Go on in. Yes, she’ll be sitting down, and you’ll take off your coat and hat, and she’ll say, “You’re late, did you remember to bring some candy?” and you won’t answer, you’ll stand and look at her and presently say, “Mil, this time I’m going to get the truth out of you,” and you’ll keep it up for an hour or two and then put on your coat and hat and go home. Or maybe you won’t even go home.…
In a vague sort of way that’s where you thought you were going when you got on that train. You didn’t think the word, home, but the idea was something like that, you were trying to find a root somewhere, and blindly you went back to that. At first there seemed to be something in it. After a sleepless night you got off the train a little before noon, on a blazing hot July day, and took a taxi to the hotel. In spite of the vast changes since your boyhood days it all looked familiar and friendly, for only two years had passed since you had been there, at the time of your mother’s funeral. No one at the hotel remembered you, but after lunch, walking to Cooper Street, you were recognized by one of your own schoolmates with whom you had renewed acquaintance on your previous visit, and you met old Doctor Culp, grey-haired and bent over a cane, who insisted on stopping for a chat…memories of your father.…
There was the house, decrepit and apparently not painted for years, but essentially the same. The bay window where you had sat winter afternoons working at algebra, the porch pillars where the hammock had been attached, the spot under the maple tree where Jane had put the little table on summer afternoons, serving weak tea to her girl friends, oblivious to the derision of the boys of the neighborhood, the window where you had stood and looked out the day your father died.…
The real estate agent informed you that the old Sidney house, as he called it—after twenty years!—was now owned by Mr. Masenstod of the First National Bank and was being rented by the month, not on lease, to a man who ran a butcher shop and had eight children. It could be bought cheap. The following day you closed the deal and paid cash, a New York draft for sixty-two hundred dollars. But the butcher had paid his rent till the end of July and insisted on being permitted to stay a month beyond that. Your plans must wait. You went however to a contractor and made arrangements for a complete renovation, repairs, painting, new furnace, plastering—the work to begin promptly on the first of September. By that time you began to meet with questions: were you going to live there? You replied evasively. There was an article in the paper, now a daily, about the extensive improvements Mr. William B. Sidney, the prominent New York capitalist, was planning for the old family residence on Cooper Street, which he had recently purchased. Nothing left to do, you wandered about day after day, with half the town obviously wondering what the devil you were there for; you took walks into the country and went on a fishing trip to Lake Harmon.…
Around the middle of August you took a train to Dayton, and hired a car with a chauffeur and directed him west, on the Millvale road. It was graded and paved, a wide thoroughfare; gone the pleasant country road over which you had bumped with Lucy, in her roadster. On this smooth, efficient surface the miles sped by so quickly that you reached the farm long before you were ready to expect it; you rushed past; at your shout the driver stopped, turned around, and returned to come to a halt directly in front of the house. The place was changed hardly at all, except for new stables in the rear; the house was still a dazzling white among the evergreens and all the other buildings yellow. Just the same: the orchard at the back, and the tennis court. You would have liked to get out and walk up through the meadows, over the wooded hill, and down the bank of the stream to the pool, where you had sat with Lucy on that summer afternoon; you shrugged the impulse away. As you sat there, a figure on horseback appeared around the corner of one of the stables and came trotting down the driveway. It was Lucy’s father, older, smaller it seemed, but as erect as ever. At any moment you expected to see his wife follow him, but she did not appear. When he came through the gate and went off down the road alone, you said to yourself, she is dead. Nothing less would have kept those two apart, even for a short morning gallop.
You nodded to the driver, “Back to Dayton,” and leaned out of the car and looked until the legend in enormous red letters on the side of the big yellow barn, Millvale Stock Farm, faded from view. Undecided, all ends loose, you sat in your hotel room that night and tried vainly to read. You thought of Idaho, but you didn’t want to see Larry; you didn’t want to see anybody. Yet you must see someone, and you must move. You shuddered as you thought of the evening you had spent with your Aunt Cora a week previously, sitting on the narrow side porch, her rocker creaking back and forth as she talked interminably in her penetrating rasping treble of your mother’s last hours, and the impending kitchen manufacture of tomato ketchup. No, it would be pointless to go back there; not now; not for another month at least. Where was someone to talk to? Where was someone to whom there was anything to be said?
In the morning you took a train up to Cleveland; and, arriving in the middle of the afternoon, went with your bags to the Hotel Ohio, and registered. It was hot and sultry, with no saving breeze from the lake, and you wandered around the streets for a while and finally brought up in front of the entrance of the Jayhawker Club—but you did not go in. You stood there a moment, then with a drop of the shoulders turned and went off. Before long you were back at the hotel, where you spent ten minutes with the porter going over railroad schedules, and then went up to your room and packed the bags which you had unpacked only three hours before. Sitting there on the edge of the bed, you got the contractor on long distance, and were informed that everything was in readiness to begin operations promptly on the first, the minute the butcher and his brood departed. An hour later you were on an eastbound train.
You had to get off at Albany at five in the morning, and wait till eight for a train to Boston, where again you changed, this time headed north. For lack of a connection you spent the night in a hotel in Portland, and early morning found you on a rattling local with its nose pointed toward the Maine woods. Descending at the Pineville station around noon, and following the directions you had written down at the office two months before, you hired a Ford at the little roadside garage and were jolted twelve miles over a narrow dirt road, into the heart of the forest. At length the Ford came to a stop at the roadside in front of a small cottage set in the middle of a clearing; at one end was a pile of sawed wood considerably larger than the cottage itself; and from behind the woodpile a man appeared and leisurely approached. Yes, he said, this was Steve Wilson’s, and he was Steve; and yes, the trail to Bucket Lake went off to the right down the road a piece, just beyond the edge of the clearing. You couldn’t miss it; about three miles in was an old wood road off to the left; for Bucket Lake you kept to the right. Certainly, you could leave your bags with him, but he couldn’t very well take them in tomorrow, the next day he might manage it. You extracted a toothbrush and a comb and turned the bags over to him, paid the driver of the Ford, walked down the road a few hundred feet to where the entrance to a trail was marked by a felled tree, and plunged into the woods.
The trail was plain the first mile or two, but then there began to be spots where you were a little doubtful; at one place, where it suddenly emerged into a large clearing which apparently was a swamp except in late summer, you searched for nearly an hour before you could be sure you had picked it up again. It was hot even in the shade of the woods, and the sweat ran down your face and the middle of your back as you strode along with your coat and vest over your arm, incongruous and uncomfortable in your business suit and polished calfskin shoes. You had passed the wood road far behind; the trail seemed endless. Seven miles it was supposed to be and you began to be a little uneasy; you glanced at your watch; had you by any chance gone wrong somewhere? You went ahead, faster; and in another few minutes there was a break in the tree-wall, an unwonted light, and all at once you found yourself at the edge of a carpet of grass which sloped gently downward only a few yards to the shore of a lake—a miniature circular lake not more than three hundred yards in diameter, with the green forest hugging its shore on every side. Not far away, on your right, was a little cabin, and you started for it almost running and shouting, “Hello there! Schwartz! Hello!”
He was lying on the grass in the shade at the edge of the woods, back of the cabin, reading a book. At your shout he jumped up, and came toward you with a grin of surprised pleasure.
“Bill! My god you look funny!” And as he violently pumped your hand, “So you really came!”
During those three weeks, there were a dozen times when it was on the point of your tongue to tell him the whole story; that was what you had thought you were going there for. You had a feeling that it would be an immeasurable relief to tell it, to say it in words aloud, all the details and incidents, and then say, “There, what do you think of that? How’s that for nonsense?” Maybe that’s why you never breathed it, because that was the only tag you could conceive for it; if it seemed inexplicable and preposterous to you, what would it have sounded like in the telling, what could he have said except that you were obviously crazy? Maybe you expected something else from him; there’s a light in him somewhere that he never shows to anybody; you just know it’s there. He has a secret of some kind, always has had; every summer he goes off for two months to that little cabin, absolutely alone—you’re the only person that’s ever been invited to visit him.
As you swam and fished, explored the woods, read his books, and lay of an evening talking, on the grass with the stars overhead and the breeze whispering in the forest at your elbows, you had a feeling that you had in sober fact been possessed of an evil spirit and were finding the spell that would exorcise it. Tired out after the day’s exertions, for Schwartz was extremely active and you had a hard time keeping up with him, you would sit on the gunwale of the boat at the water’s edge, smoking, with dusk falling around you, and after a silence he would perhaps say:
“No, I don’t think that matters, but of course no one can prove it. It’s merely that I can’t conceive of an organism having any spring of action outside of itself. A stimulus, of course, but that’s different. If you touch me with a hot iron I jump away, but the iron is merely incidental; the spring of my action is from within, the desire to keep from getting burnt. All moral and ethical dicta are nothing but incidental hot irons—and the Christs and Mahomets and Kants and Calvins and Anthony Comstocks—essentially they’re all the same—they’re the neurotic blacksmiths that stick them in the fire and work the bellows and then pull them out and thrust them at us. Ha! At least some of us know why we jump—but all we do is hide behind a tree and make faces at them.…”
That was his favorite theme. You sat and smoked and idly listened, wondering, at peace almost. Hot irons…words…Blah!
His time up, on Labor Day Schwartz had to go. You accompanied him over the trail to Wilson’s. Pleased and amused that you had decided to stay, he arranged that Steve should keep you supplied with provisions, and also that he should prepare the cabin and boat for the winter at such time as you should decide to leave. The Ford came for him around noon, and after waving goodbye and watching them bump away down the road out of sight, you started back along the trail alone.
You stood it for two weeks. After the very first day and night you grew frightened—if not frightened, uncomfortable and apprehensive. Everything that had seemed so friendly and peaceful when he was there, the woods, the placid little lake, the wide enveloping silence broken only now and then by a bird’s song or the rustling unseen movement of a squirrel or muskrat—all became by insensible degrees hostile and threatening. You didn’t want to go out with the boat, the water seemed bottomless, forbidding and terrifying; and as for the woods, one day when you started for the top of the ridge to the east, where you and Schwartz had often gone, you turned before you were halfway there, stood a moment, breathlessly, in the midst of the forest, and then precipitately retraced your steps, almost running by the time you saw the clearing and the lake through the thinning trees. It was worst at night; you would stir out of a dream, and then, fully awake, lie in the darkness and gaze at the faint square of the window, listening to the silence.…
Just at the thickening of dusk one evening you sat at the water’s edge and found yourself wondering what would happen if you rowed out to the middle of the lake and jumped in. Naturally, if you didn’t swim you would drown; but could you keep yourself from swimming? The boat would be there within a few feet of you. Could you resist the impulse to cling to it? Even if you managed to capsize the boat and sank, the shore would be at the most only two hundred yards away, and you could swim a mile or more. Could you keep your arms and legs still and let yourself go under? What if you put rocks in your pockets or tied some in a sack around your neck? That would be horrible, you couldn’t do that. The second time you came up, perhaps the third, you would be able to open your eyes and see the cabin and the woods and the sky.…You reached down and dabbled your hand in the water, shivering, then got to your feet and went into the cabin and fixed your bed, putting on an extra blanket, for the nights had become quite cold.
The following morning, immediately after breakfast, you took the trail to Wilson’s. He couldn’t go in for your luggage that day, and in order to summon the Ford he had to ride six miles to the nearest telephone. You were forced to stay at his cottage until the next day, when, around noon, the Ford came and took you to Pineville. Steve had arisen at dawn to go in for your bags. At Portland you just made the connection to Boston, arriving there late at night. You spent the night at a hotel, intending to go across to Albany the next day and from there on to Ohio; but when morning came, you decided it would be just as well to go to New York and catch a fast train west from there.
As the Merchants’ Limited sped dizzily along the shore of the sound, you reflected that it was past the middle of September, and the work on the house was probably completed—he had said it would take only two weeks. But the reflection was forced, there was no life in it; you were in fact already aware, though you hadn’t admitted it, that you were not going back to that husk. As usual, you weren’t going to do anything. Were you then going to stay in New York? No. That is—no. Jane and the children would of course be back from the seashore; school had begun two weeks ago—no, not their school, it didn’t start till early October. Erma was probably still in Europe, you had heard nothing for more than a month. Dick—oh what did it matter?
At Grand Central, you got your bags to a taxicab and gave the driver the Eighty-fifth Street address. The traffic barely crawled, seeming scarcely to move at all, and you grew more and more impatient—and you realized that a tension which had long been progressing within you was tightening, tightening to the bursting point. You forced yourself under control—would she be there? Would she be alone? You should have telephoned her from Boston. But at Boston you were supposed to be on the way to Ohio.…Why didn’t the damn fool go around that limousine that thought it owned the avenue?
She was there. Alone. The taxi-driver refused to help you, presumably on account of the observations you had made regarding his driving, and you puffed up the stairs with the two heavy bags—it was unseasonably hot—and your hand trembled as you put the key in the door. She was sitting with both windows wide open and nothing on but the purple negligee, sewing on buttons and drinking lemonade.
“Hello,” she said, “you should have sent me a telegram, I might not have been here.”
After you had put the bags in the bedroom, and sat down and mopped off your face, she brought you a glass of lemonade and said you’d better get into a tub of cold water. She also said that she hadn’t been away at all, and it had been very quiet; Grace had gone to Atlantic City, but was now back; and there was a new musical comedy that was very nice, she had seen it three times. You sat and listened to her and looked at her, thinking surely it was impossible that such a creature existed.… After you got out of the bath she joined you in the bedroom.… Later you went to dinner.
That was two months ago, two months to a day. By the following morning nothing seemed to have changed; instead of ten weeks you might have been gone overnight. The first day or two there was a little freshness, perhaps, in the streets and the people in the office, even in this place and her, but it soon disappeared. Schwartz at his desk—well, there was nothing new or exciting in that. Nothing new anywhere. Until the middle of October you stayed at the club, but spent nearly every night here; then Erma came back and the same old round started all over again. Dinner parties, bridge, Board meetings, Lawson running in and out with that knowing sly glint in his eyes—perhaps he isn’t at all aware of it.…
Yet there was a change. You couldn’t have put it into words, not indeed feeling it, except as a vague sense of a concluded fate. Hope was gone, and with it irony. “Here I come with my radiant princess,” you used to say to yourself as you opened the door and stood aside for Millicent to enter the little restaurant on Broadway where you usually take her. That was gone—a grim but spontaneous spark of humor replaced by something perhaps less grim but infinitely more profound. The jest was too stale. Once you had tried to persuade yourself into a derisive acceptance of the caprice of fate; now the acceptance forced itself dully upon you, but the saving derision was gone. Only four nights ago, in that same restaurant, you sat and watched her methodically breaking her bread into little pieces and dropping them into her soup, and when she said, “I think bread is very nice in soup,” there was no smile in you, no twinge, no reaction at all; that oft-repeated statement, like all else, seemed to have lost even the significance of banality.
Another winter; in a month it will be Christmas again. You’d better get her another fur coat and bring it Christmas morning. You will at that. If you’re here. Erma says you look like hell and that you’ve got a disposition like the camel she rode that time at Ghardaia. She says you ought to go abroad for a year. Why not? Dick has mentioned it too, three or four times, though he seems to be embarrassed about it; that’s the first time you’ve ever seen him act like that. Is he trying to get you out of the way? What for? For Lawson? For himself? Not likely; that’s not like him. You should ask him about it, straight, and then you’d know; you should have asked him this morning when he came in your office and didn’t seem to know what he’d come for. He said something about Jane’s good judgment, but that doesn’t prove anything.
Even if they don’t know, even if she was telling you the truth last night, what business is it of theirs? Jane, with her superior air of seeing things which you can’t be expected to see! Oh she knows what’s good for you! Sure, she knows everything, just as she did thirty years ago—more than that—when you’d run up from the lot, trying not to cry, and she’d have that look on her face—oh it was kind enough. How kind she was, how kind and understanding, while your mother would stand there with that silly meaningless smile.…
If not Dick, why couldn’t you ask Jane? Does it matter so much? But you must know if they know. You’re not going on like this, like a helpless imbecile, with them discussing you behind your back, trying to decide what they’d better do about you.…
Exactly what did she say? Did she say she had seen Jane? Yes. Night before last—seems a year ago. You came up after dinner, rather early, and she wasn’t back yet. You remembered you hadn’t told Schwartz about that car, and you got the telephone book out of the closet to look up his number, and as you sat, waiting for him to answer, with the phone book lying upside down on the table, in front of you, you noted indifferently the chaos of numbers scribbled in pencil all over the cover; it was a habit of Millicent’s that had at one time amused you; and suddenly you saw among that chaos a number that riveted your attention: Chelsea 4343. You hung up the receiver and grabbed up the book and looked at it closely; of course you hadn’t put that number there; but it was quite plain, unmistakable, Chelsea 4343.
It was half an hour before you heard her key in the door. You waited till she had got her hat and coat put away, and then you held the book in front of her, pointing to the scribbled number, and said:
“Did you put that there?”
She looked at it without replying. “Look here,” you said, “if ever you told the truth you’d better tell it now. Did you write that number there?”
She nodded. “Yes, I remember now, I wrote it one day—”
“What for?”
“Why, sometimes I look a number up and then forget it so I write it down—”
“Whose number is it?”
She didn’t glance at it again; she looked steadily at you, and finally shook her head, “I don’t remember.”
During the half-hour you had waited for her to come you had sworn that you would beat the truth out of her, choke it out of her; now you were determined and perfectly calm; you were not even angry; you just wanted the truth.
“You might as well sit down, we’re going to have this out,” you said, and took a chair in front of hers, close to her. “You’d better be careful what you tell me, because this is something I can check up on. I want to know when you telephoned my sister Jane, and what for.”
“I really had forgotten it was your sister’s number,” she said.
“All right. Go on.”
It took an hour to get it out of her, and before she was through she had told it a dozen different ways. Was Erma in it? Sometimes she was and sometimes she wasn’t; anyway she hadn’t seen her. At first she said she’d seen Jane twice and then she said only once. It was mostly Dick. As long ago as last spring, Dick had sent for her and offered her fifty thousand dollars if she would let you alone, go away somewhere, and not let you know where she was. When she wouldn’t take it he had doubled his offer. This fall, just recently, he had been after her again; this time when she refused the money he threatened her. Then Jane came, and begged her. “She begged me all afternoon,” she said. She took a day to think about it, and she put that number there only a week ago, when she phoned Jane that she had decided not to go.
At first you believed it. After you had got all you could out of her and tried to piece it together and decide how much of it was true and how much she had invented, you put on your hat and coat and started for Tenth Street. She didn’t ask where you were going or whether you’d be back; she just sat there, solemn, quietly watching you. Probably two minutes after you left she was reading a book. You never got to Jane’s house; you walked past it, but you didn’t go in. You couldn’t decide what to say. What if it were all a lie? No, there was too much detail in it; in spite of the way she had contradicted herself, she couldn’t have made it all up, there was an essential verity in it. When you finally turned definitely away from Jane’s house and took a taxi to Park Avenue, you were telling yourself that you would ask Dick about it in the morning, that would be better; and then, by god, you’d let them all know that you didn’t want them poking their noses into your affairs.
And then, yesterday, like a lousy coward you didn’t go to the office at all. You packed trunks! And you found the revolver and sat on the edge of the bed for an hour, holding it in your hand and looking at it, as if that was going to put muscles in your guts. In the afternoon you went to Jane’s house; she was out and wouldn’t be back till after dinner. That didn’t matter. Don’t kid yourself.
Last night Millicent was surprised to see you. Of course, you hadn’t telephoned, but she was surprised more than that; you could tell by the way she looked at you, though she didn’t say anything. You told her you hadn’t asked Jane and Dick about it, but you were going to, and if you found she’d been lying you’d make her pay for it. She said you wouldn’t ask them. She said it as if it didn’t make any difference one way or the other, ‘‘You won’t ask them about it.” You replied quietly that she was wrong this time, you certainly would, you most certainly would; and then all of a sudden there was that tiny flash deep in her eyes, and she said, with no change at all in her voice:
“Anyway, I made it all up.”
Good god, what does it matter what she said? You ought to know by this time. What she says! You knew it too, really you didn’t give a damn, but you jumped on her, you began it all over again, tearing yourself to pieces.…She declared calmly that Dick had never mentioned you, she hadn’t seen him for months. She had never seen Jane, nor telephoned her; she had put that number there one day, during the summer, when she wanted to write you about something and couldn’t get your address from the office, because they didn’t have it, and she thought of phoning to Jane for it, and after looking up the number had remembered that Jane was at the seashore. Dick had never offered her money to leave you, but she still thought she might get some from him, just because he felt sorry for her.…
And at the end, after all that, after you’d made a whining fool of yourself, she actually thought she could touch you. By god, she did. Her eyes looked like that, not really starting to close, just ready to, tightened up a little. A thousand times you’ve seen them like that. Then they do begin to close, and her lips get straight and thin and very quiet, and her eyes get narrower and tighter.…It was vivid and terrible, in your dream that last night in Schwartz’s cabin.…
There goes her chair again, pulling it across the rug. Now would have been the time, now that you know she’s sitting down. Go across to the windows and pull down the shades. You pitiful paltry coward. Last night it sounded like she was telling the truth. If she wasn’t, if Dick and Jane—begging her—no matter. What do they matter? If they came up the stairs right now and all three of you went in together—ha, that would be the way to do it. Erma too, the whole damn outfit. You could sit in a corner and listen to them, and by heaven they could keep it up all night and all day tomorrow, and forever, and they wouldn’t get anywhere. Begging her. No matter what they got her to do; they could send her to the top of the world or the middle of the jungle and you’d find her. And that’s what she knows. That’s why; that’s what she knows. So swallow it, swallow it at last, and open the door and go in and tell her so. She’ll respect you for it. That’s why she despises you, she sees you wriggling and squirming, that’s why she said Jane begged her.…
She’ll respect you! Jesus! The bitch, the filthy bitch!
Oh cut it out. Cut it out! Steady.…