One Man in His Time

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"Yes, I went to see her once—not long ago. I promised her that I'd come back when she sent for me. She wanted to tell me something, but she was so ill that she couldn't remember what it was. It was about Father, she said."

"Stephen will come for us after he has taken Margaret home. I gave him the number."

Patty turned and gave her a long look. They were passing under an electric light at the time, and Corinna thought, as she looked into the girl's face, that all the wistful yearning of the night was reflected in her eyes. What had happened, she wondered, to change their sparkling brightness into this brooding expectancy.

The car stopped before the house to which Patty had come with Gershom; and as they got out, they saw that it was entirely dark except for the dim flicker of a jet of gas in the hall. By the pavement a car was standing, and from somewhere at the back there came the sound of a baby crying inconsolably in the darkness. While they entered the hall, and went up the broad old-fashioned flight of stairs, that plaintive wail followed them, growing gradually fainter as they ascended, but never fading utterly into silence. When they reached the second storey, and turned toward the back of the house, a door at the end of the passage opened, and an old woman, with a hunch back, and a piece of knitting in her gnarled hands, came slowly to meet them. Standing there under the jet of gas, which flickered with a hissing noise, she looked at them with glassy impersonal eyes and a face that was as austere as Destiny. Afterward, when Corinna thought over the impressions of that tragic night, she felt that they were condensed into the symbol of the old woman with the crooked back, and the thin crying of the baby which floated up from the darkness below.

"We came to see Mrs. Green," explained Corinna.

The old woman nodded, and as she turned to limp down the passage, her ball of gray yarn slipped from her grasp and rolled after her until Corinna recovered it. In silence the cripple led the way, and in silence they followed her, until she opened the closed door at the end of the hall, and they entered the room, with the sickening sweetish smell and the window which gave on the black hulk of the ailantus tree. From behind a screen, which was covered with faded wall paper, the figure of the doctor emerged while they waited, an ample middle-aged man, with the air of having got into his clothes in a hurry and the face of a pragmatic philosopher. He motioned commandingly for them to approach; and going to the other side of the screen, they found the dying woman gazing at them with eager eyes.

"She is doing nicely," remarked the doctor, with the cheerful alacrity of one in whom familiarity has bred contempt of death. "Keep her quiet. One can never tell about these cases."

He made an explanatory gesture in the direction of his pocket. "I'll go down on the porch and smoke a cigar, and then if she hasn't had a relapse, I think it will be safe for me to go home. You can telephone if you need me. I am only a few blocks away." He went out with a brisk, elastic step, while his hand began to feel for the end of the cigar in his pocket.

"She's bad now," said the old woman. "It's the medicine, but she'll come to in a minute." She brought two wooden chairs with broken legs to the foot of the bed. "You'd better sit down. It may be a long waiting."

"I hope she'll know me," returned Patty. "She must have wanted to see me, or she wouldn't have sent." Her eyes left the stricken face and clung to the calla lily on the window-sill, as they had done that afternoon when she came here with Gershom. The single blossom on the lily had not faded; it was still as perfect as it had been then—only two days ago!—and not one of the closed buds had begun to open beside it.