She couldn’t! She couldn’t! She stood stock-still in her prison cell and wrung her hands in revolt. She simply could not. After having known something else, she could not go back to the narrow, sordid round of struggle with intolerable ever-renewed drudgery, to the daily, hourly contact with the children’s forgetfulness, carelessness, foolishness … to Stephen’s horrible tempers … with no outlet … no future … poverty for them all, always.
Poverty! It came down suffocatingly over her head like a smothering blanket thrown and twisted hard by an assailant who had sprung upon her out of the dark. She had thought herself safe from that long, slow starvation. To go back to it, to the raging, helpless narrowness of an income tragically too small, to rise up and lie down with that leaden care, to drag it about all day like a ball and chain … she could never endure it now that she knew that it was not in the least inevitable, knew how easy it was to avoid it, knew that if Lester were only willing to care a little more, to try a little harder, to put his mind on it really and truly, to give his heart to it as she did. …
All her old burning impatience with Lester was there, boiling up in clouds from the cauldron of her heart.
Through those turbid clouds she had a glimpse of a woman, touched and moved, standing by a man’s bedside and blessing him silently for his faithfulness, his gentleness, his fineness … but those figures were far away, flat and unreal, like something in a made-up picture. They were but an added irritation. She hated the thought of them as a creature in flames would hate the recollection of a running brook.
Poverty … isolation, monotony, stagnation, killing depression over never-ending servile tasks … poverty!
There was no way out. She knew that now. But she could not endure it. She never could endure it again. She would hate Lester. She would kill herself and the children.
She had sunk lower and lower till now she was crouching in a heap, panting, her bent arms over her face as if beaten down by relentless blows which she could no longer even try to parry.
What could she do? Her native energy rose up blindly, staggering, like a courageous fighter who has been knocked out but does not know it. What could she do? With a terrible effort, she strove to rise to a higher level than this mere brute suffering. She tried—yes, she really tried for a moment to think what was the right thing to do. She tried again to pray, to ask God to show her what was the right thing for a good woman to do—but she could not pray.
“Grant, O Lord, I beseech thee … pour into our hearts such. …” No, she could not pray. She could not command her mind to any such coherence as prayer. Whirling snatches of the thoughts which had filled her mind incessantly since the night before were blown across her attention like birds driven before a tornado—“The place for a mother is with her children—” How many times she had heard that—and said it. She was a bad woman to rebel so against it. And it would do her no good to rebel. What else could she do? Around and around the cell she tore, beating her hands on those locked doors. Someone had to stay and keep house and take care of the children and make the home. And if Lester were cured he couldn’t. No able-bodied man could do such work, of course. Nobody ever heard of such a thing. Men had to make the living. What would people say? They would laugh. They would make fun of the children. And of Lester. And of her. They would think of course she ought to want to do it. Everyone had heard her say how hard it was for a. … And they couldn’t go away to another city, somewhere else, where no one knew them. Her one chance was here, here!
But all at once with a final roar the tumult swept off and went beating its way into the distance, out of the church and her heart. There was a dead, blank silence about her, through which there came to her a clear, neat, compact thought, “But perhaps Lester will not get well. Perhaps he will not get well.”
A deep bodeful hush filled her heart. It was as though she had suddenly gone deaf to all the noises of the world, to everything but that one possibility. She was straighter now, no longer crouched and panting. She was on her knees, her hands clasped, her head decently bent, in the familiar attitude of Sunday morning.
At last she was praying.
A moment later she was running out of the church as though a phantom had risen beside her and laid a skeleton hand on her shoulder … she had not been praying that Lester … no, it was not possible that she had been praying that her husband would not get well!
But soon she walked more quietly, more at her usual pace. After all she had nothing to go on, nothing to be sure of, nothing really to make her think it very likely that Lester would. …
XXI
One of the interests of life for Lester was the uncertainty about who was to be his mental companion for any given day. It seemed to be something over which he had no control. Sometimes he had thought it might be the weather which settled the matter. Not infrequently his first early-morning look at the world told him with which great spirit he was to live that day. A clear, breezy, bird-twittering dawn after rain meant Christina Rossetti’s child-poems. A soft gray downpour of warm rain, varnishing the grass to brilliance and beating down on the earth with a roll of muted drum-notes, always brought Hardy to his mind.
