Outraged, Joseph remembered his parental authority. “Who gave you permission to talk about the damned cannon, you young dog!” he roared. “I suppose you’ve gone yelping through the town about it like a Town Crier! Who else have you jabbered with, like the windy bladder you are?”
Ernest stared at him, turning very white. He was struck to the heart. When he spoke, after a silence filled with Joseph’s enraged panting, his voice was extremely low.
“Pa, you know that’s not fair. I’m not a blabber. I’ve told nobody but Armand, and you tell him everything; you’ve told him about the new low trigger: I heard you tell him today. So I know you don’t really mind my telling him about the cannon.”
Martin had withdrawn from his father’s left at the approach of Ernest at the right side. He stood between his father and brother and the tea table in an arrested attitude. He was watching Ernest’s profile against the scarlet firelight, and something in its expression despite the largeness and starkness of the features, filled him with pity. But Hilda, awakened to interest, was not displeased. It was a good job, she was thinking, that Ernest was getting a hiding at last, a stiff-necked young un these days, given not to noticing his mother’s existence except when she annoyingly forced it upon his attention by reason of some trumpery show of maternal authority.
Joseph stared at Ernest’s pale face while the boy spoke. He felt a twinge of shame, and this made him sullen. He shrugged and turned a shoulder to his son.
“You take too much on yourself,” he said sulkily. “Too much for a lad. You’re not a man yet. Why, you really know nothing of firearms and gunpowder. Just cheap and easy blab. Sometimes you make me wonder who’s master of the damn shop, you or Georgie. And that reminds me,” he added threateningly, “I don’t want to hear any more talk about doing Georgie in, hear me? A rascally idea, fit only for upstarts and cutthroats.
“Now, what I say to Armand is none of your concern, either. After this I’ll mind my tongue. I’ve puffed you up, treating you like a man instead of the young cub that you are. But I’ll not make that mistake again. Cannon! Government! Secretary of War! Money! Big words coming from lad’s breeches. Little dog trying to bite like a lion.”
His volatile anger had blown up and drifted off, and he was already bored by the necessity of maintaining its manifestations. Moreover, he was curious. He allowed himself to smile up into Ernest’s pale and rigid face.
“Well, Napoleon, what did our Armand say about the cannon? You might as well tell me the answer, now the damage is done.”
A boy less dedicated to an idea than Ernest was, a boy who had less regard for time and more regard for irrelevances, would have become dignified at this, displayed his hurt, and removed himself proudly from his father’s side. But Ernest reverenced time, understood only this, refused to waste himself and this moment of his life in unprofitable emotions, which might, at the expense of valuable fundamentals, indulge themselves in pride. So instantly, at his father’s words, the rigidity passed from his face, and it became mobile and intent again, full of seriousness and purpose. Yet his father did not deceive himself that he had won an easy pardon.
“He said he did not see why it wouldn’t work. It could be breech-loading, he says. Old cannon was unreliable; it got stuck, sometimes, and sometimes blew the firers to smithereens. Armand also says that we’d better get to work on it at once, for there’ll be all hell to pay in America one of these days because of the slaves down South.”
“I hope,” said Joseph quickly, remembering Armand’s sensitiveness, “that you told him that it’s just a new idea of mine that I didn’t tell him about because it wasn’t clear in my mind yet?”
“Oh, yes. I told him. He said he’d ask you tomorrow about it, and perhaps you could think it out together.” Ernest hesitated. “He said to suggest to you not to tell Uncle George about it. Yet,” he added cautiously.
Joseph grinned. “He never said ‘yet.’ And you know it. For a trumpery little Frenchman Armand’s got too big an opinion of himself. Where’s my pipe?” In grave silence Ernest filled his father’s pipe from the packet on the mantelpiece, put it in his father’s mouth and lit it with a taper. There was less of affection in all this than there was of the mechanical respect a subordinate gives to a superior. He waited alertly, lighted taper in hand, until he was sure that the tobacco was burning, then he meticulously pinched the fire from the taper and replaced it. Joseph leaned back in his chair, puffed contentedly and looked at the fire. Then he began to speak thoughtfully, as though thinking aloud, while Ernest watched him with pent intensity.
“No, we couldn’t leave Georgie out, even if he is an oily, cutthroating scamp. And not because he is my brother. But without his help I wouldn’t be in America, and that’s straight. Oh, I know all about it not being brotherly love, bringing me here, but that don’t alter the fact that if he hadn’t brought me here I’d still be bootlicker to Squire Broderick.”
“His help was—was accidental,” said Ernest.
“You do have words, don’t you?” grumbled Joseph. “Well, accidental or no accidental, there it stands. He’s always yelping about ingratitude, and I won’t give him an excuse to yelp it so that people will have some right to believe him.”
“What does it matter what they believe?” asked Ernest, not contemptuously, but in the tone that one uses when pointing out an obvious fact.
“Eh? You’re a hard young devil, ain’t you? Heart of brass, and soul of iron. Heard that somewheres of a pirate with a turn of mind like yours. My word! I don’t care what people believe, but I’d have a sneaking idea that what he would say would be true. No, I couldn’t have it on my conscience.”
Ernest, who had always known that his father had unexpected honors and softnesses, was yet incredulous at this obvious folly. He could hardly believe that one would discard a blazing opportunity for anything so worthless as a small matter of conscience. It seemed revolting to him, contemptible. And yet, he was not a scoundrel either by design or temperament; paradoxically, it was because he had a large vision that even the small things of conscience were lost in it. To him such indulgence in conscience was feckless or extravagant, to be indulged in only by those who were successful and could afford it. Without loss. He had not as yet heard the theory of the survival of the fittest and the struggle for existence. But he believed in it instinctively. If George were “left in the lurch,” abandoned, thrown out of opportunity, it was because he was unfit and inferior by reason of his sly and greedy and malicious temperament, and had no place in plans of great men of immense ambitions. To Ernest, the realist, success was not won by those who possessed pointless vices or virtues.
“He wouldn’t stop at doing you a dirty turn, Pa,” he said, and hated himself for the inadequacy of his protest. But he knew that he could never have made his father understand. He compressed his lips in despair.
Joseph struck the arm of his chair with an air of finality, and showed that he was about to conclude the conversation and sit down to tea. The firelight was now the only light in the room, for it was twilight outside, a twilight like an infusion of smothering gray smoke.
“No, my lad, I don’t care. True, he’d knife me if it would help him get a penny. But I’m not that way.” He regarded Ernest with bland complacence, and the boy, increasingly revolted, saw that his father was admiring his own virtue and that this admiration would temporarily sustain him against arguments of logic and reason. He clenched his hands spasmodically, but did not speak. He was confident of ultimate victory.
Perhaps Joseph felt this, and an obscure helplessness suddenly overcame his self-admiration. He stood up abruptly, irritated. He turned to Hilda, who had begun to light the candles on the tea table, and frowned.
“Come, come, lass. Is a man to wait all night for his tea?”
Martin, who had listened in silence the while he had buttered a slice of bread for the baby and had seated her in a tall homemade chair and poured her milk into her pewter cup, suddenly straightened up and l
ooked at all of them with his large blue gaze. He looked at his nervous, handsome young father, his plump mother with her shining cheeks and curling dark hair, at his young sister and the baby, and lastly at Ernest. And his eyes were full of fear.
It seemed to him all at once that there was a danger in the room which would devour them, and that this danger flowed out of Ernest and was a tangibly dreadful thing that he must cry out against. He could feel it like a coldness.
“Stop staring around like a calf, lad,” said Hilda irritably, “and sit down.” Then she was struck by his expression. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I—I feel a little as if I might be sick,” he muttered, looking at her with vague fright. “I—I don’t believe I want any tea.”
CHAPTER VI
The Bouchard family lived on Garrison Road, about one hundred yards from the Barbour family. Armand Bouchard had built himself a characteristic home; no wooden shacks for him. With the instinct of the French for permanency, his home was of rough stone, hewn from the living rock of the State itself. Though the little house was uneven, uncouth and inartistic, though its thick-walled grayness was sturdy and unshakable, its foundations rooted in the earth, its door was strong against any storm that might blow. It was squat, rather longish, for Armand and his family did not care for upstairs bedrooms, thriftily making the heat of first-floor fires serve to warm sleeping rooms. The rooms were low-ceilinged, the conservation of heat also entering here. But low-ceilinged though they were, the rooms were large and square; no vault-like atmosphere as in other homes during that period, which ran to longitude rather than latitude. The hearths, too, were broad and hearty, scrubbed of stone, vigorous of fire. The house was no more lavishly furnished than the Barbour home, but it was full of lusty cheer, vehement affection, salty optimism and no compromises with reality.
The house was noisy, the inhabitants voluble, seemingly perpetually excited and vehement. Armand was the most excitable of them all, with his carved, nut-like face, vivacious point of black beard, fiery small eyes, yellow-toothed, rather feline grin between his hairy lips. He was a tiny man, but of such energy, speed and vitality that no one noticed his stature nor his shrivelled breadth. His collar and cravat were always loose, so that his brown, stringy neck, small and withered, was open to all weathers and all eyes. In this neck his Adam’s apple bobbed continually, even when he was silent. Sometimes he gave the impression of being deformed, for he stooped perceptibly and the “wings” of his back stuck through his thin coat. But this impression was gathered only on the infrequent occasions when he was in partial repose. Once fifteen-year-old Ernest, in a moment of rare facetiousness, put his arm about the little man’s waist and lifted him easily. Joseph thought it rather comical and laughed heartily, for Armand pretended to great wrath and helplessness, and his thin childlike arms flailed the air and his wee legs kicked impotently. Armand was almost perpetually amiable and ironical, always patient with a new idea, always eager and sympathetic. Few besides the astute Ernest also knew that Armand was shrewd and bitterly logical, undeceived and undeceivable, opportunistic and miserly. He could be the best of friends, the most faithful, but he could also be most reserved about receiving and giving favors. Ernest admired him even more than he did his father, for he had observed that Armand had no inconvenient honors and twinges, hid no secret subtleties or irresolutions. The boy would feel a current of strength and sureness, vitality and power, irony and implacability, in the little man’s presence. He told his father that Armand was a giant midget. Here was a logic he understood.
Madam Bouchard was a woman whose height and bulk would have made at least three of her meagre little husband. Because of her vast bosom and her broad and immense hips, she gave the impression of slowness and sluggishness, but in reality she was as swift on her huge feet as her husband was on his, and her aim with a ladle or a dish, when angered, was little short of miraculous. She was half Italian, with a face as round and large as a shining plate, eyes like black lakes of fire, thick, somewhat sulky mouth. Her three plump chins rested on her chest, for she appeared to have no neck. She was inordinately proud of her one real beauty: glistening black hair with ruddy crests on its waves, which she wore in a tremendous knob at the thick base of what should have been her neck. Armand called her his little white dove, and she called him her little cabbage, for they loved each other dearly. She was ponderously vehement, irritable and suspicious, thrifty and devoted, a disillusioned friend to very few, and given to wild, obscure rages. Her intelligence was the intelligence of a small, quick animal, ferreting, wary and alert. She flavored French cooking with the rich exuberance of Italian cooking, and Armand declared, with some reason, that she was the best cook in the world, even better than his father, who at one time had been chef to one of Napoleon’s aides.
She was a cynical but devoted Catholic, and over each bed was a crucifix, and no bedtime was allowed to pass without its rosary. Each Sunday saw the whole family, frail Jacques included, attending high mass in the tiny wooden Catholic church in Newtown, and no Saint’s day was allowed to pass without a special remembrance. But hers was an earthy religiousness, as that of Italians is so apt to be, and bunches of dried herbs, knitting needles, pipes, onions, candles and tobacco mingled fraternally on the kitchen mantelpiece with tiny plaster-casts of saints and Virgins To Madam Bouchard, the Saints, and even the Saviour, were intimately and cosily concerned and anxious about the smallest happenings in the lives of the Faithful, and she did not hesitate to invoke them on the most trivial occasions of distress, such as one of Armand’s light colds. Raoul’s tendency to overeat and suffer indigestion, Eugene’s inclination toward bullying, and Jacques’ chilblains. To her, the Saints, the Blessed Virgin and the Child Jesus were members of her household, and when she served a particularly delectable dish she would often say wistfully: “Now, if only Saint Francis could have a sup of that, or sweet Saint Therese!” Whether she was dressed in calico, or her one stiff black silk dress, a huge golden cross on a gold chain swung over the vast hillocks of her breasts, and even when she basked in complete repose before the fire of an evening her mighty hands played with that cross and her lips frequently moved in old, half-mechanical prayers.
Being half Italian, she did not believe in the growing French custom of limiting one’s family, and could see no connection between the fact that her three boys were only ten months apart in their births, and the lame leg and twisted hip of the youngest, Jacques. Sometimes she suffered sharply when contemplating Jacques, her beloved, and her voice frequently became rough and short when his natural sweetness of character had moved her too poignantly. Then she forced herself to take comfort in sixteen-year-old Raoul’s vigor and laughter, Eugene’s robust body and ability to take care of himself. Jacques, at fourteen, was bent and thin, with pale and emaciated features and soft brown hair in a mane on his slender neck. He used a homemade cane when he walked so slowly and frequently so painfully, but his face was so beautiful, so often merry and sparkling, that one instinctively felt that here was no sufferer silently pleading for sympathy but a youth who might be envied for some secret and engrossing happiness and contentment.
Raoul was an entirely normal youth, and consequently rather stupid. He was amiable and a little cunning, tolerant and greedy. Seventy-five years later he would have been the football hero of some minor college, for he had great shoulders, enormous vigor and a personality, due to its amiability and gift for leisurely friendship, that would have endeared him to scores of friends.
Fifteen-year-old Eugene was shorter and broader than his elder brother, Raoul, and though his features were actually handsomer than the latter’s, his face appeared less attractive, due to the lack of sparkle and gaiety that made Raoul’s face so endearing. His eyes appeared smaller, for he narrowed them continually with cold suspicion, and his mouth, though extraordinarily well cut, pouted and was sullen. He was usually reserved of speech, but when he did speak his tone was usually quarrelsome and railing, and often bullying, and at
these times his face thickened and reddened as if congested. He was slow and careful and extremely intelligent, with a gift for invention and analysis, and, to his secret shame, he was also exceptionally kind-hearted, and easily moved to a resentful compassion. Only a few appreciated or suspected his many real virtues, just as very few suspected the selfish greed of Raoul. Ernest liked him the best of any of the Bouchards, except Armand, and indeed to the superficial eye there was a great resemblance between them.
Madam Bouchard’s three earthly loves were her husband, her sons and her garden, and the garden was not the least of these. She loved the earth with an almost personal and voluptuous passion, and when she felt herself unobserved she would remove her giant boots and sink her bare feet into warm, newly turned soil. At these times a look of tranced ecstasy would come over her face, and her eyes would close, as in some sensual rapture. She liked to dig her mighty fingers into the earth, and when she would pat it about some new plant her gestures were those of a lover. Consequently growing things grew for her as for no others. They grew with a luxuriousness almost tropical in their lush crowding. Her cabbages were gigantic, her carrots like clubs, her potatoes like gourds, her peas great green globes, her turnips larger than a man’s head. Her small row of corn grew to an amazing height, and the ears, wrapped tenderly in living silk floss, glistened with healthy milky whiteness. Her kitchen was always aromatic with herbs, and as she loved flowers little less than she loved vegetables, she always had a glass or earthen pot of forget-me-nots, tight rosebuds glistening with dew, or sprays of lavender, on the table during the summer. She also possessed a hardy she-goat who responded to her silent solicitude with floods of rich milk. Once George Barbour had said half-sneeringly, as he looked at the garden and the squat sturdy house of stone: “Anyone would think you intended to live here the rest of your lives!”