Chapter I: DIDN’T sleep well that night. The memory of Mr. Masters’ set sullen (3)

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 I was 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 on the 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’t_ have 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. _Please_ feel 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 that she 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 as _my_ friend. 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 round from 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 hunt and 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, then one 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.

XVI