The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

David flushed at the abrupt nakedness of her compliment. He gathered from the candor of her example the courage to look at her as she had looked at him.

She was not beautiful. Her skin had a strange olive tinge: it was fleckless smooth: it was not transparent. Her hair was heavy, not fine. He noticed her wide short hands. Capable hands. The sense of her flesh, under the quiet silken sheath of her gown had a disquietude and a heat that won him. For the first time he realized how a woman whom he was able to know not beautiful could be desirable. She made a direct call upon his senses. His senses answered.

“You can’t possibly like me, yet, Miss Bardale? You do not know me. Why, then, except to be polite——”

She laughed. Her laughter went into words.

His head was left out of it. She was a body. His own body told him. Suddenly her talk and his seemed remote from the main purpose of their nearness as if they stood in opposite corners of the room, tilting at each other with long sticks.

He had to go on tilting. He could not come nearer. However inclined he was—and to his own amazement—to drop his guards.

Her talk, he vaguely knew, made easy his sitting there. In the same distant sense he felt that his defensive parries were not unworthy. But all of this was not very conscious. The part of David given to their talk was swimming along with a free stroke that the heavy touch of his deliberation could only have disturbed. Indeed, a part of him was absent, and was busy elsewhere. Their words rose up like a pelting fire. By its light, David could look beyond, could peer into the spiritual corners of the room, could see their darkness.

There seemed no affection at all: no fellowship. Even for themselves, these persons had no affection. Their egoism was a hard and desperate passion: fruit of some perennial resistance. David could not have reasoned out why this should be: how affection must die in a hot contest: how either it must die or it must share the intensity of the combating forces and turn to passion. The way of these men and women toward themselves had much the way of animals fiercely competing for food and for love. In a less bitter contest they could have played together: like children or like animals that are fed and tamed. Now they were playing at playing. David felt, in this, their wide distinction from animals. A whole array of impulses and thoughts muddied and distressed what might have been the clear flow of natural conflict. They were whipped up into a delirium of broken starts that in the end lacked all direction. Endlessly at work, in the upholstered room, under the gowns of silk and the starched bosoms, a scrimmage of cold desire. Some things each desired of the others: a body, ruin, disappearance, help.... David thought his impressions strange. Surely, he was mistaken, seeing nonsense?

No doubt, however, of what Constance Bardale was now about. He had no idea of her goal: it was plain she was testing him. As surely as if her capable hands had moved over his body, she took his measure.

He knew now what he was doing, with his parries. To defend himself was to accept her gage of battle. He was meeting Constance Bardale in the field she had chosen. This was precisely what he now no longer wanted to do. He became silent. And she who knew a way for his defensive was helpless against his retreat. Against his resistance, she could display her forces, but she was scattered and spent in the emptiness before her. David sat back in his chair, looking beyond, thinking, and gave her nothing.