Little Heinie had almost immediately fallen asleep, leaning against the table, a ring of brown curls and two big ears catching the light as it played about his bent head.
Yes, that was the way they would be sitting if she were not there, if she were dead. She felt thinly miserable, like something that had been and no longer was ... like her own ghost. Irma was wiping her spectacles again.
"Give me the mending," said her sister-in-law, but somewhat timidly, she never quite knew what Irma would do, "I haven't used my eyes today."
Irma passed it over to her silently and changed places with her. She felt a little less useless then; coming into the circle of light with the boys seemed to take her out of that shadowy, unpleasant world where superfluous, dependent old women were waiting uncertainly, wretchedly, to get into the cold grave. No, Irma's ways were not comfortable ways, and it was all a part of the general misfit of things that it was Irma who was the widow and had the alcove and the three sons and needed help.
When from time to time Ferry coughed, just a tiny cough, but quite regular, almost like the slow, sure tick of the clock, his mother's black brows would contract at that spectre of the "Viennese malady" which had found its way into her home. Her sister-in-law wasn't the only ghost there.
Irma was from the Plitvicer Lakes, beyond Agram, now become Serb. There was always that something rough, even fierce about her, not at all like the easy-going Viennese, not like the fiery Hungarians, not like anything Frau Stacher was familiar with. Perhaps it was what had attracted Heinie. But she was vaguely afraid of it.
Irma had at one time tried to go back to her own country, to her people, with her sons—a woman bringing sons would be welcome. Then the extraordinary, the unbelievable thing revealed itself. She found she didn't exist there any more, no more than if she were dead; less than that even, for then she would have had a grave. Austrian papers were of no use to her and Servian papers she could not get. The little town where she was born, on the wild Milanovac Lake was no longer a Crownland. Her people were no longer her people; even her brother was no longer her brother. The white house with the warm brown roof and the vine growing over the door that got so red in the autumn, and the chestnut tree that got so yellow, there in front with the circular seat—all that, their father's legacy to them—she no longer had any share in it. There were, it appeared, many of these spots, these veritable no man's lands, where children had no rights and strange people went over thresholds worn by parental feet and strange people slept in the beds they were born in. If only she could have gone back there with her boys and wrested her living in some way from the wild soil, ... and Ferry in the mountain air! No wonder Irma was sombre, was fierce, and bore her sorrows heavily.
Frau Stacher kept reminding herself of all this, but what could she or anybody do about it? They were all caught in a trap ... simple and terrible as that. As she sat measuring the tuck in a shirt sleeve, she was suddenly aware of being worn to exhaustion with the changes and excitements of the new order of her days. Such desperate exertions just to keep the breath in her body! She wanted to get her clothes off, lie down, shut her eyes, be in darkness with the effortless night before her. But she sat on silently, drawing the thread weakly in and out of the thin stuff and now and then looking up at the boys. They were pale, but they were young. They could—even Ferry—expect more brightly-colored, fuller years. But for herself!... With difficulty she kept the tears from falling over her work, but only when Irma said:
"Now, boys, to bed, you've studied enough," did she feel free to lay it aside.
Then Irma quite ostentatiously told the children to say good night, though Ferry was already leaning affectionately, after his way, against his aunt and saying that he would help make up the divan, but Irma who suffered terribly from jealousy and could ill endure these signs of love, told him it was late and that she would help Tante Ilde. The three then kissed her resoundingly, but sleepily. When she felt the nearness of those young bodies, their adolescent strength held in leash by that sapping undernourishment, she realized all the more that she was useless, her sands run. She forgot that she was paying for the alcove and wondered if this was the way things would always be, as she finally laid herself down on the old brown divan, on that divan that had for years been in the sitting room at Baden, and when all the beds were in use had offered a pleasant night's rest to the last-come child. Now she was sleeping on it herself, but as an intruder, fitfully, unquietly, from time to time hearing Ferry cough and turn in his bed, and always Irma's loud, empty snore.