Chapter V: Part II (2)

With the autumn rains her restlessness returned and times of rebellion, now not against the coming of the child, but at the aridity she was living through. Alice wrote insistently that she should come to stay with her and George, later to go to a hospital. Anne refused less because of reluctance to accept Alice’s bounty than because she was unwilling to encounter old friends, old acquaintances, to have to meet their pity or amusement. Now she would not let her mind dwell upon the difficulties of the future because that would be bad for the child. This was a time when she could do nothing but wait, and this was as good a place as any. Later, of course, she must find some means of making a real livelihood. Live in Heathville, her child, hers? Of course she would find some means of escaping that.

During the radiant days of October she frequently drove with the doctor on his rounds in a small battered car that possessed a personality of its own. She liked the doctor. He was “country-queer,” as he described himself, but his was the only mind she had encountered in Heathville that could think, or express its thoughts. As to that, she believed that Dorilliam’s mother and the other women she had met did not think at all, but lived by instinct, or went about their tasks like trained animals, except that for them there was no reward of caress or tidbit. Purposeless, stupid, they seemed to her. Dr. Severance was neither. He called his car Sally.

“Named her after an old mare I had. Died in the harness, as I hope to. One thing she does almost as well as old Sally did. She gets me there.”

Yet apparently Sally did not always hold that intention. More than once the doctor had to dismount and do mysterious things to Sally, almost at times, as Anne once told him, laughing, amounting to major operations. Once Sally’s temperament overcame her not far from a small brown cottage set back in the woods; after some minutes of futile ministrations on the doctor’s part, Sally still remained where she had stopped, soundless and motionless. Anne had stepped down and was walking along the road through the yellow leaves. As she repassed the cottage a man came out and after a look towards the car beyond smiled at Anne. She had become used by now to the friendly custom in the country of taking acquaintanceship for granted. They walked back to the car together. The doctor, hands on hip, glared in mock ferociousness at the other man.

“Come to try one of your faith cures on her, I suppose,” he growled.

The other man chuckled. “Might try it on you, Tom,” he remarked. “You’re a little excited, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve worked on the blame thing an hour at least. She won’t go,” spluttered the doctor.

“That’s like you medical men. You fiddle and tinker and dose, and think you’ve done all of it. You’re always forgetting there’s something else.”

The doctor snorted. “I’ve heard you say that before! Look here, you Rufus--you use faith on Sally and get her to start, and I’ll take up some stock in that faith of yours.”

The man called Rufus had moved to the side of the car. His hair was quite white, his shoulders were stooped, and life had worn marks on his face; but he bore the indefinable stamp of the intellectual. Anne decided at once that he was not a native of Heathville. He seemed to smile easily, or else the smile never quite left his eyes. Now he bent towards the driving-wheel of the car, peering as though from near-sightedness, and stood up to grin at the doctor.

“I’ve long since discovered, as I’ve told you before--as you say, Tom, quite as you say!--that there is some eternal spark that moves things. There must be a spark, Tom, somewhere. In the case of your Sally why not turn on your spark, Tom, and see----”

The doctor’s mouth opened. A blank look came over his face. But he, too, came up to the side of the car. He reached over, touched a small lever, and instantly Sally responded with rattles and tremblings.

“Hell!” said the doctor. Anne laughed aloud, long and gayly as she had not laughed in months. “I beg your pardon,” the doctor muttered. “Ladies present.”

But Anne’s laugh still rang out, and the man called Rufus was chuckling with her. The doctor was red. He climbed into the car.

“Who was that?” asked Anne, when they had passed the brown house with the woods at its back.

“Old fool,” said the doctor.

Anne bit her lip. “Well, but who else?”

The doctor permitted himself to smile. “Name’s Kent, though you’re likely to hear him called ‘The fellow that bought the Carscadden place.’ Nobody knew where he came from, nor who he was. Had to call him something, so the title sort o’ got itself hung on to him. Folks thought, I believe, he was some relation of the Carscaddens, who hadn’t lived there for a generation.”

“Does he live there alone?”

“Lord, no; got a Jap servant, for one thing, and a wife, and there’s always a houseful o’ lame ducks, human and otherwise. You’ll have to go there and make his acquaintance some day. He’s a great friend of mine, really. But Sally don’t like him.”

“Oh,” said Anne. “Because of his principles, I suppose?”

The doctor sniffed. “Something like that,” said he.

Another day they were driving along together, slowly, in the lace-like shade of the woods. Anne had been saying little; these drives with the doctor brought a measure of soothing to her spirit. By this time the brilliance of the autumn foliage was past, lying in golden tribute on the earth that had given it life. Now and again the little car would stop before some house while the doctor went in, leaving Anne musing, outside.

“Good people, those,” the old man said, as he drove away from one little house.

“And so poor,” said Anne. “I saw four or five children there, in that tiny house.”

The doctor considered a moment. “In one sense,” he said slowly, thinking it out, “poverty is having the consciousness of poverty. Those people have never had more. They have no consciousness of being poor. They are not poor.”

“Oh, but the fact remains that they are. Look at the house, think of the lack of advantages.”

“And what are those?”

“Advantages? But, surely, one knows!”

“No, no! What are they, really, comprehensively? Can you say, Mrs. Denison? In the sense in which you mean, all a matter of comparison, aren’t they? Well, comparison with what? With something a man has not got and thinks he wants, or thinks he ought to have, or thinks somebody else has gotten ahead of him by possessing? What’s the end of that sort of thinking?”

“Ah, but not to think, not to want, not to aspire!”

“I wasn’t talking of aspirations.”

“But weren’t you?”

The doctor shook his head. “You’ll have to take that up with Rufus some day.”

“That queer man?”

“Yes, he’s queer. Old fool, as I said. Not that he’s old as he looks. But he is queer, though he’s got a lot of sound sense in him, too. He’s thought things out. You’ll have to know Rufus.”

“If he has thought out some sort of philosophy like the one you’ve been propounding it’s greatly to his credit, but it doesn’t affect the real question of poverty, does it?”

“Doesn’t it? Well, you’ll see. But let me tell you this, Mrs. Denison: the normal man is never a poor man.”

“Perhaps that accounts for so few being normal. So many are poor.”

“I don’t mean it that way. You know I don’t. I mean that the normal man cannot be poor, because he has all there is that’s worth while, because being normal about sums up to having a good digestion, doing a day’s work, getting a little happiness and giving some. Get that into life, and you’ve got about all there is, in the ultimate analysis.”

“I hear a doctor talking,” Anne commented, and added, “Your friend back there suggested one more element. He mentioned a spark.”

The doctor looked down at her sideways, pursing his lips. “H’m!” said he.

Her thoughts went back again and again to that conversation. Was that all? Must she endure, and find nothing more than that? Health and work, it summed up to, for happiness was only a fleeting illusion. She saw no riches in the doctor’s circle. Poverty was not merely having no money, and she shrank from poverty for herself and the child. Thinness of joy, meagerness? No, no! That should not be.

The thought set her pacing restlessly up and down the small overheated room on an evening when the rain beat against the windows. It was Sunday, and Willy observed the day by going to church in the morning, whatever the weather, and by having their dinner at two o’clock instead of at noon. The displaced meal hour set the day awry. Except for that there seemed to be no change from other days. Willy was forever busy at something.

“My goodness, child, that lamp’s smoking,” she said, when she came into the room. She took the low rocking-chair by the table, the cat Buster jumping into her lap. “I been thinking,” she went on. “When I was a child, they used to call Sunday the Lord’s day. That’s funny, now ain’t it?”

Even old Willy’s chatter was better than the dreary persistence of the rain. “Funny?” Anne asked, smiling a little. “Why?”

“As if every day isn’t the Lord’s day,” said Willy, her faded eyes looking at Anne, looking away again. “I just guess he sees to that. He’s got us all in his hand every day, Sundays and all; and every day, come day go day, he keeps right on working and looking out for us.”

Anne smiled a little. She had heard a good deal of Willy’s primitive theology during the past months.

“Not but what I know Sunday’s by rights set apart for us humans,” Willy went on. “A good thing it is, too. I’ve heard folks talk hard things about men, and about women, too, that does one way on weekdays and another on Sundays. But I say--land!--it’s better to behave decent one day of the week than never at all, poor critters. And if that’s being a hypocrite, well, it’s better to be a hypocrite one day than seven.”

Anne laughed aloud. Miss Willy stroked Buster, who purred like a tea-kettle.

“Another funny thing is how people’s mistakes get mixed up with their sins, in folks’s minds. I don’t doubt the Lord sees which is which. I don’t doubt he’s capable of handling ’em both. But I often think folks try too hard to do the untangling themselves. I don’t know. But I’m going on seventy-three. I’ve come to the conclusion we’d be better off if we’d just leave it all to the Lord.”

“That’s a comfortable doctrine, my dear,” Anne remarked. “But if you’d let it work out, wouldn’t it be a little like giving the kitten the work-basket to play with?”

Miss Willy looked at her over the top of her spectacles. “That’s just what the good Lord has done,” said she, “given us the work-basket to play with. And a real good snarl we make out of it, most of us. But having given us a work-basket apiece, as you might say, he don’t expect the kittens to take on themselves to say who’s to blame for the tangles. That’s where we don’t follow the Lord’s way.”

“There’s no question of that,” Anne agreed.

“No. And that’s what you’re doing, Anne Warren. You and Brice had one work-basket between you. Somehow it’s got into an awful mess. So you’re scratching at Brice, thinking it’s his fault.”

“I don’t want to talk about Brice.”

“I dare say. But I’m going to talk about him. Whenever I’ve a mind to. Right now what I got to say is, that baby that’s coming has got a right to his father, and his father has got a right to him.”

“Brice has gone. They have tried to find him. He’s gone.”

“Yes. Maybe. But you’re forgetting that he’s the baby’s father. I know. I don’t say they haven’t done all they could do to get hold of Brice. But they ought to do more than they can. There ain’t anything impossible, after you get it done. The baby belongs to him.”

Anne jumped to her feet. “No! No, he’s mine! All mine!”

“He’s the Lord’s, Anne Warren. And the Lord’s fixed it so’s he had to have father and mother both. You’re setting yourself up in the Lord’s place when you pass judgment on Brice.”

“He has set judgment upon himself. He has gone. If he never sees his son, that will be judgment. He deserves it. I am not sorry. No, I’m not sorry.”

4

After a time of weakness when she scarcely realized the small creature at her side, after other days of watching him with wonder, and days of sitting in the sunny window behind the geraniums with the baby asleep in a basket nearby, Anne said to Miss Willy:

“His name is Warren.”

Willy looked at her. Anne saw protest in the look, but she smiled, serenely, securely. “His name is Warren,” she repeated.

“H’m,” said old Willy. “Well. After your poor dear father. Well, you’re his mother. I suppose you got a right to call him what you’re a mind to.”

“I am his mother. Oh, I am,” Anne agreed, lifting the baby, snuggling him up to her face. She knew well enough what Willy implied. For this was Brice’s child, like Brice in every small feature, like him even in the soft, reddish hair on his head. But her whole being protested against what Willy wanted. Another Brice--all the more reason why he should not bear Brice’s name. No one should have a share in him, Brice least of all. She denied Brice’s share in him, even to herself. He was hers, all hers, miraculously flesh of her flesh, hers to love, to mold. He should be more and more hers. Often during that marvelous spring and summer the same jealous thought returned to her. The child flourished and grew, a sunny baby. His first smile was for Willy.

“Look at that, now,” the old woman cried. “Who’d a thought it? He knows me. He knows his old Willy.”

Anne snatched the baby up to her breast. She had watched for that first smile, longed for it, wanted it for herself. But a moment afterwards she was ashamed. Willy was the slave of them both, toiling and loving with a devotion as absolute as that of the nun whose life is centered in the cross on the altar and the red light before it, who spends her nights on her knees and would starve herself, castigate herself, readily give up her body and soul and her life bit by bit that her Lord might perceive and accept her adoration. Willy would come in a dozen times during the day to look at the child. Her face became rapt when his tiny fingers curled about one of hers.

“To think this should happen to me,” she said more than once. “To think of your baby being right here in my house, where I can see him and all.”

Then she would trot off to her work again, trotting more slowly and falteringly as the months passed. Anne, absorbed in the child, took it as a matter of course that things were done for them both. She did not observe that Willy’s hours of work were longer than they had ever been. One day in the spring she surprised the old woman spading the garden, and remonstrated.

“I can do it,” said Willy. “I like to do it.”

“Nonsense,” said Anne. “Dorilliam can do it in half the time. I’ll go up the hill after supper and tell him to come tomorrow.”

“Now look here, Anne Warren, I won’t have you wasting your money that way. You got to save.”

Anne laughed a little. “Save out of what I have? What’s the use? It would never amount to anything.”

“You got plenty to save something out of, if you don’t go frittering it away. You got to save for Warren’s education.”

“Land,” said Dorilliam’s mother, when she dropped in one morning while the baby was having his bath by the kitchen stove, “mine never had all those fixin’s. I just washed ’em off when they were dirty, and kept ’em well fed, and let ’em cry and let ’em sleep. A baby ain’t only a baby, when all’s said and done.”

Anne said nothing. That, doubtless, was true, as far as it went. But to compare the young Warren with these country children? As well compare grain-sacks and silk. There were things about her child that she had never observed in others. She never tired of pondering on all his small perfections. Her state was not peace, but absorption. The rest of the world was shut out, thrust aside, while she tended her baby and watched the developing wondrousness of him. For the first time in her life she was absorbed in something besides herself, yet this was inextricably herself, her own as nothing else had ever been. As his individuality developed she hugged that thought to her more and more. Even while she adored them and gloried in them, she was jealous of the will and impulses that came from somewhere within his small self. For when young Warren wanted to sleep or to stay awake, he did so. When he was hungry, he made his want known vociferously. He loved the warm water about his plump little body, and yelled when he was lifted out of it. He hated to have his nose and his ears touched, and decisively said so. Here was something apart from his mother, not hers at all, needs and preferences not springing from her, the will of another creature to which she must yield, which she resented and feared and adored.

“Got a will of his own,” said Willy one day when the two of them had tried in vain for an hour or more to get him to sleep. When their patience was threadbare, both vanquished by the utter helplessness of the adult before a baby’s unreasoned persistence, the boy had abruptly stopped crying, looked into the old woman’s face, smiled divinely, and dropped into slumber. She laid him down on the sofa. “Just wanted to make us understand once for all that he wouldn’t go to sleep till he got good and ready,” said she.

Anne bent over the child. “He’s his mother’s own boy,” she said, with the fatuous sentimentality of the parent who has just been worsted in a battle with her offspring and finds balm in her tenderness, pride in the strength of the victor.

Miss Willy sniffed. “He is, and he isn’t,” said she. She had no sooner dropped into the rocking-chair than Buster jumped into her lap. “Some of him’s yours and some is his father’s. You needn’t look at me that way, Anne Warren. And some of him belongs to himself, and a good part’s the Lord’s. What the Lord means him to be you can’t tell much about. It’s got to come out. I’ve always noticed that the Lord does a lot of mixing of his stuffs, before he finishes a job. Same as I do with my bread. And when he’s got a thing turned out at last, it’s cram full of most everything, good and bad, sense and foolishness. It works pretty well, but it needs a whole lot of oiling to keep it a-going. The baby’s like that. There’s a lot in that baby that’s going to come out, do what you will. You got to help him get started, but I guess when you think he’s all finished it’ll be just about the time he’s beginning to run with his own machinery, and if you poke your hand into it you’ll likely get pinched. He belongs to himself, Anne, and don’t you forget that. Not that you’re likely to get much of a chance to.”

Anne smiled. Willy was not a mother, Willy could not know.

There is no chart which tells how a mother’s time goes. Anne did not know how the months went. In the autumn Alice and George stopped for an hour. They had been motoring, and Alice was anxious to get back to the children.

“Darling, are you comfortable here? Why won’t you come back with us?” Alice asked.

Anne laughed. “No, I’m not comfortable, as you know comfort, Alice. But this is the place for me until Wanny is a little older. Of course I am not going to live here forever. When he is old enough to play with other children I shall have to take him away from here. There will be the question of school, too. I shall have to learn how to make money.”

They were alone under the apple tree. George had driven to the store for gasoline. For a moment Alice looked off, vaguely, at a distant hill-top where already a maple gleamed yellow; then without turning to Anne she asked,

“Did you hear that Ranney is married?”

“I supposed he would be. In the spring, wasn’t it?”

Alice shook her head. “No, just lately. Not to that girl he was engaged to. He treated that nice girl so badly. Kept putting things off. He has married a woman who was divorced. He’s so different from George. One wouldn’t think they could be brothers.”

Winter came and went by, and in earliest spring, before the glaze ice was gone, Miss Willy fell. Anne came down one morning to find the kitchen cold. She called, opened the door of the old woman’s bedroom. Then throwing a shawl about her she went out of doors. At the door of the hen-house she found her, huddled, eyes dim with pain.

“No, don’t you lift me,” said Willy, her lips blue, her face gray in the sunlight. “Something’s broke.”

Anne sped across the road for the doctor and on for Dorilliam, who came running back with his father and a brother or two. They carried old Willy into the bedroom off the kitchen, and for an hour while young Warren shrieked unregarded Anne stood by and helped. When the worst of it was over Miss Willy’s lips quivered to a smile. Anne followed the doctor out of doors. She was shaken and trembling. It was the first time she had ever seen torture administered that healing might come.

“No, she’s not likely to die,” the doctor told her. “Of course she has worked pretty hard, but it’s amazing how much vitality there is in her sort. I’ve known bones to knit even at her age. But with a broken hip--well, she may get around some, after a time.”

After a time. Anne looked at him, pale. He patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry too much, Mrs. Denison,” he told her. “Whatever happens, you can comfort yourself with one thing. It means a lot to Miss Willy to know you are here. I shall never forget the light in her face the day she told me her widowed niece had come to take care of her in her old age. They so dread being a burden, these people. And they dread even more having to be taken care of by strangers, maybe to go on the town.”

To take care of her. That brave lie told to shield Anne’s pride. She went back to the kitchen. To take care of her.

Bit by bit, Anne learned what that meant, to take care of someone. Day by day she learned what it had meant that old Willy had taken care of herself and the boy.

Things, unimagined things, things vaguely known about but never realized, had to be done, and not by someone else whom she could dismiss from her thoughts with pay; elemental things, that she had always taken for granted. The fire in the kitchen stove would not keep burning unless it were fed with some regularity. After a week that stove seemed to Anne like some ravenous maw that was always yawning, always devouring, never to be satisfied. There were twenty-two steps from the wood-pile at the end of the shed, with a step up and a step down each way. Twenty-two steps, to bring in coal or wood, that Miss Willy, at seventy-four, had trod how many times a day? There was food to be cooked, food that mysteriously scorched, or came from the stove as mysteriously hard. Water, the pump over the kitchen sink the only means of getting it. How had old Willy ever, oh, ever carried all those pails and pitchers of water upstairs and down again, for Anne’s needs and Warren’s? And she had always thought of water and food and fire quite simply as things that were, that existed, like air and sunlight, made for man’s use, and there waiting, simply, infallibly there.

Then, there was time. Hitherto time had been divided into a few broad parts, bed-time and rising-time, breakfast- and luncheon- and dinner-time; or, at Miss Willy’s, dinner- and supper-time. Now there were many bewildering subdivisions, and one had to hasten to meet them before their requirements or demands or whatever they were used for slipped over into another of the strange subdivisions, disastrously. Time to get up--oh, yes, but time also to make the fire, time to get it to going, time to get the stove hot and the breakfast cooked, time for young Warren’s increasing needs, while in her consciousness was always the fact that Miss Willy lay, patient, waiting, perhaps suffering. There were hens and the chicks to be fed, then a rushing for dinner. And in between, where there was not room to crowd a single second’s endeavor, a whole multitude of tasks that must somehow be got through. Cleaning. And washing. What those things did to her back, so much younger than Willy’s.

“It’s awful, you having to do everything,” Miss Willy said to her one day when she brought the boy into the room all fresh and rosy from his bath. She had got up at five that morning, but things were still waiting. Yet she looked down at Willy and laughed.

“It is. It is, isn’t it? Because I’m such a duffer at it, Willykin. You don’t know!”

Miss Willy did not laugh with her. Her lips trembled. “But if you wasn’t here, Anne, I’d--maybe I’d have to--go on--the town.”

Anne put the boy on the floor--he was beginning to creep about--and sat on the side of the bed.

“Willy,” she said, “something is happening to me. I don’t know what it is. But I think I was never so happy in my life nor so disgusted with myself. I do hate to see you lying there, but I think perhaps your breaking your funny old bones was just your last fine sacrifice for me. I think----”

But that was too much for old Willy. Her eyes struck dim fire. “Now look here, Annie Warren,” said she, with the first return of her old spirit that she had shown since her fall, “if you think the Lord’s put me here so’s you can get hold of a mite of sense, you’re mistaken. That’s putting too much on the Lord. I slipped on the ice because I wasn’t looking out. That’s what did it. My own fault. But I do say it’s high time you knew how to do things. Not that I should want you to tire yourself out. And--my goodness! Quick! Look at that child! He’ll be on the stove in a minute!”

Anne flew.

There were days, a while later, when she got up at four, when to stay in bed would have been sheer unwarrantable luxury, though her body still ached for rest and she told herself that she could not go through with the work ahead of her. Yet she arose, and the day’s work caught her up, whirled her on with it, herself not the force that accomplished but the means, the mere tool of that force.

When spring reluctantly gave way to summer people in Heathville hastily made their gardens. It was not safe to plant earlier lest the tender green shoots be nipped by late frost, nor later lest the first hot spell of June wither them.

“Memorial Day, that’s the right time to plant,” said old Deacon Bassett who lived up the road. “You ain’t likely to get caught either goin’ or comin’.”

Dorilliam had done the plowing, the spading, the leveling. Anne had supposed that Dorilliam would do all the rest. She had never felt interested in gardening, and now her time was too full to contemplate added work out of doors. But she sat at the kitchen table one night with pencil and paper after paying Dorilliam, her pocket-book open, what remained of its contents spread out before her. There had to be extra milk now, quarts of it, for young Warren. Oranges, too, that now had become not the inevitable breakfast fruit, but a daily expense of five cents, ten cents, a staggering total each month. The boy was beginning to walk; the delicate shoes she sent to town for wore out in a few weeks. Old Willy had always done their washing. That Anne was incapable of, and it had to be paid for. Moreover, she had discovered the extreme meagerness of the old woman’s supply of bedding and towels, and had bought more. Pity she had not thought of bringing some from that house whose contents she had never wanted to see again. The people who had rented it at first had departed. The next tenants had wanted it unfurnished, and she had insisted that everything should be sent to the auction rooms, everything, everything. She wanted nothing, no reminders. They brought a small fraction of what they had cost. At old Willy’s command, for it was more than suggestion, the little sum had been deposited in a savings bank, to be used for the boy’s education. That could not be touched. With herself as housekeeper, more was spent than under old Willy’s close management for food and fuel. Even kerosene had to be bought oftener. And now loomed the question of the garden. Anne counted her money, tried to estimate the hours during the summer that she would need Dorilliam, added up what that would cost, deducted. It could not be done. She spoke of it to Willy, the next day.

“I’ve decided that we won’t have a garden this year, dear,” said she. “I’m no gardener. You know that. We’ll just do without.”

For a moment the old woman lay without looking at Anne, without speaking. Her face against the pillow was wrinkled and pallid. Her age might have been beyond computing, like the Sphinx’s, and as silently as the Sphinx she might have been pondering the proposition implied in Anne’s words. Then she spoke.

“What’ll we eat?” she asked.

“Oh, anything, everything,” Anne said lightly, even while an inner sense warned her that the question was not a light one. “There’s always something to eat, isn’t there?”

“Well, what?” Willy persisted.

There is no question as tormenting as the one which puts its solution on the questioner. Old Willy lay looking impassively at a crack in the wall, but Anne looked at Willy. “There is always something to eat, isn’t there?” she had asked. But was there? Food. Food, the elemental, primal, ultimate necessity. Was it indeed always there? She thought of her pocket-book, her sheets of figuring. The thing faced her, simply, starkly, naked, stripped of everything, as hideous and uncompromising as a skeleton: was food always there? What would they eat? Where would it come from?

It was breath-taking, bewildering. She busied herself again and again with her pencil and paper, then consulted Dorilliam. Something, some remote shame or pride, forbade her from talking to Willy. That old woman lying there, who had met this problem so many years, now so helpless, probably thinking and thinking, perhaps worrying. No. If she had the thing to go through with, she would do it alone, for Dorilliam did not count as a person except in the sense of being a workman of sorts and of having to be paid.

“What you want to buy seeds for?” he asked, when she asked him as casually as she could what she would need to buy.

“To plant in the garden,” said she, sternly. She was always suspecting that Dorilliam held her in secret amusement and scorn, as those countrymen do who know a few things beyond the scope of someone they confront, and believe their knowledge surpasses all of the others. But the boy was honestly puzzled.

“Yeah. But what you want to buy ’em for? Why don’t you plant what you got?”

“What I have?”

“Sure. She’s got ’em saved up, ain’t she? Everybody saves ’em up for next year.”

So after all she spoke to Willy again about the garden, went to the place where Willy had stored the saved seeds, in jars and small packets tied about with bits of string. Economy had never held anything of beauty for Anne, but when she brought out those seeds, fruit of an old woman’s toil, so carefully cured and saved that the soil might be fruitful again the next year, something gripped at her throat. Here was a poignant significance that rose up at her. Here, too, was the germ of a new perception. The garden was made and tended that they might have something to eat. As simple as that. But there was more in it than that stark necessity. It was the child of other gardens. In the little packets of saved seeds there was not only harvest, but a link with gardens of other summers, with summers to come, as old Willy’s toil was linked with the labor of the ages, as her own would be. On and on, the treadmill, unending, however one ached. And after she had talked with Willy as to methods and means, she was confronted with her stupendous ignorance of what seemed so simple, what was, indeed, so elemental.

“Why, you just scrape out a row, and put ’em into it,” said Willy. “Then you cover ’em up.”

“With what?” she asked, for she had seen newspapers carefully spread over some of the old woman’s tender “cuttings” and wondered if that were a rite to be observed with everything else.

“Good land, child, ain’t you got any sense at all? You cover ’em up with dirt, and pat ’em all down, of course.”

Anne laughed a little. “Do they have to be patted? Shall I pull up the blankets and hear them say their prayers, too?”

Willy sniffed. “You don’t have to blaspheme just because you’re so ignorant,” said she, “though lots of folks do. Yes, they do have to be patted, or else trod on. The dirt’s got to touch ’em, or else they won’t sprout. And the dirt’s got to be fine, not all lumps. Sakes alive, I wish I could get out o’ this bed.”

“That’s sheer pride and jealousy, Willy. You think I can’t make this garden, and you want to do it yourself,” Anne laughed. But when she confronted the actual task she did not laugh. Before, she felt herself potentially able to cope with it. It must be quite simple, like driving a Ford, because people of such inferior intelligence mastered it. Of course it was not fit work for her, and she had not a minute to spare for it. But it must be easy enough, since even an old woman like Willy had accomplished it. Her only difficulty would be in finding time. So one morning she got up at four, just as dawn was flushing on the western hills, and betook herself to the place Dorilliam had raked at such a cost. Scrape out a row, Willy had said, and make the dirt fine. Easy, until her shoulders ached with the weight of the hoe.

Her row turned out to be a wandering path of varying depth. She dropped in the seeds. Willy had said there were enough in the bundle for a whole row, but they mysteriously gave out before the row was half filled. She considered the problem, carefully picked out seeds enough for the rest of the row. Then came the affair of making the dirt fine, to cover them with. She could not. It was heavy with dew, refused to crumble, persisted in becoming a tough, clayey substance under her hands. She had been out two hours, Warren’s cries could be heard, she was aching and angry. She had not achieved one single row in this miserable garden, and the piece of smoothed land stretched before her into a leering expanse as broad as an ocean. It was the first time she had ever discovered that to work with nature one must use nature’s time, wait on her moods. When she went to the garden again, later in the day, she was amazed to find that the earth crumbled easily enough. Thereafter she rose at the same early hour, but worked at other things until the garden was ready.

A few weeks later, again directed by one of Deacon Bassett’s pronouncements, she was working there with a hoe, the baby happy and noisy, playing in the dirt, his attention absorbed by filling a tin can with a hole in the bottom, watching the soil sift out, and filling the can again. Someone spoke to him over the fence. Anne looked up and nodded, but Warren deserted his game and promptly performed the acrobatic feat of making himself into a small pyramid, bracing his feet until they were steady by resting his hands on the ground, his inevitable method of arising. Then he toddled and tumbled towards Dorilliam.

“What’s them things for?” Dorilliam presently asked. He had come near, holding Warren’s hand.

Anne sat back, wearily, but with a sense of triumph, too. “Them things” were an achievement, and she took pride in making them well, first by scraping the earth up with a hoe, then rounding it off with her hands.

“They’re the hills for the corn, of course,” said she. “This is the week for corn. What should they be?” She rather enjoyed snubbing Dorilliam.

“I dunno,” said the boy. “Never saw nothing like ’em before.”

“And you’ve lived in the country all your life. I’m surprised at you. Mr. Bassett says it’s much better to plant corn in hills than in rows. It doesn’t blow over as easily.”

Dorilliam’s slow grin was a thing to see. “Here, you gimme that hoe,” said he, and forsook Warren’s hand so abruptly that the baby sat down with a soft thud. Dorilliam scraped out a shallow hole.

“Now that,” said he, “is a hill. You put your corn in there on top. Then you cover it over. Then you stomp on it. That’s the way to plant corn. Them things you made, they ain’t hills. They’re Mount Ararats.”

“My goodness,” Anne murmured, meekly. “A hill upside down.”

But the incident gave her a new feeling of humility, of helplessness, of respect: humility, that she, Anne Denison, should cope so badly with such primitive affairs; helplessness, because there seemed so many difficulties, however absurd and small; respect for these country people, even for Dorilliam, that they could perform with ease what she found so intricate.

Long before the last row was planted and walked on there were green things beginning to show in the first ones. By that time she had formed quite a friendship with the Deacon, a stern, gray old man. Often after supper he would come down the road to inspect her labors. Sometimes, when a new problem came up, she would tuck Warren under her arm and run to Bassett’s house for advice.

“Yes,” she complacently told him one evening, “they’re coming along.” That was a phrase he used; she had unconsciously adopted it. “And I do think Miss Willy’s seeds are wonderful. Ever so many more come up than I’ve planted, it seems to me.”

Bassett rubbed his chin. He shaved on Sundays only. “Yeus. Well, mebbe,” said he. “But I shouldn’t be s’prised if a good many of those green shoots are weeds. I s’ppose you ain’t got around to weedin’ yet.”

That, when she had begun to tell herself that her labors were all but over. She thought of her aching arms, of tasks waiting indoors, thought yearningly of Dorilliam. But old Willy had managed without the boy. So would she. Many an evening after she had washed the day’s grime from Warren and got him to sleep, and laundered some of his small garments, and made the kitchen neat after supper, she worked on her knees between the rows, weeding until it was too dark to see. Yet do what she might, there were disasters.

“Seems like our beet-greens is terrible slow, this year,” said Miss Willy. “You got ’em in in time, too. It’s funny, what a difference there is in seasons.”

No need to tell her that all the young beets had been carefully, laboriously, back-breakingly weeded up. And such futile things, anyway, beet-greens. To get the best of one, merely by being. It shamed her, that difficulty of coping with little things that she had scarcely realized existed except as insignificant parts of a whole that ordered itself. She had always been willing to battle with what she conceived to be big things, those that meant conflict with people. There was exhilaration in that. It got one somewhere. But this daily, hurrying conflict with nature and the bare routine of living was bewildering. It entangled her in all sorts of complicated trivialities, as though it could make any difference, for example, whether one planted corn in rows or in holes or on small Mount Ararats. To find that it did make a difference, that one had to discover and yield to the preferences of corn and of beans, was bewildering.

Bewildering; but slowly out of bewilderment there came a feeling of conducting a campaign. She was not going to let herself be conquered by a vegetable garden. It grew in importance, became a battle-ground. Eventually, victorious, she had such a feeling of triumph and achievement as not even the arrival of Warren had given her,--Wanny, that small-featured replica of Brice. The garden with all its failures and oddities, not in the least like Miss Willy’s neat, straight-rowed one, was a thing of her own creating, wrought by her own labor, by the veritable sweat of her brow and the grime of her hands and the ache of her body, something that contributed to the very foundation of life, something, quite simply, to eat. It was as though she had caused earth or air or water to come into existence. She had caused food to be. She did not regard her performance nor its results as beautiful, nor as clever, nor as amusing, nor as something bound up with the future, like Wanny. She had brought something that was elemental out of nothingness. She had become creative of that which was the very basis of existence.

5

So the summer passed in toil. No time for thoughts, nor for thought. No time, really, for anything, with so much to be done, so little that could be left undone. Hens, Anne discovered, could be as clamorous as babies. When a prideful, clucking absurdity emerged from a hidden nest with a brood of chicks she could have crushed the lot of them. They were hated, but they were important, for they were food, and after a day or two their very helplessness and dependency captured her. She was indignant and sorrowful when one fell prey to Buster’s rapaciousness. Miss Willy frequently asked after her flowers. There were weeds among them that Anne told herself could not go unregarded, whatever happened. The peonies bloomed so generously. How could she let their brave beauty smother in weeds? After a summer rain, the hollyhocks lay on the ground. There was no time for it, but she must find stakes, tie them up.

By midsummer Wanny was toddling everywhere. He possessed an ingenuity for getting into mischief beyond anything his mother had ever encountered. If he were silent or out of sight for too long she had to drop everything, hunt for him. And his clothes, those small costly shoes that wore out so soon, the rompers that had to be fresh every morning. There were days when his bath was no more than a hasty sponging away of grime before he was put to sleep, nights when she was so weary that she dropped on her bed without undressing, to wake in the dawn with a crowding sense of things waiting to be done, in a panic of fear lest she had over-slept. Everything was in the present. The future was something she had no time to think about. Work. Two to care for, three to provide for, hurriedly, rather chaotically.

Winter came, when she had thought there would be more time. But again there were stoves, lamps, sewing. The child had outgrown the first baby coat Alice had sent. Anne contrived to make him another out of an old skirt of her own. It had no air of elegance. She laughed when she dressed him in it.

“Pitty, pitty,” said Warren, smoothing his bulging front.

“Not so very pretty, old man,” Anne laughed. “But it will keep you warm.”

“Pretty is as pretty does,” said old Willy, and Anne, “Goodness, I hope not. If his looks had to be measured by his behavior----!”

Two years before she could not have tolerated that garment. Now she could laugh at it, was even rather proud of it. But she did not for more than a moment think of the change in herself. There was something else waiting to be done. Orderliness she had not begun to learn. There were neighbor women who came to see Miss Willy, bringing gifts of pies and doughnuts and “tastes” of jelly and jam and pickles. Seeing Miss Willy’s enjoyment of the delicacies, Anne remembered that the old woman had always managed to put up some of her own. Now the pantry shelves held none. She had never thought of making any. Where had Willy found time to do it? How did those other women, busy mothers of families, find time? Even the mere thought of their dish-washing staggered Anne’s imagination, now that she knew how mysteriously dishes piled up for only three. And there was their mending, their cooking, their washing. Yet those over-worked women found time to come to Miss Willy’s and “visit” sometimes for an hour or more. Anne found herself listening to their talk. It was no longer of trivialities beyond or beneath her scope and her interest; it was of things become vital. They had been vague, dull, toiling creatures without imagination, without grace, uninteresting. Now they emerged into separate entities, personalities with feelings and impulses which she recognized, more skilled and experienced than herself in things of first importance. There was so much that they knew and that she did not, and things they achieved daily, as a matter of course, simply and neatly, that staggered her efforts and ingenuity to perform and left her worn with fatigue after trying.

“The working classes”--she remembered that she used to think of the working classes, in the old days, with something akin to disgust. She had never been able to understand Nicky’s interest in them, nor how she had been able to endure daily contact with them. Either they toiled with an impenetrable, ineffectual, stolid indifference, or they disagreeably or violently protested against their lot, deviously trying to better it at the cost of the comfort of people who were more fortunate than themselves. They were unreasonably envious, and their morals were as sordid as their way of living. She had always felt injured and angry when one of her maids had asked for extra time off. She remembered her amused scorn when they spent their earnings for some foolish finery to be worn on one or two afternoons of the week.

These women who dropped in to see Willy were toilers in a labor unending. She knew about that, now. As far as she could perceive, theirs was a labor without result or reward, just a grind, day after day, year after year. Now she knew that they were not sunk in a dull state of mental and spiritual stagnation. They were not clamorously trying to better their lot at the expense of others. Apparently they shattered no more of the Ten Commandments than anyone else did. Sometimes she wondered what secret revolts of the soul might be theirs, or whether they had souls at all in the sense of possessing a well-spring of feeling and thought and aspiration. They concerned themselves with things she had never supposed required thought or were bound up with feeling or led to aspiration, but indubitably aspiration and feeling and thought played a part in their lives.

At first they had been shy with her. One or two had told her hesitatingly how fine it was for Miss Willy to have her there. They thought of her as the niece from the city who went about always dressed up and sat around while Miss Willy waited on her. Now they found her aproned, busy, and there was always the child to talk about. Anne found herself listening with absorbed interest to tales of other children’s illnesses. She was not bored when Mrs. Ware told how her Julia had broken her collar-bone, nor when Mrs. Beaman told how her twins in one winter had measles and chicken pox and whooping cough, alternately, “so’s we were no sooner gettin’ out o’ one thing with Elizabeth than we come down with the same thing with Florence; and by the time Florence was better, Elizabeth had started on something else.” Those things were not trivial. They were not disgusting. They were not unpleasant diseases that troublesome children persisted in having, so that one wondered how mothers endured them. They were dangers that lurked for Wanny. Those women were mothers. So was she.

She took Wanny to the Christmas tree at the church. His round-eyed wonder was a revelation, something that pierced to her heart. Mrs. Beaman gave him an orange. When he held it in both hands, stared at it, it was not an orange, but a symbol, a mystery. He had seen it taken from a box under the tree. Therefore it was endued with beauties and wonders beyond all other oranges. Anne, looking up, met Mrs. Beaman’s glance, her tolerant, understanding smile.

A few days thereafter Mrs. Wells ran down the road bearing a plate wrapped up in a napkin. Hot rolls. “I thought maybe they’d go good for supper,” said she.

“Land! I should think so,” old Willy said. “We ain’t had any home-made bread since I don’t know when.”

The visitor looked at Anne. “Why, you don’t buy all your bread, do you?”

“I can’t make it,” Anne said.

“But it costs so much at the store.”

The next day Anne bundled up Wanny and walked up the road to the Bassetts’s. The children of that house had long ago gone away, the old couple were alone, and Mrs. Bassett was known as the best housekeeper in Heathville, eternally busy.

“Will you teach me how to make bread?” Anne asked, and could see the flattered look in the old woman’s eyes.

Her first loaves were an achievement that gave her a satisfaction scarcely less than her conquest of the garden.

“What’s that I smell?” old Willy called out, from the bedroom. “You ain’t ever trying to make bread, child! You’ll just waste the flour.”

“Not I,” Anne declared, coming in with a freshly baked loaf turned out on a towel. “Look at that! Willy, when I think of the money we’ve spent at that store for bread----!”

Old Willy’s lips quivered. “I got to get out o’ this bed,” said she. “You can’t do all the work yourself, and takin’ on more all the time.”

Anne put the loaf down, came and stood near the bed. “Willy,” she said, “it’s the strangest thing. No matter how much more I find to do, I always seem to find time to do it in. And stranger still, I rather like doing it. It makes me feel so important.”

Gradually the women who had been coming to see Miss Willy lingered to chat with Anne. Recipes were given, that had to be explained. Flower seeds were brought in small bits of brown paper, and about their flowers odd sentiments lingered, odd to Anne because at first they seemed so trivial.

“That’s ‘Impatience,’” said one, presenting a slim sprig of green planted in a can from which the label had been removed. “‘Impatience,’ though some folks call it ‘Patience’. Either way it’s the truth, for it’s always in a hurry to bloom, and it blooms all the time.”