“Lizzie, listen. Mrs. Ferguson is my best friend. I made her do this
and I can’t have you treating her so rudely. I thought, of course,
you’d told her.”
She laid her hand on my detaining fingers, and as she spoke in her most
coaxing manner smoothed them caressingly, detaching them from their
hold.
“Dear girl, I know all that. Every word you say is true. And I’ll fix
it, I’ll straighten it all out. There won’t be the slightest trouble.”
“Will you telephone those people?” I implored.
My hand was dislodged. She drew away.
“Indeed I will, the first moment I get.” She paused, arrested by a
thought. “What’s their name? I’ve forgotten.” Then backing off: “_You_
telephone them. You see I can’t now and I don’t know when I’ll be near
a booth. Say I’m sick, or have left town, or anything you like. Just
any excuse until I can attend to it. Good-by. I’ll probably come in and
see you this afternoon.”
She turned and made off as quickly as she could, a tall vigorous
figure, moving with a free swinging step. I stood and watched her
hastening down the path between the trunks of the bare trees. There
was not a trace upon her of the tempest of two nights before. It might
never have been. Her whole bearing suggested coursing blood and high
vitality. She was very like the irresponsible and endearing creature I
had known when I first went to Mrs. Bushey’s.
I gave up my walk and went home to send the telephone. As I hurried
along I wondered where she could be going and why she seemed so light
in spirit. I was in that feverish state of foreboding when the simplest
events assume a sinister aspect. The thought crossed my mind that she
might be going to elope with Roger. It would be like her to elope, and
though it would be very unlike him (about the last thing in the world
one could conceive him doing), he might have become clay in the hands
of that self-willed and beguiling potter.
“Well,” I thought, “so much the better. It’ll be over.” And I decided
the best thing for me to do would be to go back to Europe and join the
spinsters and widows in the pensions.
I sent the telephone, trying to soothe an angry female voice that
complained of a morning “utterly ruined.” I sent another one to
Betty, who was also discomposed, having heard from the mother of “the
barbarous child.” Betty wouldn’t believe her, had evidently championed
the teacher with heat. Betty is a stalwart adherent, a partisan, and I
foresaw battles in high places.
The afternoon drew to a golden mellow close and I lay on the sofa
waiting for Lizzie. I hadn’t relinquished the idea of the elopement but
it did not seem so probable as it had in the morning. Anyway, if she
hadn’t eloped--if she did come in to see me--I had made up my mind I
would ask her pointblank what she intended to do about Roger. It was
one word for Lizzie and two for myself. I really thought if things went
on the way they were, I should go mad. Not that it would matter if I
went mad, for nobody depends on me, nor am I necessary to the progress
or welfare of the state. But I don’t want to be an expense to my
friends. And I don’t know whether one hundred and sixty-five dollars
a month is enough for maintenance in an exclusive lunatic asylum and I
know they would never send me to any but the best.
When a knock came I started and called a husky “Come in.” The door
opened--there had been no elopement. Roger stood on the threshold,
smiling and calm, which I knew he wouldn’t have been if he was a
bridegroom. Marriage would always be a portentous event with a
conscientious Clements.
Whatever I might be with Lizzie I couldn’t be pointblank with Roger,
though I had known him for fifteen years and her for six months. I
explained my trepidation by a headache and settled back on the sofa.
He was properly grieved and wanted me to follow Mrs. Ashworth to the
south. I saw myself in a white dress on a hotel piazza being charming
to men in flannels and Panama hats, and the mere thought of it made
me querulous. He persisted with an amiable urgence. If my opinion of
him hadn’t been crystallized into an unchangeable form, I should have
thought him maddeningly stupid. I began to wonder, if the present state
of affairs lasted much longer, if I wouldn’t end by hating him. I was
thinking this when Lizzie came in.
I had never seen her, not even in the gladdest days before her
illness, look as she did. The old Lizzie was back, but enriched and
glorified. She entered with a breathless inrush, shutting the door
with a blind blow, her glance leaping at me and drawing me up from
the cushions like the clutch of a powerful hand. It seemed as if some
deadening blight had been lifted from her and she had burst into life,
enhanced and intensified by the long period of hibernation. Her lips
were parted in a slight, almost rigid smile, her eyes, widely opened,
had lost their listless softness and shone with a deep brilliance.
Roger gave a suppressed exclamation and rose to his feet. I think she
would have astonished any man, that Saint Anthony would have paused to
look, not tempted so much as held in a staring stillness of admiration.
She was less the alluring woman than the burning exultant spirit,
cased in a woman’s body and shining through it like a light through a
transparent shell.
“Lizzie!” I exclaimed on a rising note of question. I had a sense of
momentous things, of a climax suddenly come upon us all.
“I’ve been to Vignorol,” she said, and came to a halt in front of me,
her gaze unwavering, her breast rising to hurried breaths.
“How do you do, Miss Harris,” said Roger, coming smilingly forward. He
had the air of the favored friend who shows a playful pique at being
overlooked.
The conventional words, uttered in an urbane tone, fell between us like
an ax on a stretched thread. It can be said for him that he knew Lizzie
too little to realize what her manner portended. He evidently saw
nothing except that she was joyously exhilarated and looked unusually
handsome.
She gave him a glance, bruskly quelling and containing no recognition
of him. It was her famous piece-of-furniture glance, to which I had
been so often treated. It was the first time Roger had ever experienced
its terrors and it staggered him. In bewilderment he looked at me for
an explanation. But she was not going to let any outside influence come
between us. I was important just then--a thing of value appropriated to
her uses.
“I’ve been two days fighting it out, trying to make up my mind to do
it. And this morning, when you met me, I was going there.”
“Well?” I was aware of that demanding look of Roger’s, which, getting
nothing from me, turned to her. That was useless, but how was he to
know?
“I sang for him,” she said, the brilliant eyes holding mine as if to
grasp and focus upon herself every sense I had.
“Lizzie!”
The premonition of momentous things grew stronger. Underneath it, in
lower layers of consciousness, submerged habits of politeness made
themselves felt. I ought to get Roger into the conversation.
“I sang better than I ever did before. And Vignorol, who used to scold
and be so discouraged, told me I’d got it!”
“Lizzie!”
For a moment we stared at each other, speechless, she giving the useful
pair of ears time to carry to the brain, the great news.
Then the subconscious promptings grew too strong to be denied and I
said:
“Mr. Clements will be as glad as we are to know that.”
Thus encouraged, Roger emerged from his astonishment. He was not as
debonair as at the beginning, also he evidently wasn’t sure just what
it was all about, but he seized upon the most prominent fact, and said,
without enthusiasm, rather with apprehension:
“This doesn’t mean, Miss Harris, that you’re thinking of returning to
your old profession?”
Her look at him was flaming, as silencing as a blow. I don’t know
why she didn’t tell him to hold his tongue, except that she was too
preoccupied to waste a word. He flinched before it, drew himself up and
backed away, dazed, as he might have been if she really had struck him.
Having brushed him aside she went on to me. The main fact imparted, her
exultation burst forth in a crowding rush of words:
“It wasn’t my voice--but that’s better, he says it’s the long rest--it
was the other thing--the temperament, the soul. It’s got into me. I
knew it myself as soon as I began to sing. I felt as if something
that bound me was gone--ropes and chains broken and thrown away. It
was so much easier. Before I was always making efforts, listening to
what they told me, trying to work it out with my head. And to-day!
Oh, Evie, I knew it, I felt it--something outside myself that poured
into me and carried me along. I could just let myself go and be
wonderful--wonderful--wonderful!”
She threw out her arms as if to illustrate the extent of her
wonderfulness, wide as she could stretch, then brought her hands
together on her bosom, and, with half-shut eyes, stood rapt in ravished
memory.
We gazed mutely at her as if she were some remarkable spectacle upon
which we had unexpectedly chanced.
“I sang and sang,” she said softly, “and each time it was better.
Vignorol wouldn’t let me go.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He kissed me,” she murmured dreamily.
Roger in his corner moved and then was still.
“But what did he suggest about you? What did he want you to do?”
My mouth was dry. Sitting on the edge of the sofa I clutched the sides
of it as if it was a frail bark and I was floating in it over perilous
seas.
“Go back to where I belong,” she said, and then came out of her ecstasy
and began to pace up and down, flinging sentences at me.
“Try it again and do it this time. He says I can, and I know I can.
Oh, Evie, to get away from all this--those hateful pupils, those
hideous lessons--those women! To go back to my work, be among my
own people.” She brushed by Roger, her glance, imbued with its inward
vision, passing over him as if he was invisible. “It’s like coming out
of prison. It’s like coming to life again after you were dead.”
[Illustration: “I could just let myself go and be wonderful!”]
She had expressed it exactly. She _had_ been dead. The mild and wistful
woman of the last two months was a wraith. _This_ was Lizzie Harris
born again, renewed and revitalized, now almost terrible in her naked
and ruthless egotism.
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought yet. Vignorol wants me to study with
him for nothing, pay it back when I make good. But that doesn’t matter
now. I can’t think of anything but that I’m home, in my place, and
that I can do it. They were all disappointed in me, said I’d never get
there. I can. I will. Wait!--Watch me. You’ll see me on top yet, and it
won’t be so far off, either. I’ll show you all it’s in me. I’ll wake up
every clod in those boxes, I’ll make their dull fat faces shine, I’ll
hear them clap and stamp and shout, ‘Brava, Bonaventura!’”
She cried out the two last words, staring before her with flashing
eyes that looked from the heights of achievement upon an applauding
multitude. In the moment of silence I had a queer clairvoyant feeling
that it was true, that it would happen, and I saw her as the queen of
song with her foot upon the public’s neck. Then the seeing passion left
her face and her lip curled in superb disdain.
“And you wanted to make a _singing teacher_ out of me!”
She swept us both with a contemptuous glance, as if we were the chief
offenders in a conspiracy for her undoing. I was used to it, but Roger,
the galled jade whose withers were yet unwrung, winced under her scorn.
“But Miss Harris,” he protested, “we only--”
“Oh, I’m not talking to you,” she said brutally. “You don’t know
anything about it.”
“Certainly, if you say so,” he replied.
There was a moment’s pause. I did not like to look at him. You can
bear being insulted if no one else sees it, but one old friend mustn’t
witness another’s humiliation, especially when that other is unable by
temperament and training to hit back.
Lizzie, having crushed him like an annoying and persistent fly, wheeled
toward the door.
“I must go. I can’t stay any longer.” Then in answer to a question
from me, “Oh, I don’t know where--out to breathe. I can’t stay still. I
want to walk and feel I’m free again, that I’m not cramped up in a dark
hole with no sunshine. I want to feel that I’m myself and say it over
and over.”
She went out, seeming to draw after her all the stir and color that she
had brought in. It was as if a comet with a bright and glittering tail
had crowded itself into the room, and then, after trying to squeeze
into the contracted area, swishing and lashing about and flattening us
against the walls, had burst forth to continue on its flaming way.
I fell back on the sofa feeling that every nerve in me had snapped and
I was filled with torn and quivering ends. Stupidly, with open mouth, I
looked at Roger, and he, also stupidly but with his mouth shut, looked
at me. I don’t know how long we looked. It probably was a few seconds
but it seemed an age--one of those artificially elongated moments
when, as some sage says, the measure of time becomes spiritual, not
mechanical. I saw Roger afar as if I was eying him through the big end
of an opera glass--a tiny familiar figure at the end of a great vista.
The space between us was filled with a whirling vortex of thoughts,
formless and immensely exciting. They surged and churned about trying
to find a definite expression, trying to force their way to my brain
and tell me thrilling and important news. Then the familiar figure
advanced, pressed them out of the way, and taking a chair by the sofa
sat down and demanded explanations.
I couldn’t give them. I couldn’t explain Lizzie to him any more than
I could to Betty or Mrs. Ashworth. I remembered him, before he had
met her, telling me in the restaurant that I was seeing her through
my own personality, and now _he_ was doing it, and he’d never get
anywhere that way. I wanted desperately to make him understand. There
was something so pitiful in his dismay, his reiterated “But why should
she be offended with me. What have _I_ done?” And then hanging on
my words as if I was some kind of a magician who could wave a wand
and make it all clear. Nothing would have pleased me more than to be
able to advance some “first cause” from which he could have worked up
to a logical conclusion. But how could I? The lost traveler in the
Australian bush was faced by a task, simple and easy, compared to
Roger Clements’ trying to grasp the intricacies of Lizzie Harris’
temperament.
I was sorry for him. I was sorry (the way you’re sorry for some one
inadequately equipped to meet an unexpected crisis) to see how helpless
he was. I tried to be kind and also truthful--a difficult combination
under the circumstances--and make plain to him some of the less complex
aspects of the sphinx, only to leave him in dazed distress.
He was alarmed at her evident intention to go back to the stage,
couldn’t believe it, wanted me to tell him why an abandoned resolution
should come back like a curse to roost. He couldn’t get away
from his original conception of her, had learned her one way and
couldn’t relearn her another. It was at once a pathetic sight and an
illuminating experience--the man of ability, the student, the scholar,
out of his depths and floundering foolishly. The mind trained to the
recognition of the obvious and established, accustomed to fit its own
standards to any and all forms of the human animal, coming up with a
dizzying impact against the mind that had no guide, no standard, no
code, but floats in the flux of its own emotions.
I repeat I was sorry, immensely sorry. Such is the inconsistency of
human nature that I was filled up and overflowing with sympathy at the
spectacle of my own man, once my exclusive property, hurt, flouted and
outraged by the vagaries of my successful rival.
A eight o’clock that evening I was in my sitting-room when I heard
her come in. She did not stop at my door but went up-stairs, a quick
rustling progress through the silence of the house. It was very still,
not a sound from any of the rooms, when I heard the notes of her piano,
and then her voice--“_Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix._” The register was
shut, and I stole to the door and opening it stood at the stair-head
listening. Before the aria was over I knew that what she had said was
true. Lizzie had found herself.
After a pause she began again--_O Patria Mia_ from _Aïda_. I tiptoed
forward and let myself noiselessly down on the top step, breath held
to listen. As the song swelled, the cry of a bleeding and distracted
heart, the doors along the passages were softly opened. Up and down
the wall came the click of turned latches and stealthy footsteps. Mrs.
Bushey’s lodgers were not abroad, as I had thought. The stairs creaked
gently as they dropped upon them. When _Patria Mia_ was over we were
all there. I could see the legs of Mr. Hamilton and the count dangling
over the banisters above me. On the bottom of the flight Mr. Weatherby
sat, and Miss Bliss and Mr. Hazard leaned against the wall, looking up
with the gaslight gilding their faces.
In the silence that fell on the last note no one spoke. There was no
rising chorus of praise as there once had been. I don’t think we were
aware of one another, each rapt in the memory of an ecstatic sadness.
The cautious foot of Mrs. Phillips stealing along the lower hall made
me look down and I saw her stationing herself beside young Hazard, and
that Dolly Bliss’ face shone with tears.
She went on--_Vissi d’Arte, Vissi d’Amore_, Musetta’s song; the
habanera from _Carmen_, Brahm’s _Sapphische Ode_, sounding the depths
and heights. Between each piece we were dumb, only the creaking of the
banisters as Mr. Hamilton shifted, or the sniffing of Miss Bliss when
the song was sad, fell on our silence. We never saw her. She was at
last the diva, remote, august, a woman mysterious and unknown, singing
to us across an impassable gulf.
As long as I live I shall never forget it--the narrow half-lit
passages, the long oval of the stair-well, on the bottom step of my
flight Mr. Weatherby’s back, broad and bent, as he rested his elbows on
his knees. Against the whitewashed wall below Mr. Hazard with his eyes
fixed in a trance of listening; Mrs. Phillips, her head pressed back
against the wall, her lids closed, and Dolly Bliss’ little face bright
with slow dropping tears.
We were Liza Bonaventura’s first audience.