Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/312



night she set up an old stretcher in the kitchen and made herself a bed out of buggy robes and ragged quilts that had been discarded and used as pads on the wagon seat. She used it the next night and the night after that. It was a chilly and uncomfortable bed and on cold nights she had to sleep in all her clothes; but week after week went by and she showed no signs of wishing to leave it. After a few contrite but clumsy attempts at reconciliation, Jerry, too, took the stretcher as a thing accepted and permanent.

A sort of cold respect for each other grew up between them after the quarrel on Christmas day. To both it had been a warning of the abyss toward which they were tending, and they strove to maintain the outer decencies of human intercourse. This was best done by avoiding each other, having little to say and tending strictly to their own affairs, interfering as little as possible with those of the other. After their long siege of violent quarreling and mutual recrimination, this silence that had settled down between them seemed almost like peace. But at meals, over the corn cakes and rank salt hogmeat, they looked at each other with hard, inimical eyes. When they spoke it was in tones flat and dry from which all life had gone. A dreary oppression, dull, heavy and deadening, weighed upon the breasts of both of them, went with Jerry to the field and stayed with Judith as she shambled about the kitchen. When he came in at night from the field she rarely spoke or looked at him. Silently she slapped the corn cakes and fried meat on his plate and they ate in a hostile silence which was not disguised by the prattle and clamor of the children.

The stimulation that had come to Judith out of her determination to have no more children died away as all stimulation must, leaving her listless and slack. Daily she grew more slovenly about her work. More and more her mind turned in