The count picked up his fur-lined coat from the stair rail, and shook
himself into it.
“I should wait to go to her when she comes in, but this _meeserable_
dinner, where I sit beside young girls who know nothing and married
ladies who know too much--no mystery, no allure. But I must go--perhaps
you?--” He looked at me tentatively over his fur collar.
“I’ll go up as soon as she comes in,” I answered. “If there’s anything
I can do for her be assured I’ll do it.”
“You are a sweet lady,” said the count and departed.
After that I sat with the door open a crack waiting and listening. The
hours ticked by. I heard Mr. Hamilton’s step on the street stairs, a
knock at the Westerner’s door, and as it opened to him, a joyous clamor
of greeting in which Miss Bliss’ little treble piped shrilly. Hazard
was painting her and she spent most of her evenings in there with
them. It was a good thing, they were decent fellows and their room was
properly heated.
At intervals the sounds of their mirth came from below. The rest of the
house was dumb. At eleven I could stand it no more and went up. If she
wasn’t there I could light up the place for her--she rarely locked her
door--and have it bright and warm.
It was dimly lighted and very still on the top floor, the gas-jet
tipping the burner in a small pale point of light. I knocked and got
no answer, then opened the door and went in. The room was dark, the
window opposite a faint blue square. In the draft made by the opening
door the gas shot up as if frightened, then sunk down, sending its thin
gleam over the threshold. As I moved I bumped into the table and heard
a thumping of something falling on the floor. I saw afterward it was
oranges. I groped for matches, lighted the gas and looked about, then
gave a jump and a startled exclamation. Lizzie Harris was lying on the
sofa.
“Lizzie,” I cried sharply, angry from my fright, “why didn’t you say
you were there?”
She made no sound or movement and seized by a wild fear, I ran to her.
At the first glance I thought she was dead. She was as white as a china
plate, lying flat on her back with her eyes shut, her hands clasped
over her waist. I touched one of them and knew by the warmth she was
alive. I clutched it, shaking it and crying:
“Lizzie, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”
She tried to withdraw it and turned her face away. The movement was
feeble, suggesting an ebbing vitality. I thought of suicide, and in
a panic looked about for glasses and vials. There was nothing of the
kind near her. In my lightning survey I saw a scattering of newspaper
cuttings on the table among the rest of the oranges.
“Have you taken anything, medicine, poison?” I cried in my terror.
“No,” she whispered. “Go away. Let me alone.”
I was sorry for her, but I was also angry. She had given me a horrible
fright. Failure and criticism were hard to bear, but there was no sense
taking them this way.
“What _is_ the matter then? What’s happened to make you like this?”
“Let me alone,” she repeated, and lifting one hand, held it palm upward
over her face.
That something was wrong was indisputable, but I couldn’t do anything
till I knew what it was. I put my fingers on the hand over her face and
felt for her pulse. I don’t know why, for I haven’t the least idea how
a pulse ought to beat. As it was I couldn’t find any beat at all and
dropped her hand.
“I’ll have to get a doctor, I’ll call the man in the boarding house
opposite.”
“Don’t,” she said in a voice which, for the first time, showed a note
of life. “If you bring a doctor here I’ll go out in the street as I am.”
She was in the blue kimono. I didn’t know whether she had strength
enough to move, but if she had I knew that she would do as she said and
the night was freezing.
“I won’t call the doctor if you’ll tell me what’s happened to you?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, and raising the hand from her face caught at
my skirt. I bent down for her voice was very low, hardly more than a
whisper.
“Masters has left me.”
“Left you,” I echoed, bewildered. “He was here last night. I saw him.”
Her eyes held mine.
“Left me for good,” she whispered, “forever.”
Any words that I might have had ready to brace up a discouraged spirit
died away.
“What--what do you mean?” I faltered.
“He and I were lovers--lived together--you must have known it. He got
tired of me--sick of me--he told me so himself--those very words. He
said he was done with it all, the singing and me.” She turned her
head away and looked at the wall. “I’ve been here ever since. I don’t
know how long.”
[Illustration: “Masters has left me”]
I stood without moving, looking at her, and she seemed as dead to my
presence as if she had really been the corpse I at first thought her.
Presently I found myself putting a rug over her, settling it with
careful hands as if it occupied my entire thoughts.
I do not exactly know what did occupy them. A sort of sick disgust
permeated me, a deep overwhelming disgust of life. Everything was vile,
the world, the people in it, the sordid dirt of their lives. I almost
wished that I might die to be out of it all.
Then I sat down beside her. She lay turned to the wall, with the light
of the one burner making long shadows in the folds of the rug. Her neck
and cheek had the hard whiteness of marble, her hair, like a piece
of black cloth, laid along them. The sickening feeling of repugnance
persisted, stronger than any pity for her. I suppose it was the long
reach of tradition, an inherited point of view, transmitted by those
prim and buckramed ladies on my dining-room wall, and also perhaps that
I had never known a woman, well, as a friend, who had done what Lizzie
Harris had done. It was the first time in my life, which had moved so
precisely in its prescribed groove, that I had ever taken to my heart,
believed in, grieved over, loved and trusted a woman thus stained and
fallen.
I will also add, for I am truthful with myself, that when I got up and
went to her, all inclination to touch her, to console and comfort her,
was gone. For those first few moments she was physically objectionable
to me, as if she might have been covered with dirt. Yet I felt that
I must look after her, had what I suppose you would call a sense of
duty where she was concerned. I have always hated the phrase; to me it
signifies a dry sterile thing, and it held me there because I would
have been uncomfortable if I had gone. Is it the training women get in
their youth that makes them like this, makes them only give their best
when the object is worthy, as we ask only the people to dinner who can
give us a good dinner back? I heard the sense of duty chill in my voice
as I spoke to her.
“Have you had anything to eat since--that is, to-day?”
She did not answer. I bent farther over and looked at the profile with
the eyes closed. They were sunken, as if by days of pain. I have seen
a good many sick people in my life, but I had never seen any one so
changed in so short a time. I gazed down at her and the appeal of that
marred and anguished face suddenly broke through everything, stabbed
down through the world’s armor into the human core. I tried to seize
hold of her, to make my hands tell her, and cried out in the poor words
that are our best:
“Oh, Lizzie, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for you.”
It was like taking hold of a dead body. Her arm fell from my hand an
inert weight. Condemnation or condonement were all the same to her.
What was I to do? The clock marked midnight. The joyful sounds from
below had ceased. I did not like to rouse the others, for, as far as
I could see, she was in no immediate danger. She appeared to be in a
condition of collapse, and I had never heard of any one dying of that.
It was twenty-four hours since I had seen Masters on the stairs. She
had had nothing to eat since then. Food was the best thing and I went
into the kitchen to get some.
The top floor has what Miss Bliss calls “the bulge” on all others
by having a small but complete kitchen. The gaslight showed it in a
state of chaos, piles of plates waiting to be washed, the ice-box with
opened door and a milk bottle overturned, some linen lying swathed
and sodden over the edge of the laundry tub. I made a brew of tea and
brought it to her, but one might as well have tried to make a statue
drink. In answer to my pleadings she turned completely to the wall,
moving one hand to the top of her head where it lay outstretched with
spread fingers. In the faintly lighted room, in the creeping cold of a
December midnight, that speechless woman with her open hand resting on
her head, was the most tragic figure I have ever seen.
I took the tea back to the kitchen and washed the plates. Also I
hunted over the place for any means of self-destruction that might be
there. There were vials in the medicine closet that I stood in a row
and inspected, emptying those I wasn’t sure about into the sink. As I
worked I thought, sometimes pursuing a consecutive series of ideas,
sometimes in disconnected jumps. It was revolutionary thinking, casting
out old ideals, installing new ones. I was outside the limits within
which I had heretofore ranged, was looking beyond the familiar horizon.
In that untidy kitchen, sniffing at medicine bottles, I had glimpses
far beyond the paths where I had left my little trail of footprints.
I didn’t know why she had given herself to Masters. Strange as it may
sound, it did not then seem to me to matter. It was her affair, concern
for her conscience, not mine. What was my concern was that I could not
give my love and take it back. It went deeper than her passions and her
weaknesses. It went below the surface of life, underlay the complicated
web of conduct and action. It was the one thing that was sure amid the
welter of shock and amaze.
And I understood Masters, was suddenly shifted into his place and saw
his side. He had tried to make her understand and she wouldn’t, then
on the straining tie that held them had dealt a savage blow, brought
an impossible situation to the only possible end. I hated him, if
she had been nothing to me I would have hated him. Shaking a bottle
of collodion over the sink I muttered execrations on him, and as I
muttered knew that I admired the brutal courage that had set them both
free.
The dawn found me sitting by her frozen in mind and body. I had had
time to think of what I should say to all inquiries: the failure of the
concert, the blow to her hopes, had prostrated her. It was half true
and quite plausible.
When the light was bright and the street awake I went out into the hall
and waited. Miss Bliss was the first person I caught, coming up from
the street door with a milk bottle. Her little face was full of sleep
that dispersed under my urgent murmurings. She stepped inside the door
and hailed tentatively:
“Hullo, Miss Harris.”
There was no answer and she ventured less buoyantly:
“Don’t you feel good, Miss Harris?”
The lack of response scared her, yet she stood fascinated like the
street gamin eying the victim of an accident. She had seen enough to do
what I wanted, and I took her by the arm and pulled her into the hall.
“She looks like she was dead,” she whispered, awed. “Would you think a
big husky woman like that would take things so hard?”