Waiting

When Anne Stephens, in her early forties, reached the plain to which her life had climbed, and looked back along the path she had come, some half a dozen incidents stood out clearly defined. In their place along the path they had seemed no more prominent than many others. But from her final elevation much of the rest was lost, too vague, too hidden in underbrush to be visible.

She remembered one still, white winter day. She must have been very young, for she was small enough to sit unobserved beneath the window bench in her father’s work shop. Content, still and white as the day, filled her. She watched the colorless vibrations above the small rusty stove in the corner and sniffed the comforting air, thick with fresh paint and sawdust. Her father worked above her, humming under his breath. That feeling of content must have been his, too. Perhaps hers came from him. He was making something, a case for the works of an old clock, she thought. Then the door flew open, and crisp, sharp as the winter air, her mother stood on the threshold, her blue eyes hard and snapping.

“So you’re out here, wasting your day, John Stephens, when you might be finding something useful to do!”

Her father stepped away from the bench so that his curly fair hair no longer caught the pale sun. He smiled apologetically.

“Put away your rubbish and go help Johnnie in the store. If you can’t get work for every day for yourself, the least you could do as a man is to be of use to your son! Is that Anne, now, under the bench! Come into the house.”

Her mother slammed the door and was gone, but the still content had fled. Anne crawled out, shaking the shaving curls from her hair. Her father fingered the polished boards on his bench, and then picked up the tools.

“It’s the fun there is in making things. The only joy that is good. Women don’t know it—the joy of making.”

Then there was a night, how much later Anne did not know, when she woke with her heart cold at the sound of her mother sobbing. She crept out to the head of the stairs to listen.

“It’s only that she isn’t good enough for you, my Johnnie, my first-born! Johnnie, I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for you—slaved for you—to give you what you desired—and you have no more love for me, your mother!”

And then a voice cajoling, caressing, John, her oldest brother.

“Now, mother, can’t a man take a wife? A man has a mother and he wants a wife, too, doesn’t he? Now, mother—”

Anne knew that her mother had thrown her arms about John’s neck. She had always known that her mother loved John more than the rest of them.

“Go your way!” her mother’s voice shrilled out. “You’re cruel, stubborn and set. Keep her away from me, I tell you. I’ll hate her!”

“Now, mother, you wouldn’t. I’m bringing her home for dinner this Sunday, and I’ll show her what a mother I’ve got. You’ll be used to the feeling by then.”

“Leave me alone! I’ll have no more to do with you!”

Anne had crawled hastily back to bed, and had listened in the dark to the choking, sobbing breath of her mother as she climbed the stairs. Sunday John’s sweetheart had come to dinner, and Anne had waited, tortured, for something to break. Her mother’s cheeks were bright between the smooth bands of her heavy hair, but John had thrown his arm over her shoulders and joked at his Marie—“See how you’ll have to work to make up to me for leaving such a mother!” And nothing had happened.

Then there was the dreadful time after Pearce, the second brother, had come home from the west, where he had gone in search of gold and found only the seed of death, so that he lived but three days after he had come back. Anne felt the chill darkness of the house; it was as though the grave sod had been piled over them all. Her mother, coming into the house after the funeral, had stared for a moment at her father. Anne remembered her face distinctly. The skin had drawn tightly over the high cheekbones and temples, and a gray, dusty pallor lay upon it. She had gone into her room and locked the door. How many days had she stayed there? Anne heard her father begging outside the door, begging against that awful silence within. Finally he had cried, crouching on the floor, cried like a little child; then he had called out, “Unless you come out, Kate, I will bring my axe and chop down this damned door!”

Anne remembered the slow opening of the door, the dreadful pause while her mother stood above her father, staring down at him. She had said, “If part of my body was torn off, you would give it time to heal. And you can not let me be—” Suddenly her father had taken her mother in his arms, and she was crying, too. Anne had run away, out of the house.

Another thing she remembered. She had been sitting in a crotch of the old apple tree at the side of the house, sewing for a doll. She had a family of dolls whom she tended carefully, without enthusiasm. As she sewed, a wonderful idea had seized her, gripping her heart with its splendor until she was dizzy. She had climbed down from the tree and gone in quest of her mother. She had found her in her low rocker, sewing, her eyes shining. One of her rare, light moods was upon her. Anne stood in front of her, trembling, eager.

“Mother, will you—that is, I want—”

“Well? Don’t stammer.” How fast that little pricking sound of the needle ran!

“Will you tell me, please, where I can get a baby? Of my own? I must have a baby.”

“What are you talking about?” Her mother dropped her sewing, wary suspicion in her eyes.

“I want a baby—” Anne found it difficult to say more.

“Who has been telling you things you shouldn’t know? Come here!” Anne had shrunk away. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing—I just thought it—please, mother!” She winced under her mother’s sharp grasp.

“Have the children—” Her mother sighed. “Oh, you are so stubborn! Don’t shut your mouth that way! What has been said to you about babies?”

“Nothing! Nothing!” Anne was hot with shame now, an inexplicable, harrowing shame.

“Well, think nothing of them, then. You’re a baby yourself. Don’t let me hear you talking of such things.”

Anne had played no more with dolls.

One day at school the teacher had said, “Now, children, let’s all think what we want to be when we are grown up.” She had gone round the class until she came to Anne. “Anne, do you want to be a milliner or a teacher, too?” Anne shook her head. “No, I want to be a mother.” The sound of the laughter, sudden like thunder, rattled against her still. She had never spoken her desire again.

After that came a stretch of years in which she made two discoveries. One was the magic of color and form; she could capture it with brush and paint, and the other was the extraordinary wonder of her own body. During the Christmas week of her last year in school her class had a sleigh ride. She had gone reluctantly. The drive was a blur of sensations: chill air tingling in her nostrils, the smell and crackle of hay in the huge bobs, sharp bells on the horses, the crunch under the runners, the yellow glow from the swinging lanterns. Songs and shouts and giggles, and then, on the way home, silence, with low whispers, until the boy next Anne had slipped his arm about her and pulled her close against him. Strange, maddening thrill, all ecstasy and sweet shame. She had never seen the boy again; he was a cousin of someone, visiting. But the thrill became part of her dreams.

There was one dream. Sometimes she could cling to it when she had wakened. Sometimes she knew only from the still, white peace with which she woke that she had dreamed it. She lay in a great meadow which curved against a blue sky under the sun. No wind stirred. She lay there, not as herself, but as the meadow, part of the quiet, waiting soil.

In March of her year at the normal school, Anne met Robert Duffy. He had come over from the university for a short series of lectures. Anne had been unruffled by the comments upon him; he was the youngest man on the staff of the university, with a reputation of brilliance and the forecast of a great future. When he walked out on the platform, Anne, in her corner, leaned forward, the pupils of her eyes dilating. He was thin and dark, with hasty gestures, and a hostile eagerness sprang from his voice and eyes.

At the end of his second lecture, Anne waited at the edge of the crowd about the platform. She proffered some question, simple, almost irrelevant, and as he answered her, stood near him, her brow, her beautiful throat, her relaxed fingers, touched with subtle humility. After that he watched for her, and Anne’s days leaped up like a ship at the flick of the wind. Robert Duffy may have thought he drove her down the seas before him. Anne knew.

He had not wished to marry so immediately. He was working for a degree, was developing a new chemical theory. But Anne, lifting his hands to clasp the pillar of her throat, had said, calmly,

“Why wait? You are tired and nervous now for someone to take care of you.”

* * *

In April Anne was summoned home. Her mother had died suddenly. Her father wept for her as the young girl he had loved, and Anne, looking at the pale oval face between the sleek, dark wings of her hair, saw her for the first time as a woman of passion and force caught in too narrow an orbit.

The father went to live with John and his wife, and in June Anne was married. She remembered only one thing her father had said.

“I thought it might be, now, Annie, you would make an artist.”

She had smiled and gone swiftly on with her preparations. Her mother’s death had foreshortened life for her, until she felt at times a fear that she too might die with her desire unreached.

One of the next years there were two moments with sharp outlines; the rest blurred into full tide of passionate tenderness, fear, absorption. One moment was at night in that first summer. She and Robert walked along the river just outside the little college town, silent, until Robert turned on her.

“Where are you! I can’t reach you,” he had cried out. “I am afraid of you! You drown me, and I never touch you. What are you doing with me?”

She was glad of the darkness which hid the sudden fierce contraction of her body, hid the terror and hatred that leaped within her. But she had laughed softly and said, “You are tired. You work too hard,” until he lay with his head against her breast, her fingers in his hair, while she stared with sombre, heavy eyes at the pale glow on the water at her feet. She had been shamed at the coil of emotion his cry had struck, so that she had thrust the moment out of memory.

The other sharp moment was shortly before the birth of her second child. She lay on the couch in the sitting room, staring dully at the dingy carpet, the litter of papers on the desk. Margaret, who slept in her arms, had stirred, and the touch of that silky head in the curve under Anne’s chin drew her up from her apathy. Robert came to the door, and she knew the conflict she had waited for was upon her.

“I understand you have talked with Samuels,” Robert began. “You might have said so—all this time!”

“I thought you would wish to make your decision yourself.”

Robert slumped into a chair near the desk. She thought for the first time that she knew how he would look as an old man, the eagerness drained out of his dark face.

“Samuels told you his offer, of course? I harness my brains to his chemical plant for life.”

“He said there would be opportunity for you to carry on any experiments you wished.” Her voice trailed off wearily, as though she had no spirit for a fight.

“You’d like me to take it?”

“Only if you wish.” She pressed that small, silky head against her throat.

“You know what I want! To go on my own path—” He stopped.

“Have you thought of the children?”

“You give me small chance to think of anything else!”

She turned her face away from him, her eyes closed. Presently he rose heavily.

“Very well. Have it your way.”

“No, Robert. You must decide. Are you so sure your own path leads anywhere?” She saw in his eyes the great weight of her own passive, inert body, of her gray immobility.

“I was, once. Anne, I don’t mean to be selfish—” He flung out his hands, with their slender, nervous fingers, in a limp, impotent gesture. “Samuels’ offer is profitable. I am taking it.”

“Why so tragic, Robert?” Her words hurried slightly. “Even if you leave your university for someone who appreciates your value, you’ll still have time for your own work, evenings and all.”

“Turn off an idea after dinner!” He broke off into an ugly little laugh. “Have you no comprehension of the way creative work must be done? How you wait and wait while it grows within you? You can’t just do it forcibly overnight. But I said I was taking Samuels’ offer. I’ll become his well-paid consulting chemist.”

When he had gone, Anne laid her lips gently against the fragrant warm crease of Margaret’s neck, her eyes closed to hide their triumph.

* * *

After that, ten years in which Anne had been as God walking in his garden. Her children were the miracle, herself extended beyond her own narrow limits, the work of her flesh and her spirit. In them she was fulfilled, and in their growth she saw her own work. Her passion was not that of the mother so much as that of the artist. She could have created pictures; instead she chose to create human beings. Robert begged her to spend less time with the children, to leave them, and she brushed his words carelessly aside.

Almost overnight, it seemed, Jamie, the youngest, was four, sandy-haired, chunky, jolly, and Margaret, fourteen, was a tall, slim thing with dark eyes and hasty gestures like her father. She developed stubborn, reticent moments, against which Anne thrust herself vainly.

Anne’s first jealousy licked through her veins when she saw Margaret, after a long afternoon curled up with a book, silent, almost sullen at Anne’s approach, fling aside book and mood at her father’s homecoming. Anne heard them in the library, Margaret’s light voice chording with Robert’s tone. She went to the door, shaken with a forlorn desire to beg them to admit her, but pride held her outside.

The sound of those voices, however, stood out as the first, faint rumble in Anne’s clear sky. “It was ridiculous of Robert to take the child so seriously, to talk with her as though she were a grown person,” she thought; she added hastily, a surface thought, “Of course, I want the children to be real friends with their father. It’s only that he’s spoiling her!”

Margaret came in from school one day, her eyes alight.

“Mother, the girls are going to Miss Truesdale’s camp this summer. Could I go?”

Anne asked which girls were going, and added, gently, “Mother would rather have her girl with her.”

“Oh, mother!” cried Margaret, and then was silent, her whole slight figure stiffening into protest.

“Wouldn’t you rather stay with mother?”

Margaret lifted her dark eyes, and Anne had a sudden impulse to seize her, to shake out of her the hostility that lay within her glance. But she said, with her persistent gentleness, “At any rate, I should have to know more of the camp before I could decide.”

At the sight of Margaret rushing down to meet her father that evening, Anne’s decision clicked into shape. She would send the child to the camp. It would, after all, be excellent training, with the regularity of the life, and all. Margaret had been growing too fast and perhaps studying too hard. She was over-emotional.

Margaret came back after two months in the mountains, brown, slim, apparently docile. Anne had moved her household to the shore, near enough town so that Robert could spend week-ends with them. The second week of Margaret’s return Anne discovered that her casual manner of wandering down the road in the early afternoon had a definite motive; she went to intercept the postman.

Anne’s first thought was one of horror. Had a silly flirtation started. Surely Margaret was too young for that! She was only a little girl.

The next afternoon Anne followed with swift, silent feet, when she saw Margaret start down the lane. She found her on a bench near the tennis court, her dark head and slim brown throat bent over a letter.

“Oh, she is beautiful,” thought Anne, “this young girl-child of mine! I won’t have her touched—not yet—”

At her feet on the gravel, Margaret crumpled the letter into her pocket and flung back her head, scarlet running into the tan of her cheeks.

“A letter?” said Anne, as she sat down beside Margaret. “How nice!”

Margaret slipped to the end of the bench; in her bright eyes something fluttered desperately, seeking escape.

“Who is writing to you?” Anne kept her voice gentle, in spite of the inflexible impulse behind her words. As Margaret rose, poised at the edge of flight, she added, “If I weren’t sure of you, Margie, I should think you were hiding something you were ashamed of!” She saw the girl flinch.

“It’s nothing,” she protested. “Just from a friend, from Miss Innsmere at the camp.”

“Won’t you show me her letter?” Anne sat very quiet. She stretched out one firm white hand toward Margaret, and her face showed nothing of the sharp fear that circled within her. Was Margaret lying to her? “You see, mother doesn’t know her.”

“It’s just a letter to me.” The girl’s hands clenched over her pocket and she retreated a step.

Anne rose deliberately and laid her fingers on the girl’s wrist. She was taller than Margaret; the child was a reed she could bend in her fingers. But the quiver of the wrist under her fingers disturbed her, and unexpectedly, she was aghast at the flame of defiance that leapt in the dark pupils of the girl’s eyes.

In that moment Margaret wrenched her wrist free, and with a fierce “Oh-h—” was running across the tennis court toward the shore.

At luncheon Anne felt Margaret’s eyes touch her warily; she paid no heed. Once when Margaret was a mere baby she had been stubborn, and Anne by quiet ignoring of her had brought her swiftly to her arms in hot tears.

Then she knew that she must see that letter. Quickly she went along the hall to Margaret’s room. She must protect the child. There lay the child’s dress, but her fingers found no letter in the pocket. She stood in front of the little white desk, with a faint smile at the tiny yellow shells laid in a row along the top, and the flat, bleached sand-dollars, one at each corner of the blue blotter. Just a child, after all! Like a distant echo Anne felt the slow rhythm of the days before Margaret’s birth, when all her life had turned inward, dream-woven, to the making of this child.

There in one of the pigeonholes were the letters. Anne hesitated. Margaret need never know; there seemed no other way. She brushed aside the strange qualm and drew out the letters, several of them, addressed to Miss Margaret Duffy, in a bold, square hand. Freda Innsmere, Truesdale Camp, on the flap. At least the child hadn’t lied. She had the folded sheet in her fingers when behind her she heard a little strangled cry, and turning, she faced Margaret. She made an instinctive motion of concealment, but the envelope slipped to the floor. For an instant, as the wide, incredulous horror of Margaret’s gaze travelled from that white square up to her mother’s face, Anne shared that horror, as though she saw her guilty reflection in the girl’s dark stormy eyes. Only for an instant. Then she spoke, crisply.

“I am sorry, Margaret. But if you insist upon concealment, it is necessary for me to do this.”

Margaret stood motionless, a little figure of bronze, save for her quick breathing.

“Perhaps you came back to hide these letters?” Anne added cruelly. She saw the adorable young curves of shoulder and knee melt from bronze to trembling flesh. “Unless you are ashamed, Margie, why do you hide them from mother?” Her voice filled again with its soft, rich tones. “Come, sit here beside me, and tell me about this new friend.”

Margaret shrank away from her outstretched hands, retreated along the end of the bed, clinging to the footrail, her knuckles showing white through the tan.

“Oh, you shouldn’t touch them!” she cried out. “They are mine—and you shouldn’t touch them!”

“Margaret, dear, mother wants only what is best for you. You know that. This woman has made you secretive, ashamed.”

“I’m not ashamed!” Margaret’s lips struggled with tears.

Anne lifted the sheet and unfolded it. With a swift movement, Margaret was in front of her.

“If you read that—I—I’ll hate you!” she cried.

Anne dropped the letter and pulled the girl into her warm embrace.

“Margie, little Margie! You are my daughter! Flesh of my flesh, spirit of my spirit! I won’t have a stranger standing between us!” She felt the child’s tears on her throat, felt her body stiffen within her arms. “I shall not read those letters against your will. But you will bring them to me.”

She went slowly from the room. She turned at the door; Margaret stood motionless, her head averted. Something in her posture tore at Anne, like a rending of flesh from flesh. A strange fear hurried at her heels down the hall. Later she knew what that pain and fear had been; worse than birth-anguish, they were the labor pains of her new knowledge.

Anne took her sewing down to the screened porch. She had discovered years earlier that whenever life snarled itself up, she had only to sit down with something in her hands, something requiring attention, and gradually, without effort on her part, things would smooth themselves out. So she sat now, her fingers busy with bright orange wool with which she embroidered a blouse for Margaret. Finally she heard Jamie wake, and scramble off in search of his brother.

Then she heard within the house Margaret’s voice, clear with delight;

“Father! I didn’t know you were coming today!”

Anne laid aside her sewing with a secret faint dismay, which she banished instantly. She found Robert in the hall; Margaret, hanging over the banister, drew back at Anne’s approach.

“Hello, Anne.” Robert kissed the cool cheek Anne offered. “The city was so beastly I came out a day early. Had your swim, Margie? Fine, I want to see that new dive you wrote about.”

“I’ll wait for you down by the boathouse,” said Margaret, and she whisked down the stairs and out of the door.

“Don’t let her stay in the water too long, Robert,” said Anne. “She seems tired. And bring the boys back when you come.”

Anne went slowly back to her sewing. A faint disturbance lingered under her ignoring concentration on the orange stitches.

Dinner was rather silent, in spite of Anne’s gentle and insistent talk. Margaret and her father had come in just in time to dress. Margaret had twisted her damp hair on the crown of her head and bound it with a green ribbon. That, with her green linen dress, gave her small pointed face with its winged brows the look of a startled dryad. Anne glanced at her often; there hung about her a cloud of excitement, like light over water. Once she found Robert, too, eyeing her speculatively.

When Anne came down from Jamie’s goodnight she found the porch deserted. Little Robert came back presently, somewhat disconsolate because Dad and Margie were taking a long walk and didn’t want him. He sat beside Anne, telling her in his shrill young voice of all he had done since morning. She sent him to bed finally, and at his summons, climbed the stairs to bid him goodnight. As she descended she heard Margaret and her father at the door.

“Goodnight, Bobs,” Margaret was saying. “And you’ll tell her? Oh, Bobs!”

“If you’ll promise to go straight to sleep and get unstrung a little. Goodnight, Margie.”

Margaret’s flight up the stairs carried her past her mother before she saw her.

“Goodnight, dear,” called Anne.

Margaret hesitated, whirled, came back the few steps, lifting her face mutely toward Anne.

“Goodnight, mother’s little girl.” Anne kissed her wistfully. “Sleep well.” Again at Margaret’s hasty withdrawal, she felt that strange fear. But she went calmly down to the porch, where Robert waited.

“Have you time to talk awhile?” he asked abruptly, and she heard in his voice an excitement like Margaret’s. He waited until she had settled herself in a low chair, and then dropped opposite her against a pillar. He lighted a cigar, the light glowing within his fingers.

“Are you very tired this week?” she asked.

“Nothing unusual,” he dismissed her inquiry bruskly. “I want to talk about Margaret.”

Had the child gone to her father, tale-bearing! That would be unendurable.

“She’s been telling me things—” Robert paused.

“She didn’t tell you about her letters?” Anne spoke with frigid scorn.

“Letters? No.”

“Well?” Anne waited, the autumn dusk wrapping her in outward tranquillity.

“The beginning, I suppose, is a call I had last week. I thought I wouldn’t write about it. A Miss Innsmere came into the office one day. She was at this camp where you sent Margaret, a dancing teacher. Quite a person, too, I judge, young, vigorous—a Danish girl. She came in about Margaret. Thinks the child has a talent for dancing.”

“Why did she go to you?” Anne found it difficult to keep her voice from bristling.

“Because you weren’t in town, I suppose. She seemed to think we wouldn’t take to the idea, and so she came to talk it over.”

“What idea?” Anne’s antagonism rippled in her tone.

“Why, of Margaret’s dancing. She thinks she ought to study—Margie, I mean. On the side, for a few years. Then she’ll know whether it’s the thing. And Margie wants to.”

“You mean study dancing professionally?”

“Yes.”

“Ridiculous! I hope you told her we had our own plans for Margaret.”

“Now, wait a minute, Anne. You see, Margaret has been talking to me, too. She wants to do it.”

“You haven’t encouraged her!”

“I have listened to her, Anne.”

“Why hasn’t she come to me about this?” Anne shut her hands together in her lap. The letters! They were about this scheme!

“Can’t you see? She is afraid you will disapprove. Afraid she can’t make you see how much she wishes to try it.”

“She knows it is absurd, then, if she is so sure of my disapproval.”

“Is it, Anne? Why?”

“A public dancer! That child? Are you mad, Robert?”

“Margaret said to me tonight, and she didn’t sound childlike, that she thought she had to dance. She studied last year, you know, at school. She says—and you know how shy she is with words—that it is the only thing she loves. That she can say things she feels and thinks that way. That she feels as though she has just been waiting until she found this out. We walked down through the Black Firs tonight, and she danced for me, a dance she had made for the trees, she said. Anne, it was the loveliest dream I ever saw!”

Anne was silent. Her hands moved together up to her heart, as if to hold close the edges of a gaping wound. After the grief of the afternoon Margaret had taken her father away to dance for him. Margaret was afraid to come to her.

“You know, Anne,” went on Robert eagerly, “I have a strong belief that a desire like that is—well, sort of sacred. That we haven’t any business to stand in the way. Don’t you think so?”

“She’s only a child,” said Anne coldly. “She doesn’t really know what she wants.”

“I’m not so sure. I knew what I wanted earlier than that. Didn’t you? I didn’t get it.” His voice dropped wrily. “That’s no reason why Margaret shouldn’t.”

“Surely, Robert, you don’t believe what you are saying—that a child knows better what it needs than its mother—its parents can know?”

“Ah, Anne, we don’t know much! If this isn’t the right thing, she has plenty of time to find it out.” Robert pulled himself to his feet, drew a chair near Anne’s, and seated himself. “You think, probably, that I don’t appreciate how this makes you feel. Shall I tell you? You are feeling as though a picture you had started to paint suddenly walked off your canvas!”

He puffed strongly at his cigar, and the momentary glow touched into relief his cheekbones and temples, lighted his eyes with a glimmer of their old eagerness. They were Margaret’s eyes! The same pointed fold of eyelids, the same dark fire. What had he said? A picture, walking off the canvas—

“I wonder why I said picture,” he went on slowly, out of the darkness. “I must have been thinking of that career you might have taken. You chose children instead, and human beings aren’t so docile as paint and canvas, are they?”

“Why discuss that?” Anne moved impatiently. “You must admit that I have no interests, no concern, except the good of the children. That’s why I won’t consent to this plan. You’ve been wheedled into it by a strange woman and a child! I—I think it rather unjust of you to encourage Margaret without consulting me.”

“Don’t be hasty, Anne. There are so many things I’d like to say tonight.” He flicked his cigar end over the railing. “You’ve no idea how much thinking I have done this week. It began after Miss Innsmere’s call. Then young Carsdale came in. Remember him? That boy at the university? He has carried through several of the things we started—and more of his own. He was telling me about them. When he left, he grinned at me and said, ‘They’ve got you properly domesticated and successful, haven’t they, Duffy?’ He was a little shabby in that gilt-edged office where I sit all day.”

Anne caught her breath sharply.

“You are suggesting, I suppose, that I am to blame for your—commercialization?” she asked, incredulity in her cool tone.

“I want to show you how I feel about Margie. I know why she is afraid to come to you with her desires. You are indomitable, Anne. You are like the earth itself. No one sees its motion, but no one can stop it and everyone is whirled along with it. Sometimes I have known that you chose me—shall we say to father your children for you? Sometimes I have pretended I was a free agent. Sometimes I have been sorry you didn’t devour me utterly—the female spider has a neat way with her spouse, you know! I shouldn’t say these things now, when it is all too late, except for Margaret. She doesn’t want to be eaten. The boys are still too young to mind.”

“How can you sit there and say those things!” Anne’s voice was thick with whirling rage. “As though I were a monster—”

“Anne, dear, you insist upon misunderstanding me. You have been a very beautiful mother. That I know. I am not blaming you that I am prosperous and respectable instead of lean and hollow-eyed from wrestling with ideas and schemes. There was at least a motive there. The children did need food and shelter. But Margaret is no longer a baby. She must have what she wants.”

Something snapped in Anne, and a terrible grinding pain, a physical anguish seized her. She huddled back in her chair, her hands pressing against her breasts.

“Oh, you can’t know!” she cried. “You think I am selfish, devouring! You can’t know! Before she was born I dreamed of her—beauty and health and loveliness. And since she was a baby I have watched her, worked to make her what she is. A dancer—in public—You have tried to get her away from me! You have tried—”

“Anne! You know that is a lie! I have been humble enough that she has cared for me. When I saw her dancing tonight I was jealous to frenzy that others might watch that. But if she wishes it, who are we to stand in her way?”

“She doesn’t know. She doesn’t need to dance—to do anything! I had planned so many things for years to come. Surely if I have made her what she is, I have a right to decide what she shall be!”

“Made her?” Robert sat forward; Anne could see his shoulders hunched against the dim light through the window behind him. “We like to think that, don’t we? Instead—I was a tool for you, and you, even you, Anne, were a tool for—what? An obscure drive of peoples behind us, craving embodiment. What have you made about her? When she was born you felt you had created her. What had you done, but wait, wait, while she grew?” He was silent. On the shore below them Anne heard the steady rhythm of the surf, like a great crowd shouting in the distance.

What had she done but wait? But wait? The words slipped into the rhythm of the surf.

“You know—” Robert’s voice dropped into a puzzled wonder. “That’s what all creative work seems to amount to. You wait. You think you are making something, but you only wait while it grows.” Another silence. “I have filled my days so full I had no time for that slow waiting. Do you see, Anne? We are nothing but the soil—lying fallow under the sun.”

Anne sat very still. The dreadful rending within her had ceased, and a heavy, lethargic cessation of pain, like that after childbirth, brooded over her. Incredibly there hung about her a moment of white peace, like that of her old dream, in which she lay in the great windless meadow curving against the sky, part of the waiting soil.

Robert had spoken the truth. Margaret’s struggles had been only an inarticulate expression of the same truth. It had been as though the soil tried to drag under its warm darkness a flower, opening above.

Robert rose and stood near her.

“That’s all, Anne.” She felt his fingers brush her shoulder. “After all, you are an artist. Perhaps you should have chosen otherwise than children for your work.”

Anne could not speak. Humility, a strange garment for her, enclosed her.

“It is late. Perhaps tomorrow—after you have slept on it.” He pulled his tone back to an ordinary level. “You are cold?” She had shivered under his fingers.

“No. Only stripped.” Her laugh trembled into a sob.

“Won’t you come in, now?”

“Not yet, please.” A moment of hesitating silence, and Robert moved toward the door. “Robert—” Anne found words with cumbersome difficulty. “It may be—that tomorrow I can thank you.” She saw him draw his body erect, as though a weight had dropped from him. “Goodnight.”

She sat for a long time, like one who accustoms himself to the thin, clear air of a mountain top. She had reached the plateau from which she could see the winding of the path she had followed. When, at last, she climbed silently to her room, she slept with the exhaustion which follows bodily suffering.

She woke early, lying for a time with her eyes closed. Then she rose, and with a curious feeling of exaltation, as though she prepared herself for a sacrament, she wound her long braids of dark hair about her head and bathed. She could hear Jamie and little Rob, their tongues clattering in small boy early morning style, but no one else seemed awake. She dressed carefully, choosing a dull blue crepe morning gown that Margaret had always liked. Then she went to Margaret’s door, and knocked. After a silent moment she pushed it ajar.

Margaret stirred sleepily, her face flushed and young in a cloud of dusky hair. At the sight of Anne she woke instantly, and the wistful alertness in her eyes wrenched at Anne’s poise.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped, her eyes caressing the sweet curve of the child’s body beneath the cover.

“Margie, dear,” she said, “Father talked over with me your plans—” She saw terror leap in the girl’s eyes, but she kept her voice serene. “I shall be glad to have you study dancing. Will you, some day, show me some of your own dances?”

Margaret’s eyes widened, and a flame ran into her cheeks.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh! I thought you wouldn’t like it—” She sat up against her pillow. “I must tell you—” a bewildered shame in her face—“that I burned up those letters yesterday. They—they were just about the dancing.”

“I am sorry about the letters.” Anne’s serenity had a tinge of piteousness. “Margaret, can you understand how hard it is to find your baby has grown up? I am sorry.”

Margaret brushed away the episode impetuously.

“You really mean that you are glad about the dancing?” Her slim hand moved shyly along the blanket toward her mother. “You are glad?”

The reticent caress winged into Anne’s heart.

“Yes,” she said steadily. “I wanted to tell you, to begin your day!”

She stood for an instant beside the bed, before she turned to leave. In that instant she had her vision of further waiting; a waiting into which Margaret might, some day, return.