The baby was sick, a doctor had left
shortly before, and one minute clenched hand rested on the mother's
bare breast. Lee found himself gazing fixedly at the girl's face:
trouble slowly clouded it, the trouble was invaded by fear, a terrible
question. He realized that the hand was growing cold--the baby was
dead.
Waves of suffering passed darkly over the mother, incredulity swiftly
followed by a frozen knowledge; she tried with her lips, her mouth, to
breath life into the flesh already meaningless, lost to her. Then the
tragedy of existence drew her face into a mask universal and timeless,
a staring tearless shocked regard as white and inhuman as plaster of
Paris. Emotion choked at Lee's throat; and, in a sense of shame at
having been so shaken, he admitted that Mina Raff had an extraordinary
ability: he evaded the impressive reality by a return to the trivial
fact. In the gloom there was only a scattering of applause, a failure
of approbation caused either by an excess of emotion in the audience,
or--this he thought more probable--a general uneasiness before a great
moment of life. The crowded theatre was wholly relieved, itself again,
in a succeeding passage of trivial clowning.
Hatred pursued the youthful informally maternal figure: that,
eventually, she was saved by the love of an individual was small before
the opposed mass--women surrounded her with vitriolic whispers, women
turned her maliciously from house to house, a woman had betrayed her.
Pages:
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121