THE OUTBREAK
There comes a time
After white months of ice--
Slow months of ice--long months of ice--
There comes a time when the still floods below
Rise, lift, and overflow--
Fast, far they go.
Miss Orella sat in her low armless rocker, lifting perplexed, patient
eyes to look up at Dr. Bellair.
Dr. Bellair stood squarely before her, stood easily, on broad-soled,
low-heeled shoes, and looked down at Miss Orella; her eyes were
earnest, compelling, full of hope and cheer.
"You are as pretty as a girl, Orella," she observed irrelevantly.
Miss Orella blushed. She was not used to compliments, even from a
woman, and did not know how to take them.
"How you talk!" she murmured shyly.
"I mean to talk," continued the doctor, "until you listen to reason."
Reason in this case, to Dr. Bellair's mind, lay in her advice to Miss
Elder to come West with her--to live.
"I don't see how I can. It's--it's such a Complete Change."
Miss Orella spoke as if Change were equivalent to Sin, or at least to
Danger.
"Do you good. As a physician, I can prescribe nothing better. You need
a complete change if anybody ever did."
"Why, Jane! I am quite well."
"I didn't say you were sick. But you are in an advanced stage of
_arthritis deformans_ of the soul. The whole town's got it!"
The doctor tramped up and down the little room, freeing her mind.
"I never saw such bed-ridden intellects in my life! I suppose it was
so when I was a child--and I was too young to notice it. But surely
it's worse now. The world goes faster and faster every day, the people
who keep still get farther behind! I'm fond of you, Rella. You've got
an intellect, and a conscience, and a will--a will like iron. But you
spend most of your strength in keeping yourself down. Now, do wake up
and use it to break loose! You don't have to stay here. Come out to
Colorado with me--and Grow."
Miss Elder moved uneasily in her chair. She laid her small embroidery
hoop on the table, and straightened out the loose threads of silk, the
doctor watching her impatiently.
"I'm too old," she said at length.
Jane Bellair laughed aloud, shortly.
"Old!" she cried. "You're five years younger than I am. You're only
thirty-six! Old! Why, child, your life's before you--to make."
"You don't realize, Jane. You struck out for yourself so young--and
you've grown up out there--it seems to be so different--there."
"It is. People aren't afraid to move. What have you got here you so
hate to leave, Rella?"
"Why, it's--Home."
"Yes. It's home--now. Are you happy in it?"
"I'm--contented."
"Don't you deceive yourself, Rella. You are not contented--not by a
long chalk. You are doing your duty as you see it; and you've kept
yourself down so long you've almost lost the power of motion. I'm
trying to galvanize you awake--and I mean to do it."
"You might as well sit down while you're doing it, anyway," Miss Elder
suggested meekly.
Dr. Bellair sat down, selecting a formidable fiddle-backed chair, the
unflinching determination of its widely-placed feet being repeated by
her own square toes. She placed herself in front of her friend and
leaned forward, elbows on knees, her strong, intelligent hands clasped
loosely.
"What have you got to look forward to, Rella?"
"I want to see Susie happily married--"
"I said _you_--not Susie."
"Oh--me? Why, I hope some day Morton will come back----"
"I said _you_--not Morton."
"Why I--you know I have friends, Jane--and neighbors. And some day,
perhaps--I mean to go abroad."
"Are you scolding Aunt Rella again, Dr. Bellair. I won't stand it."
Pretty Susie stood in the door smiling.
"Come and help me then," the doctor said, "and it won't sound so much
like scolding."
"I want Mort's letter--to show to Viva," the girl answered, and
slipped out with it.
She sat with Vivian on the stiff little sofa in the back room; the
arms of the two girls were around one another, and they read the
letter together. More than six months had passed since his last one.
It was not much of a letter. Vivian took it in her own hands and went
through it again, carefully. The "Remember me to Viva--unless she's
married," at the end did not seem at all satisfying. Still it might
mean more than appeared--far more. Men were reticent and proud, she
had read. It was perfectly possible that he might be concealing deep
emotion under the open friendliness. He was in no condition to speak
freely, to come back and claim her. He did not wish her to feel bound
to him. She had discussed it with Mrs. St. Cloud, shrinkingly,
tenderly, led on by tactful, delicate, questions, by the longing of
her longing heart for expression and sympathy.
"A man who cannot marry must speak of marriage--it is not honorable,"
her friend had told her.
"Couldn't he--write to me--as a friend?"
And the low-voiced lady had explained with a little sigh that men
thought little of friendship with women. "I have tried, all my life,
to be a true and helpful friend to men, to such men as seemed worthy,
and they so often--misunderstood."
The girl, sympathetic and admiring, thought hotly of how other people
misunderstood this noble, lovely soul; how they even hinted that she
"tried to attract men," a deadly charge in Bainville.
"No," Mrs. St. Cloud had told her, "he might love you better than all
the world--yet not write to you--till he was ready to say 'come.' And,
of course, he wouldn't say anything in his letters to his aunt."
So Vivian sat there, silent, weaving frail dreams out of "remember me
to Viva--unless she's married." That last clause might mean much.
Dr. Bellair's voice sounded clear and insistent in the next room.
"She's trying to persuade Aunt Rella to go West!" said Susie.
"Wouldn't it be funny if she did!"
In Susie's eyes her Aunt's age was as the age of mountains, and also
her fixity. Since she could remember, Aunt Rella, always palely pretty
and neat, like the delicate, faintly-colored Spring flowers of New
England, had presided over the small white house, the small green
garden and the large black and white school-room. In her vacation she
sewed, keeping that quiet wardrobe of hers in exquisite order--and
also making Susie's pretty dresses. To think of Aunt Orella actually
"breaking up housekeeping," giving up her school, leaving Bainville,
was like a vision of trees walking.
To Dr. Jane Bellair, forty-one, vigorous, successful, full of new
plans and purposes, Miss Elder's life appeared as an arrested
girlhood, stagnating unnecessarily in this quiet town, while all the
world was open to her.
"I couldn't think of leaving Susie!" protested Miss Orella.
"Bring her along," said the doctor. "Best thing in the world for her!"
She rose and came to the door. The two girls make a pretty picture.
Vivian's oval face, with its smooth Madonna curves under the
encircling wreath of soft, dark plaits, and the long grace of her
figure, delicately built, yet strong, beside the pink, plump little
Susie, roguish and pretty, with the look that made everyone want to
take care of her.
"Come in here, girls," said the doctor. "I want you to help me. You're
young enough to be movable, I hope."
They cheerfully joined the controversy, but Miss Orella found small
support in them.
"Why don't you do it, Auntie!" Susie thought it an excellent joke. "I
suppose you could teach school in Denver as well as here. And you
could Vote! Oh, Auntie--to think of your Voting!"
Miss Elder, too modestly feminine, too inherently conservative even
to be an outspoken "Anti," fairly blushed at the idea.
"She's hesitating on your account," Dr. Bellair explained to the girl.
"Wants to see you safely married! I tell her you'll have a thousandfold
better opportunities in Colorado than you ever will here."
Vivian was grieved. She had heard enough of this getting married, and
had expected Dr. Bellair to hold a different position.
"Surely, that's not the only thing to do," she protested.
"No, but it's a very important thing to do--and to do right. It's a
woman's duty."
Vivian groaned in spirit. That again!
The doctor watched her understandingly.
"If women only did their duty in that line there wouldn't be so much
unhappiness in the world," she said. "All you New England girls sit
here and cut one another's throats. You can't possible marry, your
boys go West, you overcrowd the labor market, lower wages, steadily
drive the weakest sisters down till they--drop."
They heard the back door latch lift and close again, a quick, decided
step--and Mrs. Pettigrew joined them.
Miss Elder greeted her cordially, and the old lady seated herself in
the halo of the big lamp, as one well accustomed to the chair.
"Go right on," she said--and knitted briskly.
"Do take my side, Mrs. Pettigrew," Miss Orella implored her. "Jane
Bellair is trying to pull me up by the roots and transplant me to
Colorado."
"And she says I shall have a better chance to marry out there--and
ought to do it!" said Susie, very solemnly. "And Vivian objects to
being shown the path of duty."
Vivian smiled. Her quiet, rather sad face lit with sudden sparkling
beauty when she smiled.
"Grandma knows I hate that--point of view," she said. "I think men and
women ought to be friends, and not always be thinking about--that."
"I have some real good friends--boys, I mean," Susie agreed, looking
so serious in her platonic boast that even Vivian was a little
amused, and Dr. Bellair laughed outright.
"You won't have a 'friend' in that sense till you're fifty, Miss
Susan--if you ever do. There can be, there are, real friendships between
men and women, but most of that talk is--talk, sometimes worse.
"I knew a woman once, ever so long ago," the doctor continued
musingly, clasping her hands behind her head, "a long way from
here--in a college town--who talked about 'friends.' She was married.
She was a 'good' woman--perfectly 'good' woman. Her husband was not a
very good man, I've heard, and strangely impatient of her virtues. She
had a string of boys--college boys--always at her heels. Quite too
young and too charming she was for this friendship game. She said that
such a friendship was 'an ennobling influence' for the boys. She
called them her 'acolytes.' Lots of them were fairly mad about
her--one young chap was so desperate over it that he shot himself."
There was a pained silence.
"I don't see what this has to do with going to Colorado," said Mrs.
Pettigrew, looking from one to the other with a keen, observing eye.
"What's your plan, Dr. Bellair?"
"Why, I'm trying to persuade my old friend here to leave this place,
change her occupation, come out to Colorado with me, and grow up.
She's a case of arrested development."
"She wants me to keep boarders!" Miss Elder plaintively protested to
Mrs. Pettigrew.
That lady was not impressed.
"It's quite a different matter out there, Mrs. Pettigrew," the doctor
explained. "'Keeping boarders' in this country goes to the tune of
'Come Ye Disconsolate!' It's a doubtful refuge for women who are
widows or would be better off if they were. Where I live it's a sure
thing if well managed--it's a good business."
Mrs. Pettigrew wore an unconvinced aspect.
"What do you call 'a good business?'" she asked.
"The house I have in mind cleared a thousand a year when it was in
right hands. That's not bad, over and above one's board and lodging.
That house is in the market now. I've just had a letter from a friend
about it. Orella could go out with me, and step right into Mrs.
Annerly's shoes--she's just giving up."
"What'd she give up for?" Mrs. Pettigrew inquired suspiciously.
"Oh--she got married; they all do. There are three men to one woman in
that town, you see."
"I didn't know there was such a place in the world--unless it was a
man-of-war," remarked Susie, looking much interested.
Dr. Bellair went on more quietly.
"It's not even a risk, Mrs. Pettigrew. Rella has a cousin who would
gladly run this house for her. She's admitted that much. So there's no
loss here, and she's got her home to come back to. I can write to Dick
Hale to nail the proposition at once. She can go when I go, in about a
fortnight, and I'll guarantee the first year definitely."
"I wouldn't think of letting you do that, Jane! And if it's as good as
you say, there's no need. But a fortnight! To leave home--in a
fortnight!"
"What are the difficulties?" the old lady inquired. "There are always
some difficulties."
"You are right, there," agreed the doctor. "The difficulties in this
place are servants. But just now there's a special chance in that line.
Dick says the best cook in town is going begging. I'll read you his
letter."
She produced it, promptly, from the breast pocket of her neat coat.
Dr. Bellair wore rather short, tailored skirts of first-class
material; natty, starched blouses--silk ones for "dress," and
perfectly fitting light coats. Their color and texture might vary with
the season, but their pockets, never.
"'My dear Jane' (This is my best friend out there--a doctor, too. We
were in the same class, both college and medical school. We
fight--he's a misogynist of the worst type--but we're good friends all
the same.) 'Why don't you come back? My boys are lonesome without you,
and I am overworked--you left so many mishandled invalids for me to
struggle with. Your boarding house is going to the dogs. Mrs. Annerly
got worse and worse, failed completely and has cleared out, with a
species of husband, I believe. The owner has put in a sort of
caretaker, and the roomers get board outside--it's better than what
they were having. Moreover, the best cook in town is hunting a job.
Wire me and I'll nail her. You know the place pays well. Now, why
don't you give up your unnatural attempt to be a doctor and assume
woman's proper sphere? Come back and keep house!'
"He's a great tease, but he tells the truth. The house is there,
crying to be kept. The boarders are there--unfed. Now, Orella Elder,
why don't you wake up and seize the opportunity?"
Miss Orella was thinking.
"Where's that last letter of Morton's?"
Susie looked for it. Vivian handed it to her, and Miss Elder read it
once more.
"There's plenty of homeless boys out there besides yours, Orella," the
doctor assured her. "Come on--and bring both these girls with you.
It's a chance for any girl, Miss Lane."
But her friend did not hear her. She found what she was looking for in
the letter and read it aloud. "I'm on the road again now, likely to be
doing Colorado most of the year if things go right. It's a fine
country."
Susie hopped up with a little cry.
"Just the thing, Aunt Rella! Let's go out and surprise Mort. He thinks
we are just built into the ground here. Won't it be fun, Viva?"
Vivian had risen from her seat and stood at the window, gazing out with
unseeing eyes at the shadowy little front yard. Morton might be there.
She might see him. But--was it womanly to go there--for that? There were
other reasons, surely. She had longed for freedom, for a chance to grow,
to do something in life--something great and beautiful! Perhaps this was
the opening of the gate, the opportunity of a lifetime.
"You folks are so strong on duty," the doctor was saying, "Why can't you
see a real duty in this? I tell you, the place is full of men that need
mothering, and sistering--good honest sweethearting and marrying, too.
Come on, Rella. Do bigger work than you've ever done yet--and, as I
said, bring both these nice girls with you. What do you say, Miss Lane?"
Vivian turned to her, her fine face flushed with hope, yet with a
small Greek fret on the broad forehead.
"I'd like to, very much, Dr. Bellair--on some accounts. But----" She
could not quite voice her dim objections, her obscure withdrawals; and
so fell back on the excuse of childhood--"I'm sure Mother wouldn't let
me."
Dr. Bellair smiled broadly.
"Aren't you over twenty-one?" she asked.
"I'm twenty-five," the girl replied, with proud acceptance of a life
long done--as one who owned to ninety-seven.
"And self-supporting?" pursued the doctor.
Vivian flushed.
"No--not yet," she answered; "but I mean to be."
"Exactly! Now's your chance. Break away now, my dear, and come West. You
can get work--start a kindergarten, or something. I know you love
children."
The girl's heart rose within her in a great throb of hope.
"Oh--if I _could_!" she exclaimed, and even as she said it, rose
half-conscious memories of the low, sweet tones of Mrs. St. Cloud. "It
is a woman's place to wait--and to endure."
She heard a step on the walk outside--looked out.
"Why, here is Mrs. St. Cloud!" she cried.
"Guess I'll clear out," said the doctor, as Susie ran to the door. She
was shy, socially.
"Nonsense, Jane," said her hostess, whispering. "Mrs. St. Cloud is no
stranger. She's Mrs. Williams' sister--been here for years."
She came in at the word, her head and shoulders wreathed in a pearl
gray shining veil, her soft long robe held up.
"I saw your light, Miss Elder, and thought I'd stop in for a moment.
Good evening, Mrs. Pettigrew--and Miss Susie. Ah! Vivian!"
"This is my friend, Dr. Bellair--Mrs. St. Cloud," Miss Elder was
saying. But Dr. Bellair bowed a little stiffly, not coming forward.
"I've met Mrs. St. Cloud before, I think--when she was 'Mrs. James.'"
The lady's face grew sad.
"Ah, you knew my first husband! I lost him--many years ago--typhoid
fever."
"I think I heard," said the doctor. And then, feeling that some
expression of sympathy was called for, she added, "Too bad."
Not all Miss Elder's gentle hospitality, Mrs. Pettigrew's bright-eyed
interest, Susie's efforts at polite attention, and Vivian's visible
sympathy could compensate Mrs. St. Cloud for one inimical presence.
"You must have been a mere girl in those days," she said sweetly.
"What a lovely little town it was--under the big trees."
"It certainly was," the doctor answered dryly.
"There is such a fine atmosphere in a college town, I think," pursued
the lady. "Especially in a co-educational town--don't you think so?"
Vivian was a little surprised. She had had an idea that her admired
friend did not approve of co-education. She must have been mistaken.
"Such a world of old memories as you call up, Dr. Bellair," their
visitor pursued. "Those quiet, fruitful days! You remember Dr. Black's
lectures? Of course you do, better than I. What a fine man he was! And
the beautiful music club we had one Winter--and my little private
dancing class--do you remember that? Such nice boys, Miss Elder! I
used to call them my acolytes."
Susie gave a little gulp, and coughed to cover it.
"I guess you'll have to excuse me, ladies," said Dr. Bellair.
"Good-night." And she walked upstairs.
Vivian's face flushed and paled and flushed again. A cold pain was
trying to enter her heart, and she was trying to keep it out. Her
grandmother glanced sharply from one face to the other.
"Glad to've met you, Mrs. St. Cloud," she said, bobbing up with
decision. "Good-night, Rella--and Susie. Come on child. It's a wonder
your mother hasn't sent after us."
For once Vivian was glad to go.
"That's a good scheme of Jane Bellair's, don't you think so?" asked
the old lady as they shut the gate behind them.
"I--why yes--I don't see why not."
Vivian was still dizzy with the blow to her heart's idol. All the
soft, still dream-world she had so labored to keep pure and beautiful
seemed to shake and waver swimmingly. She could not return to it. The
flat white face of her home loomed before her, square, hard, hideously
unsympathetic--
"Grandma," said she, stopping that lady suddenly and laying a pleading
hand on her arm, "Grandma, I believe I'll go."
Mrs. Pettigrew nodded decisively.
"I thought you would," she said.
"Do you blame me, Grandma?"
"Not a mite, child. Not a mite. But I'd sleep on it, if I were you."
And Vivian slept on it--so far as she slept at all.