“Be careful when you wind it up!” she cautioned. “Something’s wrong. It rocks so. I’m afraid of its tipping off the table.”
The preparations were completed very early, and the happy Rosaleen had nothing to do but sit near the window to wait, where she could see the lights glittering up Fifth Avenue, and the buses sailing to and fro.
Presently Enid joined her, sat on the window sill, perfectly still, perfectly silent. She didn’t even move when Lawrence came in, urbane and indulgent, in evening dress. Rosaleen and Miss Mell welcomed him with smiles; they were, and they were willing to show that they were, tremendously flattered at his coming to their party.
“I’ve brought some champagne,” he said. “It’s in the hall, in a pail of ice.”
“Hownice!” said Miss Mell.
He bowed politely. Then he turned his attention to Enid, sitting on the window sill.
“Well, my beauty!” he said, in his harsh voice, “Looking out there for a new sweetheart?”
Enid’s voice came, singularly flat and dispirited.
“No,” she said. And after a pause. “I dare sayI was looking for God.... What an empty looking heaven, isn’t it?”
“On the contrary. I hear it’s extraordinarily crowded with planets and constellations and that sort of thing. And probably ghosts.”
“Do you believe in ghosts—really?”
“No, my dear; I have no fears.”
“Fears!” cried Enid. “Fears!... I wouldn’t call it afear. I’d call it a hope.... Oh! Don’t I wish I could see a ghost! I’m—I’m always looking for something like that. Something to show that we don’t end.”
“Aha! You’re afraid of death, are you?”
“No!” she said, impatiently. “Don’t you understand? I don’t care when or how I go. I don’t care whether I become an angel or a devil, or a puff of breath in a great god’s mouth. Or a ghost. So long as it doesn’tend.”
“Itdoesend,” said Lawrence. “Rest assured of that.”
“Don’t you care?”
“My dear creature, I shall never know it. I’ll never be conscious of this highly unpleasant annihilation. It’s only the dread of it. And that doesn’t exist if you refuse to think of it.”
“But suppose there’s someone else you’re longing and longing to see again?”
“Now!” he cried, triumphantly. “Now we’re getting at the mystery of your life. It’s a dead lover!”
“Oh! You and your beastly obsession with lovers!” she cried, almost with a sob. “It’s a—child’s ghost....”
“Be thankful it’s out of this brutal, hostile world, then,” said Lawrence. “Where’s Rosaleen? She lives in another nice little world, all by herself.”
“Perhaps hers is the real world,” said Enid. “I wish I could think so.”
Itwas a wonderful ecstatic evening, the sort Rosaleen expected of artists. The studio was crowded, suffocatingly hot, filled with a joyful young riot. Except for Lawrence, they were all young. There was Miss Gosorkus and a man she had brought, there were the two English girls with three of their countrymen, there was a male cousin of Miss Mell’s and three young ships’ officers known to her, and two old friends from her art school. There was a distrait young Frenchman desperately in love with Enid, and a lot of other people who drifted in and out. There was a terrific amount of noise; they were wilfully, exaggeratedly noisy; theysang, shouted and stamped. The old phonograph blared its loudest, and the couples danced as best they could in the crowd. They drank the punch and the champagne and grew wilder and wilder. Rosaleen, astonished and delighted, believed herself actually to be witnessing one of those “orgies” so often mentioned in the papers as taking place in artists’ studios. It was not till long, long afterward that she realised how innocent, how decent, how happy it really was, how young....
At first she was rather ignored. Enid was so dazzling that she captured all the strangers, and the rest of the crowd all knew Dodo Mell and went to her in preference to Rosaleen. But, by the time the thing was in full swing, she, too, had at last secured the exclusive attention of someone; she, too, like Enid, like Devery, younger of the English girls, like the two Art School girls, had a man standing at her side and admiring her when he wasn’t dancing with her. She didn’t know his name or who he was, but he was amusing and rather attractive; a curly-haired, black-eyed young man, looking rather like a sprightly devil, with outstanding ears which gave him a singularly alert air.
Suddenly, almost of one accord, they all wearied of dancing.
“Let’s go out somewhere,” said Rosaleen’s young man. It was the classic suggestion, and they all agreed joyfully.
“I’ll take you all to the Brevoort for supper,” said the magnificent Lawrence.
Rosaleen was passing about a basket of cigarettes, and she happened at that instant to be standing at his elbow. And she said, with polite and surprised joy:
“Hownice!”
He turned and looked at her, fixed his monocle and stared at her.
“I’d forgotten all aboutyou!” he said. “What areyoudoing?”
“Having a lovely time!” she told him, with a smile.
“You look very pretty,” he said. “Very sweet....”
And she fancied, half ashamed of the fancy, that again his face changed as it had done that afternoon in his studio.
He bent his lordly head.
“I want to speak to you!” he whispered. “Slip into the back room and wait!”
A little reluctant, but very curious, she did so; and for five very long minutes stood in there, withthe gas turned low, and the two cots piled with imposing male overcoats and sticks, and the furs and wraps of the girls. The sound of the music and the dancing feet made her impatient: someone shouted “One more before we go! Put on agoodrecord, Enid!” She really couldn’t have endured it much longer, if Lawrence hadn’t come. But, though he had said he wanted to speak to her, he stood there speechless, fingering his monocle, not even looking at her. At last he said:
“Er ... Rosaleen!... It occurred to me—wouldn’t you like to stop for your Miss Waters?”
She thought she had never heard a kinder, a more generous idea.
“Why, yes, Iwould!” she said. “It’s very nice of you to think of that!”
“Then we’d better arrange this way. You go downstairs with the others, but slip into my studio. The door’s open and it’s dark; no one will notice you. Then I’ll make some excuse to get away from them, and I’ll come back here with a taxi.”
“A taxi! We won’t need a taxi. It’s only a step. And I don’t see why we need to make such a secret of it all——”
“Enid would make a row,” he said with a frown. “No; do it my way, if you please!”
Thedawn was coming when the taxi drew up to the door. Lawrence got out, helped Rosaleen to descend, and while he paid the enormous reckoning she stood in the dim street, over which hung that strange air of suspense which comes before the sunrise. The street lights still burned, but against a palely clear sky; the sparrows in the park were beginning to stir.
Lawrence opened the front door with his key and they entered the dark hall, musty with the smell of cooking, of paints. Outside his own door he held out a hand and she took it; an immense, fat hand.
“Now then, it’s allright, isn’t it?” he said, with exaggerated heartiness. “No ill feeling, is there? We’re the best of friends?”
“Oh, yes!” said Rosaleen, brightly, and in her mind added:
“If only I can get away from you and never, never set eyes on you again ...!”
A desolating weariness was upon her; her limbs were like lead as she climbed the stairs. Her chief desire was not to wake Mell and Bainbridge; the idea of having to talk to them, to open her lips even to answer them, was intolerable. She had had her fill of talking that night.
For the sake of ventilation the girls always slept with the curtains between the rooms drawn back and the studio windows open; and so it was now. She could see them there in the back room, solemnly still, on their cots, with the faint breeze of the sunrise blowing through the big room and lifting a fine, cindery dust from the hearth. Rosaleen sat down near the window and rested her head on her arms, on the broad sill.
Now that the sun had got up, the whole thing began to assume the character of a nightmare. Her tired brain began to confuse the memory of Lawrence with the drawing of a gargoyle she had seen in his studio the day before. In a blurred memory she seemed to see him as a sort of monster who had for hours and hours been sitting by her side and talking. Talking and talking and talking. And about what, do you suppose, but to urge her to run away with him. She had said shedidn’t want to, but he had considered that of no importance. He had considered it a matter for logic, for reasoning. He had tried to show her the advantages; and when she persisted in saying that she didn’t want to, he had become offensive and horrible. He had never had the faintest intention of going after Miss Waters; the taxi, by his command, went speeding through Central Park, up Riverside Drive, went on throughroads and streets unknown to her, while Lawrence talked, shouted, bullied her. She had never imagined anything so horrible. And yet she wasn’t afraid of him. Perhaps some feminine instinct informed her that a talking man, like a barking dog, is not to be feared.
And, quite suddenly, touched by some obscure impulse, he had become sorry. He had called himself a brute and a beast; he said he must have been mad, and she was privately inclined to agree with him. She didn’t know that it was his theory that women are to be won by force, by daring. With her, love could only be the outcome of sympathy. She could only love a man because she liked him. But she was not so much angry at Lawrence as disgusted and astonished. When he begged for her forgiveness she gave it promptly, and hoped that this would be the end of this immeasurably painful scene. But it was not enough. Nothing would do but a reconciliation, and for this it appeared necessary to go to a road house and have supper and more champagne. She sat at the table with him in the crowded, noisy dining-room, while he acted the jovial host; she had a constrained but polite smile for his pleasantries. She had been as diplomatic with him as if he had been a lunatic.
All the way home he had worshipped her as an angel. He said he wasn’t fit to live in the same world with her....
And now, with the world awake, the sun shining, the streets alive, for the first time since the wretched fiasco, Rosaleen began to weep for young Landry.
Sheneedn’t have worried; neither Enid nor Dodo Mell asked a single question. Somewhere near ten o’clock Enid woke up and at once shook her sleepy friend, who, after putting on her spectacles and a lavender kimono, set to work to make coffee. And suddenly discovered Rosaleen asleep in a chair in the studio.
“Coffee, Rosaleen!” she called, cheerfully.
She awoke with a start and sat up, pale and dishevelled, in her party dress and slippers. But they showed no surprise. Breakfast was ready on a trunk in the back room and they all sat down to it, the benign Dodo in her kimono, Enid in a smock and petticoat, with her bare feet in mules, and Rosaleen with her incongruously dissipated look.
“Nicerolls!” said Enid. “Where’d you get them, Rosaleen?”
“A little new baker’s,” Rosaleen answered.
Never had her friends seemed so charming, or a feminine world so desirable. The coffee cheered her sad heart, and raised her spirits, and after she hadbathed and dressed, she lost all sense of fatigue. She had, in fact, that false vigour one sometimes has after a sleepless night, that sensation of being all mind and spirit and no body.
“Ambrose is coming this afternoon!” called Miss Mell, suddenly, from her drawing, to Rosaleen washing handkerchiefs in the rusty sink.
“Who’s Ambrose?” she asked.
“Oh, my dear, how cruel! Why, he’s the one who adored you so last night. He’s my cousin.”
Rosaleen recollected the young man like a sprightly devil, with the curly hair and the outstanding ears.
“I’d better tidy up the place then,” she said. “It’s awful.”
“I’ll treat us all to cakes for tea,” said Dodo. “If you’ll get them, Rosaleen?”
“And there are two dead mice in the trap,” said Enid. “Better take them out!”
Rosaleen protested; this was an intolerable task. But Dodo and Enid assured her that the mice would stay there until she removed them.
“And every day it’ll be worse,” said Enid.
So Rosaleen was obliged to drop the little victims into an empty cracker box and throw them out of the window at the back of the hall. She fetched the cakes and borrowed an extra cup from MissGosorkus. Then she sat down listlessly. Her work was all in Lawrence’s studio, and she had nothing to do.
Ambrose Matthewswas, in fact, a very welcome distraction. He came that afternoon, and he was so nicely entertained that he returned again and again, nearly every day. Enid said she didn’t mind as long as he waited until five o’clock, because then the light wasn’t any good. Miss Mell was not disturbed by talking, or by walking, or by singing or by dancing while she worked, and Rosaleen, it must be confessed, cared very little whether she worked at all, or not.
Ambrose was a young man with an obsession. Two generations ago it would have been called Love; one generation past would have called it Women; but he, of course, called it Sex. He was a writer, he said. His father supported him, so that he didn’t need to be “commercial.” He was indeed so uncommercial that his creations never got beyond his own brain. However, he was only twenty-two, and still regarding his world.
The talk, during his visits, was supposed to be stimulating, and it resolved itself into a sort of duel between Ambrose and Rosaleen, in which Enidwas the young man’s perverse second and Miss Mell assisted Rosaleen in her defense.
He used to bring lurid little magazines of strange shapes and colours, things that never lasted more than a few months.
“Why do they publish the things?” asked Miss Mell. “They certainly can’t pay. And nobody could possibly enjoy them.”
“Listen to this!” said Ambrose. “It’sgood!”
And then would follow the expression of some individual’s point of view, which was called an “article,” always about fallen women, race suicide, and so on. It appeared from these little publications that it was not only necessary but “sincere” and altogether praiseworthy to repeat all the well-known facts and statistics on these subjects over and over, endlessly. No matter how trite, or how biased, so long as the author was “sincere” and stuck to more or less forbidden topics, his “article”mustbe published, and his opinionmustbe respected. It was a crime against society not to be eternally interested in these things.
Rosaleen was well aware that Ambrose had no intentions toward her of a personal nature; he was simply mildly attracted by her. But as a matter of principle he was forever urging on her his point of view. He couldn’t endure her inviolable reserve;it made him furious that she would not discuss these things. He was always saying how incomplete was the life of a woman without an “affair.” And he was not content with dissertations upon the influence of love on the soul; he became medical and pathological and sociological. According to him, the life of a spinster was not only anti-social and morbid; it was a sort of suicide; it led inevitably to madness and death. Facts did not disturb him; the numbers of self-respecting celibate women he was naturally obliged to meet, who were neither ill nor mad, and who were quite as happy as the married women, convinced him not at all. All these women, he insisted, were either absorbed in secret love-affairs, or—or they could not and did not exist. He denied them.
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you and your professors and your doctors and your writers,” said Enid, one day. “It makes you all frantic to think that women can get along without you. Well, they can and they do, plenty of them.”
Ambrose said, no, they didn’t. Or if they did, they were dreadfully unhappy.
“No more unhappy thanwiththem,” said Enid.
As for Rosaleen, she said nothing. She didn’t agree with either Ambrose or Enid. She felt that she should have liked very much to have a husbandand children, but that, if they never came to her, she should nevertheless manage to live a fairly pleasant and happy life. She knew, however, that this was not a “view,” and that no one would have been interested in hearing it.
In spite of his fixed idea, they not only tolerated Ambrose, but they were rather fond of him. He filled a gap. He was, in a way, their pet. They liked to see his curly head leaning against the back of their big wing chair; they liked to hear his voice, and to smell the smoke of his pipe. He was another young thing in their young world; and what in later life was to be highly unpleasant, was now, at twenty-three, harmless and laughable.
Lawrence never came. Dodo and Enid saw that there was a mystery here, and they spoke of it to each other more than once. Sometimes they laughed and sometimes they were angry. The way in which he had invited everyone to supper and then run off and left the others to pay! But they didn’t mention it to Rosaleen, and she, in despair of ever being able to explain that extraordinary evening, never brought up the subject. But they all missed him. Once in a while Miss Mell would say, “There goes Lawrence!” and they would run to the window, to see him, in his great fur-lined coat and silk hat, getting into a taxi, off to one of those teas where heso shone. He was inordinately fond of “society”: they read his name in the papers in connection with all sorts of pageants, charity balls, amateur theatricals, costume dances. He said he did it to get business, but that wasn’t quite true. He did it because he liked it; because he liked the idle and seductive women who flattered him. He had sitters, too, women who came in elegant limousines and had tea with him. He never raised his eyes to the windows above.
Butone day early in April, just before the Spring came, he appeared, just as usual, in the doorway.
“Hello!” said Enid, carelessly. “We didn’t expectyou. We haven’t any cup for your tea. We broke our only extra one this morning.”
“The obliging Dorothy Mell will go down to my room and get one,” said he, “also a package of chocolates on the table by the window. Eh?”
She did, and she brought up all Rosaleen’s work and left it secretly in the back room.
Lawrence was unusually polite. He asked them all how they were getting on, and listened with interest while they told him. They were all a little proud of their progress. Miss Mell had three big orders ahead of her. Enid was going to have anexhibition with three other young and arrogantly unpopular artists. And Rosaleen was more or less regularly employed by a magazine to do each month a page of—if you can believe that such things exist—“childrens’ fashions.”
“You’re all doing very nicely,” he said. “I’m very much pleased. I came up to give you my blessing before I go.”
“Before you go!” said Miss Mell. “Where are you going?”
“I’m giving up my place downstairs, and to-morrow,to-morrow, I’m off to Paris! Paris the kind, Paris the friendly! Paris the beneficent goddess of my student days! I have a nostalgia, my children.... So I shall kiss you all good-bye and give you a little fatherly advice before leaving....”
He swaggered over to Rosaleen’s table.
“No reason why you shouldn’t become successful,” he said. “You must know, my children, that brains are not necessary to an artist. An artist can be absolutely crude and ignorant, and yet be a genius. He needs only an ardent spirit. Of course, you haven’t got that, Rosaleen, but then you’re not an artist. But take this Enid girl. Give her a certain amount of knowledge, as definite as that of a brick-layer; teach this woman to draw, and shewillbe an artist—of a sort. She doesn’t need to knowanything else. She won’t need to read, or to think....”
“Oh, so you’re beginning to see me, are you?” said Enid.
“I always did see you, my dear. You’re very nice to see. Children, listen to my advice. If a woman wishes to make herself irresistible, after attending to personal appearance, I recommend her to become an artist or an actress. Nothing else will give her the same prestige—not even a lot of money. There’s a rakishness about it—a spiciness. It gives a piquancy even to Rosaleen.”
He laughed.
“Good Lord!” he said. “How they all love us! It’s queer.... Of all artists, the painter is the favourite with the public. To most of them, artistmeanspainter.... And yet, thinking it over, it’s not so hard to understand this favouritism. The painter is apt to be more ordinary, more normal, more human, than the poet or the musician. His art is more obvious, more facile. It certainly requires less ‘temperament.’ The painter is not required to be erratic and morbid. In fact, a proper painter is expected to be more or less rollicking. I ask you to consider for a moment the popular idea of what goes on in our studios! The public imagines the poet sitting up all night writing in ecstasy, the musician forever before his instrument. But the painter! Lord! They never think of us asworking. We’re supposed to be eternally pawning our dead mother’s ring for money for Bohemian orgies, to be rowdy and care-free and generous, and all that sort of thing. The painter is the only artist that the public likes to see happy.”
“Of course it’s the easiest art to understand,” said Enid.
“Don’t talk, woman, but listen and try to learn. There’s no question here of ‘understanding’ art. But it’s easier and pleasanter for people to look at a painting, which takes only a minute, than it is to listen to an opera, or to read an epic.... So I advise you all to be artists, my children, and to enjoy yourselves.”
Then he solemnly kissed them each good-bye.
And after that, no more of Lawrence for a long time.
Miss Waterswas clearing out her desk that morning. She had a pupil drawing in the studio, but it was a pupil who was meek and ignorant and could be left alone. She was trying to figure out just how much she owed, writing in an exercise book, with great precision, the amount, the date, and the nature of each bill.
WILLIAM WELLS—GROCER—EGGS, COFFEE,BREAD, JAM—MAY4TH, 1915. $3.07.
That was an old one.... Bills for paints, brushes, paper, for headache powders, cold cream and “druggists’ sundries,” for framing, bills of carpenters, coal and wood men, icemen, butchers. And she had got into one of her panics, at the sight of all these debts, and the thought of her penniless old age. Her mind would rush round like a little animal in a cage, looking for a chance of escape. She felt trapped and terrified. She didn’t know how to earn or how to save. She foresaw herself starving in a garret, dying in the ward of a hospital, going mad, being paralysed and helpless, all the spectres that haunted her hours of serious thought.
There was a ring at the door bell. She didn’t go.She always waited hoping that the presumable collector would go away. But it rang again and again, and at last the meek little pupil called out, “I think your bell is ringing, Miss Waters!” So finally she opened the door, to see there the obliging little Italian fruiterer.
“Telephone!” he cried, in great excitement. “Telephone, Missa Wata!”
Having no telephone in her own flat, Miss Waters had long ago made an “arrangement” with Tony, by which she was permitted to give her friends his telephone number, and was to be summoned by him when anyone of them should call for her. It didn’t happen very often.
“Oh, my!” she said. “I’m so busy! Do you know who it is, Tony?”
He shook his head.
“Telephone!” he cried, again.
“Er—chi?” she enquired. “Chi, Tony?”
“Doan know!” he cried, in distress. “Doan know! Missa Wata coma quick!”
She slipped into a rain-coat and hurried out to the little shop on the corner, where at the back, among barrels and boxes and crates and a pungent smell of oranges, was Tony’s telephone. She picked up the receiver.
“Ye-hes?” she enquired, in her most cultivated voice.
“Number please!” said the operator.
“I don’t want a number,” Miss Waters explained. “Someone called me!”
“Your party’s hung up!” said the operator.
Miss Waters didn’t comprehend, but Tony’s wife, an opulent young woman nursing a big baby, exclaimed:
“Your fren, she no wait. You come too slow. She go away. Gooda-bye.”
Miss Waters was frantically distressed, and protested through the telephone. But the operator had no consolation to give her, and Tony and his wife were smiling and indifferent. She left the shop, after buying an orange to placate Tony, and returned to her flat. But her distress did not subside; she felt that she had been called upon and had not responded, that in some way she had failed someone.
And suddenly came to the conclusion that it must have been Rosaleen. She “just felt” that it was. And it worried her beyond measure. She knew that Rosaleen was quite alone in her studio now, for Mell and Bainbridge had gone to Provincetown for the month of July, and she felt sure that something was wrong. Rosaleen wouldn’t have called her out for nothing. She peered into the studio; the meekpupil was still drawing a “study” of empty boxes; then she hurried out of the flat and back to Tony’s fruit store.
It was Rosaleen’s own voice that answered, and she gave an odd cry:
“Miss Waters!... I’d been trying....”
“I thought so, dear! Was there——”
“Please come right away!” Rosaleen interrupted her, with desperate earnestness. “Just as quickly as you possibly can! Please,pleasehurry!”
“What’s wrong, my dear?”
“Oh, nevermind! I’ll tell you when you get here. Hurry!”
Her great anxiety made the poor old soul slower than ever. With fumbling, trembling fingers she tried to dress in such a way as to be ready for any emergency; then she went into the studio to excuse herself to the pupil, and couldn’t get away from her; stood there saying utterly unnecessary things, repeating herself. At last she was hurrying across the park in the glare of the July sun, trying to walk her fastest, but with a nightmare sensation of being as stiff as a wooden doll, and covering no ground. She hurried up the dark stairs and knocked on the studio door. It was flung open and Rosaleen confronted her.
She gave a shriek of terror.
“Rosaleen!” she cried. “Oh!... Rosaleen!”
To see neat, fair Rosaleen like this, white as a ghost, with her hair half down, her dress spattered with blood!...
“Whatisit? Whatisit?” she cried.
“Hush!” whispered Rosaleen, shaking her arm. “Keep quiet! You’ve got to help me!”
Miss Waters followed her into the back room, but she couldn’t suppress another scream. For there on one of the cots lay the enormous bulk of a man, with his eyes closed and his hair dank and wet across his brow.
“What shall I do with him?” whispered Rosaleen.
“Whoishe?” Miss Waters asked.
“Why, Lawrence Iverson, of course!”
“What’s the matter with him, Rosaleen?” Miss Waters cried. “Is he—drunk?”
“No! He tried to kill himself!”
“Mercy!”
“He cut his wrist with a knife, and said he was going to bleed to death——”
“Send for a doctorquickly!”
“No! Then he’d be put in prison. It’s against the law.” They both stared helplessly at the silent man.
“We ought to tie it up,” said Miss Waters.
“I did. I don’t think it’s bleeding any more. But I’m afraid it was too late. He wouldn’t let me touch it at first. Oh, Miss Waters! Is he dying?”
Miss Waters couldn’t help thinking so; anyone who lay quiet with closed eyes and a face as white as that was presumably dying.
“I think yououghtto get a doctor,” she said. “You might be accused of murdering him.”
“I can’t help it,” said Rosaleen. “I told him I wouldn’t.”
“Did he talk?”
“Yes, lots. He came in while I was eating my lunch.... Came bursting in the moment I opened the door. And he said he’d lost everything—he said ‘Heaven had mocked him’.... Then he said, ‘Rosaleen, I’m going to kill myself, and I must have you near me when I die,’ and he took a knife out of his pocket.... Oh!...”
She gripped Miss Waters’ hand violently, struggling against a sort of convulsion of sickness and terror.
“Oh! No, no, no! Don’t comfort me, or anything.... I’vegotto brace up.... If I let go ... one minute ... I’ll scream!”
Miss Waters felt that if Rosaleen screamed, she would go mad. With trembling hands she took off her jacket and hat, and laid them on a chair.
“Shall we give him some brandy?”
“I haven’t any.”
“I’ll run out and get some.”
Rosaleen blanched at the thought of waiting alone with her sinister guest, but she gallantly agreed. And Miss Waters put on her things again and went, with weak knees and pounding heart, down the stairs to the street. She didn’t know where to get brandy; she stood irresolutely outside the house for a moment; then she hurried to theFine Feathers’shop and approached the elder partner, Miss Sillon.
“I want some brandy for a sick person!” she whispered. “Have you any?”
“Yes, I have!” answered Miss Sillon. “Whatisthe matter, Miss Waters? You look absolutely done up. Who’s sick?”
“Oh, no one special!” cried Miss Waters, in mortal terror lest this acute young woman should penetrate the mystery.
Miss Sillon asked no more questions, but fetched a small flask and gave it to Miss Waters.
“Call on me, you know, if you want anything,” she said. “I’m awfully practical!”
“Oh, no, thank you!” said Miss Waters. “I—I—I have a trained nurse and a doctor waiting....”
Rosaleen let her in.
“He’s groaning now,” she said. “Is that a good sign, do you think?”
Miss Waters shook her head.
“Here’s the brandy,” she said.
“How do you give it?” asked Rosaleen. “With water? Hot? Out of a spoon?”
Miss Waters reflected. Then she remembered often having seen in moving pictures flasks being held to the lips of injured persons. So Rosaleen lifted up his head and Miss Waters poured a little brandy down his throat. He opened his great black eyes and fixed her with a sombre, dreadful stare.
“Oh, mercy!” she cried.
Rosaleen hastily laid his head back on the pillow and came round to look at him.
“Mr. Iverson!” she cried. “Are you better?”
He groaned and flung his arms across his face. And began to sob in a hoarse, heart-rending voice.
“Oh, Lawrence dear!” she cried, kneeling down beside him. “What is the trouble? What can I do for you?”
His great body was shaking with the violence of his sobs. Rosaleen put her arms about him.
“Please don’t cry!” she entreated.
She tried gently to take his arms away, so that she could see his face, but he resisted, and she was afraid to persist, for fear of hurting his bandagedwrist. She laid her cheek against his hands and clasped him tighter, suffering with him, in anguish at his despair.
“Tell me!” she said. “What can I do for you?”
Very slowly he took down his arms and let her see his awful face, his desperate and forlorn regard.
“Well!” he said. “What do you imagine you can do?I’m going blind!”
Atfirst he couldn’t believe it. He thought it was; he followed her for two blocks; then he decided it wasn’t, and suddenly she had stopped to look in a shop window, and he knew. He was shocked. This the pretty, endearing kid of two years ago, this haggard, hollow-cheeked woman so shabbily dressed, without gloves, with worn old boots, with that air of haste and anxiety!
“Rosaleen!” he said.
She whirled round and looked into his face with startled eyes.
“Why!” she cried. “Mr. Landry!”
He took her little bare hand and looked down at her, distressed beyond measure by the change in the poor little thing. But smiling, to hide his disturbance.
“Where are you off to, in such a hurry?” he asked, “I’ve been trying to catch you up for a long time.”
“I’m going home.”
“Still living up-town?”
“No; down in Washington Square.”
He couldn’t endure to let go of her hand, he couldn’t endure the thought of losing her; the tenderness and affection he had felt for her two years ago came back a hundredfold now. A tenderness that wrung his heart. To see her so shabby, so thin, so anxious, and still with her lovely, luminous grey eyes....
“Can’t I walk with you part of the way?” he asked.
“I was going in the ‘L’,” she said, doubtfully.
“But you’re not in a hurry?... Have you had lunch?”
“Oh, I couldn’t!”
“Nonsense! Come on!”
She wavered; and he instantly took advantage of her irresolution by taking her arm.
“Please!” he said. “It’s Saturday, the one day I don’t have to hurry.”
And, so afraid was he of any silence between them, that he began to talk about nothing; about how he had come up to Tiffany’s from his office, to see about a watch he was having repaired. About how fine the weather was for March, and how lively Fifth Avenue looked, and so on, until they were outside the little restaurant he had decided upon.
“I can’t, Mr. Landry! I look too—awful!”
“Rosaleen, you couldn’t look awful. And if I don’t mind, I don’t believe anyone else will complain.”
She followed him to a corner table and sat down, confused and embarrassed, opposite him. She was so conscious of her bare hands, her carelessly dressed hair. He ordered a substantial lunch, and then leaned across the table, to look at her.
“You’re much thinner,” he said. “Why? You don’t look well!”
“I’m all right,” she said. “How are you?”
“I’m not all right,” he answered. “I’ve never been all right since I was fool enough to let you go.”
“Oh, no!” she said, with a bitter little smile. “Don’t pretend you’ve been thinking of me all the time. I know better!”
“No,” he said, in his serious way. “I’m not saying I’ve thought of you all the time. What I mean is, that I realised long ago—that you were the—the right one—the only woman in the world for me....”
She smiled again, but with tears in her eyes.
“Let’s not be silly!” she said. “Let’s just be good friends.....”
“No!... Look here, Rosaleen.... I wish I could tell you how I feel.... At first, I’ll behonest—At first I was angry. I felt that you hadn’t been fair with me.... I thought I’d forget the whole thing. But I couldn’t. I wrote to you, twice. And then when you didn’t answer, I thought—it was over. It haunted me. I promise you, Rosaleen——”
She laid her hand very lightly on his arm.
“Please—let’s not bring it all up again?” she said. “Itisall over.... Tell me how you’ve been getting on. You look—splendid.”
And she really thought he did. He was well-dressed, he had a prosperous, an important air; he was no longer a boy, but a man, and a mighty self-confident man.
“I’m doing very well,” he said. “But I want to hear about you.”
“Oh!... I’m an artist!” she said, laughing. “A regular professional artist.”
“Are you? It doesn’t seem to agree with you.”
“It isn’t the work that disagrees with me; it’s the not getting any work. I’m poor!”
“Do you support yourself? Don’t you live with—those Humberts any longer?”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “You see ... I’m married.”
“Rosaleen!” he cried.
For a few moments he was silent, looking at her,filled with an immense regret, a remorse that stifled him.
“Who?” he asked at last.
“An artist.”
“But—doesn’t the fellow support you? Doesn’t he—work?”
“He tries. But he’s nearly blind.”
“Good God! And you support him?”
“I do the best I can. Only I’ve been sick.”
“No!” he cried. “Rosaleen, this is horrible! What can I do to help you?”
“Don’t!” she said. “You’ll make me cry.... You—you make me so—so sorry for myself....”
They couldn’t finish their lunch, either of them. Landry paid the check, and they rose. But as she was passing out in front of him, he stopped her.
“Rosaleen,” he said. “They have very good chocolates here. You used to like chocolates. Let me get you a box!”
But now she was crying, and he hastily turned with her into a quieter street.
“No cause for tears!” he said, cheerfully.
“I know it!... But I’m—I’m a fool.... I’m nervous, I guess....”
“I’ll take you home.”
“No, I’drathernot, Mr. Landry!”
“Don’t you want to see me again?”
“Yes, I do. Any evening—this evening, if you like.”
He wrote down the address.
“But I don’t like to let you go like this!” he said. “I don’t think you’re fit. Let me get you a taxi?”
“No, thanks, really I’m perfectly all right!”
She smiled at him to convince him. And with a long hand clasp they separated. He stood looking after her, with a pity almost beyond his endurance. So this is what she had come to! Shabby, hungry, running about looking for work to support a blind husband. He could see before him the kid in the sailor blouse, in Miss Waters’ studio....
The girl he ought to have married. He could have spared her all this. It washisfault, all of it his fault.
Theywere living in the same studio Rosaleen had once shared with Enid and Dodo. And when Landry opened the door, he was rather impressed. Perhaps he had unconsciously expected a garret and the blind man lying on a pallet. And instead saw a large and imposingly artistic room, very dark in the corners, but with a circle of light from a red-shaded lamp on a table in the centre and Rosaleen and her husband sitting beside it. The husband, too, was much better than he had expected; he wasreally a very gentlemanly chap, and a good talker; nothing pitiful or destitute about him. One wouldn’t have suspected him of being blind. An immense, fat fellow with a tremendous voice, and a somewhat broad sense of humour. He talked to Landry about the opera, for that was the only form of art with which the young man was acquainted. He had a very decent cigar to offer him, and he mixed an excellent cocktail.
Rosaleen, too, was different; she wore an embroidered smock of dark red silk and she had bronze slippers and stockings, and her fine brown hair was parted on one side and doubled under, to look like a short crop. Landry thought she looked quite as an artist’s wife ought to look, and charming, and adorable. She had scarcely said a word all the evening; she had sat in silence while the two men talked, but he knew very well that she wasn’t listening. She had an odd, preoccupied look in her eyes which he later came to know very well....
It was a mild and somewhat flavourless evening. When the time came for him to go, the husband invited him to come to lunch the following Saturday, and he had said that he would.
He went home in a queer mood; he was, although he didn’t know it, refusing to think at all, refusing to examine his impressions.
Ashe was walking over from the bus that next Saturday, he met her hurrying through Fourth Street, and he was really shocked at her appearance. Even an artist’s wife ought to be a little more particular. She was hatless, with felt bedroom slippers on her feet, and her arms were filled with huge bundles from which protruded the feathery tops of carrots and celery leaves. The gay April breeze was blowing her soft untidy hair across her eyes, and at first she didn’t recognise him.
“Oh, Mr. Landry!” she said. “Don’tlookat me!... You shouldn’t come so early...!”
There was a very great change in her; a greater one than he had realised before. She was not only thinner and paler and older looking; she was different. That critical and childish look in her eyes had gone, that air of an observer; she was no longer looking on at life, she wasinit, she was living.
He took one of the immense bags and followed her upstairs.
And the studio, too, was revealed to him in its reality; the artistic glamour of it was gone in the daylight. In fact, it wasn’t a studio at all; there was, crowded into one corner, a small table on which Rosaleen’s drawing materials were neatly laid outon a blotter, but the other corners contained only sordid and common adjuncts to a poverty-stricken life; a cheap little bureau covered with a paltry lace scarf, a trunk masquerading as a table, a wooden egg crate in which were dozens of tins of tomatoes, bought at a sale. The distinguished artist himself was not what he had seemed; he was still handsome, still debonair, but he was wearing a dirty collar and a soiled white apron over a wrinkled suit. He was sitting beside a little gas stove on a table, on which was superimposed a portable oven with a glass door, and he was peering in with his extinguished eyes, so absorbed in his watching that he had to make a visible effort to arouse himself and to welcome Landry.
“A la bonne heure!” he said, cordially. “I’ve made something which no man with a soul could resist. It will be ready at one sharp. A Galette, to be eaten hot, with a sauce of wine and cream. That, coffee of the best, and a marvellous little salad.... Eh?”
Landry answered without great enthusiasm; he wasn’t much interested in food. And immediately the conversation languished, the animation fled from Lawrence’s face; he became again crumpled and dejected, until Rosaleen, who had been in the back room, returned and began asking him questions aboutthe Galette. That started him; he talked and talked, and his talk was all of food—about methods of preparation—a subject upon which Landry was profoundly ignorant. The meals in his home were plain and not greatly varied, meat, poultry and game roasted or broiled, the more respectable vegetables, an unobtrusive salad, innocent milky puddings, and those peculiar and delectable Southern hot breads. When he ate in a restaurant he ordered very much the same things, and when he was the guest of someone very rich who set rare dishes before him, he didn’t quite know what he was eating and cared still less. Such an idea as stuffing an eggplant with chopped liver seemed to him fantastic and frivolous.
The lunch was undoubtedly a good one, but it was ruined by Lawrence’s interminable culinary talk. There was no chance for a word with Rosaleen; she seemed to have no other idea in her head but to “draw out” her tiresome husband, to encourage him to bore their guest beyond toleration. Landry felt that this was hardly hospitable.
At last he rose.
“I’ll have to be going,” he said. “It’s after three, and I have an engagement.”
Lawrence shook his hand with tremendous cordiality.
“Come again!” he said. “Take pity on a man who has very little left in life. Come often!”
He turned toward Rosaleen, and Landry distinctly saw a look of understanding pass between them which he didn’t like.
“I’ll walk as far as the corner with you,” said Rosaleen. “I have an errand.”
And just as she was, she went out of the door with him. He stopped her at the head of the stairs.
“You shouldn’t go out in those slippers, Rosaleen! You’ll catch cold....”
“But that’s just where I’m going!” she answered, laughing. “To the shoemaker’s to get my shoes. They’re being mended.”
“But—” he began, and stopped.
“But haven’t you more than one pair?” he had been about to say.
He couldn’t endure to see her running about the streets like this, hatless, in bedroom slippers, a neglected, pitiful creature who had lost her womanly pride.
All the circumstances of her life puzzled and displeased him. There was something about it he couldn’t comprehend—that fat fellow with his cooking, the strained gallantry of Rosaleen’s bearing, the subtly unpleasant atmosphere which surroundedthem. Even poverty couldn’t account for it, he thought.
They had reached the corner, and Rosaleen stopped.
“Mr. Landry!” she said. “Could you lend me ten dollars?”
He pulled out his bill fold, handed her a bill, politely waved aside her thanks, and fled, hurrying from the sight of her. He felt really sick, with pity, with amazement, with an unconquerable disgust.
Ridiculous! He had said that he wanted to help Rosaleen, and now, as soon as he had a chance, he was horribly upset.
He sat down that very evening and wrote her a note.