The home-maker

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

For one instant, an instant she never forgot, Evangeline knew for the first, the only time in her life, a gust of cold, deadly contempt for herself. It nearly killed her, she who had tried so hard all her life to keep her self-respect, she who had been willing to pay any price so that in her own eyes she might be always in the right. Yes, it nearly killed her.

But it did not reconcile her to the inevitable nor bow her spirit in resignation. Never before had she been asked to pay any such price as this.

She couldn’t! She couldn’t! She stood stock-still in her prison cell and wrung her hands in revolt. She simply could not. After having known something else, she could not go back to the narrow, sordid round of struggle with intolerable ever-renewed drudgery, to the daily, hourly contact with the children’s forgetfulness, carelessness, foolishness ... to Stephen’s horrible tempers ... with no outlet ... no future ... poverty for them all, always.

Poverty! It came down suffocatingly over her head like a smothering blanket thrown and twisted hard by an assailant who had sprung upon her out of the dark. She had thought herself safe from that long, slow starvation. To go back to it, to the raging, helpless narrowness of an income tragically too small, to rise up and lie down with that leaden care, to drag it about all day like a ball and chain ... she could never endure it now that she knew that it was not in the least inevitable, knew how easy it was to avoid it, knew that if Lester were only willing to care a little more, to try a little harder, to put his mind on it really and truly, to give his heart to it as she did....

All her old burning impatience with Lester was there, boiling up in clouds from the cauldron of her heart.

Through those turbid clouds she had a glimpse of a woman, touched and moved, standing by a man’s bedside and blessing him silently for his faithfulness, his gentleness, his fineness ... but those figures were far away, flat and unreal, like something in a made-up picture. They were but an added irritation. She hated the thought of them as a creature in flames would hate the recollection of a running brook.

Poverty ... isolation, monotony, stagnation, killing depression over never-ending servile tasks ... poverty!

There was no way out. She knew that now. But she could not endure it. She never could endure it again. She would hate Lester. She would kill herself and the children.

She had sunk lower and lower till now she was crouching in a heap, panting, her bent arms over her face as if beaten down by relentless blows which she could no longer even try to parry.

What could she do? Her native energy rose up blindly, staggering, like a courageous fighter who has been knocked out but does not know it. What could she do? With a terrible effort, she strove to rise to a higher level than this mere brute suffering. She tried—yes, she really tried for a moment to think what was the right thing to do. She tried again to pray, to ask God to show her what was the right thing for a good woman to do—but she could not pray.