XX

I WRITE to-night in a hushed house--a house that holds the emptiness

that follows the withdrawal of a dynamic presence.

Lizzie is gone.

As her ship bears her away to future glory, we, the hewers of wood and

drawers of water, sit here recuperating from the labors of getting her

off. In its hour of departure the magnet gave forth the full measure of

its power and we bent our backs and lent our hands in a last energy of

service. No votaries bowed before the shrine of a deity ever celebrated

their worship with more selfless acts of devotion than Mrs. Bushey’s

lodgers in speeding Lizzie on her way.

What did Mr. Hazard’s unfinished order matter when Lizzie, having

forgotten to order the expressman, one had to be sought up and down

the reaches of Lexington Avenue? Of what consequence to Miss Bliss

were broken sittings, on the proceeds of which she could have lived

for a week, when Lizzie’s traveling dress was found to be in rags and

had to be mended by some one who knew how? When the count rendered

his tribute in fruit and flowers, did he stop to consider that the

money was part of the fund reserved for his passage home, and now he

would have to travel second cabin? No one thought of anything but the

departing goddess. They were proud and glad to deny themselves that she

might go, grandly serene, amid clouds of ascending incense.

As for me, after that night of respite, I became a body again, a body

whose mission was the preparing of another for the great adventure.

She drew me after her as the fisherman draws the glittering bit

of tin that revolves from the end of his line. The simile is not

entirely satisfactory because I did not glitter, but I revolved, round

and round, as the fisherman’s hand pulled or eased on the line. I

sewed, I packed, I unpacked, searching for forgotten necessities. I

was down-town, executing overlooked errands, I was up-town, cooking

hurried meals in the kitchenette. My voice in the morning called her

to breakfast, my good night was the last sound on the stairs as I left

her room, grown bare and bleak, losing its character, as one by one the

signs of her occupancy vanished. I had no time to feel, to be glad or

sorry. Even the passion to have her go was overridden by the ruling

instinct that while she was there I must serve. And though the poet

tells us there are those who can do this while standing and waiting, I

evidently was not one of them.

As we demonstrated her power by the zeal of our devotion, her arrogant

exactions increased in a corresponding ratio. She was never more aloof,

more regally indifferent, more imperiously demanding. The call of her

destiny had come to her and she heard nothing else.

Her stay with us had been only the bivouac of a night, and we the

passers-by she had encountered in the moment of halt. With the goal in

sight we lost what small significance we had and assumed the aspect

of strangers, by whose fire she had rested, in whose tent she had

slept. Already, before she had gone, we had faded into the limbo of the

useless and outworn. Henceforward, from our humble corner, we would

watch her mounting on others as she had mounted on us--climbing higher

and higher with never a backward glance or a wave of her hand to the

little group who strained their eyes for a sign of remembrance.

Some day the others would find her out and be angry, cite to their

friends proofs of her ingratitude, grow bitter at the memory of their

unappreciated efforts, add her to the list of forgetful great ones who

took all and rendered nothing back. From a deeper knowledge of her I

would never know their disillusion. The thought that she felt no love

for any of us had for me no sting. I even went farther, agreed that

it was not her place to feel it. Arrived at last at the heart of her

mystery, I could keep my memory of her fair and untarnished, untouched

by efforts to fit her into a frame where she didn’t belong.

She was not, as they would think, a heartless and cruel fellow of

ours, but the creature of another species, thinking in a different

language, seeing life from a different angle. What we were trained to

accept as right and just, she had no power to recognize. Custom and

tradition had formed a groove in which we walked unquestionably onward.

She wandered at will in a world expressly created for her, peopled by

shades who had no meaning apart from their usefulness. Environment

that had molded and put its stamp upon us made no impression upon her

invulnerable self-concentration. We held a point of view in common,

responded automatically to established ideas and inherited impulses.

She saw no claims but her own and moved upon what she wanted with the

directness of an animal. The bogies with which we were frightened into

good behavior--public opinion, social position, loss of respect--she

snapped her fingers at. Her only law was the law of her own being, her

standard, a fierce and defiant determination to be true to herself.

Restraints and reticences, subtleties of breeding, delicacies of

conduct, imposed on us by the needs of communal life, were not for

her, selected and set apart to be that lonely figure in the crowded

companionable world--the people’s servant.

That was what I at last knew her to be--an instrument for the joy,

the recreation, the enthrallment of that great, sluggish, full-fed

Minotaur, the public. For this purpose nature had fashioned her,

eliminating every characteristic that might render her unfit,

pruning away virtues that would hamper, uprooting instincts that

would interfere. As Wordsworth saw the All-Mother saying of a worthy

specimen, “I will make a lady of my own,” so, seeing Lizzie, she had

said, “I will make an artist of my own,” and had set about doing it

with thoroughness.

From the beautiful outer case to “the hollows where a heart should

be” she was formed to be the one thing--a cunningly framed and

articulated mechanism for our entertainment. To us--whom she so lightly

regarded--she was foreordained to carry a message of beauty, call

us from our sordid cares, and base ambitions, catch us up from the

grayness of the every day to the heights where once more we caught a

glimpse of the vision and the dream. That we should work and sacrifice

to help her to her place, she, unconscious but impelled by her destiny,

felt, and made me feel. And having gathered up our tribute she had left

us, not ungratefully, not having taken all and given nothing, but in

her own time and in her own way to pay us back a hundredfold.

I thought it all out in the cab coming back from the steamer, and I was

content to have it so.

I had gone down to see her off--she wanted me and no one else. We

had passed up the dock amid throngs of passengers and presently

there were stewards and cabin-boys running for her luggage, and

officers discreetly staring. When we bought the ticket I had seen on

the list the name of a countess, and I learned that she was a royal

lady traveling incognita with a maid. Everybody thought Lizzie was

the countess and I the maid. I looked the part, trotting at her

heels, carrying a large bandbox covered with pink roses that had

been overlooked in the final scramble. She had a triumphal progress,

everything made easy, boys bearing the count’s flowers going before

her up the gangway, and I following with the bandbox that nobody had

offered to take. Before I left I saw the royal lady leaning on the

railing, a pale person with the curling fringe and prominent eyes of

the typical British princess. Nobody paid any attention to her, but

when we went exploring about the decks, looks followed us and whispers

buzzed.

As the big ship churned the water and ponderously moved off, I stood on

the pier’s edge and waved to her. I was the tiny unit in the crowd--the

nameless, humdrum, earth-bound crowd--for whom she was to weave the

spell, and create the illusion. Through a glaze of tears I watched her,

tall and splendid beside the dowdy princess--my beautiful Lizzie, a

real princess, going imperially to claim her crown.

The windows are open and the spring night comes in, soft as a caress.

In the basement of the apartment-house some one is playing _Annie

Laurie_ on the accordion, and in the back yards the servants are

chatting in the kitchen doors. From Mr. Hazard’s room, below me, I can

hear a low murmur of voices. The others are in there talking it over,

all, I know, singing the praises of Lizzie, voicing hopes for her

success as deep and sincere as prayers. I can fancy them, reclining on

chairs and sofas, worn out by their labors and feeling blankly that

something has gone out of their lives. A wild disturbing chord in the

day’s melody is hushed, a red thread in the tapestry has been withdrawn.