The Foreign Woman
NO WONDER THE SOUL OF RUSSIA IS ONE OF THE GREAT ENIGMAS OF THE WORLD
By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Author of “Angelica,” “The Married Man,” etc.
HE sat in the small, hot room, in a state of pleased expectancy. He awaited the entrance of something exotic and highly interesting, probably with a beard. The catalogue of the Institute of Foreign Languages had promised him a “native teacher,” and what could a native Russian be but a bearded and mysterious creature?
He looked again through the pages of the unintelligible little red book—all in Russian—and thought with delight of the time to come, when it should be plain as day to him, when he should be able to say, with a casual air, that he could read and speak Russian.
He was anxious, poor young fellow, for some claim to distinction. He was only too well aware of his own ordinariness—a pleasant, friendly sort of mediocrity which distressed him profoundly. He was slight, sandy-haired, wiry, not unattractive, but certainly not fascinating. People liked him but didn’t remember him.
He was not an idiot. He knew well enough that he had no brilliant or remarkable qualities, and therefore, sure that he could not be anything extraordinary, he had decided to do something extraordinary. He had decided, in short, to go to Russia, live there for a long time, and write amazing books about it all.
Why not? He was a journalist; he could and did write articles about everything; he wrote with facility and a certain skill. He had, moreover, a naïve and innocent journalistic point of view. He saw the “human interest” in things. He felt that he would very easily discern the “human interest” in this Russian situation and present it to America in moving terms. His paper was willing to buy the special articles he intended to write, and on the pay for them he would live, Bolshevist fashion, while he collected his material.
He took out his watch. He had paid for an hour, and fifteen minutes of it had already passed. He frowned. After all, you know, he was somebody. He was a newspaper man, and a graduate of Columbia University, and he had paid cash for his twenty lessons, and people had no business to keep him waiting.
He got up, opened the door, and walked about, hoping that his restlessness might be observed from the corridor, and assuaged; but no one passed. All the other doors along the corridor were closed, and he heard a diligent hum, with now and then a French or German word familiar to him, from other teachers and other pupils, properly employed. He had decided to return to the office and “make a row,” and had got himself into the proper mood for one, when he saw a figure hastening along the corridor, and he went back and sat down.
She came in, breathless, sat down beside him, closed her eyes, and placed both hands above her heart. He waited for her to speak with some alarm, she gasped so. She was a plump little woman of indefinite age—forty-five, he imagined—dressed in clothes such as he hadn’t seen for fifteen years. All that she wore was dainty and fresh, with a pitiful sort of elegance—little ruffles of fine lace about her wrists, a bit of black velvet about her high collar. Her very shape was old-fashioned—a succession of curves, a round, tight look, a sort of dowdy neatness.
Nothing more foreign could be imagined. She didn’t stir, and he ventured a look at her face. With her eyes thus closed, her[Pg 15] soft, plump visage had a look of profound sadness and immense wisdom. It impressed him, it almost hypnotized him.
Suddenly she opened her eyes—pale gray eyes, clear and blank.
“My heart!” she said, in excellent English. “I suffer very much!” She picked up the book. “Do you know any Russian words?” she asked, with a shadowy smile.
“No,” he said; “not one.”
“A beautiful, beautiful language!” said she. “Only listen!”
She began reading him something from the middle of the book. Of course he couldn’t comprehend a word, but he liked to hear it. Her voice was charming, and the foreign sounds entertained him. She turned a page and went on.
“This is an extract from a most beautiful Russian tale,” she explained. “You would surely admire it.”
She continued. Her voice became sad, she made soft, slow gestures with her small dimpled hand.
“Ah, how very sad this is!” she said. “All that is best in Russia is so sad!”
“What’s the story about?” he asked, with curiosity.
“It is about two young men who are in an inn—” she began, when suddenly a bell rang loudly in the room. “My God!” she said mildly. “What is this?”
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“It must be that the lesson is ended,” said she. “One would not believe how the time flies! You have not had your full time—I was so late. I think I must go with you to the office and ask if I cannot make this up to you.”
“Never mind,” said he. “Please don’t bother—it doesn’t matter!”
“Ah, but it does!” said she. “You have paid, and it is very important that one should secure what one has paid for.”
She had risen, and went walking briskly along the corridor, an odd little figure in a long, trailing skirt. He followed her into the quiet office, where a severe director sat writing at a desk. He looked up with a surprised air.
“I was late for this gentleman’s lesson,” said the stout little woman. “He has missed much of it.”
“Then why do you waste more time in coming here?” cried the director, with a frown. “Go back, madame, and finish it. Make the best of the time that is left.”
“I thought the hour finished.”
“But on the contrary—the half-hour bell has just rung.”
“Ah!” said she, with a pleased smile. “I did not understand!”
And they walked back again, down the corridor, to the hot little room.
“I don’t understand everything of this,” she explained to him. “This is my first lesson that I give. This position of Russian professor belongs to my husband, but he is ill, and they kindly permit me to take his place for this little while. Now we must not waste more time!”
She opened the book again, and studied it with serious regard.
“A difficult language,” she said; “but so very beautiful! The English and Americans can never learn to pronounce our consonant sounds—never! Could you say this?”
She uttered a sound, and he tried to imitate her, but failed. She smiled with a sort of benevolent triumph.
“Ah, it cannot be done—not ever! Now, on the contrary, we Russians have no difficulty whatsoever with any of the English words. I don’t know—it is the Russian soul, perhaps. We have so great a sympathy. Nothing is strange to us, nothing is foreign—nothing at all. We are at home in all languages, in all countries. It is our mystery.”
“You speak English very well,” he said.
“Why not? I lived for years in England; but in this country, only three months.”
She fell silent.
“Why is it that you wish to learn Russian?” she asked suddenly.
“Well, I thought of going to Russia, you know—to study the people and write a book.”
“Useless!” she said calmly.
“Why?”
“Never can you know our people—above all things, now, in our time of trouble. Oh,” she cried, “it is so terrible! I cannot bear that strange people should go there now—to our Holy Russia, to see our agony! If you knew!”
She covered her eyes with her hand.
“If you knew! We have left everything there, all we had on this earth. We have no news of our friends. Perhaps they are dead; certainly they are ruined. Such wonderful people—real Russian souls! We, too, are ruined. We have lost everything we had.[Pg 16]”
He was deeply impressed by the tragic note in her voice.
“I know,” he said; “but perhaps things will improve before long.”
“For Russia, yes—for us, no. We are ruined. We are finished,” she said quite simply. “We are torn up by the roots. We are not young enough to begin again. Above all, such a man as my husband—one of the greatest minds of Russia. A wonderful man! Imagine you, he is an artist, he paints, composes music, writes poetry, all in the most charming taste, and he is also a marvelous financier. Ah, what is one to say to comfort such a man? And that now he must teach Russian in this place!”
Again she was silent, and he didn’t like to interrupt her. He was deeply interested in her—her fine voice, her passionate gesture, the extreme novelty of her. He was aware of a depth and variety of feeling in her which amazed him. She was like a woman in a novel; and with it all she had a simplicity such as he had never seen before. It was impossible to doubt the sincerity of a single word she uttered.
She began to speak again.
“What is it that you think you will see in Russia?” she asked. “I tell you, nothing! You will never see the Russian soul. You will stay there a year, five years, ten years, and never will you know a single Russian. No; we do not wear our hearts on our sleeves. Shall I tell you something of us?”
“Yes, please do!” he said earnestly.
She began to tell him of Petrograd—of shops there, more elegant, she said, than anything to be found in Paris. She described a certain confectioner’s shop. When you went in, you were invited to sample all the sweets displayed there, and there were hundreds of different sorts—hundreds, she assured him! She described forty to him, lingering in ecstasy over their perfections.
She told him of the houses, warm, full of flowers, in the bitterest winter weather; and the women—the kindest women in all the world. She talked of the court, but only briefly. She began to speak of the Czarina, but she could not go on. The words strangled her.
“And all that is gone!” she said. “All that—my God!”
He carefully concealed his American disapproval of courts and sovereigns. He even felt sorry, on her account, that it had gone.
“I do not think that you know in this country what social life is,” she said. “Here it is so formal, so without heart. With us, it is so different. It may be that on a certain day I am tired, ill, lazy. I do not wish to dress. I am in negligee. My friends come, and I receive them just in this fashion. No one is surprised.
“‘For God’s sake, do not apologize, Anastasie!’ they say. ‘It is you we come to see, not your fine clothes!’”
And here the bell rang again, unmistakably for the lesson’s end. Again she was surprised.
“Ah!” she said. “It has been very pleasant for me to talk to you! You are of a sympathetic nature, there is no doubt of that!”
He hadn’t learned a word, not a syllable of Russian, but he was entirely satisfied. He felt that he had met with something even more truly Russian than the language. He walked out of the building, feeling decidedly more cosmopolitan.
II
Two days later he returned for his next lesson, in the dusk of a snowy February afternoon. This time he found her waiting for him, sitting before the table in the little room. They smiled in friendly fashion.
“I was thinking, as I came,” he said, “that this must be like a Russian winter afternoon.”
“Oh, no!” she said. “It isn’t! It has not the—the feeling. There is—how shall I tell you?—a sort of excitement about our snowy days. But I must not waste your time. Let us begin!”
For ten minutes or so she worked industriously, teaching him Russian words for chair, table, wall, floor, ceiling.
“You are really learning now?” she asked solicitously.
“Yes,” he answered, very much pleased.
“It seems, however, that as a teacher I am not successful,” she said, with a melancholy little smile. “To you I give my first lesson, and to you I give my last. After this I have finished.”
“Why? Is your husband coming back?”
“No,” she said. “He is not well—yet.”
She got up, went over to the window, and stood there looking out. He couldn’t help thinking, as he regarded her round form in profile, that she looked like the[Pg 17] little wooden figures of Noah’s wife in the arks that children play with. And then he saw her face, and was sorry for his fancy. She was gazing out across the dark, snow-covered expanse of Madison Square, wonderfully misty in the falling snow, and she was silently weeping.
“No,” she said. “He is not coming back. He is very ill.”
He felt terribly sorry for her, but he could think of nothing at all to say. She came back and sat down in the full glare of the electric light. She looked intolerably pitiful, her scanty eyebrows red with weeping, her mouth compressed and trembling a little.
“And they tell me this morning that there will be no more lessons for me. It seems that I talk too much English to the pupils, and that must not be. I must talk only in Russian, and I always forget.”
She shrugged her shoulders, while she wiped her eyes, quite unaffectedly, with an elaborate little lace handkerchief.
“And now,” she said, “do you remember the word for ‘table’?”
But he couldn’t bear that.
“About your husband,” he began respectfully. “Are you sure you have a good doctor? Being in a strange country, you know—”
“I don’t need a doctor, my friend!” she told him, with a stern smile. “I have seen too much of illness and death. A doctor can tell me nothing and can do nothing for me.”
“But,” he said, “in other ways—if you’re leaving here, can’t I help you to find some other sort of—occupation? I’m a newspaper man; I know all sorts of people. I should be more than happy to help you.”
She bowed her head gravely.
“Thank you! I know enough of the world to appreciate kindness. You are very good—very kind. I had a little plan. I thought perhaps I would give private lessons in my home, if I could find pupils.”
“I’d like to come, very much.”
“Oh, no! With you that is not possible. At least, not now. You have paid for a course of twenty lessons here.”
“I’d rather take them from you.”
“But you have paid!” she cried, with a sort of horror. “You must not waste that money!”
He smiled, with a slight feeling of superiority toward this foreign thrift.
“I’ll arrange it,” he said.
So before the end of the lesson she gave him a card on which was engraved:
“The French form of the name,” she explained. “It would be impossible for any one in this country to pronounce the Russian form.”
He felt a fleeting doubt of this. He would have liked a try at it.
“And your name?” she asked.
“Hardy,” he said. “Winslow Hardy.”
She repeated it, and in spite of Russian ease in foreign tongues, she certainly said “Vinslow.”
They arranged for an afternoon the next week, and they settled the terms, which were high. Hardy was by no means well off, and his heart sank a little at the thought of this expense; but a fine pity swayed him. He would have made many sacrifices for this unhappy woman.
He had never before been conscious of this chivalry in himself. He had been in love from time to time, but it had not been a disinterested passion. He had always sought for the advantage. He had always been kind, generous, a little idealistic in his dealings with his fellows; but never before had he been really moved by pity.
He thought time and again of the poor Russian lady. In fact, he hardly ever forgot her. He imagined the unhappy soul, with all her little elegancies, living in squalor and anxiety, and his mind was busy with schemes for her salvation. He planned to force or persuade every one he knew to study Russian.
III
Imagine Hardy’s surprise when he reached the address given him, and found it to be an imposing apartment house, with a palm-bedecked entrance and two negro boys in uniform to receive him and inspect him with a hostile air. He went up on the lift to the top floor, and found her there in a splendidly furnished sort of double salon, high-ceilinged, bright with sunshine, with flowers and plants all about. She herself was dressed in a short white garment suspiciously like a wrapper, worn over a voluminous black skirt. Over her soft, mouse-colored hair was tied a bit of lace.
He could scarcely avoid staring at her; she didn’t look dressed. It took him a long time to get used to her domestic costume.
The room, too, disconcerted him. It[Pg 18] was no sort of room to have a lesson in. The elegance, the airy charm of it, destroyed his serious intent. He wanted to sit there and chat with his hostess; and in fact that is what he did.
She offered him Russian cigarettes from a little lacquer box, and while he smoked she instructed him for a few minutes; but they were interrupted by the entrance of a gaunt young girl who brought them weak, fragrant tea and a plate of biscuits. After that there was no more lesson. They talked—or, rather, Mme. Sensobiareff talked and he listened.
The hour passed very agreeably. When he saw by his watch that it was finished, he got up to take his leave.
“One minute, if you please!” she said, and went out of the room.
He waited, looking about him, wondering how it was that a woman existing in such comfort should either need or wish to give lessons for a living. Though it increased the illusion of aristocratic refinement there was about her, it filled him with some misgiving. They couldn’t be entirely ruined!
There was the sound of footsteps in the hall, the curtains parted, and she came in again, followed by a man.
“My husband,” she said. “Paul, this is the gentleman who has been so very kind to me.”
Oh, no doubt that he was ruined, poor devil! His face was like wax, his eyes sunken and extinguished, all his bearing hopeless and despairing. He was a slender, high-shouldered man, younger than she by some years, with fair hair and a light mustache—an upcurled mustache, bitterly at variance with his utter despondency. She was right—no doctor was needed to read his fate. Whatever mysterious malady he had, it had progressed beyond any earthly check.
He shook hands with Hardy. He offered him cigarettes again, and insisted upon giving him a glass of sherry. He was very polite, very nervous. He spoke English beautifully, but so fast, so volubly, that it was difficult to follow him.
Hardy couldn’t get away; he had to stay and talk for a long time. The poor chap was marvelously well informed upon American affairs, and it delighted him to talk. He said that he was “considering financial opportunities”; he asked questions about the stock market.
All the time he talked, Hardy was conscious of the stout little woman beside him, watching her husband’s ghastly face with a terrible fervor. It was as if she wanted to remember every one of his looks and his words forever.
It was a devotion of absolute simplicity. He was her sole object in life, her one interest. At the next lesson she began talking about him, and she never stopped. She felt obliged to interpret this great mind of Russia for her American friend. She showed his paintings, she played his music on the piano, she read aloud his Russian poems, and she explained his surroundings.
“Paul is dying of nostalgia,” she said. “He loved his country so! He is used to big, beautiful rooms and light and air. Ah, I never thought they could cost so dear! I have got the best I could for him, but at what a cost—what a cost! It is draining us of every penny. I am taking it, little by little, all we had put away, only to give him these few little things. He is so ill he doesn’t know how I manage. It is the last I can ever do for him. At least he shall die in peace and quiet!”
She did, inevitably, teach Hardy a little Russian. He was presently able to speak to the servant and to be comprehended; but he learned other things of greater value to him. He had before him a lesson in fortitude, in sublime unselfishness, which touched him to the heart. He was beginning to learn something of the charm and the magic that lie in utter sincerity, in spontaneous and artless intercourse.
However, his lessons were abruptly terminated. He found a new position on a Middle Western newspaper, and he left New York.
He parted from Mme. Sensobiareff with real regret. She listened to his plans with an actually motherly interest. He had decided, after all, that he would write a book about the Middle West, which he had heard was replete with atmosphere, and she approved his plan.
“Write, by all means!” she said. “I am sure that you will do well. You Americans are so clever! With us, it is so different. We feel—my God, we feel so deeply, but we are dumb!”
He hadn’t found her or her husband noticeably dumb; however, he didn’t say so. He said that he would write to her, and he went away, filled with hope and his own special and touching enthusiasm. It was[Pg 19] not that he particularly liked writing, but it seemed to him the readiest way to distinguish himself, and that was his great desire.
IV
Hardy’s book was never written. In fact, his Middle Western career was brief and very unpleasant. He didn’t suit his editor at all. He was perpetually criticized and badgered, and his air of sophistication and cynic wisdom was resented as an affectation from the execrated metropolis. He came back to New York in midsummer, terribly disappointed and sorely perplexed. He couldn’t understand his failure, both professional and personal.
He had saved a little money, and he used it to give himself a vacation before applying to his old newspaper. He went on a fishing trip with two other men, to a beautiful, remote mountain spot, far from all noise and turmoil, and far from any supervised source of water supply.
When he came back to the city, he wondered that his vacation had done him so little good. He felt so tired, so wretched, so despondent, that he couldn’t think of going to work. He sat in his furnished room, in a stupor of misery, scarcely able to drag himself out for meals, waiting with alarm and anxiety for his physical and mental condition to improve.
“I hope I’m not going to be ill!” he thought, in despair.
His money was all gone, and what was he to do?
He tried to fight it off. He insisted to himself that it was nothing. He couldn’t lay a finger on any alarming symptom, except this weariness, this chill dread. He couldn’t eat, but he slept a great deal.
It was a sweltering August afternoon, and his room was like an oven. He awakened from a long nap, and sprang up, dizzy and confused, but filled with sudden activity. He wanted to go out, he wanted to talk to somebody, at once. He was in great haste. He brushed his hair with the greatest precision, but he didn’t observe that he had on no collar or tie.
He found it difficult to get down the stairs, and when he reached the street he had to walk very rapidly to keep from staggering. The fierce glare of the sun was intolerable.
Suddenly there came to his distracted brain the thought of Mme. Sensobiareff and her cool, airy rooms, the kindness of her voice. He felt that if he could have a cup of her weak, fragrant tea, and sit quietly listening to her for a little while, his malady would leave him. He needed to talk to her. He was so anxious to talk that he muttered to himself as he walked.
She said, afterward, that he had been guided to her. Perhaps he was; certainly he never quite understood how he got there. He arrived at the hottest hour of that intolerable day, a disheveled and sinister figure. The hall boy didn’t want to let him in, but Hardy pushed him aside with a melodramatic scowl, and began ascending the seven flights of stairs. It didn’t occur to him to use the lift.
He went on at a terrific gait, with his heart pounding madly and his head almost bursting. He didn’t rest once. He reached her door and rang the bell. She opened the door herself, and he lurched in, gasping, his face crimson. He couldn’t speak. He waved his hands feebly and flung himself down on the sofa and cried.
He didn’t faint, he didn’t actually lose consciousness, for he was aware of talking volubly for a long time; yet he didn’t know what was going on about him. At last he came to himself, and gradually became aware that he was lying in bed in a darkened room, with his shoes and coat off, and a damp towel about his forehead. The dark green shades at the windows were flapping with a gentle, pleasing sound. There was an agreeable fresh fragrance in the air—a feeling of wonderful peace and calm. He felt very sick and inert, and he made no effort to move, although he heard voices at his bedside. He looked with languid interest at a big bureau facing him, on which were two framed photographs and a silver toilet service.
“He ought to go to the hospital,” said a deep, buzzing voice.
“Never!” came the voice of Mme. Sensobiareff. “That shall not be!”
“Then you’ll have to get two nurses, one for the day and one for the night. You’ll have to turn your house upside down. It’ll cost you a great deal—a very great deal; and it’s unnecessary and foolish. Put him in the hospital, and—”
“Never! As for two nurses, that cannot be arranged. I shall take care of him myself.”
“Nonsense! He’ll have to be looked after constantly. There are all sorts of[Pg 20] things to be done for him which an inexperienced—”
“Ah! Inexperienced, you tell me?” she whispered fervently. “There is no one in the world who can nurse better than I. I have a genius for nursing. I was at Port Arthur during the most awful days, and I nursed—my God!—perhaps five hundred men. I shall take care of him. My servant will help me.”
“Impossible! You’ll kill the fellow between you. And you’ll be held responsible for—”
“Enough!” she said curtly. “This is my affair. I take it upon myself. Give your instructions; they will be carried out to the letter.”
“You realize that this is a very serious illness?”
“It is the typhoid fever,” said she. “I know very well.”
“Yes,” said the other. “I see you do know something. Well—”
They walked quietly away, and Hardy fell asleep.
In the night he awoke, or grew conscious again, and he saw sitting bolt upright beside his bed the gaunt young servant, in a red calico dressing jacket and a tremendous braid of dark hair. Her flat face looked so immobile, so inhuman, that he suddenly became terrified.
“Madame!” he called. “Quick! Come here! A dead woman! Quick!”
Mme. Sensobiareff hurried into the room almost at once. She soothed him, gave him something to drink, and brought an ice cap for his head. He grew calmer and presently quite lucid.
“Don’t keep me here,” he said, in a weak whisper. “Send me to the hospital. This is too much for you!”
“Hush! Hush! Be quiet! You are not to talk!”
And he gave up completely and resigned himself to her miraculous care.
V
For two weeks Hardy was very ill, often delirious. Then he began little by little to improve, to enter into a delightful period of rest and peace. The two women devoted their lives to him. They waited upon him with the most passionate seriousness. There was no annoying fuss, no superfluous attention, but one or the other of them was at hand every minute, and they divined his every want.
The quiet, beautiful order of the room, the odd and touching delicacy of his nurses, sank into his spirit. In spite of his weakness, in spite of the minor pains and discomforts of his malady, he was happy.
But he couldn’t help worrying. One morning, while Mme. Sensobiareff was busy about the room, he spoke to her about his anxiety.
“It isn’t right!” he said, in a feeble, plaintive tone. “Your husband is ill, too, and I’m taking up all your time and upsetting everything. He won’t—”
“It makes no difference to him,” she said. “He is not here. Only rest and be tranquil, my dear!”
“But I feel like a beast!” he protested. “To come here like this, and to let you do all this! And the expense! I haven’t a cent to repay you. You can’t imagine how it makes me feel. I’m ashamed!”
“That is foolish, my dear—very foolish. I understand how it is with you.” She paused for a moment. “I do not think there is any one on this earth who can understand better the troubles of others,” she said; “because I have felt them all—all! You must believe me!”
As she looked at him, still smiling, her pale, clear eyes grew misty.
“I have the most sorrowful heart in the world,” she said. “He is dead!”
“Your husband?” he cried, shocked.
She bowed her head.
“Three months ago. But we will not speak of that, if you please. You will see now what a blessing it is for me that I can help you.”
As he grew stronger they talked more and more together—or, rather, she talked and he listened. It was a sort of monologue made up of her own vast experience. She had seen so much, traveled so much, suffered so much. She had seen plagues, famine, battles, she had lived in alien and hostile countries, she who lived so much through her friends had seen so many of them suffer; and now, past her youth, she found herself utterly alone, poor, friendless, thousands of miles from her home.
Hardy would sit propped up in a chaise longue near the window, and, while he smoked the five cigarettes he was permitted daily, he would listen to her charming voice, talking and talking. Sometimes he grew sleepy, but he concealed it.
There was one thing that puzzled him. She never sat with him in the evening.[Pg 21] After they had had dinner, which he now took in the dining room, he was always conducted back to his own room, and Anna would come in, with her sewing, to keep him company. This was not very entertaining, for she didn’t know a dozen words of English, and he didn’t like to read and entirely ignore her.
What on earth did Mme. Sensobiareff do with herself? He heard the doorbell ring, time after time, every evening, but he heard no sounds to indicate social activity, no voices, no moving about. Who came? He couldn’t ask Anna, and he didn’t care to ask her mistress; but he thought about it a great deal, and he didn’t like it.
The time came when he was declared well, and the doctor made his last visit.
“Now I’ll have to be thinking about going away,” he said.
“Oh, no!” she protested. “I have this beautiful lodging, all paid for five months to come. You must stay here until you have found a position.”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “It wouldn’t—you see, it’s awfully kind of you, but it wouldn’t look—you see, you’re here all alone. People would talk.”
“These people, who are they? I have no friends. No one will know or care. Don’t trouble yourself, my friend!” she said, smiling. “There will be no difficulty. I am a thousand years old!”
In the end he decided that he would stay, for a time at least, as much for her sake as for his own, until he could find work and in that way be able to help her. He resolved to protect her and care for her all his life.
An amazing existence! It continued for six weeks, for even after he had found a place as copy writer for a mail order house, she insisted upon his taking his earnings to buy clothes.
“Without clothes one can do nothing,” she said. “It is always necessary to present a good appearance.”
She was truly like a mother to him. She looked after his clothes, she wanted to hear every detail of his day, and she dearly loved to give him advice, which was always sensible, but sometimes a little irritating, because it was so obvious. Never was there such a wonderful friend, so unfailingly kind, so loyal, so delicate.
And yet—would you believe it?—all his natural affection for her was poisoned by suspicion, because of those mysterious evenings. He bitterly resented being shunted off into his own room after dinner. He resented the secrecy and the mystery. He would sit there, listening to the sound of the doorbell, the front door opening and closing, and then nothing further. The room she had given him was at the back of the flat, because it was quiet there. It was very quiet.
One evening he went into the kitchen, to try to talk with Anna. Since he had been declared well, the maid no longer sat with him in the evenings, and he felt that even her silent company would be better than none.
He found her sitting by the table, her head in her hands, the picture of a despondent exile; but when he entered she looked up with a friendly, anxious smile.
“You eat?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” he said.
She shrugged her shoulders, to show her despair at not understanding, and kept on smiling.
Suddenly the swing door from the dining room was opened, and Mme. Sensobiareff came in. She looked at Hardy gravely; then, without a word, she drew herself a glass of water and went out again, leaving him astounded and distressed, a prey to the most disagreeable suspicions. What in Heaven’s name was she doing, dressed like that, in evening dress, with bare arms and neck and so elaborate a coiffure?
He went back to his own room and walked up and down in the dark, angry, terribly humiliated. After all, what did he know about her, except that she had been kind? Women of a certain sort were often kind, with a facile, lavish kindness. He felt that he comprehended the mystery now, that he knew what sort of house this was, and the thought of all that he had accepted was intolerable to him.
She had no right to force her kindness on him! It was shameful; she had degraded him. If any one should ever hear of it, that he had been supported—yes, certainly supported for weeks by this woman, out of her disgraceful earnings!
She thought him a little moody and ill-humored the next morning at breakfast; but with her unfailing generosity, she made allowances. She sat there in her crisp white wrapper, a very model of domesticity, and smiled at him over the pretty little bouquet of flowers that she always arranged on the table. She went to the[Pg 22] front door with him, and bade him good-by; and with constraint, in misery, he replied to her, and hurried off. He had decided never to return.
He fully intended to write to her, but he never did. He found it too difficult. He couldn’t reproach her, for her conduct was none of his business, and he could think of no plausible lie. He put off writing for day after day, and little by little the pain of the thing wore off and his regret and shame grew faint.
However, he wasn’t ungrateful. He tried to compute the cost of his illness and his long stay, and he made a magnificent effort to save enough to repay the disconcerting total; but it wasn’t possible. It would take many months. He had got back into newspaper work again, doing special articles, and his earnings were not imposing.
When he had scraped together a small part of his debt, he decided to take the money to her. He trusted to her tact and good sense to avoid the necessity of an awkward explanation.
He arrived at the apartment house, and was about to enter the lift when the boy stopped him.
“The madam’s gone,” he said, with a grin.
“Gone? Moved away?”
“Yes, sir—moved away.” He chuckled. “She certainly did move away. She wuz moved away. Seems she’d borrowed some money on that furniture of hers, and couldn’t pay it. One day the people came and took it away. Ah thought Ah’d never get over laughin’. There she stood, watching it go; and she didn’t have a stick left in the place!”
“Do you know where she went?” asked Hardy.
“No, sir, Ah do not. She didn’t invite me to call,” said the boy.
Hardy went away, heavy-hearted. For many, many nights she came to haunt him—that poor, friendless foreign woman, so wonderfully kind, so wise and so sad. He blamed himself bitterly for losing track of her. She hadn’t investigated his morals, she hadn’t blamed, she hadn’t judged—she had simply helped. His scruples now appeared petty and cruel. He thought that he would give anything he had if he could only see her again, in her beruffled white wrapper, sitting before the samovar and talking.
He remembered her devotion to her husband. What if she had taken a wrong way, in order to live? Who was he, whom she had so greatly benefited, to despise her?
VI
Hardy owed many of his special articles to a detective friend of his named Clendenning—a big, magnificent creature with a princely air and a marvelous wardrobe. When there was something interesting to be “pulled off,” Clendenning used to “tip off” Hardy; and when it was possible, the detective would take his friend along, to witness his exploits.
He was a very useful man for a certain sort of work, for his gentlemanly air made it possible for him to go without arousing suspicion into places where some of his colleagues would have been conspicuous. He was an adroit fellow, full of guile and ironic humor. Nothing in life gave him such pleasure as his “little surprises,” his neat traps for knaves of all sorts.
“If you’re around such and such a corner, at such and such a time,” he would say, “you might see something you could work into a story, old man.”
Hardy always followed such suggestions, and was always rewarded.
One evening Clendenning came into the little restaurant where Hardy almost always ate his dinner, and sat down at the table beside him.
“Want to see something interesting?” he asked.
“I do,” said Hardy.
“There’s a poor old feeble ass of a man who’s been complaining of a mysterious Persian woman,” he said. “He says she’s bewitched him, and he can’t keep away from her. He goes every night to get a psychic consultation, and she gives him advice about the stock market. He’s lost thousands already, but he says he thought he hadn’t interpreted her advice right, and kept going back for more. At last he came to headquarters with a complaint—says she’s a fraud. He says her place is crowded every evening with people clamoring for a chance to press ten dollars into the mysterious Persian’s hand and get a psychic message. Of course, it’s a pretty plain case for the police; but from what he said I thought it might be funny. I like to see how those things are done. It’s wonderful to see how easy it is to fool people. I like[Pg 23] to watch ’em work. She calls herself the Princess Zoraide. Ready?”
They rose and strolled out into the mild October night. They lighted cigars and sauntered uptown to a street of grim and moribund stone houses, given over to more or less mysterious enterprises. They stopped at one, rang the bell, and were admitted to a little drawing room furnished in moldy satin and poorly illuminated by a gas chandelier. Almost every seat was occupied, and the dreary light revealed a set of figures so dramatic, so interesting, that Hardy’s professional instincts were at once aroused.
He saw two women, probably a mother and daughter, sitting side by side, hand in hand, on a sofa, both weeping. He saw a white-bearded old man with his head thrown back and his dim eyes staring raptly at the ceiling. He saw a man who appeared to be on the brink of delirium tremens, his body twitching, his face contorted. He saw a great, fat blond woman in diamonds and silks and feathers, with a false, distrait smile on her painted face. In shadowy corners he saw other women whispering together. He was impressed by the atmosphere of pain, of terrible anxiety, that surrounded these people who came to receive relief and assuagement from the Princess Zoraide.
He sat down near the door with Clendenning, to await his turn. One by one he watched these people receive their summons, vanish into an inner room, and reappear again as shadows hastening through the dark hall to the front door. He would have liked to see their faces then, to see if the psychic consultation had in any way altered them.
The room had filled again, but Hardy was no longer observant. He was thinking. He was thinking of the immeasurable human longing after hope, and it occurred to him that perhaps even a charlatan might satisfy this.
The young woman who gave the summons to the waiting clients once more appeared before the curtains, and repeated her formula:
“The princess is ready for the next seeker!”
“You go first,” said Clendenning, and Hardy rose.
He walked across the room, past all those strained faces, opened the curtains, and entered a room completely dark, filled with a heavy perfume. A hand guided him to a chair, and he vaguely discerned a white form opposite him.
“What is your trouble?” asked a low voice.
He hesitated a moment. He hadn’t prepared anything to say.
“A love affair,” he said at last.
He knew that more questions would follow, but he was unable to arm himself, to set himself to invent something plausible. He was troubled, unhappy; he sat there in the dark with a blank and apprehensive mind.
“And what is the difficulty?” asked the Princess Zoraide. “What is it that you wish to know?”
He said nothing at all.
“Come, my friend!” she said a little impatiently. “Can you expect that I should enter into your heart and know its secrets? I have the most sympathetic nature in the world, but—”
He rose suddenly. He knew that phrase, that voice!
“What? Is it you?” he cried.
“I? Who? What is it that you mean?” she faltered.
“Mme. Sensobiareff!”
She gave a sigh that was like a groan.
“Yes,” she said. “See how I am obliged to gain my living! Ah, well! But why do you come here? Have you some trouble, my dear?”
“No! Listen! Don’t you know how dangerous this is? It’s illegal—it’s not allowed.”
“I do no harm.”
“But it’s against the law.”
“No one will trouble about me, so obscure, so—”
“The man who came with me is a detective. You’ll be arrested.”
“My God!” she cried. “My God! I—arrested?”
To him, an American, her alarm seemed exaggerated. To be arrested had not the same terrible meaning that it had for her. The hand that had clutched his arm trembled violently.
“Arrested? No, no! I do no harm. I help many people. I am very psychic. I am very sympathetic. I comprehend the troubles of others. If you knew! So many people bring their friends to me, because I have helped them! Oh, no! I cannot be arrested! Oh, my friend! At my age! And I am so alone here, in a[Pg 24] foreign land! It will kill me! I shall die!”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Wait! Let me think! Can you slip out without being seen? I will wait for you on the corner of Fifth Avenue. Hurry!”
He went stealthily down the dark hall, opened the front door, and went out. He didn’t know whether the formidable Clendenning had seen him or not. He expected every moment to feel a hand on his shoulder, to see that handsome and ironic face; and then he would be lost. He felt himself absolutely incapable of deceiving Clendenning, or of outwitting him.
But no one came. Hardy stood in the shadow, nervous as a cat, watching the quiet street. He saw some one go up the steps of the house, and enter, but no one came out. Why didn’t she hurry? Had Clendenning already seized her?
He stopped a passing taxi and told the driver to wait, and once more he looked down the silent street. Certainly Clendenning would be growing impatient; if she didn’t come soon—
He was startled to hear her voice behind him.
“I left by the back door and went through the yards to the next street,” she whispered. “I am sure that no one saw me. Oh, my friend!”
He hurried her into the taxi.
“Be quick!” he said to the driver.
He took her to his lodging house, where they entered unobserved and went upstairs to his little room. He locked the door behind them and sat down on the bed, trying to smile, to reassure her; but he expected every moment to hear a knock at the door, and the detective’s voice, demanding satisfaction for this outrageous betrayal. What in Heaven’s name was he to do with her?
“Now, you know,” he said, with a distorted smile, “it wouldn’t be such a serious matter, even if you were arrested. Perhaps a fine—”
“No!” she said firmly. “I should die. If they come to arrest me, I shall kill myself. I have a pistol here in my hand bag!”
“Nonsense!” he cried impatiently. “Don’t be so absurd!”
“Do you think, then, that I have so much to live for?” she asked. “I have nothing—nothing at all. When you went away, without a word—I had thought I should always have you. Well, never mind; let us not speak of it. I am a foolish old woman. Let us say no more.”
He stared at her with a new idea dawning upon him. She wasn’t old. She wasn’t much over forty, he imagined, and she had certainly not renounced the intention to charm. He observed her queer little hat, made up of odds and ends of jet, lace, and satin, her carefully powdered face, her earrings, her drab hair artfully disposed, all her harmless coquetry. He recalled all that she had done for him, how she had nursed him and provided for all his wants. He thought of his base suspicions with shame. The poor soul had simply been holding her psychic consultations to earn money—so much of which she had used for him.
Why hadn’t he seen it before? She loved him—it must be that! For what other reason would a woman do all that she had done?
What sublime sacrifices she had made, and how brutally he had rewarded her! He thought he had never heard of so generous and noble a nature before. He felt crushed and immeasurably humiliated before her—her who had almost undoubtedly saved his life.
“Why shouldn’t I make a sacrifice?” he asked himself. “What better could I do with my life than to try to make her happy? I’m not much good. I’ll never be much use any other way.”
He began to walk up and down the room.
“Of course she’s at least twelve years older than I; but she’s a charming, intelligent woman, and I respect her.”
And then the unworthy thought came to him—what a startling and distinguished thing it would be to marry her!
He stopped short.
“Mme. Sensobiareff,” he said, with dignity, “will you marry me?”
“What?” she asked with a frown.
“I know I’ve acted badly, but I—at the time I didn’t understand. I didn’t really appreciate you; but now—if you will—”
“Marry you!” she said, with a look that amazed him. “Are you mad?”
“But—”
“Is it possible that you didn’t know?” she said. “Couldn’t you see? That man—that saint—”
She began to weep, holding a tiny lace handkerchief to her eyes.
“One of the master minds of Russia—a noble soul—the kindest and best of men!” she sobbed. “Is it possible that[Pg 25] you think—oh, how little you know of women! You think I would replace him?”
“Replace him by you,” her tone implied.
Hardy was completely taken aback. He couldn’t speak.
“No,” she said, drying her eyes. “I have thought of nothing but him. Only help me to get away, where I shall be safe, and then forget me! I am the most unhappy wretch in the world. I have wished only to gain my living, and it seems that I have become a criminal. Only save me from this disgrace!”
“Yes, of course!” he said hurriedly. “Let me see!”
He fancied he heard a footstep on the stairs. He turned pale.
“Have you any money?” he cried. “If you could go to Canada—”
“Yes, I have money. In time, if it had not been for this, I should have become rich. But why are you so pale? Is there danger?”
“There’s no time to lose. Are you ready?”
She rose, adjusted her queer little hat before his mirror, and carefully patted her eyes.
“I am ready,” she said.
They went down the stairs and through the sleeping house with noiseless steps.
“Wait!” said Hardy. “Let me look first!”
He went out into the street and looked carefully up and down. No one there! He returned to fetch her. She took his arm with a pathetic, appealing gesture, and they went off through the quietest and darkest streets, both filled with haste and dread, unable to speak.
She was terribly out of breath when they reached the Grand Central Station. While he bought her ticket, she sat panting on a bench, her face concealed by a thick veil, but her little plump hands clasped passionately. A more forlorn, utterly foreign figure couldn’t be imagined.
They had nearly an hour to wait. He sat down beside her and tried to reassure her.
“You needn’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure there won’t be much of a search for you, and probably there’s no fear of further trouble. Only—you’ll never do that again, will you?”
“Never!”
“What will you do? Write me as soon as you reach Montreal. I’ll be anxious until I hear from you.”
“Yes, I shall write,” she said.
“How will you manage there?”
“I shall find a way.”
He persuaded her to take a cup of coffee and a sandwich at the lunch counter. Then he bought her some magazines and a box of chocolates.
“It’s time for you to go now,” he said. “I want you to know that never, as long as I live, shall I forget what you did for me. It was—”
“Hush!” she said. “You are repaying me, my dear. I only hope I have not brought you any trouble.”
The image of Clendenning rose up before him, but he answered valiantly:
“Certainly not! But when I think of what you did for me—a stranger—”
He could no longer repress the question which tormented him.
“But why did you do it? Why were you so good to me?”
She raised her veil and smiled at him.
“Ah, my dear!” she said “It is the Russian heart![Pg 26]”
MUNSEY’S
MAGAZINE
SEPTEMBER, 1922
Vol. LXXVI NUMBER 4
Hanging’s Too Good for Him
THE PATHETIC STORY OF TOMMY ELLINGER, OF NEW YORK, AND AN INNOCENT YOUNG
GIRL FROM THE COUNTRY
By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
HE first emerged from obscurity at his father’s funeral. He was the only son and the heir to everything, and therefore, of course, the center of interest; but immediately and forever he destroyed all the tepid sympathy and good will of the assembled relatives by his curious air of immense carelessness, his foppish nonchalance.
He hadn’t even the decency to wear a dark suit, they observed. He was dressed in light gray, evidently quite new, and he kept his hands in his pockets. It never occurred to any of them that his indifference might be a clumsy effort to conceal an immeasurable embarrassment. Neither did any one else remember what he remembered—that his father had detested any sort of formal mourning. And it was Tommy’s destiny always to do a thing in the wrong way, always to antagonize, invariably to blunder.
It was not regret for the loss of his father, or any great regard for his opinions, that caused Tommy to remember and to respect his wishes. It was nothing more than a naïve and kindly sentimentality. His father had been a horrible bully to him, the great bogey of his childhood. His mother had died when he was very little, and he had been sent off to boarding school at once.
It seemed to the family that Tommy had always been at school, winter and summer. Once in a great while he had emerged at some cousin’s Christmas party, a rather silly blond boy in military uniform, always spoken of as “poor little Tommy Ellinger.” There were no family rumors or traditions about him, no reports of his behavior at school.
Now, however, that he had definitely come to life, it was necessary for the family to decide upon him, and they decided unfavorably. He got, then and there, the name of being “defiant” and “conceited.”
His father’s elder brother was to be his guardian until he was twenty-one—a task which disgusted and appalled Uncle James. He was an old bachelor lawyer, living in a hotel. Naturally his first thought for Tommy was college, which would remove the boy for all his minority, and even longer; but Tommy fought desperately against that. His hatred for books, for herding with other young males, for all the bullying and chaffing which terrified his awkward innocence, for the competition which dazed his lumbering mind, made him unusually resolute. Business, too, he summarily repudiated.
“Then what do you intend to do?” his uncle demanded, with false patience.
“Well,” said Tommy desperately, “why couldn’t I be a lawyer, like you?”
His uncle looked at him with a grim smile, and answered nothing. The subject was dropped for the time being, and Tommy went to live at his uncle’s hotel, to make up his mind about his very important future. He lived a wretched sort of life, forever hanging about the lobby, or sitting through vaudeville shows and musical comedies. He ate breakfast with his exasperated old uncle every morning, and dinner almost every evening.
There was something peculiarly and intolerably irritating about Tommy—some quality which, in spite of his invariable good temper and his ingratiating manners, infuriated his uncle. A perfect young ass, the old lawyer called him.
Why was it that the qualities which would have been so endearing in a girl of eighteen were so maddening in Tommy? Why was he, with his youth, his boundless good will,[Pg 28] his plaintive innocence, really nothing on earth but a young ass?
He was a great lanky boy with a naïve, good-humored face and a preposterous foppish air, a man-of-the-world air; wearing clothes ostentatiously correct and an amazing eyeglass with a broad black ribbon. He imagined that he looked like a foreign diplomat, while at the bottom of his heart he was quite conscious of being and looking a puppy. He swaggered, but without any self-assurance.
He devoted great thought to his clothes, and he could not refrain from mentioning his sartorial inventions and improvements to his uncle.
“What do you think of the cut of this coat?” he would ask. “Do you notice this shoulder? Rather good, eh?”
“Beautiful!” his uncle would say. “I never saw such grace and elegance—a regular Beau Brummel! You’re fascinating. There’s nothing that interests me like the cut of your coats!”
Then Tommy would open the evening paper and laugh loudly and ostentatiously at something in it, to show how undisturbed he was.
“Why don’t you go out?” the old gentleman used to ask, often and often, when, their dinner finished, they went up together in the lift to the little sitting room they shared. “What’s the matter with you, Thomas? A boy of your age, sitting at home here with an old fellow like me, night after night! Why don’t you go out somewhere and enjoy yourself? Haven’t you any friends?”
Well, he hadn’t. All the boys he had known and liked in the military academy up the Hudson had come from the farthest ends of the country—from Texas, from California, from Maine. He had never been particularly popular, anyhow, and he was too shy and too ridiculous to make friends now.
His uncle attached great importance to this, for he himself had scores of friends. He wished Tommy to be a sort of creature the like of which is no longer to be found—the traditional, old-fashioned beau, the arbiter of elegance, welcomed everywhere, affable, agreeable, but forever unattached, the society man of a past generation. He supplied the boy with spending money, and introduced him to a few charming young married women and a great many old bachelors.
“Now go ahead!” he told him. “Make yourself popular! Make yourself liked! A young man of your age, of good family, with a little money in your pockets, with good prospects!”
He was invited to one or two sedate houses, for his uncle’s sake, but nothing came of it. The society life toward which his uncle urged him forever eluded him. In fact, he had no life of any sort. He was only waiting, hanging about in innocent and dreary idleness, unable to believe that life should so cheat him of every joy, every excitement.
It was spring when Tommy’s father died and he left the military academy. He spent a horrible summer with his uncle, in a hotel in town, or at other similar hotels in the mountains, on the coast, anywhere and everywhere. Then came a still worse winter, during which the old gentleman’s exasperation rose to a fury.
They would go now and then to a musical comedy of the liveliest sort, this being the Uncle James’s idea of what the boy ought to like. When the old man saw him sitting there not liking it, when he saw him not caring for or comprehending wines, a barbarian as to food, absolutely indifferent to the arts, and hopeless in regard to sport, he became almost homicidal.
“Go away!” he shouted at him. “Go and spend this summer by yourself! I won’t waste the money on taking you to a decent place. Go on a farm! Go to some cheap, miserable, damnable little country boarding house, where you can sit and gape all day, like the booby you are!”
Tommy felt that it would be paradise now to get away from his uncle, no matter where. The idea of going off alone, unbullied, unthwarted, quite dazzled him. He was only too ready to go anywhere his uncle suggested.
So Uncle James answered several newspaper advertisements, and at last found a place which he felt would be suitable. He wrote and made all arrangements, and then gave Tommy his directions, money that was to last him for a month, and the following advice:
“Don’t make a fool of yourself about any of the girls there. Remember, you haven’t a penny for the next three years except what I choose to allow you; and if you get yourself mixed up or compromised, I won’t help you. I won’t recognize any responsibility of that sort![Pg 29]”
Tommy turned scarlet.
“Not in my line, Uncle James!” he replied, with extreme jauntiness. And off he went.
II
His uncle almost forgot about Tommy for some time. He had a letter from the boy every week—a stupid, schoolboy letter which he hardly bothered to read. “The weather had been very hot. I guess you are glad not to be here, aren’t you? There is a lot of hay fever around now. It is certainly a lucky thing that you didn’t come”—and that sort of thing.
Then, while Uncle James was enjoying his little breakfast at the corner table in the grill room, which he had occupied for years and years, just as he was about to taste that invariable bowl of oatmeal with cream and powdered sugar, his eye was caught by a headline on the front page of his paper. He dropped his spoon on the floor.