He could not tell if she had understood. But there was no doubt that she had seen and recognized him. Her eyes closed slowly and she sank back into somnolence. Randall stood for another moment looking at her face so queerly shrunken and sharpened. Then he turned and left the room. He felt as if he had lived a century since yesterday. He walked away through the halls of the hospital, full of early morning noises and the smell of coffee and breakfast; past young nurses in blue and white stripes carrying trays and pushing carts laden with all sorts of things. When he rang for the elevator he saw through the iron gratings that it could not stop at his floor; it was filled by a patient on a wheeled stretcher, surrounded by nurses. He ran down the stairs instead and went out to the sun shining in Fifty-ninth Street and the incredible fact that New York was going about its morning business unconcerned who had lived or died during the night.
When he walked into the library at home, Seymour dropped his newspaper on the floor and looked up with a chortle. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Baby Brother has gone and done it.”
“Shut up.” Randall flopped into his chair and told him what had happened.
“Good God!” Seymour sat with his mouth open while Randall talked. “God Almighty! What a thing to happen to you.”
“To me? You ought to see her. She’s awfully sick, Seymour. She’s very likely to die.”
Seymour whistled. “For a good little boy who stays home and keeps his pants buttoned, the damnedest things happen to you.”
“I guess they do.” Randall felt a little dizzy and was overcome by an enormous yawn. “I’d better go to bed,” he said. He looked dully at the crumbs on Seymour’s plate.
“When did you last eat?”
“I haven’t the remotest idea. Now that you mention it I suppose I’m hungry.”
“You ought to have something more than a roll. Look here, you go and get your clothes off and I’ll go up to the corner and get you some food.”
“Thanks.” Randall’s eyes were so heavy that the room was a blur. He leaned back in his chair with his hands hanging over the arms. Seymour went away. When he came back in a quarter of an hour Randall was sound asleep. Seymour had brought sliced ham, eggs, butter, cheese, a tin of tomato soup, and a jar of potato salad. He was very clumsy with the gas hurner but he managed to assemble the queer meal on the table and woke Randall up.
“It’s a horror,” he apologized, “but eat it.”
“It’s fine.” Randall sopped up fried egg with the crust of a roll and said, “I’d rather have it than oysters and terrapin. Brother,” he said, “don’t you think we’d better have a telephone put in here?”
“Well—” Seymour was surprised. “I never thought of it before.”
“Neither did I. But after yesterday—”
“I suppose it might be a good idea. But you want it during this emergency. By the time they get it installed—”
“Couldn’t you order it this morning? Couldn’t you say it is for an emergency?”
“Why, yes, I’ll try. I’ll see about it on the way to the office. Now you get to bed, you’re dead. You’ll sleep for twelve hours.”
“Oh, sure.”
Randall went away to his room, but he stopped on the way to find Mrs. Quinn at her cleaning, and told her to wake him up before she left the house at noon.
It was four days before there was sufficient change in Renata’s condition for the doctor to concede a real chance of her pulling through. After the second day Randall stopped trying to keep himself rationally pessimistic. One could not be the bystander at a fight for someone’s life without believing passionately that the fight would be won. The days went by as if they had been lifted from the calendar, nameless and wrenched from their design. On Wednesday when he ordinarily took the week’s first choir rehearsal he forget it completely and was appalled at what he had done. But Dr. Fitzhugh was wonderfully kind; he told him on Thursday to stay away from work altogether until his friend was out of danger.
So day and night, morning, evening, the routine of sleep and food and daily habits dissolved and ran together like a series of colors whose mixture produces nothing but grey. All during that time, he would remember later, Renata was not the woman he had known before and was to know much better afterwards. She was ‘she’; or ‘the case’. She was the instrument through which, for the first time in his life, he was stubbornly, fanatically absorbed in the attainment of something that he wanted and would stop at nothing to win. Even after Doctor Whitby began cautiously to admit that she was gaining, Randall took no account of hours or days or the matters that ordinarily filled them. And then one sunny morning he was sitting beside the narrow, high bed, with Renata raised a little on her mattress, still pale—but not ghastly, still heavy-eyed, but smiling. Her face which he had first learned to know in a frame of ruffles and wavy pompadoured hair, was a different face above the ugly white hospital gown, and her hair, parted in the middle, fell over her shoulders in two long brown braids. Her hands quietly folded on the covers, had also changed; their square firmness was gone. They were blue-white and fragile. She looked, he thought, like the kind of pictures he had seen in art and history books; he did not know enough of painting to realize that she looked like a model for Giotto. She was too weak to speak with any of her verve and sparkle, her voice like the rest of her was thin and wavering, but she said, “How you are good! Such a goodness is never before.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “You have a wonderful doctor and your nurses—!”
“Is true. Is very different everything here, why they are not the suore?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean. But don’t try to explain,” he added quickly. “You mustn’t use your strength talking.”
“Le suore,” she said again. “Le monache. Long. Black. Sometimes—” she wrinkled her nose.
“Oh,” he said, laughing, “you mean nuns. Well, this isn’t a Catholic hospital, Renata.”
“No?” She crossed her hands on her breast, dismayed. “You mean I nearly die among heathens? Oh! Dio! How I confess that?”
“I’m afraid that’s not the worst thing you’d ever have done. I think we’re very nice heathens. But I admit I should have thought of calling in a priest for you. I’m sorry, I’ve been pretty distracted.”
“Never mind. If I have seen the priest then, I know absolutely I must die. Basta now if maybe he come soon one day. I tell him is no my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Randall.
He was surprised, as she improved day by day, that she seemed to give no thought at all to her plans, to questions which he would have supposed must be on her mind. She lay in bed like a contented child, submitting to treatment, obediently doing what she was told, even to eating the soft, milky, slippery food which she told Randall was disgusting.
“What would you like instead?” he asked her; and when she told him he had to admit he had never heard of anything that she mentioned. But he remembered her speaking of the Ristorante Brunetti, so he sought out the place and found it in West Thirty-seventh Street and asked the proprietor if there was anything he could make for Signorina Tosi within the limits of her strict invalid diet.
“She is here? She is sick? She didn’t go in Italy? Mamma mia!” The man clapped his hands to his head.
Randall told him.
“Ah poveretta! You leave to me, Signore. Every day I make for her something very good, very light. Like we give the bambini. I make her well quick.”
So every morning on his way to the hospital Randall stopped at Brunetti’s restaurant and collected a parcel. There was always a bottle of pastina in brodo or some other delicate soup; there was a risotto or dainty boiled chicken or pasta in a little casserole. Sometimes there was a cup of what looked to Randall like custard, but when he wondered why Renata might not as well eat the hospital’s custard, she laughed and hugged Brunetti’s dish to her bosom.
“0h, no,” she said. “This is the zabaione. You didn’t never taste? Here!”—and she made him fin
ish it.
She gained strength on the food she liked, and the daily pint fiasco of wine which the doctor approved to the astonishment of the nurses. But at the end of the second week she had still not mentioned Milano, where she should be arriving in a few days if she had left New York when she was to have gone. Doctor Whitby had told Randall that it would be out of the question for her to sing before next autumn, and better if she did not travel at any distance for at least six weeks. Not knowing how to tell her, Randall put off the subject until almost the day when she should have arrived in Italy. Then he asked her if she did not think he should cable somebody there that she was not coming. She seemed surprised.
“Pensa!” she said. “Is true! I am not going.”
“But hadn’t you thought of it?”
She smiled weakly. “Sometimes is very hard to think. But you are right, Randalo, is necessary inform La Scala.”
“And all your other engagements?”
“Oh, Santorelli, alla Scala, he tell them.”
Randall wrote down the name. He thought for a moment and sat looking at Renata. She saw that he was waiting for her to speak and she let him wait until a puzzled look came into his eyes. She said, “What you think, Randalo? Is something?”
“I was wondering if you would like me to cable Baldini too,” he said. To his surprise, she did not toss off an answer in her usual way. She said quietly, “No, is time enough I write him. Thank you.”
Randall sat wondering what she meant. In a way he did not really dare to think. He wanted to ask and lacked the courage. She lay there looking at him with a little smile, that newly childish expression in her eyes to which he was not accustomed; was it gentleness or trustfulness? Whatever it was, it meant to him that she was changed. He said a little uneasily, “I hope Baldini was good to you that day when you were taken ill.”
“He was good. He did the best he could. He could not remain, I tell him to go. An important artist cannot abandon the engagements.” She thought for a moment and then she said, “But he was not good like you, Randalo. Nobody I have ever seen, nobody is good like you.” And two great tears rolled from her eyes and slid down her cheeks.
“Oh, Renata, dear!” He took her hand and put his cheek to it. “Don’t tell me things life that, it isn’t true. I’m so glad I was here.” He bent over her and dropped to his knees and kissed her hand and held it to his cheek. He took her other hand and held them both clasped in his and looked into her eyes and tried to smile. “Don’t you see, Renata, I—” he gulped and stopped speaking. He laid his face on their clasped hands.
“Tanto buono,” he heard her whisper. “Un angelo, sei tu.”
“No,” he said, his face hidden. “But you know, surely you know, I—” This was not time to say it. She was weak and very far from well and nothing should agitate her now. He stayed for a moment as he was, then he raised his head and looked at her, and gently freed her hands and stood up.
“I’ll go and send the cable now,” he said. “You should be resting. I’ll be in again later.”
In more than two weeks he had scarcely seen Seymour. Every day he went out early to pick up Renata’s food and make a quick visit to the hospital before he went downtown to St. Timothy’s. Seymour was usually asleep when Randall left the house, and they never met for dinner because Randall spent the evenings at the hospital, sitting with Renata until it was time for her to go to sleep. When he did see Seymour for a moment, their talk consisted of quick reports: Renata was improving and Seymour was having a wonderful time with his automobile. He offered to take Randall and Renata out in it when she was well enough to go for an airing, and Randall said that would still be a long time off. He would let Seymour know. The Times was lying on the floor between them and Randall looked at it absently. “It’s so queer,” he said. “I’ve never been one for the news like you, but these past couple of weeks I have absolutely no idea what’s happened anywhere.”
“You haven’t missed a thing,” said Seymour. “Nothing’s happened. San Francisco’s been destroyed. Vesuvius has erupted. A—”
“What? What happened to San Francisco?”
“Oh, nothing much. Just a little earthquake. And a little fire.”
Randall stared. “That just goes to show. I’ve been practically in another world.” He looked at his watch. “I must go now.”
Seymour pointed out that since the telephone was already installed, it could as well be used to inquire about Renata. But Randall said, “They only say the same thing: she is doing well. It’s routine.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but I want to see for myself.”
Seymour could see for himself too. He was more curious than ever about Renata Tosi. Randall was so wrapped up in her that he had no idea how he appeared, and if he had realized, he would not have cared. He was a different man. He showed an ability to plan and manage, a degree of purpose which nothing had ever evoked before. Seymour’s curiosity probed beyond the self-evident fact that Randall was deeply in love, and that his romantic, childlike nature would consider no dénouement other than marriage. Seymour wondered. The Devil a monk would be, at this particular time. But one grave illness and a burden of gratitude which to her would first be welcome but later oppressive, would never make a wife out of the minx he had seen coquetting on the opera-house stage. Very probably she had no interest in marriage at all unless—and that thought worried him almost as much as his fear of Randall’s being hurt—she thought there was money involved. He wished he knew a tactful way to sound out that question; and when Renata was about to leave the hospital and Randall, with surprising efficiency, was arranging everything, her move with a nurse to a quiet hotel for a week, then a long stay at a comfortable boarding-house in the country, Seymour asked him, “Are you sure you can afford all this, Ran? Aren’t you spending an awful lot of money?”
“Not as much as you’ve spent on your automobile,” said Randall. “And I had a lot in my account, too. I told you I’ve never used all my income. What have I had to spend it on?”
Seymour felt uncomfortable. He had not expected such an answer, though he doubted that the implication of his own extravagance, or even selfishness, was intentional. He only said, “Well, you couldn’t have had the bill from that surgeon yet. It’s going to be a whopper, you know.”
“Is it? Well, it’ll be worth it. How do you know how much it will be, anyway? Have you had such a lot of experience with doctors?”
Seymour froze up and went away saying, “Why don’t you get those trunks and valises out of the drawing-room?”
“They aren’t in my way there,” said Randall. “Do I interfere with what you keep in the cellar?”
But he had a bewildering morning with Renata’s luggage the day before she was to leave the hospital. Enough of her clothes had to be produced to dress her to move to a hotel. Then Randall pointed out that she could hardly want to be encumbered with all those opera costumes and winter clothes now and while she was in the country. So she thought out a list of things that he should sort and pack and bring to her. He wrote down each item of the clothes and other articles that she would need; and between his unfamiliarity with the names of such things in Italian or English either, and his intense embarrassment at her graphic explanations what some of them were, she laughed until her nurse became alarmed and said she would rupture her stitches.
She was enchanted with the country. Randall had remembered a place where he had spent a summer with his mother in the years after Hare Island was sold, a dairy farm in Putnam County east of Lake Mahopac. It was owned by people named Maynard, who took one or two summer boarders every year, and gave them comfortable rooms in the big farmhouse, and abundant, delicious food. When he told Renata where she was to go her eyes sparkled and she said, “Ah, a lago. I will feel like myself very quick.”
“You like lakes especially?”
“I am born sul Lago di Como. Is my paesino, my village there. What beauty!”
“Oh, Lord. Well, l
ook, Renata—don’t expect anything of Lake Mahopac. But it’s as far as you ought to travel now.”
“Must be beautiful,” she said. “Is a lake.”
The Maynards soon said she was the nicest guest they had ever had. At first they had their misgivings about an Italian opery-singer who didn’t speak good English, was recovering from a long illness, would probably put on airs and throw tantrums and be temperamental and a nuisance. Instead she amazed them by her lively interest in everything around her and her ready comments about the farm which sounded to the Maynard family and their hired hands like madness. But she kept them laughing.
“Is so fine the erba here,” she exclaimed, pointing to the rich stand of meadow grass west of the house. It was the end of May. “How is you are not already cutting?”
“Cutting! For land’s sakes, why?” Tom Maynard was appalled.
“But,” she said, astonished, “you leave to grow high such beautiful grass, will soon begin to dry. Would be a pity, no?”
“A pity? Gee.” The farmer scratched his head. “A field o’ hay like that?”
“Hay? What is, hay?”
Randall was there and he explained. She listened, squinting with bewilderment.
“Never I hear of such a thing,” she said. “We would cut it now.”
“What do you know about it anyway? How do you know when they cut the hay in Italy?”
“How I know! Madonna, I am contadina, peasant, if I didn’t go to work in Milano I never know anything except walk four chilometri up and down the mountain every day carrying the milk on my back to the latteria, and sew the fazzoletti like my aunts.”
“What are fazzoletti?” asked Randall, dumbfounded by this glimpse of her origin.
“Like this.” She took out her handkerchief. “But bigger, pieces of silk like you buy everywhere for the presents. We sew on them the hems, all the women. Dio mio! how many dozens—for two lire the week.”
“How much would that be in our money, Renata?” He spoke watching the strangely harsh expression of her face.
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