The unwelcome man

by Waldo David Frank

In the room of Sarah and Josiah stood two beds, in place of the one. It was to that one they had come, when they were married. Sarah was eighteen then, ten years the younger of the two. Josiah had begun by thriving in his affairs. He had taken on flesh in token of his natural love of living; he had taken on bitterness in token of Sarah’s rôle. So at least, it seemed to Sarah. She was thirty-three, and already she had outlived her husband.

At times, with this thought, a flood of anger came as she looked at the two prim, sneering beds that marked her punishment. For punishment it was—humiliating, permanent. But more often than anger and more lasting, came the sense of failure, the taste of ashes in her mouth, the waste of desert before her eyes. But Sarah had taken on no flesh. And she was not clever enough to take on bitterness.

With March had come a revival of winter, and of misfortune. The country had been frozen ruggedly. Marsden, the eldest now of the Burt children, had been playing Indian. He had scuffled to the low roof of the porch, where lay a thin, insidious scale of ice. He had slipped and fallen. Once more, the Mother was flung helpless, mindless, into the shadows. Marsden had been brought back from the Hospital in Brooklyn. His life was saved. It was to be the life of a cripple.

This afternoon in the late spring, Sarah stood alone in the room, before the oval mirror of her bureau. She was examining herself.

Marsden lay muffled up on the porch. Quincy was asleep in the room that had been Marsden’s. The two windows facing forward to the street were open; but Sarah had thrown-to the shutters. The cries of the other children came up from the lawn—joyous, sharp, petulant variations on the theme of youth. Sarah could hear them well, and love them. A portion of her senses was forever fixed on them, interpreting their moods, primed to detect a signal of distress or danger as they romped on, and to rush down in help. Since the accident to Marsden, even in sleep she was a half-cocked trigger of anxieties, a wrack of nerves singing with strain.

But this was spring. And Sarah was only thirty-three. However her mind might bend to the deep business of her children, the eyes that looked at her from the mirror were not so much a mother’s as a woman’s.

She had come up to change her waist. She lingered, undressed, trying to understand. For Sarah knew that the reason given by Josiah was a pretext. There was but one truth, though there were a thousand reasons. That truth was—coldness. To Josiah, Sarah was no longer a woman to be loved.

So, with the spring sun splintering through the shutters, Sarah looked at herself and tried to understand. The room was in shadow. It appeared cramped and painful with its low ceiling and its dash of red flowers on the wall, its heavy draperies, and its unhappy beds. The bureau was between the shuttered windows. And where stood Sarah, a sun’s ray fell on her breast, one lighted a spray from her dull mass of hair, another shot aslant her arm, pointing its poverty of curve, its pathos of angle and declivity where the flesh fell in and the bone ridged out. Yes:—she looked old enough. And yet, all that had once been lovable was still somehow there.

In Sarah was the contradiction of a woman given over to a conscious, self-fashioned life, in whom once had reigned the unconscious and wild fervors of girlhood. Her mouth was long, sensitive at its points, although the lips had flattened and grown less tender. There was a responsive fire in her eyes although some chill had curtailed it, even as the smoulder of her lips seemed dying out. Her expression—the gentle gradation of all her face together—had weathered best. Here was warmth, even strength. But as Sarah’s examining gaze fell, it found worse fortune. Her throat had lost its tightness; its vague bagginess beneath the chin was grey against the sun on her breast. And here too was failure. Her bosom was no longer fresh, elastic. It bespoke weariness. It lacked the quality that had always made her charming in Dutch neck. So Sarah covered it quickly with her waist, ere a too poignant recognition of her defeat here bore in upon her. For here, wishing could not defeat her eyes. Her efforts might cast a glamor on her face making her see afresh what once was there; but the drab dullness of her body was beyond the scope of her illusion.

It was all obvious: the stiff angle of her brown petticoat, the long rigidity of her back, the narrowness above her waist, the dry impoverishment of her shoulders, the fleshless nape of her neck, the unlit mass of her hair. And yet, a glimpse of her eyes as they went out, half suppliant, half proud, to prove her worth, destroyed this obviousness. For beneath the blur of sadness in which their glance was bathed, there was a power of spirit, pregnant of miracles, if only the man she loved had cared to call them forth. But after all, it was inexorably true—the acknowledgment beat against what she chose to see:—dismissed from the fair office to which she had been originally called, thrown back upon a maze of service without the gift which had transfigured it, she was still really young! In the tremor of her mouth, the frightened passion of her eyes, flashed somehow forth a vision as of one being buried alive.