brought her a snack to eat. He hooked up the record player and let music penetrate the whole little house. He believed in humor and in beauty and in color and in music and he mined the deepest faiths he had . . . for he knew he could heal her.
On the second morning, he went in to remove her breakfast tray and saw that she was lying against the
pillow with her face turned to the window. Between the dainty white margins of the curtains there was visible a patch of ground planted with roses. On her face, for the first time in his knowledge of her, lay a look of peace.
'I used to love to sit on the ground with my hands in the dirt,' she said to him. 'There is something about earth on your hands . . .'
'Yes, there is. And something about light. And something about running water, too. Don't you think so?'
'Yes,' she said stirring.
He thought this particular 'yes' had a most pK>sitive sound to it. He went softly, however. He took care not to nag at her, not to bother.
On the third day Rosemary got up and dressed in a cotton frock. She began to make a brave effort to eat, as if she owed this to him. In the evening, he built a fire (for there is something about a fire, too) and he read to her. He read some poetry. It gave him such pleasure to realize that she was going to be the best pupil he had ever had. She listened so intently. It was lively to listen so. It was a spark of life which he would fan.
Once she said to him, during that evening, with a look of pain, 'You are so sane.' It made him wince to understand how eight years of her life had been spent alone with that which could not have been called sane. No wonder, he said to himself. No wonder it has nearly killed her.
Now his week off began to go leaping by. She helped dust some books. She couldn't, of course, dust many. Mr. Gibson had to go back to work on the Monday, so on Friday Mrs. Violette came in.
Mrs. Violette was produced for them by Paul Town-send. She was a cleaning woman; she worked for the Townsends in the afternoons. But she was a young person, very slim and quick, with shining black hair and skin of a soft peach color and a countenance of a smoothness and design that was foreign. At least there was something odd, and not plain American, about her looks—Near Eastern perhaps. One couldn't place her.
Mrs. Violette didn't concern herself with being placed. She was cool and detached, taciturn and competent. One knew that she could keep this little house clean with the back of one of her slim strong buff-colored hands. Mr. Gibson thought she would do admirably. She was not,
thank heaven, some garrulous woe-loving old creature reduced to drudgery by adversities. She was fresh and self-respecting. She would be fine. Rosemary agreed, but wondered if it wouldn't cost too much.
'Until you are perfectly well,' he told her, 'Mrs. Violette is an economy. Now that's just sensible.'
'At least you make it sound sensible,' Rosemary said with a touch of life and opinion.
So Mr. Gibson went back to his classes on the Monday, convinced that Rosemary wasn't going to die.
He rode the buses. He wasn't much of a driver, for an automobile was a thing he had known, all his life, how to do without. So he left the ancient car in the garage until such time as Rosemary might wish to use it. She understood it, which was more than he did, and he rode his thirty minutes, brooding and half-smiling to himself over little schemes. For he was possessed by the joy of nurture which is closely akin, if not identical with, the deep joy of creation. He had never known this in his Ufe before. It absolutely absorbed him.
Rosemary was eating well. She was stuffing herself to please him. (Ah, so it did!) When he came home, the little house would be shining from the administrations of Mrs. Violette, and Rosemary would recount to him how many eggs she'd had, how many glasses of milk, what toast. . . . And he'd say she'd be fat as a pig pretty soon and feel a sting behind his eyes.
One afternoon he came walking home, the two blocks from the bus stop, to see her sitting on the ground at the far side of the house, near the roses. He altered his course and stepped softly toward her on the grass. She looked up and her face was dirty where she had swipetl an earthy hand across her nose. She was patting and combing the earth around one rose bush with hef bare fingers.
This earth was dampish and richly dark. She told him it was in good tilth. Mr. Gibson squatted down to admire and, at the same time, to taste and turn and enjoy a word that was new to him. What a wonderful word! Tilth. He understood it immediately.
She said the roses needed mulchng and he learned about mulch. She showed him how delicately she had pruned this one rose bush, how the buds must be left to grow outward. She seemed to understand what the plant needed. It seemed to him that she felt toward this one
plant— all she could manage yet—much as he felt toward her, Rosemary. He didn't say so. When he helped her to her feet, it seemed to him that she sprang up rather lightly. It made him happy.
Then one Saturday morning, puttering in his room, he realized that, while he could hear Mrs. Violette in the kitchen, he missed another presence in the house. He looked out of all the windows and at last saw Rosemary sitting in the back-yard grass, in the sun, with a hairbrush in her hand. She was brushing her hair in slow rhythm and while he watched she did not cease to brush her hair. Something about the scene startled him. The rhythm, the sensuous rhythm, the ritual of it, the strangeness . . . Rosemary was a woman. She was a mystery. One day, when he had brought her to full life and health as he would do, why, he did not know with whom he would be living in this house! He did not know Rosemary, herself. ...
Paul Townsend turned out to be an ideal landlord. He was genial and easy, but he did not intrude. One day, however, when three weeks had gone by and the Gibsons could be presumed settled in, Paul invited them to supper.
It was their first social event.
Rosemary wore her best dress. Mr. Gibson admired it aloud. It was a dullish blue, a pleasant enough dress. But he fussed a little. As soon as ever she felt just like it, he told her, she must buy at least two new dresses... maybe three. Rosemary quietly promised that she would. She accepted everything he urged upon her these days with no more weak spilling of grateful tears. In fact, she was full of grace in the matter of receiving.
They walked across the double driveway to Paul Town-send's house.
While not grand, this was certainly the home of a solvent man. Paul Townsend, a chemicaf engineer, owned the plant and laboratory down near the college, and it must return him if not a fortune at least a pleasant living.
