This admission was the climax of terror to Julie. She had always sheltered in her father’s loud confidence. To have him broken in body was frightful enough; to see his broken spirit laid bare, to know that always that sinister dread had lurked in the back of his mind, and that all his big bluster was just a cloak for it, seemed to take the roof from over her head, leaving her uncovered in a bleak world. Her heart beat so fearfully that the thin material of her blouse fluttered up and down. Nevertheless, she put her other hand, cold as it was, steadfastly over her father’s. “Never mind, pappy, honey!” she said. “Never mind. We’ll manage someway.”
He looked dimly at her white face with the big eyes, and felt the tremor of her fingers.
“Poor Julie,” he said. “Poor little Julie. I kind of hate to have life git a-hold of you.”
But after all Emmet Rose did not have to “lay down” long on his women-folks. A broken rib had pierced one lung, pneumonia set in, and five days after they brought him out of the woods his great body was stiff and tenantless, and Julie and her mother, two terrified little people, were left alone. Yet, for all their fear, with a dogged pertinacity they rebuilt their lives and struggled on, like a chess-player, who having lost his best piece still fights on with what the game has left to him.
Later on, when death swooped again and her mother was gone, Julie, frightened and alone, nevertheless rebuilt her life once more, and went on spinning her web of existence, supported by dressmaking and millinery which she had established in her father’s old shop, and protected from being quite alone by Aunt Sadie Johnson who rented one half of the house, and who was not Julie’s aunt at all, but was so old a friend of her mother’s that Julie had always called her so.
This is the thread of Julie Rose’s life, running on narrow and timorous lines back into the past to her birth in Hart’s Run, and forward into the future, at the command of existence; and all along its pathway of the past and future one may see her small figure faring forth, as she weaves her strand in the pattern of humanity. All of it is of interest and of value in that pattern, but for the sake of winding some of the thread into a ball of narrative, one must pick it up definitely at one point and break off at another; therefore, to begin, let us pick it up on a June night in the summer of 1918, the year that Julie was thirty-two.
II
It was a soft and gracious evening early in the month. The dusk, drenched by dew, which brought out the fragrance of locust blossoms, of peonies, roses, and cut grass in the dooryards up and down the street, fell over Hart’s Run in breath after breath of oncoming darkness, obliterating the sordid aspect of the village—except where the electric lights glaringly defied it—so that the cheap lines of the new garage were gathered into obscurity, the telegraph poles disappeared, and looking up one saw the wide, tumbled outline of mountains, with a remote young moon sailing the sky.
Some of the night’s fragrance drifted in through Julie’s back door, but she was unconscious of its appeal, having gone into her shop to see if everything was in order and safely locked up, before she started out for the week-night prayer-meeting.
She had already seen to everything once, but she returned nervously this second time just to be quite sure that all was safe. Snapping on the light, she stood a moment, and looked all about the neat little place; then she stepped across and tried the handle of the door. She was just turning away, when a sudden rasping noise jumped her heart into her throat, and stiffened all the nerves at the back of her neck. She stood transfixed, frozen with terror. She was all alone in her part of the house. What could the noise be? A snake? Once, as a little girl, she had almost stepped on a rattlesnake, and ever since any sudden rasping sound threw her into an agony of fear. Again the sound broke forth, constricting her with renewed terror. But now she realized that it came from the old disused fireplace, and she knew distressfully well what it was; though her fear left her, revulsion and discomfort took its place. It was the chimney swallows. Their nest had come down and the young birds were in the fireplace. Julie crept over, and pulling forward the board screen which she had covered with wall paper, peered into the hearth. There was only one, a naked little fledgling with blind eyes and gaping mouth. The sight of it nauseated Julie, and yet filled her with unhappy compassion.