The Devourers

"Why are you not here? I am wearing a large straw hat with blue ribbons, and a white dress and a blue sash, like the ingénue in a drawing-room comedy. And there is no one to see me. And the fields are full of flowers, and I pick them, and have no one to give them to. Surely it is the time in all good story-books when the heroine in a white dress and blue sash is sitting on a wall for Prince Charming to pass and see her, and stop suddenly.... But life is a badly constructed novel; uninteresting people walk in and walk out, and all is at contra-tempo, like a Brahms Hungarian Dance.

"Prince Charming, why have you gone three thousand miles away?"

"Good-morning again.

"This is a divine day—cool winds and curtseying grasses.

"I am still here, living on herbs and sunsets and memories of things that have not been. You are a thing that has not been. Perhaps that is why you are so much in my thoughts. I have many friends whom I seldom think of. I have a few lovers whom I never think of. And I have you who are nothing, and whom I always think of. It is absurd and wonderful.

"My lovers! You ask me who they are and why I have them. I have them because they make me look pretty. I look pretty when I laugh. A woman's beauty depends entirely upon how much she is loved. Did you not know that? The best 'fard pour la beauté des dames' is other people's adoration.

"My lovers therefore have their use, but they are not entertaining. They are uniformly sad or angry. Yet I am good to my lovers. I let them trot in and out of their tempers like nice tame animals that nobody need mind. I do not require them to perform in public; I sit and watch their innocent tricks with kind and wondering eyes.

"Et vous, mon Prince Charmant? What of you? Who are you making to look prettier? Whose cheeks are you tinting? Whose eyes are you brightening? Whose heart are you making to flutter by the hurry of yours? Who smiles and dimples and blushes for your sake? I suppose you are falling in love with your fair countrywomen—tall, tennis-playing English girls, with cool, unkissed mouths and white, inexperienced hands. Ah, Prince Charming, whom do you love?

"Eve."

He replied: "You have spoken. Whom do I love? Eve."

She was glad. She lived a life of fevered joy. She was not Nancy. She was the Girl in the Letters; and the Girl in the Letters was a wild, unfettered, happy creature. Nothing seemed sweeter to her than this subtle amor di lontano—this love across the distance. Ah, how modern and piquant and recherché! And, again, how thirteenth-century! Was it not Jaufré Rudel, the Poet-Prince, who had loved the unseen Countess Melisenda for so many years?

"Amore di terra lontana,Per voi tutto il core mi duol,"

and who at last, coming to her, had died at her feet? Could they not also love each other across the distance, wildly and blindly, without the aid of any one of their senses? Surely that was the highest, the divinest, the most perfect way of love!

So Nancy lived her dream, and tossed the tender little love-letters across the ocean with light hands.

"Cher Inconnu,

        "I write to you because it is raining and the sky is of grey flannel. You will say that I wrote to you yesterday because the weather was fine and the sky was of blue silk.

"Ah, dear Unknown! It is true. You have grown into my life, like some strange, startling modern flower, out of place, out of season, yet sweet to my unwondering eyes. You are a black and white flower of words, growing through your brief wild letters into the garden of my heart.

"What a garden, mon ami! What a growth of weeds! what a burst of roses! what a burgeoning of cabbages! An unnatural, degenerate garden, where the trees carry marrons glacés and the flowers are scented with patchouli.

"Into this luxuriance of perversity, this decadent brilliance of vegetation, you have blossomed up, strange and new, for the delight of my soul. That you should say you love me, you who have never seen me, is sweeter perfume to my sated senses than the incense of all the thousand seraph-flowers that bow and swing at my feet.

"Good-bye. My name is Nancy."

To this letter he replied by cable: "Nancy, come here at once."

"'Come here at once!' The arrogant words go with a shock of pleasure to my heart. I am unused to the imperative; nobody has ever bullied me or told me to do this and that. I think I like it. I like being meek and frightened, and having to obey.

"'Come here at once!' I find myself timidly looking round for my hat and gloves, and wondering whether I shall wear my blue or my grey dress on the journey. I am nice on journeys. I am good-tempered, and wear mousie-coloured clothes that fit well, and I have a small waist. All this is very important in travelling, and makes people overlook and forgive the many, many small packages I carry into the compartment, and the hatboxes I lose, and the umbrellas I forget. When I am tired I can put my head down anywhere and go to sleep; I sleep nicely and quietly and purrily, like a cat.

"I am really very nice on journeys. Also I am very popular with useful people, like conductors and porters and guards. They take care of me and give me advice, and open and shut my windows, and lock my compartments even when it does not matter; and they bring me things to eat, and run after all the satchels and parcels I leave about.

"Your last letter says you are going to Switzerland. How nice! I should like to be with you, throbbing away on excitable little Channel steamers, puffing along in smoky, deliberate Continental trains, driving the bell-shaking horses slowly up the wide white roads that coil like wind-blown ribbons round the swelling breasts of the Alps; table-d'hôting at St. Moritz; tennis-playing at Maloya; clattering and rumbling over the covered bridges near Splügen; wandering through the moonlike sunshine of Sufer's pine-forest, where beady-eyed squirrels stop and look, and then scuttle, tail flourishing, up the trees. I am friends with every one of those squirrels. Greet them from me.

"Nancy."    New York.    

"Amor mio di Lontano,

        "I am in the city again the horrible, glaring, screaming city, all loud and harsh in the uncompromising July sun. How I long to-day for the shade of the closed Italian houses, the friendly, indrawn shutters, the sleeping silence of the empty streets, and, far-off, the cerulean sweep of the Mediterranean!

"And a new lover at my side! A brand-new lover, whose voice would sound strange to my ears, whose eyes I had not fathomed, whose feelings I did not understand, whose thoughts I could only vaguely and wrongly guess at, whose nerves would respond strangely, like an unknown instrument, to the shy touch of my hand.

"Your letter is brought to me. Written at the Hotel Bellevue, Andermatt. Andermatt! How cool and buoyant and scintillant it sounds. It falls on my heart like a snowflake in the humid heat of this town.

"I have opened the letter. What? Only three words!

"Again: 'Come at once.' Again the words, with their brief, irresistible imperiousness, thrill my lazy soul.

"If you write it a third time … by all that is sweet and unlikely, I shall come!

"Will you be glad? Will you kiss my white hands gratefully? Shall we be simple and absurd and happy? Or shall we fence and be brilliant, antagonistic, keen-witted? No matter! No matter! The fever of my heart will be stilled. My eyes will see you and be satisfied."

A cablegram to Andermatt. Reply paid. (Money borrowed from Fräulein Müller.)

"Dreamt that you had long black beard. Tell me that not true.—Nancy."

Reply from Andermatt:

"Not true. Come at once."

Nancy did not go at once. She had no money to go with; and, of course, she never intended to go at all.

He wrote: "Will you meet me in Lucerne?" and she replied: "Impossible."

He: "I shall expect you in Interlaken."

She: "Out of the question."

He: "I shall be in London in October. After that I am off to Peru."

So in September she wrote to him again.

"I lay awake last night dreaming of our first meeting. It will be framed in the conventional luxury of a little sitting-room in a Grand Hotel. It will be late in the afternoon—late enough to have the pretty pink-shaded lights lit, like shining fairy-tale flowers, all over the room. Then a knock at the door. And you will come into my life. What then, what then, dear Unknown? My hands will lie in yours like prisoned butterflies; my wilfulness and my courage, my flippancy and effrontery will throb away, foolishly, weakly, before your eyes. What then? Will Convention guide the steed of our Destiny gently back into the well-kept stables of the common-place? or shall we take the reins into our own hands, and lash it rearing and foaming over the precipice of the Forbidden, down into the flaming depths of passionate happiness?

"Good-bye. Of course I shall not come."

XIII

Fräulein Müller came to town three times a week and taught Anne-Marie arithmetic and geography. Of arithmetic Anne-Marie understood little; of geography no word. She pointed vaguely with a ruler at the map, and said: "Skagerrack and Kattegat," which were the words whose sounds pleased her most.

"The child is not at all a genius," said Fräulein Müller, much depressed.

One day George and Peggy came to visit them at the boarding-house. And with them they brought Mr. Markowski and his violin.

In the drawing-room after tea Nancy asked the shy and greasy-looking Hungarian to play: and the fiddle was taken tenderly out of its plush-lined case. Markowski was young and shabby, but his violin was old and valuable. Markowski had a dirty handkerchief, but the fiddle had a clean, soft white silk one. Markowski placed a small black velvet cushion on his greasy coat-collar, and raised the violin to it; he adjusted his chin over it, raised his bow, and shut his eyes. Then Markowski was a god.

Do you know the hurrying anguish of Grieg's F dur Sonata? Do you know the spluttering shrieks of laughter of Bazzini's "Ronde des Lutins"? The sobbing of the unwritten Tzigane songs? The pattering of wing-like feet in Ries's "Perpetuum Mobile?"

Little Anne-Marie stood in the middle of the room motionless, pale as linen, as if the music had taken life from her and turned her into a white statuette. Ah, here was the little neoteric statue that Nancy had tried to fix! The child's eyes were vague and fluid, like blue water spilt beneath her lashes; her colourless lips were open.

Nancy watched her. And a strange dull feeling came over her heart, as if someone had laid a heavy stone in it. What was that little figure, blanched, decolorized, transfigured? Was that Anne-Marie? Was that the little silly Anne-Marie, the child that she petted and slapped and put to bed, the child that was so stupid at geography, so brainless at arithmetic?

"Anne-Marie! Anne-Marie! What is it, dear? What are you thinking about?"

Anne-Marie turned wide light eyes on her mother, but her soul was not in them. For the Spirit of Music had descended upon her, and wrapped her round in his fabulous wings—wrapped her, and claimed her, and borne her away on the swell of his sounding wings.

XIV

"Fräulein, I have no more money—not one little brown cent in the wide world," said Nancy, sitting on the lawn of the Gartenhaus, and drinking afternoon tea out of Fräulein's new violet-edged cups.

"So?" said Fräulein. For a long time her lips moved in mental calculation. Then she said: "I could let you have forty-seven dollars."

Nancy put down the cup, and, bending forward, kissed Fräulein's downy cheek.

"Dear angel!" she said; "and then?"

"What is to be done?" said Fräulein, drying her lips on her new fringed serviette, and folding it in a small neat square.

"Mah!" said Nancy, raising her shoulders, swayed back into Italian by the stress of the moment.

"No news from your husband?"

"Bah!" said Nancy, shrugging her shoulders again, and waving her hand from the wrist downwards in a gesture of disdain.

Fräulein sighed, and looked troubled. Then she said:

"You must come and live here, you and Anne-Marie. I will send Elisabeth away—anyhow, she has broken already three lamp-glasses and a plate—and we must live with economy." Fräulein, who had lived with that lean and disagreeable comrade all her life, then coughed and looked practical. "Yes, I shall be glad to get rid of that clumsy girl, Elisabeth."

Nancy put one arm round her neck and kissed her again. Then she said: "I have only one hope."

"What is that?" asked Fräulein.

It was Nancy's turn to cough. She did so, and then said: "There is … there are … some … some people in England who are interested in me—in my writings. I think … they might help … I ought to go over and see them."

"Certainly," said Fräulein, "you must go. And I will keep Anne-Marie here with me. Then she need not interrupt her violin-lessons."

"Yes," said Nancy. "You could keep Anne-Marie...." She sighed deeply. "Of course she must not interrupt her lessons. I suppose you think I ought to go?"

"Of course," said Fräulein, who was practical. "A firm like that won't do anything without seeing you and talking business. But mind, mind they do not cheat! Authoresses are always being cheated."

Nancy smiled. "I shall try not to let them."

"Being English, perhaps they will not. In Berlin–" And here Fräulein repeated a discourse she had made many, many years ago in Wareside when Nancy's first poem had been read aloud. Fräulein remembered that day, and spoke of it now with tearful tenderness. She also believed she remembered bits of the poem:

"This morning in the gardenI caught the little birds;This morning in the orchardI picked the little words."

"What!" said Nancy. "Why did I 'pick the little words'?"

"Perhaps it was 'plucked,'" said Fräulein, looking vague.

"This morning in the gardenI caught the little words;This morning in the orchardI plucked … or picked the little birds–"

—"or caught them," continued Fräulein, much moved.

"I cannot say that that sounds very beautiful," said Nancy.

"Oh, but it was. It may have been a little different. But it was lovely. And you were a little tiny thing, like Anne-Marie!"

"Listen to Anne-Marie," said Nancy.

Anne-Marie had insisted upon bringing her violin to the Gartenhaus, and was now practising on it in the dining-room. The windows were open. She was playing a little cradle-song very softly, very lightly, in perfect tune.

"That is indeed a Wonderchild," said Fräulein.

Markowski had called her a Wonderchild directly. When he had seen her weeping convulsively after he had played, he had exclaimed: "This is a Wonderchild. I will teach her to play the fiddle."

And sure enough he had come to the house on the following day, with a little old half-sized fiddle, like a shabby reproduction of the dead Guarnerius, and had given Anne-Marie her first lesson. The lesson had been long, and Anne-Marie had emerged from it with feverish eyes and hot cheeks, and with anger in her heart. For the Bird, or the Fairy, or the Sorcerer, or the Witch that made music in other violins, did not seem to be inside the little shabby fiddle Markowski had brought her.

"Be gentle, be gentle! and do what I say," said Markowski, with his stringy black hair falling over his vehement eyes. "One day the Birds and the Witches will be in it, and they will sing to you. Now, practise scale of C."

And Anne-Marie had practised scale of C—to Nancy's amazement, for she thought that in one lesson no one could have learnt so much. In ten lessons Anne-Marie had learnt fifteen scales and a cradle-song. In two months she had learnt what other children learn in two years. So said Markowski, who got more and more excited, and gave longer and longer lessons, and came every day instead of twice a week.

"What do I owe you?" Nancy asked him. "I can't keep count of the lessons. You seem to be always coming."

"Never mind! never mind!" said Markowski, waving excited, unwashed hands. And as he had heard about their financial position from George and Peggy, he added, "You will pay me … when she plays you the Bach Chaconne!"

"Very well," said Nancy, who thought that that meant in a week or two. "Just as you please, Herr Markowski."

And then she thought he must be insane, because he was bent with laughter as he packed away his violin.

Fräulein Müller made accounts in a little black book all one day and half one night, and in the morning she went to Lexington Avenue to see Nancy.

"I can give you eighty dollars. Will that pay your journey to England to see the firm of publishers?"

Oh yes, Nancy thought so. And how good of her! And how could Nancy ever thank her?

"Of course, those people will be glad to advance you something at once, even if the manuscript is not quite ready," said Fräulein, who was romantic besides being practical.

"I suppose so," said Nancy.

"See that you have a proper contract. You had better ask a barrister to make it for you." And Nancy promised that she would.

So Fräulein hurried off to the Deutsche Bank, and drew out eighty dollars and a little extra, because Anne-Marie would have to have puddings and good soups while she was with her. The thought of giving puddings to Anne-Marie made her hurriedly take her handkerchief from her pocket and blow her nose.

"One day it shall be sago, one day it shall be rice, and one day it shall be tapioca, with Konfitüre." And Fräulein Müller hurried with her eighty dollars to Nancy.

But then a strange thing happened. Nancy would not go. Day after day passed, and Nancy always had some excuse for not having packed her trunk or taken her berth. Surely it was not so difficult to pack the little things she wanted for a short business journey. Her new navy-blue serge, observed Fräulein, was very good, and the brown straw hat for autumn would do nicely.

"You must dress sensibly in a business-like way to go and see those people," said Fräulein. "It would never do if you went looking like a flimsy fly-away girl."

"No, indeed," said Nancy, smiling with pale lips. That evening she wrote to George. He came up to town at the lunch-hour next day, and asked to see her. She left Anne-Marie at table eating stewed steak, to go and speak to him.

"George," she said, keeping in hers the cool damp hand he held out, "I want money. I want a lot of money."

George slowly withdrew his hand, and pulled at a little beard he had recently and not very successfully grown on his receding chin.

"Then I guess you must have it," he said.

"But I want a great deal. Two or three hundred dollars," said Nancy. "Or four–"

"Stop right there," said George. "Don't go on like that, or I can't follow." And he pulled his beard again.

"Oh, George, how sweet of you! how dear of you!" And she clasped his moist left hand, which he left limply in hers.

"The bother of it is, I don't know how I shall get it," said George. "I'm just thinking that"–

"Oh, don't tell me—please don't tell me!" said Nancy. "I—I'd rather not know! I know you won't steal, or murder anyone, but get it, George! Oh, thank you! thank you so much! Good-bye!"

And Nancy, as she looked out of the window after him, at his cheap hat and his sloping shoulders, and saw him board a cable-car going down-town, felt that she was a vulture and a harpy.

"The Girl in the Letters has demoralized me," she said.

He brought her four hundred dollars on the following Monday, and she wept some pretty little tears over it, and covered her ears with her hands, and dimpled up at him, when he began to tell her how he had got them. She was the Girl in the Letters. She was practising. And with George it answered very well—too well! She had to stop quickly and be herself again. Then he went away.

And she went out and bought dresses. She bought drooping, trailing gowns and flimsy fly-away gowns, and an unbusiness-like hat, and shoes impossible to walk in. She bought Crème des Crèmes for her face, and Crème Simon for her hands, and liquid varnish for her nails, and violet unguent for her hair.

Then she waited for the Unknown's next letter, saying

"Come."

The letter did not arrive. A day passed, and another. And he did not write. A week passed, and another, and he did not write. Nancy sat in the boarding-house with her dresses and her hats and her Crème des Crèmes. The entire four hundred dollars of George, and fifteen dollars out of Fräulein's eighty, were gone.

Nancy sat and looked out of the window, and thought her thoughts. Could she write to the Unknown again? No. Hers had been the last letter. He had not answered it. Should she telegraph? Where to? And to say what? He had gone to Peru. She knew, she felt, he had gone to Peru. The pretty, silly, romantic story was ended—ended as she had wished it to end, without the banal dénouement of their meeting. Better so. Much better so. Nancy was really very glad that things were as they were.

And now what was going to happen to her? She said to herself that she must have been insane to borrow all that money and buy those crazy dresses, those idiotic hats. What should she do? The terror of life came over her, and she wished she were safely away and asleep in the little Nervi cemetery between her father and her mother, cool and in the dark, with quiet upturned face.

Oh yes, she was really exceedingly glad that things were as they were!

Half-way through the third week a telegram was brought to her. It came from Paris.

"Why not dine with me next Thursday at the Grand Hôtel?"

To-day was Thursday.

She cabled back.

"Why not? At eight o'clock.—Nancy."

Oh, the excitement, the packing, the telegraphing to Fräulein, the hurry, the joy, the confusion! The stopping every minute to kiss Anne-Marie; the sitting down suddenly and saying, "Perhaps I ought not to go!" And then, the jumping up again at the thought of the boat that left to-morrow at noon.

Fräulein came to fetch Anne-Marie at ten in the morning. She arrived joyful and agitated, bringing a fox-terrier pup in her arms, a present for Anne-Marie, to prevent her crying.

"Why should I cry?" said Anne-Marie, with the hardness of tender years.

"Why, indeed!" said Nancy, buttoning Anne-Marie's coat, while quick tears fell from her eyes. "Mother will come back very soon—very soon."

"Of course," said Anne-Marie, holding the puppy tightly round the neck, and putting up a shoe to have it buttoned.

"Don't let her catch cold, Fräulein," sobbed Nancy, bending over the shoe; and when it was fastened, she kissed it.

"No," said Fräulein, beaming. "She shall wear flannel pellipands that I am making for her."

The second shoe was buttoned and kissed. Her hat was put on with the elastic in front of her ears. Her gloves? Yes, in her coat-pocket. Handkerchief? Yes. The mice? Yes; Fräulein had them, and the violin, and the music-roll, and the satchel. The box was already downstairs in the carriage. They were ready.

"Let me carry down the puppy," said Nancy on the landing, with a break in her voice. "Then I can hold your dear little hand."

"Oh no!" said Anne-Marie. "I'll carry the puppy. You can hold on to the bannisters."

So Nancy walked down behind Anne-Marie and the puppy. Fräulein was in front, dreading the moment of leave-taking, and thinking with terror of the possibility of travelling all the way to Staten Island with a loud and tearful Anne-Marie. So she started a new topic of conversation.

"You shall have pudding every day," she said, trying to turn round on the second landing to Anne-Marie, close behind her, and nearly dropping the satchel and the mice, as the violin-case caught in the bannisters. "One day it shall be sago, another day tapioca...."

"I don't like tapioca," said Anne-Marie, walking down the stairs. "I don't like nothing of all that."

They were at the door. By request of Nancy, nobody was there to speak to them. But all the boarders who were in the house were looking at them from behind the drawing-room curtains.

"Then what do you like for dessert?" said Fräulein, going down the stone steps by Anne-Marie's side, while Nancy still followed.

"I like peppermint bullseyes," said Anne-Marie, "and pink jelly." And she added: "Nothing else," while the pimply boy and the maid hoisted her into her carriage. Fräulein got in after her, with the many packages. And the puppy barked at the mice.