It was a few weeks later. A doctor had been there and gone, and
returning into the living-room Ethel sank down on a chair with a quiet
intensity in her eyes. For some time she had not been feeling herself,
but she did not want to worry Joe, and so at last she had telephoned to
the clergyman who had married her.
"You may not remember me," she had said, "but you married me in
December. Perhaps you'll recall it if I say there were only three
friends at the church."
"Oh, yes, I remember it--perfectly."
"Thank you. I'm not quite well and I have no friends to turn to, so I'm
wondering if you could recommend a good doctor I could see."
The doctor recommended had just paid his visit. And now as the dusk
deepened she had the strangest feelings. Her year and a half in the
city seemed hurried and feverish as a dream. Her mind ran back into the
past and on into the future. Only a few days before, the round robin
letter had come again. In it the girl who had married the mining
engineer out West had told of having a baby in a little town in Montana.
Ethel had thought of the doctor then.
She rose now and got the letter and re-read it slowly. Presently she
put it down and began crying softly, though she felt neither sad nor
frightened. Her life had so completely changed. All those girl
friends, so scattered; all those years, so far behind. It was like
getting on a ship, she thought, to start across the ocean. "You can't
get off, you must go across. Oh, Ethel Lanier, how happy you'll be."
But the happiness seemed a long way off.
How quiet it was. The nurse came in with Susette from the park. Ethel
went into the nursery and kneeling down she began to unbutton Susette's
little jacket. The child's plump face was so rosy and cold. She kissed
it suddenly.
"Martha," she said, "I'll need you here for a long time now. I'm going
to have a baby."
She reddened then and held her breath. Queer, how she had blurted it
out! She had not meant to tell any one yet. But the look of dawning
joy and relief in Martha's eyes made her glad she had spoken. Plainly
the nurse had been dreading the time so fast approaching when she would
have to leave Susette, who was now nearly four years old. But all she
said to Ethel was this:
"I'm glad to hear it, Mrs. Lanier. I hope you'll be very careful now."
She shot a look as keen as a knife, which asked, "Do you really want a
child? Or are you like her? Was it a mistake?"
And Ethel went quickly out of the room. In the living-room her eye was
caught by Amy's photograph on the table. She had always kept it there.
In her cleaning she had put it back. Emily, too, had put it back. They
had never spoken Amy's name. But Ethel faced the picture now for some
moments steadily. Somehow it had lost its beauty, it looked weak and
soul-less, without power any longer over Ethel's future. "Poor Amy.
Oh, how much you missed." And she added, "I'll never be like that." For
an instant she let her mind dwell on the past, on how Susette's coming
must have been--unwelcomed by her mother.
"But this one will be welcomed! Our love is so--so different! This
will bind us, oh, so close! It's done now, you're tied for life!" She
had never felt it so before. The months of her marriage had been so
exciting, and even in the long summer's thinking her love had seemed
always a little unreal. "But this is real--inside of me!" Her fancy
went careering ahead, with joy and wonder, a thrill of dismay. "I was
so free, with my life to choose! I could have been almost anything!
But now it is settled. This is my life. We talk and we talk about
being free--and then all at once--a baby."
In the days which followed and grew into weeks and months, the feeling
of quiet remained with her. The pang of uneasiness as to how she was to
find friends for Joe and herself, was allayed and put off to the future.
He would not expect anything of her just now. And because it was
pressing upon her no longer, it became a pleasure to dream and plan for
herself and Joe and the children.
She was only twenty-four, and although Joe was thirty-six he looked
years younger. They could grow. Now she began asking him to read aloud
in the evenings, nor was the reading all "mere fluff." Though she picked
out amusing things to vary the monotony, she insisted on magazines and
books which had been recommended by the little history "prof" at home,
to whom Ethel wrote long letters. The books rather appalled her husband
at times; but using her new hold on him, she said:
"Go on, dear, now begin." And she picked up her sewing with a look which
said, "We've got to grow, you know, if we're ever to get friends worth
while or have a life worth living."
But again she would shut out all that, and smile to herself and grow
absorbed. And this habit grew to such a degree that by the beginning of
summer their reading bees had come to an end. In June she took Martha
and Susette and went to the seashore for three months. She came back in
September, and now the time was drawing near. Her husband's love grew
anxious and there came troubled gleams in his eyes.
The trained nurse had arrived. The doctor kept coming. Martha was
plainly "in a state." And Emily Giles, for all her grim ways, had
moments almost tender. All centering, swiftly centering, as the long
voyage neared its end.