As he was walking over from the bus that next Saturday, he met her
hurrying through Fourth Street, and he was really shocked at her
appearance. Even an artist’s wife ought to be a little more particular.
She was hatless, with felt bedroom slippers on her feet, and her arms
were filled with huge bundles from which protruded the feathery tops of
carrots and celery leaves. The gay April breeze was blowing her soft
untidy hair across her eyes, and at first she didn’t recognise him.
“Oh, Mr. Landry!” she said. “Don’t _look_ at me!... You shouldn’t come
so early...!”
There was a very great change in her; a greater one than he had realised
before. She was not only thinner and paler and older looking; she was
different. That critical and childish look in her eyes had gone, that
air of an observer; she was no longer looking on at life, she was _in_
it, she was living.
He took one of the immense bags and followed her upstairs.
And the studio, too, was revealed to him in its reality; the artistic
glamour of it was gone in the daylight. In fact, it wasn’t a studio at
all; there was, crowded into one corner, a small table on which
Rosaleen’s drawing materials were neatly laid out on a blotter, but the
other corners contained only sordid and common adjuncts to a
poverty-stricken life; a cheap little bureau covered with a paltry lace
scarf, a trunk masquerading as a table, a wooden egg crate in which were
dozens of tins of tomatoes, bought at a sale. The distinguished artist
himself was not what he had seemed; he was still handsome, still
debonair, but he was wearing a dirty collar and a soiled white apron
over a wrinkled suit. He was sitting beside a little gas stove on a
table, on which was superimposed a portable oven with a glass door, and
he was peering in with his extinguished eyes, so absorbed in his
watching that he had to make a visible effort to arouse himself and to
welcome Landry.
“A la bonne heure!” he said, cordially. “I’ve made something which no
man with a soul could resist. It will be ready at one sharp. A Galette,
to be eaten hot, with a sauce of wine and cream. That, coffee of the
best, and a marvellous little salad.... Eh?”
Landry answered without great enthusiasm; he wasn’t much interested in
food. And immediately the conversation languished, the animation fled
from Lawrence’s face; he became again crumpled and dejected, until
Rosaleen, who had been in the back room, returned and began asking him
questions about the Galette. That started him; he talked and talked,
and his talk was all of food--about methods of preparation--a subject
upon which Landry was profoundly ignorant. The meals in his home were
plain and not greatly varied, meat, poultry and game roasted or broiled,
the more respectable vegetables, an unobtrusive salad, innocent milky
puddings, and those peculiar and delectable Southern hot breads. When he
ate in a restaurant he ordered very much the same things, and when he
was the guest of someone very rich who set rare dishes before him, he
didn’t quite know what he was eating and cared still less. Such an idea
as stuffing an eggplant with chopped liver seemed to him fantastic and
frivolous.
The lunch was undoubtedly a good one, but it was ruined by Lawrence’s
interminable culinary talk. There was no chance for a word with
Rosaleen; she seemed to have no other idea in her head but to “draw out”
her tiresome husband, to encourage him to bore their guest beyond
toleration. Landry felt that this was hardly hospitable.
At last he rose.
“I’ll have to be going,” he said. “It’s after three, and I have an
engagement.”
Lawrence shook his hand with tremendous cordiality.
“Come again!” he said. “Take pity on a man who has very little left in
life. Come often!”
He turned toward Rosaleen, and Landry distinctly saw a look of
understanding pass between them which he didn’t like.
“I’ll walk as far as the corner with you,” said Rosaleen. “I have an
errand.”
And just as she was, she went out of the door with him. He stopped her
at the head of the stairs.
“You shouldn’t go out in those slippers, Rosaleen! You’ll catch
cold....”
“But that’s just where I’m going!” she answered, laughing. “To the
shoemaker’s to get my shoes. They’re being mended.”
“But--” he began, and stopped.
“But haven’t you more than one pair?” he had been about to say.
He couldn’t endure to see her running about the streets like this,
hatless, in bedroom slippers, a neglected, pitiful creature who had lost
her womanly pride.
All the circumstances of her life puzzled and displeased him. There was
something about it he couldn’t comprehend--that fat fellow with his
cooking, the strained gallantry of Rosaleen’s bearing, the subtly
unpleasant atmosphere which surrounded them. Even poverty couldn’t
account for it, he thought.
They had reached the corner, and Rosaleen stopped.
“Mr. Landry!” she said. “Could you lend me ten dollars?”
He pulled out his bill fold, handed her a bill, politely waved aside her
thanks, and fled, hurrying from the sight of her. He felt really sick,
with pity, with amazement, with an unconquerable disgust.