They were very far from the Negroes in Georgia.

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT GOES ON INSIDE

Half an Hour in the Life of a Modern Woman

May 8.

Marise looked at the clock.  They all three looked at the clock.  On school mornings the clock dominated their every instant.  Marise often thought that the swinging of its great pendulum was as threatening as the Pendulum that swung in the Pit.  Back and forth, back and forth, bringing nearer and nearer the knife-edge of its dire threat that nine o’clock would come and the children not be in school.  Somehow they must all manage to break the bonds that held them there and escape from the death-trap before the fatal swinging menace reached them.  The stroke of nine, booming out in that house, would be like the Crack o’ Doom to the children.

Marise told Paul not to eat so fast, and said to Elly, who was finishing her lessons and her breakfast together, “I let you do this, this one time, Elly, but I don’t want you to let it happen again.  You had plenty of time yesterday to get that done.”

She stirred her coffee and thought wistfully, “What a policeman I must seem to the children.  I wish I could manage it some other way.”

Elly, her eyes on the book, murmured in a low chanting rhythm, her mouth full of oatmeal, “Delaware River, Newcastle, Brandywine, East Branch, West Branch, Crum Creek, Schuylkill.”

Paul looked round at the clock again.  His mother noted the gesture, the tension of his attitude, his preoccupied expression, and had a quick inner vision of a dirty, ragged, ignorant, gloriously free little boy on a raft on the Mississippi river, for whom life was not measured out by the clock, in thimbleful doses, but who floated in a golden liberty on the very ocean of eternity.  “Why can’t we bring them up like Huckleberry Finns!” she thought, protestingly, pressing her lips together.

Then she laughed inwardly at the thought of certain sophisticated friends and their opinion of her life.  “I daresay we do seem to be bringing them up like Huckleberry Finns, in the minds of any of the New York friends, Eugenia Mills for instance!” She remembered with a passing gust of amusement the expression of slightly scared distaste which Eugenia had for the children.  “Too crudely quivering lumps of life-matter for Eugenia’s taste,” she thought, and then, “I wonder what Marsh’s feeling towards children really is, children in general.  He seems to have the greatest capacity to ignore their existence at all.  Or does he only seem to do that, because I have grown so morbidly conscious of their existence as the only thing vital in life?  That’s what he thinks, evidently.  Well, I’d like to have him live a mother’s life and see how he’d escape it!”

“Mother,” said Paul seriously, “Mother, Mark isn’t even awake yet, and he’ll never be ready for school.”