world.
Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the
Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her.
For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she
walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to
mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face
with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city
feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the
years.
In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and
almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his
hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with
Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got
into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town
laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to passers-by in
the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town,
where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing
songs.
One of the girls sat on Sam's lap and put an arm about his neck.
"Give me some money, rich man," she said.
Sam looked at her closely.
"Who are you?" he asked.
She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that she
had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.
"I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes," she said frankly,
"but if Tim saw me here he would kill me."
Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a
taxicab drove back to his hotel.
After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in a
kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which he did
not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited, planned a
return to business which he did not execute, and month after month
continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon and begin
drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry and talkative,
calling men by their first names, slapping chance acquaintances on the
back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young men intent upon gain.
In the early summer he got in with a party of young men from New York and
with them spent months in sheer idle waste of time. Together they drove
high-powered automobiles on long trips, drank, quarrelled, and went on
board a yacht to carouse, alone or with women. At times Sam would leave
his companions and spend days riding through the country on fast trains,
sitting for hours in silence looking out of the window at the passing
country and wondering at his endurance of the life he led. For some months
he carried with him a young man whom he called a secretary and paid a
large salary for his ability to tell stories and sing clever songs, only
to discharge him suddenly for telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of
another tale told by the stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed's
hotel in the Illinois town.
From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,
Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless
way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way
of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his
native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for hours by
little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and talking
nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew
habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and
more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about
hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to
sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor's head.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train
intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had
heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he
thought he would do something for them.
"I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them my
money," he thought. "Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by setting
them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear."
At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see an
attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days stayed
about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had picked
up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and
gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men
and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of
enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that
shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.
In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he
came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the
river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.
"I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the
river," he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. "Take
us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it
costs."
It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he went
among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to
continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him on
the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.
"Sing louder," he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his
companions.
A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to
perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the deck
before the shouting crowd.
"Now dance!" he growled, "or I will throw you into the river."
The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked at
him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along the deck
or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take effect, a
queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction came to him
and he raised his hand for silence.
"I want to see a woman who is a mother," he shouted. "I want to see a
woman who has borne children."
A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the group
gathered about the dancer.
"I have borne children--three of them," she said, laughing up into his
face. "I can bear more of them."
Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair on
the deck. The crowd laughed.
"Belle is after his roll," whispered a short, fat man to his companion, a
tall woman with blue eyes.
As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing songs,
went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman beside Sam
pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.
"My children are there. They are getting supper now," she said.
She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting
along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a
song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam's companion kept time
with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood
looking up the river.
"Turn back," he said, "I am tired of this crew."
On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.
"We will go to my house," she said quietly, "just you and me. I will show
you the kids."
Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the
distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had
grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small
groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam
her story.
She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.
"I drove him crazy," she said, laughing quietly. "He wanted me to stay at
home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me down
town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn't come he would go
away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn't a man. He would
do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids on
my hands."
In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in an
open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,
eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but
grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.
"We will go to my house. I want to have you alone," said the woman.
They drove through street after street of workingmen's houses, where
children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their
bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after them,
holding to the back of the carriage.
The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up
and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of
the running boys.
"Run, you little devils," she cried.
They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under the
lights.
"Give me a silver dollar," she said, turning to Sam, and when he had given
it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp. The two
boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.
Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps, striking
Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black crawling thing,
alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she crept forward and
dropped it down the neck of the driver.
In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam's head
was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran back over
the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a scorn of all
effort burned in him.
"It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth," he thought. "He comes to a
fine end in life."
On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the
air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night
there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the
carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood climbed
through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half hope awoke
in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing, intoxicated
woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot through him. He
began thinking of what she had said before the laughing crowd on the
steamer.
"I have borne three children and can bear more."
His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,
and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him. He
thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of life
unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command and
direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.
"Else why am I here?" he muttered, looking away from the vacant, laughing
face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver on the
seat in front. "Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why went I about
seeking Truth?"
His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles
and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her
black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling
beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her
hand.
"Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have
been," he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he
thought, was being tossed about by life.
Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped. Through
the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before a bar
drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their heads
throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell came
out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and
shouted. "O Will, come out here."
A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to his
elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had
started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.
"Will you run it?" he asked.
"Sure," she said. "The kids can take care of themselves."
At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got out
of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk skirting
a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a tangled mass of
bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and in the distance the
grey body of the river showed faint and far away. The undergrowth was so
thick that, looking down, one saw only the tops of the growth, with here
and there a grey outcrop of rocks that glistened in the moonlight.
Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the houses
facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily on Sam's
arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door and into a
long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the room went up
to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the end one looked
into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor
and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three
children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at
the knob of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his face
and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown eyes,
was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and black
eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him so that
his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and with yellow
hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another chair, her head
hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would have said, seven,
the black-haired boy ten.
The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman; the
sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired boy
straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.
"Hello, Mother," he said heartily.
The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the
dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.
"Come here, Joe," she said.
The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,
supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed she
struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him reeling
into the dining-room.
"Now you, Tom," she called to the black-haired boy. "I told you kids to
wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten
and nothing done and you two reading books again."
The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam
walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she
winced and twisted in his grasp.
"You come with me," he said.
He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned heavily
on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.
At the top of the stairway he stopped.
"We go in here," she said, pointing to a door.
He took her into the room. "You get to sleep," he said, and going out
closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.
Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off
the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by the
table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.
Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back at
him self-consciously.
"Which of you two puts Mary to bed?" he asked, and then, without waiting
for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. "Let Tom do it," he
said. "I will help you here."
Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going
busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him
dry wiping towels. Sam's coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.
The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within Sam's
breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though the lash
of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old memories
began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood, his mother
at work among other people's soiled clothes, his father Windy coming home
drunk, and the chill in his mother's heart and in his own. There was
something men and women owed to childhood, not because it was childhood
but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any question of
fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.
In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house
there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam's spirit. The boy Joe went
quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves. Somewhere
on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The backs of the
hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and competent the
hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled, unshaken by life.
Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He had always wanted
quickness and firmness within his own body, the health of the body that is
a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an American and down deep
within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become
so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with
him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through
his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and
planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had
brought him to nothing and had only left him more shaken and uncertain
then ever.
The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to
escape the shy silent presence of the boy. "Has life quite gone from me?
Am I but a dead thing walking about?" he asked himself. The presence of
the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown
tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.
Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?
The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two boys
said good night to the strange man in their mother's house. Joe, the
bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook it
solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.
"I'll be around here to-morrow I think," Sam said huskily.
The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and
down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a new
journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body
wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day when
he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for Truth, he let
his mind go so that it played freely over his past life, reviewing and
analysing.
For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where the
lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted good on
his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought back to him
the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had given him
herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.
It was two o'clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and
blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor
and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open
door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and that
the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past like
living things upon the floor.
Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy with
sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.
"Mother! O Mother!" called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could hear
the little body moving restlessly in bed.
Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed to
him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for hours
been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing for
which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in the
corridor of the hospital.
In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished
dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her shoes
and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A cool
morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened doors as
he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them sat at the
table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His tongue was
heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange questioning
eyes. "Why are you here?" their eyes asked.
For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the
children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had gone
away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the porch
outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she went to
sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly and
sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw the
country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came into
his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the tears but
evidence of self pity? He wondered.
One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and
again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling
upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,
had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the
lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking
self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the
corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too went
up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands
awkwardly.
Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on
the couch. "I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now," he
said to himself.
When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car and
went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft cashed.
Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and buying
clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night clothes, and
books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All these things he had
sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there to pack the trunks and
suit cases, and get them to the station. A large, motherly-looking woman,
an employe of the hotel, who passed through the hall, offered to help with
the packing.
After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to the
house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large bills.
He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the past.
"I will see what it will do here," he thought.
In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the
living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked at
him.
"There's a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen," she said. "Get me a
drink. Why do you hang about here?"
Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with
her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.
"What was your husband like?" he asked.
"Who? Jack?" she said. "Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He stood
for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and went
away." She looked at Sam and laughed.
"I didn't care much for him," she added. "He couldn't make money enough
for a live woman."
Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.
"The children will be a bother, eh?" he said.
"I have an offer for the house," she said. "I wish I didn't have the kids.
They are a nuisance."
"I have been figuring that out," Sam told her. "I know a woman in the East
who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I should like
to do something to help you. I might take them to her."
"In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away," she laughed, and took
another drink from the bottle.
Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown attorney.
"Get a neighbour in here to witness this," he said. "The woman will want
things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and
puts it on her."
She looked at him suspiciously. "What's the graft? Who gets stuck for the
fares down east?"
Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a
tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.
"Sign here," he said, putting the paper before her. "Here is your
neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent."
The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at
Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle
lay down again on the couch.
"If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed," she
declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but at the
moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take an
advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in life,
for purpose to come into his own life.
Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at the
brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an
automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came out.
He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children
accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found
the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit
cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an
envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked
up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride of
them.
At two o'clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of the
boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York flyer
--bound for Sue.
CHAPTER II
Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money, that
he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does not mean
much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy Americans than is
commonly believed. Something has happened to him that has happened to the
others also, to how many of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies
and quick brains, men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what
they had thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing
weary they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have leaned
the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a little. Strong
convictions have become weak. Old gods are dying.
"It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
near to you."
The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with
determination.
What is inscribed on it?
It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have
believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves
Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown
among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and
courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had
to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe
has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we
must build now, in a lifetime.
In our father's day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky,
and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and
mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land. When the land was
conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls
the wolves still howl.
* * * * *
There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three
children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws of
failure.
But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still there.
It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New England
roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it looked down at
him from the stars.
Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept. Perhaps
his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it began then.
The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was a
house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam's breast
there was a feeling of something alive, growing.
Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in
Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by
raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,
coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children--a little
inclined toward tears and homesickness--she was flustered and nervous.
Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate to
the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe and
Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come out at the
front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little frightened. Her
hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam thought her figure
almost boyish in its slenderness.
With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask
many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question she
did ask.
"Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?" she
asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the
children.
Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a help.
"They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep," he said,
as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with him
three strange children were an everyday affair.
Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the
house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought
together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other
and little Mary put her arms about Sam's neck and hid her face on his
shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue's
arms. "She will be your mother now," he said defiantly, not looking at
Sue.
* * * * *
The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and
very nobly by Sue.
There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted on
that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come into
her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly romantic
act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening, both Sam and
the children had been installed in the house.
A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions
regarding food for the children. "They will want bread and milk, and beds
must be found for them," she said, and then, although her mind was still
filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam's children by some
other woman, she took her plunge. "This is Mr. McPherson, my husband, and
these are our three children," she announced to the puzzled and smiling
servant.
They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden. In
the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A
little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.
"Don't bring lamps, a candle will do," Sue said, and she went to stand
near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point of
breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive sense
of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children feel at
home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys. "There is a
barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you everything,"
she said, smiling at them.
* * * * *
A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue's house and a road
that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and the
Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In the feeble
light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick branches
overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into the
darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before the
house.
He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling for
possession of his person.
There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring always
to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way, trampled
people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped forward, the man
of achievement.
And then there was another personality, a quite different being
altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a
timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or
walked before men.
What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive thing
within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him out of his
place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many times it had
tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.
It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against
it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into
darkness.
He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had come.
There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis for love
and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse could be
carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and brought to
her.
A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life, kneeling
before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was again afraid.
When he saw Sue's figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale, flashing thing,
coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to hide himself in
the darkness.
And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because
she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human
perplexities.
He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive within
him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her. "Nothing but
boldness will answer now," he kept saying to himself.
* * * * *
They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to
tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he came
to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path and
stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.
Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically. "I
have taken them and you, of course," she said, after he had stepped to her
and had put his arm about her waist. "My life alone hasn't turned out to
be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them and you, in
the house there. The two years you have been gone have seemed like an age.
What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought they must be your own
children by some other woman, some woman you had found to take my place.
It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two must be nearly fourteen."
They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue's command,
found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped and
excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.
In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue's figure going
through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room. Presently
she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A place was being
prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which he was to live
what was left of his life.
With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure of
the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped down
over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more intense.
Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house darkly
seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman, Sue,
ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives together.
Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three children who must
begin life as he had once done, who must listen to his voice, the voice of
Sue and all the other voices they would hear speaking words in the world.
They would grow up and thrust out into a world of people as he had done.
To what end?
There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. "To shift the load to the
shoulders of children is cowardice," he whispered to himself.
An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from
Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into
which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to be
concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it, but
he stood still under the trees. "I cannot run away from life. I must face
it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love," he told
himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.
How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a bird
moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of leaves. The
darkness before and behind was a wall through which he must in some way
manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand before him, as
though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he moved out of the
grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into the house.
THE END
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Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the
Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her.
For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she
walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to
mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face
with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city
feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the
years.
In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and
almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his
hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with
Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got
into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town
laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to passers-by in
the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town,
where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing
songs.
One of the girls sat on Sam's lap and put an arm about his neck.
"Give me some money, rich man," she said.
Sam looked at her closely.
"Who are you?" he asked.
She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that she
had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.
"I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes," she said frankly,
"but if Tim saw me here he would kill me."
Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a
taxicab drove back to his hotel.
After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in a
kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which he did
not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited, planned a
return to business which he did not execute, and month after month
continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon and begin
drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry and talkative,
calling men by their first names, slapping chance acquaintances on the
back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young men intent upon gain.
In the early summer he got in with a party of young men from New York and
with them spent months in sheer idle waste of time. Together they drove
high-powered automobiles on long trips, drank, quarrelled, and went on
board a yacht to carouse, alone or with women. At times Sam would leave
his companions and spend days riding through the country on fast trains,
sitting for hours in silence looking out of the window at the passing
country and wondering at his endurance of the life he led. For some months
he carried with him a young man whom he called a secretary and paid a
large salary for his ability to tell stories and sing clever songs, only
to discharge him suddenly for telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of
another tale told by the stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed's
hotel in the Illinois town.
From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,
Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless
way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way
of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his
native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for hours by
little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and talking
nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew
habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and
more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about
hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to
sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor's head.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train
intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had
heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he
thought he would do something for them.
"I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them my
money," he thought. "Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by setting
them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear."
At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see an
attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days stayed
about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had picked
up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and
gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men
and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of
enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that
shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.
In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he
came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the
river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.
"I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the
river," he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. "Take
us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it
costs."
It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he went
among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to
continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him on
the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.
"Sing louder," he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his
companions.
A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to
perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the deck
before the shouting crowd.
"Now dance!" he growled, "or I will throw you into the river."
The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked at
him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along the deck
or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take effect, a
queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction came to him
and he raised his hand for silence.
"I want to see a woman who is a mother," he shouted. "I want to see a
woman who has borne children."
A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the group
gathered about the dancer.
"I have borne children--three of them," she said, laughing up into his
face. "I can bear more of them."
Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair on
the deck. The crowd laughed.
"Belle is after his roll," whispered a short, fat man to his companion, a
tall woman with blue eyes.
As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing songs,
went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman beside Sam
pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.
"My children are there. They are getting supper now," she said.
She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting
along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a
song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam's companion kept time
with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood
looking up the river.
"Turn back," he said, "I am tired of this crew."
On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.
"We will go to my house," she said quietly, "just you and me. I will show
you the kids."
Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the
distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had
grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small
groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam
her story.
She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.
"I drove him crazy," she said, laughing quietly. "He wanted me to stay at
home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me down
town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn't come he would go
away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn't a man. He would
do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids on
my hands."
In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in an
open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,
eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but
grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.
"We will go to my house. I want to have you alone," said the woman.
They drove through street after street of workingmen's houses, where
children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their
bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after them,
holding to the back of the carriage.
The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up
and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of
the running boys.
"Run, you little devils," she cried.
They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under the
lights.
"Give me a silver dollar," she said, turning to Sam, and when he had given
it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp. The two
boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.
Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps, striking
Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black crawling thing,
alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she crept forward and
dropped it down the neck of the driver.
In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam's head
was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran back over
the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a scorn of all
effort burned in him.
"It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth," he thought. "He comes to a
fine end in life."
On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the
air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night
there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the
carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood climbed
through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half hope awoke
in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing, intoxicated
woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot through him. He
began thinking of what she had said before the laughing crowd on the
steamer.
"I have borne three children and can bear more."
His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,
and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him. He
thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of life
unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command and
direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.
"Else why am I here?" he muttered, looking away from the vacant, laughing
face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver on the
seat in front. "Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why went I about
seeking Truth?"
His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles
and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her
black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling
beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her
hand.
"Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have
been," he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he
thought, was being tossed about by life.
Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped. Through
the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before a bar
drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their heads
throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell came
out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and
shouted. "O Will, come out here."
A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to his
elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had
started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.
"Will you run it?" he asked.
"Sure," she said. "The kids can take care of themselves."
At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got out
of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk skirting
a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a tangled mass of
bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and in the distance the
grey body of the river showed faint and far away. The undergrowth was so
thick that, looking down, one saw only the tops of the growth, with here
and there a grey outcrop of rocks that glistened in the moonlight.
Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the houses
facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily on Sam's
arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door and into a
long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the room went up
to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the end one looked
into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor
and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three
children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at
the knob of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his face
and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown eyes,
was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and black
eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him so that
his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and with yellow
hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another chair, her head
hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would have said, seven,
the black-haired boy ten.
The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman; the
sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired boy
straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.
"Hello, Mother," he said heartily.
The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the
dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.
"Come here, Joe," she said.
The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,
supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed she
struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him reeling
into the dining-room.
"Now you, Tom," she called to the black-haired boy. "I told you kids to
wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten
and nothing done and you two reading books again."
The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam
walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she
winced and twisted in his grasp.
"You come with me," he said.
He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned heavily
on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.
At the top of the stairway he stopped.
"We go in here," she said, pointing to a door.
He took her into the room. "You get to sleep," he said, and going out
closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.
Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off
the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by the
table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.
Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back at
him self-consciously.
"Which of you two puts Mary to bed?" he asked, and then, without waiting
for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. "Let Tom do it," he
said. "I will help you here."
Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going
busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him
dry wiping towels. Sam's coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.
The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within Sam's
breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though the lash
of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old memories
began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood, his mother
at work among other people's soiled clothes, his father Windy coming home
drunk, and the chill in his mother's heart and in his own. There was
something men and women owed to childhood, not because it was childhood
but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any question of
fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.
In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house
there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam's spirit. The boy Joe went
quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves. Somewhere
on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The backs of the
hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and competent the
hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled, unshaken by life.
Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He had always wanted
quickness and firmness within his own body, the health of the body that is
a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an American and down deep
within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become
so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with
him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through
his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and
planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had
brought him to nothing and had only left him more shaken and uncertain
then ever.
The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to
escape the shy silent presence of the boy. "Has life quite gone from me?
Am I but a dead thing walking about?" he asked himself. The presence of
the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown
tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.
Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?
The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two boys
said good night to the strange man in their mother's house. Joe, the
bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook it
solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.
"I'll be around here to-morrow I think," Sam said huskily.
The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and
down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a new
journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body
wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day when
he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for Truth, he let
his mind go so that it played freely over his past life, reviewing and
analysing.
For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where the
lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted good on
his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought back to him
the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had given him
herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.
It was two o'clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and
blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor
and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open
door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and that
the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past like
living things upon the floor.
Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy with
sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.
"Mother! O Mother!" called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could hear
the little body moving restlessly in bed.
Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed to
him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for hours
been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing for
which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in the
corridor of the hospital.
In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished
dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her shoes
and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A cool
morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened doors as
he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them sat at the
table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His tongue was
heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange questioning
eyes. "Why are you here?" their eyes asked.
For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the
children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had gone
away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the porch
outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she went to
sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly and
sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw the
country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came into
his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the tears but
evidence of self pity? He wondered.
One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and
again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling
upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,
had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the
lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking
self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the
corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too went
up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands
awkwardly.
Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on
the couch. "I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now," he
said to himself.
When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car and
went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft cashed.
Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and buying
clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night clothes, and
books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All these things he had
sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there to pack the trunks and
suit cases, and get them to the station. A large, motherly-looking woman,
an employe of the hotel, who passed through the hall, offered to help with
the packing.
After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to the
house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large bills.
He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the past.
"I will see what it will do here," he thought.
In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the
living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked at
him.
"There's a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen," she said. "Get me a
drink. Why do you hang about here?"
Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with
her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.
"What was your husband like?" he asked.
"Who? Jack?" she said. "Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He stood
for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and went
away." She looked at Sam and laughed.
"I didn't care much for him," she added. "He couldn't make money enough
for a live woman."
Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.
"The children will be a bother, eh?" he said.
"I have an offer for the house," she said. "I wish I didn't have the kids.
They are a nuisance."
"I have been figuring that out," Sam told her. "I know a woman in the East
who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I should like
to do something to help you. I might take them to her."
"In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away," she laughed, and took
another drink from the bottle.
Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown attorney.
"Get a neighbour in here to witness this," he said. "The woman will want
things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and
puts it on her."
She looked at him suspiciously. "What's the graft? Who gets stuck for the
fares down east?"
Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a
tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.
"Sign here," he said, putting the paper before her. "Here is your
neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent."
The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at
Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle
lay down again on the couch.
"If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed," she
declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but at the
moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take an
advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in life,
for purpose to come into his own life.
Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at the
brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an
automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came out.
He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children
accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found
the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit
cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an
envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked
up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride of
them.
At two o'clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of the
boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York flyer
--bound for Sue.
CHAPTER II
Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money, that
he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does not mean
much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy Americans than is
commonly believed. Something has happened to him that has happened to the
others also, to how many of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies
and quick brains, men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what
they had thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing
weary they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have leaned
the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a little. Strong
convictions have become weak. Old gods are dying.
"It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
near to you."
The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with
determination.
What is inscribed on it?
It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have
believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves
Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown
among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and
courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had
to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe
has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we
must build now, in a lifetime.
In our father's day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky,
and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and
mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land. When the land was
conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls
the wolves still howl.
* * * * *
There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three
children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws of
failure.
But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still there.
It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New England
roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it looked down at
him from the stars.
Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept. Perhaps
his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it began then.
The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was a
house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam's breast
there was a feeling of something alive, growing.
Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in
Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by
raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,
coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children--a little
inclined toward tears and homesickness--she was flustered and nervous.
Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate to
the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe and
Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come out at the
front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little frightened. Her
hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam thought her figure
almost boyish in its slenderness.
With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask
many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question she
did ask.
"Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?" she
asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the
children.
Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a help.
"They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep," he said,
as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with him
three strange children were an everyday affair.
Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the
house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought
together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other
and little Mary put her arms about Sam's neck and hid her face on his
shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue's
arms. "She will be your mother now," he said defiantly, not looking at
Sue.
* * * * *
The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and
very nobly by Sue.
There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted on
that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come into
her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly romantic
act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening, both Sam and
the children had been installed in the house.
A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions
regarding food for the children. "They will want bread and milk, and beds
must be found for them," she said, and then, although her mind was still
filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam's children by some
other woman, she took her plunge. "This is Mr. McPherson, my husband, and
these are our three children," she announced to the puzzled and smiling
servant.
They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden. In
the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A
little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.
"Don't bring lamps, a candle will do," Sue said, and she went to stand
near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point of
breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive sense
of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children feel at
home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys. "There is a
barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you everything,"
she said, smiling at them.
* * * * *
A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue's house and a road
that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and the
Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In the feeble
light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick branches
overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into the
darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before the
house.
He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling for
possession of his person.
There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring always
to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way, trampled
people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped forward, the man
of achievement.
And then there was another personality, a quite different being
altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a
timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or
walked before men.
What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive thing
within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him out of his
place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many times it had
tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.
It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against
it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into
darkness.
He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had come.
There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis for love
and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse could be
carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and brought to
her.
A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life, kneeling
before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was again afraid.
When he saw Sue's figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale, flashing thing,
coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to hide himself in
the darkness.
And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because
she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human
perplexities.
He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive within
him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her. "Nothing but
boldness will answer now," he kept saying to himself.
* * * * *
They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to
tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he came
to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path and
stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.
Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically. "I
have taken them and you, of course," she said, after he had stepped to her
and had put his arm about her waist. "My life alone hasn't turned out to
be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them and you, in
the house there. The two years you have been gone have seemed like an age.
What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought they must be your own
children by some other woman, some woman you had found to take my place.
It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two must be nearly fourteen."
They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue's command,
found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped and
excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.
In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue's figure going
through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room. Presently
she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A place was being
prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which he was to live
what was left of his life.
With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure of
the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped down
over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more intense.
Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house darkly
seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman, Sue,
ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives together.
Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three children who must
begin life as he had once done, who must listen to his voice, the voice of
Sue and all the other voices they would hear speaking words in the world.
They would grow up and thrust out into a world of people as he had done.
To what end?
There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. "To shift the load to the
shoulders of children is cowardice," he whispered to himself.
An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from
Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into
which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to be
concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it, but
he stood still under the trees. "I cannot run away from life. I must face
it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love," he told
himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.
How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a bird
moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of leaves. The
darkness before and behind was a wall through which he must in some way
manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand before him, as
though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he moved out of the
grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into the house.
THE END
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