Part Second Pine
“The big pine was like greenish bronze....”
I
The big pine was like greenish bronze against the October sky....
A statue in Central Park had brought it back to her, the pine and the ruined graveyard and the autumn sunlight raking the meadows. It was a fortnight since she had come to New York, and in that fortnight she felt that she had turned into stone. Her shoes were worn thin; her feet throbbed and ached from walking on hard pavements. There were times, especially toward evening, when the soles of her feet were edged with fire, and the pain brought stinging tears to her eyes. Yet she walked on grimly because it was easier to walk than to wait. Up Fifth Avenue; down one of the cross streets to the Park, which was, she thought, merely an imitation of the country; back again to Sixth Avenue; and up Sixth Avenue until she drifted again over the Park and into the prison-like streets that ran toward the river. Occasionally she glanced up to read the name of a street; but the signs told her nothing. Fifth Avenue she had learned by name, and Broadway, and the dirty street where she rented a hall room, for fifty cents a day, over a cheap restaurant. Yesterday, she had asked for work on the other side of the city; but nobody wanted help in a store, and her obstinate pride insisted that she would rather starve than take a place as a servant. Twice she had waited in the restaurant beneath her room; but the dirt and the close smells had nauseated her, and by the end of the second day she had been too sick to stand on her feet. After that the waitress whose place she had taken had returned, and the woman in charge had not wanted her any longer. “You’d better get used to smells before you try to make a living in the city,” she had said disagreeably. The advice was sound, as Dorinda knew, and she had no just cause for resentment. Yet there were moments when it seemed to her that New York would live in her recollection not as a place but as an odour.
All day she walked from one stony street to another, stopping to rest now and then on a bench in one of the squares, where she would sit motionless for hours, watching the sparrows. Her food, usually a tough roll and a sausage of dubious tenderness, she bought at the cheapest place she could find and carried, wrapped in newspaper, to the bench where she rested. Her only hope, she felt, lay in the dogged instinct which told her that when things got as bad as they could, they were obliged, if they changed at all, to change for the better. There was no self-pity in her thoughts. The unflinching Presbyterian in her blood steeled her against sentimentality. She would meet life standing and she would meet it with her eyes open; but she knew that the old buoyant courage, the flowing outward of the spirit, was over for ever.
What surprised her, when she was not too tired to think of it, was that the ever-present sense of sin, which made the female mind in mid-Victorian literature resemble a page of the more depressing theology, was entirely absent from her reflections. She was sorry about the blue dress; she felt remorse because of the cow her mother might have had; but everything else that had happened was embraced in the elastic doctrine of predestination. It had to be, she felt, and no matter how hard she had struggled she could not have prevented it.
At night, worn out with fatigue, she would go back to the room over the restaurant. The brakeman on the train had given her the address, and he had put her in the street car that brought her to the door in Sixth Avenue. Here also the smells of beer and of the cooking below stairs had attacked her like nausea. The paper on the walls was torn and stained; all the trash in the room had been swept under the bed; and when she started to wash her hands at the rickety washstand in one corner, she had found a dead cockroach in the pitcher. Turning to the narrow window, she had dropped into a chair and stared down on the crawling throng in the street. Disgust, which was more irksome than pain, had rushed over her. After all the fuss that had been made over it, she had asked in bitter derision, was this Life?
Walking up Sixth Avenue one afternoon, she asked this question again. Something was trying to break her. Life or the will of God, it made no difference, for one hurt as much as the other. She could not see any use in the process, but she went on as blindly as a machine that has been wound up and cannot stop until it has run down. Nothing was alive except the burning sore of her memory. All the blood of her body had been drawn into it. Every other emotion—affection, tenderness, sympathy, sentiment—all these natural approaches to experience had shrivelled up like nerves that are dead. She was consumed by a solitary anguish; and beyond this anguish there was nothing but ashes. The taste of ashes was in her mouth whenever she tried to look ahead or to pretend an interest in what the future might bring. Though her mind saw Jason as he was, weak, false, a coward and a hypocrite, he was so firmly knit into her being that, even when she tore him from her thoughts, she still suffered from the aching memory of him in her senses. Pedlar’s Mill or New York, what did it matter? The city might have been built of straw, so little difference did it make to her inescapable pain.
At first the noises and the strange faces had confused her. Then it occurred to her that there might be temporary solace in the crowd, that she might lose herself in the street and drift on wherever the throng carried her. Her self-confidence returned when she found how easy it was to pursue her individual life, to retain her secret identity, in the midst of the city. She discovered presently that when nothing matters the problem of existence becomes amazingly simple. Fear, which had been perversely associated with happiness, faded from her mind when despair entered it. From several unpleasant episodes she had learned to be on the watch and to repulse advances that were disagreeable; but at such moments her courage proved to be as vast as her wretchedness. Once an elderly woman in deep mourning approached her while she sat on a bench in the Park, and inquired solicitously if she needed employment. In the beginning the stranger had appeared helpful; but a little conversation revealed that, in spite of her mourning garb, she was in search of a daughter of joy. After this several men had followed Dorinda on different occasions. “Do I look like that kind?” she had asked herself bitterly. But in each separate instance, when she glanced round at her pursuer, he had vanished. In a city where joy may be had for a price, there are few who turn and follow the footsteps of tragedy. Yes, she could take care of herself. Poverty might prove to be a match for her strength, but as far as men were concerned, she decided that she had taken their measure and was no longer afraid of them.
A surface car clanged threateningly in her ears, and stepping back on the corner, she looked uncertainly over the block in front of her. While she hesitated there, a man who had passed turned and stared at her, arrested by the fresh colour in the face under the old felt hat. Her cheeks were thinner; there were violet half-moons under her eyes; but her eyes appeared by contrast larger and more radiantly blue. The suffering of the last two weeks, fatigue, hunger, and unhappiness had refined her features and imparted a luminous delicacy to her skin.
Threading the traffic to the opposite pavement, she turned aimlessly, without purpose and without conjecture, into one of the gloomy streets. It was quieter here, and after the clamour and dirt of Sixth Avenue, the quiet was soothing. Longer shadows stretched over the grey pavement, and the rows of dingy houses, broken now and then by the battered front of an inconspicuous shop, reminded her fantastically of acres of broomsedge. When she had walked several blocks she found that the character of the street changed slightly, and it occurred to her, as she glanced indifferently round, that by an accident she had drifted into the only old-fashioned neighbourhood in New York. Or were there others and had she been unable to find them? She had stopped, without observing it, in front of what had once been a flower garden, and had become, in its forlorn and neglected condition, a refuge for friendless statues and outcast objects of stone. For a few minutes the strangeness of the scene attracted her. Then, as the pain in her feet mounted upward to her knees, she moved on again and paused to look at a collection of battered mahogany furniture, which had overflowed from a shop to the pavement. “I wonder what they’ll do with that old stuff,” she thought idly. “Some of it is good, too. There’s a wardrobe exactly like the one great-grandfather left.”
She was looking at the mahogany wardrobe, when the door of the shop widened into a crack, and a grey and white cat, with a pleasant face, squeezed herself through and came out to watch the sparrows in the street.
“She is the image of Flossie,” thought Dorinda. Her eyes smarted with tears, and stooping over, she stroked the cat’s arching back, while she remembered that her mother would be busy at this hour getting supper.
“Anybody can see you like cats,” said a voice behind her; and turning her head, she saw that a stout middle-aged woman, wearing a black knitted shawl over a white shirtwaist, was standing in the midst of the old furniture. Like her cat she had a friendly face and wide-awake eyes beneath sleek grey and white hair.
“She is just like one we had at home,” Dorinda answered, with her ingenuous smile.
“You don’t live in New York, then?” remarked the woman, while she glanced charitably at the girl’s faded tan ulster.
“No, I came from the country two weeks ago. I want to find something to do.”
The woman folded her shawl tightly over her bosom and shook her head. “Well, it’s hard to get work these days. There are so many walking the streets in search of it. The city is a bad place to be when you are out of work.”
Dorinda’s heart trembled and sank. “I thought there was always plenty to do in the city.”
“You did? Well, whoever told you that never tried it, I guess.”
“There are so many stores. I hoped I could find something to do in one of them.”
“Have you ever worked in a store?”
“Yes, at home. It was a country store where they kept everything.”
“I know that kind. My father used to keep one up the state.”
As she bent over the cat, Dorinda asked in a voice that she tried to keep steady. “You don’t need any help, do you?”
The other shook her head sorrowfully. “I wish we did; but times are so hard that we’ve had to give up the assistant we had. I’m just out of the hospital, too, and that took up most of our savings for the last year.” Her large, kind face showed genuine sympathy. “I’d help you if I could,” she continued, “because you’ve got a look that reminds me of my sister who went into a convent. She’s dead now, but she had those straight black eyebrows, jutting out just like yours over bright blue eyes. That sort of colouring ain’t so common as it used to be. Anyhow, it made me think of her as soon as I looked at you. It gave me a start at first. That’s because I’m still weak after the operation, I guess.”
“Was it a bad operation?”
“Gall stones. One of the worst, they say, when it has gone on as long as my trouble. Have you ever been in a hospital?”
Dorinda shook her head. “There wasn’t any such thing where I lived. We always nursed the sick at home. Great-grandfather was bedridden for years before his death, and my mother nursed him and did all the work too.”
The woman looked at her with interest. “Well, that’s the way you do in the country, of course,” she replied, adding after a moment’s hesitation, “You look pretty tired out. Would you like to come in and rest a few minutes? I was getting so low in my spirits a little while ago that I looked out to see if I couldn’t find somebody to speak a few words to. When this sinking feeling comes on me in the afternoon, I don’t like to be by myself. I thought a cup of tea might help me. They haven’t let me touch beer since I went to the hospital, so I’d just put the kettle on to boil. It ought to be ready about now, and a bite of something might pick you up as well as me. My mother came from England and she was always a great one for a cup of tea. ‘Put the kettle on,’ she used to say, ‘I’m feeling low in my spirits.’ Day or night it didn’t make any difference. Whenever she felt herself getting low she used to have her tea.”
She led the way, the cat following, through the shop to a corner at the back, where she could still watch the door and the pavement. Here a kettle was humming on a small gas stove; and a quaint little table, with a red damask cloth over it, was laid for tea. There were cups and saucers, a tea set, and a wooden caddy with a castle painted on the side. “It looks old-fashioned, I know, but we are old-fashioned folks, and my husband sometimes says that we haven’t got any business in the progressive ’nineties. Everything’s too advanced for us now, even religion. I guess it’s living so much with old furniture and things that were made in the last century.”
Dorinda smiled at her gratefully and sat down beside the little red cloth, with her smarting feet crossed under the table. If only she might take off her shoes, she thought, she could begin to be comfortable. At Pedlar’s Mill tea was not used except in illness or bereavement, and she was not prepared for the immediate consolation it afforded her. Strange that a single cup of tea and a buttered muffin from a bakery should revive her courage! After all, the city wasn’t so stony and inhospitable as she had believed. People were friendly here, if you found the right ones, just as they were in the country. They liked cats too. She remembered that she had seen a number of cats in New York, and they all looked contented and prosperous. It was pleasant in the little room, with its restful air of another period; but at last tea was over, and she thanked the woman and rose to leave. “I can’t tell you the good it’s done me,” she said, and added plaintively, “Do you know of any place where I might find work?”
The woman—her name, she said, was Garvey—bent her head in meditation over the tea-pot. “I do know a woman who wants a plain seamstress for a few weeks,” she said at last a trifle dubiously, for, in spite of her kindness, she was a cautious body. “The girl she had went to the hospital the day I came out, and she has never been suited since then. Do you know how to sew?”
“I’ve helped make children’s dresses, and of course my own clothes,” Dorinda added apologetically. “You see, I never had much to make them out of.”
“I see,” Mrs. Garvey assented, without additional comment. After pondering a minute or two, she continued cheerfully, “Well, you might suit. I can’t tell, but I’d like to help you. It’s hard being without friends in a big city, and the more I talk to you, the more you remind me of my sister. I’ll write down the address for you anyway. It’s somewhere in West Twenty-third Street. You know your way about, don’t you?”
“Oh, I’ll find it. People are good about directing me, especially the policemen.”
“Well, be sure you don’t go until after six o’clock. Then the other girls will be gone, and she will have more time to attend to you. But you mustn’t set your heart on this place. She may have taken on someone since I talked with her.”
Dorinda smiled. No, she wouldn’t set her heart on it. “I’ll go and sit in a park while I’m waiting,” she replied gratefully. “If I’m going to be a dressmaker, I ought to notice what women are wearing.”
With the slip of paper in her purse, and her purse slipped into the bosom of her dress, she left the shop and followed the street back to Fifth Avenue. The hour spent with the stranger had restored her confidence and there was no shadow of discouragement in her mind. Something told her, she would have said, that her troubles were beginning to mend. “I can sew well enough when I try, even if I don’t like it,” she thought. “Ma taught me how to make neat buttonholes, and I can run up a seam as well as any one.”
As she approached Fifth Avenue she began to observe the way the women were dressed, and for the first time since she left Pedlar’s Mill she felt old-fashioned and provincial. The younger women who passed her were all wearing enormous balloon sleeves and bell skirts, which were held up with the newest twist by tightly gloved hands. Now and then, she noticed, the sleeves were made of a different material from the dress, but the gloves were invariably of white kid, and the small coquettish hats were perched very high above crisply waved hair which was worn close at the temples.
In spite of her blistered feet, she walked on rapidly, lifting her face to the wind, which blew strong and fresh over the lengthening shadows. How high and smooth and round the sky looked over the steep brown houses! Presently, from a hotel of grey stone, as gloomy as a prison, a gaily dressed girl flitted out into a hansom cab which was waiting in front of the door. There was a vision of prune-coloured velvet sleeves in a dress of grey satin, of a skirt that rustled in eddying folds over the pavement, and of a jingling gold chatelaine attached to the front of a pointed basque. “How happy she must be,” Dorinda thought, “dressed like that, and with everything on earth that she wants!”
She had turned to move on again, when a man carrying a basket of evergreens brushed against her, and she saw that he was engaged in replenishing the stone window boxes on the ground floor of the hotel. As she passed, a whiff of wet earth penetrated her thoughts, and immediately, in a miracle of recollection, she was back at Five Oaks in the old doctor’s retreat. Every detail of that stormy afternoon started awake as if it had been released from a spell of enchantment. She saw the darkened room, lighted by the thin blue flame from the resinous pine; she saw the one unshuttered window, with the hunched box-bush and the white turkeys beyond; she heard the melancholy patter of the rain on the shingled roof; and she watched the old man’s face, every line and blotch distorted by the quivering light, while he wagged his drunken head at her. A shudder jerked through her limbs. Her memory, which was beginning to heal, was suddenly raw again. Would she never be free? Was she doomed to bear that moment of all the moments in her life wherever she went? Her courage faded now as if the sun had gone under a cloud. She had been dragged back by the wind, by an odour, into the suffocating atmosphere of the past. Though her body was walking the city street, in her memory she was rushing out of that old house at Five Oaks. She was running into the mist; she was hurrying down the sandy road through the bulrushes; she was crouching by the old stump, with the wet leaves in her face and that suspense more terrible than any certainty in her mind. She listened again for the turn of the wheels, the clink of the mare’s shoes; the slip and scramble in the mud holes; the hollow sound of hoofs striking on rock....
Never in her life had she been so tired. In an effort to shake her thoughts free from despair, she quickened her pace, and looked about for a bench where she could rest. On the opposite side of Fifth Avenue a row of cab horses waited near a statue under some fine old trees. She had never seen the name of the square, but it appeared restful in the afternoon light; and crossing the street, she found a place in the shade on a deserted bench. It was five o’clock now, and Mrs. Garvey had told her not to go to see the dressmaker until six. Well, it was a relief to sit down. Slipping off her shoes, she pushed them under the bench and spread her wide skirt over her feet. The quiet was pleasant in the moving shadows of the trees. From where and how far, she wondered, did the people come who were lounging on the benches around her? So many people in New York were always resting, but she concluded that they must have money put by or they couldn’t afford to spend so much time doing nothing.
Gradually, while she sat there, watching the sparrows fluttering round the nose bags of the horses, hollow phrases, without meaning and without sequence, swarmed into her mind. Five o’clock. At home her mother would be getting ready for supper. That grey and white cat had made her think of Flossie. They were alike as two peas. Remembering the old man had upset her. She must put him out of her mind. You couldn’t change things by thinking. How could horses feed in those nose bags? What would Dan and Beersheba think of them? There was another woman with velvet sleeves in a silk dress. How Miss Seena would exclaim if you told her that so many women were wearing sleeves of different material from their dresses! That flaring collar of lace was pretty though.... The way the old man had leered at her over the whiskey bottle. “He’s coming back this evening. He went away to be married.” No, she must stop thinking about it. If she could only blot it all out of her memory. The buildings in New York were so high. She wondered people weren’t afraid to go to the top of them. There was a poor-looking old man on the bench by the fountain. In rags and with the soles dropping away from his shoes. People were rich in New York, but they were poor too. Nobody but Black Tom, the county idiot, wore rags like that at Pedlar’s Mill. How her feet ached! Would they ever stop hurting?... “He went away to be married. He went away to be married.” How dark the room was growing, and how black the box-bush looked in the slanting rain beyond the window. Feet were pattering on the shingled roof, or was it only the rain?... It was getting late. Almost time to go to the dressmaker’s. Suppose the dressmaker were to take a fancy to her. Such things happened in books. “You are the very girl I am looking for. One who isn’t afraid to work.” There was a fortune, she had heard, in dressmaking in New York. Miss Seena knew of a dressmaker who kept her own carriage.... How funny those lights were coming out in the street! They were winking at her, one after another. It was time to be going; but she didn’t feel as if she could stir a step. Her knees and elbows were full of pins and needles. It’s resting that makes you know how tired you are, her mother used to say....
Suddenly nausea washed over her like black water, rising from her body to her exhausted brain. She could scarcely sit there, holding tight to the bench, while this icy tide swept her out into an ocean of space. The noises of the city grew fainter, receding from her into the grey fog which muffled the sky, the lights, the tall buildings, the vehicles in the street. It would be dreadful if she were sick here in the square, with that ugly old man and all the cab drivers staring at her.... Then the sickness passed as quickly as it had come; and leaning back against the bench, she closed her eyes until she should be able to get up and start on again. After a minute or two, she felt so much better that she slipped her feet into her shoes, fastened the buttons with a hairpin, and rising slowly and awkwardly, walked across the square to the nearest corner.
The noises, which had almost died away, became gradually louder. There was a tumult of drums in the air, but she could not tell whether the beating was in her ears or a parade was marching by somewhere in the distance. Evidently it was a procession, though she could see nothing except the moving line of vehicles in the street, which had left the ground and were swimming in some opaque medium between earth and sky. “How queer everything looks,” she thought. “It must be the lights that never stop winking.”
She put her foot cautiously down from the curb, imagining, though she could not see it, that the street must be somewhere in front of her. As she made a step forward into the traffic, the sickness swept over her again, and an earthquake seemed to fling the pavement up against the back of her head. She saw the lights splinter like glass when it is smashed; she heard the drums of the invisible procession marching toward her; she tried to struggle up, to call out, to move her arms, and with the effort, she dropped into unconsciousness.