The blue wall

by Richard Washburn Child

That question brought the laugh away from her, and for a minute she looked serious.

“Many a time, when I go to sleep of nights, I think of that myself,” she says, patting my hand.

“I actually know no more of the reason for those cures than you. Nevertheless I know surely enough it’s not me that cures them. No. I think it’s their own wills. A bit of claptrap fools them into exerting their own minds on their bodies, and by the same token the fear of weakness will make the weakness itself. So the world rolls around, my dear.”

It was those words of hers I have never forgotten. I’ve never forgotten, for one reason, because, when I began to play for patients and worked over them with the talk and flap-dash and monkey-shine, and got them to pay their money freely, then half the time they would improve and say they felt the flow of vitality, and some of them went away well and sound as biscuits, when, before they had come to us, they had had doctors and drugs and baths and changes of climate for nothing. I even knew some who would swear that Welstoke’s daughter had more power of healing than the great Welstoke herself, and among them, too, was rich and terribly cultured people, who would come with veils in closed carriages and would be afraid their husbands would find out, and then, if they didn’t pay the bill rendered, all that was necessary was to threaten suit to have them go into a panic and rush the money to us in a hurry. It is wonderful how easy a person drops into new views of what is fair and right when their surroundings change, and something else is wonderful—the fact that I, who sit here with the two of you now, a broken old housemaid, once had gowns as fashionable as any on the Continent, and that without a penny of inheritance or a single love affair.

“All is well with us,” Welstoke used to say, “and all will be well if you have the sense to keep out of a match with some lying-tongued creature who, on his side, will believe nothing you say, and will cast sheeps’ eyes at every plump blonde from Benares to Buffalo. Besides which, my dear, there never was one of them that didn’t snore. Remember that and you are safe.”

Indeed, I thought I was safe, as she called it. I believed that the affectionate natures of my father and of my mother had offset each other in me, for three years went by and never a thought did I give to love of man. And when it came, there was a flit of it like the shadow of a flying bird that comes and goes on the wall and is none the less hard to forget. It is so with all, I’m thinking, high and low, rich and poor; we see these shadows of what might be, and whist! they are gone again, as if to say we’d live again in another world and there is plenty of time in other lives than ours—time for the right head to lean on the shoulder that was meant for it and this hand to touch that!

Be that as it may, the thing happened the winter we were at Venice. Madame Welstoke was in her heyday then, with plenty of money to give dinners for the little crowd that was made up out of dark-brown society—the old men who’d tell of nearly reaching greatness and the like of that, with champagne running from the corners of their eyes and their voices cracking with all the bad-spent years. And there were fat, jeweled women, too, hanging on alimony or adventure, and middle-aged men from this country, who had left New York or Philadelphia for one reason or another of their own, and talked about rates of interest and whistled tunes that were popular in the United States in the seventies, and had a word or two for my shoulders.

“Be careful how you talk too much,” old Welstoke would say. “It’s a very fair presentment you make with a bit of rouge, and a hairdresser, and keeping your big hands under the table as much as possible. Whatever you do, listen, and be on your guard, if the conversation runs to letters or music. One way to be educated is to be silent!”

Perhaps she laid it on so heavy about my lack of “finish,” as she called it, that when my one moment came to speak and say in my plain way a word or two, it gagged me in my throat and would not slide out.

In those days a French Jew, named Vorpin, had a place just off the Grand Canal, called “Trois Folies,” and by waiting till mid-evening for dinner, we could find the café well-nigh empty. The truth was I went there often alone when a fit of depression was on me, and it was no wonder these fits came. A week of idleness, taken by a person who comes from my class, and should be working eight and ten hours a day, is a misfortune often longed for and seldom recognized when it has come.