“We have the child to serve—that is our first thought; therefore we must think of the child’s mother first. As for her other part, as our companion, she will be one with us, of course. We have been here five full days, and we have not been allowed, by the presence of him who is gone—and may God rest and keep that—we have not been allowed to do the best we could in this great privilege of being together and drawing close to reality. Many have gone without food and drink for ten days—to come close to God. There is food here and water—to keep us in life. This is what I would say: We must change our point of view.”
He paused, and their eyes turned from one to another. The child’s face seemed washed in the magic of morning. The preacher added:
“We must cease to regard ourselves as suffering, as creatures in want, as starving or dying of thirst. Rather, as three souls knit, each to the other, who have entered upon a pilgrimage together—a period of simple austerity to cleanse and purify our bodies the better to meet and sense reality, and to approach with a finer sensitiveness, than we have ever known—the mystery and ministry of God.... So we are not suffering, Bellair. We are not suffering—”
He turned to the woman.
“We are chosen ones. This is our wilderness. When we are ready—God will speak to us. We are very far from the poor needs of the body—for this is the time and period of our consecration. God bless you both—and the Gleam.”
9
It was the seventh evening, the cool coming in. Bellair could not feel his body below his lungs, unless he stopped to think. The child was on his knee, his hands holding it. The little face was browned, but very clear and bright. Bellair’s hands against the child’s dress were clawlike to his own eyes, like the hands of a black man very aged. He could move his fingers when he thought of it, but he did not know if they moved unless he watched. The effort of steadying the child he did not feel in his arms, but in his shoulders. It was like the ache in his eyes. No tears would come, but all the smart of tears’ beginnings; and the least little thing would bring it about. He had to stop between words and wait for his throat to subside—in the simplest saying.
He saw everything clearly. The open boat was like a seat lifted a trifle above the runways of the world. He could see them, as one in the swarming paths beneath could never hope to see. It was all good, but the pain and the pressure of them all!... Bessie Brealt in pain and pressure; Davy Acton in the hard heavy air; Broadwell who was trying to be a man at Lot & Company’s; the old boarding-house woman who had forgotten everything but her rooms—her rooms moving with shadows whom she never saw clearly and never hoped to understand—shadows that flitted, her accounts never in order, her rooms never in order.... There had been people in there whom he never saw—one girlish voice that awakened in the afternoon and sang softly, a most subdued and impossible singing. She worked nights at a telephone switch-board—the night-desires of the great city passing through her—and she sang to the light of noon when it came to the cage.... Sunday afternoons when it was fine, a bearded man emerged from a back-room, emerged with a cane and cigarette case. Always on the front steps he lit the cigarette....
Bellair now couldn’t smoke.... Once there had been moaning in a lower back room, moaning night and morning from a woman. He was not sure if it were the millinery woman, or the one who worked in Kratz’s. The moaning stopped and as he passed through the hall, he heard a doctor say to the landlady:
“King Alcohol.”