IV
Dorinda stood in Doctor Faraday’s office and looked out into East Thirty-seventh Street. Beneath her there was a grey pavement swept by wind and a few pale bars of sunshine. She saw the curved iron railing of the porch and the steps of the area, where an ashcan, still unemptied, awaited the call of the ashcart. A fourwheeler, driven by a stout, red-faced driver, was passing in the street; at the corner an Italian youth with a hunchback was selling shoe-strings; on the pavement in front of the house, a maltese cat, wearing a bell on a red ribbon, sunned himself lazily while he licked the fur on his stomach. Overhead, the vault of the sky appeared remote, colourless, as impenetrable as stone.
When she turned into the house, she knew to weariness what she should find awaiting her. A narrow oval room, with sand-coloured walls, curtains of brown damask, and furniture of weathered oak, which was carved and twisted out of all resemblance to her mother’s cherished pieces of mahogany. On the long tables piles of old magazines lay in orderly rows. In the fireplace three neat gas logs shed a yellow flame shot with blue sparkles. Very far apart, three patients were sitting, with strained expectant eyes turned in the direction of the folding doors which led into the inner office. In the last two years she had learned to know the office and the street outside as if they were books which she had studied at school.
Standing there, she thought idly of her new dress of navy blue poplin. She knew that she looked well in it, that the severe white linen collar and cuffs suited the grave oval of her face. Though she had lost her girlish softness and bloom, she had gained immeasurably in dignity and distinction, and people, she noticed, turned to look at her now when she went out alone in the street. The severe indifference of her expression emphasized the richness of her lips and the vivid contrast of her colouring. Her eyes had lost their springtime look, but they were still deeply blue beneath the black, shadows of her lashes. Young as she was she had acquired the ripe wisdom and the serene self-confidence of maturity; she had attained the immunity from apprehension which comes to those only who can never endure the worst again. Yet she was not unhappy. In the security of her disenchantment there was the quiet that follows a storm.
While she waited there for the sound of the doctor’s bell, she thought dispassionately of what the last two years had meant in her life. Everything and nothing! Her outward existence had been altered by them, but to her deeper self they had been scarcely more than dust blowing across her face. Dust blowing, that was all they had meant to her!
She lived the period over again in her recollection, as she might have lived over one of the plays she had seen. She thought of the Faradays; of her diffidence, of their kindness; of the English governess and the French teacher, neither of whose speech was intelligible to her. She recalled the morning breakfasts; the walks in the Park in the afternoon; her nervous dread of the office; her first mistakes; the patience of the doctor and Mrs. Faraday; the way she had gradually become one of the family circle; the six small children, and especially the little girl Penelope, who had taken a fancy to her from the beginning; the two summers when she had gone to Maine with the family; the bathing, and how strange she had felt coming out on the beach with no shoes on and skirts up to her knees. Then she thought of Penelope’s illness; of the sudden attack of pneumonia while Mrs. Faraday was in bed with influenza; of the days and nights of nursing because Penelope cried for her and refused to take her medicine from the trained nurse; of the night when they thought the child was dying, and how she had sat by the bed until the crisis at dawn. Then of the crisis when it came. The quieter breathing; the way the tiny hand fluttered in hers; the band of steel that loosened about her heart; and Mrs. Faraday crying from her bed, “Dorinda, we can never forget what you have done! You must stay with us always!” After that she had grown closer to them. Where else could she go? Nowhere, unless she went back to Pedlar’s Mill, and that, she felt, was still impossible. Some day she might go back again. Not yet, but some day, when her hate was as dead as her love. There were moments when she missed Old Farm, vivid moments when she smelt growing things in the Park, when she longed with all her heart for a sight of the April fields and the pear orchard in bloom and the big pine where birds were singing. But the broomsedge she tried to forget. The broomsedge was too much alive. She felt that she hated it because it would make her suffer again.
They missed her at home, she knew. Her father had not been well. He was getting old. Every month she sent him half of her salary. They would not have had that much if she had stayed at Pedlar’s Mill; and then there was the extra money at Christmas. Last Christmas the doctor had given her a check for fifty dollars, and after Penelope’s illness, they had wished to give her more, but she had refused to let them pay her for nursing the child.... There was a cow at home now, not the red one of Doctor Greylock’s, but a Jersey her father had bought from James Ellgood. Her father’s tobacco crop had done well last year, and he had mended some of the fences. When the mortgage came due, she hoped he would be able to meet it. She wondered if life had changed there at all. Rose Emily was dead—that would make a difference to her. And Jason’s father, that horrible old man, was actually dying, her mother had written....
The doctor’s bell rang, and she turned, while the folding doors opened, to usher the next patient into the private office. Two women went in together, while the doctor’s assistant, a young physician named Burch, led the remaining patient away for examination. She had grown to know the young doctor well, and since last summer, when he spent his vacation in Maine, she had suspected that he was on the verge, of falling in love with her. Cautious, deliberate, methodical, he was in no danger, she felt, of plunging precipitately into marriage. Doctor Faraday approved, she was aware, and his wife had done all in her power to make the match; but Dorinda had felt nothing stronger than temperate liking. Richard Burch was not ugly; he was even attractive looking after you got used to his features. He had a short, rather stocky figure, and a square, not uninteresting face, a good face, Mrs. Faraday called it. Almost any girl who had the will to love might have argued herself into loving him. That emotion was, in part at least, the result of a will to love, Dorinda had learned in the last two years, since she had picked up more or less of the patter of science; and the last thing she wished to do, she assured herself, was ever to live through the destructive process again. With a complete absence of self-deception, she could ask herself now if she had been in love with love when she met Jason Greylock, and if any other reasonably attractive man would have answered as well in his place. Was it the moment, after all, and not the man, that really mattered? If Bob Ellgood had shown that admiring interest in her the year before instead of the day after she met Jason, would her life have been different? Did the importunate necessity exist in the imagination, and were you compelled to work it out into experience before you could settle down to the serious business of life?
She looked round as the door opened, and saw Doctor Burch coming out with the two women patients.
“At ten to-morrow,” the elder woman said, as she slipped on her fur coat.
“Ten to-morrow,” Dorinda repeated mechanically, while she went over to the desk and wrote down the appointment in the office book. When she turned away, the woman had gone, and Doctor Burch was gazing at her with his twinkling, near-sighted eyes from behind rimless eyeglasses.
“There’s one more to come,” she observed in a brisk, professional tone.
“One more?”
“Patient, I mean.”
“Oh, yes. That will finish them till we go out. You ought to thank your stars you don’t have to make calls.”
“Yes. I get tired listening to complaints.”
He smiled. “You aren’t sympathetic?”
She thought of Rose Emily. “Well, I’ve seen so much real misery.”
“It’s real enough everywhere.”
“Yes, I know. I suppose the truth is that life doesn’t seem to me to be worth all the fuss they make over it. The more they suffer, the harder they appear to cling to living. I believe in facing what you have to face and making as little fuss about it as possible.”
“I’ve noticed that. You hate fussiness.”
She assented gravely. “When you’ve been very poor, you realize that it is the greatest extravagance.”
“You’ve been very poor, then?”
“Almost everybody is poor at Pedlar’s Mill. The Ellgoods are the only people who have prospered. The rest of us have had to wring whatever we’ve had out of barren ground. It was a struggle to make anything grow.”
“Well, your face gives you away,” he said thoughtfully. “Any nerve specialist could tell you that you are made up of contradictions. You’ve got the most romantic eyes I ever saw—they are as deep as an autumn twilight—and the sternest mouth. Your eyes are gentle and your mouth is hard—too hard, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. People say we make our mouths. I heard Doctor Faraday tell a woman that a few days ago. But it isn’t true. Life makes us and breaks us. We don’t make life. The best we can do is to bear it.”
“And you do that jolly well.”
She did not smile as she answered. “Oh, I’m satisfied. I’m not unhappy—except in spots,” she corrected herself.
“Yet you have very little pleasure. You never go out.”
“Yes, I do—sometimes. Every now and then Mrs. Faraday takes me to the theatre.”
“Do you ever go to hear music?”
“No, Mrs. Faraday doesn’t care for it.” She laughed. “The best I’ve ever heard was a band in the street.”
For an instant he hesitated, and she wondered what was coming. Then he said persuasively: “There’s a good concert to-morrow. Would you care to come?”
She glanced at him inquiringly. “Sunday afternoon?”
“Yes, there’s this new pianist, Krause. You aren’t too pious, are you?”
“I’m not pious at all.” A satirical memory sifted through her mind, and she heard her own voice saying, “Will you let her die without giving her time to prepare?”
“Then I’ll come for you at half-past two. We’ll hear the concert, and then have tea somewhere, or a stroll in the Park.”
When he had gone, she put the office in order, and then waited until the last patient should leave. After all, why shouldn’t she try to find some pleasure in life? Her hesitation had come, she felt, from a nervous avoidance of crowds, a shrinking from any change in her secluded manner of living. She hummed a line from one of the Gospel hymns. “Rescue the perishing, care for the dying.”
“How ignorant he will think me when he discovers I have never heard any music. I am ignorant, yet I am educated compared to what I was two years ago. I know life now, and that is a great deal.”
The patient came out and left, and in a few minutes Doctor Faraday passed through the room on his way to put on his overcoat.
“Are you going out before lunch?” she asked, because she knew Mrs. Faraday hated to have him miss his meals.
“Yes, I can’t wait, but I’ll light a cigar.”
He took out one of the long slender cigars he preferred, and stopped in front of her while she struck a match and held her hand by the flame.
“That’s a suitable young man, Dorinda,” he remarked irrelevantly, with his whimsical smile.
“Young man?” She glanced up inquiringly. Though her sense of humour had developed almost morbidly, she had discovered that it was of a wilder variety than Doctor Faraday’s.
“I think, my dear girl,” he explained, “that you could go farther and do worse than take Richard. If I’m not mistaken, he has a future before him.”
She laughed. “There wouldn’t be much for me in that sort of future.”
“But there might be in the results.” Then he grew serious. “He is interested in you, and I hope something will come of it.”
A pricking sensation in her nerves made her start away from him.
“Don’t,” she said sharply. “I’ve finished with all that sort of thing.” “Not for good. You are too young.” “Yes, for good. I can’t explain what I mean, but the very thought of that makes me—well, sick all over.”
Her face had gone white, and struck by the change, he looked at her closely. “Some women,” he said, “are affected that way by a shock.”
“You mean by a blow on the head?”
“No, I don’t mean a physical blow. I mean an emotional shock. Such a thing may produce a nervous revulsion.”
“Well, that has happened to me.”
He laid his hand on her shoulder. “It will pass probably. You are handsomer than ever. It is natural that you should need love.”
A wave of aversion swept over her face. “But ‘I don’t need it. I am through with all that.”
He looked at her gravely. “And you will fill your life—with what?”
She laughed derisively. How little men knew! “With something better than broomsedge. That’s the first thing that puts out on barren soil, just broomsedge. Then that goes and pines come to stay—pines and life-everlasting. You won’t understand,” she explained lightly. “I was talking to Doctor Burch about Pedlar’s Mill just before you came in, and I told him we had to get our living from barren ground.”
He patted her shoulder. “Well, I hope that, too, will pass,” he answered as he turned to put on his overcoat.
She remembered his words the next day while she sat in the concert hall waiting for the music to begin. At first she had tried to make out the names on the programme, desisting presently because they confused her. Beethoven. Bach. Chopin. She went over the others again, stumbling because she could make nothing of the syllables. A-p-p-a-s-s-i-o-n-a-t-a. What did the strange word mean? P-a-t-h-é-tique—that she could dimly grasp. Sonata? Nocturne? What did the strange words mean? How could she be expected to know she had never heard them before?
Suddenly, while she struggled over the letters, the music floated toward her from the cool twilight of the distance. This was not music, she thought in surprise, but the sound of a storm coming up through the tall pines at Old Farm. She had heard this singing melody a thousand times, on autumn afternoons, in the woods. Then, as it drew nearer, the harmony changed from sound into sensation; and from pure sensation, rippling in wave after wave like a river, it was merged and lost in her consciousness.
In the beginning, while she sat there, rapt in startled apprehension, she thought of innumerable things she had forgotten; detached incidents, impressions which glittered sharply, edged with light, against the mosaic of her recollections. Mellow sunshine, sparkling like new cider, streamed over her. Music, which she had imagined to be sound only, was changing into colour. She saw it first in delicate green and amber; then in violent clashes of red and purple; but she saw it always as vividly as if it reached her brain through her eyes. She thought first of the evening sky over the bulrushes; of the grass after rain in the pasture; of the pear trees breaking with the dawn from palest green into white. Then the colours changed, and she remembered sunsets over the broomsedge. The glow cast upward from the earth as if the wild grass were burning. The bough of a black-gum tree emblazoned in scarlet on the blue sky. The purple mist of autumn twilight, like the bloom on a grape. The road home through the abandoned fields. The solitary star in a sky which was stained the colour of ripe fruit. The white farm-house. The shingled roof like a hood. Swallows flying. Swallows everywhere, a world of swallows spinning like curved blades in the afterglow.
With the flight of wings, ecstasy quivered over her, while sound and colour were transformed into rhythms of feeling. Pure sensation held and tortured her. She felt the music playing on her nerves as the wind plays on a harp; she felt it shatter her nerves like broken string, and sweep on crashing, ploughing through the labyrinth of her soul. Down there, in the deep below the depths of her being, she felt it tearing her vitals. Down there, in the buried jungle, where her thoughts had never penetrated, she felt it destroying the hidden roots of her life. In this darkness there was no colour; there was no glimmer of twilight; there was only the maze of inarticulate agony....
Now it was dying away. Now it was returning. Something that she had thought dead was coming to life again. Something that she had buried out of sight under the earth was pushing upward in anguish. Something that she had defeated was marching as a conqueror over her life. Suddenly she was pierced by a thousand splinters of crystal sound. Little quivers of light ran over her. Beads of pain broke out on her forehead and her lips. She clenched her hands together, and forced her body back into her chair. “I’ve got to stand it. No matter what it does to me, I’ve got to stand it.”