CHAPTER XXXVIII
Onlynow that he tried to use his hands and found them without hinges or feeling did he realize how cold he had been.
Pain began in him, and fear. He had endured a stealthily creeping paralysis and when he heard Patty’s step, he was almost afraid to speak lest his words come forth brittle and fall breaking on the floor.
He turned in slow, thudding steps. Patty shivered in the frigid air and hitched her shawl about her, tucking in her hands as she scolded:
“What on earth! The window open! Are you mad?”
No answer came from RoBards. His brain might as well have been snow. He stood holding out his hands as if they were something dead. Patty ran to him and seizing his fingers cried out in pain at them. He was alive, he could be hurt. She began to chafe his fingers in hers, to blow on them with her warm breath. She ran to the window and raising it scooped up a double handful of snow and wrapped it about his hands. Snow was warm to him, but bitter cold to her little palms. She was warm and soft where she touched him. She bustled about for cold water to pour on his hands, for anything that could save them. She sought for warm thoughts to keep her world from icy inanition.
“I hate people who say that terrible things are for the best. But maybe this is, for once. The baby—the poor little baby—I was alone and I was so busy taking care of Immy, that I—I forgot till it was too late to—to——”
RoBards groaned: “You don’t mean that the baby is dead?”
If Patty had looked away with shame he would have felt that she felt guilty of a cruel negligence, but she staredstraight into his eyes. She seemed almost to lean on his eyes. And so he felt that she was defying him to accuse her of what she had done.
He dared not take the dare. Then she began with suspicious garrulity:
“Maybe it was God that took the baby back. He has solved our problem. If the poor little thing had lived—think! But now! It’s too bad, but—well, Immy’s a girl again. And nobody knows, nobody knows! Nobody need ever know.”
But they were not rid of the baby yet. It waited on the sill of their decision. Its body, built in secret with so much mystic care and borne with such agony, was empty, but as inescapable as an abandoned house.
The little house must be removed from the landscape it dominated, before the neighbors grew aware of its presence.
While RoBards dully tried to set his thought-machinery going, Patty murmured:
“I’ll have to tell Immy. She is too weak to wonder yet. She’ll carry on terribly, but it can’t be helped. And she’ll be glad all the rest of her days. But where shall we—what can we do with the baby now?”
“Huh?” gasped RoBards. “Oh, yes, what can we do with the—yes, that is the question, what can we do? We’ve got to do something.”
But that could wait. Immy was faintly moaning, “Mamma! Mamma!” Patty ran to her. RoBards followed and bent to kiss the wrung-out wisp that had survived the long travail. She whispered feebly: “Where’s my baby? I haven’t even seen it yet. Is it a boy or——”
Patty knelt and caressed her and asked her to be brave. Then, in order to have done with the horror, told it to her in the fewest words.
Immy gave back the ghost of a shriek in protest against this miserable reward of all her shame and all the rending of her soul and body. She wanted to hold her achievement in her arms. She wanted to feel its little mouth nuzzlingher flesh, drawing away that first clotted ache. Nature demanded that the child take up its offices in her behalf no less than its own. Thousands of years of habit clamored in her flesh.
No one could say how much was love and how much was strangled instinct. But she was frantic. She whispered Murder! and kept maundering as she rocked her head sidewise, trying vainly to lift her weak hands in battle:
“Oh, this is too much, this is just a little too much! How much am I supposed to endure? Will somebody please tell me how much I am expected to stand? That’s all I ask. Just tell me where my rights begin, if ever. If ever! My baby! My little, little baby that has never seen me and never can see me! Why, they won’t even let me hold my own baby in my arms!”
RoBards stared at her in such pity that his heart seemed to beat up into his throat. Patty knelt and put out her hands to Immy in prayer for mercy, but Immy pushed them away, and threshed about like a broken jumping jack yanked by an invisible giant child.
She turned her head to him and pleaded: “Papa! you bring me my baby. You always get me what I want, papa. Get me my baby!”
Since life seemed determined to deny him his every plea, RoBards resolved that he at least would not deny anyone else anything—especially not Immy. He went to the big chair where the blanketed bundle was and gathering the child into his aching arms carried it to Immy and laid it in hers.
The way her hands and her gaze and her moans and her tears rushed out to welcome it persuaded him that he had done the right thing. If ever property had been restored to its owner, now was the time.
He could not bear to see the grief that bled about the child from Immy’s eyes. She held it close under her down-showering curls and her tears streamed over it like rain from the eaves on snow. They could not waken roses or violets, but they eased the sky.
She wept no longer the harsh brine of hate. Her grief was pure regret, the meek, the baffled yearning for things that cannot be in this helpless world.
This was that doll that as a little girl she had held to her merely hinted breasts and had rocked to sleep and made fairy plans for. Now and then as she wagged her head over it, and boasted of its beauty, she would laugh a little and look up with a smile all awry and tear-streaked.
And that was what broke RoBards: to see her battling so bravely to find something beautiful, some pretext for laughter in the poor rubbish of her life. He wondered that it did not break God’s heart to see such a face uplifted. Perhaps he could not see so far. Perhaps he turned away and rushed across the stars to hide from her, as RoBards fled from her.
He hobbled into his library, that wolf-den of his, and he glared at it with hatred of everything in it. He lighted the kindling laid crosswise in the fireplace, to hear flames crackle, and to fight the dank chill.
There were lawbooks piled and outspread about his desk. He flung them off the table to the floor. Laws! Human laws!
On the shelves there were philosophies, histories, a Bible, a Koran, Confucius, the Talmud, Voltaire, a volume of Dr. Chirnside’s sermons. He tore them from their places and tossed them into the air to sprawl and scatter their leaves like snowflakes—and as full of wisdom. He flung a few of them into the fire, but they began to smother it. And somehow that made him laugh.
The abysmal vanity of his temper! He was more foolish and futile than the books he insulted. Poor Job, whose God gave him to the devil to torture on a bet, without explaining to his servant why. Poor Kung-fu-tse trying to be wise. Poor Voltaire, with a mighty cachinnation and a heart full of pity for the victims of persecution. Poor Dr. Chirnside, anxiously floundering through the bogs of terror on the stilts of dogma. Poor Jud Lasher, lying there in the walls!—or where?
This wrestling, Jacob-wise, with invisible angels or fiends, took his mind for a saving while from the unbearable spectacle of his own child’s immediate hell.
There was silence again about the lonely house. By and by Patty came into the room to say:
“She’s asleep. I gave her some drops. Too many, I’m afraid. And now—now what?”
They leaned against the mantelpiece, tall shadows against the swirling flames. Her head and his were lost in the dark as if they were giants reaching to the clouds. And they were, indeed, in the clouds; lost there.
They both thought of the same thing, of course: As usual with human kind, they were concerned about keeping something secret from somebody else. They wanted to make a decent concealment of their family shame.
RoBards’ eyes wandered and fell upon the hearthstone at his feet with the firelight shuttling about it in ripples. Jud Lasher was under there.
He must not hide the child in these same walls. There would be something burlesque about that. Strange, hideous, loathsome truth that the most sorrowful things have only to be repeated to become comic!
He walked away from the hearthstone. It was too much like a headstone. He went to the window. The night had not changed. The earth was stowed away under a great tight tarpaulin of snow. The sky was a vast steel-blue windowpane frosted with stars and the long ice-trail of the Milky Way.
Through the snow a few trees stood upthrust. Among them the little tulip trees huddled together slim and still. There beneath were the bodies of his children and Patty’s. He had seen Patty cry over them as Immy had done, and sway with their still frames, according to that inveterate habit women have of rocking their children, awake or asleep, alive, or——
Immy’s baby belonged out there with the family—with its tiny uncle and its tiny aunt. They would not flinch from it or snub it because of the absence of a marriage ceremony.It had not been to blame. There was nothing it could have done to insist upon such a provision; nothing to prevent its own arrival. It brought with it a certain sanctifying grace. It brought with it a certain penitential suffering.
RoBards nodded to himself, went to Patty and told her his plan, and then hastened to find in the cellar an axe and a shovel, and a discarded empty box of the nearest size for its purpose.
He put on his heaviest coat, his boots and his gloves, and a heavy scarf. In the meantime Patty had fetched the child. She whispered:
“When I took it from her, her hands resisted. Her lips made a kissing sound and she mumbled something that sounded like, ‘Baby go by-by!’”
Patty had wrapped the little form in a silken shawl she had always prized since it came out of China in one of her father’s ships—in the wonderful days when she had had a father and he had had ships. A girlish jealousy had persisted in her heart and she would never let Immy wear that shawl. Now she gave it up because it was the only thing she could find in the house precious enough to honor the going guest and be a sacrifice.
RoBards pushed out into the snow with his weapons and his casket, and made his way to the young tulip trees, which were no longer so young as he imagined them.
The snow was ice and turned the shovel aside. He must crack its surface with the ax, and it was hard for his frozen fingers to grip the handle. Only the sheer necessity of finishing the work made it possible for him to stand the pain. By the time he reached the soil deep below, he was so tired and so hot that he flung off his overcoat and his muffler and gloves.
The ground was like a boulder and the ax rang and glanced and sprinkled sparks of fire. Before he had made the trench deep enough, he had thrown aside his fur cap and his coat, and yet he glowed.
At last he achieved the petty grave, and set the box in it, and heard the clods clatter on it; filled in and trampled downthe shards of soil, and shoveled the snow upon that and made all as seemly as he could.
It was not a job that a gravedigger would boast of, but it was his best. He gazed at the unmarked tomb of the anonymous wayfarer. There should have been some rite, but he could not find a prayer to fit the occasion or his own rebellious mood.
He was so tired, so dog-tired in body and soul that he would have been glad to lie down in his own grave if somebody would have dug him one.
He hobbled and slid back to the house, flung the ax and the shovel into the cellar from the top of the stairs, and went to bed.
The next morning he would have sworn that the whole thing was delirium. At any rate, it was finished.
But it was not finished. Immy woke at last and before her mind was out of the spell of the drug, her arms were groping for her baby, her breast was aching; and when she understood, her scream was like a lightning stroke in a snowstorm.
RoBards could stand no more. He told Patty that she would have to face the ordeal. It was cowardly to leave her, but he must save his sanity or the whole family was ruined.
As he left the house for the barn and the horse he kept there, he was glad to see that snow was fluttering again. That little mound needed more snow for its concealment.