XIII
Theweather is fine and we are all recuperating. I must confess the physical and spiritual storm of the last six weeks has rather laid me waste. I haven’t felt so much in so many ways since—well, my high water mark was the last year of my married life and that’s getting to be a faded canvas. The metaphor is somewhat mixed, but if I draw attention to it it can pass. I’m like that letter-writing English woman who couldn’t spell, and when she was doubtful about a word always underlined it and if it was wrong it passed for a joke.
We sit about a good deal in my front room and late in the afternoon Lizzie’s admirers drop in. The doctor, by the way, is one of them. He says he’s still interested in “the case,” poor young man. Lizzie greets them with wistful softness and seems as indifferent to their homage as if they were pictures hanging on the wall. I talk to them, and while we talk we are acutely conscious of her, singularly dominated by her compelling presence.
In all the change in her that quality is as strong as ever. I do not yet know what it is that makes her the focusing point of everybody’s attention, but that she is, nobody who has lived in this house could deny. I believe actresses are trained to “take the stage and hold it,” but Lizzie has the faculty as a birthright. It is not her looks; I have seen hundreds of women who were as handsome as she and had no such ascendency. It is not the high-handed way she imposes her personality upon every one, because she doesn’t do that any more. It is not her serene self-absorption, her unconscious ignoring ofyourlittle claims to be a person of importance. It’s something so powerful no one can escape it, and so subtle no one can define it—some sort of magnetic force that puts her always in the center, makes her presence felt like an unescapable sound or a penetrating light. Wherever she is she is “it.” “Where the MacGregor sits there is the head of the table.”
Wednesday afternoon in the slack hours—the rush hours are from five to seven, when the men come home from business—Mrs. Stregazzi, the eldest small Stregazzi and Mr. Berwick dropped in. They had just heard of her illness and came to make inquiries.Berwick explained this because Mrs. Stregazzi couldn’t. In a large, black lynx turban that looked like Robinson Crusoe’s hat, and a long plush coat, she dropped on the end of the sofa tapping her chest in explanatory pantomime and fetching loud breaths from the bottom of her lungs.
Berwick looked morosely at her, then explained:
“It’s cigarettes—cuts her wind.”
“It’s my new corset,” Mrs. Stregazzi shot out between gasps, “and your stairs.”
The small Stregazzi, a little pale girl of ten, eyed her mother for a considering moment, then apparently satisfied with her symptoms, sat down on the prie-dieu and heaving a deep sigh, folded her hands in her lap and assumed a patient expression.
Lizzie’s illness disposed of, the conversation turned—no, jumped, leaped, sprang—into that world of plays and concerts in which they had their beings. Mrs. Stregazzi, though still having trouble with her “wind,” launched forth into a description of the concert tour she and Berwick were to take through New England. Berwick had made a hit at Lizzie’s concert and he’d “got his chance at last.”
I sat aside and marveled at her. She must havebeen forty years old and she looked as weather-beaten as if, for twenty of the forty years, she had been the figurehead of a ship. But vigor and enthusiasm breathed from her. With the Robinson Crusoe hat slipped to one side of her head and the new corsets emitting protesting creaks as she swayed toward me, she gasped out the route, the terms, the programs, then dabbing at the little girl with her muff, exclaimed:
“And the kids are going to stay with mommer in the Bronx. Mrs. Drake, I’ve got the cutest little flat at One Hundred and Sixty-ninth Street. Wish you’d go up there some day and you’ll see the best pair of children and the grandest old lady in Manhattan.”
Berwick growled an assent and Miss Stregazzi, with her air of polite patience, filled in while her mother caught her breath.
“Grandma’s seventy-two. She used to sing in the opera chorus, but she’s got too old.”
Mrs. Stregazzi nodded confirmation, her eyes full of pride.
“That’s the way she pulled me along and got my education. Didn’t let go of the rudder till I could take hold. Now I do it. It’s been a struggle, tookme into vaudeville, where I met Stregazzi and had my troubles, but they’re over now. I’m back where I belong and mommer can rest, blessed old soul. I keep them pretty snug, don’t I, Dan?”
Berwick gave a second growl and then the conversation swung back to the inevitable topic. I felt as if I were on a scenic railway on a large scale, being rushed perilously along with wild drivings through space, varied by breathless stoppages in strange towns. I never heard so much geography since my school-days or so much scandal since I came to the age when I could listen to my elders. Names I knew well and names I’d never heard jostled one another in those flying sentences, and the quarrels!andthe divorces!ANDthe love-affairs! I looked uneasily at the little girl and caught her in the act of yawning. In proof of her grandmother’s good training she concealed her mouth with a very small hand in a very dirty white glove. Her mother ended a graphic account of the trials of a tertium quid on the road:
“And he pulled a kodak from under his coat and snapped them just in the middle of the kiss.Thatdivorce wasn’t contested.”
The little girl, having accomplished her yawn,dropped her hand and said without interest, but as one who feels good manners demand some sort of comment:
“Whose divorce?”
“No one you know, honey. A lady I toured with two seasons ago.”
Lizzie and Berwick listened. I had never heard him do anything else. Before I came to live here if I had been told of the excellence of his vocal performance and then seen him I would have shaken my head and said: “That’s not the man.” A winter at Mrs. Bushey’s has taught me that the artist does not have a brand upon his brow like Cain.
His listening was of a glowering unresponsive kind; Lizzie’s was all avid attention. It was the first time since her illness that she had shown any animation. A faint color came into her face, now and then she halted Mrs. Stregazzi’s flow of words with a sharp question. The projected tour was the thing that absorbed her. She kept pulling Mrs. Stregazzi out of the scandals back to it. There was no envy in her interest. It was to me extremely pathetic, she, the failure, speeding Berwick on his way to success. As might have been expected he was stolidly indifferent to it, but I was amazed to see that Mrs. Stregazzi, whom I was beginning to like, wasuntouched or was too engrossed in her own affairs to notice anything else.
Outside at the head of the staircase she paused, and giving a glance at the closed door, said in a lowered voice:
“Where’s Masters?”
Berwick had gone on ahead, the little girl with her arm hooked over the banister was slowly descending. Mrs. Stregazzi’s eye, holding mine, was intelligent and questioning. I saw that she knew and took it for granted that I did.
“He doesn’t come any more. They’ve had a difference—a quarrel, I think.”
“Left her!” She raised her painted eyebrows, and compressing her lips, looked down the stairs and emitted a low “Umph!”
A world of meaning was in that sound, a deep understanding pity.
“I thought he’d do it,” she said, as if speaking to herself. “She couldn’t hold him the way things were going.”
She stood musing, her head slightly drooped. The Robinson Crusoe hat changed its angle and slid down over her forehead. When the fur interfered with her vision she arrested its progress, ramming it violently back.
“I guess she feels pretty bad,” she ruminated, still with the effect of thinking aloud. “That man’s got a terribly taking way with women.”
I felt very uncomfortable. If it was unnecessary to contradict her it was also unnecessary to admit her charges by receiving them in silence. I changed the subject:
“She says she’ll never sing again. It’s very unfortunate.”
Mrs. Stregazzi harpooned the hat with an enormously long pin, tipped by a diamond cluster.
“Never sing again—oh, rats!”
She grimaced as she charged with the pin through a series of obstructions.
“Don’t you be afraid, dearie. She’ll sing—she can’t help it.”
“But she’s positive about it. She insists.”
“Does she?” She shook her head, testing the solidity of the anchorage. “She’ll be back singing before the spring.Youdon’t know, but it’s in her blood. We can’t keep off, none of us. Andshe!Just wait. That’s all she’s made for.”
The little Stregazzi had come to an end of her adventure against the newel post. She lolled upon it, wiping the crevices with her fingers, then lookingat her gloves to see how much dirtier they were.
Her mother descended a step, paused, cogitated, then turned to me, frowning.
“I suppose he’s done nothing for her?”
I saw she meant money. The astonishing rawness of it made me redden to my hair. She waited for my answer, blind apparently to the expression of anger which must have been as plain as my outraged blush.
“As to that—” I began haughtily.
“He hasn’t. Well, I’ll send her round fifty dollars to-morrow and if that’s not enough drop me a line at mother’s and I’ll forward some more. This is the best contract I’ve ever had.”
When I explained and tried to thank her for Lizzie she laughed.
“Oh, don’t bother to tell her about it. It’s all in the day’s work. If you’ve got some rich woman interested in her so much the better. But, dearie,” she laid her hand on mine resting on the banister, “don’t you fret about her.She’llgo back to the old stamping ground.”
When I went back into the room Lizzie was sitting in the wicker chair gazing out of the window. She spoke without looking at me.
“Do you know what I feel like? As if it was night and I was on a ship going out to sea, and as if the land was getting smaller and smaller. I can just see the lights of houses and little towns twinkling in a line along the edge of the shore.”
“Where’s the ship going?” I asked.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” came her answer through the dusk.
A knock cut off my reply. It was Roger, dropped in for an hour before dinner. Lizzie rose and was for going, but I urged her to stay and she sank back in her chair, glad, poor soul, to be with us and escape the dreariness of her own thoughts. I lit the student lamp and he and I sat down by it with Lizzie near the window, the light falling across her skirts, the upper part of her dimly blocked out in shadows and the pale patches of her face and hands.
As usual, she said almost nothing and a selfish fear stirred in me that she was going to spoil our hour. It’s hard for two people on intimate confidential terms, to have a gay spontaneous interview while a third sits dumb in a corner. I think Roger felt the irk of it at first. He did most of the talking and he did it to me. But as the time wore on Inoticed that he began to address himself more and more to her. He seemed unconscious of it and it set me wondering. Was he—a man not susceptible to personal influences—going to feel that queer magnetic draw? It interested me so much that I forgot to follow what he said and watched him, and there was no doubt about it—hedidkeep turning toward the window, where he could see nothing but a motionless shape and the indistinct oval of a face.
The conversation resolved itself into a monologue, two mute ladies and a talking man.
Roger really did feel it; Roger, who would hardly listen to me when I told him about her in the restaurant. It showed what a force she possessed, and my fancy dwelt on it till I began to see it as a visible thing stretching from her and reaching out toward him. It was an uncanny idea, but it obsessed me, and Roger’s voice sunk to a rumbling bass murmur as I tried to picture what it might look like—a thin steady ray like a search-light, or a quivering thread of vibrating air, or long clutching tentacles such as an octopus has, or a spectral arm of gigantic size like the one Eusapia Pallidino conjured out of shape when “the conditions were favorable.” The cessation of his voice broke myimaginings and I was rather glad of it. Next time I see him I’m going to tell him about them and ask him which of the collection it felt most like.
I wrote all this a week ago, and reading it over to-night it seems strange that I was only amused, strange by contrast with the way I feel about the same thing now. It’s not that there’s any difference, or that anything has gone wrong, but—well, it was a joke then and it doesn’t seem to be a joke any more.
What’s made the change was something that happened here this afternoon. It’s nothing at all, but it disturbed me. I hate to think it did. I hate to write it did. I hate to have the suspicious petty side of me come up and look at me and say: “I’m still here. You can’t get rid of me. I’m bound up with the rest of you and every now and then I break loose.”
If I wasn’t a foreboding simpleton who had had her nerve shaken by bad luck I’d simply laugh. And instead of doing that I feel like a cat on the edge of a pond with a stone tied around its neck, and I can’t sleep. I put out the light and went to bed and here I am up again, wrappered and slippered, writing it out. If I put it down in black and white,see it staring up at me in plain words, it will fall back into its proper place. An insignificant thing—a nonsensical thing—the kind of thing you tell to your friends at a lunch as a good story on yourself.
I was out with Betty and didn’t get home till five. As I came up the stairs I heard voices on the top floor, just a low rise and fall, nothing distinguishing. Since her illness Lizzie keeps her sitting-room door open and I knew the voices were from there. I supposed one of the admirers was with her and went into my rooms and took off my things. Then I thought it would be nice to go up and make them tea. And I went up and it was Roger.
That’s all.
Why shouldthatkeep me awake? Why all evening should it have kept coming up between me and the pages I tried to read? Aren’t they both my friends? Why can’t they laugh and talk together and I be contented? And it was all so natural and explicable. Roger had come tomydoor and, finding me out, had gone up there to wait for me.
But—oh! Why should one woman be beautiful and one plain? Why should one charm without an effort, be lovely with a flower’s unstudied grace, and another stand awkward, chained in a stupidreserve, caught in a web of self-consciousness, afraid of being herself? Why is Lizzie Harris as she is and I as I am? I can’t write any more, I don’t get anywhere. I know it’s all right. Iknowit, but—something keeps me awake.