The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

The beach was bedlam. He went through the throngs, as if he were wading a morass.

Only the buffet of the waves when he swam beyond the breakers gave him a resistance where he could dwell with a certain comfort. But he could not bathe all day. He went in to dinner. A sort of immersement in a black pot where food was. Clatter of dishes, hot stickiness of human motion, flies stuck on paper. It was hard to part the tasteless substance of his neighbors from the sodden stuff he prodded down his throat.

He escaped to the sea. While the populace digested, he could be alone with it. It beat in monotone upon his world: it flayed it. The sea lay there cruelly content, droning its repetitious chant. Until the endless song mounted, terraced, burst in his ears like a vast shout of conquest. Tom felt an invasion. His small body was being swept by a terrene monster. The sea’s laborious approach against his nerves was no relief from the crepitous guerilla of the women, children, men, beating their individual sticks and stones upon him. Tom went back to the deserted bay where the sea was less the sea. And, gazing at the watery world, he wondered by what spell the ocean had even been a balm to him: by what strength he had dared love it.

He said aloud to himself in the silence: “Well, leave here. I give you permission. Go somewhere else. If this bores you.” He had no answer. He did not wish to go somewheres else. He wished to go back.

He had always loved this being close among the pleasure-toiling people. He had looked forward to the nights. The open theater, garlanded in paper lanterns, the carrousel with its comical rugose rounds of music, the dance-halls by the sea where the salt air swooned in the invasion of shuffled feet, of perfume, of pop and beer. The silent stretches away from the lights where he could see the couples under the moon discovering love, finding for once glad uses for their bodies. All this Tom loved, and for it had come.... There was the solemn jay decked in white duck trousers who walked as close as he dared to the girl in frills, with her face simpering down toward her languid feet. [How far her puff sleeves kept him off, how dangerous a sealing of adventure to take her hands! And her lips? Could he have them without the sea rocking upon them and wiping out the future?] Tom would dance with the prettiest girl he could find—then with the ugliest: and chuckle as he discovered the law of compensation unobserved. “She has less looks, no more sense.” He would be hero to a gang of boys, buying them soda and ice-cream: confidant of the pendulous matron in virginal crinolines who believed him when he said that he was sure she could dance: you must not let your daughters bully you, madam, into being old!... Then aloof, watching the prides, the passions, the innumerable nonsenses collect, become a single human clutter, astir in a flare of lights, a ribboning of banal music, a haze of sweaty odors.... Once more about him silence and at his feet a Sea—musing in its moveless might as if it were all the heavens, all the stars made through some portent palpable to him. It lay there aloof like truth. And he its master since it lay also in his brain. The crowds he had left were a sputter of sand fallen on the sea and gone.

So, once. Now nothing of all this. The world had fooled him. Ashes were in his mind. Yet he could not leave his mind and the world. Ten days Tom moved in this numbness....

Sudden, he went to the station, and sent a wire to David, returned to his hotel, paid his bill. The message was:

“I am coming home. Save supper for me. Will call for you.”

... He had a sense that if he visited the bay it would be sweet and fertile like a young woman who is warm with the breathing of her body: that if he had stayed to dinner at the hotel, the women’s chatter would amuse him, the naughtiness of the children under the frowns of their mothers shine like snatches of song. For he was on the train....

A heavy heated day met him in the City: one of those laden evenings when the air has lost its resilience to throw off the fetid waste poured by the turmoil of life. All that the millions, in grips with the materials of work, have thrown impure into the air remained for the millions to breathe.