As she was not aware that Judith hated the Elevated Railroad, so she was not aware that she was fond of the far away Aunt Hester with the long-pointed fingers which could curl backwards. She did not know that when she was playing in her corner of the room, where it was her way to sit on her little chair with her face turned towards the wall, she often sat curving her small long fingers backward and talking to herself about Aunt Hester. But this—as well as many other things—was true. It was not secretiveness which caused the child to refrain from speaking of certain things. She herself could not have explained the reasons for her silence; also it had never occurred to her that explanation and reasons were necessary. Her mental attitude was that of a child who, knowing a certain language, does not speak it to those who have never heard and are wholly ignorant of it. She knew her Aunt Hester as her mother did not. She had seen her often in her dreams and had a secret fancy that she could dream of her when she wished to do so. She was very fond of dreaming of her. The places where she came upon Aunt Hester were strange and lovely places where the air one breathed smelled like flowers and everything was lovely in a new way, and when one moved one felt so light that movement was delightful, and when one wakened one had not quite got over the lightness and for a few moments felt as if one would float out of bed.
The healthy, vigourous young couple who were the child’s parents were in a healthy, earthly way very fond of each other. They had made a genuine love match and had found it satisfactory. The young mechanic Jem Foster had met the young shop-girl Jane Hardy, at Coney Island one summer night and had become at once enamoured of her shop-girl good looks and high spirits. They had married as soon as Jem had had the “raise” he was anticipating and had from that time lived with much harmony in the flat building by which the Elevated train rushed and roared every few minutes through the day and a greater part of the night. They themselves did not object to the “Elevated”; Jem was habituated to uproar in the machine shop, in which he spent his days, and Jane was too much absorbed in the making of men’s coats by the dozens to observe anything else. The pair had healthy appetites and slept well after their day’s work, hearty supper, long cheerful talk, and loud laughter over simple common joking.
“She’s a queer little fish, Judy,” Jane said to her husband as they sat by the open window one night, Jem’s arm curved comfortably around the young woman’s waist as he smoked his pipe. “What do you think she says to me to-night after I put her to bed?”
“Search ME!” said Jem oracularly.
Jane laughed.
“ ‘Why,’ she says, ‘I wish the Elevated train would stop.’
“ ‘Why?’ says I.
“ ‘I want to go to sleep,’ says she. ‘I’m going to dream of Aunt Hester.’ ”
“What does she know about her Aunt Hester,” said Jem. “Who’s been talkin’ to her?”
“Not me,” Jane said. “She don’t know nothing but what she’s picked up by chance. I don’t believe in talkin’ to young ones about dead folks. ’Tain’t healthy.”
“That’s right,” said Jem. “Children that’s got to hustle about among live folks for a livin’ best keep their minds out of cemeteries. But, Hully Gee, what a queer thing for a young one to say.”
“And that ain’t all,” Jane went on, her giggle half amused, half nervous. “ ‘But I don’t fall asleep when I see Aunt Hester,’ says she. ‘I fall awake. It’s more awake there than here.’
“ ‘Where?’ says I, laughing a bit, though it did make me feel queer.
“ ‘I don’t know’ she says in that soft little quiet way of hers. ‘There.’ And not another thing could I get out of her.”
On the hot night through whose first hours Judith lay panting in her corner of the room, tormented and kept awake by the constant roar and rush and flash of lights, she was trying to go to sleep in the hope of leaving all the heat and noise and discomfort behind, and reaching Aunt Hester. If she could fall awake she would feel and hear none of it. It would all be unreal and she would know that only the lightness and the air like flowers and the lovely brightness were true. Once, as she tossed on her cot-bed, she broke into a low little laugh to think how untrue things really were and how strange it was that people did not understand—that even she felt as she lay in the darkness that she could not get away. And she could not get away unless the train would stop just long enough to let her fall asleep. If she could fall asleep between the trains, she would not awaken. But they came so quickly one after the other. Her hair was damp as she pushed it from her forehead, the bed felt hot against her skin, the people in the next flat quarreled more angrily, Judith heard a loud slap, and then the woman began to cry. She was a young married woman, scarcely more than a girl. Her marriage had not been as successful as that of Judith’s parents. Both husband and wife had irritable tempers. Through the thin wall Judith could hear the girl sobbing angrily as the man flung himself out of bed, put on his clothes and went out, banging the door after him.
“She doesn’t know,” the child whispered eerily, “that it isn’t real at all.”
There was in her strange little soul a secret no one knew the existence of. It was a vague belief that she herself was not quite real—or that she did not belong to the life she had been born into. Her mother and father loved her and she loved them, but sometimes she was on the brink of telling them that she could not stay long—that some mistake had been made. What mistake—or where was she to go to if she went, she did not know. She used to catch her breath and stop herself and feel frightened when she had been near speaking of this fantastic thing. But the building full of workmen’s flats, the hot room, the Elevated Railroad, the quarrelling people, were all a mistake. Just once or twice in her life she had seen places and things which did not seem so foreign. Once, when she had been taken to the Park in the spring, she had wandered away from her mother to a sequestered place among shrubs and trees, all waving tender, new pale green, with the leaves a few early hot days had caused to rush out and tremble unfurled. There had been a stillness there and scents and colours she knew. A bird had come and swung upon a twig quite near her and, looking at her with bright soft full eyes, had sung gently to her, as if he were speaking. A squirrel had crept up onto her lap and had not moved when she stroked it. Its eyes had been full and soft also, and she knew it understood that she could not hurt it. There was no mistake in her being among the new fair greenness, and the woodland things who spoke to her. They did not use words, but no words were needed. She knew what they were saying. When she had pushed her way through the greenness of the shrubbery to the driveway she had found herself quite near to an open carriage, which had stopped because the lady who sat in it was speaking to a friend on the path. She was a young woman, dressed in delicate spring colours, and the little girl at her side was dressed in white cloth, and it was at the little girl Judith found herself gazing. Under her large white hat and feathers her little face seemed like a white flower. She had a deep dimple near her mouth. Her hair was a rich coppery red and hung heavy and long about her cheeks and shoulders. She lifted her head a little when the child in the common hat and frock pressed through the greenness of the bushes and she looked at Judith just as the bird and the squirrel had looked at her. They gazed as if they had known each other for ages of years and were separated by nothing. Each of them was quite happy at being near the other, and there was not in the mind of either any question of their not being near each other again. The question did not rise in Judith’s mind even when in a very few minutes the carriage moved away and was lost in the crowd of equipages rolling by.
At the hottest hours of the hot night Judith recalled to herself the cool of that day. She brought back the fresh pale greenness of the nook among the bushes into which she had forced her way, the scent of the leaves and grass which she had drawn in as she breathed, the nearness in the eyes of the bird, the squirrel, and the child. She smiled as she thought of these things, and as she continued to remember yet other things, bit by bit
, she felt less hot—she gradually forgot to listen for the roar of the train—she smiled still more—she lay quite still—she was cool—a tiny fresh breeze fluttered through the window and played about her forehead. She was smiling in soft delight as her eyelids drooped and closed.
“I am falling awake,” she was murmuring as her lashes touched her cheek.
Perhaps when her eyes closed the sultriness of the night had changed to the momentary freshness of the turning dawn, and the next hour or so was really cooler. She knew no more heat but slept softly, deeply, long—or it seemed to her afterwards that she had slept long—as if she had drifted far away in dreamless peace.
She remembered no dream, saw nothing, felt nothing until, as it seemed to her, in the early morning, she opened her eyes. All was quite still and clear—the air of the room was pure and sweet. There was no sound anywhere and, curiously enough, she was not surprised by this, nor did she expect to hear anything disturbing.
She did not look round the room. Her eyes remained resting upon what she first saw—and she was not surprised by this either. A little girl about her own age was standing smiling at her. She had large eyes, a deep dimple near her mouth, and coppery red hair which fell about her cheeks and shoulders. Judith knew her and smiled back at her.
She lifted her hand—and it was a pure white little hand with long tapering fingers.
“Come and play with me,” she said—though Judith heard no voice while she knew what she was saying. “Come and play with me.”
Then she was gone, and in a few seconds Judith was awake, the air of the room had changed, the noise and clatter of the streets came in at the window, and the Elevated train went thundering by. Judith did not ask herself how the child had gone or how she had come. She lay still, feeling undisturbed by everything and smiling as she had smiled in her sleep.
While she sat at the breakfast table she saw her mother looking at her curiously.
“You look as if you’d slept cool instead of hot last night,” she said. “You look better than you did yesterday. You’re pretty well, ain’t you, Judy?”
Judith’s smile meant that she was quite well, but she said nothing about her sleeping.
The heat did not disturb her through the day, though the hours grew hotter and hotter as they passed. Jane Foster, sweltering at her machine, was obliged to stop every few minutes to wipe the beads from her face and neck. Sometimes she could not remain seated, but got up panting to drink water and fan herself with a newspaper.
“I can’t stand much more of this,” she kept saying. “If there don’t come a thunderstorm to cool things off I don’t know what I’ll do. This room’s about five hundred.”
But the heat grew greater and the Elevated trains went thundering by.
When Jem came home from his work his supper was not ready. Jane was sitting helplessly by the window, almost livid in her pallor. The table was but half spread.
“Hullo,” said Jem; “it’s done you up, ain’t it?”
“Well, I guess it has,” good-naturedly, certain of his sympathy. “But I’ll get over it presently, and then I can get you a cold bite. I can’t stand over the stove and cook.”
“Hully Gee, a cold bite’s all a man wants on a night like this. Hot chops’d give him the jim-jams. But I’ve got good news for you—it’s cheered me up myself.”
Jane lifted her head from the chair back.
“What is it?”
“Well, it came through my boss. He’s always been friendly to me. He asks a question or so every now and then and seems to take an interest. To-day he was asking me if it wasn’t pretty hot and noisy down here, and after I told him how we stood it, he said he believed he could get us a better place to stay in through the summer. Some one he knows has had illness and trouble in his family and he’s obliged to close his house and take his wife away into the mountains. They’ve got a beautiful big house in one of them far up streets by the Park and he wants to get caretakers in that can come well recommended. The boss said he could recommend us fast enough. And there’s a big light basement that’ll be as cool as the woods. And we can move in to-morrow. And all we’ve got to do is to see that things are safe and live happy.”
“Oh, Jem!” Jane ejaculated. “It sounds too good to be true! Up by the Park! A big cool place to live!”
“We’ve none of us ever been in a house the size of it. You know what they look like outside, and they say they’re bigger than they look. It’s your business to go over the rooms every day or so to see nothing’s going wrong in them—moths or dirt, I suppose. It’s all left open but just one room they’ve left locked and don’t want interfered with. I told the boss I thought the basement would seem like the Waldorf-Astoria to us. I tell you I was so glad I scarcely knew what to say.”
Jane drew a long breath.
“A big house up there,” she said. “And only one closed room in it. It’s too good to be true!”
“Well, whether it’s true or not we’ll move out there to-morrow,” Jem answered cheerfully. “To-morrow morning bright and early. The boss said the sooner the better.”
A large house left deserted by those who have filled its rooms with emotions and life, expresses a silence, a quality all its own. A house unfurnished and empty seems less impressively silent. The fact of its devoidness of sound is upon the whole more natural. But carpets accustomed to the pressure of constantly passing feet, chairs and sofas which have held human warmth, draperies used to the touch of hands drawing them aside to let in daylight, pictures which have smiled back at thinking eyes, mirrors which have reflected faces passing hourly in changing moods, elate or dark or longing, walls which have echoed back voices—all these things when left alone seem to be held in strange arrest, as if by some spell intensifying the effect of the pause in their existence.
The child Judith felt this deeply throughout the entirety of her young being.
“How STILL it is,” she said to her mother the first time they went over the place together.
“Well, it seems still up here—and kind of dead,” Jane Foster replied with her habitual sociable half-laugh. “But seems to me it always feels that way in a house people’s left. It’s cheerful enough down in that big basement with all the windows open. We can sit in that room they’ve had fixed to play billiards in. We shan’t hurt nothing. We can keep the table and things covered up. Tell you, Judy, this’ll be different from last summer. The Park ain’t but a few steps away an’ we can go and sit there too when we feel like it. Talk about the country—I don’t want no more country than this is. You’ll be made over the months we stay here.”
Judith felt as if this must veritably be a truth. The houses on either side of the street were closed for the summer. Their occupants had gone to the seaside or the mountains and the windows and doors were boarded up. The street was a quiet one at any time, and wore now the aspect of a street in a city of the dead. The green trees of the Park were to be seen either gently stirring or motionless in the sun at the side of the avenue crossing the end of it. The only token of the existence of the Elevated Railroad was a remote occasional hum suggestive of the flying past of a giant bee. The thing seemed no longer a roaring demon, and Judith scarcely recognized that it was still the centre of the city’s rushing, heated life.
The owners of the house had evidently deserted it suddenly. The windows had not been boarded up and the rooms had been left in their ordinary condition. The furniture was not covered or the hangings swathed. Jem Foster had been told that his wife must put things in order.
The house was beautiful and spacious, its decorations and appointments were not mere testimonies to freedom of expenditure, but expressions of a dignified and cultivated thought. Judith followed her mother from room to room in one of her singular moods. The loftiness of the walls, the breadth and space about her made her, at intervals, draw in her breath with pleasure. The pictures, the colours, the rich and beautiful textures she saw brought to her the free—and at the same time soothed—feeling she
remembered as the chief feature of the dreams in which she “fell awake.” But beyond all other things she rejoiced in the height and space, the sweep of view through one large room into another. She continually paused and stood with her face lifted looking up at the pictured things floating on a ceiling above her. Once, when she had stood doing this long enough to forget herself, she was startled by her mother’s laugh, which broke in upon the silence about them with a curiously earthly sound which was almost a shock.
“Wake up, Judy; have you gone off in a dream? You look all the time as if you was walking in your sleep.”
“It’s so high,” said Judy. “Those clouds make it look like the sky.”
“I’ve got to set these chairs straight,” said Jane. “Looks like they’d been havin’ a concert here. All these chairs together an’ that part of the room clear.”
She began to move the chairs and rearrange them, bustling about cheerfully and talking the while. Presently she stooped to pick something up.
“What’s this,” she said, and then uttered a startled exclamation. “Mercy! they felt so kind of clammy they made me jump. They HAVE had a party. Here’s some of the flowers left fallen on the carpet.”
She held up a cluster of wax-white hyacinths and large heavy rosebuds, faded to discoloration.
“This has dropped out of some set piece. It felt like cold flesh when I first touched it. I don’t like a lot of white things together. They look too kind of mournful. Just go and get the wastepaper basket in the library, Judy. We’ll carry it around to drop things into. Take that with you.”
Judith carried the flowers into the library and bent to pick up the basket as she dropped them into it.
As she raised her head she found her eyes looking directly into other eyes which gazed at her from the wall. They were smiling from the face of a child in a picture. As soon as she saw them Judith drew in her breath and stood still, smiling, too, in response. The picture was that of a little girl in a floating white frock. She had a deep dimple at one corner of her mouth, her hanging hair was like burnished copper, she held up a slender hand with pointed fingers and Judith knew her. Oh! she knew her quite well. She had never felt so near any one else throughout her life.
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