(From _The Century Magazine_)
Eighteen years. Well, he was driving a good car, an expensive roadster,
he was well clad, a rather solid fine-looking man, not too heavy. When
he had left the Middle-Western town to go live in New York City he was
twenty-two, and now, on his way back there, he was forty. He drove
toward the town from the east, stopping for lunch at another town ten
miles away.
When he went away from Caxton, after his mother died, he used to write
letters to friends at home, but after several months the replies began
to come with less and less frequency. On the day when he sat eating his
lunch at a small hotel in the town ten miles east of Caxton he suddenly
thought of the reason, and was ashamed. “Am I going back there on this
visit for the same reason I wrote the letters?” he asked himself. For a
moment he thought he might not go on. There was still time to turn back.
Outside, in the principal business street of the town, people were
walking about. The sun shone warmly. Although he had lived for so many
years in New York, he had always kept, buried away in him somewhere, a
hankering for his own country. All the day before he had been driving
through the eastern Ohio country, crossing many small streams, running
down through small valleys, seeing the white farmhouses set back from
the road, and the big red barns.
The elders were still in bloom along the fences, boys were swimming in
a creek, the wheat had been cut, and now the corn was shoulder-high.
Everywhere the drone of bees; in patches of woodland along the road a
heavy, mysterious silence.
Now, however, he began thinking of something else. Shame crept over
him. “When I first left Caxton, I wrote letters back to my boyhood
friends there, but I wrote always of myself. When I had written a
letter telling what I was doing in the city, what friends I was making,
what my prospects were, I put, at the very end of the letter, perhaps,
a little inquiry. ‘I hope you are well. How are things going with you?’
Something of that sort.”
The returning native--his name was John Holden--had grown very uneasy.
After eighteen years it seemed to him he could see, lying before him,
one of the letters written eighteen years before when he had first
come into the strange Eastern city. His mother’s brother, a successful
architect in the city, had given him such and such an opportunity: he
had been at the theater to see Mansfield as _Brutus_, he had taken
the night boat upriver to Albany with his aunt; there were two very
handsome girls on the boat.
Everything then must have been in the same tone. His uncle had given
him a rare opportunity, and he had taken advantage of it. In time
he had also become a successful architect. In New York City there
were certain great buildings, two or three skyscrapers, several huge
industrial plants, any number of handsome and expensive residences,
that were the products of his brain.
When it came down to the scratch, John Holden had to admit that his
uncle had not been excessively fond of him. It had just happened that
his aunt and uncle had no children of their own. He did his work in
the office well and carefully, had developed a certain rather striking
knack for design. The aunt had liked him better. She had always tried
to think of him as her own son, had treated him as a son. Sometimes she
called him son. Once or twice, after his uncle died, he had a notion.
His aunt was a good woman, but sometimes he thought she would rather
have enjoyed having him, John Holden, go in a bit more for wickedness,
go a little on the loose, now and then. He never did anything she had
to forgive him for. Perhaps she hungered for the opportunity to forgive.
Odd thoughts, eh? Well, what was a fellow to do? One had but the one
life to live. One had to think of oneself.
Botheration! John Holden had rather counted on the trip back to Caxton,
had really counted on it more than he realized. It was a bright summer
day. He had been driving for days over the mountains of Pennsylvania,
through New York State, through eastern Ohio. Gertrude, his wife, had
died during the summer before, and his one son, a lad of twelve, had
gone away for the summer to a boys’ camp in Vermont.
The idea had just come to him. “I’ll drive the car along slowly through
the country, drinking it in. I need a rest, time to think. What I
really need is to renew old acquaintances. I’ll go back to Caxton and
stay several days. I’ll see Herman and Frank and Joe. Then I’ll go
call on Lillian and Kate. What a lot of fun, really!” It might just
be that when he got to Caxton, the Caxton ball team would be playing
a game, say with a team from Yerington. Lillian might go to the game
with him. It was in his mind faintly that Lillian had never married.
How did he know that? He had heard nothing from Caxton for many years.
The ball game would be in Heffler’s field, and he and Lillian would go
out there, walking under the maple trees along Turner Street, past the
old stave factory, then in the dust of the road, past where the sawmill
used to stand, and on into the field itself. He would be carrying a
sunshade over Lillian’s head, and Bob French would be standing at the
gate where you went into the field and charging the people twenty-five
cents to see the game.
Well, it would not be Bob; his son perhaps. There would be something
very nice in the notion of Lillian’s going off to a ball game that way
with an old sweetheart. A crowd of boys, women and men, going through a
cattle gate into Heffler’s field, tramping through the dust, young men
with their sweethearts, a few gray-haired women, mothers of boys who
belonged to the team, Lillian and he sitting in the rickety grandstand
in the hot sun.
Once it had been--how they had felt, he and Lillian, sitting there
together! It had been rather hard to keep the attention centered on
the players in the field. One couldn’t ask a neighbor, “Who’s ahead
now, Caxton or Yerington?” Lillian’s hands lay in her lap. What white,
delicate, expressive hands they were! Once--that was just before he
went away to live in the city with his uncle and but a month after
his mother died--he and Lillian went to the ball field together at
night. His father had died when he was a young lad, and he had no
relatives left in the town. Going off to the ball field at night was
maybe a risky thing for Lillian to do--risky for her reputation if
any one found it out--but she had seemed willing enough. You know how
small-town girls of that age are?
Her father owned a retail shoe store in Caxton and was a good,
respectable man; but the Holdens--John’s father had been a lawyer.
After they got back from the ball field that night--it must have
been after midnight--they went to sit on the front porch before her
father’s house. He must have known. A daughter cavorting about half
the night with a young man that way! They had clung to each other
with a sort of queer, desperate feeling neither understood. She did
not go into the house until after three o’clock, and went then only
because he insisted. He hadn’t wanted to ruin her reputation. Why, he
might have---- She was like a little frightened child at the thought of
his going away. He was twenty-two then, and she must have been about
eighteen.
Eighteen and twenty-two are forty. John Holden was forty on the day
when he sat at lunch at the hotel in the town ten miles from Caxton.
Now, he thought, he might be able to walk through the streets of Caxton
to the ball park with Lillian with a certain effect. You know how it
is. One has to accept the fact that youth is gone. If there should turn
out to be such a ball game and Lillian would go with him, he would
leave the car in the garage and ask her to walk. One saw pictures of
that sort of thing in the movies--a man coming back to his native
village after twenty years; a new beauty taking the place of the beauty
of youth--something like that. In the spring the leaves on maple trees
are lovely, but they are even more lovely in the fall--a flame of
color; manhood and womanhood.
After he had finished his lunch John did not feel very comfortable.
The road to Caxton--it used to take nearly three hours to travel the
distance with a horse and buggy, but now, and without any effort, the
distance could be made in twenty minutes.
He lit a cigar and went for a walk not in the streets of Caxton, but
in the streets of the town ten miles away. If he got to Caxton in the
evening, just at dusk, say, now----
With an inward pang John realized that he wanted darkness, the
kindliness of soft evening lights. Lillian, Joe, Herman, and the rest.
It had been eighteen years for the others as well as for himself. Now
he had succeeded, a little, in twisting his fear of Caxton into fear
for the others, and it made him feel somewhat better; but at once he
realized what he was doing and again felt uncomfortable. One had to
look out for changes, new people, new buildings, middle-aged people
grown old, youth grown middle-aged. At any rate, he was thinking of
the other now; he wasn’t, as when he wrote letters home eighteen years
before, thinking only of himself. “Am I?” It was a question.
An absurd situation, really. He had sailed along so gaily through upper
New York State, through western Pennsylvania, through eastern Ohio. Men
were at work in the fields and in the towns, farmers drove into towns
in their cars, clouds of dust arose on some distant road, seen across a
valley. Once he had stopped his car near a bridge and gone for a walk
along the banks of a creek where it wound through a wood.
He was liking people. Well, he had never before given much time to
people, to thinking of them and their affairs. “I hadn’t time,” he
told himself. He had always realized that, while he was a good enough
architect, things move fast in America. New men were coming on. He
couldn’t take chances of going on forever on his uncle’s reputation. A
man had to be always on the alert. Fortunately, his marriage had been a
help. It had made valuable connections for him.
Twice he had picked up people on the road. There was a lad of sixteen
from some town of eastern Pennsylvania, working his way westward toward
the Pacific coast by picking up rides in cars--a summer’s adventure.
John had carried him all of one day and had listened to his talk with
keen pleasure. And so this was the younger generation. The boy had nice
eyes and an eager, friendly manner. He smoked cigarettes, and once,
when they had a puncture, he was very quick and eager about changing
the tire. “Now, don’t you soil your hands, Mister; I can do it like a
flash,” he said, and he did. The boy said he intended working his way
overland to the Pacific coast, where he would try to get a job of some
kind on an ocean freighter, and that, if he did, he would go on around
the world. “But do you speak any foreign languages?” The boy did not.
Across John Holden’s mind flashed pictures of hot Eastern deserts,
crowded Asiatic towns, wild half-savage mountain countries. As a young
architect, and before his uncle died, he had spent two years in foreign
travel, studying building in many countries; but he said nothing of
this thought to the boy. Vast plans entered into with eager boyish
abandon, a world tour undertaken as he, when a young man, might have
undertaken to find his way from his uncle’s house in East Eighty-first
Street downtown to the Battery. “How do I know--perhaps he will do it,”
John thought. The day in company with the boy had been very pleasant,
and he had been on the alert to pick him up again the next morning; but
the boy had gone on his way, had caught a ride with some earlier riser.
Why hadn’t John invited him to his hotel for the night? The notion
hadn’t come to him until too late.
Youth, rather wild and undisciplined, running wild, eh? I wonder why I
never did it, never wanted to do it.
If he had been a bit wilder, more reckless--that night, that time when
he and Lillian--“It’s all right being reckless with yourself, but when
some one else is involved, a young girl in a small town, you yourself
lighting out”--He remembered sharply that on the night, long before, as
he sat with Lillian on the porch before her father’s house his hand--It
had seemed as though Lillian, on that evening, might not have objected
to anything he wanted to do. He had thought--well, he had thought of
the consequences. Women must be protected by men, all that sort of
thing. Lillian had seemed rather stunned when he walked away, even
though it was three o’clock in the morning. She had been rather like a
person waiting at a railroad station for the coming of a train. There
is a blackboard, and a strange man comes out and writes on it, “Train
Number 287 has been discontinued”--something like that.
Well, it had been all right, everything had been all right.
Later, four years later, he had married a New York woman of good
family. Even in a city like New York, where there are so many people,
her family had been well known. They had connections.
After marriage, sometimes, it is true, he had wondered. Gertrude used
to look at him sometimes with an odd light in her eyes. That boy he
picked up in the road--once during the day when he said something to
the boy, the same queer look came into his eyes. It would be rather
upsetting if one knew that the boy had purposely avoided him next
morning. There had been Gertrude’s cousin. Once, after his marriage,
John heard a rumor that Gertrude had wanted to marry that cousin, but
of course he had said nothing to her. Why should he have? She was his
wife. There had been, he had heard, a good deal of family objection to
the cousin. He was reputed to be wild, a gambler and drinker.
Once the cousin came to the Holden apartment at two in the morning,
drunk and demanding that he be allowed to see Gertrude, and she slipped
on a dressing-gown and went down to him. That was in the hallway of the
apartment, downstairs, where almost any one might have come in and seen
her. As a matter of fact, the elevator boy and the janitor did see her.
She had stood in the hallway below talking for nearly an hour. What
about? He had never asked Gertrude directly, and she had never told him
anything. When she came upstairs again and had got into her bed, he lay
in his own bed trembling, but remained silent. He had been afraid that
if he spoke he might say something rude; better keep still. The cousin
had disappeared. John had a suspicion that Gertrude later supplied him
with money. He went out West somewhere.
Now Gertrude was dead. She had always seemed very well, but suddenly
she was attacked by a baffling kind of slow fever that lasted nearly a
year. Sometimes she seemed about to get better, and then suddenly the
fever grew worse. It might be that she did not want to live. What a
notion! John had been at the bedside with the doctor when she died. It
was at night, and as the boy was asleep, he was not called. There was
something of the same feeling he had had that night of his youth when
he went with Lillian to the ball field, an odd sense of futility, of
inadequacy. There was no doubt that in some subtle way both women had
accused him.
Of what? There had always been, in some vague, indefinable way, a kind
of accusation in the attitude toward him of his uncle, the architect,
and of his aunt. They had left him their money, but---- It was as though
the uncle had said, as though Lillian during that night long ago had
said----
Had they all said the same thing, and was Gertrude his wife saying it
as she lay dying? A smile. “You have always taken such good care of
yourself, haven’t you, John dear? You have observed the rules. You have
taken no chances for yourself or the others.” She had actually said
something of that sort to him once in a moment of anger.