My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“Everybody liked him,” Frank said. “He was just like his brother Reginald. Everybody likes Reg. It was careless to leave a lamp all night under an incubator, wasn’t it? It’s queer nobody heard the explosion.”

“Let’s sit here a little while, under this pine tree. On the grass.”

“I went to the creek to fish one summer with a party, Conway in the lot. I remember how we laughed and talked all the best part of a night once, a big log fire, and how Conway looked, by the fire, in the light of the blaze. Laughed till he shook all over when Albert told the one about the deacon up at Elijah Church. Did you ever hear Albert tell about Deacon Pope’s prayer?”

“No. Or maybe I have. I don’t know.”

She sat under the pine tree, inattentive to Frank’s story, lost in a haze of grief which was no less ever-present because she did not know exactly where it centered. She knew that if Frank had not been present she should actually have wept, but that he held the flow of her grief intact with some hushing power, that his presence called for definite tears, exactly wept, committed to a future which she had now obliterated.

Alone in her room when the walk was over, she remembered the beauty of the hilltop and the sublimated air of the bird’s song, and the grass that swung backward in the late afternoon sunlight. As her memory grew more intense, dwelt upon, the intensity of her grief multiplied, gathered now into a passion for Conway, whom she was free to mourn and long for. She remembered every gesture and posture of his body, conned each one to bring it back to being, and focused about his jealousy, which had become precious now, and about his bitter, hurt replies, that fell the more poignantly in that they were surrounded by his lightness and carelessness. She was free to love him and to want him. Her hate of Albert inverted itself and became an intense passion for Conway. She searched for a small picture of him, turning out boxes and drawers in a state of violent grief which centered half the night about the finding of this small physical token. When she had found it she set it upon her mantel in the place of honor from which she had withdrawn pictures of Albert, of Ruth, and of Jane.

Preoccupied with her grief she took less account of the town. Jane came no more to sit on her piano bench and twitter at the notes of the music, or if she came to the portico for a brief call she seemed business-like, abstracted, mirthless. Ruth had found diversions in another street. She saw them clearly now. They had liked her sincerely, in their ways, but they had liked her as a means of access to Conway and Albert. They had poured their friendship over her for this.

She practised in her chamber now, above the street, close to the lower boughs of the great elm tree, remote from interruption, and in her zeal Conway kept with her in mind, delighting with her in each graceful run and in each whispering trill. She would speak to him continually, commenting on each effort and each achievement, assuming him in mind as a companion. “You hear that?” she would say, or “How’s that for a few first-hand remarks on the joy of being above the ground? Of running around the wheel of the seasons?” Or, inarticulate before what she did, articulating only with the cry of the strings, she felt such rush of impulse as would say: Here in this succession of sound cries out a sorrow greater than our personal sorrows, the sorrow of the whole of man at finding himself in an earth addicted to time. As would say: Here in the adagio man spreads out the infinite tentacles of his multiform being, his personality, and lays, kind for kind, each sensitive feeler upon a like that protrudes from the Source. As would say: This theme, a pastoral from some central-European rolling plain, is ours as we sit in the heart of this land where the seasons rise and fall in waves, a melancholy procession, and men mark their time with their labor as they roll the soil over from year to year endlessly plowing. Conway was with her in these articulations, in the breath of her throat, in the beat of her right hand over the gut wires. The people went by, fluttering to the county fair and back, and August was over. A disaster from the outside world, reported, passed over the town and left a ripple of hysteria. Theodosia played in her chamber, except on the day set for the appearance of her master, above the shock of the street, above the calamity, relating her carefully guarded playing, guardedly within its bounds, to Conway. The town had begun to rumble of a mishap of its own.

Through the buying and selling of the town, the greetings and passings here and there, a mishap had begun to be felt. A young woman, a girl named Minnie Harter, was known to be bearing a child. Whispers of this had floated over the gossip of the streets and the porches. Minnie was a plump soft girl who limped slightly when she walked. She lived with her parents at the end of the street, near the house where Conway had lived. Whispers said that she had had too many intimates. The long roadway up the avenue under the trees now led to Minnie’s door as the shock of her ill-doing mounted and frayed out to a settled fact. The rumor of Minnie came upon Theodosia as she worked over the adagio one summer morning, or it faintly colored her sense of her act as she darned the household linens that were now worn and thin. Looking intently at the lapping threads of the cloth as she darned, she penetrated the folding lines of cotton, one up and one down, over and over, they unsatisfied and completed in one instant, and she searched minutely into the flash of recognition that had accompanied her first seeing when reality had lain on the instant just behind the warp and weft of these accurately braided lines of old worn cloth. “Some truth is near at hand,” she thought, striving to regain the acumen of the lost moment. She became more cool and more abstracted, passing to another mood regarding her playing, as if some cold disinterested part stood outside herself. In this temper she searched into the limitations of her hand, at the end of an hour of duos with her master, and pried out each truth, flinching from nothing, testing her reach as if it were the reach of some other musician, some hand remote from her in which she had only a curious interest.

“And that marks the limit of what you can do in that direction.... Your mind can go beyond your hand....” The master made her points clear.