A Woman Named Smith - Marie Conway Oemler (the best novels to read TXT) 📗

Somewhere, far, far off, a faint and feeble little light glimmered, one small point of light in vast blackness. In the whole universe there wasn't anything or anybody but just that tiny light, and swift black water, and drowning me. Something deep within me—I think occultists call it the body-spirit—was clamoring frantically to hold fast to the light, because if that went under I should go under, too. I tried to keep my eyes upon the trembling spark.

Whereupon the light changed to a sound, the monotonous insistence of which forced me to be worriedly aware of it. It was—why, it was a voice, calling, over and over and over again, "Sophy! Sophy!"

Somebody was calling me. With an immense effort I managed to raise my eyelids. I was lying in a bed, and caught a drowsy, fleeting glimpse of four posts.

Four posts upon my bed,
Four angels for my head,
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
Bless the bed that I lie on!

Granny used to say that for me at night; only she had said "four hangels for my 'ead," at which I used to giggle into my pillows. I hadn't felt so close to Granny since I was little Sophy, in the rooms over our shop in Boston. She was somewhere around me; if I went to sleep now, she'd be there when I woke up in the morning. But the sound that was a calling voice wouldn't let me go to sleep. Slowly, heavily, I managed to get my eyes open again.

"Look at me!" said the voice imperiously. Two large dark eyes caught my wavering glance and held it, as in a vise. "Sophy! Sophy! I need you."

Said another voice, then, brokenly: "For mercy's sake, Jelnik, let her go in peace!"

"No, she sha'n't die. I won't have it!—Sophy, come back! It is I who call you, Sophy. Come back!"

My stiff lips moved. "Must go—sleep," I tried to say.

"No, I forbid you to go to sleep, Sophy!" His dark eyes, full of life and compelling power, held my tired and dimmed ones, his firm, warm hands held my cold and inert fingers. "My love, my dear love, stay. You have got to stay, Sophy. Don't you understand? You can't go, Sophy!"

My dulled brain stumblingly laid hold upon a thought: Nicholas Jelnik was calling me. He was calling me because he loved me. One simply can't go down into sleep and darkness, when a miracle like that is climbing like the morning-star into one's skies.

"Stay!" he said, his lips against my ear. "Sophy! My love, my dear love, stay!"

But although he held me close, I could feel myself being drawn away. There must have been that in my straining glance that made him aware, for of a sudden he cried out, lifted me bodily in his arms, and kissed me on the mouth.

My heart quite stopped beating, as a spent runner pauses, that he may gather new strength to go on. With a sigh I fell back; but not into the water and the dark.

"By God, you've pulled her through, Jelnik!" cried the voice of Richard Geddes.

Came vague sounds, stirs, movements, hands upon me. Then oblivion again.

I woke up one pleasant forenoon to find a brisk and capable young woman in white sitting in my room, her head bent over the piece of linen she was hemming. She was a healthy, handsome young woman, with hard, firm cheeks, hard, firm lips, and professional eyes and glasses. She glanced up and met my wan stare.

"What are you doing here, if you please?" I asked politely.

"I have been nursing you, Miss Smith. You have been quite ill, you know."

I lay there looking at that self-contained, trained young woman, with feelings of almost ludicrous astonishment. I remembered the skidding car; and Richard Geddes lying with his head on Alicia's knees, and how we had both thought him dead; and myself sitting in the dust; and then the pain. But it was astounding news that I had been very badly hurt full three weeks ago!

Alicia stole in and, seeing me awake, tried to smile, but cried instead, with a wet cheek against my hand. A few minutes later Doctor Geddes himself appeared. It was enough to scandalize any self-contained nurse to see a six-foot-three doctor behave in the most abandoned and unbedside manner!

"Sophy!" gulped the doctor, "oh, deuce take you, Sophronisba Two, what do you mean by scaring honest folks half out of their wits?"

The nurse was destined to receive another shock. Richard of the Lion Heart dropped down on his knees beside Alicia, and laid his bearded cheek against my wan one, and for a while couldn't speak. Alicia tried to get her slender arms around him, and couldn't.

"I think," ventured the nurse, in level tones, "that the patient had better not be excited. Shall I give her a stimulant, doctor?"

"The patient's on the highroad to getting well," said the doctor. "And we're the best of all stimulants, aren't we, Sophy?"

When I began to get stronger, the dream which had haunted my illness came back with astonishing vividness and haunted my waking hours. I knew it was a dream, for of course I hadn't been in black water, I hadn't strained toward a light upon the flood, and of course, I hadn't really heard Nicholas Jelnik calling my name; and the kiss was part of the fantasy. I watched him stealthily, this cool, collected, impersonal young man, to whom even the efficient nurse was astonishingly respectful, and pure laughter seized me at the idea of his crying aloud, being as agitated, as passionate, as fiercely insistent, as he had been in the vision.

I ventured to put a part of the vagary to the acid test:

"Alicia, I wasn't thrown out again, into water, was I?"

"No. That was delirium, dear. You were frightfully ill for a while, Sophy." Her face paled. "So ill that The Author fled, because he wouldn't stay in the house and see—what we expected to see. He said it would permanently shatter his nerves. But he has wired every day since."

"It was sensible of him to go. And it's kind of him to wire." I said no more about the water.

"Everybody has been kind. And it wasn't duty kindness, either. It was kind kindness!" said Alicia, lucidly. "Do you know what they're saying in Hyndsville now? They're saying old Sophronisba played a joke on herself." She left me to digest that as best I might.

It isn't pleasant to be ill anywhere. But it isn't altogether unpleasant to be on the sick list in South Carolina. Everybody is anxious about you. Old ladies with palm-leaf fans in their tireless hands come and sit with you. They aren't brilliant old ladies, you understand. I know some whose secular library consists of the Complete Works of John Esten Cooke, Gilmore Simms's War Poems of the South, and a thumbed copy of Father Ryan. But add to these the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Imitation of Christ, and it doesn't make such a bad showing. It's astonishing how soothing the companionship of women fed upon this pabulum can be, when the things of the world are of necessity set aside for a space, and the simpler things of the spirit draw near.

Old gentlemen in well-brushed clothes and immaculate, exquisitely darned linen, call daily with small gifts of fruit and flowers, and send you messages from which you infer that the sun won't be able to shine properly until you come outside again. And there isn't a housekeeper of your acquaintance who hasn't got you on her mind: there are sent to you steaming bowls of perfect soup, flaky rolls and golden cake, jeweled jellies, and cool, enticing, trembly things in glass dishes. And when you can sit up for more than an hour or two at a time, why, then you know what it really means to have South Carolina neighbors.

Doctor Geddes made me spend my days in the garden that Schmetz had labored upon with such loving-kindness, and that in consequence was become a marvel of bloom and scent. Every butterfly in South Carolina must have visited that garden. I hadn't known there were that many butterflies in the world. All the florist-shop windows in New York, that I had once paused before with envy and longing, were stinted and poor and pale before the living, out-o'-doors wonder of it. Florist shops haven't any bees, nor birds, nor butterflies, nor trees that wave their green branches at you like friendly hands.

A flowering vine festooned the