The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

David’s arms went out, and he yawned. His body was rigid. It seemed to press out the energy of words: “Oh—O! I am sleepy.”

Tom laughed. He had come in far later—from a dance. He had been up an hour earlier. “Why don’t you lie down, then?”

David’s eyes seemed to exercise command over his sluggish state. They thought the idea a good one. The big body lifted heavily from the chair, went wide and down to the floor. David lay on his back. Tom looked at him. He could have raised his foot and placed it on David’s stomach. One hand, palm upward, slumbered directly beside Tom’s chair. Tom could have stepped on it. The temptation ran humorously through him.

“Why you should be sleepy, my dear man! I’ll bet you slept ten hours.”

“Well,” after a pause, “it’s Sunday.”

Tom laughed again. “You’re still a lazy country lout.”

David snorted and smiled. He rolled his generous round head away from Tom and closed his eyes. Since his eyes alone had borne the quality of resistance that was his space in the world, David lay prone and altogether passive: he was a little like a flame that has been extinguished.

Tom began to contemplate his friend. David breathed deep and low. Looking and pondering, Tom came to breathe in unison. His shorter, tighter body made this anomalous. They breathed together. But David was sleeping. Tom’s breath brought him discomfort. A tithe of it he discharged by stirring his foot to within an inch of David’s hand. It stayed there. He was forward in his seat. His gaze went forward fixed on some vague moving object that swung in a pure parabola away. All of him followed.

They had been together a month. There was David’s face fallen away on its side. Tom could see the slight strained tendons of his neck. His sleepy hair was a mood apart from the floor it touched like a mist thrown from the alert earth in the morning. His pipe had slipped and cast its ashes. Tom wondered if he was closer to his friend after a month, and how far closer he could grow. This the question he followed. As if in search of it, he leaned agilely forward, immersed, and picked up the pipe next to David’s hand. He was again erect in his chair. He held the pipe before him. Not seeing it. He was very awake thinking. Suddenly he looked at his hands, amazed. They were empty. The pipe was in his mouth. On his face came an expression of motion, as if he wanted to get away. He thrust the pipe back of him, on the tabaret. Again, rest came to his features. They no longer strained in the symbol of the need to move. He was in contemplation. His lips parted and pursed at a faster tempo than his breathing. His eyes hardened. He took a long draught of air as if his sluggish breathing had half stifled him. Once more he breathed at his wonted measure.

He looked down at David, for the first time naturally: as if David were this expected object at his feet, and not some threshold beyond them.... They had been after all a mere month together. Why was he counting time with David, when elsewise he was glad to take his days in gross, and the thought of the years like steps of a painful stairway to be mounted toward the flat respite of death? In this lingering with David and his hurry elsewhere, there was a discord, a whirling that made him dizzy. One part of him moved faster than the rest. He turned and turned around. Tom’s eyes were seeking again. He must hold on to something to stop this spinning. His jaw dropped an instant, before he had caught himself up. There were his hands once more athwart his chest: in them David’s pipe. Tom jumped from his chair. Carefully, however: David was sound asleep.