Joe smiled on her.
"Sally! Sally! what an impetuous girl you are! What would I do without you?"
VII
OF THE THIRTY THOUSAND
One wonderful January twilight, when the clear, cold air seemed to tremble with lusty health, Myra sat alone in the Ramble, before the little frozen pond. And she thought:
"This is the bench we sat on; and it was here, that morning, that we quarreled; and this is the little pond; and those the trees—but how changed! how changed!"
A world-city practises magic. Any one who for years has slept in her walls and worn the pave of her streets and mingled with her crowds and her lighted nights, is changed by her subtle enchantment into a child of the city. He is never free thereafter. The metropolis may send him forth like a carrier-pigeon, and he may think he is well rid of his mistress, but the homing instinct inevitably draws him back. "All other pleasures," as Emerson said of love, "are not worth its pains." Myra thought that she hated New York—the great nervous sea of life, whose noise and stress and tragedy had shattered her health. She had longed for the peace of nature; she had gone forth to the meadows and the mountains, and for a long time been content with the sounds of the barnyard and the farm, the wind and the brook; she had sunk, as it were, into the arms of the earth and rested on that great nourishing breast. She loved pure air, far horizons, quiet, and the mysterious changes of the landscape. She thought she was done with the city forever. For had she not found that the Vision of White Towers seen that first evening was hollow and bitter at the heart, that beneath the beauty was dust and horror, routine and disease?
But one snow-bound morning as she gazed out from the quiet house and saw the limitless white of the world, the fences buried, the trees loaded, the earth lost under the gray heavens, suddenly she was filled with a passionate desire for life. She was amazed at the restlessness in her heart. But she could not shake it off. Her desire was very definite—to walk down Eightieth Street, to hear and see the trolleys bounding down the little hill to Seventy-ninth Street, to shop on Third Avenue, to go threading her way through the swarm of school children outside the school gates. And then subtly she felt the elixir of a Broadway night, the golden witchery of the lights, the laughter-smitten people, the crowded cars and motors, the shining shops, the warmth of the crowd. A thousand memories of streets and rooms, of people and of things, flooded her mind. The country seemed barren and cold and lonely. She was grievously homesick. It was as if the city cried: "It is winter; the world is dark and dead. Come, my children, gather together; gather here in my arms, you millions; laugh and converse together, toil together, light fires, turn on lights, warm your hands and souls at my flaming hearth. We will forget the ice and the twilight! Come, winter is the time for human beings!"
And so Myra awoke to the fact that she was indeed a child of the city—that the magic was in her blood and the enchantment in her heart. It was useless to recall the mean toil, the narrow life, the unhealthy days. These, dropped in the great illusion of crowded New York, were transformed into a worthy struggle, a part of the city's reality. She suddenly felt as if she would go crazy if she stayed in the country—its stillness stifled her, its emptiness made her ache.
But there was a deeper call than the call of the city. She wanted to be with Joe. Her letters to him had been for his sake, not hers. She had tried to save him from herself, to shut him out and set him free, to cure him of his love. Desperately she did this, knowing that the future held nothing for them together. And for a time it had been a beautiful thing to do, until finally she was compelled to believe that he really was cured. His notes were more and more perfunctory, until, at last, they ceased altogether. Then, when she knew she had lost him, it seemed to her that she had condemned herself to a barren, fruitless life; that the best had been lived, and it only remained now to die. She had given up her "whole existence," cast out that by which she truly lived. There were moments of inexpressible loneliness, when, reading in the orchard, or brooding beside some rippling brook, she glanced southward and sent her silent cry over the horizon. Somewhere down there he was swallowed in the vastness of life; she remembered the lines of his face, his dark melancholy eyes, his big human, humorous lips, his tall, awkward strength; she felt still those kisses on her lips; felt his arms about her; the warmth of his hand; the whisper of his words; and the wind in the oaks.