CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The next day Anne went home and the following Monday was back in the loft. A long period of stagnant waiting had ended in a new burst of hope and the place vibrated with the rush of people going and coming. Like the three prongs of a huge fork, Black Tom, Roger and Katya caught up on their unflagging faith and indefatigable energy the smaller plans and physical limitations of those about them.
Often Anne came from a revery to find that her hands had been idle on the keyboard for a long time. There was no safe, quiet spot anywhere in life. The surface at every point was heaving, just as the surface of the earth had heaved and cracked on the day of the Great Quake, torn open by forces within itself. Until then the earth had been the most stable thing in the universe. Sun and moon came and went; stars gleamed and died away; rain beat upon it and the wind swept over it, but, to human sense, the old, old earth was still. And then, in a moment, without warning, its patience exhausted, it had risen and like an angry giant, struggled to hurl aside the pigmies crawling upon it. Anne had never forgotten that feeling, as the earth began to rock, the feeling of being grasped and personally shaken by a malignant force beyond her power to propitiate, a force growing more and more furious, illimitable in its anger. In a moment it might release her or it might go on forever until it had annihilated every living thing.
There was no permanence, no sureness, no stability, no stillness anywhere. Often Anne closed her machine and slipped away unable to endure the noise and confusion. But out upon the streets the noise and confusion continued. People hurried everywhere. Cars clanged by obeying many desires to go in many directions. Newsboys shrieked their announcements of murders, explosions, and terrible deeds of violence. Sometimes Anne sought quietness by the sea, but, gripped in the law of ebb and flood, the sea roared or moaned or whimpered to its degree of strength.
As the weeks passed, the longing for a place of stillness, one little spot of silence, grew to a desperate need. She must have it. Somewhere it must exist, this small place of peace where she could stop for a moment. She thought of the meeting to which she had gone with Charlotte, but when she visioned the interval that preceded filled with the assertions of false optimism, the hymns of gloating joy, the sickening testimony, she could not face them. Then the silence had caught her but Anne knew that if she sought it deliberately in these surroundings it would escape. Perhaps, somewhere else, in other faiths, if she searched she would find it. Anne began to search.
And now, that all her thought was turned to find Silence, she found others seeking, too. Some sought silence in costly edifices, beautiful with stained glass and priceless paintings. Others in public halls, cozily furnished rooms, rickety buildings. In offices that did double service, where Business and Silence alternated like opposing armies occupying the same fortress successively.
There were Services of Silence conducted by men and services by women. Some built a vestibule of music and, in the beautiful vestments of ancient orthodoxy, walked slowly through to the treasure room of Stillness. Others, in the common garb of everyday, entered without prelude. Some plunged from the roar of traffic into Silence as if it were a bath; others went through little personal rituals of reading and bodily posturing, as if to steal upon it unawares.
Old, old faiths claimed silence as their own, and conceded reluctantly to the modern scramble in simple statements of the hour and place they offered it. Like a conservative firm reluctant to meet the modern need of advertising, they offered this staple so long a specialty of their own. New faiths shrieked of Silence as if it were a food to be eaten instantly before it cooled.
"A half-hour of Silence, from twelve to twelve-thirty,"—like the professional card of a reputable physician; and "Come and be Quiet With Us"; "Learn the Power of Silence"; "Be Still and Know"—the paid advertisement of a hustling quack.
Anne sought but could not find. The stained glass and wide arches of the churches; the few cozily placed chairs of ordinary rooms were as glaring in their claims as the thick carpet, the heavy oaken door and casement windows of the little gray stone church. The solemn music, the sentimental texts upon the walls, as artificial as the modulated voice of the Trained Reader and the bowed head of the Boston Lecturer.
Outwardly Anne grew quieter and quieter. Sometimes she saw Katya watching her with a mingling of triumph and curiosity that would have interested her deeply six months before. Now, nothing interested her. Not even the dependence of Rogie held her to the exclusion of this growing need to find a place of peace. Once, Rogie had seemed to fill every need, but now Anne knew within herself something over and above the power of any person or situation quite to fill. It had always been so. In her love for her mother and Belle, there had been the empty spot of longing for a wider life and deeper interests. Then Roger had come, with the wider life and deeper interests, but the tiny empty spot had remained, the very core of herself that had never melted into Roger's. Now, she and Roger could scarcely see each other across the space of separation.
Concerned with the pain of the world, Roger strode on, confusing the force of his own effort with the accomplishment of results. When, early in spring, he won the case of a Hindoo revolutionist, he was as excited as Rogie at a new toy. He came shouting down the loft, and because Katya was out, and he had to share this enthusiasm with some one, came to Anne.
"Singh's been released. They couldn't make their case. We've got them on the run." Perched on the railing about Anne's desk, he swung his feet like an excited boy. "Of course England will chase him out of India again, but he'll get in some deadly licks before she does. Gosh, but I'd like to be there to-day. Think of it, that slip of a fellow, stirring up that old race, prodding it out of its centuries of sleep."
But Anne did not see that old race rising from its sleep. At most it would be only a little turning, as Rogie turned and then settled to deeper sleep. She shrugged: "He will prod and then die."
"What of that? It doesn't nullify his accomplishment. Suppose millions more still have to do it. Can't you get the romance—if nothing else?"
Anne smiled faintly. "That's just what I do get—millions of sleepers—in an ageless sleep." Across the room, Black Tom was the center of an excited group, elated at the success of Singh. A messenger boy dashed in with a telegram. Two telephones rang wildly. "It's like a little child with a horn," she said quietly, "blowing because he likes to hear the noise himself."
Roger's hands clenched and he dropped quickly from the railing.
"You've got—just about as much imagination—as a flea."
Anne shrugged. "Since you don't know the extent of a flea's imagination, your figure hasn't much force, has it?"
Roger turned away and Anne went on with her work.
At two o'clock she left the office and went to the flat. But even here she was not needed as she once had been. On her return, Belle had installed a practical nurse three afternoons a week to relieve Hilda, and the woman had filled Anne's place completely. Anne went on the days she did not come, but she felt her in Hilda's accounts of how "she rests papa and manages him to perfection," and in James' constant references to things she said or did for him. Now that there was no need to fill hours with chatter, Anne missed the need. The empty relationship with her father was emptier than before.
In the vacuum of her isolation, Anne began to watch her thoughts, until she came to see them as minute machines, installed within her brain by some outside power, clicking away independent of her will. A power was working out some experiment with her, using her brain as if it were a dark room for the development of a film. Without emotion Anne watched the negative develop. She grew absorbed in the process. She often asked Roger to repeat a statement, and then sat motionless, watching its reaction, as if it were a stone he had dropped into the well of her intelligence. With judicial exactness she weighed the most trite remark, until conversation with Anne became impossible.
Roger escaped it when he could. Night after night, he stayed on at the office and Anne ate her dinner alone. Or he returned to work immediately after dinner, always courteous and insincere in his excuse. Anne saw the insincerity but never resented it. She was glad to have Roger go. When he stayed there was nothing real to talk about and the effort of making conversation with Roger was more exhausting than the lonely evening.
It was on a Sunday afternoon, after several such evenings in succession, that Anne sat pretending to read in her favorite place, a cushioned settle under the window that gave on the bay and hills beyond. It was a still day of little wind, but a dry, high fog hid the sun. It was three o'clock, the dreariest, the least personal of any hour of the day. The feeling of youth that morning has was gone. The positiveness of evening and lighted lamps had not yet come.
Roger had gone to the office in the morning, read for a little after lunch and was now asleep in the darkened room beyond, Rogie in the crib beside him. But he would not sleep much longer. Rogie would probably wake when he did and Roger would play a while with him. Then, unless Roger went to a meeting, they would sit, each absorbed or feigning absorption in his reading: Roger in some legal or economic work of vast pretension, Anne in her novel, a thing so far from life in the maudlin sentimentality, spread like soft icing over the relation between the man and the woman, that it would better have been frankly a fairytale. About them the silence of the dead hour would close and they would sit in peace as false as the stillness of the churches and small meeting rooms.
Anne thrust her book aside. If she went out to walk, the Sunday streets would echo the tread of others trying to kill the day in the same way. At the flat James would be asleep in his chair, Hilda napping in the dining-room. Anne leaned forward, her elbows on the sill, her chin in her palms. The Bay, flat and gray as if it, too, were exhausted from the week's work, stretched to the fog-crowned hills. Under the pall, the Sleeping Beauty on Tamalpais had passed to eternal rest. The commanded peace of the Seventh Day shut like a cover of lead upon the world.
Only Charlotte Welles could move beneath such grayness, unconscious of its deadening weight. She would be walking now, with her short, quick steps, straight to the peace she entered at her will. Anne moved uneasily, like a sick person resisting a desired opiate. Perhaps, if she went once again, and tried not to hear the hymns or the testimonies or the selected readings, if she slipped into the back seat, just before the meeting closed, she might yet grasp the secret and have it for her own.
In the room beyond, Rogie cried and Roger woke. She heard him lift the baby from its crib and in a moment they were laughing together. Then the blind went up with a noisy spring, and Roger came out, rested and carrying the delighted Rogie in his arms.
"There, you little fake." He deposited the baby on the rug before the fire, threw a piece of wood which caught instantly in gay little tongues of flame, and laughed at Rogie's clumsy efforts to reach them through the screen. But Anne did not see them. She was looking at Roger's back, at the rumpled hair and slightly creased shirt, with faint distaste.
Roger removed his son to safer distance, stretched and crossed to the window on the other side of the room.
"Beastly day. I wonder how that Kenneally meeting will be."
Roger yawned and, leaning against the window sash, looked into the gray stillness for an inspiration. Rogie, finding the pretty flames inaccessible and himself deserted, puckered his face for a cry, which Anne diverted just in time by cuddling him to her and kissing his bare toes.
Roger turned listlessly from the window, took a cigarette from the brass box on the mantel shelf, and began to walk up and down.
"Are you going? It's at four, isn't it?" she asked.
"I don't know—I haven't decided yet. Kenneally isn't much of a speaker."
He might not go. The afternoon would shut heavy upon them. She could not face it. She carried Rogie into the bedroom and closed the door. She dressed first and then dressed Rogie. If Roger did decide to go, she did not wish to prevent him by leaving the baby on his hands. A few moments later, carrying Rogie, delighted at the prospect of going out, but objecting strongly to his bonnet, which he tried to remove by vicious tugs, Anne came into the living-room. Roger was in his chair now, an open book on his lap. He looked up surprised at Anne, dressed to go out.
"I'll take him, so you needn't stay in if you want to go to the meeting."
"Going up to the house?" He was sure she was because Anne never went anywhere else on a Sunday, but he always mentioned her coming and going with kindly formality.
"No. I'm going to church."
"To church!"
Anne drew on her gloves and nodded.
"What church?"
"Christian Science."
"What!" Roger barked the word in exasperated astonishment.
"The Christian Science Church," Anne said with maddening composure, as if she were disciplining a child for its harsh voice.
Roger closed his book and rose. "Are you a Scientist now?"
"No."
"Then what do you want to go and listen to that drivel, for?"
Anne did not answer and moved to the door. Roger stepped quickly in front of her.
"How many times have you been?"
Anne's face flamed with the ugly, brick-red flush. Her body tightened and she looked scornfully at Roger.
"I shall be late as it is," she said stiffly. "Please let me pass."
"I won't." Roger knew that his anger was carrying him to rudeness, but Anne's manner rasped him beyond control. Behind Anne, he saw the subtle, low-voiced influence of Charlotte Welles. A Christian Science wife, believing in the muddled effusions of a sick old woman; for all he knew practicing her ridiculous faith upon him. Lost in a stupid philosophy that denied disease and poverty, Anne dared to look in scorn at Black Tom, at Katya, at Singh, at himself. With a quick movement, Anne passed him and laid her hand on the door-knob.
"You sha'n't go," he cried, white with anger.
"I shall go where I please," Anne answered quietly, "I don't interfere with you. You can go to your meeting, listen to your own particular brand of 'drivel,' pump up the enthusiasm of a few dozen people who don't know what else to do with themselves on a Sunday afternoon. At least, the few million Scientists, more or less, in the world, haven't had their belief manufactured and forced down their throats."
Roger's anger died. He reached for Rogie, and before Anne knew what had happened, holding the baby firmly, Roger stood aside.
"You're right. You don't interfere with me. But Rogie doesn't go."
It was Anne now who flamed to anger. Standing upon her tiptoes she snatched for the baby, who, thinking it was a new kind of game, wound his hands in his father's thick hair and kicked with joy.
"Give him to me," she commanded in a cracked whisper.
Roger stepped back, for between himself and Anne clutching for their child, the old Anne stood upon her tiptoes defying John Lowell.
"No, Rogie does not go." He turned and went silently back to the fire and sat down, Rogie clinging to his neck. For a moment Anne stood motionless in an anger that seemed to have frozen her to the bone. Then, with a sob that was a cry of hate, she opened the door and went quickly.
Until it was dark, Anne walked up one street and down another. She passed mean houses where families sat at dinner behind partly-drawn blinds, and stately homes, the intimacy of family life decorously concealed behind thick curtains. She did not know when the high fog parted and the stars came out, but when the sky was all a-glitter and a soft little wind ruffled the bay, she found herself sitting on a pile of lumber at the farthest jetty of Fisherman's Wharf. The lighted ferries lumbered cheerfully, the fishing boats grated softly on the piles. A few yards behind, in the new warehouse of Giuseppe Morelli, a group of fishermen laughed and chattered while they mended their nets against the turn of the tide.
Beyond the wharf, on the rocky crest of a hill, she could just glimpse the cottage light. She looked at it for a long time without emotion. She was cold and calm. Nothing could ever again stir her to anger or feeling of any kind.
The wind freshened. The men began climbing down into their boats. With much calling back and forth, the boats pushed off.
Anne left the wharf and went slowly up the steep, silent streets. At the foot of her own stairs she stopped and looked at her watch. It was five minutes after eleven.
The light in the cottage was out, the fire lay a handful of smoldering embers. The room was rather cold but she was not conscious of its chill although she stood for some time listening to the even breathing of Roger asleep in the next room. Then she crept into the bedroom, undressed and got noiselessly into bed. At its warmth, she shivered as if touched by something unclean. But in a few minutes she was asleep, worn by her long walk and the storm of anger and despair.
In the dawn, Roger woke, and, turning slightly, looked at Anne. She was sleeping as always, on her side, her cheek pillowed on one arm; small, exquisitely fair and utterly unmoving. Roger looked at her, almost with surprise that she should be there. And then aversion to Anne's body gripped him. He did not want to touch her or be near her. Never again of his own impulse would he wish to hold her in his arms or kiss her.