“WHAThas made them so different?” the child pondered while sitting opposite them in the carriage. “Why don’t they behave toward me as they did at first? Why does mamma avoid my eyes when I look at her? Why does he always try to joke when I’m around and make a silly of himself? They don’t talk to me as they did yesterday or the day before yesterday. Their faces even seem different. Mamma’s lips are so red she must have rouged them. I never saw her do that before. And he keeps frowning as though he were offended. Could I have said anything to annoy them? No, I haven’t said a word. It cannot be on my account that they’re so changed.Even their manner toward each other is not the same as it was. They behave as though they had been naughty and didn’t dare confess. They don’t chat the way they did yesterday, nor laugh. They’re embarrassed, they’re concealing something. They’ve got a secret between them that they don’t want to tell me. I’m going to find it out. I must, I don’t care what happens, I must. I believe I know what it is. It must be the same thing that grown-up people always shut me out from when they talk about it. It’s what books speak of, and it comes in operas when the men and women on the stage stand singing face to face with their arms spread out, and embrace, and shove each other away. It must have something to do with my French governess, who behaved so badly with papa and was dismissed. All these things are connected. I feel they are, but I don’t know how. Oh, to find it out, at last to find it out, that secret! To possess the key thatopens all doors! Not to be a child any longer with everything kept hidden from one and always being held off and deceived. Now or never! I will tear it from them, that dreadful secret!”
A deep furrow cut itself between the child’s brows. He looked almost old as he sat in the carriage painfully cogitating this great mystery and never casting a single glance at the landscape, which was shading into all the delicate colors of the spring, the mountains in the freshened green of their pines, the valleys in the mistier greens of budding trees, shrubbery and young grass. All he had eyes for were the man and the woman on the seat opposite him, as though, with his hot gaze, as with an angling hook, he could snatch the secret from the shimmering depths of their eyes.
Nothing gives so keen an edge to the intelligence as a passionate suspicion. All the possibilities of an immature mind are developedby a trail leading into obscurity. Sometimes it is only a single light door that keeps children out of the world that we call the real world, and a chance puff of wind may blow it open.
Edgar, all at once, felt himself tangibly closer, closer than ever before, to the Unknown, the Great Secret. It was right next to him, still veiled and unriddled, but very near. It excited him, and it was this that lent him his sudden solemnity. Unconsciously he sensed that he was approaching the outer edges of childhood.
The baron and Edgar’s mother were both sensible of a dumb opposition in front of them without realizing that it emanated from the child. The presence of a third person in the carriage constrained them, and those two dark glowing orbs opposite acted as a check. They scarcely dared to speak or look up, and it was impossible for them to drop back into thelight, easy conversational tone of the day before, so entangled were they already in ardent confidences and words suggestive of secret caresses. They would start a subject, promptly come to a halt, say a broken phrase or two, make another attempt, then lapse again into complete silence. Everything they said seemed always to stumble over the child’s obstinate silence and fall flat.
The mother was especially oppressed by her son’s sullen quiescence. Giving him a cautious glance out of the corners of her eyes, she was startled to observe, for the first time, in the manner Edgar compressed his lips, a resemblance to her husband when he was annoyed. At that particular moment, when she was playing “hide-and-seek” with an adventure, it was more than ordinarily discomfiting to be reminded of her husband. The boy, only a foot or two away, with his dark, restless eyes and that suggestion behind his pale foreheadof lying in wait, seemed to her like a ghost, a guardian of her conscience, doubly intolerable there in the close quarters of the carriage. Suddenly, for one second, Edgar looked up and met his mother’s gaze. Instantly they dropped their eyes in the consciousness that they were spying on each other. Till then each had had implicit faith in the other. Now something had come between mother and child and made a difference. For the first time in their lives they set to observing each other, to separating their destinies, with secret hate already mounting in their hearts, though the feeling was too young for either to admit it to himself.
When the horses pulled up at the hotel entrance, all three were relieved. The excursion had been a failure, each of them felt, though thy did not say so. Edgar was the first to get out of the carriage. His mother excused herself for going straight up to herroom, pleading a headache. She was tired and wanted to be by herself. Edgar and the baron were left alone together.
The baron paid the coachman, looked at his watch, and mounted the steps to the hall, paying no attention to Edgar and passed him with that easy sway of his slim back which had so enchanted the child that he had immediately begun to imitate the baron’s walk. The baron brushed past him, right past him. Evidently he had forgotten him and left him to stand there beside the driver and the horses as though he did not belong to him.
Something in Edgar broke in two as the man, whom in spite of everything he still idolized, slighted him like that. A bitter despair filled his heart when the baron left without so much as touching him with his cloak or saying a single word, when he, Edgar, was conscious of having done no wrong. His painfully enforced self-restraint gave way, the tooheavy burden of dignity that he had imposed upon himself dropped from his narrow little shoulders, and he became the child again, small and humble, as he had been the day before. At the top of the steps he confronted the baron and said in a strained voice, thick with suppressed tears:
“What have I done to you that you don’t notice me any more? Why are you always like this with me now? And mamma, too? Why are you always sending me off? Am I a nuisance to you, or have I done anything to offend you?”
The baron was startled. There was something in the child’s voice that upset him at first, then stirred him to tenderness and sympathy for the unsuspecting boy.
“You’re a goose, Eddie. I’m merely out of sorts to-day. You’re a dear boy, and I really love you.” He tousled Edgar’s hair, yet with averted face so as not to be obliged to see thosegreat moist, beseeching child’s eyes. The comedy he was playing was becoming painful. He was beginning to be ashamed of having trifled so insolently with the child’s love. That small voice, quivering with suppressed sobs, cut him to the quick. “Go upstairs now, Eddie. We’ll get along together this evening just as nicely as ever, you’ll see.”
“You won’t let mamma send me right off to bed, will you?”
“No, no, I won’t, Eddie,” the baron smiled. “Just go on up. I must dress for dinner.”
Edgar went, made happy for the moment. Soon, however, the hammer began to knock at his heart again. He was years older since the day before. A strange guest, Distrust, had lodged itself in his child’s breast.
He waited for the decisive test, at table. Nine o’clock came, and his mother had not yet said a word about his going to bed. Why did she let him stay on just that day of all days,she who was usually so exact? It bothered him. Had the baron told her what he had said! He was consumed with regret, suddenly, that he had run after the baron so trustingly. At ten o’clock his mother rose, and took leave of the baron, who, oddly, showed no surprise at her early departure and made no attempt to detain her as he usually did. The hammer beat harder and harder at Edgar’s breast.
Now he must apply the test with exceeding care. He, too, behaved as though he suspected nothing and followed his mother to the door. Actually, in that second, he caught a smiling glance that travelled over his head straight to the baron and seemed to indicate a mutual understanding, a secret held in common. So the baron had betrayed him! That was why his mother had left so early. He, Edgar, was to be lulled with a sense of security so that he would not get in their way the next day.
“Mean!” he murmured.
“What’s that?” his mother asked.
“Nothing,” he muttered between clenched teeth.
He, too, had his secret. His secret was hate, a great hate for the two of them.
THEtumult of Edgar’s conflicting emotions subsided into one smooth, clear feeling of hate and open hostility, concentrated and unadulterated. Now that he was certain of being in their way, the imposition of his presence upon them gave him a voluptuous satisfaction. Always accompanying them with the compressed strength of his enmity, he would goad them into madness. He gloated over the thought. The first to whom he showed his teeth was the baron, when he came downstairs in the morning and said “Hello, Edgar!” with genuine heartiness in his voice. Edgar remained sitting in the easy chair and answered curtly with a hard “G’d morning."
“Your mother down yet?”
Edgar kept his eyes glued to his newspaper.
“I don’t know.”
The baron was puzzled.
“Slept badly, Eddie?” The baron was counting on a joke to help him over the situation again, but Edgar merely tossed out a contemptuous “No” and continued to study the paper.
“Stupid,” the baron murmured, shrugging his shoulders and walked away. Hostilities had been declared.
Toward his mother Edgar’s manner was cool and polite. When she made an awkward attempt to send him off to the tennis-court, he gave her a quiet rebuff, and his smile and the bitter curl at the corners of his mouth showed that he was no longer to be fooled.
“I’d rather go walking with you, mamma,” he said with assumed friendliness, looking her straight in the eyes. His answer was obviouslynot to her taste. She hesitated and seemed to be looking for something.
“Wait for me here,” she decided at length and went into the dining-room for breakfast.
Edgar waited, but his distrust was lively, and his instincts, all astir, extracted a secret hostile intent from everything the baron and his mother now said. Suspicion was beginning to give him remarkable perspicacity sometimes. Instead, therefore, of waiting in the hall, as he had been bidden, he went outside to a spot from which he commanded a view not only of the main entrance but of all the exits from the hotel. Something in him scented deception. He hid himself behind a pile of wood, as the Indians do in the books, and when, about half an hour later, he saw his mother actually coming out of a side door carrying a bunch of exquisite roses and followed by the baron, the traitor, he laughed in glee. They seemed to be gay and full ofspirits. Were they feeling relieved at having escaped him to be alone with their secret? They laughed as they talked, and turned into the road leading to the woods.
The moment had come. Edgar, as though mere chance had brought him that way, strolled out from behind the woodpile and walked to meet them, with the utmost composure, allowing himself ample time to feast upon their surprise. When they caught sight of him they were quite taken aback, he saw, and exchanged a glance of astonishment. The child advanced slowly, with an assumed nonchalant air, never removing his mocking gaze from their faces.
“Oh, here you are, Eddie. We were looking for you inside,” his mother said finally.
“The shameless liar!” the child thought, but held his lips set hard, keeping back the secret of his hate. The three stood there irresolutely, one watchful of the others.
“Well, let’s go on,” said the woman, annoyed, but resigned, and plucked one of the lovely roses to bite. Her nostrils were quivering, a sign in her of extreme anger. Edgar stood still, as though it were a matter of indifference to him whether they walked on or not, looked up at the sky, waited for them to start, then followed leisurely. The baron made one more attempt.
“There’s a tennis tournament to-day. Have you ever seen one?”
The baron was not worth an answer any more. Edgar merely gave him a scornful look and pursed his lips for whistling. That was his full reply. His hate showed its bared teeth.
Edgar’s unwished-for presence weighed upon the two like a nightmare. They felt very like convicts who follow their keeper gritting their teeth and clenching their fists in secret. Edgar neither did nor said anythingout of the way, yet he became, every moment, more unbearable to them, with his watchful glances out of great moist eyes and his dogged sullenness which was like a prolonged growl at any attempt they made at an advance.
“Go on ahead of us,” his mother suddenly snapped, made altogether ill at ease by his intent listening to everything she and the baron were saying. “Don’t be hopping right at my toes. It makes me fidgety.”
Edgar obeyed. But at every few steps he would face about and stand still, waiting for them to catch up if they had lingered behind, letting his gaze travel over them diabolically and enmeshing them in a fiery net of hate, in which, they felt, they were being inextricably entangled. His malevolent silence corroded their good spirits like an acid, his gaze dashed extinguishing gall on their conversation. The baron made no other attempts to court the woman beside him, feeling, infuriatedly, thatshe was slipping away from him because her fear of that annoying, obnoxious child was cooling the passion he had fanned into a flame with so much difficulty. After repeated unsuccessful attempts at a conversation they jogged along the path in complete silence, hearing nothing but the rustling of the leaves and their own dejected footsteps.
There was active hostility now in each of the three. The betrayed child perceived with satisfaction how their anger gathered helplessly against his own little, despised person. Every now and then he cast a shrewd, ironic look at the baron’s sullen face and saw how he was muttering curses between gritted teeth and had to restrain himself from hurling them out at him. He also observed with sarcastic glee how his mother’s fury was mounting and that both of them were longing for an opportunity to attack him and send him away, or render him innocuous. But he gave them no opening,the tactics of his hate had been prepared too well in advance and left no spots exposed.
“Let us go back,” his mother burst out, feeling she could no longer control herself and that she must do something, if only cry out, under the imposition of this torture.
“A pity,” said Edgar quietly, “it’s so lovely.”
The other two realized the child was making fun of them, but they dared not retort, their tyrant having learned marvellously in two days the supreme art of self-control. Not a quiver in his face betrayed his mordant irony. Without another word being spoken they retraced the long way back to the hotel.
When Edgar and his mother were alone together in her room, her excitement was still seething. She tossed her gloves and parasol down angrily. Edgar did not fail to note these signs and was aware that her electrified nerves would seek to discharge themselves, but hecourted an outburst and remained in her room on purpose. She paced up and down, seated herself, drummed on the table with her fingers, and jumped up again.
“How untidy you look. You go around filthy. It’s a disgrace. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself—a boy of your age!”
Without a word of opposition Edgar went to his mother’s toilet table and washed and combed himself. His cold, obdurate silence and the ironic quiver of his lips drove her to a frenzy. Nothing would have satisfied her so much as to give him a sound beating.
“Go to your room,” she screamed, unable to endure his presence a second longer. Edgar smiled and left the room.
How the two trembled before him! How they dreaded every moment in his presence, the merciless grip of his eyes! The worse they felt the more he gloated, and the more challenging became his satisfaction. Edgartortured the two defenceless creatures with the almost animal cruelty of children. The baron, because he had not given up hope of playing a trick on the lad and was thinking of nothing but the goal of his desires, could still contain his anger, but Edgar’s mother was losing her hold upon herself and kept constantly slipping. It was a relief to her to be able to shriek at him.
“Don’t play with your fork,” she cried at table. “You’re an ill-bred monkey. You don’t deserve to be in the company of grown-up people.”
Edgar smiled, with his head tipped a trifle to one side. He knew his mother’s outburst was a sign of desperation and took pride in having made her betray herself. His manner and glance were now as composed as a physician’s. In previous days he might have answered back rudely so as to annoy her. But hate teaches many things, and quickly. Howhe kept quiet, and still kept quiet, and still kept quiet, until his mother, under the pressure of his silence, began to scream. She could stand it no longer. When they rose from table and Edgar with his matter-of-course air of attachment preceded to follow her and the baron, her pent-up anger suddenly burst out. She cast prudence to the winds and let out the truth. Tortured by his crawling presence she reared like a horse pestered by crawling flies.
“Why do you keep tagging after me like a child of three? I don’t want you around us all the time. Children should not always be with their elders. Please remember that. Spend an hour or two by yourself for once. Read something, or do whatever you want. Leave me alone. You make me nervous with your creepy ways and that disgusting hang-dog air of yours!”
He had wrested it from her at last—the confession! He smiled, while the baron andhis mother seemed embarrassed. She swung about, turning her back, and was about to leave, in a fury with herself for having admitted so much to her little son, when Edgar’s voice came, saying coolly:
“Papa does not want me to be by myself here. He made me promise not to be wild, and to stay with you.” Edgar emphasized “Papa,” having noticed on the previous occasion when he used the word that it had had a paralyzing effect upon both of them. In some way or other, therefore, he inferred, his father must be implicated in this great mystery and must have a secret power over them, because the very mention of him seemed to frighten and distress them. They said nothing this time either. They laid down their arms.
The mother left the room with the baron, and Edgar followed behind, not humbly like a servitor, but hard, strict, inexorable, like a guard over prisoners, rattling the chainsagainst which they strained in vain. Hate had steeled his child’s strength. He, the ignorant one, was stronger than the two older people whose hands were held fast by the great secret.
TIMEwas pressing. The baron’s holiday would soon come to an end, and the few days that remained must be exploited to the full. There was no use, both he and Edgar’s mother felt, trying to break down the excited child’s pertinacity. So they resorted to the extreme measure of disgraceful evasion and flight, merely to escape for an hour or two from under his yoke.
“Please take these letters and have them registered at the post-office,” his mother said to Edgar in the hall, while the baron was outside ordering a cab. Edgar, remembering that until then his mother had sent the hotelboys on her errands, was suspicious. Were they hatching something against him? He hesitated.
“Where will you wait for me?”
“Here.”
“For sure?”
“Yes.”
“Now be sure to. Don’t leave before I come back. You’ll wait right here in the hall, won’t you?” In the consciousness of his superiority he had adopted a commanding tone with his mother. Many things had changed since the day before yesterday.
At the door he encountered the baron, to whom he spoke for the first time in two days.
“I am going to the post-office to register these letters. My mother is waiting for me. Please do not go until I come back.”
The baron hastened past him.
“All right. We’ll wait.”
Edgar ran at top speed to the post-office,where he had to wait while a man ahead of him asked a dozen silly questions. Finally his turn came, and at last he was free to run back to the hotel, which he reached just in time to see the couple driving off. He turned rigid with anger, and had the impulse to pick up a stone and throw it at them. So they had escaped him after all, but by what a mean, contemptible lie! He had discovered the day before that his mother lied, but that she could so wantonly disregard a definite, expressed promise, shattered his last remnant of confidence. He could not understand life at all any more, now that he realized that the words which he had thought clothed a reality were nothing more than bursting bubbles. But what a dreadful secret it must be that drove grown-up people to such lengths, to lie to him, a child, and to steal away like criminals! In the books he had read, men deceived and murdered one another for money, power,empire, but what was the motive here? What were his mother and the baron after? Why did they hide from him? What were they, with their lies, trying to conceal? He racked his brain for answers to the riddle. Vaguely he divined that this secret was the bolt which, when unlocked, opened the door to let out childhood, and to master it meant to be grown up, to be a man at last. Oh, to know what it was! But he could no longer think clearly. His rage at their having escaped him was like a fire that sent scorching smoke into his eyes and kept him from seeing.
He ran to the woods and in the nick of time reached a quiet dark spot, where no one could see him, and burst into tears.
“Liars! Dogs! Mean—mean—mean!”
He felt he must scream the words out to relieve himself of his frenzy. All the pent-up rage, impatience, annoyance, curiosity, impotence, and the sense of betrayal of the last fewdays, which he had suppressed in the fond belief that he was an adult and must behave like an adult, now gushed from him in a fit of weeping and sobbing. It was the final crying spell of his childhood. For the last time he was giving in to the bliss of weeping like a woman. In that moment of uncontrolled fury his tears washed away his whole childhood, trust, love, credulity, respect.
The lad who returned to the hotel was different from the child that had left it. He was cool and level-headed. He went first to his room and washed his face carefully so that the two should not enjoy the triumph of seeing the traces of his tears. Then he planned his strategy and waited patiently, without the least agitation.
There happened to be a good many guests in the hall when the carriage pulled up at the door. Two gentlemen were playing chess, a few others were reading their papers, and agroup of ladies sat together talking. Edgar sat among them quietly, a trifle pale, with wavering glances. When his mother and the baron appeared in the doorway, rather embarrassed at encountering him so soon, and began to stammer out their excuses prepared in advance, he confronted them calmly, and said to the baron in a tone of challenge:
“I have something to say to you, sir.”
“Very well, later, a little later.”
Edgar, pitching his voice louder and enunciating every word clearly and distinctly, said, so that everyone in the hall could hear:
“No, now. You behaved like a villain. You knew my mother was waiting for me, and you——”
“Edgar!” cried his mother, feeling all glances upon her, and swooped down on him. But Edgar, realizing that she wanted to shout him down, screamed at the top of his voice:
“I say again, in front of everybody, you lied, you lied disgracefully. It was a dirty trick.”
The baron went white, the people stared, some laughed. The mother clutched the boy, who was quivering with excitement, and stammered out hoarsely:
“Go right up to your room, or I’ll give you a beating right here in front of everybody.”
But Edgar had already calmed down. He regretted he had been so violent and was discontented with himself that he had not coolly challenged the baron as he had intended to do. But his anger had been stronger than his will. He turned and walked to the staircase leisurely, with an air of perfect composure.
“You must excuse him,” the mother still went on, stammering, confused by the rather wicked glances fixed upon her, “he’s a nervous child, you know.”
She was afraid of nothing so much as a scandal, and she knew she must assume innocence.Instead, therefore, of taking to instant flight, she went up to the desk and asked for her mail and made several other inquiries before rustling up the stairs as though nothing had happened. But behind her, she was quite conscious, she had left a wake of whispered comment and suppressed giggling. On the first landing she hesitated, the rest of the steps she mounted more slowly. She was always unequal to a serious situation and was afraid of the inevitable explanation with Edgar. She was guilty, she could not deny that, and she dreaded the child’s curious gaze, which paralyzed her and filled her with uncertainty. In her timidity she decided to try gentleness, because in a battle the excited child, she knew, was the stronger.
She turned the knob gently. Edgar was sitting there quiet and cool, his eyes, turned upon her at her entrance, not even betraying curiosity. He seemed to be very sure of himself.
“Edgar,” she began, in the motherliest of tones, “what got into you? I was ashamed of you. How can one be so ill-bred, especially a child to a grown-up person? You must ask the baron’s pardon at once.”
“I will not.”
As he spoke Edgar was looking out of the window, and his words might have been meant for the trees. His sureness was beginning to astonish his mother.
“Edgar, what’s the matter with you? You’re so different from what you were. You used to be a good, sensible child with whom a person could reason. And all at once you act as though the devil had got into you. What have you got against the baron? You liked him so much at first. He was so nice to you.”
“Yes, because he wanted to make your acquaintance.”
“Nonsense. How can you think anything like that?"
The child flared up.
“He’s a liar. He’s false through and through. Whatever he does is calculated and common. He wanted to get to know you, so he made friends with me and promised me a dog. I don’t know what he promised you, or why he’s so friendly with you, but he wants something of you, too, mamma, positively he does. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be so polite and friendly. He’s a bad man. He lies. Just take a good look at him once, and see how false his eyes are. Oh, I hate him!”
“Edgar, how can you talk like that!” She was confused and did not know what to reply. The feeling stirred in her that the child was right.
“Yes, he’s a bad man, you can’t make me believe he isn’t. You must see he is. Why is he afraid of me? Why does he try to keep out of my way? Because he knows I can see through him and his badness."
“How can you talk like that?” she kept protesting feebly. Her brain seemed to have dried up.
All of a sudden a great fear came upon her, whether of the baron or the boy, she knew not. Edgar saw that his warning was taking effect, and he was lured on to win her over to his side and have a comrade in his hate and hostility toward the baron. He went over to her gently, put his arms about her, and said in a voice flattering with the excitement quivering in it:
“Mamma, you yourself must have noticed that it isn’t anything good that he wants. He’s made you quite different. You’re the one that’s changed, not I. He set you against me just to have you to himself. I’m sure he means to deceive you. I don’t know what he promised you, but whatever it is, he doesn’t intend to keep his promise. You ought to be careful of him. A man who will lie to one personwill lie to another person, too. He’s a bad, bad man. You mustn’t trust him.”
Edgar’s voice, soft and almost tearful, seemed to speak out of her own heart. Since the day before an uncomfortable feeling had been rising in her which told her the same, with growing emphasis. But she was ashamed to tell her own child he was right, and she took refuge, as so many do when under the stress of overwhelming feeling, in rude rejoinder. She straightened herself up.
“Children don’t understand such things. You have no right to mix into such matters. You must behave yourself. That’s all.”
Edgar’s face congealed again.
“Very well. I have warned you.”
“Then you won’t ask the baron’s pardon?”
“No.”
They stood confronting each other, and the mother knew her authority was at stake.
“Then you will stay up here and eat by yourself, and you won’t be allowed to come to table and sit with us until you have asked his pardon. I’ll teach you manners. You won’t budge from this room until I give you permission to, do you hear?”
Edgar smiled. That cunning smile seemed to be part of his lips now. Inwardly he was angry at himself. How foolish to have let his heart run away with him again and to have tried to warn her, the liar.
His mother rustled out without giving him another glance. That caustic gaze of his frightened her. The child had become an absolute annoyance to her since she realized that he had his eyes open and said the very things she did not want to know or hear. It was uncanny to have an inner voice, her conscience, dissevered from herself, incorporated in her child, going about as her child, warning her and making fun of her. Until then the childhad stayed alongside of her life, as an ornament, a toy, a thing to love and have confidence in, now and then perhaps a burden, but always something that floated along in the same current as her own life, keeping even pace with it. For the first time this something reared itself up and opposed her will. A feeling akin to hate mingled itself in her thoughts of her child now. And yet, as she was descending the stairs, a little tired, childish voice came from her own breast, saying, “You ought to be careful of him.”
On one of the landings was a mirror. The gleam of it struck her eyes, and she paused to scrutinize herself questioningly. She looked deeper and deeper into her own face until the lips of her image parted in a light smile and formed themselves as if to utter a dangerous word. The voice within her was still speaking, but she threw back her shoulders as though to shake off all those invisible thoughtsgave her reflection in the glass a bright glance, caught up her skirt, and descended the rest of the stairs with the determined manner of a player who has tossed his last coin down on the table.
THEwaiter, after serving Edgar with dinner in his room, closed and locked the door behind him. The child started up in a rage. His mother’s doings! She must have given orders for him to be locked in like a vicious beast.
“What’s going on downstairs,” he brooded grimly, “while I am locked in up here? What are they talking about, I wonder? Is the mystery taking place, and am I missing it? Oh, this secret that I scent all around me when I am with grown-ups, this thing that they shut me out from at night, and that makes them lower their voices when I come upon them unawares, this great secret that has been near me for days, close at hand, yet still out ofreach. I’ve done everything to try to get at it.”
Edgar recalled the time when he had pilfered books from his father’s library and had read them, and found they contained the mystery, though he could not understand it. There must be some sort of seal, he concluded, either in himself or in the others that had first to be removed before the mystery could be fathomed. He also recalled how he had begged the servant-girl to explain the obscure passages in the books and she had only laughed at him.
“Dreadful,” he thought, “to be a child, full of curiosity, and yet not to be allowed even to ask for information, always to be ridiculed by the grown-ups, as if one were a stupid good-for-nothing. But never mind, I’m going to find it out, and very soon, I feel sure I will. Already part of it is in my hands, and I mean not to let go till I hold the whole of it."
He listened to find out if anyone were coming to the room. Outside, the trees were rustling in a strong breeze, which caught up the silvery mirror of the moonlight and dashed it in shivering bits through the network of the branches.
“It can’t be anything good that they intend to do, else they wouldn’t have used such mean little lies to get me out of their way. Of course, they’re laughing at me, the miserable creatures, because they’re rid of me at last. But I’ll be the one to laugh next. How stupid of me to allow myself to be locked in this room and give them a moment to themselves, instead of sticking to them like a burr and watching their every move. I know the grown-ups are always incautious, andtheywill be giving themselves away, too. Grown-ups think we’re still babies and always go to sleep at night. They forget we can pretend to be asleep and can go on listening, and we canmake out we’re stupid when we’re really very bright.”
Edgar smiled to himself sarcastically when at this point his thoughts reverted to the birth of a baby cousin. The family in his presence had pretended to be surprised, and he had known very well they were not surprised, because for weeks he had heard them, at night when they thought he was asleep, discussing the coming event. And he resolved to fool his mother and the baron in the same way.
“Oh, if only I could peep through the key-hole and watch them while they fancy they’re alone and safe. Perhaps it would be a good idea to ring, and the boy would come and open the door and ask what I want. Or I could make a terrible noise smashing things, and then they’d unlock the door and I’d slip out.”
On second thought he decided against either plan, as incompatible with his pride. No one should see how contemptibly he had beentreated, and he would wait till the next day.
From beneath his window came a woman’s laugh. Edgar started. Perhaps it was his mother laughing. She had good cause to laugh and make fun of the helpless little boy who was locked up when he was a nuisance and thrown into a corner like a bundle of rags. He leaned, circumspectly out of the window and looked. No, it wasn’t his mother, but one of a group of gay girls teasing a boy.
In looking out Edgar observed that his window was not very high above the ground, and instantly it occurred to him to jump down and go spy on his mother and the baron. He was all fire with the joy of his resolve, feeling that now he had the great secret in his grasp. There was no danger in it. No people were passing by—and with that he had jumped out. Nothing but the light crunch of the gravel under his feet to betray his action.
In these two days, stealing around and spyinghad become the delight of his life, and intense bliss, mingled with a faint tremor of alarm, filled him now as he tiptoed around the outside of the hotel, carefully avoiding the lights. He looked first into the dining-room. Their seats were empty. From window to window he went peeping, always outside the hotel for fear if he went inside he might run up against them in one of the corridors. Nowhere were they to be seen, and he was about to give up hope when he saw two shadows emerge from a side entrance—he shrank and drew back into the dark—and his mother and her inseparable escort came out.
In the nick of time, he thought. What were they saying? He couldn’t hear, they were talking in such low voices and the wind was making such an uproar in the trees. His mother laughed. It was a laugh he had never before heard from her, a peculiarly sharp, nervous laugh, as though she had suddenlybeen tickled. It made a curious impression on the boy and rather startled him.
“But if she laughs,” he thought, “it can’t be anything dangerous, nothing very big and mighty that they are concealing from me.” He was a trifle disillusioned. “Yet, why were they leaving the hotel? Where were they going alone together in the night?”
Every now and then great drifts of clouds obscured the moon, and the darkness was then so intense that one could scarcely see the white road at one’s feet, but soon the moon would emerge again and robe the landscape in a sheet of silver. In one of the moments when the whole countryside was flooded in brilliance Edgar saw the two silhouettes going down the road, or rather one silhouette, so close did they cling together, as if in terror. But where were they going? The fir-trees groaned, the woods were all astir, uncannily, as though from a wild chase in their depths.
“I will follow them,” thought Edgar. “They cannot hear me in all this noise.”
Keeping to the edge of the woods, in the shadow, from which he could easily see them on the clear white road, he tracked them relentlessly, blessing the wind for making his footsteps inaudible and cursing it for carrying away the sound of their talk. It was not until he heard what they said that he could be sure of learning the secret.
The baron and his companion walked on without any misgivings. They felt all alone in the wide resounding night and lost themselves in their growing excitement, never dreaming that on the high edges of the road, in the leafy darkness, every movement of theirs was being watched, and a pair of eyes was clutching them in a wild grip of hate and curiosity.
Suddenly they stood still, and Edgar, too, instantly stopped and pressed close up againsta tree, in terror that they might turn back and reach the hotel before him, so that his mother would discover his room was empty and learn that she had been followed. Then he would have to give up hope of ever wresting the secret from them. But the couple hesitated. Evidently there was a difference of opinion between them. Fortunately at that moment the moon was shining undimmed by clouds, and he could see everything clearly. The baron pointed to a side-path leading down into the valley, where the moonlight descended, not in a broad flood of brilliance, but only in patches filtering here and there through the heavy foliage.
“Why does he want to go down there?” thought Edgar.
His mother, apparently, refused to take the path, and the baron was trying to persuade her. Edgar could tell from his gestures that he was talking emphatically. The child wasalarmed. What did this man want of his mother? Why did he attempt—the villain!—to drag her into the dark? From his books, to him the world, came live memories of murder and seduction and sinister crime. There, he had it, the baron meant to murder her. That was why he had kept him, Edgar, at a distance, and enticed her to this lonely spot. Should he cry for help? Murder! He wanted to shriek, but his throat and lips were dry and no sound issued from his mouth. His nerves were tense as a bow-string, he could scarcely stand upright on his shaking knees, and he put out his hand for support, when, crack, crack! a twig snapped in his grasp.
At the sound of the breaking twig the two turned about in alarm and stared into the darkness. Edgar clung to the tree, his little body completely wrapped in obscurity, quiet as death. Yet they seemed to have been frightened.
“Let’s go home,” he could now hear his mother say anxiously, and the baron, who, evidently, was also upset, assented. Pressed close against each other, they walked back very slowly. Their embarrassment was Edgar’s good fortune. He got down on all fours and crept, tearing his hands and clothes on the brambles, through the undergrowth to the turn of the woods, from where he ran breathlessly back to the hotel and up the stairs to his room. Luckily the key was sticking on the outside, and in one second he was in his room lying on the bed, where he had to rest a few moments to give his pounding heart a chance to quiet down. After two or three minutes he got up and looked out of the window to await their return.
They must have been walking very slowly indeed. It took them an eternity. Circumspectly he peeped out of the shadowed frame. There, at length, they came at a snail’s pace,the moonlight shining on their clothes. They looked like ghosts in the greenish shimmer, and the delicious horror came upon him again whether it really might have been a murder, and what a dreadful catastrophe he had averted by his presence. He could clearly see their faces, which looked chalky in the white light. His mother had an expression of rapture that in her was strange to him, while the baron looked hard and dejected. Probably because he had failed in carrying out his purpose.
They were very close to the hotel now, but it was not until they reached the steps that their figures separated from each other. Would they look up? Edgar waited eagerly. No.
“They have forgotten all about me,” he thought wrathfully, and then, in triumph, “but I haven’t forgotten you. You think I am asleep or non-existent, but you’ll find outyou’re mistaken. I’ll watch every step you take until I have got the secret out of you, you villain, the dreadful secret that keeps me awake nights. I’ll tear the strings that tie you two together. I am not going to go to sleep.”
As the couple entered the doorway, their shadows mingled again in one broad band that soon dwindled and disappeared. And once more the space in front of the hotel lay serene in the moonlight, like a meadow of snow.
EDGARmoved away from the window, breathing heavily, in a shiver of horror. A gruesome mystery of this sort had never touched his life before, the bookish world of thrilling adventure, excitement, deception and murder having always belonged to the same realm as the wonderland of fairy tales, the realm of dreams, far away, in the unreal and unattainable. Now he was plunged right into the midst of this fascinatingly awful world, and his whole being quivered deliriously. Who was this mysterious being who had stepped into his quiet life? Was he really a murderer? If not, why did he always try to drag his mother to a remote, dark spot?Something dreadful, Edgar felt certain, was about to happen. He did not know what to do. In the morning he would surely write or telegraph his father—or why not that very moment? His mother was not in her room yet, but was still with that horrid person.
The outside of the door to Edgar’s room was hung with a portière, and he opened his door softly now, closed it behind him, and stuck himself between the door and the portière, listening for his mother’s steps in the corridor, determined not to let her stay by herself a single instant.
The corridor, at this midnight hour, was quiet and empty and lighted faintly by a single gas jet. The minutes stretched themselves into hours, it seemed, before he heard cautious footsteps coming up the stairs. He strained his ears to listen. The steps did not move forward with the quick, regular beat of someone making straight for his room, but sounded hesitatingand dragging as though up a steep, difficult climb. Edgar also caught the sound of whispering, a pause, then whispering again. He was a-quiver with excitement. Was it both of them coming up together? Was the creature still sticking to her? The whispering was too low and far away for him to catch what they were saying. But the footsteps, though slowly and with pauses between, were drawing nearer. And now he could hear the baron’s voice—oh, how he hated the sound of it!—saying something in a low, hoarse tone, which he could not get, and then his mother answering as though to ward something off:
“No, no, not tonight!”
Edgar’s excitement rose to fever heat. As they came nearer he would be bound to catch everything they said. Each inch closer that they drew was like a physical hurt in his breast, and the baron’s voice, how ugly itseemed, that greedy, grasping disgusting voice.
“Don’t be cruel. You were so lovely this evening.”
“No, no, I mustn’t. I can’t. Let me go!”
There was such alarm in his mother’s voice that the child was terrified. What did the baron want her to do? Why was she afraid?
They were quite close up to him now, apparently right in front of the portière. A foot or two away from them was he, trembling, invisible, with a bit of drapery for his only protection.
Edgar heard his mother give a faint groan as though her powers of resistance were weakening.
But what was that? Edgar could hear that they had passed his mother’s door and had kept on walking down the corridor. Where was he dragging her off to? Why was she not replying any more? Had he stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth and was he squeezing her throat?
Wild with this thought, Edgar pushed the portière aside and peeped out at the two figures in the dim corridor. The baron had his arm round the woman’s waist and was forcing her along gently, evidently with little resistance from her. He stopped at his own door.
“He wants to drag her in and commit the foul deed,” though the child, and dashing the portière aside he rushed down the hall upon them.
His mother screamed; something came leaping at her out of the dark, and she seemed to fall in a faint. The baron held her up with difficulty. The next instant he felt a little fist dealing him a blow that smashed his lips against his teeth, and a little body clawing at him catlike. He released the terrified woman, who quickly made her escape, and,without knowing against whom, he struck out blindly.
The child knew he was the weaker of the two, yet he never yielded. At last, at last the great moment had come when he could unburden himself of all his betrayed love and accumulated hate. With set lips and a look of frenzy on his face he pounded away at the baron with his two small fists.
By this time the baron had recognized his assailant. He, too, was primed with hate of the little spy who had been dogging him and interfering with his sport, and he hit back, striking out blindly. Edgar groaned once or twice, but did not let go, and did not cry for help. They wrestled a fraction of a minute in the dark corridor grimly and sullenly without the exchange of a single word. But pretty soon the baron came to his senses and realizing how absurd was this duel with a half-grown boy he caught hold of Edgar tothrow him off. But Edgar, feeling his muscles weakening and conscious that the next moment he would be beaten, snapped, in a fury, at the strong, firm hand gripping at the nape of his neck. The baron could not restrain a slight outcry, and let go of Edgar, who seized the opportunity to run to his room and draw the bolt.
The midnight struggle had lasted no more than a minute. No one in any of the rooms along the corridor had caught a sound of it. Everything was silent, wrapped in sleep.
The baron wiped his bleeding hand with his handkerchief and peered into the dark uneasily to make sure no one had been watching or listening. All he saw was the one gas jet winking at him, he thought, sarcastically.
EDGARwoke up the next morning dazed, wondering whether it had not been a horrid dream, and with the sickly feeling that hangs on after a nightmare, his head leaden and his body like a piece of wood. It was only after a minute or so that he realized with a sort of alarm that he was still in his day clothes. He jumped out of bed and went to look at himself in the mirror. The image of his own pale, distorted face, with his hair all rumpled and a red, elongated swelling on his forehead, made him recoil with a shudder. It brought back to him the actuality painfully. He recalled the details of the battle in the corridor,and his rushing back to his room and throwing himself on to the bed dressed. He must have fallen asleep thus and dreamed everything over again, only worse and mingled with the warmish smell of fresh flowing blood.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel beneath his window, voices rose like invisible birds, and the sun shone deep into the room. “It must be very late,” he thought, glancing at his watch. But the hands pointed to midnight. In the excitement of the day before he had forgotten to wind it up. This uncertainty, this hanging suspended in time, disturbed him, and his sense of disgust was increased by his confusion of mind as to what had actually occurred. He dressed quickly and went downstairs, a vague sense of guilt in his heart.
In the breakfast-room his mother was sitting at their usual table, alone. Thank goodness, his enemy was not present. Edgar would not have to look upon that hateful face of his.And yet, as he went to the table, he was by no means sure of himself.
“Good morning,” he said.
His mother made no reply, nor even so much as glanced up, but kept her eyes fixed in a peculiarly rigid stare on the view from the window. She looked very pale, her eyes were red-rimmed, and there was that quivering of her nostrils which told so plainly how wrought up she was. Edgar bit his lips. Her silence bewildered him. He really did not know whether he had hurt the baron very much or whether his mother had any knowledge at all of their encounter. The uncertainty plagued him. But her face remained so rigid that he did not even attempt to look up for fear that her eyes, now hidden behind lowered lids, might suddenly raise their curtains and pop out at him. He sat very still, not daring to make the faintest sound, and raising the cup to his lips and putting it backon the saucer with the utmost caution, and casting furtive glances, from time to time, at his mother’s fingers, which played with her spoon nervously and seemed, in the way they were bent, to show a secret anger.
For a full quarter of an hour he sat at the table in an oppressive expectancy of something that never came. Not a single word from her to relieve his tension. And now as his mother rose, still without any sign of having noticed his presence, he did not know what to do, whether to remain sitting at the table or to go with her. He decided upon the latter, and followed humbly, though conscious how ridiculous was his shadowing of her now. He reduced his steps so as to fall behind, and she, still studiously refraining from noticing him, went to her room. When Edgar reached her door he found it locked.
What had happened? He was at his wits’ end. His assurance of the day before had desertedhim. Had he done wrong, after all, in attacking the baron? And were they preparing a punishment for him or a fresh humiliation? Something must happen, he was positive, something dreadful, very soon.
Upon him and his mother lay the sultriness of a brewing tempest. They were like two electrified poles that would have to discharge themselves in a flash. And for four solitary hours the child dragged round with him, from room to room, the burden of this premonition, until his thin little neck bent under the invisible yoke, and by midday it was a very humble little fellow that took his seat at table.
“How do you do?” he ventured again, feeling he had to rend this silence, ominous as a great black storm cloud. But still his mother made no response, keeping her gaze fixed beyond him.
Edgar, in renewed alarm, felt he was in the presence of a calculated, concentrated angersuch as he had never before encountered. Until then his mother’s scoldings had been outbursts of nervousness rather than of ill feeling and soon melted into a mollifying smile. This time, however, he had, as he sensed, brought to the surface a wild emotion from the deeps of her being, and this powerful something that he had evoked terrified him. He scarcely dared to eat. His throat was parched and knotted into a lump.
His mother seemed not to notice what was passing in her son, but when she got up she turned, with a casual air, and said:
“Come up to my room afterwards, Edgar, I have something to say to you.”
Her tone was not threatening, but so icy that Edgar felt as though each word were like a link in an iron chain being laid round his neck. His defiance had been crushed out of him. Silently, with a hang-dog air, he followed her up to her room.
In the room she prolonged his agony by saying nothing for several minutes, during which he heard the striking of the clock, and outside a child laughing, and within his own breast his heart beating like a trip-hammer. Yet she, too, could not be feeling so very confident of herself either, because she kept her eyes averted and even turned her back while speaking to him.
“I shall say nothing to you about the way you behaved yesterday. It was unpardonable, and it makes me feel ashamed to think of it. You have to suffer the consequences now of your own conduct. All I mean to say to you is that this is the last time you will be allowed to associate with your elders. I have just written to your father that either you must be put under a tutor or sent to a boarding-school where you will be taught manners. I sha’n’t be bothered with you any more.”
Edgar stood with bowed head, feeling thatthis was only the preliminary, a threat of the real thing coming, and he waited uneasily for the sequel.
“You will ask the baron’s pardon.” Edgar gave a start, but his mother would not be interrupted. “The baron left to-day, and you will write him a letter which I shall dictate.” Edgar again made a movement, which his mother firmly disregarded. “No protestations. Here is the paper, and here are the pen and the ink. Sit down.”
Edgar looked up. Her eyes were steely with an inflexible determination. This hardness and composure in his mother were quite new and strange. He was frightened, and seated himself at the desk, keeping his face bent low.
“The date—upper right-hand corner. Have you written it? Space. Dear Sir, colon. Next line. I have just learned to my regret—got that?—to my regret that you have alreadyleft Summering. Two m’s in Summering. And so I must do by letter what I had intended to do in person, that is—faster, Edgar, you don’t have to draw each letter—beg your pardon for what I did yesterday. As my mother told you, I am just convalescing from a severe illness and am very excitable. On account of my condition, I often exaggerate things and the next moment I am sorry for it.”
The back bent over the desk straightened up. Edgar turned in a flash. His defiance had leapt into life again.
“I will not write that. It isn’t true.”
“Edgar!”
“It is not true. I haven’t done anything that I should be sorry for. I haven’t done anything bad that I need ask anybody’s pardon for. I simply came to your rescue when you called for help.”
Every drop of blood left her lips, her nostrils widened.
“I called for help? You’re crazy.”
Edgar got angry and jumped up from his chair.
“Yes, you did call for help, in the corridor, when he caught hold of you. You said, ‘Let me go, let me go,’ so loud that I heard it in my room.”
“You lie. I never was in the corridor with the baron. He went with me only as far as the foot of the stairs——”
Edgar’s heart stood still at the barefacedness of the lie. He stared at her with glassy eyeballs, and cried in a voice thick and husky with passion:
“You—were not—in the hall? And he—he didnothave his arm round you?”
She laughed a cold, dry laugh.
“You were dreaming.”
That was too much. The child, by this time, knew that adults lie and resort to impudent little evasions, lies that slip through finesieves, and cunning ambiguities. But this downright denial of an absolute fact, face to face, threw him into a frenzy.
“Dreaming, was I? Did I dream this bump on my forehead, too?”
“How do I know whom you’ve been rowdying with? But I am not going to argue with you. You are to obey orders. That’s all. Sit down and finish the letter.” She was very pale and was summoning all her strength to keep on her feet.
In Edgar, a last tiny flame of credulity went out. To tread on the truth and extinguish it as one would a burning match was more than he could stomach. His insides congealed in an icy lump, and everything he now said was in a tone of unrestrained, pointed maliciousness.
“So I dreamed what I saw in the hall, did I? I dreamed this bump on my forehead, and that you two went walking in the moonlightand he wanted to make you go down the dark path into the valley? I dreamed all that, did I? What do you think, that I am going to let myself be locked up like a baby? No, I am not so stupid as you think. I know what I know.”
He stared into her face impudently. To see her child’s face close to her own distorted by hate broke her down completely. Her passion flooded over in a tidal wave.
“Sit down and write that letter, or——”
“Or what?” he sneered.
“Or I’ll give you a whipping like a little child.”
Edgar drew close to her and merely laughed sardonically.
With that her hand was out and had struck his face. Edgar gave a little outcry, and, like a drowning man, with a dull rushing in his ears and flickerings in his eyes, he struck out blindly with both fists. He felt he encounteredsomething soft, a face, heard a cry....
The cry brought him to his senses. Suddenly he saw himself and his monstrous act—he had struck his own mother.
A dreadful terror came upon him, shame and horror, an impetuous need to get away seized him, to sink into the earth; he wanted to fly far away, far away from those eyes that were upon him. He made for the door and in an instant was gone, down the stairs, through the lobby, out on the road. Away, away, as though a pack of ravening beasts were at his heels.
AFTERhe had put a long stretch of road between him and the hotel, Edgar stopped running. He was panting heavily, and he had to lean against a tree to get his breath back and recover from the trembling of his knees. The horror of his own deed, from which he had been fleeing, clutched at his throat and shook him as with a fever. What should he do now? Where should he run away to? He was already feeling a sinking sensation of loneliness, there in the woods, only a mile or so from the house. Everything seemed different, unfriendlier, unkinder, now that he was alone and helpless. The trees that only the day before had whispered to him like brothersnow gathered together darkly as if in threat. This solitariness in the great unknown world dazed the child. No, he could not stand alone yet. But to whom should he go? Of his father, who was easily excited and unapproachable, he was afraid. Besides, his father would send him straight back to his mother, and Edgar preferred the awfulness of the unknown to that. He felt as though he could never look upon his mother’s face again without remembering that he had struck her with his fist.
His grandmother in Bains occurred to him. She was so sweet and kind and had always petted him and come to his rescue when, at home, he was to be the victim of an injustice. He would stay with her until the first storm of wrath had blown over, and then he would write to his parents to ask their forgiveness. In this brief quarter of an hour he had already been so humbled by the mere thoughtof his inexperienced self standing alone in the world that he cursed the stupid pride that a mere stranger’s lying had put into him. He no longer wanted to be anything but the child he had been, obedient and patient and without the arrogance that he now felt to be excessive.
But how to reach Bains? He took out his little pocketbook and blessed his luck star that the ten-dollar gold piece given to him on his birthday was there safe and sound. He had never got himself to break it. Daily he had inspected his purse to see if it was there and to feast his eyes on the sight of it and gratefully polish it with his handkerchief until it shone like a tiny sun. But would the ten dollars be enough? He had travelled by train many a time without thinking that one had to pay, and still less how much one paid, whether ten or a hundred dollars. For the first time he got an inkling that there were facts in life upon which he had never reflected, and that all themany things that surrounded him and he had held in his hands and toyed with somehow contained a value of their own, a special importance. An hour before he had thought he knew everything. Now he realized he had passed by a thousand mysteries and problems without noticing them, and was ashamed that his poor little wisdom had stumbled over the first step it took into life. He grew more and more discouraged, and his footsteps lagged as he drew near the station.
How often he had dreamed of this flight from home, of making a dash for the great Life, becoming king or emperor, soldier or poet! And now he looked timidly at the bright little building ahead of him and thought of nothing but whether his ten dollars would bring him to his grandmother at Bains.
The rails stretched away monotonously into the country, the station was deserted. Edgar went to the window shyly and asked, whisperingso that nobody but the ticket-seller should hear, how much a ticket to Bains cost. Amused and rather astonished eyes behind spectacles smiled upon the timid child.
“Whole fare or half fare?”
“Whole fare,” stammered Edgar, utterly without pride.
“Three dollars and thirty-five cents.”
“Give me a ticket, please.”
In great relief Edgar shoved the beloved bit of polished gold under the grating, change rattled on the ledge, and Edgar all at once felt immensely wealthy holding the strip of colored paper that guaranteed him his liberty, and with the sound of coin clinking in his pocket.
On examining the timetable he found there would be a train in only twenty minutes, and he retired to a corner, to get away from the few people idling on the platform. Though it was evident they were harboring no suspicions,the child, as if his flight and his crime were branded on his forehead, felt that they were looking at nothing but him and were wondering why a mere boy such as he should be travelling alone. He drew a great sigh of relief when at last the first whistle sounded in the distance, and the rumbling came closer and closer, and the train that was to carry him out into the great world puffed and snorted into the station.
It was not until Edgar took his seat in the train that he noticed he had secured only a third-class passage. Having always travelled first class, he was again struck with a sense of difference. He saw there were distinctions that had escaped him. His fellow-passengers were unlike those of his first-class trips, a few Italian laborers, with tough hands and uncouth voices, carrying pickaxes and shovels. They sat directly opposite, dull and disconsolate-eyed, staring into space. They must havebeen working very hard on the road, for some of them slept in the rattling coach, open-mouthed, leaning against the hard, soiled wood.
“They have been working to earn money,” came into Edgar’s mind, and he set to guessing how much they earned, but could not decide. And so another disturbing fact impressed itself upon him, that money was something one did not always have on hand, but had to be made somehow or other. And for the first time he became conscious of having taken the ease in which he had been lapped as a matter of course and that to the right and the left of him abysms yawned which his eyes had never beheld. It came to him now with the shock of suddenness that there were trades and professions, that his life was hedged about by innumerable secrets, close at hand and tangible, though he had never noticed them.
Edgar was learning a good deal in that singlehour of aloneness and saw many things as he looked out of his narrow compartment into the great wide world. And for all his dark dread, something began to unfold itself gently within him, not exactly happiness as yet, rather a marvelling at the diversity of life. He had fled, he felt, out of fear and cowardice, yet it was his first independent act, and he had experienced something of the reality that he had passed by, until then, without heeding it. Perhaps he himself was now as much of a mystery to his mother and his father as the world had been to him. It was with different eyes that he looked out of the window. He was now viewing actualities, it seemed to him. A veil had been lifted from all things, and they were showing him the core of their purpose, the secret spring of their actions. Houses flew by as though torn away by the wind, and he pictured to himself the people living in them. Were they rich or poor,happy or unhappy? Were they filled with the same longing as he to know everything? And were there children in those houses like himself who had merely been playing with things? The flagmen who waved the train no longer seemed like scattered dolls, inanimate objects, toys stationed there by indifferent chance. Edgar now understood that the giving of the signal was their fate, their struggle with life.
The wheels turned faster and faster, along serpentine windings the train made its way downward from the uplands, the mountains took on gentler curves and receded into the distance. The level was reached, and Edgar gave one final glance backward. There were the mountains like blue shadows, remote and inaccessible. And to Edgar it was as though his childhood were reposing up there where they lightly merged with the misty heavens.