It was decided that Georgia was to have a bed in a ward at eight
dollars a week. Private rooms were twenty-five and they couldn't
afford that during the month she would be laid up, particularly since
her pay would stop automatically after her third day of absence. The
office rule was very strict on that point.
She sat limply in the waiting room while Al was attending to her
registration and her mother was upstairs with the nurse unpacking her
things. On the opposite wall were a couple of windows, sharply framing
vistas into the park across the street, and she saw two fragments of
the path where she had often walked on Sunday mornings with Stevens.
It was this same wall in front of her which had seemed so sullen gray
and prison-color from the other side and which had sometimes turned
their talk to sombre things--death and immortality. From the inside,
as she now saw it, the wall was not gray but cheerfully reddish brown,
patterned vertically like a thrasher's wing.
Two pictures hung by the window, of the pope and of Frances Xavier
Cabrini, founder of the order of nuns that conducted the hospital.
They were photographs, she thought, or reproductions from photographs.
She looked closely at them, first at the old man, then at the old
woman. She saw in them more than she had ever seen in such pictures
before. They offered at least one positive answer to the riddle,
perhaps the safest answer for such as she--to submit oneself through
one's lifetime so as to attain at the end of it the matchless serenity
of those two untroubled faces.
It came to her then in a moment of more than natural revelation, as it
seemed, that she must seek the peace which these two had found.
She crossed slowly to the desk in the corner, to write what she knew
might be the last of the thousands of letters she had written.
_My dear_, she began on the hospital paper, _I am here with_, not to
cause him anxiety in the beginning of his great enterprise, _a touch of
the grip. Nothing serious. In haste and headache. Georgia._
She paused. Even if it must end by her giving him up, she loved him.
Should she, by an omission so significant, upset and distress him and
perhaps hinder him in a task which, well performed, would bring great
things to him, if never now to her! _I love you_, she added, _always_.
A second note she dated a week forward. _My dear, I haven't pulled
around again as soon as I expected, but the rest has done me a world of
good. Don't worry about me--they say I've a constitution like a horse.
For my sake, make good, Mason--you've got to. With love, lots of it,
always, G._
A third she put two weeks ahead. _Dearest, I'm doing fine and will be
out soon now. Your letters have been such a comfort. It's almost two
thousand years since we've seen each other, isn't it? I love you,
dear. Georgia._
She put them in their envelopes, addressed them, and wrote 1, 2 and 3
respectively in the upper right hand corners in such a way that the
stamps would conceal them. Al came in as she was finishing, and she
explained how she wanted them mailed a week apart. At first he
refused, but at last was over-persuaded by her misery. He promised to
do her errand as she asked, and kept his promise faithfully.
A page boy chanting "Mis-ter Stev-uns, Mis-ter Riggle-hei-murr, Mis-ter
An-droo Brown, Mis-ter Noise, Mis-ter Stevuns," caught Mason in the
grill paying a lot of attention to a first vice-president over a
planked tenderloin, German fried and large coffee. Accordingly he made
his first report not to Silverman, but to the old man, thus: