Part 15

Then suddenly I dropped my rouge and gave a smothered cry--I heard Lizzie calling my name. For a moment power of movement seemed stricken from me. I had not thought that she would be the one to tell me. She called again and I opened the door and went into the hall. Her head was visible over the banisters.

“Have you got the key of that trunk?” she said. “It’s packed and I want to lock it.”

It was a ruse to get me up there. Even Lizzie wouldn’t announce an engagement at the top of her voice down two flights of stairs. I found the key and mounted, holding to the hand-rail. It seemed a long climb. When I got to the top I had no breath, though I had gone slowly, and I trembled so that I was afraid she would notice it, and laid the key on the table.

The trunk was packed, its lid down, and another, open, with garments trailing over its sides, stood in the middle of the floor. Round it lay the unpacked remains of Lizzie’s wardrobe, in mounds, in broken scatterings, in confused interminglings. If a cyclone had descended on neat closets and bureau drawers, scooped out their contents, carried it with a whirling centripetal motion into the center of the room, took a final churning rush through it and dashed out again, the place could not have presented a more wildly disheveled appearance.

In an unencumbered corner, an eddy untouched by the cyclone’s wrath, Roger stood putting on his coat. We looked across the chaos, bowed and smiled. I knew my smile by heart. Roger’s was something new, rose no higher than his lips, leaving his eyes somber, I might say sullen. Lizzie, without words, had snatched up the key and knelt by the trunk. She looked untidy, hot and rather cross. They certainly had not the appearance of lovers.

I fell weakly into a chair and awaited revelations. None came. Roger buttoned his coat, Lizzie made scratching noises with the key. There was something strained and sultry in the silence. Could she have refused him? One of the disappointing things about people in real life is their failure to rise to the dramatic expression fitting to great moments. Had I been in a play I would have used words vibrating with the thud of my own heart-beats. What I did say was:

“Have you had a nice evening?”

“Very,” said Roger with a dry note.

“Have we,” murmured Lizzie, busy with the key. “I’m sure I don’t know. I’ve not had time to say a word to Mr. Clements.”

“I’m afraid I’ve been rather in the way,” he remarked, the dry note a trifle more astringent.

“Well, the truth is you have,” she answered. “Are you sure this is the right key, Evie?”

The gleam of hope brightened into a ray. I sat forward on the edge of the chair looking from Lizzie’s bent back to Roger’s face, which had reddened slightly and had a tight look about the mouth. I am, by nature, a shy and modest person, and under normal conditions the last thing I would do would be to force another’s confidence. But I _had_ to know. I had to drag the truth out of them if it came with a shriek like the roots of the fabled mandrake.

“Haven’t you talked _at all_?” I exclaimed, with an agonized emphasis that might have betrayed me to a child of twelve.

They did not appear to notice it. Roger moved from his corner, picking his way round a clump of boots that had been whirled near the sofa.

“Talk?” said Lizzie, still engaged with the key. “How can people talk when they’re packing to go to Europe? There! It’s in and it turns. Thank goodness the lock’s all right.”

She rose and surveyed the room with an intent frowning glance.

“That,” pointing to the other trunk, “I’ll begin on now and finish to-morrow. This,” turning to the full one, “is done. I’d better lock it at once and get it out of the way.”

She turned back to it and gave a series of tentative pushes at the lid which rose rebelliously over bulging contents.

Nothing had happened! She hadn’t let him speak--he hadn’t dared--no opportunity had offered? What did it matter how or why? The sickening thudding of my heart began to grow less. I leaned my elbow on my knees and my forehead on my hands, feeling at last as if I was going to be Early Victorian and swoon.

Under the shadow of my fingers I could see Roger’s feet stepping carefully among the boots. Skirting tangled heaps of millinery, they arrived at the trunk. I dropped my hands and watched while he addressed himself to Lizzie’s back.

“Good night.” He stretched out his hand. “Good-by.”

She turned, saw the hand and put hers into it; then, for the first time smiled, but not with her habitual rich glow.

“Good-by. I’d ask you to stay but there’s really too much to do. I’ve got to have to-morrow free to finish up in.”

The hands separated and dropped. His back was toward me and I was glad of it.

“Perhaps we’ll meet again some day.”

“Oh, surely.” The abstraction of her look vanished, her smile flashed out brilliant and dazzling. “But not here, not this way. You’ll see me soon in my right place--behind the footlights.”

He murmured a response and moved toward the door. She turned back to the trunk, pressing on it and then drawing back and pressing again. He passed me with a low “Good night, Evie,” and I answered in the same tone.

He was at the door when she ceased her efforts, and drawing herself up with a deep breath, called peremptorily:

“Come here, Mr. Clements.”

He stopped, the door-knob in his hand.

“What is it, Miss Harris?”

She stood back from the trunk, flushed and irritated.

“Just sit on this trunk, please. It must be locked to-night.”

Her eye on him was as the eye of a general or a subaltern, impersonal, commanding, imperious.

He met it and stood immovable. In the fifteen years I have known him I had never seen him look so angry.

“Hurry up,” she said sharply. “I’d ask Evie but she’s not heavy enough.”

He answered with icy politeness:

“Miss Harris, I am very sorry, but I’ve already stayed too long. There are other men in the house, who will surely only be too happy to sit on your trunk whenever you choose to command them,” and he opened the door.

“Oh, very well, if you’re going to be so disobliging,” she answered, angry now in her turn. Then to me: “Come over here, Evie, and help. If we both press as hard as we can I think we can do it. I don’t care to wait till the morning. I want this locked now.”

I rose obediently and began to steer my way through the cyclone’s track. Roger came in, shutting the door with a bang.

“Mrs. Drake’s in no condition to make such exertions. She’s been ill and oughtn’t to be asked to do such things. Evie, don’t touch that trunk.”

“That’s perfect rubbish. I’m not asking her to _lift_ it. Come on, Evie.”

I stopped, looking helplessly from one to the other. They glared at each other, his face pale, hers red. They seemed on the verge of battle and I knew what Lizzie was like when her temper was up.

“Oh, don’t fight about a trunk,” I implored.

“I’ve not the slightest intention of fighting about anything,” said Roger, looking as if, had a suitable adversary been present, he would have felled him to the ground. “But I won’t have you making efforts that are unnecessary and that you’re unable to make.”

“You talk like a perfect fool,” said Lizzie, with the flashing eye of combat I knew so well.

He bowed.

“I’m quite ready to admit it. But as a perfect fool I absolutely refuse to let you make Mrs. Drake help shut that trunk.”

“Then do it yourself.”

As usual she had the best of it. Roger knew it and bore upon his face the look of the bear in the pit at whom small boys hurl gibes. When she saw the symptoms of defeat she began to melt.

“It’ll not take five minutes--just one good pressure on this corner. There’s a hat box that sticks up and has to be squeezed down.”

With a white face of wrath Roger strode over the clothes and sat on the trunk. I have never believed that he could be ridiculous, my Roger hedged round with the dignity that is the Clements’ heritage, but he was then, boiling with rage, perched uncomfortably on the sloping lid. A hysterical desire to laugh seized me and I backed off to my chair, biting my under lip, afraid to speak for fear of exploding into a screaming giggle.

They were unconscious of anything funny in the situation, one too angry, the other too engrossed. With a concentrated glance she surveyed the trunk, directing the bestowal of his weight. When she had finally got him in the right place, she knelt, key in hand, and in answer to a curt demand he rose and flopped furiously down. To the protesting crunching of the hat box, the lid settled and the click of the lock sounded.

“Done,” she cried triumphantly, falling back in a sitting posture on the floor.

Roger got up.

“Have I your permission to go?” he asked with elaborate deference.

“You have,” said his hostess, and from the floor looked up with a bright and beaming face from which every vestige of bad temper had fled. “Good-by--good luck. And remember, the first performance I give in New York I expect to see you applauding in the bald-headed row.”

As the door shut on him my laughter came like the burst of a geyser. Lizzie, still on the floor, looking at me with annoyed surprise, made it worse. When she asked me in a hostile voice kindly to tell her what the joke was, it got beyond my control and I became hysterical. It wasn’t very bad--I always do things in a meek subdued way--but I laughed and cried when I tried to explain and laughed again.

When she saw there was no use ordering me not to be an idiot, she got up, grumbling to herself and began on the second trunk. She kept stepping round me carrying armfuls of clothes, trailing skirts over my knees, leaning forward from a kneeling posture to jerk blouses, cloaks and petticoats from the back of my chair. I tried to retreat into corners, but she worked in wide comprehensive sweeps, wherever I went coming after me to find something that was under my chair or upon which I was sitting. Finally she used me as a sort of stand, throwing things on me and plucking them off, muttering abstractedly as she worked.

I was recovering and she was inspecting a skirt outheld at arm’s length when she said musingly:

“I hadn’t the least idea Roger Clements was so bad-tempered. He’s just a self-sufficient cross-grained prig. Gets into a rage when I ask him to sit on a trunk. I can’t stand that kind of man.”

I bade her good night and went down-stairs.

The lights were burning high. I put them out and laid down on the bed. My laughter and tears were over. Fatigue, anger and pain were sensations that existed somewhere outside me, in a world I had left. I seemed to have no body, to be a spirit loosened from fleshly trammels, floating blissfully in prismatic clouds.

I floated in them, motionless in ecstatic relief, savoring my joy, knowing the perfection of peace, till the windows paled with the dawn.

XX

I WRITE to-night in a hushed house--a house that holds the emptiness that follows the withdrawal of a dynamic presence.

Lizzie is gone.

As her ship bears her away to future glory, we, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, sit here recuperating from the labors of getting her off. In its hour of departure the magnet gave forth the full measure of its power and we bent our backs and lent our hands in a last energy of service. No votaries bowed before the shrine of a deity ever celebrated their worship with more selfless acts of devotion than Mrs. Bushey’s lodgers in speeding Lizzie on her way.

What did Mr. Hazard’s unfinished order matter when Lizzie, having forgotten to order the expressman, one had to be sought up and down the reaches of Lexington Avenue? Of what consequence to Miss Bliss were broken sittings, on the proceeds of which she could have lived for a week, when Lizzie’s traveling dress was found to be in rags and had to be mended by some one who knew how? When the count rendered his tribute in fruit and flowers, did he stop to consider that the money was part of the fund reserved for his passage home, and now he would have to travel second cabin? No one thought of anything but the departing goddess. They were proud and glad to deny themselves that she might go, grandly serene, amid clouds of ascending incense.

As for me, after that night of respite, I became a body again, a body whose mission was the preparing of another for the great adventure. She drew me after her as the fisherman draws the glittering bit of tin that revolves from the end of his line. The simile is not entirely satisfactory because I did not glitter, but I revolved, round and round, as the fisherman’s hand pulled or eased on the line. I sewed, I packed, I unpacked, searching for forgotten necessities. I was down-town, executing overlooked errands, I was up-town, cooking hurried meals in the kitchenette. My voice in the morning called her to breakfast, my good night was the last sound on the stairs as I left her room, grown bare and bleak, losing its character, as one by one the signs of her occupancy vanished. I had no time to feel, to be glad or sorry. Even the passion to have her go was overridden by the ruling instinct that while she was there I must serve. And though the poet tells us there are those who can do this while standing and waiting, I evidently was not one of them.

As we demonstrated her power by the zeal of our devotion, her arrogant exactions increased in a corresponding ratio. She was never more aloof, more regally indifferent, more imperiously demanding. The call of her destiny had come to her and she heard nothing else.

Her stay with us had been only the bivouac of a night, and we the passers-by she had encountered in the moment of halt. With the goal in sight we lost what small significance we had and assumed the aspect of strangers, by whose fire she had rested, in whose tent she had slept. Already, before she had gone, we had faded into the limbo of the useless and outworn. Henceforward, from our humble corner, we would watch her mounting on others as she had mounted on us--climbing higher and higher with never a backward glance or a wave of her hand to the little group who strained their eyes for a sign of remembrance.

Some day the others would find her out and be angry, cite to their friends proofs of her ingratitude, grow bitter at the memory of their unappreciated efforts, add her to the list of forgetful great ones who took all and rendered nothing back. From a deeper knowledge of her I would never know their disillusion. The thought that she felt no love for any of us had for me no sting. I even went farther, agreed that it was not her place to feel it. Arrived at last at the heart of her mystery, I could keep my memory of her fair and untarnished, untouched by efforts to fit her into a frame where she didn’t belong.

She was not, as they would think, a heartless and cruel fellow of ours, but the creature of another species, thinking in a different language, seeing life from a different angle. What we were trained to accept as right and just, she had no power to recognize. Custom and tradition had formed a groove in which we walked unquestionably onward. She wandered at will in a world expressly created for her, peopled by shades who had no meaning apart from their usefulness. Environment that had molded and put its stamp upon us made no impression upon her invulnerable self-concentration. We held a point of view in common, responded automatically to established ideas and inherited impulses. She saw no claims but her own and moved upon what she wanted with the directness of an animal. The bogies with which we were frightened into good behavior--public opinion, social position, loss of respect--she snapped her fingers at. Her only law was the law of her own being, her standard, a fierce and defiant determination to be true to herself. Restraints and reticences, subtleties of breeding, delicacies of conduct, imposed on us by the needs of communal life, were not for her, selected and set apart to be that lonely figure in the crowded companionable world--the people’s servant.

That was what I at last knew her to be--an instrument for the joy, the recreation, the enthrallment of that great, sluggish, full-fed Minotaur, the public. For this purpose nature had fashioned her, eliminating every characteristic that might render her unfit, pruning away virtues that would hamper, uprooting instincts that would interfere. As Wordsworth saw the All-Mother saying of a worthy specimen, “I will make a lady of my own,” so, seeing Lizzie, she had said, “I will make an artist of my own,” and had set about doing it with thoroughness.

From the beautiful outer case to “the hollows where a heart should be” she was formed to be the one thing--a cunningly framed and articulated mechanism for our entertainment. To us--whom she so lightly regarded--she was foreordained to carry a message of beauty, call us from our sordid cares, and base ambitions, catch us up from the grayness of the every day to the heights where once more we caught a glimpse of the vision and the dream. That we should work and sacrifice to help her to her place, she, unconscious but impelled by her destiny, felt, and made me feel. And having gathered up our tribute she had left us, not ungratefully, not having taken all and given nothing, but in her own time and in her own way to pay us back a hundredfold.

I thought it all out in the cab coming back from the steamer, and I was content to have it so.

I had gone down to see her off--she wanted me and no one else. We had passed up the dock amid throngs of passengers and presently there were stewards and cabin-boys running for her luggage, and officers discreetly staring. When we bought the ticket I had seen on the list the name of a countess, and I learned that she was a royal lady traveling incognita with a maid. Everybody thought Lizzie was the countess and I the maid. I looked the part, trotting at her heels, carrying a large bandbox covered with pink roses that had been overlooked in the final scramble. She had a triumphal progress, everything made easy, boys bearing the count’s flowers going before her up the gangway, and I following with the bandbox that nobody had offered to take. Before I left I saw the royal lady leaning on the railing, a pale person with the curling fringe and prominent eyes of the typical British princess. Nobody paid any attention to her, but when we went exploring about the decks, looks followed us and whispers buzzed.

As the big ship churned the water and ponderously moved off, I stood on the pier’s edge and waved to her. I was the tiny unit in the crowd--the nameless, humdrum, earth-bound crowd--for whom she was to weave the spell, and create the illusion. Through a glaze of tears I watched her, tall and splendid beside the dowdy princess--my beautiful Lizzie, a real princess, going imperially to claim her crown.

The windows are open and the spring night comes in, soft as a caress. In the basement of the apartment-house some one is playing _Annie Laurie_ on the accordion, and in the back yards the servants are chatting in the kitchen doors. From Mr. Hazard’s room, below me, I can hear a low murmur of voices. The others are in there talking it over, all, I know, singing the praises of Lizzie, voicing hopes for her success as deep and sincere as prayers. I can fancy them, reclining on chairs and sofas, worn out by their labors and feeling blankly that something has gone out of their lives. A wild disturbing chord in the day’s melody is hushed, a red thread in the tapestry has been withdrawn.

I feel it, too.

And so the tale is ended. I don’t think I shall ever write any more. In the autumn, when I started this manuscript, I just intended to put down the happenings of a lonely woman’s life, to read over on evenings when looking back was pleasanter than looking forward. Now, without intending to, I have written a story, which is not my fault, as the story happened to intrude itself into the lonely woman’s life, greatly to her surprise, and a good deal to her sorrow. But this is the finish of it. There is no more to tell. The heroine has gone, if to come back not the same heroine. The hero--you know as much about him as I do. And the author--well, the author is just where she was, a widow of thirty-three, doing light housekeeping in an eighteen-foot apartment. It can’t be much of a story because it hasn’t got anywhere; nobody has died, nobody has married. So to myself--for I am going to put this away in a trunk and never let a soul see it--I make my bow as an author.

Good night, Evelyn Drake. As a sadder and wiser woman I take my leave of you. Good-by.

EPILOGUE

THIS has been a day of coincidences. They began in the afternoon and ended an hour ago. And now, past midnight, in my sitting-room looking out on the lights of the Rond Point, like Bret Harte’s heroine, “I am sitting alone by the fire, dressed just as I came from the dance”--only it wasn’t a dance, it was the opera.

But to get to the coincidences: This afternoon I was unpacking an old trunk full of odds and ends that I brought when we came to Paris last autumn, and at the bottom of it I found the manuscript I had written four years ago at Mrs. Bushey’s. I laid it on the top to read over in some idle moment when Roger wouldn’t catch me. For though we’ve been married three years and talked over everything that ever happened to either of us, Roger doesn’t know the whole story of that winter.

Of course I _have_ asked him if he wasn’t really in love with Lizzie, and he always laughs and says he wasn’t, that he was attracted by her and interested in her as a type. I don’t contradict him--it’s best to let men rest peacefully in their innocent self-delusions. Besides, if I pressed the subject we might have to go on to Lizzie and Masters, and that’s the part of the story he doesn’t know. Sometimes I’ve thought I’d tell him and then I’ve always stopped. Why should I? It’s all come out right. Lizzie has traveled along the line of least resistance in one direction and reached success, and Roger has done the same thing in another and reached me. She _must_ be happy if fulfilled ambitions can do it, and we _are_, with each other and last year--to crown it all--our boy.

Well, I won’t go into that--I get too garrulous. When a woman of thirty-six has a baby she never gets over the pride and wonder of it.

We came over to Paris last autumn for Roger to do some reading in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and took this charming apartment near the Rond Point. On bright mornings I can look into the little park and see Roger Clements IX sitting out there in his perambulator studying Parisian life. The day suddenly strikes me as unusually fine and I go out and sit on the bench beside him and we study Parisian life together, while his _nou-nou_ knits on a camp-chair near by.

Bother--I keep losing sight of the coincidences which are the only reason I began to write this. To resume:

During these four years we have tried to keep track of Lizzie. It was difficult because, of course, after the first few months, she stopped writing. If it hadn’t been for Betty we should have lost her entirely, but Betty, being the source of supplies, did know, at least, her whereabouts. I may add, en passant, that Mrs. Ferguson stood by her contract to the end and now is enjoying the fruits thereof. If she isn’t known as the patron of the greatest living prima donna, she is known as a lady who made a career possible to one of the rising singers of Europe.