XIV
It’stwo weeks to-day since that night when I couldn’t sleep. It’s been a horrible two weeks—a sickening, disintegrating two weeks. My existence has been dislocated, thrown wide of its bearings, as if the world had taken a sudden wild revolution, whirled me through space, and I had come up dizzy and bewildered, still in the old setting, but with everything broken and upside down.
It began with that visit of Roger to Lizzie’s sitting-room. The morning after I felt humiliated, utterly ashamed of myself. It’s no new thing for me to be a fool. I permit myself that luxury. But to be a mean-spirited, suspicious fool was indulging myself too far. I saw Lizzie and she spoke about Roger, simply and sweetly, and my folly grew to a monumental size, beneath which I was crushed. And my dread faded as the horror of a nightmare fades when the morning comes, with the sun and the sounds of every day.
I have heard people say that these moments ofrelief in a period of anxiety are all that enable one to bear the strain. I don’t think that’s true. Alterations of stress and serenity tear one to pieces. If you’re going to be put on the rack it’s better to have no reprieve. Then your mind accepts it, gets accustomed to it and you tune up your nerves, screw your courage to the sticking place and march forward with the calm of the hopeless.
On Sunday afternoon—that was yesterday—Roger and I were to have tea with Mrs. Ashworth. He came earlier than I expected, wanting to take a walk with me before we went there. Lizzie was in my sitting-room, also Miss Bliss, picking over the last box of chocolates contributed by the count. Miss Bliss was not dressed for receiving—instead of the kimono and the safety pin she wore the Navajo blanket, and when she saw him she gave a cry that would have done credit to Susanna when she discovered the elders. I would have seen the humor of it—the model who had posed for the altogether in abject confusion at being caught huddled to the chin in a blanket as thick as a carpet—had I not had all humor stricken from me by the sight of Roger in the doorway. The cry had halted him. He evidently had no idea what had caused it. His eyes swervedfrom Miss Bliss to sweep the room in a quick questioning glance. When it touched Lizzie something shot up in it—the question was answered. Miss Bliss made her escape without anybody noticing her, and I heard about the walk and went into the back room to get my outdoor things.
I have explained how the kitchenette and bathroom are a connecting passage between the two larger rooms of the suite. I came back through them, and having left the sitting-room door open, could see at the end of the little vista Roger and Lizzie by the table. As once before I had stopped to watch them, I stopped now, not smilingly this time, but furtively, guiltily.
They were talking together. To watch wasn’t enough—I had to hear and I stole forward, stepping lightly over the bathroom rug and half closed the door. Standing against it, I listened. Heaven knows the conversation was innocent enough. She was telling him about a bracelet she wore that belonged to some of those Spanish people she was descended from. I suddenly felt as if I was looking through a keyhole, and had stretched out my hand to shut the door when a silence fell. Then all the acquired decencies of race and breeding left me. Ipushed the door open a crack and peered in. She had taken the bracelet off and given it to him and he was turning it about, studying it while she watched him.
“I’ve been told it’s quite valuable as an antique,” she said. “Do you suppose it really is?”
“I don’t know about the antique, but I should think it might have some value. The design’s very unusual,” he answered, and handed it back to her.
She clasped it on her arm, and as she did so, her head down-bent, they were silent, his eyes on her face.
I had never seen him look at any woman that way, but I had seen other men. It is an unmistakable look, the mute confession of that passion which makes the proudest man a slave.
I closed the door and leaned against it. For a moment I felt sick and frightened—frightened at what I’d seen and frightened of myself.
Presently I came into the room and found them still talking of the bracelet. And then Roger and I started for our walk, leaving Lizzie alone.
He suggested that we go round the reservoir and I agreed, stepping along silently beside him. It was a raw bleak afternoon, no sun, everything gray. Thestreets were sprinkled with sauntering Sunday people who had a detached dark aspect against the toneless monochrome. They looked as if they were moving in front of painted scenery. The park was wintry, sear boughs patterned against the sky, blurs of denuded bushes, expanses of hoary grass. Along the roadway the ruts were growing crumbly with the frost, and little spears and splinters of ice edged the puddles.
The reservoir shone a smooth steely lake, with broken groups of figures moving about it. Some of them walked briskly, others loitered, red and chilled. All kinds of people were making the circuit of that body of confined and conquered water—Jews and Gentiles, simple and gentle, couples of lovers, companies of young men, family parties with the children getting in the way and being shoved to one side, stiff stout women like Betty trying to lose a few pounds. On the west side vast apartment-houses made a rampart, pierced with windows like a line of forts.
We commented on the cold and Roger quickened the pace, sweeping me along the path’s outer edge. Presently he began to talk of Lizzie, leaning down to catch my answers, keen, impatient, straining tohear me and not lose a word. He is a tall man and I am a small woman and I bobbed along at his shoulder trying to keep up with him, trying to sound bright and interested, and feeling myself a meager unlovely body carrying a sick and shriveled heart.
“No, she’ll never sing again,” I said, in answer to a question. “She seems to have made up her mind to that.”
He swung his cane, cutting at the head of a dry weed.
“That’s a good thing.”
“Why is it a good thing?”
“Oh, because,” he dropped a pace behind me to let a straggling, red-nosed family pass and I craned my head back to hear him. “She’s not fitted for that kind of life. It’s not for women like her.”
“Why?”
He was beside me again.
“She’s too—er—too fine, too delicately organized.”
I didn’t answer. Knowing what I did, what was there for me to say?
“The women to succeed in that have got to be aggressive, fight their way like men. She never could do it.”
I again had no response and we fared on, I tryingto keep up, hungry for his next word and fearful of what it might be. It came in a voice that had an artificial note of carelessness.
“What’s become of that man you told me about, that man we saw in the hall one night when you first went up there?”
“I don’t know what’s become of him.”
“You haven’t seen him lately?”
“No, not for some weeks.”
There was another pause. I wasn’t going to help him. It was part of my torment to wait and see how he was going to get the information he wanted, to see Roger, uneasy and jealous, feeling round a subject, not daring to be frank. When he could wait no longer his voice showed a leashed and guarded impatience.
“You led me to believe he was a great friend of hers.”
“Hewas.”
“Was?Is he so no longer?”
“No, they’ve had a quarrel of some sort.”
“Umph.”
Again a silence. We passed a trio of Jewish girls in long coats who looked me over solemnly with large languorous eyes.
“He was a horrible-looking bounder,” he said.
“He was what he looked,” I answered.
“Then how,” he exclaimed, unable to restrain the question, “couldhe have been a friend of hers?”
He was embarrassed and ashamed, and to hide it cut vigorously at the dead weeds with his cane. Through this childish ruse his desire to know was as plain as if he had expressed it in words of one syllable.
“He was her sponsor. She was a sort of speculation of his; he was training her for the operatic stage. I’ve told you all this before.”
“Yes, I know, but—well, it’s a reasonable explanation.”
He had been speaking with his face turned from me, his eyes following the slashings of the cane. Now he lifted his head and looked across to the apartment-houses. The movement, the brightened expression, the tone of his voice, told of a lifted weight. He had heard it all before, but then he hadn’t cared. Now, caring, he wanted to hear it again, to be assured, to have all uncertainty appeased.
“It was a business arrangement,” he said. “Yes, I remember, you told me some time ago.”
This time I didn’t answer because a thought hadsurged up in my mind that had put everything else out—I ought to tell him! He was under Lizzie’s spell and Lizzie was as unknown to him as if she had been an inhabitant of Mars. He was charmed by a creature of his own creating, an ideal built up on her beauty and her weakness. Did he know her as she really was he would have recoiled from her as if she had been one of the sirens from whom Ulysses fled. She was the opposite of everything he imagined her to be, of everything he held sacred in woman. John Masters had been her lover. It was appalling, monstrous. Imusttell him.
And then I thought of her and how she had confessed her secret and I had said I wouldn’t tell.
The impulse to reveal it for his sake and the impulse to keep silent for hers, began to struggle in me. I became a battle-ground of two contending forces. The desire to tell was strongest; it was like a live thing fighting to get out. It filled me, crushed every other thought and impulse, swelled up through my throat and pressed on my lips. I bit them and walked on with fixed eyes. As if from a distance I heard Roger’s voice:
“From what you said he must be an impossible cad. I knew she couldn’t have had him for a friend.Poor girl, having to associate with a man like that because business demanded it. What a rotten existence.”
I had to tell.
“Roger,” I said, hearing my voice sound hoarse.
“Yes.”
I felt suddenly dizzy and halted. Like a vision I saw Lizzie lying on the sofa, whispering to me that Masters had left her. The inside of my mouth was so dry I had difficulty in articulating. I stammered:
“Wait. I can’t walk so fast.”
He was very apologetic.
“Oh, Evie, dear, I beg your pardon. You should have told me before. I am so used to walking alone that I forgot.”
We moved at a slower pace. The view that had receded from my vision came back. My face was damp and the icy air blowing on it was good. The spiritual fight went on, with my heart beating and beating like a terrible warlike drum urging me on. Now was the time for him to know, before it was too late. We were half-way round—I could get it over before we’d made the full circuit. And then I’d be at peace, would have done a hideous thingthat I ought to do. Now—now! I fetched up a breath from the bottom of my lungs. He spoke:
“That’s why she oughtn’t to go on with this singing. It brings a woman into contact with people that she shouldn’t meet.”
Each sentence seemed to point my way clearer. If he’d had any doubts, hadn’t been so completely without suspicion. But to hear him talk this way! I tried to make a beginning with Lizzie’s whispering voice getting in the way. I couldn’t find a phrase, nothing came but blunt brutal words. There was a moment when I thought I was going to cry these out, scream at him, “Roger, she was that man’s mistress!” Then everything blurred and I caught hold of the fence.
I was pulled back to reality by the quick concern of his voice.
“Evie, are you ill?”
I suppose I looked awful. His face told me so; he was evidently scared. I realized I couldn’t go on with it, must wait till a better time. The thought quieted me and my voice was almost natural, though my lips felt loose and shaky.
“I’m tired, I think.”
“You’re as white as death. Why didn’t you tellme? Good heavens, what an idiot I am not to have noticed before.”
Two men and a child stopped. The intent and glassy interest of their eyes helped to pull me together. I let go of the fence and put my hands, trembling as if with an ague, into my muff. Roger gave the trio a savage look, before which they quailed and slunk reluctantly away, watching us over their shoulders.
“Come,” he said commandingly, and pulled my hand through his arm. “We’ll go to the Eighty-sixth Street entrance and get a cab.”
We walked forward, arm in arm, and I gradually revived. I couldn’t come to any decision now. I wasn’t fit. I must think it over by myself. My forces began to come back and the feeling of my insides falling down into my shoes went away. Roger was in a state of deep contrition and concern, bending down to look into my face, while I held close to his arm. People stared at us. I think they took us for lovers. They must have thought the gentleman had singular taste to be in love with such a sorry specimen of a woman.
When we reached the Eighty-sixth Street entrancehe wanted to take me home, but I insisted on going to Mrs. Ashworth’s. I couldn’t bear the thought of my own rooms. Alone there, I would go back to that appalling subject and I couldn’t stand any more of it now. We got into a taxi and sped away through the Sunday quietness of the city, sweeping through Columbus Circle and then down to Fifth Avenue. I leaned against the window watching the long line of vehicles. I was empty of sensation, gutted like a burned-out house, and that purposeful procession caught and carried my attention, exercising on my spent being a hypnotic attraction. Roger, finding me inclined for silence, sat back in his corner and lighted a cigarette. He had accepted my explanations in perturbed good faith. We sped on this way, with the glittering rush that swept by my window, lulling me into a sort of exhausted torpor.
The usual adjusting of myself to Mrs. Ashworth’s environment was not necessary. I harmonized better than I had ever done before. I am sure every red corpuscle in my blood was pale, and if, on my former visits I had instinctively moved softly, now I did so because I was too limp to move any other way. If refinement, as some people think, is merelyan evidence of depleted vitality, I ought to have appeared one of the most refined females of my day and generation.
Betty was there and Harry Ferguson, Harry obviously ill at ease. I know just how he felt—as if he was too big for the chairs, and when he spoke it sounded like a stevedore. I used to feel that my manner of speech oscillated between that of the cowgirl in a western melodrama and the heroine of one of my favorite G. P. R. James’ romances, who, when she went out riding, described herself as “ascending her palfrey.” Betty, I noticed, escaped the general blight. She is too nervelessly unconscious; wouldn’t be bothered trying to correspond with anybody’s environment.
I sat in a Sheraton chair and watched Mrs. Ashworth’s hands as she made tea. The prominent veins interested me. I have heard that they are an indication of blue blood, and though they are not pretty, they suit Mrs. Ashworth as everything about her does. Her hands move deftly and without hurry and she never interrupts conversation with queries about sugar and cream. A maid, who was neither young nor old, pretty nor ugly, an unobtrusive,perfectly articulated piece of household machinery, made noiseless flittings with plates. Mrs. Ashworth does not like men servants. I suppose they are clumsy and by their large bulky shapes and gruff voices, disturb the rhythm of that beautiful, mellow, subdued room.
Presently I was sipping my tea and looking at Harry Ferguson trying to sip his in a perfect way. I knew that he didn’t like tea, would have preferred a Scotch highball, but didn’t dare to ask for it. He spilled some on the saucer, then dropped the spoon and had to grovel for it, coming up red and guilty, looking as if he had been caught in some shameful act. I could hear him telling Betty on the way home that it was nonsense taking him to tea—why the devil hadn’t she dropped him at the club. And Betty, making vague consoling sounds while she studied the appointments of passing motors.
Then suddenly they began to talk of Lizzie Harris and I forgot Mrs. Ashworth’s veins and Harry’s embarrassments. Betty explained her to our hostess, and I sat looking into my cup and listening. It was what might have been called the popularized version of a complicated subject—Lizzie as a sad and chastenedneophyte who had failed in a great undertaking and been shattered. Mrs. Ashworth was softly sympathetic. She turned to me.
“Roger tells me that she is a charming person and very handsome.”
I agreed.
“Pretty tough,” Harry growled. Then abashed by the rudeness of his tone, cleared his throat and stared at Roger Clements the Signer as if he had never noticed him before.
“I was wondering,” said Betty, “if she could teach singing. You know she has nothing.”
I became aware that Betty had not come for nothing to sit on a Sheraton chair and drink tea. As usual she had “a basic idea”. So had Mrs. Ashworth—two entirely dissimilar minds had converged to the same point.
“Roger and I were talking about her the other evening,” said Roger’s sister, “and I suggested that there are a great many women teachers and their standing is good, I hear.”
On the subject of the wage-earning woman Mrs. Ashworth is not well informed. I fancy she has admitted the fact that there must be wage-earning women with reluctance. It would be better for themall to be in homes with worthy husbands. But it has penetrated even to Mrs. Ashworth’s sheltered corner that these adjuncts are not always found.
“We could get her pupils,” said Betty with determination—she felt Mrs. Ashworth’s quality sufficiently to subdue it—“pupils among the right sort of people. And you and I, and some others I know, could give her a proper start.”
They talked on outlining a career for Lizzie as a singing teacher of the idle rich. They would put her on her feet, they would make her more than self-supporting. Their combined social influence extended over that narrow belt which passes up through Manhattan Island like a vein of gold. Lizzie would be placed in a position to tap the vein.
If I had suddenly hurled the truth into that benevolent conspiracy, what a transformation! All the interest now centered round that pitiful figure would dissolve like a morning mist and float away to collect about something more deserving and understandable. If I should represent her case as sufficiently desperate they would give her money, but that much more valuable thing they were giving now—the hand extended in fellowship—would be withdrawn as from the contact of a leper.
Intheircase I felt no obligation to tell. What they were doing would not hurt them and it was necessary for her. I came back to the old starting point—to help her, to get her back to where she ought to be, I must deceive and go on deceiving. Unquestionably something was wrong with my world. If I could only have lived in Pippa’s or fitted Pippa’s philosophy to mine! But could anybody? I wish Robert Browning was in my place, sitting here to-night by the student lamp, half dead trying to decide what is the right thing to do.
Oh, I’m so tired—and I can’t get away from it, I can’t stop thinking of it. Why did they ever meet? Why did I go down-stairs that afternoon and bring him up? Why did a man—cold and indifferent—suddenly catch fire as he had done? Why couldn’t I be left in peace? Why was it he, my man, who had come to bring me back to life and joy? Why? why? why?