The Brimming Cup

CHAPTER XV
HOME LIFE

The heat was appalling even early in the morning, right after breakfast. There were always three or four such terrific days, even up here in the mountains, to remind you that you lived in America and had to take your part of the ferocious extremes of the American climate.

And of course this had to be the time when Touclé went off for one of her wandering disappearances. Marise could tell that by the aspect of the old woman as she entered the kitchen that morning, her reticule bag bulging out with whatever mysterious provisions Touclé took with her. You never missed anything from the kitchen.

Marise felt herself in such a nervously heightened state of sensitiveness to everything and everybody in those days, that it did not surprise her to find that for the first time she received something more than a quaint and amusing impression from the old aborigine. She had never noticed it before, but sometimes there was something about Touclé's strange, battered, leathery old face . . . what was it? The idea came to her a new one, that Touclé was also a person, not merely a curious and enigmatic phenomenon.

Touclé was preparing to depart in the silent, unceremonious, absent-minded way she did everything, as though she were the only person in the world. She opened the screen door, stepped out into the torrid glare of the sunshine and, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure, trudged down the path.

"Where does she go?" thought Marise, and "What was that expression on her face I could not name?"

Impulsively she went out quickly herself, and followed after the old woman.

"Touclé! Touclé!" she called, and wondered if her voice in these days sounded to everyone as nervous and uncertain as it did to her.

The old woman turned and waited till the younger had overtaken her. They were under the dense shade of an old maple, beside the road, as they stood looking at each other.

As she had followed, Marise regretted her impulse, and had wondered what in the world she could find to say, but now that she saw again the expression in the other's face, she cried out longingly, "Touclé, where do you go that makes you look peaceful?"

The old woman glanced at her, a faint surprise appearing in her deeply lined face. Then she looked at her, without surprise, seriously as though to see what she might read in the younger woman's eyes. She stood for a long moment, thinking. Finally she sat down on the grass under the maple-tree, and motioned Marise to sit beside her. She meditated for a long time, and then said, hesitatingly, "I don't know as a white person could understand. White people . . . nobody ever asked me before."

She sat silent, her broad, dusty feet in their elastic-sided, worn, run-over shoes straight before her, the thick, horny eyelids dropped over her eyes, her scarred old face carved into innumerable deep lines. Marise wondered if she had forgotten that anyone else was there. She turned her own eyes away, finally, and looking at the mountains saw that black thunderclouds were rolling up over the Eagle Rocks. Then the old woman said, her eyes still dropped, "I tell you how my uncle told me, seventy-five years ago. He said people are like fish in an underground brook, in a black cave. He said there is a place, away far off from where they live, where there is a crack in the rock. If they went 'way off they could get a glimpse of what daylight is. And about once in so often they need to swim there and look out at the daylight. If they don't, they lose their eyesight from always being in the dark. He said that a lot of Indians don't care whether they lose their eyesight or not, so long's they can go on eating and swimming around. But good Indians do. He said that as far as he could make out, none of the white people care. He said maybe they've lost their eyes altogether."

Without a move of her sagging, unlovely old body, she turned her deep black eyes on the flushed, quivering, beautiful woman beside her. "That's where I go," she answered. "I go 'way off to be by myself, and get a glimpse of what daylight is."

She got up to her feet, shifted her reticule from one hand to the other, and without a backward look trudged slowly down the dusty road, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure.

Marise saw her turn into a wood-road that led up towards the mountain, and disappear. Her own heart was burning as she looked. Nobody would help her in her need. Touclé went away to find peace, and left her in the black cave. Neale stood. . . .

A child's shriek of pain and loud wailing calls for "Mother! Mother! Mother!" sent her back running breathlessly to the house. Mark had fallen out of the swing and the sharp corner of the board had struck him, he said, "in the eye! in the eye!" He was shrieking and holding both hands frantically over his left eye. This time it might be serious, might have injured the eye-ball. Those swing-boards were deadly. Marise snatched up the screaming child and carried him into the kitchen, terrible perspectives of blindness hag-riding her imagination; saying to herself with one breath, "It's probably nothing," and in the next seeing Mark groping his way about the world with a cane, all his life long.

She opened the first-aid box on the kitchen-shelf, pulled out a roll of bandage and a length of gauze, sat down with Mark in her lap near the faucet, and wet the gauze in cold water. Then she tried in vain to induce him to take down his hands so that she could see where the blow had struck.

But the terrified, hysterical child was incapable of hearing what she said, incapable of doing anything but scream louder and louder when she tried to pull down those desperately tight little hands held with frantic tenseness over the hurt eye. Marise could feel all his little body, quivering and taut. His shrieks were like those of someone undergoing the most violent torture.

She herself responded nervously and automatically to his condition, felt herself begin to tighten up, and knew that she was equally ready to shake him furiously, or to burst into anguished tears of sympathy for his pain.

Wait now . . . wait . . . what was the thing to do for Mark? What would untie those knots of fright and shock? For Paul it would have been talk of the bicycle he was to have for his birthday; for Elly a fairy-story or a piece of candy! For Mark . . .

High above the tumult of Mark's shrieks and her own spasmodic reactions to them, she sent her intelligence circling quietly . . . and in an instant . . . oh yes, that was the thing. "Listen, Mark," she said in his ear, stopping her effort to take down his hands, "Mother's learned a new song, a new one, awfully funny. And ever so long too, the way you like them." She put her arms about him and began, hearing herself with difficulty through his cries.

("How preposterous we must sound, if Eugenia is listening," she thought to herself, as she sang, "out-yelling each other this way!")

As usual Mark fell helpless before the combination of music and a story. His cries diminished in volume. She said in his ear, "And then the Lady sings," and she tuned her voice to a young-ladyish, high sweetness and sang,

Mark made a great effort and choked down his cries to heaving sobs as he tried to listen,

She told the little boy, now looking up at her out of the one eye not covered by his hands, "Then the gentleman says to her," she made her voice loud and hearty and bluff,

She explained in an aside to Mark, "But her father had told her she must always answer just the one thing, 'no,' so she had to say," she turned up in the mincing, ladylike key again, and sang,

Mark drew a long quivering breath through parted lips and sat silent, his one eye fixed on his mother, who now sang in the loud, lusty voice,

And in the high, prim voice, she answered herself,

A faint smile hovered near Mark's flushed face. He leaned towards his mother as she sang, and took down his hands so that he could see her better. Marise noted instantly, with a silent exclamation of relief that the red angry mark was quite outside the eye-socket, harmless on the bone at one side. Much ado about nothing as usual with the children. Why did she get so frightened each time? Another one of Mark's hairbreadth escapes.

She reached for the cold wet compress and went on, singing loudly and boldly, with a facetious wag of her head, (how tired she was of all this manoeuvering!),

She applied the cold compress on the hurt spot and put out her hand for the bandage-roll, singing with an ostentatiously humorous accent and thinking with exasperation how all this was delaying her in the thousand things to do in the house,

She wound the bandage around and around the little boy's head, so that it held the compress in place, singing in the high, sweet voice,

She went on with a heavy, mock solemnity, in the loud voice,

She pinned the bandage in place at the back of Mark's head,

She gathered the child up to her, his head on her shoulder, his face turned to her, his bare, dusty, wiry little legs wriggling and soiling her white skirt; and sang, rollickingly,

"There, that's all," she said in her natural voice, looking down at Mark. She said to herself rebelliously, "I've expended enough personality and energy on this performance to play a Beethoven sonata at a concert," and found she was quoting something Vincent Marsh had said about her life, the day before.

There was a moment while the joke slowly penetrated to Mark's six-year-old brain. And then he laughed out, delightedly, "Oh, Mother, that's a beaut! Sing it again. Sing it again! Now I know what's coming, I'll like it such a lots betterer."

Marise cried out in indignant protest, "Mark! When I've sat here for ten minutes singing to you, and all the work to do, and the sun getting like red-hot fire every minute."

"What must you got to do?" asked Mark, challengingly.

"Well, the very first thing is to get dinner ready and in the fireless cooker, so we can turn out the oil-stove and cool off this terrible kitchen."

Mark looked up at her and smiled. He had recently lost a front tooth and this added a quaintness to the splendor of his irresistible smile. "You could sing as you get the dinner ready," he said insinuatingly, "and I'll help you."

Marise smothered an impulse to shout to the child, "No, no, go away! Go away! I can't have you bothering around. I've got to be by myself, or I don't know what will happen!" She thought of Touclé, off in the green and silent woods, in a blessed solitude. She thought of Eugenia up in her shaded room, stretched on the chaise-longue in a thin silk room-gown, she thought of Neale and his stern eyes . . . she looked down on the dusty, tanned, tousle-headed little boy, with the bandage around his head, his one eye looking up at her pleadingly, his dirty little hand clutching at the fold of her skirt; and drearily and unwillingly she summoned herself to self-control. "All right, Mark, that's true. I could sing while I peel the potatoes. You could wash them for me. That would help."

They installed themselves for this work. The acrid smell of potato-parings rose in the furnace-like heat of the kitchen, along with the singing voice, asking and answering itself. Mark listened with all his might, laughing and wriggling with appreciation. When his mother had finished and was putting the potatoes into the boiling water, he said exultantly, "He got around her, all right, I should say what!"

Paul burst in now, saying, "Mother, Mother!" He stopped short and asked, "What you got on your head, Mark?"

The little boy looked surprised, put his hand up, felt the bandage, and said with an off-hand air, "Oh, I bunked my head on the corner of the swing-board."

"I know," said Paul, "I've done it lots of times." He went on, "Mother, my pig has lice. You can just see them crawling around under his hair. And I got out the oil Father said to use, but I can't do it. It says on the can to rub it on with a stiff little brush. I don't see how ever in the world you're going to get your pig to stand still while you do it. When I try to, he just squeals, and runs away."

His mother said with decision, from where she stooped before the open ice-box door, "Paul, if there is anything in the world I know nothing about, it is pigs. I haven't the slightest idea what to do." She shut the heavy door with a bang more energetic than was necessary to latch it, and came back towards the stove with a raw, red piece of uncooked meat on a plate.

"Oh, how nasty meat looks, raw," said Mark, with an accent of disgust.

"You eat it with a good appetite when I've cooked it," remarked his mother, somewhat grimly, putting it in a hot pan over the fire. An odor of searing fibers and smoke and frying onions rose up in the hot, still air of the kitchen.

"If I could have guessed we'd have such weather, I'd never have ordered a pot-roast," thought Marise, vexed.

"Please, Mother, please," begged Paul.

"Please what?" asked his mother, who had forgotten the pig.

"Henry!" said Paul. "If you could see how he scratches and scratches and how the behind of his ears is all scabs he's so bitten."

"Wouldn't Eugenia and Vincent Marsh love this conversation?" thought Marise, turning the meat in the pan and starting back from the spatters of hot fat.

"Mother, don't you see, I agreed to take care of him, with Father, and so I have to. He's just like my child. You wouldn't let one of us have lice all over, and scabs on our . . ."

"Oh stop, Paul, for Heaven's sake!" said his mother.

Through the smoke and smell and heat, the sensation of her underclothing sticking hotly to her limbs, the constant dogging fear and excitement that beset her, and the causeless twanging of her nerves, there traveled to her brain, along a channel worn smooth by the habit of her thought about the children, the question, "What is it that makes Paul care so much about this?" And the answer, almost lost in the reverberation of all those other questions and answers in her head, was, "It comes from what is best in Paul, his feeling of personal responsibility for the welfare of others. That mustn't be hindered." Aloud, almost automatically, she said, in a neutral tone, "Paul, I don't think I can do a single thing for you and Henry, but I'll go with you and look at him and see if I can think of anything. Just wait till I get this and the potatoes in the fireless cooker."

Paul made a visible effort, almost as though he were swallowing something too large for his throat, and said ungraciously, "I suppose I ought to help you in here, then."

"I suppose so," said his mother roughly, in an exact imitation of his manner.

Paul looked at her quickly, laughing a little, sheepishly. He waited a moment, during which time Mark announced that he was going out to the sand-pile, and then said, in a pleasant tone, "What can I do?"

His mother nodded at him with a smile, refrained from the spoken word of approbation which she knew he would hate, and took thought as to what he might do that would afflict him least. "You can go and sweep off the front porch, and straighten out the cushions and chairs, and water the porch-box geraniums."

He disappeared, whistling loudly, "Massa's in the cold, cold ground." Marise hoped automatically that Elly was not in earshot to hear this.

She felt herself tired to the point of exhaustion by the necessity always to be divining somebody's inner processes, putting herself in somebody's else skin and doing the thing that would reach him in the right way. She would like, an instant, just an instant, to be in her own skin, she thought, penetrated with a sense of the unstable equilibrium of personal relations. To keep the peace in a household of young and old highly differentiated personalities was a feat of the Blondin variety; the least inattention, the least failure in judgment, and opportunities were lost forever. Her sense of the impermanence of the harmony between them all had grown upon her of late, like an obsession. It seemed to her that her face must wear the strained, propitiatory smile she had so despised in her youth on the faces of older woman, mothers of families. Now she knew from what it came . . . balancing perpetually on a tight-rope from which . . .

Oh, her very soul felt crumpled with all this pressure from the outside, never-ending!

The worst was not the always recurring physical demands, the dressing and undressing the children, preparing their food and keeping them clean. The crushing part was the moral strain; to carry their lives always with you, incalculably different from each other and from your own. And not only their present lives, but the insoluble question of how their present lives were affecting their future. Never for a moment from the time they are born, to be free from the thought, "Where are they? What are they doing? Is that the best thing for them?" till every individual thought of your own was shattered, till your intelligence was atrophied, till your sensibilities to finer things were dulled and blunted.

Paul came back. "About ready for Henry?" he asked. "I've finished the porch."

She put the two tightly closed kettles inside the fireless cooker and shut down the lid. "Yes, ready for Henry," she said.

She washed her hot, moist face in cold water, drank a glass, put on a broad-brimmed garden hat, and set out for the field back of the barn. The kitchen had been hot, but it seemed cool compared to the heat into which they stepped from the door. It startled Marise so that she drew back for an instant. It seemed to her like walking through molten metal. "Mercy! what heat!" she murmured.

"Yes, ain't it great?" said Paul, looking off, down the field, "just what the corn needs."

"You should say 'isn't,' not 'ain't,'" corrected his mother.

"But it'll be cooler soon," said Paul. "There's a big thunderstorm coming up. See, around the corner of the mountain. See how black it is now, over the Eagle Rocks" He took her hand in his bramble-scarred little fingers, and led her along, talking proudly of his own virtue. "I've moved Henry's pen today, fresh, so's to get him on new grass, and I put it under the shade of this butternut tree."

They were beside the pen now, looking over the fence at the grotesque animal, twitching his gross and horribly flexible snout, as he peered up at them out of his small, intelligent eyes, sunk in fat, and almost hidden by the fleshy, hairy triangles of his ear-flaps.

"Don't you think Henry is a very handsome pig?" asked Paul.

"I think you take very good care of him," she answered. "Now what is the matter about the oil you can't put on? Doesn't he like it?"

"He hasn't felt it yet. He won't even let me try. Look!" The child climbed over the fence and made a quick grab at the animal, which gave an alarmed, startled grunt, wheeled with astonishing nimbleness, and darted away in a short-legged gallop.

"Look there, that's the way he always does!" said Paul in an aggrieved tone.

Marise considered the pig for a moment. He had turned again and was once more staring at her, his quivering, fleshy snout in the air, a singularly alert expression of attention animating his heavy-jowled countenance.

"Are there any things he specially likes?" she asked Paul.

"He likes to eat, of course, being a pig," said Paul, "and he loves you to scratch his back with a stick."

"Oh, then it's easy. Come outside the pen. Now listen. You go back to the barn and get whatever it is you feed him. Then you put that in the trough, and let him begin to eat, quietly. Then take your oil and your brush, and moving very slowly so that you don't startle him, lean over the fence and begin to brush it on his back where he likes to be rubbed. If he likes the feel of it, he'll probably stand still. I'll wait here, till you see how it comes out."

She moved away a few paces, and sank down on the grass under the tree, as though the heat had flung her there. The grass crisped drily under her, as though it too were parched.

She closed her eyes and felt the sun beating palpably on the lids . . . or was it that hot inward pulse still throbbing . . . ? Why wouldn't Neale do it for her? Why wouldn't he put out that strength of his and crush out this strange agitation of hers, forbid it to her? Then there was nothing in her but intense discomfort, as though that were a universe of its own. A low, distant growl of thunder shook the air with a muffled, muted roar.

After a time, a little voice back of her announced in a low, cautious tone, "Mother, it works! Henry loves it!"

She turned her head and saw the little boy vigorously rubbing the ears and flanks of the pig, which stood perfectly still, its eyes half shut, rapt in a beatitude of satisfaction.

Marise turned her head away and slid down lower on the grass, so that she lay with her face on her arm. She was shaking from head to foot as though with sobs. But she was not crying. She was laughing hysterically. "Even for the pig!" she was saying to herself. "A symbol of my life!"

She lay there a long time after this nervous fit of laughter had stopped, till she heard Paul saying, "There, I've put it on every inch of him." He added with a special intonation, "And now I guess maybe I'd better go in swimming."

At this Marise sat up quickly, with an instant experienced divination of what she would see.

In answer to her appalled look on him, he murmured apologetically, "I didn't know I was getting so much on me. It sort of spattered."

---

It was, of course, as she led the deplorable object towards the house that they encountered Eugenia under a green-lined white parasol, on the way back from the garden, carrying an armful of sweet-peas.

"I thought I'd fill the vases with fresh flowers before the rain came," she murmured, visibly sheering off from Paul.

"Eugenia ought not to carry sweet-peas," thought Marise. "It ought always to be orchids."

In the bath-room as she and Paul took off his oil-soaked clothes, Mark's little voice called to her, "Mother! Mo-o-other!"

"Yes, what is it?" she answered, suspending operations for a moment to hear.

"Mother, if I had to kill all the ants in the world," called Mark, "I'd a great deal rather they were all gathered up together in a heap than running around every-which-way, wouldn't you?"

"For goodness' sakes, what a silly baby thing to say!" commented Paul with energy.

Marise called heartily to Mark, "Yes indeed I would, dear."

Paul asked curiously, "Mother, how can you answer him like that, such a fool thing!"

Marise felt another wave of hysterical laughter mounting, at the idea of the difficulty in perceiving the difference in degree of flatness between Mark's remarks and those of Paul.

But it suddenly occurred to her that this was the time for Elly's hour at the piano, and she heard no sound. She hastily laid out the clean clothes for Paul, saw him started on the scrub in the bath-tub, and ran downstairs to see if she could find Elly, before the storm broke, turning over in her mind Elly's favorite nooks.

---

The air was as heavy as noxious gas in the breathless pause before the arrival of the rain.

In the darkened, shaded hall stood a man's figure, the face turned up towards her, the look on it meant for her, her only, not the useful house-mother, but that living core of her own self, buried, hidden, put off, choked and starved as she had felt it to be, all that morning. That self rose up now, passionately grateful to be recognized, and looked back at him.

Thunder rolled among the distant hills.

She felt her pulse whirling with an excitement that made her lean against the wall, as he took a great stride towards her, crying out, "Oh, make an end . . . make an end of this. . . ."

The door behind him opened, and Elly ran in, red-faced and dusty. "Mother, Mother, Reddy has come off her nest. And there are twelve hatched out of the fourteen eggs! Mother, they are such darlings! I wish you'd come and see. Mother, if I practise good, won't you come afterwards and look at them?"

"You should say 'practise well,' not 'good,'" said Marise, her accent openly ironical.

The wind, precursor of the storm falling suddenly on the valley, shook the trees till they roared.

Over the child's head she exchanged with Vincent Marsh a long reckless look, the meaning of which she made no effort to understand, the abandon of which she made no effort to restrain.

With a dry, clattering, immediate rattle, without distance or dignity, the thunder broke threateningly over the house.

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