“Why? what for? for how long?”
“I don’t know for how long, but we must lose no time in getting Immy out of town.”
CHAPTER XXXVII
Another exodus. But they were scapegoats now, fleeing into the wilderness with a mystic burden of guilt, anonymous guilt; for Immy would not speak.
Complete was the contrast between that first flight from the cholera and this fleeing where no man pursued, but all men waited.
Then David and Patty RoBards were part of a stampede, striving to save their romance from the plague. Then they were bride and groom; now they carried with them a daughter, unforeseen then, but older to-day than her mother was when she married RoBards. But Immy’s bridegroom was where?—was who?
In that other journey to Tuliptree Farm the streets were smothered with dust and the waterless city stifled under a rainless sky.
Now water was everywhere. The fountains were still, but the pipes underground were thick as veins and arteries. Water in the form of snow lay on the ground, on the roofs, on the shoulders of the men, on their eyelashes, on the women’s veils and in their hair and the feathers of their hats. It lay in long ridges on the backs of the horses plunging, slipping, falling. It plastered the panes of the lamp-posts and the telegraph-posts that had grown up in a new forest all over town; it lay along the wires that strung spider webs from wall and chimney and tree.
The banners that hung from all the shops and stretched across the street were illegible. The busses and the hacks were moving dunes of white.
There was a fog of snow. Everybody walked mincingly, except the children, who rejoiced to slide on their brass-toed boots or on the sleds that ran like great, prong-horned beetles among the legs of the anxious wayfarers.