Part 4

Wardwell, standing by his wife with the feeling of a strange man watching over a girl baby left suddenly and unaccountably to his care and at the same time with the hunger of a young lover for his sweetheart's first kisses, thought, and thought often, that she was going away from him.

She was unfailingly dear and thoughtful. The moments which she could snatch for him from the ever increasing care of her mother she filled with anxious and touching tenderness. Every day brought him a new and revealing sense of the depth of her spirit and affection. But the feeling of being separated from her came pressing upon him with a twofold weight.

In the day time she played her part as the girl who had come from "that place" with Rose Wilding, while Wardwell looked on heart sick with sympathy for the pain that he knew she carried and with a withering sense of his own uselessness. She played a part. But she played the part so well in her self-effacing patience that he was finding it necessary to remind himself that she was playing a part. It came to the point where he at times caught himself walking rapidly up and down his room and arguing with himself whether this was really his Augusta, or whether he, too, was losing his grip on reality.

At night, when she was away from his sight and he knew that she had gone back into the little Augusta of Rose Wilding's memory, it was, if anything, worse. Here he knew she played a willing part, trying to make the part a reality. For Wardwell knew the daring of her mind and the greatness of her desire; knew that she would stop at nothing, would grasp at every thread of memory that could possibly draw her mother's mind across the vacant wilderness between the present and the past.

But even this double barrier of outward isolation from the Augusta who was his was not the great thing that he feared. The look which he had seen in Augusta's face in the days when they were hunting the city for her mother, that strained, listening look that took her away from him and from everything about them, was often in her eyes now. Somehow he knew that in it she spoke to the spirit of Rose Wilding that wandered in the unknown places.

He did not resent the state of things. But he found himself unaccountably peevish and unwontedly tempted to self pity.

He did not know what was coming upon him. Would not have believed it if he had been told. He knew that they were bad days for him. They were days in which he sat pounding out useless hours at the typewriter, only to destroy the work as soon as he had done it. They were nights when he worked feverishly, bitterly at the jokes and skits that were at once his bread and butter and the bane of his soul.

He came to hate the mere thought of writing at all. He was a failure. Even the things that he could do, the hated jokes that until now had brought him enough for a living, were now failing him. He was not making enough to afford to take Augusta and her mother away from this big house. And the thought that Augusta in the face of all her burdens was obliged to keep it to support her mother and herself, while he barely paid his board drove him frantic.

One day in the middle of the winter he climbed to the coop in the fourth story of the old building in Bleecker street where the presses were complaining over the last edition of the afternoon. He had been walking nearly all day, climbing stairs in increasing discouragement and going down them again with a certain sickly relief. He was, in short, looking for work.

Six months before he would have sworn that he would never again have to go back to the treadmill of routine work. He had been so sure that he could sit his whole life, if necessary, and turn out stories and scraps enough to give him the money he needed. He had deliberately planned for himself a life in which he would earn just enough to live in his own way, giving himself the time to think and work upon the books that he wanted to write.

His marriage had changed his plan of life. He did not propose that Augusta and her mother should be dependent upon the girl's work and the house. It did not occur to him that Augusta was not, and did not intend to be, dependent upon him for a living. There was, of course, a living in the house for herself and her mother, as there had always been. But that was not Wardwell's way of looking at the matter. Augusta was his wife. And it was his immediate business to begin earning enough money for all three of them.

At once he had begun to crowd himself. For a few weeks he had found himself earning more money than he had ever thought possible from his daily work. But it took him only a short time to flood the market of Sunday papers which he had built up for himself. He had not known how thin was the vein which he had been working. In a certain foolish contempt for the thing which he did easily he had thought that he could turn it out mechanically, without heart in it, and in any quantity. He was sharply undeceived.

The first few batches of stories that came back did no more than annoy him. But as the refusals became more and more perfunctory, and more carefully polite, Wardwell knew, with sickening insight, that his stories were not even being read by the editors who used to welcome them.

He knew that he had lost his power through despising it. He had writhed on in ugly despair, cursing the facility with which he could still write; for he knew that it was that very facility which was now his undoing. He had not hoped, but he had kept on trying. Now his money was gone and he must find something.

Jim Ray was sympathetic, and heartily sceptical.

"All rot!" he growled. "Stop bitting your finger ends and ease up a little. Your face looks like a rat's with the ferret about three jumps behind. Quit it. Borrow some money. Here, I'm as poor as my own devil but I can get you some. There's lots of the stuff around somewhere. Borrow a hundred and go up on a farm somewhere for a few weeks, and sleep."

"You're all wrong," said Wardwell, still breathing hard, "there's nothing the matter with me. It's the confounded stairs here. They're so steep they lean over backward."

"You need to go easy, I tell you, Jimmie. What you need is a rest."

"Rest! I haven't done a stroke for six weeks!"

"Probably not. But you've been bending over a typewriter till the back ribs are sticking into your lungs."

"What in blazes are you talking about?" said Wardwell bluffly. "If you want to stall me off, why don't you give me the usual thing--'office all full just now, leave your name and address, we'll call you up if we need, and so forth?' Was I so useless as that when I was here?"

"Jimmie," said Ray quietly, "there's plenty of work here for a man as good as you. But you're not able just now to do it, and it would kill you to try. Go home and go to bed, and let your wife take care of you."

Wardwell stared at his friend, trying to outface him, to bluff the thing down by sheer stubbornness. But there was a sickening, cold weakness at the bottom of his stomach. He knew that Ray was seeing through him and finding him out as he had not been able to see himself.

With an odd feeling of curiosity and detachment he walked over to a little square of mirror that hung on a pillar at just the right height for Ray to comb his bald head by. Wardwell took it off the nail and shoved it up the post about a foot and a half.

He was curious to know what it was in him that Ray had seen. But there was nothing to be seen, except, perhaps, a sort of hunted look about the eyes and a kind of pinched drawing of the nostrils. He did not look at all like a sick man.

"You're all wrong," he repeated stubbornly. "And besides, my wife's got something else to do."

Ray only answered quietly:

"How much are you coughing, Jimmie?"

Wardwell looked around sharply, in a turn of sudden worry. But in a moment he laughed out:

"What the deuce are you doing? Second story work, along with your other little activities? Of course I--I cough a little. But that's just the smoking and the irritation. Confound you, you'd be coughing bricks if you'd been sitting at a machine for six weeks without being able to knock out a good line!"

"I suppose so. But, Jimmie, you'll have to give up this other idea. You don't look well. You'd never stand cold and wet and long waiting. You know the dog's life of a reporter. One good cold would do for you."

"But, I tell you--"

"Jimmie, be sensible for once. Go home and let that good little girl of yours get a good look at you. If she doesn't tell you to pack off out of the city for a while, I'll admit that I'm wrong."

Wardwell stayed a while, arguing mulishly, but Jim Ray did not move from his position. He would not agree to help Jimmie to a job because the latter was not able to work.

At home, he found Augusta tearfully trying to coax and lift her mother back into bed. As he stood in the sitting room he could hear the girl pleading:

"Please, please, mamma dear, can't you help just one little step! I can't lift any more--Just one little step!"

Then he heard the sagging of the bed under the heavy body and he knew that Augusta had accomplished her task.

Now he remembered what Doctor Gardner had told him, that this phase of Mrs. Wilding's malady would come--not long before the end. She would rouse herself out of the torpor into which she had settled. Some vague, unformed fear would probably stir her, and she would have to be watched. If it was coming now Augusta must not be left to do this alone. He would have to find a good strong nurse. He must see Gardner about it right away. That he had no money did not occur to him now. In the face of Augusta's need he did not think of that fact.

Augusta came out suddenly and walked straight into Jimmie's arms where he stood in the middle of the room.

"Oh, Jimmie," she said, resting tiredly against him, "I needed you so! Where have you been?"

"Oh, just around."

"She had crawled under the bed, Jimmie," said Augusta choking, "just like some poor wild thing, and when she looked out at me, _Oh!_ Why, why does she seem to fear me, to almost _hate_ me sometimes?"

"No, dearest, no," said Jimmie, holding her quiet. "No, it isn't that at all. There's something we don't understand. She's in the dark and so are we. Her mind is struggling to break through, and we cannot help because we are in the dark too. Outwardly she doesn't know you. But she does know you, dear, she feels you, in another way. She knows that her little Augusta is around her, caring for her. The flesh and the senses are playing a cruel trick on her poor spirit, dear. But she does know that you are about her."

"Oh, Jimmie, do you really believe it? I'm so tired trying to believe!"

"Yes, dear, I'm as sure as that we are standing here that she does in some way--I don't know how--she does really feel you. But I'm afraid, dearest that there is a change coming now. You know Gardner told us to expect it. And it's going to be cruel hard upon you, dear. You must not try to do all alone. I'll see Gardner tonight and we'll get a good strong nurse."

At the word he felt Augusta stiffen resistingly in his arms and he knew that a struggle was coming.

"Oh, Jimmie, don't ask me to do that! I couldn't--I couldn't give up one little bit of her, not one little minute to anyone."

"But, dear, you are not able. You are too little for it."

"I can't help it, Jimmie. You know I can't. You know how I've waited, every hour of every day, waited and prayed, for a moment when my darling would know me--when she would know that I hadn't left her, that she hadn't been left to strange, careless people. And think, Jimmie, think what it would mean to me if the moment came, even one little flash, and I wasn't there for her to know me! Jimmie," she said quietly, turning slowly upon him with that strange, unseeing light in her eyes, "I think, if my moment should slip away from me that way--I think that I should die."

And Wardwell, bewildered, silenced, half believing, knew that he was beaten.

But he did go to see the doctor.

Doctor Gardner's little eyes twinkled behind a cloud of smoke from a big cigar as Wardwell expounded the situation at home and told what must be done and what Augusta must not be allowed to do. When Jimmie had quite finished the doctor asked with an elaborate diffidence:

"Ah--Do I understand that you are intending to do something that Augusta does not want?"

"Well--of course--" Jimmie started to explain.

"I was only going to remark," the doctor went on serenely, "that, to my personal knowledge, Augusta began doing things after her own plan on the day she was born. And, so far as I know, nobody has been able to change that. You see, the trouble has been that she has always turned out to be right."

"Yes, of course she's always right," Wardwell hastened to agree, "but, in this--"

"And, unless you have found a way," the doctor proceeded, "of changing Augusta, we'll just have to let her go her own way in this. To be sure, though, we must try to see that she does not kill herself with the hard work.

"But how's the book coming on?" he asked suddenly, sitting up and fixing Wardwell with a sharp, steady appraisal that Jimmie could almost feel physically.

"Rotten!" said Jimmie, annoyed and sullen, though he did not know why. "But how did you know--?"

"Oh, Augusta was telling me something the other day, about your walking the floor, and--one thing and another. Come inside here a moment," the doctor commanded, rising brusquely and walking to the door of his inner office.

As Wardwell closed the double baize-lined, sound-proof doors of the little consulting room behind him he felt a sickening assurance that he was going to hear bad news. But he was mainly irritated and angry with himself because he now knew that he had been giving Augusta additional worry.

A half hour later he was listening restlessly to Doctor Gardner's explanations about 'filtration in the upper right lobe' and 'weakening of the walls' and gathering in a general way that he was well on the way to being a consumptive. He was telling himself quietly that he did not believe a word of it, that if he could just once strike his stride on a good little story he would be all right in a week.

Finally the doctor prescribed. "You will have to get out of the city at once. Just walk out, don't fuss about it, and go south somewhere, where you can stay out in the open and just lie around and eat and sleep. Don't take work with you, and don't let it follow you. Just walk out and drop everything but the business of saving your life. That's just what I mean, young man. I have not concealed anything from you. And--I'm not exaggerating anything. You must do this _now_, tomorrow."

Saying nothing, Wardwell rose to go. Inwardly he was grumbling to himself that it was always easy for the other fellow to tell you to drop everything and walk away. But he knew that he could not be churlish. The doctor was probably right and certainly he was honest and friendly. They shook hands in silence, and the doctor, used to seeing people take their news in all sorts of ways, let him go without another word.

Augusta had once said that Jimmie sometimes was not quite grown up. Outside in the street he proved it. He turned deliberately and looking up at Doctor Gardner's window, much after the manner of a boy sticking out his tongue in defiance, he said aloud:

"You can go to the devil. I wouldn't leave Augusta now, not to save ten lives."

As an afterthought, before reaching home, he went into a drug store and called the doctor on the telephone. He warned him truculently:

"Tell her my nerves are bad, that's true enough. Tell her any tale you like. But don't tell her--what you've just told me. I won't have Augusta worried now."

He would not expect to hide it long from Augusta, if there was anything seriously wrong with him. She always knew the truth, somehow. But he did not believe literally what the doctor had told him, and he was confident that things could drift on as they were.

"In fact," he said to himself as he walked along in the face of the sharp night wind, "I feel better this minute than I have for a long time. That's just natural contrariness, I suppose."

Augusta was waiting for him, sitting wrapped in a heavy dressing robe reading under the lamp in her mother's sitting room. She was so like a tired little girl that as his glance momentarily followed the stream of the light into the mother's room and fell upon the little cot drawn up and ready at the side of the mother's bed, Wardwell for an instant lost his grip on reality. The fiction at which Rose Wilding's poor wandering mind had grasped seemed to be actually the truth. And Wardwell found that he had to struggle with himself before he could remember that Augusta was truly his wife and that she and he had an existence for each other which did not depend on that fiction. But when he looked again at Augusta and saw the woman in her, the steady, self-contained, gentle strength that shone in the beauty of her tired eyes, he knew that Augusta was really his. And now for the first time he weakened, his knees bent under him, he felt and was the sick man. He wanted to tell her, to confide, to lean upon her. Angrily he shook the feeling off and came quickly over to sit on the arm of her chair.

"You had him all fixed!" he began accusingly, thinking to head off with banter the question in her eyes. "The first thing he said was that you got up and rearranged the parlor furniture and fired the cook and fixed the furnace the very day you were born--well, I couldn't swear that he mentioned the furnace in so many words. But that was the general idea. You've always had your own way, and everybody else's way. And you always will. And he turned me out, laughing at me for thinking that I could change things."

"What else did he say, dear?" she asked with a quiet smile of full understanding. "About you?"

"Oh, it was just like the fellow that went to the doctor and said he was sick.

"'Stop smoking.'

"'But, doctor, I never smoked in my life.'

"'Oh, I see. Then that's just what you need. Start smoking. My usual fee is ten dollars--but--ah--considering--'"

"_Jimmie!_"

"Honest! Cross my heart! Hope to die of a broken leg! It was just like that.

"He told me that I had to take a rest. I told him I hadn't worked for weeks. Then he told me that whatever I was doing I should stop it."

"You are not telling me what he really said," Augusta commented.

"Oh, big words, all big long ones, that might have meant polygamy or liver trouble for all I knew. But the upshot of it was just what I knew before. I'm nervous and my temper is bad. And he must have known that I didn't have any money, for he really didn't ask me for any," he confessed gracelessly as an afterthought.

"But it's just as I told him. If I could only rap out a decent few lines I'd be all--"

A sharp fit of coughing came up, choking him. He rose and hurried out into the hall. Augusta started to follow him, but a movement in the bedroom caught her ear and she turned back. She wanted to follow him, to make him tell her just what was the trouble. But the fear of what her mother might do was too strong upon her.

For the time, Wardwell had escaped. In his own room, he sat down at the desk, gasping between spells of coughing and trying to smother the noise with his handkerchief. The coughing stopped after a little, and he was surprised to feel a sensation of pleasant warm moisture in his irritated throat.

He cocked one ear up in a funny way he had, as though to listen. Then put his handkerchief to his lips and held it there a moment. When he drawn it away and looked meditatively for a little while at the red blotch on it, he nodded his head.

He did not take this fresh piece of news argumentatively, defiantly, as he had met the words of the doctor. This was definite, conclusive. He must deliberate. He decided that he would deliberate. That was the thing. This matter must be thought out carefully.

He looked at the typewriter in front of him, for counsel. Then suddenly his arms shot out grabbing the rusted iron frame of the typewriter and hugging it, while his head sank down upon it and he whispered to it in agony:

"God! Never another good line on you!"

This has to be told. In that moment, that battered old contraption of cast iron and rattling keys was more to Jimmie Wardwell than woman, man or child could be. It was dearer to him, it was nearer to where he thought and really lived. And he loved it and hugged it to him, as though already they were trying to take part of his soul from him. For men of Wardwell's kind are like that. When the passion of creating has once gotten fire in their souls, they are damned to live this life alone. No articulate being can come near. And in their loneliness they fasten on something connected with their passion. There have been men who have loved to the death a rickety old table at which they have worked, or even a corner of a garret room.

After a while Jimmie lurched up out of his chair and fumblingly got ready to crawl into bed. It was the first time that he had missed going down to say good night, but he dared not face Augusta tonight.

The idea of dying, physically, meant little or nothing to him. He had never thought of it. He did not think of it now. But the failures of the past months and this last sure sign of physical failure, of the end in fact, threw him into blind panic; not a panic in fear of pain, or darkness, still less of punishment. No, it was the fear that the spirit fire, burning pent up and mad within him, was to be smothered. He was afraid, afraid that he, Jimmie Wardwell, would be snuffed out before he could form and bring out the things that burned within him and craved for expression.

Shivering under the bed clothes, he moaned over and over like a hurt child: "Never another good line!" Until, again like a child in pain, he fell into a sort of sleep.

He did not hear, probably he had forgotten, the girl who came with trembling steps and beating heart to listen at his door for this breathing and then hurried back in anxious fear to her own endless vigil.

A Wardwell debonair and blithe as the early spring morning came into Augusta's sitting room after breakfast. He had swept from him all traces of the storm of the night, and Augusta knew from the first glance that she would learn nothing from him in this mood.

"The glory of the morning, "The beauty of the dawning, "The joy of the skies, "Lies in her eyes--and lies--and lies--and--Oh, "Well, maybe it only fibs,"

He chanted impudently.

Augusta was standing at the table fixing fruit for her mother. As Jimmie came up behind her she lifted up her face to be kissed. But as Jimmie stooped she quickly lifted the peeled peach she held in her hand and stuck it full into his mouth.

"Aawa--yab yab--yak!" Jimmie expostulated. Then, when he was articulate:

"Peaches is peaches, I'll admit. But some peaches is witches, you'll admit. Anyhow, I _won't_ be kissed now till I've had a bath," he wound up defiantly.

"Come in to see mother," said Augusta serenely.