When the gong of dismissal sounded, Jean went into her own room and closed the door. She heard Mary come and light the light but she made no sound. After a while the light went out, but from time to time Jean heard a match strike, and she knew that the little doctor was lying there smoking. It was strange to have Mary smoking and thinking about her, as if she were "a case," but there was comfort in it too, as if she had come home and some one was watching over her. At last Jean slept.
In a few days, Mary spoke tentatively of China. But the hour of rekindled interest did not return and they did not mention it again. Jean took on a few cases and attended to them mechanically in the mornings. But no misfortune or sorrow penetrated below the surface of the mind trained to handle them. The real hours of the day were the afternoons, when Jean walked for miles alone against the clean sea wind, or through the gray fog, that now seemed to be filled with the souls of the dead; helpless things that had not been able to get through this grayness into the joy in which they had believed; or lingering souls, loath to leave the only world they had ever known.
In the evenings, Jean took some classes, and tried to mix cheerfully with the other workers, women like those whom it had once so stimulated her to feel working at the tangle with their thin, white fingers. But now they depressed her, sheltered from personal emotion behind their diffused pity for the world. Often, she left them to walk in the Latin Quarter until night emptied the streets of the dark men, forever arguing and gesticulating, and the frowsy women, terrible in their fecundity, nursing their babies from big, brown breasts. The tremendous vitality of these people rested Jean, so that watching, she herself seemed to be accomplishing.
But the days slipped into weeks and the weeks to months and she still stood aside watching. She wrote no letters to New York and received none. Sometimes she felt that she ought to write to Jerome Stuart but when she tried to think of what she would say, she could find nothing.
It was a week before Christmas, a blue, clear day between rains, that Jean sat by the sea and tried to face the coming year. What was she going to do? The waves lapped the sand, fishing smacks scudded by, and white gulls circled overhead. Jean's thoughts went round and round in an ever narrowing circle, and when she tried to slip through this closing space and grasp the coming year, Gregory, on the sand beside her, stirred. Her fingers touched his crisp, dry hair. The beach was crowded with people, but they were alone. The sand was littered with papers, and broken piers jutted into the water and the air was heavy with summer heat. But she was alive with every nerve in her.
Jean got up and began to walk back across the dunes. On and on over the shifting sand, past the straggling cottages of workmen, on through the well-kept streets of wealthy homes, dwindling again to middle-class flats, until finally, at dusk, Jean stood on the last hill looking down into Chinatown. She was tired at last, so that the weariness in her muscles corresponded to the weariness in her soul, and she had the temporary peace that comes of physical and mental accord. The odor of sandalwood and opium and strange eastern things rose to meet her as she went forward down the hill.
Stolid women pattered along, making their ridiculous purchases, haggling over a leek, a single pork chop, a wing of chicken. Calm men sat smoking long pipes in their dim shops. She might have left it the day before. The vast stability of it mocked her. It was like the ever moving, never resting sea—this human necessity to eat, to buy and sell, to move about. Hundreds of people had died since she had walked these streets with Herrick. Death had touched her own life. Thousands of walking, talking units had been taken, thousands of the little empty spaces had lasted for a second and then the moving mass had closed in again.
A woman came from a dark doorway, a rainbow bundle strapped to her back. From the bundle a small brown face with almond eyes looked calmly on the confusion of living. The mother stopped to bargain for a fried fish and Jean touched the smooth, brown cheek.
"A silly mess, isn't it, baby?"
The mother turned instantly and moved farther into the familiar safety of her own people. At the corner Jean stopped again, looking toward Portsmouth Square, the benches filled with men and boys, the familiar refuse of Babary Coast. She was still looking when a man, hurrying round the corner, brought up so suddenly that he seemed to have been thrown back upon his heels.