"What is it?" said he. "What's the matter?"
But Anne, after a second glance at his tired face, was all concern for
him.
"Have you had something to eat?" she asked.
He put that aside, and said remindingly:
"What is it about father?"
Anne stood at the foot of the stairs. She had the air of defending the
way, lest he rush up before he was intelligently prepared.
"We don't know what it is. He went all to pieces. It was just after you
had gone. I found him there, shaking. He just said to me: 'I'll go to
bed.' So I helped him. That's all I know."
Jeff felt an instant and annoyed compunction. He had dashed off, to the
tune of his own wild mood, and left his father to the assaults of
emotions perhaps as overwhelming and with no young strength to meet
them.
"I'll go up," said he. "Did you call a doctor?"
"No. He wouldn't let me."
Jeff ran up the stairs and found Lydia in a chair outside the colonel's
door. She looked pathetically tired and anxious. And so young: if she
had arranged herself artfully to touch the sympathies she couldn't have
done it to more effect. Her round arms were bare to the elbow, her hands
were loosely clasped, and she was sitting, like a child, with her feet
drawn up under her on the rung of the chair. She looked at him in a
solemn relief but, he saw with a relief of his own, no sensitiveness to
his presence apart from the effect it might have on her father.
"He's asleep," she said, in a whisper. "I'm sitting here to listen."
Jeffrey nodded at her in a bluff way designed to express his certainty
that everything was going to be on its legs again now he had come home.
For the first time he felt like the man in the house, and the thin tonic
braced him. He opened the door of his father's room and went in. The
colonel's voice came at once:
"That you, Jeff?"
"Yes," said Jeff. He sat down by the bedside in the straight-backed
chair that had evidently been comfortable enough for the sisters'
anxious watch. "What's the matter, father?"
The colonel moved slightly nearer the edge of the bed. His eyes
brightened, Jeff noted by the light of the shaded lamp. He was glad to
get his son home again.
"Jeff," said he, "I've been lying here making up my mind I'd tell you."
Jeffrey rose and closed the door he had left open a crack out of
courtesy to the little watcher there. He came back to the bed, not with
a creaking caution, but like a man bringing a man's rude solace. He
could not believe his father was seriously undone. But, whatever was the
matter, the colonel was glad to talk. Perhaps, loyal as he was, even he
could scarcely estimate his own desire to turn from soft indulgences to
the hard contact of a man's intelligence.
"Jeff," said he, "I'm in a bad place. I've met the last enemy."
"Oh, no, you haven't," said Jeff, at random. "The last enemy is Death.
That's what they say, don't they? Well, you're years and years to the
good. Don't you worry."
"Ah, but the last enemy isn't Death," said the colonel wisely. "Don't
you think it. The last enemy is Fear. Death's only the executioner. Fear
delivers you over, and then Death has to take you, whether or no. But
Fear is the arch enemy."
Sane as he looked and spoke, this was rather impalpable, and Jeffrey
began to doubt his own fitness to deal with psychologic quibbles. But
his father gave short shrift for questioning.
"I'm afraid," he said quite simply.
"What are you afraid of?" Jeff felt he had to meet him with an equal
candour.
"Everything."
They looked at each other a moment and then Jeff essayed a mild, "Oh,
come!" because there was nothing more to the point.
"I've taken care of myself," said the colonel, with more vigour, "till
I'm punk. I can't stand a knockdown blow. I couldn't stand your going
away. I went to bed."
"Is my going a knockdown blow?"
There was something pathetic in hearing that, but pleasurable, too, in a
warm, strange way.
"Why, yes, of course it is."
"Well, then," said Jeff, "don't worry. I won't go."
"Oh, yes, you will," said the colonel instantly, "or you'll be punk. I'd
rather go with you. I told you that. But it wouldn't do. I should begin
to pull on you. And you'd mother me as they do, these dear girls."
"Yes," said Jeffrey thoughtfully. "Yes. They're dear girls."
"There's nothing like them," said the colonel. "There never was anything
like their mother." Then he stopped, remembering she was not Jeff's
mother, too. But Jeff knew all about his own mother, the speed and shine
and bewildering impulse of her, and how she was adored. But nobody
could have been soothed and brooded over by her, that gallant fiery
creature. Whatever she might have become if she had lived, love of her
then was a fight and a devotion, flowers and stars and dreams. "And it
isn't a thing for me to take, this sort of attachment, Jeff. I ought to
give it. They ought to be having the kind of time girls like. They ought
not to be coddling an old man badly hypped."
Jeff nodded here, comprehendingly. Yes, they did need the things girls
like: money, clothes, fun. But he vaulted away from that disquieting
prospect, and faced the present need.
"Have you had anything to eat?"
"Oh, yes," the colonel said. "Egg-nog. Anne makes it. Very good."
"See here," said Jeff, "don't you want to get up and slip your clothes
on, and I'll forage round and fish out cold hash or something, and we'll
have a kind of a mild spree?"
A slow smile lighted the colonel's face, rather grimly.
He admired the ease with which Jeff grasped the situation.
"Don't you start them out cooking," he advised.
"No, I'll find a ham-bone or something. Only slip into your trousers.
Get your shoes on your feet. We'll smoke a pipe together."
"You're right," said the colonel, with vigour. "We'll put on our shoes."
Jeff, on his way to the door, heard him throwing off the bedclothes. His
own was the harder part. He had to meet the tired, sweet servitors
without and announce a man's fiat. There they were, Lydia still in her
patient attitude, and Anne on the landing, her head thrown back and the
pure outline of her chin and throat like beauty carved in the air. At
the opening of the door they were awake with an instant alertness.
Lydia's feet came noiselessly to the floor, and Jeff understood, with a
pang of pity for her, that she had perched uncomfortably to keep herself
awake. This soft creature would never understand. He addressed himself
to Anne, who believed in the impeccable rights of man and could take
uncomprehended ways for granted.
"He's going to get up."
Anne made a movement toward the door.
"No," said Jeffrey. He was there before her, and, though he smiled at
her, she knew she was not to pass. "I'll see to him. You two run off to
bed."
They were both regarding him with a pale, anxious questioning. But
Anne's look cleared.
"Come, Lydia," said she, and as Lydia, cramped with sleep, trudged after
her, she added wisely, "It'll be better for them both."
When they were gone, Jeffrey did go down to the kitchen, rigid in the
order Mary Nellen always left. He entered boldly on a campaign of
ruthless ravaging, found bread and cheese and set them out, and a roast
most attractive to the eye. He lighted candles, and then a lamp with a
gay piece of red flannel in its glass body, put there by Mary Nellen,
who, though on Homeric knowledge bent, kept religiously all the ritual
of home. The colonel's slippered step was coming down the stairs.
Jeffrey went out into the hall and beckoned. He looked stealth and
mischief, and the colonel grimaced wisely at him. They went into the
kitchen and sat down to their meal like criminals. The colonel had to
eat, in vying admiration of Jeff, ravenous from his day's walk. When
they drew back, Jeff pulled out his pipe. He was not an incessant
smoker, but in this first interval of his homecoming all small
indulgences were sweet. He paused in filling, finger on the weed.
"Where's yours?" he asked.
The colonel shook his head.
"Don't smoke?" Jeff inquired.
"I haven't for a year or so." He was shamefaced over it. "The fact
is--Jeff, I'm nothing but a malingerer. I thought--my heart--"
"Very wise," said Jeffrey, his eyes half-closed in a luxurious lighting
up. "Very wise indeed. But just to-night--don't you think you'd
better have a whiff to-night?" The colonel shook his head, but Jeff sent
out an advance signal of blue smoke. "Where is it?" said he.
"Oh, I suppose it's in my bureau drawer," said the colonel, with
impatience. "Left hand. I kept it; I don't know why."
"Yes," said Jeffrey. "Of course you kept your pipe."
He ran softly upstairs, opening and shutting doors with an admirable
quiet, and put his hand on the old briarwood. From Anne's room he heard
a low crooning. She was awake then, but with mind at ease or she
wouldn't sing like that. He could imagine how Lydia had dropped off to
sleep, like a burden of sweet fragrances cast on the bosom of the night,
an unfinished prayer babbled on her lips. But to think of Lydia now was
to look trouble in the face, and he returned to his father not so
thoroughly in the spirit of a specious gaiety. It did him good, though,
to see the colonel's fingers close on the old pipe, with a motion of the
thumb, indicating a resumed habit, caressing a smooth, warm boss. The
colonel soberly but luxuriously lighted up, and they sat and puffed a
while in silence. Jeffrey drew up a chair for his father's feet and
another for his own.
"What's your idea," he said,' at length, "of Weedon Moore?"
The colonel took his pipe out and replaced it.
"Rather a dirty fellow, wasn't he?"
"Yes. That is, in college."
"What d' he do?"
The colonel had never been told at the time. He knew Moore was an
outcast from the gang.
"Everything," said Jeffrey briefly. "And told of it," he added.
The colonel nodded. Jeffrey put Moore aside for later consideration, and
made up his mind pretty generously to talk things over. The habit of his
later years had been all for silence, and the remembered confidences of
the time before had involved Esther. Of that sweet sorcery he would not
think. As he stood now, the immediate result of his disaster had been to
callous surfaces accessible to human intercourse and at the same time
cause him, in the sensitive inner case of him, to thank the ruling
powers that he need never again, seeing how ravaging it is, give himself
away. But now because his father had got to have new wine poured into
him, he was giving himself away, just as, on passionate impulse, he had
given himself away to Lydia. He put his question desperately, knowing
how inexorably it committed him.
"Do you suppose there's anything in this town for me to do?"
The colonel produced at once the possibility he had been privately
cherishing.
"Alston Choate--"
"I know," said Jeffrey. "I sha'n't go to Choate. You know what Addington
is. Before I knew it, I should be a cause. Can't you and I hatch up
something?"
The colonel hesitated.
"It would be simple enough," he said, "if I had any capital."
"You haven't," said Jeff, rather curtly, "for me to fool away. What
you've got you must save for the girls."
The same doubt was in both their minds. Would Addington let him earn his
living in the bald give and take of everyday commerce? Would it half
patronise and half distrust him? He thought, from old knowledge of it,
that Addington would behave perfectly but exasperatingly. It was
passionate in its integrity, but because he was born out of the best
traditions in it, a temporary disgrace would be condoned. If he opened a
shop, Addington would give him a tithe of its trade, from duty and, as
it would assuredly tell itself, for the sake of his father. But he
didn't want that kind of nursing. He was sick enough at the accepted
ways of life to long for wildernesses, ocean voyages on rough liners,
where every man is worked hard enough to let his messmate alone. He was
hurt, irremediably hurt, he knew, in what stands in us for the
affections. But here were affections still, inflexibly waiting. They had
to be reckoned with. They had to be nurtured and upheld, no matter how
the contacts of life hit his own skin. He tried vaguely, and still with
angry difficulty, to explain himself.
"I want to stand by you, father. But you won't get much satisfaction out
of me."
The colonel thought he should get all kinds of satisfaction. His glance
told that. How much of the contentment of it, Jeffrey wondered, with a
cynical indulgence for life as it is, came from tobacco and how much
from him?
"You see I'm not the chap I was," he blundered, trying to open his
father's eyes to the abysmal depth of his futility.
"You're older," said the colonel. "And--you'll let me say it, won't
you, Jeff?" He felt very timid before his rough-tongued, perhaps
coarsened son. "You seem to me to have got a lot out of it."
Out of his imprisonment! The red mounted to Jeffrey's forehead. He took
out his pipe, emptied it carefully and laid it down.
"Father," he said slowly, "I'm going to tell you the truth. When we're
young we're full of yeast. We know it all. We think we're going to do it
all. But we're only seething and working inside. It's a dream, I
suppose. We live in it and we think we've got it all. But it's a
horribly uncomfortable dream."
The colonel gave his little acquiescing nod.
"I wouldn't have it again," he said. "No, I wouldn't go back."
"And I give you my word," said Jeffrey, slowly thinking out his way,
though it looked to him as if there were really no way, "I'm as much at
sea as I was then. It's not the same turmoil, but it's a turmoil. I was
pulled up short. I was given plenty of time to think. Well, I
thought--when I hadn't the nerve to keep myself from doing it."
"You said some astonishing things in the prison paper," his father
ventured. The whole thing seemed so gravely admirable to him--Jeff and
the prison as the public knew them--that he wished Jeff himself could
get comfort out of it.
"Some few things I believe I settled, so far as I understand them." Jeff
was frowning at the table where his hand beat an impatient measure. "I
saw things in the large. I saw how the nations--all of 'em, in living
under present conditions--could go to hell quickest. That's what they're
bent on doing. And I saw how they could call a halt if they would. But
how to start in on my own life, I don't know. You'd think I'd had time
enough to face the thing and lick it into shape. I haven't. I don't know
any more what to do than if I'd been born yesterday--on a new
planet--and not such an easy one."
While the colonel had bewailed his own limitations a querulous
discontent had ivoried his face. Now it had cleared and left the face
sedate and firm in a gravity fitted to its nobility of line.
"Jeff," he said. He leaned over the table and touched Jeffrey's hand.
Jeff looked up.
"What is it?" he asked.
"The reason you're not prepared to go on is because you don't care. You
don't care a hang about yourself."
Jeffrey debated a moment. It was true. His troublesome self did not seem
to him of any least account.
"Well," said he, "let's go to bed."
But they shook hands before they parted, and the colonel did not put his
pipe away in the drawer. He left it on the mantel, conveniently at
hand.