“Come, review your days and your years, call them to account! Tell us how much time you have allowed to be stolen from you by a creditor, by a mistress, by a patron, by a client.” Which of us can read those lines without blushing?
This night is my birth night. Nine and twenty years ago, at eleven o’clock, when the July sun had sunk out of the valley of the James, when the cattle were at rest, and the whippoorwills uttered forth their conscience-stricken notes, “Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!” the moon had arisen and shone upon the purple bloom of the fox-grapes, hidden above the brook, then a deep joy came over my mother and she was delivered of me. It must have been the blessed, unspeakable, sacred joy of labour, which men never know. My father told me once that she wept in the midst of her joy—that is how I know.
XIII
Suffering, suffering. Oh, mystery of pain! Then surcease from pain. And pain again. Oh, mystery of death, the sure relief. And yet I can not bring myself to do that.
“You must have sleep at any cost,” my doctor says, “or the mind will give.”
Courage! courage! Bring in the pitcher and the bowl, Sandy; I need more courage. My doctor is right. The mind is the whole thing. The memory and the imagination can conjure up the few supreme moments of my buried life when she sat beside me and rested over me, looking down into my eyes, as we were stretched at full length beneath the crab-tree blossoms. There is her father’s house upon the hill, a white house with the old balcony porch; there is the row of servants’ quarters, whitewashed in the sunshine, and the little negro children playing under the swaying hollyhocks—and here am I beside her, and she by my side. She wears a blue sun-bonnet, turned back, and a low collar, revealing her soft, delicate neck. Gently she tosses my hair, and smooths my eyebrows with her sensitive fingers. Ah me, my arms yearn forth, and I let my head fall in her lap, and almost—almost fall asleep.
“Dearest boy,” she whispers, her lips moistening my ear, and I catch the rare aroma of her hair, “my boy, my boy, the ecstasy ahead of us when I shall hold you close, so close! See the new moon in the day sky, dear? I think of a time when she will shine upon us two together, covering us with silvered light until I might just see you dimly enough to stroke your face. Twelve more moons and the thirteenth we will pledge together, and lie here under our crab-apple tree, you and I alone, you and I and the wind—oh, I mustn’t think of it. Sometimes it makes me almost wild.”
Then came the rapids and the whirlpools in the gulf of my development. And I sank. When I came up again, I had lost her.