CHAPTER XXIIIFOR ARIADNE’S SAKE
CHAPTER XXIII
FOR ARIADNE’S SAKE
Little Ariadne was six months old before Lydia could begin to make the slightest effort to resume the social routine of her life. This was not at all on account of ill health, for she had recovered her strength rapidly and completely, and, like a good many normal women, had found maternity a solvent of various slight physical disorders of her girlhood. She felt now a more assured physical poise than ever before, and could not attribute her disappearance from Endbury social life to weakness. The fact was that Dr. Melton had upheld her in her wish to nurse her baby herself, which limited her to very short absences from the house and to a very quiet life within doors. She also discovered that the servant problem was by no means simplified by the new member of the family. “Girls” had always been unwilling to come out to Bellevue because of the distance from their friends and followers, and they now put forth another universally recognized obstacle in the phrase, “I never work out where there is a baby. They make so much dirt.” Anastasia O’Hern was there, to be sure—heavy-handed, warm-hearted ’Stashie, who took the new little girl to her loyal spinster heart and wept tears of joy over her safe arrival; but ’Stashie had proved, as Paul predicted from the first time he saw her, incorrigibly rattle-headed and loose-ended. She had learned to prepare a number of simple, homely dishes, quite enough to supply the actual needs of the everyday household, and what she cooked was unusually palatable. She had the Celtic feeling for savoriness. She had also managed, under Lydia’s zealous tuition, to overcome theCeltic tolerance for dirt, and thanks to her square, powerful body, as strong as a ditch-digger’s, she made light work of keeping the house in a most gratifying state of cleanliness.
But there were gaps in her equipment that were not to be filled by any amount of tuition. In the first place, as Paul said of her, she was as much like the traditional trim maid as a hippopotamus is like a gazelle. Furthermore, as Dr. Melton summed up the matter in answer to one of Paul’s outbreaks against her, she was utterly incapable of comprehending that satisfied vanity is the vital element in human life. For anything that pertained to the appearance of things, ’Stashie was deaf, dumb and blind. She would as soon as not put one of her savory stews on the table in an earthen crock, and she never could be trusted to set the table properly. There were always some kitchen spoons among the silver, and the dishes looked, as Paul said, “as though she had stood off and thrown them at a bull’s-eye in the middle of the table.” Moreover, she herself could not emancipate herself from the ideas of toilet gleaned in the little one-room cabin in County Clare. She was passionately devoted to Lydia, and took with the humblest gratitude any hints about the care of her person, but it was like trying to make a color-blind person into a painter! Anastasia could only love on her knees, and serve, and sympathize and cherish; she could not remember to comb her hair, or to put on a clean apron when she opened the door, even if it were Madame Hollister herself who rang. She had once opened to that important personage attired in a calico wrapper, a sweater, and a pair of rubber boots, having just come in from emptying the ashes—one of the heavy tasks, outside her regular work, which she took upon her strong, willing self. “But I was clane, and I got her into the house in two minutes from the time she rang, the poor old soul!” she protested to Lydia, who, at Paul’s instance, had taken her to task.
Lydia explained, “But Mr. Hollister’s aunt is a personwho would rather wait half an hour in the cold than see you without an apron.”
To which ’Stashie exclaimed, in awestruck wonder before the mysteries of creation, “Folks do be the beatin’est, don’t they now, Mis’ Hollister!”
“And you must not speak of Mr. Hollister’s aunt as a ‘poor old soul,’” explained Lydia, apprehensive of Paul’s wrath if he ever chanced to hear such a characterization.
“But she is that,” protested ’Stashie. “Anybody that’s her age and hobbles around so crippled up with the rheumatism—my heart bleeds for ’em.”
“She is very rich—” began Lydia, but after a moment’s hesitation she had not continued her lesson in social value. She often found that ’Stashie’s questions brought her to a standstill.
There was something lacking in the Irishwoman’s mental outfit, namely, the capacity even to conceive that ideal of impersonal self-effacement, which, as Paul said truthfully, is the everywhere accepted standard for servants. Her loquacity was a never-ending joke to Madeleine Lowder and her husband, who were exulting in a couple of deft, silent, expensive Japanese “boys” and who, since Madeleine frankly expressed her horror at the bother of having children, seemed likely to continue ignorant, except at comfortable second-hand, of harassing domestic difficulties.
If Lydia had not been in such dire need of another pair of hands than her own slender ones, or if the supply from Endbury intelligence offices had been a whit less unreliable and uncertain, she would not have felt justified in retaining the burly, uncouth Celt, in spite of her own affection, so intensely did Paul dislike her. As it was, she felt guilty for her presence and miserably responsible for her homeliness of conduct. ’Stashie was a constant point of friction between husband and wife, and Lydia was trying with desperate ingenuity to avoid points of friction by some other method than the usual Endbury one of divided interests. Many times she lay awake at night, convincedthat her duty was to dismiss Anastasia; only to rise in the morning equally convinced that things without her would be in the long run even harder and more disagreeable for Paul than they were now. The upshot of the matter was that she herself was a very incompetent person, she was remorsefully sure of that; although her mother and Marietta and Paul’s aunt all told her that she need expect nothing during the first year of a baby’s life but one wretched round of domestic confusion.
Lydia did not find it so. She was immensely occupied, it is true, for though Ariadne was a strong, healthy child, who spent most of her time, her grandmother complained, in sleeping, to Lydia’s more intimate contact with the situation there seemed to be more things to be done for the baby, in addition to the usual cares of housekeeping, than could possibly be crowded into twenty-four hours. And yet she was happier during those six months than ever before in her life; happier than she had ever dreamed anyone could be. She stepped about incessantly from one task to another and was very tired at night, but there was no nervous strain on her, and she had no moments of blasting skepticism as to the value of her labors.
Everything she did, even the most menial tasks connected with the baby, was dignified, to her mind, by its usefulness; and she so systematized and organized her busy days that she was always ahead of her work. Paul was obliged to alter his judgment of her as impractical and incapable—although of course the dearest and sweetest of little wives—for nothing could have been more competent than the way she managed her baby and her simple housekeeping. Indeed, there came to the young husband’s mind not infrequently, and always with a slight aroma of bitterness, the conviction that Lydia was perfectly able to do whatever she really wished to do and considered important; and that previous conditions must have been due to her unwillingness to set herself seriously at the problems before her. It was a new theory about his wife’s character,which the intelligent young man laid by on a mental shelf for future use after this period of intense domesticity should be past.
At present, he accepted thankfully his clean house and his savory food, was not too much put out by ’Stashie’s eccentricities, since there was no one but the immediate families to see them, and rejoiced with a whimsical tenderness in Lydia’s passion of satisfaction with her baby. He saw so little of the droll, sleeping, eating little mite that he could not as yet take it very seriously as his baby. But it was, on the whole, a happy half-year for him too. He was much moved and pleased by Lydia’s joy. He had meant to make his wife happy.
Lydia herself was transported by the mere physical intoxication of new motherhood, a potion more exciting, so her much experienced physician said, than any wine ever fermented. She hung over her sleeping baby, poring upon the exquisite fineness of the skin, upon the rosy little mouth, still sucking comically at an imaginary meal, upon the dimpled, fragile hands, upon the peaceful relaxation of the body, till the very trusting, appealing essence of babyhood flooded her senses like a strong drug; and when the child was awake, and she could bathe the much creased little body, and handle the soft arms, and drop passionate kisses on the satin-smooth skin, and rub her cheek on the downy head, she found herself sometimes trembling and dizzy with emotion. She felt constantly buoyed up by a deep trust and belief in life which she had not known before. The huge and steadying continuity of existence was revealed to her in those days. It was a revelation that was never to leave her. She outgrew definitely the sense of the fragmentary futility of living which had always been, inarticulate, unvoiced, but intensely felt, the torment of her earlier life.
It grieved her generous heart and her aspiration to share all with her husband that the exigences of his busy life deprived him of any knowledge of this newly-opened wellof sweet waters, that he had nothing from his parenthood but an amused, half shame-faced pride in points about the baby which, he was informed, were creditable.
At a faint hint of this feeling on Lydia’s part, her sister-in-law broke into her good-natured laughter at Lydia’s notions. “What can a man know about a baby?” she cried conclusively.
“Why, I didn’t know about one till Ariadne came. I learned on her. What’s to hinder a man’s doing the same thing?”
Madeleine was so much amused by this fantastic idea that she repeated it to Dr. Melton, who came in just then.
“Don’t it takeLydia!” she appealed to him.
The doctor considered the lovely, fair-haired creature in silence for a moment before answering. Then, “Yes; of course you’re right,” he assented. “It’s a strictly feminine monopoly. It’s as true that all men are incapable of understanding the significance of a baby in the universe and in their own lives, as it is true that all women love babies and desire them.” His tone was full of a heavy significance. He could never keep his temper with Paul’s sister.
Madeleine received this without a quiver. She neither blushed nor looked in the least abashed, but there was an unnecessary firmness in her voice as she answered, looking him steadily in the eye: “Exactly! That’s just what I’ve been telling Lydia.” She often said that she was the only woman in Endbury who wasn’t afraid of that impertinent little doctor.
After Madeleine had gone away, Lydia looked at her godfather with shining eyes. “I am living! I am living!” she told him, holding up the baby to him with a gesture infinitely significant; “and I like it as well as I thought I should!”
“Most people do,” he informed her, “when they get a peck at it. It generally takes something cataclysmic, too, to tear them loose from their squirrel-cages—like babies, or getting converted.”
If he thought that early married life could also be classed among these beneficently uprooting agencies, he kept his thoughts to himself. Lydia’s marriage had been eminently free from disagreeable shocks or surprises, and amply deserved to be called successful in the usual reasonable and moderate application of that adjective to matrimony; but there had been nothing in it, certainly, to destroy even temporarily anyone’s grasp on what are known as the realities of life.
The doctor considered, and added to his last speech: “Getting converted is surer. Babies grow up!”
Lydia felt that her godfather was right, and that babies gave one only a short respite, when, toward spring, she observed in all the inhabitants of her world repeated signs of uneasy dissatisfaction with her “submergence in domesticity,” as Mrs. Emery put it in a family council. Her father inquired mildly, one day in March, with the touchingly vague interest he took in his children’s affairs, if it weren’t about time she returned a few calls and accepted some invitations, and began “to livelikefolks again.” “Ariadne isn’t the first baby in the world,” he concluded.
“She’s the first oneIever had,” Lydia reminded him, with the humorous smile that was so like his own.
“Well, you mustn’t forget, as so many young mothers do, that you’re a member of society and a wife, as well as a wet-nurse,” he said.
Marietta had never resumed an easy or genial intercourse with the Hollisters since the affair of the dinner party, but she came to call at not infrequent intervals, and Paul’s sister dropped in often, to “keep an eye on Lydia,” as she told her husband. She had an affection for her sister-in-law, in spite of an exasperated amusement over her liability to break out with new ideas at unexpected moments. Both these ladies were loud in their exhortations to Lydia not to let maternity be in her life the encumbering, unbeautifying, too lengthy episode it was to women with less force of character than their own. “You do get sooutof things,”Madeleine told her with her usual breathless italicizing, “if you stay away too long. You just never can catch up! There’s a behind-the-timesysmellabout your clothes—honest, there is—if you let them go too long.”
Marietta added her quota of experienced wisdom to the discussion. “If you just hang over a baby all the time, you get morbid, and queer, and different.”
Madeleine had laughed, and summed up the matter with a terse, “Worse than that! You get left!”
Lydia’s elder brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had married the grocer’s daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to Lydia not to make a fool of herself and miss the best of life to live up to the tommyrot standard of old dry-as-dust Endbury. The Emerys heard but seldom from this erring son, and Lydia, who had been but a child when he left home, had never before received a letter from him. He wrote from a fruit farm in Oregon, the description of which, on the grandiloquent letter-head, gave an impression of ampleness and prosperity which was not contradicted by the full-blooded satisfaction in life which breathed from every line of the breezy, good-natured letter.
The incident stirred Lydia’s imagination. It spoke of a wider horizon—of a fresher air than that about her. She tried to remember the loud-talking, much-laughing, easy-going young man as she had seen him last. They were too far apart in years to have had much companionship, but there had been between them an unspoken affection which had never died. People always said that George and Marietta were alike and Lydia and Harry. To this Mrs. Emery always protested that Lydia wasn’t in theleastlikeHenry, and she didn’t know what people were talking about; but the remark gave a secret pleasure to Lydia. She, too, was very fond of laughing, and her brother’s vein of light-hearted nonsense had been a great delight to her. It was not present in any of the rest of the family, and certainly did not show itself in her at this period of her life.
During this time Paul’s attention was concentrated on bringing about a reallotment of American Electric territory in the Middle West, an arrangement that would add several busy cities to his district and make a decided difference in his salary and commissions. He worked early and late in the Endbury office, and made many trips into all parts of the field, to gather data conclusive of the value of his scheme. Lydia had tried hard to get from him information enough to understand what it was all about, but he put her off with vague, fatigued assurances that it was too complicated for her to grasp, or for him to go over without his papers; that it would take him too long to explain, and that, anyhow, she could be sure of one thing—it was all straight, clean business, designed entirely to give the public better service and more work from everybody all ’round. Lydia did not doubt this. It was always a great source of satisfaction to her to feel secure and unshaken trust in her father’s and her husband’s business integrity, and she was sorry for Marietta, who could not, she feared, count among her spiritual possessions any such faith in Ralph. It was, on the other hand, one of her most unresigned regrets, that she was not allowed to share in these ideals for public service of her husband and father—these ideals so distantly glimpsed by her, and perhaps not very consciously felt by them. It was not that they refused to answer any one of her questions, but they were so little in the habit of articulating this phase of their activities that their tongues balked stubbornly before her ignorant and fumbling attempts to enter this inner chamber.
“Oh, it’s all right, Lydia! Just you trust me!” Paul would cry, with a hint of vexation in his voice, as if he felt that questions could mean only suspicion.
Lydia’s tentative efforts to construct a bridge between her world and his met constantly with this ill success. She had had so little training in bridge-building, she thought sadly.
One evening that spring, such a futile attempt of hers was interrupted by the son of one of their neighbors, a lad of eighteen, who had just been given a subordinate position in his father’s business. As he strolled up to their veranda steps, Lydia looked up from the dress she was enlarging for the rapidly growing baby and reflected that astonishingly rapid growth is the law of all healthy youth. The tall boy looked almost ludicrous to her in his ultra-correct man’s outfit, so vividly did she recall him, three or four years before, in short trousers and round-collared shirt-waist. His smooth, rosy face had still the downy bloom of adolescence.
“Howd’ do, Walter!” said Paul, glancing up from a pile of blue-prints over which he had been straining his eyes in the fading evening light.
“Evening,” answered the boy, nodding and sitting down on the top step with one knee up. “D’you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Hollister?”
“Not at all,” she answered gravely, tickled by the elaborate carelessness with which he handled his new pipe.
“What you working on, Hollister?” he went on with the manner of one old business man to another.
Lydia hid a smile. She found him delicious. She began to think how she could make Dr. Melton laugh with her account of Walter the Man.
“The lay-out of the new power-house—Elliott-Gridley works in Urbana,” answered Paul, in a straightforward, reasonable tone, a little absent.
Lydia stopped smiling. It was a tone he had never used to answer any business question she had ever put to him. “I’m figuring on their generators,” he went on in explanation.
“Big contract?” asked Walter.
“Two thousand kilowatt turbo generator,” answered Paul.
The other whistled. “Whew! I didn’t know they had the cash!”
“They haven’t,” said Paul briefly.
“Oh, chattel-mortgage?” surmised the other.
“Lease-contract,” Paul corrected. “That doesn’t have to be recorded.”
“What’s the matter with recording it?”
“Afraid of their credit. They don’t want Dunn’s sending all over creation that they’ve put chattel-mortgages on their equipment, do they?”
“No; sure! I see.” The boy grasped instantly, with a quick nod, the other’s meaning. “Well, that’soneway of gettin’ ’round it!” he added admiringly after an instant’s pause.
Lydia had laid down her work and was looking intently at her two companions. At this she gave a stifled exclamation which made the boy turn his head. “Say, Mrs. Hollister, aren’t you looking kind of pale this evening?” he asked. “These first hot nights do take it out of a person, don’t they? Mr. Hollister ought to take you to Put-in-Bay for a holiday. Momma’d take care of the baby for you and welcome. She’s crazy about babies.” He was again the overgrown school-boy that Lydia knew. The conversation drifted to indifferent topics. Lydia did not take her usual share in it, and when their caller had gone Paul inquired if she really were exhausted by the heat.
“Oh, no,” she said; “you know I don’t mind the heat.”
“You didn’t say much when Walter was here, and I—”
“I was thinking,” Lydia broke in. “I was thinking that I couldn’t understand a word you and Walter were saying any more than if you were talking Hebrew. I was thinking that that little boy knows more about your business than I do.”
Paul did not attempt to deny this, but he laughed at her dramatic accent. “Sure, he does! And about how to tie a four-in-hand, and what’s the best stud to wear at the back of a collar, and where to buy socks. What’s that to you?”
Lydia looked at him with quivering, silent lips.
He answered, with a little heat: “Why, look-y here, Lydia, suppose I were a doctor. You wouldn’t expect to know how many grains of morphine or what d’you call ’em I was going to use in—”
“But Dr. Meltonisa doctor, and I know lots about what he thinks of as he lives day after day—there are other things besides technical details and grains of morphine—other problems—human things—Why, for instance, there’s one question that torments him all the time—how much it’s right to humor people who aren’t sick but think they are. He talks to me a great deal about such—”
Paul laughed, rising and gathering up his blue-prints. “Well, I can’t think of any problem that torments me but the everlasting one of how to sell more generators and motors than my competitors. Come on indoors, Honey; I’ve got to have some light if I finish going over these to-night.”
His accent was evidently intended to end the discussion, and Lydia allowed it to do so, although the incident was one she could not put out of her mind. She watched Walter going back and forth to Endbury with a jealousy the absurdity of which she herself realized, and she listened with a painful intentness to the boy’s talk during his occasional idle sojourns on their veranda steps. Yet she had been used to hearing Paul talk unintelligibly to the business associates whom, from time to time, he brought out to the house to dine and to talk business afterward. Somehow, she said to herself, it’s being justWalterseemed to bring it home to her. To have that boy—and yet she liked him, too, she thought. She looked sometimes into his fresh, innocently keen face with a yearning apprehension. Paul was amused at his precocious airs, and yet was not without respect for his rapidly developing business capacity. He said once, “Walter’s a real nice boy. I shouldn’t mind having a son like that myself!”
The remark startled Lydia. If she were to have a son hewouldbe like that, she realized. And he would grow upand marry some—she sprang up and caught Ariadne to her in a sudden fierce embrace.
“You’ll break your back lifting that heavy baby ’round so,” Paul remonstrated with justice.
For all her aversion to the set forms of “society” as understood by Endbury, Lydia was fond of having people about her, “to try to get really acquainted with them” she said, and during that summer the Hollister veranda in the evening became a rendezvous for their Bellevue neighbors. Paul rather deplored the time wasted in this unprofitable variety of informal social life which, in his phrase, “counted for nothing” but he was always glad to see Walter. “At the rate he’s going and the way he’s taking hold, he’ll be a valuable business friend in a few years,” he said prophetically to Lydia, and he assumed more and more the airs of a comrade with the lad.
One evening when Walter came lounging over to the veranda, Lydia was busy indoors, but later she stepped to the door in time to hear Paul say, laughing: “Well, for all that, he’s not so good as Wellman Phelps’ stenographer.”
“How so?” asked the boy, alert for a pleasantry from his elder.
“Why, Phelps carries this fellow ’round with him everywhere he goes, has had him for years, and twice a week all he has to do is to say: ‘Say, Fred; write my wife, will you?’”
His listener broke out into a peal of boyish laughter. “Pretty good!” he applauded the joke.
“It’s a fact,” Paul went on. “Fred writes it and signs it and sends it off, and Phelps never has to trouble his head about it.”
Lydia stepped back into the darkness of the hall.
When she came out later, a misty figure in white, Paul rose, saying, “Well, Walter, I’ll leave you to Mrs. Hollister now. I’ve got some work to do before I get to bed.”
Lydia sat silent, looking at the boy’s face, clear and untarnished in the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with the shadow of the slender youngtrees. They seemed creatures scarcely more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, full outlines of a child’s.
“What are you thinking about, Walter?” Lydia asked him suddenly.
He started, and brought his limpid gaze to hers. “About how to cross-index our follow-up letter catalogue better,” he answered promptly.
“Really? Really?” She leaned toward him, urging him to frankness.
He was surprised at her tone. “Why, sure!” he told her. “Why not? What else?”
Lydia said no more.
She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband’s world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently, did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas about his wife’s resumption of her social duties as had everyone else. “It made him uneasy,” as he put it, “to be losing so many points in the game.”
“Look here, my dear,” he said one evening in spring when the question came up; “summer’s almost here, and this winter’s been as good as dropped right out. Can’t you just pick up a few threads and make a beginning? It’ll make it easier in the fall.” He added, uneasily, “We don’t want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you know. You can leave the kid with ’Stashie, can’t you, once in a while? She ought to be able to dothatmuch, I should think.” He spoke as though he had assigned to her the simplest possible of all domestic undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said finally, before attacking a pile of papers, “If I’m going to earn a lot more money, what good’ll it do us if you don’t do your share? Besides, we owe it to the kid. You want to do your best by your little girl, don’t you?”
As always, Lydia responded with a helpless alacrity tothat appeal. “Oh, yes! Oh, yes! We must do our best for her.” This phrase summed up the religion she had at last found after so much fervent, undirected search. The church, as she knew it, was chiefly the social center of various fashionable activities which differed from ordinary fashionable enterprises only in being used to bring in money, which money, handed over to the rector, disappeared into the maw of some unknown, voracious, charitable institution. And beyond the church there had been no element in the life she knew, that was not frankly materialistic. But now, as the miracle of awakening consciousness took place daily in her very sight, and as the first dawnings of a personality began to look out of her child’s eyes, all Lydia’s vague spiritual cravings, all the groping tendrils of her aspirations, clung about the conviction more and more summing up her inner life, that she must do her best for Ariadne, must make the world, into which that little new soul had come, a better place than she herself had found it. She felt as naïvely and passionately that her child must be saved the mistakes that she had made, as though she were the first mother who ever sent up over her baby’s head that pitiful, universal prayer.
The matter of the social duty of the young Hollisters was finally compromised by Lydia’s accepting a number of invitations for the latter part of the season, and giving a series of big receptions in May. They were not by a hair nor a jot nor a tittle to be distinguished from their predecessors of the year before. As they seemed hardly adequate, Lydia suggested half-heartedly that they give a dinner party, but Paul replied, “With ’Stashie to pour soup down people’s backs and ask them how their baby’s whooping cough is, as she passes the potatoes?”
The hot weather came with the rush that was always so unexpected and so invariable, and another season was over. It was a busy, silent, thoughtful summer for Lydia. Of course (much to Lydia’s distress), Ariadne had been weaned when her mother had been forced to leave her to “go out” again, and this necessitated such anxious attentionto her diet and general regimen during the hot weather that Lydia was very grateful to have little to interfere with her.
The General Office had accepted provisionally Paul’s redistributing plan, and in his anxiety to prove its value he was away from home more even than usual. The heat was terrible, but Lydia and he both knew no other climate, and Lydia loved the summer as the time of year when the fierceness of Nature forced on all her world a reluctant adjournment of their usual methods of spending their lives. She was absorbed in Ariadne, and the slow, blazing summer days were none too long for her.
The child began to develop an individuality. She was a sensitive, quickly-responsive little thing; exactly, so Mrs. Emery said, like Lydia at her age, except that she seemed to have none of Lydia’s native mirth, but, rather, a little pensive air that made her singularly appealing to all who saw her, and that pierced her mother’s heart with an anguish of protecting love.
Lydia said to her godfather one day, suddenly, “I wonder if people can be taught how to fight?”
He had one of his flashes of intuition. “The baby, you mean?”
Lydia evaded the directness of this. “Oh, in general, aren’t folks better off if they like to fight for themselves? Don’t theyhaveto?”
He considered the question in one of his frowning silences, so long that Lydia started when he spoke again. “They don’t need to fight with claws for their food, as they used to do. Things are arranged now so that the physically strong, who like such a life, are the ones who choose it. They get food for the others. Why shouldn’t the morally strong fight for the weaker ones and make it possible for everyone to have a chance at developing the best of himself without having to battle with others to do it?”
“That’s pretty vague,” said Lydia.
“Why, look here,” said the doctor. “You don’t plow the field to plant the wheat that makes your bread. That’sa man of a coarser physical fiber than yours, who is strengthened by the effort, and not exhausted as you would be. Why shouldn’t the world be so organized that somebody of coarser moral texture than yours should do battle with the forces of materialism and tragic triviality that—”
“But Ariadne’s growing up! She will need all that sosoon— and the world won’t be organized then, you know it won’t—and she’s no fighter by instinct, any more than—” She was silent. The doctor filled in her incomplete sentence mentally, and found no answer to make.
CHAPTER XXIV“THROUGH PITY AND TERROR EFFECTING A PURIFICATION OF THE HEART”
CHAPTER XXIV
“THROUGH PITY AND TERROR EFFECTING A PURIFICATION OF THE HEART”
One hot day in August, Ariadne slept later than usual and when she woke was quite unlike her usual romping, active self. Her round face was deeply flushed, and she lay listlessly in her little bed, repulsing with a feeble fretfulness every attempt to give her food. Lydia’s heart swelled so that she was choked with its palpitations. Paul was out of town. She was alone in the house except for her servant. To that ignorant warm heart she turned with an inexpressible thankfulness. “Oh, ’Stashie! Stashie!” she called in a voice that brought the other clattering breathlessly up the stairs. “The baby! Look at the baby! And she won’t touch her bottle.”
The tragic change in the Irishwoman’s face as she looked at their darling, their anguished community of feeling—there was instantly a bond for the two women which wonderfully ignored all the dividing differences between them. Lydia felt herself—as she rarely did—not alone. It brought a wild comfort into her tumult. “’Stashie, you don’t—you don’t think she’s—sick?” She brought the word out with horrified difficulty.
’Stashie was running down the back stairs. “I’m ’phonin’ to th’ little ould doctor,” she called over her shoulder.
Lydia ran to catch up Ariadne. The child turned from her mother with a moan and closed her eyes heavily. A moment later, to Lydia’s terror, she had sunk into a stupor.
The doctor found mistress and maid hanging over the baby’s bed with white faces and trembling lips, hand inhand, like sisters. He examined the child silently, swiftly, looking with a face of inscrutable blankness at the clinical thermometer with which he had taken her temperature. “Just turn her so she’ll lie comfortably,” he told ’Stashie, “and then you stay with her a moment. I want a talk with your mistress.”
In the hall, he cast at Lydia a glance of almost angry exhortation to summon her strength. “Are you fit to be a mother?” he asked harshly.
“Wait a minute,” said Lydia; she drew a long breath and took hold of the balustrade. “Yes,” she answered.
“Ariadne’s very sick. I oughtn’t to have allowed you to wean her with hot weather coming on. You’d better wire Paul.”
“Yes,” she said, not blenching. “What else can I do?”
“’Phone to the hospital for a trained nurse, start some water boiling to sterilize things, and get somebody here in a hurry to go to the nearest drug store for me. I’ll go back to her now.”
“Is she—is she—dangerously—?” asked Lydia in a low, steady voice.
“Yes; she is,” he said unsparingly.
The telegram Lydia sent her husband read: “Ariadne suddenly taken very sick. Dr. Melton says dangerously. He thinks she does not suffer much, though she seems to. When shall I expect you?”
The answer she received in a few hours read: “Have two nurses. Get Jones, Cleveland, consultation. Impossible to leave.”
It was handed her as she was running up the stairs with a pitcher of hot water. She read it, as she did everything that day, in a dreamlike rapidity and quietness, and showed it to Dr. Melton without comment. He handed it back without a word. Later, he turned for an instant from the little bed to say, irrelevantly, “Peterson, of Toledo, would be better than Jones, if I have to have anybody. But so far, it’s simple enough—damnably simple.”
He was obliged to leave for a time after this, called bya patient at the point of death. That seemed quite natural to Lydia. Death was thick in the air. He left the baby to a clear-eyed, deft-handed, impersonal trained nurse, on whom Lydia waited slavishly, sitting motionless in a corner of the room until she was sent for something, then flying noiselessly upon her errand.
Her mother and father were out of town, and Marietta limited herself to telephoning frequent inquiries. She told ’Stashie to tell her sister she knew she would be only in the way, with two nurses in the house. Lydia made ’Stashie answer all the telephone calls. She felt that if she broke her silence, if she tried to speak—and then she could not bear to be out of the sight of the little figure with the flushed cheeks, moving her head back and forth on the pillow and gazing about with bright, unseeing eyes. As night came on, she began to give, in a voice not her own, little piteous cries of suffering, or strange delirious mockeries of her pretty laughter and quaint, unintelligible, prattling talk. Once, as the long, hot night stood still, the baby called out, quite clearly: “Mamma! Mamma!” It was the first time she had ever said it.
Lydia sprang up and rushed toward the bed like an insane person, her arms outstretched, her eyes glittering. Dr. Melton did not forbid her to take up her child, but he said in a neutral tone, “It would be better for her to lie perfectly quiet.”
Lydia stopped short, shuddering. The doctor did not take his eyes from his little patient. After a moment the mother went slowly back to her seat. “Hand me the thermometer,” said the doctor to the nurse.
In the early morning came a telegram from Paul. “Wire me frequently baby’s condition. Spare no expense in treatment.”
Lydia answered: “Ariadne slightly worse. Doctor says crisis in three days.”
This time she put in no extra information as to the baby’s suffering, and her message was under ten words, like his own. She despatched him thereafter a bulletin every fouror five hours. They ran mostly to the effect that Ariadne was about the same.
The doctor came and went, the nurses relieved each other, the telephone rang for Marietta’s inquiries, Flora Burgess called once a day to get the news from ’Stashie. Lydia was slave to the nurses, alert for the slightest service she could render them, divining, with a desperate intuition, their needs before they were formulated. ’Stashie was the only person who paid the least attention to her, ’Stashie the only phenomena to break in on the solitude that surrounded her like an illimitable plain. ’Stashie made her eat. ’Stashie saw to it that once or twice she lay down. ’Stashie combed her hair, and bathed her white face—most of all, ’Stashie went about with eyes that reflected faithfully the suffering in Lydia’s own. She said very little, but as they passed, the two women sometimes exchanged brief words: “Niver you think it possible, Mis’ Hollister!”
“No,” Lydia would answer resolutely; “it’s not possible.”
But as the hours slowly filed past the doctor assured her bluntly that it would be quite possible. “There’s a fighting chance,” he said, “and nothing more.” He added relentlessly, “If I hadn’t been such a fool as to let you wean her—”
There was in his manner none of his usual tenderness to his godchild. One would have thought he scarcely saw her. He was the physician wholly. Lydia was grateful to him for this. She could not have borne his tenderness then, but his professional concentration left her horribly alone.
No, not alone! There was always ’Stashie—silent ’Stashie, with red eyes, her heart bleeding. But even ’Stashie’s loyal heart could not know all the bitterness of Lydia’s. ’Stashie’s breasts did not swell and throb, as if in mockery. ’Stashie did not hear, over and over, “If she had not been weaned—”
On the night and near the hour when the crisis was expected, Lydia was at the end of the hall, where she had installed an oil-stove. She was heating water needed forsome of the processes of the sick room. It had begun to steam up in the thick, hot night air, was singing loudly, and would boil in an instant. She sat looking at it in her tense, trembling quiet. There was no light but the blue flame of the stove.
Suddenly there rang loudly in her ears the question to which she had deafened herself with such crucifying effort—“What if Ariadne should die?” It was as though someone had called to her. She looked down into the black abyss from which she had willfully turned away her eyes, and saw that it was fathomless. A throe of revolt and hatred shook her. She bowed her head to her knees, racked by an anguish compared with which the torture of childbirth was nothing; and out of this deadly pain came forth, as in childbirth, something alive—a vision as swift, as passing as a glimpse into the gates of Paradise; a blinding certainty of immensity, of the hugeness of the whole of which she and Ariadne were a part; of the sacredness of life, which was to be lived sacredly, even if— She raised her head, living a more exalted instant than she had ever dreamed she would know.
The water broke into quick, dancing bubbles. In a period of time incalculably short, transfiguration had come to her.
The door at the other end of the hall opened and Dr. Melton’s light, uneven footstep echoed back of her. She did not turn. He laid a hand on her shoulder. It was trembling, and with a wonderful consciousness of endless courage she turned to comfort him. His lips were twitching so that for an instant he could not speak. Then, “She’ll pull through. I’m pretty sure now, she’ll—” he got out and leaned against the wall.
Lydia took him into a protecting embrace as though it were his baby who had turned back from the gates of death. She had come into a larger heritage. She was mother to all that suffered. Looking down on the head which, for an instant, lay on her bosom, she noticed how white the hair was. He was an old man, her godfather, he had been ona long strain—. He looked up at her. And then in an instant it was over. He had mastered himself and had grasped the handle of the basin.
“How long has this been boiling?” he asked.
Lydia pointed to her watch, hanging on the wall. “Three minutes by that,” she said. “May I leave to tell ’Stashie?”
The doctor nodded absently.
Neither spoke of Paul.
Lydia hurried across the dark, silent house with swift sureness. The happiness she was about to confer cast a radiance upon her. She touched the door to the servant’s room, and ran her fingers lightly over it to find the knob. Faint as the noise was, it was answered instantly by a stir inside. There was a thud of bare feet and a quick rush. Lydia felt the door swing open before her in the darkness and spoke quickly to the trembling, breathing form she divined there, “The doctor says she’s safe.”
Strong arms were about her, hot tears not her own rained down on her face. Before she knew it, she was swept to her knees, where, locked in the other’s close embrace, she felt the big heart thump loud against her own and heard go up above her head a wild “Oh, God! Oh, Mary Mother! Oh, Christ! Oh, Mary Mother! Glory be to God! Hail, Mary, Mother of God! Thanks be to God! Thanks be—”
Kneeling there in the blackness, with her servant’s arms around her, Lydia thought it the first prayer she had ever heard.
Ariadne grew well with the miraculous rapidity of children, and when Paul came back was almost herself again, if a little thinner.
It was upon Lydia that Paul’s eyes fastened, Lydia very white, her face almost translucent, her starry eyes contradicting the tremor of her lips. He drew her to him, crying out: “Why, Lydia darling, you look as though you’d been drawn through a knot-hole! This has been enough sightharder on you than on the baby! What in the world woreyouout so? I thought you had two nurses!”
He looked closely into her face, seeing more changes: “Why, you poor, poor, poor thing!” he said compassionately. “You look positively years older.”
“Oh, I am that,” she told him, seeming to speak, oddly enough, he thought, exultantly.
“You just shouldn’t allow yourself to get so wrought up over Ariadne,” he expostulated affectionately. “You’ll wear yourself out! What earthly good did it do the baby? Sickness is a matter for professionals, I tell you what! You had the two nurses and your precious old Dr. Melton that you swear by! What more could be done? That’s the reason I didn’t come back. I knew well enough that there wasn’t an earthly thing I could do to help.”
Lydia looked at him so strangely that he noticed it. “Oh, of course I could have been company for you. But that was theonlything! Getting the baby well was the business of the hour,wasn’tit now? And the doctor and nurses were looking out for that. Besides, you had ’Stashie to wait on you.”
“Yes; I had ’Stashie,” admitted Lydia.
Paul perceived uneasily some enigmatic quality in her quiet answer, and went on reasonably: “Now, Lydia, don’t go making yourself out a martyr because I didn’t come back. You know I’d have come if there was anything to be done! I’d have come from the ends of the earth to help you nurse her if we’d had to do that! But, thank the Lord, I make enough money so we could do better by the little tad than that!”
“Suppose I had gone to the theater that night,” asked Lydia slowly. “There was nothing I could do here.”
Paul was justifiably aggrieved. “Good Lord, Lydia! I wasn’t off amusing myself! I was doingbusiness!”
His special accent for the word was never more pronounced.
“Making money to pay for the trained nurses that savedher life,” he ended. His conviction of the unanswerable force of this statement put him again in good humor. “Now, little madame, you listen to me. You’re going to take a junketing honeymoon off with me, or I’ll know the reason why! I’m going to take you up to Put-in-Bay for a vacation! Pretty near all our card-club gang are there now, and we’ll have a gay old time and cheer you up! I bet you just let yourself go, and worried yourself into a fever, didn’t you?”
During this speech Lydia stood leaning against him, feeling the cloth of his sleeve rough on her bare forearm, feeling the stir and life of his body, the warmth of his breath on her face. She had an impulse to scream wildly to him, as though to make him hear and stop and turn, before he finally disappeared from her sight; and she faced him dumbly. There were no words to tell him—she tried to speak, but before his absent, kind, wandering eyes, a foreknowledge of her own inarticulateness closed her lips. He had not been there, and so he would never know. She stirred, moved away, and rearranged the flowers in a vase. “Oh, yes; I worried, of course,” she said. “The baby was awfully sick for three days.”
She felt desperately that she was failing in the most obvious duty not to try to make him understand what had happened in his absence. She bethought herself of one fact, the mere statement of which should tell him a thousand times more eloquently than words, something of what she had suffered. “The doctor told me twice that she wouldn’t have been sick if she hadn’t been weaned.” She said this with an accent of immense significance, clasping her hands together hard.
Paul was unpacking his suit-case. “Great Scott! You nursed her six months!” he said conclusively, over his shoulder. “Besides, youhadto wean her—don’t you remember?”
“Oh, yes; I remember,” said Lydia. Her hands dropped to her sides.
“Don’t they get over things quickly?” commented Paul,looking around at the baby. “To see her creeping around like a little hop-toad and squeaking that rubber bunny—why, I declare, I don’t believe that anything’s been the matter with her at all. You and the doctor lost your nerve, I guess.”
Three or four days later he was called away again. Their regular routine began. The long, slow days, slid past the house in Bellevue in endless, dreamy procession. Ariadne grew fast, developing constantly new faculties, new powers. By the end of the summer she was no longer a baby, but a person. The young mother felt the same mysterious forces of change and growth working irresistibly in herself. The long summer, thoughtful and solitary, marked the end of one period in her life.
She looked forward shrinkingly to the winter. What would happen to this new self whose growth in her was keeping pace with her child’s? What would happen next?