The Devourers Part 37

Poverty and loneliness pushed Nancy along the dreary year, and she went in her brown dress, with her heels worn down at the side, through the autumn and the winter. Aldo was away for weeks at a time, and although he seemed in good humour when he was at home, and dressed elaborately, he was always parsimonious in the house, warning against rashness and expense.

Anne-Marie went to a kindergarten, where the grocer's children, and the baker's children, and the milkman's children went, and she liked them, and they liked her.

And now April was here. Where it could, it pushed and penetrated; through the trestles of the elevated railroads it spilt its suns.h.i.+ne on the ground. And it ran into the open window of the 82nd Street flat, and stretched its sweetness on the faded yellow silk of the hated lampshade.

To Nancy, who was moping in her dingy brown dress, April said: "Go out."

So she put on her hat, and went out. And, having no reason to turn to the right, she turned to the left, and after a few blocks, having no reason to turn to the left, she turned to the right, and ran straight into a little messenger-boy, who was coming round the corner carrying some flowers in tissue-paper, and whistling.

Some trailing maidenhair escaping from the paper caught in her dress, and broke off. "I am sorry," she said.

"Can't yer use yer eyes!" said the boy rudely.

Then April said to Nancy: "Smile!" And she smiled, dimpling, and said again: "I am sorry."

The boy looked at her, and turned his tongue round in his mouth; then he sniffed, and said: "Here you are! This is for you."

He pushed the bunch of flowers into Nancy's hand, then turned back, and went round the corner again, whistling. Nancy ran after him, but he ran quicker, looking round every now and then and laughing at her. When he turned another corner Nancy stood with the flowers in her hand, wondering.

She opened the paper a little at the top, and looked in. Mauve orchids and maidenhair--a bouquet for a queen. She walked slowly back to her house, carrying the flowers in front of her with both hands, and their idle beauty and extravagant loveliness lifted her prostrate spirit above the dust around her.

She went to her room with them, avoiding Minna, who was clattering dishes in the kitchen, and, locking her door, sat down near the bed. She drew the tissue-paper away, and the fairy-like flowers, scintillant and bedewed, nodded at her.

In their midst lay a letter, with the crest of a Transatlantic steams.h.i.+p on the envelope. She opened it with timid hands.

"DEAR UNKNOWN IN THE PALE BLUE DRESS,

"I am sending this to you as a child sends a walnut-sh.e.l.l boat sailing down a river. Where will it go to? Whom will it reach? I am leaving America to-day. By the time you read this--are you smiling with wondering eyes? or is your mouth grave, and your heart subdued?--I shall be throbbing away to Europe on board the _Lusitania_, and we shall probably never meet. But I am superst.i.tious. As I drove down to the steamer just now the words that are often in my mind when I travel sprang with loud voices to my ear:

"'Dort wo du nicht bist, dort ist dein Gluck.'

"Do you know German?

"'There _where thou art not_, is thy happiness.'

"I am leaving America because I hate it, and have never been happy here; probably my happiness was meanwhile in Europe, or Asia, or Australia.

But what, now that I am going to Europe, if my happiness were in America after all? What if I were driving away from it, taking s.h.i.+ps and sailing from it, catching trains and leaving it behind? I stopped the cab, and got these flowers on chance.

"The steward has called a messenger, an impish boy with a crooked mouth.

He stands here waiting.

"I look at him, and like to think that you will see him too. But you?

How shall we find you, the flowers, and my heart, and the messenger-boy?

"I shall tell him to stop the first girl he meets who is dressed in light blue. That is you. And I reason that if you wear a light blue dress you must be young; and if you are young you are happy; and if you are happy you are kind; and if you are kind you will write to me, who am a lonely, crabbed, and crusty man.

"My address is the Metropole, London.

"ROBERT BEAUCHAMP LEESE."

Nancy placed the letter on the bed beside the flowers; she sat a long time, with folded hands, looking at them. They brought but one message to her eyes that were vexed with shabbiness, to her soul that was shrunk by privation--riches.

They belonged to another sphere. They had come up the wrong street, into the wrong house. If they could have life and motion they would rise quickly--Nancy could imagine them--lifting dainty skirts and tripping hurriedly out from the sordid flat.

Nancy laid her cheek near to the delicate petals, and her hand on the letter. Her fancy played with an answer--an answer that should startle him, surprise him.

"How shall I hold you, fix you, freeze you, Break my heart at your feet to please you!..."

Yes, she could quote Browning to him, and Heine; she could paint a fantastic picture of her light blue gown, against which the mauve orchids melted in divine dissonance of colour; she would be wearing with it a large black hat, with feathers curving over a shading velvet brim....

She sighed, and went to the rickety bamboo-table, where the inkstand stood on a cracked plate, and the ivory pen lay in demoralized familiarity, with a red wooden penholder belonging to Anne-Marie. On the cheap notepaper which she used when she wrote to borrow a saucepan from Mrs. Schmidl, or to ask Mrs. Johnstone to wait until next week, she wrote:

"DEAR SIR,

"The wrong girl got your letter. I was dressed in _brown_."

She did not sign her name, but she read his letter over again, and, seeing that he was lonely, and crabbed, and crusty, she added her address.

He answered to "Miss '_brown_'" at the address she had given him, and he began his letter: "Dear wrong girl, write to me again." And she wrote back to say that indeed she would not dream of writing to him.

He replied thanking her, and asking if she were not the Miss Brown he had met on board s.h.i.+p sixteen years ago, who had been so kind and maternal to him, and had then had smallpox so badly. He hoped and believed she was that Miss Brown.

Nancy felt that she must tell him she was not that Miss Brown. And she did so. And there the correspondence ended. At least, so she told herself as she ran up the stairs after posting her letter at the corner of the street.

She was alone that evening, as so often. The piano-lamp was lit. The little china clock on the mantelpiece ticked time away like a hurrying heart, and Nancy suddenly realized that life was pa.s.sing quickly, and that she was not living. She was shut up in the dusky little flat with Mr. Johnstone, and was as dead as he. A fierce excitement overcame her suddenly, like a gust of wind, like a flame of fire--regret for her wasted talents, resentment against her fate, hatred of the poverty that was crippling and maiming and crus.h.i.+ng her. What was she doing? Was she asleep? was she drugged? was she dreaming? What had come over her that she could let herself drift down into the nameless obscurity, the sullen ignominy of despair?

When midnight struck, Nancy leaped from her chair as one who is called by a loud voice. Life was rus.h.i.+ng past her; she would wake, and go too.

Some old French verses came into her head about "la belle" who wanted to enter the "blue garden"; who pa.s.sed it in the morning, and looked in through the open gates.

"La belle qui veut, La belle qui n'ose, Cueillir les roses Du jardin bleu."

And she pa.s.sed at noon, and looked in through the open gates:

"La belle qui veut, La belle qui n'ose, Cueillir les roses Du jardin bleu."

In the evening she said: "Now I will enter." But she found that the gates were closed.

"La belle qui veut, La belle qui n'ose, Cueillir les roses Du jardin bleu."

Some characters evolve slowly, by imperceptible gradations, as a rose opens or a bird puts on its feathers. But Nancy broke through her chrysalis-sh.e.l.l in an hour. From one day to the next the gentle, submissive Nancy was no more; the pa.s.sive, childlike soul clothed in the simplicity of genius died that night--for no other reason but that her hour had come--drifted off, perhaps, in the little dreamboat of her childhood, where Baby Bunting sat at the helm waiting for her. And together they went back, afloat on the darkness, to the Isle of What is No More.

"DEAR UNKNOWN,

"You are very persistent. Is it not enough to know who I am not, that you needs must want to know who I am? What's in a name? A woman by any other name would be as false.

"Then call me, if call me you will, by the sweeping, impersonal, fragile name of Eve. And picture me as Eve, with the serpent coiled round her neck like a boa, and the after-glimmer of a lost Paradise in her tranquil eyes. The tranquil eyes are blue, under dark hair.