THE WHITE TIME
The days went, shortening. She kept to her couch through all but those
hours when the sun was high. Then she lay to be warmed in the open while
the year died before her. She could not see another year. She must read
all her meanings into this one. September went and October waned. The
sky was often overcast. They had ceased to talk of her going back. Her
brother reminded her cheerfully that he had half expected a long stay
for her. She must be patient. She spoke in his own vein of hopefulness,
promising patience, and smiled as ever on her pair, who still wandered
in that garden, bantering comrades, tasting the fruit of every tree but
one.
And one day she knew that all her imaginings about this pair had been
vain, caught it in the deepened look of Ewing as he turned from Virginia
to herself. It was a thing to bask in--that look--like the fervid sun
itself. But it hurt her, too; made it harder to let go of life. Yet
always before her was the face of Kitty Teevan with its beseeching eyes:
"You have so little time to live, and I must live in his memory always!"
And so she put the thing away, letting him think as he must, wincing
under his look of pity, and that devouring thing that lurked always back
of his pity, and striving for lightness when she talked with him.
"I understand why our land seemed unreal to you," she said to him while
they loitered in the blue dusk of the pine woods near the cabin one day.
The peaks beyond were misty behind gray clouds that lay sullenly along
the horizon. "I understand why you called our land a stage land, for
this is unreal to me, painted, theatrical, impossible. I keep hearing
the person who's seen the play telling his neighbor what's to come
next."
"It's real enough," he answered, looking away from her. "I have a way of
telling when a land is real."
"You have?"
"Any land is real where you are. New England or Colorado or Siberia
or----"
"There, there!" she soothed him mockingly--"or India's coral strand.
That's quite enough. You have learned your geography lesson. What a busy
traveler you must have been!"
"And no land can be real where you are not," he went on gravely. "I go
where you go, follow you around the world and out into the stars beyond
the moon, up and down and on forever, and it all seems real to me--all
except you."
"Oh, I--I'm real, real enough, but this land is a sad, fearful,
threatening land, so heartless." She shivered. "Let us go in!"
"That's only because it's closing up now for the winter; that's why the
sky is sorry. The leaves are nearly gone, and the fat old bears are
slouching down from the high places to curl up in the holes, and the
deer are moving down into the valleys, and pretty soon the hills will
crawl under white blankets and go to sleep. And we shall have to do the
same. We shall be shut in before you know it, snowed in, frozen in, like
the bears. But the winter--it can't take you from me."
"There, there!" But she could not finish. She flashed a helpless smile
at him and fled indoors. He went after her, crying that winter was upon
them.
And then, all in a day and a night, winter came. The wind fell to an
ominous hush one midday, and a leaden quiet lay over the hills. Blurred
masses of cloud rose slowly above the peaks, shaping themselves with
ponderous sloth. Below these a white mist formed. Then one tiny snow
crystal fell. It was followed presently by another, and then by more,
floating down with unhurried ease. Meaningless wisps they seemed,
fugitive bits of wool, perhaps, from a sheep losing its fleece in some
nearby shearing pen. More of them came with the same slow, loitering
grace, as if they would lull suspicion of the fury they heralded.
By night the storm had shut off the hills so that the cabin might have
been set in a plain, for all the eye could see. The flakes no longer
came saunteringly, but swiftly now, in a slant of honest fervor, frankly
threatening.
By morning the land was muffled in white. The sun shone pale and cold
through the mist, and the wind began a game with its new plaything,
still light and dry, and quick to dance to any piping. Spruce and
hemlock seemed to have darkened their green, and their arms drooped
wearily under the white burdens they bore. The second day's fall buried
their lowest branches so that not even the circle of bare earth was left
about them.
Inside the cabin they sought the peace of the earth under its cover, the
trustful repose of the live things sleeping there. The days sped by
almost unmarked. Scarcely ever were they certain of the day of week or
month, especially after Ben forgot to mark his calendar on the days he
and Ewing devoted to getting deer for their winter's meat. There were
but opinions as to the date after that.
Ben, after his work with the stock each morning, hibernated gracefully
in a chair by the kitchen stove, sleeping with excited groans, like a
dreaming dog. Or, awake, he stared at the wall with dulled eyes. At
times he would touch his guitar to life and sing very softly, or hold it
affectionately in his lap, a hand muting its strings, while he pondered
dreamily of far-off matters, of cities and men, and the folly of
expecting ever to receive treasure such as the advertisements promise.
Ewing and Virginia, after the snow packed, went forth on snowshoes far
into the white silence; over open spaces so glaring that the eyes closed
in defense; through ravines where once-noisy streams were stilled; and
under forest arches of green where the snow was darkened to hints of
blue--they agreed that Sydenham would paint it blue without
condescending to hints--and where the hush was so intense that they
instinctively lowered their voices. They passed long times without
speech, as they would have done in a church, worshiping the still beauty
about them, beauty of buttressed peak, of snow-choked canyon, of
green-roofed cathedral, of pink light at sunset on endless snow-quilted
slopes.
Mrs. Laithe, too, sought the open when the sun was high, and one day in
midwinter she walked as far as the lake in the path beaten by the stock.
It did not occur to her then that this was no feat for a dying woman nor
even on the succeeding days when this walk became her habit. It was a
change for her eyes from the cabin prospect; the sun warmed her
genially, despite the intense cold, and she liked the stillness, all the
movements of life going on in a strange, muffled silence. This helped
her to remember her own plight. Life still abounded with all its warmth
and glad clashing, but she must have only eyes for it--no heart of
desire. She had been so sure of this from the first that she gave but
heedless smiles to the others when they told her she was better. They
had always said such things.
She slept the long nights through now, seeking bed like a tired child,
and waking in strange refreshment. And milk no longer appeased her
hunger as it had wholly done when she arrived. The savor of baked meats
was now sweet to her. She was presently walking to the lake both morning
and afternoon, breathing deep of the dry air that ran fire in her veins
as she absorbed it. And the flush on her face when she returned was not
that of fever.
But more eloquent than these physical symptoms was a sullen current of
rebellion rising slowly within her, the old fighting instinct, a lust
for sheer living, a thing she had believed was long since extinct.
She did not lose her certainty of death all in a day. For weeks she was
haunted merely by an unquiet suspicion. The cough still racked her night
and morning, and the fever came each evening, but the old potency seemed
to have gone from both. She tried to believe at first that this was one
of those false rallies so common before the end.
The full, maddening realization came to her on a day when Ewing walked
with her to the lake. He turned on her suddenly when they had mounted a
slope, seized both her hands, and looked long into her eyes with a
certain grave wonder.
"You are made new," he said at last. She trembled in a sudden panic,
divining the truth of it, feeling, as he spoke, a great rush of life
overwhelming her.
"You are living again, you are going to live. I knew you would live." He
still gripped her hands. It was as if he had drawn her, warm and
pulsing, out of all the wintry death about them. She could not face him,
but released her hands and turned away. He had seen truly. She had
relaxed utterly when she came, to waver unresistingly down into the cool
abyss of her despair. But some indomitable brute thing had risen in her
while she slept, to fight for life, and to fire her whole being with its
triumph. While she had rested and waited in that luxury of
self-abandonment she had been cheated of her victory--betrayed back to
life.
Trying now to think what life would mean to her, she was overwhelmed
with shame and dismay. With death so near things had been simple. But
how could she live on and face Ewing, shaming herself and shaming him in
the darkness of his belief about her?
They walked back to the cabin in silence. Ewing, too, she felt, saw the
future to be less simple now.
"I shall know what to do," he said, as they reached the door; and there
was again in his eyes that puzzling look of some fixed purpose. For the
first time this vaguely alarmed her now, and she questioned him swiftly
with her eyes. But he only pointed to his mother's portrait--they had
entered the studio--and said, "Do you think I'd do less for you than I
would for her?"
She could endure neither his own look nor the mother's, and fled to her
room. There she studied her face in the glass. It was all true. She was
going to live, and she sickened at the thought. Again it was a time for
tears and laughter.