CHAPTER VI.THE BUTTERFLY.
Well, may there not be butterfliesThat lift with weary wings the air;That loathe the foreign sun, which liesOn all their colors like despair;That glitter, homesick for the formAnd lost sleep of the worm?—S. M. B. Piatt.
In these trying days the neighbor who came closest in friendship and loving service, oddly enough, was the Butterfly of the house, Mrs. Layton. She and her husband had a richly furnished suite of rooms near that of the Dorings. They received many calls, went out frequently, and appeared to find life well worth living. Mrs. Layton was pretty, was always arrayed as the lilies of the field, and all male humanity bent the knee before her.
Cartice’s illness had revealed the unsuspected fact that the Butterfly had a heart as well as a pair of gorgeous wings. She had been astonishingly faithful and kind in her attentions, and astonishingly efficient too, so that now, in the dull days of convalescence the two had become close friends, the formal wall between them havingfallen under the pressure of suffering and sympathy.
It was the Butterfly who had sent for the doctor when Cartice was found unconscious on the floor, helped him when he came, and kept a watchful eye on his patient afterward. Nothing makes such close friends as to help and be helped in suffering. We learn to love those to whom we do good.
Cartice had always found a strange enjoyment in looking at the Butterfly since she first saw her, she knew not why. Was she beautiful? Yes, she had beauty worthy of a higher order of being than a butterfly. That was the marvel of it, that she could be a butterfly with a classic profile and the eyes of a mystic—eyes that could see through all masks.
Now that Cartice knew her so well the strange attraction increased, though she could not determine wherein lay her remarkable power to charm. This power, however, was acknowledged on all sides, and many fell under its influence. Even on the street, women as well as men turned to look after her, though if asked the reason could not have told it. The inexplicable quality we call magnetism belonged to her to an extraordinary degree; but who can explain what that is? It attracts; it compels planets as well as persons to follow after it; but that is all we know about it.
“Mrs. Doring,” said the Butterfly, one day, “you must cheer up or you will die. Worse than that, you will make yourself old long before your time. I know it isn’t a polite thing to say, but you look five years older than when you came to this house.”
The aching heart of the other swelled almost to bursting. The faculty of unburdening herself by friendly confidences had never been hers. Something within her stood like a grim sentinel forbidding all outlet, and though she yearned for sympathy, could not seek it nor meet it with loosened tongue when it came. The instinct of repression had been fostered by a loveless, lonely childhood and lifelong habit. Not a word could she utter now, but the eyes, with their pitiful, wordless appeal, their unbearable burden, turned to the Butterfly, and in one never-to-be-forgotten glance laid bare their owner’s broken heart. Then with a moan she fell forward, and the long repressed agony burst forth in sobs.
The Butterfly’s arms clasped her closely, her tears fell over her, and the words she spoke were wiser than a butterfly ever uttered before. The greatest mind could not have devised a better method of cure for the sick soul than the sympathetic instincts of this airy creature suggested. From that hour between those two no fence or wall, or barrier of any kind existed. They knew each other as we shall all be known when thearmors and masks our hypocritical social usages have forced upon us shall be laid aside with our clay garments.
“Dear Mrs. Doring,” said Mrs. Layton, presently, “it is not necessary to tell me what troubles you. I know it through sympathy. You are greatly distressed for lack of money. You cannot pay your board, and you and your husband are strangers here. I dare say you never imagined it, but my husband and I are almost without a cent in the world, too. We owe this house an immense bill for board, and I am afraid it will never be paid, for every day the situation grows gloomier. It half kills me to go to the table, when I know that we are not paying for the very food we eat, and I suspect you suffer the same way for the same reason. Our outlook is as bad as yours, only we are not strangers here and you are. Yet being known has its disadvantages as well as its advantages. It is hard to be humiliated in the eyes of one’s friends. So far our difficulties are not generally known, but things too bad to think of are ahead of us, I fear. You see I pretend to be sunny and happy. I sing and dance and affect to be merry all the time—for that is the best way, though I assure you my heart often weighs a ton.”
“I am astonished,” said Cartice. “I thought you a butterfly out and out, with no troubles at all.”
“Naturally, I believe I am. I love the beauties and pleasures of life; but nobody knows what butterflies are thinking about while they are fluttering around looking so care-free and joyous. I do the butterfly act now with a fell purpose—two fell purposes in fact. I keep others from suspecting that things are going wrong, and I keep myself from dwelling on my troubles. You must learn butterfly philosophy too. You must go out and meet people and make friends, let yourself out a little and show what is in you.”
“I can’t, dear, for many reasons,” and Cartice glanced at her well-worn gown, and thought of the hopeless condition of her wardrobe.
“Clothes, eh?” said the other, going straight to the point. “Don’t worry on that score, I am handy with a needle and can help you tinker up some of your things to look quite fine. I can toss up a delicious little bonnet, too.”
“But I have no heart in anything,” said Cartice. “You don’t know all—no; you don’t know all.”
“I know more than you think I do. I know precisely what it is to be pitifully disappointed in one’s husband, to find that he is the opposite of what one thought him, to lose confidence in his ability, his manliness, his loyalty and his love.”
“Yes, yes, that is the hardest of all,” wailedCartice, shaken to the soul to learn that what she believed hidden was written in big letters on the outer walls of her life, as it were.
“That, too, you must throw off,” said the philosophic Butterfly. “There are few wives who haven’t had some of that kind of experience. For the most part men are abominable wretches, their whole lives made up of deceit and lies. It hurt me cruelly, cruelly when I found it out and just had to believe it in the face of not wanting to; but now, well—I have taught myself not to care very much.”
“It seems to me that a wife only ceases to care when she ceases to love, and then she ought to give her husband up entirely,” said Mrs. Doring.
“Yes, it is true; when one doesn’t care it is because one doesn’t love one’s husband any more. Of course, it would be honester, more moral and self-respecting to leave him, but we women are mostly tied up by different kinds of chains, so that no matter how wide our eyes are opened we usually go right on pretending we don’t see, and so become hypocrites, too. The whole fabric seems to be pretty much a warp and woof of lies. But I don’t puzzle much over problems as big and hard as that. I haven’t the head for it. I just edge along the easiest way I can, and leave the things I don’t understand, and couldn’t set right if I did, for others to puzzle over and fix up if they can.”
Cartice was astonished at the Butterfly’s hard trials and airy method of ignoring them. We are always astonished to learn that another has had the same kind of a load to carry that we have borne, all the more if that other has carried it gaily. It is common to believe our own experiences unique.
“You are ever so much cleverer than I when it comes to things learned out of books,” Mrs. Layton went on, “I have very little of what they call learning—too little entirely; but any one can see that you are well instructed. But when it comes to knowing about people as they are and not as they ought to be, I am far ahead of you, though I am only a month or two older. You are a mere baby in all that, absolutely blind to what I can see across the street; and you are such an earnest, honest, credulous soul that you are bound to have your heart broken dozens of times while you are learning what you ought to know already.”
“How did you learn it all so soon?”
“By experience, the only school whose lessons we remember. I was married at seventeen and am twenty-four now. One can learn a heap of things in seven years, with so good a chance as I have had.” (Here the Butterfly’s mouth took on a hard and bitter curve, which told more than her word of what her sad wisdom had cost.) “That I was romantic goes without saying. I believedin the foolish love-stories I read and expected life to be like them. Were I clever like you, I would write books and tell about life as it is and not as novel writers generally pretend it is, deluding the ignorant and inexperienced. I actually believed there was such a thing as happiness, and that I could secure it in the usual way, by marrying the man I was in love with—otherwise the man who had succeeded in casting a spell over me that caused me to see him through a mist of enchantment, for that is what it means. But my fool’s paradise didn’t last long. I soon learned to my sorrow that a man out of a book is not at all like a man in a book. One shock after another came, until at last nothing could surprise me. After a time my husband began to drink heavily and does yet, and that is what has brought us to poverty. When he is bad drunk he is ugly and dangerous. In short, my life is hard and hateful ’way down out of sight.”
“O my friend,” cried Cartice, with glistening eyes, “it is a tragedy, and I thought nobody suffered as I do.”
Mrs. Layton continued: “When I married I loved him, was proud of him, believed in him. Now I only pity him, and care for him only as a mother cares for a child. Could he read my thoughts his vanity, should he have any left, must suffer. Such men lose far more than we do, after all, but they are so steeped in selfishness,so besotted in ignorance, they can’t see it. And he has wretched health, as any one may see. I don’t know what the end will be, and dare not think of it.”
“I wish we could know what such experiences mean,” said Cartice. “What is suffering for? Why must it be? We try hard to find the right road; we do the best we can; the way looks fair and smooth, and then from no fault of our own that we can see we are plunged into dark depths. I wish we knew the reason of it, the purpose of it. I wish we knew.”
“It is rather strange, Mrs. Doring, that I tell you everything so frankly. I have never been so confidential with any one before. Chatterer as I appear to be I am as proud as Clara Vere de Vere, and keep my own affairs to myself; but in talking with you everything bubbles right out, yet you never ask any questions. I shouldn’t mind telling you anything, even if it wasn’t to my credit, I feel so much confidence in you, and somehow it helps me to tell you. I was attracted to you from the first, but you were so reserved and unapproachable that if it had not been for this illness of yours, I doubt if we ever should have become so well acquainted. You have a curious effect on me. I couldn’t tell a fib to you nor to any one in your presence if I wanted to, and yet it has always been easy to me to tell little bits of lies about things that couldn’t hurtany one. I never thought there was any harm in it. But somehow I can’t do it when you are near, nor even when I think of you, and I shouldn’t wonder if I gave up the habit altogether. Do you remember one day before you got sick, when several of us were in the parlor and I had a new fan and the rest were admiring it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Mrs. Orton asked me how much it cost. Of course it’s the worst of manners to ask the price of things, but one meets plenty of impertinent, ill-bred people as one goes along, and must be civil to them. I was about to tell her that it cost five dollars, though it only cost two, when I saw you looking at me, and quick as a flash out came the truth. You didn’t know the price of it, so I wasn’t afraid you would catch me in a fib; but I was ashamed not to speak the truth in your presence. Your eyes look into one, deep down inside, and expect to see everything there sweet and clean and honest, and I could not disappoint them.”
“You can’t be half so wicked as you represent yourself, for you have one of the sweetest faces I ever saw, and one of the most beautiful,” said Mrs. Doring, with fervent admiration.
The Butterfly lilted out a significant little laugh. “Yes, I have been told that I have an innocent face; but that is a freak of nature, forI am not innocent. I am tolerably—yes, tolerably well informed on some subjects, and I do one thing that you will consider abominable, I flirt.”
“Dear friend, do tell me exactly what it is to flirt,” Cartice asked, entreatingly. She remembered that her husband had taken refuge in that word on the occasion of the affair with Mrs. Parker.
The Butterfly looked at her pityingly. “If any other woman asked me that question,” she said, “I should be sure she was a villain of the deepest dye, and was affecting ignorance in order to pull the wool over my eyes; but you are such a muff about such things that I can readily believe you don’t know. It isn’t very easy to explain. Words can’t describe it very well. Not mincing matters in my case it’s making a bid for the attention of men and getting it.”
“Politeness demands that ladies receive attention from gentlemen,” said the unsophisticated Mrs. Doring, innocently.
“My benighted friend, your name should be Galatea. I don’t mean mere polite attention, but particular attention, sentimental, lover-like attention, with a strong flavor of danger in it.”
Cartice began to understand. “What comes of it?” she asked.
A shrug of Mrs. Layton’s graceful shoulders. “Nothing, often. Sometimes—well, there areextraordinary cases, and at the beginning it’s best not to think of the end.”
“What do you get out of it?”
Another shrug. “Come to think of it, nothing particular, unless it be distraction.”
“And those who flirt with you,—how do they come out?”
“Some of them have the bad taste to become serious, which makes it rather awkward. Then they have to be sent off for good, and perhaps they wail about bruised hearts and such like, which I don’t mind. They never get a whack amiss. What I don’t owe them some other woman does. I only help to even up for women in general.”
“But you might grow serious, too, some time.”
“I am not afraid, because I have no heart any more. It is as dead as the traditional door-nail. I can dance nearer the edge of a precipice than anybody else and keep my head.”
“Some do go over, don’t they?”
“Yes; poor fools with hearts who ought not to play in that kind of a game.”
“It is something I know nothing whatever about, but it appears to be both perilous and unprofitable,” said Cartice.
“You are quite right in your conclusion. The liquor habit is also perilous and unprofitable, yet the man addicted to it keeps right on in it. One must do something to keep from rememberingcertain other things. With me it’s a case of keeping my mind off misery. I got into it because in the first year of my married life my husband neglected me shamefully, spending most of his time with a mincing little woman who posed for goodness itself. For a time I broke my heart over it; all women do. Then I braced up and began to administer his own medicine to him, only not in such repugnantly large doses. We all do things it would be better not to do, because somebody else does us an injury. We get into one trouble in trying to escape from another. It’s merely a matter of choice between the frying pan and the fire,—a puzzle far too deep for my light head to work on.”
Nothing is accidental. We meet the people we are destined to meet, and with their help or hindrance work out our problem, be it hard or easy. The most feather-weight of mortals may prove our greatest teacher. In whose keeping we shall find the most precious treasures we know not. But it was written in the great unopened book that the Butterfly was to be help and healing to the bruised heart of Cartice Doring, and to bear a torch which should light for her the very darkest page of life.
When affairs are at their worst a change has to come. Misery itself does not stand still. It moves slowly, nevertheless it moves. Thefinances of the Laytons and Dorings had reached the stage of desperation. Colonel Layton found the situation too grave to face without frequent liquefactions. The result was that he escaped facing it altogether, for he forgot it completely during the day, and at night went into a stupor too profound for landlords or other monsters to invade.
The Butterfly and Cartice thought of a means of extricating themselves at last. They decided to leave the hotel, take lodgings and eat, Bohemian fashion, when they could pay for it, and fast when they had no money.
They found furnished rooms, side by side, which they provided with some tiny traps for cooking, by selling some of the Butterfly’s personal treasures. To the surprise of the others, Colonel Layton volunteered to go daily to market and bring in supplies for both families, a task he performed for some time with a faithfulness not natural to his character, which was uncertain and ease-loving to the last degree. He went early and returned loaded like a porter. Among his purchases, cream cheese in liberal quantities was always a certainty. This was the bait that lured him to the market. He had a boyish fondness for it, and like a boy was willing to go out of his way to get it.
Cartice and the Butterfly rejoiced in each other more and more every day. They shared theirmoney and whatever else they possessed freely, and the unqualified frankness of their confidences was salvation for them. To tell a trouble to sympathetic ears is, in a measure, to throw it off. Repression kills, but expression is life. The seed that sends a plant upward from the earth expresses itself. Were conditions such that it could not do so, it would die and rot away in the darkness.
The blessed Butterfly, whose extraordinary baptismal name of Chrissalyn, fitted her so exquisitely, had a far nobler mission in the world than she herself dreamed.
Mrs. Doring continued to search for the meaning of things. She had sought happiness and found wretchedness, and in the first anguish of disappointment failed to see that she was not the only one who had had a fruitless quest. There was the Butterfly whose experience was the same, and many others, now that she thought of it. Perhaps all had more or less disappointment were their inner lives known.
Dimly she began to see that the pursuit of happiness could not be the true purpose of life, though all the world assumed that it was. Her dream of conjugal companionship had vanished altogether. There were times when she hated her husband, times when she pitied him, times when she despised him, and times when she tried to believe that she loved him,—must love him ordie. Had any soul in the universe so yearned for love as she and been from birth so stinted of it? Behind the immobile mask that hid her proud, suffering heart from other eyes, her soul cried for it. What could not she have endured, with a laugh on her face and a song on her lips, had love walked by her side? Could poverty or any other terror which civilization has nursed daunt her then? No, a thousand times no, she said.
Her own troubles diminished, however, in the presence of the heavier ones under which Chrissalyn now staggered.
Colonel Layton was going down hill distressingly fast, and nothing could be done to save him. His health was broken, his wits muddled and wandering most of the time, and the end of his resources at hand. He had let go his anchorage and was drifting to his destruction, careless of wind or tide.
Meantime the brave Butterfly smiled before the world and chatted cheerily when her friends called, though with her heart in her mouth, and her ear ever alert for her husband’s wavering footsteps. When she heard the unwelcome sound, she made excuse and went outside to intercept his entrance. Usually at such times he was pathetically obedient, and sat where she placed him, in some vacant room or dark corner of the hall, till her visitors left and shecame for him. To be sure he complained and whined and swore in a rambling way without rage, yet when Chrissalyn came he went with her like a worn out child. However, he was not always so tractable. There were times when he blustered and threatened, and his eyes had a light dancing in them that made one’s blood run cold.
One night Mrs. Doring could not sleep, a sense of impending danger oppressed her. Getting up and putting on a wrapper, she went to a window and looked into the street. All was still, and yet somewhere she fancied she heard mutterings. On going into the hall she saw the Laytons’ door open, the lights at full flare, and, to her surprise, the colonel, fully dressed, sitting in the doorway whetting a razor, with a slow, sibilant stroke, which seemed to give him extraordinary pleasure, for he smiled in a gratified way and his eyes twinkled like stars. There was no fury in his face, but something far more dreadful—the look of a lunatic who meditates a deed he considers delightful. Sitting by the window, opposite the door, was Chrissalyn, clad only in her sleeping gown, with a face white and rigid, and a pistol held firmly in her hand.
At sight of the scene Cartice grew cold with fright; but she went close to Colonel Layton and was about to speak, when, without pausing in his razor whetting, he said, gently, “Go away, now,Mrs. Doring, and come back a little later if you want to.”
In spite of the apparently innocent words, she felt that behind them lurked some terrible intention. If she called help the arrival of others might precipitate whatever horror lurked in his mad mind.
Chrissalyn heard everything but said nothing, and her silence was eloquently ominous.
“Why should I come again if I go away?” she asked, thinking to lead his mind from the work in hand.
Shrugging his shoulders significantly, he said, “Merely to see sights,” and then laughed the low satisfied laugh of one who knows and enjoys things his listener dreams not of.
“What sights?”
Another shrug. His vanity, ever strong, overcame his secretiveness, and he could not refrain from boasting of his intended exploits. “The last of Chrissalyn and me,” he said, presently, with a chuckle. “I’m tired of the whole damned business of living, and shall give it up, but I shan’t leave her behind me. Oh, no! She goes first.”
Though chilled to the marrow at this cool statement, whose truth the scene and the hour confirmed, Cartice pretended to put no stress upon it. Hurriedly racking her brains for some pretence for her call and pretext for his services,she said, “I’m sorry to trouble you just now, Colonel, but Louis is very sick, and I want you to go and ring up Barton’s night clerk and get some whiskey for him as soon as you can. You are always so kind and obliging; I’m sure you won’t mind my bothering you.” He was ever the most easily flattered creature. Then, too, there was magic for him in the word whiskey.
“You’ll go, won’t you?” she asked, entreatingly, as he made no answer.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he replied, absently holding the razor close to his eyes and looking critically at its edge, but making no move.
“You will excuse me if I beg you to make haste, please,” she continued. “Poor Louis is in a wretched state.”
He got up slowly, took his hat and began to waver about the room, still holding the open razor in his hand. As he moved toward Chrissalyn she raised the hand that clutched the pistol, and her eyes had a steady, determined look that said she would defend herself to the death.
“Come, Colonel,” cried Cartice, apparently in good-natured haste, “I hear Louis groaning. Please go as quickly as you can.” He laid the razor down and went out and down the stairs as docile as a dog.
Chrissalyn fell forward in a dead faint. When she returned to consciousness, limp and pale, and Cartice suggested taking her into her apartment,lest the Colonel return, she smiled feebly, saying, “There is no danger. He will not be back in ten or twelve hours. You probably think this scene unusual, but its like has occurred several times before. Once I had to shoot, and the ball went through his hat. The shock of it was almost too much for me, for I thought I had killed him.”
“My poor Chriss, you must leave him, and not run such risks any more. One such experience is enough to make you grey-headed.”
“I stay on because I can do no other thing, and if I could I should stay to take care of him, poor, helpless, wandering soul that he is. He will come home to-morrow weak as a baby, go to bed and lie there helpless for weeks.”
She was a true prophet. At midnight of the next day he crept wearily up the stairs, a feeble, disheveled, miserable figure, with a pale, peaked face, and faded, watery eyes. Taking refuge in bed, he arose no more for over a month.
These days of terror and anxiety were telling seriously on the Butterfly, ever a fragile being, who hung to earth seemingly by the most delicate thread. The pity of it was that she loved life so. Even as it had disclosed itself to her, full of disappointment, of tragedy, heartache and humiliation, with want menacing her daily and trouble elbowing her at every step, still she loved it. Her ideal was not particularly exalted.Given pretty clothes and surroundings, a few pleasant friends, a modest retinue of moths to circle round her and a few gold pieces to jingle in her purse, and she could squeeze joy out of life still. But remember she was a butterfly.