The Mother: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

at last he said, “Is it not ours then to keep?” and the women laughed, but the old woman laughed loudest of all, because she thought the boy so clever. The mother drank the soup then gratefully, and she murmured to her cousin’s wife, “It is your good heart, my sister.”
    But the cousin’s wife said, “Do you not the same for me in my hour?”
    And so the two women felt themselves the more deeply friends because of this hour common to them both and that must come again and yet again.

IV
    B UT THERE WAS THE man. To him there was no change in time, no hope of any new thing day after day. Even in the coming of the children his wife loved there was no new thing, for to him they were born the same and one was like another and all were to be clothed and fed, and when they were grown they must be wed in their turn and once more children born and all was the same, each day like to another, and there was no new thing.
    In this little hamlet so had he himself been born, and except to go to the small town which lay behind a curve of the hill upon the river’s edge, he had never once seen anything new in any day he lived. When he rose in the morning there was this circle of low round hills set against this selfsame sky, and he went forth to labor until night, and when night was come there were these hills set against this sky and he went into the house where he had been born and he slept upon the bed where he had slept with his own parents until it grew shameful and then they had a pallet made for him.
    Yes, and now he slept there in the bed with his own wife and children and his old mother slept on the pallet, and it was the same bed and the same house, and even in the house scarcely one new thing except the few small things that had been bought at the time of his wedding, a new teapot, the blue quilt upon the bed newly covered, new candlesticks and a new god of paper on the wall. It was a god of wealth, and a merry old man he was made to be, his robes all red and blue and yellow, but he had never brought wealth to this house. No, this man looked often at the god and cursed him in his heart because he could look so merrily down from the earthen wall and into this poor room that was always and ever as poor as it was.
    Sometimes when the man came home from a holiday in town or when he had gone on a rainy day to the little inn and gambled a while with the idlers there, when he came home again to this small house, to this woman bearing her children that he must labor to feed, it fell upon him like a terror that so long as he lived there was naught for him but this, to rise in the morning and go to this land of which they owned but little and rented from a landlord who lived in pleasure in some far city; to spend his day upon that rented land even as his father had done before him; to come home to eat his same coarse food and never the best the land could give, for the best must ever be sold for others to eat; to sleep, to rise again to the same next day. Even the harvests were not his own, for he must measure out a share to that landlord and he must take another share and fee the townsman who was the landlord’s agent. When he thought of this agent he could not bear it, for this townsman was such a one as he himself would fain have been, dressed in soft silk and his skin pale and fair and with that smooth oily look that townsmen have who work at some small, light task and are well fed.
    On such days when all these thoughts pressed on him he was very surly and he spoke not at all to the woman except to curse her for some slowness, and when her quick temper rose against him it was a strange malicious pleasure to him to fall to loud quarreling with her, and it eased him somehow, although she had often the best of him, too, because her temper was more stout than his, except when she was angry at a child. Even to his anger he could not cling as long as she did, but grew weary of it and flung himself off to something else. Quickest of