III
Loveof 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 inDombey 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 orchidamong 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, therearerespectable 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 Napoleonused 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.”
“Therearehandsome people who are perfectlyconvenable. 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 beshe’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 megreatly. 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 theglass 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 theregister’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’twantto 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’tthink 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-stairson 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 usprobably 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. Iamgoing 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 ofthe 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.