Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (22 page)

 
          
For,
you see, she was too quick and clever to be humbugged long by the kind that
tried to get things out of her. How she used to laugh at the old
double-chinners trotting round to the night-clubs with their boy friends! She
laughed at old ladies in love; and yet she couldn’t bear to be out of love,
though she knew she was getting to be an old lady herself. ‘

 
          
Well,
I remember one day another patient of mine, who’d never had much looks beyond
what you can buy in Fifth Avenue, laughing at me about Mrs. Clingsland, about
her dread of old age, and her craze for admiration—and as I listened, I
suddenly thought: “Why, we don’t either of us know anything about what a
beautiful woman suffers when she loses her beauty. For you and me, and
thousands like us, beginning to grow old is like going from a bright warm room
to one a little less warm and bright; but to a beauty like Mrs. Clingsland it’s
like being pushed out of an illuminated ballroom, all flowers and chandeliers,
into the winter night and the snow.” And I had to bite the words back, not to
say them to my patient…

 
          
  

 
          
Mrs.
Clingsland brightened up a little when her own son grew up and went to college.
She used to go over and see him now and again; or he’d come home for the
holidays. And he used to take her out for lunch, or to dance at those cabaret
places; and when the head-waiters took her for his sweetheart she’d talk about
it for a week. But one day a hall porter said: “Better hurry up, mister.
There’s your mother waiting for you over there, looking clean fagged out”; and
after that she didn’t go round with him so much.

 
          
For
a time she used to get some comfort out of telling me about her early triumphs;
and I used to listen patiently, because I knew it was safer for her to talk to
me than to the flatterers who were beginning to get round her.

 
          
You
mustn’t think of her, though, as an unkind woman. She was friendly to her
husband,
and friendly to her children; but they meant less
and less to her. What she wanted was a looking-glass to stare into; and when
her own people took enough notice of her to serve as looking-glasses, which
wasn’t often, she didn’t much fancy what she saw there. I think this was about
the worst time of her life. She lost a tooth; she began to dye her hair; she
went into retirement to have her face lifted, and then get frightened, and came
out again looking like a ghost, with a pouch under one eye, where they’d begun
the treatment…

 
          
I
began to be really worried about her then. She got sour and bitter toward
everybody, and I seemed to be the only person she could talk out to. She used
to keep me by her for hours, always paying for the appointments she made me miss,
and going over the same thing again and again; how when she was young and came
into a ball-room, or a restaurant or a theatre, everybody stopped what they
were doing to turn and look at her—even the ac-ors on the stage did, she said;
and it was the truth, I daresay, but that was over…

 
          
Well,
what could I say to her? She’d heard it all often enough. But there were people
fowling about in the background that I didn’t like the look of people, you
understand, who live on weak women that can grow old. One day she showed me a
love-letter. She said she didn’t know the man who’d sent it; but she knew about
him. He was a Count Somebody; a foreigner. He’d had adventures. Trouble in his
own country, I guess… She laughed and tore the letter up. Another came from him,
and I saw that too—but I didn’t see her tear it up.

 
          
“Oh,
I know what he’s after,” she said. “Those
kind
of men
are always looking out for silly old women with money… Ah,” says she, “it was
different in old times. I remember one day I’d gone into a florist’s to buy
some violets, and I saw a young fellow there; well, maybe he was a little
younger than me—but I looked like a girl still. And when he saw me he just
stopped short with what he was saying to the florist, and his face turned so
white I thought he was going to faint. I bought my violets; and as I went out a
violet dropped from the bunch, and I saw him stoop and pick it up, and hide it
away as if it had been money he’d stolen… Well,” she says, “a few days after
that I met him at a dinner, and it turned out he was the son of a friend of
mine, a woman older than
myself
, who’d married abroad.
He’d been brought up in
England
, and had just come to
New York
to take up a job there…”

 
          
She
lay
back with her eyes closed, and a quiet smile on
her poor tormented face. “I didn’t know it then, but I suppose that was the
only time I’ve ever been in love…” For a while she didn’t say anything more,
and I noted the tears beginning to roll down her cheeks. “Tell me about it, now
do, you poor soul,” I says; for I thought, this is letter for her than
fandangoing with that oily Count whose letter she hasn’t torn up.

 
          
“There’s
so little to tell,” she said. “We met only four or five times—and then Harry
went down on the
Titanic.”

 
          
“Mercy,”
says I, “and was it all those years ago?”

 
          
“The
years don’t make any difference, Cora,” she says. “The way he looked at me I
know no one ever worshipped me as he did.”

 
          
“And
did he tell you so?” I went on, humouring her; though I felt kind of guilty
toward her husband.

 
          
“Some
things don’t have to be told,” says she, with the smile of a bride. “If only he
hadn’t died, Cora… It’s the sorrowing for him that’s made me old before my
time.”
(Before her time!
And her
well over fifty.)

 
          
Well,
a day or two after that I got a shock. Coming out of Mrs. Clingsland’s front
door as I was going into it I met a woman I’d know among a million if I was to
meet her again in hell—where I will, I know, if I don’t mind my steps… You see,
Moyra, though I broke years ago with all that crystal-reading, and table-rapping,
and what the Church forbids, I was mixed up in it for a time (till Father
Divott ordered me to stop), and I knew, by sight at any rate, most of the big
mediums and their touts. And this woman on the doorstep was a tout, one of the
worst and most notorious in
New York
; I knew cases where she’d sucked people dry
selling them the news they wanted, like she was selling them a forbidden drug.
And all of a sudden it came to me that I’d heard it said that she kept a
foreign Count, who was sucking
her
dry—and
I gave one jump home to my own place, and sat down there to think it over.

 
          
I
saw well enough what was going to happen. Either she’d persuade my poor lady
that the Count was mad over her beauty, and get a hold over her that way; or
else—and this was worse—she’d make Mrs. Clingsland talk, and get at the story
of the poor young man called Harry, who was drowned, and bring her messages
from him; and that might go on forever, and bring in more money than the Count…

 
          
Well,
Moyra, could I help it? I was so sorry for her, you see. I could see she was
sick and fading away, and her will weaker than it used to be; and if I was to
save her from those gangsters I had to do it right away, and make it straight
with my conscience afterward—if I could…

 
          
  

 
          
I
don’t believe I ever did such hard thinking as I did that night. For what was I
after doing? Something that was against my Church and against my own
principles; and if ever I got found out, it was all up with me—me, with my
thirty years’ name of being the best masseuse in
New York
, and none honester, nor more respectable!

 
          
Well,
then, I says to myself, what’ll happen if that woman gets hold of Mrs.
Clingsland? Why, one way or another, she’ll bleed her white, and then leave her
without help or comfort. I’d seen households where that had happened, and I
wasn’t going to let it happen to my poor lady. What I was after was to make her
believe in herself again, so that she’d be in a kindlier mind toward others …
and by the next day I’d thought my plan out, and set it going.

 
          
It
wasn’t so easy, neither; and I sometimes wonder at my nerve. I’d figured it out
that the other woman would have to work the stunt of the young man who was
drowned, because I was pretty sure Mrs. Clingsland, at the last minute, would shy
away from the Count. Well, then, thinks I, I’ll work the same stunt myself—but
how?

 
          
You
see, dearie, those big people, when they talk and write to each other, they use
lovely words we ain’t used to; and I was afraid if I began to bring messages to
her, I’d word them wrong, and she’d suspect something. I knew I could work it
the first day or the second; but after that I wasn’t so sure. But there was no
time to lose, and when I went back to her next morning I said: “A queer thing
happened to me last night. I guess it was the way you spoke to me about that
gentleman—the one on the
Titanic.
Making me see him as clear as if he was in the room with us—” and at that I had
her sitting up in bed with her great eyes burning into me like gimlets. “Oh,
Cora, perhaps he
is’.
Oh, tell me
quickly what happened!”

 
          
“Well,
when I was
laying
in my bed last night something came
to me from him. I knew at once it was from him; it was a word he was telling me
to bring you…”

 
          
I
had to wait then, she was crying so hard, before she could listen to me again;
and when I went on she hung on to me, saving the word, as if I’d been her
Saviour. The poor woman!

 
          
The
message I’d hit on for that first day was easy enough. I said he’d told me to
tell her he’d always loved her. It went down her throat like honey, and she
just lay there and tasted it. But after a while she lifted up her head. “Then
why didn’t he tell me so?” says she.

 
          
“Ah,”
says
I, “I’ll have to try to reach him again, and ask
him that.” And that day she fairly drove me off on my other jobs, for fear I’d
be late getting home, and too tired to hear him if he came again.
“And
he
will
come,
Cora; I know he will! And you must be ready for him, and write down everything.
I want every word written down the minute he says it, for fear you’ll forget a
single one.”

 
          
Well,
that was a new difficulty. Writing wasn’t ever my strong point; and when it
came to finding the words for a young gentleman in love who’d gone down on the
Titanic,
you might as well have asked me
to write a Chinese dictionary. Not that I couldn’t imagine how he’d have felt;
but I didn’t for Mary’s grace know how to say it for him.

 
          
But
it’s wonderful, as Father Divott
says,
how
Providence
sometimes seems to be listening behind the
door. That night when I got home I found a message from a patient, asking me to
go to see a poor young fellow she’d befriended when she was better off—he’d
been her children’s tutor, I believe—who was down and out, and dying in a
miserable rooming-house down here at Montclair. Well, I went; and I saw at once
why he hadn’t kept this job, or any other job. Poor fellow, it was the drink;
and now he was dying of it. It was a pretty bad story, but there’s only a bit
of it belongs to what I’m telling you.

 
          
He
was a highly educated gentleman, and as quick as a flash; and before I’d half
explained, he told me what to say, and wrote out the message for me. I remember
it now. “He was so blinded by your beauty that he couldn’t speak—and when he
saw you the next time, at that dinner, in your bare shoulders and your pearls,
he felt farther away from you than ever. And he walked the streets till
morning, and then went home, and wrote you a letter; but he didn’t dare to send
it after all.”