XX

Hugo had three hours to wait for a Chicago train. His wages purchased

his ticket and left him in possession of twenty dollars. His clothing

was nondescript; he had no baggage. He did not go outside the Grand

Central Terminal, but sat patiently in the smoking-room, waiting for the

time to pass. A guard came up to him and asked to see his ticket. Hugo

did not remonstrate and produced it mechanically; he would undoubtedly

be mistaken for a tramp amid the sleek travellers and commuters.

When the train started, his fit of perplexed lethargy had not abated.

His hands and feet were cold and his heart beat slowly. Life had

accustomed him to frustration and to disappointment, yet it was

agonizing to assimilate this new cudgeling at the hands of fate. The old

green house in the Connecticut hills had been a refuge; Roseanne had

been a refuge. They were, both of them, peaceful and whimsical and they

had seemed innocent of the capacity for great anguish. Every man dreams

of the season-changed countryside as an escape; every man dreams of a

woman on whose broad breast he may rest, beneath whose tumbling hair and

moth-like hands he may discover forgetfulness and freedom. Some men are

successful in a quest for those anodynes. Hugo could understand the

sharp contours of one fact: because he was himself, such a quest would

always end in failure. No woman lived who could assuage him; his fires

would not yield to any temporal powers.

He was barren of desire to investigate deeper into the philosophy of

himself. All people turned aside by fate fall into the same morass.

Except in his strength, Hugo was pitifully like all people: wounds could

easily be opened in his sensitiveness; his moral courage could be taxed

to the fringe of dilemma; he looked upon his fellow men sometimes with

awe at the variety of high places they attained in spite of the heavy

handicap of being human--he looked upon them again with repugnance--and

very rarely, as he grew older, did such inspections of his kind include

a study of the difference between them and him made by his singular

gift. When that thought entered his mind, it gave rise to peculiar

speculations.

He approached thirty, he thought, and still the world had not re-echoed

with his name; the trumps, banners, and cavalcade of his glory had been

only shadows in the sky, dust at sunset that made evanescent and

intangible colours. Again, he thought, the very perfection of his

prowess was responsible for its inapplicability; if he but had an

Achilles' heel so that his might could taste the occasional tonic of

inadequacy, then he could meet the challenge of possible failure with

successful effort. More frequently he condemned his mind and spirit for

not being great enough to conceive a mission for his thews. Then he

would fall into a reverie, trying to invent a creation that would be as

magnificent as the destructions he could so easily envision.

In such a painful and painstaking mood he was carried over the

Alleghenies and out on the Western plains. He changed trains at Chicago

without having slept, and all he could remember of the journey was a

protracted sorrow, a stabbing consciousness of Roseanne, dulled by his

last picture of her, and a hopeless guessing of what she thought about

him now.

Hugo's mother met him at the station. She was unaltered, everything was

unaltered. The last few instants in the vestibule of the train had been

a series of quick remembrances; the whole countryside was like a

long-deserted house to which he had returned. The mountains took on a

familiar aspect, then the houses, then the dingy red station. Lastly his

mother, upright and uncompromisingly grim, dressed in her perpetual

mourning of black silk. Her recognition of Hugo produced only the

slightest flurry and immediately she became mundane.

"Whatever made you come in those clothes?"

"I was working outdoors, mother. I got right on a train. How is father?"

"Sinking slowly."

"I'm glad I'm in time."

"It's God's will." She gazed at him. "You've changed a little, son."

"I'm older." He felt diffident. A vast gulf had risen between this

vigorous, religious woman and himself.

She opened a new topic. "Whatever in the world made you send us all that

money?"

Hugo smiled. "Why--I didn't need it, mother. And I thought it would make

you and father happy."

"Perhaps. Perhaps. It has done some good. I've sent four missionaries

out in the field and I am thinking of sending two more. I had a new

addition put on the church, for the drunkards and the fallen. And we put

a bathroom in the house. Your father wanted two, but I wouldn't hear of

it."

"Have you got a car?"

"Car? I couldn't use one of those inventions of Satan. Your father made

me hire this one to meet you. There's Anna Blake's house. She married

that fellow she was flirting with when you went away. And there's our

house. It was painted last month."

Now all the years had dropped away and Hugo was a child again, an

adolescent again. The car stopped.

"You can go right up. He's in the front room. I'll get lunch."

Hugo's father was lying on the bed watching the door. A little wizened

old man with a big head and thin yellow hands. Illness had made his eyes

rheumy, but they lighted up when his son entered, and he half raised

himself.

"Hello, father."

"Hugo! You've come back."

"Yes, father."

"I've waited for you. Sit down here on the bed. Move me over a little.

Now close the door. Is it cold out? I was afraid you might not get here.

I was afraid you might get sick on the train. Old people are like that,

Hugo." He shaded his eyes. "You aren't a very big man, son. Somehow I

always remembered you as big. But--I suppose"--his voice thinned--"I

suppose you don't want to talk about yourself."

"Anything you want to hear, father."

"I can't believe you came back." He ruminated. "There were a thousand

things I wanted to ask you, son--but they've all gone from my mind. I'm

not so easy in your presence as I was when you were a little shaver."

Hugo knew what those questions would be. Here, on his death-bed, his

father was still a scientist. His soul flinched from giving its account.

He saw suddenly that he could never tell his father the truth; pity,

kindredship, kindness, moved him. "I know what you wanted to ask,

father. Am I still strong?" It took courage to suggest that. But he was

rewarded. The old man sighed ecstatically. "That's it, Hugo, my son."

"Then--father, I am. I grew constantly stronger when I left you. In

college I was strong. At sea I was strong. In the war. First I wanted to

be mighty in games and I was. Then I wanted to do services. And I did,

because I could."

The head nodded on its feeble neck. "You found things to do? I--I hoped

you would. But I always worried about you. Every day, son, every day for

all these years, I picked up the papers and looked at them with

misgivings. 'Suppose,' I said to myself, 'suppose my boy lost his temper

last night. Suppose someone wronged him and he undertook to avenge

himself.' I trusted you, Hugo. I could not quite trust--the other thing.

I've even blamed myself and hated myself." He smiled. "But it's all

right--all right. So I am glad. Then, tell me--what--what--"

"What have I done?"

"Do you mind? It's been so long and you were so far away."

"Well--" Hugo swept his memory back over his career--"so many things,

father. It's hard to recite one's own--"

"I know. But I'm your father, and my ears ache to hear."

"I saved a man pinned under a wagon. I saved a man from a shark. I

pulled open a safe in which a man was smothering. Many things like that.

Then--there was the war."

"I know. I know. When you wrote that you had gone to war, I was

frightened--and happy. Try as I might, I could not think of a great

constructive cause for you to enter. I had to satisfy myself by thinking

that you could find such a cause. Then the war came. And you wrote that

you were in it. I was happy. I am old, Hugo, and perhaps my nationalism

and my patriotism are dead. Sides in a war did not seem to matter. But

peace mattered to me, and I thought--I hoped that you could hasten

peace. Four years, Hugo. Your letters said nothing. Four years. And then

it stopped. And I understood. War is property fighting property, not

David fighting Goliath. The greatest David would be unavailing now. Even

you could do little enough."

"Perhaps not so little, father."

"There were things, then?"

Hugo could not disappoint his father with the whole formidable truth.

"Yes." He lied with a steady gaze. "I stopped the war."

"You!"

"After four years I perceived the truth of what you have just said. War

is a mistake. It is not sides that matter. The object of war is to make

peace. On a dark night, father, I went alone into the enemy lines. For

one hundred miles that night I upset every gun, I wrecked every

ammunition train, I blew up every dump--every arsenal, that is. Alone I

did it. The next day they asked for peace. Remember the false armistice?

Somehow it leaked out that there would be victory and surrender the

next night--because of me. Only the truth about me was never known. And

a day later--it came."

The weak old man was transported. He raised himself up on his elbows.

"You did that! Then all my work was not in vain. My dream and my prayer

were justified! Oh, Hugo, you can never know how glad I am you came and

told me this. How glad."

He repeated his expression of joy until his tongue was weary; then he

fell back. Hugo sat with shining eyes during the silence that followed.

His father at length groped for a glass of water. Strength returned to

him. "I could ask for no more, son. And yet we are petulant, insatiable

creatures. What is doing now? The world is wicked. Yet it tries

half-heartedly to rebuild itself. One great deed is not enough--or are

you tired?"