Thea hurried him along, talking rapidly, as if to get it over. “You might have kept me in misery for a while, perhaps. I don’t know. I have to think well of myself, to work. You could have made it hard. I’m not ungrateful. I was a difficult proposition to deal with. I understand now, of course. Since you didn’t tell me the truth in the beginning, you couldn’t very well turn back after I’d set my head. At least, if you’d been the sort who could, you wouldn’t have had to,—for I’d not have cared a button for that sort, even then.” She stopped beside a car that waited at the curb and gave him her hand. “There. We part friends?”
Fred looked at her. “You know. Ten years.”
“I’m not ungrateful,” Thea repeated as she got into her cab.
“Yes,” she reflected, as the taxi cut into the Park carriage road, “we don’t get fairy tales in this world, and he has, after all, cared more and longer than anybody else.” It was dark outside now, and the light from the lamps along the drive flashed into the cab. The snowflakes hovered like swarms of white bees about the globes.
Thea sat motionless in one corner staring out of the window at the cab lights that wove in and out among the trees, all seeming to be bent upon joyous courses. Taxicabs were still new in New York, and the theme of popular minstrelsy. Landry had sung her a ditty he heard in some theater on Third Avenue, about:
“But there passed him a bright-eyed taxi
With the girl of his heart inside.”
Almost inaudibly Thea began to hum the air, though she was thinking of something serious, something that had touched her deeply. At the beginning of the season, when she was not singing often, she had gone one afternoon to hear Paderewski’s recital. In front of her sat an old German couple, evidently poor people who had made sacrifices to pay for their excellent seats. Their intelligent enjoyment of the music, and their friendliness with each other, had interested her more than anything on the programme. When the pianist began a lovely melody in the first movement of the Beethoven D minor sonata, the old lady put out her plump hand and touched her husband’s sleeve and they looked at each other in recognition. They both wore glasses, but such a look! Like forget-menots, and so full of happy recollections. Thea wanted to put her arms around them and ask them how they had been able to keep a feeling like that, like a nosegay in a glass of water.
XI
Dr. Archie saw nothing of Thea during the following week. After several fruitless efforts, he succeeded in getting a word with her over the telephone, but she sounded so distracted and driven that he was glad to say good-night and hang up the instrument. There were, she told him, rehearsals not only for “Walküre,” but also for “Götterdämmerung,” in which she was to sing Waltraute two weeks later.
On Thursday afternoon Thea got home late, after an exhausting rehearsal. She was in no happy frame of mind. Madame Necker, who had been very gracious to her that night when she went on to complete Gloeckler’s performance of Sieglinde, had, since Thea was cast to sing the part instead of Gloeckler in the production of the “Ring,” been chilly and disapproving, distinctly hostile. Thea had always felt that she and Necker stood for the same sort of endeavor, and that Necker recognized it and had a cordial feeling for her. In Germany she had several times sung Brangaena to Necker’s Isolde, and the older artist had let her know that she thought she sang it beautifully. It was a bitter disappointment to find that the approval of so honest an artist as Necker could not stand the test of any significant recognition by the management. Madame Necker was forty, and her voice was failing just when her powers were at their height. Every fresh young voice was an enemy, and this one was accompanied by gifts which she could not fail to recognize.