Chapter III: Part 3

Late yesterday afternoon when I ran up the steps of 30 West Twentieth Street and the door opened and closed on me, my one sensation was relief. I had taken a cab at the ferry and I had marvelled at the dexterity with which the cabby turned and twisted through the dingy streets. Safe, not kidnapped, money still in my bag, the wonderful adventure of getting to my destination without adventure accomplished, I stepped from that cab. The cabby took my trunk from the top of his hansom, banged it on the sidewalk, accepted the dollar we had agreed upon, and waited. I waited, too, politely. Suddenly he turned very red and climbed to his perch, swearing roundly.

As I followed Miss Jackson up the stairs to the third floor I asked her why he did that. She answered vaguely that they were rude.

I came to Miss Jackson’s because her mother and my mother knew each other, and because it is eminently respectable. As we climbed the dark stairs my elation dropped from me. The hall needs the winds of heaven to blow through it. Coming back to dinner, I fairly groped through the dimness. But the dining-room was bright and cheerful. All the people seemed young. They were very gay. At dinner the whole talk was of the theatre. As I have not been to a play since I was eighteen, I sat stupidly quiet. Everybody went out after dinner—most of them to the theatre. Miss Jackson went, too. Up in my room I leaned from the window and tried to realize the wonderfulness of being in New York. Below me the street was dark, but far away across the housetops I saw a glow that I took to be the lights of Broadway. After a long time I stole down the dim, depressing stairs. I opened the door, let in the sweet, cool April air. I don’t know how long I stood there looking out at the dark, deserted street. I thought of it as a siren of the sea, calling, luring to it the youth of our wide, free land. My mind went to my little room up two dark flights of stairs. I was paying ten dollars a week for a room just about the size of the rug in front of my fireplace at home. What was the size of the working girl’s room who paid five dollars a week? How many flights of dark stairs did she have to climb? I seemed to feel the city—the city that I have not yet seen. I seemed to feel its immensity—stretching away, street after street, in overpowering sameness the length of the island. I thought of the overcrowded East Side and the foreigners herded like cattle, overflowing into the streets, and then I thought of Bobby—or had I been thinking of him through all my thoughts?—jostling in the crowded streets, loitering, listening, feeling the beat of the city’s great heart.

When I closed the door and came down the hall I saw the telephone in spite of the dimness. Almost before I knew it I had found the number I sought, my hand was on the receiver. But I did not take it down. The memory of a bright-eyed little lady bird who waited for her lover to come to her restrained me. I must be as wise as she.

I ran up to my room. A fog had crept in from the sea. The river must be near. The calls of whistles and horns came shrill and often. They seemed to give anxious warning. The city _is_ a siren. It wrapped itself closer in this white fog sheet of mystery and it called to me. Hastily I donned coat and hat, ran down the stairs and out on the street. I did not hesitate—to hesitate was to go back. In front of me, not far away, another street opened. I reached it, stood still for a moment; a wraithlike little figure hurried past. “What street is this?” I asked. Wraithlike he sped on without a reply. I hurried after him, caught him by the arm. “What street is this?” I insisted. “And which is up and which down?”

“Whut’s de matter wid y’nut?”

Humbly, I told him that I was a stranger; that I lived near and had just walked out for a little glimpse of the city. He told me to keep straight ahead until I came to Twenty-third Street, and stand there a while till the hayseeds fell off me. I gave him a dime. He graciously allowed me to accompany him. The city street widens beautifully at Twenty-third. It had seemed like one of our narrow mountain gulches. I gave my little lad another dime. I wanted to be told so much. The open space, vague in the fog, is Madison Square; the street that rolled away into the gloom, the Avenue, and the white, white foggy flare of light, Broadway.

Some weight of the city’s loneliness fell on me as I retraced my steps alone. The fog seemed denser—it might have been because the light lay behind. A few blocks down, as I turned into my own street, my own audacious thoughts brought me to a standstill. If I kept straight on I would come to Washington Square. An old schoolmate lived there.

I had no difficulty in recognizing the Arch, the cross on the church, the light that burns always. I found the number. I would have thought I had made a mistake, but I have written it so often. I went up the bare, worn steps, rang a jangly bell. A slatternly woman came to the door. Back of her I could see a dingy hall lighted by a blinking gas jet. She called my friend loudly. There was no reply. She said her work was heavier in the spring, that she was often very late.

I had pictured my artist friend in her studio home surrounded with comfort. “Hasn’t she a studio?” I stammered. The woman laughed loudly. “Her room, third floor back, ain’t no bigger ’n yo’ hand. She paints an’ sews an’ cooks, eats an’ lives an’ sleeps there, ’cept when she got jobs out.”

I turned and fled. I was trembling so I could hardly stand. Such a fragile, lovely creature—my friend back in my school-girl days. A joyous young creature, fashioned for joy. I did not want to see her; I knew instinctively that she did not want to see me.

On the street again, out of the foggy darkness, a shadow lurched toward me. I shrank against the building I was passing. It bent and looked into my face, laughed drunkenly, and passed on. I tried to move. My limbs had taken root. As I stood there flattened against that wall I heard cautious, descending footsteps, whispering voices. Some people were coming down nearby steps, and I was glad. I would follow close behind them. After what was to me a very long time, as they did not pass, I went in the direction of their voices, until I stumbled over a dark mass that lay in my path. Something told me. The slow, cautious steps, the whispering voices—I dropped to my knees on the pavement. The face I lifted and looked into was a young girl’s. She was unconscious. I sprang up. There was movement in my limbs now. I ran, breathless, into a man. I caught him by the arm, pleading with him to hurry; I dragged him to the girl on the pavement. I gasped out all I knew.

He took a flashlight from somewhere about him, knelt, looked at the girl, and I—I looked at the pool of blood widening on the pavement. I had not seen it before. She was dying. I dropped down by her, too. “Oh, poor little girl,” I cried, “why did you come to this city of Gomorrha? Why didn’t you stay at home?”

“See here”—the light flashed full in my own face, the low, cold voice bit into my spirit as a bullet of steel might have burrowed in my flesh—“how do I know that what you’ve told me is on the level?”

Stupidly I stared at him. Whose face was this—as familiar as my own viewed in the looking-glass?

The eyes looking into mine were suddenly confused, the apology he gave murmured. He stared as though I bewildered him. He pushed his hat back. I hadn’t recognized Bobby Haralson, but I knew that lock of hair on his brow. Had I not once watched a flame devour it? Head and heart awhirl, I smiled at him. “Mr. Haralson,” I said, and I laughed outright. “I am on the level.”

There was the sound of approaching footsteps. He flashed the light out. “So you know me?” he said.

“Who does not?” I answered. “But you do not know me, honest, now.”

“I do—and I don’t,” he said.

Not far away a figure loomed; it brought us back to the poor little girl that lay there so quietly between us.

“You must get away, quickly. Officer!” he called. His voice has a carrying quality if it is so low, for soon an answering hail came through the fog.

“Will you go? Go!” he commanded. “I’ll see this through.”

“I can’t,” I said, and I suddenly knew that I spoke out of a vast content. “I’m lost. It’s no use to tell me west. I don’t know west.”

“West what?” Again his words bit into me like they were steel.

“Twenty.” The officer was only a few steps away and Bobby fairly forced it from me.

“The Arch, the Avenue, Twentieth Street, then to your left.”

Obediently, I did it all. I am safe at Miss Jackson’s. But, oh, will I ever sleep again? When I close my eyes I see the girl’s fair little face, that widening pool of blood; and then I see Bobby’s eyes—the puzzled stir of memory in them.

_April 17th._

I fell asleep at daylight this morning. When I waked the breeze was tossing the curtains, the sun shining, there was a sense of joyousness in the morning. I shopped with an agent—I could not have shopped without one. We lunched at a cunning tearoom just off the Avenue. I ordered just about what mammy would have for a guest of ours: soup, broiled chicken, two vegetables, a salad, a sweet, and coffee. I nearly fainted when I saw my bill. And then the tip! I would not have given it, but I saw it offered at a nearby table. I was confused to give it, but the pretty, refined looking girl did not seem to mind accepting it.

This afternoon, by appointment, I met Mr. Elliott. Mr. Elliott is a member of the firm. He is young, tall, slender. Somehow I thought all publishers were middle-aged, stocky as to build, and with close-cut white moustaches.

Mr. Elliott asked me if I had ever dined at Mouquin’s. His face was a compliment when I told him that like a little mountain boy of my acquaintance I had never “ben nowhar nur seen nothin’.” I _do like_ Mr. Elliott. My heart is almost leaping out of me! I drove straight to Mrs. Christopher again. She told me all the literary people go to Mouquin’s. If Bobby should be there to-night! If we should meet!

_One_ A. M.

Out of gratitude to Mrs. Christopher I must acknowledge that the girl who looked back at me from the mirror to-night was a stranger to me. Mr. Elliott did not know her, either. As I came down the boarding-house stairs—the parlours at present are occupied by people from the South and the stuffy hall is the only reception-room—I flushed under his gaze. It is most bewildering to emerge from a Marsville spinster to a New York belle.

Mouquin’s. A confused memory of a flight of steps, a clutter of tables, a sea of faces.

“Aren’t you hungry? Don’t you like your oysters? It is a trifle late for them.”

We were seated. I knew that. It was Mr. Elliott’s voice. I knew that, too. I was glad, although he seemed so far away, that I had not lost him. The plate that was rising, falling, lurchingly, drunkenly, held oysters——

“Drink your cocktail.” Out of the blur of things he pushed it toward me. Obediently I drank it. I saw that the oysters numbered six, that their shells were as pink and polished as a lady’s finger-nails. Obediently I ate them—the oysters, not the shells.

“What makes you so quiet to-night? But maybe you aren’t having a good time?”

With the help of the wine that sparkled and bubbled at my right hand, blessed little helper in time of need, I did not have to give account of my appetite again; I was making quite respectable headway with my chicken. Feverishly I assured Mr. Elliott that I was having the loveliest time but one I’d ever had in my life.

Mr. Elliott beamed. “Will you tell me about that time?” he asked.

But women have their little reserves. The lovely time to which I had reference was a mountain storm I once survived, on Craggy, six thousand feet above sea level, separated from my party, having followed a cattle path by mistake, and—_alone_. This time was just as lovely as that. Then, after a terrified scurrying here and there, I had gone back to the mountain top to wait. Out of what had seemed an innocent sky an electric storm broke. Lashing his steeds with whips of fire, Apollo drove them across the boiling heavens. At each ear-crashing report of thunder the earth threatened to crumble, hurling me down through bottomless space. With the sharp hissings of snakes the lightning fell about me. Rain-drenched, storm-torn, but too terrified to brave the electric fires darting across the mountain’s top to what seemed safety under the big rock where a flock of frightened sheep huddled, I took the storm in the open. When it had rolled away the sheep no longer huddled—I was indeed alone—they lay still.

“Does it meet your approval?” Mr. Elliott put the direct question to me, and somehow I knew it had been asked before. I looked down at my plate helplessly—we had reached the salad course—I tried to rouse my laggard brain. Approval of what, and what was approval?

“It gets my goat!” The words came from my lips. My ears heard them. And the fright of the foolish words cleared my brain.

“What!” There was astonishment, there was amusement, there was also a puzzled intentness in the eyes that looked into mine, and I stammered that the girl who sat at the next table—the girl who looked so cultured and smartly got up—had just said it, and that it was new to me, but it sounded like an idiom of the street.

With that careless, satiated New York glance Mr. Elliott’s eyes swept the girl. “Beef to the heel,” he said heartlessly.

“Beef to the heel!” That puzzled me, too.

We had drained our coffee cups when two people who sat at a table behind us passed—a man and a woman—Bobby Haralson and Dicky. I recognized Bobby as I came in; the lovely droop of Dicky’s back is not unfamiliar to me, either.

“That’s Bob Haralson—you’ve heard of him—one of our biggest men, and his biggest work is still in him. He’s the nicest, most lovable, queerest fellow you ever did see. He has hosts of friends, but mostly, he lives to himself. He’d give his last dollar to a friend and go hungry himself; and once I knew him to refuse to be introduced to a rich fellow of power in the literary world because that man belonged soul and body to a corporation—had been bought. That’s Bob Haralson! I often see him here, but I never saw him here with a woman before. Come to think of it, I never saw him anywhere before with a woman—not much in his line, women. But they seemed to be having a corking time. I never saw him so animated. That little witch—pretty, wasn’t she?—has got him going. I’d have asked him over to be introduced had he been alone.”

As we left the restaurant Mr. Elliott asked me to go with him to a little theatre where the one-act plays were all thrills. I couldn’t tell him that if I had any more thrills he’d probably have to call an ambulance and send me to a hospital; I couldn’t explain that as far as I was concerned the play was done, curtain down, and lights out.

We went. We sat in darkness. The darkness was a great relief. Mr. Elliott could not see me. I sat there with tightly shut eyes until, at a stir among the people about me, I heard some one say a man had fainted. “It gets my goat!” I murmured. Fortunately there was quite a little stir about us and Mr. Elliott did not hear me.

_April 18th._

Some hours ago, when I left New York, having decided to run up to Plymouth and finish up the work on the book by the sea, Mr. Elliott put me in the coach, having showered me with books, flowers, and magazines. I opened the flowers in the cab, and I stared at them and at him.

“Don’t you like them?”

Did I like orchids and lilies of the valley? Bobby’s Christmas gift to me? I pulled up. I wasn’t going to be beef to the heel. I joined the New York procession—and I think I made good.

There’s a little slit of a mirror in the coach, right here by my chair, and I take a peep at myself. Blessings on Mrs. Christopher, I don’t look like a spinster, and from Marsville. And then—then I bury my face in nice Mr. Elliott’s flowers, drinking in their perfume, and splashing them with some very big and salty tears.

_April 25th._

I have spent the morning in Plymouth’s quaint old graveyard—such a soft, sunny, springlike morning. I have looked at the dim old slabs that bear testimony to the virtue of departed wives. I am sitting on the grave of a virtuous wife now, looking past the stones, past the big rock the nimble Pilgrims leaped on when they landed on free soil, far out to where sea and sky meet. Had I been a Puritan maid I would have said to my lover when we climbed to this hill soft days like this and looked to sea: “Dear boy, with my heart I give you all that women who are like me give to one man—the thoughts I have kept for you, the lips I have kept for you. If you had a great searchlight and should throw it back over the road of my life there’s not a single little bend that it would shame me for your eyes to see; but when I’m dead, don’t put my virtue on a tombstone.”

_April 26th._

This has been a heavenly day. Mr. Elliott came to Boston on business and ran down to Duxbury to see some friends of his, and all of them motored over to Plymouth and got me. I lunched at the loveliest home in Duxbury. The sea was almost in the back porch. Mr. Elliott came back in the machine with me and took the train for Boston. When he left he held my hands in a mighty close friendly clasp, and he said—never mind what he said. It is lovely of Mr. Elliott to be so good to me, and it’s comforting down to my toes. For some idiotic reason I want to cry again. I won’t cry! And I won’t sit here. (I have climbed to the old graveyard, and seated myself on the slab of a virtuous spouse.) I need all my nerve force. It must sparkle in the changes I’ve got to put in my book. And I know why I’m nervous, and I know why I want to cry. It’s always satisfactory when you can chase an emotion to its lair——I was taken to the graveyard when I was very little—mammy used to take me with her when she went to put flowers on my great-aunt’s grave, the lady whose false teeth fell into mammy’s care; and she (mammy) was always so solemn on these occasions—it was before the day of Christian Science—there was death then, and hell, and a devil. I feel quite cheerful since I have analyzed the teary feeling.

_April 26th._
_Night._

A letter from Dicky forwarded to New York and on here. It lilts like the song of the happy little wren that was singing in the big cedar tree at the garden gate the day I left home.

“Oh, Caroline,” Dicky says, “I want to go out under the stars to-night at home and bury my face in the pansies that always riot in your April garden. With their soft little faces close, close to mine, I want to tell them a secret. I want to tell it to you, too, Caroline. But not yet—not yet.”

I go out under the stars, through the quiet streets, and down to the quiet sea. The night is poignantly sweet and beautiful. Dicky, little sister, child of my love, keep your secret. I could not bear to hear it yet—not yet.

_April 27th._

A telegram from Bobby. He wants to come to Plymouth. He has something to tell me. It is Bobby’s chivalry that makes him feel he should go through the form of asking me for Dicky. I have wired no. There’s a little kodak of him that I cut from a magazine and put in my little silver frame. I can reach out my hand and touch it here where I sit, and, vaguely, it comforts me.

I have faced it. I love Bobby. To love—it is to give. Bobby’s wife must give. The hands that take into their keeping that precious thing—his genius—what tender, comprehending hands they must be. There’ll be times, lots of ’em, when Bobby’s wife will have to do all the loving for two. There’ll be times when he will thrust her out, and if she sits whimpering on the doorstep that it’s cold out there, heaven help her—how he’ll hate her. There’ll be times when the work presses, when he’s distrait—knows she’s there just as he knows the house furnishings are there, bed near centre of room, bureau against west wall, light above——If she gets frightened at the wilted leaves and jerks his love for her out of his body to look at the roots too often, then heaven help you, Robert Haralson.

Bobby, Bobby, I’d know at a glance—without a glance. When you opened the door I’d _feel_, Bobby. Sometimes her tired-out man child quivering with his day’s toil asks mother love of his wife. She’s got to be counsellor, comforter, friend—comrade with whom to forget life’s cares. Out of all the world she’s got to be the one woman that is his _need_. I am your _need_! If disaster stripped you of all that the world has showered on you, if it reduced you to the hurdy-gurdy man who grinds his organ under your window—Bobby, Bobby, would Dicky _love_ the gathering of the pennies?

_April 28th.
Morning._

Bobby wires again: “What are you up to, Caroline, that you didn’t let me know you were here, that Dicky didn’t know; that Elliott wasn’t told it was Dicky with me; that you were so naughty in the Square the other night as to laugh at my confusion? Little girl with eyes like moonflowers, all right for youse. And mum’s the word.”

“Her eyes, full and clear, with their white-encircled, gray irises, are like moonflowers.” That’s what Bobby says on page 131 about his heroine. And back in one of his first letters to me, “Please turn to page 131 of the book and try to think whose eyes I tried to describe.”

_April 28th.
Noon._

On the heels of Bobby’s telegram I have this letter from him.

_To-day, Wednesday._

MY DEAR CAROLINE HOWARD:

Please hurry up and get all the sea air you want, and go up
to Boston and let them show you Milk Street and the _Youth’s
Companion_ building (that’s all there is there). Oh, I forgot the
beautiful men. Look ’em over! I’ve seen ’em. They all carry a
black network bag with a MS. play, and Emerson, and two watercress
sandwiches for lunch in it. All right for youse. Do you know I
have an idea that you’ll meet your fate up there among the _Baked
Beans_. I’m told those Apollo “Belvidears” always take to a girl
that’s both intelligent and good looking. Get that? Well, I won’t
send you a wedding present—so, there!

But, speaking seriously, we’ve had rain here all day. It’s been
cold, too—kind of like late of an evening when you go down barefoot
in the ten-acre medder to drive the cow home, and your mind is
on whippoorwills and stone bruises and Cherokee roses and hot
corn-pone, and the little girl with the white sunbonnet on the
adjoining farm that you saw picking cherries in the lane, and who
you (I don’t mean you, I mean me) fondly imagine is going to come
over to your farm some day and scold you when the cow doesn’t come
home, but who really runs away with a patent churn agent and winds
up by keeping a shooting gallery in South Bend, Indiana.

Oh, well, what’s the _odds_?

Hope you are feeling _quite well_ after your long trip from the
soggy south.

Now while you are up “No’th” just turn yo’self a’ loose and have
a good time. Down in our country the old-time opinion is that
_Liberty Jams_ everything into a bad shape, but it ain’t so. No—the
real and genuine liberty sets you _Free_; it doesn’t cramp you or
lower your ideals _at All_.

A great many wise people have learned that; _you see Them
Everywhere in Greater New York_. And I think you would like to
bring your cow up here and spend the remainder of your time. You
can live nicely on _fifty cents a week_; but a great deal better on
_half a billion_ dollars.

Since I have discovered what a help printed matter is to me,
I simply love to write letters. I know a man who writes 1,900
letters a day to his _Loved One_. But don’t you think he is kind of
“crowdin’” the mourners?

Please ma’am write to me some more right away; I like to hear from
you.

P.S. I’ve had a great time chopping up the papers and building this
letter. You’ll excuse my frivolousness, won’t you?

BOB.

Bobby, I condone your offense—time spent cutting up the papers, time worth so many cents per word, to amuse me. Times spent together when apart, how close they come.

_April 29th.
Morning._

How the sea flashes, and the blue, blue sky flashes, too. There’s a boat drifting this way. It looks like a white-winged gull afloat, a messenger of joy. How the waves sing, and their swelling song is all about a little girl in a white sunbonnet picking cherries in the lane. I remember that day, too, Bobby. It was a picnic. You climbed the tree and I caught up my dress to catch the big ripe cherries. When the picnic was over and we got home my gentle mother scolded over the ruined dress. She gave it to the washerwoman’s little girl.

How the waves sing, and their shouting song is—Bobby’s _loved one_.

_Afternoon._

The day’s mood has changed. A cold wind blows in from the sea. If mammy could see me out here on this deserted stretch of shore in the rain and the spray that dashes on me from the stormy, inrushing waves she’d say her prayers in thankfulness that she put the old storm coat and rubbers in, for I’ve got them on.

How fierce the rush of the waves! Something as elementally savage as their assault of the shore stirs in me, writhes in its travail—is born. Bobby is _mine_.

Dicky, light-hearted, laughing child who would pluck the flower of love as a baby gathers a posy, forgive me.

When the day is hot and the road is long, and the flower of love droops, what then, Dicky?

_Night._

I have wired Bobby that I will be in New York Wednesday. It will take me that long to finish the changes in the book. I wired him that my train gets in about five-thirty, and that if he likes I will take dinner with him.

_April 30th._

Bobby’s wire reads:

Sure, Mike, I’ll be on hand at 5:30 Wednesday to welcome you on
your retreat from Bosting. And don’t bother yourself about the
train getting in at six or later, for I’ll be on the job and I’ll
be there when you get there.

I have already ordered the lye hominy and turnip greens for dinner,
and you’ll be properly looked after by the committee of one when
you hit the town.

Hoping these few lines will find you the same, I remain,

Yours continuously,
B.

_May 1st._

Bobby wasn’t at the train. If he was, we missed each other. I wasn’t conscious of it on the train, but now I know I pictured him there at the station, standing just a little in advance of the mass of people; vaguely, I think my mind ran the gamut of earth’s meetings and thought of dim shores, not of earth, where that one who goes first must surely await the other. To the whir of the wheels as they ate up the miles that lie between Boston and New York my heart sang, Bobby’s loved one, Bobby’s _loved one_. I was in a maze of vague, happy thought—and he wasn’t there—he didn’t meet me.

It is 12 P. M. now. I went with Miss Jackson to a horrid little show, and when we came in I could not believe there was not a message of some sort for me.

_May 2d._

I stayed in all morning in such a tense state of expectancy that it has left me limp. How glad I am that Dicky does not know I am here—I simply can’t see Dicky yet. I am at sea as to Bobby’s reason for not meeting me, at sea that no message from him comes to me, but one thing I know: I can trust his, “Mum’s the word, Caroline.”

Mrs. Christopher and I shopped this afternoon. Afterward we had tea at the Astor and went down to the Waldorf and sat in Peacock Alley. Such a mix up of fine clothes and commonness. The women have hard faces, painted, world-weary, they are too much of—oh, everything: too red as to lips, too black as to eyebrows, too gold as to hair; they don’t walk—they can’t, poor things—their general appearance as they mince along the Avenue is that of a procession of mannikins done up in slit bolster cases. Bah! It all makes me think of a big rock near Marsville. Once I passed it with a mountaineer. “When I wuz a child,” he said, “that wuz a monster rock—the masterest (biggest) rock I ever seed. Hit’s dwindled sence I wuz a child.” Since I reached here New York’s dwindled.

“Caroline Howard,” I said to myself, sternly, out in the street again, “it isn’t New York that has dwindled—it is you. Robert Haralson didn’t meet you. Whatever his reason for a dime he could have ’phoned from his home; a slot machine would have cost him a nickel, a note a two-cent stamp.”

My shoulders braced, my chin went up, my spirit caught the spirit of this great wonder-town. Night fell. The magic of night on Broadway—the flashing signs, the whizzing motors, the hurrying, surging throngs, the snatches of speech that drift to one’s ears, there on the street where all seems youth, laughter, joy—human documents, the snatches of speech one hears. “How can I leave you here?” I heard the words spoken by a plain anxious-faced woman, and the overdressed, under-dressed, doll-faced girl’s answer: “You poor dear! How you worry! What have I to fear? New York’s lovely, and my job’s lovely, and my boss is loveliest of all.”

I heard a man’s voice, such a cultured, hearty sort of a voice, but a note of bitterness and discouragement rang through it. “That man—I gave him his chance—brought him here. Look where he is now, and look where I am. He is not an artist. His success is not based on a solid foundation. But look at him—money—fame—what’s the use of holding to one’s ideals, of being faithful to them. What’s the use of—anything?”

My train goes out in an hour. City of laughter and of tears, of power that can crush as a giant foot crushes an ant, marvel of the world—I bid you adieu.

_May 4th.
Sunday Night._

I’ve broken the Sabbath by travelling all day. In town I hired a buggy to bring me home. Our hacks do not run on Sunday. It is raining. It has rained all the way. I had a silent driver who never spoke to me, seldom to his horses. I was glad that it was raining; glad that my driver was silent. My thoughts were as vague, as blurred as the dim mountain forms seen through the rain. We drove through Marsville without meeting a soul. As we passed the Duckett houses that forever watch each other like antagonists, I saw that poor old lady slipping home from doing up his work; I saw him rocking on his front porch in placid content. A sudden rage against this man-made world seized me.

I scrambled in my bag for the little gift to her, leaped out, and sent the man on home with my baggage.

He greeted me jauntily. He was just sitting there counting his blessings. He could eat three as hearty meals a day as he had ever et, and when night come sleep sound as a mouse in a shuck pen—the Lord had been good to the old man.

I wasn’t hypocrite enough to take the hand extended. I wanted to shake the life out of his smiling old body.

“Has he been good to the old lady?” I asked. He only stared at me. “Do you know you told me you swam your horse through swollen streams once to get to a little log church because you knew your congregation would be waiting for you there? You wanted to preach that sermon that day that some soul might be saved that you might never reach again. You said you didn’t want the devil to get anybody. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” he quavered, “I remember.”

“Well,” I stormed, “it’s my honest belief that he will get you. I wonder what the God you have preached all these years means to do with men like you who are mean to their wives and cloak their meanness to poor feeble old women under smooth-sounding texts.”

He stood up, his faded blue eyes flashed, his pallid lips under the straggly white moustache worked. When he dropped back in his chair, having uttered no word, I thought maybe I had killed him. But I did not care. He would have gone to his Maker with a little preparation he would otherwise not have had. I stood over him silent, inexorable.

“She got mad because——”

“Never mind what she got mad about,” I said. “For fifty-nine years and six months she didn’t get mad. And she’s not mad now. I saw her slipping out of the back of your house just a minute ago. She’s been doing up your night work. You ought to go over there and get down on your knees—the knees you have worn out praying the Lord to make you the sort of a man you have not desired to be—and ask her to forgive you, and bring her home.”

Some good honest blood left in the old veins crept up and tinged the pallid, sunken cheeks. And, suddenly, all my fierceness was gone. I was pleading for the love that had betrayed them at the end of a lifetime. I had his old, old hands in mine that looked so young and strong by contrast, and I was leading him back to their courtship days, to the time when their one little child was born and she almost lost her life. Some of the story I knew from him, and some of it I knew from her. Before I finished the tears were dropping down his cheeks. “The old man has some lonely hours,” he said. Gayly I told him they were over; gayly I pressed my gift into his hand, and I fairly pushed him into her gate.

As I hurried on I suddenly realized that the rain was over, that the eastern hills were sparkling under a giant rainbow, and that Ellinor Baxter was rushing toward me with outstretched hands. Ellinor threw as many of her pupils as she could on her assistant, and, with the help of one of the older girls, took my pupils in my absence.

“How radiant you look!” I said as I kissed her. “I was afraid you would be all dragged out with the children.”

“The children,” she said, vaguely, and then flushing like a rosy girl she plunged into stories of the children’s good behaviour. She turned and walked homeward with me. Was it that fleeting brightness in the sky that made her seem so young and bright and strangely changed?

_May 15th._

School closed to-day. Commencement was quite a triumph. Monday morning I went to work in the schoolroom, examinations and commencement exercises on hand. Suddenly the play I had seen with Miss Jackson and thought so bad came into my mind. The more I thought of it the better it seemed. I decided on tableaux, my ideas got from that play. There were just fourteen days in which to work it out, but the children hailed it with joy. It was something new; it was something different. Ellinor’s help was invaluable. Marsville was delighted with it. Ellinor _is_ changed. If there was anybody here to love I’d think she was in love. She was running to angles, and now she’s got some pretty curves, the gray hairs are quite hidden by the new way she is doing her lovely, heavy, red-brown hair, and her soft brown eyes—they are looking out on the spring world with a new, wistful expression in them. She smiles so easily and she hums snatches of tender old songs.

_May 22d.
Midnight._

This afternoon there was an unfamiliar knock at the door and I ran down without waiting for mammy. It was Mr. Elliott. He looked so foreign to the old place, so New Yorkish standing there, that quite without warning, in the way I do things, while my lips were speaking a welcome and he was following me into the sitting-room, something within me was singing: “How could I know I should love thee afar, when I did not love thee anear?” But that something within me was not singing about Mr. Elliott, although I saw the glad light in his eyes. My own eyes saw the sun-shot green May-mist of the trees in Madison Square, the clock’s big face above the treetops, against the sky’s soft blue the radiant, triumphant Diana. My ears heard the roll of wheels on the Avenue, the clang of cars on Broadway; my veins felt the beat of the city’s hurrying, feverish life.

Out under the pines where mammy brought tea and helped me, with the dignity of a departed day, I still felt alien to it all. Mr. Elliott praised the beaten biscuit, and she told him as a mark of special favour the story of receiving my great aunt’s teeth when she was dying. I could not seem to belong to the scene—the big waving pine plumes against the spring sky, the ancient house drowsing in peace, the soft sweep of the hills, the mountains against the sky like a string of sapphires. But when Mr. Elliott said good-bye, when he caught my hands and poured out a flood of eager words, “Would I? Could I?” I came back to reality.

Did it mean _that_, this feel of the city? Could I go back and live there with Mr. Elliott—dear, charming, nice Mr. Elliott. For one swift instant I was swept by his belief in what we together might make of life, and it seemed so infinitely more than I could make of life alone. For one swift instant that old terror—the inevitableness of human change—pierced me like a sword. Always I have felt a contemptuous sort of pity for Jane Joyner, who lives near, toothless and untidy and incapable as she is, with the house running over with dirty children. Was Jane to be pitied? Jane whose youth and beauty were not dead but had passed into another form of life—lived in her children. Was she out of harmony with life’s great laws? Big and fierce my heart cried out, “No!” It was I who was outside of life, not Jane. Her man’s arm went round her shoulders nights when she stood over the kitchen stove. Her baby lifted its dirty, loving, laughing little face to hers as it clutched her knees. Taking my lonely after-supper walk I had seen them through the open kitchen door. What had I? A dream that was bodiless, life emptied of the big, vital things. And if I sent Mr. Elliott away as I sent the others, the boy lovers who came over the mountains to tell me what he is telling me now? What have I left that is more than I refuse? In the bare, honest moment I faced it. Bleak and stark in its honesty, the truth faced me. After work hours when I walk in the twilight and look in Jane Joyner’s kitchen the thing that comes close to my heart is a dream without a body—nothing more.

“I thought I was happy until you came along,” Mr. Elliott was saying. “Then I found out how lonely my gayety was.”

He is strong and fine, capable of making a woman happy, and I hold the future of our two lives in my hands. And then he was drawing me to him. Almost, his lips touched mine. The quick revolt, the wave of physical nausea—it was as though an icy, sinister wind had swooped down on my blooming flowers and shrivelled them.

With a desolate little smile I drew back from him, an alien standing outside of all that might have been mine. I bade him good-bye, and to-night, when I walked by Jane’s kitchen, open to the soft night, I turned my eyes away, afraid to look in on the sweet little home scene. In all my life I have never felt so alone.

_Wednesday Morning._

Mr. Elliott sent back a wonderful basket of fruit. It came over on the hack and the whole village is agog over it. The gossip has disturbed dear old mammy greatly. She suggests that we still the gossip and flatter our neighbours by giving a party. Then they won’t know what to think. I have consented. Mammy is a woman of action. The party comes off this afternoon. The house hums with activity.

_Wednesday Afternoon._

The party has passed into history. I got only the littlest taste of the contents of that beautiful basket Mr. Elliott sent me. Everybody was here, and they all seemed to have such a good time. Even the reconciled Ducketts tottered over. What a success I seem to be at reuniting severed hearts. If my book is a failure I may set up an establishment of the sort—go into a trance and vision dazzling futures for people. Well, how do I like the idea? Seven days ago had I put the question to myself my spirit would have flung back in bitterness, “Physician, heal thyself.”

For seven nights, no matter which way I willed my feet to go, they have led me past Jane’s kitchen door. Alone in the soft spring darkness, in the soft wet darkness some of the nights, I have faced my life. I have looked in that open door till the bitterness and the loneliness have gone out of me. Last night when her man’s arms went about her as she dished their supper, when her child’s arms reached up to her, I looked in, not in bitterness, not in pity of self, not in aching loneliness, but in love. It is wonderful when you can look in on untidy Janes at their kitchen tasks and feel close to their happiness. Life’s supremest gift is hers. Almost, it was mine. Not a makeshift, not a compromise—life’s supremest gift. Across sunlit waves a boat like a white-winged gull set sail for me. Almost, it reached me. How my heart went out to that white drifting boat of prophecy! How the waves sang! Bobby’s _loved one_. Sunlit waves and flashing white-winged boat are gone. But the singing soul of those words shall keep my heart young. It shall be tender to the young and happy, pitiful to the old and alone, compassionate to all untouched by love, whether they scoff in unbelief or whether they would lay down their lives for love.

Oh, how tired I am! And how heavy the silence is here in the bridelike, white loveliness of my May garden! And how this silence differs from its fall silences! The silence holds resignation in the fall—this is tense with expectancy. The snowballs that have come so late this year are swaying, they seem to be beckoning to some one, but there is no wind. And the lilies of the valley, late, too—my flower children delayed their blooming till I came home—are swaying; they are pouring out their fragrance—it is poignantly, deliciously sweet, but I feel no wind.

Something is the matter with this garden and with me. I am quivering all over as if with intense excitement. The party has tired me out. Just then, when John opened the gate, I almost leaped from this bench.

The letters John has brought me are from Mr. Elliott and Dicky. I open Mr. Elliott’s first—a woman always opens a man’s letter first. It is a fine, manly letter, and it ends:

“You said you once knew Bob Haralson. He has been at death’s door—struck down without a moment’s warning—appendicitis—a knife quick or death operation. It was the day you came down from Boston. I remember date because you came down from Boston. Haralson is creeping about. I saw him yesterday.”

The lines of mountains dance dizzily. I shut my eyes—shut out the spring glory, my fingers making a pressing blackness against my eyeballs. I try to imagine the world this spring day with Bobby gone out of it. Then my heart leaps madly. It is explained—_explained_.

I can’t sit still, so I climb to the hilltop. I am calmer in motion. I can see the village from the hilltop. It is being claimed by the twilight, the soft, slow, lingering spring twilight. There must be a lot of moisture to make such a brilliant aftermath. The heavens are so pink they have tinged the eastern hills. League on league the cloud waves blush pink as the heart of a seashell. The whole world glows. My mood catches the sky’s glowing mood. It is explained. He has been ill unto death, but he is not dead—he is alive—_alive_.

Something drops from my belt and I pick it up and stare at it stupidly. It is Dicky’s little letter. Dicky will know about Bobby. She will explain their presence together that night at Mouquin’s.

“Caroline, is your right hand paralyzed that I don’t hear from you? Do a lot of little tow-headed mountaineers and a garden that I know is at its loveliest now mean more to you than I do? I can’t understand your silence. I am coming home. I am to have my vacation now, and I am to keep on having it. Somebody’s with me. He is the secret of the prolonged vacation. I guess it will be in June. That’s the loveliest time of all. He will be here only a day or two, three at the longest, and I hate to think of him at that dinky little Marsville hotel. Hotel! Ye gods! Come to New York and we will show you some hotels. Dearest, won’t you, won’t you, have him home with us? There are some such ducks of places to spoon these moonlit nights in that heavenly rose garden of yours.”

Did I cry out in that sharp pain, or was it some wounded thing out there in the shadow of the woods? Steadily I finish the letter. It is to-day—now, at twilight—when the hack gets in, that Dicky and her lover are coming. She apologizes that we do not know earlier, but mammy and I are equal to any emergency. I do feel sorry for mammy, but I walk on straight into the sunset glare, leaving mammy to her fate. That is my only sensation—I am sorry for mammy. She does love to splurge when company comes.

Far down the road I see a buggy. It is coming this way. There are two people in it, but it is too far away to recognize faces. It is two men. It stops. One man gets out, the other turns the buggy around and drives back toward the village. The man who got out of the buggy walks on in the rose-red haze that wraps the world. The lilies of the valley that I thrust in my belt send out a sudden fragrance—it is the trembling of my body that has shaken them. I stop because I can’t walk on. I lean against a friendly tree-trunk.

The man comes on, moving slowly, feebly, I see as he gets nearer. I think of trivial things, as we do in crisic moments. Bobby is taller than I thought. The hat he is wearing adds distinction to one who is already distingué. The crease in his trousers will be copied by the young men of Marsville. From somewhere in me a faint satisfaction stirs that the party has left me wearing my best new gown, my hair done in a New York way.

Almost at my side Bobby stops, panting a little. I speak first. Women always do. I feel sure Eve opened the conversation when Adam waked from the sleep that deprived him of a rib and supplied him with a wife.

“So you have come again—and not alone this time.” It is not in the least what I meant to say.

“Did you know that I came?” Bobby’s low voice holds a note of surprise. “How did you know? But I suppose the boy told you.”

“I was in the garden. I saw you. I know why you came, and why you left.”

“Why did I leave?”

“You ran from a youthful ideal.”

“Men have done more foolish things,” Bobby’s answer comes gravely.

“And wiser.” I hate the mocking laughter that escapes my lips.

“I don’t understand you.” His face has grown whiter; it has changed subtly. “Has Elliott been here? Is it Elliott?”

I sweetly assure him that Mr. Elliott has been here, and I manage to leave the impression that he may be coming again.

This time Bobby’s face goes close to black. With a mocking little bow he bids me good-bye, turns, goes down the road. He marches straight ahead. I have never seen a lion stalk through an African jungle, but I think of one as I look at him. Where is he going? Where is Dicky’s lover going? A dumb sort of fright grips me. I spin down the road to where he marches breast forward with never a backward look—if a woman can spin in these narrow-not-made-to-overtake-anybody’s-lover New York frocks.

“Bobby,” I cry, hard upon him, “stop!”

He turns. Not the Bobby of my letters, not the Bobby of my dreams, not the Bobby of Washington Square, a politely impatient-to-be-gone stranger.

Always, it is the unexpected that overtakes me. To my amazed surprise I wet with salty tears my New York finery.

“I’m tired, Bobby,” I gasp. “I’ve been having a party—and I’m not used to having parties. That’s what makes me such a cat. And, oh, Bobby, you’ll have to pardon things—Dicky just sprung your coming on us.”

“Dicky didn’t know that I was coming.” He speaks slowly, he takes my face in his hands and looks down at me, a long, deep look. The hard, black look on his own face has lifted.

As I try to tell him that Dicky didn’t tell me he was ill, that I have just learned it from Mr. Elliott’s letter, as I try to tell him what the bright May world would be to Dicky with him gone out of it, and as I flounder that I hope they will be heavenly happy, I splash more tears on my pretty clothes.

Bobby’s face flashes—all that a woman could want or dream of comes into it.

“Dicky didn’t know I was in the hospital. I went in under an assumed name. When a fellow’s tied up with publishers and theatrical people like I am——” Bobby drops the subject as one that holds no further interest. “If I had died, would it have spoiled the May world for you, Caroline?” There is a sharp note of anxiety in his voice.