THE count and Miss Harris have met and all fear of battle is over.
At the first encounter, which took place in my sitting-room, it was
obvious that the young man was stricken. Since then he has seen her
twice and has fallen in love--at least he says he has.
As soon as he felt sure of it he came in to tell me. So he said the
other evening, sitting in the steamer chair Betty gave me to replace
the one Mrs. Bushey took.
“You are a woman of sympathy,” he said, lighting his third cigarette,
“and I knew you would understand.”
Numberless young men have told me of their love-affairs and always were
sure I would understand. I think it’s because I listen so well.
I have a fire now. It was easier to buy coal than argue with Mrs.
Bushey. The count stretched his legs toward it and smoked dreamily and
I counted the cigarettes in the box. He smokes ten in an evening.
“She is most beautiful. I can find only one defect,” he murmured, “she
is not thin enough.”
“Isn’t she?” I said, in my character of sympathetic woman, “I thought
she was rather too thin.”
“Not for me,” answered the lover pensively; “no one could be too thin
for me.”
He resumed his cigarette. It was nine and there were seven left. I
calculated that they would last him till eleven.
“There was a lady in Rome I once knew,” he began in a tone of
reminiscence, “thin like a match and so beautiful,” he extended his
hand in the air, the first finger and thumb pressed together as if he
might have been holding the match-like lady between them, “a blonde
with brown eyes, immense eyes. Oh, _Dio mio!_” His voice trailed away
into silence, swamped by a flood of memory.
“Were you in love with her, too?” I have noticed that the confiding
young men expect the sympathetic woman to ask leading questions.
“Yes,” said the count gravely, “four years ago.”
“You must have been very young.”
Such remarks as this are out of character. They take me unawares and
come from the American part of me--not the human universal part, but
that which is individual and local.
“Oh, no, I was nineteen.” He went back to his memories. “She was all
bones, but such beautiful bones. One winter she had a dress made of fur
and she looked like an umbrella in it. This way,” he extended his hands
and described two straight perpendicular lines in the air, “the same
size all the way up. Wonderful!”
“Our young men don’t fall in love so early,” I said.
“They don’t fall in love at all,” replied the count, “neither do the
women. They only flirt, all of them, except Miss Harris.”
“Doesn’t she flirt?”
I was stretching my sympathetic privileges a little too far. My excuse
is curiosity, vulgar but natural. I had never before seen any one like
Miss Harris and I wanted to get at the heart of her mystery.
“Flirt!” exclaimed the count. “Does a goddess flirt? That’s what
she is. Think of it--in this new shiny country, in this city with
telephones and policemen, in this sad street with the houses all built
the same.” He sat upright and shook his cigarette at me. “She belongs
where it is all sunshine and joy, and they dance and laugh and there is
no business and nobody has a conscience.”
“Do you mean Ancient Greece or Modern Naples?”
The count made a vague sweeping gesture that left a little trail of
smoke in the air.
“_N’importe!_ But not here. She is a pagan, a natural being, a nymph, a
dryad. I don’t know what in your language--but oh, something beautiful
that isn’t bothered with a soul.”
I started, Masters and the count, raw America and sophisticated Italy,
converging toward the same point.
Before I could answer her voice sounded startlingly loud through the
register. For the first moment I didn’t recognize the strain, then I
knew it--“_Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore_”--I have lived for art, I have
lived for love. We looked at each other in surprised question as the
impassioned song poured from the grating. It was as if she had heard us
and this was her answer.
My knowledge of nymphs and dryads is small, but I feel confident if one
of them had ever sung a modern Italian aria through a modern American
register she could not have rendered it with less heart and soul than
Miss Harris did.
Yesterday morning Betty telephoned me to come and lunch with her.
Betty’s summons are not casual outbreaks of hospitality. There is
always an underlying purpose in them, what a man I know who writes
plays would call “a basic idea”. She is one of the few people who never
troubles about meaningless formalities or superfluous small talk. It’s
her way, and then she hasn’t time. That’s not just a phrase but a fact.
Every hour of her day has its work, good work, well done. Only the poor
know Betty’s private charities, only her friends the number of her
businesslike benefactions.
Walking briskly down the avenue I wondered what was her basic idea this
time. Sometimes it’s clothes: “There are some dresses on the bed. Look
them over and take what you like. The gray’s rather good, but I think
the pink would be more becoming. I can have it done over for you by
my woman.” Sometimes it’s a reinvestment of part of my little capital
suggested by Harry, a high interest and very safe. Once it was an
attempt to marry me off. That was last autumn when I had just got back
from Europe, to a man with mines from Idaho. When I grew tearful and
reluctant she gave it up and shifted him--for he was too valuable to
lose--to a poor relation of Harry’s.
We were at lunch when the basic idea began to rise to the surface,
Betty at the head of the table, very tight and upright in purple cloth
and chiffon, and little Constance, her eldest born, opposite me. Little
Constance is an adorable child with a face like a flower and the manner
of a timid mouse. She loves clothes and when I come leans against me
looking me over and gently fingering my jewelry. She won’t speak until
she has examined it to her satisfaction. At the table her steadfast
gaze was diverted from me to a dish of glazed cherries just in front of
her.
The entrée was being passed when Betty, helping herself, said:
“Harry’s just met a man from Georgia who is in cotton--not done up in
it, his business.” She looked into the dish then accusingly up at the
butler: “I said fried, not boiled, and I didn’t want cream sauce.”
The butler muttered explanations.
“Tell her it mustn’t happen again, no more cream sauce for lunch.” She
helped herself, murmuring, “Really the most fattening thing one can
eat.”
“Why do you eat it?” said little Constance, withdrawing her eyes from
the cherries.
“Because I like to. Keep quiet, Constance. Mr. Albertson, that’s his
name, is well-off, perfectly presentable and a widower.”
So it was matrimonial again.
“That’s very nice,” I replied meekly.
“We’ll have him to dinner some night next week and you to meet him.”
“Why do you ask me? He’d surely rather have some one younger and
prettier.”
“It doesn’t matter what he’d rather have. I’ll telephone you when the
day’s fixed.”
“Betty,” I murmured, looking at her pleadingly.
“Evie,” she returned firmly, “don’t be silly. The present situation’s
got to come to an end some time.”
“It’ll never end.”
“Rubbish. There’s no sense in you scraping along this way in two
rooms--”
“Remember the kitchenette.”
“In two rooms,” she went on, ignoring the kitchenette. “Of course I
don’t want you to live in Georgia, but--”
Little Constance showed a dismayed face.
“Is Evie going to live in Georgia?”
Betty turned a stern glance on her.
“Constance, you’ll lunch up-stairs if you keep on interrupting.”
Constance was unaffected by the threat.
“When is she going?” she asked.
“Never,” I answered.
“I’m glad,” said little Constance, and seeing her mother’s glance
averted, stole a cherry from the dish and hid it in her lap.
“From what Harry says, and he’s heard all about Mr. Albertson, he
seems a perfectly fitting person, forty-five, of very good family and
connections, and with an income of thirty thousand a year.”
“He’ll probably not like me,” I said hopefully.
“Oh, he will,” answered Betty with grim meaning, “I’ll see to that.”
I could hear her retailing my perfections to Mr. Albertson and my heart
sank. Masterful, managing people crush me. If the man from Georgia
liked me, as the man from Idaho did, I foresaw a struggle and I seem
to have exhausted all my combative force in the year before my husband
died. I looked at little Constance and caught her in the act of popping
the cherry into her mouth. It was large and she had to force it into
her cheek and keep it there like a squirrel with a nut. An expression
of alarm was in her face, there was evidently less room for it than she
had expected.
Betty went ruthlessly on.
“Your present way of living is absurd--you, made for marriage.”
I saw little Constance’s eyes grow round with curiosity, but she did
not dare to speak.
“Made for companionship. If you were a suffragette or a writer, or
trimmed hats or ran a tea-room, it would be different, but you’re a
thoroughly domestic woman and ought to have a home.”
Little Constance bit the cherry with a sharp crunching sound. Betty
looked at her.
“Constance, are you eating your lunch?”
Little Constance lifted her bib, held it to her mouth, and nodded over
it.
The danger was averted. Betty turned to me.
“Marriage is the only life for a normal woman. Judkins, I’ll have some
more of those sweetbreads.”
She helped herself, and under the rattle of the spoon and fork, little
Constance crunched again, very carefully.
“And what is the good of living in the past. That’s over, thank heaven.”
“I’m not living in the past any more. Betty, I’m--I’m--raising my head.”
Betty looked sharply up from the sweetbreads, and I flinched under her
glance. She cast an eye on Judkins, who was receding into the pantry,
waited till he was gone, then said, in an eager hushed voice:
“Evie, don’t tell me there’s some one?”
Never have I been more discomfited by the directness of my Betty. I
felt myself growing red to my new rat and was painfully aware that
little Constance, now crunching rapidly, had fixed upon me the deadly
stare of an interested child.
“Of course there isn’t. What nonsense. But time has passed and one
doesn’t stay broken-hearted forever. I’m not _old_ exactly, and
I’m--that is--it’s just as I said, I’m beginning to come alive again.”
“Oh!” Betty breathed out and leaned against her chair-back, with a
slight creaking of tight drawn fabrics. But she kept her eye on me, in
a sidelong glance, that contained an element of inspecting inquiry.
Little Constance swallowed the cherry at a gulp and the question it had
bottled up burst out:
“Evie, are you going to get married?”
“No,” I almost shouted.
Little Constance said no more, but her gaze remained glued to my face
in an absorption so intense that she leaned forward, pressing her chest
against the edge of the table. Betty played with her knife and fork
with an air of deep thought. Judkins reentered to my relief.
He was passing the next dish when little Constance broke the silence.
“Evie, why did you get all red just now?”
“Constance,” said her mother, “if you’re a good girl and stop talking
you can have a cherry when lunch is over.”
“Thanks, mama,” said little Constance, in her most mouse-like manner.
After lunch we drove about in the auto and shopped, and as the
afternoon began to darken Betty haled me to a reception.
“Madge Knowlton’s daughter’s coming out,” she said. “And as you used to
know her before you went to Europe, it’s your duty to come.”
“Why is it my duty? I was never an intimate of hers.”
I’m shy about going to parties now; I feel like Rip Van Winkle when he
comes back.
“To swell the crowd. It’s a social service you owe to a fellow woman in
distress.”
We entered the house through a canvassed tunnel and inserted ourselves
into a room packed with women and reverberating with a clamor of
voices. We had a word and a hurried handclasp with Madge Knowlton and
her daughter, and then were caught in a surging mass of humanity and
carried into a room beyond. The jam was even closer here. I dodged
a long hatpin, and was borne back against a mantelpiece banked with
flowers whose delicate dying breath mingled with the scents of food and
French perfumery. When the mass broke apart I had momentary glimpses of
a glittering table with a woman at either end who was pouring liquid
into cups.
At intervals the crowd, governed by some unknown law, was seized by
migratory impulses. Segments of it separated from the rest, and drove
toward the door. Here they met other entering segments with a resultant
congestion. When thus solidified the only humans who seemed to have the
key of breaking us loose were waiters. They found their way along the
line of least resistance, making tortuous passages like the cracks in
an ice pack.
From them we snatched food. I had a glass of punch, a cup of coffee,
a chocolate cake, two marrons and a plate of lobster Neuberg, in the
order named. I haven’t the slightest idea why I ate them--suggestion I
suppose. All the other women were similarly endangering their lives,
and the one possible explanation is that we communicated to one another
the same suicidal impulse. It was like the early Christians going to
the lions, the bold ones swept the weaker along by the contagion of
example.