And the great hammer that beat in my head, the merciless hammer that rang like iron, began to clang: “And the sins … of the fathers … shall be visited … upon the children … unto the third … and the fourth … generation … And the sins … of the fathers. …”
I pressed my ears between my hands, but the hammer clanged on—“unto the third … and the fourth … generation. …”
Oh the terrible isolation of the child, that pallid mystery of purity enclosed within a cell of purification, that luminous chrysalid sublimely silent, expectant, awaiting its mutation, while the never to be unfolded wings are being eaten away; and no living thing dare press the seal of welcome even on that translucent forehead for the foul contamination that lies therein! “For the sins … of the fathers …”
Under the hammer-clang repeating the pitiless law, my head reeled to and fro: “Oh Life, Life, where will you make it up to her? Why was the dream of justice ever born in the human mind, if it must stand dumb before this terrible child?”
And far away there stretched before my eyes the limitless procession of little lives that had come forth in waste and blight, to die in their smitten youth, bearing through all their pain in the unnameable grace of babyhood, the aroma of green tendrils, the gloss and the down of childhood shining and floating still among the dust and death. Oh, that girl’s long golden hair! How thick and fair it gleams around the waxy face! And the little starved kitten in the alleyway with its delicate paws catching at a windblown straw! God? Did men ever believe a God could so order life? Did anyone ever believe it?
I stared up at the sky, and the face of the consumptive caressing his geranium came in between. Ah, well, he and I at least had lived a little; but the mother of the doll had never lived; she had died always.
We have gone from each other now. Somehow the door of my coffin reopened, and I came back to the living. The man passed down to the dead. Of his will he went. It happened so: on a day of thunder and storm he leaned out and measured with his eyes for the last time; then he looked back into the room; no one was there. He set the geranium carefully at the side of the windowsill, and plunged to the stone below—the kind, hard stone that was merciful to him.
The child remains. In the summer days she still sits there upon the step—her sullen eyes staring with a seeing blindness at what she does not understand, sometimes the skull-like face bending to kiss the only thing that does not shun her love—the Doll.
If her father and mother live they never face that sight. Stranger hands attend her, professional hands, sterilized hands. They do their duty, kindly; but never the warmth of all-oblivious love, careless of contamination, enfolds her to a living breast, kisses through the clay to the spirit. Locked within the fatal narrowing circle, her soul is freezing while her body rots. Powerless in its martyrdom it waits the final expiation, hidden and dark, like an eye seen dull-blue under a lid that has never unclosed. Powerless, non-understanding. … —“For the sin … of the father … has been visited … upon the child. …” And there is no Justice anywhere, not anywhere.
Endnotes
-
Coauthored with Rosa Slobodinsky. —S.E. Editor ↩
Colophon
Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories published between 1891 and 1914 by
Voltairine de Cleyre.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Weijia Cheng,
and is based on transcriptions from
various sources
and on digital scans from
various sources.
The cover page is adapted from
Fifty-Seventh Street,
a painting completed in 1908 by
Louis Eilshemius.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
July 26, 2022, 4:09 p.m.
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