The Freelands | Page 9

little while with a certain
pleasure, he said:
"Yes, my dear?"
Noticing his presence, and continuing to put bottles into the basket, she
answered:
"I thought I must--they're what dear Mother's given us."
There they lay--little bottles filled with white and brown fluids, white
and blue and brown powders; green and brown and yellow ointments;
black lozenges; buff plasters; blue and pink and purple pills. All
beautifully labelled and corked.
And he said in a rather faltering voice:
"Bless her! How she does give her things away! Haven't we used
ANY?"
"Not one. And they have to be cleared away before they're stale, for
fear we might take one by mistake."
"Poor Mother!"
"My dear, she's found something newer than them all by now."
Felix sighed.
"The nomadic spirit. I have it, too!"
And a sudden vision came to him of his mother's carved ivory face,

kept free of wrinkles by sheer will-power, its firm chin, slightly
aquiline nose, and measured brows; its eyes that saw everything so
quickly, so fastidiously, its compressed mouth that smiled sweetly, with
a resolute but pathetic acceptation. Of the piece of fine lace, sometimes
black, sometimes white, over her gray hair. Of her hands, so thin now,
always moving a little, as if all the composure and care not to offend
any eye by allowing Time to ravage her face, were avenging
themselves in that constant movement. Of her figure, that was short but
did not seem so, still quick-moving, still alert, and always dressed in
black or gray. A vision of that exact, fastidious, wandering spirit called
Frances Fleeming Freeland--that spirit strangely compounded of
domination and humility, of acceptation and cynicism; precise and
actual to the point of desert dryness; generous to a point that caused her
family to despair; and always, beyond all things, brave.
Flora dropped the last little bottle, and sitting on the edge of the bath let
her eyebrows rise. How pleasant was that impersonal humor which
made her superior to other wives!
"You--nomadic? How?"
"Mother travels unceasingly from place to place, person to person,
thing to thing. I travel unceasingly from motive to motive, mind to
mind; my native air is also desert air--hence the sterility of my work."
Flora rose, but her eyebrows descended.
"Your work," she said, "is not sterile."
"That, my dear," said Felix, "is prejudice." And perceiving that she was
going to kiss him, he waited without annoyance. For a woman of
forty-two, with two children and three books of poems--and not
knowing which had taken least out of her--with hazel-gray eyes, wavy
eyebrows darker than they should have been, a glint of red in her hair;
wavy figure and lips; quaint, half-humorous indolence, quaint,
half-humorous warmth--was she not as satisfactory a woman as a man
could possibly have married!

"I have got to go down and see Tod," he said. "I like that wife of his;
but she has no sense of humor. How much better principles are in
theory than in practice!"
Flora repeated softly, as if to herself:
"I'm glad I have none." She was at the window leaning out, and Felix
took his place beside her. The air was full of scent from wet leaves,
alive with the song of birds thanking the sky. Suddenly he felt her arm
round his ribs; either it or they--which, he could not at the moment
tell--seemed extraordinarily soft. . . .
Between Felix and his young daughter, Nedda, there existed the only
kind of love, except a mother's, which has much permanence--love
based on mutual admiration. Though why Nedda, with her starry
innocence, should admire him, Felix could never understand, not
realizing that she read his books, and even analyzed them for herself in
the diary which she kept religiously, writing it when she ought to have
been asleep. He had therefore no knowledge of the way his written
thoughts stimulated the ceaseless questioning that was always going on
within her; the thirst to know why this was and that was not. Why, for
instance, her heart ached so some days and felt light and eager other
days? Why, when people wrote and talked of God, they seemed to
know what He was, and she never did? Why people had to suffer; and
the world be black to so many millions? Why one could not love more
than one man at a time? Why--a thousand things? Felix's books
supplied no answers to these questions, but they were comforting; for
her real need as yet was not for answers, but ever for more questions, as
a young bird's need is for opening its beak without quite knowing what
is coming out or going in. When she and her father walked, or sat, or
went to concerts together, their talk was neither particularly intimate
nor particularly voluble;