Long before it was light the next morning Isabelle heard the heavy tread of
the blacksmith as he was going his rounds to light the fires; then she
snuggled deeper into bed. When Margaret's maid finally came with the coffee
and pushed back the heavy shutters, Isabelle looked out into another world
from the one she had come to half frozen the afternoon before. She had
entered the village from the rear, and now she looked off south and west
from the level shelf on which the houses sat, across a broad valley, to
black woods and a sloping breast of hills, freshly powdered with snow, to
the blue sky-line, all as clear in the snow-washed mountain air as in a
desert. The sun striking down into the valley brought out the faint azure
of the inner folds of the hills.
There was scarcely a footprint in the road to break the soft mass of
new-fallen snow. Isabelle could see a black cat deliberately stealing its
way from the barn across the road to the house. It lifted each paw with
delicate precision and pushed it firmly into the snow, casting a deep
shadow on the gleaming surface of white. The black cat, lean and muscular,
stretching itself across the snow, was the touch of art needed to complete
the silent scene....
A wood-sled drawn by two heavy horses came around the corner of the house,
softly churning the new snow before its runners. A man clad in a burly
sheepskin coat and fur cap, his feet in enormous rubber shoes, stood on the
sled, slowly thrashing his arms and breathing frostily.
"Hello, Sol!" the man cried to the blacksmith, who was shovelling a path
from the barn to the house.
"Morning, Ed. Going up to Cross's lot?"
"Ye--as--"
"Hard sledding?"
The two men exchanged amicable nothings in the crisp, brilliant air through
which their voices rang with a peculiar timbre. To Isabelle, looking and
listening from her window, it was all so fresh, so simple, like a picture
on a Japanese print! For the first time in months she had a distinct
desire,--to get outside and look at the hills.
"You are commanded," announced Margaret, a little later, "to the doctor's
for supper at six. That wasn't the way it was put exactly, but it amounts
to the same thing. The doctor's least word is a command here.... Now I am
off to help the housekeeper with the accounts,--it's all I am good for!"...
So Isabelle was left to set forth on her ramble of exploration by herself.
She pushed through the snow to the last house on the village street, where
the road dipped down a long hill, and the wide arc of northern mountains
was revealed in a glittering rampart. Her eyes filled involuntarily with
tears.
"I must be very weak," she said to herself, "to cry because it's
beautiful!" And sitting down on a rock by the road, she cried more, with a
feeling of self-pity and a little self-contempt. An old woman came to the
door of the house she had just passed with a dish-pan of water and looked
curiously at the stranger. At first the countrywoman opened her lips as if
she intended to speak, but stood with her dish-pan and said nothing.
Isabelle could see through her tears the bent figure and battered face of
the old woman,--a being without one line of beauty or even animal grace.
What a fight life must have been to reduce any woman's body to that! And
the purpose,--to keep the breath of life in a worn old body, just to live?
"Pleasant morning!" Isabelle said with a smile through her tears.
"It ain't bad," the old woman admitted, emptying her dish-pan.
As Isabelle retraced her steps into the village the old woman followed her
with curious eyes, thinking no doubt that a woman like this stranger, well
dressed, young, and apparently well fed, ought not to be sitting on a rock
on a winter's day crying!
"And she's quite right!" Isabelle said to herself.
The jewelled morning was the same to them both,--the outer world was
imperturbable in its circular variety. But the inner world, the
vision,--ah, there was the extraordinary variation in human lives! From
heaven to hell through all gradations, and whether it were heaven or hell
did not depend on being like this crone at the end of the road or like
herself in its sheltered nooks,--it was something else.
"I will have to see Margaret's wonderful doctor, if this keeps on," she
said, still dropping tears.
The blacksmith stood beside the open door of his shop, gazing reflectively
across the white fields to the upland. Beside him was a broken wood-sled
that he was mending. Seeing Isabelle, he waved her a slow salute with the
sled-runner he had ready in his hand.
"Morning!" he called out in his deep voice. "Seeing the country? The hills
are extra fine this morning."
He proceeded slowly to brush the snow from the frame of the sled, still
glancing now and then over the fields. Isabelle felt that she had caught
his characteristic moment, _his_ inner vision.
"You have a good view from your shop."
"The best in the town! I've always been grateful to my father for one
thing,--well, for many things,--but specially because he had the good sense
to set the old smithy right here where you can see something. When there
isn't much going on, I come out of doors here and take a long look at the
mountains. It rests your back so."
Isabelle sat down in the shop and watched Mr. Short repair the sled,
interested in the slow, sure movements he made, the painstaking way in
which he fitted iron and wood and riveted the pieces together. It must be a
relief, she thought, to work with one's hands like that,--which men could
do, forgetting the number of manual movements Mrs. Short also made during
the same time. The blacksmith talked as he worked, in a gentle voice
without a trace of self-consciousness, and Isabelle had again that sense of
VISION, of something inward and sustaining in this man of remote and narrow
range,--something that expressed itself in the slow speech, the peaceful,
self-contained manner. As she went back up the street to the house the
thick cloud of depression, of intangible misery, in which she had been
living as it seemed to her for eternity, settled down once more,--the
habitual gait of her mind, like the dragging gait of her feet. She at least
was powerless to escape the bitter food of idle recollection.
* * * * *
The doctor's house was a plain, square, white building, a little way above
the main road, from which there was a drive winding through the spruces. On
the sides and behind the house stretched one-story wings, also white and
severely plain. "Those are the wards, and the one behind is the operating
room," Margaret explained.
The house inside was as plain as on the outside: there were no pictures, no
rugs, no useless furniture. The large hall divided the first floor in two.
On the right was the office and the dining room, on the left with a
southerly exposure the large living room. There were great, blazing fires
in all the rooms and in the hall at either side,--there was no other
heat,--and the odor of burning fir boughs permeated the atmosphere.
"It's like a hospital almost," Isabelle commented as they waited in the
living room. "And he has French blood! How can he stand it so--bare and
cold?"
"The doctor's limitations are as interesting as his powers. He never has a
newspaper in the house, nor a magazine,--burns them up if he finds them
lying about. Yet he reads a great deal. He has a contempt for all the froth
of immediate living, and still the whole place is the most modern,
up-to-date contemporary machine of its kind!"
Outside was the blackness of the cold winter night; inside the grayness of
stained walls lighted by the glow from the blazing fires. A few pieces of
statuary, copies of the work of the idealistic Greek period, stood in the
hall and the living room. All that meant merely comfort, homelikeness--all
in a word that was characteristically American--was wanting. Nevertheless,
as Isabelle waited in the room she was aware of a peculiar grave beauty in
its very exclusions. This house had the atmosphere of a mind.
Some nurse came in and nodded to Margaret, then Mrs. Beck the matron
appeared, and a couple of young doctors followed. They had been across the
valley on snow-shoes in the afternoon and were talking of their adventures
in the woods. There was much laughter and gayety--as if gathered here in
the wilderness these people all knew one another very well. After some time
Isabelle became aware of the entrance of another person, and turning around
saw a thin, slight man with a thick head of gray hair. His smooth-shaven
face was modelled with many lines, and under the dark eyebrows that had not
yet turned gray there were piercing black eyes. Although the talk and the
laughter did not die at once, there was the subtle movement among the
persons in the room which indicated that the master of the house had
appeared. Dr. Renault walked directly to Isabelle.
"Good evening, Mrs. Lane. Will you come in to supper?"
He offered her his arm, and without further word of ceremony they went into
the dining room. At the table the doctor said little to her at first. He
leaned back in his chair, his eyes half closed, listening to the talk of
the others, as if weary after a long day. Isabelle was puzzled by a sense
of something familiar in the man at her side; she must have met him before,
she could not tell where. The dining room, like the living room, was
square, panelled with white wood, and the walls stained. It was bare except
for several copies of Tanagra figurines in a recess above the chimney and
two large photographs of Greek athletes. The long table, made of heavy oak
planks, had no cloth, and the dishes were of the coarsest earthenware, such
as French peasants use.
The talk was lively enough,--about two new cases that had arrived that
afternoon, the deer-hunting season that had just closed, bear tracks
discovered on Bolton Hill near the lumber-camp, and a new piano that a
friend had sent for the convalescent or "dotty" ward, as they called it.
The young doctor who sat at Isabelle's right asked her if she could play or
sing, and when she said no, he asked her if she could skee. Those were the
only personal remarks of the meal. Margaret, who was very much at home,
entered into the talk with unwonted liveliness. It was a workshop of busy
men and women who had finished the day's labor with enough vitality left to
react. The food, Isabelle noticed, was plentiful and more than good. At the
end of the meal the young men lighted cigarettes, and one of the nurses
also smoked, while a box of cigars was placed before Renault. Some one
began to sing, and the table joined the chorus, gathering about the
chimney, where there were a couple of settles.
It was a life, so Isabelle saw, with an order of its own, a direction of
its own, a strong undercurrent. Its oddity and nonchalance were refreshing.
Like one of the mountain brooks it ran its own course, strong and liquid
beneath the snow, to its own end.
"You seem to have a very good time up here among yourselves!" Isabelle said
to the doctor, expressing her wonder frankly.
"And why not?" he asked, a smile on his thin lips. He helped himself to a
cigar, still looking at her whimsically, and biting off its end held a
match ready to strike, as if awaiting her next remark.
"But don't you ever want to get away, to go back to the city? Don't you
feel--isolated?"
"Why should we? Because there's no opera or dinner parties? We have a
dinner party every night." He lighted his cigar and grinned at Isabelle.
"The city delusion is one of the chief idiocies of our day. City people
encourage the idea that you can't get on without their society. Man was not
meant to live herded along sidewalks. The cities breed the diseases for us
doctors,--that is their one great occupation."
He threw the match into the fire, leaned back in his chair with his hands
knit behind his head, and fastening his black eyes on Isabelle began to
talk.
"I lived upwards of twenty years in cities with that same delusion,--not
daring to get more than a trolley-car fare away from the muck and noise.
Then I was kicked out,--had to go, thank God! On the Arizona plains I
learned to know what an idiot I had been to throw away the better half of a
life in a place where you have to breathe other peoples' bad air. Why,
there isn't room to think in a city! I never used to think, or only at odd
moments. I lived from one nervous reflex to another, and took most of my
ideas from other folks. Now I do my own thinking. Just try it, young woman;
it is a great relief!"
"But--but--" Isabelle stammered, laughing in spite of herself.
"You know," Renault bore on tranquilly, "there's a new form of mental
disease you might call 'pavementitis'--the pavement itch. When the patient
has it badly, so that he can't be happy when removed from his customary
environment, he is incurable. A man isn't a sound man, nor a woman a
healthy woman, who can't stand alone on his own two legs and be nourished
intellectually and emotionally away from the herd.... That young fellow who
has just gone out was a bad case of pavementitis when he came to
me,--couldn't breathe comfortably outside the air of New York. Hard worker,
too. He came up here to 'rest.' Rest! Almost nobody needs rest. What they
want is hard work and tranquil minds. I put him on his job the day he came.
You couldn't drive him away now! Last fall I sent him back to see if the
cure was complete. Telegraphed me in a week that he was coming up,--life
was too dull down there! ... And that little black-haired woman who is
talking to Mrs. Pole,--similar case, only it was complicated. She was
neurotic, hysterical, insomniac, melancholy,--the usual neurasthenic
ticket. Had a husband who didn't suit or a lover, I suspect, and it got
fastened in the brain,--rode her. She's my chief nurse in the surgical ward
now,--a tremendous worker; can go three nights without sleep if necessary
and knows enough to sleep soundly when she gets the chance.... Has relapses
of pavementitis now and then, when some of her fool friends write her; but
I fix that! ... So it goes; I have had incurable cases of course, as in
everything else. The only thing to do with 'em then is to send them back to
suck their poison until it kills."
The whimsical tone of irony and invective made Isabelle laugh, and also
subtly changed her self-preoccupation. Evidently Dr. Renault was not a
Potts to go to with a long story of woe.
"I thought it was surgery, your specialty," she remarked, "not nervous
prostration."
"We do pretty much everything here--as it is needed. Come in to-morrow
morning sometime and look the shop over."
He rose, threw away his cigar, and at this signal the group scattered.
Renault, Margaret, and Isabelle went back to the bare living room, where
the doctor stood silently in front of the fireplace for a few minutes, as
though expecting his guests to leave. When they started, he threw open a
long window and beckoned to Isabelle to follow him. Outside there was a
broad platform running out over the crest of the hill on which the house
was built. The land beyond fell away sharply, then rose in a wooded swell
to the northern mountains. The night was dark with glittering starlight
above, and the presence of the white masses of the hills could be felt
rather than seen,--brooding under the stars. There was the tinkle of a
sleigh-bell on the road below,--the only sound in the still night.
"There!" Renault exclaimed. "Is there anything you would like to swap for
this?"
He breathed deeply of the frosty air.
"It seems almost as if a voice were speaking in the silence!"
"Yes," Renault assented gravely. "There is a voice, and you can hear it up
here--if you listen."