Part 8

At the Hart’s Run station Julie bought a ticket to Washington, but when the train reached Gordonsville she slipped out of it unnoticed and, buying another ticket, crossed the tracks and boarded the Richmond train which was waiting there. At the station in Richmond, Timothy Bixby met her.

Thus, as easily almost as changing from one garment to another, Julie Rose slipped out of all her established life. With that sudden violent outcry, “What’s folks ever done for you or for me, that we got to please ’em now!” she had burst open a door, through which she and Timothy passed defiantly, finding themselves in a world where life turned round and looked at them with apparent beneficence. In the happiness of their companionship they drew long breaths of freedom; and, relaxing into the recreating power of their love, they found themselves and a confidence they had never known, so that for the first time they faced their fellow beings without fear.

His concern was all for her. When he met her that first afternoon at the Richmond station, he insisted that she was tired and must have supper at once before he took her to their rooms. Accordingly, they had their first meal together in the station restaurant, a meal that in spite of the city heat and the coming and going of hurried people, was to Julie the most wonderful she had ever eaten. Afterward they boarded a westbound street-car.

“I’m afraid you’re going to find the city mighty hot after the mountains,” he said anxiously.

She did not answer, but she turned and looked at him, and words were not necessary. What did heat or material discomfort matter to her then?

The city was hot, tired, and flat after long weeks of summer; disheveled and overgrown with extra population also, as were most cities near any of the big training-camps, in that war year of 1918.

“The rooms ain’t much, honey,” he apologized, as the car ground its way west with jerks of stops and starts. “An’ they ain’t in a swell part of town; but they’re the best I could do, an’--an’ I got something to show you.”

The rooms were in a part of the city made up almost entirely of blocks of small frame houses, sheltering Richmond’s poorer inhabitants, who spilled out of their front doors on to the little porches and into the streets: the men in shirt sleeves, the women sometimes tidied for the afternoons, sometimes still in the depression of wrappers that had been worn through all the heat of the day.

“You see it ain’t much--pretty hot, an’ cheap out this way,” he apologized again as they got off the car and started along the street.

She looked up at him as she had looked before. “Oh, Tim!” she cried; and suddenly she laughed--a ripple of shy wild ecstasy. “Oh, Tim, honey! How could anything like that matter now?”

Looking at her, he caught the flaming happiness of her face, and laughed too. “I know, I know,” he whispered. “An’ anyhow, I have got something fine to show you,” he added.

Though the streets were for the most part lined with small wooden houses, there was an occasional more pretentious one of brick, and sometimes a larger frame dwelling. It was in one of these last, a double, three-storied house which accommodated several families and one or two single lodgers, that Mr. Bixby had found an abode for them--a sitting-room, a kitchen, and at the back a bedroom. The rooms were close and the furniture was cheap and ugly, but what did that matter? The porch outside was clothed with a cottage vine, a strip of zinnias and cosmos marched in the tiny front-yard, and at the back was another attempt at a flower bed.

“Oh, Tim! Oh, Tim!” she cried. She stood in the middle of the small domain and turned slowly about. “Oh, Tim! It’s _ours_!” The rooms ceased thereat to be mere rooms; with that rush of emotion her heart opened to them, they entered, and the place became her home.

But he would not let her linger there now. Depositing her bags, he urged her out again. “Come on,” he cried. “I got to show you ’fore it’s too late.”

He turned into a street running south, which after a few minutes’ walk came to an end in a small bit of parkway where were a row of benches and a stone balustrade. “There now! Look!” he cried. It was his triumph.

All the cheap sordidness of the city ended abruptly here. Beyond was space--a deep drop to the stretches of the James River below. Overhead was the infinite breadth and height of the sky, and far across the river, whose tawny waters were tufted by little islands, were green stretches of open country.

He drew her down to a bench. “This is the jumping-off place,” he told her. “I thought you could come here an’ kind of stretch and breathe when things got too close on you back there in the streets.”

It was amazing. The mean streets reached almost to them, fenced off by just that little edge of open ground, yet all one had to do was to turn the back upon them to enter another world, a place of space and freedom, of green islands, clean air, the smell of the water, and the yellow flow of it. Here, too, they found the secret places of their own souls. The twilight and then the dark came slowly down. They sat together upon the bench, their eyes rested by the open stretches before them, their hands close clasped, their bodies touching, and their soft, half-whispered words feeling out toward one another, as they brought to light all the past tragedies of their lives, all their sorrowful timidities. Here was one at last to whom everything might be told, who would listen, who would perfectly understand. They paused often to say in whispered wonder, “Why, I never told that to anyone before!”

He told her there in halting phrases about his marriage. His disjointed words only touched upon the high places, like a child skipping across a brook on the stepping-stones. All the difficult everyday intercourse with his wife that had followed their union was a dark flood he did not dip into. What he did tell was enough for her to understand.

“We lived in the same town together,” he said. “I’d known her always, off an’ on. She was mighty handsome--big and full of life. Everybody thought she was going to marry Warwick Preston. But I reckon they quarreled or something. Anyhow, him and Ethel Dow ran off and got married. She--Elizabeth--lived a few doors down the street from me. We met one evening--she was mighty fine an’ big-lookin’. She asked me to come an’ see her, an’ I went several evenin’s. One night she cried, an’ said how lonesome she was. I was lonesome, too--”

“I understand,” Julie cried hastily, and he went no further with his explanation. They turned away from the unhappy past to the miracle of the present.

“We’re free! We’re free!” she exulted. “None of the little old fears can hold us any more. We’ve found ourselves, honey! We’ve found one another.”

“It was you unlocked the door an’ set me free,” he burst out. “You’re my sister an’ my mother! You’re all I am. Oh, my little honey! My love!”

“I’m your sister an’ your mother--I’m the one that would die for you!” she cried in answer.

After that they needed no more words. Silence fell, and the dusk that had faded now into dark, wrapped them close about. They sat thus for a long time, but at last it was late, and rising they made their way hand in hand like happy children back to the three little rooms that were now their home.

XV

In the lodging-house in their new life together Julie and Mr. Bixby passed as Mr. and Mrs. Freeman. It was Julie who named them.

“An’ that’s the truth; we _are_ free. It isn’t any lie,” she pleaded.

“It’s God’s truth,” he affirmed solemnly.

They kept their own first names, for they both clung tenaciously to the truth whenever it was possible. Indeed, they did not practise many subterfuges nor make any very great effort at concealment. In this big strange life of a city where neither of them had ever been before, it did not seem likely that he would be traced, or that a country so grimly occupied with war and great undertakings would pause long enough in all the mad confusion to note that one inconspicuous man had failed to appear at the place assigned to him. They were not worried either about finances. They each had a small stock of ready money, and Julie had a couple of Liberty Bonds which could be sold in case he found any trouble in getting work. They had agreed that he must leave his bonds for Elizabeth, although, as she had a small income of her own, she was independent of his support. He found a position almost at once in a printing establishment where war had left them short of men, and where they welcomed his expert services. Julie planned to seek work also later on, but for the present he entreated her not to.

“No, take time just to be alive a while,” he begged. “Why, we’re almost as new as Adam an’ Eve; all I want you to do is just to help me name the animals.”

“Name the animals!” she laughed, as no human being had ever laughed before at his small whimsicalities.

They were both released into a gayety and laughter of life that heretofore had passed them by. Youth flowed back into Julie’s face, and with it her lost prettiness--or perhaps a fresh prettiness which even her youth had never known. Ordinarily the strangeness of their new surroundings, with the inevitable publicity of the lodging-house, would have terrified them both. But not now. As certain animals put their young in the centre of the flock, and then in companionship face the enemy boldly, so together they pooled their confessed weaknesses and fears, and thus were able to turn an assured front to the rest of the world. Their passion had released them. Heretofore they seemed to themselves to be clinging merely to the edges of life, but now they were at its flaming centre. Nay more, they were life itself; and from the heart of it they looked forth at the rest of the world with a fearless joy. Like children who make a tent out of a couple of chairs roofed by an old shawl and, creeping under it, find an enchanted world of their own, no matter what tragedies may be facing the grown-up people around them, so under the grim roof of a world’s war these two discovered a miraculous existence. After their long years of repression, in this sudden release they were intoxicated with the rapture of existence. For Julie the days flowed by in ecstasy, from early morning when she arose and prepared his breakfast, on through all the happy day as she attended to her small home tasks, and so to the fall of evening which brought him home again--every moment was a golden joy keyed to a hidden rhythm. Other people also became a delight to her. With that one defiant and releasing cry of hers, she had defied people, and found freedom; but now that she was free, she no longer held any grudge against them. Indeed, one of the keenest delights in her new existence was a fearless and easy intercourse with the rest of the world. Her happiness and vividness of life was such that it could not be contained within their own two personalities, but must flow forth in a warm friendliness to all the people with whom she came in contact--to the children in the street, the clerks in the shops and at market, and to the other lodgers in the house. With these last she found herself on friendly terms almost at once.

They were ordinary enough people, but to Julie they seemed different from any she had ever known. There was Mrs. Watkins, who had the rooms across the hall from Julie on the first floor. She was a frail and tired little woman, wilted by the heat, and burdened with the care of four small children. She generally managed to get herself into a tidy dress late in the afternoon, but most of the day she went about in a wrapper, her hair in curl-papers, and her constant complaint, “My Lord, _ain’t_ it hot!” To help her with her sewing for the children was a delight to Julie. She did it so eagerly and so well, that even Mrs. Watkins’ fretful discouragement was pierced by gratitude.

“My, but you’re kind! Why, you couldn’t be kinder to me if you was my own sister,” she burst out one day, as Julie held up a completed dress with pretty summer ruffles. “I never did think I’d get that dress finished for poor little Nell. Looks like the heat always drags me down so--but you! Why, you ain’t been at it no time, an’ now it’s all done. Nell!” she called out of the window into the hot street, “Nelly! run here a second; momma’s got something to show you, dearie.”

The little girl entered the cluttered bed-sitting-room, a languid and pale little creature of eight years, but when Julie held up the little frock before her, her eyes lighted with joy.

“Oh, momma!” she breathed, turning to her mother. “Oh, it’s done, ain’t it!”

She seized the dress, and holding it up under her chin, danced away to look at herself in the faded mirror.

“Oh, momma! Let me wear it this evening,” she pleaded, turning about from side to side, preening before the glass.

“You better take time to thank Mis’ Freeman, ’stead er primpin’ like that,” her mother admonished her. “She’s the one finished it for you, she’s your friend.”

“Thank you, thank you, marm,” the child said, turning toward Julie. The words were constrained and inadequate, spoken in obedience to her mother’s command; but as she stood there with the pink folds of the frock caught close to her and her pinched face flushed with happiness, she was a little point of color and joy that lighted up the discouraged room and made her mother’s eyes linger upon her fondly a moment, then turn for sympathetic understanding to Julie.

“Look what else I got,” Julie said, and took a small package from her workbasket. The child unwrapped it shyly and a bright pink ribbon shimmered into view.

“For my hair--to match the dress,” she breathed, and fell dumb with happiness.

“My, but you’re kind!” Mrs. Watkins exclaimed again.

“Oh, it ain’t anything,” Julie deprecated. “I love to see children in pretty clothes, an’ I like to sew. I used to do dressmaking up in the country where I lived.” With the words, suddenly the sight of her little shop in Hart’s Run staring with blank shuttered windows out upon the street, with its nasturtiums and sweet peas in the side yard, rose up in her mind and hung there a moment before it dissolved. It gave Julie a sharp stab of unexpected wistfulness.

“I had a little shop once--a millinery shop, where I did sewing, too,” she confided. Somehow she felt she must speak of her home. It had come to her as a shy child comes to its mother’s knee, and she must give it some touch of recognition. “It was a shop in the front, and I had my living rooms in behind, and a little garden on the side with sweet peas and nasturtiums in it,” she went on, offering the inner vision propitiation.

“My! That must’ve been nice,” the other said. “You’d like that. My Lord! Ain’t it hot! I wish’t I was in the country right this minute.” She mopped her face with a dingy handkerchief. “What was the name of the place?”

“Oh, it’s just a little town up in the mountains,” Julie evaded. “You wouldn’t ever have heard of it.”

“What’s its name?” Mrs. Watkins persisted. “Maybe I have. I had a brother used to be in the lumber business up in the western part of the state.”

“Its name--its name--” Julie hesitated. She found it extraordinarily difficult to lie, and yet to speak the truth would be utter recklessness. All the time the little shop which had been her home seemed to hang there in her mind expectant, waiting to see whether she would own or deny it.

“Its name’s Red River,” she said at last, with an effort. Instantly the picture of the shop broke and swirled away. “Oh, no, it isn’t! No, it isn’t!” she corrected herself breathlessly, and completely reckless now. “It’s Hart’s Run. Red River’s the county town. But it’s Hart’s Run--Hart’s Run,” she cried, “where my home was.”

Then, terrified by what she had done, her heart began to flutter violently up and down and she looked wildly about for some means of changing the conversation. As she did so she caught sight through the window of a strange old woman going down the porch steps, and passing uncertainly out into the street.

“Oh, Mrs. Watkins,” Julie whispered, “look quick. Who is that old woman?”

Mrs. Watkins peeped out. “That? Oh, that’s the poor old soul lives all by herself up on the third floor. She’s mighty peculiar. It’s Miss Fogg.”

“I’ve seen her several times, an’ meant to ask about her. What’s the matter with her? She looks--she looks dreadful,” Julie cried, glad to elaborate the subject, and hoping that the name she had spoken would be overlooked.

“Well, she’s mighty peculiar,” Mrs. Watkins repeated. “I reckon she must be cracked.”

“But she looks so strange, so--so awful,” Julie persisted.

“Well, she’s really lookin’ better than usual right now. She has spells when she don’t come out of her room for days together, when she don’t even pretend to fix herself up. You think she’s awful looking now; but you just ought to see her then. She just stays shut up in that room and don’t see a soul except her canary bird, if you could call that a soul--just for days. I don’t know what in the world she does with herself--just sits an’ mopes, I reckon.”

“But don’t people go in to see her, to see what’s the trouble?”

“Oh, she don’t thank you to: she’s mighty peculiar, I tell you. An’ proud--_who-ee!_ It’s enough to kill you with laughing, but that old rag-bag that looks like she hadn’t washed herself for a week--she thinks herself better’n anybody in this house. Wouldn’t that kill you? That’s because she used to go out sewing for some of the grand people here in town. That’s her trade--dressmaking.”

“Oh, well, then she and I ought to get along,” Julie cried eagerly. “I’ll go to see her. I hate to have any one look so awful.”

“She won’t thank you an’ she won’t see you; she’ll just slam the door in your face. She seems like she’s mighty suspicious of every one. She won’t have a thing to do with anybody, I tell you.”

“I’m going to see her just the same,” Julie persisted. “It’s awful--the look in her face, I mean. It’s like she hadn’t a friend in the world.”

“She won’t let anybody be friends with her, she’s so proud an’ touchy, an’ so peculiar.” Mrs. Watkins hastened to defend the neighborliness of the house. “People ain’t going to put up with it. Some of the ladies she sewed for used to come to see her and bring her things, but she’s so stand-offish even with them that they’ve about quit comin’.”

“What does she live on?” Julie inquired.

“Oh, she ain’t poor. She’s got some private means of her own. No, ma’am, she ain’t poor.”

“There’s something dreadful the matter with her,” Julie said distressfully. “I met her one day on the porch and looked straight into her eyes, and I never saw anything so--so awful looking.”

“Well, there was a doctor once came to see her; one of the ladies she used to sew for had him to come; an’ he said she was mighty bad off; said she had some sort of melancholia, an’ it wasn’t really safe to have her goin’ ’round loose; said she was liable to do something terrible.”

“What? What would she do?” Julie’s eyes widened with apprehension.

“I dunno.” The other shook her head. “Maybe kill herself, or something.”

“How _awful_!” Julie gasped, appalled. “The poor, poor thing!”

That night after supper, as they sat in the little park overhanging the river, Julie confessed to Tim that she had told Mrs. Watkins she came from Hart’s Run.

“I don’t know how I ever came to do such a thing,” she said in a frightened voice; “I didn’t mean to speak of it; I tried not to. I tried my best to lie. An’ first I said ‘Red River,’ but right away I changed it to ‘Hart’s Run.’ I had to. It seemed like I’d almost slapped my home an’ all the days that were gone right in the face when I said ‘Red River.’ I oughtn’t to have said ‘Hart’s Run’--I know I oughtn’t to. Oh, do you reckon it’s done any harm? Do you think we ought to move away some place else?”

“No--no. It’s all right. I don’t expect she even noticed,” he comforted her. “It’s all right.”

She was leaning against him, and he felt a tremor of fear shiver through her.

“My little honey, it’s all right,” he whispered, his arm tightening round her. “It’s all right. I’m glad you said ‘Hart’s Run.’ I wouldn’t have had you not to. Don’t get scared.”

They were all alone on the lower terrace of the park. At their back rose a steep bank. In front was the sheer drop to the river, overhung by the wide soft spaces of the misty air. Their hands met in a tight clasp, and for a moment they were silent in the ecstasy of their complete trust in each other. But after a moment she spoke diffidently.

“Tim, I got a notion about our--our happiness.” They never spoke of it as love. “I want to tell you about it.” She had fallen into a little trick of saying eagerly, “I want to tell you,” or “I want to tell you all about it.” And always he answered, “Tell me, my little honey.”

Since her mother’s death there had never been any one who had really wanted to hear what she had to say, and even her mother had not wanted it, had not understood, in the complete way that he did. Now, because of his understanding, her thoughts poured themselves out in a manner that astonished her. His creative sympathy made ideals and fancies, which heretofore had been too deep or too elusive to be expressed, come forth fleshed in words.

“Tell me, my honey,” he said now.

“Well, our happiness, Tim--it’s so--so alive, that it seems like it was a real thing running through us, like the way sap runs up the trees in spring. Oh, honey, ’til you came I was as dead as a winter branch, an’ now it seems like I couldn’t hold all the happiness, all the life that’s mine. I got to pour it out for other folks.”

“What’s folks ever done for you, or for me, that you got to please ’em now?” he said unexpectedly.

She was startled, frightened by his quotation of her own words. “Oh, I don’t feel that way now,” she cried. “I don’t feel it now that we got each other, do you? Do you, Tim?” she questioned anxiously, trying to read his face in the dusk.

“No, I don’t now--now that we’re free,” he answered. “I know something,” he announced suddenly.

“What? What do you know?”

“Oh, honey! It wa’n’t really the other folks kep’ us down. It was our own selves, our scary selves that we couldn’t break free of.”

She stared out into the wide dusk in amazement. “That’s the truth,” she said at length, with deep conviction. “It’s just the truth. Nobody to blame but our own little selves,” she repeated. “Nobody to blame, not--Why, Tim, not even Elizabeth!”

“No, not even her,” he nodded back.

They were neither of them bitter people; and with this revelation all their resentment towards the rest of the world melted away, leaving their hearts clean-swept and trembling with reverence toward the great happiness and emancipation that was theirs.

“Oh, Tim, I _got_ to try an’ help people,” she whispered, presently. “I’m so happy I got to pour some of it out for somebody. That’s why I got to try an’ help that poor old Miss Fogg.”

“Who’s Miss Fogg?” he questioned.

“She’s that poor thing lives up on the third floor all to herself,” she told him. “Sometimes she shuts herself in for days and days and won’t see a soul, Mrs. Watkins was telling me. She’s awful to look at, just awful. She’s--she’s--oh, Tim, she scares me! She’s what _I_ might have grown into if you hadn’t come. I’ve got to help her! It seems like I owe it to our happiness to try an’ make her happy, to pour life back into her! Oh, honey, you don’t care if I take some of our happiness and give it away, do you?” she cried suddenly, twisting off whimsically.

“Take all you want of it.” He made a gay, large gesture of bestowal. “There’ll always be a plenty to go round.”

They broke into happy laughter together in the dusk.

“Come on,” he proposed, jumping up. “Let’s go get us some ice cream.”

So hand in hand, laughing softly together, they wandered away along the summer street.