Her stay with us had been only the bivouac of a night, and we the passers-by she had encountered in the moment of halt. With the goal in sight we lost what small significance we had and assumed the aspect of strangers, by whose fire she had rested, in whose tent she had slept. Already, before she had gone, we had faded into the limbo of the useless and outworn. Henceforward, from our humble corner, we would watch her mounting on others as she had mounted on us—climbing higher and higher with never a backward glance or a wave of her hand to the little group who strained their eyes for a sign of remembrance.
Some day the others would find her out and be angry, cite to their friends proofs of her ingratitude, grow bitter at the memory of their unappreciated efforts, add her to the list of forgetful great ones who took all and rendered nothing back. From a deeper knowledge of her I would never know their disillusion. The thought that she felt no love for any of us had for me no sting. I even went farther, agreed that it was not her place to feel it. Arrived at last at the heart of her mystery, I could keep my memory of her fair and untarnished, untouched by efforts to fit her into a frame where she didn’t belong.
She was not, as they would think, a heartless and cruel fellow of ours, but the creature of another species, thinking in a different language, seeing life from a different angle. What we were trained to accept as right and just, she had no power to recognize. Custom and tradition had formed a groove in which we walked unquestionably onward. She wandered at will in a world expressly created for her, peopled by shades who had no meaning apart from their usefulness. Environment that had molded and put its stamp upon us made no impression upon her invulnerable self-concentration. We held a point of view in common, responded automatically to established ideas and inherited impulses. She saw no claims but her own and moved upon what she wanted with the directness of an animal. The bogies with which we were frightened into good behavior—public opinion, social position, loss of respect—she snapped her fingers at. Her only law was the law of her own being, her standard, a fierce and defiant determination to be true to herself. Restraints and reticences, subtleties of breeding, delicacies of conduct, imposed on us by the needs of communal life, were not for her, selected and set apart to be that lonely figure in the crowded companionable world—the people’s servant.
That was what I at last knew her to be—an instrument for the joy, the recreation, the enthrallment of that great, sluggish, full-fed Minotaur, the public. For this purpose nature had fashioned her, eliminating every characteristic that might render her unfit, pruning away virtues that would hamper, uprooting instincts that would interfere. As Wordsworth saw the All-Mother saying of a worthy specimen, “I will make a lady of my own,” so, seeing Lizzie, she had said, “I will make an artist of my own,” and had set about doing it with thoroughness.
From the beautiful outer case to “the hollows where a heart should be” she was formed to be the one thing—a cunningly framed and articulated mechanism for our entertainment. To us—whom she so lightly regarded—she was foreordained to carry a message of beauty, call us from our sordid cares, and base ambitions, catch us up from the grayness of the every day to the heights where once more we caught a glimpse of the vision and the dream. That we should work and sacrifice to help her to her place, she, unconscious but impelled by her destiny, felt, and made me feel. And having gathered up our tribute she had left us, not ungratefully, not having taken all and given nothing, but in her own time and in her own way to pay us back a hundredfold.
I thought it all out in the cab coming back from the steamer, and I was content to have it so.
I had gone down to see her off—she wanted me and no one else. We had passed up the dock amid throngs of passengers and presently there were stewards and cabin-boys running for her luggage, and officers discreetly staring. When we bought the ticket I had seen on the list the name of a countess, and I learned that she was a royal lady traveling incognita with a maid. Everybody thought Lizzie was the countess and I the maid. I looked the part, trotting at her heels, carrying a large bandbox covered with pink roses that had been overlooked in the final scramble. She had a triumphal progress, everything made easy, boys bearing the count’s flowers going before her up the gangway, and I following with the bandbox that nobody had offered to take. Before I left I saw the royal lady leaning on the railing, a pale person with the curling fringe and prominent eyes of the typical British princess. Nobody paid any attention to her, but when we went exploring about the decks, looks followed us and whispers buzzed.
As the big ship churned the water and ponderously moved off, I stood on the pier’s edge and waved to her. I was the tiny unit in the crowd—the nameless, humdrum, earth-bound crowd—for whom she was to weave the spell, and create the illusion. Through a glaze of tears I watched her, tall and splendid beside the dowdy princess—my beautiful Lizzie, a real princess, going imperially to claim her crown.
The windows are open and the spring night comes in, soft as a caress. In the basement of the apartment-house some one is playing Annie Laurie on the accordion, and in the back yards the servants are chatting in the kitchen doors. From Mr. Hazard’s room, below me, I can hear a low murmur of voices. The others are in there talking it over, all, I know, singing the praises of Lizzie, voicing hopes for her success as deep and sincere as prayers. I can fancy them, reclining on chairs and sofas, worn out by their labors and feeling blankly that something has gone out of their lives. A wild disturbing chord in the day’s melody is hushed, a red thread in the tapestry has been withdrawn.
I feel it, too.