Words and Music
Hilda Harper’s lunch hour was from half past twelve to half past one. Unfortunately it coincided with the daytime personal appearance of Roman Starr at the Royal; unfortunately, because Hilda was underweight and ought to have eaten lunch, but would have starved rather than miss one moment of Roman’s seductive crooning.
Regularly every weekday she rushed from the office to the Royal, bought her ticket with the right change (to save time), and sank into a seat breathless but blissful. She hoped that the ushers and the girl at the ticket window did not notice her or guess her secret. They did, but she was just one of a hundred “repeaters” of her age and sex, distinguished only by the fact that she came six days a week instead of four or five.
Through the long, hungry afternoons she took dictation or typed without a conscious thought of what she was doing. Though there was no room in her mind for anything save Roman’s beautiful face, devastating smile, and plaintive gurgling, she was able to accomplish her work with very few errors, none of them glaring enough to be detected by her boss, Mr. Lincke, who had graduated from a Vienna grammar school in his freshman year.
Hilda and an older girl, Margaret Quinlan, lived in the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Reade. The Reades had a radio, and the girls were welcome to listen in as often as they chose, which, in Hilda’s case, was every evening from seven till eight, when Roman Starr and his Starr-Light Orchestra took the air. Hilda had several pictures of Roman, clipped from newspapers and magazines, and always she kept one concealed in her hand to look at surreptitiously while Roman purled or cooed. Margaret pretended not to know this and was too kindhearted to kid her roommate about the one sided romance. And inasmuch as Margaret liked conversation, and Hilda would neither converse nor listen except when Roman was the topic, the older girl feigned more interest in him than she really felt.
Margaret was rather musical in an amateur way. She wondered, to herself, what you would call Roman’s voice. It was not a tenor or a baritone, or even a contralto. Sometimes it was the hum of a mosquito a foot from one’s ear; sometimes the drone of a bee that had taken an anesthetic. She wondered, too, at the enraptured reception, by Hilda and others, of his every new opus. It seemed to her that he turned out at least two a week, but the titles and the words and the music were so much alike that his announcement, “Tonight I am going to sing you a little number that I have just composed,” was quite necessary. Necessary, that is, to Margaret. Hilda thought they were all different and all beautiful, but her favorite was “My Bride-to-Be.”
The words of the refrain were written indelibly on Hilda’s heart, and she whispered them a thousand times a day:
My bride-to-be, my only true love;
There’s none so fair, so sweet as she,
My bride-to-be; I never knew love
Until she came and conquered me.
You ask me to describe her, but I will not even try.
Could one describe the fairest of God’s angels in the sky?
I’ll only say she’s just like you, love,
For you are she, my bride-to-be!
Margaret went with Hilda when Roman’s first sound picture, Amourette, was shown. She guessed why Hilda was not anxious to go a second time. For one thing, Roman’s voice did not screen well. But the scenes between the hero and the lovely Lydia Languish, with whom he did his amouretting, were what ruined the evening. They were simply unbearable, if you felt like Hilda and thousands of her fellow-sufferers.
Nearly every day, in nearly every paper, there was mention of Roman, and the theatrical, moving-picture, and radio publications were full of him. Hilda’s dresser overflowed with clippings. The one she liked best and read most frequently was from Wave Lengths—a half-page story under his own signature, a story in which he bared his soul.
“I feel,” it said in part, “that I shall never attain the artistic heights to which I aspire until I have experienced a great love; perhaps, probably, a love that is unrequited.
“I believe Art thrives on love, that the appealing emotional quality which, kind friends assure me, is now present in my voice would be increased an hundredfold were I suddenly to find myself submerged in a sea of Passion.
“ ’Twere futile to go in search of this inspiring rapture. Nor am I sure the impetus to my art would be worth the pain it might bring me. Yet I will not retreat from love’s advance. When I meet the one girl, the woman I have dreamed of, my arms will be open. If she turns away, so much the worse for me. And, I fancy, so much the better for my career.”
Hilda hoped he was wrong about the advantages of disappointment. Because if she happened to be the woman he had dreamed of, and if his arms happened to be open when they met—well, she certainly would never detour for his Art’s sake.
It was natural that Roman should receive mash notes, hundreds of them a day. The first one Hilda wrote him was so warm that she lacked the nerve to sign it and was therefore not surprised when no answer came. Her name and address went with the second one, which by a great effort she kept comparatively cool. It read:
My dear Mr. Starr:
You will probably be surprised to get a letter from me and will probably think me bold to be writing to a man to whom I have never been introduced, but I can not resist the temptation to tell you how much I admire your singing and your looks and
