Slackening her steps, the girl remembered, with a stab of reproach, that Mrs. Birdsong was very ill and might die. "It is too dreadful," she added in a whisper. "It would be too dreadful to die in the spring."
But the thought was as empty as her voice. No matter how hard she tried, she could not make herself feel that illness and death really touched her. She could not believe that anything in the world mattered, except to be alive and to know what she wanted from life. She adored Mrs. Birdsong. She adored her so passionately that it was impossible to associate her with illness or death. "God wouldn't let it happen to her," she said, putting the fear out of her mind. "God wouldn't let her suffer like that." The next instant her thoughts sprang back to herself and to the promise of joy that glittered in the vagueness ahead. At one moment she longed to go away from Queenborough—to go anywhere. But immediately afterwards, she would think of her grandfather, too old and feeble to do more than sit in the sun and think about nothing. What could he have to think about since he had given up law? And her mother would miss her, too, she reminded herself. Her poor mother had had, as everybody said, a sad life, though her sad life had failed, apparently, to make her unhappy.
"If only I knew what I wanted," Jenny Blair sighed again; for it had occurred to her that what she really wanted most was something beyond her reach—something as far away as the moon. "Perhaps, if they were to say I could go, I shouldn't wish ever to leave them."
At the end of the yard, she came upon a roofless summer-house smothered in ivy, and when the smoke of a cigar drifted to her, she thought, "Yes, he is there. I knew all the time he was waiting." Without surprise, she felt that she had been coming all her life down this walk to the summer-house where she expected to find him.
"Thank God, it's you, Jenny Blair!" George Birdsong exclaimed, as he caught sight of her. "I was afraid to turn when I heard you coming. Since I stole out for a smoke, I've had to ward off the advances of two nurses and four patients."
He looked harassed and miserable, and there was an anxious question in his usually smiling eyes. Even his skin, which she had thought so fresh and clear, was darkened by smudges of pain and fatigue. Everything about him, from his light chestnut hair, so thick and upspringing that it seemed blown back on his head, to the short curve of his upper lip under the faint moustache, looked dejected and listless. Even his hard, strong body appeared to have given way and softened within from an invisible break. A throb of sympathy pulsed through her, not in her heart alone, but deeper, far deeper. She longed to put her head down on the railing of the summer-house and burst into tears. About what? She did not know. Only she could have wept because something too brilliant to be true was blurred and tarnished by suffering. Yet she couldn't tell why she suffered like this. It was all as vague as the rest of her discontent.
"Do you mind me?" she asked. "I am so sorry. I am waiting for Grandfather."
"No, I'm glad you came." He was still standing beside the bench from which he had risen. "It will do me good to talk to you. I am smoking because I have to. I've lost my nerve, and I have to hold on to something, if it's no bigger than a cigar."
"Yes, I know. I feel that way too." She sat down stiffly on the end of the bench, and he dropped back in his place. The smell of his cigar made everything more alive, and she remembered that Grandfather had said a man could always smoke himself into submission to fate. That was when Doctor Bridges had taken away his pipe because of a cough. She couldn't say it aloud to anybody older than John Welch, but she wished women in Queenborough would begin smoking in public and not just up the chimney, as Aunt Etta had always done.
"I haven't had a wink of sleep for two nights and scarcely any for a week," Mr. Birdsong said, and his tone sounded hurt and astonished, as if he were protesting against an injustice. "How can I sleep when Eva is going through hell? I was afraid to drop off lest she should wake up and want me. And now my nerves are all shot to pieces. Don't get the idea I've been drinking. I haven't. I haven't touched a drop, and I'm not going to touch a drop until all this is over."
Sinking back in the corner of the rustic bench, Jenny Blair stared at him with eyes that she felt were expressionless. Though she was aching with sympathy, she could think of nothing to say that seemed right in her mind. Never before had she seen him stripped of his charm, his gaiety, his effervescent good-humour. Yet, in some strange way she couldn't explain, she found that she liked him better when he appeared merely human and suffering.
"You're sure you don't mind my talking?" he asked abruptly. "It makes it easier for me if I can talk to somebody. I have to get away from things. I'm not like a woman."
"Women want to get away too."
"No, you're wrong about that." She could see that he was not interested in the point. "You don't know anything about women. Not yet. Women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting. But men are different. Men must get away or take a drink, one or the other. Is your grandfather in the hospital?"
"Yes, she wanted to see him alone. That's why I'm keeping William. Where's William?" She glanced round the garden, and at the sound of his name, William came, with his tongue lolling out, and stretched himself on a bed of grasses and clover. "I hope," she added in a tone softened to affliction, "that it isn't really serious."
He had finished one cigar and was immediately beginning another. "You don't know what you are talking about," he replied, and she noticed that the fingers with which he struck a match were shaking. "Everything like that is serious. And it's Eva!" He almost cried the words in his agony. "It's Eva! I know I oughtn't to talk to you like this. Don't listen to me. You're only a child."
"I'm seventeen and a half."
"That's only a child. But you understand. You always understood things."
She looked at him gravely, still speaking in the firm and soothing tone she had learned from her mother. "I don't think you bear trouble as well as she does."
"As Eva? Of course I don't. If I could go away or take a drink, I shouldn't keep on smoking one cigar after another."
"Then why don't you go away or take a drink?"
He answered with a gesture of irritation. "I told her I'd stay by her and not touch a drop, and I'm going to keep my word. I'm going to keep my word to her once. If I were to go home, even for a minute, the temptation might be too strong for me. The best thing I can do is to sit here until your grandfather goes and they send for me."
"I wish I could help."
"You're helping just by letting me talk. If I talked like this to other people, they would think I was out of my head. But you don't."
"No, I don't," she responded proudly. In spite of her effort to sound firm and soothing, she was unable to banish a note of triumph. She tried to feel sad and hopeless because Mrs. Birdsong, whom she had always adored, was ill and unhappy and a surgeon would be obliged to disfigure her lovely body; but the regret slipped like quicksilver out of her mind, and the place it had occupied was overflowing the next instant with a sensation of surprise and delight. Life was adorable. How she wished everybody in the world could be happy! "Poor Mrs. Birdsong," she repeated vacantly to herself. "Poor Mrs. Birdsong;" and immediately afterwards, she began to wonder if she really wanted to go away. It might be more fun to stay in Queenborough and go to balls and cotillions, and have all the lovely dresses her mother would order from New York and Paris. Through the mesh of ivy, as rusty as old iron, she could see the tall, pale grasses and the white heads of clover racing faster and faster in the April wind, which was scented with Mr. Birdsong's cigar. And it seemed a part of the spring frolic that the smoke of his cigar should be strangely exciting and mysterious as it drifted about her.