“At one time,” said Allan doubtfully, “he was a selfless reformer and a fighter for what he calls ‘human rights’ as opposed to what he calls ‘exploitation.’ I wonder what happened to him?”
“You did,” said Rufus, smiling. “You exposed to him his fundamental self-serving, which is natural to all men. And that is why he hates you.”
“I'm glad he is out of the Senate,” said Allan, nodding. “But he broods, now. He is becoming increasingly silent and sullen and arbitrary. His children detest him. And Laura. …”
“Ah, yes, Laura,” said Rufus, his ruddy face darkening. “she is not what I would call happy. I have asked her. She says Patrick has ‘changed.’ He is bad-tempered, at times, dogmatic and immovable, sometimes rigid with the children, sometimes maudlin.” Rufus began to laugh. “I remember the occasion when he was orating about ‘the people,’ and you brought his attention to the fact that he, too, is one of ‘the people.’ He was offended and outraged, and denied it. You never told me. …”
Allan only smiled. “By the way, sir, you know he is backing that radical newspaper in New York, called The Proletariat? Is that another example of his desperate attempts to evade reality, and evade acknowledging he is no better than other men? Or is it vindictiveness?”
“It is both of them. You will notice that though he heads charitable organizations, and works for them, he gives little of his own money. He hounds other rich men for contributions, however. I have noticed, too, that he has become much more frenetic since he withdrew that old amendment to the act regulating railroads. It was a long time ago. I suppose you won’t tell me. …”
Allan smiled again wryly. “Well,” said Rufus, “he never goes to see his father any more. The poor old man. I am glad you are kind to him, and visit him.”
“Pat,” said Allan, “is full of vengefulness. You may laugh at him, sir, but I think of him as a volcano. He might, sometime in the future, become desperately dangerous.”
Allan Marshall loved his children wisely as well as devotedly. If he had a favorite at all it was the girl, Dolores. Cornelia regarded her two sons and her daughter with mingled amusement, good-temper, impatience, and affectionate dislike. She found them, in her self-centered lust for life, boring and uninteresting. “I’m not fascinated by prattle,” she would say. “I have enough of it from Estelle, who grows more childish as she grows older, and then, of course, I had my brothers. Read the children fairy tales, if you want to, dear Allan, and talk to them, and drive them about the whole damned country. But don’t try to inspire devotion in me for them. Incidentally, though Dolores is only seven she has all the delicate, angular, and little gestures of a born old maid. She will probably cost us a couple of million dollars to marry her off. And Tony is almost as bad as she. I can stand DeWitt easier than I can stand the twins.
DeWitt, five years old, sometimes made Allan uneasy. He was small, very dark, quiet and penetrating, and very cold and peremptory. There was a stiffness about him, a certain sharpness, which Cornelia would declare he had inherited from his father. Black-eyed, possessed of straight black hair and pointed features, skeptical even at his very young age, disdainful of his older brother and his sister, whom he called “softies,” he was hard, at times, to love.
Rufus Anthony, or Tony, was brilliant and discerning, and had a subtlety beyond his years. He might be a little too gentle, a little too devoted to his twin sister, a little too grave about his responsibilities to others, a little too prone to be hurt by a casually brutal word or act. But he was not effeminate; he was not too bookish, though at seven he read many adult books, and he was an excellent scholar. Too, he was tall, slender, strong, and healthy, and when his rights were challenged, he could fight, and win over, any of his playmates, of whom he had many in Portersville and New York and Newport. Other boys respected him and courted him, and admired his mastery over horses and boats and his skill at sports. His amazing good looks never inspired envy, which was a remarkable thing, for he had softly curling hair the color of old silver and beautiful eyes of so pale a blue that they looked crystalline in sunlight.
Dolores, his beloved twin sister, was so like her brother that only her long and flowing hair, only the slight dimple in her right cheek, only her feminine ways, distinguished her from him. Allan would hold her in his arms, fondle her almost fiercely, murmur incoherent words of adoration into her ears. Though he loved DeWitt (with conscious effort), he was frequently angered by the little boy’s contempt for Dolores, against which she had no defense.
As usual, Allan and Cornelia and the children always spent two or three weeks in the summer in the house at Portersville. Allan worked furiously during this time, but he gave many hours to his children while Cornelia visited, sat in the gardens, planned her wardrobe for the season in New York and on the Riviera, and wandered through the rooms of the great house with all her childhood affection. If she happened on her children accidentally, she would hurry away as fast as possible. She went often to the Portersville offices of the company, and sat in on the drowsy summer meetings of the board of directors, and in a common-sense and practical way, gave her opinion, which was invariably received with the deepest attention and respect. It seemed to Allan that she was treated even more deferentially than he, but he had to admit that she had an astuteness at times beyond his own. There she would sit in a tall chair, a little back from the long table, flamboyantly beautiful and stylish in her white linen suits and high lace shirtwaists, her red hair partially covered by wide flower-filled hats, her gloved hands tense on her purse, her hazel eyes quick and discerning and blazing with life and intelligence. There was nothing she did not know about the company. Her remarks and suggestions were incorporated into the minutes of the board, and usually acted upon. Her loud voice, when she spoke, dominated the men. If, at twenty-nine, her features had become harder and more predatory, and if there was a sharp line between her eyes, she was still striking and full of fascination and power.
She listened to Allan with thoughtfulness and attention, and if she disagreed, it was a disagreement between equals. He knew that sometimes she was secretly amused by him, as was her father, though he never knew why. He had also discovered that his wife and his father-in-law would sometimes glance at him warily, and again, he never knew why. These were his only complaints against his wife.
On Sunday afternoons in Portersville during the summer he would take his children for drives, while Cornelia napped at home or went over papers concerning company matters. A favorite place of call was the Purcells’, where Grandma Purcell would listen with loving concern to her grandchildren, and where Grandpa Purcell could always be relied upon for a joke, a surreptitious handful of chocolates and cakes, a game, or a rough story. To the twins, lame and gentle and lovely Ruth Purcell, now seventeen, was the most important member of the family. Between the girl and the children there was an unspoken understanding and sympathy.
For DeWitt, at least, the most interesting place to visit was the home of Patrick and Laura Peale. All the children called Patrick “uncle,” and Laura, “auntie.” DeWitt, who knew that Patrick and Laura found him incomprehensible, and who looked at him with some coolness, was great friends with the Peale children—Miles, seven; Fielding, six; and Mary, four. Here the pretty twins were held in some scorn by the younger Peales. Here DeWitt’s remarks and opinions were received with approval; here he was the leader, though younger than the two other boys. It did not annoy him that “Daddy” was not so welcome in this house as he was at the Purcells’.
On this hot Sunday in August, Allan was besieged by his children. It was almost two o’clock. When were they going for their drive? And what house first? Dolores saw that her father appeared to be unusually tired today, and she nestled against his arm, looking up at his face concernedly. “Do we have to go see old Ruth?” asked DeWitt. “I like Grandpa Purcell, but Grandma isn’t so nice, and I hate Ruth. I hate lame people. Let’s go see Miles and Fielding and Mary. They’ve got a new pony.”
??
?What does it matter if Ruth is lame?” asked Tony admonishingly. “She told me she’ll have some new books for us today.”
“Pish on your old books,” said DeWitt. “Besides, they’re not good stories she reads. Silly ones. And Dolores looks silly, too, sitting on Ruth’s knee like a baby. Daddy, let’s go to the Peales’. Besides, they won’t be here next week. They’re going to the seashore, they said last time. They don’t go to Newport like us.”
Allan reached out to rumple the black hair of his youngest child, but DeWitt pulled away. He loathed having anyone touch him without his consent, and his small dark face, so concentrated and alert, darkened still more with resentment. He smoothed down the hair, which Allan had not touched, and he threw up his little head angrily. All his slight body stiffened. He repeated, “Let’s go to the Peales’.”
“I think,” said Allan judiciously, “that DeWitt should have his choice this week.”
This seemed fair to the twins, who, however, found the Peale children wearing and unfriendly. So Allan and the three children rolled away in one of the victorias, open to the hot wind and the sun. Tony and Dolores laughed and chattered with their father. DeWitt, as usual, was almost completely silent, his eyes raking the countryside with their accustomed pouncing look. He thought the babble of his brother and sister about the grandeur of the mountains, the glimpses of wild creatures in the woods, and the view of the city falling away below them, eminently foolish and pretentious. He could not imagine himself becoming ecstatic over a field of buttercups, or the blue flash of a jay among the dim boughs of a tree. When the twins begged that the carriage be stopped so that they could look closer at the silent flitting of a doe and a fawn among the trees, he uttered a low rude sound. DeWitt nursed a small animosity against his father. There was something about Daddy which invariably aroused annoyance and impatience in the little boy, and something close to contempt.
Allan, though he smiled at his children, was abstracted. He leaned back in his carriage and acknowledged to some misery and more than a little weariness. He said, “I wish there was some other place to go, somewhere interesting, where we’ve never gone before.”
“Where?” asked Tony eagerly. But Dolores pressed her face against her father’s arm with sympathy. Allan raised his hand, and the coachmen drew up the horses on the mountain road. “Let me think,” said Allan, frowning. He looked off into the radiant haze of the trees, and then far off into the mountains. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He started to speak, then stopped. No, it would not “do.” The whole idea was sentimental and ridiculous. Why should he have thought of it today, when he had not thought of it for years, and had not even cared? He had been working too hard this week. In fact, the past two years, which had included the Panic of 1893, had been almost too much for any man. His burdens and responsibilities had been increasing steadily. It was his exhaustion which had given him that absurd idea. …
“Where?” repeated Tony, and now even Dolores asked.
“Somewhere to play?” asked DeWitt, interested. “If it’s new, I don’t care.”
Allan looked at his children. The golden dust was slowly settling about the carriage, and the sleek black horses shrugged in it and tossed their heads. The hot and windy silence of the heights stirred the woods on either side of the road, and the mountains stood against the hot pale sky in vague green and purple. As Allan considered, and gazed at his children, the horses moved impatiently and their harness clattered in the quiet. The coachman sat like a statue with folded arms.
It was absurd, thought Allan, even to think of it. Cornelia would stare, round her eyes with amusement, and shrug. Allan could endure her rare but savage tempers with equanimity; he could quarrel with her, and even, on occasion, let her have her way without a loss in his own self-esteem. But her amusement, covert as it always was, and only revealed by a hazel twinkle, never failed to enrage him. He said aloud, “I don’t think we’ll go, after all. If we did, it would have to be a secret, and secrets. …”
“A secret!” cried the twins with delight.
“A secret,” repeated DeWitt with slow and sinister pleasure.
For the first time the difference in intonation between the twins and DeWitt came forcibly to Allan’s attention. Now he looked only at the youngest child, and he frowned. “Secrets aren’t always good,” he said somewhat pompously. DeWitt brightened. “This wouldn’t be, would it, Daddy?” he asked. His black eyes shone with anticipation.
“I didn’t say that, DeWitt.” Allan became irritable with himself and the little boy. Dolores said. “If it’s a nice secret, and it would be fun. …”
“There aren’t any ‘nice’ secrets,” said the precocious DeWitt scornfully. “Who would want them then, you silly old thing?”
“It’s not a secret,” said Allan, annoyed. “I didn’t mean it in your way, DeWitt. You’re too sharp for your own good, young man.”
The small eyes narrowed on Allan cunningly. “Oh, all right, then. We’ll go to the Peales. They’ve got a new pony. Who wants a secret anyway, except girls?” His little sallow hand played indifferently with the buttons of his jacket. “The last time, Miles kicked Dolores and made her cry, and Mary put pepper in old Tony’s lemonade. It was awfully funny. I have lots of fun at the Peales’.”
The twins were depressed at this recollection. Dolores hesitated, then said, “Daddy, we’d like to go to see the secret place.”
DeWitt laughed his quiet and derisive laughter. “Fielding hates old Tony, too. He puts burrs on his chair. Lots of fun at the Peales’. They like me and I like them.”
“I think they’re awful,” said Tony. His fair face was already flushed with sun and heat, and now it flushed deeper. “Sometimes they play all right, but most of the time they’re nasty. Daddy, let’s go to the secret place.”
DeWitt smiled and said nothing. Why, the little devil gets what he wants almost all the time! thought Allan wrathfully. He said, “We’ll go to this new place, but it isn’t a secret; at least it isn’t from your mama. Is that understood?”
“Do we have to tell her?” asked DeWitt, still smiling.
“Not if you don’t want to,” replied Allan. He leaned toward the coachman and gave him instructions. The carriage was driven to a wider place in the road, then carefully turned about. Allan continued: “I haven’t been there, myself, except to drive by it.”
The carriage rolled down the road in the warm and golden silence. Portersville rose slowly up to meet it, its river a sparkling flash dividing East Town from West, its houses and factories dun-colored in the sunlight. Now the carriage began to roll down a long and winding road away from the city, and green fields sloped into the valley. “Winston Road,” said Dolores wonderingly. “We don’t know anyone on Winston Road.” Allan did not answer. He was excited, dubious, and uneasy. It might all turn out very disagreeably for everybody, under all the circumstances. DeWitt, the little fiend, had goaded him into it. Allan glanced at the child, and was angered to see that his son was watching him with a speculative gleam in his eye.
Allan leaned back in the carriage and closed his aching eyes. Perhaps he hadn’t recovered completely from his “collapse” of a year ago; perhaps it was returning. With some fear, he recalled the weeks previous to his breakdown: the insomnia, the nightmares, the sense of smothering and choking even when working quietly at his desk, the cold trembling of his bones, the nausea, the increased necessity to drink if he was to meet people with any composure, the nebulous but awful forebodings which struck him without warning, the consciousness of some enormous loss which was without a name, the sedatives which finally could not calm the sick and unconscious dreads, the restlessness which tormented him and made him aware of every curling nerve in his body, and finally the total inability to think and concentrate.
He became aware, now, that he was sweating, and that his sweat was cold in spite of the heat. Good God, he thought, not again! His fear made his throat tighten. If only, his thoughts continued, I knew what the hell had caused tha
t damned collapse, and why it is threatening again. I have everything I ever wanted; no man could want more. He felt a gentle touch on his arm and opened his eyes. Dolores was gazing at him with concern. “Don’t you feel well, Daddy?” she asked anxiously. He put his arm about the child and tried to smile. “Not very,” he admitted. And then, without thinking, he added, “Perhaps that is why I thought of going to—this place.”
His own words startled him. He pondered over them. I’m losing my mind, he said to himself. What have they got to do with it? I haven’t given them a passing thought for years, except, perhaps, at Christmas, when I’ve sent them gifts. And I wouldn’t have sent them at all, if it hadn’t been for my mother.
The carriage was bowling rapidly down the suburban road. Handsome houses gave way to those less pretentious, and finally the green spaces were wider and wider and cornfields appeared, clusters of straggling woods, meadows yellow with wheat and oats, gray farm houses, fences, and cattle. Bridges over summer-shrunken streams were crossed smartly; the mountains hovered in the sky like mauve clouds. Dogs ran out from lanes, barking at the carriage. The Sunday silence seemed to have absorbed all motion from the landscape.
“We’re coming to Laketon,” said Tony. “Are we going to a farm?”
“No,” said Allan. “We are going just two miles beyond Laketon. You’ve never been there.”
The carriage went through the small village, emerged onto a country road overhung with ancient elms tangled and cool against the sun. The children were sitting up straight, watching. “What little houses,” said DeWitt scornfully. “Poor people’s houses.”