There was a blacksmith's forge down the road by the farmhouse where
Winnie and her mother were staying. In the morning in the silence the
first sound Winnie heard was the chiming of the hammer like a bell.
There were maple trees against her window. The leaves were yellowing.
When the sun shone through them they were a silken veil of light.
The days were long and bright. The farmer's wife was busy with household
tasks and Winnie and her mother spent uninterrupted hours on the long
narrow veranda when Mrs. Price embroidered, or read a novel while Winnie
listened.
Winnie was oppressed by the silence. She had not cared at first to
believe that she would have a child, but the dark thought ran along
after her like a dog that will not be beaten off. She knew it was there
in her mind, but she would not recognize it.
Dr. Beach came into the country to visit her. He spoke of the care she
must give to her health and he told her that if she continued to improve
over a long time she might be able to evade the operation.
It was only when he gave her hope that despair forced her to realize
herself. She gazed at him in helpless terror. When he turned to speak
to her mother, Winnie left the room, and while he remained she did not
come back.
After the doctor had gone Mrs. Price entered the old-fashioned farm
bedroom and found Winnie lying on her face.
"Winnie! My darling! You are sobbing your heart out!" Mrs. Price's
black-clothed body trembled and her precise voice shook. She laid her
blue-veined hand on Winnie's wrist.
But Winnie could not tell. She glanced up, her little face dim with
despair.
"Winnie! Are you in pain? Shall I call the doctor again? Winnie, my
darling! Dear child, answer me! You must not act like this!"
But Winnie buried her head in pillows and would not reply. She had wept
out all she wanted to say. She was sodden. She was still. There was
nothing left in her but silence.
Mrs. Price, tears of anxiety in her eyes, gripped Winnie's wrists and
held them tight. They were still together. The wooden clock ticked on
the low mantel. Then Mrs. Price said, "Winnie, if you cannot manage to
tell me what is the matter I shall telegraph your father."
Crushed against Mrs. Price's finality, Winnie struggled to free herself.
"I want to die! Oh, I want to die!" she said, and every time she said
"die," something in her shouted against the dumbness of her throat,
life, life! The shriek was against Laurence and against the living child
that had come to consume her.
Mrs. Price shivered as with cold, but she tried to be calm. "Winnie,"
speaking very low, "you _must_ use some self-control. Something terrible
has happened. You have heard something from home which you have not told
me. I am your mother. I love you better than anything in the world, and
you have no right to keep me in ignorance of anything that is troubling
you." Her lips were bluish and her upper lip was wet with sweat. The
skin on her hands was withered like white crêpe and the veins swelled in
her trembling wrists.
The clock ticked. Winnie murmured something in the pillow. Mrs. Price
waited.
Outside the open window the evening air congealed in heaviness. It hung
cold and bitter over the moist grass. The smell of weeds floated into
the room.
Mrs. Price looked out and saw that each stalk of golden rod in the
meadow opposite was separately still. The sky was blue stone. Only the
pine trees seemed warm against the vacuous shining of twilight. For
night was terrible, descending in brightness. It was a mirror in the
pale still sky. It was nothing.
Slowly the darkness grew up from the earth, and, as the trees darkened,
the earth began to grow into being.
Winnie was glad of the darkness. When the room grew dark she did not
hold the child separately in her body. It lay with her in the body of
the dark and she was freed of it.
"Mamma!" She sat up, her body a harsh gray stroke of determination
against the white inert pillow.
"Yes, my dear." Mrs. Price smoothed her child's brow. "Oh, I am so glad
you are quieter, Winnie."
Out of the silence from which the sun had passed the moon suddenly
unrolled, huge and white and dry as a dead flower. A dragon-fly darting
across the window and the dry white face of the moon, so gorgeously
lifeless, was a gold thorn sinking into the quiet flesh of shadow.
Voices sounded from the road. The lowest branches of the trees yet
trembled with light. Then the world died away in the chirping of insects
and the bleat of frogs.
"I will light a lamp, darling." Mrs. Price went over to a table. She
could barely be seen. The match spurted suddenly into flame, and she was
plain again.
When the lamp was lit the night outside went black and the moon, now
vast and green and strange, rushed gorgeously against the lifted window
pane.
Lamplight sucked at the shadows but could not draw them utterly to
itself so that the corners of the big room remained vague and only here
and there some object gave out a grudging glint.
Mrs. Price was stiff but shaken and gentle. "Now, Winnie, darling, tell
me what has made you like this." She came to the bed and looked down.
Winnie threw back her head and, with closed eyes, plucked at the
bedclothes. "I can't tell you."
"Are you unhappy? Has something happened between you and your husband,
my child? You must be fair to me, Winnie."
Winnie rocked herself. "Oh, I can't tell. What would be the use? I can't
tell."
"What am I to do, Winnie?"
Still Winnie rocked herself. "Oh, I would rather be dead!" she said.
"Don't say that, Winnie! We mustn't think such thoughts. Aren't we doing
everything on earth to make you live? Your father and I want to do
everything on earth to make life better and surer and sweeter for you
and your babies."
Winnie began to throw herself about in the bed again. "Oh, I'd rather be
dead than to be sick and have another baby. I know I'm going to die."
"Have another baby." Mrs. Price did not receive the words. They were
strange. They remained outside her.
Then, all at once, without her being aware of the moment, their meaning
entered into her and burnt her with terror.
"What do you mean, Winnie? This isn't possible." Mrs. Price seated
herself shakily on the bed and took Winnie's struggling hands again.
"Ba----This is nonsense, Winnie." She held Winnie's hands firmly. Her
own hands were dry and hot.
Mrs. Price felt strange with herself. The words had changed her. She was
in a new place.
"How long has this----" She tried to speak. Her throat was dry. She
could not go on.
"Oh, don't ask me--six weeks--two months--I don't know!"
"Winnie, are you sure of this?"
"I'm sure of it."
Mrs. Price's grip on Winnie's arms relaxed. Winnie lay still, moaning.
Mrs. Price got up. Her eyes looked wasted with fear. She stared
helplessly at her daughter.
"Oh, Winnie, what shall I do for you?"
Winnie's nostrils, very wide open, quivered like those of a mare crazy
with a painful bit. "I won't! I'll die first!" she said. "I won't!"
Laurence was around her, in her, formless like smoke. Her animosity to
him was living its separate life within her.
She sobbed herself into numbness. She would not feel it. She wanted the
life in her to lie cold and numb. Her breasts swelled. She thought she
could feel the milk flowing through them like shame through her flesh.
Mrs. Price walked up and down the room, clasping and unclasping her
hands. "Yes, I'll send for Dr. Beach. We must send for Dr. Beach. I
cannot understand your husband, Winnie."
Bewildered by the catastrophe as she was, it gave her a certain feeling
of assurance to be able unreservedly to condemn Laurence again.
She gazed at Winnie prone on the bed and felt suddenly sickened with
futility. All of Mrs. Price sickened and armed against Laurence. She
wanted to snatch the child from the taint of its father as from a
disease.
"Why didn't you tell me this sooner, Winnie? Something might have been
done. You know how unwise this is in your state."
Winnie stared at her mother. "I'm going to die."
Again tears swam in Mrs. Price's eyes, but she would not unbend
herself. "No dear, you are not going to die. We will take good care of
you and you will come through this terrible thing."
Winnie stirred wearily and impatiently. "I don't care. I'm going to
die." She was stubborn and calm now. Die was a stupid word like dust. It
settled dully upon her pain.
* * * * *
Mrs. Price wrote a letter to Mrs. Farley. "Winnie is evidently going to
have another baby. This is a great misfortune. I cannot understand how
Laurence allowed this to occur. In her state you may imagine!"
It was apparent that Mrs. Price was alarmed and that in writing the
letter her hand had trembled, but it was plain too that in her veiled
reproaches she was still delicately gratifying her hatred of Laurence.
* * * * *
Winnie, waiting for Dr. Beach, refused to stay in bed. She got up and
put on a flowered négligé and sat by the open window. Looking down the
long wet road, she hated the hill that set itself up heavily between her
and the sky. She hated life that came to the end of itself abruptly like
the road to the horizon at the end of the hill.
When Dr. Beach came in Winnie spoke to him resentfully, and when her
mother told him what was the matter, blushed a defiant crimson.
It was a delicate situation to consider. All three people thought of
Laurence with condemnation, but mention of him was eschewed. When Mrs.
Price talked her voice was choked with pent opprobrium.
Dr. Beach told Winnie to undo her dressing gown. When he examined her,
his hot hands touched her cold body here and there lightly.
She felt her body harshen to his touch. It was at the moment when his
hand touched her that the child became hers. It was not that she wanted
the child, but that she wanted the thing the man could not touch. She
hated the day when the child would no longer be secret.
After the doctor had touched her and made her aware of the child she
ceased in part to feel that Laurence was in the child's flesh. She would
have liked to think of herself as the only creature capable of giving
birth.
Dr. Beach was uncomfortable. He talked vaguely. He had advised her
against having a child, but because it would have been better to avoid
this contingency there was no reason to suppose she would not pull
through all right. "Above all," he told Mrs. Price, "keep her mind off
herself. Do not allow her to become depressed."
* * * * *
Nearly four months had passed while Winnie remained in the country with
her mother. Autumn was at a close.
One day Winnie felt her flesh move. This quickening was as though she
had never before known herself with child. She conjectured for the first
time all of the inevitable details of the baby's birth. There was
nothing to speculate. She felt herself caught in the grip of this
horrible sameness.
One Sunday Mr. Price came down from town to see them. He had the air of
a victor, and Mrs. Price, who was conquering the exultance of her
resentment toward Laurence, felt guilty in understanding her husband's
secret content.
"That man ought to be killed!" Mr. Price said to his wife. "He ought to
be strung up and tarred and feathered. Nothing is too severe to do to a
fellow like that. I suppose you'll say that for Winnie's sake we must
keep our hands off."
Mrs. Price was agitated. "Oh, yes, we must try to keep the peace for
Winnie's sake. You must remember, Perry, this is a hard time for her."
Mr. Price walked back and forth across the room, flapping his coat-tails
with his hands and blowing out his mustache. "I should say it was! I
should say it was!" he repeated. He had his head lowered like that of a
bull about to charge, and in the depths of his murky blue eyes glowed a
surreptitious spark of triumph. "Bad blood in that Farley family," he
said.
Winnie came into the room reluctantly, prepared to resist her father's
bullying. Her soft eyes were hard with reserves.
Mr. Price came up to her and gave her a dominating caress. "Well,
Winifred, how are you, my dear little girl?"
She returned his perfunctory kiss, her moist lips cool with distaste.
"Feeling pretty badly, dear?"
"No, Father. I'm feeling pretty well."
He cleared his throat. He was disappointed.
"I ought to be going home," Winnie pouted, smiling a little, "but Mother
won't let me. I had letters from Laurie and Mamma Farley just today and
they are worried about me."
"Worried about you! So are we worried about you! I'd like to know where
home is if it's not right here with your mother! Your own mother is
certainly the one to take care of you when you're in this state!"
"Mamma Farley took care of me when my other two babies were born,"
Winnie said stiffly.
Mr. Price choked, and to relieve himself, went to the window and spit.
Mrs. Price began to speak tremulously for his comfort. "Those were
circumstances we couldn't help, dear. Thank Heaven that this time, when
you are really more seriously in need of us, we are here beside you to
do everything in our power. I think Winnie ought to lie down and rest,"
Mrs. Price said, shepherding her husband out of the room before his
exultance should become too crass.
* * * * *
Laurence came heavily into the house and hung up his hat. All day he had
felt the new child, a fiery thread through the blackness of his mind
sewing him to earth. His fear of the new child smoldered like a hot
ache in the back of his brain.
Thirty-one years old. He could not bear to recall in detail the
incidents of his life. He had achieved nothing; so he had ceased to
believe in achievement. As a boy he had invariably thought of himself in
grandiose and ultra-masculine rôles. When girls had come into his dreams
they had come in gratitude to receive some contemptuous beneficence at
his hands. He was ashamed now when he recalled the gauche sense of
superiority that had showed itself in bad manners. And yet his habit of
mind remained the same. When he ceased to give himself he would admit
equality, and he could not do that. His pride bound him to endless
obligations. Against Winnie, he obliterated gladness in himself and
denied his acquisitive spirit. She should have him all and he would be
nothing.
The door in the hall opened behind Laurence and closed with a sharp
click of the latch. Laurence moved in the heaviness of circles, but
Alice's movements were always angular and resistant.
"Hello, Laurie," she said coldly. They seldom talked together.
The gas flame burnt blue in the cold hall. Alice took off her beaver
sailor hat and hung it beside Laurence's acid-stained derby.
She looked at him. The patience she read in his coarse florid face was
like everything else in the house. The house at night was a monstrous
phlegmatic beast half drowned. Its inmates were sightless parasites.
Alice was pugnacious. "What's the matter with you?" she joked
brusquely. "Winnie hasn't had twins, has she?"
"Winnie's all right," Laurence said.
"How do you regard the prospect of becoming a proud father a third time,
Laurence?" she demanded suddenly. She knew she was offensive but felt
she must wrench something from this huge mass of bitterly desponding
flesh.
The world was muted with fleshiness and heaviness. Only in her own body
pain rang clear and sharp and chiming sweet. Her pain was her beauty
that she kept inside herself. It was her virginity. She felt that he had
no beauty of pain.
"You are the only thing that reconciles me to it, Alice," he retorted
sourly.
"A benighted old spinster, eh?"
"Well, I have a pretty wife and shall soon have three lovely children.
My state has its compensatory illusions."
"Ah, yes, I suppose it has." She did not know what more to say to him.
He walked into the living-room, ignoring her.
It was a moment before she could make herself follow him.
If Winnie died----How did these things happen? Laurence was almost like
a murderer.
For a moment she envied him, then in her terrible emptiness she felt
herself more beautiful than he.
Mad. I'm going mad. He doesn't know.
Laurence wanted to get away from her. His expression of life was always
bitter and cheap and he knew it, but he was rather proud of the
exquisiteness which made it unendurable for him to tell the truth to
himself. He despised Alice for the brutal veracity of her introspection.
Alice carried pain of self like a banner. He felt that her arrogant
suffering showed a want of fineness. To dare to see as she did, he felt,
one must be emotionally dull.
Winnie was false and puerile, but because he felt that the truth would
kill Winnie, she seemed to him more delicate and beautiful than Alice.
Alice recognized that Laurence hated her because she understood him too
well.
She could not comprehend this. She would have let herself be known even
in utter contempt. She was clouded now with the murk of herself that no
one would know. She wanted to be known to be cleansed.
* * * * *
Winnie was tired of the country that left her too much with herself. She
hated the empty road in the bleak days and the black tree at the end
that swayed against the damp green twilights. She was glad when Mrs.
Price agreed that it was time for them to go back to the city.
They left the farmhouse at night. Mr. Price had sent his car out and in
it they were driven to the station, ten miles away. It was moonlight.
The pine trees along the road tossed their green hair in the wind. The
long boughs swept the ground. The trees clutched the earth with their
roots as if in a frenzy. They would not give way.
At the deserted station one light burned over the window where the
telegraph operator worked. They sat for a long time in the dim waiting
room, until the big train, fiery and terrible, rushed out of nothing and
came to a standstill at the end of the platform.
When they went into the long dim car hung with green curtains, every one
was asleep.
Mrs. Price helped her daughter to undress and Winnie lay down on her
side in the lower berth with the window shade up. As she lay there and
the train began to move, the oppression of the last few weeks culminated
in her emotions, in an unreasoning panic, and she imagined that she was
already dead.
It was foggy. The train passed through a railway yard and Winnie saw
rows of empty cars, long and low, that were like monsters with
lusterless hides and opaque eyes, submerged in mist. Hundreds of dull
eyes stared from the dimly shining windows, the pale eyes of the cars.
Delicate bridges floated over her head as the train passed beneath them,
and the swinging arms of derricks and huge machines, lifted through the
mist, were as frail as lace.
Lights burst against the mist like rotted stars, and there were other
lights that opened upon her suddenly, glad and unseeing as the eyes of
blind men raised in delight.
The moon, small with distance, slimed over with fog, was green like
money lost a long time. The telegraph wires stretched across the pale
landscape tautly, like harpstrings. One after another the flat branched
poles seemed to open submissive palms to the passing train.
Winnie wanted the morning. She wanted to get back to Mamma Farley and
her familiar commonplace. Before expanding in voluptuous rebellion,
Winnie wanted to know that the cage was sure. Somehow Mamma Farley made
her more certain of its sureness.
In the morning they alighted in the teeming station, and Winnie, anxious
not to be seen, walked a little behind Mrs. Price. Winnie was ashamed of
herself. She felt herself cold and isolated in the vividness of the life
she contained.
At the big gate at the end of the track, they met Laurence. "Well,
Winnie. Well, Mrs. Price."
Winnie looked up at him with eyes shuddering in softness. She showed him
her helplessness against which he could not defend himself. When she
lifted her mouth he had to kiss her. She was ashamed of his shabby
clothes.
Laurence tried to say something to Mrs. Price. "You look well."
"Yes, and Winnie has gotten along very nicely with me. How is your
mother? How are the children?" She did not look at him, and while she
talked she moistened her lips that were like paper under her tongue.
In the waiting room they met Mr. Price. He had arrived at the train a
few moments late and the confusion of the incoming crowd had carried
them past him before he knew it.
He was gruff and short with Laurence. "How-do, * * * * * Farley?" He
turned quickly to Winnie. "Well, Winnie, you're back, are you? How is
she, Vivien? Mother and I are going to keep a tight hold on you, my
young lady. We are going to see that your health is taken care of after
this."
"You'll let us take you and Winnie home in the carriage?" Mrs. Price
said to Laurence.
"I have a taxicab for Winnie, Mrs. Price." He took Winnie's arm. She
protested a little.
"It seems so absurd," Mrs. Price demurred, preserving her well-bred
poise, but plainly irritated.
Laurence, pretending not to hear, dragged Winnie on.
Winnie pouted and hung back. "You'll come to see me this afternoon,
Mother," she called over her shoulder.
Mrs. Price nodded and smiled.
* * * * *
It was Sunday. Winnie had fallen sick, and, to escape the feeling of
tension that prevailed at home, Laurence went into the country for a
long walk.
Winnie might die. Then what? In the sense of oppression he experienced,
the thought of Winnie's danger awoke something in him which he refused
to recognize, which was like a stealthy and terrible hope of relief.
He walked on, immersed in himself, scarcely realizing that he moved.
Then the ardor of his imaginings subsided in the familiar contours of
being and he saw the road again, stretching before him like a shadowed
light and the pale trees standing away on either side against the dim
enormous sky.
Laurence wondered if he had grown suddenly old. Formerly, without
articulating it, he had experienced a sense of immanence on every hand.
Now he felt dry and exhausted in his nameless understanding. Everything
remained outside him. He had lost the power of enlarging his being. From
his numbness he regarded enviously what he considered the illusions of
others, and yet his exhaustion seemed to him the sum of life and he
could not but consider with contempt all those who imagined that there
was anything further.
Only the horror that was between Winnie and himself gave him a little
life. The hideousness of his fatherhood made his apathy glow a little
like an illumined grimace. Through sheer irrelevance it seemed to have
some meaning. He began to depend on this ugly fact of the child he did
not want.
Yet he could not bear to be in the sickroom where Winnie was. Her
sweetly pathetic commonplace was so grotesquely familiar that he could
scarcely endure to be aware of it close to the sense of what she held.
In these days she was keenly dramatizing herself. She glanced stealthily
sidewise at the mirror and the Madonna look came into her face. When
Bobby and May were beside her, she drew them within her thin little arms
and pressed them to her breast with an air of ecstasy and reverence.
But she did not care to have them close to her for long, and if they
fell into some childish dispute she called, in a peevish complaining
voice, for Mamma Farley, and said that no one considered her or
remembered that she was sick.
When Laurence reached home after his walk it was eleven o'clock. He
passed through the still house and up the stairs to the bedroom,
wondering if Winnie were asleep. When he opened the door he saw the
light shining on her where she lay on the lounge with her eyes shut.
Her mop of reddish hair was tangled about her face, turned to one side
on the pillows. The gold edges of her lashes rested delicately on her
shadowed cheek. She heard Laurence, and stirred.
With a nauseous sense of inevitability, he waited for her to turn upon
him her look of conscious sweetness.
"You were gone so long, Laurie!" She blinked at him and smiled drowsily.
"Yes," he said. "I went for a long walk."
She made a little mouth. "I've been back such a little while, I don't
think you ought to leave me when it's Sunday, Laurie."
"You'll like me better if you don't see too much of me." His joke was
stiff. He looked as though his false smile hurt him.
Winnie gazed at him. Her mouth began to quiver. "I get so lonesome,
Laurie. Mamma Farley goes off with Bobby and May, and Alice is always
poked away in her room!"
He did not answer this. "It's cold in here. Mother shouldn't have let
the fire die down." He walked over to the grate and with his fingers
laid some lumps out of the scuttle upon the hot coals. "Keep that shawl
around you, Winnie. Hadn't I better call Mother and tell her to help you
to get to bed?"
He came back to her. She did not speak to him. Tears rolled from her
open eyes and left wet smears along her lifted face.
"All worn out, eh?" He touched her hair uncomfortably. "I'll call
Mother. She always knows what to do for you. I don't."
She clung to his hand. "You don't hate me because I'm like this, do you,
Laurie?"
"Don't be foolish, Winnie, child. You're worn out or you wouldn't talk
this way." He put her gently from him. "I'm going to call Mother."
She began to sob. "You want to go! I don't want you to touch me if you
hate me!"
Smiling wearily, he looked at her. It was a kind of relief to him to be
unable to defend himself. "Since I make you cry, I think I'd better go,
Winnie."
"Oh," she sobbed, "you make me cry by not wanting me! You hurt me so.
You're so cruel!"
Still he stood helpless, not touching her. "For your own sake, you must
stop, Winnie."
"If--if you call Mamma Farley in here now I'll--I'll kill myself!"
"No, you won't, Winnie." His voice shook. "But if you don't want me to
call her, I won't."
Winnie became a little calmer. Then she said, more soberly, "You neglect
and despise me."
"I don't, Winnie."
"You do!" She sat up quickly. Her eyes insisted on his reply.
"Do you believe that? Does my life really indicate that to you?"
Her little face was hard. "You do things for me," she contended, "but
it's not because you love me!"
His smile faltered. He shrugged wearily. "It would be hopeless for me to
attempt to justify myself, Winnie, but for the sake of your health and
your baby" (he looked at her straightforwardly) "we must try to overcome
this continual bickering."
She looked steadily with her dissolving gaze against his unpenetrated
eyes. "Oh, I wish my children didn't belong to you!" she said suddenly.
He glanced away from her. "If I thought you and the children could do
without me I might agree to resign my parental rights," he said with a
slight sneer.
She pressed her hands together, regarding him in silence. Finally she
said, "Oh, I know you'd be glad to!" She was crying soundlessly.
He does not love me.
She felt sorry for herself. She felt the slightness of her body and the
fragileness of her bones. She was new and real to herself in her
illusion of smallness that made it easier for her to relinquish her
pride.
She turned her face from him and lay back on the pillow again.
Voluptuously, she was conscious of her weakness. With infinite and
exquisite contempt, she loved herself.
"Laurie?" Her fingers picked the cover. She did not look at them, but
she knew them, little and thin, and remembered how small they were when
he held them in his clumsiness. "Won't you kiss me, Laurie?"
Hating himself for his helplessness, he leaned over her and kissed her.
She lifted her arms to him. "Oh, Laurie, when I'm sick and you feel this
way----If I should die, I couldn't bear it!" she said.
"But you won't die, Winnie. You won't die!" He gave up, leaning his face
against her hair. Why could they never touch?
He felt the child stir in her against him, and the child seemed so
terrible and real that he longed for some terrible realness in them with
which to understand the child.
Winnie felt the child stirring between them, and was ashamed. It kept
her from remembering sweetly the slightness of her body and the
smallness of her pretty outstretched arms. She was ugly and inert at the
mercy of the child.
"Love me, Laurie!" she moaned. "I can't help being like this!" She was
unfair to him, but the agony in her voice was sweet to her
self-contempt.
"Stop, Winnie. You have no right to say things like that." He could not
speak any more. He held her close up against him.
To herself she was small and ugly with child in a small dark room. She
kissed his hair, stiff and bitter against her mouth. She envied him the
wonder of the fear he felt for her.
But, while there was resentment in her, it elated her to inspire this
horror of pity. Small and weak as she was, her hands were the hands of
joy and agony. She was jealous of her closeness to death, half afraid
that the doctor was wrong. She wanted to be in danger. Secretly, her
weakness fed on its new strength.
"Dear Laurie," she said tenderly.
He kissed her again. "I've worried until I'm not fit to be with you,
Winnie," he said. Then he got up. "I'll call Mother. You must go to
sleep." With tears in his eyes, he smiled at her.
"Good night, Laurie, dear." Her voice was stifled in tears, but she
smiled too.
When he went out and she was alone in the room, the recollection of his
pained face made her feel that he had taken something from her that
belonged to her, that she was incapable of holding.
* * * * *
After Christmas Winnie was moved into the back room over the kitchen,
because it was warmer for her so.
There were a rag carpet here, an old-fashioned cherry bedstead, and a
chest of drawers. On the flowered wall beside the bed hung a German
print which represented a gamekeeper who had caught some children
stealing apples. It was a very old print with a cracked glass. The
children in the picture had strange oldish faces. The girls wore long
skirts and the boy had half-length pants. The gamekeeper, with
side-whiskers and red raddled cheeks, was dressed in a high hat, a short
brown waistcoat, and tight trousers. To the right of him, in the
foreground of the scene, two little dachshunds stood sedately at
attention.
Winnie stared at the picture until she hated it.
Sharp specks of light flecked the worn green shades that darkened the
windows. The room faced east and at four o'clock Winnie watched the sun
set over the dim purple housetops. Then it was a flat white metal disk
with a harsh rim of whiter fire. But half an hour later it was only a
pinkish welter around which floated wispy clouds that looked burning
hot, like feathers dipped in molten ore. By five o'clock everything had
disintegrated in the lilac dust of twilight.
The doctor advised Winnie that, in order to avoid a premature
confinement, she must move about as little as possible. But she was so
bored when she was alone that she sometimes put on a fancy house gown,
powdered her nose, and went downstairs. Every one, by an exaggerated
consideration, seemed determined to make her aware of her state. As she
walked she was obliged to sway grotesquely backward to balance the
weight she carried before her. When she passed the long mirror in the
little-used parlor, and saw herself hideous and inflated, she burst into
tears.
Her mother was often at the house, and there was nothing so sickening to
Winnie as the sweet platitudes which Mrs. Price was constantly uttering.
"The dear little baby!" Mrs. Price would say. "What a wonderful thing it
is to be a mother!" Her flat face was alight with the sickish reflection
of a memory that was growing dim.
Mrs. Farley, with no more animation, was less refined, and Winnie could
say things to the mother-in-law which the mother would not have listened
to. For some reason it satisfied Winnie to discuss her condition with
irrelevant vulgarity. She hated her family for dedicating her to this
sordid thing every minute of her life. There was something false in
their heightened regard of her which existed because she was sick and
weak.
She had become accustomed to feeling the baby move in her. Its life had
become definite and independent of her. It lay in her, complete, as
though it had no right there. Yet her mother, in particular, talked as
though the child were a hope and a wonder still in dream. As though they
must keep their hearts fixed upon it and pray it into being.
It seemed to Winnie that her life was being taken away and given to the
child.
* * * * *
There was almost a frenzy about Mrs. Farley's attention to work. She got
up at half past five in the morning, and in the still gray dawn when the
grass in the back yard was silver with rime she took out the ashes in a
big bucket and emptied them into the bin in the alley. The gray dust
settled on her uncovered hair, but she did not seem to know it. Stiff
locks, sticky with dirt, hung about her grimed face. Her flannel waist
was half out of the band of her draggled skirt. Her hands, crimson at
the knuckles, and grained with the filth of labor, clutched the ash can
stiffly.
Mr. Farley knew his wife's abstraction was intended as a rebuke to him,
but he wanted to hide behind it. Her continually averted face bewildered
him, and at the same time left him grateful.
His life had been ruined. He had sacrificed everything. And now he was
offered the opportunity to escape.
Since Helen had left the city again, the project for their future which
had been forced into his mind appeared to him as a dream out of which he
had been allotted the impossible task of making reality.
His wife, concentrating herself upon household things, seemed to him
strong and natural. She had ground under her feet. She had selected the
carpet she walked on. It was hers. When he passed through a room where
she was at work and she swept dust into his eyes, he did not rebel. The
grit in his eyes was the truth of her right. He had no carpet and no
house in which to make his dream. He knew that, even though he had
bought the house, it was hers, because she wanted it. In his uncertainty
he was ashamed before her because her wants were so definite and
limited.
Sometimes, in his confusion, he passed judgment upon himself before he
knew whom it was that he judged. In a panic, he tried to find some sure
conception of himself to hold against the ebb and flow of his
irresolution. Winnie's precarious health gave him the loophole he
needed. Until the baby was born, he must hold in abeyance the
contemplation of his own affairs. He owed it to her.
"Poor little Winnie!" he often said. "I miss her so when she is not at
meals. She should be the first thought of all of us now. We should let
our individual problems go until we can see her through her trouble."
His wife understood that he was excusing himself for what he had not
done. In the beginning of their disagreement, when she was frightened
with the strangeness of her situation, she had waited, in a numb agony
of quiescence, for the first legal steps to be taken. Nothing had
occurred, and she still waited. But there was furtive listening in her
attitude. She listened and, in spite of herself, was glad.
* * * * *
The gas jet was shaded so that the glow fell only on half the bed where
the footboard made darkness like an echo on the wall. Winnie's supper,
untasted, was in a tray on a chair: tea, black with long standing, and
shriveled toast on a chipped plate.
On the chest of drawers, glasses and medicine bottles marked themselves
in separate blackness against the blank brilliant yellow-papered wall.
In front of them was a china holder with a bent candle beside which some
one had laid the rust-pink core of an apple.
About the big looking-glass the frame of purplish wood was rich with
satin reflections, but the glass it surrounded was gray and still and
mirrored a part of the bed and the German print as though they were a
long way off.
The fire had burned low and the room was hot and had a close smell.
Winnie wore a thick cotton nightdress with long sleeves. Ruffles of
coarse embroidery set stiffly away from her thin wrists. She felt
herself hot and light against the cold pillow and the cold damp linen.
The window shades were up, and she could see the moonlight, faint
outside. The moonlight grew in the room as the fire died down. The
steady burn of the gas flame was cold, like liquid glass flowing over
the dark.
Winnie's feet grew cold. She began to shiver. The cold crept up her legs
under her nightdress. It was like grass growing up her.
The fire in the grate sputtered and flared out again. It grew too
bright. It stung her.
The brightness flowed into her eyes until they were like hot pools, and
she could not see.
When Mrs. Farley came to take the tray away, Winnie had a high fever,
and Dr. Beach had to be called in the same evening.
* * * * *
It was four o'clock in the afternoon. In Winnie's bedroom the window was
slightly lifted to let in the soft spring air. The room was flooded with
an apricot-colored glow. Pink dots of sunlight moved on the wall.
The polished chest of drawers and the cherry bedstead were a deep rich
red. There were lilac shadows on the cool sheets hollowed by Winnie's
upraised knees. The picture of the gamekeeper dissolved in pale
sunshine.
Winnie was sunk in a dream when a sudden pain widened her eyes. She sat
up astonished, for she knew what the pain meant. It was like a
challenge. The child had come to wrestle with her.
The pain came again and she clenched her fists until the nails made
little red half-moons in her soft full palms. She had closed her eyes,
but when she opened them they shone with a new and fierce aliveness.
Winnie spread her toes out tensely against nothing. Each time the pain
came to her she seemed to know the whole world with her hips and thighs.
Then she lay back exhausted, feeling knowledge ebb away in the tingling
peace of relief.
When Mrs. Farley came into the room to carry away the soiled lunch tray,
Winnie was unable to speak, but the shifting determined eyes of the
older woman gave one quick glance and guessed what had come about.
Mrs. Farley ran out and called Dr. Beach and Mrs. Price on the
telephone. Later she remembered Laurence.
Winnie was aware of the confusion in her room. She even understood that
the physician and her mother were discussing whether or not she should
be moved to a hospital. But in the reality of suffering their voices and
faces were unreal.
If there had been no surcease Winnie could not have borne it, but just
when she felt that she could endure least, pain went out of her like a
quenched light, and she sank faintly as if into a memory of herself.
It had grown dark. A shaded lamp was lit. A nurse had come from the
hospital and Mrs. Price and Mrs. Farley were sent out.
The nurse was a tall woman with a plump, sallow face and small confident
eyes. Her nose was fat with widened nostrils that were slightly
inflamed. Her peaked cap set up very high on her untidy gray hair. When
she walked her starched skirt rattled like paper. She came and stood by
the bedside and was harsh and still like the shadows on the wall.
Dr. Beach was a stooped, middle-aged man with a bald head and
inscrutably professional eyes. In his shirt sleeves, he sat on the edge
of Winnie's bed, rattling the chain on his vest or looking at his watch
and coughing occasionally. Sometimes he spoke to the nurse in an
undertone.
When he laid his cold hand, covered with blond hair, on Winnie's warm
flesh, she shuddered to his touch. She hated the assertive hand on her,
demanding her back out of pain. The heavy hand weighed down her glory
and she sank back, dimmed.
The bent candle on the chest of drawers made another black bent candle
behind it. On the wall, back of the row of medicine bottles, were other
bottles that seemed never to have moved since the world began. The
pictures had each their separate stillness of shadow. The print of the
German gamekeeper floated, drowned, on the gray becalmed glass opposite.
A heavy breath bellied the shade before the window, and swung it slowly
inward. Then it relaxed heavily into its place against the sill.
Outside the moonless night, as if choked with quiet, crowded up from the
empty street.
When Winnie lifted her lids a little they showed only the lower rim of
the pain-flecked irises. Dr. Beach examined the purplish nails on her
cold hands and felt her pulse uneasily.
Suddenly Winnie clutched at the nurse's hands, and, with eyes open and
unseeing, uttered shriek after shriek.
The sick woman was lost in pain as in a wilderness. Her hands and feet
were strange. The bed was strange. In the vast bed, so far from one end
to the other, she had lost her feet.
She knew there was blood on her. The world poured from her, molten.
The nurse put the chloroform cap over Winnie's nose. Then her head
detached itself from her body and floated over the bed. Her head danced
like a golden thistle on a pool of blood.
Her lightness expanded. She was vastly light. And the body in the bed in
the dark pool grew still, and small, and far off. She was pale and angry
with joy.
But through the mist of herself, something leaped angrily upon her and
dragged her to earth. Hot claws sank into her. She sank, nerveless, in
the infinite darkness.
She was in bed again. The vast bed stretched from side to side of the
unseen sky, and oscillated like a ship.
Not enough chloroform. She wanted to tell them, but they were too far
away. They could not have heard.
She saw the bright things in the doctor's bag. Then long claws of steel.
She wanted to scream. Her tongue and lips were wool. She knew that far
away, out of the darkness which did not belong to her, something warm
and moist slipped. The child emerged from the blackness in which she was
still caught.
The child passed from the torture which went on without it.
* * * * *
"Mrs. Farley, it's over. You can rest." The nurse leaned close. Winnie
felt the nurse's breath, dry and hot as a sirocco, blown on her cold ear
across the dark.
What did it matter to the rocking dark that the child was born? Her
wrists floated. Her heart strained and gathered itself as if for its
most profound joy.
But the great joy to which she opened, slowly transfigured itself. An
ugly and living shudder ran through her. The joy refused her. At the
instant in which she knew it entirely, she ceased to be. Her heart
stopped beating. She fell back, noiseless.
The nurse, with the child in her lap, sat by a porcelain basin cleansing
the baby with a big sponge.
Dr. Beach called her and she laid the baby in the new crib while she
went quickly for Mrs. Farley.
When the nurse had returned and Dr. Beach was working, attempting to
revive Winnie, Laurence came into the room.
He saw the excitement and helplessness of the doctor. Once Winnie's
eyelids seemed to twitch. Then Laurence leaned forward with a curious
unconscious eagerness. He asked for only one thing. He wanted to know
that Winnie was dead. Stealthily and suspiciously, he watched the
corpse, hating the small relaxed body that had tortured him with its
suffering. He wanted to know that there was no more pain.