The Brimming Cup Part 52

II

September 10.

Marise was slowly going through a pa.s.sage of Scriabine, which had just come in the mail. She was absorbed in the difficulties and novelties of it, her ear alert to catch a clue to the meaning of those new rhythms and progressions, her mind opened wide to understand them when she heard them.

It was with an effort that she brought her attention back to Elly, who had come in behind her and was saying something urgently. Marise turned around on the piano-stool, her head humming with the unfamiliar, tantalizing beauties and intricacies of the page she had left half unread, and considered the little girl for an instant before she heard what she said. How Elly did grow! That dress was already much too small for her.

Well, Elly was not the only one who had grown out of her old clothes this summer ... the old garments that had been large enough and now must be laid aside! ... Elly was saying, "Mother, one of my chickens looks sick, and I don't know what to do. I _wish_ you'd come!"

Marise began a process of mentally weighing which was more important, Scriabine or Elly's chicken. Elly looked at her mother with imploring eyes. "Mother, he looked awfully sick. And he is my nicest little Downy-head, the one I've always loved the best. I've tried to take such good care of him. Mother, I'm _worried_ about him."

Marise decided that Scriabine had at least the capacity to wait, while the chicken might not. She got up, saying, "All right, Elly, we'll see what we can do."

Elly pulled her along rapidly to the chicken-yard where grossly self-satisfied hens scratched in trash and filth undiscriminatingly, and complacently called their families to share what they had found there, or indeed at times apparently to admire them for having found nothing. Marise stood regarding them with a composed, ironic eye. It was good, she reflected, to be able to know that that was the way you looked from the outside, and not to care a bit because you knew firmly that there was something else there that made all the difference. All the same, it was a very good thing to have had the scaring thought that you were like that ... "there but for the grace of G.o.d... ." Was it complacent to say that? Oh, what did it matter what you called it,--complacent or not, if you knew! It all came back to not caring so much about what things could be called, if you knew what they were.

Elly had disappeared into the chicken-house and now came back with a perplexed face. "Downy-head was there, by the nests, and now he's gone."

Marise caught in the child's eyes the realness of her anxiety and thrilled to it, as she always did to any real emotion. "I'll help you look," she said, turning her eyes about the chicken-yard, crowded with voluble, intently self-centered, feathered personalities. "Which hen is his mother, Elly?

"This one, Old Speckle. Oh, Mother, there he is, lying down. He must be feeling worse!" She ran forward and stooped over a little panting yellow ball. Across the intervening s.p.a.ce and beyond all those carelessly alive bodies, Marise's eyes caught the unmistakable aspect of death in the tiny creature lying there.

"Mother!" cried Elly, "his eyes look so! He can't get his breath.

_Mother!_" Marise felt the child's agitation and alarm knock at her heart. She looked down helplessly at the dying creature. That tiny, tiny sc.r.a.p of down-covered flesh to be alive, to contain the miracle and mystery of life, and now to be struggling, all alone, with the miracle and mystery of death!

The little thing opened its glazing eyes once more, drew a long breath, and lay still. An age-old inherited knowledge and experience told Elly what bad happened. She gave a scream, picked it up and held it in her cupped hands, her little face drawn in horrified incredulity. She looked up at her mother and said in a whisper, "Mother, he's _dead_."

Marise nodded silently. Poor Elly! She wished she could think of something comforting to say. But what is there to say? For her there had never been anything but stoic silence. The mother hen clucked unconcernedly at their feet, and with coaxing guttural sounds called the rest of the chickens to eat a grain. The strong ammonia smell of the chicken-yard rose in the suns.h.i.+ne. Elly stood perfectly still, the little ball of yellow down in her hand, her face pale.

Marise looked down on her with infinite sympathy. Her child, flesh of her flesh, meeting in this uncouth place the revelation of the black gulf! But she remained silent, not knowing what to say.

Elly spoke in a low voice, "But, Mother, how _can_ he be dead, just so quick while we were looking at him? Mother, he was alive a minute ago.

He was breathing. He looked at me. He knew me. And in just a minute like that ... nothing!"

She looked around her wildly. "_Mother, where has his life gone to?_"

Marise put her arm around the little girl's shoulders tenderly, but she still only shook her head without a word. She did not know any more than Elly where his life had gone. And surely loving silence was better than tinkling words of falseness.

Elly looked up at her, glistening drops of sweat standing on her temples. "Mother," she asked, urgently, in a loud, frightened whisper, "Mother, do we die like that? Mother, will _you_ die like that? All in a moment ... and then ... nothing?"

It came like thunder, then, what Marise had never thought to feel. With a clap, she found that this time she had something to answer, something to say to Elly. Looking deep, deep into Elly's eyes, she said firmly with a certainty as profound as it was new to her, "No, Elly, I don't believe we do die like that ... all in a moment ... nothing."

She was astonished by what she said, astonished by the sudden overflowing of something she had not known was there, but which was so great that her heart could not contain it, "comme une onde qui bout dans une urne trop pleine." And she was as moved as she was astonished. Elly came into her arms with a comforted gasp. They clung to each other closely, Marise's ears humming with the unfamiliar beauty and intricacy of that new page at which she had had that instant's glimpse. Here was a new harmony, a new progression, a new rhythm to which her ear had just opened ... heard here in this uncouth place!

That evening, after the children were in bed, she stopped her reading of the new music for a moment to say to Neale, "You know those ideas that other people are better for children than their parents are?"

"Yes," said Neale, laying down the baseball page of his newspaper, instantly all there, looking at her intently.

"Well, I don't believe a word of it," said Marise.

"I should say it depended on which parents and on which children were meant," advanced Neale guardedly.

Marise had at first an affectionate smile for this, and then a laugh.

She got up from the piano-stool and went to kiss him. He said with a whimsical suspicion of this, "Why so?"

"Because you are so entirely you," she told him, and went back to Scriabine.

III

September 22.

It was the half-hour of pause after lunch. The children played idly with the fox-terrier and lounged on the steps of the side-porch, strong and brown, living cups filled to the brim with life. Neale had pushed his chair back from the table, lighted his pipe, and sat meditating.

Presently he put out his hand and laid it on Marise's, who had turned to look down the sun-flooded valley.

It was high-noon, dreamy, entranced, all the world golden with the magnificent weather as a holly-hock is golden with pollen. From the brook came the living voice of the water, with the special note of brave clarity it always had for brilliant noons.

It seemed to Marise that she too was all gold-powdered with the magnificence of life, that in her heart there sang a clear living voice that did not fear high-noons.

IV

October.

Would Vincent come back at all? Marise had wondered so often. Not Vincent in the flesh; that last angry bewildered gesture had finality in it. He had given her up then, totally. But would he come back to haunt her in those inevitable moments of flat ebb-tide in life, when what should be moist and living, withered and crisped in the merciless drought of drudgery and routine? She feared it, frankly dreaded it at first, and tried to think how to brace herself against it. But it was not then that tie came, not when she was toiling with dishes to wash, or vegetables to pare, or the endless care of the children's never-in-order clothes. Instead she found in those moments, which had been arid before, a curious new savor, a salt without which life would seem insipid, something which gave her appet.i.te for the rest. "This is all Tolstoyan nonsense and sentimentality," she told herself mockingly, "there is nothing sacred about scrubbing the floor." Or on another day, "I wonder if it's a twist of the absurd mediaeval ascetic perversity left over?"

Or again, "All it does for me is to take off the curse of belonging to the bourgeoisie." But no matter what skeptical name she called it, nor how much she minimized the reality of it, she felt some odd value in it which she would not have gone without. Once she said to herself, "It's ballast, to a person like me," although she did not know exactly what this meant. And another time she said, "Perhaps it's that I'm making an honest effort to do my share." But it was true and real, the fact that after such work the reading of the day's news of the world brought her a less oppressive sense of guilt. And stranger than this, music had greater vitality for her. She felt it a deeper, richer soil than even she had dreamed of, and struck her roots profoundly into depths which kept her whole complicated organism poised, steady, and upright.

And here it was that Vincent came back. Not the Vincent of the hawk-like imperious face, or burning eyes of desire, which had seemed to him his realest self. But the Vincent who had come in from the porch that day in March when she had first played to him, who had smiled at her, the good, grateful, peaceful smile, and had said to her music, "Go on, go on." It was the same Vincent of the afternoon in Cousin Hetty's garden when the vulture of the desire to possess had left him for a moment in peace.

Often and often he came thus as she played and leaned his head back and said, "Go on." And thus Marise knew he would always come. And thus she welcomed him.

This was what was left of him in the house he had so filled with his smoky, flaming brilliance.

V

December.

They had been talking around the fire of the stars and their names and stories, she and Neale and the children. Presently interest overcoming inertia they decided to go out and see if the clouds had blown away so that the stars could be seen. They huddled on hastily found wraps, thrust their feet into flapping, unbuckled overshoes, and leaving the still, warm, lamp-lit room, they shuffled out, laughing and talking, into the snow which lay thick and still before the house.

At first they carried out between them so much of the house atmosphere that it hung about them like warm fog, s.h.i.+elding them from the fiercely pure, still cold of the air, and from the brilliant glitter of the myriad-eyed black sky. They went on talking and laughing, pointing out the constellations they knew, and trying to find others in the spangled vault over their heads.

"A bear!" cried Mark. "I could draw a better bear than that any day!"

And from Paul, "They can call it Orion's belt all they want to, but there's no belt to it!" And from Elly, "Aldebaran! Aldebaran! Red-eyed Aldebaran!"

But little by little the house-air began to be thinned about them, to blow away from between them in wisps and wreathes, off into the blackness. The warmed, lighted house dwindled to nothing. There were only the great cold black sky and the small cold white earth. Their voices were lowered; they stood very still, close together, their heads tipped back, their faces and hearts upraised silently to receive the immensity above and about them.

Elly murmured under her breath, "Doesn't it seem funny, our world being just one of all those, and such a little one, and here we are, just these few of us, standing on the world and looking at it all."