The Empty Sack

by Basil King

It was a shock to learn that the possessor of so much beauty, the bearer of so melodious a title, had begun life as Emma Lyon, a servant girl, but, after all, she reflected, the circumstance only created analogies with herself. There were more analogies still. Emma Lyon had been an artist's model. In an artist's studio she had made the acquaintance of men of lofty station, just as she herself had met Bob. She had loved and been loved. Romney was perhaps her Hubert Wray. Her career had been exciting and dramatic—the friend of a queen, the more-than-wife of one of the great men of the age. The tragic, miserable death didn't frighten Jennie, since misery and tragedy always stalked on the edge of her experience. She fell asleep amid vast, vague concepts of queens and heroes beset with loves and problems not unlike Jennie Follett's.

All through the next day she stilled the working of thought by application to The Egoist. She took to it as to a drug. In the intervals of her household duties, or whenever her mind became active over her affairs, she ran to her room to begin again, "Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent clashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing." She got little farther, since, for her purpose, this was far enough. She was drugged already, as by dentist's gas. The more she read the more she felt herself wandering sleepily through realms of dream, where words, as she understood them, had ceased to have significance.

So, by sheer force of will, she brought herself to that moment in the afternoon when she stood at the studio door. She hadn't thought; she hadn't, in her own phrase, imagined. She had allowed herself no instant in which to count the cost or to shrink from paying it. Hubert, love, and the family deliverance from poverty would be hers before nightfall, and she meant not to look beyond. She opened the door softly.

Before showing herself, she stopped and listened. There was not a sound. It was often so if Hubert was painting, and the silence only assured her that if he was there, as he probably was, he was waiting for her alone. He was waiting for her alone with that look in his eyes, that maddened animal look which she had seen yesterday, so bestial and yet so compelling! Still more softly she moved forward among the studio odds and ends.

Then she saw—and stopped.

In the Byzantine chair, a nude woman, seated in the manner of the Egyptian cat-goddess, was holding up a skull. Though the woman looked the other way, Jennie could see her as a lovely creature, straight, strong, triumphant, and unashamed. Hubert was painting, busily, eagerly. He raised his eyes, saw Jennie as she cowered, took no notice of her at all, and went on with his work. It passed all that she had ever imagined of cruelty that, as she turned to make her way out again, he should glance up once more—and let her go.

Hubert—and the woman dressed like that! The woman dressed like that—in this intimacy with Hubert! She herself shut out—cast out—sent to the devil! Some one else in her place, when she might so easily have kept it!

Jennie's suffering was in the dry and stony stage at which it hardly seemed suffering at all. Yes, it did; she knew it was suffering—only, she couldn't feel. She could think lucidly and yet put the whole situation away from her for the reason that it would keep. Anguish would keep; tears would keep. She could postpone everything, since she had all the rest of her life to give to its contemplation. Just for the present, the memory of the woman in the chair with Hubert looking at her was so scorching to the mind that she could do nothing but snatch her faculties away from it.

Coming to Fifth Avenue and seeing an electric bus stop near the curb, she climbed into it. It was the old story of not knowing where to go or what to do once her simple round of habits had been upset. Snuggled close to a window, she could at least be jolted along without effort of her own while she still fought off the consciousness of the frightful thing that had happened. It was not merely Hubert and the woman; it was everything. So much was included that she couldn't bear to think of this ruin to her beautiful house of cards.

Such wealth and beauty in the shop windows! Such streams of people in their new spring clothes! She had heard it said that every heart had its bitterness, but she didn't think that that could be possible. If everyone had a heartache like hers, or even the memory of such a heartache, it would make too monstrous a world, too deplorable a human race. After all, there must be some sense in the presence of mankind on earth, and if all were kicked about and bruised, there would be none. She preferred to think that the people on the pavements and in the limousines were as happy as they looked, and that she alone was selected for bewilderment and pain.