But she was minded now to be as ruthlessly clear-sighted about herself as she had once been obstinately blind.
“The whole equipment—I haven’t got it. He banked too much on my looks, thought they were going to go farther than they did. If I’d had a great voice—one of the wonderful voices of the world, like Patti or Melba—it wouldn’t have mattered about not having the rest. But there are hundreds with voices as good as mine. He thought beauty and dramatic instinct were going to carry me through. He knew I had the one and he thought he could give me the other—train it into me. Nobody knows how hard he tried. He used to make me stand up and go over every gesture after him, he even made marks on the floor where I was to put my feet. And then he’d sit down and hold his head and groan. Poor Jack”—she gave a little dry laugh—“he had an awful time!”
I could realize something of Masters’ desperation. To have discovered a song-bird in the western wilds, hoped to retrieve his fortunes with it and then found a defect in its mechanism that neither work nor brains nor patience could supply—it was bitter luck.
“He was an artist,” she went on. “He could have gone straight to the top but he lost his voice after the first few years, while he was still touring the small European towns.”
I noticed that she spoke in the past tense, her tone one of melancholy reminiscence as if he really was dead. She might have been delivering his funeral sermon and placing flowers of memory on his tomb.
“Why couldn’t you have got from him what he tried to teach you? I can’t understand, you’re so intelligent.”
She mused for a moment, then said:
“I’ve been thinking of that myself while I’ve been lying here. Looking back I don’t seem to have given it my full mind and I’ve been wondering if perhaps I wasn’t too taken up with him. I couldn’t get away from the real romance, the love-making and the quarrels, first one and then the other. There wasn’t anything else in my life. I hadn’t time to be interested in those women I had to pretend to be. My affairs and me were the only things that counted.”
“But you were so much in earnest, so desperately anxious to succeed.”
She gave me a side look, sharp and full of meaning.