Part 14 (1/2)

was,” thought Neale, ”but the old man's right.”

Ah, this is bully! ”Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will ... but thou, G.o.d's darling, heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them....”

Why, this was not marked! The old man must have been asleep at the switch.

Neale stopped turning the pages and jumping from one marked pa.s.sage to another. He began to read for himself, a deep vibration within answering the organ-note which throbbed up at him out of the page.

”This,” he said to himself, after a long, absorbed silence, ”this is my meat.”

There was a good place on top of the plate-beam of the mill, dry and safe. One morning before Grandfather and Si came down to work, Neale climbed up to this, dusted it clean of the litter of a century or more and put the three volumes there. Whenever the water got low, and the mill shut down, and Si went off to oil the harness and Grandfather to have a visit with Grandmother in the kitchen, Neale clambered up and clinging with one hand, reached in and took out a volume ... any one of the three. From there to the top of the highest lumber-pile outside, in the clean sunlight.

The pungent smell of the newly-sawed wood, the purifying wind, wide s.p.a.ce about him, solitude, silence, and this deep, strong voice, purifying, untroubled, speaking to him in a language which was his own, although he had not known it.

”_TO-DAY SHALL BE THE SAME AS YESTERDAY_”

CHAPTER XVI

March, 1902.

Flora Allen found she was not following the words on the page, and let the book slowly fall shut. As it lay there among her hair-brushes and cold-cream pots, she looked at it with a listless distaste. How sick she was of reading instructive books! She never wanted to see another! She turned sideways in her chair with the gesture of a person about to stand up, but the motive power was not enough, and she continued to sit, one arm hanging over the back of her chair. Why get up? Why do anything more than anything else?

How horribly lonely she was! How horribly empty her room was!

The emptiness echoed in her ears. It was an echo she often heard. She always heard it more or less. She told herself that it was like the emptiness of a long stone corridor along which she seemed to be always hurrying, hoping to come to a door that would let her out into life--the warm, quivering life that other people--women in books for instance--seemed to have.

Now she was tired. She had almost worn herself out in the long flight down the empty pa.s.sage-way that led from birth to death. She began dreadfully to fear that she would never find a door. Wherever she thought she saw one ajar, it was slammed in her face.

Looking back, how she envied her earlier rebellious unhappy self, bright with the animation of her nave hatred for Belton and America; quivering with her aspiring cry of ”Europe” and ”culture!” She had been married almost sixteen years--was it possible! A life-time! A life-time filled with nothing. A life-time spent between Belton and Bayonne! Oh, it wasn't fair! She had never had a chance--never! And soon it would be too late for her chance!

How hideously fate always discriminated against her. She was always thrown in the dreariest places with the dreariest dead-and-alive people, flat and insipid and tiresome.

Other women encountered big and moving things in their lives, knew adventure and excitement, had something to look forward to, something to look back on. But she had nothing but stagnation. And n.o.body to care _what_ she had, because they all a.s.sumed that if sawdust and chips were good enough for them, that diet ought to be good enough for any one.

The days, that might be so precious, slid by, one like another, and there were not so very many days left to her, when vivid personal life might be possible. Where was she to find it, where, where? She was so _tired_ of stagnation.

She was reduced to envying the exciting life of the women of the demi-monde of whom she was aware here as never before in her life, of whom everybody was conscious. It was indeed precisely to avoid resembling their bright colors and gaiety that all the appallingly respectable women wore such ill-fitting dark clothes and heavy shoes on the street, never broke their solemn silence in a public place, and never laughed freely anywhere except safely behind walls. The women they were so determined not to resemble seemed from a distance to Flora Allen the only people in France who openly enjoyed life as she thought people in Europe did, the only ones who bore the slightest relations.h.i.+p to the vivacious, animated picture of European existence as she had imagined it in Belton. Except, of course, such dusty, vulgar excursion-train crowds of common people as you saw at Lourdes. Flora hated vulgar people.

And yet--ugh!--life couldn't be all gaiety and brightness for the women of the ”half-world.” That evening last year, when she had tried to lighten the deadly dullness by a little, playful flirtation with M.

Fortier, such as any American would have answered by half-sentimental banter--she had never forgotten how frightened she had been by his instant misunderstanding--the horrible spring he had made at her in the dusk of the carriage; his brutal hands on her shoulders, his flabby, old face suddenly inflamed; the terrifying weight of his obese body against her hands as she pushed him furiously away! For months afterwards she had been afraid to smile at any man, as she said ”good-evening”; and she read in their eyes, in all their eyes, what they would think of her if she but looked squarely and frankly at them.

But wasn't there _ever_ to be anything for her, between the deadly flat propriety of things like those awful progressive-euchre parties in Belton and _that_ sort of thing?

Isabelle came into the room now, floor-brush and cleaning cloths in hand. She was surprised to find her mistress still before her dressing-table at half-past ten in the morning. To herself she made the comment, not by any means for the first time, ”Well, the good G.o.d certainly never created a lazier good-for-nothing.” Aloud she said respectfully, ”I beg Madame's pardon for not knocking. I thought the room was empty. Do I disturb Madame by coming to clean?”

Madame got up hastily, murmured a ”no, oh no,” and disappeared down the hall. Isabelle opened the windows, fell on her knees and set to work with energy, suppressing (lest her mistress still be within earshot) the lively dance-air which came to her lips, as she rattled the brush against the furniture and base-boards. She would be nineteen at her next birthday. What a lovely spring day, how sweet the air was, Jeanne had promised to let her walk out beyond the city-walls next Sunday afternoon with Pierre, and she had a new pair of shoes, real leather shoes, to show off there. Perhaps Pierre would take her to a confiserie and buy her some candied chestnuts! Her pulse beat strong and full, the dance-tune jigged merrily inside her head, she reached far under the bed with her brush, and enjoyed so heartily the elastic stretch and recoil of the muscles in her stout shoulders, that she reached again and again, although there was no need for it. ”Jig! Jig! Pr-r-rt!” went the dance tune in her head ... new shoes ... suns.h.i.+ne ... candied chestnuts ...