For the moment she had passed beyond the point of thinking of rights and wrongs. She was concentrated on immediate necessities. She almost forgot the complication of Freda and was shocked at herself when that came back to her.
She heard the sound of Gage’s car starting down the driveway. He was going out then. All her feelings, her thoughts bore on one question. Where was he going?
CHAPTER XVIII
IN HOSPITAL
AFTER the first twenty-four hours with Gregory nothing seemed real to Freda outside of the hospital. She had found for herself a hotel room, a shabby little room in a second rate hotel, a room with scarred brown maple bureau and iron bed from which the paint had peeled. It looked out on a fire escape and a narrow court, helplessly trapped between tall brick walls.
To that room she went for her periods of rest, for the hospital had no vacant room or even bed, where she might relax. After she had gone to the hotel from the hospital several times the way seemed curiously familiar. Two blocks to the east, across the street car line, past the drug store with its structure of Tanlac in the window—one block to the north and there was the entrance of the hotel with seven or eight broad cement steps leading up to it. There was not one thing which she passed which impressed itself in the least on her imagination—not one image that was vivid enough to penetrate. Night and day it was the same—like moving blindfolded through still air. It was only when she went back to the hospital that her mind seemed to stir from its lethargy.
The hardest moments were those of Gregory’s lucidity—when the sight of her made him flame with a passion which leapt through his restricted and suffering body, when phrases came to his hot lips which made her quiver with the sense of him. She would kneel beside his bed and tell him softly reassuring things and with his head turned on his pillow he would regard her from the depths of those eyes, always haggardly set, but now far sunken.
She had no faintest doubts as to her past or present actions. That was Freda’s great triumph over most of the women she knew. She did not doubt; she did not worry. Most of them had carried over into their new self-confidence and their new chances a habit of worry born of ingrowing responsibilities in the past and now fostered by general self-consciousness. It was unnatural to Freda to mope over her actions or to analyze them. She knew how to go ahead and there always was absence of self-consciousness about what she did, simplicity of manner, dignity of step. It was as if she had somehow stepped over the phase of altercation, doubt and experiment into a manner which did the unusual easily, but only if the unusual came in her path, which accepted new rules, new customs without a flush, and most of all was able to merge the best of feminism into a fine yet unchristened ease of sex. She did not need either the little fears or defenses of her mother or the larger ones of Margaret Duffield. It did not occur to her that she was very complete in herself and satisfying to herself. She bothered with no altercations or analysis.
It was not a wholly sad time for all the deepening anxiety and danger—it was not a time for depression. Freda knew that she had come to grips with life and she was glad to feel her full strength called to battle.
While they wondered about her in St. Pierre, while her name ran like a little germ of gossip spreading contagion from lip to lip in St. Pierre, she sat most of the time in the hospital, in the chair beside Gregory’s bed, touching his hot, tense wrist with the coolness of her fingers—she sat outside his room in the recess of the bay windows on a curved window seat and watched people come and go—and once in a while she slipped into the hospital library and got hold of a book on pregnancy which fascinated her. Skillfully manipulated conversation with the nurse had given her enough information so that she had been able to control a great part of her own present liability to sickness and she felt better than she had for several weeks.
Three days after her arrival Gregory came successfully through the first crisis of his illness. Freda walked on air the next day. The doctor was cheerful and jocose.