Flight

she lingered, idly fingering book after book. Her delay was repaid when a dingy, much-handled volume seemed to spring from the table, bringing with it a strange thrill. Jean had had a copy of this same book. So had Carl. Both of them had with elaborate indirection kept it from her and, with natural curiosity, she had always been eager to know why. And, with equal naturalness, she had made a solemn vow to read it from cover to cover when she could put her hands upon a copy. It was Leaves of Grass. She opened it eagerly. Her eyes fell on the yellowed page. They read:

O Me! O Life!

O Me! O Life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself for ever reproaching myself (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?),
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring⁠—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer

That you are her⁠—that life exists and identify,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

The old man, the shop, the passersby, everything was blotted out by the words, powerful, true, so applicable to her own case. “That the powerful play goes on, and I may contribute a verse,” she repeated softly, consciously changing the pronoun. She paid the man for the book, cheerfully giving up the food which the book would cost, and hurried home with it.

When she had put Jean to bed she sat and read over and over again the words. “Foolish and faithless.” “For who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?” She had been foolish, to the dead Jean she had been faithless. To herself, but a wild happiness filled her that in the hour of difficulty, at the time when she had been forced to make the biggest decision of her life, she may have been foolish but not faithless. She fell asleep whispering: “That the powerful play goes on, and I, Mimi Daquin, may contribute a verse.”

The words gave her a comforting sense of direction. She had been blindly wandering, groping, striving towards a goal that had never been clear, indeed she had never even vaguely visualized any destination other than the struggle to do those things which seemed to her to be right. Even for this indefinite rightness or wrongness she had no tangible definition⁠—she sought only by instinct or conscience or some other indefinable guide the path to truth and beauty and happiness.⁠ ⁠…

This new consciousness gave her faith and courage at a time when she needed these things more than she had ever needed them before. Summer came with the usual migration of the few regular customers she had to the seashore or the mountains. Mimi no longer called on the Mannings, for she could no longer conceal even from their unsuspecting eyes the extent of her distress. She saved the small fee at the day nursery, for it was seldom now that she had to be away from home. Her rent was several weeks overdue and the relations between Mimi and her landlady had reached an actually strained point.

“Stuck-up niggers think they can sponge off of common ones⁠—humph! I’ll show her she can’t make no footmat out of me!” she overheard her landlady saying to her husband one evening. “An’ I ain’t never been satisfied she’s respectable⁠—if that baby’s got a daddy he must have had some relatives she could get money from. I’m tired of foolin’ with her and if she don’t pay me by Sad’dy I’m goin’ to put her and her baby right out there in the street!”

Sick at heart, hungry, discouraged, Mimi slowly struggled up the stairs to her room. Even Petit Jean’s coos of welcome could not cheer her up. She lay on the bed beside him and wept.

And as though she had not already enough to bear, she found new trouble awaiting her that dwarfed all that had gone before, when she returned to the house the following evening after another day of fruitless search for work. Mrs. Williams, her landlady, had volunteered to care for Jean while she was out, despite her words of the night before. When the rickety screen door banged behind her, Mimi heard Mrs. Williams calling from the rear of the house. On an old davenport lay Jean, vomiting wretchedly. Intermittently he screamed, writhing in the paroxysmal pain which recurred every few minutes. On his face was a ghastly pallor and he seemed in a state of complete collapse.

Mimi rushed to the cot and fell on her knees beside Jean as she flung anxious questions at the perspiring, frightened woman above her.

“Yes’m, I called a doctor⁠—my doctor⁠—and he said it wasn’t nothing but cramps. He gave your baby some castor oil, but soon as the doctor left he began throwin’ up and yellin’ mo’ than ever.”⁠ ⁠…

Mimi, frightened as she was, remained calm.

“While I take him up to my room, will you get Dr. Newton?” she asked. She knew him by sight, having seen him at church often when she had gone there with the Mannings. His name came instantly to her, for she had been told many times of his eminence among the coloured physicians of Philadelphia. He came at once, trim, alert, intelligent. His brown face was a mask as he asked questions and examined Jean. Long brown fingers probed the baby’s abdomen, methodically, confidently he measured pulse and temperature. Coolly he recited the symptoms as he found them:

“… vomiting, at first contents of stomach, then bilious⁠ ⁠… collapse⁠ ⁠… pallor⁠ ⁠… feeble pulse⁠ ⁠… temperature normal⁠ ⁠… abdomen relaxed⁠ ⁠… increasing prostration⁠ ⁠… rising temperature⁠ ⁠… tumour, sausage-shaped, curving⁠ ⁠…” He turned to Mimi. “What’s been done for him?” Mimi told him of the doctor called by