Chapter Thirty-seven

For five or six years, at intervals that had grown from semi-occasional to occasional, tiny black flashes of vertigo had been laying hold of Henriette. The first appreciable instance was once at a blackboard, as she was diagraming the genealogy of the Tudor family for a class of twenty-six girls and boys. Just for a moment, like one of her prankish boys yanking the plait of the little girl ahead of him, something had yanked one of Henriette’s breaths. It was something at first too quick, and too slight, to feel quite sure it had happened. For all the world like the little girl of the yanked braid turning her startled head.

Then it happened once or twice in church, or at Saturday-morning teachers’ meeting; and one Saturday, while lunching with Henry at the Blue Bird, she had been obliged to put down her coffee-cup and grip the table-edge to hold herself steady, smiling all the while, but unconscious of one word he was saying.

It was disquieting, but scarcely so disquieting as embarrassing. Her lean, fibrous body had never, in all the years she had inhabited it, so much as called attention to the frailties of its flesh. It was one of Henriette’s rare boasts that she had never in all her life spent a day in bed, or had so much as a headache.

There was something lean and ascetic and brown and tough about Henriette’s body at forty-nine. The fibrous body of a woman whose flesh had never dared to shimmer of those ecstasies that lay sleeping beneath its surface.

And just as there was something shameful to Henriette about the girls she passed on High Street, most of whom she knew by name and taught in school, who permitted their dresses to sag off one bare shoulder and their young breasts to tremble in outline behind their flimsy blouses, so there was something shameful in these vertiginous signalings of a body she had so rigorously held in subordination.

The one being for whom desire could awaken in that prim flesh, had by the very decorum of all his years of friendship with her, held it so in abeyance, that at forty-nine, the sight of Henriette to herself, undressed before her mirror, would have been shock and anathema to her.

Nice Henriette. The chilled niceness of a little tomb.

Vertigo and that irrepressible rise of the nap of her flesh that the sight and too often the mere thought of Henry could inspire, were equally to be dismissed and despised.

For five years, Henriette, ashamed of the frailty, contemptuous of it, unwilling to admit that the attacks were anything more than “nerves,” had fought the panic of these moments of black suffocation and ignored their recurrences.

Then one evening, seated at her little table in the tiny living-room of her frame house on Ludlow Street, correcting examination papers on fractions, proper and improper, she fainted suddenly down into them.

There was no ignoring it this time, because it so happened that when Henriette sat down to the table and picked up the first sheet of foolscap, with “Martin Giles, Grade four E, Class B, Arithmetic,” written across the top in the monotonous, vertical chirography of stubby fingers, the small, gilt shepherdess-clock on the mantel was striking seven, in the bleating little fashion it had. When Henriette struggled back out of the overwhelming kind of tight blackness that had flowed over and seemed to drown her, the index finger to her right hand still lay against Martin’s rather dreary conclusion and 3½ x 6¼ = 18½, and the shepherdess-clock on the mantel was now pointing to twenty-two minutes to eight.

The next day, after school, she paid her visit to Doctor Dan. The cruel grilling before the fluoroscope had been a harrowing experience. The baring of her breasts to the stethoscope. The close, personal questions that made her lips quiver and recede back against dry teeth, as she tried to answer them. The proddings and the punchings that only the enormously impersonal procedure of Doctor Dan, whose eyes were frighteningly attentive, but whose lips kept smiling, made endurable.

It had been a little awful, too, that moment before he called her back into his office, after she had climbed back into her waist and hooked the high-necked dickey close about her throat.

Not exactly awful with fear. Suppose, after all, there should turn out to be something seriously wrong with her. Well, suppose. Henriette had her God. A precious Presbyterian one. There were Simpsons, notably her parents, who had been dear to her, gone on to a peace more vast than anything finite she could hope to find. There were compensations, even if Doctor Dan’s closely scrutinizing eyes should make findings. Most of the time Henriette believed in her soul’s immortality. It behooved her that this be one of those times. There was something about the loneliness of stalking back into that office, to hear about the possible death of a life that had not been lived, that made Henriette need terribly to believe in her soul’s immortality.

But after all, she had stalked back in, and Doctor Dan had only tilted in his swivel and made a church of his ten fingers and talked of run-down condition—too close application—general overhauling—and here she was at home again in her own chromesque sitting-room that you entered by two short steps straight from the small bricked yard, feeling a little sheepish after the frightening kind of aloneness of that moment of waiting until Doctor Dan called her back into his office after the examination.

Of course she was run down. Mid-year examinations. One of the most nervous classes of youngsters she had had in years. Must cut down on her Saturday Morning Club work. Resign from programme-committee. Dinah, an old family-washerwoman, might be induced to come in once a week for the general going-over of the little house. Yes, run-down. Doctor Dan had been clever. Fortunately, it was Friday. She would sleep an hour later tomorrow, and possibly pass up the Club, although Miriam Chipman was to read a paper on Leonardo da Vinci she particularly wanted to hear. Still, it might be a good idea to lie abed until time to meet Henry at the Blue Bird.

Part of the appalling sense of loneliness, in that moment before her re-entry into Doctor Dan’s office, had been so complexly interwoven with Henry. Thoughts that she beat back from coming to life....

On Monday she was to call back at Doctor Dan’s for drops and further instructions. Run-down. Nothing much to worry about. But served her right for her absurd assurance, all these years, that her tough, lean body somehow had exemption from decay.

Well, anyway, it was sweet and normal and cozy to be back home again after the peep over the precipice into the abyss of loneliness that had yawned so suddenly at her feet. It left her a little weak and woefully in need of a cup of tea, which, somehow, she had not quite the energy to go into the kitchen and brew for herself.

Instead, Henriette just sat in an unwonted kind of idleness in the small sitting-room that smelled of dried grasses and chalk-powder, rocking away in a low chair with sawed-off legs, when, by routine, she should have been washing and peeling her usual two potatoes and pounding herself a bit of round-steak to lay in the skillet to fry, or fluffing up a pair of eggs into omelette. She just sat on, while the twilight began to pour around her, and the footsteps of Henry, who semi-occasionally of a Friday, stopped by to exchange a word about Saturday’s plans, drew up at the door.

It was particularly nice to have him come this evening. It was part of her grateful return to a world of warm normalcy that was safely remote from the cold-steel curve of instruments and the odor of iodoform and frightening kind of loneliness that had so suddenly pervaded her heart. Yes, it was particularly nice to hurry across to light the gas and draw the shades and drag the stiff-backed rocker with the cane inset that Henry always occupied in a sitting-forward attitude, closer to the table.

The dear delight of living, it flashed over her suddenly, was like a flame, unbreakable, though it bend and double upon itself.

It was good and warm and all right to be opening the door for Henry. They were always of few words together. She drew out his rocker and took a bisque wheelbarrow from the mantel, into which he could rap his pipe from time to time, and placed it on the table beside him. While he lit up, she lighted a lamp on a small stand in an opposite end of the room, that had a white china rose-painted shade, and drew up her own chair primly opposite him.

“Getting right nippy,” she said, narrowing her shoulders.

“Is it? I’ve been thinking, Henriette,” he said.

She hoped he had not trumped up some afternoon excursion for their tomorrow. It would be difficult to evade it without telling him of Doctor Dan’s dictum that she take it easy for the next few days. She would no more have told Henry of the ripple across the face of the tranquillity of the routine he had learned to expect from her!

“Here’s an article, Henry, I cut out of The Nation. It’s right in line with some of your ideas about the debt-cancellation. Bankers, it goes on to say, are beginning to realize the idiocy of the Versailles programme——”

“Nonsense! Neither Democrats nor Republicans will face the fact yet for a while that the War was a colossal failure——”

“But this article goes on to say that we are asking a country to mortgage not only itself but its children for two-thirds of a century—it’s as if we were pledging all the little unborn babies to give us their note for a war that took place in this world long before they had ever arrived in it from the land of the unborn.”

“Well, Mr. Mellon and Mr. Hoover know that, and will doubtless let their European friends know they know it; but no man out to get his votes is likely to dare talk such commonsense. But all that’s beside the point. I—I’ve been thinking, Henriette.”

Oh, dear—there was something he must be wanting to do tomorrow!

“Yes?”

“Henriette, something hit me between the eyes today.”

For the moment, she seemed to take him literally, peering forward anxiously.

“What?”

“A realization.”

“They do hit one—that way—sometimes,” she said, and, for no reason she could diagnose, began to tremble.

“Life, Henriette, is passing us by.”

“Why, Henry Schuyler, what are you talking about!”

“It’s been my fault. Twenty years of the rather despicable, detached inertia of a man who thinks so long before he leaps, that by the time he’s ready, the opportunity to leap has passed him by, that’s me. Henriette, I hope the opportunity hasn’t really passed me by.”

“Why, Hen-ry Schuyler, what on earth are you talking about? Why, Henry Schuyler!”

She had to say something. Anything. Because all of a sudden, around Henriette’s brain was racing and racing the excitement of her lifetime.

“Let’s catch on to what there’s left of life. You and me, Henriette.”

“Why, Hen-ry—I believe you’re proposing to me.”

“I am.”

She looked at him in a little short-of-breath fashion that was to become, from then on, a mannerism resulting from her ailment, as it settled, but which made it appear as if life were suddenly too large and delicious a gulp for her to swallow down easily.

“I think I’m going to giggle, Henry. It’s funny.”

“Let’s make it funnier, Henriette.”

“I never did!” said Henriette, and sat with her bony hands held up against her breast, and her mouth slightly open with the thirsty-bird look.

“You never did what?”

The impulse for hilarity was suddenly like a gale in Henriette. She began to laugh.[61]

“I like to hear you do that, Henriette.”

“Oh, Henry! It is funny!”

“Let’s make it funnier! Marry me!”

“When?”

“What’s the matter with now? Good a time as any. Let’s walk over and rout out Ed Sykes for a special license and carry it around to the parsonage.”

She reached out suddenly and caught him by the arm.

“Henry Schuyler, look at me!”

“Yes?”

“Look me in the eye. Who’ve you seen today? Are you being noble?”

“No more so than usual.”

“Nobody’s been telling you I’m run-down or anything? And need a little rest?”

“If they had, Henriette, I wouldn’t be proposing anything so arduous as married life.”

“Sure you haven’t been talking to Doctor Dan——”

“Doctor Who?” he said, with a bland prevarication he was never known to achieve before or after.

The sweet, eager look flowed back into her face.

“They won’t let me teach—married, Henry.”

“Dumb of them,” he said; “but it suits me exactly. My bank-account for the moment is the shape of a hen’s egg, but we can indulge in the amiable hallucination that two can live as cheaply as one.”

“I haven’t a thing to wear.”

“Take my coat, if you think it’s going to be damp talking over to the Sykeses,” he said, and took his flimsy top-coat off a peg.

Her own was hanging on the same peg beside the door, but she slid into his.

“Come.”

“Coming.”

FOOTNOTES: