Chapter XXIV

Maud was very angry. She was not in good form after her late hours at the dance and added to her physical malaise came this crashing disappointment. It had been actually inconceivable to Maud that Horatia would ultimately refuse Anthony. Didn’t he offer everything in the world that Maud held valuable? Before her protests, her storms, her really bitter accusations that Horatia had been cruel and selfish, Horatia was silent, stubbornly silent, Maud said. But it was not stubborn silence. It was sympathy with what Maud wanted and regret for the fact that she could not help her get the things she wanted. Maud had given Horatia a happy summer or she had been at least the occasion of offering her one and Horatia was filled with real gratitude. Maud did not want her to leave. She was full of secret enterprising plans for seeing Marjorie or even Anthony himself and insisting that they press Horatia--Maud stopped at no delicacies when the end was really important. But on that point Horatia was fixed. She would not see Anthony again and she would never allow the question to be reopened. And she was leaving at once.

She left Maud with a wet towel around her head, wailing that her summer had been spoiled. There had been several times during their talk when Horatia had nearly added insult to injury by laughing at her sister. This was one of them. She had such a clear picture of Maud, reviving after her departure, and planning the best way to utilize Horatia’s romance.

“Come, Maud,” she said, “think of all the friends you’ve made.”

“I’d like to know how I can keep friends in the face of all the scandal this will make! People will say--and you did encourage him! Just as I was planning to see a lot of these people this winter. They’ll all wonder----”

“It will make you interesting, Maud.” Horatia did smile a little as she said that.

“Oh, you can laugh!” Maud’s tone was pettish but already there was a touch of secret solace in it.

Horatia left her on that note and took the jitney bus to the station. It was a rickety Ford that rattled and creaked over the hills which she was used to crossing with Anthony or Harvey. But Harvey was in town and there was only the jitney this morning, symbol, thought Horatia, of what the world offered to a woman who had no man to provide for her comfort. The back of the seat hit her spine uncomfortably and she held on to the side, grimly taking pleasure in her own discomfort. Once she saw a roadster coming in a whirl of dust, but it was not Anthony.

The train was no better than the bus. She shared a seat with an amazingly fat and amazingly rude woman who acted as if Horatia’s travelling bag was a personal insult and made little digs at it with her umbrella. Horatia idly wondered why she noticed all these things and later why she found it such a nuisance to carry her own bag.

“I’m quite spoiled,” she said to herself, “spoiled and soft.”

In the station she hesitated. She did not want to go to _The Journal_ office until late afternoon and it was only half past ten. The reporters would be there now. By afternoon they would be out and Jim (at the very thought her heart beat faster), Jim would be alone perhaps. Well, she couldn’t go to Maud’s house. She boarded a car for West Park.

West Park sat complacently still in the sunlight. Horatia was glad to see it again--glad to come back to its acceptance of everything, including herself. She went up the hill to her uncle’s house and Aunt Caroline greeted her with what for Aunt Caroline was almost enthusiasm. She wanted to know all about Maud’s babies and Maud’s rent and how Horatia liked it. Horatia answered a host of petty questions with no irritation. It was a good thing, she thought, that these bland and undesigning aunts are in the world. How they comfort us in all our worries by their placid fronts and limited worlds. If--

“And how is Mr. Langley?” asked her aunt as they finished their lunch. She could never come to calling him Jim.

Horatia could have kissed her for that assumption that everything was all right between her and Jim.

“And by the way, a telephone message came for you here the other day. I said I didn’t know when you’d be back, but I took it down.”

“Funny it should come here----” said Horatia.

Her aunt consulted the memorandum on her desk.

“Here it is--a Mrs. Gordon at Mercy Hospital wanted to see you.”

“Sure it was I?”

“Oh, yes--I was very sure to ask and I spelt the name.”

Horatia reflected. It was now early afternoon. If she went to Mercy Hospital that would be a way to get off and think--and to pass the impatient hours until--

“I must go into town to the office,” she told Aunt Caroline, “but perhaps I’ll come back tonight for supper, unless I have to stay at the office.”

Aunt Caroline said that she hoped Horatia would be very sure to get back by half past six, and that she should expect her. She added that she hoped Horatia wouldn’t tire herself out again with all that newspaper work, and she stood on the top step watching her as she had watched her that first morning when Horatia set off to work. Horatia recalled that day.

“Ah, but now,” she said to herself, “I know where to look for my romance. Romance--how stupidly I went after it--and how glorious that I know where to look for it now.”

Mercy Hospital, flat, clean, yellow brick, fascinated her. Its very paint seemed deliberately sanitary at the expense of charm. She wondered who Mrs. Gordon was. She waited and finally through a maze of corridors was taken to the maternity wing. It appeared that Mrs. Gordon was a maternity case. There was some delay before she was admitted. She stood in the corridor feeling very young and unimpressive. Nurses, holding little blanket bundles, hurried past her. A smell of ether came sickishly from an open door and now, wheeled quickly and expertly, came a table with a covered form under it that was silent and still.

“Is she dead?” Horatia whispered to a nurse at the desk.

The nurse laughed.

“Oh, no indeed. Her baby just came and they’re taking her back to her room. They don’t die that easy.”

But to Horatia it was serious. How close to death people went for their babies, she thought tremulously! To do a thing like that one must be sure of great love. Would she some day be like that silent figure? She shivered in sudden horror. A man came out of a room and paced up and down silently, his face gray with pain. The nurse, passing, spoke to him reassuringly.

“A couple of hours,” she said, “she’s doing fine.”

The man tried to smile and failed. Horatia shivered again. This was the grim side of love. It frightened her.

“You wanted to see Mrs. Gordon?” Still another nurse beckoned. “Go down to 434. Go right in.”

She opened the door a little timidly and a figure on the bed turned slowly toward her. Horatia gasped.

“Grace!”

Grace nodded and smiled. She was pale and her yellow hair in two long braids was beautiful.

“No less than Grace.”

“But I never guessed.”

“I didn’t mean that you should. Or anyone else. That’s the idea in being Mrs. Gordon.”

“And you have a baby!”

“Quite a darling. Here, look at it.”

She pushed the corner of the blanket back from a queer little wrinkled face. Two tiny crumpled fists lay close to the red cheeks.

“Is it a girl?”

“Yes--that’s why I wanted to see you. Can I call it Horatia?”

“After me--but why after me?”

“Because,” said Grace, smiling a little pathetically, “I’d like to have her be like you. Bring her up so that she would be.”

Horatia recovered her poise. She sat down by the bedside.

“I shall be very proud to have that cunning thing have my name,” she answered, “and please, may I know about it?”

“There’s not much to know. It happened. Sometimes such things do happen. At first I thought I wouldn’t have it. Then as I faced the idea of abortion, I couldn’t. Something bigger than me--something racial, I suppose--took hold of me. So I made plans--dressed cleverly and two months ago went on my vacation--buried myself in a lodging house as Mrs. Gordon. Then I came to the hospital when it was about to come. Nobody knows what fun I had creating a character for the records.”

“But will you keep it?”

“Keep it!” cried Grace, “isn’t it mine? I’ll keep it of course. Take it back and say I’ve adopted it. People will believe it--or not. But I’m pretty valuable to my work. I fancy they’ll believe it or, pretend that they do. What do I care if they don’t?”

“And the father?” ventured Horatia.

Grace’s shoulders shrugged just a trifle.

“Gracious, he doesn’t know about it. It’s not his affair. He wasn’t looking for children. It’s mine. Besides I’m done with him and he knows it--months ago. As a matter of fact, Horatia, I’m done with all that.”

She went on talking with her old passion for analysis.

“You mustn’t imagine that this is a heavy reformation. I haven’t any sense of being reformed. I don’t want to be reformed. Indirectly it’s because of the baby, of course. I’ve had love and now I have my baby. I’m not as greedy as most women. I’m contented with my baby. I don’t have to have love too. I have work and my child and that’s all I want. You told me once that the sum total of my philosophy was wrong. And I think I’ve found out why. It’s because it didn’t have any hope--any chance in it. Since that baby came, I’ve had a tremendous sense of new hopes--of a chance always that a further generation can straighten things out. It’s such a clean slate to write on.”

“You’re a wonderful woman, Grace,” Horatia said, “more brave and more wonderful than almost any woman I know. I’d give anything to be as brave as you are. And I’m so proud to have your daughter bear my name.”

Grace reddened a little awkwardly.

“I’ve talked a lot about myself,” she answered, “let’s have your affairs on the table. Where’s Langley?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve just come back to town?”

“I’ve just come back to Jim and I’ve not gone to the office yet. I’m going later.”

“You’re going to marry Jim soon?”

“If he’ll have me. I’ve been rotten, Grace. I’ve been cheap. I wanted to run Jim’s life--choose his friends. Then when I found I couldn’t, instead of respecting his resistance or leaving him a right to decide things for himself I left him and let Anthony Wentworth make love to me. For a while I even let myself get weakened by Anthony--or Anthony plus his possessions. But I came to. And so I’m back here to ask Jim if he will have me.”

“He’ll have you,” answered Grace dryly.

“But I’ve been so rotten--so indirect. When I think how superior I felt to you! And I’ve been a coward all along. Why, even now, in the hall I was fearing having children. And here you--alone----”

“Nonsense,” said Grace, “you were nothing of the sort. I’m quite abnormal. Occasionally good comes out of abnormality. That in the crib is the good. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you want to be like me. No--my Horatia will be like you. Normal--struggling and lovable in her youth and as you will be--normal, sure and loved in her maturity. I’m glad you are taking Jim, though. Jim won’t make you too normal, ever. Wentworth is a nice lad but not what you want. You want the divine fire burning on your own hearth. It’s a hard fire to watch and keep up but together you and Jim can do it. Wentworth would only give you fires to keep you warm.”

Horatia smiled in comprehension.

“I’m awfully glad I know you, Grace.”

“I’ll be nicer, now,” admitted Grace.

“Can I hold the baby?”

She took the soft little bundle into her arms and walked to the window with it. Below the first twilight was hanging over the city. It was gray and the lights were beginning to outline the buildings and the streets. Far away on the other side of the city was her man. What did anything matter except that he was there? Problems, their own or society’s, the struggle for existence, birth, illness, death even were glorious if you faced them gravely and with love.

The baby stirred its little fists and she held it tenderly against her. How often she had said glibly that she wanted to live, to have children, to be loved, to work? Yet how much of it had been only talk and how she had shivered when the things that went with children and life and work, pain and disappointment and questionings, had even come near her. For the first time it seemed to her that she really wanted life--wanted it full of joys and pains--wanted it beneath its romantic glamour. She felt her spirit move confidently towards the battle. Not as she had left the stone house that first morning with her heart dancing for the fun and experience. Not as she had left it this afternoon, even, quaking with hopes and fears. Now her heart was beating more steadily, less excitedly, more in time with the heart of the world into which romance and reality unceasingly pump the blood of life.

It was only the mood--the inspiration of the moment--and she knew that it would pass. But it would come again, often, though not often enough to keep the world always sunlit with glow, yet----

Gently she laid the baby in the crib and kissed Grace. “I’ll come again,” she promised, “and now I must go to Jim.”