Out of the Air

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

“Have you a shovel handy?” she surprisingly asked.

“Yes, why?”

Mrs. Spash did not answer immediately. He turned and looked at her. She was still gazing at him hard; but the light from some long-harbored emotion of her dulled old soul was shining bluely in her dulled old eyes.

“I want you should get it,” she ordered briefly. “There’s something right here,” she pointed, “that I want you to dig up.”

VIII

Susannah let herself lightly down on the tin roof; it was scarcely a step from her window. With deliberate caution, she turned and drew the shade. Then she tiptoed toward the skylight. The workmen were still soldering; the older man, with the air of one performing a delicate operation, lay stretched out flat, holding some kind of receptacle; the younger was pouring molten lead from a ladle. Try as she might, she could not prevent her feet from making a slight tapping on the tin. The older man glanced sharply up. “Look out!” called the younger, and he bent again to his work. Almost running now, she stepped into the gaping hole of the skylight. The stairs were very steep—practically a ladder. As she disappeared from view, she heard a quick “What the hell!” from the roof above her.

Susannah hurried forward along a dark passage, looking for stairs. The passage jutted, became lighter, went forward again. This must be the point where the shed-addition joined the main building. She was in the hallway of a dingy, conventional flat-house, with doors to right and left. One of these doors opened; a woman in a faded calico dress looked her over, the glance including the traveling-bag; then picked up a letter from the hall-floor, and closed it again. Susannah found herself controlling an impulse to run. But no steps sounded behind her—she was not as yet pursued. And there was the stairway—at the very front of the house! She descended the two flights to the entrance. There, for a moment, she paused. As soon as Warner discovered her flight, they would be after her. The workmen would point the way. The street—and quick—was the only chance. Noiselessly she opened the door. At the head of the steps leading to the street, she stopped long enough for a look to right and left. Only a scattered afternoon crowd—no Warner, no Byan. An Eighth Avenue tram-car was ringing its gong violently. On a sudden impulse of safety, she shot down the steps, ran past her own door to the corner. An open southbound car had drawn up, was taking on passengers. She reached it just as the conductor was about to give the forward signal, and was almost jerked off her feet as she stepped onto the platform. Steadying herself, she looked, in the brief moment afforded by the bumpy crossing of the car, down the side street.

The entrances of her own house at the corner, the entrances to the house she had just left, were blank and undisturbed; no one was following her. She paid her fare, and settled down on the end of a cross-seat.

And now she was aware not of relief or reaction or fear, but solely of her headache. It had changed in character. It had become a furious internal bombardment of her brows. If she turned her eyes to right or left, she seemed to be dragging weights across the front of her brain. Yet this headache did not seem quite a part of herself. It was as though she knew, by a supernormal sensitiveness, the symptoms of someone else. It was as though suddenly she had become two people. Anyway, it had ceased to be personal. And somewhere else within her head was growing a delicious feeling of freedom, of lightness, of escape from a wheel. Her evasion of the Carbonado Mining Company did not account for all that; she felt free from everything. “I’m not going to take any more rooms,” she said to herself. “I’m going to sleep out of doors now, like the birds. People find you when you take rooms. Where shall I begin?” She considered; and then one of those little hammers of intuition seemed to tap on her brain. Again, she did not resist. “Why, Washington Square of course!” she said to herself.