Greeley would be there this Sunday evening, and perhaps Whittier, too, thought Rachel pleasurably. She had only recently met the Carys, and though she refused most social events, she found that she was anticipating this one with eager curiosity, and she determined to take Fey with her. It was what the girl needed; diversion, new people, change. Rachel reproached herself for not having thought of it sooner. Fey led too monotonous a life, no wonder she precipitated herself into foolish situations like the meeting with Simeon Tower. Fey had not mentioned him again and Rachel had persuaded herself that the incident was over.
After breakfast she called Fey into the little sitting-room, broached the subject of the Misses Carys’ party, and was soon disillusioned.
‘But Doctor Rachel,’ cried Fey, distressed but inflexible, ‘I can’t go with you. I’m driving out with Mr. Tower this afternoon.’
‘Fey—thee mustn’t! If he’s coming, tell him thee can’t go. I want thee with me. Thee’ll meet real people, young ones, too, worth while. I beg thee, child—don’t be so stubborn!’
It was hopeless. Fey had promised to go with Tower, and go she would. Rachel was too proud to implore, and too just to command. She had no authority over Fey, and the girl liberally repaid in work the food and shelter which she received from the Infirmary. So Rachel said nothing more. At four o’clock she watched from her window when the Tower brougham clattered up to the curb. The matched bays sparkled with silver trimmings, their coats glowed like polished walnut, their blackened hoofs were as glossy as the maroon trim on the carriage. The two men on the box were resplendent in green livery and leather boots. Rachel saw the footman hold the door for Fey, and Fey, radiant in her feuille-morte dress, give him a gracious nod of thanks as she stepped into the brougham. She acts as though she were born to all that, thought Rachel, startled. And as the carriage turned on Second Avenue to drive north, she had a fleeting glimpse of the two inside. She saw the angle of Tower’s back in the heavy furred greatcoat and his blunt profile inclined near Fey. There was unmistakable pursuit in his attitude, his hand, conspicuous in a mauve glove, hovered near the girl’s knee, and Fey, though she sat demurely in the extreme right corner of the carriage, had her head tilted receptively and she was laughing. Rachel saw the flash of even white teeth, and realized, with new dismay, how seldom she had seen Fey laugh.
Rachel turned sadly from the window and began to dress herself for the Cary party. She arrived at five to find the little house already full. The Irish maid ushered her upstairs to the drawingroom and that forest glade was appropriately murmurous with birdlike voices. Phoebe and Alice received her most graciously. They liked entertaining ‘strong-minded women’ of accomplishment, knowing that for all their show of disdain it put the men on their mettle, and bred stimulating talk. There were several feminists present today and Alice Cary suavely drew Rachel over to a red settee where Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were discussing—not woman’s rights, but the deplorable advent of the bustle. Rachel had no interest in fashion and quietly smiling and seating herself she examined the other guests. Whittier had not come, after all, and Rachel, who had just read Snowbound and had looked forward to expressing her admiration, was disappointed. Bayard Taylor was there, however, holding forth on his recent trip to Russia and at the same time paying court to the redoubtable Fanny Fern who made more money from her writings than any other authoress. Fanny was accompanied by her husband, James Parton, who gravitated persistently, notebook in hand, around Horace Greeley, a tall, shambling figure with a ludicrous old baby’s face behind steel spectacles. Mr. Parton was industriously gathering material for a biography. Rachel was not much impressed by Mr. Greeley, whose squeaky voice and incessant flow of nervous opinions irritated her, nor did she read Mr. Greeley’s Tribune. The two strong-minded ladies on the settee beside her had progressed from bustles to an enthusiastic condemnation of a Mrs. Victoria Claflin Woodhull’s theories about free love, a subject as foreign to Rachel’s interest as bustles. She began to feel out of place and a trifle forlorn. Her mind wandered back to the Infirmary and the management of a difficult case in Ward B; from there it moved with the familiar stab of worry to Fey.
The Cary sisters well merited their reputation as hostesses. They had instantly noticed Rachel’s isolation and Alice now advanced across the room with a dark-haired young man in tow.
‘Doctor Moreton, may I present Mr. Ewen MacDonald? ’ said Alice, smiling. ‘A stranger to our shores. Mr. Greeley brought him. He is much interested in your Infirmary and indeed in all our social conditions.’
The young man smiled and bowed, clasping Rachel’s hand in a quick, warm grip. ‘May I—Doctor?’ he asked, pulling up a chair beside her. ‘I’d like very much to talk to you, but you’re my first woman physician and I’m dreadful awed.’
His gray eyes twinkled as he smiled at her and Rachel laughed. She liked him at once. He had simplicity and humor. He seemed so much interested in the Infirmary that Rachel found herself talking enthusiastically, and she was woman enough to be flattered that he showed no signs of restlessness. He brought her claret lemonade and cake, then reseated himself by her side in spite of the inviting glances sent him by Fanny Fern and a lovely languishing Miss Elkins.
Rachel was woman enough, too, to find Mr. MacDonald’s own story quite romantic. Though he gave few details, she gathered that he had been sent from Scotland to find a lost heiress in the West, a distant cousin of his.
‘And did you never find her?’ asked Rachel.
‘Never,’ he answered. ‘She’d vanished like an elf-wife and my quest is a failure.’ He spoke in a light tone, but he frowned a little and Rachel saw the subject disturbed him.
‘It’s quite like one of Fanny Fern’s own romances, I believe,’ she said, smiling and nodding toward that lady across the room, ‘and no doubt it will yet have a happy ending.’
‘I fear not,’ he answered, drawing his thick brows together. ‘Old Sir James, the laird who sent me, is dying, and I sail for Scotland in the morning.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Rachel, with warm sympathy.
At once MacDonald smiled. ‘You’re a very nice woman, Doctor Moreton, and I don’t mean to sound dejected. I’ve had a rare good time in your land. I’ve seen it all from Boston to the Pacific, from Chicago to New Orleans, and I like it. Sometime I’ll be back, but now I must off to my ain bit country and settle down again.’
He reminded her of someone, Rachel thought suddenly. Was it his voice, or was it the slow, warm smile? The impression was vague and yet pleasurable. She searched desultorily for the reason while they went on chatting. As usually happens, the feeling of recognition lessened as she tried to pin it down. By the time new arrivals surged into the little drawing-room and the hostesses tactfully rearranged groupings, Rachel had lost the impression entirely. All during their conversation she had been charmed and stimulated, and she never once thought of Fey.
At nine o’clock, Doctor Moreton’s hackney cab was announced, and Rachel was sorry that she had ordered it so early, for the talk had become general. The opening of the New West was the topic, and Greeley and Bayard Taylor engaged in a sparkling duet of enthusiasm, supported now and then by a quietly witty interpolation from MacDonald. He was the youngest man there and yet he held his own with grace and distinction. They listened to him.
Rachel left regretfully, feeling a real disappointment that Mr. MacDonald was sailing so soon.
She arrived home at the Infirmary full of the evening’s pleasure and anxious to share it. She went up to Fey’s room and found the girl already changed back into her uniform and the baby sleeping quietly in her cradle.
‘You’ve had a good time!’ cried Fey, her half-guilty, half-triumphant flush fading as she saw Rachel’s face. She had been braced for a scolding.
‘Thee should have been there, child!’ Rachel sat down on the cot. ‘Such good talk, and interesting people with ideas. And a charming young Scotsman. Thee would have liked him, thee couldn’t help it.’ ?
??
‘Perhaps I might have,’ said Fey sweetly, and without the faintest interest. She would not hurt Rachel, but she longed to be left alone again to relive those hours with Simeon, to evaluate each incident and decide on a course. Matters were moving very fast. They had driven up the Bloomingdale Road to Claremont. There they had had champagne punch and cakes and attracted a good deal of attention from a party of Sunday excursionists who recognized Simeon. So deeply had he been concentrating on her that he had scarcely noticed this attention, and Fey, remembering the nervous glances he had cast about during their other outing to the Mall, was delighted by this evidence of his increasing absorption. He had given her a thousand dollars for the turquoise, presented the roll of bills with an embarrassment which she did not share in the acceptance. It was far more than she had expected, but she was completely ignorant of its market value, and she was, moreover, well aware that the transaction had unexpressed overtones.
On the long drive back, she had let him kiss her. It had been almost a boy’s kiss—fumbling, overeager, and while she responded to him with instinctive tact, she had felt a sudden maternal pity.
‘Thee’s not listening, Fey,’ said Rachel. She had been telling Fey more about young MacDonald. Fey, examining and savoring the ripening relation with Simeon, had not heard one word.
‘I’m sorry, Doctor Rachel,’ she said, starting and smiling apology.
Rachel sighed: ‘Well, out with it. Thee’s thinking of thy afternoon’s jaunt. There’s little use my trying to interest thee in anything else.’
‘Not in any handsome young man unless he could give me riches and position,’ said Fey, laughing. She stood up and put her hands on her friend’s shoulders. ‘ I know I worry you, dear Doctor Rachel, and I’m sorry, but I must follow my fate.’
‘Fiddlesticks, child,’ snapped Rachel, suddenly impatient. ‘We make our own fortunes and we call it Fate. Does thee know what Plato said? “All things are in Fate, yet all things are not decreed by Fate.” We have free will, and need not even listen to the Guide who would lead us to heaven.’
Fey smiled and kissed Rachel’s furrowed forehead. ‘You look so handsome in that lovely gown. I wish you’d dress up all the time.’
Rachel looked down at the rich satin folds, and laughed. ‘Thee’s incorrigible, but thee reminds me that I must put off this lovely gown and get to work. Please to start changing the dressing on Mrs. Samuelson’s leg and wait with her until I get there.’
The following Wednesday a case of scarlet fever appeared in the children’s ward and Fey was terrified. She no longer dared leave Lucita at all, and she hung over the baby constantly watching for the first signs of fever, or the dreaded ‘strawberry’ tongue.
Rachel’s reassurances that nursing infants usually seemed immune did little to comfort Fey. Her fear provided the final spur to the decision she had been forming since Simeon gave her the thousand dollars. She rented a furnished apartment on West Eighteenth Street, near Sixth Avenue.
The parting scene between Rachel and Fey was keyed low. Neither woman said much and each allowed the tissue of affection to conceal her separate misgiving. Fey hid a pricking of guilt, as Rachel hid her profound disapproval of a move which she knew to be partially connected with Simeon Tower.
‘You’ll come to see me, won’t you?’ begged Fey, holding her friend’s hand. ‘And as soon as I’m settled, I’ll come and help you any time you need me.’
Rachel nodded and smiled without speaking. They stood in the little hall outside the clinic door where they had first met. How different had been that other girl, frightened, bedraggled in her cheap dress, distorted by pregnancy! And yet, it seemed to Rachel, that there had been also a delicacy, a sensitivity of spirit, which were now lost. Fey had been blurred then, and groping, while now she radiated assurance and vitality. I am wrong, perhaps, not to rejoice at the change, thought Rachel. Fey was a vivid figure in the leaf-brown silk which highlighted her creamy skin, her red mouth like a geranium, the hair glossy black against the bonnet’s tawny plume; and the baby was as vivid, her golden-red curls spraying like tiny feathers around the edges of the muslin cap. Both of them so brilliantly young and eager for life.
Rachel saw them into the hackney and kissed them. She waved good-bye from the brownstone stoop and turned back into the Infirmary feeling bleak, old and empty. Had it, after all, been selfishness which had fooled her into thinking she might keep them always? A clutching at vicarious maternity, or—worse offense against the Spirit—had she tried to dominate those two whom she loved?
If she had not been somehow at fault, why should she be punished now by this bitterness of failure? Why should the hospital work seem suddenly futile, a monotony of uphill ploddings never reaching a permanent summit?
She applied to these painful questionings her invariable remedy. Islanded by quiet in her locked room, she tried to free her heart and send it upward to the Light. She waited in the midst of silence for the secret word, and the peace. Not in years had the answer failed her as it did today. She could find no inner stillness, she could not even control her usually disciplined body which harried her by a dozen small discomforts. The muscle throbbed in her cheek, her right knee ached, and through her ears there was a rushing of blood. Age, drabness, and defeat circled around hear bowed head like vultures, and blacker even than their shadows was the anguish of a stirring memory. She thought of her husband, not with the usual gentle tenderness, but with a sharp physical desire. A long-forgotten frenzy seized upon her; she felt again the ecstatic pressure of a man’s hard body, heard the thick-voiced, broken words of passion and fulfillment. So long ago and never to come again. Why should this body shamefully betray her by a violent yearning of its own?
She looked down at the heavy middle-aged outline beneath the gray percale coverall. A shudder of disgust shook her, for with the pain of nostalgia came the recognition of envy. It was not then only thoughts of vicarious maternity with which Fey inspired her. There was the other too. And this further substitution was unbearably humiliating.
She slipped to her knees beside the bed and bent her head on her clasped hands. Slow tears oozed through her fingers and fell on the white counterpane.
She knelt, crouching by the bed, until outside on Second Avenue the lamplighter shuffled by. The pale glow of gaslight struck through her uncurtained window. And there was a timid knock on the door.
‘Doctor Moreton,’ called Nellie Molloy’s anxious voice, ‘we do be a-needing of you, doctor—little Minnie’s coughing fit to bust, and that slut in Ward A’s bleeding again like a stuck pig.’
Rachel got up slowly. She walked to the washbowl and, dipping a towel in the pitcher, she rubbed the wet end over her ravaged face.
‘Be right with you, Nellie,’ she answered. ‘(Jet more ice up from the basement.’
She tidied her hair before the tiny mirror, picked up her stethoscope and instrument case. She unlocked the door and hurried down the hall to the ward. At her appearance the restless, fretful patients quieted and turned their faces to her, their different expressions of suffering fused into one collective look of hopeful relief. ‘ ’Tis the doctor, God bless her, she’ll ease ye now, Violet,’ whispered a voice to the little prostitute who was miscarrying.
Rachel gave them all her friendly smile, and walking to Violet's cot she laid her cool hand on the frightened girl’s forehead, at the same time gently pulling down the sheet.
Fey was not happy during her first days on Eighteenth Street. She missed Rachel and even the Infirmary far more than she had expected to, and she was for a time bewildered by this new way of living. She had at last achieved elegance, but her crowded rooms oppressed her, and she had to grope her way into knowledge of each detail. Her apartment was on the second floor of a converted residence. She had a parlor, dining-room, back bedroom, and kitchen, all furnished by a welter of the owner’s discarded pieces in overstuffed walnut, bird’s-eye maple, and brass. The flat was expensive, fifty dollars a month, and there was even
a bathroom with a boxed-in toilet and enormous tin tub rimmed in varnished pine. No hot water, of course, and the hastily installed cold-water pipe never yielded more than a discouraged trickle, so that Fey continued to bathe herself and the baby from the bedroom washbowl. Also the bathroom was freezing cold. It was now November, and all the rooms were cold because she had not yet made proper contact with a coal merchant, and since she had no servant she had to carry what coals were delivered up and down from the basement herself. It was necessary, too, to find a milkman, a baker boy, and an ashman besides getting herself and Lucita and a basket down to the Jefferson Market at Tenth Street to buy food. The food once bought provided a further problem. Fey understood the management of an open fire, she could make tortillas and chile, but for all her natural efficiency she was balked by the griffin-footed curlicued stove in her dark kitchen. The drafts were faulty and it went out—repeatedly.
All these troubles would have been avoided had she moved into a boarding-house. It was Simeon who had vetoed that and suggested that she try for an apartment. In a boarding-house there was no privacy, and no respectable lady might receive male callers except in the parlor. Fey had agreed with him that the apartment would be better. She knew that he intended to visit her, and she was as anxious for freedom of movement as he.
He called on the fourth evening after she had moved in. Fey had not expected him so soon, but he had not been able to wait. His nights were disturbed by dreams of her, and her image had begun to invade his office and interfere with plans for floating a new bond issue.
In April, Simeon had obtained a charter for the Gulf and San Diego Railroad. Only nine miles of track had actually been constructed and these were rapidly turning into the usual ‘streaks of rust,’ but nobody knew that or cared. An accommodating Congress had donated some twenty million acres of land, and if there were no tracks, at least there was an abundance of elegantly named town sites where depots might some day appear. Also it was obvious to anybody that rail connection between the Gulf of Mexico and Southern California would soon be a necessity. How convenient, too, that Simeon’s newly acquired Transie Steamship Line should ply between New York and Galveston! Only Vanderbilt had as yet developed the technique of monopoly, and Simeon found the project alluring. .