and say the things he had always wished to say but never said—speak the unspeakable, find a tongue for the unspoken language, make her understand his life, his purpose, and his heart’s desire, as he had never done before. And filled with this wild hope, this impossible conviction, he strode towards the closed door of her little room to arouse her.
Then, abruptly, he paused. Upon an old cupboard, in a glass half-filled with water, he saw, as he had seen a thousand times, grinning at him with a prognathous, a strangely human bleakness, the false teeth she had put there when she went to bed. And suddenly he knew he could not speak to her. For grotesque, ugly, and absurd as they were, those grinning teeth evolved for him, somehow, as nothing else on earth could do, the whole image of his mother’s life of grief and toil and labour—the intolerable memories of the vanished and the irrevocable years, the strange and bitter miracle of life. And he knew then that he could not speak, that there was nothing he could say to her.
He rapped gently at the door and in a moment heard her voice, quick, sharp, and startled, roused from sleep, saying: “Hah?… what say?… who’s there?”
He answered: in a moment she opened the door and stood there, her face startled, curiously small and white and sunken, somehow like a child’s. When he spoke to her she answered incoherently: and then she smiled in an apologetic and embarrassed manner, and covered her mouth shyly with one hand, while she extended her other for the glass that held her teeth. He turned his head away: when he looked again her face had taken on its familiar contour, and she was saying in her usual tone: “Hah?… What is it, son?”
“Nothing, Mama,” he said awkwardly. “I—I didn’t know you were asleep… I—I—just came in to say good night, Mama.”
“Good night, son,” she said, and turned her white cheek up to him. He kissed it briefly.
“Now go and get some sleep,” she said. “It’s late and you’ve all your packing to do yet when you get up tomorrow.”
“Yes,” he said awkwardly. “… I guess you’re right…. Well, good night.” And he kissed her again.
“Good night,” she said. “Turn out the lights, won’t you, before you go to bed.”
And as he turned the kitchen light out he heard her door close quietly behind him, and the dark and lonely silence of the old house was all around him as he went down the hall. And a thousand voices—his father’s, his
