The Empty Sack

by Basil King

"That's all very well for him," she said, falling back with a grimace on the language Gussie brought home with her from vaudeville shows, "but I ain't no blooming plant."

Hubert's love, she thought at other times, was like a rare and precious cordial, of which a few drops carefully doled out ran like fire through the veins. Bob's was a rushing torrent which, without saying with your leave or by your leave, carried you away. She preferred the cordial, of which you could take up the glass and put it down according as you wanted less or more; but, on the other hand, when there was a flood which, without asking your permission, poured all over you, what were you to do? She knew what she meant to do; but it was the difficulty of doing it and facing that terrific tide which made her stand aghast. If Bob would only let her alone....

But, then, Bob couldn't let her alone. He himself would have argued that you might as well ask a man to let a hand or a foot alone while it is aching. At the minute when Jennie was thinking these thoughts as she flitted about the house, he was seated at an open hotel window on the Santa Thereza hill above Rio de Janeiro, looking down on an iridescent city creeping round the foam-fringed edges of a turquoise sea, and saying to himself: "I'm watching over you, Jennie. I'm here, but my love is there and fills all the space between us. I came away and left you exposed to all sorts of trouble. I shouldn't have done that; I'm sorry now I did. I thought that if we were married the rest would take care of itself; but I see now it couldn't. You're having a harder time than I ever supposed you'd have, and you're having it all alone; but my love is with you, Jennie, and the worst can't happen while it protects you. Dangers will threaten you, but you'll go to meet them with my love closing you in, and something will ward them off."

"I wish he'd stop thinking about me like that."

Jennie's reference, while she stood at the mirror putting the last touches to her costume, was to this same thought as expressed in the letters she received from South America. Its appeal to her imagination was such as to create an atmosphere wrapping her about as a halo wraps a saint. She couldn't get away from it. In going to meet Hubert, as she would do in a few minutes, it would go with her, an embarrassing witness of the sin against itself.

For the minute, the action of her mind was twofold. She was making this protest as to Bob and was also giving minute attention to her dress. Not only was it her first appearance in public since her father's funeral but it was a moment at which the victim must be neatly decked for the altar. Having no money to spend on "mourning," she had put deft touches of black on a last year's white summer suit, to which a black hat thrown together by Gussie, with the black shoes and stockings already in her possession, added their mute witness that she was grieving for a relative. Having, moreover, the native chic which counts for most in the art of dressing, she was one more instance of the girl of the humbler walks in life who, by some secret of her own, confounds the product of the Rue de la Paix.

She was to leave for the studio as soon as her mother got up from her early-afternoon rest. The early-afternoon rest had become a necessity for Lizzie ever since the day when Josiah had been laid away.

"You'll call me if Teddy rings," she had stipulated, before lying down, and Jennie had promised faithfully.

As to Teddy's message, nominally sent from Paterson, Lizzie had betrayed a skepticism which the three girls found disconcerting. She said nothing, but it was precisely the saying nothing that puzzled them. When they themselves grew expansive over the things they would buy with the money Teddy was going to make, the mother's faint smile was alarming. It was alarming chiefly because it combined with other things to produce that effect of strangeness they had all noticed in her since their father died. Though they couldn't define it for themselves, it was as if she had renounced any further effort to make life fulfill itself. She was like a man on a sinking ship, who, after casting about as to how he may save himself, knows there is no choice left but to go down, and so becomes resigned. Having thrown up her hands, Lizzie was waiting for the waters to close over her. Jennie was thus uneasy about her mother, as she was uneasy about Bob, uneasy about Hubert, and, most of all, uneasy about herself.

By the time she was ready she heard Lizzie stirring in her bedroom. It was the signal agreed upon. She was free to go, which meant that she was free to turn her back on all her more or less sheltered past and strike out toward a terrifying future. She felt as she had always supposed she would feel on leaving her home on her wedding day; and she would do as she had decided she would do in that event. She would go without making a fuss, without anything to record that the going was different from other goings, or that the return would be different from other returns. She would make her departure casual, without consciousness, without admitted intentions. She merely called to her mother, therefore, through the closed door, that she was on her way, and her mother had called out in response, "Very well." This leave-taking making things easier—all Jennie had to do was to gulp back a sob.