She read it in her hoarse, thrilling voice, and it sounded so vehement,
so passionate, so touching, that they both believed the letter to be so
in itself.
"Now I’ll run out and mail it," she said.
Just as she was, with disheveled hair and unfastened blouse, she hurried
out into the street. A man spoke to her, and she swore at him.
She was back within a few minutes, panting, but her mother was no longer
in the kitchen; she had gone into the dark bedroom to quiet the poor
little baby.
"I’ll hold him, Angie," she said. "You can go on ironing."
But Angelica flung herself on her knees before the child on her mother’s
lap.
"Gawd! Little feller! Little love! Gawd, I wish he’d die and be out of
this!"
Her mother could not rebuke her. Worn out by unending worry, by lack of
sleep, by the heat, by intolerable toil for the tiny thing, she, too,
could only wish it dead. It suffered so; it was so weak, so pitiful.
Night after night they had held it in their arms, close to the window,
where it might get what air there was. They sang to it, rocked it,
bathed its wasted little body to cool it, and all the while it wailed in
its feeble voice--a weak, monotonous, heart-rending sound. They tended
it by day and by night. From time to time it slept, but fitfully, the
beating of its little heart shaking its emaciated body.
Angelica would sit beside it, her eyes fixed upon it, scarcely daring to
breathe in her terror that it might die as it slept; for though she said
and she meant that she wished it to die and be free of its misery, for
her own sake she longed for it to live to the utmost limit, no matter if
every day and every night were a pain to her, and her whole life went by
in its service. She wanted to be holding it in her arms every waking
hour; she could not sleep unless it lay within the reach of her hand.
Even if she went to the corner on an errand for her mother, she was
filled with panic until she had got back to it, and had seen it and
touched it again.
She cared for nothing else whatever. She didn’t trouble to dress
herself decently; she no longer helped her mother about the flat.
Barefooted, her heavy hair pinned in a great slovenly coil, her blouse
unfastened, with a ragged skirt hanging about her lean hips, she would
sit for hours with the little wailing thing in her arms, pressed against
her bosom, while she sang to it in her hoarse, touching voice.
She learned all she could from the doctor and the visiting nurse, and
did just as they had told her. She bathed the child, fed it, tended it,
in the most careful and professional way; but she would not let it
alone. The doctor told her to leave it in the clothes-basket which was
its bed, and the nurse assured her it would be cooler and more
comfortable there; but she could not restrain herself from snatching it
up. She could not help feeling that the passion of her love, the
generous warmth of her body, must invigorate and vitalize it. Most cruel
of all delusions--that love can save!