Mrs. Thorndike ventured that she had found the town much changed for the better.
Yes, Mrs. Ferguesson supposed it was.
Then Mrs. Thorndike began in earnest. “How wonderful it is that all your sons have turned out so well! I take the MacAlpin paper chiefly to keep track of the Ferguesson boys. You and Mr. Ferguesson must be very proud.”
“Yes’m, we are. We are thankful.”
“Even the Denver papers have long articles about Hector and Homer and their great sheep ranches in Wyoming. And Vincent has become such a celebrated chemist, and is helping to destroy all the irreducible elements that I learned when I went to school. And Bryan is with Marshall Field!”
Mrs. Ferguesson nodded and pressed her hand, but she still kept looking down the hall toward the front door. Suddenly she turned with all herself to Mrs. Thorndike and with a storm of tears cried out from her heart: “Oh, Miss Knightly, talk to me about my Lesley! Seems so many have forgot her, but I know you haven’t.”
“No, Mrs. Ferguesson, I never forget her. Yesterday morning I took a box of roses that I brought with me from my own garden down to where she sleeps. I was glad to find a little seat there, so that I could stay for a long while and think about her.”
“Oh, I wish I could have gone with you, Miss Knightly! (I can’t call you anything else.) I wish we could have gone together. I can’t help feeling she knows. Anyhow, we know! And there’s nothing in all my life so precious to me to remember and think about as my Lesley. I’m no soft woman, either. The boys will tell you that. They’ll tell you they got on because I always had a firm hand over them. They’re all true to Lesley, my boys. Every time they come home they go down there. They feel it like I do, as if it had happened yesterday. Their father feels it, too, when he’s not taken up with his abstractions. Anyhow, I don’t think men feel things like women and boys. My boys have stayed boys. I do believe they feel as bad as I do about moving up here. We have four nice bedrooms upstairs to make them comfortable, should they all come home at once, and they’re polite about us and tell us how well fixed we are. But Miss Knightly, I know at the bottom of their hearts they wish they was back in the old house down by the depot, sleeping in the attic.”
Mrs. Thorndike stroked her hand. “I looked for the old house as I was coming up from the station. I made the driver stop.”
“Ain’t it dreadful, what’s been done to it? If I’d foreseen, I’d never have let Mr. Ferguesson sell it. It was in my name. I’d have kept it to go back to and remember sometimes. Folks in middle age make a mistake when they think they can better themselves. They can’t, not if they have any heart. And the other kind don’t matter—they aren’t real people—just poor put-ons, that try to be like the advertisements. Father even took me to California one winter. I was miserable all the time. And there were plenty more like me—miserable underneath. The women lined up in cafeterias, carrying their little trays—like convicts, seemed to me—and running to beauty shops to get their poor old hands manicured. And the old men, Miss Knightly, I pitied them most of all! Old bent-backed farmers, standing round in their shirt-sleeves, in plazas and alleyways, pitching horseshoes like they used to do at home. I tell you, people are happiest where they’ve had their children and struggled along and been real folks, and not tourists. What do you think about all this running around, Miss Knightly? You’re an educated woman, I never had much schooling.”
“I don’t think schooling gives people any wisdom, Mrs. Ferguesson. I guess only life does that.”
“Well, this I know: our best years are when we’re working hardest and going right ahead when we can hardly see our way out. Times I was a good deal perplexed. But I always had one comfort. I did own our own house. I never had to worry about the rent. Don’t it seem strange to you, though, that all our boys are so practical, and their father such a dreamer?”
Mrs. Thorndike murmured that some people think boys are most likely to take after their mother.
Mrs. Ferguesson smiled absently and shook her head. Presently she came out with: “It’s a comfort to me up here, on a still night I can still hear the trains whistle in. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I lie and listen for them. And I can almost think I am down there, with my children up in the loft. We were very happy.” She looked up at her guest and smiled bravely. “I suppose you go away tonight?”
Mrs. Thorndike explained her plan to spend a day in the country.
“You’re going out to visit the little schools? Why, God bless you, dear! You’re still our Miss Knightly! But you’d better take a car, so you can get up to the Wild Rose school and back in one day. Do go there! The teacher is Mandy Perkins—she was one of her little scholars. You’ll like Mandy, an’ she loved Lesley. You must get Bud Sullivan to drive you. Engage him right now—the telephone’s there in the hall, and the garage is 306. He’ll creep along for you, if you tell him. He does for me. I often go out to the Wild Rose school, and over to see dear Mrs. Robertson, who ain’t so young as she was then. I can’t go with Mr. Ferguesson. He drives so fast it’s no satisfaction. And then he’s not always mindful. He’s had some accidents. When he gets to thinking, he’s just as likely to run down a cow as not. He’s had to pay for one. You know cows will cross the road right in front of a car. Maybe their grandchildren calves will be more modern-minded.”
Mrs. Thorndike did not see her old friend again, but she wrote her a long letter from Wiscasset, Maine, which Mrs. Ferguesson sent to her son Hector, marked, “To be returned, but first pass on to your brothers.”
Before Breakfast
Henry Grenfell, of Grenfell & Saunders, got resentfully out of bed after a bad night. The first sleepless night he had ever spent in his own cabin, on his own island, where nobody knew that he was senior partner of Grenfell & Saunders, and where the business correspondence was never forwarded to him. He slipped on a blanket dressing-gown over his pyjamas (island mornings in the North Atlantic are chill before dawn), went to the front windows of his bedroom, and ran up the heavy blue shades which shut out the shameless blaze of the sunrise if one wanted to sleep late—and he usually did on the first morning after arriving. (The trip up from Boston was long and hard, by trains made up of the cast-off coaches of liquidated railroads, and then by the two worst boats in the world.) The cabin modestly squatted on a tiny clearing between a tall spruce wood and the sea,—sat about fifty yards back from the edge of the red sandstone cliff which dropped some two hundred feet to a narrow beach—so narrow that it was covered at high tide. The cliffs rose sheer on this side of the island, were undercut in places, and faced the east.
The east was already lightening; a deep red streak burnt over the sky-line water, and the water itself was thick and dark, indigo blue—occasionally a silver streak, where the tide was going out very quietly. While Grenfell stood at his window, a big snowshoe hare ran downhill from the spruce wood, bounded into the grass plot at the front door, and began nervously nibbling the clover. He was puzzled and furtive; his jaws quivered, and his protruding eyes kept watch behind him as well as before. Grenfell was sure it was the hare that used to come every morning two summers ago and had become quite friendly. But now he seemed ill at ease; presently he started, sat still for an instant, then scampered up the grassy hillside and disappeared into the dark spruce wood. Silly thing! Still, it was a kind of greeting.
Grenfell left the window and went to his walnut washstand (no plumbing) and mechanically prepared to take a shower in the shed room behind his sleeping-chamber. He began his morning routine, still thinking about the hare.
First came the eye-drops. Tilting his head back, thus staring into the eastern horizon, he raised the glass dropper, but he didn’t press the bulb. He saw something up there. While he was watching the rabbit the sky had changed. Above the red streak on the water line the sky had lightened to faint blue, and across the horizon a drift of fleecy rose cloud was floating. And through it a white-bright, gold-bright planet was shining. The morning star, of course. At this hour, and so near the sun, it would be V
enus.
Behind her rose-coloured veils, quite alone in the sky already blue, she seemed to wait. She had come in on her beat, taken her place in the figure. Serene, impersonal splendour. Merciless perfection, ageless sovereignty. The poor hare and his clover, poor Grenfell and his eye-drops!
He braced himself against his washstand and still stared up at her. Something roused his temper so hot that he began to mutter aloud:
“And what’s a hundred and thirty-six million years to you, Madam? That Professor needn’t blow. You were winking and blinking up there maybe a hundred and thirty-six million times before that date they are so proud of. The rocks can’t tell any tales on you. You were doing your stunt up there long before there was anything down here but—God knows what! Let’s leave that to the professors, Madam, you and me!”
This childish bitterness toward “millions” and professors was the result of several things. Two of Grenfell’s sons were “professors”; Harrison a distinguished physicist at thirty. This morning, however, Harrison had not popped up in his father’s mind. Grenfell was still thinking of a pleasant and courtly scientist whom he had met on the boat yesterday—a delightful man who had, temporarily at least, wrecked Grenfell’s life with civilities and information.
It was natural, indeed inevitable, that two clean, close-shaven gentlemen in tailored woods clothes, passengers on the worst tub owned by the Canadian Steamships Company and both bound for a little island off the Nova Scotia coast, should get into conversation. It was all the more natural since the scientist was accompanied by a lovely girl—his daughter.
It was a pleasure to look at her, just as it is a pleasure to look at any comely creature who shows breeding, delicate preferences. She had lovely eyes, lovely skin, lovely manners. She listened closely when Grenfell and her father talked, but she didn’t bark up with her opinions. When he asked her about their life on the island last summer, he liked everything she said about the place and the people. She answered him lightly, as if her impressions could matter only to herself, but, having an opinion, it was only good manners to admit it. “Sweet, but decided,” was his rough estimate.
Since they were both going to an island which wasn’t even on the map, supposed to be known only to the motor launches that called after a catch of herring, it was natural that the two gentlemen should talk about that bit of wooded rock in the sea. Grenfell always liked to talk about it to the right person. At first he thought Professor Fairweather was a right person. He had felt alarm when Fairweather mentioned that last summer he had put up a portable house on the shore about two miles from Grenfell’s cabin. But he added that it would soon vanish as quietly as it had come. His geological work would be over this autumn, and his portable house would be taken to pieces and shipped to an island in the South Pacific. Having thus reassured him, Fairweather carelessly, in quite the tone of weather-comment small talk, proceeded to wreck one of Grenfell’s happiest illusions; the escape-avenue he kept in the back of his mind when he was at his desk at Grenfell & Saunders, Bonds. The Professor certainly meant no harm. He was a man of the world, urbane, not self-important. He merely remarked that the island was interesting geologically because the two ends of the island belonged to different periods, yet the ice seemed to have brought them both down together.
“And about how old would our end be, Professor?” Grenfell meant simply to express polite interest, but he gave himself away, parted with his only defence—indifference.
“We call it a hundred and thirty-six million years,” was the answer he got.
“Really? That’s getting it down pretty fine, isn’t it? I’m just a blank where science is concerned. I went to work when I was thirteen—didn’t have any education. Of course some business men read up on science. But I have to struggle with reports and figures a good deal. When I do read I like something human—the old fellows: Scott and Dickens and Fielding. I get a great kick out of them.”
The Professor was a perfect gentleman, but he couldn’t resist the appeal of ignorance. He had sensed in half an hour that this man loved the island. (His daughter had sensed it a year ago, as soon as she arrived there with her father. Something about his cabin, the little patch of lawn in front, and the hedge of wild roses that fenced it in, told her that.) In their talk Professor Fairweather had come to realize that this man had quite an unusual feeling for the island, therefore he would certainly like to know more about it—all he could tell him!
The sun leaped out of the sea—the planet vanished. Grenfell rejected his eye-drops. Why patch up? What was the use … of anything? Why tear a man loose from his little rock and shoot him out into the eternities? All that stuff was inhuman. A man had his little hour, with heat and cold and a time-sense suited to his endurance. If you took that away from him you left him spineless, accidental, unrelated to anything. He himself was, he realized, sitting in his bathrobe by his washstand, limp! No wonder: what a night! What a dreadful night! The speeds which machinists had worked up in the last fifty years were mere baby-talk to what can go through a man’s head between dusk and daybreak. In the last ten hours poor Grenfell had travelled over seas and continents, gone through boyhood and youth, founded a business, made a great deal of money, and brought up an expensive family. (There were three sons, to whom he had given every advantage and who had turned out well, two of them brilliantly.) And all this meant nothing to him except negatively—“to avoid worse rape,” he quoted Milton to himself.
Last night had been one of those nights of revelation, revaluation, when everything seems to come clear … only to fade out again in the morning. In a low cabin on a high red cliff overhanging the sea, everything that was shut up in him, under lock and bolt and pressure, simply broke jail, spread out into the spaciousness of the night, undraped, unashamed.
When his father died, Henry had got a job as messenger boy with the Western Union. He always remembered those years with a certain pride. His mother took in sewing. There were two little girls, younger than he. When he looked back on that time, there was nothing in it to be ashamed of. Those are the years, he often told the reformers, that make character, make proficiency. A business man should have early training, like a pianist, at the instrument. The sense of responsibility makes a little boy a citizen: for him there is no “dangerous age.” From his first winter with the telegraph company he knew he could get on if he tried hard, since most lads emphatically did not try hard. He read law at night, and when he was twenty was confidential clerk with one of the most conservative legal firms in Colorado.
Everything went well until he took his first long vacaton—bicycling in the mountains above Colorado Springs. One morning he was pedalling hard uphill when another bicycle came round a curve and collided with him; a girl coasting. Both riders were thrown. She got her foot caught in her wheel; sprain and lacerations. Henry ran two miles down to her hotel and her family. New York people; the father’s name was a legend in Henry’s credulous Western world. And they liked him, Henry, these cultivated, clever, experienced people! The mother was the ruling power—remarkable woman. What she planned, she put through—relentless determination. He ought to know, for he married that only daughter one year after she coasted into him. A warning unheeded, that first meeting. It was his own intoxicated vanity that sealed his fate. He had never been “made much over” before.
It had worked out as well as most marriages, he supposed. Better than many. The intelligent girl had been no discredit to him, certainly. She had given him two remarkable sons, any man would be proud of them.…
Here Grenfell had flopped over in bed and suddenly sat up, muttering aloud. “But God, they’re as cold as ice! I can’t see through it. They’ve never lived at all, those two fellows. They’ve never run after the ball—they’re so damned clever they don’t have to. They just reach out and take the ball. Yes, fine hands, like their grandmother’s; long … white … beautiful nails. The way Harrison picked up that book! I’m glad my paws are red and stubby.”
For a moment he recalled
sharply a little scene. Three days ago he was packing for his escape to this island. Harrison, the eldest son, the physicist, after knocking, had entered to his father’s “Come in!” He came to ask who should take care of his personal mail (that which came to the house) if Miss O’Doyle should go on her vacation before he returned. He put the question rather grimly. The family seemed to resent the fact that, though he worked like a steam shovel while he was in town, when he went on a vacation he never told them how long he would be away or where he was going.
“Oh, I meant to tell you, Harrison, before I leave. But it was nice of you to think of it. Miss O’Doyle has decided to put off her vacation until the middle of October, and then she’ll take a long one.” He was sure he spoke amiably as he stood looking at his son. He was always proud of Harrison’s fine presence, his poise and easy reserve. The little travelling bag (made to his order) which on a journey he always carried himself, never trusted to a porter, lay open on his writing table. On top of his pyjamas and razor case lay two little books bound in red leather. Harrison picked up one and glanced at the lettering on the back. King Henry IV, Part I.
“Light reading?” he remarked. Grenfell was stung by such impertinence. He resented any intrusion on his private, personal, non-family life.
“Light or heavy,” he remarked dryly, “they’re good company. And they’re mighty human.”
“They have that reputation,” his son admitted.
A spark flashed into Grenfell’s eye. Was the fellow sarcastic, or merely patronizing?
“Reputation, hell!” he broke out. “I don’t carry books around with my toothbrushes and razors on account of their reputation.”
“No, I wouldn’t accuse you of that.” The young man spoke quietly, not warmly, but as if he meant it. He hesitated and left the room.
Sitting up in his bed in the small hours of the morning, Grenfell wondered if he hadn’t flared up too soon. Maybe the fellow hadn’t meant to be sarcastic. All the same he had no business to touch anything in his father’s bag. That bag was like his coat pocket. Grenfell never bothered his family with his personal diversions, and he never intruded upon theirs. Harrison and his mother were a team—a close corporation! Grenfell respected it absolutely. No questions, no explanations demanded by him. The bills came in; Miss O’Doyle wrote the checks and he signed them. He hadn’t the curiosity, the vulgarity to look at them.