She was shocked and indignant at the casualness of Dr. Stephenson’s manner. He was a ruddy bulky man, his hair almost white and his dark eyes almost concealed under the drapery of his brows, with a tenor voice and an engaging homely urbanity; and he asked her if she had had a cold recently and whether her bowels were regular. He also inquired regarding morning nausea and a score of other phenomena. There was no examination; he didn’t even take her pulse. When he asked if she was married the only answer he got was Lora’s quick flush that included even her ears.
“Nothing to brag about,” he said finally, looking at his watch. “Anybody might skip a period any time. Cold, or excitement, or a little congestion. Nature has her little pranks. Watch yourself and don’t do anything foolish and take one of these pills three times a day for four days and if necessary come back here four weeks from today at ten o’clock in the morning.”
“I can’t; I work.”
“All right, seven o’clock then.”
She paid him three dollars, and left, walking slowly and reluctantly down the street toward the apartment. Cecelia would be there, and she didn’t want to talk to her or listen to her. She wanted less, just now, to go to the room where Pete would be. She had overcome her dread and consulted the oracle, not without a vast swallowing of qualms and panic hesitations — and here she was, no better off than before. Another whole month of this business? Not even sure of what to hope for. That doctor was an ignorant old fool; surely there was some way of telling. Oh, she thought, and all her heart was in it— Oh, if she could only talk it over with Cecelia! But she pressed her lips tightly together and shook her head.
Four weeks later it was settled; Dr. Stephenson confessed that it would be most extraordinary for nature to carry a prank to this extreme, with all the corroborating symptoms. Yes, no doubt of it, another miracle had been performed, as he playfully put it. Then, as Lora sat and stared helplessly at him, he volunteered an offer to act as guide and counsellor during the pre-natal period, and got out of a drawer of his desk a card on which to record her name and address and other pertinent information. Lora stood up abruptly and shook her head.
“Thanks, no, it isn’t necessary. I shall probably be going home — that is — I don’t know what I’m going to do exactly—”
He insisted on the name and address with such emphasis that after she got out to the sidewalk again she kept looking back over her shoulder, wondering if she were being followed. Then she felt the absurdity of it and resolutely kept her face straight ahead until she reached her own address; but there the impulse again overcame her, she couldn’t resist a swift anxious glance to the left as she entered the vestibule.
What made it worse — or better, she didn’t know which — was Pete Halliday’s announcement, made a few days earlier, of his intention to join the Canadian army at the end of June, immediately after commencement. In less than a month, then, Pete would be gone. He could say that, or she could say it, aloud even, to herself, but it didn’t mean much of anything in the face of her present devouring delight at feeling herself in his arms, feeling his caresses and kisses, above all feeling herself dropping with him into that whirling pool of madness where the senses ceased to exist and everything, life itself, fainted away into an ecstasy of groans and writhings and convulsions. She loved that. “I love it, you don’t know how I love it,” she would say to him, crouching over him, running the fingers of both hands through his hair, tousling him beyond remedy. She loved every bit of it, from the moment when they met at the corner of Stanton Avenue and he would grin at her and squeeze her arm — even that thrilled her so that she trembled all over — to the end, the next mornings when she would climb softly out of bed so as not to disturb his sleep, dress hurriedly and trot down to the street-car on the way to her job at the switchboard. He had rented a room on Cameron Street, only a dozen blocks or so from the apartment, and nearly every night she was there with him; the exceptions were of his choosing, left to her there would have been none. Dining at a little Italian restaurant down the street and then going usually directly to the room — a program that was varied only now and then by a theatre or a movie or a walk to the lake front and back — he would want to smoke and talk, or read aloud perhaps, but she would have none of it. With a thousand tricks and traps she would tease him out of it, and in the end he would respond with an energy and insane ardor that sometimes genuinely frightened her, though she would have bit off her tongue rather than confess it. Then he would dress again, usually leaving off the necktie, sometimes even the coat, when the warm May evenings came, and go to fetch a pitcher of beer from the corner saloon; and she would listen to him contentedly for hours, no matter what flights he attempted, until the time arrived to go to bed in earnest. Not that he was then permitted to go quietly to sleep; she had first to sit on his stomach, tie ribbons in his hair, make sure if he had any new moles, find out how hard a pinch he could take without squealing; and this led not infrequently to further and more exhausting delights, so that sometimes when the alarm sounded in the morning she felt that she would give all the wealth of a million worlds just to lie there one more hour. Pete never heard the alarm at all.
How glad she was now for the pile of crisp twenties in the handkerchief drawer! It held out bravely; for while all girlish caution and reserve of her body had expired in one swift leaping flame, other cautions not only remained, they took on a new shrewdness and ingenuity. For one thing she kept her job. When Pete asked her why — for he had soon perforce learned that the switchboard was not her only source of income — she would pull his nose and tell him it was none of his business. (Rarely was she so far away from him that she couldn’t pull his nose without moving anything but her arm.) Declaring that the little Italian restaurant was just as good, she would no longer go to Dillon’s because it was too expensive; she limited the movies to once a week, and all but abolished the theatre entirely. Pete would make faces and roar against her tyranny but offered no serious objection. She had the good sense never to suggest the ignominy and outrage of riding on a street-car; it was always either taxi or walk, and always he would just as soon walk if time did not press and there was any chance of her keeping up. She developed a gait that was very effective, a sort of compromise between a walk and a lope, and dared him to lose her.
After her second visit to the doctor she grew more sedate. He could either walk more slowly, she said, or go on alone; for her part she was tired of galloping frantically at his heels until her breath gave out. “What’s the matter?” he demanded, “I thought you liked it.” For reply she would grab his coat and pull him back, and he would slacken his pace for a few blocks, then gradually and unconsciously work back into his stride until she pulled him up again.
The two last Sundays in June they took trips to the lake shore, north of the city, a short journey by train to a spot where two or three dilapidated huts stood isolated on a sandy strip of beach. The huts were abandoned and Pete said he had never seen any sign of life around them; he had discovered the place by accident, the preceding summer on a walking trip. They took their lunch and ate on the sand in the sun, and Lora found that and the swimming delightful; but what she liked most about it was the hour after lunch in his arms on the sand with the sun insolently staring at them, and the cool breeze on her naked thighs as she would lie afterwards not bothering to put her skirt down, learning to breathe again. The breeze caressed her skin as she lay with her head on his shoulder, his arm encircling her and her own arm lying dead across him; his eyes would be open gazing at the sky above, while hers would open and close indifferently and indolently, and she would wonder what he was thinking about without daring or caring enough to ask. Or he would perchance talk, as he did when once the breeze deposited on his cheek a gossamer thread of white, lighter than a feather, with a tiny brown speck at one end. She picked it up and laid it on his lips, and he gave a puff and off it went again.