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dusting?  Were there then for Mrs. MacNab who had been trampled
into the mud for generations, had been a mat for King and Kaiser,
moments of illumination, visions of joy, at the wash tub, say,
with her children? (Yet two had been base born and one had
deserted her) Aat the public house, drinking? Turning over
scraps in her drawers? Some cleavage of the dark there must have
been, some channel in the depths of obscurity through which light
enough issued to twist her face, smiling in the glass, and make
her, turning to her job again, mumble out the old Music hall song.
      Walking the beach the mystic, the visionary, were possessed
of intervals of comprehension perhaps; suddenly, unexpectedly,
looking at a stone, stirring a puddle with a stick, heard an
absolute answer, so that they were warm in the frost and had
comfort in the desert. The truth had been made known to them.
But Mrs. McNab was none of these. She was no skeleton lover,
who voluntarily surrenders and makes abstract and reduces the
multiplicity of the world to unity and its volume and anguish to
one voice piping clear and sweet an unmistakable message. The
inspired, the lofty minded, might walk the beach, hear in the lull
of the storm a voice, behold in some serene clearing a vision, and
so mount the pulpit and make public how it is simple, it is certain,
our duty, our hope; we are one. Mrs. McNab continued to drink
and gossip as before. She was toothless almost; she had pains
in all her limbs. She never divulged her reasons for opening
windows and dusting bedrooms, and singing, when her voice was gone,

 


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