The Mother

In the kitchen of the small thatched farmhouse the mother sat on a low bamboo stool behind the earthen stove and fed grass deftly into the hole where a fire burned beneath the iron cauldron. The blaze was but just caught and she moved a twig here, a handful of leaves there, and thrust in a fresh bit of the dried grass she had cut from the hillsides last autumn. In the corner of the kitchen as near as she could creep to the fire sat a very old and weazened woman, wrapped in a thick padded coat of bright red cotton stuff, whose edges showed under a patched coat of blue she wore over it. She was half blind with a sore disease of the eyes, and this had well-nigh sealed her eyelids together. But through the small slits left open she could see a great deal still, and she watched the flare of the flames as they leaped and caught under the strong and skillful hands of the mother. Now she said, her words hissing softly through her sunken, toothless gums, “Be careful how you feed the fire⁠—there is only that one load⁠—is it two?⁠—and the spring is but newly come and we have long to go before the grass is long enough to cut and here I am as I am and I doubt I can ever go again and pick a bit of fuel⁠—a useless old crone now, who ought to die⁠—”

These last words the old woman said many times a day and every time she said them she waited to hear the son’s wife speak as she now did, “Do not say it, old mother!

At that cry of hers some desire hardened in the man and he said wilfully, “But I will have myself a robe cut from this piece and I like it very well so that I will have it for the once! There are those three silver pieces I know we have.”

Now those three coins were of good value and coins the mother had brought with her when she came to be wed, and her own mother had handed them to her for her own when she left her home. They were her precious possession and she had never found the hour when she could spend them. Even when she had bought the coffin for the old mother when they thought her dying, she had pinched and borrowed and would not spend her own, and often the thought of those three silver pieces was in her mind for safe riches, and they were there if ever times grew too hard, some war or hardship that might come at any hour and lose them the fruits of their land. With those three coins in the wall she knew they could not starve for a while. So now she cried, “That silver we cannot spend!”

But the man leaped up as swift as a swallow and darted past her in a fury and he went to that cranny and searched in it and seized the silver.

And picking up the child from the bed of soft earth where she had laid him she went home.

But he was not there. When she turned the corner of the house he was not there. The old woman was peering anxiously toward the field, and the two children sat upon the doorstep waiting and weary and they cried out when they saw her and she said bewildered, “Your father⁠—is he not come yet?”

“He has not come and we are hungry,” cried the boy, and the girl echoed in her broken, childish way, “Not come, and we are hungry!” and sat with her eyes fast shut against the piercing last golden rays of the sun. And the old mother rose and hobbled to the edge of the threshing-floor and called out shrilly to the cousin coming home, “Saw you my son anywhere?”

But the mother cried out in sudden impatience, “Let be, old mother! Do not tell all he is not come!”

“Well, but he does not,” said the old woman, peering, troubled.

But the mother said no more. She fetched cold rice for the children and heated a little water and poured it over the rice for the old woman and found a morsel of some old food for the dog, and while they ate she went down the street, the babe upon her arm, to the wayside inn. There were but few guests there now, and only a scattered one or two on his way home to some near village, for it was the hour when men are in their homes and the day’s work done.

Suddenly out of the twilight of the short winter’s evening there stood the man. Out of the twilight he stood, sudden and black, and he seized her wrist in his large soft hand and there was no other soul near by. No, it was the hour when countrymen are in their houses and it was cold and the air full of the night’s frost and such a time as no one lingers out unless he must. Yet here was he, and he had her wrist and held it and she felt his hand on her and she stood still, smitten into stillness.

Then the man took the small parcel of silver he had and with his other hand he forced it into her hand that he held, and he closed her fingers over it and he said, “I bought these for none other than for you. For you alone I bought them. They are yours.”

And he was gone into the gathering shade under the city wall, and there was she left alone, the silver trinkets in her hand.

Then she came to herself and she ran after him crying, “I cannot⁠—but I cannot⁠—.”

But he was gone. Although she ran into the gate and peered through the flickering lights that fell from open shops, she could not see him.

Then the mother slowed her steps and said no more and they went on, more slowly, save that when they came near to that shop of medicine the mother made haste again without knowing that she did, she was so eager. It was still early in the day and they were the first buyers and the medicine seller was but taking down the boards from his shop doors, and he did it slowly, stopping often to yawn and thrust his fingers into his long and uncombed hair and scratch his head. When he looked up and saw this countrywoman and the girl standing there before his counter he was amazed and he cried out, “What is it you want at such an early hour?”

Then the mother pointed to her child and she said, “Is there any balm that you have for such eyes as these?”

The man stared at the girl then and at her seared and red-rimmed eyes that she could scarcely open at all so red and seared they were, and he said, “How has she come by such eyes?”

The mother answered, “At first we thought it was the smoke made them so. My man is dead and I have a man’s work to do on the land, and often has she fed the fire if I came home late. But these last years it seems more than this, for I have saved her the smoke, and there seems some heat that comes up in her of its own accord and burns her eyes.