I
Bruce Storrs stood up tall and straight on a prostrate sycamore, the
sunlight gleaming upon his lithe, vigorous body, and with a quick,
assured lifting of the arms plunged into the cool depths of the river.
He rose and swam with long, confident strokes the length of a pool
formed by the curving banks and returned to the log, climbing up with
the same ease and grace that marked his swimming. He dashed the water
from his eyes and pressed his deeply-tanned hands over his shapely
head. It was evident that he was the fortunate inheritor of clean
blood in a perfectly fashioned body; that he had used himself well in
his twenty-eight years and that he found satisfaction and pride in
his health and strength. He surveyed the narrow valley through which
the river idled and eddied before rushing into the broader channel
beyond--surveyed it with something of the air of a discoverer who has
found and appropriated to his own uses a new corner of the world.
It was a good place to be at the end of a day that was typical of
late August in the corn belt, a day of intense dry heat with faint
intimations on the horizon of the approach of autumn. With a contented
sigh he sat down on the log, his feet drawn up, his shoulders bent,
and aimlessly tore bits of bark from the log and tossed them into the
water. Lulled by the lazy ripple, he yielded himself to reverie and
his eyes filled with dreams as he stared unseeingly across the stream.
Suddenly he raised his head resolutely as if his thoughts had returned
to the world of the actual and he had reached a conclusion of high
importance. He plunged again and now his short, rapid strokes threshed
the water into foam. One might have thought that in the assertion of
his physical strength he was testing and reassuring himself of his
complete self-mastery.
Refreshed and invigorated, he clambered up the bank and sought a great
beech by whose pillar-like trunk he had left his belongings, and
proceeded to dress. From a flat canvas bag he produced a towel and a
variety of toilet articles. He combed his thick curly hair, donned a
flannel shirt and knotted a blue scarf under its soft collar. His shoes
of brogan type bore the imprint of a metropolitan maker and his gray
knickerbockers and jacket indicated a capable tailor.
He took from the bag a package of letters addressed in a woman’s
hand to Bruce Storrs, and making himself comfortable with his back
to the tree, he began to read. The letters had been subjected to
many readings, as their worn appearance testified, but selecting the
bulkiest, he perused it carefully, as though wishing to make sure that
its phrases were firmly fixed in his memory.
“... Since my talk with you,” he read, “I have had less pain, but the
improvement is only temporary--the doctors do not deceive me as to
that. I may go quickly--any day, any hour. You heard my story the other
night--generously, with a fine tolerance, as I knew you would. If I
had not been so satisfied of your sense of justice and so sure of your
love, I could never have told you. But from the hour I knew that my
life was nearing its end I felt more and more that you must know. One
or two things I’m afraid I didn’t make clear ... that I loved the man
who is your father. Love alone could be my justification--without that
I could never have lived through these years.
“The man you have called father never suspected the truth. He trusted
me. It has been part of my punishment that through all these years
I have had to endure the constant manifestations of his love and
confidence. But for that one lapse in the second year of my marriage, I
was absolutely faithful in all my obligations to him. And he was kind
to you and proud of you. He did all for you that a father could, never
dreaming that you were not his own. It was one of my sorrows that I
couldn’t give him a child of his own. Things went badly with him in
his last years, as you know, and what I leave to you--it will be about
fifty thousand dollars--I inherited from my father, and it will help
you find your place in the world.
“Your father has no idea of your existence.... Ours was a midsummer
madness, at a time when we were both young. I only knew him a little
while, and I have never heard from him. My love for him never wholly
died. Please, dear, don’t think harshly of me, but there have been
times when I would have given my life for a sight of him. After all you
are his--his as much as mine. You came to me from him--strangely dear
and beautiful. In my mind you have always been his, and I loved you the
dearer. I loved him, but I could not bring myself to leave the man you
have called father for him. He was not the kind of man women run away
with....
“When I’m gone I want you to put yourself near him--learn to know him,
if that should be possible. I am trusting you. You would never, I
know, do him an injury. Some day he may need you. Remember, he does not
know--it may be he need never know. But oh, be kind to him....”
He stared at the words. Had it been one of those unaccountable
affairs--he had heard of such--where a gently reared woman falls prey
to a coarse-fibered man in every way her inferior? The man might be
common, low, ignorant and cruel. Bruce had been proud of his ancestry.
The Storrs were of old American stock, and his mother’s family, the
Bruces, had been the foremost people in their county for nearly a
century. He had taken a pardonable pride in his background.... That
night when he had stumbled out of the house after hearing his mother’s
confession he had felt the old friendly world recede. The letters,
sealed and entrusted to the family physician for delivery at her death,
merely repeated what she had told him.
In his constant rereadings he had hoped that one day he would find
that he had misinterpreted the message. He might dismiss his mother’s
story as the fabrication of a sick woman’s mind. But today he knew the
folly of this; the disclosure took its place in his mind among the
unalterable facts of his life. At first he had thought of destroying
himself; but he was too sane and the hope of life was too strong for
such a solution of his problem. And there had been offers--flattering
ones--to go to New York and Boston. He convinced himself that his
mother could not seriously have meant to limit the range of his
opportunities by sending him to the city where his unknown father
lived. But he was resolved not to shirk; he would do her bidding.
There was a strain of superstition in him: he might invite misfortune
by disregarding her plea; and moreover he had the pride and courage
of youth. No one knew, no one need ever know! He had escaped from
the feeling, at first poignant, that shame attached to him; that he
must slink through life under the eyes of a scornful world. No; he had
mastered that; his pride rallied; he felt equal to any demand fate
might make upon him; he was resolved to set his goal high....
Life had been very pleasant in Laconia, the Ohio town where John
Storrs had been a lawyer of average attainments--in no way brilliant,
but highly respected for his probity and enjoying for years a fair
practice. Bruce had cousins of his own age, cheery, wholesome
contemporaries with whom he had chummed from childhood. The Storrs,
like the Bruces, his mother’s people, were of a type familiar in
Mid-western county seats, kindly, optimistic, well-to-do folk, not too
contented or self-satisfied to be unaware of the stir and movement of
the larger world.
The old house, built in the forties by John Storrs’s grandfather,
had become suddenly to Bruce a strange and alien place that denied
his right of occupancy. The elms in the yard seemed to mock him,
whispering, “You don’t belong here!” and as quickly as possible he
had closed the house, made excuses to his relatives, given a power of
attorney to the president of the local bank, an old friend, to act for
him in all matters, and announced that he’d look about a bit and take a
vacation before settling down to his profession.
This was all past now and he had arrived, it seemed inevitably, at the
threshold of the city where his father lived.
The beauty of the declining day stirred longings and aspirations,
definite and clear, in his mind and heart. His debt to his mother was
enormous. He remembered now her happiness at the first manifestation of
his interest in form, color and harmony; her hand guiding his when he
first began to draw; her delight in his first experiment with a box of
colors, given him on one of his birthdays. Yes; he should be a painter;
that came first; then his aptitude in modeling made it plain that
sculpture was to be his true vocation. To be a creator of beautiful
things!--here, she had urged, lay the surest hope of happiness.
Very precious were all these memories; they brought a wistful smile to
his face. She had always seemed to him curiously innocent, with the
innocence of light-hearted childhood. To think of her as carrying a
stain through her life was abhorrent. Hers was the blithest, cheeriest
spirit he had known. The things she had taught him to reverence were
a testimony to her innate fineness; she had denied herself for him,
jealously guarding her patrimony that it might pass to him intact. The
manly part for him was to live in the light of the ideals she had set
for him. Pity and love for one who had been so sensitive to beauty in
all its forms touched him now; brought a sob to his throat. He found a
comfort in the thought that her confession might be attributable to a
hope that in his life her sin might be expiated....
He took up the letters and turned them over for the last time, his eyes
caught and held now and then by some phrase. He held the sheets against
his face for a moment, then slowly tore them into strips, added the
worn envelopes and burned them. Not content with this, he trampled the
charred fragments into the sandy turf.