The Amazing Lady

by Zona Gale

THE AMAZING LADY

By ZONA GALE

NOTHING can exceed the air of satisfaction which pervades a sleeping car just after the berths have been made up in the morning. The night is safely past, dressing in one's section has been got through, and one's destination leaps upon one from out the sheathing miles. Pelleas and I came in from breakfast in the dining car and shared in the general cheer.

"Really," said Pelleas benignly, "I cannot understand how people find traveling in America in the least uncomfortable."

"Nor can I," I agreed, "in the morning. But at night, when ti e porter begins making up the berths, I would far rather be riding on a camel."

"But a camel is no larger than one's berth," argued Pelleas, with a subconscious nod toward a field of gorgeous marsh marigolds swimming past, "and no more humped."

"Ah, well," said I pacifically, "perhaps not. But the two have a great deal in common—and all the advantages are on the side of the camel."

"On the back of the camel," Pelleas gravely corrected.

On the train it is astonishing what frivolous talk absorbs one. I aver that the two young women occupying the section at the back of ours talked for four hundred miles about almost nothing. Not that this is impossible in stationary moments, however; for to talk of almost nothing is a satisfaction which many derive from the most unpromising subjects.

"I wish," said I suddenly, upon this reflection, "that I might sometime travel in the company of really distinguished-looking persons. When distinguished-looking persons do their traveling I cannot imagine, for whenever I travel, all the ill-equipped beings seem to come forth and the charming people to stay hermetically sealed at home."

"You might take out the box of daguerreotypes," suggested Pelleas, "and set them on the opposite seat. Then you need look at nothing but distinction."

I smiled in approbation. That delightful company of old daguerreotypes in leather cases and the three miniatures in velvet bags which I was carrying to Lisa for her cabinet—what perfect traveling companions they would make, to be sure! No fussing about draughts, no curiosity in their fellows, no look of dust or weariness—only that perennial bloom and silence and repose.

"Indeed," I said, "I have a great inclination to do that." For it is the reflection which has upborne me most that if one seems insane one is not necessarily insane.

Pelleas smiled and bought a paper and went off to the smoking compartment. Although he has not smoked in years and can never read in a pitching coach, yet Pelleas finds paper and smoking compartment unwritten laws of his manhood. One becomes very tenacious of one's ways of youth when they no longer besiege one.

Almost at once the train pulled into a station, all of blackened brick and clanging breakfast gongs. I have no idea what place it may have been, but it was A City, such as constantly swim up to the track when one travels, lie heavily upon either side of the rails while the train stands, and then, I dare say, jaunt ponderously off across the fields looking for more railway trains to wake them from sooty dreams. But this City I remember because from its uninviting depths there emerged and boarded the train and entered our car the Boy and the Amazing Lady.

The Boy—how I remember him as I saw him first. He was in the early twenties—hair of twenty, eyes of twenty, delicious curved mouth of twenty. He came in glowing, looking up and about the car like a knight on the alluring edge of a greenwood whence might possibly, at any magic moment, advance the Enchanted Adventure. He was brown, full-lipped, sparkling, vivid, and with that lifted glance that some way speaks freedom. He was not yet a prey to life. And immediately I had a curious impression that he looked a little like his mother—I am not sure how I knew that, but I was certain, just as when, sometimes, I have had presented to me an unknown girl of tall awkwardness, I have, even though I have never before seen her, yet suppressed an involuntary and unreasonable exclamation of "How you have grown!"

The Amazing Lady had not grown very much. She was very little—I suspected her daintiness to have attracted the Boy to her, for she was obviously a decade his senior, and, just as obviously, she was for him the Enchanted Adventure, ready made. His smile had a look of Paradise about it. Yet she was insignificant and too—blond; and she owned a rich, forced contralto in speech and that accent of piecemeal polish which deceives nobody. There was a perfume of spiced flowers in her garments, as if they had lain in strange smoke; there were about her hints of unrelated colors, skillfully marshaled; and in her very coiffure was an exaggerated understanding of the world. She was a strange companion for the Boy—but they had a kinship, I was to discover: the undoubted kinship of the fragrance of a joss house and the incense of a cathedral.

The Amazing Lady threw her admirable little hat on the opposite seat, shook back her stra3ring hair—beautiful hair—and came to rest with a sigh, but losing none of her positiveness. She was like an exclamation point grown momentarily languorous.

"I always have my shoes made to order," announced the Amazing Lady by way of introduction to the moment; "I had these made to order. And, really, I'm getting tired of it. See how much too long they are."

Her contralto went through the car like wind. Everyone knew about the shoes. The young women in the berth at the back of ours ceased their excursions into the obvious and listened; and that anomaly, the gouty socialist, who sat opposite them, tried to derive news from the minor in his section.

Of course the Boy's reply was inaudible. I think that all the world may be divided into those who under the usual conditions speak audibly and inaudibly in trains. I cast my classification humbly upon the sea of those already made, but I know of none more defining nor within which are merged so many obvious touchstones.

"Ah," said the Amazing Lady next, in her low, pricking staccato, "where is our book? Let us read—let us be reading when the train pulls out"—she dropped her tone to a different kind of audibility—"as we shall read always and always!" she said.

At that I could have found it in my heart to listen, had she not obligingly made this unnecessary. After all, if these two were chaperoned by a book, things could not be so mightily incongruous, I innocently thought.

The Boy drew the book from his bag, a small, discreet book of good birth and antecedents of charming certainty. She took it lingeringly, her eyes meeting his as their hands met. And as she opened the book, the train slipped into motion, and the City shambled back about its business on the map.

"Now it is too late—now it is too late not to go!" said the Amazing Lady exultantly, in her low resonance. "Whether I go to Channing or New York, it is too late to go back."

The Boy murmured, his eyes striving for hers. And hers gave themselves momentarily to his, and drooped, returned, were captured—she had great art, but I have seen sunflowers that I thought had no less art of a certain kind in their wide eyes.

"Let us read," she said, so that only the Boy and I heard; "I am afraid to think——"

Ah, she had art—the art of the sunflower and the woman of the stone age and many primal things. She opened the book and read, for obviously she was not of womenkind who are formed for listening. I do not know what book they may have had, but in spite of myself the fragments that I caught stirred me to something of their enthusiasm.

… waitings on spring slopes, with fresh lawns and spangled inclines undulating in sun to the borders of another land. Another land! Compact of hope refined to peace, and stars whose mystery is only promise, where to remember joy is to possess joy, where Conduct herself goes masked as Delight.

They read on, the reading punctuated by many a sentence of silence, glances of tacit interpretation, spontaneous meeting of eyes over some mounting phrase. I protest that there is no love-making like the love-making of two who are reading a wonderful book.

I maintain that one must have been at least twice as old as I not to have been stirred. And after all I thought in unconscious surrender, why should I sit perched there, like a suspicious beetle, merely because two were incongruous and one spoke contralto?

I am persuaded that the Boy would have read contentedly on for the whole day, swimming through the russet land on the waves of that contralto. But the Amazing Lady had a taste for ballooning. In ten minutes she let the book fall, rested her head against the cushions, and looked up at him.

"Are you glad?" she asked.

"Glad!" said the Boy in a rapture sufficient for me to hear.

"Ah, no—but really glad?" she persisted. "I haven't made you think. Perhaps I ought to make you think."

She leaned forward, her face prettily belying her words. And in that moment a certain fleeting, elusive resemblance which the Amazing Lady seemed to me to bear to some one whom I could not name, returned to me, became a phantom, took shape, and beckoned to me from her eyes. There was something about her indefinably like Ingeborg Anderson, the little Norwegian maid who comes on Thursdays to do our mending. I treasured this circumstance to tell to Pelleas, who is delighted with resemblances, and birthdays which fall upon the same day, and similarities of family names and the like. When the days grow colorless these things become our toys instead of books that tell of the spangled slopes and fresh lawns of Another Land.

Meanwhile the Boy was murmuring something sufficiently defiant in answer, full of certainty and its protestation; whereat, with a burst of frankness which I guessed to be rare enough, the Amazing Lady said, in her daring resonance:

"If I was just the way I am, only with a great name, your people would call me clever and eccentric, and be proud of me. Wouldn't they?"

I could guess what the Boy was earnestly saying: That they would be proud of her as soon as they really knew her!

"No, they won't," said the Amazing Lady positively. "They'll think everything rude that they do is just a lapse, and everything rude that I do they'll think is because I don't know any better. I know. They'll be themselves to each other, but when they speak to me they'll look through something at me—as if I was some one else. And they'll keep hearing things I've done—oh, there's plenty to hear—and they'll tell you. And then I shall hate myself because it hurts you!"

"We'll go away!" cried the Boy vehemently, and, as I suspected, immediately grew geographical and predicated statements of Capri and Provence and the château country and rural England. Love is a famous voyager and has an invariable idea that because things are intrinsically wrong in the West, there will be smooth sailing east of West But in my heart I knew, as I heard their words, that no geography and no created space could make the future fair for these two. I am old, and I have seen much magic—but never the magic of long peace between two such as these. As well expect a pot of primroses to find fellowship with a gazing crystal.

"Shall I leave you at Channing?" she went on to the Boy. "Shall I get off at Channing, or shall I go with you to New York and face them all? Channing—I hate Channing!" she burst out. "Why should I go to Channing? What do they know about all the things that I like best? And what is there in living if you can't live with people who like some of the things that you like? In Channing they tell me how different my aunt was, and that my clothes aren't heavy enough, and they get up at four o'clock on November mornings to make Christmas presents. And yet everybody in the whole world would say that it is my duty to go to Channing, and let you go to New York alone!"

The Boy's dark head bent down—I could guess well enough how his part of the antiphony went on. Antiphonies of the sort are pitched invariably in the same key.

How could I help them, I fell wondering, though I know very well that upon such an affair as this it is madness to intrude. Moreover, I have grown to suspect that my interest in romance is simply the helpless curiosity of an old woman in whose heart a glint of moonlight some way persists, in spite of all these years of the practical sun. Still, it is a very terrible thing to be old and not to tell others what one has learned, since to learn is the only possible compensation for growing old. Yet how could I cry out: "Attention, please! From the pinnacle of my seventy years let me give you both news that you are about making a tragic mistake." Did I not know that they would have looked up at me with no least indignation and have called serenely back:

"Ah, madam, but this, you see, is different!"

None the less, I longed to help the Boy. He was so eager, so radiant, so buoyant. If only Enid or Lisa might have been with me, and if only he might have looked upon the delicacy, the quiet, the gentleness, the distinction of my two little grandnieces who, for all their spirit and daring, are porcelain, I felt sure that he might have understood. If only his own mother might momentarily have sat there opposite the Amazing Lady, it seemed to me that he would have felt the reason why he must leave her. Instead he was simply drifting on with that really bewildering contralto in his ears, and all the spell of the book, which she presently resumed, laid upon him. And there was I, a helpless old woman, with nothing in my possession with which to appeal to the Boy like a voice from his own world—save indeed, I thought whimsically, my box of old Mechlin, my photographs of Lisa and Enid, and—my daguerreotypes!

I sat erect with the sheer enormity of the fancy.

That delicate, distinguished company of my mother and her friends, in pelisse and tippet, in plaited book muslin and curls, with prim waists and white hands, and eyes that were three parts shyness and one part gentle archness—why could I not summon them, I boldly wondered, to touch the understanding of this Boy who, in delicacy and distinction, was so like them?

While I hesitated, certain that anyone but Pelleas would have looked upon the idea as mad enough, the Amazing Lady, almost pathetically testing her art to allure the Boy the more deeply, sank back,with a sigh, to her window corner.

"Trains always make me sleepy," she said, with lids heavy above her really fine eyes. "Sit over there for a little—and afterwards I will tell you what I dream."

"She must have very fine eyelashes," I told myself, "to warrant that," and my heart was beating in high excitement For this device of hers left the Boy free for a little, and I was determined upon a bold move, such as only a bored old woman upon a railway journey would credit to herself for art strategical.

Instantly I opened Pelleas's suit case and took out the box of daguerreotypes. It was a box of—I had almost said withered—heliotrope velvet, clasped with thin silver, and, within, a band of faded satin ribbon wrapped the cases. I laid the ribbon upon the dark background of the seat before me—no one would suppose what a background for art is the velvet of Pullman cars—and delicately, one by one, I dusted each case and laid it open on the pale satin. Absurd enough I must have looked, with my white hair and kerchief, amusing myself with these ancient likenesses!

One by one I laid them before me, those beautiful people of another day—almost of Another Land compact of hope and mystery and the stars, such as the book of the Boy recorded. First, the daguerreotype of a kinswoman of my grandmother's, a Mistress Patience Worship, exquisite of needle and skilled in mixing simples, who gave up a famous match with my lord of Welchester for marriage to a poor rector, and lent to his country parsonage the elegance of a court and the quiet of heaven. Beside her went Patty Bloodgood, with her little pointed face and great spirit eyes, and upon her flowered muslin gown were crossed the hands which were like the hands of an empress and had yet known nothing but loving service for everyone. And wound about her throat was the amber which my Lord of Leicester himself had sent to some ancient woman of her family whom Elizabeth had honored. Next I set upon the ribbon the daguerreotypes of the sisters Walpole—Letty and Berenice—who had been guests of the President when, at a famous ball given in their honor a young French marquis had insulted the memory of their kinsman, Sir Robert Walpole; upon which Mistress Berenice had coolly halted the minuet to tell him clearly that his entire nation might have been drawn through Sir Robert's white staff of office had he cared to make the staff sufficiently hollow! There were spirit and daring, if one likes; and indeed my Lady Letty had later eloped with a young lieutenant—she in her muslin frock and he in his muddy uniform. And yet the Amazing Lady with her spirit and daring could not possibly even have held in her hand their likenesses without suggesting an incongruity; and I even fancy that the incongruity might have extended to the likeness of Olivia Prescott, who managed my mother's stillroom with rare wisdom and attended our household, my father used to say, with "queen's quiet," touching and lifting among the herbs and cheeses as if they had been gold leaf and crown jewels. But the Amazing Lady could not even have handled herbs and cheeses without a tableau light.

When I took up the three bags of white velvet I was in some trepidation, for I knew that the Boy had turned and was watching me. Yet I went on, quietly enough, as I hope, loosening the tassels of silk and drawing out, one after another, the three miniatures of my mother, Honoria Semple. The portraits had been painted by a famous artist of London, and all three had been his despair. For her beauty was so elusive a thing, so a product of that moment's smile, that moment's thought, that moment's dream, that it was no matter of ease to beguile it to the brush. She was very tiny, very fair, almost pathetically young. In one portrait her fair hair lay loosely about her face; in another she wore her collar of seed pearls and there was a rope of pearls about her slender, pointed waist; and in the third her delicate hands lay upon an unfurled fan of cobweb which Martha Washington had given to her mother. And always in her face was that clear look of some other self than her when we knew; a secret self, of which not all were aware and none possessed—it may be not even she herself. I longed to lay her likeness in the hand of the Boy, saying simply: "See. Is she not like the pollen of flowers? But that woman whom you have chosen is only diamond dust!"

Instead, I half turned toward the Boy, who sat frankly watching me; and I spoke to him across the narrow aisle, quite simply and as if I had the right, as, in the circumstance, I am half persuaded that I had.

"It is not possible," said I almost absently, "that you are one of the Abbotts of Maryland?"

The Boy was at my side in an instant.

"No, madam," he said with just the right shade of regret, "my family is of Virginia."

"Ah," cried I in unfeigned delight—what a miracle it is to be an old woman with white curls, able to act quite as one likes!—"ah, then you will be interested in these miniatures of my mother, a Virginia girl who married a gentleman of Maryland, one of the Abbotts whom you must forgive me for observing that you resemble."

He took in his hand the likeness of my mother, and he might have touched her hand through a minuet and himself fitted charmingly in the picture. His rare face lighted as he looked at the face upon the ivory.

"A belle in the days of Daguerre," he said below his breath. "Ah, thank you! How very beautiful she is."

I nodded, and sat rearranging the three bags.

"She has both kinds of beauty, madam," said the Boy then, as if he spoke half to himself and a very little to me. "She has the beauty of the eyes—and the beauty within the eyes."

I nodded again, rearranging my velvet bags. Then I laid in his hand the other miniatures.

"When she was eighteen," I said—oh, and most absently, I assure everyone, I made room beside me for the Boy—"when she was eighteen—" And when my mother was eighteen proved such an alluring matter that, speaking from her heart as well as my own, it was surely no wonder that I talked on inexcusably about her. There were charming things to tell of her—when she was the belle of ancient New York, when the empress took her to her chateau at Aix, when she lived with Patience Worship and ministered to the needy of the little church. And in it all her fineness, her distinction, her exceeding delicacy were like a star standing over the threshold of Another Land—a land where mystery and delight are more than idols, vaguely understood.

The Boy was very quiet. In her corner the Amazing Lady leaned, her face against the cushions, one little made-to-order shoe peeping from her skirts. And I, perplexed as to where my course was to arrive, and filled with certainty that it would lead nowhere at all, lifted the worn leather that framed the faces of my beautiful people and told the Boy all the delicious Dresden things and all the stern, unwavering things I knew of their lives. Would he not see, I wondered mutely, oh, would he not see that the lady whom he should delight to honor must be the fine embroidering of flowers upon the world. I could not tell what he thought. He sat silently holding the three miniatures, listening to my garrulity quite as if I had had the right to besiege him with these unbidden guests.

At last the Amazing Lady stirred and sighed, and instantly, with that lighting of the face which is not to be mistaken, the Boy turned toward her, the miniatures of my mother forgotten in his hands, quite as if she had not been the flower of two courts and the ministering angel to a parish. It is true that I can by no means tell what was passing in the Boy's mind or how much of all that I meant him to see, was finding admittance. But as I look back I can find it in my heart to doubt that my most finely flavored adventuring might, by any possibility, have succeeded. However, that is destined always to be one of those delicious subjects which Pelleas and I love to argue over our lonely fire.

For even while I wondered and doubted, Pelleas himself emerged from the smoking compartment, newspaper in hand. And while my heart sank in the certainty that he would think me mad and that the plot was ruined at the crowning moment, I became aware that Pelleas was holding his paper toward me.

"Ettarre," he said, with his benign, unconscious look at the Boy, "I can't read what it says—but doesn't that look like Ingeborg, who does our mending? And doesn't the heading say she is married to a scamp?"

I looked. And there, from a decorative design of hearts and footlights, smiled out at me above a corsage of jewels and flowers the face—not of Ingeborg, but of the Amazing Lady herself.

"I knew she looked like somebody," I said overstupidly, and could have said no more to save us all. "I knew she looked like somebody," I said, and glanced fearfully at the Boy.

"Millionaire Broker Returns to Find Wife Missing" went on the glaring headlines, so that I wondered that all the car did not know. But no one knew but the Boy.

I remember that he took the paper from my hand and confronted her, in the moment of her wakening. Before she understood, the Amazing Lady even looked up at him with the prettiest sigh and fluttering of lids. But when she had looked vaguely at the paper, her eyes went swiftly, pitifully to the Boy's eyes. Then she took the sheet and read it at a word, and read what it meant for her and the Boy. There was no mistaking. And the Boy knew.

"I thought he was dead," I heard her saying over and over; and she cried out something to the Boy, but her voice was curiously lowered now, so that I did not hear, and all the rich contralto was thin and bodiless. As for me, I gathered up my daguerreotypes with trembling hands and tried to tie my velvet bags with the miniatures lying unregarded upon the seat. But Pelleas, suspecting nothing, hunted through the time card to see if the city that we were nearing were Channing, and wondered earnestly on which side of the track the big Channing locomotive works would prove to be.

A moment later, when the brakeman called the station, I remembered with a thrill the Amazing Lady's uncertainty whether she should go to Channing or New York. But now there was no uncertainty. She had put on her admirable little hat and was tugging at her gloves, talking all the while in a quivering undertone and looking into the terrible, young face of the Boy.

There was Channing itself creeping about the tracks, black brick and trundling trucks and wagons of milk cans—quite like a permanent city. And into its heart, with Pelleas's paper still crushed in her arm, went the Amazing Lady.

I looked after her, filled with a sudden yearning, and, I dare say because I am an unstable old woman with no cast iron to speak of among my principles, I was filled, too, with an uncontrollable pity for her. Pelleas brought me back to the needs of the moment:

"The locomotive works must be on the left-hand side," he decided discontentedly. "And the ice houses are sure to be between them and the car windows!"

I did not see the Boy again. All that afternoon the small discreet volume, of good birth and antecedents of charming certainty, lay in the seat where the Amazing Lady had fallen asleep. It lay there when we left the train that afternoon; and still the Boy stayed somewhere away, fighting it out alone. If only, I thought helplessly, they might have been of use to him in his need—the spirits of those women folded away in my faded violet ribbon and white velvet bags! But the matter was beyond their art and mine, under the scepter of Another Land.

At last I told Pelleas about it as well as I could, by no means sparing myself in the part I had essayed to play from the text of the miniatures and of what may have been in the heart of my mother as well as in my own.

Pelleas listened in silence with that most terrifying air, known to some of us offenders, of waiting in confidence to hear us justify ourselves at the end. There is nothing more crushing to a culprit who has no justification. And when I had no more to tell Pelleas looked down at me musingly.

"Ettarre," he astonished me by saying, "as between you and that poor girl on the train—I don't know, upon my honor, which to call the Amazing Lady."