The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

He had a dream. He was in a pit—or was it a well? He groped round and round its circular bottom. He looked up. Far beyond his eyes was a dimness he knew was Light. It hurt him to look up. It made him dizzy. It made him tremble. He groped round and round.... Then, he stopped. Quite still. The bottom of the pit swung up and struck against his eyes. Tom lashed him from behind with a whip. “Go ahead!” Tom muttered. David faced about. The well began to swing maddingly around with shattering strokes like a vast piston. The bottom where he groped swerved up, went up, high, high. He had the sense of a terrific altitude. The well was upside down. He was tumbling, rushing down the well. Beneath him, infinitely far, he saw the dimness he knew was Light....

David awoke: horror crept over all his flesh. He clutched his bed. He lay there stabbed by every mutter of the night.

It was long before his mind that was cowering far in a corner of the room came back to him, sat with him, took away his fears: before the stirrings of the dark silence ceased to be a shatter and shriek in his nerves.

It was long before he forgot the dream. He made no effort to remember it. A dream was a bit of nonsense. Nonsense also that its mere coming to his mind brought back the streaking of darkness into veins of horror....

It was not long before he put to himself for the first time a question: What was killing the friendship between Tom and himself? For an uncharted time, he had been in fever, in trance; he had not looked at all. Now, seeing with sudden eyes, he saw their friendship and how it had changed, and how a blight was on it.

Always there had been flurries of irritation; swift misgivings; shadows. How much else there had been! Warm communion: the sweet living in Tom’s strength and in the knowledge of his caring: the sheer delight of watching his clear mind cut through the mists of life, like a bird soar and sing over his head. Where now these delights?... It came to David how, for a long time already, they had not been....

Tom came home without taking his dinner. He was not hungry: also he knew that David would be out. He sat motionless in his favorite straight-back chair and took the storm of his senses with heroic grimness.

In such an hour, David’s absence moved him obliquely. He was glad of his solitude in their room: fearful of the tread in the hall that must break it. And yet, he was listening, yearning,—suddenly possessed of the sense of something missing, and that thing vital, and that thing David. He caught himself back, in an eternal question: “If he were here, what would you say to each other?”

This raging schism there was in all his thoughts: he yearned to hold David, and he yearned to be rid of him. Two monsters, these desires, feeding upon each other, feeding upon him. He helpless against them. If he wounded the one, its hurt was strength to the other. How could he kill the one, without being overwhelmed at once by its opponent? In their balance he was torn away by conflict, yet in their balance he was saved from some black annihilation he could not envisage. How could he lose David altogether? In what realm lived his wish altogether to have him?

David came in.