My Mortal Enemy (7 page)

I was delighted. She was … she was herself, Myra Henshawe! I hadn’t expected anything so good. The electric bulbs in the room were shrouded and muffled with coloured scarfs, and in that light she looked much less changed than Oswald. The corners of her mouth had relaxed a little, but they could still curl very scornfully upon occasion; her nose was the same sniffy little nose, with its restless, arched nostrils, and her double chin, though softer, was no fuller. A strong cable of grey-black hair was wound on the top of her head, which, as she once remarked, “was no head for a woman at all, but would have graced one of the wickedest of the Roman emperors.”

Her bed was in the alcove behind her. In the shadowy dimness of the room I recognised some of the rugs from their New York apartment, some of the old pictures, with frames peeling and glass cracked. Here was Myra’s little inlaid tea-table, and the desk at which Oswald had been writing that day when I dropped in upon their quarrel. At the windows were the dear, plum-coloured curtains, their cream lining streaked and faded—but the sight of them rejoiced me more than I could tell the Henshawes.

“And where did you come from, Nellie? What are you doing here, in heaven’s name?”

While I explained myself she listened intently, holding my wrist with one of her beautiful little hands, which were so inexplicably mischievous in their outline, and which, I noticed, were still white and well cared for.

“Ah, but teaching, Nellie! I don’t like that, not even for a temporary expedient. It’s a cul-de-sac. Generous young people use themselves all up at it; they have no sense. Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.”

“But won’t you allow me, too, a temporary eclipse?”

She laughed and squeezed my hand. “Ah,
we
wouldn’t be hiding in the shadow, if we were five-and-twenty! We were throwing off sparks like a pair of shooting stars, weren’t we, Oswald? No, I can’t bear teaching for you, Nellie. Why not journalism? You could always make your way easily there.”

“Because I hate journalism. I know what I want to do, and I’ll work my way out yet, if only you’ll give me time.”

“Very well, dear.” She sighed. “But I’m ambitious for you. I’ve no patience with young people when they drift. I wish I could live their lives for them; I’d know how! But there it is; by the time you’ve learned the short cuts, your feet puff up so that you can’t take the road at all. Now tell me about your mother and my Lydia.”

I had hardly begun when she lifted one finger and
sniffed the air. “Do you get it? That bitter smell of the sea? It’s apt to come in on the night wind. I live on it. Sometimes I can still take a drive along the shore. Go on; you say that Lydia and your mother are at present in disputation about the possession of your late grandfather’s portrait. Why don’t you cut it in two for them, Nellie? I remember it perfectly, and half of it would be enough for anybody!”

While I told her any amusing gossip I could remember about my family, she sat crippled but powerful in her brilliant wrappings. She looked strong and broken, generous and tyrannical, a witty and rather wicked old woman, who hated life for its defeats, and loved it for its absurdities. I recalled her angry laugh, and how she had always greeted shock or sorrow with that dry, exultant chuckle which seemed to say: “Ah-ha, I have one more piece of evidence, one more, against the hideous injustice God permits in this world!”

While we were talking, the silence of the strangely balmy February evening was rudely disturbed by the sound of doors slamming and heavy tramping overhead. Mrs. Henshawe winced, a look of apprehension and helplessness, a tortured expression, came over her face. She turned sharply to her husband, who was resting peacefully in one of their old, deep chairs, over by the muffled light. “There they are, those animals!”

He sat up. “They have just come back from church,” he said in a troubled voice.

“Why should I have to know when they come back from church? Why should I have the details of their stupid, messy existence thrust upon me all day long, and half the night?” she broke out bitterly. Her features became tense, as from an attack of pain, and I realised how unable she was to bear things.

“We are unfortunate in the people who live over us,” Oswald explained. “They annoy us a great deal. These new houses are poorly built, and every sound carries.”

“Couldn’t you ask them to walk more quietly?” I suggested.

He smiled and shook his head. “We have, but it seems to make them worse. They are that kind of people.”

His wife broke in. “The palavery kind of Southerners; all that slushy gush on the surface, and no sensibilities whatever—a race without consonants and without delicacy. They tramp up there all day long like cattle. The stalled ox would have trod softer. Their energy isn’t worth anything, so they use it up gabbling and running about, beating my brains into a jelly.”

She had scarcely stopped for breath when I heard a telephone ring overhead, then shrieks of laughter, and
two people ran across the floor as if they were running a foot-race.

“You hear?” Mrs. Henshawe looked at me triumphantly. “Those two silly old hens race each other to the telephone as if they had a sweetheart at the other end of it. While I could still climb stairs, I hobbled up to that woman and implored her, and she began gushing about ‘mah sistah’ and ‘mah son,’ and what ‘rah-fined’ people they were.… Oh, that’s the cruelty of being poor; it leaves you at the mercy of such pigs! Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.” She leaned back, exhausted, and shut her eyes.

“Come, Nellie,” said Oswald, softly. He walked down the hall to my door with me. “I’m sorry the disturbance began while you were there. Sometimes they go to the movies, and stay out later,” he said mournfully. “I’ve talked to that woman and to her son, but they are very unfeeling people.”

“But wouldn’t the management interfere in a case of sickness?”

Again he shook his head. “No, they pay a higher rent than we do—occupy more rooms. And we are somewhat under obligation to the management.”

I
soon discovered the facts about the Henshawes’ present existence. Oswald had a humble position, poorly paid, with the city traction company. He had to be at his desk at nine o’clock every day except Sunday. He rose at five in the morning, put on an old duck suit (it happened to be a very smart one, with frogs and a military collar, left over from prosperous times), went to his wife’s room and gave her her bath, made her bed, arranged her things, and then got their breakfast. He made the coffee on a spirit lamp, the toast on an electric toaster. This was the only meal of the day they could have together, and as they had it long before the ruthless Poindexters overhead began to tramp, it was usually a cheerful occasion.

After breakfast Oswald washed the dishes. Their one luxury was a private bath, with a large cupboard, which he called his kitchen. Everything else done, he went back to his own room, put it in order, and then dressed for the office. He still dressed very neatly, though how he managed to do it with the few clothes he had, I could not see. He was the only man staying in that shabby hotel who looked well-groomed. As a special favour from his company he was allowed to take two hours at noon, on account of his sick wife. He came
home, brought her her lunch from below, then hurried back to his office.

Myra made her own tea every afternoon, getting about in her wheel-chair or with the aid of a cane. I found that one of the kindest things I could do for her was to bring her some little sandwiches or cakes from the Swedish bakery to vary her tinned biscuit. She took great pains to get her tea nicely; it made her feel less shabby to use her own silver tea things and the three glossy English cups she had carried about with her in her trunk. I used often to go in and join her, and we spent some of our pleasantest hours at that time of the day, when the people overhead were usually out. When they were in, and active, it was too painful to witness Mrs. Henshawe’s suffering. She was acutely sensitive to sound and light, and the Poindexters did tramp like cattle—except that their brutal thumping hadn’t the measured dignity which the step of animals always has. Mrs. Henshawe got great pleasure from flowers, too, and during the late winter months my chief extravagance and my chief pleasure was in taking them to her.

One warm Saturday afternoon, early in April, we went for a drive along the shore. I had hired a low carriage with a kindly Negro driver. Supported on his arm and mine, Mrs. Henshawe managed to get downstairs. She looked much older and more ill in her black broadcloth coat and a black taffeta hat that had once
been smart. We took with us her furs and an old steamer blanket. It was a beautiful, soft spring day. The road, unfortunately, kept winding away from the sea. At last we came out on a bare headland, with only one old twisted tree upon it, and the sea beneath.

“Why, Nellie!” she exclaimed, “it’s like the cliff in
Lear
, Gloucester’s cliff, so it is! Can’t we stay here? I believe this nice darkey man would fix me up under the tree there and come back for us later.”

We wrapped her in the rug, and she declared that the trunk of the old cedar, bending away from the sea, made a comfortable back for her. The Negro drove away, and I went for a walk up the shore because I knew she wanted to be alone. From a distance I could see her leaning against her tree and looking off to sea, as if she were waiting for something. A few steamers passed below her, and the gulls dipped and darted about the headland, the soft shine of the sun on their wings. The afternoon light, at first wide and watery-pale, grew stronger and yellower, and when I went back to Myra it was beating from the west on her cliff as if thrown by a burning-glass.

She looked up at me with a soft smile—her face could still be very lovely in a tender moment. “I’ve had such a beautiful hour, dear; or has it been longer? Light and silence: they heal all one’s wounds—all but one,
and that is healed by dark and silence. I find I don’t miss clever talk, the kind I always used to have about me, when I can have silence. It’s like cold water poured over fever.”

I sat down beside her, and we watched the sun dropping lower toward his final plunge into the Pacific. “I’d love to see this place at dawn,” Myra said suddenly. “That is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it’s as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution. You know how the great sinners always came home to die in some religious house, and the abbot or the abbess went out and received them with a kiss?”

When we got home she was, of course, very tired. Oswald was waiting for us, and he and the driver carried her upstairs. While we were getting her into bed, the noise overhead broke out—tramp, tramp, bang! Myra began to cry.

“Oh, I’ve come back to it, to be tormented again! I’ve two fatal maladies, but it’s those coarse creatures I shall die of. Why didn’t you leave me out there, Nellie, in the wind and night? You ought to get me away from this, Oswald. If I were on my feet, and you laid low, I wouldn’t let you be despised and trampled upon.”

“I’ll go up and see those people to-morrow, Mrs. Henshawe,” I promised. “I’m sure I can do something.”

“Oh, don’t Nellie!” She looked up at me in affright. “She’d turn a deaf ear to you. You know the Bible says the wicked are deaf like the adder. And, Nellie, she has the wrinkled, white throat of an adder, that woman, and the hard eyes of one. Don’t go near her!”

(I went to see Mrs. Poindexter the next day, and she had just such a throat and just such eyes. She smiled, and said that the sick woman underneath was an old story, and she ought to have been sent to a sanatorium long ago.)

“Never mind, Myra. I’ll get you away from it yet. I’ll manage,” Oswald promised as he settled the pillows under her.

She smoothed his hair. “No, my poor Oswald, you’ll never stagger far under the bulk of me. Oh, if youth but knew!” She closed her eyes and pressed her hands over them. “It’s been the ruin of us both. We’ve destroyed each other. I should have stayed with my uncle. It was money I needed. We’ve thrown our lives away.”

“Come, Myra, don’t talk so before Nellie. You don’t mean it. Remember the long time we were happy. That was reality, just as much as this.”

“We were never really happy. I am a greedy, selfish, worldly woman; I wanted success and a place in the
world. Now I’m old and ill and a fright, but among my own kind I’d still have my circle; I’d have courtesy from people of gentle manners, and not have my brains beaten out by hoodlums. Go away, please, both of you, and leave me!” She turned her face to the wall and covered her head.

We stepped into the hall, and the moment we closed the door we heard the bolt slip behind us. She must have sprung up very quickly. Oswald walked with me to my room. “It’s apt to be like this, when she has enjoyed something and gone beyond her strength. There are times when she can’t have anyone near her. It was worse before you came.”

I persuaded him to come into my room and sit down and drink a glass of cordial.

“Sometimes she has locked me out for days together,” he said. “It seems strange—a woman of such generous friendships. It’s as if she had used up that part of herself. It’s a great strain on me when she shuts herself up like that. I’m afraid she’ll harm herself in some way.”

“But people don’t do things like that,” I said hopelessly.

He smiled and straightened his shoulders. “Ah, but she isn’t people! She’s Myra Driscoll, and there was never anybody else like her. She can’t endure, but she has enough desperate courage for a regiment.”

T
he next morning I saw Henshawe breakfasting in the restaurant, against his custom, so I judged that his wife was still in retreat. I was glad to see that he was not alone, but was talking, with evident pleasure, to a young girl who lived with her mother at this hotel. I had noticed her respectful admiration for Henshawe on other occasions. She worked on a newspaper, was intelligent and, Oswald thought, promising. We enjoyed talking with her at lunch or dinner. She was perhaps eighteen, overgrown and awkward, with short hair and a rather heavy face; but there was something unusual about her clear, honest eyes that made one wonder. She was always on the watch to catch a moment with Oswald, to get him to talk to her about music, or German poetry, or about the actors and writers he had known. He called her his little chum, and her admiration was undoubtedly a help to him. It was very pretty and naïve. Perhaps that was one of the things that kept him up to the mark in his dress and manner. Among people he never looked apologetic or crushed. He still wore his topaz sleeve-buttons.