Alice Adams | Page 4

did
almost everything else, for that matter.
He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his
windows and stop at each house. The milkman carried his jars round to
the "back porch," while the horse moved slowly ahead to the gate of the
next customer and waited there. "He's gone into Pollocks'," Adams
thought, following this progress. "I hope it'll sour on 'em before
breakfast. Delivered the Andersons'. Now he's getting out ours. Listen
to the darn brute! What's HE care who wants to sleep!" His complaint
was of the horse, who casually shifted weight with a clink of steel
shoes on the worn brick pavement of the street, and then heartily shook
himself in his harness, perhaps to dislodge a fly far ahead of its season.
Light had just filmed the windows; and with that the first sparrow woke,
chirped instantly, and roused neighbours in the trees of the small yard,
including a loud-voiced robin. Vociferations began irregularly, but

were soon unanimous.
"Sleep? Dang likely now, ain't it!"
Night sounds were becoming day sounds; the far-away hooting of
freight-engines seemed brisker than an hour ago in the dark. A cheerful
whistler passed the house, even more careless of sleepers than the
milkman's horse had been; then a group of coloured workmen came by,
and although it was impossible to be sure whether they were homeward
bound from night-work or on their way to day- work, at least it was
certain that they were jocose. Loose, aboriginal laughter preceded them
afar, and beat on the air long after they had gone by.
The sick-room night-light, shielded from his eyes by a newspaper
propped against a water-pitcher, still showed a thin glimmering that
had grown offensive to Adams. In his wandering and enfeebled
thoughts, which were much more often imaginings than reasonings, the
attempt of the night-light to resist the dawn reminded him of something
unpleasant, though he could not discover just what the unpleasant thing
was. Here was a puzzle that irritated him the more because he could not
solve it, yet always seemed just on the point of a solution. However, he
may have lost nothing cheerful by remaining in the dark upon the
matter; for if he had been a little sharper in this introspection he might
have concluded that the squalor of the night-light, in its seeming effort
to show against the forerunning of the sun itself, had stimulated some
half-buried perception within him to sketch the painful little synopsis of
an autobiography.
In spite of noises without, he drowsed again, not knowing that he did;
and when he opened his eyes the nurse was just rising from her cot. He
took no pleasure in the sight, it may be said. She exhibited to him a
face mismodelled by sleep, and set like a clay face left on its cheek in a
hot and dry studio. She was still only in part awake, however, and by
the time she had extinguished the night-light and given her patient his
tonic, she had recovered enough plasticity. "Well, isn't that grand!
We've had another good night," she said as she departed to dress in the
bathroom.

"Yes, you had another!" he retorted, though not until after she had
closed the door.
Presently he heard his daughter moving about in her room across the
narrow hall, and so knew that she had risen. He hoped she would come
in to see him soon, for she was the one thing that didn't press on his
nerves, he felt; though the thought of her hurt him, as, indeed, every
thought hurt him. But it was his wife who came first.
She wore a lank cotton wrapper, and a crescent of gray hair escaped to
one temple from beneath the handkerchief she had worn upon her head
for the night and still retained; but she did everything possible to make
her expression cheering.
"Oh, you're better again! I can see that, as soon as I look at you," she
said. "Miss Perry tells me you've had another splendid night."
He made a sound of irony, which seemed to dispose unfavourably of
Miss Perry, and then, in order to be more certainly intelligible, he
added, "She slept well, as usual!"
But his wife's smile persisted. "It's a good sign to be cross; it means
you're practically convalescent right now."
"Oh, I am, am I?"
"No doubt in the world!" she exclaimed. "Why, you're practically a
well man, Virgil--all except getting your strength back, of course, and
that isn't going to take long. You'll be right on your feet in a couple of
weeks from now."
"Oh, I will?"
"Of course you will!" She laughed briskly, and, going to the table in the
center of the room, moved his glass of medicine an inch or two, turned