Of Time and the River (3 page)

“Oh, I’d be all right, George—I think I could stand anything—all the rest of it—if it wasn’t for Papa. . . . I’m almost crazy from worrying about him this summer. There were three times there when I knew he was gone. . . . And I honestly believe I pulled him back each time by main strength and determination—do you know what I mean?” she said hoarsely and eagerly—“I was just determined not to let him go. If his heart had stopped beating I believe I could have done something to make it start again—I’d have stood over him and blown my breath into him—got my blood into him—shook him,” she said with a powerful, nervous movement of her big hands— “anything just to keep him alive.”

“She’s—she’s—saved his life—time after time,” said Barton slowly, flicking his cigar ash carefully away, and looking down deeply, searching for a word.

“He’d—he’d—have been a dead man long ago—if it hadn’t been for her.”

“Yeah—I know she has,” George Pentland drawled agreeably. “I know you’ve sure stuck by Uncle Will—I guess he knows it, too.”

“It’s not that I mind it, George—you know what I mean?” she said eagerly. “Good heavens! I believe I could give away a dozen lives if I thought it was going to save his life! . . . But it’s the STRAIN of it. . . . Month after month . . . year after year . . . lying awake at night wondering if he’s all right over there in that back room in Mama’s house—wondering if he’s keeping warm in that old cold house—”

“Why, no, child,” the older woman said hastily. “I kept a good fire burnin’ in that room all last winter—that was the warmest room in the whole place—there wasn’t a warmer—”

But immediately she was engulfed, swept aside, obliterated in the flood-tide of the other’s speech.

“—Wondering if he’s sick or needs me—if he’s begun to bleed again—oh! George, it makes me sick to think about it—that poor old man left there all alone, rotting away with that awful cancer, with that horrible smell about him all the time—everything he wears gets simply STIFF with that rotten corrupt matter—Do you know what it is to wait, wait, wait, year after year, and year after year, never knowing when he’s going to die, to have him hang on by a thread until it seems you’ve lived forever—that there’ll never be an end—that you’ll never have a chance to live your own life—to have a moment’s peace or rest or happiness yourself? My God, does it always have to be this way? . . . Can I never have a moment’s happiness? . . . Must they ALWAYS come to me? Does EVERYTHING have to be put on my shoulders? . . . Will you tell me that?” Her voice had risen to a note of frenzied despair. She was glaring at her cousin with a look of desperate and frantic entreaty, her whole gaunt figure tense and strained with the stress of her hysteria.

“That’s—that’s the trouble now,” said Barton, looking down and searching for the word. “She’s . . . She’s . . . made the goat for every one. . . . She . . . she has to do it all. . . . That’s . . . that’s the thing that’s got her down.”

“Not that I mind—if it will do any good. . . . Good heaven’s, Papa’s life means more to me than anything on earth. . . . I’d keep him alive at any cost as long as there was a breath left in him. . . . But it’s the strain of it, the STRAIN of it—to wait, to wait year after year, to feel it hanging over you all the time, never to know when he will die—always the STRAIN, the strain—do you see what I mean, George?” she said hoarsely, eagerly, and pleadingly. “You see, don’t you?”

“I sure do, Helen,” he said sympathetically, digging at his thigh, and with a swift, cat-like grimace of his features. “I know it’s been mighty tough on you. . . . How is Uncle Will now?” he said. “Is he any better?”

“Why, yes,” the mother was saying, “he seemed to improve—” but she was cut off immediately.

“Oh, yes,” the daughter said in a tone of weary dejection. “He pulled out of this last spell and got well enough to make the trip to Baltimore—we sent him back a week ago to take another course of treatments. . . . But it does no real good, George. . . . They can’t cure him. . . . We know that now. . . . They’ve told us that. . . . It only prolongs the agony. . . . They help him for a little while and then it all begins again. . . . Poor old man!” she said, and her eyes were wet. “I’d give everything I have—my own blood, my own life—if it would do him any good—but, George, he’s gone!” she said desperately. “Can’t you understand that? . . . They can’t save him! . . . Nothing can save him! . . . Papa’s a dead man now!”

George looked gravely sympathetic for a moment, winced swiftly, dug hard fingers in his thigh, and then said:

“Who went to Baltimore with him?”

“Why, Luke’s up there,” the mother said. “We had a letter from him yesterday—said Mr. Gant looks much better already—eats well, you know, has a good appetite—and Luke says he’s in good spirits. Now—”

“Oh, Mama, for heaven’s sake!” the daughter cried. “What’s the use of talking that way? . . . He’s not getting any better. . . . Papa’s a sick man—dying—good God! Can no one ever get that into their heads!” she burst out furiously. “Am I the only one that realizes how sick he is?”

“No, now I was only sayin’,” the mother began hastily—“Well, as I say, then,” she went on, “Luke’s up there with him—and Gene’s on his way there now—he’s goin’ to stop off there tomorrow on his way up north to school.”

“Gene!” cried George Pentland in a high, hearty, bantering tone, turning to address the boy directly for the first time. “What’s all this I hear about you, son?” He clasped his muscular hand around the boy’s arm in a friendly but powerful grip. “Ain’t one college enough for you, boy?” he drawled, becoming deliberately ungrammatical and speaking good-naturedly but with a trace of the mockery which the wastrel and ne’er-do-well sometimes feels towards people who have had the energy and application required for steady or concentrated effort. “Are you one of those fellers who needs two or three colleges to hold him down?”

The boy flushed, grinned uncertainly, and said nothing.

“Why, son,” drawled George in his hearty, friendly and yet bantering tone, in which a note of malice was evident, “you’ll be gettin’ so educated an’ high-brow here before long that you won’t be able to talk to the rest of us at all. . . . You’ll be floatin’ around there so far up in the clouds that you won’t even see a roughneck like me, much less talk to him”—As he went on with this kind of sarcasm, his speech had become almost deliberately illiterate, as if trying to emphasize the superior virtue of the rough, hearty, home-grown fellow in comparison with the bookish scholar.

“—Where’s he goin’ to this time, Aunt Eliza?” he said, turning to her questioningly, but still holding the boy’s arm in his strong grip “Where’s he headin’ for now?”

“Why,” she said, stroking her pursed serious mouth with a slightly puzzled movement, “he says he’s goin’ to Harvard. I reckon,” she said, in the same puzzled tone, “it’s all right—I guess he knows what he’s about. Says he’s made up his mind to go—I told him,” she said, and shook her head again, “that I’d send him for a year if he wanted to try it—an’ then he’ll have to get out an’ shift for himself. We’ll see,” she said. “I reckon it’s all right.”

“Harvard, eh?” said George Pentland. “Boy, you ARE flyin’ high! . . . What you goin’ to do up there?”

The boy, furiously red of face, squirmed, and finally stammered:

“Why . . . I . . . guess . . . I guess I’ll do some studying!”

“You GUESS you will!” roared George. “You’d damn well BETTER do some studying—I bet your mother’ll take it out of your hide if she finds you loafin’ on her money.”

“Why, yes,” the mother said, nodding seriously, “I told him it was up to him to make the most of this—”

“Harvard, eh!” George Pentland said again, slowly looking his cousin over from head to foot. “Son, you’re flyin’ high, you are! . . . Now don’t fly so high you never get back to earth again! . . . You know the rest of us who didn’t go to Harvard still have to walk around upon the ground down here,” he said. “So don’t fly too high or we may not even be able to see you!”

“George! George!” said the young woman in a low tone, holding one hand to her mouth, and bending over to whisper loudly as she looked at her young brother. “Do you think anyone could fly very high with a pair of feet like that?”

George Pentland looked at the boy’s big feet for a moment, shaking his head slowly in much wonderment.

“Hell, no!” he said at length. “He’d never get off the ground! . . . But if you cut ‘em off,” he said, “he’d go right up like a balloon, wouldn’t he? Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw!” The great guffaw burst from him, and grinning with his solid teeth, he dug blindly at his thigh.

“Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi,” the sister jeered, seeing the boy’s flushed and angry face and prodding him derisively in the ribs—“This is our Harvard boy! k, k, k, k!”

“Don’t let ‘em kid you, son,” said George now in an amiable and friendly manner. “Good luck to you! Give ‘em hell when you get up there! . . . You’re the only one of us who ever had guts enough to go through college, and we’re proud of you! . . . Tell Uncle Bascom and Aunt Louise and all the rest of ‘em hello for me when you get to Boston. . . . And remember me to your father and Luke when you get to Baltimore. . . . Good-bye, Gene—I’ve got to leave you now. Good luck, son,” and with a friendly grip of his powerful hand he turned to go. “You folks come over sometime—all of you,” he said in parting. “We’d like to see you.” And he went away.

At this moment, all up and down the platform, people had turned to listen to the deep excited voice of a young man who was saying in a staccato tone of astounded discovery:

“You DON’T mean it! . . . You SWEAR she did! . . . And YOU were there and saw it with your OWN eyes! . . . Well, if that don’t beat all I ever heard of! . . . I’ll be DAMNED!” after which ejaculation, with an astounded falsetto laugh, he looked about him in an abstracted and unseeing manner, thrust one hand quickly and nervously into his trousers pocket in such a way that his fine brown coat came back, and the large diamond-shaped pin of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity was revealed, and at the same time passing one thin nervous hand repeatedly over the lank brown hair that covered his small and well-shaped head, and still muttering in tones of stupefied disbelief—“Lord! Lord! . . . What do you know about that?” suddenly espied the woman and her two children at the other end of the platform, and without a moment’s pause, turned on his heel, and walked towards them, at the same time muttering to his astonished friends:

“Wait a minute! . . . Some one over here I’ve got to speak to! . . . Back in a minute!”

He approached the mother and her children rapidly, at his stiff, prim and somewhat lunging stride, his thin face fixed eagerly upon them, bearing towards them with a driving intensity of purpose as if the whole interest and energy of his life were focussed on them, as if some matter of the most vital consequence depended on his reaching them as soon as possible. Arrived, he immediately began to address the other youth without a word of greeting or explanation, bursting out with the sudden fragmentary explosiveness that was part of him:

“Are you taking this train, too? . . . Are you going today? . . . Well, what did you decide to do?” he demanded mysteriously in an accusing and challenging fashion. “Have you made up your mind yet? . . . Pett Barnes says you’ve decided on Harvard. Is that it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Lord, Lord!” said the youth, laughing his falsetto laugh again. “I don’t see how you can! . . . You’d better come on with me. . . . What ever got into your head to do a thing like that?” he said in a challenging tone. “Why do you want to go to a place like that?”

“Hah? What say?” The mother who had been looking from one to the other of the two boys with the quick and startled attentiveness of an animal, now broke in:

“You know each other. . . . Hah? . . . You’re taking this train, too, you say?” she said sharply.

“Ah-hah-hah!” the young man laughed abruptly, nervously; grinned, made a quick stiff little bow, and said with nervous engaging respectfulness: “Yes, Ma’am! . . . Ah-hah-hah! . . . How d’ye do? . . . How d’ye do, Mrs. Gant?” He shook hands with her quickly, still laughing his broken and nervous “ah-hah-hah”—“How d’ye do?” he said, grinning nervously at the younger woman and at Barton. “Ah-hah-hah. How d’ye do?”

The older woman still holding his hand in her rough worn clasp looked up at him a moment calmly, her lips puckered in tranquil meditation:

“Now,” she said quietly, in the tone of a person who refuses to admit failure, “I know you. I know your face. Just give me a moment and I’ll call you by your name.”

The young man grinned quickly, nervously, and then said respectfully in his staccato speech:

“Yes, Ma’am. . . . Ah-hah-hah. . . . Robert Weaver.”

“AH-H, that’s SO!” she cried, and shook his hands with sudden warmth. “You’re Robert Weaver’s boy, of course.”

“Ah-hah-hah!” said Robert, with his quick nervous laugh. “Yes, Ma’am. . . . That’s right. . . . Ah-hah-hah. . . . Gene and I went to school together. We were in the same class at the University.”

“Why, of course!” she cried in a tone of complete enlightenment, and then went on in a rather vexed manner, “I’ll VOW! I knew you all along! I knew that I’d seen you just as soon as I saw your face! Your name just slipped my mind a moment—and then, of course, it all flashed over me. . . . You’re Robert Weaver’s boy! . . . And you ARE,” she still held his hand in her strong, motherly and friendly clasp, and looking at him with a little sly smile hovering about the corners of her mouth, she was silent a moment, regarding him quizzically—“now, boy,” she said quietly, “you may think I’ve got a pretty poor memory for names and faces— but I want to tell you something that may surprise you. . . . I know more about you than you think I do. Now,” she said, “I’m going to tell you something and you can tell me if I’m right.”

“Ah-hah-hah!” said Robert respectfully. “Yes, Ma’am.”

“You were born,” she went on slowly and deliberately, “on September 2nd, 1898, and you are just two years and one month and one day older than this boy here—” she nodded to her own son. “Now you can tell me if I’m right or wrong.”

“Ah-hah-hah!” said Robert. “Yes, Ma’am. . . . That’s right. . . . You’re absolutely right,” he cried, and then in an astounded and admiring tone, he said: “Well, I’ll declare. . . . If that don’t beat all! . . . How on earth did you ever remember it!” he cried in an astonished tone that obviously was very gratifying to her vanity.