Suddenly, however, she became aware that one of the passing
shadows remained stationary between her line of vision and the
gleaming asphalt; and raising her eyes she saw a young woman
bending over her.
"Excuse me--are you sick?--Why, it's Miss Bart!" a half-familiar
voice exclaimed.
Lily looked up. The speaker was a poorly-dressed young woman with
a bundle under her arm. Her face had the air of unwholesome
refinement which ill-health and over-work may produce, but its
common prettiness was redeemed by the strong and generous curve
of the lips.
"You don't remember me," she continued, brightening with the
pleasure of recognition, "but I'd know you anywhere, I've thought
of you such a lot. I guess my folks all know your name by heart.
I was one of the girls at Miss Farish's club--you helped me to go
to the country that time I had lung-trouble. My name's Nettie
Struther. It was Nettie Crane then--but I daresay you don't
remember that either."
Yes: Lily was beginning to remember. The episode of Nettie
Crane's timely rescue from disease had been one of the most
satisfying incidents of her connection with Gerty's charitable
work. She had furnished the girl with the means to go to a
sanatorium in the mountains: it struck her now with a peculiar
irony that the money she had used had been Gus Trenor's.
She tried to reply, to assure the speaker that she had not
forgotten; but her voice failed in the effort, and she felt
herself sinking under a great wave of physical weakness. Nettie
Struther, with a startled exclamation, sat down and slipped a
shabbily-clad arm behind her back.
"Why, Miss Bart, you ARE sick. Just lean on me a little till you
feel better."
A faint glow of returning strength seemed to pass into Lily from
the pressure of the supporting arm.
"I'm only tired--it is nothing," she found voice to say in a
moment; and then, as she met the timid appeal of her companion's
eyes, she added involuntarily: "I have been unhappy--in great
trouble."
"YOU in trouble? I've always thought of you as being so high up,
where everything was just grand. Sometimes, when I felt real
mean, and got to wondering why things were so queerly fixed in
the world, I used to remember that you were having a lovely time,
anyhow, and that seemed to show there was a kind of justice
somewhere. But you mustn't sit here too long--it's fearfully
damp. Don't you feel strong enough to walk on a little ways now?"
she broke off.
"Yes--yes; I must go home," Lily murmured, rising.
Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin shabby figure at her
side. She had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged
victims of over-work and anaemic parentage: one of the
superfluous fragments of life destined to be swept prematurely
into that social refuse-heap of which Lily had so lately
expressed her dread. But Nettie Struther's frail envelope was now
alive with hope and energy: whatever fate the future reserved for
her, she would not be cast into the refuse-heap without a
struggle.
"I am very glad to have seen you," Lily continued, summoning a
smile to her unsteady lips. "It'll be my turn to think of you as
happy--and the world will seem a less unjust place to me too."
"Oh, but I can't leave you like this--you're not fit to go home
alone. And I can't go with you either!" Nettie Struther wailed
with a start of recollection. "You see, it's my husband's
night-shift--he's a motor-man--and the friend I leave the baby
with has to step upstairs to get HER husband's supper at seven. I
didn't tell you I had a baby, did I? She'll be four months old
day after tomorrow, and to look at her you wouldn't think I'd
ever had a sick day. I'd give anything to show you the baby, Miss
Bart, and we live right down the street here--it's only three
blocks off." She lifted her eyes tentatively to Lily's face, and
then added with a burst of courage: "Why won't you get right into
the cars and come home with me while I get baby's supper?
It's real warm in our kitchen, and you can rest there, and I'll
take YOU home as soon as ever she drops off to sleep."
It WAS warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther's match
had made a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed
itself to Lily as extraordinarily small and almost miraculously
clean. A fire shone through the polished flanks of the iron
stove, and near it stood a crib in which a baby was sitting
upright, with incipient anxiety struggling for expression on a
countenance still placid with sleep.
Having passionately celebrated her reunion with her offspring,
and excused herself in cryptic language for the lateness of her
return, Nettie restored the baby to the crib and shyly invited
Miss Bart to the rocking-chair near the stove.
"We've got a parlour too," she explained with pardonable pride;
"but I guess it's warmer in here, and I don't want to leave you
alone while I'm getting baby's supper."
On receiving Lily's assurance that she much preferred the
friendly proximity of the kitchen fire, Mrs. Struther proceeded
to prepare a bottle of infantile food, which she tenderly applied
to the baby's impatient lips; and while the ensuing degustation
went on, she seated herself with a beaming countenance beside her
visitor.
"You're sure you won't let me warm up a drop of coffee for you,
Miss Bart? There's some of baby's fresh milk left over--well,
maybe you'd rather just sit quiet and rest a little while. It's
too lovely having you here. I've thought of it so often that I
can't believe it's really come true. I've said to George again
and again: 'I just wish Miss Bart could see me NOW--' and I used
to watch for your name in the papers, and we'd talk over what you
were doing, and read the descriptions of the dresses you wore. I
haven't seen your name for a long time, though, and I began to be
afraid you were sick, and it worried me so that George said I'd
get sick myself, fretting about it." Her lips broke into a
reminiscent smile. "Well, I can't afford to be sick again, that's
a fact: the last spell nearly finished me. When you sent me off
that time I never thought I'd come back alive, and I didn't much
care if I did. You see I didn't know about George and the baby
then."
She paused to readjust the bottle to the child's bubbling mouth.
"You precious--don't you be in too much of a hurry! Was it mad
with mommer for getting its supper so late? Marry
Anto'nette--that's what we call her: after the French queen in
that play at the Garden--I told George the actress reminded me of
you, and that made me fancy the name . . . I never thought I'd
get married, you know, and I'd never have had the heart to go on
working just for myself."
She broke off again, and meeting the encouragement in Lily's
eyes, went on, with a flush rising under her anaemic skin: "You
see I wasn't only just SICK that time you sent me off--I was
dreadfully unhappy too. I'd known a gentleman where I was
employed--I don't know as you remember I did type-writing in a
big importing firm--and--well--I thought we were to be married:
he'd gone steady with me six months and given me his mother's
wedding ring. But I presume he was too stylish for me--he
travelled for the firm, and had seen a great deal of society.
Work girls aren't looked after the way you are, and they don't
always know how to look after themselves. I didn't . . . and it
pretty near killed me when he went away and left off writing . .
. It was then I came down sick--I thought it was the end of
everything. I guess it would have been if you hadn't sent me off.
But when I found I was getting well I began to take heart in
spite of myself. And then, when I got back home, George came
round and asked me to marry him. At first I thought I couldn't,
because we'd been brought up together, and I knew he knew about
me. But after a while I began to see that that made it easier. I
never could have told another man, and I'd never have married
without telling; but if George cared for me enough to have me as
I was, I didn't see why I shouldn't begin over again--and I did."
The strength of the victory shone forth from her as she lifted
her irradiated face from the child on her knees. "But, mercy, I
didn't mean to go on like this about myself, with you sitting
there looking so fagged out. Only it's so lovely having you here,
and letting you see just how you've helped me." The baby had sunk
back blissfully replete, and Mrs. Struther softly rose to
lay the bottle aside. Then she paused before Miss Bart.
"I only wish I could help YOU--but I suppose there's nothing on
earth I could do," she murmured wistfully.
Lily, instead of answering, rose with a smile and held out her
arms; and the mother, understanding the gesture, laid her child
in them.
The baby, feeling herself detached from her habitual anchorage,
made an instinctive motion of resistance; but the soothing
influences of digestion prevailed, and Lily felt the soft weight
sink trustfully against her breast. The child's confidence in its
safety thrilled her with a sense of warmth and returning life,
and she bent over, wondering at the rosy blur of the little face,
the empty clearness of the eyes, the vague tendrilly motions of
the folding and unfolding fingers. At first the burden in her
arms seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down, but as
she continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper,
and penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though
the child entered into her and became a part of herself.
She looked up, and saw Nettie's eyes resting on her with
tenderness and exultation.
"Wouldn't it be too lovely for anything if she could grow up to
be just like you? Of course I know she never COULD--but mothers
are always dreaming the craziest things for their children."
Lily clasped the child close for a moment and laid her back in
her
mother's arms.
"Oh, she must not do that--I should be afraid to come and see her
too often!" she said with a smile; and then, resisting Mrs.
Struther's anxious offer of companionship, and reiterating the
promise that of course she would come back soon, and make
George's acquaintance, and see the baby in her bath, she passed
out of the kitchen and went alone down the tenement stairs.
As she reached the street she realized that she felt stronger and
happier: the little episode had done her good. It was the first
time she had ever come across the results of her spas
modic
benevolence, and the surprised sense of human fellowship took the
mortal chill from her heart.
It was not till she entered her own door that she felt the
reaction of a deeper loneliness. It was long after seven o'clock,
and the light and odours proceeding from the basement made it
manifest that the boarding-house dinner had begun. She hastened
up to her room, lit the gas, and began to dress. She did not mean
to pamper herself any longer, to go without food because her
surroundings made it unpalatable. Since it was her fate to live
in a boarding-house, she must learn to fall in with the
conditions of the life. Nevertheless she was glad that, when she
descended to the heat and glare of the dining-room, the repast
was nearly over.
In her own room again, she was seized with a sudden fever of
activity. For weeks past she had been too listless and
indifferent to set her possessions in order, but now she began to
examine systematically the contents of her drawers and cupboard.
She had a few handsome dresses left--survivals of her last phase
of splendour, on the Sabrina and in London--but when she had been
obliged to part with her maid she had given the woman a generous
share of her cast-off apparel. The remaining dresses, though they
had lost their freshness, still kept the long unerring lines, the
sweep and amplitude of the great artist's stroke, and as she
spread them out on the bed the scenes in which they had been worn
rose vividly before her. An association lurked in every fold:
each fall of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in
the record of her past. She was startled to find how the
atmosphere of her old life enveloped her. But, after all, it was
the life she had been made for: every dawning tendency in her had
been carefully directed toward it, all her interests and
activities had been taught to centre around it. She was like some
rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud
had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.
Last of all, she drew forth from the bottom of her trunk a heap
of white drapery which fell shapelessly across her arm. It was
the Reynolds dress she had worn in the Bry TABLEAUX. It had been
impossible for her to give it away, but she had never seen it
since that night, and the long flexible folds, as she
shook them out, gave forth an odour of violets which came to her
like a breath from the flower-edged fountain where she had stood
with Lawrence Selden and disowned her fate. She put back the
dresses one by one, laying away with each some gleam of light,
some note of laughter, some stray waft from the rosy shores of
pleasure. She was still in a state of highly-wrought
impressionability, and every hint of the past sent a lingering
tremor along her nerves.
She had just closed her trunk on the white folds of the Reynolds
dress when she heard a tap at her door, and the red fist of the
Irish maid-servant thrust in a belated letter. Carrying it to the
light, Lily read with surprise the address stamped on the upper
comer of the envelope. It was a business communication from the
office of her aunt's executors, and she wondered what unexpected
development had caused them to break silence before the appointed
time. She opened the envelope and a cheque fluttered to the
floor. As she stooped to pick it up the blood rushed to her face.
The cheque represented the full amount of Mrs. Peniston's legacy,
and the letter accompanying it explained that the executors,
having adjusted the business of the estate with less delay than
they had expected, had decided to anticipate the date fixed for
the payment of the bequests.
Lily sat down beside the desk at the foot of her bed, and
spreading out the cheque, read over and over the TEN THOUSAND
DOLLARS written across it in a steely business hand. Ten months
earlier the amount it stood for had represented the depths of
penury; but her standard of values had changed in the interval,
and now visions of wealth lurked in every flourish of the pen. As
she continued to gaze at it, she felt the glitter of the visions
mounting to her brain, and after a while she lifted the lid of
the desk and slipped the magic formula out of sight. It was
easier to think without those five figures dancing before her
eyes; and she had a great deal of thinking to do before she
slept.
She opened her cheque-book, and plunged into such anxious
calculations as had prolonged her vigil at Bellomont on the night
when she had decided to marry Percy Gryce. Poverty simplifies
book-keeping, and her financial situation was easier to ascertain
than it had been then; but she had not yet learned the
control of money, and during her transient phase of luxury at the
Emporium she had slipped back into habits of extravagance which
still impaired her slender balance. A careful examination of her
cheque-book, and of the unpaid bills in her desk, showed that,
when the latter had been settled, she would have barely enough to
live on for the next three or four months; and even after that,
if she were to continue her present way of living, without
earning any additional money, all incidental expenses must be
reduced to the vanishing point. She hid her eyes with a shudder,
beholding herself at the entrance of that ever-narrowing
perspective down which she had seen Miss Silverton's dowdy figure
take its despondent way.
It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty
that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of
deeper empoverishment--of an inner destitution compared to which
outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed
miserable to be poor--to look forward to a shabby, anxious
middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial
to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the
boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still--it
was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept
like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the
years. That was the feeling which possessed her now--the feeling
of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the
whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor
little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood
submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had
never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. Her
parents too had been rootless, blown hither and thither on every
wind of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter them
from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without any one
spot of earth being dearer to her than another: there was no
centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which
her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for
itself and tenderness for others. In whatever form a
slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood--whether in the
concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or
in the conception of the house not built with hands, but
made up of inherited passions and loyalties--it has the same
power of broadening and deepening the individual existence, of
attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum
of human striving.
Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to
Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her
mating-instinct; but they had been checked by the disintegrating
influences of the life about her. All the men and women she knew
were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild
centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life
had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther's kitchen.
The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up
the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them,
seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It
was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant
margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the
frail audacious permanence of a bird's nest built on the edge of
a cliff--a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together
that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.
Yes--but it had taken two to build the nest; the man's faith as
well as the woman's courage. Lily remembered Nettie's words: I
KNEW HE KNEW ABOUT ME. Her husband's faith in her had made her
renewal possible--it is so easy for a woman to become what the
man she loves believes her to be! Well--Selden had twice been
ready to stake his faith on Lily Bart; but the third trial had
been too severe for his endurance. The very quality of his love
had made it the more impossible to recall to life. If it had been
a simple instinct of the blood, the power of her beauty might
have revived it. But the fact that it struck deeper, that it was
inextricably wound up with inherited habits of thought and
feeling, made it as impossible to restore to growth as a
deep-rooted plant tom from its bed. Selden had given her of his
best; but he was as incapable as herself of an uncritical return
to former states of feeling.
