“What? Yes!” and Balcomb turned to him again. “I wouldn’t have you think for a minute that the past’s blood-rusted key has any horrors for me. I’ll bet you I did raise the high perpendicular hand to those poor orphans as they passed the pickled pigs’ feet and the stewed rhubarb at Mrs. Fassett’s boarding-house. And I’m glad I did. My office in the world is to make two cheerful jays where none has been before. Say, that little Merriam girl is a most delicious peach, isn’t she? Miss Dameron’s cousin or something of the kind. About as much alike as the Queen of Sheba and Come into the Garden Maud! I’m going to play up to that little girl; but say, I don’t care for that strutting little captain. I’ve got to cut him out. These West Pointers always did make me tired. Think the earth is theirs and the fullness thereof; and I’m unalterably opposed to militarism, social and political.”
Morris said nothing, and Balcomb went on, in his usual breathless fashion:
“I must cultivate Mrs. Carr. She’s certainly a good thing. I really think she rates me above par owing to a strong position I took with her a few evenings ago ad interim, so to speak, while Dutchy Schmidt got mad and talked through his hair. The strong position, as I was saying, was apropos of Ibsen. When I remarked, quite casually, that Ibsen was the great soul photographer, you should have seen her eyes light up! I have visions of being much seen in these parlors hereafter. I guess Mike, the hubbyhub, isn’t so much on soul himself, but she has him hypnotized, all right. Just look at that sawed-off Pollock playing up to my girl! The infinitesimal projectile of dynastic imperialism! I see his finish. Ah! Watch me lift my velvety tenor.”
Herr Schmidt whirled on the piano stool and glared in Balcomb’s direction through his shaggy mane; and the young promoter sprang into the middle of the floor and began acting and singing with the utmost sang-froid. He was easily the best man in the company, and Mrs. Carr was delighted with the spirit that he brought to rehearsals.
The chorus had been drilled apart, and this was the first time Morris had heard the principals sing. He had joined the chorus under protest, but Mrs. Carr had insisted and when he learned that Zelda was to be the star it had not been difficult to comply. She began now one of her songs, as Gretchen, the commandant’s daughter:
“O deep dark woods of fatherland,
Thy boughs stretch high above;
O whispering wind in woodlands deep,
Thy voice is all of love.”
Until to-night, he had not heard her sing since the evening of Rodney Merriam’s lobster, and he felt again the thrill that her voice had awakened in him then. She stood within the circle that the others of the company made for her, and he fancied that a great distance lay between her and every other human thing. When a contralto voice is pure and true, it is one of the surest vehicles of passion there is in the world. It has a gathering power that seems to sweep all before it; it touches the heights but never lets go of the depths; it becomes, when it rises greatly, something that is not of this world and that yet speaks of every joy and every grief that the world has known. It was a song of farewell,—the song of a girl singing to her lover who was going away to war; and it seemed to Morris Leighton that it was a good-by to everything that a girl might know and hold good.