As she lurched (for she rolled like a ship at sea) and leered (for her eyes
fell on nothing directly, but with a sidelong glance that deprecated the
scorn and anger of the world—she was witless, she knew it), as she
clutched the banisters and hauled herself upstairs and rolled from room
to room, she sang. Rubbing the glass of the long looking-glass and leering
sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her
lips—something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps,
had been hummed and danced to, but now, coming from the
toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was
like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency itself, trodden down
but springing up again, so that as she lurched, dusting, wiping, she
seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble, how it was getting
up and going to bed again, and bringing things out and putting
them away again. It was not easy or snug this world she had known for
close on seventy years. Bowed down she was with weariness. How long,
she asked, creaking and groaning on her knees under the bed, dusting
the boards, how long shall it endure? but hobbled to her feet again,
pulled herself up, and again with her sidelong leer which slipped and
turned aside even from her own face, and her own sorrows, stood and
gaped in the glass, aimlessly smiling, and began again the old amble and
hobble, taking up mats, putting down china, looking sideways in the
glass, as if, after all, she had her consolations, as if indeed there twined
about her dirge some incorrigible hope. Visions of joy there must have
been at the wash- tub, say with her children (yet two had been base-born
and one had deserted her), at 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 grinning in the glass and make her, turning to her
job again, mumble out the old music hall song. The mystic, the visionary,
walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone,
asking themselves "What am I," "What is this?" had suddenly an answer
vouchsafed them: (they could not say what it was) so that they were
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warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert. But Mrs McNab continued
to drink and gossip as before.
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