The next day Anne went home and the following Monday was back in the
loft. A long period of stagnant waiting had ended in a new burst of
hope and the place vibrated with the rush of people going and coming.
Like the three prongs of a huge fork, Black Tom, Roger and Katya caught
up on their unflagging faith and indefatigable energy the smaller plans
and physical limitations of those about them.
Often Anne came from a revery to find that her hands had been idle on
the keyboard for a long time. There was no safe, quiet spot anywhere
in life. The surface at every point was heaving, just as the surface
of the earth had heaved and cracked on the day of the Great Quake,
torn open by forces within itself. Until then the earth had been the
most stable thing in the universe. Sun and moon came and went; stars
gleamed and died away; rain beat upon it and the wind swept over it,
but, to human sense, the old, old earth was still. And then, in a
moment, without warning, its patience exhausted, it had risen and like
an angry giant, struggled to hurl aside the pigmies crawling upon it.
Anne had never forgotten that feeling, as the earth began to rock, the
feeling of being grasped and personally shaken by a malignant force
beyond her power to propitiate, a force growing more and more furious,
illimitable in its anger. In a moment it might release her or it might
go on forever until it had annihilated every living thing.
There was no permanence, no sureness, no stability, no stillness
anywhere. Often Anne closed her machine and slipped away unable to
endure the noise and confusion. But out upon the streets the noise
and confusion continued. People hurried everywhere. Cars clanged by
obeying many desires to go in many directions. Newsboys shrieked their
announcements of murders, explosions, and terrible deeds of violence.
Sometimes Anne sought quietness by the sea, but, gripped in the law of
ebb and flood, the sea roared or moaned or whimpered to its degree of
strength.
As the weeks passed, the longing for a place of stillness, one little
spot of silence, grew to a desperate need. She must have it. Somewhere
it must exist, this small place of peace where she could stop for
a moment. She thought of the meeting to which she had gone with
Charlotte, but when she visioned the interval that preceded filled
with the assertions of false optimism, the hymns of gloating joy, the
sickening testimony, she could not face them. Then the silence had
caught her but Anne knew that if she sought it deliberately in these
surroundings it would escape. Perhaps, somewhere else, in other faiths,
if she searched she would find it. Anne began to search.
And now, that all her thought was turned to find Silence, she found
others seeking, too. Some sought silence in costly edifices, beautiful
with stained glass and priceless paintings. Others in public halls,
cozily furnished rooms, rickety buildings. In offices that did double
service, where Business and Silence alternated like opposing armies
occupying the same fortress successively.
There were Services of Silence conducted by men and services by women.
Some built a vestibule of music and, in the beautiful vestments of
ancient orthodoxy, walked slowly through to the treasure room of
Stillness. Others, in the common garb of everyday, entered without
prelude. Some plunged from the roar of traffic into Silence as if it
were a bath; others went through little personal rituals of reading and
bodily posturing, as if to steal upon it unawares.
Old, old faiths claimed silence as their own, and conceded reluctantly
to the modern scramble in simple statements of the hour and place they
offered it. Like a conservative firm reluctant to meet the modern need
of advertising, they offered this staple so long a specialty of their
own. New faiths shrieked of Silence as if it were a food to be eaten
instantly before it cooled.
"A half-hour of Silence, from twelve to twelve-thirty,"--like the
professional card of a reputable physician; and "Come and be Quiet
With Us"; "Learn the Power of Silence"; "Be Still and Know"--the paid
advertisement of a hustling quack.
Anne sought but could not find. The stained glass and wide arches of
the churches; the few cozily placed chairs of ordinary rooms were as
glaring in their claims as the thick carpet, the heavy oaken door and
casement windows of the little gray stone church. The solemn music, the
sentimental texts upon the walls, as artificial as the modulated voice
of the Trained Reader and the bowed head of the Boston Lecturer.
* * * * *
Outwardly Anne grew quieter and quieter. Sometimes she saw Katya
watching her with a mingling of triumph and curiosity that would have
interested her deeply six months before. Now, nothing interested her.
Not even the dependence of Rogie held her to the exclusion of this
growing need to find a place of peace. Once, Rogie had seemed to fill
every need, but now Anne knew within herself something over and above
the power of any person or situation quite to fill. It had always been
so. In her love for her mother and Belle, there had been the empty spot
of longing for a wider life and deeper interests. Then Roger had come,
with the wider life and deeper interests, but the tiny empty spot had
remained, the very core of herself that had never melted into Roger's.
Now, she and Roger could scarcely see each other across the space of
separation.
Concerned with the pain of the world, Roger strode on, confusing the
force of his own effort with the accomplishment of results. When, early
in spring, he won the case of a Hindoo revolutionist, he was as excited
as Rogie at a new toy. He came shouting down the loft, and because
Katya was out, and he had to share this enthusiasm with some one, came
to Anne.
"Singh's been released. They couldn't make their case. We've got them
on the run." Perched on the railing about Anne's desk, he swung his
feet like an excited boy. "Of course England will chase him out of
India again, but he'll get in some deadly licks before she does. Gosh,
but I'd like to be there to-day. Think of it, that slip of a fellow,
stirring up that old race, prodding it out of its centuries of sleep."
But Anne did not see that old race rising from its sleep. At most it
would be only a little turning, as Rogie turned and then settled to
deeper sleep. She shrugged: "He will prod and then die."
"What of that? It doesn't nullify his accomplishment. Suppose millions
more still have to do it. Can't you get the romance--if nothing else?"
Anne smiled faintly. "That's just what I do get--millions of
sleepers--in an ageless sleep." Across the room, Black Tom was the
center of an excited group, elated at the success of Singh. A messenger
boy dashed in with a telegram. Two telephones rang wildly. "It's like a
little child with a horn," she said quietly, "blowing because he likes
to hear the noise himself."
Roger's hands clenched and he dropped quickly from the railing.
"You've got--just about as much imagination--as a flea."
Anne shrugged. "Since you don't know the extent of a flea's
imagination, your figure hasn't much force, has it?"
Roger turned away and Anne went on with her work.
At two o'clock she left the office and went to the flat. But even
here she was not needed as she once had been. On her return, Belle
had installed a practical nurse three afternoons a week to relieve
Hilda, and the woman had filled Anne's place completely. Anne went
on the days she did not come, but she felt her in Hilda's accounts
of how "she rests papa and manages him to perfection," and in James'
constant references to things she said or did for him. Now that there
was no need to fill hours with chatter, Anne missed the need. The empty
relationship with her father was emptier than before.
In the vacuum of her isolation, Anne began to watch her thoughts, until
she came to see them as minute machines, installed within her brain by
some outside power, clicking away independent of her will. A power was
working out some experiment with her, using her brain as if it were a
dark room for the development of a film. Without emotion Anne watched
the negative develop. She grew absorbed in the process. She often
asked Roger to repeat a statement, and then sat motionless, watching
its reaction, as if it were a stone he had dropped into the well of
her intelligence. With judicial exactness she weighed the most trite
remark, until conversation with Anne became impossible.
Roger escaped it when he could. Night after night, he stayed on at
the office and Anne ate her dinner alone. Or he returned to work
immediately after dinner, always courteous and insincere in his excuse.
Anne saw the insincerity but never resented it. She was glad to have
Roger go. When he stayed there was nothing real to talk about and the
effort of making conversation with Roger was more exhausting than the
lonely evening.
It was on a Sunday afternoon, after several such evenings in
succession, that Anne sat pretending to read in her favorite place,
a cushioned settle under the window that gave on the bay and hills
beyond. It was a still day of little wind, but a dry, high fog hid the
sun. It was three o'clock, the dreariest, the least personal of any
hour of the day. The feeling of youth that morning has was gone. The
positiveness of evening and lighted lamps had not yet come.
Roger had gone to the office in the morning, read for a little after
lunch and was now asleep in the darkened room beyond, Rogie in the crib
beside him. But he would not sleep much longer. Rogie would probably
wake when he did and Roger would play a while with him. Then, unless
Roger went to a meeting, they would sit, each absorbed or feigning
absorption in his reading: Roger in some legal or economic work of vast
pretension, Anne in her novel, a thing so far from life in the maudlin
sentimentality, spread like soft icing over the relation between the
man and the woman, that it would better have been frankly a fairytale.
About them the silence of the dead hour would close and they would sit
in peace as false as the stillness of the churches and small meeting
rooms.
Anne thrust her book aside. If she went out to walk, the Sunday streets
would echo the tread of others trying to kill the day in the same way.
At the flat James would be asleep in his chair, Hilda napping in the
dining-room. Anne leaned forward, her elbows on the sill, her chin
in her palms. The Bay, flat and gray as if it, too, were exhausted
from the week's work, stretched to the fog-crowned hills. Under the
pall, the Sleeping Beauty on Tamalpais had passed to eternal rest. The
commanded peace of the Seventh Day shut like a cover of lead upon the
world.
Only Charlotte Welles could move beneath such grayness, unconscious
of its deadening weight. She would be walking now, with her short,
quick steps, straight to the peace she entered at her will. Anne moved
uneasily, like a sick person resisting a desired opiate. Perhaps, if
she went once again, and tried not to hear the hymns or the testimonies
or the selected readings, if she slipped into the back seat, just
before the meeting closed, she might yet grasp the secret and have it
for her own.
In the room beyond, Rogie cried and Roger woke. She heard him lift the
baby from its crib and in a moment they were laughing together. Then
the blind went up with a noisy spring, and Roger came out, rested and
carrying the delighted Rogie in his arms.
"There, you little fake." He deposited the baby on the rug before
the fire, threw a piece of wood which caught instantly in gay little
tongues of flame, and laughed at Rogie's clumsy efforts to reach them
through the screen. But Anne did not see them. She was looking at
Roger's back, at the rumpled hair and slightly creased shirt, with
faint distaste.
Roger removed his son to safer distance, stretched and crossed to the
window on the other side of the room.
"Beastly day. I wonder how that Kenneally meeting will be."
Roger yawned and, leaning against the window sash, looked into the
gray stillness for an inspiration. Rogie, finding the pretty flames
inaccessible and himself deserted, puckered his face for a cry, which
Anne diverted just in time by cuddling him to her and kissing his bare
toes.
Roger turned listlessly from the window, took a cigarette from the
brass box on the mantel shelf, and began to walk up and down.
"Are you going? It's at four, isn't it?" she asked.
"I don't know--I haven't decided yet. Kenneally isn't much of a
speaker."
He might not go. The afternoon would shut heavy upon them. She could
not face it. She carried Rogie into the bedroom and closed the door.
She dressed first and then dressed Rogie. If Roger did decide to go,
she did not wish to prevent him by leaving the baby on his hands. A
few moments later, carrying Rogie, delighted at the prospect of going
out, but objecting strongly to his bonnet, which he tried to remove by
vicious tugs, Anne came into the living-room. Roger was in his chair
now, an open book on his lap. He looked up surprised at Anne, dressed
to go out.
"I'll take him, so you needn't stay in if you want to go to the
meeting."
"Going up to the house?" He was sure she was because Anne never went
anywhere else on a Sunday, but he always mentioned her coming and going
with kindly formality.
"No. I'm going to church."
"To church!"
Anne drew on her gloves and nodded.
"What church?"
"Christian Science."
"What!" Roger barked the word in exasperated astonishment.
"The Christian Science Church," Anne said with maddening composure, as
if she were disciplining a child for its harsh voice.