The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

David, walking the dim sunless City, walked as through himself. And as he went he missed the lights that an hour before, of their own cheer, had lit the corridors of his being and made him all, all of the City, so glad a habitation. He missed these things, he learned how many they were.

He did not think of the strange little girl. She had been fleckless beautiful. She had been more than that in the miracle of her spell upon him. For this he groped. In his mind was the vision of her budding life, sweet, ineffably sweet like an unopened rose in the dew of the dawn. She had left a wound in his heart—the stab of her vision—from which now his blood seemed unstintingly to flow.

He thought of himself alone. Sudden all his proud contentment was away. Not clouded, this time, as it had been so often. Away. It was gone surely, like the little girl.

His contentment. What then had it been? The parts of it that were no more he could piece together into a memory of his contentment.

It had been a haze covering the way of his feet, blinding his eyes, wrapping him in darkness. He saw now. He saw that his feet had carried him a way different from the haze of his contentment.

He thought of his emptiness. He seemed to recognize it, now, as if it had long been there. The absence of Tom and Constance—was this the absence of two great parts of his emptiness permitting him at last to know them—since their absence was in a measure their negation, the first timorous return from an emptiness that filled him to a fullness that he lacked? He could not go in very far. His mind was strangely cramped with pain. He knew much, however. He knew he did not love Constance and that there is no substitute for love. He knew he did not fully respect his dearest friend and that for this there was no solace. Most of all he knew his life was sterile: despite its blandishments and its colors, its devouring of hours, it lacked something he needed. Something he needed as he might thirst for water in a land that held everything else.

Sterile work: sterile friendship: sterile embraces. It was not so simple as this, but here was the germ that desiccated him, turned his impulses from action, deflected life from living. He did not live. Thence came that he did not risk, that he went safe, that he won materials and pleasures. To what end since he did not live? He compromised with love, he compromised with dreams. That was the technique of his succeeding: to cheat his body into love-affairs, his mind into business, his loyalties into friendship. To what end since he did not live? And if the miracle was, that life lay in the risk rather than in succeeding, in love rather than in the love-affair, in the dream rather than in any fact?

Oh, he could not understand. He did not know what to do. If his ways were wrong, his relations false, how could he change them? He dragged through a morass, not knowing.

Now suddenly, his clear thoughts held within them, as if in an embrace, the little girl. He saw the resilience of that fresh young life: its pride, its firmness. He saw how it must stoop and bend and give, if it would avoid the pains that waited it growing into the world. If it would win ease, it must lose—lose all that made it lovely! Lose its fine fresh sweetness. David pondered on this. Would that election satisfy him? Would it be well to see that loveliness gray away in price for the escape from pain? He heard his answer clear. At all costs the bravery of youth, the firm coolness of which her flesh was symbol—at cost of any pain, of all defeat!

A deceiving gladness came to David: a gratitude that he was still somewhat like that little girl.... Had they not smiled at each other?