PART THREEChapter 11
IN the hurly-burly of the rearrangement of life, nobody had been able to pay much attention to Stephen, and he had reveled in this freedom from supervision. He had always steered his small, hard life on a line of his own, a line he strove to make parallel to the course of the rest of the family, and never intersecting. Contact with others always meant trouble in Stephen’s experience—except with Henry and Helen. Now that the grown-ups had almost forgotten his existence, he was enjoying life as never before, under his dirty, crumpled rompers, stiff with spilled egg-yolk and cold bacon grease.
His father’s accident had made no impression on his emotions. Events that did not touch Stephen personally never made any impression on his emotions. The only element in the new situation which interested him was that Mother seemed to have forgotten all about Teddy. This was important. It made Stephen very glad that Father had fallen off the roof and broken his legs all up, or whatever it was. As long as Father stayed in bed, he couldn’tbother anybody, even when he and Stephen were left alone.
For, after a time, they were left alone. When the sick man began to improve so that he was conscious, and later, occasionally out of pain, there were hours when the round of volunteer neighbors and helpers thinned out, when he was left in his bed in the dining-room, a glass of water, a book, something to eat and the desk-telephone on a table by his side, with instructions to telephone if he needed anything.
“Don’t you hesitate a minute now, Mr. Knapp,” said old Mrs. Hennessy heartily; “if it’s no more than to put a shovelful of coal on the kitchen fire, you call fourteen ring thirty-two and I’ll be right over.”
“And when Stephen gets to acting up, just shake the window-curtain real hard and I’ll drop everything to come over and settle him,” said Mrs. Anderson zestfully.
So far Stephen had not “acted up.” Probably, so Mrs. Anderson told Mrs. Knapp, “because as things are now he’s let to do just what he pleases and goodness knows whatthatis!” Stephen had even been a stimulating element in his father’s days when they first began to emerge from the endless nightmare of pain and to become, once more, successive stages in a human life.
Lester never spoke to any one about those first weeks after his fall and thought of them himself as little as possible. The mere casual mention of them afterwards brought the cold sweat out on him. No circle in any hell would have contained more concentrated suffering than was crowded into his every conscious moment—horrible, brute, physical suffering, tearing at every nerve, suffering that degraded him, that left him no humanity. When this was deadened for an instant by opiates or exhaustion, there were terrible hallucinations—he was again on the steep, icy roof, turning, death in his heart, to throw himself down into cold nothingness—he was falling, falling, endlessly falling ... and now he knew what intolerable anguish awaited him at the end of his fall. He screamed out dreadfully at such times and tore at the bedclothes as if to save himself. These moments of frenzy always ended by his coming to himself with a great start and finding himself burning and raging once more in unendurable physical pain.
Later, once in a while, there were fleeting instants almost of lucidity during which, as he was flung through space by the whirlwind of that inhuman, impersonal agony, he yet caught glimpses as it were of his own personality lying there prone, waiting for him to come back to enter it. This half-consciousness always brought the same thought to him....“Poor weak wretch! He had not even force enough to kill himself!” He thought it as of some one else, half-pityingly, half-contemptuously.
Then came periods of freedom from pain, incredulous, breathless bliss, poisoned by his horrified apprehension of being touched; for the slightest touch, even of the bed, plunged him again into the abyss.
During one of those respites when he lay, scarcely daring to breathe, there came to him the first personal sensation since his fall. He chanced to lie with his head turned towards the room, and for a moment he saw it, as it was, a part of human life, and not merely the background for this endless dying of his! On the floor sat Stephen, very dirty and uncared for, playing with his Teddy-bear! The expression on his face reminded Lester of something ... something, it seemed, which had begun, something with which he had wanted to go on. But just then Eva had brushed his pillow, and this glimpse back into the human life out of which he had hurled himself vanished in the molten lava of his physical pain.
Little by little, some unsuspected and implacable vitality hidden in his body slowly pushed him, groaning and unwilling, out of the living death which he still so passionately desired to make dead death. The weeks passed, he suffered less. He lay passiveand empty, staring up at the ceiling, counting and cataloguing all the small blemishes and stains in the plaster. A little strength seeped slowly back into his body. One day he found that he could read for a few moments at a time. He became aware of the life that went on about him. Chiefly it was Stephen’s life, because Stephen was generally in the foreground of the room.
Lester began to look down at the child as he played about the floor, watched languidly the expression on his round, pugnacious face, almost always dirty now, but, so it seemed to his father, not always so darkly grim as he remembered it. But then, he thought again (one of the slow thoughts which occasionally pushed their way up to his attention), he had never seen Stephen except in active conflict with authority.
“I never saw one of my children just living before,” he meditated. As he lay in bed, a book was usually open before him, but he looked over it at the far more interesting spectacle of his undiscovered little boy.
His first voluntary move back towards life was on the day when he had his talk with Stephen about his Teddy.
It began by his remembering suddenly what it had been which had begun, and with which he hadwanted to go on. The little memory, presenting itself so abruptly out of his subconsciousness, startled him into saying impulsively, “Oh, Stephen, come here a minute. What was it you started to tell me that day—up in the bathroom, when I was shaving—about your Teddy?”
The moment he had spoken he realized how foolish the question was. The day seemed like yesterday to him because there had been only blackness for him ever since. But it was two months ago; and two months for a little boy—how could he have thought that Stephen would remember?
But, as a matter of fact, Stephen looked as though he remembered very well indeed. He had started at the word “Teddy,” had turned instantly suspicious eyes on his father and had made a clutch at the stuffed bear over whose head he now stared at the man in bed, silently, his mouth a hard line, with the dogged expression of resistance which was so familiar.
Lester’s enforced observation of Stephen made this pantomime intelligible to him, in part. Stephen was afraid something would happen to Teddy. Why in the world should he be afraid?
On this question he put his attention, watching Stephen closely as he said laughingly, “What’s the matter with you, old man? Do you think I want to take Teddy away to play with him myself?”
Stephen’s face relaxed a very little at this. His eyes searched his father’s, deeply and gravely, with an intense wary seriousness, as a white traveler, lost in a jungle amongst savages, might search the eyes of one of the tribe who offered a friendly aspect. Could he be trusted? Or was this just another of their cannibalistic wiles?
“I like your Teddy fine,” continued Lester, conversationally. “I always liked the way he snuggles up to you in your bed. I used to wake up and look over at him sometimes. But I’m afraid I’m too old to play with him, myself.”
At the mention of Teddy’s sleeping beside him, Stephen looked away and down into the bright, opaque eyes of his fetish, and as he did this, his father felt an acute shock of surprise. The child’s face was passionately tender and loving. He looked as his own mother had looked when she held her first baby in her arms. Lester was so astonished that he was obliged to wait a moment before he could command his voice to casual negligence.
“So you don’t remember what it was you were going to ask me about Teddy?” he said, presently. “Well, itwasquite a while ago.”
So far he had not induced Stephen to say a single word. That was always Stephen’s way of resisting talk, and persuasion, and attempts to reach him.
Lester held his book up again and waited.
He waited a long time.
But waiting was one thing which circumstances made easy for him. There was little else a paralyzed man could do. Stephen sat motionless, his face a blank, staring into space. His father felt the uncertainty and questioning going on under that self-protective front of stolidity. Presently, a long time afterwards, the little boy got up and came slowly towards his father’s bed. “Yes, I ’member what it was,” he said in a low tone, keeping his eyes fixed intently on the expression of his father’s face. “I wanted to ask you ... to ask you not to let Mother ...” his voice dropped to a solemn, quavering whisper, “... not to let MotherwashTeddy.”
Lester survived the entire and grotesque unexpectedness of this with no more sign of his amazement than a flicker of his eyelids. He considered a dozen different ways of advancing into the undiscovered country and rejected them all in favor of the neutral question, “Was Mother going to wash Teddy?”
At this it all came out in a storm, the visit to the lady, the horrible, misshapen, shrunken Teddy there, Mother’s stealing Teddy away at night, the devouring dread in Stephen’s mind, a dread so great that it now overcame even his fierce pride and his anger, as he sobbed out at the last, “Don’t let him bewashed, Father!Don’tlet him!” He raised his streaming eyes agonizingly towards his father, his whole face quivering.
Lester was so horrified that for a moment he could not speak. He was horrified to see Stephen reduced so low. He was more horrified at the position in which he found himself, absolute arbiter over another human being, a being who had no recourse, no appeal from his decisions. It was indecent, he thought; it sinned against human dignity, both his and the child’s.... “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master!” he cried to himself, shamed to the core by Stephen’s helpless dependence on his whim, a dependence of which Stephen was so tragically aware, all his stern bulwarks of anger and resistance broken down by the extremity of his fear—fear for what he loved! Fear for himself would never so have transfigured Stephen, never!
Lester understood this. More, he felt it himself, felt himself ready to fight for Stephen as Stephen had been ready to fight for Teddy; he, Lester, who had never felt that he had the right to fight for anything of his own.
His gaze on the child had passion in it as he said firmly, weightily, “I’ll never have anything done to your Teddy that you don’t want, Stephen. He’s yours. You’ve got the right to have the say-so about him.”
Stephen looked at his father blindly, as if he did not understand these strange words. But though they were unfamiliar, though he could not understand them, they gave him hope. “You won’t have him washed?” he asked, clinging to the one point he understood.
“Not washed or anything else if you don’t want it,” said his father, reiterating his own point. It seemed to him he could not live another day if he did not succeed in making Stephen understand that.
To his astonishment, again to his shame, Stephen burst out with a phrase which had never before passed his lips except under protest, “Oh, thank you, Father! Oh,thankyou!” he cried loudly, his lips trembling.
Lester found the child’s relief shocking. It made him sick to think what a dread must have preceded it, what a fathomless blackness of uncertainty in Stephen’s life it must represent. He spoke roughly, almost as he would to another man, “You don’t have to thank me, Stevie,” he said. “Great Scott, old boy, it’s none ofmybusiness, what you do with your own Teddy, is it?”
Even as he spoke—like a lurid side-glimpse—was it possible that there were people who wouldenjoythanks extorted on those infamous terms? Were they ever set over children?
His insistence seemed to have penetrated a littleway through Stephen’s life-long experience of the nature of things. The little boy stood looking at him, his face serious and receptive, as if a new idea were dawning on him. It was so new that he did not seem to know what to do with it, and in a moment turned away and sat down on the floor again. He reached for his Teddy and sat clasping him in his lap.
The two were silent, father and son.
Lester said to himself, shivering, “What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings! Absolute, unquestioned power! Nobody can stand that. It’s cold poison. How many wardens of prisons are driven sadistically mad with it!”
He recoiled from it with terror. “You have to be a superman to be equal to it.”
In the silent room he heard it echoing solemnly, “That’s what it is to be a parent.”
He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it. He looked over the edge of his bed at Stephen and abased himself silently.
The child sat motionless, clasping Teddy, his face bent and turned away so that Lester could not see its expression. His attitude was that of some one thinking deeply.
Well, reflected Lester, there was certainly good reason for the taking of thought by everybody concerned!He let his head fall back on the pillow and, staring up, began for the first time since his fall to think connectedly about something other than his own wretchedness. For the first time the ugly blemishes on the ceiling were not like blotches in his own brain. Presently he forgot them altogether.
That sudden contact with Stephen’s utterly unsuspected suffering had been like dropping his fingers unawares upon red-hot iron. His reaction had been the mere reflex of the intolerable pain it gave him. Now, in the long quiet of his sick-room, he set himself to try to understand what it meant.
So that had been at the bottom of Stephen’s fierceness and badness in those last days of the old life. So it had been black despair which had filled the child’s heart and not merely an inexplicable desire to make trouble for his mother. For Heaven’s sakes, how far off the track they had been! But however could they have guessed at the real cause of the trouble? What possessed the child to keep such a perverse silence? Why hadn’t he told somebody? How could they know if he never said a word.
He thought again of the scene in the bathroom that last morning and saw again Stephen’s wistful face looking up into his. Stephen hadtriedto tell him. And those sacred itemized accounts of Willing’s Emporium had stopped his mouth.
But Evangeline was always on hand. Why hadn’t Stephen....
Without a word, with a complete perception that filled all his consciousness, Lester knew why Stephen had never tried to tell his mother.
And yet—his sense of fairness made him take up the cudgels for Eva—it hadn’t been such an unreasonable idea of hers. Teddy was certainly as dirty as it was possible for anything to be. You have to keep children clean whether they like it or not. Suppose Teddy had been played with by a child who had scarlet fever? They’d have to have him cleaned, wouldn’t they? He’d gone too far, yielded to a melodramatic impulse when he’d promised Stephen so solemnly they’d never have anything done to Teddy that he didn’t like.
But as a matter of fact Teddy never had been near scarlet fever or anything else contagious. And even if he had, weren’t there ways of dry-cleaning and disinfecting that would leave the personality of the toy intact? You didn’t have to soak it in a tub of soapy water. What was the matter with wrapping it in an old cloth and baking it in the oven, as you do with bandages you want to sterilize. If anybody had had the slightest idea that Stephen felt as he did....But nobody had!And that was the point.
He saw it now. Nothing turned on the questionof whether Teddy should or should not be cleaned. That purely material matter could have been arranged by a little practical ingenuity if it had occurred to anybody that there was anything to arrange. The question really was why had it not occurred to anybody?
What was terrifying to Lester was the thought that the conception of trying to understand Stephen’s point of view had been as remote from their minds as the existence of the fourth dimension.
And even now that the violent shock of this little scene with Stephen had put the conception into his brain, how under the sun could you ever find out what was felt by a child who shut himself up so blackly in his stronghold of repellent silence?
WhyhadStephen so shut himself up?
The question was as new to Lester as a question of the cause of the law of gravity. It had never occurred to him that perhaps Stephen had not been born that way.
But even a sullen stronghold of badness was better than that dreadful breakdown of human dignity. Lester felt he could never endure it again to have Stephen look into his face with that slavish, helpless searching of his eyes. No self-respecting human being could bear that look from another.
Could there be human beings—women—mothers—who fattened on it, fought to keep that slave’slook in the eyes of children? He turned from this thought with a start.
Well, what good did all this thinking do him? Or Stephen? What could he do now, at once, to escape out of this prison and take Stephen with him?
With a heat of anger, he told himself that at least he could start in to make Stephen feel, hour by hour, in every contact with him, that he, even a little boy, had some standing in the world, inviolable by grown-ups, yes,sacred even to parents.
He breathed hard and flung out his arm.
For the first time he desired to get well, to live again.