I bade her good night and went down-stairs.
The lights were burning high. I put them out and laid down on the bed. My laughter and tears were over. Fatigue, anger and pain were sensations that existed somewhere outside me, in a world I had left. I seemed to have no body, to be a spirit loosened from fleshly trammels, floating blissfully in prismatic clouds.
I floated in them, motionless in ecstatic relief, savoring my joy, knowing the perfection of peace, till the windows paled with the dawn.
XX
I write to-night in a hushed house—a house that holds the emptiness that follows the withdrawal of a dynamic presence.
Lizzie is gone.
As her ship bears her away to future glory, we, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, sit here recuperating from the labors of getting her off. In its hour of departure the magnet gave forth the full measure of its power and we bent our backs and lent our hands in a last energy of service. No votaries bowed before the shrine of a deity ever celebrated their worship with more selfless acts of devotion than Mrs. Bushey’s lodgers in speeding Lizzie on her way.
What did Mr. Hazard’s unfinished order matter when Lizzie, having forgotten to order the expressman, one had to be sought up and down the reaches of Lexington Avenue? Of what consequence to Miss Bliss were broken sittings, on the proceeds of which she could have lived for a week, when Lizzie’s traveling dress was found to be in rags and had to be mended by some one who knew how? When the count rendered his tribute in fruit and flowers, did he stop to consider that the money was part of the fund reserved for his passage home, and now he would have to travel second cabin? No one thought of anything but the departing goddess. They were proud and glad to deny themselves that she might go, grandly serene, amid clouds of ascending incense.
As for me, after that night of respite, I became a body again, a body whose mission was the preparing of another for the great adventure. She drew me after her as the fisherman draws the glittering bit of tin that revolves from the end of his line. The simile is not entirely satisfactory because I did not glitter, but I revolved, round and round, as the fisherman’s hand pulled or eased on the line. I sewed, I packed, I unpacked, searching for forgotten necessities. I was down-town, executing overlooked errands, I was up-town, cooking hurried meals in the kitchenette. My voice in the morning called her to breakfast, my good night was the last sound on the stairs as I left her room, grown bare and bleak, losing its character, as one by one the signs of her occupancy vanished. I had no time to feel, to be glad or sorry. Even the passion to have her go was overridden by the ruling instinct that while she was there I must serve. And though the poet tells us there are those who can do this while standing and waiting, I evidently was not one of them.
As we demonstrated her power by the zeal of our devotion, her arrogant exactions increased in a corresponding ratio. She was never more aloof, more regally indifferent, more imperiously demanding. The call of her destiny had come to her and she heard nothing else.