His gloomy and discouraged face was the face of a man who retires baffled from some tremendously complicated problem.
"Put down your umbrella," I said. "Don"t be foolish."
"I"m not foolish," he retorted irritably. "Don"t want to loosh thish umbrella again."
"Well then," I said, "hold it in the other hand, and I will help you."
This struck him as a marvellous idea, one of those discoveries that revolutionize science, and he instantly obeyed. He was now very drunk. He was nauseating. The conventions which society has built up in fifty centuries ceased suddenly to exist. It was impossible that they should exist--there in that cabin, where we were alone together, screened, shut in. I lost even the sense of convention. I was no longer disgusted.
Everything that was seemed natural, ordinary, normal. I became his mother. I became his hospital nurse. And at length he lay in bed, clutching the umbrella to his breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it from both hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left him to his inanimate companion.
II
I should have left then, though I had a wish not to leave. But I was prevented from going by the fear of descending those sinister stairs alone, and the necessity of calling aloud to the concierge in order to get out through the main door, and the possible difficulties in finding a cab in that region at that hour. I knew that I could not have borne to walk even to the end of the street unprotected. So I stayed where I was, seated in a chair near the window of the larger room, saturating myself in the vague and heavy flood of sadness that enwraps the fretful, pa.s.sionate city in the night--the night when the commonest noises seem to carry some mystic message to the listening soul, the night when truth walks abroad naked and whispers her secrets.
A gas-lamp threw its radiance on the ceiling in bars through the slits of the window-shutters, and then, far in the middle wilderness of the night, the lamp was extinguished by a careful munic.i.p.ality, and I was left in utter darkness. Long since the candles had burnt away. I grew silly and sentimental, and pictured the city in feverish sleep, gaining with difficulty inadequate strength for the morrow--as if the city had not been living this life for centuries and did not know exactly what it was about! And then, sure as I had been that I could not sleep, I woke up, and I could see the outline of the piano. Dawn had begun. And not a sound disturbed the street, and not a sound came from Diaz" bedroom. As of old, he slept with the tranquillity of a child.
And after a time I could see the dust on the piano and on the polished floor under the table. The night had pa.s.sed, and it appeared to be almost a miracle that the night had pa.s.sed, and that I had lived through it and was much the same Carlotta still. I gently opened the window and pushed back the shutters. A young woman, tall, with a superb bust, clothed in blue, was sweeping the footpath in long, dignified strokes of a broom.
She went slowly from my ken. Nothing could have been more prosaic, more sane, more astringent. And yet only a few hours--and it had been night, strange, voluptuous night! And even now a thousand thousand pillows were warm and crushed under their burden of unconscious dreaming souls. But that tall woman must go to bed in day, and rise to meet the first wind of the morning, and perhaps never have known the sweet poison of the night.
I sank back into my chair....
There was a sharp, decisive sound of a key in the lock of the entrance-door. I jumped up, fully awake, with beating heart and blushing face. Someone was invading the flat. Someone would catch me there.
Of course it was his servant. I had entirely forgotten her.
We met in the little pa.s.sage. She was a stout creature and appeared to fill the flat. She did not seem very surprised at the sight of me, and she eyed me with the frigid disdain of one who conforms to a certain code for one who does not conform to it. She sat in judgment on my well-hung skirt and the rings on my fingers and the wickedness in my breast, and condemned me to everlasting obloquy.
"Madame is going?" she asked coldly, holding open the door.
"No, madame," I said. "Are you the _femme de menage_ of monsieur?"
"Yes, madame."
"Monsieur is ill," I said, deciding swiftly what to do. "He does not wish to be disturbed. He would like you to return at two o"clock."
Long before two I should have departed.
"Monsieur knows well that I have another _menage_ from twelve to two,"
protested the woman.
"Three o"clock, then," I said.
_Bien_, madame," said she, and, producing the contents of a reticule: "Here are the bread, the b.u.t.ter, the milk, and the newspaper, madame."
"Thank you, madame."
I took the things, and she left, and I shut the door and bolted it.
In antic.i.p.ation, the circ.u.mstances of such an encounter would have caused me infinite trouble of spirit. "But after all it was not so very dreadful," I thought, as I fastened the door. "Do I care for his _femme de menage_?"
The great door of the house would be open now, and the stairs no longer affrighting, and I might slip un.o.bserved away. But I could not bring myself to leave until I had spoken with Diaz, and I would not wake him.
It was nearly noon when he stirred. I heard his movements, and a slight moaning sigh, and he called me.
"Are you there, Magda?"
How feeble and appealing his voice!
For answer I stepped into his bedroom.
The eye that has learned to look life full in the face without a quiver of the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is is the ordered and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be abhorrent, nothing blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we exceed nature? In the presence of the primeval and ever-continuing forces of nature, can we maintain our fantastic conceptions of sin and of justice? We are, and that is all we should dare to say. And yet, when I saw Diaz stretched on that wretched bed my first movement was one of physical disgust. He had not shaved for several days. His hair was like a doormat. His face was unclean and puffed; his lips full and cracked; his eyes all discoloured.
If aught can be vile, he was vile. If aught can be obscene, he was obscene. His limbs twitched; his features were full of woe and desolation and abas.e.m.e.nt.
He looked at me heavily, mournfully.
"Diaz, Diaz!" said my soul. "Have you come to this?"
A great and overmastering pity seized me, and I went to him, and laid my hand gently on his. He was so nervous and tremulous that he drew away his hand as if I had burnt it.
"Oh, Magda," he murmured, "my head! There was a piece of hot brick in my mouth, and I tried to take it out. But it was my tongue. Can I have some tea? Will you give me some cold water first?"
Strange that the frank and simple way in which he accepted my presence there, and a.s.sumed my willingness to serve him, filled me with a new joy!
He said nothing of the night. I think that Diaz was one of the few men who are strong enough never to regret the past. If he was melancholy, it was merely because he suffered bodily in the present.
I gave him water, and he thanked me.
"Now I will make some tea," I said.
And I went into the tiny kitchen and looked around, lifting my skirts.
"Can you find the things?" he called out.
"Yes," I said.
"What"s all that splashing?" he inquired.
"I"m washing a saucepan," I said.
"I never have my meals here," he called. "Only tea. There are two taps to the gas-stove--one a little way up the chimney."
Yes, I was joyous, actively so. I brought the tea to the bedroom with a glad smile. I had put two cups on the tray, which I placed on the night-table; and there were some biscuits. I sat at the foot of the bed while we drank. And the umbrella, unperceived by Diaz, lay with its handle on a pillow, ludicrous and yet accusing.
"You are an angel," said Diaz.
"Don"t call me that," I protested.
"Why not?"