The book of Evelyn

by Geraldine Bonner

X

I didn’t sleep well that night. The memory of Mr. Masters’ set sullen face kept me wakeful. At four I got up, lit the light and tried to read Kidd’s Social Evolution. Through the ceiling I could hear Mr. Hamilton’s subdued snoring on the floor above. It seemed like the deep and labored breathing of that submerged world whose upward struggle I was following through Mr. Kidd’s illuminating page.

After breakfast, when no sign or word had come from Lizzie, I decided to stay in till I heard from her. I dawdled through the morning and when Emma was cleaning up went out on the landing and listened. The upper floors were wrapt in quiet. I stole up a flight and a half and looked at her door—tight shut and not a sound. I went down again worried, though it was possible she had gone out and I not heard her. After lunch I opened the register and listened—complete silence. During the rest of the afternoon I sat waiting for her footfall. Dusk came and no woman had mounted the stairs. At seven a tap came at my door and Count Delcati pushed it open.

The count brought letters from the Italian aristocracy to its New York imitation and goes to entertainments that the rest of us read of in the papers. He was arrayed for festival and looked like an up-to-date French poster, a high-shouldered black figure with slender arms slightly bowed out at the elbows. His collar was very stiff, his shirt bosom a clear expanse of thick smooth white. He wore his silk hat back from his forehead, and his youthful yet sophisticated face, with its intense black eyes and dash of dark mustache, might have been looking at me from the walls of the Salon Independent.

He removed his hat, and standing in the doorway, said:

“Have you seen her to-day?”

“No,” I answered. “Have you?”

He shook his head.

“I think she must be away. When I came home at six I went up there and knocked, but there was no answer.”

There was nothing in this to increase my uneasiness. She came and went at all hours, often taking her dinner at what she called “little joints” in the lower reaches of the city. Nevertheless my uneasiness did increase, gripped hold of me as I looked at the young man’s gravely attentive face.

“Have you seen her since the concert?” he asked.

“Yes, the day after, when you were all in here.”

“She hadn’t seen the notices?”

I shook my head.

He leaned against the door-post and gazed at his patent leather shoes. As if with reluctance he said slowly:

“I have.”

“What were they like?”

“Rotten.”

He pronounced the word with the “r” strangled yet protesting, as if he had rolled his tongue round it, torn it from its place and put it away somewhere in the recesses of his throat.

“Oh, poor girl!” I moaned.

“That’s why I went up there. She must have seen them and I wished to assure her they were lies.”

“Did they say anything very awful?”

He shrugged.

“They spoke of her beauty—one said she had a good mezzo voice. But they were not kind to her, to Mr. Berwick, very.”

I said nothing, sunk in gloom.

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.”

“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?”

I had prepared my lesson in the small hours and answered glibly:

“She’s not half so strong as you think and very sensitive, morbidly sensitive.”

“Um,” said Miss Bliss, “poor thing! I don’t see how if she was so sensitive, she could have stood that man Masters around so much.”

She went down to dress and presently the news percolated through the house. There was an opening and shutting of doors and whisperings on the top flight. Everybody stole up and offered help except the count, who rose late to the summons of an alarm clock. Mr. Hazard went across the street for the doctor, met Mrs. Bushey on her way to physical culture and sent her in.

I met her in the third-floor hall and we talked, sitting on the banister. The count’s alarm clock had evidently done its work, for he eyed us through the crack of his door.

“How dreadful—terribly unfortunate,” Mrs. Bushey muttered, then, looking about, caught the count’s eye at the crack: “Good morning, Count Delcati. You’re up early.”

The count responded, the gleaming eye large and unwinking as if made of glass.

Mrs. Bushey’s glance returned to me. The smile called forth by the greeting of the star lodger died away.

“If her concert was such a failure and she’s sick, how is she going to live?”

I hadn’t thought of that. It added a complication to the already complex situation.

“Oh, she must have something,” I said with a vaguely reassuringly air. “She hasn’t been making money but—”

“Do you know anything positive of her financial position?” interrupted Mrs. Bushey.

It was hard to be vague on any subject with Mrs. Bushey, on the subject of finances impossible. She listened to a few soothing sentences then said grimly:

“I see you don’t really know anything about it. Please try and find out. Of course I’m one of the most kind-hearted people in the world, but”—she held her physical culture manuals in the grip of one elbow and extended her hands—“one must live. I can’t be late with my rent whatever my lodgers can be.”

The count’s voice issued unexpectedly through the crack:

“I am late two times now and I still stay.”

Mrs. Bushey smiled at the eye.

“Of course, Count Delcati, but you’re different. I know all about you. But Miss Harris—a singer who can’t make good. They’re notoriously bad pay.” She turned sharply on me. “What seems to be the matter with her?”

“Collapse,” I said promptly. “Complete collapse and prostration.”

Mrs. Bushey hitched the books into her armpit and patted them in with her muff.

“Those are only words. I’m glad Mr. Hazard’s gone for the doctor.” She turned and moved toward the stair-head. “And if it’s anything contagious she must go at once. Don’t keep her here five minutes. The doctor’ll know where to send her.” She began the descent. “If I’d only myself to think of I’d let her stay if it was the bubonic plague. But I won’t expose the rest of you to any danger.” She descended the next flight and her voice grew fainter: “I’m only thinking of you, my lodgers are always my first consideration. If any of you got anything I’d never forgive myself.” She reached the last flight. “I wouldn’t expose one of you to contagion if I never made a dollar or rented a room. That’s the way I am. I know it’s foolish—you needn’t tell me so, but—” The street door shut on her.

The doctor came with speed and an air of purpose. At last he had somewhere to go when he ran down the stairs with his bag, and it was difficult for him to conceal his exhilaration. He was young, firm and businesslike, examined Lizzie, asked questions and said it was “shock”. He was very anxious to find out what had “precipitated the condition,” even read the notices, and then sat with his chin in his hand looking at the patient and frowning.

Out in the hall I enlarged on her high-strung organization and he listened, fixing me with a searching gaze that did not conceal the fact that he was puzzled. We whispered on the landing over nursing, food and the etceteras of illness, then branched into shocks and their causes till he suddenly remembered he had to be in a hurry, snatched up his bag and darted away.

That was yesterday. To-night I have brought up my writing things and while I watch am scratching this off at the desk where, not so long ago, I found her choosing her stage name. Poor Lizzie—is there a woman who would refuse her pity?

I can run over the names of all those I know and I don’t think there’s one, who, if she could look through the sin at the sinner, would entirely condemn. The worst of it is they all stop short at the sin. It hides the personality behind it. I know if I talked to Betty this way she’d say I was a silly sentimentalist with no knowledge of life, for even my generous Betty wouldn’t see over the sin. There’s something wrong with the way women appraise “the values” in these matters; actions don’t stand in the proper relations to character and intentions. We’re all either sheep or goats. Everything that makes our view-point, books, plays, precedent, public opinion, will have it that we’re sheep or goats, and though we can do a good many bad things and remain pure spotless sheep, there’s just one thing that if we do do, puts us forever in the corral with the goats.

But, oh—I groan as I write it—if it only hadn’t been Masters! That brute, that brigand! A hateful thing some one once told me keeps surging up in my memory—Rousseau said it I think—that one of the best tests of character was the type of person selected for love and friendship. I can’t get it out of my head. What fool ever told it to me? Oh—all of a sudden I remember—it was Roger—Roger! I feel quite frightened when I think of him. He would be so angry with me for being mixed up in such an affair, or—as he’s never angry with me—angry with fate for leading me into this galère. He is one of the people who adhere to the sheep and goat theory. To him women are black or white, and the white ones must have the same relation to the black that Voltaire had to Le bon Dieu—know them by sight but not speak.