It is no doubt owing to the habit of life in Higgleston being so little
differentiated from Taylorville that I was never able to get any other
impression of it than as a place one put up at on the way to some other;
always it bore to my mind the air of a traveller's room in one of those
stops where it is necessary to open the trunks but not worth while to
unpack them. Nor do I think it was altogether owing to what I left there
that my recollection of it centres paganly about the cemetery. In
Taylorville, love and birth, though but scantily removed from the savour
of impropriety, were still the salient facts of existence, but in
Higgleston a funeral was your real human occasion. It was as if the
rural fear of innovation had thrown them back for a pivotal centre upon
the point of continuity with their past.
It was a generous rolling space set aside for the dead, abutting on two
sides on the boardwalks of the town, stretching back by dips and hollows
to the wooded pastures. Near the gates which opened from the walk, it
was divided off in single plots and family allotments, scattering more
and more to the farthest neglected mounds that crept obscurely under the
hazel thickets and the sapling oaks, happiest when named the least,
assimilated quickliest to their native earth. It was this that rendered
the pagan touch, for though nearly all Higgleston was church-going and
looked forward to a hymn-book heaven, they seemed to me never quite
dissevered from the untutored pastures to which their whole living and
dying was a process of being reabsorbed.
Higgleston, until this junction of railroads occurred, had been a close
settled farming community, and a vague notion of civic improvement had
ripped through the centre of its wide old yards and comfortable, country
looking dwellings, a shadeless, unpaved street lined with what were
known as business blocks, with a tendency to run mostly to front and a
general placarded state of being to let, or about to be opened on these
premises.
Beyond the railway station there was a dingy region devoted to car shops
and cheap lodgings, known locally as Track Town, whose inhabitants were
forever at odds with the older rural population, withdrawing itself into
a kind of aristocracy of priority and propriety; and between these an
intermediary group, self styled, "the leading business men of the town,"
forever and trivially busy to reconcile the two factions in the
interests of trade. That Tommy was by reason of his position as managing
salesman of Burton Brothers, generically of this class, might have had
something to do with my never having formed any vital or lasting
relations with either community; and it might have been for quite other
reasons. For in the very beginning of my stay there, Life had seized me;
that bubbling, frothing Force, working forever to breach the film of
existence. I was used by it, I was abused by it. For what does Life care
what it does to the tender bodies of women?
My baby was born within ten months of my marriage and most of that time
I was wretchedly, depressingly ill. All my memories of my early married
life are of Olivia, in the mornings still with frost, cowering away from
the kitchen sights and smells, or gasping up out of engulfing nausea to
sit out the duty calls of the leading ladies of Higgleston in the cold,
disordered house; of Tommy gulping unsuitable meals of underdone and
overdone things, and washing the day's accumulation of dishes after
business hours, patient and portentously cheerful, with Olivia in a
wrapper, half hysterical with weakness--all the young wife's dreams gone
awry! And Tommy too, he must have had visions of himself coming home to
a well-kept house, of delicious little dinners and long hours in which
he should appear in his proper character as the adored, achieving male.
Not long ago I read a book of a man's life written by a man, in which he
justified himself of unfaithfulness because his wife appeared before him
habitually in curl papers--and there were days when I couldn't even do
my hair!
In the beginning we had taken, in respect to Tommy's position among
those same live business men, a house rather too large for us, and we
hadn't counted on the wages of a servant. Now with the necessity upon us
of laying by money for the Great Expense, we felt less justified in it
than ever. This pinch of necessity was of the quality of corrosion on
what must have been meant for the consummate experience. I have to dwell
on it here because in this practical confusion of my illness, was laid
the foundation of our later failure to come together on any working
basis. We hadn't, in fact, time to find it; no time to understand, none
whatever in which to explore the use of passion and react into that
superunion of which the bodily relation is the overt sign--young things
we were, who had not fairly known each other as man and woman before we
were compelled to trace in one another the lineaments of parents, all
attention drawn away from the imperative business of framing a common
ideal, to centre on the child.
What this precipitance accomplished was, that, instead of being drawn
insensibly to find in the exigencies of marriage the natural unfolding
of that inward vitality, always much stronger in me than any exterior
phase, I was by the shock of too early maternity driven apart from the
usual, and I still believe the happier, destiny of women.
With all this we were spared the bitterness of the unwelcoming thought.
Little homely memories swim up beyond the pains and depressions to
mark, like twigs and leafage on a freshet, the swelling of the new
affection: Effie at Montecito, overruling all my mother's shocked
suggestions as to her supposed obliviousness of my condition, sitting up
nights to sew for me ... the dress I tried to make myself ... the bureau
drawer from which I used to take the little things every night to look
at them ... the smell of orris.
"See, Tommy; I've done so much to-day. Isn't it pretty?"
"My dear, you've shown that to me at least forty times and I've always
said so."
"Yes, but isn't it?... the little sleeves ... did you think anything
_could_ be so small? Tommy, don't you wish it would _come_?"
We had to make what we could of these moments of thrilled expectancy, of
tender brooding curiosity.
I scarcely recall now all the reasons why it was thought best for me to
go back to my mother in August, and to the family physician, but I find
it all pertinent to my subject. Whatever was done there was mostly
wrong, though I was years finding it out. I mean that whatever chance I
had of growing up into the competent mother of a family was probably
lost to me through the inexactitudes of country practice. We hadn't then
arrived at the realization that the well or ill going of maternity is a
matter of sceptics rather than sentiment. Taylorville was a town of ten
thousand inhabitants, but at that time no one had heard of such a thing
as a trained nurse; the business of midwifery was given over in general
to a widow so little attractive that she was thought not to have a
chance of marrying again, and by the circumstance of having had two or
three children of her own, believed to be eminently fit. To Olivia's
first encounter with the rending powers of Life, there went any amount
of affectionate consideration and much old wives' lore of an
extraordinary character. It seems hardly credible now, but in the
beginning of things going wrong, there were symptoms concealed from the
doctor on the ground of delicacy.
My baby, too, poor little man, was feeble from birth, a bottle baby; the
best that could have been done would hardly have been a chance for him.
Lying there in the hot, close room, all the air shut out with the light,
in the midst of pains, I made a fight for him, tried to interpose such
scraps of better knowledge as had come to me through reading, but they
made no headway against my mother's confidential, "Well, I ought to
know, I've buried five," and against Forester, who by the added
importance of having invested all her fortune, had gained such way with
my mother that she listened respectfully to his explication of what
should be done for the baby. It was Forester who overbore with ridicule
my suggestion that he should be fed at regular hours, for which I never
forgave him. But I had enough to do to fortify my racked body against
the time when I should be obliged to get up and go on again, as it
seemed privately I never should be able.
And they were all so fond and proud of my little Thomas Henry--he was
named so for his father and mine--Effie simply adored him; the wonder of
his smallness, the way in which he moved his limbs and opened and shut
his eyes; quite as if there had never been one born before. The way they
hung over him, and the wrong things they did! Even Cousin Lydia drove
into church the first Sunday after, for the purpose of holding him for a
quarter of an hour in her large, silk poplin arms, at the end of which
time she had softened almost to the point of confidence.
"I thought I was going to have one once," she admitted, "but somehow I
couldn't seem to manage it." She looked over to where Cousin Judd sat
with my mother. "He was always fond of young ones...." It occurred to me
then that Cousin Lydia was probably a much misunderstood woman.
Of the next six months at Higgleston after I returned to it with a three
months' old baby I have scarcely any recollection that is not mixed up
with bodily torment for myself and anxiety for the child. I think it
probable that most of that time my husband found the house badly kept,
the meals irregular and his wife hysterical. I hadn't anything to spare
with which to consider what figure I might have cut in the eyes of the
onlooker. Tommy shines out for me in that period by reason of the
unwearying patience and cheerfulness with which he successfully ignored
the general unsatisfactoriness of his home, and at times for a certain
exasperation I had with him, as if by being somehow less quiescent he
might have opposed a better front to the encroachments of distress. We
did try help in the kitchen after our finances had a little recovered
from the strain of my confinement, a Higgleston girl of no very great
competence and a sort of back-door visiting acquaintance with two thirds
of the community. Her chief accomplishments while she stayed with us,
were concocted out of the scraps and fag ends of our private
conversations. I could always tell that Ida had overheard something by
the alacrity with which she banged the pots about in the kitchen in
order that she might get through with her work and go out and tell
somebody. In the end Tommy said that when it came to a choice between
getting his own meals and losing his best customers he preferred the
former.
All this time I did not know how ill I was because of the consuming
anxiety for the baby. I remember times in the night--the dreadful
momentary revolt of my body rousing to this new demand upon it, before
the mind waked to the selfless consideration; and the failure of
composure which was as much weakness as fear; the long watching, the
walking to and fro, and the debates as to whether we ought or ought not
to venture on the expense of the doctor. And for long years afterward
what is the bitterest of bitterness, finding out that we had done the
wrong thing. To this day I cannot come across any notices of the more
competent methods for the care of delicate children, without a
remembering pang.
All the time this was going on I was aware by a secondary detached sort
of self, that there was a point somewhere beyond this perplexity of
pain, at which the joyful possession of my son should begin. I was
anxious to get at him, to have speech with him, to realize his
identity--any woman will understand--and along about the time the blue
flags and the live-for-evers and the white bridal wreaths were at their
best in the cemetery, it came upon me terrifyingly that I might, after
all, have to let him go without it. We were walking there that day, the
first we had thought it safe to take the baby out, for it was customary
to walk in the cemetery on Sunday and almost obligatory to your social
standing. The oaks were budding, and the wind in the irises and the
shadow of them on the tombstones, and the people all in their Sunday
best, walking in the warm light, gave an effect of more aliveness than
the sombre yards of the town could afford.
Tommy had taken the baby from me, for, though I could somehow never get
enough of the feel of him, his head in the hollow of my shoulder, his
weight against my arm, I was so little strong myself that I was glad to
pretend that it was because he was really getting heavy, and just then
we passed a little mound, so low, where a new headboard had been set up
with the superscription, "Only son of ---- and ---- aged eight months,"
and it was the age, and the little mound was just the length of my boy.
I think there was a rush of tears to cover that, the realization by a
kind of prevision that it was just to that he was to come, tears checked
in mid-course by the swift up-rush of the certainty, of the reality, of
the absoluteness of human experience. For by whatever mystery or magic
he had come to identity through me, he was my son as I knew, and not
even death could so unmake him.
I dwell upon this and one other incident which I shall relate in its
proper place, as all that was offered to me of the traditional
compensation for what women are supposed to be. If a sedulous social
ideal has kept them from the world touch through knowledge and
achievement, it has been because, sincerely enough, they have not been
supposed to be prevented from world processes so much as directed to
find them in a happier way. This would be reasonable if they found them.
What society fails to understand, or dishonestly fails to admit, is that
marriage as an act is not invariably the stroke that ushers in the
experience of being married.
Whatever proportions the change in my life had assumed to the outward
eye, it was only by the imagined pain of loss that I began to perceive
that I could never be quite in the same relation to things again, and to
identify my experience with the world adventure. I had become, by the
way of giving life and losing it, a link in the chain that leads from
dark to dark; I had touched for the moment a reality from which the
process of self-realization could be measured. It was the most and the
best I was to know of the incident called maternity, that whether it
were most bitter or most sweet it was irrevocable.
I suppose, though he was always so inarticulate, that Tommy must have
caught something of my mood from me. He didn't seem to see anything
ridiculous in my holding on to a fold of the baby's skirt all the way
home; and when we had come into the house and the boy was laid in his
crib again, so wan and so little, I sat on my young husband's knee and
cried with my face against his, and he did not ask me what it was about.
I think, though, that we had not yet appreciated how near we were to
losing him until my mother came to visit us along in the middle of the
summer. She was quite excited, as she walked up from the station with
Tommy, and for her, almost gay with the novelty of spending a month with
a married daughter, and then as soon as she had sight of the child, I
saw her checked and startled inquiry travel from me to Tommy and back
to the child's meagre little features, and a new and amazing tenderness
in all her manner to me. That night after I was in bed she came in her
night-dress and kissed me without saying anything, and I was too
surprised to make any motion of response. That was the first time I
remember my mother having kissed me on anything less than an official
occasion ... but she had buried five herself.
Notwithstanding, my mother's coming and the care she took of the baby,
seemed to make me, if anything, less prepared for the end. There were
new remedies of my mother's to be tried which appeared hopeful. I
recovered composure, thought of him as improving, when in fact it was
only I who was stronger for a few nights' uninterrupted sleep. Then
there was a day on which he was very quiet and she scarcely put him down
from her lap at all. I do not know what I thought of that, nor of the
doctor coming twice that day, unsummoned. I suppose my sensibilities
must have been blunted by the strain, for I recall thinking when Tommy
came home in the middle of the afternoon, how good it was we could all
have this quiet time together. It was the end of June. I remember the
blinds half drawn against the sun and the smell of lawns newly cut and
the damask rose by the window; I was going about putting fresh flowers
in the vases, a thing I had of late little time to do ... suddenly I
noticed Tommy crying. He sat close to my mother trying to make the
boy's poor little claws curl round his finger, and at the failure tears
ran down unwiped. I had never seen Tommy cry. I put down my roses
uncertain if I ought to go to him ... and all at once my mother called
me.