CHAPTER XI
With Billy on strike and away doing picket duty, and with the
departure of Mercedes and the death of Bert, Saxon was left much
to herself in a loneliness that even in one as healthy-minded as
she could not fail to produce morbidness. Mary, too, had left,
having spoken vaguely of taking a job at housework in Piedmont.
Billy could help Saxon little in her trouble. He dimly sansed her
suffering, without comprehending the scope and intensity of it.
He was too man-practical, and, by his very sex, too remote from
the intimate tragedy that was hers. He was an outsider at the
best, a friendly onlooker who saw little. To her the baby had
been quick and real. It was still quick and real. That was her
trouble. By no deliberate effort of will could she fill the
aching void of its absence. Its reality became, at times, an
hallucination. Somewhere it still was, and she must find it. She
would catch herself, on occasion, listening with strained ears
for the cry she had never heard, yet which, in fancy, she had
heard a thousand times in the happy months before the end. Twice
she left her bed in her sleep and went searching--each time
coming to herself beside her mother's chest of drawers in which
were the tiny garments. To herself, at such moments, she would
say, "I had a baby once." And she would say it, aloud, as she
watched the children playing in the street.
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