X
Jasper Penny stood at a window of his bed room, his left arm carried in
a black silk handkerchief, gazing down at the long, low roof of Myrtle
Forge, built by his great, great grandfather Gilbert over a hundred and
ten years before. It was February, and he could hear the ringing blows
of axes, cutting the ice out of the forebay to liberate the water power
for the completion of a forging of iron destined to be rolled into
tracks for the slowly lengthening Columbia Steam Railway System. It was
midday, a grey sky held a brighter, diffused radiance where the veiled
sun hung without warmth, and the earth was everywhere frozen
granite-like. He could see beyond the Forge shed heaped charcoal, and
the black mass seemed no more dead than the ground or bare, brittle
trees sweeping down and up to where, on encircling hills, they were
lifted sharply against the cloudy monotony.
He was ordinarily impervious to the influence of weather, the more
depressing aspects of nature; but now he was conscious of a dejection
communicated, in part at least, he felt, by the bleak prospect without.
Another, and infinitely more arresting, reason for this feeling had just
stirred his thoughts--for the first time he was conscious of the
invidious, beginning weariness of accumulating years. He was hardly past
forty, and he impatiently repudiated the possibility that he was
actually declining; in fact he had not yet reached the zenith of his
capabilities, physical or mental; yet his broken arm, slow in mending,
the pain, had unquestionably depleted him more than a similar accident
ten years ago. Not only this, but, during the forced inaction, his mind
had definitely taken a different cast; considerations that had seemed to
constitute the main business of existence had lately faded before
preoccupations and feelings ignored until now.
Jasper Penny saw, objectively, not so much the surrounding circumstance
as his own former acts and emotions; detached from his habitual being by
hardly more than a month his past was posed before his critical
judgment. Looked at in this manner his life appeared crowded with
surprisingly meaningless gestures and words, his sheer youth an
incomprehensible revolt. A greater part of that had been lately
expressed by his mother, when he had returned to Myrtle Forge with an
arm broken by a fall in a railroad coach travelling to Philadelphia. She
had said, shaking her head with tightened lips:
"I warned you plenty against those train brigades. It isn't safe nor
sensible with a good horse service convenient. But then you have always
been a knowing, head-strong boy and man.... A black Penny."
How she would get along without that last phrase he was at a loss to
conjecture, from his first consciousness he recalled it, now a term of
reproach and now extenuation. Only a few weeks before she had repeated
it in precisely the same tone of mingled admonition and complaint that
had greeted his most boyish mishaps. He had grown so accustomed to it,
not only from Gilda Penny but from every one familiar with the Pennys
and their history, that it had become part of his automatic entity.
Jasper--a black Penny.
The course of his thoughts turned back to the earliest episodes
remembered in that connection, to a time in which the especial quality
had necessarily freest play. Now he characterized it as mere uninformed
wildness; but he still recalled the tremendous impatience with which he
had met the convenient enclosure of a practicable, organized society.
Even at Myrtle Forge, where--in contrast to dwelling in the confines of
a city--he had had a rare amount of actual freedom, a feeling of
constriction had sent him day after day into the woods, hunting or
merely idle along the upper reaches of still unsullied streams. Yet it
had been an especial kind of wildness; he owed that recognition to his
vanished youth. The term generally included champagne parties and the
companionship of various but similar ladies of the circus or opera
house. But nothing of that had then entered into his deep-rooted
rebellion. He had had merely a curious passion for complete
independence, an innate turning from street-bound affairs and men to the
isolation and physical accomplishment of arduous excursions on horses or
foot. He had, then, avoided, even dreaded, women. And that instinct, he
told himself, shifting his injured arm to a more comfortable position,
had been admirably founded.
The ax blows ceased; from his position he could just see the top of the
great wheel that drove the Forge trip hammer; and slowly the rim
blurred, commencing to turn. The forebay was open. A pennant of black
smoke, lurid with flaming cinders, twisted up in the motionless air. The
hammer fell once, experimentally, with a faint jar, and a grimy figure
shovelled charcoal into a barrow.
His mind soon returned to the point where it had been deflected by the
movement at the Forge; he could even visualize his mature boyhood--a
straight, arrogant figure, black certainly, with up-sloping brows and an
outthrust chin. And that, he thought, not without complacency, was not
very far from a description of himself at present. There were, of
course, the whiskers, severely trimmed on his spare face, and showing,
in certain lights, a glimmer of silver; but he was as upright, as
comfortably lean, now as then. He was still capable of prolonged
physical exertion.... It was ridiculous to think of himself as
definitely aging. Yet he was past forty, and the years seemed to go far
more swiftly than at twenty-one.
Women! The silent pronouncement included the smallest plural
possible--only two; but it seemed to Jasper Penny that they comprised
all the variations, the faults and virtues, of their entire sex. With a
certain, characteristic formality, propriety, he considered his wife
first, now a year dead. He wondered if she had found the orthodox and
concrete heaven in the frequent ecstatic contemplation of which so much
of her life had been spent. It had been that fine superiority to the
material that had first attracted him to her, a quality of shining
enthusiasm, of reflected inspiration from a vision, however trite, of
eternal hymning; and it had been that same essence which finally held
them apart through the greater number of their married years. Phebe's
health, slowly ebbing, had drawn her farther and farther from the known
world in general and the affairs and being of her husband in particular;
her last strength had gone in the hysteria of protracted religious
emotion, during which she had become scarcely more to Jasper Penny than
an attenuated, rapt invalid lingering in his house.
Her pale, still presence was usurped by a far different, animated and
colourful, figure. He thought of Essie Scofield, of all that she
paramountly held and expressed, with a reluctance that had lately,
almost within the past week, grown to resemble resentment, if not actual
irritation. Yet, however, casting back through the years, in his present
remoteness, he was able to recreate her and his emotions as they had
first, irresistibly moved together. The absolute opposite of Phebe,
already withdrawing into her religious, incorporeal region, Essie
Scofield had immediately swept him into the whirlpool of her vivid,
physical personality. Before her the memory of his wife faded into
insignificance. But there was no mere retrospect in the considering of
Essie; very much alive she presented, outside the Penny iron, the one
serious preoccupation, complication, of his future.
At the time when he had first admitted, welcomed, her claim on him, he
had felt a sudden energy in which he had recognized a play of the traits
of a black Penny. Here was a satisfactory, if necessarily private,
exercise of his inborn contempt for the evident hypocrisy, the
cowardice, of perfunctory inhibitions and safe morals. That, however,
had been speedily lost in his rocketing passion, flaring out of a quiet
continence into giddy spaces of unrestraint. Essie, after a momentary
surrender, had attempted retreat, expressing a doubt of the durability
of their feeling; she had, in fact, made it painfully clear that she
wished to escape from the uncomfortable volume of his fervour; but he
had overborne her caution--her wisdom, he now expressed it.
That, more than anything else, brought before him the undeniable passage
of time, the fact that he was rapidly accomplishing middle age--the
total extinguishing of an emotion which he had felt must outlast life.
It had gone, and with it his youth. Of course, he had recognized that he
was no longer thirty; he had been well aware of his years, but only
during the last few weeks had there been the slight, perceptible
dragging down.... On the black walnut dressing stand past the window lay
a letter he had received from Essie that morning; it contained her usual
appeal for an additional sum of money--he gave her, formally, six
thousand dollars a year; and the manner of the demand, for the
necessities of their daughter, showed his sharpened perceptions that she
had never really experienced the blindness of a generous emotion.
Eunice, the child, was incontrovertible proof of that--no more than an
additional lever for her to swing.
His face darkened, and he moved his shoulder impatiently, as if to throw
off a burden grown unendurable. But it was fastened immovably--his
responsibility was as baldly apparent as the February noon, its greyness
now blotted by a wind-driven, metallic shift of snow.
He had been criminally negligent of Eunice. This realization was
accompanied by no corresponding warmth of parenthood; there was no
quickening of blood at the thought of his daughter, but only a newborn
condemnation of his neglected, proper pride. He had, thoughtlessly,
descended to a singularly low level of conduct. And it must abruptly
terminate. Jasper Penny had not seen Eunice for seven, nine, months; he
would remedy this at once, supervise advantages, a proper place, for
her. Afterward Essie and himself could make a mutually satisfactory
agreement.