"It is a wild and miserable world,
Thorny and full of care,
Which every friend can make his prey at will."
"Know how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong."
Beneath the quietness of Myron Holder's manner there raged a very chaos
of reckless, despairing thought. It is undeniable that at this time no
maternal love warmed her heart towards her child.
There was one night--one dreadful night--whose memory stained forever
even the dark pages of her retrospect. A night through the long hours
of which she lay and thought of death--not to herself--but to the
sleeping infant at her side. All the tales she had ever heard of
desperate women's crimes came to her, assailing her weakened will and
tired brain with insidious suggestions of safety, and freedom, and
immunity from blame.
Pallid, she rose in the early dawn. As she passed the old English
mirror in its shabby gilt frame, she caught a fleeting glimpse of
burning cheeks, cracking parched lips and bloodshot eyes. She withdrew
her glance shuddering.
It was very early in the morning. She crossed the kitchen, and softly
opening the door looked forth upon the unawakened world. The air was
somewhat chilly, but sweet and soft. A heavy dew spread a pearly film
over the grass, broken here and there by a silvery shield, where the
spider webs held the moisture: gossamers they are in these early
morning hours when the world is pure and quiet,--shreds of the
Madonna's winding sheet, as we all know. But what are they when the
dew is gone and they are laden with the dust and soot and grime of the
long hot day? Gossamers still?
Down between the trees she could see the dull glimmer of the lake,
awaiting the sun to strike it into silver; a few pale stars lingered,
loath to bid the world good-by before the moon, which, a wraith-like
orb, still soared on high, white and diaphanous. All was calm,
passionless, and pure. As Myron Holder looked there grew within her
soul a sick shuddering against the woman of the past night. She saw
herself vile where all was holy, passionate where all was peace. And
from her soul, a plea, indefinite in aspiration, and vaguely voyaging
to some unknown haven, went forth, that her old heart might be
vouchsafed to her, her own suffering, fearing, trusting, loving,
betrayed heart, instead of this throbbing centre of pain with its
bitter blood of despair and hate.
Slow resolutions began to stir in her heart: she would go through the
world "spending and being spent" for others: she would be patient to
her grandmother, always remembering she had shamed her: she would be
true and faithful and self-sacrificing in every relation she assumed to
others; she would be sympathetic to all and she would die soon, very
soon, she thought, and the village would mourn her and at last speak of
her with loving kindness. Poor Myron! Like "many mighty men," she did
not realize the utter barrenness of a posthumous joy or understand how
diffident Death can be when wooed.
Her mood was jarred by the child's cry and the grandmother's querulous
complaint. She turned from the morning just as the sun's rays shot
across the lake.
As soon as she was able to do so she resumed her work--bending over her
toil, a patient figure in a worn blue print gown and dark sunbonnet, a
humble mark she seemed for public scorn: yet all the scandal and spite
of the scurrilous little village played about her.
As Mrs. Disney expressed it, old Mrs. Holder "took it most terrible
hard": therefore the village matrons contracted a habit of running in
at all hours to the little hop-clad house and condoling with Mrs.
Holder, and with her speculating as to the identity of the child's
father.
Now and then these zealous comforters rather overdid the matter,
notably when Mrs. Weaver, with a view of exonerating Mrs. Holder from
all blame and relieving her of all responsibility for Myron's behavior,
remarked that "It did seem as if bad was born in some people."
Old Mrs. Holder rose at that, and speedily made Mrs. Weaver aware that
Myron's badness was purely sporadic, and that heredity had nothing to
do with it. She did not express herself in this way, but conveyed the
same idea much more forcibly.
It is possible that, being Myron's grandmother, she felt a slight
reflection from Mrs. Weaver's well-meant suggestion that Myron had
inherited vice as her birthright; be that as it may, she speedily made
Mrs. Weaver aware that if there was any truth in such an idea, she
herself must be in a perilous state: the old Englishwoman had managed
to glean pretty accurate data about the Jamestown people, and she knew
that Mrs. Weaver's mother had "tript in her time." Mrs. Weaver called
no more upon Mrs. Holder, but the others showed no abatement of their
zeal.
These good Jamestown women had a pleasant habit of sitting with Mrs.
Holder until Myron's form appeared at noon or night. They gazed at her
while she opened the gate, trod the little path past the front door,
and until she turned the corner: when Vice in the person of Myron
entered the back door, Virtue embodied in one or more of Jamestown's
matrons fled from the front door, hearing, ere the gate was reached,
the first measures of the jeremiad with which her grandmother greeted
her. There was little wonder that Myron Holder grew morbidly nervous
and supersensitive. She would scarce have been responsible for any
deed, however evil.
All the morning the anticipated agony of the ordeal of walking up the
path, under these scathing eyes, oppressed and tortured her. No martyr
ever contemplated with greater dread the red-hot ploughshares than
Myron Holder did those few yards of red trodden earth, bordered by fox
grass and burdock leaves.
Through the long hours of the slow afternoons she braced herself for
the return home at night, but she did not try to elude any of the
humiliations of her position. The garden gate was terrible to her as
the surgeon's knife to the sufferer--for the hasp was loosened and
twisted, the gate had to be lifted before it could be opened, and
sometimes she was kept fumbling with the fastening until the blood swam
before her eyes in a red mist.
Doubtless she should have considered all these painful contingencies
and walked more heedfully, but the thought, which the Jamestown matrons
often quoted, did not, as they seemed to think it should, dull the pain
of the thousand stings she received daily--it only pressed them home.
There are many
"Dainty themes of grief
In sadness to outlast the morn;"
but the tale of Myron Holder's expiation is not one of them--it is a
sordid theme, yet, being human, not too sordid to be writ out. It is a
painful relation; but when one woman lived it, we may not shrink from
contemplating it, nor hesitate to view step by step the way one woman
trod.
The first summer of her child's life wore away. Autumn came before
Myron Holder was goaded into any demonstration of her suffering.
She was one day working for Mr. Disney, who worked old Mr. Carroll's
place on shares. It was the time of the apple harvest. All day long
they had been picking, gathering, sorting, and carrying the heavy
fruit. Between Mr. Carroll and Mr. Disney was waged a continual war of
wits, each endeavoring to get the better of the other. The afternoon
was far spent when old Mr. Carroll came, limping out, bent and thin,
only his erectness of poise when he stood still evidencing the old
soldier.
The fruit had been divided into two long heaps, alike in their
dimensions, but, as all the pickers knew, of widely different quality.
The grass was sere and yellowed, the sapless apple leaves fell in
rustling showers at the lightest breath of wind, and now and then an
apple fell with a dull sound upon the earth. The brown side of the
drive-house formed a neutral background into which all the sombre tints
of the little scene blended, save the brilliant reds and yellows of the
two long piles of apples.
"Well, Mr. Disney--got the apples sorted?" asked Mr. Carroll with
affected geniality. Mr. Disney, a shallow-witted man, was betrayed by
the smile on the lips into disregard of the cold eyes, and replied with
rash effusiveness:
"Yes--picked, sorted, divided, sold, almost cooked and eaten." Old Mr.
Carroll's smile froze.
"Which is my pile?" he asked with an indescribable intonation of
sarcastic contempt, which pierced even Disney's denseness and made a
slow red gather to his cheeks as he answered--"That one."
"Then I'll take this one," replied Mr. Carroll, indicating the other.
Disney faltered then--wanted to re-divide--and managed to confuse
himself completely. Mr. Carroll listened contemptuously; his keen old
eyes had discerned the mud on the apples in the heap assigned to him,
and he had decided, rightly enough, that they were windfalls.
Disney's half-hearted plea for a re-division was manifestly absurd, and
the caustic old man enjoyed a pleasant half-hour in ridiculing the
idea. For once he had his enemy fairly "on the hip."
The end of it was that presently, when Mr. Warner drove past, he saw
old Mr. Carroll enthroned upon an upturned bushel basket, his cynical
old eyes gleaming with amusement, his feet shifting restlessly with
delight, his tongue irritating Disney almost beyond endurance.
He had placed himself on the side of the drive-house door and demanded
that his apples be carried in then and there. Disney longed to refuse,
but his agreement provided that he perform all the labor of harvesting
and storing Mr. Carroll's share. There was nothing for it, therefore,
but to obey the irascible old man, who, in numerous playful ways, made
the carrying in of the fruit a weariness of the flesh to Disney. He
stopped him to pull stray wisps of grass out of his pails, or to
examine a purely imaginary blemish in an apple. He let his cane slip
down so that Disney tripped over it. He took one of the pails, and
pretended to fix one of the handles, which was perfectly secure as it
was--and all the time he talked, gently, irritatingly, making the most
innocent of pauses for replies that Disney felt he must make, but which
he made as briefly as possible.
The afternoon waned; finally the last apple of the heap was transferred
to the drive-house. Then Mr. Carroll rose, trying his best to conceal
the stiffness of his joints from Disney, locked the drive-house door
and limped off to his lonely house, solitary but triumphant.
A little later he watched the departure of the disgusted Disney and his
pickers--Myron Holder dragging wearily home alone, body and heart alike
aching; the rest slyly nudging one another, with meaning looks at
Disney's sullen face.
Still later, when Mr. Carroll blew out his yellow wax candle, he pushed
aside the limp white blind, raised the many-paned window and looked
forth into the moonlight. It was very clear and quiet. Disney's pile
of apples lay roughly outlined beneath its covering of old sacks. Mr.
Carroll looked at it amusedly--as he looked a stray apple, left
swinging unseen, fell. As the sound reached his ears a malevolent
smile irradiated his face. Still smiling, he put the window down, let
the blind fall and sought sleep.
That night Myron Holder traversed the road home in the deepest
dejection; forced to endure all day the covert sneers of the other
pickers, with extreme bodily weariness added to her mental burden,
helpless as a fly from which a wanton hand has torn the wings, she
felt, as she trod her solitary way home, utterly despairing.
Ere she was fairly within the doors her grandmother's taunting words
met her. Roused from her long apathy of mute endurance, she tore her
sunbonnet from her head and flashed one dreadful look of rage and
defiance at the old woman--such a look as made Mrs. Holder' stagger
back, holding up her hand as if to shield herself from a blow.
Terrified at the turmoil in her own breast, Myron turned and fled into
her room. She saw the boy's little form upon the blue and white
checked counterpane of her bed, she rushed up to the couch, her hands
were clenched, her heart seemed throbbing in her throat. Dreadful
thoughts circled about her, wild and diverse, but all hung upon the one
axis of pain. Half in delirium, she bent over the child. It looked up
at her and smiled, and stirred feebly, but yet as if its impulses made
towards her. With a cry she caught it to her bosom.
There was one creature that yet smiled upon her. Thereafter, from day
to day, throughout the long winter, her adoration of her child waxed
stronger and stronger.
Every instant she could spare from her toiling she held it in her arms.
On Sunday, when good Jamestown people did no extra work, Myron Holder
had her only pleasure. For then she shut herself into her room with
the child, whispering to it, caressing it, soothing it when awake, and
during its long sleep holding it with loving avarice in her arms, too
greedy of the cherished weight to relinquish it to the couch.
Her grandmother managed even from this tenderness to distill some
bitter drops to add to Myron's cup. She dwelt long and eloquently upon
the wrong Myron had done the child. Slowly the winter passed, and Mrs.
Deans once more hired Myron Holder to come to the farm daily. The
child was left with old Mrs. Holder, while Myron earned a subsistence
for all three.
What Myron Holder endured daily no words can tell. By what written
sign may we symbolize the agony of a heart, bruised and pierced and
crushed day after day? By what language express the torture of a pure
soul, stifled in a chrysalis of shame?
Some souls may be purified by fire, doubtless, as the old Greeks
cleansed their asbestos fabrics; but we should be wary how we thrust
our fellows into the furnace, for no base tissue will stand the fire,
and a soul, to emerge unsmirched and undestroyed, must be of strong
fibre indeed.