NOBLE had driven Mr. Driggs downtown in the sleigh, tucked in under a glossy black bearskin, and already the softly falling snow had blurred the footprints down the front path and the tracks of the sleigh runners. Mrs. Driggs rocked by the window, made sleepy by the warm room and the quivering web of snowflakes, yawning great, gasping, moaning yawns that squeezed the tears out of her eyes. Magnificent even in negligée, she wore a dressing gown of bright purple panne velvet, with coffee-colored lace falling down the front like a brook in spring foaming and cascading down a mountain. On the floor Hoagland lay stretched on his stomach, languidly pasting in his scrapbook pictures from embossed sheets of moss roses, forget-me-nots, little scrolls saying "Remember Me," the heads of St. Bernard dogs, and wrens building nests in old shoes. On the floor about him were a yellow box of Velvets, nearly empty, a strewing of bits of oiled paper from the Velvets he had eaten, several apple cores, turning brown, and two apples from each of which one small bite had been taken. Myrtle, the "girl," was trundling the carpet sweeper about the dining room, pausing now and then to hurl a friendly insult at the shouting canary: "Shut up, squawk-box; you'll have us all deef!" or to call in to Mrs. Driggs: "The fern looks kinda pindlin' this mornin', Mis' Driggs. I told you you better not try that plant food on it; that feller sellin' it was too slick."
Mrs. Driggs suddenly stopped rocking and peered out intently.
"For goodness' sake, Myrtle! There's Mr. Green going home at this hour—he must be sick or something."
Myrtle stepped over Hoagland and had a look.
"Say, I bet he is sick; he's all sort of hunched up, and holdin' on to his side." And a few minutes later Mrs. Driggs hurried to the door to let in Kate, who had run across the street bareheaded, with her golf cape thrown around her shoulders.
"Oh, Mrs. Driggs, I wonder if I might use your telephone to call up Doctor Wells? Mr. Green has come home with a feverish cold; he's had it for several days; and now he says he has a bad pain in his side, and I thought I'd feel so much easier in my mind if Doctor Wells had a look at him, though he vows—and declares he won't see the doctor if he does come; he says he feels too sick to be bothered. How do, Hoagland?"
Hoagland looked up with a glazed expression.
"Tell Mrs. Green you don't feel so good, either. He's all bunged up with a head cold; everybody has them just now. I kept him home from school to-day, it's so mean out. I hope Mr. Green isn't anything serious?"
"Oh, I don't think so, thank you, but you know how men are. When they're sick they always think they're just about dying."
"That's right! I tell Mr. Driggs he'd be surprised if I carried on the way he does every time I had a little ache or pain."
"A man's just really nothing but a great big boy, I sometimes think."
"That's right!" She shook with appreciative laughter. "Will you call up, or do you want I should?"
"Oh, would you? I'm not very used to it. How do, Myrtle! Isn't this a snowy morning?"
"Now you stay right here, so you can grab it the minute I get doctor. Hello! Hello! I want 8—number 8. . . . Hello! Number 8? . . . Oh, all tight! She hasn't got it yet. . . . Hello! Number 8? Hello! Central! You know, Doctor Wells's office. I ought to have had the sense to tell her that first off. . . . Hello! Is this Doctor Wells's office? . . . Oh—hold the wire. Here, Mrs. Green, quick."
"Hello! Doctor Wells's office? . . . Is Doctor Wells there? . . . Oh, isn't he? Well, when do you expect him back, please? . . . I said, when do you expect"
"Don't put your mouth so close."
"What, Mrs. Driggs? . . . Oh—oh—hello! . . . Well, can I leave a message? This is Mrs. Green, Mrs. Joseph Green. . . . I beg your pardon? . . . Oh. G-r-e-e-n. . . . Oh, Mrs. Wells! Oh, is that you? How do you do? This is Kate Green. I'm telephoning from Mrs. Driggs's. . . . Oh, I'm very well, thank you; it's Joe—could Doctor Wells come and have a look at him? Yes. . . . No, I don't think . . . oh, thank you ever so much. . . . Thank you. Good-by. What do I do now, Mrs. Driggs?"
"See, hang it up here. Now you let us know if there's anything in the world we can do."
Kate hurried back across the street. Jodie was playing alone under the lilac bush, good as gold, making snow Parker House rolls. Kate stopped to stuff a cold wet little hand into a mitten, to tuck a bent red ear under his knitted cap. Then in to Joe.
"And that," she said impressively to Carrie Pyne a week later, "is the last time I've been out of this house."
For Joe was really ill. He had double pleurisy, and Doctor Wells said there was danger of pneumonia and thought to himself of the way Joe had been drinking lately. He was suffering so that he couldn't sleep except when he was given morphine; he couldn't eat, though everyone sent delicious things—quivering jellies, chicken broth, hothouse grapes. He would try while Kate held a spoonful, tears running down sometimes over her cheerful stretch of smile. But it was too hard to swallow. A spoonful of calf's-foot jelly, a peeled grape—that was enough. Kate would stop outside his door, angrily brush away her tears with the back of her hand, and go in smiling, her eyes shining ecstatically. Poor Joe, dear Joe, propped up with pillows, her old pink crocheted shawl around his shoulders, gasping with shallow painful breaths.
"Look, Joe! From the Mortimer girls." She opened a soiled old satin bonbon box. "Some of Miss Evangeline's nut cakes."
Joe pretended to try to lift one, keeping up the old joke, dear and familiar to them both, about the weight of Mortimer cake. Kate wanted to cry.
Everyone was so kind. Miss Smith came to the kitchen door with a small bunch of bruised-looking salmon sweet peas and a great deal of asparagus fern on the same day that Clark's boy brought a sheaf of American beauties from Mr. and Mrs. Driggs, the kind that cost a dollar apiece, with stems so long that nothing but the umbrella jar would hold them.
Kate moved through her days uplifted, nursing Joe unselfishly and lovingly, but in a glow of noble exaltation. She couldn't help knowing that Doctor Wells thought she was a wonderful little woman; she couldn't resist running down what she was doing in order to have him praise her. She liked having her little sitting room warm and welcoming for him when he came in out of the cold, a small fire of pine knots burning, ivy and geraniums looking out at the snow. She always remembered to offer him Joe's cigars. She was aglow with sweetness and selflessness while he was there, glad that the mirror over the mantel gave her a glimpse of shining hair and fresh white collar that made her old brown dress becoming, as she sat listening to his instructions about Joe. She was pensively pleased, ton, that she had grown pale, that there were circles under her eyes—circles that came from tears of real sorrow, from nights made sleepless by sorrow and love.
Nothing would keep her long from Joe's room. Even when he was asleep she sat beside him, dizzy for want of sleep herself. She must be there when he woke, when his eyes appealed to her for reassurance.
Late at night, alone in the kitchen heating Joe's milk and the water for his hot-water bag, the tears would run down her cheeks; she would shake with hiccuping sobs while she had little comforting drinks of hot milk and bites of Lizzie's gingersnaps. Oh, Joe, my darling, get well, please get well, she thought, filling the saucepan. All that good jelly, we'll never get it eaten! I'll give some to Miss Smith. No, I can't; she sent a bowlful. I never saw the moon so white and big; that misty look means more snow. Oh, I'm so tired. I must get something for Jodie's poor little hands; they're as chapped as chapped can be, from snow inside his mittens. What was it I wanted to ask Doctor Wells to-morrow? I believe he really enjoys coming here. I don't believe he's very happy. Of course Mrs. Wells is very nice, but not exactly sympathetic. Two o'clock! I guess everyone else in town is asleep in bed. Oh, please, God, make Joe get well soon!
Mr. Donner came to inquire, before leaving for Colorado. Baa! Baa! Kate thought, sleepily, listening to his kind bleating voice, looking at his large mild face. Boiled mutton, but no caper sauce. "Yes, indeed, I'll tell Mr. Green—I'm so sorry he isn't allowed to see anyone yet. Thank you—thank you." Baa! Baa!
But she was grateful to Mr. Donner. He had helped Joe so much that perhaps next year all their dreams would come true—the house on the hill, the winter in Italy. Joe was so sure of it that Kate had begun to think of Italy as their property, to feel a modest pride when she read of water bluer than blue, of lemon trees gold and silver with fruit and blossoms. See, Westlake, see what Italy can do. Mr. Donner had a new claim, the Thunder Bird property, that would make them all rich as soon as shafts could be sunk and mining begun. Joe and Kate and Jodie would be rich, Lulu and Charlotte. Aunt Sarah would be richer, and even Carrie Pyne, who had brought her small savings to Joe to invest as an especial favor to her, would have something of her own at last. The thought of how well he was taking care of the family helped Joe more than medicine as he sat up in bed struggling to breathe.
This was the one solid thing he could anchor to in those gray waters where he drifted, between the times of pain. Gray days and nights when he floated weakly, flowing this way, flowing that way, like a water plant in the tides, only rooted firmly in the knowledge that, after all, he was a good business man, that everything was coming out all right. Who else in town was going to take his family to Italy next winter, for the whole winter? He thought dimly of a peasant nurse in full flowered skirts and streamered cap holding Jodie's hand. "Buon giorno, Maria!" "Buon giorno, Signor!" The bright skirts billowed away and Jodie's bare brown legs twinkled beside them, fading into the dark bureau, the mirror gleaming faintly in the snowy twilight, the dark oblong of the doorway suddenly glowing dusky gold as the downstairs lamps were lit.
"Joe?"
"Yes."
"Are you asleep?"
"Not now."
"Would you like a little beef tea?"
"No, thank you."
"Some hot milk?"
He moved his head weakly from side to side.
"Please try just a little beef tea!"
"All right. Kate—you don't have to whisper just because I do."
"I know; it's silly of me. I don't mean to. Or would you rather have chicken broth? It's every bit as easy."
"All right."
"But have whichever you'd rather, Joe. Or would you rather have something cool, some orange juice?"
Kate was a wonderful nurse, he told himself, slipping into the dark waters, numb with the exhaustion that came after the pain, when the bones in his body felt as if they had been pulverized. And then he was swirling in a whirlpool of nightmare, borrowing again, seeing the faces change as he asked, losing everything.
He struggled back into his own room, his own bed. Kate was sitting by him, holding hot milk in a blue cup with flowers on it. A paper pinned on the lampshade shielded his eyes and threw the light on her bright hair and compassionate face. He and she were stretched out on cushioned chairs on the terrace; through blossoming lemon trees they saw the blue Mediterranean, turquoise and sapphire gleaming through emerald and gold and pearl, like that heavenly city in the Bible or somewhere, he thought, impressed with himself for remembering.
The house was cold that week. Kate and Lizzie struggled with the furnace, but there was an edge in the air; the snowy wind came keenly through every crack. Kate, shivering, her nose pink, her golf cape hugged tightly around her, would run into the kitchen to stand with her back up to the stove, drinking hot water, her teeth chattering against the cup. Late at night, light-headed with exhaustion, she would watch the white moon falling down the cold sky, dragging her after it until she broke away to draw herself up into a cramping knot on the sofa at the foot of the bed, trying to warm herself, too cold really to sleep, too tired really to stay awake, while the sofa seemed to rock under her like a ship at sea.
A day came when Joe was much worse. His fever jumped up; you could hear his loud gasping breathing all over the house. Kate was so frightened that she ran across the street through the deep snow to telephone Doctor Wells, without noticing that she had nothing on her feet but her satin slippers, those old friends, white once, that she had painted black with scarlet heels, and that she couldn't imagine life without, though already the toes had gone all fuzzy. She hadn't been out of doors for days and days. The cold misty air blessed her aching eyelids. There had been sleet in the night, and the trees in the mist were white against gray, streaming up and losing themselves.
Doctor Wells came four times that day. When he went home just before midnight Kate felt the earth crumbling under her feet. Lizzie, with red rims around her eyes, came to the bedroom door with hot soup, and Kate tried to feed Joe, but he couldn't swallow; it dribbled out again. His beseeching eyes seemed to pull the heart out of her body. She stretched her mouth into a wide encouraging smile. "You'll be better to-morrow morning, Joey; you see if you aren't."
She thought perhaps if she read to him he would go to sleep. She got the book about Italy that they had been reading before his illness and sat down in the rocking chair, wrapped in the old silkolene eiderdown with poppies on it.
"'Winter had passed: violets poured in blue streams and cataracts beneath white veils of almond blossom; and the warm wind carried the fragrant promise of orange and lemon trees.'
"Joey?"
He was still except for that loud, tearing breathing. She put her head down on the bed by his hand, and when she lifted it there was a dark patch on the quilt.
She opened the window cautiously. The night was held in the soft deep silence that comes before snow. Then a tiny thread of sound was spun from the unbelievable silence, a chime of sleigh bells that drew near, pure and clear as bells of ice, and passed, and died away. Who were those people? Where were they going? She would never know, and she would never forget them.
Later she woke from a deep sleep, sitting up so suddenly that she felt sick and dizzy, crying, "Yes, Joe?" But there was no answer. Joe was quiet; even the difficult breathing was still.