Chapter I: DIDN’T sleep well that night. The memory of Mr. Masters’ set sullen (2)

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 at _my_ door. 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.”

“I _never_ said 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 at the 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 prosperous bulk 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 deep breath, 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.

XIII

THE weather 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 of _your_ little 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 have been 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, took me 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! _and_ the divorces! AND the 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. _That_ divorce 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, was untouched 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. _You_ don’t know, but it’s in her blood. We can’t keep off, none of us. And _she!_ 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 looking at 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’ll_ go 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 I noticed 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--he _did_ keep 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 my imaginings 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 should _that_ keep 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 to _my_ door 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 stupid reserve, 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. I _know_ it, but--something keeps me awake.

XIV

IT’S two 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 of relief 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 swerved from 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. I pushed 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. The streets 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 to hear 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 trying to 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.”

“He _was_.”

“_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, “_could_ he 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 had surged 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. I _must_ tell 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 thing that 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 tell me? 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 entrance he 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 merely an 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 chastened neophyte 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 them all 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.

In _their_ case 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?

XV

THINGS have 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 for _them_ with 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, I could 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 in _The Master Builder_ when 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 widow of 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 world ourselves. 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 and _I_ declared 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 even _Tristan 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.”