1
Far from the highways, a hundred miles, two hundred miles inland from
the coast, there are many scattered villages, many road-strung hamlets
like Heathville, some in the valleys, some daring the hill-tops, some
clustered about an ancient mill now falling to ruin or transformed to
some more placid use. It may be that over the rutted, narrow roads
stage coaches once swirled by on the way to Albany, disgorging their
tired travelers at the largest house whose size alone now proclaims its
earlier uses. It may be that people built other houses near the tavern
in human gregariousness, longing to feel themselves in touch with the
world of affairs. There are other roads over which stage coaches never
passed. They remained for the conquest of the rural-delivery mail
carrier. There are a few that even the mail carrier does not attempt,
that climb and wind and drop to wind again for miles between house and
house. Always where those roads begin there stands a row of wooden
or metal boxes set on posts of varying height, storm-bent to varying
angles, where the postman stops. The row of boxes and the postman’s
automobile are to the people who live along that road what stage coach
and tavern were to their progenitors--their link with the world of
affairs. Otherwise life goes on for them with much the same unbroken
round as through two centuries. Birth and death, toil and Sunday rest.
Goodnesses, evil. A few fields wrung from the grip of granite, a few
growing back to underbrush. Sun and blight, good crops and failures.
New shingles on a roof here, a new grave yonder. In every village there
is a church, in every one a schoolhouse with a flagpole in front.
The road to Heathville begins at a railroad station where a train
from the south stops once a day, not to be outrivaled by the train
from the north. As though disdaining things as modern as railways,
it rises hurriedly from the station, crosses a bridge and runs for a
mile or two along a crest of red sandstone; then it takes its own way
up hill and down, beside a tumbling stream winding through fern-sweet
woods, past fields where willow and hazel tread along the brooks, past
rocky pastures where cattle wear their paths among cedars and laurel
and blueberries to graze on the rough thatch of grass between granite
outcroppings. At last it emerges into a country gentler because it has
submitted to the hand of man. Orchards and great red barns come closer
together. Finally, on the summit of the last rocky lift, a white church
steeple points towards the gilded cock that sways to the wind and looks
down upon a dozen houses.
Anne arrived there at the hour when dusk had faded into night, a
kindly curtain softly dropped between her and the life she had left;
kindly, as though to blot distress out of her unhappy consciousness;
and softly, as though to indicate the measure of the life that was
waiting for her in the weeks and years to come. But she was not
aware of the dropping of the curtain; she had no sense of being the
spectator at a play. The drama, or the tragedy, was of herself. What
had been and what was still to come was all that mattered to her. The
people in the train, those she had left behind, those she might meet
in Heathville, all were no more than settings of her stage. There
was no other stage than hers, no other play than this mad misery of
which she was the victim, this sequence of events which had caught
her up and was carrying her along with it. Yet as at a play, Anne
had a sense of definite divisions of time. One act was over. Now she
was going through another. Again there should be action, directed by
herself, staged by herself, brought to some conclusion of her own
contriving. For the time being she was trapped. For months, perhaps
for a year, the best she could do would be to escape those irritating
contacts, to wait with endurance if not with patience, until she should
be physically free again. Looking forward, she had no intention of
remaining in the trap forever. What if Brice were not found? What if
she had indeed failed with him? What if their marriage were wrecked
forever? Once past this miserable bondage of the body, would not her
courage and her intention reassert themselves, and her pride? Had those
ever failed her? Could one lose, or drop like a garment, all one’s
characteristics, merely because one had been mistaken and found one’s
self involved in an unwelcome human commonplace like the one awaiting
her? This child--of course one became fond of her own child. But she
was not of the maternal type, not the sort of woman who would lose her
identity in becoming a mother. The child, if it lived--perhaps it would
not!--should be properly loved and cared for. Of course, there would be
its future to think about. There would be difficulties there, if Brice
did not come back. But if he did--ah, he would admit, then, how right
she had always been in her ambitions. Yet for the present there was
this slow-dragging time ahead. By that, and by the uncertainty about
Brice, she was trapped.
Only Nicky had approved of her journey. The thought of it came to Anne
on the day she found Miss Willy’s letter; her plan matured quickly,
inevitably.
“Oh, Nance dear,” Alice protested. “You can’t go away, not with all
this uncertainty.”
“The uncertainty is worse here, Alice, than it will be there. No one
knows me there, except Willy. No one will be watching and speculating.”
They were all in the room when she told of her plan, Nicky and Ambrose
and the Copelands. George Copeland, large and shy, told her:
“There’s plenty of room here, Anne. Like to have you.”
“I know you would, George. But don’t you see? I’ve got to get away.”
Nicky gave Ambrose a look. Anne understood. They had been talking it
over between them, probably quarreling, as always.
“Anne has the right to do what she wants,” Nicky declared. “Brice
seems to have done it. Don’t get sentimental about it, George, nor you
either, Alice. Anne doesn’t want sympathy, nor a soft bed to lie on.
What she wants now is to get away. Don’t you see that? To get away. It
strikes me as perfectly natural.”
Alice said nothing. Her eyes rested softly on Anne. Oddly enough, it
was Ambrose who made Anne’s way clear for her. The house could be
rented. It would bring sixty, perhaps seventy dollars a month, half
to be held as interest on the mortgage, and something, of course, for
upkeep. There was the money that Ranney Copeland had. George could
see to that, properly reinvest it. There would be an assured income,
minute, to be sure, but something.
On the train Anne thought of her last words with Nicky. “How did you
know?” she had asked, when they had a moment together alone, before
parting. “How could you know I wanted to get away?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Nicky returned, with a shrug.
“I never did, before. I wanted to go on into things, not away. Now I
want to get away from everything, from myself and everything.”
Nicky gave her a look in which mockery lurked. “Oh, well, as to that!
Good luck to you!”
For the last two hours on the train Anne’s thought blurred like the
passing landscape. She saw the river, the villages and hills, the woods
and fields. She sensed the past, believed she sensed the future. The
train was an overheated, rumbling discomfort that had to be endured,
and the country it bore her through mattered nothing. Her own physical
lassitude reacted upon her mind until both past and future were lost
in her miserable realization of the physical. At last the name of her
station was called. She looked about her on the dark platform, and
almost immediately was aware of the quaint, small person talking as
she came. She had forgotten how tiny Miss Willy was, and how intensely
herself, whatever the circumstances.
“Annie, dear child! To think of your coming to see me at last! My
beet-greens are up--your dear father used to love them so. I remember
you didn’t, though. I’ve brought an automobile. It’s Mr. Wilkinson’s.
He’s careful, real careful. Where’s your trunk, child? I knew you’d be
used to riding in them, coming from the city and all. All those things
yours? My, but you must have a lot of clothes. Still, I dare say you’d
need ’em. Living like you do. No, I can get in alone. Let me look at
you! My, but you’re pale, child. You ain’t sick are you?”
That was Miss Willy.
“And how is dear Brice?” asked Miss Willy, before they were out of the
town. “So handsome! I knew he would take good care of you.”
“I want to know how you are,” Anne evaded. “I’ll talk about Brice
tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’m well. I’m always well. I can do a day’s work yet, and not have
to thank anybody to help me. Why, what do you think, child? Somebody
called me an old lady, only the other day. Or maybe a few months ago.
Seems like the other day.”
“You’re not old,” Anne said, putting her hand over Miss Willy’s. Cotton
gloves, the finger-tips long, too long. Knuckles, work-worn, bony,
enlarged. Cotton gloves. Age. She shivered.
“Well, I just guess I am not,” said Miss Willy. “I’m only just
seventy-two. That’s not ninety-two, is it? No, nor eighty-two. Oh, I
can do a day’s work yet!”
The car lurched on, the chatter continued. Anne caught bits of it as
she caught glimpses of woods and fields under the stars.
“The day you were married. So sweetly innocent. All in white. I
couldn’t help crying. Going off with the man of your heart. So
handsome. Woman’s lot in life. Life is hard for some. Not that I
mean--good gracious, no! Dear Brice! So good of him to let you come to
see me. Good of him to spare you.”
On and on it went, on and on. Her childhood--like that, on and on.
“Each day brings it own troubles. Not that I mean--no, of course not.
But sufficient unto the day--_you_ know. Annie dear--_you_ know!”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“I believe you weren’t listening. It’s pretty scenery, here in the
glen. Too dark now to see. But you will see it. You’re going to stay a
while, ain’t you? Annie, ain’t you going to stay a while? Come so far
and all?”
“Yes. I’m going to stay--a while.”
“Dear Brice. So good of him to let you come. I guess he thought you
needed the change. It’s wonderful the way a man will do everything
for one he loves. So romantic. Like Mazeppa. Or Hero and that
what’s-his-name--the one that swam the river.”
“Leander--wasn’t it?”
“Leander. Yes. Pa had a horse once named Leander. Sorrel. But I’m sure
I wouldn’t want anybody to risk his life swimming a river or anything
for me. Human life--the breath of the Almighty.”
What was she saying? Was it really as bewildering as it sounded, or was
Anne’s own mind chaotic? It didn’t matter. She heard herself answering
again. “Not a river, was it? A strait.”
“It’s the same thing. Salt water. And whales. Most uncomfortable, I
should think. Night air’s always damp. Especially if the weather’s
cold. That reminds me. I do hope Dorilliam won’t leave the milk before
we get there. It’ll sour before morning, if he does.”
At last the chatter ceased. The car made an abrupt turn. Miss Willy
grasped Anne’s arm as it veered. A small house loomed in the darkness.
“I was afraid to leave the lamp burning,” Miss Willy said. “You wait
outside, child, while I strike a light.”
The milk was on the doorstep, and a large black cat that Anne trod on
in the dark. Her bags were set inside at last.
“The kitchen’s no place to bring you into,” said Miss Willy, “but I got
to see to the milk.”
Anne sank into a rocking-chair, closed her eyes. In a moment Miss Willy
was back. “My goodness, you’re pale as an appagotion!” she cried. “I’ll
get you some tea. ’Twon’t take a minute.”
She talked while she busied herself. At the table, the cat jumped into
her lap. “Poor Buster! Poor little Buster! The lady didn’t mean to
walk on his tail. Auntie’s baby! Ain’t he handsome, Annie? Is your tea
right?”
“You always had a black cat,” Anne said. Willy’s voice, the jumble
of her words. Long ago, childhood, strangely mixed with the present.
What--what--oh, that languor, that heaviness, and the chatter going on.
“I call myself his auntie. Cats are so sensitive. He’d feel dreadfully
hurt, Buster would, if he suspected he wasn’t a member of the family. I
never was married. I don’t like to say I’m--but he knows as much as a
child. You’ll see, Anne, he knows just as much as a child.”
That kitchen. Sounds going on and on. Later, the narrow dark hall and
the straight flight of stairs, the bedroom above, the bed. Longing for
rest, for cool sheets.
“Now you sleep as late as you can,” said Miss Willy. “You just make
yourself right at home here. To think of your coming to see me.”
Sleep. This low-ceilinged room her refuge. Sounds outside, perhaps only
insects, but like a lawn-mower, clicking, rattling, whirling. They
reminded her of too much. Of people on porches, of Brice, walking,
walking behind a lawn-mower, of things she wanted to shut out of her
memory forever.
Yet that night she slept soundly and without dreams. She awoke slowly
to realization of where she was. A band of sunlight lay on the floor,
and through the open windows came the soft sounds of earliest summer,
birds, and a low humming that she could not place. Far off, someone was
whistling. She had not wound her watch. She went to the window, but to
her eyes there was no beauty. The loveliness of the rolling hills, the
freshly green pastures and orchards, the little garden below with its
neat rows of vegetables already proclaiming old Willy’s diligence--this
was only the country. Always she had thought of the country as of
a place where lives were rough and barren of enjoyment, crude, as
necessary to the maintenance of man as were mills, but as far beyond
her interest as the manufacture of soap. The morning was warm, but
she shivered. To be here, in this emptiness! That church up the road;
across the way the gray house with an ell, and the few other houses
beyond--what sort of people could live in those houses, center their
lives about that bare church? Bare--yes, that was it; she had come to
this bareness, to hide. To hide; but not to remain. Impossible, that.
Time would pass, the long dragging months. Meanwhile, she would have to
make things as easy as possible. Willy was happy at having her. Willy
was kind and willing, devoted.
“I let you get your sleep out,” Miss Willy said, beaming, when at last
Anne went down to the kitchen. “I always say there’s nothing like
sleep for the young. As for me, I like to get up in the morning, so’s
to get my chores out of the way. My, you look pretty!”
Anne breakfasted at the kitchen table, the cat Buster staring up at her
with yellow eyes and Miss Willy talking the while.
“Auntie’s boy was naughty this morning. He caught a poor, poor little
robin. Come out to the porch, Annie-my-dear. I’ll show you the nest.”
Anne felt no interest in nests, nor in the wide-opened beaks that arose
from the one in the grapevine, but it was easier to follow old Willy
than to remain indoors. Alone, she would have to think. The garden was
a tangled, blossomy place, iris and peonies massed in bloom, roses
budding; bees hummed there, a cat-bird called.
“The flowers take care of themselves,” said Miss Willy. “Funny how the
Lord seems to be able to trust things that are only meant for looks to
take care of themselves, while what’s meant for use has to give us a
lot of hard work and all. I want you should see my vegetables.”
They passed a row of flaunting rhubarb. A cooped hen beat back and
forth behind slats because her chicks were rambling and scratching
under the broad leaves.
“There, look at my beet-greens. And the radishes. They’re not quite
ready. I got the peas in good and early. Ain’t it a handsome sight?”
Anne had to say something; the small bright-eyed face was expectant.
“Wonderful! Who does it all for you?”
Miss Willy laughed. “I just knew you’d ask that. Nobody does it but me.
Not a soul helps me. I just guess I can do my day’s work yet.”
“But, Willy, you don’t plant and dig. You can’t!”
The little head tossed. “Oh, don’t I? It’s my garden. I do it all.
Well”--she gave Anne a fleeting look--“well--all but the spading.
Dorilliam does that. I don’t want to take praise for what I don’t
do. And--my gracious!--that reminds me! I ought to’ve gone over this
morning and had him drive down for your trunk. Now I can’t get him till
noon. You did bring a trunk, didn’t you? You going to stay a while?”
Suddenly Anne felt dizzy. “Can’t we go back to the house?” she asked.
“Can’t we go in? I must tell you----”
In the cool kitchen Anne told her. Miss Willy sat upright, sometimes
her eyes on Anne’s face, sometimes on the hands folded tightly together
on her apron. She asked no question, made no comment. When Anne had
stopped speaking she sat for another moment silent; her lips twitched a
little. Then she said, not looking at Anne:
“And to think it was me you came to. I--I’ve always wanted a baby to
hold all I’d a mind to.”
Anne pressed her hands to her cheeks, started to speak again.
“I wouldn’t talk any more, if I were you,” said Miss Willy. “I can see
you been through a lot. Talking won’t help it. You’ll feel different,
after the baby comes.”
“Ah--different! I hope so. But the baby is such a small part of it.”
“No it ain’t, either. You’ll see.”
“I suppose there is always a way out of everything,” Anne said, from
her mood of utter weariness. “We may both die.”
Miss Willy stood up. “Now look here, Anne Warren! I’m glad you come to
my house. I’m glad to have you here. I want you should stay. But it’s
my house, and there’s one thing I won’t have in my house. I won’t have
the Lord’s ways blasphemed nor questioned.”
Anne flushed. “I can go, I suppose.”
“Well, you won’t go. You’ll stay where you be. But you’ll use what
sense you got while you’re doing it.”
“Willy----!”
“I mean it. And I’ll say whatever I’ve a mind to. There ain’t anybody
else to do it, and I knew you when you were a child. You were a little
cantankerous imp, all the time wanting your own way, no matter what
it might lead to. Many’s the time I longed to turn you over my knee.
Many’s the time I wondered whether Solomon didn’t know better than
folks nowadays, when he said that about sparing the rod. Still and all,
a man with as many wives as he had must have been tried beyond patience
when it come to the children. So I never laid hands on you, more’s
the pity, and you’re past spanking, now. But you’ll stay here and act
sensible. And you won’t talk about dying. That’s in the Lord’s hands,
not yours.”
Anne stood up. How weary she was, how spent. How futile and foolish old
Willy, with her primitive talk. That to go on for months. Yet after her
waiting was over there would be other months. “Dear old Willy, you are
kind. I want to stay here for a time, until--afterwards. I can pay a
little.”
“Well then, so you shall,” said Miss Willy. “It’s a grand thing, to
feel independent. Like me.”
2
The days were long, but she dreaded the fall of evening, when the
insects began their rattling song. There were letters from Alice. Twice
Ambrose wrote, inclosing the monthly check. There was no word of Brice.
On that subject Ambrose wrote only a line each time. Alice recounted in
detail, from which Anne’s mind shrank away, his endeavors and George’s.
What it all summed up to was that Brice had vanished. And the crickets
and locusts clicked on, like lawn-mowers. George still wished for
publicity, but to that Anne refused her consent. She could see those
headlines, or the veiled salaciousness of those small surreptitious
paragraphs in the column marked “Personal.” Her affairs should never be
aired there. Never would she consent to that final blow to her pride,
never to the surmises and smiles that would cause. Besides, now she did
not want him to come back, did not want to see him. He had done enough,
hurt her too much, put too much upon her. Let him stay away forever!
She tore Alice’s letter to bits, wept with anger. Miss Willy, hearing
the sobs, ran to the gray house across the road, came back with the
doctor.
It was the beginning of a friendship. A grizzled man, humorous, short
of temper, Anne liked him. Gradually she came to look forward to his
visits, always unexpected, apt to be lingering.
“Well, what of it?” he asked her one day when she complained of a
headache. “Be gone by tomorrow.”
She was nettled. That, from a doctor. “But what of today? It’s really
quite bad.”
“I dare say. But you’ve got to expect a pain here or there. I’m not
going to dose you for that, Mrs. Denison.”
“Do you treat all your patients this way?”
“Not all. But part of the time. Words to you, syrup to others. When
there’s nothing the matter with ’em.”
“You think there is nothing the matter with me?”
“You’re sharing the common lot. Women in your condition always think
it’s uncommon. But it isn’t.”
She flushed. Her condition, the common lot. “I know what you mean. But
my position is not quite the same----”
“I wonder if you do know what I mean?” he interrupted. “I’m not
thinking of your physical condition. Call it mental. Or moral, if you
like.”
“Doctor Severance! Moral!”
“Yes. Not speaking of morals. You find yourself in a situation. I’m a
physician, so I called it a condition. You think it’s uncommon, unique,
I dare say. It is not. Not a bit of it!”
“Who has been talking to you of my affairs, Doctor Severance?”
“You have. Not in words, no. Nor anyone else. No need to. Plain enough.
Something’s gone wrong. You think it’s shaking the world. All women
do. A teacup drops, there’s no other teacup. But isn’t there? Patterns
vary, of course. But there remain plenty of teacups. All hold tea or
coffee, most have handles.” He smiled, kindly, tolerantly. “Be mistress
of yourself, Mrs. Denison, though your teacups smash.”
Anne stood up, biting her lip. “It seems to me,” she said, “that I have
been mistress of myself!”
“Possibly too much, in a sense,” said he. “Bluff. All women use bluff.
Some can’t find anything better. Some don’t want to. Some don’t need
to. Some get away with it, even to bluffing themselves. You’ve been
trying to do that, Mrs. Denison. I doubt if you can.”
“What else can one do?” she cried, with a gesture of impotence.
“Ha! Think it out. There’s a prescription for you. A new one,” he
chuckled, “for headaches.”
Others of his prescriptions she tried to follow. She must walk every
day, he insisted, meet the neighbors. But she had never walked without
objective. Up the hill past the church, over the covered bridge to the
store, where men and children stopped talking when she entered and
stared at her curiously; in the other direction, down the road to
nowhere, and back again. There was no sense in that. Better stay in the
garden with Willy, or sit in the kitchen while Willy was busy at stove
or sink. Aimless walks were intolerable.
“All right, then,” said the doctor. “See that hill over there? You walk
to the top of that hill every day. No detours. There’s a brook or two.
Jump them. Bit of a marsh. Find the tough clumps of grass. Wet feet
won’t hurt you. Rocks. Go over them. Don’t go around. Straight up and
straight back, if you want to.”
“But there are cattle!” she protested.
“Plenty,” said he. “Good company, cattle. Try to find out what they’re
thinking.”
“But the sun is so hot!”
“All right. Go at night, then,” he laughed. “Good medicine, madam!”
For a time she obeyed him. When the sun dropped below the hill’s summit
she would go warily down through the fields, over the marsh and the
deep, narrow brooklets, watchfully among the cattle who stared, slowly
followed, at last overcame their own shyness and her panic and nosed at
her hands and her skirt.
“Take ’em some salt,” said Miss Willy.
Anne laughed aloud the first time she felt the warm roughness of their
tongues on her palm and discovered that after all she was not afraid.
At first she thought only of reaching the top of the hill and
returning. So much to be done with, got out of the way. But one day she
lingered there until sunset. Another, she came back with her hands
full of forget-me-nots. It was cool on the shaded hillside, warm on the
crest, where the sun still shone. The rocks had gray velvet over them.
There were strange little blossoms in the grass. Things she had never
noticed before began to present themselves. The walk began to be not
merely a prescription, a climb up a hillside. Gradually it was becoming
an adventure, an exploration. But there were days so hot that she could
not go out, even when the shadows were long; days when the walls of
the house seemed to flicker in the intensity of the heat like the air
above a fire. Then even the twitter of birds rasped her nerves. The
humming of bees and the cooing of doves were as irritating as a siren’s
whistle. There were days when she was too languid to do more than lie
on her bed and endure; other hours when the attempt at enduring became
almost madness, when she could have shrieked aloud in protest at her
helplessness. That was what hurt. To be helpless, to have to wait, to
endure, rebellious and bitter at the thought of what life had done to
her. Life, and Brice. No, she did not want Brice to come back. She
hated Brice, hated those years when his silence had fooled her, hated
her memories and could not get away from them. They pursued. To look at
the sun did not shut them out, nor to cover her eyes. Memories? They
leaped out at her. That sofa. Brice’s frown of anxiety. The chair in
the living-room, hideous, out of place. Why hadn’t he let her tuck it
away upstairs? Why did she remember it so?
When she had been there a while the neighbors began to call. Prim
women, strangely dressed, figures bulging or angular.
“Oh, I can’t see anyone,” Anne said, when the first ones came. “Tell
them I’m not at home, or something.”
Miss Willy stood in the bedroom door. For a moment she pressed her lips
together. Then she said, “Now look here, Annie Warren, I won’t have you
behave so. They’ve come to call. You put on that lavender dress and
come down.”
“You’re not dressed up,” Anne said, smiling a little. During her
childhood Willy had called her Annie. She had loathed the diminutive.
Willy knew it. But Willy knew, too, that in submitting to that Anne
would have to submit to more. It held her in bounds, became the symbol
of Willy’s authority. Willy was taking the same line now.
“I’m folks. I’m not company. You do as I tell you.”
Anne did more, did her best, but she could not make conversation with
them. Their talk was of gardens and children, of intimate illnesses and
more intimate affairs in their neighbors’ houses.
“I suppose they are curious about me,” she said, one day, when she was
watching old Willy perform the rite of making doughnuts.
“That’s as may be,” said Miss Willy, dryly. “When you’ve lived in the
country as long as I have you’ll know the easiest way to stop folks
from bein’ curious is to get in the first word. I told ’em you are my
niece. I lied. But I don’t doubt the Lord will forgive me. I said you’s
a widow, come to live with me to help out. I said you’s going to take
care of me in my old age. No harm in that. It’s a long way off from me
yet, praise be. You don’t have to be scared.”
“Willy! Do I deserve that?” Anne cried, not so much in protest as
in wonderment. It was like looking into a mirror, and finding an
unaccustomed expression on her own face.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Miss Willy, dryly. “I been wondering a
good deal. I don’t know what you aim to do. But it seems to me you’re
not bracing yourself. You’re hiding away from yourself. Trying to.
Nobody can, in the end, far as I know.”
Anne thought a moment. “Yes,” she said, “yes. That is just what I am
trying to do. What else is there?”
“You got your life to live.”
“My life. You call it my life. It is not. This thing that is coming,
and what Brice has done to me--my life, my own life has been taken away
from me. I’m walled in. I’m trapped.”
“Most folks are walled in, with one thing or another. I never met one
that wasn’t. You ain’t making use of your wall.”
“Use of it?”
“What else are walls for?” asked Willy, waving a long fork over the
frying pan. “Folks wouldn’t build ’em for nothing. They don’t, if it’s
only to get the rocks out o’ the fields. God doesn’t, either. Walls
are useful, if it’s only to brace up against.”
“Oh, what can I do? It’s easy enough to talk about bracing, setting
one’s feet firm! My whole world has slipped. What is left?”
Miss Willy smiled. “I am, for one thing.” She returned to the table,
began to cut out more rings of dough.
Anne reached her hand across. “Willy, I’m not ungrateful. I appreciate
everything you do for me. I know I don’t pay what it’s worth----”
“Now look here, Anne Warren! I take your pay ’cause I got to, and to
make you feel better. But when you talk about gratitude--well, that’s
your business, not mine. Folks that do things for gratitude do them
from vanity. I hope I ain’t vain. Maybe I am. But I try not to be. Our
Lord wasn’t vain when he healed the leper and raised up the dead.”
She dropped a plateful of rings into the smoking fat. Anne’s eyes were
smarting. “Willy, you make me ashamed,” she murmured.
“That’s good,” said Miss Willy.
“What can I do? Don’t you see how helpless I am?”
“Well, since you ask, there’s one thing you can do. You can think of
the folks around here as folks, not lumps of clay. That’s what you been
doing. But you listen to me, Anne Warren! There’s all sorts of clay.
I’m not saying you’re our sort. Some clay’s good for bricks, and some
for fine china. There’s some that ain’t good for a thing, as far as I
know, but to keep things from growing. Still and all, the Almighty used
clay. Didn’t look about him for anything better. He’d just finished
making a new world, too, all spick and span, with flowers and waters
and snakes and everything. Might have taken his pick, but he found clay
plenty good enough. There! That’s the last. Want a hot one?”
Anne took the doughnut, went out of doors to a chair under the apple
tree. The old woman’s talk had startled her. Notwithstanding a lurking
sense of shame and deserved admonishment her thoughts were not of
herself. Where had old Willy learned her philosophy? Surely philosophy,
or wisdom, did not accrue to one. It was no thistle-seed, to be blown
white-winged on the wind, to germinate wherever it fell, on rock or
roadside or--clay. Willy’s life had been bare, so bare. Anne’s thought
brought back, in one of those oddly photographic flashes with which
the mind visualizes a long train of circumstance in a single picture,
the coming of Willy to her father’s house and events leading up to
it. There had been many women, called, in the small-town phraseology,
housekeepers. Between the time of her mother’s death and the coming of
Willy, Professor Warren’s continuous advertisements for help were the
joke and the pity of his neighbors. Anne could not remember her mother,
but she remembered the succession of housekeepers, not as individuals,
but as people who got in her way, who tried to restrain her, on whom
she used all her childish arts of retaliation and torment until they
left in despair or dudgeon. She remembered the day when Miss Willy
came, a small gray-clad person with a carpet bag that instantly claimed
the child’s attention and afterward became an object of admiration.
There was no other like it in town, and she used to bribe Alice into
docility, and even occasionally Nicky, by a sight of it in the attic.
Sometimes Nicky held out for the further bribe of being allowed to
march up and down the length of the attic with it in her hands,
while Alice and Anne would chant, “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are
marching.” Alice always wanted to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,”
but Nicky and Anne agreed that a carpet bag was not an appropriate
implement for Christian soldiers. Besides, one couldn’t step as quickly
to that tune as to the other.
But that first day Anne had eyed Miss Willy solemnly, biding her time.
She had no doubt that this new one would be like the others, easy to
vanquish.
“Her name’s Willy,” she told her father that night at the supper table.
The professor, harassed, poor man, as he always was when confronted
with his daughter after a long day at the high school, weakly
remonstrated. “That’s what she said it was,” Anne insisted. “She told
me to call her that.”
“But, surely,” the professor protested, weakly, looking to the end of
the table for help. Miss Willy was all placidity.
“She can, if she’s a mind to,” said she.
The good man’s frown of helpless perplexity had not lessened. “But
surely, there must be another name, a name more, ah----”
“I know,” Miss Willy had answered, tranquilly. “Folks do seem to find
it kind o’ queer. But that’s what I was christened. After my pa. Not
Willamena nor anything like that. Just plain Willy.”
“Then I think your--ah--last name----”
“It don’t make much difference. That’s Willis.”
Anne was still solemn, her eyes demurely downcast. Willy Willis. She’d
know how to deal with that! But her hopes and intentions met their
small Waterloo no later than that same night. The campaign was short
and decisive.
“I get to bed by myself,” she told Willy. But Willy replied, “Not this
night, you don’t. Not till I get those snarls out o’ your hair, anyway.”
“I like it this way. I don’t like to have anybody else comb my hair.”
“Liking ain’t getting. You stand still. I won’t hurt any more than I
got to. But those snarls come out.”
So Miss Willy remained, saw her married, and a year or two later
watched while the professor’s life ebbed, while Anne and Brice were
hurrying towards the town Anne had left with so little reluctance. Then
she had come back to Heathville. That was old Willy’s life, as Anne
knew it. Where and how had wisdom, philosophy, come to her?
That evening Anne asked, “Willy, have you ever lived anywhere else but
here and with father and me?”
Miss Willy was knitting. “No,” she said. “Never was much of a mover.”
Anne smiled. “How did you happen to come to us?”
“I wanted my freedom,” said Willy.
“Freedom?”
“Yes. I guess maybe most folks do, sooner or later. My aunt was a good
woman. This was her house. She took me in when ma died. But I wanted my
freedom. So when I saw your pa’s advertisement, I packed up and went.
Then I come back again. The house had been shut up for years. My land,
it was dirty! I don’t know when I’ve had such a good time as I did
cleaning it up. And the garden all weeds. When I was a girl, this place
used to seem kind of little, shut off in the hills the way it is and
all. There didn’t seem to be anything to do. Now--dear me, sirs! The
days ain’t half long enough.”
“I must help you more,” Anne said.
Miss Willy looked over her spectacles, went on with her knitting,
changing a needle. “I wasn’t hinting,” said she. “I like the work.
Funny, it’s just what my aunt used to do, when I was a girl. Maybe the
difference is now it’s my own. I don’t know. Only, I’m free now. I
guess folks get to know about that, when they’re old. I had a squirrel
once. It lived in a cage for years. Went round and round on a wheel
thing at one side of the cage. I thought, ‘Poor thing! It’s old. It
ain’t got long to live. I’ll give it its freedom before it dies.’ So I
set the cage on the porch, and opened the door. The squirrel went out
like a flash, and ran up a tree. But the next day it was back in its
cage again, making the wheel go round and round.”
There were days when the heat was less, when midsummer quietude brooded
upon the hills, and fields exhaled the odors of growing things and
woods exuded their winter-stored moisture to the summons of the wind
across the tree-tops; long mornings when Anne listlessly washed the
dishes and made the beds and dusted, while old Willy toiled outside;
and long afternoons when Anne walked, sometimes on the road through
the glen, sometimes to the doctor’s prescribed hill-top and back,
sometimes, as her strength grew, to farther pastures. To those walks
she was driven and lured: driven by her desire to get away from the
house, from Willy’s chatter, from her own thoughts; and lured as a
child goes looking for fairies by a feeling that never quite came to
consciousness that somewhere, sometime, she would find something, some
balm of the spirit, some response or enlightenment. Sometimes she
walked in desperation, taking with her the burden of her rebellion.
This place, to be buried here! She must, must get away, anywhere,
anywhere. But at least the long walks gave her dreamless sleep. In
August Nicky came for a Sunday. Alice and the children were at the
seashore. Nicky was in a quiet mood; they spent the long afternoon
under the apple tree.
“You look at me as though I were one of your ‘cases,’” Anne said,
aware of Veronica’s covert inspection.
“Do I?” Nicky calmly responded. “I wasn’t thinking about you at all, if
you want to know. I was thinking about myself--and Ambrose.”
“He’d be glad to know that.”
Nicky was lounging back, one knee over the other, arms under her head.
“You know, Anne--this mess of yours--it’s made me like Ambrose rather
better.”
“Because I’ve proved your contention that marriage is a failure? Made
you think you are right in your eternal argument with Ambrose?”
“Oh, no. I always knew I was. But Ambrose has been so mad about it. He
was always so darned meek, before. I rather prefer Ambrose mad.”
“The rôle of the strong man, the cave-man,” Anne laughed. “Even you
can’t escape the feminine complex, Nick, the longing to cling, to have
something to cling to.”
Nicky chuckled. “There’s only one George,” she said, cryptically. “And
time hasn’t finished with George yet, nor with Alice. One thing I’ve
noticed about clinging vines, feminine and otherwise. They rot the
stump they cling to. If it isn’t a stump, they smother it, keep it from
fruiting. And if by any chance the old tree’s too strong for them, the
vine is no good. There you are.”
Anne sat up. “Well, I have failed. I admit that. Or to put it the other
way, maybe the right way, Brice failed. But just the same, Nicky, it
does not have to be failure. There ought to be a sense of duty, if
nothing more, that would bind. Brice failed in that. I never did.”
“Didn’t you? But anyway, this rot about duty. Oh, I know it has its
uses. It helps along the propagation of the race. But when you think
what it does to poor old humanity--! No, old girl. If I should marry
I’d have to be jolly well certain that there’d be something more left
after ten years than mere duty. That salt would have no savor for me.
As it hasn’t for Brice, apparently.”
“I have stopped thinking about Brice. I prefer to stop talking about
him.”
“All right, after I’ve given you a message from Ambrose. They’ve done
all they can to trace Brice. Ambrose asked me to say that he cannot
collect on the life insurance for you. Not evidence enough. He wants
to know if you’d like to sell the house. He’d buy it himself on a
quit-claim deed. Nobody else would, without Brice’s signature.”
“How Ambrose must have loved offering me charity,” said Anne, bitterly.
“Tell him I thank him beyond words. But I have enough. Between forty
and fifty a month.”
Nicky sat up, too. “Good Lord, Anne! Is that all? What’ll you--do?” she
cried.
Anne bit her lip, made a helpless gesture with her hands.
Yet gradually, during the weeks she had been in Heathville, her sense
of values had been readjusting themselves. Here there was all but
nothing to spend money for.
“Why, you’re richer than anybody in this whole village,” Miss Willy had
said, “unless it’s that Kent man and the doctor. Even the minister only
gets two hundred a year, and he’s well off. Forty dollars a month--my
land!”
She was watching the old woman at work in her garden one day, squatting
between the rows, weeding. “Why do you work so for those things, stupid
things like beets and carrots?” she asked.
“They’re for winter. The cabbages, too, and potatoes. Of course.”
“But why do you grow them at all? Why not buy them?”
Miss Willy looked up. “I just told you. They are for winter. What
else’ll we eat?”
“But there’s a store!”
“A store? My goodness, child! Folks around here don’t buy things like
them at the store. It don’t keep ’em, anyway. But even if it did, who’d
buy what they grow in the garden?”
Yet even then Anne did not dream of the ways and means, the contrivings
and savings, that went into life in the village, Miss Willy’s and that
of her neighbors. Their meals were plain enough. Anne observed, without
comment, that whatever was bought or brought in from the garden was
eaten, sooner or later, to the last mouthful, by human or cat or fowl.
Nothing was wasted.
She had noticed the clothes worn by the women, and there was the affair
of Miss Willy’s best bonnet, donned only for Sundays and the monthly
church supper. “I do think it becomes me,” said Willy complacently.
“I’ve had it six years going on seven. It’s just as good as new.”
Then there was the boy Dorilliam. The name had amused her. She
repeated it, smiling, one evening, and Miss Willy said, “Yes, it’s
real high-sounding. He’s the seventh. Mis’ Wells, she wanted a girl,
all the rest being boys. Had her heart set on calling it Dora. When it
come, well, she was always romantic, Mis’ Wells was, and she never had
much of a chance to break out. I guess it did her some good to call him
Dorilliam.”
During the midsummer heat Anne protested against the old woman’s
eternal work in the garden; she would pay Dorilliam to hoe.
“But it’s twenty cents an hour!” Miss Willy cried. “My goodness, child!
Twenty cents for one hour, and sugar the price it is.”
In the early coolness of September her walks became longer. The
heaviness of her languor was less, yet one day when she reached the
crest of the hill and sat down in the shade of a weather-worn maple she
knew that she was tired, not with that terrible weight of the spirit
which had shadowed her for so long, borne her down, but as a workman
is tired at noon and sits down, gratefully, that his body may refresh
itself with food and rest and cessation from toil. From where she sat
no habitation of man was to be seen. The world seemed a place empty
of animate life, for even the cattle were below in the marsh, out of
sight. Haze lay on the hills, merging them into the sky. The patches of
sweetfern were already darkening to ripeness, and the rock at her side
was warm to the touch. Asters and goldenrod glowed in the sunlight, the
sumach was red. Beyond, down the valley, here and there in the woods,
a white birch shone, slender, fastidious, seeming to tread its way
daintily forward to the eye’s finding, like a conscious beauty at a
ball. Upon the meadows cloud-shadows lingered, and under the maple was
shade, quiet and shade.
Different. Why were things different, today? Many times she had
looked on the same scene, inwardly shrunk from its emptiness. But
this quietude in the drenching sunlight and the cool shade, this was
not emptiness. Peace. Yes, it was a sort of peace, but something was
going on in it, through it. There was life working. Not hurrying,
not crowding, silent, but working on and on. Trees gnarled by winter
storms, rocks laid bare and carved by frost and ice; a land worn rugged
and seamed from its age-long battle, but still with vitality and a germ
of things to be, things that would die to grow again, grow and become
lovely with a perpetual renewing. And even after fruition and harvest,
through winter, to spring, on and on, ever to be renewed. Life.
Suddenly, there under the sheltering boughs of the old tree, there
facing the sunlight, she put her hand to her heart. Another heart
within her was beating, another life had stirred.
For an hour she sat there, her arms clasping her knees, her head bowed
above them. A great stillness pervaded her. Life going on, herself part
of it, needed. That was it, needed. Fitting in with it. Necessary to
its scheme, a part of its plan; a utensil of service, and servant as
well. And for so long she had thought there was no plan at all; or, if
there were, that its parts were hopelessly jumbled. Strange. If one
were a part, or were needed, then there was something to do, something
to wait for, to hope for.
At last she stood up, and looked again over the drowsy loveliness
of the world. Slowly she went down the hill, and placidly. There
was nothing to hurry for, no need now to walk and walk so that she
could not think. When she came in sight of the spire and houses
of Heathville, even those looked different, less poor and sordid,
friendlier. Miss Willy was not in the kitchen. There came a faint echo
of hammering from the direction of the hen-house, and Anne took her way
towards it. The downy chicks that had scratched under the rhubarb had
long since grown into frisky birds large enough to be promoted to the
privilege of roosting with their mothers and aunts in the hen-house.
Miss Willy was there now, mysteriously wielding a hammer.
“What on earth are you doing?” Anne asked, from the doorway.
“Carpentering--you?”
Miss Willy turned, her mouth as full of nails as a seamstress’s of
pins. “I’m making a walk for that poor blind chicken,” said she. She
took the nails from between her lips, and pointed with pride to a
contrivance she had achieved, a board slanting from floor to roost,
with occasional cross-pieces on it. “There, look at that! Ain’t that
grand? Dunno why I didn’t think of it before. That poor chicken has
been trying its level best to jump on the roost every night, and
bumping its head on the board and all. Must a felt like a body knocking
at the Gate and Saint Peter away on vacation.”
“But what good is that queer-looking board?”
“Can’t you see, child? Use your eyes! That’s a walk. I been coming out
here every night to put that poor thing on its roost. Come winter, and
I’d get good and tired of it. Besides, think of its feelings. Now I’ll
just train it to peck around and find its own walk and climb up. Get
on the roost like its folks, without having to be helped all the time.
Nobody likes to be helped all the time.”
Anne’s face softened a little. “And I would have killed that blind
chicken long ago,” she said, thoughtfully.
“Well, then, I wouldn’t. Lots o’ folks with two eyes in their head see
less than that chicken and have no more sense. It’s got a right to
live.”
3
When autumn came, Dorilliam set up a stove in the front parlor, that
room which until Anne’s arrival had been kept for the most part closed,
a ceremonial elegance of which Miss Willy was very proud. The house
itself had none of the dignity of the doctor’s and some of the other
older ones. Apparently it represented the imaginative efflorescence of
some country builder of half a century before, limited in means and
method. There were but two sizable rooms on the first floor, parlor and
kitchen. Miss Willy’s bedroom opened off from the kitchen, little more
than a large cupboard, its space amply filled with bed and pine bureau,
while back of the kitchen, longer than the house itself, was the shed
where wood was stored and a miscellany of oddments that were mysteries
to Anne. She had pleaded to have the wall-papered fireboard taken away
from the parlor. An open fire would have made of the room a different
place. But Miss Willy looked troubled.
“But how’d we heat your bedroom?” she asked. “Mine’s real nice and
warm, opening off from the kitchen like it does. But if the stove pipe
don’t run up through yours, child, how’ll we heat it?”
For the first time Anne understood the purpose of the round hole in
her floor that had seemed so mysterious, the hole through which she
could see one red rose on the parlor carpet. She had supposed that
it was left for the purpose of being able to look down upon callers.
It amused her to be brought face to face with so elemental a problem
as heating a house. It had startled her to find that there was no
bathroom, surprised her that the water in the kitchen came from a pump,
not from a faucet. Yet those things did not concern her, and in the
matter of the fireplace she yielded. In time Dorilliam set up a stove.
When she first saw Willy come staggering in with an armful of wood,
she protested. It was not woman’s work. Dorilliam must do it. But
thereafter, mysteriously, the fire in the stove seemed to feed itself,
and in the evenings old Willy would drop wearily into her chair and
nod. Vaguely Anne wondered why she was so tired, now that the garden
work was over, the small crops harvested and stored away in the cellar.
Yet, after all, the endless monotony of the days were enough to weary
anyone. Morning, drudgery, night, morning again, and more drudgery.
That summed up life in Heathville, as far as she could discern.
With the autumn rains her restlessness returned and times of rebellion,
now not against the coming of the child, but at the aridity she was
living through. Alice wrote insistently that she should come to stay
with her and George, later to go to a hospital. Anne refused less
because of reluctance to accept Alice’s bounty than because she was
unwilling to encounter old friends, old acquaintances, to have to
meet their pity or amusement. Now she would not let her mind dwell
upon the difficulties of the future because that would be bad for the
child. This was a time when she could do nothing but wait, and this
was as good a place as any. Later, of course, she must find some means
of making a real livelihood. Live in Heathville, her child, hers? Of
course she would find some means of escaping that.
During the radiant days of October she frequently drove with the
doctor on his rounds in a small battered car that possessed a
personality of its own. She liked the doctor. He was “country-queer,”
as he described himself, but his was the only mind she had encountered
in Heathville that could think, or express its thoughts. As to that,
she believed that Dorilliam’s mother and the other women she had met
did not think at all, but lived by instinct, or went about their
tasks like trained animals, except that for them there was no reward
of caress or tidbit. Purposeless, stupid, they seemed to her. Dr.
Severance was neither. He called his car Sally.
“Named her after an old mare I had. Died in the harness, as I hope to.
One thing she does almost as well as old Sally did. She gets me there.”
Yet apparently Sally did not always hold that intention. More than
once the doctor had to dismount and do mysterious things to Sally,
almost at times, as Anne once told him, laughing, amounting to major
operations. Once Sally’s temperament overcame her not far from a small
brown cottage set back in the woods; after some minutes of futile
ministrations on the doctor’s part, Sally still remained where she
had stopped, soundless and motionless. Anne had stepped down and was
walking along the road through the yellow leaves. As she repassed the
cottage a man came out and after a look towards the car beyond smiled
at Anne. She had become used by now to the friendly custom in the
country of taking acquaintanceship for granted. They walked back to the
car together. The doctor, hands on hip, glared in mock ferociousness
at the other man.
“Come to try one of your faith cures on her, I suppose,” he growled.
The other man chuckled. “Might try it on you, Tom,” he remarked.
“You’re a little excited, aren’t you?”
“Well, I’ve worked on the blame thing an hour at least. She won’t go,”
spluttered the doctor.
“That’s like you medical men. You fiddle and tinker and dose, and think
you’ve done all of it. You’re always forgetting there’s something else.”
The doctor snorted. “I’ve heard you say that before! Look here, you
Rufus--you use faith on Sally and get her to start, and I’ll take up
some stock in that faith of yours.”
The man called Rufus had moved to the side of the car. His hair was
quite white, his shoulders were stooped, and life had worn marks on
his face; but he bore the indefinable stamp of the intellectual. Anne
decided at once that he was not a native of Heathville. He seemed to
smile easily, or else the smile never quite left his eyes. Now he
bent towards the driving-wheel of the car, peering as though from
near-sightedness, and stood up to grin at the doctor.
“I’ve long since discovered, as I’ve told you before--as you say, Tom,
quite as you say!--that there is some eternal spark that moves things.
There must be a spark, Tom, somewhere. In the case of your Sally why
not turn on your spark, Tom, and see----”
The doctor’s mouth opened. A blank look came over his face. But he,
too, came up to the side of the car. He reached over, touched a small
lever, and instantly Sally responded with rattles and tremblings.
“Hell!” said the doctor. Anne laughed aloud, long and gayly as she
had not laughed in months. “I beg your pardon,” the doctor muttered.
“Ladies present.”
But Anne’s laugh still rang out, and the man called Rufus was chuckling
with her. The doctor was red. He climbed into the car.
“Who was that?” asked Anne, when they had passed the brown house with
the woods at its back.
“Old fool,” said the doctor.
Anne bit her lip. “Well, but who else?”
The doctor permitted himself to smile. “Name’s Kent, though you’re
likely to hear him called ‘The fellow that bought the Carscadden
place.’ Nobody knew where he came from, nor who he was. Had to call
him something, so the title sort o’ got itself hung on to him. Folks
thought, I believe, he was some relation of the Carscaddens, who hadn’t
lived there for a generation.”
“Does he live there alone?”
“Lord, no; got a Jap servant, for one thing, and a wife, and there’s
always a houseful o’ lame ducks, human and otherwise. You’ll have to go
there and make his acquaintance some day. He’s a great friend of mine,
really. But Sally don’t like him.”
“Oh,” said Anne. “Because of his principles, I suppose?”
The doctor sniffed. “Something like that,” said he.
Another day they were driving along together, slowly, in the lace-like
shade of the woods. Anne had been saying little; these drives with the
doctor brought a measure of soothing to her spirit. By this time the
brilliance of the autumn foliage was past, lying in golden tribute on
the earth that had given it life. Now and again the little car would
stop before some house while the doctor went in, leaving Anne musing,
outside.
“Good people, those,” the old man said, as he drove away from one
little house.
“And so poor,” said Anne. “I saw four or five children there, in that
tiny house.”
The doctor considered a moment. “In one sense,” he said slowly,
thinking it out, “poverty is having the consciousness of poverty. Those
people have never had more. They have no consciousness of being poor.
They are not poor.”
“Oh, but the fact remains that they are. Look at the house, think of
the lack of advantages.”
“And what are those?”
“Advantages? But, surely, one knows!”
“No, no! What are they, really, comprehensively? Can you say, Mrs.
Denison? In the sense in which you mean, all a matter of comparison,
aren’t they? Well, comparison with what? With something a man has not
got and thinks he wants, or thinks he ought to have, or thinks somebody
else has gotten ahead of him by possessing? What’s the end of that sort
of thinking?”
“Ah, but not to think, not to want, not to aspire!”
“I wasn’t talking of aspirations.”
“But weren’t you?”
The doctor shook his head. “You’ll have to take that up with Rufus some
day.”
“That queer man?”
“Yes, he’s queer. Old fool, as I said. Not that he’s old as he looks.
But he is queer, though he’s got a lot of sound sense in him, too. He’s
thought things out. You’ll have to know Rufus.”
“If he has thought out some sort of philosophy like the one you’ve been
propounding it’s greatly to his credit, but it doesn’t affect the real
question of poverty, does it?”
“Doesn’t it? Well, you’ll see. But let me tell you this, Mrs. Denison:
the normal man is never a poor man.”
“Perhaps that accounts for so few being normal. So many are poor.”
“I don’t mean it that way. You know I don’t. I mean that the normal man
cannot be poor, because he has all there is that’s worth while, because
being normal about sums up to having a good digestion, doing a day’s
work, getting a little happiness and giving some. Get that into life,
and you’ve got about all there is, in the ultimate analysis.”
“I hear a doctor talking,” Anne commented, and added, “Your friend back
there suggested one more element. He mentioned a spark.”
The doctor looked down at her sideways, pursing his lips. “H’m!” said
he.
Her thoughts went back again and again to that conversation. Was that
all? Must she endure, and find nothing more than that? Health and work,
it summed up to, for happiness was only a fleeting illusion. She saw no
riches in the doctor’s circle. Poverty was not merely having no money,
and she shrank from poverty for herself and the child. Thinness of joy,
meagerness? No, no! That should not be.
The thought set her pacing restlessly up and down the small overheated
room on an evening when the rain beat against the windows. It was
Sunday, and Willy observed the day by going to church in the morning,
whatever the weather, and by having their dinner at two o’clock instead
of at noon. The displaced meal hour set the day awry. Except for that
there seemed to be no change from other days. Willy was forever busy at
something.
“My goodness, child, that lamp’s smoking,” she said, when she came into
the room. She took the low rocking-chair by the table, the cat Buster
jumping into her lap. “I been thinking,” she went on. “When I was a
child, they used to call Sunday the Lord’s day. That’s funny, now ain’t
it?”
Even old Willy’s chatter was better than the dreary persistence of the
rain. “Funny?” Anne asked, smiling a little. “Why?”
“As if every day isn’t the Lord’s day,” said Willy, her faded eyes
looking at Anne, looking away again. “I just guess he sees to that.
He’s got us all in his hand every day, Sundays and all; and every day,
come day go day, he keeps right on working and looking out for us.”
Anne smiled a little. She had heard a good deal of Willy’s primitive
theology during the past months.
“Not but what I know Sunday’s by rights set apart for us humans,” Willy
went on. “A good thing it is, too. I’ve heard folks talk hard things
about men, and about women, too, that does one way on weekdays and
another on Sundays. But I say--land!--it’s better to behave decent one
day of the week than never at all, poor critters. And if that’s being a
hypocrite, well, it’s better to be a hypocrite one day than seven.”
Anne laughed aloud. Miss Willy stroked Buster, who purred like a
tea-kettle.
“Another funny thing is how people’s mistakes get mixed up with their
sins, in folks’s minds. I don’t doubt the Lord sees which is which. I
don’t doubt he’s capable of handling ’em both. But I often think folks
try too hard to do the untangling themselves. I don’t know. But I’m
going on seventy-three. I’ve come to the conclusion we’d be better off
if we’d just leave it all to the Lord.”
“That’s a comfortable doctrine, my dear,” Anne remarked. “But if you’d
let it work out, wouldn’t it be a little like giving the kitten the
work-basket to play with?”
Miss Willy looked at her over the top of her spectacles. “That’s just
what the good Lord has done,” said she, “given us the work-basket
to play with. And a real good snarl we make out of it, most of us.
But having given us a work-basket apiece, as you might say, he don’t
expect the kittens to take on themselves to say who’s to blame for the
tangles. That’s where we don’t follow the Lord’s way.”
“There’s no question of that,” Anne agreed.
“No. And that’s what you’re doing, Anne Warren. You and Brice had one
work-basket between you. Somehow it’s got into an awful mess. So you’re
scratching at Brice, thinking it’s his fault.”
“I don’t want to talk about Brice.”
“I dare say. But I’m going to talk about him. Whenever I’ve a mind to.
Right now what I got to say is, that baby that’s coming has got a right
to his father, and his father has got a right to him.”
“Brice has gone. They have tried to find him. He’s gone.”
“Yes. Maybe. But you’re forgetting that he’s the baby’s father. I
know. I don’t say they haven’t done all they could do to get hold of
Brice. But they ought to do more than they can. There ain’t anything
impossible, after you get it done. The baby belongs to him.”
Anne jumped to her feet. “No! No, he’s mine! All mine!”
“He’s the Lord’s, Anne Warren. And the Lord’s fixed it so’s he had to
have father and mother both. You’re setting yourself up in the Lord’s
place when you pass judgment on Brice.”
“He has set judgment upon himself. He has gone. If he never sees his
son, that will be judgment. He deserves it. I am not sorry. No, I’m not
sorry.”
4
After a time of weakness when she scarcely realized the small creature
at her side, after other days of watching him with wonder, and days of
sitting in the sunny window behind the geraniums with the baby asleep
in a basket nearby, Anne said to Miss Willy:
“His name is Warren.”
Willy looked at her. Anne saw protest in the look, but she smiled,
serenely, securely. “His name is Warren,” she repeated.
“H’m,” said old Willy. “Well. After your poor dear father. Well, you’re
his mother. I suppose you got a right to call him what you’re a mind
to.”
“I am his mother. Oh, I am,” Anne agreed, lifting the baby, snuggling
him up to her face. She knew well enough what Willy implied. For this
was Brice’s child, like Brice in every small feature, like him even
in the soft, reddish hair on his head. But her whole being protested
against what Willy wanted. Another Brice--all the more reason why he
should not bear Brice’s name. No one should have a share in him, Brice
least of all. She denied Brice’s share in him, even to herself. He
was hers, all hers, miraculously flesh of her flesh, hers to love, to
mold. He should be more and more hers. Often during that marvelous
spring and summer the same jealous thought returned to her. The child
flourished and grew, a sunny baby. His first smile was for Willy.
“Look at that, now,” the old woman cried. “Who’d a thought it? He knows
me. He knows his old Willy.”
Anne snatched the baby up to her breast. She had watched for that first
smile, longed for it, wanted it for herself. But a moment afterwards
she was ashamed. Willy was the slave of them both, toiling and loving
with a devotion as absolute as that of the nun whose life is centered
in the cross on the altar and the red light before it, who spends
her nights on her knees and would starve herself, castigate herself,
readily give up her body and soul and her life bit by bit that her Lord
might perceive and accept her adoration. Willy would come in a dozen
times during the day to look at the child. Her face became rapt when
his tiny fingers curled about one of hers.
“To think this should happen to me,” she said more than once. “To think
of your baby being right here in my house, where I can see him and all.”
Then she would trot off to her work again, trotting more slowly and
falteringly as the months passed. Anne, absorbed in the child, took it
as a matter of course that things were done for them both. She did not
observe that Willy’s hours of work were longer than they had ever been.
One day in the spring she surprised the old woman spading the garden,
and remonstrated.
“I can do it,” said Willy. “I like to do it.”
“Nonsense,” said Anne. “Dorilliam can do it in half the time. I’ll go
up the hill after supper and tell him to come tomorrow.”
“Now look here, Anne Warren, I won’t have you wasting your money that
way. You got to save.”
Anne laughed a little. “Save out of what I have? What’s the use? It
would never amount to anything.”
“You got plenty to save something out of, if you don’t go frittering it
away. You got to save for Warren’s education.”
“Land,” said Dorilliam’s mother, when she dropped in one morning while
the baby was having his bath by the kitchen stove, “mine never had all
those fixin’s. I just washed ’em off when they were dirty, and kept ’em
well fed, and let ’em cry and let ’em sleep. A baby ain’t only a baby,
when all’s said and done.”
Anne said nothing. That, doubtless, was true, as far as it went. But to
compare the young Warren with these country children? As well compare
grain-sacks and silk. There were things about her child that she had
never observed in others. She never tired of pondering on all his small
perfections. Her state was not peace, but absorption. The rest of the
world was shut out, thrust aside, while she tended her baby and watched
the developing wondrousness of him. For the first time in her life she
was absorbed in something besides herself, yet this was inextricably
herself, her own as nothing else had ever been. As his individuality
developed she hugged that thought to her more and more. Even while
she adored them and gloried in them, she was jealous of the will and
impulses that came from somewhere within his small self. For when young
Warren wanted to sleep or to stay awake, he did so. When he was hungry,
he made his want known vociferously. He loved the warm water about his
plump little body, and yelled when he was lifted out of it. He hated to
have his nose and his ears touched, and decisively said so. Here was
something apart from his mother, not hers at all, needs and preferences
not springing from her, the will of another creature to which she must
yield, which she resented and feared and adored.
“Got a will of his own,” said Willy one day when the two of them had
tried in vain for an hour or more to get him to sleep. When their
patience was threadbare, both vanquished by the utter helplessness of
the adult before a baby’s unreasoned persistence, the boy had abruptly
stopped crying, looked into the old woman’s face, smiled divinely, and
dropped into slumber. She laid him down on the sofa. “Just wanted to
make us understand once for all that he wouldn’t go to sleep till he
got good and ready,” said she.
Anne bent over the child. “He’s his mother’s own boy,” she said, with
the fatuous sentimentality of the parent who has just been worsted in
a battle with her offspring and finds balm in her tenderness, pride in
the strength of the victor.
Miss Willy sniffed. “He is, and he isn’t,” said she. She had no sooner
dropped into the rocking-chair than Buster jumped into her lap. “Some
of him’s yours and some is his father’s. You needn’t look at me that
way, Anne Warren. And some of him belongs to himself, and a good part’s
the Lord’s. What the Lord means him to be you can’t tell much about.
It’s got to come out. I’ve always noticed that the Lord does a lot of
mixing of his stuffs, before he finishes a job. Same as I do with my
bread. And when he’s got a thing turned out at last, it’s cram full of
most everything, good and bad, sense and foolishness. It works pretty
well, but it needs a whole lot of oiling to keep it a-going. The baby’s
like that. There’s a lot in that baby that’s going to come out, do what
you will. You got to help him get started, but I guess when you think
he’s all finished it’ll be just about the time he’s beginning to run
with his own machinery, and if you poke your hand into it you’ll likely
get pinched. He belongs to himself, Anne, and don’t you forget that.
Not that you’re likely to get much of a chance to.”
Anne smiled. Willy was not a mother, Willy could not know.
There is no chart which tells how a mother’s time goes. Anne did not
know how the months went. In the autumn Alice and George stopped for an
hour. They had been motoring, and Alice was anxious to get back to the
children.
“Darling, are you comfortable here? Why won’t you come back with us?”
Alice asked.
Anne laughed. “No, I’m not comfortable, as you know comfort, Alice. But
this is the place for me until Wanny is a little older. Of course I
am not going to live here forever. When he is old enough to play with
other children I shall have to take him away from here. There will be
the question of school, too. I shall have to learn how to make money.”
They were alone under the apple tree. George had driven to the store
for gasoline. For a moment Alice looked off, vaguely, at a distant
hill-top where already a maple gleamed yellow; then without turning to
Anne she asked,
“Did you hear that Ranney is married?”
“I supposed he would be. In the spring, wasn’t it?”
Alice shook her head. “No, just lately. Not to that girl he was engaged
to. He treated that nice girl so badly. Kept putting things off. He has
married a woman who was divorced. He’s so different from George. One
wouldn’t think they could be brothers.”
Winter came and went by, and in earliest spring, before the glaze ice
was gone, Miss Willy fell. Anne came down one morning to find the
kitchen cold. She called, opened the door of the old woman’s bedroom.
Then throwing a shawl about her she went out of doors. At the door of
the hen-house she found her, huddled, eyes dim with pain.
“No, don’t you lift me,” said Willy, her lips blue, her face gray in
the sunlight. “Something’s broke.”