THE DAWN
Outside in the narrow passage, smelling of dust and yesterday's cooking,
the pallid light filtered in through the closed window; and it seemed to
Corinna that this light pervaded her own thoughts until the images in
her mind moved in a procession of stark outlines against a colourless
horizon. In this unreal world, which she knew was merely a distorted
impression of the external world about her, she saw the figure of the
dead woman, still and straight as the effigy of a saint, the twisted
shape of the old hunchback, and after these the shadow of the starved
cat stealing along the top of the high brick wall. What was the meaning
in these things? Where was the beauty? What inscrutable purpose, what
sardonic humour, joined together beauty and ugliness, harmony and
discord, her own golden heritage with the drab destinies of that dead
woman and this work-worn cripple?
"I can't stand it any longer," she thought. "I must breathe the open
air, or I shall die."
Then, just as she was about to hurry toward the stairs, she checked
herself and stood still because she realized that the old woman had
followed her and was droning into her ear.
"Yes, ma'am, that's the way life is," the impersonal voice was
muttering, "but it ain't the only way that it is, I reckon. I sees so
many sick and dying folks that you'd think I was obliged to look at
things unnatural-like. But I don't, not me, ma'am. It ain't all that
way, with nothing but waiting and wanting, and then disappointment. Even
Maggie had her good times somewhere in the past. You can't expect to be
always dressed in spangles and riding bareback, that's what I used to
say to her. You've got to take your share of bad times, same as the rest
of us. And look at me now. I've done sick nursing for more'n fifty
years--as far back as I like to look--but it ain't all been sick
nursing. There's been a deal in it besides.
"Naw'm, I've got a lot to be thankful for when I begin to take stock."
Her wrinkled face caught the first gleam of sunlight that fell through
the unwashed window panes. "I've done sick nursing ever since I was a
child almost; but I've managed mighty well all things considering, and
I've saved up enough to keep me out of the poor house when I get too old
to go on. When I give up I won't have to depend on charity, and the city
won't have to bury me either when I'm dead. And I've got a heap of
satisfaction out of my red geraniums too. I don't reckon you ever saw
finer blooms--not even in a greenhouse. Naw'm, I ain't been the
complaining sort. I've got a lot to be thankful for, and I know it."
Her old eyes shone; her sunken mouth was trembling, not with self-pity,
Corinna realized, with a pang that was strangely like terror, but with
the courage of living. The pathos of it appeared intolerable for a
moment; and gathering her cloak about her, Corinna felt that she must
cover her eyes and fly before she broke out into hysterical screaming.
Then the terror passed; and she saw, in a single piercing flash of
insight, that what she had mistaken for ugliness was simply an
impalpable manifestation of beauty. Beauty! Why it was everywhere! It
was with her now in this squalid house, in the presence of this crippled
old woman, unmoved by death, inured to poverty, screwing, grinding,
pinching, like flint to the crying baby, and yet cherishing the blooms
of her red geranium, her passionate horror of the poor house, and her
dream of six feet of free earth not paid for by charity at the end. Yes,
that was the way of life. Blind as a mole to the universe, and yet
visited by flashes of unearthly light.
"Thank you," said Corinna hurriedly. "I must go down. I must get a
breath of air, but I will come back in a little while." Then she started
at a run down the stairs, while the old woman gazed after her, as if the
flying figure, in the cloak of peacock-blue satin and white fur, was
that of a demented creature. "Air!" she repeated, with scornful
independence. "Air!", and turning away in disgust, she limped painfully
back to wait outside of the closed door. Here, when she had seated
herself in a sagging chair, she lifted her bleak eyes to the
smoke-stained ceiling, and repeated for the third time in a tone of
profound contempt: "Air!"
At the foot of the stairs, Corinna ran against Gideon Vetch. "She died
soon after you went out," she said, "but Patty is still there."
"I'll go up to her," he answered; and then as he placed his foot on the
bottom step, he looked back at her, and added, "I tried to spare her
this."
She assented almost mechanically. Fatigue had swept over her from head
to foot like some sinister drug and she felt incapable of giving out
anything, even sympathy, even the appearance of compassion. "Then it is
all true?" she asked. "Patty is not your child?"
A shadow crossed his face, but he did not hesitate in his reply. "I
never had a child. I was never married."
"You took her like that--because the mother was going to prison?"
He nodded. "She was a child. What difference did it make whether she was
mine or not? She was the nicest little thing you ever saw. She is
still."
"Yes, she is still. But you never knew what became of the mother?"
"I didn't know her real name. I didn't want to. The circus people called
her Queenie, that was all I knew. She'd stuck a knife into a man in a
jealous rage, and he happened to die. They said the trial would be
obliged to go against her. I was leaving California that night, and I
brought the child with me. I have never been back--" He spread out his
broad hand with a gesture that was strangely human. "You would have done
it in my place?"
She shook her head. "No, I should have wanted to, but I couldn't. I am
not big enough for that."
He was already ascending the stairs, but at her words, he turned and
smiled down on her. "It was nothing to make a fuss about," he said.
"Anybody would have done it."
Then he mounted the stairs lightly for his great height, taking two
steps at a time, while she passed out on the porch where Stephen was
waiting for her. As he rose wearily from the wicker rocking chair beside
the empty perambulator, she felt as if he were a stranger. In that one
night she seemed to have put the whole universe between her and the old
order that he represented.
"I kept my car waiting for you," he began. "It was better to let your
man go home."
She smiled at him in the pale light, and he broke out nervously: "You
look as if you would drop. What have they done to you?" Though she wore
the cloak of peacock-blue over her evening gown, the pointed train wound
on the floor behind her, and the fan of white ostrich plumes, which she
had forgotten to leave in the car, was still in her hand. Her face was
wan and drawn; there were violet circles under her eyes; and she looked
as if she had grown ten years older since the evening before. It was the
outward impression of the night, he knew. In this house one passed back
again into the power of time; youth could not be prolonged here for a
single night.
"I don't know what it means," he said, with a mixture of exasperation
and curiosity. "I wish you would tell me what it means."
"I feel," she answered, in an expressionless tone, as if the
insensibility of her nerves had passed into her voice, "that I have
faced life for the first time."
"Tell me what it means," he reiterated impatiently.
Dropping into the chair from which he had risen, she drew her train
aside while the doctor passed them hurriedly, with a muttered apology,
and went into the house. Then, leaning forward, with the fan clasped in
her hands, and her eyes on the straight deserted street, which ended
abruptly on the brow of a hill, she repeated word for word all that the
dying woman had said. The sun had not yet risen, but a faint opalescent
glow suffused the sky in the east, and flushed with a delicate colour
the round cobblestones in the street and the herring-bone pattern of the
pavement, where blades of grass sprouted among the bricks. Though she
did not look up at Stephen's face, she was aware while she talked of
some subtle emanation of thought outside of herself, as if the struggle
in his mind had overflowed mechanical processes and physical boundaries,
and was escaping into the empty street and the city beyond. And this
silent struggle, so charged with intensity that it produced the effect
of a cry, became for her merely a part, a single voice, in that greater
struggle for victory over circumstances which went on ceaselessly day
and night in the surrounding houses. Everywhere about her there was the
vague groping toward some idea of freedom, toward independence of
spirit; everywhere there was this perpetual striving toward a universe
that was larger. The dwellers in this crowded house, with their vision
of space and sunlight; the village with its vision of a city; the city
with its vision of a country; the country with its vision of a republic
of the world--all these universal struggles were condensed now into the
little space of a man's consciousness. To Corinna, in whose veins flowed
the blood of Malvern Hill and Cold Harbor, it seemed that the greater
victory must lie with those who charged from out the cover of philosophy
into the mystery of the unknown. If she had been in Stephen's place, she
knew that she should have taken the risk, that she should have flung
herself into the enterprise of life as into a voyage of discovery. Yet,
at the moment, appreciating all that it meant to him, she asked herself
if she had been wise to let him see the thought in her mind. For an
instant, after telling him, she hesitated, and in this instant Stephen
spoke.
"So he isn't her father?"
"No, he isn't her father. He had never seen her mother; he did not even
know her name, for he met the woman by accident when she was arrested in
the circus. Patty was over two years old then--about two and a half, I
think. Gideon Vetch took the child because of an impulse--a very human
impulse of pity--but he knew nothing of her parentage. He knows nothing
now, not even her real name. It is much worse than we ever imagined. Try
to understand it. Try to take it in clearly before you act rashly. There
is still time to weigh things--to stop and reflect. Nothing whatever is
known of Patty's birth, except that her father, so the woman said, died
in the first year of their marriage, before the child was born, and less
than two years later the mother was sent to prison for killing another
man--"
She broke off hurriedly, wiping her lips as if the mere recital of the
sordid facts had stained them with blood. It all sounded so horrible as
she repeated it--so incredibly evil!
"Oh, my dear boy, try to take it in however much it may hurt you," she
pleaded, turning a coward not on her own account, not even on his, but
for the sake of something deeper and more sacred which belonged to them
both and to the tradition for which they stood. A passionate longing
seized her now to protect Stephen from the risk that she had urged him
to take.
"I understand. It is terrible for her," he answered.
"I hate you to see Patty. Poor child, she looks seared." Then a possible
way occurred to her, even though she hated herself while she suggested
it. "I am not sure that it is wise for you to wait. There are so many
things you must think of. There is first of all your family--"
He laughed shortly. "It is late in the day to remember that."
"I know." A look of compunction crossed her face. "Forgive me."
"Of course I think of them," he said presently. "Poor Dad. He is the
best of us all, I believe." Though there was an expression of pain in
his eyes, she noticed that the unnatural lethargy, the nervous
irritation, had disappeared. He looked as if a load had dropped from his
shoulders.
As with many women who have reconciled themselves to the weakness of a
man, the first sign of his strength was more than a surprise, it was
almost a shock to her. She had believed that her knowledge of him was
perfect; yet she saw now that there had been a single flaw in her
analysis, and that this flaw was the result of a fundamental
misconception of his character. For she had forgotten that, conservative
and apparently priggish as he was, he was before all things a romantic
in temperament; and the true romantic will shrink from the ordinary risk
while he accepts the extraordinary one. She had forgotten that men of
Stephen's nature are incapable of small sacrifices, and yet at the same
time capable of large ones; that, though they may not endure petty
discomforts with fortitude, they are able, in moments of vivid
experience, to perform acts of conspicuous and splendid nobility. For
the old order was not merely the outward form of the conservative
principle, it was also the fruit of heroic tradition.
"You must think it over, Stephen," she pleaded. "Go away now, and try
to realize all that it will mean to you."
"Thinking doesn't get me anywhere," he replied. His face was pale and
thoughtful; and Corinna knew, while she watched him, that he had found
freedom at last; that he had come into his manhood. "I've made my
choice, and I'll stand by it to-day even if I regret it to-morrow.
You've got to take chances; to leave the safe road and strike out into
open country. That's living. Otherwise you might as well be dead. I
can't just cling like moss to institutions that other people have made;
to the things that have always been. I've got to take chances--and I'm
enough of a sport not to whine if the game goes against me--"
The part of Corinna's nature that was not cautious, but reckless, the
part in her whose source was imagination and impulse, thrilled in
sympathy with his resolve. Though she gazed down the straight deserted
street, her eyes were looking beyond the sprouting weeds and the
cobblestones to some starry flower which bloomed only in an invisible
world.
"I understand, dear," she answered softly. "I can't tell whether or not
it is the safe way; but I know it is the gallant way."
"It is the only way," he responded steadily. "If I am ever to make
anything of my life, this is the test. I see that I've got to meet it. I
shall probably have to meet it every day of my life--but, by Jove, I'll
meet it! Patty isn't just Patty to me. She is strength and courage. She
is the risk of the future. I suppose she is the pioneer in my blood, or
my mind. I can't help what she came from, nor can she. I've got to take
that as I take everything else, with the belief that it is worth all the
cost. The thing I feel now is that she has given me back myself. She has
given me a free outlook on life--"
He stopped abruptly, for there was the sound of footsteps in the house,
and after a minute or two, Patty and Gideon Vetch came out on the porch.
The girl looked, except for the red of her mouth, as if the blood had
been drawn from her veins, and her eyes were like dark pansies. All the
light had faded from them, changing even their colour.
"Patty," said Stephen; and he made a step toward her, with his hands
outstretched as if he would gather her to him. Then he stopped and fell
back, for the girl was shrinking away from him with a look of fear.
"I can't talk now," she answered, smiling with hard lips. "I am tired. I
can't talk now." Running ahead she went down the steps, through the
gate, and into Vetch's car which was standing beside the curbstone.
"She's worn out," explained Vetch. "I'll take her home, and you'd better
try to get some sleep, Mrs. Page. You look as tired as Patty."
"Let me go with you," returned Corinna. "Your car is closed, and Patty
and I are both bareheaded." For a moment she turned back to put her hand
on Stephen's arm. "I must sleep," she said. "I shan't go to the shop
to-day."
Vetch was waiting at the door of the car, and when she stumbled over her
train, she fell slightly against him. "How exhausted you are," he
observed gently, "and what a rock you are to lean on!"
She looked at him with a smile. "Those are the very words I've used
about you."
He laughed and reddened, and she saw the glow of pleasure kindle in his
unclouded blue eyes. "Even rocks crumble when we put too much weight on
them," he responded, "but since you have done so much for us, perhaps
you may be able to convince Patty that nothing can make any difference
between her and me. Won't you try to see that, daughter?"
"Oh, Father!" exclaimed Patty with a sob, "it makes all the difference
in the world!"
"There it is," said Vetch with anxious weariness. "That is all I can get
out of her."
"She is so tired," replied Corinna. "Let her rest." Though her gaze was
on the street, she saw still the dusk beyond the ailantus tree and the
old woman, with the crooked back, pressing down the eyelids over those
staring eyes.
They did not speak again through the short drive; and when they reached
the house and entered the hall, Patty turned for the first time to
Corinna. "I can never tell you," she began, "I can never tell
you--" Then, with a strangled sob, she broke away and ran to the
staircase beyond the library.
"Let her rest," said Corinna, as Vetch came with her on the porch.
"Leave her to herself. She needs sleep, but she is very young--and for
youth there is no despair that does not pass."
"You are as tired as she is," he returned.
She nodded. "I am going home to sleep, but the look of that child
worries me."
"I kept it from her for sixteen years," he said slowly, "and she found
out by an accident."
"I never suspected, or I might have prevented it."
"No, I trusted too much to chance. I have always trusted to chance."
"I think," she said, "that you have trusted most to your good
instincts."
He smiled, and she saw that he was deeply touched. "Well, I'm trusting
to them now," he responded. "They have led me between two extremes, and
it looks as if they had led me into a nest of hornets. I've got them all
against me, but it isn't over yet, by Jove! It is a long road that has
no turning--"
They had descended the steps together, and walking a little way beyond
the drive, they stood in the bright green grass looking up at the clear
gold of the sunrise.
"There is a meeting to-night," she said.
"Of the strikers--yes, I may win them. I can generally win people if
they let me talk--but the trouble goes deeper than that. It isn't that I
can't carry them with me for an hour. It is simply that I can't make any
of them see where we are going. It is a question not of loyalty, but of
understanding. They can't understand anything except what they want."
"Whether you win or not," she answered, "I am glad that at last I am on
your side."
His face lighted. "On my side? Even if it means failure?"
As she looked up at him the sunrise was in her face. The sky was turning
slowly to flame-colour, and each dark pointed leaf of the magnolia tree
stood out illuminated against a background of fire. "It may be failure,
but it is magnificent," she said.
He was smiling down on her from his great height; and while she stood
there in that clear golden air, she felt again, as she had felt twice
before when she was with him, that beneath the depth of her personal
life, in that buried consciousness which belonged to the ages of being,
something more real than any actual experience she had ever known was
responding to the look in his eyes and the sound of his voice. All that
she had missed in life--completeness, perfection--seemed to shine about
her for an instant before it passed on into the sunlight. A fancy,
nothing more! A fading gleam of some lost wildness of youth! For if she
had spoken the thought in her mind while she stood there, she would have
said, "Give me what I have never had. Make me what I have never been."
But she did not speak it; the serene friendliness of her look did not
alter; and the impulse vanished as swiftly as the shadow of a bird in
flight.
"I thank you," he answered in a low voice. "I shall remember that."
The moment had passed, and she held out her hand with a smile. "I shall
come to stay with Patty while you are at the meeting to-night," she
said; and then, as she turned away to the car, he walked beside her in
silence.
A little later, when she looked back from the gate, she saw him standing
in the bright grass with the sunrise above his head.