XVIII
I haven’t seen her for two days. Yesterday morning I went up-stairs to leave the hat, found her door open and her rooms empty. Emma says she has been out most of the time. I waited in all afternoon, expecting to hear Betty on the telephone in a state of wrath about the pupil. Also I had my ear trained for the postman’s light ring. At any moment I might get a letter now from Roger, announcing his engagement. Why should not Lizzie’s absences abroad be spent in walks with him?
As usual the anticipated didn’t happen. Betty did telephone but in amiable ignorance of her protégée’s revolt. She had run to earth a second pupil, who would be ready the following morning at eleven. Would I please tell Lizzie and did I know how the first lesson had gone? I prevaricated—I can do that at the telephone when Betty’s stern gaze is not there to disconcert me. I was really afraid to tell her, and besides, I, too, was getting rebellious. Let Lizzie manage her own affairs and fight her own fights. I said cheerfully she would tell Betty about it, and hung up the receiver wondering what would happen. Then I wrote a note to Lizzie about the new pupil, went up-stairs, knocked, and getting no response, pushed it under the door.
For the rest of the day I sat waiting like a prisoner in the death cell.
This morning, when I leaned out of the back window and looked down on the damp soil and bare shrubs of the yard, I felt the first soft air of spring. The sunlight slanted on the brick walls, the wet spots on the walk around the sun-dial shrunk as I watched them. On the top of a fence a scarred and seasoned old cat, at which Mr. Hamilton was wont to throw beer bottles, stretched lazily, blinking at a warm inviting world. I leaned farther out—tiny blunt points of green were pushing through the mold along the walk. Mrs. Phillips, sure in her ownership of the yard, had planted crocuses. Winter wasn’t lingering in the lap of spring—he had jumped off it at a bound.
I turned from the window and went into the front room, wondering vaguely why winter should always be a male and spring a female. The tin roof was dry, the hot bright sun had licked up the sparrow’s bath. Across the street a line of women from the tenements were advancing on the park, pushing baby carriages—buxom broad-hipped mothers with no hats and wonderful coiffures of false hair. It was a glorious morning, the air like a thin clear wine. I put on my things and went out.
The street showed sunny and clear, fair bright avenues inviting the wayfarer to wanderings. Children sped by in groups and scattering throngs. Smart slim ladies strolled with dogs straining at leashes. Friends met and stood in talkative knots, motors flashed by attended by the fluttering of loosened veils. On the fringe of benches along the park wall the idle sunned themselves, lax and lazy. Down-town, where the women shop, men would be selling arbutus at the street corners. Soon naughty boys with freckled noses would trail in hopeful groups along the curb, holding up stolen lilacs to ladies in upper windows—yes, spring had come.
I bought a bunch of daffodils at the florist’s and went into the park. The first hint of green was faint on the lawns, and points of emerald were breaking out along the willow boughs. Through the crystal air the sounds of children at play came musically—little yaps and squeals and sudden sweet runs of laughter. The glass walls of the casino were a-dazzle, and revolving wheels caught the sun and broke it on their flying spokes.
I was near the lake when I saw Lizzie. She was walking up a side path that crossed mine, her head down, her step quick and decided. She didn’t see me and I stood and waited. Then her eye, deep and absorbed, shifted, caught me, and she came to an abrupt halt. For the first startled moment there was an indecision about her poised body and annoyed face that suggested flight. If I did not share her dismay, I did her surprise. This was the hour set for the second lesson. Of course she might have told Betty that she would give no more, also she might have been hastening to the tryst with the new pupil. You never could tell. In answer to my smiling hail she approached, not smiling but looking darkly intent and purposeful.
“Which way are you going?” she said, by way of greeting.
I have been called a tactful person, and acquaintance with Lizzie has developed what was an untrained instinct into a ripened art:
“Nowhere in particular. I’m just strolling about in the sun.”
Obviously relieved, she said:
“I’m going over there—” pointing to the apartment-houses across the park. “I have business on the west side.”
The new pupil lived on the east side. So she really had given it up.
“You’ve told Mrs. Ferguson that you won’t give that lesson—the one she telephoned about?”
A sudden blankness fell on her face.
“Didn’t you get the letter I put under your door?” I cried in alarm. I couldn’t bear just now, with everything failing me, to have Betty angry.
She nodded, looking down and scraping on the ground with her foot. Then slowly raised her eyes, and glimpsing at me under her lashes, broke into a broad smile.
“I forgot all about it.”
“Oh, Lizzie! How could you? If you’ve made up your mind to end it the least you could do was to let her know. That’s really too bad.”
“Yes, I suppose it is.” Her hasty contrition was far from convincing. “Perfectly awful. I ought to be punished in some painful way. Look here, Evie, dearest, I’m in a hurry. Why can’t you just pop into a taxi and go down and explain it to her?”
“I’ll tell you why I can’t, simply and clearly—because I won’t.”
“Goodness, how provoking of you.” She didn’t seem at all provoked. Her only concern was to get away from me and go to the mysterious business on the west side. She bent sidewise to catch her skirt and moved away. “Then I will, this evening, to-morrow morning—”
I caught her by the arm.
“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.”
“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.