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Sisters

K >> Kathleen Norris >> Sisters




The next instant a woman came up the road, running, and making a
queer, whimpering noise that Cherry never forgot. She was a
stranger to them, but she ran toward them, making the odd, gasping
noise with much dry mouthing, and with wild eyes.

Horror was in her aspect, and horror was the emotion that the
first glimpse of her awakened vaguely in their hearts, but as she
saw them she suddenly found voice for so hideous a scream that
Cherry's knees failed her, and Peter sprang forward with a shout.

He gripped the woman's arm, and her frantic eyes were turned to
him.

"Oh, my God!" she cried in a hoarse, cawing voice. "My God!
They're over the bank--they're over the bank!"

"Who?" Peter shouted, his heart turning to ashes.

"Oh, the car--the automobile!" the woman mouthed. "Oh, my God--I
saw it go! I saw it fall! Oh, God, save them-oh, God, take them,
don't let them suffer that way!"

They were all running now, running with desperate speed down the
long road, about the curves, on and on toward the frantic noise of
the dog's barking, and toward another noise, the sound of a human
voice twisted and wild with agony.

The strange woman was crying out wildly; Cherry was sobbing a
prayer. Peter, without knowing that he spoke at all, was repeating
over and over again the words: "Not Alix-my God!--it cannot be--
she has never had an accident before-not Alix!"

A last curve, and they knew. Over one of the sharpest and ugliest
of the descending precipices, crashing down through the saplings
and underbrush and striking the trunks of a score of trees on its
way, the heavy car had fallen like a boulder. And Peter saw that
it was Alix's car, and with a great cry he sprang over the bank
and, slipping and stumbling, followed its mad course down almost
to the dry creek-bed in the canyon, and fell on his knees beside
the huddled figure that, erect and strong, in its striped blue
gingham, had been Alix only a few short minutes ago.

She had been flung clear of the car, and although almost every
bone in her body was broken, by some miracle the face, except for
a deep cut where the brown hair met the tanned forehead, was
untouched. And as he caught her in his arms and bent over her with
the bitterness of death stopping his own heart, a soft, thick
braid loosened and fell like the touch of her hand upon his own,
and it seemed to him that in the tranquil face and in the very
look of the closed and fast-shadowing eyelids he caught a glimpse
of Alix's old smile.

Peter forgot everything else in the world. He held her close to
him and put his face against her face, and perhaps she had never
so truly been his own as in this moment of their parting, when the
quiet autumn woodland, shot with long shafts from the sinking sun,
rang with his bitter cry:

"No, Alix--not dead! My wife--my wife!"

There were other men and women gathering fast now, and the whole
little valley was beginning to ring with the tragedy. After a
while some sympathetic man touched Peter on the arm to say that
Mrs. Lloyd had fainted, and that if he would please tell them what
to do about the other man--he was not yet dead--

Peter roused himself, and with help from half a dozen hands on all
sides he carried Alix up to the road and laid her upon a motor
robe that some kindly spectator had spread in the deep dust. AH
about he heard the quick, horrified breathing and muttering of the
shocked and sympathetic neighbours who had gathered, but to him
there was a brassy light in the world and a hideous taste of inky
bitterness in the very air he breathed, and he recognized nobody.

Presently he was conscious that a small, slight woman with
disorderly fair hair and with her face streaked with dust and
tears was standing beside him, and looking down at her, he saw
that it was Cherry.

"Yes, Cherry?" he said, moistening his dry lips.

"Peter," she said, "they say Martin's living--he was screaming--"
She grew deathly pale, and faintness swept over her, but she
mastered it. "He was caught by that tree," she said. "And he is
living. Will you tell them--tell one of these men--that if he will
help me, we can drive him home. If you'll tell him that, then I'll
get a doctor--"

"Yes, I will," Peter said, not stirring. His eyes had the look of
a sleep-walker; he nodded slowly and gravely at her, like a very
old man. "You--" he said to a man who had stopped his car near by
and who was pressing sympathetically close. "Will you--?"

"If you'll sit in the back seat, dear, and just rest his poor
head," a woman said to Cherry. Peter saw that they were lifting
Martin's big, senseless form in tender hands and carrying it
through the little group. There was a shudder as Martin moaned
deeply. Peter went and sat on the low bank by Alix again, and
lifted one of her limp hands, and held it. Ah, if in God's mercy
and goodness she might moan, he thought, that one slight ray of
hope would flood all the world with light for him again! But she
did not stir.

"Gone?" said Cherry's heartrending voice, a mere whisper, beside
him.

He turned upon her lifeless eyes.

"Gone," he echoed.

"Oh, Alix--my darling! My own big sister!"

Cherry sobbed, falling to her knees and passionately kissing the
peaceful face. "Oh, Alix, dearest!"

The women about broke into tears. Peter pressed his hand close
against his aching eyeballs, wishing that he might cry.

"She drove here," he heard a man's voice saying in the silence,
"and she must have lost control of her car for a minute. Then--do
you see?--the wheel slipped on the bank. Once it got this far, no
power in God's earth--"

"No power in God's earth!" another man's voice said in solemn
confirmation.

"Peter," Cherry said, "will you come to me as soon as you can? I
shall need you."

"As soon as I can," he answered, absently.

The car drove away, and he heard Martin moan again as it moved.

"Joyce," said a man's kind voice close beside him. He recognized
the voice rather than the distressed face of an old friend and
neighbour. "Joyce, my dear fellow," he urged, affectionately,
"tell us what we may do, and we'll see to it. Pull yourself
together, my dear old chap. Now, shall I telephone for an--an
ambulance? You must help us just a little here, and then we'll
spare you everything else."

"Thank you, Fred," Peter answered after a moment, during which he
looked seriously and studiously at his friend, as if ascertaining
through unseen mists and barriers the identity of the speaker.
"Thank you," he said. "Will you help me take--my wife--home?"

"You wish it that way?" the other man said, anxiously.

"Please," Peter answered, simply. And instantly there was moving
and clearing in the crowd, a murmuring of whispered directions.

After a while they were at the mountain cabin, and Kow, with tears
running down his yellow face, was helping them. Then Peter and his
friend were walking up over the familiar trails, he hardly knew
where, in the late twilight, and then they went into the old
living room, and Alix was lying there, splendid, sweet, untouched,
with her brave, brown forehead shadowed softly by her brown hair,
and her lashes resting upon her cheeks, and her fingers clasped
about the stems of three great, creamy roses.

There were other flowers all about, and there were women in the
room. White draperies fell with sweeping lines from the merciful
veiling of the crushed figure, and Alix might have been only
asleep, and dreaming some heroic dream that lent that secret pride
and joy to her mouth and filled those closed eyes with a triumph
they had never known in life.

Peter stood and looked down at her, and the men and women drew
back. But although the muscles of his mouth twitched, he did not
weep. He looked long at her, while an utter silence filled the
room, and while twilight deepened into dark over the cabin and
over the mountain above it.

Something cold touched his hand, and he heard the dog whimper.
Without turning his head or moving his eyes from Alix's face, he
pressed his fingers on the silky head; his breast rose on one
agonized breath, but he controlled it. Buck was as still as his
master, sensing, in unfailing dog-fashion, that something was
wrong.

"So that was your way out, Alix?" Peter said in the depth of his
soul. "That was your solution for us all? You would go out of
life, away from the sunshine and the trees and the hills that you
loved, so that Cherry and I should be saved? I was blind not to
see it. I have been blind from the very beginning."

Silence. The room was filling with shadows. On the mantel was a
deep bowl of roses that he remembered watching her cut--was it
yesterday or centuries ago?

"I was wrong," he said. "But I think you would be sorry to have me
face--what I am facing now. You were always so forgiving, Alix;
you would be the first to be sorry."

He put his hand over the tigerish pain that was beginning to reach
his heart. His throat felt thick and choked, and still he did not
cry.

"An hour ago," he said, "if it had been that the least thought of
what this meant to you might have reached me an hour ago, it would
not have been too late. Alix, one look into your eyes an hour ago
might have saved us all! Fred," Peter said aloud, with a bitter
groan, clinching tight the hands of the old friend who had crept
in to stand beside him "Fred, she was here, in all her health and
joy and strength only today. And now--"

"I know--old man--" the other man muttered. He looked anxiously at
Peter's terrible face. In the silence the dog whimpered faintly.
But when Peter, after an endless five minutes, turned away, it was
to speak to his friend in an almost normal voice.

"I must go down and see Cherry, Fred. She took her husband to the
old house; they were living there."

"Helen will stay here," the man assured him, quickly. "I'll drive
you down and come back here. We thought perhaps a few of us could
come here to-morrow afternoon, Peter," he added timidly, with his
reddened eyes filling again, "and talk of her a little, and pray
for her a little, and then take her to--to rest beside the old
doctor--"

"I hadn't thought about that," Peter answered, still with the air
of finding it hard to link words to thought. "But that is the way
she would like it. Thank you--and thank Helen for me--"

"Oh, Peter, to do anything--" the woman faltered. "She came to us,
you know, when the baby was so ill--day after day--my own sister
couldn't have been more to us!"

"Did she?" Peter asked, staring at the speaker steadily. "That was
like her."

He went out of the house and got into a waiting car, and they
drove down the mountain. Alix had driven him over this road day
before yesterday--yesterday--no, it was today, he remembered.

"Thank God I don't feel it yet as I shall feel it, Thompson!" he
said, quietly. The man who was driving gave him an anxious glance.

"You must take each day as it comes," he answered, simply.

Peter nodded, folded his arms across his chest, and stared into
the early dark. There was no other way to go than past the very
spot where the horror had occurred, but Thompson told his wife
later that poor Joyce had not seemed to know it when they passed
it. Nor did he give any evidence of emotion when they reached the
old Strickland house and entered the old hallway where Cherry had
come flying in, a few short years ago, with Martin's first kiss
upon her lips.

Two doctors, summoned from San Francisco, were here, and two
nurses. Martin had been laid upon a hastily moved bed in the old
study, to be spared the narrow stairs. The room was metamorphosed,
the whole house moved about it as about a pivot, and there was no
thought but for the man who lay, sometimes moaning and sometimes
ominously still, waiting for death.

"He cannot live!" whispered Cherry, ghastly of face, and with the
utter chaos of her soul and brain expressed by her tumbled frock
and the carelessly pushed back and knotted masses of her hair.
"His arm is broken, Peter, and his leg crushed--they don't dare
touch him! And the surgeon says the spine, too--and you see his
head! Oh, God! it is so terrible," she said in agony, through shut
teeth, knotting her hands together, "it is too terrible that he is
breathing NOW, that life is there NOW, and that they cannot hold
it!"

She led Peter into the sitting room, where the doctors were
waiting. The nurses came and went; the lamps had been lighted.
Both the physicians rose as Peter came in, and he knew that they
had been told that this was the man whose wife had been killed
that day. Their manner expressed the sympathy they did not voice.
Peter sat down with them.

"Is there any hope?" he asked, when Cherry had gone away on one of
the restless, unnecessary journeys with which she was filling the
endless hours. One man shook his head, and in the silence they
heard Martin groan.

"It is possible he may weather it, of course," the older man said,
doubtfully. "He is coming out of that first stupor, and we may be
able to tell better in a short time. The fact that he is living at
all indicates a tremendous vitality."

Thoughtfully and gravely they exchanged technical phrases.
Cherry's Chinese boy brought in a tray, and both the other men ate
and drank. Peter nodded a negative without a change of expression,
but presently he roused himself to replenish the fire. The clock
ticked and ticked in the stillness.

Cherry came to the door to say "Doctor!" on a burst of tears. The
physicians departed at once to the study, and Peter was
immediately summoned to assist them in handling the big frame of
the patient. Martin was thoroughly conscious now; his face chalk
white. Cherry, agonized, knelt beside the bed, her frightened eyes
moving from face to face.

There was a brief consultation, then Cherry and Peter were
banished.

"Don't worry, dear," said one of the nurses, coming out of the
sick-room. "It's just that Doctor Henry thinks he would be more
comfortable if we could get the arm and leg set! You see, now that
he's conscious and is running just a little temperature--"

"Much fever?" Cherry asked, sharply.

"Oh, nothing at all, dear!" the nurse hastened to say. "The only
thing is, that setting the arm and leg will ease the pain and save
his strength." She bustled off for basins, bandages, and hot
water. In the silence Martin's groans occasionally broke.

Cherry, her eyes on the study door, stood biting her fingers in
frenzy. When from the sound of Martin's voice she realized that he
was being hurt, she looked at Peter in agony.

"Oh, why do they do that--why do they do that? Torturing him for
nothing!" he heard her whisper. "Go in and--go in and do
something!" she urged, incoherently.

But the sounds had stopped, and there was a blessed interval of
silence. The clock on the mantel sounded eight in swift, silvery
strokes, and presently a sympathetic nurse came silently in with a
tray holding two cups of hot soup. Cherry shut her eyes and shook
her head.

"Please, Cherry--you need it!" Peter pleaded, carrying her a
smoking cup. She protested again with a gesture, looked wearily
into his eyes, and drank the soup docilely, like a child.

"You, too, Peter!" she said, suddenly rousing herself. Peter
gulped down his own cupful, waved away the sandwiches that were on
the tray, and took the chair opposite the one in which Cherry was
sitting.

The clock presently struck the half-hour, but neither spoke.
Cherry's pallor, her air of fatigue and bewilderment, and the
familiar setting of the old environment made her seem a child
again. Peter watched her with a confused sense that the whole
frightful day had been a dream. Once she looked up and met his
eyes.

"He can't live," she said in a whisper.

"Perhaps not," Peter answered very low. Cherry returned to her
sombre musing.

"We didn't see this end to it, did we?" she said with a pitiful
smile after a long while.

"Oh, no--NO!" Peter said, shutting his eyes, and with a faint,
negative movement of his head.

"We wouldn't have had this happen--" Cherry began. Her lips
trembled, her whole face wrinkled, and she put her hand across her
eyes and pressed it there with a gesture of forlornness and sorrow
that wrenched Peter's heart. Her tears began to fall fast.

"Poor Cherry--if I could spare you all this!" he said, knotting
his fingers and feeling for the first time the prick of bitter
tears against his eyelids.

"Oh, there is nothing you can do," she said faintly and wearily
after a while. And she whispered, as if to herself, "Nothing--
nothing--nothing!"

Then there was silence again. The lamps burned softly; the fire
sucked and flickered; a chilling air, full of autumn sadness,
began to creep from the corners of the room. Peter's eyes moved
over the backs of the old books, Dickens and Thackeray and the
"Household Book of Verse," moved to the faded photograph of
Cherry's mother on the mantel, a beautiful woman in the big
sleeves of the late nineties.

The doctors came back; there was a little stir and rearrangement
as they seated themselves.

"Any change?" Cherry asked, cautiously.

"No change." Both men shook their heads.

"Any--any hope?" she faltered.

The physicians exchanged glances. No word was spoken, but the look
in their faces, the faint narrowing of eyes and compressing of
lips, gave her her answer.




CHAPTER XXIII


It was all strange and bewildering, thought Peter. It was not like
anything he had ever connected in his thoughts with Alix, yet it
was all for her.

The day was warm and still, and the little church was packed with
flowers, and packed with people. Women were crying, and men were
crying, too, rather to his dazed surprise. The organ was straining
through the warm, fragrant air, and the old clergyman, whose
venerable, leonine head, in its crown of snowy hair, Peter could
see clearly, spoke in a voice that was thickened with tears.
Strangers, or almost strangers, had been touching Peter's hand
respectfully, timidly, had been praising Alix. She had been "good"
to this one, "good" to that one, they told him; she had always
been so "interested," and so "happy."

Her coffin was buried in flowers, many of them the plain flowers
she loved, the gillies and stock and verbena, and even the sweet,
sober wall-flowers that were somehow like herself. But it was the
roses that scented the whole world for Alix to-day, and fresh
creamy buds had been placed between the waxen fingers. And still
that radiant look of triumphant love lingered on her quiet face,
and still the faint ghost of a smile touched the once kindly and
merry mouth.

They said good-bye to her at the church, the villagers and old
friends who had loved her, and Peter and two or three men alone
followed her down along the winding road that led to the old
cemetery. Cherry was hanging over the bedside of her husband, who
still miraculously lingered through hours of pain, but as Peter,
responsive to a touch on his arm, crossed the church porch to
blindly enter the waiting motor-car, he saw, erect and grave, on
the front seat, in his decent holiday black, and with his felt hat
held in his hands, Kow, claiming his right to stand beside the
grave of the mistress he had loved and served so faithfully. The
sight of him, in his clumsy black, instead of the usual crisp
white, and with a sad and tear-stained face shook Peter strangely,
but he did not show a sign of pain.

The twisted low branches of oak trees threw shadows on the grave
when they finally reached it, and sheep were cropping the watered
grass of the graveyard. It was silent and peaceful here, on the
very top of the world, not a sound intruded, and nothing stirred
but the shadow of a flying bird, and the slowly moving, rounded
woolly backs of the sheep.

The soft autumn sky, the drift of snowy clouds across the blue,
the clear shadows on brown grass under the oaks, all these were
familiar. But Peter still looked dazedly at his black cuff and at
the turned earth next to the doctor's headstone, telling himself
again that this was for Alix. How often he had seen her sitting
there, with her bright face sobered and sweet, as she talked
lovingly, eagerly, of her father! They had often come here, Peter
the more willingly because she was so sensible and happy about it;
she would pack lunch, button herself into one of the crisp blue
ginghams, chatter on the road in her usual fashion. And if, for a
few moments, the train of memory fired by the sight of the old
doctor's grave became too poignant, and tears came, she always
scolded herself with that mixture of childish and maternal
impatience that was so characteristic of her, and that Peter had
seen her use to this very father years ago!

He remembered her, a tall, awkward girl, with a volume of Dickens
slipping from her lap as she sat on a hassock by the fire, teasing
her father, scolding and reproaching him. Blazing red on high
cheek-bones, untidy black hair, quick tongue and ready laugh; that
was the Alix of the old days, when he had criticized and
patronized her, and told her that she should be more like Anne and
little Cherry!

He remembered being delegated, one day, to take her into town to
the dentist, and that upon discovering that the dentist was not in
his office, he had taken her to the circus instead. She had been
about thirteen, and had eaten too many peanuts, he thought, and
had lost a petticoat in full sight of the grand-stand. But how
grateful and happy she had been!

"Dear little old blue petticoat!" he said. "Dear little old madcap
Alix--!"

There was silence, the silence of inanition, about him. He came to
himself with a start. He was up on the hills, in the cemetery--
this was Alix's grave, newly covered with wilting masses of
flowers, and he was keeping everybody waiting. He murmured an
apology; the waiting men were all kindness and sympathy.

He got back into the motor-car; Kow got in; the man who drove them
quickly toward the valley talked easily and steadily to Peter,
attempting to interest him in the affairs of some water company in
San Francisco. When they got to the valley a city train was
arriving, and Peter saw people looking at him furtively and
sorrowfully. He remembered the many, many times Alix had waited
for him at the trains; he glanced toward the big madrone under
which she always parked her car. She was usually deep in a book as
he crossed from the train, but she would fling it into the back
seat, and make room for him beside her. The dog would bound into
the tonneau, Alix would hand her husband his mail, the car would
start with a great plunge toward the mountain--toward the cool
garden high up on the ridge--

"She never had an accident, Fred," he said, simply.

"Alix?" The other man nodded gravely, but there was a worried look
in his eyes. He did not like Peter's quiet tone. "It may be that
her steering-gear broke," he said. "I don't believe it was her
fault. Never will! No, it was just one of those things--" He
emptied his lungs with a great breath of nervousness and sympathy.
"Now, we want you to-night--" he began, pleadingly.

"No--no--no!" Peter said, quickly. "I had better go to her sister.
Poor Lloyd is dying, and she is on the verge of a collapse. The
nurse said this morning that they could not get her to undress or
to leave the room. Poor girl--poor Cherry! I had better go there,
Fred. She will need me!"

"No chance for him?" the driving man asked, turning his car.

"No--it's only a matter of time!"

"She came in for the old doctor's money, didn't she?"

"Yes--all of it, now. And my wife had some property--some I had
given her; that will go to the sister now. She will be well
fixed," Peter said, in a dull tone. "That would have pleased
Alix."

"She's a beautiful woman, and young still," said the other man,
after awhile. Peter did not hear him.

Cherry looked small and pathetic in her fresh black, and her face
was marked by secret incessant weeping. But the nurses and doctors
could not say enough for her self-control; she was always
composed, always quietly helpful and calm when they saw her, and
she was always busy. From early morning, when she slipped into the
sick-room, to stand looking at the unconscious Martin with a
troubled, intent expression that the nurses came to know well,
until night, she moved untiringly about the quiet, shaded house.
She supervised the Chinese boy, saw that the nurses had their
hours for rest and exercise, telephoned, dusted, and arranged the
rooms, saw callers sweetly and patiently, filled vases with
flowers.

Every day she had several vigils in the sick-room, and every day
at least one long talk with the doctors. Peter would find her deep
in letters and documents, or find her--who had loved to be idle, a
few weeks ago--busily sewing. Sometimes she gave him a long list
of things to do for her in the village and the city, and every day
she wrote notes--Cherry, who had always hated to write notes!--to
thank the friends who had sent in flowers, soups, and jellies, and
custards for the patient. Every afternoon and evening had its
callers; she and Peter were rarely alone.

Martin was utterly unconscious of the life that flowed on about
him; sometimes he seemed to recognize Cherry, and would stare with
painful intentness into her face, but after a few seconds his gaze
would wander to the strange nurses, and the room that he had never
known, and with a puzzled sigh he would close his eyes again, and
drift back into his own strange world of pain, fever, and
unconsciousness.

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