Ainslee's Magazine, February 1913 — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE WOMAN WITH A PAST every man, married or unmarried, young or old, amorous or ascetjc, could remember the curious timbre of her voice, with its elusive foreign intona- tion; the way her red mouth drooped at the corners, as if a sort of weariness of the spirit clung to it; and the mar- velous, deep red of her hair. Such hair !—with tones as rich as wine, and as soft as autumn leaves. Her eyes, as a matter of fact, were gray with a purple glamour about them somehow, but all that the man she was talking to ever recalled about them was their curi- ously sweet, deep look—which always gave him the fatuous impression that she was really and for the first time studying a Kindred Soul. She liked Olaf Nilsson, from the first day she met him on Mrs. Levinsky’s ramshackle stairs. She had gone there on one of her festless, impulsive visits of benevolence. Like most unsatisfied women, she filled her life with a thou- sand interests, and chief among them was the interest in other women, an al- most passionate wish to protect them from sundry buffets of outrageous for- tune which, along with some unessential material luxuries, had been her own portion. She was always seeking out obscure sisters who were in precari- ous situations, and giving them the one little tug needed to keep them from going fairly over the precipice. She had come to the dingy lodging house on some such errand. The girl she came to see was sordid and unappreciative, but Pippa came several times per- sistently—and, after she had met Olaf Nilsson, and grown to know him in a swift, bohemian fashion, she came oftener, and even stopped sometimes at his studio. There were advantages in having no longer a_ conventional reputation to lose. Olaf Nilsson had a poet’s face, dreamy, yet not effeminate, topped by a mane of flaxen-fair hair, and starred by eyes as blue as his own mountain lakes. He was from far Norway, and some- thing of the brooding poetry and mys- ticisms of his country lingered in his rathe: wistful smile. “What a boy!” said Philippa Car- “ 85 penter to her heart. ‘‘What an ex- quisite, hopeful, wonderful boy !” They talked together like old friends —odd talk that leaped across formal preliminaries, and went at once to the heart of the things for which they both cared. He told her his brief and sim- ple history, and it was touching to note that to him it seemed neither brief nor simple. He dwelt on the early child- hood memories quite seriously and rev- erently; his account of how the great German musician had carried him away to Munich to study was palpably to him the recital of a miracle. Those years in the German city, days of work and am- bition, and a few friends—years that a less ingenuous youth would have dis- missed in a few casual words—he de- scribed breathlessly. To him they had been notable, magical, not comparable to any other’s experiences. Then there was America, where he had had such fair prospects, and where he had been so sure of making his for- tune and bringing the world to his feet. Here again he was absurdly, touchingly intense. There was no lack of courage in him, but there was an almost too poignant realization of failure and dis- appointment. As his days of study in Munich had comprised for him all hope and glamorous ambition, so his year in America spelled for him the whole of the limitless tragedy of defeated genius. He had gone down into the depths, he and his passionate intensity of soul, and he had come back with the exaltation of suffering glimmering about him like a nimbus. His face had become etherealized, his look was fanatical, ab- stracted. And he had written a sym- phony. It was a tragical symphony— that of course. With the egotism which is too simple to be arrogant, he had called it “Geistschmere’—“‘Soul Pain” —and doubtless he believed that in its poignant harmonies he had for the first time voiced the anguish of humanity that is broken on the wheel. One day he told Mrs. Carpenter that he had sent his symphony to the di- rector of a great orchestra famous on two continents. So might a Japanese father speak of sending his son to war, (C@) ANIC IOoOk (E@)