My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

She was sitting up in the bed now, the coverlets thrown aside, her passion to know what Siver had been saying over and over leaping the space that had been set between them by their offices as mistress and houseman. She asked rapid questions, impatient of the replies which came as if they had been known before, came to her ears as routine once the first great fact had assailed her.

“Mr. Conway, he got burned up too, got burned to death in the house, clean to death,” Siver said.

He stood in the doorway, rubbing his hand on the wood of the frame, mumbling his story over and over beyond the low flare of her repeated questions. Suddenly her mind became clear again after the fog of surprise. It was true that Siver had dreamed the story.

“You dreamed all this, Siver. You’re not awake yet.”

“You can smell the smoke out in the trees for your own self and you can smell the burn outside, if you go out. They got his body out towarge day and put it in a coffin and took it over to Mr. Eli Brooke’s house, his uncle’s house. You can see the smoke out in the trees and you can smell of the fire....”

The report was then a confirmation; the coffin, when Siver spoke of it, settled the truth into her. She arose and dressed herself for the day and later she met the music teacher in the parlor and played the lesson with mechanical care.

When the obligation of the lesson was done she went to her room and later she lay on her bed to stare at the ceiling until her grief took shape. At first there were three Conways to play back and forth in her mind, the Conway of the first fact, as he had been Friday evening and many another evening, charming, negligent, beautiful to see, kissing her at the door, flinging her a smile from beyond the lamp. Over against this lay the awful second fact, Conway a charred, shrunken ember lying in a coffin which no one dared open, which would never again be opened. This was Conway. Up the street half a mile, in an avenue of trees to a doorway, through a hall and a parlor, and there lay the horrible fact. She was not afraid of it. It was real, there, never to be denied, and if he could endure it so could she. The second fact was hers now. The third fact grew together, gaining strength as the minutes passed, dominating all the rest. This was Conway become a memory. The third fact had already begun to supplant the first. The fact of him as a memory, as finished, as perpetual now and unchanged, stole over the first and dimmed it. At this recognition she wept with more pain and reached for the first fact with greater eagerness, but the third prevailed until the first became an utter shadow and went before the day was done.

She lay on her bed, spent with weeping, remembering now the alarms of the night and knowing that they had been the last cry of Conway’s circumstance. She probed her memory of the night to penetrate its knowledge for every substance and sound, and she remembered the flat toneless matter that had cluttered her rest. She turned continually to Albert as the one who must give her comfort and ease her pain, and her longing for him became perpetual. She knew that he had gone across the state on some mission, but she thought that he would come to Conway’s funeral when he learned of the disaster. Over and over she decided that she would send him a message telling him to come, and she thought of his grief as identical with her own. Conway had been their friend, Albert’s first, and through Albert her own. She would weep anew to recall how much the two of them had loved Conway. But she kept to a passive rôle and sent no message. Albert did not come. He had been traveling all week into remote countries and was not easily reached by the telegraphed communications which someone sent.

The days passed slowly while her life seemed suspended in grief, days scarcely noticed until many of them were gone and Conway had become the last fact utterly, had achieved dissolution. He lay intangible now among the elements of a past that had slipped by while she was unaware.