THE CALL OF ETERNITY
Elsie walked on and on eastward towards the lake. For a week she had been
living alone in a room she had found near the park on the night that she
left Harvey Spencer, telephoning in the drug-store. She had resolved that
instant to go. It was to be "Now or never"--and she hurried away in an
opposite direction from the hiding place--and from Druce.
The little money that he had put in her hands for drugs had somehow
lasted her until now. She had been too ill to go out, her body racked
with fever.
She was conscious that she must tomorrow find some work to do, for the
landlady had twice asked her for the next week's rent. She looked in at
the door of a laundry where a German woman was singing as she ironed
children's dresses by the light of a flaring gas jet. It looked pleasant
and peaceful in there. Perhaps that motherly woman would let her work
with her. She would see tomorrow.
Elsie walked on towards the lake. She wanted to look at the water. She
wanted to breathe the cool breath of great winds coming over the water to
cool this fierce fire of shame and horror fevering her soul, flaming in
her delicate cheeks.
Elsie came to the lake front at a wide high lot between two comfortable
mansions on Sheridan Road.
Lights of homes shone through the night's darkness. Beams as of sunshine
danced across the water.
A light from an upper chamber in the nearest home shone across her and
streamed onward to the sands.
Elsie stood clasping and unclasping her little slender hands. The
waters,--they could wash away that blow, the marks of that blow, wash
away those words threatening death from one who had killed something in
her heart. She realized that she was not afraid, facing the life to come.
She was afraid only to go on living in the same world with one who had
taken her girlhood and her womanhood, afraid only of this frightful fever
in her veins, of this poison that was consuming her.
Out yonder were the cool deeps of death--of death? What then? Far across
the waves she saw a light.
It was as if her spirit went to meet the light, went in quest of the
meaning of such a beacon light across black waters.
The light seemed to grow bigger and bigger as she gazed. By flinging her
frail body into the dreadful surges could one reach peace and safety?
Faintly her spirit heard the answer of the pursuing hound of heaven,
faintly she heard the call of eternity and of the Eternal Love.
The great black billows called to her. Elsie wondered what all the poor
girls the waves toss up along the shores say to their Maker. She seemed
to feel with them as she stood there, how the waves seize the bodies of
the lost,--how the undertow takes them. Elsie put her hands to her face.
"Why am I here alone in the night?" she heard herself asking. Her voice
sounded strangely familiar, yet unfamiliar as if some one were speaking
to her. Then she knew that the voice was her own soul in the silence.
"Mother will forgive me, mother wants me back, mother will help me get
well--if there is any health in me. Mother knows that it wasn't all my
fault--" her thought defended her against that voice.
"Why am I here alone in the night?" the question was repeated.
"I will go home. I will begin again. Men begin again. Oh!..." A sob came
from her lips.... "No, no, no!"
She felt with every nerve of her quivering being that in the slow upward
climb of sex towards true love and true parenthood woman's battle is
man's,--felt that God and Nature are now demanding not less of men.
The suffering girl could not put her certainty into words, but in her
body and in her soul she knew--she knew.
Suddenly from the opened window of the nearest home she heard above the
wind the cry of a baby, the loud, sweet, prolonged, fiercely-demanding
cry of a hungry little baby.
A wistful smile twisted her lips as she listened.
Suddenly as the baby's cry was stopped she put her hands to her bosom and
a strange lovely light shone on her face.