"Then I shouldn't stay. I'd go as soon as I could."
"There's Cousin Eva."
"Yes, of course there's Cousin Eva. But she may get well."
"If she gets well, I'll go. I'll go the first of next year. There's a place waiting for me with Burdette in New York. He's one of the very best men in the Neurological Institute."
For the first time she looked at him with animation, almost with interest. "It's good of you to wait," she said, "and I know that she depends on you." Feeling that this perfunctory praise was not sufficient, she added, "I wonder if people always want to go away and be something else? Grandfather thinks they do."
"As long as they're young, and sometimes after they're middle-aged. The trouble is we imagine we can change ourselves by changing our scenery. I feel that way, though I ought to have learned better. I'd like to go away and be free, and I know perfectly well the kind of freedom I am looking for has not yet been invented. After all, Queenborough is only a small patch in the world. It is the same everywhere. People who have tradition are oppressed by tradition, and people who are without it are oppressed by the lack of it—or by whatever else they have put in its place. You want to go to New York and pretend to be unconventional, but nothing is more cramping than the effort to be unconventional when you weren't born so. It is as hard on the nerves as pretending, like Cousin Eva, to be an ideal."
"But all places are not like Queenborough."
"Some are worse, and some are bigger. It is all nonsense to talk as if Southerners were a special breed, all wanting the same things and thinking after the same pattern. There are as many misfit minds here as anywhere else. Washington Street used to be a little Mayfair at the tail end of the procession, and Queenborough has all the foul or stale odours of civilization. If we have our false sense of security, so have New York and London and even Moscow. It looks, by the way, as if England's sense of security is about to be tried. Her next war will probably be with Ulster, and it may come any day."
"Grandfather was telling us that last night. It was dreadful, too, about the killing of the Austrian Crown Prince."
"Yes, but that didn't excite me. Somehow, if anybody has to be sacrificed, I prefer that it should be a crown prince. There are few persons I can spare easier. The thing that pricks through my skin is when some hundreds of poor devils are blown up in a mine owned by philanthropists."
She smiled vaguely. "You are very advanced, aren't you?"
"Perhaps. That depends on the way you're going, I suppose, and on how far you've gone."
"Well, you're different, anyway. That's the reason Grandfather likes you so much, though you never seem to agree about anything. But he says all the Archbalds are eccentric. I suppose it began with his great-aunt Sabina, who was a witch. There were only two witches in the Colony," she added proudly, "and she was one of them. I don't mind that a bit. I think it's nice to be different. Grandfather thinks it hurts dreadfully. That's what he means when he says he made a good living by putting an end to himself. Mrs. Birdsong understands, but I don't."
"You wouldn't, not with your sparrow vision. But it's true, nevertheless. You must be a slave or starve in this damned world. That's the trouble I'm facing now, and it is as true of medicine as of everything else. Conform, or be kicked out."
"If I felt like that," she said when he paused and looked at her with a frown, as if he dreaded yet expected an answer, "I'd go as far away as I could."
"Where? There isn't any place far enough away for a man who asks more civilization, not less. It's silly to talk, as some people do, about seeking an opportunity outside the South, unless, of course, he is merely seeking more patients to experiment on, or more clients to keep out of prison. Our civilization is as good as the rest, perhaps better than most, because it's less noisy; but the whole thing is a hollow crust everywhere. A medical man is expected to take it easier when he calls it anthropology, but I can't see how that helps. They forget that living in anthropology may be quite as disagreeable to a sensitive mind as living in civilization."
She laughed a little vacantly, because she was wondering how she could hurt George at the station to-morrow. Would it be better to behave as if she didn't know he was there or to nod disdainfully when she told Mrs. Birdsong good-bye? "That sounds like Grandfather," she said. "But, you know, he's much happier now than he was in his youth. He thinks you will be less vehement about wrongs when you are older."
"That's easy to say when you are eighty-three; but what are you going to do about living while you still have to live? Of course if you happen to be either a primitive or a pervert, it's a simple problem. Then you can escape to the South Sea Islands, eat breadfruit, and debauch the natives. But suppose you're neither a primitive nor a pervert, but merely civilized. Suppose you ask a better social order, not a worse one--"
"Oh, John, don't say things like that," she broke in hurriedly; for she had seen the curtain at Mrs. Birdsong's window blow out in the sunlight, and that blown curtain had started a strange flutter in all the nerves of her body. Was he standing there at the window? What had happened? Was he really as indifferent as he appeared? Or was he only pretending? Aloud she said in a vacant tone, "You ought to be careful how you talk. People won't want you for a doctor if they think you're not normal."
"You're right," he assented moodily. "I've never talked this way before, not even to your grandfather. Most people would tell you that I'm no worse than a crack-brained Socialist. But something upset me this morning. There was an accident down at the chemical plant, and the helplessness of the poor always makes me see red when I come up against it like that. Especially when there's a fool of a philanthropist standing by who has learned nothing more from two thousand years than 'ye have the poor always with you.' No, I'm not joking. That actually happened. She thinks I'm disqualified as a physician because I told her that poverty is a social disease and should be wiped out like smallpox."
"I must go now. There's Mamma looking for me." She smiled plaintively, as she turned away, and looked back to say over her shoulder, "I'll ask her to find out his name and send some soup to the man who was hurt. Mamma is always doing something for somebody." Oh, yes, she knew, she knew; but she couldn't (and it wasn't her fault) find the poor interesting. She loved life, and she wanted to be happy; and if John called that the sparrow vision—well, there was nothing she could do about it. If attending to your own happiness meant the sparrow vision of life, that vision seemed to her to have its advantages. But the poor, and John also, had been different before she had fallen in love. Perhaps when this ache of hope that was not hope passed out of her heart, she might feel sorry for other people again.
"Well, that's all. Good-bye!" he called derisively.
"Good-bye. I'll see you at the station to-morrow."
On the steps she turned again and looked after him as he walked away from her. "I despise him," she said in a whisper; but she was not thinking of John Welch, she was not even seeing him.
CHAPTER 8
"I didn't speak to him," Jenny Blair said to herself while the train moved away. "He couldn't make me speak to him, not even at the very last minute."
A wave of exultation swept over her. She heard again, with a difference, that strange whisper of excitement among the images in her mind. These images were still vague, but they had ceased to be colourless. Glow and rhapsody were in this thrilling suspense, this burning light that streamed into her thoughts. Though she had not spoken to him, though she had not even looked at him until the last, she had known that he remembered. Without glancing in his direction, she had felt that he was seeking her eyes, that he was asking her to forgive him. But she had resisted. Gravely and tenderly, she had kissed Mrs. Birdsong; gravely and kindly, she had shaken Berry's hand and told her to take care of her mistress; gravely and indifferently, her eyes had wandered from John Welch to her grandfather and from her grandfather to the train that was waiting.