“If we could only die together and neither of us be left—
“God wouldn’t call that suicide—oh, He couldn’t, not when there’s two people that nobody wants and they don’t ask anything but just to be together. That nobody really wants—my daughter don’t—except maybe the Tubbses. And they are so poor, too. Nobody needs us and we just want to find a happy way to go off together where we can sleep! Oh, I wouldn’t think that would be wrong, would it?”
They were at home. She hastened to burrow among the pile of stewpans for the nine dollars, her week’s salary, which she had hidden there. When she found that it was safe, she didn’t care so much, after all. What difference would it have made if the money had been gone?
Father staggered like a drunkard to one of the flimsy, straight, uncomfortable chairs. But he got himself up and tried to play on the mouth-organ a careless tune of grassy hills and a summer breeze. While he played he ridiculed himself for such agony over the loss of an overcoat, but his philosophizing didn’t mean anything. He had lost the chance of finding work when he had lost the overcoat. He couldn’t really think, and the feeble trickle of music had a tragic absurdity. He petulantly threw the mouth-organ on the bed, then himself slumped on the coverlet. His face was grayly hopeless, like ashes or dust or the snow of great cities.
Mother had been brooding. She was only distantly conscious of his final collapse. She said, suddenly, bluntly: “Let’s go away together. If we could only die while we are still together and have some nice things to remember—”
Hers was the less conventional mind of the two. He protested—but it was a feeble mumble. The world had come to seem unreal; the question of leaving it rather unimportant.
Much they talked, possibly for hours, but the talk was as confused as the spatter of furniture in that ill-lighted room—lighted by a gas-jet. All that they said was but repetition of her first demand.
While he lay on the bed, flat, his arms out, like a prisoner on a rack, wondering why all his thoughts had become a void in which he could find no words with which to answer her, she slowly stood up, turned out the gas, then again opened the gas-cock.
She hastily stripped off her overcoat and fitted it over the crack at the bottom of the door, where showed a strip of light from the slimy hall without. She caught up the red cotton table-cloth and stuffed it along the window, moving clumsily through the room, in which the darkness was broken only by pallid light that seeped through the window from cold walls without. She staggered over and lay down beside him. Her work was done, and in the darkness her worried frown changed to a smile of divine and mothering kindliness which did not lessen as a thin, stinging, acid vapor of illuminating gas bit at her throat and made her cough.
Father raised his head in stupefied alarm. She drew him down, put his head on her shoulder. She took his hand, to lead him, her little boy, into a land of summer dreams where they would always be together. The Innocents were going their way, asking no one’s permission, yet harming no one.... His hand was twitching a little; he coughed with a sound of hurt bewilderment; but she held his hand firmly, and over this first rough part of the road the mother of tenderness led him pityingly on.