Phases of an Inferior Planet

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"My dear girl, I'm in an awful hurry. Would you mind being quiet awhile?" And he entered his study, closing the door after him. Mariana left the piano and sat with folded hands looking down into the street below. A fine rain was falling, and the streets were sloppy with a whitish slime. The women that passed held their skirts well above their ankles, revealing all shapes and varieties of feet. She noticed that they carried their skirts awkwardly, with a curious hitch upon the right hip. They were working-women for the most part, and their gowns were neither well made nor well cut, but they walked aggressively, with an uneven, almost masculine, swagger.

Mariana yawned and sighed. She would have liked to go back to the piano and bang a march or some stirring strain of martial music, but she recalled Anthony's injunction and yawned again. She remembered suddenly that her practising had become uncertain of late, and that Anthony's objection seemed to lie like a drawn sword between her and her art. An involuntary smile crossed her lips, that she who had pledged herself to the pursuit of music had also given herself to a man to whom Wagner was as Rossini. She dwelt upon her changed conditions almost unconsciously. It was not that her devotion to art had cooled since her marriage, but that something was forever preventing the expression of it. That Anthony regarded it as one of the trivialities of life, she saw clearly, and there was an aggrieved note in her regret. To her, in whom the artistic instinct was bone of her bone and blood of her blood, the sacrifice of a professional career was less slight than Algarcife believed, and in the depths of her heart there still lurked the hope that in time Anthony's impassioned opposition to a stage life would wear itself out. When the moment came, she dreamed of a final reinspiration of the slumbering fires of her ambition. Now, as she sat beside the window, she became aware of the awakening. Once again she allowed her mind to hover above the distant future and to illuminate its neutral canvas with garish colors. In the future anything and everything was possible. Some weeks ago Signor Morani had sent for her and offered her tuition, and she had accepted. "If you achieve success you can repay me," he had said, adding, with philosophic intention, "If not, I shall have lost nothing that was my own."

Mariana, in a burst of gratitude, had wept upon his shoulder, and he had smiled as he patted her prostrate head.

"Remember," he said, "that you are an artist first, and a wife and mother afterwards, and you will succeed."

Sitting beside the window and staring at the expressionless tenements across the way, she laughed with soft insistence at the professor's warning. What a consuming force was love, that it had destroyed her old mad longing for the stage! Was it all love, or was it only the love of Anthony?

Then before her, in the train of her thoughts, the sentiments of her life were limned vividly, and she remembered the young highwayman whose picture she had seen. She saw the bold, Byronic countenance, with the shadow of evil upon the lips and the uncultured eyes. She recalled the blur by which the printer had obscured the chin, and she felt again the tremor with which she had awaited the sentence of the court. She thought of Edgardo, the romantic tenor, of his impassioned arias, and then of his fat and immobile face, of his red-cheeked German wife, to whom he was a faithful husband, and of his red-cheeked German children, to whom he was a devoted father. She laughed again as she remembered the tears with which she had bedewed her pillow, and the spasm of jealousy in which she had mentally attacked the prima donna. Last of all she thought of Jerome Ardly, as she had seen him upon the night of her arrival, sitting in indolent discussion of his dinner, the Evening Post spread out upon his knee. She experienced in memory the thrill which had seized her at his voice. She remembered how strong and masterful he had looked with the glow of heart disease, which she had thought the glow of health, upon his face. Then her thoughts returned to Anthony and settled to rest. To dwell upon him was as if she had laid her head upon his arm and felt his hand above her heart; as if she had anchored herself in deep waters, far beyond the breakers and shallows of life.

In the next room she knew that Anthony was at work, that he had probably, for the time being, forgotten her existence. The knowledge caused her a twinge of pain, and she went to the door, opened it, and looked in.

Algarcife glanced up absently.

"You don't wish anything, do you?" he inquired, and she saw that an irritable mood was upon him, "I can't be interrupted."

"It is nothing," answered Mariana as she closed the door, but she felt a sudden tightening of the heart, and, as she gathered up several loose sheets of music lying upon the floor, she thought, with a spasm of regretful pain, of the practising she had given up. "He does not know," she said, and a few tears fell upon the key-board.