Of Time and the River (35 page)

“Who done that? . . . What are they yelling for? . . . Which side’s ahead now? . . . What happened that time, Ben?”

To which Ben usually makes no reply whatever, but the savage scowl between his grey eyes deepens with exasperation, and finally, cursing bitterly, he says:

“Damn it, Flood! What do you think I am—the whole damned newspaper? For heaven’s sake, man, do you think all I’ve got to do is answer damn-fool questions? If you want to know what’s happening, go outside where the rest of them are!”

“Well, Ben, I just wanted to know how—” Mr. Flood begins hoarsely, heavily, and stupidly.

“Oh, for God’s sake! Listen to this, won’t you?” says Ben, laughing scornfully and contemptuously as he addresses the invisible auditor of his scorn, and jerking his head sideways toward the bloated figure of his employer as he does so. “Here!” he says, in a disgusted manner. “For God’s sake, someone go and tell him what the score is, and put him out of his misery!” And scowling savagely, he speaks sharply into the mouthpiece of the phone and puts another placard on the line.

And suddenly, even as the busy figures swarm and move there in the window before the waiting crowd, the bitter thrilling game is over! In waning light, in faint shadows, far, far away in a great city of the North, the 40,000 small empetalled faces bend forward, breathless, waiting—single and strange and beautiful as all life, all living, and man’s destiny. There’s a man on base, the last flash of the great right arm, the crack of the bat, the streaking white of a clean-hit ball, the wild, sudden, solid roar, a pair of flashing legs have crossed the rubber, and the game is over! And instantly, there at the city’s heart, in the great stadium, and all across America, in ten thousand streets, ten thousand little towns, the crowd is breaking, flowing, lost for ever! That single, silent, most intolerable loveliness is gone for ever. With all its tragic, proud and waiting unity, it belongs now to the huge, the done, the indestructible fabric of the past, has moved at last out of that inscrutable maw of chance we call the future into the strange finality of dark time.

Now it is done, the crowd is broken, lost, exploded, and 10,000,000 men are moving singly down 10,000 streets—toward what? Some by the light of Hesperus which, men say, can bring all things that live on earth to their own home again—flock to the fold, the father to his child, the lover to the love he has forsaken—and the proud of heart, the lost, the lonely of the earth, the exile and the wanderer—to what? To pace again the barren avenues of night, to pass before the bulbous light of lifeless streets with half- averted faces, to pass the thousand doors, to feel again the ancient hopelessness of hope, the knowledge of despair, the faith of desolation.

And for a moment, when the crowd has gone, Ben stands there silent, lost, a look of bitter weariness, disgust, and agony upon his grey gaunt face, his lonely brow, his fierce and scornful eyes. And as he stands there that red light of waning day has touched the flashing head, the gaunt, starved face, has touched the whole image of his fiercely wounded, lost and scornful spirit with the prophecy of its strange fatality. And in that instant as the boy looks at his brother, a knife is driven through his entrails suddenly, for with an instant final certitude, past reason, proof, or any visual evidence, he sees the end and answer of his brother’s life. Already death rests there on his proud head like a coronal. The boy knows in that one instant Ben will die.

XX

He visited Genevieve frequently over a period of several months. As his acquaintance with the family deepened, the sharpness of his appetite for seduction dwindled, and was supplanted by an ecstatic and insatiable glee. He felt that he had never in his life been so enormously and constantly amused: he would think exultantly for days of an approaching visit, weaving new and more preposterous fables for their consumption, bursting into violent laughter on the streets as he thought of past scenes, the implication of a tone, a gesture, the transparent artifice of mother and daughter, the incredible exaggeration of everything.

He was charmed, enchanted: his mind swarmed daily with monstrous projects—his heart quivered in a tight cage of nervous exultancy as he thought of the infinite richness of absurdity that lay stored for him. His ethical conscience was awakened hardly at all—he thought of these three people as monsters posturing for his delight. His hatred of cruelty, the nauseating horror at the idiotic brutality of youth, had not yet sufficiently defined itself to check his plunge. He was swept along in the full tide of his adventure: he thought of nothing else.

Through an entire winter, and into the spring, he went to see this little family in a Boston suburb. Then he got tired of the game and the people as suddenly as he had begun, with the passionate boredom, weariness, and intolerance of which youth is capable. And now that the affair was ending, he was at last ashamed of the part he had played in it and of the arrogant contempt with which he had regaled himself at the expense of other people. And he knew that the Simpsons had themselves at length become conscious of the meaning of his conduct, and saw that, in some way, he had made them the butt of a joke. And when they saw this, the family suddenly attained a curious quiet dignity, of which he had not believed them capable and which later he could not forget.

One night, as he was waiting in the parlour for the girl to come down, her mother entered the room, and stood looking at him quietly for a moment. Presently she spoke:

“You have been coming here for some time now,” she said, “and we were always glad to see you. My daughter liked you when she met you—she likes you yet—” the woman said slowly, and went on with obvious difficulty and embarrassment. “Her welfare means more to me than anything in the world—I would do anything to save her from unhappiness or misfortune.” She was silent a moment, then said bluntly, “I think I have a right to ask you a question: what are your intentions concerning her?”

He told himself that these words were ridiculous and part of the whole comic and burlesque quality of the family, and yet he found now that he could not laugh at them. He sat looking at the fire, uncertain of his answer, and presently he muttered:

“I have no intentions concerning her.”

“All right,” the woman said quietly. “That is all I wanted to know. . . . You are a young man,” she went on slowly after a pause, “and very clever and intelligent—but there are still a great many things you do not understand. I know now that we looked funny to you and you have amused yourself at our expense. . . . I don’t know why you thought it was such a joke, but I think you will live to see the day when you are sorry for it. It’s not good to make a joke of people who have liked you and tried to be your friends.”

“I know it’s not,” he said, and muttered: “I’m sorry for it now.”

“Still, I can’t believe,” the woman said, “that you are a boy who would wilfully bring sorrow and ruin to anyone who had never done you any harm. . . . The only reason I am saying this is for my daughter’s sake.”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” he said. “I’m sorry now for acting as I have—but you know everything I’ve done. And I’ll not come back again. But I’d like to see her and tell her that I’m sorry before I go.”

“Yes,” the woman said, “I think you ought.”

She went out and a few minutes later the girl came down, entered the room, and he said good-bye to her. He tried to make amends to her with fumbling words, but she said nothing. She stood very still as he talked, almost rigid, her lips pressed tightly together, her hands clenched, winking back the tears.

“All right,” she said finally, giving him her hand. “I’ll say good-bye to you without hard feelings. . . . Some day . . . some day,” her voice choked and she winked furiously—“I hope you’ll understand—oh, good-bye!” she cried, and turned away abruptly. “I’m not mad at you any longer—and I wish you luck. . . . You know so many things, don’t you?—You’re so much smarter than we are, aren’t you? . . . And I’m sorry for you when I think of all you’ve got to learn . . . of what you’re going through before you do.”

“Good-bye,” he said.

He never saw any of them again, but he could not forget them. And as the years went on, the memory of all their folly, falseness, and hypocrisy was curiously altered and subdued and the memory that grew more vivid and dominant was of a little family, one of millions huddled below the immense and timeless skies that bend above us, lost in the darkness of nameless and unnumbered lives upon the lonely wilderness of life that is America, and banked together against these giant antagonists, for comfort, warmth, and love, with a courage and integrity that would not die and could not be forgotten.

XXI

One afternoon early in May, Helen met McGuire upon the street. He had just driven in behind Wood’s Pharmacy on Academy Street, and was preparing to go in to the prescription counter when she approached him. He got out of his big dusty-looking roadster with a painful grunt, slammed the door, and began to fumble slowly in the pockets of his baggy coat for a cigarette. He turned slowly as she spoke, grunted, “Hello, Helen,” stuck the cigarette on his fat under-lip and lighted it, and then, looking at her with his brutal, almost stupid, but somehow kindly glance, he barked coarsely:

“What’s on your mind?”

“It’s about Papa,” she began in a low, hoarse and almost morbid tone—“Now I want to know if this last attack means that the end has come. You’ve got to tell me—we’ve got the right to know about it—”

The look of strain and hysteria on her big-boned face, her dull eyes fixed on him in a morbid stare, the sore on her large cleft chin, above all, the brooding insistence of her tone as she repeated phrases he had heard ten thousand times before suddenly rasped upon his frayed nerves, stretched them to the breaking- point; he lost his air of hard professionalism and exploded in a flare of brutal anger:

“You want to know what? You’ve got a right to be told what? For God’s sake,”—his tone was brutal, rasping, jeering—“pull yourself together and stop acting like a child.” And then, a little more quietly, but brusquely, he demanded:

“All right. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know how long he’s going to last,” she said with morbid insistence. “Now, you’re a doctor,” she wagged her large face at him with an air of challenge that infuriated him, “and you ought to tell us. We’ve got to know!”

“Tell you! Got to know!” he shouted. “What the hell are you talking about? What do you expect to be told?”

“How long Papa has to live,” she said with the same morbid insistence as before.

“You’ve asked me that a thousand times,” he said harshly. “I’ve told you that I didn’t know. He may live another month, he may be here a year from now—how can we tell about these things,” he said in an exasperated tone, “particularly where your father is concerned. Helen, three or four years ago I might have made a prediction. I did make them—I didn’t see how W. O. could go on six months longer. But he’s fooled us all—you, me, the doctors at Johns Hopkins, everyone who’s had anything to do with the case. The man is dying from malignant carcinoma—he has been dying for years—his life is hanging by a thread and the thread may break at any time—but when it is going to break I have no way of telling you.”

“Ah-hah,” she said reflectively. Her eyes had taken on a dull appeased look as he talked to her, and now she had begun to pluck at her large cleft chin. “Then you think—” she began.

“I think nothing,” he shouted. “And for God’s sake stop picking at your chin!”

For a moment he felt the sudden brutal anger that one sometimes feels toward a contrary child. He felt like taking her by the shoulders and shaking her. Instead, he took it out in words and, scowling at her, said with brutal directness:

“Look here! . . . You’ve got to pull yourself together. You’re becoming a mental case—do you hear me? You wander around like a person in a dream, you ask questions no one can answer, you demand answers no one can give—you work yourself up into hysterical frenzies and then you collapse and soak yourself with drugs, patent medicines, corn-licker—anything that has alcohol in it—for days at a time. When you go to bed at night you think you hear voices talking to you, someone coming up the steps, the telephone. And really you hear nothing: there is nothing there. Do you know what that is?” he demanded brutally. “Those are symptoms of insanity— you’re becoming unbalanced; if it keeps on they may have to send you to the crazy-house to take the cure.”

“Ah-hah! Uh-huh!” she kept plucking at her big chin with an air of abstracted reflection and with a curious look of dull appeasement in her eyes as if his brutal words had really given her some comfort. Then she suddenly came to herself, looked at him with clear eyes, and her generous mouth touched at the corners with the big lewd tracery of her earthy humour, she sniggered hoarsely, and prodding him in his fat ribs with a big bony finger, she said:

“You think I’ve got ‘em, do you? Well—” she nodded seriously in agreement, frowning a little as she spoke, but with the faint grin still legible around the corners of her mouth,—“I’ve often thought the same thing. You may be right,” she nodded seriously again. “There are times when I do feel off—you know?—QUEER—looney— crazy—like there was a screw loose somewhere—Brrr!” and with the strange lewd mixture of frown and grin, she made a whirling movement with her finger towards her head. “What do you think it is?” she went on with an air of seriousness. “Now, I’d just like to know. What is it that makes me act like that? . . . Is it woman-business?” she said with a lewd and comic look upon her face. “Am I getting funny like the rest of them—now I’ve often thought the same—that maybe I’m going through a change of life—is that it? Maybe—”

“Oh, change of life be damned!” he said in a disgusted tone. “Here you are a young woman thirty-two years old and you talk to me about a change of life! That has about as much sense to it as a lot of other things you say! The only thing you change is your mind—and you do that every five minutes!” He was silent for a moment, breathing heavily and staring at her coarsely with his bloated and unshaven face, his veined and weary-looking eyes. When he spoke again his voice was gruff and quiet, touched with a burly, almost paternal tenderness: