At the Hart’s Run station Julie bought a ticket to Washington, but when
the train reached Gordonsville she slipped out of it unnoticed and,
buying another ticket, crossed the tracks and boarded the Richmond
train which was waiting there. At the station in Richmond, Timothy
Bixby met her.
Thus, as easily almost as changing from one garment to another, Julie
Rose slipped out of all her established life. With that sudden violent
outcry, “What’s folks ever done for you or for me, that we got to
please ’em now!” she had burst open a door, through which she and
Timothy passed defiantly, finding themselves in a world where life
turned round and looked at them with apparent beneficence. In the
happiness of their companionship they drew long breaths of freedom;
and, relaxing into the recreating power of their love, they found
themselves and a confidence they had never known, so that for the first
time they faced their fellow beings without fear.
His concern was all for her. When he met her that first afternoon at
the Richmond station, he insisted that she was tired and must have
supper at once before he took her to their rooms. Accordingly, they had
their first meal together in the station restaurant, a meal that in
spite of the city heat and the coming and going of hurried people, was
to Julie the most wonderful she had ever eaten. Afterward they boarded
a westbound street-car.
“I’m afraid you’re going to find the city mighty hot after the
mountains,” he said anxiously.
She did not answer, but she turned and looked at him, and words were
not necessary. What did heat or material discomfort matter to her then?
The city was hot, tired, and flat after long weeks of summer;
disheveled and overgrown with extra population also, as were most
cities near any of the big training-camps, in that war year of 1918.
“The rooms ain’t much, honey,” he apologized, as the car ground its way
west with jerks of stops and starts. “An’ they ain’t in a swell part of
town; but they’re the best I could do, an’--an’ I got something to show
you.”
The rooms were in a part of the city made up almost entirely of blocks
of small frame houses, sheltering Richmond’s poorer inhabitants, who
spilled out of their front doors on to the little porches and into the
streets: the men in shirt sleeves, the women sometimes tidied for the
afternoons, sometimes still in the depression of wrappers that had been
worn through all the heat of the day.
“You see it ain’t much--pretty hot, an’ cheap out this way,” he
apologized again as they got off the car and started along the street.
She looked up at him as she had looked before. “Oh, Tim!” she cried;
and suddenly she laughed--a ripple of shy wild ecstasy. “Oh, Tim,
honey! How could anything like that matter now?”
Looking at her, he caught the flaming happiness of her face, and
laughed too. “I know, I know,” he whispered. “An’ anyhow, I have got
something fine to show you,” he added.
Though the streets were for the most part lined with small wooden
houses, there was an occasional more pretentious one of brick, and
sometimes a larger frame dwelling. It was in one of these last, a
double, three-storied house which accommodated several families and one
or two single lodgers, that Mr. Bixby had found an abode for them--a
sitting-room, a kitchen, and at the back a bedroom. The rooms were
close and the furniture was cheap and ugly, but what did that matter?
The porch outside was clothed with a cottage vine, a strip of zinnias
and cosmos marched in the tiny front-yard, and at the back was another
attempt at a flower bed.
“Oh, Tim! Oh, Tim!” she cried. She stood in the middle of the small
domain and turned slowly about. “Oh, Tim! It’s _ours_!” The rooms
ceased thereat to be mere rooms; with that rush of emotion her heart
opened to them, they entered, and the place became her home.
But he would not let her linger there now. Depositing her bags, he
urged her out again. “Come on,” he cried. “I got to show you ’fore it’s
too late.”
He turned into a street running south, which after a few minutes’
walk came to an end in a small bit of parkway where were a row of
benches and a stone balustrade. “There now! Look!” he cried. It was his
triumph.
All the cheap sordidness of the city ended abruptly here. Beyond was
space--a deep drop to the stretches of the James River below. Overhead
was the infinite breadth and height of the sky, and far across the
river, whose tawny waters were tufted by little islands, were green
stretches of open country.
He drew her down to a bench. “This is the jumping-off place,” he told
her. “I thought you could come here an’ kind of stretch and breathe
when things got too close on you back there in the streets.”
It was amazing. The mean streets reached almost to them, fenced off
by just that little edge of open ground, yet all one had to do was to
turn the back upon them to enter another world, a place of space and
freedom, of green islands, clean air, the smell of the water, and the
yellow flow of it. Here, too, they found the secret places of their
own souls. The twilight and then the dark came slowly down. They sat
together upon the bench, their eyes rested by the open stretches before
them, their hands close clasped, their bodies touching, and their soft,
half-whispered words feeling out toward one another, as they brought
to light all the past tragedies of their lives, all their sorrowful
timidities. Here was one at last to whom everything might be told, who
would listen, who would perfectly understand. They paused often to say
in whispered wonder, “Why, I never told that to anyone before!”
He told her there in halting phrases about his marriage. His disjointed
words only touched upon the high places, like a child skipping across
a brook on the stepping-stones. All the difficult everyday intercourse
with his wife that had followed their union was a dark flood he did not
dip into. What he did tell was enough for her to understand.
“We lived in the same town together,” he said. “I’d known her always,
off an’ on. She was mighty handsome--big and full of life. Everybody
thought she was going to marry Warwick Preston. But I reckon they
quarreled or something. Anyhow, him and Ethel Dow ran off and got
married. She--Elizabeth--lived a few doors down the street from me. We
met one evening--she was mighty fine an’ big-lookin’. She asked me to
come an’ see her, an’ I went several evenin’s. One night she cried, an’
said how lonesome she was. I was lonesome, too--”
“I understand,” Julie cried hastily, and he went no further with his
explanation. They turned away from the unhappy past to the miracle of
the present.
“We’re free! We’re free!” she exulted. “None of the little old fears
can hold us any more. We’ve found ourselves, honey! We’ve found one
another.”
“It was you unlocked the door an’ set me free,” he burst out. “You’re
my sister an’ my mother! You’re all I am. Oh, my little honey! My love!”
“I’m your sister an’ your mother--I’m the one that would die for you!”
she cried in answer.
After that they needed no more words. Silence fell, and the dusk that
had faded now into dark, wrapped them close about. They sat thus for a
long time, but at last it was late, and rising they made their way hand
in hand like happy children back to the three little rooms that were
now their home.