Belle Mitchell was much taller than Anne or Hilda, with straight, very
heavy brown hair and brown eyes. She had a jolly, even disposition,
was rarely hurt herself, never knew when she hurt others, and felt
competent to manage any situation in which she found herself. Her
favorite expression was "look facts in the face." She loved Anne with
the same protecting tenderness that Anne felt for Hilda, and never
understood the chain of "highfalutin" reasoning by which Anne finally
exploded into one of her rare rages. James Mitchell had always been
a little afraid of Belle, but he agreed with Hilda that she "had a
practical streak." This was supposed to have descended to her intact,
like an heirloom, from James' Scotch grandmother.
At seventeen, Belle had looked over the possibilities of the future,
left high-school and gone into hospital training. Four years later she
was earning twenty-five dollars a week. She had then left the family
and taken an apartment with two other nurses. As she explained to Anne:
"The only way to go on caring for your family is to get away from them."
She had paid for Anne's course in a good business college and
supplemented the family income with five dollars a week, until Anne was
making enough to pay her own board. Then she stopped.
"In some silly streak she'll call 'being honest with papa,' mamma will
tell him, and some race-track tout will get that extra five. Or she'll
have a fit of rebellion and go off at a tangent in another washing
machine or bread mixer or aluminum contraption for getting a whole
dinner under one lid, and nobody will have the benefit. But kidlets,"
and here Belle had put her arms about Anne in a way that always melted
any hardness Anne felt for Belle's practicality, "this rule is not for
you. If you want any extras--please, sisterkin, ask, won't you?"
Anne had promised, her amazement at Belle's ability to do these firm,
decided things, mingling with a sense of disloyalty to her mother in
recognizing their truth. She herself could never have left the house,
nor stopped a contribution, unless she had done it as the final step
against pricks that Belle would never have felt at all.
But now, as Anne sat in the cool darkness of her own little room,
looking out into the fog-wrapped silence of the empty street, she was
not thinking of Belle, nor of Belle's management of "her case." She was
thinking again, in spite of her effort not to, of Roger Barton. He had
passed out of her life, and yet, in some inexplicable way, he seemed to
have suddenly entered it very intimately.
In the six months of his connection with Lowell & Morrison, Anne
had seen more of him than of any man in any of the three offices in
which she had worked. They had never talked of personal things, but
of business details and the generalities into which these seemed
inevitably to lead them; discussions, scarcely ever more than a few
moments long, of plays and books and Life.
Anne envied Roger his university education and Roger envied Anne the
courage which carried her, after a hard day's work, to extension
lectures at night. From these she extracted a kind of sensory
conviction of the complex and interesting world beyond her experience.
A world of clear thinking, in contrast to the muddled and confused
mental processes of her own family and of all the people whom she had
ever known; of aims higher than the daily grubbing for food and shelter
that they called living. In Roger Barton, Anne had encountered the
first person who, born into an environment like her own, had forced his
way through to this interesting and complex world. Anne often wondered
how he had done it, but as he seemed to take his own progress for
granted, and had never commented on the achievement, Anne had been too
shy to ask him. And now she would probably never see him again. Through
the monotony of the working day there would be no moment to look
forward to; no memory with which to contrast the dullness of evenings
at home.
Out in the great world open to men, Roger Barton would make another
place for himself. Before his ability, his courage and his masculinity,
everything was possible. He could leave to-morrow for distant countries
and the far strange places he expected some day so confidently to see.
He could seek beauty and romance, limited only by his own powers of
physical endurance. He could work his way in ships about the world, or
tramp alone across deserts. He was strong and free.
And she? In a few days she would begin again to look for another place.
Perhaps she would better her salary a little, but she would come and go
at fixed hours. For the greater part of the waking day she would sell
her intelligence and strength to strangers. They would know nothing of
the reality beneath, nor would she touch their lives at any vital spot.
Her father would get over this spell of depression at his losses and
his annoyance with her contradiction, and the house would run smoothly,
like a narrow gauge train along a dusty, uninteresting depression
between high hills; beyond these she would never see. It was all so
flat, so gray, so dead. Anne shivered:
"Anything as ugly as this house and the way we live is WICKED."
Through the silence of the lonely street, Belle's firm step echoed
clearly. The signal ring, three quick peals, brought Hilda running to
the stair-head. The lever on the landing clicked, far below the door
opened and closed with a slam, and Belle came gayly up the stairs,
filling every cranny of the house with the force of her cheerful
efficiency, just as if a strong breeze had been suddenly admitted.
"Hello, moms. Her Royal Highness decided she was well enough to let me
off for an hour, and so I----"
All sound suddenly ceased. Then Belle, with a brisk "Hello, papa,"
followed her mother down the hall, past the dining-room, and the
kitchen door closed behind them.
Anne shrugged impatiently. No smallest change was ever accomplished in
the Mitchell household without this background of tragedy. The news of
her action in leaving Lowell & Morrison was now being "broken" to Belle
and advice asked, exactly as if Anne had absconded with the funds or
tried to commit suicide. There were no degrees of tragedy among the
Mitchells.
"I don't care, let them talk it over until there isn't a shred of it
left. I'm not going to explain. They wouldn't understand if I talked
all night."
Anne closed the window, turned on the softly shaded lamp and chose a
book from the small bookcase at the foot of the white enameled bed.
Settled in the chintz-covered Morris chair, she opened the book and
forced herself to follow the lines to the end of the first page. But
Roger Barton's angry gray eyes moved between the words and Anne did not
even turn the leaf. The book slowly slid to her lap. Across it Anne
stared into the future.
The sound of Belle's step coming firmly along the hall drew her back to
the present with a physical reaction of having been literally lifted
from one spot and deposited in another. And before she had quite
achieved equilibrium in the moment, Belle was tapping at the door. This
tap of Belle's was not a motion of the fingers, but a denunciation of
any pretense of absence you might be intending. It not only declared
Belle's certainty that you were there but her knowledge of exactly what
you were doing.
"It's me, kidlets; may I come in?"
Anne opened the door and Belle instantly filled the entire room.
Closing the door, she smiled down upon Anne, flushed and a little
stiff with the force of her decision not to be led into any apologetic
explanation of her act.
"Well, you certainly have done it this time. I never saw such gloom,
and that's going some. You'd think the sheriff was in the parlor and
the morgue wagon at the door. Tell me the whole sad tale."
From an ivory cigarette case, "a remembrance from an officer patient,"
Belle drew a cigarette and lighted it.
"Come on, 'fess up."
"You've been out there half an hour and have heard the whole thing,
more no doubt."
"From A to Z, and inside out and I haven't got it straight yet. Why did
you do it? That's what has upset them, but they don't seem to know what
it was. Why did you?"
"That's what they both asked."
"Their intelligence must be looking up. I gather that you were asked to
do something your conscience didn't approve and that you up and quit."
"I wasn't asked to do anything. But John Lowell isn't straight and I
won't work for him."
Through her cigarette smoke, Belle stared as Hilda and James had done.
"But, kiddie, you'll never find a business man that is straight, or an
office or any place where you approve of everything. How long do you
think I'd be a nurse if I had to approve of everything I see in an
operating room; people cut up when there's no need; often carelessness
that would make your hair stand on end. My relation to the surgeon is
like yours to Lowell. I hand the instruments, and keep mum."
"And I quit."
"So I hear," Belle laughed. "But what are you going to do? Ask for a
certificate of conscience from your next employer? I say, sisterkin,
what do you think business life is?"
"That depends on what you want to make it."
"Rot. It's compromise from dawn till dark; from the cradle to the
grave. When you start out you think you're going to do wonderful
things, reorganize everything and everybody, because your own pet
ideals are the very finest ideals in captivity. And--in the end you're
lucky if you remember what they were. Why, even I, and nobody would
accuse me of being sentimental, had all kinds of ideas about what a
nurse's vocation might be, a kind of etherealized Florence Nightingale
in a perpetual ecstasy; but when I came up against real patients,
whining nervous women and men--well, Belle Nightingale gives her pills
and powders now strictly according to the doctor's orders and forgets
most of her patients with the last pay check. The whole thing's like
Mom's pot-roast--a good solid makeshift for something better."