He forgot her as he sang, the footlights, the great audiences claiming him. They called him back! “Bis! bis!” He gave it again. Still, they called for him. He must come back! He gave them for encore a ballad long forgotten; he had pulled it back from the cobwebs of two decades; he had made it his own; reviving it to a larger popularity; they were selling records of it now on Broadway. In South America, in Mexico, in lonely ranches, distant barrancas, the far-spread audiences listened to his imprisoned voice, by modern magic released to them.
Detached, as an observer he worshiped his wonderful gift; impersonally, it was guarded; he could speak of it without vanity. Pity, the fellow who wrote the simple air was dead; it was enriching publishers; those “canned music people!”
The audience, South American, English, Mexican, was calling. Australia, now, was clapping her hands. That last verse again.
“But, my darling, you will be,
Ever young and fair to me.”
The hush, that wonderful hush which always greets that ballad, falls on the house again.
It came, the soaring voice, to Tom Hardin, outside Gerty’s tent on his lonely cot. He knew that song. He had shouted it with the fellows at college, passing through the Lawrence streets at night. The words came running back to meet him. “Woman is changeable.” Had he sensed the words then? “Woman is changeable.” All of them then, not alone Gerty. For she had loved him once, he had seen her face flushing answer into his. Changed altogether, the changeable. Disdained by his wife, a pretty figure a man cuts! If his wife can’t stand him, who can? He wasn’t good enough for her. He was rough. His life had kept him from fitting himself to her taste. She needed people who could talk like Rickard, sing like Godfrey. People, other people, might misconstrue her preferences. He knew they were not flirtations; she needed her kind. She would always keep straight; she was straight as a whip. Life was as hard for her as it was for him; he could feel sorry for her; his pity was divided between the two of them, the husband, the wife, both lonely in their own way.
Then his bitterness softened to the new air Godfrey was singing. He could hear his mother’s voice humming it over her task in her rough pioneer kitchen. He lay quite still listening, life crowding before his open eyes. No use coaxing sleep, with the moon making day of the night. His memory was a harp, and Godfrey was plucking at the strings.
On the other side of the canvas walls, Gerty Hardin lay listening to the message meant for her. The fickle sex, he had called hers; no constancy in woman, he had declared, fondling her hair. He had tried to coax her into pledges, pledges which were also disavowals to the man outside.
Silver threads! Age shuddered at her threshold. She would not get old, oh, why would he not sing something else? She hated that song. Cruel, life had been to her, none of its promises had been kept. To be happy, why, that was a human’s birthright; grab it, that was her creed! Before you get old, before the pretty face wrinkles, and men forget to look at you with the worship beauty brings. She wanted to die before that happened—she would push age away from her—she could. But before that awful time which offered no alleviation, she must be happy, she must taste of success, hear the plaudits of the crowd left behind. When God made the world, He did not make enough happiness to go around; one must snatch it as it passed. There was a chance yet; youth had not gone. He was singing it to her, her escape—