by Willa Cather
Ardessa told herself that O’Mally was notoriously fickle; Becky amused him, but he would soon find out her limitations. The wise thing, she knew, was to humor him; but it seemed to her that she could not swallow her pride. Ardessa grew yellower within the hour. Over and over in her mind she bade O’Mally a cold adieu and minced out past the grand old man at the desk for the last time. But each exit she rehearsed made her feel sorrier for herself. She thought over all the offices she knew, but she realized that she could never meet their inexorable standards of efficiency.
While she was bitterly deliberating, O’Mally himself wandered in, rattling his keys nervously in his pocket. He shut the door behind him.
“Now, you’re going to come through with this all right, aren’t you, Miss Devine? I want Henderson to get over the notion that my people over here are stuck up and think the business department are old shoes. That’s where we get our money from, as he often reminds me. You’ll be the best-paid girl over there; no reduction, of course. You don’t want to go wandering off to some new office where personality doesn’t count for anything.” He sat down confidentially on the edge of her desk. “Do you, now, Miss Devine?”
Ardessa simpered tearfully as she replied.
“Mr. O’Mally,” she brought out, “you’ll soon find that Becky is not the sort of girl to meet people for you when you are away. I don’t see how you can think of letting her.”
“That’s one thing I want to change, Miss Devine. You’re too soft-handed with the has-beens and the never-was-ers. You’re too much of a lady for this rough game. Nearly everybody who comes in here wants to sell us a gold-brick, and you treat them as if they were bringing in wedding presents. Becky is as rough as sandpaper, and she’ll clear out a lot of dead wood.” O’Mally rose, and tapped Ardessa’s shrinking shoulder. “Now, be a sport and go through with it, Miss Devine. I’ll see that you don’t lose. Henderson thinks you’ll refuse to do his work, so I want you to get moved in there before he comes back from lunch. I’ve had a desk put in his office for you. Miss Kalski is in the bookkeeper’s room half the time now.”
Rena Kalski was amazed that afternoon when a line of office boys entered, carrying Miss Devine’s effects, and when Ardessa herself coldly followed them. After Ardessa had arranged her desk, Miss Kalski went over to her and told her about some matters of routine very good-naturedly. Ardessa looked pretty badly shaken up, and Rena bore no grudges.
“When you want the dope on the correspondence with the paper men, don’t bother to look it up. I’ve got it all in my head, and I can save time for you. If he wants you to go over the printing bills every week, you’d better let me help you with that for a while. I can stay almost any afternoon. It’s quite a trick to figure out the plates and overtime charges till you get used to it. I’ve worked out a quick method that saves trouble.”
When Henderson came in at three he found Ardessa, chilly, but civil, awaiting his instructions. He knew she disapproved of his tastes and his manners, but he didn’t mind. What interested and amused him was that Rena Kalski, whom he had always thought as cold-blooded as an adding-machine, seemed to be making a hair-mattress of herself to break Ardessa’s fall.
At five o’clock, when Ardessa rose to go, the business manager said breezily:
“See you at nine in the morning, Miss Devine. We begin on the stroke.”
Ardessa faded out of the door, and Miss Kalski’s slender back squirmed with amusement.
“I never thought to hear such words spoken,” she admitted; “but I guess she’ll limber up all right. The atmosphere is bad over there. They get moldy.”
After the next monthly luncheon of the heads of departments, O’Mally said to Henderson, as he feed the coat-boy:
“By the way, how are you making it with the bartered bride?”
Henderson smashed on his Panama as he said:
“Any time you want her back, don’t be delicate.”
But O’Mally shook his red head and laughed.
“Oh, I’m no Indian giver!”
SCANDAL
Connie Ayrshire had a cold, a persistent inflammation of the vocal cords that defied the throat specialist. Week after week her name was posted at the opera, and week after week it was canceled, and the name of one of her rivals was substituted. For nearly two months she had been deprived of everything she liked, even of the people she liked, and had been shut up until she had come to hate the glass windows between her and the world and the wintry stretch of the park they looked out upon. She was losing a great deal of money and, what was worse, she was losing life; days of which she wanted to make the utmost were slipping by, and nights which were to have crowned the days, nights of incalculable possibilities, were being stolen from her by women for whom she had no great affection. At first she had been courageous, but the strain of prolonged uncertainty was telling on her, and her nervous condition did not improve her larynx. Every morning Miles Creedon looked down her throat, only to put her off with evasions, to pronounce improvement that apparently never got her anywhere, to say that tomorrow he might be able to promise something definite.
Her illness, of course, gave rise to rumors—rumors that she had lost her voice, that at some time last summer she must have lost her discretion. Connie herself was frightened by the way in which this cold hung on. She had had many sharp illnesses in her life, but always before this she had rallied quickly. Was she beginning to lose her resiliency? Was she, by any cursed chance, facing a bleak time when she would have to cherish herself? She protested, as she wandered about her sunny, many-windowed rooms on the tenth floor, that if she was going to have to live frugally, she wouldn’t live at all. She wouldn’t live on any terms but the very generous ones she had always known. She wasn’t going to hoard her vitality. It must be there when she wanted it, be ready for any strain she chose to put upon it, let her play fast and loose with it; and then, if necessary, she would be ill for a while and pay the piper. But be systematically prudent and parsimonious she would not.
When she attempted to deliver all this to Doctor Creedon, he merely put his finger on her lips and said they would discuss these things when she could talk without injuring her throat. He allowed her to see no one except the director of the opera, who did not shine in conversation and was not apt to set Connie going. The director was a glum fellow, indeed, but during this calamitous time he had tried to be soothing, and he agreed with Creedon that she must not risk a premature appearance. Connie was tormented by a suspicion that he was secretly backing the little Spanish woman who had sung many of her parts since she had been ill. He furthered the girl’s interests because his wife had a very special consideration for her, and madame had that consideration because—But that was too long and too dreary a story to follow out in one’s mind. Connie felt a tonsilitis disgust for opera-house politics, which, when she was in health, she rather enjoyed, being no mean strategist herself. The worst of being ill was that it made so many things and people look base.
She was always afraid of being disillusioned. She wished to believe that everything for sale in Vanity Fair was worth the advertised price. When she ceased to believe in these delights, she told herself, her pulling power would decline and she would go to pieces. In some way the chill of her disillusionment would quiver through the long, black line which reached from the box-office down to Seventh Avenue on nights when she sang. They shivered there in the rain and cold, all those people, because they loved to believe in her inextinguishable zest. She was no prouder of what she drew in the boxes than she was of that long, oscillating tail, little fellows in thin coats, Italians, Frenchmen, South-Americans, Japanese.
When she had been cloistered like a Trappist for six weeks, with nothing from the outside world but notes and flowers and disquieting morning papers, Connie told Miles Creedon that she could not endure complete isolation any longer.
“I simply cannot live th
rough the evenings. They have become horrors to me. Every night is the last night of a condemned man. I do nothing but cry, and that makes my throat worse.”
Miles Creedon, handsomest of his profession, was better looking with some invalids than with others. His athletic figure, his red cheeks, and splendid teeth always had a cheering effect upon this particular patient, who hated anything weak or broken.
“What can I do, my dear? What do you wish? Shall I come and hold your lovely hand from eight to ten? You have only to suggest it.”
“Would you do that even? No, caro mio, I take far too much of your time as it is. For an age now you have been the only man in the world to me and you have been charming. But the world is big, and I am missing it. Let some one come tonight, some one interesting, but not too interesting. Pierce Tevis, for instance. He is just back from Paris. Tell the nurse I may see him for an hour tonight,” Connie finished pleadingly, and put her fingers on the doctor’s sleeve. He looked down at them and smiled whimsically.
Like other people, he was weak to Connie Ayrshire. He would do for her things that he would do for no one else; would break any engagement, desert a dinner-table, leaving an empty place and an offended hostess, to sit all evening in Connie’s dressing-room, spraying her throat and calming her nerves, using every expedient to get her through a performance. He had studied her voice like a singing master; knew all of its idiosyncracies and the emotional and nervous perturbations which affected it. When it was permissible, sometimes when it was not permissible, he indulged her caprices. On this sunny morning her wan, disconsolate face moved him.
“Yes, you may see Tevis this evening if you will assure me that you will not shed one tear for twenty-four hours. I may depend on your word?” He rose, and stood before the deep couch on which his patient reclined. Her arch look seemed to say, “On what could you depend more?” Creedon smiled, and shook his head. “If I find you worse tomorrow—” He crossed to the writing-table and began to separate a bunch of tiny flame-colored rosebuds. “May I?” Selecting one, he sat down on the chair from which he had lately risen, and leaned forward while Connie pinched the thorns from the stem and arranged the flower in his buttonhole.
“Thank you. I like to wear one of yours. Now I must be off to the hospital. I’ve a nasty little operation to do this morning. I’m glad it’s not you. Shall I telephone Tevis about this evening?”
Connie hesitated. Her eyes ran rapidly about, seeking a likely pretext. Creedon laughed.
“Oh, I see. You’ve already asked him to come. You were so sure of me! Two hours in bed after lunch, with all the windows open, remember. Read something diverting, but not exciting; some homely British author; nothing abandonné. And don’t make faces at me. Until tomorrow!”
When her charming doctor had disappeared through the doorway, Connie fell back on her cushions and closed her eyes. Her mocking-bird, excited by the sunlight, was singing in his big gilt cage, and a white lilac-tree that had come that morning was giving out its faint sweetness in the warm room. But Connie looked paler and wearier than when the doctor was with her. Even with him she rose to her part just a little; couldn’t help it. And he took his share of her vivacity and sparkle, like every one else. He believed that his presence was soothing to her. But he admired; and whoever admired, blew on the flame, however lightly.
The mocking-bird was in great form this morning. He had the best bird voice she had ever heard, and Connie wished there were some way to note down his improvisations; but his intervals were not expressible in any scale she knew. Parker White had brought him to her from Ojo Caliente, in New Mexico, where he had been trained in the pine forests by an old Mexican and an ill-tempered, lame master-bird, half thrush, that taught young birds to sing. This morning, in his song there were flashes of silvery Southern springtime; they opened inviting roads of memory. In half an hour he had sung his disconsolate mistress to sleep.
That evening Connie sat curled up on the deep couch before the fire awaiting Pierce Tevis. Her costume was folds upon folds of diaphanous white over equally diaphanous rose, with a line of white fur about her neck. Her beautiful arms were bare. Her tiny Chinese slippers were embroidered so richly that they looked like the painted porcelain of old vases. She looked like a sultan’s youngest, newest bride; a beautiful little toy-woman, sitting at one end of the long room which composed about her, which, in the soft light, seemed happily arranged for her. There were flowers everywhere: rose-trees; camellia-bushes, red and white; the first forced hyacinths of the season; a feathery mimosa-tree tall enough to stand under.
The long front of Connie’s study was all windows. At one end was the fireplace, before which she sat. At the other, set back in a lighted alcove, hung a big, warm, sympathetic interior by Lucien Simon, a group of Connie’s friends having tea in the painter’s salon in Paris. The room in the picture was flooded with early lamp-light, and one could feel the gray, chill winter twilight in the Paris streets outside. There stood the lion-like old composer, who had done much for Connie, in his most characteristic attitude before the hearth. Mme. Simon sat at the tea-table. B——, the historian, and H——, the philologist, stood in animated discussion behind the piano, while Mme. H—— was tying on the bonnet of her lovely little daughter. Marcel Durand, the physicist, sat alone in a corner, his startling black-and-white profile lowered broodingly, his cold hands locked over his sharp knee. A genial, red-bearded sculptor stood over him, about to touch him on the shoulder and waken him from his dream.
This painting made simply another room, so that Connie’s study on Central Park West seemed to open into that charming French interior, into one of the most highly harmonized and richly associated rooms in Paris. There her friends sat or stood about, men distinguished, women at once plain and beautiful, with their furs and bonnets, their clothes that were so distinctly not smart—all held together by the warm lamp-light, by an indescribable atmosphere of graceful and gracious human living.
Pierce Tevis, after he had entered noiselessly and greeted Connie, stood before her fire and looked over her shoulder at this picture.
“It’s nice that you have them there together, now that they are scattered, God knows where, fighting to preserve just that. But your own room, too, is charming,” he added at last, taking his eyes from the canvas.
Connie shrugged her shoulders.
“Bah! I can help to feed the lamp, but I can’t supply the dear things it shines upon.”
“Well, tonightit shines upon you and me, and we aren’t so bad.” Tevis stepped forward and took her hand affectionately. “You’ve been over a rough bit of road. I’ m so sorry. It’s left you looking very lovely, though. Has it been very hard to get on?”
She brushed his hand gratefully against her cheek and nodded.
“Awfully dismal. Everything has been shut out from me but—gossip. That always gets in. Often I don’t mind, but this time I have. People do tell such lies about me.”
“Of course we do. That’s part of our fun, one of the many pleasures you give us. It only shows how hard up we are for interesting public personages, for a royal family, for romantic fiction, if you will. But I never hear any stories that wound me, and I’m very sensitive about you.”
“I’m gossiped about rather more than the others, am I not?”
“I believe! Heaven send that the day when you are not gossiped about is far distant! Do you want to bite off your nose to spite your pretty face? You are the sort of person who makes myths. You can’t turn around without making one. That’s your singular good luck. A whole staff of publicity men, working day and night, couldn’t do for you what you do for yourself. There is an affinity between you and the popular imagination.”
“I suppose so,” said Connie, and sighed. “All the same, I’m getting almost as tired of the person I’m supposed to be as of the person I really am. I wish you would invent a new Connie Ayrshire for me, Pierce. Ca
n’t I do something revolutionary? Marry, for instance?”
Tevis rose in alarm.
“Whatever you do, don’t try to change your legend. You have now the one that gives the greatest satisfaction to the greatest number of people. Don’t disappoint your public. The popular imagination, to which you make such a direct appeal, for some reason wished you to have a son, so it has given you one. I’ve heard a dozen versions of the story, but it is always a son, never by any chance a daughter. Your public gives you what is best for you. Let well enough alone.”
Connie yawned and dropped back on her cushions.
“He still persists, does he, in spite of never being visible?”
“Oh, but he has been seen by ever so many people. Let me think a moment.” He sank into an attitude of meditative ease. “The best description I ever had of him was from a friend of my mother, an elderly woman, thoroughly reliable and matter-of-fact. She has seen him often. He is kept in Russia, in Moscow, at school. He is about eight years old and of marvelous beauty. He is always that in every version. My old friend has seen him being driven in his sledge on the Nevskii Prospekt on winter afternoons; black horses with silver bells and a giant in uniform on the seat beside the driver. He is always attended by this giant, who is responsible to the Grand Duke Paul for the boy. This lady can produce no evidence beyond his beauty and his splendid furs and the fact that all the Americans in Moscow know that he is your son.”