VI
Thecount and Miss Harris have met and all fear of battle is over. At the first encounter, which took place in my sitting-room, it was obvious that the young man was stricken. Since then he has seen her twice and has fallen in love—at least he says he has.
As soon as he felt sure of it he came in to tell me. So he said the other evening, sitting in the steamer chair Betty gave me to replace the one Mrs. Bushey took.
“You are a woman of sympathy,” he said, lighting his third cigarette, “and I knew you would understand.”
Numberless young men have told me of their love-affairs and always were sure I would understand. I think it’s because I listen so well.
I have a fire now. It was easier to buy coal than argue with Mrs. Bushey. The count stretched his legs toward it and smoked dreamily and I countedthe cigarettes in the box. He smokes ten in an evening.
“She is most beautiful. I can find only one defect,” he murmured, “she is not thin enough.”
“Isn’t she?” I said, in my character of sympathetic woman, “I thought she was rather too thin.”
“Not for me,” answered the lover pensively; “no one could be too thin for me.”
He resumed his cigarette. It was nine and there were seven left. I calculated that they would last him till eleven.
“There was a lady in Rome I once knew,” he began in a tone of reminiscence, “thin like a match and so beautiful,” he extended his hand in the air, the first finger and thumb pressed together as if he might have been holding the match-like lady between them, “a blonde with brown eyes, immense eyes. Oh,Dio mio!” His voice trailed away into silence, swamped by a flood of memory.
“Were you in love with her, too?” I have noticed that the confiding young men expect the sympathetic woman to ask leading questions.
“Yes,” said the count gravely, “four years ago.”
“You must have been very young.”
Such remarks as this are out of character. Theytake me unawares and come from the American part of me—not the human universal part, but that which is individual and local.
“Oh, no, I was nineteen.” He went back to his memories. “She was all bones, but such beautiful bones. One winter she had a dress made of fur and she looked like an umbrella in it. This way,” he extended his hands and described two straight perpendicular lines in the air, “the same size all the way up. Wonderful!”
“Our young men don’t fall in love so early,” I said.
“They don’t fall in love at all,” replied the count, “neither do the women. They only flirt, all of them, except Miss Harris.”
“Doesn’t she flirt?”
I was stretching my sympathetic privileges a little too far. My excuse is curiosity, vulgar but natural. I had never before seen any one like Miss Harris and I wanted to get at the heart of her mystery.
“Flirt!” exclaimed the count. “Does a goddess flirt? That’s what she is. Think of it—in this new shiny country, in this city with telephones and policemen, in this sad street with the houses all built the same.” He sat upright and shook his cigarette atme. “She belongs where it is all sunshine and joy, and they dance and laugh and there is no business and nobody has a conscience.”
“Do you mean Ancient Greece or Modern Naples?”
The count made a vague sweeping gesture that left a little trail of smoke in the air.
“N’importe!But not here. She is a pagan, a natural being, a nymph, a dryad. I don’t know what in your language—but oh, something beautiful that isn’t bothered with a soul.”
I started, Masters and the count, raw America and sophisticated Italy, converging toward the same point.
Before I could answer her voice sounded startlingly loud through the register. For the first moment I didn’t recognize the strain, then I knew it—“Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore”—I have lived for art, I have lived for love. We looked at each other in surprised question as the impassioned song poured from the grating. It was as if she had heard us and this was her answer.
My knowledge of nymphs and dryads is small, but I feel confident if one of them had ever sung a modern Italian aria through a modern Americanregister she could not have rendered it with less heart and soul than Miss Harris did.
Yesterday morning Betty telephoned me to come and lunch with her. Betty’s summons are not casual outbreaks of hospitality. There is always an underlying purpose in them, what a man I know who writes plays would call “a basic idea”. She is one of the few people who never troubles about meaningless formalities or superfluous small talk. It’s her way, and then she hasn’t time. That’s not just a phrase but a fact. Every hour of her day has its work, good work, well done. Only the poor know Betty’s private charities, only her friends the number of her businesslike benefactions.
Walking briskly down the avenue I wondered what was her basic idea this time. Sometimes it’s clothes: “There are some dresses on the bed. Look them over and take what you like. The gray’s rather good, but I think the pink would be more becoming. I can have it done over for you by my woman.” Sometimes it’s a reinvestment of part of my little capital suggested by Harry, a high interest and very safe. Once it was an attempt to marry me off. That was last autumn when I had just got back from Europe, to a man with mines from Idaho. When Igrew tearful and reluctant she gave it up and shifted him—for he was too valuable to lose—to a poor relation of Harry’s.
We were at lunch when the basic idea began to rise to the surface, Betty at the head of the table, very tight and upright in purple cloth and chiffon, and little Constance, her eldest born, opposite me. Little Constance is an adorable child with a face like a flower and the manner of a timid mouse. She loves clothes and when I come leans against me looking me over and gently fingering my jewelry. She won’t speak until she has examined it to her satisfaction. At the table her steadfast gaze was diverted from me to a dish of glazed cherries just in front of her.
The entrée was being passed when Betty, helping herself, said:
“Harry’s just met a man from Georgia who is in cotton—not done up in it, his business.” She looked into the dish then accusingly up at the butler: “I said fried, not boiled, and I didn’t want cream sauce.”
The butler muttered explanations.
“Tell her it mustn’t happen again, no more cream sauce for lunch.” She helped herself, murmuring,“Really the most fattening thing one can eat.”
“Why do you eat it?” said little Constance, withdrawing her eyes from the cherries.
“Because I like to. Keep quiet, Constance. Mr. Albertson, that’s his name, is well-off, perfectly presentable and a widower.”
So it was matrimonial again.
“That’s very nice,” I replied meekly.
“We’ll have him to dinner some night next week and you to meet him.”
“Why do you ask me? He’d surely rather have some one younger and prettier.”
“It doesn’t matter what he’d rather have. I’ll telephone you when the day’s fixed.”
“Betty,” I murmured, looking at her pleadingly.
“Evie,” she returned firmly, “don’t be silly. The present situation’s got to come to an end some time.”
“It’ll never end.”
“Rubbish. There’s no sense in you scraping along this way in two rooms—”
“Remember the kitchenette.”
“In two rooms,” she went on, ignoring the kitchenette. “Of course I don’t want you to live in Georgia, but—”
Little Constance showed a dismayed face.
“Is Evie going to live in Georgia?”
Betty turned a stern glance on her.
“Constance, you’ll lunch up-stairs if you keep on interrupting.”
Constance was unaffected by the threat.
“When is she going?” she asked.
“Never,” I answered.
“I’m glad,” said little Constance, and seeing her mother’s glance averted, stole a cherry from the dish and hid it in her lap.
“From what Harry says, and he’s heard all about Mr. Albertson, he seems a perfectly fitting person, forty-five, of very good family and connections, and with an income of thirty thousand a year.”
“He’ll probably not like me,” I said hopefully.
“Oh, he will,” answered Betty with grim meaning, “I’ll see to that.”
I could hear her retailing my perfections to Mr. Albertson and my heart sank. Masterful, managing people crush me. If the man from Georgia liked me, as the man from Idaho did, I foresaw a struggle and I seem to have exhausted all my combative force in the year before my husband died. I looked at little Constance and caught her in the act of popping the cherry into her mouth. It was large and she hadto force it into her cheek and keep it there like a squirrel with a nut. An expression of alarm was in her face, there was evidently less room for it than she had expected.
Betty went ruthlessly on.
“Your present way of living is absurd—you, made for marriage.”
I saw little Constance’s eyes grow round with curiosity, but she did not dare to speak.
“Made for companionship. If you were a suffragette or a writer, or trimmed hats or ran a tea-room, it would be different, but you’re a thoroughly domestic woman and ought to have a home.”
Little Constance bit the cherry with a sharp crunching sound. Betty looked at her.
“Constance, are you eating your lunch?”
Little Constance lifted her bib, held it to her mouth, and nodded over it.
The danger was averted. Betty turned to me.
“Marriage is the only life for a normal woman. Judkins, I’ll have some more of those sweetbreads.”
She helped herself, and under the rattle of the spoon and fork, little Constance crunched again, very carefully.
“And what is the good of living in the past. That’s over, thank heaven.”
“I’m not living in the past any more. Betty, I’m—I’m—raising my head.”
Betty looked sharply up from the sweetbreads, and I flinched under her glance. She cast an eye on Judkins, who was receding into the pantry, waited till he was gone, then said, in an eager hushed voice:
“Evie, don’t tell me there’s some one?”
Never have I been more discomfited by the directness of my Betty. I felt myself growing red to my new rat and was painfully aware that little Constance, now crunching rapidly, had fixed upon me the deadly stare of an interested child.
“Of course there isn’t. What nonsense. But time has passed and one doesn’t stay broken-hearted forever. I’m notoldexactly, and I’m—that is—it’s just as I said, I’m beginning to come alive again.”
“Oh!” Betty breathed out and leaned against her chair-back, with a slight creaking of tight drawn fabrics. But she kept her eye on me, in a sidelong glance, that contained an element of inspecting inquiry. Little Constance swallowed the cherry at a gulp and the question it had bottled up burst out:
“Evie, are you going to get married?”
“No,” I almost shouted.
Little Constance said no more, but her gaze remained glued to my face in an absorption so intense that she leaned forward, pressing her chest against the edge of the table. Betty played with her knife and fork with an air of deep thought. Judkins reentered to my relief.
He was passing the next dish when little Constance broke the silence.
“Evie, why did you get all red just now?”
“Constance,” said her mother, “if you’re a good girl and stop talking you can have a cherry when lunch is over.”
“Thanks, mama,” said little Constance, in her most mouse-like manner.
After lunch we drove about in the auto and shopped, and as the afternoon began to darken Betty haled me to a reception.
“Madge Knowlton’s daughter’s coming out,” she said. “And as you used to know her before you went to Europe, it’s your duty to come.”
“Why is it my duty? I was never an intimate of hers.”
I’m shy about going to parties now; I feel like Rip Van Winkle when he comes back.
“To swell the crowd. It’s a social service you owe to a fellow woman in distress.”
We entered the house through a canvassed tunnel and inserted ourselves into a room packed with women and reverberating with a clamor of voices. We had a word and a hurried handclasp with Madge Knowlton and her daughter, and then were caught in a surging mass of humanity and carried into a room beyond. The jam was even closer here. I dodged a long hatpin, and was borne back against a mantelpiece banked with flowers whose delicate dying breath mingled with the scents of food and French perfumery. When the mass broke apart I had momentary glimpses of a glittering table with a woman at either end who was pouring liquid into cups.
At intervals the crowd, governed by some unknown law, was seized by migratory impulses. Segments of it separated from the rest, and drove toward the door. Here they met other entering segments with a resultant congestion. When thus solidified the only humans who seemed to have the key of breaking us loose were waiters. They found their way along the line of least resistance, making tortuous passages like the cracks in an ice pack.
From them we snatched food. I had a glass ofpunch, a cup of coffee, a chocolate cake, two marrons and a plate of lobster Neuberg, in the order named. I haven’t the slightest idea why I ate them—suggestion I suppose. All the other women were similarly endangering their lives, and the one possible explanation is that we communicated to one another the same suicidal impulse. It was like the early Christians going to the lions, the bold ones swept the weaker along by the contagion of example.
I met several old acquaintances who cried as if in rapturous delight.
“Why, Evelyn Drake, is this really you?”
“Evie—I can’t believe my eyes! I thought you had gone to Europe and died there.”
“How delightful to see you again. Living out of town, I suppose. We must arrange a meeting when I get time.”
And so forth and so on.
It made me feel like a resurrected ghost who had come to revisit the glimpses of the moon. My old place was not vacant, it was filled up and the grass was growing over it. I was glad when one of those blind stampeding impulses seized the crowd and carried me near enough to Betty to cry, as I was borne along, “I’m going home and I’d rather walk,”and was swept like a chip on a stream to the door.
It was raining, a thin icy drizzle. Beyond the thronging line of limousines, the streets were dark with patches of gilding where the lamplight struck along the wet asphalt. They looked like streets in dreams, mysteriously black gullies down which hurried mysteriously black figures. I walked toward Lexington Avenue, drooping and depressed, in accord with the chill night and the small sad noises of the rain. I was in that mood when you walk slowly, knowing your best dress is getting damp and feeling the moisture through your best shoes and neither matters. Nothing matters.
Once I used to enjoy teas, found entertainment in those brief shouted conversations, those perilous feasts. Perhaps I was sad because I was so out of it all. And what was I in—what took its place? I was going back to emptiness and silence. To greet me would be a voiceless darkness, my evening companion a book.
I got on a car full of damp passengers. As if beaten down by the relentless glare of the electric lights, all the faces drooped forward, hollows under the eyes, lines round the mouths. They sat in listless poses, exhaling the smell of wet woolen andrubber and I sat among them, also exhaling damp smells—also with hollows under my eyes and lines round my mouth. That, too, didn’t matter. What difference if I was hollowed and lined when there was no one to care?
My room was unlighted and cold. I lighted the gas and stood with uplifted hand surveying it. It was like a hollow shell, an empty echoing shell, that waited for a living presence to brighten it. Just then it seemed to me as if I never could do this—its loneliness would be as poignant and pervasive when I was there, would steal upon me from the corners, surround and overwhelm me like a rising sea. My little possessions, my treasures, that were wont to welcome me, had lost their friendly air. I suddenly saw them as they really were, inanimate things grasped and held close because associated with the memory of a home. In the stillness the rain drummed on the tin roof and the line in a forgotten poem rose to my mind, “In the dead unhappy night and when the rain is on the roof.”
I snatched a match and hurried to the fire. Thrusting the flame between the bars of the grate, I said to myself:
“I must get some kind of a pet—a dog or a Persian cat. I’ve not enough money to adopt a child.”
The fire sputtered and I crouched before it. I didn’t want any supper, I didn’t want to move. I think a long time passed, several hours, during which I heard the clock ticking on the mantel over my head, and the rain drumming on the roof. Now and then the rumbling passage of a car swept across the distance.
I have often sat this way and my thoughts have always gone back to the past like homing pigeons to the place where they once had a nest. To-night they went forward. My married life seemed a great way off, and the Evelyn Drake in it looked on by the Evelyn Drake by the fire, a stranger long left behind. The memories of it had lost their sting, even the pang of disillusion was only a remembrance. With my eyes on the leaping flames I looked over the years that stretched away in front, diminishing to a point like a railway track. My grandmother had lived to eighty-two and I was supposed to be like her. Would I, at eighty-two, be still a pair of ears for young men’s love stories and young women’s dreams of conquest?
Oh, those years, that file of marching years, coming so slowly and so inevitably, and empty, all empty!
The rain drummed on the roof, the clock ticked and the smell of my best skirt singeing, came delicately to my nostrils. Eventhatdidn’t matter. From thirty-three to eighty-two—forty-nine years of it. I looked down at my feet, side by side, smoking on the fender. Wasn’t it Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked to define happiness, answered, “four feet on the fender”?
There was a knock on the door, probably the count to continue the recital of his love’s young dream. My “Come in” was not warm.
The door opened and Roger entered in a long wet raincoat.
I jumped up crying “Roger,” and ran to him with my hand out.
He took it and held it, and for a moment we stood looking at each other quite still and not speaking. I was too glad to say anything, too glad to think. It was an astonishing gladness, a sort of reaction I suppose. It welled through me like a warm current, must have shone in my face, and spoken from my eyes. I’ve not often in my life been completely outsidemyself, broken free of my consciousness and soared, but I was then just for one minute, while I looked into Roger’s face, and felt his hand round mine.
“You’re glad to see me, Evie,” he said and his voice sounded as if he had a cold.
That broke the spell. I came back to my eighteen-foot parlor, but it was so different, cozy and pretty and intimate, full of the things I care for and that are friends to me. The rain on the roof had lost its forlornness, or perhaps, by its forlornness accentuated the comfort and cheer of my little room.
We sat by the fire. Roger’s feet were wet and he put them upon the fender.
“Now, if you’d been plodding about in the rain with me you’d put yours up, too. Hullo, what have I said? Your face is as red as a peony.”
“It’s the fire. I’ve been sitting over it for a long time,” I stammered.
Just then the register became vocal, with the habanera fromCarmen.
Roger got up and shut it.
“Don’t you want to hear her sing?” I asked.
“No, I want to hear you talk,” said he.