Phases of an Inferior Planet. Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
new worship, as she had introduced it into the old. She typified the Church when, in its fresh young passion, and suffused with the dying splendors of paganism, it turned from the primitive exercises of its founders and revived the worship of the gracious Madonna of Old Egypt in the worship of the Madonna of Nazareth, and the flower-scented feasts of Venus in the Purification of the Virgin. There existed in the girl an unsatisfied restlessness of self, resulting in the desire for complete submergence of soul in idea. Her nature veered constantly from extreme to extreme; there was no semblance of a saner medium, and as a system must have exponents, the high priests and priestesses of art became her lesser divinities.
She began to haunt the Metropolitan Opera-house. From the fifth gallery she looked down every evening upon an Italian or German landscape. She herself trembled like a harp swept by invisible fingers; she grew pale with Marguerite, wept over the dead Juliet, and went mad with the madness of Lucia.
When the voice of that fair Bride of Lammermoor who sang for us that season was borne to her on the notes of a flute which flagged beneath the exceeding sweetness of the human notes they carried, Mariana grasped the railing with her quivering hands and bowed her head in an ecstasy of appreciation. It was the ecstasy with which a monk in mediæval days must have thrilled when he faced in a dim cathedral some beautiful and earthly Virgin of the great Raphael. It was the purest form of sensuous self-abnegation. Then, as the curtain fell, she would rise and step gropingly towards the door, cast into sudden darkness. Wrapped in that mental state as in a mantle, she would descend the stairs and pass out into the street. At such times she was as far removed from the existence to which she was returning as was the poor mad Lucia herself. And then in the night she would awake and sing softly to herself in the stillness, lying with seraphic eyes and hands clasped upon her breast, until the morning sun flashed into her face and the day began.
There was also a tragic side to her emotions. Her past inheritance of ages of image-worshippers laid hold upon her. From being merely symbols of art the singers became divinities in their own right. She haunted their hotels for fleeting glimpses of them. She bought their photographs with the money which should have gone for a winter hat. She would gladly have kissed the dust upon which they trod. After her first hearing of "Tristan and Isolde," she placed the prima donna's photograph beneath the bust of Wagner, and worshipped her for weeks as a bright particular star.
In the evening she attended the opera alone. Returning when it was over, she crossed Broadway, boarded a car, and, reaching The Gotham, toiled up to the fourth landing. She was innocent of prudery, and she went unharmed. Perhaps her complete absorption in something beyond herself was her safeguard. At all events, she brushed men by, glanced at them with unseeing eyes, and passed placidly on her way.
Mariana was famished for romance, but not for the romance of the street. She had an instinctive aversion to things common and of vulgar intent. Her unsatisfied desire was but the craving of a young and impressionable heart for untried emotion. It was the poetry of living she thirsted for – poetry in æsthetic proportions, with a careful adjustment of light and shade. She desired harmonious effects and exquisite schemes of color, all as appropriate settings to a romance which she could arrange and blend in treatment as an artist arranges models of still life. So, for a time, she expended herself upon great singers. A new tenor appeared as Edgardo. Upon the stage he was dark and fierce and impassioned. He made an adorable lover. He sang to Lucia, not to the audience, and he threw half his arias into his eyes. Mariana was enraptured. She fell desperately in love. During the day she went about in meditative abstraction; during the night she turned upon her little cotton pillow-slip, and wept to think how far below him she must ever remain. She even wished herself a chorus girl, that she might intercept his glances. She grew frantically jealous of the prima donna, whom, also, she adored. She imagined innumerable romances in which he enacted upon the stage of life the part of Edgardo. Then, through the kindness of Signor Morani, she was introduced to the object of her regard, and the awakening was abrupt. He was fat and commonplace. He proved to be the faithful husband of a red-faced little German wife, and the devoted father of a number of red-faced German children. He possessed no qualities for romantic development, and Mariana recovered.
For a period her susceptibilities abated. The wave of activity spent its violence. Life flowed for her like a meadow stream, sensitive to faint impressions from a passing breeze, but calm when the breeze was afar.
Upon a night of "Carmen" she saw from the fifth gallery a velvet rose fall from the prima donna's bosom to the stage. When the curtain fell she rushed madly down and begged it of an usher. She carried it home, and hung it upon the wall above her bed. At night, before falling asleep, she would draw the curtains aside, and, in the electric light that flooded the room, cast her eyes upon the vivid bit of color. In the early morning she would awake, and, raising herself upon her elbow, touch it reverently with her hand. It was homage rendered to her own ambition.
At The Gotham, her bare little chamber, with its garish wall-paper, was a source of acute discomfort to her. Once, after a long spell of pneumonia, she had fallen into a fit of desperation, and had attacked the paper with a breakfast-knife. The result was a square of whitewashed wall above the bureau. An atmosphere of harmony was so necessary to her growth that she seemed to droop and pine in uncongenial environment. In the apartment-house, with its close, unventilated halls, its creaking elevator, its wretchedly served dinners, she had always felt strangely ill at ease. Her last prayer at night was that the morrow might see her transplanted to richer soil, her first thought upon awakening was that the coming day was pregnant with possibilities. Life in its entirety, life with passionate color and emotional fulfilment, was the food she craved.
Of Mariana, Mr. Ardly had made a laborious and profound analysis.
"That young person is a self-igniting taper," he had concluded. "If some one doesn't apply the match, she will go off of her own accord – and she will burn herself out before time has cast a wet blanket upon her."
He himself was a self-contained young fellow, who, like a greater before him, followed with wisdom both wine and women. His life was regulated by a theory which he had propounded in youth and attempted to practice in maturer years. The theory asserted that experience was the one reliable test of existing conditions. "I refused to believe that alcohol was an intoxicant," he had once said, "until I tested it."
When Mariana first arrived, he surprised in his heart an embryonic sentiment concerning her, and proceeded to crush it as coolly as he would have crushed a fly that encroached upon the private domain of his person.
"I have no dissipations," he explained, when discussing the affair with Mariana. "I neither drink nor love."
"Which is unwise," retorted Mariana. "I do both in moderation. And a man who has never been in love is always a great school-boy. I should be continually expecting him to tread upon my gown or to break my fan. Sentiment is the greatest civilizer of the race. If I were you I would begin immediately."
"I dislike all effort," returned Ardly, gravely, "and love is cloying. Over-loving produces mental indigestion, as over-eating produces physical. I have suffered from it, and experience has made me abstemious. I shall abstain from falling in love with you."
"What a pity!" sighed Mariana, lifting her lashes.
"Well, I can't agree with you," argued Ardly, "and I don't regret it. I am very comfortable as I am."
"I am not," retorted Mariana. "I detest the dinners. Who could be comfortable on overdone mutton and cold potatoes?"
"Even in the matter of food I am without prejudices," declared the other. "I had as soon want a good dinner and have a poor one as have a good one and want none. These are the only conditions with which I am acquainted. There may be estates where things are more equally adjusted, but I know nothing of them; I have not experienced them."
Mariana sighed. "You are as depressing as Mr. Paul," she complained.
"I only speak of what I know," explained Ardly, complacently. "Upon other matters I have no opinions, and I calmly repeat that I have found appetite and gratification to be situated upon opposite sides of a revolving globe. When one's up the other's down."
"I shall cut a passage through," said Mariana. "If life doesn't equalize things, I will."
"And I will watch the process," remarked Ardly, indolently.
It