[Illustration: (A pile of ties and a small vial)]
I
Ten years after that visit to New York I happened to be in a
sprawling overgrown West-coast city which was in the throes of rapid
development--it ran about the shore, stumbling all over itself and
finally tumbled untidily into the sea. Every hotel and boarding-house
was overcrowded, and I was very poor. Things had gone badly with my
family and with me. I had come West in the middle of the year to take
a position in a college--a college that was as experimental and
unsubstantial as everything else in the place. I found lodgings in
an apartment-hotel, wretchedly built and already falling to pieces,
although it was new. I moved in on a Sunday morning, and while I was
unpacking my trunk, I heard, through the thin walls, my neighbour
stirring about; a man, and, from the huskiness of his cough and
something measured in his movements, not a young man. The caution of
his step, the guarded consideration of his activities, let me know
that he did not wish to thrust the details of his housekeeping upon
other people any more than he could help.
Presently I detected the ugly smell of gasolene in the air, heard a
sound of silk being snapped and shaken, and then a voice humming very
low an old German air--yes, Schubert’s _Frühlingsglaube_; ta ta te-ta
| ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta | ta. In a moment I saw the ends of dark neckties
fluttering out of the window next mine.
All this made me melancholy--more than the dreariness of my own case.
I was young, and it didn’t matter so much about me; for youth there
is always the hope, the certainty, of better things. But an old man,
a gentleman, living in this shabby, comfortless place, cleaning his
neckties of a Sunday morning and humming to himself ... it depressed
me unreasonably. I was glad when his outer door shut softly and I
heard no more of him.
There was an indifferent restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel.
As I was going down to my dinner that evening, I met, at the head
of the stairs, a man coming up and carrying a large black tin tray.
His head was bent, and his eyes were lowered. As he drew aside to
let me pass, in spite of his thin white hair and stooped shoulders,
I recognised Oswald Henshawe, whom I had not seen for so many
years--not, indeed, since that afternoon when he took me to see Sarah
Bernhardt play _Hamlet_.
When I called his name he started, looked at me, and rested the tray
on the sill of the blindless window that lighted the naked stairway.
“Nellie! Nellie Birdseye! Can it be?”
His voice was quite uncertain. He seemed deeply shaken, and pulled
out a handkerchief to wipe his forehead. “But, Nellie, you have grown
up! I would not know you. What good fortune for Myra! She will hardly
believe it when I tell her. She is ill, my poor Myra. Oh, very ill!
But we must not speak of that, nor seem to know it. What it will mean
to her to see you again! Her friends always were so much to her,
you remember? Will you stop and see us as you come up? Her room is
thirty-two; rap gently, and I’ll be waiting for you. Now I must take
her dinner. Oh, I hope for her sake you are staying some time. She
has no one here.”
He took up the tray and went softly along the uncarpeted hall.
I felt little zest for the canned vegetables and hard meat the
waitress put before me. I had known that the Henshawes had come on
evil days, and were wandering about among the cities of the Pacific
coast. But Myra had stopped writing to Aunt Lydia, beyond a word of
greeting at Christmas and on her birthday. She had ceased to give
us any information about their way of life. We knew that several
years after my memorable visit in New York, the railroad to whose
president Oswald had long been private secretary, was put into the
hands of a receiver, and the retiring president went abroad to live.
Henshawe had remained with the new management, but very soon the
road was taken over by one of the great trunk lines, and the office
staff was cut in two. In the reorganization Henshawe was offered a
small position, which he indignantly refused--his wife wouldn’t let
him think of accepting it. He went to San Francisco as manager of a
commission house; the business failed, and what had happened to them
since I did not know.
I lingered long over my dismal dinner. I had not the courage to
go up-stairs. Henshawe was not more than sixty, but he looked much
older. He had the tired, tired face of one who has utterly lost hope.
Oswald had got his wife up out of bed to receive me. When I entered
she was sitting in a wheel-chair by an open window, wrapped in a
Chinese dressing-gown, with a bright shawl over her feet. She threw
out both arms to me, and as she hugged me, flashed into her old gay
laugh.
“Now wasn’t it clever of you to find us, Nellie? And we so safely
hidden--in earth, like a pair of old foxes! But it was in the cards
that we should meet again. Now I understand; a wise woman has been
coming to read my fortune for me, and the queen of hearts has been
coming up out of the pack when she had no business to; a beloved
friend coming out of the past. Well, Nellie, dear, I couldn’t
think of any old friends that weren’t better away, for one reason
or another, while we are in temporary eclipse. I gain strength
faster if I haven’t people on my mind. But you, Nellie ... that’s
different.” She put my two hands to her cheeks, making a frame
for her face. “That’s different. Somebody young, and clear-eyed,
chock-full of opinions, and without a past. But you may have a past,
already? The darkest ones come early.”
I was delighted. She was ... she was herself, Myra Henshawe! I
hadn’t expected anything so good. The electric bulbs in the room
were shrouded and muffled with coloured scarfs, and in that light
she looked much less changed than Oswald. The corners of her mouth
had relaxed a little, but they could still curl very scornfully
upon occasion; her nose was the same sniffy little nose, with its
restless, arched nostrils, and her double chin, though softer, was no
fuller. A strong cable of grey-black hair was wound on the top of her
head, which, as she once remarked, “was no head for a woman at all,
but would have graced one of the wickedest of the Roman emperors.”
Her bed was in the alcove behind her. In the shadowy dimness of the
room I recognised some of the rugs from their New York apartment,
some of the old pictures, with frames peeling and glass cracked. Here
was Myra’s little inlaid tea-table, and the desk at which Oswald had
been writing that day when I dropped in upon their quarrel. At the
windows were the dear, plum-coloured curtains, their cream lining
streaked and faded--but the sight of them rejoiced me more than I
could tell the Henshawes.
“And where did you come from, Nellie? What are you doing here, in
heaven’s name?”
While I explained myself she listened intently, holding my wrist
with one of her beautiful little hands, which were so inexplicably
mischievous in their outline, and which, I noticed, were still white
and well cared for.
“Ah, but teaching, Nellie! I don’t like that, not even for a
temporary expedient. It’s a cul-de-sac. Generous young people use
themselves all up at it; they have no sense. Only the stupid and the
phlegmatic should teach.”
“But won’t you allow me, too, a temporary eclipse?”
She laughed and squeezed my hand. “Ah, _we_ wouldn’t be hiding in
the shadow, if we were five-and-twenty! We were throwing off sparks
like a pair of shooting stars, weren’t we, Oswald? No, I can’t bear
teaching for you, Nellie. Why not journalism? You could always make
your way easily there.”
“Because I hate journalism. I know what I want to do, and I’ll work
my way out yet, if only you’ll give me time.”
“Very well, dear.” She sighed. “But I’m ambitious for you. I’ve no
patience with young people when they drift. I wish I could live their
lives for them; I’d know how! But there it is; by the time you’ve
learned the short cuts, your feet puff up so that you can’t take the
road at all. Now tell me about your mother and my Lydia.”
I had hardly begun when she lifted one finger and sniffed the air.
“Do you get it? That bitter smell of the sea? It’s apt to come
in on the night wind. I live on it. Sometimes I can still take a
drive along the shore. Go on; you say that Lydia and your mother
are at present in disputation about the possession of your late
grandfather’s portrait. Why don’t you cut it in two for them, Nellie?
I remember it perfectly, and half of it would be enough for anybody!”
While I told her any amusing gossip I could remember about my family,
she sat crippled but powerful in her brilliant wrappings. She looked
strong and broken, generous and tyrannical, a witty and rather
wicked old woman, who hated life for its defeats, and loved it for
its absurdities. I recalled her angry laugh, and how she had always
greeted shock or sorrow with that dry, exultant chuckle which seemed
to say: “Ah-ha, I have one more piece of evidence, one more, against
the hideous injustice God permits in this world!”
While we were talking, the silence of the strangely balmy February
evening was rudely disturbed by the sound of doors slamming and heavy
tramping overhead. Mrs. Henshawe winced, a look of apprehension and
helplessness, a tortured expression, came over her face. She turned
sharply to her husband, who was resting peacefully in one of their
old, deep chairs, over by the muffled light. “There they are, those
animals!”
He sat up. “They have just come back from church,” he said in a
troubled voice.
“Why should I have to know when they come back from church? Why
should I have the details of their stupid, messy existence thrust
upon me all day long, and half the night?” she broke out bitterly.
Her features became tense, as from an attack of pain, and I realised
how unable she was to bear things.
“We are unfortunate in the people who live over us,” Oswald
explained. “They annoy us a great deal. These new houses are poorly
built, and every sound carries.”
“Couldn’t you ask them to walk more quietly?” I suggested.
He smiled and shook his head. “We have, but it seems to make them
worse. They are that kind of people.”
His wife broke in. “The palavery kind of Southerners; all that slushy
gush on the surface, and no sensibilities whatever--a race without
consonants and without delicacy. They tramp up there all day long
like cattle. The stalled ox would have trod softer. Their energy
isn’t worth anything, so they use it up gabbling and running about,
beating my brains into a jelly.”
She had scarcely stopped for breath when I heard a telephone ring
overhead, then shrieks of laughter, and two people ran across the
floor as if they were running a foot-race.
“You hear?” Mrs. Henshawe looked at me triumphantly. “Those two silly
old hens race each other to the telephone as if they had a sweetheart
at the other end of it. While I could still climb stairs, I hobbled
up to that woman and implored her, and she began gushing about ‘mah
sistah’ and ‘mah son,’ and what ‘rahfined’ people they were.... Oh,
that’s the cruelty of being poor; it leaves you at the mercy of such
pigs! Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some
sort of dignity.” She leaned back, exhausted, and shut her eyes.
“Come, Nellie,” said Oswald, softly. He walked down the hall to
my door with me. “I’m sorry the disturbance began while you were
there. Sometimes they go to the movies, and stay out later,” he said
mournfully. “I’ve talked to that woman and to her son, but they are
very unfeeling people.”
“But wouldn’t the management interfere in a case of sickness?”
Again he shook his head. “No, they pay a higher rent than we
do--occupy more rooms. And we are somewhat under obligation to the
management.”
[Illustration: (A tree with the sea in the distance)]