Part 6

I feel sick, for I love her. If she hasn’t got a soul or temperament or any of the rest of it that they do so much talking about, she’s got something tucked away somewhere that’s good, that’s true. It looks at you out of her eyes, it speaks to you in her voice--and then Masters comes along and it’s gone.

I stopped here, and biting the end of my pen, looked gloomily at the wall and met the cold stare of my ancestors. I wonder what the men would have said if they had been there this afternoon. I’m not sure--men are men and Lizzie is beautiful. But about you ladies, I can make a guess. You would purse your mouths a little tighter and say, “Evelyn, you’re keeping queer company. Whatever you may think in your heart, drop her. That’s the wise course.” All but the French Huguenot lady, she’s got an understanding eye. She feels something that the others never felt, probably saw a little deeper into life and it softened the central spot.

No, my dears, you’re all wrong. You’re judging by appearances and fixed standards, which is something your descendant refuses to do. Go to sleep and try and wake up more humble and humane. Good night.

VIII

BETTY had the dinner for Mr. Albertson last night and of course I went, for Betty is like royalty, she doesn’t invite, she commands. In a brief telephone message she instructed me to wear my blue crêpe and I wore it. Before dinner, in her room, she eyed me critically and put a blue aigrette in my hair.

Mr. Albertson was a gallant Southerner with courtly manners and a large bald spot. We got on very nicely, though he did not exhibit that appreciation of my charms that marked the Idaho man from the moment of our meeting. If, however, he should develop it I have resolved to crush it by strategy. I don’t know just how yet--the only thing I can think of at present is to ask him to call and pretend I’m drunk like David Garrick. I’ll get a better idea if the necessity arises. I haven’t the courage to defy Betty twice.

Betty sent me home in the limousine, without the footman and the chow dog. It was a cold still night, the kind when the sky is a deep Prussian blue and all the lights have a fixed steady shine. As the car wheeled into Fifth Avenue and I sat looking out of the window, revolving schemes for the disenchanting of Mr. Albertson, I saw Roger walking by. Before I thought I had beckoned to him and struck on the front window for the chauffeur to stop. The car glided to the curb and Roger’s long black figure came running across the street.

“You!” he cried, “like a fairy princess with a feather in your hair. What ball are you coming from, Cinderella?”

As soon as he spoke I grew shy. Do the women who have ready tongues and the courage of their moods, realize the value of their gifts?

“I--I--it’s not a ball, it’s Betty Ferguson’s and she’s sending me home.”

“All right.” He said something to the chauffeur, stepped in and the car started. “What a piece of luck. I was coming from a deadly dinner and going to a deadly club. What inspired you to hail me?”

Nothing did, or something did that I couldn’t explain. I felt round for an answer and produced the first that came.

“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Go ahead.” He pulled the rug over me. “It’s a nipping cold night abroad. Let’s hear what it was you wanted to talk about.”

For a moment I thought of telling him of Lizzie Harris and Mr. Masters, then I knew that wouldn’t do. Lizzie’s secrets were my secrets. I had to tell him something and in my embarrassment I told him the first thing that came into my head.

“Betty asked me to dinner to meet a man from Georgia.”

As soon as I had said it I had a sick feeling that he might be wondering why I should stop him on Fifth Avenue at eleven o’clock of a winter’s night, to impart this piece of intelligence.

He received it with the dignity of a valuable communication.

“Did she? And what was he like?”

“Very charming. His name’s Albertson and he has cotton mills down there.”

“Must be a man of means.”

“I believe he is.”

It was very nice of Roger to take it so simply and naturally, but you can always rely on his manners. My embarrassment passed away. The auto sped out into the concentrated sparklings of Plaza Square, then swerved to the left, sweeping round the statue of Sherman led to victory by a long-limbed and resolute angel.

“We’re going the wrong way. What’s Nelson doing?” I raised a hand to rap on the window.

“I told him to take us through the park. Put your hand in your muff. Why did Betty ask you to meet Mr. What’s-his-name from Georgia?”

I know every tone of Roger’s voice, and the one he used to ask that question was chilly. Betty’s plans involved no secrecy, so I said, laughing:

“I think she’s trying to make a match.”

“Oh,” said Roger.

I had thought he would laugh with me, but in that brief monosyllable there was no amusement. It came with a falling note, and it seemed to be a sort of extinguisher on the conversation, a full stop at the end of it, for we both fell silent.

The auto swept up the drive, gray and smooth between gray trees. I could see a reach of deep blue sky with the stars looking big and close, as if they had come down a few billion miles and were looking us over with an impartial curiosity. Across the park the fronts of apartment-houses showed in gleaming tiers, far up into the night, their lights yellower than the stars. It was lovely to glide on, swiftly and smoothly, with the frost gripping the world in an icy clasp while we were warm and snug and so friendly that we could be silent.

“Isn’t this beautiful, Roger?” I said, looking out of the window. “Look on the other side of the park, hundreds of lights in hundreds of homes.”

Roger gave a sound that if I were a writer of realistic tendencies, I should call a grunt.

We met a hansom with the glass down, and on an ascending curve another auto swooping by with two great glaring lamps. I felt quite oddly happy; the menacing figure of Mr. Albertson became no more than a bogy. After all even Betty couldn’t drag me struggling to the altar.

“Why is Betty so anxious to marry you off?” came suddenly from the corner beside me.

Mr. Albertson assumed his original shape as a marriageable male with a bald spot and a cotton mill, and Betty slipped back into position. I wasn’t sure she couldn’t drag any one to the altar if she made up her mind to it. My voice showed the oppression of this thought.

“She thinks all women should be married.”

“You have been married.”

Something was the matter with Roger to say that.

“Well, she thinks I’m poor and lonely.”

“Are you?”

I began to have an uncomfortable, complicated feeling. Fear was in it, also exhilaration. It made me sit up stiffly, suddenly conscious of a sensation of trembling somewhere inside.

“I am poor,” I said, “that is, poor compared to people like Betty.”

“And lonely, too?”

The disturbance grew. It made me draw away from Roger, pressed close into my corner, as if no scrap or edge of my clothing must touch him. I was afraid that my voice would show it and determined that it mustn’t.

“I’m lonely sometimes. That rainy night when you came in unexpectedly I was.”

My voice _wasn’t_ all right. I cleared my throat and pretended to look at the stars.

Roger said nothing, but the secret subways of emotion that connect the spirits of those who are in close communion, told me he, too, was moved. The air in the closed scented car did not seem enough for natural breathing. It was like a pressure, something that put your heart-beats out of tune, and made your lips open with a noiseless gasp. I stood it as long as I could and then words burst out of me. They came anyway, ridiculous words when I write them down:

“But I’ll never marry any of them. No matter what they are, or what Betty wants, or how many of them she has up to dinner.”

The pressure was lifted and I sank back trembling. It was as if I had been under water and come up again into the air. The spiritual telegraph told me that Roger felt as I did, and that suddenly he or I or both of us, had broken down a barrier. It was swept away and we were close together--closer than the night when we had held hands and forgotten where we were, closer than we’d ever been in all the years we’d known each other. It was not necessary to say anything. In our several corners we sat silent, understanding for the first time, I and the man I loved.

The sharp landscape slid by us, naked trees, spotted lines of light, stretches of lawn grizzled with frost, woodland depths with the shine of ice about the tree roots, and then the flash of glassy ponds.

We sat as still as if we were dead, as if our souls had come out of our bodies and were whispering. It was a wonderful moment of time, one of the unforgetable moments that dot the long material years. All that’s gone before and all that’s going to come dies away and there’s only the present--the beautiful exquisite present. We only have a few like that in our lives.

It lasted till the auto drew up at my door. We said good night and parted.

Up in my room I sat a long time by the fire thinking of the hundreds of women like myself, the disillusioned ones, in the dark dens of tenements and in the splendid homes near by. I tried to send them messages through the night, telling them we could rise out of the depths. I saw life as it really is, hills and valleys, patches of blackness and then light, but always with an unresting force flowing beneath, the immortal thing that urges and upholds and makes it all possible. I remembered words I used to work on bits of perforated board when I was a little girl, “God is Love.” I never understood what it meant, even when I stopped working it on perforated board and grew to the reasoning stage. To-night I knew--got at last what a happy child might understand--love in the heart was God with us, come back to us again.

IX

YESTERDAY was the concert day and I couldn’t go--a bad cold. The house lamented from all its floors, for it was going en masse, even the trained nurse with a usurped right to the sun-dial.

The only way I could add to the festivity of the occasion was to distribute my possessions among that section of the audience drawn from Mrs. Bushey’s light housekeeping apartments. It began with the Signorita Bonaventura, who wore my mother’s diamond pendant, then went down the line:-- Miss Gorringe my green satin (she said it would be horribly unbecoming, but the audience wouldn’t notice her), Miss Bliss my black lynx furs, Mrs. Phillips, the nurse, my evening cloak, Mr. Hazard my opera glasses, Mr. Weatherby my umbrella--his had a broken rib and it looked like snow. We were afraid the count couldn’t find anything suitable to his age and sex, but he emptied my bottle of Coty’s Jacqueminot on his handkerchief and left, scented like a florist’s. Mrs. Bushey came last and gleaned the field, a gold bracelet, a marabou stole and a lace handkerchief she swore she wouldn’t use.

Much noise accompanied the passage of the day and some threatening mishaps. At eleven we heard Berwick was hoarse, but at one (by telephone through my room) that raw eggs and massage were restoring him. At midday Miss Gorringe sent a frantic message that the sash of the green satin wasn’t in the box. Gloom settled at two with a bulletin that Mrs. Stregazzi’s second child had croup. It was better at five. Mr. Hazard’s dress suit smelled so of moth balls that the prima donna said it would taint the air, and Emma, the maid, hung it out on the sacred sun-dial. There was a battle over this. For fifteen minutes it raged up two flights of stairs, then Mr. Hazard conquered and the sun-dial was draped in black broadcloth.

At intervals Lizzie came down to see me and use the telephone. She was in her most aloof mood, forbidding, self-absorbed. On one of her appearances she found a group of us congregated about my steam kettle. Our chatter died away before her rapt and unresponsive eye. Even I, who was used to it, felt myself fading like a photographic proof in a too brilliant sun. As for the others they looked small and frightened, like mice in the presence of a well-fed lioness, who, though she might not want to eat them, was still a lioness. They breathed deep and unlimbered when the door shut on her.

In the late afternoon Roger came to see me. He brought a bunch of violets and a breath of winter into my bright little room. The threatening snow had begun to fall, lodging delicately on eaves and ledges, a scurry of tiny particles against the light of street-lamps. We stood in the window and watched it, trimming the house-fronts with white, carpeting the steps, spreading a blanket ever so softly and deftly over the tin roof. How different to the rain, the insistent ruthless rain. The night when the rain fell came back to me. How different that was from to-night!

There was a hubbub of voices from the hall and then a knock. They were coming to see me before they left. They entered, streaming in, grubs turned to butterflies. The house was going cheaply in cars over the bridge; only the prima donna and Miss Gorringe were to travel aristocratically in a cab.

Strong scents from the count’s Jacqueminot mingled with the faint odor of moth balls that Mr. Hazard’s dress suit still harbored. Miss Gorringe had rouged a little and the green satin was quite becoming. Miss Bliss had rouged a good deal and had had her hair marcelled. In the doorway the trained nurse hung back, sniffing contemptuously at Mr. Hazard’s back. Mrs. Bushey, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Weatherby grouped themselves by the fireplace.

“Where’s the prima donna?” I asked.

“Coming,” cried a voice from the stairs, and the air was filled with silken rustlings.

It was like an entrance on the stage, up the passage and between the watching people, and I don’t think any actress could have done it with more aplomb. In her evening dress she was truly superb--a goddess of a woman with her black hair in lusterless coils and her neck and shoulders as white as curds. Upon that satiny bosom my mother’s pendant rose and fell to even breathings. Whatever anybody else may have felt, the star of the occasion was calm and confident.

Her appearance had so much of the theatrical that it must have made us suddenly see her as the professional, the legitimate object of glances and comments. Nothing else could explain why I--a person of restrained enthusiasms--should have broken into bald compliments. She took them with no more self-consciousness than a performing animal takes the gallery’s applause, smiled slightly, then looked at Roger, the stranger. I did so, too, childishly anxious to see if he admired my protégée. He evidently did, for he was staring with the rest of them, intent, astonished.

Her glance appeared to gather up his tribute as her hands might have gathered flowers thrown to her. He was one of the watching thousands that it was her business to enthrall, his face one of the countless faces that were to gaze up at her from tier upon tier of seats.

When the door shut on the last of them, laughter and good nights diminishing down the stairs, he turned to me with an air that was at once bewildered and accusing.

“Why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me she was so good-looking?”

“I did and you wouldn’t believe me,” I answered gaily, for I was greatly pleased. It was a little triumph over Roger with his hypercritical taste and his rare approvals.

The next morning I waited anxiously for news. I thought Lizzie would be down early, but the others came before her, dropping in as the morning wore away. With each entrance I grew more uneasy.

Mr. Hazard was first, in a gray sweater.

“Well, she looked great. I wish I could have painted her that way. But--” he tilted his head, his expression grown dubious. “You know, Mrs. Drake, I don’t know one tune from another--but--”

“But what?” I said sharply.

“Well, it seemed to me Berwick got away with it.”

“Do you mean the audience liked him better?”

He nodded, a grave agreeing eye on me.

“He got them when he sang that thing about _The Three Grenadiers_. It made your heart swell up.”

He leaned nearer, lowering his voice. “And he got them in that German duet, too.”

He drew back and nodded again darkly, as if wishing me to catch a meaning too direful for words.

An hour later Miss Bliss blew in in a blue flannel jacket and the remnants of her marcelle wave. By contrast with her flushed and blooming appearance of the evening before, she looked pinched and pallid. She cowered over the fire, stretching her little chapped hands to the blaze and presenting a narrow humped back to my gaze.

“She didn’t seem to catch on some way or other. I don’t know why but--”

She stopped and leaned forward for the poker.

“But what?”

“Well--” She poked the fire, the edge of the flannel jacket hitched up by the movement, showing a section of corset laced with the golden string that confines candy boxes. “She doesn’t give you any thrill. I’ve heard people without half so much voice who could make the tears come into your eyes. I tell you what, Mrs. Drake,” she turned round with the poker uplifted in emphasis, “_I_ wouldn’t spend _my_ good money to hear a woman sing that way. If I shell out one-fifty I want to get a thrill.”

She was still there when the count came in. He sat between us gently rocking and eying her with a pensive stare. She pulled down her jacket and patted solicitously at the remains of her marcelle.

“She looked,” said the count, pausing in his rocking, “she looked like a queen.”

“Good gracious,” I cried crossly, “_do_ drop her looks. I saw her.”

The count, unmoved by my irritation, answered mildly:

“One can’t drop them so easily.”

“But her singing, her performance?”

“Her performance,” murmured the young man, and appeared to look through Miss Bliss at a distant prospect. “It was good, but--”

I had to restrain myself from screaming, “But what?”

“It was not so good as she is, had none of the--what shall I say--_air noble_ that she has.” He screwed up his eyes as if projecting his vision not only through Miss Bliss, but through all intervening objects to a realm of pure criticism. “It has a bourgeois quality, no distinction, no imagination, and she--” Words were inadequate and he finished the sentence with a shrug.

Miss Bliss leaned forward and poked the fire, once more revealing the golden string. The count looked at it with a faint arrested interest. I was depressed, but conventions are instinctive, and I said sternly:

“Miss Bliss, let the count poke the fire.”

The count poked and Miss Bliss slipped to the floor, and sitting cross-legged, comfortably warmed her back.

The count was gone when Mrs. Bushey entered. Mrs. Bushey says she understands music even as she does physical culture.

“It was a frost,” she explained, dropping on the end of the sofa.

“I know that,” I answered, “the paper this morning said the thermometer was twenty-two degrees.”

“Not that kind of a frost, a theatrical frost for her. She hasn’t got the quality.”

“No thrill,” murmured Miss Bliss, and no men being present, stretched out her feet and legs in worn slippers and threadbare stockings to the blaze.

I fought against my depression--Mrs. Bushey did not like Bonaventura.

“She hasn’t got the equipment,” said Mrs. Bushey with a sagacious air. Her eye roamed about the room and lighted on Miss Bliss’ legs. “_Are_ you cold?” she asked, as if amazed.

“Frozen,” answered Miss Bliss crossly.

“How can that be possible when I’ve done everything to make your room warm, spent all my winter earnings on coal?”

Miss Bliss cocked up her chin and replied:

“You must have had very poor business this winter.” Then to me very pointedly: “I wanted to ask you, Mrs. Drake, if you’d lend me your Navajo blanket, just for a few nights. It would look so bad for the house if I was found frozen to death in bed some morning.”

I agreed with alarmed haste, but Mrs. Bushey did not seem inclined for war. She smiled, murmuring, “Poor girl, you’re anemic,” and then, her eye lighting on Marie Antoinette’s mirror:

“Yes, Miss Harris’ll never get anywhere till she gets some color into her voice. It’s the coldest organ I ever heard. Would you mind if I took that mirror away? I have a new lodger, a delightful woman from Philadelphia, and I’ve no mirror for her--I can’t, I literally _can’t_, buy one with my finances the way they are. I suppose after this failure Miss Harris’ll be late with her rent.”

Thus Mrs. Bushey. When she had gone--taking the mirror--Miss Bliss lay flat before the fire and reviled her.

Miss Gorringe came next with the green satin dress. It was upon Miss Gorringe I was pinning my hopes. None of the others knew anything. Miss Gorringe, lifting out the dress with cold and careful hands, looked solemn:

“No, I can’t say it was a success. I’d like to because she’s certainly one of the most lovely people I’ve ever played for, but--” She depressed the corners of her mouth and slowly shook her head.

I sat up in my shawls and did scream:

“But what?”

Miss Gorringe, used to the eccentricities of artists, was unmoved by my violence. She placed the dress carefully over the back of a chair.

“She doesn’t get over,” she said.

“Get over what?”

I had heard this cryptic phrase before, but didn’t know what it meant.

“The footlights--across, into the audience. And she ought to, but they were as cold as frogs till Berwick woke them up with _The Three Grenadiers_. _He_ can do it. He hasn’t got any better voice or method but,” she gave a little ecstatic gesture, “temperament--oh, my!”

“Has she got no temperament at all?” I asked.

“I’ve never played for anybody who had less.” Miss Gorringe held up the green scarf. “Here’s the sash.”

“Not a bit of thrill,” Miss Bliss chanted, prone before the fire.

“Can’t a person get temperament, learn it in some way?”

Miss Gorringe pondered:

“They can teach them rôles, hammer it into them. When a person’s got the looks she has they sometimes do it. But I guess they’ve done all they can for her. She’s been with Vignorol for two years. He wouldn’t have taken her unless he thought there was something in it. And John Masters has been training her besides, and I’ve heard people say there’s no one better than Masters for that. You see they can teach her how to walk and stand and make gestures, but they can’t put the thing into her head or her voice. She doesn’t seem to understand, she doesn’t feel.”

I was silent. She did feel, I knew it, I’d seen it. There was some queer lack of coordination between her power to feel and her power to express.

Miss Gorringe administered the coup de grâce.

“She sang the duet from _The Valkyrie_ as if she was telling Siegmund to put on his hat and come to supper.”

“It’s imagination,” I said.

“It’s temperament,” Miss Gorringe corrected. “And without it, the way she is, she’d better go in for church singing, or oratorio, or even teaching.”

The dusk was gathering and I was alone when she came down. She threw herself into the wicker chair beside my sofa. Her face looked thinner and two slight lines showed round her mouth.

“Well?” I said, investing my voice with a fictitious lightness. “Where have you been all day?”

“I’m tired or I’d have been down earlier. Have you seen the others?”

With her deadly directness she had gone straight to the point I dreaded.

“Yes, they’ve been in.”

“Did they like it?”

One of the most formidable things about this woman is the way she keeps placing you in positions where you must either lie and lose your self-respect or tell the truth and incur her sudden and alarming anger. I was not afraid of that now, but I couldn’t hurt her. I tried to find a sentence that would be as truthful and painless as the circumstances permitted. The search took a moment.

“They didn’t,” she answered for me.

She turned her face to the window and drummed on the chair-arm with her fingers, then said defiantly:

“They don’t know anything.”