Warm and flushed, she sprang out of bed, lighted a candle and went softly downstairs in her slippered feet. Neither Lester nor Stephen woke as she went into the room, and she stood for an instant gazing down at them. Stephen was beautiful and strong, sleeping with both rounded arms flung up over his head. Lester was looking almost like a boy in the abandon of his sleep, like the fine, truehearted, sensitive boy to whom she had given herself as a girl.
But that boy had been vibrant with life from his head to his heels. And now half of his body lay dead. From the first it had been appalling to Evangeline to see that helpless, frozen immobility. How splendidly he had endured it, without a complaint! But she had seen from his eagerness tonight, as they talked of the possibility of having a Ford, how imprisoned he had felt, how wild with pleasure it made him to think he would be able to get out of these four walls. She would never have been as patient as he! If she had been condemned to that death-in-life of half her body, not able even to turn over in bed without waking up to a nightmare of struggle, her legs like so much stone. …
Had she made a sound? Had the light of the candle disturbed him a little?
Without waking, Lester drew a long breath, turned over easily in bed, drew up his knees with a natural, flexible motion, threw his arm out over the covers, and dropped off to profound sleep once more.
Everybody at the store was sure, the next day, that Mrs. Knapp was coming down with some serious malady. She was not only extremely pale and shaken by shivers that ran all over her. It was worse. She had a look of deathlike sickness that frightened the girls in her department. They sent for Mr. Willing to come.
When he did, he gave one look at Mrs. Knapp’s pinched face and stooped shoulders and ordered her home at once. “You’re coming down with the flu, Mrs. Knapp. Everybody’s having it. Now it doesn’t amount to anything this year if you take it quick. But it’s foolishness to try to keep on your feet. You get right home, take some quinine and some aspirin, and give yourself a sweat. You’ll be all right. But don’t wait a minute.”
Without a word, Mrs. Knapp put on her wraps and went out of the store. She did not turn homeward. She dared not go home and face Lester and the children till she had wrestled with those awful questions and had either answered them or been killed by them.
Where could she go to be alone? She decided that she would walk straight ahead of her out into the country. No, that would not do. Everybody knew her. They would comment on it. They would ask her questions. She felt that she would burst into shrieks if anyone asked her a question just then.
As she hesitated, she saw over the roofs of the houses the spire of St. Peter’s pointing upward, and with a rush her heart turned towards the quiet and solitude of the church. Thank Heaven, it was always kept open.
She hurried down a side-street and, pushing open the heavy door, stumbled forward into the hushed, dusky, empty building. She felt her way to the nearest pew, knelt down and folded her hands as if to pray. She tried with all her might to pray. But could not.
The raging unrest and turmoil in her heart rose up in clashing waves and filled the church with its clamor. It was in vain that she tried to combat it with odds and ends of prayers which came into her mind with the contact of the pew, with the familiar atmosphere of church.
“Almighty and most merciful Father. …”
Lester was better!
“Oh, God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in. …”
Lester would get well … would get well!
“God be merciful to us and bless us and show us the. …”
And then. … And then. …
“No! No! No!” she cried out aloud, passionately, and pressed her trembling hands over her mouth, frightened.
She was a wicked woman. God be merciful to me, a sinner. She had no heart. She did not want her husband to get well. She did not want to go home and live with her children.
But she must. She must! There was no other way. Like a person shut up suddenly in an airless prison, she ran frantically from one locked door to another, beating her hands on them, finding them sullenly strong, not even shaken on their cruel steel hinges as she flung herself against them. If Lester got well, of course he could not stay at home and keep house and take care of the children … no able-bodied man ever did that. What would people say? It was out of the question. People would laugh at Lester. They would laugh at her. They would not admire her any more. What would people say if she did not go back at once to the children? She who had always been so devoted to them, she whom people pitied now because she was forced to be separated from them. Everyone had heard her say how hard it was for a mother to be separated from her. …
For one instant, an instant she never forgot, Evangeline knew for the first, the only time in her life, a gust of cold, deadly contempt for herself. It nearly killed her, she who had tried so hard all her life to keep her self-respect, she who had been willing to pay any price so that in her own eyes she might be always in the right. Yes, it nearly killed her.
But it did not reconcile her to the inevitable nor bow her
