This Quiet Dust Was Gentlemen and Ladies: The Midst of Life. Ii

June twenty-third
I WONDER if one could prove statistically that there is always more fog and rain in haying week than at any other time. I suppose not. I suppose it is just that one watches more closely. We cut it Monday. Tuesday, when it should have dried, was the foggiest day of the year as well as the longest. The fog gave me a curious feeling of being hung in space, for there was a salt tang to it not indigenous to any inland fog, and also a rarefied, Alpine feel, hardly justified by this altitude. I lapsed into a state of suspension, conscious only that I must store up the longest day in the year against the time when daylight is a fleeting luxury — and that the hay was n’t drying. Yesterday, however, it dried very well, and, although the rain wet it last night, the wind which has been blowing about fifty miles an hour has made it safe enough to put in the barn.
Does it seem to you odd — my preoccupation with hay? I don’t imagine it does, even though the danger of fire from fermentation was the only fact about it that worried or interested me when you were here. But after you died I found the list of fields that you planned to change into mowings, and although I can’t now remember taking any interest in anything at that time, except externally, for the reassurance of my friends, I insisted that extra fertilizer be bought and spread, and that for the first time we raise all our own hay. That meant, of course, the rebuilding and strengthening of the big barn at the farmer’s house; and quickly, too, for there was no other storage space, and you know how slowly work done by the natives ordinarily progresses. But I developed the zeal of a fanatic, and soon rocks were being hauled for a new foundation, beams were laid, the level was changed, and the old barn became a reproduction of the new one you had planned in your mind. I used to go up every day and talk to the men about the work, using technical phrases whose meaning I did n’t really know and whose issuance from my lips never ceased surprising me.
Once, two years after you were dead, the man whose gestures had reminded me of you said to me: ‘You’re not one person. You’re two. ... Is your voice like your husband’s as well?’ I was shocked into a vivid curiosity by the remark; for I realized that, whatever significance it held for him, for me it was a radical and dangerous truth. I knew that nothing in nature could fulfill its life span split in two.
Suddenly I remembered an incident the spring after you died. Alice and I had gone to garner lilacs from a deserted farm. I was busy breaking off branches when from nowhere appeared a sour-faced, wizened little man who, while displaying his sheriff’s badge, said in that acid Yankee drawl, ‘What d’ ye mean — stealing them thar lilacs?‘
‘Oh, dear,’ I thought. ‘I hate policemen. And this one I can’t even flatter. He’s sure to arrest me, and then what shall I do?’
‘I have no intention of stealing these lilacs,’ my voice said. ‘The house, as far as I can see, is deserted; the property is n’t posted, and I saw no reason for believing they belonged to anyone in particular.’
‘Wa’al, they do,’ he said; ‘and I can have you prosecuted to the full extent o’ the law, if I like, too.’
‘Yes, you can,’ I thought. ‘And then I’d have to go to court with a lot of strange people. I could n’t bear that.’
‘You could try to prosecute me,’ I said; ‘but, considering I had no intention of stealing and that I am quite willing to pay for the lilacs, I think you’d have a hard time proving your case.’
He was staring at the Connecticut license plates on the car.
‘Whar’s your registration papers for that car, and whar’s your own license, too?’
‘Oh, God,’ I thought. ‘This is the end.’ It was a secondhand car I had just bought, and the registration papers had n’t come through.
‘I have n’t them with me. I’m sorry,’ announced my voice.
‘Wa’al now,’ he said, shaking his head with pleasure. ‘Haow do I know you ain’t stolen that car just like you was stealin’ the lilacs?’
‘I don’t know how,’ I thought. ‘All I want is to go home, away from you, you loathsome little man.’
‘You don’t know,’ I said firmly. ‘ But if you want to know, you can first, find out my name and address, and then you can send me a summons, and then I ’ll tell you in front of a judge in court.’
I leaped into the car, slammed the door, and drove off with my lilacs.
‘Were you surprised,’ I asked Alice, ‘at the way I talked to him?’
‘ It did n’t sound like you at all,’ she said.
And of course it was n’t I. It was you, taking the words out of my mouth, as they say, or putting them in. It all came back to me when the man said, ‘You’re two people, not one.’ Ever since, I’ve been fighting to become one again — and that was two years ago.
For the past day or two I have wanted to write you about the haying, just casually — the little things that happen — the covey of young partridges barely saved from being slaughtered by the mowing machine; the young cat whose leg was nearly cut off by it, and the little wild rabbit that emerged from his hole at the wrong moment, to be nearly mowed down — the perpetual danger of sudden death and destruction that gives life in the country its pattern of excitement. But I could n’t write. Some unexpressed and heavy feeling weighed me down. This morning, however, the moment flashed back over me when I had first stood alone in the rebuilt barn, all filled with our own hay, grown from our own land, to feed the cattle, which in turn feed us and fertilize the land that nourishes them. You were there, too. I know it; and I write this because you must know that I know it. We stood together on that same island in space and time where we had stood the night those words were read over us — ‘for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death us do part.’ Our marriage bed was a stack of hay — sweet, resilient, and indestructible, growing afresh each year.
That was our second marriage. Of the third there will be no writing.

June twenty-fourth
I’m in a foul humor this morning. I thought at first I ought to write you only when I was feeling, if not happy, at least collected. But I do realize that, since you did n’t mind my black moods when you could n’t escape them, they certainly can’t offend you now. I suspect, anyway, that before ever they could reach eternity these pettinesses would dissolve like the smoke from skyrockets.
And I think even you would be cross if you were here, for the thermometer has dropped below fifty and the wind is blowing the trees so hard they look like crazy women doing aesthetic dancing and losing their garments all over the lawn. I resent these unnecessary readjustments. It’s bad enough to live through winters anywhere, without October’s being introduced into June. One wants at least some visible and tangible evidence that there is a semblance of order in nature. Once when I was a little girl at the beach it was so cold on the Fourth of July we had to light the fire, and I have never forgotten the malaise caused me by such irregularity. That’s how I feel to-day.
But now that I have complained to you, miraculously, without even a touch of your hand, you have done it again. You have once more restored my equanimity.
For, of course, there are advantages to cold days, even in June. The flies did n’t bother me yesterday when I rode through the woods to Cockaday’s house. Although it is still empty, it has n’t yet begun to show bad signs of decay, and stands inviting and remote on top of the little cleared hill, deep in the woods. The irises were still in bloom by the front door, and at the back door a heavily laden white moss-rose bush and some sweet Williams reverted, alas, to the universal magenta.
I always feel the same sharp emotion at the sight of perennial flowers, persisting long after the hands that planted them are back unfeeling in the soil t hey once so consciously cultivated. Do you remember one July night when we were starting out to the Marches for dinner, feeling very gay? As we drove by the garden with the spikes of blue Delphinium sticking up way over the hemlock hedge, — they don’t any more, it’s grown so tall, — I said, 4You know, we could always be as gay and frivolous as this if we liked, and the Delphinium would go right on growing even after we were dead.’
The next time I remembered that fact there was no longer any gaiety left in the world. You were dying in a New York hotel bedroom. I was sitting in the next room with Gregory, waiting for the doctors to come out. Their last chance, they had said, was to puncture the lung and drain out the fluid. Crises annihilate barriers. Once Gregory had written me a charming letter, glad that I was going to marry you, sure I would not encroach on your so perfect stylization: ‘a museum piece,’ he called you. But now we spoke quite simply of how much we both loved you, the best friend, the best husband, man or woman ever had. And always the punctuating chorus: ‘He can’t die. He can’t die. They can’t let him die.’
How long we sat there I can’t tell, but eventually the two doctors came out and stood in the doorway, faces pale and drawn. They did n’t speak a word. We waited. Then Gregory said, ‘Can’t you say something — just something?’
‘If only we could,’ Dr. Bristol said.
‘You mean there’s no hope?’
‘One can’t say that. We’ve simply failed to puncture the lung. Some miracle may happen.’
‘And I’m sure it will,’ I said, in an unnaturally cordial tone, as if not to hurt their feelings. ‘I know you’ve clone your best, but if one has reached the limits of science, one can’t lose by believing in miracles, can one?’
They left, poor men, weary and nerve-racked, — it was a very bad winter for pneumonia, they told me, — and I turned to Gregory.
‘You believe in miracles, don’t you?’
‘ I believe in this one — with all my heart.’
But miracles require symbols. For the moment I was stumped. Just then someone came from another room — you took almost the whole floor of a hotel to die in — and said London was on the telephone. It was Patricia. Someone had cabled her of your illness, and she wanted reassurance. Like a miracle it was, to hear the very timbre of her voice so many thousand miles away; but when the voice stopped, nothing remained. Mechanics are no fit symbol for miracles. It was then I thought of the Delphinium in the garden, growing year after year. Somehow I thought if we both could think very hard about it for a long time, you would n’t die. At the time it did n’t seem to me at all a fatuous idea. I went and sat on your bed, and was afraid to speak.
‘That Trimble’s a grand man.’ You spoke in gasps, with a great effort not to appear breathless. ‘He’s gentle as a woman, and strong as a panther. And what do you think Bristol’s name is? Cyril. Is n’t that perfect?’
Your debonairness frightened me. I’ve only learned the game of sportsmanship since that time. ‘So they did n’t pull it off, eh? I could have told them they would n’t. Now, what I need — ’
‘Dearest, what you need is rest and quiet. Please don’t talk so much. You must keep your strength.’
‘You’re right. Run along, then; I’ll go to sleep. Kiss me, Jinny.’
‘There’s something I thought of I want to say to you. I thought if you were, oh, bored maybe — and did n’t know what to think about — why — you might remember the Delphinium in the garden. I was just thinking about them myself, that’s all.’
‘I’ve plenty to think about.’
You spoke so sternly, and what you were really saying was, ‘You ought to know better than to try to put the fear of death in me.’ I can see now how it must have seemed to you, carving out your own way of death. But I was so frightened, and you had so long before conquered fear. I remember lying in bed one morning talking about fear. You said you were no longer afraid of anything, either in life or in deal In Death’s only terror for you, you said, would be leaving me. Then it all seemed very far away.
I suppose I never really believed in miracles. For, if I had, I should hate Delphinium for having failed me. But when I look up from writing you 1 see the big copper kettle in the curve of the piano filled with them — marvelous big ones, each flower a whole spectrum of varying blues, like the windows of Chartres, like the color of forget-menots, like the brilliance of your eyes — a magical alembic, even if it failed to save your life.

July fourth
I left New York early this morning, driving in a sort of coma. I grow weary of motoring alone, though I mind it least in the spring. Then there is a particular kind of rushing, time-ridden excitement that is magnetic. One thinks one can see the leaves hurrying to fulfill their growth. And the blossoms are so frail, so perfect, so doomed to destruction or fruition, whichever one calls it. Electrified into a heightened consciousness of the poignancy of transition and growth and change, one strains one’s eye to distinguish between blossom and leaf. But now the trees are in full foliage, green and mature, and I can never believe summer is n’t here forever, a safe, relaxed, and easy season.
So I dozed my way as far as Simsbury, where I came to with a start. For there the same picture always recurs in my mind. Do you remember the first time we ever motored together in that antiquated yellow car of yours? We were going to New Haven, to what you always called the Harvard game, and what I had been accustomed to calling the Yale game. We thought ourselves so securely set on the rippling current of flirtation after you had braved what you chose to call the perilous path to my door.
When we stopped at your friend Ned’s house in Simsbury to take him along to New Haven, we were greeted by a new maid who gave you the message that Ned would be late and you were to wait for him. She turned to me and said, ‘Would you like to go upstairs, Mrs. Sherburn?’ Into an uncharted sea flowed the rippling current of flirtation. I waited for you to explain, but you did n’t. And when I came downstairs we sat at opposite ends of the room and pushed hard against silence. The furniture was old and good, set catty-cornered. Numbers of large green glass rum bottles reflected the light, distorting our faces into patterns of unreality. After æons of time, Ned came. I who had never met him before welcomed him like an old friend.
You drove to New Haven as though Lucifer himself were at your heels. Ned kept begging you to slow down, to consider his wife, his children, if you cared nothing for your own life and ours. We flew even faster. Finally he appealed to me. ‘ Miss Cary, can’t you do something with him? ’
I put my hand on your knee and said, ‘Aren’t you being rather childish?’ and you answered, ‘Is that what you call it? I don’t know. I’ve never felt this way before.’ But you did slow down.
Sometimes I wonder whether it was n’t the unsuspecting maid who really married us.

July fifth
To-day was a weather breeder — warm, sunny, and deceptively clear, with the breeze always blowing due east. A splendid day for work, and I never realize how much there is to do until John’s two months are up. From May first until July first, I feel like a lady with a gardener, though I doubt whether even in eternity John could assume any such stature to you. But from July on I’m a lady with a garden, and a very demanding one, too. It is n’t just my hard work to-day, though, that makes me think you have always underestimated John.
I remember so well the first time you pointed out to me his house, bleak to abstraction. The Duke, you said, resided there in his shooting box. He never worked but two months in the year, had let his own house be sold for taxes; but, perfectly turned out in corduroy jacket and excellent English ride, he took full advantage of the shooting season. I have since found it untrue that he never works. The speed of his movements is so restrained that it renders them invisible. But not so the results.
The slogan still holds around here — and it’s no legend — that Mr. Sherburn could do the work of three men in a day. And who knows that better than I? But did you ever transplant all the minute seedlings without breaking one? Did you put away the beds so that not one plant was winter-killed? Perhaps you could have, but I am afraid you expended your patience in other ways. John has always done it, and I feel as though he always should. But I was shocked this week to learn that John is seventy, and his rheumatism not fictitious.
I can hear the tempo of John’s speech as I can see the rhythm of his walk, though I have never been able to stay in one place long enough to listen to the end of a sentence. His words are pronounced like the very slowest beat of the metronome when you are learning to play whole notes with full tone. But, however much extra pay John’s sloth has earned him, he has repaid me in gifts — two bobtailed kittens when I was already possessed of four mother cats and fourteen young, though they were all long-tailed; some wild forgetme-not plants for the bank of the pool, unfortunately pecked to destruction by the ducks; and a pitcher plant in flower, which bloomed all through a coalgaseous New York winter.
No, John is worth his weight in gold. I know, for, having done his work just one day, I am worth mine only in sleep.

July tenth
How strange is this business of things! I have thought about it a great deal in these five days when people have been coming and going, and my thread to eternity has served only to lead me through the labyrinthine immediate.
The satisfaction in things lies in the one-sidedness of one’s relation to them. When a man or woman with a flair for companionship has passed through the age of experimentation into permanence, then through a period of desperation, and out again into the smooth and detached state where relationships are entered upon merely from a need for flattery and diversion, people are bound to be less satisfying than things. That sounds miserly, but by people, of course, I don’t mean one’s three or four good friends. I mean the little personal cycles with which one embroiders life — from casualness through intensity, to intimacy, and back again to casualness. They serve to emphasize the solidity of the background against which they are temporary ornaments. Their design varies, and sometimes they may even form a pattern which becomes permanently a part of the whole. Usually, however, these decorations are born of some transitory need — a woman’s desire for reassurance of her beauty or her charm, a man’s wish for a slight variation from the routine of responsibility. As in a game of chance, some of the cards are inevitably discarded. With things it is otherwise. One does not surround one’s self with objects which have not withstood the test of daily use or scrutiny.
I am not trying to defend the collector’s instinct. That is quite another matter, and one with which I have little sympathy. Sometimes when strangers are brought to see ‘your beautiful and interesting house,’ they say, ‘Oh, I see you collect antiques.’ I wonder they don’t say, ‘So you collect emotions, or thoughts, or the color green.’ The misconception that money is able to purchase the quality which a personally imagined and executed chair or table has gathered to itself in centuries of use, I find actively painful and irritating. For to me old things have been a balm.
I look at the crewelwork curtains, woven at least two centuries ago by patient and accomplished waiting women, embroidered by great ladies who had few ways of expressing their talents and their imagination. They, too, married and loved and were happy, just as I was. Their husbands and lovers, too, were snatched from them in war or illness or sudden death. All the sharpened perception of happiness or anxiety or grief has gone into the design, the delicate stitches of these still beautiful, faded blue and yellow wool flowers. The draperies of old linen hang in my windows, exquisite in themselves, shielding the room against the too bright light of day, the heavy dark of night — and me from the penetrating consciousness of isolated sorrow.
When first I came home after you died, I used to sit for hours on that uncomfortable old pine bench in front of the fireplace. Stiffer and stiffer my spine would grow until sharp pain gripped the back of my neck, relief from the hurt which could know no physical expression. I used to trace with my eyes and my finger tips the scratches and bruises and carved initials that mar the smoothness of the wide pine plank.
‘How hastily this rough bench was thrown together,’ I would think. ‘Some pioneer chopped down the great broad tree, cut out the right-sized board, planed it off not very smooth, cut and stripped a sapling of its bark, and used it for the four legs that transform part of the tree into an object of household use. And all the time, perhaps, his ear was cocked, listening for the Indians, his eye watching to keep his few precious cattle from straying out of the small and newly cleared pasture.’
Sometimes as I sat there by the fire, stiff and alone, I would glance over the Register of the Deaths in N-, ‘from the First Settlement of the Town, in 1658, to August 1824; copied from the Town Records, and from the Records of Deac. Ebenezer Hunt, Rev. John Hooker, Rev. Solomon Williams, Doct. Eben Hunt, Doct. David Hunt ’ — my eye resting on such entries as the following: —

1665

Apr. 28 Matthew Cole, Killed by lightning

Oct. 17 Samuel Wright, died in his chair

1675

Mar. 14 Robert Bartlett, Thomas Holton, Mary Earle, Increase Whelstone and James Mackrannels, slain by Indians

1685

Apr. 7 Henry Woodward, Killed at corn mill

1704

May 13 Capt. John Taylor . . . Benoni Janes and two children . . . Deac. Benj. Janes and four children . . . Moses Hutchinson and one child..... and Patience Webb; all killed by the Indians at Paskhornuck

1707

Oct. 8 Esther Alvord & John Parsons, drowned

1708

July 9 Samuel and Joseph Parsons, killed by Indians

1709

Nov. 3 Deliverance, son of Timothy Baker, died at New Haven

1739

Dec. Phenix, Negro

1740

Dec. 26 Jonah, Negro child

1742

Dec. 8 Abigail & Hannah, daughters of John Lyman, burnt to death

1746

Aug. Pompey, an Indian

1748

Feb. 14 Daughter of Rev. Jonathan Edwards

1755

Aug. 27 Capt. Hawley, Lt. Pomeroy and Thomas Wait, killed at Lake George

1769

July 5 Thankful and Jonathan Hunt, killed by lightning

1771

Aug. 22 Ebenezer Edwards, accidentally killed

1776

Sept. 26 Clark, Bartlett, Alvord and Ervin, in the army

Oct. 30 Polly Province Judd, Riley and Brewer, in the army Richard Stillingfleet, midshipman

1779

Apr. 23 Lieut. Elihu Root, drowned

1786

May 5 Widow Thankful Hunt

1788

Aug. 27 Freelove Johnson

1789

May 5 Samuel Marshall, fall from a horse

1797

Feb. 9 Wealthy Pomeroy

1802

May 25 John Pomeroy, at the Island of Trinidad

Aug. 8 Susy Wells, black girl

1803

Nov. 17 John Wyer, perished in hard storm

1806

Mar. 11 John Allis, said to be hung by his wife and an Irishman

1807

Apr. 6 Widow Margaret Bryant, perished in the woods

“ 10 Arunah Strong’s daughter, died by drowning

Aug. 20 Martin Ely, Jr. by fall of clock weight

1808

Jan. 9 Enos Kingsley, Jr. scalded

1809

Apr. 7 David Sparks’ child, perished in woods

1810

Jan. 26 John Starr, distracted man

1812

Mar. 25 Mrs. Bradford, at Shepherd’s factory

Apr. 27 Hervey Humphrey, from a fall

1814

Mar. 22 Abigail Ely, at Shepherd’s factory

1816

Mar. 6 - Gilbert, at Shepherd’s factory

1817

Dec. 15 John Lathwood, old British soldier

“ 26 Friend Smith, drowned

1819

Nov. 7 Caleb Strong, 11 years Gov. of Mass.

1820

Sept. 15 Charles P. son of Daniel Butler, at Bay of St. Louis

Oct. 10 Lt. Robert Lyman, U. S. army, son of Levi Lyman, at Bay of St. Louis

1821

Feb. 14 Erastus Dwight, found dead in his house

Aug. 18 Peter, Dutchman

Oct. 13 Charles, son of Dr. C. L. Sceger, at sea

1822

Apr. 14 Lill Church, a colored person

1824

Feb. 9 Experience Day

The little mouldering, crudely bound book would fall from my hand and the dark have come in.

‘I must draw the curtains,’ I would think, ‘the curtains into which some great lady in France may have embroidered her thoughts at the very same time that Benoni Janes’s or Captain John Taylor’s widow sat on this bench, grieving for her husband, wishing it were not always the best and bravest men the Indians slew.’

My stiffness would go, the tight pain at the back of my neck relax. No longer an entity, only a minor lay figure in the continuous pageant of being, I am become close to the Frenchwoman who sat in her Louis XV bergère, to the Englishwoman, that early American, who dropped down tired from her work on this bench where I sit idle to-day. Peace they both found, if not as I have, at least in the grave.

July eighteenth
It has been a long time — a week or more — since I have written you. The days have been much populated. Why, I can’t tell, for everything but you and me seems accidental. The evenings I can sum up for you in snatches of words that people say to me: ‘But for me you are always a refuge . . .’ or ‘Why — oh, why not?’
Only to-night is real, real as death. The bowl of the sky is covered with clouds, a bulwark against the dew. But over through the wooded hill the moon is a shining oval, darkly striped. The light is like death, or perhaps merely life inverted. Shapes, patterns, and outlines are clear, but no variation in color and only the sharpest movements are visible. The fireflies dart through the black shadows like the shining lost periods to unwritten sentences of revelation.
I stroll about the lawn with a man I have not seen since I knew you. This week we met for the first time in eight years. No longer is there even a trace of the former quick magic flickering between us; just the relaxed case of friends. I feel old, and a little tired. He is thinking of and wishing for the young girl who yesterday caught his heart and fancy. We stand in the garden, inhaling the heavy pungent odor of Regal lilies, observing with interest that, no dew having fallen, the day lilies retain their open bell shapes, outlines abstract and colorless in the muted moonlight. The Delphinium, no longer cerulean or azure or sky-blue, hover, erect shadows, dark or light, over the pure white phlox. Do you remember, when I planted the flaming Coquelicot, I asked you why there was so much white phlox in the garden? You said, ‘Once you’ve seen it by full moonlight you will know why.’
Together it bathed us in its arrested white silence, and I thought I knew. But one learns only as much as one needs for the time being.
To-night, with my friend in the garden, knowing so well the island on which he stood (Were she here, what should he say to her? Kiss her, perhaps, there among the white phlox), I understood my island, too. No space, no time, the clouds a monstrous multifingered dark gray hand against a smoky yellow.
‘It is a relief,’ I started to say, ‘on such a night to know that at thirty one’s life stopped, that the future, however unexperienced, is only a series of incidents already perceived. And one’s entity is as controlled by the past as is the quality of this white phlox by certain refracted rays of moonlight.’
‘No time or space to-night,’ I said.
‘No,’ he answered, ‘no time or space, but the feeling — and uncanny, too — of a thousand people there in the orchards and woods, lighting their cigarettes from the fireflies.’
A thousand people, or two, or one — and the white phlox you planted so long ago to shine in the moonlight.

August second
To-day I returned from a motor journey to Virginia. It always takes me a day or two to become acclimatized. There is so much to do when I first come home — all the new flowers and vegetables to see, the dogs to greet and the news to hear.
The Vet had stopped by on his way to test our neighbor’s cows, and left word that Sandy must never again be ridden by anyone weighing more than a hundred and ten pounds, and that even then his lameness might continue. Can you picture me, a long, lank, black-haired skeleton, astride a slightly lame chestnut horse? Not with com about to ripen, and raspberries and blueberries demanding the accompaniment of thickest cream. If I try to be frivolous, it is because I believe neither in sentimentality about animals nor in undue emotion over one’s possessions. But it was you, after all, who gave him to me for a wedding present. ‘No,’ you would say; ‘for a saddle horse. If you can’t ride him, shoot him.’ I’m afraid that is what I shall have to do, but he is such a charming character, his gaits are so easy, and I have no other horse to ride.
The cows would fill you with pride. There is nothing so attractive, at least in the bovine world, as a two-year-old Jersey. Built with such style, so neatly turned and so adequate, with its slim legs and ankles, and its round, downy, peach-colored bags, teats full for milking time. The youngest one dropped a bull calf this morning, thus winning me a bet with the farmer. For we have had two heifer calves this summer, and he predicted they would run in threes. But I thought of how good veal would taste in November, and bet him a new dahlia bulb the next calf would be a bull.
I do wish you could be here to eat some of it. I should think one of the penalties of being dead would be never to taste any more the delicious foods you liked so much — no rich stock soup, no peas fresh from the garden cooked barely at all, no tender green lettuce dressed in the best French oil, tarragon vinegar, and herbs.
I have thought a great deal about food and dying. I used to think funeral meats a myth or a feckless convention, but I know better now. For the whole first week you were ill, you ate so conscientiously, knowing your strength depended on it, even when weak and breathless, that the broth or milk gagged you. One day you asked for custard, and I ordered some, but when it came you did n’t like it. You said you wanted the kind you had when you were a little boy. Your thoughts going so far back frightened me, but I telephoned your mother, and she made some herself and brought it right in to you. That you ate quite painlessly.
For that first week I could n’t touch any food, but afterward when you could n’t eat I forced myself. It became a curious ritual with me — so many pounds of steak to keep us both alive. I can still see the plated hotel platter with the fried potatoes and water cress, and in the centre a flat piece of rare steak with the black grill-marks on it. I used to cut it all up in little pieces the way I broke up my two squares of bedtime Peter’s chocolate when I was a little girl. There seemed something unctuous and important about it, though at the time I did n’t realize. But the night you died — I had been sitting on your bed all day — they came in at nine o’clock and said I must eat. So I went into the other room and ate a great big steak. With each swallow I’d think, ‘Jack’s dying in the next room, but I must chew my steak.’ I suppose it was a purely animal feeling. All my mind and spirit wanted to go with you, but some deep-down instinct to live made me strengthen myself against my own will. For once that day we did both die and I brought you back again. Twice would have been too much.
All day you sat propped against the pillows, that ghastly tent of canvas and isinglass surrounding you with the oxygen you could n’t draw into your lungs. Only your hand, thin and feverish, unlike the strong and sinewy one that knew me so well, lay on my bare breast, on my heart. The black doctors and white nurses came and went like automata. I felt no shame. Once when I was a little girl I was shocked almost to sickness at the sight of a woman in a railroad station suckling her child, oblivious of the laughter of some lewd young boys. Suddenly that moment flashed back to me, and I knew that birth and death, life’s beginning and life’s end, were the same. You were my husband and my father and my child, who must be given life. Your hand lay heavier on my breast. The nurse, taking your pulse, shook her head. I could feel the life flowing out of you. Down, down we went into a black smothering abyss.
‘We can’t die,’I thought. ‘We can’t die like this in a black smothering hole. I’ll breathe for him. My lungs shall be his lungs. My heart is his heart. O God, bring us up out of this black and terrible valley. . . .’ That time we came back together. The next time you went alone.
For a few hours you rested more peacefully, and when I came back into the room from eating my steak the old glint was in your eye and you said to the nurse, ‘That’s me boid. Does n’t she look beautiful?’ The picture your words evoked — our overhearing in a railroad station, filled with American Legionnaires, one veteran introducing his girl friend to another with the phrase, ‘ Meet me boid ’ — that picture, relieving the tension of the sick room, cutting through the interminable noise of the oxygen machine, was a blessed stroke of tact no one but you would ever have conferred.
Those few moments were a summation of all our gaiety. How heavywitted I must have seemed to you when I could only say, ‘You need n’t flirt with me. I’m just your wife.’ That remark puzzled me for a long time afterward, for it hardly seemed characteristic of a woman who bridled at the very suggestion of uxoriousness. But now I understand it. The shock of seeing such concentrated joy in the eyes of one so near to death made me understand what I had not grasped before — that you were really too sick to live. After such pain and such ecstasy, life could only have been stale. Instinctively perceiving that to be your highest moment of consciousness, I spoke the only truth I knew: ‘I’m just your wife.’

(To be continued in the next issue)