_ CHAPTER XXIV. THE SACKCLOTH OF SPRING VALLEY
Number five roared eastward through the town that day on time. No one stepped down from the train, and no one took passage on it. Spring Valley had dropped back into its customary uneventfulness so far as the outer world might tell. It was but a little hamlet on the long line of fields and trees that lies along the way of Number Five.
Hurrying on toward the vast confusion of the metropolis, Number Five gave up its tenants to be lost in the cosmic focus of the great city, where all about were the lights and the anxious faces. The city, with its tall, dentated outline against the sky--wonderful, beautiful, alluring; the city with its unceasing strife, its vast and brooding peace, where walk side by side the ablest men, the most beautiful women of all the world, all keyed to the highest pitch of effort, all living at white heat of emotion and passion, of joy and of sorrow--the city and its ways--we may not know these unless we, too, embark on Number Five.
In the silk-lined recesses of one of the city's greatest hostelries, where anything in the world may be bought, there sat, soon after the arrival of Number Five at the metropolis, the traveling man, Ben McQuaid of Spring Valley, and a little milliner from a town east of Spring Valley which Ben McQuaid "made" in his regular travel for his "house." He had bought for her now the most expensive viands, the most confusing and inspiring wines that all the city could offer. Soft-footed servants were attending them both. They were having their little fling. To the city that was a matter of small consequence.
Nor, when it comes to that, was all the city itself of so much consequence. The great fact is that, while Ben McQuaid and the little milliner were speeding east on Number Five, at midday, when the dusty maples of Spring Valley still were motionless under the heat of the inland summer day--old Nels Jorgens' wife was walking across the way with a covered dish in her hands.... In the dish, you say, there was only some crude cottage cheese for Aurora Lane? Was that all you saw? Seek again: for you, too, are human and neither may you escape the great things of life, nor ought you to miss its great discoveries.
Mrs. Nels Jorgens had on no hat. Her gown was God knows what--gingham or calico or silk or cloth of gold, who shall say? She was a woman of fifty-eight. Her sunken stomach protruded far below her flattened and withered bosom as she walked. Her stringy hair was gray and uncomely. But her face--now her face--have you not seen it? Perhaps not in the city. But the little supper in the city (not yet come to the time of sack-cloth) was by no means so great a thing as the service of Mrs. Nels Jorgens, the wagon-maker's wife, when she carried across to Aurora Lane a dish of something for her luncheon.
And others came. From the byways of this late cruel-hearted village came women, surely not cruel-hearted after all. They seemed to have some common errand. They were paying off the debt of years, though what they brought was not in silver dishes and there was no bubbling wine. So far from calling this a merciless, ignorant town, a hopeless town, at noon of that day, had you been there and seen these women and their ways, you would have called it charitable, kindly, beautiful; though after all it was and had been only human.
Over the breathless maples there seemed now to hang a stratum of another atmosphere, as sensible, as appreciable, as though a physical thing itself. The sympathy of Spring Valley was awake at last--after twenty years!
"'Rory, I just thought I'd come over and bring you a dish of this--I had some already made. I said to myself, says I, if we can eat this all the time, maybe you can just once"--it was the old jest, humble but kind. It sounded wondrous sweet to Aurora Lane--after twenty years.
After these had gone away again, a little awed by the white, sad dignity of Aurora Lane--even nature seemed to relent. Ben McQuaid and the little milliner were cooled by swiftly revolving electric fans yonder in the city. But along in the evening of this summer day in Spring Valley the leaves of the maples were stirred by softly moving breezes done by nature's hand.
"Aaron," said old Silas Kneebone to his crony, "seems like we're goin' to get a change of weather. Maybe the hot spell's broke at last."
"I'll tell you what I'll do, Silas," said his friend suddenly, straightening up on his staff. "I'll tell you what I'll do with you, Silas. Even if it
is goin' to be cool before long--I'll just take you over to the drug store and buy you a drink of ice-cream sody at the fountain!"
"Time comes," he continued after a time, "when a fellow's been feelin' kind of stirred up, some way--when he feels just like he didn't care a hang for no expense. Ain't that the truth?" _