Anyone closely watching the strange woman would have said that her
first care was not to seem distraught; but then, no one was closely
watching her. On a rapturous May morning, with the lilac scenting the
air, and the tulip beds in only the passing of their glory, there were
so many things better worth doing than observing a respectably dressed
young woman, probably the wife of an artisan, that she went unobserved.
As there were at that very minute some two or three hundred more or
less like her also pushing babies in the Park, the eye that singled her
out for attention would have had more than the gift of sight.
What she did that was noticeable--again had there been anyone to
notice her--was to approach first one little group and then another,
quickly sheering away. One would have said that she sheered away from
some queer motive of strategy. Her movements might have been called
erratic, not because they were aimless, but because she didn't know or
didn't find the object of her search. Even if that were so, she neither
advanced nor receded, nor drifted hither or yon, more like a lost thing
than many another nursemaid giving her charge the air or killing time.
There was nothing sinister about her, unless it was sinister to have
moments of seeming dazed or of muttering to herself. She muttered to
herself only when sure that there was no one to overhear, and with
similar self-command she indulged in looking dazed only when she
knew that no eye could light on her. As if aware of abnormality, she
schooled herself to a semblance of sanity. Otherwise she was some
thirty years of age, neatly if cheaply clad, and too commonplace and
unimportant for the most observant to remember her a second after she
had passed.
At sight of a little hooded vehicle, standing unguarded where the lilac
bushes made a shrine for it, she paused. Again, the pause was natural.
She might have been tired. Pushing a baby carriage in a park is
always futile work, with futile starts and stops and turnings in this
direction or in that. If she stood to reconnoiter or to make her plans
there was no power in the land to interfere with her.
Her further methods were simple. Behind the bench on which Miss Nash
and Miss Messenger were by this time entering on an orgy of romantic
confidence there rose a gentle eminence. To the top of this hill the
strange woman made her way. She made it with precautions, sauntering,
dawdling, simulating all the movements of the perfect nurse. When
two women, wheeling young laddies strapped into go-carts, crossed
her path she walked slowly till they were out of sight. When a park
attendant with a lawnmower clicked his machine along to cut a distant
portion of the greensward, she waited till he too had disappeared. A
few pedestrians were scattered here and there, but so distant as not
to count. A few riders galloped up or down the bridle-path near Fifth
Avenue, but these too she could disregard. Except for Miss Nash and
Miss Messenger, turned towards each other, and with their backs to her,
she had the world to herself. Softly she crept down the hill; softly
she stole in among the lilacs.
"My little Gracie! my little Gracie!" she kept muttering, but only
between closed lips. "My little Gracie!"
* * * * *
"Oh, don't think, Milly," Miss Messenger was saying, "that I shan't
give him the chance to come across honorable. I shall. You say that an
action for breach doesn't seem to you delicate, and I don't say but
what I shrink from it. But when you've a trunkful of letters simply
burning with passion, simply _burning_ with it, what good are they to
you if you don't?... And he's worth fifty thousand dollars if he's
worth a penny. Don't talk to me! A fishmonger, right in the heart of
East Eighty-eighth Street, the very best district.... If I sue for
twenty-five thousand dollars I'd be pretty sure of getting five ... and
with a sympathetic jury, possibly six or eight ... and with all that
money I could set up a little nursing home in London ... say in the
Portland Place neighborhood ... with a specialty in children's diseases
... and put you in charge of it as matron. You and me together...."
"Oh, but, Etta, I couldn't leave my little boy, not till he's able to
do without me. By that time there may be other children for me to take
care of, so that I could keep near him. I've thought of that. He being
the first, and his father and mother such a fine healthy young couple,
with everything to support a big family...."
During the minutes which marked his transfer from one destiny to
another, Miss Nash's little boy remained in the sweet, blest country
to which little babies go in dreams. When a swift hand raised the
veil, lifting him with deft gentleness, he knew nothing of what was
happening. While the cap was peeled from his head and pulled over that
of a big, featureless rag doll shaped to the outlines of a baby's
limbs, he was still on the lap of Miss Nash's angels. On the lap of
these angels he stayed during the rest of the exchange. The strange
woman's hand was tender. Lightly it drew over the little boy's head
the soiled, cheap bonnet worn by the big rag doll; lightly it laid the
little warm body into its new bed. Where he had nestled the big rag
doll with his cap on its head gave a fair imitation of his form, unless
inspected closely. By the time the veils were lowered on the two little
carriages there was nothing for the most suspicious eye to wonder at. A
respectable woman of the humbler classes was trundling her baby back to
its home. The infant rested quietly.
The rag doll, too, rested quietly when Miss Nash returned to her
charge, as Miss Messenger to hers. Miss Nash had heard so much within
an hour that she was not quite mistress of herself. Nothing was so
rare with her as to neglect the due examination of her child, but this
time she neglected it. Etta had given her so much to think of that for
the minute her mind was over-taxed. Because the love theme had become
involved with the compelling dictates of self-interest, which even a
sweet creature like Miss Nash couldn't overlook, she laid her hands
absently on the push-bar, beginning to make her way homeward. There was
no question as to Etta's worldly wisdom. The choice lay between worldly
wisdom and the warm, glowing, human thing we call affection. In Milly
Nash's experience it was the first time such a choice had been put up
to her.
"Don't talk to me!" Miss Etta pursued, as they sauntered along side by
side. "I simply love my children up to every penny I'm paid for it,
not a farthing more; and if you'll take my advice, Milly Nash, you'll
follow my example."
Miss Nash felt humble, rebuked. Through fear of disturbing her little
boy, she pushed as gently as a zephyr blows.
"I'm not sure that I could measure it out, not with this little fellow."
"This little fellow, fiddlesticks! He's just like any other little
fellow."
"Oh, no, he isn't. There's character in babies just as there is
in grown-up people. This child's got it strong, all sweetness and
loveliness, and so much sense--you'd never believe it! Why, he
knows--there's nothing that he doesn't know, in his own dear little
way. I tell you, Etta, that if you had him you'd feel just like me."
"Just like you and be out of your heart's job--your heart's job, mind
you--as soon as he's four years old, and they want to put him with a
French girl to learn French. Oh, I know them, these aristocrats! When
I get my alimony, or whatever it is, I'm simply going to provide for
the future, and you'll be a goose, Milly Nash, if you simply don't come
with me, and do the same."
While Miss Nash was shaking her head with her gentle perplexed smile,
the strange woman was crossing Fifth Avenue. Having accomplished
this feat, she entered one of the streets running from that great
thoroughfare toward the East River. Squalor being so much the rule in
New York, the wealthier classes find it hard to pre-empt to themselves
more than a long thin streak, relatively trim, bearing to the general
disorder the proportion of a brook to the meadow through which it runs.
The strange woman had left Fifth Avenue but a few hundred yards away
before she and her baby were swallowed up in that kind of human swarm
in which individuals lose their identity. Afraid of betraying some
frenzy she knew to be within her by mumbling to herself, she kept her
lips shut with a fierce, determined tightness. She was a little woman,
and when you looked at her closely you saw that she had once possessed
a wild dark prettiness. Even now, as she pushed her way between uncouth
men and women, or screaming children at play, her wild dark eyes blazed
with sudden anger or swam with unshed tears by fits and turns.
The house at which she stopped was hardly to be distinguished from
thousands of others in which a brief brownstone dignity had fallen,
first to the boarding-house stage, and then to that of tenements. From
the top of a flight of brownstone steps a frowzy, buxom, motherly
woman came lumbering down to lend a hand with the baby carriage.
"So you've brought your baby, Mrs. Coburn. Now you'll be able to get
settled."
The reply came as if it had been learned by rote. "Yes, now I'll be
able to get settled. I've got her crib ready, though all my other
things is strewed about just as when I moved in. Still, the crib's
ready, which is the main thing. She's a fretful baby by nature, so
you mustn't think it funny if you hear her cry. Some people thought
I'd never raise her, so that if you ever hear say that my little girl
died...."
"I'll know it's not true," the buxom woman laughed. "She couldn't die,
and you have her here, now could she? Do let me have a peep."
By this time they had lifted the carriage over the steps and into the
little passageway. Seeing that there was no help for this inspection,
the strange woman trembled but resigned herself. The neighbor lifted
the veil, and peered under it.
"My, what a love! And she don't look sick, not a little mite."
"Not her face, she don't. Her poor little body's some wasted, but then
so long as I've got her...."
"I believe as it'd be too much lime-water in her milk. She's
bottle-fed, ain't she? Well, them bottle-fed babies--I've had two of
'em out of my five--you got to try and try, and ten to one you'll find
as it's that nasty lime-water that upsets 'em."
Having unlocked her door, which was on the left of the passageway,
the strange woman pulled her treasure into a room stuffy with closed
windows, and dim with drawn blinds. Turning the key behind her, she
was alone at last.
She fell on her knees, throwing the veil back with a fierceness that
almost tore it off. She strained forward. Her breath came in racking,
panting sobs.
"My Gracie! my Gracie! God didn't take you! God wouldn't be so mean! I
just dreamed it, and now I've waked up."
Suddenly she changed. Drawing backward, she put her hands to her brow
and pressed them down the whole length of her face. Her eyes filled
with horror. Her face turned sallow. Her lips fell apart.
"I'll get twenty years for this. Perhaps it'll be more. I don't think
they hang for it, but it'll be twenty years anyhow, if they find it
out." She sprang up, still muttering in broken, only partly articulated
phrases. "But they'll never find it out. What's there to find? It's
my baby! My precious only baby!" She was on her knees again, dragging
herself forward by the sides of the little carriage, her eyes strained
toward the infant face. "My little Gracie! I've missed you all the time
you've been away. My heart was near broke. Now you've come back to me.
You're mine--mine--mine!"
He opened his eyes. It was his usual hour for waking up. For the first
time in his history amazement gave an expression to his face which it
was often to wear afterward. Instead of being in his own nest, downy,
clean, and scentless, he was in a humpy little hole unpleasant to
his senses. Instead of the Na-Na with her tender smile, or the Ma-Ma
with her love, he saw this terrifying woman's stormy eyes, rousing
the sensation he was later to know as fear. Instead of his nursery,
spotless and gay, he was dumped amid the forlorn disarray of furniture
that has just been moved into an empty tenement. Without getting these
impressions in detail, he got them at once. He got them not as separate
facts, but as facts in a single quintessence, distilled and distilled
again, till no one element can be told from any other element, and held
to his lips in a poisoned draught.
All he could do was to wail, but he wailed with a note of anguish which
was new to him. It was anguish the more bitter because of the lack of
explanation. His only awareness hitherto had been that of power. He
had been a baby sovereign, obeyed without having to command. Now he
had been born again as a baby serf, into conditions against which his
will, imperious in its baby way, would beat in vain. Once more, he knew
this, not by reasoned argument, of course, but by heartbroken instinct.
It was not merely the distress of the present that was in his cry, but
dread of the future. There was something else in the world besides
Comfort, Tenderness, and Joy, and he had touched it. Without knowing
what it was he shrank back from the contact and sobbed.
And yet such is the need for love in any young thing's heart, that when
the strange woman had lifted him up, and cradled him on her bosom, he
was partly soothed. He was not soothed easily. Though she held him
closely, and sang to him softly, seated in the low rocking-chair in
which she had rocked her baby-girl, he went on sobbing. He sobbed,
not as he had sobbed in his old nursery, for the sport or the mischief
of the thing, but because his inner being had been bruised. But his
capacity for sobbing wore itself out. Little by little the convulsions
grew calmer, the agony less desperate. Love held him. It was not
the love of the Ma-Ma or the Na-Na, but it was love. It had love's
embrace, love's lullaby. Arms were about him, he was on a breast.
The shipwrecked sailor may be only on a raft, but he is not sinking.
Little by little he turned his face into this only available refuge. A
dangling embroidery adorned it, and in his struggle not to go down his
little hands clutched at that.