... Valeria felt a cadenced, gently oscillating movement, and opened her

eyes. She could see nothing. A grey linen roof was above her, grey linen

walls around her. Ah, the walls undulated, parted slightly, and let some

light through. Valeria could see parts of shops, and of houses, and

people passing.... She was being carried through the streets. What was

the matter with her mouth? She raised her hand in its brown kid glove

and touched her mouth, and down along one side of it where she felt

something unusual; her glove seemed not to touch her cheek but her

teeth; then something hot and viscid ran into the palm of her hand and

down her arm. A hand--was it hers?--fell on her breast. Suddenly she

remembered her violet bag, fat with money. Where was it? She tried to

say, "Where is it? Where is it? It is Nancy's." She cried it out loud,

but could hear only a muffled bubbling and blowing through her mouth.

Then oblivion.

... Now she was in a small, light room. Everything round her was light

and white; she saw the ceiling first. It was of glass--white frosted

glass. Everything was white; the people were white, except their faces,

which looked dark and yellow over their white clothes. One of the faces

looked at her very near, then another. Then a lighter face came with

white wings round its head. Valeria knew what that was, but could not

remember. She thought she would smile at that face, and did so, but the

face did not smile back. It continued looking at her closely, and she

felt a hand touch her forehead and smooth back her hair.

Another face came, red, with bloodshot eyes, and someone took hold of

her head and turned it. A voice said: "Useless. But we can try." Then a

sound of running water. Valeria put out her hand to stop it. Immediately

the winged face was bending over her. "Yes, dear? Yes, dear?" Valeria

thought she told her to stop the running water. But the winged face only

nodded and smiled, and said: "That is a good, brave dear! We shall soon

be better--soon be better." Another face and a voice: "Shall I wash

this?" Then something gushed over Valeria's cheek and trickled, warm and

salt, down her throat. Something choked. Then there was a pain, a pain

somewhere in the room, a burning, maddening pain. A man's voice said:

"Leave alone. That's no use. Look at this." Valeria's head was turned

round again, and she heard a crepitant sound as if her hair were being

cut. Running water again.... Valeria's head lay sideways, and she could

see the white-gowned back of a man washing his hands under a silver tap.

She liked watching him. He turned round, shaking his wet hands in the

air with his sleeves rolled back. It was he who had the red face and

the bloodshot eyes, and a clipped grey moustache. He nodded to Valeria

as he saw her eyes open, and said: "That's good, that's right. A little

patience." Valeria smiled at him; she felt that her mouth did not move,

so she blinked with her eyes, and the red face nodded back in friendly

manner.

Someone held her wrist, and for a while everything was silent. Again,

again, a shooting, maddening pain. An exclamation, and then a word:

"Useless." Valeria opened her eyes. She saw the white-winged woman's

face with her eyes fixed on the red face, which was bending forward, and

the two other faces were also bending over, looking down at something

Valeria could not see, for it was on her own pillow. Then the red-faced

man said: "Useless," again. And the white-winged face moved its lips.

"Useless!" The word conveyed nothing clear to Valeria's mind, but

something in her body responded to the word. Thump, thump, thump, her

heart began to beat, loud and quick, louder and quicker, until it could

be heard all over the room. Thump, thump, thump, it rolled like a drum,

and Valeria turned her frightened eyes to the red face above her. She

said to him: "Stop my heart. Stop my heart from beating like this." But

the three men and the sister did not seem to hear. They stood quite

still listening to it, and then Valeria knew that she had not spoken.

Thud, thump; thud, thump; quicker and quicker, and Valeria's eyes rolled

wildly, imploring help. Then the Sister said to the surgeon: "Oh, try!

try, poor thing!" And again water rushed, and something was rolled

stridently across the marble floor.

"Ether," said the surgeon.

One of the yellow faces bent over her, and he had a dark net mask in his

hand. He held it over her face.

Suddenly Valeria was wide awake. She sat up with a shriek, and struck

out at the yellow face and the mask. She saw the two doctors and the old

surgeon, and the Sister of Charity. She spoke and her voice came. She

wanted to say: "Save me! Save me!" but she heard herself saying: "I have

time to cross!" Then she tried to explain about the violet bag, and the

money, but what she cried was: "Nancy! Nancy!" Then the surgeon was

angry with the man who held the mask, and turned on him with impatient

words. But the Sister stood over Valeria, and made the sign of the cross

above her. "Lie down, dear, lie down," she said. So Valeria lay down.

Thud, thump; thud, thump; thud, thump, rolled the drum of her heart.

"Now," said the surgeon, "you must be good. Don't move! Count! Count to

twenty."

Valeria struggled to get up. The black mask was near her face again.

"Now, dear, now!" said the Sister's voice. "Count: one--two--three----"

"Breathe deeply," said someone, and Valeria did as she was told.

Then she remembered that she was to count. But she had lost time, so she

felt she must begin further on. "... Nine," she said, breathing deeply;

"ten." She was on a swing--a large, wild swing in the air that swung her

out in the sky and back through the wide, white air. "Eleven, twelve,"

Valeria felt that she must say thirteen quickly because--unlucky

number--"thirteen ... fourteen...."

The swing swung her out, flying through the air with a swoop and a sweep

beyond all the mountains. The people around her seemed to be left far

away, down in the little white room. They would never hear her voice

from so far away. "FIFTEEN!" she cried, shouting loud, loud, from afar.

Then the sweep of a gigantic wave swung her out into Eternity.

* * * * *

"I knew it was useless," said the Surgeon angrily. The face was covered,

and the stretcher was wheeled away.

An hour later Zio Giacomo, Nino, and Aunt Carlotta came hurrying in,

red-eyed and white-faced. It was over. Aunt Carlotta wrung her hands,

and the Sister consoled her, and assured her that there had been no

suffering.

"I want to see her," said Aunt Carlotta, sobbing.

"No, no," said the Sister. "Don't."

"Don't!" said Giacomo brokenly, the tears streaming down his face. Nino

said not a word, but went with one of the young doctors into the large

bare room where two stretchers stood, each with a shrouded burden.

"This one," said the doctor, he who had held the mask. Nino saw, gasped,

and turned away.

Aunt Carlotta was being led in, supported by the Sister. Nino grasped

her hand.

"Come away," he whispered; "come away at once."

Carlotta shook her head, her face buried in her handkerchief. "My

sister's child! My sister's only child! I must close her eyes." Nino

went out.

Carlotta was led to the farther of the two stretchers. The cloth was

lifted from Valeria's face. Then shriek after shriek resounded through

the bare chill room, echoing through the wide corridors, reaching the

patients lying selfish and sad in their wards. Shriek after shriek. But

the two quiet figures on the stretchers were not disturbed.

Valeria was buried in Nervi near Tom.

IX

When Nancy in New York received the news of her mother's death she wore

black instead of brown, and wept, and wept, and wept, as children weep

for their mothers. Then she wore brown again, and went on living for

Anne-Marie, as mothers live for their children.

They had left Mrs. Schmidl's kindly, dingy roof, and moved a little

further away from the niggers, into a small flat in 82nd Street. Mrs.

Schmidl's niece, Minna, came and did the housework, and took Anne-Marie

for walks. Anne-Marie loved Minna. Anne-Marie watched her with entranced

gaze when she spoke to the tradesmen, and followed her from room to room

when she swept and did the beds. Minna wore low-necked collars, and a

little black velvet ribbon round her neck, and pink beads. She was

beautiful in Anne-Marie's sight, and Anne-Marie imitated as much as

possible her manner, her walk, and her language. Nancy could hear them

talking together in the kitchen. Minna's voice: "What did you have for

your tea? A butter-bread?" And Anne-Marie's piping treble: "Yes, two

butter-breads mit sugar." Minna: "That's fine! To-morrow Tante Schmidl

makes a cake, a good one. We eat it evenings." "A cake--a good one!"

echoed Anne-Marie.

Nancy's soul crumbled with mortification. She had taken out her

manuscript, and it lay before her on the table once more. Its broad

pages were dear to her touch. They felt thick and solid. The tingling

freshness of thought, the little thrill that always preceded the ripple

and rush of inspiration, caught at her, and the ivory pen was in her

hand.

"A cake--a good one," repeated in the next room Anne-Marie, who liked

the substantial German sound of that phrase.

"Oh, my little girl! My little girl! How will she grow up?" And Nancy

the mother took the ivory pen from Nancy the poet's hand, and Anne-Marie

was called and kept, and taught, for the rest of the day.

During the months that followed, Nancy played a game with her little

daughter which, to a certain extent, was successful.

"We will play that you are a little book of mine, that I have written. A

pretty little book like Andersen's 'Maerchen,' with the pictures in it.

And in this book that I love----"

"What colour is it?" asked Anne-Marie.

"Pink, and white, and gold," said Nancy, kissing the child's shining

hair.

"Well, in it, in the midst of the loveliest fairy-tale, somebody has

come and written dreadfully silly, ugly words, like--like

'butter-bread.' I must take all those out, mustn't I? And put pretty

words and pretty thoughts in instead. Otherwise nobody will like to read

the book."

"No," said Anne-Marie, looking slightly dazed. "And will you put

pictures in it?"

"Oh yes," said Nancy. "And I wish I could put rhymes into it too."

But that was not to be. Long explanations about boy and toy--rain and

pain--fly and cry--far and star--left Anne-Marie bewildered and cross.

Nancy coaxed and petted her. "Just you say a rhyme! Only one. Now what

rhymes with _day_?"

No. Anne-Marie did not know what rhymed with day.

"_Play_, of course, my goosie dear! Now what rhymes with _dear?_"

"Play," said Anne-Marie.

"No; do think a little, sweetheart. With _dear!--dear?_"

"Vegetables?" asked Anne-Marie, who had spent many hours in Frau

Schmidl's kitchen.

Nancy groaned. _"Dear_!" she repeated again.

_"Darling!"_ cried Anne-Marie triumphantly, and was lifted up and

embraced.

"I wish you were a poet, Anne-Marie!" said her mother, pushing the fair

locks from the child's level brow.

"What for?" said Anne-Marie, wriggling.

"Poets never die," said Nancy, thus placing a picture in the fairy-tale

book.

"Then I'll be," said Anne-Marie, who knew death from having buried a

dead kitten in the Schmidls' yard, and dug it up a day or two after to

see what it was like.

But Anne-Marie was not to be a poet. In the little pink and white books

that mothers think they create, the Story is written before ever they

reach the tender maternal hands. And Anne-Marie was not to be a poet.

But Nancy herself could not forget that Fate had printed the seal of

immortality upon her own girlish brow. She thought: "I cannot finish

The Book now. The Book must wait until later on, when Anne-Marie does

not need me every moment. But now, now I can write a cycle of

child-poems on Anne-Marie."

So she watched her little daughter through narrowed eyelids, throwing

over the unconscious blonde head the misty veil of imagery, searching in

the light blue eyes for the source of word and symbol, standing

Anne-Marie like a little neoteric statue on the top of a sonnet, trying

to fix her in some rare, archaic pose. But Anne-Marie was the child of

her surroundings; Anne-Marie wore clothes of Minna's cutting and

fitting, and on her yellow head a flat pink cotton hat like a lid.

Anne-Marie had spoken Italian like a royal princess, but her

German-American English was of 7th Avenue and 82nd Street. And

Anne-Marie's pleasures were, as are those of every child, taken where

she found them; for her no wandering in a shady garden, nursing an

expensive, mellifluously-named doll. Since the Monte Carlo

"Marguerite-Louise," whose eyes, attached to two small lumps of lead now

lay in a box on a shelf, Anne-Marie's dolls had been numerous but

unloved. At Mrs. Schmidl's suggestion, and for economic motives, Nancy

had gone down town one day to a wholesale shop in Lower Broadway, where

she had been able to buy "one dozen dolls, size nine, quality four, hair

yellow, dress blue," for two dollars and seventy cents.

The first of the dozen was the same evening presented to Anne-Marie. It

was rapturously kissed; it was christened Hermina--Minna's name; its

clotted yellow hair was combed; attempts were made to undress it, but as

it did not undress, it was put to sleep as it was, and Anne-Marie went

to bed carefully beside it.

In due time Hermina broke and died. What unbounded joy was Anne-Marie's

when Hermina herself, with the self-same azure eyes, clotted yellow

hair, blue dress, angel smile, reappeared before her. She was

rapturously kissed. In due time also this second Hermina, legless, and

with pendulous, dislocated head, was taken away from Anne-Marie's fond

arms, and a new stiff Hermina was produced, with clotted hair and angel

smile renewed. Anne-Marie's eyes opened large and wide, and she drew a

deep breath. With more amazement than love she accepted the third

Hermina, and did not kiss her. That Hermina died quickly, and Nancy,

with a triumphant smile, produced a fourth. With a shriek of hatred

Anne-Marie took her by the well-known painted boots, and hit the

well-known face against the floor.

The other eight were given to her at once, and were hit, and hated, and

stamped upon. For many nights Anne-Marie's dreams were peopled with dead

and resuscitated Herminas--placid, smiling Herminas with no legs; booted

Herminas with large pieces broken out of their cheeks; fearful Herminas

all right in the back, but with darksome voids where their faces ought

to be under the clotted yellow hair.

She would have no more dolls, and her pleasures were taken where she

found them mainly in the kitchen. She liked to wash dishes, because she

was not allowed to; and she could be seen whisking a kitchen-towel under

her arm in the brisk, important manner of Minna. She liked to see the

butcher's man slap a piece of steak down on the table; and the laugh of

the "coloured lady" who brought the washing was sweet in her ears. She

also liked the piano that was played in the adjoining flat--the piano

that drove Nancy to distraction and despair whenever she tried to work.

"Rose of my spirit, Fountain of my love,

Lilial blue-veined flower of my desire----"

wrote Nancy, trying not to hear the climpering next door.

"Minna! Minna! What is that tune?" called Anne-Marie, jumping from her

chair. "Is it 'Eastside, Westside,' or 'Paradise Alley'?"

"No, it ain't. It's 'Casey would waltz.'"

"Oh, is it? Sing it. Do sing it, Minna."

And from the kitchen came Minna's voice, a loud soprano:

"Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde,

And the band--played--on."

Then Anne-Marie's childish falsetto:

"Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde,

And the band--play--don."

Alas! even the cycle of child poems must wait until Nancy could afford a

larger apartment, and a governess for the "lilial blue-veined flower of

her desire." There was no "Stimmung" for lyrics in the left-top flat in

82nd Street.

Aldo was at home a good deal during the day-time, yawning, reading the

interminable Sunday papers that lay about all the week, smoking

cigarettes, and wishing they could afford this and that.

In the evenings he went out. His work, it seemed, was to be done more in

the evening than in the day-time, so he explained to Nancy. He explained

very little to Nancy. Once he had brought home one hundred dollars

instead of twenty, but she had been so startled and aghast, so nervous

and impatient to know how he had got it, and, above all, it had been so

impossible to make her understand the subtleties of his duties to Mrs.

Van Osten, that he had finally declared it was simply a present for an

extra important piece of work he had had to do. And the next time he

received a hundred dollars--about three months afterwards, when more

arduous duties once more developed upon him--he took eighty to the Dime

Savings-Bank, and brought the usual twenty dollars home.

As soon as the little savings-bank book was placed in his hand, the

Caracciolo grandfather awoke in him again, and murdered the lazzarone

who cared not for the morrow. He became heedful of little things,

grudging of little expenses. The dingy flat was run on the strictest

principles of economy, and when a dollar could be taken up the steps of

the savings-bank and put away, he was happy. He had learned that by

making deep, grateful eyes at Minna over the accounts, she would keep

expenses down to please him; and many were the lumps of sugar and bits

of butter taken from Mrs. Schmidl's larder by Minna's fat, pink hand and

placed, sacrificial offerings, on the Della Roccas' shabby table.

Anne-Marie's pink hats and Minna-made frocks had to last through the

seasons long after the "coloured lady" had washed every vestige of tint

and vitality out of them, and they were a thorn in Nancy's eye. Nancy

wore her pepper-and-salt dress day after day; it turned, and it

dyed--black, and when it was no more, she got another like it.

The days passed meanly and quickly. And Nancy learned that one can be

dingy, and sordid, and poverty-stricken, and yet go on living, and

gently drift down into the habit of it, and hardly remember that things

were ever otherwise.

The evenings only were terrible. When Minna had gone home, and

Anne-Marie slept, and Aldo had sauntered out to meet some Italians, or

had hurried in full evening-dress to his work, Nancy sat drearily in the

"parlour." From mantelpiece, shelf, and what-not photographs of unknown

people, friends of Mrs. Johnstone, the landlady, gazed at her with faded

faces and in obsolete attire; actresses in boy's clothes, and

large-faced children; chinless young men in turned-down collars; Mr. and

Mrs. Johnstone in bridal attire; their first-born baby with no clothes

on, now a clerk at Macy's. Hanging on the wall, with whitish eyes that

followed Nancy about, was the enlarged photograph of dead Mr. Johnstone,

and Nancy, in her loneliness, feared him. She covered him one evening

with a table-cloth, but it was worse. When, on her arrival months ago,

she had collected all these photographs and hidden them away in a

closet, Mrs. Johnstone, who liked to drop in suddenly, had arrived, and

looked round with a red face.

"You don't want to do that," she had said, taking all the pictures out

again and setting them up in their places. She also would not allow the

large ornamental piano-lamp, that took up half the stuffy little room,

to be moved. It had cost thirty-two dollars. So it stood there in the

dark-carpeted, obscure parlour, and its yellow silk shade with the grimy

white silk roses pinned on it was an outrage to Nancy's pained gaze.

One evening at bed-time Anne-Marie said to her mother: "I like the girl

next door."

"You do not know her, darling," said Nancy.

"Oh yes, I do. I talked to her from the back-window."

"What is her name?" said Nancy, unfastening strings and buttons on her

daughter's back.

"Oh, she told me--I don't know. A little dry name like a cough."

Nancy laughed and kissed the nape of Anne-Marie's neck, which was plump,

and fair, and sweet to smell. At that moment the girl-neighbour knocked

and came in, with a bear made of chocolate for Anne-Marie. Her name--the

dry name like a cough--was Peggy.

"I've just come in because I thought you seemed kind of lonesome," she

said, looking round the parlour after Anne-Marie had been tucked in and

left in the adjoining bedroom with the door ajar.

She then told Nancy that she worked in a hairdresser's shop down

Broadway, "mostly fixing nails." "Sickening work," she added. "All those

different hands I have to keep holding kind of turns me. Especially

women's!"

Nancy laughed. Peggy offered to fix her nails for nothing, and after

some hesitation Nancy allowed her to do so.

"My! you have hands quite like a lady," said Peggy; and the cup of

Nancy's bitterness was full. Nancy quickly changed the subject.

"Is it you who play the piano?" she asked.

"No, my brother. He works in a shipping office. But he is great on

music."

At this point Anne-Marie's voice was heard from the adjoining room:

"What is that piece that was lovely?"

Peggy laughed, but could not say which piece Anne-Marie meant. After a

while she went to call her brother, who came in, lanky and diffident,

and was introduced as "George." Anne-Marie kept calling from her room

about the piece that was lovely, and finally the young man went back to

his flat, leaving the doors open, and played all the pieces of his

repertoire.

But "the piece that was lovely" was not among them. Peggy and Nancy

said: "She probably dreamt it." But Anne-Marie cried "No, no, no!" at

the first note of every piece that was started. At last she wept, and

was naughty and rude, and the bear's hindlegs, which she had not yet

eaten, were taken away from her.

Peggy and George were very friendly, and promised to call again. They

lived alone. Their parents had a sheep ranch in Dakota.

"Rotten place," said George. "New York is good enough for me." And they

shook hands and left.

After that, when Mr. Johnstone frightened Nancy more than usual, she

knocked at the wall in Anne-Marie's room with a hair-brush, and Peggy

came in, and spent a friendly evening with her. Sometimes George came,

too, and read the magazine supplements of the Sunday papers aloud.

George read all the poems.

"He's a great one for poetry," said his sister.

George passed his manicured fingers through his thin hair, and looked

self-conscious.

"I guess all the real poets are dead long ago," he said.

"I fear so," said Nancy.

"Mamma!" came Anne-Marie's voice, distinct and wide-awake, through the

half-open door.

"Yes, dear," said Nancy. "Good-night."

"Mamma!" cried Anne-Marie. "Come here."

Nancy rose and went to her. Anne-Marie was sitting up in bed.

"What did he say?"

Nancy did not know.

"He said the poets were dead. All the real ones. You said poets could

never die."

Nancy sat down on the bed, and pressed the little fair head to her

heart.

"I will tell you about that to-morrow," she said. "And you must not

listen to what is said in another room. It is not honourable." After a

long explanation of what "honourable" meant, Nancy rose and kissed her.

"You had better shut the door," said Anne-Marie. "One can't be

honourable if one can be not."

So the door was closed.

Early next morning Anne-Marie inquired about the poets.

"Well," said Nancy, who had forgotten about it, and was taken unawares.

She spoke slowly, making up her story as she went on, and trying to put

another picture in the little book of Anne-Marie's mind. "Once the world

was full of roses, and poets lived for ever."

"Yes," said Anne-Marie.

"Then one day some people said to God: 'There are too many useless

things in the world. Roses, for instance. We could do without them, and

have vegetables instead.' So God took away the roses. And all the poets

died."

"What of?"

"Of silence," said Nancy. "They died because they had nothing more to

say."

Anne-Marie looked very sad. Nancy made haste to comfort her.

"Then God put a few roses back, for little Anne-Maries who don't like

vegetables (which is very naughty of them, because they do one good),

and so also a few poets came back into the world."

"But not the real ones?"

"Well, not quite real ones, perhaps," said Nancy.

"Then what is the good of them?" asked Anne-Marie.

Nancy could not say. Nancy could not say what was the good of not quite

real poets. But for that matter, what was the good of the real ones?

What was the good of anything? Nancy's thoughts went in drooping file to

her own work. What was the good of writing a Book? "I need not have

written any story at all," she said to herself.

Perhaps that is what God will say when the dead worlds come rolling in

at his feet, at the end of Eternity.

X

Poverty and loneliness pushed Nancy along the dreary year, and she went

in her brown dress, with her heels worn down at the side, through the

autumn and the winter. Aldo was away for weeks at a time, and although

he seemed in good humour when he was at home, and dressed elaborately,

he was always parsimonious in the house, warning against rashness and

expense.

Anne-Marie went to a kindergarten, where the grocer's children, and the

baker's children, and the milkman's children went, and she liked them,

and they liked her.

And now April was here. Where it could, it pushed and penetrated;

through the trestles of the elevated railroads it spilt its sunshine on

the ground. And it ran into the open window of the 82nd Street flat,

and stretched its sweetness on the faded yellow silk of the hated

lampshade.

To Nancy, who was moping in her dingy brown dress, April said: "Go out."

So she put on her hat, and went out. And, having no reason to turn to

the right, she turned to the left, and after a few blocks, having no

reason to turn to the left, she turned to the right, and ran straight

into a little messenger-boy, who was coming round the corner carrying

some flowers in tissue-paper, and whistling.

Some trailing maidenhair escaping from the paper caught in her dress,

and broke off. "I am sorry," she said.

"Can't yer use yer eyes!" said the boy rudely.

Then April said to Nancy: "Smile!" And she smiled, dimpling, and said

again: "I am sorry."

The boy looked at her, and turned his tongue round in his mouth; then he

sniffed, and said: "Here you are! This is for you."

He pushed the bunch of flowers into Nancy's hand, then turned back, and

went round the corner again, whistling. Nancy ran after him, but he ran

quicker, looking round every now and then and laughing at her. When he

turned another corner Nancy stood with the flowers in her hand,

wondering.

She opened the paper a little at the top, and looked in. Mauve orchids

and maidenhair--a bouquet for a queen. She walked slowly back to her

house, carrying the flowers in front of her with both hands, and their

idle beauty and extravagant loveliness lifted her prostrate spirit above

the dust around her.

She went to her room with them, avoiding Minna, who was clattering

dishes in the kitchen, and, locking her door, sat down near the bed. She

drew the tissue-paper away, and the fairy-like flowers, scintillant and

bedewed, nodded at her.

In their midst lay a letter, with the crest of a Transatlantic steamship

on the envelope. She opened it with timid hands.

"DEAR UNKNOWN IN THE PALE BLUE DRESS,

"I am sending this to you as a child sends a walnut-shell boat sailing

down a river. Where will it go to? Whom will it reach? I am leaving

America to-day. By the time you read this--are you smiling with

wondering eyes? or is your mouth grave, and your heart subdued?--I shall

be throbbing away to Europe on board the _Lusitania_, and we shall

probably never meet. But I am superstitious. As I drove down to the

steamer just now the words that are often in my mind when I travel

sprang with loud voices to my ear:

"'Dort wo du nicht bist, dort ist dein Glueck.'

"Do you know German?

"'There _where thou art not_, is thy happiness.'

"I am leaving America because I hate it, and have never been happy here;

probably my happiness was meanwhile in Europe, or Asia, or Australia.

But what, now that I am going to Europe, if my happiness were in America

after all? What if I were driving away from it, taking ships and sailing

from it, catching trains and leaving it behind? I stopped the cab, and

got these flowers on chance.

"The steward has called a messenger, an impish boy with a crooked mouth.

He stands here waiting.

"I look at him, and like to think that you will see him too. But you?

How shall we find you, the flowers, and my heart, and the

messenger-boy?

"I shall tell him to stop the first girl he meets who is dressed in

light blue. That is you. And I reason that if you wear a light blue

dress you must be young; and if you are young you are happy; and if you

are happy you are kind; and if you are kind you will write to me, who am

a lonely, crabbed, and crusty man.

"My address is the Metropole, London.

"ROBERT BEAUCHAMP LEESE."

Nancy placed the letter on the bed beside the flowers; she sat a long

time, with folded hands, looking at them. They brought but one message

to her eyes that were vexed with shabbiness, to her soul that was shrunk

by privation--riches.

They belonged to another sphere. They had come up the wrong street, into

the wrong house. If they could have life and motion they would rise

quickly--Nancy could imagine them--lifting dainty skirts and tripping

hurriedly out from the sordid flat.

Nancy laid her cheek near to the delicate petals, and her hand on the

letter. Her fancy played with an answer--an answer that should startle

him, surprise him.

"How shall I hold you, fix you, freeze you,

Break my heart at your feet to please you!..."

Yes, she could quote Browning to him, and Heine; she could paint a

fantastic picture of her light blue gown, against which the mauve

orchids melted in divine dissonance of colour; she would be wearing with

it a large black hat, with feathers curving over a shading velvet

brim....

She sighed, and went to the rickety bamboo-table, where the inkstand

stood on a cracked plate, and the ivory pen lay in demoralized

familiarity, with a red wooden penholder belonging to Anne-Marie. On

the cheap notepaper which she used when she wrote to borrow a saucepan

from Mrs. Schmidl, or to ask Mrs. Johnstone to wait until next week, she

wrote:

"DEAR SIR,

"The wrong girl got your letter. I was dressed in _brown_."

She did not sign her name, but she read his letter over again, and,

seeing that he was lonely, and crabbed, and crusty, she added her

address.

He answered to "Miss '_brown_'" at the address she had given him, and he

began his letter: "Dear wrong girl, write to me again." And she wrote

back to say that indeed she would not dream of writing to him.

He replied thanking her, and asking if she were not the Miss Brown he

had met on board ship sixteen years ago, who had been so kind and

maternal to him, and had then had smallpox so badly. He hoped and

believed she was that Miss Brown.

Nancy felt that she must tell him she was not that Miss Brown. And she

did so. And there the correspondence ended. At least, so she told

herself as she ran up the stairs after posting her letter at the corner

of the street.

She was alone that evening, as so often. The piano-lamp was lit. The

little china clock on the mantelpiece ticked time away like a hurrying

heart, and Nancy suddenly realized that life was passing quickly, and

that she was not living. She was shut up in the dusky little flat with

Mr. Johnstone, and was as dead as he. A fierce excitement overcame her

suddenly, like a gust of wind, like a flame of fire--regret for her

wasted talents, resentment against her fate, hatred of the poverty that

was crippling and maiming and crushing her. What was she doing? Was she

asleep? was she drugged? was she dreaming? What had come over her that

she could let herself drift down into the nameless obscurity, the sullen

ignominy of despair?

When midnight struck, Nancy leaped from her chair as one who is called

by a loud voice. Life was rushing past her; she would wake, and go too.

Some old French verses came into her head about "la belle" who wanted to

enter the "blue garden"; who passed it in the morning, and looked in

through the open gates.

"La belle qui veut,

La belle qui n'ose,

Cueillir les roses

Du jardin bleu."

And she passed at noon, and looked in through the open gates:

"La belle qui veut,

La belle qui n'ose,

Cueillir les roses

Du jardin bleu."

In the evening she said: "Now I will enter." But she found that the

gates were closed.

"La belle qui veut,

La belle qui n'ose,

Cueillir les roses

Du jardin bleu."

Some characters evolve slowly, by imperceptible gradations, as a rose

opens or a bird puts on its feathers. But Nancy broke through her

chrysalis-shell in an hour. From one day to the next the gentle,

submissive Nancy was no more; the passive, childlike soul clothed in

the simplicity of genius died that night--for no other reason but that

her hour had come--drifted off, perhaps, in the little dreamboat of her

childhood, where Baby Bunting sat at the helm waiting for her. And

together they went back, afloat on the darkness, to the Isle of What is

No More.

* * * * *

"DEAR UNKNOWN,

"You are very persistent. Is it not enough to know who I am not, that

you needs must want to know who I am? What's in a name? A woman by any

other name would be as false.

"Then call me, if call me you will, by the sweeping, impersonal, fragile

name of Eve. And picture me as Eve, with the serpent coiled round her

neck like a boa, and the after-glimmer of a lost Paradise in her

tranquil eyes. The tranquil eyes are blue, under dark hair.

"What! more questions? Yes, I am young--not disconcertingly so. And

good-tempered--not monotonously so. And almost pretty--not distractingly

so.

"And I write to you, not because I am temerarious, but because the month

is April and the time is twilight. And you are the Unknown."

The Unknown answered. And she wrote to him again. She put all her

fancies and all her phrases into the letters. She wrote him lies and

truth. She described herself to him as she thought she was not--but as

perhaps she really was. In her letters she was a spoilt butterfly,

whirling through life with vivid wings.

As she wrote she grew to resemble the girl she wrote about. She borrowed

money from Peggy and from George, who had fallen in love with her. She

would pay it back some day. She bought clothes, and ran up debts, and

signed notes, and resorted to expedients. All the cleverness that should

have gone into her book she used in her everyday life to wrench herself

free from the poverty that was choking her. "Nothing matters! Nothing

matters!" Only to get out of the mire and the mud--to lift little

Anne-Marie out of the hideous surroundings, to stand her up safe and

high in the light, out of reach of the sordid struggle.

One day--a chilly afternoon in May--Aldo did not come home. Minna had

gone to fetch Anne-Marie from school, when a messenger rang and gave

Nancy a sealed letter.

In it Aldo said the chance of his life had come, and that he could not

throw it aside--no! for her own sake, and for the child's, he would not

do so. He thought not of himself. His thwarted ambitions, his warped

talents, his stifled nature, had cried for a wider horizon. But not for

this was he taking so grave a step. One day she would know how he was

sacrificing himself for her sake. And he would open his arms, and she

would fall on his breast and thank him. (Here was a blur--where Aldo's

tear had fallen.) And he enclosed five hundred dollars. She was to be

careful, as five hundred dollars was a large sum--two thousand five

hundred francs. And she might take a smaller flat, and pay Minna eight

dollars a month instead of ten. And she had better not write about this

to Italy, as probably in a few months' time everything would be

explained, and now farewell, and the Saints protect them! And she was to

pray for him. And he was for ever her unhappy Aldo.

The messenger had darted off as soon as she had signed his receipt, and

Nancy sat down, rigid and dazed, with her letter and the

five-hundred-dollar bill in her hand.

Aldo was not coming back. Aldo had left her and the child to struggle

through life alone. All that day she carried her heart cold and stern as

a rock in her delicate breast.

In the evening she went into his room. True, it was a mean and miserable

room. Everything in it--from the small window that looked out on a dark,

damp wall to the torn carpet, from the crooked folding-bedstead to the

broken piece of mirror leaning against the wall on the narrow

mantelpiece--everything was horrible, everything was good to get away

from. Nancy looked round, and pity drove the stinging tears to her eyes.

Poor Aldo! What had Aldo had, after all, to come home to? Not love. For

the love that would have carried them through and over such wretchedness

was not in Nancy's heart. Her love for him had been all for his beauty;

her love had been a delicate, sensitive, blow-away creature, half ghost,

half angel, whom to wound was to kill. And Fate had amused itself by

throwing bricks and bats at it, choking it under mountains of ugliness,

kicking it through crowded streets, dragging it up squalid stairs....

When Nancy drew the sheet from its face, she saw that it had been dead a

long time. And she was sorry for Aldo.

She pulled his trunk out from under the bed, and remorsefully and

compassionately put all his things into it--his books, his broken comb

and cheap brushes, his old patent-leather shoes that he wore about the

house instead of slippers, some packets of cigarettes. When she opened

his dark cupboard, and saw that all the new clothes had been taken away,

she smiled with a little sigh, and remembered how pale he had looked

when he said good-bye that morning.

How had he got those five hundred dollars to give her? She knelt down

suddenly beside the open trunk, and said a prayer for him, as he had

wished her to do. When she rose and shut the trunk, she shut in it the

memory of Aldo, that was not to be with her any more.

Anne-Marie hardly noticed her father's absence, talking of him

occasionally in the airy, detached manner of children; but Minna went

for a week with red eyes and swollen face. And after a while the

accounts rose with a rush.

Nancy paid all her debts, bought some clothes, and gave Mrs. Johnstone

notice. She engaged a suite in a fashionable boarding-house on Lexington

Avenue. Peggy and George stayed with her the last day in the flat, and

helped her with her packing; but in the evening they went back to their

rooms, for they were expecting a friend--Mr. Markowski, a Pole--who was

to come and make music with George.

Anne-Marie was asleep, and Nancy sat down in the denuded room where

everything belonging to her had already been put away. The dead Mr.

Johnstone looked sadly at her, and even the piano-lamp was bland and

dulcet, shining on the roses that George had brought her.

The postman's double knock startled her, and she received from his hand

a letter. Aldo? No. It came from England, and was addressed to "Miss

Brown." She called the grinning postman in, and gave him half a dollar.

Thank you. He would see that all them "Miss Brown" letters and any

others were brought to her new address. She opened the letter; the

large, well-known handwriting was pleasant to her eyes. The little crest

of the Grand Hotel spoke to her of cheerful, well-remembered things.

She seemed to look through its round gold ring as through an

opera-glass, that showed her far-away things she knew and loved. "Hotel

Metropole." She imagined the brilliantly lit lounge, the gaily-gowned,

laughing women rustling past with the leisurely, well-groomed men; the

soft-footed, obsequious waiters; the ready, low-bowing porter; the

willing, hurrying pageboys; and beyond the revolving glass doors

London, bright, brilliant, luxurious, rolling to its pleasures.

She sat down and answered the Unknown's letter:

"The room is closed and warm and silent. The lamp and the fire give a

mellow glow to the heavy old-rose curtains, and to the soft-tinted

arabesques on the carpet. Some large pale roses are leaning drowsily

over their vase, and dreaming their scented souls away.

"I am smoking a Russian cigarette (with a _soupcon_ of white heliotrope

added to its fragrance), and writing to you.

"My unknown friend! Are you worthy of companionship with the scent of my

roses and the smoke of my cigarette--such delicate, unselfish

things?..."

A piercing cry from the adjoining room made Nancy leap from her chair.

Penholder in hand, she rushed into Anne-Marie's room. The child, a slip

of white, was standing on her bed, pale of cheek, wild of eye, one hand

extended towards the wall. Her tumbled hair stood yellow and flame-like

round her head.

"Listen!" she gasped--"listen!" And Nancy stopped and listened.

Clearly and sweetly through the wall came the voice of a violin. Then

the piano struck in, accompanying the "Romance" of Svendsen. Anne-Marie

stood like a little wild prophetess, with her hand stretched out. Then

she whispered: "It is the lovely piece--the lovely piece that he could

not remember!"

"It is a violin, darling," said Nancy, and sat down on the bed.

But Anne-Marie was listening, and did not move. Nancy drew the blanket

over the little bare feet, and put her arm round the slight, nightgowned

figure.

The last long-drawn note ended; then Anne-Marie moved. She covered her

face with her hands and began to cry.

"Why do you cry, darling--why do you cry?" asked Nancy embracing her.

Anne-Marie's large eyes gazed at Nancy. "For many things--for many

things!" she said. And Nancy for the first time felt that her child's

spirit stood alone, beyond her reach and out of her keeping.

"Is it the music, dear?"

Anne-Marie held her tight, and did not answer. Nancy coaxed her back to

bed, and soon tucked her up and left her. But the door between them was

kept wide open, and the sound of Grieg's "Berceuse" and Handel's

"Minuet" reached Nancy at her table, and helped her to add fantastic

details to her letter.

The next morning they moved to the boarding-house in Lexington Avenue.

They did not see George, who had already gone down-town to his shipping

office; but Peggy helped them into the carriage, and with Minna ran up

and down the stairs after forgotten parcels.

"What's wrong with the kiddy? She don't look festive," said Peggy,

handing a hoop and a one-legged policeman, survivor of the Schmidl's

Punch-and-Judy show, into the carriage to Anne-Marie.

"Your music yesterday excited her very much," said Nancy. "She liked the

violin."

"Oh, that was Markowski. He's a funny old toad," said Peggy; and she got

on to the carriage-step to kiss Anne-Marie. But Anne-Marie covered her

face, and turned her head away. She seemed to be crying, and Peggy

winked at Nancy, and said; "She's a queer little kid." And Nancy said,

"She does not like good-byes." Then Minna got into the carriage with the

cage of Anne-Marie's waltzing mice, for she was going to the

boarding-house with them to help unpack.

"Good-bye! Au revoir! Come and see us soon!"... The carriage rumbled

off. Minna had counted and recounted on her fingers how many things they

had, and how many things they had forgotten, when Anne-Marie raised her

red face from her hands.

"I _do_ like good-byes," she said. "But why did she say an old toad did

the music?"

Nancy comforted her, and said it did not matter, and they were going to

a nice, nice, nice new house.

The nice new house was expecting them, and a cheeky, pimply German

page-boy took their packages up. He was rough with the hoop and the

policeman, and held his nose as he carried up the waltzing mice. But the

room they were to have was large and sunny, and everything was bright.

They went down to luncheon, and sat down at a table with many strangers.

Anne-Marie, who thought it was a party, was very shy in the beginning

and very noisy at the end of the meal. The boarders were the kith and

kin of all boarding-house guests. There was the silent old gentleman

and the loud young man; the estimable couple that kept themselves to

themselves; and the lady with the sulphur-coloured hair who did not keep

herself to herself. There was the witty man and the sour woman; there

were the ill-behaved children, that quarrelled all day and danced

skirt-dances in the drawing-room at night; and their ineffectual mother

and harassed father. There was also the Frenchman, the two Swedish

girls, and the German lady.

The German lady sat opposite Nancy, and, having looked at her and at

Anne-Marie once, continued to do so at intervals all during lunch. Every

time Nancy raised her eyes she met those of the German lady fixed upon

her. They were kindly, inquisitive brown eyes behind glasses. Nobody

spoke to Nancy at luncheon, the sulphur-haired lady and the witty man

talking most of the time of their own affairs and their opinion of Sarah

Bernhardt. Nancy was kept busy telling Anne-Marie in Italian not to

stare at the two little girls, who seemed to fascinate her by their

execrable behaviour.

In the evening Nancy went down to dinner alone. After the soup the

German lady spoke to her.

"I hope the little girl is quite well," she said, nodding towards the

empty place near Nancy.

"Oh yes, thank you. She has early supper and goes to bed."

"That is English habit," said the German lady. "Were you in England?"

"When I was a child," said Nancy.

Then the fish came; and always Nancy felt the brown eyes behind the

glasses fixed on her face. At the mutton the German lady spoke again:

"I heard you speak Italian," she said. "Are you from _il bel paese ove

il si suona_?"

Nancy laughed and said: "My mother was Italian. My father was English. I

was born in Davos, in Switzerland." For some unaccountable reason the

German lady flushed deeply. She did not speak again until the sago

pudding had gone round twice and the fruit once--very quickly.

"You speak German?" she said.

"I had a German governess," said Nancy.

Again the German lady's smooth cheeks flushed. Then every one rose and

went into the drawing-room, and Nancy went to her room and wrote to the

Unknown.

"You ask me to talk about myself. Nothing pleases me better; for I am

selfish and subjective.

"I am a gambler. I went to Monte Carlo some time ago. Oh, golden-voiced,

green-eyed Roulette! I gambled away all my money and all the money of

everyone else that I could lay hands on. I laid hands on a good deal. I

have rather pretty hands.

"I am a dreamer. I have wandered out in deserted country roads dreaming

of you, my unknown hero, and of Uhland's mysterious forests, and of

Maeterlinck's lost princesses, until I could feel the warmth welling up

at the back of my eyes, which is the nearest approach to tears that is

vouchsafed me.

"I am a heathen. I have a hot, unruly worship for everything beautiful,

man, woman, or thing. I believe in Joy; I trust in Happiness; I adore

Pleasure.

"I am a savage--an overcivilized, hypercultivated savage with some of

the growls and the hankerings after feathers still left in him. I adore

jewels. I have some diamonds--diamonds with blue eyes and white

smiles--as large as my heart. No, no! larger! I wear them at all seasons

and everywhere; round my throat, my arms, my ankles, all over me! I like

men to wear jewels. If ever I fall in love with you, I shall insist upon

your wearing rings up to your finger-tips. Do not protest, or I will

_not_ fall in love with you.

"I am feminine; over- and ultra-feminine. I wear nothing but

fluffinesses--trailing, lacey, blow-away fluffinesses, floppy hats on my

soft hair, and flimsy scarves on my small shoulders. I have no views. I

belong to no clubs. I drink no cocktails--or, when I do, I make

delicious little grimaces over them, and say they burn. They _do_ burn!

I smoke Russian cigarettes scented with white heliotrope, because surely

no man would dream of doing such a sickening thing.

"I am careless; I am extravagant; I am lazy--oh, exceedingly lazy. I

envy La Belle au Bois dormant, who slept a hundred years. Until Prince

Charming....

"Good-bye, Prince Charming.

"EVE."

XI

The next day at luncheon the German lady stared again, and looked away

quickly.

Anne-Marie asked her mother: "What is Irish stew when he is alive?"

Nancy smiled and dimpled. Then the German lady, who had seen the dimple

and the smile, said in a sudden, loud voice, over which she had no

control: "Is your name Nancy?"

Nancy looked up with a start. "Yes!" she said. And everyone was silent.

"My name is Fraeulein Mueller," said the German lady, taking a pink-edged

handkerchief from her pocket and making ready for tears.

"Fraeulein Mueller! Fraeulein Mueller!" said Nancy dreamily. "You read

Uhland to me, and Lenau, and ... 'shine out little head sunning over

with curls.'"

Then Fraeulein Mueller wept in her handkerchief, and Nancy rose from her

seat and went round and kissed her. Then it was Fraeulein Mueller's turn

to get up and go round and kiss Anne-Marie; whereupon the sulphur-haired

lady remarked how small the world was; and the witty man said they would

next discover that he and she were brother and sister, and had she not a

strawberry mark on her left shoulder?

After lunch Fraeulein Mueller asked Nancy to her room, and she held

Anne-Marie on her lap, and had to say the baby rhyme, "Da hast du 'nen

Thaler, geh' auf den Markt" about fifty times, with the accompanying

play on Anne-Marie's pink, outstretched palm, before she was allowed to

talk to Nancy. Then she told them all about the years she had passed in

an American family after leaving the Grey House, and about the little

house she had just rented on Staten Island--a tiny little house in a

garden, where she was going to live for the rest of her life. She was

furnishing it now, and it would be ready next week.

"You must come to see it. You must stay with me there," said Fraeulein

Mueller, looking for a dry spot on the sodden handkerchief. "Oh, meine

kleine Nancy! My little Genius! Und was ist mit der Poesie?"

The following week Fraeulein Mueller left Lexington Avenue for her

"Gartenhaus," as she called it, and three days later Nancy and

Anne-Marie went to stay with her for a fortnight.

"What for an education has the child?" inquired the old governess, when

Anne-Marie had been put to bed after a day of wonders. What?

Strawberries grew on plants? Anne-Marie had always thought they came in

baskets.

"She seems to know nothing," said Fraeulein Mueller. "I tried her with a

little arithmetic. Did she know the metric system? Oh yes, she said she

did, and wanted to speak about something else. But I kept her to it,"

said Fraeulein sternly, "and asked her: 'What are millimetres?' Do you

know what the child said? She said that she supposed they were relations

of the centipedes!"

Nancy laughed, and told Fraeulein Mueller about the Sixth Avenue School.

Fraeulein clasped horrified hands.

"I will educate her myself. I suppose she is also a genius."

"No, I am afraid not," said Nancy, shaking her head regretfully. "I wish

she were!"

The two women were silent; and from the little bedroom upstairs, through

the open window, came Anne-Marie's voice, like tinkling water.

"She is singing," said Fraeulein Mueller.

"Oh yes; she always sings herself to sleep. She likes music." And Nancy

told her about the violin.

"We shall buy her a violin to-morrow," said Fraeulein Mueller.

And so she did. The violin was new and bright and brown; it was labelled

"Guarnerius," and cost three dollars. Anne-Marie pushed the bow up and

down on it with great pleasure for a short time. Then she became very

impatient, and took it out into the garden, and looked for a large

stone.

"... It made ugly voices at me," she said, standing small and

unrepentant by the broken brown pieces, while Fraeulein Mueller and Nancy

shook grieved heads at her.

"I do not think that music is her vocation after all," said Fraeulein

Mueller. "But we shall see."

XII

"Good-morning, my tenebrious Unknown. I am in the country, perched up on

a stone wall with nothing in sight but vague, distant hills and sleepy

fields. Queer insects buzz in the sun, and make me feel pale. I dread

buzzing insects with a great shivery dread.

"Why are you not here? I am wearing a large straw hat with blue ribbons,

and a white dress and a blue sash, like the _ingenue_ in a drawing-room

comedy. And there is no one to see me. And the fields are full of

flowers, and I pick them, and have no one to give them to. Surely it is

the time in all good story-books when the heroine in a white dress and

blue sash is sitting on a wall for Prince Charming to pass and see her,

and stop suddenly.... But life is a badly constructed novel;

uninteresting people walk in and walk out, and all is at contra-tempo,

like a Brahms Hungarian Dance.

"Prince Charming, why have you gone three thousand miles away?"

* * * * *

"Good-morning again.

"This is a divine day--cool winds and curtseying grasses.

"I am still here, living on herbs and sunsets and memories of things

that have not been. You are a thing that has not been. Perhaps that is

why you are so much in my thoughts. I have many friends whom I seldom

think of. I have a few lovers whom I never think of. And I have you who

are nothing, and whom I always think of. It is absurd and wonderful.

"My lovers! You ask me who they are and why I have them. I have them

because they make me look pretty. I look pretty when I laugh. A woman's

beauty depends entirely upon how much she is loved. Did you not know

that? The best 'fard pour la beaute des dames' is other people's

adoration.

"My lovers therefore have their use, but they are not entertaining. They

are uniformly sad or angry. Yet I am good to my lovers. I let them trot

in and out of their tempers like nice tame animals that nobody need

mind. I do not require them to perform in public; I sit and watch their

innocent tricks with kind and wondering eyes.

"Et vous, mon Prince Charmant? What of you? Who are you making to look

prettier? Whose cheeks are you tinting? Whose eyes are you brightening?

Whose heart are you making to flutter by the hurry of yours? Who smiles

and dimples and blushes for your sake? I suppose you are falling in love

with your fair countrywomen--tall, tennis-playing English girls, with

cool, unkissed mouths and white, inexperienced hands. Ah, Prince

Charming, whom do you love?

"EVE."

He replied: "You have spoken. Whom do I love? Eve."

She was glad. She lived a life of fevered joy. She was not Nancy. She

was the Girl in the Letters; and the Girl in the Letters was a wild,

unfettered, happy creature. Nothing seemed sweeter to her than this

subtle _amor di lontano_--this love across the distance. Ah, how modern

and piquant and recherche! And, again, how thirteenth-century! Was it

not Jaufre Rudel, the Poet-Prince, who had loved the unseen Countess

Melisenda for so many years?

"Amore di terra lontana,

Per voi tutto il core mi duol,"

and who at last, coming to her, had died at her feet? Could they not

also love each other across the distance, wildly and blindly, without

the aid of any one of their senses? Surely that was the highest, the

divinest, the most perfect way of love!

So Nancy lived her dream, and tossed the tender little love-letters

across the ocean with light hands.

* * * * *

"CHER INCONNU,

"I write to you because it is raining and the sky is of grey flannel.

You will say that I wrote to you yesterday because the weather was fine

and the sky was of blue silk.

"Ah, dear Unknown! It is true. You have grown into my life, like some

strange, startling modern flower, out of place, out of season, yet sweet

to my unwondering eyes. You are a black and white flower of words,

growing through your brief wild letters into the garden of my heart.

"What a garden, mon ami! What a growth of weeds! what a burst of roses!

what a burgeoning of cabbages! An unnatural, degenerate garden, where

the trees carry _marrons glaces_ and the flowers are scented with

patchouli.

"Into this luxuriance of perversity, this decadent brilliance of

vegetation, you have blossomed up, strange and new, for the delight of

my soul. That you should say you love me, you who have never seen me, is

sweeter perfume to my sated senses than the incense of all the thousand

seraph-flowers that bow and swing at my feet.

"Good-bye. My name is Nancy."

To this letter he replied by cable: "Nancy, come here at once."

"'Come here at once!' The arrogant words go with a shock of pleasure to

my heart. I am unused to the imperative; nobody has ever bullied me or

told me to do this and that. I think I like it. I like being meek and

frightened, and having to obey.

"'Come here at once!' I find myself timidly looking round for my hat and

gloves, and wondering whether I shall wear my blue or my grey dress on

the journey. I am nice on journeys. I am good-tempered, and wear

mousie-coloured clothes that fit well, and I have a small waist. All

this is very important in travelling, and makes people overlook and

forgive the many, many small packages I carry into the compartment, and

the hatboxes I lose, and the umbrellas I forget. When I am tired I can

put my head down anywhere and go to sleep; I sleep nicely and quietly

and purrily, like a cat.

"I am really very nice on journeys. Also I am very popular with useful

people, like conductors and porters and guards. They take care of me and

give me advice, and open and shut my windows, and lock my compartments

even when it does not matter; and they bring me things to eat, and run

after all the satchels and parcels I leave about.

"Your last letter says you are going to Switzerland. How nice! I should

like to be with you, throbbing away on excitable little Channel

steamers, puffing along in smoky, deliberate Continental trains, driving

the bell-shaking horses slowly up the wide white roads that coil like

wind-blown ribbons round the swelling breasts of the Alps;

table-d'hoting at St. Moritz; tennis-playing at Maloya; clattering and

rumbling over the covered bridges near Spluegen; wandering through the

moonlike sunshine of Sufer's pine-forest, where beady-eyed squirrels

stop and look, and then scuttle, tail flourishing, up the trees. I am

friends with every one of those squirrels. Greet them from me.

"NANCY."

* * * * *

NEW YORK.

"AMOR MIO DI LONTANO,

"I am in the city again the horrible, glaring, screaming city, all loud

and harsh in the uncompromising July sun. How I long to-day for the

shade of the closed Italian houses, the friendly, indrawn shutters, the

sleeping silence of the empty streets, and, far-off, the cerulean sweep

of the Mediterranean!

"And a new lover at my side! A brand-new lover, whose voice would sound

strange to my ears, whose eyes I had not fathomed, whose feelings I did

not understand, whose thoughts I could only vaguely and wrongly guess

at, whose nerves would respond strangely, like an unknown instrument, to

the shy touch of my hand.

"Your letter is brought to me. Written at the Hotel Bellevue, Andermatt.

_Andermatt!_ How cool and buoyant and scintillant it sounds. It falls on

my heart like a snowflake in the humid heat of this town.

"I have opened the letter. What? Only three words!

"Again: 'Come at once.' Again the words, with their brief, irresistible

imperiousness, thrill my lazy soul.

"If you write it a third time ... by all that is sweet and unlikely, I

shall come!

"Will you be glad? Will you kiss my white hands gratefully? Shall we be

simple and absurd and happy? Or shall we fence and be brilliant,

antagonistic, keen-witted? No matter! No matter! The fever of my heart

will be stilled. My eyes will see you and be satisfied."

* * * * *

A cablegram to Andermatt. Reply paid. (Money borrowed from Fraeulein

Mueller.)

"Dreamt that you had long black beard. Tell me that not true.--NANCY."

Reply from Andermatt:

"Not true. Come at once."

* * * * *

Nancy did not go at once. She had no money to go with; and, of course,

she never intended to go at all.

He wrote: "Will you meet me in Lucerne?" and she replied: "Impossible."

He: "I shall expect you in Interlaken."

She: "Out of the question."

He: "I shall be in London in October. After that I am off to Peru."

So in September she wrote to him again.

"I lay awake last night dreaming of our first meeting. It will be framed

in the conventional luxury of a little sitting-room in a Grand Hotel. It

will be late in the afternoon--late enough to have the pretty

pink-shaded lights lit, like shining fairy-tale flowers, all over the

room. Then a knock at the door. And you will come into my life. What

then, what then, dear Unknown? My hands will lie in yours like prisoned

butterflies; my wilfulness and my courage, my flippancy and effrontery

will throb away, foolishly, weakly, before your eyes. What then? Will

Convention guide the steed of our Destiny gently back into the well-kept

stables of the common-place? or shall we take the reins into our own

hands, and lash it rearing and foaming over the precipice of the

Forbidden, down into the flaming depths of passionate happiness?

"Good-bye. Of course I shall not come."

XIII

Fraeulein Mueller came to town three times a week and taught Anne-Marie

arithmetic and geography. Of arithmetic Anne-Marie understood little; of

geography no word. She pointed vaguely with a ruler at the map, and

said: "Skagerrack and Kattegat," which were the words whose sounds

pleased her most.

"The child is not at all a genius," said Fraeulein Mueller, much

depressed.

One day George and Peggy came to visit them at the boarding-house. And

with them they brought Mr. Markowski and his violin.

In the drawing-room after tea Nancy asked the shy and greasy-looking

Hungarian to play: and the fiddle was taken tenderly out of its

plush-lined case. Markowski was young and shabby, but his violin was old

and valuable. Markowski had a dirty handkerchief, but the fiddle had a

clean, soft white silk one. Markowski placed a small black velvet

cushion on his greasy coat-collar, and raised the violin to it; he

adjusted his chin over it, raised his bow, and shut his eyes. Then

Markowski was a god.

Do you know the hurrying anguish of Grieg's F dur Sonata? Do you know

the spluttering shrieks of laughter of Bazzini's "Ronde des Lutins"? The

sobbing of the unwritten Tzigane songs? The pattering of wing-like feet

in Ries's "Perpetuum Mobile?"

Little Anne-Marie stood in the middle of the room motionless, pale as

linen, as if the music had taken life from her and turned her into a

white statuette. Ah, here was the little neoteric statue that Nancy had

tried to fix! The child's eyes were vague and fluid, like blue water

spilt beneath her lashes; her colourless lips were open.

Nancy watched her. And a strange dull feeling came over her heart, as if

someone had laid a heavy stone in it. What was that little figure,

blanched, decolorized, transfigured? Was that Anne-Marie? Was that the

little silly Anne-Marie, the child that she petted and slapped and put

to bed, the child that was so stupid at geography, so brainless at

arithmetic?

"Anne-Marie! Anne-Marie! What is it, dear? What are you thinking about?"

Anne-Marie turned wide light eyes on her mother, but her soul was not in

them. For the Spirit of Music had descended upon her, and wrapped her

round in his fabulous wings--wrapped her, and claimed her, and borne her

away on the swell of his sounding wings.

XIV

"Fraeulein, I have no more money--not one little brown cent in the wide

world," said Nancy, sitting on the lawn of the Gartenhaus, and drinking

afternoon tea out of Fraeulein's new violet-edged cups.

"So?" said Fraeulein. For a long time her lips moved in mental

calculation. Then she said: "I could let you have forty-seven dollars."

Nancy put down the cup, and, bending forward, kissed Fraeulein's downy

cheek.

"Dear angel!" she said; "and then?"

"What is to be done?" said Fraeulein, drying her lips on her new fringed

serviette, and folding it in a small neat square.

"_Mah!_" said Nancy, raising her shoulders, swayed back into Italian by

the stress of the moment.

"No news from your husband?"

"Bah!" said Nancy, shrugging her shoulders again, and waving her hand

from the wrist downwards in a gesture of disdain.

Fraeulein sighed, and looked troubled. Then she said:

"You must come and live here, you and Anne-Marie. I will send Elisabeth

away--anyhow, she has broken already three lamp-glasses and a plate--and

we must live with economy." Fraeulein, who had lived with that lean and

disagreeable comrade all her life, then coughed and looked practical.

"Yes, I shall be glad to get rid of that clumsy girl, Elisabeth."

Nancy put one arm round her neck and kissed her again. Then she said: "I

have only one hope."

"What is that?" asked Fraeulein.

It was Nancy's turn to cough. She did so, and then said: "There is ...

there are ... some ... some people in England who are interested in

me--in my writings. I think ... they might help ... I ought to go over

and see them."

"Certainly," said Fraeulein, "you must go. And I will keep Anne-Marie

here with me. Then she need not interrupt her violin-lessons."

"Yes," said Nancy. "You could keep Anne-Marie...." She sighed deeply.

"Of course she must not interrupt her lessons. I suppose you think I

_ought_ to go?"

"Of course," said Fraeulein, who was practical. "A firm like that won't

do anything without seeing you and talking business. But mind, mind they

do not cheat! Authoresses are always being cheated."

Nancy smiled. "I shall try not to let them."

"Being English, perhaps they will not. In Berlin----" And here Fraeulein

repeated a discourse she had made many, many years ago in Wareside when

Nancy's first poem had been read aloud. Fraeulein remembered that day,

and spoke of it now with tearful tenderness. She also believed she

remembered bits of the poem:

"This morning in the garden

I caught the little birds;

This morning in the orchard

I picked the little words."

"What!" said Nancy. "Why did I 'pick the little words'?"

"Perhaps it was 'plucked,'" said Fraeulein, looking vague.

"This morning in the garden

I caught the little words;

This morning in the orchard

I plucked ... or picked the little birds----"

--"or caught them," continued Fraeulein, much moved.

"I cannot say that that sounds very beautiful," said Nancy.

"Oh, but it was. It may have been a little different. But it was lovely.

And you were a little tiny thing, like Anne-Marie!"

"Listen to Anne-Marie," said Nancy.

Anne-Marie had insisted upon bringing her violin to the Gartenhaus, and

was now practising on it in the dining-room. The windows were open. She

was playing a little cradle-song very softly, very lightly, in perfect

tune.

"That is indeed a Wonderchild," said Fraeulein.

Markowski had called her a Wonderchild directly. When he had seen her

weeping convulsively after he had played, he had exclaimed: "This is a

Wonderchild. I will teach her to play the fiddle."

And sure enough he had come to the house on the following day, with a

little old half-sized fiddle, like a shabby reproduction of the dead

Guarnerius, and had given Anne-Marie her first lesson. The lesson had

been long, and Anne-Marie had emerged from it with feverish eyes and hot

cheeks, and with anger in her heart. For the Bird, or the Fairy, or the

Sorcerer, or the Witch that made music in other violins, did not seem to

be inside the little shabby fiddle Markowski had brought her.

"Be gentle, be gentle! and do what I say," said Markowski, with his

stringy black hair falling over his vehement eyes. "One day the Birds

and the Witches will be in it, and they will sing to you. Now, practise

scale of C."

And Anne-Marie had practised scale of C--to Nancy's amazement, for she

thought that in one lesson no one could have learnt so much. In ten

lessons Anne-Marie had learnt fifteen scales and a cradle-song. In two

months she had learnt what other children learn in two years. So said

Markowski, who got more and more excited, and gave longer and longer

lessons, and came every day instead of twice a week.

"What do I owe you?" Nancy asked him. "I can't keep count of the

lessons. You seem to be always coming."

"Never mind! never mind!" said Markowski, waving excited, unwashed

hands. And as he had heard about their financial position from George

and Peggy, he added, "You will pay me ... when she plays you the Bach

Chaconne!"

"Very well," said Nancy, who thought that that meant in a week or two.

"Just as you please, Herr Markowski."

And then she thought he must be insane, because he was bent with

laughter as he packed away his violin.

Fraeulein Mueller made accounts in a little black book all one day and

half one night, and in the morning she went to Lexington Avenue to see

Nancy.

"I can give you eighty dollars. Will that pay your journey to England to

see the firm of publishers?"

Oh yes, Nancy thought so. And how good of her! And how could Nancy ever

thank her?

"Of course, those people will be glad to advance you something at once,

even if the manuscript is not quite ready," said Fraeulein, who was

romantic besides being practical.

"I suppose so," said Nancy.

"See that you have a proper contract. You had better ask a barrister to

make it for you." And Nancy promised that she would.

So Fraeulein hurried off to the Deutsche Bank, and drew out eighty

dollars and a little extra, because Anne-Marie would have to have

puddings and good soups while she was with her. The thought of giving

puddings to Anne-Marie made her hurriedly take her handkerchief from her

pocket and blow her nose.

"One day it shall be sago, one day it shall be rice, and one day it

shall be tapioca, with _Konfituere_." And Fraeulein Mueller hurried with

her eighty dollars to Nancy.

But then a strange thing happened. Nancy would not go. Day after day

passed, and Nancy always had some excuse for not having packed her trunk

or taken her berth. Surely it was not so difficult to pack the little

things she wanted for a short business journey. Her new navy-blue serge,

observed Fraeulein, was very good, and the brown straw hat for autumn

would do nicely.

"You must dress sensibly in a business-like way to go and see those

people," said Fraeulein. "It would never do if you went looking like a

flimsy fly-away girl."

"No, indeed," said Nancy, smiling with pale lips. That evening she wrote

to George. He came up to town at the lunch-hour next day, and asked to

see her. She left Anne-Marie at table eating stewed steak, to go and

speak to him.

"George," she said, keeping in hers the cool damp hand he held out, "I

want money. I want a lot of money."

George slowly withdrew his hand, and pulled at a little beard he had

recently and not very successfully grown on his receding chin.

"Then I guess you must have it," he said.

"But I want a great deal. Two or three hundred dollars," said Nancy. "Or

four----"

"Stop right there," said George. "Don't go on like that, or I can't

follow." And he pulled his beard again.

"Oh, George, how sweet of you! how dear of you!" And she clasped his

moist left hand, which he left limply in hers.

"The bother of it is, I don't know how I shall get it," said George.

"I'm just thinking that"----

"Oh, don't tell me--please don't tell me!" said Nancy. "I--I'd rather

not know! I know you won't steal, or murder anyone, but get it, George!

Oh, thank you! thank you so much! Good-bye!"

And Nancy, as she looked out of the window after him, at his cheap hat

and his sloping shoulders, and saw him board a cable-car going

down-town, felt that she was a vulture and a harpy.

"The Girl in the Letters has demoralized me," she said.

He brought her four hundred dollars on the following Monday, and she

wept some pretty little tears over it, and covered her ears with her

hands, and dimpled up at him, when he began to tell her how he had got

them. She was the Girl in the Letters. She was practising. And with

George it answered very well--too well! She had to stop quickly and be

herself again. Then he went away.

And she went out and bought dresses. She bought drooping, trailing gowns

and flimsy fly-away gowns, and an unbusiness-like hat, and shoes

impossible to walk in. She bought _Creme des Cremes_ for her face, and

_Creme Simon_ for her hands, and liquid varnish for her nails, and

violet unguent for her hair.

Then she waited for the Unknown's next letter, saying

"Come."

The letter did not arrive. A day passed, and another. And he did not

write. A week passed, and another, and he did not write. Nancy sat in

the boarding-house with her dresses and her hats and her _Creme des

Cremes_. The entire four hundred dollars of George, and fifteen dollars

out of Fraeulein's eighty, were gone.

Nancy sat and looked out of the window, and thought her thoughts. Could

she write to the Unknown again? No. Hers had been the last letter. He

had not answered it. Should she telegraph? Where to? And to say what? He

had gone to Peru. She knew, she felt, he had gone to Peru. The pretty,

silly, romantic story was ended--ended as she had wished it to end,

without the banal _denouement_ of their meeting. Better so. Much better

so. Nancy was really very glad that things were as they were.

And now what was going to happen to her? She said to herself that she

must have been insane to borrow all that money and buy those crazy

dresses, those idiotic hats. What should she do? The terror of life came

over her, and she wished she were safely away and asleep in the little

Nervi cemetery between her father and her mother, cool and in the dark,

with quiet upturned face.

Oh yes, she was really exceedingly glad that things were as they were!

Half-way through the third week a telegram was brought to her. It came

from Paris.

"Why not dine with me next Thursday at the Grand Hotel?"

To-day was Thursday.

She cabled back.

"Why not? At eight o'clock.--NANCY."

Oh, the excitement, the packing, the telegraphing to Fraeulein, the

hurry, the joy, the confusion! The stopping every minute to kiss

Anne-Marie; the sitting down suddenly and saying, "Perhaps I ought not

to go!" And then, the jumping up again at the thought of the boat that

left to-morrow at noon.

Fraeulein came to fetch Anne-Marie at ten in the morning. She arrived

joyful and agitated, bringing a fox-terrier pup in her arms, a present

for Anne-Marie, to prevent her crying.

"Why should I cry?" said Anne-Marie, with the hardness of tender years.

"Why, indeed!" said Nancy, buttoning Anne-Marie's coat, while quick

tears fell from her eyes. "Mother will come back very soon--very soon."

"Of course," said Anne-Marie, holding the puppy tightly round the neck,

and putting up a shoe to have it buttoned.

"Don't let her catch cold, Fraeulein," sobbed Nancy, bending over the

shoe; and when it was fastened, she kissed it.

"No," said Fraeulein, beaming. "She shall wear flannel pellipands that I

am making for her."

The second shoe was buttoned and kissed. Her hat was put on with the

elastic in front of her ears. Her gloves? Yes, in her coat-pocket.

Handkerchief? Yes. The mice? Yes; Fraeulein had them, and the violin, and

the music-roll, and the satchel. The box was already downstairs in the

carriage. They were ready.

"Let me carry down the puppy," said Nancy on the landing, with a break

in her voice. "Then I can hold your dear little hand."

"Oh no!" said Anne-Marie. "I'll carry the puppy. You can hold on to the

bannisters."

So Nancy walked down behind Anne-Marie and the puppy. Fraeulein was in

front, dreading the moment of leave-taking, and thinking with terror of

the possibility of travelling all the way to Staten Island with a loud

and tearful Anne-Marie. So she started a new topic of conversation.

"You shall have pudding every day," she said, trying to turn round on

the second landing to Anne-Marie, close behind her, and nearly dropping

the satchel and the mice, as the violin-case caught in the bannisters.

"One day it shall be sago, another day tapioca...."

"I don't like tapioca," said Anne-Marie, walking down the stairs. "I

don't like nothing of all that."

They were at the door. By request of Nancy, nobody was there to speak to

them. But all the boarders who were in the house were looking at them

from behind the drawing-room curtains.

"Then what do you like for dessert?" said Fraeulein, going down the stone

steps by Anne-Marie's side, while Nancy still followed.

"I like peppermint bullseyes," said Anne-Marie, "and pink jelly." And

she added: "Nothing else," while the pimply boy and the maid hoisted her

into her carriage. Fraeulein got in after her, with the many packages.

And the puppy barked at the mice.

"Good-bye, Anne-Marie! Good-bye, darling!" cried Nancy, kissing her with

great difficulty through the carriage-window across Fraeulein, and the

violin, and the mice, that were on Fraeulein's lap. "God bless you! God

bless you and keep you, my own darling!"

The puppy barked deafeningly. The pimply boy nodded to the cabman, and

off they were.

Nancy walked slowly back into the house, and up the stairs, and into the

desolate rooms.

XV

Peggy and George accompanied her to the boat, Peggy excited and

talkative, George depressed and silent. In his murky down-town office

George had felt himself of late more poet than clerk, and now he was all

elegy. She was leaving! She was going away with his heart, and she might

perhaps never return! She might perhaps never return the four hundred

dollars either. They belonged to a friend of George's--a mean and sordid

soul. George stifled the unlovely thought, born of the clerk, and

surrendered his spirit to the grief of the poet.

Farewell! Farewell! The ship turned its cruel side, and hid the little

waving figure from his sight. It throbbed away like a great, unfaithful

heart, abandoning the land. Farewell! What were four hundred dollars,

belonging to a friend, compared with the torn and quivering heart-strings

of a lover?

The ship heaved forward towards the east, rising and sinking as ships

rise and sink, carrying Nancy and her dresses, and her hats, and her

little pots of cream, to the Unknown. And the nearer they got to him,

the more frightened was Nancy. What if she should reach Paris, with the

fourteen dollars she still possessed, and he were not there? What if he

turned out to be a brute and a beast? What--oh, terrible thought!--if he

were to think her not as pretty as he had expected? She was not really

pretty. Oh, why had she not the pale sunshiny hair of the American girl

opposite her at table? Why not the youth-splashed eyes of the little

girl from the West, who was going to Paris to study art? Why not the

long, up-curling lashes of her light and starry glance?

Nancy comforted herself by hoping that he himself might be hideous. But

if he were? How should she smile at him and talk to him if he were a

repugnant, odious monster? Then she reasoned that if he were a monster,

he would not have asked her to come. "Why not dine with me on Thursday?"

is not the kind of telegram a monster would send. No, he was not a

monster.

What would he say to her when they met? Everything depended on the first

moment. She pictured it in a thousand different ways. The pictures

always began in the same manner. She arrived in Paris; she drove from

the Gare du Nord, not to the Grand Hotel where he was staying, but to

the Continental. She engaged a gorgeous suite of rooms. What! with

fourteen dollars? Exactly so! What did it matter? It was Rouge or Noir.

If Rouge came up, all was well. If Noir--_la debacle_! _le deluge_!

Fifty francs more or less made absolutely no difference. A few hours'

rest. An hour or two for an elaborate toilette; all the creams used, all

the details perfect. Then she would send a messenger, at a quarter to

eight, to his hotel:

"Dear Unknown, I am here!"

Then--ah! then, what? He arrives, he enters, he sees her. Then she must

say something. Ah! what? What are her first words to be? "_How do you

do?_" Dreadful! No, never that! "_Here I am!_" Worse, worse still. In

French, perhaps? "_Me voila!_" Ridiculous! No; she will say nothing. He

must speak first.

Then she imagines his opening phrases. After a long silence his voice,

deep and trembling with emotion: "Yes, you are the Woman of my Dreams!"

That would be very nice. Or, then: "Ah! Eve! Eve! How I have longed for

you!" That would strike the right note at once. Or, then, with both

hands outstretched: "So _this_ is Nancy!" That would be rather nice. But

perhaps he will say something more original: "Why did you not tell me

you had a dimple in your chin?"

Ah, how long Nancy lay awake thinking of those First Words! Nancy tossed

in her little berth, and turned her pillow's freshest side to her hot

cheek; and she palpitated and trembled, smiled and feared, repented and

defied, until the huge boat creaked against the landing stage of the

Havre dock.

She arrived at the Gare du Nord at three o'clock. She drove to the

Continental, and engaged a suite of rooms that cost eighty francs a day:

a sitting-room, all tender greens and delicate greys, looking as if it

were seen through water, and adjoining it a gorgeous scarlet bedroom,

with a dozen mirrors a-shine, all deferentially awaiting the Elaborate

Toilette.

Sleep was out of the question. By four o'clock the note that was to be

sent at half-past seven was written, and Nancy began her elaborate

toilette. She thought of ordering the coiffeur, but she remembered that

coiffeurs had always dressed her hair in wonderful twists and coils and

rolls, until her head looked like a cake to which her face did not in

any way belong. So she did her hair _a la Carmen_, parted on one side.

It seemed the style of hair-dress that the Girl in the Letters would

adopt. But when it was done it looked startling and impertinent. So she

unpinned it again and decided in favour of a simple, unaffected

coiffure. She parted her hair in the middle, plaited it, and pinned it

round her head. It _was_ unaffected and simple. She looked like the

youngest of the two Swedish girls in the boarding-house. She did not

look at all like the Girl in the Letters. So once more she unpinned it,

and did it _a la pierrot_--a huge puff in the middle, waving down over

her forehead, and two huge puffs, one on each side. It looked pretty and

unladylike.

By this time it was six o'clock. The creams! First a little cold cream;

then _Creme Imperatrice_; then--she remembered the directions given her

by the person in the shop perfectly--a tiny amount of Leichner's rouge,

mixed with a little _Creme des Cremes_ in the palm of the hand, gently

rubbed into the cheeks and chin; then powder--rose-coloured and Rachel.

Now a _soupcon_ of rouge on the lobes of the ears and in the nostrils.

This, the person in the shop said, was very important. Then the eyebrows

brushed with an atom of _mascaro_, a touch of Leichner on the lips, an

idea of shadow round the eyes--and behold!

Nancy beheld. Her face looked mauve, and her nostrils suggested a

feverish cold. Her eyes looked large, and tired, and intense, like the

eyes of the prairie chickens at Monte Carlo.

Seven o'clock! She had forgotten her nails! For twenty minutes she

painted her nails with the pink varnish, which was sticky, and, once on,

would not wash off. Her fingers looked as if she had dipped them in

blood.

Half-past seven! She must send the note. She rang the bell, and a

waiter came. He had been a nice, well-behaved German waiter, as he had

shown her respectfully to her expensive rooms. When he saw her as she

now appeared--she had hastily slipped into the lightest of the three

trailing dresses--the waiter stared; he stared rudely, with raised

eyebrows, at her, and took the note from her hand.

He read the address, nodded, and said: "Jawohl! All right. C'est bon!"

And then he smiled. He smiled--at her!--and went down the passage

whistling softly.

Nancy shut her door. She took off the trailing dress, and went to her

bathroom. She turned on the hot water and washed her face. She washed

off the shades and _soupcons_, the _cremes_ and the _mascaro_ from her

eyebrows and her chin, her ears and her nostrils. Then she pinned her

hair loosely on the top of her head, as she always did, and put on the

darkest of the three trailing gowns. But her nails she scrubbed in vain.

They remained aggressively rose-coloured, and Nancy blushed hotly every

time she saw them. She decided to put her hat and gloves on. She did so.

Then she sat down in her sitting-room and waited. She waited fifteen

minutes.

Then somebody knocked.

Nancy started to her feet as if she had been shot. With beating heart

she ran back into the bedroom and shut the door after her. No, it was

not quite shut; it swung lightly ajar, and Nancy left it so. She heard

the knock repeated more loudly at the outer door; she heard the door

open, and someone enter. Then the door closed, and steps--the waiter's

steps--went back along the hall.

Somebody was in that room. Somebody! A man! A man whom she had never

seen. A man to whom she had written forty or fifty letters, whom she had

called "mon ami" and "mes amours," "Prince Charming," and "my unknown

lover"!

Nancy stood motionless, petrified with shame, her face hidden in her

white-gloved hands. She would never go in--never! Not if she had to

stand here for years! She could not face that silent man next door.

The situation was becoming ridiculous. The silence was tense in both

rooms. Ah, when three thousand miles had separated them, how near she

had felt to him! And now, with a few feet of carpet and an open door

between them, he was far away--incommensurably far away! A stranger, an

intruder, an enemy!

Utter silence. Was he there? Yes. Nancy knew he was there, waiting.

Suddenly Nancy was frightened. The one idea possessed her to get away

from that unseen, silent man. She would slip through the bathroom, and

out into the passage and away! She took a step forward. Her trailing

dress rustled. Her high-heeled boots creaked. And in the next room the

man coughed.

Nancy stood still again, transfixed--turned to stone.

Another long silence, ludicrous, untenable. Then in the next room the

First Words were spoken. He spoke them in a calm and well-bred voice.

"Our dinner will be cold."

Nancy laughed suddenly, softly, convulsively. Her voice was treble and

sweet as she replied:

"What have you ordered?"

The man in the next room said: "Fillet of sole."

"Fried?" asked Nancy earnestly; and, knowing that unless she slid in on

that fillet of sole she would never do so, she passed quickly under the

draped portiere and entered the room.

They looked each other in the face. She saw a large and stalwart figure,

a hard mouth, and a strong, curved nose in a sunburnt face, two chilly

blue eyes under a powerful brow, and waving grey hair. He looked down at

her, and was satisfied. His cool blue gaze took her in from the top of

her large black feathered hat to the tips of her Louis XV. shoes.

"Come," he said, offering his arm. And they went out together.

The dinner was not cold. Nancy hardly spoke at all. She was nervous and

charming. She sipped Liebfraunmilch, and dimpled and rippled while he

told her that he had mines in Peru, and that he had been away from

civilization for twenty years.

"I went down to the mines when I was twenty, and came back when I was

forty. That is four years ago. I have been fighting my way ever since,

trying to keep clear of the wrong woman. I am afraid of women."

"So am I," said Nancy, which was not true.

He laughed, and said: "And of what else?"

"Spiders," said Nancy, with her head on one side.

"And what else?"

"Lions," said Nancy.

"And what else?"

"Thunderstorms." And, as he seemed to be waiting, she added: "And of

you, of course."

He did not believe it. But she was.

After dinner he took her to the Folies Bergeres and then to the Boite a

Fursy; and he watched her narrowly, and was glad that she did not laugh.

Then he took her back to the hotel. They went up together in the lift,

and along the red-carpeted, boot-adorned corridor to her green and grey

salon. He did not ask permission, but walked in and sat down--large and

long--in the small brocaded armchair.

"Are you tired?" he said.

Nancy said, "No," and remained standing.

He said, "Sit down," and she obeyed him.

He sat staring before him for a while, with his underlip pushed up under

his upper-lip, making his straight, short-cut moustache stand out. He

was a strong, large, ugly man. Nancy suddenly remembered that she had

called him "toi," and said, "adieu, mes amours" to him in her letters,

and she felt faint with shame. He made a little noise, something between

a cough and a growl, and looked up at her.

"What are you thinking?" he said.

She laughed. "I am thinking that I called you Prince Charming, whereas

you really are the Ogre."

"Yes," he said, and stared at her a long time. Then he got up suddenly

and put out his large hand. "Good-night, Miss Brown," he said. He took

his hat and stick, and went out, shutting the door decidedly behind him.

The next morning at half-past eleven he came; he had a small bunch of

lilies of the valley in his hand.

"Will you invite me to lunch?" he said.

Yes, Nancy would be very pleased. She thought of the twenty-two francs

in her purse; but nothing mattered.

They lunched in the dining-room, and he was very silent. Nancy spoke of

music, but he did not respond.

"Do you sing?" she asked at last.

He looked up at her like an offended wild beast. "Do I look as if I

could sing?"

"No, you don't," she said. "You look as if you could growl."

He smiled slightly under his clipped moustache, and did not answer.

Nancy gave up all attempt at conversation. Her heart beat fast. Things

were going wrong. He was tired of her already. He looked bored--well,

no, not bored, but utterly indifferent and hard, as if he were alone.

After their coffee he got up--every time he rose Nancy wondered anew at

his breadth and length--and led the way out. Nancy trotted after him

with short steps. He went into the lounge and took a seat near a table

in the window, pushing a chair forward for Nancy.

"May I smoke?" he said, taking a large cigar-case from his pocket.

Nancy nodded. He chose his cigar carefully, clipped the end off, and lit

it. Nancy could not think of a word to say. All her pretty, frivolous

conversation, all the bright remarks and witty repartee, wavered away

from her mind. She had not prepared herself for monologues.

After the first puff he said: "You don't smoke, do you?"

"Oh no!" said Nancy.

As soon as she had said it a wave of crimson flooded her face. She

remembered writing that she smoked Russian cigarettes perfumed with

heliotrope. He had not believed her. How could she have written such an

idiotic thing? And suddenly she realized that she was not the Girl in

her Letters at all, and that he must be bored and disappointed. But no

more was he the Man of his Letters; at least, she had imagined him quite

different, with fair hair and droopy grey eyes, and a poet's soul. Then

she remembered that he had never spoken about himself in his letters at

all.

At this point he looked up and said: "I like a woman who can keep quiet.

You have not spoken for half an hour." And she laughed, and was glad.

When he had finished his cigar, he said: "I hope you have not left any

valuables in your room. It is not safe."

"Oh no," said Nancy; "I haven't."

"Have you given them to the office?"

"No," said Nancy--"no;" and suddenly she remembered that she had told

him in her letters that she wore jewels all over her.

Without looking up, he said: "Will you give me your purse? I will take

care of it."

Nancy felt that if she went on flushing any more her hair would catch

fire. She drew out her purse and handed it to him. He opened it slowly

and deliberately. He took out the three sous and the two francs, and put

them into his pocket. Then he opened the middle division, and looked at

the twenty-franc piece. He took it out and placed it on the table. Then

he went through all the other compartments, gazing pensively at an

unused tramway ticket and at a medal of the Madonna del Monte. He put

those back again, and handed Nancy the purse. The twenty-franc piece he

put into a purse of his own, and into his pocket.

"Now let us go for a drive," he said.

Nancy, feeling dazed, rustled away, and took the lift to her room. She

pinned on her hat, took her coat and gloves, and just caught the lift

again as it was passing down. When he saw her, he said "That was quick,"

and they went out together. A victoria was waiting for them. The porter

was profusely polite, and the horses started off at a loose trot down

the Boulevards and towards the Etoile. He asked her many questions

during the drive, and in her answers she was as much as possible the

Girl of the Letters.

He sounded her about Monte Carlo, and she was glad that she was quite

_au courant_, and could mention systems and the Cafe de Paris.

"Would you like to go there again?" he asked.

"Yes--oh yes!" she said, clasping her mauve kid gloves. Then she fell

into a reverie, and she kept her hands clasped in her lap, for she was

saying an _Ave_ and _a Pater_ for Anne-Marie.

The carriage was turning into the Bois when her companion said:

"Where do you want to go?"

Nancy said: "This is very nice. The Bois is lovely."

"I mean where do you want to go to to-morrow, or the day after, or next

week. You do not want to stay in Paris for ever, do you?"

She drew a little quick breath, and said, "Oh!" and then again, "Oh,

really?" and looked up at him with uncertain eyes.

"Do not look at me as if I were the spider, or the lion, or the

thunderstorm. Tell me if there is any place on earth that you have

longed to go to. And when. And with whom."

Nancy's eyes filled quickly with glowing tears. "I should like to go to

Italy," she said, "to a little village tip-tilted over the sea, called

Porto Venere."

The Ogre, who had read "Elle et Lui," nodded, and said: "I know.

Anywhere else?"

"I should like to stay a few days in Milan--to see some people who are

dear."

"Et apres?"

"I should like to go to Switzerland. Only to one or two little places

there--the Via Mala, Spluegen, Sufers--"

"H'm--h'm," said he, and waited to hear more.

"And then--and then--yes, perhaps to Monte Carlo--and oh, to Naples and

to Rome! But I want to stay longest in Porto Venere."

He nodded, and said: "When do you want to start?"

"To-morrow," said Nancy.

"And how? In a train? Or by motor? Or by boat?"

"I don't mind," said Nancy, hiding her face in her handkerchief and

beginning to weep.

"And with whom?" There was a pause. "What about a maid?"

"Oh, no maid!" said Nancy. Then she looked up. "With you," she said,

because the Girl in the Letters would have said it, and also because she

wanted him to come.

"All right. Don't take much luggage," he said.

XVI

They went. They went through Switzerland. They drove down the wide white

roads that coil like wind-blown ribbons round the swelling breasts of the

Alps; they went up the barren Julier Pass, and through the shuddering

Via Mala, breakfasting at St. Moritz, table d'hoting at Maloya,

wandering through the moonlike sunshine of Spluegen's pine-forests,

clattering and rumbling over the covered bridges of Sufers. The

snow-tipped pine-trees, like regiments of monks with nightcaps on,

nodded at them in stately gravity; the squirrels stopped with quick,

beady glances, and scuttled away, tail-flourishing, up the branches,

while the bland Helvetian cows stood in the green meadows to watch them

pass.

Every evening they went together down boot-adorned passages to the door

of Nancy's room. And there he said, "Good-night, Miss Brown," and left

her.

They went on into Italy--straight down to Naples without stopping in

Milan, for Nancy would not see anyone she loved after all; for she could

not explain anything, and did not know what to say, and did not want to

think of anything just now. She would think afterwards. They clambered

up the Vesuvius; they wandered through Pompei; they went to Spezia, and

remembered Shelley; they went on to Porto Venere, and trembled to think

that the sharks might have eaten Byron when he swam across the bay; they

rowed about the Golfo, and ate _vongole_ and other horrible,

ill-smelling _frutti di mare_. And every evening, in the boot-adorned

passages of the hotels, he took her to the door of her room, and said,

"Good-night, Miss Brown."

In Spezia a little steamer that was coasting northwards took them on

board. They were sliding on blue waters into Genoa, when Nancy, seated

on a basket of oranges, felt the touch of the Ogre's hand on her

shoulder. She looked up and smiled. He sat down on another basket beside

her. It creaked and groaned under his weight, so he got up and fetched a

heavy wooden case, dragging it along the deck to Nancy's side.

"Now what?" he said.

Nancy had grown to understand him well. Not for an instant did she think

that he was talking of the moment, or the next hour, as she had thought

when they had driven in the Bois, now more than a month ago. She knew

that he looked at life in large outlines, and seldom spoke of small,

immediate things.

"Now what?" she echoed. He put his large brown hand on her small one,

and it was his first caress. It thrilled Nancy to the heart. His chilly

blue eyes watched her face, and saw it paling slowly under his gaze.

"Now you must go home," he said.

"Yes," said Nancy, "now I must go home." And she wondered vaguely

whether home was the boarding-house in Lexington Avenue or Mrs.

Johnstone's flat in 82nd Street. She decided that it was the flat, where

the bunch of orchids and maidenhair had come and lived almost a week.

Peggy and George would be her friends again, and the dead Mr. Johnstone,

and the naked baby, and the chinless young man would be with her in the

evenings. And Anne-Marie must leave Fraeulein Mueller's _Gartenhaus_, and

go back to school on Sixth Avenue.

"What are your thoughts," said the Ogre.

"... I was wondering what made you send that messenger-boy with the

flowers and the letter--the letter to the girl in blue.... It was not a

bit like you," she said. And, looking into the hard face, she added:

"You are not at all like that."

"I know I'm not," he said. Then he added, with a laugh, "Thank God! But

we all do things that are not like ourselves now and then. Don't we?"

She did not answer. "Don't you?" he insisted.

Nancy sighed and wondered. "I don't know. What is like me, and what is

not like me? I do not know at all. I do not know myself."

"I do," said the Ogre. And there was another long silence. He had the

aggravating habit of stopping short after a sentence that one would like

to hear continued.

"Speak," said Nancy. "Say more."

"It was not like me to send those useless and expensive flowers out into

the world to nobody, and to write a crazy letter _in's Blaue

hinein_--into space. But we all have mad moments in our lives when we do

things that are quite unlike us." A pause again. "It was not like you to

write me those letters describing your old-rose curtains--afterwards

they were blue velvet--and your scented cigarettes, and your jewels, and

your lovers. And it was not like you to cross the Atlantic and come to

Paris and to supper with a man you had never met, in order to see

whether you could get money out of him."

Nancy covered her face. "Oh!" she said, "have you thought that?"

"Oh!" he said, "have you done that?" And there was silence.

The Captain passed and remarked on the fine weather, adding that they

would arrive in less than an hour. Then he went by.

"I liked your first letter--poor little truthful letter on the cheap

paper. You said you were the wrong girl. You were dressed in brown. I

could see you in your shabby brown dress--I knew it must be shabby--and

I liked the idea of doing something unexpected with a little money. Then

I was amused at your letter saying you were not Miss Brown. After that

the lies began."

Nancy quivered. The houses of Quarto were coming into sight; the red

hotel of Quinto was gliding past.

"How could you think that I would believe in the old-rose curtains in

the 300's of East 82nd Street, I who have lived five or six years in New

York? That showed me that you were a foreigner, or you would have known

that street numbers in New York tell their own tale. Then your letters

told me that you were a fanciful creature, and they told me that you

were lonely, or you would not have found time to write so much--a

cultivated, little fibber, who quoted every poet under the sun,

especially the out-of-the-way ones. Then, when I found out that you

had a child--"

"Oh!" gasped Nancy, and the tears welled over. "You know about

Anne-Marie!"

"I know about Anne-Marie. I even have a picture of her." He unbuttoned

his coat, and drew out his pocket-book, and from it a little snapshot

photograph, which he handed to Nancy. It was herself and Anne-Marie in

front of a toy-shop. They were in the act of turning from it, and

Anne-Marie's foot was lifted in the air. They were both laughing, and

neither of them looking their best.

"Oh, but that's hideous of her," said Nancy. "She is quite different

from that."

He smiled, and put the picture back into his pocket-book, and the

pocket-book into his breast-pocket.

"When I had found out that you had a child, and that your husband"--he

hesitated--"was--er--Neapolitan, I understood what you were after, and

decided that I would--walk into it--que je marcherais, as the French

say. Et j'ai marche." A long silence, and then he said: "And now, what

do you want?"

But Nancy was crying, and could not answer. "Do you want to go on living

in America?" Nancy shook her head.

"What are you crying for?" and he took her wrist, and pulled one hand

from her face.

Nancy raised her reddened eyes. "I am crying," she said brokenly,

"because all the--the prettiness has been taken out of everything. Yes,

I was poor--yes, I was miserable, and I was inventing things in my

letters; but I thought you believed them--and I thought you--you loved

me, like Jaufre Rudel. And I have never, never been so happy as when--as

when--I loved you across the distance--and you were the Unknown--and now

it is all broken and spoilt--and all the time you thought I wanted

money--I mean you knew I wanted money, and you had that hideous picture,

and"--here Nancy broke into weak, wild sobs--"you thought I looked like

that!"

"That's so," said Jaufre Rudel.

And he let her cry for a long time.

Quarto had slipped back into the distance, and San Francesco D'Albaro

was moving smoothly into view.

"I can't go on crying for ever," said Nancy, raising her face with a

quivering smile, "and the Captain will think you are a huge, horrid,

scolding English Ogre."

They were nearly in. "Get your little bag and things," he said to her,

and she rose quickly and complied. Everybody was standing up waiting to

land. Oh, how good it was to be taken care of and ordered about, to be

told to do this and that! She stood behind him small and meek, holding

her travelling-bag in one hand, and in the other the umbrellas and

sticks strapped together. His large shoulders were before her like a

wall. She raised the bundle of umbrellas to her face and kissed the

curved top of his stick. And now, what?

They drove to the hotel. Then they had dinner. In the evening they sat

on the balcony, and watched the people passing below them. Handsome

Italian officers, moustache-twisting and sword-clanking, passed in twos

and threes, eyeing the hurrying modistes and the self-conscious

_signorine_ that walked beside their portly mothers and fathers. The

military band was playing in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, and the music

reached the balcony faintly. Then Nancy told him about her work. About

the first book of verse that had set all Italy aflame, about the second,

The Book, the work of her life, that had been interrupted.

He listened, smoking his cigar, and making no comment. Then he spoke.

"There is a boat from here on Wednesday. The _Kaiser Wilhelm_. A good

old boat. Go over and fetch the child." Then he halted, and said: "Or do

you like her to be brought up in America?"

"Oh no!" said Nancy.