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CHAPTER 13
The street-lamps were lit, but the rain had ceased, and there was a momentary revival
of light in the upper sky. Lily walked on unconscious of her
surroundings.
She was still treading the buoyant ether which emanates from the high moments of
life.
But gradually it shrank away from her and she felt the dull pavement beneath her
feet.
The sense of weariness returned with accumulated force, and for a moment she
felt that she could walk no farther.
She had reached the corner of Forty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and she remembered
that in Bryant Park there were seats where she might rest.
That melancholy pleasure-ground was almost deserted when she entered it, and she sank
down on an empty bench in the glare of an electric street-lamp.
The warmth of the fire had passed out of her veins, and she told herself that she
must not sit long in the penetrating dampness which struck up from the wet
asphalt.
But her will-power seemed to have spent itself in a last great effort, and she was
lost in the blank reaction which follows on an unwonted expenditure of energy.
And besides, what was there to go home to?
Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room--that silence of the night which may
be more racking to tired nerves than the most discordant noises: that, and the
bottle of chloral by her bed.
The thought of the chloral was the only spot of light in the dark prospect: she
could feel its lulling influence stealing over her already.
But she was troubled by the thought that it was losing its power--she dared not go back
to it too soon.
Of late the sleep it had brought her had been more broken and less profound; there
had been nights when she was perpetually floating up through it to consciousness.
What if the effect of the drug should gradually fail, as all narcotics were said
to fail?
She remembered the chemist's warning against increasing the dose; and she had
heard before of the capricious and incalculable action of the drug.
Her dread of returning to a sleepless night was so great that she lingered on, hoping
that excessive weariness would reinforce the waning power of the chloral.
Night had now closed in, and the roar of traffic in Forty-second Street was dying
out.
As complete darkness fell on the square the lingering occupants of the benches rose and
dispersed; but now and then a stray figure, hurrying homeward, struck across the path
where Lily sat, looming black for a moment
in the white circle of electric light.
One or two of these passers-by slackened their pace to glance curiously at her
lonely figure; but she was hardly conscious of their scrutiny.
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 *** 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 spasmodic
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
corner 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 torn 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.
There remained to her, as she had told him, the uplifting memory of his faith in her;
but she had not reached the age when a woman can live on her memories.
As she held Nettie Struther's child in her arms the frozen currents of youth had
loosed themselves and run warm in her veins: the old life-hunger possessed her,
and all her being clamoured for its share of personal happiness.
Yes--it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made
everything else of no account.
One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw that
nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.
It was growing late, and an immense weariness once more possessed her.
It was not the stealing sense of sleep, but a vivid wakeful fatigue, a wan lucidity of
mind against which all the possibilities of the future were shadowed forth
gigantically.
She was appalled by the intense cleanness of the vision; she seemed to have broken
through the merciful veil which intervenes between intention and action, and to see
exactly what she would do in all the long days to come.
There was the cheque in her desk, for instance--she meant to use it in paying her
debt to Trenor; but she foresaw that when the morning came she would put off doing
so, would slip into gradual tolerance of the debt.
The thought terrified her--she dreaded to fall from the height of her last moment
with Lawrence Selden.
But how could she trust herself to keep her footing?
She knew the strength of the opposing impulses-she could feel the countless hands
of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate.
She felt an intense longing to prolong, to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her
spirit.
If only life could end now--end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost
possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the loving and foregoing
in the world!
She reached out suddenly and, drawing the cheque from her writing-desk, enclosed it
in an envelope which she addressed to her bank.
She then wrote out a cheque for Trenor, and placing it, without an accompanying word,
in an envelope inscribed with his name, laid the two letters side by side on her
desk.
After that she continued to sit at the table, sorting her papers and writing, till
the intense silence of the house reminded her of the lateness of the hour.
In the street the noise of wheels had ceased, and the rumble of the "elevated"
came only at long intervals through the deep unnatural hush.
In the mysterious nocturnal separation from all outward signs of life, she felt herself
more strangely confronted with her fate.
The sensation made her brain reel, and she tried to shut out consciousness by pressing
her hands against her eyes.
But the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to symbolize her future--she felt as
though the house, the street, the world were all empty, and she alone left sentient
in a lifeless universe.
But this was the verge of delirium...she had never hung so near the dizzy brink of
the unreal.
Sleep was what she wanted--she remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two
nights. The little bottle was at her bed-side,
waiting to lay its spell upon her.
She rose and undressed hastily, hungering now for the touch of her pillow.
She felt so profoundly tired that she thought she must fall asleep at once; but
as soon as she had lain down every nerve started once more into separate
wakefulness.
It was as though a great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and
her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it, without knowing where to
take refuge.
She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness was possible:
her whole past was reenacting itself at a hundred different points of consciousness.
Where was the drug that could still this legion of insurgent nerves?
The sense of exhaustion would have been sweet compared to this shrill beat of
activities; but weariness had dropped from her as though some cruel stimulant had been
forced into her veins.
She could bear it--yes, she could bear it; but what strength would be left her the
next day?
Perspective had disappeared--the next day pressed close upon her, and on its heels
came the days that were to follow--they swarmed about her like a shrieking mob.
She must shut them out for a few hours; she must take a brief bath of oblivion.
She put out her hand, and measured the soothing drops into a glass; but as she did
so, she knew they would be powerless against the supernatural lucidity of her
brain.
She had long since raised the dose to its highest limit, but tonight she felt she
must increase it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing
so--she remembered the chemist's warning.
If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep without waking.
But after all that was but one chance in a hundred: the action of the drug was
incalculable, and the addition of a few drops to the regular dose would probably do
no more than procure for her the rest she so desperately needed....
She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely--the physical craving
for sleep was her only sustained sensation.
Her mind shrank from the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes contract in a
blaze of light--darkness, darkness was what she must have at any cost.
She raised herself in bed and swallowed the contents of the glass; then she blew out
her candle and lay down.
She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first effects of the
soporific.
She knew in advance what form they would take--the gradual cessation of the inner
throb, the soft approach of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes
over her in the darkness.
The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect increased its fascination: it was
delicious to lean over and look down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness.
Tonight the drug seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to be
stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like
sentinels falling asleep at their posts.
But gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she wondered
languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited.
She saw now that there was nothing to be excited about--she had returned to her
normal view of life.
Tomorrow would not be so difficult after all: she felt sure that she would have the
strength to meet it.
She did not quite remember what it was that she had been afraid to meet, but the
uncertainty no longer troubled her.
She had been unhappy, and now she was happy--she had felt herself alone, and now
the sense of loneliness had vanished.
She stirred once, and turned on her side, and as she did so, she suddenly understood
why she did not feel herself alone.
It was odd--but Nettie Struther's child was lying on her arm: she felt the pressure of
its little head against her shoulder.
She did not know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the fact,
only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure.
She settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to pillow the
round downy head, and holding her breath lest a sound should disturb the sleeping
child.
As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden,
some word she had found that should make life clear between them.
She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge
of thought--she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she
could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.
Slowly the thought of the word faded, and sleep began to enfold her.
She struggled faintly against it, feeling that she ought to keep awake on account of
the baby; but even this feeling was gradually lost in an indistinct sense of
drowsy peace, through which, of a sudden,
a dark flash of loneliness and terror tore its way.
She started up again, cold and trembling with the shock: for a moment she seemed to
have lost her hold of the child.
But no--she was mistaken--the tender pressure of its body was still close to
hers: the recovered warmth flowed through her once more, she yielded to it, sank into
it, and slept.