“You’re in pain, Aaron?” she asked, but only abstractedly, for she was still richly contemplating what Aaron had said about Rufus’s child. Aaron stood up and studied them all, his eyes darting from face to face. He did not answer his wife, but as he smiled his yellowish smile, a spasm drew together the papery grayness of his facial muscles. He nodded, but as if to himself.
Without another word he walked out of the room. He had always walked quickly and lightly, as he was a small man. But lately he had been walking with feebleness, and slowly. Only Stephen remarked this, following his father with a long, concerned look.
Sophia rose with the fluid motions of a young woman, extended her hand to Rufus and said grandly, “My darling, I must have one last look at my first grandchild. Come, let us go.” Rufus took her hand, but as he led his mother from the room, he turned his head to wink in a brotherly and conspiratorial fashion at his brother. It meant nothing; it was part of his good-humored attitude toward everyone, and was almost automatic. Stephen did not see it, nor did Alice. They were standing close together on the hearth, and Alice’s head was on Stephen’s shoulder.
Sophia’s hoops swayed lightly up the stairway, and the diamonds in her ears sparkled in the light of the chandelier. When she and Rufus had reached the head of the stairs she kissed Rufus warmly, and suddenly, from behind the masquerade of her gray hair and faded cheeks and slightly purplish lips, blazed again the color which she had once possessed, and which she had given to her second son. “You heard what Papa said!” she whispered exultantly. “You heard what he said!”
3
Slowly, Alice and Stephen followed the others, but not for some little time.
The south bedroom was the smallest of all the bedrooms in the house, and was reserved for the least important guests, or their servants. However, it was pleasant with bright chintzes, and had three windows facing south, and white woodwork and a little black marble fireplace. None of the luxury of the other rooms was here, but yet it was friendly and charming.
It had been taken for granted that when Rufus married Lydia they would live with Aaron and Sophia. And it had been taken equally for granted that when Stephen married Alice they would not live in this house. Instead, Aaron, with a mocking gesture of magnanimity, had given Stephen the old home in which both sons had been born, a dark, small-roomed, uncomfortable, and old-fashioned place with a brickwalled kitchen, tiny entries, a stark narrow parlor, a lightless dining room, miniature bedrooms, and a dolorous and very dank garden. Alice, with her delicacy, had lightened the house with pale colors, had given warmth where there had been only chill, had set out a garden with burning flowers and bushes which mitigated the looming darkness of many trees. She had thrown away much of the heavy and ponderous furniture and had brought to the rooms considerable of the elegant and airy and discriminating pieces which had been saved from her parents’ home. What had once been ugly and repellent was now lovely and attractive.
A fire had been grudgingly lit in the south bedroom at Aaron’s direction, but had not burned long enough to dispel the fierce cold. The lamps had been lighted and the rosechintz curtains drawn. Alice shivered when she and Stephen entered, and clasped her arms with her hands. Stephen noticed this and said, “Let us go to bed at once. It is so cheerful to watch the fire when one is in bed.”
But Alice, always the complaisant and softly agreeable, went to the big poster bed, threw back the covers, and exclaimed, “There are no warming pans!” She turned to Stephen, her face unusually excited. He put his long thin arms about her. “What does it matter, dearest? I’ll warm you. I’ll hold you close.”
He was astounded when she pulled away from him, ran to the bell rope, and jerked it violently. She was breathing fast; her eyes were vivid. Stephen could not understand, and when he attempted to take her in his arms again she thrust him from her. “Stephen!” she cried. “They shall not do this to you any longer!” She stamped her foot and burst into tears.
Stephen was greatly alarmed. “Don’t disturb yourself so, darling,” he said with anxiety. “What does it matter?”
A robe-clad and yawning maid, resentful and sullen-eyed, answered the bell. “Where are the warming pans?” demanded Alice, her little white fists clenched at her sides. “Mr. Stephen has not been well, and he shall not get into that cold damp bed. Bring the warming pans at once, without any delay!”
The maid, who knew Alice very well, saw the tears of anger and mistook them for signs of helpless frustration. She said, with grumbling contempt, “There aren’t any coals for the pans, Mrs. deWitt.”
“Alice,” began Stephen, but Alice, to his increasing astonishment, gestured at him fiercely.
“Be quiet, Stephen. Edith, there are coals in the drawing room. Fill the pans there. Two of them.”
The maid, now wide awake and as astonished as Stephen, retreated as if in flight. Alice, full of an unprecedented energy, tore the yellow quilt from the bed, flung it about Stephen’s shoulders, and pushed him into a chair near the fire. Then she sat on his knees, put her arms about his neck, and held him with unexpected and ferocious strength, her tears running down his neck. Stephen, petrified, could only sit in confounded silence while she wept.
“They shall not do this to you any longer!” she cried over and over. “All the insults, while you do the work! All the laughter and the jeers and the scorn, when they’d be nothing without you! Always ‘gray Stephen,’ while Rufus gets the credit! I can’t stand it any longer, Stephen. Sometimes I hate you when you let them use you so disdainfully.” She beat on his shoulders with her fists. “Let us go away, a long way, far off, where you’ll be appreciated!”
Now Stephen was greatly frightened. He kissed her wet cheeks and tried to calm her awful trembling. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Alice. What does it matter what they think? I know what I am. It’s enough for me.” He was quiet a moment, while sharp scenes from his whole somber life ran before his eyes. “Life is so short,” he commented, half inaudibly. “One does one’s work, to the best of one’s ability. It’s of no consequence if no one else appreciates it.”
“It is, to a man’s wife, to her sense of her husband’s importance!” Alice was still trembling. Her soft hair was disordered, and stood about her wet and passionate face in a mass of gilt ringlets.
Stephen was silent. He smoothed Alice’s hair, and he sighed, over and over. Then he tried to smile, that painfully uncertain smile of his. “It’s been too much for you today, my Alice.” But he was heavy with his memories. He was not angered by them, but only bewildered. It was true that Rufus was the one who had the brilliant appearance, strong imagination, and boldness. What was it in him, Stephen, that made others despise him, and hold him in low esteem? This thought had dogged all his unobtrusive and conscientious life.
Stephen had not yet reached the point in his thoughts when he could come to believe that mankind is entranced by pyrotechnic superficialities, by gay lies and a handsome exterior, by hypocritical grace and false good-fellowship, by a magnetism that was utterly selfish and so superbly self-centered that it excited adoration in others. It was necessary to believe in something. He believed in mankind with a kind of desperation, and if mankind despised him, it was because in some way he was wrong. He also believed in God.
The maid returned, full of umbrage, and dumped the filled pans on the bed. She was about to stamp out of the room when Alice called, “Put them between the sheets, Edith.” Alice rose from her husband’s knee and confronted the maid. Edith glared at her. For a hard moment or two Alice and the maid confronted each other in a test of will. Then Edith, muttering under her breath, wrenched apart the bedclothes and thrust the pans between them. It was as though she were handling weapons which she ached to employ. Then she went from the room, slamming the door noisily behind her. Alice began to laugh shakily. “I never knew,” she said in wonder. “I never knew. And it’s so very easy. I always hated to put people ‘in their places,’ as they say. But now I know. You must do it, pleasantly
when you can, or in a callous way, if necessary, but you must do it when it has to be done.”
Stephen said, speaking despondently, “I suppose I have no character.”
Alice was quite intoxicated with her new discoveries. “You have a lot of character, Stephen! But you put on no airs, make no pretentions, demand nothing of anyone, treat everyone with consideration and gentleness. That is not wrong—at times. But those times come so very seldom. Self-abnegation and service inspire contempt. … Why, how awful!” Appalled, she clapped her cold little hands to her cheeks and looked at Stephen in horror. “What a frightful world!”
Stephen, very disturbed, got to his feet, the quilt hanging from his shoulders. He took the girl in his arms, pressed her face to his breast as if to hide from her the terrible thing she had seen in a moment of woeful revelation. He murmured over and over, as he smoothed her hair, “No, dear, you’re wrong. It’s all right. Edith was just tired and sleepy, and that’s why she was so uncivil. How agitated you are. Let me help you to bed. My dearest, my dearest.”
Alice cried silently as she undressed. When they were in bed he held her closely, her head on his shoulder, and he looked sadly into the darkness of the room. Between the slightly parted draperies he could see the icy glimmer of the moon. The wind had fallen, and there was no sound at all but the slow dropping of the coals in the fireplace.
Alice curled closer to him, and her soft hand found his cheek. She made herself laugh a little. “It’s so late, and we ought to be asleep,” she said murmurously, clinging to him.
“Yes, yes,” he said.
“I found out something else,” said Alice, again with that note of wonder in her voice. “He hates everybody—but you.”
“Who?” asked Stephen, confused.
“Your father.” And then, incredibly, and after this incredible statement, she fell asleep.
Stephen lay beside her, staring dry-eyed at the slit of moon showing between the draperies. He had immediately forgotten Alice’s words. They were words of a beloved child, who knew nothing. He would often lie like this, lately, unable to sleep, and without warning, without his will, scenes from his past life would come to him, overwhelming in their clarity, crushing in their half-revealed significance.
Twenty years ago he had had but one desire. He was a young boy, lonely, forgotten, not considered by his parents, who were so engrossed by the lively and lovable Rufus. He had no friends, for even boys his own age avoided him at his school. He had nothing to say to them, and what he overheard them saying to each other seemed so empty and so trivial, so without content or meaning, that it seemed impossible to him that they were interested in their own conversation. His teachers overlooked him completely, and were never conscious that he was there. He moved like a shadow through his childhood.
When he was ten years old he had wanted a dog to mitigate his loneliness. The dogs of his schoolmates raced after him, fawning, looking at him with strange and fathomless eyes. There was something in their brief presence which comforted him; they licked his hands, even when their masters called them impatiently, and they pressed against his knees. They filled him with warmth, made him feel at one with the world in which he lived, and in which he usually felt such a griefstricken stranger. For just that little time when they leaped upon him, and tried to speak to him, he was no longer an alien, but was accepted into the universal brotherhood.
So Stephen had wanted a dog of his own. He never asked his parents for anything. It took him months to ask his father for a dog. Aaron had looked at him speechlessly. “It won’t eat much,” Stephen had pleaded. “I’ll take care of it.”
Aaron, at that time, was just beginning to acquire some wealth. He was crafty and noncommunicative about his new money. He considered Stephen, whom he was always forgetting, then said coldly, “A dog? What for? We can’t have pets around here. I don’t like them.”
A few months later he bought Rufus a pony.
Stephen, lying beside his wife, was suddenly convulsed with the agony he had felt when his father had brought the pony home for Rufus, a pony jingling with bells, and with a saddle and harness of red leather and silver. Again, he heard Rufus’s joyful cries, the loud and loving laughter of Sophia, the pleased chuckling of Aaron. He stood apart from them all and watched, as he watched now, with the anguish in his heart fresh and keen. He had not been envious or angered. There had been no resentment in him, no indignation. Only pain.
He had crept away, unseen, unnoticed. He had not hated his father for this betrayal; even then, he had believed it inevitable that his own desires should be disregarded. He had walked for a long time, up a hill, and then had sat on a stone, not grieving, only very still, and very cold. He had watched the round crimson sun go down beyond the distant mountains, and he was conscious only of his suffering.
He had never bought himself a dog when he had married and had gone away from his parents. He no longer wanted a dog. The dog he had desired was dead.
The maple clock on the mantelpiece chimed half-past two. Alice was breathing deeply beside Stephen. He touched her hair. He thought: why do I remember these things? What does it matter now? Why should they torment me, when they were so long ago?
4
Portersville stood on both sides of a narrow river that was spanned by a slender bridge, one side reserved for foot passengers and the other for vehicles.
It was a small and quiet town of some fifteen thousand people, and unusually sophisticated. It was not uncommon for the more affluent to go frequently to Philadelphia, which the State Railroad Company had made only forty-five minutes away. There they would attend the opera, the theater, and social gatherings, for many had close friends and relatives in the big city to the east. They regretted that Philadelphia probably would never engulf them in its prophesied growth, for here the mountains rose abruptly and the hills were too steep. However, they happily believed that some day they would regard themselves as a suburb of the beloved city. Some of them had homes high in the hills, similar to that of the deWitts’, and it was a local amusement to turn spyglasses in the direction of Philadelphia and declare that the smoke was quite visible.
Portersville had always, in a way, considered itself a suburb of Philadelphia, and there was little local industry. Before the advent of the State Railroad Company there had been much water traffic on the river between the various communities. This traffic had practically disappeared. The labor which supported the State Railroad Company lived in either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, the two connecting cities, though the largest office force was in Portersville. The State Railroad Company had recently set up a small office in Philadelphia, which was being used more and more by Rufus deWitt, but most of the executive work was accomplished in Portersville.
It was a pleasant town, if rather quiet in coloring. The streets were as broad as possible, considering the shouldering hills and mountains. Many of the wealthier people owned hilly farms in the vicinity, and culled their farm labor from the East Town, as it was called, which was a section of threestoried, narrow houses of fieldstone or brick, with winding streets suggestive of European hamlets. The white steeples of churches pierced the prevailing gray and brown and dark red of the section. There was a small sawmill here, cutting lumber for almost exclusively local use, and a few granaries and a flour mill. Three streets of shops, occupying three sides of the public square, serviced the modest needs of the working and lower-middle-class people. Here lived the little merchants, the butchers, the harness and saddle makers, the laborers, and the domestic servants who worked in the fine, great houses of West Town. Portersville was proud that it had few, if any, slums, and it prided itself on the fact that its “stock” was German and English and Scotch. Here, as yet, there was no struggle between race and race, no antagonisms except that vaguely and good-humoredly felt for the very small Catholic population.
West Town was completely occupied by families of means, who drew most of their wealth from enterprises near Scranton, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia. The
majority of them had been born in Portersville, and nothing could induce them to leave for larger cities and more excitement. Their homes lay near the river, and for some distance beyond it, homes of the same fieldstone and brick which housed their employees. Some few, like the deWitts, had built their homes in the style of Southern residences, with white pillars and pediments, and arched first stories, but in the main the houses, though large, suggested conservative quietness and solidity. A number of the people in this section had migrated, after acquiring considerable money, from East Town, but never did they refer to their former section with contempt or aversion. In fact, many wistfully remembered the more active community life, the bustle about the square on Saturday nights, the rumors and the laughter, and the naїve neighborly friendships.
Very few despised their origin in East Town. The deWitts, with the exception of Stephen, did. It had been quite “a feather in their caps” when the two sons had married the Fielding daughters, whose father and grandfathers had never engaged in “trade,” but had drawn their money from England and from immense farms in the center of the state. Again, with the exception of Stephen, the deWitts had nothing to do with their old neighbors in East Town, who were not angered at this snobbery but found it immensely amusing.
Portersville’s one bank was the Portersville National, on the east side of the river. It occupied a third of one of the streets of the little public square, and was its most imposing building, built of gray stone with wide polished windows and smooth granite steps. It was the center of much activity, for the bank occupied only two stories, the other two being rented as offices for local lawyers, prosperous businessmen, two or three doctors, town administrators who could not be accommodated in the little town hall, and the State Railroad Company. If one could afford to rent “front” offices, one had definitely arrived. The rear offices, though not as large as the front ones, were as well lighted and as clean and busy. Sometimes, when fortunes changed decidedly, the gentlemen in the rear would take over the front offices, and the “front gentlemen” would move “temporarily” to the rear. It became quite an occasion for gossip and excitement when these changes took place, and so it was somewhat of a game, good-natured and happily competitive.