Chapter 26

THE VOICES IN THE WOOD

Lydia had not been mistaken in her premonition of Paul's attitude toward the new maid. He found her quite unendurable, but the direful stories told by their Bellevue acquaintances about the literal impossibility of keeping servants during the hot season induced him to postpone his wrath against the awkward, irreverent, too familiar Irishwoman until after Lydia should feel more herself. Paul's wrath lost nothing by keeping.

To Lydia, on the contrary, Anastasia's loyalty and devotion were inexpressibly comforting during the trying days of that summer. Her servant's loving heart radiated warmth and cheer throughout all her life. One day, when her mother protested against 'Stashie's habit of familiar conversation with the family (they had all soon adopted the Irish diminutive of her name), Lydia said: "I can not be too thankful for 'Stashie's love and kindness."

Mrs. Emery was outraged. "Good gracious, Lydia! What things you do say."

"Why not? Because she hasn't been to college? Neither have I. She's as well educated as I am, and a great deal better woman."

"Why, what are you talking about? She can't read!"

"I don't," said Lydia. "That's worse."

Her mother turned the conversation, thinking she would be glad when this period of high-strung nerves and fancies should be over. She told Dr. Melton that it seemed to her that "Lydia took it very hard," and she supposed they couldn't expect her to be herself until after September.

The doctor answered: "Oh, there's a great deal of nonsense about that kind of talk. A normal woman--and, thank Heaven, Lydia's that to the last degree--has the whole universe back of her. Lydia's always balanced on a hair trigger, it's true, but she _is_ balanced! And now all nature is rallying to her like an army with banners."

"Ah, you never went through it yourself!" Mrs. Emery retreated to the safe stronghold of matronhood. "You don't know! I had strange fancies, like Lydia's. Women always do."

Another one of Lydia's fancies of that summer drove her to a strange disregard of caste rules. It came through a sudden impulse of compassion one hot midsummer day when Miss Burgess hobbled up the driveway in the hope of gleaning some Bellevue society notes.

"It's a terrible time of year, Miss Lydia," she said, sinking into a chair with a long, quavering sigh. "One drops from thirty and sometimes forty dollars a week to twenty or less; and it's so hard on one's feet, being on them in hot weather. I assure you mine ache like the toothache. And expenses are as high as in winter, or worse, when you have an invalid to look out for. Out here in breezy Bellevue you've no conception how hot it is on Main Street. And Mother _feels_ the heat!"

All this she said, not complainingly, but in her usual twittering manner of imparting information, as though it were an incident of a five-o'clock tea, but Lydia felt a pang of remorse for her usual thoughtless attitude of exasperated hilarity over Miss Burgess' peculiarities. She noticed that the kind, vacuous face was beginning to look more than middle-aged, and that the scanty hair above it was whitening rapidly.

"Why, bring your mother out here for the day, why don't you, any time!" she said impulsively. "I can't have any social engagements, you know, the way I am, and Paul's away a good deal of the time, and 'Stashie and I can get you tea and eggs and toast, at least. I'd love to have her. Now, any morning that threatens heat, just you telephone you're both coming to spend the day."

She felt quite strange at the thought that she had never seen the mother of this devoted, unselfish, affectionate, lifelong acquaintance.

But Miss Burgess, though moved almost to tears at Lydia's "kind thoughtfulness," clung steadfastly to her standards. She had always known that she must not presume on her "exceptional opportunities for acquaintance with Endbury's social leaders," she told Lydia, nor take advantage of any inadvertent kindness of theirs. Her mother would be the first one to blame her if she did; her mother knew the world very well. She went away, murmuring broken thanks and protestations of devotion.

Lydia looked after her, disappointed. She had been quite stirred by the hope of giving some pleasure. There was little to break the long, lonely, monotonous expectancy of her life. And yet nothing surprised those who knew her better than her equable physical poise during this time of trial and discomfort. Everyone had expected so high-strung a creature to be "half-wild with nerves." But Lydia, although she continued to say occasional disconcerting things, seemed on the whole to be gaining maturity and firmness of purpose. Paul was away a great deal that summer and she had many long, solitary hours to pass--a singular contrast to the feverish hurry of the winter "season." Her old habit of involuntary questioning scrutiny came back and it is possible that her motto of "action at all costs" was passed under a closer mental review than during the winter; but though she went frequently to see her godfather and Mrs. Sandworth, she did not break her silence on whatever thoughts were occupying her mind, except in one brief, questioning explosion. This was on the occasion of her last visit to Endbury before her confinement, a few days after her call from Flora Burgess. It had occurred to her that they might know something about the reporter's family and she stopped in after her shopping to inquire.

She found her aunt and her godfather sitting in the deeply shaded, old grape arbor in their back yard; Dr. Melton with a book, as always, Mrs. Sandworth ungirdled and expansive, tinkling an ice-filled cup and crying out upon the weather.

"Sit down, Lydia, for mercy's sake, and cool off. Yes; we know all about her; she's a patient of Marius'. Have some lemonade! Isn't it fearful! And Marius keeps reading improving books! It makes me so much hotter! She's English, you know."

Dr. Melton looked up from his book to remark, with his usual judicial moderation, "I could strangle that old harridan with joy. She has been one of the most pernicious influences the women of this town have ever had."

"Flora Burgess' mother? Why, I never heard of her in the world until the other day."

"You can't smell sewer gas," said the doctor briefly.

Mrs. Sandworth laughed. "Marius almost killed himself last winter to pull her through pneumonia. He worked over her night and day. Oh, Marius is a great deal better than he talks--strangle--!"

"I'm a fool, if that's what you mean," said the doctor.

"What is the matter with Flora Burgess' mother?" asked Lydia.

"She's been a plague spot in this town for years--that lower-middle-class old Briton, with her beastly ideas of caste--ever since she began sending out her daughter to preach her damnable gospel to defenseless Endbury homes."

"Marius--my _dear_!" chided Mrs. Sandworth--"The Gospel--damnable! You forget yourself!"

The doctor did not laugh. "They're the ones," he went on, "who first started this idiotic idea of there being a social stigma attached to living in any but just such parts of town."

"You live in just such a part of town yourself," said Lydia.

"My good-for-nothing, pretentious, fashionable patients wouldn't come to me if I didn't."

"Why do you have to have that kind of patients?"

Occasionally, of late, with her godfather, Lydia had displayed a certain uncompromising directness, rather out of character with her usual gentleness, which the doctor found very disconcerting. He was silent now.

Mrs. Sandworth's greater simplicity saw no difficulties in the way of an answer. "Because, Lydia, he's one of the Kentucky Meltons, and because, as I said, he talks a great deal worse than he is."

"Because I am a fool," said the doctor again. This time he flushed as he spoke.

"He doesn't like things common around him," went on Mrs. Sandworth, "any more than any gentleman does. And as for strangling old Mrs. Burgess, what good would that do? It can't be she who's influencing Endbury, because all it's trying to do is to be just like every other town in Ohio."

"In the Union!" amended Dr. Melton grimly. He subsided after this into one of his fidgety, grimacing, finger-nail-gnawing reveries. He was wondering whether he dared tell Lydia of a talk he had had that morning with her father. After a look at Lydia's flushed, tired face, he decided that he would better not; but as the two women fell into a discussion of the layette, the conversation, Mr. Emery's nervous voice, his sharp, impatient gestures, came back to him vividly. He looked graver and graver, as he did after each visit to his old friend, and after each fruitless exhortation to "go slow and rest more." Mr. Emery was in the midst of a very important trial and, as he had very reasonably reminded his physician, this was not a good time to relax his grasp on things. "Now I'm back in practice, in competition with younger men, I _can't_ sag back! It's absurd to ask it of me."

"You were a fool to go back into practice at your age."

"A fool! I've doubled my income."

"Yes; and your arteries--look here, suppose you were dead. The bar would get along without you, wouldn't it?"

"But I'm not dead," the other truthfully opposed to this fallacious supposition, and turned again to his papers.

The doctor shut his medicine case with a spiteful snap. "Don't fool yourself that it's devotion to the common weal that drives you ahead! Don't make a pretty picture of yourself as working to the last in heroic service of your fellow-man! You know, as I know, that if you dropped out this minute, American jurisprudence would continue on its triumphant, misguided way quite as energetically as now."

Mr. Emery looked up, dropping for once the mask of humorous tolerance with which he was accustomed to hide any real preoccupation of his own. "Look here, Melton, I'm too nervous to stand much fooling these days. If you want to know the reason why I'm going on, I'll tell you. I've got to. I need the money."

"Gracious powers! Did you get caught in that B. and R. slump?"

The Judge smiled a little bitterly. "No; I haven't lost any money--for a very good reason. I never was ahead enough to have any to lose. Haven't you any idea of what the cost of living the way we do--"

Dr. Melton interrupted him, wild-eyed: "Why, Nat Emery! You have yourself and your wife to feed and clothe and shelter--and you tell me that costs so much that you can't stop working when there's--"

"Oh, go away, Melton; you make me tired!" The Judge made a weary gesture of dismissal. "You're always talking like a child, or a preacher, about how things _might_ be! You know what an establishment like ours costs to keep up, as well as I do. I'm in it--we've sort of gradually got in deeper and deeper, the way folks do--and it would take a thousand times more out of me to break loose than to go on. You're an old fuss, anyhow. I'm all right. Only for the Lord's sake leave me quiet now."

The doctor shivered and put his hand over his eyes as he remembered how, to his physician's eye, the increasing ill health of his old friend gleamed lividly from his white face.

Mrs. Sandworth brought him back to the present with an astonished "Good gracious! how anybody can even _pretend_ to shiver on a day like this!" She added: "Look here, Marius, are you going to sit there and moon all the afternoon? Here's Lydia going already."

Seasoned to his eccentricities as she was, she was startled by his answer. "Julia," he said solemnly, "did you ever consider how many kinds of murder aren't mentioned in the statute books?"

"Marius! What ideas! Remember Lydia!"

"Oh, I remember Lydia!" he said soberly. He went to lay a hand fondly on her shoulder. "Are you really going, my dear? I'll walk along to the waiting-room with you."

"Don't talk her to death!" cried Mrs. Sandworth after them.

"I won't say a word," he answered.

It was a promise that he almost literally kept. He was in one of the exaggeratedly humble moods which alternated with his florid, talkative, cock-sure periods.

Lydia, too, was quite thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun, and passed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: "Godfather, how can we, any of us, do any better?"

"God knows!" he said, with a gesture of impotence, and went his way.

Lydia entered the waiting-room and went to ask a man in uniform when the next car left for Bellevue.

"There's been an accident in the power-house, lady," he told her, "and that line ain't runnin'."

Lydia gave an exclamation of dismay. "But I must get back to Bellevue to-night!"

Paul was out of town, but she knew the agonies of anxiety 'Stashie would suffer if she did not appear. "Oh, but I can telephone," she reminded herself.

"You kin get out there if you don't mind takin' the long way around," the man explained with a friendly interest. "If you take the Garfield line and change at Ironton to the Onteora branch, it'll bring you back on the other side of Bellevue, and Bellevue ain't so big but what it won't be a very long walk to where you live."

Lydia thanked him, touched, as she so often was, with the kind and, to her, welcome absence of impersonality in working people; and, assuring herself that she had time enough to eat something before her car's departure, betook herself to a dairy lunch-room where she ate a conscientiously substantial supper. The heat of the day had left her little appetite; but to "take care of herself" now seemed at last one of the worth-while things to do which she had always had so eager a longing.

At seven o'clock she took the trolley pointed out to her by her friend, the starter, who noticed and remembered her when she returned to the waiting-room. The evening rush was over, and for some time she was the only passenger. Then a very tired-looking, middle-aged man, an accountant perhaps, in a shabby alpaca coat, boarded the car and sank at once into a restless doze, his heat-paled face nodding about like a broken-necked doll's. Lydia herself felt heavy on her the death-like fatigue which the last weeks had brought to her, but she was not sleepy. She looked out intently at the flat, fertile, kindly country, gradually darkening in the summer twilight. She was very fond of her home landscape. She had not taken so considerable a journey on a trolley for a long time--perhaps not since the trip to the Mallory house-party. That was a long time ago.

At the edge of thick woods the car came to a sudden stop. The lights went out. The conductor disappeared, twitched at the trolley, and went around for a consultation with the motorman, who had at once philosophically pulled off his worn glove and sat down on the step. "Power's off!" he called back casually into the car to the accountant, who had started up wildly, with the idea, apparently, that he had been carried past his station. "We've got to wait till they turn her on again."

"How long'll that be?"

"Oh, I don't know. The whole system is on the bum to-day. Maybe half an hour; maybe more. Better take another nap."

The accountant looked around the car, encountered Lydia's eyes, and smiled sheepishly. After a time of silent waiting, enlivened only by the murmur of the conversation between the motorman and the conductor outside, the gray-haired man suggested to Lydia that it would be cooler out under the trees, and if she would like to go he would be glad to help her. When he had her established on a grassy bank he forbore further talk, and sat so still that, as the quiet moments slipped by, Lydia almost forgot him.

It was singularly pleasant there, with the rustling blackness of the wood behind them, and before them the sweep of the open farming country, shimmering faintly in the light of the stars now beginning to show in the great unbroken arch of the heavens.

Here the talk of the two men on the steps of the car was distinctly audible, and Lydia, with much interest, pieced together a character and life-history for each out of their desultory, friendly chat; but presently they too fell silent, listening to the stir of the night breezes in the forest. Lydia leaned her head against a tree and closed her eyes.

She never knew if it were from a doze, or but from a reverie that she was aroused by a sudden thrilling sound back of her--the clear, deep voice of a distant 'cello. Her heart began to beat faster, as it always did at the sound of music, and she sat up amazed, looking back into the intense blackness of the wood. And then, like a waking dream, came a flood of melody from what seemed to her an angel choir--fresh young voices, throbbing and proclaiming through the summer night some joyous, ever-ascending message. Lydia felt her pulses loud at her temples. Almost a faintness of pleasure came over her. There was something ineffably sweet about the disembodied voices sending their triumphant chant up to the stars.

The sound stopped as suddenly as it began. The motorman stirred and drew a long breath. "They do fine, don't they?" he said. "My oldest girl's learning to sing alto with them."

"He ain't musical himself, is he?" asked the conductor.

"No; _he_ ain't. It's some Dutch friends that does the playing. But he got the whole thing up, and runs the children. It's a nawful good thing for _them_, let me tell you."

"What'd he do it for, I wonder," queried the conductor idly.

"Aw, I don't know. He's kind o' funny, anyhow. Said he wanted to teach young folks how to enjoy 'emselves without spending money. That kind of talk hits their _folks_ in the right spot, you bet. He owns a slice of this farm, you know, and he's given some of the younger kids pieces of ground for gardens, and he's got up a night class in carpentering for young fellows that work in town all day. He's a crack-a-jack of a carpenter himself."

"He'll run into the unions if he don't look out," prophesied the conductor.

"I guess likely," assented the motorman. "They got after Dielman the other day, did you hear, because he--" The talk drifted to gossip of the world of work-people.

It stopped short as the 'cello again sent out its rich, vibrant introduction to the peal of full-throated joy. There seemed to be no other sound in all the enchanted, starlit world than this fervid harmony.

This time it did not stop, but went on and on, swelling and dying away and bursting out again into new ecstasies. In one of the pauses, when nothing but the 'cello's chant came to her ears, Lydia suddenly heard mingling with it the sweet, faint voice of a little stream whispering vaguely, near her. It sounded almost like rain on autumn leaves. The lights in the car flared up, blinding white, but the two men on the step did not stir. The conductor sat with his arms folded on his knees, his head on his arms. The motorman leaned against the end of the car. When the music finally died, after one long, ringing, exultant shout, no one moved for a time.

Then the motorman stood up, drawing on his glove.

"Quite a concert!" said the conductor, starting for the back platform.

"They do _fine_!" repeated the motorman.

The accountant came forward from the shadow and helped Lydia up the steps. There were traces of tears on his tired face.

* * * * *

In September, when her mother leaned over her to say in a joyful, trembling voice, "Oh, Lydia, it's a girl, a darling little girl!" Lydia opened her white lips to say, "She is Ariadne."

"What did you say?" asked her mother.

"We must see that she has the clue," said Lydia faintly.

Mrs. Emery tiptoed to the doctor. "Keep her very quiet," she whispered; "she is a little out of her head."