The Faraway Bride by Stella Benson — Read

The Butters baby had proved to be twins, and there was so much extra sewing for Anna to do that she was obliged to take some home. Her stitching was poor; she did not mind; she was tired of other people's children. She did not mind if every garment she made should fall to pieces on their superfluous bodies. She resented, too, being obliged to remain so much in the presence of her husband, whose melancholy and arid figure seemed to her now little more than a tiresomely deathless reminder of her disappointed motherhood. She said that her son was dead, she imagined him dead, but she knew that he was not dead. At the very root of her mind was the sane admission that there was no practical reason why he should not return in safety to Chi-tao-kou, with or without a wife. This root of common sense was planted deeply out of sight in her heart, however; aboveground flourished the branching growth of silly premonition and apprehension -- a growth which she saw no reason to prune; and from this tangle had lately blossomed her entirely senseless determination to see her son's bride through the distorting eyes of the dead Alexander -- to call her Death, and to have no hope. This superficial, yet ardently nourished, hopelessness did not prevent her from taking her sewing every afternoon out on to the ramshackle porch of their house, which commanded a view of the street along which her son, if he returned, must come. The despair which ached continually, like a cramp, in her brain did not prevent her from thinking "I'll make curd cakes the first evening, I think, and I'll kill one of the last two chicks out of Old Speckly's last brood but one."

Old Sergei was obscurely glad that his wife's work now obliged her to spend more time in the house. Her presence was tempestuous, her words hardly ever kind. Nineteen years of marriage had made her so wary and contrary a bird that the little snares he spread to trip her into a complaisant word of approval or an appropriate and flattering grunt of agreement were always futile. He was never allowed to complete his sporadic gestures of preening himself. Still, even humiliation was better than silence -- especially as there was no mocker at hand to witness his frequent humiliations. Somehow, in spite of Anna's impatience, he felt safe with her, as one feels safe even in a rough straw bed after groping in a dark room. Wherever she sat, sewing, he sat near her, trying not to notice that she often moved petulantly away. From the porch, however, as he soon discovered, she would not move away; there, he -- sitting just inside the window -- had his companion pinned down.