Part 14

“I’ve been two days fighting it out, trying to make up my mind to do it. And this morning, when you met me, I was going there.”

“Well?” I was aware of that demanding look of Roger’s, which, getting nothing from me, turned to her. That was useless, but how was he to know?

“I sang for him,” she said, the brilliant eyes holding mine as if to grasp and focus upon herself every sense I had.

“Lizzie!”

The premonition of momentous things grew stronger. Underneath it, in lower layers of consciousness, submerged habits of politeness made themselves felt. I ought to get Roger into the conversation.

“I sang better than I ever did before. And Vignorol, who used to scold and be so discouraged, told me I’d got it!”

“Lizzie!”

For a moment we stared at each other, speechless, she giving the useful pair of ears time to carry to the brain, the great news.

Then the subconscious promptings grew too strong to be denied and I said:

“Mr. Clements will be as glad as we are to know that.”

Thus encouraged, Roger emerged from his astonishment. He was not as debonair as at the beginning, also he evidently wasn’t sure just what it was all about, but he seized upon the most prominent fact, and said, without enthusiasm, rather with apprehension:

“This doesn’t mean, Miss Harris, that you’re thinking of returning to your old profession?”

Her look at him was flaming, as silencing as a blow. I don’t know why she didn’t tell him to hold his tongue, except that she was too preoccupied to waste a word. He flinched before it, drew himself up and backed away, dazed, as he might have been if she really had struck him.

Having brushed him aside she went on to me. The main fact imparted, her exultation burst forth in a crowding rush of words:

“It wasn’t my voice--but that’s better, he says it’s the long rest--it was the other thing--the temperament, the soul. It’s got into me. I knew it myself as soon as I began to sing. I felt as if something that bound me was gone--ropes and chains broken and thrown away. It was so much easier. Before I was always making efforts, listening to what they told me, trying to work it out with my head. And to-day! Oh, Evie, I knew it, I felt it--something outside myself that poured into me and carried me along. I could just let myself go and be wonderful--wonderful--wonderful!”

She threw out her arms as if to illustrate the extent of her wonderfulness, wide as she could stretch, then brought her hands together on her bosom, and, with half-shut eyes, stood rapt in ravished memory.

We gazed mutely at her as if she were some remarkable spectacle upon which we had unexpectedly chanced.

“I sang and sang,” she said softly, “and each time it was better. Vignorol wouldn’t let me go.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He kissed me,” she murmured dreamily.

Roger in his corner moved and then was still.

“But what did he suggest about you? What did he want you to do?”

My mouth was dry. Sitting on the edge of the sofa I clutched the sides of it as if it was a frail bark and I was floating in it over perilous seas.

“Go back to where I belong,” she said, and then came out of her ecstasy and began to pace up and down, flinging sentences at me.

“Try it again and do it this time. He says I can, and I know I can. Oh, Evie, to get away from all this--those hateful pupils, those hideous lessons--those women! To go back to my work, be among my own people.” She brushed by Roger, her glance, imbued with its inward vision, passing over him as if he was invisible. “It’s like coming out of prison. It’s like coming to life again after you were dead.”

She had expressed it exactly. She _had_ been dead. The mild and wistful woman of the last two months was a wraith. _This_ was Lizzie Harris born again, renewed and revitalized, now almost terrible in her naked and ruthless egotism.

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought yet. Vignorol wants me to study with him for nothing, pay it back when I make good. But that doesn’t matter now. I can’t think of anything but that I’m home, in my place, and that I can do it. They were all disappointed in me, said I’d never get there. I can. I will. Wait!--Watch me. You’ll see me on top yet, and it won’t be so far off, either. I’ll show you all it’s in me. I’ll wake up every clod in those boxes, I’ll make their dull fat faces shine, I’ll hear them clap and stamp and shout, ‘Brava, Bonaventura!’”

She cried out the two last words, staring before her with flashing eyes that looked from the heights of achievement upon an applauding multitude. In the moment of silence I had a queer clairvoyant feeling that it was true, that it would happen, and I saw her as the queen of song with her foot upon the public’s neck. Then the seeing passion left her face and her lip curled in superb disdain.

“And you wanted to make a _singing teacher_ out of me!”

She swept us both with a contemptuous glance, as if we were the chief offenders in a conspiracy for her undoing. I was used to it, but Roger, the galled jade whose withers were yet unwrung, winced under her scorn.

“But Miss Harris,” he protested, “we only--”

“Oh, I’m not talking to you,” she said brutally. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“Certainly, if you say so,” he replied.

There was a moment’s pause. I did not like to look at him. You can bear being insulted if no one else sees it, but one old friend mustn’t witness another’s humiliation, especially when that other is unable by temperament and training to hit back.

Lizzie, having crushed him like an annoying and persistent fly, wheeled toward the door.

“I must go. I can’t stay any longer.” Then in answer to a question from me, “Oh, I don’t know where--out to breathe. I can’t stay still. I want to walk and feel I’m free again, that I’m not cramped up in a dark hole with no sunshine. I want to feel that I’m myself and say it over and over.”

She went out, seeming to draw after her all the stir and color that she had brought in. It was as if a comet with a bright and glittering tail had crowded itself into the room, and then, after trying to squeeze into the contracted area, swishing and lashing about and flattening us against the walls, had burst forth to continue on its flaming way.

I fell back on the sofa feeling that every nerve in me had snapped and I was filled with torn and quivering ends. Stupidly, with open mouth, I looked at Roger, and he, also stupidly but with his mouth shut, looked at me. I don’t know how long we looked. It probably was a few seconds but it seemed an age--one of those artificially elongated moments when, as some sage says, the measure of time becomes spiritual, not mechanical. I saw Roger afar as if I was eying him through the big end of an opera glass--a tiny familiar figure at the end of a great vista. The space between us was filled with a whirling vortex of thoughts, formless and immensely exciting. They surged and churned about trying to find a definite expression, trying to force their way to my brain and tell me thrilling and important news. Then the familiar figure advanced, pressed them out of the way, and taking a chair by the sofa sat down and demanded explanations.

I couldn’t give them. I couldn’t explain Lizzie to him any more than I could to Betty or Mrs. Ashworth. I remembered him, before he had met her, telling me in the restaurant that I was seeing her through my own personality, and now _he_ was doing it, and he’d never get anywhere that way. I wanted desperately to make him understand. There was something so pitiful in his dismay, his reiterated “But why should she be offended with me. What have _I_ done?” And then hanging on my words as if I was some kind of a magician who could wave a wand and make it all clear. Nothing would have pleased me more than to be able to advance some “first cause” from which he could have worked up to a logical conclusion. But how could I? The lost traveler in the Australian bush was faced by a task, simple and easy, compared to Roger Clements’ trying to grasp the intricacies of Lizzie Harris’ temperament.

I was sorry for him. I was sorry (the way you’re sorry for some one inadequately equipped to meet an unexpected crisis) to see how helpless he was. I tried to be kind and also truthful--a difficult combination under the circumstances--and make plain to him some of the less complex aspects of the sphinx, only to leave him in dazed distress.

He was alarmed at her evident intention to go back to the stage, couldn’t believe it, wanted me to tell him why an abandoned resolution should come back like a curse to roost. He couldn’t get away from his original conception of her, had learned her one way and couldn’t relearn her another. It was at once a pathetic sight and an illuminating experience--the man of ability, the student, the scholar, out of his depths and floundering foolishly. The mind trained to the recognition of the obvious and established, accustomed to fit its own standards to any and all forms of the human animal, coming up with a dizzying impact against the mind that had no guide, no standard, no code, but floats in the flux of its own emotions.

I repeat I was sorry, immensely sorry. Such is the inconsistency of human nature that I was filled up and overflowing with sympathy at the spectacle of my own man, once my exclusive property, hurt, flouted and outraged by the vagaries of my successful rival.

A eight o’clock that evening I was in my sitting-room when I heard her come in. She did not stop at my door but went up-stairs, a quick rustling progress through the silence of the house. It was very still, not a sound from any of the rooms, when I heard the notes of her piano, and then her voice--“_Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix._” The register was shut, and I stole to the door and opening it stood at the stair-head listening. Before the aria was over I knew that what she had said was true. Lizzie had found herself.

After a pause she began again--_O Patria Mia_ from _Aïda_. I tiptoed forward and let myself noiselessly down on the top step, breath held to listen. As the song swelled, the cry of a bleeding and distracted heart, the doors along the passages were softly opened. Up and down the wall came the click of turned latches and stealthy footsteps. Mrs. Bushey’s lodgers were not abroad, as I had thought. The stairs creaked gently as they dropped upon them. When _Patria Mia_ was over we were all there. I could see the legs of Mr. Hamilton and the count dangling over the banisters above me. On the bottom of the flight Mr. Weatherby sat, and Miss Bliss and Mr. Hazard leaned against the wall, looking up with the gaslight gilding their faces.

In the silence that fell on the last note no one spoke. There was no rising chorus of praise as there once had been. I don’t think we were aware of one another, each rapt in the memory of an ecstatic sadness. The cautious foot of Mrs. Phillips stealing along the lower hall made me look down and I saw her stationing herself beside young Hazard, and that Dolly Bliss’ face shone with tears.

She went on--_Vissi d’Arte, Vissi d’Amore_, Musetta’s song; the habanera from _Carmen_, Brahm’s _Sapphische Ode_, sounding the depths and heights. Between each piece we were dumb, only the creaking of the banisters as Mr. Hamilton shifted, or the sniffing of Miss Bliss when the song was sad, fell on our silence. We never saw her. She was at last the diva, remote, august, a woman mysterious and unknown, singing to us across an impassable gulf.

As long as I live I shall never forget it--the narrow half-lit passages, the long oval of the stair-well, on the bottom step of my flight Mr. Weatherby’s back, broad and bent, as he rested his elbows on his knees. Against the whitewashed wall below Mr. Hazard with his eyes fixed in a trance of listening; Mrs. Phillips, her head pressed back against the wall, her lids closed, and Dolly Bliss’ little face bright with slow dropping tears.

We were Liza Bonaventura’s first audience.

XIX

THE next morning, while I yet slept, she came knocking and rattling at my door. When I let her in she upbraided me for having it locked, unmindful of my sleepy excuses that as the street door was generally open all night it was wisdom to keep one’s apartment firmly closed.

She was in the blue kimono over her nightgown, and when I got back into bed--for it was too early for breakfast--sat down on the edge of the couch and told me that she had decided to accept Mrs. Ferguson’s offer to send her to Europe.

I had expected some move but hadn’t dared to hope for this. It was impossible to hide my agitation, to wipe the expression of startled excitement off my face. She paid no attention to me, would not have noticed if I had fallen flat in a dead faint, so engrossed was she in her plans. Staring out of the window with narrowed far-seeing eyes, she developed her program, oblivious of the fact that I was not answering, more like a person thinking aloud than one consulting another. When she finally paused, I said hoarsely, afraid to believe it:

“Mrs. Ferguson may have changed her mind. You wouldn’t hear of the offer when she made it.”

She treated the suggestion as preposterous.

“What an idea! Who ever heard of any woman changing her mind on such a subject.”

“You’ve changed yours,” I answered faintly.

“I’m different, and besides I’ve changed it for the better. She’ll be only too glad to send me. Why think of what it means to her! She’ll be known as the patron of one of the greatest living prima donnas. That’s a thing that doesn’t happen to everybody. Is the morning paper down-stairs? I want to see what steamers are leaving this week. I’ll go as soon as I can get off. Oh, I won’t meet anybody, and it doesn’t matter if I do.”

The door closed on her and I fell back on the pillows like a marionette whose wire has broken. Limp as a rag I lay looking up at the ceiling, and out of my mouth issued a sigh that was almost a groan. It was all I had power for. The tension snapped, I suddenly felt myself invaded by a lassitude so deep, so vast that it went to the edges of the world and lapped over. I would like to have been removed to a far distance and lain under a tree and watched the leaves without moving or thinking or speaking. I would like to have stayed in bed and looked at the dusty circle of cement flowers from which the chandelier hung, for years and years.

She came hastening back with the paper, tore it apart, and spreading it on the table read the shipping advertisements. Several steamers were due to sail within the week. She decided on the best and throwing the paper on the floor, said briskly:

“I’ll see her about it this morning before she goes out. There’s no need to bother about it before breakfast. I’ll just take a cup of coffee down here with you and then go up and dress. Let’s get it now.”

I rose, telling her to set the table while I dressed. She put on two cups, each trip to the table impeded by the paper, over which she trampled with loud cracklings, then she gave it up and followed me, talking. My toilet, performed with mutilated rites owing to its publicity, took me from room to room, with Lizzie at my heels. When I shut the door on my bath, she leaned against it and through the crack gave me her opinion on the rival merits of Paris and Berlin as centers of musical study.

While I was making the breakfast she stood in the entrance of the kitchenette, then, squeezing by her with the coffee pot in one hand and a plate of toast in the other, she did not give me enough room and the toast slid off the plate and was strewed afar. She picked up a piece and sat down eating it, her elbows on the table, while I gathered up the rest. Hot and disheveled I took my place opposite while she watched me, biting delicately at her toast, benignly beautiful and fresh as a summer’s morn.

She was stretching her hand for her cup when a disturbing thought made her pause. She dropped the hand and looked at me in consternation:--her big trunk was no good, it had been broken three years ago coming from California.

“Oh, well”--a happy solution occurred to her and she held out her hand for the cup--“I can borrow one of yours. That large one with the Bagdad portière over it. I’ll return it as soon as I get there. You don’t mind loaning it to me, do you, dearest?”

I gave it, warmly, generously, effusively. It wasn’t like giving Mrs. Bushey the lamp. There was no necessity for diplomatic pressure. I would have given her my jewels, my miniatures, my last cent in the bank, my teeth like Fantine, each and all of my treasures, to have her go. Nobody knows how I wanted her to go. It was not that I had ceased to love her--I will do that till I die. It was not that I had hopes Roger would forget her--he may be as faithful as Penelope for all I know. I was unable to stand any more. I was down, done, ended. I wanted to creep into my little hole, curl up and lie still. I wanted to look at the wreath of cement flowers for years. I wanted immunity from the solving of unsolvable questions, respite from trying to straighten out what persisted in staying tangled, freedom to regain my poise, reinstate my conscience, patch up the broken pieces of my heart. An immovable body had encountered an irresistible force, and though the immovable body was still in its old place, it had been so scarred and torn and tattered by the irresistible force that only rest would restore it.

That was two days ago. In the interim there has been no rest--I have spent most of the forty-eight hours in taxicabs and at telephones--but relief is in sight.

Lizzie is going.

It is all arranged. Betty has dispersed the pupils and renewed her European offer. Between taxicabs she caught me here yesterday and told me that few women have the privilege of being the patron of one of the greatest living prima donnas. The privilege sat soberly upon her and she was going to make herself worthy of it by giving one of the greatest living prima donnas every advantage that Europe offers.

In the afternoon Lizzie and I went down to the steamship office and bought her ticket, and then to the banker’s to draw the first instalment on her letter of credit. It was a royally generous letter and I said so. Lizzie didn’t think it was too much and went over a list of expenses to prove it. She is to go to Berlin--Vignorol wanted Paris but as a dramatic singer she preferred Berlin. I gathered from a casual remark that Vignorol was hurt at her desertion of him and his country. But this didn’t trouble her.

“Vignorol! I don’t see that it was so kind of him to want to take me for nothing. It would have made him. He’s only known here in New York now and as my teacher he would have been known all over the world.”

The steamer sails the day after to-morrow and this afternoon I sent up the trunk. I had offered to come in the evening and help her pack and then backed out. In an offhand manner, as she was sorting piles of sheet music, she said Roger was coming in after dinner to say good-by. She seemed engrossed by the music, gave an absent-minded assent when I said I couldn’t help that night. I could not tell whether she had at last guessed and was exhibiting unusual tact or whether she was still unconscious. I knew that every minute of the next day was filled and it would be Roger’s only chance to see her alone. It was difficult to imagine him proposing in a room littered with his lady’s wardrobe. But love is said to find out a way and if a man’s in earnest he can put the question just as well in a fourth-floor parlor full of clothes, as he can by moonlight in a bower.

I had been waiting for this interview, braced and steeled for the announcement. It was the final trial and I was going to go through with it proudly and stoically if I died the day after. I did not feel quite as if I should die. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, that’s why we don’t all, sometime or other, commit suicide. Hope upheld me now: with a career beckoning she might refuse him. It was but a sickly gleam. No woman, comprehensible to me, would ever put the greatest career the world offers before Roger Clements. The hope lay in the fact that Lizzie was not a comprehensible woman.

With great inward struggle I preserved my pride and stoicism through the rest of the afternoon. They were still with me when, in the evening I lay down on the divan bed, whence I can hear all ascending footsteps. The wreath of cement flowers gradually faded, and the daylight sounds of the house were absorbed in the evening quiet. Night had possession of the city for what seemed an endless time when I heard him going up: from the street, past my floor, up the next flight, and the next, then the far faint closing of Lizzie’s door. Rigid in the dark I pictured the meeting--the room with its high blaze of gas, the open trunks and scattered garments, and Lizzie with her smile and the enveloping beam of her glance.

It was profoundly still in the back room, only the tiny ticking of my watch on the table. The old tomcat, who at this hour was wont to lift up his voice in a nuptial hymn, had gone afield for his wooing. The parlors and bedrooms in the extensions were quiet, their lighted windows throwing a soft yellow light into my darkened lair. Our little bit of the city held its breath in sympathy with me, prone with fixed eyes, seeing those two in the parlor.

Would he work up to it in gentle gradations, gracefully and poetically as men did in novels, or blurt it out in one great question which (for me at least) would have made life blossom as the wood did when Siegmund sung? They would probably stand--people didn’t sit when such matters were afoot--and if she said yes would he take her in his arms then and there? Under the same roof, just two floors above me, they might be standing now, enfolded, cheek to cheek. Pride and stoicism fell from me and I pressed my face into the pillow and moaned like a wounded animal.

The watch ticked on. It was evidently not going to be short and tempestuous. Roger was an unhurried person and he would probably proffer his suit with dignified deliberation. I was certain, if he was successful, he’d come in and tell me on the way down. I couldn’t see him passing my door and not remembering. The place was dark, he might think I was asleep and go by. I got up and lit the lights, thinking as I stretched up with the match, that they were signals telling him I was here, waiting, ready to wish him joy.

Then I looked at the watch--only just nine. He might be hours longer. I could spend the time in preparation, be ready to meet him with a frank unforced smile.

I went to the back window and looked up at the stars for courage. The sky was sprinkled with them--big ones and bright pin points. For centuries they had been gazing down at the puny agonies of discarded lovers, unmoved and cynically curious, winking at them in derision. The thought had a tonic effect. Under its stimulus I straightened my ancestors, askew after a morning’s dusting, and touched up the bunch of daffodils on the table. Then the effect began to wear off. I reached for the watch--twenty minutes past nine.

If she had refused him it would have been done by now. Lizzie wasn’t one to spare or mince her words. I’d better get ready for him. I went to the mirror and saw a ghost, and the stars’ stern message was forgotten. That I should some day be dust was not a sustaining thought now when I was so much a suffering sentient thing, sunk down in the midmost of the moment. I brushed some rouge on my cheeks and smiled at the reflection to see if I could do it naturally. It was ghastly, like the grimace of a corpse that had expired in torment.