“Of course you won’t understand, Caroline,” she writes me. “There never was a day in your life when you would have understood. Books are people to you. You live placidly in that dull little mountain town, and when your time comes you’ll die there placidly. Had you been Eve the angel with the flaming sword would never have had the unpleasant duty of driving you out. You to tempt a man! You’re like that coldly beautiful statue Pygmalion fashioned. She waked to life, but you never will. I wonder why I tell you, Caroline. The probationers in this hospital—probably in all big city hospitals—are made to feel like the dirt under foot—if there was under foot any good honest earth-dirt. Every time her betters pass her she’s got to paste herself against the wall, and all the inmates of the hospital are her betters. There are some nice young doctors—but it is against discipline for her to speak to them. If she does the older nurses punish her with extra work. Last night, after a hard day, I walked on the Avenue—we are just a block away—and one of the beautiful doors opened just like enchantment, thrown back by a liveried servant. An old, old man came out. Perhaps it would have been different if youth and beauty had floated out. All that was his seemed so wasted. It was just the youth in me, I suppose, that was so fierce at life and its injustices. The lights down the Avenue beckoned and beckoned. I wanted to follow them. The distance was swallowing the old man in his car. Just for once in my life I wanted a taste of the city at night; I wanted to forget the groans of the sick and dying. You’ve never been a prune, and a potato, and a slice of bread. Try it, Caroline. I, who used to be Henrietta Dickenson, am now one thousand four hundred prunes. I am one thousand and ninety-five potatoes. I spare you the slices of bread. If you think I exaggerate make the count yourself. Prunes four times a week—five of them to a saucer. Potatoes each meal—meals three per day. Potatoes, prunes, and bread—plain, common food—maybe that’s why I have done such a common thing.
“I turned off the Avenue. At a news stand I picked up the Herald. ‘You don’t want that. You want an evening paper,’ the boy said. Fate or the boy, I know not which, I took the Herald. The ‘ad’ I answered says the man is lonely; that he wants an attractive woman friend. The ‘ad’ was signed Telemachus. His letter fairly scintillated. I answered. He wrote again. Now he asks for a meeting. But the letter is oh, so chivalrous, so witty, so wonderful, Caroline. And there’s a reticence, an impersonal note in it that piques a woman’s fancy, stirs her imagination——
“I am leaving the hospital now. It is dusk—the time to meet the hero of one’s adventure. The place of meeting is not far away. It is only a few blocks down Madison from the hospital. I have stolen out in a gypsy dress that I wore at the hospital dance. I have thrown a long dark cloak about me. In the twilight I shall escape—not be snatched up and sent to Bellevue. Don’t worry, Caroline.”
Don’t worry! Since the day Dicky became our child (mother’s sister’s only child, a little wailing thing three days old and orphaned of her own mother) I have worried. Now my heart clutches with fear as it clutched the day, now a year past, when Dicky threw into our quiet midst the bomb of her determination to go away from us. Nineteen-year-old Dicky alone in the great city of New York. Our guarded and treasured lambkin thrown into the mouths of wolves. A trained nurse! Under discipline! Dicky, the free, gypsy child of our hearts.
We, poor dear old mammy and I, register Dicky’s emotions as faithfully as a trusted thermometer. That Dicky should have to rise with the sun, and, having risen, have to put her own room in order. That Dicky must be silent in the presence of her superiors. It sounds like the court of King James, anyway, and not free America—not that the court of any king would awe Dicky.
Once, before we came to live in the mountains, when Dicky was six, we paid a visit to grandmother. Dicky left a saucer of cottage cheese untasted at her plate. Next morning at breakfast it was there, at dinner, at tea. I saw when we went in to tea that the child’s endurance of the saucer of cheese had been reached, and my coward teeth chattered in terror—grandmother had attempted to discipline the child before—the result being that for three interminable days Dicky had appeared at meals, brought down in the arms of grandmother’s old coloured butler, robbed of her clothes and dressed in a royal defiance and a flannel nightgown. Dicky lifted the offending cheese daintily. She didn’t look at me or at grandmother. She spoke to old Benjamin, and she was as perfectly poised and dignified as a little duchess. “Take it away, please,” she said; “it’s spoiled.”
“Her mar’s dead, an’ yore mar’s dead,” mammy said one morning as I hurried away to my school teaching; “if you an’ Mr. John can’t an’ won’t do nothin’ to save the child from ruin, mammy will.”
I came home the day of mammy’s disciplining of Dicky to find the child digging up the lawn. If we do live in the heart of the Blue Ridge hills I cling to a remembered civilization—the front yard is the lawn. Gypsy curls blowing, gypsy eyes flashing, Dicky with each tiny upflung spade of dirt was shrieking (she couldn’t have been more than seven), “Mr. Devil, Mr. Devil, can you hear? I’m going to keep on digging till I get close enough and you can hear. I want you to shovel mammy into your hot fire and burn her up.”
I picked Dicky up that day and kissed the anger out of her flaming little face, and a few minutes later I heard her say in the voice that makes us wax in Dicky’s hands, “I was just a little angry with you, Mammy, and I asked Mr. Devil to burn you up—but I’m not mad now, and I hope he won’t.”
Dicky went to New York. We knew that she would. That’s why John and I, dear faithful old mammy, too, were so helpless, our hearts contracting in fear.