Possession

by Louis Bromfield

But there was one thing of which Rebecca knew nothing and which Ellen chose to keep a secret because it could have been of interest to none save herself. After she had played the first group on her program and returned to the platform in response to the applause, she caught a glimpse among the shadows in the back of the hall of a dark, familiar face. It astonished her that she should have noticed it at all, and once she had seen it, the rest of the audience failed to trouble her; it no longer had any existence. From that moment there had been a strange lift apparent in her music, a wild sort of ecstasy which carried every one with it. She played for one person. Among the shadows at the back of the hall Callendar sat, listening, his dark sleek head bent forward a little. He was alone.

It was Rebecca who saw to it, in the months which followed, that Ellen was seen at the proper places, dressed with just a touch of fantasy so that she might attract notice and yet not be taken for a demi-mondaine; it was Rebecca who saw to it that Ellen’s fierce dark beauty (so confident now in her triumph so arrogant) was set down for posterity by the most fashionable portrait painter in England, a man with a romantic reputation whom the gullible public would in time connect with Lilli Barr in some hazy intrigue which had never existed. It was Rebecca who saw to it that Ellen was photographed beside this composer and that one, and that the photographs, skilfully made with an eye to public attention, fell into proper hands and traveled to America where they looked forth from the pages of the Sunday supplements into the startled, proud faces of Charles and Hattie Tolliver and Fergus and Robert. They even found their way, after the rest of the family had exhausted the possibilities of the papers, into the cell of Gramp Tolliver who chuckled with wicked satisfaction over the spectacle of the ruthless granddaughter who had, after all, escaped.

And they found their way back to the Town where Mrs. Herman Biggs (née Seton and now the mother of three children) clipped them and showed them to the neighbors and to her brother Jimmy, a spindly, nervous youth of nineteen, who in his childhood had been honored more than once by cuffs from the hands of Lilli Barr which the newspapers said (via Miss Schönberg) were insured for one hundred thousand dollars.

In her boarding house, Cousin Eva Barr, last of the family, dominated the greasy meals for more than a week by the stories of the childhood of Lilli Barr. Under the spell of the reflected glamour, she forgot even the charities she administered so grimly, and spent most of her day at meetings and walking along streets where she would be likely to encounter people who would ask about her cousin. For in all the excitement, it seemed that in some way she herself had at last escaped the tradition that made a vigorous, unmarried woman into a grim, forbidding dreadnought.

Miss Ogilvie too shared the triumph though in a different fashion. It was she, after all, who had discovered Lilli Barr; but it was not this which warmed her fluttering heart so much as the old secret of the missing five hours, which even now she shared with no one. It was Miss Ogilvie—poor, timid, Miss Ogilvie—trapped like Cousin Eva Barr in the tradition of an earlier generation, who had helped this Lilli Barr to escape. And in her thoughts (she being a sentimental creature and knowing nothing of the truth) the little parlor took on a new glow of romance and glamour. At times, when her secret seemed almost too difficult to keep, she fancied that some day, after she herself was dead, they might place on the front of her house a little tablet with an inscription which read, “It was from this house on the Fifth of January, 1903, that Lilli Barr (then Ellen Tolliver) eloped ... etc. etc.”

So, in the first years of her fame, Ellen remained a little dazed by her success. She moved, terrified always on the eve of a concert, going between concerts her hard-working, secretive way, so that there grew up about her, in addition to all Rebecca’s marvelous lies, a legend of mystery. Few people knew her or anything at all of her real life. There were only the gaudy stories of Rebecca’s fabrication which people believed and yet did not believe because there were so many of them and they were all so conflicting. In place of the old coldness and restraint, which melted only when Ellen’s fingers touched the keyboard of a Bechstein or a Steinway, Rebecca managed to create such a sense of splendor and unmorality that presently the newspapers, as old Sanson had done long ago, came to speak of her as a second Teresa Carreño.

She caught too from Rebecca something of the latter’s contagious sense of showmanship and came to understand presently that if one wished to be sensationally successful it was necessary not only to be a fine musician but something of a charlatan as well. She learned not simply to walk out upon the platform; she made an entrance. In Paris, where Rebecca managed to buy up most of the press, she had a great following. Women came to the concerts for no other reason than to see her clothes and to study the youthful perfection of her figure.

Success and triumph flared up in her path in whatever direction she turned, yet there were times when the old doubts, the old self-reproach, assailed her bitterly.

One night, as she left the Salle Gaveau after a concert, and stood waiting with Rebecca for Schneidermann’s motor to come up, the sight of an affiche bearing the name LILLI BARR in great letters filled her with a kind of terror. Silently she gazed at it, fascinated by the name and the program in small letters beneath it ... Bach, Schumann, Moussorgsky, Chopin, Debussy ... all the great names dwarfed beneath the gigantic LILLI BARR. She knew that on the sidewalk, almost within arm’s length of her, there stood students, hungry and a little threadbare, who waited by the door to catch a glimpse of her as she left the hall. She knew that this Lilli Barr, whose name was set forth in letters so gigantic, had every reason to be content. Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr.... She stared at the name with a curious sensation of strangeness, of detachment. Lilli Barr was herself now, and Ellen Tolliver was dead, swallowed up by a fantastic creature whom Rebecca and Schneidermann between them had created. To the world Ellen Tolliver had no existence; she had never lived at all, and she had now to play a rôle—to put on a false face—that the world might not discover it had been deceived. She was still playing the mountebank, the charlatan, as she had done in the drawing-room on Murray Hill behind a painted screen with a Russian tenor and a Javanese dancer. For a moment she hated Lilli Barr with a passionate hatred. She had lost possession forever of Ellen Tolliver. In the midst of her pride there had always been the grain of humility, fiercely hidden from the world, which made her in spite of everything an artist.

The voice of Rebecca, shrewd and sleek with her success as an “exploitress,” sounded in her ear.