In the room of Sarah and Josiah stood two beds, in place of the one. It
was to that one they had come, when they were married. Sarah was
eighteen then, ten years the younger of the two. Josiah had begun by
thriving in his affairs. He had taken on flesh in token of his natural
love of living; he had taken on bitterness in token of Sarah’s rôle. So
at least, it seemed to Sarah. She was thirty-three, and already she had
outlived her husband.
At times, with this thought, a flood of anger came as she looked at the
two prim, sneering beds that marked her punishment. For punishment it
was--humiliating, permanent. But more often than anger and more lasting,
came the sense of failure, the taste of ashes in her mouth, the waste of
desert before her eyes. But Sarah had taken on no flesh. And she was not
clever enough to take on bitterness.
With March had come a revival of winter, and of misfortune. The country
had been frozen ruggedly. Marsden, the eldest now of the Burt children,
had been playing Indian. He had scuffled to the low roof of the porch,
where lay a thin, insidious scale of ice. He had slipped and fallen.
Once more, the Mother was flung helpless, mindless, into the shadows.
Marsden had been brought back from the Hospital in Brooklyn. His life
was saved. It was to be the life of a cripple.
This afternoon in the late spring, Sarah stood alone in the room,
before the oval mirror of her bureau. She was examining herself.
Marsden lay muffled up on the porch. Quincy was asleep in the room that
had been Marsden’s. The two windows facing forward to the street were
open; but Sarah had thrown-to the shutters. The cries of the other
children came up from the lawn--joyous, sharp, petulant variations on
the theme of youth. Sarah could hear them well, and love them. A portion
of her senses was forever fixed on them, interpreting their moods,
primed to detect a signal of distress or danger as they romped on, and
to rush down in help. Since the accident to Marsden, even in sleep she
was a half-cocked trigger of anxieties, a wrack of nerves singing with
strain.
But this was spring. And Sarah was only thirty-three. However her mind
might bend to the deep business of her children, the eyes that looked at
her from the mirror were not so much a mother’s as a woman’s.
She had come up to change her waist. She lingered, undressed, trying to
understand. For Sarah knew that the reason given by Josiah was a
pretext. There was but one truth, though there were a thousand reasons.
That truth was--coldness. To Josiah, Sarah was no longer a woman to be
loved.
So, with the spring sun splintering through the shutters, Sarah looked
at herself and tried to understand. The room was in shadow. It appeared
cramped and painful with its low ceiling and its dash of red flowers on
the wall, its heavy draperies, and its unhappy beds. The bureau was
between the shuttered windows. And where stood Sarah, a sun’s ray fell
on her breast, one lighted a spray from her dull mass of hair, another
shot aslant her arm, pointing its poverty of curve, its pathos of angle
and declivity where the flesh fell in and the bone ridged out. Yes:--she
looked old enough. And yet, all that had once been lovable was still
somehow there.
In Sarah was the contradiction of a woman given over to a conscious,
self-fashioned life, in whom once had reigned the unconscious and wild
fervors of girlhood. Her mouth was long, sensitive at its points,
although the lips had flattened and grown less tender. There was a
responsive fire in her eyes although some chill had curtailed it, even
as the smoulder of her lips seemed dying out. Her expression--the gentle
gradation of all her face together--had weathered best. Here was warmth,
even strength. But as Sarah’s examining gaze fell, it found worse
fortune. Her throat had lost its tightness; its vague bagginess beneath
the chin was grey against the sun on her breast. And here too was
failure. Her bosom was no longer fresh, elastic. It bespoke weariness.
It lacked the quality that had always made her charming in Dutch neck.
So Sarah covered it quickly with her waist, ere a too poignant
recognition of her defeat here bore in upon her. For here, wishing could
not defeat her eyes. Her efforts might cast a glamor on her face making
her see afresh what once was there; but the drab dullness of her body
was beyond the scope of her illusion.
It was all obvious: the stiff angle of her brown petticoat, the long
rigidity of her back, the narrowness above her waist, the dry
impoverishment of her shoulders, the fleshless nape of her neck, the
unlit mass of her hair. And yet, a glimpse of her eyes as they went out,
half suppliant, half proud, to prove her worth, destroyed this
obviousness. For beneath the blur of sadness in which their glance was
bathed, there was a power of spirit, pregnant of miracles, if only the
man she loved had cared to call them forth. But after all, it was
inexorably true--the acknowledgment beat against what she chose to
see:--dismissed from the fair office to which she had been originally
called, thrown back upon a maze of service without the gift which had
transfigured it, she was still really young! In the tremor of her mouth,
the frightened passion of her eyes, flashed somehow forth a vision as of
one being buried alive.
Rapidly, now, Sarah completed her dressing. With a care strange to her,
she tidied her hair, making a ribbon serve as fillet for it. And then,
she threw open the shutters. The golden light swept in upon her face.
Two heavy lines within each cheek, a furrow hinting on the forehead came
out, as her mood faded before the day’s more real brilliancy. So Sarah
tore off the ribbon. With a last effort, she returned to her hair. With
her brush, she tried to bring back to it a show of wave and of
resiliency. But her touch was heavy; and the opaque mass failed to
respond. The woman who can feel no decoration in her hair is miserable.
For here, in most women, lurks the aura of their desire to please. The
sense of beauty there lifts the plain woman above a too stifling
consciousness. The sense of failure, there, will weigh on the fairest
woman like a pall. Sarah’s next move was the gesture of a housewife,
stubbornly resolved not to become a dowd. Sighing, she smoothed out her
skirt over her hips. And then, she went to look after Quincy.
As she entered the little room which had been Marsden’s, a flood of
vague longing swept over her. She caught up the infant and strained him
against her breast. Seated on his cot, she swayed widely to and fro, her
child’s body warm upon her own. There was a bitter satisfaction in her
embrace. With it, she had almost forgotten Quincy. He was, for the
nonce, a mere luscious symbol of her dreary untempered life. He was to
be hugged, to be felt, to be experienced.
She was holding him too tight. And he began to cry. In an instant, Sarah
recalled the fact of her son. She held him now, carefully, tenderly. And
the child’s crying ceased. She looked down upon his rosy, wrinkled face.
She kissed his eyes--bright blue they were. She drew delight in cradling
his dimpled fists in her own outdrawn hands. And then, she began to
speak to him.
“Excuse me, dearest,” she said, “excuse me for everything. Excuse me,
not only for having squeezed you so hard, but also for having given you
birth.”
As she was silent, she wept. A deep sense of pain seemed to envelop them
together. And in that sense, they became almost one, again.
“Quincy, my baby,--forgive me,” she whispered. She placed her wet face
against his and held it there, waiting for his response. And so she
remained--swayed in her uncharted feelings--agony and a sweet joy of
life. And the strange conflict that swayed her rocked her child to
sleep.
She placed him back between his covers and closed the door gently behind
her. The spring in her heart was hurting her. She knew not what to do,
where to go, in order to dispel this subtle restlessness. The children
below were content without her. It was almost time to be cooking
supper. But she felt nauseous at the prompting. In her own house, in her
own hall, she stood, hesitant, palpitant, unnerved and ill-at-ease. What
was come over her? She sought refuge, back in her room. She flung
herself face down, upon her bed--as a girl might, and as no woman should
need to. And there she lay, not thinking, scarcely feeling, luxuriously
adrift in an element that was both hot and cold. But this could not
last. She must start supper going; she must put Thomas and Adelaide to
bed. She did.
* * * * *
Sarah went to her husband in the parlor. He sat at the table, roughly
fingering a batch of papers. Business had gone better this spring. But
it had failed to pace the stride of outlay. The drain of the Brooklyn
Hospital had sunk Josiah deeper than ever into debt. And he was
brooding. No word of kindness or of fellowship came from him, those
days. The seeming purpose of fate to meet him and the rise in his
affairs with always another blow appealed to the man’s instinct for
irony. It was to him as if he were playing a game, playing it well, yet
destined to go down before stacked cards. Everything seemed to point to
an invidious combination. The very fact of his increasing business, with
the gall it added, seemed proof to him that an Intelligence was at work
against him. His strokes of fortune made him suffer, since they did no
good. His wife’s serene behavior made him suffer, since his emotions
balked at acknowledging or rewarding it. The fact of his power always to
stem a tide, always to go on barely, made him suffer, since it prevented
what in his mood had seemed a luxury--the final breaking-up, the
sureness of an End.
As Sarah came in and took a rocker across the table, he lifted his head
from his papers, glanced at her impatiently, and then plunged back into
his scrutiny. And his behavior also made him suffer. For he craved to
regain warmth for his wife; in hurting her he hurt himself with
concomitant misgivings. He struggled hard against the new, indomitable
habit of his heart, to couple Sarah with Quincy, and him with all the
misery and sorrow that his coming had seemed to unleash upon them. But
it was in vain. He could not battle against his growing nausea for all
that was nearest to him. His mind might dilate with keenness upon the
tribulations of Sarah, upon her strong humility, upon the puerile
unfairness of his attitude. He could not mend that part of him which
ruled him. He could not reach it, with all his reason. Always, this part
within him flung him back upon the loss of his two favorite children,
upon the accident to Marsden, upon the link between these misfortunes
and his wife. And with his heart so turned, he could not divorce the
association,--could not but regard Sarah with insuperable reproach.
Sarah was darning stockings. And when Josiah broke the silence her hands
knocked nervously together. For she had been inured to his silence as
the more bearable of evils. She gulped. Then she mastered her curious
fright, set aside her work and looked up.
“Sarah,” her husband began, “I’ve found a way of gettin’ rid of the
Wyoming land. And though it’s robbery and a loss, I’m goin’ to take it.”
“But Josiah--”
“The Shinone Land Company of Billings, Montana, offers me two thousand
dollars. The fact that they offer me anything at all makes me
suspicious. But even a dollar of tax--well, I can’t feel I have a right
to. So there’s an end of _that_ fond story.”
He threw the letter over into her lap.
Sarah took it. But she did not read it. She was dwelling on his tone and
on the breaking that it seemed to cover. She knew for what this land was
symbol, in Josiah’s mind. She had no hope of it. But she feared to have
its going added to the long list of other things now gone. As a
property, it might be a worthless drain. As an idea, it still meant much
to him. Her spirit faltered at the thought of this last mark of his
enthusiastic youth erased by the present. Turning to look at him, Sarah
was seconded in her conviction. Josiah was resting his head in his two
hands, elbows upon the table. And his gaze went past her--far beyond. It
seemed to be following the swift passage of a hope. This investment had
not been the dearest portion of his hopes. Josiah was no materialist.
Simply, it was the last. And now it was going--vanishing--to join the
other ghosts.
Sarah rose and came to his side. She placed her hands on his two
shoulders.
“Josiah,” she said.
The man gazed on.
“Josiah!”
“Well?”
It was not easy to talk to a man’s shoulders, particularly since she
loved his face. But Sarah mustered courage.
“I have a feeling about that property, Josiah. Let’s hold on to it. For
good luck, dear.”
“I can’t afford to.”
“But, Josiah--listen. You seem to have forgotten. That money of mine.
It ain’t much. And it’s true--we was always going to let it lie,
collecting interest for the children. But it’s not enough to count, that
way. And it will pay that tax, for some time to come. Let’s take a
chance, Josiah. Let’s be daring--and--and take a chance. Let’s hold on
to the land.”
She stopped, because somehow--despite the trifling subject--there were
too many tears.
Her husband jumped up and faced her. “I’ve got no hold on your money,”
he said sharply.
“Josiah!”
He felt the pain expressed in her reproach. The knowledge of it made him
uncomfortable. He saw that the one decent thing which he could do was to
accept.
“All right, Sarah,” he spoke stiffly,--“if you’re fool enough to want
it,” and left the room.