XXI
The establishment of Madame Leota was in darkness save for a single light that gleamed forth from the library window of the apartment at the top of the house. Madame sat beside the table wearing one of the elaborate ruffled dressing gowns that she loved so well. Opposite her at the table was Ivan Alter. They were alone in the entire house except for Terese.
"This place," Louella said, "is unused to quiet. How sad the halls must feel not to hear the laughter of Minetta and Belle. If houses have souls, and I believe they do, they must grow melancholy when the old order changeth, giving place to the new, the old order of which they have grown fond."
Terese brought a pot of tea. Madame poured a cup and sipped it languidly. That day she had bade goodbye to her servants and her girls. She had given each servant a check for five hundred dollars and every girl had been rewarded with a thousand. There were tears in everybody's eyes at the parting.
"I'll give each of you my New York address," she told them, "so that if you are ever in need of funds, you can write to me."
Now they were all gone and Madame sat with Ivan in her apartment, the apartment which had been nearest to home she had known in over forty years, and which, in the morning, she was leaving forever.
"I feel," she murmured, "as though once more all my past life is being burned away. I wonder if in the process I will become purified."
More and more, in her advancing years, Madame was turning to religion. She knew that she was an undesirable character, in most people's opinions. It did not bother her in the slightest. She went to church because she enjoyed the services. She was interested in studying the faces of the congregation. The smug hypocrisy, the upturned noses, the assumed sanctified expressions. The over-dressed females, the gloomy stolid-faced men. For religion itself Madame did not care a great deal. She liked its pomp. She liked to Join in the singing, even though her voice was raucous and harsh.
"You do not need to be purified," declared Ivan thoughtfully. "I have known you for years. I have never known you to be wrong, nor to be guilty of a small or mean act. True, you have run a house of love. You have catered to the unquenchable desires of men. If there be fault, the fault lies with Nature for so constituting society that it needs such houses. You have saved more girls than any other member of your church. You have done vast good. No girl has ever started on the downward path through the portals of your house and many have actually climbed back to the stars again. I tell you frankly that if there is a God, which of course is open to argument, and you are denied entrance to Heaven, then I shall be everlastingly grateful for permission to reside in hell."
"Thanks, Ivan," said she. "I shall miss you greatly when I am in New York."
"Perhaps, old friend," said he, "you will permit me to call upon you now and then when business calls me to your city. You know, being an artist, I am welcome everywhere, when as a matter of fact for that very reason I should be barred from all respectable homes."
"I'd like to have you," she said simply. "Your coming will be something for which to look forward."
"You can depend upon it," said he. "I'll come. Perhaps some day you will let me paint your portrait."
"But I am an old woman," she objected, "a fat ugly old woman with chins way down to here."
"You are entirely wrong," he said emphatically. "Beauty is something more than a shallow earthly surface appearance. If it were not, all the sensuous girls on magazine covers would be masterpieces. Needless to say they are not. They last no longer than last nights sunset. Great pictures must be of great subjects. But great subjects can concern themselves with simple things. Their greatness is a sort of veneer with which the artist varnishes the canvas. Take for instance Vincent Van Gogh's, 'Potato-Eaters,' a group of peasants with misshapen faces, eating their supper in the light of a kerosene lamp, or his 'Portrait of a Peasant Woman Rocking a Cradle.' Or Titian's portrait of 'Francis I,' the man with the tremendously long nose. Or Rembrandt's 'Portrait of An Old Man.' Better still, take Paul Gauguin's 'Tahitian Girl Reclining' or his 'Women in a Hut.' What color, what splendor, what music, what motion! Would any of these pictures do for a magazine cover? Not one! Why? Are they lacking in beauty? On the contrary, they are breathtaking. They are magnificent. Under this category you must fall. How Rembrandt or Van Gogh would have joyed to have painted you."
Madame Leota smiled. "You are a good friend," she said, "and you know how to make an old lady happy by making pretty speeches. It is odd that of all the men I have known the two who meant the most to me were artists, and neither of you were ever my lover. The other one was Steve Garland. He died thirty years ago. Yet his memory is as vivid as though I had been with him only yesterday. I suppose it is because he is never out of my thoughts for long. He knew the kind of a woman I was, but he painted my portrait, a queer portrait with the light so arranged that it formed a halo about the head."
"He too," broke in Ivan, "could see that there was something magnificent about you. I read a book recently. It didn't amount to much, but one sentence impressed itself upon me. I cannot quote it accurately though in substance it was this! 'You cannot speak of a good tree or a bad sunset.' Such words cannot be used in speaking of nature. Therefore in speaking of you, we cannot use the words good or bad either. You are above such words. You are magnificent."
"It is pleasant to be flattered," murmured Madame Leota. "None of us grow so old that we cannot appreciate it. Though we may be misshapen and ugly we yearn to appear lovely. Until the day of her death, a woman wants people to love her. When love ceases, she dies, for love is the food on which the root of her life feeds. All my life I havfe been two women, Louella Leota and Mary Blaine. Occasionally I have changed back and forth. Now Louella Leota ceases to exist forever, and Mary Blaine will settle down to a calm and doddering old age. But Steve Garland said that neither of the lives these two women had led was the life that the gods had intended to be mine. There was another woman hidden within me, the woman I might have been if circumstances had not altered my life. Occasionally, he said, this woman peeped out and it was this woman he painted. Whether he spoke truth or not, who can say? At any rate I wanted to be Louella Leota. She was the woman to whose affairs I gave most attention. Mary Blaine was but a creature in a mist. And that third woman, if she existed, must never be allowed out, else she might have played havoc with my life. Can you imagine how deadly it would have been if she had escaped and it turned out that she was a good woman?"
Madame took a pinch of snuff. She smiled wistfully. "Strange indeed has been my life," she said, "for now that Louella Leota whom I have favored above the others must dissolve and drift away as though she were no more than the mist of moonrise." She paused to sneeze. "I wonder if they will allow me to take snuff in New York," she mused in sudden panic.
"Of course they will," he hastened to assure her, "and anyway, according to your brother's will you will be mistress of the house. If they imagine you tare a queer creature, make all the servants take snuff so that you need not be conspicuous. Seriously, though, if I were you, I wouldn't change my personality in the slightest. As you are, the girl cannot help but love you. If you tried to ape modern society women you would only make a caricature of yourself and end up an object of ridicule."
"I'll take your advice," declared Madame Leota. "Either people must like me as I am or not at all."
"As you are is quite lovely enough," said Ivan.
For awhile they sat in silence. Occasionally Madame sipped her tea.
"I've arranged for old Marlow to be kept on as gardener," said she presently. "I am also giving him a pension. He'd be like a ship out of water if he had to leave this place."
"You think of everything," said Ivan. "I wonder how often during your life you've thought as seriously of your own comfort."
She shrugged her shoulders. "What matter?" she asked wearily. "After all what do I amount to despite your pretty speeches?"