Of Time and the River (42 page)

What was it?—this indefinable tribal similarity that united these people so unmistakably. No one could say: it would have been difficult to find four people more unlike in physical appearance, more strongly marked by individual qualities. Whatever it was— whether some chemistry of blood and character, or perhaps some physical identity of broad and fleshy nose, pursed reflective lips and flat wide cheeks, or the energies of powerfully concentrated egotisms—their kinship with one another was astonishing and instantly apparent.

XXX

In a curious and indefinable way the two groups of men in the hall had become divided: the wealthier group of prominent citizens, which was composed of the brothers William, James, and Crockett Pentland, Mr. Sluder and Eliza, stood in a group near the front hall door, engaged in earnest conversation. The second group, which was composed of working men, who had known Gant well and worked for or with him—a group composed of Jannadeau the jeweller, old Alec Ramsay and Saul Gudger, who were stone-cutters, Gant’s nephew, Ollie Gant, who was a plasterer, Ernest Pegram, the city plumber, and Mike Fogarty, who was perhaps Gant’s closest friend, a building contractor—this group, composed of men who had all their lives done stern labour with their hands, and who were really the men who had known the stone-cutter best, stood apart from the group of prominent and wealthy men who were talking so earnestly to Eliza.

And in this circumstance, in this unconscious division, in the air of constraint, vague uneasiness and awkward silence that was evident among these working men, as they stood there in the hall dressed in their “good clothes,” nervously fingering their hats in their big hands, there was something immensely moving. The men had the look that working people the world over have always had when they found themselves suddenly gathered together on terms of social intimacy with their employers or with members of the governing class.

And Helen, coming out at this instant from her father’s room into the hall, suddenly saw and felt the awkward division between these two groups of men, as she had never before felt or noticed it, as sharply as if they had been divided with a knife.

And, it must be admitted, her first feeling was an unworthy one—an instinctive wish to approach the more “important” group, to join her life to the lives of these “influential” people who represented to her a “higher” social level. She found herself walking towards the group of wealthy and prominent men at the front of the hall, and away from the group of working men who had really been Gant’s best friends.

But seeing the brick-red race of Alec Ramsay, the mountainous figure of Mike Fogarty, suddenly with a sense of disbelief and almost terrified revelation of the truth, she thought: “Why-why- why—these men are really the closest friends he’s got—not rich men like Uncle Will or Uncle Jim or even Mr. Sluder—but men like Mike Fogarty—and Jannadeau—and Mr. Duncan—and Alec Ramsay—and Ernest Pegram—and Ollie Gant—but—but—good heavens, no!” she thought, almost desperately—“surely these are not his closest friends—why-why—of course, they’re decent people—they’re honest men—but they’re only common people—I’ve always considered them as just WORKING men—and-and-and—my God!” she thought, with that terrible feeling of discovery we have when we suddenly see ourselves as others see us—“do you suppose that’s the way people in this town think of Papa? Do you suppose they have always thought of him as just a common working man—oh, no! but of course not!” she went on impatiently, trying to put the troubling thought out of her mind. “Papa’s not a working man—Papa is a BUSINESS man—a well-thought-of business man in this community. Papa has always owned property since he came here—he has always had his own shop”—she did not like the sound of the word “shop,” and in her mind she hastily amended it to “place”—“he’s always had his own place, up on the public square—he’s—he’s rented places to other people—he’s—he’s—oh, of course not!—Papa is different from men like Ernest Pegram, and Ollie, and Jannadeau and Alec Ramsay—why, they’re just working men—they work with their hands—Ollie’s just an ordinary plasterer—and-and—Mr. Ramsay is nothing but a stone- cutter.”

And a small insistent voice inside her said most quietly: “And your father?”

And suddenly Helen remembered Gant’s great hands of power and strength, and how they now lay quietly beside him on the bed, and lived and would not die, even when the rest of him had died, and she remembered the thousands of times she had gone to his shop in the afternoon and found the stone-cutter in his long striped apron bending with delicate concentration over a stone inscription on a trestle, holding in his great hands the chisel and the heavy wooden mallet the stone-cutters use, and remembering, the whole rich and living compact of the past came back to her, in a rush of tenderness and joy and terror, and on that flood a proud and bitter honesty returned. She thought: “Yes, he was a stone-cutter, no different from these other men, and these men were his real friends.”

And going directly to old Alec Ramsay she grasped his blunt thick fingers, the nails of which were always whitened a little with stone dust, and greeted him in her large and spacious way:

“Mr. Ramsay,” she said, “I want you to know how glad we are that you could come. And that goes for all of you—Mr. Jannadeau, and Mr. Duncan, and Mr. Fogarty, and you, Ernest, and you, too, Ollie— you are the best friends Papa has, there’s no one he thinks more of and no one he would rather see.”

Mr. Ramsay’s brick-red face and brick-red neck became even redder before he spoke, and beneath his grizzled brows his blue eyes suddenly were smoke-blue. He put his blunt hand to his moustache for a moment, and tugged at it, then he said in his gruff, quiet, and matter-of-fact voice:

“I guess we know Will about as well as anyone, Miss Helen. I’ve worked for him off and on for thirty years.”

At the same moment, she heard Ollie Gant’s easy, deep, and powerful laugh, and saw him slowly lift his cigarette in his coarse paw; she saw Jannadeau’s great yellow face and massive domy brow, and heard him laugh with guttural pleasure, saying, “Ah-h! I tell you vat! Dat girl has alvays looked out for her datty—she’s de only vun dat coult hantle him; efer since she vas ten years olt it has been de same.” And she was overwhelmingly conscious of that immeasurable mountain of a man, Mike Fogarty, beside her, the sweet clarity of his blue eyes and the almost purring music of his voice as he gently laid his mutton of a hand upon her shoulder for a moment, saying:

“Ah, Miss Helen, I don’t know how Will could have got along all these years without ye—for he has said the same himself a thousand times—aye! that he has!”

And instantly, having heard these words, and feeling the strong calm presences of these powerful men around her, it seemed to Helen she had somehow re-entered a magic world that she thought was gone for ever. And she was immensely content.

At the same moment, with a sense of wonder, she discovered an astonishing thing, that she had never noticed before, but that she must have heard a thousand times;—this was that of all these people, who knew Gant best, and had a deep and true affection for him, there were only two—Mr. Fogarty and Mr. Ramsay—who had ever addressed him by his first name. And so far as she could now remember, these two men, together with Gant’s mother, his brothers, his sister Augusta, and a few of the others who had known him in his boyhood in Pennsylvania, were the only people who ever had. And this revelation cast a strange, a lonely and a troubling light upon the great gaunt figure of the stone-cutter, which moved her powerfully and which she had never felt before. And most strange of all was the variety of names by which these various people called her father.

As for Eliza, had any of her children ever heard her address her husband as anything but “Mr. Gant”—had she ever called him by one of his first names—their anguish of shame and impropriety would have been so great that they could hardly have endured it. But such a lapse would have been incredible: Eliza could no more have addressed Gant by his first name than she could have quoted Homer’s Greek; had she tried to address him so, the muscles of her tongue would have found it physically impossible to pronounce the word. And in this fact there was somehow, now that Gant was dying, an enormous pathos. It gave to Eliza’s life with him a pitiable and moving dignity, the compensation of a proud and wounded spirit for all the insults and injuries that had been heaped upon it. She had been a young countrywoman of twenty-four when she had met him; she had been ignorant of life and innocent of the cruelty, the violence, the drunkenness and abuse of which men are capable; she had borne this man fifteen children, of whom eight had come to life, and had for forty years eaten the bread of blood and tears and joy and grief and terror; she had wanted affection and had been given taunts, abuse, and curses, and somehow her proud and wounded spirit had endured with an anguished but unshaken fortitude all the wrongs and cruelties and injustices of which he had been guilty toward her. And now at the very end her pride still had this pitiable distinction, her spirit still preserved this last integrity: she had not betrayed her wounded soul to a shameful familiarity, he had remained to her—in mind and heart and living word—what he had been from the first day that she met him: the author of her grief and misery, the agent of her suffering, the gaunt and lonely stranger who had come into her hills from a strange land and a distant people—that furious, gaunt, and lonely stranger with whom by fatal accident her destiny—past hate or love or birth or death or human error and confusion—had been insolubly enmeshed, with whom for forty years she had lived, a wife, a mother, and a stranger—and who would to the end remain to her a stranger—“Mr. Gant.”

What was it? What was the secret of this strange and bitter mystery of life that had made of Gant a stranger to all men, and most of all a stranger to his wife? Perhaps some of the answer might have been found in Eliza’s own unconscious words when she described her meeting with him forty years before:

“It was not that he was old,” she said,—“he was only thirty-three— but he LOOKED old—his WAYS were old—he lived so much among old people.—Pshaw!” she continued, with a little puckered smile, “if anyone had told me that night I saw him sitting there with Lydia and old Mrs. Mason—that was the very day they moved into the house, the night he gave the big dinner—and Lydia was still alive and, of course, she was ten years older than he was, and that may have had something to do with it—but I got to studying him as he sat there; of course, he was tired and run down and depressed and worried over all that trouble that he’d had in Sidney before he came up here, when he lost everything, and he knew that Lydia was dying, and that was preyin’ on his mind—but he LOOKED old, thin as a rake you know, and sallow and run down, and with those OLD ways he had acquired, I reckon, from associatin’ with Lydia and old Mrs. Mason and people like that—but I just sat there studying him as he sat there with them and I said—‘Well, you’re an old man, aren’t you, sure enough?’—pshaw! if anyone had told me that night that some day I’d be married to him I’d have laughed at them—I’d have considered that I was marrying an old man—and that’s just exactly what a lot of people thought, sir, when the news got out that I was goin’ to marry him—I know Martha Patton came running to me, all excited and out of breath—said, ‘Eliza! You’re not going to marry that old man—you know you’re not!’—you see, his WAYS were old, he LOOKED old, DRESSED old, ACTED old—everything he did was old; there was always, it seemed, something strange and old-like about him, almost like had he been born that way.”

And it was at this time that Eliza met him, saw him first—“Mr. Gant”—an immensely tall, gaunt, cadaverous-looking man, with a face stern and sad with care, lank drooping moustaches, sandy hair, and cold-grey staring eyes—“not so old, you know—he was only thirty-three—but he LOOKED old, he ACTED old, his WAYS were old— he had lived so much among older people he seemed older than he was—I thought of him as an old man.”

This, then, was “Mr. Gant” at thirty-three, and since then, although his fortunes and position had improved, his character had changed little. And now Helen, faced by all these working men, who had known, liked, and respected him, and had now come to see him again before he died—suddenly knew the reason for his loneliness, the reason so few people—least of all, his wife—had ever dared address him by his first name. And with a swift and piercing revelation, his muttered words, which she had heard him use a thousand times when speaking of his childhood—“We had a tough time of it—I tell you what, we did!”—now came back to her with the unutterable poignancy of discovery. For the first time she understood what they meant. And suddenly, with the same swift and nameless pity, she remembered all the pictures which she had seen of her father as a boy and a young man. There were a half-dozen of them in the big family album, together with pictures of his own and Eliza’s family: they were the small daguerreotypes of fifty years before, in small frames of faded plush, with glass covers, touched with the faint pale pinks with which the photographers of an earlier time tried to paint with life the sallow hues of their photography. The first of these pictures showed Gant as a little boy; later, a boy of twelve, he was standing in a chair beside his brother Wesley, who was seated, with a wooden smile upon his face. Later, a picture of Gant in the years in Baltimore, standing, his feet crossed, leaning elegantly upon a marble slab beside a vase; later still, the young stone-cutter before his little shop in the years at Sidney; finally, Gant, after his marriage with Eliza, standing with gaunt face and lank drooping moustaches before his shop upon the square, in the company of Will Pentland, who was at the time his business partner.

And all these pictures, from first to last, from the little boy to the man with the lank drooping moustaches, had been marked by the same expression: the sharp thin face was always stern and sad with care, the shallow cold-grey eyes always stared out of the bony cage-formation of the skull with a cold mournfulness—the whole impression was always one of gaunt sad loneliness. And it was not the loneliness of the dreamer, the poet, or the misjudged prophet, it was just the cold and terrible loneliness of man, of every man, and of the lost American who has been brought forth naked under immense and lonely skies, to “shift for himself,” to grope his way blindly through the confusion and brutal chaos of a life as naked and unsure as he, to wander blindly down across the continent, to hunt for ever for a goal, a wall, a dwelling-place of warmth and certitude, a light, a door.