ELLEN TERHUNE
527
couch and remarked in her inadequately lowered voice:
"I
don't think
our friend in the next room has discovered the use of the soft pedal yet–
as well as a number of other things! ...
I
don't think she's entirely
nonnal-one can see it from her oversized head."
I
realized then that it was not only in technique that Ellen's music
was beyond Miss Bristead: musically trained though she was, she had no
real feeling for music whatever. Ellen had been mistaken in her notion
that her mother's marriage had shut her off from a musical career: Miss
Bristead was conventional and worldly, she could not conceivably be
anything else. And now Ellen, surmounting her own despair, had come
back all the way through the years to justify her, to let her know her
sympathy, to show her that something fine had come out of her, something
that might make all that-the coldness, the sickness, the quarreling, the
bad birth and the ugly changeling-something that might make all that
right.
I
wanted to tell Ellen that she had triumphed, that she had written
a great piece of music.
I
wanted to assure her, confronted as we were by
her mother's
Gorgon-li~e
incomprehension, that
I
at least understood
and applauded.
"I
liked it very much,"
I
said, and got up quickly and went into the
music-room. But Ellen had already escaped. There was nobody there:
I
looked around. Everything seemed perfectly familiar, unexpectedly and
yet reassuringly: the mask of Beethoven, the old violins, Ellen's ·silver–
framed photograph of Debussy. But the room, rather queerly, was much
darker than the one from which
I
had come.
I
had an impulse to go after Ellen and call to her that
I
was there.
I
was eager to see her again. But
I
knew it would be better to return
to Miss Bristead and ask her to .make Ellen come in.
I
went back, then,
into the living-room; but it was empty: Miss Bristead had gone out again.
This room had darkened, too-the weather must suddenly have clouded.
I
turned on the electric lamp on the little round table by the couch, and
saw that the mahogany of the surface was dimmed by a film of dust. .There
was
a pile of current magazines, current for 1926.
I
picked two or three
of them up and noted the dates on the covers. Then
I
looked about the
room. There it was just as
I
had seen it in August. All the shades were
drawn.
I
picked up from another table a vase of faded flowers and stirred
up a foul stink: they were gladiolas withered to a crisp yellow thinness.
The house had been shut up in a hurry: the gladiolas had been fcfrgotten.
I
found my hat and coat in the hall, but the big front door was fast
locked.
I
came back to the living-room, openM one of the front wlnddws,
and stepped out on to the dark porch, where
I
saw that it was raining.
I
did not fear that Miss Bristead would come back-! knew there was
nobody there.
The next day
I
read in the paper that Ellen Terhune was dead. She
had gone,
l.t
turned out, to the city the night of my visit In August.
Sh~
