PART II

1

Far from the highways, a hundred miles, two hundred miles inland from the coast, there are many scattered villages, many road-strung hamlets like Heathville, some in the valleys, some daring the hill-tops, some clustered about an ancient mill now falling to ruin or transformed to some more placid use. It may be that over the rutted, narrow roads stage coaches once swirled by on the way to Albany, disgorging their tired travelers at the largest house whose size alone now proclaims its earlier uses. It may be that people built other houses near the tavern in human gregariousness, longing to feel themselves in touch with the world of affairs. There are other roads over which stage coaches never passed. They remained for the conquest of the rural-delivery mail carrier. There are a few that even the mail carrier does not attempt, that climb and wind and drop to wind again for miles between house and house. Always where those roads begin there stands a row of wooden or metal boxes set on posts of varying height, storm-bent to varying angles, where the postman stops. The row of boxes and the postman’s automobile are to the people who live along that road what stage coach and tavern were to their progenitors—their link with the world of affairs. Otherwise life goes on for them with much the same unbroken round as through two centuries. Birth and death, toil and Sunday rest. Goodnesses, evil. A few fields wrung from the grip of granite, a few growing back to underbrush. Sun and blight, good crops and failures. New shingles on a roof here, a new grave yonder. In every village there is a church, in every one a schoolhouse with a flagpole in front.

The road to Heathville begins at a railroad station where a train from the south stops once a day, not to be outrivaled by the train from the north. As though disdaining things as modern as railways, it rises hurriedly from the station, crosses a bridge and runs for a mile or two along a crest of red sandstone; then it takes its own way up hill and down, beside a tumbling stream winding through fern-sweet woods, past fields where willow and hazel tread along the brooks, past rocky pastures where cattle wear their paths among cedars and laurel and blueberries to graze on the rough thatch of grass between granite outcroppings. At last it emerges into a country gentler because it has submitted to the hand of man. Orchards and great red barns come closer together. Finally, on the summit of the last rocky lift, a white church steeple points towards the gilded cock that sways to the wind and looks down upon a dozen houses.

Anne arrived there at the hour when dusk had faded into night, a kindly curtain softly dropped between her and the life she had left; kindly, as though to blot distress out of her unhappy consciousness; and softly, as though to indicate the measure of the life that was waiting for her in the weeks and years to come. But she was not aware of the dropping of the curtain; she had no sense of being the spectator at a play. The drama, or the tragedy, was of herself. What had been and what was still to come was all that mattered to her. The people in the train, those she had left behind, those she might meet in Heathville, all were no more than settings of her stage. There was no other stage than hers, no other play than this mad misery of which she was the victim, this sequence of events which had caught her up and was carrying her along with it. Yet as at a play, Anne had a sense of definite divisions of time. One act was over. Now she was going through another. Again there should be action, directed by herself, staged by herself, brought to some conclusion of her own contriving. For the time being she was trapped. For months, perhaps for a year, the best she could do would be to escape those irritating contacts, to wait with endurance if not with patience, until she should be physically free again. Looking forward, she had no intention of remaining in the trap forever. What if Brice were not found? What if she had indeed failed with him? What if their marriage were wrecked forever? Once past this miserable bondage of the body, would not her courage and her intention reassert themselves, and her pride? Had those ever failed her? Could one lose, or drop like a garment, all one’s characteristics, merely because one had been mistaken and found one’s self involved in an unwelcome human commonplace like the one awaiting her? This child—of course one became fond of her own child. But she was not of the maternal type, not the sort of woman who would lose her identity in becoming a mother. The child, if it lived—perhaps it would not!—should be properly loved and cared for. Of course, there would be its future to think about. There would be difficulties there, if Brice did not come back. But if he did—ah, he would admit, then, how right she had always been in her ambitions. Yet for the present there was this slow-dragging time ahead. By that, and by the uncertainty about Brice, she was trapped.

Only Nicky had approved of her journey. The thought of it came to Anne on the day she found Miss Willy’s letter; her plan matured quickly, inevitably.

“Oh, Nance dear,” Alice protested. “You can’t go away, not with all this uncertainty.”

“The uncertainty is worse here, Alice, than it will be there. No one knows me there, except Willy. No one will be watching and speculating.”

They were all in the room when she told of her plan, Nicky and Ambrose and the Copelands. George Copeland, large and shy, told her:

“There’s plenty of room here, Anne. Like to have you.”

“I know you would, George. But don’t you see? I’ve got to get away.”

Nicky gave Ambrose a look. Anne understood. They had been talking it over between them, probably quarreling, as always.

“Anne has the right to do what she wants,” Nicky declared. “Brice seems to have done it. Don’t get sentimental about it, George, nor you either, Alice. Anne doesn’t want sympathy, nor a soft bed to lie on. What she wants now is to get away. Don’t you see that? To get away. It strikes me as perfectly natural.”

Alice said nothing. Her eyes rested softly on Anne. Oddly enough, it was Ambrose who made Anne’s way clear for her. The house could be rented. It would bring sixty, perhaps seventy dollars a month, half to be held as interest on the mortgage, and something, of course, for upkeep. There was the money that Ranney Copeland had. George could see to that, properly reinvest it. There would be an assured income, minute, to be sure, but something.

On the train Anne thought of her last words with Nicky. “How did you know?” she had asked, when they had a moment together alone, before parting. “How could you know I wanted to get away?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Nicky returned, with a shrug.

“I never did, before. I wanted to go on into things, not away. Now I want to get away from everything, from myself and everything.”

Nicky gave her a look in which mockery lurked. “Oh, well, as to that! Good luck to you!”

For the last two hours on the train Anne’s thought blurred like the passing landscape. She saw the river, the villages and hills, the woods and fields. She sensed the past, believed she sensed the future. The train was an overheated, rumbling discomfort that had to be endured, and the country it bore her through mattered nothing. Her own physical lassitude reacted upon her mind until both past and future were lost in her miserable realization of the physical. At last the name of her station was called. She looked about her on the dark platform, and almost immediately was aware of the quaint, small person talking as she came. She had forgotten how tiny Miss Willy was, and how intensely herself, whatever the circumstances.

“Annie, dear child! To think of your coming to see me at last! My beet-greens are up—your dear father used to love them so. I remember you didn’t, though. I’ve brought an automobile. It’s Mr. Wilkinson’s. He’s careful, real careful. Where’s your trunk, child? I knew you’d be used to riding in them, coming from the city and all. All those things yours? My, but you must have a lot of clothes. Still, I dare say you’d need ’em. Living like you do. No, I can get in alone. Let me look at you! My, but you’re pale, child. You ain’t sick are you?”

That was Miss Willy.

“And how is dear Brice?” asked Miss Willy, before they were out of the town. “So handsome! I knew he would take good care of you.”

“I want to know how you are,” Anne evaded. “I’ll talk about Brice tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’m well. I’m always well. I can do a day’s work yet, and not have to thank anybody to help me. Why, what do you think, child? Somebody called me an old lady, only the other day. Or maybe a few months ago. Seems like the other day.”

“You’re not old,” Anne said, putting her hand over Miss Willy’s. Cotton gloves, the finger-tips long, too long. Knuckles, work-worn, bony, enlarged. Cotton gloves. Age. She shivered.

“Well, I just guess I am not,” said Miss Willy. “I’m only just seventy-two. That’s not ninety-two, is it? No, nor eighty-two. Oh, I can do a day’s work yet!”

The car lurched on, the chatter continued. Anne caught bits of it as she caught glimpses of woods and fields under the stars.

“The day you were married. So sweetly innocent. All in white. I couldn’t help crying. Going off with the man of your heart. So handsome. Woman’s lot in life. Life is hard for some. Not that I mean—good gracious, no! Dear Brice! So good of him to let you come to see me. Good of him to spare you.”

On and on it went, on and on. Her childhood—like that, on and on.

“Each day brings it own troubles. Not that I mean—no, of course not. But sufficient unto the day—you know. Annie dear—you know!”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“I believe you weren’t listening. It’s pretty scenery, here in the glen. Too dark now to see. But you will see it. You’re going to stay a while, ain’t you? Annie, ain’t you going to stay a while? Come so far and all?”

“Yes. I’m going to stay—a while.”

“Dear Brice. So good of him to let you come. I guess he thought you needed the change. It’s wonderful the way a man will do everything for one he loves. So romantic. Like Mazeppa. Or Hero and that what’s-his-name—the one that swam the river.”

“Leander—wasn’t it?”

“Leander. Yes. Pa had a horse once named Leander. Sorrel. But I’m sure I wouldn’t want anybody to risk his life swimming a river or anything for me. Human life—the breath of the Almighty.”

What was she saying? Was it really as bewildering as it sounded, or was Anne’s own mind chaotic? It didn’t matter. She heard herself answering again. “Not a river, was it? A strait.”

“It’s the same thing. Salt water. And whales. Most uncomfortable, I should think. Night air’s always damp. Especially if the weather’s cold. That reminds me. I do hope Dorilliam won’t leave the milk before we get there. It’ll sour before morning, if he does.”

At last the chatter ceased. The car made an abrupt turn. Miss Willy grasped Anne’s arm as it veered. A small house loomed in the darkness.

“I was afraid to leave the lamp burning,” Miss Willy said. “You wait outside, child, while I strike a light.”

The milk was on the doorstep, and a large black cat that Anne trod on in the dark. Her bags were set inside at last.

“The kitchen’s no place to bring you into,” said Miss Willy, “but I got to see to the milk.”

Anne sank into a rocking-chair, closed her eyes. In a moment Miss Willy was back. “My goodness, you’re pale as an appagotion!” she cried. “I’ll get you some tea. ’Twon’t take a minute.”

She talked while she busied herself. At the table, the cat jumped into her lap. “Poor Buster! Poor little Buster! The lady didn’t mean to walk on his tail. Auntie’s baby! Ain’t he handsome, Annie? Is your tea right?”

“You always had a black cat,” Anne said. Willy’s voice, the jumble of her words. Long ago, childhood, strangely mixed with the present. What—what—oh, that languor, that heaviness, and the chatter going on.

“I call myself his auntie. Cats are so sensitive. He’d feel dreadfully hurt, Buster would, if he suspected he wasn’t a member of the family. I never was married. I don’t like to say I’m—but he knows as much as a child. You’ll see, Anne, he knows just as much as a child.”

That kitchen. Sounds going on and on. Later, the narrow dark hall and the straight flight of stairs, the bedroom above, the bed. Longing for rest, for cool sheets.

“Now you sleep as late as you can,” said Miss Willy. “You just make yourself right at home here. To think of your coming to see me.”

Sleep. This low-ceilinged room her refuge. Sounds outside, perhaps only insects, but like a lawn-mower, clicking, rattling, whirling. They reminded her of too much. Of people on porches, of Brice, walking, walking behind a lawn-mower, of things she wanted to shut out of her memory forever.

Yet that night she slept soundly and without dreams. She awoke slowly to realization of where she was. A band of sunlight lay on the floor, and through the open windows came the soft sounds of earliest summer, birds, and a low humming that she could not place. Far off, someone was whistling. She had not wound her watch. She went to the window, but to her eyes there was no beauty. The loveliness of the rolling hills, the freshly green pastures and orchards, the little garden below with its neat rows of vegetables already proclaiming old Willy’s diligence—this was only the country. Always she had thought of the country as of a place where lives were rough and barren of enjoyment, crude, as necessary to the maintenance of man as were mills, but as far beyond her interest as the manufacture of soap. The morning was warm, but she shivered. To be here, in this emptiness! That church up the road; across the way the gray house with an ell, and the few other houses beyond—what sort of people could live in those houses, center their lives about that bare church? Bare—yes, that was it; she had come to this bareness, to hide. To hide; but not to remain. Impossible, that. Time would pass, the long dragging months. Meanwhile, she would have to make things as easy as possible. Willy was happy at having her. Willy was kind and willing, devoted.

“I let you get your sleep out,” Miss Willy said, beaming, when at last Anne went down to the kitchen. “I always say there’s nothing like sleep for the young. As for me, I like to get up in the morning, so’s to get my chores out of the way. My, you look pretty!”

Anne breakfasted at the kitchen table, the cat Buster staring up at her with yellow eyes and Miss Willy talking the while.

“Auntie’s boy was naughty this morning. He caught a poor, poor little robin. Come out to the porch, Annie-my-dear. I’ll show you the nest.”

Anne felt no interest in nests, nor in the wide-opened beaks that arose from the one in the grapevine, but it was easier to follow old Willy than to remain indoors. Alone, she would have to think. The garden was a tangled, blossomy place, iris and peonies massed in bloom, roses budding; bees hummed there, a cat-bird called.

“The flowers take care of themselves,” said Miss Willy. “Funny how the Lord seems to be able to trust things that are only meant for looks to take care of themselves, while what’s meant for use has to give us a lot of hard work and all. I want you should see my vegetables.”

They passed a row of flaunting rhubarb. A cooped hen beat back and forth behind slats because her chicks were rambling and scratching under the broad leaves.

“There, look at my beet-greens. And the radishes. They’re not quite ready. I got the peas in good and early. Ain’t it a handsome sight?”

Anne had to say something; the small bright-eyed face was expectant. “Wonderful! Who does it all for you?”

Miss Willy laughed. “I just knew you’d ask that. Nobody does it but me. Not a soul helps me. I just guess I can do my day’s work yet.”

“But, Willy, you don’t plant and dig. You can’t!”

The little head tossed. “Oh, don’t I? It’s my garden. I do it all. Well”—she gave Anne a fleeting look—“well—all but the spading. Dorilliam does that. I don’t want to take praise for what I don’t do. And—my gracious!—that reminds me! I ought to’ve gone over this morning and had him drive down for your trunk. Now I can’t get him till noon. You did bring a trunk, didn’t you? You going to stay a while?”

Suddenly Anne felt dizzy. “Can’t we go back to the house?” she asked. “Can’t we go in? I must tell you——”

In the cool kitchen Anne told her. Miss Willy sat upright, sometimes her eyes on Anne’s face, sometimes on the hands folded tightly together on her apron. She asked no question, made no comment. When Anne had stopped speaking she sat for another moment silent; her lips twitched a little. Then she said, not looking at Anne:

“And to think it was me you came to. I—I’ve always wanted a baby to hold all I’d a mind to.”

Anne pressed her hands to her cheeks, started to speak again.

“I wouldn’t talk any more, if I were you,” said Miss Willy. “I can see you been through a lot. Talking won’t help it. You’ll feel different, after the baby comes.”

“Ah—different! I hope so. But the baby is such a small part of it.”

“No it ain’t, either. You’ll see.”

“I suppose there is always a way out of everything,” Anne said, from her mood of utter weariness. “We may both die.”

Miss Willy stood up. “Now look here, Anne Warren! I’m glad you come to my house. I’m glad to have you here. I want you should stay. But it’s my house, and there’s one thing I won’t have in my house. I won’t have the Lord’s ways blasphemed nor questioned.”

Anne flushed. “I can go, I suppose.”

“Well, you won’t go. You’ll stay where you be. But you’ll use what sense you got while you’re doing it.”

“Willy——!”

“I mean it. And I’ll say whatever I’ve a mind to. There ain’t anybody else to do it, and I knew you when you were a child. You were a little cantankerous imp, all the time wanting your own way, no matter what it might lead to. Many’s the time I longed to turn you over my knee. Many’s the time I wondered whether Solomon didn’t know better than folks nowadays, when he said that about sparing the rod. Still and all, a man with as many wives as he had must have been tried beyond patience when it come to the children. So I never laid hands on you, more’s the pity, and you’re past spanking, now. But you’ll stay here and act sensible. And you won’t talk about dying. That’s in the Lord’s hands, not yours.”

Anne stood up. How weary she was, how spent. How futile and foolish old Willy, with her primitive talk. That to go on for months. Yet after her waiting was over there would be other months. “Dear old Willy, you are kind. I want to stay here for a time, until—afterwards. I can pay a little.”

“Well then, so you shall,” said Miss Willy. “It’s a grand thing, to feel independent. Like me.”

2

The days were long, but she dreaded the fall of evening, when the insects began their rattling song. There were letters from Alice. Twice Ambrose wrote, inclosing the monthly check. There was no word of Brice. On that subject Ambrose wrote only a line each time. Alice recounted in detail, from which Anne’s mind shrank away, his endeavors and George’s. What it all summed up to was that Brice had vanished. And the crickets and locusts clicked on, like lawn-mowers. George still wished for publicity, but to that Anne refused her consent. She could see those headlines, or the veiled salaciousness of those small surreptitious paragraphs in the column marked “Personal.” Her affairs should never be aired there. Never would she consent to that final blow to her pride, never to the surmises and smiles that would cause. Besides, now she did not want him to come back, did not want to see him. He had done enough, hurt her too much, put too much upon her. Let him stay away forever! She tore Alice’s letter to bits, wept with anger. Miss Willy, hearing the sobs, ran to the gray house across the road, came back with the doctor.

It was the beginning of a friendship. A grizzled man, humorous, short of temper, Anne liked him. Gradually she came to look forward to his visits, always unexpected, apt to be lingering.

“Well, what of it?” he asked her one day when she complained of a headache. “Be gone by tomorrow.”

She was nettled. That, from a doctor. “But what of today? It’s really quite bad.”

“I dare say. But you’ve got to expect a pain here or there. I’m not going to dose you for that, Mrs. Denison.”

“Do you treat all your patients this way?”

“Not all. But part of the time. Words to you, syrup to others. When there’s nothing the matter with ’em.”

“You think there is nothing the matter with me?”

“You’re sharing the common lot. Women in your condition always think it’s uncommon. But it isn’t.”

She flushed. Her condition, the common lot. “I know what you mean. But my position is not quite the same——”

“I wonder if you do know what I mean?” he interrupted. “I’m not thinking of your physical condition. Call it mental. Or moral, if you like.”

“Doctor Severance! Moral!”

“Yes. Not speaking of morals. You find yourself in a situation. I’m a physician, so I called it a condition. You think it’s uncommon, unique, I dare say. It is not. Not a bit of it!”

“Who has been talking to you of my affairs, Doctor Severance?”

“You have. Not in words, no. Nor anyone else. No need to. Plain enough. Something’s gone wrong. You think it’s shaking the world. All women do. A teacup drops, there’s no other teacup. But isn’t there? Patterns vary, of course. But there remain plenty of teacups. All hold tea or coffee, most have handles.” He smiled, kindly, tolerantly. “Be mistress of yourself, Mrs. Denison, though your teacups smash.”

Anne stood up, biting her lip. “It seems to me,” she said, “that I have been mistress of myself!”

“Possibly too much, in a sense,” said he. “Bluff. All women use bluff. Some can’t find anything better. Some don’t want to. Some don’t need to. Some get away with it, even to bluffing themselves. You’ve been trying to do that, Mrs. Denison. I doubt if you can.”

“What else can one do?” she cried, with a gesture of impotence.

“Ha! Think it out. There’s a prescription for you. A new one,” he chuckled, “for headaches.”

Others of his prescriptions she tried to follow. She must walk every day, he insisted, meet the neighbors. But she had never walked without objective. Up the hill past the church, over the covered bridge to the store, where men and children stopped talking when she entered and stared at her curiously; in the other direction, down the road to nowhere, and back again. There was no sense in that. Better stay in the garden with Willy, or sit in the kitchen while Willy was busy at stove or sink. Aimless walks were intolerable.

“All right, then,” said the doctor. “See that hill over there? You walk to the top of that hill every day. No detours. There’s a brook or two. Jump them. Bit of a marsh. Find the tough clumps of grass. Wet feet won’t hurt you. Rocks. Go over them. Don’t go around. Straight up and straight back, if you want to.”

“But there are cattle!” she protested.

“Plenty,” said he. “Good company, cattle. Try to find out what they’re thinking.”

“But the sun is so hot!”

“All right. Go at night, then,” he laughed. “Good medicine, madam!”

For a time she obeyed him. When the sun dropped below the hill’s summit she would go warily down through the fields, over the marsh and the deep, narrow brooklets, watchfully among the cattle who stared, slowly followed, at last overcame their own shyness and her panic and nosed at her hands and her skirt.

“Take ’em some salt,” said Miss Willy.

Anne laughed aloud the first time she felt the warm roughness of their tongues on her palm and discovered that after all she was not afraid.

At first she thought only of reaching the top of the hill and returning. So much to be done with, got out of the way. But one day she lingered there until sunset. Another, she came back with her hands full of forget-me-nots. It was cool on the shaded hillside, warm on the crest, where the sun still shone. The rocks had gray velvet over them. There were strange little blossoms in the grass. Things she had never noticed before began to present themselves. The walk began to be not merely a prescription, a climb up a hillside. Gradually it was becoming an adventure, an exploration. But there were days so hot that she could not go out, even when the shadows were long; days when the walls of the house seemed to flicker in the intensity of the heat like the air above a fire. Then even the twitter of birds rasped her nerves. The humming of bees and the cooing of doves were as irritating as a siren’s whistle. There were days when she was too languid to do more than lie on her bed and endure; other hours when the attempt at enduring became almost madness, when she could have shrieked aloud in protest at her helplessness. That was what hurt. To be helpless, to have to wait, to endure, rebellious and bitter at the thought of what life had done to her. Life, and Brice. No, she did not want Brice to come back. She hated Brice, hated those years when his silence had fooled her, hated her memories and could not get away from them. They pursued. To look at the sun did not shut them out, nor to cover her eyes. Memories? They leaped out at her. That sofa. Brice’s frown of anxiety. The chair in the living-room, hideous, out of place. Why hadn’t he let her tuck it away upstairs? Why did she remember it so?

When she had been there a while the neighbors began to call. Prim women, strangely dressed, figures bulging or angular.

“Oh, I can’t see anyone,” Anne said, when the first ones came. “Tell them I’m not at home, or something.”

Miss Willy stood in the bedroom door. For a moment she pressed her lips together. Then she said, “Now look here, Annie Warren, I won’t have you behave so. They’ve come to call. You put on that lavender dress and come down.”

“You’re not dressed up,” Anne said, smiling a little. During her childhood Willy had called her Annie. She had loathed the diminutive. Willy knew it. But Willy knew, too, that in submitting to that Anne would have to submit to more. It held her in bounds, became the symbol of Willy’s authority. Willy was taking the same line now.

“I’m folks. I’m not company. You do as I tell you.”

Anne did more, did her best, but she could not make conversation with them. Their talk was of gardens and children, of intimate illnesses and more intimate affairs in their neighbors’ houses.

“I suppose they are curious about me,” she said, one day, when she was watching old Willy perform the rite of making doughnuts.

“That’s as may be,” said Miss Willy, dryly. “When you’ve lived in the country as long as I have you’ll know the easiest way to stop folks from bein’ curious is to get in the first word. I told ’em you are my niece. I lied. But I don’t doubt the Lord will forgive me. I said you’s a widow, come to live with me to help out. I said you’s going to take care of me in my old age. No harm in that. It’s a long way off from me yet, praise be. You don’t have to be scared.”

“Willy! Do I deserve that?” Anne cried, not so much in protest as in wonderment. It was like looking into a mirror, and finding an unaccustomed expression on her own face.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Miss Willy, dryly. “I been wondering a good deal. I don’t know what you aim to do. But it seems to me you’re not bracing yourself. You’re hiding away from yourself. Trying to. Nobody can, in the end, far as I know.”

Anne thought a moment. “Yes,” she said, “yes. That is just what I am trying to do. What else is there?”

“You got your life to live.”

“My life. You call it my life. It is not. This thing that is coming, and what Brice has done to me—my life, my own life has been taken away from me. I’m walled in. I’m trapped.”

“Most folks are walled in, with one thing or another. I never met one that wasn’t. You ain’t making use of your wall.”

“Use of it?”

“What else are walls for?” asked Willy, waving a long fork over the frying pan. “Folks wouldn’t build ’em for nothing. They don’t, if it’s only to get the rocks out o’ the fields. God doesn’t, either. Walls are useful, if it’s only to brace up against.”

“Oh, what can I do? It’s easy enough to talk about bracing, setting one’s feet firm! My whole world has slipped. What is left?”

Miss Willy smiled. “I am, for one thing.” She returned to the table, began to cut out more rings of dough.

Anne reached her hand across. “Willy, I’m not ungrateful. I appreciate everything you do for me. I know I don’t pay what it’s worth——”

“Now look here, Anne Warren! I take your pay ’cause I got to, and to make you feel better. But when you talk about gratitude—well, that’s your business, not mine. Folks that do things for gratitude do them from vanity. I hope I ain’t vain. Maybe I am. But I try not to be. Our Lord wasn’t vain when he healed the leper and raised up the dead.”

She dropped a plateful of rings into the smoking fat. Anne’s eyes were smarting. “Willy, you make me ashamed,” she murmured.

“That’s good,” said Miss Willy.

“What can I do? Don’t you see how helpless I am?”

“Well, since you ask, there’s one thing you can do. You can think of the folks around here as folks, not lumps of clay. That’s what you been doing. But you listen to me, Anne Warren! There’s all sorts of clay. I’m not saying you’re our sort. Some clay’s good for bricks, and some for fine china. There’s some that ain’t good for a thing, as far as I know, but to keep things from growing. Still and all, the Almighty used clay. Didn’t look about him for anything better. He’d just finished making a new world, too, all spick and span, with flowers and waters and snakes and everything. Might have taken his pick, but he found clay plenty good enough. There! That’s the last. Want a hot one?”

Anne took the doughnut, went out of doors to a chair under the apple tree. The old woman’s talk had startled her. Notwithstanding a lurking sense of shame and deserved admonishment her thoughts were not of herself. Where had old Willy learned her philosophy? Surely philosophy, or wisdom, did not accrue to one. It was no thistle-seed, to be blown white-winged on the wind, to germinate wherever it fell, on rock or roadside or—clay. Willy’s life had been bare, so bare. Anne’s thought brought back, in one of those oddly photographic flashes with which the mind visualizes a long train of circumstance in a single picture, the coming of Willy to her father’s house and events leading up to it. There had been many women, called, in the small-town phraseology, housekeepers. Between the time of her mother’s death and the coming of Willy, Professor Warren’s continuous advertisements for help were the joke and the pity of his neighbors. Anne could not remember her mother, but she remembered the succession of housekeepers, not as individuals, but as people who got in her way, who tried to restrain her, on whom she used all her childish arts of retaliation and torment until they left in despair or dudgeon. She remembered the day when Miss Willy came, a small gray-clad person with a carpet bag that instantly claimed the child’s attention and afterward became an object of admiration. There was no other like it in town, and she used to bribe Alice into docility, and even occasionally Nicky, by a sight of it in the attic. Sometimes Nicky held out for the further bribe of being allowed to march up and down the length of the attic with it in her hands, while Alice and Anne would chant, “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.” Alice always wanted to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” but Nicky and Anne agreed that a carpet bag was not an appropriate implement for Christian soldiers. Besides, one couldn’t step as quickly to that tune as to the other.

But that first day Anne had eyed Miss Willy solemnly, biding her time. She had no doubt that this new one would be like the others, easy to vanquish.

“Her name’s Willy,” she told her father that night at the supper table. The professor, harassed, poor man, as he always was when confronted with his daughter after a long day at the high school, weakly remonstrated. “That’s what she said it was,” Anne insisted. “She told me to call her that.”

“But, surely,” the professor protested, weakly, looking to the end of the table for help. Miss Willy was all placidity.

“She can, if she’s a mind to,” said she.

The good man’s frown of helpless perplexity had not lessened. “But surely, there must be another name, a name more, ah——”

“I know,” Miss Willy had answered, tranquilly. “Folks do seem to find it kind o’ queer. But that’s what I was christened. After my pa. Not Willamena nor anything like that. Just plain Willy.”

“Then I think your—ah—last name——”

“It don’t make much difference. That’s Willis.”

Anne was still solemn, her eyes demurely downcast. Willy Willis. She’d know how to deal with that! But her hopes and intentions met their small Waterloo no later than that same night. The campaign was short and decisive.

“I get to bed by myself,” she told Willy. But Willy replied, “Not this night, you don’t. Not till I get those snarls out o’ your hair, anyway.”

“I like it this way. I don’t like to have anybody else comb my hair.”

“Liking ain’t getting. You stand still. I won’t hurt any more than I got to. But those snarls come out.”

So Miss Willy remained, saw her married, and a year or two later watched while the professor’s life ebbed, while Anne and Brice were hurrying towards the town Anne had left with so little reluctance. Then she had come back to Heathville. That was old Willy’s life, as Anne knew it. Where and how had wisdom, philosophy, come to her?

That evening Anne asked, “Willy, have you ever lived anywhere else but here and with father and me?”

Miss Willy was knitting. “No,” she said. “Never was much of a mover.”

Anne smiled. “How did you happen to come to us?”

“I wanted my freedom,” said Willy.

“Freedom?”

“Yes. I guess maybe most folks do, sooner or later. My aunt was a good woman. This was her house. She took me in when ma died. But I wanted my freedom. So when I saw your pa’s advertisement, I packed up and went. Then I come back again. The house had been shut up for years. My land, it was dirty! I don’t know when I’ve had such a good time as I did cleaning it up. And the garden all weeds. When I was a girl, this place used to seem kind of little, shut off in the hills the way it is and all. There didn’t seem to be anything to do. Now—dear me, sirs! The days ain’t half long enough.”

“I must help you more,” Anne said.

Miss Willy looked over her spectacles, went on with her knitting, changing a needle. “I wasn’t hinting,” said she. “I like the work. Funny, it’s just what my aunt used to do, when I was a girl. Maybe the difference is now it’s my own. I don’t know. Only, I’m free now. I guess folks get to know about that, when they’re old. I had a squirrel once. It lived in a cage for years. Went round and round on a wheel thing at one side of the cage. I thought, ‘Poor thing! It’s old. It ain’t got long to live. I’ll give it its freedom before it dies.’ So I set the cage on the porch, and opened the door. The squirrel went out like a flash, and ran up a tree. But the next day it was back in its cage again, making the wheel go round and round.”

There were days when the heat was less, when midsummer quietude brooded upon the hills, and fields exhaled the odors of growing things and woods exuded their winter-stored moisture to the summons of the wind across the tree-tops; long mornings when Anne listlessly washed the dishes and made the beds and dusted, while old Willy toiled outside; and long afternoons when Anne walked, sometimes on the road through the glen, sometimes to the doctor’s prescribed hill-top and back, sometimes, as her strength grew, to farther pastures. To those walks she was driven and lured: driven by her desire to get away from the house, from Willy’s chatter, from her own thoughts; and lured as a child goes looking for fairies by a feeling that never quite came to consciousness that somewhere, sometime, she would find something, some balm of the spirit, some response or enlightenment. Sometimes she walked in desperation, taking with her the burden of her rebellion. This place, to be buried here! She must, must get away, anywhere, anywhere. But at least the long walks gave her dreamless sleep. In August Nicky came for a Sunday. Alice and the children were at the seashore. Nicky was in a quiet mood; they spent the long afternoon under the apple tree.

“You look at me as though I were one of your ‘cases,’” Anne said, aware of Veronica’s covert inspection.

“Do I?” Nicky calmly responded. “I wasn’t thinking about you at all, if you want to know. I was thinking about myself—and Ambrose.”

“He’d be glad to know that.”

Nicky was lounging back, one knee over the other, arms under her head. “You know, Anne—this mess of yours—it’s made me like Ambrose rather better.”

“Because I’ve proved your contention that marriage is a failure? Made you think you are right in your eternal argument with Ambrose?”

“Oh, no. I always knew I was. But Ambrose has been so mad about it. He was always so darned meek, before. I rather prefer Ambrose mad.”

“The rôle of the strong man, the cave-man,” Anne laughed. “Even you can’t escape the feminine complex, Nick, the longing to cling, to have something to cling to.”

Nicky chuckled. “There’s only one George,” she said, cryptically. “And time hasn’t finished with George yet, nor with Alice. One thing I’ve noticed about clinging vines, feminine and otherwise. They rot the stump they cling to. If it isn’t a stump, they smother it, keep it from fruiting. And if by any chance the old tree’s too strong for them, the vine is no good. There you are.”

Anne sat up. “Well, I have failed. I admit that. Or to put it the other way, maybe the right way, Brice failed. But just the same, Nicky, it does not have to be failure. There ought to be a sense of duty, if nothing more, that would bind. Brice failed in that. I never did.”

“Didn’t you? But anyway, this rot about duty. Oh, I know it has its uses. It helps along the propagation of the race. But when you think what it does to poor old humanity—! No, old girl. If I should marry I’d have to be jolly well certain that there’d be something more left after ten years than mere duty. That salt would have no savor for me. As it hasn’t for Brice, apparently.”

“I have stopped thinking about Brice. I prefer to stop talking about him.”

“All right, after I’ve given you a message from Ambrose. They’ve done all they can to trace Brice. Ambrose asked me to say that he cannot collect on the life insurance for you. Not evidence enough. He wants to know if you’d like to sell the house. He’d buy it himself on a quit-claim deed. Nobody else would, without Brice’s signature.”

“How Ambrose must have loved offering me charity,” said Anne, bitterly. “Tell him I thank him beyond words. But I have enough. Between forty and fifty a month.”

Nicky sat up, too. “Good Lord, Anne! Is that all? What’ll you—do?” she cried.

Anne bit her lip, made a helpless gesture with her hands.

Yet gradually, during the weeks she had been in Heathville, her sense of values had been readjusting themselves. Here there was all but nothing to spend money for.

“Why, you’re richer than anybody in this whole village,” Miss Willy had said, “unless it’s that Kent man and the doctor. Even the minister only gets two hundred a year, and he’s well off. Forty dollars a month—my land!”

She was watching the old woman at work in her garden one day, squatting between the rows, weeding. “Why do you work so for those things, stupid things like beets and carrots?” she asked.

“They’re for winter. The cabbages, too, and potatoes. Of course.”

“But why do you grow them at all? Why not buy them?”

Miss Willy looked up. “I just told you. They are for winter. What else’ll we eat?”

“But there’s a store!”

“A store? My goodness, child! Folks around here don’t buy things like them at the store. It don’t keep ’em, anyway. But even if it did, who’d buy what they grow in the garden?”

Yet even then Anne did not dream of the ways and means, the contrivings and savings, that went into life in the village, Miss Willy’s and that of her neighbors. Their meals were plain enough. Anne observed, without comment, that whatever was bought or brought in from the garden was eaten, sooner or later, to the last mouthful, by human or cat or fowl. Nothing was wasted.

She had noticed the clothes worn by the women, and there was the affair of Miss Willy’s best bonnet, donned only for Sundays and the monthly church supper. “I do think it becomes me,” said Willy complacently. “I’ve had it six years going on seven. It’s just as good as new.”

Then there was the boy Dorilliam. The name had amused her. She repeated it, smiling, one evening, and Miss Willy said, “Yes, it’s real high-sounding. He’s the seventh. Mis’ Wells, she wanted a girl, all the rest being boys. Had her heart set on calling it Dora. When it come, well, she was always romantic, Mis’ Wells was, and she never had much of a chance to break out. I guess it did her some good to call him Dorilliam.”

During the midsummer heat Anne protested against the old woman’s eternal work in the garden; she would pay Dorilliam to hoe.

“But it’s twenty cents an hour!” Miss Willy cried. “My goodness, child! Twenty cents for one hour, and sugar the price it is.”

In the early coolness of September her walks became longer. The heaviness of her languor was less, yet one day when she reached the crest of the hill and sat down in the shade of a weather-worn maple she knew that she was tired, not with that terrible weight of the spirit which had shadowed her for so long, borne her down, but as a workman is tired at noon and sits down, gratefully, that his body may refresh itself with food and rest and cessation from toil. From where she sat no habitation of man was to be seen. The world seemed a place empty of animate life, for even the cattle were below in the marsh, out of sight. Haze lay on the hills, merging them into the sky. The patches of sweetfern were already darkening to ripeness, and the rock at her side was warm to the touch. Asters and goldenrod glowed in the sunlight, the sumach was red. Beyond, down the valley, here and there in the woods, a white birch shone, slender, fastidious, seeming to tread its way daintily forward to the eye’s finding, like a conscious beauty at a ball. Upon the meadows cloud-shadows lingered, and under the maple was shade, quiet and shade.

Different. Why were things different, today? Many times she had looked on the same scene, inwardly shrunk from its emptiness. But this quietude in the drenching sunlight and the cool shade, this was not emptiness. Peace. Yes, it was a sort of peace, but something was going on in it, through it. There was life working. Not hurrying, not crowding, silent, but working on and on. Trees gnarled by winter storms, rocks laid bare and carved by frost and ice; a land worn rugged and seamed from its age-long battle, but still with vitality and a germ of things to be, things that would die to grow again, grow and become lovely with a perpetual renewing. And even after fruition and harvest, through winter, to spring, on and on, ever to be renewed. Life. Suddenly, there under the sheltering boughs of the old tree, there facing the sunlight, she put her hand to her heart. Another heart within her was beating, another life had stirred.

For an hour she sat there, her arms clasping her knees, her head bowed above them. A great stillness pervaded her. Life going on, herself part of it, needed. That was it, needed. Fitting in with it. Necessary to its scheme, a part of its plan; a utensil of service, and servant as well. And for so long she had thought there was no plan at all; or, if there were, that its parts were hopelessly jumbled. Strange. If one were a part, or were needed, then there was something to do, something to wait for, to hope for.

At last she stood up, and looked again over the drowsy loveliness of the world. Slowly she went down the hill, and placidly. There was nothing to hurry for, no need now to walk and walk so that she could not think. When she came in sight of the spire and houses of Heathville, even those looked different, less poor and sordid, friendlier. Miss Willy was not in the kitchen. There came a faint echo of hammering from the direction of the hen-house, and Anne took her way towards it. The downy chicks that had scratched under the rhubarb had long since grown into frisky birds large enough to be promoted to the privilege of roosting with their mothers and aunts in the hen-house. Miss Willy was there now, mysteriously wielding a hammer.

“What on earth are you doing?” Anne asked, from the doorway. “Carpentering—you?”

Miss Willy turned, her mouth as full of nails as a seamstress’s of pins. “I’m making a walk for that poor blind chicken,” said she. She took the nails from between her lips, and pointed with pride to a contrivance she had achieved, a board slanting from floor to roost, with occasional cross-pieces on it. “There, look at that! Ain’t that grand? Dunno why I didn’t think of it before. That poor chicken has been trying its level best to jump on the roost every night, and bumping its head on the board and all. Must a felt like a body knocking at the Gate and Saint Peter away on vacation.”

“But what good is that queer-looking board?”

“Can’t you see, child? Use your eyes! That’s a walk. I been coming out here every night to put that poor thing on its roost. Come winter, and I’d get good and tired of it. Besides, think of its feelings. Now I’ll just train it to peck around and find its own walk and climb up. Get on the roost like its folks, without having to be helped all the time. Nobody likes to be helped all the time.”

Anne’s face softened a little. “And I would have killed that blind chicken long ago,” she said, thoughtfully.

“Well, then, I wouldn’t. Lots o’ folks with two eyes in their head see less than that chicken and have no more sense. It’s got a right to live.”

3

When autumn came, Dorilliam set up a stove in the front parlor, that room which until Anne’s arrival had been kept for the most part closed, a ceremonial elegance of which Miss Willy was very proud. The house itself had none of the dignity of the doctor’s and some of the other older ones. Apparently it represented the imaginative efflorescence of some country builder of half a century before, limited in means and method. There were but two sizable rooms on the first floor, parlor and kitchen. Miss Willy’s bedroom opened off from the kitchen, little more than a large cupboard, its space amply filled with bed and pine bureau, while back of the kitchen, longer than the house itself, was the shed where wood was stored and a miscellany of oddments that were mysteries to Anne. She had pleaded to have the wall-papered fireboard taken away from the parlor. An open fire would have made of the room a different place. But Miss Willy looked troubled.

“But how’d we heat your bedroom?” she asked. “Mine’s real nice and warm, opening off from the kitchen like it does. But if the stove pipe don’t run up through yours, child, how’ll we heat it?”

For the first time Anne understood the purpose of the round hole in her floor that had seemed so mysterious, the hole through which she could see one red rose on the parlor carpet. She had supposed that it was left for the purpose of being able to look down upon callers. It amused her to be brought face to face with so elemental a problem as heating a house. It had startled her to find that there was no bathroom, surprised her that the water in the kitchen came from a pump, not from a faucet. Yet those things did not concern her, and in the matter of the fireplace she yielded. In time Dorilliam set up a stove. When she first saw Willy come staggering in with an armful of wood, she protested. It was not woman’s work. Dorilliam must do it. But thereafter, mysteriously, the fire in the stove seemed to feed itself, and in the evenings old Willy would drop wearily into her chair and nod. Vaguely Anne wondered why she was so tired, now that the garden work was over, the small crops harvested and stored away in the cellar. Yet, after all, the endless monotony of the days were enough to weary anyone. Morning, drudgery, night, morning again, and more drudgery. That summed up life in Heathville, as far as she could discern.

With the autumn rains her restlessness returned and times of rebellion, now not against the coming of the child, but at the aridity she was living through. Alice wrote insistently that she should come to stay with her and George, later to go to a hospital. Anne refused less because of reluctance to accept Alice’s bounty than because she was unwilling to encounter old friends, old acquaintances, to have to meet their pity or amusement. Now she would not let her mind dwell upon the difficulties of the future because that would be bad for the child. This was a time when she could do nothing but wait, and this was as good a place as any. Later, of course, she must find some means of making a real livelihood. Live in Heathville, her child, hers? Of course she would find some means of escaping that.

During the radiant days of October she frequently drove with the doctor on his rounds in a small battered car that possessed a personality of its own. She liked the doctor. He was “country-queer,” as he described himself, but his was the only mind she had encountered in Heathville that could think, or express its thoughts. As to that, she believed that Dorilliam’s mother and the other women she had met did not think at all, but lived by instinct, or went about their tasks like trained animals, except that for them there was no reward of caress or tidbit. Purposeless, stupid, they seemed to her. Dr. Severance was neither. He called his car Sally.

“Named her after an old mare I had. Died in the harness, as I hope to. One thing she does almost as well as old Sally did. She gets me there.”

Yet apparently Sally did not always hold that intention. More than once the doctor had to dismount and do mysterious things to Sally, almost at times, as Anne once told him, laughing, amounting to major operations. Once Sally’s temperament overcame her not far from a small brown cottage set back in the woods; after some minutes of futile ministrations on the doctor’s part, Sally still remained where she had stopped, soundless and motionless. Anne had stepped down and was walking along the road through the yellow leaves. As she repassed the cottage a man came out and after a look towards the car beyond smiled at Anne. She had become used by now to the friendly custom in the country of taking acquaintanceship for granted. They walked back to the car together. The doctor, hands on hip, glared in mock ferociousness at the other man.

“Come to try one of your faith cures on her, I suppose,” he growled.

The other man chuckled. “Might try it on you, Tom,” he remarked. “You’re a little excited, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve worked on the blame thing an hour at least. She won’t go,” spluttered the doctor.

“That’s like you medical men. You fiddle and tinker and dose, and think you’ve done all of it. You’re always forgetting there’s something else.”

The doctor snorted. “I’ve heard you say that before! Look here, you Rufus—you use faith on Sally and get her to start, and I’ll take up some stock in that faith of yours.”

The man called Rufus had moved to the side of the car. His hair was quite white, his shoulders were stooped, and life had worn marks on his face; but he bore the indefinable stamp of the intellectual. Anne decided at once that he was not a native of Heathville. He seemed to smile easily, or else the smile never quite left his eyes. Now he bent towards the driving-wheel of the car, peering as though from near-sightedness, and stood up to grin at the doctor.

“I’ve long since discovered, as I’ve told you before—as you say, Tom, quite as you say!—that there is some eternal spark that moves things. There must be a spark, Tom, somewhere. In the case of your Sally why not turn on your spark, Tom, and see——”

The doctor’s mouth opened. A blank look came over his face. But he, too, came up to the side of the car. He reached over, touched a small lever, and instantly Sally responded with rattles and tremblings.

“Hell!” said the doctor. Anne laughed aloud, long and gayly as she had not laughed in months. “I beg your pardon,” the doctor muttered. “Ladies present.”

But Anne’s laugh still rang out, and the man called Rufus was chuckling with her. The doctor was red. He climbed into the car.

“Who was that?” asked Anne, when they had passed the brown house with the woods at its back.

“Old fool,” said the doctor.

Anne bit her lip. “Well, but who else?”

The doctor permitted himself to smile. “Name’s Kent, though you’re likely to hear him called ‘The fellow that bought the Carscadden place.’ Nobody knew where he came from, nor who he was. Had to call him something, so the title sort o’ got itself hung on to him. Folks thought, I believe, he was some relation of the Carscaddens, who hadn’t lived there for a generation.”

“Does he live there alone?”

“Lord, no; got a Jap servant, for one thing, and a wife, and there’s always a houseful o’ lame ducks, human and otherwise. You’ll have to go there and make his acquaintance some day. He’s a great friend of mine, really. But Sally don’t like him.”

“Oh,” said Anne. “Because of his principles, I suppose?”

The doctor sniffed. “Something like that,” said he.

Another day they were driving along together, slowly, in the lace-like shade of the woods. Anne had been saying little; these drives with the doctor brought a measure of soothing to her spirit. By this time the brilliance of the autumn foliage was past, lying in golden tribute on the earth that had given it life. Now and again the little car would stop before some house while the doctor went in, leaving Anne musing, outside.

“Good people, those,” the old man said, as he drove away from one little house.

“And so poor,” said Anne. “I saw four or five children there, in that tiny house.”

The doctor considered a moment. “In one sense,” he said slowly, thinking it out, “poverty is having the consciousness of poverty. Those people have never had more. They have no consciousness of being poor. They are not poor.”

“Oh, but the fact remains that they are. Look at the house, think of the lack of advantages.”

“And what are those?”

“Advantages? But, surely, one knows!”

“No, no! What are they, really, comprehensively? Can you say, Mrs. Denison? In the sense in which you mean, all a matter of comparison, aren’t they? Well, comparison with what? With something a man has not got and thinks he wants, or thinks he ought to have, or thinks somebody else has gotten ahead of him by possessing? What’s the end of that sort of thinking?”

“Ah, but not to think, not to want, not to aspire!”

“I wasn’t talking of aspirations.”

“But weren’t you?”

The doctor shook his head. “You’ll have to take that up with Rufus some day.”

“That queer man?”

“Yes, he’s queer. Old fool, as I said. Not that he’s old as he looks. But he is queer, though he’s got a lot of sound sense in him, too. He’s thought things out. You’ll have to know Rufus.”

“If he has thought out some sort of philosophy like the one you’ve been propounding it’s greatly to his credit, but it doesn’t affect the real question of poverty, does it?”

“Doesn’t it? Well, you’ll see. But let me tell you this, Mrs. Denison: the normal man is never a poor man.”

“Perhaps that accounts for so few being normal. So many are poor.”

“I don’t mean it that way. You know I don’t. I mean that the normal man cannot be poor, because he has all there is that’s worth while, because being normal about sums up to having a good digestion, doing a day’s work, getting a little happiness and giving some. Get that into life, and you’ve got about all there is, in the ultimate analysis.”

“I hear a doctor talking,” Anne commented, and added, “Your friend back there suggested one more element. He mentioned a spark.”

The doctor looked down at her sideways, pursing his lips. “H’m!” said he.

Her thoughts went back again and again to that conversation. Was that all? Must she endure, and find nothing more than that? Health and work, it summed up to, for happiness was only a fleeting illusion. She saw no riches in the doctor’s circle. Poverty was not merely having no money, and she shrank from poverty for herself and the child. Thinness of joy, meagerness? No, no! That should not be.

The thought set her pacing restlessly up and down the small overheated room on an evening when the rain beat against the windows. It was Sunday, and Willy observed the day by going to church in the morning, whatever the weather, and by having their dinner at two o’clock instead of at noon. The displaced meal hour set the day awry. Except for that there seemed to be no change from other days. Willy was forever busy at something.

“My goodness, child, that lamp’s smoking,” she said, when she came into the room. She took the low rocking-chair by the table, the cat Buster jumping into her lap. “I been thinking,” she went on. “When I was a child, they used to call Sunday the Lord’s day. That’s funny, now ain’t it?”

Even old Willy’s chatter was better than the dreary persistence of the rain. “Funny?” Anne asked, smiling a little. “Why?”

“As if every day isn’t the Lord’s day,” said Willy, her faded eyes looking at Anne, looking away again. “I just guess he sees to that. He’s got us all in his hand every day, Sundays and all; and every day, come day go day, he keeps right on working and looking out for us.”

Anne smiled a little. She had heard a good deal of Willy’s primitive theology during the past months.

“Not but what I know Sunday’s by rights set apart for us humans,” Willy went on. “A good thing it is, too. I’ve heard folks talk hard things about men, and about women, too, that does one way on weekdays and another on Sundays. But I say—land!—it’s better to behave decent one day of the week than never at all, poor critters. And if that’s being a hypocrite, well, it’s better to be a hypocrite one day than seven.”

Anne laughed aloud. Miss Willy stroked Buster, who purred like a tea-kettle.

“Another funny thing is how people’s mistakes get mixed up with their sins, in folks’s minds. I don’t doubt the Lord sees which is which. I don’t doubt he’s capable of handling ’em both. But I often think folks try too hard to do the untangling themselves. I don’t know. But I’m going on seventy-three. I’ve come to the conclusion we’d be better off if we’d just leave it all to the Lord.”

“That’s a comfortable doctrine, my dear,” Anne remarked. “But if you’d let it work out, wouldn’t it be a little like giving the kitten the work-basket to play with?”

Miss Willy looked at her over the top of her spectacles. “That’s just what the good Lord has done,” said she, “given us the work-basket to play with. And a real good snarl we make out of it, most of us. But having given us a work-basket apiece, as you might say, he don’t expect the kittens to take on themselves to say who’s to blame for the tangles. That’s where we don’t follow the Lord’s way.”

“There’s no question of that,” Anne agreed.

“No. And that’s what you’re doing, Anne Warren. You and Brice had one work-basket between you. Somehow it’s got into an awful mess. So you’re scratching at Brice, thinking it’s his fault.”

“I don’t want to talk about Brice.”

“I dare say. But I’m going to talk about him. Whenever I’ve a mind to. Right now what I got to say is, that baby that’s coming has got a right to his father, and his father has got a right to him.”

“Brice has gone. They have tried to find him. He’s gone.”

“Yes. Maybe. But you’re forgetting that he’s the baby’s father. I know. I don’t say they haven’t done all they could do to get hold of Brice. But they ought to do more than they can. There ain’t anything impossible, after you get it done. The baby belongs to him.”

Anne jumped to her feet. “No! No, he’s mine! All mine!”

“He’s the Lord’s, Anne Warren. And the Lord’s fixed it so’s he had to have father and mother both. You’re setting yourself up in the Lord’s place when you pass judgment on Brice.”

“He has set judgment upon himself. He has gone. If he never sees his son, that will be judgment. He deserves it. I am not sorry. No, I’m not sorry.”

4

After a time of weakness when she scarcely realized the small creature at her side, after other days of watching him with wonder, and days of sitting in the sunny window behind the geraniums with the baby asleep in a basket nearby, Anne said to Miss Willy:

“His name is Warren.”

Willy looked at her. Anne saw protest in the look, but she smiled, serenely, securely. “His name is Warren,” she repeated.

“H’m,” said old Willy. “Well. After your poor dear father. Well, you’re his mother. I suppose you got a right to call him what you’re a mind to.”

“I am his mother. Oh, I am,” Anne agreed, lifting the baby, snuggling him up to her face. She knew well enough what Willy implied. For this was Brice’s child, like Brice in every small feature, like him even in the soft, reddish hair on his head. But her whole being protested against what Willy wanted. Another Brice—all the more reason why he should not bear Brice’s name. No one should have a share in him, Brice least of all. She denied Brice’s share in him, even to herself. He was hers, all hers, miraculously flesh of her flesh, hers to love, to mold. He should be more and more hers. Often during that marvelous spring and summer the same jealous thought returned to her. The child flourished and grew, a sunny baby. His first smile was for Willy.

“Look at that, now,” the old woman cried. “Who’d a thought it? He knows me. He knows his old Willy.”

Anne snatched the baby up to her breast. She had watched for that first smile, longed for it, wanted it for herself. But a moment afterwards she was ashamed. Willy was the slave of them both, toiling and loving with a devotion as absolute as that of the nun whose life is centered in the cross on the altar and the red light before it, who spends her nights on her knees and would starve herself, castigate herself, readily give up her body and soul and her life bit by bit that her Lord might perceive and accept her adoration. Willy would come in a dozen times during the day to look at the child. Her face became rapt when his tiny fingers curled about one of hers.

“To think this should happen to me,” she said more than once. “To think of your baby being right here in my house, where I can see him and all.”

Then she would trot off to her work again, trotting more slowly and falteringly as the months passed. Anne, absorbed in the child, took it as a matter of course that things were done for them both. She did not observe that Willy’s hours of work were longer than they had ever been. One day in the spring she surprised the old woman spading the garden, and remonstrated.

“I can do it,” said Willy. “I like to do it.”

“Nonsense,” said Anne. “Dorilliam can do it in half the time. I’ll go up the hill after supper and tell him to come tomorrow.”

“Now look here, Anne Warren, I won’t have you wasting your money that way. You got to save.”

Anne laughed a little. “Save out of what I have? What’s the use? It would never amount to anything.”

“You got plenty to save something out of, if you don’t go frittering it away. You got to save for Warren’s education.”

“Land,” said Dorilliam’s mother, when she dropped in one morning while the baby was having his bath by the kitchen stove, “mine never had all those fixin’s. I just washed ’em off when they were dirty, and kept ’em well fed, and let ’em cry and let ’em sleep. A baby ain’t only a baby, when all’s said and done.”

Anne said nothing. That, doubtless, was true, as far as it went. But to compare the young Warren with these country children? As well compare grain-sacks and silk. There were things about her child that she had never observed in others. She never tired of pondering on all his small perfections. Her state was not peace, but absorption. The rest of the world was shut out, thrust aside, while she tended her baby and watched the developing wondrousness of him. For the first time in her life she was absorbed in something besides herself, yet this was inextricably herself, her own as nothing else had ever been. As his individuality developed she hugged that thought to her more and more. Even while she adored them and gloried in them, she was jealous of the will and impulses that came from somewhere within his small self. For when young Warren wanted to sleep or to stay awake, he did so. When he was hungry, he made his want known vociferously. He loved the warm water about his plump little body, and yelled when he was lifted out of it. He hated to have his nose and his ears touched, and decisively said so. Here was something apart from his mother, not hers at all, needs and preferences not springing from her, the will of another creature to which she must yield, which she resented and feared and adored.

“Got a will of his own,” said Willy one day when the two of them had tried in vain for an hour or more to get him to sleep. When their patience was threadbare, both vanquished by the utter helplessness of the adult before a baby’s unreasoned persistence, the boy had abruptly stopped crying, looked into the old woman’s face, smiled divinely, and dropped into slumber. She laid him down on the sofa. “Just wanted to make us understand once for all that he wouldn’t go to sleep till he got good and ready,” said she.

Anne bent over the child. “He’s his mother’s own boy,” she said, with the fatuous sentimentality of the parent who has just been worsted in a battle with her offspring and finds balm in her tenderness, pride in the strength of the victor.

Miss Willy sniffed. “He is, and he isn’t,” said she. She had no sooner dropped into the rocking-chair than Buster jumped into her lap. “Some of him’s yours and some is his father’s. You needn’t look at me that way, Anne Warren. And some of him belongs to himself, and a good part’s the Lord’s. What the Lord means him to be you can’t tell much about. It’s got to come out. I’ve always noticed that the Lord does a lot of mixing of his stuffs, before he finishes a job. Same as I do with my bread. And when he’s got a thing turned out at last, it’s cram full of most everything, good and bad, sense and foolishness. It works pretty well, but it needs a whole lot of oiling to keep it a-going. The baby’s like that. There’s a lot in that baby that’s going to come out, do what you will. You got to help him get started, but I guess when you think he’s all finished it’ll be just about the time he’s beginning to run with his own machinery, and if you poke your hand into it you’ll likely get pinched. He belongs to himself, Anne, and don’t you forget that. Not that you’re likely to get much of a chance to.”

Anne smiled. Willy was not a mother, Willy could not know.

There is no chart which tells how a mother’s time goes. Anne did not know how the months went. In the autumn Alice and George stopped for an hour. They had been motoring, and Alice was anxious to get back to the children.

“Darling, are you comfortable here? Why won’t you come back with us?” Alice asked.

Anne laughed. “No, I’m not comfortable, as you know comfort, Alice. But this is the place for me until Wanny is a little older. Of course I am not going to live here forever. When he is old enough to play with other children I shall have to take him away from here. There will be the question of school, too. I shall have to learn how to make money.”

They were alone under the apple tree. George had driven to the store for gasoline. For a moment Alice looked off, vaguely, at a distant hill-top where already a maple gleamed yellow; then without turning to Anne she asked,

“Did you hear that Ranney is married?”

“I supposed he would be. In the spring, wasn’t it?”

Alice shook her head. “No, just lately. Not to that girl he was engaged to. He treated that nice girl so badly. Kept putting things off. He has married a woman who was divorced. He’s so different from George. One wouldn’t think they could be brothers.”

Winter came and went by, and in earliest spring, before the glaze ice was gone, Miss Willy fell. Anne came down one morning to find the kitchen cold. She called, opened the door of the old woman’s bedroom. Then throwing a shawl about her she went out of doors. At the door of the hen-house she found her, huddled, eyes dim with pain.

“No, don’t you lift me,” said Willy, her lips blue, her face gray in the sunlight. “Something’s broke.”

Anne sped across the road for the doctor and on for Dorilliam, who came 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.