Happy singers, like happy nations, have no history. Easter was a happy singer, but she had plenty of histories, though they would never be engraved on deathless tablets. Volition being her strongest asset, and pleasure-loving her weakness, she spent her nights singing, her days trifling. She called it happiness, a reaction from the passionate tension of interpreting Isolde, Brunnhilde, Kundry, Norma for the delight of huge audiences. The morning saw her briskly walking through the park. Her apartment was on Central Park West, near 72nd Street. Her robust physique daily demanded many cubic feet of fresh air. In the afternoon she rode about in her car; there now were two at her service, one, an electric brougham for the city visits, the shops. She was fairly prudent in diet, though she drank too much champagne, smoked too many cigarettes. Punctual at rehearsals, she was out of bed earlier on those days. So the opera didn't interfere with hygiene. An admirable artiste, and with the moral sense to be observed in a barnyard.
Paul was the present incumbent in her House of Life. His wealth, social position, above all, his amiable personality, fitted her like a glove. Easter disliked broils or bother. After the tragic happenings of her nightly work, the very sight of a lover pulling a long face, exasperated her. Ulick drove her into fits of rage with his importunings, his complaints that she wasn't treating him on the level. "Very well," she would retort, "I'm not. What are you going to do about it? You know what Paul is, and what I think of him. I'm fond of you, Jewel, but Paul pleases me more. He has tact. He lets me alone. I'm quite sure if he had been mixed up in that horrid mess up in New Hampshire—where was it anyhow?—he wouldn't consider it any claim on me. I don't. But you do—yes, you do, Ulick Invern. You seem to think that you are a sort of a guardian, a lover, perhaps a husband"—she laughed. The idea of a husband having any authority over her tickled her rib risible. Ulick gloomed. What could he say or do in face of such barbed-wire opposition? The only thing he achieved was to neglect, and grossly, Mona Milton. He discontinued his visits, if not altogether, at least spaced them at wide intervals. Mona did not complain. Occasionally she went to luncheon with him at Martin's. The opera and Easter tempted her curiosity. At first the sheer vitality of the glorious singing woman repelled her, but she, too, was eventually trapped. The first act of Tristan and the swan song of Isolde stirred her very entrails. It was conceded, however, by the cognoscenti that Istar's second act lacked the exquisite tenderness of Olive Fremstad— she had arrived—whose Sieglinde was a masterly exposition of the pitiful, charming woodland creature. But in the Immolation Scene of the Twilight of the Gods Istar trod dramatic heights. That chronic fault-finder, Alfred Stone, confessed that since Lilli Lehmann and Milka Ternina, no one had so touched him. Materna and the earlier Wagnerian singers were only bawlers in comparison. But Istar—!
When he heard from her lips the terms that she had imposed on the management without singing a note in advance, he threw up his hands. "In the heart of every prima-donna there is a pawnbroker," he asserted, and the mot rapidly gained currency. Easter only smiled. She liked Alfred. He was the first man who had been kind to her in the big city that depressing night of her arrival. And he had stood by her at the première; to be sure, he couldn't have done anything else without stultifying his critical powers. She was not ungrateful, but that was a secret. Her triumph had been authentic. No preliminary blasts of advertising trumpets. Philip Hale, who came over from Boston for the event, had summed up the situation when wiring to his newspaper "When Istar sings she is her own passionate press-agent." Edgar Saltus compressed it in an epigram: "Istar may be a Daughter of Sin, but she has no vocal vices." It was all true.
For Mona the singer presently became an obsession. She concealed her feelings concerning the palpable defection of Ulick. She was as cordial as ever in her conduct toward him, but she no longer spoke of their dream-children. Grane and Shamus had died the swift death of all poetic conceptions confronted by harsh reality. Her love for him seemed diverted to Easter. As the lustre of an electric lamp attracts the night-moth so the glittering personality and fame of the prima-donna drew within its warm zone the feebler will of Mona. The two girls became close companions. With growing disquietude Ulick noticed this; but he was powerless. He had kept to himself his early adventure with Easter. And Easter had never heard from him a hint of his relations with Mona. Yet he was certain that if she didn't precisely know the facts she surmised them. She would fix her brilliant eyes on the girl and Mona, blushing, would hang her head. How much did Easter know? How much had Alfred told her? He was a gossip, a tattler of mean tales, an amateur in the art of scandalous insinuation. Nevertheless, the others were pleased when he appeared. He saw more clearly than any of them, and he had the disagreeable gift of telling truths. It was a wonder he maintained his unpopularity.
... One sunny afternoon in midwinter they went to the old Vienna Café next to Grace Church to drink coffee and chatter about eternity and the town-pump. It was Alfred's beloved stamping-ground. The white suavities of Grace Church, the twist of the street where Broadway debouches into Union Square, aroused in him the fancy that in no other spot of the planet is the tempo of living faster, or any place where the human pulse beats more quickly. The tumults and alarums of the day are more exciting than a Cycle in Cathay. Vitality is at its hottest. We are like a colony of ants disturbed by a stranger, he ruminated. We are caught in eddies and whirlpools; and on the edges of foaming breakers we are dumped upon densely populated sands. Childe Roland, if he came to New York, would not be heard, so many other knights are blowing their horns; besides, he might be puzzled to find his eagerly sought-for Dark Tower. Our surfaces are hard, boastful, the rhythms of our daily life abrupt, over-emphatic. There are few timid backwaters left for sensitive folk who dislike the glare and rumble of modern traffic. We appear to be making some unknown goal, as in the streets we seem to be running to a fire or a fight that we never reach. Alternately hypnotic and repellant, New York is often a more stony-hearted step-mother than the Oxford street of De Quincey. Alfred admitted to himself that our city would not be considered beautiful in the old order of aesthetics. Its specific beauty savours of the monstrous. The scale is epical. Too many buildings are glorified chimneys. But what a picture of titanic energy, of cyclopean ambition! Look over Manhattan from Washington Heights. The wilderness of flat roofs in London; the winning profile of Paris; the fascination of Rome as viewed from Trinatà dei Monti; of Buda from across the Danube at Pest—those are not more startlingly dramatic than New York, especially when the chambers of the west are filled with the tremendous opal of a dying day, or when the lyric moonrise paves a path of silver across the hospitable sea we call our harbour. With all his ingrained hostility to America and things American (he despised the uncouth Bartholdi statue as an emblem of liberty, saying that its torch was in reality a threatening club: "Get to work," it commanded) he was forced to acknowledge the supremacy of New York. Two European cities only were more dramatic; Toledo, Prague. And during a summer sunrise the reverberations of our parent-planet, of that blazing white disk which made the sky a metallic blue, evokes Africa, rather than Italy; Enfin—the true firmament of North America.
Easter and Mona, escorted by Paul and Ulick, entered. They were in high spirits. They surrounded Alfred, forcing him to drop his newspaper. The habitués were sipping coffee and playing chess. Some were celebrities. Alfred named them. One and all they stared at the singer. Several came over to the table and paid their way with extravagant compliments. She took all without a trace of the pose of the pampered prima-donna. It was her due. It was also in the day's work. When the others had gone, the party fell to arguing. A chance word of Ulick's had sent Easter up into the air. What! if women were such cowardly cows, the slaves of their husbands, and their dress-makers, the dupes of their lovers and children, was that sufficient reason why a level-headed woman should follow the call of these sheep! A woman should listen to her inward promptings. Easter said she didn't propose to be a shop-girl trying to live on the wage doled her by some self-advertising philanthropists—she gave a list that jarred Alfred's cynicism—those humbugs who drove thousands of girls into the ranks of prostitutes. Supposing, she continued, I had no voice, only my looks, what then! The stage, of course. What matters envious backbiting. A nun immured doesn't escape calumny. Hamlet knew. A girl who had an ounce of beauty or brains, practical brains, not moonshine rhapsody, can always make her way. Marry, forsooth! And beget a lot of brats for some cheap clerk, who stints her expenses! Pooh! Short-lived as is the good time of a cocotte despite her inevitable chance of poverty and disease, isn't her existence in a show-down about as useful, or as useless? That depends on the angle of moral incidence—or the chill, gray life of a servant, a factory worker, or the wife of a workman, with the horrors of frequent child-bearing, the hideous drunkenness, abuse and grinding poverty? Many a girl has remained virtuous because she was too plain to be tempted.
"You sweet duckling!" she exclaimed turning to Mona and embracing her energetically, "what will you ever know of the submerged lives about you? You were reared in cotton-wool and have been spared the sight of such agonizing." Mona shivered, and timidly returned the embrace. The three young men exchanged glances. Suddenly Easter took a new tack. "Jewel," she said meditatively regarding him, "Jewel, why don't you write a novel?" "Good heavens, old girl, I have hardly the energy to pencil my allotted newspaper paragraphs. Novels nowadays mean either the naked truth and that spells disaster, or slimy sensual sentimentality. Your heroine to make an impression, must resist seduction, though longing for carnal satisfaction; or, if she happens to be a professional prostitute—led from the sloppy paths of a still sloppier virtue when very young—then she must be converted in the limelight to the sound of pharasaical trumpets. The chief thing is to combine voluptuous description with hypocritical repentance. To dissect the sex emotions calmly is the one unforgivable offence. Foam at the mouth, you may, in presenting the details of nymphomania or satyriasis, if you only piously turn up your eyes at the close. Sex is as sane, as clean as any other physical function; in fact, it's cleaner. Eating, drinking, and digestion are not particularly attractive. Fornication, conception, child-bearing are natural. Treat them naturally. Don't slop over them. Don't tell about blasted lives, blackened souls, because your heroine assumes a horizontal attitude and sees the moon over the shoulder of her lover. Don't gasbag about sin, when the sexual act is no more sinful than eating. Good God! how long are the emasculated ideals of ancient Asiatic fanatics to check the free exercise of a woman's nature? Calling a natural process like copulation a sin doesn't make it so. I am a feminist, as you girls know, but I don't give a rap for the suffrage if it doesn't free woman from her sexual slavery. If a man can run around, having a good time, and not be reproached with his loose-living, why, by the same token, can't a woman?" He was unusually animated.
"Bravo Ulick!" cried Easter. Mona shivered again. She knew. Paul giggled; when in doubt he always giggled, but he was thoroughly shocked by Ulick's banal defence of immorality. Alfred shook his head; he, too, knew the mainspring of this verbiage. "Ulick, my lad, you write your novels in the air. You will never publish one. You are 'veule' as they in your beloved language and 'veule' means something more than soft or weak. The truth is—" "Alfred and his truths," sniffed Easter —"is Ulick, you are rotten, morally rotten. Even your not drinking or smoking is only cowardice. Back to the boulevards for you!"
"Besides," pursued Alfred, thoroughly aroused, "isn't it time to give literature a breathing-spell from this infernal sex-humbuggery? Today everything is referred to sex, from religion to dreams. Childhood is trapped by psychiatrists searching for sex-documents. And, then, doesn't all this interest in a woman's chastity sicken you? It makes me think that men are still Turks buying female flesh by weight. It's simply disgusting, that's what it is. Why not her liver or her lungs! I'd as soon ask if a woman were constipated as ask if she were chaste. The world is hag-ridden by sexuality. And the worst of it is that with their 'new freedom', as they call it, women are becoming more polyandrous. They, too, needs must have a staff of males for their individuality! Music is to blame a lot, Wagner's music in particular. What else is Tristan and Isolde but a tonal orgasm? Think of the Prelude—never mind the love-music in Act II. That is avowedly voluptuous, as it should be—but just see with what savant art Wagner has built up from the sighing, yearning bars at the opening of the Prelude a perfect chart, dynamic, emotional, evoking physical images; then developing a crescendo without parallel in music the climax subsiding into a melancholy close like two felines caterwauling on a back fence. Musical erethism, I tell you...."
Easter's eyes snapped. "Disgusting, Alfred. I fancy you prefer the parsiphallic repulse of Kundry, when Wagner had become anti-natural, denying womanhood, thanks to his epicene patron, crazy King Ludwig of Bavaria." Alfred sniggered. Ulick never moved a muscle. It was vieux jeu, this lecturing from Alfred; at least it didn't stir him to the depths as did the burning phrases of Milt. "I'd like to meet your brother, Mona, if he is anything like you." "He isn't, Istar," she replied, "he has a beautiful nature, pure as the stars." "Listen to her. You might suppose, Mona, that you were leading, or had led—" Easter significantly paused—"a wicked life. You fast! Oh! As for your beautiful souls! Pooh! Men are all alike! Beasts! The soutane checks, no doubt; but I shouldn't like to tempt your brother too far." She became reflective. The men were uneasy. Where was all this vain talk leading to? Easter exploded another little bombshell. "I repeat, I'd like to meet your brother some time, Mona." The other girl nodded. "What's become of Dora that Paul used to rave over, or was it you, Jewel?" "Oh, by Jove, I say," remonstrated Paul. "For God's sake, if we are going to discuss brothels I'm off," said Alfred, and he left in a huff. The party broke up.