CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
"I am the resurrection and the life."
Alone in the church, Jean sat upright in the first pew. The stained windows, the fine linen of the young priest's cassock, his deep-toned chant, the odor of incense, the satin-grained wood of the pews, the exquisite lace of the altar cloth, impressed themselves in a setting warm and intimate for the small gray coffin resting at the altar rail.
Jean sat dry-eyed, as if she were witnessing a rite in which the priest and Martha had a part. They belonged. She had handed Martha over to this young man, and now he and Martha and God were carrying on some ceremony. She was an outsider.
The stinging sweetness of the incense rose in a blue cloud as the priest incensed the coffin. His voice ceased. He looked inquiringly toward Jean. Alone in the apartment, just before the undertaker had come, Jean had kissed her mother for the last time. But in the depth of the waiting silence, a need to look once more on that restful little face gripped her, and she rose and went slowly to the casket, Against the white satin of the pillow, so lightly that even in death she seemed resenting this comfort, Martha was resting. It seemed to Jean that the eyes under the thin, veined lids were quietly happy and that the mouth, so oddly young now, smiled. In the beloved atmosphere of prayer and adoration, Martha had gained consciousness. Loosed from the flesh, all the emotional capacity, the power of love and devotion and joy suppressed had been freed at last by the cessation of earthly cares and prejudices to express itself and claim its own. In the interval of rest below the altar, Martha had come to life, a life in which the body had no part.
Jean touched the thin hair on the temples. "You're happy, dear, aren't you?" And, afterwards, Jean often had the feeling that the little head had moved in acknowledgment.
She went back to the pew. The cover was screwed down. The young priest preceded the coffin to the door. In stole and surplice he stood beside the open grave. "Dust to dust." The earth and dry snow powdered upon the lid. It was all as Martha would have wished—calm, beautiful, alone with Jean and God.
Jean came back to the apartment. The trees on the Palisades were hidden under a burden of white. Thick white snow muffled passing footsteps. She was alone, absolutely alone in the still, snow-muffled universe.
The next day Jean went back to the office. Jerome Stuart made no conventional reference and Jean was grateful. He suggested their getting to work on a new Child Labor law and they talked over details for an hour. When he had gone back to his own office, Jean wrote a brief note telling Mary. But even Mary was not real, She, too, was off beyond the barrier that shut Jean from the rest of the world.
At the end of the week Katy returned. The routine of life settled. Trained by Martha, Katy duplicated to her best the comfort that Martha had infused. Each night as Jean closed the door behind her, she felt it claim her, this grotesque, terrible duplicate of Martha's devotion. For thirty dollars a month, Katy created a home, followed the small customs that had sprung from Martha's love.
As the days slid by, one exactly like another, Jean felt as if she were being walled forever in Katy's ordered emptiness. She left earlier in the morning and returned later at night, but it was there waiting, until the day came to center in the moment when she would have to turn the knob and enter the warm, lighted vault; sit alone at the well-prepared meal and afterwards try to read in the silence. All day she was conscious of it waiting.
Strange fears rose in Jean and she was helpless before them. Sometimes she left the office in the middle of the afternoon and went home to face and conquer the terrible emptiness, and sometimes she walked in the night until she could scarcely stand, and it was there waiting for her. Gradually in the depth of the emptiness, something formed, a shadow-shape that Jean could neither annihilate nor grasp. It was as if, in her going, Martha had left a door open behind her, a narrow crack through which Jean could neither see clearly, nor quite close. And the thought of death began to sift down through life, absorbing its reality.
Jean saw herself, her work, her smallest act, as a pebble in the conglomerate mass of time. Like a gigantic rock crusher, Time reduced all effort to powder. In the vacant hours of the night, under the gleam of the cold, gold stars, the endings of things came to obsess Jean. Everything ended, everything. No matter how deeply indented the surface, the ending washed it clean again. Separation washed out human relationships, old age washed away physical effort and interest, death washed away all. Everything ended, books, buildings, days, nights, work, rest, love, life. Everything lasted for a while and then stopped.
Hour after hour Jean sat, staring out to the river, stifled by the fact of death, that great ending containing within itself all the ends of one's smallest acts.
Where was Martha now? Was there nothing anywhere of that patient little figure that had trotted so busily through its daily rounds? Were all the habits and preferences one built up through the years, but things of flesh? Was there nothing left anywhere, in any form, of that gigantic faith? Did man impose upon himself this sentence of life? Summon himself from nowhere, to struggle for a moment, and go back to nothingness again? In his terror of the immense quietness of Death, had he invented Heaven, an escape from the inconceivable peace he had never known in life? Had he invented God because he dared not be alone beyond the grave? And if Man had not imposed his own sentence, who had? Martha's God, the Tyrant who hurled us into life, whipped us through the years, snatched us away at the end, never for one single moment, revealing His purpose. Or was it all some huge machine set going in the unthinkable beginning of Time, grinding purposelessly on to an unthinkable end?
The door would neither open wide nor close, and Jean's hair whitened above the temples.
In April, when the trees began to bud, she gave Katy an extra month's wages and dismissed her. Jean had reached another ending; the ending of the senseless battle that had once seemed so worth while. She was going back to the gray fog, to the wide still spaces, back to the warm sands and cool salt winds and the sea, that neither sought nor promised peace but had it.
When the details of her going were arranged with the committee, Jean went to tell Jerome Stuart. Now that she was leaving, this quiet man with the stooping student shoulders and the thick gray hair, always ruffled to disorder, stood out for a moment, against the background of their work together, and Jean felt, as he sat looking at her, that he was surprised and disappointed. But it did not matter. Nothing mattered.
"You are really leaving for good?"
"Yes. I never expect to come back to New York. I've turned in my resignation and it's been accepted, with a provision of their own invention that, if I change my mind within a year, I am to return." Jean smiled. "And I let it go at that."
"Then all the schemes we've talked over are not to be? No one else can take your place and carry them through."
For a moment Jean felt them dragging at her, holding her back. To what end? What would they give in return? Greater comfort, for a time, to a few people whom she would never see. A few patches put in the social fabric.
"Oh, yes, they can. Why, Charlotte Stetson's so anxious to try her hand she could scarcely be decently regretful!"
Jean tried to speak lightly but Jerome Stuart's expression stopped her.
"Please don't be insincere, Mrs. Herrick."
Jean flushed. She was destroying this man's conception of her and she had valued it.
"You are acting on a lessened impulse and it is wrong," he added quietly. "It is always wrong and so—it is always a mistake."
"Not always," Jean defended, and rose abruptly. If she stayed she might ask him of life and death and the aimless muddle of the whole. "I've thought it over carefully. I am not acting on impulse. It is a decision."
He said nothing as he followed to the door and rang the elevator bell. But as Jean stepped into the cage, he held out his hand and said with the look that had often made Jean feel that, in spite of his forty-eight years, his grown daughter, and all the years of public service behind him, he had kept unspoiled the sweet cleanness of a little child.
"Think it over again—and come back."
She shook her head. She did not want to lie again to Jerome Stuart.
The next day Jean stood in the empty apartment that had been her home for five years. With the removal of the furniture it seemed to have changed its spirit. The bare walls stared back indifferent to the pain and happiness they had encompassed. Before another twenty-four hours were gone, some one else might be looking down into the tree-lined street where, later, the fat white babies would be wheeled, and where now the trees were beginning to leaf, not as they would in the full eagerness of a few weeks hence, but in the meager, timid fashion of a chilly spring, a little leaf here and there.