“Mrs. Drake!” She whirled round and put her hands on my shoulders and
looked into my face with a sweetness that was quite bewitching. “You
dear little mouse, don’t you know you’re one kind and I’m another. Both
are nice kinds in their way, so don’t let’s try to mix them up.”
There is something disarmingly winning about this woman. I think for
the first time in my life I have met a siren. I pulled my shoulders
from the grasp of her hands, as I felt myself pulling my spirit from
the grasp of her attraction.
“I’ve not finished your dress,” I said.
She turned her back to me and gave a sigh.
“Go on, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi,” she said, and then added:
“Are you the mother of anything?”
“No,” I answered.
“Too bad,” she murmured, “you ought to be.”
I didn’t reply to that. In the moment of silence the sound of feet on
the stairs was audible. They came up the passage and began the ascent
of the next flight. Miss Harris started.
“That’s my man, I guess,” she said quickly and tore herself from my
hands.
She ran to the door and flung it open. I could see the man’s feet and
legs half-way up the stairs.
“Jack,” she cried in a joyous voice, “I’m here, in Mrs. Drake’s room.
Come down;” then to me: “It’s Mr. Masters. I’m going to the theater
with him.”
The feet descended and Mr. Masters came into view. He was the man Roger
and I had seen in the passage.
He took Miss Harris’ proffered hand, then sent a look at me and my
room that contained a subtle suggestion of rudeness, of bold and
insolent intrusion. Before she could introduce us he bowed and said
easily:
“Good evening, Mrs. Drake. Saw you the other night in the hall.”
I inclined my head very slightly. His manner and voice increased my
original dislike. I felt that I could not talk to him and turned to
Miss Harris. Something in her face struck me unpleasantly. Her look
was bent upon him and her air of beaming upon the world in general was
intensified by a sort of special beam--an enveloping, deeply glowing
beam, such as mothers direct upon beloved children and women upon their
lovers.
The door was open and Mr. Masters leaned upon the door-post.
“Nice little place you’ve got here,” he said. “Better than yours,
Lizzie.”
Miss Harris withdrew her glance from him, it seemed to me with an
effort, as if it clung upon him and she had to pluck it away.
“Finish me,” she said, turning abruptly to me, “I must go.”
All the especial glow for me was gone. Her eyes lit on mine vacant and
unseeing. I suddenly seemed to have receded to a point on her horizon
where I had no more personality than a dot on a map. I was not even a
servant, simply a pair of hands that prepared her for her flight into
the night with the vulgar and repulsive man. This made me hesitate,
also I didn’t want to go on with the hooking while Mr. Masters leaned
against the door-post with that impudently familiar air.
“If Mr. Masters will go into the passage,” I said.
He laughed good-humoredly, but did not budge. Miss Harris made a
movement that might easily have degenerated into an angry stamp.
“Oh, don’t be such an old maid,” she said petulantly. “Do the collar
and let me go.”
I couldn’t refuse, but I went on with the hooking with a flushed face.
What a fool I had been not to take Betty’s advice. Charming as she
could be when she wanted, Miss Harris was evidently not a person whose
manners remained at an even level.
“Have you heard Miss Harris sing?” asked Mr. Masters.
“Yes, through the register.”
“That’s a bad conductor. You must come up and hear her in her own rooms
some evening.”
“If Miss Harris wants me to.”
“Mrs. Drake will some day hear me sing in the Metropolitan,” said the
lady.
“Some day,” responded Mr. Masters.
There was something in his enunciation of this single word, so acid, so
impregnated with a sneering quality that I stopped my work and cast a
surprised glance at him.
He met it with a slight smile.
“Our friend Lizzie here,” he said, “has dreams--what I’m beginning to
think are pipe dreams.”
“Jack,” she cried with a sudden note of pleading, “you know that’s not
true. You _know_ I’ll some day sing there.”
“I know you want to,” he replied, then with the air of ignoring her and
addressing himself exclusively to me: “Miss Harris has a good voice, I
might say a fine voice. But--all here,” he spread his fingers fan-wise
across his forehead and tapped on that broad expanse, “the soul, the
thing that sees and feels--absent, nil,” he fluttered the spread
fingers in the air.
I was astounded at his cruel frankness--all the more so as I saw it had
completely dashed her spirits.
“Rubbish, I don’t believe a word of it,” I answered hotly, entirely
forgetting that I was angry with her.
“Not a bit,” he returned coolly, “I’ve told her so often. A great
presence, a fine mechanism,” he swept her with a gesture as if she had
been a statue, “but the big thing, the heart of it all--not there.
No imagination, no temperament, just a well regulated, handsomely
decorated musical box. Isn’t that so, Lizzie?”
He turned from me and directly addressed her, his eyes narrowed, his
face showing a faint sardonic amusement. I wondered what she was going
to say--whether she would fly at him, or whether, like the woman I
knew, she would hide her mortification and refuse him the satisfaction
of seeing how he hurt her.
She did neither. Moving to the divan, she picked up her coat, showing
me a face as dejected as that of a disappointed child. His words seemed
to have stricken all the buoyancy out of her and she shrugged herself
into the coat with slow fatigued movements. Bending to pick up her
gloves and glasses she said somberly:
“I’ll get a soul some day.”
“We hope so,” he returned.
“He doesn’t know anything about it,” I said in an effort to console.
“Oh, doesn’t he!” she answered bitterly. “It’s his business.”
“I’m a speculator in voices,” he said, “and our handsome friend Lizzie
here has been an investment that, I’m beginning to fear, won’t pay any
dividends.”
He laughed and looked at her with what seemed to me a quite satanic
pleasure in his tormenting.
I could think of nothing to say, bewildered by the strange pair. Miss
Harris had gathered up her belongings and moved to the door with a
spiritless step.
“Good night,” she said, glancing at me as if I was a chair that had
temporarily supported her weight in a trying moment.
“Good night,” said Mr. Masters cheerfully. “Some day go up and hear
Lizzie sing and see if you can find the soul in the sound.”
He gave a wave with his hat and followed her down the hall.
I shut the door, and am not ashamed to confess, leaned upon it
listening. I wanted to hear her attack him on the lower flight. But
their footsteps died away in silence.
I cleared away my supper, sunk in deep reflections. What an
extraordinary woman! One moment treating you like her bosom friend,
the next oblivious of your existence, and most extraordinary of all,
meekly enduring the taunts of that unspeakable man. I couldn’t account
for it in any way except that she must be going to marry him--and that
was a hateful thought. For if she _was_ rude, and had the manners of a
spoiled child, there was something about her that drew you close, as if
her hands had hold of yours and were pulling you softly and surely into
her embrace.
V
ROGER and I went out to dinner last night, down-town to our favorite
haunt in University Place.
I put on my best, a brown velveteen princesse gown (one of Betty’s
made over), my brown hat with the gold rose and my amber beads. I even
powdered my nose, which I was brought up to think an act of depravity
only perpetrated by the lost and fallen. When I am dressed up I really
do not look thirty-three. But I’ll have to buy two little rats to puff
out my hair at the sides. It’s too flat under that hat. Roger was
pleased when he saw me--that’s why I did it. What’s the fun of dressing
for yourself? Some one must look at you admiringly and say, well,
whatever it’s his nature to say. I suppose Mr. Masters would exclaim,
“Gee, you’re a peach!” Roger said, “I like you in brown.”
I love going down Fifth Avenue in the dark of a winter evening. The
traffic of business is over. Motors and carriages go spinning by,
carrying people to dinners. The big glistening street is like an
artery with the joyous blood of the city racing through it, coursing
along with the throb, throb, throb of a deathless vitality. And the
lights--the wonderful, glowing, golden lights! Two long lines of them
on either side that go undulating away into the distance, and broken
ones that flash by in a yellow streak, and round glaring ones like the
alarmed eyes of animals rushing toward you in terror.
And I love the noise, the near-by rumble and clatter, and outside it
the low continuous roar, the voice of the city booming out into the
quiet of the fields and up into the silence of the skies. One great,
unbroken sound made up of millions of little separate sounds, one great
consolidated life made up of millions of little separate life, each of
such vital importance to the one who’s living it.
We had lots to talk about, Roger and I. We always do. We might be
wrecked on a desert island and go on talking for ten years without
coming to the end. There are endless subjects--the books we read, the
plays we see, pictures over which we argue, music of which I know
nothing, and people, the most absorbing of all, probably because
gossiping is a reprehensible practise. There is nothing I enjoy more.
If I hadn’t been so well brought up I would be like the women in
the first act of _The School for Scandal_. Sometimes we make little
retrospective journeys into the past. But we do this cautiously. There
are five years we neither of us care to touch on, so we talk forward by
preference.
Of course I had to tell Roger of Miss Harris and Mr. Masters. It lasted
through two courses.
“What a dog!” was Roger’s comment.
“Roger,” I said earnestly, “do you think she could be in love with such
a man?”
Roger shrugged.
“How can _I_ tell?”
“But could any woman--any possible kind of a woman? And she’s a very
possible kind. Something comes from her and finds your heart and draws
it right out toward her. She couldn’t.”
“Perhaps you don’t understand this enigmatical lady.”
“Maybe I don’t understand everything about her, I’ve only known her a
few days. But I can feel--it’s an instinct--that underneath where the
real things are she’s true and sound.”
I can see into Roger more clearly than he knows, and I saw that he
wasn’t at all interested in Miss Harris. He looked round the room and
said indifferently:
“Why does she have a cad like that hanging about?”
“Perhaps underneath there’s something fine in him.”
“Very far underneath, buried so deep nobody but Miss Harris can find
it.”
“Roger, don’t be disagreeable. You’ve never seen either of them.”
“Evie, dear, your descriptions are very graphic. Do you know what I
think?” He looked at me, smiling a little, but with grave eyes. “I
think that you’re seeing Miss Harris through yourself. You’re putting
your brain into her head and your heart into her body and then trying
to explain her. That’s what’s making her such a puzzle.”
The waiter here produced a casserole with two squabs in it and
presented it to Roger’s gaze as if it were a gift he was humbly
offering. Roger looked at it and waved him away as if the gift was not
satisfactory.
“They look lovely,” I called, and Roger smiled.
The squabs occupied him and my thoughts occupied me finally to find
expression in a question:
“Roger, what is a gentleman?”
He looked surprised.
“A gentleman? What do you mean?”
“Just what I say--what is it?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t. That’s just the point. There are lots of things that
everybody--young people and fools--seem to understand and I don’t. One
is the theory of vicarious atonement, one is why girls are educated to
know nothing about marriage and children, which are the things that
most concern them, and one is what makes a man a gentleman.”
Roger considered:
“Let’s see--at a blow. A gentleman is a man who observes certain rules
of behavior founded on consideration for the welfare and comfort of
others.”
“It sounds like the polite letter writer. Can a gentleman tell lies?”
“To benefit himself, no. To shield others, yes.”
“If he was noble inside--in his character--and uncouth outside, would
he be a gentleman?”
“What do you mean by uncouth?”
“Well--wore a watch chain made of nuggets like a man I met in Dresden,
and ate peas with his knife?”
“No.”
“Then, if he had beautiful manners and a bad heart, would he be one?”
“If his bad heart didn’t obtrude too much on his dealings with society,
he might.”
“Is it all a question of clothes and manners?”
“No.”
“You’ve got to have besides the clothes and manners an inner instinct?”
“That’s it.”
I mused for a moment, then, looking up, caught Roger’s eye fixed on me
with a quizzical gleam.
“Why this catechism?”
“I was thinking of Mr. Masters.”
“Good heavens!” said Roger crossly, his gleam suddenly extinguished.
“Can’t you get away from the riff-raff in that house? I wish you’d
never gone there.”
“No, I can’t. I was wondering if Mr. Masters, under that awful exterior
had a fine nature, could he possibly be a gentleman?”
“Evie,” said Roger, putting down his knife and fork and looking
serious, “if under that awful exterior Mr. Masters had the noble
qualities of George Washington, Sir Philip Sidney and the Chevalier
Bayard he could no more be a gentleman than I could be king of Spain.”
“I was afraid that’s what you’d say.” I sighed and returned to my squab.
I said no more about it, but when I got home my thoughts went back to
it. I hated to think of Lizzie Harris in the company of such a man.
If she was lacking in judgment and worldly knowledge some one ought
to supply them for her. She was alone and a stranger. Mrs. Bushey had
told me she came from California, and from what I’d heard, California’s
golden lads and lassies scorned the craven deference to public opinion
that obtains in the effete East. But she was in the effete East, and
she must conform to its standards. She probably had never given them
a thought and had no initiated guide to draw them to her attention.
Whatever Betty might say, I was free to be friendly with whomever
I pleased. That was one of the few advantages of being a widow,
_déracinée_ by four years in Europe. By the morning I had decided
to put my age and experience at her service and this afternoon went
up-stairs to begin doing it.
She was in her front room, sitting at a desk writing. A kimono of
a bright blue crêpe enwrapped her, her dark hair, cloudy about
the brows, was knotted loosely on the nape of her neck. She rose
impulsively when she saw me, kissed me as if I was her dearest friend,
then motioned me to the sofa, and went back to her place at the desk.
The room is like mine, only being in the mansard, the windows are
smaller and have shelf-like sills. It was an odd place, handsome things
and tawdry things side by side. In one corner stood a really beautiful
cabinet of red Japanese lacquer, and beside it a three-legged wooden
stool, painted white with bows of ribbon tied round each leg as if
it was some kind of deformed household pet. Portions of Miss Harris’
wardrobe lay over the chairs, and the big black hat crowned the piano
tool. On the window-sill, drooping and withered, stood a clump of
cyclamen in a pot, wrapped in crimped green paper. Beside it was a
plate of crackers and a paper bag, from whose yawning mouth a stream
of oranges had run out, lodging in corners. The upright piano, its top
covered with stacked music, the wintry light gleaming on its keys,
stood across a rear angle of the room and gave the unkempt place an air
of purpose, lent it a meaning.
It must be confessed Miss Harris did not look as if she needed
assistance or advice. She was serene and debonair and the blue kimono
was extravagantly becoming. I sat down upon the sofa against a pile
of cushions. The bottom ones were of an astonishing hardness which
obtruded through the softness of the top ones as if an eider-down quilt
had been spread over a pile of bricks. I tried to look as if I hadn’t
felt the bricks and smiled at Miss Harris.
“See what I’ve been doing,” she said, and handed me a sheet of note
paper upon which were inscribed a list of names.
I looked over them and they recalled to my mind the heroines of G. P.
R. James’ novels of which, in my teens, I had been fond.
“Suggestions for my stage name,” she explained. “How does number three
strike you?”
Number three was Leonora Bronzino.
“That’s an Italian painter,” I answered.
“Is it? What a bother. Would he make a fuss?”
“He’s been dead for several hundred years.”
“Then he doesn’t matter. What do you think of number five?”