Chapter 17
OLD Mrs. Anderson, having borne seven children and raised three to maturity (not to speak of having made a business of guiding Mrs. Knapp by neighborly advice through the raising of her three), knew what was brewing with Stephen the moment she stepped into the kitchen. She had been expecting Stephen to have one of his awful tantrums again any day. The only reason he hadn’t so far was because poor crippled Mr. Knapp was so weak and so indifferent to what the children did that Stephen was allowed to have his own way about everything. But foolish indulgence wore out after a while and only made things worse in the end. All the regulation signs of an advancing storm were there. She noted them with a kindling eye. Stephen’s face was clouded; he gave her a black look and did not answer her “Howdo, Stevie dear?” And as she took a chair, he flung down his top with all his might. A moment later, as he lounged about the kitchen with that insolent swagger of his that always made her blood boil, he gave a savage kick at his blocks.
Now was the time to give Mr. Knapp some goodadvice that would save him trouble in the end. She never could stand hunchbacks and cripples and had not liked Mr. Knapp very well even before he was so dreadfully paralyzed; but she felt it her duty to help out in that stricken household. “You’ll have trouble with that child to-day, Mr. Knapp,” she said wisely; “he’s spoiling for a spanking. Anybody with experience can see that by looking at him. My! what a relief ’twill be when he’s out of the house and goes to school with the others.”
It had been her habit thus to diagnose Stephen to his mother. And as for the remark about the relief it would be to have Stephen go to school, it was threadbare with repetition. She scarcely knew she had said it, so familiar was it. It astonished her to have Mr. Knapp look at her as though she had said something which shocked him. She was nettled at his look and replied to it resentfully by a statement of her oft-repeated philosophy of life, “The only way to manage children, Mr. Knapp, is never to let them get ahead of you. If you watch for the first signs of naughtiness and cut it short”—her gesture indicated how it was to be cut short—“it doesn’t go any further.”
To illustrate her point she now addressed Stephen’s listening, stubborn back in a reproving tone of virtue, “Stephen, you mustn’t kick your blocks like that. It’s naughty to.”
Stephen instantly kicked them harder than ever and continued to present a provocatively rebellious back to the visitor.
Mrs. Anderson turned to his father with the gratified look traditionally ascribed to the Teutonic warlords when they forced Serbia into a corner. She tapped the fingers of one hand rapidly in the palm of the other and waited for the father of the criminal to take action. He continued to draw his needle in and out of the stocking he was darning. His face looked like Stephen’s back.
What a disagreeable man Mr. Knapp was! She was not surprised that he had been so disliked by all the sensible people at the store. And how ridiculous for a man to be darning a stocking! He might at least look ashamed of it! Mrs. Anderson disliked him so much at this moment that she felt herself trembling and burning, “Well, Mr. Knapp, you’re not going to pass over a wilful disobedience like that, I hope,” she said, her voice shaking with anger as much at Stephen’s father as at Stephen.
“Ididn’t tell Stephen not to kick his blocks,” he said dryly.
Her sense of extravagant rightness in the face of insane wrongness flamed over her so hotly that she could scarcely speak. “Well ... but ... but ... oh, I understand! I understand!” she finallybrought out bitterly. “I understand. You think it is all right and perfectly proper for Stephen to kick things around as much as he pleases.”
Mr. Knapp stooped to look into the oven where a rice pudding was cooking. How ridiculous for a man to be cooking a rice pudding! “I’m sure I don’t know why you think you understand anything about it because I have not told you what my opinion on the subject is,” he said, over his shoulder.
Stephen’s back became more acutely listening. He did not understand the big words and he could not make out his father’s tone, except that, unlike Mother, he did not get mad at Stephen and begin to pick on him whenever Mrs. Anderson had been there a little while.
Mrs. Anderson did not make out Mr. Knapp’s tone very well herself, except that it was all part of his intense disagreeableness. A weak poor creature Lester Knapp was, a perfect failure at everything, and without even the poor virtue of knowing it. Besotted in self-conceit into the bargain, though she had never suspected that before. Poor Mrs. Knapp! And those poor children! Her mother’s heart ached for them, left in such hands.
Mr. Knapp went on drawing his thread to and fro silently. Little by little, out of the air, Mrs. Anderson drew the information that she had been insulted,though she had not perceived exactly when. She felt rasped to the bone. With dignity, she drew her cape up around her shoulders and prepared to go.
“Take the advice of an old woman who was bringing up children before you wereborn,” she said solemnly, her voice shaking with the depth of her feeling. “You’ll find out when it is too late that theymust be made to mind! Everything depends on that. Mrs. Knapp, their poor mother, understood that perfectly.”
“Good afternoon,” said Mr. Knapp, very distinctly.
The door closed behind her ungently enough, and with its slam Lester Knapp felt himself transported by an invigorating wave of anger such as he had rarely felt in his life, simple, hot, vivifying rage as good as a drink of whiskey. It made him feel twice as alive as usual. “Strange thing, the human mind,” he thought rapidly. “When I ran into Mrs. Andersonism in business, it only made me sick, sort of hamstrung me with disgust. Anything they’d put their filthy hands on I’d ratherletthem have than touch them enough to fight them. But when it threatens Stephen.... God! Iloveto fight it! I’d enjoy strangling that old harpy with my two hands. She thinks she can bully me by threatening my vanity, does she? She thinks she can gether damned old hands on my little boy, does she? I should say it was enough to have killed four of her own.”
He looked over at Stephen’s brooding back and set his stirred and sharpened wits to the problem of switching Stephen off from the track that was taking him towards one of his explosions. He had discovered that Stephen’s salvation at such times was something hard to do, something Stephen could struggle with, but not quarrel with. He thought fast, almost excitedly. Would he think of something first, or would Stephen blow up first?
Stephen turned away from the pile of his toys and began to wander about the kitchen, casting a somber eye on the too familiar things. “Alexander, Alexander, what new world can I get for you?” asked his father, unleashing his inventiveness and sending it leaping forward on the trail.
In a moment, “Say, Stephen, how’d you like to beat up a pretend egg?” he asked.
Stephen glowered at him suspiciously, but with a spark of unwilling curiosity in his dark eye.
“Like this,” said his father. He wheeled himself to the shelf, took down a tin basin, filled it with warm water, put a bit of soap into it and began to whip it to a froth with an egg-beater.
Stephen’s face lightened. Ever since he could remember he had seen his mother playing with thatfascinating toy; ever since he could remember he had put his hand out for it; ever since he could remember his mother had said, “No, no, you’d only make a mess,” and had hung it up out of reach.
He had gone too far towards a nervous explosion to be able to say “Oh, goody!” or “Give it to me!” but he held out his hand silently. His father took no notice of his sullen expression and did not offer to show him how it worked.
Stephen set the egg-beater in the water and with perfect confidence began to try to turn the handle. He always had perfect confidence that he could do anything he tried. At once the egg-beater slipped sideways and fell to the floor. Stephen frowned, picked it up and held it tighter with his left hand. But he found that when he put his attention on his left hand to make it hold tight, his right hand refused to make the round-and-round motion he so much admired. He had never before tried to do two different things with his two hands. He took his attention off his left hand and told his right hand to make the circular motion. Instantly the whole thing began to slip. As instantly he flashed his mind back on his left hand and caught the beater before it fell. But at once his right hand, left to itself, stopped turning.
“For him, it’s just like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach,” reflected Lester.
Stephen was disconcerted by the unexpected difficulty of the undertaking. He stood still a moment in the mental attitude of a man who has caught a runaway pig by the ear and a hind leg and does not dare let go. He breathed hard and frowned at the perverse creature of steel in his hand.
His father felt as the spectators at a prize-fight feel when the second round begins. He prayed violently that nothing might interrupt the rest of the bout. Especially did he pray that the old Anderson imbecile might not come in. If she did, he would just throw the stove-lid at her head. What was he for, if not to protect Stephen from marauding beasts of prey? He himself did not make a motion for fear of distracting Stephen’s attention.
The little boy went at it again, but with none of his first jaunty cocksureness, cautiously, slowly, turning the handle a little at a time. He made no progress whatever. The combination of the two dissimilar motions was too much for him. If some one had held the egg-beater still, he could have turned the handle, he knew that. But he would never ask any one to do it. He would do it himself. Himself! He tried again and again without the slightest success and began to put on the black, savage look he had for things that displeased him.
His father followed with sympathy as he toiled forward into the unmapped jungle of his own mind.How he stuck at it, the little tyke! And how touching was his look of outraged indignation at his own unruly right hand! His father said to himself, half-laughing, half-wistful, “Poor old man! We’ve all been there! That painful moment when we first realize that our right hands are finite and erring!”
He shook with silent mirth over the sudden, hot-tempered storm which followed in a tropical gust, when Stephen stamped his feet, ground his teeth, and, turning red and purple with rage, tried by main strength to master the utensil. He turned his eyes discreetly down on his darning when Stephen, with a loud “Gol darned old thing!” threw the egg-beater across the kitchen. He felt Stephen suddenly remember that his father was there and glance apprehensively up at him. He chose that moment to stoop again to the oven door and gaze fixedly in at the bland face of the rice pudding.
But he did not see it. He saw Stephen’s fiery little nature at grips with itself, and inaudibly he was cheering him on, “Go to it, Stevie! Get your teeth in it! Eat it up!” He was painfully, almost alarmingly interested in the outcome. Would Stephen conquer, or would he give up? Was there real stuff behind that grim stubbornness which had given them such tragic trouble? Or was it just hatefulness, as the Mrs.-Anderson majority of the worldthought it? He held a needle up to the light and threaded it elaborately. But he was really looking at Stephen, standing with his stout legs wide apart, glowering at the prostrate but victorious egg-beater. In spite of his sympathetic sense of the seriousness of the moment Lester’s diaphragm fluttered with repressed laughter. Cosmic Stephen in his pink gingham rompers!
He took up another stocking and ran his hand down the leg. Stephen sauntered over towards the beater, casually. He glanced back to see if he need fear any prying surveillance of his private affairs, but his father’s gaze was concentrated on the hole in the stocking. Carelessly, as though it were an action performed almost absent-mindedly, Stephen stooped, picked up the beater, and stood holding it, trying experiments with various ways of managing that maddening double action. His clumsiness, his muscular inexpertness with an unfamiliar motion, astounded his father. How far back children had to begin! Why, they did not know how to doanything! Not till they had learned.
This did not seem to him the trite platitude it would have been if somebody else had said it to him. It cast a new light into innumerable corners of their relations with Stephen which had been dark and pestilential. They hadn’t begun to be patientenough, to go slow enough. Stephen was to the egg-beater, to all of life, as he himself would be, put suddenly in charge of a complicated modern locomotive.
No, Stephen was not! Painlessly, with the hard-won magnanimity of a man who has touched bottom and expects nothing out of life for himself, not even his own admiration, Lester recognized in Stephen’s frowning, intent look on his problem a power, a heat, a will-to-conquer, which he had never had. He had never cared enough about either locomotives or egg-beaters to put his mind on them like that. Stephen got that power from his mother. From his other world of impersonality Stephen’s father saw it and thrilled in admiration as over a ringing line in a fine poem. If only Stephen could be steered in life so that that power would be a bright sword in his hand and not a poison in his heart.
The clock ticked gravely in the silence which followed. For Lester the pause was full of grave, forward-looking thoughts about Stephen. Presently the little boy come back purposefully to the basin of water. He put the beater in, and once more tried to turn the handle. The perverse thing did all that perversity could imagine, slipped sideways, stuck, started too suddenly, twice fell to the floor clattering. Each time Stephen picked it up patiently and went back to work. Lester ached with fatigue atthe sight of his perseverance. Heavens!Nothingwas worth such an effort as that!
“Why with such earnest pains dost thou provokeThe years to bring the inevitable yoke?”
“Why with such earnest pains dost thou provokeThe years to bring the inevitable yoke?”
“Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke?”
But Stephen did not flinch. He felt he almost had it. Once he turned the wheel three-quarters of the way around! His heart leaped up. But after this it balked continuously. Stephen fetched a long quavering sigh of discouragement and fatigue. But he did not stop trying. He could not have stopped. Something more potent than fatigue held him there. The tough fibers of his passionate will were tangled about his effort. He could not stop till he dropped. He was very near dropping. He scarcely knew what he was doing, his attention was so tired. But his hands, his brave, strong little hands kept on working. His back and legs ached. His shoulders bowed themselves. But he did not stop.
“Under the bludgeonings of chance....”
murmured Lester to himself.
And then, all at once, it was as though Stephen had turned a corner. Something rearranged itself inside his head. Instead of toiling uphill he felt himself begin to glide down easily. Why, he could do it! That rebellious right hand of his was suddenlytamed. Whir-r-r! went the steel spokes flashing in the white suds. They sang like music in Stephen’s ears! Whir-r-r! He could hardly believe it!
Once in a while it stuck or jerked, but he had only to take thought—Stephen could feel the thinking place in his head draw togetherhard—and command his hand to turn regularly. How it hated to, that old hand! And how Stephen loved the feeling of bossing it around!
He turned and turned. The foamy suds frothed higher and higher! Whir-r-r! The kitchen was full of the sound.
Stephen threw back his head and, laughing proudly, looked up at his father. His face was ruddy and glowing with his effort, with his triumph. All his fatigue was gone. Whir-r-r!
His father drew a long breath. He felt like clapping his hands and shouting “Hurrah!” It had been nip and tuck there for a while. Talk about the cave-man who had invented the bow and arrow! If Stephen had been a cave-man he would have invented the telephone. What a stirring spectacle it had been. He felt as though he had been reading some Emerson. Only it was lots better than any Emerson!
“Well, sir,” he exclaimed to the child, “I certainly will hate to have you begin going to school!”
The rice pudding was done. He took it out and put some coal on the fire and glanced at the clock. Why, it was almost time to expect the other children in from school. How the afternoon had flown! It was hard to put your mind on anything but the absorbing spectacle of Stephen’s advance into life. He must get out the milk and cookies with which he welcomed the others in. They always burst in as soon as possible after four. Sometimes Lester wondered what they had done before, in the old days, in the interval between four and six, when he usually found them waiting for him at the door of the store. Evangeline used to say that they were “playing ’round” with their school-mates.
He had not noticed that Stephen had stopped turning the egg-beater and was now looking up hard into his face, until the little voice asked, “What will you hate to have me going to ’chool for?”
Lester had to think for a moment before he could remember what he had said. Then, “Great Scott, Stevie, why wouldn’t I? I’llmissyou—what do you think? I’ll be lonesome without my funny, nice, little boy to keep me company.”
He wondered what made Stephen ask such a question. The child usually was quick enough to catch your meaning. He wheeled himself into the pantry and did not see that Stephen, after standing for a moment, turned away and went quietly out of theroom. When he came back and found him gone, Lester thought that probably he had gone upstairs to look for another toy.
Stephen felt very queer inside, sort of shaky and trembly. He had never felt like that before. And the queerness went all over him so that he couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t making up a queer face that Father would ask him about. The first thing to do was to get away where nobody would see him. He turned away, trying to pretend to walk carelessly and went into the empty dining-room.
But it didn’t stop. He could feel it, making him tremble and shake inside. And yet he didn’t feel sick—oh, no! It was a strange good feeling that was almost too much for him. It was too big for him. He was too little to hold it. It seemed to overflow him, so that he could scarcely breathe, in a bright, warm, shining flood. And Stephen was such a little boy! He had never felt anything like it before. It frightened him and yet he loved it. He must get off somewhere by himself where he would be safe—and alone—with the new, strange, bright, drowning feeling.
Under the stairs—always his refuge—he crept in on his hands and knees, not noticing the dust which flew up in his face as he crept. Those corners were not clean as they had been when Mother kept thehouse, but Stephen thought of nothing but that now the quivering was all over him, even his face ... the way it was when he was going to cry. He and his new feeling crept farther and farther in, as far as he could go. He sat down then, cross-legged, his face turned towards the safe, blind wall. He was safe. He was all alone. It was dark. He said to himself so low that there was no sound, “Father will miss me when I go to school.” Then, lower still, “Father likes to have me around.”
And suddenly Stephen’s eyes overflowed and his cheeks were wet, and hot drops fell down on his dusty hands.
But he was not crying. He knew that. It hurt to cry. And this did not hurt. It helped. The water ran quietly out of his eyes and poured down his cheeks. It was as though something that had ached inside him so long that he had almost forgotten about it were melting and running away. He could feel it hurting less and less as the tears fell on his hands. It was as though he were being emptied of that ache.
The tears fell more and more slowly and stopped. And now nothing hurt Stephen at all. There was no ache anywhere, not even the old one, so old he had almost forgotten about it. Stephen felt weak and empty without it and leaned his head faintly against the dusty dark wall.
He sat there a long time, it seemed to him, till little by little he felt the weakness going out of his legs and the emptiness out of his body. He must go back to Father now, or Father would wonder where he was.
But Father would think he had been crying and would ask him why. How could Father tell the difference if he saw the wet on his cheeks? Stephen would have died rather than try to tell any one what had been happening to him. He did not know at all what had been happening to him. He would rub the wet off his cheeks with his hands. Yes, that would do. Then Father would never know. He scrubbed vigorously at his eyes and his cheeks with his fists, and when he felt that there was no dampness left, he backed out on his hands and knees into the dining-room again. Was it the same room it had been when he had crept in? It didn’t seem possible! It looked so different. And Stephen felt so different. Like another Stephen altogether. So light! So washed! So clear! He didn’t seem to weigh anything at all, but to float through the air as he walked. Nothing looked to Stephen as it had. The walls and furniture had a sprightly, cheerful expression. He waved his hand to them as he floated out to the kitchen.
Lester had been busy at first getting the fouro’clock lunch ready for the children. He had taken down from the pantry shelf a paper bag of cookies, yes, the boughten kind; they happened to be out of home-made ones. He ought to have been making some instead of hanging fascinated over Stephen’s hand-to-hand battle with the universe.
But it was, glory be, no longer such a tragic matter, the sort of food Henry had! It certainly was a special provision of Providence that Henry and Helen were so much stronger than they had been; that just when they fell into his inexpert hands, they had begun to outgrow their delicate health. However could he have managed the care of them if they had been sick so often as when poor Eva had been struggling with the care of them? Wasn’t it all a piece of her bad luck to have had them during that trying period and turn them over to him just as her wonderful cooking and nursing had pulled them through. What a splendid nurse she was!
He poured out a glass of milk apiece for the children and looked impatiently at the clock. He loved the moment of their noisy arrival, loved the clatter of their feet on the porch, the bang of the door thrown open. Why were they late to-day?
Oh, yes, he remembered. They were due at a rehearsal of the school-play—Helen’s play—the one they had worked out together. What fun it was to have her bring him her little experiments inwriting! He began to think that perhaps she might have a little real talent. Of course most of what she set down was merely a copy of what she had read, but every once in a while there was a nugget, something she had really seen or felt. This, for instance, which he had found scrawled across the fly-leaf of her arithmetic—poor Helen and her hated arithmetic!
“The measured beats of the old clockBring peace to my heartAnd quiet to my mind.”
“The measured beats of the old clockBring peace to my heartAnd quiet to my mind.”
“The measured beats of the old clock
Bring peace to my heart
And quiet to my mind.”
That was the real thing, a genuine expression of her own personality. How different from the personality of her mother, to whom the ticking of a clock could scarcely be anything but a trumpet-call to action. Different from her father’s personality too. The clock always said to him,
“But at my back I always hearTime’s winged chariot hurrying near....”
“But at my back I always hearTime’s winged chariot hurrying near....”
“But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near....”
Ah, what a second-rater he was! How he always thought of everything in terms of what somebody else had said! In earlier days when he was a boy and still thought he might perhaps amount to something this had been an affliction to him, a secret shame. But now he did not grieve over it. Sincehe had died and come back to this other life, he took everything and himself, too, more simply, with little concern for the presentability of the rôle he was to play. If, honestly, that was the sort of nature he had, why rebel against it? The only people who got anywhere by rebelling were rebels to begin with. And he was not. Why wasn’t it enough, anyhow, to love the beauties other men had created?
He heard Stephen come back into the kitchen. He had been gone quite a while after that toy.
“Father,” said Stephen softly, behind him.
Lester started at the color of the little voice. There was something queer about it.
Cautiously, with his ever-present dread of intruding, he glanced at Stephen not curiously, but with a casual air.
The little boy came up to his chair and stood there, looking up at him with a strange expression of shining-quiet in his eyes. He had evidently been crying hard, for his cheeks were covered with the smeary marks of black where he had wiped off the tears with his dirty hands. But what on earth could he have been crying about? There had not been a sound.
And he did not look like a child who has been crying. He looked ... he was smiling now ... he looked like a little golden seraph hovering around the golden gates.
“Father,” said Stephen in a small, clear voice. He hesitated, evidently trying to think of something to say, his shining eyes fixed on his father’s. Finally he brought out, “Wouldn’t you like me to bring you a drink of water?” His smile, as he said this, was dazzling, his voice sweet, sweet with loving-kindness.
“Why, yes, Stevie,” said his father over a lump in his throat, “I do believe I am thirsty without realizing it.”
Stephen pushed a chair before him to the sink, climbed up on it, took down the dipper and held it under the faucet. The bright water gushed out, spattering over him, over the floor. He caught half the dipper full, turned off the faucet, and carried the dipper awkwardly back to his father, who took a long drink appreciatively.
“Thank you, old man,” he said as he handed it back.
Stephen set it back on the table and returned to hover near his father, smiling up at him speechlessly.
Lester felt the room filled with the flutter of airy, unseen wings and ached with his helpless wonder at them. What could have happened? What could have happened? He held his breath for fear of saying the wrong thing in his clumsy ignorance. All he dared do was to smile silently back at Stephen.
“Father,” said Stephen again, although he evidentlyhad nothing to add to the word, “Father....” He could think of nothing else to say to express the mysteriously born fullness of his heart.
“Yes, Stevie,” said his father, his own heart very full.
“Father ... would it hurt your sick legs very much if I sat in your lap for a while?”
Lester reached out hungrily and pulled the child up into his arms. “There’s just one good thing that can be said about my sick legs, Stephen,” he said, trying to be whimsical, “they positively cannot be hurt any more.”
Stephen laughed a little, nestled, turned himself, and then with a long sigh as though he were very, very tired, with a sudden relaxation of all his warm little body, was asleep, his round dark head falling back limply on his father’s shoulder.
Lester was almost frightened. Had the child fainted? Was he sick? But the expression on Stephen’s face was of complete calm. It looked like a smooth, closed bud, secret and serene, close-wrapped, all the personality at rest, nothing left but the tender mask of flesh.
Lester stirred involuntarily a hair’s breadth. Stephen felt the movement and his eyes flew open wide for an instant. At first they were shallow and meaningless in a mere physical opening. Then, before sleep took him wholly, he recognized hisfather, and all that made the little boy Stephen shone out of his eyes like a candle leaping up brightly before it goes out. That look was for Lester. Without stirring, in the exquisite smile of his eyes, his lips, all his transfigured little face, Stephen gave himself lovingly to his father.
Long after the burning little spirit had gone elsewhere, leaving the inert, deep-breathing, warm, small body on the paralyzed knees, his father sat there, his lips quivering.
Presently he said to himself, “And I am the man who, three months ago, was so eager to get out of life.”