“In Russia, in the village where I was born, there was a pogrom, when I
was six years old. My father drove my mother and myself to a hut in the
forest, for safety, and went back to look after his affairs. He came, by
night, to bring us food, until for three days it snowed, and he could
not come.”
He paused, and smiled at me with wet red lips.
I thought, “He is telling me this story to frighten me. He’s inventing
it. It’s going to be frightening, but I must remember he’s just
inventing it.”
“For three days we had no food, and it was silent in the forest, and I
cried with hunger and fear. On the third evening we heard a scratching
at the door—”
His eyes had a strange green light in them. He sat, heavy and savage and
amused—
“My mother said, ‘who is there?’
“There was no answer—but we heard something sigh.
“‘It will be a messenger from your father, Stepan,’ my mother said. But
she got the revolver he had left with her.
“There was another scratching at the door. She opened it—and a black
wolf leapt at her. I lay on the floor. My mother fired the revolver into
his open jaws, and he dropped, writhed a moment, and was dead. She
barricaded the door, while I lay screaming.
“‘Never cry again, never scream, Stepan, my son,’ she said. ‘The wolf is
only food from the forest.’ She got a carving knife from the dresser,
and cut the dead wolf’s throat and said ‘Drink, my son. His blood will
make you strong.’”
He flung back his head, and laughed deep in his throat.
“I remember how warm and good the blood tasted. . . . Does the story
amuse you,—little girl who thinks she is ‘hard-boiled?’” He ran his
huge hand through my hair.
I thought, “He is insane, and I am going insane . . . his green eyes are
like a wolf’s,” and I broke. I said; “Can’t I go home now . . . please
let me go home now, and I will come back, if you want me to . . . but
let me go now . . .”
He laughed again, “So polite the independent little girl grows . . . but
you can’t go home quite yet . . . I will tell you more stories.”
I covered my face from the sight of those shining eyes. He snarled and
tore my hands away.
* * * * *
He slept, panting a little, panting like a wolf. Slowly, inch by inch, I
moved away from him; got up, and found I could not stand. It was cold. I
wrapped the velvet robe around me, sat down on a chair beside a table;
remembered he had left brandy on the table, and groped for it. There was
no sound in the room but that faint sound of panting. The brandy
steadied me, and I dressed, thinking, “If I had a knife . . . to slide
across his throat as he sleeps, so soundly—”
Dressed, I crept to the door in the dark, closed it as softly as
possible, and rang for a sleepy, insolently grinning elevator boy.
It was only two blocks home. I wanted to walk; the cold air made me
sane. On the first street-corner, a policeman was yawning.
“Isn’t it late for a young lady like yourself to be walking about?” he
said.
“I’ve been seeing a sick friend, officer . . . and I’m only walking two
blocks home.”
“I’ll put you on your doorstep then, if you’d like,” he said, and talked
cheerfully, about the cold, and his wife who did not like his new hours
of work. And I was grateful for the sound of his comfortable Irish
voice.
Next morning, making up my face, I thought: “It was a nightmare. It
couldn’t have happened. I must have dreamed it.” But there was a blue
bruise on my throat where Stepan had gripped it, and my hands were
shaking, still.
Lucia came in, looking very fresh. “Pat, my child, if I take an extra
day off to go to Portland and see the family for the week-end, would you
go as far as Boston with me? You haven’t seen your aged parent for
months, have you?”
“Let’s take the five o’clock tonight,” I said.
X
Between rows of syringa bushes that, notwithstanding weight of recent
snow, and starkness of bare twigs, were faintly redolent of blossom
scent from all the Springtimes of my childhood, a stone pathway led to
the door.
I was less real to myself than the recollection of a plump little child
who had run up that pathway; less real than the memory of a girl who had
walked ever so sedately to conceal the fast beat of her heart, beside a
man named Roger.
Father opened the door himself—yes, of course, it was eleven and the
housekeeper and maid would be in bed. I kissed him, holding my breath to
conceal the scent of my last cigarette in the cab.
“You are looking well, my dear.”
“So are you, father. How do you feel?” He was looking appallingly
fragile and tired. We talked for a little, courteously, about
Lytton-Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians,” and of how modern biographies
were written with the dramatic pace of first rate novels. Then he told
me that Nellie, the housekeeper, had said she would sit up to see me,
and I climbed the curved stairway. It had a balustrade that had been fun
to slide down, before I was fifteen and grew dignified when I heard
someone say I was going to be pretty.
I left father sitting, reading William de Morgan’s “Alice-for-Short,”
which intrigued him because it was a novel written by a man nearly
seventy—and he had always planned to write a novel when the profession
of medicine left him leisure. Father was past seventy, now.
I remembered while washing and freshening myself before I went to see
the housekeeper, hearing that I had been because of my sex the greatest
disappointment of my father’s life. And I considered, dispassionately
the fact that he was not as aware of me, as a person; as he was aware of
either of the women who had been his wives, women whose portraits hung
in the long livingroom. I could not be as real to him as either of those
women.
He grew up, finished medical college in a year when the man giving the
Commencement address to the young doctors (address on “The Necessity of
Keeping a Sense of Proportion”), illustrated it with the awful example
of certain physicians who were going mad, contemporaneously, about
things called “germs.”
Two or three years after, father and other impecunious young doctors in
Boston pooled their small funds to import from Philadelphia one of these
“madmen” who believed in germs, and had him lecture to them.
A man lives through so much and no more. Father had lived through years
when Darwin and Huxley were gods of his young generation; through a
grand passion for a wife who died young; through a felicitous second
marriage with my mother, who was to him, probably, like a delightful
young daughter. He lived to be a successful physician. He lived to grow
old and tired—too tired to keep up his practice, except among charity
patients who would have had most difficulty in finding a successor to
him. It was unreasonable to expect him to have interest or understanding
left for a daughter who had grown up in a generation which discarded the
ideal of “service to humanity” for the working philosophy of, “let us
enjoy ourselves by the way for the end may prove disappointing.”
He was polite to me; was sorry for the catastrophe of my marriage, sorry
with the detachment of a man whose seventy crowded years have left him
with no sense of importance in anything, save the problem, growing
immediate, of—“and after death?” That was a problem that absorbed him
the more intensely now, because his life had been too occupied to
consider it.
In my childhood, a younger, more vigorous man that he had been, used to
say to mother, that exquisitely dressed gay young figure that vanished
before I was twelve, “Take the child to church—religion’s a great
solace to women, and they need it in this world.”
That was a sentence vaguely remembered, with the sound of mother’s
deprecating laughter, the odour of Eau de Violette, and light that came
through stained glass windows so beautifully it made up for the
heaviness of the preacher’s voice.
Nowadays, father urged me courteously to come home to live; and I knew
that my presence in a household, slow-moving as his old footsteps, would
be disturbing. I knew that he knew that, but felt it his duty to urge
me. And I could not live at home any more; for I was not, even yet,
sufficiently tired, or sufficiently old to live solely by remembrance.
* * * * *