Chapter 9

( Originally Published 1915 )

HILDA WISHES ADELE WOULD KEEP HER HANDS OFF. AND IS SURPRISED TO HEAR HER NAME SPOKEN

THE fact that gave Hilda the deepest pain, during the days of anxious watching that followed the doctor's night call, was that so little could be done to help the baby in its struggle for breath and life. The windows were kept open, day and night; and a fire flickered steadily in the small grate. A screen and draped chair-backs were so placed about the basket as to shield the baby from drafts; and Hilda and Adele between them made a coat of light flannel wadded with cotton batting to keep the thin little body warm. The doctor prescribed little in the way of drugs. It was mainly a question of oxygen and food, he said. Accordingly, Hilda bent all her ingenuity to preparing the precise modification of milk that the baby seemed best able to digest and assimilate.

The doctor had suggested a nurse. But Hilda had shaken her head at this. She would not consider giving up any part of the laborious, hour-by-hour detail of caring for the helpless infant. And the doctor, a middle-aged American, reflectively considering the extraordinarily good-looking woman before him, so unmistakably a woman of training and ability, accepted her decision. And if his reflections, as his shrewd gaze wandered from Hilda to the wan-faced Adele, and from her to the celebrated Blink Moran who at that moment gravely entered the room with a glass of water, ran off into dubious speculation, Hilda never knew it. For once, so deep were her thoughts regarding the frail little life in the basket, she did not consider the conventions at all. The doctor was there because it was his job to be there. He seemed to know his business. And that, in her intensity of feeling, was all she asked of him.

She worked so hard, indeed, during these days, that her mind dwelt only at rare intervals on the curious life she was living. She took to lying down and snatching a few moments of sleep whenever an opportunity offered; usually in Adele's room, because Moran came in and out at all hours. He sat with the baby a good deal, particularly after Hilda's discovery that Adele was eating next to nothing and was really in a run-down condition that bordered on illness. He became as deft as Hilda herself in handling the baby and in smoothing out and rearranging bed linen. During the first day or so Hilda found the extreme intimacy of some of the work rather embarrassing, but, realizing how wholesomely and completely Moran and Adele accepted every natural detail of life she deliberately thrust aside her self-consciousness in the matter.

Rather more difficult than this was the task of familiarizing herself with Adele's artless ways with Moran. Adele usually addressed him as "Dear" and "Dearie." She was continually taking his arm, or stroking his hand. More than once, when Hilda came in from her daily walk, she found Moran seated by the basket, chin on hand, gazing soberly down at the little being that was fighting instinctively and blindly to clear its inflamed bronchial passages and the slightly congested portion of its lungs; and Adele leaning on his shoulder, her arm about his neck, her slim fingers perhaps playing absently in his hair.

It did not seem to Hilda that Adele was in love with Moran. Certainly he was not in love with the girl; for it was invariably toward herself, Hilda reflected, that he showed the unself-conscious solicitude, even tenderness, that she found so restful and pleasing. As nearly as she could understand this rather queer business, he simply took Adele and her little attentions for granted. Certainly he never started or shifted his position when Hilda came in upon them. Nor did he ever himself caress Adele. Hilda told herself that Adele played about him as a child will play about a big dog. But nevertheless, she wished Adele wouldn't do it. More than once, when she found herself alone with Adele, the thought of these free and easy ways intruded into her mind and made her rather stiffer in manner than she would otherwise have been. But this slight stiffness made no difference to Adele. "She's not very fine," Hilda thought. Indeed, the child had early taken to calling Hilda by her given name. She did this quite naturally, as if she never addressed any one in any other way, and yet without the slightest diminution of the deference she so plainly felt toward Hilda.

One afternoon Hilda came in, pausing as usual before opening the door and making a little extra noise as a warning, and found the two, not by the baby, who was sleeping at the moment, but in Adele's room. Moran was seated on the sofa, one knee clasped in his big hands. Adele was curled up on the floor beside him, looking up with an eager light in her eyes. She heard the door open, and beckoned. Hilda winced, but went on into the room with them, threw aside her furs and coat, and dropped into a chair.

"Oh, Hilda, dear," Adele whispered, "what do you think has happened ? You can't guess !"

Hilda smiled, rather wearily, and slowly shook her head.

"But do guess ! It's happened to Blink. And it's wonderful."

Hilda searched her mind.

Adele's face fell. Then, more quietly, she explained. "He's got his match with Carpentier."

Hilda compressed her lips. The simple announcement brought a curious and inexplicable little thrill. She looked, almost shyly, at the big man, her friend, seated there on the sofa. He was utterly unperturbed. She had. never seen him otherwise. She had never heard him utter a hasty or emotional word. She had never even seen him make a hasty motion. He was slow—kind but slow, like the big dog Adele made of him. . . . Yet, the men the had seen fighting on that disconcertingly interesting evening out at Luna Park by the Porte Maillot, had been, every man, alert, swift, rushing creatures, tigers all. This man he was to meet, the great Carpentier, had exhibited a nervous agility in every movement of a finger. And yet Moran was admittedly a match for this alert champion, he was admittedly greater than those vigorous flashing fighters she had seen in action. The crowd that had gazed on him that night with such admiring curiosity knew that. They knew something about him that she, close as she now was to him, did not know at all. The passing thought stirred a curiously unreasonable little rush of emotion within her—an emotion not unlike crude primitive jealousy. Jealousy of a crowd of Frenchmen and women ! . . . Moran himself knew this quality of his own nature, knew it so well that he never bothered to exhibit the faintest flash of it in his ordinary life. He never even seemed to think of it.

Hilda was disturbed—vaguely, but deeply.

Adele was chattering on—"It's to be a month from tonight, out at Luna Park. Blink's to have twenty thousand francs, win, lose or draw, and the championship if he wins. Think of it, Hilda, dear—the heavyweight championship of France. And Blink a middleweight !"

Moran gravely shook his head at this. "Hardly a middleweight, Adele," he said. "I've put on too much for that. I shan't ever make a hundred and fifty-eight again—couldn't do it now, without weakening myself pretty seriously."

"But you won't weigh as much as Carpentier," Adele persisted.

"Pretty near it. I think I'll fight at about a hundred and seventy. That'll be giving him five to ten pounds--not so much !"

Hilda tried to reflect. "You—you'll be pretty busy now," she ventured, making a determined effort to cover her sudden sinking of heart.

He shook his head. "Not so much as if I was really out of condition, and. had to train hard," he replied. "You see, until just lately, I've done gym work and wrestling and sparring, and even some road work now and then—oh, all fall and winter. And I've had fourteen fights since September. I'm really pretty fit right now. Probably for the last week or so, just before the fight, I ought to go out to the country and put in all my time at it . . ."

He hesitated, and his gaze wandered in through the open doorway to the baby's basket. Hilda's gaze followed his. And Adele's. They were silent for a little time.

The baby coughed; and they saw the basket shake with the effort. A faint whimpering followed. Hilda and Adele sprang up as one person and glided swiftly to the basket. Hilda smoothed out the bedding, and changed the baby's position a little. Then she and Adele, one on each side of the basket, stood motionless while the baby drifted off again into a light restless sleep.

Adele was the first to slip back into the other room. Hilda followed.

Moran was still seated, still clasping his knee in those solid hands of his. Adele was kneeling on the sofa beside him and had thrown an arm across his shoulders.

"We've got to work harder now, Hilda," she said, with a desperate sort of earnestness. "I haven't helped very much, but I'm going to do better. We've got to take care of Blink now, too."

He smiled at this. "You haven't got to take care of me, child," he said.

Adele nodded vigorously; her lips compressed, her eyes glistening. "You know, Blink," she insisted, giving his big, quite immovable shoulders an impulsive squeeze with her frail arm, "you've got to have your sleep. We're not going to let you in on the night work any more. You must be in bed every night by ten. If I have to see to it myself. Yes, I'm going to put your light out every night at ten."

Moran smiled again. "Eleven will do, Adele," he said. "Too much sleep is as bad as too little."

Adele merely shook her head at this, very firmly. And Hilda felt uncomfortably out of the situation. She wished Adele would let him alone. She wondered a little, with a strange stirring wonder, what could be the quality in a woman that would enable her to give her caresses so freely. Plainly, a casual embrace meant precisely nothing at all to this natural child of the stage. . . . It was not so with Hilda herself. She felt the color coming into her face, and bit her lip. For her to give a caress now would mean —well, everything. She simply could not do it. Not unless she were ready to give everything. And this was unthinkable. Or was it? Torturingly vivid pictures flashed on her—bits of her own experience with the one man she had loved, the man who had held her close and pressed his lips to hers, the man from whom she had fled in a very panic of the soul and who had been forced, by the fineness of his own nature, to let her go. And ever since, her life had been incomplete. She was a cheated woman. She had worked, and worked, desperately. But now even the work had failed her. . . The worst of it all was the utter confusion of it. She did not know what she was thinking or what she was feeling. There was the baby, suffering, and tugging at her heartstrings. Here was the man who was at once so big and so amazingly light and graceful and whose nature was mysteriously hidden from her, touching and stirring her imagination and making her think of the warm humanizing compensations of love. . . She wished Adele would take her hands off him. And at the thought of the girl, all unconscious of self though she might be, slipping into his room at night and turning out his light, she went cold. Adele must not do that. She must not do that !

There was some relief from those queer thoughts in the fact that Moran, when he now spoke, addressed himself to her and not to Adele.

"It's queer," he was saying, "but every time, in my big fights, there has been something like this. When I met Willie Lewis in California—the first time—my mother was sick. She died three days after the fight. And at the time of my match with Billy Papke . ." He did not go on with the story. Hilda caught him studying her, and thought that perhaps he feared depressing her. "It needn't really make so much difference," he concluded. "I must do several hours' work each day, say every morning. And then, at night, before I go to bed, I'll put on a sweater and trot out to the fortifications and run for half an hour. That, and being fairly regular about my sleep, will be enough—up to the last week. Just to keep fit, and work up my wind a little." He glanced in again through the doorway, and his voice took on. a gentler quality. "The doctor told me this noon, when I met him down-stairs, that we'll be through the worst of this within one or two weeks. It isn't going to be a really severe case, he thinks, even if it turns out to be pneumonia. It's only the weakness of the baby that worries him. And he said—I meant to tell you this, Hilda—that the way you're working out the feeding proposition will save her if anything can."

Hilda sat motionless in her chair, her hands limp in her lap. The color, that had already risen in her face, mounted richly now. It seemed to her that her face was fairly burning. For one unthinkable thing had happened on this instant. He had called her "Hilda." He had crossed a line. From this moment she would be "Hilda" to him; no doubt of that now. She, willy-nilly, had crossed the line with him. She wondered, with a tightening of her nerves, what experiences might lie on the farther side of that line. She wished, almost petulantly, that he hadn't spoken that name so calmly, so casually, almost as if it meant nothing at all to him. She wondered, even, if he knew he had spoken it.

She drew in a long breath. "I'm glad," she said, "that he feels that way about it." Then she rose, and busied herself picking up her coat and her furs and putting them away in her own room. She sat down beside the baby before she realized that her hat was still on her head. So she got up again, took it off, and put it in its compartment in her wardrobe trunk. And all the time her color was up, and her pulse beat fast, and there was a pressure at her temples and at the back of her head. She wished Adele would come in here with her, and felt relieved when the girl did. Moran went out.