My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“What’s Lethe’s name? Is Lethe married?”

“Her name is the same as mine is, Froman. That’s her name. Lethe Froman. Or she goes by the name of Lethe Ross.”

Theodosia went soon after. She left Americy standing by the table picking at the delicate laces of the garments with pleased scrutiny.

Sitting above in her chamber she saw the hill fields beyond the town as the light of the sunset withdrew from the valley and spread laterally over the plowed spaces that were ready now for the tobacco and the corn. Her own uncertainty spread to become the uncertainty of the passing light that lingered wanly, renewed itself, or was diffused into the somber twilight. Presently she was looking out upon the uncertainty of trees and gloom which was lit in feeble masses here and there by the street-lights. Long after this she prepared for bed by the indefinite light of her lamp, which made a hard and futile glow that subtended remote black shadows. When she slept the hour was late. She fell into a confused dream that centered about Albert, who leaned toward her from a bank giving her flowers that he had plucked from beyond a fence, who walked before her down a long hall, passing farther away, moving toward the inevitable disaster of doors. Beyond this vivid image lay another, vaguely merged with it but more remote, a picture under a picture, a large awkward collie dog floundering before her in a path, moving away from her toward some fixed limit, and in her inner being lay a disgust of him and a loathing that fulfilled itself in a sudden sob of thankfulness when he passed beyond her view. The passing form became then Conway with a laugh in his eyes and pleasure in his words, but when he leaned near her to kiss he became Albert, who caught her away into an unhappy fulfilment for which she wept even in the deep trance of dream.

Later, long after, it seemed, into her sleep came a flat muffled sound as if it were the shape of a peal of alarm, falling long and dull against the enduring quality of her torpor. It was shaped, the sound, like the fire alarm of the town, insistent and reiterated, but it fell toneless upon her deadened senses. It seemed to her that she had slept very long when it came again, that it was more perpetual, blurred into her dream with matter that clotted and cluttered weary thought, timbers laid into mind, shapeless and unwieldy masses set into a mind fixed upon sleep. A brief annoyance arose with each curiously shaped flat tone, annoyance that any matter should reiterate itself as if it had importance above any other matter, but she did not stir in her bed or know any real beyond the cluttering wooden masses of cry that had some relation to the village fire alarm, some foolish senseless likeness. When the shapes finally ceased she became aware of their withdrawal and missed them with a small distress that half awakened her, but later she slept again.

Conway was burned to death that night when his father’s house was destroyed. Theodosia had the news of this disaster from Siver when he came to kindle the fire in her grate; there was a hint of late frost in the air. She waked from unrested sleep when Siver fumbled with the wood and the coal, when he fumbled with the door latch. She turned on her pillow as he waited at the doorway, as he looked away from the bed uncertainly, his head leaned forward, preparing a disclosure.

“What is it?” she asked. She knew he had something to tell. “Tell it, Siver. Has Aunt Bet got a misery this morning? Do you have to cook the breakfast?”

He told her then as he worried with the latch. Mr. Dudley Brooke’s house had burned. “Towarge midnight,” he said.

“Mr. Dudley Brooke’s house,” he said. He lingered at the door, half closing it, drifting in and out of the doorway, looking at the floor where the bright light of the fire danced in brilliant yellow, averting his eyes from her.