Time Is Noon

IV

SHE LIFTED THE LATCH very softly, the cottage was dark, a dark small solid shape in the faintly lighter surrounding darkness. Mrs. Mark must be asleep. But she was not. Her voice came cutting small and thin out of the darkness.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s only I — Joan — back again.”

“What are you back for at this time of night?”

She heard Mrs. Mark fumbling for matches, and there was a scratch and a flaring light. In it Mrs. Mark’s wizened face peered out, a jumble of lines.

“My soul, Joan, what have you got there?”

She stood holding Paul, her bundle on her arm. “I’ve left my — the house — the Pounders’ house. I can’t go back. If I can just stay the night with you—”

Mrs. Mark was lighting the candle beside her bed. “My soul and body,” she was muttering, “my soul and body! There’s no peace.”

“He’s a quiet child,” said Joan quickly.

“I don’t mean him,” said Mrs. Mark. “Come on in. There are sheets in the bureau drawer and quilts in that old box. I don’t know where you can sleep.”

“I’ll sleep in the other room, on that settee — I’ll manage.”

She was desperately tired. Paul was so heavy, always inert in her arms. She laid him down on the foot of the bed. Mrs. Mark peered at him.

“He’s a big child to carry. What did he do — go to sleep?”

She had better speak at once, tell it definitely and clearly. “He’ll never be right — he’s born wrong.”

“Oh, my soul,” Mrs. Mark whispered. “Give him to me.”

Joan lifted Paul and laid him across the dead legs. Mrs. Mark held him in her sticks of arms and stared at him with her small inscrutable eyes, muttering over and over, “Oh, my soul — my soul—” Her face was gathered into a knot of pity.

Joan sat down on the bed and suddenly the old sobbing began to rise in her, the old dry aching sobbing. But she held it in her throat, choking, dry. No use crying. There was really no use crying. She set her teeth. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she said. “I can just manage if you don’t feel sorry for me.”

“I’m not being sorry for you,” Mrs. Mark answered. “What’s the good? Well, get along and fix your bed. It’s late. There ought to be milk and bread in the kitchen. I heard the delivery man leaving them tonight.”

She lay back and Joan took Paul from her and undressed him for the night. She made the bed upon the couch in the small sitting room and laid him there. Then she went back to Mrs. Mark and took her scrawny yellow hand. “Shall I tell why I left that house? I feel as if I ought to tell you, coming here like this.”

Mrs. Mark’s hand was like a clutch of wires, thin, stiff, dry.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “I gave up wanting to know why long ago. What happens happens. You came away because you had to, I reckon.”

“Yes, I had to,” she said.

“It’s why we all mostly do the way we do. Get along now. I’m ready for my sleep.”

She blew out the candle and Joan felt her way out of the dark room.

When she woke in the morning it was light. She woke in light and the small stone house was full of a warm peace. She got up and bathed and dressed Paul freshly and fed him and then when she was dressed she opened the door quietly. But Mrs. Mark was not asleep. She had brushed her hair and tidied her sheets about her and put on her bedsack and was lying with her eyes fixed upon the door.

“I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed it,” she said in her high small voice. “These days I take to dreaming. There are times when I feel my old man in the house and my girl that died when she was six.”

“I’m no dream,” said Joan, smiling. No, this morning was real. The sun was streaming in the windows. She felt strong and actual, able for whatever was ahead. “Now your breakfast. I shall bring you hot water and when you’ve washed you shall have a tray. I’ll not ask you what you want — I’ll just bring it.”

She straightened the bed and put the table to rights. Under the bed Mrs. Mark had had drawers put so that she could reach them, where she kept her things, the clothes she needed, her comb and brush.

“Not going to give me my choice, eh?” she grunted, her small sad eyes amiable.

“No,” said Joan cheerfully. “You’re always bossing other folks, you know.”

She busied herself, fetching the water, turning her back while Mrs. Mark struggled. She heard her panting and dragging at her legs, and she could not bear it. “Why don’t you let me help?” she said. “I took care of my mother so long.”

“I guess I can still take care of my own two legs,” said Mrs. Mark sharply.

“I’ll get your tray ready then.”

In the small kitchen she fed wood into the stove. She tried to realize that she was a woman who had left her husband the day before. Was this how such a woman felt? But she felt as one feels who has stepped out of stumbling through a darkly shadowed wood into a meadow in the morning light. The very sunshine was different. She had so often risen in the cold shadows of that house and gone downstairs into the cold silence. Bart was always there to overpower her spirit. She knew him for what he was, and daily she had determined to be as she would. Yet because he was never changed he could overpower her every mood. She could never be freely happy when he was near. If she was for a moment happy, he was there like the knowledge of Paul — a dark weight.

But Paul was still her baby. He did not ask anything of her, only to be fed and cared for. Her heart flew out of her in tenderness to Paul, who never asked anything of her, and she dropped the stove lid and ran to fetch him. She propped him with quilts in a corner of the kitchen and made laughter over him, talking to him. This morning she could not be sad. He was her little boy anyhow. The fire was crackling in the wood stove and the bottom of the kettle began to sizzle. The room was full of sunshine.

If I lived here I’d hang yellow curtains, she thought in the midst of everything. She loved this small, sparsely furnished house. Perhaps Mrs. Mark would let her stay. She could make a garden and buy a cow and then if she could make just a little money … Her mind, freed, was dancing about the house like a beam of light. She could do anything. She could find a way. She would write to Francis. No — she paused and stood still, the bread knife in her hand, pressing into the loaf — she thought of Roger Bair. Even after all these years why shouldn’t she write to Roger Bair and ask him how a woman with little children could make some money? She stopped again above the eggs she was frying, her spoon poised. She hadn’t said a word to Mrs. Mark about Rose — about Rose’s children. She was leaping ahead as she always did without thinking how she was going to do the thing she wanted, seeing it done. She was always seeing things done. She lifted the eggs and put them on a plate with the bacon and ran into the wasted garden and found a spray of small scarlet leaves from the top of a woodbine vine and laid it upon the white cloth of the tray and poured the coffee. It was all ready. “There!” she said, setting it before Mrs. Mark with delight.

Mrs. Mark looked up at her. She had made herself very neat in a clean high-necked nightgown. Her wrinkled face was like a triangle of cracked old ivory, her small black eyes peering deeply out. She looked at the tray and wet her withered bluish lips.

“My soul,” she exclaimed, “I don’t eat two eggs. You’d think I could walk ten miles! I’m not going to feed up legs like this that won’t even heave theirselves to the other side of the bed.”

But she began to eat.

“Good?” said Joan, watching her, smiling.

“The toast’s a mite brown,” said Mrs. Mark. She drank a little coffee. “You’re not going away?”

“No,” said Joan, “not if you will let me stay.”

“Coffee’s a mite strong,” said Mrs. Mark, gulping it. “It makes my eyes water — I’m not used to it.” Deep in her eyes were scanty tears.

“I’ll get some hot water to thin it,” said Joan gently.

It was not possible in this quiet free house to keep from telling Mrs. Mark everything.

She told her about Rose. “Rose is dead — my little sister.”

“Don’t tell me!” said Mrs. Mark. “That little thing! She pestered me so trying to be good to me, reading to me when I wanted to go to sleep — Oh, dear,” she sighed, “and why should she die, a little kind-meaning young thing, and me like this?”

“She died far away in a city near Tibet — a Chinese city. I’m to have her two children. It’s all I can do for her.”

“What for?” said Mrs. Mark. “You’re being put upon. That Winters woman’s got a great big house and Winters has the store, and you have nothing.”

“I want Rose’s children,” said Joan.

“How are you going to take care of them?”

“I’ll find some way.”

Mrs. Mark lay silent for a moment regarding her, her small black eyes winking lidlessly like a bird’s eyes. She grunted at last. “Well, you’re big enough to do what you want. I reckon nobody will gainsay a great thing like you — scared of you — I am myself. I didn’t want those two eggs. But I was scared not to eat them before you.”

She laughed a dry wheeze of laughter, and Joan let out her own great laugh and was startled by it. She had not laughed recklessly like that since before her mother died. Then she was shy, having laughed so loudly. They were talking about Rose and it was strange laughter. But there was some odd happiness is her, mixed with sorrow. Paul was standing by her knees, his head leaning against her. He raised his head a little and she remembered him.

“I believe he’s really trying to walk alone,” she said eagerly. They watched him, and laughter died between them. She said sadly, “But I don’t believe he even knows me — see — Paul, Paul — Paul?”

But Mrs. Mark continued to stare steadily at Paul, watching him. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You know him, don’t you? The value of him you’ve got — giving birth, feeding, tending. I think of that a lot with my dead girl. I birthed her and tended her. It was a life, though she died. Paul’s life is a life, too, one kind of a life.”

“Bart’s mother wanted me to put him away somewhere,” Joan said. Little by little all the bitterness was seeping out of her into words now.

“You can’t ever put him away anywhere,” said Mrs. Mark. “That’s what folks don’t understand. Putting his body away wouldn’t help. You can’t put your child away from your heart. Besides, you don’t want to miss everything of him just because you haven’t all of him. He’s got his own ways. He’s Paul. Don’t measure him by other people. Just take him as he is. If he talks, those few words he’ll say will mean more to you than anybody’s.”

She listened, drinking in the short words. Nobody had ever talked with her about Paul. It was a comfort to talk about him at last. A mother wanted to talk about her child. She had always shrunk from talking before the few she knew. She heard women in a store talking: “Johnnie’s walking now — pulling himself up by anything.” “My Mary Ellen starts school in the fall—” “Polly’s first in her grade this month—” And by such words she was tortured. She held herself away from all mothers of children. Now through the morning she sat holding Paul, talking to Mrs. Mark about him, playing with his fingers, with his golden curls, weeping sometimes.

“Go on and cry,” said Mrs. Mark calmly. “I used to cry. You pass the need, after a while. You can’t keep it up.”

She pointed out to Mrs. Mark the lovely perfection of his body, the shape of his head, the set on his shoulders, the sweetness of his flickering smile.

“I suppose it all makes no difference really,” she said sadly.

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Mark. “It makes a difference to you, doesn’t it? He’s a handsome child, and be thankful he is. You get more fun out of tending him anyway than if he was homely. In the smallest drawer under my bed there’s a little black money box, locked. Here’s the key.” She dragged up a string from her bosom. “I want you to buy a bed. You could have this one almost any day — I’ll be done with it and soon. Still, I don’t want to feel people are waiting for the bed I die in.”

“Oh, no!” cried Joan. “I don’t want you to give me anything.”

“I’m not giving you anything,” said Mrs. Mark irritably. “I’m making it so you can stay and take care of me while I finish dying. Don’t be an interruption. I didn’t pray God to have you come. I wouldn’t demean myself to pray after what’s happened to me. The politest thing I can do about God now is to say there isn’t any under the circumstances. But I’m mortal glad not to die alone.”

“There’s Rose’s children to come,” said Joan.

“Pack them in if that Winters woman won’t have them,” said Mrs. Mark, closing her eyes, “There’s a room finished off in the garret. I was going to fix my girl a room there and Mr. Mark died that winter and she stayed with me. That Winters woman — well, she’s a Christian, isn’t she? Get along, Joan, I’m tired.” She opened her eyes as Joan tiptoed away. “If that Bart Pounder comes around don’t pay any attention to him. Fire and clay don’t mix, and all the stirring in the world won’t mix them. Get along now, for mercy’s sake! I’m worn out.”

In Bart’s house where she had never belonged, everything had been a burden. To be free had seemed impossible, to write to Roger Bair would have been a task beyond her power to do. She lived submerged and overcome. Now by the simple processes of this small house wherein she was free, by the approval of this one old dying woman, by the desperate simplicity of crude sorrow, she thought easily, Why should I not write to Roger Bair? While Mrs. Mark slept and when she had made the house neat, she took Paul out into a sunny corner behind the house and set him in a nest of dried leaves and stretched herself beside him and planned the letter. It need only be very short. She could speak directly to him if ever they came to speech. She could write directly. She would begin, “Dear Roger Bair. …”

She lay in the warm sun, dreaming. It was so easy to think of him here. When she had thought of him in that house it was a hopeless thought. So might a mole think of a bird, so might a bird think of a star. When she remembered him, the thought of him fell back, like an arrow blunted and stopped too soon of its aim. But today, in the free loneliness, in this joyful loneliness, she saw him very clearly. Of course he was the one who could help her. She felt him instant and warm to help her. They had known each other that day without waiting. She would write and he would answer.

The day was full of the certainty. She lay with her face turned to the sun, her eyes closed that she might see inward the more clearly and remember him. Soon she would get up and write the letter. She put off the writing, planning. It would be sweet to take the pen and make the words, “Dear Roger Bair.” Then she would write, “You have helped Francis so much, and now I need help too. I remember you.” Or she might write … She paused, dreaming, and without knowing it, was swept on into warm dreaming sleep.

When she woke it was cold with sundown. A wind had risen out of the nearby wood. Paul was fretting among the leaves, struggling to get up. He certainly tried to get up alone now sometimes. She jumped to her feet and brushed the leaves from her skirt and out of her hair and picked him up and ran into the house with him.

“How I slept!” she called to Mrs. Mark in the other room while she tended him. But Mrs. Mark did not answer. She went to the door and cried merrily, “Still sleeping?” But Mrs. Mark did not answer. She found the matches and lit the candle quickly. The room felt strangely empty. When the candle was lit she saw Mrs. Mark lying in the dusk, her hands neatly folded upon her breast. She was dead.

She laid Paul safely in quilts upon the floor and locking the door upon the two of them, ran through the deepening twilight to find Dr. Crabbe. He was eating his supper of bread and milk and he leaped up when he saw her. But when she cried out her message he sat down again.

“I’ll finish my supper,” he said. “I learned a long time ago not to run if the patient was already dead. Run for the dying — but if it’s too late, finish your supper — that’s sense for the doctor.” He dipped up the last mouthful. “Poor soul,” he said heartily, “I’ve been expecting her to go off suddenly like this any time for months. I’ve been trying to get her to have somebody in, but she always said she hadn’t had much of her own way in life, and she was going to die as she liked. How come you were there, Joan?”

Joan hesitated. Dr. Crabbe had taken her when she was born. She had begun her life naked in his hands. “I’ve left my husband,” she said.

“You have!” said Dr. Crabbe. “You and your upbringing!” He put down his spoon and bellowed, “Nellie!” The housekeeper put her head in the door. “I’m going! Mrs. Mark has died at last.”

“You’ve got rice pudding yet to eat,” cried Nellie belligerently.

“I won’t eat it,” he shouted, struggling into a threadbare brown coat. She disappeared, muttering. “Come on,” he said to Joan. He tramped ahead of her to his small rackety old car and started the engine with a roar. “Left Bart Pounder, eh?” he shouted. She nodded. The engine calmed and the car jumped down the road like a jackrabbit. “I never told you,” he said, “I was married once.”

“No!” she whispered, unbelieving.

“She ran away from me,” he said abruptly, “ran away with a fellow — friend of mine — a fellow I knew in college. He came to visit us — decent chap, too. We’d talked some of being partners. I couldn’t blame her. Smooth-skinned fellow — I’ve always been kind of hairy.”

“She didn’t run away for that,” said Joan.

“How do I know what for? She ran away when we’d been married less than a year. Some women run and some stick it out, I reckon. Your mother stuck it.”

“I couldn’t,” said Joan quickly.

“No. Well,” said Dr. Crabbe, “some women do. It doesn’t matter in the end. Lucille — that was her name — she’s been happy. Every now and then she writes me, wants me to get married again. I say who to, for God’s sake? There isn’t anybody else. Get out that side, Joan. Not that I can do anything, if she’s dead.”

But he went in and washed Mrs. Mark’s dead body carefully while Joan waited outside. He called Joan at last. There was a slip of paper in his hand. “She had this under the pillow — wrote it today, I reckon.”

There were four lines scrawled upon the paper.

Joan Richards, married Pounder, is to have my house and everything in it. In the money box is one hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I write this in full and right mind.

ABBY MARK

“Has she anybody?” asked Joan in a whisper. Mrs. Mark lay stiff and still on the bed.

“Never heard of it,” said Dr. Crabbe, washing his hands.

“It’s not legal,” she argued.

“No, but if anybody shows up and says it isn’t, tell him to come and see me, and I’ll sic Martin Bradley on him. Martin’s beholden to me. I’ve kept him out of trouble for years, and there’s never been anything to have him do back for me.” He dried his hands, and glanced at Mrs. Mark. “Are you scared to stay here till tomorrow with her?” he asked.

Joan looked at Mrs. Mark, neat and composed. “I can’t imagine being afraid of her,” she said.

“No,” said Dr. Crabbe. “She’s been as good as dead for years. Well, I’ll go back and eat my rice pudding.” He seized his dilapidated leather bag and trudged away.

So she had had no time to write the letter to Roger Bair. But in the night she woke, and the thought of it was sweet. It lay ahead of her, like a treat to a child, a pleasure to be fulfilled. Even if he never answered her, she would have written the letter and signed her name, Joan Richards. He need not know her life. She would simply be herself to him, Joan Richards. Behind the closed door Mrs. Mark lay dead, but she was not afraid. She would like to have gone in and thanked Mrs. Mark if she could. “Thank you for giving me a house, a home. You’ve made me safe.” It seemed impossible to bear it if there was no way to thank Mrs. Mark in the power of her gratitude. But Mrs. Mark would have been the last person to endure thanks. She could imagine Mrs. Mark opening her small dead eyes to say, “Get along — don’t bother me. Don’t you see I’m dead?” and instantly closing them again. It was like Mrs. Mark to give her all she had and then die before she could be thanked. She drifted into sleep.

In the morning when Mr. Blum came with his two men she had everything ready. She had picked a bouquet of pale purple wild asters and goldenrod, and placed them by the bed, and she had opened the windows to sun and wind. There was no odor in the room. When she had opened the door she had half expected the remembered smell of death. But Mrs. Mark had not died suddenly in health and fullness. Her body was spare and dry, bone clean, withered without decay. She lay exactly as she was. Mr. Blum put on his gloves and his men set a long box beside the bed.

“Dr. Crabbe’s given full directions,” he said unctuously. “You are the sole mourner, ma’am, I understand?”

“She had no one,” said Joan.

“Very nice, I’m sure,” said Mr. Blum. “I remember your mother so well — beautiful in death, I said of her. I don’t remember the name of the gentleman you married, Miss Richards.”

She did not answer, and he forgot her. “Easy there, now, men, feet first — There she is, comfortable as a baby!”

He fitted the lid down exactly and took Mrs. Mark away.

It was impossible to feel sad. She was ashamed that she could not feel sad. She was not sad even when she stood in the corner of the churchyard beside the grave. About the narrow hole stood a few old people — Mr. Pegler, Mr. and Mrs. Billings, Miss Kinney, Dr. Crabbe and Mrs. Parsons. They stood listening to the new minister’s quick abstracted voice. He had not known Mrs. Mark except as a rude old woman who pretended to be asleep when he went to see her, and now he made haste to bury her.

They stood about him in the bright afternoon, old and wrinkled and shabby. Only Dr. Crabbe looked sturdy, stocky and rough like a thick-trunked tree whose top had been early chopped away and the wound long healed. His curly white hair blew in the breeze as he held his hat in his hands. Miss Kinney stood a little away from them all, a wraith. She talked to herself, her lips moving, smiling. Catching Joan’s eyes she waved her hand gaily across the grave and then remembered where she was and blushed an ashen pink. Her face was more than ever like a small withered flower at the end of a long stalk.

It was over very quickly. Mrs. Parsons sang, her voice rising feeble and shallow in the autumn air. “For all the saints who from their labors rest,” she sang. Joan listened, gazing across the grass to where her mother and father lay. Mrs. Mark would have hated such singing. “Don’t call me a saint, for pity’s sake,” she would have snorted if she could.

Yes, it was soon over. The minister shook hands with them briskly and went away. The old people lingered. They spoke to her. “Well, Joan, we don’t see much of you these days,” and lingering they spoke together a moment. None of them had known Mrs. Mark very well. “She wasn’t a woman you could know,” said Mrs. Parsons gently, “but I am sure she was very good.”

Mr. Pegler pondered. “I didn’t make her a pair of shoes — let me see — not for twelve years, and then they were house shoes — slippers. She came to me that day, I remember, saying she was stiff in the legs. Well, we all have to go, one way or another, and soon it’s all over with us. We’ve had all there is. There’s nothing beyond.”

They fell silent, these old people, looking at a new grave, troubled, frightened. No one contradicted Mr. Pegler, for once. Any day now, any one of them — Miss Kinney was staring down at the coffin, bewildered, as though she had not seen it before. The sexton was beginning to shovel in the earth.

“Why, we are all getting old, aren’t we?” Miss Kinney cried. She looked down upon them, one and another, her small face frightened.

“Come along now,” said Dr. Crabbe, taking her fragile arm in his hand. “I’ll take you home. Your mother will be wanting you.”

“Yes, of course,” said Miss Kinney. “I must go, of course. I can’t leave Mother too long.” She bobbed away beside Dr. Crabbe, a head taller than he, a wisp dropping over his thick rolling body.

Mr. and Mrs. Billings were waiting. They stood together, a little to one side, waiting for her. These two were not afraid. “Everything’s got to die,” Mr. Billings was saying respectfully. He said this often in his butcher shop. He had not sold Mrs. Mark any meat in years. But she was part of the village, so he had come to her funeral.

“Joan, honey,” said Mrs. Billings. “How are you getting on?”

Now everyone was gone except the three of them. And she wanted to tell this plain old pair everything. They stood so honest in the sunshine, their big comfortable bodies, their red honest faces. “I’ve left my husband,” she said. They stared at her. “I just couldn’t go on,” she said quickly.

Mr. Billings nodded. “I know the Pounders,” he said very slowly. “They’re honest folks — though queer. They keep to themselves. I buy a steer or two from them now and then.”

Mrs. Billings patted her hand, sighing hoarsely, “Well, dear—”

“I’m living in Mrs. Mark’s cottage,” Joan said, hurrying on. “She left it to me. I’m to have Rose’s children.”

“That little pretty Rose,” mourned Mrs. Billings. “It’s hard to understand all that’s took place — so much scattering and sorrow these last ten years. Yet it seems only yesterday that your mother went.”

“Yes,” said Joan. They stood in silence a moment. She felt them warmly near her, without condemnation, taking her as she was.

“Well,” said Mr. Billings, clearing his throat, “with all them children you’ll be like the old woman in the shoe. I better send you some meat to make ’em some broth.”

He grinned at her cheerfully and she smiled and tears rushed to her eyes. “You’re two of the best people in the world,” she said.

Mr. Billings laughed. “We’re most common,” he said.

The sexton was shaping the grave carefully, patting down the sod. It was all over and they went away.

But still it was not possible to be sad. Waking next morning, in the little house, it was as though now for the first time she was really beginning to live. Mrs. Mark had given her a place where she could live and had gone quietly away, leaving nothing of herself.

She set the three rooms straight and neat, and put Mrs. Mark’s clothes together. There was very little. Mrs. Mark had lived here without small possessions. She was not willing to be cluttered by many things. In the closet hung two black dresses. They were limp and the folds were faded from long hanging. She had not worn them in years. All the things scarcely filled a bushel basket. Joan packed them neatly and took them into the attic and found a corner under the eaves.

She had not been in the attic before. There was a room finished off in unpainted boards, a room never lived in, clean except for dust. That was David’s room, she decided quickly. This house was now her own! Every room was hers to do with as she liked. There was no feeling of strangeness anywhere in it. It had been given to her and she had taken it. The other house to which she so foolishly had fled for shelter could never have been hers. It was shaped from the beginning by alien life. Though they had all died and left it to her, it would not have been hers and she could not have loved it. But this house sheltered her at once, warmly, closely. She felt as though she had already lived here a long time. She loved the deep walls, the many small windows, the hues of brown and golden stone. There was an old fireplace. Someone had taken the stones of the field, from his own land, and built this house and made a fireplace to warm him and his love. Surely, surely sometime this house had been made in love and lovers had planned it and Mrs. Mark had only kept it for her. And she would live here with all her children, gathering them together beneath this roof.

And warm in all she did, like a southern current through the sea, ran the thought of the letter to Roger Bair. It would be like bringing him, too, under this roof. She put off writing hour by hour — her heart needed its dream. She set the house neat and made the bed fresh, the mattress fresh with sun and wind, and she gathered flowers from the meadows, goldenrod and small starry purple asters and a bunch of scarlet leaves, and when the house was made wholly her own she sat down in the evening of a day of sweet loneliness, when she had seen no other face than Paul’s, to write the letter at last. So how could she be sad?

“Dear Roger Bair—” she wrote. Then she stopped and over her at that instant flowed the meaning of his name. She loved him. All these years she had loved him. Whenever his name had been written in any letter of Francis’, she had seen it above all other words upon the page. But not until now had she been free to know she loved him. Under the shadow of that silent house, love had stifled, alive but not known. Now in this free solitude it came forth, a lovely noble shape, full grown. It had been growing all this time. She sat staring down at the name she had written. To write it had been to open the door and he was there. He had always been there, ever since that morning she had seen him on the flying field. She put aside the pen and sat quietly in her little house, the shades drawn, alone in the lamplight. She could love him fully and freely, quite alone. She could love him and live in her love for him, asking nothing. It was filling her even now, an energy for life. She took up the pen again and began to write swiftly and clearly. I need your help. I am not afraid to ask for it.

When she had asked of him what she wanted she signed her name and sealed the letter and made ready for the night. She had early laid Paul in the bed and he was asleep. She stood in her nightgown, looking down at him as she always did before she put out the light. He lay quietly, his smooth child’s face untroubled, his lips parted and rosy. He was getting tall. He was growing stronger and trying to get to his feet when she put him on the floor. She had watched him, the feeble brain dimly struggling to follow the strong beautiful undirected body, and daily her heart had broken by him. He was all she had and she had often wept to know it. But now looking at him it came to her that he was no longer everything. She had something more at last. Even weeping could not be the same now.

Under the speed of the days went the knowledge of this silver thread weaving between her and Roger Bair. His letter came back to her quickly, immediate, sure. She knew his handwriting, which she had never seen, small, clear, square letters, free of each other, each standing independent in its shape. It was a cool letter, a letter wary of feeling, ready to help her at a distance. He had talked with her brother, he wrote, as to what she was able to do. Her brother had remembered she used to write music, that she and Martin Bradley had worked at music together. He remembered Bradley as an uncommonly gifted fellow in that way. He had called Bradley at his office and got suggestions. Bradley said one could do music writing for a music publishing firm — make orchestrations, set in harmonies melodies others had made — hack stuff in a way, but she could do it at home. Bradley had given him the name of a firm and he had been to see them and they were sending some things for her to try out.

She read the letter. It was long and closely written, but all concerning his errand, all except the last line about Francis—“Your brother is a good flier.”

But at that moment it did not matter about Francis. Francis was not between them. There was something else. She must sweep Martin Bradley away from between them. She made haste to write to him. “I do not want to accept anything from Martin Bradley — nothing at all. Do not mention my name to him. I will accept only from you.”

She wrote to him freely, not caring what he thought. He must know her from the beginning as she was. If she were free, then she was free. She would be nothing but herself. His letter came back again, immediate. “It is I who am doing this for you. I have mentioned your name to no one.”

So their letters came and went, a bright warp and woof beneath her days. Under all that she had to do was this silver weaving back and forth between her and Roger Bair, a strong bright fabric underlying her whole life.

She saw it there, silver as the meshed steel of armor. It spread under her and around her, to save her and to make her strong.

On the fourth of October, John Stuart was to bring Rose’s children home. She was making yellow curtains. She had been restless without them, seeing them inevitable against the smoke-dark plaster walls of the kitchen until, feeling as guilty as though she were robbing a till, she took two dollars of her money and went to Mr. Winters’ store. “I want the brightest yellow stuff you have,” she said to Mr. Winters. He was behind the counter, his pencil over his ear. He had grown very thin and stooped and looked continually dazed. More than ever he forgot where things were.

“Let me see,” he pondered. He ran his fingers down a pile of bright ginghams.

“I see it — there!” she cried. His finger halted and he pulled out a bolt of gold and threw it before her. She watched him greedily as he measured it off, the precious stuff she had no right to buy, not with Fanny coming now to her door every Saturday, complaining, “Frankie’s grown right out of himself now, Miss Joan. He’s got to have a new suit of clothes.” Fanny had accepted with placidity the change in meeting place. “Yes, lots of ladies just can’t stand their men, I reckon. I get that way myself sometimes. Lem’s awful to live with steady. I reckon every man is.” No, she had no right to the yellow stuff, brought for beauty against a dark wall.

“The children come the fourth of October,” said Mr. Winters abruptly, his scissors sliding down the cloth. “Seven o’clock train.”

“I’ve been waiting to hear,” she said. “I’m longing for them.”

“If Mattie had her health,” said Mr. Winters gloomily above the bright stuff, “Rob’s children would be with his father and mother. I always wanted more children. But she didn’t want to go through with it. After our girl died she said she wouldn’t go through with it.”

“I’m all ready for them,” Joan said. “You shall see them often. You can come and see them. I’m living in Mrs. Mark’s little house, you know.”

“Are you, now?” he said. He was folding the stuff and she saw he did not know she was living alone and she did not tell him. Time enough for that when the moment came. Time enough when she must hear Mrs. Winters cry out, “But you’re doing a sinful thing, Joan!” She must have the children first, safe under the roof.

Looking at Mr. Winters’ thin gray face she was sorry for him. The rest of his life he would be living with his old wife in their little square house on the village street, quite alone. She must take the children there often. She was so rich in all her children. “I’m going to bring them up often to see you,” she said.

But he did not smile. He shook his head, sighing. “It oughtn’t ever to have been like this. It doesn’t seem as if we deserve it — God-fearing people,” he muttered.

“No,” she agreed. “Well, anyway, there are the children.”

“I set my heart on Rob from the day he was born,” he said.

She touched his withering hand before she went away. The skin was hard and dry and cold.

She took the stuff back and cut it and hung it in strips of yellow light. Even Paul turned at it. He could really walk alone a little now — if she put him on his feet. He held his head up a moment, staring at the yellow curtains. His eyes slipped away, and came wandering back again to their brightness. It had been right to buy them, after all.

Then she had her own letter from John Stuart. She looked up over the table next morning when she was ironing Paul’s clothes and there between the curtains she saw Bart coming down the path. Her heart stopped. He had found her, then. Of course she knew she would be found. She was frightened, for a moment. He looked huge and strong in his work clothes, standing outside the door. He rattled the latch and lifted it and stood there in the open doorway. She looked at him, her body calm and straight, imprisoning her frightened, flying heart.

“Well, Bart?” she said pleasantly, sturdily. She held hard to the hot iron. A hot iron was a good thing to hold, if she needed it.

“I knew a week ago you were here,” he said sullenly. She ironed busily, meticulous about the small belt.

“I haven’t hidden it,” she said cheerfully.

He fumbled in his pocket. “Here are two letters that came for you.”

“Put them there on the windowsill,” she said. Her heart was quieting now, like a wild bird gaining hope. She need not be afraid of him. He did not know what to say to her, what to do with her. She was stronger than he.

“Aren’t you coming back?” he asked, watching her iron. She began to fold the little garment, but the iron was there, ready, hot.

“No, Bart. I’m never coming back,” she answered.

“We never did anything to you. We were good to you,” he said after a moment.

“I don’t complain, Bart,” she said cheerfully.

He waited, his slow brain searching. “Ma means well,” he said at last. “It’s her way.”

“I know,” she said. She unrolled another garment and worked steadily on.

“I don’t give anything for that — that Snade girl.”

“That’s all right, Bart,” she said quickly. “Don’t talk about her.”

“If you’d come back,” he said heavily, “I’d forget her easily. A fellow doesn’t mean anything. She hung around the barn a lot.”

“Don’t,” she said. “I don’t care.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No.”

He pondered, leaning against the doorway. She ironed, longing fiercely that he would go away. What was this power of shadow which one creature could cast over another, merely by his dull being? But she was not afraid anymore. She would not need the iron. She could set it away.

“You never did care about me, Jo. I’ll never get over liking you — loving you.”

“I did wrong to marry you, Bart. I see that. You would have been really happy with someone else — maybe with her. I’m going to set it right.”

“I’d rather you came back. I liked it the way it was before the kid came. You acted happy enough then.”

She did not answer. She was putting things away, setting the room straight. She fetched some carrots to cook for Paul’s dinner and began washing them. She watched their color come clean and clear out of the water — a pure deep color. It was beautiful the way color came out everywhere, out of the mud of the earth. The carrot was a shape of color between her fingers, mysteriously made … He was standing there endlessly and she could not forget him. She was mad to have him gone and the doorway empty to the sky. She fixed her mind steadily upon the carrot, slicing it firmly.

“You’re not coming back, sure enough, Jo?” he asked helplessly.

Now she knew, quite simply, that if she had again to lie beside his great body she would kill herself. Pain and hurt, right or wrong, there was something still beyond these. Her body could not again be subject when her mind, her heart, revolted. She would kill her body and set herself free. She began to tremble.

“No, never, Bart.”

“Gee,” he muttered, “Ma and Pop’ll never get over it — never get over the talk.”

“I can’t live to save them from that, Bart.”

“You sure?”

“So sure I’m going to ask you to bring the trunk with my things.”

He spat in the dust by the door and wiped his enormous hand across his mouth. He was in deep distress, she could see. She was sorry for him. He was suffering in his way. But he had not mentioned Paul’s name. He began to talk again sullenly, scuffing the thick toe of his shoe against the threshold. “You act so high and mighty. But Ma says the kid’s your fault. Your old man was crazy — everybody knew he was—”

“Go home, Bart,” she said, steadily. “I don’t want you here. I’m happier when you are not here.”

He looked at her bewildered. But now she was trembling very much. Her head whirled with giddiness.

“If you don’t go away at once,” she said clearly, “I shall take Paul and go where you can never find us. I’ll do that even if it is at the bottom of some river.”

“Gee,” he muttered. “I’m not hurting you—”

“Go — go—” she said tensely, her eyes forcing him, her will pushing him. He stared at her, and went slowly down the path. Not until the gate slammed, not until the air was cleared where he had stood, could she quiet her trembling. Let her forget — let her think of lovely shapes and colors, growing out of the earth. Let her never remember Bart and those years — or anything he had ever said.

Through the open door she could see the long lovely flowing together of the undulating hills. The sky was cloudless and the breeze was stealing in about her, pure and mild as the water in a sunny stream, as cleansing.

After a while, when her body was still, she opened the letters. One was from John Stuart, telling her when he was coming. “Dear Madam,” he began formally. David was well. But the baby, Mary, had been ill. The artificial food had not nourished her. He had done the best he could, but she cried incessantly. Yet when she ate, she was ill. It was difficult to understand God’s purpose.

The other was from Francis, a few scratched lines. His handwriting was exactly what it had been when he was a boy in school, loose, nervous, irregular.

It’s too bad about Rose and Rob. But I can hardly remember Rose, somehow. She was the only one of us that did what she wanted, but she got killed for it. That’s life for you. I’m going on regular flying as soon as there’s a vacancy.

She read the letters through and tore them up. Bart had touched them, he had taken them from his pocket. She rose and washed her hands. Then she went upstairs and planned. Here there must be a bed for David. She must buy a table and a chair. But she could take a little of her own money now. Yesterday the score had come from the music publishers and it was not too difficult to do. She dared to buy a bed for David and a crib for Mary to lie beside her.

The future was warm about her again. Bart was walking down the road, away from her, his figure smaller each moment that she planned. She was making her life, shaping it about the children. One had to take life and make it, gather it from here and there — yellow curtains, carrots, a bed for a little boy, milk for a sick baby, sheets of music to write, her unfinished child, a house — out of such and everything she would make her life. And underneath was the strong sustaining web of love unspoken. What if it were unspoken and unreturned? A phrase came flying out of her childhood, her father, from the pulpit, reading, “And underneath us are the everlasting arms.” She had caught the phrase then because it was lovely, listening to him idly in the careless fullness of her childhood. But now when all childhood was gone she could take the beautiful words, like an empty cup, and fill them to the brim with her own meaning, her own secret meaning.

In the dusky October evening they stood waiting at the train, she and Mr. and Mrs. Winters. She had forced herself to learn to leave Paul alone sometimes. It was not very far, not really. The house stood just beyond the village, and if she put him on a quilt upon the floor and locked the door, he must be safe. But even so, she left her heart behind to guard him, and now she stood impatiently.

They were silent and somehow forlorn in the dusk, the three of them. “If I’d been listened to at first,” Mrs. Winters said now and then, but Mr. Winters said nothing at all and Joan could not talk for thinking of Rose. Rose had gone away so sure of God’s will. But she was not saved alive. The train came whistling and pounding in, and paused a second at the wayside station. It was a great through train that did not commonly stop at a small place unless someone asked it, and that was seldom. But it stopped to bring home from very far this tall stooping gray-haired young man, holding in his arms a wailing baby. Beside him, clinging to his coat, was a small thin boy in a brown cloth suit, looking in steadfast silence at all he saw. They stood far down upon the platform, their few worn bags about them. Joan saw them first and went running.

“Oh, give me the precious little thing!”

She took her from him, this fragment from Rose, this child her sister Rose had given her. It was unutterable comfort to hold her close at last. “You’re home, my darling,” she murmured. “David, my darling, you’re home. Oh, how tired you all look!”

“To the bone,” the man said. He gave her the baby but he still clung to David’s hand.

“Well, well,” Mr. Winters was saying. “Well, here you are.”

“My mother and father died,” said David, “so they couldn’t come with us.” His voice was sudden and clear out of the darkness.

In the evening she sat listening to John Stuart. She had brought the children home with her and bathed them and fed them. It had been her sacrament, the bathing of their childish flesh, the giving of the bread and milk. She had washed and comforted the wailing baby and soothed her chafed limbs. She had heated the creamy milk and fed it to her and watched her small worn face settle into sleep. Across from her, David sat watching. “My Uncle John doesn’t know how to make Mary stop crying.”

“Uncles don’t, so well,” she said. She looked at him, waiting, ready for worship of him. But she must not hurry him. His mind was full of images she did not know. She must wait until he showed himself.

“Are we going to live here?”

“Yes, David.”

“There’s no wall.”

“No wall at all. You can run as far as you like. Only come home to me at night.”

He sighed deeply and freely. “I want to go to bed.”

“Yes, your bed is all ready, a new bed specially for you.”

“I can bathe myself. I haven’t had my amah bathe me for a long time now.”

“You shall do everything for yourself.”

He looked up from his bowl of bread and milk. “I know milk runs from a cow. Once my father told me that. But I haven’t seen it.”

“This ran fresh today for you and Mary and Paul.”

He lay clean and fed between the sheets made fragrant by the sun, waiting for John Stuart. “I’d rather not go to sleep without saying my prayers to my Uncle John.”

She was glad she had said to John Stuart, “You’d better come down the first evening.” She heard his footsteps soon.

“David’s waiting,” she said. They went upstairs together. But he had not been able to wait after all. He was asleep, lying on his side, his thin little hand under his cheek. The man hesitated. “I won’t wake him to say his prayers tonight.”

“No,” she said quietly. “Sleep will do more for him, after all.”

Downstairs she and John Stuart sat by the fireplace and she lit the logs. He sat as though he were exhausted, making no move to help her. When the fire was blazing he looked about the small quiet room and brought his eyes to her as she sat waiting for him to speak.

“You don’t know what this means,” he said. “The quiet — the stillness about the house. I keep listening.”

“For what?” she asked. That was the look on his face, the look of listening.

“For the cries of people,” he answered. “For strange separate cries — screams which no one goes to still, a child crying so that I know it’s in pain, people quarreling, the drone of priests, the angry mob. The sea dashing against the ship woke me so often in the night. It was like that roaring. When the bandits burst the city gates it was like that — a swelling roar — I saw them hew Rob down. He called out something to me. I couldn’t hear it, in the noise. But I couldn’t have gone to him. I was bound to a bamboo and they were carrying me away.”

She stared at him, trying to see what he was telling her. He was talking in a quiet remote voice, gazing into the fire.

“But how did you escape?”

“I had a friend among them,” he answered, “a man who had been in my hospital. He tied me himself, loosely, and whispered to me not to resist. So I let him tie me. They burned my hospital. I have to begin again from the bottom. Nothing’s left. They tore everything to pieces.”

She thought suddenly of the peach-colored satin nightgown she had given Rose. In its way it had been precious to her — a small delicate something that was precious. She had never had another so pretty. There had been no one to give her such things, and she could not afford them. But the crowd had torn it and thrown it away. It was wasted after all.

“You’re not going back!” she said.

He was holding his hands to the fire and around the narrow wrists where his cuffs had slipped up she saw deep scarified marks, still purple, where ropes had ground away the flesh.

“Yes, I’m going back — the people there need a hospital. There’s no hospital in a thousand miles.” He smiled a little. “Maybe that’s why I go back, because I seem important there. Here I’d be one of hundreds — a country doctor, maybe. There I’m specialist, surgeon and everything. It’s become a mania with me to save lives. I don’t know what for—”

“See what they did!” she whispered.

“It’s a curious thing,” he said slowly, almost faintly, “the fellow who saved me talked almost like a Christian. Do you know, he made me think of Rob. He was so young and so anxious to do good — you know, serve the common people. The odd thing was he thought they were right to kill. He had it all worked out. He wasn’t crazy at all. He was good in his way. He thought he was doing his duty. He used to talk about it in the hospital. And it was through him that I found the children afterwards. The amah had taken them to her home in the village. They weren’t hurt — they were there several days before I could get them out. She dressed them up like the village children. I don’t believe David realizes much. She covered his face when — when they took his mother — and she got him right away.”

She could not speak.

“Yes, I must go back,” he said, sighing.

But for the moment they sat sheltered in this still small house in the center of the wild and noisy world. She asked him no more. When he rose to go she said quietly over their handclasp, “You will come again sometime? This is more than passing?”

But he put his hand to his forehead in a gesture she remembered from her father.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t tell — I never know—” He put her hand down. “Wait, I remember I had something to give you.” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a small torn book bound between stiff black cardboard covers. “They found this. It was your sister’s diary.”

He went away, and she did not see him again.

But after all, she thought, sitting alone by the fire, holding the little book, Rose would have chosen to die in martyrdom. Death must have come for her large and shining and swift. That would be Rose, dying purely for Christ’s sake, dying with a lift of angel wings. She opened the book. Rose’s hands had written here. This was the story of her life in that strange far country. She began to read eagerly, tenderly, half-shyly. There would be things here which Rose had not meant anyone to see, intimate, secret things which Rose would never tell.

But over and over it was the same thing—“We must thank God today for—” “We must endure hardship as brave soldiers of Christ.” There was really nothing there at all, nothing about Rose.

She was ashamed to be so happy. But she could not keep from happiness. It was the bodily happiness of one who, after long illness, deprived of sleep and food, of the pleasure of the power to walk and move, feels sleep fall upon him gratefully again, knows afresh the taste of fruit and meat and bread, and feels his limbs once again his own, to come and go. She spent her days in simplest joy of cooking and mending and making clean for these three who were hers. She was aghast when she suddenly thought, watching David run across a meadow in the wind, “It is better that Rose died.” But he was a flying ecstasy in the wind and falling leaves. He ran everywhere. He could not walk. In the ceaseless wonder of all there was to be seen, he ran all day. She let him go free knowing he was born to be free and so must be free. She waited for him at night to give him food and rest. She sat beside him as he ate, waiting for him to speak, watching his vivid narrow face move and change with his thinking.

“In the woods I saw a kind of animal. It had a tail straight up its back.”

“That was a squirrel.”

“It held a nut like a monkey does. There aren’t monkeys in these woods. I’ve seen monkeys.”

“Here there are only monkeys in a zoo.”

“I haven’t seen a zoo. But I will. I’ll see everything. Am I going to school?”

“You shall go to school in the village where your mother and your Uncle Francis and I went to school when we were little.”

“I want to see the boys here. I hope they, aren’t cowards. They were cowards there — in the place I came from. They’d yell names at me in the street because I was a foreigner, and when I went after them they ran and hid.” He scowled, remembering. “Some day when I’m big I’m going to lead an army against them. I’m going to fight them with an army and guns. I hate cowards. I used to fill my pockets with stones and hunt them, but I couldn’t find them. There were so many little winding streets and courts. And they’d run into the women’s courts and hide. They’d hide among the women!” He looked at her to share his disgust.

His mind was full of memories she did not know. She must wait for them to fade, she must make other memories for him. “You will find brave boys here, some of them,” she said quietly.

He ate on, pondering over his plate. “My father didn’t want me to fight. He said it was wrong. When I grow up I won’t be a preacher, so’s I can fight.”

“It’s only wrong not to fight fairly,” she said.

“Oh, sure — not to fight fair, that’s wrong.” he agreed heartily. He rose, having eaten mightily. He laughed, quickly, loudly. “Gee, you remember that first day I came I didn’t know how milk came out of a cow? I thought it ran out!” He laughed, boasting, “I know better now — you have to pull it out! But I didn’t know much about America then. A fellow ought to know about his own country, oughtn’t he?”

“Yes,” she agreed, smiling, adoring him. She wanted to seize his small lean eager body to her, but she would not. He could make it blade-tense against even her, if he were not willing. She must leave him alone. All she had to do was to set food upon the table for him to take, put books near — she must buy books — open the door to the fields and sky. He went stamping upstairs to bed. He was just learning to whistle and she heard the uncertain piping of his whistling in his own room. He was trying to whistle “Oh, say, can you see—” Soon he would shout and she could go to him; not until he called.

But sometimes when he called she saw the look of pondering upon his face, that look of remembering. Yet never once had he spoken of what he remembered. She saw him look like this, pausing before he bit into a piece of cake, or at night lingering before he went to bed. Once in the night when the wind howled he called her and she went to find him, lying tensely wakeful! “I just wanted to ask you something,” he said, his voice carefully casual. “In America, they don’t ever come in a big crowd to kill people, do they?”

She took David’s hand. It was cold and damp. “Would you like to come and sleep with me?” she said.

“Yes,” he whispered.

In her bed she held him quietly, feeling his body relax and grow warm.

“You’re safe here,” she said. About him, about them all, she would build securely the walls of her own house. There were no other walls that could be trusted.

Yet even as she held him in his sleep, she knew that in the morning she must let him go free again. In the morning she must pretend he had not been afraid and that the night had never been.

But the baby Mary she could hold in her arms until she was appeased. Mary had stopped her wailing. She was beginning to grow. She lay content in Joan’s arms, watching her out of dark merry comprehending eyes.

My face will be the first she knows, Joan thought, trembling with joy, gazing back into her eyes. She knew now the mystery of flesh, sweet to the touch and sentient with mind. This child’s flesh was informed with her mind. The mind ran through the veins and muscles and made them flow and spring. This child’s hands were quick and searching, instant to seek and explore, tenacious to cling. To hold her was to hold a springing eager life. She grew within days to be a merry willful gleeful creature, moving, reaching, wanting, laughing soon, stiffening instantly at refusal.

From these two Joan turned to Paul in silence. She had learned to live in David when it was his time, in Mary at her hour. Paul must have his hour, too. But she tended him in quiet. He could struggle to his feet now and walk in a fashion across a little space. But she could not be sure he knew her.

“Joan, Joan!” David’s flying voice rang through the house a score of times a day. Mary laughed aloud to see her come. But Paul smiled at anything, at nothing, his heavy body struggling dully to movement. When she held him now she held him in silence, feeding him carefully, tending him closely. He was hers forever, and yet he would never be wholly hers. Alien earthy ancestors had entered into his making and had withheld him. She had tried to mingle parts forever separate. His very flesh was not all her own. She did not kiss his hands, his feet, as once she had. They were taking on a look of Bart’s hands, Bart’s feet. She put the thought away steadfastly. She held him, crying in her heart, “You are my own child.” But he was not quite her own. She knew now that only love could make an own child.

… “I have no children,” Roger Bair wrote when she told him of her houseful. “My wife is not strong and we have had no children.”

She read the words and put the letter down quickly. He had not told her he was married. He should have told her. She was desolate for the moment, knowing he was not free. She had never thought him otherwise than free by his very being. She remembered him always free, soaring to the sky, as she had seen him the one morning. Everything seemed to be taken from her. She had to make her life out of bits. Then her mother’s sense in her cried out, “And did you ever tell him about yourself?” No, but he had seen her big with child. He had seen her so at first. She wrote him fully then, plainly, “I have left my husband. I want you to know.” She told him everything. When this was done she was at peace again. The pain was over. He was himself, he was alive in her time in the world. It was enough. It was still strength enough to live upon. And that day where the meadow behind the house ran down to a small stream, she found blind gentians. They were bright blue. She had never found them so late before.

In and out of the house Rob’s father came and went, restlessly, hungering for the children, but shy of them because they made him think of Rob and suffer. And he was not in David’s passionate life of school and play, nor in Mary’s life of daily growing. Mary turned away from his painful smile at her to laugh at Joan, because Joan laughed easily. She always made Joan laugh and knew she did.

“This granddaughter of yours is going to be a tease,” she said.

“Is she?” he answered. “Yes … Mattie isn’t so well,” he said at last, “else I’d bring the children to spend the day.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. But her eyes were watching Mary secretly. Mary was staring astonished at her own small hands, moving them this way and that. She tasted them suddenly, carefully and critically and Joan laughed. She must not miss a moment of Mary. Nothing really mattered except Mary, inquiring the universe of her two small hands.

Rob’s father hesitated. “She says you oughtn’t to take care of the children. It worries her.”

“But I am caring for them.” She forgot Mary and her hands. She looked at Rob’s father sharply. This was the moment she knew must come. She waited for the words shaping on his tongue.

“She — she thinks — you oughtn’t take care of them. She’s heard about your situation.”

“Did you tell her?”

“No — she heard it in the village — gossip. She came home from the missionary meeting and asked me. I told her I knew. She blamed me some for not telling her.”

She leaped to her feet. “I shall go to see her,” she cried. She wavered and sat down. “No, I won’t. You’re the one to decide, Mr. Winters. Look at me! Am I fit to have the children?”

She was begging him at first. If he denied her, then she would fight for them. The words stuck in her throat, a gorge. She shook back her hair. “Do what you like for yourself, but the children are mine,” she said loudly. “I can work to feed them — you mustn’t think of money. They’ll be happy here. Look at David!”

They looked. He was flying in from school, his black hair tumbling, his cheeks faintly red, beginning to round.

“I’m starving!” he shouted.

“There’s bread and apple butter ready in the kitchen,” she cried.

“I want to do my duty by my son’s children, Joan,” said Rob’s father gently. “I am fond of them, especially as David grows older.”

She stared at him, thinking quickly. She must think of something to force him. He was talking on. “If Mattie should feel it her duty we could find a respectable woman to help.” He was staring into the lighted lamp, talking.

“You don’t understand, Mr. Winters,” she cried. “They’re mine!”

She stopped, helpless before his stupidity. Oh, the stupidity of these good stubborn people! Her body prickled with anger. She got up and sat down again. David was coming back.

He appeared, a huge slice of bread in his hand, his mouth full. She gloated over him. She had made the good food ready, knowing this moment would come. Then she was tricky. She took him by the shoulder and held his wiry body in her arms. He did not give himself to her. He was full of impatience to be away.

“David, want to go live with your grandmother?”

They looked at each other. The boy forgot to chew in his consternation. “I won’t go.” he said. She felt his body stiffen. “I can’t go. I’d have too far to walk to school next year. I’m going to try for the junior baseball team.”

“You’ve never played baseball,” said Rob’s father mildly.

“I’ve thrown a lot of rocks,” said David hotly. “You don’t know how many rocks I’ve thrown at the people in Chito. I throw good!”

She wanted to laugh, but she must not. She said gently, releasing him, “You’re not going. Go on out and play.”

“I wouldn’t go,” he paused to tell them. “Because this is my home.”

“I don’t know where David gets his temper. Rob was so gentle,” Mr. Winters said.

“Rose was stubborn as a mule,” she answered in triumph. “You’d better leave him to me.”

They looked at each other. She kept her eyes on him, steadily, willing him. What a gentle good face he had! What troubled serious blue eyes, innocent and stubborn in goodness! She was not good, and she did not care. She would have what she wanted now. She had to make a life.

“They’d be a great trouble to you and Mrs. Winters,” she said. “Mrs. Winters is so busy in the church. And she does so much in the village. I remember how she used to do—”

“Doggone it!” he said suddenly, looking at her. She laughed. Oh, it was good to laugh. He rose, his eyes twinkling. “I’m not going to say you’re a good woman,” he protested. “You’ve run away from your husband and you don’t come to church and you’re as good as kidnapping my own son’s children.”

“Come in as often as you can,” she begged him. “And tomorrow I’ll dress the children up and bring them to see Mrs. Winters — that is, if David doesn’t have to play ball!”

He turned at the door to say, “Don’t be afraid of Mattie — I’ll tend to her.”

“I’m not afraid of anybody,” she said tranquilly.

The year flowed on into deep autumn again and there was the first frost. In the field next to her meadow her neighbor’s corn was shocked and pumpkins stood naked gold, waiting.

She lived day upon day, from end to end of every day, abandoned to each day. Never did she get up from her bed in the morning to plan, “Today I must do this and this,” nor did she ever at night say to herself, “Tomorrow …”

She lived as much a creature of the hour as any bird or beast. The hour brought its need and she fulfilled it. The pressing haste of wife and mother was not hers. She lived within no circle. No one came to her door to urge her to the church or to a meeting of the women. Because she was not in the beaten path of living they let her be, shy of what they did not understand. Neither was there anyone to cry her down, or if they did, she did not hear it and did not care.

She came and went about her business in the village as decently as any wife and they were puzzled by her decency and let her be. Only she never went into church. She could not enter it anymore. Where God had been was now only silence. Her spirit cried a truce with God.

One day there was a knock upon the door and she opened it and saw the new minister. She asked him to come in, as she asked anyone to come in who stood there, and waited for him to tell his errand.

He began brightly and quickly. “You are in my parish, Mrs. Pounder, and I have missed your face in the congregation.” She fixed her eyes on him fearlessly and strongly, and he began again. “God is ready to forgive us if we come to him.”

“Forgive?” she said clearly. “For what am I to be forgiven?”

“God …” he began, the sweat breaking out a little on his lip.

“If there were a God,” she said quietly, “I could not forgive Him.” He looked at her bewildered and went away soon. She watched him trudge down the road. I spoke exactly as Mrs. Mark would have spoken, she thought, amused.

If it had been a generation earlier she could not have lived thus freely. But the times had loosened everyone. The village paper told of strange doings in the great towns, men and women living anyhow, drunkenness and heedlessness. Automobiles began to be built in long flying lines of speed, open to the winds. They raced through the village, full of young men and women going so fast their faces could not be seen. They were blurring lines of scarlet and green and yellow and kingfisher blue, and their hair streamed behind their profiles, sharp against the sky.

One morning old Mrs. Kinney stepped from the curb. Sarah Kinney had run back for a shawl and had been slow, and old Mrs. Kinney had been provoked. She called shrilly, “Sarah, I’m going on!”

She stepped off the curb to punish Sarah, and a car tore by at her left side, threw her and went on. It was a long red car, and all the young faces were turned straight ahead and it did not stop. Miss Kinney, running out, saw no more. She screamed and ran to her mother. Old Mrs. Kinney was lying on the road, dying. But she paused long enough to say with impatience, “You’re always forgetting something.”

“I declare I miss her,” said Dr. Crabbe to Joan at the funeral. “I feel downright cheated. I believe I could have kept her going another ten years.”

Behind her black-gloved hand Miss Kinney whispered excitedly, “I’m going back to Banpu as soon as I can brush up on the language!”

But day after day passed and she did not go. “I shall begin brushing up right away,” she said gaily, and then she forgot and played in the garden among the falling leaves. They made her laugh, falling on her face, on her spraying white hair. She shook her head at them, laughing.

So Joan’s coming and going seemed gentle. Besides, she had been a child there in Middlehope. The old were growing older and they saw her still a child. “Joan will turn out all right in the end,” they said, seeing her still a small girl, wayward for a moment. But she was a woman, making her life out of what she had about her.

When she went into the store for food or clothes or shoes, the clerks greeted her as smoothly as they did another. It was true Ned Parsons was a little wary of her, kind but wary.

“What can I do for you?” He made her nameless. There was no saying “Joan”—it seemed too close now that he had two children. And Netta never quite forgot that he had once been in love with Joan Richards, or very nearly in love. She talked at night in bed against women who left their men.

“Nothing makes it right, I say,” she cried. “I’d feel it my duty to make the best of it.” She hinted against Joan. “There’s things about her I’ve never told even you — her and Martin Bradley.”

He said mildly. “I thought Martin was sweet on you once.”

But she screamed at him out of the darkness. “Me? No, thank you! I wouldn’t have married Martin Bradley if he was the last man on earth. I wouldn’t touch him or let him touch me — he gives me the creeps — always did, too! I never did understand Joan Richards—”

But Netta talked against women. She’d talk against his own sister. “There’s Emily — she’s got a good job in the city, works on a newspaper. She hasn’t anybody except herself. You’d think she’d sent Petie something. She didn’t even write when little Louise was born — People are so selfish.”

He listened. Netta talked so much. He couldn’t answer everything. He had stopped answering her years ago. His mother had been such a quiet woman, smiling and dreaming and writing her stories. They used to think her silly when they were growing up. He was glad now he had not been quite so impatient as Emily had been. Emily had said to her mother, “I don’t see how you can expect any publisher to take such drivel as you write.” But Emily was always on their father’s side. She’d get angry when they came home from school and dinner wasn’t ready and their father would be puttering distractedly about the stove, and their mother’s voice would drift down from the attic, “I’ll be right down.” But very often she wasn’t right down and Emily was angry and left home as soon as she could get a job. It seemed she was all the angrier because she herself secretly wanted to write stories and couldn’t be happy at anything else, though she always made fun of it.

But his mother never seemed to know Emily was angry. She was always quiet, thinking and smiling to herself and saying, “I really think I’ve got it this time.” A quiet woman was nice in the house …

“I’d like to see some clear blue gingham,” said Joan’s cheerful voice. Joan always had a lovely rushing voice.

“Let’s see. Netta’s just made some dresses for Louise out of this.”

“You’ve never seen my Mary’s eyes!” Joan’s voice was like laughter. “There — that sky color!” She looked just as she used to, a little heavier maybe, but she was tall. Netta was growing thinner all the time. Netta boasted, “Joan Richards — there, I forget all the time she’s married — Joan Pounder’s hair’s getting real gray. I haven’t a gray hair myself. I take after my mother. She hasn’t a gray hair at sixty!”

Joan’s smooth rosy face under soft early-graying hair — He tied up the bundle of blue gingham. “Here you are,” he said abruptly. “Anything else?”

“No, thank you, Ned!” Her voice was like singing and she walked out of the store as though she were dancing.

Ned’s getting bald, Joan thought, the blue gingham under her arm. He looks dyspeptic. I wonder if Netta’s a good cook? She thought a little tenderly of Ned’s pimpled young face, yearning at her over a guitar. It seemed very long ago. He would be ashamed now if he knew she remembered him thus. But so he had been and it made a small memory, precious, too, in its way. Everything in life that was her own now was precious. She had used to plan so much for the future, to want everything. Now she wanted only to sort out of the world that which was her own. She had only lived in Middlehope. She heard of strikes and ferment outside, of hunger marchers, of men jailed for discontent too freely spoken. A turn outward, at a moment, and she might have been one of them. But she had made the inward turn.

She was drawing near to the house and now she saw someone sitting on the stone steps of the little porch. She had left David at home to watch Mary and Paul, but this was not David. She came nearer and it was Frankie. He was sitting quietly and compactly, waiting for her, his hands in his pockets. The winter air was biting cold. She hurried toward him. “Why, Frankie!” She had not seen him in months. Fanny had come and gone irregularly. She had been away working, she said, and had taken Frank with her. She had not been to get her money for nearly a month. “Why didn’t you go in, Frankie?”

“Your boy told me to, ma’am, but I thought I’d rather wait here.”

He had grown a great deal. He was much taller than David, tall and strong, brown-skinned, dark eyes madly lashed. But his lips were like her father’s lips, purely, coldly set into the round soft oval of his face. His body was not lean and angular as David’s was. It was soft-limbed, lightly fleshed. She looked him over swiftly.

“I thought I gave Fanny money to get you some new clothes!” The boy was completely out of his clothes, his hands dangling out of his short sleeves, his trousers tight about his legs.

“I haven’t seen her, ma’am — not in a mighty long time. She went away and left us.”

“Where did she go?”

“She said she was going to New York to get a job. The factory’s closed again, ma’am. There’s a strike on again, and they aren’t going to take back any colored hands. Lem stayed a week and a day or two and he went to get a job at the pants factory in Newville he heard was looking for help.”

“Where have you been all this time?”

“Waiting — waiting for her to come back. She told me to wait. But I finished up everything to eat in the house.”

She stood looking at him, and he looked back at her trustfully, quietly, waiting for her. Did he know what she was to him? She could not tell.

“Where are her other children?”

“Willa’s got a job at the chapel dancing — she’s only fifteen but she looks grown up — and Roberta’s got a fellow to feed her. Roberta’s the oldest.”

He stood looking at her patiently with his lovely mournful dark gaze.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” she said, distraught.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t expect you would. Fanny’s always saying so, too.”

He looked down and scuffed the dead grass a little. Then she saw he was barefoot.

“You haven’t any shoes on,” she cried.

“No.” His voice was acquiescent, mild. “Fanny was going to get me some before snow, she said, but she hasn’t come back.”

He looked at her apologetically.

“I’ll be all right in a year or two, ma’am, when I’m grown enough to get a job somewhere singing. It’s only just now I haven’t anywhere to go.”

He was so uncomplaining, he so took for granted that he was homeless and that he was nowhere wanted, that her heart ached over him. And everywhere about him, like a visible aura, hung an air of Francis. No single feature was quite the same. Francis’ brown hair was here blacker and curlier, his dark eyes were darker and more liquid, his head rounder and his face fuller. But there was the likeness in his look, in his pose, in the way he stood, his weight relaxed upon his right leg, his hands in his pockets. There was even a look of herself — She caught it, hauntingly, like a fleeting glimpse into a distant mirror.

“Come in with me,” she said quietly. The old familiar need to do for her own flooded into her again. In the troubled world there were the few who were her own. She took Frankie into her house and closed the door against the cold.

Inside, David was lying upon the floor reading furiously, his face set as though for a fight, his hands clenched in his hair. Mary was sitting beside him, absorbed with a little doll. In his corner in a pen she had made for him Paul was clinging to the side. He was six now, and he still said not a word. To these three she said calmly and with resolution, “This is Frankie.”

She went into the kitchen at once and quietly began to prepare the supper for them all.

She had not for a long time heard from Roger Bair — not, that is, for weeks. That was a long time. He had asked her to send him a picture of herself and she had none to send him. She had not had a picture taken since she left college. Instead she had written how she looked and what she did, and sent it to him. “Do you see me? Thirty-three years old, hair already a little gray and never cut. Height, five feet nine, weight to correspond, eyes green-blue, tending to be a little stern, maybe? There — I can’t write of myself.”

She also asked David. “David, write down how I look. Someone wants my picture and I haven’t a one.” He stretched himself before the fire with pencil and pad and considered her seriously and wrote hard, for almost an hour, his tongue between his lips, scratching out an occasional word. When it was done he folded it very small and gave it to her.

“Shall I read it?” she asked.

He blushed brilliantly. “I don’t care,” he muttered, and ran out of the house into the spring evening. But she did not read it, telling Roger she had not. “I told my boy David to write you a picture of me.”

She had not heard from him since. She could not forget that she had not. It gnawed in her all day and she remembered at night with a feeling of emptiness that it was a long time since she had seen his handwriting. But she waited. She would wait and if the time went on she would ask Francis. But she read the newspaper carefully each day because she grew a little frightened. Among the headlines of stocks falling headlong and swarming runs upon banks she searched for a news item — PILOT CRASHES. But it was not there. It came at last to be almost enough that it was not there.

In her house her life was divided into the four children. David was the warm vivid center about which they moved. He was the one who was always having something happen to him. Every particle of him was adventure. She could go all day with her heart in her mouth because in the afternoon his school team was playing the Clarkville team. He was so little but he would go wherever the big boys went. When he burst into the house shouting for her, shouting, “We beat ’em — we beat ’em!” her heart let down in instant relief. “Oh, David, I’m so glad!” “Yep,” he boasted, “we beat ’em ten to nothing — to nothing, mind you, Joan!” He was strung so high, so fine, suffered in such an abyss of agony, he was so impaled by pain, joy such ecstasy, that the house vibrated with him. She was involved in all his being. He was shy with her for a while until he asked her, “Did you read what I wrote about you?” She shook her head, smiling. “I sent it off just as you folded it.” He was relieved, his shyness fell off him like an awkward garment not his own. He was not naturally shy.

But after a while she saw he had something to say to her and she put herself quietly in his way, that he might speak. “You’re a comfort to me, David. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Remembering the rare precious praise her mother had given her, she was lavish with her own praise to them all. Even to Paul she gave praise. “That’s just fine, Paul — now walk to me, here, Good boy, good boy—” He staggered his few steps industriously, clutching her hand, turning his empty face up to catch her praise.

The warmth in her voice freed David’s tongue. “I just want to tell you,” he said offhandedly, “that I only wrote good things about you.” He was turned away from her, but she saw that his trim close-set ears were crimson. “Thank you, David,” she said composedly, careful not to be tender. He turned over the pages of a book he was reading. “I said,” he added, suffused, “I said I wished you were my real mother.” She wanted to run to him and take him in her arms, to fondle him and adore him. But she knew him. She went on with her sewing. “You are like my own son,” she said. She lifted her eyes and he met them and a deep look passed between them. “Guess I’ll go out a while,” he said quickly.

“Fresh cookies in the jar,” she reminded him. So that was the picture he had given to Roger. It was easier to wait for Roger again.

She had been anxious until she knew what David would feel of Frankie. She was silent while David watched Frankie, weighing him.

“Why is he so brown if he isn’t Chinese?” he asked starkly before them all.

“Frank is American,” she answered. “There are many Americans who are black. Frankie’s mother was dark and his father was white. That’s why he is brown and why his hair is curly and why he has his lovely voice.”

“Sing,” David commanded.

Frankie opened his mouth and began to sing. The song was abominable, musical claptrap, but his voice startled her again. It flowed out of him richly, largely, noble in its volume, dignifying the cheap tune. They listened, even Paul listened, his eyes wandering, searching for the source. Mary stretched out her arms, imperious to be taken and brought near.

“What else do you know?”

“I know a lot of things,” said Frankie. He began to sing again. “Like a river, glorious, is God’s perfect peace.” She listened, remembering her father.

“Who taught you that?” she asked.

“I’ve heard ’em singing it down in South End,” he answered. “Some of the old folks sing it. Fanny sings it sometimes when she’s feeling good.”

Well, she had found a peace, too. And David loved Frankie. “Sing something funny!” he would demand. And Frankie, his great eyes suddenly droll, sang a witty tune, “De farmer say to de weevil.” David listened, laughing. He loved Frankie because Frankie could make him laugh. But Frankie, without knowing it, shaped himself to each one of them. He made David laugh, he fetched and carried for imperious Mary, he lifted Paul to his feet and urged him to stepping. “There now, ’atta boy!” And to Joan he was something she did not understand. But she knew that if she were to grow old and weak, David might be wandering beyond seas, and Mary would be having her own way, and Paul would be as he had been born, but Frankie would come back to see that she had food and shelter. There was faithfulness in him. She could feel it, deep and steadfast in his quiet lovely look.

David and Frankie grew together, sleeping in the same room, going to the same school. But Frankie was far below his grade. David came home one afternoon bleeding, blown with battle.

“Why, David!” cried Joan horrified, hastening for water and bandages.

“Some of the fellows laughed at Frankie,” he said furiously. “They said he was dumb and they called him a nigger, and I socked ’em. He’s just dark, isn’t he, Joan?”

She looked at Frankie and caught his look, full of deep self-realization.

“Let me wash you, David,” she said. “Turn around and let me see you.” He turned, not knowing in his anger that she had not answered. When he had gone clattering upstairs to change his bloody shirt, Frankie spoke to her.

“I know I’m a nigger, ma’am.”

She looked back at him impulsively. But he might at this moment have been Francis, cut in bronze! She leaned to him and quickly kissed his forehead. “You are one of my children,” she said.

He warmed and melted, wavering, longing. But he did not dare to come too near her. He took her hand and held it against his cheek. His cheek was hot and soft beneath her palm. Now she felt this other flesh. It was as sweet, as sound, as any flesh, not strange to her. “There,” she said. “Run along and find David. I’ll spread you both some bread and jam.”

But under this passage of the days there was a stillness. They were very nearly enough, these children. Paul was nearly enough of sorrow. He was there among the others, blind, stumbling, mumbling at his hands, seizing gluttonously upon his food. His placid baby face was changing. The vacancy of his mind was beginning to shape it inexorably and more swiftly than wisdom might have shaped it. He was nearly sorrow enough, but not quite. There might be, she was beginning to know, a sorrow deeper than Paul, even as there was a joy deeper than David’s and Mary’s growing, sweeter than Frankie’s singing. They were not quite enough, all of them, for her sorrow and her joy. Something bright had ceased to weave beneath her, as though Roger were not living. Silence was worse than death. She never could bear silence since she had left Bart’s house. To be alive and silent was more meaningful than death. Day after day went past and he was silent. She came to feel she was living on a far island, out of sight and sound. Above her in the air, around her in the seas, people came and went and moved and struggled. But she heard nothing. Fanny had not come back. Francis did not write. Even in the village there was silence. No one came near her, day after day. Only Mrs. Winters had come twice, to look at the children. “I want them to know their grandmother,” she said. But both times she had stared at Paul.

“My goodness, Joan, you can’t keep a child like that here!”

Joan picked him up and wiped his drooling mouth and made his garments neat. She bore the pain drearily. It must come again and again, David asking sharply, “Why can’t Paul walk?”—Mary snatching Paul’s toys, knowing already he was without defense. Only Frankie was never surprised. “Yes’m, there’s quite a lot of babies in Sound End slow like Paul.” He looked out for Paul, always. He took Paul’s toys gently away from Mary and gave them back to him.

She said quietly to Mrs. Winters, “I think it just as well that they grow used to children like Paul. They’re part of life.”

“If I’d had my health,” said Mrs. Winters, “you’d never have to. Mr. Winters used to be so delicate, and now he’s heavier than me.” She held up her arm. “Remember what round white arms I used to have, Joan?” She looked at her withered yellow arm sadly.

Joan forgot what she had said of Paul. “Have you seen Dr. Crabbe?” she asked.

“Him!” said Mrs. Winters. “I wouldn’t go to him — I don’t put confidence in him — never did. He’s always abetted Mr. Winters against his egg-nog, anyway. Says it doesn’t do any good if he doesn’t want it. It’s contrary to religion, if nothing else. We’ve all got to do what we don’t want to — it’s life.”

Joan smiled. Mrs. Winters was old now. There was no use contradicting the old, whose voices would so soon be stopped. But she knew life only began when one did what one wanted to do. She wanted to see Roger Bair — to speak to him. It was no longer enough to write.

“Well, I’ll be going,” said Mrs. Winters. “David looks peakedy to me. He’s too thin. I saw him on the street yesterday.”

“He’ll never be fat — he burns himself up,” she answered. “Look at Mary!”

They both looked at Mary. She was chewing a rubber doll and when she saw them looking at her she dimpled madly, murmuring. Mrs. Winters capitulated. “Yes, she’s real heavy. You’ve done well by her, Joan. Well, as I was saying — my Ellen was just as healthy and in a week she was dead — pneumonia. You can’t fix your heart, not on anything in this world.” She turned away from Mary.

Joan did not answer. “I will fix my heart,” she said silently. “What is the use of living if you do not fix your heart? It is not living, living only to avoid pain.” And always she waited for Mrs. Winters to complain because she had left Bart

But Mrs. Winters began, “I don’t go to church anymore. I can’t abide the minister’s wife — a cold driving woman, laying down the law, especially in the missionary society. I told her, “Haven’t I got a son that was a missionary and my own daughter-in-law, lying out there martyrs? These children wouldn’t have been motherless if I’d been listened to. Well”—she sighed—“you’d better start David in on cod-liver oil. And if I were you, and I don’t mean to hurt you, Joan, but I’d put that child away. It isn’t right. Now you listen to me.”

She held Paul to her closely for a long time after Mrs. Winters was gone. One could not put sorrow away and have done with it. It lived on as long as one’s heart could beat to feel it.

David burst into the room. “Hello, Joan!” he shouted, and darted toward the kitchen. In a moment Frank would be there. He came and followed David, smiling at her silently. Did he really look as much like his father as she thought? She was frightened sometimes lest someone in the village might see him and see how much he looked like Francis Richards. But who now would remember Francis? No one thought about Francis anymore, no one except herself.

Whether Roger reached her first or whether she saw the notice of Francis’ death first, hardly seemed important. The notice was only a small paragraph, a plane had been lost in a curious manner by a man who had, it seemed, meant to lose it — a man named Francis Richards. She stood holding the paper in her hand, staring at the name. But Francis Richards was not a very common name. Still, it was common enough so that she must keep her head. She must telegraph. But the doorbell had rung at that moment and without waiting there was such a knocking that she put the paper down and ran to the door. He had telegraphed her first, of course. Roger — but it was he himself! She knew him instantly. She had not forgotten a line of his face, his body.

“Am I in time?” he asked quickly. She stared at him. “I mean — have you seen the morning paper?”

Then it was Francis!

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” she answered. He came in as though the house were his own and sat down before her. He had come to tell her Francis was dead. After a while, very soon, it would matter that Francis was dead. But not yet.

“It is true?” He had put down his hat. Now he took off his coat. She had never seen him in ordinary clothes before. This was the sort of clothes he wore, this rough brownish stuff.

“I’ve got to tell you. I wish I had been there. He was such an odd fellow — never himself on the ground. People didn’t like him. But in the air he was quite different.” He was swallowing hard, wiping his forehead with a brownish linen handkerchief. “In the air something changed him. He was gay, you know — quite gay, as soon as we’d left the earth. I saw it happen again and again when we went up together.”

He was telling her about Francis and she must listen. It was not right now to look at his eyes, his mouth, his hands.

“He’d been getting on very well — only nobody liked him. I don’t think anybody ever had any proof that he had actually any part in the trouble we had over wages. But he was the sort you’d suspect of discontent. I hope I’m not hurting you?” He was looking at her kindly. She shook her head and he went on.

“I liked him — knowing how he was in the air, you know.”

But he was talking to her at a distance, as though they had never written to each other, as though letters had not come and gone a hundred times.

“Don’t — don’t be sad,” he begged her. He leaned forward and his face was near to hers — very near. She could see lines about his eyes. His skin was fine-grained, burned brown, his teeth strong and even. “No one will ever know exactly what happened. No one was near him — I mean he had no close friends. The men saw him coming to the field, walking along with a woman. She was telling him something, talking to him …

“Sweet boy, haven’t I told you I can’t get a job? Take me with you where you live. How did I find you? I have my ways. No, I’ll tell you the truth — I asked a farm fellow—”

“Let me go. Take your hand off my arm!”

But she would not loose him. She was there, still pretty. How did women like that stay pretty so long? God, if she’d only been fat — ugly — old! But she was pretty. Her breast was against his arm. He could feel it. No white woman had such lovely breasts. She had pulled back her coat on purpose. When he knew what she did on purpose why couldn’t he hate her? But it only made him want her again. And when he wanted her he thought of his mother, and he couldn’t take her — not to glut himself. If once he could glut himself, he might get it out of him forever.

He used to sit in church beside his mother. He could sit still a long time feeling her warmth, catching the smell of her, the organ, the sound of his father’s high intense voice, playing intensely upon him.

“Get away!” he shouted. He began to walk quickly, as fast as he could. But she was saying something, hanging to him, never letting him go. There was a smell about her, warm, close. He began to run. But she was saying something.

“And your boy, Frank — there’s Frankie—”

He stopped. “Who?”

“Didn’t Miss Joan tell you? You put a boy in me, Frank — he’s almost as big as me now.”

“Joan?”

“She’s been helping me with him this long time.”

“You’re lying!”

“Come home and look at him! Spittin’ image of you, Frank. Your sister knows it — everybody knows it if they see him—”

Now he could shake her off. Now he must shake her off. He ran through the station and into the field. There the plane was waiting, the little plane in which he had learned to fly. Someone was getting into it, someone else who was learning. He pushed the boy aside.

“I’ve got to,” he gasped, and leaped into the seat and seized the stick. That was the engine roaring. Now, now he was off the ground. There — up … up … up — as high as he could go, into the sky!

… Roger was holding her two hands. “The plane dropped like a shot bird, wheeling, over and over. No one will know what happened. He was burned to death.”

The room was so still. The two boys were at school, the two babies were asleep. She was ashamed of her hands, rough from gardening. He would feel her hands rough in his. Francis burned to death — that was because Fanny had found him. She had tried so desperately to keep them apart. If Fanny ever came back she would say, “I never can see you again. I have taken the child. Now let me never see or hear of you again.”

“Don’t grieve so silently — speak to me — ease yourself to me.” He was caressing her hands. She must draw them away.

“My hands are so — so rough,” she said indistinctly.

“Why should they be so rough?” He was looking at them, tenderly.

“I raise a good many of our own vegetables. The children eat a lot.”

“You don’t make enough at that music?”

“Oh, yes,” she said quickly. “It really mounts up. I work at it several hours every day. But it all helps. Besides, I like gardening. It’s good soil.”

He was still looking at her hands. Now he dropped them as though he had thought of something. He began to feel in his pockets for his pipe. He began to speak as he had before he took her hands. “Well — did your brother help you in any way — financially, I mean?”

“No,” she replied. “No. Francis never helped me in any way. He wasn’t really able to.”

He lit his pipe and began smoking it. He looked around the room and at her. “This is where you live,” he said. “I’ve wondered what a room would be like where you live — you and all your children!”

“It is really where I live,” she said. She must look at him carefully, at every line of his body, his hands, his hair and head, the shape of his mouth, the color of his eyes. This was he. She put aside Francis. Francis must wait now, being dead. He must wait upon this moment of life. Soon Roger would be going. … But he was going even now, standing up, putting on his coat, his hat in his hand.

“Now, I must go. You will not grieve too much?”

She shook her head, not smiling, her eyes steady. “I am too used to sorrow. But it will be sorrow. I remember him a little boy—”

“I must come back,” he said abruptly. He had a very kind quiet voice, the voice of one habitually kind.

“You will come back?” she cried, smiling at him.

“Yes,” he said, “I must come back — to see how you do. You are very solitary here.”

She shook her head, speechless, and he went away.

Now their letters began again, now without pretense.

“I am used to seeing women helpless, leaning upon men. You live on that solitary hillside and are not afraid …”

“… Don’t you see I am not solitary? I have everything.”

He began to write of his wife — quietly, without apology that he had said so little about her. “She is a delicate creature — you would make two of her — a small creature looking like a child until one sees her face. It’s always been like living with a small child.”

She put the letter away. Let her remember Francis — let her remember she had a fresh sorrow over which to mourn. His clothes had come home to this house he had never entered, but it was his home because she was here, because she was the only one to know if he lived or died. She sorted them, his few clothes, his books. She looked at them. There were two little books about revolution, a copy of a book by Marx — she remembered hearing of Marx in college, long ago — a book about communism in Russia. Yes, the papers talked a good deal about Russia. It was all so confusing. Nothing was clear except the days of her life, beginning each morning and ending with the night. She found a picture of his mother among the books. But nothing else — no letter, no trace of how he had lived. His clothes were cheap and old, except his extra flying clothes. Those he had bought of good quality. He had paid well for those.

Strange how agony went out of pain when youth was gone. Sharpness of pain was gone, frantic pain was gone, sorrow was only an ache now, a deep swelling ache. Or was it that having suffered so vividly over Paul she had filled her capacity for suffering, so that now nothing could stab her again? Death seemed not sorrowful anymore, no more since she had come to think of death to free Paul. There was no other healing for Paul. So the sting was gone from any dying. When people died, they were set free. Francis was free, free of Fanny at last, free of himself. No, death could no longer wound her …

“… You understand how I could never leave my wife,” Roger wrote. “She is so defenseless — a helpless creature. You are so strong you are able to bear life as it is.”

She put his letter down and began to weep. She wept aloud, in the middle of a shining morning, in the midst of spring. For now she was mortally wounded. Because she was strong she must bear to the uttermost. Because she was strong, he said, she must again give up what she wanted. She wrote back to him wildly, out of her intolerable hurt. He answered, “I cannot make her suffer. Shall the deer suffer because it is the deer, because it is not born the lion?”

She was silent in her agony — shaking and trembling, feeding the children blindly, going blindly about the house. “Joan, you don’t laugh!” David cried. “I wish you’d laugh again about something!” Frankie was silent, watching her with great melancholy eyes.

She flung back at Roger, “And shall the lion suffer because it is the lion? It suffers the more being strong also to suffer … Let us not write anymore. You are not free. I can see it.”

She would end it. She sealed the letter and mailed it in hot hurry. Let it all be over. She was wounded to the core. He could wound her as death could not wound her, as even Paul had not the power to wound her. She walked back into her house. Let her be content with what she had. She had so much. She would stretch it to be enough.

She put a smile upon her face resolutely. Paul was walking, clinging from chair to chair, turning himself about the leg of the table, panting with his struggle to walk. Mary was already on her feet, a small nimble thing. They were all there in her house. David was frowning over his arithmetic. In the kitchen she heard Frankie moving about quietly, getting supper for her. In his delicate way he held himself aloof from the others, never quite like them, knowing himself, serving them in small ways unasked, shy of sitting down with them.

“Sit down, Frankie,” she said every day.

“Yes’m, I’m nearly ready to.” But he delayed if he could.

Then as she stood among them, Paul saw her. For the first time in his life he really saw. He looked up at the sound of her coming, and he staggered toward her, three steps, and caught her around the knees and looked up at her. Out of his dim gaze something focused in his mind for a moment and he spoke—“Mamma?”

It was his first word. She stared, incredulous with joy, into his upturned face. Why, he knew her — Paul knew his mother! She fell to her knees and seized him and began to laugh and to sob. “Children, David, Frankie, did you hear Paul? He called me!”

He pulled at the blue beads about her throat, the beads Mr. Winters had given her long ago. She had put them on this morning because of her blue dress.

They came running around her, David shouting, Mary clamoring with glee at the noise, Frankie smiling. “Say it again, Paul!” cried David.

“Say it, darling,” she urged. “Once more — Mamma — Mamma — say it, Paul!” She was avid to hear the word again, to repeat the moment.

But Paul had slipped to the floor and was staring at the beads, spreading them over his hands, as though he could not hear her. The moment had gone. “But anyway he spoke once,” she said fiercely, getting up from her knees. “I’ve heard his voice once, even if he never speaks again.”

He was mumbling over the beads. She turned away quickly.

“Now, David, do you need help with your arithmetic? Yes, Frankie, toast the bread — we’ll have toast and milk for supper, all of us.”

But Paul really had spoken to her. In the great desolation—“I have ended what was between Roger and me”—there was the little taper burning. Once Paul had spoken to her.

“Did you think I was going to let you get away from me like that?” Roger was there. She opened the door in the morning and he was there. “Your letter came last night. She and I were there alone. I saw her as I’ve always known she was — always in my heart she was — never wanting to see. You made me see her—”

He clenched his hands upon her shoulders. Across the room Mary was pausing, astonished. She saw Mary’s eyes, staring, astonished, at this stranger bursting into the house.

“Roger, it isn’t so easy—”

“No, it isn’t so easy — It’s so hard you’ve got to help me know what to do. She’s here. I brought her.”

“Roger!” she cried at him in consternation. “What have you told her?”

“Nothing at all except that you were the sister of one of my best men who was killed, and I wanted to see how things were. Come,” he said brusquely.

She followed him down the narrow grassy path to the picket gate. There in the road was a small low car. Roger’s wife sat there.

“Millicent, this is Francis Richards’ sister. You know I told you …”

She put out her hand and felt a cool slight touch upon it. “How do you do?” It was a light, pretty voice. She lifted her eyes to the face. “Will you come in?” she said quietly. This was the face Roger had once loved very much. He had said, “I was once very much in love. I was very young.” Yes, this was a helpless creature. The pretty, aging face turned to Roger, questioning, helpless.

“Yes, get out and come in,” he said. He opened the door and helped her out. She went up the path in her dainty high-heeled shoes, clinging to his arm. Behind them Joan walked, alone. She had never in all her life clung to anyone as this woman was doing, never once.

In the house they sat down, the three of them. Instinctively she drew up for this woman the comfortable chair. “Will you sit here?” She made her voice quiet, hospitable. This was her house and these were her guests. Casually the slender figure in the girlish blue suit settled into the chintz-covered chair which was her own. She sat down on a straight chair, feeling herself huge, untidy, beside this minute perfection. Roger had loved this porcelain creature. Roger’s deep passion had been poured upon this childish woman. She glanced at him. He was sitting there, gloomy, waiting.

The little creature was looking at him with pale anxiety. “I don’t believe you feel well, Roger. He hasn’t seemed well since last night.” She was gazing at him out of her pretty, china-blue eyes. “I didn’t want him to come this morning, but he would come.” She laughed with aging coquetry. “I have to fuss over him a little. I’ve never had any children, Mrs. … Mrs. …”

She did not supply a name for herself. It did not matter what her name was.

“It is right for you to take care of him,” she said gravely. Of course Roger could never leave this little creature, this little defenseless creature. The strong, the strong must suffer. “I have my four children,” she said suddenly.

“Such a comfort, I know,” the cool high voice was murmuring.

But Roger had said nothing at all. He was sitting there in his brown tweed overcoat, silent, his hat between his fingers. It was true he did not look well. There were deep circles under his eyes and his dark skin was sullen. “Beloved!” she cried to him in her heart. As though she had spoken he lifted his head and they looked at each other fully.

“He doesn’t look well, does he?” the chattering childish voice was saying.

“Let’s go, Millie,” he said suddenly. He took her arm and went toward the door. He turned his head to say to her. “I’d like to see those four children sometime.” They were going toward the car, across the grass. “I’m coming back to see them. Careful, Millicent — your dress is caught on the door.” He disengaged her skirt carefully and helped her in.

“Good-bye,” said Joan quietly. She turned and went back into her house and shut the door. She sat down in a straight-backed chair and waited to hear the sound of the motor begin. But it did not begin.

The door opened and he was back. He had shut the door and he was at her feet, kneeling, his head on her knees. But no, she would not touch his head, his shoulders. She held herself by the arms, away from him. She was thinking over and over again, No one has ever taken care of me. I wish I were a small thing so someone would call me “little girl”—That was how silly she could be, she cried furiously in her heart, dreaming that anyone could call a great creature like her “little girl”!

“I understand,” she was saying aloud. “Of course I understand how you cannot leave a little thing like that—” She had begun so patiently and quietly, understanding. For Roger to leave Millicent would be as though she were to leave Paul. She could understand that. Then why was all this bitterness welling up in her? It lay upon her tongue, like bitter gall. “What a pity,” she was saying dryly, bitterly, “what a pity women are not all born small and pretty and weak! Women don’t need anything except little weak pretty hands and faces, little slender bodies.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. He lifted up his head to stare at her.

She laughed, holding herself away from him. “I mean, go back to taking care of her!”

But he was looking at her as one of the children might have looked at her if she had turned suddenly harsh, who had never been harsh. He was frightened because she was pushing him away.

“But I came back to tell you I couldn’t bear it not to see you anymore. There isn’t any life for me away from you.”

His long body was folded absurdly at her knees. His hair was gray at the temples, as gray as her own. But she loved him. He could come here into this house as the children had come. Some day he might so come, if she did not send him away now, if step by step he came his own way.

“I need you,” he cried out at her. Then she let herself go. She released herself and took his head into her hands and pressed it against her bosom. It was right, this head against her bosom. This was right — this deep relief.

“Oh, how I’ve needed you, your strength. I’ve been so tired,” he said brokenly.

“Yes, I know — I understand … Hush — I know—”

He sighed, like a child giving itself to sleep. She looked down upon his face. He had closed his eyes. The lines were gone out of his face now, for this moment. He was at rest in her, leaning on her.

“… Roger!” Millicent’s voice came crying from the car.

He sprang to his feet at the sound. The lines sprang back again about his mouth, his eyes.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Yes, go,” she said.

“Roger, are you coming?”

He put the voice away. She could see him putting it away from between them. He took her hands.

“This isn’t the end, you know. It’s the beginning. I don’t know what the end will be. But I’ll go on until I find it. I’m coming back.” He had her hands still. She nodded, smiling. He laid her hands down gently and she let them lie in her lap as he had laid them. He was gone. She had now only the moment of his head against her bosom. She felt still the touch of his head upon her bosom, his face there, the stigmata of love. He needed her. It was enough for love’s beginning, whatever was the end.

She heard Paul whimpering, awake from sleep, and at his voice she rose and went back to him. The boys would be coming home from school, too. Yes, she could hear Frankie now, his voice calling down the road, “Singin’ wid a sword in mah hand, O Lord — singin’ wid a sword in mah han’.”

She looked out of the door as she passed. The car was gone. And down the road marched the two boys, hand in hand, to the tune of Frankie’s singing. He had taken off his shoes and stockings and was walking barefoot. The spring sunshine poured down upon them. She paused on her way to the kitchen and began to sing with them as they drew near, her voice big and fresh, “Singin’ wid a sword in mah hand, O Lord—”

After all, she need not hurry. The day was still at noon.