"I did think so, Mother." He gulped. "I got mixed up. If you think so, it feels true, doesn't it?"
"We told him it wasn't to-day. But he kept thinking so."
Catherine remembered the dash he had made through the hall to her bedroom, his halt at the door, his long stare at her. Poor boy!
"You better sit down, son," she said. "Here comes dessert."
Later, when she bade them good night, his arms tightened about her neck.
"You said to-morrow," he whispered, "and I thought maybe it was to-morrow. Because to-morrow is to-day, always, when it gets here."
"We can write letters to each other," said Catherine, rubbing her cheek softly against his hair. "Won't that be fun? We never wrote to each other."
"With my own name on the envelope?"
"Yes, sir." Catherine felt him relax into pleased contemplation of envelopes with his own name.
"It's queer Charles doesn't come." Mrs. Spencer laid aside her magazine as Catherine entered the living room. "Do you know what dentist he goes to?"
"Dr. Reeves, I think. He had to wait until the doctor came in from dinner."
"Oh, yes." Mrs. Spencer ruffled her fingers through the pages. "Alethea went on Thursday," she said. "I'll be glad to move in here. It's rather queer, staying alone."
"I am glad you want to come." Catherine was grateful. "It relieves me of any anxiety. Things should run smoothly."
"Spencer was quite pitiful." Mrs. Spencer looked like an inquisitive little bird. "He's rather hard to manage. Notional. Marian seems more normal."
"She is more phlegmatic than Spencer." Catherine refused to take up that word, "pitiful," and its implications.
"They're both sweet children. They act well-bred in public. It's a pleasure to take them out. Even whenSpencer was so distressed, he didn't make himself conspicuous. And when I promised him you'd really be here, he settled down again."
Catherine again rejected the distress. She wouldn't argue with her mother about going away. Too late, now.
"Miss Kelly is very good with them, I think," she said. "She gives them better training than I ever did. I suppose she sees them more impersonally. Even Letty——"
"I don't think anyone trains children better than their mother." Mrs. Spencer was indignant. "You always did very well. Miss Kelly does seem competent, of course."
A sharp ring at the bell brought Catherine to her feet. Perhaps Charles had forgotten his key. But as she hurried down the hall, she heard a shrill guffaw from Sam, and the elevator slid rapidly out of sight as she opened the door.
"Why, Flora! Come in."
Flora, hastening to drag a lugubrious expression over the wide grin Sam had evidently provoked, shook her head, the stiff purple flowers on her large hat rattling like hail.
"No'm, I ain't coming in," she said. "I came to ask a favor of you, Mis' Hammond. You well, and the children?"
"Yes, we're all well." Catherine recalled the dejected, bruised Flora she had last seen. Bruises and dejection had vanished; Flora was resplendent in a spotted yellow polo coat, a brilliantly striped scarf displayed over one shoulder, and—Catherine almost laughed aloud—arctics,flapping about plump white silk-stockinged legs. But she was uneasy; the olive-whites of her eyes shone, and her gold tooth flashed.
"Mis' Hammond, you knows what I done told you, about that worthless puhfessional man." She thrust her hands deep into her pockets, trying to swagger a little. "You recollects? I don' want to bother you, but he's the worstest man. He's tryin' to ruin my character."
"I thought you had him put in prison."
"Yessum. But he's bailed out. An' the case is postponed, while he works against me. He's provin' that I was bad, and let my li'l girl run wild. They shut her up." Flora scrambled for a handkerchief, and rubbed vigorously at her eyes. "My lawyer fr'en, he says if I can get proof about my character, then that man won't stand no trial. He tole me to get a proof from you, Mis' Hammond. You know I worked hard, don't you?"
"What kind of proof, Flora? There, don't cry. Of course I'll help you."
"My lawyer fr'en, he says you should write it out about me. A kinda paper, all about how I done work for you. With your name and where you lives on it. Then you don' have to come to court, you just writes it down on a paper."
"Come in, Flora, and I'll write something for you."
"No'm, I'se going to stand right here."
"Wait, then."
Catherine wrote a brief, emphatic statement. She had employed Flora Lopez for three years, and always found her reliable, competent, hard working. What do I really know about her, she thought, her pen poised at the end of that sentence. Character—she saw again that neat,respectable flat, eloquent of Flora's ambition, and the little boy. She is a self-respecting woman, who has supported herself and her children.
"Just Flora, that former maid of mine," she told her mother. "Wants a recommendation."
"There you are." She handed the sheet to Flora.
"But Mis' Hammond, my lawyer fr'en, he say you have to get a notary seal onto it, or it ain't good in court." She stared at the writing. "You could mebbe send it by mail to me. I moved to a new place. Folks in that house were too nosy. I'm at——"
"I'm going away to-morrow, for a month." Catherine hesitated. "I tell you, we'll go find a notary to-night. There are several along the Avenue, if it isn't too late."
Her mother agreed, rather doubtfully, to wait until she returned, unless Charles came in the meantime.
"I don't think you ought to go out with that colored woman this time of night," she insisted.
But Catherine, hurrying into coat and hat, was off. The notary in the tobacco shop at the corner had gone home. After a cold, slipping walk on sleeted streets to Broadway and down, Catherine found another shop, and a man who could put a seal to her oath.
Flora folded the paper. She refused to put it in her pocket.
"I got to get it safe to my lawyer fr'en," she insisted. "I is obliged to you, Mis' Hammond." She turned her homely, dark face passionately toward Catherine, her wide mouth moving grotesquely as she spoke. "Mos' folks is cruel mean to you if your luck is bad! Women are the mostest mean. Sayin' I neglects my chile—all'count of my being a good worker. You got somebody to work for you now?"
"Mrs. O'Lay, the janitor's wife. You remember her? She can't cook as you could. Mr. Hammond doesn't eat a meal without wishing you were back."
"I—I jus' couldn't come back, Mis' Hammond. I'se obliged to you, but——"
"Are you working somewhere?"
"Washings, at home. I ain't making so much money. But my lawyer fr'en, he ain't charging me but half rates."
"Do you need money?" Catherine's hand moved toward her pocket book.
"I'se too much obliged, Mis' Hammond, to need it." She looked away, and suddenly darted out across the street, her arctics flapping, her dirty yellow coat flopping about her awkward flight.
Catherine went home, stepping gingerly over the glare of ice. A taxi rattled and skidded to a stop at the door just as she reached the apartment house, and her mother came out.
"Here, you'll slip." Catherine seized her arm, and engineered her passage. "Has Charles come home?"
"Yes, poor boy. He's had an awful time. Tell the driver to go very slowly!" Mrs. Spencer disappeared in the cab.
VIII
"'At Flora, she coming back to wuk for you-all?" Sam made friendly inquiry as he stopped the elevator at Catherine's floor.
"No."
"She say she got grand job for some elegant folks. Sma't worker, Flora is."
Poor Flora—Catherine unlocked the door quietly—lying to Sam, to save her face some way, of course.
If Charles is miserable—hope thrust out a new tendril, waveringly, in a blurred picture of herself ministering to him, pretending tenderly that nothing ever had been wrong.
"Hello." She smiled as he turned from the window, draped in a melancholy air of pain nobly borne. "You have had a horrid time, haven't you?"
"Just a jumpy tooth." He sat down, reaching for the paper. "Your mother was worried about you. Said you went off with a darky hours ago."
"She didn't seem worried. I met her at the door." Catherine went out to the hall closet with her wraps. Her fingers brushed the sleeve of his heavy coat. If I can pretend, she thought.
"It was only Flora," she said as she returned. "She wanted a statement from me, evidence as to her character. That man, you remember, her puhfessional gentleman? He seems to have a scheme to save himself at her expense. We went out to hunt up a notary."
"You committed yourself legally to some defense of her?"
"Yes, indeed. Poor Flora!"
"Unwise, wasn't it? How do you know what she'll do with such a paper?"
"It seemed little enough to do for her. They want to prove she neglected her children."
"Didn't she?"
Catherine wondered; did he mean that implied comparison? At least he wouldn't drag it out, openly, if she ignored it.
"Have you had any dinner?"
"Can't eat with a nerve howling like a fiend."
"Come along, poor boy. I'll find you something."
"Don't bother."
"Come on, Charles." Catherine went into the kitchen. "Here's a wonderful roast beef," she called back, and Charles came reluctantly. "You sit there—" she pushed the chair near the shining white table. "Coffee, or cocoa?"
"Cocoa, if it isn't too much trouble. I'd like to sleep. Had a cup of coffee."
"Did the dentist keep you all this time in his torture chamber?" Catherine moved swiftly from ice-chest to stove. If I can invoke our midnight lunches, all down the past, she thought—I can't go away, without trying to reach him. It is like death.
"No," said Charles. "I haven't been there all the evening."
Catherine stirred the foaming cocoa. Let's pretend, she wanted to cry out; let's pretend!
"I thought probably you would be asleep. Since you start off to-morrow."
"I wanted to see you." Catherine poured the cocoa and set it before him. She stood there, one hand spread delicately, the fingers pressed against the oilcloth. "And you—didn't want to see me, did you!" She was supplicating, provocative, leaning above him.
"I had to stop with some manuscript, at Miss Partridge's." Charles buttered a slice of bread deliberately,and forked a slice of pink meat to his place. "Is there any Worcestershire?"
"And she gave you coffee?" Catherine moved hastily away from the table, and felt blindly along the cupboard shelf for the bottle of sauce.
"Yes." Charles was blandly engrossed in his lunch.
He's as much as telling me that he chose to go to her, when he wished comfort. Catherine set the Worcestershire beside his plate. I won't hear him. But what a burlesque, my serving him, when I can't, through any outer humility, reach him.
"Want more sugar?" She asked, casually.
"No. This is fine." His upward glance was puzzled, uneasy.
Ah, I have no pride, no decency! she cried to herself. Her heart was beating in suffocating rhythm; her fingers lifted, undirected, aching for the touch of that stubborn, beloved head—the prominent temples, the hollow above the cheekbones, the old intimate brushing across his eyes, down to cup his strong, obdurate chin.
"Charles," she whispered, and swayed backward from his sudden violent start, which clattered the carving knife to the floor.
"Damn!" he clapped his hand to his jaw. "Oh, damn!"
"What is it?"
"That tooth. Hell, I've yanked that filling out." He was on his feet, his face contorted under his hand. "Get me some iodine. He said iodine would stop it."
The tooth was treated. Charles, a little sheepishly, admitted that the pain was less.
"Guess I'll crawl right into bed, before it jumps again. If I can get to sleep——"
Catherine filled a hot-water bag and slipped it under his cheek.
"That feels fine." He looked up at her. "Thanks."
Catherine bent quickly and brushed her lips on his forehead.
"Good night," she said steadily. "Go right to sleep." She lay wakeful for a long time.
"When I come back," she thought, at last— She twisted restlessly. "That tooth—I was a little mad, and it destroyed my frenzy. I ought to be glad, and I'm not."
The hours on Sunday between breakfast and time for her train were telescoped into a band of pressure. Directions to Mrs. O'Lay; final arrangements for her mother; engrossing details devouring the few hours.
The taxi was announced. Letty burst into wails because she couldn't go; she had been discovered busily emptying her bureau drawers into an old suitcase. Catherine, distracted, kissed her mother and hurried away, hearing the determined shrieks until the elevator reached the ground floor. Charles, Spencer, and Marian climbed into the taxi after her.
"You look lovely," said Marian, over and over, stroking the soft fur at the throat of her jacket. "You look just lovely."
Spencer snuggled close against her, without a word. Charles, after a businesslike inquiry into the state of her tickets, was silent. And Catherine's one clear thought was: it is lucky that I can't escape now—like a moving stairway, and I've stepped squarely on it. I couldn't, to-day, furnish the energy, the motive power, to go and leave them.
IMPASSE
I
Catherine moved slowly up the covered stairway from the Randolph Street station, sniffing at the strange smell of Chicago. What did make it so different from New York? Smoke, blown whirling back in the sharp east wind over the grinding of ice along the lake shore, something more composite than that, which, if she could but decipher, would give her the essential difference between the cities. She snatched at her hat, as she reached the gusty platform. There was Bill, lounging against the paper stand! As she edged through the home-bound crowd, he saw her, with a sharp lifting of his negligent, withdrawn look, and started toward her.
"Catherine!" He drew her out of the crowd, into a little corner protected by the booth.
"What a horrid place I made you wait!" Pleasure shimmered over Catherine, like sun in shallow water. "Have you had to stand here long? Oh, it is nice to see you!" The strange city, the unknown, hurrying people, walled them about in deepened intimacy.
"Fine." Bill smiled down at her. "You look as if you had been eating up this west, and liked its taste."
"I have. I do." Soft, clear brilliance in her eyes,in her smile. "Let's go somewhere, so I can tell you about it. I want to talk and talk."
"There's a place just north of here. Would you like to walk? A little place I found. Wonderful dinners. Or if you want to celebrate, we can go to some huge hotel."
"I don't care. Let's try your little place."
They walked swiftly along the Avenue, the lake wind whipping against them, Bill answering Catherine's random questions about the gaunt, dark buildings they passed, about his work.
"I'm chattering," she thought. "I don't care!"
"Here we are." Bill's hand under her elbow guided her into the doorway of a small white building.
"Wall papers," read Catherine from the hall sign, but Bill steered her to an opposite door.
"Oh, I do like it." She nodded at Bill's fleet, anxious query.
A long, irregular room, with scattered tables, dull gray enamel, shining in the soft orange light of small lamps, and a great brick fireplace where logs burned.
"Sit here, where you can watch the fire without scorching." Bill chose a table in a small alcove. "Now tell us all about it. Have you been made president of one of these colleges? Or endowed? You look amazingly triumphant."
"Do I strut?" Catherine laughed softly, slipping out of her coat, drawing off her gloves.
"Not quite. But—you could, couldn't you?"
"I've had a wonderful time, Bill. Incredibly wonderful!"
"And you haven't been lonely, or homesick? How long since you left New York?"
"More than two weeks. I've finished Illinois. That's why I'm here to-night. I go on to Ohio at midnight. Homesick? Should I be ashamed not to be? The first day or so, I felt guilty. And I woke up at night, thinking I heard Spencer cry out in his sleep, or Letty. Now I just sleep like a baby—or a spinster."
"Henrietta wrote me that they are all O.K. Had a note this morning."
"She wrote me, too. Nice old thing, to drop in on them. I do miss them of course. But——" She looked up, a wistful shadow across her eyes. "Bill, I had forgotten how much time there really was in a day. When you could go straight ahead, just doing the things you had planned. Doing one job. You said I'd have two jobs, didn't you? These last weeks I've had one. And I love it! Not forever, of course. But for this month. I feel like aperson. Sometimes, almost like a personage! People have been very kind, and interested."
She was silent as Bill turned to consult with the waitress; for a moment her eyes lingered on his head, dark and gaunt against the firelight, and then looked away at the groups of diners. Early yet, Bill had said.
"Well?" Bill watched her. "What a charming gown—like an Indian summer."
"Margaret selected it." Catherine stretched one arm along the table, the loose sleeve of golden brown velvet falling softly away from the firm ivory of her wrist. "I was doubtful about the color."
"You needn't be."
"She bullied me into all sorts of lugs." Catherine laughed. "And I've been glad of it." She hovered delightedly over the tray of hors-d'œuvres. "Like a flower garden!"
"A woman runs this place," remarked Bill with apparent irrelevance.
"Down in a little southern Illinois town, the wife of one of the college faculty wants to start a tea room. She told me all about it. Her husband doesn't want her to. She says she supposes it isn't very high brow. You know, Bill"—Catherine clasped her hands at the edge of the table—"It's happening everywhere. Women are just busting out. That's been what they've wanted to know about me. How I manage it. It's pitiful, their eagerness. Even their husbands. I went out to dinner one night, and the thing the college president wanted to know was all about how I managed. How many people it took to fill my place, and all the rest. I expected to be told in so many words that I ought to be home with my children."
"And you haven't?"
"Indirectly, sometimes. But even the most righteous mothers crave information. How do I manage! It's extraordinary. It may have gone to my head. Like strong drink. I know I'm talking too much. But, Bill, you've boiled me over, all this brew, and I have to talk!"
"I like it."
"You see—" Catherine glanced up doubtfully. "I can't write to Charles. It sounds too much like crowing." She fingered her soup spoon. She wanted to talk about Charles, too. Bill would understand. Those brief, impersonal notes of his: he was well, he was working on his book, he was busy with semester finals, the children were well, yours, Charles.
"You never saw Charles's mother, did you?" asked Bill.
"No." Catherine waited. Bill was never random in his associations.
"He's told you about her, of course?"
"Lots of times. She was devoted to him, wasn't she? You knew her?"
"We lived next door for years, you know. She died just as Charles went to college. His father had died years earlier. Just enough income for comfort, and just Charles. I think"—he grinned a little—"that you'll have to train Charles as long as she did, before he can fully appreciate your career."
"But that was years ago."
"Yes. But—I think I can tell you this, without violation—Charles told me once, talking of you before I had met you, that to him you were the perfect woman, like his mother. Which meant—tender, loving, and devoted."
Catherine's spoon clicked against the soup plate. Her eyelids were suddenly heavy, weighted with memories. Charles had said that to her, years ago. A cold finger touched her heart, binding it, and she knew, through all the brimming delight of the past days, how she had hidden away the troubling thought of Charles.
"I don't mean that she spoiled him grossly," Bill was saying. "She was too New England, too much what we used to call a gentlewoman for that. Charles was simply the center of her life; his welfare, his desires, his future—those things set the radius of her circle. She had nothing else, you see. Except the idea"—the corners of Bill's mouth rose in his slow smile—"that since Charles was a man, he was a superior being. Did womenreally think that, Catherine? Or was that a concession they knew they could easily afford to make?"
"But Charles doesn't think men are superior." Catherine's smile was uncertain, begging for assurance. "Why, those early experiments of his, the brochures he published, were directed against that very superstition."
"Yes. Intellectually he has come a long way since those early days. But that matters so much less than we like to think."
Catherine waited while the waitress served the next course. Bill's words had evoked a thought clearly from the churning within her; she held it until the waitress had gone, and then spoke,
"You mean, exactly, that he wishes my radius to be his desires, his welfare, his future?"
"That's his old pattern. Bound to hang on, Catherine. Because it is so flattering, so pleasant. Isn't it what we all wish, anyway? Someone living within our limits?"
"Perhaps men wish it."
"You think women don't?"
"Do they?" Catherine shook her head. "I don't want Charles to have nothing but me in his life. Aren't women hardier? Since they've never had that—it is a sort of human sacrifice, isn't it? Men are like vines! Did you know vines wouldn't grow well, some of them, unless you sacrifice to them? Bones and flesh. 'If you have an old hen,' said the nursery man, when I asked him about our Actinidia in Maine, 'bury her close to the roots. Then the vine will shoot up.' And it did!"
"You would make over the old saying about sturdy oaks, wouldn't you?"
"Don't make fun of me. Perhaps I can discoversomething which will change the world!" She stared intently at Bill. "You—" she hesitated. "You live without that human sacrifice, Bill. You aren't an Actinidia."
"And so, perhaps, I know why men wish it." Bill pushed to one side his untouched salad. "Without any question now of its fairness or justice to women like Henrietta, or you. In the first place, it is convenient, practically so; smooths down all the details of living. But especially, it drops a painted screen between man and the distressing futility of his life. A man with a family and a regular wife, old style, doesn't often have to face his own emptiness. He feels important. He hurries around at his work, and if doubt pricks a hole in that screen, the picture painted there is intricate enough to hide the hole. He has something to keep his machinery in action. If by day his little ego is deflated, there is, to change my figure, free air at home to blow him full again."
"You sound as if you thought all wives were adoring and humble," said Catherine.
"Some of them used to be." Bill grinned at her, and lifted his hand abruptly in a signal to the waitress. "This is supposed to be a party," he apologized, "and not a lecture by me. Tell me more about what you've been doing."
Catherine's talk was fragmentary. Something—what Bill had said, or perhaps simply his being Bill with all the old associations close around him—had blown the froth away from the past two weeks; she had thought that she had become almost a different Catherine, bright, hard, full of enthusiasm and interest, absorbed in her rôle of Bureau-representative. She saw now that herinner self still stood with feet entangled in perplexity and doubt.
"Bill"—she broke into her own recital—"if a man doesn't have free air at home, does he look for it somewhere else?"
"He may." Bill's quick upward glance was disturbed. He knew, then, about Charles and Stella. Henrietta would have told him. "Or"—lightly—"he runs along on a flat tire."
Catherine was silent, her mind skipping along with the absurd figure. Stella Partridge was, after all, too busy pumping her own ego hard to perform that task long for any man. She might flatter him, and cajole——
"Do the children write to you?"
Catherine reached into the pocket of her coat.
"I've been moving too fast the last few days to have letters. I expect a lot to-morrow in Ohio." She spread the sheet on the table. "Here's the latest. Letty made the crosses."
"Dere Mother I will be glad when you come home again because I do not like to sleep in Daddys and your room so well. Walter is coming to see me for a day and maybe I am going home with him we are being good I love YouFrom your loving Son Spencer Hammond Good-by."
"Dere Mother I will be glad when you come home again because I do not like to sleep in Daddys and your room so well. Walter is coming to see me for a day and maybe I am going home with him we are being good I love You
From your loving Son Spencer Hammond Good-by."
"Nice kid." Bill looked up. "Let's see, he is just nine, isn't he?"
"Going on ten." Catherine refolded the letter. She loved the little smudge from an inky thumb in the margin.
"What shall we do now? You have several hours left." Bill set down his coffee cup. "Music? Theater? We can probably find seats for something."
"I'd rather—" Catherine paused. "Is it too stormy for a walk? I never get out of doors any more. This morning, from a window in the building at the University, I had a glimpse of the lake. Could we go there? I'd like to see how much like the ocean it is."
"It's windy, of course."
"I'd like that." A picture of herself, buffeted by winds over a stretch of water—perhaps that would blow away the melancholy cobwebs, would whip her again into froth.
Bill summoned a taxi, and in silence they rode through the long streets, south toward the park, their shoulders brushing as the machine bumped over frozen slush.
Bill slumped forward, his hands linked about his knees, his shoulders an arc of weariness. The long streets seemed drawn past the windows of the cab, on either side a sliding strip of unfamiliar shapes. It's as if a spring had broken in him, thought Catherine, a secret spring which had kept him running. Perhaps Henrietta was right, and he is sick.
"It's a long way, isn't it?" She had a plaintive moment of loneliness. Bill was the one familiar thing in the strange city, and he had retreated almost beyond communication. "I didn't know it was so far."
"We're almost there." Bill straightened his shoulders, and peered out at the sliding street. "In the Fifties. I thought you'd like Jackson Park. More space there."
A moment later he thrust open the door.
"Here!" he called to the driver. "We'll get out here."
II
"There's your lake." Bill slipped his hand firmly under her arm, and they bent slightly forward into the darkrushing wind. At their feet a steady crunching, a restless churning as of china waves; beyond, a stretch of black hidden action under a sky black and infinitely remote, with sharp white stars. "This wind has broken up the shore ice."
Along the sloping beach rose vague suggestions of grotesqueries; piles thrusting tortured heads with ice-hair above the frozen surface, driftwood caught between great blocks of dirty ice.
"It's like Doré's Inferno." Catherine shivered. "You remember? That frozen hell, with awful heads sticking up in the ice?"
"Let's walk along. You're cold." Buffeted, they went along the deserted drive, passing regularly from shadow into the burst of light under the yellow globes that hung above them. "I like that black sky," said Bill. "In New York we never have that."
"No." Catherine glanced westward, through bare limbs of trees. "See, there's the city glare, back there." She was warm again, her blood tingling under the dark rush of the wind; the black hidden movement of the water, the cold vasty black of the sky were exciting, like a shouted challenge.
"Here is shelter from the wind." Bill drew her into an angle made by the porch of a small summer pavilion. "You can put your head out to see the lake, without being knocked flat."
The wind racketed in the loose boards nailed along the lake side of the porch. Catherine leaned back, laughing, out of reach of the gusts. She could just catch the dim outline of Bill's face, his strong, aquiline profile.
"Bill!" She felt suddenly that in the dark, windy night there was nothing else human except Bill and herself; she wanted to burrow into his silence, his withdrawal. Her fingers brushed his arm in soft demand.
"Great, isn't it?" His voice was low and warm, walking under the rush of the wind. "Blows the nonsense clear out of you." He moved slightly so that his shoulder sheltered her. "Warm enough?"
"I shouldn't like to be here alone." She couldn't see his face distinctly—shadowy eye sockets, dark mouth. "I'd feel too little! You keep me life-size."
Silence, warm and comforting, like a secret place within the noise of the wind rattling at the boards, churning up the ice cakes.
"I can't pry into him." Catherine's feeling broke into splinters of thought. "It wouldn't be fair. He'd hate it. Digging under to see his roots. Something passionless and fine in this—no strife—as if he accepted me—whole. Dear Bill."
"Well?" He was smiling at her, she knew. "You have a train to catch, haven't you?"
They stood together in the downtown station. Bill had collected her luggage from the check-room, had brought a bunch of violets for her from the little florist's counter.
"It's Valentine's Day, you know." He watched gravely as she fastened them against the soft beaver of her collar. "I'm starting East to-morrow," he said. "I'll see your family before you do, won't I?"
"You can give them my love first hand. Tell them I'm coming soon."
"I'll tell them you are so triumphant and successful that they will be fortunate to have you again."
Catherine laughed softly. A local train was announced, draining off the waiting people, leaving them almost alone in the station.
"You know," she said, quietly, "you puff me up, Bill. Not when you say ridiculous things like that, but all the time." Under his seeking, hungry eyes, she flushed. "And I am grateful."
A scurry to the platform, as the through express rolled in. Bill, relinquishing her bags to the porter, seized her hand in a hard clasp, and stood, bareheaded, below her on the platform shouting, "Good luck!" as she was carried with increasing rush away.
III
Catherine, braced against the shivers and jounces of the old Ford taxi, wondered inertly what it would feel like to live in such a town, in one of those two-story frame houses, with a corrugated iron garage in the rear, and grayish lace curtains at the windows, with smoke-blackened sparrows scrapping in the front yard, and drifting, curling feathers of soot in the dingy air. I could plan a town like this with a ruler, she thought. A straight line for the business street, a few parallel lines, a few right-angled lines: dots for churches, one of each kind; for moving-picture theaters; for schools; small squares for yards and houses. Factories along the railroad, pouring up the blanket of smoke under which the town lay. Was that the soul of the town, that close-hanging smoke, with its drifting feathers of soot? Andthen, out at the edge, where the frame houses were far apart, scattered, a handful of college buildings, in medieval isolation. When she had said "Hope College" to the driver, he had shrieked to a baggage master, "Hi, Chuck! Where's Hope Collidge, d'yuh know?"
"Out past the lunatic asylum. You know, down the car track."
Hope College, typical of the small denominational institutions offering a normal certificate. So Dr. Roberts had classified it.
That must be the lunatic asylum, that group of brick buildings with prison windows. They were well out of town, now, the cab skidding and jerking over deep ruts. Gray, flat, interminable fields under a flat gray sky. It's like a dream, thought Catherine, a funny, burlesque of a dream, with me rattling along.
"This it, lady?" The taxi shivered in all its bolts as it halted, and the driver poked his head in at the door. There was a driveway winding between two rows of small blotched poplar trunks, and back from the road two square brick buildings, scrawled over with black network of old vines.
"I don't know."
"Guess it must be." He slammed the door and whirred up the driveway.
Just as Catherine climbed the steps, still moving vaguely in a dream burlesque, a clangor of bells burst out, followed by the clamp of feet, the sound of voices released. She opened the heavy door, and stepped into the hall. The sense of dream vanished; this was real enough. Opposite the door rose the central stairs of the building, twisting up in a dimly lighted well. Up and down them climbedyoung people, girls, a few boys. Shabby, gaudy, flippant, serious—Catherine watched them, with a sharp resurgence of all her shining belief, her keen, exciting delight in the thing she had come for.
She marched into an office at the left of the hall. A girl sitting at a small table, her smooth, pale-yellow head bent over a book, looked up.
"Is this the Dean's office?" Catherine smiled at her; something like Letty in the yellow hair, although the face was rather strained and thin. "I'm Mrs. Hammond, from the Lynch Bureau."
"She'll be right in." The girl rose and opened the door into the adjoining office, as if in uncertainty. "She hasn't come down from class yet. If you'll sit down——"
"Yes. Do you happen to know whether there is any mail for me here?"
"I'll see." The girl had an awkward, half-suspicious way of staring. "Mrs. Charles Hammond?" she asked.
Catherine sat down on a hard straight chair near the window; the girl's eyes were inquisitive, over the edge of her book. Catherine shuffled the envelopes hastily. Nothing from home. Strange—she had given them this address, and for this date. A bulky envelope from Dr. Roberts, a thin one from Henrietta. She tore open the flap of the latter, and let the round, jerky writing leap at her. Every one was well. Henrietta thought she might be interested in some hospital gossip. Stella Partridge had been doing some work for Dr. Beck, the psychiatrist, and had told several of the other doctors that she thought a medical man should be in charge of the clinic rather than a mere Ph. Doctor. "She says Beck has asked her to help him with a book, but I have astrong doubt. Has Charles found her out, do you suppose?"
Catherine folded the latter, and tried to poke with it into its envelope the swirl of feeling it evoked. For a brisk little woman had darted into the office and at a word from the girl was darting now at her.
"Mrs. Hammond? I'm Dean Snow. Come right in!" The pressure of her palm against Catherine's was like a firmly stuffed pincushion. "Has anyone else with a cold been in, Martha?"
Catherine, passing ahead of the Dean into her office, caught the friendly softening in the voice of the girl as she answered,
"No'm, not this morning. The plumber came, and I sent him over to the dormitory. He says that pipe is rusted and ought to come out. I told him he'd have to see you first."
"That's right, Martha. And you got those letters off?"
"Yes'm."
"Good."
She followed Catherine, closing the door.
"Just have a chair, Mrs. Hammond." She whisked herself into place beside the old roll-top desk, her rotating office chair creaking as she settled down on its springs. A little cubby-hole of an office, with a sort of film of long use over the gray walls and painted floor, over the crammed pigeon holes of the desk, over the huge framed photographs—the "Acropolis," the "Porch of the Maidens," the "Sistine Madonna," and, above the desk, a faded group photograph of gentle faces above enormous puffed sleeves; in the corner a small hat-tree, from which a rusty umbrella dangled.
"You teach, Miss Snow, in addition to being Dean?"
"Oh, yes. Latin and Greek. It's a great relief from plumbers and colds." She had a plump, white face, with gray bangs over her forehead, sharp blue eyes, and full pink lips held firmly together. She has humor, thought Catherine, and common sense, but she's intolerant. "So you're making an investigation of us, are you?" The Dean rubbed at a streak of chalk-dust on the sleeve of her tight dress. "What do you expect us to do after you point out our shortcomings?"
She thinks I am dressy and interfering. Catherine held her hands motionless against her desire to fidget. She's just the kind of sensible woman I can't get on with.
"The Bureau wants to make a constructive study," she said. "Not a criticism."
"We need just one constructive thing." Miss Snow smiled. "Money. We're poor. Small endowment fund. The Baptists around here seem poorer each year. Now I haven't had a secretary for five years. The students help me out, and I deduct the hours from their tuition. If we had money we could do much more. We get fine young people. The godless younger generation doesn't come here. We wouldn't admit them if they wanted to come. Our girls and boys know how to work. They are in earnest. But you don't want to give us money, do you? No, you want to change things. Mrs. Hammond—" She leaned forward, her plump fist coming down whack on her knee. "I've been here almost forty years, as student, teacher, officer. Our President, Dr. Whitmore, has been here as long as that. Don't you think we know how to run a college?"
Catherine hunted for phrases, gracious, illuminating,with which to justify her mission. So many of these little colleges through the state, such diversity of aim, changes in educational ideas——
"You see," she finished appealingly, "that's our idea. That there should be a clear, definite program in the training of young teachers, and that enough is known about educational needs now to make such a program feasible."
"I've watched young people go out of here for many years now, and I know it doesn't make much difference what they've been taught. If they have the fear of God, if they are earnest and faithful, they succeed. If not—none of your modern folderols will save them. Give them the mental discipline of mathematics and the classics, and they can teach children reading and writing all right. I've seen too many fads in education to take them seriously. First it was natural science that was to make the world over, and we had to raise a fund for a laboratory. Then—oh, there's no use listing them. But I ask you, Mrs. Hammond, what's happened to Rousseau, or Froebel, or that woman a year or so ago, that foreigner, Monty somebody, who had a new scheme? Gone. You have to cling to the eternal verities. Fads pass."
The building quivered under the violent clangor of bells and the sound of hurrying feet. Miss Snow pulled open a drawer and lifted out a shabby, yellow-edged volume. "Here's one thing that stands. Ovid." She tucked it under her arm and rose. "I have a class now. Would you care to visit it?"
In the late afternoon Catherine stood in the hall, bidding Miss Snow farewell.
"It's been interesting, and I appreciate the time you have given me, out of your very busy day," she said.
"I've enjoyed it." Miss Snow shook hands vigorously. "I enjoy talking. It airs my ideas even if it doesn't change them much. I wish you could stay to hear the Glee Club practice to-night. We're real proud of their singing."
"I have to take that very early train." Catherine descended the steps and climbed into the waiting taxi—the same one which had brought her. "The Commercial House," she said.
The early February twilight lay over the fields, as if the smoke had settled more closely on the earth. She leaned back, letting the day float past her, in unselected, haphazard bits. All that zeal and honest industry poured into medieval patterns. The very best of the old patterns, no doubt, with that stern righteousness, that obligation in them. Something infinitely pitiful, touching, in those young things she had watched, awkward, serious, patient, most of them.
"Of course, most of our girls teach only a few years, and then marry," Miss Snow had said. She couldn't have had more finality if she had said, "and then die!"
Luncheon, a hurried half hour in a chilly, bare dining hall, with grace helping the creamed codfish grow cold. The other faculty members, serious and threadbare, like farm horses, thought Catherine, with bare spots chafed by the harness of inadequate salary, of monotony. As untouched by any modern thought as if centuries of time separated them. And each year, young people turned into that hopper.
If I can put that feeling down on paper, she thought,it should move even this mountain of age and tradition. To-morrow, my day will be different; the large colleges are somewhat awake. But there are hundreds of these.
At the desk of the hotel she asked hopefully for mail. Perhaps she had given this address to Charles and Miss Kelly, and not the college. The clerk poked through a pile of letters and shook his bald, red head. Three days without a word, for Henrietta's letter had been written days ago. After a moment of hesitation—amusing, how old habits of economy hung on!—she wrote out a telegram.
"Night letter?" The clerk counted the words.
"No. I want it to go the quickest possible way. I want an answer before that morning train."
In the bare little hotel room, she sat down under the light, her writing pad balanced on her knee. A note to Dr. Roberts.
"There seems no limit to the things we may accomplish," she wrote, "when I see, at first hand, what the catalogue discrepancies really mean, in flesh and blood and buildings."
Suppose something was wrong, at home? She stared about at the dingy, painted walls, with faint zigzags of cracks, and fear prickled through the enthusiasm which enclosed her. This was the first time that letters had failed to meet her. In two hours, or three, she should have an answer to her message. "Please wire me at once, care Commercial House. No word from you here." She picked up her pen again. No use to worry; letters miscarried, and she would hear soon.
She opened Henrietta's letter, to reread the comment on Stella Partridge. Something behind that, she thought.That woman doesn't make incautious remarks. Her mind fumbled with the news, as if it were a loose bit out of an intricate mechanism; if she could fit it into place, she could see how the whole affair ran. That was one of Charles's lowest boiling points, that contention about medical men and psychologists. Perhaps Partridge had been too greedy, and laid those smooth hands of hers on something Charles particularly wanted for himself, for his own job. Whatever it is—Catherine rose suddenly, piling her letters and portfolio on the corner of the dresser—whatever it is, I mean to know about it, when I go home again. I am through fumbling along.
Her room had grown chilly. A wind rattled at the loose sash of the window. She looked out at the angle of street; a hardware store across the way mirrored its enormous window light in shining pans and kettles. The air seemed full of whirling bits of mica. She pushed the window up and leaned out; sharp and wet on her face, the mica was snow, driven along on the wind.
Only an hour since she had telegraphed. She would go down to dinner. Something insidious in the way the soft fingers of worry pried between thoughts, pushed down deeper than thought.
She stopped at the desk.
"If a message comes for Mrs. Hammond, please send it in to the dining room."
"Guess we're going to have a blizzard, aren't we?" The clerk rubbed an inky forefinger thoughtfully over his red baldness. "Coming along from Chicago and the west on this wind."
More pushing of those soft fingers: delay of trains, wires down, who knows when I may hear!
"It may not be a bad storm," said Catherine, and went resolutely in to dinner. But she heard the clerk's, "You can't tell when you're going to get trouble."
In the dining room, a few traveling men scattered about at tables sending glances of incurious speculation after her as she chose a seat; a middle-aged waitress whose streaked purplish hair shrieked aloud her effort to keep youth enough to win tips, and whose heavy, laborious tread spoke more loudly of aching, fallen arches. Catherine started at the twin bottles of vinegar and yellowish oil in the center of the table. Letty's just gone to bed, she thought. Mrs. O'Lay is serving dinner. I shouldn't care to be a traveling saleswoman. The hotel drives my job into some remote limbo. I'll go to bed early. To-morrow, at the University, it will be different. Such a cordial note from that history professor's wife, asking me to stay with them. It was nice of Dr. Roberts to write personally to them.
Good steak, at least. Fair coffee. Finally, as the waitress set a triangle of pie before her, she saw the clerk in the doorway, his eyes focusing on her. He came slowly toward her. It's come, thought Catherine. He ought not to button that alpaca coat; absurd, the way it creases over his fat stomach.
"They just telephoned this from the station," he said, laying a sheet of paper beside her plate. The elaborate scrolled heading,Commercial House, wriggled under her eyes, settled flatly away as she read the penciled words.
Spencer hurt coasting wired you this morning can you comeCharles
Spencer hurt coasting wired you this morning can you come
Charles
"Hope it's nothing serious, ma'am."
Those soft fingers of worry had unsheathed their claws; they tore at her, deep in the unheeded, rhythmic working of her body. She could not breathe, nor see, nor speak. Spencer!
"Nothing serious," he repeated, and suddenly her heart was clattering against her ribs. She could lift her eyes from that paper. Why, he had a kindly face, that bald clerk; his flat nostrils had widened a little, in avid human sniffing at disaster, but his eyes were sympathetic.
"It's my little boy." She could breathe now. "It says he is hurt. Why—" she thrust back her chair in a violent motion, and wavered as she stood up. "There was a telegram this morning. I should have known this morning!"
"That's too bad, Ma'am. It never came here."
"I'll have to get a train." Catherine was hurrying out of the dining room, the clerk at her heels. "When can I?"
"It don't say how bad he's hurt." She felt his hand close about her arm. "You sit down here, and I'll 'phone to the station for you." He drew her into the enclosure behind his counter, and pushed her gently into an old leather chair. "Little fellows stand an awful lot of knocking around. I've got three, so I ought to know. Now, take it easy. Where you want to go? New York City?"
Grateful tears in Catherine's eyes made prismatic edges around his solid figure. As she watched him thumbing a railroad folder, her panic lifted slightly. Perhaps—oh, perhaps Spencer wasn't badly hurt. Charles would be frightened, would want her.
"Um. That's too bad. You just missed a good train." He turned to the telephone. "Gimme the station. Yea-uh. That's right."
Henrietta would be there.
"When's the next through train east, Chuck? Huh? No, the next one." He spit his words out of the corner of his mouth toward the receiver. "Any word of that out of Chicago yet? Well, say, I got a lady here got to get to New York on it. Got to, I said. You got any berths here? Well, you could wire for one, couldn't you? What you hired for?"
He hung up the earpiece.
"He says there's trouble west of here. Snow. That seven o'clock just went through, late. He's gonna let me know about the midnight."
"I'd better go to the station."
"What for? You stay here where it's comfortable. You go up to your room and I'll let you know. I'm on till midnight."
"Just go up and wait?" Catherine was piteous.
"Yes, ma'am. I'll take care of you. Now don't you go worrying. I always tell my wife she'd have the grass growing over all of us if worry could do it. That's the woman of it, I suppose."
"You're very kind." Catherine was reluctant to leave him. He was a sort of bulwark between her and the rush of dark fear. "I ought to wire them——"
"Sure. Here, write it out. It stands in reason he needn't be hurt much, and still he'd want his mother."
Catherine's pencil wobbled in her stiff fingers. Spencer would want her. All day he had wanted her. Hours between them——
"Will take first train." She looked up, her lip quivering. "I wouldn't have time for an answer, would I?"
"You ought not to, if that train's anywhere near on time, and if there's a berth left on it." The clerk turned away, to fish cigars out of his counter for a man who stood waiting, one hand plying a busy toothpick.
"D'yuh hear anything about the blizzard down Chicago way?" the man asked. "Say it's put kinks in the train service."
"You always hear worse than happens." The clerk's glance at Catherine was anxious. But she signed her name to the message and wrote out the address.
V
The midnight express for New York, coming through three hours late, did not stop. The clerk came up to Catherine's door to tell her.
"They ain't an empty berth on her," he said. "Took off several coaches to lighten her for the drifts."
"What am I going to do?" Catherine asked.
"There's a local in the morning. You could get something out of Pittsburgh, if you got that far."
The rest of the night, the next day, the next night, all were to Catherine grotesquely unreal, as if life had been transposed to a different key, where all familiar things were flatted into dissonance and harsh strangeness. All night the scrape of snow-plows and shovels, futile against the snow; the snow which seemed the wind itself turned to dry, drifting, impenetrable barriers. The local, dragged by two locomotives, hours late, like a moving snowdrift itself. The hours in that train, with nothing but snowdarkening the windows, hiding the world, driving through the aisles with the opening of the doors. Pittsburgh, late in the afternoon, and no word from Charles. She beat helplessly against the gruff taciturnity of the ticket agent; he had stood up all day confronting cross, belated travelers. There was a train in an hour, making connections at Philadelphia. Night on that train, in a crowded day coach, malodorous and noisy. She felt as if she dragged the train herself, down through strange valleys, where blast furnaces sent up red shrieks of flame, through dim, sleeping towns.
Philadelphia at two, the next morning. A narrow strip of platform across which the wind whirled. Another crowded day coach. Where were these people going, that colored boy, asleep, his feet stuck out into the aisle in their ragged socks, his shoes clasped under one arm—that man and woman, slumping peacefully against each other, mouths drooping wide?
As Catherine stepped down to the platform in the New York station, the huge dim roofs of the train shed spun dangerously about her. A porter loped beside her, pawing at her bag, but she walked away from him, her eyes wide like a somnambulist. She made her way to a telephone booth, and then, when she had lifted her hand to drop in the nickel, stopped abruptly. If she telephoned, and something dreadful came over the wire, buzzing into her head, it would transfix her there, unable to move, held forever behind that close, dirty glass door. She pushed violently against the door, freed herself, and fled out to the street. She passed on the steps a woman crawling on her knees, one arm moving in sluggish circles, scrubbing. After she had found a taxi and was whirring away through the dark street, the motion of that weary arm continued before her eyes. How dark the city was, and still, as if she had come into it just at the turn of the tide, before the morning life moved in. "Dark o' the moon"—she heard Spencer's voice chanting—"pulls the ole water away from the earth."
When she stepped out of the cab she did not even glance at the house. She paid the driver, picked up her bag, and went into the dim, tiled hall. She was empty, capable of precise, brisk movement. All her fear, her pressure of anxiety, her physical weariness, were held in solution, waiting the moment which would crystallize them. She stood at the elevator shaft, her finger on the button. The car was beneath her, the dust-nap of its top at her feet. The bell shrilled, but nothing else stirred. The man is asleep, she thought, dispassionately, and without haste she began to climb the stairs to the fifth floor.
At the door she stopped again, staring a moment at the small card,Hammond. She had no key. If she rang, she would waken everyone. But she must, in some way, enter. She knocked, softly. Her face, turned up to the dark painted grain of the metal door, grew imploring.
There was her door, and she couldn't open it, couldn't know what was behind it! Like a dreadful nightmare. She pounded with her knuckles. Then, softly, the door opened, and Charles, his bathrobe trailing, his eyes sleep-swollen, was blinking at her. She seemed a dream to him, too!
"Why, Catherine—you? How'd you get here, this timeof day?" He whispered, and then he closed the door with a caution alarming in its quietness.
"Spencer! Tell me—" Catherine's nostrils quivered at a strange smell in the dark hall, an odor of antiseptics, of drugs.
"Thought you'd never come." Charles muttered. "Ghastly, your not being here."
"Is he here?" Catherine started to pass Charles, but he caught her, held her a moment. Catherine felt in the pressure of his arms, in his harsh kiss, the thwarted rage, helplessness, distress—she knew she had those to meet, later. Now— "Tell me, please!" she begged. "Spencer."
"He's better." Charles released her. "Sleeping now. Mustn't disturb him." He led the way to the living room, past closed, dark doors. "We'd better go into the kitchen."
Catherine stumbled into a chair.
"He was hurt, coasting. He and Walter Thomas. Right in front of the house. Miss Kelly was just coming out with the other children, to take them all to the park. He and Walter—coasted around the corner, into a truck. Hurt his head. Miss Kelly carried him in here herself." Charles was leaning against the table, his face away from Catherine, his mouth twisting wryly. Catherine touched his hand. "When I got home, Henrietta was here, and another surgeon. His head—" Catherine swung up to a sharp peak of agony—Spencer? She saw, unbearably, that fine, sensitive, growing life of his, smeared over. "They didn't dare move him. Unconscious. Stitches in his temple. They think now he's all right." He grew suddenly voluble, shrill. "You can'ttell about such things at once. Have to wait. Might injure his brain. But he's been conscious, perfectly clear-headed, normal. Got a good nurse. Just keep him quiet, flat on his back. Children are tough— Oh, Catherine——"
A door was opening somewhere, an inch at a time. Catherine strained forward, too heavy with pain to rise. She felt Charles's uneasy start, felt the hours of anxiety behind the sharp gripping of his hand under hers. Feet shuffled toward them. Her mother appeared at the door, her blue eyes blinking under the frill of her lace cap, a perceptible quaver in the old hand which held together the folds of her gray bathrobe.
"Thank Heaven you've come, Catherine!" She scuffed across the linoleum and pecked softly at Catherine's cheek. "Poor little Spencer—he asked for you."
"Oh!" Catherine was on her feet, but Charles held her fingers restrainingly.
"Last night, mother means. The nurse said she'd call me the instant he woke. He's really sleeping now. Not unconscious."
Catherine stood between them for a moment of silence. "It stands to reason he might not be hurt bad, and yet want his mother." Who said that? Some one had said it to her.
"We looked for you yesterday," said Mrs. Spencer.
"Blizzards. I couldn't get a train." Catherine felt a bond between them, excluding her, accusing her. Charles stared at her, his eyes sunken, the lines about his mouth deepened; her mother—a thin, wrinkled film seemed drawn over her face, dimming her color. "I came the instant I could. I sat up on a local." She clasped herhands against her breast, against the heavy, pounding ache.
"You must be tired to pieces, poor child." Her mother patted her arm. "Don't feel so bad, Cathy. It might have happened if you'd been right here. And it's turning out so much better than——"
"But I wasn't here," said Catherine, quietly. And then, "What about Walter?" She could see that sled sweeping around the corner. "Was he hurt?"
"Shaken up and bruised. Spencer was steering."
A rustle at the door, a strange face staring at her, crisp and cold above white linen.
"Yes?" Charles stepped forward intently.
"The little boy is awake."
"This is Mrs. Hammond, Miss Pert. She may go in?"
She was a culprit, a stranger, trembling, unable to move.
"You'd better take off your hat and coat, Mrs. Hammond. And don't excite him. He's drowsy."
The dim, shaded light; a little still mound under the counterpane; under the smooth white turban of bandages, Spencer's gray eyes, moving softly with her flight from the door to his bed. On her knees beside him, her fingers closing about his hand. Quiet, not to excite him. How limp and small his hand felt!
"Hello, Moth-er!" He sighed, and his eyelids shut down again.
VI
The next two weeks life was a shadow show outside that room where Spencer lay. "He must be kept flat and motionless," the surgeon said, with Dr. Henrietta noddingassent. "Even as he feels stronger." Catherine was concentrated entirely upon that. Everything reduced itself to terms of Spencer. Books that she might read to him, games she might devise, stories she could tell—anything to keep him content until it was safe for him to lift that bandaged, wounded head. Always there was the terror lest some sign of injury might show itself, some quirk in his mind, some change in personality, some flush to indicate fever and infection. "We think he has, miraculously, escaped any bad effects," said Henrietta, "but we can't be absolutely sure for a few days." At night, when he slept, Catherine would leave Charles in the house, and slip out for a quick walk in the cold March darkness. But terrifying images pursued her—sudden blackness shutting down over that shining, golden reality that was Spencer to her—and she would hasten back, unassuaged of her terror until she stood again at the door of his room.
When her trunk came, she had rummaged through it, selecting all the material of her work, and sending it to Dr. Roberts with a brief note. "My son has been injured and I can do nothing more with this. If you can send someone else to finish the work, please do so. I can not even think of it for the present."
There would come a day, she knew, when she could think again, a day when she would face the lurking shadows of her guilt, would determine what it meant. Not now. Not until Spencer was well.
Charles was waiting, too, she knew. He was subdued, considerate, concerned lest she overtax herself. But he seemed one of the shadows in the outer world.
Then Spencer lost his angelic patience, and began to fret humanly about lying flat in bed.
"A few more days, Spencer." Henrietta smiled at him. "Then this crack in your head will be healed enough."
"But I feel all right now."
Fear, retreating, dragged away the distortion it had given, and gradually the shadows about Catherine grew three-dimensional again. Henrietta warned her: "You'll have a frightful slump, Catherine, unless you let yourself down easily, after this strain."
"I don't feel tired, not at all."
"That's the trouble. And you are. Rest more. Spencer doesn't need you every second now. Let Charles sleep here to-night."
Catherine shook her head.
"I sleep fairly well here, because I know I shall wake if Spencer stirs. Anywhere else I should lie awake, listening."
"But he's safe now. I'm sure of that. The only danger, after the first, was infection. And that's past. Two more days and I'll let him up. I don't want you down." Henrietta paused, her fingers running along the black ribbon of her glasses. "When are you going back to work?" she flung out.
A subtle change in Catherine's face, like the quick drawing of shades at all the windows of a house.
"I don't know." She moved away from Henrietta, to glance in at Spencer.
"Um." Henrietta shrugged. "Well, I'll be in early to-morrow."
That was the first shadow to take real form. Whenwasshe going back to work? And behind the shades drawn against Henrietta moved a sharp curiosity. What had Dr. Roberts done about the investigation? There hadbeen a note from him, tossed into a drawer. A note of sympathy. Had he said anything about the work? But as she made a faint motion to go in search of the note, Spencer called her.
Another shadow to grow more real was Miss Kelly. She had managed Letty with amazing competence, keeping her quiet and amused. She had come earlier in the morning than usual, to dress Marian and walk with her to school. But she was worried, shying away when she met Catherine in the hall, and her pale blue eyes stared with some entreaty in them. The day that Spencer first sat up, Charles carried him into the living room to the armchair, and Catherine tucked a rug about his feet and left him there, to look out of the window. As she went back to the bedroom, she heard a choking, muffled sound, and there in the hall stood Miss Kelly, her hands over her face.
"What is it?" she asked gently, touching the woman's shoulder. Then, as she looked at the swollen, reddened eyes, she knew. "He's quite well again," she said. "Don't cry."
"I—I hadn't left him a second," Miss Kelly whispered. "Just to help Letty down the steps."