IT’S two weeks to-day since that night when I couldn’t sleep. It’s
been a horrible two weeks--a sickening, disintegrating two weeks. My
existence has been dislocated, thrown wide of its bearings, as if the
world had taken a sudden wild revolution, whirled me through space, and
I had come up dizzy and bewildered, still in the old setting, but with
everything broken and upside down.
It began with that visit of Roger to Lizzie’s sitting-room. The
morning after I felt humiliated, utterly ashamed of myself. It’s no
new thing for me to be a fool. I permit myself that luxury. But to be
a mean-spirited, suspicious fool was indulging myself too far. I saw
Lizzie and she spoke about Roger, simply and sweetly, and my folly grew
to a monumental size, beneath which I was crushed. And my dread faded
as the horror of a nightmare fades when the morning comes, with the sun
and the sounds of every day.
I have heard people say that these moments of relief in a period of
anxiety are all that enable one to bear the strain. I don’t think
that’s true. Alterations of stress and serenity tear one to pieces. If
you’re going to be put on the rack it’s better to have no reprieve.
Then your mind accepts it, gets accustomed to it and you tune up your
nerves, screw your courage to the sticking place and march forward with
the calm of the hopeless.
On Sunday afternoon--that was yesterday--Roger and I were to have tea
with Mrs. Ashworth. He came earlier than I expected, wanting to take
a walk with me before we went there. Lizzie was in my sitting-room,
also Miss Bliss, picking over the last box of chocolates contributed
by the count. Miss Bliss was not dressed for receiving--instead of the
kimono and the safety pin she wore the Navajo blanket, and when she
saw him she gave a cry that would have done credit to Susanna when she
discovered the elders. I would have seen the humor of it--the model
who had posed for the altogether in abject confusion at being caught
huddled to the chin in a blanket as thick as a carpet--had I not had
all humor stricken from me by the sight of Roger in the doorway. The
cry had halted him. He evidently had no idea what had caused it. His
eyes swerved from Miss Bliss to sweep the room in a quick questioning
glance. When it touched Lizzie something shot up in it--the question
was answered. Miss Bliss made her escape without anybody noticing
her, and I heard about the walk and went into the back room to get my
outdoor things.
I have explained how the kitchenette and bathroom are a connecting
passage between the two larger rooms of the suite. I came back through
them, and having left the sitting-room door open, could see at the end
of the little vista Roger and Lizzie by the table. As once before I
had stopped to watch them, I stopped now, not smilingly this time, but
furtively, guiltily.
They were talking together. To watch wasn’t enough--I had to hear
and I stole forward, stepping lightly over the bathroom rug and half
closed the door. Standing against it, I listened. Heaven knows the
conversation was innocent enough. She was telling him about a bracelet
she wore that belonged to some of those Spanish people she was
descended from. I suddenly felt as if I was looking through a keyhole,
and had stretched out my hand to shut the door when a silence fell.
Then all the acquired decencies of race and breeding left me. I pushed
the door open a crack and peered in. She had taken the bracelet off
and given it to him and he was turning it about, studying it while she
watched him.
“I’ve been told it’s quite valuable as an antique,” she said. “Do you
suppose it really is?”
“I don’t know about the antique, but I should think it might have some
value. The design’s very unusual,” he answered, and handed it back to
her.
She clasped it on her arm, and as she did so, her head down-bent, they
were silent, his eyes on her face.
I had never seen him look at any woman that way, but I had seen other
men. It is an unmistakable look, the mute confession of that passion
which makes the proudest man a slave.
I closed the door and leaned against it. For a moment I felt sick and
frightened--frightened at what I’d seen and frightened of myself.
Presently I came into the room and found them still talking of the
bracelet. And then Roger and I started for our walk, leaving Lizzie
alone.
He suggested that we go round the reservoir and I agreed, stepping
along silently beside him. It was a raw bleak afternoon, no sun,
everything gray. The streets were sprinkled with sauntering Sunday
people who had a detached dark aspect against the toneless monochrome.
They looked as if they were moving in front of painted scenery. The
park was wintry, sear boughs patterned against the sky, blurs of
denuded bushes, expanses of hoary grass. Along the roadway the ruts
were growing crumbly with the frost, and little spears and splinters of
ice edged the puddles.
The reservoir shone a smooth steely lake, with broken groups of figures
moving about it. Some of them walked briskly, others loitered, red and
chilled. All kinds of people were making the circuit of that body of
confined and conquered water--Jews and Gentiles, simple and gentle,
couples of lovers, companies of young men, family parties with the
children getting in the way and being shoved to one side, stiff stout
women like Betty trying to lose a few pounds. On the west side vast
apartment-houses made a rampart, pierced with windows like a line of
forts.
We commented on the cold and Roger quickened the pace, sweeping me
along the path’s outer edge. Presently he began to talk of Lizzie,
leaning down to catch my answers, keen, impatient, straining to hear
me and not lose a word. He is a tall man and I am a small woman and
I bobbed along at his shoulder trying to keep up with him, trying to
sound bright and interested, and feeling myself a meager unlovely body
carrying a sick and shriveled heart.
“No, she’ll never sing again,” I said, in answer to a question. “She
seems to have made up her mind to that.”
He swung his cane, cutting at the head of a dry weed.
“That’s a good thing.”
“Why is it a good thing?”
“Oh, because,” he dropped a pace behind me to let a straggling,
red-nosed family pass and I craned my head back to hear him. “She’s not
fitted for that kind of life. It’s not for women like her.”
“Why?”
He was beside me again.
“She’s too--er--too fine, too delicately organized.”