“Ain’t that enough?” called Joe. “Hey, Ma!”—and he rushed up and kissed her again. “That’s enough, hear?”
She wiped a tear from her eye and shook her head sorrowfully. “Oh, Joey, I’ve been worrying about you, so long. Where have you been?”
“I worked on ranches, ships, all that kind of thing, and I worked hard and ate like a hog and I saw the most wonderful places. Look at me! Look how tan I got!”
“And you, Petey?” she wailed softly, turning to Peter with one hand still clinging to Joe’s arm. “Your leg, your poor little leg!”
“It ain’t so little!” called Joe with a wry grin. “He’s all right now! He was a big star on the freshman team at Penn, Ma, a future all-American is what he is! Hey, Pete?”
And Peter began dancing around the room to show his mother that his leg was healed up and well. “See, Ma?” he cried. “It’s nothing, it’s good as new. I told you in my letters a million times … didn’t I, Rose!”
“Ah! he’s all right,” said Rose, coming up to Peter and throwing her arms around him. “He’s all right, the little bum.”
“Oh, my goodness, I’m so happy I don’t know what to do,” sighed the mother finally. She took down an apron from a hook and wound it on. “I’ve never been so happy in all my life. I knew something was going to happen, Rose, I told you I felt something, you remember when I told you that I had a dream, I—” And she fell silent, shaking her head, reflective and inscrutable in her own grave joyous thoughts, and vigorously began cutting bread and getting the lunch together.
“You see?” said Rose, nudging Joe in the ribs. “Watch her …”
“Aw, Ma knows, Ma knows,” said Joe, chuckling, and then he brought his hand down on his knee with a resounding slap: “We’re going to have a big celebration!” he cried. “Hey, Rosey, ain’t we? We’ll get drunk New Year’s Eve on a nice big quart of good Scotch, huh? We’ll get the old man piffed again! Hyah! hyah! hyah!”
Then he threw himself back in the chair and emitted a loud happy sigh. “Home again, what a deal! Bring on that food! From now on I’m just gonna sit back and take it easy just like it was when I was a kid. No more flophouses and bunkhouses and going broke and scrounging around for me.… Nosir! Home again!” In a few moments his mother had prepared a stack of thick roast-beef sandwiches, and Rose followed bearing a kettle of steaming hot chocolate. All four of them fell to eating and drinking elatedly, in an atmosphere that made the two brothers realize more than ever that they were home again.
[8]
Later in the day Peter went upstairs to the attic to find some old books packed in a trunk. Up there, for purposes of study and solitude, Francis had arranged himself a little room in a partition of the attic at the back of the house where the east gable protruded from the sloping roof. Rose had said Francis was not in, but Peter peeked in and was surprised to find him seated at his desk turning over the pages of a paper-backed book. The slant-ceilinged little room was stuffy and close from the heat of a radiator hissing steadily at the valve, warmish with a faint odor of wine.
“How are you, Mr. Bones!” yelled Peter.
Francis looked up blandly. “Hello there. What are you doing around here?”
“Didn’t you know I was coming home for Christmas?”
“Yes,” said Francis vaguely, “but I didn’t know it would be so soon.”
Peter sat down, and lit a cigarette, and instantly jumped up nervously. “What’s that book you’ve got there? Oh! It’s in French!” He took the paper-backed volume and scanned the title—“Les faux monnayeurs. What is that?”
“It’s a novel by André Gide.”
“What’s it all about?”
“What’s it about? Well, I suppose it’s about the falsity of people in particular, and everything in general.”
“Where did you get the book?”
“Ah … why, I got it right here in Galloway, in the public library.”
“You did!” cried Peter. “Oh, yes, now I remember—they have a shelf of French literature in the back over by the shelf for cookbooks!”
Francis had produced a bottle of wine from a desk drawer and was wiping off some glasses.
“What’s that … wine!” said Peter. “I’ll be damned.”
Francis glanced at Peter curiously. He cleared his throat and said, “It was rather a surprise to find Gide stuck in there by your cookbook shelf amongst the Zolas and Dumas and Hugos of French morality.”
“It was?” burst out Peter with a sheepish and confused grin.
“Well, yes. Not, of course, that it’s to be held against the city fathers of Galloway.…”
“Why’s that?”
“Well,” said Francis wryly, “I don’t know exactly why’s that, but maybe you could say that to insinuate the notorious Monsieur Gide among the most respectable and honored French writers would constitute … well, you know—”
“Oh, I see!” cried Peter. “And what was this guy Gide notorious for? What did he do?”
Francis cleared his throat again. “Well … he was noted for his monstrous perversity of character, his monstrous opinion of bourgeois Europe, for one thing. Ah, why, he’s even been considered by some of the most valorous pedagogues of French letters as a … as a seditious churl—”
“Yes?”
“And, ah, in some quarters he’s regarded as an unnatural corrupter of French youth.” And with a kind of lonely disconsolate glee Francis began to chuckle as though somewhat overcome by the sound of the words.
He uncorked the wine bottle with a gallant flourish and poured Peter a glass. “Here, try some of this, it isn’t exactly the very best-but it’s not too bad.”
Peter took a long gulp and nodded eagerly. “And this Gide … why do you read him? I mean all the business about the churl and all that. I mean—you know!”
Francis smiled. “What do you mean?”
“How should I know? What does he write about?”
“People.”
“And they’re all false? Do you think that everybody in the world is false? Do you think the world is false?”
“Do I?”
“Yeah! What’s your philosophy? Do you have one?” blurted Peter, blushing.
Francis cleared his throat, with a somewhat askance look out the window, and a little frown of amazement, although he was somewhat pleased also.
“For instance!” cried Peter, holding up a finger rigidly. “Just tell me one ‘for-instance’! We have a guy at Penn who does nothing but sit around drinking coffee and talking philosophy and he’s always saying ‘for-instance’ and showing what he means. He’s pretty smart too.”
“Well, you just don’t pull for-instances out of the hat. You give me a for-instance, for instance …”
Peter doubled up with a crazy laugh and threw himself down on the chair. “No, wait!” he cried. “I always wanted to know what you think. We’re taking philosophy this year. I have a lot of ideas myself but I never can put them together nice and logical. My philosophy is that you can’t explain the world. It’s too big and it’s too crazy and sometimes it’s funny and most of the time it’s … strange.”
“In the first place,” said Francis, pursing his lips, “I don’t believe in mysteries. Obviously there’s mystery in your strangeness idea. As for the world being funny, I don’t know. If nightmares are funny …”
“Is that what Gide says?” said Peter almost sullenly, with sudden curiosity.
“I don’t suppose so—perhaps it’s taken for granted. He’s just a typical European intellectual. His concern is with truth and the stupidity of the world … and his enemy is society, I suppose.”
“High society?”
“No, people … everybody.”
“So everybody is false?”
“I didn’t say that. He just understands that men have organized themselves in an insane way that’s almost impossible to untangle and almost too much for the man of sensibility to bear.…”
“Yeah?”
; “And finally, on top of that, there’s the nightmare in all its clear full contours”—Francis mused with a smile—“at all times too, unexpected and vast.” Francis got up to close the window, which was open an inch at the bottom, and came back and gently lowered himself back in the chair, where for a moment he sat in absolute lassitude, with his thin hands drooping over the edge of the chair as though they were broken at the wrist. He stared emptily out on the sunny snow-flashing day.
“Here’s a for-instance!” cried Peter. “Take today. See all the snow out there and the icicles on the houses and the sun shining, and the kids sliding down the hill having a big time. Look down the road there, here comes Charley and Mickey home from school. See them? Charley on the bike, Mickey walking beside him. They come all the way from school and now they’re hungry, they’re ready for a big meal. Look at the pretty girl down there sliding with her kid brother on the sled. Take all that. What do you think about it?”
“What do I think?” laughed Francis. “Gad!”
“Yes! I mean, do you enjoy it?”
“But that’s utterly beside the point.”
“No, it’s only a for-instance,” cried Peter, almost pained. “See? It’s another philosophy! If you didn’t have eyes and if you didn’t have feelings and senses all that would be still out there, but you wouldn’t know about it, you’d be sitting here, it would be out there and you wouldn’t know a thing about it. You wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything—”
“That would be sort of nice,” murmured Francis faintly.
“No!” laughed Peter savagely.
“Well, now, here’s another philosophy. Take that day of yours outside, and turn it into a night, a cold night—it isn’t day all the time, is it? That’s only the half of it … the other half is night, you know. And so, we have our consciousness of that night and therefore we have our consciousness of the necessary and natural brutishness of things, don’t we? And wouldn’t it be better, then, if we had no consciousness at all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Peter. “The night would be nice, you’d go out and take a nice walk, get some fresh air—”
“I mean the night that’s icy blackness. The one you can’t live in. The one we have. The true one.”
“What?” asked Peter, a little embarrassed and stricken by Francis’ tone.
“Your winter night … all merciless and hopeless, the one that kills you in the end, the one that has no consideration of any human pith or earthly significance except to destroy all of us completely. Tell me about that one. Tell me about your precious senses that inform us on the subject—”
“Well, I don’t know,” mumbled Peter, a little confused.
“They tell you about our crime—”
“What crime?”
“Well, ours. They tell you about it in various ways—original sin, Darwinian drive, Freudian unconscious, whatnot … But our only crime is that we were given that consciousness of yours, isn’t it? Without it, I suppose we’d be a large group of innocent louts. It might be better.”
“What about the churl man of sensibility?” cried Peter, shrewd, flushed and watchful.
Francis nodded, smiling, almost eagerly. “We strike out at each other automatically, snarling and clawing. That’s what they call crime, or sin, that’s what we are—sinners. But our only crime is our innocence. Our only responsibility is there, and it is not a responsibility. A perfect set-up for the gods, a perfect set-up for the night, and in another sense a perfect set-up for entrenched reaction.”
“What a lot of stuff!” yelled Peter, amazed. “How can you believe all that?”
“Isn’t it true that all they told you when you were a kid turned out to be a lot of crap? They told you about God as soon as you had Santa Claus in doubt or before, someone did. Yet you ought to know by now there’s no Godliness anywhere, and there certainly is no God to comfort and watch over us. Maybe you might even, in the sophistication of modern times,” he went on, “be forced to admit there must be a devil even in spite of the fact there is no God. Certainly the brutality on all sides is evident, all the Godliness must be hiding out somewhere. It’s a force, a weight of persuasion. And then they told you about love, didn’t they? Yet you ought to know by now, really, that it’s impossible to love in the middle of so much icy night and unhappiness.”
“I don’t know …” muttered Peter, a little frightened.
“Surely at some time it’ll occur to you that love’s just a word describing the fiddling around with flattery and deceit that makes you feel a little better for a moment. And then justice. They imprint that word in stone all over the world, on friezes around court-house buildings. Yet you ought to see, or perhaps you sense it now, that justice isn’t the concern of men in this world. Men are too unhappy for that. You can’t blame them, there’s no so-called faith, life’s too short for that, there’s no time. The icy blackness doesn’t last long, just long enough to choke you and freeze you to death.”
“But I don’t believe it!”
“Why not, if it’s the truth.”
“I don’t know,” said Peter. “Why should you believe what those guys say?” he suddenly asked slyly.
“What guys?” cried Francis with an amazed laugh.
“What do you care what he’s got to say—Gide … or guys like Engels.”
“Who’s talking about them?”
Peter stood staring doggedly out the window as though he would lose his persuasion, if Francis were to catch his eye and begin laughing in his strange mirthless way.
But Francis had wearied of the conversation, he was wiping his hands with a towel at the sink in a brisk and absorbed manner, and Rosey downstairs was calling them down to eat.
It was a strange conversation that Peter never forgot.
[9]
It was christmas week, and for young Charley it was nothing but troubles.
At fourteen now, he was in the ninth grade in school where his marks were somewhat below average, though not for lack of intelligence. A strange, quiet boy, interested much less in book-learning than in what was to be learned from old rusty automobiles on the junkheap or from the thousand machineries all around him. At home he was the self-reliant, unobtrusive, almost solitary little son who more often than not was to be found in some obscure corner of the house or cellar or garage tinkering meditatively with some gadget that had come to his grave attention. Among his neighborhood pals he was always, by silent and inscrutable consent, the “leader of the gang.” This was due, no doubt, to his awesome air of concentration and the way he had of assuming all kinds of responsibilities in the innumerable circumstances that offered themselves in their play. Like his older brother Joe he had the same peculiar mannerisms that hinted of an absorbed self-assurance: he replied to a question only after a brief solemn wetting of the lips, he walked with a long determined stride towards his object, and he gazed at people with the same calm, level, blue-eyed mien of absolute reasonableness, as though nothing could ever faze or mystify him. But unlike Joe, whom he greatly venerated in his quiet way, young Charley was much less gregarious and less lively.
He was in trouble and, to make it worse, he was alone and unwatched in his tribulations. This, however, was just the way he uncompromisingly wanted it. A week earlier, in the company of several other boys with slingshots, he had broken a window in the home of a certain crochety old man well known in the district for his hermit-like and testy disposition. This old man had submitted a formally written report to the police insisting that the culprit, the “young thug,” be apprehended and punished at once. Charley heard about this and was scared. All his chums laid low and kept mum and went about for days with secretive, pale airs.
But an efficient motorcycle policeman, known throughout Galloway as Tooey Warner, was assigned to investigate the source of the vandalism, and that was the end. This terrifying policeman spent several days browbeating schoolboys in the neighborhood and eventually found out that Charley had done it, or at least had been the leader of th
e barrage. That same afternoon, when Charley was coming home from school, the same day his big brothers came home, Tooey Warner roared up on his motorcycle, pulled up to the curb with a screeching skid, took off his glove, yelled, “Come here, you!” and, when Charley came over, the cop slashed the glove across his face with a vicious swipe.
“All right, let’s go down to the station, wise guy. Get in!” He gunned the motor with an awful roar and adjusted his goggles.
“But, wait a minute, Mr. Warner!” cried Charley terrified. “I didn’t mean to do it, I just shot over some trees and it hit the window. Honest! I’m willing to pay for the window!”
But Tooey Warner never felt that his job was done until he drew repentant tears from his miscreants. Again he slashed Charley across the face with his glove, drawing blood this time with the small steel button on the wrist. He was the most scrupulous and brutal cop on the force. Though it could never be said that he did not display equal intrepidity with regard to adult transgressors of the law, it was household knowledge that the schoolboys were his choice specialty.
“Honest, Mr. Warner!” cried Charley now, a little tearful, realizing somehow that he was expected to cry, “I didn’t mean to do it. I can pay for the damages if you let me—!”
“Why you little punk, where would you get the money? Do you know what you did? The damages are nine bucks!” And the cop punctuated this with another sharp slash across Charley’s face.
“I can pay for it,” said Charley, grimly, in a quiet voice.
Tooey Warner glanced at him with a severe stare of repressed rage, a-tremble with elemental vitality. He had a lot to do that day, he was harried on all sides by his work and his wife and the hatred of almost everybody in town, and suddenly, sighing, his chest almost collapsing, his eyes losing their fire and growing stony, he became a bored policeman and took out a notebook. He wedged his glove temporarily under his arm and began to execute a slow scribble. It took a long time. Then he snapped the book shut and looked squarely into Charley’s eyes.