He stepped out of the car and mounted a little bank, and discerned far ahead a hopeful gleam. Driving on carefully and slowly, he saw with relief that the light shone from the window of a small, faintly outlined house. Amusedly, as he pushed open the sagging gate, he went on with his appropriate verses.
"What in the midst lay but the tower itself?
The round, squat tower, blind as a fool's heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world—"
He knocked at the door, but there was no answer. He knocked again more heavily. There was a light, there must be human beings about; perhaps the occupant had gone to drive home the cow. Perhaps a deaf person lived here. He stepped to the window and peered in.
The interior was like a hundred interiors which he had seen in his childhood, a little room which was at once kitchen and living-room, its furniture a bare pine table, a few chairs, a half-dozen cooking-vessels, dirty, out-of-date calendars pinned against the wall, rags in a broken sash, and, hanging on a nail, a miner's grimy coat and a woman's shawl. He had driven with his father to such houses as this a hundred times and had sat waiting in the buggy or on the grass by the roadside amusing himself with childish games. Sometimes he had been puzzled and distressed by a sound whose cause he then understood but dimly. Memory played him another trick, it caused him to hear the same sound now.
He could not see into the inner room, perhaps the deaf person was there; he knocked again and opened the door. Then he laid his hand across his lips. The sound had not been remembered—it had been heard. It proceeded from the inner room.
"What's the matter?" he asked loudly and impatiently. "I've come to ask my way. Is any one ill?"
He saw that a distorted figure lay upon a low bed. Fearing that here was an emergency which had been repellent to him from his youth, he went unwillingly toward the inner room and stood with his hand upon the jamb.
"What is the trouble?" he asked again.
With painful effort the woman turned and looked up at him. It was not as he had feared; her need was of a different sort. Upon her pale face stood drops of perspiration and she clutched her thin chest with both hands. It was the same agony which had smitten Edward Levis with merciful swiftness, here long drawn out. He had seen but a few cases, but he recognized it as different from all other sorts of anguish. But he could not be delayed!