My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

She gathered the letters together and dropped them into the fire in a fury of anger, but when they had turned to feathery cinders she wondered at her act and repented of it. Persons had grown out of the search, a man vaguely outlined in youth, Anthony Bell, or her mother, Charlotte, others. Her infantile concept of her father as one playful, merry, light-hearted, child-like, made a confused war with later concepts of him as a jumble of demands upon affection and forbearance. She remembered her mother as a large passionate woman who hated her broken life, but in turn she remembered little Annie, born after the incident behind the jail, five years after. She was benumbed before the new knowledge and shared only with Anthony.

Her outer vision dulled by the fire and by weariness, her inner vision heightened, and she began to divide her being, searching for some soul or spirit. Her search took her into her grandfather’s being where it touched accurately to her own. He was old, withered, palsied, but he had life, a life, from first to last, she observed, and the house was real for him and the people of the house, the pain of his sickness. Her search took her into many of the ways of men. When a man is a baby someone uncovers his nakedness and bathes it. Then he has a long season of being obscure, withdrawn within himself, alive, secret with life. Finally he is old and again someone must uncover his nakedness and bathe him, handle him as if he were new-born. She herself had done this for him. Where, she questioned, is his soul?

She brought forward her knowledge of the old man’s life, trying to make it stand as a picture before her. As a young man he had taught for a time in some college. His journals had come from far cities and he would read all night. He had been richly alive then, sensitive, secret with life, his nakedness covered, his bow gallant, his compliments ready. He had been a gay story-teller, and his friends had loved him. They had come miles to visit him, to sit all night over the fire. Then he had married Alice, a strange woman who liked to sit apart.

When all the subtractions were made the naked man was left, new-born, uncovered. There should be a soul there somewhere, she thought, and she searched into the withered leavings of crippled body and quavering voice. When she had found this entity in her grandfather she would, she thought, be able to identify it within herself. Her emotion for him pooled largely within her and brought her to tears, and she gazed down into the red coals of her fire with a blurred vision. Gratitude and anxiety mingled in her weeping, and when she thought of the burnt letters her tears were renewed. Then she drew a blanket about her shoulders and went softly down the stairs to her grandfather’s door and listened to his noisy breathing with a sob of thankfulness that he still lived. She went within and passed beyond the glow of the night-light Siver had placed on the table near the bed. There was a mouldy smell of age putrefaction, close air, burning oil from the lamp. The fire had been covered with ashes, but it smouldered and gave a jerky flame. The air near the bed was heavy with the sour odor. The man lay stretched at length, sinking flatly into the bed, scarcely raising the quilts from their level. He had spread a silk handkerchief over his forehead to protect it from the cold, and she saw with a moment of shame that the handkerchief was streaked with stains where he had worn it about his throat. A week before she had bathed his face and shoulders, somewhat loathingly, but three days later she had bathed his entire body. She had grown in the interval. The days since had towered above her and she had reached to accompany each one to its highest pinnacle.

She loathed nothing that he might reveal and she looked at him searchingly. She remembered that his knowledge was gone or blurred; he could no longer lay his hand upon it; it was gone then; his charm was gone. What, she questioned, did his spirit have to do with his knowledge, with his person, his courage, his putrefying flesh, his taste, his temper, his determination, his belief in herself? He wanted to be alive, secret, shut within himself. She tried to eliminate from herself all but that which they held in common and, the cancellations made, to identify something which one could describe as deathless, as indicative of a man. Her tenderness intervened, however, and she found that she had resolved to make him some light flannel caps to protect his head from the cold while he slept. She felt a holy sense of comfort when she went softly from his door. In the hall Horace was taking off his overcoat. He had just come in.

“You’re up late, Dosia,” he said. “You let your fellows stay till after midnight. It’s not prudent. Trust a Bell.”

He opened the parlor door and looked in at the dark and the fireless hearth. She had gone to the foot of the staircase.

“Grandfather,” she said. “I was in his room.” She was indifferent to his words.

“Come on,” he said, “we’ll go upstairs together, hand in hand, our hearts entwined. ‘She’s a pretty girl now,’ I said the other day, said it to myself, you understand, and it wasn’t a lie I told either. No need to worry about the old man. He’s better. I’ll lay a bet he’ll be out again in a week. The old war horse, he’s not so easy beaten. He’ll come under the wire first, the old horse will. It’s been a long time since I walked upstairs with as pretty a lady.”

At the top of the flight, where his way led him down the hall to his room at the back of the house, he caught her into his arms.