THE GRAPE
CHAPTER I
There were vagrant little streams of water, released by thaw, hurrying along against the curbs of Second Avenue, the absolutely impeccable spring day that Lilly Penny walked out of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital into the warm scented bath of its sunshine, a blanketed bundle in the crook of her arm that mysteriously seemed to animate the nap of the wool, lifting it and suggesting the little life it enfolded.
She felt strangely light and giddy that life could have gone clattering on outside those dim weeks of hers inside the walls.
She had gone down in a dark, a fantastic hiatus in her scheme of things, and it was incredible that out here were street cars still clanging for right of way, pedestrians weaving in and out the great tapestry of a city day, factory whistles splitting asunder with terrific cleavage the fore—from the afternoon. There was a hurdy-gurdy rattling tinnily through the morning that must have played on uninterruptedly through this strange demise of hers.
School children, the air raucous with them, sped home for luncheon through streets that already smelled of sun on asphalt. She had never really noticed them before. That little fat girl with the braids. How pretty to loop them up that way behind each ear with bright red bows. She pressed against the little warm life at her bosom. She felt throaty with laughter, and the tears of a delicious weakness that made her ache to lie down somewhere in this sun, close to the soft bearing earth whose secret she knew now, and open this bundle. Hers! It was the first moment of her actual ownership. Reality was reclaiming her from that unreal realm of doctors and nurses and the dozy detached period of her convalescence.
She wanted to run with her living loot to some quiet corner and open it up. There was a little square of park with a municipal-laid-out bed of tulips across the street, but its benches were crowded with humanity, like sparrows sunning themselves on a wire, and the winding of its asphalt paths swift with the hurry of all the strangely uninterrupted world outside.
She hurried toward Seventeenth Street—could have run, in fact, such a resurgence of the old vitality was upon her. Before one of the private houses a rheumatic-looking oleander was in the supremest moment of its full bloom. It lit up the old street as if a bride had donned her veil there. Outside the cleaning establishment were two stretchers of lace curtains sunning themselves against the wall.
Lilly hurried up the stoop and pulled out the bell that rang dimly in one of those subterranean retreats peculiar to landladies.
Mrs. McMurtrie herself opened the door, as usual her great hands steaming and swollen with suds.