XII
Lizzieis coming to life, hesitatingly and as if with reluctance. I suppose it’s natural for her to be extraordinarily weak, but I never would have believed she could be conscious enough to talk and so utterly indifferent to everything that should concern her. When I told her about the money, saying it came from a friend, she murmured, “That’s all right,” and never asked who the friend was. She seemed to have no interest in the subject, or in any subject, for that matter. She makes me think of a brilliant, highly colored plant that a large stone has fallen on.
One afternoon last week, when I was sitting by the table in her room reading, she suddenly spoke.
“Evie, how long is it that I’ve been sick here?”
“Nearly a month. You’ve been very ill, but you’re getting better now every day.”
She said no more and I got up and began moving about the room, arranging it for the evening. I was pulling down the blinds when I heard her stirring,and looking back, saw that she had twisted about in the bed and was watching me. In the dusk, her face, framed in elf locks of black hair, looked like a white mask. I thought she was going to ask me something—there was a question in her eyes—but she made no sound. I lighted the lamp and shifted into place the paper rose that hung from the shade. She continued to follow my movements with the intent observation of an animal. I have seen dogs watch their masters just that way. The feeling that something was on her mind grew stronger. I went to her and sat on the side of the bed.
“Do you want to ask me anything?” I said.
She shook her head, but her eyes were unquiet. Suddenly I thought I guessed. I put my hand on hers and spoke very low.
“Lizzie, the thing you told me that night when I came up and found you here”—I looked into her face to see if she understood—“I’ve never told to anybody.”
She stared at me without answering.
“Do you know what I mean?”
She gave a slight affirmative nod.
“And I never will tell it to any one unless you ask me to.”
“Idon’t care if you tell it,” she said with weak indifference.
It was the first gleam of her old self. Whatever she had wanted to say to me it was not that. Other women—the women of my world—would have been fearful of their secret lightly guarded. I don’t believe she had given it a thought. Either her trust in me was implicit or she didn’t care who knew it. I like to think it was the first.
She settled back against the pillow and made feeble smoothings of the sheet. Still persuaded of her inward disquiet I sat silent waiting for her to speak. After a moment or two she did.
“Have any letters come for me?”
I knewthiswas the question. I got up and gave her the pile of letters stacked on the desk. She looked over the addresses, then pushed them back to me.
“I was afraid he might write to me,” she said. “But it’s all right, he hasn’t.”
I got a shock of displeased surprise.
“You didn’t expect him towriteto you, Lizzie?”
“He might have.”
“But after—after what you told me, surely, oh, surely, you don’t want to hear from him?”
I was fearful of her answer. If she was waiting, hungering for a letter from him, it would have been too much even for me.
“That’s just it—Idon’twant to. It’s all in the past, as if it had happened a hundred years ago. I want it to stay there—to be dead.”
She looked into my eyes, a deep look, that for some inexplicable reason reminded me of Wuzzy’s. I have long realized that my point of view, my mental processes, are too remote from hers for me ever to see into her mind or understand its workings. But I was certain that she meant what she said. My poor Lizzie, coming up out of the Valley of the Shadow, with her feeble feet planted on the past.
A few days after this she was well enough to sit up in bed with her hair brushed and braided, and read her letters. One was from Vignorol asking her why she had not come for her lessons.
She gave it to me, remarking:
“I wish you’d answer that. Tell him I’ve been sick, and that I’ll never come for any more lessons.”
I dropped my sewing, making the round eyes of astonishment with which I greet her unexpected decisions.
“You’re not thinking of giving up your singing?”
“Yes, forever.”
“But why? Surely you’re not going to let one failure discourage you.”
I was disturbed. From a few recent remarks, I am satisfied that she has no means whatever. Shemustgo on with her singing; as Mrs. Bushey would say, “One must live.” She could curb her ambitions, make her living on a less brilliant plane.
“I’ll never sing again,” she answered.
“You might give up attempting the opera, or even concerts. But there are so many other things you could do. Church singing—you began that way.”
“Yes, that’s it. I began, and I’m not going back to where I began. I’m going on or I’m going to stop. And I can’t go on.”
I thought she alluded to her lack of means and said:
“Lizzie, I can get the money for you to go back to Vignorol—I can get people who will stand behind you and give you every chance.”
She looked listlessly at the wall and shook her head.
“It’s no use. I don’t want it. Masters was right. I know it now.”
“You mean—” I stopped; it seemed too cruel.
But she was minded now to be as ruthlessly clear-sighted about herself as she had once been obstinately blind.
“The whole equipment—I haven’t got it. He banked too much on my looks, thought they were going to go farther than they did. If I’d had a great voice—one of the wonderful voices of the world, like Patti or Melba—it wouldn’t have mattered about not having the rest. But there are hundreds with voices as good as mine. He thought beauty and dramatic instinct were going to carry me through. He knew I had the one and he thought he could give me the other—train it into me. Nobody knows how hard he tried. He used to make me stand up and go over every gesture after him, he even made marks on the floor where I was to put my feet. And then he’d sit down and hold his head and groan. Poor Jack”—she gave a little dry laugh—“he had an awful time!”
I could realize something of Masters’ desperation. To have discovered a song-bird in the western wilds, hoped to retrieve his fortunes with it and then found a defect in its mechanism that neither work nor brains nor patience could supply—itwasbitter luck.
“He was an artist,” she went on. “He couldhave gone straight to the top but he lost his voice after the first few years, while he was still touring the small European towns.”
I noticed that she spoke in the past tense, her tone one of melancholy reminiscence as if he reallywasdead. She might have been delivering his funeral sermon and placing flowers of memory on his tomb.
“Why couldn’t you have got from him what he tried to teach you? I can’t understand, you’re so intelligent.”
She mused for a moment, then said:
“I’ve been thinking of that myself while I’ve been lying here. Looking back I don’t seem to have given it my full mind and I’ve been wondering if perhaps I wasn’t too taken up with him. I couldn’t get away from the real romance, the love-making and the quarrels, first one and then the other. There wasn’t anything else in my life. I hadn’t time to be interested in those women I had to pretend to be. My affairs and me were the only things that counted.”
“But you were so much in earnest, so desperately anxious to succeed.”
She gave me a side look, sharp and full of meaning.
“Because, though I wouldn’t acknowledge it, Iknew he wanted to break with me and the only way I could keep him was to make good.”
“Good heavens, how horrible!” I winced under her pitiless plain speaking.
“Yes, it was,” she said gently.
There was a pause. The little palliatives I had to offer, the timid consolations, were shriveled up by that fierce and uncompromising candor. Her voice broke the silence, quietly questioning:
“I suppose you think I did a very bad thing?”
“Oh, Lizzie, don’t ask me that. I can’t sit in judgment. That’s for you, not for me.”
She looked at her hands, long and thin on the quilt. Thus down-drooped, her face was shockingly haggard and wasted. Yet of the storm which had caused this ruin she was now speaking with a cold impersonal calm, as if it had all happened to somebody else. My own emotions that swelled to passionate expression died away before that inscrutable and baffling indifference.
“He was a very fine man,” she said suddenly.
“Fine?” I gasped.
“Yes, in lots of ways. About his art and work for one thing—he had great ideals. And he was very good to me.”
That was the coping stone. I heard myself saying in a faint voice:
“How?”
“Well, for one thing, he never lied to me. He told the truth about the singing, about me, about everything. He wasn’t a coward, either. He didn’t run away and send me a letter. He came and had it out with me, made me understand.”
This time I couldn’t speak. Her next words were like the laying of the final wreath on the bier of the loved and respected dead:
“It had to end and he ended it. He didn’t care how much it hurt me, or what I felt, or what anybody thought. That’s the right way to be—not to let other people’s feelings make you afraid, not to be considerate because it’s easier than fighting it out. He was a fine man.”
That was John Masters’ obituary as delivered by his discarded mistress.
The thing I couldn’t get over was that she showed no signs of penitence. As far as I could see she was in no way inclined to admit her fault, to bow her head and say, “I have sinned.” Her own conduct in the affair seemed to be the last thing that troubled her. Yet I can say that I, a woman with the traditionalmoral views, could not think her either abandoned or base. I don’t know to what world or creed she belonged, or to what ethical code she adhered, except that it was not mine or anybody else’s that I have ever known. Whatever it was it seemed to uphold her in her course. What was done was done and that was the end of it. No strugglings of inner irresolution, no attempt to exonerate or exculpate, disturbed her somberly steadfast poise. What would have been admirable to any one was her acceptance of the blow, and her recognition of her lover’s right to deliver it.
As she improved, moved about the room and took her place against accustomed backgrounds, I began to realize that the change in her was more than skin deep. Her wild-fire was quenched, her moods, her beamings, her flashes of anger were gone. A wistful passivity had taken their place, lovely but alien to her who was once Lizzie Harris. Whatever Masters had said in that last interview had acted like an extinguisher on a bright and dancing flame. It made me think of Dean Swift and Vanessa. Nobody knows what the dean said to Esther Vanhomrigh in the arbor among the little trees—only she had returned from it a broken thing to die soon after.Her lover had killed her; Lizzie’s had not quite, but he had certainly put out the light in that wayward and rebellious spirit.
It has its good points, for those people who are to help her find her more comprehensible, much more to their liking than they would the old Lizzie. Roger, for example, has met her again and is quite impressed. It was the other afternoon when I was sitting with her in her front room. The door was open and as I talked I listened for steps that would stop two flights below atmydoor. I had had no word that steps might be expected, but one doesn’t always need the word. There are mornings when a woman wakes and says to herself, “He’ll come to-day.” It had been one of these mornings.
At five, when the lights were lit and I had put on the tea water to boil, I heard the ascending feet. If it was some one for me could I bring them up? Lizzie would be delighted. I ran down and found him standing at my door preparing to knock with the head of his cane. Would he mind coming up—I didn’t like to leave her too much alone? No, he wouldn’t, and up he came.
Lizzie, long and limp in the easy chair, was sheltered from the lamp glow by the paper rose.She smiled and held out her hand and I saw he was shocked by the change in her, as well he might be. The only other time he had seen her was the night of the concert, the climax of that little day to which every dog of us is entitled.
All things that are frail and feeble appeal to Roger. Both he and Mrs. Ashworth get stiff and ice-bound before bumptious, full-fed, prosperous people. He sat down beside her and made himself very agreeable. And I was pleased, immensely pleased; could better endure the thought of Lizzie like a smashed flower if by her smashing she was to win his approval and interest.
As I made the tea I could hear their voices rising and falling. Coming up the passage with the tray the doorway framed them like a picture and I stopped and gazed admiringly. It was like the cover of a ten-cent magazine—a graceful woman and a personable man conversing elegantly in a gush of lamplight. The lamplight was necessary to the illusion, for it hid Roger’s wrinkles and made his gray hair look fair. He could easily have passed for the smooth-shaven, high-collared wooer, and Lizzie, languidly reclining with listening eyes, quite fittingly filled the rôle of wooee.
An hour afterward, as we went down-stairs, Roger was silent till we got to my door. Then he said:
“She seems very different from what she was that night when I saw her in your room.”
“She is different. You don’t seem to realize she’s been very sick.”
“Yes—but—”
I pushed open the door.
“Roger, aren’t you coming in?”
“Sorry, but I can’t. I’m going out to dinner and I have to go home and change.”
I was disappointed, but I wouldn’t have shown it for the world. I couldn’t help thinking it was rather stupid of him not to have made a move to get away sooner, to have a moment’s talk in my parlor by my lamplight.
“From what you told me of her I thought she was rather high-pitched and western.”
“Ineversaid that.”
“Maybe you didn’t, but somehow I got the impression. She’s anything but that—delicate, fine.”
“Um,” I responded. These positive opinions on a person I knew so much better than he did rasped me a little.
Roger shifted his hat to his left hand and moved to the stair-head.
“There’s something very unusual about her, a sort of fragile simplicity like a dogrose. Good-by, Evie. Good night.”
I went into my room. It was cold and the chill of it struck uncomfortably on me. I had a queer feeling of being suddenly flat—spiritually—as a flourishing lawn might feel when a new roller goes over it. It improves the looks of the lawn. That it didn’t have the same effect on me I noticed when I caught myself in the chimneypiece glass. What a dim little colorless dib of a woman I was! And how particularly dim and colorless a dib I must look beside Lizzie.
I got my supper, feeling aggrieved. I had never before accused fate of being unfair when it forgot to make me pretty. But now I felt hurt, meanly discriminated against. It wasn’t just to give one woman shining soulful eyes, set deep under classic brows, and another small gray-green ones that said nothing and grew red in a high wind. It wasn’t a square deal.
Yesterday afternoon Betty turned up and found the invalid sitting in my steamer chair looking atthe juniper bush. Betty had never spoken to her before and they talked amicably, Mrs. Ferguson visibly thawing. I left them, for I want Betty to know her and help her of her own free will, want to eliminate myself as the middleman.
I was in the kitchenette, getting tea again, when Betty came to the door and hissed her impressions in a stage whisper.
“Why didn’t you tell me she was so charming?”
Business with the kettle.
“She’s one of the sweetest creatures I ever met.”
Business with the hot water.
“I don’t know why I ever thought she looked theatrical. She must have had on somebody else’s clothes. She’s a Madonna—those eyes and that sad far-away look.”
Business with the toast.
Betty was so interested that she got into the kitchenette with me. The congestion was extreme, especially as she takes up so much room and is so hard. You can’t squeeze by her or flatten her against walls—you might as well try to flatten a Corinthian column. I had to feel round her for cups and plates, engirdle her glistening and prosperousbulk and grope about on the shelves behind her.
“It’s absurd of her fooling about with this music. She ought to marry. Has she any serious admirer?”
“Wouldn’t any woman who looked like that have serious admirers? Betty, I can’t find the cups. Would you mind moving an inch or two?”
“I wouldn’t mind at all if there was an inch or two to move in to. When you have a kitchen like this you’re evidently expected to hire your maid by measure. Who’s her admirer?”
“Oh, every man in the house.”
“Are any of them possible?”
I pried her back from the stove and inserted myself between her and it, feeling like a flower being pressed in the leaves of a book.
“No, not very possible.”
“I’ll have to see what I can do.”
As I poured the water on the tea I couldn’t help saying over my shoulder:
“There’s Mr. Albertson. He’s still unclaimed in the ‘Found’ Department.”
Mr. Albertson hadn’t loved me at first sight and Betty feels rather sore about it. She drew a deepbreath, thereby crushing me against the front of the stove.
“No,” she said consideringly. “He won’t do. He’s too old and too matter-of-fact. Besides, I want him for one of the Geary girls, my second cousins, who live up in the Bronx and make shoe bags. I’m not sure which he’ll like best, so to-morrow night I’m having them both to dine with him.”
Then we had tea and Betty’s good impression increased. She went away whispering to me on the stairs that she was quite ready to tide Miss Harris over her difficulties and help her when she had decided what she wanted to do.