VIII
Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for
another hour, the eternal Mary and Martha—an immoralist
Mary and a reformist Martha. It was Vida who conquered.
The fact that she had been left out of the campaign for the
new schoolbuilding disconcerted Carol. She laid her dreams
of perfection aside. When Vida asked her to take charge of
a group of Camp Fire Girls, she obeyed, and had definite
pleasure out of the Indian dances and ritual and costumes. She
went more regularly to the Thanatopsis. With Vida as lieutenant
and unofficial commander she campaigned for a village
nurse to attend poor families, raised the fund herself, saw to
it that the nurse was young and strong and amiable and
intelligent.
Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman
and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its
air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not
because, in Vida's words, "this Scout training will help so
much to make them Good Wives," but because she hoped
that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their
dinginess.
She helped Ella Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny
triangular park at the railroad station; she squatted in the
dirt, with a small curved trowel and the most decorous of
gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella about the
public-spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt that she was
scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of
incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking from
trains saw her as a village woman of fading prettiness,
incorruptible virtue, and no abnormalities; the baggageman
heard her say, "Oh yes, I do think it will be a good example
for the children"; and all the while she saw herself running
garlanded through the streets of Babylon.
Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther
than recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she
rediscovered Hugh. "What does the buttercup say, mummy?"
he cried, his hand full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with
pollen. She knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made
life more than full; she was altogether reconciled . . .
for an hour.
But she awoke at night to hovering death. She crept away
from the hump of bedding that was Kennicott; tiptoed into
the bathroom and, by the mirror in the door of the
medicine-cabinet, examined her pallid face.
Wasn't she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew
plumper and younger? Wasn't her nose sharper? Wasn't
her neck granulated? She stared and choked. She was only
thirty. But the five years since her marriage—had they not
gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had been under
ether; would time not slink past till death? She pounded her
fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely
against the indifferent gods:
"I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so—Vida
and Will and Aunt Bessie—they tell me I ought to be satisfied
with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums
in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be
annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not
content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I
want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do
they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes
at Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness?"
