"To go after him?" I repeated.
She nodded.
"He was in the charity part. I was afraid they'd bury him in the potter's field and they wouldn't mark—it, and that I couldn't never tell which one it was. So I want to get him and have him buried here. He didn't want I should go—he thought it'd be too much for me. But I was bound to, so he says he'd go. They'd ought to get here on the Five o'Clock this afternoon. Oh, if I'd went yesterday, do you think it would 'a' been any different?"
There I could comfort her. I did not think it would have been different. But when I tried to tell her how much better it was this way than that the baby should first have come to her and then have sickened, she would have none of it.
"I've never held him once," she said. "Do you s'pose anything could be worse than that? I'd rather have got hold of him once, no matter what."
It touched me unutterably, the grief of this mother who was no mother. I had no knowledge what to say to her. But I think that what she wanted most was companionship. She went to one and another and another of our neighbours to whom she had shown so happily the broken post-card picture, and to them in the same way she took the news:—
"My baby died."
And I was amazed to find how in this little time, the tentacles of her heart having fastened and clung, she had made for herself, without ever having seen the child, little things to tell about him: His eyes were so bright; the sun was shining and the picture was made out-of-doors, yet the eyes were opened wide. They were blue eyes—had she told us? Had we noticed the hands in the picture? And the head was a beautiful shape.... All this seemed to me marvellous. For I saw that no woman ever mourns for any child dumbly, as a bird mourns a fledgling, but even if she never sees it, she will yet contrive some little tender ways to give it personality and to cherish it.
They did their best to comfort her, the women of the village. But many of them had lost little children of their own, and these women could not regard her loss as at all akin to theirs. I think that this my neighbour felt; and perhaps she dimly felt that to me her grief, hardly less than theirs, brimmed with the tragic disaster of the unfulfilled and bore, besides, its own peculiar bitterness. In any case I was of those who, that afternoon, went out to the cemetery to await the coming of my neighbour and "him" and their little burden. Calliope was there, and Mis' Amanda Toplady and Miggy; and when it was time to go Little Child was with me, so she went too. For I am not of those who keep from children familiarity with death. Familiarity with the ways of death I would spare them, but not the basic things, primal as day.
"I don't want to give a real funeral," my neighbour had said. "I just want the few that I tell to happen out there to the cemetery, along about five. And then we'll come with him. It seems as if it'll hurt less that way. I couldn't bear to see a whole line driving along, and me look back and know who it was for."