The Sick a Bed Lady Part 15

The darkening room was warm as an oven now, and the great, soft, glowing pile of apple-wood embers lured one's drowsy eyes like a flame-colored pillow. No one spoke at all until midnight.

But the clock had only just finished complaining about the hour when the Partridge Hunter straightened up abruptly and cried out to no one in particular:

"Well, I simply can't bluff this out any longer. I've just _got_ to know how it all happened!"

No one stopped to question his meaning. No one stopped to parry with word or phrase. Like two tense music-boxes wound to their utmost resonance, but with mechanism only just that instant released, Alrik and the Pretty Lady burst into sound.

The Pretty Lady spoke first. Her breath was short and raspy and cross, like the breath of a person who runs for a train--and misses it.

"It was--in--Florida," she gasped, "the--last--of March. The sailboat was a dreadful, flimsy, shattered thing. But he _would_ go out in it--_alone_--storm or no storm!" She spoke with a sudden sense of emotional importance, with a certain strange, fierce, new pride in the shortcomings of her Man. "He must have swamped within an hour. They found his boat. But they never found his body. Just as one could always find his pocket, but never his watch--his purse, but never his money--his song, but never his soul." Her broken self-control plunged deeper and deeper into bitterness. "It was a stupid--wicked--wilful--accident,"

she persisted, "and I can see him in his last, smothery--astonished-- moment--just--as--as--plainly--as--though--I--had--been--there.

Do you think for an instant that he would swallow even--Death--without making a fuss about it? Can't you hear him rage and sputter: '_This_ is too salt! _This_ is too cold! Take it away and bring me another!' While all the time his frenzied mind was racing up and down some precious, memoried playground like the Harvard Stadium or the New York Hippodrome, whimpering, 'Everybody'll be there except--_me_--except M-E!'"

The Pretty Lady's voice took on a sudden hurt, left-out resentment. "Of course," she hurried on, "he wasn't exactly sad to go--nothing could make him sad. But I know that it must have made him very _mad_. He had just bought a new automobile. And he had rented a summer place at Marblehead. And he wanted to play tennis in June--"

She paused for an instant's breath, and Alrik crashed like a moose into the silence.

"It was lung trouble!" he attested vehemently. "Cough, cough, cough, all the time. It came on specially worse in April, and she died in May. She wasn't never very strong, you know, but she'd been brought up in your wicked old steam-heated New York, and she would persist in wearing tissue-paper clothes right through our rotten icy winters up here. And when I tried to dose her like the doctor said, with cod-liver oil or any of them thick things, I couldn't fool her--she just up an' said it was nothin' but liquid flannel, and spit it out and sa.s.sed me. And Gruff--Growly-Dog-Gruff," he finished hastily, "I don't know what ailed him. He jus' kind of followed along about June."

The Partridge Hunter drew a long, heavy breath. When he spoke at last, his voice sounded like the voice of a man who holds his hat in his hand, and the puffs of smoke from his pipe made a sort of little halo round his words.

"Isn't it nice," he mused, "to think that while we four are cozying here to-night in the same jolly old haunts, perhaps they three--Man, Girl, and Dog--are cuddling off together somewhere in the big, spooky Unknown, in the shade of a cloud, or the shine of a star--talking--perhaps--about--_us_?"

The whimsical comfort of the thought pleased me. I did not want any one to be alone on such a night.

But Alrick's tilted chair came crashing down on the floor with a resounding whack. His eyes were blazing.

"She _ain't_ with him!" he cried. "She _ain't_, she AIN'T, she A-I-N-'T!

I won't have it. Why, it's the middle of the night!"

And in that electric instant I saw the Pretty Lady's face set rigidly, all except her mouth, which twisted in my direction.

"I'll wager she _is_ with him," she whispered under her breath. "She always did tag him wherever he went!"

Then I felt the toe of my slipper meet the rec.u.mbent elbow of the Partridge Hunter. Had I reached out to him? Or had he reached back to me? There was no time to find out, for the smooth, round conversation shattered p.r.i.c.kingly in the hand like a blown-gla.s.s bauble, and with much nervous laughter and far-fetched joke-making, we rose, rummaged round for our candles, and climbed upstairs to bed.

Alrik's Old Mother burrowed into a corner under the eaves.

The Pretty Lady had her usual room, and mine was next to hers. For a lingering moment I dallied with her, craving some tiny, absurd bit of loving service. First, I helped her with a balky hook on her collar.

Then I started to put her traveling coat and hat away in the closet. On the upper shelf something a little bit scary brushed my hands. _It was the Blue Serge Man's cap, with a ragged gash across it where Growly-Dog-Gruff had worried it on a day I remembered well._ With a hurried glance over my shoulder to make sure that the Pretty Lady had not also spied it, I reached up and shoved it--oh, 'way, 'way back out of sight, where no one but a detective or a lover could possibly find it.

Then I hurried off to my room with a most garish human wonder: How could a _man_ be all gone, but his silly cap _last_?

My little room was just as I remembered it, bare, bleak, and gruesomely clean, with a rag rug, a worsted motto, and a pink china vase for really sensuous ornamentation. I opened the cheap pine bureau to stow away my things. _A trinket jingled--a tawdry rhinestone side-comb. Caught in the setting was a tiny wisp of brown hair._ I slammed the drawer with a bang, and opened another. _Metal and leather slid heavily along the bottom._ It might have been my beast's collar, if distinctly across the name-plate had not run the terse phrase "Alrik's Cross Dog." I did not like to have my bureau haunted! When I slammed that drawer, it cracked the looking-gla.s.s.

Then, with candle burning just as cheerfully as possible, I lay down on the bed in all my clothes and began to _wake up_--wider and wider and wider.

My reason lay quite dormant like some drugged thing but my memory, photographic as a lens, began to reproduce the ruddy, blond face of the Blue Serge Man beaming across a chafing-dish; the mournful, sobbing sound of a dog's dream; the crisp, starched, Monday smell of the blue gingham ap.r.o.ns that Alrik's Wife used to wear. The vision was altogether too vivid to be pleasant.

Then the wet wind blew in through the window like a splash of alcohol, chilling, revivifying, stinging as a whip-lash. The tormented candle flame struggled furiously for a moment, and went out, hurtling the black night down upon me like some choking avalanche of horror. In utter idiotic panic I jumped from my bed and clawed my way toward the feeble gray glow of the window-frame. The dark dooryard before me was drenched with rain. The tall linden trees waved and mourned in the wind.

"Of course, of course, there are no ghosts," I reasoned, just as one reasons that there is no mistake in the dictionary, no flaw in the multiplication table. But sometimes one's fantastically jaded nerves think they have found the blunder in language, the fault in science. Ghosts or no ghosts--if you _thought_ you saw one, wouldn't it be just as bad?

My eyes strained out into the darkness. Suppose--I--should--_think_--that I heard the bark of a dog? Suppose--suppose--that from that black shed door where the automobile used to live, I should _think_--even T-H-I-N-K that I saw the Blue Serge Man come stumbling with a lantern? The black shed door burst open with a bang-bang-bang, and I screamed, jumped, s.n.a.t.c.hed a blanket, and fled for the lamp-lighted hall.

A little dazzled by the sudden glow, I shrank back in alarm from a figure on the top stair. It was the Pretty Lady. Wrapped clumsily like myself in a big blanket, she sat huddled there with the kerosene lamp close beside her, mending the Blue Serge Man's cap. On the step below her, smothered in a soggy lavender comforter, crouched Alrik's Old Mother, her dim eyes brightened uncannily with superst.i.tious excitement.

I was evidently a welcome addition to the party, and the old woman cuddled me in like a meal-sack beside her.

"Naw one could sleep a night like this," she croaked.

"_Sleep?_" gasped the Pretty Lady. Scorn infinite was in her tone.

But comfortably and serenely from the end of the hall came the heavy, regular breathing of the Partridge Hunter, and from beyond that, Alrik's blissful, oblivious snore. Yet Alrik was the only one among us who claimed an agonizing, personal sorrow.

I began to laugh a bit hysterically. "Men are funny people," I volunteered.

Alrik's Old Mother caught my hand with a chuckle, then sobered suddenly, and shook her wadded head.

"Men _ain't_ exactly--people," she confided. "Men _ain't_ exactly people--at all!"

The conviction evidently burned dull, steady, comforting as a night-light, in the old crone's eighty years' experience, but the Pretty Lady's face grabbed the new idea desperately, as though she were trying to rekindle happiness with a wet match. Yet every time her fretted lips straightened out in some semblance of Peace, her whole head would suddenly explode in one gigantic sneeze. There was no other sound, I remember, for hours and hours, except the steady, monotonous, s...o...b..ry swash of a bursting roof-gutter somewhere close in the eaves.

Certainly Dawn itself was not more chilled and gray than we when we crept back at last to our beds, thick-eyed with drowsy exhaustion, limp-bodied, m.u.f.fle-minded.

But when we woke again, the late, hot noonday sun was like a scorching fire in our faces, and the drenched dooryard steamed like a dye-house in the sudden burst of unseasonable heat.

After breakfast, the Pretty Lady, in her hundred-dollar ruffles, went out to the barn with shabby Alrik to help him mend a musty old plow harness. The Pretty Lady's brains were almost entirely in her fingers.

So were Alrik's. The exclusiveness of their task seemed therefore to thrust the Partridge Hunter and me off by ourselves into a sort of amateur sorrow cla.s.s, and we started forth as cheerfully as we could to investigate the autumn woods.

Pa.s.sing the barn door, we heard the strident sound of Alrik's complaining. Braced with his heavy shoulders against a corner of the stall, he stood hurling down his new-born theology upon the glossy blond head of the Pretty Lady who sat perched adroitly on a nail keg with two shiny-tipped fingers prying up the corners of her mouth into a smile.

One side of the smile was distinctly wry. But Alrik's face was deadly earnest. Sweat bubbled out on his forehead like tears that could not possibly wait to reach his eyes.

"There ought to be a separate heaven for ladies and gentlemen," he was arguing frantically. "'Tain't fair. 'Tain't right. I won't have it! I'll see a priest. I'll find a parson. If it ain't proper to live with people, it ain't proper to die with 'em. I tell you I won't have Amy careerin' round with strange men. She always was foolish about men. And I'm breakin' my heart for her, and Mother's gettin' old, and the house is goin' to rack and ruin, but how--_how_ can a man go and get married comfortable again when his mind's all torturin' round and round and round about his first wife?"

The Partridge Hunter gave a sharp laugh under his breath, yet he did not seem exactly amused. "Laugh for _two_!" I suggested, as we dodged out of sight round the corner and plunged off into the actual Outdoors.

The heat was really intense, the October sun dazzlingly bright. Warmth steamed from the earth, and burnished from the sky. A plushy brown rabbit lolling across the roadway dragged on one's sweating senses like overshoes in June. Under our ruthless, heavy-booted feet the wet green meadow winced like some tender young salad. At the edge of the forest the big pines darkened sumptuously. Then, suddenly, between a scarlet sumach and a slim white birch, the cavernous wood-path opened forth mysteriously, narrow and tall and domed like the arch of a cathedral.

Not a bird twitted, not a leaf rustled, and, far as the eye could reach, the wet brown pine-needles lay thick and soft and padded like tan-bark, as though all Nature waited hushed and expectant for some exquisitely infinitesimal tragedy, like the travail of a squirrel.

With brain and body all a-whisper and a-tiptoe, the Partridge Hunter and I stole deeper and deeper into the Color and the Silence and the Witchery, dazed at every step by the material proof of autumn warring against the spiritual insistence of spring. It was the sort of day to make one very tender toward the living just because they were living, and very tender toward the dead just because they were dead.

At the gurgling bowl of a half-hidden spring, we made our first stopping-place. Out of his generous corduroy pockets the Partridge Hunter tinkled two drinking-cups, dipped them deep in the icy water, and handed me one with a little shuddering exclamation of cold. For an instant his eyes searched mine, then he lifted his cup very high and stared off into _Nothingness_.

"To the--_All-Gone People_," he toasted.

I began to cry. He seemed very glad to have me cry. "Cry for two," he suggested blithely, "cry for two," and threw himself down on the twiggy ground and began to snap metallically against the cup in his hand.

"Nice little tin cup," he affirmed judicially. "The Blue Serge Man gave it to me. It must have cost as much as fifteen cents. And it will last, I suppose, till the moon is mud and the stars are dough. But the Blue Serge Man himself is--quite _gone_. Funny idea!" The Partridge Hunter's forehead began to knit into a fearful frown. "Of course it _isn't_ so,"

he argued, "but it would certainly seem sometimes as though a man's _things_ were the only really immortal, indestructible part of him, and that Soul was nothing in the world but just a composite name for the S-ouvenirs, O-rnaments, U-tensils, L-itter that each man's personality acc.u.mulates in the few years' time allotted to him. The man himself, you see, is wiped right off the earth like a chalk-mark, but you can't escape or elude in a million years the wizened bronze elephant that he brought home from India, or the showy red necktie that's down behind his bureau, or the floating, wind-blown, ash-barrel bill for violets that turns up a generation hence in a German prayer-book at a French book-stall.