The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

David got up.

“There!” She came up to him close. She took his head in her two hands. “Are you convinced?” He shook his head and her hands moved with it....

Since her plan had been found and she knew that it was working, there was peace in Cornelia. Her way with David was the way of a mother. She knew how this birth and this life had rended her: what it had cost her in blood and anguish. So is the mother peaceful, knowing this, with her unknowing child.

She took her toll of him, like a mother also. She held his cheeks with her hands and she drew him down and kissed him.

“And you see, don’t you, why you can’t stop so suddenly from going to see her? What would she think? The offense and the pain—yes, David, the pain, if you stayed away?”

He went back to Helen Daindrie. He went again and again. Cornelia had settled and given him what he desired. There was reason no longer for seeing Cornelia.

Spending his quiet evenings with Helen, he did not see the Doctor. He forgot him, he was ashamed, as Cornelia had cleverly made him, of the conceited presumption that he could help his cause by staying away. He came, therefore, feeling nothing but peace: wanting the right to feel no other thing. For in peace, he came to himself. And what he sought above all else was this. Coming to Helen and sitting there beside her, it was easier, somehow.

But it was easier most of all to look at Tom, and know he hated him, and know that they must part....

They had gone on living together. The silence about them, holding them in, was stiff and frozen.

David went no longer to Flora’s. He wandered about the City, seeing nothing, until his legs ached, and then he went to bed. He found that he needed more sleep than he had needed in years. There was a constant weighing soreness in his body. His head was heavy. His thoughts pushed through some clotted substance in his mind with a swerving pain. Often his eyes ached: often his food did not agree with him. Yet he was hungry. He needed great sleep, great food. After sleep, he was heavy, after food he was often sick with heartburn. He was like a pregnant woman. He went about loaded and diminished. His thoughts delineated no true objective world. What came with any sharpness into the mist of his mind, he hated. Thus Tom. What soothed his dwelling in these mists he courted. Thus Helen Daindrie.