The Brimming Cup

CHAPTER XXIX
VIGNETTES FROM HOME LIFE

Paul had been sent for blue-berries through the Eagle Rock woods to the high upland pasture where the Powers cows fed during the day. On the upper edge of that, skirting a tract of slash left from an old cutting, was a berry-patch, familiar to all the children of Crittenden's valley.

When at four o'clock there was no sign of him, and then at five still none, Marise began to feel uneasy, although she told herself that nothing in the world could happen to Paul on that well-known mountain-side. He had taken Médor with him, who would certainly have come for help if Paul had fallen and hurt himself. She excused herself to the tall, awkward lad from North Ashley come to try over his part in a quartet, asked Touclé to help Elly set the supper things on the table if she should be late, and set off at a rapid pace by the short-cut over the ledges.

As she hurried over the rough trail, frankly hastening, now frankly alarmed, she thought that probably for all the life-time of the people in the valley the death of Frank Warner would set a sinister element of lurking danger in those familiar wooded slopes. Nothing could have happened to Paul, but still she hurried faster and faster, and as she came near the upper edge of the pasture she began to shout loudly, "Paul! Paul!" and to send out the high yodel-cry that was the family assembly call. That act of shouting brought her a step nearer to panic.

But almost at once she heard the little boy's answer, not far from her saw his dog bounding through the bushes, and as she emerged from the woods into the open pasture she saw Paul running towards her, pail in hand, evidently astonished to know her there. But there was about him something more than astonishment, something which Marise's mother-eye catalogued as furtitve, that consciousness of something to hide which always looks to grown-ups like guilt. She gave no sign of seeing this, however, stopping short to catch her breath, smiling at him, and wondering with great intensity what in the world it could be. He looked a little frightened.

He came up to her, answering her smile uneasily, and she saw that he had only a few berries in his pail. At this she was relieved, thinking that possibly all that had happened was that he had lingered to play. But when she glanced back at his face, she had the impression that there was something more, very much more. He had received some indelible impression and it was his instinct to hide it from his mother. Her heart sank forebodingly.

"What is the best thing to do?" she asked herself. "To speak about it first, or to wait till he does?"

She sat down on a stone, fanning herself with her hat, watching him, trying to make out the meaning of every shift of expression, turn of eye, position of his hands, carriage of his head, bringing to this all her accumulated knowledge of Paul, afire with the sudden passion to protect him which had flamed up with her intuition that something had happened to him.

(Come and gone with the dry rapidity of fingers snapped, she had thought, "The point is, that other people may be more clever than mothers, but nobody else cares enough, always, always to try to understand!")

"I thought I'd come up and walk back with you," she offered.

"I haven't got very many," said Paul, abashed, looking down at the few, blue, bloom-covered balls in the bottom of his shining tin pail. "I was trying to hurry up and get enough for supper, anyhow."

Marise in spite of herself, moved by pity for his confusion, offered him a way out. It always seemed to her too dreadful for anyone not to have a way out, even if it implied a fib. "Weren't there very many on the bushes?" she asked.

But he refused it with a characteristic integrity. "Oh yes, there were lots there," he said.

A silence fell. The little dog, sensitively aware of something wrong, whined uneasily, and pawed at Paul's hand. But Paul did not look down at him. He stood, his bare feet wide apart, the empty pail in his hand, looking down the beautiful green slope of the pasture, golden now in the long rays from the sun poised low on the line of the mountains opposite.

Marise looked at him, seeing nothing in all the world but that tanned, freckled, anxious little face. With what an utter unexpectedness did these moments of crisis spring on you; something vital there, and no warning, no chance to think.

"Anything the matter, Paul?" she said gently.

He nodded, silent.

"Anything you can tell Mother?" she asked, still more gently.

Paul said gruffly, "I don't know: it's about Ralph Powers. He was up here this afternoon." He looked down at his brown, bramble-scratched legs.

Marise's imagination gave an unbridled leap of fear. She had always felt something strange and abnormal about Ralph. But she thought, "I mustn't tyrannize over Paul, even by a too-waiting expectant silence," and stooped over with the pretext of tying her shoe. A lump came to her throat. How terribly, helplessly, you cared about what came to your children!

When she lifted her head, Paul had come nearer her and was looking down at her, with troubled eyes. "Say, Mother, he didn't say not to tell you. Do you suppose it would be fair?"

She made a great effort at loyalty and said, "I can't tell, Paul. You saw him. You know better than I, if you think he meant you not to tell. Try to remember if he said anything about it."

Paul thought hard. "You wouldn't tell anybody?" he asked.

"Not if you don't want me to," she answered.

Paul sat down by her and drew a long breath. "I don't believe he would care, your knowing it, if you never told anybody else, nor said anything to him. Mother, I was going along, up there by the big rock where the white birches grow, and I saw Ralph. . . . He was in front of a sort of table he'd fixed up with a long piece of slate-stone, and he had some queer-shaped stones on it . . . oh, Mother . . . he was crying so, and talking to himself! And when he saw me he got as mad! And he told me about it, just as mad all the time, as though he was mad at me. Mother, it's an altar!

"An altar!" said Marise, stupidly, utterly disconcerted by the word, so totally other than what her fears had been foreboding.

"Yes, an altar, and he says the stones on it are idols, and he bows down and worships them, the way the Bible says it's wicked to."

Marise was too much astonished to open her lips.

Paul said, "Mother, Ralph says he hates God, and isn't going to say his prayers to him any more. He says God let his father and mother both get killed, and he don't know what the devil could do any worse than that. He said he started in having an altar to idols because he thought from what the Bible said that if you did you'd be so wicked lightning would strike you dead. But it didn't, and now he doesn't believe anything. So he's going on, having idols because the Bible says not to."

Marise's first rounded and exclusive emotion was of immense relief. Nothing had happened to her own son, and beside this relief, nothing for the moment seemed of any consequence. She drew Paul to her with a long breath of what was, she recognized it the moment afterward, her old, clear, undiluted, ferocious, hateful mother-egotism. For that instant she had not cared an atom what happened to another woman's child, so long as hers was safe.

But the next instant, the awareness of her hard heart cut across her like the lash of a whip. She shrank under it, horrified. She hung her head guilty and ashamed, divining the extremity of the other child's misery.

As she sat there, with her living arms around her own little son, the boy whose mother was dead came and stood before her in imagination, showing those festering, uncared-for wounds of sorrow and bitterness and loneliness, and furious, unavailing revolt from suffering too great to be borne.

She felt the guilt driven out from her narrow heart as it swelled larger to take him in. Any child who needed a mother so much, was her own child. He had no longer any mother who would care enough to try to understand, but she would care enough.

"He bowed down and worshiped," said Paul, in a shocked, frightened voice. "He knocked his head on the stones and cried like anything. He said he hated God."

"Oh!" cried Marise, intolerably stung by sympathy and pity. She started up to her feet, her heart burning, the tears on her cheeks. Her arms ached with emptiness till she should have drawn that suffering into them.

Paul said shyly, "Say, Mother, it's awful hard on those Powers kids, isn't it, not having anybody but their grandmother. Say, Mother, don't you think maybe we could . . . we could . . ." He turned his freckled, tanned, serious little face up to hers.

His mother stooped to kiss him, furiously, burningly, passionately, as she did not often kiss Paul, and he clung to her with all the strength of his strong little arms. "Yes, yes, you darling, you darling," she told him brokenly. "Yes, yes, yes."

Marise was slowly going through a passage 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 God. . . ." 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 space 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 scrap 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 sunshine. 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.

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.

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 appetite 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.

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, shielding 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."

Marise thought, "We seem to be the only living things in all creation." In that huge, black, cold glittering universe how tiny was the little glow of life they made!

Tiny but unquenchable! Those myriads of hard staring eyes could not look down the immortal handful of human life and love which she and Neale had created between them.

There was a silence, filled with still, breathless cold; with enormous space, with infinity.

Marise felt a rigorous shudder run over her, as though something vital were coming to her, like the rending pang of pain which heralds child-birth. After this, did she close her eyes for a moment, or did it come to her while she continued to gaze wide-eyed at the stern greatness of the universe? What was this old, familiar, unknown sensation?

. . . as though, on a long journey in the dark it had grown light, so that she had suddenly recognized which way she was going.

Then she knew what it was. Conscious and awake, she was feeling herself one with the great current, advancing with an irresistible might, majesty and power, in which she shared, to which she gave her part.

She was putting away the clean sheets from the washing on the shelves at the end of the hall, upstairs, her mind entirely on the prosaic task, wondering when she would have to replace some of the older ones, and wishing she could put off buying till the outrageous post-war prices went down. Someone stirred behind her and she turned her head quickly to see who was there. It was Neale, come in early. He was standing, looking at her back; and in the instant before he saw that she had turned, she caught the expression on his face, the tender fathomless affection that was there.

A warm gush of happiness surged up all over her. She felt a sudden intense physical well-being, as though her breath came more smoothly, her blood ran more sweetly in her veins.

"Oh, Neale!" she said, under her breath, flushing and turning to him. He looked at her, his strong, resolute face and clear eyes smiled, and opening his arms he drew her into them. The ineffable memory of all the priceless past, the ineffable certainty of the priceless future was in their kiss.

That evening, after a long golden hour at the piano, she chanced to take down the Largo in the Chopin sonata. As she began it, something stirred in her mind, some memory that instantly lived with the first notes of the music. How thick-clustered with associations music became, waking a hundred echoes and overtones!

This was the memory of the time when she had played it, almost a year ago, and had thought how intimacy and familiarity with music but deepened and enriched and strengthened its hold on you. It was only the lower pleasures of which one grew tired,—had enough. The others grew with your growing capacity to hold them. She remembered how that day she had recalled the Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and free," and had thought that music took you in to worship quite simply and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine, that you adored none the less although you were at home there and not breathless with adoration like the nun: because it was a whole world given to you, not a mere pang of joy, because you could live and move and be blessedly and securely at home there.

She finished the last note of the Largo and sat silent. She was thinking that her marriage was like that, too.

Presently she got up, took out the old portfolio of photographs, and pinned upon the wall over the piano the view taken from Rocca di Papa.

Marise had been drilling the chorus in the Town Hall of Ashley after the men's working-hours, and now in the dimming light of the early evening was going home on snow-shoes, over the hill-path. She liked to use snow-shoes and occasionally said that she could walk more easily and more lightly on them than on bare ground. She trod over the tops of the deep drifts with an accentuation of her usual strong free step.

The snow fell thickly and steadily, a cold, finely-spun, straight-hung curtain, veiling all the muffled sleeping valley. There was an inconceivable silence about her as she drew her snow-shoes over the velvet-like masses of the snow. But within her were ringing echoes of the rhythms and cadences of the afternoon's struggle, imperfectly sung most of them, haltingly, or dully, or feebly, or with a loud misunderstanding of the phrase. At the recollection of these failures, she clenched her hands hard inside her fur gloves with an indomitable resolution to draw something better from her singers the next time.

But mingled with them was a moment of splendor. It was when the men had tried over the passage she had explained to them the week before. She had not known then, she did not know now, how clearly or definitely she had reached them with her summary of the situation of the drama: the desperate straits of the Israelites after the three-year drought, the trial by fire and water before the scorning aristocracy, Elijah stark and alone against all the priesthood of Baal, the extremity of despair of the people . . . and then the coming of the longed-for rain that loosened the terrible tension and released their hearts in the great groaning cry of thanksgiving. She had wondered how clearly or definitely she had reached their understanding, but she knew that she had reached their hearts, when suddenly she had heard all those men's voices pealing out, pure and strong and solemn and free, as she had dreamed that phrase could be sung.

The piercing sweetness of the pleasure this had brought to her came over her again in a wave. She halted on the crest of the hill, and for a moment in place of the purples and blues of the late snowy afternoon there hung before her eyes the powerful, roughly clad bodies of those vigorous men, their weather-beaten faces, their granite impassivity, under which her eye had caught the triumph of the moment, warming them as it did her, with the purest of joys this side of heaven, the consciousness of having made music worthily. The whole valley seemed to be filled to its brim with that shout of exultation. It had taken all of her patience, and will-power, and knowledge of her art and of these people to achieve that moment. But it had lifted her high, high above the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of security in joy.

The snow fell more and more thickly, covering her as she stood with a fine, soft mantle of white. She had heard the men that afternoon saying they had seen signs of the winter break-up, and she wondered at it now, looking about the frozen, buried, beautiful valley and up to the frozen towering mountains, breathing in the cold air, as pure as the ether itself. It seemed to her that spring was as remote and unreal and impossible an imagination of the heart as a child's fairy-tale.

Then suddenly, bursting out of the dimming distance, close in front of her, flying low, silently, strongly, a pair of wild geese went winging off towards the north, their gray shapes the only moving thing in all the frost-held world.

Marise drew a great breath of delight in their strong and purposeful vitality. She looked after them, her heart rising and singing with comradely pride in them. She would have liked to shout an exultant greeting after them, "Hurrah!"

They went beating off, fast and straight, for their unseen destination, while, treading the velvet-like snow-drifts with her strong free tread, Marise went home.

It was the first warm day of the year. The hard-frozen ruts of the road thawed on top and glistened. The snow-banks shrank visibly from one hour to the next under a warm wind and a hazy sun. The mountains were unbelievably beautiful and seductive in a shimmer of blue and silver. The children had brought home a branch of pussy-willows, and as Marise and Neale stood for a moment at the open door breathing in the new softness, they saw Touclé, old and stooped and shabby, her reticule bag bulging, her flat feet in enormous overshoes plodding up the road towards the mountain.

They smiled at one another. It was in truth the first day of spring. Marise said, after a pause, "Do you know what she goes off for?"

Neale shook his head with a wide indifference as to the reason. "Because she's an Injun," he conjectured casually.

"She told me once," said Marise, with a sudden wonder what Neale would think of that glimpse into the old mystic's mind, how he would (for she knew beforehand he would) escape the wistfulness which struck at her even now, at the thought of that door to peace. She repeated to him word for word what Touclé had told her on that hot August day.

Neale gave her his usual careful attention. Marise thought to herself, "Neale is the only person I ever knew who could listen to other people's ideas." But when she finished he made no comment. She asked him, "Did you ever think that old carven-image had that in her? How profound a disdain for us busy-about-nothing white people she must have!"

Neale nodded. "Most likely. Everybody has a good deal of disdain for other people's ideals."

"Well, you haven't for hers, have you?" challenged Marise. Neale looked thoughtful. "I'm no mystic. Their way of managing life often looks to me like sort of lying down on the job. I'm no mystic and I'm no fish. Looks to me as though the thing to do isn't to go off in a far corner to get your momentary glimpse of daylight, but to batter a hole in the roof of your cave and let daylight in where you live all the time. I can't help being suspicious of a daylight that's so uncertain you have to go away from life and hold your breath before you can see it for a minute. I want it where I do my work."

Marise looked at him, thinking deeply. That was just what Neale did. But when she looked back at the old Indian woman, just now turning into the wood-road, she sighed wistfully, and did not know why.

There was so very much growing always to be done in life.

". . . I'm planning perhaps to make the trip to the temples in the Malay jungle. Biskra was deadly, and Italy worse . . . vulgarity and commonness everywhere. What an absolutely dreary outlook wherever one turns one's eyes! There is no corner of the modern world that is not vulgar and common. Democracy has done its horrible leveling down with a vengeance . . ."

---

(A letter from Mr. Welles:)

". . . The life here is full of interest and change, and it's like dew on my dusty old heart to see the vitality of the joy-in-life of these half-disinherited people. I'm ashamed to tell you how they seem to love me and how good they are to me. Their warmness of heart and their zest in life. . . . I'm just swept back into youth again. It makes me very much mortified when I think what a corking good time I am having and what sanctimonious martyr's airs I put on about coming down here. Of course a certain amount of my feeling younger and brisker comes from the fact that, working as I am, nobody feels about me the laid-on-the-shelf compassion which everybody (and me too) was feeling before. I am somebody here and every time I say 'Dr. Martin' to a well-educated Negro physician whom another white man has just hailed as 'Andy' I feel not only a real sense of righteous satisfaction but the joyful mischievous fun that a small boy has. Give my love to Paul (speaking of small boys) and tell him I'm saving up for the fishing-pole I am going to use when I go fishing with him next summer. He said in his last letter he wanted to come down here and make me a visit; but you tell him I think he'd better get his growth before he does that."

From a profound sleep, serene warm infinity of rest, Marise was wakened by a little outcry near the bed, a sobbing voice saying through chattering teeth, "Mother! Father!"

Still drowned in sleep, Marise cried out, "What? What's that?" and then, "Oh, you, Elly. What's the matter, dear? Notions again?"

"Oh, Mother, it was an awful dream this time. Can't I get into bed with you?"

"Why yes, come along, you dear little silly."

The fumbling approach to the bed, Marise holding the sheets open and stretching out her hand through the cold darkness towards the little fingers groping for her; the clutch at her hand with a quick anguish of relief and joy. "Oh, Mother!"

Then the shivering body rolling into bed, the little cold arms tight around her neck, the cold smooth petal-like cheek against hers.

Marise reached over beyond Elly and tucked the covers in with one arm, drew the child closer to her, and herself drew closer to Neale. She wondered if he had been awakened by Elly's voice, and the little stir in the room, and hoped he had not. He had been off on a very long hard tramp over mountain trails the day before, and had been tired at night. Perhaps if he had been wakened by Elly he would drowse off again at once as she felt herself doing now, conscious sleepily and happily of Elly's dear tender limbs on one side of her and of Neale's dear strong body on the other.

---

The strong March wind chanted loudly outside in the leafless maple-boughs. As Marise felt her eyelids falling shut again it seemed to her, half-awake, half-asleep, that the wind was shouting out the refrain of an old song she had heard in her childhood, "There's room for all! There's room for all! What had it meant, that refrain? She tried drowsily to remember, but instead felt herself richly falling asleep again, her hands, her arms, her body.

"There's room for all! There's room for all!"

She was almost asleep. . . .

Someone was speaking again. Elly's voice, calmer now, wistful and wondering, as though she were lying awake and trying to think.

"Mother."

"Yes, dear, what is it?

"Mother, aren't you and father afraid of anything?"

---

Marise was wide-awake now, thinking hard. She felt Neale stir, grope for her hand and hold it firmly . . . Neale's strong hand!

She knew what she was saying. Yes, she knew all that it meant when she answered, "No, Elly, I don't believe we are."

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