Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/303

 son, the son of the wife of his youth whose memory he had cherished for twenty years. He wandered about restlessly from neighbor to neighbor, seeking comfort and finding none. As he sat hunched over the Blackford stove, his usually erect shoulders bowed into a semi-circle, it seemed to Judith that winter had descended upon him over night, as snow falls on the hills.

She, too, as she went about her work, kept thinking of Bob—and of death.

The thought that he was dead would waylay her suddenly, startingly, and she would see him as she had known him in life, his lithe, muscular body, his boyish smile, his clear eyes, fearless and dreamy.

Once with a dustrag she slapped a fly on the wall. It fell mashed and mangled to the floor.

It came over her suddenly that he had died like that. With all his health, vigor, and charm, his power to make women love him, he had died like the fly. Some great, pitiless engine of war had mashed these things out of him and left only a few bits of stinking flesh.

"What are we all anyway but flies," she said to herself bitterly.

One morning when it was mild and the sun was shining she went out to clean the rain barrel that had grown slimy with a green scum. Bent over with her head and shoulders in the almost empty barrel, she scrubbed the sides vigorously with the scrubbing brush. When she had finished, her wrists felt weak and shaky. Taking hold of the top of the barrel with both hands she tried to tip it to drain away the dirty water and was suddenly aware that it was too heavy for her. She could not understand it. She had dumped the same barrel many times before with the greatest ease. She struggled with it and for the first time in her life felt herself overcome by a sense of physical powerlessness. Some virtue had gone out of her long, muscular arms trained from childhood to do heavy work. Her breath came in short, quick gasps and she felt her knees weaken and tremble in a way that she had never felt before.