XVII
As soon as Betty heard that the European offer was refused she turned her attention to the lessons. Bustling about, making appointments, talking over reluctant mothers, forcing people to study singing who never thought of doing so, she is an inspiring sight to everybody but the object of her campaign.
Lizzie makes me uneasy. She has shown no enthusiasm, taking it all for granted as though busy ladies could not better employ their time than by helping her to fortune. Betty thinks it timidity, that she is distrustful of herself. I know better. Her languor conceals a dreary disinclination. She has never said a word of thanks to Betty or Mrs. Ashworth. Once or twice I have suggested that they have taken a good deal of trouble and she might—I have always stopped there and she has never asked me to go on. What is the good of telling a person they ought to have feelings which nature seems to have left out of them?
Last night Roger came and after a few moments with me suggested that we go up-stairs and talk over the new work with her. I wouldn’t, said I was sleepy and wanted to go to bed. When he had gone I lowered the lights and sat waiting to hear his footsteps coming down. I waited an hour and a half, and then they came, descending the creaking staircase, passing my door, and going on to the street. That wasn’t a good night for sleeping. In the small hours I got up and tried to read. The book was painfully appropriate, The Love Letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. I read them till I heard the milkman making his rounds.
There is something horribly humiliating about women’s love-letters. When the passion is unrequited, or half requited as it was with De Lespinasse, they are so abject. She made a brave stand, poor soul, tried to find Guibert a wife and pretend she didn’t mind. But when she began to sicken to her death, all her bravery vanished. Those last letters are like a shrill frenzied wail. And she was a very first-class woman in love with a very second-class man. I suppose it’s a sort of sex tradition that we should adore and adhere in this ignominious way. We’ve had it hammered into us that to love and cling was our mission till it’s grown to have a fictitious value, and we feel if we don’t love and cling something is wrong with us. And what’s accomplished by it—who is benefited by our useless suffering?
The other evening down-town in the dusk I passed a girl waiting on the corner by a show-window. The light fell full on her face and I knew by her expression why she was there—a rendezvous with her young man who was late. She was angry, close-lipped and sullen-eyed. I could read her thoughts—she was going to tell him her opinion of him, be haughty and frigid, give him a piece of her mind and leave him. Just then he came slouching up, a lowering surly cub, and when she saw him she couldn’t hide her joy. Her anger vanished at his first word. She’d have believed anything he told her knowing in her heart it was a lie. She hardly wanted his excuses, so glad he’d come, so pitifully slavishly glad.
It’s shameful, crushing, revolting. Here am I, the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time, feeling just the same as that subjugated shop-girl. Roger up-stairs with Lizzie, and I can’t sleep, and can’t eat, and can’t stop caring, and worst of all, if he wanted to come back to me I’d open my arms to him. Talk of the forward march of women! When the cave man went forth to find a new wife, the old discarded one left in the corner by the fire felt just the same as I do in the opening of the twentieth century.
But now, as Pepys says, to bed. I’ll sleep if I have to take a thumping dose of trional which I was taught in my youth was even more wicked than powdering your nose.
This afternoon Lizzie went forth to give her first lesson and I stayed in to wait for her. I was anxious about it. If the survival of the fittest prevails among educators as it does in the animal kingdom I felt sure that Lizzie as a teacher would not survive. Her pupil is the spoiled child of fortune, sixteen, with a voice as small as her dot will be large. Betty had conjured me to make our protégée give up the black tea-tray hat and I had tried and failed. Before her haughty and uncomprehending surprise I had wilted. No one would have had the courage to tell her why she should look meek and unassuming. As it was she had dressed herself with unusual care, even to the long green earrings which I hadn’t seen for months. She was more like the duchess in an English comedy cast for Broadway, than a penniless music teacher being pushed up the ladder.
As I sat waiting Miss Bliss came in—wrapped in the Navajo blanket. She threw it back and stood for me to admire, very dainty in a new pink blouse with a Pierrot frill encircling her neck and a broad pink ribbon tied round her head. Boyishly slender, her arms extended to hold out the blanket, she had the fragile grace of a Tanagra figurine—a modern Tanagra with a powdered nose and a dash of carmine on the lips. When I told her she was pretty she blushed, dropped the blanket on the floor and herself on the blanket, and said a girl owed it to herself always to look her best.
“You might meet a man in the hall,” she murmured, mechanically reaching for the poker, “and what’s the sense of looking like a slob?”
When she poked the fire a belt held down the back of the blouse. The kimono jacket, the safety pin and the golden corset string were gone, if not forever, at least till their owner was safely landed in her own little flat with her own little husband.
Our gossiping stopped when we heard Lizzie’s step on the stairs. She entered without knocking, sweeping in and slamming the door. A brusk nod was all Miss Bliss got and my greeting was a curt “Hello, Evie.” She threw herself into a rocker, and extending her feet beyond the hem of her skirt, sunk down in the chair and looked at her boots. In her hand she held a bunch of unopened letters.
I was keyed up for something unusual but I hadn’t seen her in this state since her illness. We waited for her to speak, then as she showed no inclination to do so I remarked, with labored lightness:
“Well, Lizzie, how was it?”
“Beastly,” she answered, without looking up.
“Was your pupil a nice girl?”
“No.”
“Was she disagreeable?”
“I don’t know, but I detested her. A little, simpering, affected idiot. Sing—that fool!”
She lifted her head and looked round the room with a wild and roving eye. Her glance, raised high, avoided us as if the sight of her fellow humans was disagreeable. Miss Bliss cleared her throat and stirred cautiously on the blanket. She knew where Lizzie had been and was exceedingly anxious to hear her adventures in the halls of wealth, but didn’t dare to ask.
“It really isn’t of any consequence what she’s like,” I soothed. “Just take her as a matter of business.”
“Matter of business!” She struck her hands on the arms of the chair with a slapping sound and jumped up. “What have I to do with business?” Then she walked to the window and stood drumming with her fingers on the pane.
The quick nervous tattoo fell ominously on my uneasiness. Miss Bliss sent a furtive masonic look at me, and glanced away. With an elaborate air of nonchalance she patted her frill and picked at her skirt, and finally, unable to stand the combined pressure of our silence and her own curiosity, said boldly:
“What kind of a house was it?”
Lizzie answered slowly, pronouncing each word with meticulous precision:
“It was a large, shiny, expensive house. It was a hideous house. Nobody who was anything, or ever expected to be anybody, ought to go into such a house.”
“You don’t say!” exclaimed Miss Bliss, artlessly amazed. “I read about it in the papers and they said it cost millions and had things in it out of kings’ palaces.”
To this there was no response, and Dolly Bliss and I began to talk together. We chose a safe topic—a bargain sale of stockings at Macy’s. We tried to invest it with a careless sprightliness, which was difficult, not so much because of the subject but by reason of the tattoo on the pane. It was like an accompaniment out of tune. We couldn’t seem to give our minds to the stockings while it went on, even when we raised our voices and tried to drown it. Suddenly it stopped and we stopped, too, dropping the stockings and eying each other with fixed stares. Each of us was determined not to look at Lizzie and it took all our will to refrain.
She began moving about behind us, and we tried a new subject—the count’s approaching departure. We said nice things about him, echoed each other. I remarked that he was a charming person, and Miss Bliss remarked that he was a very charming person. We had to make a great effort. It was almost impossible to keep it up with that woman padding about behind your chair like an ill-tempered tiger. When a sudden unexpected sound of tearing paper came from her, I jumped as if the tiger had made a spring at me. She was opening one of her letters. It loosened the tension. We suppressed gasps and took up the count again, more as if he was a human being and less as if he was the center piece at a dull dinner-party. Lizzie’s voice, loud and startled, stopped us.
“What do you think of this—Mrs. Stregazzi’s married Berwick!”
The count fled from our minds like an offended god. We ejaculated, “Berwick!—Mrs. Stregazzi!” and sat stunned.
Lizzie consulted the letter:
“Last week in Portland, Maine. She says, ‘We’re as happy as clams and everybody predicts a great future for Dan.’”
“Well!” I breathed and looked at the other two. Lizzie’s temper was gone, a shared sensation made her one with us.
“Did you ever!” she murmured as any ordinary young woman might have done.
“Why she’s fifteen years older than he is.”
“More like twenty. She’s not so young as she looks.”
“Good gracious, how extraordinary!” I fell back in my chair aghast before this evidence of a woman’s daring. “And those two children, and the grandmother!” Mrs. Stregazzi’s dauntless courage began to pale when I compared it to the bridegroom’s.
“Maybe he wanted a home,” Miss Bliss hazarded.
“A man may want a home but he doesn’t want a ready-made family in it.”
It was my place in the trio to voice the sentiments of that staid and unadventurous middle class, which is described as “the backbone of the country.”
“Singers don’t want homes,” said Lizzie, “they’re in the way.”
“It must have been love,” I said in an awed voice. “Nothing else could explain it.”
For a moment we were silent, each deflecting her glance from the other to an adjacent object. I don’t know why it should have been, but Mrs. Stregazzi’s reckless act seemed to have depressed us. Any one coming into the room would have said we had had bad news.
Miss Bliss broke the spell, emerging from depths of thought in which she had been evolving a working hypothesis.
“I don’t see why it is so strange,” she said ponderingly.
“You don’t?”—the backbone of a country in which all men are free and equal does not bend readily—“with that disparity and he just beginning his career?”
“No, I don’t.” She was sitting cross-legged, holding an ankle in each hand and rocking gently. “I’ll tell you just what I think—I believe they were lonely. Lots of people get married because they’re lonely.”
“She had a mother and two children.”
“She took care of them, they weren’t companions. Berwick’s a companion, likes what she does and works at the same thing. It’s great to have a person like that around.” She nodded, with shrewd eyes shifting from one face to the other. “I’ve seen a lot and I’ve noticed. All sorts of people get married, and it comes out right. It’s not just the young ones and suitable ones that pull it off. It’ll be fine for Mrs. Stregazzi to have him to go round with, and it’ll be fine for him to have her to think about and talk things over with.”
“They can help each other along in their work,” I admitted.
“They can be fond of each other,” said Miss Bliss.
She ceased rocking and looked out of the window, the shrewd eyes growing dreamy. Our appearance of depression returned, a shade darker than before. Mrs. Stregazzi and Berwick might have shown a dashing disregard for public opinion, but there was no reason for us to look as if we had heard of their mutual destruction in a railway accident. If we had been waiting for their mutilated remains we couldn’t have appeared more melancholy. Miss Bliss heaved a sigh and observed:
“It’s a great thing to have some one fond of you.”
Lizzie and I didn’t answer, but we gave ear as if the Delphic oracle had spoken and we were trying to extract balm from its words.
“And it’s a great thing to be fond of some one yourself.”
Our silence gave assent, but the oracle’s wisdom did not seem to cheer us. We sat sunk in our chairs, eying her morosely. Her imagination roused, she ranged over the advantages of the married state:
“Just think how lovely it would be to know there was some one who cared whether you were sick or well, or happy or blue. Wouldn’t it be great to have some one come home in the evening who was going to be awfully glad to see you and who you were just crazy to have come? And when work was slack and you were losing your sleep about money, wouldn’t it be grand to know there was a feller who could chip in and pay the bills? Oh, gee—” she dropped her eyelids with the ecstatic expression of one who glimpses ineffable radiances. “Well, I guess yes.”
An answering “yes” came faintly from me. The ecstatic expression flashed away, and she turned, all brusk negation:
“Oh, Mrs. Drake, you don’t know what it is. You’re well fixed with money of your own. But girls like us”—she pointed to Lizzie, then brought her finger back to her own knee upon which she tapped in bitter emphasis—“we’ve got only ourselves. We’ve got to make good or go under. And it’s fight, fight, fight. I’ve had to do something I hated since I was sixteen and now she”—with a nod at Lizzie, “has got to do something she hates.”
“How lovely it would be to know there was some one who cared!”
Lizzie, sunk in the chair, eyed her like a brooding sphinx. She met the gaze with the boldness of the meek roused to passion:
“You do hate it, Miss Harris. You’ve done as good as say so. And it’s new now, you’re only beginning. Wait till you come home every evening, disgusted with it all and everything and everybody; when it’s bad weather and you feel sick and nobody cares. Wait till you have to stand anything they hand out to you, and not say a word back or you’ll lose your job. I know. I’ve tried it and it’s tough. It’s too much. Any man that ’ud come along and offer to take you out of it would look all right to you.” Her boldness began to weaken before that formidable gaze. She became hurriedly apologetic. “I’m not saying there is any man. I’m only supposing. And I don’t mean now. I mean after you’ve been up against it for years and years and the grind’s crushed the heart out of you.”
There was no answer, and the oracle, now openly scared at her temerity, scrambled to her feet. In the momentary silence I heard the distant bang of the street door. She heard it too and forgot her fear, wheeling to the mirror for a quick touching up of her hair ribbon and frill. When she turned back her color had risen to match her reddened lips and her manner showed a flurried haste.
“I got to go—several things to attend to—my supper and some sewing to finish.” She didn’t bother to be careful of excuses. The man who hoped to acquire the legal right to pay her bills was waiting below. She went, trailing the Navajo blanket from a hanging hand.
Lizzie drew a deep breath and said:
“She’s right.”
“About what?”
“About me.”
“You mean the teaching?”
“I do. It’s a dog’s work.”
She rose and faced me, sullen as a thunder-cloud.
“But you’ve hardly tried it.”
“I’ve tried it enough. There are plenty of women who can scratch along that way and be thankful to Providence and pleasant to the pupils. Let them do it. It’s their work, not mine.”
She turned from me and went to the window, but not this time to drum on the pane. Leaning against the frame she looked out on the tin roof. The angry contempt of her face suggested that the millionaires Betty was collecting were gathered there, unable to escape, and forced to hear how low they stood in the opinion of their hireling.
“I am an artist. Those people,” she made a grandiose gesture to the tin roof, “don’t know what an artist is. They think they’re condescending, doing a kindness. I’m the one that’s condescending—I do them not a kindness but an honor, when I enter their houses and listen to the squawking of their barbarous children.”
“You can’t expect them to think that.”
“I don’t, they haven’t got sense enough. That woman, the mother, came in while I was there. I’ve no doubt she thought she was being very agreeable. She asked me questions about my method.” She gave me a sidelong cast of her eye full of derision. “I sat and listened, and when she was done I said I didn’t discuss my method with people who knew nothing.”
“Oh, Lizzie,” I groaned. “You didn’t say that?”
“Certainly I did. Only that. I was polite and patient. If I hadn’t felt so disgusted and out of spirits I’d have spoken to her freely and fully. But it wasn’t worth while.”
“But they won’t stand that sort of thing. They won’t have you again.”
“I don’t intend to go again. I couldn’t endure it for five minutes. I’d rather sweep a crossing on Lexington Avenue.”
“There aren’t any crossings on Lexington Avenue, and if there were, you don’t know how to sweep. What will you say to Mrs. Ferguson and Mrs. Ashworth?”
She shrugged with an almost insolent indifference.
“I’ll say I don’t like it. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“Lizzie, I beg of you to be reasonable. They won’t go on helping you if you disappoint them like this.”
“Then they can stop helping me—I’m not so immensely charmed and interested in them. They try and force me into things I don’t want to do. They take it out of my hands and then come smiling at me and say it’s all arranged. So it is—to their liking but not to mine.”
“It’s your profession, the only thing you know. What else could they do?”
“Let me alone.”
It was like beating yourself on a brick wall. I felt frantic.
“But what’s going to become of you? You’ve got no means of livelihood.”
She shrugged again.
“I don’t know. But one thing I do know and that is that I won’t do slave’s work for you, or Mrs. Ferguson, or any one else in the world.”
I didn’t know what to say. I might go on talking all night and not make a dent on her. Demosthenes would have turned away baffled before her impossible unreasonableness.
It was getting dark and I could see her as a tall black silhouette against the blue dusk of the window. There was only one suggestion left.
“Are you going to take Dolly Bliss’s advice and marry?” My voice sounded unnatural, like somebody else’s.
“Marry?” she echoed absently. “I suppose I could do that.”
“Is it that you can’t make up your mind, Lizzie?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured again, this time as if she wasn’t thinking of what she said.
I rose with shaking knees. It was the critical moment of her fate and mine.
“Don’t you want to?” I almost whispered, drawing near her.
Her answer made me stop short. It came with a tremor of fierce inner feeling, revolt, rage and desperation, seething into expression:
“Oh God, how I hate it all!”
“Hate what—marriage?”
“No, everything that’s around me. Those women, this damnable work—no money—no hope! I’m crazy with the misery of it. It’s like being bound down and smothered. I want to get out. I want to be free. I want to do what I like and be myself. You’re trying to make me into some one else. You’re crushing me and killing me. I’d rather be dead in my grave than go on this way.”
She burst into frantic tears, savage, racking, snatching the curtain about her and sobbing and strangling behind it. The room was nearly dark and I could see the long piece of drapery swaying as she clutched it to her. I tried to pluck it away, and through its folds, felt her body shaken and bent like a tree in a tempest. I had never heard such weeping, moans and wails, with words coming in inarticulate bursts. I was frightened, caught her hand and drew her out of the curtain which hung askew from torn fastenings. She pushed me away and threw herself on the sofa, where, under the vast circumference of her hat, she lay prone, abandoned to the storm.
I stood helplessly regarding her, then as broken sentences came from under her hat, took out the pins and held it before me like a shield, while she gasped in choked reiteration that we were killing her, that she hated us all, that she’d rather die than give another lesson. If her paroxysm hadn’t been so devastating I would have lost my temper at the outrageous injustice of such sentences as I could catch. I tried to say something of this in a tempered form, but she shut me off with an extended hand, beating it at me, calling out strangled execrations at Betty and Mrs. Ashworth and the mother of her pupil. If any one who did not know the situation had heard her, they would have thought those worthy and disinterested women had been plotting her ruin.
There was nothing for me to do but wait till her passion spent itself, which it began to do in sighs and quivering breaths that shook her from head to foot. When I saw it was moderating I told her I would get her some wine and went to the kitchenette, leaving her with drenched face and tangled hair, a piteous spectacle. In a few moments I was back with the wine-glass. The room was empty—she had gone leaving the black hat.
I picked it up and sat down on the sofa. We certainly had got to the climax.
I didn’t count—with my hundred and sixty-five dollars a month. I could retire into any corner, and live forgotten and love forlorn like Mariana. But Lizzie—? She couldn’t sing, she wouldn’t teach, nobody could help her. Marriage was the only way out. As I sat on the sofa, absently staring at the hat, I had a memory of a corral I had seen at a railway station in a trip I once took to the West. It was a pen for the cattle that came off the range and had to be driven into the cars. The entrance was wide, but the fenced enclosure narrowed and narrowed until there was only one way of exit left, up a gangway to the car. The comparison wasn’t elegant but it struck me as fitting—Lizzie was on the gangway with the entrance to the car the only way to go.
“I wish to heaven she’d hurry and get into it,” I groaned.