BETTY had the dinner for Mr. Albertson last night and of course I went,
for Betty is like royalty, she doesn’t invite, she commands. In a brief
telephone message she instructed me to wear my blue crêpe and I wore
it. Before dinner, in her room, she eyed me critically and put a blue
aigrette in my hair.
Mr. Albertson was a gallant Southerner with courtly manners and a
large bald spot. We got on very nicely, though he did not exhibit that
appreciation of my charms that marked the Idaho man from the moment of
our meeting. If, however, he should develop it I have resolved to crush
it by strategy. I don’t know just how yet--the only thing I can think
of at present is to ask him to call and pretend I’m drunk like David
Garrick. I’ll get a better idea if the necessity arises. I haven’t the
courage to defy Betty twice.
Betty sent me home in the limousine, without the footman and the
chow dog. It was a cold still night, the kind when the sky is a deep
Prussian blue and all the lights have a fixed steady shine. As the
car wheeled into Fifth Avenue and I sat looking out of the window,
revolving schemes for the disenchanting of Mr. Albertson, I saw Roger
walking by. Before I thought I had beckoned to him and struck on the
front window for the chauffeur to stop. The car glided to the curb and
Roger’s long black figure came running across the street.
“You!” he cried, “like a fairy princess with a feather in your hair.
What ball are you coming from, Cinderella?”
As soon as he spoke I grew shy. Do the women who have ready tongues and
the courage of their moods, realize the value of their gifts?
“I--I--it’s not a ball, it’s Betty Ferguson’s and she’s sending me
home.”
“All right.” He said something to the chauffeur, stepped in and the car
started. “What a piece of luck. I was coming from a deadly dinner and
going to a deadly club. What inspired you to hail me?”
Nothing did, or something did that I couldn’t explain. I felt round for
an answer and produced the first that came.
“I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Go ahead.” He pulled the rug over me. “It’s a nipping cold night
abroad. Let’s hear what it was you wanted to talk about.”
For a moment I thought of telling him of Lizzie Harris and Mr. Masters,
then I knew that wouldn’t do. Lizzie’s secrets were my secrets. I had
to tell him something and in my embarrassment I told him the first
thing that came into my head.
“Betty asked me to dinner to meet a man from Georgia.”
As soon as I had said it I had a sick feeling that he might be
wondering why I should stop him on Fifth Avenue at eleven o’clock of a
winter’s night, to impart this piece of intelligence.
He received it with the dignity of a valuable communication.
“Did she? And what was he like?”
“Very charming. His name’s Albertson and he has cotton mills down
there.”
“Must be a man of means.”
“I believe he is.”
It was very nice of Roger to take it so simply and naturally, but you
can always rely on his manners. My embarrassment passed away. The auto
sped out into the concentrated sparklings of Plaza Square, then swerved
to the left, sweeping round the statue of Sherman led to victory by a
long-limbed and resolute angel.
“We’re going the wrong way. What’s Nelson doing?” I raised a hand to
rap on the window.
“I told him to take us through the park. Put your hand in your muff.
Why did Betty ask you to meet Mr. What’s-his-name from Georgia?”
I know every tone of Roger’s voice, and the one he used to ask that
question was chilly. Betty’s plans involved no secrecy, so I said,
laughing:
“I think she’s trying to make a match.”
“Oh,” said Roger.
I had thought he would laugh with me, but in that brief monosyllable
there was no amusement. It came with a falling note, and it seemed to
be a sort of extinguisher on the conversation, a full stop at the end
of it, for we both fell silent.
The auto swept up the drive, gray and smooth between gray trees. I
could see a reach of deep blue sky with the stars looking big and
close, as if they had come down a few billion miles and were looking
us over with an impartial curiosity. Across the park the fronts of
apartment-houses showed in gleaming tiers, far up into the night, their
lights yellower than the stars. It was lovely to glide on, swiftly and
smoothly, with the frost gripping the world in an icy clasp while we
were warm and snug and so friendly that we could be silent.
“Isn’t this beautiful, Roger?” I said, looking out of the window. “Look
on the other side of the park, hundreds of lights in hundreds of homes.”
Roger gave a sound that if I were a writer of realistic tendencies, I
should call a grunt.
We met a hansom with the glass down, and on an ascending curve another
auto swooping by with two great glaring lamps. I felt quite oddly
happy; the menacing figure of Mr. Albertson became no more than a bogy.
After all even Betty couldn’t drag me struggling to the altar.
“Why is Betty so anxious to marry you off?” came suddenly from the
corner beside me.
Mr. Albertson assumed his original shape as a marriageable male with a
bald spot and a cotton mill, and Betty slipped back into position. I
wasn’t sure she couldn’t drag any one to the altar if she made up her
mind to it. My voice showed the oppression of this thought.
“She thinks all women should be married.”
“You have been married.”
Something was the matter with Roger to say that.
“Well, she thinks I’m poor and lonely.”
“Are you?”
I began to have an uncomfortable, complicated feeling. Fear was in it,
also exhilaration. It made me sit up stiffly, suddenly conscious of a
sensation of trembling somewhere inside.
“I am poor,” I said, “that is, poor compared to people like Betty.”
“And lonely, too?”
The disturbance grew. It made me draw away from Roger, pressed close
into my corner, as if no scrap or edge of my clothing must touch him. I
was afraid that my voice would show it and determined that it mustn’t.
“I’m lonely sometimes. That rainy night when you came in unexpectedly I
was.”
My voice _wasn’t_ all right. I cleared my throat and pretended to look
at the stars.
Roger said nothing, but the secret subways of emotion that connect
the spirits of those who are in close communion, told me he, too,
was moved. The air in the closed scented car did not seem enough for
natural breathing. It was like a pressure, something that put your
heart-beats out of tune, and made your lips open with a noiseless gasp.
I stood it as long as I could and then words burst out of me. They
came anyway, ridiculous words when I write them down:
“But I’ll never marry any of them. No matter what they are, or what
Betty wants, or how many of them she has up to dinner.”
The pressure was lifted and I sank back trembling. It was as if I
had been under water and come up again into the air. The spiritual
telegraph told me that Roger felt as I did, and that suddenly he or
I or both of us, had broken down a barrier. It was swept away and we
were close together--closer than the night when we had held hands and
forgotten where we were, closer than we’d ever been in all the years
we’d known each other. It was not necessary to say anything. In our
several corners we sat silent, understanding for the first time, I and
the man I loved.
The sharp landscape slid by us, naked trees, spotted lines of light,
stretches of lawn grizzled with frost, woodland depths with the shine
of ice about the tree roots, and then the flash of glassy ponds.
We sat as still as if we were dead, as if our souls had come out of our
bodies and were whispering. It was a wonderful moment of time, one of
the unforgetable moments that dot the long material years. All that’s
gone before and all that’s going to come dies away and there’s only the
present--the beautiful exquisite present. We only have a few like that
in our lives.
It lasted till the auto drew up at my door. We said good night and
parted.
Up in my room I sat a long time by the fire thinking of the hundreds
of women like myself, the disillusioned ones, in the dark dens of
tenements and in the splendid homes near by. I tried to send them
messages through the night, telling them we could rise out of the
depths. I saw life as it really is, hills and valleys, patches of
blackness and then light, but always with an unresting force flowing
beneath, the immortal thing that urges and upholds and makes it all
possible. I remembered words I used to work on bits of perforated board
when I was a little girl, “God is Love.” I never understood what it
meant, even when I stopped working it on perforated board and grew to
the reasoning stage. To-night I knew--got at last what a happy child
might understand--love in the heart was God with us, come back to us
again.