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Book 1Thirteen
Lucy used to be sorry that her birthday came in March. In Chicago it was the most disagreeable season of the year; and at home, in Haverford, it was always cheerless enough. The ice on the Platte had either disappeared or gone rotten, so there was no skating. The wind never stopped blowing, and the air was full of dust from the ploughed fields and sand from the river banks. But this year March was the happiest month she had ever known.
Sebastian was getting up his programs for his April concert tour in the East, and every morning was important. It was much more as if he were really living at the studio now. He kept the place full of flowers and growing plants because he found Lucy liked them. When he opened the door for her, he met her with a kiss. That embrace, often playful but never hurried, seemed to bring them at once into complete understanding: every sound, every silence, had the beauty of intimacy and confidence. The air one breathed in that room was different from any other in the world. Lucy thought there was even a special kind of light there, which kept a soft tint of gold, though the fog was brown and the smoke hung low outside. The weather was consistently bad. The ice cakes ground upon each other in the Lake, rain and wet snow beat down upon the city, high winds strewed the streets with broken umbrellas. But when she reached the Arts Building the elevator took her up into an untroubled climate.
It was at night, when she was quiet and alone, that she got the greatest happiness out of each day--after it had passed! Why this was, she never knew. In the darkness she went over every moment of the morning again. Nothing was lost; not a phrase of a song, not a look on his face or a motion of his hand. In these quiet hours she had time to reflect, and to realize that the few weeks since the 4th of January were longer than the twenty-one years that had gone before. Life, it seemed, could not be measured by years.
It was not that she had been discontented before. She had been happy ever since she first came to Chicago; thought herself fortunate to have escaped from a little town to a city, and to work with a kind and conscientious man like Paul Auerbach. But that time was far away. She began a new life on the night when she first heard Clement Sebastian. Until that night she had played with trifles and make-believes.
Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself--except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself. She was no longer afraid to like or to dislike anything too much. It was as if she had found some authority for taking what was hers and rejecting what seemed unimportant.
One morning Sebastian brought out an old English song, She Never Told Her Love. He sang it over several times, walking up and down and smiling to himself: But let concealment, like a worm i` the bud, feed on her damask cheek.
He stopped beside the piano and bent down, bringing his face close to Lucy`s.
"It doesn`t feed on yours, my dear!"
She started and put her hand quickly to her cheek. "But why should it? I have nothing to conceal!"
"Nothing? Nothing troubles you?"
"How can you ask me?" She looked up at him in astonishment. "When I live my life out under your eyes every day?"
"Don`t you sometimes feel it`s a waste, living your life out?"
"Not for me, it isn`t. Have we finished?"
"Once again, please."
As Lucy got up from the piano, she drew a long breath. "I`ve never heard that song before. The words are lovely, too."
Sebastian laughed. "Oh, yes? And there are plenty more where those came from." He went to the bookcase, ran his finger along a row of small red leather volumes, and pulled one out of its place. "Take it along. You`ll find the lines of this song, and others. Lots of lovely words." He sometimes used that teasing tone, as if she were a child.
Lucy blushed. She had read it, certainly, and had thought it a rather foolish comedy, where everybody was pretending and nobody was in earnest. Until she began to play for Sebastian she had never known that words had any value aside from their direct meaning.
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