This Proud Heart (19 page)

The train stopped at last, and she stepped upon an empty platform and went through the empty station and down the road on the south edge of the town toward home. She could not remember anything she had seen all day. Her mind was filled with this surging need in her to make, to shape, her waiting people. She walked quickly, and took off her hat and carried it in her hand. Twenty minutes, fifteen, ten—she was at the gate, and she lifted the latch. There was a strange car at the door, a small dusty gray car.

“John—Marcia!” she called, and went toward the porch.

The door opened, and her father came out.

“Why, Dad!” she cried cheerfully.

“My dear,” he said gravely, “Mark is very ill.”

She stared at him from the steps. “He was all right,” she said, her breath catching in her throat, “he was all right this morning.”

“Hal brought him home at noon,” her father said. “You weren’t here, and Lucile came over, and they got him to bed and sent for the doctor. Your mother and I came over right away. It’s typhoid.”

But she was pushing past him, up the stairs, into Mark’s room. It was already not his room. A strange nurse sat by his bed, and he lay, his face very red, his eyes half closed.

“Mark—darling!” she said, and the nurse stood up as she came in.

“Mrs. Keening?” the nurse asked, but Susan did not see her.

“Dearest, I’m back,” she said. She knelt beside the bed and leaned toward him.

And he opened his eyes slowly and turned his head toward her and said in a drowsy, thick voice, “Have a—good day?”

“Why didn’t you tell me this morning, darling?” she cried. “I’d never have gone!”

But Mark did not answer her. He passed his dry tongue over his dry lips.

“Water,” he whispered to the nurse.

She brought him a cup with a little water in it and he drank and closed his eyes again.

“How long has he been like this?” Susan asked. Within her body her bones were weak with terror and she felt a nausea of fright creeping over her like a cold fog.

“He should have been in bed days ago,” the nurse said in a clear useful voice. “He’s dragged around until now he’s down he’s collapsed. The doctor’s downstairs and wants to see you, he said, as soon as you come in. You’d better go on and let your husband rest.”

She took up a basin and began sponging Mark’s forehead and hands, and Susan got up slowly, gazing at this fevered Mark, whose hot swollen face looked strange to her.

She went into her room and smoothed her hair and washed her face and hands and went downstairs, and all the time she was taking her world and forcing it to the catastrophe of this hour. Her mother came out of the kitchen, her round wrinkled face puckered.

“I’ve sent Jane and the children home,” she whispered. “Johnnie kept crying.”

“Yes,” said Susan loudly. Why did people whisper as soon as somebody was ill? Mark was not going to die. She went into the living room, and there with her father sat the doctor, a young, sharp man whom she had never seen, since the old doctor died who had taken care of her when John and Marcia were born. They were all so healthy. They never needed doctors.

“Mrs. Keening, your husband is a very sick man,” he said, rising quickly and sitting down again.

“It’s very sudden,” said Susan. “This morning—”

“The symptoms have not been recognized,” said the doctor. “I imagine he is of an uncomplaining nature.”

“Mark never complains,” she said. “But I should have noticed.”

The doctor coughed behind his hand. “There is some source of infection about,” he said. “Have you had your well tested? These old farms often have impure wells.”

“No,” she said, looking at him very directly. “I never thought of it.”

“Ah?” said the doctor. She could feel him thinking, “It is your business, I should say, to think of such things.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of it myself,” her father murmured.

“I should have thought of it,” she said. It was as though she had stabbed herself. “It was I who wanted to come here,” she went on ruthlessly. “If we had stayed in the house where we were, we’d have had the town water supply, and this wouldn’t have happened.”

The doctor coughed again.

“Now, Susan,” her father said, “there is nothing more absurd than such talk, when the thing’s already done.”

“I wanted to come here so I could do my work,” she went on in the same voice.

The doctor did not speak.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Susan quickly, leaning forward in her chair. “What shall we do for him?”

The day was gone—no, more, it had never been.

“He must be taken to the hospital,” said the doctor. She could feel him enjoying his power over her. He rose. “I’ll send the ambulance at once,” he went on ruthlessly. “Meanwhile, you must all take precautions. I’ll let you know.”

He was gone, and she looked at her father.

She rose abruptly. “I had better go and see what’s to be done,” she said restlessly. She paused on her way to the door and kissed the thick white hair on the crown of her father’s head.

But there was nothing for her to do.

She hung about Mark’s bed a moment.

“Oughtn’t we to—” she began, and the nurse said firmly, “He’s quite all right, Mrs. Keening. I will see to everything.”

She went downstairs again, into the room where her father was. He had not moved, sitting there quietly by the window as she had left him. She went over to the deep windowsill, and sat down. The window was open and the wind of the cool late September evening blew in. She gazed into the garden and after a while she looked at her father.

“Have I been wrong?” she asked. “Should I have given up the half of ray life? How do I know it would have saved him?”

“There is no use in such questions,” her father said. He put his beautiful hands together, fingertip to fingertip, and contemplated them. “When you give up the half of your life for any reason,” he said quietly and clearly, “you then become an entirely different person. You do not merely become the half of what you might be—the sacrifice twists you and deforms you into another creature.” He waited, and then went on. “Your grandfather lived only for his music and he was one sort of man, and his wife and children nearly starved. And I swore I’d never treat a woman as he treated my mother. Your mother was a pretty baby when we were married and I was twenty-two, and promised to take care of her. And because she was afraid when there was no salary coming in every month, I took a job teaching instead of trusting to my luck writing. I think in the end I’ve done worse by her than my father did by my mother. I’m not pleasant to live with, and no pleasanter for knowing it.”

She did not answer. What would she have been if she had stayed in the little house and put Susan Gaylord quietly to death, hour by hour, every day?

“What people don’t see,” her father went on, his fingertips fluttering apart, “is that it’s not a question at all of the work. The world can live without the bit of music or poetry or what not that people like you and me feel we have to make. The point is, what about you and me?” He paused again, and pressed his fingers together firmly. “My advice to you is, give up your life if you can. If you can do it, you can do without it, and everything will be simple. People will understand you and like you better if you’re not different from them. God, how people hate any person whose head stands higher than theirs! They’ll keep you down if they can—they’ll cut off your head to do it.”

He was silent, and she sat watching the delicate spare hands, saying nothing, hearing over and over again in the confusion of her mind what he had said. She could not now know what she should have done or been. She had lived as naturally and unconsciously as children live, from every part of her being. And the woman she was had been the woman Mark loved. So much she knew, and no more.

The house was so still that the noise of the pounding of the machines that were digging a new well only made the stillness deeper. She had had the old well sealed at once. No one should ever drink from it again. She had moved to her parents’ house until it was finished.

“Stay until Mark comes back,” her mother begged her.

She could come at night to the house where she had been a child, but in the morning she wanted to be in her own house. For now the days were nothing but blank hours between the visits she could make to Mark. Morning and afternoon she watched the clock until she could open the door of the small white room in the hospital where he lay motionless upon his bed, smiling drowsily when she came in, but scarcely speaking. Every day at one of the times she met his father or his mother. They could never come together because of cows to be milked and chores to be done.

“How does the boy look to you, Susan?” his father always whispered hoarsely, and she always answered clearly and loudly, “Mark will get well!”

But his mother seldom spoke. She took Susan’s hand and held it hard, and gave her the smile that was so dimly Mark’s own. Sometimes they sat together by Mark’s bed for the half hour allotted to them, and Mark spoke to neither of them. When the time was gone and they came away together and out again into the strong autumn sunshine, Susan said, “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it! I am glad the weather stays fine for his sake. The very air is lively.”

And his mother agreed. “The air makes a difference.” And they smiled at each other and parted because they could speak no more.

And day after day she refused to believe anything except that when Mark could gather his strength together he would do it and get well. She needed him and he knew it. She told him over and over.

“Darling, everything is stopped until you are home again. We are all waiting.”

When the letter came from New York she put it on her desk and did not open it. She could not think of a moment of her life away from Mark. If she could not be with him, she must at least think of him. It was impossible to turn to her work, lest she forget him.

“What a wicked woman I am,” she thought. “Even now I could work and forget him whom I love.”

So she would not work. If against the dark emptiness of her brain the figures stole forth, the figures she could make, she sent them away again. Let there be no one there but Mark. She felt a strange superstition rising in her. If she could think only of Mark she could keep him alive. If she never let him slip out of her mind, then he would not slip out of life. She could hold him to life. She believed this at last, and was not afraid. She could save him. She had always done everything she wanted to do. The doctor said gravely, “I must tell you I am not at all pleased, Mrs. Keening. He is putting up no fight at all.” But still she would not let herself be afraid. Everything had always come right for her. She would not let Mark die.

“It is a strange case,” the doctor said at last. “It is not running its proper course to a crisis. He is not getting better.”

“He’s no worse,” she said stubbornly.

“There is no standing still for a human being,” the doctor retorted. “If he isn’t getting better, he is getting worse.”

… One day, causelessly, Mark was better, and on that day he died. He had talked a little when she came in.

“How are the children?” he opened his eyes to ask.

“They are well, except we all long for you,” she answered. They were alone for a few moments.

“I’m still—tired,” he said, very faintly.

“Yes, and rest,” said Susan comfortingly. “You’re to rest as long as you like, my darling. Only don’t forget us.”

He smiled, and after a while he asked, “What are you making now?”

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “I can’t do any work until you come home. I must have you well and home again.”

He said in his slow fainting voice, “What shall you make—then?”

“I am going to do my group over again, darling,” she said gently. “But only when you are quite well.”

“The woman was looking away, wasn’t she?” he murmured.

“Yes,” said Susan softly.

He did not speak again. He closed his eyes, and then suddenly as she sat gazing at his silent face, he turned his head away from her toward the wall and quietly he died.

How could he die so quickly, so quietly? If she had dreamed that death was in his mind she would have seized him and held him, cried out to him, and forced the thought of death away from him. When she screamed it was too late. He had already gone. The nurse had run in.

“Why—why—” she had said, startled.

“Quick—” Susan gasped.

But it was no use. He had escaped them effortlessly, not by swiftness or by speed, but by simple weariness.

“I saw him look so very tired,” Susan said, her throat tight and hard. She could remember now every instant of Mark’s last look. “Then he closed his eyes and turned his face away.”

“He just gave up, that’s what,” said the nurse resentfully. “I’ve had ’em do that on me before. You work and work on ’em, and then some fine day they just get tired and quit on you.”

The doctor was there. His quick hands were touching Mark’s breast and eyes, his pulse, his hands. He drew the sheet over his face.

“You had better go home, Mrs. Keening,” he said quietly. “Shall I call your father?”

“No,” she said, “no.”

She could not move. She could not think what to do.

“Come and lie down in the other room, dear,” said the nurse.

“No,” she said again.

“Shall I call a cab?” asked the doctor. He was kind, but she could see that for him there was no more to be done here, and he wanted to be about his business.

“No, I have my car,” she said.

“You needn’t worry about—details,” he said. “I’ll ring your father. I’m very sorry, Mrs. Keening. We did all we could, you know. I think there was a certain stamina lacking, perhaps—one doesn’t know—well, if you’ll excuse me—”

She was able to turn at last. She went down the hall steadily and out into the sunshine of the rich October day. She climbed into the small gray car and drove to her own house. She would tell no one. Let others do the telling. She wanted to go home, to go upstairs into the room where she and Mark had lived together, and there she would shut the door against everyone else. He could not be quite gone yet from the house where they had lived.