The conductor came to tell her that this was her station. He lifted her heavy bag for her and carried it to the foot of the steps of the coach.
Then came the excitement of the swoop and pause of the Flyer. Freda was bundled aboard, hat awry, nervously watching for her bag, taken from her hands by some one, porter or conductor. The curtains swung from all the berths. The porter’s voice was low and lazy. He showed her to lower six—a little cubby hole with curtains drawn aside, revealing the delightful neatness of the berth. Freda knew even less of sleeping on trains than she did of eating there. Awkwardly she managed to undress and crept in between the thick white sheets. In the darkness she lay awake, wondering. Wondering at the rush and sound and the mysteries shrouded behind green swinging curtains. When the train shrieked a signal or stopped lurchingly at some station she pushed up the curtain beside her and, propped on her pillows, lay looking into the night tasting the full delight of inexperience. At last she fell asleep and dreamed of Gregory. It was a frightening dream. He did not know who she was, did not remember her. Towards dawn she pushed her way out of it and woke up to see the rain falling lightly over the even country and to realize that she was begrimed with the coal dust and sticky with heat.
At noon she reached Fairmount and stood in the station looking about her for information. The excitement of the last lap and approaching climax of her journey overcame her fatigue and her eyes were brilliant. She decided to take a taxi to the hospital and chose at random one from a row of disheveled looking “For Hire” machines waiting for the daily debouch of passengers from the Flyer. She climbed in with her bag and closed the shaky door, and the driver started his motor. Freda’s heart was racing. The cab could not go fast enough—nor slow enough. It seemed to her as if she could not bear what might be waiting of joy or sorrow, as if emotion was welling up so strong that it would burst its bounds and overcome her. Through the dusty cab windows she saw Fairmount—ill developed wooden houses with unhealthy looking trees giving little shade—a business district of twelve or fifteen squares with all the machinery of business being conducted as it was at this hour in hundreds of other First National Banks and Gilt Edge Stores and Greek Restaurants and brick office buildings. The cab whisked through it rapidly and came to a section of broader streets where more impressive looking houses of brick or stone appeared at leisurely intervals. A little park with a dusty looking playground adjoining it. A row of apartments and there on the corner where a “Silent Zone” sign, awry and disregarded by a group of boys playing in the street made a vain appeal, was St. Agatha’s Hospital.
Inside the little entry was an office with three or four glass windows, behind which she looked for an informant. A slim, weary looking nun came at last, looking at her from behind steel rimmed glasses without curiosity.
“Macmillan—yes,” she said, “you’re—?”
“I’m his wife.”
The nun accepted the fact simply and as if she yielded Freda certain rights and privileges. Freda felt frightened. She wanted to go into Gregory’s room, kneel down by his bed and tell him to get well. She could see it wasn’t going to be as direct as that.
A buzzing, muffled bell, sounded by the nun, had summoned a nurse, who came into the office thumping heavily on her flat rubber-heeled shoes. She was commissioned to take Freda to the last room in corridor “A”—the “typhoid case.” Freda left her bag in the office and followed the nurse, as she clumped indifferently along. The presence of the nurse bothered her. She wanted to get rid of her—tell her she would go on alone but she did not dare. In corridor “A” the nurse gave her a chair.
“I’ll find his nurse and see if you can see him now.”
“I’m his wife,” said Freda.