He thought of all his years away from home, the years of wandering in many lands and cities. He remembered how many times he had thought of home with such an intensity of passion that he could close his eyes and see the scheme of every street, and every house upon each street, and the faces of the people, as well as recall the countless things that they had said and the densely-woven fabric of all their histories. To-morrow he would see it all again, and he almost wished he had not come. It would have been easy to plead the excuse of work and other duty. And it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place.
But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.
The train rushed onward through the moonlit land.
* * *
6. The Home-coming
When he looked from the windows of the train next morning the hills were there. They towered immense and magical into the blue weather, and suddenly the coolness was there, the winy sparkle of the air, and the shining brightness. Above him loomed huge shapes, the dense massed green of the wilderness, the cloven cuts' and gulches of the mountain passes, the dizzy steepness, with the sudden drops below. He could see the little huts stuck to the edge of bank and hollow, toy-small, far below him in the gorges. The everlasting stillness of the earth now met the intimate, toiling slowness of the train as it climbed up round the sinuous curves, and he had an instant sense of something refound that he had always known--something far, near, strange, and so familiar--and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.
At last the train came sweeping down the long sloping bend into the station, But even before it had come to a full halt George had been watching out of the windows and had seen Randy Shepperton and his sister Margaret waiting for him on the platform. Randy, tall and athletic-looking, was teetering restlessly from one foot to another as his glance went back and forth along the windows of the train in search of him. Margaret's strong, big-boned figure was planted solidly, her hands clasped loosely across her waist, and her eyes were darting from car to car with swift intensity. And as George swung down from the steps of the pullman and, valise in hand, strode towards the platform across the rock ballast of the roadbed and the gleaming rails, he knew instantly, with that intuitive feeling of strangeness and recognition; just what they would say to him at the moment of their meeting.
Now they had seen him. He saw Margaret speak excitedly to her brother and motion towards his approaching figure. And now Randy was coming on the run, his broad hand extended in a gesture of welcome, his rich tenor shouting greetings as he came:
"How are you, boy?" he shouted. "Put it there!" he cried heartily as he came up, and vigorously wrung him by the hand. "Glad to see you, Monk!"
Still shouting greetings, he reached over and attempted to take the valise. The inevitable argument, vehement, good-natured, and protesting, began immediately, and in another moment Randy was in triumphant possession and the two were walking together towards the platform, Randy saying scornfully all the time in answer to the other's protests:
"Oh, for God's sake, forget about it! I'll let you do as much for me when I come up to the Big Town to visit you!...Here's Margaret!" he said as they reached the platform. "I know she'll be glad to see you!"
She was waiting for him with a broad smile on her homely face. They had grown up together as next-door neighbours, and were almost like brother and sister. As a matter of fact, when George had been ten and Margaret twelve, they had had one of those idyllic romances of childhood in which each pledged eternal devotion to the other and took it for granted that they would marry when they grew up. But the years had changed all that. He had gone away, and she had taken charge of Randy when her parents died; she now kept house for him, and had never married. As he saw her standing there with the warm smile on her face, and with something vaguely spinsterish in her look in spite of her large, full-breasted figure and her general air of hearty good nature, he felt a sudden stirring of pity and old affection for her.
"Hello, Margaret!" he said, somewhat thickly and excitedly. "How are you, Margaret?"
They shook hands, and he planted a clumsy kiss on her face. Then, blushing with pleasure, she stepped back a pace and regarded him with the half bantering expression she had used so often as a child.
"Well, well, well!" she said. "You haven't changed much, George! A little stouter, maybe, but I reckon I'd have known you!"
They spoke now quietly about Aunt Maw and about the funeral, saying the strained and awkward things that people always say when they talk of death. Then, this duty done, there was a little pause before they resumed their natural selves once more.
The two men looked at each other and grinned. When they had been boys together Randy had seemed to George more like Mercutio than anybody he had ever known. He had had a small, lean head, well shaped, set closely with blond hair; he had been quick as a flash, light, wiry, active, with a wonderful natural grace in everything he did; his mind and spirit had been cleat, exuberant, incisive, tempered like a fine Toledo blade. In college, too, he had been the same: he had not only done well in his classes, but had distinguished himself as a swimmer and as quarter-back on the football team.
But now something caught in George's throat as he looked at him and saw what time had done. Randy's lean, thin face was deeply furrowed, and the years had left a grey deposit at his temples. His hair was thinning back on both sides of the forehead, and there were little webbings of fine wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. It saddened George and somehow made him feel a bit ashamed to see how old and worn he looked. But the thing he noticed most was the expression in Randy's eyes. Where they had once been clear and had looked out on the world with a sharp and level gaze, they were now troubled, and haunted by some deep preoccupation which he could not quite shake off even in the manifest joy he felt at seeing his old friend again.
While they stood there, Jarvis Riggs, Parson Flack, and the Mayor came slowly down the platform talking earnestly to one of the leading real estate operators of the town, who had come down to meet them. Randy saw them and, still grinning, he winked at George and prodded him in the ribs.
"Oh, you'll get it now!" he cried in his old extravagant way. "At all hours, from daybreak to three o'clock in the morning--no holds barred! They'll be waiting for you when you get there!" he chortled.
"Who?" said George.
"Haw-w!" Randy laughed. "Why, I'll bet they're all lined up there on the front porch right now, in a reception committee to greet you and to cut your throat, every damned mountain grill of a real estate man in town! Old Horse-face Barnes, Skin-'em-alive Mack Judson, Skunk-eye Tim Wagner, The Demon. Promoter, and Old Squeeze-your-heart's-blood Simms, The Widder and Orphan Man from Arkansas--they're all there!" he said gloatingly. "She told them you're a prospect, and they're waiting for you! It's your turn now!" he yelled. "She told them that you're on the way, and they're drawing lots right now to see which one gets your shirt and which one takes the pants and B.V.D.s! Haw-w!"--and he poked his friend in the ribs again.
"They'll get nothing out of me," George said, laughing, "for I haven't got it to begin with.
"That doesn't matter!" Randy yelled. "If you've got an extra collar button, they'll take that as the first instalment, and then--haw-w! they'll collect your cuff-links, socks, and your suspenders in easy payments as the years roll on!"
He stood there laughing at the astounded look on his friend's face. Then, seeing his sister's reproving eye, he suddenly prodded her in the ribs, at which she shrieked in a vexed manner and slapped at his hand.
"I'll vow, Randy!" she cried fretfully. "What on earth's the matter with you? Why, you act like a regular idiot! I'll vow
you do!"
"Haw-w!" he yelled again. Then, more soberly, but still grinning: "I guess we'll have to sleep you out over the garage, Monk, old boy. Dave Merrit's in town, and he's got the spare room." There was a slight note of deference in his voice as he mentioned Merrit's name, but he went on lightly: "Or if you like--haw-w!--there's a nice room at Mrs. Charles Montgomery Hopper's, and she'd be glad to have you!"
George looked rather uncomfortable at the mention of Mrs. Charles Montgomery Hopper. She was a worthy lady and he remembered her well, but he didn't want to stay at her boarding-house. Margaret saw his expression and laughed:
"Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho! You see what you're in for, don't you? The prodigal comes home and we give him his choice of Mrs. Hopper or the garage! Now is that life or not?"
"I don't mind a bit," protested George. "I think the garage is swell. And besides"--they all grinned at each other again with the affection of people who know each other so well that they are long past knowledge--"if I get to helling around at night, I won't feel that I'm disturbing you when I come in...But who is Mr. Merrit, anyway?"
"Why," Randy answered, and now he had an air of measuring his words with thoughtful deliberation, "he--he's the Company's man--my boss, you know. He travels around to all the branches to check up and see that everything's O.K. He's a fine fellow. You'll like him," said Randy seriously. "We've told him all about you and he wants to meet you."
"And we knew you wouldn't mind," Margaret said. "You know, it's business, he's with the Company, and of course it's good policy to be as nice to him as we can." But then, because such designing was really alien to her hospitable and whole-hearted spirit, she added: "Mr. Merrit is all right. I like him. We're glad to have him, anyway."
"Dave's a fine fellow," Randy repeated. "And I know he wants to see you...Well," he said, and the preoccupied look was in his eyes again, "if we're all ready, let's get going. I'm due back at the office now. Merrit's there, of course. Suppose I run you out to the house and drop you, then I'll see you later."
This was agreed upon. Randy grinned once more--a little nervously, George thought--and picked up the valise and started rapidly across the station platform towards his car, which was parked at the kerb.
At the funeral that afternoon the little frame house which old Lafayette Joyner--Aunt Maw's father, and George Webber's grandfather--had built with his own hands years ago looked just as it had always looked when George had lived there as a boy. Nothing about it had been changed. Yet it seemed smaller, meaner, more shabby than he remembered it. It was set some distance back from the street, between the Shepperton house on one side and the big brick house in which his Uncle Mark Joyner lived on the other. The street was lined with cars, many of them old and decrepit and covered with the red clay of the hills. In the yard in front of the house many men stood solemnly knotted in little groups, talking quietly, their bare heads and stiff Sunday clothes of austere black giving them an air of self-conscious shyness and restraint.
Inside, the little rooms were jammed with people, and the hush of death was on the gathering, broken now and then by muffled coughs and by stifled sobs and sniffles. Many of them were Joyners, who for three days had been coming in from the hills--old men and women with the marks of toil and pain upon their faces, cousins, in-laws, distant relatives of Aunt Maw. George had never seen some of them before, but they all bore the seal of the Joyner clan upon them, the look of haunting sorrow and something about the thin line of the lips that proclaimed their grim triumph in the presence of death.
In the tiny front room, where on wintry nights Aunt Maw had always sat by the light of a kerosene lamp before a flickering fire, telling the boy her endless stories of death and sorrow, she now lay in her black coffin, the top and front of which were open to display as much of her as possible to the general view. And instantly, as George entered, he knew that one of her main obsessions in life had been victorious over death. A spinster and a virgin all her years, she had always had a horrible fear that, somehow, some day, some man would see her body. As she grew older her thoughts had been more and more preoccupied with death, and with her morbid shame lest someone see her in the state of nature after she was dead. For this reason she had a horror of undertakers, and had made her brother, Mark, and his wife, Mag, solemnly promise that no man would see her unclothed corpse, that her laying out would be done by women, and, above all else, that she was not to be embalmed. By now she had been dead three days--three days of long hot sun and sultriness--and it seemed to George a grim but fitting ending that the last memory he would have of that little house, which in his childhood had been so filled with the stench of death-in-life, should now be the stench of death itself.
Mark Joyner shook hands cordially with his nephew and said he was glad he had been able to come down. His manner was simple, dignified, and reserved, eloquently expressive of quiet grief, for he had always been genuinely fond of his older sister. But Mag, his wife, who for fifty years had carried on a nagging, internecine warfare with Aunt Maw, had appointed herself chief mourner and was obviously enjoying the role. During the interminable service, when the Baptist minister in his twanging, nasal voice recited his long eulogy and went back over the events of Aunt Maw's life, Mag would break forth now and then in fits of loud weeping and would ostentatiously throw back her heavy black veil and swab vigorously with her handkerchief at her red and swollen eyes.
The minister, with the unconscious callousness of self-righteousness, rehearsed again the story of the family scandal. He told how George Webber's father had abandoned his wife, Amelia Joyner, to live in open shame with another woman, and how Amelia had shortly, afterwards "died of a broken heart". He told how "Brother Mark Joyner and his God-fearing wife, Sister Maggie Joyner," had been filled with righteous wrath and had gone to court and wrested the motherless boy from the sinful keeping of his father; and how "this good woman who now lies dead before us" had taken charge of her sister's son and brought him up in a Christian home. And he said be was glad to see that the young man who had been the recipient of this dutiful charity had come home again to pay his last debt of gratitude at the bier of the one to whom he owed so much.
Throughout all this Mag continued to choke and sputter with histrionic sorrow, and George sat there biting his lips, his eyes fixed on the floor, perspiration streaming from him, his jaws clenched hard, his face purple with shame and anger and nausea.
The afternoon wore on, and at last the service was over. People began to issue from the house, and the procession formed for the long, slow ride to the cemetery. With immense relief George escaped from the immediate family group and went over to Margaret Shepperton, and the two of them took possession of one of the limousines that had been hired for the occasion.
Just as the car was about to drive off and take its place in the line, a woman opened the door and got in with them. She was Mrs. Delia Flood, an old friend of Aunt Maw's. George had known her all his life.
"Why, hello there, young man," she said to George as she climbed in and sat down beside him "This would've been a proud day for your Aunt Maw if she could've known you'd come all the way back home to be here at her funeral. She thought the world of you, boy." She nodded absent-mindedly to Margaret. "I saw you had an empty place here, so I said, 'It's a pity to let it go to waste. Hop right in,' I said. 'Don't stand on ceremony. It might as well be you,' I said, 'as the next fellow.'"
Mrs. Delia Flood was a childless widow well past middle age, short, sturdy, and physically stolid, with jet black hair and small, piercing brown eyes, and a tongue that was never still. She would fasten upon anyone she could catch and corner, and would talk on and on in a steady monotone that had neither beginning nor end. She was a woman of property, and her favourite topic of conversation was real estate. In fact, long before the present era of speculation and sky-rocketing prices, she had had a mania for buying and selling land, and was a shrewd judge of values. With some sixth sense she had always known what direction the development of the growing town
was likely to take, and when things happened as she predicted, it was usually found that she had bought up choice sites which she was able to sell for much more than she had paid for them. She lived simply and frugally, but she was generally believed to be well off.
For a little while Mrs. Flood sat in contemplative silence. But as the procession moved off and slowly made its way through the streets of the town, she began to glance sharply out of the windows on both sides, and before long, without any preliminary, she launched forth in a commentary on the history of every piece of property they passed. It was constant, panoramic, and exhaustive. She talked incessantly, gesturing briefly and casually with her hand, only pausing from time to time to nod deliberately to herself in a movement of strong affirmation.
"You see, don't you?" she said, nodding to herself with conviction, tranquilly indifferent whether they listened or not so long as the puppets of an audience were before her. "You see what they're goin' to do here, don't you? Why, Fred Barnes, Roy Simms, and Mack Judson--all that crowd--why, yes--here!--say!"--she cried, frowning meditatively--"wasn't I reading it? Didn't it all come out in the paper--why, here, you know, a week or two ago--how they proposed to tear down that whole block of buildings there and were goin' to put up the finest garage in this part of the country? Oh, it will take up the whole block, you know, with a fine eight-storey building over it, and storage space upstairs for more cars, and doctors' offices--why, yes!--they're even thinkin' of puttin' in a roof garden and a big restaurant on top. The whole thing will cost 'em over half a million dollars before they're done with it--oh, paid two thousand dollars a foot for every inch of it!" she cried. "But pshaw! Why those are Main Street prices--you can get business property up in the centre of town for that! I could've told 'em--but hm!"--with a scornful little tremor of the head--"they didn't want it anywhere but here--no, sir! They'll be lucky if they get out with their skins!"