XX
Iwriteto-night in a hushed house—a house that holds the emptiness that follows the withdrawal of a dynamic presence.
Lizzie is gone.
As her ship bears her away to future glory, we, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, sit here recuperating from the labors of getting her off. In its hour of departure the magnet gave forth the full measure of its power and we bent our backs and lent our hands in a last energy of service. No votaries bowed before the shrine of a deity ever celebrated their worship with more selfless acts of devotion than Mrs. Bushey’s lodgers in speeding Lizzie on her way.
What did Mr. Hazard’s unfinished order matter when Lizzie, having forgotten to order the expressman, one had to be sought up and down the reaches of Lexington Avenue? Of what consequence to Miss Bliss were broken sittings, on the proceeds of which she could have lived for a week, when Lizzie’s traveling dress was found to be in rags and had tobe mended by some one who knew how? When the count rendered his tribute in fruit and flowers, did he stop to consider that the money was part of the fund reserved for his passage home, and now he would have to travel second cabin? No one thought of anything but the departing goddess. They were proud and glad to deny themselves that she might go, grandly serene, amid clouds of ascending incense.
As for me, after that night of respite, I became a body again, a body whose mission was the preparing of another for the great adventure. She drew me after her as the fisherman draws the glittering bit of tin that revolves from the end of his line. The simile is not entirely satisfactory because I did not glitter, but I revolved, round and round, as the fisherman’s hand pulled or eased on the line. I sewed, I packed, I unpacked, searching for forgotten necessities. I was down-town, executing overlooked errands, I was up-town, cooking hurried meals in the kitchenette. My voice in the morning called her to breakfast, my good night was the last sound on the stairs as I left her room, grown bare and bleak, losing its character, as one by one the signs of her occupancy vanished. I hadno time to feel, to be glad or sorry. Even the passion to have her go was overridden by the ruling instinct that while she was there I must serve. And though the poet tells us there are those who can do this while standing and waiting, I evidently was not one of them.
As we demonstrated her power by the zeal of our devotion, her arrogant exactions increased in a corresponding ratio. She was never more aloof, more regally indifferent, more imperiously demanding. The call of her destiny had come to her and she heard nothing else.
Her stay with us had been only the bivouac of a night, and we the passers-by she had encountered in the moment of halt. With the goal in sight we lost what small significance we had and assumed the aspect of strangers, by whose fire she had rested, in whose tent she had slept. Already, before she had gone, we had faded into the limbo of the useless and outworn. Henceforward, from our humble corner, we would watch her mounting on others as she had mounted on us—climbing higher and higher with never a backward glance or a wave of her hand to the little group who strained their eyes for a sign of remembrance.
Some day the others would find her out and be angry, cite to their friends proofs of her ingratitude, grow bitter at the memory of their unappreciated efforts, add her to the list of forgetful great ones who took all and rendered nothing back. From a deeper knowledge of her I would never know their disillusion. The thought that she felt no love for any of us had for me no sting. I even went farther, agreed that it was not her place to feel it. Arrived at last at the heart of her mystery, I could keep my memory of her fair and untarnished, untouched by efforts to fit her into a frame where she didn’t belong.
She was not, as they would think, a heartless and cruel fellow of ours, but the creature of another species, thinking in a different language, seeing life from a different angle. What we were trained to accept as right and just, she had no power to recognize. Custom and tradition had formed a groove in which we walked unquestionably onward. She wandered at will in a world expressly created for her, peopled by shades who had no meaning apart from their usefulness. Environment that had molded and put its stamp upon us made no impression upon her invulnerable self-concentration. We held apoint of view in common, responded automatically to established ideas and inherited impulses. She saw no claims but her own and moved upon what she wanted with the directness of an animal. The bogies with which we were frightened into good behavior—public opinion, social position, loss of respect—she snapped her fingers at. Her only law was the law of her own being, her standard, a fierce and defiant determination to be true to herself. Restraints and reticences, subtleties of breeding, delicacies of conduct, imposed on us by the needs of communal life, were not for her, selected and set apart to be that lonely figure in the crowded companionable world—the people’s servant.
That was what I at last knew her to be—an instrument for the joy, the recreation, the enthrallment of that great, sluggish, full-fed Minotaur, the public. For this purpose nature had fashioned her, eliminating every characteristic that might render her unfit, pruning away virtues that would hamper, uprooting instincts that would interfere. As Wordsworth saw the All-Mother saying of a worthy specimen, “I will make a lady of my own,” so, seeing Lizzie, she had said, “I will make an artist of my own,” and had set about doing it with thoroughness.
From the beautiful outer case to “the hollows where a heart should be” she was formed to be the one thing—a cunningly framed and articulated mechanism for our entertainment. To us—whom she so lightly regarded—she was foreordained to carry a message of beauty, call us from our sordid cares, and base ambitions, catch us up from the grayness of the every day to the heights where once more we caught a glimpse of the vision and the dream. That we should work and sacrifice to help her to her place, she, unconscious but impelled by her destiny, felt, and made me feel. And having gathered up our tribute she had left us, not ungratefully, not having taken all and given nothing, but in her own time and in her own way to pay us back a hundredfold.
I thought it all out in the cab coming back from the steamer, and I was content to have it so.
I had gone down to see her off—she wanted me and no one else. We had passed up the dock amid throngs of passengers and presently there were stewards and cabin-boys running for her luggage, and officers discreetly staring. When we bought the ticket I had seen on the list the name of a countess, and I learned that she was a royal lady travelingincognita with a maid. Everybody thought Lizzie was the countess and I the maid. I looked the part, trotting at her heels, carrying a large bandbox covered with pink roses that had been overlooked in the final scramble. She had a triumphal progress, everything made easy, boys bearing the count’s flowers going before her up the gangway, and I following with the bandbox that nobody had offered to take. Before I left I saw the royal lady leaning on the railing, a pale person with the curling fringe and prominent eyes of the typical British princess. Nobody paid any attention to her, but when we went exploring about the decks, looks followed us and whispers buzzed.
As the big ship churned the water and ponderously moved off, I stood on the pier’s edge and waved to her. I was the tiny unit in the crowd—the nameless, humdrum, earth-bound crowd—for whom she was to weave the spell, and create the illusion. Through a glaze of tears I watched her, tall and splendid beside the dowdy princess—my beautiful Lizzie, a real princess, going imperially to claim her crown.
The windows are open and the spring night comes in, soft as a caress. In the basement of the apartment-housesome one is playingAnnie Laurieon the accordion, and in the back yards the servants are chatting in the kitchen doors. From Mr. Hazard’s room, below me, I can hear a low murmur of voices. The others are in there talking it over, all, I know, singing the praises of Lizzie, voicing hopes for her success as deep and sincere as prayers. I can fancy them, reclining on chairs and sofas, worn out by their labors and feeling blankly that something has gone out of their lives. A wild disturbing chord in the day’s melody is hushed, a red thread in the tapestry has been withdrawn.
I feel it, too.
And so the tale is ended. I don’t think I shall ever write any more. In the autumn, when I started this manuscript, I just intended to put down the happenings of a lonely woman’s life, to read over on evenings when looking back was pleasanter than looking forward. Now, without intending to, I have written a story, which is not my fault, as the story happened to intrude itself into the lonely woman’s life, greatly to her surprise, and a good deal to her sorrow. But this is the finish of it. There is no more to tell. The heroine has gone, if to come back not the same heroine. The hero—youknow as much about him as I do. And the author—well, the author is just where she was, a widow of thirty-three, doing light housekeeping in an eighteen-foot apartment. It can’t be much of a story because it hasn’t got anywhere; nobody has died, nobody has married. So to myself—for I am going to put this away in a trunk and never let a soul see it—I make my bow as an author.
Good night, Evelyn Drake. As a sadder and wiser woman I take my leave of you. Good-by.