Part 13

"He leaned toward her and, elbow on his knee, he set looking at her. But she was looking a little by him, into the green of the room, and I guess past that, into the green of all outdoors. I got up and slipped out, without their noticing me, and I went through the house with one fact bulging out of the air and occupying my brain. And it was that sitting there beside him, with him owning her future like he owned his own, Robin's world was as different from Alex's as the world is from the Proudfits' conservatory.

"I went up to Chris, in the pretty, pinky room next to Robin's and found him sitting up in bed and pulling the ties out of the down comforter, as hard as he could. I just stood still and looked at him, thinking how eating and drinking and creating and destroying seems to be the native instincts of everybody born. Destroying, as I look at it, was the weapon God give us so that we could eat and drink and create the world in peace, but we got some mixed up during getting born and we got to believing that destruction was a part of the process.

"'Chris,' I says, 'what you pulling out?'

"'I donno those names of those,' he says. 'I call 'em little pulls.'

"'What are they for?' I ask' him.

"'I donno what those are for,' he says, 'but they come out _slickery_.'

"Ain't it funny? And ain't it for all the world the way Nature works, destroying what comes out _slickery_ and leaving that alone that resists her? I was so struck by it I didn't scold him none.

"After a while I took him down for tea. On the way he picked up a sleepy puppy, and in the conservatory door we met the footman with the little tea wagon and the nice, drowsy quiet of the house went all to pieces with Chris in it:--

"'Supper, supper--here comes supper on a wagon, runnin' on litty wheels goin' wound an a-w-o-u-n-d--' says he, some louder than saying and almost to shouting. He sat down on the floor and looked up expectant: 'Five lumps,' he orders, not having belonged to the house party for nothing.

"'Tell us about your day, Chris,' Robin asks. 'What did you do?'

"'It isn't _by_, is it?' Chris says, anxious. 'To-day didn't stop yet, did it?'

"'Not yet,' she reassures him. 'Now is still now.'

"'I want to-day to keep being now,' Chris said, 'because when it stops, then the bed is right there. It don't be anywhere near to-night, is it?' he says.

"'Not very near,' Robin told him. 'Well, then, what are you doing to-day?' she asks.

"'I'm to the house's party,' he explained. 'The house is having its party. An' I'm to it.'

"'Do you like this house, dear?' Robin asked.

"'It's nice,' he affirmed. 'In the night it--it talks wiv its lights. I saw it. With my daddy. When I was off on a big road.' Chris looked at her intent, from way in his eyes. 'I was thinkin' if my daddy would come,' he says, patient.

"Robin stoops over to him, quick, and he let her. He'd took a most tremendous fancy to her, the little fellow had, and didn't want her long out of his sight. 'Is that Robin?' he always said, when he heard anybody coming from any direction. She give him a macaroon, now, for each hand, and he run away with the puppy. And then she turned to Alex, her face bright with whatever she was thinking about.

"'Alex,' she says, 'he's a dear little fellow--a dear little fellow. And all alone. I've wanted so much to ask you: Can't we have him for ours?'

"Alex looks at her, all bewildered up in a minute. 'How ours?' he asks. 'Do you mean have him educated? That, of course, if you really want it.'

"'No, no,' she says. '_Ours._ To keep with us, bring up, make. Let's let him be really ours.'

"He just leaned back in the big chair, smiling at her, meditative.

"'My dear Robin,' he says, 'it's a terrible responsibility to meddle that way with somebody's life.'

"She looked at him, not understanding.

"'It's such an almighty assumption,' he went on, 'this jumping blithely into the office of destiny--keeping, bringing-up, making, as you say--meddling with, I call it--anybody's life.'

"'Isn't it really meddling to let him be in a bad way when we can put him in a better one?' she asked, puzzled.

"'I love you, Robin,' says he, light, 'but not for your logic. No, my dear girl. Assuredly we will not take this child for ours. What leads you to suppose that Nature really wants him to live, anyway?'

"I looked at him over my tea-cup, and for my life I couldn't make out whether he was speaking mocking or speaking plain.

"'If Chris is to be inebriate, criminal, vicious, even irresponsible, as his father must be,' Alex says, 'Nature wants nothing of the sort. She wants to be rid of him as quickly as possible. How do you know what you are saving?'

"'How do you know,' Robin says, 'what you are letting go?'

"'I can take the risk if Nature can,' he contends.

"She sat up in her chair, her eyes bright as the daylight, and I thought her eagerness and earnestness was on her like a garment.

"'You have nobody to refer the risk to,' Robin says, 'Nature has us. And for one, I take it. So far as Chris is concerned, Alex, if no one claims him, I want him never to be out of touch with me.'

"But when a woman begins to wear that garment, the man that's in love with her--unless he is the special kind--he begins thinking how much sweeter and softer and _womaner_ she is when she's just plain gentle. And he always gets uneasy and wants her to be the gentle way he remembers her being--that is, unless he's special, unless he's special. Like Alex got uneasy now.

"'My heavens, dear,' he says--and I judged Alex had got to be one of them men that lays a lace 'dear' over a haircloth tone of voice, and so solemnly believes they're keeping their temper--'My heavens, dear, don't misunderstand me. Experiment as much as you like. Material is cheap and abundant. If you don't feel the responsibility, have him educated wherever you want to. But don't expect me to play father to him. The personal contact is going it a little too strong.'

"'That is exactly what he most needs,' says Robin.

"'Come, dear,' says Alex, 'that's elemental--in an age when everybody can do things better than one can do them oneself.'

"She didn't say nothing, and just set there, with her tea. Alex was watching her, and I knew just about as sure what he was thinking as though I had been his own thought, oozing out of his mind. He was watching her with satisfaction, patterned off with a kind of quiet amusement and jabbed into by a kind of worryin' wonder. How exactly, he was thinking, she was the type everlasting of Wife. She was girlish, and in little things she was all I'll-do-as-you-say, and she was even shy; he believed that he was marrying a girl whose experience of the world was commendably slight, whose ideas about it was kind of vague--commendably again; and whose ways was easy-handled, like skein silk. By her little firmnesses, he see that she had it in her to be firm, but what he meant was that she should adopt his ideas and turn firm about them. He had it all planned out that he was going to embroider her brain with his notions of what was what. But all of a sudden, now and then, there she was confronting him as she had just done then with a serious, settled look of Woman--the Woman everlasting, wanting a garden, wanting to work, wanting a child....

"In the doorway back of Alex, Bayless come in, carrying a tray, but it didn't have no card.

"'It's somebody to speak with you a minute, Mr. Proudfit,' says Bayless. 'It's Mr. Insley.'

"'Have him come here,' Alex says. 'I hope,' he says, when the man was gone, 'that the poor fellow has changed his mind about our little festivities.'

"Robin sort of tipped up her forehead. 'Why _poor_?' she asks.

"'Poor,' says Alex, absent, 'because he lives in a pocket of the world, instead of wearing the world like a garment--when it would fit him.'

"I was just setting my tea-cup down when she answered, and I recollect I almost jumped:

"'He knows something better to do with the world than to wear it at all,' was what she said.

"I looked over at her. And maybe it was because she was sort of indignant, and maybe it was because she thought she had dared quite a good deal, but all of a sudden something sort of seemed to me to set fire to the minute, and it leaped up like a time by itself as we heard Insley's step crossing the library and coming towards us....

"When he come out where we were, I see right off how pale he looked. Almost with his greeting, he turned to Alex with what he had come for, and he put it blunt.

"'I was leaving the Cadozas' cottage on the Plank Road half an hour ago,' he said. 'A little way along I saw a man, who had been walking ahead of me, stagger and sprawl in the mud. He wasn't conscious when I got to him. He was little--I picked him up quite easily and got him back into the Cadozas' cottage. He still wasn't conscious when the doctor came. He gave him things. We got him in bed there. And then he spoke. He asked us to hunt up a little boy somewhere in Friendship Village, who belonged to him. And he said the boy's name was Chris.'

"It seemed like it was to Alex Proudfit's interested lifting of eyebrows rather than to Robin's exclamation of pity that Insley answered.

"'I'm sorry it was necessary to trouble you,' he says, 'but Chris ought to go at once. I'll take him down now.'

"'That man,' Robin says, 'the father--is he ill? Is he hurt? How badly is he off?'

"'He's very badly off,' says Insley, 'done for, I'm afraid. It was in a street brawl in the City--it's his side, and he's lost a good deal of blood. He walked all the way back here. A few hours, the doctor thought it would be, at most.'

"Robin stood up and spoke like what she was saying was a take-for-granted thing.

"'Oh,' she says, 'poor, poor little Chris. Alex, I must go down there with him.'

"Alex looks over at her, incredulous, and spoke so: 'You?' says he. 'Impossible.'

"I was just getting ready to say that of course I'd go with him, if that was anything, when from somewheres that he'd gone with the puppy, Chris spied Insley, and come running to him.

"'Oh, you are to the house's party, too!' Chris cried, and threw himself all over him.

"Robin knelt down beside the child, and the way she was with him made me think of that first night when she see him at the church, and when her way with him made him turn to her and talk with her and love her ever since.

"'Listen, dear,' she said. 'Mr. Insley came here to tell you something. Something about daddy--your daddy. Mr. Insley knows where he is, and he's going to take you to him. But he's very, very sick, dear heart--will you remember that when you see him? Remember Robin told you that?'

"There come on his little face a look of being afraid that give it a sudden, terrible grown-up-ness.

"'Sick like my mama was?' he asked in a whisper. 'And will he _go out_, like my mama?'

"Robin put her arm about him, and he turned to her, clung to her.

"'You come, too, Robin,' he said. 'You come, too!'

"She got up, meeting Alex's eyes with her straight look.

"'I must go, Alex,' she said. 'He wants me--needs me. Why, how could I do anything else?'

"Alex smiles down at her, with his way that always seemed to me so much less that of living every minute than of watching it live itself about him.

"'May I venture to remind you,' he says--like a little thin edge of something, paper, maybe, that's smooth as silk, but that'll cut neat and deep if you let it--'May I venture to remind you that your aunt is announcing our engagement to-night? I think that will have escaped your mind.'

"'Yes,' Robin says, simple, 'it had. Everything had escaped my mind except this poor little thing here. Alex--it's early. He'll sleep after a little. But I must go down with him. What did you come in?' she asked Insley, quiet.

"I told her I'd go down, and she nodded that I was to go, but Chris clung to her hand and it was her that he wanted, poor little soul, and only her. Insley had come up in the doctor's rig. She and I would join him with the child, she told him, at the side entrance and almost at once. There was voices in the house by then, and some of the young folks was coming downstairs and up from the tennis-court for tea. She went into the house with Chris. And I wondered if she thought of the thing I thought of and that made me glad and glad that there are such men in the world: Not once, not once, out of some felt-he-must courtesy, had Insley begged her not to go with him. He knew that she was needed down there with Chris and him and me--he knew, and he wouldn't say she wasn't. Land, land I love a man that don't talk with the outside of his head and let what he means lay cramped somewheres underneath, but that reaches down and gets up what he means, and holds it out, for you to take or to leave.

"Mis' Emmons was overseeing the decorations in the dining room. The whole evening party she had got right over onto her shoulders the way she does everything, and down to counting the plates she was seeing to it all. We found her and told her, and her pity went to the poor fellow down there at the Cadozas' almost before it went to Chris.

"'Go, of course,' she said. 'I suppose Alex minds, but leave him to me. I've got to be here--but it's not I Chris wants in any case. It's you. Get back as soon as you can, Robin.'

"I must say Alex done that last minute right, the way he done everything, light and glossy. When Robin come down, I was up in the little seat behind the doctor's cart, and Alex stood beside and helped her. A servant, he said, would come on after us in the automobile with a hamper, and would wait at the Cadozas' gate until she was ready to come back. Somehow, it hadn't entered anybody's head, least of all, I guess, Alex's own, that he should come, too. He see us off with his manners on him like a thick, thick veil, and he even managed to give to himself a real dignity so that Robin said her good-by with a kind of wistfulness, as if she wanted to be reassured. And I liked her the better for that. For, after all, she _was_ going--there was no getting back of that. And when a woman is doing the right thing against somebody's will, I'm not the one to mind if she hangs little bells on herself instead of going off with no tinkle to leave herself be reminded of, pleasant.

"We swung out onto the open road, with Chris sitting still between the two of them, and me on the little seat behind. The sunset was flowing over the village and glittering in unfamiliar fires on the windows. The time was as still as still, in that hour 'long towards night when the day seems to have found its harbour it has been looking for and to have slipped into it, with shut sails--so still that Robin spoke of it with surprise. I forget just what she said. She was one of them women that can say a thing so harmonious with a certain minute that you never wish she'd kept still. I believe if she spoke to me when I was hearing music or feeling lifted up all by myself, I wouldn't mind it. What she'd say would be sure to fit what was being. They ain't many folks in anybody's life like that. I believe she could talk to me any time, sole unless it's when I first wake up in the morning; then any talking always seems like somebody stumbling in, busy, among my sleeping brains.

"For a minute Insley didn't say anything. I was almost sure he was thinking how unbelievable it was that he should be there, alone with her, where an hour ago not even one of his forbidden dreams could have found him.

"'Beautifully still,' he answered, 'as if all the things had stopped being, except some great thing.'

"'I wonder,' she says, absent, 'what great thing.' And all the time she seemed sort of relaxed, and resting in the sense--though never in the consciousness--that the need to talk and to be talked to, to suggest and to question, had found some sort of quiet, levelling process with which she was moving along, assentin'.

"Insley stooped down, better to shield her dress from the mud there was. I see him look down at her uncovered hands laying on the robe, and then, with a kind of surprise, up at her face; and I knew how surprising her being near him seemed.

"'That would be one thing for you,' he answered, 'and another for me.'

"'No,' she says, 'I think it's the same thing for us both.'

"He didn't let himself look at her, but his voice--well, I tell you, his voice looked.

"'What do you mean?' he says--just said it a little and like he didn't dare trust it to say itself any more.

"'Why, being able to help in this, surely,' she says.

"I could no more of helped watching the two of them than if they had been angels and me nothing but me. I tried once or twice to look off across the fields that was smiling at each other, same as faces, each side of the road; but my eyes come back like they was folks and wanted to; and I set there looking at her brown hair, shining in the sun, without any hat on it, and at his still face that was yet so many kinds of alive. He had one of the faces that looked like it had been cut out just the way it was _a-purpose_. There wasn't any unintentional assembling of features there, part make-shift and part rank growth of his race. No, sir. His face had come to life by being meant to be just the way it was, and it couldn't have been better.... It lit up wonderful when he answered.

"'Yes,' he said, 'a job is a kind of creation. It's next best to getting up a sunrise. Look here,' he remembered, late in the day, 'you'll have no dinner. You can't eat with them in that place. And you ought to have rest before to-night.'

"Ain't it funny how your voice gets away from you sometimes and goes dilly-nipping around, pretty near saying things on its own account? I use' to think that mebbe my voice didn't belong to the me I know about, but was some of the real me, inside, speaking out with my mouth for a trumpet. I donno but I think so yet. For sometimes your voice is a person and it says things all alone by itself. So his voice done then. The tender concern of it was pretty near a second set of words. It was the first time he had struck for her the great and simple note, the note of the caring of the man for the physical comfort of the woman. And while she was pretending not to need it, he turned away and looked off toward the village, and I was certain sure he was terrified at what might have been in his voice.

"'I like to think of it down there,' he said, pretty near at random, 'waiting to be clothed in a new meaning.'

"'The village?' she asked.

"'Everywhere,' he answered. 'Some of the meanings we dress things up in are so--dowdy. We wouldn't think of wearing them ourselves.'

"She understood him so well that she didn't have to bother to smile. And I hoped she was setting down a comparison in her head: Between clothing the world in a new meaning, and wearing it for a garment.

"Chris looked up in Insley's face.

"'I'm new,' he contributes, 'I'm new on the outside of me. I've got on this new brown middie.'

"'I've been admiring it the whole way,' says Insley, hearty--and that time his eyes and Robin's met, over the little boy's head, as we stopped at the cottage gate.

XI

"The lonesome little parlour at Mis' Cadoza's was so far past knowing how to act with folks in it, that it never changed expression when we threw open the shutters. Rooms that are used to folks always sort of look up when the shutters are opened; some rooms smile back at you; some say something that you just lose, through not turning round from the window quite quick enough. But Mis' Cadoza's parlour was such a poor folkless thing that it didn't make us any reply at all nor let on to notice the light. It just set there, kind of numb, merely enduring itself.

"'You poor thing,' I thought, 'nobody come in time, did they?'

"Insley picked out a cane-seat rocker that had once known how to behave in company, and drew it to the window. Ain't it nice, no matter what kind of a dumb room you've got into, you can open its window and fit the sky onto the sill, and feel right at home....

"Robin sat there with Chris in her arms, waiting for any stir in the front bedroom. I went in the bedroom, while Dr. Heron told me about the medicine, and it seemed to me the bare floor and bare walls and dark-coloured bedcovers was got together to suit the haggardy unshaven face on the pillow. Christopher's father never moved. I set in the doorway, so as to watch him, and Insley went with the doctor to the village to bring back some things that was needed. And I felt like we was all the first settlers of somewheres.

"Chris was laying so still in Robin's arms that several times she looked down to see if he was awake. But every time his eyes was wide and dark with that mysterious child look that seems so much like thought. It kind of hurt me to see him doing nothing--that's one of the parts about sickness and dying and some kinds of trouble that always twists something up in my throat: The folks that was so eager and able and flying round the house just being struck still and not able to go on with everyday doings. I know when Lyddy Ember, the dressmaker, died and I looked at her laying there, it seemed to me so surprising that she couldn't hem and fell and cut out with her thumb crooked like she done--and that she didn't know a dart from a gore; her hands looked so much like she knew how yet. It's like being inactive made death or grief double. And it's like working or playing around was a kind of life.... The whole house seemed inactive and silence-struck, even to the kitchen where Mis' Cadoza and the little lame boy was.

"Robin set staring into the lilacs that never seemed to bloom, and I wondered what she was thinking and mebbe facing. But when she spoke, it was about the Cadoza kitchen.

"'Miss Marsh,' she says, 'what kind of people must they be that can stay alive in a kitchen like that?'

"'Pioneers,' I says. 'They's a lot of 'em pioneerin' away and not knowing it's time to stop.'

"'But the dirt--' she says.

"'What do you expect?' I says. 'They're emergin' out of dirt. But they _are_ emergin'.'

"'Don't it seem hopeless?' says she.

"'Oh, I donno,' I says; 'dirt gets to be apples--so be you plant 'em.'

"But the Cadoza kitchen _was_ fearful. When we come through it, Mis' Cadoza was getting supper, and she'd woke up nameless smells of greasy things. There the bare table was piled with the inevitable mix-up of unwashed dishes that go along with the Mis' Cadozas of this world, so that you wonder how they ever got so much crockery together. There the floor wasn't swept, clothes was drying on a line over the stove, Spudge was eating his supper on the window-sill, and in his bed in the corner lay little Eph, so white and frail and queer-coloured that you felt you was looking on something bound not to last till much after you'd stopped looking. And there was Mis' Cadoza. When we had come through the kitchen, little Eph had said something glad at seeing Insley and hung hold of his hand and told him how he meant to model a clay Patsy, because it was Patsy, the dog, that had gone out in the dark and first brought Insley in to see him.

"'An' when I'm big,' the child says, 'I'm going to make a clay _you_, Mr. Insley.'

"Mis' Cadoza had turned round and bared up her crooked teeth.

"'Don't you be impident!' she had said, raspish, throwing her hand out angular.

"Mis' Cadoza was like somebody that hadn't got outside into the daylight of _Yet_. She was ignorant, blind to life, with some little bit of a corner of her brain working while the rest lay stock-still in her skull; unclean of person, the mother to no end of nameless horrors of habit--and her blood and the blood of some creature like her had been poured into that poor little boy, sickly, bloodless, not ready for the struggle.

"'_Is_ there any use trying to do anything with anybody like that?' says Robin.