They were looking out of the window. Thea kept his arm. Down on the river four battleships were anchored in line, brilliantly lighted, and launches were coming and going, bringing the men ashore. A searchlight from one of the ironclads was playing on the great headland up the river, where it makes its first resolute turn. Overhead the night-blue sky was intense and clear.
“There’s so much that I want to tell you,” she said at last, “and it’s hard to explain. My life is full of jealousies and disappointments, you know. You get to hating people who do contemptible work and who get on just as well as you do. There are many disappointments in my profession, and bitter, bitter contempts!” Her face hardened, and looked much older. “If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up for it, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.” As she glanced at Dr. Archie’s face, Thea stopped short and turned her own face away. Her eyes followed the path of the searchlight up the river and rested upon the illumined headland.
“You see,” she went on more calmly, “voices are accidental things. You find plenty of good voices in common women, with common minds and common hearts. Look at that woman who sang Ortrude with me last week. She’s new here and the people are wild about her. ‘Such a beautiful volume of tone!’ they say. I give you my word she’s as stupid as an owl and as coarse as a pig, and any one who knows anything about singing would see that in an instant. Yet she’s quite as popular as Necker, who’s a great artist. How can I get much satisfaction out of the enthusiasm of a house that likes her atrociously bad performance at the same time that it pretends to like mine? If they like her, then they ought to hiss me off the stage. We stand for things that are irreconcilable, absolutely. You can’t try to do things right and not despise the people who do them wrong. How can I be indifferent? If that doesn’t matter, then nothing matters. Well, sometimes I’ve come home as I did the other night when you first saw me, so full of bitterness that it was as if my mind were full of daggers. And I’ve gone to sleep and wakened up in the Kohlers’ garden, with the pigeons and the white rabbits, so happy! And that saves me.” She sat down on the piano bench. Archie thought she had forgotten all about him, until she called his name. Her voice was soft now, and wonderfully sweet. It seemed to come from somewhere deep within her, there were such strong vibrations in it. “You see, Dr. Archie, what one really strives for in art is not the sort of thing you are likely to find when you drop in for a performance at the opera. What one strives for is so far away, so deep, so beautiful”—she lifted her shoulders with a long breath, folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him with a resignation that made her face noble,—“that there’s nothing one can say about it, Dr. Archie.”
Without knowing very well what it was all about, Archie was passionately stirred for her. “I’ve always believed in you, Thea; always believed,” he muttered.
She smiled and closed her eyes. “They save me: the old things, things like the Kohlers’ garden. They are in everything I do.”
“In what you sing, you mean?”
“Yes. Not in any direct way,”—she spoke hurriedly,—“the light, the color, the feeling. Most of all the feeling. It comes in when I’m working on a part, like the smell of a garden coming in at the window. I try all the new things, and then go back to the old. Perhaps my feelings were stronger then. A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude. I am more or less of an artist now, but then I was nothing else. When I went with you to Chicago that first time, I carried with me the essentials, the foundation of all I do now. The point to which I could go was scratched in me then. I haven’t reached it yet, by a long way.”
Archie had a swift flash of memory. Pictures passed before him. “You mean,” he asked wonderingly, “that you knew then that you were so gifted?”
Thea looked up at him and smiled. “Oh, I didn’t know anything! Not enough to ask you for my trunk when I needed it. But you see, when I set out from Moonstone with you, I had had a rich, romantic past. I had lived a long, eventful life, and an artist’s life, every hour of it. Wagner says, in his most beautiful opera, that art is only a way of remembering youth. And the older we grow the more precious it seems to us, and the more richly we can present that memory. When we’ve got it all out,—the last, the finest thrill of it, the brightest hope of it,”—she lifted her hand above her head and dropped it,—“then we stop. We do nothing but repeat after that. The stream has reached the level of its source. That’s our measure.”
There was a long, warm silence. Thea was looking hard at the floor, as if she were seeing down through years and years, and her old friend stood watching her bent head. His look was one with which he used to watch her long ago, and which, even in thinking about her, had become a habit of his face. It was full of solicitude, and a kind of secret gratitude, as if to thank her for some inexpressible pleasure of the heart. Thea turned presently toward the piano and began softly to waken an old air:—