find themselves in pawn, and she moved among the trays like the
guardians of cemetery grounds, who carry about with them some of the
lugubrious stillness of the earth on which they have been standing.
She dealt, in most part, in cameos, garnets, and a great many inlaid
bracelets and cuff-links. There were a few watches however, and silver
vessels and fishing tackle and faded slippers—and when, at night, she
lit the lamp, these and the trays of precious and semi-precious stones,
and the little ivory crucifixes, one on either side of the window,
seemed to be leading a swift furtive life of their own, conscious of the
slow pacing woman who was known to the street as Lydia Passova.
No one knew her, not even her lover—a little nervous fellow, an
Englishman quick in speech with a marked accent, a round-faced youth
with a deep soft cleft in his chin, on which grew two separate tufts of
yellow hair. His eyes were wide and pale, and his eyeteeth prominent.
He dressed in tweeds, walked with the toes in, seemed sorrowful when not
talking, laughed a great deal and was nearly always to be found in the
café about four of an afternoon.
When he spoke it was quick and jerky. He had spent a great deal of his
time in Europe, especially the watering places—and had managed to get
himself in trouble in St. Moritz, it was said, with a well-connected
family.
He liked to seem a little eccentric and managed it simply enough while
in America. He wore no hat, and liked to be found reading the _London
Times_, under a park lamp at three in the morning.
Lydia Passova was never seen with him. She seldom left her shop,
however, she was always pleased when he wanted to go anywhere: “Go,” she
would say, kissing his hand, “and when you are tired come back.”
Sometimes she would make him cry. Turning around she would look at him a
little surprised, with lowered lids, and a light tightening of the
mouth.
“Yes,” he would say, “I know I’m trivial—well then, here I go, I will
leave you, not disturb you any longer!” and darting for the door he
would somehow end by weeping with his head buried in her lap.
She would say, “There, there—why are you so nervous?”
And he would laugh again: “My father was a nervous man, and my mother
was high-strung, and as for me——” He would not finish.
Sometimes he would talk to her for long hours, she seldom answering,
occupied with her magnifying glass and her rings, but in the end she was
sure to send him out with: “That’s all very true, I have no doubt; now
go out by yourself and think it over”—and he would go, with something
like relief, embracing her large hips with his small strong arms.
They had known each other a very short time, three or four months. He
had gone in to pawn his little gold ring, he was always in financial
straits, though his mother sent him five pounds a week; and examining
the ring, Lydia Passova had been so quiet, inevitable, necessary, that
it seemed as if he must have known her forever—“at some time,” as he
said.
Yet they had never grown together. They remained detached, and on her
part, quiet, preoccupied.
He never knew how much she liked him. She never told him; if he asked
she would look at him in that surprised manner, drawing her mouth
together.
In the beginning he had asked her a great many times, clinging to her,
and she moved about arranging her trays with a slight smile, and in the
end lowered her hand and stroked him gently.
He immediately became excited. “Let us dance,” he cried, “I have a great
capacity for happiness.”
“Yes, you are very happy,” she said.
“You understand, don’t you?” he asked abruptly.
“What?”
“That my tears are nothing, have no significance, they are just a
protective fluid—when I see anything happening that is about to affect
my happiness I cry, that’s all.”
“Yes,” Lydia Passova said, “I understand.” She turned around reaching up
to some shelves, and over her shoulder she asked, “Does it hurt?”
“No, it only frightens me. You never cry, do you?”
“No, I never cry.”
That was all. He never knew where she had come from, what her life had
been, if she had or had not been married, if she had or had not known
lovers; all that she would say was, “Well, you are with me, does that
tell you nothing?” and he had to answer, “No, it tells me nothing.”
When he was sitting in the café he often thought to himself, “There’s a
great woman”—and he was a little puzzled why he thought this because his
need of her was so entirely different from any need he seemed to
remember having possessed before.
There was no swagger in him about her, the swagger he had always felt
for his conquests with women. Yet there was not a trace of shame—he was
neither proud nor shy about Lydia Passova, he was something entirely
different. He could not have said himself what his feeling was—but it
was in no way disturbing.
People had, it is true, begun to tease him:
“You’re a devil with the ladies.”
Where this had made him proud, now it made him uneasy.
“Now, there’s a certain Lydia Passova for instance, who would ever have
thought——”
Furious he would rise.
“So, you do feel——”
He would walk away, stumbling a little among the chairs, putting his
hand on the back of every one on the way to the door.
Yet he could see that, in her time, Lydia Passova had been a “perverse”
woman—there was, about everything she did, an economy that must once
have been a very sensitive and a very sensuous impatience, and because
of this everyone who saw her felt a personal loss.
Sometimes, tormented, he would come running to her, stopping abruptly,
putting it to her this way:
“Somebody has said something to me.”
“When—where?”
“Now, in the café.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, a reproach——”
She would say:
“We are all, unfortunately, only what we are.”
She had a large and beautiful angora cat, it used to sit in the tray of
amethysts and opals and stare at her from very bright cold eyes. One day
it died, and calling her lover to her she said:
“Take her out and bury her.” And when he had buried her he came back,
his lips twitching.
“You loved that cat—this will be a great loss.”
“Have I a memory?” she inquired.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Well,” she said quietly, fixing her magnifying glass firmly in her eye.
“We have looked at each other, that is enough.”
And then one day she died.
The caretaker of the furnace came to him, where he was sipping his
liqueur as he talked to his cousin, a pretty little blond girl, who had
a boring and comfortably provincial life, and who was beginning to
chafe.
He got up, trembling, pale, and hurried out.
The police were there, and said they thought it had been heart failure.
She lay on the couch in the inner room. She was fully dressed, even to
her coral ornaments; her shoes were neatly tied—large bows of a ribbed
silk.
He looked down. Her small eyes were slightly open, the left, that had
used the magnifying glass, was slightly wider than the other. For a
minute she seemed quite natural. She had the look of one who is about to
say: “Sit beside me.”
Then he felt the change. It was in the peculiar heaviness of the
head—sensed through despair and not touch. The high breasts looked very
still, the hands were half closed, a little helpless, as in life—hands
that were too proud to “hold.” The drawn-up limb exposed a black
petticoat and a yellow stocking. It seemed that she had become hard—set,
as in a mould—that she rejected everything now, but in rejecting had
bruised him with a last terrible pressure. He moved and knelt down. He
shivered. He put his closed hands to his eyes. He could not weep.
She was an old woman, he could see that. The ceasing of that one thing
that she could still have for anyone made it simple and direct.
Something oppressed him, weighed him down, bent his shoulders, closed
his throat. He felt as one feels who has become conscious of passion for
the first time, in the presence of a relative.
He flung himself on his face, like a child.
That night, however, he wept, lying in bed, his knees drawn up.
SONG IN AUTUMN
The wind comes down before the creeping night
And you, my love, are hid within the green
Long grasses; and the dusk steals up between
Each leaf, as through the shadow quick with fright
The startled hare leaps up and out of sight.
The hedges whisper in their loaded boughs
Where warm birds slumber, pressing wing to wing,
All pulsing faintly, like a muted string
Above us where we weary of our vows—
And hidden underground the soft moles drowse.
[Illustration]
THE NIGGER
John Hardaway was dying. That wasn’t what he minded. His small,
well-shaped hands twitched at the soft coverlet which rose and fell
slowly with his breathing, and he breathed hard with mouth open, showing
all his teeth.
Rabb, the nigger, crouched in the corner. The air about her was heavy
with her odour. She kept blinking her eyes. She was awed at the presence
of her master, but ashamed too, ashamed that he was dying—ashamed as she
would have been had he been caught at his toilet.
Rabb was a good nigger; she had served John Hardaway’s mother, she had
seen her die—old Mrs. Hardaway fluttered against her lace like a bird
caught in deep foliage—Rabb had been able to do something about Mrs.
Hardaway’s death because Mrs. Hardaway had loved her, in her way.
Mrs. Hardaway had died understandably—she had breathed hard too, opening
her mouth, but it was gentle and eager, like a child at the breast.
Rabb had tried to be near her, had put her hands on her. But the thing
she was trying to touch lay in some hidden corner of Mrs. Hardaway, as a
cat hides away under a bed, and Rabb had done nothing after all.
But it was different with John Hardaway. She watched life playing
coquettishly with him. It played with him as a dog plays with an old
coat. It shook him suddenly in great gusts of merriment. It played with
his eyelids; it twisted his mouth, it went in and out of his body, like
a flame running through a funnel—throwing him utterly aside in the end,
leaving him cold, lonely, and forbidding.
John Hardaway hated negroes with that hate a master calls love. He was a
Southerner and never forgot it. Rabb had nursed him when he was an
infant, she had seen him grow up into a big boy, and then she had been
there when he broke his mistress’s back by some flaw in his otherwise
flawless passion.
From time to time John Hardaway called for water. And when Rabb tried to
lift his head, he cursed her for a ‘black bitch’—but in the end he had
to let her hold it.
John Hardaway was fifty-nine, he had lived well, scornfully, and this
always makes the end easier; he had been a gentleman in the only way a
Southerner has of being one—he never forgot that he was a Hardaway——
He called out to her now:
“When I die—leave the room.”
“Yes, sah,” she whispered sadly.
“Bring me the broth.”
She brought it trembling. She was very tired and very hungry, and she
wanted to whistle but she only whispered:
“Ain’t there nothing I kin do for you?”
“Open the window.”
“It’s night air, sah——”
“Open it, fool——”
She went to the window and opened it. She was handsome when she reached
up, and her nose was almost as excellent as certain Jewish noses; her
throat was smooth, and it throbbed.
Toward ten o’clock that night John Hardaway began to sing to himself. He
was fond of French, but what he learned in French he sang in English.
“Ah, my little one—I have held you on my knee——
“I have kissed your ears and throat——
“Now I set you down——
“You may do as you will.”
He tried to turn over—but failed, and so he lay there staring into the
fire.
At this point in the death of John Hardaway, Rabb, the nigger, came out
of her corner, and ceased trembling. She was hungry and began heating
some soup in a saucepan.
“What are you doing?” John Hardaway inquired abruptly.
“I’s hungry, sah.”
“Then get out of here—get into the kitchen.”
“Yes, sah,” but she did not move.
John Hardaway breathed heavily, a mist went over his eyes—presently,
after interminable years, he lifted his lids. Rabb was now slowly
sipping the steaming soup.
“You damned nigger!”
She got up from her haunches hurriedly—placing her hand in front of her,
backing toward the door.
“Little one, I have taken you on my knee——”
Rabb crept back—she came up to the bed.
“Massah, don’t you think——?”
“What?”
“A priest—maybe?”
“Fool!”
“Yes, sah, I only wanted to make safe.”
He tried to laugh. He pressed his knees together. He had forgotten her.
Finally toward dawn he began to wander.
Rabb moistened the roll of red flesh inside her lip and set her teeth.
She began to grin at nothing at all, stroking her hips.
He called to her.
“I want to tell you something.”
She came forward—rolling her eyes.
“Come closer.”
She came.
“Lean down!” She leaned down, but already the saliva began to fill her
mouth.
“Are you frightened?”
“No, sah,” she lied.
He raised his hand but it fell back, feebly. “Keep your place,” he
whispered, and instantly went to sleep.
He began to rattle in his throat, while Rabb crouched in the corner,
holding her breasts in her folded arms and rocking softly on the balls
of her feet.
The rattling kept on. Rabb began creeping toward him on hands and knees.
“Massah!”
He did not move.
“John!”
He felt a strange sensation—he lifted his eyelids with their fringe of
white lashes and almost inaudibly said:
“Now go!”
He had closed his eyes a long time, when he was troubled with the
thought that someone was trying to get into his body as he left it. He
opened his eyes and there stood Rabb the nigger very close, looking down
at him.
A gush of blood sprang from his nose.
“No, sah!”
He began to gasp. Rabb the nigger stood up to her full height and looked
down at him. She began to fan him, quickly. He breathed more hurriedly,
his chest falling together like a house of cards. He tried to speak, he
could not.
Suddenly Rabb bent down and leaning her mouth to his, breathed into him,
one great and powerful breath. His chest rose, he opened his eyes, said
“Ah!” and died.
Rabb ran her tongue along her lips, and raising her eyes, stared at a
spot on the wall a little higher than she was wont to. After a while she
remembered her unfinished soup.
LULLABY
When I was a young child I slept with a dog,
I lived without trouble and I thought no harm;
I ran with the boys and I played leap-frog;
Now it is a girl’s head that lies on my arm.
Then I grew a little, picked plantain in the yard;
Now I dwell in Greenwich, and the people do not call;
Then I planted pepper-seed and stamped on them hard.
Now I am very quiet and I hardly plan at all.
Then I pricked my finger on a thorn, or a thistle,
Put the finger in my mouth, and ran to my mother.
Now I lie here, with my eyes on a pistol.
There will be a morrow, and another, and another.
INDIAN SUMMER
At the age of fifty-three Madame Boliver was young again. She was
suddenly swept away in a mad current of reckless and beautiful youth.
What she had done with those years that had counted up into such a
perfect conclusion, she could not tell—it was a strange, vague dream.
She had been plain, almost ugly, shy, an old maid. She was tall and
awkward—she sat down as if she were going to break when she was in those
new years that girls call early bloom.
When she was thirty she had been frankly and astonishingly Yankee; she
came toward one with an erect and angular stride. She was severe, silent
and curious. It was probably due to this that she was called Madame. She
dressed in black outlined with white collar and cuffs, her hair was
drawn straight back and showed large lobed and pale ears. The tight
drawn hair exposed her features to that utter and unlovely nakedness
that some clean rooms are exposed to by the catching back of heavy and
melancholy curtains—she looked out upon life with that same unaccustomed
and expectant expression that best rooms wear when thrown open for the
one yearly festivity that proclaims their owners well to do.
She had no friends and could not keep acquaintances—her speech was
sharp, quick and truthful. She spoke seldom, but with such fierce
strictness and accuracy that those who came into contact with her once,
took precautions not to be thus exposed a second time.
She grew older steadily and without regret—long before the age of thirty
she had given up all expectations of a usual life or any hopes of that
called “unusual”; she walked in a straight path between the two, and she
was content and speculated little upon this thing in her that had made
her unloved and unlovely.
Her sisters had married and fallen away about her as blossoms are
carried off, leaving the stalk—their children came like bits of pollen
and she enjoyed them and was mildly happy. Once she, too, had dreamed of
love, but that was before she had attained to the age of seventeen—by
that time she knew that no one could or would ask for her hand—she was
plain and unattractive and she was satisfied.
She had become at once the drudge and the adviser—all things were laid
upon her both to solve and to produce. She laboured for others easily
and willingly and they let her labour.
At fifty-three she blazed into a riotous Indian Summer of loveliness.
She was tall and magnificent. She carried with her a flavour of some
exotic flower; she exhaled something that savoured of those excellences
of odour and tone akin to pain and to pleasure; she lent a plastic
embodiment to all hitherto unembodied things. She was like some rare
wood, carved into a melting form—she breathed abruptly as one who has
been dead for half a century.
Her face, it is true, was not that plump, downy and senseless
countenance of the early young—it was thin and dark and marked with a
few very sensitive wrinkles; about the mouth there were signs of a
humour she had never possessed, of a love she had never known, of a joy
she had never experienced and of a wisdom impossible for her to have
acquired. Her still, curious eyes with their blue-white borders and the
splendid irises were half veiled by strange dusty lids. The hair, that
had once been drawn back, was still drawn back, but no appallingly
severe features were laid bare. Instead the hair seemed to confer a
favour on all those who might look upon its restrained luxury, for it
uncovered a face at once valuable and unusual.
Her smile was rich in colour—the scarlet of her gums, the strange
whiteness of her teeth, the moisture of the sensitive mouth, all seemed
as if Madame Boliver were something dyed through with perfect and rare
life.
Now when she entered a room everyone paused, looking up and speaking
together. She was quite conscious of this and it pleased her—not because
she was too unutterably vain, but because it was so new and so
unexpected.
For a while her very youth satisfied her—she lived with herself as
though she were a second person who had been permitted access to the
presence of some lovely and some longed-for dream.
She did not know what to do. If she could have found religion newly with
her new youth she would have worshipped and have been profoundly glad of
the kneeling down and the rising up attendant with faith, but this was a
part of her old childhood and it did not serve.
She had prayed then because she was ugly; she could not pray now because
she was beautiful—she wanted something new to stand before, to speak to.
One by one the old and awkward things went, leaving in their wake
Venetian glass and bowls of onyx, silks, cushions and perfume. Her books
became magazines with quaint, unsurpassable and daring illustrations.
Presently she had a salon. She was the rage. Gentlemen in political
whiskers, pomaded and curled, left their coats in the embrace of pompous
and refined footmen.
Young students with boutonnières and ambitions came; an emissary or two
dropped in, proffered their hearts and departed. Poets and musicians,
littérateurs and artists experimenting in the modern, grouped themselves
about her mantels like butterflies over bonbons and poured sentiment
upon sentiment into her ears.
Several gentlemen of leisure and millions courted her furiously with
small tears in the corners of their alert eyes. Middle-aged professors
and one deacon were among the crowd that filled her handsome apartment
on those days when she entertained.
There was something about Madame Boliver that could not quite succumb to
herself. She was still afraid; she would start, draw her hand away and
pale abruptly in the middle of some ardent proposal—she would hurry to
the mirror at such times, though she never turned her head to look in.
Was it possible that she was beautiful now? And if so, would it remain?
And her heart said, “Yes, it will remain,” until at last she believed
it.
She put the past behind her and tried to forget it. It hurt her to
remember it, as if it were something that she had done in a moment of
absent-mindedness and of which she had to be ashamed. She remembered it
as one remembers some small wrong deed hidden for years. She thought
about her past unattractiveness as another would have thought of some
cruelty. Her eyes watered when she remembered her way of looking at
herself in her twenties. Her mouth trembled when she thought back to its
severity and its sharp retorts.
Her very body reproached her for all that had been forced upon it in her
other youth, and a strange passion came upon her, turning her memory of
her sisters into something at times like that hatred felt by the
oppressed who remember the oppression when it has given way to plenty.
But now she was free. She expanded, she sang, she dreamed for long
hours, her elbows upon the casement, looking out into the garden. She
smiled, remembering the old custom of serenading, and wondered when she,
too, would know it.
That she was fifty-three never troubled her. It never even occurred to
her. She had been fifty-three long ago at twenty, and now she was twenty
at fifty-three, that was all—this was compensation, and if she had been
through her middle age in youth she could go through her youth in middle
age.
At times she thought how much more beautiful nature is in its
treacheries than its remedies.
Those who hovered about her offered, time on time, to marry her, to
carry her away into Italy or to Spain, to lavish money and devotion on
her, and in the beginning she had been almost too ready to accept them
in their assurances, because the very assurances were so new and so
delightful.
But in spite of it she was, somewhere beneath her youth, old enough to
know that she did not love as she would love, and she waited with a
patience made pleasant by the constant attentions of the multitude.
And then Petkoff, “the Russian,” had come, accompanied by one of the
younger students.
A heavy fur cap came down to the borders of his squinting and piercing
eyes. He wore a mixture of clothing that proclaimed him at once foreign
and poor. His small moustache barely covered sensitive and well shaped
lips, and the little line of hair that reached down on each side of his
close-set ears gave him an early period expression as if he, too, in
spite of his few years, might have lived in the time when she was a
girl.
He could not have been much over thirty, perhaps just thirty—he said
little but never took his eyes off the object of his interest.
He spoke well enough, with an occasional lapse into Russian, which was
very piquant. He swept aside all other aspirants with his steady and
centred gaze. He ignored the rest of the company so completely as to rob
him of rudeness. If one is ignorant of the very presence of his fellow
beings, at most he can only be called “strange.”
Petkoff was both an ambitious and a self-centred man—all his qualities
were decisive and not hesitatingly crooked, providing he needed
crookedness to win his point. He was attractive to Madame Boliver
because he was as strange as she was herself, her youth was foreign, and
so was Petkoff.
He had come to this country to start a venture that promised to be
successful; in the meantime, he had to be careful both in person and in
heart.
What he felt for Madame Boliver was at first astonishment that such a
woman was still unmarried; he knew nothing of her past, and guessed at
her age much below the real figure. After a while this astonishment gave
way to pleasure and then to real and very sincere love.
He began to pay court to her, neglecting his business a little and
worrying over that end of it, but persisting, nevertheless.