III
Her first thought, when she opened her eyes the next morning, was that she was free to leave the hospital as soon as she pleased. If only she might have stayed there until she died, tranquil, indifferent, with nothing left but this sardonic humour. A little later, as she glanced at the other patients in the ward, at the woman who moaned incessantly and at the young girl, with flaming red hair, who had lost her leg in an accident, she told herself that there were people in the world who were worse off than she was. Through the high window she could see that the sky was clear, and that a strong breeze was blowing a flag on the top of a grey tower. She was glad it was not raining. It would have been a pity to go back into the world on a wet day.
After she had had her breakfast, and a glib young doctor had given her some directions, she got out of bed and a pupil nurse helped her to dress. They had arranged, she discovered presently, that a friend of one of the other patients—the moaning woman, it soon appeared—should go with her as far as her lodging-house. That was the stranger’s way also, and she had promised to see that Dorinda reached her room safely.
“Do they know that you are coming?”
“Yes, the nurse telephoned for me. I can get the sane room, and they’ve put my bag in it.”
“Well, I’ll be glad to go with you,” said the woman, a depressed-looking person, in rusty mourning. “You must be careful about crossing the street while you’re so weak.”
“I don’t feel as if I could walk a step,” Dorinda answered, sinking into a chair while she dressed.
Her street clothes were so uncomfortable that she wondered how she could ever have worn them. Her stockings were too large, and the feet of them were drawn out of shape; her dress felt as if it weighed tons. But her hair troubled her most. No matter how hard she tried, she could not make it look neat. So much of it had been cut away on the right side that she was obliged to wind what was left into a thin twist and fasten it like a wreath round her head. Her face was thin and pallid, just the shape and colour of an egg, she thought despondently, and “I’m all eyes,” she added, while she gazed at herself in the small mirror.
It was late afternoon when she left the hospital, leaning on the arm of the stranger, who remarked with every other step, “I hope you ain’t beginning to feel faint,” or, “You’d better take it more slowly.” The bereaved woman was provided with a collection of gruesome anecdotes, which she related with relish while they crept along the cross street in the direction of Sixth Avenue. “There ain’t much I don’t know about operations,” she concluded at the end of her recital.
As the air brushed her face, Dorinda’s first sensation was a physical response to the invigorating frostiness. Then it seemed to her that whenever she took a step forward the pavement rose slightly and slid up to meet her. In so short a time she had forgotten the way to walk, and she felt troubled because in her case the law of gravitation appeared to be arbitrarily suspended. When she put her foot out, she did not know, she told herself, whether it would have the weight to come down or would go floating up into the air. “Could anything have happened to my brain,” she wondered, “when I was struck on the head?” In a little while, however, the sensation of lightness gave place to the more familiar one of strained muscles. Though she could walk easily now, she was beginning to feel very tired, and she could barely do more than crawl over the long block.
A high wind was blowing from the west, billowing the sleeves and skirts of women’s dresses, whipping the dust into waves, and tossing the gay streamers in Fifth Avenue. The sunlight appeared to splinter as it struck against the crystal blue of the sky and to scatter a shower of sparkling drops on the city. Though it was all bright, gay, beautiful, to Dorinda the scene might have been made of glass in the windy hollow of the universe. “I’m dried up at the core,” she thought, “and yet, I’ve got to go on pretending that I’m alive, that I’m like other people.” She felt nothing; she expected nothing; she desired nothing; and this insensibility, which was worse than pain, had attacked her body as well as her heart and mind. “If somebody were to stick a pin in me, I shouldn’t feel it,” she told herself. “I’m no better than a dead tree walking.”
At the corner of Sixth Avenue, a gust of wind struck her sharply, and still leaning on the arm of her companion, she drew back into the shelter of a shop.
“Let’s stand here until the next car comes.”
“Do you feel any worse?”
“No, not worse, only different.”
“I’ve known ’em to faint dead away the first time they left the hospital.”
“Well, I’ve no idea of fainting. Just tell me when you see the right car coming.”
The thing that worried her most, and she had puzzled over this from the minute she came down the steps of the hospital, was the curious impression in her mind that she had seen everything and everybody before. Every face was familiar to her. She seemed to have known each person who passed her in some former time and place, which she dimly remembered; and each reminded her, in some vague resemblance of contour, feature, or shifting expression, of the way Jason had looked when she first loved him. “Just as I was trying to forget him,” she thought, with irritation, “everybody begins to look like him.”
When the car came, and she got on and found a seat beside a fat German, who was buried in his newspaper, this senseless irritation still persisted. “Maybe if I stop looking at their faces and keep my eyes fixed on their clothes, the resemblance will pass away,” she told herself resolutely. “What a funny hat, just like a cabbage, that woman is wearing, and the man with her has on a tie like a little boy’s. He must be an artist. I read in some book that artists wore velvet coats and flowing ties.” Then, inadvertently, she raised her eyes to the face of the stranger, and discovered that he was gazing at her with a look that reminded her of Jason. Even the fat German wore a familiar expression when he turned to touch the bell and glanced down at her as he rose to go out of the car.
At the lodging-house, where she had to explain her case all over again, she was still haunted by this delusive resemblance. There might have been a general disintegration and reassembling of personalities since she had gone to the hospital, and she felt that she had seen them all before in other circumstances and other periods.
Alone, at last, in her little room, she dropped wearily on the hard bed, which, like the wife of the proprietor, bulged in the wrong places, and lay, without seeing or hearing, surrendered to the grey hollowness of existence. Sheer physical weakness kept her motionless for an hour; and when at the end of that time, she lifted her hands to take off her hat, she felt as if she were recovering from the effects of an anæsthetic. Gradually, as the stupor wore off, she became aware of the objects around her; of the hissing gas jet, which burned in the daytime; of the dirty carpet, with an ink splotch in the centre; of the unsteady washstand that creaked under its own weight; of the stale ashes of a cigar in the top of the soap dish; of the sharp ridge down the middle of the bed on which she was lying. And she thought clearly, “No matter how bad it is, I’ve got to go through with it.”
The hardest thing, she knew, that she had to face was not the wreck of her happiness, but the loss of a vital interest in life. Even people who were unhappy retained sometimes sufficient interest in the mere husk of experience to make life not only endurable but even diverting. With her, however, she felt that she had nothing to expect and nothing to lose. One idea had possessed her so completely that now, when it had been torn out from the roots like a dying nerve, there was no substitute for happiness that she could put in its place. “I’ve finished with love,” she repeated over and over. “I’ve finished with love, and until I find something else to fill my life, I shall be only an empty shell....”
Rising from the bed, she opened her bag and unfolded her dresses. None of them would do for New York, she realized. All of them, she saw now, were absurd and countrified. As she shook out the blue nun’s veiling, she said to herself, “If I hadn’t bought this dress, perhaps he would never have fallen in love with me, and than I should still be living at Old Farm, and Ma would have her cow and nothing would have happened that has happened.” She laughed with the perverse humour that she had brought back out of the depths of unconsciousness. If only one could get outside of it and stand a little way off, how ridiculous almost any situation in life would appear! Even those moments when she had waited in anguish at the fork of the road were tinged with irony when they revived now in her memory. “All the same I wouldn’t go through them again for anything that life could offer,” she thought.