Mrs. Farley had taken the baby, with its crib, into the nursery. She was
seated in a low rocker, crying by the nursery fire, when May woke up.
Roused from sleep by her grandmother's sobs, May saw Mrs. Farley, with
trembling lips that seemed withered by grief, lifting her head and
swaying her thin body, one knotted hand clutched to her breast as if in
unendurable pain.
"What's the matter, Grandma Farley?" May asked when she could endure the
mystery no longer. She was like an inquisitive little animal, expecting
to be beaten, but determined to gain its end.
Mrs. Farley pretended not to have heard. She was ashamed because she did
not know how to explain her suffering to the child.
"Is--is anybody sick, Grandmother? Is Mamma worse?" May asked again with
piping persistence. She saw the crib and some vagueness in it curiously
agitated. "What's that?" she said excitedly.
Mrs. Farley rose stiffly, her figure half black, and half shining,
against the firelight. Her spectacles glinted where they were fastened
on her untidy flannel waist. Her old black skirt was glossed green where
the fireshine caught in its folds. The gray down on her cheek glistened
like a mist. Separate strands of her hair were threads of metal, hot and
bright on her head.
She turned and looked at May, a small vague figure across the room in
the white bed. May's eyes, with their dilated pupils, were quick even in
the shadow.
Mrs. Farley fumbled her hands painfully along the folds of her skirt.
"Go to sleep! Go to sleep, child!" she said in a voice harsh with fear.
Day was breaking. Around the dark edges of the lowered shades, livid
squares of light were widening against the wall.
With a stealthy gesture, May sunk into the bedclothes again and pulled
the cold sheet up to her chin, but her eyes, alive in her pale little
face over the edge of the quilt, followed her grandmother's movements
covertly.
Mrs. Farley thought she heard a sound from the crib, and went swiftly to
it.
May, quivering with eagerness, sat up again. "What's that, Grandmother?"
Mrs. Farley bent lower over the crib. Her voice choked. "That's your new
little brother," she said.
May, delighted by the excitement and puzzled and interested by her
grandmother's tears, threw the covers away from her, and, clutching the
rail at the side of the bed, pulled herself to her naked knees so that
she could look. "I want to see, Grandma Farley!" she begged. "I want to
get out." She had already slipped one bare leg over the bar and was half
way to the floor.
"Get back into bed this instant, May! You'll take cold and wake Bobby
too." Mrs. Farley lifted the baby, all wrapped in blankets, and carried
it to May's bedside.
Without sympathy, and with the impersonal curiosity of a child, the
little girl stared at the baby's small sharp features and dull bluish,
unrecognizing eyes. She was accustomed in examining picture books to see
fat children with round faces, and she thought it did not resemble a
baby.
"Whose is it? Is it Mamma's?" she asked. "Where did she get it? Can I
touch it?" She laid a small finger on the bundle, then drew back with a
shudder of alienation. "How can you bear to touch it, Grandma?"
Mrs. Farley could not speak. She began to cry again.
An involuntary half-smile of astonishment parted May's lips when she saw
the small tears gather in the dirty corners of her grandmother's eyes
and slip along the flaccid shriveled cheeks and finally fall in gray
spots of moisture on the cream-colored flannel in which the baby was
wrapped.
Mrs. Farley felt that she should tell May something about her mother,
but did not know how to begin. "Go to sleep. You'll wake Bobby. I'll
show you the baby in the morning."
"It's morning already," May pointed out after a minute.
Mrs. Farley, moving away with averted face, glanced at the gray
luminousness which stole under the shade and blanched the wainscot. "No
matter if it is," she said. "It's not morning for you. Go to sleep."
Hesitating, May clung to the bedrail; but she slipped at last into the
sheet. Soon after, in spite of her resistance, she had fallen asleep
again, and lay, breathing deeply and evenly, with her lips parted in
dreaming interest.
* * * * *
Laurence went out of the death chamber into the hall, where the gray
light of the cold spring morning came dimly from the street through the
transom. A milk cart stopped outside. He could hear the clatter of tins,
as it came to a halt, and the hurrying feet of the driver running down
the area steps and up again. Bottles were jostled together with a dull
clink. The man outside whistled. The horse's shoes chimed on the cold
hard street, and the milk wagon rumbled away, the noises blurring in
distance.
There were more footsteps, dull, methodic. One man called to another.
There was a musical shiver of breaking glass, curses uttered in a hoarse
male voice, and the flat thud of running feet.
Laurence opened the front door and looked into the street. Above the
dull housetops were stone blue clouds. The arc light burning over the
pavement opposite was like a ball of pale unraveling silk. On the
windows of the houses with their lowered blinds, the sunless day was
reflected in livid brightness.
He could not bear the light and he turned back into the house into the
darkened parlor, where the leaves of plants on the stand in the corner
seemed to burn with a bluish fire. He could see the begonia leaves like
pink hairy flesh, and the gray fur of fern fronds.
The long pier glass in darkness was like black silver. It was as though
he had never seen himself move formlessly forward on its surface. He was
cold. He could not stay there.
Softly and quickly, he went out into the hall and mounted the stairs
again. He put his hand on the knob of the bedroom door and fancied that
it swung inward of itself.
Dr. Beach had gone, but the nurse was still in the room. She had her
back turned to the door and was folding up some clothes. The gas flame
had been extinguished. The window curtains were open. Objects in the
room were plainly visible, throwing no anchorage of shadow about them.
Laurence went toward the bed. He set his feet down carefully as if he
were afraid of being heard.
When he reached Her, he saw She had not moved. She would never move. A
sob of agony and relief shook him from head to foot.
The nurse coughed discreetly. Scarcely aware of it, he heard her
starched dress rustle and her shoes creak as she tiptoed out.
He knelt down by the bed. The last hour of Winnie's suffering was yet
real and terrible to him.
He pulled the sheet back from Her face. She had not moved. She was dead.
Stillness revolved about him in eternal motion.
Winnie lay in the center of quickness. She was dead. He wanted to rush
out of the circle filled with Her warmth.
The stillness revolved again.
She held Her pain shut in Her. He would never know it again.
He hated to leave the room where the silence was quick. Out of the
silence his pain was waiting to grasp him.
About Winnie the house revolved in wider and wider circles at the edge
of which Her quickness died away.
He threw himself into the vortex of Her terrific quiet. It caught him
and twisted him and bore him to its center.
He was dead. He would never live again. He became one with the endless
word. She was timeless in the bed in silence.
* * * * *
When Laurence stumbled into the hall he came upon his father.
"Well, Son, I don't know what to say! My God, I don't know what to say."
Mr. Farley turned away, sobbing.
Laurence was numbed to the sound of his father's words, and waited for
the echo of silence to die away.
They walked downstairs and into the living-room. Alice was in the room
and Mr. and Mrs. Price were both there seated near a window. It was like
a holiday--Christmas or Easter--to see the family together in the early
morning in the artificial illumination.
Laurence covered his face. Alice went over to him and patted his
shoulder.
"You must eat some breakfast, Laurie."
The kindness in her voice hurt him. He wanted to go away. But she took
his hand and he was too sick to rebel against her, so he let her lead
him forward through the portières into the next room where the table was
set.
May and Bobby had been dressed early and seated at table, for they were
going for the day to a neighbor's house. Over her brown serge dress that
was becoming too short and tight, May wore a fancy clean white apron.
The bow on her hair was of her best red ribbon, but it was already half
untied and dangled in a huge loop above one of her ears. Bobby, too, was
in a new blue woolen blouse. He was bibless and the porridge he was
eating trickled, in gluey gray-white drops of milk and half-dissolved
sugar, over his chin and down his dickey.
He could not get it out of his head that this was a celebration, and
several times he had asked Aunt Alice where the presents were.
May was discreet enough to attend to her food, but she ate slowly and
methodically, and was in no hurry to leave. When she saw her father led
in by Aunt Alice as if he were a blind man, it seemed a part of the
general strangeness and excitement.
May understood that there was something wrong with her mother. Yet her
information was too meager to project anything but vague images in her
mind. At one moment the unexpectedness of it all elated her. Her eyes
shone. She shuddered with happiness, and her drawers were wet. But the
exaltation, produced by the sense of mystery, was followed by
depression. Tears gathered among her lashes and rolled down her cheeks
as she realized that her father was crying too.
After the children had been sent away, the embalmer arrived and went
upstairs, and when the wreath was hung on the door it seemed almost as
if Winnie had died again.
The house now stood out from other houses. What the family had wanted to
conceal like a shame was revealed to the world. Their grief no longer
belonged to themselves. When they went to a window and looked out their
differentness separated them infinitely from the people in the street.
They were crushed by their consciousness of separateness.
The day was interminable.
Toward evening, in the twilight, they sat in the living-room huddled in
their chairs. Relaxed by emotion, they looked drunk. Their gestures, as
they shifted their postures limply, were the gestures of debauch. With
bleered vague eyes, they peered spiritlessly at one another out of the
shadows.
The sun had gone down and there was only a chilly whiteness in the
center of the room and in front of the windows. In the gloom, the
drunken people floated in their senseless grief like fish. They stirred
languidly, or they got up, took some aimless steps, and resumed their
places.
No one suggested a light. They were ashamed of their exhaustion and
their dry eyes. In terror of not caring enough, they began to talk,
dwelling on harrying details in order to wring from each other the
stimulus which would draw a little moisture from their dry lids.
Really, they were sick with fatigue. They wanted to sleep. They made
themselves tense against weariness. They did not know whether, if they
made a light, brightness would rouse them from their disgraceful torpor,
or merely reveal their plight.
Mr. Farley, who had been in the death chamber, came downstairs, and when
he stumbled over a stool by the door of the room he lit the gas. Then
the reddish glow made jack-o'-lanterns of their swollen, inflamed faces.
They saw each other and found that they could cry again. The tears came
peacefully now, without effort. Their strength flowed from them under
their lids. Their heads floated confusedly above the bodies to which
they were secured by their attenuated necks, in which they were
conscious of the nausea and indigestion of weakness.
The contemplation of so much misery left Mr. Farley as weak as jelly.
But in the very completeness of his mental and physical depletion he
felt relief.
At the moment when he descended from the room where the dead woman lay
to the strange twilight inhabited by her sodden family, he gave up. He
no longer attempted to escape from his vision of himself. With a feeling
of luxury, he admitted his incapacity for change. He was brazen in his
inward confession of failure. His ideals were too high. They could never
be realized in this life. He could not go back. He had a sense of utter
humiliation and failure, yet, at the same time, was subtly grateful for
his degradation. The fumes of fatigue permitted a vague indulgence to
his self-contempt. He put Helen away from him forever. Death was a
bitterness and a peace.
* * * * *
Alice had set out some cold meat on the table in the dining-room, but no
one thought to eat.
From somewhere in the cold a fly came and buzzed feebly about the frayed
meat on the big sheep bone that lay disconsolately in a congealed pool
of amber-white grease in the middle of the glossy blue dish.
No one came into the dining-room. The teapot, covered, at first, with a
bloom of moisture, grew heavy, and drops of water collected at its base.
The young fly clung to the huge flayed bone of the dead beast. It
crawled on moist, quivering legs along the dry and fleshless parts, only
to slip back uncertainly when it clutched at the fat.
In the empty dining-room it was as if the silence had stripped the
burned flesh from the dead bone. The gas light shone, very bright on the
stupidity of the table at which no one sat. The tablecloth was white and
lustrous from the iron. The high-backed chairs stood vacantly about the
vacant meal, the dry, highly polished tumblers, and the clean-wiped
plates.
The coffin was on a table in the parlor. It had a movable inside which
was pushed up so that the shoulders and head of the corpse protruded
above the box. Stiffly, yet as if of themselves, the head and shoulders
of the corpse uprose from the sides of the coffin. The smooth, strange
face, like the face of a wax angel, rose up complaisantly above the
sides of the box.
The German woman at the bakery, who was out of bed with a child ten days
old, had come to act as wet-nurse for the other new-born child. In the
nursery, opposite the death chamber, she sat pressing the infant's lips
to the stiff brown nipple on her full white breast.
It caught the nipple weakly and hungrily, but it did not have the
strength to keep it. The brown teat, sloppy with saliva, fell from its
small strained mouth. The baby squeezed its thumbs under its wrinkled
fingers. Its hands half opened and shut. Its weak eyes did not see the
nipple it had lost, and it began to cry fretfully, without shedding any
tears.
The stout woman had a sense of unusualness and impropriety in allowing
the dead woman's baby to take her breast, but she overcame the feeling
before she permitted it to become plain to herself. With firm fingers
she pressed the stiff nipple between the slobbering lips. The baby
scratched her delicate skin with its soft nails. Its hands clutched in
the agony of its satisfaction. It pressed and grappled with her
resilient breast, and left there faint red marks of delight and rage.
It was happy. It sucked with fierce unseeing content. Its sightless eyes
stared angrily. Its cheeks were drawn in and relaxed unceasingly.
When the breast slipped out again, it despaired. Its furry forehead
wrinkled above its wizened face. Its opaque eyes grew sharp and
merciless with baffled desire. Like a small blind beast fumbling the
air, it moved its head searchingly from side to side, sucking.
It seemed impossible for the scrawny and emaciated child to satisfy
itself. The woman took the breast away and the infant was angry once
more. Its eyes drew up out of sight beneath its overhanging lids. Its
whole body writhed in protest. It was a healthy child, the woman said,
because on the second day it could scream like that.
By and by it grew tired of its rage and went to sleep. It slept with its
lids apart, like a drunken thing, showing its bleared irises. And,
monotonously, vigorously, it drew the air in and out of its mouth. It
seemed angry and merciless even in its sleep.
* * * * *
On the way to the distant cemetery, Laurence rode in the carriage with
his father. Both men were under the illusion that the carriage remained
fixed while the confused faces in the streets were hurried past them
like bright leaves and driftwood torn by some hidden stream.
When the hearse came to a halt near the new-made grave, Mrs. Price, in
the carriage behind them, had to be aroused from a stupor and assisted
to her feet. Her knees shook. She gazed wildly and incredulously about,
and when they were lowering the coffin into the hole, she exclaimed, in
a tone of reproach, "Winnie! My God, Winnie!" as if she expected the
dead woman to rise in response and give some comforting assurance.
Laurence refused to see what was going on. He kept his eyes fixed on the
bright ground, and permitted himself to realize nothing more than that,
though the March day was fresh, the sun was warm on his back.
But as the minister's last words were said, Laurence felt the agitation
of people turning away, and something in him refused to reconcile itself
to the irrevocable thing which had occurred.
Recognizing no one, he walked aimlessly apart among strange graves.
Those who regarded him found in him the same fascination and repugnance
which had pervaded the body as it lay in the coffin. In some way he
seemed to belong to it.
* * * * *
Among the untended graves stood an unpainted kiosk, the dusty stair that
led to it yet littered with leaves of the autumn past. It was a
meaningless thing, empty, like the words on the tombstones--words of
which the earth had already hidden the meaning.
The wind blew very high up the long hillside in the cold, still sun. It
shook the stiff, glossy blades of dry yellow grass, and disturbed the
small, sharp shadows that laced their roots. The bare trees rocked
heavily from the earth, and swung their polished branches together.
On one grave a faded cotton flag drooped under an iron star. By another
was a wreath of tin and wax, white roses and orange blossoms, soiled
and spotted with rust, in a wooden case with a broken glass over the
top. An iron bench had sunk into the ground, and was fixed there with a
leg uplifted in an attitude of resignation. Some blue glass jars were
filled with dried crocus buds and the greenish ooze of the rotting
stems.
Above the hard twinkling slope of grass, the sky was a cold, pure blue.
Pine trees, tall and conical, were flaming satin, dark against the flat
white burning disk of the sun.
In a shining tree the white sun burnt innocently, like an enormous
Christmas candle. There was happiness in the strong, bitter smell of the
pine trees warmed by the sun.
The light that floated thin between their branches was sprayed fine from
the circle of heat, like the stiff, hot hair of an angel, burning harsh
and glorious as it floated from a halo. The wind rushed up against the
trees and they stirred darkly as in a shining sleep.
The branches swayed; crossed each other; and fell back.
Among the graves there were obelisks, like paralytic fingers stripped
dry to the bone, pointing up. A geranium in a pot was still on a grave
like a red glass flame. Among the tombs it slept, encased in brightness.
A fruit tree in premature bloom was shedding its blighted petals.
Heavily the tree, weighted with white, shed its ripe silence. The petals
fell, and mingled with the satin flakes of light on the trembling grass.
The still grave posts were deep in silence. The silence was asleep. It
did not know itself.
Silence crept waist high. Breast high. Drowned in itself.
It was asleep.
When the sun sank, out from the copper-blue night, from the horizon, the
dark trees rolled angrily. The remote stars flashed blue sparks like a
paler rage. But infinitely deep, from the night of the earth, the
gray-white tombstones floated up.
* * * * *
Laurence could not believe in death. He did not know it. But he was sick
with death, because it oppressed his unbelief. He wanted to take it into
himself and understand it.
Yet the same breath which desired knowledge was filled with protest. He
wanted to get away from the thing which crushed him with its unknown
being--crushed him in the blankness of the still sunshine and the cold
wind above the damp, new grave.
When he reached home after the funeral, the children had come back. May
clung about her father. Because of her fear of him, she seemed to know
him better than others knew him. For her own sake he wanted her to hate
him, to keep herself separate from his pity of her.
He felt his pity for others in him like a rottenness. He would have torn
the sickness out of his flesh, but it was through him, decaying him. His
blood was dry.
If he saw anything unworthy, he immediately discovered its weakness, and
sheltered it with his contempt. He could not be clean and strong and
harsh for himself. That was why he could fight for nothing that he
wished; because his enemies were inside him, and in order to destroy
them he had to tear and torture himself. If the sickness in him had been
his own, he could have cured it; but it was the sickness of his
children, of Alice, of his father and mother.
As a young man he had never been able to carry a decision into effect,
since he could never clearly distinguish his own pains from the pains of
those he opposed. As a boy, his pride made him suffer with a sense of
misunderstood greatness. Winnie had drunk that suffering out of him. He
had drained himself dry that her agony might be rich.
Winnie had drunk his want. He was empty. His heart was old.
He flung his children away. He was free. But free was the name of a
thing he had lost. While Winnie lived there was a certain vividness in
his fatigue. His resentment of her had held him together.
He analyzed the family and told himself that it was a monster which fed
on pain. It had grown stronger while Winnie had been weak and sick. It
was yet stronger now that she was dead.
When night came he thought of Winnie, who had always been afraid to be
alone, left in the dark and the silence and the wet earth. About twelve
it began to rain. She was more still out there because of the rain.
He saw the plump, stiff body happy in its box. The rain softened its
plumpness. The dead woman was lost in the thick night, in the
rain--always.
The night said nothing, but in one place, far off, where the grave was,
the night became bright and horrible. He understood the night where it
came from the grave in the darkness.
The dead woman stirred. The cold was bright in the whiteness of her
face. Here was where the dark ended in itself.
The rain fell upon her. He could not tear her from the rain, or from his
horror of her. He was locked in his horror of her as in a perpetual
embrace.
She was dead. She lived in him endlessly. Never could he be delivered
except into greater intimacy. Forever, he belonged to her; to her white
face with shut eyes, to its passive torture, to its movelessness against
rain. He felt already the day, cold like this, still like this, when she
would have him utterly. Almost, it seemed that he remembered something.
* * * * *
One evening after the children had eaten, Alice said, "I'll undress the
kiddikins. Is it time for the baby's bottle, Mamma?"
Mrs. Farley wanted to give the baby his bottle, but there was meat
burning in the oven, so she resigned the office to Alice. "If he's still
asleep, don't wake him up."
Alice went upstairs, carrying the bottle in one hand and holding Bobby's
fist with the other. May came behind.
When they reached the nursery, the baby seemed so quiet that Alice set
the bottle on the mantel shelf and began to undress Bobby.
It was summery dusk in the room. Outside the window the city melted in
hyacinth mist. The gold lights in the houses across the street were
still like a row of crocuses. Everything else seemed to be shaken in the
trembling dusk. The room quivered, unreal.
In the half dark, May watched Aunt Alice.
"Climb into bed, Bobby."
"He didn't say his prayers, Aunt Alice."
"Well, he can say his prayers tomorrow night."
May knew that she, too, would not be allowed to say her prayers. Aunt
Alice was awful. Aunt Alice in the dark, like a tower. Prayers seemed an
incantation against an evil which Aunt Alice desired.
"Can you undo your own dress?"
May squirmed and bent forward. Her hand reached up to the first button.
"Here! At that rate it will take you all night!" Out of the darkness
again, Aunt Alice's hand, heavy and hot and sure. She clutched May's
shoulder and gave it a little shake. "Wriggler!"
The clothes slipped off. May felt her nakedness piercing the dark.
Suddenly Aunt Alice caught her and faced her about, naked as she was.
"What makes you act as though I were an ogress, May?"
Aunt Alice's hands hurt. May was no longer aware that Aunt Alice existed
separate from the dark. It was shadow itself that bit into the child's
flesh.
"I--I don't know." May giggled. Her eyes shone with arrested tears.
"Did I ever hurt you? Suppose I had pinched you--like this! Slapped
you!"
Aunt Alice's hand flew out of the dark and fastened itself, alive and
stinging, on May's cheek. It was a light slap, almost in play, but May
died under it. She was stupid like a mirror. She sobbed painlessly.
"What are you crying for? Cry-baby! As if I had really hurt you!"
May did not care any more; so she went on crying.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself! You'll wake the baby up."
May cried.
"Hush, I say!" Alice held May against her breast in a fierce, unkind,
smothering hug, so that the baby might not hear her cry.
She uncurled May's loose fingers and laid them against her breast in the
darkness. She wanted May to be conscious of breasts burning and
unfolding of themselves. She wanted May to help her to understand her
breasts.
May felt Aunt Alice big and soft under her palm. She did not want her.
She had no name for the feel of her beyond the consciousness of softness
which she did not like.
She was naked and chilled. Her palm sunk upon the big bosom where Aunt
Alice pressed it, and she shuddered away from the yielding flesh. She
did not want to know why Aunt Alice was like that. Why Aunt Alice's
front swelled softly thick under her fingers. Why Aunt Alice's heart
beat with a steady and terrible hammer.
"Here! Get away from me and put on your nightgown, you silly little
girl!"
May was glad to be freed and pulled the gown on. Her head caught in the
fabric, but she struggled through until, finally, her face peeped
out--only a blind blur of face in the dim room.
"Get into bed!"
Aunt Alice sounded sharp and commanding again. May felt, more than ever,
she was unloved, but, remembering the feel of the big bosom, was glad.
Free!
May scampered across the cold, bare floor on her bare feet. She braced
her toes in the rail of the bed and swung herself over. Then she
snuggled down--quick!
Alice could not shake off the sensation she had had with the little
naked girl in her arms. The child's small, thin nakedness was like a
knife. Alice wanted the child's nakedness to cut her heavy flesh into
feeling.
She went over to the crib. In the dark, she could feel the baby staring
up, awake, making no sound. She turned to the mantel shelf for the
bottle and offered it to his lips which she could barely see. His small
hands touched her meaninglessly. He accepted the bottle. He was content.
She could hear him sucking.
She knelt by the crib, by the baby that ignored her. She gave herself to
it. She betrayed it sweetly.
Oh, baby!
She wept, enjoying her shame. She wanted to put its hands in her breast,
its lips in her breast. In the dark room she wanted to tear off her
clothes to give the baby her nakedness.
But the baby could not take her. It could not show her herself. In time
it would give the light of pain to some one, but now it was little with
small hands.
Alice could not bear the baby any more. What did she want?
She went out of the nursery and into her own room and closed the door.
What did she want?
She began to pull her clothes off. First her blouse. Her skin prickled
with chill. The darkness was thick about her. It loved her.
Horace Ridge.
Her clothes slipped off. She pulled off her shoes and stockings and the
floor and the slick matting knew her feet. The darkness knew her.
Her body was white and stiff against the dark. With a sensual agony she
knew how ugly she was.
Horace Ridge.
She could not bear his name--his pain.
Through the door she could hear Laurence and her father talking as they
passed through the hall.
Take this body away from me. I do not know it. I can no longer bear the
company of this unknown thing.
She lay down in the bed and pulled the sheets up.
Spring.
If Mamma Farley calls me to dinner, she said to herself, I shall be
sick.
In the dark street a boy whistled. She heard girls laugh. Through the
window a new-leafed tree over the opposite roof moved its black foliage
against the bloom of the sky, milk-purple clouds streaked with rose. A
hard moon, thin like a shell, lay up there glowing inside itself with a
cold secret light.
Alice felt her body harsh like the moon.
He did not love me.
They make me ugly, because unmeaning.
Beauty, straight, white, tall like a temple.
You cannot be beautiful alone....
I open my heart. I take the world to my heart. I am beauty.
... But my body is dark in the temple.
* * * * *
"Alice!"
Alice waited a moment, smothering.
I shall not answer.
"Alice!"
Alice's lips against the crack of the closed door. "Yes, Mamma."
"Did the baby drink his milk?"
"Yes."
"Dinner'll get cold."
Alice put her clothes on, feeling as though she had been sick.
Why do I go?
She went downstairs and into the dining-room, feeling lost in the glow
of the orange-colored flame that sputtered above the table. There was
cream tomato soup, already served, a thick purplish-pink, curdling a
little in the sweated plates.
"Hello, Alice."
"Good evening, Alice." Mr. Farley was drinking his soup timidly, and
without enjoyment. Surreptitiously, his blunt fingers crumbled atoms of
a crust. He did not look at his wife, but his eyes searched the faces of
his children warily.
"Have your beef rare, Laurence?" Mrs. Farley asked.
"Yes," Laurence said casually. His mother always served him first. He
stretched his legs under the table. He sat heavily in his chair as if he
had fallen there. He took big gulps of soup and tilted his dish. Then he
began to wipe butter from his knife on a ragged piece of half-chewed
bread. There was a kind of satisfaction of disgust in all he did. "I
hear Ridge is dangerously ill, Alice." His eyes were hard with
curiosity, as he glanced at her, but not unsympathetic.
"Well?" Alice gave him a combative stare. "If you're threatening to
express any satisfaction about it, please keep your mouth shut."
"I was never down on Ridge personally. He has written some fool books,
but I am every sorry to hear that he is sick."
"I'd better write to him and give him your sympathy."
"No need to be sarcastic, Alice," Laurence said.
Mr. Farley coughed. "In spite of the impracticability of his views, I'm
sure none of us wish Ridge out of the way."
Alice frayed the edges of her slice of beef by futile jabs with her
fork, but she could not make up her mind to eat. Suddenly these people
became intolerable to her. She rose without a word, and walked out of
the room.
They stared at her disappearing back.
"What's the matter, Alice?" Laurence called. He got up, glancing at his
mother. "Shall I go after her?"
Mrs. Farley had so hardened, in her determination to keep silence, that
it was difficult for her to speak of commonplace matters. "Leave her
alone," she said in a grating voice.
Laurence shrugged and sat down again.
"She probably feels that we are not sympathetic in regard to Mr. Ridge,"
Mr. Farley said. He smiled painfully and apologetically.
"No, I don't think we are," said Laurence comfortably.
Mrs. Farley had shut herself up again.
Alice went out through the kitchen and stood in the back yard. It was
foggy close to the earth. The street lamps beyond the high back wall
diffused their brightness in the thickness of the night so that the
darkness seemed atingle with a whitish blush.
The light from the open door behind her streamed out and cut the
darkness with a wedge-shaped blade. Where it fell, the grass was
purple-blue milk, rich and thick with color.
Alice walked to the alley gate, and fumbled with the cold latch until
she had opened it. Fog lay in the lamplit alley like a bright breath.
Up and down the street beyond, the cold roofs were heavy on the solid
houses. Their dead finality was like a threat against the vague and
living dark.
Alice felt as though she were rushing out of herself like an unseen
storm.
She wanted to lose her body in the dark.
But, at the end of the alley, people were passing. And she could see the
square, turgid as a river, where lights of cabs and automobiles floated,
trembled, disappeared, and reappeared again. She was in terror of them.
She no longer wanted to be known to herself.
She turned, and shut the gate, and ran back up the walk to the house.
The kitchen was vacant, bare. A moth spun in zig-zag near the quivering
gas flame. On the stove, the pots and pans, crusted with food, leaned
together, half upset. There was white oilcloth on the table, and on the
floor a scrap of threadbare red carpet. Bread was making in a covered
bowl on a shelf back of the stove. The baby's clothes, which Mrs. Farley
had been ironing, hung in a corner on a line. On a chair the bread board
was laid out with a heel of bread and a large knife.
Alice picked up the knife. She wanted to cleave her vision of herself.
But she must cleave it surely. She was afraid.
She dropped the knife, and, at the clatter, almost ran from the room.
She went quickly but very softly up the creaking back stairway. Her
breath was choking and guilty. She remembered where Laurie kept his
pistol, and she passed into his room and fumbled in the bureau drawer
among his clothes.
When she had the pistol in her hand, suddenly, she felt sure of herself.
She did not want to do it now. Not that night.
She was ashamed of having left the dining-room, and decided to go
downstairs once more.
Before she went, she carried the pistol to her room and hid it.
She felt calm. For the first time, it seemed as if her whole body was
hers, as in a love embrace. She was not afraid of understanding it. She
rested in relief, in intimacy with herself. Nothing separated her from
herself.
* * * * *
Alice threw a gray woolen bathrobe about her over her nightgown, and
went downstairs to get the morning paper.
Sunlight came over the transom of the street door and blue motes floated
down a spreading ladder of light. The light and the whirling motes sank
into the soft dingy nap of the carpet as into a vortex. There was a deep
spot of radiance, putty colored, like a pool of dust, still in the
gloom.
Alice opened the door and took the paper in.
As she carried it upstairs, the steps creaked under her short, broad,
bare feet.
She went into her room. The folded paper was slick and cold. It rattled
as she opened it.
Her eyes ran over the columns and the gray print seemed to shift and
dance and come together like the broken figures in a kaleidoscope.
Horace Ridge was dead.... She laid the paper on the bed.
The paper seemed a strange thing. The room, the bed, the chairs, were
words. What she knew had no word.
She felt exalted--almost happy.
She dressed, and put on her hat, and placed Laurie's pistol in her bag.
When she shut the pistol in the bag she had a foolish feeling that she
was doing something irrelevant, but her reason told her that she had to
have it.
When she opened the front door a second time, she knew that Mamma Farley
was up because the milk bottle had been taken in.
The street had been washed, and smelt sweet. A child trundled a baby
carriage up and down the block. The carriage went through the wet and
left gray, glistening tracks where the concrete had already dried. Some
negro workmen in huge clumsy coats and bulging-toed shoes went by.
Alice closed the door softly behind her. She had a vague idea that she
would go to the cemetery where Winnie was buried. She would take the
train a short distance and walk the rest of the way.
She reached the station. It was full of stopped clocks marking the hours
of appointed departures. The stopped clocks and the stir of people in
the electric-lighted shed made one feel that the world had stopped. The
motionless agitation reminded one of the restless stillness of the dead.
It was very dirty. An employee in a blue denim jacket pushed a trash
receiver along the platform and carelessly swept up some piles of fruit
peel and cigarette stubs, and smeared over places where people had spit.
Alice walked through the gate and out to the track. Sunshine came
through the roof of the shed and burned the cinders like black diamonds.
The atmosphere had a palpable texture and was acrid with smoke. An
engine rushed down upon her, steaming and shining. The red cars were
covered with a yellow-gray film of dust that made them orange bright.
The windows glittered.
Alice climbed into the long car filled with grimy, green plush seats,
and sat down by a window that was smeared along the ledge with cinders.
People came in. Girls, men. A woman with a crying baby. Their faces,
too, looked wan and orange in the bright clear morning sunlight.
The train started. Feeling it move, Alice was terrified. It seemed to
her that already something had begun which she could not control. It was
as though the train were carrying her out of herself.
Fields swept by. There was a marsh where the water twinkled with a
moving shudder among the still reeds. Then came an aqueduct. On a hill
were red brick houses set with shimmering glass, and above the cold
roofs the raw green of fresh leaves against the cold pure blue of the
morning sky.
A station with a neat park about it. Another station.
Alice rose and swayed forward down the aisle of the moving train. At the
next stop she got out.
It was lonely. The station house was a little deserted brick building of
only one room. Alice walked along the dusty road between the wet bright
fields. It was going to rain. The sky was clotted with cloud. Through
the vapors the illumined shadows of the sun's rays were outspread,
fan-shaped, like shadowy fingers of fire.
By itself, close to the road, was a whitewashed wooden church, and a
bush with pagan-red leaves burnt up against it in beauty and derision.
Alice felt, all at once, that she could go no further. She took out the
pistol.
She looked all about her. She was suddenly ashamed. Feeling as though
she were playing a dangerous game, she held the pistol to her breast.
She wanted the pistol to go off but she was afraid to pull the trigger.
She tried the cold ring of metal against her temple.
She felt herself ridiculous. Vainly she attempted to recall Winnie in
the coffin, horrible and gone forever.
She sat down limply on a grass bank by the roadside. The gray,
motionless foliage of the trees grew thick and cumulus against the rainy
sky. In her lax hand she held the pistol, stupid pistol which could no
longer convince her of its purpose. It lay inertly on her palm that
rested among the long gray grasses brushed flat to the earth with their
dull crystal weight of dew.
Death.
She kept repeating the bright word to herself. She was dead. She could
not believe in death.
She stood up and shook her skirts and put the pistol in the bag.
She felt stupid and sick. Her boots were all over dust and burrs clung
to her petticoats. She hardly saw what was around her. She had never
felt such heaviness in her life.
She walked back and sat down in the dirty little waiting-room until a
train should come. Already she fretted against herself. She did not
believe in death. She could not hurt herself enough. She felt herself
grow mean and hard and withered in her unbelief.
She went back.