“You brood overmuch on Nettie, dear. If I could see you married to some
sweet girl of a woman, some good, _kind_ girl———”
“Dear mother, I’m married enough. Perhaps some day——— Who knows? I can
wait.”
“But to have nothing to do with women!”
“I have my friends. Don’t you trouble, mother. There’s plentiful work
for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast out from him.
Nettie was life and beauty for me—is—will be. Don’t think I’ve lost too
much, mother.”
(Because in my heart I told myself the end had still to come.)
And once she sprang a question on me suddenly that surprised me.
“Where are they now?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Nettie and—him.”
She had pierced to the marrow of my thoughts. “I don’t know,” I said
shortly.
Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine.
“It’s better so,” she said, as if pleading. “Indeed . . . it is better
so.”
There was something in her quivering old voice that for a moment took
me back across an epoch, to the protests of the former time, to those
counsels of submission, those appeals not to offend It, that had always
stirred an angry spirit of rebellion within me.
“That is the thing I doubt,” I said, and abruptly I felt I could talk
no more to her of Nettie. I got up and walked away from her, and came
back after a while, to speak of other things, with a bunch of daffodils
for her in my hand.
But I did not always spend my afternoons with her. There were days when
my crushed hunger for Nettie rose again, and then I had to be alone; I
walked, or bicycled, and presently I found a new interest and relief in
learning to ride. For the horse was already very swiftly reaping the
benefit to the Change. Hardly anywhere was the inhumanity of horse
traction to be found after the first year of the new epoch, everywhere
lugging and dragging and straining was done by machines, and the horse
had become a beautiful instrument for the pleasure and carriage of
youth. I rode both in the saddle and, what is finer, naked and
barebacked. I found violent exercises were good for the states of
enormous melancholy that came upon me, and when at last horse riding
palled, I went and joined the aviators who practised soaring upon
aeroplanes beyond Horsemarden Hill. . . . But at least every alternate
day I spent with my mother, and altogether I think I gave her
two-thirds of my afternoons.
§ 4
When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made an
euthanasia for so many of the older people in the beginning of the new
time, took hold upon my mother, there came Anna Reeves to daughter
her—after our new custom. She chose to come. She was already known to
us a little from chance meetings and chance services she had done my
mother in the garden; she sought to give her help. She seemed then just
one of those plainly good girls the world at its worst has never failed
to produce, who were indeed in the dark old times the hidden antiseptic
of all our hustling, hating, faithless lives. They made their secret
voiceless worship, they did their steadfast, uninspired, unthanked,
unselfish work as helpful daughters, as nurses, as faithful servants,
as the humble providences of homes. She was almost exactly three years
older than I. At first I found no beauty in her, she was short but
rather sturdy and ruddy, with red-tinged hair, and fair hairy brows and
red-brown eyes. But her freckled hands I found, were full of apt help,
her voice carried good cheer. . . .
At first she was no more than a blue-clad, white-aproned benevolence,
that moved in the shadows behind the bed on which my old mother lay and
sank restfully to death. She would come forward to anticipate some
little need, to proffer some simple comfort, and always then my mother
smiled on her. In a little while I discovered the beauty of that
helpful poise of her woman’s body, I discovered the grace of untiring
goodness, the sweetness of a tender pity, and the great riches of her
voice, of her few reassuring words and phrases. I noted and remembered
very clearly how once my mother’s lean old hand patted the firm
gold-flecked strength of hers, as it went by upon its duties with the
coverlet.
“She is a good girl to me,” said my mother one day. “A good girl. Like
a daughter should be. . . . I never had a daughter—really.” She mused
peacefully for a space. “Your little sister died,” she said.