The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

David thought she was inviting him to bare his breast for her knife-thrust. He was long past the desire of sensation from Lois at the expense of pain. He looked dull. And Lois stamped her feet. “Then I shan’t tell you. Now!”

Tom had suggested a plan. But he was half-hearted about it. He did not want to go to the old place with his friend. He did not want to go with him elsewhere. He went off alone. He selected the seashore. There seemed nothing strange in this. He thought it was the turn of the sea. Here too he did not altogether understand. He was afraid to tempt the old place with David. Surely he would not enter it alone.

He went through a little huddled city, sweating and plethoric with high-colored houses and swift dilapidations: a city with the face of a slovenly fishwife, peeled by the summer sun and cut by the winter winds.

Beyond it the beach: a great golden girdle beneath the quiet bosom of the sea. The ocean breathed gently there. It rose and fell passionless and sweet, touching the word of men with virginal disdain. The sun smiled aslant, as if half turned away out of compassion for the feebleness of men. But despite its clemency, the human swarm was like a pullulant emanation in a rich yeasty substance. Women and children and men shifted like black maggots in the luxuriance of summer.

The sea rose from the night as a jewel glows and burns beyond itself. The sun swung into the sky and made of it a luminous flood that poured gold on the beach, splintered mazes of sapphire, emerald, bronze on the breasting waters. Yet of itself the sky was no color and no thing. The sun fevered and sank away, leaving the sky a-tremble with its passion. The sky lingered, lost in the haze of the sun’s mystery, given to the rapture of remembrance that is night.

Within this stillness the broken hurry of people. Men and women were a low spawn flecking and feeding on the universal fragrance. Tom walked among them and tried to amuse himself. Never had human life been so distasteful to him, so anomalous.

He rose early to escape it. A line of boarding houses and hotels lay along the sand. A motley strewing. High barracks with false Colonial fronts and rococo pillars scarfing their dismal heights. Smug cottages burdened with great names: Sea-Crest, Manning Arms, The Breakers. Sprawling, winging frames with turrets that twirled and were picked out in colored glass.... On the beach, when Tom set out, a sparse sprinkling of children. Mothers gossiped low in the background and a few bathers, loosed from the conventional bonds by the tart spell of the water, screamed, laughed, gesticulated, bounded. Tom left them behind. The sea combed back and the dwellings of men were lost. All about, flatness. The grass ran silver away across salt meadows that were ruddy in sun.

The sea was broken here. It lapped idle, and was green and halted by the blue purl of the river that came out to be lost in the sea’s freedom. The bay was quieter than the scudding grass that marged it. There was a rocking stillness everywhere against which the earnest and sharp sally of the pipers in the sea-weed was a dissonant shred. Here Tom threw himself down and took the pungent air into his eyes and mouth and let it moisten the strain of his body. He was immersed in the sweet summer.

A mood grew on him. He learned of a mistake that he had made. Upon the contrast and the stillness of this place came something from without and filled it and made its song. He found that he was longing for the comradeship of David.

Sitting idle and full of the sap of the summer, he found that the part of him which warmed him was straining outward, toward a vague thing indeed—since he wanted no specific thing of David—but with a pull that had no vagueness. He found himself unable to partake of the gentle world he was in. He found himself tangenting from it, making of his wish a rod to vault him back into the burning City. He sat musing, half asleep, without sense of time. He dug with his fingers in the sand. He watched a bug voyage from spot to spot with a rapt floating interest. He tried to enjoy a cigarette, with a sense telling him that the air had a sweeter perfume, could he but swing himself to know it. Unease was on him. He consulted his watch and its denotation of the hours was like news from a far country. Impulse to move was balked by lack of desire to go. He stayed, balanced, bored, strangely exhausted with these hours of indolence, glad of the excuse of hunger to make him move.