Part 10

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.