He would walk about in the park for hours arguing this affair out to
himself. Both the shoulds and should nots.
It got him nowhere except into a state of impatience. He liked clear-cut
acts and he could not decide to go or stay. As it was, nothing could be
worse for his business than this same feverish indecision. He made up
his mind.
Madame Boliver was radiantly happy. She began to draw away from a life
of entertainment and, instead, turned most of her energies into the
adoration of her first real love. She accepted him promptly, and with a
touch of her old firm and sharp decisiveness, and a hint of her utter
frankness. He told her that she took him as she would have taken a piece
of cake at a tea party, and they both laughed.
That was in the Winter. Madame Boliver was fifty-five—he never asked her
how old she was and she never thought to tell him. They set the day for
their wedding early in the following June.
They were profoundly happy. One by one the younger, more ardent admirers
fell off, but very slowly; they turned their heads a little as they
went, being both too vain and too skeptical to believe that this would
last.
She still held receptions and still her rooms were flooded, but when
Petkoff entered, a little better dressed but still a bit heedless of the
throng, they hushed their highest hilarities and spoke of the new novels
and the newest trend in art.
Petkoff had taken notice of them to that degree necessary to a man who
knows what he has won, and from whom and how many. He looked upon them
casually, but with a hint of well-being.
Madame Boliver grew more beautiful, more radiant, more easeful. Her
movements began to resemble flowing water; she was almost too happy, too
supple, too conscious of her well-being. She became arrogant, but still
splendid; she became vain, but still gracious; she became accustomed to
herself, but still reflective. She could be said to have bloomed at too
auspicious an age; she was old enough to appreciate it, and this is a
very dangerous thing.
She spent hours at the hair dresser’s and the dressmaker’s. Her dressing
table resembled a battlefield. It supported all the armament for keeping
age at a distance. She rode in the avenue in an open carriage, and
smiled when the society notices mentioned her name and ran her picture.
She finally gave one the impression of being beautiful, but too
conscious of it; talented, but too vain; easy of carriage, but too
reliant on it; of being strange and rare and wonderful, but a little too
strange, a little too rare, a little too wonderful. She became
magnificently complex to outward appearances, yet in her soul Madame
Boliver still kept her honesty, her frankness and her simplicity.
And then one day Madame Boliver took to her bed. It began with a
headache and ended with severe chills. She hoped to get up on the
following day, and she remained there a week; she put her party off,
expecting to be able to be about, but instead she gave it sitting in a
chair supported by cushions.
Petkoff was worried and morose. He had given a good deal of time to
Madame Boliver, and he cared for her in a selfish and all-engrossing
way. When she stood up no longer he broke a Venetian tumbler by throwing
it into the fireplace. When she laughed at this he suddenly burst out
into very heavy weeping. She tried to comfort him, but he would not be
comforted. She promised him that she would walk soon, as a mother
promises a child some longed-for object. When she said, “I will be well,
dear, soon; after all I’m a young woman,” he stopped and looked at her
through a film of painful tears.
“But are you?” he said, voicing for the first time his inner fear.
And it was then that the horror of the situation dawned upon her. In
youth, when youth comes rightly, there is old age in which to lose it
complacently, but when it comes in old age there is no time to watch it
go.
She sat up and stared at him.
“Why, yes,” she said in a flat and firm voice, “that’s so. I am no
longer of few years.”
She could not say “no longer young,” because she was young.
“It will make no difference.”
“Ah,” she said, “it will make no difference to you, but it will make a
difference to us.”
She lay back and sighed, and presently she asked him to leave her a
little while.
When he had gone she summoned the doctor.
She said: “My friend—am I dying—so soon?”
He shook his head emphatically. “Of course not,” he assured her; “we
will have you up in a week or so.”
“What is it, then, that keeps me here now?”
“You have tired yourself out, that is all. You see, such extensive
entertaining, my dear madame, will tax the youngest of us.” He shook his
head at this and twisted his moustache. She sent him away also.
The next few days were happy ones. She felt better. She sat up without
fatigue. She was joyful in Petkoff’s renewed affections. He had been
frightened, and he lavished more extravagant praise and endearing terms
on her than ever before. He was like a man who, seeing his fortune go,
found how dear it was to him after all and how necessary when it
returned to him. By almost losing her he appreciated what he should have
felt if he had lost her indeed.
It got to be a joke between them that they had held any fears at all. At
the club he beat his friends on the back and cried:
“Gentlemen, a beautiful and young woman.” And they used to beat his
back, exclaiming: “Lucky, by God!”
She ordered a large stock of wine and cakes for the wedding party,
bought some new Venetian glasses and indulged in a few rare old carpets
for the floor. She had quite a fancy, too, for a new gown offered at a
remarkably low sum, but she began to curb herself, for she had been very
extravagant as it was.
And then one day she died.
Petkoff came in a wild, strange mood. Four candles were burning at head
and feet, and Madame Boliver was more lovely than ever. Stamping, so
that he sent up little spirals of dust from the newly acquired carpet,
Petkoff strode up and down beside the bier. He leaned over and lit a
cigarette by one of the flickering flames of the candles. Madame
Boliver’s elderly sister, who was kneeling, coughed and looked
reproachfully upward at the figure of Petkoff, who had once again
forgotten everyone and everything. “Damn it!” he said, putting his
fingers into his vest.
I’D HAVE YOU THINK OF ME
As one who, leaning on the wall, once drew
Thick blossoms down, and hearkened to the hum
Of heavy bees slow rounding the wet plum,
And heard across the fields the patient coo
Of restless birds bewildered with the dew.
As one whose thoughts were mad in painful May,
With melancholy eyes turned toward her love,
And toward the troubled earth whereunder throve
The chilly rye and coming hawthorn spray—
With one lean, pacing hound, for company.
THE RABBIT
The road was covered with red and yellow leaves. Rugo Amietieve, who
said that he was an Armenian, had wished one of those lingering
good-byes to this rotund and plentiful day that only a man of slow and
methodical mind can bring into being. He bid it adieu with more than the
silence and the love of his heart; he had whispered over it, his square
yellow teeth a little apart and touching the moist curve of his
under-lip with the small round point of flesh that clung to his upper
like a tear. He said good-bye resolutely and quite peacefully, with the
restraint of a man who knows what’s bad for him and why. Rugo did not
want to leave the country, but he had to. He knew why he did not want
to, and he knew why he was being forced to—necessity—that was it,
necessity had been hurrying his people about the world from the
beginning of time and would hurry them.
Farewell held no piquancy for him, he did not tear out his heart by his
departure; there was nothing in the fact of the sunlight and the blowing
and dying leaves that gave him sweet pain and too heavy sorrow; the red
of the fallen apples sent no pang into the very midst of his being. On
the contrary Rugo Amietieve felt only that sense of loss that a good
housewife feels when she is letting a rich quilt out of her fingers. In
the soil, as Rugo had known it, had been life, hard and fragrant. He had
toiled at the plough grumbling, but sensing, with a slow, precise
pleasure, that the air was warm and good and healthy. He had tended his
geese and his cows with the same stolid satisfaction, and he watched
them moving about, leaning on his two folded and brown hands. The ducks’
yellow, gaping mouths gave him physical pleasure, he would have liked to
press his hand over them where they were all shining and brittle; it
would have given him as much pleasure as a flower petal—more, because
these living things that cackled and spread their wings and brought
forth young were profitable also—the world lived here and moved, and its
incidental placing of him where he could profit by it was the thing that
amazed and satisfied him.
Now it was otherwise. He must go away into the city where, they said,
nothing was fresh and new and living. His uncle had died, leaving him
his little tailoring establishment on the East Side. There Rugo was
bound, there from this day forward he would sit and sew interminably as
though he were a machine—as though he had suddenly died and had to work.
He lifted his straight nose and smelled the September air. Here the
woods dipped over the road, spilling shadows gigantic and restless, with
a speckling of ragged sun patches like flowers. Mosquitoes came up from
the swamp as the night descended and sang about Rugo’s ears and set him
swearing. They got into the long, tangled meshes of his beard and clung
there; they sat in among these thick, ruddy strands and hissed against
the shuddering flesh of his cheeks. He lifted one of his hands and
struck his face on either side, and went on.
The next morning the East Side, in the early Thirties, saw a stranger
sweeping out what had been old Amietieve’s shop. Rugo looked about him
with sad eyes. The room was twelve feet by twenty-four and the back part
was curtained off by a hanging of dull green, sprinkled over with pink
roses; a small cot bed was thus hidden from the front of the shop. It
was within these four walls that Rugo must live. He turned around in it,
sniffing the air with his long nose, laid back again as he had done in
the last hour in the country. He sneered. “You’re a little fool room,”
he said, “to be so small.” It was as if he were shaking it, as a child
is shaken and held up to learn by another’s larger and more important
example. He held this room up by the scruff of its neck and shook it in
the face of the thirty acres he had known, and he sneered upon it.
He had learned the trade when still a child, when this same uncle had
been guardian, but his fingers were freedom clumsy and he broke the
needle.
Work came hesitatingly and painfully. Rugo was a slow man, and at this
task he was still more laborious and backward. He toiled far into the
night seated upon his table, his goose between his knees. People walking
by on their way home sometimes peered in over the top of the cardboard
sign specked by the flies and the open fashion book with its strange,
angular, shiny gentlemen carrying canes and looking over their shoulders
playfully as if they were keeping something very amusing in their minds
to hand out like favours; and such people often said, “That chap will
die of consumption, you see.”
The butcher’s shop across the way seemed to be vying with the remnants
of silks and serge in Rugo’s window. There were rump ends and flanks and
knuckle bones, remnants of some fine animal, all wonderful and red and
satiny yellow where the layers of fat crept out like frostings, or where
fat spread over kidneys like irregular lace; yet to Rugo they were
somehow painful, they made him think of the cows and the poultry that he
had so often gazed fondly upon, of the animal life he had grown up
among, and he turned his head away and went on stitching.
Rugo got his own breakfast, lunch, dinner. Behind the curtain there,
beside his bed, was a small gas stove. In the Winter the shop was deadly
with heavy air. He could not open the door or he would have flooded the
place in a moment with cold, piercing and cruel, so he sat in the foul
air of a gas burner, and his eyes grew so dark in the paling face that
the children of the neighbourhood called him “Coal Eye.”
In the Summer business had picked up, though Rugo seldom had any time to
himself. He worked quicker, but then orders were more plentiful on
patches, turnings and pressings. He had become attached to a small, ill
and very slender Italian girl who came once with her father’s coat.
Her straight parted dark hair made him think of animals, he thought her
gentle and Madonna-like, not taking into account a small, cruel and
avaricious mouth. It was very red and he was pleased with it. Almost
anything bright pleased him. The very fact that these lips were cruel
pleased him, though he did not know that it was the brightness of
calculation that made them attractive to him.
Rugo was not a good-looking man, but this did not trouble him; he was as
good-looking as anyone he had ever seen, and therefore he was
unconscious that for so large a head, his body was rather small.
This girl Addie told him. It hurt him, because he was beginning to like
her. He noticed that when his lip trembled her eyes got very bright.
“Why,” he asked her, puzzled, “do you always look so pretty when you say
things like that?”
This flattered her, but it only made it worse for Rugo. She was indeed a
very common woman, with a little to make her young and pretty, and she
made the most of it.
Finally he spoke to her quietly and slowly about love and marriage. Of
course Addie, in her shrewd mind, had calculated on this; his was a
business that threatened to prosper, and she was attracted to him,
anyway. She made her plans accordingly; she acted displeased.
“You are a poor, common tradesman,” she said bitterly, as if she were
something uncommon and therefore beyond him. He felt this, too, and
instead of discovering her own smallness in the retort, he only got the
point she wanted him to get. He began to think himself below her. He
raised his hand:
“What do you want that I shall do?”
She shrugged her narrow shoulders and laughed, showing a red tongue that
seemed to crouch in her mouth in a long, dented line.
“But I must do something, you say I am only——”
“You shall never be anything else.”
“True, but I may be more.”
“Hardly.”
“Why do you say ‘hardly’?”
“You are not the sort of person—now, for instance——”
“Yes?” he questioned slowly, turning around and looking into her face.
“Well, for instance, you are hardly a hero.”
“Are heroes the style?” he asked pitifully. This made her laugh even
harder.
“Not in your family, I take it.”
He nodded. “Yes, that’s true—we were always quiet people. You do not
like quiet people?”
“They are like women,” she answered.
He pondered awhile over this. He shook his head; after all he knew
better and he was angry because he had been letting Addie lie to him.
“That is not true.”
She began to scream at him:
“So, that’s the way you begin, calling me a liar, is it?” She put her
hands into her hair on either side and tore at it. This had even more of
an effect upon Rugo than she had expected. He beat his hands together.
In spoiling the perfect oval of her head, in ruinously shaking its
smooth and parted hair, she had hurt him as much as if she had shaken a
holy picture.
“No, no,” he cried. “I will do something, you shall see—it is all
right—it is all right.” He approached her and, touching her shoulder
with his hand, he added:
“For you I will do it—I will do it.”
She smiled. “You will do what, Rugo Amietieve?”
“I shall be less like a woman. You called me like a woman; well, you
shall see.”
She came close to him, her two thin arms pressed close to her side.
“You will do something big and grand—Rugo—for me?”
He looked down at her, puzzled and quiet. The cruel mouth was half open,
showing the shining line of her teeth. He nodded, but this time he moved
away from her and stood staring out into the street.
She came up behind him, caught both of his hands, and, leaning forward,
kissed him on the back of his neck. He tried to turn, but she held his
two hands a moment longer and then broke out of the shop at a run.
Presently he set to work again, sitting cross-legged on his table.
He wondered what he was expected to do. He had often spoken to her of
returning to the country, with a hint in his voice that she would be
there beside him, too. Now it had come to this.
He pondered. A hero—what was a hero—what made the difference between a
hero and himself, anyway? He remembered tales the gypsies had told him
about their greatest men when he had been in the old land of his birth.
They told a story of a lad who fought and fought, and finding himself
unequal to the task of killing his rival, flung himself off a mountain.
What would be the use of that—he would die, and then he might as well
not have lived. He thought of all the great people he had read of, or
had heard of, or had known. There was Jean the blacksmith, who had lost
an eye saving his child from a horse. If he lost an eye Addie would not
like him.
Napoleon—there was a well-known man; he had done so many things, it
seemed, for which people framed him in white enamel and hung him upon
their bedroom walls; but chiefly he had been renowned for his killing.
Rugo thought about that awhile and came to the illuminating conclusion
that all heroes were men who killed or were killed.
Well, the last was impossible; if he was killed he might just as well
have starved in the country and not have laid eyes on Addie. Therefore,
he must kill—but what—but whom?
Of course, he might save something or somebody, but they would have to
be in danger first, and there might not be any danger for days and days,
and he was tired of waiting.
Presently he laid his work aside, lowered the shade, and, lying face
down on his bed, he tried to think it all out clearly.
Presently he got a vivid picture of killing in his mind. He sat up and
put his hands two or three times over his face. It was damp. He sat on
the edge of the bed and looked at the carpet. His mind wandered. He
thought of the ducks he had longed to stroke, of the gentle, feeding
cows, of the fresh, clean air—then he thought again of Addie and of what
he must do. He tried to picture himself killing someone. He put his two
hands together and looked at them—there, that was the way. Then he
smiled. His hands, set as they were, could not have choked anything
larger than a thrush. He widened them, but he separated them instantly
and rubbed them down his legs, breathing heavily. What a terrible
business a hero’s was! He thought of the throbbing that must stop
beneath such hands as his. He got up, shaking his shoulders from side to
side as if his back hurt him. He pulled up the shade.
The butcher’s windows opposite attracted his attention. Two gas lights
were burning there vividly. Rugo could see flanks of beef laid out in
pans, little ruddy pools collecting about them like insertion. Fowl hung
by the necks and several hams lured the passer-by as they swung softly
this way and that.
He opened his door hesitatingly and shutting it carefully stepped out
into the roadway.
He crossed over and leaned his head against the glass. He looked in very
close now, and he could see the film that shrouded the dead eyes of the
fowl and the hares. Slabs of liver laid out in heaps, flanked by cuts of
tripe, drew his attention.
A strange sensation had hold of him in the pit of his stomach. It seemed
to him that he was turning pale. He raised his hand to his beard and
tugged at it.
Two or three red hairs separated and came out. He held them up between
him and the light. Then he darted in the back door of the shop.
Presently he emerged carrying a box. With the furtive and hurried step
of a man who is being observed he crossed the street. He opened the door
of his own little shop and, locking it quickly, he put the box in the
corner and turned down the light.
It was very dark and he stumbled. A little reflection came from the meat
shop window and touched the rims of his cardboards, and his pattern book
full of the funny strutting gentlemen. His heart was beating horribly
against his side. He began to question himself and stopped. He could
never do it unless he made his mind a resolute thing. He clenched his
teeth, blinking his eyes as he did so. He began to shiver.
Presently he threw himself on the ground in the corner near the box, his
arms over his head, his face flat upon the dust and grime of the boards.
He must do it quickly—but he couldn’t do it.
His mind began to wander again. He thought of the road, red and yellow
with the dying leaves of Autumn, of the great swaying shadows and the
sunlight breaking in between in little jagged spots like flowers. He
remembered the mosquitoes, and he got to his knees and let his hands
hang down at his sides.
The Summer had always been so pretty; the rains left the fields so
bright and sudden when they came into view over the top of the hill. The
ploughing had been good, he had really enjoyed that after all, only then
he had not known just how much he did enjoy it. What a pity that he had
not known what a good thing it all was then.
Something moved beside him, breathing softly. He uttered a sharp cry and
the same thing moved back, hitting a board, and was again silent.
He bent forward, thrust his two hands out, closed them—tighter, tighter
and tighter. A faint cry, a little jerking to and fro—that was all.
He stood up and turned the light on. He looked at his hands. Then
backing away from the corner, never letting his eyes rest there, he
plunged his hands up to the elbows in a pail of water. He threw a cupful
of it inside his shirt at the neck. He opened the door. Addie was there.
She came in softly, gently, insinuatingly. She could see by his face
that something very horrible and necessary had been done. She saw by his
face how it had hurt, by his hands what it must have cost him.
She came close to him. “What have you done, Rugo?” she said.
“I—I have killed,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“What—where?” She moved toward the centre of the room and then looked
into the corner.
“That?” she began to laugh.
“Take it or leave it,” he said suddenly in a loud and penetrating voice.
She stooped and lifted it up—a small grey rabbit.
She laid it down again. She placed her arm about him.
“Come quickly,” she said. “Comb your hair.”
She pushed him into the street. She was afraid of him, for there was
something strange and hard in his mouth and he walked putting each foot
down very flat and steady.
“Where are you going? What are you going to do?” He did not seem to know
that she was there, clinging to him, her arm about his waist. He had
forgotten her. He looked up into the air, sniffing it and smiling.
“Come,” she said, “we are going to have your boots shined.”
THE FLOWERING CORPSE
So still she lies in this closed place apart,
Her feet grown fragile for the ghostly tryst;
Her pulse no longer striking in her wrist,
Nor does its echo wander through her heart.
Over the body and the quiet head
Like stately ferns above an austere tomb,
Soft hairs blow; and beneath her armpits bloom
The drowsy passion flowers of the dead.
A BOY ASKS A QUESTION OF A LADY
The days had been very warm and quick. It was Fall now and everything
was drawing to a close. It had been a bad, but somehow pleasant, year. A
great number of people had been disillusioned and were not seen hurrying
from one place to another, as is customary with those of undisturbed
habit. They went slowly, and it was said that Winter with its snow and
frost would be most welcome.
Carmen la Tosca was in the habit of riding at a swift gallop down the
lane and into the copse beyond. She leaned ever so little in her saddle
as she went under the boughs. The plume of her hat bent and swung
smartly back into place as she rounded the curve.
Her horse was a clear cascade of white. The shining forelock, the soft
descending plane of the frontal bone melted into a taut nostril. And
where Carmen la Tosca broke the living line of its back with her own,
the spine flowed beneath her as deftly as water, and quivered into
massive alert haunches, which in turn socketed in velvet, a foaming
length of tail.
Carmen la Tosca rode well. She let more than usual of her pelvis drop
into the saddle. Upon the reins she kept gloved hands in a grip that was
consciously lacking in direction.
Carmen la Tosca was an actress. She had played in “Fife and Fiddle” and
“Drums of the King.”