Chapter VIII: Isabel

THE taxi brought him to the hospital a few minutes after eleven. He went up to Obstetrical Ward B. To a nurse who sat at a desk in the corridor he gave his name. “I would like to see Miss Drury in room thirty-seven.”

“Just a minute,” said the nurse, and pressed a button on her desk. Presently another uniformed young woman appeared. “Take this visitor to room thirty-seven, Miss Paget.”

He accompanied the young woman down the corridor.

She tapped at a door, opened it slightly, and glanced in. “A visitor for you,” she said, and ushered Norman in.

On a small high bed lay Isabel, her pointed face framed in loosely strewn locks of short auburn hair against her pillow. She raised her head a little as the door closed behind him.

“Oh,” she said, and smiled, “it’s you.” A thin arm was withdrawn languidly from under the coverlet, and a hand was offered to him. It seemed strangely frail for her hand. She seemed queerly thin and white. He put his hat, stick and bouquet upon the little table by the bed, and bent over her hand. A sudden emotion flooded him so that he could not speak for a moment. He held her thin hand to his lips. He would have dropped on his knees beside the bed--but that would have been awkward, the bed was so high. His sense of the ridiculous helped him to recover his self-possession.

“Isabel!” he said.

“Yes, here I am,” she said. “Who would have thought it would come to this?” Her face was lit up by one of her amused ironic perceptions. How well he knew that look!

“The wood near Athens,” he said.

“Yes--the wood near Athens! But do sit down, Norman.”

He drew the chair up close to her bed.

“I hope you understand,” she went on, “that it really isn’t my fault you’ve been dragged into all this. Dr. Zerneke explained everything to you, didn’t she?”

He nodded, not quite able to trust himself to speak.

“I didn’t think I’d see you at all,” she said. “I thought it would be simpler not to. But when you called up, that seemed to me rather silly.”

“Why didn’t you want to see me?” he asked.

“Well--everything was settled, and I didn’t want things upset. I haven’t got my strength back yet, and I didn’t feel equal to arguing with you. I remembered you as being rather controversially conventional, you know.”

“I suppose I am rather conventional,” he said humbly. “But what did you think my attitude would be, about this?”

“Oh, I thought you might be shocked at the idea of my deserting my child. I thought you might preach the duties of motherhood to me--that sort of thing. You remember, we once had an argument about it. You thought woman’s destiny after all was the home. I suppose it is, for most of them. But I’ve got to paint, Norman. I can’t give up my life to a baby. Please don’t think I’m heartless. But I’m not going to let a biological accident change my whole life.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?” Norman asked abruptly.

“Well, I didn’t know for a long time.”

“You didn’t know!”

“At least I wouldn’t believe it. I was an awful fool, Norman. You see, I’d always thought of myself as an artist--not a woman. I simply couldn’t admit the possibility of such a thing as my having a baby. You remember, when you were afraid this might happen, and I laughed and said oh, it would be all right? That was just my sublime egotism!” She laughed. “I thought it _couldn’t_ happen to me.”

“But you found out you were a woman after all,” he said solemnly.

She stirred restlessly beneath the coverlet. “I found out that my body is a woman’s body,” she said. “And that still seems queer to me. Yes, apparently it’s true that this body of mine is a baby-factory, just like other girls’ bodies. And what a strange and cumbersome process it is, Norman! I’ve a good chance to observe it, you see. I was under ether during the final crisis, so I can’t speak of that. But I saw and felt enough to make me wonder at women--why they stand for it, being made use of this way as baby-producers. I suppose Nature traps them into it--and then they accept their fate. But I’m not going to! My body has been used nine months for a purpose that I never consented to--used and occupied and then torn and mangled--but I’m free now at last, and I’m going to stay free. My body may be a woman’s body, but my thoughts are not a woman’s thoughts. I have something else to do than take care of a baby! And even my silly body seems to know that at last.--I’m supposed to be a milk-producing animal now, a kind of contented cow with bloated udders. But my milk is drying up. Dr. Zerneke says it is because of my mental conflict. My mind, you see, is resuming possession of my body. Soon it will be all mine again. And then I shall be a painter once more, and never a woman again, Norman.

“And yet,” she continued, “there has been one good thing about it. It has set me free from my family. They’ve repudiated me, thank God!--let me go my own way at last. I suppose that was why I could be so calm about it, and practically think nothing about it for so many months. I had nothing to lose when the truth came out--except my respectability. Nothing to lose but my chains, and a world to gain, as the soap-box orators say. And it was worth it. I comforted myself with that thought, Norman, when the pain came--that I was giving birth to a bastard child, and my shocked family would never lay loving hands on me again to drag me back into the fold. I was buying my freedom at last by going through that torture.”

“Don’t!” said Norman involuntarily.

“I’m sorry!” she laughed and reached out a white hand and patted his bent head as though he were a child. “I shouldn’t have talked that way. Poor boy, I’ve shocked you again. I suppose you came here to see a Madonna. I never could live up to your romantic expectations, Norman. You’d better stop trying to understand me. There’s no reason why you should be bothered. It’s no concern of yours.”

“It seems to me,” said Norman, choking a little as he tried to speak, “that it--is--a concern of mine.”

“I didn’t intend that it should be. Did it upset you when you heard about it?”

“Naturally it upset me. But Dr. Zerneke’s letter was so diplomatic that at first I didn’t know what it was all about.”

“That’s my fault. I made her promise to write very diplomatically. I thought of you in the bosom of your family there in Vickley--you might have forgotten the girl who led you astray back in Cambridge. I told her to say that I was the girl who took you to Springer’s studio.”

“She mentioned Springer,” said Norman, and he thought of all the trouble that mention had caused--old Gilbert’s surmises of double-dealing. How far away that coil of respectability seemed now!

“I saw him at Steinbach’s this morning,” he said.

“Springer? Yes, he has a show on at Steinbach’s next week. He’s done some very fine things. You ought to see them.”

“He spoke of you.”

“He and Roberta have been very good to me. I don’t know what I’d have done without them. It’s nice, too, his being in Chicago now. I have somebody to talk to. And he’s got me a place to stay, in Michigan, until I’m able to stand the trip across. You’ve heard of my luck, I suppose? I’m going to study in Paris! I owe that to them, too. They’ve found me the sort of patron every young artist dreams about. A rich woman in Boston is giving me my traveling expenses and fifteen dollars a week for a year. With three hundred francs a week in Paris, I shall feel that I own the world!”

“Does Springer approve of--your plans?”

She frowned. “Springer is a dear,” she said, “but he can’t forget that I am a woman, and he doesn’t believe that women _can_ be artists in a serious way. See what he’s done to Roberta--”

“Roberta is his wife, I take it?”

She nodded. “Roberta had a great deal of promise as a painter. But she’s settled down to just being a painter’s wife. I think that’s why she has done all these things for me--to give me my chance.”

“Then _he_ doesn’t think you ought to go to Paris?”

“He doesn’t say anything about it. But he’s not very enthusiastic.”

“What does he want you to do?”

“I don’t know. Secretly, I suppose, he thinks I ought to give up my career and live for my child. Something of that sort.”

“And you consider that--quite out of the question, I suppose.”

“Yes, Norman. I’ve tried to tell you why. And I don’t think any sort of compromise would do--such as keeping the baby and going on with my career. I’d not be a good mother. It just wouldn’t work out. It wouldn’t be good for the child to have a mother like that. The only sensible thing is to have the baby adopted by people who do want one.”

“Even if you know nothing of these people, Isabel?”

“Dr. Zerneke knows them. And I’m sure they couldn’t be worse parents than I should be!”

“Suppose,” said Norman, “they should be conventional people--and the boy should inherit your talent. They wouldn’t understand him. They’d try to discourage him.”

“If he were an artist, that wouldn’t keep him from being one.” Then Isabel smiled. “But why not suppose that he will inherit your traits, Norman? That’s quite as likely. And then he’d get along perfectly well in his bourgeois environment.”

“So that’s what you think of me--as a perfectly bourgeois person,” said Norman.

“You’ve managed to make terms with the world you live in,” she said, “I thought you got along with it very comfortably.”

“So I did,” he said, “until yesterday--when this thing came up. This has knocked the foundations of my old life to pieces.”

“I’m sorry,” said Isabel. “I hope it’s not as bad as that. This needn’t affect your life.”

“It does,” said Norman. “There’s no use pretending. Isabel, won’t you marry me?”

She took his hand between both of hers for a moment. “It’s terribly sweet of you to want to, Norman. But we’ve already discussed that, back at Cambridge. You remember.”

“I remember that you didn’t want to marry a bourgeois young lawyer and settle down to a life of teas and bridge in Vickley,” he said. “But now--I’m afraid you’d not be marrying a prosperous lawyer in Vickley, Isabel. You’d be marrying”--he smiled--“a ruined man and an outcast.”

“You make it very attractive, Norman,” she said. “It’s a temptation to marry you, just to ruin you. But the trouble is, the marriage which would be your ruin would make me a respectable woman again. I can’t venture that. I’ve too recently escaped from prison to give up my freedom. I won’t marry you, Norman.”

“Is that your real reason?” he asked.

“Marriage is marriage, Norman. I’m going to Paris to paint. You want to keep me here, looking after your baby. No, thank you.”

“Is that the real reason?” he repeated.

“What else? Oh, I suppose you mean, do I love you?”

“Perhaps that’s what I do mean. But I suppose I know the answer already.”

“If I weren’t going to be a painter, I could love you, Norman. If I were a real girl, I’d be proud to have your babies. I’m sorry, for your sake--and perhaps for my own--that I’m such a queer monster as I am, and--and not a nice girl for you, Norman.”

She turned her head away from him and flung her arm up to cover her face. She was crying.

“Go away,” she said, after a moment.

He thought with a thrill that this wild girl might yet be conquered.... And then he remembered that he mustn’t upset Dr. Zerneke’s patient.

He rose, contritely.

She found a handkerchief under her pillow, and wiped her eyes, and turned toward him. He was fumbling with the tissue wrappings of the bouquet.

“Oh, flowers!” she cried. And then, as he unwrapped them: “Jonquils! I love them! How nice of you to remember!”

She is a girl, after all! thought Norman.

“Put them in the water pitcher,” she told him.

He did so.

“And now come here and kiss me.”

He bent over her, and their lips touched. What did that kiss mean? Gratitude, to be sure. A lonely girl in a hospital.... He wished he could believe it was more.

“Norman, dear,” she said softly, “will you forgive me for being--what I am?”

“But are you that, really?” he asked. “I wish I knew!”

“Yes--yes--yes!” she cried, raising herself up from her pillow. “Don’t be fooled by a few silly tears, Norman. The real me is in Paris now, sitting before an easel in a paint-smeared smock. You’ve found me weak and helpless, but I’ve that hope. And if I didn’t have it, as God knows I mightn’t have--if I didn’t have Paris to look forward to and three hundred francs a week for a year and no questions asked--if I had been penniless and scared, I might have married you, Norman. But you’d only have had my woman’s body--my thoughts would never have stayed with you. That’s the truth, and we’re both lucky to have escaped such a trap. Think! if you’d given up everything for me, and then found you could never really have me--and if I had given up my dreams for food and shelter--we’d have hated each other, Norman.”

“It isn’t just us,” he said. “Isabel, it’s our son. Couldn’t we--”

She bit her lip and shook her head.

“Besides,” she said, “you’re engaged to another girl. Hal told me so.”

“What does that matter, now?”

“She’ll give you another son.”

“Doesn’t,” he asked desperately, “doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

“Why,” she asked wonderingly, “should our child mean so much to you? You’ve never even seen him.”

“I want to see him.”

“You can. But don’t you understand--”

“I understand that he would interfere with your career, yes,” said Norman harshly.

“Hate me if you want to. But I am what I am. And if I’ve nursed this baby at my breast, and still think of myself as an artist and not as a mother--” She paused.... “Norman--I fought out this wife and mother business once before--when I was eighteen. I was engaged. And I was really in love ... more than I ever will be again. But I saw what marriage would do to me, and I wouldn’t go through with it. My mother tried to make me. But I wouldn’t--I couldn’t. I settled it for myself then that I was going to be an artist, and not a wife and mother. I don’t suppose you’ll ever understand. But there’s no use arguing with me. I’ve my own road to go.”

“But to give your child away to strangers--!” he protested bitterly.

She sank back on her pillow. “I can’t talk to you any more,” she said wearily. “You’d better go.”

“I want to see my son,” he said stubbornly.

“The nurse will show you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. And--I’ll try to understand your point of view....”

“Good-by,” she said. “And thank you for the flowers.”

There was a tap at the door.

“Yes?” said Isabel. “I think,” she said to Norman, “that’s the baby now.”