“One night I seemed to see what the whole house was straining for—a kind of process of marriage continually afoot. Just now it was Lois. I remember my father being called into the front room where Lois and Collinge had been for an evening—his face beaming when he came forth, and my mother’s quiet sanction. There were conferences after that, dressmaking, the arrangement of money affairs. And I was suddenly ill with it. To me, there could be no trade or public business. To me, it had to do with a child and that was consecrated ground. Oh, you must see it had to be different. I wanted it like a stroke of lightning. I did not understand but I wanted it like that—like a flight of swans—and not talk and property transactions. To me it had to do with rain and frost and the tides and the pulses of plants—the silent things. I did not understand—but knew that children came to those who took each other.
“I remember one supper; the countryman talked—talked of the marriage day—the breakfast, the ceremony—the end and the dusk, and turned to Lois with sleepy half-folded eyes. She was smiling and flushed—and I looked from face to face at the table, at my sisters—and I rushed away because I could find nothing pure.... Some one said my mother never looked prettier.... I remember the flood of honeysuckle perfume that came to me in the torture of hatred, as I passed through the distant hall.... And then later from the top of the stairs, Lois and my mother were talking, and Lois said:
“‘You know, Mother, we will not have children for the first three years, at least——’”
“I was somehow below by her in the lower hall. She seemed a rosy pig upstanding, marked red and flaming.... And that night long afterward, my mother found me and said, ‘You are getting beyond me, Olga.’ ... But I could only think of men and women copying the squirrels, filling their bins, dressing their door-yards, reaching for outer things—and it was back of my very being—back of the mother and the patriarch—back of the shepherding and the folding—back of me. I hated life with destroying hatred—Lois wanting the seasons, but unwilling to bring forth fruit, accepting the countryman’s idea of life.... Can you see that it had the look of death to me?”
Bellair could only bow his head. To him the woman was revealing the grim days through which she had won her poise and power.... She was telling another incident with the same inclination—for the thought of being a mother had been the one master of her days. He seemed to see the child, the girl, the younger woman about her—a grey-eyed, red-lipped girl, with a waist that was smaller and smaller as she gained in inches from fifteen to eighteen—madness for mothering, passionate in that, but not passionate for sensation—her face sometimes so white, that they would ask her mother, “Is Olga quite well?”... Yet teeming with that intensive health that goes with small bones and perfect assimilation—that finds all to sustain life in fruit and leaves ... books, light sleeping, impassioned with the lives of great women and the saints—one of those who come to the world for devotion and austerity and instant sacrifice; yet for none of these apart; rather a fruitful vine, her prevailing and perennial passion for motherhood.
“And yet I almost ceased to breathe,” she was saying, “when I came to understand man’s part in these things. I felt myself differently after that—even children—but from this early crisis which so many men and women have met with untellable suffering, emerged a calm that could not have come without it. The travail brought me deep into the truth. For all great things the price must be paid—how wonderfully we learned that in the open boat. There are sordid processes in the production of all fine things—even in the bringing forth of a Messiah.”
She paused, as if she saw something enter the eyes that had listened so fervently. Bellair cleared his voice. “I remember something he said,” he told her. “That matter is the slate—spirit the message that is written. The slate is broken, the message erased, but eyes have seen it, and the transaction is complete. For the spirit has integrated itself in expression——”
“I think he said it, for you to tell me now,” the Faraway Woman whispered.
“Only he could have halted your story,” Bellair added.
“... I told you when my Guest came in the afterglow, of the house of our nearest but distant neighbour; now I am telling you of years afterward, when there were many houses between on the long road, and my playmate Paul had gone away to Sidney. Lois had long been married. I was seventeen—and so strangely and subtly hungering—for expression, for something that I did not know, which meant reality to me, but which was foreign and of no import to all about me. Often at evening I stared up the long road.... I remember late one night in the nearest house, the soft wind brought me the cry of a child. It was so newly come and it was not well. I went to it just as I was, though the people had just moved in and were strange to us. It was thirst—as we know. I went to it, as we would have gone to a waterfall. The door of their house was locked, but I knocked. The father came down at last. The lower rooms were filled with unpacked boxes. I told him why I had come. He talked to me strangely. He went upstairs and sent the mother down to me. It did not seem as if I could live through that night—and not have my way. She put her arms about me, led me upstairs to a room that was not occupied—save a chair by the window. I stood there waiting until she returned with the child.... I saw lights back in our house when they missed me—voices, but I could not go. In the early light I heard the woman saying to my mother: ‘... We really needed her so. Baby was restless, but he is much better and quiet with her. They are very happy together.... Yes, she is safe and well.’”