The trumpet in the dust

by Constance Holme

“My daughter Tibbie,” Mrs. Clapham remarked, after the second pause; and, halting a little on her lame knee, she went into her cottage and shut the door.

PART IV
THE TRUMPET

CHAPTER I

It was the same cottage, and yet not the same; her old home, and yet a place that she hardly knew; but indeed for the first few moments she scarcely so much as saw it. All that it seemed to her just then was a shelter gathered around her in her oncoming grief. The grief had not reached her yet, but it was coming, and coming fast, feeling for her where she stood waiting in the path of its passionate sweep. She was like those who, caught on the sands by the tidal wave, found themselves fixed to the spot by the first sounds of its approach. Sooner or later, however, they always began to run, racing hither and thither, without hope and without goal. It was only she who could not begin to run. All she could do was to stand there, helpless and bound, until that deepest of tides had swung itself over her head.

The cottage was small enough, as she knew, far smaller than the House of Dreams, but it did not seem small enough to her now. It fretted her that she could not draw the walls close enough to her on every side. She wanted a place smaller still, darker and closer—more like the grave into which they would put Tibbie. From her post just inside the door she lifted her eyes for the first time, looking around her on all hands for that narrower, darker place....

But even after she had begun to search, it was some time before she could find it. Her mind which, unknown to herself, she had left behind her in the House of Dreams, refused at first to visualise any other. Already it had imprinted upon itself every inch of the rooms, so that she might have inhabited them for many years. Now her eyes, resting again upon objects which, only that morning, had been more familiar to her than her face, roamed over and round them with a puzzled expression. She had seen them so long that she had learned not to see them, and now out of them beheld fresh colours suddenly springing, new contours suddenly taking shape. There was a cupboard somewhere, said her unwillingly shifted mind, anxious to hurry away again to its happy place. She could almost feel it straining away from her like a separate thing, leaning and tugging against its leash. The cupboard was in the passage, said the impatient mind, and was firmly brought back to admit that there was no passage. It was up at the House of Dreams that there was a passage, a little hall; here there was only a cupboard under the stairs. Her eyes, focussing themselves at last, found the door to the narrow hole where coal was kept, and the broom, a broken hamper, a broken chair....

Her mind gave up the struggle when she remembered the chair, bringing itself back definitely from the House of Dreams. The wrench was so fierce that for the moment it seemed almost physical; an actual body seemed to be torn away. But as soon as it was done she saw the cottage as usual, knowing it to be hers, and letting it slide back into that place where she neither consciously saw nor thought of it at all. Limping, she went direct to the dark cupboard, and, groping with accustomed hands, found and brought forth the little chair. Lifting it in her arms as if it had been the child to whom it had once belonged, she set it upon the hearth; and from that far place where the great wave of it had been held back until the signal was given, her grief broke over her, swamping her, stamping her down—rolling her, choking her, but always sweeping her on, casting her up at length on that grey beach of total exhaustion where sorrow gives up at last its simulated dead....

It is always the child for whom a mother weeps when a son or a daughter dies; not the strong man or the mature woman, but the child whom she sees through and behind them and in them all their lives. The adult may have her confidence and pride, but it is the still faintly discerned child that holds and keeps her love. She looks up to the former, and is even a little afraid; the latter looks up to her, and sees her as God. For a mother, indeed, a child dies as soon as it ceases to be a child, though she may not weep for it then. Life, passing on inexorably, tells her that it is against nature to weep for this purely natural change. It is only when the grown man or woman, whom perhaps she can hardly recognise, is laid to rest, that she is allowed to weep. Then at last she may cry her heart out for the child who died but was never buried ever so long ago.

So it was for the child Tibbie that Mrs. Clapham wept, seated in the rocking-chair with the angry voice, her head dropped on the table on her outflung arms, and beside her the little lame chair resting lob-sidedly on the hearth. It was worm-eaten, it had lost a leg—the cane seat was ripped across; but it was still alive, as all much-used pieces of furniture are alive until they finally come to the axe. And indeed the personality of this chair was such as it seemed even the axe could hardly destroy. Low-legged, broad-seated, with a curved mahogany back, it had been a present to Tibbie from an old Colonel who lived in the place. A martyr to rheumatism himself, it had troubled him sorely to see the child sitting so often on the cottage step. “Suffer for it—she’ll suffer for it!” he used to say, stopping stiffly in front of her as he hobbled past; and after he had said it a time or two, he had sent the chair. Tibbie had simply lived in it from that time on—played in it, eaten, chattered and fallen asleep. It had had its place by the window in summer, by the fender during the winter. It was the centre of great games played by Tibbie and others out in the street, and she had even been seen, bound on some errand, dragging it after her on a string. It was a wonder, indeed, that it did not attend her to school. When she was older again she had sat in it while she sewed, the centre of billows of drapery sweeping all over the floor. The last time she had sat in it was with Baby Steve in her arms, her laughing fair head leaned to his sad eyes.... But it was neither as the young dressmaker nor as the young mother that Mrs. Clapham could think of Tibbie just then. The years of maturity were all of them wiped out, leaving only the many pictures of the child and the little chair.

Yet it was on that very day that Tibbie had sat in it with Baby Steve, that the chair had finally, so to speak, thrown up its job. It had been a brave chair, taking things as they came, turning when required into a railway-train or a ’bus, a chopping-block, perhaps, or even a stand for a machine. It had been made of sound stuff by sensible, skilled hands, and it showed itself worthy to its latest hour. But, as it is with the best people, so it was with the good chair; all in a moment it had begun to grow old. Quite suddenly it began to show its scratches and dents, and to lose the last of its fine gloss. It began to creak when a hand was laid on its back, as if it had been the giver resenting a sudden touch. Presently they discovered it to be worm-eaten, and knew then that it “wouldn’t be long.” Even then, however, it had managed to hold together, until this last day when it had decided to cease. Perhaps the recent rains had got into its old bones, or else the weight of the new generation was greater than it could face. Anyhow, Tibbie had sprung to her feet, saying “Mother! I do believe, Mother ... the old chair’s giving way!” and as they had stared at it, almost afraid, it had softly released a leg, and then laid itself down with the air of a live thing gently preparing itself for death....