The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/Broken Wings/Chapter 4
IV
At the studio, where she came to him within the week, her first movement had been to exclaim on the splendid abundance of his work. She had looked round charmed—so struck as to be, as she called it, crushed. "You've such a wonderful lot to show."
"Indeed, I have!" said Stuart Straith.
"That's where you beat us."
"I think it may very well be," he went on, "where I beat almost everyone."
"And is much of it new?"
He looked about with her. "Some of it is pretty old. But my things have a way, I admit, of growing old extraordinarily fast. They seem to me in fact, nowadays, quite 'born old,'"
She had the manner, after a little, of coming back to something. "You are unhappy. You're not beyond it. You're just nicely, just fairly and squarely, in the middle of it."
"Well," said Straith, "if it surrounds me like a desert, so that I'm lost in it, that comes to the same thing. But I want you to tell me about yourself."
She had continued at first to move about, and had taken out a pocket-book, which she held up at him. "This time I shall insist on notes. You made my mind a blank about that play, which is the sort of thing we can't afford. If it hadn't been for my fat old lady and the next day's papers!" She kept looking, going up to things, saying, "How wonderful!" and "Oh, your way!" and then stopping for a general impression, something in the whole charm. The place, high, handsome, neat, with two or three pale tapestries and several rare old pieces of furniture, showed a perfection of order, an absence of loose objects, as if it had been swept and squared for the occasion and made almost too immaculate. It was polished and cold—rather cold for the season and the weather; and Stuart Straith himself, buttoned and brushed, as fine and as clean as his room, might at her arrival have reminded her of the master of a neat, bare ship on his deck awaiting a cargo. "May I see everything? May I 'use' everything?"
"Oh no; you mayn't by any means use everything. You mayn't use half. Did I spoil your 'London Letter'?" he continued after a moment.
"No one can spoil them as I spoil them myself. I can't do them—I don't know how, and don't want to. I do them wrong, and the people want such trash. Of course they'll sack me."
She was in the centre, and he had the effect of going round her, restless and vague, in large, slow circles. "Have you done them long?"
"Two or three months—this lot. But I've done others, and I know what happens. Oh, my dear, I've done strange things!"
"And is it a good job?"
She hesitated, then puffed, prettily enough, an indifferent sigh. "Three and ninepence. Is that good?" He had stopped before her, looking at her up and down. "What do you get?" she went on, "for what you do for a play?"
"A little more, it would seem, than you. Four and sixpence. But I've only done, as yet, that one. Nothing else has offered."
"I see. But something will, eh?"
Poor Straith took a turn again. "Did you like them—for colour?" But again he pulled up. "Oh, I forgot; we didn't notice them!"
For a moment they could laugh about it. "I noticed them, I assure you, in the Banner. 'The costumes in the second act are of the most marvellous beauty.' That's what I said."
"Oh, that will fetch the managers!" But before her again he seemed to take her in from head to foot. "You speak of 'using' things. If you'd only use yourself—for my enlightenment. Tell me all."
"You look at me," said Mrs. Harvey, "as with the wonder of who designs my costumes. How I dress on it, how I do even what I still do on it, is that what you want to know?"
"What has happened to you?" Straith asked.
"How do I keep it up?" she continued, as if she had not heard him. "But I don't keep it up. You do," she declared, as she again looked round her.
Once more it set him off, but for a pause once more almost as quick. "How long have you been———?"
"Been what?" she asked as he faltered.
"Unhappy."
She smiled at him from a depth of indulgence. "As long as you've been ignorant—that what I've been wanting is your pity. Ah, to have to know, as I believed I did, that you supposed it would wound me, and not to have been able to make you see that it was the one thing left to me that would help me! Give me your pity now. It's all I want. I don't care for anything else. But give me that."
He had, as it happened at the moment, to do a smaller and a usual thing before he could do one so great and so strange. The youth whom he kept for service arrived with a tea-tray, in arranging a place for which, with the sequel of serving Mrs. Harvey, seating her and seeing the youth again out of the room, some minutes passed. "What pity could I dream of for you," he demanded as he at last dropped near her, "when I was myself so miserably sore?"
"Sore?" she wondered. "But you were happy—then."
"Happy not to have struck you as good enough? For I didn't, you know," he insisted. "You had your success, which was so immense. You had your high value, your future, your big possibilities; and I perfectly understood that, given those things, and given also my very much smaller situation, you should wish to keep yourself."
"Oh, oh!" She gasped as if hurt.
"I understand it; but how could it really make me 'happy'?" he asked.
She turned at him as with her hand on the old scar she could now carry. "You mean that all these years you've really not known———?"
"But not known what?"
His voice was so blank that at the sound of it, and at something that looked out from him, she only found another "Oh, oh!" which became the next instant a burst of tears.