Althea: A Story

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Althea

By Alfred Lambourne

Who could help but love her? She was the incarnation of an unappeased desire. Her name should have been after that of the Fifth Muse, for she was a true daughter of Apollo and Mnemosyne. Hers was rapture of the Sun-God, and her dancing was a memory. The desire in her mother's soul, and which remained ungratified, was transmitted to a life within her womb, and it made Althea her child never tire of the dance. Her feet seemed too light for the earth. It is the law of life; it is the being of gods and mortals. The modern psychologist has added much to the teaching of Spurzheim and Gall. We have greater knowledge of the sexual science. A ruling passion the more often comes from a desire suppressed in the mother, than it does from the temperamental. Althea had inherited the latter, but her ruling passion came from another cause. Her mother could not attend the ball, and she recalled an hour of love. To dance was the one delight of the girl. Madly she danced and the mother whose desire had but lasted for a brief hour, saw it perpetuated in her child. Althea's thoughts of heaven were music, and a dancing before the throne. What could the mother do but yield to her daughter's wish? Althea should begin a career; a dance should be planned and she should create it as a thing of life and beauty.

II

What a terrible cough! How low, how obstinate, how deeply-seated! Itracked the mother's frame; it was both distressing to hear and to look upon. And that cough had developed itself after the day of the visit to the atelier. The ballet master had arranged and completed the dance for Althea, a time was set for its first rehearsal. But by that time the mother was distressed indeed. Yet she must attend. Wrapped in her shawl, yet shivering with chill, and plagued with her cough, the mother was a witness to the skill of her child. Yet at what a price

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A death's head at the feast. To each spell of coughing by the mother, the daughter performed her wondrous motions. Happy was Althea in the interpretations of the many phases in the intricate dance. In each pause of the theme she divided her excited words between questions of approbation for her dancing, and solicitude in her mother's distress. A death's head at the feast, the shadow, as it were, of life. Pneumonia! After the first rehearsal the mother had rapidly developed the disease. The cough had ceased, a crisis had come. A sudden fall of temperature, her livid lips and face deeply-flushed, the clammy perspiration upon her brow, all told that the patient's illness has taken an unfavorable turn. As is so often the truth in life, Althea was made to feel the crucial moments of the present focussed to a double emotion. Now she knew an ineffable pleasure in her art, and now she also knew an intolerable pain, in her mother so suddenly stricken. Hers was a hurrying from the dreams in the halls of delight, to the realities at the side of a death bed. The rehearsals had gone on, for the girl, in the efforts which she put forth for a perfect success, did not realize that her mother would die. And the physicians had entertained a hope. But now came the inevitable, and the end was near. "Not too much grief," that is what the mother had always said. "Not too much grief, Althea, when I am dead." And now her admonition was put to the test. In a few days the mother lay beneath the soil, and the heaped up gifts of flowers.

Ill

"A Dance of the Soul," that was indeed a felicitious name. In the dance was the life ecstasy of Althea, and she carried forward yearnings of the mother, who was dead. The audience that would watch entranced, how should they know that the steps, the glides, the swaying and tossing of her limbs, all the wondrous motions of the girl before them, the grace and passion of her dancing, were the result of a prenatal influence? The watchers in the theatre would see only and know only, the beauty and skill in the exquisite and subtle interpretation of the happy dancer. They would be bewildered by the ability and the exhaustless pleasure which Althea displayed in her art. Why should they imagine that its true origin was the longing that once filled the soul and flesh of a woman who now lay beneath the sod? They would not conceive that it was a desire in that which was now but graveyard dust, that animated before them the living flesh. There was not a trace of sorrow in "A Dance of the Soul."

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This masterpiece of Althea's was an expression of infinite freedom and gladness. It epitomized the soul's joy of existence, its delight in untrammeled life. The dance interpreted the soul ill its exquisite pleasure as a partaker in the infinite. Her creation was all her own, and it rose into the realms of the highest art.

IV Yet we are not writing of Althea to describe a dance. Our thought was a psychological one. We will not write of her success in the midst of blazing lights and before applauding thousands, but of a very different scene. What concerns us is not what happened before the delighted audience of the living, but that which took place among the unheeding and silent dead. It was a beautiful and secluded spot of the cemetery where Althea's mother lay buried. The ornamental shrubs, with their clusters of bloom, the stifly-fronded evergreens, and the swaying pendant branches of the willows, made it richly solemn. There among the dead, was it not a strange place, a strange setting for a dance? The golden evening light lay across the grassy sward and the headstones and monuments of polished marble and granite gleamed amid the shrubbery trees. There Althea passed through her last rehearsal for "A Dance of the Soul." For music, there were only the remembered chords, the echoes in the brain of the girl, these and the calling of the birds that began to seek their own places of rest. "See, mother, see!" Althea spoke as to the living. "See, mother, see!" and the feet of the dancer, so lightly did she tread, hardly appeared to touch the leaf on the ground. "See, mother, see!" And again, and yet again, the young girl circled around the grassy mound. Yes, in utter abandon to her art, Althea did her best. She glided with infinite grace; she danced like a slyph; she appeared as if held in air by wings; and, at the close of the dance, she seemed but to wait an unseen signal to dance again. Yes, Althea was the incarnation of an unappeased desire; a desire of the .mother, and which, remaining ungratified, was transmitted to a life within her womb. And yet the desire was triumphant over even the grave. "See, mother, see!" And Althea, in her intoxication of joy, danced for the invisible, "A Dance of the Soul."