a family and the head of a household; living with a child who was one
incessant and irrepressible demand for attention, and a wife who was
wrestling with weakness and sickness--eating out her heart in cruel
loneliness, and cowering in the grip of fiends of melancholia and
despair!
He had thought that when they moved into the new home, their domestic
trials would be at an end. But now the cruel winter fell upon them. They
had never known what a winter in the country was like; they came to see
why the farmer had protested against their building in such a remote
place. There were many days when they could not get to town, and some
when they could not even get to the farm-house. Also there was the pump,
which was continually freezing, and necessitating long and troublesome
operations before they could get any water.
It was, as fate would have it, the worst winter in the oldest
inhabitant’s memory. The farmer’s well froze over on three occasions,
and it had never frozen before, so he declared. For such weather as this
they were altogether unprepared; they had only a wood-stove, and could
not keep a fire all night; and the cheap blankets they had bought were
made all of cotton, and gave them almost no protection. They would not
sleep with the windows down; and so, for weeks at a time, they would
go to bed with their clothing, even their overcoats on; and would pile
curtains and rugs upon these--and even so, they would waken at two or
three o’clock in the morning, shivering and chilled to the bone.
And in this icy room they would have to get up and build a fire; and it
might be half an hour before they could get the house warm. Also, they
had no facilities for bathing; and so little by little they began to
lose their habits of decency--there were days when Corydon left her
face unwashed, and forgot to brush her hair. Everyday, it seemed, they
slipped yet further down the grade. Thyrsis would work until he was
faint and exhausted, and then he would come over, and find there was
nothing ready to eat. By the time that he and Corydon had cooked a meal,
they would both of them be ravenous, and they would sit and devour their
food like a couple of savages. Then, because they had over-eaten, they
would have to rest before they cleared things away; and like as not
Thyrsis would get to thinking about his work, and go off and leave
everything--and the dishes and the food might stay up on the table until
the next meal. There was nearly always a piled-up mass of dishes and
skillets and sauce-pans in the house--to Thyrsis these soiled dishes
were the original source of the myth of Sisyphus and his labor.
And then there was the garbage-pail that he had forgotten to empty, and
the lamps he had neglected to fill, and the slop-pails and the other
utensils of domesticity. There were the diapers that somebody had to
wash--and outside was always the bitter, merciless cold, that drove them
in and shut them up with all this horror. The time came, as the winter
dragged on, when the house which they had built with so many sacrifices,
and into which they had moved with such eager anticipations, came to
seem to them like a cave in which a couple of wild beasts cowered for
shelter.