Part 5

“Oh!” Betty breathed out and leaned against her chair-back, with a slight creaking of tight drawn fabrics. But she kept her eye on me, in a sidelong glance, that contained an element of inspecting inquiry. Little Constance swallowed the cherry at a gulp and the question it had bottled up burst out:

“Evie, are you going to get married?”

“No,” I almost shouted.

Little Constance said no more, but her gaze remained glued to my face in an absorption so intense that she leaned forward, pressing her chest against the edge of the table. Betty played with her knife and fork with an air of deep thought. Judkins reentered to my relief.

He was passing the next dish when little Constance broke the silence.

“Evie, why did you get all red just now?”

“Constance,” said her mother, “if you’re a good girl and stop talking you can have a cherry when lunch is over.”

“Thanks, mama,” said little Constance, in her most mouse-like manner.

After lunch we drove about in the auto and shopped, and as the afternoon began to darken Betty haled me to a reception.

“Madge Knowlton’s daughter’s coming out,” she said. “And as you used to know her before you went to Europe, it’s your duty to come.”

“Why is it my duty? I was never an intimate of hers.”

I’m shy about going to parties now; I feel like Rip Van Winkle when he comes back.

“To swell the crowd. It’s a social service you owe to a fellow woman in distress.”

We entered the house through a canvassed tunnel and inserted ourselves into a room packed with women and reverberating with a clamor of voices. We had a word and a hurried handclasp with Madge Knowlton and her daughter, and then were caught in a surging mass of humanity and carried into a room beyond. The jam was even closer here. I dodged a long hatpin, and was borne back against a mantelpiece banked with flowers whose delicate dying breath mingled with the scents of food and French perfumery. When the mass broke apart I had momentary glimpses of a glittering table with a woman at either end who was pouring liquid into cups.

At intervals the crowd, governed by some unknown law, was seized by migratory impulses. Segments of it separated from the rest, and drove toward the door. Here they met other entering segments with a resultant congestion. When thus solidified the only humans who seemed to have the key of breaking us loose were waiters. They found their way along the line of least resistance, making tortuous passages like the cracks in an ice pack.

From them we snatched food. I had a glass of punch, a cup of coffee, a chocolate cake, two marrons and a plate of lobster Neuberg, in the order named. I haven’t the slightest idea why I ate them--suggestion I suppose. All the other women were similarly endangering their lives, and the one possible explanation is that we communicated to one another the same suicidal impulse. It was like the early Christians going to the lions, the bold ones swept the weaker along by the contagion of example.

I met several old acquaintances who cried as if in rapturous delight.

“Why, Evelyn Drake, is this really you?”

“Evie--I can’t believe my eyes! I thought you had gone to Europe and died there.”

“How delightful to see you again. Living out of town, I suppose. We must arrange a meeting when I get time.”

And so forth and so on.

It made me feel like a resurrected ghost who had come to revisit the glimpses of the moon. My old place was not vacant, it was filled up and the grass was growing over it. I was glad when one of those blind stampeding impulses seized the crowd and carried me near enough to Betty to cry, as I was borne along, “I’m going home and I’d rather walk,” and was swept like a chip on a stream to the door.

It was raining, a thin icy drizzle. Beyond the thronging line of limousines, the streets were dark with patches of gilding where the lamplight struck along the wet asphalt. They looked like streets in dreams, mysteriously black gullies down which hurried mysteriously black figures. I walked toward Lexington Avenue, drooping and depressed, in accord with the chill night and the small sad noises of the rain. I was in that mood when you walk slowly, knowing your best dress is getting damp and feeling the moisture through your best shoes and neither matters. Nothing matters.

Once I used to enjoy teas, found entertainment in those brief shouted conversations, those perilous feasts. Perhaps I was sad because I was so out of it all. And what was I in--what took its place? I was going back to emptiness and silence. To greet me would be a voiceless darkness, my evening companion a book.

I got on a car full of damp passengers. As if beaten down by the relentless glare of the electric lights, all the faces drooped forward, hollows under the eyes, lines round the mouths. They sat in listless poses, exhaling the smell of wet woolen and rubber and I sat among them, also exhaling damp smells--also with hollows under my eyes and lines round my mouth. That, too, didn’t matter. What difference if I was hollowed and lined when there was no one to care?

My room was unlighted and cold. I lighted the gas and stood with uplifted hand surveying it. It was like a hollow shell, an empty echoing shell, that waited for a living presence to brighten it. Just then it seemed to me as if I never could do this--its loneliness would be as poignant and pervasive when I was there, would steal upon me from the corners, surround and overwhelm me like a rising sea. My little possessions, my treasures, that were wont to welcome me, had lost their friendly air. I suddenly saw them as they really were, inanimate things grasped and held close because associated with the memory of a home. In the stillness the rain drummed on the tin roof and the line in a forgotten poem rose to my mind, “In the dead unhappy night and when the rain is on the roof.”

I snatched a match and hurried to the fire. Thrusting the flame between the bars of the grate, I said to myself:

“I must get some kind of a pet--a dog or a Persian cat. I’ve not enough money to adopt a child.”

The fire sputtered and I crouched before it. I didn’t want any supper, I didn’t want to move. I think a long time passed, several hours, during which I heard the clock ticking on the mantel over my head, and the rain drumming on the roof. Now and then the rumbling passage of a car swept across the distance.

I have often sat this way and my thoughts have always gone back to the past like homing pigeons to the place where they once had a nest. To-night they went forward. My married life seemed a great way off, and the Evelyn Drake in it looked on by the Evelyn Drake by the fire, a stranger long left behind. The memories of it had lost their sting, even the pang of disillusion was only a remembrance. With my eyes on the leaping flames I looked over the years that stretched away in front, diminishing to a point like a railway track. My grandmother had lived to eighty-two and I was supposed to be like her. Would I, at eighty-two, be still a pair of ears for young men’s love stories and young women’s dreams of conquest?

Oh, those years, that file of marching years, coming so slowly and so inevitably, and empty, all empty!

The rain drummed on the roof, the clock ticked and the smell of my best skirt singeing, came delicately to my nostrils. Even _that_ didn’t matter. From thirty-three to eighty-two--forty-nine years of it. I looked down at my feet, side by side, smoking on the fender. Wasn’t it Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked to define happiness, answered, “four feet on the fender”?

There was a knock on the door, probably the count to continue the recital of his love’s young dream. My “Come in” was not warm.

The door opened and Roger entered in a long wet raincoat.

I jumped up crying “Roger,” and ran to him with my hand out.

He took it and held it, and for a moment we stood looking at each other quite still and not speaking. I was too glad to say anything, too glad to think. It was an astonishing gladness, a sort of reaction I suppose. It welled through me like a warm current, must have shone in my face, and spoken from my eyes. I’ve not often in my life been completely outside myself, broken free of my consciousness and soared, but I was then just for one minute, while I looked into Roger’s face, and felt his hand round mine.

“You’re glad to see me, Evie,” he said and his voice sounded as if he had a cold.

That broke the spell. I came back to my eighteen-foot parlor, but it was so different, cozy and pretty and intimate, full of the things I care for and that are friends to me. The rain on the roof had lost its forlornness, or perhaps, by its forlornness accentuated the comfort and cheer of my little room.

We sat by the fire. Roger’s feet were wet and he put them upon the fender.

“Now, if you’d been plodding about in the rain with me you’d put yours up, too. Hullo, what have I said? Your face is as red as a peony.”

“It’s the fire. I’ve been sitting over it for a long time,” I stammered.

Just then the register became vocal, with the habanera from _Carmen_.

Roger got up and shut it.

“Don’t you want to hear her sing?” I asked.

“No, I want to hear you talk,” said he.

VII

MISS HARRIS is going to appear in a concert. She came glowing and beaming into my room to tell me. Vignorol, her teacher, had arranged it--with a violinist and a baritone--in Brooklyn.

“Why not New York?” I asked.

“Not _yet_,” said Miss Harris, moving about the room with a jubilant dancing step, “but after this is over--wait and see!”

Great things are expected to come of it. The public’s attention is to be caught, then another concert, maybe an engagement in one of the American opera companies--just for experience. It is to be the opening of a career which will carry her to the Metropolitan Opera House. The baritone is another of Vignorol’s pupils, Berwick, a New Englander--nothing much, just to fill up. The violinist is a Mrs. Stregazzi, who also fills up, and little Miss Gorringe accompanies. I was shown a pencil draft of the program with Liza Bonaventura written large at the top--“Yes, it’s to be Bonaventura; I had a superstition about it,” and the dress is to be white, or, with a sudden bright air:

“I might borrow your green satin--but of course I couldn’t. You’re too small.”

Since then the house has resounded with practising from the top floor. Heavy steps and light feminine rustlings have gone up and down the stairs. Once the strains of a violin came with a thin whine through the register as if some melancholy animal was imprisoned behind the grill. In the dusk of the lower hall I bumped into a young man with tousled hair and frogs on his coat, whom I have since met as Mr. Berwick.

The star is in a state of joyful excitement which has communicated itself to the rest of us. When in the evening she goes over her repertoire, the Westerners and Miss Bliss sit on the bottom steps of their stairs, Mr. Hamilton and the count on the banisters of theirs and I on the top step of mine. A Niagara of sound pours over us, billowing and rushing down through the well, buffeted between the close confining walls. When each piece is ended Miss Harris comes out on her landing, leans over the railing and calls down:

“How was that?”

Then our six faces are upturned and we express our approbation, according to our six different natures.

Our mutual hopes for her success have drawn us together and we have suddenly become very friendly. Mr. Hazard drops in upon me in a paint-stiffened linen blouse and Mr. Weatherby has confided to me the money to pay for his laundry. Mr. Hamilton has smoked a large black cigar in my dining-room, and Miss Bliss has come shivering with hunched shoulders and clasped red arms to “borrow a warm” (her own expression) at my fire.

In my excursions to the top floor I have met Mrs. Stregazzi and Miss Gorringe. Mrs. Stregazzi is a large blond lady with an ample figure and a confidential habit. On our first meeting she called me “dearie” and told me all about her divorce from Mr. Stregazzi, who, I gathered, was her inferior, both in station and the domestic virtues. In his profession--the stage--he was something called “a headliner”, and appeared to be involved mysteriously with trained animals. Since his divorce he has married another “headliner”. It’s like that story of the Frenchman in Philadelphia: “He _is_ a Biddle, she _was_ a Biddle, they are _both_ Biddles.” I must ask Lizzie Harris what it is. Miss Gorringe is a thin sallow girl with an intelligent face, and Mr. Berwick a bulky silent New Englander, in the early twenties, who bears a strong resemblance to the bust of Beethoven over Schirmer’s music store.

They are strange people, artless as children, and completely absorbed in themselves and their work. They appear to have no points of contact with any other world, and the real part of their world is the professional part. They don’t say much about their homes or their lives away from it.

A few days ago they took tea with me, and as they talked I had a series of glimpses, like quickly shifted magic lantern slides, of their life on trains, in hotels, behind the scenes and on the stage. It seemed to me a sort of nightmare of hurry and scramble, snatched meals, lost trunks, cold dressing-rooms. Maybe the excitement makes up for the rest. It must be exciting--at least that’s the impression I got as I sat behind the teacups listening.

Lizzie Harris seemed to find it enthralling, everything they said interested her. Mrs. Stregazzi told some anecdotes that I didn’t like--I don’t want to be a prig, but they really were _too_ sordid and scandalous--and our prima donna hung on the words of that fat made-up woman as if she spoke with the tongues of men and of angels. The more I know of her the less able I am to get at the core of her being, to place her definitely in my gallery of “women I have known.” I had finally decided that in spite of her tempests, her egotism and her weather-cock moods, there was something rare and noble in her, and here she was drinking in cheap gossip about a set of people she didn’t know, and who seem to be a mixture of artist, mountebank and badly brought-up child.

As I sat pouring the tea I felt again that curious aloofness in her. But before it was more a withdrawal of her spirit into herself, a retreating into an inner citadel and closing all the doors. This time it was the spirit reaching toward others and shutting me out, like a child who forgets its playmate when a circus passes by. She listened hungrily, now and then commenting or questioning with a longing, almost a homesick note. When they rose to go, with a scraping of chair-legs and a concerted clamor of farewells, she was reluctant to lose them, followed them to the hall and leaned over the banister watching their departing heads.

She made me feel an outsider, almost an intruder. I was willing to efface myself for the moment and stood by the table waiting for her to come back and reestablish me in her regard. She said nothing, however, but brushed by the door and went up-stairs. In a few minutes Musetta’s song filled the house. The next morning she came in while I was at breakfast and asked me to lend my green satin dress to Miss Gorringe, and when I agreed kissed me with glowing affection.

That all happened early in the week. Yesterday afternoon I was witness to a scene, the effect of which is with me still, at midnight, scratching this down in my rose-wreathed back room. It was a hateful scene, a horrible scene--but let me describe it:

Calls of my name descending from the top floor in Miss Harris’ voice, took me out to my door.

“I am going over some of my things,” the voice cried. “Come up and listen.” Then, as I ascended, “It’s the scene between Brunhilda and Siegmund in _Die Walkuere_, the _piéce de résistance_ of the evening.”

I didn’t find Miss Gorringe as I expected, but Mr. Masters, sitting on the piano stool and looking glum. He rose, nodded to me, and sinking back on the stool, laid his hands on the keys and broke into a desultory playing. With all my ignorance I have heard enough to know that he played uncommonly well.

The future Signorita Bonaventura was looking her best, a slight color in her cheeks, confidence shining in her eyes.

“We’ve been trying it over. Did you hear?”

The weather had been warm, the register closed, so I had only heard faintly.

“Well, it’s going to be something great,” said the prima donna.

“Is it?” said Mr. Masters with his back to us.

The sneering quality was strong in his tone and I began to wish I hadn’t come.

“Go across the room, Mrs. Drake,” he said curtly. “Sit where you can see her.”

I obeyed, sitting in the corner by the window. She faced me and Mr. Masters was in profile.

My friends tell me I am completely devoid of the musical sense. It must be true, for I can not sit through _Meistersinger_, and there are long reaches of _Tristan and Isolde_ that get on my nerves like a toothache. But I _have_ some kind of appreciation, do derive an intense pleasure from certain scenes in certain operas. It was one of these scenes they were now giving, that one in the second act of _Die Walkuere_ when Brunhilda appears before Siegmund.

It has always seemed to me that the drama rose above the music, overpowered it. I supposed this to be the fancy of my own ignorance and never had the courage to say it. But the other day I read somewhere the opinion of Dujardin, the French critic, and he expressed just what I mean--“It is not the music, no, it is not the music, that counts in the scene, but the words. The music is beautiful--of course it is, it couldn’t be otherwise--but Wagner was aware of the beauty of the poetry and allowed it to transpire.”

That is exactly what I should have said if I had dared.

Masters struck the opening notes and she began to sing.

“Siegmund sieh’ auf mich! Ich bin’s der bald du folgst-- Siegmund, look on me. I come to call thee hence.”

What a greeting!

A stir of irritation passed through me. She looked at Masters with a friendly air and sang the lines with an absence of understanding and emotion that would have robbed them of all meaning if anything could. I wanted to shake her.

Then I forgot--Masters began.

If I was surprised at his playing his singing amazed me. He had almost no voice, but he had all the rest--the wonderful thing, imagination, the response to beauty, power of representing a state of mind. I don’t explain well, I am out of my province, perhaps it’s better if I simply say he became Siegmund.

As he played he turned and looked at her. His whole face had changed, transformed by the shadow of tragedy. To him Lizzie was no longer Lizzie, she was the helmed and armored daughter of Wotan delivering his death summons. I can pay no higher tribute to him than to say I forgot him, the burlap walls, the thin tones of the piano and saw a vision of despairing demigods.

“Wer bist du, sag’ Die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?”

Then Lizzie:--

“Nur Todgeweihten Taugt mein Anblick: Wer mich erschaut, Der scheidet vom Lebenslicht.”

My vision was dispelled. No one could have kept it listening to her and watching her. As they went on what he created she destroyed; it was the most one-sided, maddening performance. I found myself eager to have her stop that I might hear him. Before they had reached the end I knew that Mr. Masters was an artist and she was not. That is all there was to it.

She turned to me, proudly smiling, with a questioning “Well”.

Mr. Masters, his head drooped, heaved a sigh.

I could not be untruthful. I had been too deeply moved.

“Your voice is very fine,” I said in the flattest of voices and looked at her beseechingly.

She met my eyes steadily and her smile died away.

“Only a voice,” she said.

“Miss Harris,” I cried imploringly. “You are young, you have beauty--” She cut short my bromides with an angry exclamation.

“And no more temperament than a tomato can,” Mr. Masters finished for me.

He ran his fingers over the keyboard in a glittering flow of notes.

“You’re a liar,” she cried, turning furiously on him.

Now, for the first time, I saw her really angry, not childishly petulant as in her orange-throwing mood, but shaken to her depth with rage. She was rather terrible, glaring at Masters with a grim face.

“Am I?” he said, coolly striking a chord. “We’ll see Tuesday night in Brooklyn.”

I had expected him to answer her in kind, but he only seemed weary and dispirited. Her chest rose with a deep breath and I saw to my alarm that she had grown paler.

“You didn’t always think that,” she said in a muffled voice.

“No,” he answered quietly, “I believed in you at first.”

He spread his hands in a long clutching movement and struck another chord. It fell deep into the momentary silence as if his powerful fingers were driving it down like a clencher on his words.

“And you don’t any more?”

“No, I’ve about done believing,” he responded.

She ran at him and seized him by the shoulder. He jerked it roughly out of her grasp and twirling round on the stool faced her, exasperated, defiant, a man at the end of his patience. But his eyes said more, full of a steely dislike. She met them and panted:

“You can’t, you don’t. Even you couldn’t be so mean--” then she stopped, it seemed to me as if for the first time conscious of the hostility of his gaze. There was the pause of the realizing moment and when she burst out her voice was strangled with passion:

“Go--get out--go away from me. I’m sick of it all. I’ll stand no more--go--go.”

She ran to the door and threw it open. I got up to make my escape. Neither of them appeared to remember I was there.

“All right,” he said, calmly rising. “That suits me perfectly.”

He picked up his hat and coat and moved to the door. I tried to get there before him, dodging about behind their backs for an exit, then, like a frightened chicken, made a nervous dive and got between them. Her hand on my arm flung me back as if I had been a chair in the way. I had a glimpse of her full face, white and with burning eyes. She frightened me.

Mr. Masters walked into the hall and there came to a standstill. After looking at the back and front of his hat he settled it comfortably on his head and moved toward the stairs.

Suddenly she rushed after him and caught him by the arm.

“No--no--” she cried. “Don’t go.”

I couldn’t see her face, but his was in plain view and it looked exceedingly bored.

“What is it now?” he said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m so discouraged--you take the heart out of me. I don’t know what I’m saying and I’ve tried so hard--oh, Jack--”

Her voice broke, her head sank. Mr. Master’s expression of boredom deepened into one of endurance.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked with weary patience.

“Come back. Don’t be angry. Forget what I said.”

She began to cry, shielding her face with one hand, the other still holding him by the sleeve.

He sighed, and glancing up, saw me. I expected him to drive me forth with one fierce look. Instead he made a slight grimace and reentered the room, she holding to his sleeve. He dropped heavily on the piano stool and she on the chair opposite, her hands in her lap, two lines of tears on her cheeks. Neither said a word.

The way was clear and I flew out with the wild rush of a bird escaping from a snare. As I ran down the stairs the silence of that room, four walls enclosing a tumult of warring passions, followed me.

It’s midnight and I haven’t got over the ugliness of it. What am I to think? The thing many people would think, I won’t believe, I can’t believe. No one who knew her could. That the unfortunate creature loves him is past a doubt--but how can she? How can she humiliate herself so? Where is the pride that the rest of us have for a shield and buckler. Where is the self-respect? To cry--to let him see her cry, and then--that’s the _comble_, as the Paris art students say--to call him back!