"If you can't raise kids of your own—if you ain't got it in you to have kidsthat'll live—talk not to me of other people's brats."
And he turned to his evening paper. Meta was silenced.
This was the way of it: "Your kids died. You couldn't raise your own." Never "our daughter" or "our son," but "your kids." Had they lived, and had they been credits, Meta knew he would have claimed them. Had they lived, and had they been discredits, they would have been her children, wholly hers. . . . Even as in death they were hers.
A slave to great love was Meta. It had come into her with the first breath of life; she had taken it with the milk from her mother's breast. It had filled the home of her girlhood—even now tears came to her eyes when she remembered the adoration of her father for her mother—and she carried it full-visioned into her marriage with David. She worshiped her man. She it would be, she believed, who would wait upon him, labor for him, suffer for him; be his right and left hand; mend his garments, wash them, lay them out neatly for him; run to his bidding, sit with him in the evenings—talking, laughing, dreaming, loving—loving! Riding pink clouds in a sea of roses.
David desired none of these. He forbade them. He was a hard man.
"When I want you I'll call you," he rasped, many times. "Don't baby me. I ain't that kind. Don't bother me. Don't ask questions. When I want you, you'll know it. I can take care of myself. I ain't a soft booby. You take care of the house. That's your job."
Thus, Meta believed something had died within her; certain of the elements of her being had expired after the first few years. She believed she had crushed down her great love for love; believed she had forgotten it, put it back of her, stilled its outcry. When a peeping voice called, resolutely she beat it down.
And thus, for twenty-one years, seven months and thirteen days she lived in Hell.
IN A hard, tight way they were prosperous. David's job as foreman of the construction gang gave somewhat above their living, (the expenses always sternly dictated by the husband) and they managed to buy a cottage. On each Sunday they went to church, and David dropped a dime on the collection plate, Seven times in the years they had gone to a show.
On each workday morning, at six-thirty o'clock, David lifted from his seat at the table, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, slammed the back door and went to his work. On each workday night he returned at six o'clock, silently drew cold water from the tap in the kitchen, doused his face and hands in the blue-enamel basin, flirted the blue-edged towel over his head and ate his supper.
After that, feet propped on a chair, he read the paper, tight-eyed, tight lipped—the same tight eyes and lips he used with his foreign workmen. Sometimes, dropping the paper, he spoke four or five curt words. Usually he didn't! When Meta, in the early days of her married life, attempted to prolong the conversation, he lifted to his feet and went to bed. Later in the years he told her gruffly, "Shut up, I'm tired."
Came the morning of the twenty-first year, seventh month and fourteenth day, which was in David's fifty-fourth year. He tossed back the covers of their bed, yawned, stretched, rubbed his eyes with his. knuckles, and sat up. On the other side of the bed Meta bent over her shoelaces. She felt his hands pulling at the covers.
"It's still dark," he complained, "It ain't daylight."
Meta straightened up, staring at him and from him to the new sunlight streaming in at the window, She said nothing; surprise, fear, was heavy upon her.
David rubbed his eyes, stretched the lids, pulling them out with his fingers. Lifting his legs over the side of the bed he staggered to his feet, tottered a step or two, with hands outstretched, pawing the walls, feeling his way. Meta hurried to him.
"What's—what's the matter?" she asked quickly, Her thin hands were trembling.
"Eh?" He was feeling along the walls. "I don't—I don't know." He peered vacantly above her, around her, but never directly at her. "Something's the—I can't see! I don't—Is it morning? Is it daylight?”
Meta led him to a chair. Hovering about him, his curt commands brought her to herself.
"Get my clothes," he commanded. "Help—help me into them."
So far as she could remember, this was the first time in years that he had asked her aid. It came strangely from him.
"I don't know what's the matter with me," he worried, rubbing his eyes.
"Don't rub them," Meta advised. "That'll make them worse."
David grumbled. Carefully, filled with nervousness at the unusual in her assisting him, Meta aided him to dress. He didn't bark at her. He was curiously silent—pathetically silent.
"I'll go down and see a doctor," he mused as she led him into the kitchen. "Wind's been blowing cement in my eyes, last two-three days, And dust, more'n a week. Eyes been hurting me for months, with the wind and dirt and everything. Mebbe my stomach is out of fix."
Meta watched him curiously, tensely. He strove to be casual, matter-of-fact, but his hands wavered in their task of conveying the food to his lips.
"I'll go down and see a doctor," he said again as he fumblingly pushed back the chair, almost fell to the floor, recovered his balance and clung to the table edge. "I'll go down right away. Get my hat!"
But David didn't go to the doctor. He didn't go to anyone, outside the narrow yard. David was blind.
AT FIRST, after the physician had made three trips, examined closely and announced positively there was no hope, both David and Meta were stunned.
The house was paid for, true, and compensation insurance would be available. They'd live—frugally—but they'd live. The thing of it was that David could not—would not—realize he was stricken. He cursed, grumbled, damned the Creator and His universe, and promised largely what a man would do when he could again see.
Meta held herself aloof, at first. Timidly her fingers would wander toward his shoulder, at times when she read aloud to him. Then, without touching him, they would be withdrawn.
After weeks it was that David realized: realized and was afraid. He who was now in total darkness, and who had been unafraid during all the days of his life, before, took on a fear of the night. It was not the darkness of blindness that overcame him, but the clutching fingers of dusk—he could feel them!—the whispering, hoarse voices that came with nightfall. His nervousness would grow in the late hours of the afternoon, and after supper, when Meta read to him, David would ask that she sit close. By little and little, after weeks, his hand would stray to her chair, seeking the assurance of her nearness.
Meta expanded quickly under this new softness. A hint of the forgotten maternal crept into her manner and into her eyes as she aided him in dressing or undressing, as she combed his hair and washed his face and hands. The warmth of youth came to her—a warmth matured with years, true—when merely she sat and watched, unseen, and saw the
