it is no doubt owing to the habit of life in higgleston being so little differentiated from taylorville that i was never able to get any other impression of it than as a place one put up at on the way to some other; always it bore to my mind the air of a traveller's room in one of those stops where it is necessary to open the trunks but not worth while to unpack them. nor do i think it was altogether owing to what i left there that my recollection of it centres paganly about the cemetery. in taylorville, love and birth, though but scantily removed from the savour of impropriety, were still the salient facts of existence, but in higgleston a funeral was your real human occasion. it was as if the rural fear of innovation had thrown them back for a pivotal centre upon the point of continuity with their past.
it was a generous rolling space set aside for the dead, abutting on two sides on the boardwalks of the town, stretching back by dips and hollows to the wooded pastures. near the gates which opened from the walk, it was divided off in single plots and family allotments, scattering more and more to the farthest neglected mounds that crept obscurely under the hazel thickets and the sapling oaks, happiest when named the least, assimilated quickliest to their native earth. it was this that rendered the pagan touch, for though nearly all higgleston was church-going and looked forward to a hymn-book heaven, they seemed to me never quite dissevered from the untutored pastures to which their whole living and dying was a process of being reabsorbed.
higgleston, until this junction of railroads occurred, had been a close settled farming community, and a vague notion of civic improvement had ripped through the centre of its wide old yards and comfortable, country looking dwellings, a shadeless, unpaved street lined with what were known as business blocks, with a tendency to run mostly to front and a general placarded state of being to let, or about to be opened on these premises.
beyond the railway station there was a dingy region devoted to car shops and cheap lodgings, known locally as track town, whose inhabitants were forever at odds with the older rural population, withdrawing itself into a kind of aristocracy of priority and propriety; and between these an intermediary group, self styled, "the leading business men of the town," forever and trivially busy to reconcile the two factions in the interests of trade. that tommy was by reason of his position as managing salesman of burton brothers, generically of this class, might have had something to do with my never having formed any vital or lasting relations with either community; and it might have been for quite other reasons. for in the very beginning of my stay there, life had seized me; that bubbling, frothing force, working forever to breach the film of existence. i was used by it, i was abused by it. for what does life care what it does to the tender bodies of women?
my baby was born within ten months of my marriage and most of that time i was wretchedly, depressingly ill. all my memories of my early married life are of olivia, in the mornings still with frost, cowering away from the kitchen sights and smells, or gasping up out of engulfing nausea to sit out the duty calls of the leading ladies of higgleston in the cold, disordered house; of tommy gulping unsuitable meals of underdone and overdone things, and washing the day's accumulation of dishes after business hours, patient and portentously cheerful, with olivia in a wrapper, half hysterical with weakness—all the young wife's dreams gone awry! and tommy too, he must have had visions of himself coming home to a well-kept house, of delicious little dinners and long hours in which he should appear in his proper character as the adored, achieving male. not long ago i read a book of a man's life written by a man, in which he justified himself of unfaithfulness because his wife appeared before him habitually in curl papers—and there were days when i couldn't even do my hair!
in the beginning we had taken, in respect to tommy's position among those same live business men, a house rather too large for us, and we hadn't counted on the wages of a servant. now with the necessity upon us of laying by money for the great expense, we felt less justified in it than ever. this pinch of necessity was of the quality of corrosion on what must have been meant for the consummate experience. i have to dwell on it here because in this practical confusion of my illness, was laid the foundation of our later failure to come together on any working basis. we hadn't, in fact, time to find it; no time to understand, none whatever in which to explore the use of passion and react into that superunion of which the bodily relation is the overt sign—young things we were, who had not fairly known each other as man and woman before we were compelled to trace in one another the lineaments of parents, all attention drawn away from the imperative business of framing a common ideal, to centre on the child.
what this precipitance accomplished was, that, instead of being drawn insensibly to find in the exigencies of marriage the natural unfolding of that inward vitality, always much stronger in me than any exterior phase, i was by the shock of too early maternity driven apart from the usual, and i still believe the happier, destiny of women.
with all this we were spared the bitterness of the unwelcoming thought. little homely memories swim up beyond the pains and depressions to mark, like twigs and leafage on a freshet, the swelling of the new affection: effie at montecito, overruling all my mother's shocked suggestions as to her supposed obliviousness of my condition, sitting up nights to sew for me ... the dress i tried to make myself ... the bureau drawer from which i used to take the little things every night to look at them ... the smell of orris.
"see, tommy; i've done so much to-day. isn't it pretty?"
"my dear, you've shown that to me at least forty times and i've always said so."
"yes, but isn't it?... the little sleeves ... did you think anything could be so small? tommy, don't you wish it would come?"
we had to make what we could of these moments of thrilled expectancy, of tender brooding curiosity.
i scarcely recall now all the reasons why it was thought best for me to go back to my mother in august, and to the family physician, but i find it all pertinent to my subject. whatever was done there was mostly wrong, though i was years finding it out. i mean that whatever chance i had of growing up into the competent mother of a family was probably lost to me through the inexactitudes of country practice. we hadn't then arrived at the realization that the well or ill going of maternity is a matter of sceptics rather than sentiment. taylorville was a town of ten thousand inhabitants, but at that time no one had heard of such a thing as a trained nurse; the business of midwifery was given over in general to a widow so little attractive that she was thought not to have a chance of marrying again, and by the circumstance of having had two or three children of her own, believed to be eminently fit. to olivia's first encounter with the rending powers of life, there went any amount of affectionate consideration and much old wives' lore of an extraordinary character. it seems hardly credible now, but in the beginning of things going wrong, there were symptoms concealed from the doctor on the ground of delicacy.
my baby, too, poor little man, was feeble from birth, a bottle baby; the best that could have been done would hardly have been a chance for him. lying there in the hot, close room, all the air shut out with the light, in the midst of pains, i made a fight for him, tried to interpose such scraps of better knowledge as had come to me through reading, but they made no headway against my mother's confidential, "well, i ought to know, i've buried five," and against forester, who by the added importance of having invested all her fortune, had gained such way with my mother that she listened respectfully to his explication of what should be done for the baby. it was forester who overbore with ridicule my suggestion that he should be fed at regular hours, for which i never forgave him. but i had enough to do to fortify my racked body against the time when i should be obliged to get up and go on again, as it seemed privately i never should be able.
and they were all so fond and proud of my little thomas henry—he was named so for his father and mine—effie simply adored him; the wonder of his smallness, the way in which he moved his limbs and opened and shut his eyes; quite as if there had never been one born before. the way they hung over him, and the wrong things they did! even cousin lydia drove into church the first sunday after, for the purpose of holding him for a quarter of an hour in her large, silk poplin arms, at the end of which time she had softened almost to the point of confidence.
"i thought i was going to have one once," she admitted, "but somehow i couldn't seem to manage it." she looked over to where cousin judd sat with my mother. "he was always fond of young ones...." it occurred to me then that cousin lydia was probably a much misunderstood woman.
of the next six months at higgleston after i returned to it with a three months' old baby i have scarcely any recollection that is not mixed up with bodily torment for myself and anxiety for the child. i think it probable that most of that time my husband found the house badly kept, the meals irregular and his wife hysterical. i hadn't anything to spare with which to consider what figure i might have cut in the eyes of the onlooker. tommy shines out for me in that period by reason of the unwearying patience and cheerfulness with which he successfully ignored the general unsatisfactoriness of his home, and at times for a certain exasperation i had with him, as if by being somehow less quiescent he might have opposed a better front to the encroachments of distress. we did try help in the kitchen after our finances had a little recovered from the strain of my confinement, a higgleston girl of no very great competence and a sort of back-door visiting acquaintance with two thirds of the community. her chief accomplishments while she stayed with us, were concocted out of the scraps and fag ends of our private conversations. i could always tell that ida had overheard something by the alacrity with which she banged the pots about in the kitchen in order that she might get through with her work and go out and tell somebody. in the end tommy said that when it came to a choice between getting his own meals and losing his best customers he preferred the former.
all this time i did not know how ill i was because of the consuming anxiety for the baby. i remember times in the night—the dreadful momentary revolt of my body rousing to this new demand upon it, before the mind waked to the selfless consideration; and the failure of composure which was as much weakness as fear; the long watching, the walking to and fro, and the debates as to whether we ought or ought not to venture on the expense of the doctor. and for long years afterward what is the bitterest of bitterness, finding out that we had done the wrong thing. to this day i cannot come across any notices of the more competent methods for the care of delicate children, without a remembering pang.
all the time this was going on i was aware by a secondary detached sort of self, that there was a point somewhere beyond this perplexity of pain, at which the joyful possession of my son should begin. i was anxious to get at him, to have speech with him, to realize his identity—any woman will understand—and along about the time the blue flags and the live-for-evers and the white bridal wreaths were at their best in the cemetery, it came upon me terrifyingly that i might, after all, have to let him go without it. we were walking there that day, the first we had thought it safe to take the baby out, for it was customary to walk in the cemetery on sunday and almost obligatory to your social standing. the oaks were budding, and the wind in the irises and the shadow of them on the tombstones, and the people all in their sunday best, walking in the warm light, gave an effect of more aliveness than the sombre yards of the town could afford.
tommy had taken the baby from me, for, though i could somehow never get enough of the feel of him, his head in the hollow of my shoulder, his weight against my arm, i was so little strong myself that i was glad to pretend that it was because he was really getting heavy, and just then we passed a little mound, so low, where a new headboard had been set up with the superscription, "only son of —— and —— aged eight months," and it was the age, and the little mound was just the length of my boy. i think there was a rush of tears to cover that, the realization by a kind of prevision that it was just to that he was to come, tears checked in mid-course by the swift up-rush of the certainty, of the reality, of the absoluteness of human experience. for by whatever mystery or magic he had come to identity through me, he was my son as i knew, and not even death could so unmake him.
i dwell upon this and one other incident which i shall relate in its proper place, as all that was offered to me of the traditional compensation for what women are supposed to be. if a sedulous social ideal has kept them from the world touch through knowledge and achievement, it has been because, sincerely enough, they have not been supposed to be prevented from world processes so much as directed to find them in a happier way. this would be reasonable if they found them. what society fails to understand, or dishonestly fails to admit, is that marriage as an act is not invariably the stroke that ushers in the experience of being married.
whatever proportions the change in my life had assumed to the outward eye, it was only by the imagined pain of loss that i began to perceive that i could never be quite in the same relation to things again, and to identify my experience with the world adventure. i had become, by the way of giving life and losing it, a link in the chain that leads from dark to dark; i had touched for the moment a reality from which the process of self-realization could be measured. it was the most and the best i was to know of the incident called maternity, that whether it were most bitter or most sweet it was irrevocable.
i suppose, though he was always so inarticulate, that tommy must have caught something of my mood from me. he didn't seem to see anything ridiculous in my holding on to a fold of the baby's skirt all the way home; and when we had come into the house and the boy was laid in his crib again, so wan and so little, i sat on my young husband's knee and cried with my face against his, and he did not ask me what it was about.
i think, though, that we had not yet appreciated how near we were to losing him until my mother came to visit us along in the middle of the summer. she was quite excited, as she walked up from the station with tommy, and for her, almost gay with the novelty of spending a month with a married daughter, and then as soon as she had sight of the child, i saw her checked and startled inquiry travel from me to tommy and back to the child's meagre little features, and a new and amazing tenderness in all her manner to me. that night after i was in bed she came in her night-dress and kissed me without saying anything, and i was too surprised to make any motion of response. that was the first time i remember my mother having kissed me on anything less than an official occasion ... but she had buried five herself.
notwithstanding, my mother's coming and the care she took of the baby, seemed to make me, if anything, less prepared for the end. there were new remedies of my mother's to be tried which appeared hopeful. i recovered composure, thought of him as improving, when in fact it was only i who was stronger for a few nights' uninterrupted sleep. then there was a day on which he was very quiet and she scarcely put him down from her lap at all. i do not know what i thought of that, nor of the doctor coming twice that day, unsummoned. i suppose my sensibilities must have been blunted by the strain, for i recall thinking when tommy came home in the middle of the afternoon, how good it was we could all have this quiet time together. it was the end of june. i remember the blinds half drawn against the sun and the smell of lawns newly cut and the damask rose by the window; i was going about putting fresh flowers in the vases, a thing i had of late little time to do ... suddenly i noticed tommy crying. he sat close to my mother trying to make the boy's poor little claws curl round his finger, and at the failure tears ran down unwiped. i had never seen tommy cry. i put down my roses uncertain if i ought to go to him ... and all at once my mother called me.
