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.
5
So the summer passed in toil. No time for thoughts, nor for thought. No time, really, for anything, with so much to be done, so little that could be left undone. Hens, Anne discovered, could be as clamorous as babies. When a prideful, clucking absurdity emerged from a hidden nest with a brood of chicks she could have crushed the lot of them. They were hated, but they were important, for they were food, and after a day or two their very helplessness and dependency captured her. She was indignant and sorrowful when one fell prey to Buster’s rapaciousness. Miss Willy frequently asked after her flowers. There were weeds among them that Anne told herself could not go unregarded, whatever happened. The peonies bloomed so generously. How could she let their brave beauty smother in weeds? After a summer rain, the hollyhocks lay on the ground. There was no time for it, but she must find stakes, tie them up.
By midsummer Wanny was toddling everywhere. He possessed an ingenuity for getting into mischief beyond anything his mother had ever encountered. If he were silent or out of sight for too long she had to drop everything, hunt for him. And his clothes, those small costly shoes that wore out so soon, the rompers that had to be fresh every morning. There were days when his bath was no more than a hasty sponging away of grime before he was put to sleep, nights when she was so weary that she dropped on her bed without undressing, to wake in the dawn with a crowding sense of things waiting to be done, in a panic of fear lest she had over-slept. Everything was in the present. The future was something she had no time to think about. Work. Two to care for, three to provide for, hurriedly, rather chaotically.
Winter came, when she had thought there would be more time. But again there were stoves, lamps, sewing. The child had outgrown the first baby coat Alice had sent. Anne contrived to make him another out of an old skirt of her own. It had no air of elegance. She laughed when she dressed him in it.
“Pitty, pitty,” said Warren, smoothing his bulging front.
“Not so very pretty, old man,” Anne laughed. “But it will keep you warm.”
“Pretty is as pretty does,” said old Willy, and Anne, “Goodness, I hope not. If his looks had to be measured by his behavior——!”
Two years before she could not have tolerated that garment. Now she could laugh at it, was even rather proud of it. But she did not for more than a moment think of the change in herself. There was something else waiting to be done. Orderliness she had not begun to learn. There were neighbor women who came to see Miss Willy, bringing gifts of pies and doughnuts and “tastes” of jelly and jam and pickles. Seeing Miss Willy’s enjoyment of the delicacies, Anne remembered that the old woman had always managed to put up some of her own. Now the pantry shelves held none. She had never thought of making any. Where had Willy found time to do it? How did those other women, busy mothers of families, find time? Even the mere thought of their dish-washing staggered Anne’s imagination, now that she knew how mysteriously dishes piled up for only three. And there was their mending, their cooking, their washing. Yet those over-worked women found time to come to Miss Willy’s and “visit” sometimes for an hour or more. Anne found herself listening to their talk. It was no longer of trivialities beyond or beneath her scope and her interest; it was of things become vital. They had been vague, dull, toiling creatures without imagination, without grace, uninteresting. Now they emerged into separate entities, personalities with feelings and impulses which she recognized, more skilled and experienced than herself in things of first importance. There was so much that they knew and that she did not, and things they achieved daily, as a matter of course, simply and neatly, that staggered her efforts and ingenuity to perform and left her worn with fatigue after trying.
“The working classes”—she remembered that she used to think of the working classes, in the old days, with something akin to disgust. She had never been able to understand Nicky’s interest in them, nor how she had been able to endure daily contact with them. Either they toiled with an impenetrable, ineffectual, stolid indifference, or they disagreeably or violently protested against their lot, deviously trying to better it at the cost of the comfort of people who were more fortunate than themselves. They were unreasonably envious, and their morals were as sordid as their way of living. She had always felt injured and angry when one of her maids had asked for extra time off. She remembered her amused scorn when they spent their earnings for some foolish finery to be worn on one or two afternoons of the week.
These women who dropped in to see Willy were toilers in a labor unending. She knew about that, now. As far as she could perceive, theirs was a labor without result or reward, just a grind, day after day, year after year. Now she knew that they were not sunk in a dull state of mental and spiritual stagnation. They were not clamorously trying to better their lot at the expense of others. Apparently they shattered no more of the Ten Commandments than anyone else did. Sometimes she wondered what secret revolts of the soul might be theirs, or whether they had souls at all in the sense of possessing a well-spring of feeling and thought and aspiration. They concerned themselves with things she had never supposed required thought or were bound up with feeling or led to aspiration, but indubitably aspiration and feeling and thought played a part in their lives.
At first they had been shy with her. One or two had told her hesitatingly how fine it was for Miss Willy to have her there. They thought of her as the niece from the city who went about always dressed up and sat around while Miss Willy waited on her. Now they found her aproned, busy, and there was always the child to talk about. Anne found herself listening with absorbed interest to tales of other children’s illnesses. She was not bored when Mrs. Ware told how her Julia had broken her collar-bone, nor when Mrs. Beaman told how her twins in one winter had measles and chicken pox and whooping cough, alternately, “so’s we were no sooner gettin’ out o’ one thing with Elizabeth than we come down with the same thing with Florence; and by the time Florence was better, Elizabeth had started on something else.” Those things were not trivial. They were not disgusting. They were not unpleasant diseases that troublesome children persisted in having, so that one wondered how mothers endured them. They were dangers that lurked for Wanny. Those women were mothers. So was she.
She took Wanny to the Christmas tree at the church. His round-eyed wonder was a revelation, something that pierced to her heart. Mrs. Beaman gave him an orange. When he held it in both hands, stared at it, it was not an orange, but a symbol, a mystery. He had seen it taken from a box under the tree. Therefore it was endued with beauties and wonders beyond all other oranges. Anne, looking up, met Mrs. Beaman’s glance, her tolerant, understanding smile.
A few days thereafter Mrs. Wells ran down the road bearing a plate wrapped up in a napkin. Hot rolls. “I thought maybe they’d go good for supper,” said she.
“Land! I should think so,” old Willy said. “We ain’t had any home-made bread since I don’t know when.”
The visitor looked at Anne. “Why, you don’t buy all your bread, do you?”
“I can’t make it,” Anne said.
“But it costs so much at the store.”
The next day Anne bundled up Wanny and walked up the road to the Bassetts’s. The children of that house had long ago gone away, the old couple were alone, and Mrs. Bassett was known as the best housekeeper in Heathville, eternally busy.
“Will you teach me how to make bread?” Anne asked, and could see the flattered look in the old woman’s eyes.
Her first loaves were an achievement that gave her a satisfaction scarcely less than her conquest of the garden.
“What’s that I smell?” old Willy called out, from the bedroom. “You ain’t ever trying to make bread, child! You’ll just waste the flour.”
“Not I,” Anne declared, coming in with a freshly baked loaf turned out on a towel. “Look at that! Willy, when I think of the money we’ve spent at that store for bread——!”
Old Willy’s lips quivered. “I got to get out o’ this bed,” said she. “You can’t do all the work yourself, and takin’ on more all the time.”
Anne put the loaf down, came and stood near the bed. “Willy,” she said, “it’s the strangest thing. No matter how much more I find to do, I always seem to find time to do it in. And stranger still, I rather like doing it. It makes me feel so important.”
Gradually the women who had been coming to see Miss Willy lingered to chat with Anne. Recipes were given, that had to be explained. Flower seeds were brought in small bits of brown paper, and about their flowers odd sentiments lingered, odd to Anne because at first they seemed so trivial.
“That’s ‘Impatience,’” said one, presenting a slim sprig of green planted in a can from which the label had been removed. “‘Impatience,’ though some folks call it ‘Patience’. Either way it’s the truth, for it’s always in a hurry to bloom, and it blooms all the time.”
There were slips of geranium, too, and a small, prickly cactus. Anne thought of Alice’s masses of flowers, of those she herself had always managed to buy for the dining-room, and of lilacs and orchids, and tulips; Tulips that fell. But these little struggling things in pots and cans had personality, identity. They were a nuisance at first, because she was forever forgetting to water them; but when she discovered them drooping, and watched for them to revive, they assumed an importance beyond reason. They were gifts. She could not let them die. Then they bloomed.
By the time spring came again Miss Willy was hobbling about with a crutch and a cane. The crutch Anne had to buy. That month she began to do their washing. The cane was brought out of a chest in the attic.
“My poor grandfather’s cane,” said Miss Willy. “You can see his name on the silver band. Poor man. I’m afraid he drank a good deal. My grandmother married again. But after all, I’m sure there’s nothing like young love, my dear. I’ve been thinking. When Wanny grows up——”
So Willy was almost herself once more, though she was never again able to do active work. She could sit in the window behind the flowers and sew, and knit stockings for Warren. It lifted a good deal from Anne to have her watch the boy, whose capacity for mischief increased every day.
“What that child does think up,” said Willy. He had climbed on a chair when no one was looking and dropped soap into a stew Anne was making for dinner. They discovered it when he danced up and down, clapping his hands and shouting:
“Oh, ’ook at the bubbles! ’ook at the bubbles on the stove! Pretty bubbles! Wanny makes ooooh pretty bubbles!”
Then, from the chair where his mother had forcefully deposited him, he howled miserably. “Don’t like Wanny’s bubbles! Bad Mums don’t like Wanny’s bubbles!”
Anne looked dolefully at Willy. “Stew enough for two days. Oh dear! All that good meat!”
Miss Willy’s placidity was not ruffled. “He was only just doing what you do yourself, and what most folks do,” said she.
“I never put soap in the stew,” Anne protested, laughing ruefully.
“I ain’t so sure about that. But what I meant was he only sees things from where he stands. You got to make allowances for that.”
In the course of the months Anne had achieved some measure of orderliness. Work did not crowd as much as before. She found herself looking forward with unsuspected eagerness to the time when the garden could be planted. It was good to see the snows melting, good to see the brown earth emerging and drying, good to bring in pussy-willows and to wander with Warren through the moist woods to find hepaticas, even good to hear the hylas again. One night when the others were asleep she stood at her window and looked out. The moon was high. Earth and sky were inherent parts of the same beauty, hesitant, translucent. In the moonlight even the familiar garden and roads and fields wore an effect of luminous unreality. The world slept, yet it was breathing and dreaming. It called her to go forth into its hesitant loveliness, to penetrate and become a part of its dream. The boy was sleeping with his face buried in his pillow, the red curls on his neck damp and sweet. He could be trusted not to wake. She crept down the stairs. The doors were never locked.
It was strange to be walking along the road in this strange light. Even the shadows were softer, melting and merging into the earth. On and on she walked, slowly, through a world creating itself anew, through sweet woods, between fields fragrant with the moist breath of night, past a marsh where the hylas piped, little Pans, plaintive, luring, singing of joys that might be or joys to come.
Abruptly, where the road wound through a stretch of woods, she stopped. Something moved there. Once fear would have held her, but she had come to know how needless fear was in that far-away countryside.
“I hope I have not frightened you?” a voice asked.
Strange, to hear again a voice of cultivation, words enunciated with careless precision. Suddenly she remembered. Not far beyond was the house of the man who had come out to the doctor’s car on the day it had stalled, the man the doctor termed “old fool.”
“Not exactly,” she said, quietly. “I’m afraid I have walked rather farther than I meant to.”
He had come nearer. He was hatless, and she remembered how white his hair had looked that day, and realized that its whiteness gave him that strange appearance now in the dim light.
“Yes. One has to come out on a night like this,” he said. “I’ve an idea that the real purpose of the moon is to keep the balance even. The sun works. The moon calms and blesses. We need both work and calm, to keep the balance true.”
Anne smiled faintly. How odd he was, to speak like that, without preface, to a stranger.
“There are various other things one needs, are there not?” she suggested, falling into his mood.
“Yes. Oh, yes. But they all come into the two categories. Work, not necessarily what one does not love or enjoy, but work, occupation. And calm. ‘Ease and alternate labor.’ What else is there?”
They had fallen into step. After a moment she said, “I think you are laughing at me.”
He grasped at a bough that projected across the road, its buds just beginning to open, snapped it off, the sound of its breaking distinct in the night’s stillness.
“Forgive me. Not at you. I should not have said that. Nor felt it. It’s only fair that life should give us the obvious things, make us go searching for the others.”
“So there is something else?”
She knew he turned to look at her. “You came out to find it, didn’t you? And I came out.”
They walked on a little. “Does one find, I wonder?” she murmured.
They had reached the edge of the woods. Before them a meadow lay flooded with moonlight, gleaming like a sea becalmed. They stood still, held by its beauty.
“I don’t know,” he said presently. “But if one may still search, still come out, into this!”
“It’s beautiful,” she said softly. “But there’s no answer there.”
“I’m not so sure. Not that it matters, the answer. It’s the search, the fact that one can come out, that one wants to.”
“Is that enough?” Unconsciously they spoke almost in whispers, as though to speak aloud would be to break the spell of the night.
“Not enough, no. But there’s always the belief or the hope that there’s something to be found. Else one would not come out.”
“I wonder,” she said.
“Oh, we all wonder. But we all know it’s there.”
“What?”
He waited. “Rhythm, I think. Or call it God.”
They were silent a moment. Then, without seeming to know she was there, he walked away.
6
The first day she permitted Miss Willy to go as far as the garden Anne proudly pointed. “There!” she exclaimed. “Look at that, all ready for the seeds. I did it myself, too. Dorilliam did nothing but the plowing.”
“Wanny helped,” the youngster boasted.
“Not the hoeing and raking! You never did, Anne Warren!” old Willy cried.
Anne laughed, brushed a hand upward across her damp forehead. “But I did. I’m so proud of it. I call that a good job well done.”
A letter received from Alice about that time amused her. Alice and George were taking the children to Europe for the summer. Would not Anne use their house while they were gone? The servants would be there, the house going on as usual. There would be the car, and Warren would like the children’s playthings, the sand-pile and swing in the yard. There was plenty of room for Miss Willy, too. Anne’s first thought was, “Why, I couldn’t leave the garden!” Then she laughed aloud. But it was quite true. That garden had been conquered the year before. Now it was hers, and she could not tolerate the thought of leaving it. That summer there were no such mistakes as had baffled her last year, for old Willy looked on and advised. Anne was bending over the wash-tubs every week, rejoicing in the flapping white things on the line. She was making their bread, and under Willy’s direction canning fruits and young tender vegetables in glass jars for winter. Warren, with his increased capacity for getting out of sight and into mischief, was even more care than before. Yet she had an elated consciousness of living.
One July day when the heat was so intense that Willy had not ventured out of doors, Anne was hanging out clothes, grateful that the weekly washing was done. The old woman came to the kitchen door.
“Wanny with you?” she called.
Anne put the last clothes-pin in place, took up her basket. “That monkey! Has he slipped off again? I’ll have to go look for him.”
She went, calling, and presently Warren came running towards her, his face mottled with crimson, torn with briers, and both his closed fists dripping red. But he was smiling angelically.
“I brought you some, too, Mums,” said he, opening his hands and holding them up to her. He had been tightly grasping the raspberries.
“He ought to be spanked,” said Miss Willy.
Anne looked over the child’s head, and smiled. He was standing in one of the tubs getting scoured, his dimpled body rising from the suds in which he was infinitely more interested than in cleanliness.
“Will you do the spanking?” she asked.
Miss Willy looked at her over her spectacles, said not a word more.
That afternoon the child was sleepy. His forehead was hot. “Don’t want to go out in the garden. Want to stay here,” he said later, and Anne, who was starting the fire for supper, absently agreed.
“All right, old man. But don’t get in mother’s way.”
Then she heard a cry from Miss Willy. Another moment and she was kneeling on the floor, lifting the child to her breast, shrieking.
“Stop that! Leave him there! Don’t take him up! It’s a spasm,” she heard Willy say.
“He’s dying! My baby’s dying!”
“He ain’t, either! You leave him right there, and run for the doctor. I’ll get the kettle on. Give me a spoon to put in his mouth. Now run——!”
The little body was stiff, the child’s eyes rolled upward.
“If the doctor ain’t there, get Mis’ Beaman,” Willy called after her.
She stumbled on the steps, caught herself, raced on. The doctor was not there. Mrs. Beaman turned from the stove, the twins and the other children staring open-mouthed at the frantic woman who had burst in upon them.
“My baby! Convulsions—he’s dying,” Anne panted.
Instantly Mrs. Beaman grasped a steaming tea-kettle from the stove and held it towards Anne. “Take that and run,” said she. “Here you, Johnny, you carry this pot. Never mind the potatoes in it, they won’t do any harm. Now I’ll get the mustard——”
Ten minutes, half an hour, and Wanny was wrapped in a blanket, relaxed, his eyes closed. Mrs. Beaman laughed.
“I used to think you used a good many things to bathe him with, when he was a baby,” she said, “but I guess it’s the first time he ever had a hot bath with potatoes floating around in the water.”
Anne was still trembling. “If you hadn’t come! You saved my boy.”
Late in August Nicky came for a week. She watched Anne at first curiously, making no comment on her varied activities. Human work in the garden was over until time for harvesting. There were hours in the long afternoons when the two could sit in the shade or walk through the woods.
“Anne,” Veronica asked one day, “do you ever have time to think?”
Anne laughed. “Yes, with my hands.”
“I’ve never seen you look so happy, so satisfied.”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“That, from Nance Denison! But you aren’t Nance Denison.”
Anne leaned forward, her hands dropped beyond her knees. “Oh, yes I am. Don’t you think I am not, Nicky old girl. I always wanted to do things, my own things, have my own way. Now I’m doing them, reveling in having my own way. Of course I’m happy!”
“And satisfied?”
“Oh, well, that! There always has to be something beyond. Of course I’m not going to stay here forever.”
“That’s really what I came about, Nance.” Anne looked at her questioningly. “There’s a new home for working girls. A sort of hotel, really, but they want to provide something more for the girls than other homes do. They want a hostess, a woman who has been used to things. I can get you the job if you want it.”
“There’s Wanny.”
“You could have Wanny with you. The pay isn’t bad.”
Anne stood up, her hands behind her back. There was the garden, the house, the hen-house, the hills and ripening fields.
“Nicky, I can’t,” she said. “Not while old Willy lives.”
Nicky lay back, stretched her arms over her head, yawned. “You’re growing up, Anne,” said she.
Afterwards, Anne wondered at herself a little. It was true that a few years before she would have taken the chance without thinking of anyone who stood in the way. If she had heard of some other woman making such a choice she would have scorned her for it, set her down in the same category into which she had dismissed people like those who were now her neighbors, as being of no account, bound by their own dullness and stupidity and lack of initiative, without intention, without aspiration. Her mind was still groping. She could not have told why she had permitted herself to be held by allegiance to old Willy. But, however vaguely, she was beginning to feel that there was something beyond initiative and aspiration, some established necessary sequence, perhaps even some purpose.
Several times she had encountered the man Kent on the road or in the store. Once he had said to Warren:
“You come to see me, and I’ll show you something!”
She thought of him as of one who could speak her old language, remembered his odd way of coming abruptly to things that were commonly left unspoken or only touched upon after a preface of intimacy, as though they were common enough to be taken for granted, so much a part of one’s habitual thought as to come naturally to any man’s lips. Her harvesting work was done for the year. The little place was neat for winter, the pantry shelves were filled. She smiled when she looked at those rows of bright jars. She, Anne Denison, “forehanded!” On a day in late September she took her son by the hand and set forth. Not that Warren permitted himself to be held in leash for long. His legs were sturdy. How she loved them, their curves and dimples and bruises. He would trot ahead of her to kick up the leaves, go foraging into the woods, spring out upon her at the next turn. He howled when he investigated a chestnut burr, a moment later joyously presented her with a spray of asters. Walks with Wanny had their variety. Before they came in sight of the cottage her ears caught the sound of music. A piano, played rather superbly, she thought. In spite of her restraining call Warren flew to the door, hammered upon it.
“I want to see what that noise is. Let me in. I want to see.”
As she reached the door it opened, and Kent stood there, laughing. He took the child’s hand, closed the door behind them, and came down the walk towards Anne.
“We’ve interrupted you,” she said, with an air of apology.
But he shook his head. “No. I was playing to my wife. But she’s asleep now. It always quiets her.”
“I am sorry. I did not know Mrs. Kent was ill.”
His face bore a worn look, as of one who had not slept. “Always ill. I am very glad you came to see me.”
“I have been thinking so much, Mr. Kent, of some of the things you said to me that night when I was so wild as to walk in the moonlight.” He looked at her questioningly, yet she did not find it difficult to speak simply of what had seemed so simple to him.
He nodded. “Ah—yes.” Then his manner changed. He looked down at Warren. “How would you like to come into my garden? I could show you something there.”
“There isn’t any garden any more. We’ve dug the potatoes,” said Warren.
“There is always a garden,” the man said, laughing. “Come along!”
He led the way with the boy, talking and answering, for there had to be a good deal of answering, with Warren.
“This is a funny garden,” said Warren.
“You just wait,” laughed Kent. “And don’t stumble.”
The path led down sharply. Anne drew a quick breath when it ended abruptly in a cleared space at the base of the hill, a space perhaps a full hundred yards across, leveled and smooth, the woods closing it in, sunlight drenching it. Only a few bronzed leaves clung to the low-growing oaks against its forested wall. For the rest, it was raked clean, like a house swept and garnished. And that, thought Anne, was what it must be, a house here in the woods, with the sky for its roof. There were borders where even now a late rose or two braved the cold nights. At one side a long shallow pool, its banks strengthened with field stones, caught a bit of the sky’s blue. Just beyond was an arbor, white, grape-trellised, and at other places two long low benches of gleaming white. On one of these lay a doll, large as a baby and as daintily dressed, its legs hanging limply over the side. On the floor of the arbor, in a spot of sunlight, a dog lay. It got up when it saw Kent, hobbled joyously towards him on three legs. He stooped and patted it. Warren drew back towards his mother.
“I never saw a dog like that,” he said. “Where’s all of him?”
“The rest of him, you mean?” Kent laughed aloud. “Well, once he was caught in a trap. The trap bit off his paw. But there are no other dogs here, you see, so he doesn’t realize how different he is. We don’t remind him of it.”
Anne remembered, something the doctor had said that first time. “A lot of lame ducks.” This, apparently, was one of them. Then she became aware of a face in the depths of the arbor, a form there.
“Jenny,” Kent called. “You Jenny there! Come out here and say ‘how do’ to the lady and the young man I’ve brought to call on you.”
It was a child; or, surely, the laugh came from a girl who was not quite past childhood. A girl of thirteen or so, Anne thought, when she haltingly emerged. As she came she seemed to help herself by the side of the arbor where shade lay deepest. Her face wore that curious agedness of the city child who has long been ill.
“A-a-ah! No you don’t,” Kent called out, laughing. “Don’t you touch that crutch, Jenny!”
“I ain’t, honest I ain’t, Mr. Kent. It’s on the bench!”
“Then you’re cheating. You’re holding on to the wall.”
The girl giggled delightedly, as at some huge joke. “But I got to.”
“Now hear that! I told you to come here. Now then, come along. Come along.”
She came to the opening of the arbor, bracing herself by a hand on its side. Anne saw that her body was twisted, restricted by some muscular impediment, perhaps a form of paralysis. Jenny was smiling, and Kent shook his head.
“Won’t do, Jenny. You let go of that door, and come out here.”
“But I can’t, Mr. Kent. Honest I can’t.”
“Come!”
She took a step or two forward, wavered. Anne would have jumped to her side, but Kent’s raised hand warned her back.
“Now you see that you can. Come along!”
A step or two more, and suddenly the girl fell awkwardly, sprawling, laughing. “Gee, ain’t he funny!” she cried.
Kent helped her up, took her arm and led her to one of the benches. “Now next time, young woman, you’ll walk. Tumbling has gone out of fashion. Do you hear?” he warned her.
“It’s a heavenly place,” Anne said, “a sort of magic garden, as though the fairies had lived here a while and then forgotten it.”
Kent nodded. “I made it for my wife. We just about live down here, in the summer. You see, she’s afraid of the woods, and as they shut in the garden she’s safe here. She’s afraid to run away, except by the path, and we can watch that.”
In spite of herself Anne stared.
“Yes, she is like that,” Kent said, quietly. “As I said, it’s the reason for our living here. Where we lived before she was forever running away, slipping past all our vigilance. It wasn’t good for her to be constantly watched and she needed the air. Now she is happier. She has some freedom, but she is safe.”
Before the strange revelation Anne knew nothing to say. Kent went on, as though musing: “That doll over there. It is hers. I shall have to take it back to the house before she wakes up, or she’ll cry for it. She calls it her baby, yet at times, you see, she forgets it. When she is very bad. Yes, she is like that.”
Presently Anne said, “The little girl there——”
Kent smiled. “Oh, Jenny. Yes. We have them here. First one, then another. Jenny will soon be all right. She went on two crutches a few months ago.”
He had indeed shown her something in his garden. Anne was certain of that. His wife “like that,” the lame dog, the child Jenny. She thought of their meeting in the moonlight, and his words, “Not that it matters, the answer. It’s the search.” Now, in the light of what he had shown her, those words did not ring true. For what was his search, how much was he seeking? Obviously, the man was not impoverished. He was not held to Heathville by that dumb and stupid allegiance to the soil that she read in the simpler people. Yet there he stayed with a mad wife and a lame dog and children like Jenny. “We have them here. First one, then another.” He was not searching, not seeking. He was submitting, letting himself be held. By what?
She had been held by old Willy, as Kent was held by his wife.
Throughout the winter the old woman seemed as mentally brisk as ever. “My land,” she said, one cold Sunday morning, “I do wish I could get up the hill to church. Makes me feel downright wicked, to be so mad about it. Not that I s’ppose it’s any worse to get mad because you can’t go to church than because you can’t dance or something, nor any better, either.”
Anne laughed. “I don’t believe it will be held up against you because you can’t go to church,” said she.
Miss Willy sniffed. “I was talking about getting mad, not about going to church,” she said.
Anne laughed. “Well, I’m sorry you can’t get to church, then.”
“So am I. I do want something awful to see that new bonnet the minister’s wife got in the missionary box.”
“Willy! You wicked old woman! You’ve fooled me for years. I thought you went to church to say your prayers. I didn’t dream your mind was so set on worldly things.”
Miss Willy sniffed. “I do go to church to say my prayers, when I can get there. And if a body’s mind wasn’t mixed up with worldly things, what would there be to pray about?” she demanded.
There came a day in April when the sun shone and from Anne’s window all the world wore a fresh morning face after rain. Dressing, she looked out upon the familiar scene, now as unconsciously cherished as the features of a beloved. Then she turned to the bed where Warren, now in his fourth year, lay asleep. He had long since refused to submit to a day-time nap, though after his day’s intensive play he was willing enough to go to bed with the chickens. But no birds could wake him early in the morning. He lay now with his arms and legs outstretched, strong and plump, his firm flesh tanned by sun and weather. He was her life, her blessing. Whenever she saw him like that a surge of love all but choked her. She bent over him before she left the room. He would sleep for hours longer.
She went down quietly, started the kitchen fire as noiselessly as she could, went out to the hens. The morning air was sweet. Good to breathe it in. She raised her face in the sunshine. When she went in again she set the simple breakfast to cooking. There was no sound from Miss Willy’s room. Strange, for the old woman had not lost her life-long habit of waking with the dawn. She would wait patiently until Anne could find time to help her dress, but always she called out a morning greeting. Anne softly turned the knob of the bedroom door. The little figure was lying on its side, one hand under a withered cheek. Anne’s heart leaped. That stillness, and the posture like a child asleep, secure in a mothering presence near by. She bent over the bed.
Miss Willy was, indeed, asleep. Past waking.
Presently Anne went across the road for the doctor. He made his brief examination, and stood up, looking at Anne who was unaware of the tears on her cheeks.
“Yes,” he told her, gently, “yes, she’s gone. Worn out. That’s the best way to go. Finished her work.”
“Sleep at the end of the day,” Anne murmured.
The doctor nodded. “Like David. You remember? ‘Who after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid with his fathers.’ What’s better than to serve one’s own generation?”
“She did that.”
The doctor turned away. “I’ll send women to you,” he said, from the door.
They came, those women. Quietly, reverently they came, not reluctantly to that task from which Anne shrank, but taking it as one of the things to be done, by its very inevitableness removed from horror. She heard them moving about the room, speaking in low voices behind the closed door. They asked her to heat water, and when she had it ready one of them said:
“Now don’t you feel so bad. Her time had come.”
Dorilliam’s mother came out to the kitchen. “I didn’t like to open the bureau without you said so. But I know where the things are. She’s had ’em laid away a long time. She told me about ’em.”
Anne helped them find the poor, decent clothes, so plain, so clean. So Willy had thought of her burial, even while she thought so much of living. Death—Anne remembered the day her father died. Willy had been alone with him. She and Brice had hurried, but arrived too late. She had been a little in awe of that silent presence, even afraid. She had cried out to Brice when strange men with black bags passed the parlor door on the way upstairs, and Brice had closed the door and put his arms about her, closed the door against her dread. Now there was no Brice.
Hurriedly she put that memory from her. There was nothing of fear connected with Willy’s lying there. Why remember that shielding from that other fear? She had felt no grief for her father; they had never been close together. After he died she had been sorry that they had never been closer. This was different. Not grief, but something gentler, something more poignant. Or was grief like this? Death like this quiet passing seemed scarcely mysterious, but only a part of the inevitable round of things. Now she knew something about that round of things. There was winter, a going to sleep, and spring following winter. She thought of Miss Willy’s springtime, of the little toiling creature who had wanted her freedom. Had she found freedom now? Or what? For there was spring.
“You’d better let me take Wanny home with me,” said Mrs. Beaman. “The twins’ll just love looking after him. It ain’t good for children to be in the house when there’s death.”
Anne kissed her. “If you’ll take him for a few hours, later,” she said. “For a day or two I can tell him Miss Willy’s asleep in there.”
So the child played about as usual, whispering when he came into the kitchen, tiptoeing past the closed door. Willy was asleep. He understood that, and Anne dwelt on the thought of it.
Mrs. Bassett came over the first day, a slender, thin-lipped woman, with some sprays of geranium in her hand. “Seems like I never get much time to grow flowers,” she said, “but there’s these.”
Another brought heliotrope, another a basket of crocuses. One came with nasturtiums. “Seems real nice to see ’em this time o’ year, don’t it?” she asked, with pride. “They do real well in my south windows. They come from some seeds she gave me once.”