Mothers Still

The child sat up, clutching her nightgown together over her thin neck. She thrust one foot out of bed, shivering as it touched the floor. Then she waited. Some low noise reached her; she plunged out and crept along the hall to the head of the stairs. The room below was dark. The noise came again. She seized the railing and stepped down one step, two steps, three. There she could see around the railing to the foot of the stairs, where in the dim bar of light from the corner street lamp crouched a woman, her face close to the glass.

The child clung to the rail, trying to stop the chattering of her teeth. She couldn’t clench them, and they were so noisy that she put one hand across her mouth, and reluctantly started down toward the figure. The noise came again; a hoarse grating “Oh-h.”

The child’s lips moved against her tight hand. “I won’t cry tonight. I won’t cry tonight.” A step creaked and she paused. The woman made the sound again.

Two more steps, fearful, slow. The child took her hand from the rail and dragged it across to the shoulder of the woman.

“Mother, come up—to bed——”

The woman started violently, turning her face, a distorted blur in the faint light.

“Go back to bed! What are you down here for?”

“Won’t you come, too, mother?” The child tried to take the restless hands of the woman.

“Go away! Leave me alone! Go away!” The woman’s voice broke high. She rose to her feet, pushing the child away. “Leave me alone!”

She turned into the dark room, and with irregular feet walked across, back, across, on into the library, stumbling against a chair.

The child crouched on the stair, huddling her body against the railing. “I won’t cry,” she said. Then she listened. On and on went the feet, stopping, beginning. Words, too, but she couldn’t make them out. Poor mother! Where was her father? Was it very late? Why couldn’t men come home at exactly a time? Or if they didn’t, why couldn’t you just go to bed, anyway? She wouldn’t cry, even if the low, muttering voice did come out of the dark. She was cold. The spindles pressed into her thin body. The clock on the landing above her ticked interminably against the silence. She—she was sleepy. She wouldn’t cry! She sat up with a start; she would get her kitten. Then she wouldn’t wish to cry. She climbed the stairs with caution. At the head she deliberated. She would go down the rear stairs; the kitten might be in the cellar-way. She went along the hall carefully to the very end. There she closed a door that stood ajar. She always closed that. Hulda slept on the third floor, and always pretended not to know, the next morning. The child couldn’t bear to think that perhaps she did know. She put away resolutely the thought of Hulda’s strong, warm arms; they had held her one night when the house was full of nurses and doctors for her mother. Then the child started down the steep kitchen stairs.

A dim light burned in the kitchen. The child scurried across to the cellar door. Her hand on the knob, she waited. Another noise? This came from the cellar-way. A strange, low sound; a purr, but not a quiet purr. It was alive, glad. The child glowed all over her cold little body at the sound. It was so glad that it went straight into her heart. Was it her kitten, trying to comfort her? She pulled open the door, and dropped to her knees by the market basket on the step.

The sound ceased abruptly. At the child’s soft “Kitten? My kitten? Are you there?” it began again. The child put her hand into the basket and then with a faint scream drew back. What had she touched? Something that squirmed! The low ecstatic purr went on. The child gathered her courage, and pulled the basket into the light. Then, she saw. She stared and stared, holding her face quite close, while the vibrations of the irregular purr tingled from her ears through her heart down to her toes.

Squirming, blind, confused, they were—kittens! And the child’s own kitten was washing them, loving them.

“Why, kitten!” The child tried to laugh. “What—what have you done?”

She clasped her hands, swaying slightly. She had no knowledge of this thing before her, for she was young and strangely without curiosity. What she had learned of the real ways of the world pleased her so little that she seldom came out of her fancies to learn more. But as she watched her kitten, as she listened to the triumphant purring, she knew suddenly that the world held more than she had understood.

“Beautiful! kitten,” she said. “Beautiful!”

She didn’t know why it seemed beautiful. The new kittens were squirmy and bedraggled. But the mother loved them! How she washed them and sang!

“You’re a mother-cat, kitten.” The child’s voice thrilled in her throat. Her palms firm on the dusty step, she leaned over the basket and kissed her kitten between its ears. Then she pushed the basket into place, rose, and closed the door. She stood for a moment listening to the purr that came faintly to her. Then tense with this wonder that flowered in her heart, she went through the pantry, on into the dining room. As the door swung behind her, the front door closed cautiously. She could see her father standing by the window.

Then she heard the thin taunting voice from the library.

“Did he tear himself away from his pretty friends?”

“Oh, come, Mary!” The child, struggling with the nausea that the night voices always caused her, heard him go into the library. She drew her hands against her ears, but she heard, far off, her father’s voice.

“Don’t be a fool and make a scene tonight. I had to stay on business. Come on.”

Then her mother’s shrill, “Don’t touch me! Sot!”

“Calm yourself, Mary. You mustn’t excite yourself. It’s bad, in your condition.”

“My condition! Calm!”

The child couldn’t bear the high gasping laugh. Under her palms the beating of blood in her ears vibrated strangely like her kitten’s purring. She hurried back to her room and crept into bed; she crawled down between the covers, pulling them tight against her ears, drawing her knees up to her chin, tense, cold, desperate. She could hear voices beating against the ceiling of the room beneath her—roars or mutters or shrieks.... After rocking for a wretched eternity on those waves of sound, she slept.

When the child came home after school the next day, the house was quiet, with the clean stillness of afternoon. Hulda was out. The door of the mother’s room was closed. The child pressed tentative fingers against the knob, and then with a sigh came away. Probably her mother was sleeping. The kittens weren’t in the cellar-way. She had a spasmodic fear that they had all died; a few minutes of frantic search found the basket in a corner of the furnace room. Making a cushion of a piece of dusty sacking, she sat down to watch the kittens. They were all curled up, asleep; they were fluffier, although their tails were queer yet.

The child puzzled. It had been “Mother’s Day” at school. Some mothers who didn’t need to rest that day, were at school. The children had said verses. “A mother is the—no, a—mother still, the holiest thing alive.” The child had liked that one, because of her kitten. She had tried to tell about her kitten, but a boy had laughed, and the teacher said, “Another time.” So she repeated it now to the cat. “A mother is a mother still.” She wasn’t at all sure about the meaning, but it said something to the feeling the basket had given her. Her head drooped. The furnace room was warm. She would lie down with the kittens. One arm around the basket, one under her head, she curled up on the floor and slept.

The mother cat, jumping out of the basket and making off up the stairs, did not waken her. Later, with a shudder, she opened her eyes. It was dark, with voices. Was it still night?—or another night? She sat up wearily, holding her breath that she might listen. She was in the cellar. The voices were above her. Her mother’s, and another, not her father’s. Hulda? Were they quarreling, too? She walked to the stairs. Even there she couldn’t distinguish words. Her mother was angry. Poor Hulda! Up the stairs went the child. She pushed the door open. Hulda sat at the kitchen table, crying, her round, pink face swollen and homely. The mother stood with her back to the door.

“Where is the man?” She sounded very angry.

The child clasped her hands with a hopeless little sigh. Hulda was picking at the edge of the white oilcloth on the table with large, red fingers, while tears slipped over her cheeks.

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps you don’t know which man!”

Hulda’s hands dropped to her lap. How tight her waist strained over her full bosom! The buttons would surely fly off! She did not raise her eyes as she spoke.

“I sent him away.”

“Sent him! Huh! You’d better send again. You can make him marry you now.”

“I won’t. Poor folks ain’t got no right to marry.”

“The sooner you send, the better.”

“I won’t.” Hulda’s cheeks quivered. “Tie him to me and babies—a new one every year—and him maybe making something of hisself alone. I sent ’im away.”

“You—do you expect me to believe you let him go after he’d got you into trouble!”

“It wasn’t trouble then. I didn’t know. I couldn’t help it. But I—I made him go. I won’t send for ’im.”

Hulda’s choked voice hurt the child. It felt too clogged up with tears. Her mother stepped nearer Hulda; her lowered voice rasped like sandpaper.

“Pfau! A man’s duty is to his children and their mother, no matter what he wants. You’re a shameless slut. Coming and thrusting yourself on respectable people, and now when I shouldn’t be troubled! Pack up and get out of my house!”

“Mother! Oh, mother!” The child could not keep back the cry. She stiffened as her mother wheeled, hysterical hands beating at throat and breast.

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing, mother! Don’t—don’t talk so. You’ll be sick again. Hulda——” She smiled at Hulda pitifully.

“Don’t speak to her. She’s a bad woman. She’s going away, at once!”

“Where to?” Hulda’s tears had stopped. Her eyes were specks of bloodshot blue between swollen lids, but her lips were firm. “I ain’t got no place to go. I could stay and work a while yet till your baby come. Then I could go off and—die with mine. I—loved him. I ain’t bad. You——Bein’ married don’t make you good!”

“Insulted in my own house by a strumpet! Before my child!”

“She’s heard worse,” said Hulda grimly.

The mother dropped into a chair, her eyelids fluttering, her hands beating wildly. The child, kneeling, pulled the hands into her lap.

“There, mother, there!” Her heart in her throat made words difficult.

The door to the pantry swung slowly open. The child, tightening her fingers about her mother’s hands, waited, not breathing. Just as her mother moaned again, she saw. It was her father, home early, investigating affairs.

“What’s the matter?” He came in uncertainly, looking at Hulda and the child. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Hulda. Mother’s sending her away.”

“Oh, come, come.” He stepped to the sink, and turned on the water with a loud splash. “Hulda ought to be careful not to excite your mother. It’ll be all right.”

The child shook her head. Sometimes her father’s presence broke a difficult tangle. Today something too terrible for any lightness had thrown its net over them. Hulda, with frightened eyes, watched the father as he held the glass of water to the mother’s lips. Wrenching one hand free, the mother knocked the glass away. Drops of water burned on the child’s hand.

“Send that—that thing away!” The words were hot and dry, from parched lips.

“What have you done, Hulda? You should remember your mistress’ condition. She has to be careful.”

Hulda turned away.

“Maybe I have to be, too,” she muttered.

“Eh?” The father lost his conciliatory smile. “Eh? What do you mean?”

Hulda faced him.

“I’m goin’,” she said, “but maybe—maybe I have to be a mother, same’s her.”

The child dropped her mother’s hand, and looked at Hulda’s blotched face, lifted in a sort of strange dignity.

“A mother?” she said, in a whisper.

Her father touched her shoulder.

“Run on away. Go and play. Go and play with your kitten.”

She looked up at him despairingly.

“My kitten? She’s a mother, too. Oh!” she stammered, “tell me—a mother——. Tell me—why ‘a mother is a mother still the holiest thing alive’?”