The Pain
which might have driven them apart, had but drawn them closer together, and it was together that they now faced Deltje’s pain. And to them both, because all their lives they had been healthy, Deltje’s pain was like a thing apart: a mysterious and powerful third person who, for incomprehensible reasons, clutched at Deltje’s side and forced her to lie helpless for hours on the low wooden bedstead in the little bedroom.
The three-roomed mud-walled house in which the old couple lived stood close to a small stream behind a row of peach-trees. Every year from these trees they took a thank-offering of dried fruit to the Thanksgiving at Harmonie, and year by year they had beaten the stones of the peaches into the earthen floor of the living-room. Every morning Deltje sprinkled this floor with clear water from the stream and swept it with a stiff besom. The floors of the kitchen and bedroom she smeared regularly with a mixture of cow-dung and ashes called mist. The
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