It was a common practice in Taylorville never to send for the doctor
until you knew what was the matter with you. So long as the symptoms
failed to align themselves with any known disorder, they were supposed
to be amenable to neighbourly advice, to the common stock of medical
misinformation, to the almanac or some such repository of science; and
though this practice led on too many occasions to the disease getting
past the curable stages before the physician was called, I never
remember to have heard it questioned.
"You see," people remarked to one another at the funeral, "they didn't
know what was the matter with her until it was too late," and it passed
for all extenuation. It was natural then that my mother should have kept
any premonitory symptoms of her indisposition even from Forester; close
as they were in their affections she would have thought it indelicate to
have spoken to him of her health. The first determinate stroke of it
came upon her sitting quietly in her usual place at prayer meeting on a
Wednesday evening.
It had been Forester's habit to close the shop a little early on that
evening, going around to the church to walk home with her, getting in
before the last hymn to save his face with the minister by a show of
regular attendance. But on this evening customers detained him beyond
his usual hour, so that by the time he reached the corner opposite the
church, he saw the people dribbling out by twos and threes, across the
lighted doorway, and noted that my mother was not with them. He thought
she might have slipped out earlier and gone around to the shop for him
as occasionally happened, but seeing the lights did not go out at once
in the church, he looked in to make sure, and saw her still sitting in
her accustomed place. The sexton and the organist, who were fussing
together about a broken pedal, appeared not to have observed her there,
and one of them was reaching up to put out the light when Forester
touched her on the shoulder. She started and seemed to come awake with
an effort, and on the way home she stumbled once or twice in a manner
that led him, totally unaccustomed as he was to think of my mother as
ill in any sort, to get a little entertainment out of it by gentle
rallying, which was dropped when he discovered that it caused her
genuine, pained embarrassment. The following Tuesday he came home to the
midday meal to find her lying on the floor, inarticulate and hardly
conscious. There must have been two strokes in close succession, for she
had managed after falling, to get a cushion from the worn sitting-room
lounge under her head and to pull a shawl partly over her. Effie, who
was at Montecito, was summoned home, and that evening, by the doctor's
advice, the telegram was sent which separated me so opportunely from the
Shamrocks. By the time I reached her, speech had returned in a measure,
and by the end of a fortnight she was able to be lifted into the chair
which she never afterward left.
I remember as if it were yesterday, the noble outline of her face and of
her head against the pillows, the smooth hair parted Madonna-wise and
brought low across her ears, the blue of her eyes looking out of the
dark, swollen circles, for all her fifty-two years, with the unawakened
clarity of a girl's. Stricken as I was from my first realizing contact
with sin, and my identification with it through the assumed passions of
the stage, it grew upon me during the days of my mother's illness that
there was a kind of intrinsic worth in her which I, with all my powers,
must forever and inalienably miss. With it there came a kind of
exasperation, never quite to leave me, of the certainty of not choosing
my own values, but of being driven with them aside and apart.
It was responsible in part for a feeling I had of being somehow less
related to my mother's house than many of her distant kin who were
continually arriving out of all quarters, in wagons and top buggies, to
express a continuity of interest and kind which had the effect of
constituting me definitely outside the bond.
The situation was furthered no doubt, by the whisper of my connection
with the stage which got about and set up in them an attitude of
circumspection, out of which I caught them at times regarding me with a
curiosity unmixed with any human sympathy. Yet I recall how keen an
appetite I had for what this illness of my mother's had thrown into
relief, the web of passionate human interactions, bone and body of the
spirituality that went clothed as gracelessly in the routine of their
daily lives as the figures of the men under the unyielding ugliness of
store clothing. It came out in the talk of the women sitting about the
base burner at night with their skirts folded back carefully across
their knees, in the watches we found it necessary to keep for the first
fortnight or so. I remember one of these occasions as the particular
instance by which my mother emerged for me from her condition of
parenthood, to the common plane of humanity, by way of an old romance of
her's with Cousin Judd. Cousin Lydia sat up with her that night and
Almira Jewett, a brisk, country clad woman of the Skaldic temperament
who from long handling of the histories of her clan had acquired an
absolute art of it. She was own sister to the woman who married my
mother's half-brother, and the Saga of the Judds and the Wilsons and the
Jewetts and the Lattimores ran off the points of her bright needles as
she sat with her feet on the fender, with a click and a spark. Cousin
Lydia never knitted; she sat with her hands folded in her large lap and
time seemed to rest with her.
"It will be hard on Judd," Almira offered to the unspoken reference
forever in the air, as to the possible fatal termination of my mother's
illness.
"Yes, it'll be hard on him." A faint, so faint nuance of assent in
Cousin Lydia's voice seemed to admit the succeeding comment, shorn of
impertinence. I guessed that the several members of the tribe were
relieved rather than constrained to drop their intimate concerns into
Almira Jewett's impartial histories.
"I never," Almira invited, "did get the straight of that. Sally was
engaged to him, warn't she?"
"Not to say engaged," Cousin Lydia paused for just the right shade of
relation, "but so as to want to be. Judd set store by her; he'd have had
it that way anyway, but Sally couldn't make up her mind to it on account
of their being own cousins."
"I reckon she had the right of it; the Lord don't seem no way pleased
with kin marrying."
"I don't know, I don't know;" Cousin Lydia dropped the speculation into
the pit of her own experience. "It looks like He wouldn't have made 'em
to care about it then. But being as she saw it that way, they couldn't
have done different. Not that Judd didn't see it in the light of his
duty, too." There was evidently nothing in the annals of the Judds and
the Lattimores which allowed a violation of the inward monitor.
"Well, I must say, he has turned it into grace, if ever a man has. Not
to say but what you've helped him to it." It was in the manner of
Almira's concession of not in the matter, that Cousin Judd had chosen
Lydia chiefly for her capacity not to offer any distraction to his
profounder passion, and nothing in Cousin Lydia's comment to deny it.
From the room beyond we could hear the inarticulate, half-conscious
notice of my mother's pain. Cousin Lydia moved to attend her.
"All those years," I whispered to Almira, "she has loved him and he has
loved my mother!" I was pierced through with the pure sword of the
spirit which had divided them. But Almira was more practical.
"She was better off," Almira insisted. "Lydia hadn't no knack with men
folk ever. She knew Judd wouldn't have loved her, but so long as he
loved your mother she was safe. They got a good deal out of it, her
knowing and sympathizing. She could sympathize, you see, for she knew
how it was herself, loving Judd that way. It was no more than right they
should get what they could out of it. It was the only thing they had
between them."
"All those years!" I said again. I felt myself immeasurably lifted out
of the mists and mires of the Shamrocks into clear and aching
atmospheres.
"I will say this for Lydia," extenuated the Skald, "that though she
hadn't no gift to draw a man to her, she knew how to hold her hand off
and let him go his own thought. It was religion kept your mother and
Judd apart, and yet it was in religion they comforted one another. Lydia
never put herself forward like she might, claiming it was her religion
too. And she was one that appreciated church privileges."
But I wondered where my father came in. It had been, I knew, a
passionate attachment.
"Like a new house," said Almira, "built up where the old one has been,
but the cellars of it don't change. Real loving is never really got
over." I felt the phrase sounding in some subterranean crypt of my own.
With this new light on it, it came out for me wonderfully in my mother's
face, as I watched her through the anxious days, how much her life had
been stayed in renunciations. I suppose my new appreciation must have
shone out for her as well, for I could see rising out of her disorder,
like a drowned person out of the sea, a bond of our common experience.
We were two women, together at last, my mother and I, and could have
speech with one another.
Something no doubt contributed to this new understanding by an affair of
Forester's which, as I began to be acquainted with the incidents
preceding it, I believed to be partly responsible for my mother's
stroke. I have already sketched to you how Forester had grown up in the
need of finding himself always at the centre of feminine interest
without the opportunity of satisfying it normally by marriage, and how
the too early stimulation of sentiment and affection had led to his
being handed about from girl to girl in the attempt to gratify his need
without transgressing any of the lines marked out by his profession as
an eminently nice young man. It came naturally out of the mere
circumstance of there being a limited number of girls at hand whom he
might conceivably court without the intention of marrying, for him to
fall into the society of others whom he might not court but who might
nevertheless find it much to their advantage to marry him.
I do not know how and when it came to my mother's ears that he was
calling frequently at the Jastrows; very likely they brought it to her
notice themselves. They were a poor, pushing sort, forever exposing
themselves to the slights arising from their own undesirability, which
they forever tearfully attributed to an undeserved and paraded poverty.
They paraded it now as the insuperable bar to all that they might have
done for my mother, all that they actually had it in their hearts to do
on their assumption of a right of being interested, an assumption which,
even in her weakness, before she could trust herself to talk very much,
I felt her dumbly imploring me to deny. The girl--Lily they called
her--was not without a certain appeal to the senses; and knowing rather
more of my brother's methods, I did not find Mrs. Jastrow's pretension
to a community of interest in what might be expected to come of his
attention, altogether unjustified. But in view of mother's condition and
what Effie told me of the way business was going--rather was not going
at all--any kind of marriage would have been out of the question. It was
the way I put the finality of that into my dealings with Mrs. Jastrow,
that drew mother over into the only relation of normal human
interdependence I was ever to have with her. Whenever Mrs. Jastrow would
come to call with that air she had, in her dress and manner, of being
pulled together and made the best of, I could see my mother's fears
signalling to me from the region of tremors and faintness in which she
had sunk, and I would set my wits up as a defence against what,
considering all there was against her, was a really gallant effort on
Mrs. Jastrow's part to make out of Forester's philanderings a basis for
a family intimacy. It was plain that neither my mother nor Mrs. Jastrow
dared put the question to Forester, but rested their case on such mutual
admissions of it as they could wring from one another.
I could never make out on my mother's part, whether she was really
afraid of the issue, or if in the preoccupation of their affection both
she and Forester had overlooked his young man's right to a woman and a
life of his own. Through all her dumb struggle against it, never but
once did my mother openly face the ultimate possibility of his marriage
with Lily Jastrow.
It was about the third week of her illness, and Mrs. Jastrow, making one
of her interminable calls, had been brought so nearly to the point of
tears by my imperiousness, that Effie had been obliged to draw her off
into the kitchen to have her opinion about a recipe for a mince meat
such as she knew the Jastrows couldn't afford to be instructed in, and
so had gotten her out of the side door and started down the walk before
the situation could come to a head. My mother watched her go.
"Do you think," she hazarded suddenly, "that Forester really is engaged
to her?"
"To Lily? Oh, no; Forester doesn't get engaged to girls, he
just--dangles." It was characteristic of my mother's partiality that
even damaging insinuations such as this, slid off from it as too far
from the possibility to be even entertained. Perhaps a trace of my old
exasperation with the whole situation, and the glimpse I had of Mrs.
Jastrow letting herself out of our gate with her assumption of being as
good as anybody still to the fore but a little awry, prompted me to add:
"And it is only natural for her mother to make the most of it. She's
looking out for her own, just as you are."
"A mother has a right to do that;" she protested, "to keep them from
making themselves miserable. It is no more than her duty."
"Yes," I said; the remark had the effect of a challenge.
"Young people don't know how to choose for themselves; they make
mistakes." She revolved something in her mind. "You, now ... you're
unhappy, aren't you, Olivia?"
"Yes; oh, yes." I had not thought of myself as being so particularly,
but I did not see my way to deny it.
"I've been afraid ... sometimes ... since you wrote me about going on
the stage, maybe you weren't exactly ... satisfied. But it isn't that,
is it?"
"No, mother, it isn't that."
"There! You see!" She shook off her weakness with the conviction. "And
you mightn't have been if I hadn't looked out for you a little."
"Why, mother, what could you possibly----" She triumphed.
"You remember that Garrett boy that was visiting at his uncle's? He
called that night; the night you were engaged to Tommy."
"Yes, I remember. You sent him away?"
"He wasn't suitable at all ... smoking, and driving about on Sunday that
way...." Her tone was defensive. "He left a letter that night----"
"Mother! You didn't tell me!"
"I was thinking it over ... I had a right ... you were too young!"
"Mother ... did you read it?"
"I ... looked at it. You hadn't met him but once and I had a right to
know; and that night you were engaged. I took it for a sign."
"And the letter?" It seemed all at once an immeasurable and irreparable
loss.
"I sent it back ... and, anyway, it turned out all right." I was
possessed for the moment with the conviction that it was all dreadfully,
despairingly wrong.
"I couldn't have borne for you to marry anybody but a Christian,
Olivia!" I thought of Tommy's exceedingly slender claim to that
distinction and I laughed.
"Tommy smokes," I said; "he says he has to do it with the customers."
"Oh, but not as a habit, Olivia." I overrode that.
"Tell me what became of him--of Mr. Garrett. Did you ever hear?"
"He went West," she recollected; "I asked his aunt. He quarrelled with
them because his uncle wouldn't send him to school. At his age they
thought it wasn't suitable. I wouldn't have wanted you to go West,
Olivia."
I took her worn hands in mine. "It's all right, mother. I'm not going
West. And I'm not going on the stage any more. I'm done with it." I felt
so, passionately, at the time. We sat quietly for a time in that
assurance and listened to Effie singing in the kitchen.
"Olivia," she began timidly at last, "aren't you ever going to have any
more children?"
"Oh, I hope so, mother. I haven't been strong, you know, since the first
one. We didn't think it advisable."
"Well, if you can manage it that way ..." There was a trace in her tone
of the woman who hadn't been able to manage. I wished to reassure her.
"When I was in the hospital the doctor told me ..." I could see the deep
flush rising over her face and neck; there were some things which her
generation had never faced. I let them fall with her hands and sat
gazing at the red core of the base burner, waiting until she should take
up her thought again.
"I used to think those things weren't right, Olivia, but I don't know.
Sometimes I think it isn't right, either, to bring them into the world
when there is no welcome for them." She struggled with the admission.
"You and I, Olivia, we never got on together."
"But that's all past now, mother." She clung to me for a while for
reassurance.
"I hope so, I hope so; but still there are things I've always wanted to
tell you. When you wrote me about going on the stage ... there are wild
things in you, Olivia, things I never looked for in a daughter of mine,
things I can't understand nor account for unless--unless it was I turned
you against life ... my kind of life ... before you were born. Many's
the time I've seen you hating it and I've been harsh with you; but I
wanted you should know I was being harsh with myself ..."
"Mother, dear, is it good for you to talk so?"
"Yes, yes, I've wanted to. You see it was after your father came home
from the war and we were all broken up. Forester was sickly, and there
was the one that died. So when I knew you were coming, I--hated you,
Olivia. I wanted things different. I hated you ... until I heard you
cry. You cried all the time when you were little, Olivia, and it was I
that was crying in you. I've expected some punishment would come of it."
"Oh, hush, hush mother! I shouldn't have liked it either in your place.
Besides, they say--the scientists--that it isn't so that things before
you are born can affect you as much as that." She moved her head feebly
on the pillows in deep-rooted denial.
"They can say that, but we've never got on. There's things in you that
aren't natural for any daughter of mine. They can say that, Olivia, but
we--we know."
"Yes, mother, we know."
I took her hands again and nursed them against my cheek; after a time
tears began to drip down her flaccid cheeks and I wiped them away for
her.
"Don't, mother, don't! We get along now, anyway! And as for the things
in me which are different, do you know, mother, I'm getting to know that
they are the best things in me."
I honestly thought so; and after all these years I think so now.
I wheeled her into the bedroom presently, where she fell into the light
slumber of the feeble, and seemed afterward hardly to remember, but I
was glad then to have talked it all out with her, for though she lived
nearly two years after, before I saw her again another stroke had
deprived her of articulateness.