CHAPTER X

THE LIGHT ON THE ROAD

When Caroline entered the house, the sound of clinking plates and rattling knives told her that the boarders had already assembled at supper; and it surprised her to discover that she was hungry for the first time in months. Happiness had made everything different, even her appetite for the commonplace fare Mrs. Dandridge provided. It was just as if an intense physical pain had suddenly ceased to throb, and the relief exhilarated her nerves, and made her eager for the ordinary details which had been so irksome a few hours before. Life was no longer distorted and abnormal. Her pride and courage had come back to her; and she understood at last that it was not the unfulfilment of love, but the doubt of its reality, that had poisoned her thoughts. Since she knew that it was real, she could bear any absence, any pain. The knowledge that genuine love had been hers for an hour, that she had not been cheated out of her heritage, that she had not given gold for sand, as she had done as a girl--the knowledge of these things was the chain of light that would bind together all the dull years before her. Already, though her pulses were still beating rapturously, she found that the personal values were gradually assuming their right position and importance in her outlook. There were greater matters, there were more significant facts in the world to-day than her own particular joy or sorrow. She must meet life, and she must meet it with serenity and fortitude. She must help where the immediate need was, without thought of the sacrifice, without thought even of her own suffering. How often in the past eight years had she told herself, "Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good. There are lives filled to overflowing in which love has no place." Now she realized that her love must be kept like some jewel in a secret casket, which was always there, always hidden and guarded, yet seldom brought out into the daylight and opened. "I must think of it only for a few minutes of the day," she said, "only when I am off duty, and it will not interfere with my work." And she resolved that she would keep this pledge with all the strength of her will. She would live life whole, not in parts.

Without taking off her hat, she went into the dining-room, and tried to slip unnoticed into her chair at a small table in one corner. The other seats were already occupied, and a pretty, vivacious girl she had known at the hospital, looked up and remarked, "You look so well, Miss Meade. Have you been for a walk?"

"Yes, I've been for a walk. That is why I am late."

Down the centre of the room, beneath the flickering gas chandelier and the fly-specked ceiling, there was a long, narrow table, and at the head of it, Mrs. Dandridge presided with an air as royal as if she were gracing a banquet. She was a stately, white-haired woman, who had once been beautiful and was still impressive--for adversity, which had reduced her circumstances and destroyed her comfort, had failed to penetrate the majestic armour of her manner. In the midst of drudgery and turmoil and disaster, she had preserved her mental poise as some persons are able to preserve their equilibrium in a rocking boat. Nothing disturbed her; she was as superior to accidents as she was to inefficiency or incompetence. Her meals were never served at the hour; the food was badly cooked; the table was seldom tidy; and yet her house was always crowded, and there was an unimpeachable tradition that she had never received a complaint from a boarder.

As she sat now at the head of her unappetizing table, eating her lukewarm potato soup as if it were terrapin, she appeared gracious, charming, supported by the romantic legends of her beauty and her aristocratic descent. If life had defeated her, it was one of those defeats which the philosopher has pronounced more triumphant than victories.

"I spent the afternoon at the Red Cross rooms," she remarked, regal, serene, and impoverished. "That is why supper was a little late to-night. Since I can give nothing else, I feel that it is my duty to give my time. I even ask myself sometimes if I have a moral right to anything we can send over to France?"

Inadvertently, or through some instinct of tact which was either divine or diabolical, she had touched a responsive cord in the heart of every man or woman at the table. There was no motive beyond impulsive sympathy in the words, for she was as incapable of deliberate design as she was of systematic economy; but her natural kindliness appeared to serve her now more effectively than any Machiavellian subtlety could have done. The discontented and dejected look vanished from the faces about her; the distinguished widow, with two sons in the army, stopped frowning at the potato soup; the hungry but polite young man, who travelled for a clothing house, put down the war bread he was in the act of passing; and the studious-looking teacher across the table lost the critical air with which she had been regarding the coloured waitress. As Caroline watched the change, she asked herself if the war, which was only a phrase to these people a few months ago, had become at last a reality? "We are in it now, body and soul," she thought, "we are in it just as France and England have been in it from the beginning. It is our war as much as theirs because it has touched our hearts. It has done what nothing has been able to do before--it has made us one people."

Into these different faces at Mrs. Dandridge's table, a single idea had passed suddenly, vitalizing and ennobling both the bright and the dull features--the idea of willing sacrifice. Something greater than selfish needs or desires had swept them out of themselves on a wave of moral passion that, for the moment, exalted them like a religious conversion. What had happened, Caroline knew, was that the patriotism in one of the most patriotic nations on earth had been stirred to the depths.

The talk she heard was the kind that was going on everywhere. She had listened to it day after day, as it echoed and re-echoed from the boarding-houses, the hospitals, and the streets--and through the long, bitter months, when coal was scarce and heatless and meatless days kept the blood down, she was aware of it, as of a persistent undercurrent of cheerful noise. There were no complaints, but there were many jests, and the characteristic Virginian habit of meeting a difficult situation with a joke, covered the fuel administration with ridicule. For weeks ice lay on the pavements, a famine in coal threatened; and as the winter went by, bread, instead of growing better, became steadily worse. But, after all, people said, these discomforts and denials were so small compared to the colossal sacrifices of Europe. Things were done badly, but what really counted was that they were done. Beneath the waste and extravagance and incompetence, a tremendous spirit was moving; and out of the general aspect of bureaucratic shiftlessness, America was gathering her strength. In the future, as inevitably as history develops from a fact into a fable, the waste would be exalted into liberality, the shiftlessness into efficiency. For it is the law of our life that the means pass, and the end remains, that the act decays, but the spirit has immortality.

For the next six months, when the calls were many and nurses were few, Caroline kept her jewel in the secret casket. She did not think of herself, because to think of herself was the beginning of weakness, and she had resolved long ago to be strong. When all was said, the final result of her life depended simply on whether she overcame obstacles or succumbed to them. It was not the event, she knew, that coloured one's mental atmosphere; it was the point of view from which one approached it. "It is just as easy to grow narrow and bitter over an unfulfilled love as it is to be happy and cheerful," she thought, "and whether it is easy or not, I am not going to let myself grow narrow and bitter. Of course, I might have had more, but, then, I might have had so much less--I might not have had that one hour--or his friendship. I am going to be thankful that I have had so much, and I am going to stop thinking about it at all. I may feel all I want to deep down in my soul, but I must stop thinking. When the whole country is giving up something, I can at least give up selfish regret."

The winter passed, filled with work, and not unhappily, for time that is filled with work is seldom unhappy. From Blackburn she had heard nothing, though in April a paragraph in the newspaper told her that Angelica was about to sue for a divorce in some Western state; and Daisy Colfax, whom she met one day in the waiting-room of the hospital, breezily confirmed the vague announcement.

"There really wasn't anything else that she could do, you know. We were all expecting it. Poor Angelica, she must have had to overcome all her feelings before she could make up her mind to take a step that was so public. Her delicacy is the most beautiful thing about her--except, as Robert always insists, the wonderful way she has of bringing out the best in people."

As the irony of this was obviously unconscious, Caroline responded merely with a smile; but that same afternoon, when Mrs. Timberlake paid one of her rare visits, she repeated Daisy's remark.

"Do you suppose she really believes what she says?"

"Of course she doesn't. Things don't stop long enough in her mind to get either believed or disbelieved. They just sift straight through without her knowing that they are there."

They were in the ugly little green-papered room at the hospital, and Caroline was holding Letty tight in her arms, while she interpolated cryptic phrases into the animated talk.

"Oh, Miss Meade, if you would only come back! Do you think you will come back when mother and father get home again? I wrote to father the other day, but I had to write in pencil, and I'm so afraid it will all fade out when it goes over the ocean. Will it get wet, do you think?"

"I am sure it won't, dear, and he will be so glad to hear from you. What did you tell him?"

"I told him how cold it was last winter, and that I couldn't write before because doing all the doctor told me took up every single minute, and I had had to leave off my lessons, and that the new nurse made them very dull, anyhow. Then I said that I wanted you to come back, and that I hadn't been nearly so strong since you went away."

She was looking pale, and after a few moments, Caroline sent her, with a pot of flowers, into an adjoining room.

"I don't like Letty's colour," she said anxiously to the housekeeper, in the child's absence.

"She is looking very badly. It is the hard winter, I reckon, but I am not a bit easy about her. She hasn't picked up after the last cold, and we don't seem able to keep her interested. Children are so easily bored when they are kept indoors, and Letty more easily than most, for she has such a quick mind. I declare I never lived through such a winter--at least not since I was a child in the Civil War, and of course that was a thousand times worse. But we couldn't keep Briarlay warm, even the few rooms that we lived in. It was just like being in prison--and a cold one at that! I can't help wishing that David would come home, for I feel all the time as if anything might happen. I reckon the winter put my nerves on edge; but the war seems to drag on so slowly, and everybody has begun to talk in such a pessimistic way. It may sound un-Christian, but I sometimes feel as if I could hardly keep my hands off the Germans. I get so impatient of the way things are going, I'd like to get over in France, and kill a few of them myself. It does look, somehow, as if the Lord had forgotten that vengeance belongs to Him."

"Doctor Boland told me yesterday that he thought it would last at least five years longer."

"Then it will outlast us, that's all I've got to say." She cleared her throat, and added with tart irrelevancy, "I had a letter from Angelica a few weeks ago."

"Is it true? What the paper said?"

"There wasn't a word about it in the letter. She wrote because she wanted me to send her some summer clothes she had left here, and then she asked me to let her know about Letty. She said she had been operated on in Chicago a month ago, and that she was just out of the hospital, and feeling like the wreck of herself. Everybody told her, she added, how badly she looked, and the letter sounded as if she were very much depressed and out of sorts."

"Do you think she may really have cared for Mr. Wythe?"

Mrs. Timberlake shook her head. "It wasn't that, my dear. She just couldn't bear to think of Mary's having more than she had. If she had ever liked David, it might have been easier for her to stand it, but she never liked him even when she married him; and though a marriage may sometimes manage very well without love, I've yet to see one that could get along without liking."

She rose as Letty came back from her errand, and a minute or two later, Caroline tucked the child in the car, and stood watching while it started for Briarlay.

The air was mild and fragrant, for after the hard, cold winter, spring had returned with a profusion of flowers. In the earth, on the trees, and in the hearts of men and women, April was bringing warmth, hope, and a restoration of life. The will to be, to live, and to struggle, was released, with the flowing sap, from the long imprisonment of winter. In the city yards the very grass appeared to shoot up joyously into the light, and the scent of hyacinths was like the perfume of happiness. The afternoon was as soft as a day in summer, and this softness was reflected in the faces of the people who walked slowly, filled with an unknown hope, through the warm sunshine.

"Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good," repeated Caroline, wondering who had first said the words.

It was then, as she turned back to enter the hospital, that the postman put some letters into her hand, and looking down, she saw that one was from Blackburn.