Mr. Dickett urged tolerantly. "It seems a roving sort of life, to us,
I know, and unsettled, but if they like it, why I can't see any real
harm..."
"Tastes differ," said his wife grimly--and so, God knows, they do!
THE GOSPEL
For the first few days of her stay there, she thought little enough of
the strangeness of the situation. To think of it, to marvel at the
neat stillness, the quiet precision of all the domestic arrangements,
would have been to let her mind dwell on just what she had to avoid.
She was sick to her very soul of all that the words "domestic
arrangements" implied; sick with an actual spiritual nausea. It was
honestly no exaggeration to say that she would gladly have died rather
than take the trouble to arrange the details of living.
So every morning she woke when her dreams ended and lay staring idly,
through the cross-bars of the primitive window-netting, at the swaying,
sinking, tree-tops, and the floating white above them, so white between
the blue and green; and then her breakfast came, fresh and chill and
shining, with a flaming nasturtium on the snowy linen; and then a
dreamy time, when thought ranged among stray lines of poetry and
memories of childhood; and then some one rubbed and kneaded and ironed
out her tired muscles and she slept again. Sometimes foaming milk came
in a beaded brown pitcher that smelt of dairies; sometimes luscious,
quartered fruits, smothered in clotting cream, tempted a palate nearly
dulled beyond recall; sometimes rich, salted broth steamed in a dim,
blue bowl till she regretted to see the bottom of it.
And just at that time she was lifted into a long, basket chair and,
propped in lavendered pillows, looked dreamily into the hills and
pastures rolling out in front of her. Cows wandered here and there,
birds swooped lazily through the June blue, the faintest scent of
grapevines hung on the wind. But no human figures blotted the
landscape; only the faint, musical clash of distant scythes (a sound as
natural as the cawing and lowing and interminable twittering of the
busy animal world all around) spoke of men.
Then one day (it might have been a week's time) she caught herself
listening for sounds of household labour. Where was the breaking, the
slamming, the whistling, the quarrelling, the brushing and the rattling
that these thin partitions ought to filter through? Simply, it was
not. A little faint, suspicious worry came to her: the house was a
tomb, then? Did it have to be? Was she as bad as that?
And when her tray came next, some kind of savoury stew, by now, with
fresh picked strawberries on a sea-green grape leaf, she looked
directly at the woman who brought it to the bed.
"How still this house is!" she said, and flushed with weakness, for it
was her first real sentence, and it occurred to her that only little
sighs of fatigue or groans of relief and halting exclamations of, "That
feels good," or "No more, thanks," had passed her lips.
The woman smiled. She wore a straight gown of some cool stripe of
white and grey and her eyes were grey.
"We live in a quiet place," she said, and lifted the pillows higher.
But it seemed that after that--perhaps it was because she listened--she
began to hear faint sounds. The clear falling of poured out water, and
the tinkling of dish on dish, now and then, and later, the soft murmur
of exchanging women's voices.
Another day she spoke of the freshness of her morning egg, and that
afternoon she leaned nearer the casement to catch the cluck of a
motherly hen with her brood, and smiled at the scurry of wing and feet
as grain was scattered somewhere.
It must have been at that time that the doctor came up to see her, a
big brown man, whose beard hid his smile when he chose, but nothing
could cover the keen, reading beam of the eye.
"I see you are doing well," he said.
"It is wonderful," she answered him, "but I am sure it is not the
world."
"The world is very large," he said, and went away.
"And I never asked about--about anybody," she murmured, her eyes
filling, "but I am sure they are all right, or he would have said!"
She was ashamed, afterward, to remember for how long she had thought
the woman who attended on her a servant. And yet she did think her so
until the morning when it suddenly occurred to her that it was not
possible any ordinary servant should be so deft and self-contained at
once: servants were not so calm--that was it, so calm. Even the best
of them were hurried and anxious, and if they were old and valued, they
got on one's nerves the more: one had to consider them. Of course,
this was a trained nurse. She had decided suddenly that she felt equal
to rising for her bath, and congratulated herself on discerning the
nurse in time, for now she could ask for help, if she needed it.
"If you will show me the bathroom," she said, "and will be there to
help me over the edge of the tub, in case I feel weak----"
"I will be there," said the woman, "but I must get it ready: the tub is
not high."
And when she stepped into the next room she realised, with a little
smile, how far she was from white porcelain and tiled walls. On the
scrubbed deal floor there stood a white deal tub, clean as new milk,
round and copper bound. Towels and soaps and sponges were there in
plenty, and great metal ewers full of hot and cold water, and nothing
else but one chair in all the scrubbed cleanliness. The woman poured
the water over her as she crouched in the fragrant wooden pool and
dried her gently and quickly in towels pressed away in lavender, with
the deft, sure movements of one well practised in her business; but
when she lay, just happily tired from the new exertion, among the
fragrant sheets, a tiny shadow seemed about to haunt her sleep. She
placed the little discomfort with difficulty, but at length expressed
it.
"That tub is very heavy, now," she said drowsily. "Is there a man to
lift it?"
For the first time the woman smiled. Till then she had been hands and
feet merely, tireless and tactful, but impersonal: now she smiled, and
her face was very sweet.
"I shall empty it," she said. "I am quite strong. Go to sleep, now."
Very soon again the doctor came, and at her quiet request gave her news
of husband, children and home; all well, it seemed, and smoothly
ordered. Days of absolute stillness had broken the habit of insistent
speech, and many things that once would have said themselves before she
thought, now halted behind her lips and seemed not worth the muscular
effort. But one thing she did mention.
"Ought not the nurses here to have more help?" she asked. "Mine lifts
out my bath-water every day. Are there not servants enough? I could
pay for it..."
"There are no servants here at all," he said, "and there is nobody you
could pay more than you are already paying."
"Then they are all nurses?"
"There are no trained nurses here, if you mean that," he said.
"Then who--what is the woman who takes care of me?" she asked, vaguely
displeased.
"She is one of the daughters of the house," he said. "She is no more a
nurse than her mother is a cook or her sister a laundress. They do
what is to be done, that is all. Each has done and can do the others'
tasks."
She felt in some way corrected, yet it was hard to say in what she had
offended. But Dr. Stanchon was an odd man in many ways. "All the
same," she persisted, "I think I had better have a nurse, now. I shall
feel more comfortable. Ask Miss Jessop if she could come out to me. I
believe I could get along with her, now. I'm afraid I was childish,
before."
But he only shook his head. "The time for Miss Jessop has passed, dear
friend," he said quietly. "No nurse ever comes here."
"Then this is a private house," she began again, "their own home. And
I do not even know their names!"
"It is private because it is their own home--just that," he said.
"That is what a home is. It is a simple fact, but one that seems not
to have been included in your education."
"Why, Dr. Stanchon, what can you mean?" she cried. "My mother's
hospitality----"
"I mean that I do not consider an art museum a home, no matter how
highly the chef is paid," he said shortly.
"But there is the place on the Hudson----"
"That is a country club, nothing more," he interrupted. "Your mother
dismissed a butler once, because, though he offered eight liqueurs to a
guest, the guest asked for a ninth and the butler had neglected to
order it. I have attended her there for a really painful attack of
sciatica when none of her visitors knew that anything ailed her, though
she had been away from them for forty-eight hours."
"But that is mother's house, not mine," she protested, "and I do not
pretend to keep up----"
"You do not pretend to, because you could not do it," he interrupted
again. "Your father is a multi-millionaire and your husband is not.
But it is your constant ideal, nevertheless, and your failures to
realise it, even in the degree to which you have tried, have sapped
your vitality to a point which even you can understand now, I should
suppose."
She looked doubtingly at him.
"Do you really mean, Dr. Stanchon," she began, "that this dreadful
attack----"
"'Attack'!" he muttered brusquely, "'attack'! One would imagine I had
pulled you through pneumonia or peritonitis! If, after constant
sapping and mining and starving-out the garrison, it gives way and
falls defeated, you choose to call the day of surrender a yielding to
an attack, then you have had an attack."
And again he left her abruptly, a prey to creeping, ugly doubts. For
she had been very sorry for herself and the fatality that had stranded
her on the dreary coast where so many of her friends had met mysterious
wreckage.
"Has the doctor sent patients here before?" she asked her attendant the
next morning, when she sat, fresh and fragrant in her invalid ruffles,
at the window, watching the poultry yard, which somehow she had not
noticed before, and the cow browsing beside the brook where the white
ducks paddled, gossiping.
"Oh, yes, often," said the busy sister (she was Hester; the other was
Ann). "We are never without some one. So many people are ill in the
city. Now I am going to clean your room, and perhaps you will feel
like stepping out on the balcony?"
Surprised, for she had not seen any such addition to the simple frame
house, she stepped through a window cut down somewhat clumsily, but
efficiently enough, and hinged to swing outward, onto a shallow, roofed
_loggia_ with vines grown from boxes on the sides and two long, low
chairs faced to the view of the hills. In one of these sat a woman,
slender and motionless, whose glistening white wrapper seemed to melt
in the strong sun into the white of the painted wooden balustrade that
protected the balcony. Flushed with an invalid's quick irritation and
resentful of any other occupant, for her raw nerves were not yet
healed, she was about to turn back hastily into the room when a second
glance assured her that it was only one of her own white wrappers
draped along the chair. The face and hands that her vexed irritation
must have supplied amazed her, in retrospect, with their distinctness
of outline, and she trembled at her weak nerves.
From inside the room came the swishing of water and the sound of
scrubbing; soon the strong clean flavour of soapy boards floated out,
and the flick of the drops into the pail; from where she sat she could
see out of the corner of her eye the fluff of snowy suds that foamed
over the shining bucket as Hester rubbed the milky cake of soap with
the bristles. Her strong strokes had a definite rhythm and set the
time for the stern old hymn-tune she crooned. The listener on the
balcony obeyed her growing interest and turned her chair to face into
the room. The kilted Hester, on her knees, her brow bound with a
glistening towel, threw her body forward with the regularity of a
rower, her strong, muscled arms shot out in a measured curve; on her
little island of dry boards she sang amid her clean, damp sea,
high-priestess of a lustral service as old as the oldest temple of man,
and the odour of her incense, the keen, sweet freshness of her
cleansing soap, rose to the heaven of her hymn.
"You sing as if you liked it," said the watcher.
"And so I do," said Hester. "Things must be clean, and I like to make
them so."
"Why, you are doing just what we did in the gymnasium the year I went
there," cried the invalid, with the first real interest she had felt in
anything outside herself. "We kneeled on the floor and swept our arms
out just like that!"
"If there were many of you, it must soon have been clean," said Hester,
moving the rug she knelt on deftly. "Oh, we were not cleaning it,"
said the invalid smiling. "It was only the same motion."
"Indeed? Then why were you doing it?" Hester asked, turning her
flushed face in surprise toward the ruffled whiteness in the window.
She stared at the worker, but even as she stared she frowned
uncomfortably.
"Why, for--for exercise--for strength," she said slowly, and coloured
under Hester's smile....
Later in the day she moved out again upon the balcony, regretful for
the first time that no one of her own world could be there to talk with
her. Hester, wiping bed, chair and mirror with the white cloth that
never seemed to soil, whipping the braided rag rugs below her on the
green with strong, firm strokes that recalled the scheduled blows she
had practised at a swinging leather ball, vexed her, somehow, and she
was conscious of a whimsical wish that her delusion of the white
wrapper stretched along the reclining chair had proved a reality. The
soft grey shadows of early evening covered the little balcony, the
chairs were plunged in it, and it was with a cry of apology that she
stepped into a grey gown, so soft and thin that she had taken it for a
deeper shadow, merely, and had actually started to seat herself in the
long chair where the slender woman lay. Her own body appeared so
robust beside this delicate creature's that pity smothered the surprise
at her quiet presence there, and the swift feeling that she herself was
by no means the frailest of the doctor's patients added to her
composure as she begged pardon for her clumsiness.
"I thought I was the only patient here," she explained. "Miss Hester
and Miss Ann have a wonderful way of getting quiet and privacy in their
little house, haven't they?"
"Is it so little?" the stranger asked. She felt embarrassed, suddenly,
and tactless, for she had taken it for granted that they were both of
the class to which the modest cottage must seem small.
"I only meant," she added hastily, for it seemed that at any cost this
gentle, pale creature must not be hurt, "I only meant that to take in
strangers, in this way, and to keep the family life entirely separate
requires, usually, much more space."
"But do they keep it separate--the family life!"
("Evidently," she thought, "they have not been able to give her a
private room, like mine, or perhaps she eats with them.")
"I think that is how they do it," the stranger went on, "by not having
any separate life, really. It is all one life, with them."
"All one life..." the other repeated, vaguely, recalling, for some
reason, the doctor's words, "but, of course, in a larger establishment
that would not be possible. With servants..."
"I suppose that is why they have no servants," said the stranger.
There was a soft assurance in the tone, soft, but undoubtedly there.
And yet what assurance should a woman have who did not find this house
small? She discovered that she was still a little irritable, for she
spoke brusquely.
"People do not employ servants, I imagine, for the very simple reason
that they cannot afford to."
"Not always," said the other quietly. "I have known Ann and Hester
many years, and there has never been a time when they could not have
afforded at the least one servant."
"Tastes differ, I suppose," she answered shortly. "I should have
supposed that every woman would take the first opportunity of relieving
herself from the strain of household drudgery, which any ignorant
person can accomplish."
"Have you found so many of them to accomplish it for you?"
She flushed angrily.
"Dr. Stanchon has been talking about me!" she cried with hot memories
of her interminable domestic woes.
"Indeed not," said the grey lady. "I knew nothing.... I only asked if
ignorant persons really accomplished their drudgery to any one's
satisfaction nowadays? They used not to when--when I employed them...."
So she had been wrecked beyond repair, this shadowy, large-eyed thing!
She spoke as of a day long over. The other woman felt ashamed of her
suspicion.
"No, indeed," she answered wearily, "that was an exaggeration,
naturally. But they might, if they would take pains. They are paid
enough for it, heaven knows."
"Ann and Hester are not paid," said the voice from the dim chair.
"Perhaps that is why they take pains."
The woman nodded fretfully.
"That is all very well," she said, "and sounds very poetic, but it
would be rather impractical for us all to do, on that account."
"Impractical? _Impractical?_"
A hint of gentle laughter from the long chair. "But it seems to me
that Ann and Hester are the least impractical of people--are they not?
They are surely less harassed than you were?"
("I must have been very sleepy: I don't remember telling her all about
it," thought the woman, "but she seems to know.")
"Yes," she said aloud, "I was harassed. Nearly to death, it seems. I
am hardly myself yet. I suppose you have been through it all?"
"I have been through a great deal, yes."
The shadows deepened and a thin, new moon sank lower and lower. The
grey figure grew less and less distinct to her, and before she knew it,
she slept. When she woke, she was alone on the balcony, and the
sunlight lay in blue-white pools upon the floor. For the first time in
her life she had slept alone under the stars, with no one to settle her
into her dreams or to attend on her when she woke from them, and
suspicion and displeasure darkened for a moment the freshest awakening
she could remember. Had they really forgotten her? No one seemed to
be coming, and after a quarter of an hour's impatient waiting she left
the long, couch-like chair, opened the door of her room and went with
quick determined steps down the narrow hall, down the stairs, straight
to the sounds of women's voices in the distance. They led her through
a shining kitchen, where a patient, old clock presided, through a cool,
dim buttery into a primitive laundry, or washing shed, with deal tubs
and big copper cauldrons and a swept stone floor. But no odour of the
keen cleanliness she had learned to connect with Hester's soap ruled
the wash-house this morning: a breeze from Araby the blest blew through
the piles of dewy crimson strawberries that heaped themselves in yellow
bowls, in silver-tinted pans, in leaf-lined wicker baskets, and brought
all the gardens of June into the bare, stone room. Hester's quick
fingers twisted the delicate hulls from the scarlet, scented globes,
and near her, measuring mounds of glittering sugar, stood a broader,
squarer woman with greying hair, who smiled gravely at her, facing her.
"Here she is, now," said this woman, whom she guessed to be Ann, and
Hester, turning to her, added, as one who finishes a sentence, merely,
"And I was just getting ready a dish of strawberries for you. Mother
has stepped out for your egg: the brown hen has just laid. The rolls
are in the oven and mother has the chocolate ready. I thought you
would be early this morning, you were sleeping so soundly."
"Early? early?" she repeated, taken aback by their easy greeting of
her. "Why, what do you mean?" And just then the clock struck seven,
deliberately.
"Why--why, I thought--then you did not forget--" she began, uncertainly.
"There is nothing like the open air for sleeping, when one is ready for
it," said Hester. "Did you not notice the cover I threw over you? You
must have gone off before it grew dark, quite."
"Oh, no, because I was with--" then she stopped abruptly. For it
dawned on her that the other woman must have been a dream, since she
perceived that she was unwilling to ask about her, so faintly did that
conversation recall itself to her, so uncertain her memory proved as to
how that other came and went, or when.
"It was a dream, of course," she thought, and said, a shade resentful
still,
"I never slept--that way--before."
"It seems to suit you," said Ann briskly, "for you have never left your
room till now."
Then it dawned on her suddenly.
"Why, I am well!" she said.
"Very nearly, I think," Hester answered her. "Will you have your
breakfast under the tree, while sister picks the berries?"
To this she agreed gladly and found herself, still wondering at the new
strength that filled her, under a pear-tree, in a pleasant patch of
shadow, eating with relish from Hester's morning tray. Ann knelt not
far from her in the sun, not too hot at this hour for a hardy worker,
and soon her low humming rose like a bee's note from under her broad
hat.
"The wash is all ready for you, sister, on the landing," she called.
"Tell mother her new towels bleached to a marvel: they are on the
currant-bushes now. I'll wet them down and iron them off while the
syrup is cooking, I think--I know she's anxious to handle them."
"Are you always busy, Miss Ann?" her guest inquired, for Ann's fingers
never stopped even while she looked toward the house-door.
"Always in the morning, of course," she answered, directly. "Every one
must be, if things are to get done."
"But in the afternoon you are ironing, and Miss Hester tells me you do
a great deal in the garden. When do you rest?"
"In my bed," said Ann briefly.
She was less sweetly grave than her sister, and it was easy to see that
her tongue was sharper. She would not have been so soothing to an
invalid, but the woman under the pear-tree had her nerves better in
hand by now, and felt, somehow, upon her mettle to prove to this broad,
curt Ann that there were tasks in the world beyond her sturdy
rule-of-thumb.
"But surely every one needs time to think--to consider," she began
gently. "Don't you find it so?"
"To plan out the day, do you mean?" said Ann, moving to a new patch.
"I generally do that at night before I go to sleep."
"No, no," she explained, "not the day's work--that must be done, of
course--but the whole Scheme, life, and one's relation to it..."
"I don't feel any call to study that out," said Ann. "I haven't the
headpiece for it."
"No, but some people have, and so----"
"Have you?" said Ann.
She bit her lip.
"It is surely every woman's duty to cultivate herself as far as she
can," she began. "Nobody denies that nowadays."
Ann was silent.
"Don't you agree with me?" the woman persisted. "You surely know what
I mean?"
"Oh, yes, I know what you mean, well enough," Ann said at last. "I
know you have to cultivate strawberries, if you want to get more of
'em--and bigger. The question is, what do you get out of it?"
A flood of explanations pressed to her lips, but just as they brimmed
over, some quick surmise of Ann's shrewd replies choked them back.
After all, what had she got out of it? What that she could show? She
rose slowly and walked back to her room, where the bath, fresh,
uncreased clothes, and Hester's deft ministry waited ready for her.
Later, she lay again in the balcony chair, not so soothed by her little
pile of books as she had looked to be. Beautiful, pellucid thought,
deep-flowing philosophies, knife-edged epigrams and measured verse lay
to her hand, but they seemed unreal, somehow, and their music echoed
like meaningless words shouted, for the echo merely, in empty halls.
She drowsed discontentedly and woke from a dream of the grey lady to
see her stretched in the companion chair, herself asleep, it seemed,
for it was only after a long doubtful stare from the other that she
opened her great dark eyes.
"And I almost thought I had dreamed of meeting you before! Wasn't it
absurd? I am only now realising how ill I have been--things were all
so confused... I find that I can't even reply to Miss Ann as I ought
to be able to, when she scorns the effects of culture!"
"Does Ann scorn culture?" the grey lady asked in mild surprise. "I
never knew that."
"She scorns the leisure that goes to produce it, anyway."
"Did you give her a concrete instance of any special culture?"
She moved uneasily in her chair.