Tommy had taken the baby from me, for, though I could somehow never get enough of the feel of him, his head in the hollow of my shoulder, his weight against my arm, I was so little strong myself that I was glad to pretend that it was because he was really getting heavy, and just then we passed a little mound, so low, where a new headboard had been set up with the superscription, "Only son of —— and —— aged eight months," and it was the age, and the little mound was just the length of my boy. I think there was a rush of tears to cover that, the realization by a kind of prevision that it was just to that he was to come, tears checked in mid-course by the swift up-rush of the certainty, of the reality, of the absoluteness of human experience. For by whatever mystery or magic he had come to identity through me, he was my son as I knew, and not even death could so unmake him.
I dwell upon this and one other incident which I shall relate in its proper place, as all that was offered to me of the traditional compensation for what women are supposed to be. If a sedulous social ideal has kept them from the world touch through knowledge and achievement, it has been because, sincerely enough, they have not been supposed to be prevented from world processes so much as directed to find them in a happier way. This would be reasonable if they found them. What society fails to understand, or dishonestly fails to admit, is that marriage as an act is not invariably the stroke that ushers in the experience of being married.
Whatever proportions the change in my life had assumed to the outward eye, it was only by the imagined pain of loss that I began to perceive that I could never be quite in the same relation to things again, and to identify my experience with the world adventure. I had become, by the way of giving life and losing it, a link in the chain that leads from dark to dark; I had touched for the moment a reality from which the process of self-realization could be measured. It was the most and the best I was to know of the incident called maternity, that whether it were most bitter or most sweet it was irrevocable.
I suppose, though he was always so inarticulate, that Tommy must have caught something of my mood from me. He didn't seem to see anything ridiculous in my holding on to a fold of the baby's skirt all the way home; and when we had come into the house and the boy was laid in his crib again, so wan and so little, I sat on my young husband's knee and cried with my face against his, and he did not ask me what it was about.
I think, though, that we had not yet appreciated how near we were to losing him until my mother came to visit us along in the middle of the summer. She was quite excited, as she walked up from the station with Tommy, and for her, almost gay with the novelty of spending a month with a married daughter, and then as soon as she had sight of the child, I saw her checked and startled inquiry travel from me to Tommy and back to the child's meagre little features, and a new and amazing tenderness in all her manner to me. That night after I was in bed she came in her night-dress and kissed me without saying anything, and I was too surprised to make any motion of response. That was the first time I remember my mother having kissed me on anything less than an official occasion ... but she had buried five herself.
Notwithstanding, my mother's coming and the care she took of the baby, seemed to make me, if anything, less prepared for the end. There were new remedies of my mother's to be tried which appeared hopeful. I recovered composure, thought of him as improving, when in fact it was only I who was stronger for a few nights' uninterrupted sleep. Then there was a day on which he was very quiet and she scarcely put him down from her lap at all. I do not know what I thought of that, nor of the doctor coming twice that day, unsummoned. I suppose my sensibilities must have been blunted by the strain, for I recall thinking when Tommy came home in the middle of the afternoon, how good it was we could all have this quiet time together. It was the end of June. I remember the blinds half drawn against the sun and the smell of lawns newly cut and the damask rose by the window; I was going about putting fresh flowers in the vases, a thing I had of late little time to do ... suddenly I noticed Tommy crying. He sat close to my mother trying to make the boy's poor little claws curl round his finger, and at the failure tears ran down unwiped. I had never seen Tommy cry. I put down my roses uncertain if I ought to go to him ... and all at once my mother called me.
CHAPTER III
Very closely on the loss of my baby, of which I have spared you as much as possible, came crowding the opening movement of my artistic career. Within a month I was in a hospital in Chicago, recovering from the disastrous termination of another expectancy that had come, scarcely regarded in the obsession of anxiety and overwork during the last weeks of my boy's life, and had failed to sustain itself under the shock of his death. And after the hospital there was a month of convalescence at Pauline's. It was the first time I had seen her since her marriage.
I found her living in one of those curious, compressed city houses, one room wide and three deep, which, after the rambling, scattered homes of Higgleston, induced a feeling of cramp, until I discovered a kind of spaciousness in the life within. It was really very little else than relief from the accustomed inharmonies of rurality, a sort of scenic air and light that answered perfectly so long as you believed it real. Pauline's wall papers were soft, unpatterned, with wide borders; her windows were hung with plain scrim and the furniture coverings were in tone with the carpets. When ladies called in the afternoon, Pauline gave them tea which she made in a brass kettle over a spirit lamp. You can scarcely understand what that kettle stood for in my new estimate of the graciousness of living: a kind of sacred flame, round which gathered unimagined possibilities for the dramatization of that eager inward life which, now that the strictures of bodily pain were loosed, began to press toward expression. It rose insistently against the depressing figure my draggled and defeated condition must have cut in the face of Pauline's bright competency and the quality of assurance in her choice of the things among which she moved. Whatever her standards of behaviour or furniture, they were always present to the eye, not sunk below the plane of consciousness like mine, and she could always name you the people who practised them or the places where they could be bought and at what price. My expressed interest in the teakettle, led at once to the particular department store where I saw rows of them shining in the ticketed inaccessibility of seven dollars and ninety-eight cents. From point to point of such eminent practicability I was pricked to think of preëmpting some of these new phases of suitability for myself, finding myself debarred by the flatness of my purse. The effect of it was to throw me back into the benumbing sense of personal neglect with which the city had burst upon me. From the first, as I began to go about still in my half-invalided condition, I had been tremendously struck with the plentitude of beauty. Here was every article of human use made fair and fit so that nobody need have lacked a portion of it, save for an inexplicable error in the means of distribution. I, for instance, who had within me the witness of heirship, had none of it.