XIV
Atthe Hart’s Run station Julie bought a ticket to Washington, but when the train reached Gordonsville she slipped out of it unnoticed and, buying another ticket, crossed the tracks and boarded the Richmond train which was waiting there. At the station in Richmond, Timothy Bixby met her.
Thus, as easily almost as changing from one garment to another, Julie Rose slipped out of all her established life. With that sudden violent outcry, “What’s folks ever done for you or for me, that we got to please ’em now!” she had burst open a door, through which she and Timothy passed defiantly, finding themselves in a world where life turned round and looked at them with apparent beneficence. In the happiness of their companionship they drew long breaths of freedom; and, relaxing into the recreating power of their love, they found themselves and a confidence they had never known, so that for the first time they faced their fellow beings without fear.
His concern was all for her. When he met herthat first afternoon at the Richmond station, he insisted that she was tired and must have supper at once before he took her to their rooms. Accordingly, they had their first meal together in the station restaurant, a meal that in spite of the city heat and the coming and going of hurried people, was to Julie the most wonderful she had ever eaten. Afterward they boarded a westbound street-car.
“I’m afraid you’re going to find the city mighty hot after the mountains,” he said anxiously.
She did not answer, but she turned and looked at him, and words were not necessary. What did heat or material discomfort matter to her then?
The city was hot, tired, and flat after long weeks of summer; disheveled and overgrown with extra population also, as were most cities near any of the big training-camps, in that war year of 1918.
“The rooms ain’t much, honey,” he apologized, as the car ground its way west with jerks of stops and starts. “An’ they ain’t in a swell part of town; but they’re the best I could do, an’—an’ I got something to show you.”
The rooms were in a part of the city made up almost entirely of blocks of small frame houses, sheltering Richmond’s poorer inhabitants, who spilled out of their front doors on to the little porches and into the streets: the men in shirt sleeves, the women sometimes tidied for the afternoons, sometimes still in the depression of wrappers that had been worn through all the heat of the day.
“You see it ain’t much—pretty hot, an’ cheap out this way,” he apologized again as they got off the car and started along the street.
She looked up at him as she had looked before. “Oh, Tim!” she cried; and suddenly she laughed—a ripple of shy wild ecstasy. “Oh, Tim, honey! How could anything like that matter now?”
Looking at her, he caught the flaming happiness of her face, and laughed too. “I know, I know,” he whispered. “An’ anyhow, I have got something fine to show you,” he added.
Though the streets were for the most part lined with small wooden houses, there was an occasional more pretentious one of brick, and sometimes a larger frame dwelling. It was in one ofthese last, a double, three-storied house which accommodated several families and one or two single lodgers, that Mr. Bixby had found an abode for them—a sitting-room, a kitchen, and at the back a bedroom. The rooms were close and the furniture was cheap and ugly, but what did that matter? The porch outside was clothed with a cottage vine, a strip of zinnias and cosmos marched in the tiny front-yard, and at the back was another attempt at a flower bed.
“Oh, Tim! Oh, Tim!” she cried. She stood in the middle of the small domain and turned slowly about. “Oh, Tim! It’sours!” The rooms ceased thereat to be mere rooms; with that rush of emotion her heart opened to them, they entered, and the place became her home.
But he would not let her linger there now. Depositing her bags, he urged her out again. “Come on,” he cried. “I got to show you ’fore it’s too late.”
He turned into a street running south, which after a few minutes’ walk came to an end in a small bit of parkway where were a row of benches and a stone balustrade. “There now! Look!” he cried. It was his triumph.
All the cheap sordidness of the city ended abruptly here. Beyond was space—a deep drop to the stretches of the James River below. Overhead was the infinite breadth and height of the sky, and far across the river, whose tawny waters were tufted by little islands, were green stretches of open country.
He drew her down to a bench. “This is the jumping-off place,” he told her. “I thought you could come here an’ kind of stretch and breathe when things got too close on you back there in the streets.”
It was amazing. The mean streets reached almost to them, fenced off by just that little edge of open ground, yet all one had to do was to turn the back upon them to enter another world, a place of space and freedom, of green islands, clean air, the smell of the water, and the yellow flow of it. Here, too, they found the secret places of their own souls. The twilight and then the dark came slowly down. They sat together upon the bench, their eyes rested by the open stretches before them, their hands close clasped, their bodies touching, and their soft, half-whispered words feeling out toward one another, as they broughtto light all the past tragedies of their lives, all their sorrowful timidities. Here was one at last to whom everything might be told, who would listen, who would perfectly understand. They paused often to say in whispered wonder, “Why, I never told that to anyone before!”
He told her there in halting phrases about his marriage. His disjointed words only touched upon the high places, like a child skipping across a brook on the stepping-stones. All the difficult everyday intercourse with his wife that had followed their union was a dark flood he did not dip into. What he did tell was enough for her to understand.
“We lived in the same town together,” he said. “I’d known her always, off an’ on. She was mighty handsome—big and full of life. Everybody thought she was going to marry Warwick Preston. But I reckon they quarreled or something. Anyhow, him and Ethel Dow ran off and got married. She—Elizabeth—lived a few doors down the street from me. We met one evening—she was mighty fine an’ big-lookin’. She asked me to come an’ see her, an’ I went several evenin’s. One night she cried, an’ saidhow lonesome she was. I was lonesome, too—”
“I understand,” Julie cried hastily, and he went no further with his explanation. They turned away from the unhappy past to the miracle of the present.
“We’re free! We’re free!” she exulted. “None of the little old fears can hold us any more. We’ve found ourselves, honey! We’ve found one another.”
“It was you unlocked the door an’ set me free,” he burst out. “You’re my sister an’ my mother! You’re all I am. Oh, my little honey! My love!”
“I’m your sister an’ your mother—I’m the one that would die for you!” she cried in answer.
After that they needed no more words. Silence fell, and the dusk that had faded now into dark, wrapped them close about. They sat thus for a long time, but at last it was late, and rising they made their way hand in hand like happy children back to the three little rooms that were now their home.