Of Time and the River (2 page)

“—Well, that’s certainly news to me,” the younger woman said slowly as before. “It’s the first
I
ever heard of it. . . . And you say she was forty-four when Lucille was born?”

“Now, she was all of THAT,” the mother said. “I know. And she may have been even older.”

“Well,” the younger woman said, and now she turned to her silent husband, Barton, with a hoarse snigger, “it just goes to show that while there’s life there’s hope, doesn’t it? So cheer up, honey,” she said to him, “we may have a chance yet.” But despite her air of rough banter her clear eyes for a moment had a look of deep pain and sadness in them.

“Chance!” the mother cried strongly, with a little scornful pucker of the lips—“why, of course there is! If I was your age again I’d have a dozen—and never think a thing of it.” For a moment she was silent, pursing her reflective lips. Suddenly a faint sly smile began to flicker at the edges of her lips, and turning to the boy, she addressed him with an air of sly and bantering mystery:

“Now, boy,” she said—“there’s lots of things that you don’t know . . . you always thought you were the last—the youngest—didn’t you?”

“Well, wasn’t I?” he said.

“H’m!” she said with a little scornful smile and an air of great mystery—“There’s lots that I could tell you—”

“Oh, my God!” he groaned, turning towards his sister with an imploring face. “More mysteries! . . . The next thing I’ll find that there were five sets of triplets after I was born—Well, come on, Mama,” he cried impatiently. “Don’t hint around all day about it. . . . What’s the secret now—how many were there?”

“H’m!” she said with a little bantering, scornful, and significant smile.

“O Lord!” he groaned again—“Did she ever tell you what it was?” Again he turned imploringly to his sister.

She snickered hoarsely, a strange high-husky and derisive falsetto laugh, at the same time prodding him stiffly in the ribs with her big fingers:

“Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi,” she laughed. “More spooky business, hey? You don’t know the half of it. She’ll be telling you next you were only the fourteenth.”

“H’m!” the older woman said, with a little scornful smile of her pursed lips. “Now I could tell him more than that! The fourteenth! Pshaw!” she said contemptuously—“I could tell him—”

“O God!” he groaned miserably. “I knew it! . . . I don’t want to hear it.”

“K, k, k, k, k,” the younger woman snickered derisively, prodding him in the ribs again.

“No, sir,” the older woman went on strongly—“and that’s not all either!—Now, boy, I want to tell you something that you didn’t know,” and as she spoke she turned the strange and worn stare of her serious brown eyes on him, and levelled a half-clasped hand, fingers pointing, a gesture loose, casual, and instinctive and powerful as a man’s.—“There’s a lot I could tell you that you never heard. Long years after you were born, child—why, at the time I took you children to the Saint Louis Fair—” here her face grew stern and sad, she pursed her lips strongly and shook her head with a short convulsive movement—“oh, when I think of it—to think what I went through—oh, awful, awful, you know,” she whispered ominously.

“Now, Mama, for God’s sake, I don’t want to hear it!” he fairly shouted, beside himself with exasperation and foreboding. “God- damn it, can we have no peace—even when I go away!” he cried bitterly, and illogically. “Always these damned gloomy hints and revelations—this Pentland spooky stuff,” he yelled—“this damned I-could-if-I-wanted-to-tell-you air of mystery, horror, and damnation!” he shouted incoherently. “Who cares? What does it matter?” he cried, adding desperately, “I don’t want to hear about it—No one cares.”

“Why, child, now, I was only saying—” she began hastily and diplomatically.

“All right, all right, all right,” he muttered. “I don’t care—”

“But, as I say, now,” she resumed.

“I don’t care!” he shouted. “Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace,” he muttered in a crazy tone as he turned to his sister. “A moment’s peace for all of us before we die. A moment of peace, peace, peace.”

“Why, boy, I’ll vow,” the mother said in a vexed tone, fixing her reproving glance on him, “what on earth’s come over you? You act like a regular crazy man. I’ll vow you do.”

“A moment’s peace!” he muttered again, thrusting one hand wildly through his hair. “I beg and beseech you for a moment’s peace before we perish!”

“K, k, k, k, k,” the younger woman snickered derisively, as she poked him stiffly in the ribs—“There’s no peace for the weary. It’s like that river that goes on for ever,” she said with a faint loose curving of lewd humour around the edges of her generous big mouth—“Now you see, don’t you?” she said, looking at him with this lewd and challenging look. “You see what it’s like now, don’t you? . . . YOU’RE the lucky one! YOU got away! You’re smart enough to go way off somewhere to college—to Boston—Harvard—anywhere— but YOU’RE away from it. You get it for a short time when you come home. How do you think
I
stand it?” she said challengingly. “I have to hear it ALL the time. . . . Oh, ALL the time, and ALL the time, and ALL the time!” she said with a kind of weary desperation. “If they’d only leave me ALONE for five minutes some time I think I’d be able to pull myself together, but it’s this way ALL the time and ALL the time and ALL the time. You see, don’t you?”

But now, having finished, in a tone of hoarse and panting exasperation, her frenzied protest, she relapsed immediately into a state of marked, weary, and dejected resignation.

“Well, I know, I know,” she said in a weary and indifferent voice. “. . . Forget about it . . . Talking does no good . . . Just try to make the best of it the little time you’re here. . . . I used to think something could be done about it . . . but I know different now,” she muttered, although she would have been unable to explain the logical meaning of these incoherent and disjointed phrases.

“Hah? . . . What say?” the mother now cried sharply, darting her glances from one to another with the quick, startled, curiously puzzled intentness of an animal or a bird. “What say?” she cried sharply again, as no one answered. “I thought—”

But fortunately, at this moment, this strange and disturbing flash in which had been revealed the blind and tangled purposes, the powerful and obscure impulses, the tormented nerves, the whole tragic perplexity of soul which was of the very fabric of their lives, was interrupted by a commotion in one of the groups upon the platform, and by a great guffaw of laughter which instantly roused these three people from this painful and perplexing scene, and directed their startled attention to the place from which the laughter came.

And now again they heard the great guffaw—a solid “Haw! Haw! Haw!” which was full of such an infectious exuberance of animal good-nature that other people on the platform began to smile instinctively, and to look affectionately towards the owner of the laugh.

Already, at the sound of the laugh, the young woman had forgotten the weary and dejected resignation of the moment before, and with an absent and yet eager look of curiosity in her eyes, she was staring towards the group from which the laugh had come, and herself now laughing absently, she was stroking her big chin in a gesture of meditative curiosity, saying:

“Hah! Hah! Hah! . . . That’s George Pentland. . . . You can tell him anywhere by his laugh.”

“Why, yes,” the mother was saying briskly, with satisfaction. “That’s George all right. I’d know him in the dark the minute that I heard that laugh.—And say, what about it? He’s always had it— why, ever since he was a kid-boy—and was going around with Steve. . . . Oh, he’d come right out with it anywhere, you know, in Sunday school, church, or while the preacher was sayin’ prayers before collection—that big, loud laugh, you know, that you could hear, from here to yonder, as the sayin’ goes. . . . Now I don’t know where it comes from—none of the others ever had it in our family; now we all liked to laugh well enough, but I never heard no such laugh as that from any of ‘em—there’s one thing sure, Will Pentland never laughed like that in his life—Oh, Pett, you know! Pett!”—a scornful and somewhat malicious look appeared on the woman’s face as she referred to her brother’s wife in that whining and affected tone with which women imitate the speech of other women whom they do not like—“Pett got so mad at him one time when he laughed right out in church that she was goin’ to take the child right home an’ whip him.—Told me, says to me, you know—‘Oh, I could wring his neck! He’ll disgrace us all,’ she says, ‘unless I cure him of it,’ says, ‘He burst right out in that great roar of his while Doctor Baines was sayin’ his prayers this morning until you couldn’t hear a word the preacher said.’ Said, ‘I was so mortified to think he could do a thing like that that I’d a-beat the blood right out of him if I’d had my buggy whip,’ says, ‘I don’t know where it comes from’—oh, sneerin’
like, you know,” the woman said, imitating the other woman’s voice with a sneering and viperous dislike
-“‘I don’t know where it comes from unless it’s some of that common Pentland blood comin’ out in him’—‘Now you listen to me,’ I says; oh, I looked her in the eye, you know”—here the woman looked at her daughter with the straight steady stare of her worn brown eyes, illustrating her speech with the loose and powerful gesture of the half-clasped finger-pointing hand—“‘you listen to me. I don’t know where that child gets his laugh,’ I says, ‘but you can bet your bottom dollar that he never got it from his father—or any other Pentland that I ever heard of—for none of them ever laughed that way—Will, or Jim, or Sam, or George, or Ed, or Father, or even Uncle Bacchus,’ I said—‘no, nor old Bill Pentland either, who was that child’s great-grandfather—for I’ve seen an’ heard ‘em all,’ I says. ‘And as for this common Pentland blood you speak of, Pett’—oh, I guess I talked to her pretty straight, you know,” she said with a little bitter smile, and the short, powerful, and convulsive tremor of her strong pursed lips— “‘as for that common Pentland blood you speak of, Pett,’ I says, ‘I never heard of that either—for we stood high in the community,’ I says, ‘and we all felt that Will was lowerin’ himself when he married a Creasman!’”

“Oh, you didn’t say that, Mama, surely not,” the young woman said with a hoarse, protesting, and yet abstracted laugh, continuing to survey the people on the platform with a bemused and meditative curiosity, and stroking her big chin thoughtfully as she looked at them, pausing from time to time to grin in a comical and rather formal manner, bow graciously and murmur:

“How-do-you-do? ah-hah! How-do-you-do, Mrs. Willis?”

“Haw! Haw! Haw!” Again the great laugh of empty animal good nature burst out across the station platform, and this time George Pentland turned from the group of which he was a member and looked vacantly around him, his teeth bared with savage joy, as, with two brown fingers of his strong left hand, he dug vigorously into the muscular surface of his hard thigh. It was an animal reflex, instinctive and unconscious, habitual to him in moments of strong mirth.

He was a powerful and handsome young man in his early thirties, with coal-black hair, a strong thick neck, powerful shoulders, and the bull vitality of the athlete. He had a red, sensual, curiously animal and passionate face, and when he laughed his great guffaw, his red lips were bared over two rows of teeth that were white and regular and solid as ivory.

—But now, the paroxysm of that savage and mindless laughter having left him, George Pentland had suddenly espied the mother and her children, waved to them in genial greeting, and excusing himself from his companions—a group of young men and women who wore the sporting look and costume of “the country club crowd”—he was walking towards his kinsmen at an indolent swinging stride, pausing to acknowledge heartily the greetings of people on every side, with whom he was obviously a great favourite.

As he approached, he bared his strong white teeth again in greeting, and in a drawling, rich-fibred voice, which had unmistakably the Pentland quality of sensual fullness, humour, and assurance, and a subtle but gloating note of pleased self- satisfaction, he said:

“Hello, Aunt Eliza, how are you? Hello, Helen—how are you, Hugh?” he said in his high, somewhat accusing, but very strong and masculine voice, putting his big hand in an easy affectionate way on Barton’s arm. “Where the hell you been keepin’ yourself, anyway?” he said accusingly. “Why don’t some of you folks come over to see us sometime? Elk was askin’ about you all the other day—wanted to know why Helen didn’t come round more often.”

“Well, George, I tell you how it is,” the young woman said with an air of great sincerity and earnestness. “Hugh and I have intended to come over a hundred times, but life has been just one damned thing after another all summer long. If I could only have a moment’s peace—if I could only get away by myself for a moment—if THEY would only leave me ALONE for an hour at a time, I think I could get myself together again—do you know what I mean, George?” she said hoarsely and eagerly, trying to enlist him in her sympathetic confidence—“If they’d only do something for THEMSELVES once in a while—but they ALL come to me when anything goes wrong— they never let me have a moment’s peace—until at times I think I’m going crazy—I get QUEER—funny, you know,” she said vaguely and incoherently. “I don’t know whether something happened Tuesday or last week or if I just imagined it.” And for a moment her big gaunt face had the dull strained look of hysteria.

“The strain on her has been very great this summer,” said Barton in a deep and grave tone. “It’s—it’s,” he paused carefully, deeply, searching for a word, and looked down as he flicked an ash from his long cigar, “it’s—been too much for her. Everything’s on her shoulders,” he concluded in his deep grave voice.

“My God, George, what is it?” she said quietly and simply, in the tone of one begging for enlightenment. “Is it going to be this way all our lives? Is there never going to be any peace or happiness for us? Does it always have to be this way? Now I want to ask you—is there nothing in the world but trouble?”

“Trouble!” he said derisively. “Why, I’ve had more trouble than any one of you ever heard of. . . . I’ve had enough to kill a dozen people . . . but when I saw it wasn’t goin’ to kill me, I quit worryin’. . . . So you do the same thing,” he advised heartily. “Hell, don’t WORRY, Helen! . . . It never got you anywhere. . . . You’ll be all right,” he said. “You got nothin’ to worry over. You don’t know what trouble is.”