“How was that?”
Then our six faces are upturned and we express our approbation, according to our six different natures.
Our mutual hopes for her success have drawn us together and we have suddenly become very friendly. Mr. Hazard drops in upon me in a paint-stiffened linen blouse and Mr. Weatherby has confided to me the money to pay for his laundry. Mr. Hamilton has smoked a large black cigar in my dining-room, and Miss Bliss has come shivering with hunched shoulders and clasped red arms to “borrow a warm” (her own expression) at my fire.
In my excursions to the top floor I have met Mrs. Stregazzi and Miss Gorringe. Mrs. Stregazzi is a large blond lady with an ample figure and a confidential habit. On our first meeting she called me “dearie” and told me all about her divorce from Mr. Stregazzi, who, I gathered, was her inferior, both in station and the domestic virtues. In his profession—the stage—he was something called “a headliner”, and appeared to be involved mysteriously with trained animals. Since his divorce he has married another “headliner”. It’s like that story of the Frenchman in Philadelphia: “He is a Biddle, she was a Biddle, they are both Biddles.” I must ask Lizzie Harris what it is. Miss Gorringe is a thin sallow girl with an intelligent face, and Mr. Berwick a bulky silent New Englander, in the early twenties, who bears a strong resemblance to the bust of Beethoven over Schirmer’s music store.
They are strange people, artless as children, and completely absorbed in themselves and their work. They appear to have no points of contact with any other world, and the real part of their world is the professional part. They don’t say much about their homes or their lives away from it.
A few days ago they took tea with me, and as they talked I had a series of glimpses, like quickly shifted magic lantern slides, of their life on trains, in hotels, behind the scenes and on the stage. It seemed to me a sort of nightmare of hurry and scramble, snatched meals, lost trunks, cold dressing-rooms. Maybe the excitement makes up for the rest. It must be exciting—at least that’s the impression I got as I sat behind the teacups listening.
Lizzie Harris seemed to find it enthralling, everything they said interested her. Mrs. Stregazzi told some anecdotes that I didn’t like—I don’t want to be a prig, but they really were too sordid and scandalous—and our prima donna hung on the words of that fat made-up woman as if she spoke with the tongues of men and of angels. The more I know of her the less able I am to get at the core of her being, to place her definitely in my gallery of “women I have known.” I had finally decided that in spite of her tempests, her egotism and her weather-cock moods, there was something rare and noble in her, and here she was drinking in cheap gossip about a set of people she didn’t know, and who seem to be a mixture of artist, mountebank and badly brought-up child.
As I sat pouring the tea I felt again that curious aloofness in her. But before it was more a withdrawal of her spirit into herself, a retreating into an inner citadel and closing all the doors. This time it was the spirit reaching toward others and shutting me out, like a child who forgets its playmate when a circus passes by. She listened hungrily, now and then commenting or questioning with a longing, almost a homesick note. When they rose to go, with a scraping of chair-legs and a concerted clamor of farewells, she was reluctant to lose them, followed them to the hall and leaned over the banister watching their departing heads.
She made me feel an outsider, almost an intruder. I was willing to efface myself for the moment and stood by the table waiting for her to come back and reestablish me in her regard. She said nothing, however, but brushed by the door and went up-stairs. In a few minutes Musetta’s song filled the house. The next morning she came in while I was at breakfast and asked me to lend my green satin dress to Miss Gorringe, and when I agreed kissed me with glowing affection.
That all happened early in the week. Yesterday afternoon I was witness to a scene, the effect of which is with me still, at midnight, scratching this down in my rose-wreathed back room. It was a hateful scene, a horrible scene—but let me describe it: