My Mortal Enemy/Part 2/Chapter 3
III
The 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.
On Monday, as I came home from school, I saw that the door of Mrs. Henshawe’s room was slightly ajar. She knew my step and called to me: “Can you come in, Nellie?”
She was staying in bed that afternoon, but she had on her best dressing-gown, and she was manicuring her neat little hands—a good sign, I thought.
“Could you stop and have tea with me, and talk? I’ll be good to-day, I promise you. I wakened up in the night crying, and it did me good. You see, I was crying about things I never feel now; I’d been dreaming I was young, and the sorrows of youth had set me crying!” She took my hand as I sat down beside her. “Do you know that poem of Heine’s, about how he found in his eye a tear that was not of the present, an old one, left over from the kind he used to weep? A tear that belonged to a long dead time of his life and was an anachronism. He couldn’t account for it, yet there it was, and he addresses it so prettily: ‘Thou old, lonesome tear!’ Would you read it for me? There’s my little Heine, on the shelf over the sofa. You can easily find the verse, Du alte, einsame Thräne!”
I ran through the volume, reading a poem here and there where a leaf had been turned down, or where I saw a line I knew well. It was a fat old book, with yellow pages, bound in tooled leather, and on the fly-leaf, in faint violet ink, was an inscription, “To Myra Driscoll from Oswald,” dated 1876.
My friend lay still, with her eyes closed, and occasionally one of those anachronistic tears gathered on her lashes and fell on the pillow, making a little grey spot. Often she took the verse out of my mouth and finished it herself.
“Look for a little short one, about the flower that grows on the suicide’s grave, die Armesünderblum’, the poor-sinner’s-flower. Oh, that’s the flower for me, Nellie; die Arme—sünder—blum’!” She drew the word out until it was a poem in itself.
“Come, dear,” she said presently, when I put down the book, “you don’t really like this new verse that’s going round, ugly lines about ugly people and common feelings—you don’t really?”
When I reminded her that she liked Walt Whitman, she chuckled slyly. “Does that save me? Can I get into your new Parnassus on that dirty old man? I suppose I ought to be glad of any sort of ticket at my age! I like naughty rhymes, when they don’t try to be pompous. I like the kind bad boys write on fences. My uncle had a rare collection of such rhymes in his head that he’d picked off fences and out-buildings. I wish I’d taken them down; I might become a poet of note! My uncle was a very unusual man. Did they ever tell you much about him at home? Yes, he had violent prejudices; but that’s rather good to remember in these days when so few people have any real passions, either of love or hate. He would help a friend, no matter what it cost him, and over and over again he risked ruining himself to crush an enemy. But he never did ruin himself. Men who hate like that usually have the fist-power to back it up, you’ll notice. He gave me fair warning, and then he kept his word. I knew he would; we were enough alike for that. He left his money wisely; part of it went to establish a home for aged and destitute women in Chicago, where it was needed.”
While we were talking about this institution and some of the refugees it sheltered, Myra said suddenly: “I wonder if you know about a clause concerning me in that foundation? It states that at any time the founder’s niece, Myra Driscoll Henshawe, is to be received into the institution, kept without charge, and paid an allowance of ten dollars a week for pocket money until the time of her death. How like the old Satan that was! Be sure when he dictated that provision to his lawyer, he thought to himself: ‘She’d roll herself into the river first, the brach!’ And then he probably thought better of me, and maybe died with some decent feeling for me in his heart. We were very proud of each other, and if he’d lived till now, I’d go back to him and ask his pardon; because I know what it is to be old and lonely and disappointed. Yes, and because as we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.”
It had grown quite dusk while we talked. When I rose and turned on one of the shrouded lights, Mrs. Henshawe looked up at me and smiled drolly. “We’ve had a fine afternoon, and Biddy forgetting her ails. How the great poets do shine on, Nellie! Into all the dark corners of the world. They have no night.”
They shone for her, certainly. Miss Stirling, “a nice young person from the library,” as Myra called her, ran in occasionally with new books, but Myra’s eyes tired quickly, and she used to shut a new book and lie back and repeat the old ones she knew by heart, the long declamations from Richard II or King John. As I passed her door I would hear her murmuring at the very bottom of her rich Irish voice:
Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lan-cas-ter . . .