Out of the Air Part 14

"Some of them, I guess. I have a few things in my attic I'll sell you--and some I'll give you. I'd admire to see them in the old place once more."

"You must let me buy them all," Lindsay protested.

"Well, we'll see about that," Mrs. Spash disposed of this disagreement easily. "Have you seen the Dew Pond yet?"

"The Dew Pond!" Lindsay echoed.

"The little pond beyond the barn," Mrs. Spash explained. Then, as though a great light dawned, "Oh, of course it's all so growed up round it you'd never notice it. Come and I'll show it to you."

Lindsay followed her out of the barn. This was all like a dream, he reflected--but then everything was like a dream nowadays. He had lived in a dream for two months now. Mrs. Spash struck into a path which led beyond the barn.

The trail grew narrower and narrower; threatened after a while to disappear. Lindsay finally took the lead, broke a path. They came presently on a pond so tiny that it was not a pond at all; it was a pool. Water-lilies choked it; forget-me-nots bordered it; high wild roses screened it.

Lindsay stood looking for a long time into it. "It's the Merry Mere of _Mary Towle_," he meditated aloud. Mrs. Spash received this in the uninterrogative silence with which she had received other of his confidences. She apparently fell back easily into the ways of literary folk.

"I remember now I got a glint of water from one of the upstairs bedrooms," Lindsay went on, "the first time I came into the house. But I forgot it instantly; and I've never noticed it since."

"Wait a moment!" Mrs. Spash seemed afraid that he would leave. "There's something else." She attempted to push her way through the jungle in the direction of the house. For an instant her progress was easy, then bushes and vines caught her. Lindsay sprang to her a.s.sistance.

"There's something here--that was left," she panted. "Folks have forgotten all about--" She dropped explanatory phrases.

Heedless of tearing thorns and piercing p.r.i.c.kers, Lindsay crashed on.

Mrs. Spash watched expectantly.

"There!" she called with satisfaction.

On a cairn of rocks, filmed over by years of exposure to the weather, stood what Lindsay immediately recognized to be a large old rum-jar. The sun found exposed spots on its surface, brought out its rich olive color.

"After Mr. Lewis died," Mrs. Spash explained, "Miss Murray went abroad for a year. She went to Egypt. She put this here when she came home.

Then you could see it from the house. The sun shone on it something handsome. She told me once she went into a temple on the Nile cut out of the living-rock, where there was room after room, one right back of the other. In the last one, there was an altar; and once a year, the first ray of the rising sun would strike through all the rooms and lay on that altar. Worn't that cute? I allus thought she had that in mind when she put this here."

Lindsay contemplated the old rum-jar. Mrs. Spash contemplated him. And suddenly it was as though she were looking at Lindsay from a new point of view.

Lindsay's face had changed subtly in the last two months. The sun of Quinanog had added but little to the tan and burn with which three years of flying had crusted it. He was still very handsome. It was not, however, this comeliness that Mrs. Spash seemed to be examining. The experiences at Quinanog had softened the deliberate stoicism of his look. Rather they had fed some inner softness; had fired it. His air was now one of perpetual question. Yet dreams often invaded his eyes; blurred them; drooped his lips.

"It's all unbelievable," Lindsay suddenly commented, "I don't believe it. I don't believe you. I don't believe myself."

Mrs. Spash still kept her eyes fixed on the young man's face. Her look had grown piercing.

"Have you a shovel handy?" she surprisingly asked.

"Yes, why?"

Mrs. Spash did not answer immediately. He turned and looked at her. She was still gazing at him hard; but the light from some long-harbored emotion of her dulled old soul was shining bluely in her dulled old eyes.

"I want you should get it," she ordered briefly. "There's something right here," she pointed, "that I want you to dig up."

VIII

Susannah let herself lightly down on the tin roof; it was scarcely a step from her window. With deliberate caution, she turned and drew the shade. Then she tiptoed toward the skylight. The workmen were still soldering; the older man, with the air of one performing a delicate operation, lay stretched out flat, holding some kind of receptacle; the younger was pouring molten lead from a ladle. Try as she might, she could not prevent her feet from making a slight tapping on the tin. The older man glanced sharply up. "Look out!" called the younger, and he bent again to his work. Almost running now, she stepped into the gaping hole of the skylight. The stairs were very steep--practically a ladder.

As she disappeared from view, she heard a quick "What the h.e.l.l!" from the roof above her.

Susannah hurried forward along a dark pa.s.sage, looking for stairs. The pa.s.sage jutted, became lighter, went forward again. This must be the point where the shed-addition joined the main building. She was in the hallway of a dingy, conventional flat-house, with doors to right and left. One of these doors opened; a woman in a faded calico dress looked her over, the glance including the traveling-bag; then picked up a letter from the hall-floor, and closed it again. Susannah found herself controlling an impulse to run. But no steps sounded behind her--she was not as yet pursued. And there was the stairway--at the very front of the house! She descended the two flights to the entrance. There, for a moment, she paused. As soon as Warner discovered her flight, they would be after her. The workmen would point the way. The street--and quick--was the only chance. Noiselessly she opened the door. At the head of the steps leading to the street, she stopped long enough for a look to right and left. Only a scattered afternoon crowd--no Warner, no Byan.

An Eighth Avenue tram-car was ringing its gong violently. On a sudden impulse of safety, she shot down the steps, ran past her own door to the corner. An open southbound car had drawn up, was taking on pa.s.sengers.

She reached it just as the conductor was about to give the forward signal, and was almost jerked off her feet as she stepped onto the platform. Steadying herself, she looked, in the brief moment afforded by the b.u.mpy crossing of the car, down the side street.

The entrances of her own house at the corner, the entrances to the house she had just left, were blank and undisturbed; no one was following her.

She paid her fare, and settled down on the end of a cross-seat.

And now she was aware not of relief or reaction or fear, but solely of her headache. It had changed in character. It had become a furious internal bombardment of her brows. If she turned her eyes to right or left, she seemed to be dragging weights across the front of her brain.

Yet this headache did not seem quite a part of herself. It was as though she knew, by a supernormal sensitiveness, the symptoms of someone else.

It was as though suddenly she had become two people. Anyway, it had ceased to be personal. And somewhere else within her head was growing a delicious feeling of freedom, of lightness, of escape from a wheel. Her evasion of the Carbonado Mining Company did not account for all that; she felt free from everything. "I'm not going to take any more rooms,"

she said to herself. "I'm going to sleep out of doors now, like the birds. People find you when you take rooms. Where shall I begin?" She considered; and then one of those little hammers of intuition seemed to tap on her brain. Again, she did not resist. "Why, Washington Square of course!" she said to herself.

The car was threading now the narrow ways of Greenwich Village. It stopped; Susannah stepped off. The rest seemed for a long time to be just wandering. But that curious sense of duality had vanished. She was one person again. She did not find Washington Square easily; but then, it made no difference whether she ever found it. For New York and the world were so amusing when once you were free! You could laugh at everything--the pa.s.sing crowds, surging as though business really mattered; the Carbonado Mining Company; the grisly old fool in their toils, and Susannah Ayer. You could laugh even at the climate--for sometimes it seemed very hot, which was right in summer, and sometimes cold, which wasn't right at all. You could laugh at the headache, when it tied ridiculous knots in your forehead. There was the Arch--Washington Square at last.

But it wasn't time to sleep in Washington Square yet. The birds hadn't gone to bed. Sparrows were still pecking and squabbling along the borders of the flower-beds. Besides, New York was still flowing, on its homeward surge from office and workshop, down the paths. Susannah sat down on a bench and considered. She had a disposition to stay there--why was she so weak? Oh, of course she hadn't eaten. People always had dinner before going to bed. She must eat--and she had money. She shook out her pocketbook into her lap. A ten-dollar bill, a one-dollar bill, and some small change. She must dine gloriously--free creatures always did that when they had money. Besides, she was never going to pay any more room rent. Susannah rose, strolled up Fifth Avenue. The crowd was thinning out. That was pleasant, too. She disliked to get out of the way of people. She was crossing Twenty-third Street now; and now she was before the correct, white facade of the Hague House. A proper and expensive place for dinner.

Susannah found it very hard to speak to the waiter. It was like talking to someone through a part.i.tion. It seemed difficult even to move her lips; they felt wooden.

"A pet.i.te marmite, please; then I'll see what more I want," she heard herself saying at last.

But when the pet.i.te marmite came, steaming in its big, red ca.s.serole, she found herself quite disinclined to eat--almost unable to eat. She managed only two or three mouthfuls of the broth; then dallied with the beef. Perhaps it was because instantly--and for no reason whatever--she had become two people again. Perhaps it was because she had been drinking so much ice-water. It couldn't be because H. Withington Warner was sitting at the next table to the right. It couldn't be that--because she had told him, when first she saw him sitting there, that she was no longer afraid of the Carbonado Company. And indeed, when she turned to the left and saw him sitting there also--when by degrees she discovered that there was one of him at every table in the room, she thought of Alice in the Trial Scene in Wonderland, and became as contemptuous as Alice. "After all," she said, "you're only a pack of cards."

With a flourish, the waiter set the dinner-card before her, asking: "What will you have next, Madame?" Oh yes, she was dining!

"I think I can't eat any more--the bill, please," she heard one of her selves saying. That self, she discovered, took calm cognizance of everything about her; listened to conversation. As the waiter turned his back, that half of her saw that Mr. Warner wasn't there any more; neither at the table on her right, nor anywhere. But when she had paid the bill, tipped, and risen to go, the other self discovered that he was back again at every table; and that with every Warner was a Byan and an O'Hearn. "I am snapping my fingers at them, though n.o.body sees it," she said to both her selves. "I can't imagine how they ever troubled me so much. They don't know what I'm doing! I'm sleeping out of doors; they can find me only in rooms!" As though staggered by her complete composure, not one of this triplicate mult.i.tude of enemies followed her outside.

"Now I'll go to Washington Square," she said, realizing that her personalities had merged again. "The birds must be in bed." She took a bus; and sank into languor and that curious, impersonal headache until the conductor, calling "All out," at the south terminus, recalled to her that she was going somewhere. "I must have been asleep," she thought.

"Isn't this a wonderful world?"

The long, early summer twilight was just beginning to draw about the world. The day lingered though--in an exquisite luminousness. All around her the city was grappling tentatively with oncoming dusk. On a few of the pa.s.sing limousines, the front lamps struck a garish note. Near, the Fifth Avenue lights were like slowly burning bonfires in the trees; in the distance, seemingly suspended by chains so delicate that they were invisible, they diminished to pots of gold. The six-o'clock rush had long ago ceased. Now everyone sauntered; for everyone was freshly caparisoned for the wonderful night glories of midsummer Manhattan.

Susannah sat down on a bench in Washington Square and surveyed this free world. Though her eyes burned, they saw crystal-clear. All about her Italian-town mixed democratically with Greenwich Village; made contrasting color and noise. Fat Italian mothers, s.n.a.t.c.hing the post-sunset breezes, chattered from bench to bench while they nursed babies. On other benches, lovers clasped hands. Children played over the gra.s.s. The birds twittered and the trees murmured. Every color darted p.r.i.c.klingly distinct to Susannah's avid eyes, burning and heavy though it was. Every sound came distinct to her avid ears, though it sounded through a ringing.

The Fifth Avenue busses were clumping and lumbering in swift succession to their stopping-places. How much, Susannah thought, they looked like prehistoric beetles; colossally big; armored to an incredible hardness and polish. And, already, roped-off crowds of people were patiently waiting upstairs seats. As each bus stopped, there came momentary scramble and confusion until inside and out they filled up. She watched this process for a long, long time.

"I can't go to sleep yet," she said to herself finally, "the people won't let me. One can't sleep in this wonderful world. Where does one go after dinner? Oh, to the theater, of course! On Broadway!" She found herself drifting, happily though languorously, through the arch and northward.

Twilight had settled down; had become dusk; had become night. New York was so brilliant that it almost hurt. It was deep dusk and yet the atmosphere was like a purple river flowing between stiff canon-like buildings. Everywhere in that purple river glittered golden lights. And, floating through it, were mermaids and mermen of an extreme beauty.

Susannah pa.s.sed from Fifth Avenue to Broadway. She stopped under one of the most brilliant palace-fronts of light, and bought a ticket in the front row. The curtain was just rising on the second act of a musical comedy. Susannah would have been hazy about the plot anyway, for the simple reason that there was no plot. But tonight she was peculiarly hazy, because she enjoyed the dancing so much that she became oblivious to everything else. Indeed, at times she seemed to be dancing with the dancers. The illusion was so complete that she grew dizzy; and clung to the arm of her seat. She did not want to divide into two people again.

After a while, though, this sensation disappeared in a more intriguing one. For suddenly she discovered that the audience consisted entirely of her and the Carbonado Mining Company. H. Withington Warners, by the hundred, filled the orchestra seats. Byans, by the score, filled the balcony. O'Hearns, by the dozen, filled the gallery. But this did not perturb her. "You're only a pack of cards," she accused them mentally.

And she stayed to the very end.