Long before it was light the next morning Isabelle heard the heavy tread of the blacksmith as he was going his rounds to light the fires; then she snuggled deeper into bed. When Margaret's maid finally came with the coffee and pushed back the heavy shutters, Isabelle looked out into another world from the one she had come to half frozen the afternoon before. She had entered the village from the rear, and now she looked off south and west from the level shelf on which the houses sat, across a broad valley, to black woods and a sloping breast of hills, freshly powdered with snow, to the blue sky-line, all as clear in the snow-washed mountain air as in a desert. The sun striking down into the valley brought out the faint azure of the inner folds of the hills.
There was scarcely a footprint in the road to break the soft mass of new-fallen snow. Isabelle could see a black cat deliberately stealing its way from the barn across the road to the house. It lifted each paw with delicate precision and pushed it firmly into the snow, casting a deep shadow on the gleaming surface of white. The black cat, lean and muscular, stretching itself across the snow, was the touch of art needed to complete the silent scene….
A wood-sled drawn by two heavy horses came around the corner of the house, softly churning the new snow before its runners. A man clad in a burly sheepskin coat and fur cap, his feet in enormous rubber shoes, stood on the sled, slowly thrashing his arms and breathing frostily.
"Hello, Sol!" the man cried to the blacksmith, who was shovelling a path from the barn to the house.
"Morning, Ed. Going up to Cross's lot?"
"Ye—as—"
"Hard sledding?"
The two men exchanged amicable nothings in the crisp, brilliant air through which their voices rang with a peculiar timbre. To Isabelle, looking and listening from her window, it was all so fresh, so simple, like a picture on a Japanese print! For the first time in months she had a distinct desire,—to get outside and look at the hills.
"You are commanded," announced Margaret, a little later, "to the doctor's for supper at six. That wasn't the way it was put exactly, but it amounts to the same thing. The doctor's least word is a command here…. Now I am off to help the housekeeper with the accounts,—it's all I am good for!"…
So Isabelle was left to set forth on her ramble of exploration by herself. She pushed through the snow to the last house on the village street, where the road dipped down a long hill, and the wide arc of northern mountains was revealed in a glittering rampart. Her eyes filled involuntarily with tears.
"I must be very weak," she said to herself, "to cry because it's beautiful!" And sitting down on a rock by the road, she cried more, with a feeling of self-pity and a little self-contempt. An old woman came to the door of the house she had just passed with a dish-pan of water and looked curiously at the stranger. At first the countrywoman opened her lips as if she intended to speak, but stood with her dish-pan and said nothing. Isabelle could see through her tears the bent figure and battered face of the old woman,—a being without one line of beauty or even animal grace. What a fight life must have been to reduce any woman's body to that! And the purpose,—to keep the breath of life in a worn old body, just to live?
"Pleasant morning!" Isabelle said with a smile through her tears.
"It ain't bad," the old woman admitted, emptying her dish-pan.
As Isabelle retraced her steps into the village the old woman followed her with curious eyes, thinking no doubt that a woman like this stranger, well dressed, young, and apparently well fed, ought not to be sitting on a rock on a winter's day crying!
"And she's quite right!" Isabelle said to herself.
The jewelled morning was the same to them both,—the outer world was imperturbable in its circular variety. But the inner world, the vision,—ah, there was the extraordinary variation in human lives! From heaven to hell through all gradations, and whether it were heaven or hell did not depend on being like this crone at the end of the road or like herself in its sheltered nooks,—it was something else.
"I will have to see Margaret's wonderful doctor, if this keeps on," she said, still dropping tears.
The blacksmith stood beside the open door of his shop, gazing reflectively across the white fields to the upland. Beside him was a broken wood-sled that he was mending. Seeing Isabelle, he waved her a slow salute with the sled-runner he had ready in his hand.
"Morning!" he called out in his deep voice. "Seeing the country? The hills are extra fine this morning."
He proceeded slowly to brush the snow from the frame of the sled, still glancing now and then over the fields. Isabelle felt that she had caught his characteristic moment,hisinner vision.
"You have a good view from your shop."
"The best in the town! I've always been grateful to my father for one thing,—well, for many things,—but specially because he had the good sense to set the old smithy right here where you can see something. When there isn't much going on, I come out of doors here and take a long look at the mountains. It rests your back so."
Isabelle sat down in the shop and watched Mr. Short repair the sled, interested in the slow, sure movements he made, the painstaking way in which he fitted iron and wood and riveted the pieces together. It must be a relief, she thought, to work with one's hands like that,—which men could do, forgetting the number of manual movements Mrs. Short also made during the same time. The blacksmith talked as he worked, in a gentle voice without a trace of self-consciousness, and Isabelle had again that sense of VISION, of something inward and sustaining in this man of remote and narrow range,—something that expressed itself in the slow speech, the peaceful, self-contained manner. As she went back up the street to the house the thick cloud of depression, of intangible misery, in which she had been living as it seemed to her for eternity, settled down once more,—the habitual gait of her mind, like the dragging gait of her feet. She at least was powerless to escape the bitter food of idle recollection.
* * * * *
The doctor's house was a plain, square, white building, a little way above the main road, from which there was a drive winding through the spruces. On the sides and behind the house stretched one-story wings, also white and severely plain. "Those are the wards, and the one behind is the operating room," Margaret explained.
The house inside was as plain as on the outside: there were no pictures, no rugs, no useless furniture. The large hall divided the first floor in two. On the right was the office and the dining room, on the left with a southerly exposure the large living room. There were great, blazing fires in all the rooms and in the hall at either side,—there was no other heat,—and the odor of burning fir boughs permeated the atmosphere.
"It's like a hospital almost," Isabelle commented as they waited in the living room. "And he has French blood! How can he stand it so—bare and cold?"
"The doctor's limitations are as interesting as his powers. He never has a newspaper in the house, nor a magazine,—burns them up if he finds them lying about. Yet he reads a great deal. He has a contempt for all the froth of immediate living, and still the whole place is the most modern, up-to-date contemporary machine of its kind!"
Outside was the blackness of the cold winter night; inside the grayness of stained walls lighted by the glow from the blazing fires. A few pieces of statuary, copies of the work of the idealistic Greek period, stood in the hall and the living room. All that meant merely comfort, homelikeness—all in a word that was characteristically American—was wanting. Nevertheless, as Isabelle waited in the room she was aware of a peculiar grave beauty in its very exclusions. This house had the atmosphere of a mind.
Some nurse came in and nodded to Margaret, then Mrs. Beck the matron appeared, and a couple of young doctors followed. They had been across the valley on snow-shoes in the afternoon and were talking of their adventures in the woods. There was much laughter and gayety—as if gathered here in the wilderness these people all knew one another very well. After some time Isabelle became aware of the entrance of another person, and turning around saw a thin, slight man with a thick head of gray hair. His smooth-shaven face was modelled with many lines, and under the dark eyebrows that had not yet turned gray there were piercing black eyes. Although the talk and the laughter did not die at once, there was the subtle movement among the persons in the room which indicated that the master of the house had appeared. Dr. Renault walked directly to Isabelle.
"Good evening, Mrs. Lane. Will you come in to supper?"
He offered her his arm, and without further word of ceremony they went into the dining room. At the table the doctor said little to her at first. He leaned back in his chair, his eyes half closed, listening to the talk of the others, as if weary after a long day. Isabelle was puzzled by a sense of something familiar in the man at her side; she must have met him before, she could not tell where. The dining room, like the living room, was square, panelled with white wood, and the walls stained. It was bare except for several copies of Tanagra figurines in a recess above the chimney and two large photographs of Greek athletes. The long table, made of heavy oak planks, had no cloth, and the dishes were of the coarsest earthenware, such as French peasants use.
The talk was lively enough,—about two new cases that had arrived that afternoon, the deer-hunting season that had just closed, bear tracks discovered on Bolton Hill near the lumber-camp, and a new piano that a friend had sent for the convalescent or "dotty" ward, as they called it. The young doctor who sat at Isabelle's right asked her if she could play or sing, and when she said no, he asked her if she could skee. Those were the only personal remarks of the meal. Margaret, who was very much at home, entered into the talk with unwonted liveliness. It was a workshop of busy men and women who had finished the day's labor with enough vitality left to react. The food, Isabelle noticed, was plentiful and more than good. At the end of the meal the young men lighted cigarettes, and one of the nurses also smoked, while a box of cigars was placed before Renault. Some one began to sing, and the table joined the chorus, gathering about the chimney, where there were a couple of settles.
It was a life, so Isabelle saw, with an order of its own, a direction of its own, a strong undercurrent. Its oddity and nonchalance were refreshing. Like one of the mountain brooks it ran its own course, strong and liquid beneath the snow, to its own end.
"You seem to have a very good time up here among yourselves!" Isabelle said to the doctor, expressing her wonder frankly.
"And why not?" he asked, a smile on his thin lips. He helped himself to a cigar, still looking at her whimsically, and biting off its end held a match ready to strike, as if awaiting her next remark.
"But don't you ever want to get away, to go back to the city? Don't you feel—isolated?"
"Why should we? Because there's no opera or dinner parties? We have a dinner party every night." He lighted his cigar and grinned at Isabelle. "The city delusion is one of the chief idiocies of our day. City people encourage the idea that you can't get on without their society. Man was not meant to live herded along sidewalks. The cities breed the diseases for us doctors,—that is their one great occupation."
He threw the match into the fire, leaned back in his chair with his hands knit behind his head, and fastening his black eyes on Isabelle began to talk.
"I lived upwards of twenty years in cities with that same delusion,—not daring to get more than a trolley-car fare away from the muck and noise. Then I was kicked out,—had to go, thank God! On the Arizona plains I learned to know what an idiot I had been to throw away the better half of a life in a place where you have to breathe other peoples' bad air. Why, there isn't room to think in a city! I never used to think, or only at odd moments. I lived from one nervous reflex to another, and took most of my ideas from other folks. Now I do my own thinking. Just try it, young woman; it is a great relief!"
"But—but—" Isabelle stammered, laughing in spite of herself.
"You know," Renault bore on tranquilly, "there's a new form of mental disease you might call 'pavementitis'—the pavement itch. When the patient has it badly, so that he can't be happy when removed from his customary environment, he is incurable. A man isn't a sound man, nor a woman a healthy woman, who can't stand alone on his own two legs and be nourished intellectually and emotionally away from the herd…. That young fellow who has just gone out was a bad case of pavementitis when he came to me,—couldn't breathe comfortably outside the air of New York. Hard worker, too. He came up here to 'rest.' Rest! Almost nobody needs rest. What they want is hard work and tranquil minds. I put him on his job the day he came. You couldn't drive him away now! Last fall I sent him back to see if the cure was complete. Telegraphed me in a week that he was coming up,—life was too dull down there! … And that little black-haired woman who is talking to Mrs. Pole,—similar case, only it was complicated. She was neurotic, hysterical, insomniac, melancholy,—the usual neurasthenic ticket. Had a husband who didn't suit or a lover, I suspect, and it got fastened in the brain,—rode her. She's my chief nurse in the surgical ward now,—a tremendous worker; can go three nights without sleep if necessary and knows enough to sleep soundly when she gets the chance…. Has relapses of pavementitis now and then, when some of her fool friends write her; but I fix that! … So it goes; I have had incurable cases of course, as in everything else. The only thing to do with 'em then is to send them back to suck their poison until it kills."
The whimsical tone of irony and invective made Isabelle laugh, and also subtly changed her self-preoccupation. Evidently Dr. Renault was not a Potts to go to with a long story of woe.
"I thought it was surgery, your specialty," she remarked, "not nervous prostration."
"We do pretty much everything here—as it is needed. Come in to-morrow morning sometime and look the shop over."
He rose, threw away his cigar, and at this signal the group scattered. Renault, Margaret, and Isabelle went back to the bare living room, where the doctor stood silently in front of the fireplace for a few minutes, as though expecting his guests to leave. When they started, he threw open a long window and beckoned to Isabelle to follow him. Outside there was a broad platform running out over the crest of the hill on which the house was built. The land beyond fell away sharply, then rose in a wooded swell to the northern mountains. The night was dark with glittering starlight above, and the presence of the white masses of the hills could be felt rather than seen,—brooding under the stars. There was the tinkle of a sleigh-bell on the road below,—the only sound in the still night.
"There!" Renault exclaimed. "Is there anything you would like to swap for this?"
He breathed deeply of the frosty air.
"It seems almost as if a voice were speaking in the silence!"
"Yes," Renault assented gravely. "There is a voice, and you can hear it up here—if you listen."
On their way home the two women discussed the doctor eagerly.
"I must have seen Dr. Renault somewhere," Isabelle said, "or rather what he might have been once. He's a person!"
"That is it,—he is a person,—not just a doctor or a clever surgeon."
"Has he other regular patients besides the children, the surgical cases?"
"He started with those alone. But latterly, they tell me, he has become more interested in the nervous ward,—what he calls the 'dotty' ward,—where there are chiefly convalescent children or incurable nervous diseases of children. It is wonderful what he does with them. The power he has over them is like the power of the old saints who worked miracles,—a religious power,—or the pure force of the will, if you prefer."
After her evening with Renault, Isabelle felt that Margaret's description might not be too fervid.
Towards morning Isabelle woke, and in the sudden clarity of the silent hour thoughts flowed through her with wonderful vividness. She saw Renault's face and manner, his sharp eyes, his air of dictation, arrogant and at the same time kindly,—yes, there was a power in the man! As Margaret had put it,—a religious power. The word set loose numberless thoughts, distasteful ones, dead ones. She saw the respectable Presbyterian caravansary in St. Louis where the family worshipped,—sermons, creeds, dogmas,—the little stone chapel at Grafton where she had been confirmed, and her attempt to believe herself moved by some spiritual force, expressed in the formulas that the old clergyman had taught her. Then the phrases rose in her mind. It might have done her good once,—people found it helpful,—women especially in their hours of trial. She disliked the idea of leaning for help on something which in her hours of vigor she rejected. A refuge, an explanation,—no, it was not possible! The story of the atonement, the rewards, the mystical attempt to explain the tragedy of life, its sorrow and pain,—no, it was childish! So the word "religious" had something in it repellent, sickly, and self-deceptive…. Suddenly the words stood out sharply in her mind,—"What we need is a new religion!" A new religion,—where had she heard that? … Another flash in her brooding consciousness and there came the face of the doctor, the face of the man who had talked to her one Sunday afternoon at the house where there had been music. She remembered that she wished the music would not interrupt their conversation. Yes, he was bidding her good-by, at the steps, his hat raised in his hand, and he had said with that same whimsical smile, "What we need is a new religion!" It was an odd thing to say in the New York street, after an entirely delightful Sunday afternoon of music. Now the face was older, more tense, yet with added calm. Had he found his religion? And with a wistful desire to know what it was, the religion that made Renault live as he did, Isabelle dropped once more to sleep.
* * * * *
When Isabelle presented herself at the doctor's house the next morning, as he had suggested, the little black-haired nurse met her and made Renault's excuses. The doctor was occupied, but would try to join her later. Meanwhile would she like to look over the operating room and the surgical ward? The young doctor who had been afflicted with pavementitis—a large, florid, blond young man—showed her through the operating room, explaining to her the many devices, the endless well-thought-out detail, from the plumbing to the special electric lighting.
"It's absolutely perfect, Mrs. Lane!" he summed up, and when Isabelle smiled at his enthusiasm, he grew red of face and stuttered in his effort to make her comprehend all that his superlative meant. "I know what I am saying. I have been all over Europe and this country. Every surgeon who comes here says the same thing. You can't evenimagineanything that might be better. There isn't much in the world where you can't imagine a something better, an improvement. There's almost always a better to be had if you could get it. But here, no! … Porowitz, the great Vienna orthopaedic surgeon, was here last winter, and he told me there wasn't a hospital in the whole world where the chances for recovery, taking it all round, were as large as up here in Grosvenor Flat, Vermont. Think of it! And there is no hospital that keeps a record where the percentage of successful operations is as high as ours…. That's enough to say, I guess," he concluded solemnly, wiping his brow.
In the surgical ward the wasted, white faces of the sick children disturbed Isabelle. It all seemed neat, quiet, pleasant. But the physical dislike of suffering, cultivated by the refinement of a highly individualistic age, made her shudder. So much there was that was wrong in life to be made right,—partly right, never wholly right…. It seemed useless, almost sentimentalism, to attempt this patching of diseased humanity….
In the convalescent ward, Margaret was sitting beside a cot reading to her boy.
"He'll be home in a few days now!" she said in answer to Isabelle's glance."Some day he will be a great football player."
The child colored at the reference to his ailment.
"I can walk now," he said, "a little."
Dr. Renault was at the other end of the ward sitting beside a girl of twelve, with one arm about her thin back, talking to her. The child's face was stained with half-dried tears. Presently the doctor took the child up and carried her to the window, and continued to talk to her, pointing out of the window. After a time he joined Isabelle, saying:—
"I was kept from meeting you when you came by that little girl over there. She is, by the way, one of our most interesting cases. Came here for hip disease. She is an orphan,—nothing known about her parents,—probably alcoholic from the mental symptoms. She has hysteria and undeveloped suicidal mania."
"What can you do for her?"
"What we can with medicine and surgery, and where that fails—we try other means."
Isabelle was eager to know what were those "other means," but the doctor was not a man to be questioned. Presently as he sauntered through the room he volunteered:—
"I have been talking to her,—telling her how the hills are made…. You see we have to clean out their minds as well as their bodies, get rid so far as we can of the muddy deposit, both the images associated with their environment—that is done by bringing them up here—and also what might be called inherited thought processes. Give 'em a sort of spiritual purge, in other words," he said with a smile. "Then we can build up, feed their minds something fresh. Sarah Stern there is an obstinate case,—she has a deep deposit of ancestral gloom."
"But you can't overcome the temperament, the inherited nature!"
Renault waved his hand impatiently.
"You've been told that since you were born. We have all grown up in that belief,—it is the curse of the day! … It can't be done altogether—yet. Sarah may revert and cut her throat when she leaves here…. But the vital work for medicine to-day is to see just how much can be done to change temperament,—inherited nature, as you call it. In other words, to put new forces to work in diseased brains. Perhaps some day we can do it all,—who knows?"
"Plant new souls in place of the old!"
Renault nodded gravely.
"That's the true medicine—the root medicine,—to take an imperfect organism and develop it, mould it to the perfected idea. Life is plastic,—human beings are plastic,—that is one important thing to remember!"
"But you are a surgeon?"
Renault's lips quivered with one of his ironical smiles.
"I was a surgeon, just as I was a materialist. When I was young, I was caught by the lure of so-called science, and became a surgeon, because it was precise, definite,—and I am something of a dab at it now—ask the boys here! … But surgery is artisan work. Younger hands will always beat you. Pallegrew in there is as good as I am now. There is nothing creative in surgery; it is on the order of mending shoes. One needs to get beyond that…. And here is where we get beyond patching…. Don't think we are just cranks here. We do what we can with the accepted tools,—the knife and the pill. But we try to go farther—a little way."
They descended to the basement of the main house where the more active children were playing games.
"We have to teach some of them the primitive instincts,—the play instinct, for example,—and we have a workroom, where we try to teach them the absorbing excitement of work…. I am thinking of starting a school next. Don't you want to try a hand at a new sort of education?"
So, pausing now and then to joke with a child or speak to an assistant, Renault took Isabelle over his "shop" once more, explaining casually his purposes. As a whole, it developed before her eyes that here was a laboratory of the human being, a place where by different processes the diseased, the twisted, the maimed, the inhibited, the incomplete were analyzed and reconstructed. As they emerged on the broad platform where they had stood the night before, Isabelle asked:—
"Why is it you work only with children?"
"Because I started with the little beggars…. And they are more plastic, too. But some day the same sort of thing will be done with adults. For we are all plastic…. Good-day!" and he walked away rapidly in the direction of his office.
Isabelle returned to the village in a strange excitement of impressions and thoughts. She felt as if she had been taken up out of the world that she had lived in and suddenly introduced to a planet which was motived by totally other ideas than those of the world she knew. Here was a life laboratory, a place for making over human character as well as tissue. And in bravado, as it were, the mere refuse of human material was chosen to be made anew, with happiness, effectiveness, health! She realized that a satisfactory understanding of it would come slowly; but walking here in the winter sunshine along the village street, she had that sensation of strangeness which the child has on coming from the lighted playhouse into the street…. The set vision that tormented her within—that, too, might it not be erased?
About the post-office people were gathered gossiping and laughing, waiting for the noon mail to be distributed. Country-women in fur coats drove up in dingy cutters to do their Saturday shopping. The wood-sleds went jogging past towards the valley. School children were recklessly sliding down the cross street into the main road. Sol Short was coming over from his shop to get his paper… Here the old world was moving along its wonted grooves in this backwater community. But over it all like the color swimming over the hills was SOMETHING more,—some aspect of life unseen! And faintly, very dimly, Isabelle began to realize that she had never really been alive,—these thirty years and more.
"We are all plastic," she murmured, and looked away to the hills.
Life at Grosvenor moved on in a placid routine, day after day. What with her children and the engrossing work at the doctor's Margaret was busy every morning, and Isabelle rarely saw her before the noon meal. Then at the plentiful dinner over which the blacksmith presided with a gentle courtesy and sweetness there was gossip of the hospital and the village, while Short, who had the father instinct, entertained the children. He knew all the resources of the country, every animal wild or tame, every rod of wood and pasture and hill. The little Poles opened him like an atlas or encyclopedia.
"Mr. Wilson begins to haul from his lot to-morrow," he would announce for their benefit. "I guess he'll take you up to the clearing where the men are cutting if you look for him sharp. And when you get there, you want to find a very tall man with a small head. That's Sam Tisdell,—and you tell him I said he would show you the deer run and the yard the deer have made back there a piece behind the clearing."
Then he told them how, when he was a young man, he had hunted for deer on the mountains and been caught one time in a great snowstorm, almost losing his life.
"The children have so much to do and to think about here in Grosvenor that they are no trouble at all. They never have to be entertained," Margaret remarked. "Mr. Short is much better for them than a Swiss governess with three languages!"
* * * * *
There were long evenings after the six o'clock suppers, which the two friends spent together usually, reading or talking before Isabelle's fire. Wherever the talk started, it would often gravitate to Renault, his personality dominating like some mountain figure the community. Margaret had been absorbed into the life of the hospital with its exciting yet orderly movement. There were new arrivals, departures, difficult cases, improvements and failures to record. She related some of the slowly wrought miracles she had witnessed during the months that she had been there.
"It all sounds like magic," Isabelle had said doubtfully.
"No, that is just what it isn't," Margaret protested; "the doctor's processes are not tricks,—they are evident."
And the two discussed endlessly these "processes" whereby minds were used to cure matter, the cleansing of the soul,—thought substitution, suggestion, the relationship of body and mind. And through all the talk, through the busy routine of the place, in the men and women working in the hospital, there emerged always that something unseen,—Idea, Will, Spirit, the motiving force of the whole. Isabelle felt this nowhere more strongly than in the change in Margaret herself. It was not merely that she seemed alert and active, wholly absorbed in the things about her, but more in the marvellous content which filled her. And, as Isabelle reflected, Margaret was the most discontented woman she had known; even before she married, she was ever hunting for something.
"But you can't stay here always," Isabelle said to her one evening. "You will have to go back to the city to educate the children if for no other reason."
"Sometimes I think I shan't go back! Why should I? … You know I have almost no money to live on." (Isabelle suspected that Larry's last years had eaten into the little that had been left of Margaret's fortune). "The children will go to school here. It would be useless to educate them above their future, which must be very plain."
"But you have a lot of relatives who would gladly help you—and them."
"They might, but I don't think I want their help—even for the children. I am not so sure that what we call advantages, a good start in life, and all that, is worth while. I had the chance—you had it, too—and what did we make of it?"
"Our children need not repeat our mistakes," Isabelle replied with a sigh.
"If they were surrounded with the same ideas, they probably would!" …
"The doctor has thrown his charm over you!"
"He has saved my life!" Margaret murmured; "at least he has shown me how to save it," she corrected.
There it was again, the mysterious Peace that possessed her, that had touched Margaret's hard, defiant spirit and tamed it. But Isabelle, remembering the letters with the Panama postmark she had seen lying on the hall table, wondered, and she could not help saying:—
"You are young yet, Margaret,—oh, it might be—happiness, all that you have missed!"
"No!" Margaret replied, with a little smile. "I—think not!"
She closed her eyes as if she were contemplating that other happiness, and after a silence she opened them and touched Isabelle's hand.
"I want to tell you something, dear…. I loved Rob Falkner, very much, the most a woman can."
"I knew it! … I felt it…. That it only might be!"
"He came to me," Margaret continued, "when I was hard and bitter about life, when I was dead…. It was the kind of love that women dream of, ours,—the perfect thing you feel in your heart has always been there,—that takes all of you! … It was good for us both—he needed me, and I needed him."
"Margaret!"
"I was wonderfully happy, with a dreadful happiness that was two parts pain, pain for myself, and more pain for him, because he needed me, you understand, and it could not be—I could not live with him and give him the food he hungered for—love."
Isabelle kissed the wistful face, "I know," she said. "I want to tell you more—but you may not understand! … He had to go away. It was best; it was his work, his life, and I should have been a poor weak fool to let our love stand in the way. So it was decided, and I urged him to go. He came to see me at Bedmouth before he left,—a few days, a few hours of love. And we saw how it would have to be, that we should have to go on loving and living in the spirit, for as long as our love lasted, apart. We faced that. But—but—"
Margaret hesitated and then with shining eyes went on in a low voice.
"It was not enough what we had had! I was not ready to let him go, to see him go—without all. He never asked—I gave him all. We went away to have our love by ourselves,—to live for each other just a few days. He took me away in his boat, and for a few days, a few nights, we had our love—we saw our souls."
She waited, breathing fast, then controlled herself.
"Those hours were more than ordinary life. They do not seem to me real even now, or perhaps they are the most real thing in all I have known. It was love before the parting—before Fate…. When it was all over, we went back to earth. I returned, to Mother Pole's house in Bedmouth, and I went up to the children's room and took my baby in my arms and kissed her, my little girl. And I knew that it had been right, all pure and holy, and I was glad, oh, so glad that it had been, that we had had the courage!"
Isabelle pressed the hand she held close to her breast and watched the shining face.
"And I have never felt differently—never for one moment since. It was the greatest thing that ever came to me, and it seems to me that I should never really have lived if it had not been for those days—those nights and days—and the heaven that we saw!"
"Then how can you speak as if life were ended now—"
Margaret held her hand before her face and did not answer. "It might be possible—for you both…. She never really cared for Rob,—she left him and took her child when they sold their house—because she was disappointed. And she has refused to go to him ever since."
"I know all that," Margaret murmured; "that is not it wholly. I can't tell. I don't know yet. It is not clear…. But I know that I am proud and glad of what has been,—of our love in its fulness and glory. And I know it was not sin! Nothing can make it so to me."
She had risen and stood proudly before Isabelle.
"It has made living possible for him and for me,—it has made it something noble and great, to feel this in our souls…. I wanted to tell you; I thought you would understand, and I did not want you to be wrong about me,—not to know me all!"
She knelt and buried her head in Isabelle's lap, and when she raised her face there were tears falling from the eyes.
"I don't know why I should cry!" she exclaimed with a smile. "I don't often…. It was all so beautiful. But we women cry when we can't express ourselves any other way!"
"I shall always hope—"
Margaret shook her head.
"I don't know…. There are other things coming,—another revelation, perhaps! I don't think of what will be, dear."
But womanwise, Isabelle thought on after Margaret had left, of Falkner and Margaret, of their love. And why shouldn't it come to them, she asked herself? The other, Falkner's marriage, had been a mistake for both, a terrible mistake, and they had both paid for it. Bessie could have made it possible if she had wanted to, if she had had it in her. She had her chance. For him to go back to her now, with the gulf between them of all this past, was mere folly,—just conventional wrong-headedness. And it would probably be no better for Bessie if he were to make the sacrifice…. The revelation that Margaret had hinted of had not come to Isabelle. She lay awake thinking with aching heart of her own story,—its tragic ending. Buthewas not a man,—that, too, had been a mistake!
* * * * *
Isabelle, largely left to herself, for occupation drove about the snowy hills, sometimes taking with her for company one of the convalescents or a nurse, often alone, liking the solitude of the winter spaces. Sometimes she went to the blacksmith's shop and talked with the old man, learning the genealogy and the sociology of the neighborhood. The text for Sol Short's wisdom was ever at hand in the passers-by. Ending one of his transcripts, he made a phrase that lingered in Isabelle's mind long afterward. "So she was left a charge upon the property," he said of an old woman that had come out of one of the village houses. "Aunt Mehitabel went with the house. When it was sold, she had to be taken over by the new owner, and her keep provided. And there she is now, an old woman in ill health and ill temper. I don't know as there is a worse combination."…
"I wonder why I stay," Isabelle said to Margaret after nearly two months had slipped by. "I am quite rested, as well as I shall ever be, I believe. You don't need me. Nobody does exactly! Molly writes me very contented little letters. Mother is staying with her, and she is at the party age, and would be terribly bored to come here, as you suggested. John is in St. Louis; he seems to have a good deal to do out there this winter. So you see my little world gets on perfectly without me."
"Better stay here, then," Margaret urged, "until spring. It will do you good. You haven't exhausted the doctor yet!"
"I almost never see him, and when he does remember me he chaffs me as if I were a silly child. No, I think I will go next week."
But she did not wish to leave. The winter peace of the little village had been like an enveloping anodyne to her weary body and mind. Removed from all her past, from the sights and the people that suggested those obsessing thoughts which had filled her waking hours with dreariness, she had sunk into the simple routine of Grosvenor as the tired body sinks into a soft bed. The daily sight of the snowy fields, the frozen hillsides black with forests, and the dry spirituous air, lifted her. Now and then the effect of the anodyne wore off and the old gnawing pain, or a sodden sense of futility, overwhelmed her afresh. "It will never get straight!" she said, thinking in the terms of Potts's specifics. "I am somehow wrong, and I must go all my life with this torture—or worse—until I die!" And the whole panorama of her little life would unroll before her in the sleepless hours of the still night: her girl ambitions, her mistaken marriage, her striving for experience, for life, to satisfy—what? Then her mistaken love, and Vickers's sacrifice, and the blackness afterwards,—the mistake of it all! "They'll be better without me,—mother and Molly and John! Let me die!" she cried. Then illogically she would think of Renault and wonder whathecould do for her. But she shrank from baring herself before his piercing gaze. "He would say I was a fool, and he would be right!"
So she went out into the cold country and walked miles over the frozen fields through the still woods, trying to forget, only to return still ridden by her thoughts,—bitter tears for Vickers, sometimes almost reproach for his act. "If he had let me plunge to my fate, it would have been better than this! I might never have known my mistake,—it would have been different, all of it different. Now there is nothing!" And at the end of one of these black moods she resolved to return to her world and "go through the motions as others do. What else? Perhaps it will be better when I am distracted. Potts will give me something to brace me."…
But Isabelle did not return to the city and get that prescription from the great Potts.
Just as Isabelle had completed her packing on Sunday afternoon, a message came to her from Dr. Renault through Margaret. "We need another woman,—two of our nurses have been called away and a third is sick. Will you give us some help?"
"I am going up myself for the night," Margaret added. "They are badly pushed,—six new cases the last three days."
So the night found Isabelle under the direction of Mrs. Felton, the little black-haired woman whose "case" the doctor had analyzed for her. It was a long night, and the next morning, all the experienced nurses being needed at an operation, Isabelle went on. The day was full and also the next two. The hospital force was inadequate, and though the doctor had telegraphed for help there would be no relief for a week. So Isabelle was caught up in the pressing activity of this organism and worked by it, impelled without her own will, driven hard as all around her were driven by the circumstances behind her. Dr. Renault abhorred noise, disorder, excitement, confusion of any kind. All had to run smoothly and quietly as if in perfect condition. He himself was evident, at all hours of day or night, chaffing, dropping his ironical comments, listening, directing,—the inner force of the organism. One night the little nurse dropped asleep, clearly worn out, and Isabelle sent her to bed. The ward was quiet; there was nothing to be done. Isabelle, pacing to and fro in the glass sun parlor to keep herself awake, suddenly became aware of the stillness within her. It was as if some noisy piece of machinery had ceased to revolve without her having noticed it. It was possible for her in this quiet moment to realize this: for the first time in five days she had not thought of herself. For five days she had not consciously thought! Doubtless she would have to pay for this debauch of work. She would collapse. But for five days she had not known whether she felt ill or well, was happy or distressed. Excitement—to be paid for! She shrank from the weary round of old thought that must come, the revolution of the wheels within. For five days she had not thought, she had not cared, she had not known herself! That must be the opiate of the poor, driven by labor to feed and clothe themselves; of the ambitious, driven by hope and desire…. She must work, too; work was a good thing. Why had Potts not included it in his panaceas? …
Later when she walked back into the still ward, she thought she heard a stifled breathing, but when she went the rounds of the cots, all was still. It was not until nearly morning that she noticed something wrong with a little boy, observing the huddled position of the limbs drawn up beneath the blanket. She felt of his face—it was cold. Frightened, she hurried to the bell to summon the night doctor. As she reached it Renault entered the ward and with a warning hand brought her back to the cot. He put his fingers swiftly here and there on the child's body.
"Where is Mrs. Felton?" he demanded severely.
"She was so worn out I persuaded her to get some rest. Have I neglected anything?—is anything wrong?"
"The child is dead," Renault replied, straightening himself and covering up the little form.
"Oh, I have—done something wrong!"
"It would have made no difference what you did," the doctor replied dryly. "Nothing would have made any difference. There was the millionth part of a chance, and it was not for him."
As they stood looking down at the dead face, it seemed to Isabelle that suddenly he had become a person, this dead child, with his lost millionth of a chance,—not merely one of the invalids sleeping in the room. For this brief moment when life had ceased to beat in his frail body, and before decay had begun, there was an individuality given him that he had never achieved in life.
"Poor little fellow!" Isabelle murmured softly. "He must have suffered so much." Then with that common consolation with which the living evade the thought of death, she added, "He has escaped more pain; it is better so, perhaps!"
"No—that is wrong!"
Renault, standing beside the bed, his arms folded across his breast, looked up from the dead child straight into the woman's eyes.
"That is false!" he cried with sudden passion. "Life is GOOD—all of it—for every one."
He held her eyes with his glance while his words reverberated through her being like the CREDO of a new faith.
* * * * *
When another nurse had come to relieve Isabelle, she left the ward with the doctor. As they went through the passageway that led to the house, Renault said in his usual abrupt tone:—
"You had better run home, Mrs. Lane, and get some sleep. To-morrow will be another hard day."
She wheeled suddenly and faced him.
"How dare you say that life is good for any other human being! What doyouknow of another's agony,—the misery that existence may mean, the daily woe?"
Her passionate burst of protest died in a sob.
"I say it because I believe it, because Iknowit!"
"No one can know that for another."
"For animals the account of good and evil may be struck, the pains set against the satisfactions that life offers. When we judge that the balance is on the wrong side, we are merciful,—put the creature out of its misery, as we say. But no human being is an animal in that sense. And no human being can cast his balance of good and evil in that mechanical way—nor any one else for him!"
"But one knows for himself! When you suffer, when all is blank within and you cry as Job cried,—'would God it were morning, and in the morning would God it were night!' then life isnotgood. If you could be some one else for a few hours, then you might understand—what defeat and living death—"
Oh, if she could tell! The impulse to reveal surged in her heart, that deep human desire to call to another across the desert, so that some one besides the silent stars and the wretched Self may know! Renault waited, his compelling eyes on her face.
"When you have lost the most in your life—hope, love! When you have killed the best!" she murmured brokenly. "Oh, I can't say it! … I can never say it—tell the whole."
Tears fell, tears of pity for the dead child, for herself, for the fine-wrought agony of life.
"But I know!" Renault's voice, low and calm, came as it were from a shut corner of his heart. "I have felt and I have seen—yes, Defeat, Despair, Regret—all the black ghosts that walk."
Isabelle raised her eyes questioningly.
"And it is because of that, that I can raise my face to the stars and say, 'It is good, all good—all that life contains.' And the time will come when you will repeat my words and say to them, 'Amen.'"
"That I could!"
"We are not animals,—there is the Unseen behind the Seen; the Unknown behind the Observed. There is a Spirit that rises within us to slay the ghosts, to give them the lie. Call upon it, and it will answer…. For Peace is the rightful heritage of every soul that is born."
"Not Peace."
"Yes,—I say Peace! Health, perhaps; happiness, perhaps; efficiency, perhaps. But Peace always lies within the grasp of whomsoever will stretch out his hand to possess it." …
As they stopped at the house door and waited in the deep silence of the dark morning, Renault put his hands on Isabelle's shoulders:—
"Call to it, and it will come from the depths! … Goodnight."
There in the still dawning hour, when the vaulted heavens seemed brooding close to the hills and the forests, these two affirmations of a creed rang in Isabella's soul like the reverberating chords of some mystic promise:—
"Life is good … all of it … for every one!" And, "Peace is the rightful heritage of every soul. It lies within the grasp of whomsoever will stretch out his hand to possess it."
It was still within her.
When Isabelle woke, the morning sun fretted the green shutters. She was tired in every limb,—limp, content to lie in bed while Mrs. Strong lighted the fire, threw open the shutters, and brought breakfast and the mail. Through the east windows the sun streamed in solidly, flooding the counterpane, warming the faded roses of the wall paper. A bit of the north range of hills, the flat summit of Belton's Top with a glittering ice-cap, she could see above the gray gable of the barn. The sky was a soft, cloudless blue, and the eaves were busily dripping in a drowsy persistency.
She liked to lie there, watching the sun, listening to the drip, her letters unopened, her breakfast untouched. She was delightfully empty of thoughts. But one idea lay in her mind,—she should stay on, here, just here. Since she had packed her trunk the Sunday before, a great deal seemed to have happened,—a space had been placed between the outer world that she had restlessly turned back towards and herself. Some day she should go back to that other world—to Molly and John and all the rest. But not now—no!…
As she lay there, slowly the little things of the past weeks since she had travelled the cold road from White River—the impressions, the sights, the ideas—settled into her thought, pushing back the obstinate obsessions that had possessed her for months. The present began to be important, to drive out the past. Outside in the street some one whistled, the bells of the passing sleds jangled, a boy's treble halloa sounded far away,—unconscious voices of the living world, like the floating clouds, the noise of running water, the drip of the melting snow on the eaves,—so good it all was and real! …
Margaret had found that Peace the doctor had spoken of, Margaret whose delicate curving lips had always seemed to her the symbol of discontent, of the inadequacy of life. Margaret had found it, and why not she? … That explained the difference she felt these days in Margaret. There had always been something fine and sweet in the Southern woman, something sympathetic in her touch, in the tone of her voice even when she said cynical things. Now Margaret never said bitter things, even about the wretched Larry. She had always been a listener rather than a talker, but now there was a balm in her very presence, a touch upon the spirit, like a cool hand on the brow. Yes! She had found that rightful heritage of Peace and breathed it all around her, like warmth and light.
Margaret came in with the noon mail, which she had collected from the box in the post-office. As she tossed the papers and letters on the bed, Isabelle noticed another of the oblong letters in the familiar handwriting from Panama….
"Or is it that?" she asked herself for a moment, and then was ashamed. The smile, the clear look out of the deep eyes, the caressing hand that stroked her face, all said no,—it was not that! And if it were, it must be good.
"So you are going to stay with us a while longer, Isabelle…. I shall unpack your trunk and hide it," Margaret said with smiling conviction.
"Yes,—I shall stay, for the present…. Now I must get into my clothes.I've been lazing away the whole morning here—not even reading my letters!"
"That's right," Margaret drawled. "Doing nothing is splendid for the temperament. That's why the darkies have such delightful natures. They can sit whole days in the sun and never think a thought." With her hand on the door she turned: "You must send for Molly,—it will be good for her to forget the dancing lessons and frocks. My children will take her down to Mill Hill and make a boy of her."
"Well,—but she will be a nuisance, I am afraid. She is such a young lady."…
At last Isabelle tore open a letter from her husband, one that Margaret had just brought. It was concise and dry, in the economical epistolary style into which they had dropped with each other. He was glad to hear that her rest in the country was doing her good. If it agreed with her and she was content, she had better stay on for the present. He should be detained in the West longer than he had expected. There were important suits coming on against the railroad in which he should be needed, hearings, etc. At the close there was an unusually passionate sentence or two about "the public unrest and suspicion," and the President and the newspapers. "They seem to like the smell of filth so much that they make a supply when they can't find any."
Broils of the world! The endless struggle between those who had and those who envied them what they had. There was another side, she supposed, and in the past Cairy had been at some pains to explain that other side to her. Her husband must of course be prejudiced, like her father; they saw it all too close. However, it was a man's affair to settle, unless a woman wished to play Conny's role and move her husband about the board. Broils! How infinitely far away it seemed, all the noise of the world! … She began to dress hurriedly to report at the hospital for the afternoon. As she glanced again at her husband's letter, she saw a postscript, with some scraps of St. Louis gossip:—
"I hear that Bessie is to get a divorce from Falkner. I wonder if it can be true…. I saw Steve in the street last week. From what I learn the lumber business isn't flourishing…. Pity he didn't swallow his scruples and stay with us where he would be safe!"
Poor Alice—if Steve should fail now, with all those children! And then she remembered what Alice Johnston had said to Vickers, "You see we have been poor so much of the time that we know what it is like." It would take a good deal to discourage Alice and Steve. But John must keep an eye on them, and try to help Steve. John, it occurred to her then for the first time, was that kind,—the substantial sort of man that never needed help himself, on which others might lean.
* * * * *
So Isabelle stayed in the mountain village through the winter months. Molly came with her governess, and both endeavored to suppress politely their wonder that any one could imprison herself in this dreary, cold place. The regular nurses came back to the hospital, but Isabelle, once having been drawn in, was not released.
"He's a hard master," Margaret said of the doctor. "If he once gets his hand on you, he never lets go—until he is ready to."
Apparently Renault was not ready to let go of Isabelle. Without explaining himself to her, he kept her supplied with work, and though she saw him often every day, they rarely talked, never seriously. He seemed to avoid after that first night any opportunity for personal revelation. The doctor was fond of jokes and had the manner of conducting his affairs as if they were a game in which he took a detached and whimsical interest. If there was sentiment in his nature, an emotional feeling towards the work he was doing, it was well concealed, first with drollery, and then with scientific application. So far as any one could observe the daily routine, there was nothing, at least in the surgical side of the hospital, that was not coldly scientific. As Renault had said, "We do what we can with every instrument known to man, every device, drug, or pathological theory." And his mind seemed mostly engrossed with this "artisan" side of his profession, in applying his skill and learning and directing the skill and learning of others. It was only in the convalescent ward that the other side showed itself,—that belief in the something spiritual, beyond the physical, to be called upon. One of the doctors, a young Norwegian named Norden, was his assistant in this work. And every one in the place felt that Norden was closest of all to the doctor. Norden in his experiments with nervous diseases used hypnotism, suggestion, psychotherapy,—all the modern forms of supernaturalism. His attitude was ever, as he said to Isabelle, "It might be—who knows?"—"There is truth, some little truth in all the ages, in all the theories and beliefs." Isabelle had a strong liking for this uncouth Northman with his bony figure and sunken eyes that seemed always burning with an unattained desire, an inexpressible belief. Norden said to her, the only way is "to recognize both soul and body in dealing with the organism. Medicine is a Religion, a Faith, a great Solution. It ought to be supported by the state, free to all…. The old medicine is either machine work or quackery, like the blood-letting of barbers." …
It was an exhilarating place to live in, Renault's hospital,—an atmosphere of intense activity, mental and physical, with a spirit of some large, unexpressed truth, a passionate faith, that raised the immediate finite and petty task to a step in the glorious ranks of eternity. The personality of Renault alone kept this atmosphere from becoming hectic and sentimental. He held this ship that he steered so steadily in the path of fact that there was no opportunity for emotional explosions. But he himself was the undefined incarnate Faith that made the voyage of the last importance to every one concerned. Small wonder that the doctors and nurses—the instruments of his will—"could not be driven away"! They had caught the note, each one of them, of that unseen power and lived always in the hope of greater revelations to come.
As the order of the days settled into a rhythmic routine with the passing of the weeks, Isabelle Lane desired more and more to come closer to this man who had touched her to the quick, to search more clearly for her personal Solution which evaded her grasp. There were many questions she wished to have answered! But Renault had few intimate moments. He avoided personalities, as if they were a useless drain upon energy. His message was delivered at casual moments. One day he came up behind Isabelle in the ward, and nodding towards Molly, who was reading a story to one of the little girl patients, said:—
"So you have put daughter to some use?"
"Yes!" Isabelle exclaimed irritably. "I found her going over her dresses for the tenth time and brought her along…. However does she get that air of condescension! Look at her over there playing the grand lady in her pretty frock for the benefit of these children. Little Snob! She didn't getthatfrom me."
"Don't worry. Wait a day or two and you will see the small girl she is reading to hand her one between the eyes," Renault joked. "She's on to Miss Molly's patronage and airs, and she has Spanish blood in her. Look at her mouth now. Doesn't it say, 'I am something of a swell myself?"
"They say children are a comfort!" Isabelle remarked disgustedly. "They are first a care and then a torment. In them you see all that you dislike in yourself popping up—and much more besides. Molly thinks of nothing but clothes and parties and etiquette. She has twice the social instinct I ever had. I can see myself ten years hence being led around by her through all the social stuff I have learned enough to avoid."
"You can't be sure."
"They change, but not the fundamentals. Molly is a littlemondaine,—she showed it in the cradle."
"But you don't know what is inside her besides that tendency, any more than you know now what is inside yourself and will come out a year hence."
"If I don't know myself at my age, I must be an idiot!"
"No one knows the whole story until the end. Even really aged people develop surprising qualities of character. It's a Christmas box—the inside of us; you can always find another package if you put your hand in deep enough and feel around. Molly's top package seems to be finery. She may dip lower down."
'So I am dipping here in Grosvenor,' thought Isabelle, 'and I may find the unexpected!' … This was an empty quarter of an hour before dinner and Renault was talkative.
"Who knows?" he resumed whimsically. "You might have a good sense of humor somewhere, Mrs. Lane, pretty well buried."
Isabelle flushed with mortification.
"You are witty enough, young woman. But I mean real humor, not the rattle of dry peas in the pod that goes for humor at a dinner party. Do you know why I keep Sam about the place,—that fat lazy beggar who takes half an hour to fetch an armful of wood? Because he knows how to laugh. He is a splendid teacher of mirth. When I hear him laugh down in the cellar, I always open the door and try to get the whole of it. It shakes my stomach sympathetically. The old cuss knows it, too, which is a pity! … Well, young mademoiselle over there is play-acting to herself; she thinks she will be a grand lady like mamma. God knows what she will find more interesting before she reaches the bottom of the box. Don't worry! And did you ever think where they catch the tricks, these kids? If you went into it, you could trace every one down to some suggestion; it wouldn't take you long to account for that high and mighty air in your child that you don't fancy. If you don't want her to pick up undesirable packages, see that they aren't handed out to her."
"But she has had the best—"
"Yes, of course. Lord! the best! Americans are mad for the best. Which means the highest priced. I've no doubt, Mrs. Lane, you have given Molly all the disadvantages…. Did you ever sit down for five minutes and ask yourself seriously what is the best, humanly speaking, for that child? What thingsarebest any way? … Do you want her to end where you are at your age?"
Isabelle shook her head sadly:—
"No,—not that!"
"Cultivate the garden, then…. Or, to change the figure, see what is handed out to her…. For every thought and feeling in your body, every act of your will, makes its trace upon her,—upon countless others, but upon her first because she is nearest."
Molly, having closed her book and said good-evening to the little patient, came up to her mother.
"It is time, I think, mamma, for me to go home to dress for dinner." She looked at the little watch pinned to her dress. Renault and Isabelle laughed heartily.
"What pebble that you tossed into the pool produced that ripple, do you think?" the doctor quizzed, twirling Molly about by her neck, much to her discomfort.
"He treats me like a child, too," Isabelle complained to Margaret; "gives me a little lesson now and then, and then says 'Run along now and be a good girl.'"
"It is a long lesson," Margaret admitted, "learning how to live, especially when you begin when we did. But after you have turned the pages for a while, somehow it counts."