My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

They walked about the house to the north wall and traced the creeper to its last and most remote tendril high at the eaves above the north attic window, calling, “See here!”

“See, Tony,” she said. “A hundred feet and over since it touched ground.”

They seemed sweetly childish in their pleasure in the vine and Theodosia looked at them with wonder and detachment. The best thing in the world teased her for a reply. She saw that her aunt had cared for the vine and had become actual and present in her pride of it. She had brought it from a long distance and had cared for it along the way in the train, giving it water. It had come from the wall of some relative in Virginia. She turned to Mnemosyne, for the beautiful word came again and again to her ear once her grandfather had named it. He had told her of it before, Memory, the mother of all, the seed of the mind. It was a curious question, the query her uncle had made, as simple as breath; she thought that all the people in the world must know the answer or must be in pursuit of the answer to a question of such importance—the best thing in the world. She wondered if Mnemosyne might not be the answer, the best, and her mind swam dizzily in a sense of vaguely remembered beautiful words, their ideas ill-shaped, words remembered more for their beauty of tone than for their thought—asphodel, Mytilene. But there were other beautiful things, other best things. They eluded her, unnamed, receding down a long vista into her inner sight. She recalled particular occasions when the surrounding world had seemed good, a good place in which to be. Admiring words from others, caresses, gifts, all the people singing in the church—in the seed of each happening an insufficiency. There was never enough.

They were on the portico again, the mottled shadows of the boughs falling on their faces. The voices became sharp and firm, pleasantly outlined, immense, governed by some relation to the vine on the wall and its great reach from the soil of the ground. In the moment all the people present became actors in a pageant and all the words they said seemed deeply significant as if they were proclaiming themselves now in their real and permanent, unillusory aspect, in their true cause and relation. Annie lay in the doorway with a picture book. Anthony Bell was talking, his hand upraised. Lucas came from the kitchen garden with a respectful message, affected embarrassment, his head bowed, the proper approach. Their voices stood with length and breadth, sharply edged.

Every day or two Theodosia would ask her aunt if she and Annie might go to see Aunt Deesie. The walk across the pasture and the cornfield was long, but the pleasure of Aunt Deesie’s yard was sweet. Aunt Deesie ironed the clothes, heating the irons on the open embers of the fire that burned in the yard. The baby always lay on the quilt and the small girls stood bashfully about. One day Theodosia took them some of the candy Tom Singleton had brought from the store. She could scarcely endure the joy of her loathing as she touched their fingers in giving them the sweets.

Near the end of the week Miss Doe went away in the buggy early in the afternoon and Tom and Anthony played checkers under the pine tree. The dogs walked about sleepily in the bright air, which was of the radiance of early autumn, or they slept in the shaded doorway of the barn. The day moved slowly and her stay at the farm seemed to Theodosia to be bent or deflected from its purposes. Little Annie wanted to play with the dolls, but Theodosia grew weary of them. The kitchen was closed; there was no drama being done there; no one was feeding the stock at the barns or fastening the dogs into the apple house. She wandered back to the pine tree where the game of checkers went happily along, but it could not entertain her. She whispered to Annie as they went behind the house in their search for something to do.

“We’ll go to see Aunt Deesie.”

They took the cotton umbrella from the back porch although there were no clouds. The memory of the first visit should tinge this adventure. They crossed the pasture in the brilliant sun and entered the cornfield, but when they were scarcely started along the path by the corn Annie said that she was thirsty and that she must have a drink, and she cried. She could not go farther without a drink, she said. Theodosia urged her on and promised a drink at Aunt Deesie’s cabin. When they left the cornfield and came near the cove a strange aspect of the place accosted them, for it was closed and still. All the tubs were neatly piled beside the door, their bottoms turned up, and the clotheslines were gone. They shouted from the small gate but the house was empty. Aunt Deesie and the children were gone. The place was frightful crouched under its loneliness.