Lot & Company

by Will Levington Comfort

“... Everything that I had known and loved—compensation for all that I had missed and hungered for. Only the little face—but I knew the arms were held out to me.

“Paul knew nothing of this. He was not to blame. It was not he, who carried me away. He was merely being the man he fancied—playing the thing as the world had taught him—showing himself fervent and a man. I could have laughed at his kisses.... I have nothing against him. It was his way.... But once he kissed me—and it came to me that he was the way—that he must join his call to mine.... I could do all but that—I need not love him. Can you understand—it seemed as if everything was done but that—that the little face had already chosen me.... I sent him away, and I remember long afterward I was standing on the porch alone. It rained.”

Bellair realised now that she was watching him with something like anguish. A different picture of her came to him from that moment—filed for the long days apart—the rapt look of her mouth, and the pearl in her hair that brought out the lustre of whiteness from her skin—full-bosomed, but slender—slender hands that trembled and moved toward him as she spoke.... It was something for him—as if he had always been partly asleep before—as if she had brought some final arousing component to his being.

“... My mother did not ask but once. When I told her—the horror came to me that she would die. I had not thought of it before. I had thought that it was mine—had seen very little of Paul. In fact, he had come several times, when I would not see him.... She called my father—and it was all to be enacted again. For a moment, I thought he would strike me. The most dreadful thing to them all was that I was not ashamed. They felt that I was unnatural....

“There was one high day in that little upper room. It was all like a prayer, when they would suffer me to be alone and not wring me with their misery—but this one high day, I must tell you. I stood by the window in the watery light of the sun from the far north. That moment the Strange Courage came. I felt that I could lead a nation, not to war, but to enduring peace; as if I had a message for all my people, and a courage not of woman’s, to tell it, to tell it again and again—until all the people answered. It was then that I understood that a man’s soul had come to my baby, and that it was not to be a girl, as I had sometimes thought.

“And then the rest of the waiting—days of misery that I can hardly remember the changes of—yet something singing within me—I holding it high toward heaven as I could—singing with the song within. After weeks, it suddenly came to me what they wanted to do to hide their shame—to take the little child half-finished from me—to murder it—to hide their shame.

“Then I told them that it had not occurred to me to marry Paul—that I did not love him—that I had loved the little child. I told them that I did not believe in the world—that I did not believe I had done wrong—that I did not believe our old preacher who stayed so long at the table could make me more ready for the child. I told my father that I did not believe in marrying a man and saying that I would have no children for three years. I told him that I was mad for the child—that I was young and strong and ready to die for it ... that my baby wanted me, and no other. I would have gone away, but they would not let me do that. They kept me in an upper room. Paul had gone away ... and after months my father went to find him. It was sad to me—sadness that I cannot forget in that—my father taking his cane and his bag and setting out to find the father—heart-broken and full of the awfulness of being away from his home. He had not been away for years.... And my mother coming timidly to my room.... And then I went down like Pharaoh’s daughter to the very edge of the water—for, for the Gleam!”

Her eyes were shining and she laughed a little, looking upward as if she saw a vision of it, and had forgotten the room and the listening—her eyes as close to tears as laughter.

“... And when I came back—it was all so different. I could pity them—my heart breaking for my father and mother, who had not the wonder, and only the fears. They were passing out—after doing their best as they saw it, for many, many years together—and I had brought them the tragedy, the crumbling of their house—a shame upon the patriarch of the long road, a blackness upon her maternities.... It was my father’s thought to bring Paul to me. As if I would have taken him, but he came—my father having given him much money.... Oh, do not be hard upon him. There is wildness in him and looseness, but the world had showed him the way and he was young. I said to him (it was within ten days after the coming and my father and mother were gone from the room), ‘I would not think of marrying you, Paul, but do not tell them. As soon as I am ready, I shall go away with you, and they will not be so unhappy—and as soon as we are well away, you shall be free. And you may keep the money, Paul.’

“... And now it is like bringing you a reward for listening so well. I tell you now of a moment of beauty and wonder—such as I had known but once before, and was more real to me than all the rest. It made that which was sorrowful and sordid of the rest seem of little account.... It was early evening in the upper room and still light. An old servant who loved me was in the room, and the Gleam was sleeping—the fourteenth day after his coming. The woman helped me to a chair and drew it to the window, and all was hushed. Even before I looked out, an unspeakable happiness began to gush into my heart.