Joy felt what little spirit she had left oozing away. “How could anyone learn anything from a man who said he was discouraged before she had set free a single note?”
The accompanist, with a resigned look that spoke of the thousands of beautiful airs she must have heard suffering, whipped the Louise air to the rack of one of the pianos. This piano was on a raised platform, and Pa Graham motioned to Joy to go and stand by it. As she stumbled up the steps, he went off to the darkness of the other end of the room, and Jerry sat down near by with a reassuring wink.
“Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée . . .
L’âme encore grisée
De ton premier—baiser!”
Poor Louise with her “soul yet drunk from thy first kiss.” A shiver ran through the words that should have been ecstatic. Joy knew that Louise didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she pulled herself together, floating a long, soft high note that left the air palpitant and hushed. She ought to try to be Louise—but somehow she couldn’t, with that man off in the shadows, and Jerry sitting so near, and such a cross accompanist, and such unpleasant memories disturbing the thought of her song.
As far as interpretive value went, the song was a failure. But the lovely floated high notes, and the golden middle register, led the song through to its soaring climax. Then on the whispered repetition, “je tremble délicieusement,” Joy broke down. She simply could not bring forth another note. The accompanist put in a few chords and stopped: Pa Graham came out of the shadows and walked up to Joy. He took her face in his hands and turned it gently to the window.
“Life and work—those are all you need, my child,” he said. “You are going to learn to sing so that the tears will flow or the smiles will dance, at your will.”
“Then you’re no longer discouraged, Pa?” Jerry demanded triumphantly from her seat.
“I do not know her well enough to say that. The greater a voice, the more work there is to do, to reach the perfection that voice demands. And there is one thing, Louise——Oh, yes, child, I’ll make you into a Louise, and many other things—it is not from lack of voices that there are so few great singers—it is because so few are willing to pay the price—the heartbreak of the years of toil and self-denial.”