CHAPTER SIXTEEN
One day in September when Jean had been working almost four months, Dr. Mary came to her with an open letter in her hand.
"Jean, I'm going to give you this case, because I feel in my backbone that it's out of the usual run, and that's saying a good deal, with some of those we've had lately, isn't it?"
"It certainly is. Perhaps I won't be able to handle it."
"I'll take a chance. It's because I believe you can, better than any one else, that I am turning it over. No one has done a thing on it yet. It's brand new."
Jean took the letter. It was written on ruled paper in a fairly good hand.
"Dr. Mary Maclean—Please come to see me as soon as possible.Amelia Gorman."
"Dr. Mary Maclean—Please come to see me as soon as possible.
Amelia Gorman."
"Well, at least Amelia seems used to giving orders."
"No information furnished. No request made. I'd like to go myself if I had the time. I thought first of turning it over to the C.O.S. of that district but, somehow, the woman interests me. Do you want it?"
Jean was already putting on her hat. Mary smiled.
"I know, Mary, but I haven't gotten over that first rushed feeling yet, in spite of all your warning. I'm always sure that everything will go to pot if I don't get to a case the very minute I hear of it."
"I hope you never will, not really. When that goes I can't imagine a worse work than this to be in. You'd better take some money with you, she's likely to need most anything."
An hour later Jean rang the bell of a shabby, two-story house out on the Mission Road. The house stood a little back in a dusty, parched patch of ground, where a few wilting geraniums struggled against the dust-laden wind that blew always over the bare hills. A half-grown girl opened the door. She seemed parched by the ceaseless wind and her dry hair looked as if it had never been quite free of the dust.
"Does Mrs. Gorman live here?"
"Back room. She ain't Mrs." The girl stood staring while Jean knocked on a door at the end of the dark hall.
"Come in."
It was a small room and held only a single bed, a child's crib, a broken dresser and a chair. An emaciated woman sat up in bed and looked at Jean with the calmest look of appraisal that had ever summed her up.
"You're from the Hill House. It wouldn't be anybody else. Are you Dr. Mary MacLean?"
"No, I'm not Dr. McLean. She had to go out of town. My name is Herrick."
"Miss or Mrs.?"
"Mrs."
"I'm glad of that." The woman's voice was perfectly detached, as if something bigger than a personal desire in the matter directed her.
Jean drew the chair to the side of the bed and sat down.
"Have you any children?" the woman asked abruptly.
"No. I have no children."
"Do you want them?"
For some reason it was impossible to resent this woman's questioning. She did it so calmly, so deliberately, as if each question were the end of a long line of thought, important to her. Jean felt herself grow warm and uncomfortable.
"I don't—think very much about it."
There was another long pause, in which Jean listened to the wind and to some one moving in the room above. Suddenly a child's voice broke out in angry protest: "I won't!—I won't!" There was a mild scuffle, a door slammed, then silence. The woman continued to listen for a moment. She turned back again to Jean.
"I did," she said, in her odd way of continuing her own line of thought. "I wanted a child. That's him we just heard. Mamie don't mean to be mean but she ain't any brighter than she has to be and she don't understand. That's why I wrote to Dr. MacLean. I don't know whether you'll understand, seein' you never wanted one, but I'll have to tell you, since you was the one she sent and mebbe there won't be time to send another. I ain't always as strong as I am to-day, and there won't be many more days, weak or strong."
"You mustn't talk like that. You can't——"
The woman turned her dark eyes to Jean and a faint smile touched them.
"There ain't no call to talk that way to me. I don't want no cheerin' up. The time's past for that. I fought it all out here alone and now I got my plan ready. I didn't send for no one to tell me I ain't goin' to die, because I know I am. If it wasn't for Jimmie I'd be glad, laughin' glad to go. It's him I'm goin' to tell you about."
For a while she seemed to forget Jean altogether and then she began again, in a flat, even voice, choosing only the thread of her story, as if she were used to husbanding her small strength.
"Did you ever live in a room like this? Get up in the mornin' in it and go to bed at night in it, and sit all the evenin' in it, so that your thoughts soak into it and you can feel them rush out at you the minute you open the door? You can never get away. And there don't seem to be nothing in the whole wide world but yourself. It's a terrible thing.
"I used to lay in bed at night andfeelmyself shut up in my cell, and then I got to thinkin' about all the other people in the world shut up in their cells and none of us could get out or talk through to one another, millions of us locked up tight.
"Hundreds of times I said to myself, 'If that's all there is to it, why go on?' But I could never come round to the picture of killing myself. Once I tried but I didn't get very far. And then I begun wonderin' why it was that I didn't do the job straight through; wonderin' and wonderin', until one night, like an earthquake, it hit me sudden. It was all the people behind me, clear back to Adam and Eve, holdin' me here, all the men and women that had loved each other and hated each other and had children and kept things going. And if I killed myself—it would be like takin' one of the girl's jobs in the factory to finish so she could draw her pay and then not doin' it.
"Mebbe you won't understand, but you'll have to take it the way I say, for I saw it as clear as I see you in that chair. We was put here to keep things goin'. And I was goin' to stop 'em. There wouldn't be anymeafter I was dead and all them people back of me was goin' to drop out of things, just like I had killed 'em. Did you ever think like that?"
Jean shook her head. Before the fire of loneliness that had seared this woman, she could not speak.
"We're all different, I guess. But I got so I couldn't bear the thought of dyin' and bein' ended, without ever havin' had nothin' and leavin' nothin' and so—I had a baby."
Jean felt as if the wind outside had torn its way into the room.
"You decided, made up your mind to have a baby, and had one?"
"It seems kind of queer, mebbe, when you say it like that, but it was all simple after I'd been thinkin' about it. Lots of things are queer when you first think about 'em, but after a while you get used to 'em. It's like strangers you meet and get to know after a bit real well."
Jean looked away to the houses crouching on the windswept hill.
"He lived in the same house. He was the only man that ever asked me to go any place with him or tried to kiss me. You see I was twenty-seven then, almost twenty-eight. There was never no talk about marryin'. He went away before Jimmie was born, a long time before. I think he was afraid somebody'd find out. He was always kind of scared of people. He sent some money for awhile and then he stopped. I didn't care about the money. I can always get work, and as soon as Jimmie was old enough to leave, I got a job in another place."
From under the pillow she took a bit of folded newspaper and handed it to Jean. It was a clipping a month old, a condensed account of a political fight in a small town in the southern part of the state. It said that the fight had been won by the adherents of Mayor James H. Martin, who could always be relied on to stand on the side of law and order.
"He always said he was goin' to get into politics some day and he did. I wouldn't bother now, because he ain't had none of the joy of Jimmie, but I haven't more than a few weeks, days mebbe. It's cancer, like mother had and grandmother and Aunt Sarah, and I want to know that Jimmie won't have to go to an institution. He can't be so terrible poor if he's Mayor and he'll do something for Jimmie. Maybe he'll be kind of afraid at first but if you make him promise, he'll keep it. I'll give you some letters he wrote and Jimmie's picture. Will you go?"
Evidently she had used up all her strength, for she lay back now, wasted and white, with her eyes closed. Jean tried to speak and couldn't. It was all so tangled, so thwarted, so stark and bare. It was like the rickety house in which the woman lived, and the parched hills. Jean felt as if the thick dust was choking her. The woman opened her eyes.
"You don't understand very well, do you?"
"No, not very." Jean tried to say she did, but the naked honesty of the other compelled the same from her. "I can understand how you must have been lonely but——"
The woman shook her head. "No, that's just what you don't, or you would understand it all."
Her hands, white from illness, took Jean's. "But you're kind and it don't matter much. I wanted the Doctor because she was awfully good to one of the girls that worked with me once, and when I was thinking of somebody, I remembered her."
Jean forced back the sob in her throat. "I'll go to-night if there's a train."
The sick woman smiled gratefully. "Youarekind," she said again. "And—there's not many that's kind when they don't understand."