“So I was generous and gave you my treasure. You will be careful of it,
won’t you? Not drop anything on it or let people come in with muddy
boots.”
I said I would. I found myself engaging with ardor to love and cherish
a thing I abhorred. It’s happened before, it’s the kind of thing I’ve
been doing all my life.
Mrs. Bushey gave it a loving stroke with her foot.
“I knew you’d appreciate it. You don’t often find a real Samarcand in a
furnished apartment.”
After she had gone I sat looking dejectedly at it. Of course I would
have to keep it now. I might buy some small rugs and partly cover it
up, but I suppose, when she saw them, she would be mortally hurt. And I
can’t do that. I’d rather have those awful magnified insects staring up
at me for the rest of my life than wound her pride so.
As to its being a Samarcand--I took up one corner and lo! attached to
it by a string was a price-tag bearing the legend, Scotch wool rug,
$12.75.
It _was_ somewhat of a shock. Suppose I had found it while she was
there! The thought of such a contretemps made me cold. To avoid all
possibilities of it ever happening I stealthily detached the tag and
tore it into tiny pieces. As I dropped them in the waste-basket I had a
fancy that had I made the discovery while she was present, I would have
been the more embarrassed of the two.
All afternoon I have been putting things in order, trying them and
standing back to get the effect. It’s a long time since I’ve had
belongings of my own to play with. I hung my mother’s two Kriegolf’s
(Kriegolf was a Canadian artist who painted pictures of habitan life)
in four different places. They finally came to anchor on the parlor
wall on either side of a brass-framed mirror with candle branches that
belongs to Mrs. Bushey. Opposite, flanking the fireplace, are _Kitty
O’Brien_ and _The Wax Head of Lille_. I love her best of all, the
dreaming maiden. I like to try and guess what she’s thinking of. Is it
just the purposeless reverie of youth, or is she musing on the coming
lover? It can’t be that, because, while he’s still a dream lover, a
girl is happy, and she looks so sad.
I was trying to pierce the secret of that mysterious face when the
telephone rang. It was Roger Clements, a kind voice humming along the
line--“Well, how’s everything?” Roger wanted to come up and see me and
the kitchenette, and I told him Madame would receive to-morrow evening.
He would be my first visitor and I was fluttered. I spent at least an
hour trying to decide whether I’d better bring the Morris chair from
the back room for him. When the dread of starvation is lifted from you
by one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month and life offers nothing,
you find your mental forces expending themselves on questions like
that. I once knew a man who told me he sat on the edge of his bed every
morning struggling to decide whether he’d put on a turned-down or a
stand-up collar. He said it was nerves. In my case it’s just plain lack
of interests.
It’s natural for me to try and make Roger comfortable. He’s one of
the best friends I have in the world. I’m not using the word to cover
sentiment, I do really mean a friend. He knew me before I was married,
was one of the reliable older men in those glowing days when I was
Evelyn Carr, before I met Harmon Drake. He has been kind to me in ways
I never can forget. In those dark last years of my married life (there
were only five of them altogether) when my little world was urging
divorce and I stood distracted amid falling ruins, he never said one
word to me about my husband, never forced on me consolation or advice.
I don’t forget that, or the letter he wrote me when Harmon died--the
one honest letter I got.
Everybody exclaimed when I said I was going alone to Europe. Roger was
the only one who understood and told me to go. I’ll carry to my grave
the memory of his face as he stood on the dock waving me good-by. He
was smiling, but under the smile I could see the sympathy he wanted
me to know and didn’t dare to put in words. That’s one of the ties
between us--we’re the silent kind who keep our feelings hidden away in
a Bluebeard’s chamber of which we keep the key.
I used to hear from him off and on in Europe, and I followed him in the
American papers. I remember one sun-soaked morning in Venice, when I
picked up an English review in the pension and read a glowing criticism
of his book of essays, _Readjustments_. How proud I was of him! He’s
become quite famous in these last few years, not vulgarly famous but
known among scholars as a scholar and recognized as one of the few
stylists we have over here. I can’t imagine him on the news-stalls, or
bound in paper for the masses. I think he secretly detests the masses
though he won’t admit it. The mob, with its easily swayed passions,
is the sort of thing that it’s in his blood to hate. If he had to sue
for its support like Coriolanus he would act exactly as Coriolanus
did. Fortunately he doesn’t need it. The Clements have had money for
generations, not according to Pittsburgh standards, but the way the
Clements reckon money. He has an apartment on Gramercy Park, lined with
books to the ceilings, with a pair of old servants to fuss over him and
keep the newspaper people away.
There he leads the intellectual life, the only one that attracts him.
He rarely goes into society. The recent invasion of multi-millionaires
have spoiled it, his sister, Mrs. Ashworth, says, and on these points
he and she think alike. And he doesn’t care for women, at least to fall
in love with them. When he was a young man, twenty-four to be accurate,
he was engaged to a girl who died. Since then his interest in the other
sex has taken the form of a detached impersonal admiration. He thinks
they furnish the color and poetry of life and in that way have an
esthetic value in a too sober world.
But what’s the sense of analyzing your friend? He’s a dear kind
anchorite of a man, just a bit set, just a bit inclined to think that
the Clements’ way of doing things is the only way, just a bit too
contemptuous of cheapness and bad taste and bounce, but with all his
imperfections on his head, the finest gentleman I know. I _will_ move
the Morris chair.