Life defeated by death,
Death defeated by life.
The rocking chair in which Rosalind's mother sat kept creaking. Words
came haltingly from between her white lips. The test of Ma Wescott's
life had come. Always she had been defeated. Now she must triumph in
the person of Rosalind, the daughter who had come out of her body. To
her she must make clear the fate of all women. Young girls grew up
dreaming, hoping, believing. There was a conspiracy. Men made words,
they wrote books and sang songs about a thing called love. Young girls
believed. They married or entered into close relationships with men
without marriage. On the marriage night there was a brutal assault and
after that the woman had to try to save herself as best she could. She
withdrew within herself, further and further within herself. Ma Wescott
had stayed all her life hidden away within her own house, in the
kitchen of her house. As the years passed and after the children came
her man had demanded less and less of her. Now this new trouble had
come. Her daughter was to have the same experience, to go through the
experience that had spoiled life for her.
How proud she had been of Rosalind, going out into the world, making
her own way. Her daughter dressed with a certain air, walked with a
certain air. She was a proud, upstanding, triumphant thing. She did not
need a man.
"God, Rosalind, don't do it, don't do it," she muttered over and over.
How much she had wanted Rosalind to keep clear and clean! Once she also
had been a young woman, proud, upstanding. Could anyone think she had
ever wanted to become Ma Wescott, fat, heavy and old? All through her
married life she had stayed in her own house, in the kitchen of her own
house, but in her own way she had watched, she had seen how things went
with women. Her man had known how to make money, he had always housed
her comfortably. He was a slow, silent man but in his own way he was as
good as any of the men of Willow Springs. Men worked for money, they
ate heavily and then at night they came home to the woman they had
married.
Before she married, Ma Wescott had been a farmer's daughter. She had
seen things among the beasts, how the male pursued the female. There
was a certain hard insistence, cruelty. Life perpetuated itself that
way. The time of her own marriage was a dim, terrible time. Why had she
wanted to marry? She tried to tell Rosalind about it. "I saw him on the
Main Street of town here, one Saturday evening when I had come to town
with father, and two weeks after that I met him again at a dance out in
the country," she said. She spoke like one who has been running a long
distance and who has some important, some immediate message to deliver.
"He wanted me to marry him and I did it. He wanted me to marry him and
I did it."
She could not get beyond the fact of her marriage. Did her daughter
think she had no vital thing to say concerning the relationship of men
and women? All through her married life she had stayed in her husband's
house, working as a beast might work, washing dirty clothes, dirty
dishes, cooking food.
She had been thinking, all through the years she had been thinking.
There was a dreadful lie in life, the whole fact of life was a lie.
She had thought it all out. There was a world somewhere unlike the
world in which she lived. It was a heavenly place in which there was no
marrying or giving in marriage, a sexless quiet windless place where
mankind lived in a state of bliss. For some unknown reason mankind had
been thrown out of that place, had been thrown down upon the earth. It
was a punishment for an unforgivable sin, the sin of sex.
The sin had been in her as well as in the man she had married. She had
wanted to marry. Why else did she do it? Men and women were condemned
to commit the sin that destroyed them. Except for a few rare sacred
beings no man or woman escaped.
What thinking she had done! When she had just married and after her man
had taken what he wanted of her he slept heavily but she did not sleep.
She crept out of bed and going to a window looked at the stars. The
stars were quiet. With what a slow stately tread the moon moved across
the sky. The stars did not sin. They did not touch one another. Each
star was a thing apart from all other stars, a sacred inviolate thing.
On the earth, under the stars everything was corrupt, the trees,
flowers, grasses, the beasts of the field, men and women. They were all
corrupt. They lived for a moment and then fell into decay. She herself
was falling into decay. Life was a lie. Life perpetuated itself by the
lie called love. The truth was that life itself came out of sin,
perpetuated itself only by sin.
"There is no such thing as love. The word is a lie. The man you are
telling me about wants you for the purpose of sin," she said and
getting heavily up went into the house.
Rosalind heard her moving about in the darkness. She came to the screen
door and stood looking at her daughter lying tense and waiting on the
porch. The passion of denial was so strong in her that she felt choked.
To the daughter it seemed that her mother standing in the darkness
behind her had become a great spider, striving to lead her down into
some web of darkness. "Men only hurt women," she said, "they can't help
wanting to hurt women. They are made that way. The thing they call love
doesn't exist. It's a lie."
"Life is dirty. Letting a man touch her dirties a woman." Ma Wescott
fairly screamed forth the words. They seemed torn from her, from some
deep inner part of her being. Having said them she moved off into the
darkness and Rosalind heard her going slowly toward the stairway that
led to the bedroom above. She was weeping in the peculiar half choked
way in which old fat women weep. The heavy feet that had begun to mount
the stair stopped and there was silence. Ma Wescott had said nothing of
what was in her mind. She had thought it all out, what she wanted to
say to her daughter. Why would the words not come? The passion for
denial within her was not satisfied. "There is no love. Life is a lie.
It leads to sin, to death and decay," she called into the darkness.
A strange, almost uncanny thing happened to Rosalind. The figure of her
mother went out of her mind and she was in fancy again a young girl and
had gone with other young girls to visit a friend about to be married.
With the others she stood in a room where white dresses lay on a bed.
One of her companions, a thin, flat breasted girl fell on her knees
beside the bed. A cry arose. Did it come from the girl or from the old
tired defeated woman within the Wescott house? "Don't do it. O,
Rosalind don't do it," pleaded a voice broken with sobs.
The Wescott house had become silent like the street outside and like
the sky sprinkled with stars into which Rosalind gazed. The tenseness
within her relaxed and she tried again to think. There was a thing that
balanced, that swung backward and forward. Was it merely her heart
beating? Her mind cleared.
The song that had come from the lips of Walter Sayers was still singing
within her--
Life the conqueror over death,
Death the conqueror over life.
She sat up and put her head into her hands. "I came here to Willow
Springs to put myself to a test. Is it the test of life and death?" she
asked herself. Her mother had gone up the stairway, into the darkness
of the bedroom above.