She thrust her foot into the shoe and stood up, flinging back her head as she went to the mirror to shake out her hair. The stubborn resolution, which was the controlling motive in her character, shot through her like a bolt. "Well, there's no use thinking," she said aloud. "I've got to go through with it." While she combed her hair back from her forehead, and twisted it into its usual compact knot on her head, she gazed wonderingly at her face in the mirror. After all she had suffered it seemed strange to her that her face had not withered and her hair turned white in a night. But there was scarcely a perceptible change in her appearance. The line of her hair was still dark and waving; her eyes were still clear and blue; the velvety colour still flowed beneath the few golden freckles on her cheeks. Only there was something in her eyes that had not been there until yesterday. She knew life now, she reflected, and that showed in her eyes.
Fastening her dress as she left the room, she hurried downstairs and into the kitchen where her mother was already busy about breakfast.
"What do you want me to do, Ma?"
"Everything's 'most ready. You can call your father and the boys and then pour out the coffee."
"Why didn't you wake me?"
"You're always tired Monday morning, so I thought I'd let you sleep. I don't see how it is. Sermons rest me. Why didn't you bring your wet things down to the kitchen last night?"
"I was so tired I forgot." Would her mother never stop nagging? Would there never be any quiet?
She called the men to breakfast, poured out their coffee, and helped her mother serve the cornbread and bacon. Then she sat down and ate slowly and deliberately, forcing herself to swallow, as she had forced herself to take gruel when she had had measles. The agony had died down; she felt bruised and sore as if she had been beaten; but the intensity of the pain had settled into a hard substance like lead in her breast. There was not a ripple of emotion surrounding this island of bitterness into which her love had resolved; there was only a vast sea of indifference. The torture would return, she supposed. She was accustomed now to the fact that it came and went, without reason, like one of her mother's attacks of neuralgia; but, for the moment, at least, her nerves had ceased their intolerable vibration.
After breakfast, when she walked along the road to the store, it seemed to her that the landscape had lost colour, that the autumn glow had gone out of the broomsedge. When she came to the fork she found herself listening for the clink of the mare's shoes, and she resolved that she would run into the woods or cower down in the brushwood if she heard the buggy approaching. Never would she see him again, if she could prevent it. Her mind played with absurd fancies. She imagined him dying, and she saw herself looking on without pity, refusing to save him, standing motionless while he drowned before her eyes, or was trampled to death by steers. No, she would never see him again.
There was no sound at the fork. She walked on past the burned cabin, past the Sneads' farm, where the cows looked at her pensively, past the second belt of woods, and up the bone-white slope to the station. Here she found the usual sprinkling of passengers for the early train, and in order to avoid them she went into the store and began arranging the shelves. In a minute Minnie May came to fetch her, and following the little girl into the bedroom, Dorinda found Mrs. Pedlar lying flat in bed, with the pink sacque, which she was too weak to slip on, spread over her breast. The summer had drained the last reserve of her strength. She was growing worse every hour, and she was so fragile that her flesh was like paper. Yet she still kept her vivacity and her eager interest in details.
"Oh, Dorinda," she breathed. "It isn't true, is it?"
Dorinda picked up the sacque and slipped it over the meagre shoulders. "If you aren't careful, you'll take cold," she said quietly, and then, after an imperceptible pause. "Yes, it is true."
"You don't mean he has married Geneva?"
"Yes, he has married Geneva."
"Oh, why? But, Dorinda——"
While Rose Emily was still talking, the girl turned away and went back into the store. If she didn't work and deaden thought, she couldn't possibly go through with it. All this numbness was on the surface of her being, like the insensibility that is produced by a narcotic. It didn't lessen a single pang underneath, nor alter a solitary fact of existence. At any minute, without premonition, the effects of the narcotic might wear off, and she might come back to life again. Coming back to life, with all that she had to face, would be terrible. Taking the broom from the corner behind the door, she began sweeping the floor in hard, long strokes, as if she were sweeping away a mountain of trash; and into these strokes she put as much as she could of her misery. When she had finished sweeping the store, she brushed the mud from the platform and the steps to the pile of refuse which had accumulated at the back of the house. Then she brought a basin of water and a cake of soap, and scrubbed the counter and the shelves where the dry goods were kept. She worked relentlessly, with rigid determination, as if to clean the store were the one absorbing purpose of her life.
"What's got into you, Dorinda?" asked Nathan, while he watched her. "You look as if you'd gone dirt crazy." Dirt crazy! That was what the boys said of her mother.
"I get so tired looking at dust," she replied.
"Dust? I didn't know there was a speck of dust anywhere around. Old Jubilee swept and dusted this morning."
With her dripping brush in her hand, Dorinda turned from the shelves she was washing and looked at him over the counter. She wondered why he had not spoken of Jason, and some dormant instinct, buried in the morass of her consciousness, was grateful to him because he had avoided the subject. He must know. Everybody knew by this time. Yet he had not alluded by word or look to the wreck of her happiness. Though she did not think of it at the moment, long afterwards she realized that this was one of the occasions when Nathan had shown a tactfulness which she had never imagined that he possessed.
She finished the shelves, going scrupulously into each crack and corner. Then, putting the basin and the cake of soap aside, she wiped the dampness off with a cloth, and arranged the bolts of figured calico and checked gingham in orderly rows. When this was over she attacked the pasteboard boxes on the adjoining shelf, cleaning, dusting, reassorting the contents of each separate box. It was amazing the way dust collected. Old Jubilee had cleaned the store. Yet here was dirt poked away in the corners.
She had made herself cheap, that was the trouble. If you are going to cheapen yourself, her mother had said, be sure first that the man is not cheap also. Then, even if you are sure, it pays to be prudent. Prudence builds no poorhouses—that was her mother again. Oh, if only she had known when knowledge could have been useful! If only you could live your life after experience and not before! She knew now how to face things. . . .
At that instant, with a stab of anguish, she became alive. Her pain, which had been merely a dull ache, was suddenly as keen as if a blade had been driven into her wound. She couldn't bear it. Nobody could bear it. In a kind of daze she picked up the cloth, the dust pan, the cake of soap, and carried them to the end of the room. Then, taking down her hat from a peg behind the door, she put it on and went out of the store and across the yard to the gate and the road. It seemed to her that if only she could reach home quickly, she should find that it had all been a mistake, that something had happened to make the situation less terrible than it appeared from a distance. What this something was she tried to imagine. Perhaps the old man had lied. Perhaps Jason was not really married. Perhaps he hadn't meant her to understand that he was married. There were so many possibilities, she told herself, that she could not think of them all. A hundred accidents—anything might have occurred. Only at the store she felt smothered and shut away, as if she were left behind by the hours. A deep instinct, like the instinct that drives a wounded animal to flight, was urging her to go somewhere—anywhere—as long as it was to a different place. She had made a mistake, she saw now, to come to the store. At home it would be easier. At home she should be able to think of some way out of her misery.
She walked as fast as she could, panting for breath, hurrying over the bad places in the road, as if the thing she feared were pursuing her. Down the long slope; through the thin pines; over the mile of red clay road, broken with mud holes; past the Sneads' pasture, where the sourish smell of cattle hung perpetually in the air; by the burned cabin at the fork; and on into the edge of Hoot Owl Woods at the beginning of Old Farm. When, at last, she struggled over the sagging bridge and up the rocky grade to the porch, she was almost surprised to find that the house was not on fire. There was an unnatural aspect, she felt, in the familiar scene, as of a place that had suffered beneath a tornado and yet remained unchanged on the surface. And this smiling October serenity appeared to her to be unendurable. Trembling like a blade of grass, she stood hesitating on the threshold. "Why did I come?" she asked in amazement. "What did I expect to find?"
"Is that you, Dorinda?" called her mother from the kitchen, where she was washing clothes. A kettle of "sour pickle" was simmering on the stove, and the air was laden with the pungent aroma. "What on earth is the matter?"
"I forgot something."
"It must have been mighty important. What was it you forgot?"
The trembling had passed from Dorinda's limbs to her thoughts. She felt as if she should drop. "I—I can't remember," she answered.
"Well, I never!" Mrs. Oakley appeared in the doorway, her bare arms glazed with soapsuds and her face beaded with steam. "You ain't sick, are you?"
"No, I remember now. It was a piece of embroidery Rose Emily was doing. She asked me to bring it."
"Embroidery? I should think she might have managed to wait till to-morrow."
"I didn't mind the walk. It is better than being in the store."
"Anyway, you'd better rest a bit before you go back. You look real peaked. Have you got a headache?" So her mother hadn't heard! Who would be the first one to tell her?
"A little. It was getting wet yesterday, I reckon." She must say something. If she didn't, her mother would question her all day.
"If you'd listened to what I told you," said Mrs. Oakley, "you wouldn't have got caught in that storm. Before you go upstairs you'd better rub a little camphor on your forehead."
She lifted her arms, on which soapsuds had dried like seaweed, and went back into the kitchen, while Dorinda, without stopping to look for the camphor, toiled upstairs to her room. Here she flung herself on the bed and lay staring straight up at the stained ceiling, where wasps were crawling. One, two, three, she counted them idly. There was a pile of apples on her mantelpiece. That must have brought them. But she couldn't lie here. Springing up, she went over to the mirror and began nervously changing things on her dressing-table.
Yes, she was ashen about the eyes and her features were thin and drawn. Her warm colour still held firm, but she was mottled about the mouth like a person in a high fever. Even her full red lips looked parched and unnatural. "I am losing my looks," she thought. "I am only twenty and I look middle-aged."
Why had she come back? It was worse here than it was at the store. Her suffering was more intolerable, and she seemed farther away from relief than she had been while she was cleaning the shelves. Perhaps if she went back she should find that it was easier. Something might have happened to change things. At least her mother wouldn't be at the store, and she dreaded her mother more than anything that she had to face. Yes, she had made a mistake to come home.
Going over to the curtain, she pushed it aside and looked at her dresses, taking them down from the hooks and hanging them back again, as if she could not remember which one she wanted. Then, in a single flash, just as it had returned at the store, all the horror rushed over her afresh, and she turned away and ran out of the room. Any spot, she realized, was more endurable than the place she was in.
"You ain't going back already, Dorinda?" called her mother from the kitchen.
"Yes, I'm going back. I feel better."
"It seems to me it wasn't worth your while walking all that way twice. I'd take my time going back. There ain't a bit of use hurrying like that. When you come home in the evening, I wish you'd remember to bring me that box of allspice. You forgot it on Saturday. It seems to me you're growing mighty forgetful."
But Dorinda was far down the walk on her way to the gate, and she did not stop to reply. She retraced her steps rapidly over the bridge and along the edge of the woods, where the shadows lay thick and cool. Behind her she heard the bumping of a wagon in the mud holes; but she did not glance round, for she knew that it was only one of the farmers on the way to the station.
"Going to the store?" inquired the man, as he came up with her. "Can I give you a lift?"
She shook her head, smiling up at him. "I'm not going back yet awhile, thank you. I'm out looking for one of our turkeys."
Stepping out of the road, she waited until the wagon had bumped out of sight, and then went on, in a bewildered way, as if she could not see where she was walking. As she approached the fork, her legs refused to carry her farther, and scrambling on her knees up the bank by the roadside, she dropped to the ground and abandoned herself to despair. She couldn't go on and she couldn't sit still. All she could do was to cower there behind the thicket of brushwood, and let life have its way with her. She had reached the end of endurance. That was what it meant, she had reached the end of what she could bear. The trembling, which had begun in her hands and feet, ran now in threads all over her body. For a minute her mind was a blank; then fear leaped at her out of the stillness. Springing to her feet, she looked wildly about, and sank down again because her legs would not support her.
"I've got to do something," she thought. "I've got to do something, or I'll go out of my mind." Never once, in her fright and pain, did the idea of an appeal to Jason enter her thoughts. No, she had finished with him for ever. There was no help there, and if there were help in him, she would die before she would seek it.
Raising her head, she leaned against the bole of a tree and looked, with dimmed eyes, at the October morning. Around her she heard the murmurous rustle of leaves, the liquid notes of a wood robin, like the sprinkling of rain on the air, the distant shrill chanting of insects; all the natural country sounds which she would have called silence. Smooth as silk the shadows lay on the red clay road. Over the sky there was a thin haze, as if one looked at the sun through smoked glasses. "You've got to do something," repeated a derisive voice in her brain. "You've got to do something, or you'll go out of your mind." It seemed to her that the whole landscape waited, inarticulate but alive, for her decision.
Despair overwhelmed her; yet through all her misery there persisted a dim, half conscious recognition that she was living with only a part of her being. Deep down in her, beneath the rough texture of experience, her essential self was still superior to her folly and ignorance, was superior even to the conspiracy of circumstances that hemmed her in. And she felt that in a little while this essential self would reassert its power and triumph over disaster. Vague, transitory, comforting, this premonition brooded above the wilderness of her thoughts. Yes, she was not broken. She could never be broken while the vein of iron held in her soul.
For a long while she sat there by the roadside, with her eyes on the pale sunshine and the transparent shadows. What would her mother say if she knew? When would she know? Who would have the courage to tell her? For twenty years they had lived in the house together, yet they were still strangers. For twenty years they had not spent a night apart, and all the time her mother had dreamed of coral strands and palm trees, while she herself had grown into a thing as strange and far away as Africa. Were people like this everywhere, all over the world, each one a universe in one's self separate like the stars in a vast emptiness?
Far over the autumn fields, she heard the whistle of the train as it rounded the long curve at the station. Before the sound had floated past her she had come to one of those impetuous decisions which were characteristic of her temperament. "I'll go away in the morning," she resolved. "I'll go on the first train, the one that whistles at sunrise. If I take that, I can leave the house before light."
Immediately afterwards, as soon as the idea had taken possession of her, she felt the renewal of courage in her thoughts. Once that was settled, she told herself, and there was no turning back, everything would be easier. Just to go away somewhere. It made no difference where the train went. She would go to the very end, the farther the better, as long as her money held out. "I can scrape together almost seventy dollars," she thought. "Besides the fifty I made at the store, I've saved the twenty dollars Nathan and Rose Emily gave me for a wedding present. That much ought to take me somewhere and keep me until I can find something to do." Her father, she realized with a pang, would have to manage without her. Perhaps he would be obliged to mortgage the place again. She hoped he wouldn't have to sell Dan and Beersheba, and she was confident in her heart that he would never do this. He would sooner part with the roof over his head. It would be hard on him; but he had Josiah and Rufus, and after her marriage, it was doubtful if she could have continued to help him. "Josiah may marry too," she reflected, "and of course Rufus is always uncertain." Nobody could tell what Rufus might some day take it into his head to do. Then, because weakness lay in that direction, she turned her resolute gaze toward her own future. There was no help outside herself. She knew that the situation, bad as it was now, would be far worse before it was better. Romantic though she was, she was endowed mentally with a stubborn aptitude for facing facts, for looking at life fearlessly; and now that imagination had done its worst, she set herself to the task of rebuilding her ruined world. All her trouble, she felt, had come to her from trying to make life over into something it was not. Dreams, that was the danger. Like her mother she had tried to find a door in the wall, an escape from the tyranny of things as they are; and like her mother, she had floundered among visions. Even though she was miserable now, her misery was solid ground; her feet were firmly planted among the ancient rocks of experience. She had finished with romance, as she had finished with Jason, for ever.
Twisting about on the earth, she pushed aside the branches, and looked down on Old Farm, folded there so peacefully between the road and the orchard. Wreathed in sunlight as pale as cowslips, she saw the house under the yellowing locust trees. Over the roof a few swallows were curving; from a single chimney smoke rose in a column; there was a cascade of shadows down the rocky path to the gate. She saw these blended details, not as she had seen them yesterday or the moment before she had made her decision, but as one looks on a place which one has loved and from which one is parting for ever. A bloom of sentiment and regret coloured the stark outline; and so, she knew, it would remain indelibly softened in her memory.
Rising from the ground, she went back over the road to the bridge and up the rocky grade to the porch. As she drew nearer she saw her mother come out of the kitchen and go in the direction of the hog-pen, with a basin of vegetable parings in her hand. For a few minutes at least the house would be empty! Running indoors and up the two flights of stairs to the attic, Dorinda brought down an old carpet bag which had belonged first to her grandfather and then to her mother. Once, when she was a child, her mother had used it when she had taken her to spend a night in Richmond, with a distant relative, an old maid, who had died the next year, and again Josiah and Rufus had carried the bag with them when they went to the State fair one autumn. Now, while she dusted it inside and out, and tossed the few papers it contained into a bureau drawer, she decided that it would hold all the clothes she could take with her. "It will be heavy, but I'll manage it," she thought, moving softly lest her mother should return without stopping to gather the eggs in the henhouse. "I'd just as well pack and get it over," she added. "Anything is better than sitting down and waiting for something to happen."
One by one, she smoothed and folded her wedding clothes. Six of everything; nightgowns, chemises, corset covers, with frills across the bosom, starched white petticoats, with wide tucked flounces. She looked at each garment with swimming eyes and a lump like a rock in her throat, before she laid it away in one of the bulging compartments of the carpet bag. How fine the stitches were! It was a wonder what her mother could do with her rheumatic joints.
Stepping as lightly as she could, she brought her shoes from the closet and packed them away. Then the dresses, one after another. Two blue cotton dresses that she wore in the store. The pink gingham Rose Emily had given her. Would she ever need that again, she wondered. Last of all, the blue nun's veiling. "It would have been more sensible to have got it darker," she thought grimly. There wasn't room for the hat; but, after she had put in her stockings and handkerchiefs and collars, with the bits of ribbon she sometimes wore at her neck, she folded the orange shawl and spread it on top of everything else. "That may come in useful," she added. "You never can tell what the weather will be." It was October, and everybody said winter came earlier in the North. She had decided prudently that she would wear her old blue merino, with the tan ulster and the felt hat she had put away from moths in the spare room. She could easily steal in and get them out of the closet while her mother was looking after the pigs or the chickens.
Well, that was over. After she had closed and strapped the bag, she pushed it behind the curtain. There was no telling, she reminded herself, when her mother would poke her nose into places.
When she went downstairs it was twelve o'clock and the men had come in from the fields.
"Why, Dorinda, I didn't know you'd be here to dinner!" her mother exclaimed. "Is your head bad again?"
"Yes, I wasn't feeling so well, and there wasn't much to do at the store."
"I thought Monday was the busiest day." How like her mother that was! She could never let a thing drop. Some demon of contradiction impelled her to find a point of offense everywhere. There was a glass pitcher of buttermilk on the table. A little boy, the son of William Snead, had brought it over early in the morning, as soon as Miss Tabitha had churned. Lifting the pitcher, Dorinda filled the five glasses standing in a circle at the end of the table. As she handed a glass to her father, she looked at him with a grave impersonal sentiment, as if he were a part of the farm that she was leaving. Nothing, not even her mother's nervous nagging, could annoy her to-day. She felt only a despairing tenderness, like a mist of tears, in her heart.
"I'm sorry you ain't well, daughter," Joshua said, as he took the glass from her hand; and she felt that he had put an incalculable affection into the words. It was the only remark he made during the meal, and ordinary as it was, it seemed to bring her closer to him than she had ever been in her life. Or was it only because she was parting from him so soon? Everything was precious to her now, precious and indescribably sad and lovely. If she were to speak a word, she knew that she should burst into tears.
In the afternoon, when she had helped her mother hang out the clothes at the back of the house, she came indoors and waited for an opportunity to bring down the carpet bag. "Perhaps I've always tried too hard," she thought wearily. "If I'd just give up and let things drift, it might be that something would go right." She dropped on the bottom step of the staircase; but she had no sooner decided to give up the struggle than she heard her mother's voice telling her that she was going down into the garden.
"The last of those tomatoes will spoil if I don't pick them," she said.
"Do you want me to help you?" Dorinda called back.
"No, the sun is kind of sickening. You'd better keep out of it. There ain't much left after the storm, but I might as well use the tomatoes."
She went out, with the big splint-basket on her arm; and she was scarcely out of sight before Dorinda had dragged down the carpet bag and hidden it under the front porch behind one of the primitive rock pillars of the foundation. It would be impossible, she knew, to bring down the bag in the morning without waking her mother, who was a light sleeper. Her father and the boys, drugged by toil in the open, could sleep through thunder; but her mother would start up and call out at the scratching of a mouse. After she had hidden the bag, she went back into the spare room and unwrapped her tan ulster and brown felt hat from the newspapers which protected them from moths. As she unpinned the parcels, a smell of mingled camphor and lavender was released on the air, and she hoped that her mother would not detect it. "If she says anything, I'll tell her it's time to be wearing my winter clothes," she decided, while she carried the ulster and hat upstairs to her room. Since she had clung desperately to the thought of going away, her suffering had been more endurable; the vehement pain had dulled into an apathetic despair which deadened every cell of her body. She dreaded the moment when the stupor would lift and she should think and feel clearly again.
All night she slept only in restless waves of unconsciousness. The darkness was broken up into false dawns, and at every deceptive glimmer she would steal softly to the window and watch for the first splinter of light. While it was still dark, she dressed herself in the clothes she had laid by her bed, and then sat waiting for the sound of a crow in the henhouse. In the early part of the night there was a vaporous moon; but as the hours wore on, the sky clouded over, and when the day began to break a fine, slow rain was falling. "I hate so terribly to go," she thought, while she smoothed her hair and then wrapped up her brush and comb and slipped them into the pocket of her ulster. "I don't believe I'll go after all." But she knew, even while she lingered over the idea, that there was no turning back.
When she remembered it afterwards it seemed to her that the longest journey of her life was the one down the dark staircase. In reality her descent occupied only a few minutes; but the tumult of her emotions, the startled vigilance of her nerves, crowded these vivid instants with excitement. She lived years, not moments, while she hung there in the darkness, expecting the sound of her mother's voice or the vision of a grey head thrust out of the chamber doorway. What would her mother say if she discovered her? What would she say when she went upstairs and found her room empty? At the foot of the staircase Rambler poked his nose into her hand, and padded after her to the front door. He would have followed her outside, but stooping over him, she kissed his long anxious face before she pushed him back into the hall. Her eyes were heavy with tears as she hurried noiselessly across the porch, down the steps, and round the angle of the house to the rock pillar where she had hidden her bag. Not until she had passed through the gate and into the shadow of the woods, did she rest the heavy bag on the ground and stop to draw breath. Now, at last, she was safe from discovery. "If nobody comes by, I'll have to take some of the things out of the bag and try to carry it," she said aloud, in a desperate effort to cling to practical details. But it was scarcely likely, she told herself presently, that nobody would come by. Even on a rainy morning there were always a few farmers who went out to the station at daybreak.
While she waited there by the bridge, she seemed to be alone on the earth. It was a solitude not of the body but of the spirit, vast, impersonal, and yet burdened, in some strange way, with an incommunicable regret. The night had released the wild scents of autumn, and these were mingled with the formless terrors that overshadowed her mind. She thought without words, enveloped in a despondency as shapeless as night.
Up the road there was the measured beat of a trot, followed by the light rattle of a vehicle beyond the big honey-locust at the pasture bars. While she watched, the rattle grew louder, accompanied by the jarring turn of a screw, and a minute later a queer two-wheeled gig, with a hood like a chicken coop, appeared on the slope by the gate. She knew the vehicle well; it belonged to Mr. Kettledrum, the veterinarian, and she had passed it frequently on the road to the station.
"He will talk me to death," she thought, with dogged patience, "but I can't help it."
Lifting the carpet bag, which felt heavier than it had done at the start, she stepped out into the road and waited until the nodding gig drew up beside her. Mr. Kettledrum, a gaunt, grizzled man of middle age, with a beaked nose and a drooping moustache, which was dyed henna-colour from tobacco, looked down at her with his sharp twinkling eyes.
"Thanky, Dorinda, I'm as well as common," he replied to her greeting. "I declar', it looks for all the world as if you was settin' out on a journey."
"So I am." Dorinda smiled bravely. "I wonder if you'll give me a lift to the station?"
"To be sure, to be sure." In a minute he was out on the ground and had swung the bag into the gig beside a peculiar kind of medicine case made of sheepskin. "I'm on my way back from Sam Garlick's, and it'll be more than a pleasure," he added gallantly, "to have you ride part of the way with me. Sam sets a heap of store by that two-year-old bay of his, and he had me over in the night to ease him with colic. Wall, wall, it ain't an easy life to be either a horse or a horse doctor in this here on certain world."
It was easier to laugh than to speak, and his little joke, which was as ancient and as trustworthy as his two-wheeled gig, started them well on their way. After all, he was a kind man; her father had had him once or twice to see Dan or Beersheba; and people said that, at a pinch, he had been known to treat human beings as successfully as horses. He had a large family of tow-headed children; and though she had heard recently that his wife was "pining away," nobody blamed him, for he had been a good provider, and wives were known occasionally to pine from other causes than husbands.
"It's a right good thing I came by when I did," he remarked genially. "As it happened, I was goin' to stop by anyway for that early train. I like to allow plenty of time, and I generally unhitch my mare befo' the train blows. She ain't skittish. Naw, I ain't had no trouble with her; but she's got what some folks might consider eccentric habits, an' I ain't takin' no chances. So you say you're goin' off on a journey?" he inquired, dropping his voice, and she knew by intuition that he was wondering if he had better allude to Jason's marriage. He would blame him of course; a man couldn't jilt a woman with impunity at Pedlar's Mill; but what good would that, or anything else, do her now?
"Yes, I'm going away." She tried to make her voice steady.
"On the up train or the down one?" he inquired, as he leaned out of the gig to squirt a jet of tobacco juice in the road. Upon reflection, he had abandoned his sympathetic manner and assumed one of facetious pleasantry.
"The earliest. The one that goes north. Shall we be in time for it?"
He pursed his lips beneath the sweeping moustache. "Don't you worry. We'll git you thar. Whar are you bound for?"
She spoke quickly. "I'm going to New York." That was the farthest place that came to her mind.
"You don't say so?" He appeared astonished. "Then you'll be on the train all day. You didn't neglect to bring along a snack, did you?"
A snack? No, she had not thought of one, and she had eaten no breakfast.
Mr. Kettledrum was regretful but reassuring. "It's always better to provide something when you set out," he remarked. "An empty stomach ain't a good travellin' companion; but it's likely enough that the conductor can git you a bite at one of the stops. Along up the road, at the junction, thar's generally some niggers with fried chicken legs; but all the same it's safer to take along a snack when you're goin' to travel far."
They were passing the fork of the road. Over the big gate she could see the ample sweep of the meadows, greenish-grey under the drizzle of rain; and beyond Gooseneck Creek, the roof and chimneys of Five Oaks made a red wound in the sky. Seen through the cleft of the trees, the whole place wore a furtive and hostile air. How miserable the fields looked on a wet day, miserable and yet as if they were trying to keep up an appearance. Some natural melancholy in the scene drifted through her mind and out again into the landscape. She felt anew her kinship with the desolation and with the rain that fell, fine and soft as mist, over it all. Even when she went away she would carry a part of it with her. "That's what life is for most people, I reckon," she thought drearily. "Just barren ground where they have to struggle to make anything grow."
"Now, I've never been as far as New York," Mr. Kettledrum was saying in a sprightly manner. "But from all accounts it must be a fine city. My brother John's son Harry has lived there for fifteen years. He's got a job with some wholesale grocers—Bartlett and Tribble. If you run across him while you're there, be sure to tell him who you are. He'll be glad of a word from his old uncle. Don't forget the name. Bartlett and Tribble. They've stores all over the town, Harry says. You can't possibly miss them."
They had reached the Sneads' pasture, deserted at this early hour except for a mare and her colt. A minute later they passed the square brick house, where the cows were trailing slowly across the lawn in the direction of the bars which a small coloured boy was lowering. Then came the mile of bad road, broken by mud holes. On they spun into the thin woods and out again to the long slope. At the farm her mother was calling her. There was the smell of frying bacon in the kitchen. Her father was coming in from the stable. Rufus was slouching into his chair with a yawn. Steam was pouring from the spout of the big tin coffee-pot on the table. The glint of light on the stove and the walls. Rambler. Flossie. . . . She remembered that she had eaten nothing. Hunger seized her, and worse than hunger, the longing to burst into tears.
"Wall, here we are. The train's blowing now down at the next station. You've plenty of time to take it easy while I unhitch the mare." He helped her to alight, and then, picking up her bag, carried it down to the track. "You jest stand here whar the train stops," he said. "I'll take the mare out and be back in a jiffy. You've got your ticket ready, I reckon?"
She shook her head. No, she hadn't her ticket; but it didn't matter; she would get one on the train. It occurred to her, while he stepped off nimbly on his long legs, which reminded her of stilts, that if she had not met him in the road, she would have missed the early train north and have taken the later one that went to Richmond. So small an incident, and yet the direction in which she was going, and perhaps her whole future, was changed by it. Well, she knew what was ahead of her, she thought miserably, while she stood there shivering in the wet. She was chilled; she was empty; she was heartbroken; yet, in spite of her wretchedness, hope could not be absent from her courageous heart. The excitement of her journey was already stirring in her veins, and waiting there beside the track, in the rain, she began presently to look, not without confidence, to the future. After all, things might have been worse. She was young; she was strong; she had seventy dollars pinned securely inside the bosom of her dress. Dimly she felt that she was meeting life, at this moment, on its own terms, stripped of illusion, stripped even of idealism, except the idealism she could wring from the solid facts of experience. The blow that had shattered her dreams had let in the cloudless flood of reality. "You can't change the past by thinking," she told herself stubbornly, "but there must be something ahead. There must be something in life besides love."
The train whistled by the mill; the smoke billowed upward and outward; and the engine rushed toward her. Her knees were trembling so that she could barely stand; but her eyes were bright with determination, and there was a smile on her lips. Then, just as the wheels slackened and stopped, she saw Nathan running down the gradual descent from the store. Reaching her as she was about to step on the train, he thrust a shoe box into her hand.
"You couldn't go so far without a bite of food. I fixed you a little snack." There was a queer look in his eyes. Absurd as it seemed, for a minute he reminded her of her father.
"So Mr. Kettledrum told you I was going away?"
He nodded. "Take care of yourself. If you want any money, write back for it. You know we're here, don't you?"
She smiled up at him with drenched eyes. A moment more and she would have broken down; but before she had time to reply she was pushed into the train; and when she looked out of the window, Nathan was waving cheerfully from the track. "I wonder how I could ever have thought him so ugly?" she asked herself through her tears.
The figures at the station wavered, receded, and melted at last into the transparent screen of the distance. Then the track vanished also, the deserted mill, the store, the old freight car, and the dim blue edge of the horizon. All that she could see, when she raised the window and looked out, was the dull glow of the broomsedge, smothered yet alive under the sad autumn rain.
"The big pine was like greenish bronze. . . ."
The big pine was like greenish bronze against the October sky. . . .
A statue in Central Park had brought it back to her, the pine and the ruined graveyard and the autumn sunlight raking the meadows. It was a fortnight since she had come to New York, and in that fortnight she felt that she had turned into stone. Her shoes were worn thin; her feet throbbed and ached from walking on hard pavements. There were times, especially toward evening, when the soles of her feet were edged with fire, and the pain brought stinging tears to her eyes. Yet she walked on grimly because it was easier to walk than to wait. Up Fifth Avenue; down one of the cross streets to the Park, which was, she thought, merely an imitation of the country; back again to Sixth Avenue; and up Sixth Avenue until she drifted again over the Park and into the prison-like streets that ran toward the river. Occasionally she glanced up to read the name of a street; but the signs told her nothing. Fifth Avenue she had learned by name, and Broadway, and the dirty street where she rented a hall room, for fifty cents a day, over a cheap restaurant. Yesterday, she had asked for work on the other side of the city; but nobody wanted help in a store, and her obstinate pride insisted that she would rather starve than take a place as a servant. Twice she had waited in the restaurant beneath her room; but the dirt and the close smells had nauseated her, and by the end of the second day she had been too sick to stand on her feet. After that the waitress whose place she had taken had returned, and the woman in charge had not wanted her any longer. "You'd better get used to smells before you try to make a living in the city," she had said disagreeably. The advice was sound, as Dorinda knew, and she had no just cause for resentment. Yet there were moments when it seemed to her that New York would live in her recollection not as a place but as an odour.
All day she walked from one stony street to another, stopping to rest now and then on a bench in one of the squares, where she would sit motionless for hours, watching the sparrows. Her food, usually a tough roll and a sausage of dubious tenderness, she bought at the cheapest place she could find and carried, wrapped in newspaper, to the bench where she rested. Her only hope, she felt, lay in the dogged instinct which told her that when things got as bad as they could, they were obliged, if they changed at all, to change for the better. There was no self-pity in her thoughts. The unflinching Presbyterian in her blood steeled her against sentimentality. She would meet life standing and she would meet it with her eyes open; but she knew that the old buoyant courage, the flowing outward of the spirit, was over for ever.
What surprised her, when she was not too tired to think of it, was that the ever-present sense of sin, which made the female mind in mid-Victorian literature resemble a page of the more depressing theology, was entirely absent from her reflections. She was sorry about the blue dress; she felt remorse because of the cow her mother might have had; but everything else that had happened was embraced in the elastic doctrine of predestination. It had to be, she felt, and no matter how hard she had struggled she could not have prevented it.
At night, worn out with fatigue, she would go back to the room over the restaurant. The brakeman on the train had given her the address, and he had put her in the street car that brought her to the door in Sixth Avenue. Here also the smells of beer and of the cooking below stairs had attacked her like nausea. The paper on the walls was torn and stained; all the trash in the room had been swept under the bed; and when she started to wash her hands at the rickety washstand in one corner, she had found a dead cockroach in the pitcher. Turning to the narrow window, she had dropped into a chair and stared down on the crawling throng in the street. Disgust, which was more irksome than pain, had rushed over her. After all the fuss that had been made over it, she had asked in bitter derision, was this Life?
Walking up Sixth Avenue one afternoon, she asked this question again. Something was trying to break her. Life or the will of God, it made no difference, for one hurt as much as the other. She could not see any use in the process, but she went on as blindly as a machine that has been wound up and cannot stop until it has run down. Nothing was alive except the burning sore of her memory. All the blood of her body had been drawn into it. Every other emotion—affection, tenderness, sympathy, sentiment—all these natural approaches to experience had shrivelled up like nerves that are dead. She was consumed by a solitary anguish; and beyond this anguish there was nothing but ashes. The taste of ashes was in her mouth whenever she tried to look ahead or to pretend an interest in what the future might bring. Though her mind saw Jason as he was, weak, false, a coward and a hypocrite, he was so firmly knit into her being that, even when she tore him from her thoughts, she still suffered from the aching memory of him in her senses. Pedlar's Mill or New York, what did it matter? The city might have been built of straw, so little difference did it make to her inescapable pain.
At first the noises and the strange faces had confused her. Then it occurred to her that there might be temporary solace in the crowd, that she might lose herself in the street and drift on wherever the throng carried her. Her self-confidence returned when she found how easy it was to pursue her individual life, to retain her secret identity, in the midst of the city. She discovered presently that when nothing matters the problem of existence becomes amazingly simple. Fear, which had been perversely associated with happiness, faded from her mind when despair entered it. From several unpleasant episodes she had learned to be on the watch and to repulse advances that were disagreeable; but at such moments her courage proved to be as vast as her wretchedness. Once an elderly woman in deep mourning approached her while she sat on a bench in the Park, and inquired solicitously if she needed employment. In the beginning the stranger had appeared helpful; but a little conversation revealed that, in spite of her mourning garb, she was in search of a daughter of joy. After this several men had followed Dorinda on different occasions. "Do I look like that kind?" she had asked herself bitterly. But in each separate instance, when she glanced round at her pursuer, he had vanished. In a city where joy may be had for a price, there are few who turn and follow the footsteps of tragedy. Yes, she could take care of herself. Poverty might prove to be a match for her strength, but as far as men were concerned, she decided that she had taken their measure and was no longer afraid of them.
A surface car clanged threateningly in her ears, and stepping back on the corner, she looked uncertainly over the block in front of her. While she hesitated there, a man who had passed turned and stared at her, arrested by the fresh colour in the face under the old felt hat. Her cheeks were thinner; there were violet half-moons under her eyes; but her eyes appeared by contrast larger and more radiantly blue. The suffering of the last two weeks, fatigue, hunger, and unhappiness had refined her features and imparted a luminous delicacy to her skin.
Threading the traffic to the opposite pavement, she turned aimlessly, without purpose and without conjecture, into one of the gloomy streets. It was quieter here, and after the clamour and dirt of Sixth Avenue, the quiet was soothing. Longer shadows stretched over the grey pavement, and the rows of dingy houses, broken now and then by the battered front of an inconspicuous shop, reminded her fantastically of acres of broomsedge. When she had walked several blocks she found that the character of the street changed slightly, and it occurred to her, as she glanced indifferently round, that by an accident she had drifted into the only old-fashioned neighbourhood in New York. Or were there others and had she been unable to find them? She had stopped, without observing it, in front of what had once been a flower garden, and had become, in its forlorn and neglected condition, a refuge for friendless statues and outcast objects of stone. For a few minutes the strangeness of the scene attracted her. Then, as the pain in her feet mounted upward to her knees, she moved on again and paused to look at a collection of battered mahogany furniture, which had overflowed from a shop to the pavement. "I wonder what they'll do with that old stuff," she thought idly. "Some of it is good, too. There's a wardrobe exactly like the one great-grandfather left."
She was looking at the mahogany wardrobe, when the door of the shop widened into a crack, and a grey and white cat, with a pleasant face, squeezed herself through and came out to watch the sparrows in the street.
"She is the image of Flossie," thought Dorinda. Her eyes smarted with tears, and stooping over, she stroked the cat's arching back, while she remembered that her mother would be busy at this hour getting supper.
"Anybody can see you like cats," said a voice behind her; and turning her head, she saw that a stout middle-aged woman, wearing a black knitted shawl over a white shirtwaist, was standing in the midst of the old furniture. Like her cat she had a friendly face and wide-awake eyes beneath sleek grey and white hair.
"She is just like one we had at home," Dorinda answered, with her ingenuous smile.
"You don't live in New York, then?" remarked the woman, while she glanced charitably at the girl's faded tan ulster.
"No, I came from the country two weeks ago. I want to find something to do."
The woman folded her shawl tightly over her bosom and shook her head. "Well, it's hard to get work these days. There are so many walking the streets in search of it. The city is a bad place to be when you are out of work."
Dorinda's heart trembled and sank. "I thought there was always plenty to do in the city."
"You did? Well, whoever told you that never tried it, I guess."
"There are so many stores. I hoped I could find something to do in one of them."
"Have you ever worked in a store?"
"Yes, at home. It was a country store where they kept everything."
"I know that kind. My father used to keep one up the state."
As she bent over the cat, Dorinda asked in a voice that she tried to keep steady. "You don't need any help, do you?"
The other shook her head sorrowfully. "I wish we did; but times are so hard that we've had to give up the assistant we had. I'm just out of the hospital, too, and that took up most of our savings for the last year." Her large, kind face showed genuine sympathy. "I'd help you if I could," she continued, "because you've got a look that reminds me of my sister who went into a convent. She's dead now, but she had those straight black eyebrows, jutting out just like yours over bright blue eyes. That sort of colouring ain't so common as it used to be. Anyhow, it made me think of her as soon as I looked at you. It gave me a start at first. That's because I'm still weak after the operation, I guess."
"Was it a bad operation?"
"Gall stones. One of the worst, they say, when it has gone on as long as my trouble. Have you ever been in a hospital?"
Dorinda shook her head. "There wasn't any such thing where I lived. We always nursed the sick at home. Great-grandfather was bedridden for years before his death, and my mother nursed him and did all the work too."
The woman looked at her with interest. "Well, that's the way you do in the country, of course," she replied, adding after a moment's hesitation, "You look pretty tired out. Would you like to come in and rest a few minutes? I was getting so low in my spirits a little while ago that I looked out to see if I couldn't find somebody to speak a few words to. When this sinking feeling comes on me in the afternoon, I don't like to be by myself. I thought a cup of tea might help me. They haven't let me touch beer since I went to the hospital, so I'd just put the kettle on to boil. It ought to be ready about now, and a bite of something might pick you up as well as me. My mother came from England and she was always a great one for a cup of tea. 'Put the kettle on,' she used to say, 'I'm feeling low in my spirits.' Day or night it didn't make any difference. Whenever she felt herself getting low she used to have her tea."
She led the way, the cat following, through the shop to a corner at the back, where she could still watch the door and the pavement. Here a kettle was humming on a small gas stove; and a quaint little table, with a red damask cloth over it, was laid for tea. There were cups and saucers, a tea set, and a wooden caddy with a castle painted on the side. "It looks old-fashioned, I know, but we are old-fashioned folks, and my husband sometimes says that we haven't got any business in the progressive 'nineties. Everything's too advanced for us now, even religion. I guess it's living so much with old furniture and things that were made in the last century."
Dorinda smiled at her gratefully and sat down beside the little red cloth, with her smarting feet crossed under the table. If only she might take off her shoes, she thought, she could begin to be comfortable. At Pedlar's Mill tea was not used except in illness or bereavement, and she was not prepared for the immediate consolation it afforded her. Strange that a single cup of tea and a buttered muffin from a bakery should revive her courage! After all, the city wasn't so stony and inhospitable as she had believed. People were friendly here, if you found the right ones, just as they were in the country. They liked cats too. She remembered that she had seen a number of cats in New York, and they all looked contented and prosperous. It was pleasant in the little room, with its restful air of another period; but at last tea was over, and she thanked the woman and rose to leave. "I can't tell you the good it's done me," she said, and added plaintively, "Do you know of any place where I might find work?"
The woman—her name, she said, was Garvey—bent her head in meditation over the tea-pot. "I do know a woman who wants a plain seamstress for a few weeks," she said at last a trifle dubiously, for, in spite of her kindness, she was a cautious body. "The girl she had went to the hospital the day I came out, and she has never been suited since then. Do you know how to sew?"
"I've helped make children's dresses, and of course my own clothes," Dorinda added apologetically. "You see, I never had much to make them out of."
"I see," Mrs. Garvey assented, without additional comment. After pondering a minute or two, she continued cheerfully, "Well, you might suit. I can't tell, but I'd like to help you. It's hard being without friends in a big city, and the more I talk to you, the more you remind me of my sister. I'll write down the address for you anyway. It's somewhere in West Twenty-third Street. You know your way about, don't you?"
"Oh, I'll find it. People are good about directing me, especially the policemen."
"Well, be sure you don't go until after six o'clock. Then the other girls will be gone, and she will have more time to attend to you. But you mustn't set your heart on this place. She may have taken on someone since I talked with her."
Dorinda smiled. No, she wouldn't set her heart on it. "I'll go and sit in a park while I'm waiting," she replied gratefully. "If I'm going to be a dressmaker, I ought to notice what women are wearing."
With the slip of paper in her purse, and her purse slipped into the bosom of her dress, she left the shop and followed the street back to Fifth Avenue. The hour spent with the stranger had restored her confidence and there was no shadow of discouragement in her mind. Something told her, she would have said, that her troubles were beginning to mend. "I can sew well enough when I try, even if I don't like it," she thought. "Ma taught me how to make neat buttonholes, and I can run up a seam as well as any one."
As she approached Fifth Avenue she began to observe the way the women were dressed, and for the first time since she left Pedlar's Mill she felt old-fashioned and provincial. The younger women who passed her were all wearing enormous balloon sleeves and bell skirts, which were held up with the newest twist by tightly gloved hands. Now and then, she noticed, the sleeves were made of a different material from the dress, but the gloves were invariably of white kid, and the small coquettish hats were perched very high above crisply waved hair which was worn close at the temples.
In spite of her blistered feet, she walked on rapidly, lifting her face to the wind, which blew strong and fresh over the lengthening shadows. How high and smooth and round the sky looked over the steep brown houses! Presently, from a hotel of grey stone, as gloomy as a prison, a gaily dressed girl flitted out into a hansom cab which was waiting in front of the door. There was a vision of prune-coloured velvet sleeves in a dress of grey satin, of a skirt that rustled in eddying folds over the pavement, and of a jingling gold chatelaine attached to the front of a pointed basque. "How happy she must be," Dorinda thought, "dressed like that, and with everything on earth that she wants!"
She had turned to move on again, when a man carrying a basket of evergreens brushed against her, and she saw that he was engaged in replenishing the stone window boxes on the ground floor of the hotel. As she passed, a whiff of wet earth penetrated her thoughts, and immediately, in a miracle of recollection, she was back at Five Oaks in the old doctor's retreat. Every detail of that stormy afternoon started awake as if it had been released from a spell of enchantment. She saw the darkened room, lighted by the thin blue flame from the resinous pine; she saw the one unshuttered window, with the hunched box-bush and the white turkeys beyond; she heard the melancholy patter of the rain on the shingled roof; and she watched the old man's face, every line and blotch distorted by the quivering light, while he wagged his drunken head at her. A shudder jerked through her limbs. Her memory, which was beginning to heal, was suddenly raw again. Would she never be free? Was she doomed to bear that moment of all the moments in her life wherever she went? Her courage faded now as if the sun had gone under a cloud. She had been dragged back by the wind, by an odour, into the suffocating atmosphere of the past. Though her body was walking the city street, in her memory she was rushing out of that old house at Five Oaks. She was running into the mist; she was hurrying down the sandy road through the bulrushes; she was crouching by the old stump, with the wet leaves in her face and that suspense more terrible than any certainty in her mind. She listened again for the turn of the wheels, the clink of the mare's shoes; the slip and scramble in the mud holes; the hollow sound of hoofs striking on rock. . . .
Never in her life had she been so tired. In an effort to shake her thoughts free from despair, she quickened her pace, and looked about for a bench where she could rest. On the opposite side of Fifth Avenue a row of cab horses waited near a statue under some fine old trees. She had never seen the name of the square, but it appeared restful in the afternoon light; and crossing the street, she found a place in the shade on a deserted bench. It was five o'clock now, and Mrs. Garvey had told her not to go to see the dressmaker until six. Well, it was a relief to sit down. Slipping off her shoes, she pushed them under the bench and spread her wide skirt over her feet. The quiet was pleasant in the moving shadows of the trees. From where and how far, she wondered, did the people come who were lounging on the benches around her? So many people in New York were always resting, but she concluded that they must have money put by or they couldn't afford to spend so much time doing nothing.
Gradually, while she sat there, watching the sparrows fluttering round the nose bags of the horses, hollow phrases, without meaning and without sequence, swarmed into her mind. Five o'clock. At home her mother would be getting ready for supper. That grey and white cat had made her think of Flossie. They were alike as two peas. Remembering the old man had upset her. She must put him out of her mind. You couldn't change things by thinking. How could horses feed in those nose bags? What would Dan and Beersheba think of them? There was another woman with velvet sleeves in a silk dress. How Miss Seena would exclaim if you told her that so many women were wearing sleeves of different material from their dresses! That flaring collar of lace was pretty though. . . . The way the old man had leered at her over the whiskey bottle. "He's coming back this evening. He went away to be married." No, she must stop thinking about it. If she could only blot it all out of her memory. The buildings in New York were so high. She wondered people weren't afraid to go to the top of them. There was a poor-looking old man on the bench by the fountain. In rags and with the soles dropping away from his shoes. People were rich in New York, but they were poor too. Nobody but Black Tom, the county idiot, wore rags like that at Pedlar's Mill. How her feet ached! Would they ever stop hurting? . . . "He went away to be married. He went away to be married." How dark the room was growing, and how black the box-bush looked in the slanting rain beyond the window. Feet were pattering on the shingled roof, or was it only the rain? . . . It was getting late. Almost time to go to the dressmaker's. Suppose the dressmaker were to take a fancy to her. Such things happened in books. "You are the very girl I am looking for. One who isn't afraid to work." There was a fortune, she had heard, in dressmaking in New York. Miss Seena knew of a dressmaker who kept her own carriage. . . . How funny those lights were coming out in the street! They were winking at her, one after another. It was time to be going; but she didn't feel as if she could stir a step. Her knees and elbows were full of pins and needles. It's resting that makes you know how tired you are, her mother used to say. . . .
Suddenly nausea washed over her like black water, rising from her body to her exhausted brain. She could scarcely sit there, holding tight to the bench, while this icy tide swept her out into an ocean of space. The noises of the city grew fainter, receding from her into the grey fog which muffled the sky, the lights, the tall buildings, the vehicles in the street. It would be dreadful if she were sick here in the square, with that ugly old man and all the cab drivers staring at her. . . . Then the sickness passed as quickly as it had come; and leaning back against the bench, she closed her eyes until she should be able to get up and start on again. After a minute or two, she felt so much better that she slipped her feet into her shoes, fastened the buttons with a hairpin, and rising slowly and awkwardly, walked across the square to the nearest corner.
The noises, which had almost died away, became gradually louder. There was a tumult of drums in the air, but she could not tell whether the beating was in her ears or a parade was marching by somewhere in the distance. Evidently it was a procession, though she could see nothing except the moving line of vehicles in the street, which had left the ground and were swimming in some opaque medium between earth and sky. "How queer everything looks," she thought. "It must be the lights that never stop winking."
She put her foot cautiously down from the curb, imagining, though she could not see it, that the street must be somewhere in front of her. As she made a step forward into the traffic, the sickness swept over her again, and an earthquake seemed to fling the pavement up against the back of her head. She saw the lights splinter like glass when it is smashed; she heard the drums of the invisible procession marching toward her; she tried to struggle up, to call out, to move her arms, and with the effort, she dropped into unconsciousness.
She opened her eyes and looked at the white walls, white beds, white screens, white sunlight through the windows, and women in white caps and dresses moving silently about with white vessels in their hands.
"Why, this must be a hospital," she thought. "How on earth did I come here?"
Her arm, lying outside the sheet, looked blue and cold and felt as if it did not belong to her. She could not turn her head because it was bandaged, and when, after an eternity of effort, she succeeded in lifting her hand, she discovered that her hair had been cut away on one side. Closing her eyes again, she lay without thinking, without stirring, without feeling, while she let life cover her slowly in a warm flood. The blessed relief was that nothing mattered; nothing that had happened or could ever happen mattered at all. After the months when she had cared so intensely, it was like the peace of the Sabbath not to care any longer, neither to worry nor to wonder about the future.
"I must have hurt myself when I fell," she said.
To her surprise a voice close by the bed answered, "Yes, you fainted in the street and a cab struck you. You have been ill, but you're getting all right now."
A man was standing beside her, a large, ruddy, genial-looking man, with a brown beard and the kindest eyes she had ever seen. He wore a red and black tie and there was a square gold medal hanging from his watch chain.
"Have I been here long?" she asked, and her voice sounded so queer that she couldn't believe it had come out of her lips.
"A week to-day. It will be another week at least before you're strong enough to be out."
"Was I very ill?"
"At first. We had to operate. That's why your head is shaved on one side. But you came through splendidly," he added in his hearty manner. "You have a superb constitution."
For an instant she pondered this. "Are you the doctor?" she inquired presently.
"I am Doctor Faraday." His hand was on her wrist and he was smiling at her as if he hadn't a care or a qualm.
She wondered if he knew anything about her. He appeared so big and wise and strong that he might have known all there was to know about everybody.
"Is there anything that worries you?" he asked gently, with his air of taking the world and all it contained as an inexhaustible joke. She shook her head as well as she could for the bandages, which made all her movements seem clumsy and unnatural. "I was just thinking——"
"Do you remember where you were going when you were knocked down?"
She met his eyes candidly, yielding her will to the genial strength of his personality. "I was looking for work. There was a dressmaker in West Twenty-third Street. She will have filled the place by now."
"You mustn't worry about that." She liked the way the wrinkles gathered about his merry grey eyes. "Don't worry about anything. We'll see that you have something to do as soon as you're strong enough. Meanwhile, just lie still and get well. Keep a stiff upper lip," he concluded, with a subdued laugh which would have boomed out if he hadn't suppressed it. "That's the only way to meet life. Keep a stiff upper lip," he concluded with a subdued laugh which would have boomed out if he hadn't suppressed it. "That's the only way to meet life. Keep a stiff upper lip."
"I can't help thinking,"—she glanced weakly about the room, where the white iron beds—they were the smallest beds she had ever seen—stood in a row. "Is this a charity place?"
"Now, I told you not to worry. No, we don't call it charity, but there is no charge for those who need treatment and cannot afford to pay for it. We don't expect you to be one of the rich patients. Is there anything else?"
She tried again to shake her head. All at once she had forgotten what she wanted to know. She was too weak to remember things, even important things. There was a pain at the back of her head, and this pain was shooting in wires down her neck and through her shoulders to her spine. Nothing made any difference.
"Don't make an effort. Don't try to talk," he said, and turned away to one of the beds by the door.
Hours later, when one of the nurses brought her a cup of broth, she struggled to speak collectedly. "What did the doctor tell me his name is? I don't seem to remember things."
"That's because you're still weak. His name is Faraday. He is a celebrated surgeon, and he operated on you because he brought you to the hospital. He was driving by when you were struck. The operation saved your life."
"Does he come often?"
"Not as a rule. He hasn't time to visit the patients. But he is interested in your case. It is an unusual one, and he is very much interested."
"Does he know who I am?"
"Yes, the woman you rented a room from read about the accident in the papers, and came to identify you. Can you remember anything of this last week?"
"Only that my head hurt me. Yes, and figures passing to and fro against white walls."
"It was a wonder you weren't killed. But you're all right now. You'll be as well as you ever were in a little while."
"I feel so queer with my head shaved. I can feel it even with the bandages."
"That will soon be well, and the scar won't show at all under your hair. You've everything to be thankful for," the nurse concluded in a brisk professional tone.
Dorinda was gazing up at her with a strange, groping expression. Her eyes, large, blue, and wistful in the pallor of her face, appeared to have drained all the vitality from her body. "There was something I wanted to ask the doctor," she began. "I don't seem to be able to remember what it was. . . ."
"Don't remember," replied the nurse with authority. She hesitated an instant, and stared down into the empty cup. Then, after reflection, she continued clearly and firmly, "It won't hurt you to know that you have been very ill, now that you are getting well again?"
Dorinda's features, except for her appealing eyes, were without expression. Yes, she remembered now; she knew what she had wished to ask, "Oh, no, it won't hurt me," she answered.
"Well, I thought you'd take it sensibly." After waiting a moment to watch the effect of her words, the nurse turned away and walked briskly out of the ward.
Lying there in her narrow bed, Dorinda repeated slowly, "I thought you would feel that way about it." Words, like ideas, were dribbling back into her mind; but she seemed to be learning them all over again. Relief, in which there was a shade of inexplicable regret, tinged her thoughts. She would have liked a child if it had been all hers, with nothing to remind her of Jason. For a second she had a vision of it, round, fair and rosy. Then, "it might have had red hair," she reminded herself, "and I should have hated it."
Relief and regret faded together. She closed her eyes and lay helpless, while the stream of memory, now muddy, now clear, flowed through her into darkness. At first this stream was mere swirling blackness, swift, deep, torrential as a river in flood. Then gradually the rushing noise passed away, and the stream became lighter and clearer, and bore fragmentary, rapidly moving images on its surface. Some of these images floated through her in obscurity; others shone out brightly and steadily as long as they remained within range of her vision; but one and all, they came in fragments and floated on before she could grasp the complete outline. Nothing was whole. Nothing lasted. Nothing was related to anything else.
Thirst. Would they soon bring her something to drink? The old well bucket at home. The mossy brim; the cool slippery feeling of the sides; the turning of the rope as it went down; the dark greenish depths, when one looked over, with the gleaming ripple, like a drowned star, at the bottom. Cool places. Violets growing in hollows. A hollow at Whistling Spring, where she had stepped on a snake in the tall weeds. What was it she couldn't remember about snakes? Something important, but she had forgotten it. "I've always funked things." Who said that? Why was that woman moaning so behind the screen in the corner? . . . The snake had come back now. Jason had put his hand on a snake, and that was why everything else had happened. If Jason hadn't put his hand on a snake when he was a child, he would never have deserted her, she would never have been picked up in the street, she would not be lying now in a hospital with half of her hair shaved away. How ridiculous that sounded when one thought of it; yet it was true. What was it her mother said so often? The ways of Providence are past finding out. . . . The nurse again. Oh, yes, water. . . .
The morning when she sat up for the first time, Doctor Faraday stayed longer than usual and asked her a number of questions. She felt quite at home with him. "When any one has saved your life, I suppose he feels that you have a claim on him," she thought; and she replied as accurately as she could to whatever he asked. Naturally reticent, she found now that she suffered from a nervous inability to express any emotion. She could talk freely of external objects, of the hospital, the nurses, the other patients in the ward; but constraint sealed her lips when she endeavoured to put feeling into words.
"When you are discharged, I think we can find a place for you," said Doctor Faraday. "My wife is coming to talk to you. We've been looking for a girl to stay in my office in the morning and help with the children in the afternoon. Not a nurse, you know. The office nurse has other duties; but some one to receive the patients and make appointments."