Rose Wilding did not rise from her bed the next day, nor, in the
daytime, for many days. When she had come home in the evening she had
looked, to the casual eye, as robust as ever. But in the morning it was
plain that she had fallen into a complete mental and physical collapse.
It seemed that she must have gone on upon the sheer strength of terror
and worry, until, once finding the little girl, as she thought, the
stimulus was gone; and her strength and her interest in life had gone
with it. She lay all day like one in a partial doze, evidently not
asleep, but paying no attention to anybody or anything about her.
Augusta she noticed not at all, except to take from her the food
that she brought and to submit passively to her tidying and washing.
Wardwell she recognized with a brief, passing glimmer of her old
flashing smile, but not even he could arouse her more than momentarily.
To her own doctor, whom Augusta had called in, she answered quietly,
and without seeming to think that any other explanation was necessary,
that she was resting and that she did not think that she would get up.
At night when the house had settled into its bedtime quiet, Augusta
stole into the little cot at the foot of her mother's bed, and waited.
After a little she heard her mother stir softly in the bed, and then
heard her get stealthily out to the floor. She came straight to the
little cot, and, as she knelt by it, Augusta could feel her warm breath
upon her own tumbled hair. Then, satisfied, she stole softly back into
bed and went sound asleep.
This was the first day of the new life for Augusta. And every day that
followed through the fall and winter was exactly like it. It seemed
that Rose Wilding lived through the day just waiting for the night
to come, that she might steal from her bed to find her little girl.
She never spoke to Augusta except to answer a direct question. She
submitted in a gentle, kindly way to Augusta's every ministration. She
smiled at Wardwell and always knew him. But when he would time and
again, indicating Augusta, ask who this girl was, she always answered
with a deprecating "Hush!" and a pitying glance at Augusta which said
plainly that he should not ask, that he knew well enough where the girl
had come from and he ought to know better than to hurt her feelings by
bringing it up. He asked the question often in a good-hearted effort
to make her realize that this was Augusta. But, one day, after he had
asked it, he saw Augusta's face as she caught her mother's sidelong
look. He did not ask the question again.
Gradually the three settled to an acceptance of the state of affairs as
they existed in the mind of Rose Wilding. By day, Augusta was the girl
that had followed Rose Wilding from "that place." At night, the little
Augusta came from somewhere and slept in her place at the foot of her
mother's bed.
The change that came over Rose Wilding was one that to the outer eye
was wholly inexplicable. Though that there was a change was plain to
the most casual look. Probably it was to the casual, unconcerned eye
that the change was most startling.
One day, when Rose Wilding had been some weeks at home, a new boarder,
a Mrs. Barron, a nervous, high-strung, over-worked woman, head of
department in one of the great retail stores, came into the sitting
room to speak to Augusta. She glanced accidentally into the bedroom
and straight into the eyes of Rose Wilding whom she had never before
seen.
Mrs. Barron fainted.
Augusta and Wardwell, accustomed to seeing Rose Wilding day by day,
could not realize the extent of the change that had come over her. To
them she was today practically as she had been yesterday. But to a
stranger the picture of the large handsome woman, her face blanched now
by hidden disease to a transparent pearl white, the skin smooth and
unlined as a growing baby's, her pallor doubled by the white of the
bed and the enamel that covered every object in the room, was in all
a sight to arouse a nameless, creeping dread of something present but
unseen.
Augusta had taken a few months of hospital training during the year
past, and her care of her mother became not only a cult and a religion
but almost a fanatical passion. She had turned the room into her ideal
of a hospital room. She had painted and enamelled everything so that
all could be scrubbed and washed down with disinfectants. She would
have nothing in the room that was not a pure white. She dressed the bed
and her mother in the snowiest things she could lay hand to.
The effect was not at all what she had had in mind. To herself, living
as she did so close to her mother, the room was just the cheeriest
and sweetest abode that could be made for a beloved sick one. But her
mother's wondering, childlike eyes, as they looked out unseeing from
under the circle of completely blanched hair above them upon the room
that was now her world, did not have the look familiar to the sick
room. They were eyes that looking, and seeing not, yet dealt with
strange thing that showed through a curtain.
Augusta, from long watching, from unending longing and perpetual
defeat, had worn thin the coarser material covering that held the
living, burning spirit within her. As her mother seemed to remove day
by day into deeper and deeper places of the soul's isolation, Augusta
seemed ever to follow her.
Wardwell, standing by his wife with the feeling of a strange man
watching over a girl baby left suddenly and unaccountably to his
care and at the same time with the hunger of a young lover for his
sweetheart's first kisses, thought, and thought often, that she was
going away from him.
She was unfailingly dear and thoughtful. The moments which she could
snatch for him from the ever increasing care of her mother she filled
with anxious and touching tenderness. Every day brought him a new and
revealing sense of the depth of her spirit and affection. But the
feeling of being separated from her came pressing upon him with a
twofold weight.
In the day time she played her part as the girl who had come from "that
place" with Rose Wilding, while Wardwell looked on heart sick with
sympathy for the pain that he knew she carried and with a withering
sense of his own uselessness. She played a part. But she played the
part so well in her self-effacing patience that he was finding it
necessary to remind himself that she was playing a part. It came to the
point where he at times caught himself walking rapidly up and down his
room and arguing with himself whether this was really his Augusta, or
whether he, too, was losing his grip on reality.
At night, when she was away from his sight and he knew that she had
gone back into the little Augusta of Rose Wilding's memory, it was,
if anything, worse. Here he knew she played a willing part, trying to
make the part a reality. For Wardwell knew the daring of her mind and
the greatness of her desire; knew that she would stop at nothing, would
grasp at every thread of memory that could possibly draw her mother's
mind across the vacant wilderness between the present and the past.
But even this double barrier of outward isolation from the Augusta who
was his was not the great thing that he feared. The look which he had
seen in Augusta's face in the days when they were hunting the city for
her mother, that strained, listening look that took her away from him
and from everything about them, was often in her eyes now. Somehow he
knew that in it she spoke to the spirit of Rose Wilding that wandered
in the unknown places.
He did not resent the state of things. But he found himself
unaccountably peevish and unwontedly tempted to self pity.
He did not know what was coming upon him. Would not have believed it if
he had been told. He knew that they were bad days for him. They were
days in which he sat pounding out useless hours at the typewriter, only
to destroy the work as soon as he had done it. They were nights when he
worked feverishly, bitterly at the jokes and skits that were at once
his bread and butter and the bane of his soul.
He came to hate the mere thought of writing at all. He was a failure.
Even the things that he could do, the hated jokes that until now had
brought him enough for a living, were now failing him. He was not
making enough to afford to take Augusta and her mother away from this
big house. And the thought that Augusta in the face of all her burdens
was obliged to keep it to support her mother and herself, while he
barely paid his board drove him frantic.
One day in the middle of the winter he climbed to the coop in the
fourth story of the old building in Bleecker street where the presses
were complaining over the last edition of the afternoon. He had been
walking nearly all day, climbing stairs in increasing discouragement
and going down them again with a certain sickly relief. He was, in
short, looking for work.
Six months before he would have sworn that he would never again have to
go back to the treadmill of routine work. He had been so sure that he
could sit his whole life, if necessary, and turn out stories and scraps
enough to give him the money he needed. He had deliberately planned for
himself a life in which he would earn just enough to live in his own
way, giving himself the time to think and work upon the books that he
wanted to write.
His marriage had changed his plan of life. He did not propose that
Augusta and her mother should be dependent upon the girl's work and the
house. It did not occur to him that Augusta was not, and did not intend
to be, dependent upon him for a living. There was, of course, a living
in the house for herself and her mother, as there had always been. But
that was not Wardwell's way of looking at the matter. Augusta was his
wife. And it was his immediate business to begin earning enough money
for all three of them.
At once he had begun to crowd himself. For a few weeks he had found
himself earning more money than he had ever thought possible from his
daily work. But it took him only a short time to flood the market of
Sunday papers which he had built up for himself. He had not known how
thin was the vein which he had been working. In a certain foolish
contempt for the thing which he did easily he had thought that he could
turn it out mechanically, without heart in it, and in any quantity. He
was sharply undeceived.
The first few batches of stories that came back did no more than annoy
him. But as the refusals became more and more perfunctory, and more
carefully polite, Wardwell knew, with sickening insight, that his
stories were not even being read by the editors who used to welcome
them.
He knew that he had lost his power through despising it. He had writhed
on in ugly despair, cursing the facility with which he could still
write; for he knew that it was that very facility which was now his
undoing. He had not hoped, but he had kept on trying. Now his money was
gone and he must find something.
Jim Ray was sympathetic, and heartily sceptical.
"All rot!" he growled. "Stop bitting your finger ends and ease up a
little. Your face looks like a rat's with the ferret about three jumps
behind. Quit it. Borrow some money. Here, I'm as poor as my own devil
but I can get you some. There's lots of the stuff around somewhere.
Borrow a hundred and go up on a farm somewhere for a few weeks, and
sleep."
"You're all wrong," said Wardwell, still breathing hard, "there's
nothing the matter with me. It's the confounded stairs here. They're so
steep they lean over backward."
"You need to go easy, I tell you, Jimmie. What you need is a rest."
"Rest! I haven't done a stroke for six weeks!"
"Probably not. But you've been bending over a typewriter till the back
ribs are sticking into your lungs."
"What in blazes are you talking about?" said Wardwell bluffly. "If you
want to stall me off, why don't you give me the usual thing--'office
all full just now, leave your name and address, we'll call you up if we
need, and so forth?' Was I so useless as that when I was here?"
"Jimmie," said Ray quietly, "there's plenty of work here for a man as
good as you. But you're not able just now to do it, and it would kill
you to try. Go home and go to bed, and let your wife take care of you."
Wardwell stared at his friend, trying to outface him, to bluff the
thing down by sheer stubbornness. But there was a sickening, cold
weakness at the bottom of his stomach. He knew that Ray was seeing
through him and finding him out as he had not been able to see himself.
With an odd feeling of curiosity and detachment he walked over to a
little square of mirror that hung on a pillar at just the right height
for Ray to comb his bald head by. Wardwell took it off the nail and
shoved it up the post about a foot and a half.
He was curious to know what it was in him that Ray had seen. But there
was nothing to be seen, except, perhaps, a sort of hunted look about
the eyes and a kind of pinched drawing of the nostrils. He did not look
at all like a sick man.
"You're all wrong," he repeated stubbornly. "And besides, my wife's got
something else to do."
Ray only answered quietly:
"How much are you coughing, Jimmie?"
Wardwell looked around sharply, in a turn of sudden worry. But in a
moment he laughed out:
"What the deuce are you doing? Second story work, along with your other
little activities? Of course I--I cough a little. But that's just the
smoking and the irritation. Confound you, you'd be coughing bricks if
you'd been sitting at a machine for six weeks without being able to
knock out a good line!"
"I suppose so. But, Jimmie, you'll have to give up this other idea. You
don't look well. You'd never stand cold and wet and long waiting. You
know the dog's life of a reporter. One good cold would do for you."
"But, I tell you--"
"Jimmie, be sensible for once. Go home and let that good little girl of
yours get a good look at you. If she doesn't tell you to pack off out
of the city for a while, I'll admit that I'm wrong."
Wardwell stayed a while, arguing mulishly, but Jim Ray did not move
from his position. He would not agree to help Jimmie to a job because
the latter was not able to work.
At home, he found Augusta tearfully trying to coax and lift her mother
back into bed. As he stood in the sitting room he could hear the girl
pleading:
"Please, please, mamma dear, can't you help just one little step! I
can't lift any more--Just one little step!"
Then he heard the sagging of the bed under the heavy body and he knew
that Augusta had accomplished her task.
Now he remembered what Doctor Gardner had told him, that this phase
of Mrs. Wilding's malady would come--not long before the end. She
would rouse herself out of the torpor into which she had settled. Some
vague, unformed fear would probably stir her, and she would have to
be watched. If it was coming now Augusta must not be left to do this
alone. He would have to find a good strong nurse. He must see Gardner
about it right away. That he had no money did not occur to him now. In
the face of Augusta's need he did not think of that fact.
Augusta came out suddenly and walked straight into Jimmie's arms where
he stood in the middle of the room.
"Oh, Jimmie," she said, resting tiredly against him, "I needed you so!
Where have you been?"
"Oh, just around."
"She had crawled under the bed, Jimmie," said Augusta choking, "just
like some poor wild thing, and when she looked out at me, _Oh!_ Why,
why does she seem to fear me, to almost _hate_ me sometimes?"
"No, dearest, no," said Jimmie, holding her quiet. "No, it isn't that
at all. There's something we don't understand. She's in the dark and
so are we. Her mind is struggling to break through, and we cannot help
because we are in the dark too. Outwardly she doesn't know you. But she
does know you, dear, she feels you, in another way. She knows that her
little Augusta is around her, caring for her. The flesh and the senses
are playing a cruel trick on her poor spirit, dear. But she does know
that you are about her."
"Oh, Jimmie, do you really believe it? I'm so tired trying to believe!"
"Yes, dear, I'm as sure as that we are standing here that she does in
some way--I don't know how--she does really feel you. But I'm afraid,
dearest that there is a change coming now. You know Gardner told us to
expect it. And it's going to be cruel hard upon you, dear. You must
not try to do all alone. I'll see Gardner tonight and we'll get a good
strong nurse."
At the word he felt Augusta stiffen resistingly in his arms and he knew
that a struggle was coming.
"Oh, Jimmie, don't ask me to do that! I couldn't--I couldn't give up
one little bit of her, not one little minute to anyone."
"But, dear, you are not able. You are too little for it."
"I can't help it, Jimmie. You know I can't. You know how I've waited,
every hour of every day, waited and prayed, for a moment when my
darling would know me--when she would know that I hadn't left her,
that she hadn't been left to strange, careless people. And think,
Jimmie, think what it would mean to me if the moment came, even one
little flash, and I wasn't there for her to know me! Jimmie," she said
quietly, turning slowly upon him with that strange, unseeing light in
her eyes, "I think, if my moment should slip away from me that way--I
think that I should die."
And Wardwell, bewildered, silenced, half believing, knew that he was
beaten.
But he did go to see the doctor.
Doctor Gardner's little eyes twinkled behind a cloud of smoke from a
big cigar as Wardwell expounded the situation at home and told what
must be done and what Augusta must not be allowed to do. When Jimmie
had quite finished the doctor asked with an elaborate diffidence:
"Ah--Do I understand that you are intending to do something that
Augusta does not want?"
"Well--of course--" Jimmie started to explain.
"I was only going to remark," the doctor went on serenely, "that, to my
personal knowledge, Augusta began doing things after her own plan on
the day she was born. And, so far as I know, nobody has been able to
change that. You see, the trouble has been that she has always turned
out to be right."
"Yes, of course she's always right," Wardwell hastened to agree, "but,
in this--"
"And, unless you have found a way," the doctor proceeded, "of changing
Augusta, we'll just have to let her go her own way in this. To be sure,
though, we must try to see that she does not kill herself with the hard
work.
"But how's the book coming on?" he asked suddenly, sitting up and
fixing Wardwell with a sharp, steady appraisal that Jimmie could almost
feel physically.
"Rotten!" said Jimmie, annoyed and sullen, though he did not know why.
"But how did you know--?"
"Oh, Augusta was telling me something the other day, about your walking
the floor, and--one thing and another. Come inside here a moment," the
doctor commanded, rising brusquely and walking to the door of his inner
office.
As Wardwell closed the double baize-lined, sound-proof doors of the
little consulting room behind him he felt a sickening assurance that he
was going to hear bad news. But he was mainly irritated and angry with
himself because he now knew that he had been giving Augusta additional
worry.
A half hour later he was listening restlessly to Doctor Gardner's
explanations about 'filtration in the upper right lobe' and 'weakening
of the walls' and gathering in a general way that he was well on the
way to being a consumptive. He was telling himself quietly that he did
not believe a word of it, that if he could just once strike his stride
on a good little story he would be all right in a week.
Finally the doctor prescribed. "You will have to get out of the city
at once. Just walk out, don't fuss about it, and go south somewhere,
where you can stay out in the open and just lie around and eat and
sleep. Don't take work with you, and don't let it follow you. Just walk
out and drop everything but the business of saving your life. That's
just what I mean, young man. I have not concealed anything from you.
And--I'm not exaggerating anything. You must do this _now_, tomorrow."
Saying nothing, Wardwell rose to go. Inwardly he was grumbling to
himself that it was always easy for the other fellow to tell you
to drop everything and walk away. But he knew that he could not be
churlish. The doctor was probably right and certainly he was honest and
friendly. They shook hands in silence, and the doctor, used to seeing
people take their news in all sorts of ways, let him go without another
word.
Augusta had once said that Jimmie sometimes was not quite grown up.
Outside in the street he proved it. He turned deliberately and looking
up at Doctor Gardner's window, much after the manner of a boy sticking
out his tongue in defiance, he said aloud:
"You can go to the devil. I wouldn't leave Augusta now, not to save ten
lives."
As an afterthought, before reaching home, he went into a drug store and
called the doctor on the telephone. He warned him truculently:
"Tell her my nerves are bad, that's true enough. Tell her any tale
you like. But don't tell her--what you've just told me. I won't have
Augusta worried now."
He would not expect to hide it long from Augusta, if there was anything
seriously wrong with him. She always knew the truth, somehow. But he
did not believe literally what the doctor had told him, and he was
confident that things could drift on as they were.
"In fact," he said to himself as he walked along in the face of the
sharp night wind, "I feel better this minute than I have for a long
time. That's just natural contrariness, I suppose."
Augusta was waiting for him, sitting wrapped in a heavy dressing robe
reading under the lamp in her mother's sitting room. She was so like a
tired little girl that as his glance momentarily followed the stream of
the light into the mother's room and fell upon the little cot drawn up
and ready at the side of the mother's bed, Wardwell for an instant lost
his grip on reality. The fiction at which Rose Wilding's poor wandering
mind had grasped seemed to be actually the truth. And Wardwell found
that he had to struggle with himself before he could remember that
Augusta was truly his wife and that she and he had an existence for
each other which did not depend on that fiction. But when he looked
again at Augusta and saw the woman in her, the steady, self-contained,
gentle strength that shone in the beauty of her tired eyes, he knew
that Augusta was really his. And now for the first time he weakened,
his knees bent under him, he felt and was the sick man. He wanted to
tell her, to confide, to lean upon her. Angrily he shook the feeling
off and came quickly over to sit on the arm of her chair.
"You had him all fixed!" he began accusingly, thinking to head off with
banter the question in her eyes. "The first thing he said was that you
got up and rearranged the parlor furniture and fired the cook and fixed
the furnace the very day you were born--well, I couldn't swear that
he mentioned the furnace in so many words. But that was the general
idea. You've always had your own way, and everybody else's way. And you
always will. And he turned me out, laughing at me for thinking that I
could change things."
"What else did he say, dear?" she asked with a quiet smile of full
understanding. "About you?"
"Oh, it was just like the fellow that went to the doctor and said he
was sick.
"'Stop smoking.'
"'But, doctor, I never smoked in my life.'
"'Oh, I see. Then that's just what you need. Start smoking. My usual
fee is ten dollars--but--ah--considering--'"
"_Jimmie!_"
"Honest! Cross my heart! Hope to die of a broken leg! It was just like
that.
"He told me that I had to take a rest. I told him I hadn't worked for
weeks. Then he told me that whatever I was doing I should stop it."
"You are not telling me what he really said," Augusta commented.
"Oh, big words, all big long ones, that might have meant polygamy or
liver trouble for all I knew. But the upshot of it was just what I
knew before. I'm nervous and my temper is bad. And he must have known
that I didn't have any money, for he really didn't ask me for any," he
confessed gracelessly as an afterthought.
"But it's just as I told him. If I could only rap out a decent few
lines I'd be all--"
A sharp fit of coughing came up, choking him. He rose and hurried out
into the hall. Augusta started to follow him, but a movement in the
bedroom caught her ear and she turned back. She wanted to follow him,
to make him tell her just what was the trouble. But the fear of what
her mother might do was too strong upon her.
For the time, Wardwell had escaped. In his own room, he sat down at
the desk, gasping between spells of coughing and trying to smother the
noise with his handkerchief. The coughing stopped after a little, and
he was surprised to feel a sensation of pleasant warm moisture in his
irritated throat.
He cocked one ear up in a funny way he had, as though to listen. Then
put his handkerchief to his lips and held it there a moment. When he
drawn it away and looked meditatively for a little while at the red
blotch on it, he nodded his head.
He did not take this fresh piece of news argumentatively, defiantly,
as he had met the words of the doctor. This was definite, conclusive.
He must deliberate. He decided that he would deliberate. That was the
thing. This matter must be thought out carefully.
He looked at the typewriter in front of him, for counsel. Then suddenly
his arms shot out grabbing the rusted iron frame of the typewriter and
hugging it, while his head sank down upon it and he whispered to it in
agony:
"God! Never another good line on you!"
This has to be told. In that moment, that battered old contraption of
cast iron and rattling keys was more to Jimmie Wardwell than woman,
man or child could be. It was dearer to him, it was nearer to where
he thought and really lived. And he loved it and hugged it to him,
as though already they were trying to take part of his soul from him.
For men of Wardwell's kind are like that. When the passion of creating
has once gotten fire in their souls, they are damned to live this life
alone. No articulate being can come near. And in their loneliness they
fasten on something connected with their passion. There have been men
who have loved to the death a rickety old table at which they have
worked, or even a corner of a garret room.
After a while Jimmie lurched up out of his chair and fumblingly got
ready to crawl into bed. It was the first time that he had missed going
down to say good night, but he dared not face Augusta tonight.
The idea of dying, physically, meant little or nothing to him. He had
never thought of it. He did not think of it now. But the failures of
the past months and this last sure sign of physical failure, of the end
in fact, threw him into blind panic; not a panic in fear of pain, or
darkness, still less of punishment. No, it was the fear that the spirit
fire, burning pent up and mad within him, was to be smothered. He was
afraid, afraid that he, Jimmie Wardwell, would be snuffed out before he
could form and bring out the things that burned within him and craved
for expression.
Shivering under the bed clothes, he moaned over and over like a hurt
child: "Never another good line!" Until, again like a child in pain, he
fell into a sort of sleep.
He did not hear, probably he had forgotten, the girl who came with
trembling steps and beating heart to listen at his door for this
breathing and then hurried back in anxious fear to her own endless
vigil.
A Wardwell debonair and blithe as the early spring morning came into
Augusta's sitting room after breakfast. He had swept from him all
traces of the storm of the night, and Augusta knew from the first
glance that she would learn nothing from him in this mood.
"The glory of the morning,
"The beauty of the dawning,
"The joy of the skies,
"Lies in her eyes--and lies--and lies--and--Oh,
"Well, maybe it only fibs,"
He chanted impudently.
Augusta was standing at the table fixing fruit for her mother. As
Jimmie came up behind her she lifted up her face to be kissed. But as
Jimmie stooped she quickly lifted the peeled peach she held in her hand
and stuck it full into his mouth.
"Aawa--yab yab--yak!" Jimmie expostulated. Then, when he was articulate:
"Peaches is peaches, I'll admit. But some peaches is witches, you'll
admit. Anyhow, I _won't_ be kissed now till I've had a bath," he wound
up defiantly.
"Come in to see mother," said Augusta serenely.
Rose Wilding lay propped among the snowy pillows and took no notice
whatever of them as they came in. Her rounded face and beautiful,
long, capable hands were as white as were the masses of lovely white
hair that flowed down past her temples. Only her great dark blue eyes
showed a bit of color. They looked straight ahead, alive, and full of
knowledge, but a knowledge that seemed to have nothing to do with this
present business of living. Wardwell was struck this morning more than
ever by the look of complete detachment and absorption in the eyes.
He had never thought much of souls as apart from bodies. But with
the writing man's unconscious trick of always trying to put even the
vaguest, most fugitive thoughts into words, he found himself trying
to word the nameless idea. Here was a soul, he thought, living quite
detached and almost independent in a beautiful and almost useless body.
And he saw no reason at all why this soul, so independent, so complete
to itself, could not at will leave the unnecessary body and go on
about its own absorbing business.
Meanwhile he was urging:
"She made me eat half of your fruit already, Mrs. Wilding, and if you
don't hurry and eat the other half, why, she'll make me eat it all,
just to save it."
"Yes, eat up good, darling," Augusta urged gently, with the way that
was now growing upon her of petting a child. "And don't mind him. You
know I wouldn't give him even a little tiny bit of your fruit."
"Oh, good morning, Mister Jimmie," said Rose Wilding, in the quick
apologetic way of one who has momentarily forgotten a politeness. "I
hope the book is coming on well."
She had not spoken before for weeks. Wardwell was startled completely
off his guard and the sudden mention of the book caught him on the raw
and brought back the hideous, shamed cowardice of the night.
Augusta, looking quickly up at him in her own surprise, saw the agony
and bitterness in his face, and wondered. Jimmie was never bitter. Then
she saw his face clear, and she knew that whatever it was he had fought
it down.
"Fine and dandy," he lied glibly, "only"--he paused a moment with one
ear turned up whimsically, as though considering how best to place the
difficulty before her--"only there's a Scotchman in it and he's the
contrariest man I ever had to deal with. He's Scotch and he insists on
talking a great deal, which is all wrong for a Scotchman. But, what's
worse, he will talk with a North of Ireland accent. You see, the two
brogues are so much alike, and I can't get him to stick to his own."
Rose Wilding reached daintily for a quarter of a peach and commented
helpfully:
"I mind I knew an Eyetalian once that talked with the softest Kerry
brogue you ever heard. I guess they caught him young somewhere."
Wardwell shouted uproariously, and Augusta laughed out in quick
surprised happiness. Never since the very first had her mother spoken
so naturally and like her dear self of other days.
While Augusta turned away a moment, Wardwell was watching her mother.
She was smiling with the contagion of their laughter, but she had her
eye fixed calculatingly upon Augusta. When she seemed to be convinced
that it was safe, that Augusta would not turn immediately to see her,
she reached out hastily and snatching a banana from the tray hid it
under a pillow beside her. Then she looked up furtively, to see if
Wardwell had seen her.
He winked and smiled at her, as one who compounds the felony of a
friend and brother. She laughed a little confused, deprecating laugh,
like a child caught in some new delinquency. Augusta looked around,
glancing from her mother to Wardwell, but she saw nothing. And Jimmie
never told her. He understood. Rose Wilding had always had a good
appetite. And she loved fruit. She had spent some time in that place on
the Island, where it was said that the attendants took all of the best
that was intended for the patients. Hunger, or at least the fear of
hunger had taught her to do that.
When he looked again he saw that the curtain had fallen. It was as
though the spirit of Rose Wilding which for a few minutes had stirred
the body and the senses to life had now gone. Only the eyes remained
alive, looking, looking not at Wardwell, not at the wall, but at some
problem, some question of another existence.
Augusta, understanding instantly, did not try to arouse her mother
again. Resignedly, she took up the tray and went silently from the
room. And Wardwell followed without a word.
Not again, until the very last, did Rose Wilding open her lips to speak.
Day by day her response to the promptings of life grew less and less.
With what seemed a deliberate purpose her spirit refused to know
anything of what went on about her. It was as though she definitely
turned her back upon life. She did not suffer. She had left all that
behind and was going her own way, unmolested by the useless body.
To Wardwell the sight of the helpless, almost deserted body was
sometimes uncanny. To Augusta, however, living as she did and had
always done so close to the soul of her mother, these things did not
greatly matter. That her mother did not speak to her, did not even
look at her, was not now so hard to bear. Though she loved the big
beautiful, baby-like body and petted it as she would have fondled a
baby, yet she was able to realize that she must soon give it up. So
that, by degrees and without consciousness of it, she dropped the
mediums of the senses and found herself slipping easily and naturally
over into that strange border land where her mother lived.
Wardwell was not fighting any longer. He had accepted what he thought
was fate. He did not argue. He did not look farther for work.
"I shall now," he said, sitting down deliberately at his machine,
"'proceed,' as they say aboard-ship--I wonder why does a navy man
always say he 'proceeded' to the deck and 'proceeded' to the bottom of
the ammunition well? He just ran out on deck, and he probably fell down
the stairs in the other case, but he 'proceeded'--I shall, therefore,
proceed to write jokes till I choke.
"The suffering public? Well, the public always suffers. What do I care
for them, or it, or him--whichever it is. Must be him, I guess. The
women only read the corn cure ads and the hair tonic miracles with
which the advertising editor garnishes the funny page. Hang it! I never
appreciated that fellow. I thought he was a low commercial bounder on
that page. Nothing of the kind. He belongs there. His ads are just as
old and reliable and well thumbed as any of the other jokes."
With a grin on his face he went to work, humming:
"Rip Van Winkle was a piker,
"There are some folks sleeping yet."
And because he had put off the worry that had been harping at him he
found the work coming true and easy. He forgot the book and his big
dreams, half way happy if he could earn enough to prevent his being
an added burden to Augusta. And because he now did not greatly care,
because he left the whole business on the knees of whatever gods had
cared to meddle with his affairs, the work began to pay well.
Three separate eddies of life moved quietly about their round in the
house. Ann the cook had taken the reins of authority from Augusta's
hands and was now ruling the boarding house with a competent and
jealous care. The boarders did not like her, but they knew that she
was honest and remorselessly fair and that there was no appeal from
her judgments. There were no complaints and the outward business of
the house went on smoothly and decorously as always. In the two rooms
that were now the world of Augusta and her mother everything circled
about the dim little pale flame of life in her mother which Augusta was
feeding with her love. And in his own room Wardwell worked craftily on,
going softly, husbanding his strength from day to day, paying it out
painfully, like a miser bit by bit, at the machine, making every bit
count for some work done, and jealously guarding his growing weakness
from Augusta's eyes. She must know before very long, he realized. But,
well, who could tell what might happen? And in the meantime there was
a little work to be done each day. Each line of it would be a help to
her in the end.
So the three eddies of life went quietly around, touching each other
and lapping a little upon each other, but each one a world by itself.
Spring came and slipped well along into May, the street cries changed,
the glistening pavements began to throw the heat back up into the
house, and the threat of a blistering summer came upon the air. The
three little worlds in the house went on so quietly, so unobtrusively,
that it seemed that they might have been forgotten, that they might go
on indefinitely, that they had been left out of any scheme of change.
But the change came, swift and disturbing as though it had never been
expected.
Wardwell heard the cry come up in the still night from the room below
him. He had been sitting in the dark, thinking of nothing, his mind
at loose ends, but he knew Augusta's cry and recognized in it the
trembling, very human fear of death.
As he came to the door of Rose Wilding's room he saw Augusta half
kneeling on the bed holding fast to her mother's hands. To Wardwell
it seemed that Rose Wilding was making a quivering, feeble struggle
to rise. But Augusta evidently knew different. She was pleading in a
desperate, pitiful whisper:
"Don't go! Please, darling mamma, don't go till you've known me, just
for one little minute! I wont try to keep you, darling, I know you want
to go. But just look at me once, so that I can see that you know your
own Augusta, please darling."
The hands that Augusta held stopped their quivering struggle and Rose
Wilding lay quiet, as though listening. Then slowly, naturally, she
opened her eyes with the sweet clear light of perfect reason shining
gently in them. And she said in a tender, confiding whisper:
"Augusta, my own. Stay close to me. It's--it's lonely--going." With
a sigh as of a tired child she closed her eyes and seemed to try to
cuddle to the warmth of the young body that was close to her. Then she
lay quite still.
After a little Wardwell gently lifted Augusta away. She did not resist,
nor did she break out weeping as he had been almost hoping that she
would do. Instead, she leaned against him, begging for full assurance:
"She _did_ know me, didn't she, Jimmie!"
"Of course, dear, of course she did."
Then Augusta went slowly over to the little cot which had been her
partner in the play of the weary pitiful months and began folding it
away.
Through the two days that followed Wardwell did all the necessary
things with a calculated care that showed how well he had schooled
himself. He saw to everything, anticipated everything, exerting himself
more than he had done for weeks, yet always carefully holding himself
within the limits of his strength lest a sudden breakdown should come
to frighten Augusta.
It was only on the lonely ride back from the cemetery, through the sand
pitted lots and broken streets of Greenpoint and across the ferry, that
Jimmie began to go to pieces. He was tired, tired of the struggle to
keep up, tired of the silly pretense of being a normal, cheery, good
hearted fellow. Besides, Augusta did not seem to have needed him. She
had not broken down. She would, he thought, have done just as well
without him. And he began to pity himself inordinately.
Now he was sure that Augusta was looking at him in a thoughtful,
speculative sort of way. Although he knew well enough that Augusta was
not aware of his condition, yet it took only a few minutes of this bent
of thought to convince him fully that she was wondering what in the
world she could do with a hopelessly sick husband on her hands.
The foolish, overweaning egotism of a sick mind in a sick body took
sway over him, making him forget everything but his own morbid line
of thoughts. Augusta did not need him. He was of no use to her, or to
anybody. He never would, in fact, be of any use. It would be better
to let it end now. He had never really been Augusta's husband. He had
served her as well as he could. But that was over now. She did not
need him now. He pressed his self inflicted hurt home and took a sort
of miserable pleasure from the pain. She at least could be happy. Why
should he drag her down the long dark path with himself. He might live
on and on for a deuce of a while--people did, you know. No, he was not
going to let the poor girl in for anything like that.
The heady, self-centred resolution took shape rapidly, and he began to
fill it in with all sorts of reasonable and thoughtful advantages.
He would drop out now, today, while things were still in their
present state. If he waited at all, Augusta would at once find out
his condition and she would--he knew her--immediately break up her
house and pack off with him to wherever the doctors told her to take
him. And he would be unable to resist once she took hold. Then, in the
inevitable end, she would have spent on him whatever money she had--he
had never thought to wonder whether it was much or little, or any--her
home and her way of living would be gone. He would be gone. And she
would be alone, among strangers, with no way of making a living,
probably broken down from nursing him--He drew the whole picture and
elaborated upon it.
Yes he must drop out today, quietly, without a word, and just
drift--drift on over towards oblivion. Augusta would miss him, but she
would not really need him. It would be all very simple. A short time,
maybe only a few days, of knocking around and he would be completely
down sick. Then some hospital or other would pick him up, under any
name he happened to be able to think of, and--and everything would
settle itself without fuss. He particularly did not want any fuss. He
was tired and he had found a way to avoid all bother.
He turned smiling cheerily to Augusta. He found her looking at him,
studying him with a grave, and, somehow, a different, interest.
Augusta had found herself face to face with a problem of her own.
She had known for a long time that there was something pressing on
Jimmie's mind. She knew, of course, that he was not altogether well.
But, with her own wonderful health and soundness, she could not think
of mere illness as the cause of his trouble. She was sure that the
trouble was in his heart. He had not been the same since they had known
definitely that her mother must so go.
Was that his trouble? He was, in a way, free now.
He had been kind and dear. He had done all that she had asked him--Yes,
she remembered now with confusion, she had literally _asked_ him.
And he had done everything that she had needed and more than he had
promised.
Did he want to go now?
If he did, she must make him go. For she knew well enough, she thought,
that Jimmie would never let her know that he wanted to go. He would
just stay on and be kind and say nothing. But she must not let him do
that.
Yet, with all her reasoning and searching, Augusta was first a woman.
There was just one question, and she knew it. With the simple, terrible
directness of a child she put it to herself.
Did he love her? She had never known, really. He was so kind, and so
good an actor.
They were alone now, for the first time. There was now no one, nothing
that they had to think of but themselves.
Fearless and direct as she was, Augusta quivered with the dread
of parting, for she had come to love the very thought of Jimmie's
nearness. But she knew that they were now facing the elementary facts
of life. Childlike, she had not anticipated this hour. She saw now with
a startling and vivid reality that, for the sake of both their lives,
she must _know_, before another day, whether Jimmie loved her as a man
must love a woman.
A forgotten and unbidden memory came to her in that instant, and
although she did not imagine that it had any bearing upon her problem
she grasped it and brought it out into the light, never thinking where
the consequences might lead.
"Jimmie," she said, turning quickly, "maybe you won't remember, but one
day last September I saw you in the Square talking to a lady. She had
been driving along in an automobile, and she saw you and called to you.
Then she drove the machine up to the curb and stopped, and you came and
stood with your foot on the running board. While you talked she seemed
to be pleading with you about something. Who was she?"
"Ah-ha!" said Jimmie gaily. "At last! I am now an accredited and
confirmed husband. My wife has begun to delve into my dark past. I am
now a married man! Listen, my dear, and I will unfold unto thee a tale:
"That lady--and she was a tall dark lady, mind you--was actually trying
to pay me back borrowed money! Did you ever hear the like?"
"She'd borrowed money from _you_?" said Augusta, with thoughtless
emphasis.
"Does sound like a joke, doesn't it," Jimmie admitted, with just a
tinge of bitterness in his voice. Augusta had unwittingly touched the
sore spot which he himself had just been prodding. "But--"
"Oh, I didn't mean that! Please forgive me, Jimmie, I didn't mean it
that way at all!"
"It's all right," said Jimmie lightly. "I can explain. There had been a
time when she was not as prosperous as she appeared that day. And there
also had been times--short and fleeting as they were--times when I had
plenty of money. Therefore." He turned his hands out before him in a
sort of Latin way, as though nothing could be plainer.
Augusta sat back, saying nothing. She was sorry that she had spoken
now, and about this. Jimmie, she felt, had told the literal truth. And
the incident seemed to make it more difficult to lead up to the things
which she must say today.
They rode to the door in silence, both subdued by the nearness of a
crisis which each foresaw in a different way. As the lugubrious coach
drove away they stood on the sidewalk looking after it, both half
conscious that it was the last vestige of an existence with which they
were now finished. When it had trundled around the nearest corner and
disappeared they turned to each other and, instinctively, like two
solemn, slightly frightened children, took hands and went stealing up
the steps.
Augusta did not miss Wardwell until evening. When he did not appear
for supper, she ran up the stairs to bring him, thinking that he
had perhaps fallen asleep. She had been busying herself through the
afternoon, putting off the inevitable. And now she decided that it
could be put off for still a little longer. She need not speak just yet.
His door stood open, but Jimmie was not there. She wondered that he
should have gone out today, for she knew he was tired. But, maybe, he
had just gone down to the street, and perhaps he would be coming in any
minute. She lingered a little, looking around at the signs of Jimmie's
ways--a pair of shoes in the middle of the floor, a coat draped
perilously from the arm of a chair, a necktie festooning a doorknob,
for Jimmie, while he was always wholesomely clean, was certainly not
orderly. And then the loose, scrambled piles of papers all over his
desk. She had often wanted to fuss among them, to straighten them out
and make neat piles of them. But she had learned that this was one of
the points on which Jimmie would fight. Anyone might hide his shoes
away or hang up his coat or take his neckties away to press, but touch
that desk and he would roar. And she had always understood and loved
the little boyish jealousy with which he guarded everything he wrote
until it was printed.
She went over on tiptoe, to take just a peep at what was on the
typewriter.
As if he had known that she would do just this, the words flashed
cruelly up at her from the middle of the white paper:
"I am going away, on urgent business--I am very tired."
Augusta sank down into the chair, covering the words with her arm,
sobbing:
"Oh, Jimmie, Jimmie, did you have to hurt me this way! I wouldn't have
tried to hold you. I would have let you go, and blessed you for the
dear good boy you've been to me. I know you were tired. But you didn't
need to hurt me!"
After a little she sat up and forced herself to look at the line of
words as they stared up at her. And as she studied them she found
herself listening for the sound of Jimmie's voice saying them. Then she
knew why Jimmie had written the words instead of saying them to her.
_She would not have believed him._ And Jimmie had known that.
Word by word and tone by tone, she made him say it over to her mind's
ear and eye, even to the little lift in his shoulder with which he
would have ended--And she knew!
Jimmie did not mean that at all. He did not want to go away from her!
"Urgent business!" Love laughed up in her heart. Jimmie and urgent
business!
And then the quiet, thinking Augusta came back. This was no caprice,
no mere whim of Jimmie's. He had tried to make her believe that he was
tired and only wanted escape. He had deliberately tried to hurt her
so that she would believe. Jimmie would not have done that without a
powerful reason.
And he was gone. Nothing could be more definite than that. If she had
seen him packing trunks for a week his going could not have been so
convincing. He had simply changed into his everyday street suit and
walked out, humming:
"The Priest of the Parish,
"The Clerk and his man
"Went 'round the church yard
"With a red hot brick in his han'."
Augusta rose and stole to the door to peer down the stairs, half
frightened by the distinctness of her image of him. The impression that
she had gotten, of Jimmie walking down the stairs, hands in pockets,
humming that tuneless old rhyme of his, had been so vivid that for the
moment she had thought it real, had believed that she was hearing and
seeing Jimmie go down the stairs.
The blank unconcern of the stairway looking back at her chilled her.
Jimmie was gone.
A sudden feeling of physical weakness that came over her now brought
up to her one thing that she had overlooked. She remembered that she
had never really found out what Dr. Gardner had said to Jimmie that
night when he had gone to see him. Jimmie had baffled her with many
words, both wise and foolish. And the doctor had not told her anything
definite. They had both treated her as they would have answered a
child. But that was different, then she had been living only for her
mother.
Now the conviction came to her that the key to Jimmie's action was to
be found in his talk that evening with the doctor. He had never really
been the same since. So it was a quiet, determined Augusta who faced
the doctor that evening.
"I told him that he was in very bad shape and that he would be worse
if he didn't get out of the city at once. That was some weeks ago. But
I imagine he went away laughing at me a little. He seemed to have some
absurd notion that you needed him, that he was helping you by staying."
Doctor Gardner wasted no words, for he did not feel that he was any
longer bound by the promise of silence that he had made to Wardwell.
"I needed him every moment," said Augusta slowly; "and he stayed until
he had done everything."
"Stayed? Has he gone now?"
"No no," said Augusta quickly. "I was just thinking--That was all."
Suddenly it seemed to her that she must not on any account admit that
Jimmie had gone away. She must find him now, tonight. She must not let
it become established that he had gone at all.
"Of course, you should have let me know," she went on hurriedly. "But
then, I know Jimmie. He just talked you into keeping it from me. He can
talk anybody into anything if he sets his mind to it. Now I must get
home right away."
She was already on her way to the door, and the doctor, although he had
helpful advice ready to offer her, did not try to detain her. He saw
that, just now, she wanted nothing but to get away. So he followed her
resignedly to the street door, only saying:
"You know that if you need me in any way--"
From the steps she turned and, not trusting herself to speak, grasped
his hand impulsively. Then she was gone.
As he stood looking down into the dusk after her, he wondered why she
turned west, away from her home. He cleared his throat, to call after
her.
But, well, she had always done things herself, in her own way. And she
was always right.
Augusta did not know that Wardwell a few hours earlier had sauntered
just this way that she was hurrying. She did not know as she crossed
West street, now silent and deserted as a country road, that Jimmie had
walked recklessly through its roaring traffic, weakly half hoping that
something would happen to him. She did not know that he had stood just
where she came to stand, looking down over the railing into the slip
between two docks, asking questions of the lapping water.
A dock watchman who stood within a few feet of her put his lantern out
of his hand, merely as a precaution. She did not look like any of the
many kinds that he had seen coming to look too curiously at the water.
But, she was in trouble. Happy people do not come peering down into
rivers. He cautiously moved a little closer to her.
Then she turned and, without so much as a look back, crossed the street
again and turned north.
"Whatever she was lookin' for," the watchman grumbled, "it wasn't here."
Augusta was not thinking or reasoning, or consciously searching for
Jimmie. She had loosened her mind, as it were, and was letting herself
drift in his wake. She understood him now. She knew now what he had
been going through. She was following every thought of his as it had
worked through his brain and had turned out into action. She was
feeling with him and suffering the hurt that he had felt. But she was
not following him now because she pitied him. It was not because she
wished to care for him, to mother him, to make good her debt to him.
She was following him now because she loved him. Up to now she had
needed him, his protection, his kindness, his dear thoughtfulness
and his cheer. Now she needed him because she had found out, in this
last half hour, that she loved him with a desperation that would have
frightened her if she had been able to think of it. She did not care
whether he was sick or well. She did not care whether he wanted to
stay or go. She would find him. She would hold him. She would not stop
walking until she had found him. And then she would put her arms around
him. And not any other woman, nor even death itself would get him from
her.
Now she knew that she was on the right way. Her start towards the river
had been a false one, just as Jimmie's had been. Jimmie had had no more
real thought of harming himself than she had had of finding the end of
her search in the river.
He had just set himself adrift aimlessly, and unconsciously she seemed
to know that mere physical weariness would bring him to where all the
drifting logs of the city's stream sooner or later come to rest, the
park benches.
Through the endless night she trudged, scanning the thousand figures
that weariness and misery and failure take when they finally slump down
to the friendly darkness of a shaded bench.
Policemen looked sharply after her. Good men looked wonderingly after
her. Bad men looked discriminatingly after her. Her soul was sick with
the misery and the sordidness that she searched among. But her heart
was not afraid. She was right, and love was at the end of her search.
In the gray, haggard dawn she saw him at a little distance, sitting
jauntily erect, his hand extended resting lightly on his cane, peering
interestedly up into the coming light of the new day--as though he had
that moment sat down to enjoy the fresh morning and to wonder at the
miracle of dawn.
Augusta trembled in every aching nerve, but her heart laughed as she
stole toward him. It was so like him, sitting up making a play at
interest, when, as she knew, he probably didn't care whether the day
dawned or not.
Then with a little desperate run she was kneeling on the bench beside
him and had fairly dragged his head into her arms and was kissing him
wildly, passionately.
Now Wardwell said not a word. He did not at first seem surprised. It is
doubtful if, knowing Augusta and remembering her actions in those days
when her mother had been lost, he really had thought that he could lose
himself from her in the way he had taken.
But when he found Augusta's arms tight around him something within him
awoke with a start. Augusta had kissed him before this--But--
Jimmie Wardwell knew as little of women's love and the ways of it as
most men do. But he suddenly straightened up and deliberately pulled
one of Augusta's arms away and caught her little face in his hand and
looked boldly, hungrily down into her eyes.
For a little while, unashamed and fearless, her eyes gave him back his
answer. Then her lashes dropped in surrender, and Wardwell, as though
life and strength had suddenly been poured into him, caught her up
bodily to him and hugging her tight started to carry her to the nearest
street.