The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

“They will never get along. Never. Never. They are so different: as different as ...” She stopped: she said to herself that this was her brother whom she loved, and how could she think unkind thoughts of her brother? It must not be. In the stifled conflict, she was moved. She got up, flung wide a window.

Night. It was cold. Gas-lamps blinked and strutted through the air. Their lights were false: they brought out only darkness. The street lay low and reeled and swung away on either side like the deck of a pitching vessel. The vessel was the world. It crashed through a sea of love that spumed upward to Cornelia’s eyes. Her heart’s heat condensed it; there were tears. She had a sense of the bleak urgency of life: of its passage and of its passengers. She had a sense of the element through which she and those she loved and the vessel plunged: how it was a sweet element and dim and how hard it was not to forget. Surely, all thought in her cold day was a denial of the Sea through which life was a passing: denial of all save the vessel: denial of the terror of its movement and of its passionate immersion. She, also, forgot. She, also, was a coward with the rest before such words as “religion,” or as “mystic.” The salty tang of this Sea beyond her plunging little world was in her eyes and her mouth: all her body wept silently....

The cadenced strokes of an elevated train knocked at her mind. The truth faded.

Cornelia brushed back her hair from her brow. “You are a silly woman,” she said aloud. “He doesn’t care for you really. You don’t really care for him. He will go away, and marry. He lives after all in a different world. Tom and I will console each other.”

She was relieved at her brother’s bitter mood. She was weary, as if she had been on a great journey. She lay on her couch and closed her eyes.... The air of her room was thick and was running in massive current. She felt herself swept along. The tickings of the clock on the mantel tore past her and caught in her dress like little strayings of straw. The air surged over her head; she saw a house flung upon its current and dipping across her window. Where she was it was quiet. Tom came up to her; in his hand was a gleaming scalpel. “I am going to mold David’s face,” he said. She said: “You can’t, Tom, because he is done: I have done him already.” Cornelia looked at her model of a boy: it was all wet: suddenly it sprang and David threw himself upon the ground, and broke. Her father stood over her hurting her wrists. Her wrists hurt in his fierce grasp: but she felt how her father had no hands and was armless. He stood towering beyond her, high, and hard like a stick. Cornelia knew that a string was attached to him, and that Tom held the string: he was going to jerk it, and then her father was going to fall. She was afraid: her father was going to fall on her and she would be crushed. She saw that he was a child, she was full of pity. Her face was upturned toward him. He was above her. She felt she was going to kiss him.... Over her eyes, there was David, peering through turbulent shadows into her, curious to see, since her eyes were open and she was not asleep, why she had not heard him enter....

The mood held. She remained in that palpitant hinterland where all the nerves and senses of herself met all the beings of her past. David impinged sweetly upon this swerving world. She lay, scarce breathing, looking at him with eyes that denied the rest of her.

The world where he could thrust in his head without violence receded. It went. Again, her senses were enemies, strangers. That was a man to whom she had not given herself. Her senses stormed her recovering mind. “Why does he not take me in his arms?” they pleaded. She was on her feet, shutting herself away.

“How you frightened me, David! I guess I fell asleep.” In her panting words, she was gone from him. She could dare to say: “What a pleasant surprise, your coming! I am so glad you came.” She gave him her right hand: the left hand followed. He held them both: she drew them from him.

“I thought I would chance it. Have you had dinner?... What were you dreaming about, Cornelia?”

She laughed, her low, stalwart laughter. “What would you imagine?”