All through the hamlet in those days of waiting the men and women grew used to this question and when they looked up and saw her leaning on the staff her son had cut for her from a branch of their own trees and heard her old quavering voice ask, “Neighbor, saw you my little son today?” they would answer kindly enough, “No, no, good mother, and how could we see him in the common marketplace where we go and he such as he is, and one you say who lives by books?”
Then she would turn away dashed of her hope again and she let her voice sink and mutter, “I do not know—well and I think it is he has to do with books somewhere,” and they would laugh and say to humor her, “If some day we pass a place where books are sold we will look in and see if he is there behind the counter.”
So she must go home to wait and wonder if the moths had eaten up the sheepskins.
But one day after many moons there came news. The mother sat by the door as ever she did now, her long pipe in her fingers, for she had only just eaten her morning meal. She sat and marked how sharply the morning sun rose over the rounded hills and waited for it hoping for its heat, for these autumn mornings were chill. Then came suddenly across the threshold a son of her cousin’s, the eldest son, and he went to her own elder son who stood binding the thong of his sandal that had broken as he put it on, and he said something in a low voice.
She wondered even then for she had seen this man start for the town that morning when she rose at dawn, since she could not lie abed easily if she were well, being used to dawn rising all her life, and she saw him start to town with loads of new-cut grass. Here he was back so soon, and she was about to call out and ask him if he had sold his grass so quick when she saw her elder son look up from the thong and cry aghast, “My brother?”
Yes, the old mother’s sharp ears heard it, for she was not deaf at all and she called out quickly, “What of my little son?”
But the two men talked on earnestly and very gravely and with anxious looks into each other’s faces and at last the mother could not bear it and she rose and hobbled to them and she struck her staff upon the beaten earth and cried out, “Tell me of my son!”
But the cousin’s son went away without a word and the elder son said, halting, “Mother, there is something wrong. I do not know—but, mother, I must go to town and see and tell you then—”
But the mother would not let him go. She laid hold on him and cried out the more, “You shall not go until you tell me!”
And at the sound of such a voice the son’s wife came and stood and listened and said, “Tell her, else she will be ill with anger.”
So the son said slowly, “My cousin said—he said he saw my brother this morning among many others, and his hands were tied behind him with hempen ropes and his clothes were rags and he was marching past the marketplace where my cousin had taken the grass to sell, and there was a long line of some twenty or thirty, and when my brother saw him he turned his eyes away—but my cousin asked and the guards who walked along said they were communists sent to gaol to be killed tomorrow.”
Then did the three stare at each other, and as they stared the old mother’s jaw began to tremble and she looked from this face to the other and said, “I have heard that word, but I do not know what it is.”
And the son said slowly, “So I asked my cousin and he asked the guard and the guard laughed and he said it was a new sort of robber they had nowadays.”
Then the mother thought of that bundle hid so long beneath her bed and she began to wail aloud and threw her coat over her head and sobbed and said, “I might have known that night—oh, that bundle underneath my bed is what he robbed!”
But the son and son’s wife laid hold on her at this and looked about and hurried her between them into the house and said, “What do you mean, our mother?”
And the son’s wife lifted up the curtain and looked at the man and he came and the old mother pointed to the bundle there and sobbed, “I do not know what is in it—but he brought it here one night—and bade me be secret for a day or two—and still he is not come—and never came—”
Then the man rose and went and shut the door softly and barred it and the woman hung a garment over the window and together they drew that bundle forth and untied the ropes.
“Sheepskins, he said it was,” the mother murmured, staring at it.
But the two said nothing and believed nothing that she said. It might be anything and half they expected it was gold when they felt how heavy and how hard it was.
But when they opened it, it was only books. Many, many books were there, all small and blackly printed, and many sheets of paper, some pictured with the strangest sights of blood and death and giants beating little men or hewing them with knives. And when they saw these books, the three gaped at each other, all at a loss to know what this could mean and why any man should steal and hide mere paper marked with ink.
But however much they stared they could not know the meaning. None could read a
