The Brimming Cup Part 33

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

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

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

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

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

"I know," said Paul, "I've done it lots of times." He went on, "Mother, my pig has lice. You can just _see_ them crawling around under his hair.

And I got out the oil Father said to use, but I can't do it. It says on the can to rub it on with a stiff little brush. I don't see how ever in the world you're going to get your pig to stand still while you do it.

When I try to, he just squeals, and runs away."

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

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

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

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

"Please, Mother, _please_," begged Paul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He disappeared, whistling loudly, "Ma.s.sa's in the cold, cold ground."

Marise hoped automatically that Elly was not in earshot to hear this.

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

Now she knew from what it came ... balancing perpetually on a tight-rope from which ...

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

The worst was not the always recurring physical demands, the dressing and undressing the children, preparing their food and keeping them clean. The crushing part was the moral strain; to carry their lives always with you, incalculably different from each other and from your own. And not only their present lives, but the insoluble question of how their present lives were affecting their future. Never for a moment from the time they are born, to be free from the thought, "Where are they?

What are they doing? Is that the best thing for them?" till every individual thought of your own was shattered, till your intelligence was atrophied, till your sensibilities to finer things were dulled and blunted.

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

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

She washed her hot, moist face in cold water, drank a gla.s.s, put on a broad-brimmed garden hat, and set out for the field back of the barn.

The kitchen had been hot, but it seemed cool compared to the heat into which they stepped from the door. It startled Marise so that she drew back for an instant. It seemed to her like walking through molten metal.

"Mercy! what heat!" she murmured.

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

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

"But it'll be cooler soon," said Paul. "There's a big thunderstorm coming up. See, around the corner of the mountain. See how black it is now, over the Eagle Rocks" He took her hand in his bramble-scarred little fingers, and led her along, talking proudly of his own virtue.

"I've moved Henry's pen today, fresh, so's to get him on new gra.s.s, and I put it under the shade of this b.u.t.ternut tree."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, then it's easy. Come outside the pen. Now listen. You go back to the barn and get whatever it is you feed him. Then you put that in the trough, and let him begin to eat, quietly. Then take your oil and your brush, and moving very slowly so that you don't startle him, lean over the fence and begin to brush it on his back where he likes to be rubbed.

If he likes the feel of it, he'll probably stand still. I'll wait here, till you see how it comes out."

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

She closed her eyes and felt the sun beating palpably on the lids ...

or was it that hot inward pulse still throbbing ... ? Why wouldn't Neale do it for her? Why wouldn't he put out that strength of his and crush out this strange agitation of hers, _forbid_ it to her? Then there was nothing in her but intense discomfort, as though that were a universe of its own. A low, distant growl of thunder shook the air with a m.u.f.fled, muted roar.

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

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

Marise turned her head away and slid down lower on the gra.s.s, so that she lay with her face on her arm. She was shaking from head to foot as though with sobs. But she was not crying. She was laughing hysterically.

"Even for the pig!" she was saying to herself. "A symbol of my life!"