friendliness, for the past six months had made a great change in their outward relations. They had liked each other from the day of Mrs. Stanley's recital, and the liking had increased with each subsequent meeting. During the next few weeks, they had met often. Lorimer insisted upon going to every recital at which Thayer was to sing, and under his guidance Beatrix had gained a fair idea of what went on behind the scenes. Thayer, meanwhile, had swiftly assumed his own place in society, and discerning hostesses generally found it well to put him near to Beatrix at dinner. Owing to his many evening engagements, Thayer usually ate but sparingly, so it was all the more necessary that he should be placed within range of someone with whom he cared to talk. He rarely lent himself to the usual run of social badinage; but retired into his shell whenever it became the dominant note of the conversation. A man of his bulk and prominence and potential boredom was an object of hospitable consideration. He could always talk to Beatrix, for she never chattered. Therefore he was generally to be found somewhere within the conversational radius of Beatrix Dane.

The tea table of Beatrix, moreover, had become one of the focal points of his New York life. He liked the cheery, informal atmosphere of the house whose old-fashioned austerity was tempered with a dash of modern frivolity; he liked the people he met there, people too assured of their own social position to be touchy upon slight points of social precedence. Most of all, he liked Beatrix Dane, herself. In the gay, chattering multitude among whom she moved, her own steadfast quietness stood out in bold relief, and it answered to certain traits of his own Puritanism. It was not that she was dull, or overfreighted with conscience. She frisked with the others of her kind; but her friskiness was intermittent and never frivolous. To Beatrix Dane, pleasure was an interlude, never the sole end and aim of life. And, on her own side, Beatrix felt a thorough admiration for the clean-minded, clean-bodied singer, a thorough reliance upon his judgment and upon his loyalty to anyone to whom he vouchsafed his friendship.

This had been the relation between them, on the evening of the concert for the Fresh Air Fund, a relation whose cordial matter-of-factness was in no way disturbed by the potent spell of Thayer's voice. Beatrix had spent much of her life in the open air; she was too healthy to be given to self-analysis. She admitted to herself the wonderful power of Thayer's voice, the passionate appeal of certain of his songs; but she made a curiously sharp distinction between the man and the voice. The one might be a strong guiding force in the current of her life; the other was a rising tide that swept her from her moorings and left her drifting to and fro over stormy seas. On the night of the Fresh Air Fund concert, for the first time in her experience, these two personalities had become inextricably intermingled. As she had said, she had never before realized the possibilities of either Thayer or his voice.

Everything had conspired to produce the impression. All day long, she had been haunted by a nervous, nameless dread. The vague hints and signs of the past months had suddenly gathered to a nucleus of anxiety and alarm, and, in spite of her rigid self-control, she had been terrified into giving the one outcry, partly to satisfy her feminine need for sympathy, partly with the hope of putting Lorimer upon his guard. The sympathy had come, prompt and loving; the warning had been utterly ignored.

Music ought to be taken with fasting and prayer. Quiet nerves and a full stomach are deaf to its deepest meaning. To most of the audience, Honor and Arms stood as a superb piece of vocal gymnastics; to Beatrix, Thayer was like a live wire, pulsing with a virile scorn of any but uneven contests, defiant only of those mightier than himself. To her mind, he was ready to court heavy odds, bound to conquer them, one and all; and her own pulses beat faster in time to the half-barbarous outburst which ends the great aria. The Gade concerto, instead of soothing her, had only exasperated her. She longed to get behind the violinist and the orchestra and even the composer himself, and goad them into some tenseness of emotion. But the Slavonic Dance had set her heart bounding once more, until her very finger tips tingled with the blood racing through them, and the clashing cymbals had seemed scarcely louder than the ringing of her own ears. The rest had been only the natural sequel; Danny and Arlt's failure had led inevitably up to the finale when Thayer's eyes, burning with that new, strange light, had held her own eyes captive while he had sounded the tragic note which dominates all human love.

And the finale had not been final, after all. She had had a vague presentiment that the cross might be at the end; she had been totally unprepared to find it pressed to her lips, that selfsame night.

With a swift excuse, Thayer had hurried her back into the music-room; but he had not been able to prevent that one instant when Beatrix had found herself face to face with a Lorimer she had never known till then. Though her eyes had betrayed her horror of the scene, she had kept her voice steady as she asked Thayer to call her carriage and to say her farewells to her hostess.

Thayer went with her to her own door. Neither of them spoke until they stood on the steps; then Thayer cleared his throat, but even then his voice was husky.