“The child!” screamed Mrs. Simpson.
“A bouncing boy. He weighed thirteen pounds at birth and is at the present a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy.”
“What became of — her?” said Genevieve.
“Of whom?”
“The — the contralto.”
“She died — she died in childbirth.”
“But — but Mr. Pentland?” inquired Mrs. Simpson in an uncertain voice. “Didn’t he — marry her?”
“How could he?” Eugene answered with calm logic. “He was married to someone else.”
And casting his head back, suddenly he sang: “You know I’m in love with some-boddy else, so why can’t you leave me alone?”
“Well, I NEVER!” Mrs. Simpson stared dumbly into the fire.
“Well, HARDLY ever,” Eugene became allusively Gilbertian. “She hardly ever has a Big, Big B.” And he sang throatily: “Oh, yes! Oh, yes, indeed!” relapsing immediately into a profound and moody abstraction, but noting with delight that Genevieve and her mother were looking at him furtively, with frightened and bewildered glances.
“Say!” The boy, whose ponderous jowl had been sunken on his fist for ten minutes, now at length distilled a question. “Whatever became of your father? Is he still living?”
“No!” said Eugene, after a brief pause, returning suddenly to fact. “No! He’s still dying.”
And he fixed upon them suddenly the battery of his fierce eyes, lit with horror:
“He has a cancer.” After a moment, he concluded: “My father is a very great man.”
They looked at him in stricken bewilderment.
“Gee!” said the boy, after another silence. “That guy’s worse than our old man!”
“Jimmy! Jimmy!” whispered Genevieve scathingly.
There was a very long, for the Simpson family, a very painful, silence.
“Aha! Aha!” Eugene’s head was full of ahas.
“I suppose you have thought it strange,” Mrs. Simpson began with a cracked laugh, which she strove to make careless, “that you have never seen Mr. Simpson about when you called?”
“Yes,” he answered with a ready dishonesty, for he had never thought of it at all. But he reflected at the same moment that this was precisely the sort of thing people were always thinking of: suddenly before the embattled front of that little family, its powers aligned for the defence of reputation, he felt lonely, shut out. He saw himself looking in at them through a window: all communication with life grouped and protected seemed for ever shut off.
“Mother decided some months ago that she could no longer live with Father,” said Genevieve, with sad dignity.
“Sure,” volunteered Jimmy, “he’s livin’ with another woman!”
“Jimmy!” said Genevieve hoarsely.
Eugene had a momentary flash of humorous sympathy with the departed Simpson; then he looked at her white bickering face and felt sorry for her. She carried her own punishment with her.
xix
Shall a man be dead within your heart before his rotten flesh be wholly dead within the ground, and before the producing fats and syrup cease to give life to his growing hair? Shall a man so soon be done with that which still provides a nest for working maggotry or shall a brother leave a brother’s memory before the worms have left his tissue? This is a pregnant subject: there should be laws passed, and a discipline, which train a man to greater constancy. And suddenly, out of this dream of time in which he lived, he would awaken, and instantly, like a man freed from the spell of an enchantment which has held him captive for many years in some strange land, he would remember home with an intolerable sense of pain and loss, the lost world of his childhood, and feel the strange and bitter miracle of life and have no words for what he wished to say.
That lost world would come back to him at many times, and often for no cause that he could trace or fathom — a voice half-heard, a word far-spoken, a leaf, a light that came and passed and came again. But always when that lost world would come back, it came at once, like a sword-thrust through the entrails, in all its panoply of past time, living, whole, and magic as it had always been.
And always when it came to him, and at whatever time, and for whatever reason, he could hear his father’s great voice sounding in the house again and see his gaunt devouring stride as he had come muttering round the corner at the hour of noon long years before.
And then he would hear again the voice of his dead brother, and remember with a sense of black horror, dream-like disbelief, that Ben was dead, and yet could not believe that Ben had ever died, or that he had had a brother, lost a friend. Ben would come back to him in these moments with a blazing and intolerable reality, until he heard his quiet living voice again, saw his fierce scowling eyes of bitter grey, his scornful, proud and lively face, and always when Ben came back to him it was like this: he saw his brother in a single image, in some brief forgotten moment of the past, remembered him by a word, a gesture, a forgotten act; and certainly all that could ever be known of Ben’s life was collected in that blazing image of lost time and the forgotten moment. And suddenly he would be there in a strange land, staring upward from his bed in darkness, hearing his brother’s voice again, and living in the far and bitter miracle of time.
And always now, when Ben came back to him, he came within the frame and limits of a single image, one of those instant blazing images which from this time would haunt his memory and which more and more, as a kind of distillation — a reward for all the savage struggles of his Faustian soul with the protean and brain-maddening forms of life — were to collect and concentrate the whole material of experience and memory, in which the process of ten thousand days and nights could in an instant be resumed. And the image in which Ben now always came to him was this: he saw his brother standing in a window, and an old red light of fading day, and all the strange and tragic legend of his destiny was on his brow, and all that any man could ever see or know or understand of his dead brother’s life was there.
Bitter and beautiful, scorn no more. Ben stands there in the window, for a moment idle, his strong, lean fingers resting lightly on his bony hips, his grey eyes scowling fiercely, bitterly and contemptuously over the laughing and exuberant faces of the crowd. For a moment more he scowls fixedly at them with an expression of almost savage contempt. Then scornfully he turns away from them. The bitter, lean and pointed face, the shapely, flashing, close-cropped head jerks upward, backward, he laughs briefly and with pitying contempt as he speaks to that unknown and invisible auditor who all his life has been the eternal confidant and witness of his scorn.
“Oh my God!” he says, jerking his scornful head out towards the crowd again. “Listen to this, will you?”
They look at him with laughing and exuberant faces, unwounded by his scorn. They look at him with a kind of secret and unspoken tenderness which the strange and bitter savour of his life awakes in people always. They look at him with faith, with pride, with the joy and confidence and affection which his presence stirs in everyone. And as if he were the very author of their fondest hopes, as if he were the fiat, not the helpless agent, of the thing they long to see accomplished, they yell to him in their unreasoning exuberance: “All right, Ben! Give us a hit now! A single’s all we need, boy! Bring him in!” Or others, crying with the same exuberance of faith: “Strike him out, Ben! Make him fan!”
But now the crowd, sensing the electric thrill and menace of a decisive