Geraldine Bonner

“ In this close companionship I have found her generous, unselfish and honest to the core. Is our modesty an artificial attribute, grafted on us like a bud to render us more alluring? This girl, struggling against ferocious poverty, is as instinctively, as rigorously virtuous as I am, as Betty, as Mrs. Ashworth, yet she does a thing for her livelihood, the thought of which would fill us with horror. I’m going to put it to Betty, but I wouldn’t dare tell her what I really think—that of the two points of view Miss Bliss’ is the more modest. ”

“ Mrs. Bushey cut me short by falling into the Morris chair as one become limp from an unexpected blow.
“What am I to do?” she wailed, looking up at the chandelier as though she expected an answer to drop on her from the globes. “I’ve just got four tons of the best coal and a new furnace man. I pay him double what any one else on the block pays—double—and here you are cold.”
I felt as if I was doing Mrs. Bushey a personal wrong—insulting her as a landlady and a woman—and exclaimed earnestly, quite forgetting the night Roger and I had frozen in concert. ”

“ Ashworth is Roger’s only near relation and he regards her as the choicest flower of womanhood. I don’t wonder. In her way she is a finished product, no raw edges, no loose ends. Everything is in harmony—her thin faintly-lined face, her silky white hair, her pale hands with slightly prominent veins, her voice with its gentle modulations. Nothing cheap or second rate could exist near her. She wouldn’t stamp them out—I can’t imagine her stamping—they would simply wither in the rarified atmosphere. Her friends are like herself, her house is like herself. ”

“ Betty’s plans involved no secrecy, so I said, laughing:
“I think she’s trying to make a match.”
“Oh,” said Roger.
I had thought he would laugh with me, but in that brief monosyllable there was no amusement. It came with a falling note, and it seemed to be a sort of extinguisher on the conversation, a full stop at the end of it, for we both fell silent.
The auto swept up the drive, gray and smooth between gray trees. I could see a reach of deep blue sky with the stars looking big and close, as if they had come down a few billion miles and were looking us over with an impartial curiosity. ”

“ Small coquettes and flirts, the women who make a study of charming, can not hide their pride of conquest, love to recount the havoc they have wrought. There is none of that in Lizzie. Sometimes I have thought she is so used to admiration that she accepts it as a part of her life, like the sunshine or the rain. Roger, as “a kind man,” is just lumped in with the count and the doctor and Mr. Hamilton. And with her blindness to other people’s claims she makes no inquiry, takes no notice of the humbler romances of the rest of us. She has never said a word to me about Roger as my friend. ”

“ Phillips stealing along the lower hall made me look down and I saw her stationing herself beside young Hazard, and that Dolly Bliss’ face shone with tears.
She went on—Vissi d’Arte, Vissi d’Amore, Musetta’s song; the habanera from Carmen, Brahm’s Sapphische Ode, sounding the depths and heights. Between each piece we were dumb, only the creaking of the banisters as Mr. Hamilton shifted, or the sniffing of Miss Bliss when the song was sad, fell on our silence. We never saw her. She was at last the diva, remote, august, a woman mysterious and unknown, singing to us across an impassable gulf. ”

“ I had come home from a walk, and as I climbed the first narrow stair I saw in the hall above me, a woman standing under the gas, reading a letter. I caught her in silhouette, a black form, very tall and broadening out into a wide hat, but even that way, without feature or detail, arresting. Then, as she heard me, she stepped back so that the light fell on her. I knew at once it was Miss Harris, tried not to stare, and couldn’t help it.
She is really remarkably good-looking—an oval-faced, dark-eyed woman, with black hair growing low on her forehead and waving backward over her ears. ”

“ To go back to my work, be among my own people.” She brushed by Roger, her glance, imbued with its inward vision, passing over him as if he was invisible. “It’s like coming out of prison. It’s like coming to life again after you were dead.”
“I could just let myself go and be wonderful!”
She had expressed it exactly. She had been dead. The mild and wistful woman of the last two months was a wraith. This was Lizzie Harris born again, renewed and revitalized, now almost terrible in her naked and ruthless egotism. ”

“ They come in to see me and say I look ill. Roger is particularly solicitous, wants me to go south for a month with Mrs. Ashworth. I could no more leave this place, and the spectacle of his infatuation, than I could tell him what is making me hollow-eyed and wan.
One of the bitterest of my thoughts is that I know—an instinct tells me—he is really still fondest of me. I am and always will be the better woman for him, the one that in the storm and stress of a life’s companionship, is his true mate. His feeling for Lizzie is a temporary aberration. ”

“ I was silent, holding Roger’s arm. A short fat Frenchman behind me puffed almost into my ear, “Quelle femme, mais, quelle femme!” A woman in front in a Chinese opera cloak, leaned back to say over her shoulder to a man squeezing past Roger, “La voix est bonne, mais n’est pas grande chose, mais c’est une vraie artiste.” And an angular girl at my elbow, steering an old lady through cracks in the mass, murmured ecstatically to herself, “Mon Dieu, quelle temperament!” That was the word I heard oftenest, temperament. ”

“ The quick nervous tattoo fell ominously on my uneasiness. Miss Bliss sent a furtive masonic look at me, and glanced away. With an elaborate air of nonchalance she patted her frill and picked at her skirt, and finally, unable to stand the combined pressure of our silence and her own curiosity, said boldly:
“What kind of a house was it?”
Lizzie answered slowly, pronouncing each word with meticulous precision:
“It was a large, shiny, expensive house. It was a hideous house. Nobody who was anything, or ever expected to be anybody, ought to go into such a house.” ”

“ Lizzie, without words, had snatched up the key and knelt by the trunk. She looked untidy, hot and rather cross. They certainly had not the appearance of lovers.
I fell weakly into a chair and awaited revelations. None came. Roger buttoned his coat, Lizzie made scratching noises with the key. There was something strained and sultry in the silence. Could she have refused him? One of the disappointing things about people in real life is their failure to rise to the dramatic expression fitting to great moments. ”

“ She took them with no more self-consciousness than a performing animal takes the gallery’s applause, smiled slightly, then looked at Roger, the stranger. I did so, too, childishly anxious to see if he admired my protégée. He evidently did, for he was staring with the rest of them, intent, astonished.
Her glance appeared to gather up his tribute as her hands might have gathered flowers thrown to her. He was one of the watching thousands that it was her business to enthrall, his face one of the countless faces that were to gaze up at her from tier upon tier of seats. ”

“ The star is in a state of joyful excitement which has communicated itself to the rest of us. When in the evening she goes over her repertoire, the Westerners and Miss Bliss sit on the bottom steps of their stairs, Mr. Hamilton and the count on the banisters of theirs and I on the top step of mine. A Niagara of sound pours over us, billowing and rushing down through the well, buffeted between the close confining walls. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I asked.
“Coming,” cried a voice from the stairs, and the air was filled with silken rustlings.
It was like an entrance on the stage, up the passage and between the watching people, and I don’t think any actress could have done it with more aplomb. In her evening dress she was truly superb—a goddess of a woman with her black hair in lusterless coils and her neck and shoulders as white as curds. Upon that satiny bosom my mother’s pendant rose and fell to even breathings. Whatever anybody else may have felt, the star of the occasion was calm and confident. ”

“ And she lived, willingly, proudly, without a twinge of conscience, with John Masters!
That’s one side and here’s the other:
Lizzie’s happiness, Lizzie placed beyond all need, Lizzie the wife of a man so high-thinking and right-doing that everything in her that was fine must answer to his call. Under his influence she might change, become what he now imagines her to be. Women have done that often, grown to love the man they marry and molded themselves to his ideal. ”

“ Did she care for Roger? Was she going to transfer her incomprehensible affections to him? It was a hideous thought. She came back and swept about, collecting the feast, and my dazed eyes followed her. How could she do such a thing unless she was so lacking in a central core of character that she was nothing but the shell of a woman?
It was a queer scrappy meal, most of it sent round [Pg 241] from the delicatessen store on Lexington Avenue. Such as it was the hostess offered it with as smiling an aplomb as if Delmonico’s head chef had produced it in an inspired moment. ”

“ Roger said, “I like you in brown.”
I love going down Fifth Avenue in the dark of a winter evening. The traffic of business is over. Motors and carriages go spinning by, carrying people [Pg 61] to dinners. The big glistening street is like an artery with the joyous blood of the city racing through it, coursing along with the throb, throb, throb of a deathless vitality. ”

“ I felt wretchedly underhanded and mean, and that’s one of the most unbearable feelings for a self-respecting woman to endure. For one reckless moment I thought of telling Betty the whole story. And then I knew I mustn’t. I couldn’t make her understand. I couldn’t translate Lizzie into the terms with which Mrs. Ferguson was familiar. I saw that broken woman emerging from my narrative a smirched and bespattered pariah of the kind that, from time immemorial, ladies have regarded as their hereditary foe. ”

“ The great reverberating shell of building held them like bees in a hive, buzzing as they found places whence they could see the queen bee. Through my own quivering expectancy I could sense theirs, quieter but keen, and hear, thrown back from the resonant walls and hollow dome, the sounds of fluttered programs, rustling fabrics, seats dropping and the fluctuant hum of [Pg 335] voices—the exhilarating stir and bustle of a great audience gradually settling into stillness. They couldn’t have come to see Lizzie—so many people? I was dreaming, it was somebody else. ”

“ Suppose there had never been any John Masters, that she was as pure as Diana, could she ever be tamed to the Clements’ standard?
Memories of her keep coming up, throwing oranges out of the window, listening hungrily to Mrs. Stregazzi (fancy Mrs. Stregazzi at Mrs. Ashworth’s tea table talking about her corsets and her [Pg 246] cigarettes!) facing Masters like an enraged lioness, weeping against his shoulder and pleading with him to come back. Good heavens, if no man had even touched her hand except in the clasp of friendship, she is not the woman for Roger. ”

“ Ferguson has no sense of humor, and that’s one of the reasons I love her. There is an obsession in the public mind just now about the sense of humor. People ask anxiously if other people have it as Napoleon [Pg 26] used to ask if attractive ladies he had wooed in vain “were still virtuous.” It’s like being a bromide— Give me a bromide, a humorless, soft, cushiony bromide, rather than those exhausting people who have established a reputation for wit and are living up to it. Betty is not soft and cushiony, but she is always herself. ”