One Man in His Time Part 41

"She's bleeding again," muttered the old woman. "You'd better find the doctor. I ain't used to stopping hemorrhages." Then, as Corinna went out of the room, she added querulously to Patty: "She didn't have no business trying to talk; but she would do it. She said she'd do it if it killed her--and I reckon she don't mind much if it does--She'd have killed herself sooner than this if I'd let her alone." From the street below there came the sound of a motor horn; then the noise of a car running against the curbstone; and then the opening and shutting of a door, followed by rapid footsteps on the stairs.

"That's the doctor now, I reckon," remarked the old woman; but the words had scarcely left her lips when the door opened, and Corinna came back into the room with Gideon Vetch.

"Where is Patty?" he asked anxiously. "She oughtn't to be here."

"Yes, I ought to be here," answered Patty. As she turned toward Gideon Vetch, she swayed as if she were going to fall, and he caught her in his arms. "Go home, daughter," he said almost sternly. "You oughtn't to be here. Mrs. Page, can't you make her go home?"

"I have tried," responded Corinna; then a moan from the bed reached her, and she turned toward the woman who lay there. To die like that with n.o.body caring, with n.o.body even observing it! Exhausted by the loss of blood, the woman had fallen back into unconsciousness, and the towel the old cripple held to her lips was stained scarlet.

"The doctor had gone to bed. He will come as soon as he gets dressed,"

said Corinna. "He warned us to keep her quiet."

"If he don't hurry, she'll be gone before he gets here," replied the old woman, looking round over her twisted shoulder.

"Oh, Father, Father!" cried Patty, flinging her arms about his neck; and then over again like a frightened child, "Father, Father!"

He patted her head with a large consoling hand. "There, there, daughter," he returned gently. "A little thing like that won't come between you and me."

With his arm still about her, he drew her slowly to the bedside, and stood looking down on the dying woman and the old cripple, who hovered over her with the stained towel in her hand.

"I don't even know her name," he said, and immediately afterward, "She must have had a h.e.l.l of a life!" Though there was a wholesome pity in his voice, it was without the weakness of sentimentality. He had done what he could, and he was not the kind to worry over events which he could not change. For a few minutes he stood there in silence; then, because it was impossible for his energetic nature to remain inactive in an emergency, he exclaimed suddenly, "The doctor ought to be here!" and turning away from the bed, went rapidly across the room and through the half open door into the hall.

Outside the darkness was dissolving in a drab light which crept slowly up above the roofs of the houses; and while they waited this light filled the yard and the room and the pa.s.sage beyond the door which Gideon Vetch had not closed. Far away, through the heavy boughs of the ailantus tree, day was breaking in a glimmer of purple-few birds were twittering among the leaves. Along the high brick wall a starved gray cat was stealing like a shadow. Drawing her evening wrap closer about her bare shoulders, Corinna realized that it was already day in the street.

"She's gone," said the old hunchback, in a crooning whisper. Her twisted hand was on the arm of the dead woman, which stretched as pallid and motionless as an arm of wax over the figured quilt. "She's gone, and she never knew that he had come." With a gesture that appeared as natural as the dropping of a leaf, she pressed down the eyelids over the expressionless eyes. "Well, that's the way life is, I reckon," she remarked, as an epitaph over the obscure destiny of Mrs. Green.

"Yes, that's the way life is," repeated Corinna under her breath.

Already the old cripple had started about her inevitable ministrations: but when Corinna tried to make Patty move away from the bedside, the girl shook her head in a stubborn refusal.

"I am trying to believe it," she said. "I am trying to believe it, and I can't." Then she looked at them calmly and steadily. "I want to think it out by myself," she added. "Would you mind leaving me alone in here for just a few minutes?"

Though there was no grief in her voice--how could there be any grief, Corinna asked herself?--there was an accent of profound surprise and incredulity, as of one who has looked for the first time on death.

Standing there in her spring-like dress beside the dead woman who had been her mother, Corinna felt intuitively that Patty had left her girlhood behind her. The child had lived in one night through an inner crisis, through a period of spiritual growth, which could not be measured by years. Whatever she became in the future, she would never be again the Patty Vetch that Corinna and Stephen had known.

Yes, she had a right to be alone. Beckoning to the old woman to follow her, Corinna went out softly, closing the door after her.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE DAWN

Outside in the narrow pa.s.sage, smelling of dust and yesterday's cooking, the pallid light filtered in through the closed window; and it seemed to Corinna that this light pervaded her own thoughts until the images in her mind moved in a procession of stark outlines against a colourless horizon. In this unreal world, which she knew was merely a distorted impression of the external world about her, she saw the figure of the dead woman, still and straight as the effigy of a saint, the twisted shape of the old hunchback, and after these the shadow of the starved cat stealing along the top of the high brick wall. What was the meaning in these things? Where was the beauty? What inscrutable purpose, what sardonic humour, joined together beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord, her own golden heritage with the drab destinies of that dead woman and this work-worn cripple?

"I can't stand it any longer," she thought. "I must breathe the open air, or I shall die."

Then, just as she was about to hurry toward the stairs, she checked herself and stood still because she realized that the old woman had followed her and was droning into her ear.

"Yes, ma'am, that's the way life is," the impersonal voice was muttering, "but it ain't the only way that it is, I reckon. I sees so many sick and dying folks that you'd think I was obliged to look at things unnatural-like. But I don't, not me, ma'am. It ain't all that way, with nothing but waiting and wanting, and then disappointment. Even Maggie had her good times somewhere in the past. You can't expect to be always dressed in spangles and riding bareback, that's what I used to say to her. You've got to take your share of bad times, same as the rest of us. And look at me now. I've done sick nursing for more'n fifty years--as far back as I like to look--but it ain't all been sick nursing. There's been a deal in it besides.

"Naw'm, I've got a lot to be thankful for when I begin to take stock."

Her wrinkled face caught the first gleam of sunlight that fell through the unwashed window panes. "I've done sick nursing ever since I was a child almost; but I've managed mighty well all things considering, and I've saved up enough to keep me out of the poor house when I get too old to go on. When I give up I won't have to depend on charity, and the city won't have to bury me either when I'm dead. And I've got a heap of satisfaction out of my red geraniums too. I don't reckon you ever saw finer blooms--not even in a greenhouse. Naw'm, I ain't been the complaining sort. I've got a lot to be thankful for, and I know it."

Her old eyes shone; her sunken mouth was trembling, not with self-pity, Corinna realized, with a pang that was strangely like terror, but with the courage of living. The pathos of it appeared intolerable for a moment; and gathering her cloak about her, Corinna felt that she must cover her eyes and fly before she broke out into hysterical screaming.

Then the terror pa.s.sed; and she saw, in a single piercing flash of insight, that what she had mistaken for ugliness was simply an impalpable manifestation of beauty. Beauty! Why it was everywhere! It was with her now in this squalid house, in the presence of this crippled old woman, unmoved by death, inured to poverty, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, grinding, pinching, like flint to the crying baby, and yet cheris.h.i.+ng the blooms of her red geranium, her pa.s.sionate horror of the poor house, and her dream of six feet of free earth not paid for by charity at the end. Yes, that was the way of life. Blind as a mole to the universe, and yet visited by flashes of unearthly light.

"Thank you," said Corinna hurriedly. "I must go down. I must get a breath of air, but I will come back in a little while." Then she started at a run down the stairs, while the old woman gazed after her, as if the flying figure, in the cloak of peac.o.c.k-blue satin and white fur, was that of a demented creature. "Air!" she repeated, with scornful independence. "Air!", and turning away in disgust, she limped painfully back to wait outside of the closed door. Here, when she had seated herself in a sagging chair, she lifted her bleak eyes to the smoke-stained ceiling, and repeated for the third time in a tone of profound contempt: "Air!"

At the foot of the stairs, Corinna ran against Gideon Vetch. "She died soon after you went out," she said, "but Patty is still there."

"I'll go up to her," he answered; and then as he placed his foot on the bottom step, he looked back at her, and added, "I tried to spare her this."

She a.s.sented almost mechanically. Fatigue had swept over her from head to foot like some sinister drug and she felt incapable of giving out anything, even sympathy, even the appearance of compa.s.sion. "Then it is all true?" she asked. "Patty is not your child?"

A shadow crossed his face, but he did not hesitate in his reply. "I never had a child. I was never married."

"You took her like that--because the mother was going to prison?"

He nodded. "She was a child. What difference did it make whether she was mine or not? She was the nicest little thing you ever saw. She is still."

"Yes, she is still. But you never knew what became of the mother?"

"I didn't know her real name. I didn't want to. The circus people called her Queenie, that was all I knew. She'd stuck a knife into a man in a jealous rage, and he happened to die. They said the trial would be obliged to go against her. I was leaving California that night, and I brought the child with me. I have never been back--" He spread out his broad hand with a gesture that was strangely human. "You would have done it in my place?"

She shook her head. "No, I should have wanted to, but I couldn't. I am not big enough for that."

He was already ascending the stairs, but at her words, he turned and smiled down on her. "It was nothing to make a fuss about," he said.

"Anybody would have done it."

Then he mounted the stairs lightly for his great height, taking two steps at a time, while she pa.s.sed out on the porch where Stephen was waiting for her. As he rose wearily from the wicker rocking chair beside the empty perambulator, she felt as if he were a stranger. In that one night she seemed to have put the whole universe between her and the old order that he represented.

"I kept my car waiting for you," he began. "It was better to let your man go home."

She smiled at him in the pale light, and he broke out nervously: "You look as if you would drop. What have they done to you?" Though she wore the cloak of peac.o.c.k-blue over her evening gown, the pointed train wound on the floor behind her, and the fan of white ostrich plumes, which she had forgotten to leave in the car, was still in her hand. Her face was wan and drawn; there were violet circles under her eyes; and she looked as if she had grown ten years older since the evening before. It was the outward impression of the night, he knew. In this house one pa.s.sed back again into the power of time; youth could not be prolonged here for a single night.

"I don't know what it means," he said, with a mixture of exasperation and curiosity. "I wish you would tell me what it means."

"I feel," she answered, in an expressionless tone, as if the insensibility of her nerves had pa.s.sed into her voice, "that I have faced life for the first time."

"Tell me what it means," he reiterated impatiently.

Dropping into the chair from which he had risen, she drew her train aside while the doctor pa.s.sed them hurriedly, with a muttered apology, and went into the house. Then, leaning forward, with the fan clasped in her hands, and her eyes on the straight deserted street, which ended abruptly on the brow of a hill, she repeated word for word all that the dying woman had said. The sun had not yet risen, but a faint opalescent glow suffused the sky in the east, and flushed with a delicate colour the round cobblestones in the street and the herring-bone pattern of the pavement, where blades of gra.s.s sprouted among the bricks. Though she did not look up at Stephen's face, she was aware while she talked of some subtle emanation of thought outside of herself, as if the struggle in his mind had overflowed mechanical processes and physical boundaries, and was escaping into the empty street and the city beyond. And this silent struggle, so charged with intensity that it produced the effect of a cry, became for her merely a part, a single voice, in that greater struggle for victory over circ.u.mstances which went on ceaselessly day and night in the surrounding houses. Everywhere about her there was the vague groping toward some idea of freedom, toward independence of spirit; everywhere there was this perpetual striving toward a universe that was larger. The dwellers in this crowded house, with their vision of s.p.a.ce and sunlight; the village with its vision of a city; the city with its vision of a country; the country with its vision of a republic of the world--all these universal struggles were condensed now into the little s.p.a.ce of a man's consciousness. To Corinna, in whose veins flowed the blood of Malvern Hill and Cold Harbor, it seemed that the greater victory must lie with those who charged from out the cover of philosophy into the mystery of the unknown. If she had been in Stephen's place, she knew that she should have taken the risk, that she should have flung herself into the enterprise of life as into a voyage of discovery. Yet, at the moment, appreciating all that it meant to him, she asked herself if she had been wise to let him see the thought in her mind. For an instant, after telling him, she hesitated, and in this instant Stephen spoke.

"So he isn't her father?"

"No, he isn't her father. He had never seen her mother; he did not even know her name, for he met the woman by accident when she was arrested in the circus. Patty was over two years old then--about two and a half, I think. Gideon Vetch took the child because of an impulse--a very human impulse of pity--but he knew nothing of her parentage. He knows nothing now, not even her real name. It is much worse than we ever imagined. Try to understand it. Try to take it in clearly before you act rashly. There is still time to weigh things--to stop and reflect. Nothing whatever is known of Patty's birth, except that her father, so the woman said, died in the first year of their marriage, before the child was born, and less than two years later the mother was sent to prison for killing another man--"