Part 7

“Of course they don’t,” I cried. “An Italian count, an artist, a model, a woman who rents floors.”

Her eye fell on the green dress.

“Miss Gorringe has been here.”

I nodded.

“What did _she_ say?”

I got cold under my wrappings. Had I the courage to tell her? She looked at me and gave a slight wry smile.

“Did she tell you that Berwick got away with it?”

“Some one did. I think it was Mr. Hazard, but he’s a painter and--”

She interrupted roughly.

“That’s nothing--a big bawling voice singing popular songs. If they’d let me sing _Oh, Promise Me_ I’d have had the whole house.”

For the first time in my experience of her I saw she was not open with herself. I knew that she had realized her failure and refused to admit it. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, frowning, haggard and miserable.

“I’ll get the notices to-morrow,” she said in a low voice.

It was horribly pitiful. There would be no friendly deception about the notices.

“Vignorol’s arranged for several good men to go. He wanted their opinions. They’ll give me a fine notice on _The Valkyrie_ duet.”

“Did that go well?” I asked just for something to say.

“Oh, splendidly,” she answered, without looking up. “It’s one of the things I do best.”

The room was getting dim and I was thankful for it. The dusk hid the drooping and discouraged face, but it could not shut out the voice with its desperate pretense. It was worse than the face.

“Well,” she said suddenly, straightening up, “I’ll see Masters to-morrow. He’s coming to bring me the notices.”

There was fear in the voice. I knew what the interview with Masters would be, and she knew, too. In a moment of insight I saw that she had been fighting against her dread all day, had come down to me for courage, was trying now to draw it from my chill and depressing presence. It was like a child afraid of the dark, hanging about in terror and unwilling to voice its alarm.

I sat up, throwing off my wraps and laid my hand on hers.

“Lizzie, don’t mind what he says.”

Her hand was cold under mine.

“He knows,” she answered almost in a whisper, “he _knows_.”

“I can get backers for you”--it was rash, but I know how to manage Betty--“better than he ever was, the best kind of backers.”

She jerked her hand away and glared at me.

“What do you mean by that? Do you think he’s going to give me up? Why, you must be crazy.” She jumped to her feet looking down at me with a face of savage anger. “Do you think I haven’t made good? Have they,” with a violent gesture to the door, “told you so? They’re fools, idiots, imbeciles. Masters give me up--ah--” She turned away and then back. “Why he’s never had any one with such promise as I have. He’s banking on me. I’m going to bring him to the top. He borrowed the money to send me to Vignorol. Throw me down now, just when I’m getting there, just when I’m proving he was right? Oh, I can’t talk to you. You’ve no sense. You’re as big a fool as all the rest.”

And she rushed out of the room, banging the door till the whole apartment shook.

I lay thinking about it till Emma came to get me my supper. She was right in one thing--I _was_ a fool. In my blundering attempt at encouragement I had gone straight to the heart of her fear, dragged it out into the light, held up in front of her the thing she was trying not to see--that Masters would give her up. Fool--it was a mild name for me. And _poor_ Lizzie--tragic Bonaventura!

It’s night again and I am dressed in my best with a fur cloak on to keep off the chill. I’ve got to write, not a sudden visitation of the Muse, but to ease my mind. If you haven’t got a sympathetic pair of ears to pour your troubles into, pouring them out on paper is the next best thing.

It’s two days since I have seen Lizzie. Yesterday I was in my room all day nursing my cold and expecting her, but she didn’t come. Neither did she to-day, and all I could surmise was that she was angry with me for being a fool. As I feel I was one and yet don’t like to hear it from other people, I made no effort to get into communication with her.

This evening I was well enough to go out in a cab with all my furs and a foot warmer, to dine with Roger’s widowed sister, Mrs. Ashworth. I was a good deal fluttered over the dinner, guessed why it had been arranged. It was a small affair, the Fergusons, Roger and I. Preceded by a call from Mrs. Ashworth, it had a meaningful aspect, a delicate suggestion of welcoming me into the family. I blush as I write it. I don’t know why I should, or why love and marriage are matters surrounded by self-consciousness and shame. Who was it explained the embarrassment of lovers, their tendency to hide themselves in corners, as an instinctive sense of guilt at the prospect of bringing children into a miserable world? I think it was Schopenhauer. Sounds like him--cross-grained old misanthrope.

Mrs. Ashworth is Roger’s only near relation and he regards her as the choicest flower of womanhood. I don’t wonder. In her way she is a finished product, no raw edges, no loose ends. Everything is in harmony--her thin faintly-lined face, her silky white hair, her pale hands with slightly prominent veins, her voice with its gentle modulations. Nothing cheap or second rate could exist near her. She wouldn’t stamp them out--I can’t imagine her stamping--they would simply wither in the rarified atmosphere. Her friends are like herself, her house is like herself. When I go there I feel strident and coarse. As I enter the portal I instinctively tune my key lower, feel my high lights fading, undergo a refining and subduing process as if a chromo were being transmuted into a Bartolozzi engraving.

As my cab crawled down-town--I need hardly say Mrs. Ashworth lives in a house on lower Fifth Avenue, built by her father--I uneasily wondered if the Bohemian atmosphere in which I dwelt had left any marks upon me. I tried to obliterate them and made mental notes of things I mustn’t mention. Memories of Miss Bliss’ golden corset string rose uneasily, and Lizzie Harris, and oh, Mr. Masters! I ended by achieving a sense of grievance against Mrs. Ashworth. No one had any right to be so refined. It was all very well if you inherited a social circle and large means, but-- The cab drew up with a jolt and I alighted. All unseemly exuberance died as the light from the door fell on me. I spoke so softly the driver had difficulty in hearing my order and when I walked up the steps I minced daintily.

But it was a delightful dinner. Harry and I were on one side, Betty and Roger on the other. At the foot of the table was Mrs. Ashworth’s son, Roger Clements Ashworth, a charming boy still at college. It was all perfectly done, nothing showy, nothing in the fashion. Betty’s pearls looked a good deal too large beside the modest string that Mrs. Ashworth wore, which was given to her great, great grandmother by Admiral Rochambeau. The dining-room walls were lined with portraits, with over the fireplace, that foundation stone of the family’s glory, Roger Clements, “The Signer.”

I thought of my apartment and my late associates and felt that I was leading a double life.

When I came home the house was very silent. Mounting the dim dirty stairs with the smell of dead dinners caught in the corners, I wondered how Mrs. Ashworth could countenance me. But after all, it was part of her fineness that she had no quarrel with the obscure and lowly. If she could not broaden the walls of her world--and you had only to talk to her ten minutes to see that she couldn’t--within those walls all was choice and lovely. I would have to live up to it, that was all.

I had got that far when I heard a heavy step and Mr. Masters loomed up on the flight above. The stairs are very narrow and I looked up smiling, expecting him to retreat. He came on, however, not returning my smile, staring straight before him with an immovable, brooding glance. I can’t say he didn’t see me, but he had the air of being so preoccupied that what his eye lighted on did not penetrate to his brain. As at our first meeting I received an impression of brutal strength, his broad shoulders seeming to push the walls back, his flat-topped head upheld on a neck like a gladiator. I intended asking him about the concert and the notices, but his look froze me, and I backed against the wall for him to pass.

As he brushed by he growled a word of greeting. He was in the hall below when I broke out of the consternation created by his manner, leaned over the rail and called down:

“Mr. Masters, how is Miss Harris?”

“All right,” he muttered without stopping or looking up and went on down the lower flight to the street.

They had had the interview.

The house was as silent as a tomb. I stole to the foot of the upper flight, looked up and listened. Not a sound. The rustling of my dress as I moved startled me. What _had_ he said to her? I couldn’t read his face--but his manner! I wavered and waited, the street noises coming muffled through the intense stillness. Then I decided I’d not intrude upon her, and came in here. Whatever happened she’ll tell me in her own good time, and the quietness up there is reassuring. Her anger is apt to take noisy forms. If she had been throwing oranges out of the window I would have heard her. But I do wish I might have seen her to-night.

X

I DIDN’T sleep well that night. The memory of Mr. Masters’ set sullen face kept me wakeful. At four I got up, lit the light and tried to read Kidd’s _Social Evolution_. Through the ceiling I could hear Mr. Hamilton’s subdued snoring on the floor above. It seemed like the deep and labored breathing of that submerged world whose upward struggle I was following through Mr. Kidd’s illuminating page.

After breakfast, when no sign or word had come from Lizzie, I decided to stay in till I heard from her. I dawdled through the morning and when Emma was cleaning up went out on the landing and listened. The upper floors were wrapt in quiet. I stole up a flight and a half and looked at her door--tight shut and not a sound. I went down again worried, though it was possible she had gone out and I not heard her. After lunch I opened the register and listened--complete silence. During the rest of the afternoon I sat waiting for her footfall. Dusk came and no woman had mounted the stairs. At seven a tap came at my door and Count Delcati pushed it open.

The count brought letters from the Italian aristocracy to its New York imitation and goes to entertainments that the rest of us read of in the papers. He was arrayed for festival and looked like an up-to-date French poster, a high-shouldered black figure with slender arms slightly bowed out at the elbows. His collar was very stiff, his shirt bosom a clear expanse of thick smooth white. He wore his silk hat back from his forehead, and his youthful yet sophisticated face, with its intense black eyes and dash of dark mustache, might have been looking at me from the walls of the Salon Independent.

He removed his hat, and standing in the doorway, said:

“Have you seen her to-day?”

“No,” I answered. “Have you?”

He shook his head.

“I think she must be away. When I came home at six I went up there and knocked, but there was no answer.”

There was nothing in this to increase my uneasiness. She came and went at all hours, often taking her dinner at what she called “little joints” in the lower reaches of the city. Nevertheless my uneasiness did increase, gripped hold of me as I looked at the young man’s gravely attentive face.

“Have you seen her since the concert?” he asked.

“Yes, the day after, when you were all in here.”

“She hadn’t seen the notices?”

I shook my head.

He leaned against the door-post and gazed at his patent leather shoes. As if with reluctance he said slowly:

“I have.”

“What were they like?”

“Rotten.”

He pronounced the word with the “r” strangled yet protesting, as if he had rolled his tongue round it, torn it from its place and put it away somewhere in the recesses of his throat.

“Oh, poor girl!” I moaned.

“That’s why I went up there. She must have seen them and I wished to assure her they were lies.”

“Did they say anything very awful?”

He shrugged.

“They spoke of her beauty--one said she had a good mezzo voice. But they were not kind to her, to Mr. Berwick, _very_.”

I said nothing, sunk in gloom.

The count picked up his fur-lined coat from the stair rail, and shook himself into it.

“I should wait to go to her when she comes in, but this _meeserable_ dinner, where I sit beside young girls who know nothing and married ladies who know too much--no mystery, no allure. But I must go--perhaps you?--” He looked at me tentatively over his fur collar.

“I’ll go up as soon as she comes in,” I answered. “If there’s anything I can do for her be assured I’ll do it.”

“You are a sweet lady,” said the count and departed.

After that I sat with the door open a crack waiting and listening. The hours ticked by. I heard Mr. Hamilton’s step on the street stairs, a knock at the Westerner’s door, and as it opened to him, a joyous clamor of greeting in which Miss Bliss’ little treble piped shrilly. Hazard was painting her and she spent most of her evenings in there with them. It was a good thing, they were decent fellows and their room was properly heated.

At intervals the sounds of their mirth came from below. The rest of the house was dumb. At eleven I could stand it no more and went up. If she wasn’t there I could light up the place for her--she rarely locked her door--and have it bright and warm.

It was dimly lighted and very still on the top floor, the gas-jet tipping the burner in a small pale point of light. I knocked and got no answer, then opened the door and went in. The room was dark, the window opposite a faint blue square. In the draft made by the opening door the gas shot up as if frightened, then sunk down, sending its thin gleam over the threshold. As I moved I bumped into the table and heard a thumping of something falling on the floor. I saw afterward it was oranges. I groped for matches, lighted the gas and looked about, then gave a jump and a startled exclamation. Lizzie Harris was lying on the sofa.

“Lizzie,” I cried sharply, angry from my fright, “why didn’t you say you were there?”

She made no sound or movement and seized by a wild fear, I ran to her. At the first glance I thought she was dead. She was as white as a china plate, lying flat on her back with her eyes shut, her hands clasped over her waist. I touched one of them and knew by the warmth she was alive. I clutched it, shaking it and crying:

“Lizzie, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”

She tried to withdraw it and turned her face away. The movement was feeble, suggesting an ebbing vitality. I thought of suicide, and in a panic looked about for glasses and vials. There was nothing of the kind near her. In my lightning survey I saw a scattering of newspaper cuttings on the table among the rest of the oranges.

“Have you taken anything, medicine, poison?” I cried in my terror.

“No,” she whispered. “Go away. Let me alone.”

I was sorry for her, but I was also angry. She had given me a horrible fright. Failure and criticism were hard to bear, but there was no sense taking them this way.

“What _is_ the matter then? What’s happened to make you like this?”

“Let me alone,” she repeated, and lifting one hand, held it palm upward over her face.

That something was wrong was indisputable, but I couldn’t do anything till I knew what it was. I put my fingers on the hand over her face and felt for her pulse. I don’t know why, for I haven’t the least idea how a pulse ought to beat. As it was I couldn’t find any beat at all and dropped her hand.

“I’ll have to get a doctor, I’ll call the man in the boarding house opposite.”

“Don’t,” she said in a voice which, for the first time, showed a note of life. “If you bring a doctor here I’ll go out in the street as I am.”

She was in the blue kimono. I didn’t know whether she had strength enough to move, but if she had I knew that she would do as she said and the night was freezing.

“I won’t call the doctor if you’ll tell me what’s happened to you?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said, and raising the hand from her face caught at my skirt. I bent down for her voice was very low, hardly more than a whisper.

“Masters has left me.”

“Left you,” I echoed, bewildered. “He was here last night. I saw him.”

Her eyes held mine.

“Left me for good,” she whispered, “forever.”

Any words that I might have had ready to brace up a discouraged spirit died away.

“What--what do you mean?” I faltered.

“He and I were lovers--lived together--you must have known it. He got tired of me--sick of me--he told me so himself--those very words. He said he was done with it all, the singing and me.” She turned her head away and looked at the wall. “I’ve been here ever since. I don’t know how long.”

I stood without moving, looking at her, and she seemed as dead to my presence as if she had really been the corpse I at first thought her. Presently I found myself putting a rug over her, settling it with careful hands as if it occupied my entire thoughts.

I do not exactly know what did occupy them. A sort of sick disgust permeated me, a deep overwhelming disgust of life. Everything was vile, the world, the people in it, the sordid dirt of their lives. I almost wished that I might die to be out of it all.

Then I sat down beside her. She lay turned to the wall, with the light of the one burner making long shadows in the folds of the rug. Her neck and cheek had the hard whiteness of marble, her hair, like a piece of black cloth, laid along them. The sickening feeling of repugnance persisted, stronger than any pity for her. I suppose it was the long reach of tradition, an inherited point of view, transmitted by those prim and buckramed ladies on my dining-room wall, and also perhaps that I had never known a woman, well, as a friend, who had done what Lizzie Harris had done. It was the first time in my life, which had moved so precisely in its prescribed groove, that I had ever taken to my heart, believed in, grieved over, loved and trusted a woman thus stained and fallen.

I will also add, for I am truthful with myself, that when I got up and went to her, all inclination to touch her, to console and comfort her, was gone. For those first few moments she was physically objectionable to me, as if she might have been covered with dirt. Yet I felt that I must look after her, had what I suppose you would call a sense of duty where she was concerned. I have always hated the phrase; to me it signifies a dry sterile thing, and it held me there because I would have been uncomfortable if I had gone. Is it the training women get in their youth that makes them like this, makes them only give their best when the object is worthy, as we ask only the people to dinner who can give us a good dinner back? I heard the sense of duty chill in my voice as I spoke to her.

“Have you had anything to eat since--that is, to-day?”

She did not answer. I bent farther over and looked at the profile with the eyes closed. They were sunken, as if by days of pain. I have seen a good many sick people in my life, but I had never seen any one so changed in so short a time. I gazed down at her and the appeal of that marred and anguished face suddenly broke through everything, stabbed down through the world’s armor into the human core. I tried to seize hold of her, to make my hands tell her, and cried out in the poor words that are our best:

“Oh, Lizzie, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for you.”

It was like taking hold of a dead body. Her arm fell from my hand an inert weight. Condemnation or condonement were all the same to her.

What was I to do? The clock marked midnight. The joyful sounds from below had ceased. I did not like to rouse the others, for, as far as I could see, she was in no immediate danger. She appeared to be in a condition of collapse, and I had never heard of any one dying of that. It was twenty-four hours since I had seen Masters on the stairs. She had had nothing to eat since then. Food was the best thing and I went into the kitchen to get some.

The top floor has what Miss Bliss calls “the bulge” on all others by having a small but complete kitchen. The gaslight showed it in a state of chaos, piles of plates waiting to be washed, the ice-box with opened door and a milk bottle overturned, some linen lying swathed and sodden over the edge of the laundry tub. I made a brew of tea and brought it to her, but one might as well have tried to make a statue drink. In answer to my pleadings she turned completely to the wall, moving one hand to the top of her head where it lay outstretched with spread fingers. In the faintly lighted room, in the creeping cold of a December midnight, that speechless woman with her open hand resting on her head, was the most tragic figure I have ever seen.

I took the tea back to the kitchen and washed the plates. Also I hunted over the place for any means of self-destruction that might be there. There were vials in the medicine closet that I stood in a row and inspected, emptying those I wasn’t sure about into the sink. As I worked I thought, sometimes pursuing a consecutive series of ideas, sometimes in disconnected jumps. It was revolutionary thinking, casting out old ideals, installing new ones. I was outside the limits within which I had heretofore ranged, was looking beyond the familiar horizon. In that untidy kitchen, sniffing at medicine bottles, I had glimpses far beyond the paths where I had left my little trail of footprints.

I didn’t know why she had given herself to Masters. Strange as it may sound, it did not then seem to me to matter. It was her affair, concern for her conscience, not mine. What was my concern was that I could not give my love and take it back. It went deeper than her passions and her weaknesses. It went below the surface of life, underlay the complicated web of conduct and action. It was the one thing that was sure amid the welter of shock and amaze.

And I understood Masters, was suddenly shifted into his place and saw his side. He had tried to make her understand and she wouldn’t, then on the straining tie that held them had dealt a savage blow, brought an impossible situation to the only possible end. I hated him, if she had been nothing to me I would have hated him. Shaking a bottle of collodion over the sink I muttered execrations on him, and as I muttered knew that I admired the brutal courage that had set them both free.

The dawn found me sitting by her frozen in mind and body. I had had time to think of what I should say to all inquiries: the failure of the concert, the blow to her hopes, had prostrated her. It was half true and quite plausible.

When the light was bright and the street awake I went out into the hall and waited. Miss Bliss was the first person I caught, coming up from the street door with a milk bottle. Her little face was full of sleep that dispersed under my urgent murmurings. She stepped inside the door and hailed tentatively:

“Hullo, Miss Harris.”

There was no answer and she ventured less buoyantly:

“Don’t you feel good, Miss Harris?”

The lack of response scared her, yet she stood fascinated like the street gamin eying the victim of an accident. She had seen enough to do what I wanted, and I took her by the arm and pulled her into the hall.

“She looks like she was dead,” she whispered, awed. “Would you think a big husky woman like that would take things so hard?”

I had prepared my lesson in the small hours and answered glibly:

“She’s not half so strong as you think and very sensitive, morbidly sensitive.”

“Um,” said Miss Bliss, “poor thing! I don’t see how if she was so sensitive, she could have stood that man Masters around so much.”