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Title: The book of Evelyn

Author: Geraldine Bonner

Illustrator: Arthur William Brown

Release date: September 9, 2022 [eBook #68941]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Credits: D A Alexander and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by University of California libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF EVELYN ***





THE BOOK OF EVELYN




[Illustration: The star of the occasion was calm and confident]




  THE
  BOOK OF EVELYN

  _By_
  GERALDINE BONNER
  _Author of_
  TOMORROW’S TANGLE, THE PIONEER
  RICH MEN’S CHILDREN, ETC.

  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
  ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN

  INDIANAPOLIS
  THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
  PUBLISHERS




  COPYRIGHT 1913
  THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY


  PRESS OF
  BRAUNWORTH & CO.
  BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
  BROOKLYN, N. Y.




THE BOOK OF EVELYN




I


I HAVE moved. I am in.

The household gods that have lain four years in storage are grouped
round me, showing familiar faces. It’s nice of them not to have
changed more, grown up as children do or got older like one’s friends.
They don’t harmonize with the furniture--this is an _appartement
meublé_--but I can melt them in with cushions and hangings.

It’s going to be very snug and cozy when I get settled. This room--the
parlor--is a good shape, an oblong ending in a bulge of bay window.
Plenty of sun in the morning--I can have plants. Outside the window is
a small tin roof with a list to starboard where rain-water lodges and
sparrows come to take fussy excited baths. Across the street stands a
row of brownstone fronts, blank-visaged houses with a white curtain
in every window. The faces of such houses are like the faces of the
people who live in them. They tell you nothing about what’s going on
inside. It’s a peculiarity of New York--after living in a house with an
expressionless front wall you get an expressionless front wall yourself.

From the windows of the back room I look out on the flank of the big
apartment-house that stands on the corner, and little slips of yard,
side by side, with fences between. Among them ours has a lost or
strayed appearance. Never did an unaspiring, city-bred yard look more
homesick and out of place. It has a sun-dial in the middle, circled
by a flagged path, and in its corners, sheltered by a few discouraged
shrubs, several weather-worn stone ornaments. It suggests a cemetery
of small things that had to have correspondingly small tombstones. I
hear from Mrs. Bushey, the landlady, that a sculptress once lived on
the lower floor and spent three hundred dollars lifting it out of the
sphere in which it was born.

I am going to like it here. I am going to make myself like it, get out
of the negative habit into the positive. That’s why I came back from
Europe, that a sudden longing for home, for Broadway, and the lights
along the Battery, and dear little Diana poised against the sky.
Four years of pension tables and third-class railway carriages do not
develop the positive habit. I was becoming negative to the point of
annihilation. I wanted to be braced by the savage energies of my native
city. And also I did want some other society than that of American
spinsters and widows. The Europeans must wonder how the land of the
free and the home of the brave keeps up its birth-rate-- But I digress.

When you have an income of one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month
and no way of adding to it, are thirty-three and a widow of creditable
antecedents, the difficulties of living in New York are almost
insurmountable. If you were a pauper or a millionaire it would be an
easy matter. They represent the upper and the nether millstones between
which people like me are crushed.

And then your friends insist on being considered. I had a dream of six
rooms on the upper West Side. “But the upper West Side, my dear! You
might as well be in Chicago.” Then I had revolutionary longings for a
tiny old house with no heat and a sloping roof in Greenwich Village--
“I could never go to see you there. They would stone the motor,” ended
that. There is just one slice in the center of the city in which a
poor but honest widow can live to the satisfaction of everybody but
herself. So here I am in the decorous Seventies, between Park Avenue
and Lexington, in an eighteen-foot dwelling with floors for light
housekeeping.

To enter you go down three steps to a little front door that tries to
keep up to the neighborhood by hiding its decrepitude behind an iron
grill. That lets you into the smallest vestibule in the world, where
four bells are ranged along the door-post and four letter-boxes cling
to the wall. Out of this open two more doors, one that gives egress
to a narrow flight of stairs without a hand-rail, and the other to
the ground-floor apartment, inhabited, so Mrs. Bushey tells me, by a
trained nurse and her aunt. There was a tailor there once, but Mrs.
Bushey got him out-- “Cockroaches, water bugs, and then the sign! It
lowered the tone of the house. A person like you,” Mrs. Bushey eyed me
approvingly, “would never have stood for a tradesman’s sign.”

I murmured an assent. I always do when credited with exclusive tastes
I ought to have and haven’t. It was the day I came to look the place
over, and I was nervously anxious to make a good impression on Mrs.
Bushey. Then we mounted a narrow stair that rose through a well to
upper stories. As it approached the landing it took a spirited curve,
as if in the hope of finding something better above. The stairway was
dark and a faint thin scent of many things (I know it now to be a
composite of cooking, gas leakage and cigars) remained suspended in the
airless shaft.

“On this floor,” said Mrs. Bushey, turning on the curve, as if in the
hope of finding something better up behind her, “the gas is never put
out.”

I took that floor. I don’t know whether the gas decided it, or Mrs.
Bushey’s persuasive manners, or an exhaustion that led me to look with
favor upon anything that had a chair to sit on and a bed to sleep in.
Anyway, I took it, and the next day burst in upon Betty Ferguson,
trying to carry it off with a debonair nonchalance: “Well, I’ve got an
apartment at last.”

Betty looked serious and asked questions: Was it clean? Did the
landlady seem a proper person? Had I seen any of the other lodgers?
Then dwelt on the brighter side: It’s not quite a block from Park
Avenue. If you don’t like it you can find some excuse to break your
lease. There _is_ a servant on the premises who will come in, clean up
and cook you one good meal so you won’t starve. Well, it doesn’t sound
so bad.

And now I’m in I think it’s even less bad than it sounded. The front
room is going to make the impression. It is already getting an
atmosphere, the individuality of a lady of uncultivated literary tastes
is imposing itself upon the department-store background. The center
table--mission style--is beginning to have an air, with Bergson in
yellow paper covers and two volumes of Strindberg. No more of him for
me after _Miss Juliet_, but he has his uses thrown carelessly on a
table with other gentlemen of the moment. If I am ever written up in
the papers I feel sure the reporters will say, “Mrs. Drake’s parlor
gave every evidence of being the abode of a woman of culture and
refinement.”

The back room (there are only two) is more intimate. I am going to
eat there and also sleep. Friends may come in, however; for the
bed, during the day, masquerades as a divan. A little group of my
ancestors--miniatures and photographs of portraits--hangs on the wall
and chaperons me. Between the two rooms stretches a narrow connecting
neck of bathroom and kitchenette.

There is only one word that describes the kitchenette--it is cute.
When I look at it with a gas stove on one side and tiers of shelves on
the other, “cute” instinctively rises to my lips, and I feel that my
country has enriched the language with that untranslatable adjective.
No one has ever been able to give it a satisfactory definition, but if
you got into my kitchenette, which just holds one fair-sized person,
and found yourself able to cook with one hand and reach the dishes off
the shelves with the other, you would get its full meaning.

Before the house was cut into floors the kitchenette must have been a
cupboard. I wonder if a lady’s clothes hung in it or the best china
was stored there. There is a delightful mystery about old houses and
their former occupants. Haven’t I read somewhere that walls absorb
impressions from the lives they have looked on and exhale them to the
pleasure or detriment of later comers?

Last night, as I was reading in bed--a habit acquired at the age of
twelve and adhered to ever since--I remembered this and wondered what
the walls would exhale on me. The paper has a trailing design of roses
on it, very ugly and evidently old. I wondered if the roses had bloomed
round tragedy or comedy, or just that fluctuation between the two
which makes up the lives of most of us--an alternate rise and fall,
soaring upward to a height, dropping downward to a hollow.

Five years ago mine dropped to its hollow, and ever since has been
struggling up to the dead level where it is now--the place where things
come without joy or pain, the edge off everything. Thirty-three and
the high throb of expectancy over, the big possibilities left behind.
The hiring of two rooms, the hanging of a curtain, the placing of a
vase--these are the things that for me must take the place that love
and home and children take in other women’s lives.

I got this far and stopped. No, I wouldn’t. I came back from Europe
to get away from that. I put out the light and cuddled down in the
new bed. Quite a good bed if it is a divan, and the room is going
to be fairly quiet. Muffled by walls I could hear the clanging
passage of cars. And then far away it seemed, though it couldn’t have
been, a gramophone, the Caruso record of _La Donna e Mobile_. What
a fine swaggering song and what an outrageous falsehood! Woman is
changeable--is she? That’s the man’s privilege. We, poor fools, haven’t
the sense to do anything but cling, if not to actualities to memories.
I felt tears coming--_that_ hasn’t happened for years. My memories
don’t bring them, they only bring a sort of weary bitterness. It was
the new surroundings, the loneliness, that did it. I stopped them and
listened to the gramophone, and the wretched thing had begun on a new
record, _Una Lagrima Furtiva_--a furtive tear!

With my own furtive tears, wet on the pillow, I couldn’t help laughing.




II


THERE is one thing in the front room I must get rid of--the rug. It is
a nightmare with a crimson ground on which are displayed broken white
particles that look like animalcula in a magnified drop of water. I
had just made up my mind that it must be removed when Mrs. Bushey
opportunely came in.

Mrs. Bushey lives next door (she has two houses under her wing) and
when not landladying, teaches physical culture. I believe there is no
Mr. Bushey, though whether death or divorce has snatched him from her I
haven’t heard. She is a stout dark person somewhere from twenty-eight
to forty-eight--I can’t tell age. I am thirty-three and have wrinkles
round my eyes. She has none. It may be temperament, or fat, or the bony
structure of the skull, or an absence of furtive tears.

She talks much and rapidly which ought to tend to a good combination
between us, as listening is one of the things I do best. From our
conversation, or perhaps I ought to say our monologue, I got an
impressionistic effect of my fellow lodgers past and present. The
lady who lived here before me was a writer and very close about money.
It was difficult to collect her rent, also she showed symptoms of
inebriety. I gathered from Mrs. Bushey’s remarks and expression that
she expected me to be shocked, and I tried not to disappoint her, but I
couldn’t do much with a monosyllable, which was all she allowed me.

A series of rapid sketches of the present inmates followed. Something
like this:

“Mrs. Phillips, the trained nurse, and her aunt, in the basement are
terrible cranks, always complaining about the plumbing and the little
boys who will stop on their way home from school and write bad words
on the flags. They think they own the back garden, but they don’t. We
all do, but what’s the use of fighting? I never do, I’ll stand anything
rather than have words with anybody.”

I edged in an exclamation, a single formless syllable.

“Of course, I knew you would. Then on the floor below you are two young
Westerners in the back room, Mr. Hazard, who’s an artist, and Mr.
Weatherby, who’s something on the press. The most delightful fellows,
never a day late with their rent. And in the front room is Miss Bliss,
a model--artist not cloak. She isn’t always on time with her money, but
I’m very lenient with her.”

I tried to insert a sentence, but it was nipped at the second word.

“Yes, exactly. You see just how it is. On the floor above you, in the
back, is Mr. Hamilton, such a nice man and so unfortunate. Lost every
cent he had in Wall Street and is beginning all over again. Fine,
isn’t it? Yes, I feel it and don’t say anything when he’s behind with
his rent. How could I?” Though I hadn’t said a word she looked at me
reprovingly as if I had suggested sending the delinquent Mr. Hamilton
to jail. “That’s not my way. I know it’s foolish of me. You needn’t
tell me so, but that’s how I’m made.”

I began to feel that I ought to offer my next month’s rent at once. I
have a bad memory and might be a day or two late.

“The room in front, over your parlor, is vacant. Terrible, isn’t it?
I tried to make Mr. Hamilton take the whole floor through. Even if he
isn’t good pay--”

I broke in, determined to hear no more of Mr. Hamilton’s financial
deficiencies.

“Who’s on the top floor?”

There was a slight abatement of Mrs. Bushey’s buoyancy. She looked at
me with an eye that expressed both curiosity and question.

“Miss Harris lives there,” she answered. “Have you seen her?”

I hadn’t.

“Perhaps you’ve heard her?”

I had heard a rustle on the stairs, was that Miss Harris?

“Yes. She’s the only woman above you.”

“Does she leave a trail of perfume?”

I was going to add that it didn’t mix well with the gas leakage, the
cigars and last year’s cooking but refrained for fear of Mrs. Bushey’s
feelings.

“Yes, that’s Miss Harris. She’s a singer--professional. But you won’t
hear her much, there’s a floor in between. That is, unless you leave
the register open.”

I said I’d shut the register.

“I don’t take singers as a rule,” Mrs. Bushey went on, “but Mr.
Hamilton being away all day and the top floor being hard to rent, I
made an exception. One must live, mustn’t one?”

I could agree to that.

“She’s a Californian and rather good-looking. But I don’t think she’s
had much success.”

A deprecating look came into her face and she tilted her head to one
side. I felt coming revelations about Miss Harris’ rent and said
hastily:

“What does she sing, concert, opera, musical comedy?”

“She’s hardly sung in public at all yet. She’s studying, and I’m afraid
that it’s very uncertain. Last month--”

I interrupted desperately.

“Is she a contralto or soprano?”

“Dramatic mezzo,” said Mrs. Bushey. “She’s trying to get an opening,
but,” she compressed her lips and shook her head gloomily, “there are
so many of them and her voice is nothing wonderful. But she evidently
has some money, for she pays her rent regularly.”

I felt immensely relieved. As Mrs. Bushey rose to her feet I too rose
lightly, encouragingly smiling. Mrs. Bushey did not exhibit the cheer
fitting to the possession of so satisfactory a lodger. She buttoned her
jacket, murmuring:

“I don’t like taking singers, people complain so. But when one is
working for one’s living--” Her fingers struggled with a button.

“Of course,” I filled in, “I understand. And I for one won’t object to
the music.”

Mrs. Bushey seemed appeased. As she finished the buttoning she looked
about the room, her glance roaming over my possessions. For some
obscure reason I flinched before that inspection. Some of them are
sacred, relics of my mother and of the years when I was a wife--only
a few of these. Mrs. Bushey’s look was like an auctioneer’s hand
fingering them, appraising their value.

Finally it fell to the rug. I had forgotten it; now was my chance.
Suddenly it seemed a painful subject to broach and I sought for a
tactful opening. Mrs. Bushey pressed its crimson surface with her foot.

“Isn’t this a beautiful rug?” she said. “It’s a real Samarcand.”

I smothered a start. I had had a real Samarcand once.

Mrs. Bushey, eying the magnified insects with solicitude, continued:

“I wouldn’t like to tell you how much I paid for this. It was a
ridiculous sum for me to give. But I love pretty things, and when you
took the apartment I put it in here because I saw at once _you_ were
used to only the best.”

I murmured faintly.

“So I was generous and gave you my treasure. You will be careful of it,
won’t you? Not drop anything on it or let people come in with muddy
boots.”

I said I would. I found myself engaging with ardor to love and cherish
a thing I abhorred. It’s happened before, it’s the kind of thing I’ve
been doing all my life.

Mrs. Bushey gave it a loving stroke with her foot.

“I knew you’d appreciate it. You don’t often find a real Samarcand in a
furnished apartment.”

After she had gone I sat looking dejectedly at it. Of course I would
have to keep it now. I might buy some small rugs and partly cover it
up, but I suppose, when she saw them, she would be mortally hurt. And I
can’t do that. I’d rather have those awful magnified insects staring up
at me for the rest of my life than wound her pride so.

As to its being a Samarcand--I took up one corner and lo! attached to
it by a string was a price-tag bearing the legend, Scotch wool rug,
$12.75.

It _was_ somewhat of a shock. Suppose I had found it while she was
there! The thought of such a contretemps made me cold. To avoid all
possibilities of it ever happening I stealthily detached the tag and
tore it into tiny pieces. As I dropped them in the waste-basket I had a
fancy that had I made the discovery while she was present, I would have
been the more embarrassed of the two.

All afternoon I have been putting things in order, trying them and
standing back to get the effect. It’s a long time since I’ve had
belongings of my own to play with. I hung my mother’s two Kriegolf’s
(Kriegolf was a Canadian artist who painted pictures of habitan life)
in four different places. They finally came to anchor on the parlor
wall on either side of a brass-framed mirror with candle branches that
belongs to Mrs. Bushey. Opposite, flanking the fireplace, are _Kitty
O’Brien_ and _The Wax Head of Lille_. I love her best of all, the
dreaming maiden. I like to try and guess what she’s thinking of. Is it
just the purposeless reverie of youth, or is she musing on the coming
lover? It can’t be that, because, while he’s still a dream lover, a
girl is happy, and she looks so sad.

I was trying to pierce the secret of that mysterious face when the
telephone rang. It was Roger Clements, a kind voice humming along the
line--“Well, how’s everything?” Roger wanted to come up and see me and
the kitchenette, and I told him Madame would receive to-morrow evening.

He would be my first visitor and I was fluttered. I spent at least an
hour trying to decide whether I’d better bring the Morris chair from
the back room for him. When the dread of starvation is lifted from you
by one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month and life offers nothing,
you find your mental forces expending themselves on questions like
that. I once knew a man who told me he sat on the edge of his bed every
morning struggling to decide whether he’d put on a turned-down or a
stand-up collar. He said it was nerves. In my case it’s just plain lack
of interests.

It’s natural for me to try and make Roger comfortable. He’s one of
the best friends I have in the world. I’m not using the word to cover
sentiment, I do really mean a friend. He knew me before I was married,
was one of the reliable older men in those glowing days when I was
Evelyn Carr, before I met Harmon Drake. He has been kind to me in ways
I never can forget. In those dark last years of my married life (there
were only five of them altogether) when my little world was urging
divorce and I stood distracted amid falling ruins, he never said one
word to me about my husband, never forced on me consolation or advice.
I don’t forget that, or the letter he wrote me when Harmon died--the
one honest letter I got.

Everybody exclaimed when I said I was going alone to Europe. Roger was
the only one who understood and told me to go. I’ll carry to my grave
the memory of his face as he stood on the dock waving me good-by. He
was smiling, but under the smile I could see the sympathy he wanted
me to know and didn’t dare to put in words. That’s one of the ties
between us--we’re the silent kind who keep our feelings hidden away in
a Bluebeard’s chamber of which we keep the key.

I used to hear from him off and on in Europe, and I followed him in the
American papers. I remember one sun-soaked morning in Venice, when I
picked up an English review in the pension and read a glowing criticism
of his book of essays, _Readjustments_. How proud I was of him! He’s
become quite famous in these last few years, not vulgarly famous but
known among scholars as a scholar and recognized as one of the few
stylists we have over here. I can’t imagine him on the news-stalls, or
bound in paper for the masses. I think he secretly detests the masses
though he won’t admit it. The mob, with its easily swayed passions,
is the sort of thing that it’s in his blood to hate. If he had to sue
for its support like Coriolanus he would act exactly as Coriolanus
did. Fortunately he doesn’t need it. The Clements have had money for
generations, not according to Pittsburgh standards, but the way the
Clements reckon money. He has an apartment on Gramercy Park, lined with
books to the ceilings, with a pair of old servants to fuss over him and
keep the newspaper people away.

There he leads the intellectual life, the only one that attracts him.
He rarely goes into society. The recent invasion of multi-millionaires
have spoiled it, his sister, Mrs. Ashworth, says, and on these points
he and she think alike. And he doesn’t care for women, at least to fall
in love with them. When he was a young man, twenty-four to be accurate,
he was engaged to a girl who died. Since then his interest in the other
sex has taken the form of a detached impersonal admiration. He thinks
they furnish the color and poetry of life and in that way have an
esthetic value in a too sober world.

But what’s the sense of analyzing your friend? He’s a dear kind
anchorite of a man, just a bit set, just a bit inclined to think that
the Clements’ way of doing things is the only way, just a bit too
contemptuous of cheapness and bad taste and bounce, but with all his
imperfections on his head, the finest gentleman I know. I _will_ move
the Morris chair.




III


LOVE of flowers is one of the gifts the fairies gave me in my cradle.
It’s a great possession, fills so many blanks. You can forget you’ve
got no baby of your own when you watch the flowers’ babies lifting
their little faces to the sun.

I bought four plants at Bloomingdales and put them in the front window,
a juniper bush, a Boston fern, a carrot fern and a rubber plant. I
like the ferns best, the new shoots are so lovely, pushing up little
green curly tops in the shelter of the old strong ones. I remind
myself of Miss Lucretia Tox in _Dombey and Son_, with a watering can
and a pair of scissors to snip off dead leaves. There’s one great
difference between us--Miss Tox had a Mr. Dombey across the way. I’ve
nothing across the way. The only male being that that discreet and
expressionless row of houses has given up to my eyes is the young
doctor opposite. He does the same thing every morning, runs down the
steps with a bag and a busy air, walks rapidly to Lexington Avenue,
then, when he thinks he’s out of sight, stands on the corner not
knowing which way to go.

I feel that, in a purely neighborly spirit, I ought to have an illness.
I would like to help all young people starting in business, take all
the hansoms that go drearily trailing along Fifth Avenue, especially
if the driver looks drunken and despondent, and give money to every
beggar who accosts me. They say it is a bad principle and one is always
swindled. Personally I don’t think that matters at all. Your impulse is
all right and that’s all that counts. But I digress again--I must get
over the habit.

This morning I was doing my Miss Lucretia Tox act when Betty Ferguson
came in. Betty is one of my rich friends; we were at school together
and have kept close ever since. She married Harry Ferguson the same
year that I married Harmon Drake. Now she has three children, and a
house on Fifth Avenue, not to mention Harry. Her crumpled rose leaf
is that she is getting fat. Every time I see her she says resolutely,
“I am going to walk twice round the reservoir to-morrow morning,” and
never does it.

She came in blooming, with a purple orchid among her furs, and the
rich rosy color in her face deepened by the first nip of winter. She
has a sharp eye, and I expected she would immediately see the rug and
demand an explanation. I was slightly flustered, for I have no excuse
ready and I never can confess my weaknesses to Betty. She is one of the
sensible people who don’t see why you can’t be sensible, too.

She did not, however, notice the rug, but clasping my hand fixed
me with a solemn glance that made me uneasy. Betty oblivious to
externals--what had I done?

“Who was the woman I met coming out of here just now?” she said
abruptly.

“Mrs. Bushey,” I hazarded, and then remembered Mrs. Bushey was off
somewhere imparting physical culture.

“Is Mrs. Bushey very tall and thin with black hair and a velvet dress,
and a hat as big as a tea tray?”

“No, she’s short and stout and--”

“Evie,” interrupted Mrs. Ferguson, sounding a deep note, “that woman
wasn’t Mrs. Bushey. Nobody who looked like that ever leased an
eighteen-foot house and rented out floors.”

I had a sudden surge of memory--

“It must have been Miss Harris.”

Betty loosed my hand and sank upon the sofa, that is, she subsided
carefully upon the sofa, as erect as a statue from the waist up. She
threw back her furs with a disregard for the orchid that made me wince.

“Who’s Miss Harris?” she said sternly.

I told her all I knew.

“That’s just what she looked like--the stage. Are there any more of
them here?”

I assured her there were not. She gazed out of the window with a
pondering air.

“After all, there _are_ respectable people on the stage,” she said,
following some subterranean course of thought.

I knew my Betty and hastened to reassure her--

“She’s on the top floor. Her contaminating influence, if she has one,
would have to percolate through another apartment before it got to me.”

She did not smile and I did not expect it. Mrs. Ferguson has no
sense of humor, and that’s one of the reasons I love her. There is
an obsession in the public mind just now about the sense of humor.
People ask anxiously if other people have it as Napoleon used to ask
if attractive ladies he had wooed in vain “were still virtuous.” It’s
like being a bromide-- Give me a bromide, a humorless, soft, cushiony
bromide, rather than those exhausting people who have established a
reputation for wit and are living up to it. Betty is not soft and
cushiony, but she is always herself.

“I wish you could live in a house of your own like a Christian,” she
said.

We have talked over this before. This subject has an embarrassing
side--I’ll explain it later--so I hastened to divert her.

“Why should you be wrought up over Miss Harris? I’m sure from what Mrs.
Bushey tells me she’s a very nice person,” and then I remembered and
added brightly: “She always pays her rent.”

Betty gave me a somber side glance.

“She’s very handsome.”

“There _are_ handsome people who are perfectly _convenable_. You’re
handsome, Betty.”

Betty was unmoved.

“At any rate you needn’t know her,” she said.

“Don’t you think I ought to say ‘Howd’ye do’ if I meet her on the
stairs?”

“No, why should you? The next thing would be she’d be coming into your
rooms and then, some day, she’d come when somebody you liked was there.”

She clasped her hands in her lap and drew herself up, her head so erect
the double chin she fears was visible. In this attitude she kept a cold
eye on me.

“And all because she’s handsome and wears a hat as big as a tea tray,”
I said, trying to treat the subject lightly, but inwardly conscious of
a perverse desire to champion Miss Harris.

Betty, wreathing her neck about in the tight grip of her collar,
removed her glance to the window, out of which she stared haughtily
as though Miss Harris was standing on the tin roof supplicating an
entrance.

“We can’t be too careful in this town,” she murmured, shaking her head
as if refusing Miss Harris’ hopes. Then she looked down at the floor. I
saw her expression changing as her eye ranged over the rug.

“Where did you get this rug, Evie?” she asked in a quiet tone.

I grew nervous.

“It came with the apartment.”

“Get rid of it, dear, at once. I can send you up one from the library.
Harry’s going to give me a new Aubusson.”

I became more nervous and faltered:

“But I ought to keep this.”

“Why? Is there a clause in your lease that you’ve got to use it?”

When Betty gets me against the wall this way I become frightened. Timid
animals, thus cornered, are seized with the courage of despair and fly
at their assailant. Timid human beings show much less spirit--I always
think animals behave with more dignity than people--they tell lies.

“But--but--I like it,” I stammered.

“Oh,” said Betty with a falling note, “if that’s the case--” She
stopped and rose to her feet, too polite to say what she thought. “Put
on your things and come out with me. I’m shopping, and afterward we’ll
lunch somewhere.”

I went out with Betty in the car, a limousine with two men and a chow
dog. We went to shops where obsequious salesladies listened to Mrs.
Ferguson’s needs and sought to satisfy them. They had a conciliating
way of turning to me and asking my opinion which, such is the poverty
of my spirit, pleased me greatly. I get a faint reflex feeling of what
it is to be the wife of one of New York’s rising men. Then we lunched
richly and clambered back into the limousine, each dropping languidly
into her corner while the footman tucked us in.

We were rolling luxuriously down Fifth Avenue when Betty rallied
sufficiently from the torpor of digestion to murmur.

“To-morrow morning, after breakfast, I’ll walk three times round the
reservoir.”

Roger came at eight. It was the first cold night of the season and the
furnace was not broken in. In spite of lamps the room was chilly. It
was good to see him again--in my parlor, in my Morris chair. He isn’t
handsome, a long thin man, with a long thin face, smooth shaven and
lined, and thick, sleek, iron-gray hair. Some one has said all that
a man should have in the way of beauty is good teeth. Roger has that
necessary asset and another one, well-shaped, gentlemanly hands, very
supple and a trifle dry to the touch. And, yes, he has a charming smile.

He is forty-two and hasn’t changed a particle in the last fifteen
years. Why can’t a woman manage that? When I was dressing to-night I
looked in the glass and tried to reconstruct my face as it was fifteen
years ago. I promised to be a pretty girl then, but it was just the
fleeting beauty that nature gives us in our mating time, lends us for
her own purposes. Now I see a pale mild person with flat-lying brown
hair and that beaten expression peculiar to females whom life conquers.
I don’t know whether it’s the mouth or the eyes, but I see it often in
faces I pass on the street.

It was a funny evening--conversation varied by chamber music. We began
it sitting in the middle of the room on either side of the table like
the family lawyer and the heroine in the opening scene of a play. Then,
as the temperature dropped, we slowly gravitated toward the register,
till we finally brought up against it. A faint warm breath came through
the iron grill and we leaned forward and basked in it. We were talking
about women. We often do, it’s one of our subjects. Of course Roger is
of the old school. He’s got an early Victorian point of view; I know he
would value me more highly if I swooned now and then. He doesn’t call
women “the weaker vessel,” but he thinks of them that way.

“I don’t see why you can’t be content with things as they are,” he
said, spreading his hands to the register’s meager warmth. “Why should
you want to go into politics and have professions? Why aren’t you
willing to leave all that to us and stay where you belong?”

“But we may not have anything to do where we belong. Roger, if you move
nearer the corner you’ll get a little more heat.”

Roger moved.

“Every woman has work in her own sphere,” he said, while moving.

“I haven’t.”

“You, dear Evie,” he looked at me with a fond indulgent smile. “You
have plenty of work and it’s always well done--to bring romance and
sweetness into life.”

There is something quite maddening about Roger when he talks this
way. I could find it in me to call him an ass. All the superiority of
countless generations of men who have ordered women’s lives lies behind
it. And he is impregnable, shut up with his idea. It is built round him
and cemented with a thousand years of prejudice and tradition.

“I don’t _want_ to bring romance and sweetness into life,” I said
crossly, “I want to get something out of it.”

“You can’t help it. It’s what you were put in the world for. We men
don’t want you in the struggle. That’s for us. It’s our business to go
down into the arena and fight for you, make a place for you, keep you
out of it all.”-- He moved his foot across the register and turned it
off.

“You’ve turned off the heat,” I cried.

He turned it on.

--“Keep you out of it all. Sheltered from the noise and glare of the
world by our own firesides.”

“Some of us would rather have a little more noise and glare by our own
register.”

“All wrong, Evie, all wrong. You’re in a niche up there with a lamp
burning before it. If you come down from your niche you’re going to
lose the thing that’s made you worshipful--your femininity, your charm.”

“What does our charm matter to us? What good is our femininity to us?”

He looked surprised.

“What good?”

“Look here, Roger, I feel certain that Shem, Ham and Japheth talked
this way to their wives on those rainy days in the Ark. It’s not only
a pre-glacial point of view, but it’s the most colossally selfish
one. All you men are worried about is that we’re not going to be so
attractive to make love to. The chase is going to lose its zest--”

I stopped short, cut off by a flood of sound that suddenly burst upon
us from the register.

It was a woman’s voice singing Musetta’s song, and by its clearness and
volume seemed to be the breath of the register become vocal. We started
back simultaneously and looked about the room, while Musetta’s song
poured over us, a rich jubilant torrent of melody.

“What is it?” said Roger, rising as if to defend me.

“Miss Harris,” I answered, jumping up.

“Who’s Miss Harris?”

“A singer. She lives here.”

“Does she live in there?” He pointed to the register.

“No, on the top floor, but it connects with her room.”

We stood still and listened, and as the song rose to its brilliant
climax, Roger looked at me smiling, and nodded approvingly. In his
heart he thinks he is something of a musician, has season seats at the
opera and goes dutifully to the Symphony. I don’t think he is any
more musical than I am. I don’t think literary people ever are. They
like it with their imaginations, feel its sensuous appeal, but as to
experiencing those esoteric raptures that the initiated know--it’s a
joy denied.

The song came to an end.

“Not a bad voice,” said Roger. “Who is she?”

“A lady who is studying to be a professional.” And then I added
spitefully: “Do you think she ought to give up her singing to be
sheltered by somebody’s fireside?”

Roger had turned to get his coat. He stopped and looked at me over his
shoulder, smiling--he really has a delightful smile.

“I except ladies with voices.”

“Because they add to the pleasure of gentlemen with musical tastes?”

He picked up his coat.

“Evie, one of the things that strengthens me in my belief is that when
you get on that subject you become absolutely acid.”

I helped him on with his coat.

My sitting-room door opens close to the head of the stairs. If my
visitors back out politely they run a risk of stepping over the edge
and falling down-stairs on their backs. The one gas-jet that burns
all the time is a safeguard against this catastrophe, but, as it is an
uncertain and timid flicker, I speed the parting guest with caution.

Roger was backing out with his hat held to his breast when I gave a
warning cry. It went echoing up the stairway and mingled with the sound
of heavy descending feet. A head looked over the upper banister, a
dark masculine head, and seeing nothing more alarming than a lady and
gentleman in an open doorway, withdrew itself. The steps descended, a
hand glided down the rail, and a large overcoated shape came into view.
The frightened gas-jet shot up as if caught in a dereliction of duty,
and the man, advancing toward us, was clearly revealed.

I am a person of sudden attractions and antipathies and I had one,
sharp and poignant, as I looked at him. It was an antipathy, the
“I-do-not-like-you-Doctor-Fell” feeling in its most acute form. It was
evidently not reciprocal, for, as he drew near, he smiled, an easy
natural smile that disclosed singularly large white teeth. He gave me
an impression of size and breadth, his shoulders seemed to fill the
narrow passage and he carried them with an arrogant swagger. That and
the stare he fixed on us probably caused the “Doctor Fell” feeling.
The stare was bold and hard, a combination of inspection and curiosity.

He added a nod to his smile, passed us and went down the stairs. We
looked down on his wide descending shoulders and the top of his head,
with the hair thin in the middle.

“Who’s that bounder?” said Roger.

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“Didn’t he bow to you?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make me know him. He must be some one living in
the house.”

Roger looked after him.

“I’m coming up here to see you often,” he said after a moment’s pause.

After he had gone I went into the back room and lit lights and
peeled off the outer skins of my divan bed. I felt quite gay and
light-hearted. I _am_ going to like it here. With the student lamp
lighted the back room is very cozy. I lay in bed and surveyed it
admiringly while my ancestors looked soberly down on me. They are a
very solemn lot, all but the French Huguenot lady with her frivolous
curls and the black velvet round her neck. She has a human look. I’m
sure her blood is strong in me. None of the others would ever have
lived in an eighteen-foot house with a prima donna singing through the
register, and a queer-looking man, with large white teeth, smiling at
one in the passage.




IV


I HAVE seen her--and I don’t wonder!

It was on Tuesday evening just as the dusk was falling. I had come home
from a walk, and as I climbed the first narrow stair I saw in the hall
above me, a woman standing under the gas, reading a letter. I caught
her in silhouette, a black form, very tall and broadening out into a
wide hat, but even that way, without feature or detail, arresting.
Then, as she heard me, she stepped back so that the light fell on her.
I knew at once it was Miss Harris, tried not to stare, and couldn’t
help it.

She is really remarkably good-looking--an oval-faced, dark-eyed woman,
with black hair growing low on her forehead and waving backward over
her ears. Either the size of the hat, or her earrings (they were
long and green), or a collarless effect about the neck, gave her a
picturesque, unconventional air. The stage was written large all over
her. When I got close I saw details, that she had beautifully curly
lips--most people’s come together in a straight line like a box and
its lid--and a fine nose, just in the right proportion to the rest of
her face. Also she wore a gray fur coat, unfastened, and something in
her appearance suggested a hurried dressing, things flung on.

She looked up from the letter and eyed me with frank interest. I
approached embarrassed. A secret desire to have all people like me
is one of my besetting weaknesses. I am slavish to servants and feel
grateful when salesladies condescend to address me while waiting
for change. The fear that Betty would find it out could not make me
pass Miss Harris without a word. So I timidly smiled--a deprecating,
apologetic smile, a smile held in bondage by the memory of Mrs.
Ferguson.

Miss Harris returned it brilliantly. Her face suddenly bore the
expression of one who greets a cherished friend. She moved toward me
radiating welcome.

“You’re on the third floor,” she said in a rich voice, “Mrs. Harmon
Drake.”

I saw a hand extended and felt mine enclosed in a grasp that matched
the smile and manner. Miss Harris towered over me--she must be nearly
six feet high--and I felt myself growing smaller and paler than the
Lord intended me to be before that exuberantly beaming presence. My
hand was like a little bundle of cold sticks in her enfolding grip. I
backed against the banisters and tried to pull it away, but Miss Harris
held it and beamed.

“I’ve read your name on your door every time I’ve passed,” she said,
“and I’ve hoped you’d some day open the door and find me standing there
and ask me to come in.”

I could see Betty’s head nodding at me, I could hear her grim “I told
you so.”

I made polite murmurs and pressed closer to the banister.

“But the door was never opened,” said Miss Harris, bending to look into
my face with an almost tender reproach. I felt I was visibly shrinking,
and that the upward gaze I fastened on her was one of pleading. Unless
she let go my hand and ceased to be so oppressively gracious I would
diminish to a heap upon the floor.

“Never mind,” she went on, “now I know you I’ll not stand outside any
more.”

I jerked my hand away and made a flank movement for the stairs. Five
minutes more and she would be coming up and taking supper with me. She
did not appear to notice my desire for flight, but continued talking to
me as I ascended.

“We’re the only two women in the upper part of this house. Do I
chaperon you, or do you chaperon me?”

I spoke over the banisters and my tone was cold.

“Being a married woman, I suppose I’m the natural chaperon.”

The coldness glanced off her imperturbable good humor:

“You never can tell. These little quiet married women--”

I frowned. The changed expression stopped her and then she laughed.

“Don’t be offended. You must never mind what I say. I’m not half so
interesting if I stop and think.”

I looked down at her and was weak enough to smile. Her face was so
unlike her words, so serenely fine, almost noble.

“That’s right, smile,” she cried gaily. “You’ll get used to me when you
know me better. And you’re going to do that, Mrs. Drake, for I warn you
now, we’ll soon be friends.”

Before I could answer she had turned and run down the stairs to the
street.

I let myself into the sitting-room and took off my things. I have neat
old-maidish ways, cultivated by years of small quarters. Before I can
sit with an easy conscience I have to put away wraps, take off shoes,
pull down blinds and light lamps. When I had done this I sat before the
register and thought of Miss Harris.

There was something very unusual about her--something more than her
looks. She has a challenging quality; maybe it’s magnetism, but
whatever it is that’s what makes people notice her and speak of her.
Nevertheless, she was not _de notre monde_--I apologize for the phrase
which has always seemed to me the summit of snobbery, but I can’t think
of a better one. It was not that she was common--that didn’t fit her
at all--unsensitive would be a fairer word. I felt that very strongly,
and I felt that it might be a concomitant of a sort of crude power. She
didn’t notice my reluctance at all, or I had a fancy that she might
have noticed it and didn’t care.

I was sitting thus when Mrs. Bushey came bounding ebulliently in. Mrs.
Bushey bounds in quite often, after physical culture, or when the
evenings in the other house pall. She wore a red dress under a long
fur-lined coat and stopped in pained amaze when she saw me crouched
over the register.

“Cold!” she cried aghast, “don’t tell me you haven’t enough heat?”

It was just what I intended telling her, but when I saw her
consternation I weakened.

“It _is_ a little chilly this evening,” I faltered, “but perhaps--”

Mrs. Bushey cut me short by falling into the Morris chair as one become
limp from an unexpected blow.

“What am I to do?” she wailed, looking up at the chandelier as though
she expected an answer to drop on her from the globes. “I’ve just got
four tons of the best coal and a new furnace man. I pay him double what
any one else on the block pays--_double_--and here you are _cold_.”

I felt as if I was doing Mrs. Bushey a personal wrong--insulting her as
a landlady and a woman--and exclaimed earnestly, quite forgetting the
night Roger and I had frozen in concert.

“Only this evening, Mrs. Bushey, I assure you.”

But she was too perturbed to listen:

“And I try so hard--I don’t make a cent and don’t expect to. I want
you all to be comfortable, no matter how far behind I get. That’s my
way--but I’ve always been a fool. Oh, dear!” She let her troubled gaze
wander over the room-- “Isn’t that a beautiful mirror? It came from the
Trianon, belonged to Marie Antoinette. I took it out of my room and put
it in here for you. What _shall_ I do with that furnace man?”

I found myself telling her that an arctic temperature was exactly to
my taste, and making a mental resolution that next time Roger came he
could keep on his overcoat, and after all, spring was only six months
off.

“No,” said Mrs. Bushey firmly, “I’ll have it right if I go to the
poorhouse, and that’s where I’m headed. I had a carpenter’s bill
to-day--twenty-six dollars and fourteen cents--and I’ve only eleven in
the bank. It was for your floor”--she looked over it--“I really didn’t
need to have it fixed, it’s not customary, but I was determined I’d
give you a good floor no matter what it cost.”

I was just about suggesting that the carpenter’s bill be added to my
next month’s rent when she brightened up and said an Italian count had
taken the front room on the floor above.

“Count Mario Delcati, one of the very finest families of Milan. A
charming young fellow, charming, with those gallant foreign manners.
He’s coming here to learn business, American methods. I’m asking him
nothing--a young man in a strange country. How could I? And though
his family’s wealthy they’re giving him a mere pittance to live on.
Of course I won’t make anything by it, I don’t expect to. His room’s
got hardly any chairs in it, and I can’t buy any new ones with that
carpenter’s bill hanging over me.” She smoothed the arm of the Morris
chair and then looked at the floor. “It’s really made your floor look
like parquet.”

I agreed, though I hadn’t thought of it before.

“You have a good many chairs in this room,” she went on, “more than
usually go in a furnished apartment, even in the most expensive hotels.”

I had two chairs and a sofa. Mrs. Bushey rose and drew together her
fur-lined coat.

“It’s horrible to think of that boy with only one chair,” she murmured,
“far from his home, too. Of course I’d give him any I had, but mine are
all gone. I’d give the teeth out of my head if anybody wanted them.
It’s not in my nature to keep things for myself when other people ought
to have them.”

I gave up the Morris chair. Mrs. Bushey was gushingly grateful.

“I’ll tell him it was yours and how willingly you gave it up,” she
said, moving toward the door. Then she stopped suddenly and looked
at the center-table lamp. “He’s a great reader, he tells me--French
fiction. He ought to have a lamp and there’s not one to spare in either
house.”

She looked encouragingly at me. I wanted the lamp.

“Can’t he read by the gas?” I pleaded.

“My dear,” said Mrs. Bushey, with a reproving look, “can _you_ read by
the gas?”

Conquered by her irrefutable argument, I surrendered the lamp. She was
again grateful.

“It’s so agreeable, dealing with the right sort of people,” she said,
fastening the last button of her coat. “All the others in the house are
so selfish--wouldn’t give up anything. But one doesn’t have to ask you.
You offer it at once.”

The count arrived yesterday afternoon, and we are now fast friends. Our
meeting fell out thus:-- I was reading and heard a sound of footsteps
on the stairs, footsteps going up and down, prowling restless footsteps
to which I paid no attention, as they go on most of the time.
Presently there was a knock at my door and that, too, was a common
happening, as most things and people destined for our house find refuge
at my portal--intending lodgers for Mrs. Bushey, the seedy man who has
a bill for Mr. Hamilton, the laundress with Mr. Hazard’s wash, the
artist who is searching for Miss Bliss and has forgotten the address,
the telegraph boy with everybody’s telegrams, the postman with the
special deliveries, and Miss Harris’ purchases at the department stores.

I called, “Come in,” and the door opened, displaying a thin, brown,
dapper young man in a fur-lined overcoat and a silk hat worn back from
his forehead. He had a smooth dark skin, a dash of hair on his upper
lip, and eyes so black in the pupil and white in the eyeball that they
looked as if made of enamel.

At the sight of a lady the young man took off his hat and made a deep
bow. When he rose from this obeisance he was smiling pleasantly.

“I am Count Delcati,” he said.

“How do you do?” I responded, rising.

“Very well,” said the count in careful English with an accent. “I come
to live here.”

“It’s a very nice place,” I answered.

“That is why I took the room,” said the count. “But now I am here I
can’t get into it or find any one who will open the door.”

He was locked out. Mrs. Bushey was absent imparting the mysteries of
physical culture and Emma, the maid, was not to be found. In the lower
hall was a pile of luggage that might have belonged to an actress
touring in repertoire, and the count could think of nothing better to
do than sit on it till some one came by and rescued him. Not at all
sure that he might not be a novel form of burglar, I invited him into
my parlor and set him by the register to thaw out. He accepted my
hospitality serenely, pushing an armchair to the heat, and asking me if
I objected to his wrapping himself in my Navajo blanket.

“How fortunate that I knocked at your door,” he said, arranging the
blanket. “Otherwise I should surely be froze.”

I had an engagement at the dentist’s and disappeared to put on my
things. When I came back he rose quickly to his feet, the blanket
draped around his shoulders.

“I am going out,” I said. “I have to--it’s the dentist’s.”

“Poor lady,” he murmured politely.

“But--but you,” I stammered; “what will you do while I’m gone?”

Holding the blanket together with one hand he made a sweeping gesture
round the room with the other.

“Stay here till you come back.”

I thought of Roger or Betty chancing to drop in and looked on the
ground hesitant. There was a slight pause; I raised my eyes. The count,
clasping the two ends of the blanket together over his breast, was
regarding me with mild attention.

“But if any of my friends come in to see me?”

“I will receive them--_varri_ nicely,” said the count.

We looked at each other for a solemn second and then burst out laughing.

“All right,” I said. “There are the books and magazines, there are the
cigarettes, the matches are in that Japanese box and that cut glass
bowl is full of chocolates.”

I left him and was gone till dark. At six I came back to find the room
illuminated by every gas-jet and lamp and the count still there. He had
quite a glad welcoming air, as if I might have been his mother or his
maiden aunt.

“You here still,” I cried in the open doorway.

He gave one of his deep deliberate bows.

“I have been varri comfortable and warm,” he designated the center
table with an expressive gesture, “I read magazines, I eat candy and
I smoke--yes”--he looked with a proud air into the empty box--“yes, I
smoke _all_ the cigarettes.”

Then we went into the next house to find Mrs. Bushey.

My supper--eggs and cocoa--is cooked by me in the kitchenette. It is
eaten in the dining-room or bedroom (the name of the apartment varies
with the hour of the day) on one end of the table. The effect is prim
and spinsterly--a tray cloth set with china and silver, a student lamp,
and in the middle of the table, a small bunch of flowers. People send
them sometimes and in the gaps when no one “bunches” me I buy them. To
keep human every woman should have one extravagance.

I was breaking the first egg when a knock came on the door, and Miss
Harris entered. She came in quickly, the gray fur coat over her arm, a
bare hand clasping gloves, purse and a theater bag, all of which she
cast on the divan-bed, revealing herself gowned in black velvet.

“Good evening, dearie,” she said, patting at her skirt with a
preoccupied air, “would you mind doing me a service?”

I rose uneasily expectant. I should not have been surprised if she had
asked for anything from one of my eggs to all my savings.

“Don’t look so frightened,” she said, and wheeled round disclosing the
back of her dress gaping over lingerie effects: “Hook me up, that’s
all.”

As I began the service Miss Harris stood gracefully at ease, throwing
remarks over her shoulder:

“It’s a great blessing having you here, not alone for your sweet little
self,” she turned her head and tried to look at me, pulling the dress
out of my hands, “but because before you came I had such a tragic time
with the three middle hooks.”

“What did you do?”

“Went unhooked sometimes and at others walked up and down the stairs
hoping I’d find one of the inhabitants here, or a tramp, or the
postman. He’s done it twice for me--a very obliging man.”

I did not approve, but did not like to say so.

“There’s an eye gone here.”

“Only one,” said Miss Harris in a tone of surprise, “I thought there
were two.”

“Shall I pin it?”

“Please don’t. How could I get out a pin by myself, and I won’t wake
you up at midnight.”

“But it gaps and shows your neck.”

“Then if the play’s dull, the person behind me will have something
interesting to look at.”

“But really, Miss Harris--”

“My dear, good, kind friend, don’t be so proper, or do be proper about
yourself if it’s your nature and you can’t help it, but don’t be about
me. When I’m on the stage I’ll have to show much more than my neck, so
I may as well get used to it.”

“Miss Harris!” I said in a firm cold tone, and stopped the hooking.

I caught the gleam of a humorous gray eye.

“Mrs. Drake!” She whirled round and put her hands on my shoulders and
looked into my face with a sweetness that was quite bewitching. “You
dear little mouse, don’t you know you’re one kind and I’m another. Both
are nice kinds in their way, so don’t let’s try to mix them up.”

There is something disarmingly winning about this woman. I think for
the first time in my life I have met a siren. I pulled my shoulders
from the grasp of her hands, as I felt myself pulling my spirit from
the grasp of her attraction.

“I’ve not finished your dress,” I said.

She turned her back to me and gave a sigh.

“Go on, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi,” she said, and then added:
“Are you the mother of anything?”

“No,” I answered.

“Too bad,” she murmured, “you ought to be.”

I didn’t reply to that. In the moment of silence the sound of feet on
the stairs was audible. They came up the passage and began the ascent
of the next flight. Miss Harris started.

“That’s my man, I guess,” she said quickly and tore herself from my
hands.

She ran to the door and flung it open. I could see the man’s feet and
legs half-way up the stairs.

“Jack,” she cried in a joyous voice, “I’m here, in Mrs. Drake’s room.
Come down;” then to me: “It’s Mr. Masters. I’m going to the theater
with him.”

The feet descended and Mr. Masters came into view. He was the man Roger
and I had seen in the passage.

He took Miss Harris’ proffered hand, then sent a look at me and my
room that contained a subtle suggestion of rudeness, of bold and
insolent intrusion. Before she could introduce us he bowed and said
easily:

“Good evening, Mrs. Drake. Saw you the other night in the hall.”

I inclined my head very slightly. His manner and voice increased my
original dislike. I felt that I could not talk to him and turned to
Miss Harris. Something in her face struck me unpleasantly. Her look
was bent upon him and her air of beaming upon the world in general was
intensified by a sort of special beam--an enveloping, deeply glowing
beam, such as mothers direct upon beloved children and women upon their
lovers.

The door was open and Mr. Masters leaned upon the door-post.

“Nice little place you’ve got here,” he said. “Better than yours,
Lizzie.”

Miss Harris withdrew her glance from him, it seemed to me with an
effort, as if it clung upon him and she had to pluck it away.

“Finish me,” she said, turning abruptly to me, “I must go.”

All the especial glow for me was gone. Her eyes lit on mine vacant and
unseeing. I suddenly seemed to have receded to a point on her horizon
where I had no more personality than a dot on a map. I was not even a
servant, simply a pair of hands that prepared her for her flight into
the night with the vulgar and repulsive man. This made me hesitate,
also I didn’t want to go on with the hooking while Mr. Masters leaned
against the door-post with that impudently familiar air.

“If Mr. Masters will go into the passage,” I said.

He laughed good-humoredly, but did not budge. Miss Harris made a
movement that might easily have degenerated into an angry stamp.

“Oh, don’t be such an old maid,” she said petulantly. “Do the collar
and let me go.”

I couldn’t refuse, but I went on with the hooking with a flushed face.
What a fool I had been not to take Betty’s advice. Charming as she
could be when she wanted, Miss Harris was evidently not a person whose
manners remained at an even level.

“Have you heard Miss Harris sing?” asked Mr. Masters.

“Yes, through the register.”

“That’s a bad conductor. You must come up and hear her in her own rooms
some evening.”

“If Miss Harris wants me to.”

“Mrs. Drake will some day hear me sing in the Metropolitan,” said the
lady.

“Some day,” responded Mr. Masters.

There was something in his enunciation of this single word, so acid, so
impregnated with a sneering quality that I stopped my work and cast a
surprised glance at him.

He met it with a slight smile.

“Our friend Lizzie here,” he said, “has dreams--what I’m beginning to
think are pipe dreams.”

“Jack,” she cried with a sudden note of pleading, “you know that’s not
true. You _know_ I’ll some day sing there.”

“I know you want to,” he replied, then with the air of ignoring her and
addressing himself exclusively to me: “Miss Harris has a good voice, I
might say a fine voice. But--all here,” he spread his fingers fan-wise
across his forehead and tapped on that broad expanse, “the soul, the
thing that sees and feels--absent, nil,” he fluttered the spread
fingers in the air.

I was astounded at his cruel frankness--all the more so as I saw it had
completely dashed her spirits.

“Rubbish, I don’t believe a word of it,” I answered hotly, entirely
forgetting that I was angry with her.

“Not a bit,” he returned coolly, “I’ve told her so often. A great
presence, a fine mechanism,” he swept her with a gesture as if she had
been a statue, “but the big thing, the heart of it all--not there.
No imagination, no temperament, just a well regulated, handsomely
decorated musical box. Isn’t that so, Lizzie?”

He turned from me and directly addressed her, his eyes narrowed, his
face showing a faint sardonic amusement. I wondered what she was going
to say--whether she would fly at him, or whether, like the woman I
knew, she would hide her mortification and refuse him the satisfaction
of seeing how he hurt her.

She did neither. Moving to the divan, she picked up her coat, showing
me a face as dejected as that of a disappointed child. His words seemed
to have stricken all the buoyancy out of her and she shrugged herself
into the coat with slow fatigued movements. Bending to pick up her
gloves and glasses she said somberly:

“I’ll get a soul some day.”

“We hope so,” he returned.

“He doesn’t know anything about it,” I said in an effort to console.

“Oh, doesn’t he!” she answered bitterly. “It’s his business.”

“I’m a speculator in voices,” he said, “and our handsome friend Lizzie
here has been an investment that, I’m beginning to fear, won’t pay any
dividends.”

He laughed and looked at her with what seemed to me a quite satanic
pleasure in his tormenting.

I could think of nothing to say, bewildered by the strange pair. Miss
Harris had gathered up her belongings and moved to the door with a
spiritless step.

“Good night,” she said, glancing at me as if I was a chair that had
temporarily supported her weight in a trying moment.

“Good night,” said Mr. Masters cheerfully. “Some day go up and hear
Lizzie sing and see if you can find the soul in the sound.”

He gave a wave with his hat and followed her down the hall.

I shut the door, and am not ashamed to confess, leaned upon it
listening. I wanted to hear her attack him on the lower flight. But
their footsteps died away in silence.

I cleared away my supper, sunk in deep reflections. What an
extraordinary woman! One moment treating you like her bosom friend,
the next oblivious of your existence, and most extraordinary of all,
meekly enduring the taunts of that unspeakable man. I couldn’t account
for it in any way except that she must be going to marry him--and that
was a hateful thought. For if she _was_ rude, and had the manners of a
spoiled child, there was something about her that drew you close, as if
her hands had hold of yours and were pulling you softly and surely into
her embrace.




V


ROGER and I went out to dinner last night, down-town to our favorite
haunt in University Place.

I put on my best, a brown velveteen princesse gown (one of Betty’s
made over), my brown hat with the gold rose and my amber beads. I even
powdered my nose, which I was brought up to think an act of depravity
only perpetrated by the lost and fallen. When I am dressed up I really
do not look thirty-three. But I’ll have to buy two little rats to puff
out my hair at the sides. It’s too flat under that hat. Roger was
pleased when he saw me--that’s why I did it. What’s the fun of dressing
for yourself? Some one must look at you admiringly and say, well,
whatever it’s his nature to say. I suppose Mr. Masters would exclaim,
“Gee, you’re a peach!” Roger said, “I like you in brown.”

I love going down Fifth Avenue in the dark of a winter evening. The
traffic of business is over. Motors and carriages go spinning by,
carrying people to dinners. The big glistening street is like an
artery with the joyous blood of the city racing through it, coursing
along with the throb, throb, throb of a deathless vitality. And the
lights--the wonderful, glowing, golden lights! Two long lines of them
on either side that go undulating away into the distance, and broken
ones that flash by in a yellow streak, and round glaring ones like the
alarmed eyes of animals rushing toward you in terror.

And I love the noise, the near-by rumble and clatter, and outside it
the low continuous roar, the voice of the city booming out into the
quiet of the fields and up into the silence of the skies. One great,
unbroken sound made up of millions of little separate sounds, one great
consolidated life made up of millions of little separate life, each of
such vital importance to the one who’s living it.

We had lots to talk about, Roger and I. We always do. We might be
wrecked on a desert island and go on talking for ten years without
coming to the end. There are endless subjects--the books we read, the
plays we see, pictures over which we argue, music of which I know
nothing, and people, the most absorbing of all, probably because
gossiping is a reprehensible practise. There is nothing I enjoy more.
If I hadn’t been so well brought up I would be like the women in
the first act of _The School for Scandal_. Sometimes we make little
retrospective journeys into the past. But we do this cautiously. There
are five years we neither of us care to touch on, so we talk forward by
preference.

Of course I had to tell Roger of Miss Harris and Mr. Masters. It lasted
through two courses.

“What a dog!” was Roger’s comment.

“Roger,” I said earnestly, “do you think she could be in love with such
a man?”

Roger shrugged.

“How can _I_ tell?”

“But could any woman--any possible kind of a woman? And she’s a very
possible kind. Something comes from her and finds your heart and draws
it right out toward her. She couldn’t.”

“Perhaps you don’t understand this enigmatical lady.”

“Maybe I don’t understand everything about her, I’ve only known her a
few days. But I can feel--it’s an instinct--that underneath where the
real things are she’s true and sound.”

I can see into Roger more clearly than he knows, and I saw that he
wasn’t at all interested in Miss Harris. He looked round the room and
said indifferently:

“Why does she have a cad like that hanging about?”

“Perhaps underneath there’s something fine in him.”

“Very far underneath, buried so deep nobody but Miss Harris can find
it.”

“Roger, don’t be disagreeable. You’ve never seen either of them.”

“Evie, dear, your descriptions are very graphic. Do you know what I
think?” He looked at me, smiling a little, but with grave eyes. “I
think that you’re seeing Miss Harris through yourself. You’re putting
your brain into her head and your heart into her body and then trying
to explain her. That’s what’s making her such a puzzle.”

The waiter here produced a casserole with two squabs in it and
presented it to Roger’s gaze as if it were a gift he was humbly
offering. Roger looked at it and waved him away as if the gift was not
satisfactory.

“They look lovely,” I called, and Roger smiled.

The squabs occupied him and my thoughts occupied me finally to find
expression in a question:

“Roger, what is a gentleman?”

He looked surprised.

“A gentleman? What do you mean?”

“Just what I say--what is it?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. That’s just the point. There are lots of things that
everybody--young people and fools--seem to understand and I don’t. One
is the theory of vicarious atonement, one is why girls are educated to
know nothing about marriage and children, which are the things that
most concern them, and one is what makes a man a gentleman.”

Roger considered:

“Let’s see--at a blow. A gentleman is a man who observes certain rules
of behavior founded on consideration for the welfare and comfort of
others.”

“It sounds like the polite letter writer. Can a gentleman tell lies?”

“To benefit himself, no. To shield others, yes.”

“If he was noble inside--in his character--and uncouth outside, would
he be a gentleman?”

“What do you mean by uncouth?”

“Well--wore a watch chain made of nuggets like a man I met in Dresden,
and ate peas with his knife?”

“No.”

“Then, if he had beautiful manners and a bad heart, would he be one?”

“If his bad heart didn’t obtrude too much on his dealings with society,
he might.”

“Is it all a question of clothes and manners?”

“No.”

“You’ve got to have besides the clothes and manners an inner instinct?”

“That’s it.”

I mused for a moment, then, looking up, caught Roger’s eye fixed on me
with a quizzical gleam.

“Why this catechism?”

“I was thinking of Mr. Masters.”

“Good heavens!” said Roger crossly, his gleam suddenly extinguished.
“Can’t you get away from the riff-raff in that house? I wish you’d
never gone there.”

“No, I can’t. I was wondering if Mr. Masters, under that awful exterior
had a fine nature, could he possibly be a gentleman?”

“Evie,” said Roger, putting down his knife and fork and looking
serious, “if under that awful exterior Mr. Masters had the noble
qualities of George Washington, Sir Philip Sidney and the Chevalier
Bayard he could no more be a gentleman than I could be king of Spain.”

“I was afraid that’s what you’d say.” I sighed and returned to my squab.

I said no more about it, but when I got home my thoughts went back to
it. I hated to think of Lizzie Harris in the company of such a man.
If she was lacking in judgment and worldly knowledge some one ought
to supply them for her. She was alone and a stranger. Mrs. Bushey had
told me she came from California, and from what I’d heard, California’s
golden lads and lassies scorned the craven deference to public opinion
that obtains in the effete East. But she was in the effete East, and
she must conform to its standards. She probably had never given them
a thought and had no initiated guide to draw them to her attention.
Whatever Betty might say, I was free to be friendly with whomever
I pleased. That was one of the few advantages of being a widow,
_déracinée_ by four years in Europe. By the morning I had decided
to put my age and experience at her service and this afternoon went
up-stairs to begin doing it.

She was in her front room, sitting at a desk writing. A kimono of
a bright blue crêpe enwrapped her, her dark hair, cloudy about
the brows, was knotted loosely on the nape of her neck. She rose
impulsively when she saw me, kissed me as if I was her dearest friend,
then motioned me to the sofa, and went back to her place at the desk.

The room is like mine, only being in the mansard, the windows are
smaller and have shelf-like sills. It was an odd place, handsome things
and tawdry things side by side. In one corner stood a really beautiful
cabinet of red Japanese lacquer, and beside it a three-legged wooden
stool, painted white with bows of ribbon tied round each leg as if
it was some kind of deformed household pet. Portions of Miss Harris’
wardrobe lay over the chairs, and the big black hat crowned the piano
tool. On the window-sill, drooping and withered, stood a clump of
cyclamen in a pot, wrapped in crimped green paper. Beside it was a
plate of crackers and a paper bag, from whose yawning mouth a stream
of oranges had run out, lodging in corners. The upright piano, its top
covered with stacked music, the wintry light gleaming on its keys,
stood across a rear angle of the room and gave the unkempt place an air
of purpose, lent it a meaning.

It must be confessed Miss Harris did not look as if she needed
assistance or advice. She was serene and debonair and the blue kimono
was extravagantly becoming. I sat down upon the sofa against a pile
of cushions. The bottom ones were of an astonishing hardness which
obtruded through the softness of the top ones as if an eider-down quilt
had been spread over a pile of bricks. I tried to look as if I hadn’t
felt the bricks and smiled at Miss Harris.

“See what I’ve been doing,” she said, and handed me a sheet of note
paper upon which were inscribed a list of names.

I looked over them and they recalled to my mind the heroines of G. P.
R. James’ novels of which, in my teens, I had been fond.

“Suggestions for my stage name,” she explained. “How does number three
strike you?”

Number three was Leonora Bronzino.

“That’s an Italian painter,” I answered.

“Is it? What a bother. Would he make a fuss?”

“He’s been dead for several hundred years.”

“Then he doesn’t matter. What do you think of number five?”

I looked up number five--Liza Bonaventura.

I murmured it, testing the sound. Miss Harris eyed me with attention,
rapping gently on her teeth with the pen handle.

“Is it too long?”

I wasn’t sure.

“Of course when I got to be famous it would be just Bonaventura. And
that’s a good word--might bring me luck.”

“Why don’t you use your own name?”

She laughed, throwing back her head so that I could see the inside of
her mouth, pink and fresh like a healthy kitten’s.

“Lizzie Harris on a program--never!” Then suddenly serious, “I
like Bonaventura--‘Did you _hear_ Bonaventura last night in
_Tannhäuser_’--strong accent on the hear. ‘How superb Bonaventura was
in _Carmen_.’ It has a good ring. And then I’ve got a little dribble of
Spanish blood in me.”

“You look Spanish.”

She nodded:

“My grandmother. She was a Spanish Californian--Estradilla. They owned
the Santa Caterina Rancho near San Luis Obispo. My grandfather was a
sailor on a Yankee ship that used to touch there and get hides and
tallow. He deserted and married her and got with her a strip of the
rancho as big as Long Island. And their illustrious descendant lives in
two rooms and a kitchenette.”

She laughed and jumped up.

“I’m going to sing for you and you’ll see if Bonaventura doesn’t go
well with my style.”

She swept the hat off the piano stool and seated herself. The walls of
the room are covered with an umber brown burlap which made an admirable
background for her long body clothed in the rich sinuous crêpe and her
pale profile uplifted on an outstretched white neck.

“I’ll sing you something that I do rather well--Elizabeth’s going to be
one of my great rôles,” she said, and struck a chord.

It was _Dich Theure Halle_ and she sang it badly. I don’t mean that she
flatted or breathed in the wrong place, but she sang without feeling,
or even intelligence. Also her voice was not especially remarkable.
It was full, but coarse and hard, and rolled round in the small room
with the effect of some large unwieldly thing, trying to find its way
out. What struck me as most curious was that the rich and noble quality
one felt in her was completely lacking in her performance. It was
commonplace, undistinguished. No matter how objectionable Mr. Masters
might be I could not but feel he was right.

When she had finished she wheeled suddenly round on the stool and said
quickly:

“Let me see your face.”

“It’s--it’s a fine voice,” I faltered, “so full and--er--rich.”

She paid no attention to my words, but sent a piercing look over my
embarrassed countenance. Her own clouded and she drew back as if I had
hurt her.

“You don’t like it,” she said in a low voice.

“Why do you say that--what nonsense. Haven’t I just said--”

“Oh, keep quiet,” she interrupted roughly, and giving the piano stool
a jerk was twirled away from me into a profile position. She looked so
gloomy that I was afraid to speak.

There was a moment’s pause, during which I felt exceedingly
uncomfortable and she sat with her head bowed, staring at the floor.
Then she gave a deep sigh and murmured.

“It’s so crushing--you all look the same.”

“Who?”

“Everybody who knows. And I’ve worked so hard and I’m eaten up,” she
struck her breast with her clenched fist, “eaten up in here with the
longing to succeed.”

The gesture was magnificent, and with the frowning brows and somber
expression she was the Tragic Muse. If she could only get _that_ into
her voice!

“I’ve been at it two years, with Vignorol--you know him? I’ve learnt
Italian and German, and nearly all the great mezzo rôles. And the
polite ones say what you say, and the ones who don’t care about your
feelings say ‘A good enough voice, but no temperament.’” She gave her
body a vicious jerk and the stool twirled her round to me. “How in
heaven’s name can I get temperament?”

“Well--er--time--and--er--experience and sorrow--” I had come up-stairs
to give advice, but not on the best manner of acquiring temperament.

She cut me short.

“I’ve had experience, barrels of it. And time? I’m twenty-six now--am
I to wait till I’m seventy? And sorrow? All my relations are dead--not
that I care much, most of them I didn’t know and those I did I didn’t
like. Shall I go and stand on the corner of Forty-second Street and
Broadway and clamor for sorrow?”

[Illustration: “How in heaven’s name can I get temperament?”]

“It’ll come without clamoring,” I said. Upon that subject I can speak
with some authority.

“I wish it would hurry up. I want to arrive, I want to be a great prima
donna. I _will_ be a great prima donna. I _will_ sing into that big
dark auditorium and see those thousands of faces staring up at me and
make those thousands of dull fat pigs of people sit up and come to
life.”

She rose and walked to the window, pushed it up and picking up one of
the oranges, threw it out.

“I hope that’ll hit some one on the head,” she said, banging the window
down.

“Have you had the public’s opinion on your singing?” I asked, feeling
it best to ignore her eccentricities of temper.

“Yes. I was in a concert in Philadelphia a year ago, with some others.”

“And what was the verdict?”

She gave a bitter smile.

“The critics who knew something and took themselves seriously, said
‘A large coarse voice and no temperament.’ The critics who were just
men said nothing about the singing and a good deal about the singer’s
looks--” She paused, then added with sulky passion, “Damn my looks.”

She was going to the window again and I hastily interposed.

“Don’t throw out any more oranges. You might hit a baby lying in its
carriage and break its nose.”

Though she did not give any evidence of having heard, she wheeled from
the window and turned back to me.

“It’s been nothing but disappointments--sickening disappointments.
I wish I’d been left where I was. Three years ago in California I
was living in a little town on the line between Los Angeles and San
Francisco. I sang in the church and got ambitious and went up to San
Francisco. They made a good deal of fuss over me--said another big
singer was going to come out of California. I was just beginning to
wonder if I really _was_ some one, when one of those scratch little
opera companies that tour South America and Mexico came up. Masters,
Jack--the man you met here the other night--was managing it. I got an
introduction and sang for him, and you ought to have heard him go up in
the air. Bang--pouf!--like dynamite! Not the way he is now--oh, no--”

She stopped. The memory of those days of encouragement and promise
seemed to shut off her voice. She stared out of the window as if she
were looking back at them, her face set in an expression of brooding
pain. I thought she was going to cry, but when she spoke her voice
showed an angry petulance far from the mood of tears.

“I’d never have got such big ideas if he hadn’t given them to me. I
must come on here and study, not waste myself on little towns and
little people. Go for the big prize--that was what _I_ was made for.”
She suddenly turned on me and flung out what seemed the bitterest of
her grievance, “He made me do it. _He_ insisted on my coming--got
Vignorol to take me, paid for my lessons. It’s his doing, all this.”

So _that_ was the situation. That explained it all. I was immensely
relieved. She might be in love with him, but if he was not in love with
her (and he certainly gave no evidences of it), it would be easy to get
rid of him. He was frankly discouraged about her, would probably hail
with relief any means of escaping the continued expense of her lessons.
The instinct that had brought me up-stairs _was_ a good one after all.

“Couldn’t you”--I felt my way carefully for the ground was
delicate--“couldn’t you put yourself in some one else’s hands. Get some
one else to--I don’t know what the word is--”

She eyed me with an intent watching look that was disconcerting.

“Be my backer?” she suggested.

I nodded.

“No, I could not,” she said, in a loud violent tone. “Go back on the
man who tried to make me, dragged me out of obscurity and gave me my
chance? Umph!” She turned away with a scornful movement: “That would be
a great thing to do.”

The change was so quick that it bewildered me. The cudgel with which
she had been beating Masters was now wielded in his defense. The ground
was even more delicate than I had thought, and silence was wisdom till
I saw what was coming next. I rose from the rocky cushions and moved to
the window.

The light in the little room had grown dim, the keys of the piano
gleaming whitely from their dusky corner. With a deep sigh Miss Harris
walked to the sofa, threw herself full length on it and lay still, a
tall dark shape looking up at the ceiling.

I did not know what to say and yet I did not like to leave her so
obviously wretched.

“Shall I light the gas?” I asked.

“No,” came the answer, “I like the dark.”

“Do you mind if I water the cyclamen? They’re dying.”

“I do. I want them to die.”

She clasped her hands under her head and continued to gaze at the
ceiling. I moved to the door and then paused.

“Can I do anything for you?”

“Yes--” she shifted her glance and looked at me from beneath lowered
lids. I again received the impression I had had the evening when
I hooked her dress--that I was suddenly removed to an illimitable
distance from her, had diminished to an undecipherable speck on her
horizon. Never before had I met anybody who could so suddenly and so
effectively strike from me my sense of value and importance.

“You can do something I’d like very much--go,” the voice was like a
breath from the arctic.

I went, more amazed than angry. On the landing I stood wondering. What
had I done to her? If I hadn’t been so filled up with astonishment I
might have laughed at the contrast between my recent satisfaction in my
mission and my inglorious dismissal.

My thoughts were dispersed by voices from below, resounding up through
the cleft of the stairs. From a background of concerted sound, a series
of short staccato phrases detached themselves:--

“My ’at! Look at it! Ruined! Smashed!”

I looked over the banister. On the floor below stood the count
addressing Miss Bliss, Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Hazard and Mr. Weatherby, who
stood ranged in their hallway in a single line, staring up at him. In
one extended arm he held out a silk hat in a condition of collapse.
Their four upturned faces were solemn and intent. Miss Bliss’ mouth was
slightly open, Mr. Hamilton’s glasses glittered.

“What’s the matter?” I called, beginning to descend.

The count lifted a wrathful visage and shook the hat at me.

“Look at my ’at.”

A chorus rose from the floor below:

“Some one smashed his hat.”

“Threw an orange on it.”

“He says it came from here.”

“I think he’s wrong. It must have been the next house.”

“It was not,” cried the count, furious. “It was ’ere--_this_ ’ouse. I
am about to enter and crash--it falls on me! From there--above,” he
waved the hat menacingly at the top floor.

The quartet below chorused with rising hope.

“Who’s up there, Mrs. Drake?”

“Did any one throw an orange?”

“Is Miss Harris at home?”

I approached the count, alarmed at his hysterical Latin rage.

“Who has throw the orange?” he demanded, forgetting his English in his
excitement.

“You can have it reblocked,” I said comfortingly.

The count looked as if I had insulted him.

“’Ere?” he cried, pointing to the ground at his feet as if a hatter and
his block were sitting there. “Never. I brought it from Italy.”

From below the voices persisted:

“Were you with Miss Harris?” This from Mr. Hamilton.

“Yes, I was.”

“Did she throw an orange?” This from Mr. Hazard.

“Why should any one throw an orange out of a front window?”

Miss Bliss answered that.

“She might. She’s a singer and they do queer things. I knew a singer
once and she threw a clock that wouldn’t go into a bathtub full of
water.”

This seemed to convince the count of Miss Harris’ guilt.

“She did it. I must see ’er,” he cried, and tried to get past me. I
spread my arms across the passage. If he and Miss Harris met in their
several fiery states of mind, there would be a riot on the top floor.

I don’t like to tell lies, but I remembered Roger had said that a
gentleman could lie to shield another. Why not a lady? Besides, in this
case, I would shield two others, for I had no doubt if Count Delcati
intruded on Miss Harris he would be worsted. She was quite capable of
throwing the other oranges at him and the three-legged stool.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “She didn’t throw it.”

The male portion of the lower floor chorused:

“I knew she didn’t.”

“She couldn’t have.”

“Why should she?”

The count, with maledictions on the country, the city, the street and
the house, entered his room, the Westerners entered theirs and Mr.
Hamilton ascended to his. He puffed by me on the stairs:--

“Ridiculous to accuse a lovely woman like Miss Harris of such a thing.
We ought to deport these Italians. They’re a menace to the country.”

Miss Bliss alone lingered. She is a pretty, frowsy little thing who
looks cold and half fed, and always wears a kimono jacket fastened at
the neck with a safety pin. She waited till all the doors had banged,
then looking up, hissed softly:

“She did it. I was looking out of my window and saw it coming down and
it couldn’t have come from anywhere but her room.”

“Hush,” I said, leaning over the banister. “She did. It’s the artistic
temperament.”

Miss Bliss, as a model--artist not cloak--needed no further
explanation. With a low comprehending murmur she stole into her room.




VI


THE count and Miss Harris have met and all fear of battle is over.
At the first encounter, which took place in my sitting-room, it was
obvious that the young man was stricken. Since then he has seen her
twice and has fallen in love--at least he says he has.

As soon as he felt sure of it he came in to tell me. So he said the
other evening, sitting in the steamer chair Betty gave me to replace
the one Mrs. Bushey took.

“You are a woman of sympathy,” he said, lighting his third cigarette,
“and I knew you would understand.”

Numberless young men have told me of their love-affairs and always were
sure I would understand. I think it’s because I listen so well.

I have a fire now. It was easier to buy coal than argue with Mrs.
Bushey. The count stretched his legs toward it and smoked dreamily and
I counted the cigarettes in the box. He smokes ten in an evening.

“She is most beautiful. I can find only one defect,” he murmured, “she
is not thin enough.”

“Isn’t she?” I said, in my character of sympathetic woman, “I thought
she was rather too thin.”

“Not for me,” answered the lover pensively; “no one could be too thin
for me.”

He resumed his cigarette. It was nine and there were seven left. I
calculated that they would last him till eleven.

“There was a lady in Rome I once knew,” he began in a tone of
reminiscence, “thin like a match and so beautiful,” he extended his
hand in the air, the first finger and thumb pressed together as if he
might have been holding the match-like lady between them, “a blonde
with brown eyes, immense eyes. Oh, _Dio mio!_” His voice trailed away
into silence, swamped by a flood of memory.

“Were you in love with her, too?” I have noticed that the confiding
young men expect the sympathetic woman to ask leading questions.

“Yes,” said the count gravely, “four years ago.”

“You must have been very young.”

Such remarks as this are out of character. They take me unawares and
come from the American part of me--not the human universal part, but
that which is individual and local.

“Oh, no, I was nineteen.” He went back to his memories. “She was all
bones, but such beautiful bones. One winter she had a dress made of fur
and she looked like an umbrella in it. This way,” he extended his hands
and described two straight perpendicular lines in the air, “the same
size all the way up. Wonderful!”

“Our young men don’t fall in love so early,” I said.

“They don’t fall in love at all,” replied the count, “neither do the
women. They only flirt, all of them, except Miss Harris.”

“Doesn’t she flirt?”

I was stretching my sympathetic privileges a little too far. My excuse
is curiosity, vulgar but natural. I had never before seen any one like
Miss Harris and I wanted to get at the heart of her mystery.

“Flirt!” exclaimed the count. “Does a goddess flirt? That’s what
she is. Think of it--in this new shiny country, in this city with
telephones and policemen, in this sad street with the houses all built
the same.” He sat upright and shook his cigarette at me. “She belongs
where it is all sunshine and joy, and they dance and laugh and there is
no business and nobody has a conscience.”

“Do you mean Ancient Greece or Modern Naples?”

The count made a vague sweeping gesture that left a little trail of
smoke in the air.

“_N’importe!_ But not here. She is a pagan, a natural being, a nymph, a
dryad. I don’t know what in your language--but oh, something beautiful
that isn’t bothered with a soul.”

I started, Masters and the count, raw America and sophisticated Italy,
converging toward the same point.

Before I could answer her voice sounded startlingly loud through the
register. For the first moment I didn’t recognize the strain, then I
knew it--“_Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore_”--I have lived for art, I have
lived for love. We looked at each other in surprised question as the
impassioned song poured from the grating. It was as if she had heard us
and this was her answer.

My knowledge of nymphs and dryads is small, but I feel confident if one
of them had ever sung a modern Italian aria through a modern American
register she could not have rendered it with less heart and soul than
Miss Harris did.

Yesterday morning Betty telephoned me to come and lunch with her.
Betty’s summons are not casual outbreaks of hospitality. There is
always an underlying purpose in them, what a man I know who writes
plays would call “a basic idea”. She is one of the few people who never
troubles about meaningless formalities or superfluous small talk. It’s
her way, and then she hasn’t time. That’s not just a phrase but a fact.
Every hour of her day has its work, good work, well done. Only the poor
know Betty’s private charities, only her friends the number of her
businesslike benefactions.

Walking briskly down the avenue I wondered what was her basic idea this
time. Sometimes it’s clothes: “There are some dresses on the bed. Look
them over and take what you like. The gray’s rather good, but I think
the pink would be more becoming. I can have it done over for you by
my woman.” Sometimes it’s a reinvestment of part of my little capital
suggested by Harry, a high interest and very safe. Once it was an
attempt to marry me off. That was last autumn when I had just got back
from Europe, to a man with mines from Idaho. When I grew tearful and
reluctant she gave it up and shifted him--for he was too valuable to
lose--to a poor relation of Harry’s.

We were at lunch when the basic idea began to rise to the surface,
Betty at the head of the table, very tight and upright in purple cloth
and chiffon, and little Constance, her eldest born, opposite me. Little
Constance is an adorable child with a face like a flower and the manner
of a timid mouse. She loves clothes and when I come leans against me
looking me over and gently fingering my jewelry. She won’t speak until
she has examined it to her satisfaction. At the table her steadfast
gaze was diverted from me to a dish of glazed cherries just in front of
her.

The entrée was being passed when Betty, helping herself, said:

“Harry’s just met a man from Georgia who is in cotton--not done up in
it, his business.” She looked into the dish then accusingly up at the
butler: “I said fried, not boiled, and I didn’t want cream sauce.”

The butler muttered explanations.

“Tell her it mustn’t happen again, no more cream sauce for lunch.” She
helped herself, murmuring, “Really the most fattening thing one can
eat.”

“Why do you eat it?” said little Constance, withdrawing her eyes from
the cherries.

“Because I like to. Keep quiet, Constance. Mr. Albertson, that’s his
name, is well-off, perfectly presentable and a widower.”

So it was matrimonial again.

“That’s very nice,” I replied meekly.

“We’ll have him to dinner some night next week and you to meet him.”

“Why do you ask me? He’d surely rather have some one younger and
prettier.”

“It doesn’t matter what he’d rather have. I’ll telephone you when the
day’s fixed.”

“Betty,” I murmured, looking at her pleadingly.

“Evie,” she returned firmly, “don’t be silly. The present situation’s
got to come to an end some time.”

“It’ll never end.”

“Rubbish. There’s no sense in you scraping along this way in two
rooms--”

“Remember the kitchenette.”

“In two rooms,” she went on, ignoring the kitchenette. “Of course I
don’t want you to live in Georgia, but--”

Little Constance showed a dismayed face.

“Is Evie going to live in Georgia?”

Betty turned a stern glance on her.

“Constance, you’ll lunch up-stairs if you keep on interrupting.”

Constance was unaffected by the threat.

“When is she going?” she asked.

“Never,” I answered.

“I’m glad,” said little Constance, and seeing her mother’s glance
averted, stole a cherry from the dish and hid it in her lap.

“From what Harry says, and he’s heard all about Mr. Albertson, he
seems a perfectly fitting person, forty-five, of very good family and
connections, and with an income of thirty thousand a year.”

“He’ll probably not like me,” I said hopefully.

“Oh, he will,” answered Betty with grim meaning, “I’ll see to that.”

I could hear her retailing my perfections to Mr. Albertson and my heart
sank. Masterful, managing people crush me. If the man from Georgia
liked me, as the man from Idaho did, I foresaw a struggle and I seem
to have exhausted all my combative force in the year before my husband
died. I looked at little Constance and caught her in the act of popping
the cherry into her mouth. It was large and she had to force it into
her cheek and keep it there like a squirrel with a nut. An expression
of alarm was in her face, there was evidently less room for it than she
had expected.

Betty went ruthlessly on.

“Your present way of living is absurd--you, made for marriage.”

I saw little Constance’s eyes grow round with curiosity, but she did
not dare to speak.

“Made for companionship. If you were a suffragette or a writer, or
trimmed hats or ran a tea-room, it would be different, but you’re a
thoroughly domestic woman and ought to have a home.”

Little Constance bit the cherry with a sharp crunching sound. Betty
looked at her.

“Constance, are you eating your lunch?”

Little Constance lifted her bib, held it to her mouth, and nodded over
it.

The danger was averted. Betty turned to me.

“Marriage is the only life for a normal woman. Judkins, I’ll have some
more of those sweetbreads.”

She helped herself, and under the rattle of the spoon and fork, little
Constance crunched again, very carefully.

“And what is the good of living in the past. That’s over, thank heaven.”

“I’m not living in the past any more. Betty, I’m--I’m--raising my head.”

Betty looked sharply up from the sweetbreads, and I flinched under her
glance. She cast an eye on Judkins, who was receding into the pantry,
waited till he was gone, then said, in an eager hushed voice:

“Evie, don’t tell me there’s some one?”

Never have I been more discomfited by the directness of my Betty. I
felt myself growing red to my new rat and was painfully aware that
little Constance, now crunching rapidly, had fixed upon me the deadly
stare of an interested child.

“Of course there isn’t. What nonsense. But time has passed and one
doesn’t stay broken-hearted forever. I’m not _old_ exactly, and
I’m--that is--it’s just as I said, I’m beginning to come alive again.”

“Oh!” Betty breathed out and leaned against her chair-back, with a
slight creaking of tight drawn fabrics. But she kept her eye on me, in
a sidelong glance, that contained an element of inspecting inquiry.
Little Constance swallowed the cherry at a gulp and the question it had
bottled up burst out:

“Evie, are you going to get married?”

“No,” I almost shouted.

Little Constance said no more, but her gaze remained glued to my face
in an absorption so intense that she leaned forward, pressing her chest
against the edge of the table. Betty played with her knife and fork
with an air of deep thought. Judkins reentered to my relief.

He was passing the next dish when little Constance broke the silence.

“Evie, why did you get all red just now?”

“Constance,” said her mother, “if you’re a good girl and stop talking
you can have a cherry when lunch is over.”

“Thanks, mama,” said little Constance, in her most mouse-like manner.

After lunch we drove about in the auto and shopped, and as the
afternoon began to darken Betty haled me to a reception.

“Madge Knowlton’s daughter’s coming out,” she said. “And as you used to
know her before you went to Europe, it’s your duty to come.”

“Why is it my duty? I was never an intimate of hers.”

I’m shy about going to parties now; I feel like Rip Van Winkle when he
comes back.

“To swell the crowd. It’s a social service you owe to a fellow woman in
distress.”

We entered the house through a canvassed tunnel and inserted ourselves
into a room packed with women and reverberating with a clamor of
voices. We had a word and a hurried handclasp with Madge Knowlton and
her daughter, and then were caught in a surging mass of humanity and
carried into a room beyond. The jam was even closer here. I dodged
a long hatpin, and was borne back against a mantelpiece banked with
flowers whose delicate dying breath mingled with the scents of food and
French perfumery. When the mass broke apart I had momentary glimpses of
a glittering table with a woman at either end who was pouring liquid
into cups.

At intervals the crowd, governed by some unknown law, was seized by
migratory impulses. Segments of it separated from the rest, and drove
toward the door. Here they met other entering segments with a resultant
congestion. When thus solidified the only humans who seemed to have the
key of breaking us loose were waiters. They found their way along the
line of least resistance, making tortuous passages like the cracks in
an ice pack.

From them we snatched food. I had a glass of punch, a cup of coffee,
a chocolate cake, two marrons and a plate of lobster Neuberg, in the
order named. I haven’t the slightest idea why I ate them--suggestion I
suppose. All the other women were similarly endangering their lives,
and the one possible explanation is that we communicated to one another
the same suicidal impulse. It was like the early Christians going to
the lions, the bold ones swept the weaker along by the contagion of
example.

I met several old acquaintances who cried as if in rapturous delight.

“Why, Evelyn Drake, is this really you?”

“Evie--I can’t believe my eyes! I thought you had gone to Europe and
died there.”

“How delightful to see you again. Living out of town, I suppose. We
must arrange a meeting when I get time.”

And so forth and so on.

It made me feel like a resurrected ghost who had come to revisit the
glimpses of the moon. My old place was not vacant, it was filled up
and the grass was growing over it. I was glad when one of those blind
stampeding impulses seized the crowd and carried me near enough to
Betty to cry, as I was borne along, “I’m going home and I’d rather
walk,” and was swept like a chip on a stream to the door.

It was raining, a thin icy drizzle. Beyond the thronging line of
limousines, the streets were dark with patches of gilding where the
lamplight struck along the wet asphalt. They looked like streets in
dreams, mysteriously black gullies down which hurried mysteriously
black figures. I walked toward Lexington Avenue, drooping and
depressed, in accord with the chill night and the small sad noises of
the rain. I was in that mood when you walk slowly, knowing your best
dress is getting damp and feeling the moisture through your best shoes
and neither matters. Nothing matters.

Once I used to enjoy teas, found entertainment in those brief shouted
conversations, those perilous feasts. Perhaps I was sad because I
was so out of it all. And what was I in--what took its place? I was
going back to emptiness and silence. To greet me would be a voiceless
darkness, my evening companion a book.

I got on a car full of damp passengers. As if beaten down by the
relentless glare of the electric lights, all the faces drooped forward,
hollows under the eyes, lines round the mouths. They sat in listless
poses, exhaling the smell of wet woolen and rubber and I sat among
them, also exhaling damp smells--also with hollows under my eyes and
lines round my mouth. That, too, didn’t matter. What difference if I
was hollowed and lined when there was no one to care?

My room was unlighted and cold. I lighted the gas and stood with
uplifted hand surveying it. It was like a hollow shell, an empty
echoing shell, that waited for a living presence to brighten it. Just
then it seemed to me as if I never could do this--its loneliness would
be as poignant and pervasive when I was there, would steal upon me from
the corners, surround and overwhelm me like a rising sea. My little
possessions, my treasures, that were wont to welcome me, had lost their
friendly air. I suddenly saw them as they really were, inanimate things
grasped and held close because associated with the memory of a home.
In the stillness the rain drummed on the tin roof and the line in a
forgotten poem rose to my mind, “In the dead unhappy night and when the
rain is on the roof.”

I snatched a match and hurried to the fire. Thrusting the flame between
the bars of the grate, I said to myself:

“I must get some kind of a pet--a dog or a Persian cat. I’ve not enough
money to adopt a child.”

The fire sputtered and I crouched before it. I didn’t want any supper,
I didn’t want to move. I think a long time passed, several hours,
during which I heard the clock ticking on the mantel over my head, and
the rain drumming on the roof. Now and then the rumbling passage of a
car swept across the distance.

I have often sat this way and my thoughts have always gone back to
the past like homing pigeons to the place where they once had a nest.
To-night they went forward. My married life seemed a great way off,
and the Evelyn Drake in it looked on by the Evelyn Drake by the fire,
a stranger long left behind. The memories of it had lost their sting,
even the pang of disillusion was only a remembrance. With my eyes on
the leaping flames I looked over the years that stretched away in
front, diminishing to a point like a railway track. My grandmother had
lived to eighty-two and I was supposed to be like her. Would I, at
eighty-two, be still a pair of ears for young men’s love stories and
young women’s dreams of conquest?

Oh, those years, that file of marching years, coming so slowly and so
inevitably, and empty, all empty!

The rain drummed on the roof, the clock ticked and the smell of my best
skirt singeing, came delicately to my nostrils. Even _that_ didn’t
matter. From thirty-three to eighty-two--forty-nine years of it. I
looked down at my feet, side by side, smoking on the fender. Wasn’t it
Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked to define happiness, answered, “four
feet on the fender”?

There was a knock on the door, probably the count to continue the
recital of his love’s young dream. My “Come in” was not warm.

The door opened and Roger entered in a long wet raincoat.

I jumped up crying “Roger,” and ran to him with my hand out.

He took it and held it, and for a moment we stood looking at each other
quite still and not speaking. I was too glad to say anything, too glad
to think. It was an astonishing gladness, a sort of reaction I suppose.
It welled through me like a warm current, must have shone in my face,
and spoken from my eyes. I’ve not often in my life been completely
outside myself, broken free of my consciousness and soared, but I was
then just for one minute, while I looked into Roger’s face, and felt
his hand round mine.

“You’re glad to see me, Evie,” he said and his voice sounded as if he
had a cold.

That broke the spell. I came back to my eighteen-foot parlor, but it
was so different, cozy and pretty and intimate, full of the things I
care for and that are friends to me. The rain on the roof had lost its
forlornness, or perhaps, by its forlornness accentuated the comfort and
cheer of my little room.

We sat by the fire. Roger’s feet were wet and he put them upon the
fender.

“Now, if you’d been plodding about in the rain with me you’d put yours
up, too. Hullo, what have I said? Your face is as red as a peony.”

“It’s the fire. I’ve been sitting over it for a long time,” I stammered.

Just then the register became vocal, with the habanera from _Carmen_.

Roger got up and shut it.

“Don’t you want to hear her sing?” I asked.

“No, I want to hear you talk,” said he.




VII


MISS HARRIS is going to appear in a concert. She came glowing and
beaming into my room to tell me. Vignorol, her teacher, had arranged
it--with a violinist and a baritone--in Brooklyn.

“Why not New York?” I asked.

“Not _yet_,” said Miss Harris, moving about the room with a jubilant
dancing step, “but after this is over--wait and see!”

Great things are expected to come of it. The public’s attention is
to be caught, then another concert, maybe an engagement in one of
the American opera companies--just for experience. It is to be the
opening of a career which will carry her to the Metropolitan Opera
House. The baritone is another of Vignorol’s pupils, Berwick, a New
Englander--nothing much, just to fill up. The violinist is a Mrs.
Stregazzi, who also fills up, and little Miss Gorringe accompanies. I
was shown a pencil draft of the program with Liza Bonaventura written
large at the top--“Yes, it’s to be Bonaventura; I had a superstition
about it,” and the dress is to be white, or, with a sudden bright air:

“I might borrow your green satin--but of course I couldn’t. You’re too
small.”

Since then the house has resounded with practising from the top floor.
Heavy steps and light feminine rustlings have gone up and down the
stairs. Once the strains of a violin came with a thin whine through the
register as if some melancholy animal was imprisoned behind the grill.
In the dusk of the lower hall I bumped into a young man with tousled
hair and frogs on his coat, whom I have since met as Mr. Berwick.

The star is in a state of joyful excitement which has communicated
itself to the rest of us. When in the evening she goes over her
repertoire, the Westerners and Miss Bliss sit on the bottom steps of
their stairs, Mr. Hamilton and the count on the banisters of theirs and
I on the top step of mine. A Niagara of sound pours over us, billowing
and rushing down through the well, buffeted between the close confining
walls. When each piece is ended Miss Harris comes out on her landing,
leans over the railing and calls down:

“How was that?”

Then our six faces are upturned and we express our approbation,
according to our six different natures.

Our mutual hopes for her success have drawn us together and we have
suddenly become very friendly. Mr. Hazard drops in upon me in a
paint-stiffened linen blouse and Mr. Weatherby has confided to me the
money to pay for his laundry. Mr. Hamilton has smoked a large black
cigar in my dining-room, and Miss Bliss has come shivering with hunched
shoulders and clasped red arms to “borrow a warm” (her own expression)
at my fire.

In my excursions to the top floor I have met Mrs. Stregazzi and Miss
Gorringe. Mrs. Stregazzi is a large blond lady with an ample figure
and a confidential habit. On our first meeting she called me “dearie”
and told me all about her divorce from Mr. Stregazzi, who, I gathered,
was her inferior, both in station and the domestic virtues. In his
profession--the stage--he was something called “a headliner”, and
appeared to be involved mysteriously with trained animals. Since his
divorce he has married another “headliner”. It’s like that story of the
Frenchman in Philadelphia: “He _is_ a Biddle, she _was_ a Biddle, they
are _both_ Biddles.” I must ask Lizzie Harris what it is. Miss Gorringe
is a thin sallow girl with an intelligent face, and Mr. Berwick a
bulky silent New Englander, in the early twenties, who bears a strong
resemblance to the bust of Beethoven over Schirmer’s music store.

They are strange people, artless as children, and completely absorbed
in themselves and their work. They appear to have no points of
contact with any other world, and the real part of their world is the
professional part. They don’t say much about their homes or their lives
away from it.

A few days ago they took tea with me, and as they talked I had a series
of glimpses, like quickly shifted magic lantern slides, of their life
on trains, in hotels, behind the scenes and on the stage. It seemed
to me a sort of nightmare of hurry and scramble, snatched meals, lost
trunks, cold dressing-rooms. Maybe the excitement makes up for the
rest. It must be exciting--at least that’s the impression I got as I
sat behind the teacups listening.

Lizzie Harris seemed to find it enthralling, everything they said
interested her. Mrs. Stregazzi told some anecdotes that I didn’t
like--I don’t want to be a prig, but they really were _too_ sordid and
scandalous--and our prima donna hung on the words of that fat made-up
woman as if she spoke with the tongues of men and of angels. The more
I know of her the less able I am to get at the core of her being, to
place her definitely in my gallery of “women I have known.” I had
finally decided that in spite of her tempests, her egotism and her
weather-cock moods, there was something rare and noble in her, and here
she was drinking in cheap gossip about a set of people she didn’t know,
and who seem to be a mixture of artist, mountebank and badly brought-up
child.

As I sat pouring the tea I felt again that curious aloofness in her.
But before it was more a withdrawal of her spirit into herself, a
retreating into an inner citadel and closing all the doors. This time
it was the spirit reaching toward others and shutting me out, like a
child who forgets its playmate when a circus passes by. She listened
hungrily, now and then commenting or questioning with a longing, almost
a homesick note. When they rose to go, with a scraping of chair-legs
and a concerted clamor of farewells, she was reluctant to lose them,
followed them to the hall and leaned over the banister watching their
departing heads.

She made me feel an outsider, almost an intruder. I was willing to
efface myself for the moment and stood by the table waiting for her to
come back and reestablish me in her regard. She said nothing, however,
but brushed by the door and went up-stairs. In a few minutes Musetta’s
song filled the house. The next morning she came in while I was at
breakfast and asked me to lend my green satin dress to Miss Gorringe,
and when I agreed kissed me with glowing affection.

That all happened early in the week. Yesterday afternoon I was witness
to a scene, the effect of which is with me still, at midnight,
scratching this down in my rose-wreathed back room. It was a hateful
scene, a horrible scene--but let me describe it:

Calls of my name descending from the top floor in Miss Harris’ voice,
took me out to my door.

“I am going over some of my things,” the voice cried. “Come up and
listen.” Then, as I ascended, “It’s the scene between Brunhilda and
Siegmund in _Die Walkuere_, the _piéce de résistance_ of the evening.”

I didn’t find Miss Gorringe as I expected, but Mr. Masters, sitting
on the piano stool and looking glum. He rose, nodded to me, and
sinking back on the stool, laid his hands on the keys and broke into a
desultory playing. With all my ignorance I have heard enough to know
that he played uncommonly well.

The future Signorita Bonaventura was looking her best, a slight color
in her cheeks, confidence shining in her eyes.

“We’ve been trying it over. Did you hear?”

The weather had been warm, the register closed, so I had only heard
faintly.

“Well, it’s going to be something great,” said the prima donna.

“Is it?” said Mr. Masters with his back to us.

The sneering quality was strong in his tone and I began to wish I
hadn’t come.

“Go across the room, Mrs. Drake,” he said curtly. “Sit where you can
see her.”

I obeyed, sitting in the corner by the window. She faced me and Mr.
Masters was in profile.

My friends tell me I am completely devoid of the musical sense. It must
be true, for I can not sit through _Meistersinger_, and there are long
reaches of _Tristan and Isolde_ that get on my nerves like a toothache.
But I _have_ some kind of appreciation, do derive an intense pleasure
from certain scenes in certain operas. It was one of these scenes they
were now giving, that one in the second act of _Die Walkuere_ when
Brunhilda appears before Siegmund.

It has always seemed to me that the drama rose above the music,
overpowered it. I supposed this to be the fancy of my own ignorance and
never had the courage to say it. But the other day I read somewhere
the opinion of Dujardin, the French critic, and he expressed just what
I mean--“It is not the music, no, it is not the music, that counts in
the scene, but the words. The music is beautiful--of course it is, it
couldn’t be otherwise--but Wagner was aware of the beauty of the poetry
and allowed it to transpire.”

That is exactly what I should have said if I had dared.

Masters struck the opening notes and she began to sing.

  “Siegmund sieh’ auf mich! Ich bin’s der bald du folgst--
  Siegmund, look on me. I come to call thee hence.”

What a greeting!

A stir of irritation passed through me. She looked at Masters with a
friendly air and sang the lines with an absence of understanding and
emotion that would have robbed them of all meaning if anything could. I
wanted to shake her.

Then I forgot--Masters began.

If I was surprised at his playing his singing amazed me. He had almost
no voice, but he had all the rest--the wonderful thing, imagination,
the response to beauty, power of representing a state of mind. I don’t
explain well, I am out of my province, perhaps it’s better if I simply
say he became Siegmund.

As he played he turned and looked at her. His whole face had changed,
transformed by the shadow of tragedy. To him Lizzie was no longer
Lizzie, she was the helmed and armored daughter of Wotan delivering his
death summons. I can pay no higher tribute to him than to say I forgot
him, the burlap walls, the thin tones of the piano and saw a vision of
despairing demigods.

  “Wer bist du, sag’
  Die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?”

Then Lizzie:--

  “Nur Todgeweihten
  Taugt mein Anblick:
  Wer mich erschaut,
  Der scheidet vom Lebenslicht.”

My vision was dispelled. No one could have kept it listening to her and
watching her. As they went on what he created she destroyed; it was the
most one-sided, maddening performance. I found myself eager to have her
stop that I might hear him. Before they had reached the end I knew that
Mr. Masters was an artist and she was not. That is all there was to it.

She turned to me, proudly smiling, with a questioning “Well”.

Mr. Masters, his head drooped, heaved a sigh.

I could not be untruthful. I had been too deeply moved.

“Your voice is very fine,” I said in the flattest of voices and looked
at her beseechingly.

She met my eyes steadily and her smile died away.

“Only a voice,” she said.

“Miss Harris,” I cried imploringly. “You are young, you have beauty--”
She cut short my bromides with an angry exclamation.

“And no more temperament than a tomato can,” Mr. Masters finished for
me.

He ran his fingers over the keyboard in a glittering flow of notes.

“You’re a liar,” she cried, turning furiously on him.

Now, for the first time, I saw her really angry, not childishly
petulant as in her orange-throwing mood, but shaken to her depth with
rage. She was rather terrible, glaring at Masters with a grim face.

“Am I?” he said, coolly striking a chord. “We’ll see Tuesday night in
Brooklyn.”

I had expected him to answer her in kind, but he only seemed weary and
dispirited. Her chest rose with a deep breath and I saw to my alarm
that she had grown paler.

“You didn’t always think that,” she said in a muffled voice.

“No,” he answered quietly, “I believed in you at first.”

He spread his hands in a long clutching movement and struck another
chord. It fell deep into the momentary silence as if his powerful
fingers were driving it down like a clencher on his words.

“And you don’t any more?”

“No, I’ve about done believing,” he responded.

She ran at him and seized him by the shoulder. He jerked it roughly out
of her grasp and twirling round on the stool faced her, exasperated,
defiant, a man at the end of his patience. But his eyes said more,
full of a steely dislike. She met them and panted:

“You can’t, you don’t. Even you couldn’t be so mean--” then she
stopped, it seemed to me as if for the first time conscious of the
hostility of his gaze. There was the pause of the realizing moment and
when she burst out her voice was strangled with passion:

“Go--get out--go away from me. I’m sick of it all. I’ll stand no
more--go--go.”

She ran to the door and threw it open. I got up to make my escape.
Neither of them appeared to remember I was there.

“All right,” he said, calmly rising. “That suits me perfectly.”

He picked up his hat and coat and moved to the door. I tried to get
there before him, dodging about behind their backs for an exit, then,
like a frightened chicken, made a nervous dive and got between them.
Her hand on my arm flung me back as if I had been a chair in the way.
I had a glimpse of her full face, white and with burning eyes. She
frightened me.

Mr. Masters walked into the hall and there came to a standstill. After
looking at the back and front of his hat he settled it comfortably on
his head and moved toward the stairs.

Suddenly she rushed after him and caught him by the arm.

“No--no--” she cried. “Don’t go.”

I couldn’t see her face, but his was in plain view and it looked
exceedingly bored.

“What is it now?” he said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m so discouraged--you take the heart
out of me. I don’t know what I’m saying and I’ve tried so hard--oh,
Jack--”

Her voice broke, her head sank. Mr. Master’s expression of boredom
deepened into one of endurance.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked with weary patience.

“Come back. Don’t be angry. Forget what I said.”

She began to cry, shielding her face with one hand, the other still
holding him by the sleeve.

He sighed, and glancing up, saw me. I expected him to drive me forth
with one fierce look. Instead he made a slight grimace and reentered
the room, she holding to his sleeve. He dropped heavily on the piano
stool and she on the chair opposite, her hands in her lap, two lines
of tears on her cheeks. Neither said a word.

The way was clear and I flew out with the wild rush of a bird escaping
from a snare. As I ran down the stairs the silence of that room, four
walls enclosing a tumult of warring passions, followed me.

It’s midnight and I haven’t got over the ugliness of it. What am I to
think? The thing many people would think, I won’t believe, I can’t
believe. No one who knew her could. That the unfortunate creature loves
him is past a doubt--but how can she? How can she humiliate herself
so? Where is the pride that the rest of us have for a shield and
buckler. Where is the self-respect? To cry--to let him see her cry, and
then--that’s the _comble_, as the Paris art students say--to call him
back!

I feel sick, for I love her. If she hasn’t got a soul or temperament
or any of the rest of it that they do so much talking about, she’s got
something tucked away somewhere that’s good, that’s true. It looks at
you out of her eyes, it speaks to you in her voice--and then Masters
comes along and it’s gone.

I stopped here, and biting the end of my pen, looked gloomily at
the wall and met the cold stare of my ancestors. I wonder what the
men would have said if they had been there this afternoon. I’m not
sure--men are men and Lizzie is beautiful. But about you ladies, I
can make a guess. You would purse your mouths a little tighter and
say, “Evelyn, you’re keeping queer company. Whatever you may think
in your heart, drop her. That’s the wise course.” All but the French
Huguenot lady, she’s got an understanding eye. She feels something that
the others never felt, probably saw a little deeper into life and it
softened the central spot.

No, my dears, you’re all wrong. You’re judging by appearances and fixed
standards, which is something your descendant refuses to do. Go to
sleep and try and wake up more humble and humane. Good night.




VIII


BETTY had the dinner for Mr. Albertson last night and of course I went,
for Betty is like royalty, she doesn’t invite, she commands. In a brief
telephone message she instructed me to wear my blue crêpe and I wore
it. Before dinner, in her room, she eyed me critically and put a blue
aigrette in my hair.

Mr. Albertson was a gallant Southerner with courtly manners and a
large bald spot. We got on very nicely, though he did not exhibit that
appreciation of my charms that marked the Idaho man from the moment of
our meeting. If, however, he should develop it I have resolved to crush
it by strategy. I don’t know just how yet--the only thing I can think
of at present is to ask him to call and pretend I’m drunk like David
Garrick. I’ll get a better idea if the necessity arises. I haven’t the
courage to defy Betty twice.

Betty sent me home in the limousine, without the footman and the
chow dog. It was a cold still night, the kind when the sky is a deep
Prussian blue and all the lights have a fixed steady shine. As the
car wheeled into Fifth Avenue and I sat looking out of the window,
revolving schemes for the disenchanting of Mr. Albertson, I saw Roger
walking by. Before I thought I had beckoned to him and struck on the
front window for the chauffeur to stop. The car glided to the curb and
Roger’s long black figure came running across the street.

“You!” he cried, “like a fairy princess with a feather in your hair.
What ball are you coming from, Cinderella?”

As soon as he spoke I grew shy. Do the women who have ready tongues and
the courage of their moods, realize the value of their gifts?

“I--I--it’s not a ball, it’s Betty Ferguson’s and she’s sending me
home.”

“All right.” He said something to the chauffeur, stepped in and the car
started. “What a piece of luck. I was coming from a deadly dinner and
going to a deadly club. What inspired you to hail me?”

Nothing did, or something did that I couldn’t explain. I felt round for
an answer and produced the first that came.

“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Go ahead.” He pulled the rug over me. “It’s a nipping cold night
abroad. Let’s hear what it was you wanted to talk about.”

For a moment I thought of telling him of Lizzie Harris and Mr. Masters,
then I knew that wouldn’t do. Lizzie’s secrets were my secrets. I had
to tell him something and in my embarrassment I told him the first
thing that came into my head.

“Betty asked me to dinner to meet a man from Georgia.”

As soon as I had said it I had a sick feeling that he might be
wondering why I should stop him on Fifth Avenue at eleven o’clock of a
winter’s night, to impart this piece of intelligence.

He received it with the dignity of a valuable communication.

“Did she? And what was he like?”

“Very charming. His name’s Albertson and he has cotton mills down
there.”

“Must be a man of means.”

“I believe he is.”

It was very nice of Roger to take it so simply and naturally, but you
can always rely on his manners. My embarrassment passed away. The auto
sped out into the concentrated sparklings of Plaza Square, then swerved
to the left, sweeping round the statue of Sherman led to victory by a
long-limbed and resolute angel.

“We’re going the wrong way. What’s Nelson doing?” I raised a hand to
rap on the window.

“I told him to take us through the park. Put your hand in your muff.
Why did Betty ask you to meet Mr. What’s-his-name from Georgia?”

I know every tone of Roger’s voice, and the one he used to ask that
question was chilly. Betty’s plans involved no secrecy, so I said,
laughing:

“I think she’s trying to make a match.”

“Oh,” said Roger.

I had thought he would laugh with me, but in that brief monosyllable
there was no amusement. It came with a falling note, and it seemed to
be a sort of extinguisher on the conversation, a full stop at the end
of it, for we both fell silent.

The auto swept up the drive, gray and smooth between gray trees. I
could see a reach of deep blue sky with the stars looking big and
close, as if they had come down a few billion miles and were looking
us over with an impartial curiosity. Across the park the fronts of
apartment-houses showed in gleaming tiers, far up into the night, their
lights yellower than the stars. It was lovely to glide on, swiftly and
smoothly, with the frost gripping the world in an icy clasp while we
were warm and snug and so friendly that we could be silent.

“Isn’t this beautiful, Roger?” I said, looking out of the window. “Look
on the other side of the park, hundreds of lights in hundreds of homes.”

Roger gave a sound that if I were a writer of realistic tendencies, I
should call a grunt.

We met a hansom with the glass down, and on an ascending curve another
auto swooping by with two great glaring lamps. I felt quite oddly
happy; the menacing figure of Mr. Albertson became no more than a bogy.
After all even Betty couldn’t drag me struggling to the altar.

“Why is Betty so anxious to marry you off?” came suddenly from the
corner beside me.

Mr. Albertson assumed his original shape as a marriageable male with a
bald spot and a cotton mill, and Betty slipped back into position. I
wasn’t sure she couldn’t drag any one to the altar if she made up her
mind to it. My voice showed the oppression of this thought.

“She thinks all women should be married.”

“You have been married.”

Something was the matter with Roger to say that.

“Well, she thinks I’m poor and lonely.”

“Are you?”

I began to have an uncomfortable, complicated feeling. Fear was in it,
also exhilaration. It made me sit up stiffly, suddenly conscious of a
sensation of trembling somewhere inside.

“I am poor,” I said, “that is, poor compared to people like Betty.”

“And lonely, too?”

The disturbance grew. It made me draw away from Roger, pressed close
into my corner, as if no scrap or edge of my clothing must touch him. I
was afraid that my voice would show it and determined that it mustn’t.

“I’m lonely sometimes. That rainy night when you came in unexpectedly I
was.”

My voice _wasn’t_ all right. I cleared my throat and pretended to look
at the stars.

Roger said nothing, but the secret subways of emotion that connect
the spirits of those who are in close communion, told me he, too,
was moved. The air in the closed scented car did not seem enough for
natural breathing. It was like a pressure, something that put your
heart-beats out of tune, and made your lips open with a noiseless gasp.
I stood it as long as I could and then words burst out of me. They
came anyway, ridiculous words when I write them down:

“But I’ll never marry any of them. No matter what they are, or what
Betty wants, or how many of them she has up to dinner.”

The pressure was lifted and I sank back trembling. It was as if I
had been under water and come up again into the air. The spiritual
telegraph told me that Roger felt as I did, and that suddenly he or
I or both of us, had broken down a barrier. It was swept away and we
were close together--closer than the night when we had held hands and
forgotten where we were, closer than we’d ever been in all the years
we’d known each other. It was not necessary to say anything. In our
several corners we sat silent, understanding for the first time, I and
the man I loved.

The sharp landscape slid by us, naked trees, spotted lines of light,
stretches of lawn grizzled with frost, woodland depths with the shine
of ice about the tree roots, and then the flash of glassy ponds.

We sat as still as if we were dead, as if our souls had come out of our
bodies and were whispering. It was a wonderful moment of time, one of
the unforgetable moments that dot the long material years. All that’s
gone before and all that’s going to come dies away and there’s only the
present--the beautiful exquisite present. We only have a few like that
in our lives.

It lasted till the auto drew up at my door. We said good night and
parted.

Up in my room I sat a long time by the fire thinking of the hundreds
of women like myself, the disillusioned ones, in the dark dens of
tenements and in the splendid homes near by. I tried to send them
messages through the night, telling them we could rise out of the
depths. I saw life as it really is, hills and valleys, patches of
blackness and then light, but always with an unresting force flowing
beneath, the immortal thing that urges and upholds and makes it all
possible. I remembered words I used to work on bits of perforated board
when I was a little girl, “God is Love.” I never understood what it
meant, even when I stopped working it on perforated board and grew to
the reasoning stage. To-night I knew--got at last what a happy child
might understand--love in the heart was God with us, come back to us
again.




IX


YESTERDAY was the concert day and I couldn’t go--a bad cold. The house
lamented from all its floors, for it was going en masse, even the
trained nurse with a usurped right to the sun-dial.

The only way I could add to the festivity of the occasion was to
distribute my possessions among that section of the audience drawn
from Mrs. Bushey’s light housekeeping apartments. It began with the
Signorita Bonaventura, who wore my mother’s diamond pendant, then
went down the line:-- Miss Gorringe my green satin (she said it
would be horribly unbecoming, but the audience wouldn’t notice her),
Miss Bliss my black lynx furs, Mrs. Phillips, the nurse, my evening
cloak, Mr. Hazard my opera glasses, Mr. Weatherby my umbrella--his
had a broken rib and it looked like snow. We were afraid the count
couldn’t find anything suitable to his age and sex, but he emptied my
bottle of Coty’s Jacqueminot on his handkerchief and left, scented
like a florist’s. Mrs. Bushey came last and gleaned the field, a
gold bracelet, a marabou stole and a lace handkerchief she swore she
wouldn’t use.

Much noise accompanied the passage of the day and some threatening
mishaps. At eleven we heard Berwick was hoarse, but at one (by
telephone through my room) that raw eggs and massage were restoring
him. At midday Miss Gorringe sent a frantic message that the sash of
the green satin wasn’t in the box. Gloom settled at two with a bulletin
that Mrs. Stregazzi’s second child had croup. It was better at five.
Mr. Hazard’s dress suit smelled so of moth balls that the prima donna
said it would taint the air, and Emma, the maid, hung it out on the
sacred sun-dial. There was a battle over this. For fifteen minutes
it raged up two flights of stairs, then Mr. Hazard conquered and the
sun-dial was draped in black broadcloth.

At intervals Lizzie came down to see me and use the telephone. She
was in her most aloof mood, forbidding, self-absorbed. On one of her
appearances she found a group of us congregated about my steam kettle.
Our chatter died away before her rapt and unresponsive eye. Even I, who
was used to it, felt myself fading like a photographic proof in a too
brilliant sun. As for the others they looked small and frightened,
like mice in the presence of a well-fed lioness, who, though she might
not want to eat them, was still a lioness. They breathed deep and
unlimbered when the door shut on her.

In the late afternoon Roger came to see me. He brought a bunch of
violets and a breath of winter into my bright little room. The
threatening snow had begun to fall, lodging delicately on eaves and
ledges, a scurry of tiny particles against the light of street-lamps.
We stood in the window and watched it, trimming the house-fronts with
white, carpeting the steps, spreading a blanket ever so softly and
deftly over the tin roof. How different to the rain, the insistent
ruthless rain. The night when the rain fell came back to me. How
different that was from to-night!

There was a hubbub of voices from the hall and then a knock. They
were coming to see me before they left. They entered, streaming in,
grubs turned to butterflies. The house was going cheaply in cars over
the bridge; only the prima donna and Miss Gorringe were to travel
aristocratically in a cab.

Strong scents from the count’s Jacqueminot mingled with the faint
odor of moth balls that Mr. Hazard’s dress suit still harbored. Miss
Gorringe had rouged a little and the green satin was quite becoming.
Miss Bliss had rouged a good deal and had had her hair marcelled. In
the doorway the trained nurse hung back, sniffing contemptuously at
Mr. Hazard’s back. Mrs. Bushey, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Weatherby grouped
themselves by the fireplace.

“Where’s the prima donna?” I asked.

“Coming,” cried a voice from the stairs, and the air was filled with
silken rustlings.

It was like an entrance on the stage, up the passage and between the
watching people, and I don’t think any actress could have done it with
more aplomb. In her evening dress she was truly superb--a goddess
of a woman with her black hair in lusterless coils and her neck and
shoulders as white as curds. Upon that satiny bosom my mother’s pendant
rose and fell to even breathings. Whatever anybody else may have felt,
the star of the occasion was calm and confident.

Her appearance had so much of the theatrical that it must have made
us suddenly see her as the professional, the legitimate object of
glances and comments. Nothing else could explain why I--a person of
restrained enthusiasms--should have broken into bald compliments. She
took them with no more self-consciousness than a performing animal
takes the gallery’s applause, smiled slightly, then looked at Roger,
the stranger. I did so, too, childishly anxious to see if he admired my
protégée. He evidently did, for he was staring with the rest of them,
intent, astonished.

Her glance appeared to gather up his tribute as her hands might have
gathered flowers thrown to her. He was one of the watching thousands
that it was her business to enthrall, his face one of the countless
faces that were to gaze up at her from tier upon tier of seats.

When the door shut on the last of them, laughter and good nights
diminishing down the stairs, he turned to me with an air that was at
once bewildered and accusing.

“Why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me she was so good-looking?”

“I did and you wouldn’t believe me,” I answered gaily, for I was
greatly pleased. It was a little triumph over Roger with his
hypercritical taste and his rare approvals.

The next morning I waited anxiously for news. I thought Lizzie would
be down early, but the others came before her, dropping in as the
morning wore away. With each entrance I grew more uneasy.

Mr. Hazard was first, in a gray sweater.

“Well, she looked great. I wish I could have painted her that way.
But--” he tilted his head, his expression grown dubious. “You know,
Mrs. Drake, I don’t know one tune from another--but--”

“But what?” I said sharply.

“Well, it seemed to me Berwick got away with it.”

“Do you mean the audience liked him better?”

He nodded, a grave agreeing eye on me.

“He got them when he sang that thing about _The Three Grenadiers_. It
made your heart swell up.”

He leaned nearer, lowering his voice. “And he got them in that German
duet, too.”

He drew back and nodded again darkly, as if wishing me to catch a
meaning too direful for words.

An hour later Miss Bliss blew in in a blue flannel jacket and the
remnants of her marcelle wave. By contrast with her flushed and
blooming appearance of the evening before, she looked pinched and
pallid. She cowered over the fire, stretching her little chapped hands
to the blaze and presenting a narrow humped back to my gaze.

“She didn’t seem to catch on some way or other. I don’t know why but--”

She stopped and leaned forward for the poker.

“But what?”

“Well--” She poked the fire, the edge of the flannel jacket hitched
up by the movement, showing a section of corset laced with the golden
string that confines candy boxes. “She doesn’t give you any thrill.
I’ve heard people without half so much voice who could make the tears
come into your eyes. I tell you what, Mrs. Drake,” she turned round
with the poker uplifted in emphasis, “_I_ wouldn’t spend _my_ good
money to hear a woman sing that way. If I shell out one-fifty I want to
get a thrill.”

She was still there when the count came in. He sat between us gently
rocking and eying her with a pensive stare. She pulled down her jacket
and patted solicitously at the remains of her marcelle.

“She looked,” said the count, pausing in his rocking, “she looked like
a queen.”

“Good gracious,” I cried crossly, “_do_ drop her looks. I saw her.”

The count, unmoved by my irritation, answered mildly:

“One can’t drop them so easily.”

“But her singing, her performance?”

“Her performance,” murmured the young man, and appeared to look through
Miss Bliss at a distant prospect. “It was good, but--”

I had to restrain myself from screaming, “But what?”

“It was not so good as she is, had none of the--what shall I say--_air
noble_ that she has.” He screwed up his eyes as if projecting his
vision not only through Miss Bliss, but through all intervening
objects to a realm of pure criticism. “It has a bourgeois quality, no
distinction, no imagination, and she--” Words were inadequate and he
finished the sentence with a shrug.

Miss Bliss leaned forward and poked the fire, once more revealing the
golden string. The count looked at it with a faint arrested interest. I
was depressed, but conventions are instinctive, and I said sternly:

“Miss Bliss, let the count poke the fire.”

The count poked and Miss Bliss slipped to the floor, and sitting
cross-legged, comfortably warmed her back.

The count was gone when Mrs. Bushey entered. Mrs. Bushey says she
understands music even as she does physical culture.

“It was a frost,” she explained, dropping on the end of the sofa.

“I know that,” I answered, “the paper this morning said the thermometer
was twenty-two degrees.”

“Not that kind of a frost, a theatrical frost for her. She hasn’t got
the quality.”

“No thrill,” murmured Miss Bliss, and no men being present, stretched
out her feet and legs in worn slippers and threadbare stockings to the
blaze.

I fought against my depression--Mrs. Bushey did not like Bonaventura.

“She hasn’t got the equipment,” said Mrs. Bushey with a sagacious air.
Her eye roamed about the room and lighted on Miss Bliss’ legs. “_Are_
you cold?” she asked, as if amazed.

“Frozen,” answered Miss Bliss crossly.

“How can that be possible when I’ve done everything to make your room
warm, spent all my winter earnings on coal?”

Miss Bliss cocked up her chin and replied:

“You must have had very poor business this winter.” Then to me very
pointedly: “I wanted to ask you, Mrs. Drake, if you’d lend me your
Navajo blanket, just for a few nights. It would look so bad for the
house if I was found frozen to death in bed some morning.”

I agreed with alarmed haste, but Mrs. Bushey did not seem inclined for
war. She smiled, murmuring, “Poor girl, you’re anemic,” and then, her
eye lighting on Marie Antoinette’s mirror:

“Yes, Miss Harris’ll never get anywhere till she gets some color into
her voice. It’s the coldest organ I ever heard. Would you mind if I
took that mirror away? I have a new lodger, a delightful woman from
Philadelphia, and I’ve no mirror for her--I can’t, I literally _can’t_,
buy one with my finances the way they are. I suppose after this failure
Miss Harris’ll be late with her rent.”

Thus Mrs. Bushey. When she had gone--taking the mirror--Miss Bliss lay
flat before the fire and reviled her.

Miss Gorringe came next with the green satin dress. It was upon Miss
Gorringe I was pinning my hopes. None of the others knew anything. Miss
Gorringe, lifting out the dress with cold and careful hands, looked
solemn:

“No, I can’t say it was a success. I’d like to because she’s certainly
one of the most lovely people I’ve ever played for, but--” She
depressed the corners of her mouth and slowly shook her head.

I sat up in my shawls and did scream:

“But what?”

Miss Gorringe, used to the eccentricities of artists, was unmoved by my
violence. She placed the dress carefully over the back of a chair.

“She doesn’t get over,” she said.

“Get over what?”

I had heard this cryptic phrase before, but didn’t know what it meant.

“The footlights--across, into the audience. And she ought to, but
they were as cold as frogs till Berwick woke them up with _The Three
Grenadiers_. _He_ can do it. He hasn’t got any better voice or method
but,” she gave a little ecstatic gesture, “temperament--oh, my!”

“Has she got no temperament at all?” I asked.

“I’ve never played for anybody who had less.” Miss Gorringe held up the
green scarf. “Here’s the sash.”

“Not a bit of thrill,” Miss Bliss chanted, prone before the fire.

“Can’t a person get temperament, learn it in some way?”

Miss Gorringe pondered:

“They can teach them rôles, hammer it into them. When a person’s got
the looks she has they sometimes do it. But I guess they’ve done all
they can for her. She’s been with Vignorol for two years. He wouldn’t
have taken her unless he thought there was something in it. And John
Masters has been training her besides, and I’ve heard people say
there’s no one better than Masters for that. You see they can teach her
how to walk and stand and make gestures, but they can’t put the thing
into her head or her voice. She doesn’t seem to understand, she doesn’t
feel.”

I was silent. She did feel, I knew it, I’d seen it. There was some
queer lack of coordination between her power to feel and her power to
express.

Miss Gorringe administered the coup de grâce.

“She sang the duet from _The Valkyrie_ as if she was telling Siegmund
to put on his hat and come to supper.”

“It’s imagination,” I said.

“It’s temperament,” Miss Gorringe corrected. “And without it, the way
she is, she’d better go in for church singing, or oratorio, or even
teaching.”

The dusk was gathering and I was alone when she came down. She threw
herself into the wicker chair beside my sofa. Her face looked thinner
and two slight lines showed round her mouth.

“Well?” I said, investing my voice with a fictitious lightness. “Where
have you been all day?”

“I’m tired or I’d have been down earlier. Have you seen the others?”

With her deadly directness she had gone straight to the point I dreaded.

“Yes, they’ve been in.”

“Did they like it?”

One of the most formidable things about this woman is the way she
keeps placing you in positions where you must either lie and lose your
self-respect or tell the truth and incur her sudden and alarming anger.
I was not afraid of that now, but I couldn’t hurt her. I tried to find
a sentence that would be as truthful and painless as the circumstances
permitted. The search took a moment.

“They didn’t,” she answered for me.

She turned her face to the window and drummed on the chair-arm with her
fingers, then said defiantly:

“They don’t know anything.”

“Of course they don’t,” I cried. “An Italian count, an artist, a model,
a woman who rents floors.”

Her eye fell on the green dress.

“Miss Gorringe has been here.”

I nodded.

“What did _she_ say?”

I got cold under my wrappings. Had I the courage to tell her? She
looked at me and gave a slight wry smile.

“Did she tell you that Berwick got away with it?”

“Some one did. I think it was Mr. Hazard, but he’s a painter and--”

She interrupted roughly.

“That’s nothing--a big bawling voice singing popular songs. If they’d
let me sing _Oh, Promise Me_ I’d have had the whole house.”

For the first time in my experience of her I saw she was not open with
herself. I knew that she had realized her failure and refused to admit
it. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, frowning, haggard and
miserable.

“I’ll get the notices to-morrow,” she said in a low voice.

It was horribly pitiful. There would be no friendly deception about the
notices.

“Vignorol’s arranged for several good men to go. He wanted their
opinions. They’ll give me a fine notice on _The Valkyrie_ duet.”

“Did that go well?” I asked just for something to say.

“Oh, splendidly,” she answered, without looking up. “It’s one of the
things I do best.”

The room was getting dim and I was thankful for it. The dusk hid the
drooping and discouraged face, but it could not shut out the voice with
its desperate pretense. It was worse than the face.

“Well,” she said suddenly, straightening up, “I’ll see Masters
to-morrow. He’s coming to bring me the notices.”

There was fear in the voice. I knew what the interview with Masters
would be, and she knew, too. In a moment of insight I saw that she
had been fighting against her dread all day, had come down to me
for courage, was trying now to draw it from my chill and depressing
presence. It was like a child afraid of the dark, hanging about in
terror and unwilling to voice its alarm.

I sat up, throwing off my wraps and laid my hand on hers.

“Lizzie, don’t mind what he says.”

Her hand was cold under mine.

“He knows,” she answered almost in a whisper, “he _knows_.”

“I can get backers for you”--it was rash, but I know how to manage
Betty--“better than he ever was, the best kind of backers.”

She jerked her hand away and glared at me.

“What do you mean by that? Do you think he’s going to give me up? Why,
you must be crazy.” She jumped to her feet looking down at me with a
face of savage anger. “Do you think I haven’t made good? Have they,”
with a violent gesture to the door, “told you so? They’re fools,
idiots, imbeciles. Masters give me up--ah--” She turned away and then
back. “Why he’s never had any one with such promise as I have. He’s
banking on me. I’m going to bring him to the top. He borrowed the money
to send me to Vignorol. Throw me down now, just when I’m getting there,
just when I’m proving he was right? Oh, I can’t talk to you. You’ve no
sense. You’re as big a fool as all the rest.”

And she rushed out of the room, banging the door till the whole
apartment shook.

I lay thinking about it till Emma came to get me my supper. She was
right in one thing--I _was_ a fool. In my blundering attempt at
encouragement I had gone straight to the heart of her fear, dragged it
out into the light, held up in front of her the thing she was trying
not to see--that Masters would give her up. Fool--it was a mild name
for me. And _poor_ Lizzie--tragic Bonaventura!

It’s night again and I am dressed in my best with a fur cloak on to
keep off the chill. I’ve got to write, not a sudden visitation of the
Muse, but to ease my mind. If you haven’t got a sympathetic pair of
ears to pour your troubles into, pouring them out on paper is the next
best thing.

It’s two days since I have seen Lizzie. Yesterday I was in my room all
day nursing my cold and expecting her, but she didn’t come. Neither did
she to-day, and all I could surmise was that she was angry with me for
being a fool. As I feel I was one and yet don’t like to hear it from
other people, I made no effort to get into communication with her.

This evening I was well enough to go out in a cab with all my furs and
a foot warmer, to dine with Roger’s widowed sister, Mrs. Ashworth. I
was a good deal fluttered over the dinner, guessed why it had been
arranged. It was a small affair, the Fergusons, Roger and I. Preceded
by a call from Mrs. Ashworth, it had a meaningful aspect, a delicate
suggestion of welcoming me into the family. I blush as I write it.
I don’t know why I should, or why love and marriage are matters
surrounded by self-consciousness and shame. Who was it explained the
embarrassment of lovers, their tendency to hide themselves in corners,
as an instinctive sense of guilt at the prospect of bringing children
into a miserable world? I think it was Schopenhauer. Sounds like
him--cross-grained old misanthrope.

Mrs. Ashworth is Roger’s only near relation and he regards her as
the choicest flower of womanhood. I don’t wonder. In her way she
is a finished product, no raw edges, no loose ends. Everything is
in harmony--her thin faintly-lined face, her silky white hair, her
pale hands with slightly prominent veins, her voice with its gentle
modulations. Nothing cheap or second rate could exist near her. She
wouldn’t stamp them out--I can’t imagine her stamping--they would
simply wither in the rarified atmosphere. Her friends are like herself,
her house is like herself. When I go there I feel strident and coarse.
As I enter the portal I instinctively tune my key lower, feel my high
lights fading, undergo a refining and subduing process as if a chromo
were being transmuted into a Bartolozzi engraving.

As my cab crawled down-town--I need hardly say Mrs. Ashworth lives in a
house on lower Fifth Avenue, built by her father--I uneasily wondered
if the Bohemian atmosphere in which I dwelt had left any marks upon me.
I tried to obliterate them and made mental notes of things I mustn’t
mention. Memories of Miss Bliss’ golden corset string rose uneasily,
and Lizzie Harris, and oh, Mr. Masters! I ended by achieving a sense of
grievance against Mrs. Ashworth. No one had any right to be so refined.
It was all very well if you inherited a social circle and large
means, but-- The cab drew up with a jolt and I alighted. All unseemly
exuberance died as the light from the door fell on me. I spoke so
softly the driver had difficulty in hearing my order and when I walked
up the steps I minced daintily.

But it was a delightful dinner. Harry and I were on one side, Betty
and Roger on the other. At the foot of the table was Mrs. Ashworth’s
son, Roger Clements Ashworth, a charming boy still at college. It was
all perfectly done, nothing showy, nothing in the fashion. Betty’s
pearls looked a good deal too large beside the modest string that Mrs.
Ashworth wore, which was given to her great, great grandmother by
Admiral Rochambeau. The dining-room walls were lined with portraits,
with over the fireplace, that foundation stone of the family’s glory,
Roger Clements, “The Signer.”

I thought of my apartment and my late associates and felt that I was
leading a double life.

When I came home the house was very silent. Mounting the dim dirty
stairs with the smell of dead dinners caught in the corners, I wondered
how Mrs. Ashworth could countenance me. But after all, it was part of
her fineness that she had no quarrel with the obscure and lowly. If she
could not broaden the walls of her world--and you had only to talk to
her ten minutes to see that she couldn’t--within those walls all was
choice and lovely. I would have to live up to it, that was all.

I had got that far when I heard a heavy step and Mr. Masters loomed
up on the flight above. The stairs are very narrow and I looked up
smiling, expecting him to retreat. He came on, however, not returning
my smile, staring straight before him with an immovable, brooding
glance. I can’t say he didn’t see me, but he had the air of being so
preoccupied that what his eye lighted on did not penetrate to his
brain. As at our first meeting I received an impression of brutal
strength, his broad shoulders seeming to push the walls back, his
flat-topped head upheld on a neck like a gladiator. I intended asking
him about the concert and the notices, but his look froze me, and I
backed against the wall for him to pass.

As he brushed by he growled a word of greeting. He was in the hall
below when I broke out of the consternation created by his manner,
leaned over the rail and called down:

“Mr. Masters, how is Miss Harris?”

“All right,” he muttered without stopping or looking up and went on
down the lower flight to the street.

They had had the interview.

The house was as silent as a tomb. I stole to the foot of the upper
flight, looked up and listened. Not a sound. The rustling of my dress
as I moved startled me. What _had_ he said to her? I couldn’t read his
face--but his manner! I wavered and waited, the street noises coming
muffled through the intense stillness. Then I decided I’d not intrude
upon her, and came in here. Whatever happened she’ll tell me in her own
good time, and the quietness up there is reassuring. Her anger is apt
to take noisy forms. If she had been throwing oranges out of the window
I would have heard her. But I do wish I might have seen her to-night.




X


I DIDN’T sleep well that night. The memory of Mr. Masters’ set sullen
face kept me wakeful. At four I got up, lit the light and tried to
read Kidd’s _Social Evolution_. Through the ceiling I could hear Mr.
Hamilton’s subdued snoring on the floor above. It seemed like the deep
and labored breathing of that submerged world whose upward struggle I
was following through Mr. Kidd’s illuminating page.

After breakfast, when no sign or word had come from Lizzie, I decided
to stay in till I heard from her. I dawdled through the morning and
when Emma was cleaning up went out on the landing and listened. The
upper floors were wrapt in quiet. I stole up a flight and a half and
looked at her door--tight shut and not a sound. I went down again
worried, though it was possible she had gone out and I not heard her.
After lunch I opened the register and listened--complete silence.
During the rest of the afternoon I sat waiting for her footfall. Dusk
came and no woman had mounted the stairs. At seven a tap came at my
door and Count Delcati pushed it open.

The count brought letters from the Italian aristocracy to its New York
imitation and goes to entertainments that the rest of us read of in
the papers. He was arrayed for festival and looked like an up-to-date
French poster, a high-shouldered black figure with slender arms
slightly bowed out at the elbows. His collar was very stiff, his shirt
bosom a clear expanse of thick smooth white. He wore his silk hat back
from his forehead, and his youthful yet sophisticated face, with its
intense black eyes and dash of dark mustache, might have been looking
at me from the walls of the Salon Independent.

He removed his hat, and standing in the doorway, said:

“Have you seen her to-day?”

“No,” I answered. “Have you?”

He shook his head.

“I think she must be away. When I came home at six I went up there and
knocked, but there was no answer.”

There was nothing in this to increase my uneasiness. She came and
went at all hours, often taking her dinner at what she called “little
joints” in the lower reaches of the city. Nevertheless my uneasiness
did increase, gripped hold of me as I looked at the young man’s gravely
attentive face.

“Have you seen her since the concert?” he asked.

“Yes, the day after, when you were all in here.”

“She hadn’t seen the notices?”

I shook my head.

He leaned against the door-post and gazed at his patent leather shoes.
As if with reluctance he said slowly:

“I have.”

“What were they like?”

“Rotten.”

He pronounced the word with the “r” strangled yet protesting, as if he
had rolled his tongue round it, torn it from its place and put it away
somewhere in the recesses of his throat.

“Oh, poor girl!” I moaned.

“That’s why I went up there. She must have seen them and I wished to
assure her they were lies.”

“Did they say anything very awful?”

He shrugged.

“They spoke of her beauty--one said she had a good mezzo voice. But
they were not kind to her, to Mr. Berwick, _very_.”

I said nothing, sunk in gloom.

The count picked up his fur-lined coat from the stair rail, and shook
himself into it.

“I should wait to go to her when she comes in, but this _meeserable_
dinner, where I sit beside young girls who know nothing and married
ladies who know too much--no mystery, no allure. But I must go--perhaps
you?--” He looked at me tentatively over his fur collar.

“I’ll go up as soon as she comes in,” I answered. “If there’s anything
I can do for her be assured I’ll do it.”

“You are a sweet lady,” said the count and departed.

After that I sat with the door open a crack waiting and listening. The
hours ticked by. I heard Mr. Hamilton’s step on the street stairs, a
knock at the Westerner’s door, and as it opened to him, a joyous clamor
of greeting in which Miss Bliss’ little treble piped shrilly. Hazard
was painting her and she spent most of her evenings in there with
them. It was a good thing, they were decent fellows and their room was
properly heated.

At intervals the sounds of their mirth came from below. The rest of the
house was dumb. At eleven I could stand it no more and went up. If she
wasn’t there I could light up the place for her--she rarely locked her
door--and have it bright and warm.

It was dimly lighted and very still on the top floor, the gas-jet
tipping the burner in a small pale point of light. I knocked and got
no answer, then opened the door and went in. The room was dark, the
window opposite a faint blue square. In the draft made by the opening
door the gas shot up as if frightened, then sunk down, sending its thin
gleam over the threshold. As I moved I bumped into the table and heard
a thumping of something falling on the floor. I saw afterward it was
oranges. I groped for matches, lighted the gas and looked about, then
gave a jump and a startled exclamation. Lizzie Harris was lying on the
sofa.

“Lizzie,” I cried sharply, angry from my fright, “why didn’t you say
you were there?”

She made no sound or movement and seized by a wild fear, I ran to her.
At the first glance I thought she was dead. She was as white as a china
plate, lying flat on her back with her eyes shut, her hands clasped
over her waist. I touched one of them and knew by the warmth she was
alive. I clutched it, shaking it and crying:

“Lizzie, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”

She tried to withdraw it and turned her face away. The movement was
feeble, suggesting an ebbing vitality. I thought of suicide, and in
a panic looked about for glasses and vials. There was nothing of the
kind near her. In my lightning survey I saw a scattering of newspaper
cuttings on the table among the rest of the oranges.

“Have you taken anything, medicine, poison?” I cried in my terror.

“No,” she whispered. “Go away. Let me alone.”

I was sorry for her, but I was also angry. She had given me a horrible
fright. Failure and criticism were hard to bear, but there was no sense
taking them this way.

“What _is_ the matter then? What’s happened to make you like this?”

“Let me alone,” she repeated, and lifting one hand, held it palm upward
over her face.

That something was wrong was indisputable, but I couldn’t do anything
till I knew what it was. I put my fingers on the hand over her face and
felt for her pulse. I don’t know why, for I haven’t the least idea how
a pulse ought to beat. As it was I couldn’t find any beat at all and
dropped her hand.

“I’ll have to get a doctor, I’ll call the man in the boarding house
opposite.”

“Don’t,” she said in a voice which, for the first time, showed a note
of life. “If you bring a doctor here I’ll go out in the street as I am.”

She was in the blue kimono. I didn’t know whether she had strength
enough to move, but if she had I knew that she would do as she said and
the night was freezing.

“I won’t call the doctor if you’ll tell me what’s happened to you?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said, and raising the hand from her face caught at
my skirt. I bent down for her voice was very low, hardly more than a
whisper.

“Masters has left me.”

“Left you,” I echoed, bewildered. “He was here last night. I saw him.”

Her eyes held mine.

“Left me for good,” she whispered, “forever.”

Any words that I might have had ready to brace up a discouraged spirit
died away.

“What--what do you mean?” I faltered.

“He and I were lovers--lived together--you must have known it. He got
tired of me--sick of me--he told me so himself--those very words. He
said he was done with it all, the singing and me.” She turned her
head away and looked at the wall. “I’ve been here ever since. I don’t
know how long.”

[Illustration: “Masters has left me”]

I stood without moving, looking at her, and she seemed as dead to my
presence as if she had really been the corpse I at first thought her.
Presently I found myself putting a rug over her, settling it with
careful hands as if it occupied my entire thoughts.

I do not exactly know what did occupy them. A sort of sick disgust
permeated me, a deep overwhelming disgust of life. Everything was vile,
the world, the people in it, the sordid dirt of their lives. I almost
wished that I might die to be out of it all.

Then I sat down beside her. She lay turned to the wall, with the light
of the one burner making long shadows in the folds of the rug. Her neck
and cheek had the hard whiteness of marble, her hair, like a piece
of black cloth, laid along them. The sickening feeling of repugnance
persisted, stronger than any pity for her. I suppose it was the long
reach of tradition, an inherited point of view, transmitted by those
prim and buckramed ladies on my dining-room wall, and also perhaps that
I had never known a woman, well, as a friend, who had done what Lizzie
Harris had done. It was the first time in my life, which had moved so
precisely in its prescribed groove, that I had ever taken to my heart,
believed in, grieved over, loved and trusted a woman thus stained and
fallen.

I will also add, for I am truthful with myself, that when I got up and
went to her, all inclination to touch her, to console and comfort her,
was gone. For those first few moments she was physically objectionable
to me, as if she might have been covered with dirt. Yet I felt that
I must look after her, had what I suppose you would call a sense of
duty where she was concerned. I have always hated the phrase; to me it
signifies a dry sterile thing, and it held me there because I would
have been uncomfortable if I had gone. Is it the training women get in
their youth that makes them like this, makes them only give their best
when the object is worthy, as we ask only the people to dinner who can
give us a good dinner back? I heard the sense of duty chill in my voice
as I spoke to her.

“Have you had anything to eat since--that is, to-day?”

She did not answer. I bent farther over and looked at the profile with
the eyes closed. They were sunken, as if by days of pain. I have seen
a good many sick people in my life, but I had never seen any one so
changed in so short a time. I gazed down at her and the appeal of that
marred and anguished face suddenly broke through everything, stabbed
down through the world’s armor into the human core. I tried to seize
hold of her, to make my hands tell her, and cried out in the poor words
that are our best:

“Oh, Lizzie, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for you.”

It was like taking hold of a dead body. Her arm fell from my hand an
inert weight. Condemnation or condonement were all the same to her.

What was I to do? The clock marked midnight. The joyful sounds from
below had ceased. I did not like to rouse the others, for, as far as
I could see, she was in no immediate danger. She appeared to be in a
condition of collapse, and I had never heard of any one dying of that.
It was twenty-four hours since I had seen Masters on the stairs. She
had had nothing to eat since then. Food was the best thing and I went
into the kitchen to get some.

The top floor has what Miss Bliss calls “the bulge” on all others
by having a small but complete kitchen. The gaslight showed it in a
state of chaos, piles of plates waiting to be washed, the ice-box with
opened door and a milk bottle overturned, some linen lying swathed
and sodden over the edge of the laundry tub. I made a brew of tea and
brought it to her, but one might as well have tried to make a statue
drink. In answer to my pleadings she turned completely to the wall,
moving one hand to the top of her head where it lay outstretched with
spread fingers. In the faintly lighted room, in the creeping cold of a
December midnight, that speechless woman with her open hand resting on
her head, was the most tragic figure I have ever seen.

I took the tea back to the kitchen and washed the plates. Also I
hunted over the place for any means of self-destruction that might be
there. There were vials in the medicine closet that I stood in a row
and inspected, emptying those I wasn’t sure about into the sink. As I
worked I thought, sometimes pursuing a consecutive series of ideas,
sometimes in disconnected jumps. It was revolutionary thinking, casting
out old ideals, installing new ones. I was outside the limits within
which I had heretofore ranged, was looking beyond the familiar horizon.
In that untidy kitchen, sniffing at medicine bottles, I had glimpses
far beyond the paths where I had left my little trail of footprints.

I didn’t know why she had given herself to Masters. Strange as it may
sound, it did not then seem to me to matter. It was her affair, concern
for her conscience, not mine. What was my concern was that I could not
give my love and take it back. It went deeper than her passions and her
weaknesses. It went below the surface of life, underlay the complicated
web of conduct and action. It was the one thing that was sure amid the
welter of shock and amaze.

And I understood Masters, was suddenly shifted into his place and saw
his side. He had tried to make her understand and she wouldn’t, then
on the straining tie that held them had dealt a savage blow, brought
an impossible situation to the only possible end. I hated him, if
she had been nothing to me I would have hated him. Shaking a bottle
of collodion over the sink I muttered execrations on him, and as I
muttered knew that I admired the brutal courage that had set them both
free.

The dawn found me sitting by her frozen in mind and body. I had had
time to think of what I should say to all inquiries: the failure of the
concert, the blow to her hopes, had prostrated her. It was half true
and quite plausible.

When the light was bright and the street awake I went out into the hall
and waited. Miss Bliss was the first person I caught, coming up from
the street door with a milk bottle. Her little face was full of sleep
that dispersed under my urgent murmurings. She stepped inside the door
and hailed tentatively:

“Hullo, Miss Harris.”

There was no answer and she ventured less buoyantly:

“Don’t you feel good, Miss Harris?”

The lack of response scared her, yet she stood fascinated like the
street gamin eying the victim of an accident. She had seen enough to do
what I wanted, and I took her by the arm and pulled her into the hall.

“She looks like she was dead,” she whispered, awed. “Would you think a
big husky woman like that would take things so hard?”

I had prepared my lesson in the small hours and answered glibly:

“She’s not half so strong as you think and very sensitive, morbidly
sensitive.”

“Um,” said Miss Bliss, “poor thing! I don’t see how if she was so
sensitive, she could have stood that man Masters around so much.”

She went down to dress and presently the news percolated through the
house. There was an opening and shutting of doors and whisperings on
the top flight. Everybody stole up and offered help except the count,
who rose late to the summons of an alarm clock. Mr. Hazard went across
the street for the doctor, met Mrs. Bushey on her way to physical
culture and sent her in.

I met her in the third-floor hall and we talked, sitting on the
banister. The count’s alarm clock had evidently done its work, for he
eyed us through the crack of his door.

“How dreadful--terribly unfortunate,” Mrs. Bushey muttered, then,
looking about, caught the count’s eye at the crack: “Good morning,
Count Delcati. You’re up early.”

The count responded, the gleaming eye large and unwinking as if made of
glass.

Mrs. Bushey’s glance returned to me. The smile called forth by the
greeting of the star lodger died away.

“If her concert was such a failure and she’s sick, how is she going to
live?”

I hadn’t thought of that. It added a complication to the already
complex situation.

“Oh, she must have something,” I said with a vaguely reassuringly air.
“She hasn’t been making money but--”

“Do you know anything positive of her financial position?” interrupted
Mrs. Bushey.

It was hard to be vague on any subject with Mrs. Bushey, on the subject
of finances impossible. She listened to a few soothing sentences then
said grimly:

“I see you don’t really know anything about it. Please try and find
out. Of course I’m one of the most kind-hearted people in the world,
but”--she held her physical culture manuals in the grip of one elbow
and extended her hands--“one must live. I can’t be late with my rent
whatever my lodgers can be.”

The count’s voice issued unexpectedly through the crack:

“I am late two times now and I still stay.”

Mrs. Bushey smiled at the eye.

“Of course, Count Delcati, but you’re different. I know all about you.
But Miss Harris--a singer who can’t make good. They’re notoriously bad
pay.” She turned sharply on me. “What seems to be the matter with her?”

“Collapse,” I said promptly. “Complete collapse and prostration.”

Mrs. Bushey hitched the books into her armpit and patted them in with
her muff.

“Those are only words. I’m glad Mr. Hazard’s gone for the doctor.”
She turned and moved toward the stair-head. “And if it’s anything
contagious she must go at once. Don’t keep her here five minutes. The
doctor’ll know where to send her.” She began the descent. “If I’d only
myself to think of I’d let her stay if it was the bubonic plague.
But I won’t expose the rest of you to any danger.” She descended the
next flight and her voice grew fainter: “I’m only thinking of you, my
lodgers are always my first consideration. If any of you got anything
I’d never forgive myself.” She reached the last flight. “I wouldn’t
expose one of you to contagion if I never made a dollar or rented a
room. That’s the way I am. I know it’s foolish--you needn’t tell me so,
but--” The street door shut on her.

The doctor came with speed and an air of purpose. At last he had
somewhere to go when he ran down the stairs with his bag, and it was
difficult for him to conceal his exhilaration. He was young, firm
and businesslike, examined Lizzie, asked questions and said it was
“shock”. He was very anxious to find out what had “precipitated the
condition,” even read the notices, and then sat with his chin in his
hand looking at the patient and frowning.

Out in the hall I enlarged on her high-strung organization and he
listened, fixing me with a searching gaze that did not conceal the fact
that he was puzzled. We whispered on the landing over nursing, food and
the etceteras of illness, then branched into shocks and their causes
till he suddenly remembered he had to be in a hurry, snatched up his
bag and darted away.

That was yesterday. To-night I have brought up my writing things and
while I watch am scratching this off at the desk where, not so long
ago, I found her choosing her stage name. Poor Lizzie--is there a woman
who would refuse her pity?

I can run over the names of all those I know and I don’t think
there’s one, who, if she could look through the sin at the sinner,
would entirely condemn. The worst of it is they all stop short at the
sin. It hides the personality behind it. I know if I talked to Betty
this way she’d say I was a silly sentimentalist with no knowledge of
life, for even my generous Betty wouldn’t see over the sin. There’s
something wrong with the way women appraise “the values” in these
matters; actions don’t stand in the proper relations to character and
intentions. We’re all either sheep or goats. Everything that makes our
view-point, books, plays, precedent, public opinion, will have it that
we’re sheep or goats, and though we can do a good many bad things and
remain pure spotless sheep, there’s just one thing that if we do do,
puts us forever in the corral with the goats.

But, oh--I groan as I write it--if it only hadn’t been Masters! That
brute, that brigand! A hateful thing some one once told me keeps
surging up in my memory--Rousseau said it I think--that one of the
best tests of character was the type of person selected for love and
friendship. I can’t get it out of my head. What fool ever told it to
me? Oh--all of a sudden I remember--it was Roger--Roger! I feel quite
frightened when I think of him. He would be so angry with me for being
mixed up in such an affair, or--as he’s never angry with me--angry
with fate for leading me into this _galère_. He is one of the people
who adhere to the sheep and goat theory. To him women are black or
white, and the white ones must have the same relation to the black that
Voltaire had to _Le bon Dieu_--know them by sight but not speak.




XI


IT IS three weeks since I have written a word. There’s been too much
to do, and sleeping about in chairs and on the foot of beds is not
stimulating to the brain. We have had an anxious time, for Lizzie
Harris has been desperately ill. Doctor Vanderhoff--that’s the young
man’s name--has had no necessity to run to the corner of Lexington
Avenue and then wonder which way to go, for he has been in here a good
deal of the time. He is a dear, and a clever dear, too, for he has
pulled Lizzie back from dreadful dangers. For a while we didn’t think
she would ever be herself again. Her heart--but what’s the sense of
recapitulating past perils. She’s better, that’s enough, and to-night
I’m down in my apartment leaving Miss Bliss in charge.

She’s another dear, poor little half-fed thing, running back from her
sittings to post up-stairs, panting and frost nipped, and take her
place in that still front room. How still it’s been, with the long
motionless body on the bed, that wouldn’t speak and wouldn’t eat, and
hardly seemed to breathe. Sometimes the men came up and took a turn at
the nursing. The count was no use. The sight of her frightened him and
he had to be taken into the kitchen and given whisky. But young Hazard
was as good as a hospital graduate, soft-handed and footed, better than
Mrs. Phillips, who came up once or twice between her own cases, was
very superior and nagged about the sun-dial.

When he could, Mr. Hazard watched for the first half of the night and
Dolly Bliss and I went into the kitchen and had supper of tea and eggs.
We’ve grown very intimate over these midnight meals. I don’t see how
she lives--ten dollars a week the most she has made this winter, and
often gaps without work. One night I asked her if she had ever posed
for the altogether. Under normal circumstances I would no more have
put such a question than I’d have inquired of Mrs. Bushey what she had
done with her husband. But with the specter of death at our side, the
reticences of every day have dropped away.

She nodded, looking at me with large pathetic eyes.

“Often in the past, but now, unfortunately, I’m not in demand for that.
I’m getting too thin.”

In this close companionship I have found her generous, unselfish and
honest to the core. Is our modesty an artificial attribute, grafted on
us like a bud to render us more alluring? This girl, struggling against
ferocious poverty, is as instinctively, as rigorously virtuous as I am,
as Betty, as Mrs. Ashworth, yet she does a thing for her livelihood,
the thought of which would fill us with horror. I’m going to put it to
Betty, but I wouldn’t dare tell her what I really think--that of the
two points of view Miss Bliss’ is the more modest.

When we were sure Lizzie was on the up-grade, a new worry intruded--had
she any independent means? Nobody knew. Mrs. Bushey was urgent and
to keep her quiet I offered to pay the top-floor rent for a month
and found that the count had already done it. I, who knew her best,
feared she had nothing, and it was “up to me” to get money for her from
somewhere.

Of course Betty was my natural prey and yesterday afternoon fate
rendered her into my hands. She came to take me for a drive in a
hansom, bringing with her her youngest born, Henry Ferguson, Junior,
known familiarly as Wuzzy. Wuzzy is three, fat, not talkative and
spoiled. He wore a white bunny-skin coat, a hat with rosettes on
his ears, leather leggings and kid mitts tied round his wrists with
ribbons. He had so many clothes on that he moved with difficulty,
breathing audibly through his nose. When he attempted to seat himself
on the prie-dieu, the only chair low enough to accommodate him, he had
to be bent in the middle like a jointed doll.

I can not say that I love Wuzzy as much as I do Constance. He is the
heir of the Fergusons and the conquering male is already apparent. It
is plain to be seen that he thinks women were made to administer to his
comfort and amuse him in his dull moments. I have memories of taking
care of Wuzzy last autumn at Betty’s country place when his nurse
was off duty. I never worked so hard in my life. Half the energy and
imagination expended in what the newspapers call a “gainful occupation”
would have made me one of those women of whom _The Ladies’ Home
Journal_ prints biographies.

I carried him down-stairs. It was not necessary, for dangling from the
maternal hand he could have been dragged along, but there is something
so nice about hugging a healthy, warm, little bundle of a boy. As I
bent for him he held up his arms with a bored expression, then stiff
and upright against my shoulder, looked down the staircase and yawned.
It’s the utter confidence of a child that makes it so charming. Wuzzy
relinquished himself to my care as if, when it came to carrying a baby
down-stairs, I was the expert of the western world.

As we descended I rubbed my cheek against his, satin-smooth, cold and
firm. He drew back and gazed at me, a curiously deep look, impersonal,
profound. The human being soon loses the capacity for that look. It
only belongs to the state when we are still “trailing clouds of glory.”

We squeezed him between us and tooled away toward Fifth Avenue. It was
a glorious afternoon and it was glorious to be out again, to breathe
the keen sharp air, to see the park trees in a thin purplish mist
of branch on branch. Wuzzy, seeing little boys and girls on roller
skates, suddenly pounded on us with his heels and had to be lifted to
a prominent position on our knees, whence he leaned over the door and
beat gently on the air with his kid mitts.

“What a bother this child is,” sighed Betty, boosting him up, “I only
brought him because I had to. Some relation of his nurse is sick and
she went out to see them.”

Her only son is the object of Mrs. Ferguson’s passionate adoration, yet
she always speaks of him as if he was her greatest cross.

Wuzzy comfortable, his attention concentrated on the moving show, I
brought my subject on the carpet.

“Dear me, how dreadful,” Betty murmured, much moved by the expurgated
version of Lizzie Harris’ troubles. “Wuzzy, if you don’t stop kicking
me with your heels I’ll take you home.”

Wuzzy stopped kicking, throwing himself far over the door to follow the
flight of a golden-locked fairy in brown velvet. We held him by his
rear draperies and talked across his back.

“It’s a cruel situation,” I answered. “Everything has failed the poor
creature.”

“She has no means of livelihood at all?”

“I’m not sure yet, but I don’t think so. As soon as she’s well enough
I’ll find out. Meantime there’s this illness, the doctor--”

“Yes, yes,” Betty interrupted, “I know all that. But it needn’t bother
you. I’ll attend to it.”

“Dear Betty!” I let go of Wuzzy to stretch a hand across to her.

“Now, _don’t_ be sentimental, Evie. This is the sort of thing I like
doing. If I could find some one--”

The prospects suddenly palled on Wuzzy and he threw himself violently
back and lay supine between us, gazing up at the trap.

“Good heavens, why did I bring him,” groaned his mother. “I wouldn’t
take care of a child like this for millions of dollars. Why _do_ nurses
have sick relations? There ought to be a special breed raised without a
single human tie. Get up, Wuzzy.”

She tugged at his arm, but he continued to stare upward, inert as a
flour sack.

“What does he see up there?” I said, bending my head back to try and
locate the object. “Perhaps it’s something we can take down and give
him.”

“You can’t unless you break the hansom to pieces. It’s the trap.”

I felt of it. Wuzzy’s eyes followed my hand with a trance-like
intentness and he emitted a low sound of approval.

At that moment, as though fate pitied our helplessness, the trap flew
back and a section of red face filled the aperture.

“Is it straight down the avenue I’m to go, Mrs. Ferguson?” came a
cheerful bass. “You ain’t told me.”

Wuzzy looked, flinched, his pink face puckered and a cry of mortal fear
burst from him. He clutched us with his mitts and wrenched himself to
a sitting posture, then, determined to shut out the horrible vision,
leaned as far over the door as he could and forgot all about it.
Betty gave directions and we sped along into the line of carriages
by Sherman’s statue. We had to wait there, and a policeman with
gesticulating arms and a whistle caught Wuzzy’s attention. He waved a
friendly mitt at him, muttering low comments to himself. His mother
patted his little hunched-up back and took up the broken thread:

“What was I saying? Oh, yes--if I could get some one who would hunt up
such cases as Miss Harris’ and report them to me I’d pay them a good
salary. Those are the people one never hears about, unless in some
accidental way like this.”

The policeman whistled and we moved forward. I began to feel
uncomfortable. I’d never before told Betty half a story. She went on:

“Of course there’s charity on a large scale, organized and all that.
But the hundreds of decent people who get into dreadful positions and
are too proud to ask for aid, are the ones I’d like to help. Especially
girls, good, hard-working, honest girls.”

In my embarrassment I fingered Wuzzy’s ear-rosette. He resented the
familiarity and angrily brushed my hand away.

“Oh, do let him alone,” said his mother. “You can’t tell how he’ll
break out if he gets cross--and I know Miss Harris is all that, in
spite of her hat and her looks, or you wouldn’t be so friendly with
her.”

“Charity given to her is charity given where it’s needed,” I muttered
with a red face.

I felt wretchedly underhanded and mean, and that’s one of the most
unbearable feelings for a self-respecting woman to endure. For one
reckless moment I thought of telling Betty the whole story. And then I
knew I mustn’t. I couldn’t make her understand. I couldn’t translate
Lizzie into the terms with which Mrs. Ferguson was familiar. I saw that
broken woman emerging from my narrative a smirched and bespattered
pariah of the kind that, from time immemorial, ladies have regarded as
their hereditary foe.

It would have been indulging my conscience at her expense, and my
conscience--well, it had to resign its job for the present. It was odd
that with a worthy intention and in connection with one of the best of
women, I felt my only course was to deceive. All may have been well
with Pippa’s world, but certainly all was not well with mine. I don’t
know what was wrong, only that something was. I know I should have been
able to tell the truth, I _know_ I ought not to have been made to feel
a coward and a sneak.

Betty enlarged upon her scheme of benefaction and we drove down the
avenue, full from curb to curb and glittering in its afternoon prime.
Wuzzy was much entertained, leaning forward to eye passing horses and
call greetings to dogs on the front seats of motors. Once when he
needed feminine attention he turned to me, remarking commandingly,
“Wipe my nose.” As I performed this humble service he remained
motionless, his eyes raised in abstraction to a church clock. I have
heard many people envy the care-free condition of childhood and wish
they were babes again. I never could agree with them; the very youthful
state has always seemed to me a much overrated period. But as I obeyed
Wuzzy’s command it suddenly came upon me how delightful it would be
to be so utterly free of responsibility, so unperplexed by ethical
problems, so completely dependent, that even the wiping of one’s nose
was left to other hands.

I left Lizzie early that evening. Miss Bliss and Mr. Hazard were with
her and I had a fancy they liked being together without me sitting
about and overhearing. I pulled a chair up in front of the fire and
mused over that question of taking Betty’s money. My discharged
conscience was homesick and wanted to come back. In the midst of my
musing Roger came in, and presently, he and I sitting one on either
side of the grate, it occurred to me that he would be a good person
to put in the place of my conscience--get his opinion on the vexed
question and not let him know it. I would do it so cleverly he’d never
guess and I could abide in his decision. Excellent idea!

“Roger,” I began in a simple earnest tone, “I want to ask you about a
question of ethics, and I want you to give me your full attention.”

“Go ahead,” said Roger, putting a foot on the fender. “I’m not an
authority, but I’ll do my best.”

“Suppose I knew a woman--no, a man’s better--who was, well, we’ll
say a thief, not a habitual thief but one who had thieved once, got
into bad company and been led away. And I happened to know he wanted
help--financial--to tide him over a period of want. Would I be doing
something underhanded if I asked some one--let’s say you--to give him
the money and didn’t tell you about the thieving?”

I thought I had done it rather well. Roger was interested.

“Are you supposed to know for certain he’d only committed the one
offense?”

“Quite sure,” with conviction.

“What made him do it?”

It wasn’t so easy as I thought. Theft didn’t seem to fit the case.

“Well--he was tempted, and--er--didn’t seem to have as strict a moral
standard as most people.”

“Um,” Roger considered, then: “This seems to be a complicated case. Was
he completely without will, no force, no character?”

“Not at all,” I said sharply. “He had a great deal of will and any
amount of character.”

“He sounds like a dangerous criminal--plenty of force and will and no
moral standard.”

I felt irritated and raised my voice in a combative note:

“Now, Roger, don’t be narrow-minded. Can’t you imagine quite a fine
person who mightn’t think stealing as wrong as you or I think it?”

Roger did not look irritated, but he looked determined and spoke with
an argumentative firmness:

“Evie, I’ve always regarded you as an unusually intelligent woman.
As such I’d like you to explain to me how a fine person of will and
character can steal and not think it as wrong as you or I would think
it.”

It wasn’t working out as I expected and because it wasn’t and because
Roger was giving it his full attention, I felt more irritated.

“Didn’t I tell you he’d fallen into bad company?”

“You did and I’ve taken it into consideration, but--”

“Roger, this isn’t a legal investigation. You’re not trying to break
up the beef trust or impose a fine on Standard Oil. It’s just a simple
question of right and wrong.”

“I’m glad you think it’s simple. This person with any amount of
character fell under a bad influence?”

“That’s it--he was undermined, and though he was, as I said, a fine
person, quite noble in some respects, he didn’t think stealing was so
wicked as the average respectable citizen does.”

Roger put the other foot on the fender and looked at me with increasing
concentration.

“I don’t understand at all. Let me try and get to the bottom of it.
What did he steal?”

For a moment I stared at him blankly without answering.

He went on. There was no doubt about his giving me his full attention,
it was getting fuller every moment.

“If you’ll tell me the nature of his theft and under what provocation
and circumstances it was committed maybe I’ll be able to get a better
idea of the kind of person he was. What did he steal?”

“But, Roger, this is a hypothetical case.”

“I know it is, but that doesn’t make any difference in the answer. What
was the nature of the theft--money, jewels, grafting on a large scale,
or taking an apple from the grocer’s barrel?”

I looked around the room in desperation, saw the blank left on the wall
by the Marie Antoinette mirror, and said doggedly:

“He stole a mirror.”

[Illustration: “Let me try and get at the bottom of it”]

“A mirror,” said Roger with the air of having extracted an important
bit of evidence. “Umph-- Why did he take it?”

“Roger, what’s the sense of going into all these details?”

“Evie,” with maddening obstinacy, all the more maddening because it was
so mild, “if I’m to give an answer I must know. Did he intend to sell
it?”

“Yes, he did.”

I was so angry that I felt ready to defend any one who stole anything
from anybody.

“My dear girl,” said Roger, still mild but also reproachful, “how can
you sit there and tell me that a man who steals a mirror intending to
sell it is a fine person, quite noble in some respects?”

“I can’t tell you. I won’t. I asked you a simple question about a
man--a man I just made up--and you cross-examine me as if I was being
tried for murder and you were the lawyer on the other side.”

“But, Evie, I only was trying to do what you asked.”

“Well, stop trying. Let that man and his mirror drop or I’ll lose my
temper.” I snatched up the poker and began to poke the fire. “I’ve
lost it now.” I poked furiously in illustration. “It’s too aggravating.
I did so want your opinion about it.”

“Well, then, here it is--”

I stopped poking and leaned forward, so far forward that to keep my
balance I had to put a foot on the fender.

“Has one a right to accept pecuniary aid for a person who has committed
an offense--the first--without telling the benefactor of that offense?
Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“I think one has.”

“You’re sure they needn’t tell the benefactor?”

“I wouldn’t. If you want to give a man a hand-up why rake up his past?”

I got it at last. My bad temper vanished. I was wreathed in smiles--

“Oh, Roger,” I cried joyously, “that’s just what I wanted you to say.
It’s such a relief that we’ve worked it out at last,” and I heaved a
sigh and put the other foot on the fender.

I sat for a moment, absently looking down, then I became conscious
of my feet, side by side on the brass rail--two small patent leather
points. I looked along the rail and there on the other side were
Roger’s--two large patent leather points. They looked like four small
black animals, perched in couples, sociably warming themselves by the
blaze.

“What are you smiling at?” said Roger.

“How near we came to quarreling over an imaginary man stealing an
imaginary mirror,” said I.




XII


LIZZIE is coming to life, hesitatingly and as if with reluctance. I
suppose it’s natural for her to be extraordinarily weak, but I never
would have believed she could be conscious enough to talk and so
utterly indifferent to everything that should concern her. When I
told her about the money, saying it came from a friend, she murmured,
“That’s all right,” and never asked who the friend was. She seemed to
have no interest in the subject, or in any subject, for that matter.
She makes me think of a brilliant, highly colored plant that a large
stone has fallen on.

One afternoon last week, when I was sitting by the table in her room
reading, she suddenly spoke.

“Evie, how long is it that I’ve been sick here?”

“Nearly a month. You’ve been very ill, but you’re getting better now
every day.”

She said no more and I got up and began moving about the room,
arranging it for the evening. I was pulling down the blinds when I
heard her stirring, and looking back, saw that she had twisted about
in the bed and was watching me. In the dusk, her face, framed in elf
locks of black hair, looked like a white mask. I thought she was going
to ask me something--there was a question in her eyes--but she made
no sound. I lighted the lamp and shifted into place the paper rose
that hung from the shade. She continued to follow my movements with
the intent observation of an animal. I have seen dogs watch their
masters just that way. The feeling that something was on her mind grew
stronger. I went to her and sat on the side of the bed.

“Do you want to ask me anything?” I said.

She shook her head, but her eyes were unquiet. Suddenly I thought I
guessed. I put my hand on hers and spoke very low.

“Lizzie, the thing you told me that night when I came up and found you
here”--I looked into her face to see if she understood--“I’ve never
told to anybody.”

She stared at me without answering.

“Do you know what I mean?”

She gave a slight affirmative nod.

“And I never will tell it to any one unless you ask me to.”

“_I_ don’t care if you tell it,” she said with weak indifference.

It was the first gleam of her old self. Whatever she had wanted to say
to me it was not that. Other women--the women of my world--would have
been fearful of their secret lightly guarded. I don’t believe she had
given it a thought. Either her trust in me was implicit or she didn’t
care who knew it. I like to think it was the first.

She settled back against the pillow and made feeble smoothings of the
sheet. Still persuaded of her inward disquiet I sat silent waiting for
her to speak. After a moment or two she did.

“Have any letters come for me?”

I knew _this_ was the question. I got up and gave her the pile of
letters stacked on the desk. She looked over the addresses, then pushed
them back to me.

“I was afraid he might write to me,” she said. “But it’s all right, he
hasn’t.”

I got a shock of displeased surprise.

“You didn’t expect him to _write_ to you, Lizzie?”

“He might have.”

“But after--after what you told me, surely, oh, surely, you don’t want
to hear from him?”

I was fearful of her answer. If she was waiting, hungering for a letter
from him, it would have been too much even for me.

“That’s just it--I _don’t_ want to. It’s all in the past, as if it had
happened a hundred years ago. I want it to stay there--to be dead.”

She looked into my eyes, a deep look, that for some inexplicable reason
reminded me of Wuzzy’s. I have long realized that my point of view, my
mental processes, are too remote from hers for me ever to see into her
mind or understand its workings. But I was certain that she meant what
she said. My poor Lizzie, coming up out of the Valley of the Shadow,
with her feeble feet planted on the past.

A few days after this she was well enough to sit up in bed with her
hair brushed and braided, and read her letters. One was from Vignorol
asking her why she had not come for her lessons.

She gave it to me, remarking:

“I wish you’d answer that. Tell him I’ve been sick, and that I’ll never
come for any more lessons.”

I dropped my sewing, making the round eyes of astonishment with which I
greet her unexpected decisions.

“You’re not thinking of giving up your singing?”

“Yes, forever.”

“But why? Surely you’re not going to let one failure discourage you.”

I was disturbed. From a few recent remarks, I am satisfied that she has
no means whatever. She _must_ go on with her singing; as Mrs. Bushey
would say, “One must live.” She could curb her ambitions, make her
living on a less brilliant plane.

“I’ll never sing again,” she answered.

“You might give up attempting the opera, or even concerts. But there
are so many other things you could do. Church singing--you began that
way.”

“Yes, that’s it. I began, and I’m not going back to where I began. I’m
going on or I’m going to stop. And I can’t go on.”

I thought she alluded to her lack of means and said:

“Lizzie, I can get the money for you to go back to Vignorol--I can get
people who will stand behind you and give you every chance.”

She looked listlessly at the wall and shook her head.

“It’s no use. I don’t want it. Masters was right. I know it now.”

“You mean--” I stopped; it seemed too cruel.

But she was minded now to be as ruthlessly clear-sighted about herself
as she had once been obstinately blind.

“The whole equipment--I haven’t got it. He banked too much on my
looks, thought they were going to go farther than they did. If I’d had
a great voice--one of the wonderful voices of the world, like Patti
or Melba--it wouldn’t have mattered about not having the rest. But
there are hundreds with voices as good as mine. He thought beauty and
dramatic instinct were going to carry me through. He knew I had the one
and he thought he could give me the other--train it into me. Nobody
knows how hard he tried. He used to make me stand up and go over every
gesture after him, he even made marks on the floor where I was to put
my feet. And then he’d sit down and hold his head and groan. Poor
Jack”--she gave a little dry laugh--“he had an awful time!”

I could realize something of Masters’ desperation. To have discovered a
song-bird in the western wilds, hoped to retrieve his fortunes with it
and then found a defect in its mechanism that neither work nor brains
nor patience could supply--it _was_ bitter luck.

“He was an artist,” she went on. “He could have gone straight to the
top but he lost his voice after the first few years, while he was still
touring the small European towns.”

I noticed that she spoke in the past tense, her tone one of melancholy
reminiscence as if he really _was_ dead. She might have been delivering
his funeral sermon and placing flowers of memory on his tomb.

“Why couldn’t you have got from him what he tried to teach you? I can’t
understand, you’re so intelligent.”

She mused for a moment, then said:

“I’ve been thinking of that myself while I’ve been lying here. Looking
back I don’t seem to have given it my full mind and I’ve been wondering
if perhaps I wasn’t too taken up with him. I couldn’t get away from
the real romance, the love-making and the quarrels, first one and then
the other. There wasn’t anything else in my life. I hadn’t time to be
interested in those women I had to pretend to be. My affairs and me
were the only things that counted.”

“But you were so much in earnest, so desperately anxious to succeed.”

She gave me a side look, sharp and full of meaning.

“Because, though I wouldn’t acknowledge it, I knew he wanted to break
with me and the only way I could keep him was to make good.”

“Good heavens, how horrible!” I winced under her pitiless plain
speaking.

“Yes, it was,” she said gently.

There was a pause. The little palliatives I had to offer, the timid
consolations, were shriveled up by that fierce and uncompromising
candor. Her voice broke the silence, quietly questioning:

“I suppose you think I did a very bad thing?”

“Oh, Lizzie, don’t ask me that. I can’t sit in judgment. That’s for
you, not for me.”

She looked at her hands, long and thin on the quilt. Thus down-drooped,
her face was shockingly haggard and wasted. Yet of the storm which had
caused this ruin she was now speaking with a cold impersonal calm, as
if it had all happened to somebody else. My own emotions that swelled
to passionate expression died away before that inscrutable and baffling
indifference.

“He was a very fine man,” she said suddenly.

“_Fine?_” I gasped.

“Yes, in lots of ways. About his art and work for one thing--he had
great ideals. And he was very good to me.”

That was the coping stone. I heard myself saying in a faint voice:

“How?”

“Well, for one thing, he never lied to me. He told the truth about the
singing, about me, about everything. He wasn’t a coward, either. He
didn’t run away and send me a letter. He came and had it out with me,
made me understand.”

This time I couldn’t speak. Her next words were like the laying of the
final wreath on the bier of the loved and respected dead:

“It had to end and he ended it. He didn’t care how much it hurt me, or
what I felt, or what anybody thought. That’s the right way to be--not
to let other people’s feelings make you afraid, not to be considerate
because it’s easier than fighting it out. He was a fine man.”

That was John Masters’ obituary as delivered by his discarded mistress.

The thing I couldn’t get over was that she showed no signs of
penitence. As far as I could see she was in no way inclined to admit
her fault, to bow her head and say, “I have sinned.” Her own conduct
in the affair seemed to be the last thing that troubled her. Yet I
can say that I, a woman with the traditional moral views, could not
think her either abandoned or base. I don’t know to what world or creed
she belonged, or to what ethical code she adhered, except that it was
not mine or anybody else’s that I have ever known. Whatever it was it
seemed to uphold her in her course. What was done was done and that
was the end of it. No strugglings of inner irresolution, no attempt to
exonerate or exculpate, disturbed her somberly steadfast poise. What
would have been admirable to any one was her acceptance of the blow,
and her recognition of her lover’s right to deliver it.

As she improved, moved about the room and took her place against
accustomed backgrounds, I began to realize that the change in her
was more than skin deep. Her wild-fire was quenched, her moods, her
beamings, her flashes of anger were gone. A wistful passivity had
taken their place, lovely but alien to her who was once Lizzie Harris.
Whatever Masters had said in that last interview had acted like an
extinguisher on a bright and dancing flame. It made me think of Dean
Swift and Vanessa. Nobody knows what the dean said to Esther Vanhomrigh
in the arbor among the little trees--only she had returned from it a
broken thing to die soon after. Her lover had killed her; Lizzie’s had
not quite, but he had certainly put out the light in that wayward and
rebellious spirit.

It has its good points, for those people who are to help her find her
more comprehensible, much more to their liking than they would the old
Lizzie. Roger, for example, has met her again and is quite impressed.
It was the other afternoon when I was sitting with her in her front
room. The door was open and as I talked I listened for steps that would
stop two flights below at _my_ door. I had had no word that steps might
be expected, but one doesn’t always need the word. There are mornings
when a woman wakes and says to herself, “He’ll come to-day.” It had
been one of these mornings.

At five, when the lights were lit and I had put on the tea water to
boil, I heard the ascending feet. If it was some one for me could I
bring them up? Lizzie would be delighted. I ran down and found him
standing at my door preparing to knock with the head of his cane. Would
he mind coming up--I didn’t like to leave her too much alone? No, he
wouldn’t, and up he came.

Lizzie, long and limp in the easy chair, was sheltered from the lamp
glow by the paper rose. She smiled and held out her hand and I saw he
was shocked by the change in her, as well he might be. The only other
time he had seen her was the night of the concert, the climax of that
little day to which every dog of us is entitled.

All things that are frail and feeble appeal to Roger. Both he and Mrs.
Ashworth get stiff and ice-bound before bumptious, full-fed, prosperous
people. He sat down beside her and made himself very agreeable. And
I was pleased, immensely pleased; could better endure the thought of
Lizzie like a smashed flower if by her smashing she was to win his
approval and interest.

As I made the tea I could hear their voices rising and falling. Coming
up the passage with the tray the doorway framed them like a picture and
I stopped and gazed admiringly. It was like the cover of a ten-cent
magazine--a graceful woman and a personable man conversing elegantly
in a gush of lamplight. The lamplight was necessary to the illusion,
for it hid Roger’s wrinkles and made his gray hair look fair. He could
easily have passed for the smooth-shaven, high-collared wooer, and
Lizzie, languidly reclining with listening eyes, quite fittingly filled
the rôle of wooee.

An hour afterward, as we went down-stairs, Roger was silent till we got
to my door. Then he said:

“She seems very different from what she was that night when I saw her
in your room.”

“She is different. You don’t seem to realize she’s been very sick.”

“Yes--but--”

I pushed open the door.

“Roger, aren’t you coming in?”

“Sorry, but I can’t. I’m going out to dinner and I have to go home and
change.”

I was disappointed, but I wouldn’t have shown it for the world. I
couldn’t help thinking it was rather stupid of him not to have made a
move to get away sooner, to have a moment’s talk in my parlor by my
lamplight.

“From what you told me of her I thought she was rather high-pitched and
western.”

“I _never_ said that.”

“Maybe you didn’t, but somehow I got the impression. She’s anything but
that--delicate, fine.”

“Um,” I responded. These positive opinions on a person I knew so much
better than he did rasped me a little.

Roger shifted his hat to his left hand and moved to the stair-head.

“There’s something very unusual about her, a sort of fragile simplicity
like a dogrose. Good-by, Evie. Good night.”

I went into my room. It was cold and the chill of it struck
uncomfortably on me. I had a queer feeling of being suddenly
flat--spiritually--as a flourishing lawn might feel when a new roller
goes over it. It improves the looks of the lawn. That it didn’t
have the same effect on me I noticed when I caught myself in the
chimneypiece glass. What a dim little colorless dib of a woman I was!
And how particularly dim and colorless a dib I must look beside Lizzie.

I got my supper, feeling aggrieved. I had never before accused fate
of being unfair when it forgot to make me pretty. But now I felt
hurt, meanly discriminated against. It wasn’t just to give one woman
shining soulful eyes, set deep under classic brows, and another small
gray-green ones that said nothing and grew red in a high wind. It
wasn’t a square deal.

Yesterday afternoon Betty turned up and found the invalid sitting in
my steamer chair looking at the juniper bush. Betty had never spoken
to her before and they talked amicably, Mrs. Ferguson visibly thawing.
I left them, for I want Betty to know her and help her of her own free
will, want to eliminate myself as the middleman.

I was in the kitchenette, getting tea again, when Betty came to the
door and hissed her impressions in a stage whisper.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was so charming?”

Business with the kettle.

“She’s one of the sweetest creatures I ever met.”

Business with the hot water.

“I don’t know why I ever thought she looked theatrical. She must have
had on somebody else’s clothes. She’s a Madonna--those eyes and that
sad far-away look.”

Business with the toast.

Betty was so interested that she got into the kitchenette with me. The
congestion was extreme, especially as she takes up so much room and is
so hard. You can’t squeeze by her or flatten her against walls--you
might as well try to flatten a Corinthian column. I had to feel round
her for cups and plates, engirdle her glistening and prosperous bulk
and grope about on the shelves behind her.

“It’s absurd of her fooling about with this music. She ought to marry.
Has she any serious admirer?”

“Wouldn’t any woman who looked like that have serious admirers? Betty,
I can’t find the cups. Would you mind moving an inch or two?”

“I wouldn’t mind at all if there was an inch or two to move in to. When
you have a kitchen like this you’re evidently expected to hire your
maid by measure. Who’s her admirer?”

“Oh, every man in the house.”

“Are any of them possible?”

I pried her back from the stove and inserted myself between her and it,
feeling like a flower being pressed in the leaves of a book.

“No, not very possible.”

“I’ll have to see what I can do.”

As I poured the water on the tea I couldn’t help saying over my
shoulder:

“There’s Mr. Albertson. He’s still unclaimed in the ‘Found’ Department.”

Mr. Albertson hadn’t loved me at first sight and Betty feels rather
sore about it. She drew a deep breath, thereby crushing me against the
front of the stove.

“No,” she said consideringly. “He won’t do. He’s too old and too
matter-of-fact. Besides, I want him for one of the Geary girls, my
second cousins, who live up in the Bronx and make shoe bags. I’m not
sure which he’ll like best, so to-morrow night I’m having them both to
dine with him.”

Then we had tea and Betty’s good impression increased. She went away
whispering to me on the stairs that she was quite ready to tide Miss
Harris over her difficulties and help her when she had decided what she
wanted to do.




XIII


THE weather is fine and we are all recuperating. I must confess the
physical and spiritual storm of the last six weeks has rather laid me
waste. I haven’t felt so much in so many ways since--well, my high
water mark was the last year of my married life and that’s getting
to be a faded canvas. The metaphor is somewhat mixed, but if I draw
attention to it it can pass. I’m like that letter-writing English woman
who couldn’t spell, and when she was doubtful about a word always
underlined it and if it was wrong it passed for a joke.

We sit about a good deal in my front room and late in the afternoon
Lizzie’s admirers drop in. The doctor, by the way, is one of them. He
says he’s still interested in “the case,” poor young man. Lizzie greets
them with wistful softness and seems as indifferent to their homage as
if they were pictures hanging on the wall. I talk to them, and while
we talk we are acutely conscious of her, singularly dominated by her
compelling presence.

In all the change in her that quality is as strong as ever. I do not
yet know what it is that makes her the focusing point of everybody’s
attention, but that she is, nobody who has lived in this house could
deny. I believe actresses are trained to “take the stage and hold it,”
but Lizzie has the faculty as a birthright. It is not her looks; I have
seen hundreds of women who were as handsome as she and had no such
ascendency. It is not the high-handed way she imposes her personality
upon every one, because she doesn’t do that any more. It is not her
serene self-absorption, her unconscious ignoring of _your_ little
claims to be a person of importance. It’s something so powerful no
one can escape it, and so subtle no one can define it--some sort of
magnetic force that puts her always in the center, makes her presence
felt like an unescapable sound or a penetrating light. Wherever she is
she is “it.” “Where the MacGregor sits there is the head of the table.”

Wednesday afternoon in the slack hours--the rush hours are from five to
seven, when the men come home from business--Mrs. Stregazzi, the eldest
small Stregazzi and Mr. Berwick dropped in. They had just heard of her
illness and came to make inquiries. Berwick explained this because
Mrs. Stregazzi couldn’t. In a large, black lynx turban that looked like
Robinson Crusoe’s hat, and a long plush coat, she dropped on the end of
the sofa tapping her chest in explanatory pantomime and fetching loud
breaths from the bottom of her lungs.

Berwick looked morosely at her, then explained:

“It’s cigarettes--cuts her wind.”

“It’s my new corset,” Mrs. Stregazzi shot out between gasps, “and your
stairs.”

The small Stregazzi, a little pale girl of ten, eyed her mother for a
considering moment, then apparently satisfied with her symptoms, sat
down on the prie-dieu and heaving a deep sigh, folded her hands in her
lap and assumed a patient expression.

Lizzie’s illness disposed of, the conversation turned--no, jumped,
leaped, sprang--into that world of plays and concerts in which they
had their beings. Mrs. Stregazzi, though still having trouble with her
“wind,” launched forth into a description of the concert tour she and
Berwick were to take through New England. Berwick had made a hit at
Lizzie’s concert and he’d “got his chance at last.”

I sat aside and marveled at her. She must have been forty years
old and she looked as weather-beaten as if, for twenty of the forty
years, she had been the figurehead of a ship. But vigor and enthusiasm
breathed from her. With the Robinson Crusoe hat slipped to one side of
her head and the new corsets emitting protesting creaks as she swayed
toward me, she gasped out the route, the terms, the programs, then
dabbing at the little girl with her muff, exclaimed:

“And the kids are going to stay with mommer in the Bronx. Mrs. Drake,
I’ve got the cutest little flat at One Hundred and Sixty-ninth Street.
Wish you’d go up there some day and you’ll see the best pair of
children and the grandest old lady in Manhattan.”

Berwick growled an assent and Miss Stregazzi, with her air of polite
patience, filled in while her mother caught her breath.

“Grandma’s seventy-two. She used to sing in the opera chorus, but she’s
got too old.”

Mrs. Stregazzi nodded confirmation, her eyes full of pride.

“That’s the way she pulled me along and got my education. Didn’t let
go of the rudder till I could take hold. Now I do it. It’s been a
struggle, took me into vaudeville, where I met Stregazzi and had my
troubles, but they’re over now. I’m back where I belong and mommer can
rest, blessed old soul. I keep them pretty snug, don’t I, Dan?”

Berwick gave a second growl and then the conversation swung back to the
inevitable topic. I felt as if I were on a scenic railway on a large
scale, being rushed perilously along with wild drivings through space,
varied by breathless stoppages in strange towns. I never heard so much
geography since my school-days or so much scandal since I came to the
age when I could listen to my elders. Names I knew well and names I’d
never heard jostled one another in those flying sentences, and the
quarrels! _and_ the divorces! AND the love-affairs! I looked uneasily
at the little girl and caught her in the act of yawning. In proof of
her grandmother’s good training she concealed her mouth with a very
small hand in a very dirty white glove. Her mother ended a graphic
account of the trials of a tertium quid on the road:

“And he pulled a kodak from under his coat and snapped them just in the
middle of the kiss. _That_ divorce wasn’t contested.”

The little girl, having accomplished her yawn, dropped her hand and
said without interest, but as one who feels good manners demand some
sort of comment:

“Whose divorce?”

“No one you know, honey. A lady I toured with two seasons ago.”

Lizzie and Berwick listened. I had never heard him do anything else.
Before I came to live here if I had been told of the excellence of his
vocal performance and then seen him I would have shaken my head and
said: “That’s not the man.” A winter at Mrs. Bushey’s has taught me
that the artist does not have a brand upon his brow like Cain.

His listening was of a glowering unresponsive kind; Lizzie’s was all
avid attention. It was the first time since her illness that she had
shown any animation. A faint color came into her face, now and then
she halted Mrs. Stregazzi’s flow of words with a sharp question. The
projected tour was the thing that absorbed her. She kept pulling
Mrs. Stregazzi out of the scandals back to it. There was no envy in
her interest. It was to me extremely pathetic, she, the failure,
speeding Berwick on his way to success. As might have been expected
he was stolidly indifferent to it, but I was amazed to see that Mrs.
Stregazzi, whom I was beginning to like, was untouched or was too
engrossed in her own affairs to notice anything else.

Outside at the head of the staircase she paused, and giving a glance at
the closed door, said in a lowered voice:

“Where’s Masters?”

Berwick had gone on ahead, the little girl with her arm hooked over the
banister was slowly descending. Mrs. Stregazzi’s eye, holding mine,
was intelligent and questioning. I saw that she knew and took it for
granted that I did.

“He doesn’t come any more. They’ve had a difference--a quarrel, I
think.”

“Left her!” She raised her painted eyebrows, and compressing her lips,
looked down the stairs and emitted a low “Umph!”

A world of meaning was in that sound, a deep understanding pity.

“I thought he’d do it,” she said, as if speaking to herself. “She
couldn’t hold him the way things were going.”

She stood musing, her head slightly drooped. The Robinson Crusoe
hat changed its angle and slid down over her forehead. When the fur
interfered with her vision she arrested its progress, ramming it
violently back.

“I guess she feels pretty bad,” she ruminated, still with the effect of
thinking aloud. “That man’s got a terribly taking way with women.”

I felt very uncomfortable. If it was unnecessary to contradict her it
was also unnecessary to admit her charges by receiving them in silence.
I changed the subject:

“She says she’ll never sing again. It’s very unfortunate.”

Mrs. Stregazzi harpooned the hat with an enormously long pin, tipped by
a diamond cluster.

“Never sing again--oh, rats!”

She grimaced as she charged with the pin through a series of
obstructions.

“Don’t you be afraid, dearie. She’ll sing--she can’t help it.”

“But she’s positive about it. She insists.”

“Does she?” She shook her head, testing the solidity of the anchorage.
“She’ll be back singing before the spring. _You_ don’t know, but it’s
in her blood. We can’t keep off, none of us. And _she!_ Just wait.
That’s all she’s made for.”

The little Stregazzi had come to an end of her adventure against the
newel post. She lolled upon it, wiping the crevices with her fingers,
then looking at her gloves to see how much dirtier they were.

Her mother descended a step, paused, cogitated, then turned to me,
frowning.

“I suppose he’s done nothing for her?”

I saw she meant money. The astonishing rawness of it made me redden to
my hair. She waited for my answer, blind apparently to the expression
of anger which must have been as plain as my outraged blush.

“As to that--” I began haughtily.

“He hasn’t. Well, I’ll send her round fifty dollars to-morrow and if
that’s not enough drop me a line at mother’s and I’ll forward some
more. This is the best contract I’ve ever had.”

When I explained and tried to thank her for Lizzie she laughed.

“Oh, don’t bother to tell her about it. It’s all in the day’s work. If
you’ve got some rich woman interested in her so much the better. But,
dearie,” she laid her hand on mine resting on the banister, “don’t you
fret about her. _She’ll_ go back to the old stamping ground.”

When I went back into the room Lizzie was sitting in the wicker chair
gazing out of the window. She spoke without looking at me.

“Do you know what I feel like? As if it was night and I was on a ship
going out to sea, and as if the land was getting smaller and smaller. I
can just see the lights of houses and little towns twinkling in a line
along the edge of the shore.”

“Where’s the ship going?” I asked.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” came her answer through the dusk.

A knock cut off my reply. It was Roger, dropped in for an hour before
dinner. Lizzie rose and was for going, but I urged her to stay and she
sank back in her chair, glad, poor soul, to be with us and escape the
dreariness of her own thoughts. I lit the student lamp and he and I sat
down by it with Lizzie near the window, the light falling across her
skirts, the upper part of her dimly blocked out in shadows and the pale
patches of her face and hands.

As usual, she said almost nothing and a selfish fear stirred in me that
she was going to spoil our hour. It’s hard for two people on intimate
confidential terms, to have a gay spontaneous interview while a third
sits dumb in a corner. I think Roger felt the irk of it at first. He
did most of the talking and he did it to me. But as the time wore on
I noticed that he began to address himself more and more to her. He
seemed unconscious of it and it set me wondering. Was he--a man not
susceptible to personal influences--going to feel that queer magnetic
draw? It interested me so much that I forgot to follow what he said and
watched him, and there was no doubt about it--he _did_ keep turning
toward the window, where he could see nothing but a motionless shape
and the indistinct oval of a face.

The conversation resolved itself into a monologue, two mute ladies and
a talking man.

Roger really did feel it; Roger, who would hardly listen to me when
I told him about her in the restaurant. It showed what a force she
possessed, and my fancy dwelt on it till I began to see it as a visible
thing stretching from her and reaching out toward him. It was an
uncanny idea, but it obsessed me, and Roger’s voice sunk to a rumbling
bass murmur as I tried to picture what it might look like--a thin
steady ray like a search-light, or a quivering thread of vibrating air,
or long clutching tentacles such as an octopus has, or a spectral arm
of gigantic size like the one Eusapia Pallidino conjured out of shape
when “the conditions were favorable.” The cessation of his voice broke
my imaginings and I was rather glad of it. Next time I see him I’m
going to tell him about them and ask him which of the collection it
felt most like.

I wrote all this a week ago, and reading it over to-night it seems
strange that I was only amused, strange by contrast with the way I feel
about the same thing now. It’s not that there’s any difference, or that
anything has gone wrong, but--well, it was a joke then and it doesn’t
seem to be a joke any more.

What’s made the change was something that happened here this afternoon.
It’s nothing at all, but it disturbed me. I hate to think it did. I
hate to write it did. I hate to have the suspicious petty side of me
come up and look at me and say: “I’m still here. You can’t get rid of
me. I’m bound up with the rest of you and every now and then I break
loose.”

If I wasn’t a foreboding simpleton who had had her nerve shaken by bad
luck I’d simply laugh. And instead of doing that I feel like a cat
on the edge of a pond with a stone tied around its neck, and I can’t
sleep. I put out the light and went to bed and here I am up again,
wrappered and slippered, writing it out. If I put it down in black and
white, see it staring up at me in plain words, it will fall back into
its proper place. An insignificant thing--a nonsensical thing--the
kind of thing you tell to your friends at a lunch as a good story on
yourself.

I was out with Betty and didn’t get home till five. As I came up the
stairs I heard voices on the top floor, just a low rise and fall,
nothing distinguishing. Since her illness Lizzie keeps her sitting-room
door open and I knew the voices were from there. I supposed one of the
admirers was with her and went into my rooms and took off my things.
Then I thought it would be nice to go up and make them tea. And I went
up and it was Roger.

That’s all.

Why should _that_ keep me awake? Why all evening should it have kept
coming up between me and the pages I tried to read? Aren’t they both my
friends? Why can’t they laugh and talk together and I be contented? And
it was all so natural and explicable. Roger had come to _my_ door and,
finding me out, had gone up there to wait for me.

But--oh! Why should one woman be beautiful and one plain? Why should
one charm without an effort, be lovely with a flower’s unstudied grace,
and another stand awkward, chained in a stupid reserve, caught in
a web of self-consciousness, afraid of being herself? Why is Lizzie
Harris as she is and I as I am? I can’t write any more, I don’t get
anywhere. I know it’s all right. I _know_ it, but--something keeps me
awake.




XIV


IT’S two weeks to-day since that night when I couldn’t sleep. It’s
been a horrible two weeks--a sickening, disintegrating two weeks. My
existence has been dislocated, thrown wide of its bearings, as if the
world had taken a sudden wild revolution, whirled me through space, and
I had come up dizzy and bewildered, still in the old setting, but with
everything broken and upside down.

It began with that visit of Roger to Lizzie’s sitting-room. The
morning after I felt humiliated, utterly ashamed of myself. It’s no
new thing for me to be a fool. I permit myself that luxury. But to be
a mean-spirited, suspicious fool was indulging myself too far. I saw
Lizzie and she spoke about Roger, simply and sweetly, and my folly grew
to a monumental size, beneath which I was crushed. And my dread faded
as the horror of a nightmare fades when the morning comes, with the sun
and the sounds of every day.

I have heard people say that these moments of relief in a period of
anxiety are all that enable one to bear the strain. I don’t think
that’s true. Alterations of stress and serenity tear one to pieces. If
you’re going to be put on the rack it’s better to have no reprieve.
Then your mind accepts it, gets accustomed to it and you tune up your
nerves, screw your courage to the sticking place and march forward with
the calm of the hopeless.

On Sunday afternoon--that was yesterday--Roger and I were to have tea
with Mrs. Ashworth. He came earlier than I expected, wanting to take
a walk with me before we went there. Lizzie was in my sitting-room,
also Miss Bliss, picking over the last box of chocolates contributed
by the count. Miss Bliss was not dressed for receiving--instead of the
kimono and the safety pin she wore the Navajo blanket, and when she
saw him she gave a cry that would have done credit to Susanna when she
discovered the elders. I would have seen the humor of it--the model
who had posed for the altogether in abject confusion at being caught
huddled to the chin in a blanket as thick as a carpet--had I not had
all humor stricken from me by the sight of Roger in the doorway. The
cry had halted him. He evidently had no idea what had caused it. His
eyes swerved from Miss Bliss to sweep the room in a quick questioning
glance. When it touched Lizzie something shot up in it--the question
was answered. Miss Bliss made her escape without anybody noticing
her, and I heard about the walk and went into the back room to get my
outdoor things.

I have explained how the kitchenette and bathroom are a connecting
passage between the two larger rooms of the suite. I came back through
them, and having left the sitting-room door open, could see at the end
of the little vista Roger and Lizzie by the table. As once before I
had stopped to watch them, I stopped now, not smilingly this time, but
furtively, guiltily.

They were talking together. To watch wasn’t enough--I had to hear
and I stole forward, stepping lightly over the bathroom rug and half
closed the door. Standing against it, I listened. Heaven knows the
conversation was innocent enough. She was telling him about a bracelet
she wore that belonged to some of those Spanish people she was
descended from. I suddenly felt as if I was looking through a keyhole,
and had stretched out my hand to shut the door when a silence fell.
Then all the acquired decencies of race and breeding left me. I pushed
the door open a crack and peered in. She had taken the bracelet off
and given it to him and he was turning it about, studying it while she
watched him.

“I’ve been told it’s quite valuable as an antique,” she said. “Do you
suppose it really is?”

“I don’t know about the antique, but I should think it might have some
value. The design’s very unusual,” he answered, and handed it back to
her.

She clasped it on her arm, and as she did so, her head down-bent, they
were silent, his eyes on her face.

I had never seen him look at any woman that way, but I had seen other
men. It is an unmistakable look, the mute confession of that passion
which makes the proudest man a slave.

I closed the door and leaned against it. For a moment I felt sick and
frightened--frightened at what I’d seen and frightened of myself.

Presently I came into the room and found them still talking of the
bracelet. And then Roger and I started for our walk, leaving Lizzie
alone.

He suggested that we go round the reservoir and I agreed, stepping
along silently beside him. It was a raw bleak afternoon, no sun,
everything gray. The streets were sprinkled with sauntering Sunday
people who had a detached dark aspect against the toneless monochrome.
They looked as if they were moving in front of painted scenery. The
park was wintry, sear boughs patterned against the sky, blurs of
denuded bushes, expanses of hoary grass. Along the roadway the ruts
were growing crumbly with the frost, and little spears and splinters of
ice edged the puddles.

The reservoir shone a smooth steely lake, with broken groups of figures
moving about it. Some of them walked briskly, others loitered, red and
chilled. All kinds of people were making the circuit of that body of
confined and conquered water--Jews and Gentiles, simple and gentle,
couples of lovers, companies of young men, family parties with the
children getting in the way and being shoved to one side, stiff stout
women like Betty trying to lose a few pounds. On the west side vast
apartment-houses made a rampart, pierced with windows like a line of
forts.

We commented on the cold and Roger quickened the pace, sweeping me
along the path’s outer edge. Presently he began to talk of Lizzie,
leaning down to catch my answers, keen, impatient, straining to hear
me and not lose a word. He is a tall man and I am a small woman and
I bobbed along at his shoulder trying to keep up with him, trying to
sound bright and interested, and feeling myself a meager unlovely body
carrying a sick and shriveled heart.

“No, she’ll never sing again,” I said, in answer to a question. “She
seems to have made up her mind to that.”

He swung his cane, cutting at the head of a dry weed.

“That’s a good thing.”

“Why is it a good thing?”

“Oh, because,” he dropped a pace behind me to let a straggling,
red-nosed family pass and I craned my head back to hear him. “She’s not
fitted for that kind of life. It’s not for women like her.”

“Why?”

He was beside me again.

“She’s too--er--too fine, too delicately organized.”

I didn’t answer. Knowing what I did, what was there for me to say?

“The women to succeed in that have got to be aggressive, fight their
way like men. She never could do it.”

I again had no response and we fared on, I trying to keep up, hungry
for his next word and fearful of what it might be. It came in a voice
that had an artificial note of carelessness.

“What’s become of that man you told me about, that man we saw in the
hall one night when you first went up there?”

“I don’t know what’s become of him.”

“You haven’t seen him lately?”

“No, not for some weeks.”

There was another pause. I wasn’t going to help him. It was part of
my torment to wait and see how he was going to get the information he
wanted, to see Roger, uneasy and jealous, feeling round a subject, not
daring to be frank. When he could wait no longer his voice showed a
leashed and guarded impatience.

“You led me to believe he was a great friend of hers.”

“He _was_.”

“_Was?_ Is he so no longer?”

“No, they’ve had a quarrel of some sort.”

“Umph.”

Again a silence. We passed a trio of Jewish girls in long coats who
looked me over solemnly with large languorous eyes.

“He was a horrible-looking bounder,” he said.

“He was what he looked,” I answered.

“Then how,” he exclaimed, unable to restrain the question, “_could_ he
have been a friend of hers?”

He was embarrassed and ashamed, and to hide it cut vigorously at the
dead weeds with his cane. Through this childish ruse his desire to know
was as plain as if he had expressed it in words of one syllable.

“He was her sponsor. She was a sort of speculation of his; he was
training her for the operatic stage. I’ve told you all this before.”

“Yes, I know, but--well, it’s a reasonable explanation.”

He had been speaking with his face turned from me, his eyes following
the slashings of the cane. Now he lifted his head and looked across to
the apartment-houses. The movement, the brightened expression, the tone
of his voice, told of a lifted weight. He had heard it all before, but
then he hadn’t cared. Now, caring, he wanted to hear it again, to be
assured, to have all uncertainty appeased.

“It was a business arrangement,” he said. “Yes, I remember, you told me
some time ago.”

This time I didn’t answer because a thought had surged up in my mind
that had put everything else out--I ought to tell him! He was under
Lizzie’s spell and Lizzie was as unknown to him as if she had been an
inhabitant of Mars. He was charmed by a creature of his own creating,
an ideal built up on her beauty and her weakness. Did he know her as
she really was he would have recoiled from her as if she had been
one of the sirens from whom Ulysses fled. She was the opposite of
everything he imagined her to be, of everything he held sacred in
woman. John Masters had been her lover. It was appalling, monstrous. I
_must_ tell him.

And then I thought of her and how she had confessed her secret and I
had said I wouldn’t tell.

The impulse to reveal it for his sake and the impulse to keep silent
for hers, began to struggle in me. I became a battle-ground of two
contending forces. The desire to tell was strongest; it was like a live
thing fighting to get out. It filled me, crushed every other thought
and impulse, swelled up through my throat and pressed on my lips. I
bit them and walked on with fixed eyes. As if from a distance I heard
Roger’s voice:

“From what you said he must be an impossible cad. I knew she couldn’t
have had him for a friend. Poor girl, having to associate with a man
like that because business demanded it. What a rotten existence.”

I had to tell.

“Roger,” I said, hearing my voice sound hoarse.

“Yes.”

I felt suddenly dizzy and halted. Like a vision I saw Lizzie lying on
the sofa, whispering to me that Masters had left her. The inside of my
mouth was so dry I had difficulty in articulating. I stammered:

“Wait. I can’t walk so fast.”

He was very apologetic.

“Oh, Evie, dear, I beg your pardon. You should have told me before. I
am so used to walking alone that I forgot.”

We moved at a slower pace. The view that had receded from my vision
came back. My face was damp and the icy air blowing on it was good.
The spiritual fight went on, with my heart beating and beating like a
terrible warlike drum urging me on. Now was the time for him to know,
before it was too late. We were half-way round--I could get it over
before we’d made the full circuit. And then I’d be at peace, would have
done a hideous thing that I ought to do. Now--now! I fetched up a
breath from the bottom of my lungs. He spoke:

“That’s why she oughtn’t to go on with this singing. It brings a woman
into contact with people that she shouldn’t meet.”

Each sentence seemed to point my way clearer. If he’d had any doubts,
hadn’t been so completely without suspicion. But to hear him talk this
way! I tried to make a beginning with Lizzie’s whispering voice getting
in the way. I couldn’t find a phrase, nothing came but blunt brutal
words. There was a moment when I thought I was going to cry these out,
scream at him, “Roger, she was that man’s mistress!” Then everything
blurred and I caught hold of the fence.

I was pulled back to reality by the quick concern of his voice.

“Evie, are you ill?”

I suppose I looked awful. His face told me so; he was evidently scared.
I realized I couldn’t go on with it, must wait till a better time. The
thought quieted me and my voice was almost natural, though my lips felt
loose and shaky.

“I’m tired, I think.”

“You’re as white as death. Why didn’t you tell me? Good heavens, what
an idiot I am not to have noticed before.”

Two men and a child stopped. The intent and glassy interest of their
eyes helped to pull me together. I let go of the fence and put my
hands, trembling as if with an ague, into my muff. Roger gave the trio
a savage look, before which they quailed and slunk reluctantly away,
watching us over their shoulders.

“Come,” he said commandingly, and pulled my hand through his arm.
“We’ll go to the Eighty-sixth Street entrance and get a cab.”

We walked forward, arm in arm, and I gradually revived. I couldn’t come
to any decision now. I wasn’t fit. I must think it over by myself. My
forces began to come back and the feeling of my insides falling down
into my shoes went away. Roger was in a state of deep contrition and
concern, bending down to look into my face, while I held close to his
arm. People stared at us. I think they took us for lovers. They must
have thought the gentleman had singular taste to be in love with such a
sorry specimen of a woman.

When we reached the Eighty-sixth Street entrance he wanted to take me
home, but I insisted on going to Mrs. Ashworth’s. I couldn’t bear the
thought of my own rooms. Alone there, I would go back to that appalling
subject and I couldn’t stand any more of it now. We got into a taxi and
sped away through the Sunday quietness of the city, sweeping through
Columbus Circle and then down to Fifth Avenue. I leaned against the
window watching the long line of vehicles. I was empty of sensation,
gutted like a burned-out house, and that purposeful procession caught
and carried my attention, exercising on my spent being a hypnotic
attraction. Roger, finding me inclined for silence, sat back in his
corner and lighted a cigarette. He had accepted my explanations in
perturbed good faith. We sped on this way, with the glittering rush
that swept by my window, lulling me into a sort of exhausted torpor.

The usual adjusting of myself to Mrs. Ashworth’s environment was not
necessary. I harmonized better than I had ever done before. I am sure
every red corpuscle in my blood was pale, and if, on my former visits I
had instinctively moved softly, now I did so because I was too limp to
move any other way. If refinement, as some people think, is merely an
evidence of depleted vitality, I ought to have appeared one of the most
refined females of my day and generation.

Betty was there and Harry Ferguson, Harry obviously ill at ease. I
know just how he felt--as if he was too big for the chairs, and when
he spoke it sounded like a stevedore. I used to feel that my manner of
speech oscillated between that of the cowgirl in a western melodrama
and the heroine of one of my favorite G. P. R. James’ romances, who,
when she went out riding, described herself as “ascending her palfrey.”
Betty, I noticed, escaped the general blight. She is too nervelessly
unconscious; wouldn’t be bothered trying to correspond with anybody’s
environment.

I sat in a Sheraton chair and watched Mrs. Ashworth’s hands as she
made tea. The prominent veins interested me. I have heard that they
are an indication of blue blood, and though they are not pretty, they
suit Mrs. Ashworth as everything about her does. Her hands move deftly
and without hurry and she never interrupts conversation with queries
about sugar and cream. A maid, who was neither young nor old, pretty
nor ugly, an unobtrusive, perfectly articulated piece of household
machinery, made noiseless flittings with plates. Mrs. Ashworth does not
like men servants. I suppose they are clumsy and by their large bulky
shapes and gruff voices, disturb the rhythm of that beautiful, mellow,
subdued room.

Presently I was sipping my tea and looking at Harry Ferguson trying to
sip his in a perfect way. I knew that he didn’t like tea, would have
preferred a Scotch highball, but didn’t dare to ask for it. He spilled
some on the saucer, then dropped the spoon and had to grovel for it,
coming up red and guilty, looking as if he had been caught in some
shameful act. I could hear him telling Betty on the way home that it
was nonsense taking him to tea--why the devil hadn’t she dropped him at
the club. And Betty, making vague consoling sounds while she studied
the appointments of passing motors.

Then suddenly they began to talk of Lizzie Harris and I forgot Mrs.
Ashworth’s veins and Harry’s embarrassments. Betty explained her to
our hostess, and I sat looking into my cup and listening. It was
what might have been called the popularized version of a complicated
subject--Lizzie as a sad and chastened neophyte who had failed in
a great undertaking and been shattered. Mrs. Ashworth was softly
sympathetic. She turned to me.

“Roger tells me that she is a charming person and very handsome.”

I agreed.

“Pretty tough,” Harry growled. Then abashed by the rudeness of his
tone, cleared his throat and stared at Roger Clements the Signer as if
he had never noticed him before.

“I was wondering,” said Betty, “if she could teach singing. You know
she has nothing.”

I became aware that Betty had not come for nothing to sit on a Sheraton
chair and drink tea. As usual she had “a basic idea”. So had Mrs.
Ashworth--two entirely dissimilar minds had converged to the same point.

“Roger and I were talking about her the other evening,” said Roger’s
sister, “and I suggested that there are a great many women teachers and
their standing is good, I hear.”

On the subject of the wage-earning woman Mrs. Ashworth is not well
informed. I fancy she has admitted the fact that there must be
wage-earning women with reluctance. It would be better for them all to
be in homes with worthy husbands. But it has penetrated even to Mrs.
Ashworth’s sheltered corner that these adjuncts are not always found.

“We could get her pupils,” said Betty with determination--she felt Mrs.
Ashworth’s quality sufficiently to subdue it--“pupils among the right
sort of people. And you and I, and some others I know, could give her a
proper start.”

They talked on outlining a career for Lizzie as a singing teacher of
the idle rich. They would put her on her feet, they would make her more
than self-supporting. Their combined social influence extended over
that narrow belt which passes up through Manhattan Island like a vein
of gold. Lizzie would be placed in a position to tap the vein.

If I had suddenly hurled the truth into that benevolent conspiracy,
what a transformation! All the interest now centered round that
pitiful figure would dissolve like a morning mist and float away to
collect about something more deserving and understandable. If I should
represent her case as sufficiently desperate they would give her money,
but that much more valuable thing they were giving now--the hand
extended in fellowship--would be withdrawn as from the contact of a
leper.

In _their_ case I felt no obligation to tell. What they were doing
would not hurt them and it was necessary for her. I came back to the
old starting point--to help her, to get her back to where she ought to
be, I must deceive and go on deceiving. Unquestionably something was
wrong with my world. If I could only have lived in Pippa’s or fitted
Pippa’s philosophy to mine! But could anybody? I wish Robert Browning
was in my place, sitting here to-night by the student lamp, half dead
trying to decide what is the right thing to do.

Oh, I’m so tired--and I can’t get away from it, I can’t stop thinking
of it. Why did they ever meet? Why did I go down-stairs that afternoon
and bring him up? Why did a man--cold and indifferent--suddenly catch
fire as he had done? Why couldn’t I be left in peace? Why was it he, my
man, who had come to bring me back to life and joy? Why? why? why?




XV


THINGS have been in a state of quiescence for the last few days and
then, yesterday, there was a new development.

When I say things have been quiescent, I mean on the outside. In the
inside I have been as far from quiescent as I ever was in my life. That
last year with Harmon wasn’t nearly so bad as this. It was just my own
affair then. When your heart is breaking you can sit quiet and listen
to it cracking and it doesn’t matter to anybody but yourself. It’s just
a chance of fate that you should be a little floating particle full of
pain. The world goes on the same and you don’t matter.

But when other people’s destinies are tangled up in yours, when you
have to decide what’s best for _them_ with your reason and your
inclination pulling different ways--that’s having trouble for your
shadow in the daytime and your bedfellow at night. If I was an
indifferent spectator who could stand off and study the situation with
an impartial eye, I could come to a just decision. It’s trying to lift
myself out of it and be fair that’s so agonizing--it’s being afraid
that I may tell for my own sake, betray Lizzie to save myself.

There are strong, clear-minded people who could think straight to a
conclusion, take the responsibility and act, then eat their dinner
and go peacefully to bed. I’m not one of them. I’ve always been the
kind who sees both sides and wavers, afraid if they champion one they
may be unjust to the other. Last night I was thinking of the girl in
_The Master Builder_ when she tells the hero that he hasn’t “a robust
conscience.” Then I thought of John Masters and how he broke the
fetters of his own forging. They were both right. I can see it and I
admit it but I never would have had the courage to do as they did. To
hurt and hurt for yourself--no, I couldn’t.--But I must get on to the
new development.

Betty came yesterday afternoon and took me for a drive. Under normal
circumstances this is one of my greatest treats. To be with Betty is
always good, and to watch the glory of New York on parade while Betty
explains charitable schemes or gives advice on the best mode of life
for a widow of moderate means, has been one of the joys of the winter.
Then there were small individual pleasures that I silently savored
as we glided along: the springy softness of the cushions, the fine
feel of the fur rug, wonderful clothes in show-windows, and wonderful
clothes out of show-windows making beautiful ladies more beautiful. And
there was an experience that never lost its zest, full of a thrilling
significance: when we all stopped, a block of vehicles from curb to
curb, and let the foot passengers pass. It assured me we were still a
democracy. If we had lived in the days before the French Revolution
we’d have gone dashing along and the foot passengers would have had
to dodge our proud wheels at the peril of their lives. Now we wait
on their convenience. I have seen the whole traffic drawn up while a
tramp shuffled across, while we millionaires--I am always a millionaire
when I ride with Betty--sat back and were patient. I have always hoped
Thomas Jefferson was somewhere where he could look down and see.

Yesterday all joy and interest were gone from it. Odd how our inward
vision gives the color to externals; how, when our spirit is darkened,
the sun gets dim and the sky less blue. We paint the world ourselves.
I remember after my mother died that for a long time all nature looked
gray and my close cozy intimacy with it was suddenly gone. But, that’s
another story.

Betty lifted me out of a depressed silence by a suggestion; she said it
had been germinating in her mind since Sunday. Wouldn’t it be better,
instead of starting her as teacher, to send Lizzie Harris to Europe for
several years to go on with her studies?

“She oughtn’t to give up all she’s done, and teaching singing when
you’ve expected to be a prima donna yourself, isn’t a very exhilarating
prospect.”

It was so like Betty! Always thinking of something just a little bit
better. Mrs. Ashworth never would have got beyond the teaching and it
had taken Roger and Betty to get her that far. I straightened up and
felt that the afternoon was brightening.

“It’s too early for her to throw it up,” Betty went on. “She hasn’t
given it a fair trial. She gets one setback and an illness and then
says it’s over. I don’t believe it is and I want to give her another
chance.”

“But”--to keep square with myself I had to bring up difficulties--“she
declares she’ll never sing again.”

“Oh, rubbish! We all declare we’ll never do things again. Harry and I
had a fight last autumn and _I_ declared I’d never speak to him again,
and I was speaking--and glad to do it--in two hours.”

“Your husband’s not your profession.”

“No, my dear,” said Betty with a smile, “but my marriage is, and being
a successful wife is not so very different from being a successful
prima donna. I tell you this is all nonsense about her refusing to go
on. She’s cut out for the stage. The opera bores me to death. I’d never
go if it wasn’t for my two strings of pearls and the prohibitive price
of the box. But I really think, if she was in it, I could stand even
_Tristan and Isolde_.”

I looked out of the window--wonderful how the gay animation of the
street had come back. And it was Betty’s idea and Betty was generally
right.

“I could suggest it to her,” I said.

“That’s exactly what I intend you to do, and as soon as possible. I
hate things dangling on. Make it perfectly plain to her: I’ll undertake
the whole matter, give her as long a time as she needs with any teacher
she chooses. And don’t you see if she’s taken out of this place where
she’s had the failure and been so discouraged, she’ll take a fresh
hold? It’ll be a new start in new surroundings, and she’ll feel like a
new person.”

The most sensitively self-questioning woman must have admitted the
force of the argument. If Betty’s previous efforts to play the god in
the machine had been ill-inspired, this time she redeemed herself.

“Very well,” I said cheerfully. “As Mrs. Stregazzi would say, I’ll
‘take it up with her’ this evening.”

Betty took me home and I ran up the stairs. I was like a child
hastening to impart joyful tidings. Lizzie was in her kitchen occupied
over household affairs. A glass lamp turned too high, stood on a shelf,
the delicate skein of smoke rising from its chimney, painting a dusky
circle on the ceiling. The gas, also too high, rushed from its burner
in a torn flame that leaped and hissed like a live thing caught and in
pain. Lizzie, being well enough to attend to her own needs, the place
was once more in chaos. I turned down the lamp and the gas, shut off
the sink faucet, which was noisily dribbling, and lifting a pie from
the one wooden chair, put it on the ice-box and sat down to impart my
news.

She listened without interruption, leaning against the wash-tub.

“Well?” I said, as she didn’t speak. My voice was sharp, her silence
got on my nerves.

“To go to Europe and study,” she said dreamily, “that’s been the dream
of my life.”

“Well, your dream’s come true, Lizzie!” I jumped up ready to take her
in my arms and hug her. “You can go as soon as your trunk’s packed.”

She shook her head.

“It’s too late now.”

“Too late!” I fell back from her, unbelieving, aghast--“What do you
mean?”

Her face bore an expression of sad renouncement.

“The dream’s over, I’m awake.”

“You don’t mean to say you’re going to refuse.”

She gravely nodded.

“But, Lizzie, think, listen. You don’t realize what a chance this is.
Any teacher you may choose, for as long as you like, all worry about
money over. I know Mrs. Ferguson, she’s never attempted anything that
she hasn’t carried through--”

I launched forth into a eulogy of Betty, and branched from that into a
list of the advantages accruing to the object of her bounty, holding
them up, viewing them from all sides like choice articles I was
offering for sale. I was eloquent, I was persuasive, I introduced
irrefutable arguments. Any other woman standing with reluctant feet on
the verge of such an enterprise, would have ceased to be reluctant and
leaped toward the future I pictured.

But Lizzie was immovable. I saw my words flying off her as if they were
bird-shot striking on an armored cruiser. She had only one reason for
refusing but that was beyond the power of words to shake--she had given
up her career as a singer; nothing would ever make her return to it.

I sank down on the wooden chair, my head on my breast, despair claiming
me. She went about the kitchen in a vague incompetent way picking
things up and putting them down, then suddenly wanting them and
forgetting where they were. As she trailed about she drove home her
refusal with a series of disconnected sentences, bubbles of thought
rising to occasional speech. I didn’t answer her, sitting crumpled on
the chair--until she had refused, I hadn’t realized how much I had
hoped.

Presently she swept into the back room, carrying a pile of plates with
the air of an empress bearing the royal insignia. I heard her setting
them on the dining-table and then a rattle of silver. She came back
and hunted about, feeling on shelves and opening cupboard doors, then
said, in the deep tones made for the great tragic rôles:

“Evie, there was a lemon pie somewhere around here. You’re not sitting
on it by any chance?”

Filled with misery I indicated the pie on the top of the ice-box. In
the pursuit of her domestic duties she had thrown a dish-cloth over
it. She removed the cloth, and picking up the pie, looked it over
solicitously.

“You’re going to sup with me to-night and eat this.”

The bitter appropriativeness of Lizzie feeding me on lemon pie pierced
through my anguish--I laughed. I laughed with a loud strident note,
leaning my head back against the wall and looking at the smoke mark
on the ceiling. Lizzie, pie in hand, stood looking at me in majestic
surprise.

“What are you laughing at?”

“My thoughts. They’re very funny--you and I, sitting up here alone and
carousing on lemon pie.”

“We’re not going to be alone. Mr. Clements is coming. I asked him to
supper and when he looked uncertain tempted him by saying you’d be
here.”

Roger and I eating lemon pie, dispensed by Lizzie--now the gods were
laughing, too.

“I can’t come,” I said sulkily.

She looked utterly dismayed, as if she had heard a piece of news too
direful to believe. If it had been any one but Lizzie Harris I should
have said she was going to cry.

“Not come! Why not?”

“Mightn’t I have an engagement?”

“You haven’t. I asked you if you had this morning.”

“I have a headache.”

She put the pie on the wash-tub with a distracted gesture, and began
beseechingly, her head tilted toward her shoulder, eyes and mouth
pleading:

“Ah, now, Evie, _don’t_ have a headache. The party was to be a surprise
for you. I’ve been getting it together all afternoon. And I ordered the
pie especially. _Please_ feel well. Mr. Clements has been so good to
me and I wanted to return his kindness and I knew he wouldn’t enjoy it
half so much if you weren’t here.”

I know every word was genuine. I believe she is still ignorant of
Roger’s feeling for her. One of the things I have often noticed
about her is that she seems unconscious of, or indifferent to, her
attraction for men. I have never heard her speak of it or seen her show
any pleasure in it. Small coquettes and flirts, the women who make
a study of charming, can not hide their pride of conquest, love to
recount the havoc they have wrought. There is none of that in Lizzie.
Sometimes I have thought she is so used to admiration that she accepts
it as a part of her life, like the sunshine or the rain. Roger, as “a
kind man,” is just lumped in with the count and the doctor and Mr.
Hamilton. And with her blindness to other people’s claims she makes no
inquiry, takes no notice of the humbler romances of the rest of us. She
has never said a word to me about Roger as _my_ friend. If she has ever
given it a thought she has ticketed him as just “a kind man” to me also.

I lay back in the wooden chair and stared at her with a haggard glance.

“Do you like Mr. Clements, Lizzie,” I said solemnly.

She nodded, then reached for the pie and began touching its surface
with the tip of a finger.

“Immensely. I don’t see how any one could help it. He’s so kind.”

Her attention was concentrated on what she held. She scrutinized it as
if it were a treasure in which she searched for a possible flaw.

“He’s more than kind,” I answered. Even in my misery I felt a tinge of
irritation that she should accept Roger’s homage as if he was of no
more value than the count or the doctor.

“Of course he is,” she replied. “He’s so intellectual. And then he has
such lovely manners. I think he’s more of a gentleman than any man I’ve
ever known.”

I thought of Masters. Was she in her mind comparing them? If she was
there was no sign of it in her face. She murmured a commendatory phrase
of the pie, and holding it off on the palm of an outspread hand,
carried it into the back room.

I sat on the wooden chair staring after her. Did she care for Roger?
Was she going to transfer her incomprehensible affections to him? It
was a hideous thought. She came back and swept about, collecting the
feast, and my dazed eyes followed her. How could she do such a thing
unless she was so lacking in a central core of character that she was
nothing but the shell of a woman?

It was a queer scrappy meal, most of it sent round from the
delicatessen store on Lexington Avenue. Such as it was the hostess
offered it with as smiling an aplomb as if Delmonico’s head chef had
produced it in an inspired moment. No qualm that her chief guest might
not enjoy ham and beer disturbed her gracious serenity. Petronius
Arbiter treating his emperor to a gastronomic orgy, could not have
recommended the nightingale’s tongues more confidently than Lizzie did
the canned asparagus, bought at a discount.

That Roger enjoyed it was evident. I don’t suppose he had ever been
at a supper where the ladies waited and sometimes, when the plates
ran short, washed them between courses. Lizzie’s inexpertness caused
continuous breaks in the progress of the feast--important items
overlooked, consultations as to the proper order of the viands, an
unexpected shortage of small silver. Before we had got to the canned
asparagus, I found myself assuming the management. Roger rising and
pursuing an aimless search for the beer opener, and Lizzie making
rapid futile gropings for it in the backs of drawers and the bottoms
of bowls, was distracting to my orderly sense. They couldn’t find it
anywhere. They had too much to say, got in each other’s way, forgot
to hunt and stood laughing, while I took up the search and ran it to
earth on a nail in the kitchen.

After that the party shifted its base entirely and became mine. They
were glad to relinquish it to me, took their seats with the air of
those who know an uncongenial task has found the proper hands. I
directed it, grimly attentive, and it was not the least of my pain that
I saw they thought I was pleased to do so. If I had ever done any one a
deadly wrong he would have been avenged had he seen me--making things
pleasant for Roger and Lizzie, ministering to their creature comfort,
too engrossed in my labors to join in. I was the chaperon, I was the
maiden aunt, I was Mrs. Grundy.

When we reached the last course I found that the coffee machine had not
been emptied of the morning’s dregs and took it into the kitchen, while
Lizzie put the pie on the table. From my place at the sink I could see
it, a foamy surface of beaten-egg, glistening against the white expanse
of cloth. Lizzie was proud of her pie and refused my offer to cut
it. She held the knife poised for a deliberating moment, then sliced
carefully, while Roger watched from across the table and I from beside
the sink. She cut a piece for me and put it at my place, then one for
Roger. Leaning from her seat she handed him the plate and he took it,
the circle of porcelain joining their hands. Over it he looked at her
with shining passion-lit eyes.

To me, watching from that squalid kitchen, their outstretched arms
were symbolic of their attitude one to the other, the piece of pie, a
love potion she was offering. It was “Isolde” holding out the cup to
“Tristan”. Probably any one reading this will laugh. Believe me, in
that moment, I tasted the fulness of despair--that darkening of the
dear bright world, that concentrating of all the pain one can feel into
one consummate pang.




XVI


I AM convinced now. Roger loves her. Until that supper I had ups and
downs--times when I felt unsure, hours when I argued myself into the
belief that I was mistaken. But when I came down to my rooms that night
my uncertainties were ended. As I lay in the dark I saw everything as
clear as crystal. It seemed as if I was clairvoyant, caught up above
myself, the whole situation visualized before me like a picture.

Since then there’s been only one question--what ought I to do?

Apart from my own feeling for Roger--supposing he was only the friend
he used to be--should I let him give his heart and his name to a woman,
whom, if he knew the truth, he would put away from him like a leper?
Every ideal and instinct that make up the sum of his being would
revolt, if he knew about Lizzie and John Masters. I know this, I don’t
just think it because I want to. According to his code all women must
be chaste and all men honest, and if they’re not, he doesn’t want to
have anything to do with them. It may not be generous, but that’s not
to the point. He is so made and so will remain. He has been kinder to
me than any one in the world--kind and just, as far as he knew. Should
I, who could prevent it, stand by and watch him--the illustration isn’t
flattering but it’s apt--rushing toward the precipice like the Gadarene
swine?

And then Lizzie is entirely unfitted to be the wife of such a man.
She belongs to another world that he doesn’t understand and couldn’t
tolerate. He would think the people she foregathers with were savages.
He hasn’t seen her with them, he doesn’t know how blind she is to
the niceties of manners and breeding that to him are essentials. I
try to fit her into his environment, put her up in a niche beside
Mrs. Ashworth--Lizzie, with her tempests, her careless insults, her
impossible friends! Suppose there had never been any John Masters, that
she was as pure as Diana, could she ever be tamed to the Clements’
standard?

Memories of her keep coming up, throwing oranges out of the window,
listening hungrily to Mrs. Stregazzi (fancy Mrs. Stregazzi at Mrs.
Ashworth’s tea table talking about her corsets and her cigarettes!)
facing Masters like an enraged lioness, weeping against his shoulder
and pleading with him to come back. Good heavens, if no man had even
touched her hand except in the clasp of friendship, she is not the
woman for Roger. And she lived, willingly, proudly, without a twinge of
conscience, with John Masters!

That’s one side and here’s the other:

Lizzie’s happiness, Lizzie placed beyond all need, Lizzie the wife of
a man so high-thinking and right-doing that everything in her that was
fine must answer to his call. Under his influence she might change,
become what he now imagines her to be. Women have done that often,
grown to love the man they marry and molded themselves to his ideal.
Have I the right to stand between her and such a future, bar the way to
Eden, an angel with a flaming sword?

I can’t.

In utter abandon she told me the story that I can now use against her.
She trusted me and I answered her trust with a promise that I would
never tell, unless she asked me to. It is true that she said she didn’t
care if I did tell. But does it matter what she said? Wouldn’t I, if
I used the permission given in sickness of heart and body, be meaner
than the meanest thing that crawls? Am I to buy my happiness at such a
price?

I can’t.

If she still had her career it would be different. I could see her
going forward in it, certain it was the best thing for her. But her
career is over. She is to settle down as a singing teacher, plod on
patiently, watch others making for the goal that was once to be hers.
She can’t do it any more than she can fly.

If I thought that she was vicious, bad at heart, I would be certain
I ought to tell. But with all her faults she is generous, kindly and
honest. It’s her chance--the one chance that comes to all of us. Is
it my business to take it from her, to interfere, with my flaming
sword, and say, “No, this is not for you. You have committed the
woman’s unpardonable sin. If you don’t feel the proper remorse it will
be my place to punish you, to shut you out from the possibilities of
redemption. Whatever _you_ may think about it, _I_ think that you
belong in the corral with the goats and I’m going to do all in my power
to keep you there”?

I can’t.

And so I go on, round and round like a squirrel in a cage. I wonder if
the squirrel ever feels as I do.

They come in to see me and say I look ill. Roger is particularly
solicitous, wants me to go south for a month with Mrs. Ashworth. I
could no more leave this place, and the spectacle of his infatuation,
than I could tell him what is making me hollow-eyed and wan.

One of the bitterest of my thoughts is that I know--an instinct tells
me--he is really still fondest of me. I am and always will be the
better woman for him, the one that in the storm and stress of a life’s
companionship, is his true mate. His feeling for Lizzie is a temporary
aberration. He has been bewitched--La Belle Dame Sans Merci has him in
thrall. Some day he will wake from the dream--and then? He will find
Lizzie beside him, La Belle Dame Sans Merci directing the domestic
régime, tactfully accommodating herself to his moods, taking the place
of the undistinguished wife of a distinguished husband.

Oh--why do I write like this! It’s low, contemptible, vile. I’m going
to stop. I’m going to bow my head and say it’s done and give up.

I wrote that two days ago, pressed the blotter over it and said to
myself, “The squirrel has had enough. It’s going to lie down in its
cage.”

To-night--it’s past midnight and a big moon is shining on the back
walls--I begin with a new pen on a fresh sheet to show how the squirrel
didn’t stop. Poor ridiculous, demented squirrel!

There is a sort of grotesque humor about it, I can stand off and laugh
at myself.

This afternoon the count came in to see me with news. His people have
sent for him to go back to Rome.

“Have you already learned the banking business as conducted in
America?” I inquired. I’m not so sympathetic as I used to be but the
count doesn’t seem to notice it.

He took a cigarette and answered with deliberation:

“I have now, for four months, pasted letters in a book. It seems that I
am to go on forever pasting letters in a book. I wrote it to my father
and he sends me an answer saying, ‘My son, you can paste letters in a
book as well in Rome as in New York. Come back at once. I find this
pasting too expensive!’”

I expressed fitting regrets at this paternal interference.

“It is with great sorrow that I leave,” said the count sadly, “I have
made many charming friends here.”

He removed his cigarette and bowed to me. I inclined my head. Our
mutual lack of spirits did not prevent us from being extremely polite.

“You, dear madame, have been sweetly kind to the exile. I don’t know
what I should have done without your ever beautiful sympathy.”

I made deprecating murmurs.

“A young man like myself, a romantic, must have a confidante, one who
feels and understands, one who has lived.” I bowed again in melancholy
admission of the fact. “It will be hard to go.”

He looked really troubled. His handsome warmly-tinted face wore an
expression of gravity that made him seem much older. His eyes, usually
alert and full of laughter, were wistfully dejected.

“I have loved her,” he said quietly.

For the first time in our acquaintance it seemed to me that the count
was speaking from that center of feeling that we call the heart. He
appeared no longer an irresponsible, almost elfish youth, but a man
who, as he himself expressed it, had lived. I was impressed.

“Have you told her?” I asked.

He shook his head murmuring:

“I decide to and I put it off. It is too hard. I fear what I may say.”

A sudden idea took possession of me. Writing it down in cold blood
it sounds like the deranged fancy of a lunatic. At the moment when
it came, I regarded it not only as a possible solution of all
our difficulties, but as an inspiration. My only excuse is that
self-preservation is the law of nature. I was drowning and I caught at
a straw.

“Do you really love Lizzie Harris?” I asked in a voice tense to the
trembling point.

“Very really.”

“More than that other lady, the thin one who wore the fur dress?”

“Much more.”

“More than any woman you have ever known?”

“A hundred times more.”

We must have presented an absurdly solemn appearance, I planting my
questions like a detective administering the third degree, the count
nodding automatically as he jerked out his answers, his eyes fixed on
me with an almost fierce stare.

“Why don’t you marry her?”

That was my inspiration. It seems to me the most inexplicable
aberration that ever seized a sane woman--only for the moment I wasn’t
sane. One of the curious points about it was that I never thought of
Lizzie at all, whether she would want him or not. All I saw was the
count transformed into a genie, unexpectedly come to my aid. I make no
doubt if she had shown reluctance I would have counseled him to kidnap
her as his ancestors kidnaped the Sabine women.

His expression brought me back to sense. He was looking at me with a
blank unbelieving surprise as if I had suggested something beyond the
limits of human endeavor. If I had urged him to inaugurate a conspiracy
against his king or an exploring party to the moon, he could not have
appeared more astonished.

“Marry her!” he ejaculated.

“Yes, marry her. You love her, you’ve just said so.”

“Most assuredly I do, to distraction.”

“Then why do you look so surprised?”

“But marriage--me?” He laid a finger on his breast and tapped on the
top button of his waistcoat, regarding me from beneath raised brows.
His expression was that of an intelligent person who can not believe
that he has heard aright. It made me angry.

“Yes, you. I could hardly be alluding to anybody else after what you’ve
just said.”

“But, my dear lady--” he sent a roving glance round the room as if
hunting for some one who would explain, then came back to me. As he met
my eyes he smiled, deprecatingly, almost tenderly, the smile with which
maturity greets the preposterous antics of a child. “Is it a joke you
make?”

“No, it is not,” I answered, “and I don’t see why you should think it
was. When you love a person you marry them, don’t you?”

“Alas, not always. I could never marry Miss Harris. She is not of my
order.”

“Order?” I was the one who ejaculated now.

“Exactly. Whomever I may love I only marry in my order.”

My inspiration collapsed, pierced by this unexpected and unfamiliar
word. For a moment we sat regarding each other. I don’t know how
I looked but I don’t think it could have been as abject as I felt
or the count, who is one of the most amiable of youths, would have
wanted to know what was the matter. If I had had my wits about me I
should have pretended it was a joke but I was too ashamed and crushed
to pretend anything. In the embarrassing pause I tried to smile, a
feeble propitiatory smile, which he answered in kind, brightly and
reassuringly. I saw he expected me to go on, and I didn’t know how to
go on except to argue it out with him.

“What does your order matter if you love a person?”

“But everything. It is, as you say here, what we’re there for.”

“But you do marry out of your class. Italian nobles have married
American women who were without family.”

He gave a gay smile, jerking his head with a little agreeing movement
toward his shoulder:

“Ah, truly, yes, but with fortunes--large fortunes. We need them, we
have not got the huge moneys in Italy that you have here. But the
adorable Miss Harris has nothing. Figure to yourself, Mrs. Drake; she
must work for her living. If I come home to my father with a story
like that, what happens? He is enraged, he turns me out--and then _I_
have to work for _my_ living.” He gave a delightful boyish laugh. “At
what?--pasting letters in a book? That is all I know.”

“Foreigners are very hard for Americans to understand,” I muttered,
wondering if any foreigner of any race would ever have understood why
a respectable American widow should offer her friend in marriage to an
unwilling Italian count.

He leaned from his chair, pointing the smoking cigarette at me. His
melancholy had vanished. He was a boy again, a light-hearted Latin boy,
intrigued and amused at the sentimental point of view obtaining under
the stars and stripes.

“It is you who are hard for us to understand--so loving money and so
loving love. And which you like the best we can’t find out. For us
one is here and one is there.” He pointed with the cigarette to two
opposite corners of the room. “Miss Harris I adore but I do not marry
her.” He planted his romance in the left-hand corner with a jab of his
cigarette. “And I marry a lady whom I may not love, but who has fortune
and who is of my class.” He planted her in the opposite corner with a
second jab. “They are so far apart.” And he waved the cigarette between
the two, with a sweep wide enough to indicate the distance that severed
sentiment from obligation.

That was the end of it. I pulled myself together and led the
conversation into a comparison of national characteristics. I don’t
know what he thought of me, probably that I was a horrible example of
what can be produced by a romance-ridden country.

When I think of it now (if I cared a farthing what happened to me) I
would be quite scared. I wonder if I’ve inherited a queer strain from
any of my forebears. They don’t look like it, but you can’t tell from
portraits and miniatures. In their days it was the fashion to paint out
all discreditable characteristics as, in ours, it is the highest merit
to paint them in. Could it be possible that one of those pop-eyed,
tight-mouthed women ever swerved from “a sweet reasonableness” and
bequeathed the tendency to me? I’ve read somewhere that while the
inclination to wrong-doing may not be transmitted, the weakened will
can pass on. Is my lunacy of to-day, my distracted waverings, my
temptations to disloyalty, the result of some one else’s lapse from the
normal? (The lamp’s going out. With the room getting dim I can see
the moonlight in a clear wash of silver on the windows.) It wasn’t the
little Huguenot lady. But her husband opposite, the formidable Puritan
in the wig, was one of the jury who condemned the witches. That may be
it. His cruelty is coming back to be paid for by his descendant--the
poor old witches are getting even at last. Perhaps my descendants will
some day writhe in atonement for my faults. But I have no descendants!
I never will have.

It’s the lamp’s last sputter--going out as I’m going out. In a minute
it will be dark, with the moonlight filling the gulfs of the backyards
and I, alone in the night, listening to the stillness, wondering if I
was only created to be an expiatory offering.




XVII


AS soon as Betty heard that the European offer was refused she turned
her attention to the lessons. Bustling about, making appointments,
talking over reluctant mothers, forcing people to study singing who
never thought of doing so, she is an inspiring sight to everybody but
the object of her campaign.

Lizzie makes me uneasy. She has shown no enthusiasm, taking it all
for granted as though busy ladies could not better employ their time
than by helping her to fortune. Betty thinks it timidity, that she is
distrustful of herself. I know better. Her languor conceals a dreary
disinclination. She has never said a word of thanks to Betty or Mrs.
Ashworth. Once or twice I have suggested that they have taken a good
deal of trouble and she might--I have always stopped there and she has
never asked me to go on. What is the good of telling a person they
ought to have feelings which nature seems to have left out of them?

Last night Roger came and after a few moments with me suggested that
we go up-stairs and talk over the new work with her. I wouldn’t, said
I was sleepy and wanted to go to bed. When he had gone I lowered the
lights and sat waiting to hear his footsteps coming down. I waited an
hour and a half, and then they came, descending the creaking staircase,
passing my door, and going on to the street. That wasn’t a good night
for sleeping. In the small hours I got up and tried to read. The
book was painfully appropriate, _The Love Letters of Mademoiselle de
Lespinasse_. I read them till I heard the milkman making his rounds.

There is something horribly humiliating about women’s love-letters.
When the passion is unrequited, or half requited as it was with De
Lespinasse, they are so abject. She made a brave stand, poor soul,
tried to find Guibert a wife and pretend she didn’t mind. But when she
began to sicken to her death, all her bravery vanished. Those last
letters are like a shrill frenzied wail. And she was a very first-class
woman in love with a very second-class man. I suppose it’s a sort of
sex tradition that we should adore and adhere in this ignominious way.
We’ve had it hammered into us that to love and cling was our mission
till it’s grown to have a fictitious value, and we feel if we don’t
love and cling something is wrong with us. And what’s accomplished by
it--who is benefited by our useless suffering?

The other evening down-town in the dusk I passed a girl waiting on the
corner by a show-window. The light fell full on her face and I knew by
her expression why she was there--a rendezvous with her young man who
was late. She was angry, close-lipped and sullen-eyed. I could read her
thoughts--she was going to tell him her opinion of him, be haughty and
frigid, give him a piece of her mind and leave him. Just then he came
slouching up, a lowering surly cub, and when she saw him she couldn’t
hide her joy. Her anger vanished at his first word. She’d have believed
anything he told her knowing in her heart it was a lie. She hardly
wanted his excuses, so glad he’d come, so pitifully slavishly glad.

It’s shameful, crushing, revolting. Here am I, the heir of all the ages
in the foremost files of time, feeling just the same as that subjugated
shop-girl. Roger up-stairs with Lizzie, and I can’t sleep, and can’t
eat, and can’t stop caring, and worst of all, if he wanted to come
back to me I’d open my arms to him. Talk of the forward march of women!
When the cave man went forth to find a new wife, the old discarded
one left in the corner by the fire felt just the same as I do in the
opening of the twentieth century.

But now, as Pepys says, to bed. I’ll sleep if I have to take a thumping
dose of trional which I was taught in my youth was even more wicked
than powdering your nose.

This afternoon Lizzie went forth to give her first lesson and I stayed
in to wait for her. I was anxious about it. If the survival of the
fittest prevails among educators as it does in the animal kingdom I
felt sure that Lizzie as a teacher would not survive. Her pupil is the
spoiled child of fortune, sixteen, with a voice as small as her _dot_
will be large. Betty had conjured me to make our protégée give up the
black tea-tray hat and I had tried and failed. Before her haughty
and uncomprehending surprise I had wilted. No one would have had the
courage to tell her why she should look meek and unassuming. As it
was she had dressed herself with unusual care, even to the long green
earrings which I hadn’t seen for months. She was more like the duchess
in an English comedy cast for Broadway, than a penniless music teacher
being pushed up the ladder.

As I sat waiting Miss Bliss came in--wrapped in the Navajo blanket. She
threw it back and stood for me to admire, very dainty in a new pink
blouse with a Pierrot frill encircling her neck and a broad pink ribbon
tied round her head. Boyishly slender, her arms extended to hold out
the blanket, she had the fragile grace of a Tanagra figurine--a modern
Tanagra with a powdered nose and a dash of carmine on the lips. When I
told her she was pretty she blushed, dropped the blanket on the floor
and herself on the blanket, and said a girl owed it to herself always
to look her best.

“You might meet a man in the hall,” she murmured, mechanically reaching
for the poker, “and what’s the sense of looking like a slob?”

When she poked the fire a belt held down the back of the blouse. The
kimono jacket, the safety pin and the golden corset string were gone,
if not forever, at least till their owner was safely landed in her own
little flat with her own little husband.

Our gossiping stopped when we heard Lizzie’s step on the stairs. She
entered without knocking, sweeping in and slamming the door. A brusk
nod was all Miss Bliss got and my greeting was a curt “Hello, Evie.”
She threw herself into a rocker, and extending her feet beyond the hem
of her skirt, sunk down in the chair and looked at her boots. In her
hand she held a bunch of unopened letters.

I was keyed up for something unusual but I hadn’t seen her in this
state since her illness. We waited for her to speak, then as she showed
no inclination to do so I remarked, with labored lightness:

“Well, Lizzie, how was it?”

“Beastly,” she answered, without looking up.

“Was your pupil a nice girl?”

“No.”

“Was she disagreeable?”

“I don’t know, but I detested her. A little, simpering, affected idiot.
_Sing_--that fool!”

She lifted her head and looked round the room with a wild and roving
eye. Her glance, raised high, avoided us as if the sight of her fellow
humans was disagreeable. Miss Bliss cleared her throat and stirred
cautiously on the blanket. She knew where Lizzie had been and was
exceedingly anxious to hear her adventures in the halls of wealth, but
didn’t dare to ask.

“It really isn’t of any consequence what she’s like,” I soothed. “Just
take her as a matter of business.”

“Matter of business!” She struck her hands on the arms of the chair
with a slapping sound and jumped up. “What have I to do with business?”
Then she walked to the window and stood drumming with her fingers on
the pane.

The quick nervous tattoo fell ominously on my uneasiness. Miss Bliss
sent a furtive masonic look at me, and glanced away. With an elaborate
air of nonchalance she patted her frill and picked at her skirt, and
finally, unable to stand the combined pressure of our silence and her
own curiosity, said boldly:

“What kind of a house was it?”

Lizzie answered slowly, pronouncing each word with meticulous precision:

“It was a large, shiny, expensive house. It was a hideous house. Nobody
who was anything, or ever expected to be anybody, ought to go into such
a house.”

“You don’t say!” exclaimed Miss Bliss, artlessly amazed. “I read about
it in the papers and they said it cost millions and had things in it
out of kings’ palaces.”

To this there was no response, and Dolly Bliss and I began to talk
together. We chose a safe topic--a bargain sale of stockings at
Macy’s. We tried to invest it with a careless sprightliness, which
was difficult, not so much because of the subject but by reason of
the tattoo on the pane. It was like an accompaniment out of tune. We
couldn’t seem to give our minds to the stockings while it went on, even
when we raised our voices and tried to drown it. Suddenly it stopped
and we stopped, too, dropping the stockings and eying each other with
fixed stares. Each of us was determined not to look at Lizzie and it
took all our will to refrain.

She began moving about behind us, and we tried a new subject--the
count’s approaching departure. We said nice things about him, echoed
each other. I remarked that he was a charming person, and Miss Bliss
remarked that he was a _very_ charming person. We had to make a great
effort. It was almost impossible to keep it up with that woman padding
about behind your chair like an ill-tempered tiger. When a sudden
unexpected sound of tearing paper came from her, I jumped as if the
tiger had made a spring at me. She was opening one of her letters. It
loosened the tension. We suppressed gasps and took up the count again,
more as if he was a human being and less as if he was the center piece
at a dull dinner-party. Lizzie’s voice, loud and startled, stopped us.

“What do you think of this--Mrs. Stregazzi’s married Berwick!”

The count fled from our minds like an offended god. We ejaculated,
“Berwick!--Mrs. Stregazzi!” and sat stunned.

Lizzie consulted the letter:

“Last week in Portland, Maine. She says, ‘We’re as happy as clams and
everybody predicts a great future for Dan.’”

“Well!” I breathed and looked at the other two. Lizzie’s temper was
gone, a shared sensation made her one with us.

“Did you ever!” she murmured as any ordinary young woman might have
done.

“Why she’s fifteen years older than he is.”

“More like twenty. She’s not so young as she looks.”

“Good gracious, how extraordinary!” I fell back in my chair aghast
before this evidence of a woman’s daring. “And those two children,
_and_ the grandmother!” Mrs. Stregazzi’s dauntless courage began to
pale when I compared it to the bridegroom’s.

“Maybe he wanted a home,” Miss Bliss hazarded.

“A man may want a home but he doesn’t want a ready-made family in it.”

It was my place in the trio to voice the sentiments of that staid and
unadventurous middle class, which is described as “the backbone of the
country.”

“Singers don’t want homes,” said Lizzie, “they’re in the way.”

“It must have been love,” I said in an awed voice. “Nothing else could
explain it.”

For a moment we were silent, each deflecting her glance from the other
to an adjacent object. I don’t know why it should have been, but Mrs.
Stregazzi’s reckless act seemed to have depressed us. Any one coming
into the room would have said we had had bad news.

Miss Bliss broke the spell, emerging from depths of thought in which
she had been evolving a working hypothesis.

“I don’t see why it is so strange,” she said ponderingly.

“You don’t?”--the backbone of a country in which all men are free and
equal does not bend readily--“with that disparity and he just beginning
his career?”

“No, I don’t.” She was sitting cross-legged, holding an ankle in each
hand and rocking gently. “I’ll tell you just what I think--I believe
they were lonely. Lots of people get married because they’re lonely.”

“She had a mother and two children.”

“She took care of them, they weren’t companions. Berwick’s a companion,
likes what she does and works at the same thing. It’s great to have a
person like that around.” She nodded, with shrewd eyes shifting from
one face to the other. “I’ve seen a lot and I’ve noticed. All sorts
of people get married, and it comes out right. It’s not just the
young ones and suitable ones that pull it off. It’ll be fine for Mrs.
Stregazzi to have him to go round with, and it’ll be fine for him to
have her to think about and talk things over with.”

“They can help each other along in their work,” I admitted.

“They can be fond of each other,” said Miss Bliss.

She ceased rocking and looked out of the window, the shrewd eyes
growing dreamy. Our appearance of depression returned, a shade darker
than before. Mrs. Stregazzi and Berwick might have shown a dashing
disregard for public opinion, but there was no reason for us to look
as if we had heard of their mutual destruction in a railway accident.
If we had been waiting for their mutilated remains we couldn’t have
appeared more melancholy. Miss Bliss heaved a sigh and observed:

“It’s a great thing to have some one fond of you.”

Lizzie and I didn’t answer, but we gave ear as if the Delphic oracle
had spoken and we were trying to extract balm from its words.

“And it’s a great thing to be fond of some one yourself.”

Our silence gave assent, but the oracle’s wisdom did not seem to cheer
us. We sat sunk in our chairs, eying her morosely. Her imagination
roused, she ranged over the advantages of the married state:

“Just think how lovely it would be to know there was some one who cared
whether you were sick or well, or happy or blue. Wouldn’t it be great
to have some one come home in the evening who was going to be awfully
glad to see you and who you were just crazy to have come? And when work
was slack and you were losing your sleep about money, wouldn’t it be
grand to know there was a feller who could chip in and pay the bills?
Oh, gee--” she dropped her eyelids with the ecstatic expression of one
who glimpses ineffable radiances. “Well, I guess yes.”

An answering “yes” came faintly from me. The ecstatic expression
flashed away, and she turned, all brusk negation:

“Oh, Mrs. Drake, _you_ don’t know what it is. _You’re_ well fixed with
money of your own. But girls like us”--she pointed to Lizzie, then
brought her finger back to her own knee upon which she tapped in bitter
emphasis--“_we’ve_ got only ourselves. We’ve _got_ to make good or go
under. And it’s fight, fight, fight. I’ve had to do something I hated
since I was sixteen and now she”--with a nod at Lizzie, “has got to do
something she hates.”

[Illustration: “How lovely it would be to know there was some one who
cared!”]

Lizzie, sunk in the chair, eyed her like a brooding sphinx. She met the
gaze with the boldness of the meek roused to passion:

“You do hate it, Miss Harris. You’ve done as good as say so. And
it’s new now, you’re only beginning. Wait till you come home every
evening, disgusted with it all and everything and everybody; when it’s
bad weather and you feel sick and nobody cares. Wait till you have to
stand anything they hand out to you, and not say a word back or you’ll
lose your job. I know. I’ve tried it and it’s tough. It’s too much.
Any man that ’ud come along and offer to take you out of it would look
all right to you.” Her boldness began to weaken before that formidable
gaze. She became hurriedly apologetic. “I’m not saying there _is_ any
man. I’m only supposing. And I don’t mean now. I mean after you’ve been
up against it for years and years and the grind’s crushed the heart out
of you.”

There was no answer, and the oracle, now openly scared at her temerity,
scrambled to her feet. In the momentary silence I heard the distant
bang of the street door. She heard it too and forgot her fear, wheeling
to the mirror for a quick touching up of her hair ribbon and frill.
When she turned back her color had risen to match her reddened lips and
her manner showed a flurried haste.

“I got to go--several things to attend to--my supper and some sewing to
finish.” She didn’t bother to be careful of excuses. The man who hoped
to acquire the legal right to pay her bills was waiting below. She
went, trailing the Navajo blanket from a hanging hand.

Lizzie drew a deep breath and said:

“She’s right.”

“About what?”

“About me.”

“You mean the teaching?”

“I do. It’s a dog’s work.”

She rose and faced me, sullen as a thunder-cloud.

“But you’ve hardly tried it.”

“I’ve tried it enough. There are plenty of women who can scratch along
that way and be thankful to Providence and pleasant to the pupils. Let
them do it. It’s their work, not mine.”

She turned from me and went to the window, but not this time to drum on
the pane. Leaning against the frame she looked out on the tin roof. The
angry contempt of her face suggested that the millionaires Betty was
collecting were gathered there, unable to escape, and forced to hear
how low they stood in the opinion of their hireling.

“I am an artist. Those people,” she made a grandiose gesture to the tin
roof, “don’t know what an artist is. They think they’re condescending,
doing a kindness. _I’m_ the one that’s condescending--I do them not
a kindness but an honor, when I enter their houses and listen to the
squawking of their barbarous children.”

“You can’t expect them to think that.”

“I don’t, they haven’t got sense enough. That woman, the mother, came
in while I was there. I’ve no doubt she thought she was being very
agreeable. She asked me questions about my method.” She gave me a
sidelong cast of her eye full of derision. “I sat and listened, and
when she was done I said I didn’t discuss my method with people who
knew nothing.”

“Oh, Lizzie,” I groaned. “You didn’t say that?”

“Certainly I did. Only that. I was polite and patient. If I hadn’t
felt so disgusted and out of spirits I’d have spoken to her freely and
fully. But it wasn’t worth while.”

“But they won’t stand that sort of thing. They won’t have you again.”

“I don’t intend to go again. I couldn’t endure it for five minutes. I’d
rather sweep a crossing on Lexington Avenue.”

“There aren’t any crossings on Lexington Avenue, and if there were,
you don’t know how to sweep. What will you say to Mrs. Ferguson and
Mrs. Ashworth?”

She shrugged with an almost insolent indifference.

“I’ll say I don’t like it. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“Lizzie, I beg of you to be reasonable. They won’t go on helping you if
you disappoint them like this.”

“Then they can stop helping me--I’m not so immensely charmed and
interested in them. They try and force me into things I don’t want to
do. They take it out of my hands and then come smiling at me and say
it’s all arranged. So it is--to their liking but not to mine.”

“It’s your profession, the only thing you know. What else could they
do?”

“Let me alone.”

It was like beating yourself on a brick wall. I felt frantic.

“But _what’s_ going to become of you? You’ve got no means of
livelihood.”

She shrugged again.

“I don’t know. But one thing I do know and that is that I won’t do
slave’s work for you, or Mrs. Ferguson, or any one else in the world.”

I didn’t know what to say. I might go on talking all night and not make
a dent on her. Demosthenes would have turned away baffled before her
impossible unreasonableness.

It was getting dark and I could see her as a tall black silhouette
against the blue dusk of the window. There was only one suggestion left.

“Are you going to take Dolly Bliss’s advice and marry?” My voice
sounded unnatural, like somebody else’s.

“Marry?” she echoed absently. “I suppose I _could_ do that.”

“Is it that you can’t make up your mind, Lizzie?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured again, this time as if she wasn’t thinking
of what she said.

I rose with shaking knees. It was the critical moment of her fate and
mine.

“Don’t you want to?” I almost whispered, drawing near her.

Her answer made me stop short. It came with a tremor of fierce inner
feeling, revolt, rage and desperation, seething into expression:

“Oh God, how I hate it all!”

“Hate what--marriage?”

“No, everything that’s around me. Those women, this damnable work--no
money--no hope! I’m crazy with the misery of it. It’s like being bound
down and smothered. I want to get out. I want to be free. I want to do
what I like and be myself. You’re trying to make me into some one else.
You’re crushing me and killing me. I’d rather be dead in my grave than
go on this way.”

She burst into frantic tears, savage, racking, snatching the curtain
about her and sobbing and strangling behind it. The room was nearly
dark and I could see the long piece of drapery swaying as she clutched
it to her. I tried to pluck it away, and through its folds, felt her
body shaken and bent like a tree in a tempest. I had never heard such
weeping, moans and wails, with words coming in inarticulate bursts. I
was frightened, caught her hand and drew her out of the curtain which
hung askew from torn fastenings. She pushed me away and threw herself
on the sofa, where, under the vast circumference of her hat, she lay
prone, abandoned to the storm.

I stood helplessly regarding her, then as broken sentences came from
under her hat, took out the pins and held it before me like a shield,
while she gasped in choked reiteration that we were killing her, that
she hated us all, that she’d rather die than give another lesson. If
her paroxysm hadn’t been so devastating I would have lost my temper at
the outrageous injustice of such sentences as I could catch. I tried
to say something of this in a tempered form, but she shut me off with
an extended hand, beating it at me, calling out strangled execrations
at Betty and Mrs. Ashworth and the mother of her pupil. If any one who
did not know the situation had heard her, they would have thought those
worthy and disinterested women had been plotting her ruin.

There was nothing for me to do but wait till her passion spent itself,
which it began to do in sighs and quivering breaths that shook her from
head to foot. When I saw it was moderating I told her I would get her
some wine and went to the kitchenette, leaving her with drenched face
and tangled hair, a piteous spectacle. In a few moments I was back with
the wine-glass. The room was empty--she had gone leaving the black hat.

I picked it up and sat down on the sofa. We certainly had got to the
climax.

I didn’t count--with my hundred and sixty-five dollars a month. I
could retire into any corner, and live forgotten and love forlorn like
Mariana. But Lizzie--? She couldn’t sing, she wouldn’t teach, nobody
could help her. Marriage was the only way out. As I sat on the sofa,
absently staring at the hat, I had a memory of a corral I had seen at
a railway station in a trip I once took to the West. It was a pen for
the cattle that came off the range and had to be driven into the cars.
The entrance was wide, but the fenced enclosure narrowed and narrowed
until there was only one way of exit left, up a gangway to the car. The
comparison wasn’t elegant but it struck me as fitting--Lizzie was on
the gangway with the entrance to the car the only way to go.

“I wish to heaven she’d hurry and get into it,” I groaned.




XVIII


I HAVEN’T seen her for two days. Yesterday morning I went up-stairs to
leave the hat, found her door open and her rooms empty. Emma says she
has been out most of the time. I waited in all afternoon, expecting to
hear Betty on the telephone in a state of wrath about the pupil. Also I
had my ear trained for the postman’s light ring. At any moment I might
get a letter now from Roger, announcing his engagement. Why should not
Lizzie’s absences abroad be spent in walks with him?

As usual the anticipated didn’t happen. Betty did telephone but in
amiable ignorance of her protégée’s revolt. She had run to earth a
second pupil, who would be ready the following morning at eleven. Would
I please tell Lizzie and did I know how the first lesson had gone? I
prevaricated--I can do that at the telephone when Betty’s stern gaze
is not there to disconcert me. I was really afraid to tell her, and
besides, I, too, was getting rebellious. Let Lizzie manage her own
affairs and fight her own fights. I said cheerfully she would tell
Betty about it, and hung up the receiver wondering what would happen.
Then I wrote a note to Lizzie about the new pupil, went up-stairs,
knocked, and getting no response, pushed it under the door.

For the rest of the day I sat waiting like a prisoner in the death cell.

This morning, when I leaned out of the back window and looked down on
the damp soil and bare shrubs of the yard, I felt the first soft air
of spring. The sunlight slanted on the brick walls, the wet spots on
the walk around the sun-dial shrunk as I watched them. On the top of a
fence a scarred and seasoned old cat, at which Mr. Hamilton was wont
to throw beer bottles, stretched lazily, blinking at a warm inviting
world. I leaned farther out--tiny blunt points of green were pushing
through the mold along the walk. Mrs. Phillips, sure in her ownership
of the yard, had planted crocuses. Winter wasn’t lingering in the lap
of spring--he had jumped off it at a bound.

I turned from the window and went into the front room, wondering
vaguely why winter should always be a male and spring a female. The tin
roof was dry, the hot bright sun had licked up the sparrow’s bath.
Across the street a line of women from the tenements were advancing on
the park, pushing baby carriages--buxom broad-hipped mothers with no
hats and wonderful coiffures of false hair. It was a glorious morning,
the air like a thin clear wine. I put on my things and went out.

The street showed sunny and clear, fair bright avenues inviting the
wayfarer to wanderings. Children sped by in groups and scattering
throngs. Smart slim ladies strolled with dogs straining at leashes.
Friends met and stood in talkative knots, motors flashed by attended
by the fluttering of loosened veils. On the fringe of benches along
the park wall the idle sunned themselves, lax and lazy. Down-town,
where the women shop, men would be selling arbutus at the street
corners. Soon naughty boys with freckled noses would trail in hopeful
groups along the curb, holding up stolen lilacs to ladies in upper
windows--yes, spring had come.

I bought a bunch of daffodils at the florist’s and went into the park.
The first hint of green was faint on the lawns, and points of emerald
were breaking out along the willow boughs. Through the crystal air the
sounds of children at play came musically--little yaps and squeals and
sudden sweet runs of laughter. The glass walls of the casino were
a-dazzle, and revolving wheels caught the sun and broke it on their
flying spokes.

I was near the lake when I saw Lizzie. She was walking up a side path
that crossed mine, her head down, her step quick and decided. She
didn’t see me and I stood and waited. Then her eye, deep and absorbed,
shifted, caught me, and she came to an abrupt halt. For the first
startled moment there was an indecision about her poised body and
annoyed face that suggested flight. If I did not share her dismay,
I did her surprise. This was the hour set for the second lesson. Of
course she might have told Betty that she would give no more, also she
might have been hastening to the tryst with the new pupil. You never
could tell. In answer to my smiling hail she approached, not smiling
but looking darkly intent and purposeful.

“Which way are you going?” she said, by way of greeting.

I have been called a tactful person, and acquaintance with Lizzie has
developed what was an untrained instinct into a ripened art:

“Nowhere in particular. I’m just strolling about in the sun.”

Obviously relieved, she said:

“I’m going over there--” pointing to the apartment-houses across the
park. “I have business on the west side.”

The new pupil lived on the east side. So she really had given it up.

“You’ve told Mrs. Ferguson that you won’t give that lesson--the one she
telephoned about?”

A sudden blankness fell on her face.

“Didn’t you get the letter I put under your door?” I cried in alarm. I
couldn’t bear just now, with everything failing me, to have Betty angry.

She nodded, looking down and scraping on the ground with her foot. Then
slowly raised her eyes, and glimpsing at me under her lashes, broke
into a broad smile.

“I forgot all about it.”

“Oh, Lizzie! How could you? If you’ve made up your mind to end it the
least you could do was to let her know. That’s really _too_ bad.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.” Her hasty contrition was far from convincing.
“Perfectly awful. I ought to be punished in some painful way. Look
here, Evie, dearest, I’m in a hurry. Why can’t you just pop into a taxi
and go down and explain it to her?”

“I’ll tell you why I can’t, simply and clearly--because I won’t.”

“Goodness, how provoking of you.” She didn’t seem at all provoked. Her
only concern was to get away from me and go to the mysterious business
on the west side. She bent sidewise to catch her skirt and moved away.
“Then I will, this evening, to-morrow morning--”

I caught her by the arm.

“Lizzie, listen. Mrs. Ferguson is my best friend. I made her do this
and I can’t have you treating her so rudely. I thought, of course,
you’d told her.”

She laid her hand on my detaining fingers, and as she spoke in her most
coaxing manner smoothed them caressingly, detaching them from their
hold.

“Dear girl, I know all that. Every word you say is true. And I’ll fix
it, I’ll straighten it all out. There won’t be the slightest trouble.”

“Will you telephone those people?” I implored.

My hand was dislodged. She drew away.

“Indeed I will, the first moment I get.” She paused, arrested by a
thought. “What’s their name? I’ve forgotten.” Then backing off: “_You_
telephone them. You see I can’t now and I don’t know when I’ll be near
a booth. Say I’m sick, or have left town, or anything you like. Just
any excuse until I can attend to it. Good-by. I’ll probably come in and
see you this afternoon.”

She turned and made off as quickly as she could, a tall vigorous
figure, moving with a free swinging step. I stood and watched her
hastening down the path between the trunks of the bare trees. There
was not a trace upon her of the tempest of two nights before. It might
never have been. Her whole bearing suggested coursing blood and high
vitality. She was very like the irresponsible and endearing creature I
had known when I first went to Mrs. Bushey’s.

I gave up my walk and went home to send the telephone. As I hurried
along I wondered where she could be going and why she seemed so light
in spirit. I was in that feverish state of foreboding when the simplest
events assume a sinister aspect. The thought crossed my mind that she
might be going to elope with Roger. It would be like her to elope, and
though it would be very unlike him (about the last thing in the world
one could conceive him doing), he might have become clay in the hands
of that self-willed and beguiling potter.

“Well,” I thought, “so much the better. It’ll be over.” And I decided
the best thing for me to do would be to go back to Europe and join the
spinsters and widows in the pensions.

I sent the telephone, trying to soothe an angry female voice that
complained of a morning “utterly ruined.” I sent another one to
Betty, who was also discomposed, having heard from the mother of “the
barbarous child.” Betty wouldn’t believe her, had evidently championed
the teacher with heat. Betty is a stalwart adherent, a partisan, and I
foresaw battles in high places.

The afternoon drew to a golden mellow close and I lay on the sofa
waiting for Lizzie. I hadn’t relinquished the idea of the elopement but
it did not seem so probable as it had in the morning. Anyway, if she
hadn’t eloped--if she did come in to see me--I had made up my mind I
would ask her pointblank what she intended to do about Roger. It was
one word for Lizzie and two for myself. I really thought if things went
on the way they were, I should go mad. Not that it would matter if I
went mad, for nobody depends on me, nor am I necessary to the progress
or welfare of the state. But I don’t want to be an expense to my
friends. And I don’t know whether one hundred and sixty-five dollars
a month is enough for maintenance in an exclusive lunatic asylum and I
know they would never send me to any but the best.

When a knock came I started and called a husky “Come in.” The door
opened--there had been no elopement. Roger stood on the threshold,
smiling and calm, which I knew he wouldn’t have been if he was a
bridegroom. Marriage would always be a portentous event with a
conscientious Clements.

Whatever I might be with Lizzie I couldn’t be pointblank with Roger,
though I had known him for fifteen years and her for six months. I
explained my trepidation by a headache and settled back on the sofa.
He was properly grieved and wanted me to follow Mrs. Ashworth to the
south. I saw myself in a white dress on a hotel piazza being charming
to men in flannels and Panama hats, and the mere thought of it made
me querulous. He persisted with an amiable urgence. If my opinion of
him hadn’t been crystallized into an unchangeable form, I should have
thought him maddeningly stupid. I began to wonder, if the present state
of affairs lasted much longer, if I wouldn’t end by hating him. I was
thinking this when Lizzie came in.

I had never seen her, not even in the gladdest days before her
illness, look as she did. The old Lizzie was back, but enriched and
glorified. She entered with a breathless inrush, shutting the door
with a blind blow, her glance leaping at me and drawing me up from
the cushions like the clutch of a powerful hand. It seemed as if some
deadening blight had been lifted from her and she had burst into life,
enhanced and intensified by the long period of hibernation. Her lips
were parted in a slight, almost rigid smile, her eyes, widely opened,
had lost their listless softness and shone with a deep brilliance.

Roger gave a suppressed exclamation and rose to his feet. I think she
would have astonished any man, that Saint Anthony would have paused to
look, not tempted so much as held in a staring stillness of admiration.
She was less the alluring woman than the burning exultant spirit,
cased in a woman’s body and shining through it like a light through a
transparent shell.

“Lizzie!” I exclaimed on a rising note of question. I had a sense of
momentous things, of a climax suddenly come upon us all.

“I’ve been to Vignorol,” she said, and came to a halt in front of me,
her gaze unwavering, her breast rising to hurried breaths.

“How do you do, Miss Harris,” said Roger, coming smilingly forward. He
had the air of the favored friend who shows a playful pique at being
overlooked.

The conventional words, uttered in an urbane tone, fell between us like
an ax on a stretched thread. It can be said for him that he knew Lizzie
too little to realize what her manner portended. He evidently saw
nothing except that she was joyously exhilarated and looked unusually
handsome.

She gave him a glance, bruskly quelling and containing no recognition
of him. It was her famous piece-of-furniture glance, to which I had
been so often treated. It was the first time Roger had ever experienced
its terrors and it staggered him. In bewilderment he looked at me for
an explanation. But she was not going to let any outside influence come
between us. I was important just then--a thing of value appropriated to
her uses.

“I’ve been two days fighting it out, trying to make up my mind to do
it. And this morning, when you met me, I was going there.”

“Well?” I was aware of that demanding look of Roger’s, which, getting
nothing from me, turned to her. That was useless, but how was he to
know?

“I sang for him,” she said, the brilliant eyes holding mine as if to
grasp and focus upon herself every sense I had.

“Lizzie!”

The premonition of momentous things grew stronger. Underneath it, in
lower layers of consciousness, submerged habits of politeness made
themselves felt. I ought to get Roger into the conversation.

“I sang better than I ever did before. And Vignorol, who used to scold
and be so discouraged, told me I’d got it!”

“Lizzie!”

For a moment we stared at each other, speechless, she giving the useful
pair of ears time to carry to the brain, the great news.

Then the subconscious promptings grew too strong to be denied and I
said:

“Mr. Clements will be as glad as we are to know that.”

Thus encouraged, Roger emerged from his astonishment. He was not as
debonair as at the beginning, also he evidently wasn’t sure just what
it was all about, but he seized upon the most prominent fact, and said,
without enthusiasm, rather with apprehension:

“This doesn’t mean, Miss Harris, that you’re thinking of returning to
your old profession?”

Her look at him was flaming, as silencing as a blow. I don’t know
why she didn’t tell him to hold his tongue, except that she was too
preoccupied to waste a word. He flinched before it, drew himself up and
backed away, dazed, as he might have been if she really had struck him.

Having brushed him aside she went on to me. The main fact imparted, her
exultation burst forth in a crowding rush of words:

“It wasn’t my voice--but that’s better, he says it’s the long rest--it
was the other thing--the temperament, the soul. It’s got into me. I
knew it myself as soon as I began to sing. I felt as if something
that bound me was gone--ropes and chains broken and thrown away. It
was so much easier. Before I was always making efforts, listening to
what they told me, trying to work it out with my head. And to-day!
Oh, Evie, I knew it, I felt it--something outside myself that poured
into me and carried me along. I could just let myself go and be
wonderful--wonderful--wonderful!”

She threw out her arms as if to illustrate the extent of her
wonderfulness, wide as she could stretch, then brought her hands
together on her bosom, and, with half-shut eyes, stood rapt in ravished
memory.

We gazed mutely at her as if she were some remarkable spectacle upon
which we had unexpectedly chanced.

“I sang and sang,” she said softly, “and each time it was better.
Vignorol wouldn’t let me go.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He kissed me,” she murmured dreamily.

Roger in his corner moved and then was still.

“But what did he suggest about you? What did he want you to do?”

My mouth was dry. Sitting on the edge of the sofa I clutched the sides
of it as if it was a frail bark and I was floating in it over perilous
seas.

“Go back to where I belong,” she said, and then came out of her ecstasy
and began to pace up and down, flinging sentences at me.

“Try it again and do it this time. He says I can, and I know I can.
Oh, Evie, to get away from all this--those hateful pupils, those
hideous lessons--those women! To go back to my work, be among my
own people.” She brushed by Roger, her glance, imbued with its inward
vision, passing over him as if he was invisible. “It’s like coming out
of prison. It’s like coming to life again after you were dead.”

[Illustration: “I could just let myself go and be wonderful!”]

She had expressed it exactly. She _had_ been dead. The mild and wistful
woman of the last two months was a wraith. _This_ was Lizzie Harris
born again, renewed and revitalized, now almost terrible in her naked
and ruthless egotism.

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought yet. Vignorol wants me to study with
him for nothing, pay it back when I make good. But that doesn’t matter
now. I can’t think of anything but that I’m home, in my place, and
that I can do it. They were all disappointed in me, said I’d never get
there. I can. I will. Wait!--Watch me. You’ll see me on top yet, and it
won’t be so far off, either. I’ll show you all it’s in me. I’ll wake up
every clod in those boxes, I’ll make their dull fat faces shine, I’ll
hear them clap and stamp and shout, ‘Brava, Bonaventura!’”

She cried out the two last words, staring before her with flashing
eyes that looked from the heights of achievement upon an applauding
multitude. In the moment of silence I had a queer clairvoyant feeling
that it was true, that it would happen, and I saw her as the queen of
song with her foot upon the public’s neck. Then the seeing passion left
her face and her lip curled in superb disdain.

“And you wanted to make a _singing teacher_ out of me!”

She swept us both with a contemptuous glance, as if we were the chief
offenders in a conspiracy for her undoing. I was used to it, but Roger,
the galled jade whose withers were yet unwrung, winced under her scorn.

“But Miss Harris,” he protested, “we only--”

“Oh, I’m not talking to you,” she said brutally. “You don’t know
anything about it.”

“Certainly, if you say so,” he replied.

There was a moment’s pause. I did not like to look at him. You can
bear being insulted if no one else sees it, but one old friend mustn’t
witness another’s humiliation, especially when that other is unable by
temperament and training to hit back.

Lizzie, having crushed him like an annoying and persistent fly, wheeled
toward the door.

“I must go. I can’t stay any longer.” Then in answer to a question
from me, “Oh, I don’t know where--out to breathe. I can’t stay still. I
want to walk and feel I’m free again, that I’m not cramped up in a dark
hole with no sunshine. I want to feel that I’m myself and say it over
and over.”

She went out, seeming to draw after her all the stir and color that she
had brought in. It was as if a comet with a bright and glittering tail
had crowded itself into the room, and then, after trying to squeeze
into the contracted area, swishing and lashing about and flattening us
against the walls, had burst forth to continue on its flaming way.

I fell back on the sofa feeling that every nerve in me had snapped and
I was filled with torn and quivering ends. Stupidly, with open mouth, I
looked at Roger, and he, also stupidly but with his mouth shut, looked
at me. I don’t know how long we looked. It probably was a few seconds
but it seemed an age--one of those artificially elongated moments
when, as some sage says, the measure of time becomes spiritual, not
mechanical. I saw Roger afar as if I was eying him through the big end
of an opera glass--a tiny familiar figure at the end of a great vista.
The space between us was filled with a whirling vortex of thoughts,
formless and immensely exciting. They surged and churned about trying
to find a definite expression, trying to force their way to my brain
and tell me thrilling and important news. Then the familiar figure
advanced, pressed them out of the way, and taking a chair by the sofa
sat down and demanded explanations.

I couldn’t give them. I couldn’t explain Lizzie to him any more than
I could to Betty or Mrs. Ashworth. I remembered him, before he had
met her, telling me in the restaurant that I was seeing her through
my own personality, and now _he_ was doing it, and he’d never get
anywhere that way. I wanted desperately to make him understand. There
was something so pitiful in his dismay, his reiterated “But why should
she be offended with me. What have _I_ done?” And then hanging on
my words as if I was some kind of a magician who could wave a wand
and make it all clear. Nothing would have pleased me more than to be
able to advance some “first cause” from which he could have worked up
to a logical conclusion. But how could I? The lost traveler in the
Australian bush was faced by a task, simple and easy, compared to
Roger Clements’ trying to grasp the intricacies of Lizzie Harris’
temperament.

I was sorry for him. I was sorry (the way you’re sorry for some one
inadequately equipped to meet an unexpected crisis) to see how helpless
he was. I tried to be kind and also truthful--a difficult combination
under the circumstances--and make plain to him some of the less complex
aspects of the sphinx, only to leave him in dazed distress.

He was alarmed at her evident intention to go back to the stage,
couldn’t believe it, wanted me to tell him why an abandoned resolution
should come back like a curse to roost. He couldn’t get away
from his original conception of her, had learned her one way and
couldn’t relearn her another. It was at once a pathetic sight and an
illuminating experience--the man of ability, the student, the scholar,
out of his depths and floundering foolishly. The mind trained to the
recognition of the obvious and established, accustomed to fit its own
standards to any and all forms of the human animal, coming up with a
dizzying impact against the mind that had no guide, no standard, no
code, but floats in the flux of its own emotions.

I repeat I was sorry, immensely sorry. Such is the inconsistency of
human nature that I was filled up and overflowing with sympathy at the
spectacle of my own man, once my exclusive property, hurt, flouted and
outraged by the vagaries of my successful rival.

A eight o’clock that evening I was in my sitting-room when I heard
her come in. She did not stop at my door but went up-stairs, a quick
rustling progress through the silence of the house. It was very still,
not a sound from any of the rooms, when I heard the notes of her piano,
and then her voice--“_Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix._” The register was
shut, and I stole to the door and opening it stood at the stair-head
listening. Before the aria was over I knew that what she had said was
true. Lizzie had found herself.

After a pause she began again--_O Patria Mia_ from _Aïda_. I tiptoed
forward and let myself noiselessly down on the top step, breath held
to listen. As the song swelled, the cry of a bleeding and distracted
heart, the doors along the passages were softly opened. Up and down
the wall came the click of turned latches and stealthy footsteps. Mrs.
Bushey’s lodgers were not abroad, as I had thought. The stairs creaked
gently as they dropped upon them. When _Patria Mia_ was over we were
all there. I could see the legs of Mr. Hamilton and the count dangling
over the banisters above me. On the bottom of the flight Mr. Weatherby
sat, and Miss Bliss and Mr. Hazard leaned against the wall, looking up
with the gaslight gilding their faces.

In the silence that fell on the last note no one spoke. There was no
rising chorus of praise as there once had been. I don’t think we were
aware of one another, each rapt in the memory of an ecstatic sadness.
The cautious foot of Mrs. Phillips stealing along the lower hall made
me look down and I saw her stationing herself beside young Hazard, and
that Dolly Bliss’ face shone with tears.

She went on--_Vissi d’Arte, Vissi d’Amore_, Musetta’s song; the
habanera from _Carmen_, Brahm’s _Sapphische Ode_, sounding the depths
and heights. Between each piece we were dumb, only the creaking of the
banisters as Mr. Hamilton shifted, or the sniffing of Miss Bliss when
the song was sad, fell on our silence. We never saw her. She was at
last the diva, remote, august, a woman mysterious and unknown, singing
to us across an impassable gulf.

As long as I live I shall never forget it--the narrow half-lit
passages, the long oval of the stair-well, on the bottom step of my
flight Mr. Weatherby’s back, broad and bent, as he rested his elbows on
his knees. Against the whitewashed wall below Mr. Hazard with his eyes
fixed in a trance of listening; Mrs. Phillips, her head pressed back
against the wall, her lids closed, and Dolly Bliss’ little face bright
with slow dropping tears.

We were Liza Bonaventura’s first audience.




XIX


THE next morning, while I yet slept, she came knocking and rattling
at my door. When I let her in she upbraided me for having it locked,
unmindful of my sleepy excuses that as the street door was generally
open all night it was wisdom to keep one’s apartment firmly closed.

She was in the blue kimono over her nightgown, and when I got back into
bed--for it was too early for breakfast--sat down on the edge of the
couch and told me that she had decided to accept Mrs. Ferguson’s offer
to send her to Europe.

I had expected some move but hadn’t dared to hope for this. It was
impossible to hide my agitation, to wipe the expression of startled
excitement off my face. She paid no attention to me, would not have
noticed if I had fallen flat in a dead faint, so engrossed was she in
her plans. Staring out of the window with narrowed far-seeing eyes, she
developed her program, oblivious of the fact that I was not answering,
more like a person thinking aloud than one consulting another. When
she finally paused, I said hoarsely, afraid to believe it:

“Mrs. Ferguson may have changed her mind. You wouldn’t hear of the
offer when she made it.”

She treated the suggestion as preposterous.

“What an idea! Who ever heard of any woman changing her mind on such a
subject.”

“You’ve changed yours,” I answered faintly.

“I’m different, and besides I’ve changed it for the better. She’ll be
only too glad to send me. Why think of what it means to her! She’ll
be known as the patron of one of the greatest living prima donnas.
That’s a thing that doesn’t happen to everybody. Is the morning paper
down-stairs? I want to see what steamers are leaving this week. I’ll
go as soon as I can get off. Oh, I won’t meet anybody, and it doesn’t
matter if I do.”

The door closed on her and I fell back on the pillows like a marionette
whose wire has broken. Limp as a rag I lay looking up at the ceiling,
and out of my mouth issued a sigh that was almost a groan. It was all I
had power for. The tension snapped, I suddenly felt myself invaded by a
lassitude so deep, so vast that it went to the edges of the world and
lapped over. I would like to have been removed to a far distance and
lain under a tree and watched the leaves without moving or thinking or
speaking. I would like to have stayed in bed and looked at the dusty
circle of cement flowers from which the chandelier hung, for years and
years.

She came hastening back with the paper, tore it apart, and spreading it
on the table read the shipping advertisements. Several steamers were
due to sail within the week. She decided on the best and throwing the
paper on the floor, said briskly:

“I’ll see her about it this morning before she goes out. There’s no
need to bother about it before breakfast. I’ll just take a cup of
coffee down here with you and then go up and dress. Let’s get it now.”

I rose, telling her to set the table while I dressed. She put on
two cups, each trip to the table impeded by the paper, over which
she trampled with loud cracklings, then she gave it up and followed
me, talking. My toilet, performed with mutilated rites owing to its
publicity, took me from room to room, with Lizzie at my heels. When I
shut the door on my bath, she leaned against it and through the crack
gave me her opinion on the rival merits of Paris and Berlin as centers
of musical study.

While I was making the breakfast she stood in the entrance of the
kitchenette, then, squeezing by her with the coffee pot in one hand and
a plate of toast in the other, she did not give me enough room and the
toast slid off the plate and was strewed afar. She picked up a piece
and sat down eating it, her elbows on the table, while I gathered up
the rest. Hot and disheveled I took my place opposite while she watched
me, biting delicately at her toast, benignly beautiful and fresh as a
summer’s morn.

She was stretching her hand for her cup when a disturbing thought made
her pause. She dropped the hand and looked at me in consternation:--her
big trunk was no good, it had been broken three years ago coming from
California.

“Oh, well”--a happy solution occurred to her and she held out her hand
for the cup--“I can borrow one of yours. That large one with the Bagdad
portière over it. I’ll return it as soon as I get there. You don’t mind
loaning it to me, do you, dearest?”

I gave it, warmly, generously, effusively. It wasn’t like giving Mrs.
Bushey the lamp. There was no necessity for diplomatic pressure. I
would have given her my jewels, my miniatures, my last cent in the
bank, my teeth like Fantine, each and all of my treasures, to have her
go. Nobody knows how I wanted her to go. It was not that I had ceased
to love her--I will do that till I die. It was not that I had hopes
Roger would forget her--he may be as faithful as Penelope for all I
know. I was unable to stand any more. I was down, done, ended. I wanted
to creep into my little hole, curl up and lie still. I wanted to look
at the wreath of cement flowers for years. I wanted immunity from the
solving of unsolvable questions, respite from trying to straighten
out what persisted in staying tangled, freedom to regain my poise,
reinstate my conscience, patch up the broken pieces of my heart. An
immovable body had encountered an irresistible force, and though the
immovable body was still in its old place, it had been so scarred
and torn and tattered by the irresistible force that only rest would
restore it.

That was two days ago. In the interim there has been no rest--I have
spent most of the forty-eight hours in taxicabs and at telephones--but
relief is in sight.

Lizzie is going.

It is all arranged. Betty has dispersed the pupils and renewed her
European offer. Between taxicabs she caught me here yesterday and told
me that few women have the privilege of being the patron of one of
the greatest living prima donnas. The privilege sat soberly upon her
and she was going to make herself worthy of it by giving one of the
greatest living prima donnas every advantage that Europe offers.

In the afternoon Lizzie and I went down to the steamship office
and bought her ticket, and then to the banker’s to draw the first
instalment on her letter of credit. It was a royally generous letter
and I said so. Lizzie didn’t think it was too much and went over a list
of expenses to prove it. She is to go to Berlin--Vignorol wanted Paris
but as a dramatic singer she preferred Berlin. I gathered from a casual
remark that Vignorol was hurt at her desertion of him and his country.
But this didn’t trouble her.

“Vignorol! I don’t see that it was so kind of him to want to take me
for nothing. It would have made him. He’s only known here in New York
now and as my teacher he would have been known all over the world.”

The steamer sails the day after to-morrow and this afternoon I sent
up the trunk. I had offered to come in the evening and help her pack
and then backed out. In an offhand manner, as she was sorting piles of
sheet music, she said Roger was coming in after dinner to say good-by.
She seemed engrossed by the music, gave an absent-minded assent when I
said I couldn’t help that night. I could not tell whether she had at
last guessed and was exhibiting unusual tact or whether she was still
unconscious. I knew that every minute of the next day was filled and
it would be Roger’s only chance to see her alone. It was difficult to
imagine him proposing in a room littered with his lady’s wardrobe. But
love is said to find out a way and if a man’s in earnest he can put the
question just as well in a fourth-floor parlor full of clothes, as he
can by moonlight in a bower.

I had been waiting for this interview, braced and steeled for the
announcement. It was the final trial and I was going to go through with
it proudly and stoically if I died the day after. I did not feel quite
as if I should die. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, that’s
why we don’t all, sometime or other, commit suicide. Hope upheld me
now: with a career beckoning she might refuse him. It was but a sickly
gleam. No woman, comprehensible to me, would ever put the greatest
career the world offers before Roger Clements. The hope lay in the fact
that Lizzie was not a comprehensible woman.

With great inward struggle I preserved my pride and stoicism through
the rest of the afternoon. They were still with me when, in the evening
I lay down on the divan bed, whence I can hear all ascending footsteps.
The wreath of cement flowers gradually faded, and the daylight sounds
of the house were absorbed in the evening quiet. Night had possession
of the city for what seemed an endless time when I heard him going up:
from the street, past my floor, up the next flight, and the next, then
the far faint closing of Lizzie’s door. Rigid in the dark I pictured
the meeting--the room with its high blaze of gas, the open trunks and
scattered garments, and Lizzie with her smile and the enveloping beam
of her glance.

It was profoundly still in the back room, only the tiny ticking of
my watch on the table. The old tomcat, who at this hour was wont to
lift up his voice in a nuptial hymn, had gone afield for his wooing.
The parlors and bedrooms in the extensions were quiet, their lighted
windows throwing a soft yellow light into my darkened lair. Our little
bit of the city held its breath in sympathy with me, prone with fixed
eyes, seeing those two in the parlor.

Would he work up to it in gentle gradations, gracefully and poetically
as men did in novels, or blurt it out in one great question which (for
me at least) would have made life blossom as the wood did when Siegmund
sung? They would probably stand--people didn’t sit when such matters
were afoot--and if she said yes would he take her in his arms then and
there? Under the same roof, just two floors above me, they might be
standing now, enfolded, cheek to cheek. Pride and stoicism fell from me
and I pressed my face into the pillow and moaned like a wounded animal.

The watch ticked on. It was evidently not going to be short and
tempestuous. Roger was an unhurried person and he would probably
proffer his suit with dignified deliberation. I was certain, if he was
successful, he’d come in and tell me on the way down. I couldn’t see
him passing my door and not remembering. The place was dark, he might
think I was asleep and go by. I got up and lit the lights, thinking as
I stretched up with the match, that they were signals telling him I was
here, waiting, ready to wish him joy.

Then I looked at the watch--only just nine. He might be hours longer. I
could spend the time in preparation, be ready to meet him with a frank
unforced smile.

I went to the back window and looked up at the stars for courage.
The sky was sprinkled with them--big ones and bright pin points. For
centuries they had been gazing down at the puny agonies of discarded
lovers, unmoved and cynically curious, winking at them in derision.
The thought had a tonic effect. Under its stimulus I straightened my
ancestors, askew after a morning’s dusting, and touched up the bunch of
daffodils on the table. Then the effect began to wear off. I reached
for the watch--twenty minutes past nine.

If she had refused him it would have been done by now. Lizzie wasn’t
one to spare or mince her words. I’d better get ready for him. I
went to the mirror and saw a ghost, and the stars’ stern message was
forgotten. That I should some day be dust was not a sustaining thought
now when I was so much a suffering sentient thing, sunk down in the
midmost of the moment. I brushed some rouge on my cheeks and smiled at
the reflection to see if I could do it naturally. It was ghastly, like
the grimace of a corpse that had expired in torment.

Then suddenly I dropped my rouge and gave a smothered cry--I heard
Lizzie calling my name. For a moment power of movement seemed stricken
from me. I had not thought that she would be the one to tell me. She
called again and I opened the door and went into the hall. Her head was
visible over the banisters.

“Have you got the key of that trunk?” she said. “It’s packed and I want
to lock it.”

It was a ruse to get me up there. Even Lizzie wouldn’t announce an
engagement at the top of her voice down two flights of stairs. I found
the key and mounted, holding to the hand-rail. It seemed a long climb.
When I got to the top I had no breath, though I had gone slowly, and I
trembled so that I was afraid she would notice it, and laid the key on
the table.

The trunk was packed, its lid down, and another, open, with garments
trailing over its sides, stood in the middle of the floor. Round it
lay the unpacked remains of Lizzie’s wardrobe, in mounds, in broken
scatterings, in confused interminglings. If a cyclone had descended on
neat closets and bureau drawers, scooped out their contents, carried it
with a whirling centripetal motion into the center of the room, took a
final churning rush through it and dashed out again, the place could
not have presented a more wildly disheveled appearance.

In an unencumbered corner, an eddy untouched by the cyclone’s wrath,
Roger stood putting on his coat. We looked across the chaos, bowed
and smiled. I knew my smile by heart. Roger’s was something new, rose
no higher than his lips, leaving his eyes somber, I might say sullen.
Lizzie, without words, had snatched up the key and knelt by the trunk.
She looked untidy, hot and rather cross. They certainly had not the
appearance of lovers.

I fell weakly into a chair and awaited revelations. None came. Roger
buttoned his coat, Lizzie made scratching noises with the key. There
was something strained and sultry in the silence. Could she have
refused him? One of the disappointing things about people in real life
is their failure to rise to the dramatic expression fitting to great
moments. Had I been in a play I would have used words vibrating with
the thud of my own heart-beats. What I did say was:

“Have you had a nice evening?”

“Very,” said Roger with a dry note.

“Have we,” murmured Lizzie, busy with the key. “I’m sure I don’t know.
I’ve not had time to say a word to Mr. Clements.”

“I’m afraid I’ve been rather in the way,” he remarked, the dry note a
trifle more astringent.

“Well, the truth is you have,” she answered. “Are you sure this is the
right key, Evie?”

The gleam of hope brightened into a ray. I sat forward on the edge
of the chair looking from Lizzie’s bent back to Roger’s face, which
had reddened slightly and had a tight look about the mouth. I am, by
nature, a shy and modest person, and under normal conditions the last
thing I would do would be to force another’s confidence. But I _had_ to
know. I had to drag the truth out of them if it came with a shriek like
the roots of the fabled mandrake.

“Haven’t you talked _at all_?” I exclaimed, with an agonized emphasis
that might have betrayed me to a child of twelve.

They did not appear to notice it. Roger moved from his corner, picking
his way round a clump of boots that had been whirled near the sofa.

“Talk?” said Lizzie, still engaged with the key. “How can people talk
when they’re packing to go to Europe? There! It’s in and it turns.
Thank goodness the lock’s all right.”

She rose and surveyed the room with an intent frowning glance.

“That,” pointing to the other trunk, “I’ll begin on now and finish
to-morrow. This,” turning to the full one, “is done. I’d better lock it
at once and get it out of the way.”

She turned back to it and gave a series of tentative pushes at the lid
which rose rebelliously over bulging contents.

Nothing had happened! She hadn’t let him speak--he hadn’t dared--no
opportunity had offered? What did it matter how or why? The sickening
thudding of my heart began to grow less. I leaned my elbow on my knees
and my forehead on my hands, feeling at last as if I was going to be
Early Victorian and swoon.

Under the shadow of my fingers I could see Roger’s feet stepping
carefully among the boots. Skirting tangled heaps of millinery, they
arrived at the trunk. I dropped my hands and watched while he addressed
himself to Lizzie’s back.

“Good night.” He stretched out his hand. “Good-by.”

She turned, saw the hand and put hers into it; then, for the first time
smiled, but not with her habitual rich glow.

“Good-by. I’d ask you to stay but there’s really too much to do. I’ve
got to have to-morrow free to finish up in.”

The hands separated and dropped. His back was toward me and I was glad
of it.

“Perhaps we’ll meet again some day.”

“Oh, surely.” The abstraction of her look vanished, her smile flashed
out brilliant and dazzling. “But not here, not this way. You’ll see me
soon in my right place--behind the footlights.”

He murmured a response and moved toward the door. She turned back to
the trunk, pressing on it and then drawing back and pressing again. He
passed me with a low “Good night, Evie,” and I answered in the same
tone.

He was at the door when she ceased her efforts, and drawing herself up
with a deep breath, called peremptorily:

“Come here, Mr. Clements.”

He stopped, the door-knob in his hand.

“What is it, Miss Harris?”

She stood back from the trunk, flushed and irritated.

“Just sit on this trunk, please. It must be locked to-night.”

Her eye on him was as the eye of a general or a subaltern, impersonal,
commanding, imperious.

He met it and stood immovable. In the fifteen years I have known him I
had never seen him look so angry.

“Hurry up,” she said sharply. “I’d ask Evie but she’s not heavy enough.”

He answered with icy politeness:

“Miss Harris, I am very sorry, but I’ve already stayed too long. There
are other men in the house, who will surely only be too happy to sit on
your trunk whenever you choose to command them,” and he opened the door.

“Oh, very well, if you’re going to be so disobliging,” she answered,
angry now in her turn. Then to me: “Come over here, Evie, and help. If
we both press as hard as we can I think we can do it. I don’t care to
wait till the morning. I want this locked now.”

I rose obediently and began to steer my way through the cyclone’s
track. Roger came in, shutting the door with a bang.

“Mrs. Drake’s in no condition to make such exertions. She’s been ill
and oughtn’t to be asked to do such things. Evie, don’t touch that
trunk.”

“That’s perfect rubbish. I’m not asking her to _lift_ it. Come on,
Evie.”

I stopped, looking helplessly from one to the other. They glared at
each other, his face pale, hers red. They seemed on the verge of battle
and I knew what Lizzie was like when her temper was up.

“Oh, don’t fight about a trunk,” I implored.

“I’ve not the slightest intention of fighting about anything,” said
Roger, looking as if, had a suitable adversary been present, he would
have felled him to the ground. “But I won’t have you making efforts
that are unnecessary and that you’re unable to make.”

“You talk like a perfect fool,” said Lizzie, with the flashing eye of
combat I knew so well.

He bowed.

“I’m quite ready to admit it. But as a perfect fool I absolutely refuse
to let you make Mrs. Drake help shut that trunk.”

“Then do it yourself.”

As usual she had the best of it. Roger knew it and bore upon his face
the look of the bear in the pit at whom small boys hurl gibes. When she
saw the symptoms of defeat she began to melt.

“It’ll not take five minutes--just one good pressure on this corner.
There’s a hat box that sticks up and has to be squeezed down.”

With a white face of wrath Roger strode over the clothes and sat on
the trunk. I have never believed that he could be ridiculous, my Roger
hedged round with the dignity that is the Clements’ heritage, but he
was then, boiling with rage, perched uncomfortably on the sloping lid.
A hysterical desire to laugh seized me and I backed off to my chair,
biting my under lip, afraid to speak for fear of exploding into a
screaming giggle.

They were unconscious of anything funny in the situation, one too
angry, the other too engrossed. With a concentrated glance she surveyed
the trunk, directing the bestowal of his weight. When she had finally
got him in the right place, she knelt, key in hand, and in answer to
a curt demand he rose and flopped furiously down. To the protesting
crunching of the hat box, the lid settled and the click of the lock
sounded.

“Done,” she cried triumphantly, falling back in a sitting posture on
the floor.

Roger got up.

“Have I your permission to go?” he asked with elaborate deference.

“You have,” said his hostess, and from the floor looked up with a
bright and beaming face from which every vestige of bad temper had
fled. “Good-by--good luck. And remember, the first performance I give
in New York I expect to see you applauding in the bald-headed row.”

As the door shut on him my laughter came like the burst of a geyser.
Lizzie, still on the floor, looking at me with annoyed surprise, made
it worse. When she asked me in a hostile voice kindly to tell her
what the joke was, it got beyond my control and I became hysterical.
It wasn’t very bad--I always do things in a meek subdued way--but I
laughed and cried when I tried to explain and laughed again.

When she saw there was no use ordering me not to be an idiot, she
got up, grumbling to herself and began on the second trunk. She kept
stepping round me carrying armfuls of clothes, trailing skirts over my
knees, leaning forward from a kneeling posture to jerk blouses, cloaks
and petticoats from the back of my chair. I tried to retreat into
corners, but she worked in wide comprehensive sweeps, wherever I went
coming after me to find something that was under my chair or upon which
I was sitting. Finally she used me as a sort of stand, throwing things
on me and plucking them off, muttering abstractedly as she worked.

I was recovering and she was inspecting a skirt outheld at arm’s length
when she said musingly:

“I hadn’t the least idea Roger Clements was so bad-tempered. He’s just
a self-sufficient cross-grained prig. Gets into a rage when I ask him
to sit on a trunk. I can’t stand that kind of man.”

I bade her good night and went down-stairs.

The lights were burning high. I put them out and laid down on the
bed. My laughter and tears were over. Fatigue, anger and pain were
sensations that existed somewhere outside me, in a world I had left. I
seemed to have no body, to be a spirit loosened from fleshly trammels,
floating blissfully in prismatic clouds.

I floated in them, motionless in ecstatic relief, savoring my joy,
knowing the perfection of peace, till the windows paled with the dawn.




XX


I WRITE to-night in a hushed house--a house that holds the emptiness
that follows the withdrawal of a dynamic presence.

Lizzie is gone.

As her ship bears her away to future glory, we, the hewers of wood and
drawers of water, sit here recuperating from the labors of getting her
off. In its hour of departure the magnet gave forth the full measure of
its power and we bent our backs and lent our hands in a last energy of
service. No votaries bowed before the shrine of a deity ever celebrated
their worship with more selfless acts of devotion than Mrs. Bushey’s
lodgers in speeding Lizzie on her way.

What did Mr. Hazard’s unfinished order matter when Lizzie, having
forgotten to order the expressman, one had to be sought up and down
the reaches of Lexington Avenue? Of what consequence to Miss Bliss
were broken sittings, on the proceeds of which she could have lived
for a week, when Lizzie’s traveling dress was found to be in rags and
had to be mended by some one who knew how? When the count rendered
his tribute in fruit and flowers, did he stop to consider that the
money was part of the fund reserved for his passage home, and now he
would have to travel second cabin? No one thought of anything but the
departing goddess. They were proud and glad to deny themselves that she
might go, grandly serene, amid clouds of ascending incense.

As for me, after that night of respite, I became a body again, a body
whose mission was the preparing of another for the great adventure.
She drew me after her as the fisherman draws the glittering bit
of tin that revolves from the end of his line. The simile is not
entirely satisfactory because I did not glitter, but I revolved, round
and round, as the fisherman’s hand pulled or eased on the line. I
sewed, I packed, I unpacked, searching for forgotten necessities. I
was down-town, executing overlooked errands, I was up-town, cooking
hurried meals in the kitchenette. My voice in the morning called her
to breakfast, my good night was the last sound on the stairs as I left
her room, grown bare and bleak, losing its character, as one by one the
signs of her occupancy vanished. I had no time to feel, to be glad or
sorry. Even the passion to have her go was overridden by the ruling
instinct that while she was there I must serve. And though the poet
tells us there are those who can do this while standing and waiting, I
evidently was not one of them.

As we demonstrated her power by the zeal of our devotion, her arrogant
exactions increased in a corresponding ratio. She was never more aloof,
more regally indifferent, more imperiously demanding. The call of her
destiny had come to her and she heard nothing else.

Her stay with us had been only the bivouac of a night, and we the
passers-by she had encountered in the moment of halt. With the goal in
sight we lost what small significance we had and assumed the aspect
of strangers, by whose fire she had rested, in whose tent she had
slept. Already, before she had gone, we had faded into the limbo of the
useless and outworn. Henceforward, from our humble corner, we would
watch her mounting on others as she had mounted on us--climbing higher
and higher with never a backward glance or a wave of her hand to the
little group who strained their eyes for a sign of remembrance.

Some day the others would find her out and be angry, cite to their
friends proofs of her ingratitude, grow bitter at the memory of their
unappreciated efforts, add her to the list of forgetful great ones who
took all and rendered nothing back. From a deeper knowledge of her I
would never know their disillusion. The thought that she felt no love
for any of us had for me no sting. I even went farther, agreed that
it was not her place to feel it. Arrived at last at the heart of her
mystery, I could keep my memory of her fair and untarnished, untouched
by efforts to fit her into a frame where she didn’t belong.

She was not, as they would think, a heartless and cruel fellow of
ours, but the creature of another species, thinking in a different
language, seeing life from a different angle. What we were trained to
accept as right and just, she had no power to recognize. Custom and
tradition had formed a groove in which we walked unquestionably onward.
She wandered at will in a world expressly created for her, peopled by
shades who had no meaning apart from their usefulness. Environment
that had molded and put its stamp upon us made no impression upon her
invulnerable self-concentration. We held a point of view in common,
responded automatically to established ideas and inherited impulses.
She saw no claims but her own and moved upon what she wanted with the
directness of an animal. The bogies with which we were frightened into
good behavior--public opinion, social position, loss of respect--she
snapped her fingers at. Her only law was the law of her own being, her
standard, a fierce and defiant determination to be true to herself.
Restraints and reticences, subtleties of breeding, delicacies of
conduct, imposed on us by the needs of communal life, were not for
her, selected and set apart to be that lonely figure in the crowded
companionable world--the people’s servant.

That was what I at last knew her to be--an instrument for the joy,
the recreation, the enthrallment of that great, sluggish, full-fed
Minotaur, the public. For this purpose nature had fashioned her,
eliminating every characteristic that might render her unfit,
pruning away virtues that would hamper, uprooting instincts that
would interfere. As Wordsworth saw the All-Mother saying of a worthy
specimen, “I will make a lady of my own,” so, seeing Lizzie, she had
said, “I will make an artist of my own,” and had set about doing it
with thoroughness.

From the beautiful outer case to “the hollows where a heart should
be” she was formed to be the one thing--a cunningly framed and
articulated mechanism for our entertainment. To us--whom she so lightly
regarded--she was foreordained to carry a message of beauty, call
us from our sordid cares, and base ambitions, catch us up from the
grayness of the every day to the heights where once more we caught a
glimpse of the vision and the dream. That we should work and sacrifice
to help her to her place, she, unconscious but impelled by her destiny,
felt, and made me feel. And having gathered up our tribute she had left
us, not ungratefully, not having taken all and given nothing, but in
her own time and in her own way to pay us back a hundredfold.

I thought it all out in the cab coming back from the steamer, and I was
content to have it so.

I had gone down to see her off--she wanted me and no one else. We
had passed up the dock amid throngs of passengers and presently
there were stewards and cabin-boys running for her luggage, and
officers discreetly staring. When we bought the ticket I had seen on
the list the name of a countess, and I learned that she was a royal
lady traveling incognita with a maid. Everybody thought Lizzie was
the countess and I the maid. I looked the part, trotting at her
heels, carrying a large bandbox covered with pink roses that had
been overlooked in the final scramble. She had a triumphal progress,
everything made easy, boys bearing the count’s flowers going before
her up the gangway, and I following with the bandbox that nobody had
offered to take. Before I left I saw the royal lady leaning on the
railing, a pale person with the curling fringe and prominent eyes of
the typical British princess. Nobody paid any attention to her, but
when we went exploring about the decks, looks followed us and whispers
buzzed.

As the big ship churned the water and ponderously moved off, I stood on
the pier’s edge and waved to her. I was the tiny unit in the crowd--the
nameless, humdrum, earth-bound crowd--for whom she was to weave the
spell, and create the illusion. Through a glaze of tears I watched her,
tall and splendid beside the dowdy princess--my beautiful Lizzie, a
real princess, going imperially to claim her crown.

The windows are open and the spring night comes in, soft as a caress.
In the basement of the apartment-house some one is playing _Annie
Laurie_ on the accordion, and in the back yards the servants are
chatting in the kitchen doors. From Mr. Hazard’s room, below me, I can
hear a low murmur of voices. The others are in there talking it over,
all, I know, singing the praises of Lizzie, voicing hopes for her
success as deep and sincere as prayers. I can fancy them, reclining on
chairs and sofas, worn out by their labors and feeling blankly that
something has gone out of their lives. A wild disturbing chord in the
day’s melody is hushed, a red thread in the tapestry has been withdrawn.

I feel it, too.

And so the tale is ended. I don’t think I shall ever write any more.
In the autumn, when I started this manuscript, I just intended to put
down the happenings of a lonely woman’s life, to read over on evenings
when looking back was pleasanter than looking forward. Now, without
intending to, I have written a story, which is not my fault, as the
story happened to intrude itself into the lonely woman’s life, greatly
to her surprise, and a good deal to her sorrow. But this is the finish
of it. There is no more to tell. The heroine has gone, if to come back
not the same heroine. The hero--you know as much about him as I do.
And the author--well, the author is just where she was, a widow of
thirty-three, doing light housekeeping in an eighteen-foot apartment.
It can’t be much of a story because it hasn’t got anywhere; nobody has
died, nobody has married. So to myself--for I am going to put this away
in a trunk and never let a soul see it--I make my bow as an author.

Good night, Evelyn Drake. As a sadder and wiser woman I take my leave
of you. Good-by.




EPILOGUE


THIS has been a day of coincidences. They began in the afternoon and
ended an hour ago. And now, past midnight, in my sitting-room looking
out on the lights of the Rond Point, like Bret Harte’s heroine, “I am
sitting alone by the fire, dressed just as I came from the dance”--only
it wasn’t a dance, it was the opera.

But to get to the coincidences: This afternoon I was unpacking an old
trunk full of odds and ends that I brought when we came to Paris last
autumn, and at the bottom of it I found the manuscript I had written
four years ago at Mrs. Bushey’s. I laid it on the top to read over in
some idle moment when Roger wouldn’t catch me. For though we’ve been
married three years and talked over everything that ever happened to
either of us, Roger doesn’t know the whole story of that winter.

Of course I _have_ asked him if he wasn’t really in love with Lizzie,
and he always laughs and says he wasn’t, that he was attracted by her
and interested in her as a type. I don’t contradict him--it’s best to
let men rest peacefully in their innocent self-delusions. Besides, if I
pressed the subject we might have to go on to Lizzie and Masters, and
that’s the part of the story he doesn’t know. Sometimes I’ve thought
I’d tell him and then I’ve always stopped. Why should I? It’s all come
out right. Lizzie has traveled along the line of least resistance in
one direction and reached success, and Roger has done the same thing
in another and reached me. She _must_ be happy if fulfilled ambitions
can do it, and we _are_, with each other and last year--to crown it
all--our boy.

Well, I won’t go into that--I get too garrulous. When a woman of
thirty-six has a baby she never gets over the pride and wonder of it.

We came over to Paris last autumn for Roger to do some reading in the
Bibliothèque Nationale, and took this charming apartment near the Rond
Point. On bright mornings I can look into the little park and see Roger
Clements IX sitting out there in his perambulator studying Parisian
life. The day suddenly strikes me as unusually fine and I go out and
sit on the bench beside him and we study Parisian life together, while
his _nou-nou_ knits on a camp-chair near by.

Bother--I keep losing sight of the coincidences which are the only
reason I began to write this. To resume:

During these four years we have tried to keep track of Lizzie. It was
difficult because, of course, after the first few months, she stopped
writing. If it hadn’t been for Betty we should have lost her entirely,
but Betty, being the source of supplies, did know, at least, her
whereabouts. I may add, en passant, that Mrs. Ferguson stood by her
contract to the end and now is enjoying the fruits thereof. If she
isn’t known as the patron of the greatest living prima donna, she is
known as a lady who made a career possible to one of the rising singers
of Europe.

It was two years before Liza Bonaventura made her first hit, as
Elizabeth in _Tannhäuser_ at Dresden. Then we could follow her course
in the papers. I was as proud as if I’d done it myself when I read of
the excitement her Tosca created in Berlin. After that there was a
series of triumphs in the smaller cities of Germany. She sang Carmen at
a special performance where the royal family of something or other (I
never can remember those German names, if I did I couldn’t spell them)
were present, and the kinglet or princeling of the palace gave her a
decoration.

After that the papers began to print stories about her, which is the
forerunner of fame. Some of them were very funny, but most of them
sounded true. I don’t think her press-agent had to do much inventing.
All sorts of distinguished and wonderful men were in love with her, but
she would have none of them. There were some anecdotes of her temper
that I am sure were genuine: how she once slapped a rival prima donna
in the face, and threw her slipper at the head of a German Serene
Highness who must have lost his serenity for the moment.

When we came over here we had first-hand accounts of her, from
Americans who had been traveling in Germany and were bursting with
pride and enthusiasm, and foreigners, who knew more and were more
temperate, but admitted that a new star had risen on the horizon. “The
handsomest woman on the operatic stage since Malibran,” an old French
marquis, who had heard her as Tosca, told me one night at dinner.
Then some Italians who had seen her Carmen were quite thrilled--such
temperament--such passion! Only Calve in her prime had given such a
dramatic portrayal of the fiery gipsy. Opinions were divided about
her Brunhilda. A man Roger and I met at the house of a French writer,
where we sometimes go, told us that in majesty and nobility she was
incomparable, but that her voice was inadequate. Still, she was young,
hardly in her full vigor, with care and study, aided by her magnificent
physique, she might yet rise to the vocal requirements and then--he
spread out his hands and rolled up his eyes.

To-night I have come from the opera after hearing her in _Carmen_ and
the effect is with me still--the difficulty of shaking off the illusion
and getting back into life.

When I looked round from my seat in the orchestra and saw that house,
tier upon tier of faces, hundreds of small pale ovals in ascending
ranks, all looking the same way, all waiting to hear Lizzie, I couldn’t
believe it. The great reverberating shell of building held them like
bees in a hive, buzzing as they found places whence they could see the
queen bee. Through my own quivering expectancy I could sense theirs,
quieter but keen, and hear, thrown back from the resonant walls and
hollow dome, the sounds of fluttered programs, rustling fabrics, seats
dropping and the fluctuant hum of voices--the exhilarating stir and
bustle of a great audience gradually settling into stillness. They
couldn’t have come to see Lizzie--so many people? I was dreaming, it
was somebody else.

The curtain lifted, the illuminated stage was set in the gloom like a
glowing picture. Figures moved across it, voices sang, and then Carmen
came with the red flower in her mouth and it _was_ Lizzie.

She was changed, matured, grown fuller and handsomer, much
handsomer--her beauty in full flower. Her voice, too, was immensely
improved; a fine voice, full, clear and large, not, as she had once
said to me, one of the world’s great voices, but enough for her,
sufficient for what she has to do with it. It is she, her personality,
her magnetic and compelling self, that is the potent thing.

Just as she used to seize upon and subdue us at Mrs. Bushey’s, she
seized upon and subdued those close-packed silent ranks. From the
brilliant picture, cutting the darkness in front of us, she reached
out, groped for and grasped at every consciousness, waiting to receive
its impression. The other singers lost their identity, faded into a
colorless middle distance, as we used to fade when Lizzie came among
us. She held the house, not so much charmed as subjugated, more as
the conqueror than the enchantress. As the opera progressed I, with my
intimate knowledge of her, could see her gaining force, could feel her
fierce exhilaration, as she realized her dominance was growing secure.
Her voice grew richer, her performance more boldly confident. To me
she reached her highest point in the scene over the cards, her face
stiffened to a tragic mask, the cry of “_La Mort_” imbued with horror.
I can’t get it out of my mind--the Gitana, terrible with her lust of
life, suddenly looking into the eyes of death.

I don’t know how to write about music, but it wasn’t all music. It was
the woman, the combination of her great endowment with her power of
vitalizing an illusion, of putting blood and fire into an imaginary
creation, that made it so remarkable. Her portrayal had not the vocal
beauty or sophisticated seduction of Calve’s. It was more primitive,
farther from the city and closer to the earth. It seemed to me more
Merimée’s Carmen than Bizet’s. Of its kind, I, anyway--and Roger agreed
with me--thought it superb.

When it ended and she came before the curtain there were bursts upon
bursts of applause and “bravas” dropping from the galleries. I dare
say I will never again see a dream so completely realized. Then the
house began to empty itself down that splendid stairway, a packed,
slow-moving, voluble crowd, praise, criticism, comment, flung back and
forth in the excited French fashion. I was silent, holding Roger’s arm.
A short fat Frenchman behind me puffed almost into my ear, “_Quelle
femme, mais, quelle femme!_” A woman in front in a Chinese opera
cloak, leaned back to say over her shoulder to a man squeezing past
Roger, “_La voix est bonne, mais n’est pas grande chose, mais c’est
une vraie artiste._” And an angular girl at my elbow, steering an old
lady through cracks in the mass, murmured ecstatically to herself,
“_Mon Dieu, quelle_ temperament!” That was the word I heard oftenest,
temperament.

So in a solid brilliant throng we descended the stairs, all engaged
with Lizzie, discussing her, lauding her, wondering at her--Lizzie,
whom I had seen in the making, learning to be the _vraie artiste_,
wounded, desperate and despairing that this might be.

At the stair-foot--this is the last of the coincidences--the crowd
broke into lines and clumps, scattering for the exits, and through
a break I saw a man standing by a pillar. He was looking up at the
descending people, but not as if he was interested in them, in fact
by the expression of his face I don’t think he saw them. It was John
Masters.

If he hadn’t been so absorbed he would have seen me for I was close to
him. But his eyes, set in that fixity of inner vision, never swerved.
He looked much older, more lined, his bald spot grown all over the top
of his head. Though the glimpse I had of him was fleeting, the crowd
closing on him almost directly, it was long enough for me to see that
the change was deeper than what the years might have wrought. It was
spiritual, diminished will power, self-reliance grown weak. Shabby,
thin, discouraged, he suggested just one word--failure.

My hand involuntarily shut on Roger’s arm and I whispered to him to
hurry. I could not bear the thought of meeting Masters--not for my sake
but for his. I couldn’t bear to look into his face and see him try to
smile.

It is nearly one. Roger is writing in his study and Roger Clements IX
is sleeping in his crib by my bed. How strange it all is. Four years
ago not one of us, except Lizzie, the impossible and irresponsible,
had the least idea that any of us would be where we are now. It was
Lizzie, fighting out her destiny, who crowded and elbowed us all into
our proper places, Lizzie, rapt in her vision, who brought us ours.

This is the real end of my manuscript. It _has_ got somewhere after
all. I can write “finis” with a sense of its being the fitting word.
But before I do I want to just say that I made up my mind to-night,
while we were driving home in the taxi, that I’ll never tell Roger now.

FINIS




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