Again there was a slight pause, and then Annie turned to Ruth with the manner of being bound to get right into the thing she had come to say.

"I didn't wait longer, Ruth, because I was afraid you might get away and I wondered,"--this she said diffidently, as one perhaps expecting too much--"if there was any chance of your coming out to make me a little visit before you go back.

"You know,"--she turned hastily to Ted, turning away from the things gathering in Ruth's eyes, "the country is so lovely now. I thought it might do Ruth good. She must be tired, after the long journey--and all.

I thought a good rest--" She turned back to Ruth. "Don't you think, Ruth," she coaxed, "that you'd like to come out and play with my baby?"

And then no one knew what to do for suddenly Ruth was shaken with sobs.

Ted was soothing her, telling Annie that naturally she was nervous that night. "Ted," she choked, in a queer, wild way, laughing through the sobs, "did you _hear_? She wants me to come out and play with her _baby_!"

Harriett got up and walked to the other side of the room.

Ruth--laughing, crying--was repeating: "She wants me to play with her _baby_!" Harriett thought of her own children at home, whom Ruth had not seen. She listened to the plans Annie and Ted and Ruth were making and wretchedly wished she had done differently years before.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ruth had been with Annie for five days now; the original three days for which she had said she could come had been lengthened to a week, and she knew that she would not want to go even then. For here was rest. Here she could forget about herself as set apart from others. Here she did not seem apart. After the stress of those days at home it was good to rest in this simple feeling of being just one with others. It was good to lie on the gra.s.s under the trees, troubled thoughts in abeyance, and feel spring in the earth, take it in by smell and sound. It was wonderfully good to play with the children, to lie on the gra.s.s and let the little two year old girl--Annie's baby--pull at her hair, toddling around her, cooing and crowing. There was healing in that. It was good to be some place where she did not seem to cause embarra.s.sment, to be where she was wanted. After the strain of recent events the simple things of these days were very sweet to her. It had become monstrous always to have to feel that something about her made her different from other people. There was something terrible in it--something not good for one. Here was release from that.

And it was good to be with Annie; they had not talked much yet--not seriously talked. Annie seemed to know that it was rest in little things Ruth needed now, not talk of big ones. They talked about the chickens and the cows, the flowers and the cauliflowers, about the children's pranks. It was restoring to talk thus of inconsequential things; Ruth was beginning to feel more herself than she had felt in years. On that fifth day her step was lighter than when she came; it was easier to laugh. Hers had once been so sunny a nature; it was amazingly easy to break out of the moroseness with which circ.u.mstances had clouded her into that native sunniness. That afternoon she sat on the knoll above the house, leaning back against a tree and smiling lazily at the gamboling of the new little pigs.

Annie was directing the boy who had been helping her cut asparagus to carry the baskets up where Ruth was sitting. "I'm going to talk to you while I make this into bunches, Ruth," she called.

"I'll help," Ruth called back with zest.

They talked at first of the idiosyncrasies of asparagus beds, of the marketing of it; then something Annie said set Ruth thinking of something that had happened when they were in high school. "Oh, do you remember, Annie--" she laughingly began. There was that sort of talk for awhile--"Do you remember...?" and "Oh, whatever became of...?"

As they worked on Ruth thought of the strangeness of her being there with this girl who, when they were in school together, had meant so little to her. Her own work lagged, watching Annie as with quick, sure motions she made the asparagus into bunches for market. She did things deftly and somehow gave the feeling of subordinating them to something else, of not letting them take all of her. Ruth watched her with affectionate interest; she wore an all-over gingham ap.r.o.n, her big sun hat pushed back from her browned, thin face; she was not at all attractive unless one saw the eager, living eyes--keenly intelligent eyes. Ruth thought of her other friends--the girls who had been her friends when she was in school and whom she had not seen now; she wondered why it was Annie had none of the feeling that kept those other girls away.

Annie's husband was a slow, stolid man; Ruth supposed that in his youth, when Annie married him, he had perhaps been attractive in his stalwartness. He was sluggish now; good humored enough, but apparently as heavy in spirit as in body. Things outside the material round of life--working, eating, sleeping--simply did not seem to exist for him.

At first she wondered how Annie could be content with life with him, Annie, who herself was so keenly alive. Thinking of it now it seemed Annie had the same adjustment to him that she had to the asparagus,--something subordinated, not taking up very much of herself.

She had about Annie, and she did not know just why she had it, the feeling that here was a person who could not be very greatly harmed, could not be completely absorbed by routine, could not, for some reason she could not have given, be utterly vanquished by any circ.u.mstance. She went about her work as if that were one thing--and then there were other things; as if she were in no danger of being swallowed up in her manner of living. There was something apart that was dauntless. Ruth wondered about her, she wanted to find out about her. She wanted for herself that valiant spirit, a certain unconquerableness she felt in Annie.

Annie broke a pause to say: "You can't know, Ruth, how much it means to have you here."

Ruth's face lighted and she smiled; she started to speak, but instead only smiled again. She wanted to tell what it meant to her to be there, but that seemed a thing not easily told.

"I wish you could stay longer," Annie went on, all the while working.

"So--" she paused, and continued a little diffidently--"so we could really get acquainted; really talk. I hardly ever have anyone to talk to," she said wistfully. "One gets pretty lonely sometimes. It would be good to have someone to talk to about the things one thinks."

"What are the things you think, Annie?" Ruth asked impulsively.

"Oh, no mighty thoughts," laughed Annie; "but of course I'm always thinking about things. We keep alive by thinking, don't we?"

Ruth gave her a startled look.

"Perhaps it's because I haven't had from life itself much of what I'd like to have," Annie was going on, "that I've made a world within. Can't let life cheat us, Ruth," she said brightly. "If we can't have things in one way--have to get them in another."

Again Ruth looked at her in that startled way. Annie did not see it, reaching over for more asparagus; she was all the time working along in that quick, sure way--doing what she was doing cleverly and as if it weren't very important. "Perhaps, Ruth," she said after a minute, "that that's why my school-girl fancy for you persisted--deepened--the way it has." She hesitated, then said simply: "I liked you for not letting life cheat you."

She looked up with a quick little nod as she said that but found Ruth's face very serious, troubled. "But I don't think I've done what you mean, Annie," she began uncertainly. "I did what I did--because I had to. And I'm afraid I haven't--gone on. It begins to seem to me now that I've stayed in a pretty small place. I've been afraid!" she concluded with sudden scorn.

"That isn't much wonder," Annie murmured gently.

"But with me," she took it up after a little, "I've had to go on." Her voice went hard in saying it. "Things would have just shut right down on me if I would have let them," she finished grimly.

"I married for pa.s.sion," she began quietly after a minute. "Most people do, I presume. At least most people who marry young."

Ruth colored. She was not used to saying things right out like that.

"Romantic love is a wonderful thing," Annie pursued; "I suppose it's the most beautiful thing in the world--while it lasts." She laughed in a queer, grim little way and gave a sharp twist to the knot she was tying.

"Sometimes it opens up to another sort of love--love of another quality--and to companionship. It must be a beautiful thing--when it does that." She hesitated a moment before she finished with a dryness that had that grim quality: "With me--it didn't.

"So there came a time," she went on, and seemed newly to have gained serenity, "when I saw that I had to give up--go under--or get through myself what I wasn't going to get through anyone else. Oh, it's not the beautiful way--not the complete way. But it's one way!" she flashed in fighting voice. "I fought for something, Ruth. I held it. I don't know that I've a name for it--but it's the most precious thing in life. My life itself is pretty limited; aside from the children"--she softened in speaking of them--"my life is--pretty barren. And as for the children"--that fighting spirit broke sharply through, "they're all the more reason for not sinking into things--not sinking into _them_," she laughed.

As she stopped there Ruth asked eagerly, eyes intently upon her: "But just what is it you mean, Annie? Just what is it you fought for--kept?"

"To be my _own_!" Annie flashed back at her, like steel.

Then she changed; for the first time her work fell unheeded in her lap; the eyes which a minute before had flashed fight looked far off and were dreamy; her face, over which the skin seemed to have become stretched, burned by years of sun and wind, quivered a little. When she spoke again it was firmly but with sadness. "It's what we think that counts, Ruth.

It's what we feel. It's what we _are_. Oh, I'd like richer living--more beauty--more joy. Well, I haven't those things. For various reasons, I won't have them. That makes it the more important to have all I can take!"--it leaped out from the gentler thinking like a sent arrow.

"n.o.body holds my thoughts. They travel as far as they themselves have power to travel. They bring me whatever they can bring me--and I shut nothing out. I'm not afraid!"

Ruth was looking at her with pa.s.sionate earnestness.

"Over there in that town,"--Annie made a little gesture toward it, "are hundreds of women who would say they have a great deal more than I have.

And it's true enough," she laughed, "that they have some things I'd like to have. But do you think I'd trade with them? Oh, no! Not much! The free don't trade with the bond, Ruth."

And still Ruth did not speak, but listened with that pa.s.sionate intentness.

"There in that town," Annie went on, "are people--most a whole townful of them--who are going through life without being really awake to life at all. They move around in a closed place, doing the same silly little things--copy-cats--repeaters. They're not their _own_--they're not awake. They're like things run by machinery. Like things going in their sleep. Take those girls we used to go to school with. Why, take Edith Lawrence. I see her sometimes. She always speaks sweetly to me; she means to be nice. But she moves round and round in her little place and she doesn't even _know_ of the wonderful things going on in the world today! Do you think I'd trade with _her_?--social leader and all the rest of it!" She was gathering together the bundles of asparagus. She had finished her work. "Very sweet--very charming," she disposed of Edith, "but she simply doesn't count. The world's moving away from her, and she,"--Annie laughed with a mild scorn--"doesn't even know that!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It was late when Ruth went to sleep that night; she and Annie talked through the evening--of books Annie was reading, of the things which were interesting her. She was rich in interests; ideas were as personal things to her; she found personal satisfactions in them. She was following things which Ruth knew little about; she had been long away from the centers of books, and out of touch with awakened people. A whole new world seemed to open from these things that were vital to Annie; there was promise in them--a quiet road out from the hard things of self. There were new poets in the world; there were bold new thinkers; there was an amazing new art; science was reinterpreting the world and workers and women were setting themselves free. Everywhere the old pattern was being shot through with new ideas. Everywhere were new attempts at a better way of doing things. She had been away from all that; what she knew of the world's new achievement had seemed unreal, or at least detached, not having any touch with her own life. But as disclosed by Annie those things became realities--things to enrich one's own life. It kindled old fires of her girlhood, fanned the old desire to know. Personal things had seemed to quell that; the storm in her own life had shut down around her. Now she saw that she, like those others whom Annie scorned, had not kept that openness to life, had let her own life shut her in. She had all along been eager for books, but had not been fortunate in the things she had come upon. She had not had access to large libraries--many times not even to small ones; she had had little money for buying books and was so out of touch with the world that she had not had much initiative in trying to get hold of things.

She felt now that she had failed miserably in that, but there were years when she was like a hurt thing that keeps in hiding, most of all wanting to escape more hurt. It had been a weakness--she clearly saw that now, and it had been weakening to her powers. Most of the books she had come upon were of that shut-in life Annie scorned, written from within that static living, and for it. People in them had the feeling it was right people should have, unless there were bad people in the book, and then they were very definitely bad. Many of those books had been not only unsatisfying, but saddening to her, causing her to feel newly apart from the experiences of people of her kind.

But now Annie's books let her glimpse a new world--a world which questioned, a world of protest, of experiment, a world in which people unafraid were trying to find the truth, trying to build freshly, to supplant things outworn with the vital forms of a new reality. It was quickening. It made her eager. She was going to take some of those books home, she would send for others, would learn how to keep in touch with this new world which was emerging from the old. It was like breaking out from a closed circle. It was adventure!

Even after she went to her room that night, late though it was, she did not go at once to bed. She sat for a time looking off at the lights of that town for which she had so long grieved, the town that had shut her out. The fact that it had shut her out had been a determining thing in her life, to her spirit. She wondered now if perhaps she had not foolishly spent herself in grieving for a thing that would have meant little could she have had it. For it seemed now that it had remained very much a fixed thing, and now she knew that, with it all, she herself had not been fixed. The things of which Annie talked, things men of this new day were expressing, roused her like this, not because they were all new, but because of her own inner gropings. Within herself she had been stumbling toward some of those things. Here was the sure expression of some halting thoughts of her own. It was exciting to find that there were people who were feeling the things that, even in that timid, uncertain way, she had come to feel by herself. She had been half afraid to formulate some of the things that had come into her mind. This gathered together the timid little shoots. She was excited about the things of which Annie talked--those new ideals of freedom--not so much because they were new and daring and illumining things, as because they did not come all alien. There was something from within to go out to them. In that--not that there were interesting things she could have from without--but that she, opened to the new stimulus, could become something from within, was the real excitation, the joy of the new promise was there. And this new stir, this promise of new satisfactions, let her feel that her life was not all mapped out, designed ahead. She went to sleep that night with a wonderful new feeling of there being as much for her in life as she herself had power to take.

And she woke with that feeling; she was eager to be up, to be out in the sunshine. Annie, she found, had gone early to town with her vegetables.

Ruth helped eleven-year-old Dorothy, the eldest child, get off for school and walked with her to the schoolhouse half a mile down the road.

The little girl's shyness wore away and she chatted with Ruth about school, about teachers and lessons and play. Ruth loved it; it seemed to set the seal of a human relationship upon her new feeling. What a wonderful thing for Annie to have these children! Today gladness in there being children in the world went out past sorrow in her own deprivation. The night before she had said to Annie, "You have your children. That makes life worth while to you, doesn't it?" And Annie, with that hard, swift look of being ruthless for getting at the truth--for getting her feeling straight and expressing it truly, had answered, "Not in itself. I mean, it's not all. I think much precious life has gone dead under that idea of children being enough--letting them be all. _We_ count--_I_ count! Just leaving life isn't all; living it while we're here--that counts, too. And keeping open to it in more than any one relationship. Suppose they, in their turn, have that idea; then life's never really lived, is it?--always just pa.s.sed on, always _put off_." They had talked of that at some length. "Certainly I want my children to have more than I have," Annie said. "I am working that they may. But in that working for them I'm not going to let go of the fact that I count too. Now's my only chance," she finished in that grim little way as one not afraid to be hard.