The dark mother

by Waldo David Frank

But before he could redispose his forces for their new excursion David must gather them in.

He returned to himself as a traveler comes home. Like the traveler he found how the magic of change and of adventure worked not only upon the highway. Once more in the familiar place whence he had gone, he found it strange and full of undiscovered things.

He found that he was lonely: he found that he was afraid. He found that for these reasons he wished to leave the Deanes: that they made him lonely and that they made him fear. He had been sweetly at home in himself: sweetly one with what his mother had left him. Since his coming to New York, this place where his heart dwelt was empty. His heart had not even been abroad with him, it had been away. Without his heart, he had gone to work, worked hard; lived with the family of his uncle and been glad; come so to Lois and come to love her. A strange ghost of David.

The year ripened and softened into summer—the season of relaxation, the season of decision and creation. David grew aware of a rolling fullness outside him, and of an emptiness within.

He wanted to be himself. He felt all manner of hands upon him, save his own. Gentle hands: good hands. Not his.

The idea of solitude came and grew: it filled him. He did not know, he felt—what solitude would bring him. Had he not somehow known it, after all? He would go thinking of his mother. Was that not solitude? Perhaps to be alone would be to find her. To find her, he knew, would be to be alone no more. Dim inexorable forces these, which he could not resist the more fatefully since he could not understand.

David was an animal that sought the healing of stillness. Who shall say how close his longing was to the creeping away of the brute? Perhaps the therapy of silence is no other than this return of longing to the source of longing: to union with the limitless well of life in which lies our world like a fleck in a limitless cup. In the philosopher seeking the Word, in the dumb creature seeking rest from his hurt the lure is one: the way back sure since it is the retracing of steps to the Beginning.

The sage and the brute only can go the way of spiritual homing without the folly of explanations: they are naked and submissive before the primordial voice. David, like most humans, was somewhat between these two. He was full of reasons.

He could say: it is not good for me to see so much of Lois. He could say: it is not right to impose further on the Deanes. After all, go back a year and he had not seen them: they had not bothered—or been bothered—with him. Let him blaze his own trail.... If he wished to be free to live his own life, was that not natural also? He had his own key at the Deanes. But there was a certain unavoidable restraint. Suppose he had wanted some night to stay out till morning? This had never been. It might. He was approaching twenty-one! What would his aunt say? What would Muriel and Lois think? Manhood needs room. It was awkward to bring friends to the big house: he seldom did so. What if, some day, he should want to bring a girl—bring her somewheres? A thrilling reason, this! To have a place that was his, where he could be with a girl! The hospitable house of the Deanes was not hospitable to such conceptions. In the air of these daughters, even the thought of adventure seemed strained. The presence of Muriel and Lois fretted his nerves: spiced them: taunted them. But if their lives, their thoughts, the gay deckings of their bodies called forth sex, also they stifled it. David wondered if it would be always so, even when they were married. For a reason he could not name he decided he would not want to be a husband to Lois. There was a curious contradiction in these girls: something counterfeit; perhaps something thwarted. David once saw a great red flower—Muriel’s—in a vase on her table. Thinking of other things, he smelt it: his mind went rushing toward it, finding it odorless. He crushed it. He had never felt the least impulse to crush a fragrant flower. Muriel and Lois were roses, but they had no perfume. He thought, if he held such a lover, he should want to crumple her. It might mysteriously be a way of having satisfaction—of having a substitute for satisfaction. Living in the house with Muriel and Lois, he found they sharpened his senses, yet blunted his will: heightened his needs, yet dwarfed his power to get them. And David knew it was Muriel and Lois who filled this house of the Deanes. It was the house of Muriel and Lois: not the house of his uncle and aunt. Why should he keep on living with two exacerbating cousins?...

There were reasons aplenty. But this fading day was a day that drifted beyond the world of reasons. He was alone.