Then there swept into the room two of the strangest and most delightful persons Thurley had ever seen. Collin Hedley came first, a fair-haired, boyish man with eyes so joyous and brilliant one could not look at them for long, and the bristly head of the plebeian with deep incurvation of the temples. He was most carelessly dressed, but no one would have noticed that as long as his eyes smiled; he had a mad Van Dyke beard and a lovable yet combative mouth which might or might not prophesy many things.
But it was Polly Harris who captivated Thurley’s heart and made her forget her shyness. Polly had the fashion of bombarding one’s self-consciousness. She could have changed the saying, “A cat may look at a king” to “a cat may order a king.” Even Bliss Hobart lost dignity in her presence.
“Polly can teach you to write vers libre on your cuff and tell a Chicago art patron from a Pittsburg coal dealer at a distance of fifty yards,” was Hobart’s universal recommendation. But Polly Harris could do a great deal more.
She reminded one, although her age was less than Ernestine’s, of October sunshine, partly because she was a tiny, wood-brown thing, an oddity, a fact she well knew, flat-chested as a boy, with tanned skin, eyes like topazes, if she were happy, and her brown hair bobbed like a child’s and fastened with a ridiculous velvet bow. Her dresses were inevitably the same—since her income was likewise—Polly’s regimentals, they called them, brown corduroy for winter, made in semi-smock, semi-Eton-jacket style with an abbreviated skirt and stout little boots laced as if for a walking tour. In the summer Polly appeared in brown cotton made in similar fashion and when she was dragged to some formal affair she would be induced to wear her “heirloom,” a brocaded brown velvet which Ernestine had brought from Paris. Polly was just Polly with her crisp little voice, a heart of gold and a tongue which could be sharp as a battle lance or as tender as pink rosebuds.
“The only sprite in captivity,” the family dubbed her, pitying her impossible aim—to write grand opera—and never hinting what tragedy lay before her when the tanned face would wrinkle and the bobbed hair turn gray. It was as probable that Polly Harris could write a grand opera as that Betsey Pilrig could lead the Russian ballet—but Polly, as so often happens in the case of “captured sprites,” saw none of the absurdity encasing her ambitions.
No one knew just how she lived, for she had the fierce pride of failures. “Sure ’nuff” successes or “comers” are always more amenable to loans and helping hands. In her sky parlor, the tiptop room in a bohemian New York rooming house, Polly somehow wrested from fate and the world at large a living. Limericks and hack work of hideous monotony and starvation wage with the pride of her family behind her! Her father had been an Ohio judge and her grandfather a senator, while Polly, alone and without resources, had wilfully burned family bridges some years before and drifted to New York to write her operas.
Even Polly admitted the first operas were hopeless, bravely burning them as one does old love letters. But grand opera remained her goal; nothing less would or could satisfy her. After seven desperate years of work and insufficient means, Polly had become one of the family of the very great and was envied by all; it meant, however, that she took from this family not one jot of aid or influence nor permitted them to know whether “we are eating to-day or we are moving our belt strap into the next hole.”
Sometimes the family outwitted Polly Harris and helped her in spite of herself, but more often they knew it was kindest to not try. So they did the finest thing of all because the girl’s fine self deserved and demanded it—they took her in as one of them and talked of the day her operas should be sung, listening to her pitiful dreams as kindly as they would have listened to Wagner could he have been among them telling of his Rhinegold! Polly had become a character in artistic New York and when the near-great enviously urged her to make use of the truly great, to accept some easy position as secretary or companion to this celebrity or that, Polly’s eyes would change to angry, storm things and she would turn on them with the threat that they would still see her win out, some day the great theme would come to her and the world admit her success! Then she would repay the beloved family for their kindness in not forcing old clothes and baskets of food, loans of money—as one tipped a maid. Polly would be famous, as famous as Ernestine Christian or Bliss or the lazy deceiver of a Caleb or Collin Hedley whom Polly loved in strange fashion although he was honestly unconscious of the fact.
Until then painting lamp shades at night, writing wretched verse for some wretched publication, doing a child’s song cycle for almost the cost of the music paper, harmonizing impossible marching songs, substituting at a Harlem movie house as the piano player—none of these was too mean for Polly to do since they sustained her until the day the great theme should whisper itself!
“The thing which keeps Polly afloat,” Ernestine had declared, “is that she is glad for every one else who wins out—it has made her so sunny hearted she just can’t go under.”