第95章

She sat up, looked round in wonder.Yes--it was night again--very still, very beautiful, and warm, with the air fragrant and soft.She felt intensely awake, entirely rested--and full of hope.It was as if during that long dreamless sleep her whole being had been renewed and magically borne away from the lands of shadow and pain where it had been wandering, to a land of bright promise.Oh, youth, youth, that bears so lightly the burden of the past, that faces so confidently the mystery of the future! She listened--heard a faint sound that moved her to investigate.Peering through the dense bushes, she discovered on the grass in the shadow of the next clump, a ragged, dirty man and woman, both sound asleep and snoring gently.She watched them spellbound.The man's face was deeply shaded by his battered straw hat.But she could see the woman's face plainly--the thin, white hair, the sunken eyes and mouth, the skeleton look of old features over which the dry skin of age is tightly drawn.She gazed until the man, moving in his sleep, kicked out furiously and uttered a curse.She drew back, crawled away until she had put several clumps of bushes between her and the pair.Then she sped down and up the slopes and did not stop until she was where she could see, far below, the friendly lights of the city blinking at her through the smoky mist.

She had forgotten her bundle! She did not know how to find the place where she had left it; and, had she known, she would not have dared return.This loss, however, troubled her little.Not in vain had she dwelt with the philosopher Burlingham.

She seated herself on a bench and made herself comfortable.But she no longer needed sleep.She was awake--wide awake--in every atom of her vigorous young body.The minutes dragged.She was impatient for the dawn to give the signal for the future to roll up its curtain.She would have gone down into the city to walk about but she was now afraid the police would take her in--and that probably would mean going to a reformatory, for she could not give a satisfactory account of herself.True, her older way of wearing her hair and some slight but telling changes in her dress had made her look less the child.But she could not hope to pass for a woman full grown.The moon set; the starlight was after a long, long time succeeded by the dawn of waking birds, and of waking city, too--for up from below rose an ever louder roar like a rising storm.In her restless rovings, she came upon a fountain; she joined the birds making a toilet in its basin, and patterned after them--washed her face and hands, dried them on a handkerchief she by great good luck had put into her stocking, smoothed her hair, her dress.

And still the sense of unreality persisted, cast its friendly spell over this child-woman suddenly caught up from the quietest of quiet lives and whirled into a dizzy vortex of strange events without parallel, or similitude even, in anything she had ever known.If anyone had suddenly asked her who she was and she had tried to recall, she would have felt as if trying to remember a dream.Sutherland--a faint, faint dream, and the show boat also.

Spenser--a romantic dream--or a first installment of a lovestory read in some stray magazine.Burlingham--the theatrical agent--the young man of the previous afternoon--the news of the death that left her quite alone--all a dream, a tumbled, jumbled dream, all passed with the night and the awakening.In her youth and perfect health, refreshed by the long sleep, gladdened by the bright new day, she was as irresponsible as the merry birds chattering and flinging the water about at the opposite side of the fountain's basin.She was now glad she had lost her bundle.

Without it her hands were free both hands free to take whatever might offer next.And she was eager to see what that would be, and hopeful about it--no--more than hopeful, confident.

Burlingham, aided by those highly favorable surroundings of the show boat, and of the vagabond life thereafter, had developed in her that gambler's spirit which had enabled him to play year after year of losing hands with unabating courage--the spirit that animates all the brave souls whose deeds awe the docile, conventional, craven masses of mankind.

Leisurely as a truant she tramped back toward the city, pausing to observe anything that chanced to catch her eye.At the moment of her discovery of the difference between her and most girls there had begun a cleavage between her and the social system.

And now she felt as if she were of one race and the rest of the world of another and hostile race.She did not realize it, but she had taken the first great step along the path that leads to distinction or destruction.For the world either obeys or tramples into dust those who, in whatever way, have a lot apart from the common.She was free from the bonds of convention--free to soar or to sink.

Her way toward the city lay along a slowly descending street that had been, not so very long before, a country road.Block after block there were grassy fields intersected by streets, as if city had attempted a conquest of country and had abandoned it.Again the vacant lots were disfigured with the ruins of a shanty or by dreary dump heaps.For long stretches the way was built up only on one side.The houses were for the most part tenement with small and unprosperous shops or saloons on the ground floor.Toward the foot of the hill, where the line of tenements was continuous on either side, she saw a sign "Restaurant" projecting over the sidewalk.When she reached it, she paused and looked in.A narrow window and a narrow open door gave a full view of the tiny room with its two rows of plain tables.Near the window was a small counter with a case containing cakes and pies and rolls.With back to the window sat a pretty towheaded girl of about her own age, reading.Susan, close to the window, saw that the book was Owen Meredith's "Lucile," one of her own favorites.She could even read the words: