“I knew you’d appreciate it. You don’t often find a real Samarcand in a furnished apartment.”
After she had gone I sat looking dejectedly at it. Of course I would have to keep it now. I might buy some small rugs and partly cover it up, but I suppose, when she saw them, she would be mortally hurt. And I can’t do that. I’d rather have those awful magnified insects staring up at me for the rest of my life than wound her pride so.
As to its being a Samarcand—I took up one corner and lo! attached to it by a string was a price-tag bearing the legend, Scotch wool rug, $12.75.
It was somewhat of a shock. Suppose I had found it while she was there! The thought of such a contretemps made me cold. To avoid all possibilities of it ever happening I stealthily detached the tag and tore it into tiny pieces. As I dropped them in the waste-basket I had a fancy that had I made the discovery while she was present, I would have been the more embarrassed of the two.
All afternoon I have been putting things in order, trying them and standing back to get the effect. It’s a long time since I’ve had belongings of my own to play with. I hung my mother’s two Kriegolf’s (Kriegolf was a Canadian artist who painted pictures of habitan life) in four different places. They finally came to anchor on the parlor wall on either side of a brass-framed mirror with candle branches that belongs to Mrs. Bushey. Opposite, flanking the fireplace, are Kitty O’Brien and The Wax Head of Lille. I love her best of all, the dreaming maiden. I like to try and guess what she’s thinking of. Is it just the purposeless reverie of youth, or is she musing on the coming lover? It can’t be that, because, while he’s still a dream lover, a girl is happy, and she looks so sad.
I was trying to pierce the secret of that mysterious face when the telephone rang. It was Roger Clements, a kind voice humming along the line—“Well, how’s everything?” Roger wanted to come up and see me and the kitchenette, and I told him Madame would receive to-morrow evening.
He would be my first visitor and I was fluttered. I spent at least an hour trying to decide whether I’d better bring the Morris chair from the back room for him. When the dread of starvation is lifted from you by one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month and life offers nothing, you find your mental forces expending themselves on questions like that. I once knew a man who told me he sat on the edge of his bed every morning struggling to decide whether he’d put on a turned-down or a stand-up collar. He said it was nerves. In my case it’s just plain lack of interests.
It’s natural for me to try and make Roger comfortable. He’s one of the best friends I have in the world. I’m not using the word to cover sentiment, I do really mean a friend. He knew me before I was married, was one of the reliable older men in those glowing days when I was Evelyn Carr, before I met Harmon Drake. He has been kind to me in ways I never can forget. In those dark last years of my married life (there were only five of them altogether) when my little world was urging divorce and I stood distracted amid falling ruins, he never said one word to me about my husband, never forced on me consolation or advice. I don’t forget that, or the letter he wrote me when Harmon died—the one honest letter I got.
Everybody exclaimed when I said I was going alone to Europe. Roger was the only one who understood and told me to go. I’ll carry to my grave the memory of his face as he stood on the dock waving me good-by. He was smiling, but under the smile I could see the sympathy he wanted me to know and didn’t dare to put in words. That’s one of the ties between us—we’re the silent kind who keep our feelings hidden away in a Bluebeard’s chamber of which we keep the key.
I used to hear from him off and on in Europe, and I followed him in the American papers. I remember one sun-soaked morning in Venice, when I picked up an English review in the pension and read a glowing criticism of his book of essays, Readjustments. How proud I was of him! He’s become quite famous in these last few years, not vulgarly famous but known among scholars as a scholar and recognized as one of the few stylists we have over here. I can’t imagine him on the news-stalls, or bound in paper for the masses. I think he secretly detests the masses though he won’t admit it. The mob, with its easily swayed passions, is the sort of thing that it’s in his blood to hate. If he had to sue for its support like Coriolanus he would act exactly as Coriolanus did. Fortunately he doesn’t need it. The Clements have had money for generations, not according to Pittsburgh standards, but the way the Clements reckon money. He has an apartment on Gramercy Park, lined with books to the ceilings, with a pair of old servants to fuss over him and keep the newspaper people away.