“I could just let myself go and be wonderful!”
“I could just let myself go and be wonderful!”
“I could just let myself go and be wonderful!”
She had expressed it exactly. Shehadbeen dead. The mild and wistful woman of the last two months was a wraith.Thiswas 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 heightsof 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 asinging teacherout 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 inanswer 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 andimmensely 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 nowhewas 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 haveIdone?” 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 MiafromAïda. 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. WhenPatria Miawas 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 fromCarmen, Brahm’sSapphische 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.