Part 5

Why don’t you cut loose and come to N. Y.? This is the only place to live. You can choose the kind of life you want and live it, and get all there is of existence. Come on and get in with the bunch! You can get a studio in a top story and raise tomatters on the roof if you must have ’em. I’ll help you tend to ’em. Come on and learn the beauty of a quiet life. Get away from the feverish round of gayeties that you’ve been accustomed to—men taking you out rowing (wasn’t he tall and dark, with a drooping moustache?) and men coming in the Pullman cars and sitting close by your side—oh, I haven’t forgotten about it! Often I’ve gotten out a couple of dozen sheets of paper and started to write to you, when I’d think: oh, what’s the use—she won’t want to hear from me—somebody’s ripping the buttonholes out of his collar trying to pull up car windows for her, or pulling on the wrong oar and rowing the boat into a mud bank where they’ll sit for hours until some plowman plods along and drags them out.

Please, dear Carrie, write to me some more. If you had saved all the letters I’ve written to you in the spirit you’d have a stack as high as the big sunflower by the garden gate. Write and tell me exactly what you think about when you take your hair down and sit on the rug at 11:30 P. M. before the fireplace. And I’ll tell you what I think about when I set the bottle of Scotch on the table and light the last cigar at 2 A. M., when the distant cars and cabs sound like the ripples of your mountain streams on a still summer night.

I send the ghost of a magnolia up to your window.

Yours as ever, BOB.

_April 4th._

I find a P.S. from Bobby this afternoon and the ghost of a magnolia that failed to get in the other letter.

MA CHÉRIE MLLE. CARRIE:

Here’s a magnolia.

I know you believe I am “without the pale” and “N. G.,” but I write again because I do not believe that I am.

If you come to N. Y. this spring I reckon as how you won’t want to see me because you think I am short on etiquette. All right for youse! I’ll watch all the rubberneck coaches, and when I see a little pink-cheeked girl in a straw hat with daisies on it and a white dress with a pink sash, chewing sweetgum—(for shame, Bobby)—and making eyes at the Brooklyn Bridge, I’ll know who it is, and look at you all I please.

So, au revoir, Miss Howard. I am still yours sincerely.

R. H.

_April 5th._

This sweet spring afternoon I cannot stay indoors. In her joy the earth is like the mother of a new-born child. A light, restless wind has piled snowy, errant clouds above the mountain tops, the little green leaves are uncurling, the sun shining as it shines only in the spring and on an awakened world—and the birds——A lover bird, just the kind to capture a little lady bird’s heart, has been pouring out a passionate mating song for two whole days. He is in the cedar tree not far from my window. His little lady love answers from the willow in the pasture. He is trying to make her come to him, I feel sure. Will she?

_April 6th._ _Saturday Afternoon._

My lover bird is gone from the cedar tree. Down in the willow’s cool depths, above the spring where the colts and cattle drink, there are such flutterings, such joyous little outbursts of song that I smile in sympathy. Wise, wise, little woman-bird. Since the coming of these last letters there’s been a stealthy fear following at my heels—the fear that I might go to New York. I could make my book an excuse, and I have some money. I have spent very little since that extravagant outburst last fall. And I could make Dicky an excuse. Dear little Dicky, who is as joyous over my book as if she herself had written it.

I will not go! The fate that let me put the light out the night that Bobby came here is a wicked, wicked jade, but I defy her! I’ll stay right here!

That Bobby should remember a little girl’s hat through all the years! That day so far in the past, when I left Roseboro and Ernest Cold was on the train—Bobby said he was; I don’t remember—Bobby put a real daisy in my hat band when he came in the train to tell me good-bye, and he said——

That stealthy fear that I might go to New York is stealthy no longer. Boldly it has stalked out in front of me and clutched me by the throat.

_April 15th._

This morning when I pushed up the shade in my berth I was greeted by the sun’s big, round, inquiring eye. “What are you doing here?” he seemed to be asking. I hastened to explain that my going to New York was in no way connected with Mr. Robert Haralson; that he is not to know I am there. Somewhat shamefacedly I explain to that red, watchful eye that Dicky is not to know I am there either. Dicky doesn’t need me now. Her last letter is as joyous as the lilt of a lark.

My publishers (how fine it sounds) want some little changes made in the book, and for that sole reason I am on a Pullman bound for New York.

So accustomed am I to space that I could not be boxed up in lower twelve last night, so I took the whole section. This morning as I stood on my bed reaching up for my skirt the train took a sharp curve that landed me in the aisle of the car. Visions of a hospital danced with a million stars before my eyes. A young, lovely girl helped me back into my berth. No one else, not even the porter, had witnessed my humiliation. In a little while, in spite of my aching head, I collected my senses sufficiently to get to the dressing-room. Making myself presentable was a clutching sort of experience. I have not spent the night in a train since I was eighteen, and I must have been more agile then. When I emerged from dressing I felt as a mountaineer’s baby must feel when it is being hushed to sleep. If you have ever seen one being flung from side to side of its rude little cradle, threshed about like a weaver’s shuttle, then you understand perfectly.

The girl was waiting for me; she proposed that we breakfast together. In the dining car, under the stimulus of the coffee, which stopped my headache, I told the girl about my little book and that I was going on for my first trip. Back in the coach we were the only passengers and we sat together; she told me about herself. She is going to New York, too. She is going to join the great army of workers. She is so sweet and young, so girlish and refined, so beautifully although simply dressed, that I think my face must have shown my astonishment and regret. That she should be adrift in a great city seemed too dreadful—one of its labourers, and on small wages, in desolate lodgings, isolated from all social life with her kind. I thought of the city’s temptations for a lonely, beautiful girl. And I said: “Child, go back to your family. Haven’t you somebody?”

“I have my little baby that lies in the cemetery.” Her young laugh rang bitter. “I am all alone. I left my husband—he didn’t love baby and me any longer. I mean he didn’t love me. He adored baby. She adored him, too. She used to say, ‘I’m des trazy ’bout my dear daddy.’” She looked from the window; I could see her chin quiver. When she turned back to me her voice was quite steady. “I want to be fair to him. When baby died it hurt him cruelly, and always when I place flowers in the little urn at the head of baby’s grave, I find beautiful ones in the urn at the foot. I know, although he does not love me any longer, that it hurts him for me to be a wage-earner. But I can’t take his money. You—you don’t believe in divorce?” Her voice was half timid.

I was silent. It is something I am so ignorant of. The old Ducketts are the nearest approach to divorce that we have in our mountain world. Recently, without a word to any one, that poor old lady left her home and moved to a little house across the street. Our village has wondered and gossiped about this rupture after sixty years of life together. Poor old lady, she slips in the back door of his house when he is sitting at the front door, and does up the work she has done for sixty years; then she slips home again.

“A woman can’t judge”—the girl’s voice with a defiant note in it brought my thoughts with a start back from the Ducketts, and to her—“unless it is her own problem. She, the other woman, wanted him to leave baby and me. He dropped the letter on the floor and I picked it up and read it. I don’t know why I did it. I had perfect faith in him. She said all her happiness was at stake; she eliminated our happiness—baby’s and mine.”

“But, child”—my mind took a wider circle than it had ever had need of in Marsville—“any woman might fall in love with another woman’s husband and try to take him from her. I know a coloured woman whose husband beats her, and when I try to make her leave him and live on a nice little place we have and do our washing, she says she would leave her old man but that she might not find another, that husbands is so ‘scase.’ They must be from the way some women behave. Perhaps your husband was not at fault.”

The lovely colour mounted to her face, it quivered as she told me that he had acknowledged it. We were both silent then. But presently I asked if he had gone to the other woman. She murmured no.

“He says that he is penitent.” Her eyes were stormy. “He begs me to take him back. Upon what foundation would I build my faith in him again?”

I think my own answer surprised me. “Bodies sometimes sin when souls are clean,” I said. “It could have been a passing sin of the body that did not touch the spirit, which is still true to you. If the spirit sinned he would not want to come back—he would not be sorry. Oh, child, don’t you see?”

“I never—did see—it like—that.” The girl’s words trailed like broken winged birds, her face paled.

We were under the shed in Washington and a solitary passenger, travelling bag in hand, was coming down the aisle of our coach. At sight of her, for he did not know me, his face whitened, too. In one great throb of my heart I took in the situation. I knew that he was her husband, and that he loved her. I saw it in the flash of his face at sight of her—a blind man given back his sight might look out on his restored world with a look like that.

In a lightning-like flash of time I had leaped to my feet, pushed him into the seat where I had been, and, without in the least knowing what I was saying, I heard myself say: “You foolish children. Go back to the little grave and put the two urns for flowers together. Then start life all over again.”

I left them staring into each other’s eyes in a sort of mesmerized trance, and went into the next coach. When my eyes cleared of tears I saw that the bright sunlight world beyond the car window was filled with yellow butterflies. In their circling they made a great golden wedding ring. The sweet prophecy seemed mine—not belonging to the people I had left back in the other coach. At lunch they asked me to come to their table, but I smilingly refused. When two people have just been caught up in a golden chariot and given passage direct to Paradise there is no room in the vehicle for outsiders.

I could not grind under the river and get out in the heart of the city, as the advertisements say. I had to see the skyline from the Jersey side. How wonderful it is as it glitters in the soft spring light—a proud wonder city that rests on great, tossing waters. And there lie the docks. I can read the names of the different lines on the dark little houses. And far down the stretch of moving water I see a gallant little tug assisting a great vessel out to sea. A sort of trembling seized me. Like a vision that fades, all thought of the life that lay behind me—John, mammy, the little mountain village—slipped away. As the boat drifts near and nearer to that white wonder city I want to fling the people huddled on the seats, apathetic as sheep, into the water. I want to cry aloud, “City, city, I am coming!” But they wake up at the dock. How alive they are! I am alive, too. I am over the mountain wall. At last I am part of the big, alive, throbbing world.

_April 16th._ 12 P. M.

Late yesterday afternoon when I ran up the steps of 30 West Twentieth Street and the door opened and closed on me, my one sensation was relief. I had taken a cab at the ferry and I had marvelled at the dexterity with which the cabby turned and twisted through the dingy streets. Safe, not kidnapped, money still in my bag, the wonderful adventure of getting to my destination without adventure accomplished, I stepped from that cab. The cabby took my trunk from the top of his hansom, banged it on the sidewalk, accepted the dollar we had agreed upon, and waited. I waited, too, politely. Suddenly he turned very red and climbed to his perch, swearing roundly.

As I followed Miss Jackson up the stairs to the third floor I asked her why he did that. She answered vaguely that they were rude.

I came to Miss Jackson’s because her mother and my mother knew each other, and because it is eminently respectable. As we climbed the dark stairs my elation dropped from me. The hall needs the winds of heaven to blow through it. Coming back to dinner, I fairly groped through the dimness. But the dining-room was bright and cheerful. All the people seemed young. They were very gay. At dinner the whole talk was of the theatre. As I have not been to a play since I was eighteen, I sat stupidly quiet. Everybody went out after dinner—most of them to the theatre. Miss Jackson went, too. Up in my room I leaned from the window and tried to realize the wonderfulness of being in New York. Below me the street was dark, but far away across the housetops I saw a glow that I took to be the lights of Broadway. After a long time I stole down the dim, depressing stairs. I opened the door, let in the sweet, cool April air. I don’t know how long I stood there looking out at the dark, deserted street. I thought of it as a siren of the sea, calling, luring to it the youth of our wide, free land. My mind went to my little room up two dark flights of stairs. I was paying ten dollars a week for a room just about the size of the rug in front of my fireplace at home. What was the size of the working girl’s room who paid five dollars a week? How many flights of dark stairs did she have to climb? I seemed to feel the city—the city that I have not yet seen. I seemed to feel its immensity—stretching away, street after street, in overpowering sameness the length of the island. I thought of the overcrowded East Side and the foreigners herded like cattle, overflowing into the streets, and then I thought of Bobby—or had I been thinking of him through all my thoughts?—jostling in the crowded streets, loitering, listening, feeling the beat of the city’s great heart.

When I closed the door and came down the hall I saw the telephone in spite of the dimness. Almost before I knew it I had found the number I sought, my hand was on the receiver. But I did not take it down. The memory of a bright-eyed little lady bird who waited for her lover to come to her restrained me. I must be as wise as she.

I ran up to my room. A fog had crept in from the sea. The river must be near. The calls of whistles and horns came shrill and often. They seemed to give anxious warning. The city _is_ a siren. It wrapped itself closer in this white fog sheet of mystery and it called to me. Hastily I donned coat and hat, ran down the stairs and out on the street. I did not hesitate—to hesitate was to go back. In front of me, not far away, another street opened. I reached it, stood still for a moment; a wraithlike little figure hurried past. “What street is this?” I asked. Wraithlike he sped on without a reply. I hurried after him, caught him by the arm. “What street is this?” I insisted. “And which is up and which down?”

“Whut’s de matter wid y’nut?”

Humbly, I told him that I was a stranger; that I lived near and had just walked out for a little glimpse of the city. He told me to keep straight ahead until I came to Twenty-third Street, and stand there a while till the hayseeds fell off me. I gave him a dime. He graciously allowed me to accompany him. The city street widens beautifully at Twenty-third. It had seemed like one of our narrow mountain gulches. I gave my little lad another dime. I wanted to be told so much. The open space, vague in the fog, is Madison Square; the street that rolled away into the gloom, the Avenue, and the white, white foggy flare of light, Broadway.

Some weight of the city’s loneliness fell on me as I retraced my steps alone. The fog seemed denser—it might have been because the light lay behind. A few blocks down, as I turned into my own street, my own audacious thoughts brought me to a standstill. If I kept straight on I would come to Washington Square. An old schoolmate lived there.

I had no difficulty in recognizing the Arch, the cross on the church, the light that burns always. I found the number. I would have thought I had made a mistake, but I have written it so often. I went up the bare, worn steps, rang a jangly bell. A slatternly woman came to the door. Back of her I could see a dingy hall lighted by a blinking gas jet. She called my friend loudly. There was no reply. She said her work was heavier in the spring, that she was often very late.

I had pictured my artist friend in her studio home surrounded with comfort. “Hasn’t she a studio?” I stammered. The woman laughed loudly. “Her room, third floor back, ain’t no bigger ’n yo’ hand. She paints an’ sews an’ cooks, eats an’ lives an’ sleeps there, ’cept when she got jobs out.”

I turned and fled. I was trembling so I could hardly stand. Such a fragile, lovely creature—my friend back in my school-girl days. A joyous young creature, fashioned for joy. I did not want to see her; I knew instinctively that she did not want to see me.

On the street again, out of the foggy darkness, a shadow lurched toward me. I shrank against the building I was passing. It bent and looked into my face, laughed drunkenly, and passed on. I tried to move. My limbs had taken root. As I stood there flattened against that wall I heard cautious, descending footsteps, whispering voices. Some people were coming down nearby steps, and I was glad. I would follow close behind them. After what was to me a very long time, as they did not pass, I went in the direction of their voices, until I stumbled over a dark mass that lay in my path. Something told me. The slow, cautious steps, the whispering voices—I dropped to my knees on the pavement. The face I lifted and looked into was a young girl’s. She was unconscious. I sprang up. There was movement in my limbs now. I ran, breathless, into a man. I caught him by the arm, pleading with him to hurry; I dragged him to the girl on the pavement. I gasped out all I knew.

He took a flashlight from somewhere about him, knelt, looked at the girl, and I—I looked at the pool of blood widening on the pavement. I had not seen it before. She was dying. I dropped down by her, too. “Oh, poor little girl,” I cried, “why did you come to this city of Gomorrha? Why didn’t you stay at home?”

“See here”—the light flashed full in my own face, the low, cold voice bit into my spirit as a bullet of steel might have burrowed in my flesh—“how do I know that what you’ve told me is on the level?”

Stupidly I stared at him. Whose face was this—as familiar as my own viewed in the looking-glass?

The eyes looking into mine were suddenly confused, the apology he gave murmured. He stared as though I bewildered him. He pushed his hat back. I hadn’t recognized Bobby Haralson, but I knew that lock of hair on his brow. Had I not once watched a flame devour it? Head and heart awhirl, I smiled at him. “Mr. Haralson,” I said, and I laughed outright. “I am on the level.”

There was the sound of approaching footsteps. He flashed the light out. “So you know me?” he said.

“Who does not?” I answered. “But you do not know me, honest, now.”

“I do—and I don’t,” he said.

Not far away a figure loomed; it brought us back to the poor little girl that lay there so quietly between us.

“You must get away, quickly. Officer!” he called. His voice has a carrying quality if it is so low, for soon an answering hail came through the fog.

“Will you go? Go!” he commanded. “I’ll see this through.”

“I can’t,” I said, and I suddenly knew that I spoke out of a vast content. “I’m lost. It’s no use to tell me west. I don’t know west.”

“West what?” Again his words bit into me like they were steel.

“Twenty.” The officer was only a few steps away and Bobby fairly forced it from me.

“The Arch, the Avenue, Twentieth Street, then to your left.”

Obediently, I did it all. I am safe at Miss Jackson’s. But, oh, will I ever sleep again? When I close my eyes I see the girl’s fair little face, that widening pool of blood; and then I see Bobby’s eyes—the puzzled stir of memory in them.

_April 17th._