running back with his father and a brother or two. They carried old
Willy into the bedroom off the kitchen, and for an hour while young
Warren shrieked unregarded Anne stood by and helped. When the worst of
it was over Miss Willy’s lips quivered to a smile. Anne followed the
doctor out of doors. She was shaken and trembling. It was the first
time she had ever seen torture administered that healing might come.
“No, she’s not likely to die,” the doctor told her. “Of course she has
worked pretty hard, but it’s amazing how much vitality there is in
her sort. I’ve known bones to knit even at her age. But with a broken
hip--well, she may get around some, after a time.”
After a time. Anne looked at him, pale. He patted her shoulder. “Don’t
worry too much, Mrs. Denison,” he told her. “Whatever happens, you can
comfort yourself with one thing. It means a lot to Miss Willy to know
you are here. I shall never forget the light in her face the day she
told me her widowed niece had come to take care of her in her old age.
They so dread being a burden, these people. And they dread even more
having to be taken care of by strangers, maybe to go on the town.”
To take care of her. That brave lie told to shield Anne’s pride. She
went back to the kitchen. To take care of her.
Bit by bit, Anne learned what that meant, to take care of someone. Day
by day she learned what it had meant that old Willy had taken care of
herself and the boy.
Things, unimagined things, things vaguely known about but never
realized, had to be done, and not by someone else whom she could
dismiss from her thoughts with pay; elemental things, that she had
always taken for granted. The fire in the kitchen stove would not keep
burning unless it were fed with some regularity. After a week that
stove seemed to Anne like some ravenous maw that was always yawning,
always devouring, never to be satisfied. There were twenty-two steps
from the wood-pile at the end of the shed, with a step up and a step
down each way. Twenty-two steps, to bring in coal or wood, that Miss
Willy, at seventy-four, had trod how many times a day? There was food
to be cooked, food that mysteriously scorched, or came from the stove
as mysteriously hard. Water, the pump over the kitchen sink the only
means of getting it. How had old Willy ever, oh, ever carried all those
pails and pitchers of water upstairs and down again, for Anne’s needs
and Warren’s? And she had always thought of water and food and fire
quite simply as things that were, that existed, like air and sunlight,
made for man’s use, and there waiting, simply, infallibly there.
Then, there was time. Hitherto time had been divided into a few
broad parts, bed-time and rising-time, breakfast- and luncheon- and
dinner-time; or, at Miss Willy’s, dinner- and supper-time. Now there
were many bewildering subdivisions, and one had to hasten to meet them
before their requirements or demands or whatever they were used for
slipped over into another of the strange subdivisions, disastrously.
Time to get up--oh, yes, but time also to make the fire, time to get it
to going, time to get the stove hot and the breakfast cooked, time for
young Warren’s increasing needs, while in her consciousness was always
the fact that Miss Willy lay, patient, waiting, perhaps suffering.
There were hens and the chicks to be fed, then a rushing for dinner.
And in between, where there was not room to crowd a single second’s
endeavor, a whole multitude of tasks that must somehow be got through.
Cleaning. And washing. What those things did to her back, so much
younger than Willy’s.
“It’s awful, you having to do everything,” Miss Willy said to her one
day when she brought the boy into the room all fresh and rosy from
his bath. She had got up at five that morning, but things were still
waiting. Yet she looked down at Willy and laughed.
“It is. It is, isn’t it? Because I’m such a duffer at it, Willykin. You
don’t know!”
Miss Willy did not laugh with her. Her lips trembled. “But if you
wasn’t here, Anne, I’d--maybe I’d have to--go on--the town.”
Anne put the boy on the floor--he was beginning to creep about--and sat
on the side of the bed.
“Willy,” she said, “something is happening to me. I don’t know what it
is. But I think I was never so happy in my life nor so disgusted with
myself. I do hate to see you lying there, but I think perhaps your
breaking your funny old bones was just your last fine sacrifice for me.
I think----”
But that was too much for old Willy. Her eyes struck dim fire. “Now
look here, Annie Warren,” said she, with the first return of her old
spirit that she had shown since her fall, “if you think the Lord’s put
me here so’s you can get hold of a mite of sense, you’re mistaken.
That’s putting too much on the Lord. I slipped on the ice because I
wasn’t looking out. That’s what did it. My own fault. But I do say it’s
high time you knew how to do things. Not that I should want you to tire
yourself out. And--my goodness! Quick! Look at that child! He’ll be on
the stove in a minute!”
Anne flew.
There were days, a while later, when she got up at four, when to stay
in bed would have been sheer unwarrantable luxury, though her body
still ached for rest and she told herself that she could not go through
with the work ahead of her. Yet she arose, and the day’s work caught
her up, whirled her on with it, herself not the force that accomplished
but the means, the mere tool of that force.
When spring reluctantly gave way to summer people in Heathville hastily
made their gardens. It was not safe to plant earlier lest the tender
green shoots be nipped by late frost, nor later lest the first hot
spell of June wither them.
“Memorial Day, that’s the right time to plant,” said old Deacon Bassett
who lived up the road. “You ain’t likely to get caught either goin’ or
comin’.”
Dorilliam had done the plowing, the spading, the leveling. Anne had
supposed that Dorilliam would do all the rest. She had never felt
interested in gardening, and now her time was too full to contemplate
added work out of doors. But she sat at the kitchen table one night
with pencil and paper after paying Dorilliam, her pocket-book open,
what remained of its contents spread out before her. There had to be
extra milk now, quarts of it, for young Warren. Oranges, too, that now
had become not the inevitable breakfast fruit, but a daily expense
of five cents, ten cents, a staggering total each month. The boy was
beginning to walk; the delicate shoes she sent to town for wore out in
a few weeks. Old Willy had always done their washing. That Anne was
incapable of, and it had to be paid for. Moreover, she had discovered
the extreme meagerness of the old woman’s supply of bedding and towels,
and had bought more. Pity she had not thought of bringing some from
that house whose contents she had never wanted to see again. The people
who had rented it at first had departed. The next tenants had wanted
it unfurnished, and she had insisted that everything should be sent
to the auction rooms, everything, everything. She wanted nothing, no
reminders. They brought a small fraction of what they had cost. At old
Willy’s command, for it was more than suggestion, the little sum had
been deposited in a savings bank, to be used for the boy’s education.
That could not be touched. With herself as housekeeper, more was
spent than under old Willy’s close management for food and fuel. Even
kerosene had to be bought oftener. And now loomed the question of the
garden. Anne counted her money, tried to estimate the hours during the
summer that she would need Dorilliam, added up what that would cost,
deducted. It could not be done. She spoke of it to Willy, the next day.
“I’ve decided that we won’t have a garden this year, dear,” said she.
“I’m no gardener. You know that. We’ll just do without.”
For a moment the old woman lay without looking at Anne, without
speaking. Her face against the pillow was wrinkled and pallid. Her age
might have been beyond computing, like the Sphinx’s, and as silently
as the Sphinx she might have been pondering the proposition implied in
Anne’s words. Then she spoke.
“What’ll we eat?” she asked.
“Oh, anything, everything,” Anne said lightly, even while an inner
sense warned her that the question was not a light one. “There’s always
something to eat, isn’t there?”
“Well, what?” Willy persisted.
There is no question as tormenting as the one which puts its solution
on the questioner. Old Willy lay looking impassively at a crack in the
wall, but Anne looked at Willy. “There is always something to eat,
isn’t there?” she had asked. But was there? Food. Food, the elemental,
primal, ultimate necessity. Was it indeed always there? She thought of
her pocket-book, her sheets of figuring. The thing faced her, simply,
starkly, naked, stripped of everything, as hideous and uncompromising
as a skeleton: was food always there? What would they eat? Where would
it come from?
It was breath-taking, bewildering. She busied herself again and again
with her pencil and paper, then consulted Dorilliam. Something, some
remote shame or pride, forbade her from talking to Willy. That old
woman lying there, who had met this problem so many years, now so
helpless, probably thinking and thinking, perhaps worrying. No. If she
had the thing to go through with, she would do it alone, for Dorilliam
did not count as a person except in the sense of being a workman of
sorts and of having to be paid.
“What you want to buy seeds for?” he asked, when she asked him as
casually as she could what she would need to buy.
“To plant in the garden,” said she, sternly. She was always suspecting
that Dorilliam held her in secret amusement and scorn, as those
countrymen do who know a few things beyond the scope of someone they
confront, and believe their knowledge surpasses all of the others. But
the boy was honestly puzzled.
“Yeah. But what you want to buy ’em for? Why don’t you plant what you
got?”
“What I have?”
“Sure. She’s got ’em saved up, ain’t she? Everybody saves ’em up for
next year.”
So after all she spoke to Willy again about the garden, went to the
place where Willy had stored the saved seeds, in jars and small packets
tied about with bits of string. Economy had never held anything of
beauty for Anne, but when she brought out those seeds, fruit of an
old woman’s toil, so carefully cured and saved that the soil might be
fruitful again the next year, something gripped at her throat. Here was
a poignant significance that rose up at her. Here, too, was the germ
of a new perception. The garden was made and tended that they might
have something to eat. As simple as that. But there was more in it than
that stark necessity. It was the child of other gardens. In the little
packets of saved seeds there was not only harvest, but a link with
gardens of other summers, with summers to come, as old Willy’s toil was
linked with the labor of the ages, as her own would be. On and on, the
treadmill, unending, however one ached. And after she had talked with
Willy as to methods and means, she was confronted with her stupendous
ignorance of what seemed so simple, what was, indeed, so elemental.
“Why, you just scrape out a row, and put ’em into it,” said Willy.
“Then you cover ’em up.”
“With what?” she asked, for she had seen newspapers carefully spread
over some of the old woman’s tender “cuttings” and wondered if that
were a rite to be observed with everything else.
“Good land, child, ain’t you got any sense at all? You cover ’em up
with dirt, and pat ’em all down, of course.”
Anne laughed a little. “Do they have to be patted? Shall I pull up the
blankets and hear them say their prayers, too?”
Willy sniffed. “You don’t have to blaspheme just because you’re so
ignorant,” said she, “though lots of folks do. Yes, they do have to
be patted, or else trod on. The dirt’s got to touch ’em, or else they
won’t sprout. And the dirt’s got to be fine, not all lumps. Sakes
alive, I wish I could get out o’ this bed.”
“That’s sheer pride and jealousy, Willy. You think I can’t make this
garden, and you want to do it yourself,” Anne laughed. But when she
confronted the actual task she did not laugh. Before, she felt herself
potentially able to cope with it. It must be quite simple, like driving
a Ford, because people of such inferior intelligence mastered it. Of
course it was not fit work for her, and she had not a minute to spare
for it. But it must be easy enough, since even an old woman like Willy
had accomplished it. Her only difficulty would be in finding time.
So one morning she got up at four, just as dawn was flushing on the
western hills, and betook herself to the place Dorilliam had raked at
such a cost. Scrape out a row, Willy had said, and make the dirt fine.
Easy, until her shoulders ached with the weight of the hoe.
Her row turned out to be a wandering path of varying depth. She dropped
in the seeds. Willy had said there were enough in the bundle for a
whole row, but they mysteriously gave out before the row was half
filled. She considered the problem, carefully picked out seeds enough
for the rest of the row. Then came the affair of making the dirt fine,
to cover them with. She could not. It was heavy with dew, refused to
crumble, persisted in becoming a tough, clayey substance under her
hands. She had been out two hours, Warren’s cries could be heard, she
was aching and angry. She had not achieved one single row in this
miserable garden, and the piece of smoothed land stretched before her
into a leering expanse as broad as an ocean. It was the first time she
had ever discovered that to work with nature one must use nature’s
time, wait on her moods. When she went to the garden again, later in
the day, she was amazed to find that the earth crumbled easily enough.
Thereafter she rose at the same early hour, but worked at other things
until the garden was ready.
A few weeks later, again directed by one of Deacon Bassett’s
pronouncements, she was working there with a hoe, the baby happy and
noisy, playing in the dirt, his attention absorbed by filling a tin
can with a hole in the bottom, watching the soil sift out, and filling
the can again. Someone spoke to him over the fence. Anne looked up
and nodded, but Warren deserted his game and promptly performed the
acrobatic feat of making himself into a small pyramid, bracing his
feet until they were steady by resting his hands on the ground, his
inevitable method of arising. Then he toddled and tumbled towards
Dorilliam.
“What’s them things for?” Dorilliam presently asked. He had come near,
holding Warren’s hand.
Anne sat back, wearily, but with a sense of triumph, too. “Them things”
were an achievement, and she took pride in making them well, first by
scraping the earth up with a hoe, then rounding it off with her hands.
“They’re the hills for the corn, of course,” said she. “This is the
week for corn. What should they be?” She rather enjoyed snubbing
Dorilliam.
“I dunno,” said the boy. “Never saw nothing like ’em before.”
“And you’ve lived in the country all your life. I’m surprised at you.
Mr. Bassett says it’s much better to plant corn in hills than in rows.
It doesn’t blow over as easily.”
Dorilliam’s slow grin was a thing to see. “Here, you gimme that hoe,”
said he, and forsook Warren’s hand so abruptly that the baby sat down
with a soft thud. Dorilliam scraped out a shallow hole.
“Now that,” said he, “is a hill. You put your corn in there on top.
Then you cover it over. Then you stomp on it. That’s the way to plant
corn. Them things you made, they ain’t hills. They’re Mount Ararats.”
“My goodness,” Anne murmured, meekly. “A hill upside down.”
But the incident gave her a new feeling of humility, of helplessness,
of respect: humility, that she, Anne Denison, should cope so badly
with such primitive affairs; helplessness, because there seemed so
many difficulties, however absurd and small; respect for these country
people, even for Dorilliam, that they could perform with ease what she
found so intricate.
Long before the last row was planted and walked on there were green
things beginning to show in the first ones. By that time she had formed
quite a friendship with the Deacon, a stern, gray old man. Often after
supper he would come down the road to inspect her labors. Sometimes,
when a new problem came up, she would tuck Warren under her arm and run
to Bassett’s house for advice.
“Yes,” she complacently told him one evening, “they’re coming along.”
That was a phrase he used; she had unconsciously adopted it. “And I do
think Miss Willy’s seeds are wonderful. Ever so many more come up than
I’ve planted, it seems to me.”
Bassett rubbed his chin. He shaved on Sundays only. “Yeus. Well,
mebbe,” said he. “But I shouldn’t be s’prised if a good many of those
green shoots are weeds. I s’ppose you ain’t got around to weedin’ yet.”
That, when she had begun to tell herself that her labors were all but
over. She thought of her aching arms, of tasks waiting indoors, thought
yearningly of Dorilliam. But old Willy had managed without the boy. So
would she. Many an evening after she had washed the day’s grime from
Warren and got him to sleep, and laundered some of his small garments,
and made the kitchen neat after supper, she worked on her knees between
the rows, weeding until it was too dark to see. Yet do what she might,
there were disasters.
“Seems like our beet-greens is terrible slow, this year,” said Miss
Willy. “You got ’em in in time, too. It’s funny, what a difference
there is in seasons.”
No need to tell her that all the young beets had been carefully,
laboriously, back-breakingly weeded up. And such futile things, anyway,
beet-greens. To get the best of one, merely by being. It shamed her,
that difficulty of coping with little things that she had scarcely
realized existed except as insignificant parts of a whole that ordered
itself. She had always been willing to battle with what she conceived
to be big things, those that meant conflict with people. There was
exhilaration in that. It got one somewhere. But this daily, hurrying
conflict with nature and the bare routine of living was bewildering.
It entangled her in all sorts of complicated trivialities, as though
it could make any difference, for example, whether one planted corn in
rows or in holes or on small Mount Ararats. To find that it did make a
difference, that one had to discover and yield to the preferences of
corn and of beans, was bewildering.
Bewildering; but slowly out of bewilderment there came a feeling of
conducting a campaign. She was not going to let herself be conquered
by a vegetable garden. It grew in importance, became a battle-ground.
Eventually, victorious, she had such a feeling of triumph and
achievement as not even the arrival of Warren had given her,--Wanny,
that small-featured replica of Brice. The garden with all its failures
and oddities, not in the least like Miss Willy’s neat, straight-rowed
one, was a thing of her own creating, wrought by her own labor, by the
veritable sweat of her brow and the grime of her hands and the ache of
her body, something that contributed to the very foundation of life,
something, quite simply, to eat. It was as though she had caused earth
or air or water to come into existence. She had caused food to be. She
did not regard her performance nor its results as beautiful, nor as
clever, nor as amusing, nor as something bound up with the future, like
Wanny. She had brought something that was elemental out of nothingness.
She had become creative of that which was the very basis of existence.
5
So the summer passed in toil. No time for thoughts, nor for thought.
No time, really, for anything, with so much to be done, so little that
could be left undone. Hens, Anne discovered, could be as clamorous as
babies. When a prideful, clucking absurdity emerged from a hidden nest
with a brood of chicks she could have crushed the lot of them. They
were hated, but they were important, for they were food, and after a
day or two their very helplessness and dependency captured her. She was
indignant and sorrowful when one fell prey to Buster’s rapaciousness.
Miss Willy frequently asked after her flowers. There were weeds among
them that Anne told herself could not go unregarded, whatever happened.
The peonies bloomed so generously. How could she let their brave beauty
smother in weeds? After a summer rain, the hollyhocks lay on the
ground. There was no time for it, but she must find stakes, tie them up.
By midsummer Wanny was toddling everywhere. He possessed an ingenuity
for getting into mischief beyond anything his mother had ever
encountered. If he were silent or out of sight for too long she had
to drop everything, hunt for him. And his clothes, those small costly
shoes that wore out so soon, the rompers that had to be fresh every
morning. There were days when his bath was no more than a hasty
sponging away of grime before he was put to sleep, nights when she was
so weary that she dropped on her bed without undressing, to wake in the
dawn with a crowding sense of things waiting to be done, in a panic of
fear lest she had over-slept. Everything was in the present. The future
was something she had no time to think about. Work. Two to care for,
three to provide for, hurriedly, rather chaotically.
Winter came, when she had thought there would be more time. But again
there were stoves, lamps, sewing. The child had outgrown the first
baby coat Alice had sent. Anne contrived to make him another out of an
old skirt of her own. It had no air of elegance. She laughed when she
dressed him in it.
“Pitty, pitty,” said Warren, smoothing his bulging front.
“Not so very pretty, old man,” Anne laughed. “But it will keep you
warm.”
“Pretty is as pretty does,” said old Willy, and Anne, “Goodness, I hope
not. If his looks had to be measured by his behavior----!”
Two years before she could not have tolerated that garment. Now she
could laugh at it, was even rather proud of it. But she did not for
more than a moment think of the change in herself. There was something
else waiting to be done. Orderliness she had not begun to learn. There
were neighbor women who came to see Miss Willy, bringing gifts of pies
and doughnuts and “tastes” of jelly and jam and pickles. Seeing Miss
Willy’s enjoyment of the delicacies, Anne remembered that the old woman
had always managed to put up some of her own. Now the pantry shelves
held none. She had never thought of making any. Where had Willy found
time to do it? How did those other women, busy mothers of families,
find time? Even the mere thought of their dish-washing staggered Anne’s
imagination, now that she knew how mysteriously dishes piled up for
only three. And there was their mending, their cooking, their washing.
Yet those over-worked women found time to come to Miss Willy’s and
“visit” sometimes for an hour or more. Anne found herself listening
to their talk. It was no longer of trivialities beyond or beneath her
scope and her interest; it was of things become vital. They had been
vague, dull, toiling creatures without imagination, without grace,
uninteresting. Now they emerged into separate entities, personalities
with feelings and impulses which she recognized, more skilled and
experienced than herself in things of first importance. There was so
much that they knew and that she did not, and things they achieved
daily, as a matter of course, simply and neatly, that staggered her
efforts and ingenuity to perform and left her worn with fatigue after
trying.
“The working classes”--she remembered that she used to think of the
working classes, in the old days, with something akin to disgust.
She had never been able to understand Nicky’s interest in them, nor
how she had been able to endure daily contact with them. Either they
toiled with an impenetrable, ineffectual, stolid indifference, or
they disagreeably or violently protested against their lot, deviously
trying to better it at the cost of the comfort of people who were more
fortunate than themselves. They were unreasonably envious, and their
morals were as sordid as their way of living. She had always felt
injured and angry when one of her maids had asked for extra time off.
She remembered her amused scorn when they spent their earnings for some
foolish finery to be worn on one or two afternoons of the week.
These women who dropped in to see Willy were toilers in a labor
unending. She knew about that, now. As far as she could perceive,
theirs was a labor without result or reward, just a grind, day after
day, year after year. Now she knew that they were not sunk in a dull
state of mental and spiritual stagnation. They were not clamorously
trying to better their lot at the expense of others. Apparently they
shattered no more of the Ten Commandments than anyone else did.
Sometimes she wondered what secret revolts of the soul might be
theirs, or whether they had souls at all in the sense of possessing
a well-spring of feeling and thought and aspiration. They concerned
themselves with things she had never supposed required thought or were
bound up with feeling or led to aspiration, but indubitably aspiration
and feeling and thought played a part in their lives.
At first they had been shy with her. One or two had told her
hesitatingly how fine it was for Miss Willy to have her there. They
thought of her as the niece from the city who went about always dressed
up and sat around while Miss Willy waited on her. Now they found her
aproned, busy, and there was always the child to talk about. Anne found
herself listening with absorbed interest to tales of other children’s
illnesses. She was not bored when Mrs. Ware told how her Julia had
broken her collar-bone, nor when Mrs. Beaman told how her twins in one
winter had measles and chicken pox and whooping cough, alternately,
“so’s we were no sooner gettin’ out o’ one thing with Elizabeth than we
come down with the same thing with Florence; and by the time Florence
was better, Elizabeth had started on something else.” Those things
were not trivial. They were not disgusting. They were not unpleasant
diseases that troublesome children persisted in having, so that one
wondered how mothers endured them. They were dangers that lurked for
Wanny. Those women were mothers. So was she.
She took Wanny to the Christmas tree at the church. His round-eyed
wonder was a revelation, something that pierced to her heart. Mrs.
Beaman gave him an orange. When he held it in both hands, stared at it,
it was not an orange, but a symbol, a mystery. He had seen it taken
from a box under the tree. Therefore it was endued with beauties and
wonders beyond all other oranges. Anne, looking up, met Mrs. Beaman’s
glance, her tolerant, understanding smile.
A few days thereafter Mrs. Wells ran down the road bearing a plate
wrapped up in a napkin. Hot rolls. “I thought maybe they’d go good for
supper,” said she.
“Land! I should think so,” old Willy said. “We ain’t had any home-made
bread since I don’t know when.”
The visitor looked at Anne. “Why, you don’t buy all your bread, do you?”
“I can’t make it,” Anne said.
“But it costs so much at the store.”
The next day Anne bundled up Wanny and walked up the road to the
Bassetts’s. The children of that house had long ago gone away, the old
couple were alone, and Mrs. Bassett was known as the best housekeeper
in Heathville, eternally busy.
“Will you teach me how to make bread?” Anne asked, and could see the
flattered look in the old woman’s eyes.
Her first loaves were an achievement that gave her a satisfaction
scarcely less than her conquest of the garden.
“What’s that I smell?” old Willy called out, from the bedroom. “You
ain’t ever trying to make bread, child! You’ll just waste the flour.”
“Not I,” Anne declared, coming in with a freshly baked loaf turned out
on a towel. “Look at that! Willy, when I think of the money we’ve spent
at that store for bread----!”
Old Willy’s lips quivered. “I got to get out o’ this bed,” said she.
“You can’t do all the work yourself, and takin’ on more all the time.”
Anne put the loaf down, came and stood near the bed. “Willy,” she said,
“it’s the strangest thing. No matter how much more I find to do, I
always seem to find time to do it in. And stranger still, I rather like
doing it. It makes me feel so important.”
Gradually the women who had been coming to see Miss Willy lingered to
chat with Anne. Recipes were given, that had to be explained. Flower
seeds were brought in small bits of brown paper, and about their
flowers odd sentiments lingered, odd to Anne because at first they
seemed so trivial.
“That’s ‘Impatience,’” said one, presenting a slim sprig of green
planted in a can from which the label had been removed. “‘Impatience,’
though some folks call it ‘Patience’. Either way it’s the truth, for
it’s always in a hurry to bloom, and it blooms all the time.”
There were slips of geranium, too, and a small, prickly cactus.
Anne thought of Alice’s masses of flowers, of those she herself had
always managed to buy for the dining-room, and of lilacs and orchids,
and tulips; Tulips that fell. But these little struggling things in
pots and cans had personality, identity. They were a nuisance at
first, because she was forever forgetting to water them; but when she
discovered them drooping, and watched for them to revive, they assumed
an importance beyond reason. They were gifts. She could not let them
die. Then they bloomed.
By the time spring came again Miss Willy was hobbling about with a
crutch and a cane. The crutch Anne had to buy. That month she began to
do their washing. The cane was brought out of a chest in the attic.
“My poor grandfather’s cane,” said Miss Willy. “You can see his name
on the silver band. Poor man. I’m afraid he drank a good deal. My
grandmother married again. But after all, I’m sure there’s nothing like
young love, my dear. I’ve been thinking. When Wanny grows up----”
So Willy was almost herself once more, though she was never again able
to do active work. She could sit in the window behind the flowers and
sew, and knit stockings for Warren. It lifted a good deal from Anne to
have her watch the boy, whose capacity for mischief increased every day.
“What that child does think up,” said Willy. He had climbed on a chair
when no one was looking and dropped soap into a stew Anne was making
for dinner. They discovered it when he danced up and down, clapping his
hands and shouting:
“Oh, ’ook at the bubbles! ’ook at the bubbles on the stove! Pretty
bubbles! Wanny makes ooooh pretty bubbles!”
Then, from the chair where his mother had forcefully deposited him,
he howled miserably. “Don’t like Wanny’s bubbles! Bad Mums don’t like
Wanny’s bubbles!”
Anne looked dolefully at Willy. “Stew enough for two days. Oh dear! All
that good meat!”
Miss Willy’s placidity was not ruffled. “He was only just doing what
you do yourself, and what most folks do,” said she.
“I never put soap in the stew,” Anne protested, laughing ruefully.
“I ain’t so sure about that. But what I meant was he only sees things
from where he stands. You got to make allowances for that.”
In the course of the months Anne had achieved some measure of
orderliness. Work did not crowd as much as before. She found herself
looking forward with unsuspected eagerness to the time when the garden
could be planted. It was good to see the snows melting, good to see the
brown earth emerging and drying, good to bring in pussy-willows and
to wander with Warren through the moist woods to find hepaticas, even
good to hear the hylas again. One night when the others were asleep
she stood at her window and looked out. The moon was high. Earth and
sky were inherent parts of the same beauty, hesitant, translucent. In
the moonlight even the familiar garden and roads and fields wore an
effect of luminous unreality. The world slept, yet it was breathing
and dreaming. It called her to go forth into its hesitant loveliness,
to penetrate and become a part of its dream. The boy was sleeping
with his face buried in his pillow, the red curls on his neck damp and
sweet. He could be trusted not to wake. She crept down the stairs. The
doors were never locked.
It was strange to be walking along the road in this strange light. Even
the shadows were softer, melting and merging into the earth. On and on
she walked, slowly, through a world creating itself anew, through sweet
woods, between fields fragrant with the moist breath of night, past a
marsh where the hylas piped, little Pans, plaintive, luring, singing of
joys that might be or joys to come.
Abruptly, where the road wound through a stretch of woods, she stopped.
Something moved there. Once fear would have held her, but she had come
to know how needless fear was in that far-away countryside.
“I hope I have not frightened you?” a voice asked.
Strange, to hear again a voice of cultivation, words enunciated with
careless precision. Suddenly she remembered. Not far beyond was the
house of the man who had come out to the doctor’s car on the day it had
stalled, the man the doctor termed “old fool.”
“Not exactly,” she said, quietly. “I’m afraid I have walked rather
farther than I meant to.”
He had come nearer. He was hatless, and she remembered how white his
hair had looked that day, and realized that its whiteness gave him that
strange appearance now in the dim light.
“Yes. One has to come out on a night like this,” he said. “I’ve an
idea that the real purpose of the moon is to keep the balance even. The
sun works. The moon calms and blesses. We need both work and calm, to
keep the balance true.”
Anne smiled faintly. How odd he was, to speak like that, without
preface, to a stranger.
“There are various other things one needs, are there not?” she
suggested, falling into his mood.
“Yes. Oh, yes. But they all come into the two categories. Work, not
necessarily what one does not love or enjoy, but work, occupation. And
calm. ‘Ease and alternate labor.’ What else is there?”
They had fallen into step. After a moment she said, “I think you are
laughing at me.”
He grasped at a bough that projected across the road, its buds just
beginning to open, snapped it off, the sound of its breaking distinct
in the night’s stillness.
“Forgive me. Not at you. I should not have said that. Nor felt it.
It’s only fair that life should give us the obvious things, make us go
searching for the others.”
“So there is something else?”
She knew he turned to look at her. “You came out to find it, didn’t
you? And I came out.”
They walked on a little. “Does one find, I wonder?” she murmured.
They had reached the edge of the woods. Before them a meadow lay
flooded with moonlight, gleaming like a sea becalmed. They stood
still, held by its beauty.
“I don’t know,” he said presently. “But if one may still search, still
come out, into this!”
“It’s beautiful,” she said softly. “But there’s no answer there.”
“I’m not so sure. Not that it matters, the answer. It’s the search, the
fact that one can come out, that one wants to.”
“Is that enough?” Unconsciously they spoke almost in whispers, as
though to speak aloud would be to break the spell of the night.
“Not enough, no. But there’s always the belief or the hope that there’s
something to be found. Else one would not come out.”
“I wonder,” she said.
“Oh, we all wonder. But we all know it’s there.”
“What?”
He waited. “Rhythm, I think. Or call it God.”
They were silent a moment. Then, without seeming to know she was there,
he walked away.
6
The first day she permitted Miss Willy to go as far as the garden Anne
proudly pointed. “There!” she exclaimed. “Look at that, all ready for
the seeds. I did it myself, too. Dorilliam did nothing but the plowing.”
“Wanny helped,” the youngster boasted.
“Not the hoeing and raking! You never did, Anne Warren!” old Willy
cried.
Anne laughed, brushed a hand upward across her damp forehead. “But I
did. I’m so proud of it. I call that a good job well done.”
A letter received from Alice about that time amused her. Alice and
George were taking the children to Europe for the summer. Would not
Anne use their house while they were gone? The servants would be there,
the house going on as usual. There would be the car, and Warren would
like the children’s playthings, the sand-pile and swing in the yard.
There was plenty of room for Miss Willy, too. Anne’s first thought was,
“Why, I couldn’t leave the garden!” Then she laughed aloud. But it was
quite true. That garden had been conquered the year before. Now it was
hers, and she could not tolerate the thought of leaving it. That summer
there were no such mistakes as had baffled her last year, for old Willy
looked on and advised. Anne was bending over the wash-tubs every week,
rejoicing in the flapping white things on the line. She was making
their bread, and under Willy’s direction canning fruits and young
tender vegetables in glass jars for winter. Warren, with his increased
capacity for getting out of sight and into mischief, was even more care
than before. Yet she had an elated consciousness of living.
One July day when the heat was so intense that Willy had not ventured
out of doors, Anne was hanging out clothes, grateful that the weekly
washing was done. The old woman came to the kitchen door.
“Wanny with you?” she called.
Anne put the last clothes-pin in place, took up her basket. “That
monkey! Has he slipped off again? I’ll have to go look for him.”
She went, calling, and presently Warren came running towards her, his
face mottled with crimson, torn with briers, and both his closed fists
dripping red. But he was smiling angelically.
“I brought you some, too, Mums,” said he, opening his hands and holding
them up to her. He had been tightly grasping the raspberries.
“He ought to be spanked,” said Miss Willy.
Anne looked over the child’s head, and smiled. He was standing in one
of the tubs getting scoured, his dimpled body rising from the suds in
which he was infinitely more interested than in cleanliness.
“Will you do the spanking?” she asked.
Miss Willy looked at her over her spectacles, said not a word more.
That afternoon the child was sleepy. His forehead was hot. “Don’t want
to go out in the garden. Want to stay here,” he said later, and Anne,
who was starting the fire for supper, absently agreed.
“All right, old man. But don’t get in mother’s way.”
Then she heard a cry from Miss Willy. Another moment and she was
kneeling on the floor, lifting the child to her breast, shrieking.
“Stop that! Leave him there! Don’t take him up! It’s a spasm,” she
heard Willy say.
“He’s dying! My baby’s dying!”
“He ain’t, either! You leave him right there, and run for the doctor.
I’ll get the kettle on. Give me a spoon to put in his mouth. Now
run----!”
The little body was stiff, the child’s eyes rolled upward.
“If the doctor ain’t there, get Mis’ Beaman,” Willy called after her.
She stumbled on the steps, caught herself, raced on. The doctor was
not there. Mrs. Beaman turned from the stove, the twins and the other
children staring open-mouthed at the frantic woman who had burst in
upon them.
“My baby! Convulsions--he’s dying,” Anne panted.
Instantly Mrs. Beaman grasped a steaming tea-kettle from the stove and
held it towards Anne. “Take that and run,” said she. “Here you, Johnny,
you carry this pot. Never mind the potatoes in it, they won’t do any
harm. Now I’ll get the mustard----”
Ten minutes, half an hour, and Wanny was wrapped in a blanket, relaxed,
his eyes closed. Mrs. Beaman laughed.
“I used to think you used a good many things to bathe him with, when he
was a baby,” she said, “but I guess it’s the first time he ever had a
hot bath with potatoes floating around in the water.”
Anne was still trembling. “If you hadn’t come! You saved my boy.”
Late in August Nicky came for a week. She watched Anne at first
curiously, making no comment on her varied activities. Human work in
the garden was over until time for harvesting. There were hours in the
long afternoons when the two could sit in the shade or walk through the
woods.
“Anne,” Veronica asked one day, “do you ever have time to think?”
Anne laughed. “Yes, with my hands.”
“I’ve never seen you look so happy, so satisfied.”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“That, from Nance Denison! But you aren’t Nance Denison.”
Anne leaned forward, her hands dropped beyond her knees. “Oh, yes I am.
Don’t you think I am not, Nicky old girl. I always wanted to do things,
my own things, have my own way. Now I’m doing them, reveling in having
my own way. Of course I’m happy!”
“And satisfied?”
“Oh, well, that! There always has to be something beyond. Of course I’m
not going to stay here forever.”
“That’s really what I came about, Nance.” Anne looked at her
questioningly. “There’s a new home for working girls. A sort of hotel,
really, but they want to provide something more for the girls than
other homes do. They want a hostess, a woman who has been used to
things. I can get you the job if you want it.”
“There’s Wanny.”
“You could have Wanny with you. The pay isn’t bad.”
Anne stood up, her hands behind her back. There was the garden, the
house, the hen-house, the hills and ripening fields.
“Nicky, I can’t,” she said. “Not while old Willy lives.”
Nicky lay back, stretched her arms over her head, yawned. “You’re
growing up, Anne,” said she.
Afterwards, Anne wondered at herself a little. It was true that a few
years before she would have taken the chance without thinking of anyone
who stood in the way. If she had heard of some other woman making such
a choice she would have scorned her for it, set her down in the same
category into which she had dismissed people like those who were now
her neighbors, as being of no account, bound by their own dullness
and stupidity and lack of initiative, without intention, without
aspiration. Her mind was still groping. She could not have told why
she had permitted herself to be held by allegiance to old Willy. But,
however vaguely, she was beginning to feel that there was something
beyond initiative and aspiration, some established necessary sequence,
perhaps even some purpose.
Several times she had encountered the man Kent on the road or in the
store. Once he had said to Warren:
“You come to see me, and I’ll show you something!”
She thought of him as of one who could speak her old language,
remembered his odd way of coming abruptly to things that were commonly
left unspoken or only touched upon after a preface of intimacy, as
though they were common enough to be taken for granted, so much a part
of one’s habitual thought as to come naturally to any man’s lips. Her
harvesting work was done for the year. The little place was neat for
winter, the pantry shelves were filled. She smiled when she looked
at those rows of bright jars. She, Anne Denison, “forehanded!” On a
day in late September she took her son by the hand and set forth. Not
that Warren permitted himself to be held in leash for long. His legs
were sturdy. How she loved them, their curves and dimples and bruises.
He would trot ahead of her to kick up the leaves, go foraging into
the woods, spring out upon her at the next turn. He howled when he
investigated a chestnut burr, a moment later joyously presented her
with a spray of asters. Walks with Wanny had their variety. Before they
came in sight of the cottage her ears caught the sound of music. A
piano, played rather superbly, she thought. In spite of her restraining
call Warren flew to the door, hammered upon it.
“I want to see what that noise is. Let me in. I want to see.”
As she reached the door it opened, and Kent stood there, laughing. He
took the child’s hand, closed the door behind them, and came down the
walk towards Anne.
“We’ve interrupted you,” she said, with an air of apology.
But he shook his head. “No. I was playing to my wife. But she’s asleep
now. It always quiets her.”
“I am sorry. I did not know Mrs. Kent was ill.”
His face bore a worn look, as of one who had not slept. “Always ill. I
am very glad you came to see me.”
“I have been thinking so much, Mr. Kent, of some of the things you said
to me that night when I was so wild as to walk in the moonlight.” He
looked at her questioningly, yet she did not find it difficult to speak
simply of what had seemed so simple to him.
He nodded. “Ah--yes.” Then his manner changed. He looked down at
Warren. “How would you like to come into my garden? I could show you
something there.”
“There isn’t any garden any more. We’ve dug the potatoes,” said Warren.
“There is always a garden,” the man said, laughing. “Come along!”
He led the way with the boy, talking and answering, for there had to be
a good deal of answering, with Warren.
“This is a funny garden,” said Warren.
“You just wait,” laughed Kent. “And don’t stumble.”
The path led down sharply. Anne drew a quick breath when it ended
abruptly in a cleared space at the base of the hill, a space perhaps
a full hundred yards across, leveled and smooth, the woods closing
it in, sunlight drenching it. Only a few bronzed leaves clung to the
low-growing oaks against its forested wall. For the rest, it was raked
clean, like a house swept and garnished. And that, thought Anne, was
what it must be, a house here in the woods, with the sky for its roof.
There were borders where even now a late rose or two braved the cold
nights. At one side a long shallow pool, its banks strengthened with
field stones, caught a bit of the sky’s blue. Just beyond was an arbor,
white, grape-trellised, and at other places two long low benches of
gleaming white. On one of these lay a doll, large as a baby and as
daintily dressed, its legs hanging limply over the side. On the floor
of the arbor, in a spot of sunlight, a dog lay. It got up when it saw
Kent, hobbled joyously towards him on three legs. He stooped and patted
it. Warren drew back towards his mother.
“I never saw a dog like that,” he said. “Where’s all of him?”
“The rest of him, you mean?” Kent laughed aloud. “Well, once he was
caught in a trap. The trap bit off his paw. But there are no other dogs
here, you see, so he doesn’t realize how different he is. We don’t
remind him of it.”
Anne remembered, something the doctor had said that first time. “A lot
of lame ducks.” This, apparently, was one of them. Then she became
aware of a face in the depths of the arbor, a form there.
“Jenny,” Kent called. “You Jenny there! Come out here and say ‘how do’
to the lady and the young man I’ve brought to call on you.”
It was a child; or, surely, the laugh came from a girl who was not
quite past childhood. A girl of thirteen or so, Anne thought, when
she haltingly emerged. As she came she seemed to help herself by the
side of the arbor where shade lay deepest. Her face wore that curious
agedness of the city child who has long been ill.
“A-a-ah! No you don’t,” Kent called out, laughing. “Don’t you touch
that crutch, Jenny!”
“I ain’t, honest I ain’t, Mr. Kent. It’s on the bench!”
“Then you’re cheating. You’re holding on to the wall.”
The girl giggled delightedly, as at some huge joke. “But I got to.”
“Now hear that! I told you to come here. Now then, come along. Come
along.”
She came to the opening of the arbor, bracing herself by a hand on its
side. Anne saw that her body was twisted, restricted by some muscular
impediment, perhaps a form of paralysis. Jenny was smiling, and Kent
shook his head.
“Won’t do, Jenny. You let go of that door, and come out here.”
“But I can’t, Mr. Kent. Honest I can’t.”
“Come!”
She took a step or two forward, wavered. Anne would have jumped to her
side, but Kent’s raised hand warned her back.
“Now you see that you can. Come along!”
A step or two more, and suddenly the girl fell awkwardly, sprawling,
laughing. “Gee, ain’t he funny!” she cried.
Kent helped her up, took her arm and led her to one of the benches.
“Now next time, young woman, you’ll walk. Tumbling has gone out of
fashion. Do you hear?” he warned her.
“It’s a heavenly place,” Anne said, “a sort of magic garden, as though
the fairies had lived here a while and then forgotten it.”
Kent nodded. “I made it for my wife. We just about live down here, in
the summer. You see, she’s afraid of the woods, and as they shut in the
garden she’s safe here. She’s afraid to run away, except by the path,
and we can watch that.”
In spite of herself Anne stared.
“Yes, she is like that,” Kent said, quietly. “As I said, it’s the
reason for our living here. Where we lived before she was forever
running away, slipping past all our vigilance. It wasn’t good for her
to be constantly watched and she needed the air. Now she is happier.
She has some freedom, but she is safe.”
Before the strange revelation Anne knew nothing to say. Kent went on,
as though musing: “That doll over there. It is hers. I shall have to
take it back to the house before she wakes up, or she’ll cry for it.
She calls it her baby, yet at times, you see, she forgets it. When she
is very bad. Yes, she is like that.”
Presently Anne said, “The little girl there----”
Kent smiled. “Oh, Jenny. Yes. We have them here. First one, then
another. Jenny will soon be all right. She went on two crutches a few
months ago.”
He had indeed shown her something in his garden. Anne was certain of
that. His wife “like that,” the lame dog, the child Jenny. She thought
of their meeting in the moonlight, and his words, “Not that it matters,
the answer. It’s the search.” Now, in the light of what he had shown
her, those words did not ring true. For what was his search, how much
was he seeking? Obviously, the man was not impoverished. He was not
held to Heathville by that dumb and stupid allegiance to the soil that
she read in the simpler people. Yet there he stayed with a mad wife and
a lame dog and children like Jenny. “We have them here. First one, then
another.” He was not searching, not seeking. He was submitting, letting
himself be held. By what?
She had been held by old Willy, as Kent was held by his wife.
Throughout the winter the old woman seemed as mentally brisk as ever.
“My land,” she said, one cold Sunday morning, “I do wish I could get up
the hill to church. Makes me feel downright wicked, to be so mad about
it. Not that I s’ppose it’s any worse to get mad because you can’t go
to church than because you can’t dance or something, nor any better,
either.”
Anne laughed. “I don’t believe it will be held up against you because
you can’t go to church,” said she.
Miss Willy sniffed. “I was talking about getting mad, not about going
to church,” she said.
Anne laughed. “Well, I’m sorry you can’t get to church, then.”
“So am I. I do want something awful to see that new bonnet the
minister’s wife got in the missionary box.”
“Willy! You wicked old woman! You’ve fooled me for years. I thought you
went to church to say your prayers. I didn’t dream your mind was so set
on worldly things.”
Miss Willy sniffed. “I do go to church to say my prayers, when I can
get there. And if a body’s mind wasn’t mixed up with worldly things,
what would there be to pray about?” she demanded.
There came a day in April when the sun shone and from Anne’s window all
the world wore a fresh morning face after rain. Dressing, she looked
out upon the familiar scene, now as unconsciously cherished as the
features of a beloved. Then she turned to the bed where Warren, now in
his fourth year, lay asleep. He had long since refused to submit to
a day-time nap, though after his day’s intensive play he was willing
enough to go to bed with the chickens. But no birds could wake him
early in the morning. He lay now with his arms and legs outstretched,
strong and plump, his firm flesh tanned by sun and weather. He was her
life, her blessing. Whenever she saw him like that a surge of love all
but choked her. She bent over him before she left the room. He would
sleep for hours longer.
She went down quietly, started the kitchen fire as noiselessly as she
could, went out to the hens. The morning air was sweet. Good to breathe
it in. She raised her face in the sunshine. When she went in again
she set the simple breakfast to cooking. There was no sound from Miss
Willy’s room. Strange, for the old woman had not lost her life-long
habit of waking with the dawn. She would wait patiently until Anne
could find time to help her dress, but always she called out a morning
greeting. Anne softly turned the knob of the bedroom door. The little
figure was lying on its side, one hand under a withered cheek. Anne’s
heart leaped. That stillness, and the posture like a child asleep,
secure in a mothering presence near by. She bent over the bed.
Miss Willy was, indeed, asleep. Past waking.
Presently Anne went across the road for the doctor. He made his brief
examination, and stood up, looking at Anne who was unaware of the tears
on her cheeks.
“Yes,” he told her, gently, “yes, she’s gone. Worn out. That’s the best
way to go. Finished her work.”
“Sleep at the end of the day,” Anne murmured.
The doctor nodded. “Like David. You remember? ‘Who after he had served
his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid with
his fathers.’ What’s better than to serve one’s own generation?”
“She did that.”
The doctor turned away. “I’ll send women to you,” he said, from the
door.
They came, those women. Quietly, reverently they came, not reluctantly
to that task from which Anne shrank, but taking it as one of the things
to be done, by its very inevitableness removed from horror. She heard
them moving about the room, speaking in low voices behind the closed
door. They asked her to heat water, and when she had it ready one of
them said:
“Now don’t you feel so bad. Her time had come.”
Dorilliam’s mother came out to the kitchen. “I didn’t like to open the
bureau without you said so. But I know where the things are. She’s had
’em laid away a long time. She told me about ’em.”
Anne helped them find the poor, decent clothes, so plain, so clean.
So Willy had thought of her burial, even while she thought so much of
living. Death--Anne remembered the day her father died. Willy had been
alone with him. She and Brice had hurried, but arrived too late. She
had been a little in awe of that silent presence, even afraid. She had
cried out to Brice when strange men with black bags passed the parlor
door on the way upstairs, and Brice had closed the door and put his
arms about her, closed the door against her dread. Now there was no
Brice.
Hurriedly she put that memory from her. There was nothing of fear
connected with Willy’s lying there. Why remember that shielding from
that other fear? She had felt no grief for her father; they had never
been close together. After he died she had been sorry that they had
never been closer. This was different. Not grief, but something
gentler, something more poignant. Or was grief like this? Death like
this quiet passing seemed scarcely mysterious, but only a part of the
inevitable round of things. Now she knew something about that round
of things. There was winter, a going to sleep, and spring following
winter. She thought of Miss Willy’s springtime, of the little toiling
creature who had wanted her freedom. Had she found freedom now? Or
what? For there was spring.
“You’d better let me take Wanny home with me,” said Mrs. Beaman. “The
twins’ll just love looking after him. It ain’t good for children to be
in the house when there’s death.”
Anne kissed her. “If you’ll take him for a few hours, later,” she said.
“For a day or two I can tell him Miss Willy’s asleep in there.”
So the child played about as usual, whispering when he came into
the kitchen, tiptoeing past the closed door. Willy was asleep. He
understood that, and Anne dwelt on the thought of it.
Mrs. Bassett came over the first day, a slender, thin-lipped woman,
with some sprays of geranium in her hand. “Seems like I never get much
time to grow flowers,” she said, “but there’s these.”
Another brought heliotrope, another a basket of crocuses. One came with
nasturtiums. “Seems real nice to see ’em this time o’ year, don’t it?”
she asked, with pride. “They do real well in my south windows. They
come from some seeds she gave me once.”
At night another came, a great white bloom in her hand and on her face
the look of a votary. “My night-bloomin’ cereus. ’Twon’t last, but she
always come over to see it, the night ’twas due to come out. I want she
should have it.”
On the day when Anne sent Warren to play with the Beaman children the
neighbors gathered solemnly in the parlor, presently to follow Miss
Willy, who never had led before. Anne stood by the grave lined with
evergreen boughs. There was greenery, too, over the mound of fresh
earth.
“Who did that?” she asked, as they came away.
“Why, we all did. We always do that, for a neighbor.”
Those women, unimaginative, she had thought them, their lives but one
long labor, too barren for sentiment; yet when the time for sentiment
came they had done that tender service.
On the day after the funeral Warren went into the bedroom, stood
looking at the bed. “Where’s auntie?” he asked. “When did she wake up?”
“She’s gone away, Wanny. Where she won’t have to go to sleep any more.”
The child stared at her. “Where’s that?”
“Ever so far away. Where the spring lives before it comes. Where the
baby birds come from, and baby boys and girls, before they are born.”
She had no sooner spoken the words than she was conscious of the
fatuity of them. Why should she cheat the child with sentimentality?
Why not try to tell him the truth? Why deck it out in inanities? But
Warren’s eyes were alight and wide-opened.
“Where the fairies live?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, well,” said Wanny, “she won’t like it much there. Not without me.
I guess she’ll come back soon.”
But a day or two afterwards he came to his mother with quivering lip.
“I want auntie. Why don’t she come back? Will you tell her to hurry?”
Anne turned her face away. “I want her, too, my lamb. But she can’t
come.”
“Why can’t she come? Has she lost her crutch?”
“Yes. She’s lost it.”
“Why don’t you take it to her, then?”
“I can’t, Wanny. I can’t go where she is.”
“Well, where is she? That’s what I want to know.”
How much theology did one give a child? There had to be something.
What could one say? She took him in her arms. “Auntie is with her
Heavenly Father, my dear. He loves her, and needs her.”
“How do you know he does?”
Theology had its difficulties. “I do know. He’s my Heavenly Father,
too. So I know. Just the way you know mother loves you.”
Wanny thought about that. “Have I got one, too?” he asked.
She kissed his curls. “Of course. We all have. Now run along and play.
Maybe you’d like to help feed the chickens?”
But a few nights thereafter, while she was making him ready for bed,
taking off his stockings and reveling in the fragrance of his hair
against her face, he propounded another question.
“Mums,” he asked, “when am I going to my father?”
7
Under old Willy’s handkerchiefs in the top drawer of a bureau they
found a folded sheet of paper. “I am in my right mind and senses. I
give my body to the grave and my soul to the Lord. Everything else is
to go to my friend, Anne Warren Denison.” There was Willy’s cramped
signature, and the signature of witnesses.
“It was no more than right,” said Mrs. Wells, who was one of the
witnesses, “seeing you come here to take care of her in her old age.”
Anne said nothing. The date stood out like a pointing finger. Willy
had written it more than five years before she had come to Heathville,
at a time when she thought of the old woman once a year, when the
purchase of some gift for Christmas was one of those burdensome
trivialities that she got through with as hurriedly as she could. The
house was hers, the garden, the few hundreds in the savings bank,
because old Willy had loved her, in her own mind built up about her a
little tradition that later expressed itself in the kindly falsehood
with which she quieted the curiosity of the neighbors. “Come to take
care of her in her old age.” Perhaps Willy had dreamed of that during
the years she had lived alone. Perhaps she had longed to have someone
in her old age. It was a new thing to Anne to have that feeling of
dull self-reproach, that consciousness of failure, unmixed with anger.
Anger had obliterated any consciousness of failure towards Brice. Now
old Willy’s bequest and the inescapable thoughts it brought with it
held a mirror of self-analysis up to her. She could not look around
it, nor walk away from it, but must stare and stare at the reflection
of herself. And there was another thing that she had to think about.
Warren’s questions, his reference to his father.
Willy was dead, Brice had gone out of her life, but the boy remained.
Not four years in the world, already he was asking questions she could
not answer. He would grow, would question further. Was she going to
fail her son as she had failed those others? Oh yes, Willy had, indeed,
had someone to take care of her in her old age; her longings and her
poor little pride had been justified at the end. But Anne could take
to herself no credit for that. Willy dead, she could admit her own
failure. If things had fallen out differently, she would have said,
when word came of the old woman’s death, “The poor old soul!” When word
came of the bequest, she would have said, “How funny! What on earth
shall I do with it?” It was only by chance, and because of her own
need, not Willy’s, that she had stood by at the end.
So, now that the time had come when she was free to leave, she had to
pause for a while, try to read her compass, to take her bearings, for
there were strange seas ahead. She had been drifting. Where was she
now? What was her position, what worth had this place she had thought
she had won to, this security she thought her own toil had achieved for
her spirit, this freedom from the bond of obligation? There was Brice.
She had never believed that Brice was dead. Gradually she found herself
thinking more and more about Brice, without anger, without bitterness.
If all life lead on to something, what was waiting for her? What was
she going to meet? Above all, what was Warren going to meet, and
how was she going to help him meet it? Could she escape that slow,
onsweeping purpose pervading everything, that warp that ran through
the whole fabric of life? To some natures life is a decomposing thing,
to some a stimulus, to others a slow melting-pot, terrible in its
persistency, yet all the while in its crucible melting away the baser
elements that the purer may emerge. In some natures a gold of the
spirit is the residuum, made a thing of itself only after the fires of
life have had their way with it, worked it and fused and refined it.
Anne’s physical freedom had come at last only to thrust her into the
core of the crucible, but even yet she was not undergoing its intensest
heat.
It was too early to begin work in the garden. The fields were drying
slowly that year, the season pausing, farmers waiting with impatient
acceptance of the inevitable. Many hours during the winter she had
passed with Kent before his fireside or in Miss Willy’s parlor or
tramping over the rutted roads. He had played to her and loaned her
books. On a day when the sun was as warm as in June she and Warren
started for Kent’s house, the boy running here and there to peep into
the buckets hanging to roadside maple trees.
“Sap’s running good,” Deacon Bassett told her as they passed his place.
“Cold nights and hot suns--that’s what brings the sap up.”
She had never encountered Mrs. Kent. Her presence pervaded the house,
Kent spoke of her frequently, but Anne had dreaded to see her, hoped
that she never would--that woman who played with a doll, who was afraid
of the woods and had to be watched lest she run away. In her mind she
had visualized something repulsive. Insanity, she supposed, was a
thing of wild impulses, a thing of terror. Pitiful, yes, but dreadful,
better kept behind bars or in one of those places where “they” had good
care. But on that day she was sitting in a deep chair before a fire
of embers, and Kent was playing. The children, Warren and Jenny, were
in a window-seat busy about their own affairs. The door opened. Anne
could see, without moving, the slim form that stood there, hesitant.
There was nothing startling, nothing repulsive, about that woman.
Forty, perhaps, she was obviously fragile, and could never have been
beautiful; but there remained about her a delicacy, a grace, a gentle
desire to please that must once have meant charm. She was smiling.
Kent looked over his shoulder, his fingers still touching the keys.
“Come in, Paula,” he said, quietly.
Mrs. Kent came in, step by step, still looking at Anne, until she was
standing in front of her, hands loosely clasped. She waited until the
music had stopped.
“Pretty lady,” she said, under her breath.
Kent came towards them. “It’s Mrs. Denison, Paula. Aren’t you glad to
see her?”
She held out her hand, and Anne, standing, took it. Paula still looked
at her searchingly. “I don’t know her. But she’s pretty. I’m glad she
came to see us. Are we going to have tea, Rufus? Are there any cakes?”
Kent went out of the room, and his wife took Anne’s hand, led her to a
sofa, sat down by her. She was still smiling, still friendly, like a
child in her gentleness. Anne could find nothing to say. Before Kent
returned Wanny slipped from the window-seat, came and stood in front
of the pair, his small legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, a
posture copied from his firm friend Dorilliam.
Paula’s lips parted. She withdrew her hand from Anne’s. “Oh! It’s a
child!”
“My son Warren,” said Anne. Her maternal instinct at work, she added,
“Wanny, say ‘How do you do, Mrs. Kent.’”
But Mrs. Kent had slipped to her knees before the boy. She was touching
him, first his bright hair, then his cheek, then his hand. To his
mother’s amazement the youngster submitted. Then, quite suddenly, he
laughed.
“I like you,” said he. “You’re so funny.”
Paula sat back on the floor, laughed too. “And I like you, boy.” She
looked up at Anne, leaned closer, whispered. “I have a baby, too. She
doesn’t grow. It worries me. And she never talks. She’s asleep now,
or I couldn’t have come down. I’ll show her to you, some day. But her
hair--I like the color of your boy’s hair--like fire-light. What is
your name, boy?”
Wanny told her. Again she fingered the ruddy softness of his hair, and
he laughed aloud. She said, “I like it. I think I will change the color
of my baby’s hair to that. Rufus will do it for me.”
“Will do what, Paula?” Kent asked. He came into the room, the Japanese
boy following with a tea-tray whose richness reminded Anne of old days.
When she had told him, he said, quite naturally, as though it were the
most usual thing in the world to change hair:
“Yes, of course, I will. I will send to the city today for some hair
the color of Wanny’s. In four days from now your baby shall have red
hair like his, Paula.”
And Paula, jumping up, clapped her hands. But then she spied the cakes
on the tea-tray, grabbed two of them, ate.
“Rufus,” Anne asked, a week or so later when they were walking along
through the muddy road, “Rufus, why do you keep her there? Why do you
have her live with you?” For one could ask any question, directly, of
Kent.
He frowned, looked puzzled. “I don’t know that I can make it plain
to you, Anne, or to myself. But there’s this: one does not discard
responsibility, or care, or what not, by putting it out of sight. One
sees a thing through, anyway. Life jolly well sees to it that we do
that.”
Afterwards, thinking it over, Anne wondered. Was that true? Did one
never escape? Was escape cut off? A thing out of sight--did that follow
one, haunt, overtake? Or was it always inevitably present? There was
her marriage. Brice. She had believed they had escaped each other,
and misunderstandings, and the enormous, minute daily rubs. Yet here
was she, here was Warren, with his developing intelligence and his
questions and demands and rights, and there, somewhere, was Brice. Did
he, too, have his demands, his rights? Were they still her concern,
again to become her problem? Was the whole thing still there, for them
both? Was there still that bond, still, still to be reckoned with
whether she would or not? “One sees it through, anyway. Life sees to
it that we do that.” Life--what was it? The wheel of the squirrel-cage
old Willy had once spoken about, the wheel that one spins and spins,
believing one’s self the force that drives the world; the cage that one
cannot leave, but must return to and return to, because all outside the
cage is wilderness?
For days she weighed that question; then came the great crisis of her
life, out of the blue, suddenly, without warning, as crises come. It
came, that flame of Fate which was to burn away slowly, with agony, the
dross of her spirit.