handsomely gloved and shod, and her dresses were widely copied.
She had been in stock, and in the beginning had sung in opera; she had
been the Queen in “Aïda” and she had played a boy’s part in vaudeville.
Now she was resting.
She was not the kind of woman who usually came to this quiet country
town, snuggled, as they say, among the foothills. The boy who kept the
general store said she was “stunning.” Little children ran backward
ahead of her, crying provokingly, “Red lips, red lips!” But no one
really knew her.
She had appeared in the Spring of the year with a man-servant and a
maid. For two days she had been seen at the windows hanging curtains.
When they were all hung no one saw her for some time. Then she bought a
white horse and rode it. And after that she always rode on the white
horse, though she had six or seven others before the Fall came. Usually
she rode alone. Now and again a gentleman, with a birth-mark twisting
his face into an unwilling irony, rode beside her. There was a goat path
in the underbrush and here two boys sometimes came and lay and talked of
her and waited for her to pass, riding that smart way on the white mare.
These boys were Brandt and Bailey Wilson, a farmer’s sons. Sometimes
couples, going berrying by the mountain road, came near enough to hear
her laughing behind the casement.
Sometimes she walked, descending the hill carefully, avoiding the melon
plants, talking brightly to a young man, but paying little attention to
the effect of her words, not through vanity, but simply through lack of
interest in the effect itself.
There was a great deal of gossip about her of course. She did not court
mystery, but it was all about her.
People said that she was not exactly beautiful, neither was she ugly.
Her face held the elements of both in perfect control. She was brutally
chic.
A lean, tall woman of the village, who had come from London, said Carmen
la Tosca’s back was like the Queen’s. This was probably an exaggeration.
Carmen la Tosca breakfasted in bed and late. She dusted her arms with
talc and she languidly settled into a light lace peignoir. She had tea
and rolls, and the bed stood between two unvarnished cherry-wood ovals,
in which were imprisoned two engravings of officials of the Tower of
London, in its bloodiest hour.
The double windows faced the orchard. She turned her back to the orchard
and its falling apples, and read St. Francis, or the morning paper which
was, by the time she received it, a day or two old.
The room was bare and grey and rustic. And in this Carmen la Tosca and
her bed made a strange contrast. She liked to think of it unless she had
other things on her mind. If the morning was chilly she had a quilted
jacket, and if it was raining she had the shades raised that she might
watch the rain falling a long way.
Early in the morning the boy chose it had been raining, but about eleven
it had stopped and the sun was trying to come out. Carmen la Tosca could
smell how wet everything was.
The boy was Brandt Wilson, fourteen; he had done rather well at the high
school of the nearest large town. He was short and his head was large
and his face already a little prematurely softened by melancholy. He was
splashed with mud and his red tie stuck out ridiculously at the top of a
vest that was too large for his small, shyly muscular chest.
He stood before her on the rug, his hat in his hand.
Carmen la Tosca, with a single movement, rolled over in bed.
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”
“I am Brandt Wilson. I came through the window. It was very easy.”
“Well,” she said. “What is it?”
The child hesitated, and with a look of distress, managed to say:
“I have a brother.”
Carmen la Tosca pushed away the paper and regarded him with amusement,
and a little amazement.
“He is two years older than I am—and there’s something I don’t
understand—and you know everything.”
“Who said so?”
“The neighbours, my father, my mother, my sister, the schoolmaster, the
postman——”
“That will do.”
“You are a woman of the world.” The childish sound of his voice became
terribly apparent.
“My brother is where no one understands—My sister said, ‘I don’t like
Bailey any more, he has lost that cunning little light in his eyes’—and
I said, ‘It’s still there when you give him something he likes, and he
is untying it, with his head bent down——’”
“How do you come to think of all this?”
“Once the sun was shining and we had been lying out on the bank with our
arms under our heads and then he said—he confessed”—the child faltered,
then looking at her directly and fixedly, said, “Bailey cried when he
knew it was over——”
“What was over?”
“I asked him, and he answered, ‘I am a man now.’ Shall I cry, too, when
I know that? What is it all about?”
Carmen la Tosca rose on her elbow and looked at him with suffused eyes
as if she had been crying, but it was all an illusion.
“How many of you are there?”
“Three. A married brother.”
“And how old is he?”
“Twenty-four. He cried once, too, but differently, about his sweetheart.
She died, you know, and when they told him he said, crying out, ‘I could
have saved her.’ We asked him how, but he would not tell us, but he told
mother; he said, ‘I would have said I love you.’ Is there such a power?”
Carmen la Tosca lay on her back, her hands beside her.
“That was innocence. We are all waiting for the day when people shall
learn of our innocence, all over again,” she said brightly.
“And is that suffering?”
“Yes, a special kind, for everyone,” she said gravely. “But not a
personal torment. You are not to believe in that. Suffering is all
alike, yours, mine, everybody’s. All these distinctions and what people
say about them is nonsense. Suffering is all the same everywhere for
everyone.” She suddenly rose up in bed and said, softly, “Now you do not
want to talk to me any more?”
He moved his fingers on the foot-board of the bed.
“I’m sorry,” she said hastily, covered with confusion. “It’s my
indolence that does it.”
“What?” he asked timidly.
“Embarrasses you.”
“It’s all right.”
“Now see here,” she continued. “Do you ever think of animals?”
“Why?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. I notice them——”
“Capital!” she cried, clapping her hands; “that’s what I wanted to know.
Well then, what would all this, you and I and your great trouble, mean
to them?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Your questions, my answers? Nothing.”
He coloured, and looked down. “What does it mean?” he repeated, and as
he said it he could not remember what he had come for, or what he had
said, and while she was answering he tried desperately to re-establish
himself.
He said, “And you do not know what I must go through before I feel like
Bailey?”
“A little evil day by day, that makes everything grow.”
“Yes, that is what I wanted to know,” he said, breathlessly.
“Listen then, it’s all that makes the difference between a gentleman and
a fool. Never do evil to good people, they always forgive it, and that
is nasty.”
“But what about all these things that people talk of and I do not
understand?”
“The simple story, simply told by simple people—that in the end is all
you will listen to.”
“And I’m not to try to make anything out of all this?”
“No,” she said, “nothing at all, leave it alone.”
“And not to try to understand what made him cry?”
“Just as it is. The calf is born, she lies in the sun; she waits for the
end. That is dignity.”
“But sometimes I’m unhappy.”
“In the end you will know you know nothing. That will be the death of
you.”
Brandt stood still, though she had taken up her paper.
“Just that?”
“Come here,” she said, and he came, quickly. She put her hand out with a
gentle laugh and touched him. “There, that’s all.”
He went away then.
FIRST COMMUNION
The mortal fruit upon the bough
Hangs above the nuptial bed.
The cat-bird in the tree returns
The forfeit of his mutual vow.
The hard, untimely apple of
The branch that feeds on watered rain
Takes the place upon her lips
Of her late lamented love.
Many hands together press
Shaped within a static prayer
Recall to one the chorister
Docile in his sexless dress.
The temperate winds reclaim the iced
Remorseless vapours of the snow.
The only pattern in the mind
Is the cross behind the Christ.
FINIS
For you, for me? Why then the striking hour,
The wind among the curtains, and the tread
Of some late gardener pulling at the flower
They’ll lay between our hearts when we are dead.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as
printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.