The Last Adam (4 page)

Mrs. Banning, Doctor Bull guessed, was having quite a time, since in natural operation the course of events went against her. She got there late in the process. In 1774, nine hundred more people lived in New Winton than lived there now. They must have lived in houses; but only three of the houses they could have lived in were left—what they would have called the new Cardmaker house was almost twenty years in the future as they saw it. Changes and accidents which had reduced the count of eighteenth-century houses to four, would naturally proceed until there were none. The Bannings had two of them—that was, their own large house had been developed out of one and then restored back as far as practicable, and they owned the little Allen house, which, figured in all books on the subject, across the way. George Bull knew that they coveted the Bull house; but their hostility to him personally kept them from making an offer. If Mrs. Cole—Aunt Myra— died, he wouldn't mind selling it—he supposed it would have to be to the Bannings; but, he reflected, grinning, not before he'd made an effort to find a wealthy Jew who might like to buy it—to live in, that was, not to take away. Mrs. Banning, bristling with upper middle-class New England abhorrence of New York Jews, would do some squirming then. That would really get her. He could imagine her saying: "Some dreadful people named Oppenheimer have that fine old house. They're the most odious and pushing sort of Jews. But what can you do? They simply force their way in everywhere. —"

George Bull's laugh boomed out unabashed by solitude. Suddenly remembering what he had come for; that he had at least a dozen of those damn brats to vaccinate, he took his bag. Walking round the bleak, unpainted corner of the barn, he swung open a gate and so approached the back door of the Crowe house.

It was after three o'clock when George Bull, down from Cold Hill, drove into Janet Cardmaker's road. He had just gone through the shadows lying along behind the Cobble, past the white, restored Colonial of the Lincoln place, past the Hoyts'. He was later than he had meant to be. The Crowes had given him dinner after he finished with the children—great quantities of tasteless, scalding food and tumblers full of hard cider. He felt very cheerful. When, just past the Hoyts', he encountered Virginia Banning, driving a new Ford Coupé, he roared, "All right. Wait a minute." With some difficulty he backed a hundred feet to a point where she could pass. She said, curt, unsmiling: "Thank you."

George Bull didn't resent the attitude, copied from her mother, for he guessed that Virginia was a longer thorn than he was when it came to pricking Mrs. Banning. "Got a bit of old Paul in her," he decided, remembering Mr. Banning's father. He liked her frail, still adolescent face; the cheeks a little hollowed; her sulky small mouth. Virginia Banning's blue eyes had a defiant gleam, as though she would like to tell everyone to go to hell. There was, too, a wiry rebelliousness about her narrow, fleshless buttocks—he could picture her best walking down to the post office, the wind tightening her skirt around a frank, limber stride; a short, fur-collared leather jacket buttoned across her practically breastless chest. Only one of the lot with any guts, he always thought; and that amused him, for he guessed if she had been born fifteen years later, a hell-bent for science fellow like Doctor Verney at Sansbury would have changed her altogether. Irradiated ergosterol might have done the trick. Verney would tell you all about it—a trifling deficiency of the antirachitic vitamin D, with a consequent shortage of actually assimilated lime and phosphorus. That accounted for the constriction of the jawbones, giving her face that fragile, determined shape; a flattening of the chest cavity; a narrow, somewhat rachitic pelvis.

Normal parturition would probably kill her; but fellows like Verney considered the course of nature undignified and poorly planned anyway. All that waiting around and mess, when a nice little Cesarean section —

He laughed, thinking: "I guess I needn't figure how to get it out until she finds somebody to put it in"; and then he laughed again, with relish, for he could imagine Mrs. Banning probably having a stroke at the impropriety of such gross speculations. He blinked into the golden sun and brought his car to a halt. Stepping out on the snow, beaten hard, stained with horse-dung, polished in spots by the runners of a big sled, he went and banged on the kitchen door.

There was no answer. Turning, he saw yellow electric light in the small square windows piercing the concrete foundations of the big barn. Janet might be down there.

As he pressed his bulk through it, the narrow opening left in the wagon doors was forced wider. His boots resounded on the planking while he walked familiarly to the stairs in the corner. Down their dark turnings the cobwebs came off on his swinging fur. He shoved the door at the bottom open with his foot and stepped out.

"Hello, George," Janet nodded. "I could tell you a mile off. Harold thought it was an elephant upstairs."

Harold Rogers, her farmer, sallow, unshaven, in overalls and a black leather coat, grinned. "'Lo, Doc," he said. "One of those little Devons is kind of sick. Don't know what's wrong with her."

Janet Cardmaker wore a garment which she had made herself—eight or ten red fox skins sewed over an old cloth coat. Though the cows filled the long cement stable with a humid, ammoniacal warmth, she hadn't bothered to unbutton this. A round cap, also of fox skin, was crammed casually down on her head. The big bones of her face made her look gaunt, but she was, in fact, very solid; stronger than most men; almost as tall as George Bull, and fully a head taller than Harold. Rogers. From under the circular rim of the cap's yellow fox fur some of her dark hair escaped, disordered. Her black eyes rested contemptuously a moment on Harold. She said: "Look at her, will you, George? She's an awful sick cow."

Harold said: "Might be a kind of milk fever, Doc. I—"

"Let's see," answered George Bull. "Oh! Down there."

He walked along the row of placid rumps; the cows, their necks in hangers, patient, incurious. On the cement, the last of the line had collapsed. Released from the hanger, she lay on her side, her lean, bony head against the feeding trough. In her terrible prostration, her ribs rose like a hill. Her great eyes were fixed in a stupor, hopeless and helpless; her legs inertly pointing.

George Bull stooped, put out a gloved finger and poked her udder.

"Milk fever, hell!"he said. "And listen to her breathe!"

Stepping over the stiff out-thrust of the hind legs, he pulled off his glove. Stooping again, he felt along the stretched neck until his big fingers discovered the artery in the lower throat. Compressing it, he looked at his watch. After a moment he announced, "That's better than one hundred." Unbuttoning his coat, he pulled a clinical thermometer case from his pocket, extracted the thermometer. "Good as any other," he said. He shook it, pushed it between the folds of skin where the hind leg lay half over the udder. "Bet you it's a hundred and five," he said. He looked at Harold. "Kind of milk fever, huh? Don't you even know what pneumonia looks like?"

He recovered the thermometer. "Hundred and four and a half," he observed. "Probably really more. Do you want to try to save her? Devons aren't much use to you anyway."

"They cost money," answered Janet. "It's not your cow."

"All right, get together about an acre of mustard plaster. Harold can beat it down to Anderson's pharmacy —" he fumbled until he found a notebook.

Tearing out a sheet and taking a pencil, he began to write, reading aloud: "Twenty drops of aconite and one ounce of acetate of ammonia in—oh, say, a half-pint of water. Every two hours or so. Get a blanket and cover her up. In the morning, she ought to be dead, so you needn't bother to telephone Torrington for a vet. Harold can fix it."

"Fix it, Harold," Janet agreed. "Come on up to the house, George."

The front rooms of the Cardmaker house were as Mr. Rosenthal had left them, stripped of furniture, the stairs with no rail. The new front door was never used. Janet lived in the kitchen wing, principally in the enormous kitchen, sleeping in a small bedroom up the back stairs. A Mrs. Foster came every day in summer, but in winter, when walking was harder, only twice a week, to do what washing and cleaning was done. Janet, when alone, fed herself. Harold Rogers lived with his wife in a cottage on the slope beyond the barn. This Belle Rogers was one of a locally recurring pale, wan, blonde type, descended probably from a single, pale, wan, but prolific individual five or six generations back. Janet ignored Belle's existence, and George Bull didn't doubt that Belle tried to pay Janet back by spreading the continually resowed crop of scandalous rumours about his own intimacy with Janet. It was the sort of pale, wan reprisal you'd expect from Belle; such rumours were an old story and Belle could hardly animate them into interest. George Bull didn't care in the least, remarking to Janet: "Somebody's started them chewing on the same old stuff. By God, I'm sixty-seven years old! They ought to get up a delegation to congratulate me."

Janet made no comment beyond shrugging her shoulders. Her indifference to talk in the village was so complete that George Bull doubted if she ever felt any of the pleasure he had in disregarding what was said. At moments like that he could understand Janet best. In her despoiled house, her grotesque clothes, her solitary existence, she was entirely free from the ceaseless obligations of maintaining whatever appearance you pretended to. Many people soothed themselves by saying that Miss Cardmaker was crazy; but George Bull guessed, when you thought it over, that they were the crazy ones. Other people—it would be the Bannings —thought that it was terrible. They meant that James Cardmaker's daughter had no business to live in a kitchen, eat her own cooking, care for her own cows. Her father, they said, would turn in his grave if he —

George Bull could remember Mr. James Cardmaker perfectly. Janet was about eighteen when her father finally died. She had been away for a year or so at some women's college, and it was Mr. Cardmaker's grave illness than brought her home. George Bull used to come up once or twice a week. The complaint had been, or had appeared to be, a multiple neuritis. Though Mr. Cardmaker was no drinker, his affliction showed many of the symptoms of an alcoholically induced one. George Bull couldn't help him; all he could do was charge for his visits.

Janet was around, of course; receiving his orders and instructions, of which Doctor Bull gave a good many, making up—he'd been younger then himself—learnedly for his actual helplessness in the case. Janet he'd known—in the sense that it is possible to know a child— for years. Meanwhile she had grown into a big, plain, dark girl. His head was as active as most men's on the subject, but George Bull was sure that the idea of seducing Janet had never entered it. Being Janet Cardmaker, she could be expected to order her life on the accepted lines of a dreary, dryly-educated, consciously high-thinking virtue. Everything agreed with it—her plainness; her father's intellectual and moral tastes; her going away to college. George Bull certainly hadn't been prepared that afternoon—well, he guessed it was twenty-eight years ago.

About this time of year, too; for he could remember Janet—the indelibly fixed details of great surprise assured that—standing by the window at the end of the upper hall, looking out at snow on the ground and the bare limbs of the maples. He had just left Mr. Cardmaker. Hearing him, she turned, coming down towards him, and he paused half-way, meeting her, ready to give her some needless directions. She said: "This is my room. Come in a minute."

"What do you want!"

It wasn't, even in this, her so startlingly arranged initial experience, at all an emotional matter with her. George Bull was free to enjoy, at least, the great relief of not having to pretend that it was with him. Janet simply said: "Go on. Go ahead." Even her own ignorant awkwardness did not disconcert her. She frankly expected him to instruct her. It was his problem, not hers; and to the solutions he found, she assented with a violent inexpert willingness.

The old man procrastinated. He considered himself a genealogical authority, because the Boston
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had frequently published letters of his about Connecticut families on its Saturday page. The hobby gave him something to do, or try to do, through the miserable tedium of dying. He took notes which he did not appear to recognize as the almost letterless scrawls his drooping hands made them. At least once Doctor Bull found him puzzling, in a bewilderment more grim, or even ghastly, than comic, over pages of books held upside down. Like his pendent wrists, his skin-covered face without flesh, his shoulders humped to his little round head, this confusion of aimless, vaguely human activity suggested one thing only. When you saw him shaking and shifting the book held upside down, you saw, too, what James Cardmaker—his notes in the
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his historic house and name, his college-educated daughter, aside—really was. Not merely evolved from, or like an ape, Mr. Cardmaker was an ape. The only important dissimilarities would be his relative hairlessness and inefficient teeth.

George Bull came twice a week to look at this phenomenon. Janet, adroitly arranging occupations for the servants, would follow him upstairs and go into her room to wait until he had seen as much as the collection of his fee required of Mr. Cardmaker's inane persistence in living.

This was all right, so long as the old man did manage to live. In the village everybody knew how sick Mr. Cardmaker was. Doctor Bull's willingness to go up so often was, if anything, a credit to him. Going up after Mr. Cardmaker was dead would be different. George Bull planned, as a matter of fact, to end the affair with Janet altogether. He expected to be tired of her; not realizing that mere beauty was what custom staled. Until a man withered into impotence he would not tire of Janet's vital, almost electric sensuality.

It was the summer of 1903 that Mr. Cardmaker died. George Bull could remember the very warm, very clear and beautiful day of his funeral. The doors of St. Matthias's church were standing open on the sunlit green and the hot wind in the trees. Afterwards, they went out to the cemetery behind and stood in the sun. Several women put up parasols. He could remember the strong south wind shuffling the pages of Doctor Hall's Prayer Book. The cast-up earth of the hole was dried to a crumbling yellow.