XXX

War swept the world. “Oh, if only I could go over and drive an ambulance!” Maggie thought, longing to be in the thick of things, longing to fling out her life in service in the mud, under the star-shells, and having to be content with knitting socks and going without sugar. Lily couldn’t manage socks, but she knitted sweaters⁠—sweaters for giants, vast, enormous, tiny sweaters for brownies. And yet the directions were always the same⁠—she couldn’t understand why they turned out so different, or why they had so many openwork places. “More holy than righteous,” said Maggie, picking up Lily’s dropped stitches. Lily wanted to fasten little cheering notes to the sweaters, but she was too shy. She talked all the time about “Our Boys,” and sang, with pleasurable tears in her eyes:

“ ‘There’s a long long trail a-winding
To the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingale is singing,
And a white moon beams⁠—’ ”

She thought it was the sweetest song she had ever heard. It was dashing to have Maggie say one day,

“I don’t think so much of that song⁠—or maybe it’s the way you’re singing it?”

Victor was on committees for raising money, for giving patriotic balls, for arranging benefit performances. He had never been so important and busy in his life, and when peace came he was a pricked balloon.

Saturday Market in Wilmington! The farmers’ wagons were pulled up along the curb, chickens and eggs, butter, and boxes of blackberries, and tight bunches of red and yellow flowers were spread out for sale. Women with baskets on their arms priced, bargained, tasted, stopped to gossip in midstream.

“What you asking for peaches? Kinda green, ain’t they?”

“Let’s try a piece of your cheese⁠—”

Rich women, poor women, white women, black women, filling their market baskets⁠—sea green cabbages, limp-necked poultry, a little wooden boat of cottage-cheese, a fist of yellow banana fingers, sometimes for the spirit’s sake a bunch of marigolds and bee-balm, solid as worsted work.

Maggie shifted her heavy basket from arm to arm. A couple of canteloupes, and then she could go over to the library and rest until it was time to catch the car for home.

While she was pressing her thumb into the cantaloupes and smelling them, the pain came again, so that she could hardly stand. She set her teeth, feeling the sweat spring out on her upper lip. If she could just live through this second⁠—the next⁠—the next⁠—

The pain became the center of everything, gathered all creation into itself. Streets, houses, forests, seas, the sun and sky, concentrated in that one spot of torture. Then it ebbed away, left her. She managed to get her basket over to Market Street and up the long flight of library steps, she managed to change Lily’s library book.

Each time she thought it wouldn’t come again. But it was coming oftener, and it was worse. She faced it, sitting with her basket at her feet, turning over the pages of something⁠—“The Musical Courier.”

She was afraid to go to the doctor, that was the truth. But how silly, when probably he’d say “Don’t eat tomatoes,” or “Drink hot water,” and she’d be all right again. She had nearly fainted on the street just now⁠—she certainly would have to do something.

And she made up her mind to go to the doctor now, before she lost her courage. What doctor? She didn’t know. They hadn’t had one for so long. She would telephone Isabel Leaf and ask her who was good.

“Oh, I hope it’s nothing serious!” Isabel said.

“Oh, no, nothing at all, really⁠—”

“We always go to Dr. Henderson on Delaware Avenue. Why don’t you come out to lunch, and then I’ll send you down to him in the motor?”

But now that she had made up her mind she wanted to get to the doctor’s right away. It would be more restful to have some ice cream at Jones’s, afterwards, all reassured and happy. She might even go on a spree and see the Charlie Chaplin movie at the Queen, if she didn’t have to wait too long.

She felt so well by the time she got to Dr. Henderson’s that it seemed ridiculous to go in⁠—still, she was here, and she might as well. “I wish I’d asked Isabel what he charges,” she thought, with a nervous look into her purse.

The waiting room was quite full of people⁠—masked people, hiding from each other, covering themselves up, coughing now and then, or speaking in low voices, but so still most of the time that the clock sounded loud. Waiting patients, as much a part of the furnishing of the room as the sepia photographs of cathedrals on the walls, the aspidistra in its brass jardinière, the pile of National Geographic Magazines⁠—only showing that they were real by the frightened eyes that looked out sometimes through the slits in the masks.

Maggie looked at pictures of the fishing industry of Norway. She looked at pictures of Yellowstone Park. She looked at a copy of Life, reading the jokes without taking in a word. My, it was getting late! She glared suspiciously at newcomers⁠—suppose they got in ahead of her, somehow! At this rate she’d be lucky if she caught the twenty minutes to four, without stopping for anything to eat.

And then it was her turn⁠—too soon, after all! Too soon! She picked up her market basket and went in to Dr. Henderson.

Lily had a sore throat and had spent the night with a stocking-compress around it. But she was still as hoarse as a crow in the morning, and dreadfully dejected griddlecakes for breakfast, and it hurt her too much to swallow them! So Maggie told her to stay home from church, and she would put the flowers on the altar.

She walked along the road to the church, the great sheaf of white cosmos jutting out at one side, wagging with every step.

She had cancer, and it was too late to operate. That was his verdict, stripped of the kindness and encouragement he had wrapped it in. Cancer⁠—too late to operate⁠—

What pretty single dahlias in the Worthingtons’ garden⁠—the color of raspberries and candlelight. Not much like the dahlias she used to grow at The Maples painted tin rosettes⁠—

That meant she was dying. How queer! Maggie Campion dying! But you weren’t dying when you were walking to church in your best voile dress; when you bothered to put on your best stockings, silk to just below the knees, because it was Sunday; when you got up earlier than anyone else in the house, and started the fire and made griddlecakes for breakfast.

Dying⁠—dying. The word repeated itself to her, monotonous as the beat of waves.

“Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.”

The Tennyson tableaux⁠—so long ago. Edward in a tam-o’-shanter trimmed with his Aunt Jo’s plume⁠—May in silvery white, holding the silvery lilies⁠—poor Aunt Priscilla’s blue tail⁠—Victor teasing May about Edward⁠—Edward⁠—

There went the Willie Trewhitts all packed into their new Ford coupé⁠—not going towards church, either. She nodded severely, and Willie, who had been in her Sunday school class, reddened and looked like an embarrassed little boy in spite of being a married man and father of a family.

Communion Sunday. She went into the musty little robing-room with its piles of dusty prayer books, its framed yellowed photograph of old Mr. Page in his vestments, and got out the white hangings. The cosmos were almost lost in their feathery foliage⁠—not that many people would be there to see them. Everybody went automobiling on Sundays nowadays, or stayed at home and read the Sunday papers.

She brushed the fallen petals into the newspaper she had wrapped around the wet stems, pausing to read an advertisement for a marked-down sale of overcoats at Gimbels’⁠—Victor needed an overcoat badly. She shook the petals out of the chancel window, put the folded newspaper under her pew, and knelt, thinking of nothing. Through the service she stood up, sat down, knelt, not thinking, not feeling, numb.

“Bread of the world, in mercy broken,
Wine of the soul, in mercy shed,
By whom the words of life were spoken,
And in whose death our sins are dead.

“Look on the heart by sorrow broken,
Look on the tears by sinners shed;⁠—”

And suddenly the beating waves crashed through, drenching her with realization, with terror, submerging her. Anguish and death⁠—

“I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it! I don’t want to die!”

And the answer came⁠—did her ears hear it, or her heart? She didn’t know.

“This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.”

“Bread of the world, in mercy broken,
Wine of the soul⁠—”

He had died, so that she need never die. He had promised!

“I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.” The bread of the body, the wine of the soul. The wheat and grapes had had their roots in the earth, but they had grown up towards heaven. The white bread, the red wine; white as snow and red as fire⁠—snow and fire, winter and summer, death and life, opposite and yet the same, part of eternity’s circle.

But before the wheat becomes bread it must be ground, before the grapes become wine they must be crushed. They must be sacrificed, as Christ on the Cross was sacrificed.

Winter must come, and death. But the seed lives, and rises again from the dark earth, from the grave. The only way to life is through the door of death.

She knelt, hiding her streaming face in her arms, shaken by terrible weeping. Her legs were too weak to stand, but the Son of God, the Son of Man, came down to her from his altar, bringing her his divine gift of terror and beauty, his gift of sacrifice. And as she accepted his gift he entered into her, and she into him, he was everything, the bread, the wine, the sun in the sky, the dust that danced in the sunbeams, her tear-soaked handkerchief. “Lo, I am with you alway⁠—”