Mr. Moore grinned at her, his gums toothless. “Foreign letter for you,” he said. He liked to bring her a foreign letter. “Makes your eyes shine!” he said, as he always did.
“Good!” she cried heartily. “I knew something nice would happen — it’s one of those mornings!”
“It’s not a bad day,” Mr. Moore admitted. It was so warm he had taken off his coat and was in his brown vest and gray chambray shirt. He was a little embarrassed as she reached out her hand freely for the letter. “I might have kept on my coat if I’d known you were coming out,” he apologized.
She took the letter and smiled at him warmly. It was Rose’s letter, the address neatly typed. Rob had never written. Rob was so busy, Rose said — and he had his own parents to whom to write. Rob was opening a new field often, Rob was pushing northwest among the Mohammedan peoples, over the deserts, into the high barren plateaus near Tibet, where the men looked like Indians, lean and dark and fierce.
“Well, you’ll be wanting to read your letter,” Mr. Moore said. His car set up a fury of noise and stirred a rush of dust. He jerked it into movement and urged the motor with a clatter of gears, and the car, choking, was on its way.
She thrust the letter into her dress and went upstairs to the attic. It was midmorning, and there was a pause in the work. In a few moments she must go to the kitchen and peel potatoes. But these few moments were empty. Paul was asleep in a clothes basket under an apple tree. She was always happiest when he was asleep. He was just a little boy asleep. The attic was beginning to seem a room of her own. It was her uncontrollable instinct to make a room pretty. She had made little ruffled green curtains for the gable window and a cover for the box. Last winter she had sewed rags into a round rug. Bart’s mother had showed her how. They were rags of colorless old work shirts too torn to wear, but she had dyed them green and brown. She sat down on a barrel chair she had found in the attic and had covered with the green curtain stuff. Now she tore open the letter.
It had always been a luxury to read Rose’s letters over and over slowly, to extract from them every picture. Slowly through Rose’s meager descriptions she had pieced the picture of a square mission house, dark servants coming and going, a garden thick with ferns and spotted lilies and quick-growing plants. “But, alas, there are snakes and centipedes,” Rose had written. “We have to keep continual watch over David.” David she saw clearly, a small, too thin, intrepid child. David was always running away. David was continually being sought for and found down by the riverside among the junkmen, or in the marketplace. Sometimes they found him first, but other times before they found him there would be knocking at the compound gate and a man would be there, a bare-legged farmer or a riksha coolie, holding the small boy firmly by the hand.
“He runs away in spite of everything,” Rose wrote anxiously. “Nothing will keep him inside the compound walls.”
She had read every letter absorbed, eager to see David, laughing at David, ten thousand miles away.
She tore open the thin Chinese envelope … But this was not true, not these words typed scantily here. A letter could not carry a message like this, a common letter! The lines ran together as her eyes read them. Now let her begin again carefully and quietly disentangle the words. The name of John Stuart — that was the doctor at the station — Rose had told her about John Stuart, a little. “He is a faithful worker,” Rose had said, “a man of few words.” Few words! In this handful of words he wrote, “And without warning bandits came into the town and forced the compound gates. Mr. and Mrs. Winters were killed almost immediately, we heard later from those who were watching in the crowd. The children were saved by their faithful nurse. The little girl was eleven days old. We escaped—” The lines were tangling and twisting again.
… “Rose, you are to stay here in bed and keep the children here and the amah with you, I shall go out to meet them. I shall speak to them quietly and tell them we are here only to help the people, to give them the true knowledge of God. You aren’t afraid?”
“No, Rob.” Rose was lying on the bed in the middle of the room, looking at him. She looked like a young girl again suddenly, smiling, her eyes shining. “I feel as though all my life has led up to this hour.”
“God, in whom we have believed—” he said steadfastly, his hand on the door. There was a great roaring from the street.
“In whom we have believed,” she repeated, her voice thrilling through the words. He opened the door quickly and went out. The silent little boy broke away from the Chinese woman’s grasp and ran to the window. He screamed suddenly, loudly, “Mother, they hit—”
The door burst open and the men surged into the room. He was lost — his mother was lost. It was like water rushing into the door and drowning them. A hand reached out and pulled him …
“They were found, he upon the threshold,” the letter said, “stabbed, and she, stripped and stabbed in the bedroom of their little house against the city wall. It was probably done very quickly. They were buried in the garden secretly at night by friends … I am bringing the children home.”
She sat with the letter in her lap, trying to know that they were dead. She had been trusting Rose to pray for her, and Rose for weeks had been lying folded in her grave. She would have said that surely she must have known it, that her hope, flying through space, would have met a barrier and dropped, daunted. There had been no sign. She had not felt Rose dead. She had not known. But all the time Rose was dead.
Now, any day, following this letter, this man would come bringing Rose’s two children across the sea to her, to be hers. Under this roof she must somehow make a place for them, too. The attic stretched about her, down to the eaves. If she could put two small beds there at the south, away from the wind—
Through the glorious still day she moved in silence. She could not speak to anyone yet. She went in quiet dazed mourning, tears often in her eyes. Whatever she did, she saw Rose at some past moment — Rose, demure even when she was very small, decided, knowing always what she would do, sure of how to make her life. But she could not decide against death. As reasonless as idiocy was death. One could only accept.
She went the length of the day and of the next day, death a secret in her. It would mean nothing to them that Rose was dead. They had never seen Rose, Rose standing to receive the dress like a shower of summer flowers about her white shoulders, Rose moving about the house with her quiet beaming look.
Bart’s father said fretfully, “All this government fuss and fidget with farming isn’t going to do any good. Things are getting worse all the time. In my dad’s day—”
Rose was lying now ten thousand miles away, on a low hill overlooking a Tibetan plain, in a garden beside a city wall. … “Apples won’t sell more than a couple of dollars a barrel this fall,” he continued. “Stew up as much as you can, Minna. We’ll eat apples.” And John Stuart was bringing two children to her, two more little children … “Don’t see how Annie and I can live on the little I get,” Sam was saying. He was afraid of his father and his face was redder than ever. “She’s a good manager, but—”
“She’ll have to be,” his father said. He soaked a crust in his coffee and sucked it … The children could eat apples and bread and milk. She’d get food for them. She could find a job. But she had less than two hundred dollars left out of the five hundred. Week by week it had gone for little Frank.
“She can’t manage what she hasn’t got!” Sam cried, goaded.