Munsey's Magazine/Volume 93/Issue 3/The Tiger Lily

by J. S. Fletcher

The Tiger Lily

THE STORY OF A WOMAN WHO FOUND THAT IT MIGHT BE
BETTER TO BE LOVED FOR HERSELF THAN TO BE
LOVED FOR THE BEAUTY OF HER FACE

By J. S. Fletcher

"You are wondering what brought me here," Narcissus said across the dining table to a stranger who, he perceived, was taking a thrilling interest in him. "I will tell you. I am looking for a woman."

There was an impressive pause.

"Indeed!" the stranger commented respectfully. "Your wife?"

"She is not my wife," replied Narcissus, "nor, of necessity, is she some other man's. I came here to look for her. I thought she would be here, but I cannot find her. It's very expensive and extremely annoying."

The stranger was more than interested—he was curious.

"Perhaps she is here," he suggested gently. "I may have seen her, if you haven't. Could you describe the type of woman to me?"

"Describe her?" said Narcissus, his eyes gleaming with excitement. "Certainly! She's the soulless tiger lily type—half fragrant flower, half ravening beast; scented superficialities heaped upon a yawning sepulcher of greed; the canker at the soul of all society; the cancerous growth that seems to be ever on the increase; the vampire woman—" He broke off and leaned forward, his eyes dilating, and fixed them upon a man and woman who had just come into the dining room. "There she is," he whispered. "Look!"

The stranger turned his head and beheld a magnificently beautiful and triumphantly soulless woman, with an unobtrusive and unhappy-looking man.

"At last!" exclaimed Narcissus, keeping his glowing eyes on her. "The very woman I've been trying to run down! I will watch her every movement, listen to her every word, dog her footsteps, scratch up an acquaintance, wind myself into her confidence, dissect the woman's soul—her mechanism, I mean—to its very depths!"

"Are you a detective hunting down a criminal?" the other man inquired.

"No," said Narcissus. "I'm a dramatist hunting down a temperamental type."

"What a pity," said the visitor, who had a sense of humor, "that I'm not an interviewer after all!"

Narcissus colored with vexation. He had been certain that this conversation would meet his eyes next morning in the Daily Vulture. He rose with dignity.

"What an intense relief to talk to somebody who doesn't want to make a little money out of one's remarks!" he said.

It was not for nothing that his friends had christened him Narcissus. The first time that he looked into a mirror he had fallen in love with his reflection, and he had never fallen out of love with it since then.

He went into the drawing-room to await the coming of the Tiger Lily, as he called her in his mind, and to alleviate his irritation with a cigar.

He had not very long to wait before she came, drawing in her wake the unobtrusive man. Narcissus laid his head against the oriental cushions of the lounge in a particularly pretty pose, and watched the two under his long lashes.

"He is certainly her husband," commented Narcissus. "He looks so unhappy!"

The unobtrusive man reminded him of the keeper of a first prize exhibit at a dog show. He seemed perpetually conscious of his exhibit, his responsibility toward it, and his own insignificance compared to it.

"I am the keeper," his whole manner expressed. "I am only the keeper; but my duties are not so light."

"Yes, she is certainly his wife," Narcissus said to himself, "because she takes no pains to please him."

She was rather like a tiger lily to look at, too. Her beauty was of the rustling and self-advertising type; her satisfaction in herself was as good as a printed catalogue of her admirers. Her hair was reddish gold, turned back from a round, pale face. Her eyes were amber brown and her mouth was crimson. Narcissus leaned back, and his eyes foraged in her soul. If she was a tiger lily, then he was pulling her petals brutally.

"How she loves herself!" he commented. "How she adores her beauty, her dresses, her ornaments, her dinner! It must be a pleasure to her to blow her nose. A bourgeois act, but it draws attention to the hands, the rings, and the laced handkerchief."

Yes, she was no better than a magnificent pet dog, well combed, well washed, well fed, and with the same conviction that people lived to take her out and put food before her.

His curiosity about her was immense. Did she imagine, then, that she had a soul, or was she content to be no better than a prize exhibit? If the latter, seeing that her feelings and desires were of such paramount importance to her, why did the one need of a soul remain unquestioned? A common type, he repeated to himself, Heaven knows how common, and—how utterly inscrutable!

What was the creature? Was she woman, animal, or devil? Were the rudiments of immorality in her? Was her happiness the uncouth mirth of a mindless thing? Was her sadness the seeking of her nature for a spirit, or a passion of sulkiness, perhaps, because she could not feel? Narcissus would have liked to break her to pieces, as a child breaks a mechanical toy to find out how it goes. He made up his mind to speak to her, question her, cross-examine her, torment her, to find out if she could really feel.

Just then the woman moved to the mantelpiece. Her keeper, as Narcissus called him, followed her, and looked at her with a strange, appealing sadness in his eyes.

"He adores her," thought Narcissus immediately. "Does he know what he's adoring? Does he adore her because her soullessness has called out an unselfishness in him which a good woman might never have awakened? Or does he adore her because she represents the unattainable to him—because he knows she can never love him?"

The man made a little movement toward her—it might have been to arrange a fold of lace, or to touch her cheek for a moment. He caught his sleeve in a string of jewels that she wore. The string snapped, and the stones fell in a little tinkling shower.

The Tiger Lily burst into a passion. Her eyes flashed, her cheeks flamed, she showed her teeth.

"You stupid creature!" she cried. "You're always doing something abominably clumsy!"

"That proves conclusively that he is her husband," thought Narcissus. "It proves, also, that she has no soul. She shows the utter lack of dignity and self-control of a mere animal."

He crossed the room to where the Tiger Lily and her husband were searching for the jewels on the rug.

"May I be allowed to help?" he said.

The husband was glad to find some one to talk to who would take a more lenient view of his clumsiness. The woman was glad to find some one else on whom to vent her passionate irritation.

"There were thirty amethysts in the chain," she kept on repeating, "and I've only found twenty-eight."

Narcissus was fortunate enough to discover the twenty-ninth; but nobody could find the thirtieth. The Tiger Lily was the first to give up the hunt.

"I shall leave you to it," she said to her husband with vindictiveness, "and you must look till you do find it!"

Narcissus and her husband were left searching on the rug. The man gave the dramatist a strange, appealing look out of his grave, tired eyes.

"Heavens!" thought Narcissus. "How she has made him suffer! How she deserves to suffer, too!"

Aloud he said to the man:

"She is very beautiful."

The husband flushed, as if he had been praised himself.

"It was stupid of me to break her chain," he said hurriedly. He looked at Narcissus again. "It is her one passion, collecting jewels. I have given her most of them." He paused. "But I can't give her as many as I should like."

They continued their search.

"A man," the husband added, "can do so little for a woman. She gives him everything. What can he give her?"

For a moment Narcissus was too much amazed to reply.

"You are tired," he said at length. "Let me go on looking. I won't steal her amethyst," he continued, smiling. "If I have the good luck to find it, I'll bring it back to her."

The woman's husband shook hands with him.

"I should be more than grateful," he said. He took out his card. "We have a suite on the third floor."

By dint of exhaustive searching Narcissus found the amethyst lodged in a crack of the floor. He determined to return it to the Tiger Lily in person.

II

The next morning Narcissus went up in the lift to the suite of rooms on the third floor. As it happened, the woman's husband was not at home.

"He has gone out," she said, "to see if he can buy another amethyst to match the set."

Narcissus held out the palm of his hand.

"There is no need for that," he said. "I found it."

She pounced at it as a cat pounces at a sparrow.

"Where did you find it?" she cried. She looked as if she could have kissed him, and Narcissus was man enough not to feel displeased. "It was a particularly dark stone. The deeper the color, you know, the more valuable the amethyst. I have some more that I will show you." She went into the next room and came back with a case of jewels in her hand. "Look!" she cried, as she poured them out upon the table.

"They would provide a feast for the whole of London's poor," Narcissus said, observing her, "and they have only bought one piece of womanhood!"

"My husband gave them to me," she replied, smiling.

"You will make him bankrupt," Narcissus warned her.

A look of intense vexation crossed her face.

"What, again? Has he been talking to you?" she exclaimed. "Sometimes he's so bad tempered I was afraid that there was something wrong. It would be too awful. What one goes through!"

"What he goes through, and for what!"

"I can't help it," said the Tiger Lily, with complacence, "if he's so weak about me. I only admire things in shop windows. I never ask outright for them, and then he goes and brings them home at once."

"Are all these jewels his?"

"Not all," she answered, smiling contentedly.

"Other men's?" Narcissus asked.

"Well, yes—and one man in particular." She sighed briefly. "It was very sad—he died."

"You mean he took his life?" Narcissus asked.

"How did you know?" she asked, with her eyes round.

"Because I know what women like you do to men," he answered, watching her. "You maddened him, took everything from him, gave him nothing back, and ruined him. Then he shot himself."

"You must be very clever," she said with the foolish simplicity of a mindless child, "to know all that! I was very sorry about it; but men are so silly—they get desperate about me, and there's no reason for that."

"None, I agree," Narcissus said.

She looked angry for a moment.

"You're not serious," she said.

"On the contrary, I am. Men get desperate about you, trying to find something—anything—a soul, a heart, in you. They stake their last cent on discovering it. When they learn that there is something so terrible on God's kind earth as a woman who can't feel pity or love, they lose their minds."

She stared at him with her mouth open. He realized that some animal instinct warned her that she ought to be offended.

"Tiger Lily," said Narcissus gently, "there's a question about you that I should like to decide."

She knitted her brows in a frown. She was curious about him, flattered by his curiosity, vexed and completely baffled.

"Yes?" she said. "What?"

"I told you just now," he went on, "that you were incapable of love or pity. I am certain about the pity—I should like to be more sure about the love."

She shrugged her shoulders and turned down her lips.

"Love?" she repeated with a note of interrogative contempt.

"Your husband—" Narcissus began.

"Oh, my husband!" she said. "He gives me everything I want. He's very good to me."

"Thank you," Narcissus said, "for your definition of love. You love a man for what you get from him?"

"Oh, well," she replied, laughing coquettishly.

Narcissus rose to go. She followed, like an animal.

"But you'll come back?" she asked in her helpless voice. "You'll come back again?"

"Yes, I'll come back," Narcissus told her. "Your mechanism interests me. It's really ludicrously simple, so much so that it seems intricate."

III

Narcissus began to go there very often. He was beginning to master the woman's mechanism. Sometimes the Tiger Lily's husband was there, sometimes he was not. When he was there, the three talked on general subjects. When he was not, Narcissus talked to the woman of nothing but herself.

"I often wonder where you'll go when you die," he said. "Heaven is a place for people who have used their brains and souls. Hell is a place for people who have not used them, or have misused them. You couldn't possibly be sent to heaven; but it wouldn't be fair to send you to hell for having failed to use your brain and soul. You can't use what you haven't got. I used to believe in a dogs' heaven. You might go there. No, hardly, because dogs desire to have souls—one can see it in their eyes—and you don't. A soul's the one thing you have no use for, as Americans say. It's very puzzling!"

Narcissus was the one man who had baffled the Tiger Lily. He gave her the impression that he was completely callous to her. His indifference stung her. She told him as much.

"Some day you may thank me," he replied.

"Why should I thank you, or any man, for anything you like to do for me?" she said with a vixenish note in her voice. "I don't ask you to do it."

"Not particularly," he answered, "seeing that your whole personality is a definition of the verb to ask, to beg. You live on other people, their money, their love, their lives, because you have nothing of your own at all. It's not your fault, I suppose; but it's curious that it never occurs to you to be ashamed, or to want to give them something back."

She rose and came toward him, trying to subdue him, with a kind of malevolent passion, to her way of thinking, or not thinking; but she could not speak. She was filled with rage, because she felt suddenly, before Narcissus, that she was ignorant.

"Don't paw me," said Narcissus. "I think you were going to stroke my head, or cuff it—I'm not sure which. I particularly dislike my head being touched."

"You're hurting me!" she almost screamed. "You've no right to. I never have been hurt!"

"Have I the good luck to hurt you?" he said eagerly. "I am always clever, but this is a stroke of genius. What does it feel like to feel pain for the first time in your life?"

Suddenly a burst of anger—was it anger?—came over him, and he seized hold of her.

"You'd like me to kiss you," he said, looking close into her eyes. "Do you know what I should like to do? To prick you with a dagger!"

"You would like to kiss me," she cried, tears of fury in her eyes, "but you're afraid of confessing it!"

"Tears!" exclaimed Narcissus, examining them. "Are they, too, the first of their kind? What extraordinary good luck for me! What a stroke of inspiration! But take them back now. They are easy for you to make, so they will be as easy to take back. Tears are ugly; they inflame the eyes. I can't look; I cannot bear to look at anything unsightly."

He went away. During his absence he thought that he would let the Tiger Lily fall in love with him, would encourage her to do so. He had begun to make her sensible to pain. This was in itself a triumph. Suffering, he said to himself, is the seed of the soul. He had sown the seed himself. Now he would have the inexpressible satisfaction of nursing it through prolonged pain into actual existence.

Besides, he had grown fond of the Tiger Lily's husband. The poor fellow was unhappy, and Narcissus wanted to do something to help him. He wanted to awaken in his friend's wife the capacity, not for taking, but for giving love. Besides, his vampire woman play would be the rage of London.

The Tiger Lily began to grow thinner. A new look, which was not languor, but a kind of fire, crept into her eyes. Narcissus lost no opportunity of her companionship. He seemed to court it, even to pursue her. With the look of gratification in her eyes, there came a curious approach to wistfulness.

"You are beginning to feel ignorant," he said to her. "What a blessed thing! The consciousness of ignorance is the beginning of all wisdom."

Then he would show her the letters he received, asking for autographs, asking for sittings at a photographer's. He would show her letters from other women, telling him that he was "simply too sweet to look at," and inviting him to lunch. She began to grow a little humble, and she was certainly much thinner. Narcissus told her that it did not suit her. She was a type of splendid flesh, he said. When she lost that, her personality would become a cipher.

One day he went up to the Tiger Lily's flat for tea. Her husband had gone out, and she was alone. Narcissus brought out a letter.

"I have written you this," he said, handing it to her.

She tore the envelope open. Narcissus had composed a love letter to her, couched in burning terms of adoration. Her whole face changed as she read it. Then she got up and came toward him, holding it.

"You really wrote this, meaning it for me?" she said in a whisper, coming toward him.

They were standing by the fireplace. Narcissus snatched the letter from her suddenly, tore it into pieces, and flung them in the grate. Then he watched her carefully.

"Oh!" she cried, kneeling down before the fire, her head down over the bars. "You couldn't be so cruel!"

She raked among the ashes for the scraps.

"Don't be a fool," Narcissus said. "You'll get your fingers black."

Suddenly she gave a cry.

"My head, my hair! What is it? Quick!"

"Heavens!" cried Narcissus. "It's your combs!"

She began to scream horribly.

"My head's on fire! It's burning—burning! Oh, be quick!"

He was spellbound with horror. He even wrung his hands.

Then he remembered to throw a rug over her head. He pressed it down over her head and face, and heard her cries and sobs stifled through the folds, while her hands fought madly at his wrists. His heart beat till he felt strangled, his legs trembled beneath him. At last he took the rug away, staring aghast at her, himself the embodiment of horror.

She put her hands up to her head.

"Oh, oh, it's coming off, it's coming off!" she sobbed like a child. "Look there, look there!"

With indescribable dismay Narcissus saw her hold out her hands full of great bunches of the marvelous hair.

The door opened, and her husband came into the room. She ran toward him, screaming dreadfully.

"I am all burned!" she cried. "My beautiful, beautiful hair!"

IV

It was ten days before Narcissus could persuade himself to call upon the Tiger Lily, to inquire for her in person. He had sent her notes, expressing himself anxious for her recovery from the shock that she had had; and to these she invariably replied that she was not sufficiently recovered to see any one.

At last she wrote that she would "love to see him" if he would only come and not expect too much. The last half of the sentence was underlined.

Narcissus trembled when the drawing-room door opened and he heard the Tiger Lily's voice asking him to come in. He felt like a man who enters an operating theater for the first time. A feeling of faintness and distaste stole over him. His voice was weak when he spoke.

The blinds were drawn down in the room, and she sat with her back to the light. She rose, with a kind of tremor expressed in the action. She was wearing a large shady hat. He noticed how beautifully she was dressed, and that she wore more jewels than before.

"You are—better?" Narcissus said in a weak voice. "You are not changed?" he meant to say.

"Quite well," she said, but by her voice he knew that she was changed. Suddenly she burst out: "Why don't you look at me?"

"Look!" he repeated with a voice of fear. "I am looking." He brought his eyes around slowly to her face. There was nothing altered there. "Your hair!" he exclaimed involuntarily. "You have as much as ever. It has grown?"

She laughed mysteriously and bitterly.

"A switch!" he said to himself. Aloud he went on: "Your husband?"

"He is very good to me," she said.

"Still very good to you!" echoed Narcissus.

He scrutinized her closely.

"Why do you wear a hat when you are indoors?"

"Oh, because—because it's becoming," the Tiger Lily said flippantly.

Her hat seemed to fascinate him. He could not remove his eyes from it.

"Take it off," he continued.

"I don't want to," she answered.

"Take it off," he repeated with growing insistency.

He made a step toward her. Her eyes met his with an animal's appeal for mercy. She began to remove the hat.

"You are doing your hair differently," he went on. "It is all down over your eyes. It is vulgar, done that way. It spoils you. Put it back!"

"No, no—I like it best this way," she said, retreating from him.

He put his hand out and brushed it back from her brow.

"My God!" he said. "Your face is burned, too!"

He took a step toward the door.

"You said I was exquisite," she cried. "It's not so bad. Look at me once again!"

"In—in a minute," he answered.

"Men loved me for my beauty," she cried. "Won't they ever love me for my face again?"

Narcissus was silent, standing with his back still turned to her. Then they both saw that the door was open, and that the Tiger Lily's husband was standing there, looking at both of them.

She ran to him, putting out her arms.

"Won't anybody love me for my face?" she said.

Neither of the men said anything; but her husband bent and kissed her neck, while she threw her arms about him, sobbing like a little child.

"Wouldn't it do—if some one loved you for yourself?" he said.

Then Narcissus shut the door and went away very softly.