Part 13

“You don’t?”--the backbone of a country in which all men are free and equal does not bend readily--“with that disparity and he just beginning his career?”

“No, I don’t.” She was sitting cross-legged, holding an ankle in each hand and rocking gently. “I’ll tell you just what I think--I believe they were lonely. Lots of people get married because they’re lonely.”

“She had a mother and two children.”

“She took care of them, they weren’t companions. Berwick’s a companion, likes what she does and works at the same thing. It’s great to have a person like that around.” She nodded, with shrewd eyes shifting from one face to the other. “I’ve seen a lot and I’ve noticed. All sorts of people get married, and it comes out right. It’s not just the young ones and suitable ones that pull it off. It’ll be fine for Mrs. Stregazzi to have him to go round with, and it’ll be fine for him to have her to think about and talk things over with.”

“They can help each other along in their work,” I admitted.

“They can be fond of each other,” said Miss Bliss.

She ceased rocking and looked out of the window, the shrewd eyes growing dreamy. Our appearance of depression returned, a shade darker than before. Mrs. Stregazzi and Berwick might have shown a dashing disregard for public opinion, but there was no reason for us to look as if we had heard of their mutual destruction in a railway accident. If we had been waiting for their mutilated remains we couldn’t have appeared more melancholy. Miss Bliss heaved a sigh and observed:

“It’s a great thing to have some one fond of you.”

Lizzie and I didn’t answer, but we gave ear as if the Delphic oracle had spoken and we were trying to extract balm from its words.

“And it’s a great thing to be fond of some one yourself.”

Our silence gave assent, but the oracle’s wisdom did not seem to cheer us. We sat sunk in our chairs, eying her morosely. Her imagination roused, she ranged over the advantages of the married state:

“Just think how lovely it would be to know there was some one who cared whether you were sick or well, or happy or blue. Wouldn’t it be great to have some one come home in the evening who was going to be awfully glad to see you and who you were just crazy to have come? And when work was slack and you were losing your sleep about money, wouldn’t it be grand to know there was a feller who could chip in and pay the bills? Oh, gee--” she dropped her eyelids with the ecstatic expression of one who glimpses ineffable radiances. “Well, I guess yes.”

An answering “yes” came faintly from me. The ecstatic expression flashed away, and she turned, all brusk negation:

“Oh, Mrs. Drake, _you_ don’t know what it is. _You’re_ well fixed with money of your own. But girls like us”--she pointed to Lizzie, then brought her finger back to her own knee upon which she tapped in bitter emphasis--“_we’ve_ got only ourselves. We’ve _got_ to make good or go under. And it’s fight, fight, fight. I’ve had to do something I hated since I was sixteen and now she”--with a nod at Lizzie, “has got to do something she hates.”

Lizzie, sunk in the chair, eyed her like a brooding sphinx. She met the gaze with the boldness of the meek roused to passion:

“You do hate it, Miss Harris. You’ve done as good as say so. And it’s new now, you’re only beginning. Wait till you come home every evening, disgusted with it all and everything and everybody; when it’s bad weather and you feel sick and nobody cares. Wait till you have to stand anything they hand out to you, and not say a word back or you’ll lose your job. I know. I’ve tried it and it’s tough. It’s too much. Any man that ’ud come along and offer to take you out of it would look all right to you.” Her boldness began to weaken before that formidable gaze. She became hurriedly apologetic. “I’m not saying there _is_ any man. I’m only supposing. And I don’t mean now. I mean after you’ve been up against it for years and years and the grind’s crushed the heart out of you.”

There was no answer, and the oracle, now openly scared at her temerity, scrambled to her feet. In the momentary silence I heard the distant bang of the street door. She heard it too and forgot her fear, wheeling to the mirror for a quick touching up of her hair ribbon and frill. When she turned back her color had risen to match her reddened lips and her manner showed a flurried haste.

“I got to go--several things to attend to--my supper and some sewing to finish.” She didn’t bother to be careful of excuses. The man who hoped to acquire the legal right to pay her bills was waiting below. She went, trailing the Navajo blanket from a hanging hand.

Lizzie drew a deep breath and said:

“She’s right.”

“About what?”

“About me.”

“You mean the teaching?”

“I do. It’s a dog’s work.”

She rose and faced me, sullen as a thunder-cloud.

“But you’ve hardly tried it.”

“I’ve tried it enough. There are plenty of women who can scratch along that way and be thankful to Providence and pleasant to the pupils. Let them do it. It’s their work, not mine.”

She turned from me and went to the window, but not this time to drum on the pane. Leaning against the frame she looked out on the tin roof. The angry contempt of her face suggested that the millionaires Betty was collecting were gathered there, unable to escape, and forced to hear how low they stood in the opinion of their hireling.

“I am an artist. Those people,” she made a grandiose gesture to the tin roof, “don’t know what an artist is. They think they’re condescending, doing a kindness. _I’m_ the one that’s condescending--I do them not a kindness but an honor, when I enter their houses and listen to the squawking of their barbarous children.”

“You can’t expect them to think that.”

“I don’t, they haven’t got sense enough. That woman, the mother, came in while I was there. I’ve no doubt she thought she was being very agreeable. She asked me questions about my method.” She gave me a sidelong cast of her eye full of derision. “I sat and listened, and when she was done I said I didn’t discuss my method with people who knew nothing.”

“Oh, Lizzie,” I groaned. “You didn’t say that?”

“Certainly I did. Only that. I was polite and patient. If I hadn’t felt so disgusted and out of spirits I’d have spoken to her freely and fully. But it wasn’t worth while.”

“But they won’t stand that sort of thing. They won’t have you again.”

“I don’t intend to go again. I couldn’t endure it for five minutes. I’d rather sweep a crossing on Lexington Avenue.”

“There aren’t any crossings on Lexington Avenue, and if there were, you don’t know how to sweep. What will you say to Mrs. Ferguson and Mrs. Ashworth?”

She shrugged with an almost insolent indifference.

“I’ll say I don’t like it. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“Lizzie, I beg of you to be reasonable. They won’t go on helping you if you disappoint them like this.”

“Then they can stop helping me--I’m not so immensely charmed and interested in them. They try and force me into things I don’t want to do. They take it out of my hands and then come smiling at me and say it’s all arranged. So it is--to their liking but not to mine.”

“It’s your profession, the only thing you know. What else could they do?”

“Let me alone.”

It was like beating yourself on a brick wall. I felt frantic.

“But _what’s_ going to become of you? You’ve got no means of livelihood.”

She shrugged again.

“I don’t know. But one thing I do know and that is that I won’t do slave’s work for you, or Mrs. Ferguson, or any one else in the world.”

I didn’t know what to say. I might go on talking all night and not make a dent on her. Demosthenes would have turned away baffled before her impossible unreasonableness.

It was getting dark and I could see her as a tall black silhouette against the blue dusk of the window. There was only one suggestion left.

“Are you going to take Dolly Bliss’s advice and marry?” My voice sounded unnatural, like somebody else’s.

“Marry?” she echoed absently. “I suppose I _could_ do that.”

“Is it that you can’t make up your mind, Lizzie?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured again, this time as if she wasn’t thinking of what she said.

I rose with shaking knees. It was the critical moment of her fate and mine.

“Don’t you want to?” I almost whispered, drawing near her.

Her answer made me stop short. It came with a tremor of fierce inner feeling, revolt, rage and desperation, seething into expression:

“Oh God, how I hate it all!”

“Hate what--marriage?”

“No, everything that’s around me. Those women, this damnable work--no money--no hope! I’m crazy with the misery of it. It’s like being bound down and smothered. I want to get out. I want to be free. I want to do what I like and be myself. You’re trying to make me into some one else. You’re crushing me and killing me. I’d rather be dead in my grave than go on this way.”

She burst into frantic tears, savage, racking, snatching the curtain about her and sobbing and strangling behind it. The room was nearly dark and I could see the long piece of drapery swaying as she clutched it to her. I tried to pluck it away, and through its folds, felt her body shaken and bent like a tree in a tempest. I had never heard such weeping, moans and wails, with words coming in inarticulate bursts. I was frightened, caught her hand and drew her out of the curtain which hung askew from torn fastenings. She pushed me away and threw herself on the sofa, where, under the vast circumference of her hat, she lay prone, abandoned to the storm.

I stood helplessly regarding her, then as broken sentences came from under her hat, took out the pins and held it before me like a shield, while she gasped in choked reiteration that we were killing her, that she hated us all, that she’d rather die than give another lesson. If her paroxysm hadn’t been so devastating I would have lost my temper at the outrageous injustice of such sentences as I could catch. I tried to say something of this in a tempered form, but she shut me off with an extended hand, beating it at me, calling out strangled execrations at Betty and Mrs. Ashworth and the mother of her pupil. If any one who did not know the situation had heard her, they would have thought those worthy and disinterested women had been plotting her ruin.

There was nothing for me to do but wait till her passion spent itself, which it began to do in sighs and quivering breaths that shook her from head to foot. When I saw it was moderating I told her I would get her some wine and went to the kitchenette, leaving her with drenched face and tangled hair, a piteous spectacle. In a few moments I was back with the wine-glass. The room was empty--she had gone leaving the black hat.

I picked it up and sat down on the sofa. We certainly had got to the climax.

I didn’t count--with my hundred and sixty-five dollars a month. I could retire into any corner, and live forgotten and love forlorn like Mariana. But Lizzie--? She couldn’t sing, she wouldn’t teach, nobody could help her. Marriage was the only way out. As I sat on the sofa, absently staring at the hat, I had a memory of a corral I had seen at a railway station in a trip I once took to the West. It was a pen for the cattle that came off the range and had to be driven into the cars. The entrance was wide, but the fenced enclosure narrowed and narrowed until there was only one way of exit left, up a gangway to the car. The comparison wasn’t elegant but it struck me as fitting--Lizzie was on the gangway with the entrance to the car the only way to go.

“I wish to heaven she’d hurry and get into it,” I groaned.

XVIII

I HAVEN’T seen her for two days. Yesterday morning I went up-stairs to leave the hat, found her door open and her rooms empty. Emma says she has been out most of the time. I waited in all afternoon, expecting to hear Betty on the telephone in a state of wrath about the pupil. Also I had my ear trained for the postman’s light ring. At any moment I might get a letter now from Roger, announcing his engagement. Why should not Lizzie’s absences abroad be spent in walks with him?

As usual the anticipated didn’t happen. Betty did telephone but in amiable ignorance of her protégée’s revolt. She had run to earth a second pupil, who would be ready the following morning at eleven. Would I please tell Lizzie and did I know how the first lesson had gone? I prevaricated--I can do that at the telephone when Betty’s stern gaze is not there to disconcert me. I was really afraid to tell her, and besides, I, too, was getting rebellious. Let Lizzie manage her own affairs and fight her own fights. I said cheerfully she would tell Betty about it, and hung up the receiver wondering what would happen. Then I wrote a note to Lizzie about the new pupil, went up-stairs, knocked, and getting no response, pushed it under the door.

For the rest of the day I sat waiting like a prisoner in the death cell.

This morning, when I leaned out of the back window and looked down on the damp soil and bare shrubs of the yard, I felt the first soft air of spring. The sunlight slanted on the brick walls, the wet spots on the walk around the sun-dial shrunk as I watched them. On the top of a fence a scarred and seasoned old cat, at which Mr. Hamilton was wont to throw beer bottles, stretched lazily, blinking at a warm inviting world. I leaned farther out--tiny blunt points of green were pushing through the mold along the walk. Mrs. Phillips, sure in her ownership of the yard, had planted crocuses. Winter wasn’t lingering in the lap of spring--he had jumped off it at a bound.

I turned from the window and went into the front room, wondering vaguely why winter should always be a male and spring a female. The tin roof was dry, the hot bright sun had licked up the sparrow’s bath. Across the street a line of women from the tenements were advancing on the park, pushing baby carriages--buxom broad-hipped mothers with no hats and wonderful coiffures of false hair. It was a glorious morning, the air like a thin clear wine. I put on my things and went out.

The street showed sunny and clear, fair bright avenues inviting the wayfarer to wanderings. Children sped by in groups and scattering throngs. Smart slim ladies strolled with dogs straining at leashes. Friends met and stood in talkative knots, motors flashed by attended by the fluttering of loosened veils. On the fringe of benches along the park wall the idle sunned themselves, lax and lazy. Down-town, where the women shop, men would be selling arbutus at the street corners. Soon naughty boys with freckled noses would trail in hopeful groups along the curb, holding up stolen lilacs to ladies in upper windows--yes, spring had come.

I bought a bunch of daffodils at the florist’s and went into the park. The first hint of green was faint on the lawns, and points of emerald were breaking out along the willow boughs. Through the crystal air the sounds of children at play came musically--little yaps and squeals and sudden sweet runs of laughter. The glass walls of the casino were a-dazzle, and revolving wheels caught the sun and broke it on their flying spokes.

I was near the lake when I saw Lizzie. She was walking up a side path that crossed mine, her head down, her step quick and decided. She didn’t see me and I stood and waited. Then her eye, deep and absorbed, shifted, caught me, and she came to an abrupt halt. For the first startled moment there was an indecision about her poised body and annoyed face that suggested flight. If I did not share her dismay, I did her surprise. This was the hour set for the second lesson. Of course she might have told Betty that she would give no more, also she might have been hastening to the tryst with the new pupil. You never could tell. In answer to my smiling hail she approached, not smiling but looking darkly intent and purposeful.

“Which way are you going?” she said, by way of greeting.

I have been called a tactful person, and acquaintance with Lizzie has developed what was an untrained instinct into a ripened art:

“Nowhere in particular. I’m just strolling about in the sun.”

Obviously relieved, she said:

“I’m going over there--” pointing to the apartment-houses across the park. “I have business on the west side.”

The new pupil lived on the east side. So she really had given it up.

“You’ve told Mrs. Ferguson that you won’t give that lesson--the one she telephoned about?”

A sudden blankness fell on her face.

“Didn’t you get the letter I put under your door?” I cried in alarm. I couldn’t bear just now, with everything failing me, to have Betty angry.

She nodded, looking down and scraping on the ground with her foot. Then slowly raised her eyes, and glimpsing at me under her lashes, broke into a broad smile.

“I forgot all about it.”

“Oh, Lizzie! How could you? If you’ve made up your mind to end it the least you could do was to let her know. That’s really _too_ bad.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.” Her hasty contrition was far from convincing. “Perfectly awful. I ought to be punished in some painful way. Look here, Evie, dearest, I’m in a hurry. Why can’t you just pop into a taxi and go down and explain it to her?”

“I’ll tell you why I can’t, simply and clearly--because I won’t.”

“Goodness, how provoking of you.” She didn’t seem at all provoked. Her only concern was to get away from me and go to the mysterious business on the west side. She bent sidewise to catch her skirt and moved away. “Then I will, this evening, to-morrow morning--”

I caught her by the arm.

“Lizzie, listen. Mrs. Ferguson is my best friend. I made her do this and I can’t have you treating her so rudely. I thought, of course, you’d told her.”

She laid her hand on my detaining fingers, and as she spoke in her most coaxing manner smoothed them caressingly, detaching them from their hold.

“Dear girl, I know all that. Every word you say is true. And I’ll fix it, I’ll straighten it all out. There won’t be the slightest trouble.”

“Will you telephone those people?” I implored.

My hand was dislodged. She drew away.

“Indeed I will, the first moment I get.” She paused, arrested by a thought. “What’s their name? I’ve forgotten.” Then backing off: “_You_ telephone them. You see I can’t now and I don’t know when I’ll be near a booth. Say I’m sick, or have left town, or anything you like. Just any excuse until I can attend to it. Good-by. I’ll probably come in and see you this afternoon.”

She turned and made off as quickly as she could, a tall vigorous figure, moving with a free swinging step. I stood and watched her hastening down the path between the trunks of the bare trees. There was not a trace upon her of the tempest of two nights before. It might never have been. Her whole bearing suggested coursing blood and high vitality. She was very like the irresponsible and endearing creature I had known when I first went to Mrs. Bushey’s.

I gave up my walk and went home to send the telephone. As I hurried along I wondered where she could be going and why she seemed so light in spirit. I was in that feverish state of foreboding when the simplest events assume a sinister aspect. The thought crossed my mind that she might be going to elope with Roger. It would be like her to elope, and though it would be very unlike him (about the last thing in the world one could conceive him doing), he might have become clay in the hands of that self-willed and beguiling potter.

“Well,” I thought, “so much the better. It’ll be over.” And I decided the best thing for me to do would be to go back to Europe and join the spinsters and widows in the pensions.

I sent the telephone, trying to soothe an angry female voice that complained of a morning “utterly ruined.” I sent another one to Betty, who was also discomposed, having heard from the mother of “the barbarous child.” Betty wouldn’t believe her, had evidently championed the teacher with heat. Betty is a stalwart adherent, a partisan, and I foresaw battles in high places.

The afternoon drew to a golden mellow close and I lay on the sofa waiting for Lizzie. I hadn’t relinquished the idea of the elopement but it did not seem so probable as it had in the morning. Anyway, if she hadn’t eloped--if she did come in to see me--I had made up my mind I would ask her pointblank what she intended to do about Roger. It was one word for Lizzie and two for myself. I really thought if things went on the way they were, I should go mad. Not that it would matter if I went mad, for nobody depends on me, nor am I necessary to the progress or welfare of the state. But I don’t want to be an expense to my friends. And I don’t know whether one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month is enough for maintenance in an exclusive lunatic asylum and I know they would never send me to any but the best.

When a knock came I started and called a husky “Come in.” The door opened--there had been no elopement. Roger stood on the threshold, smiling and calm, which I knew he wouldn’t have been if he was a bridegroom. Marriage would always be a portentous event with a conscientious Clements.

Whatever I might be with Lizzie I couldn’t be pointblank with Roger, though I had known him for fifteen years and her for six months. I explained my trepidation by a headache and settled back on the sofa. He was properly grieved and wanted me to follow Mrs. Ashworth to the south. I saw myself in a white dress on a hotel piazza being charming to men in flannels and Panama hats, and the mere thought of it made me querulous. He persisted with an amiable urgence. If my opinion of him hadn’t been crystallized into an unchangeable form, I should have thought him maddeningly stupid. I began to wonder, if the present state of affairs lasted much longer, if I wouldn’t end by hating him. I was thinking this when Lizzie came in.

I had never seen her, not even in the gladdest days before her illness, look as she did. The old Lizzie was back, but enriched and glorified. She entered with a breathless inrush, shutting the door with a blind blow, her glance leaping at me and drawing me up from the cushions like the clutch of a powerful hand. It seemed as if some deadening blight had been lifted from her and she had burst into life, enhanced and intensified by the long period of hibernation. Her lips were parted in a slight, almost rigid smile, her eyes, widely opened, had lost their listless softness and shone with a deep brilliance.

Roger gave a suppressed exclamation and rose to his feet. I think she would have astonished any man, that Saint Anthony would have paused to look, not tempted so much as held in a staring stillness of admiration. She was less the alluring woman than the burning exultant spirit, cased in a woman’s body and shining through it like a light through a transparent shell.

“Lizzie!” I exclaimed on a rising note of question. I had a sense of momentous things, of a climax suddenly come upon us all.

“I’ve been to Vignorol,” she said, and came to a halt in front of me, her gaze unwavering, her breast rising to hurried breaths.

“How do you do, Miss Harris,” said Roger, coming smilingly forward. He had the air of the favored friend who shows a playful pique at being overlooked.

The conventional words, uttered in an urbane tone, fell between us like an ax on a stretched thread. It can be said for him that he knew Lizzie too little to realize what her manner portended. He evidently saw nothing except that she was joyously exhilarated and looked unusually handsome.

She gave him a glance, bruskly quelling and containing no recognition of him. It was her famous piece-of-furniture glance, to which I had been so often treated. It was the first time Roger had ever experienced its terrors and it staggered him. In bewilderment he looked at me for an explanation. But she was not going to let any outside influence come between us. I was important just then--a thing of value appropriated to her uses.