She stopped, silenced by the scantiness of her vocabulary, but through her mind still whirled wordless outcries of rebellion. Her one brief visit to the city rose before her with all the horror of the inexplicable, strange, and repellent life which it had revealed to her. The very conveniences of the compact city apartment were included in her revulsion from all that it meant. The very kindnesses of the pretty, plump German woman who was her daughter-in-law startled and repelled her, as did the familiar, easy, loud-voiced affection of the blond young German-Americans who were her grandchildren. Even her own son, Hiram, become half Teutonic through the influence of his business and social relations among the Germans, seemed alien and remote to her. The stout, beer-drinking, good-natured and easygoing man seemed another person from the shy, stiff lad who had gone away from them many years ago, looking so like his father at nineteen that his mother choked to see him.
She passed in review all the small rooms of her son's home, "strung along the hall like buttons on a string," and thought of the three flights of stairs which were the only escape from them—three long, steep flights, which left her breathless, her knees trembling under her great weight, and which led out on the narrow side street, full of noisy, impertinent children and clattering traffic. Beyond that, nothing—a city full of strangers whose every thought and way of life were foreign to her, whose very breath came in hurried, feverish gasps, who exhaled, as they passed her, an almost palpable emanation of hostile indifference to her and her existence. It was no new vision to her. Ever since the doctor's verdict had made it impossible longer to resist her son's dutiful urging of his parents to make his home theirs she had spent scarcely an hour without a sudden sick wave of dread of what lay before her; but the picture was the none the less horrifying because of familiarity, and she struck her hands together with a sharp indrawn breath.
The gaunt old man turned toward her, a helpless sympathy twisting his seamed and weather-marked face. "It's too bad, mother," he said. "I know just how you feel about it. But Hiram's a good son, and"—he hesitated, casting about for a redeeming feature—"there's always the Natural History Museum and the birds."
"That's just it, Nathaniel," returned the old rebel against fate. "You have something there that's going on with one thing you've done here. You've always noticed birds and studied 'em in the woods, and you can go on doing it in a museum. But there ain't a thing for me! All I've ever done is to live right here in this house ever since I was born, and look out at the mountains and the big meadows and the river and the churchyard, and keep house and take care of you and the children.
"Now the children are all gone, and I haven't the strength to take care of you the way you need; my life is all done—there ain't no more to it!
"It's like a book—there's still a chapter you can write, or one you can finish up; but me—I've come right down to Finis, only the Lord won't write it for me. It's as if somebody wanted to scrawl on the back flyleaf something that hasn't a thing to do with the rest of the book, some scratching stuff in a furrin' language that I can't even understand."
Her husband did not contradict her. He sighed heavily and they both fell again into a cheerless silence. The moon rose with a strange, eerie swiftness over the wall of mountain before them, and its wavering reflection sprang at once to life in the swirling waters of the black hole in the Necronsett on the other side of the meadow. The old woman's heart gave a painful leap in her breast at the sight. It was probably one of the last times she would see it. Numberless occasions when she had noted it before hurried through her mind.
She felt herself again the little girl who had sat in summer evenings, miles away from the talk of her elders in a happy child's reverie, and who had grown dizzy with watching the swimming reflection in the whirlpool. She had a strange fleeting hallucination that she was again sitting in the moonlight, her cheeks flushed and her strong young pulse beating high to hear Nathaniel's footfall draw nearer down the road. She felt again the warm, soft weight of her little son, the first-born, the one who had died young, as she remembered how proud she and Nathaniel had been when he first noticed the moon.
An odd passion of recollection possessed her. As the moon rose higher she seemed to be living over at one time a thousand hours of her busy, ardent life. She looked at the high, drooping line of the mountains with her childhood's delight in its clear outline against the sky; she saw the white stones of the old graveyard, next door, glimmer through the shadow cast by the church tower, with the half uneasy, fearful pleasure of her romantic girlhood; she felt about her the solidity and permanency of the old house, her father's and her grandfather's home, with the joy in protected security of her young married life; and through it all there ran a heavy sick realization that she was, in fact, a helpless old woman, grown too feeble to conduct her own life, and who was to be forced to die two deaths, one of the spirit and one of the body.
"Come, mother," said Nathaniel, rising, "we'd better go to bed. We both of us get notiony sitting here in the moonlight."