—This is my Home. Do you see it, Leon? This is my home, I tell you. For this I came North. For this, in the talk we never had, you told me I did right. Leon does not know. Edith will never know. Whores and gamblers and corrupted officers of the Law ... God knows. God is interested. He must be. It must mean something....
She thought of her failures in New York. The House became a reality upon her ... a sort of scarlet flower upon her black tree of failures.—I have a will. I have a soul. I shall not let them die. What she possessed of strength she forced herself to give, now, wholly to the House.—It must mean something!
She studied her men and women. All of them. All of them, despite their falsity of life, held a grain of loveliness. Perhaps because this grain had been so stubborn to live, their life in the world was false? She did not know.—But it shall grow! The House shall mean something!
She made herself comfortable. There was plenty of money. She went to old shops, glowing in walls of dusty woodcuts, classic figures steel-engraved; shops that were a litter of ripe yesterdays crippled out of shape, beyond words, still mellow. Here, piece by piece, leisuredly, she picked together things for her room:—pictures, a Pembroke table, a Hepplewhite desk, a set of slender American Windsor chairs. She picked up three graceful glass goblets, three candlesticks of pewter. She made her room lovely. She watched her language. She kept her language pure. She watched the furrows in her cheeks and the grayness. The great illness and the years before it were gone, but they had taken her bloom and her hair’s wave. She used paint ... judiciously at first. But here, her taste failed, unnourished in the tasteless world about her, and by the world of her own past where they did not paint at all: so that she came to use paint badly.
She was past thirty-five. She was a little stooped, a little brittle, broken. All of her body had gone from curve to angle. Man moved her not at all. She thought of the body of man without memory, without desire. She bought a Bible. She bought a copy, bound in crumbling black Levant, of a certain Pascal’s Thoughts she had found once, browsing. It was Englished from the French. She liked him, whoever he was. He knew life. Yet he seemed young.
As her face grew sallow and the roundness of her cheeks sagged long, as her hair became hard and her knees went stiff, all of this resilience of fire drew to the eyes of Fanny. They were larger, blacker. They were hot wells of thought, sealed fountains of vision that leaped at times upward through the gray earth slumber of men.
And her hands had fingers sensitized like filaments of seed. They seemed, as her eyes saw, to spin with their faint tremor of response a woman’s clasp about the reach of her seeing.
—Harry said Jesus said—— But perhaps I can understand. From Harry’s standpoint it was the ugly word and the ugly thing. That’s it! That’s what Jesus meant. You, Boy ... you broke me and when you had broken me you came back and what you had done to me made me a horror to yourself. Poor Harry, I forgive you. For I understand. Like a child, you could not bear to see your own bad act. You meant to thrust out that ... not the beauty that was borne of it despite you. Who can thrust out beauty? Jesus didn’t preach. Jesus described the state of children like yourself. I guess his people were children like yourself. Some folk have grown up since then. And you, who quote Jesus, haven’t. That’s funny, too. And all’s forgivable. Even you, down there, respectable and holy ... bringing up Edith to be a child like yourself.
—But I love her. What can I do? Lord, I’m beginning to think! so that my love for my child does not burn me, twist me into despair? You down there ... my Darling, ... not knowing your mother, judging her with the child judgments of your father ... God! but I must be strong. Despair is childish too. My love, it is a torrent within me. Love, anger, need ... turn it away from your hurts. Turn it away from yourself ... which it can only break against and wreck. Turn it where it can flow. Edith, shall I succeed in daring to think of you here?...
—Why is it poison to me when I judge?... You, Jim Statt, you are a callous monster. You’ve a soul as black as hell. If I judge you I am poisoned.... You, Susan, you’re twisted. You hold a man in your arms to feel him die there ... all that is really he. That’s your love: hate. That’s your passion: death. If I judge you, I am poisoned.... And you, sweet Tessie, you’re hardest of all. With your sensitive soft soul and your unbalanced eyes: with your wanton small hands that turned you from an artist into this. If I despise you, Tessie, I am poisoned.