The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

So far as work emptied him work was good. A new experience was a new vessel—what David needed to pour of himself. But the season was dull. Mr. McGill was gone, and already his first task, to sort and enter bills of lading, was a tedious habit. It seemed not work to David but the kind of punishment that was occasionally meted out in school: like copying the commandment one hundred times: “I must not talk during hours.” There was nothing more or else to do, until the Manager’s return.

The office was a haphazard, a languorous, loose beast functioning dully through the inertia of its past and the prod of its future. Clusters of girls formed like flies on a kitchen table. They chatted and laughed and wiped the clotted powder from their cheeks. They took long hours for lunch, buying cakes and cream-puffs and olives from the store and eating in the office. The boys hovered about like greedy dogs, barking and sniffing and showing a tendency to rear on their hind legs. The girls, loving the sense of their desire, kept them unsated. Most of the occupants of the inner offices were absent. On the other floors, above, below, the rumble of the packers and the crash of boxes made a dusty murmur. David had seen these infernos of industry, caught the acerb flavor of wet tobacco and sweat and heat, observed men moving in the mist of their hands and women serried at filthy tables, with haggard arms that were forever plying and hot eyes that were still. He preferred his purgatory. He hated the hour of lunch when he must step down into the flaming stream of the canyon and be part of it, hunting his food. He was glad when the hour of closing came like a silent charm, stilled the drone of the work. No clock was needed to announce this hour. It went over the cluttered room like an invisible hand: its tenuous sweet fingers touched every one and everything. The girls at the writing machines clicked more slowly, their eyes wandered more and more, their hands brushed back their hair with a new hope.... A last spurt puckered their brows and their lips: then the power died. The boys at the tall ledger tables twisted legs about their chairs and stopped sharpening pencils. They whistled sudden snatches of a tune. Wide ranges of conversation sprang up. Talk wreathed forth until girls in the new silence of their machines addressed each other clear across the room: the men in the ledger alcoves laughed at jokes given forth from the front windows....

Sudden, like the last spin of a top, a tremor ran through the office, work toppled dead on its side.

Girls were in hats: cigarettes sprouted on the lips of the boys. Overhead in the sudden noise of stillness, the new mood of the machines. Life was out of the window. In groups of two and three the girls were sucked away to it: the boys followed, with noses forward and dragging limbs.

The streets were cauldrons that had overflowed. The sluices of pent life emptied upon them. Work had banked these fires: routine had stifled them to smoke. Now, the coals were strewn low and long. A draft of release whipped down the channeling gutters. There was flame. The houses brooded like disused ovens, storing their heat and their rust.

The vision of this was a searing stripe on David’s mind as he lay within the night: was a dark band as he awoke upon the morning. He was naked in bed. His strong arms were thrown up like an infant’s. His open palms pillowed his neck. As he breathed, the muscles in his abdomen rolled gently. He was a powerful boy, with white skin and a wave of golden hair upon his body. He had pulled his bed directly beneath a dormer window. The sun bronzed his head. The clear soft strength of his face came out in this sleepy light. David dozed and prodded his senses into getting up. He was strong and refreshed in the morning. He thought of work as a contest and knew he would win. The Hell of labor was upstairs where the men sweated in open shirts rolling cigars, and he had seen the women fold back their waists till the tawny dust grimed the skin of their breasts. He was in this world’s Purgatory. In the quiet offices beyond, the inner ones bound by invisible threads of gold to the ease of high houses in the winter and the distant smile of the mountains, was Paradise and was the goal. David thought that he had given up the free fields of his home and that now, already he was set on winning them back. This, it seemed to him, was droll. He wondered why he had thrown the fields away, when so evidently the promise of the City was to be able to revisit them. He wondered why he had done so. He thought of Anne, who perhaps was forgetting the scent of the clover. He recalled that if he hurried with his bath, he would have more time at breakfast—more time to be with Anne. His long legs were out of the bed.

It was hard to pierce to Anne. Both he and she were embarrassed with their desire to speak freely. They were shy. One morning she said to him:

“Mr. David, if you would want to, why don’t you come back and I’ll cook you your dinner.”

He thanked her and refused.

“You’ve worked enough, I think.”