Chapter III: Part I (3)

"What I say. Ugly old maid at twenty-nine. My life will go on like this forever and ever."

Mr. Farley was ashamed with Alice because she told the truth about herself. It hurt him to face her ugliness and not be allowed to lie to her.

"That's morbid talk," he said, walking more slowly and rubbing his forehead again.

"Bosh! I'm not morbid. My life ends where it began--that's all. You're the one who makes me sick. Why don't you kick out of this? Why don't you find somebody with some self-respect who means something to you, and go off and be happy? Some people may admire you for all this giving up your soul and allowing it to be spit on, but I don't." Her heart was hard against him. It relieved her to push her father from her out into life. It helped her to make him live in her stead.

Large round raindrops pressed their foreheads softly like rounded lips. The rain falling through the chill air was warm.

"I hardly think it has been any sacrifice of my self-respect for me to do my duty toward your mother," he answered resentfully.

They walked on quickly, a little apart. Alice was silent with irritation. She tried to fill her soul with the calm of disgust but she was feverish against his inertia. Mr. Farley felt himself misunderstood.

* * * * *

Alice had been reading in bed. It was late at night. The room was very still. She heard Mrs. Farley's tired step on the back stair coming up from the kitchen.

"Mamma!" Alice called in a sharp, subdued voice.

Mrs. Farley ambled slowly forward and leaned against the portal. She squinted at Alice wearily. "Well?"

"Come in."

"I want to go to bed early. I've had so many things to do." She entered the room uncertainly and sat on the edge of a chair. Her tired hands twitched a little in her slack lap. Her hair was untidy. Sweat glistened on her gray upper lip above her pale brown mouth. When she turned her head Alice saw the thick white down on her cheek. Her glasses were on her nose and behind them her blank eyes regarded her daughter stealthily. "You don't seem to be well, Alice. I've noticed how fidgety you've been getting in this heat."

"I wish it were only the heat." Alice sat up and hugged her knees with her big bare arms. Her nightgown was loose. It showed her heavy neck and the swell of her large breast. Her hair had slipped down and hung in moist dull locks about her hard intent face. "Do you think this operation Winnie has to go through with is serious?"

Mrs. Farley rocked herself a little. Her heel tapped the carpet restlessly. "I don't know. How can you tell?"

"At any rate her parents can afford to give her the best care."

"Yes, but that's the worst of it! The worst of it. Laurence can't bear to have her take things from them." Mrs. Farley spoke in a worn flat voice and rocked herself again.

"How absurd!"

"Oh, he'll have to let them help. There's nothing else to do."

"I suppose that's why Winnie's always in hysterics lately?"

"Is she?"

"My God, Mamma! Take a little interest in something."

Tears of protest rose in Mrs. Farley's eyes. Her mouth shook. She made an effort to rise, then sank back. "No, I take no interest in anything but work," she said bitterly. "Keeping house for you and your father----"

"Why do you do it, then? My God, you could have stopped ten years ago." Seeing her mother's eyes fill with tears, Alice's own dry eyes felt a sudden coolness. "Whom do you do it for? Laurence and I are old enough to look out for ourselves!"

Mrs. Farley's shoulders drooped and shivered. She wagged her head on her lean neck in helpless protest and reproach. Her body rocked. "I suppose your father don't need me," she said scornfully, crudely wiping the sweat from her face with her hand. She looked like a blind woman, hearing Alice from a long way off.

"Of course he doesn't need you! You ought to have found that out the time he tried to get a divorce from you!" Alice, mysteriously urged to cruelty, bore down upon her mother. Alice's eyes glittered inscrutably.

Mrs. Farley could not bear them. She stood at last, tottering a little. Her breath came quickly and raspingly. "Hush, I tell you! Hush! You've brought this up before. There's something cruel in you makes you want to go over and over things that are done with!"

"I suppose you think I'm an interfering old maid?"

"I don't know what you are."

"And you don't want to know." Alice sounded amused. It was an unpleasant sound.

Mrs. Farley, gazing very deliberately at the carpet, blew her nose. "I've never discussed my relation to your father with his children and I'm not going to now. I've sacrificed myself for what I thought best and it's nobody's business but my own."

"Sacrificed!" echoed Alice contemptuously.

"I won't listen to you and that's all there is to it. I never expected gratitude so I'm not disappointed." Mrs. Farley, not looking back, dragged into the hall.

Alice lay still an instant, her expression one of relentless retrospect. Her eyes were enigmatic but her mouth was twisted with disgust and her nostrils were wide and tense. She reached above her head and turned out the light.

The curtain flapped. Staccato fingers of rain tapped on the pane.

In the room it was dark. The narrow dark. The walls of the room drew near. She felt herself pressed between them.

Alice tossed from side to side. When she lay quiet finally the darkness receded from her, touched her lids softly in passing.

Death! Oh, my God, I want life!

She sat up in bed holding her heavy breasts. Father! A great body unmotivated. Alice's hot will sought for a world to impregnate. Wish-washy mother who had given birth meaninglessly.

Horace Ridge. She grew cool with despair--desireless.

The hot sheets turned cool. Far away the beat of rain on the window. Under the lifted sash the rain-wet wind swept through the room, frozen pain, threads of frozen wonder embroidering the hot dark. Wet wind beat the soggy awnings against the glass. A dank smell came in.

* * * * *

It was a cold August morning. The pale sky was filled with a dim still light. In the dining-room the yellow shades, half lowered, strained the gloomy radiance through them and made it a heavy orange. The tablecloth, splattered with coffee stains like old blood, was overcast with trembling reflections of yellow. The morning meal was over. The empty plates were scattered about smeared with hardened egg. The half of a muffin was mashed on the dingy carpet.

Mr. Farley, a little away from the table, sat reading his paper. Mrs. Farley was collecting the débris of breakfast. Her feeble hands moved among the dishes with shaken determination.

"Was your egg fried enough?" she asked.

"Yes, yes. Very nice." Mr. Farley glanced up and gave his wife a sightless smile. Troubled by what Alice had said to him, he was uncomfortable when Mrs. Farley spoke. He began to fold his paper.

What he was finished with, he pushed out of his mind into darkness. Alice had dragged his memories, and now the past came up to him like a corpse floating. Helen out West. She might come East next month. He hoped not. His son. Place where he sent money. He paid to be allowed to stop thinking about it.

"I'm worried about Winnie. I thought her reconciliation with her parents would improve her frame of mind, but now she seems more nervous and unhappy than ever. The thought of that operation preys on her mind."

"Well--I think she ought to go out into the country for a rest before there's any more talk of operation."

"She thinks Laurence will never be able to forgive her if she goes off with her mother and father."

"Oh, now I think that's too bad. She mustn't think things like that about Laurence." Mr. Farley talked kindly with a sort of clerical remoteness. His lips smiled wearily. His head was bent. He stood up.

Mrs. Farley picked up her pile of dishes; put the dishes between herself and life. The talk with Alice the night before had made Mrs. Farley feel furtive.

"Don't work too hard." Mr. Farley walked out.

Mrs. Farley saw May outside in the hall. "Come here, May. See if you can help me take the plates to the kitchen."

May came in, glad to be called. Her grandmother did not look at her. She picked up a plate with a cup on it. She walked into the kitchen, taking careful steps, the rim of the plate, held with both hands, pressed so tightly against her breast that it cut. The cup jiggled rhythmically, bumping time to May's steps. May's mouth hung open. Her face was bewildered with anxiety. Her breath came fast. With immense relief she reached the sink and, leaning over, slipped the plate into it.

Mrs. Farley had to talk to some one. She wanted to push the trifles forward in her life and crowd back the darkness, filling it with bright hard things, baubles, grocerymen, and dishes; so she asked May, "Has our groceryman gone by here this morning? He promised to call and exchange that condensed milk for evaporated milk."

"No'm," May said.

Mrs. Farley, frowning, her brows twitching, looked at May. Mrs. Farley could not see the little girl without feeling an irritable prompting to command her. "Go wash your face and see if your mother is awake. If she isn't, don't rouse her. Don't let Bobby see you or he'll begin to clamor to get out of bed."

May ran dutifully out.

"Don't clatter up the steps!" Mrs. Farley called sharply.

May walked very softly up the creaking stairs.

Mrs. Farley had the soiled clothes to count. She left the dishes to soak and went into the dining-room again with the big bundle tied in a sheet.

"One, two, three, four." She untied the sheet and began to count. She could not count fast enough. She crammed her mind with numbers. It was like trying to fill a slack sack to cover something hidden at the bottom.

"Shirts. Socks."

Not darned. Must darn today. Alice's stockings. Alice is a hard, selfish girl.

"Tablecloths. Two--two"--murmuring--"what did I say?"

Sacrifice. We must all make sacrifices. The home.

"One, two."

Her heart smoldered damply in its resignation. She squeezed love out of her heart.

Those awful days! Ten years older. People one did not know seemed to seek one accusingly in the street.

Furtively, she recalled the birth of her son, remembrance of a strength that had somehow become weariness. Winnie.

In the dark doorway Winnie appeared in a muslin dress. She was smiling, a little wan. Her hair was dressed high. She looked plaintive yet determined.

"I won't be sick and lie around," she said. "I'm going to help you work."

"You're going to do nothing of the sort! You sit right down here and I'll give you your breakfast at once. Did that child wake you up after all?"

"No. I was awake."

"Well, sit down."

"Oh, Mamma Farley, I want to fix my own egg." Winnie, protesting without conviction, allowed herself to be pressed into a chair.

"Where did you leave Bobby?"

"He's still asleep."

"Well, you had no business to get up."

Winnie gazed up with sweet greedy eyes. "I don't dare be sick any more. Sick people are horrid. Nobody loves them." Winnie's mouth was patient, quivering, below her lifted eyes.

"Yes. Nobody loves them." Mrs. Farley joked laboriously.

"You dear!" Winnie reached out and grasped Mrs. Farley's hand. Winnie's eyes, like brown bees, crept with their glance into the vague combative eyes before them. Thinking of yesterday's talk, Winnie's gaze pierced the rough-dried pongee blouse and the sagging black skirt, and saw the small high-shouldered form beneath. Winnie's looks invited to pain as to a bath of wine enjoyed with closed eyes.

Mrs. Farley's eyes filled with tears. Ugly and old, before Winnie's pity Mrs. Farley was a woman beaten back by a lover. She put forth a smile that was like a weak and gentle hand caressing an enemy. "Bless you, dear. You sit still while I get your breakfast."

She walked out quickly.

* * * * *

When Laurence came home to dinner Winnie, still dressed in her best, was alone in the living-room.

"Hello! You've assumed a new rôle," he said from the doorway.

She could see that finding her there made him uncomfortable. She smiled at him with a kind of happy pain.

He came forward. He was kind and distant. His lips brushed her hair.

She gazed up at him. Her eyes, with crushed back lids and lifted lashes, melted open for his.

"I don't want to be sick, Laurie. I've got to go away with Mother. You won't hate me for going away with her? I do need a change so!"

He stood before her with a kind of mocking fatigue, but she saw that he was sunk deep in himself. She wanted to drag him up.

He shook his head. "I don't know what to say to you lately."

She reached up and laced him with her arms. "Am I so unreasonable? Oh, Laurie, I don't want to die."

He seated himself helplessly on the arm of her chair. "Why think about something so improbable as dying?"

"But I might. I want you to care," she whispered.

"Don't you think I care?" His voice had a grating note as he tried to be light.

"Of course--yes--I guess so. But it's so awful to think about."

"Then don't think of it."

"I can't help it."

Death. The word had not been alive to her until this moment. Suddenly she heard it about her, whispering like wings. She floated beyond Laurence, beyond the room.

With a quick intake of breath she shut out terror grown too delicious.

"Then you will let me go away with Mother? You won't stop loving me, Laurie?"

"I'll shake you for talking nonsense," he said, getting up.

She hated him for escaping her, but her mind was made up and the next day when her mother called the morning of departure was set.

* * * * *

Settling her pince-nez on her flat nose before her fixed and despairing eyes, Mrs. Price pressed Winnie's face to her flat black bosom. "I'm so glad, dear. It was so foolish of my little girl to hold out against having her parents do anything for her. Your father is so good, Winnie. There is nothing I can ask for you that he isn't willing to give. You mustn't deprive him of that pleasure."

Winnie thought of Laurie and was stiff in her mother's embrace, yet at that moment could not have said which of them was most irritating.

Mrs. Price always avoided Laurence's name.

When Mrs. Price had gone Winnie lay in her room on the couch, excited and oppressed. She said death to herself, and the word echoed inside her like a cry down a long hall. Then the echo was lost in the deeps of darkness. But it continued to quiver below the surface of her life.

Winnie thought of being sick. She was harsh with a knowledge of herself. She would not be sick. Closing her eyes she imagined her mouth. With a kind of horror of its own act, it pressed Laurence's. She woke up.

The noonday sun outside was pale with rain. Winnie heard footsteps in the still noon street. Death. The dancing word fluttered ahead of the hurrying feet.

Winnie moved fretfully on the couch. She saw Death as the face of an insistent stranger thrust into her own. Stupid thing which she did not know. She pushed it aside feebly, feeling for what had meaning to her--Laurence, Bobby, Mrs. Price.

All at once she realized that Laurence had come home for something and was in the room. He rummaged at his desk. He was subdued in his movements, trying not to rouse her. She watched him between half-closed lids. He was familiar to her. The very crooked set of his thick neck in his broad shoulders was food to her. Hungrily she opened her eyes wider and lifted herself to her elbow.

"What's the matter, Laurie?" Her whisper, sharp and sweet, pierced the somber stillness of the room where the shades had been drawn for her to rest.

"Hello! I came to get a note book. Did I wake you?" He had started at the sound of his name, but as he faced her he held himself contained in his sharp cold smile.

"I don't care. I've been having horrid dreams, Laurie."

"That's a silly thing to do."

"Don't make fun of me. Come sit by me a minute."

"I haven't much time, dear." He came and sat on the edge of the couch. "Don't you want the shades up? It's so gloomy."

"I want you first. See how cold my hands are!"

She gave him her hands. He took them as though he did not know what to do with them. His eyes were still full of the brightness of the street and he could not see her plainly.

"I want you to love me. Oh, Laurie, you do love me!" She groped up his arms, his cheek, until she had found his mouth. She covered it up with her hand. She did not want it to speak against her. When he tried to talk she pulled him down until his eyes pressed her breast. She drew him deeper into the warm covers on the tumbled couch. She was cold. Her hands said that he must warm her. Memories of pain were silver veins in her body. Twisting herself on the couch to bring him nearer, she wrenched her arm, sharp pang of happiness.

"Love me!" she entreated. Her mouth clung against his. She could feel the force of his quickening heart beats as though they were her own. The muscles in his arm twitched under the rough-napped cloth of the sleeve which brushed her cheek. Her nostrils dilated against his arm. The smell of his body was bitter. She wanted to drink in the vividness of his strong live flesh that resisted her.

Around the dimmed squares of the yellow shades, light, entering, made shining borders. Noises drifted in the light under the bright edges of the yellow shades. Hammering from the house on the corner reverberated through the room.

"Winnie! I can't--you mustn't. You're not well enough. You mustn't excite yourself like this!"

She felt him passive in his resistance. Reluctantly her arms slipped away. Her resentful eyes shone at him from the gloom with a small and pointed light.

He leaned away from her, patting her hair as he came gradually to his feet. He did not want to see her because she made him feel guilty toward himself. Then he was obliged to look. When he smiled at her he kept her outside his eyes. He seemed relieved in spite of himself.

"Poor little sick girl," he said as to a child. "I'm glad you're going away with your mother. We'll give you a nice rest and have you all fixed up."

"You don't love me!" she said, looking at him stormily.

"Please, Winnie. Things are hard enough." His face was drawn with the effort of his continued smile.

"You don't." She turned over and closed her eyes.

"Don't be absurd." He joked uncomfortably.

But she would not look at him.

He walked out on tiptoe as though he thought her asleep.

When she knew he was gone she began to cry, and, keeping her eyes closed, moved her head from side to side and struck into the pillows with her fist.

* * * * *

Laurence did not go home to dinner, but remained working at the laboratory until after midnight. As he walked home the city streets, washed thinly with light, were yet thronged. His mind was sharply intent on itself. It was like the keel of a ship, parting the swarming life before it.

But as he drew nearer the place where Winnie was his heart strained. He felt suffocated. There were women standing in doorways. Their shadows wove the darkness together and drew it tight about his heart. He hated his work but the doing of it gave him relief, for it could not enter him.

The glow from a street lamp fell on his own house--purple-red walls that held Winnie. The big gilt figures on the transom above the door glistened on the glass that gave back a blank reflection of the light. He put in his latch key. The door, swinging away from him, seemed drawn inward with the pull of the darkness.

It shut ponderously behind him. He hesitated a moment, resisting some unknown inevitability. It was very still in the dark.

Only the stairs were half revealed by the pallor of the light that came in high up from the street.

He walked up softly and opened the bedroom door. He could hear a breath like the respiration of shadow. He knew it was Bobby.

Then somehow he realized that Winnie was awake and holding herself apart from the dark.

He did not speak. She did not speak. He sat down and began to take off his shoes.

As he laid the shoes away from him he was aware of her awareness as though she were seeing him stoop forward in the dark. He had a sense of his own motion as a pale line etched across a thick surface. When he unbuckled his belt and began to draw his trousers over his feet he felt the sharp sweep of his moving arms tearing the quiescence of the room.

He stood up naked. His cold toes gripped the hot nap of the roughened carpet. He pulled on his pajamas and the white cloth, as it was drawn up his legs, was cool white fire, that burnt upward from his bare feet.

The room seemed a final blackness into which the dark of the night outside had flowed and gathered as in a pool. Still feeling himself burning white in the cool cloth, Laurence walked to the side of the bed and looked down to see if Winnie were asleep.

Very faintly he saw the rigid line of her body, but through her nightdress he perceived her tense, like a protest. He could not see her eyes but he shivered with the feeling that they were very wide open and sightless. The darkness was against her eyes, holding her rigid upon the white sheet in the dark bed.

"Laurie!"

"I thought you were asleep." He did not know why he lied.

She did not answer at once and he stood waiting. "Laurie!"

He felt suddenly feverish in his cold clothes.

She reached out and touched him. The feel of her hand flowed along his hand and up the veins of his arm. He felt as though her hand had been laid upon his heart. His heart beat quickly. He denied his heart. He was passive. He stood apart from himself. He was unrelated to Winnie, sick and tense in the bed.

"Laurie!" she whispered again. She drew him down beside her.

"You are sick, Winnie," he said. Sure of himself, he did not resist her.

She reached up, groping to cover his mouth. It made her angry when he told her she was sick. She did not want him to build up words between them. She tried to draw him into herself, into the formlessness of contact.

"Oh, I can't sleep, Laurie! I want you to love me."

"I do love you, Winnie. If I seem not to love you it is because you are sick."

"I'm not sick! I won't be sick. You don't love me!"

"I do!"

"Please love me! I'll die if you don't love me, Laurie!"

He resisted her.

She drew his hand to her and placed it like a cup over the swell of her breast.

He trembled. "Winnie, my darling, we mustn't----"

"Laurie, I'll go mad!"

"Why, Winnie? I love you, Winnie."

But he did not love her. She seemed to him like a sickness. They were both sick with her.

"Kiss me again."

He kissed her. His palm tingled with the strangeness of her breast.

"I can't let you go 'way from me, Laurie!"

"I don't want to."

She held him. Suddenly she was no longer strange. His hand read the strangeness of her with the relief of familiarity. She burned him with wonder.

Winnie felt him yield and was glad, but her triumph congealed in agony. She fell away from him. She was cold. She was still. The throbbing of her body came to her like an echo which she could scarcely hear. She had forgotten the meaning of it. Who was this man? She was afraid.

She waited for him to leave her.

* * * * *

Laurence was tired with the feeling of Winnie that flowed through his body. She was in his veins degrading him with possession.

If she should have a child. He would not think of it. He walked over to the couch and climbed upon it. He would not think. Driving his thoughts from him, as he lay down, he felt the flap of the window shade and the respiration of Bobby rattling in his empty mind.

He tossed. His body was hot. The sheet he pulled over him made him shiver. Then he grew cold and longed for the heat to cover him up. He felt naked. He wanted to lie drowned in heat, miles thick in darkness.

* * * * *

Winnie awoke. It was morning. The room was cool and bright. Sunshine made the curtains glow. Patches of light shuddered delicately here and there on the carpet. A spear of sunshine shattered itself on the looking-glass.

Laurence slept on the couch with one arm tossed up and his head thrown back. His mouth was open. His face in sleep seemed stupid with pain. Bobby slept, too, stirring and murmuring a little. Winnie found something oppressive in the sight of people yet asleep like this in the full blaze of the sun.

Winnie's mind was clear and calm with the ease that came of sleep, but in the center of her being there was a dark spot of indecipherable vividness.

Last night. A dark spot of terror. Laurence had been frightened by what they had done. She wanted him to be frightened.

Death. If she had a child she would suffer--not he. White and holy, she felt herself a beautiful stillness in the turmoil of Laurence's cowardice.

She could not part with this fear. If she had a child Death was her hand from which he could not escape.

* * * * *

Midnight. The street lamps shone into the bedroom, making bright shadows of the drawn shades. The bureau, the bed, bits of furniture here and there, darker than the darkness, reflected the light heavily.

Laurence stood outside the door in the hall. He was trembling, afraid of his own room. He had stayed away all day because he could not see Winnie, because he hoped that when he reached home she would be asleep.

It was quiet. He opened the door and stepped inside. The sudden draught lifted the shades ponderously and let them drop again.

Fresh, clean wind from the quiet midnight street surged into the room. Light floated in under the lifted shades. It seemed as if the wind, cold and shining, were washing away the darkness.

Winnie was awake again. Laurence stood still.

He waited a long time. He felt shaken. If I take her again she will die.

He did not believe it. He went toward her with a nausea of relief. "Die" was the word of a song. It was the strange music of passion that said die.

He waited by the bed. He wanted her to tell him to go away. He could feel her still and looking at him.

When he knelt by the bed and reached his arms around her he wanted her to evade him.

"Winnie?" She trembled when he touched her. He wanted her to speak. But she was quiet.

She let him kiss her mouth.

Death. His understanding could not hold the vagueness of the strange escaping word. He felt her thinning from his grasp. His veins swelled with death.

Then he became the death-giver, glad, in spite of himself, of the drunkenness of moving with the unseen. Through the banality of sex which oppressed him, there pushed the will of an exalted and passionate horror.

He took her. They were dead.

* * * * *

Winnie lay face downward and sobbed. There was no triumph in her now. She felt herself as if already large with child, heavy and helpless. Through the darkness of her closed lids she could see, as if before her, Laurence's coarse and handsome head, his eyes turned toward her with their strained gaze, and the odd set of his neck that kept his face always a little to one side. She knew now how much she hated him.

* * * * *

Laurence, walking along the deserted streets, was relieved to find the long vistas ending in darkness. The night rose high and expressionless before him. Beyond the dim lights, the violet-blue horizon was a clear quiet stretch like a lake of glass covered with flowering stars.

His pain was choked in him, suffocated by the quiet.

His mind was sick yet with Winnie's sickness, but the pain of her no longer belonged to him. He wondered if she would have a child, if he had killed her. But the agony of his conjecture related to something already finished. She had made him love her against them both. He did not want love like that. It could never be otherwise. They were separated from each other by their own bodies.