XV
Thingshave been in a state of quiescence for the last few days and then, yesterday, there was a new development.
When I say things have been quiescent, I mean on the outside. In the inside I have been as far from quiescent as I ever was in my life. That last year with Harmon wasn’t nearly so bad as this. It was just my own affair then. When your heart is breaking you can sit quiet and listen to it cracking and it doesn’t matter to anybody but yourself. It’s just a chance of fate that you should be a little floating particle full of pain. The world goes on the same and you don’t matter.
But when other people’s destinies are tangled up in yours, when you have to decide what’s best forthemwith your reason and your inclination pulling different ways—that’s having trouble for your shadow in the daytime and your bedfellow at night. If I was an indifferent spectator who could stand off and study the situation with an impartial eye, Icould come to a just decision. It’s trying to lift myself out of it and be fair that’s so agonizing—it’s being afraid that I may tell for my own sake, betray Lizzie to save myself.
There are strong, clear-minded people who could think straight to a conclusion, take the responsibility and act, then eat their dinner and go peacefully to bed. I’m not one of them. I’ve always been the kind who sees both sides and wavers, afraid if they champion one they may be unjust to the other. Last night I was thinking of the girl inThe Master Builderwhen she tells the hero that he hasn’t “a robust conscience.” Then I thought of John Masters and how he broke the fetters of his own forging. They were both right. I can see it and I admit it but I never would have had the courage to do as they did. To hurt and hurt for yourself—no, I couldn’t.—But I must get on to the new development.
Betty came yesterday afternoon and took me for a drive. Under normal circumstances this is one of my greatest treats. To be with Betty is always good, and to watch the glory of New York on parade while Betty explains charitable schemes or gives advice on the best mode of life for a widowof moderate means, has been one of the joys of the winter. Then there were small individual pleasures that I silently savored as we glided along: the springy softness of the cushions, the fine feel of the fur rug, wonderful clothes in show-windows, and wonderful clothes out of show-windows making beautiful ladies more beautiful. And there was an experience that never lost its zest, full of a thrilling significance: when we all stopped, a block of vehicles from curb to curb, and let the foot passengers pass. It assured me we were still a democracy. If we had lived in the days before the French Revolution we’d have gone dashing along and the foot passengers would have had to dodge our proud wheels at the peril of their lives. Now we wait on their convenience. I have seen the whole traffic drawn up while a tramp shuffled across, while we millionaires—I am always a millionaire when I ride with Betty—sat back and were patient. I have always hoped Thomas Jefferson was somewhere where he could look down and see.
Yesterday all joy and interest were gone from it. Odd how our inward vision gives the color to externals; how, when our spirit is darkened, the sun gets dim and the sky less blue. We paint the worldourselves. I remember after my mother died that for a long time all nature looked gray and my close cozy intimacy with it was suddenly gone. But, that’s another story.
Betty lifted me out of a depressed silence by a suggestion; she said it had been germinating in her mind since Sunday. Wouldn’t it be better, instead of starting her as teacher, to send Lizzie Harris to Europe for several years to go on with her studies?
“She oughtn’t to give up all she’s done, and teaching singing when you’ve expected to be a prima donna yourself, isn’t a very exhilarating prospect.”
It was so like Betty! Always thinking of something just a little bit better. Mrs. Ashworth never would have got beyond the teaching and it had taken Roger and Betty to get her that far. I straightened up and felt that the afternoon was brightening.
“It’s too early for her to throw it up,” Betty went on. “She hasn’t given it a fair trial. She gets one setback and an illness and then says it’s over. I don’t believe it is and I want to give her another chance.”
“But”—to keep square with myself I had to bring up difficulties—“she declares she’ll never sing again.”
“Oh, rubbish! We all declare we’ll never do things again. Harry and I had a fight last autumn andIdeclared I’d never speak to him again, and I was speaking—and glad to do it—in two hours.”
“Your husband’s not your profession.”
“No, my dear,” said Betty with a smile, “but my marriage is, and being a successful wife is not so very different from being a successful prima donna. I tell you this is all nonsense about her refusing to go on. She’s cut out for the stage. The opera bores me to death. I’d never go if it wasn’t for my two strings of pearls and the prohibitive price of the box. But I really think, if she was in it, I could stand evenTristan and Isolde.”
I looked out of the window—wonderful how the gay animation of the street had come back. And it was Betty’s idea and Betty was generally right.
“I could suggest it to her,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I intend you to do, and as soon as possible. I hate things dangling on. Make it perfectly plain to her: I’ll undertake the whole matter, give her as long a time as she needs with any teacher she chooses. And don’t you see if she’s taken out of this place where she’s had the failure and been so discouraged, she’ll take a fresh hold?It’ll be a new start in new surroundings, and she’ll feel like a new person.”
The most sensitively self-questioning woman must have admitted the force of the argument. If Betty’s previous efforts to play the god in the machine had been ill-inspired, this time she redeemed herself.
“Very well,” I said cheerfully. “As Mrs. Stregazzi would say, I’ll ‘take it up with her’ this evening.”
Betty took me home and I ran up the stairs. I was like a child hastening to impart joyful tidings. Lizzie was in her kitchen occupied over household affairs. A glass lamp turned too high, stood on a shelf, the delicate skein of smoke rising from its chimney, painting a dusky circle on the ceiling. The gas, also too high, rushed from its burner in a torn flame that leaped and hissed like a live thing caught and in pain. Lizzie, being well enough to attend to her own needs, the place was once more in chaos. I turned down the lamp and the gas, shut off the sink faucet, which was noisily dribbling, and lifting a pie from the one wooden chair, put it on the ice-box and sat down to impart my news.
She listened without interruption, leaning against the wash-tub.
“Well?” I said, as she didn’t speak. My voice was sharp, her silence got on my nerves.
“To go to Europe and study,” she said dreamily, “that’s been the dream of my life.”
“Well, your dream’s come true, Lizzie!” I jumped up ready to take her in my arms and hug her. “You can go as soon as your trunk’s packed.”
She shook her head.
“It’s too late now.”
“Too late!” I fell back from her, unbelieving, aghast—“What do you mean?”
Her face bore an expression of sad renouncement.
“The dream’s over, I’m awake.”
“You don’t mean to say you’re going to refuse.”
She gravely nodded.
“But, Lizzie, think, listen. You don’t realize what a chance this is. Any teacher you may choose, for as long as you like, all worry about money over. I know Mrs. Ferguson, she’s never attempted anything that she hasn’t carried through—”
I launched forth into a eulogy of Betty, and branched from that into a list of the advantages accruing to the object of her bounty, holding them up, viewing them from all sides like choice articles Iwas offering for sale. I was eloquent, I was persuasive, I introduced irrefutable arguments. Any other woman standing with reluctant feet on the verge of such an enterprise, would have ceased to be reluctant and leaped toward the future I pictured.
But Lizzie was immovable. I saw my words flying off her as if they were bird-shot striking on an armored cruiser. She had only one reason for refusing but that was beyond the power of words to shake—she had given up her career as a singer; nothing would ever make her return to it.
I sank down on the wooden chair, my head on my breast, despair claiming me. She went about the kitchen in a vague incompetent way picking things up and putting them down, then suddenly wanting them and forgetting where they were. As she trailed about she drove home her refusal with a series of disconnected sentences, bubbles of thought rising to occasional speech. I didn’t answer her, sitting crumpled on the chair—until she had refused, I hadn’t realized how much I had hoped.
Presently she swept into the back room, carrying a pile of plates with the air of an empress bearing the royal insignia. I heard her setting them onthe dining-table and then a rattle of silver. She came back and hunted about, feeling on shelves and opening cupboard doors, then said, in the deep tones made for the great tragic rôles:
“Evie, there was a lemon pie somewhere around here. You’re not sitting on it by any chance?”
Filled with misery I indicated the pie on the top of the ice-box. In the pursuit of her domestic duties she had thrown a dish-cloth over it. She removed the cloth, and picking up the pie, looked it over solicitously.
“You’re going to sup with me to-night and eat this.”
The bitter appropriativeness of Lizzie feeding me on lemon pie pierced through my anguish—I laughed. I laughed with a loud strident note, leaning my head back against the wall and looking at the smoke mark on the ceiling. Lizzie, pie in hand, stood looking at me in majestic surprise.
“What are you laughing at?”
“My thoughts. They’re very funny—you and I, sitting up here alone and carousing on lemon pie.”
“We’re not going to be alone. Mr. Clements is coming. I asked him to supper and when he looked uncertain tempted him by saying you’d be here.”
Roger and I eating lemon pie, dispensed by Lizzie—now the gods were laughing, too.
“I can’t come,” I said sulkily.
She looked utterly dismayed, as if she had heard a piece of news too direful to believe. If it had been any one but Lizzie Harris I should have said she was going to cry.
“Not come! Why not?”
“Mightn’t I have an engagement?”
“You haven’t. I asked you if you had this morning.”
“I have a headache.”
She put the pie on the wash-tub with a distracted gesture, and began beseechingly, her head tilted toward her shoulder, eyes and mouth pleading:
“Ah, now, Evie,don’thave a headache. The party was to be a surprise for you. I’ve been getting it together all afternoon. And I ordered the pie especially.Pleasefeel well. Mr. Clements has been so good to me and I wanted to return his kindness and I knew he wouldn’t enjoy it half so much if you weren’t here.”
I know every word was genuine. I believe she is still ignorant of Roger’s feeling for her. One of the things I have often noticed about her is thatshe seems unconscious of, or indifferent to, her attraction for men. I have never heard her speak of it or seen her show any pleasure in it. Small coquettes and flirts, the women who make a study of charming, can not hide their pride of conquest, love to recount the havoc they have wrought. There is none of that in Lizzie. Sometimes I have thought she is so used to admiration that she accepts it as a part of her life, like the sunshine or the rain. Roger, as “a kind man,” is just lumped in with the count and the doctor and Mr. Hamilton. And with her blindness to other people’s claims she makes no inquiry, takes no notice of the humbler romances of the rest of us. She has never said a word to me about Roger asmyfriend. If she has ever given it a thought she has ticketed him as just “a kind man” to me also.
I lay back in the wooden chair and stared at her with a haggard glance.
“Do you like Mr. Clements, Lizzie,” I said solemnly.
She nodded, then reached for the pie and began touching its surface with the tip of a finger.
“Immensely. I don’t see how any one could help it. He’s so kind.”
Her attention was concentrated on what she held. She scrutinized it as if it were a treasure in which she searched for a possible flaw.
“He’s more than kind,” I answered. Even in my misery I felt a tinge of irritation that she should accept Roger’s homage as if he was of no more value than the count or the doctor.
“Of course he is,” she replied. “He’s so intellectual. And then he has such lovely manners. I think he’s more of a gentleman than any man I’ve ever known.”
I thought of Masters. Was she in her mind comparing them? If she was there was no sign of it in her face. She murmured a commendatory phrase of the pie, and holding it off on the palm of an outspread hand, carried it into the back room.
I sat on the wooden chair staring after her. Did she care for Roger? Was she going to transfer her incomprehensible affections to him? It was a hideous thought. She came back and swept about, collecting the feast, and my dazed eyes followed her. How could she do such a thing unless she was so lacking in a central core of character that she was nothing but the shell of a woman?
It was a queer scrappy meal, most of it sent roundfrom the delicatessen store on Lexington Avenue. Such as it was the hostess offered it with as smiling an aplomb as if Delmonico’s head chef had produced it in an inspired moment. No qualm that her chief guest might not enjoy ham and beer disturbed her gracious serenity. Petronius Arbiter treating his emperor to a gastronomic orgy, could not have recommended the nightingale’s tongues more confidently than Lizzie did the canned asparagus, bought at a discount.
That Roger enjoyed it was evident. I don’t suppose he had ever been at a supper where the ladies waited and sometimes, when the plates ran short, washed them between courses. Lizzie’s inexpertness caused continuous breaks in the progress of the feast—important items overlooked, consultations as to the proper order of the viands, an unexpected shortage of small silver. Before we had got to the canned asparagus, I found myself assuming the management. Roger rising and pursuing an aimless search for the beer opener, and Lizzie making rapid futile gropings for it in the backs of drawers and the bottoms of bowls, was distracting to my orderly sense. They couldn’t find it anywhere. They had too much to say, got in each other’s way, forgot to huntand stood laughing, while I took up the search and ran it to earth on a nail in the kitchen.
After that the party shifted its base entirely and became mine. They were glad to relinquish it to me, took their seats with the air of those who know an uncongenial task has found the proper hands. I directed it, grimly attentive, and it was not the least of my pain that I saw they thought I was pleased to do so. If I had ever done any one a deadly wrong he would have been avenged had he seen me—making things pleasant for Roger and Lizzie, ministering to their creature comfort, too engrossed in my labors to join in. I was the chaperon, I was the maiden aunt, I was Mrs. Grundy.
When we reached the last course I found that the coffee machine had not been emptied of the morning’s dregs and took it into the kitchen, while Lizzie put the pie on the table. From my place at the sink I could see it, a foamy surface of beaten-egg, glistening against the white expanse of cloth. Lizzie was proud of her pie and refused my offer to cut it. She held the knife poised for a deliberating moment, then sliced carefully, while Roger watched from across the table and I from beside the sink. She cut a piece for me and put it at my place, thenone for Roger. Leaning from her seat she handed him the plate and he took it, the circle of porcelain joining their hands. Over it he looked at her with shining passion-lit eyes.
To me, watching from that squalid kitchen, their outstretched arms were symbolic of their attitude one to the other, the piece of pie, a love potion she was offering. It was “Isolde” holding out the cup to “Tristan”. Probably any one reading this will laugh. Believe me, in that moment, I tasted the fulness of despair—that darkening of the dear bright world, that concentrating of all the pain one can feel into one consummate pang.