My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather
When we got home she was, of course, very tired. Oswald was waiting for us, and he and the driver carried her upstairs. While we were getting her into bed, the noise overhead broke out—tramp, tramp, bang! Myra began to cry.
“Oh, I’ve come back to it, to be tormented again! I’ve two fatal maladies, but it’s those coarse creatures I shall die of. Why didn’t you leave me out there, Nellie, in the wind and night? You ought to get me away from this, Oswald. If I were on my feet, and you laid low, I wouldn’t let you be despised and trampled upon.”
“I’ll go up and see those people to-morrow, Mrs. Henshawe,” I promised. “I’m sure I can do something.”
“Oh, don’t Nellie!” She looked up at me in affright. “She’d turn a deaf ear to you. You know the Bible says the wicked are deaf like the adder. And, Nellie, she has the wrinkled, white throat of an adder, that woman, and the hard eyes of one. Don’t go near her!”
(I went to see Mrs. Poindexter the next day, and she had just such a throat and just such eyes. She smiled, and said that the sick woman underneath was an old story, and she ought to have been sent to a sanatorium long ago.)
“Never mind, Myra. I’ll get you away from it yet. I’ll manage,” Oswald promised as he settled the pillows under her.
She smoothed his hair. “No, my poor Oswald, you’ll never stagger far under the bulk of me. Oh, if youth but knew!” She closed her eyes and pressed her hands over them. “It’s been the ruin of us both. We’ve destroyed each other. I should have stayed with my uncle. It was money I needed. We’ve thrown our lives away.”
“Come, Myra, don’t talk so before Nellie. You don’t mean it. Remember the long time we were happy. That was reality, just as much as this.”
“We were never really happy. I am a greedy, selfish, worldly woman; I wanted success and a place in the world. Now I’m old and ill and a fright, but among my own kind I’d still have my circle; I’d have courtesy from people of gentle manners, and not have my brains beaten out by hoodlums. Go away, please, both of you, and leave me!” She turned her face to the wall and covered her head.
We stepped into the hall, and the moment we closed the door we heard the bolt slip behind us. She must have sprung up very quickly. Oswald walked with me to my room. “It’s apt to be like this, when she has enjoyed something and gone beyond her strength. There are times when she can’t have anyone near her. It was worse before you came.”
I persuaded him to come into my room and sit down and drink a glass of cordial.
“Sometimes she has locked me out for days together,” he said. “It seems strange—a woman of such generous friendships. It’s as if she had used up that part of herself. It’s a great strain on me when she shuts herself up like that. I’m afraid she’ll harm herself in some way.”
“But people don’t do things like that,” I said hopelessly.
He smiled and straightened his shoulders. “Ah, but she isn’t people! She’s Myra Driscoll, and there was never anybody else like her. She can’t endure, but she has enough desperate courage for a regiment.”
THREE
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 flyleaf, 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 forebears put into us. I
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 …
FOUR
One afternoon when I got home from school I found a note from Mrs. Henshawe under my door, and went to her at once. She greeted me and kissed me with unusual gravity.
“Nellie, dear, will you do a very special favour for me to-morrow? It is the fifteenth of April, the anniversary of Madame Modjeska’s death.” She gave me a key and asked me to open an old trunk in the corner. “Lift the tray, and in the bottom, at one end, you will find an old pair of long kid gloves, tied up like sacks. Please give them to me.”
I burrowed down under old evening wraps and dinner dresses and came upon the gloves, yellow with age and tied at both ends with corset lacings; they contained something heavy that jingled. Myra was watching my face and chuckled. “Is she thinking they are my wedding gloves, piously preserved? No, my dear; I went before a justice of the peace, and married without gloves, so to speak!” Untying the string, she shook out a little rain of ten- and twenty-dollar gold pieces.
“All old Irish women hide away a bit of money.” She took up a coin and gave it to me. “Will you go to St. Joseph’s Church and inquire for Father Fay; tell him you are from me, and ask him to celebrate a mass tomorrow for the repose of the soul of Helena Modjeska, Countess Bozenta-Chlapowska. He will remember; last year I hobbled there myself. You are surprised, Nellie? Yes, I broke with the Church when I broke with everything else and ran away with a German free-thinker; but I believe in holy words and holy rites all the same. It is a solace to me to know that to-morrow a mass will be said here in heathendom for the spirit of that noble artist, that beautiful and gracious woman.”
When I put the gold back into the trunk and started making the tea, she said: “Oswald, of course, doesn’t know the extent of my resources. We’ve often needed a hundred dollars or two so bitter bad; he wouldn’t understand. But that is money I keep for unearthly purposes; the needs of this world don’t touch it.”
As I was leaving she called me back: “Oh, Nellie, can’t we go to Gloucester’s cliff on Saturday, if it’s fine? I do long to!”
We went again, and again. Nothing else seemed to give her so much pleasure. But the third time I stopped for her, she declared she was not equal to it. I found her sitting in her chair, trying to write to an old friend, an Irish actress I had met at her apartment in New York, one of the guests at that New Year’s eve party. Her son, a young actor, had shot himself in Chicago because of some sordid love affair. I had seen an account of it in the morning paper.
“It touches me very nearly,” Mrs. Henshawe told me. “Why, I used to keep Billy with me for weeks together when his mother was off on tour. He was the most truthful, noble-hearted little fellow. I had so hoped he would be happy. You remember his mother?”
I remembered her very well—large and jovial and hearty she was. Myra began telling me about her, and the son, whom she had not seen since he was sixteen.
“To throw his youth away like that, and shoot himself at twenty-three! People are always talking about the joys of youth—but, oh, how youth can suffer! I’ve not forgotten; those hot southern Illinois nights, when Oswald was in New York, and I had no word from him except through Liddy, and I used to lie on the floor all night and listen to the express trains go by. I’ve not forgotten.”
“Then I wonder why you are sometimes so hard on him now,” I murmured.
Mrs. Henshawe did not reply to me at once. The corners of her mouth trembled, then drew tight, and she sat with her eyes closed as if she were gathering herself for something.
At last she sighed, and looked at me wistfully. “It’s a great pity, isn’t it, Nellie, to reach out a grudging hand and try to spoil the past for anyone? Yes, it’s a great cruelty. But I can’t help it. He’s a sentimentalist, always was; he can look back on the best of those days when we were young and loved each other, and make himself believe it was all like that. It wasn’t. I was always a grasping, worldly woman; I was never satisfied. All the same, in age, when the flowers are so few, it’s a great unkindness to destroy any that are left in a man’s heart.” The tears rolled down her cheeks, she leaned back, looking up at the ceiling. She had stopped speaking because her voice broke. Presently she began again resolutely. “But I’m made so. People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were.… A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other. Perhaps I can’t forgive him for the harm I did him. Perhaps that’s it. When there are children, that feeling, goes through natural changes. But when it remains so personal … something gives way in one. In age we lose everything; even the power to love.”
“He hasn’t,” I suggested.
“He has asked you to speak for him, my dear? Then we have destroyed each other indeed!”
“Certainly he hasn’t, Mrs. Myra! But you are hard on him, you know, and when there are so many hard things, it seems a pity.”
“Yes, it’s a great pity.” She drew herself up in her chair. “And I’d rather you didn’t come any more for the time being, Nellie. I’ve been thinking the tea made me nervous.” She was smiling, but her mouth curled like a little snake, as I had seen it do long ago. “Will you be pleased to take your things and go, Mrs. Casey?” She said it with a laugh, but a very meaning one.
As I rose I watched for some sign of relenting, and I said humbly enough: “Forgive me, if I’ve said anything I shouldn’t. You know I love you very dearly.”
She mockingly bowed her tyrant’s head. “It’s owing to me infirmities, dear Mrs. Casey, that I’ll not be able to go as far as me door wid ye.”
FIVE
For days after that episode I did not see Mrs. Henshawe at all. I saw Oswald at dinner in the restaurant every night, and he reported her condition to me as if nothing had happened. The short-haired newspaper girl often came to our table, and the three of us talked together. I could see that he got great refreshment from her. Her questions woke pleasant trains of recollection, and her straightforward affection was dear to him. Once Myra, in telling me that it was a pleasure to him to have me come into their lives again thus, had remarked: “He was always a man to feel women, you know, in every way.” It was true. That crude little girl made all the difference in the world to him. He was generous enough to become quite light-hearted in directing her inexperience and her groping hunger for life. He even read her poor little “specials” and showed her what was worst in them and what was good. She took correction well, he told me.
Early in June Mrs. Henshawe began to grow worse. Her doctors told us a malignant growth in her body had taken hold of a vital organ, and that she would hardly live through the month. She suffered intense pain from pressure on the nerves in her back, and they gave her opiates freely. At first we had two nurses, but Myra hated the night nurse so intensely that we dismissed her, and, as my school was closed for the summer, I took turns with Oswald in watching over her at night. She needed little attention except renewed doses of codeine. She slept deeply for a few hours, and the rest of the night lay awake, murmuring to herself long passages from her old poets.
Myra kept beside her now an ebon
She talked very little after this last stage of her illness began; she no longer complained or lamented, but toward Oswald her manner became strange and dark. She had certain illusions; the noise overhead she now attributed entirely to her husband. “Ah, there, he’s beginning it again,” she would say. “He’ll wear me down in the end. Oh, let me be buried in the king’s highway!”
When Oswald lifted her, or did anything for her now, she was careful to thank him in a guarded, sometimes a cringing tone. “It’s bitter enough that I should have to take service from you—you whom I have loved so well,” I heard her say to him.
When she asked us to use candles for light during our watches, and to have no more of the electric light she hated, she said accusingly, at him rather than to him: “At least let me die by candlelight; that is not too much to ask.”
Father Fay came to see her almost daily now. His visits were long, and she looked forward to them. I was, of course, not in her room when he was there, but if he met me in the corridor he stopped to speak to me, and once he walked down the street with me talking of her. He was a young man, with a fresh face and pleasant eyes, and he was deeply interested in Myra. “She’s a most unusual woman, Mrs. Henshawe,” he said when he was walking down the street beside me. Then he added, smiling quite boyishly: “I wonder whether some of the saints of the early Church weren’t a good deal like her. She’s not at all modern in her make-up, is she?”
During those days and nights when she talked so little, one felt that Myra’s mind was busy all the while—that it was even abnormally active, and occasionally one got a clue to what occupied it. One night when I was giving her her codeine she asked me a question.