Wonderingly, guiltily, too, Carlota reassured her, but when she reached the street she looked about her that day, with the first caution she had ever felt since their arrival in New York. What could Maria have meant? They knew no one in the city who could possibly have had any sinister intent towards them, yet there had been a lurking, secret fear in the eyes of the old signora.
At the corner of Fifth Avenue she hailed a taxicab, and arriving at the studio pleaded a headache as an excuse for a short lesson. Jacobelli was in a trying mood. Over and over again he railed at her, telling her that after his months of training, she was not putting her whole heart and soul into her singing. And suddenly Carlota leaned her chin on her palms at the back of the old grand piano, and asked:
“I wonder, maestro, if I were poor and unknown, and came to you, would you give me lessons because you had faith in my voice?”
“Certainly not,” exclaimed Jacobelli positively. “I could never give you enough to win you the highest fame. The teaching is not sufficient. The great artiste must have peace of mind. We do not exist upon air; not even a bird with a celestial voice like yours. No, my dear, I would have told you to forget your pride and do exactly as you have done. Secure the financial backing of a man like Ogden Ward. I worship art. It has always been my life, but I recognize, like a sensible man, that in the times we live in we artists must still seek the patron even as Angelo and Raphael did. The public is not strong enough to sustain us. It cannot sustain itself, what would you? Some day, when the world is all golden with peace and plenty and brotherhood, then the singer will be the beloved prophet once again, and we shall delight in all the milk and honey and oil and burnt offerings we require, without the commonplace formality of contracts.” He laughed at her heartily, leaning over to pat her hands. “Come early to-morrow; Mr. Ward will be here.”
She left the studio with a sense of suffocating rebellion. They were all the same, Jacobelli, Ward, even Maria. Only the gentle, chivalrous old Marchese warmed her faith with his tender, hopeful philosophy, and were not his friends like him, even Dmitri Kavec? What was it this group had seemed to find in the fields of scarlet poppies that lifted idealism and faith in humanity above the creed of success and individual self-seeking?
As she stepped from the old red-brick building, a Greek flower vender wheeled his pushcart to the curb. She looked over the brilliantly tinted asters and chrysanthemums longingly, but purchased merely a spray of autumn leaves and hurried to the corner where the Riverside autobuses passed on their way crosstown to the Avenue.
Following after her leisurely came the man who had picked up her gloves in the vestibule some nights before. It would have been difficult to guess his age or nationality. He was slender, undersized, yet with a strongly knit, athletic frame that told of military training. Swarthy-skinned, dark-haired, with the brilliant black eyes of the southern races, he seemed merely a boy until one saw the somber, detached experience in his expression and eyes. As Carlota, almost trembling at her own temerity, stepped into the interior of a Washington Square ’bus, he followed her, swinging lightly up the narrow, winding staircase to the top.
The number which Griffeth Ames had given her was on the south side of the Square near MacDougal Street. It was an old four-story brownstone building, the last of five of the same kind sitting back in small flagged yards from the sidewalk. The paint which had scaled from its iron portico and balconies merely imitated the stucco front which had crumbled off in large patches. There were many names written on soiled cards and slips of white paper above the rows of bells in the entrance, and among them she found his. Just within the dim hall a young Italian girl knelt on a marble-topped table, polishing the brass ornaments on the old oval hall mirror. She smiled down absently as Carlota asked the way.
“At the very top of the house. You have to knock hard or he won’t hear you.”
She climbed the three flights quickly. The door at the top was ajar. It was surprising to find such spaciousness here under the gabled roof. As she hesitated on the threshold, her swift glance noticed how he had tried to partition off his private life from his professional with burlap draperies. It must have been a bleak place once, but Ames had taken it and had performed all of the customary artistic marvels to conceal its barrenness. Draperies dipped in eastern dyes, that he had picked up in the Syrian quarter on Washington Street, softened the angles of corners. The unsightly wooden partitions and beams below the peaked ceiling had acquired under his deft touch a deep rare old oaken hue the Pre-Raphaelites might have rested under. On the exterior of the low door he had even placed a brass knocker, a real antique from a shop uptown. Nobody, as Dmitri often said, but Fame would ever recognize it, and she, the willful damosel, would never climb those three flights of stairs unless she came en masquerade as a lark to tantalize him.