Cyrus Holland died just before daybreak next morning. It seemed to Deane
Franklin that he had only just fallen asleep when the telephone beside
him was ringing. When tired out he slept through other noises, but that
one always instantly reached--a call to him that got through sleep. He
wakened just enough to reach out for the 'phone and his "Hello!" was
cross. Was there never a time when one could be let alone? But the voice
that came to him banished both sleep and irritation. It was Ruth's
voice, saying quietly, tensely: "Deane? I'm sorry--but we want you.
There's a change. I'm sure father's going."
He was dressing almost the instant he hung up the receiver. To Amy, who
had roused, he said: "It's Ruth. Her father's going. I can't do a
thing--but they want me there."
At first Amy made no reply. He thought nothing about that, engrossed in
getting dressed as quickly as possible. When she burst out, "So of
course you're going!" he was dumbfounded at the passionateness of her
voice. He looked at her in astonishment; then, for the first time the
other side of it, as related to their quarrel about Ruth, turned itself
to him. "Why, of course I'm going, Amy," he said quietly.
"It makes a difference who it is, doesn't it?" she cried, stormily. "The
other night when somebody called you and there wasn't a thing you could
do, you _said_ so! You _told_ them they mustn't ask you! But _this_ is
different, isn't it?"
The words had piled up tumultuously; she seemed right on the verge of
angry, tumultuous tears. He paused in what he was doing. "Why, Amy," he
murmured in real astonishment. And then helplessly repeated in tender
reproach, "Why, Amy!"
But she laughed, it seemed sneeringly. He colored, quickly finished
dressing and left the room without saying anything more.
When she heard the front door close, heard Deane running down the steps,
she sat up in bed and burst into tears of rage. Always that woman!
Running away to her in the middle of the night! He didn't _have_ to go!
There was nothing for him to do as a doctor--he could do nothing for a
man who had been dying for a couple of days. He _said_ that--just a
couple of nights before when someone wanted him to come. But this was
Ruth Holland! She had only to telephone. Of course he'd go anywhere--any
time--for her! Her sobs grew more and more passionate. Her head down on
her knees she rocked back and forth in that miserable fury only jealousy
and wounded pride can create.
This gathered together, brought to a head, the resentment accumulating
through a number of incidents. That afternoon she had gone over to the
Lawrences' to thank Edith and her mother for the flowers from the tea
which they had sent her that morning. They had urged her to run in
often, to be friendly. Her unhappiness about her talk with Deane the
night before, when he had actually proposed that she go to see this Ruth
Holland, made her want to be with friends; she wanted to see people who
felt as she did that--though it did not so present itself to her--she
might fortify herself in the conviction that Deane was preposterously
wrong, and she taking the only course a good woman could take in
relation to a bad one. She was prepared to feel that men did not see
those things as clearly as women did, that it was woman who was the
guardian of society, and that she must bear with man in his failure to
see some things right. She had been eager to strengthen herself in that
feeling, not alone because it would, in her own mind, get her out of
reach of any possible charge of hardness or narrowness, but because it
would let her break through her feeling against Deane; she wanted to get
back to the days of his complete adoration of her, back where his
passion for her would sweep all else out of their world. She knew well
enough that Deane loved her, but there was a tightened up place around
her knowing that. It made her miserable. Things would not be right until
she found a way through that tightened up place--a way that would make
her right and Deane wrong, but would let her forgive, largely and gently
understanding. Such, not thought out, were the things that took her to
the Lawrences' that afternoon.
It was apparent that Edith had been crying. She and her mother were
gracious to Amy, but there was a new constraint. She felt uncomfortable.
When they were alone Edith broke out and told her how she was just sick
at heart about Ruth. Deane had been there that morning urging her to go
and see Ruth--instantly there was all anew that tightening up that held
her from Deane, that feeling against him and against this Ruth Holland
that was as if something virulent had been poured into her blood,
changing her whole system. Edith cried as she told how Deane and her
mother had quarreled because he felt so strongly on the subject, and
didn't seem able to understand her mother's standpoint. Then, she too
wanting to set herself right with herself, she went over the whole
story--the shock to her, how it had hurt her ideal of friendship, had
even seemed to take something from the sanctity of her own marriage. She
silenced something within herself in recounting the wrong done her,
fortified herself in repeating the things she had from her mother about
one's not being free, about what the individual owed to society.
Amy went home in a turmoil of resentment against her husband. It was
hard to hold back the angry tears. A nice position he was putting
himself in--going about the town pleading for this woman whom nobody
would take in!--estranging his friends--yes, probably hurting his
practice. And _why_? _Why_ was he so wrought up about it? Why was he
making a regular business of going about fighting her battles? Well,
_one_ thing it showed! It showed how much consideration he had for his
own wife. When she came in sight of their house it was harder than ever
to hold back the tears of mortification, of hot resentment. She had been
so sure she was going to be perfectly happy in that house! Now already
her husband was turning away from her--humiliating her--showing how much
he thought of another woman, and _such_ a woman! She did not know what
to do with the way she felt, did not know how to hold from the surface
the ugly things that surged through her, possessed her. Until now she
had had nothing but adulation from love. A pretty, petted girl she had
formed that idea of pretty women in youth that it was for men to give
love and women graciously to accept it. For her vanity to be hurt by a
man who had roused her passion turned that passion to fury against him
and made it seem that a great wrong had been done her.
As she approached she saw that Deane was standing before the house
talking to a woman in a vegetable wagon. He had one foot up on the spoke
of the wheel and was talking more earnestly than it seemed one would be
talking to a vegetable woman. Doubtless she was one of his patients. As
she came up he said: "Oh, Amy, I want you to know Mrs. Herman."
She stiffened; his tone in introducing her to a woman of what she
thought of as the lower classes seeming just a new evidence of his
inadequate valuation of her.
"Your husband and I went to school together," said Mrs. Herman,
pleasantly, but as if explaining.
"Oh?" murmured Amy.
Deane abruptly moved back from the wagon. "Well, you do that, Annie.
Ruth would love to see you, I know."
So _that_ was it! She turned away with a stiff little nod to the woman
in the wagon. Always the same thing!--urging Tom, Dick and Harry to go
and see that woman!--taking up with a person like this, introducing his
wife in that intimate way to a woman who peddled vegetables just because
she was willing to go and see Ruth Holland! She didn't know that she had
to stand such things!--she didn't know that she _would_. She guessed she
could show him that she wasn't going to play second fiddle to that Ruth
Holland!
Deane came to the door of the room where she was taking off her hat. Her
fingers were trembling so that she could scarcely get the pins. "That
little woman you were so chilly to is a pretty fine sort, Amy," he said
incisively.
"Because she is going to see Ruth Holland?" she retorted with an excited
laugh.
"Oh, you were pretty stand-offish before you knew that," he answered
coolly.
Vanity smarting from deeper hurts made her answer, haughtily: "I'm
rather inexperienced, you know, in meeting people of that class."
In his heart too there were deeper disappointments than this touched.
"Well, I must say--" he began hotly, "I think if I felt as snobbish as
that I'd try pretty hard to conceal it!"
Amy was carefully putting away her hat; she had an appearance of cold
composure, of a sense of superiority. It was because she wanted to keep
that that she did not speak. The things within would so completely have
destroyed it.
"I guess you don't understand, Amy," said Deane, quieted by her silence;
"if you knew all about Annie Morris I think you'd see she is a woman
worth meeting." Thinking of his talk with Edith and her mother that
morning, he added, a good deal of feeling breaking into his voice: "A
good sight more so than some of the people you are meeting!"
"And of course," she could not hold back, "they--those inferior
people--won't go to see Ruth Holland, and this wonderful woman will!
That's the secret of it, isn't it?"
"It's one thing that shows her superiority," he replied coolly. "Another
thing is her pluck--grit. Her husband is a dolt, and she's determined
her three children shall have some sort of a show in life, so she's
driven ahead--worked from daylight till dark many a time--to make decent
things possible for them."
"Well, that's very commendable, I'm sure," replied Amy mildly, appearing
to be chiefly concerned with a loose button on the wrap she had just
taken off.
"And with all that she's kept her own spirit alive; she's not going to
let life get clear ahead of _her_, either. She's pretty valiant, I
think." He was thinking again of Edith and her mother as he added
contentiously, "I don't know any woman in this town I'd rather talk to!"
Amy, appearing quite outside the things that were disturbing him, only
smiled politely and threaded a needle for sewing on the button. He stood
there in the doorway, fidgeting, his face red. She seemed so uncaring;
she seemed so far away. "Oh, Amy!" he cried, miserably, appealingly.
Quickly she looked up; her mouth, which had been so complacent,
twitched. He started toward her, but just then the doorbell rang. "I
presume that's your mother," she said, in matter of fact tone.
Mrs. Franklin was with them for dinner that night. Amy's social training
made it appear as if nothing were disturbing her. She appeared wholly
composed, serene; it was Deane who seemed ill at ease, out of sorts.
After dinner he had to go to the hospital and when she was alone with
his mother Amy was not able to keep away from the subject of Ruth
Holland. For one thing, she wanted to hear about her, she was avid for
detail as to how she looked, things she had done and said--that curious
human desire to press on a place that hurts. And there was too the
impulse for further self-exoneration, to be assured that she was right,
to feel that she was injured.
All of those things it was easy to get from Mrs. Franklin. Amy, not
willing to reveal what there had been between her and Deane, and having
that instinct for drawing sympathy to herself by seeming
self-depreciation, spoke gently of how she feared she did not altogether
understand about Deane's friend Ruth Holland. Was she wrong in not going
with Deane to see her?
Mrs. Franklin's explosion of indignation at the idea, and the feeling
with which, during the hour that followed, she expressed herself about
Deane's friend Ruth Holland, acted in a double fashion as both
fortification and new hurt. Mrs. Franklin, leader in church and
philanthropic affairs, had absolutely no understanding of things which
went outside the domain of what things should be. The poor and the
wicked did terrible things that society must do something about. There
was no excuse whatever for people who ought to know better. That people
should be dominated by things they ought not to feel was perversity on
their part and the most wilful kind of wickedness. She had Mrs.
Lawrence's point of view, but from a more provincial angle. Deane did
not get his questioning spirit, what she called his stubbornness, from
his mother.
Added to what she as a church woman and worker for social betterment
felt about the affair was the resentment of the mother at her son's
having been, as she put it, dragged into the outrage. She grew so
inflamed in talking of how this woman had used Deane that she did not
take thought of how she was giving more of an impression of her power
over him than might be pleasant hearing for Deane's young wife. The
indignation of the whole Franklin family at what they called the way
Deane had been made a cat's paw was fanned to full flame in this
preposterous suggestion that Amy should go to see Ruth Holland. In her
indignation at the idea she gave a new sense of what the town felt about
Ruth, and she was more vehement than tactful in her expressions against
Deane for holding out that way against the whole town. "It just shows,
my dear," she said, "what a woman of no principle can do with a man!"
Amy, hurt to the quick in this thought of the mysterious lure of a woman
of no principle, remarked casually, "She's wonderfully attractive, I
presume."
Mrs. Franklin was not too blunted by indignation to miss the pain that
was evident in the indifferently asked question. Hastily--more hastily
than subtly, she proceeded to depreciate the attractions of Ruth
Holland, but in the depreciation left an impression of some
quality--elusive, potent--which more than beauty or definite charm gave
her power. Edith too had spoken of that "something" about Ruth; a
something one never forgot; a something, she said, that no one else had.
And now, awakened by Deane's having been called by this woman in the
night, herself alone there and he hurrying to Ruth Holland, the barriers
of pride broke down and she cried because she was sorry for herself,
because she was hurt and outraged that she should be hurt, because for
the first time in her whole life she was thwarted--not having her way,
set aside. She completely lost her hold on herself, got up and stormed
about the room. When she looked at her face in the mirror she saw that
it was hideous. She couldn't help it!--she didn't care! The resentment,
rage, in her heart was like a poison that went all through her. She was
something that didn't seem herself. She thought horrible things and
ground her teeth and clenched her hands and let her face look as ugly as
it could. She hated this woman! She wished some horrible thing would
happen to her! She hated Deane Franklin! The passion he had roused in
her all turned into this feeling against him. She wouldn't stand it! She
wouldn't stay there and play second fiddle to another woman--she, a
bride! Fresh tears came with that last. Her mother and father would
never have treated her that way. They didn't think Deane Franklin good
enough for her, anyway! She would go back home! _That_ would make things
pretty hard for him! That would show what this woman had done! And he'd
be sorry then--would want her back--and she wouldn't come. She finally
found control in that thought of her power over him used to make him
suffer.
Deane, meanwhile, was hurrying through the streets that had the
unrealness of that hour just before morning. That aspect of things was
with him associated with death; almost always when he had been on the
streets at that hour it was because someone was fighting death. It was
so still--as if things were awed. And a light that seemed apart from
natural things was formed by the way the street lights grew pale in the
faint light of coming day. Everyone was sleeping--all save those in a
house half a dozen blocks away, the house where they were waiting for
death.
He was on foot, having left his car down at the garage for some repairs
after taking his mother home. As he slowed for a moment from a walk that
was half run he thought of how useless his hurrying was. What in the
world could he do when he got there? Nothing save assure them he could
do nothing. Poor Ruth!--it seemed she had so much, so many hard things.
This was a time when one needed one's friends, but of course they
couldn't come near her--on account of society. Though--his face softened
with the thought--Annie Morris would come, she not being oppressed by
this duty to society. He thought of the earnestness of her thin face as
she talked of Ruth. That let in the picture of Amy's face as he
introduced them. He tried not to keep seeing it. He did think, however,
that it was pretty unnecessary of Amy to have talked to his mother about
Ruth. All that was unyielding in him had been summoned by the way his
mother talked to him going home--"going for him" like that because he
had wanted Amy to go and see Ruth. That, it seemed to him, was something
between him and Amy. He would not have supposed she would be so ready to
talk with some one else about a thing that was just between themselves.
There had been that same old hardening against his mother when she began
talking of Ruth, and that feeling that shut her out excluded Amy with
her. And he had wanted Amy with him.
Hurrying on, he tried not to think of it. He didn't know why Amy had
talked to his mother about it--perhaps it just happened so, perhaps his
mother began it. He seized upon that. And Amy didn't understand; she was
young--her life had never touched anything like this. He was going to
talk to her--really talk to her, not fly off the handle at the first
thing she would say. He told himself that he had been stupid, hard--a
bungler. It made him feel better to tell himself that. Yes, he certainly
had been unsympathetic, and it was a shame that anything had come to
make Amy unhappy--and right there at first, too! Why, it was actually
making her sick! When he went back after taking his mother home Amy said
she had a bad headache and didn't want to talk. She was so queer that he
had taken her at her word and had not tried to talk to her--be nice to
her. It seemed now that he hadn't been kind; it helped him to feel that
he hadn't been kind. And it was the headache, being roused in the night
when she was not well that had made her so--well, so wrought up about
his answering to the call of the Hollands--old patients, old friends. He
was going to be different; he was going to be more tender with Amy--that
would be the way to make her understand. Such were the things his
troubled mind and hurt heart tried to be persuaded of as, thinking at
the same time of other things--the death to which he was hurrying, how
hard it would be for Ruth if Cyrus didn't speak to her--he passed
swiftly by the last houses where people slept and turned from a world
tinged with the strangeness of an hour so little known to men's
consciousness, softly opened the door and stepped into the house where
death was touching life with that same unreality with which, without,
day touched night.
Miss Copeland, wrapped in a bathrobe, sat in the upstairs hall. "He's
still breathing," she whispered in that voice which is for death alone.
In the room Ruth and Ted stood close together, the nurse on the other
side of the bed. Ruth's hair was braided down her back; he remembered
when she used to wear it that way, he had one of those sudden pictures
of her--on her way to school, skipping along with Edith Lawrence. She
turned, hearing him, and there was that rush of feeling to her eyes that
always claimed him for Ruth, that quick, silent assumption of his
understanding that always let down bars between them. But Ruth kept
close to Ted, as if she would shield him; the boy looked as Deane had
seen novices look in the operating room.
There was nothing for him to do beyond look at his patient and nod to
the nurse in confirmation that it would be any minute now. He walked
around to Ted and Ruth, taking an arm of each of them and walking with
them to the far side of the room.
"There's nothing to do but wait," he said.
"I wish Harriett and Cyrus would get here," whispered Ruth.
"You telephoned?"
"Before I did you--but of course it's a little farther."
They stood there together in that strange silence, hearing only the
unlifelike breathing of the man passing from life. Listening to it,
Ruth's hand on Deane's arm tightened. Soothingly he patted her hand.
Then, at a movement from the nurse, he stepped quickly to the bed. Ruth
and Ted, close together, first followed, then held back. A minute later
he turned to them. "It's over," he said, in the simple way final things
are said.
There was a choking little cry from Ted. Ruth murmured something, her
face all compassion for him. But after a moment she left her brother and
stood alone beside her father. In that moment of seeing her face, before
turning away because it seemed he should turn away, Deane got one of the
strangest impressions of his life. It was as if she was following her
father--reaching him; as if there was a fullness of feeling, a rising
passionate intensity that could fairly overflow from life. Then she
turned back to Ted.
Cyrus and Harriett had entered. There was a moment when the four
children were there together. Cyrus did not come up to the bed until
Ruth had left. Deane watched his face as--perfunctorily subdued,
decorous, he stood where Ruth had stood a moment before. Then Cyrus
turned to him and together they walked from the room, Cyrus asking why
they had not been telephoned in time.
Deane lingered for a little while, hating to go without again seeing
Ruth and Ted. He tapped at Ruth's door; he was not answered, but the
unlatched door had swung a little open at his touch. He saw that the
brother and sister were out on the little porch opening off Ruth's room.
He went out and stood beside them, knowing that he would be wanted. The
sun was just rising, touching the dew on the grass. The birds were
singing for joy in another day. The three who had just seen death stood
there together in silence.