“Oh, it’s such a pity, oh, it’s such a pity!” she moaned; and the words contained all the awful depth of her woe, all the concentrated sorrow. “Oh, it’s such a pity, such a pity!” she kept on repeating, finding no other words to express her grief and lending them power by force of repetition.
He remained lying there ... and she remained kneeling; and all that crowd of people stood silently looking on, startled and impressed by that sacred, solemn mourning. And the impressive hush, the silence of all those people, the desperate helplessness of those folk, she alone suffering and crying and unable to help her child and the people unwilling to help him: that impotence pierced her soul; and the patient suffering changed into a frenzied madness, a raging fury. With a terrible scream, like that of a goaded beast, a hoarse yell that came grating out of her parched throat, she thrust her arms, stiff with pain, like two steel rods, under the arms of that limp corpse and, with a superhuman effort, with Herculean strength exalted by suffering, she lifted the corpse, pressed it to her body, raised it with her outstretched arms and dragged it, with its legs trailing behind it, hurrying along at a mad pace, with the one idea of getting home with her child, her only child, away, far away from that callous crowd which desecrated her sorrow: there she would weep, sob out all her grief and find words, sweet words which must throb through her child and wake him and bring him back to life!
All that packed crowd had first followed her with their eyes, struck by the sudden outburst of that mad rage; and then they had gone after her, inquisitively. And it did not last long before the police-constables—those phlegmatic posts with which any outbreak of undue human emotion must always in the end collide—stopped them; they pulled those bony arms from round the corpse and took the little mother, now hanging slack and limp, one on either side by the arm and led her away. The body was carried to the mortuary.
With a resounding oath the foreman drove his folk back to work and set all that rolling activity going once more.
The passers-by hastened away; and the saw screeched, the chisel tapped, the hammer banged, the bricks were hauled up on high and the gorgeous building, the pride of a metropolis, stood resplendent in the glaring white mid-day sun, as if nothing had happened.
X. WHITE LIFE
Her life flowed on as a little brook flows under grass on a Sunday noon in summer, flowed on in calm seclusion, far from the bustle of the crowd, secretly, steadily, uninterrupted save by ever-recurring little incidents, peacefully approaching old age. She sat in her little white room, behind the muslin curtains, making lace. Her cottage stood a little way back from the street, shining behind a neatly-raked flower-garden.
The door was always shut and the curtains carefully drawn. Inside, everything was very clean: smooth, bare walls and the ceiling washed with milk-white chalk through which shone a soft touch of blue; and this bright cleanliness contrasted soberly with the things that hung on the wall. The chairs and furniture stood placed with care, as though nailed to the floor; over the mantel hung the copper Christ, a thin, elongated figure of Our Lord, with its sharp projections which shone when the sun touched them: a little figure which, so long dead, hung there so firmly nailed and looked so calmly from out of the small dark shadow-lines of its face.