CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The days went by neither slowly nor quickly, but with a terrible fixity of sameness. The routine of illness, once established, life adjusted itself to nourishment at certain hours, periods of sleep, efforts to entertain James. Even waiting to hear from Belle was reduced to a law, once in the morning post, once in the afternoon. As soon as they received her address they would cable. Till then they had to wait.
With the assumption of all responsibility by Anne, Hilda Mitchell ceased to worry about the future. Her old gayety returned. Sometimes Anne felt that her mother was really enjoying herself more than she had for many years. In this release from the housekeeping cares she had borne so long, she was like a child. She insisted on doing all the errands, and although it sometimes annoyed Anne, on the whole it filled her with tender amusement to find how far Hilda insisted on going for some small, needed thing. Prescriptions she always had filled at night in a big down-town drug store, although there was a small, reliable but very dull little drug store on the corner. She followed food bargains about the city, adding carfare until the article cost more than it would have in her own block.
At the end of the first week Anne brought Rogie to the flat. When James was awake he liked to have the baby crawling and laughing about him. Sometimes Anne wanted to cry as she watched the numbed form propped in the big bed and the laughing, crawling baby dragging his little limbs in their awkward newness over the limbs that would never walk again.
At the end of the second week she felt that she had lived this way for years, that she would never live otherwise. The loft and the world with its bickering were far away, behind the present routine. On Tuesdays and Sunday evenings two old men took turns in coming to see James. A quick, wiry little man came on Tuesday. A slow, fat man on Sunday. They came early in the evening, just after their own suppers, and James watched all day for their coming. They never had much news and there were long pauses between their remarks. The flat was never so still, so cut off from the world functioning beyond this silence, as in these long intervals between the items of office gossip. Anne could never shut the kitchen door and forget the old men, but sat tense, waiting for the next buzz from the sick room.
They had imposed upon themselves this task of calling, but she felt their relief when, always a few moments before half-past eight, each old man rose to go, said something reassuring about soon seeing James Mitchell back at work, and with awkward kindliness got himself out of the room. Then Anne would go in, straighten her father's pillows, make him comfortable for the night, and listen with assumed interest while he retailed in his thick, halting speech, their meager news. The paucity of it hurt beyond her strength to reply. To have lived fifty-five years and have no interests larger than the clickings of a machine, functioning far above him; to be bound in the tiny screws and cogs of an intricate mechanism, towering into official dimness. The old men depressed Anne terribly, almost more than James himself. His illness separated him, in his first distinction, from the rest of his world. But they were still part of it. Like chained animals they seized and gnawed at each tiny happening until they had gnawed it to powder. In these clouds of dust they were walking blindly toward the grave.
On the nights when the old men did not come James dropped asleep almost immediately after his light supper. Anne put little Roger to bed. Hilda found some reason to leave the house, even if it were only "to run down to Mrs. Welles' for a minute," and Anne was alone. Sometimes she sat in her old room, beside Rogie's basket, and stared out into the darkening street. Strange noises emerged into the stillness, tickings and creakings in the walls, rustlings and faint tappings.
Anne's thoughts, too vivid to be held within her brain, slipped into the darkness and she saw them, pictures in the thick silence; the terrible black vacuum of life in which moved the old gray men, her father, Hilda, herself, Roger, Tom, the dancing marionettes about him; Hilary Wainwright, his keen-eyed partners in great enterprises; Merle snatching at beauty, the grimed workers; all groups of whirling dervishes, spinning round in useless effort, until they dropped into decay and death.
It was in such a mood, one night about three weeks after she had come to care for James, that Anne went on the back porch, where the sure shining of the stars, the black outline of the unchanging hills, sometimes gave her rest. But to=night no peace came. The stars were hard and cold, the hills indifferent. Locked in a vault of decay and death, she heard the voice of Life, like the undertone of the sea wailing forever: This is all there is. I am decay and death, decay and death.
So deep was she within the darkness of this realization that when a man's quick step sounded on the stairs and she saw Roger smiling up, Anne stared back as if he were a stranger from another world. Roger's smile vanished and he bounded up the last steps and took her in his arms. At his touch the vividness of thought vanished, and she seemed to slip down from the high places of a dream into waking. It was good to feel his hold again and Anne smiled at him, but he looked at her anxiously.
"Princess, you're awfully pale, and your eyes are as big as saucers."
"Are they? That's good news; they always were too small."
"I'm not joking, Anne. You look all in."
"I feel all right, a little tired, but I'm perfectly well. Papa had a pretty hard day—sometimes I think he knows he'll never get about again and it frightens him. He—doesn't want to be left alone with mamma. She fusses him and he gets all nervous and worn out."
"Can't they get some one?"
"No. They couldn't pay any one. The pension isn't straightened yet. They're taking up a collection, but a couple of hundred will be a miracle, and how long does that last in illness? Besides, mamma is such a bad manager."
"You're not responsible for that. And how about me?"
"You're a wonderful manager."
"I'm not."
"Then you ought to learn," Anne tried to tease. "It's really my duty to stay away until you do. A great, big, social revolutionist able to reorganize the world, needing one small wife to look out for him!"
"It's beastly eating at restaurants, and that hill's the stillest place in the world at night. It's like lighting up a tomb to go home and not hear you or Rogie."
Anne thought of the old man in the other room, eating his soft, childish foods, alone with the empty past and death.
"I can't leave them, Roger, not yet. The doctor says that in a few weeks he may be able to get into a wheel-chair, and then he can come out here. That will be some change."
But Roger did not hear what Anne was saying; her eyes with their dark circles beneath were too big, her cheeks too pale.
"But you'll be ill yourself, and what good will that do them? Anne, Tom isn't going to be able to make that Chicago convention; he wants me to go instead. Won't you come?"
"To Chicago! Now! I couldn't, Roger. I couldn't go that far away now."
"Why not?"
If the Mitchells had been on the other side of the world they would have had to manage without her. "It seems to me you've done as much as they can expect."
Anne stiffened. "They don't expect anything. I'm not doing it because they expect it. There's nothing else to do. Don't talk like that, Roger; I don't like it."
"And I don't like it either, this arrangement, not one bit."
Anne flushed. She felt that Roger was opposing her opposition more than entreating her to go.
"Let's not talk about it. No matter what they expect or don't expect, I should be miserable. Besides, it is impossible."
"What would they do if you weren't here?"
"I am here."
"But, sweetheart, you say he doesn't need special attention. It wouldn't even take the expense of a trained nurse—if your mother has to have some one. A woman like Mrs. Horton could do it."
"Who would pay?"
"We will—until you hear from Belle, anyhow."
"How?"
Roger looked away into the twinkling lights.
"You see," Anne said after a moment, with the prim patience that made Roger feel like a greedy child clinging to his toys. "There's no sense in talking round and round like that. I couldn't go—even if I felt free in other ways."
Deftly Anne had poured the responsibility over him. Roger felt himself choking in the patience of Anne.
"You don't want to go. Why can't you be honest and say so?"
"I can't leave them with no one to see after papa." Anne's reiteration was an iceberg before the sputtering match of his objections.
"She saw to him for years."
Into that "she" went all Roger's scorn of Hilda Mitchell.
"Then mamma has had her share and I wish to help now."
"Why didn't you say so in the first place? There's no need to beat about the bush. When it comes to a show-down between your people and me, I go."
Anne's eyes narrowed. Her face flamed its ugly, brick-red, "I might just as well have, mightn't I?"
"Certainly." Roger's voice accepted Anne's decision.
There was nothing else to say. Having fought over James Mitchell's body, it seemed grotesque to ask after him. Roger turned again to the winking lights. Anne moved away to the kitchen and lit the gas.
If he followed—there was nothing to talk about. But he could not call "good night" and go off down the back stairs—to Chicago. Roger hesitated. Voices sounded below. Two women were coming up the stairs. He went slowly into the kitchen. United in the need of pretense, he and Anne stood together.
"I can only stay a moment," Charlotte Welles' voice trailed like a soft cloud after the crackling sunshine of Hilda's laugh.
Then Roger was being introduced to a small, pale woman with dark eyes that seemed to see his annoyance at being bothered with this introduction.
As soon as they were settled, he moved toward the door.
"Going already?" Hilda asked brightly.
"Yes. I have a lot to do to-night."
Anne's heart thumped. Perhaps he was going to leave for Chicago to-night. He had not said when.
"Roger's going to Chicago," she explained.
"To Chicago! Well, that is a trip! Won't it be roasting? Going on business?"
What did she suppose he was going for? "Yes," he answered as pleasantly as he could, and knew that Mrs. Welles thought him extremely rude.
"It's not so hot now," she interposed in her sweet, low voice, so evidently smoothing a situation she had no right to assume existed, that Roger resented her almost more than he did Hilda.
"No. It cools off in September." He moved nearer the door. Anne and Hilda followed.
"How long will you be away?"
"I don't know exactly. Perhaps only two weeks, perhaps longer."
"Good gracious!" Hilda trilled, "it doesn't seem worth while going for such a little while, does it? Two weeks! Hardly time to get there and back."
"I'm not going for the pleasure of the trip," Roger said stiffly, "and the convention won't last more than four days. But I won't have time to come up again. I'll say good-by now." It was almost a challenge, but it was the best that he could do. Followed by Hilda's stupid injunction to have a good time, he preceded Anne into the hall and she shut the door. Instantly the heavy breathing of James Mitchell filled the space between them. In silence they reached the stair-head and he began the long descent.
Would Roger really go like that, without a kind word or apology? Three steps below, Roger stopped, and looked back.
He was going away for weeks and Anne could not even come to the door with him.
"I won't write often. You'll see all the news in the papers and I'll be pretty busy."
"Oh, that's all right. And don't worry if you don't hear from me. There won't be any news."
They looked at each other.
Anne went slowly down the three stairs and kissed him, a kiss of condescending allowance for his bad temper and rudeness. Roger's lips brushed her cheek. "Good-bye. Take care of yourself."
He was gone.
"Annie! Annie!" It was repeated in a querulous quaver from the sick room and Anne went to her father.
"That was Roger, wasn't it? Are you going back home, Annie?" He looked up from the burrow of the bed-clothes, so disturbed that Anne laid her hand upon his shoulder to reassure him.
"No. I'm not going. Roger has to go to Chicago and he ran up to say good-by."
"That's nice. That's nice, Annie." He patted her hand, his eyes were already filming with sleep. In a moment he was breathing evenly again.
He had wakened from his sleep to clutch at her, to hold her to his need, no matter what her own. True to his own selfishness until the end; his claims always hidden under a false consideration, just as his pleased "that's nice, that's nice," covered, in its implication of affection for her, the hook with which he would draw her to him, hold her between the fussy efforts of Hilda and his own exhausted nerves.
Anne went quietly from the room, closing the door except for the narrow crack left open always for his call. In her own room, Rogie was asleep. If she lit the light he might wake. She could not lie in the dark thinking. She would have liked to go and walk far in the night, but Hilda would ask questions. There was no spot in the universe hers, hers alone, free from some binding chain, some duty to some one.
In the kitchen, Charlotte Welles was talking while Hilda listened, her blue eyes wide in a fascinated interest. As Anne came just inside the door, Charlotte's eyes included her in what she had been saying and Anne's bitterness changed slowly to anger.
"She has lost everything," Charlotte Welles was saying, "husband, child, wealth. But she has found peace. Now she knows. She says she was never really happy before."
"It's wonderful. It does seem as if there must be something in it." Hilda's head wabbled as if over-weighted by the marvel imposed upon her intelligence.
"Why didn't she give away her money," Anne demanded fiercely, "and leave her husband and kill her children—whoever she may be—years ago, if that's all she needed for her happiness?"
Charlotte Welles looked up with such gentle understanding of her bitterness and hurt that Anne wanted to strike her. What right had this woman to penetrate one's mood, to be always down there under the surface of one's thoughts? It was as if she had entered a room locked against her.
"Why, Annie!"
Anne ignored Hilda and went on in a rapid, cracking voice.
"How on earth you can believe such rubbish, I don't know. And to call it science! If science is anything, it's the seeking of effect from cause. Something happens, and you burrow far enough down under the surface and find the cause. A woman loses everything in the world she cared about and—she sings for joy! She never loved her husband or children nor enjoyed her wealth."
"She did—all three. She was a loyal wife, a devoted mother, and I never knew any one do as much good with their money, or use it to finer purpose."
"Then she's lying," Anne went on, "she's hysterical and unbalanced by grief. It's not peace she's found, it's a delusion."
"It is no delusion. It is peace, the peace that comes from understanding."
"'The peace that passes understanding.'"
"That passes understanding—until you find it."
"And no sane person ever will find it in—'Science and Health'."
"Annie! Why, what's got into you?" Hilda flushed with shame of Anne's rudeness, but Mrs. Welles did not seem to notice it.
"I don't suppose you know much about Science, do you? Have you ever read 'Science and Health'?"
"No. But would I have to read a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese, to know it wasn't?"
"Certainly not. Long ago the moon was proved not to be made of green cheese."
"And long ago, farther back than that, it was proved that human beings—except a few insane ascetics—are not happy when everything worth while in life is snatched from them and they have nothing left to make the fight worth while."
"No power in heaven or earth can snatch everything from one. It is impossible to be left with nothing. There is no such thing as a spiritual vacuum, because Love is everywhere."
"Like the poor!"
"No, because there are no poor who cannot escape from their poverty if they will. They remain poor because they do not understand Love. They do not grasp it as a force, a greater force than any so-called natural force that material science has ever discovered. Love is the magnet that draws worlds together. No star, no earth, no planet can oppose it. The poor, the ill, the unhappy remain so because they do not, will not Love. They shut themselves off, insulate themselves against the power of Love by their small, physical desires. 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you.' Christ understood."
"Without Mary Baker Eddy?"
"Anne! If I were Mrs. Welles I wouldn't explain another thing to you."
"She needn't," Anne said wearily, "I'm going to bed."
And she went. They could talk her over if they liked, wonder, excuse her, give her absent treatment. Nothing mattered. They were not real, her mother and father and Roger were not real. Black Tom with his detached love of humanity and his indifference to Merle; Charlotte Welles with her disgusting monopoly of Universal Love, her intrusive intimacy with God; all snatching at some personal comfort and dressing up their little fetish, just as she dressed Rogie's teddy bear and made a sailor of him.
Nothing mattered but sleep.