My Mortal Enemy (5 page)

As we walked home she slipped her arm through mine, and we fell a little behind the other two. “See the moon coming out, Nellie—behind the tower. It wakens the guilt in me. No playing with love; and I’d sworn a great oath never to meddle again. You send a handsome fellow like Ewan Gray to a fine girl like Esther, and it’s Christmas eve, and they rise above us and the white world around us, and there isn’t anybody, not a tramp on the park benches, that wouldn’t wish them well—and very likely hell will come of it!”

T
he next morning Oswald Henshawe, in a frock-coat and top-hat, called to take Aunt Lydia and me to church. The weather had cleared before we went to bed, and as we stepped out of our hotel that morning, the sun shone blindingly on the snow-covered park, the gold Diana flashed against a green-blue sky. We were going to Grace Church, and the morning was so beautiful that we decided to walk.

“Lydia,” said Henshawe, as he took us each by an arm, “I want you to give me a Christmas present.”

“Why, Oswald,” she stammered.

“Oh, I have it ready! You’ve only to present it.” He took a little flat package from his pocket and slipped it into her muff. He drew both of us closer to him. “Listen, it’s nothing. It’s some sleeve-buttons, given me by a young woman who means no harm, but doesn’t know the ways of the world very well. She’s from a breezy Western city, where a rich girl can give a present whenever she wants to and nobody questions it. She sent these to my office yesterday. If I send them back to her it will hurt her feelings; she would think I had misunderstood her. She’ll get hard knocks here, of course, but I don’t want to give her any. On the other hand—well, you know Myra; nobody better. She would
punish herself and everybody else for this young woman’s questionable taste. So I want you to give them to me, Lydia.”

“Oh, Oswald,” cried my aunt, “Myra is so keen! I’m not clever enough to fool Myra. Can’t you just put them away in your office?”

“Not very well. Besides,” he gave a slightly embarrassed laugh, “I’d like to wear them. They are very pretty.”

“Now, Oswald …”

“Oh, it’s all right, Lydia, I give you my word it is. But you know how a little thing of that sort can upset my wife. I thought you might give them to me when you come over to dine with us to-morrow night. She wouldn’t be jealous of you. But if you don’t like the idea … why, just take them home with you and give them to some nice boy who would appreciate them.”

All through the Christmas service I could see that Aunt Lydia was distracted and perplexed. As soon as we got back to the hotel and were safe in our rooms she took the brown leather case from her muff and opened it. The sleeve-buttons were topazes, winy-yellow, lightly set in crinkly gold. I believe she was seduced by their beauty. “I really think he ought to have them, if he wants them. Everything is always for Myra. He never gets anything for himself. And all the admiration is for her; why shouldn’t he have a little?
He has been devoted to a fault. It isn’t good for any woman to be humoured and pampered as he has humoured her. And she’s often most unreasonable with him—most unreasonable!”

The next evening, as we were walking across the Square to the Henshawes, we glanced up and saw them standing together in one of their deep front windows, framed by the plum-coloured curtains. They were looking out, but did not see us. I noticed that she was really quite a head shorter than he, and she leaned a little towards him. When she was peaceful, she was like a dove with its wings folded. There was something about them, as they stood in the lighted window, that would have discouraged me from meddling, but it did not shake my aunt.

As soon as we were in the parlour, before we had taken off our coats, she said resolutely: “Myra, I want to give Oswald a Christmas present. Once an old friend left with me some cuff-links he couldn’t keep—unpleasant associations, I suppose. I thought of giving them to one of my own boys, but I brought them for Oswald. I’d rather he would have them than anybody.”

Aunt Lydia spoke with an ease and conviction which compelled my admiration. She took the buttons out of her muff, without the box, of course, and laid them in Mrs. Henshawe’s hand.

Mrs. Henshawe was delighted. “How clever of you
to think of it, Liddy, dear! Yes, they’re exactly right for him. There’s hardly any other stone I would like, but these are exactly right. Look, Oswald, they’re the colour of a fine Moselle.” It was Oswald himself who seemed disturbed, and not overpleased. He grew red, was confused in his remarks, and was genuinely reluctant when his wife insisted upon taking the gold buttons out of his cuffs and putting in the new ones. “I can’t get over your canniness, Liddy,” she said as she fitted them.

“It’s not like me, is it, Myra?” retorted my aunt; “not like me at all to choose the right sort of thing. But did it never occur to you that anyone besides yourself might know what is appropriate for Oswald? No, I’m sure it never did!”

Mrs. Myra took the laugh so heartily to herself that I felt it was a shame to deceive her. So, I am sure, did Oswald. During dinner he talked more than usual, but he was ill at ease. Afterwards, at the opera, when the lights were down, I noticed that he was not listening to the music, but was looking listlessly off into the gloom of the house, with something almost sorrowful in his strange, half-moon eyes. During an
entr’acte
a door at the back was opened, and a draught blew in. As he put his arm back to pull up the cloak which had slipped down from his wife’s bare shoulders, she
laughed and said: “Oh, Oswald, I love to see your jewels flash!”

He dropped his hand quickly and frowned so darkly that I thought he would have liked to put the topazes under his heel and grind them up. I thought him properly served then, but often since I have wondered at his gentle heart.

D
uring the week between Christmas and New Year’s day I was with Mrs. Henshawe a great deal, but we were seldom alone. It was the season of calls and visits, and she said that meeting so many people would certainly improve my manners and my English. She hated my careless, slangy, Western speech. Her friends, I found, were of two kinds: artistic people—actors, musicians, literary men—with whom she was always at her best because she admired them; and another group whom she called her “moneyed” friends (she seemed to like the word), and these she cultivated, she told me, on Oswald’s account. “He is the sort of man who does well in business only if he has the incentive of friendships. He doesn’t properly belong in business. We never speak of it, but I’m sure he hates it. He went into an office only because we were young and terribly in love, and had to be married.”

The business friends seemed to be nearly all Germans. On Sunday we called at half-a-dozen or more big houses. I remember very large rooms, much upholstered and furnished, walls hung with large paintings in massive frames, and many stiff, dumpy little sofas, in which the women sat two-and-two, while the men stood about the refreshment tables, drinking champagne
and coffee and smoking fat black cigars. Among these people Mrs. Myra took on her loftiest and most challenging manner. I could see that some of the women were quite afraid of her. They were in great haste to rush refreshments to her, and looked troubled when she refused anything. They addressed her in German and profusely complimented her upon the way she spoke it. We had a carriage that afternoon, and Myra was dressed in her best—making an especial effort on Oswald’s account; but the rich and powerful irritated her. Their solemnity was too much for her sense of humour; there was a biting edge to her sarcasm, a curl about the corners of her mouth that was never there when she was with people whose personality charmed her.

I had one long, delightful afternoon alone with Mrs. Henshawe in Central Park. We walked for miles, stopped to watch the skating, and finally had tea at the Casino, where she told me about some of the singers and actors I would meet at her apartment on New Year’s eve. Her account of her friends was often more interesting to me than the people themselves. After tea she hailed a hansom and asked the man to drive us about the park a little, as a fine sunset was coming on. We were jogging happily along under the elms, watching the light change on the crusted snow, when a carriage passed from which a handsome woman leaned
out and waved to us. Mrs. Henshawe bowed stiffly, with a condescending smile. “There, Nellie,” she exclaimed, “that’s the last woman I’d care to have splashing past me, and me in a hansom cab!”

I glimpsed what seemed to me insane ambition. My aunt was always thanking God that the Henshawes got along as well as they did, and worrying because she felt sure Oswald wasn’t saving anything. And here Mrs. Myra was wishing for a carriage—with stables and a house and servants, and all that went with a carriage! All the way home she kept her scornful expression, holding her head high and sniffing the purple air from side to side as we drove down Fifth Avenue. When we alighted before her door she paid the driver, and gave him such a large fee that he snatched off his hat and said twice: “Thank you, thank you, my lady!” She dismissed him with a smile and a nod. “All the same,” she whispered to me as she fitted her latchkey, “it’s very nasty, being poor!”

That week Mrs. Henshawe took me to see a dear friend of hers, Anne Aylward, the poet. She was a girl who had come to New York only a few years before, had won the admiration of men of letters, and was now dying of tuberculosis in her early twenties. Mrs. Henshawe had given me a book of her poems to read, saying: “I want you to see her so that you can remember
her in after years, and I want her to see you so that we can talk you over.”

Miss Aylward lived with her mother in a small flat overlooking the East River, and we found her in a bath-chair, lying in the sun and watching the river boats go by. Her study was a delightful place that morning, full of flowers and plants and baskets of fruit that had been sent her for Christmas. But it was Myra Henshawe herself who made that visit so memorably gay. Never had I seen her so brilliant and strangely charming as she was in that sunlit study up under the roofs. Their talk quite took my breath away; they said such exciting, such fantastic things about people, books, music—anything; they seemed to speak together a kind of highly flavoured special language.

As we were walking home she tried to tell me more about Miss Aylward, but tenderness for her friend and bitter rebellion at her fate choked her voice. She suffered physical anguish for that poor girl. My aunt often said that Myra was incorrigibly extravagant; but I saw that her chief extravagance was in caring for so many people and in caring for them so much. When she but mentioned the name of someone whom she admired, one got an instant impression that the person must be wonderful, her voice invested the name with a sort of grace. When she liked people she always called them
by name a great many times in talking to them, and she enunciated the name, no matter how commonplace, in a penetrating way, without hurrying over it or slurring it; and this, accompanied by her singularly direct glance, had a curious effect. When she addressed Aunt Lydia, for instance, she seemed to be speaking to a person deeper down than the blurred, taken-for-granted image of my aunt that I saw every day, and for a moment my aunt became more individual, less matter-of-fact to me. I had noticed this peculiar effect of Myra’s look and vocative when I first met her, in Parthia, where her manner of addressing my relatives had made them all seem a little more attractive to me.

One afternoon when we were at a matinée I noticed in a loge a young man who looked very much like the photographs of a story-writer popular at that time. I asked Mrs. Henshawe whether it could be he. She looked in the direction I indicated, then looked quickly away again.

“Yes, it’s he. He used to be a friend of mine. That’s a sad phrase, isn’t it? But there was a time when he could have stood by Oswald in a difficulty—and he didn’t. He passed it up. Wasn’t there. I’ve never forgiven him.”

I regretted having noticed the man in the loge, for all the rest of the afternoon I could feel the bitterness
working in her. I knew that she was suffering. The scene on the stage was obliterated for her; the drama was in her mind. She was going over it all again; arguing, accusing, denouncing.

As we left the theatre she sighed: “Oh, Nellie, I wish you hadn’t seen him! It’s all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?”—she beat on her fur collar with her two gloved hands—“that’s where the rub comes!”

The Henshawes always gave a party on New Year’s eve. That year most of the guests were stage people. Some of them, in order to get there before midnight, came with traces of make-up still on their faces. I remember old Jefferson de Angelais arrived in his last-act wig, carrying his plumed hat—during the supper his painted eyebrows spread and came down over his eyes like a veil. Most of them are dead now, but it was a fine group that stood about the table to drink the New Year in. By far the handsomest and most distinguished of that company was a woman no longer young, but beautiful in age, Helena Modjeska. She looked a woman of another race and another period, no less queenly than when I had seen her in Chicago as Marie Stuart, and as Katharine in
Henry VIII.
I remember how, when Oswald asked her to propose a toast, she put out her
long arm, lifted her glass, and looking into the blur of the candlelight with a grave face, said: “To my coun-n-try!”

As she was not playing, she had come early, some time before the others, bringing with her a young Polish woman who was singing at the Opera that winter. I had an opportunity to watch Modjeska as she sat talking to Myra and Esther Sinclair—Miss Sinclair had once played in her company. When the other guests began to arrive, and Myra was called away, she sat by the fire in a high-backed chair, her head resting lightly on her hand, her beautiful face half in shadow. How well I remember those long, beautifully modelled hands, with so much humanity in them. They were worldly, indeed, but fashioned for a nobler worldliness than ours; hands to hold a sceptre, or a chalice—or, by courtesy, a sword.