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Together, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Part Six - Chapter 56 |
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_ PART SIX CHAPTER LVI Long before it was light the next morning Isabelle heard the heavy tread of the blacksmith as he was going his rounds to light the fires; then she snuggled deeper into bed. When Margaret's maid finally came with the coffee and pushed back the heavy shutters, Isabelle looked out into another world from the one she had come to half frozen the afternoon before. She had entered the village from the rear, and now she looked off south and west from the level shelf on which the houses sat, across a broad valley, to black woods and a sloping breast of hills, freshly powdered with snow, to the blue sky-line, all as clear in the snow-washed mountain air as in a desert. The sun striking down into the valley brought out the faint azure of the inner folds of the hills. There was scarcely a footprint in the road to break the soft mass of new-fallen snow. Isabelle could see a black cat deliberately stealing its way from the barn across the road to the house. It lifted each paw with delicate precision and pushed it firmly into the snow, casting a deep shadow on the gleaming surface of white. The black cat, lean and muscular, stretching itself across the snow, was the touch of art needed to complete the silent scene.... A wood-sled drawn by two heavy horses came around the corner of the house, softly churning the new snow before its runners. A man clad in a burly sheepskin coat and fur cap, his feet in enormous rubber shoes, stood on the sled, slowly thrashing his arms and breathing frostily. "Hello, Sol!" the man cried to the blacksmith, who was shovelling a path from the barn to the house. "Morning, Ed. Going up to Cross's lot?" "Ye--as--" "Hard sledding?" The two men exchanged amicable nothings in the crisp, brilliant air through which their voices rang with a peculiar timbre. To Isabelle, looking and listening from her window, it was all so fresh, so simple, like a picture on a Japanese print! For the first time in months she had a distinct desire,--to get outside and look at the hills. "You are commanded," announced Margaret, a little later, "to the doctor's for supper at six. That wasn't the way it was put exactly, but it amounts to the same thing. The doctor's least word is a command here.... Now I am off to help the housekeeper with the accounts,--it's all I am good for!"... So Isabelle was left to set forth on her ramble of exploration by herself. She pushed through the snow to the last house on the village street, where the road dipped down a long hill, and the wide arc of northern mountains was revealed in a glittering rampart. Her eyes filled involuntarily with tears. "I must be very weak," she said to herself, "to cry because it's beautiful!" And sitting down on a rock by the road, she cried more, with a feeling of self-pity and a little self-contempt. An old woman came to the door of the house she had just passed with a dish-pan of water and looked curiously at the stranger. At first the countrywoman opened her lips as if she intended to speak, but stood with her dish-pan and said nothing. Isabelle could see through her tears the bent figure and battered face of the old woman,--a being without one line of beauty or even animal grace. What a fight life must have been to reduce any woman's body to that! And the purpose,--to keep the breath of life in a worn old body, just to live? "Pleasant morning!" Isabelle said with a smile through her tears. "It ain't bad," the old woman admitted, emptying her dish-pan. As Isabelle retraced her steps into the village the old woman followed her with curious eyes, thinking no doubt that a woman like this stranger, well dressed, young, and apparently well fed, ought not to be sitting on a rock on a winter's day crying! "And she's quite right!" Isabelle said to herself. The jewelled morning was the same to them both,--the outer world was imperturbable in its circular variety. But the inner world, the vision,--ah, there was the extraordinary variation in human lives! From heaven to hell through all gradations, and whether it were heaven or hell did not depend on being like this crone at the end of the road or like herself in its sheltered nooks,--it was something else. "I will have to see Margaret's wonderful doctor, if this keeps on," she said, still dropping tears. The blacksmith stood beside the open door of his shop, gazing reflectively across the white fields to the upland. Beside him was a broken wood-sled that he was mending. Seeing Isabelle, he waved her a slow salute with the sled-runner he had ready in his hand. "Morning!" he called out in his deep voice. "Seeing the country? The hills are extra fine this morning." He proceeded slowly to brush the snow from the frame of the sled, still glancing now and then over the fields. Isabelle felt that she had caught his characteristic moment, _his_ inner vision. "You have a good view from your shop." "The best in the town! I've always been grateful to my father for one thing,--well, for many things,--but specially because he had the good sense to set the old smithy right here where you can see something. When there isn't much going on, I come out of doors here and take a long look at the mountains. It rests your back so." Isabelle sat down in the shop and watched Mr. Short repair the sled, interested in the slow, sure movements he made, the painstaking way in which he fitted iron and wood and riveted the pieces together. It must be a relief, she thought, to work with one's hands like that,--which men could do, forgetting the number of manual movements Mrs. Short also made during the same time. The blacksmith talked as he worked, in a gentle voice without a trace of self-consciousness, and Isabelle had again that sense of VISION, of something inward and sustaining in this man of remote and narrow range,--something that expressed itself in the slow speech, the peaceful, self-contained manner. As she went back up the street to the house the thick cloud of depression, of intangible misery, in which she had been living as it seemed to her for eternity, settled down once more,--the habitual gait of her mind, like the dragging gait of her feet. She at least was powerless to escape the bitter food of idle recollection. * * * * * The doctor's house was a plain, square, white building, a little way above the main road, from which there was a drive winding through the spruces. On the sides and behind the house stretched one-story wings, also white and severely plain. "Those are the wards, and the one behind is the operating room," Margaret explained. The house inside was as plain as on the outside: there were no pictures, no rugs, no useless furniture. The large hall divided the first floor in two. On the right was the office and the dining room, on the left with a southerly exposure the large living room. There were great, blazing fires in all the rooms and in the hall at either side,--there was no other heat,--and the odor of burning fir boughs permeated the atmosphere. "It's like a hospital almost," Isabelle commented as they waited in the living room. "And he has French blood! How can he stand it so--bare and cold?" "The doctor's limitations are as interesting as his powers. He never has a newspaper in the house, nor a magazine,--burns them up if he finds them lying about. Yet he reads a great deal. He has a contempt for all the froth of immediate living, and still the whole place is the most modern, up-to-date contemporary machine of its kind!" Outside was the blackness of the cold winter night; inside the grayness of stained walls lighted by the glow from the blazing fires. A few pieces of statuary, copies of the work of the idealistic Greek period, stood in the hall and the living room. All that meant merely comfort, homelikeness--all in a word that was characteristically American--was wanting. Nevertheless, as Isabelle waited in the room she was aware of a peculiar grave beauty in its very exclusions. This house had the atmosphere of a mind. Some nurse came in and nodded to Margaret, then Mrs. Beck the matron appeared, and a couple of young doctors followed. They had been across the valley on snow-shoes in the afternoon and were talking of their adventures in the woods. There was much laughter and gayety--as if gathered here in the wilderness these people all knew one another very well. After some time Isabelle became aware of the entrance of another person, and turning around saw a thin, slight man with a thick head of gray hair. His smooth-shaven face was modelled with many lines, and under the dark eyebrows that had not yet turned gray there were piercing black eyes. Although the talk and the laughter did not die at once, there was the subtle movement among the persons in the room which indicated that the master of the house had appeared. Dr. Renault walked directly to Isabelle. "Good evening, Mrs. Lane. Will you come in to supper?" He offered her his arm, and without further word of ceremony they went into the dining room. At the table the doctor said little to her at first. He leaned back in his chair, his eyes half closed, listening to the talk of the others, as if weary after a long day. Isabelle was puzzled by a sense of something familiar in the man at her side; she must have met him before, she could not tell where. The dining room, like the living room, was square, panelled with white wood, and the walls stained. It was bare except for several copies of Tanagra figurines in a recess above the chimney and two large photographs of Greek athletes. The long table, made of heavy oak planks, had no cloth, and the dishes were of the coarsest earthenware, such as French peasants use. The talk was lively enough,--about two new cases that had arrived that afternoon, the deer-hunting season that had just closed, bear tracks discovered on Bolton Hill near the lumber-camp, and a new piano that a friend had sent for the convalescent or "dotty" ward, as they called it. The young doctor who sat at Isabelle's right asked her if she could play or sing, and when she said no, he asked her if she could skee. Those were the only personal remarks of the meal. Margaret, who was very much at home, entered into the talk with unwonted liveliness. It was a workshop of busy men and women who had finished the day's labor with enough vitality left to react. The food, Isabelle noticed, was plentiful and more than good. At the end of the meal the young men lighted cigarettes, and one of the nurses also smoked, while a box of cigars was placed before Renault. Some one began to sing, and the table joined the chorus, gathering about the chimney, where there were a couple of settles. It was a life, so Isabelle saw, with an order of its own, a direction of its own, a strong undercurrent. Its oddity and nonchalance were refreshing. Like one of the mountain brooks it ran its own course, strong and liquid beneath the snow, to its own end. "You seem to have a very good time up here among yourselves!" Isabelle said to the doctor, expressing her wonder frankly. "And why not?" he asked, a smile on his thin lips. He helped himself to a cigar, still looking at her whimsically, and biting off its end held a match ready to strike, as if awaiting her next remark. "But don't you ever want to get away, to go back to the city? Don't you feel--isolated?" "Why should we? Because there's no opera or dinner parties? We have a dinner party every night." He lighted his cigar and grinned at Isabelle. "The city delusion is one of the chief idiocies of our day. City people encourage the idea that you can't get on without their society. Man was not meant to live herded along sidewalks. The cities breed the diseases for us doctors,--that is their one great occupation." He threw the match into the fire, leaned back in his chair with his hands knit behind his head, and fastening his black eyes on Isabelle began to talk. "I lived upwards of twenty years in cities with that same delusion,--not daring to get more than a trolley-car fare away from the muck and noise. Then I was kicked out,--had to go, thank God! On the Arizona plains I learned to know what an idiot I had been to throw away the better half of a life in a place where you have to breathe other peoples' bad air. Why, there isn't room to think in a city! I never used to think, or only at odd moments. I lived from one nervous reflex to another, and took most of my ideas from other folks. Now I do my own thinking. Just try it, young woman; it is a great relief!" "But--but--" Isabelle stammered, laughing in spite of herself. "You know," Renault bore on tranquilly, "there's a new form of mental disease you might call 'pavementitis'--the pavement itch. When the patient has it badly, so that he can't be happy when removed from his customary environment, he is incurable. A man isn't a sound man, nor a woman a healthy woman, who can't stand alone on his own two legs and be nourished intellectually and emotionally away from the herd.... That young fellow who has just gone out was a bad case of pavementitis when he came to me,--couldn't breathe comfortably outside the air of New York. Hard worker, too. He came up here to 'rest.' Rest! Almost nobody needs rest. What they want is hard work and tranquil minds. I put him on his job the day he came. You couldn't drive him away now! Last fall I sent him back to see if the cure was complete. Telegraphed me in a week that he was coming up,--life was too dull down there! ... And that little black-haired woman who is talking to Mrs. Pole,--similar case, only it was complicated. She was neurotic, hysterical, insomniac, melancholy,--the usual neurasthenic ticket. Had a husband who didn't suit or a lover, I suspect, and it got fastened in the brain,--rode her. She's my chief nurse in the surgical ward now,--a tremendous worker; can go three nights without sleep if necessary and knows enough to sleep soundly when she gets the chance.... Has relapses of pavementitis now and then, when some of her fool friends write her; but I fix that! ... So it goes; I have had incurable cases of course, as in everything else. The only thing to do with 'em then is to send them back to suck their poison until it kills." The whimsical tone of irony and invective made Isabelle laugh, and also subtly changed her self-preoccupation. Evidently Dr. Renault was not a Potts to go to with a long story of woe. "I thought it was surgery, your specialty," she remarked, "not nervous prostration." "We do pretty much everything here--as it is needed. Come in to-morrow morning sometime and look the shop over." He rose, threw away his cigar, and at this signal the group scattered. Renault, Margaret, and Isabelle went back to the bare living room, where the doctor stood silently in front of the fireplace for a few minutes, as though expecting his guests to leave. When they started, he threw open a long window and beckoned to Isabelle to follow him. Outside there was a broad platform running out over the crest of the hill on which the house was built. The land beyond fell away sharply, then rose in a wooded swell to the northern mountains. The night was dark with glittering starlight above, and the presence of the white masses of the hills could be felt rather than seen,--brooding under the stars. There was the tinkle of a sleigh-bell on the road below,--the only sound in the still night. "There!" Renault exclaimed. "Is there anything you would like to swap for this?" He breathed deeply of the frosty air. "It seems almost as if a voice were speaking in the silence!" "Yes," Renault assented gravely. "There is a voice, and you can hear it up here--if you listen." _ |
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