CHAPTER V
Parsinova unlocked her door, stepped into the little foyer and after an instant’s pause to take off hat and dustcoat, crossed the hall to her living-room. Once more cretonne hung in the doorway and slips of it covered the furniture. Summer had served as sufficient excuse to convert the place to its former simplicity. The sight of cathedral chairs and gold cushions had for the past few weeks depressed her to the point of mania. More than once she wanted to tear them to bits.
The dim light from the foyer sifted weirdly into the dark, playing here and there like ghost hands lifting the shadows. She felt her way toward the fireplace, dropped to the floor, her head touching the chair arm, and stared at the spot where in the flames she had visualized the scenes he painted. It was blank now, just a vague square full of darkness, but it gave her back his voice, the sense of his strength, the caress of his arms. It sent once more sifting upward the aroma of cloudy pipe smoke through which he had wanted to see her face. Her eyes closed. Almost she sensed him there in the magic of one of those long silences that needed no words. Almost she could feel his touch upon her hair, her longing made it so real.
Tears came hot under her lids, the first she had shed since that night. They streamed shamelessly down her cheeks and onto the sheer clinging dress. All pose—and she had grown used to posing even to herself—slid from her. Her poise slipped with it. The great Parsinova became just a lonely, huddled heap of a girl.
She lay so, whispering his name shamelessly into the darkness when suddenly it seemed that she was being lifted and drawn into the big chair. It was like embarking into some dreamland of her own making. She held her breath, choked with the fear that she might shatter it. The caress upon her hair, arms closing round her, lips seeking hers! It was not until she had the actual sense of a rough coat against her cheek that, galvanized with terror, she started up and backed toward the floor lamp that stood at one side of the fireplace.
The soft light went up. Hubert Randolph was sitting there! It was impossible of course! Slowly she went toward him, reached out a hand, touched his arm.
He laughed. “Oh, I’m real enough!”
She forgot her accent. At that moment she could not have assumed it even though the future, though life itself, depended on it. “But how—how—”
“I’ve been waiting for you since eleven-thirty,” he put in, apparently not noticing the difference. “I concluded I was entitled at least to a ‘good-by’ from the woman I love.”
She gazed at him silently a moment and then because her heart and throat were full, she voiced a triviality. “How did you get in?”
“Your little old woman! I bribed her. I’d had an idea I could go away without seeing you. Well, I couldn’t, that’s all.”
Her nerves were quivering like live things. She moved toward the couch, dropped on it. “I—” she said at last haltingly—“I am not the woman you love.”
He looked across at her.
She went on without meeting his eyes. After the unconscious revelation she had given him during those moments when she thought herself alone, she could no more have stopped the confession that came now than she could have stopped her breath.
“I am not any of the things you think me—not one of them. I am not Russian—not foreign at all. I was born in Vermont of American parents. Up to the time I met Kane, my struggle for existence was in cheap vaudeville houses, not in Moscow. I’ve never had any lovers—”
“Well,” came with a low chuckle, “no man could object to that.”
She looked up. Her eyes met his, amazed. “You don’t understand. I am not Lisa Parsinova—there is no such person. I am Lizzie Parsons and I’ve imposed on you just as I’m imposing on the American public.”
“The American public asks chiefly to be charmed and interested. If you’re doing that for them, they don’t care whether you’re Yankee or Hindustani.”
She continued to stare at him, in bewildered fashion striving to interpret his nonchalance. “You—you can’t possibly understand,” she breathed at last. “Aren’t you surprised?”
“Not in the least. You see, I’ve been Kane’s backer for years. I was with him in the vaudeville house the night he first saw you. As a matter of fact, I was the one who suggested to him that you’d be a winner on Broadway. Of course the foreign stuff was his. Any number of times I’ve watched him work with you from an adjoining room. You don’t know what pride I’ve felt in your success.”
“Then why, all these months, have you let me believe you were being fooled?”
“Well, I hadn’t exactly taken count of the fact that I was going to love you. And when the blow came I realized that if I’d been lucky enough to make you care anything for me, you couldn’t go on acting to me. You’d have to tell me—and I wanted you to, because you couldn’t help it. That night when I had you in my arms, I thought some sort of admission would come. When it didn’t and you ignored all my attempts to see you, I could only conclude I’d lost out.”
“You didn’t guess—”
“Not until to-night.”
She still groped uncertainly, not able to fasten on any one fact. “It was Kane, then, who told you where I lived.”
“No. Your little old woman here.”
“My little old woman?”
“She’s a canny soul. Must have found one of my notes that you brought home from the theater or something like that, because she looked me up one day and offered to sell me some interesting information about you. I paid her _not_ to sell it and threatened her with jail if she went to anybody else. Told her she was guilty of a criminal offense that could send her up for twenty years. I think I made it strong enough to shut her up for the rest of her days.”
“She’s been collecting from me just the same straight along.”
He flung back his head. “I said she was canny. Before I go West I’ll have another talk with her.”
“You—you’re going to-morrow?”
“No, I’m waiting over. You close Saturday night. We’ll leave Sunday.”
With the last words, he leaned forward. She took a quick step toward the wide chair, then stopped abruptly.
“But what am I to do with Parsinova?”
He pulled out his pipe, reflectively examined it.
“Think of the novelty—I’ll have two wives in one.”
Her lips tightened.
“No, you won’t! I’m going to take that woman out on a lake this summer and capsize the boat—drown her! And the body will never be found. Then I’m going to let my hair go back to its own color! Which one of us is it,” she added suddenly, “that you love?”
He laid his pipe on the chair arm.
“The little girl who called to me in the dark. Now come back here, Lizzie Parsons, where you belong!”
“I’ll always be jealous of that Russian devil!” she warned him.
MADAME PEACOCK
_CHARACTER DRAMA_
The battle royal of all time is between character and circumstance. The way we meet the experience that waits for us round the corner is the eternal Comédie Humaine. Success is the hole in the ground—the banana peel—the stumbling block that may trip us up. It is as uncertain as to-morrow.
MADAME PEACOCK