When Alwyn was seven years old a man came to visit his grandmother, a
rancher from New Mexico whose name was John Craig. He ran his brown
finger in and out of the small boy’s hair and along his eyebrows,
saying, “I had an uncle whose forehead was like that.”
Alwyn’s grandmother bent over him to see. “So it was,” she said.
He came again just before the death of Alwyn’s grandfather, and spent
four or five afternoons at the farm, during which the old man stayed
in the garden, not even coming to the house for his medicine or his
usual nap on the sofa: apparently he did not like the stranger. Alwyn’s
father seemed to have known him a long time, but not well; and they
both seemed embarrassed, as if, under circumstances unknown to the boy,
they ought to have liked each other perhaps more, perhaps less.
The stranger brought the children expensive presents. He was well
dressed, and wore two rings on his delicate but calloused hands--one
silver Indian ring and one set with a piece of onyx on which was carved
a cupid astride a fish. His face had an appearance of weariness and
controlled excitement: lean and smiling, but smiling only around his
mouth--the eyes, with brown upper lids drawn tight across them, never
ceased moving about the room or over the countryside, watchfully but
without anxiety. He walked with a loose-jointed motion, and Alwyn’s
grandmother said, “That is a regular horseback walk!”
Late in the afternoon she took her guest to the cemetery to see the
new headstone on the grave of her two dead little girls. Alwyn stayed
behind with his mother. “Who is Mr. Craig?” he asked.
His mother hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know why you shouldn’t be
told. You are old enough now to keep the family secrets. You have heard
us all speak of your father’s younger brother Evan--he is Mr. Craig. He
changed his name.”
The small boy had never in his life been so astonished. He stared in
the direction his grandmother and the stranger had gone, down the road
toward the cemetery, staring over the head of the little old man in the
garden who was the stranger’s father, but would not speak to him. “Why
did he change his name?” he cried.
His mother told him the little that she had been told; but he did not
understand it very well, and years were to pass before he actually
found out why. After his grandmother’s death he went to New Mexico, and
his uncle John Craig became a more intimate friend than his father had
been able to be. This fact amused and touched the lonely, extraordinary
man, for he himself had loved his uncle Leander more than his father.
During Evan’s boyhood--before anyone had dreamed of such a man as
John Craig, though his father often prophesied for him a disgraceful
future--Leander Tower, in the “old bachelor’s wing” of the house,
led an idle and, to everyone but his youngest nephew, insignificant
existence. Because he knew that the family would have been suffering
extreme poverty but for his financial assistance, his brother’s evident
scorn of his way of life did not embarrass him. His sister-in-law was
devoted to his comfort--it was a long-established habit to love him;
but the shadow that was left of his character, if she had met him then
for the first time, would scarcely have attracted her attention, as in
the community it attracted no attention at all. Only Evan took refuge
in that shadow from the pain of being misunderstood, the fatigue of
adolescence which is more painful though less serious than a man’s
fatigue, and from his other troubles as they arose.
When Evan entered his room, interrupting his melancholy recollections,
the old bachelor looked up with tender interest but no more eagerness.
Another unhappy boy coming into the room, a third youngster coming into
his life--he wanted neither to shut this one out nor to keep him there.
“Sit down, my boy. What’s the trouble now?”
“He called me a loafer because I came in from the field half an hour
before supper.”
“He” always meant his father. The relations between these two were
going from bad to worse. The angrier Evan became the keener were his
retorts, and there was something insulting about his eyes. He spoke in
defense of things his father feared, criticized things which were all
but sacred, and never wanted to go to church. The farm work always made
him unhappy, and sometimes made him sick; he had to run away to the
woods, for example, at butchering time. Whenever he spoke of running
away altogether, he was pleased and tempted by the fact that his father
looked afraid, grew more gentle, and talked of the evil and hardship of
great cities. Their anger sobered the whole family for days at a time,
as if it were sickness in the house. His mother whipped him once or
twice, but he would not cry out, and said, “Why don’t you let him do
his own whipping?”--which took away her courage.
“He called me a lazy rascal,” the boy complained to his uncle with an
air of resentful satisfaction, as if, detail by detail, he were giving
evidence to convict his father of a crime--the usual crime of fathers.
“I plowed all day and my head ached. Ma wouldn’t listen when I told
her.”
“Yes, yes, I see. Your mother is the finest woman I ever knew. Your pa
... You’ll find out some day, whether you like it or not, that you’re a
chip off the old block. He always thought I was good for nothing. Maybe
I was.”
He did not reproach the boy nor tell him what, on a given occasion, he
ought to have done; a boy’s ignorance was a sort of wisdom, to which an
unsuccessful old man could add nothing that would be useful. But little
by little, as if his disappointment spoke with its own voice, against
his will, he told Evan how he himself had lived and what he thought
about life. He did not imagine that anyone could profit by that story,
but it would distract the boy’s attention for a few hours from his
monotonous, half-imaginary, immature troubles.
In this way Evan came to know the young Rose Hamilton better than he
knew his mother, Hilary and his cousin Timothy better than his own
brothers. As an adolescent invariably does, he envied Leander his
distress and disappointment--they were experience at least; and there
was no place for them in present day Wisconsin so far as he could see.
His lucky brother Jim had had a chance to get away, the only chance
there was in that family.... And he felt himself drawn, as a lover
to a series of rendezvous, toward the places where his own life must
have been waiting for him, though he had no idea where they were and
scarcely cared what it was to be.
Thus Leander shaped this boy’s character as he had wanted to shape
Timothy’s, as he might have shaped Hilary’s. But he had failed so
often to exercise the power of his affection that he scarcely realized
what was happening; in any case, he was now too old to take pleasure
in it. He scarcely took notice of the breakdown in Evan’s mind of
certain moral principles--for example, superstitious respect of law and
order, love of work for its own sake, and, in a measure, the fear of
God; but the boy’s father grew more and more suspicious of them both.
Henry Tower had no power over his weak brother, but he had a right to
determine that, while Evan was a minor living in his house, he should
not have his own way about anything.
Then the newspapers brought to Wisconsin an account of the sinking of
the _Maine_. Evan’s mother flung out her arms with a curious gesture,
and cried, “Now we’ll have another war!”
She saw her son sitting round-shouldered over the papers every night
and knew what he was making up his mind to do, but was afraid to speak
of it, since he was a Tower--lest opposition give him the courage she
hoped he would lack. War against Spain was declared.
Evan did not yet know what it was to be afraid. He came in to dinner
one day after the others were seated, and stood behind his chair. “I’m
going to enlist,” he said.
His hands gripped the chair-back as if it were a weapon, as if he
might have to fight his way out of the room. His brother Ralph sighed,
thinking perhaps of the harder work that would be left for him to do.
His mother covered her face with a corner of her apron.
His uncle muttered, “Don’t you let him go, Henry.”
His father answered, “You ought to be ashamed, Leander. A boy can’t
do a finer thing than serve his country. We need him on the farm, but
we’ll have to get along.”
Evan did enlist. He enjoyed the months of novelty and excitement
before they disembarked in a Cuban harbor. There the stale-smelling
sea splashed over rocks and rotten wood. The large vegetation which
was on top kept swelling while that which was underneath rotted. The
sun was very yellow. He was lonely, but avoided the other men half
involuntarily, and wanted to sleep more than ever before. At first he
thought it was a fever about to begin, drank whisky, and took large
doses of quinine, as he was advised to do; but he learned that he was
sick only at heart.
One night he stood just above the level of the sea which glittered in
front of the moon, at the corner of two roads full of ruts, between a
high wall and a low wall, both crumbling away. He was thinking, it is
time to get back to the barracks.... There was a lump in his throat as
he remembered the leave-taking in Wisconsin.
Henry Tower had placed his hard hands on Evan’s shoulders, which were
well above his own. “Don’t you forget,” he had said, “that five of
your folks fought in the last war. You’re a strong boy; it won’t hurt
you. Never turn back, whatever happens.” The light in his eyes had
resembled, but had been too shining to be, that of affection.
Evan’s mother had come out of the kitchen where she had been crying
quietly, and embraced him with great dignity, as if sending a son away
to war were a ceremonial part of her womanly destiny, like a wedding
or a funeral. Her air of pride and resignation had made him feel the
impersonality of maternal love--he was only one of her sons, doing
what she had given him birth to do. That night in Cuba, in the weak
moonlight, Evan smiled a little bitterly, as one who has scarcely known
his own mother smiles at mothers in general. “Be a good soldier,” she
had said.
He wondered what his uncle was doing. Perhaps watching that same
three-quarters moon, which looked full of milk like a breast; all alone
in his room, perhaps, scribbling letters that he never mailed, or
pretending to read. Evan’s mother had written that he had been sick in
bed after the boy’s departure, and now planned to go to California;
perhaps he was already on his way.
On that last morning in Wisconsin, Leander had preferred not to stand
with the others around the horse and buggy; so Evan had gone to his
room to say good-by. “Well, my boy,” he had said, “now you’re a
soldier, as I was. It’s a good thing that you’re going alone, not with
one of your brothers, the way I did. Write to your father sometimes
as well as to your mother; it’ll be hard on him while you’re away,
thinking maybe he hasn’t been a good father to you....”
A palm tree which leaned over one of the walls made a gesture of
blessing Evan with its many-fingered hands. Over the other wall in
regular breaths came the air of a garden, and up from the seashore,
now loud and now faint, as it were a concertina in drunken hands, the
singing of sailors....
Leander had talked a long time, somewhat like an old schoolmaster.
Before going back to the barracks, Evan wanted to remember all he had
said. “Well, maybe it’s good-by altogether for us. I’m getting old and
my usefulness is over. You’ll live to see great days, the twentieth
century--maybe everything will be different then. Be friendly, but
not too friendly, and keep strong. And don’t get to doing things you
don’t really want to do. And when you’ve made a mistake, and things go
against you, and you can’t help it, don’t be ashamed to run away and
leave them. Don’t be ashamed to do whatever you’ve got to do....”
Those were the words he had used, or very nearly his words. “Start all
over again. You can, as long as you’re alone in the world. That’s my
advice.”
No more time to remember. The barracks.... For a moment Evan thought he
was homesick; no, it could not be that. He was not lonesome for Ralph
or his mother; he was glad to be far away from his father. All his old
uncle could give him was advice: how to live when he was away from his
family, how to live by himself. “Don’t be ashamed to run away and leave
things....” He wondered what he ought to do, what he genuinely wanted
to do, and what he was going to be able to do.
For he had begun to hate the war, though he had seen nothing of it but
barracks, horse stables to be cleaned, unemployed guns, and saloons--no
horror, no rage, and no death. Why did he hate it? He tried desperately
to think, but his mind, like a little mirror, only reflected its own
desperation, ridiculous desperation.... He smiled at himself, but bit
his lips until they bled.
The Americans, he thought, had no business to be there: it was a
foreign country; it was the South. He had been told that they were
there only to help in a war for liberty, because they loved liberty.
But even if that were true, it meant interfering in a family quarrel,
as if a stranger had come to his home in Wisconsin to help him hurt and
defy his father.
Then he had heard newspaper men say that America wanted Cuba for the
sugar and tobacco, and that ammunition had been smuggled in to the
rebels before our government had had any reason to take sides. One
who had been drinking had declared that the _Maine_ had been blown up
from the inside, blown up by Americans to make America declare war.
Evan did not know what to believe, but he was sick with suspicion.
Coming as a soldier to a foreign land, he learned, as soldiers often
do, how little he loved his own. He imagined the profitable monotony
of Wisconsin, where he had been so miserable as a boy, taking the
place of Cuba’s lattices, the shade of blossoming trees embossed on
the dust, the pallid masonry, the gardens and flower markets, the
scalloped water which became an ocean only at a certain distance from
the island, beyond coral reefs which were like a fence--the work of the
mysterious race they were there to wipe out, Spanish work. Out of the
small churches came gusts of incense, mystery, and muttering--God was
not worshiped like that in Wisconsin. He wanted to steal inside them
and lose himself in the music which laughed and cried at the same time;
but he could not overcome his timidity, and in fact was half ashamed of
being a foreigner and a Protestant.
His imagination was aroused, not by the young, hot-headed American
army, but by the natives; not by the natives who were rebels, but by
their oppressors, the enemy. He had seen them as prisoners being pushed
into the damp citadel--handsome, sallow men with the unabashed faces
of eagles whose wings have been broken. The rebels were blacker, dirty
fellows, weaklings with excited eyes like those of dogs, already
jealous of the Americans. To fight a war of independence, they had had
to become dependent on a new set of masters.
Then he began to believe that the Americans would lose the war. There
were three spells against them--Spanish blood, the Church, and the
heat. Sooner or later the rebels would prefer to be governed by their
own kind rather than by foreigners; their mothers and sweethearts would
have preferred it then. Handsome women who seemed to have been fasting
came to look at the lists of dead and wounded; they shuddered in their
fine veils without making a sound; and Evan believed that they wept
not only because their sons were dead, but because they had died as
rebels. Old mothers were behind the crumbling walls, praying to the God
of Spain for the Spanish army, and kneeling beside them perhaps there
were rows of black-eyed girls. All hating the Americans--hating him.
In dilapidated carriages or in carts drawn by velvety burros he saw
certain ones with brown, parrotlike faces who understood something of
which men, above all young American men, were ignorant. He heard talk
of spies and plots, of women dynamiting the town; men said, “They are
tiger cats.”
The Church was an enemy--innumerable priests in league with that
Spanish God. Evan was afraid of the black-magic prayers whose precise
meaning no one knew, going up among the organ pipes and bright images.
The Americans did not pray....
The heat was an enemy. Mimosa, magnolia, and oleander--the sweetness
of these Cuban lives was poison to Americans, at least to him. The
country boy had never dreamed of such a host of doctors as there were,
to keep them from falling sick--sick of the canned food, of the moist
filth, of the women along the quays. In spite of them, the whole army
would come down with a fever, and be driven out. Evan was astonished
that no one saw what was going to happen; perhaps no one cared. He
tried to tell another soldier, a dull giant named Hodge, who said that
he was plain crazy--after which he was afraid to open his mouth.
Sooner or later, in any case, his company would be sent up in the
hills to fight. Bushes and vines lay all over those hills to entangle
them, bushes and vines like masses of green hair. He thought he would
suffocate without the little coolness that puffed in to the seaport
from the sea. War in tight, high, hot valleys in the heart of the
island. Soldiers running back and forth, shooting in the sunlight.
Somebody’s blood, perhaps his own, soaking through a uniform like
sweat, with sweat.... It was not the fear of death which overcame
him when he thought of these things, but the fear of a loathsome
disease--from time to time the fear of going mad. His mother had often
said that the Towers were a nervous family....
A month passed, in drill, in drinking, in caring for horses, and in
other menial tasks such as he had had to do all his life. He had
been unhappy before, almost always, in fact, but now his unhappiness
was mixed with a wilder emotion. One afternoon he was told that his
company would be moved the next day or the day after. Suddenly he
realized that he was not going mad--it was much simpler than that. He
was a traitor.
That night he sat by himself in a bar on the quay; he felt stupid and
almost happy, and asked himself, not what a traitor ought to do when
ordered to the front, but whether or not he had fallen in love with
the girl who ran the bar. Her old father picked a guitar and tried to
make her sing--she had sung at least once every evening. But she shook
her head and walked back and forth with an air of preoccupation--three
steps to the right, two to the left, and a turn upon her heels, as if
walking were a difficult dance. At first two grizzled Cubans and a
young rebel sergeant were there; they paid and went out, leaving the
door open. The night scented the low room with leaves and the sea. The
old man fell asleep and dropped his guitar, which murmured a little for
a moment, on the floor.
The girl sat down beside Evan, and he tried to talk to her. She said
the war would last many years. Unable to remember any more Spanish
words, he touched (but no more than touched) her wrist with his mouth,
and laid one hand on her knee, pretending to do so by accident. Parting
her lips and lifting one eyebrow, she smiled--it was hardly a smile.
Evan had no experience of love, and all the sensibility in his body
gathered in his hand. The old man in the corner ground his teeth and
sighed in his sleep.
Then someone came down the road, singing drearily, _There’ll be a hot
time in the old town to-night_. It was Hodge, the soldier who had
called Evan “plain crazy.” He stumbled over the threshold, a great,
swaying body which smelled of rum and the cavalry stables. He did not
speak to Evan--he had not done so, in fact, since he had heard what
Evan thought about the war. The girl rose to serve him.
He laid six one dollar bills on the table in a row, and counted them
drunkenly with his forefinger. Evan saw the girl’s eyes glitter at the
sight of so much money; and when she brought Hodge’s whisky she spread
out her flowered shawl on one arm, swept four of the bills to the
floor, and perched on the table. At once Hodge began to make love to
her. Then she dropped her shawl, swung backward in his arms, adroitly
gathered up the bills with it, and slipped them inside her dress as she
folded it about her shoulders. Then she picked up the two bills which
were left and tucked them in his pocket, saying: “Put away your money.
You’ll lose it.”
Hodge did not seem to have seen what she had done. Evan asked for
another drink. The girl served him indifferently, closed the door as
if to discourage other customers, and went back to Hodge’s knee. Evan
could not look away from the drugged motions of the other soldier’s
head as he tried to kiss her--as mechanically, seductively, she avoided
his mouth. An ignorant boy, he could not say to himself, This is not
love. So he shut his eyes, confused at once by disgust and desire.
Suddenly the girl slapped Hodge and tried to get away. But he caught
one of her ankles in his large right hand and continued to fondle
her clumsily with the other. She gnashed her teeth, fluttered like a
heavy bird in a trap, and cried out. Her father sat up jerkily, trotted
behind the bar, came back waving a broomstick, and stumbled around the
table--still half asleep and trying to wake up. The girl kept muttering
to him, between hisses of anger, to let them alone. With fatuous
patience, Hodge pushed her red skirt above her knee. She struck him
again.
Evan did not dare to interfere; to all intents and purposes Hodge knew
that he was a traitor. Furthermore, he saw that in the tussle a corner
of one of the stolen dollar bills had appeared between the girl’s
breasts. He wanted to go, but if he did, it would be his turn to be
chased by the old man with his broomstick, because he had not paid for
his drinks.
Now the other soldier was furious; he shook the girl, and cursed at the
top of his voice: “Damn dirty dogs! We’ll fix you! Half nigger! Look
out, I’ll break every bone in your body.”
He was weak because he was drunk; the girl was strong with anger, so
the struggle was equal. She kicked him, and stood up on one leg; he
still held the other in his fist like a trap. She screamed in Spanish:
“You wait! you wait! Before this war is over ...”
Hodge wrenched her ankle, and she sank to the floor.
Evan understood some of her words, and was glad, that the other did
not. She was chanting, chattering about the war, about relatives and
friends in the Spanish army, about hideous revenges. “Stick you like
pigs. Pigs, all you foreigners!” she cried.
Terrified by what she was saying, her old father dropped his
broomstick, waved his arms, and tried to make her keep still.
Then the door opened, and a lieutenant and a sergeant came in. There
was a sudden silence. Hodge relaxed his great fist. The girl stumbled
away behind the bar. The small, red-faced lieutenant glanced at Evan,
glared at Hodge, and said to the sergeant, “Smith, take this drunken
bastard away and lock him up.”
Smith saluted, with a look of disappointment at having work to do.
Hodge was sober now. “Sir, that bitch stole some of my money.”
“Shut up!” snapped the officer. “Hell! Get out of here!” They went. The
officer settled into a chair, sighed, grinned, and asked for whisky.
Tossing back her hair and looking ashamed, the girl served him. He
took her hand. She smiled, half closing her eyes, biting her lower
lip--scarcely a smile. It was beginning all over again.
The officer said in bad Spanish, “Now, you little devil, give me that
money.” He lifted his index finger and brought it down firmly on the
paper money between her breasts. The girl began to cry, and behind the
bar the old man shook his head idiotically, and called on the Virgin
Mother under his breath.
The officer pulled out the dollar bills one after another. Then he
whispered something to the girl, putting the money in her small, red
hand. She smiled, and sat on his knee.
Evan sulked on the bench at the other side of the room. He paid the old
man what he owed, saw the tumbler of rum which he had not finished in
front of him, and drank it at one gulp. Then he thought he was going to
be sick.
The old man fell asleep again. The girl nestled in the officer’s
armpit. The officer kept looking at Evan as if to tell him to go.
Evan’s arms lay very heavily on the dirty table; inside his stiff boots
his heels were asleep, and tingled. He foresaw, with the extravagance
of an innocent mind, the rest of the night on the narrow bed without
sheets in the back room. Disgusted at the way another man succeeded
in doing what he had wanted to do, he realized that his disgust was
jealousy and his jealousy was mixed with shame. Shame of Americans--he
was an American; this was war--he was a soldier; love--an hour ago
he had been making love to the same girl. “Stuck like pigs, all you
foreigners,” she had said.
Time to get back to the barracks.... He loathed everything he could
think of. To-morrow he was going up among the hills--the sweat, the
flies, the pus running out of sores--to fight for what he loathed. “A
boy can’t do a finer thing than serve his country.” To-morrow--he would
not; better jump in the sea. To-morrow--he would if he could; he could
not. So he stumbled out of the place and down the street.
A week later, about the time that his company went into action, Evan
lay on the deck of a British freighter off the coast of Florida. He
was still seasick. There had been a violent storm, and on the slopes
of the waves nodded great masses of rust-colored seaweed in the shape
of chrysanthemums. The ropes cried and were drawn in or loosened
by barefoot men, working all around him. The full canvas, stiffly
inflated, stood out over his head in a relief as hard as marble. The
deserter lay on a pile of wet blankets, still dazed at what he had done.
A sailor named Marbury came with something to eat. It was he who had
brought Evan away from Cuba, away from the war, away, indeed, from a
whole life well begun, or badly begun.... Marbury called him John. He
had said, back there in Cuba that night, whenever it was: “I don’t
want to know your name. I’ll call you John--John ... oh, let’s say ...
Craig. You’ll need a new name if you come with me.”
Evan had stumbled out of the saloon on the waterfront. He had not
known what to do with himself. He had stopped and stared into the
dark space where the sea was making a loud noise. He had thought of
running, jumping, and getting out of sight under the waves; that had
been a gauge of his misery, not of his intentions--he had not had any
intentions. He had stumbled down the road, and looked into another
saloon, and seen another soldier; whereupon he had thought only of
finding a place where there were no soldiers.
Then he had met a man who had touched his elbow and said: “See here,
mate, what’s happened? You come along with me.”
Evan thought now that there must have been a dangerous look on his
face, and when they had met under one of the lanterns the Americans
had put up along the sea, the sailor must have seen it. He himself had
seen a short young man wearing a jacket and no shirt, a sharp, ragged
fellow; even his upstanding hair and his red face had looked ragged.
Very humbly, as if he had been arrested, Evan had followed the sailor.
“Find a pub,” he had muttered. “You need a stiff drink.”
Evan could not remember drinking it. He had wondered why he had
followed this man, and wished he would go away and let him alone so he
could jump into the sea or whatever it was he had thought he had to do.
He must have said something there in the saloon about jumping into the
sea, since the Englishman had asked, “What ails you, damn it?”
Probably Evan had answered that he hated the war, that he was
sick of the heat, and the Americans were going to lose the war,
anyway--answered not very intelligibly; for Marbury admitted now that
he had not believed him. A man would be crazy to desert just because
he wanted to; there must have been some trouble that he would not talk
about.
Marbury had interrupted him. “Damn! You’d better come with me. Come to
sea. Make an English sailor of you.” He had continued to drink, wiping
his mouth (which looked younger than the rest of his face) on the back
of his hand, and watching Evan.
Evan had noticed that the back of his hand was marked with a blue
heart in a circle, and that he wore what seemed to be a pair of old
bedroom slippers.
Then the sailor had murmured, looking round to be sure that he was not
being heard, “You see, a man came on shore with me. Name’s Pigeon.
He got in a fight. Some bones broken. Lying upstairs in one of these
houses. Some woman’s taking care of him. He can’t go back to the ship;
she’s the _Amber_, freight, for London. Can’t even sit up. And we sail
to-night. Hard luck. He’s to blame. Drunk, he was. A man hadn’t ought
to fight with foreigners. That Eye-talian put his knee on his chest and
hammered him....”
Evan had laughed a little. A Cuban, scarcely human, kneeling on a
man named Pigeon--a Cuban rather like an angel, Jacob’s angel in the
Bible.... Marbury had given a long, foolish account of the affair at
least twice. Evan had listened with great interest, without realizing
as yet that he was going to desert.
Then Marbury had said: “Damn it! Your soldiers there in the port will
let you go with me in the boat because two of us came in. Not in that
uniform. So I’ll go back and see Pigeon and I’ll steal his clothes.
We’ll put a stone in your uniform and pitch the blasted thing in the
sea. Come along now.”
Marbury had stood up; Evan had stood up; and to his amazement he
had followed meekly. He had not been frightened; he had not been
arrested....
To Evan, on board the _Amber_, all this seemed to have taken place a
long time ago. He staggered to his feet and began to be initiated into
the mysteries of life on a ship. There were a number of them; that of
Marbury’s affection in particular, because of which he learned, he had
been brought away from Cuba. “You’re a crazy lubber,” Marbury said,
“but I like you. If I hadn’t liked you, you could have jumped in the
sea and be damned. I wouldn’t have took the trouble with you I took.”
In the beginning this affection seemed merely comic, like that of a dog
which tries one’s patience by leaping up, scratching with its paws, and
breathing close to one’s face. Later Evan had to take it seriously, and
it warned him of the extreme limits of the outcast individualism in
which he had taken the first step. He was a deserter, and Marbury was
the only friend he had.
There was also a young sullen boy, miserably jealous of the attention
the American was receiving. He said to Marbury: “You’re always talking
with that Yankee. You’re not my mate any more.” This reminded Evan of
his uncle Leander’s story of Hilary, who of course was his uncle, too,
though even younger than he, being dead....
And because he remembered how Hilary had disappeared in the Civil War,
he wrote a letter to his mother, to be mailed as soon as the ship
touched land:
Dear Mother,
I have run away from the army. I can’t explain it. I will be in a
foreign country by the time you get this. I don’t know when I can
come back to America, if I ever can. I suppose you’ll be ashamed of
me. Try to think that I am still the same.
Your loving son.
And as the four-master staggered with infinite patience toward
Europe, a sharp sadness took possession of him. Wisconsin with its
crops of every color, its hickory-nut trees, its white sunrises and
red sunsets--he would never see them again; no one would love him so
faithfully, so intimately, as even his hard father had done. But it was
something more than homesickness which hurt him; it was the keenest of
regrets, that of a young man who has made his choice, for the infinite
possibilities he has given up, when at last it is too late to change
his mind.
So after dark, when he could steal away from Marbury and the rest, he
crept into a corner of the boat, and clenched his teeth, and hid his
face in a piece of wet canvas. They ran into a heavy mist one night; at
regular intervals a bell was rung, and it had the tone of a dinner bell
at home, deepened and made sadder by the sea. Over the taffrail, in the
light of a number of lanterns which were hung up in case they should
draw near another boat, each wave lifted its broad shoulders and its
head covered with foam--lifted its head, and fell; but there was always
another to take its place. And between one wave and another he put away
the troubles of his youth: his family’s broken hearts, and the shameful
riddle of being a deserter, and indeed, his youth, which was a trouble
in itself. They had served their purpose; he wondered what it was; soon
he would not have time to wonder. He could not regret what he had done,
any more than a dead man can regret having died. He said to himself,
“It can’t be helped; I’ll have to make the best of it, and the best
will be bad enough”; and by thinking that he had made peace with the
past--in a measure, and in the manner of young, ignorant, unlucky
men--he made his peace with the future.
The _Amber_ went up the Thames to the city of London, and docked in the
Pool. The sailors emptied the hold; the captain secured a cargo for Rio
de Janeiro, and they put it on board.
Evan shared a bed with Marbury in a lodging house in Wapping. He had
signed for the next voyage, not knowing what else to do. The night
before they were to sail, Marbury went to bed at seven o’clock. Evan
wanted to be alone, so he pretended to have lost his pipe, and said he
was going out to buy another.
He thought he might never be there again, so he determined to set out
on foot to see the whole of London. It was cold, and he walked briskly,
as if he had a long way before him and a definite destination. The
angry, dim autumn in the largest city in the world; a beast of a city,
crouching in the smoke, never moving but seeming to move, because of
the agitated swarms of its parasites. The vomit of chimneys and the
backwash of the sea.... Striped above the shop windows, with holes
burned in it here and there by the short street lamps, the fog was like
a dirty woolen blanket, but it gave no warmth at all. Evan shivered
and walked faster, thinking of the Cuban summer, that heat full of
sleeping dogs, bottle-flies, and flowering bushes. Scarcely remembering
the weeks at sea, he felt as if he had fallen out of Cuba through a
trapdoor into a cellar containing millions of people.
He went into a pub to get warm, wondered what his father would say if
he came through the swinging door and found him there drinking whisky,
and was amused as if it were an idle fancy, as if in reality he had no
father. When he went out again, his sense of direction told him that
he was going away from the lodging house in Wapping; but he thought of
Marbury as if he were a man he had known years ago, as if, that night,
he had not a friend in the world.
He was in no hurry to return to the lodging house; indeed, he was
curiously unwilling to. A few hours more, and the long voyage would
begin. The sailors were a family, a large male family; in a few weeks
on the intimate sea they would know him well; he was a deserter and
should have no intimates. His place was there on the blackish pavement
which extended for miles in every direction, or no direction at all;
in the yellow fog where everyone, not only himself, had a secret, if
only that of his identity; in the horde of men and women not keeping
step, streaming through the darkness, stumbling, hurrying, limping....
A sore, sorry mob which no one would take the trouble to count--wearing
second-hand clothes, bitten by fleas--in which he was safe. The light
of the shops lit up only their ragged bodies, so that they seemed to
have no feet; the light of the lamps poured upon their hats and folded
shawls, so that they seemed to have no faces. There, when he met a
slight, middle-aged man who lifted his elbows like his father, he could
cross the road and never see him again; and when, under a street light,
a man stared at him sympathetically as Marbury had done on the Cuban
waterfront, he could turn quickly down a side street. On the _Amber_
bound for Rio he would not be able to escape from anything or anybody.
The great, squat city grew still. Only half-mad creatures without
occupation, and a few others mysteriously, perhaps criminally busy,
were left on the pavement. He crossed the river and came to the City.
He knew that the powerful, the trustworthy, those who had parents,
wives, children, and nothing to be ashamed of, lived and worked there.
He would have had no business among them, but not one of them was to
be seen. Footsteps and a shadow--a watchman; another--a policeman.
Here and there a bit of paper revolved like a little skirt worn by an
invisible body, and pairs of cats in areaways made music.
He came to the river again. There on the Embankment lay many men,
wrapped in rags, in newspapers, in one another’s arms; and a few women
lean and shameless as men. Evan was comforted by the sight of that
painful bed full of derelicts, equality and sleep their only comforts.
They were his countrymen; his fatherland, like theirs, was disgrace,
and this was its very capital. He could not cross the boundaries of
that country however far he traveled--so why take passage on a ship
for Rio? The Thames passed indifferently, and carried off a rowboat
which winked its eye. He sat down beneath a coping and drew his knees
up under his jacket. Near by, an enormous man rolled over and recited
something in his sleep; to Evan’s amazement, it was Spanish--a love
song or a prayer, he could not determine which; for sounder sleep
quickly laid its hand over the great mouth, which was apparently
toothless.
Evan wondered if Marbury were asleep and what he thought of his
absence. It was time to start back toward Wapping. Then he realized
that he was not going back, not clambering aboard early next morning,
not sailing to Rio. He smiled; yes, deserting again.... If he had not
run away from an army and his family and a whole country, he might have
been troubled by his bad faith toward Marbury, perhaps even toward the
captain of the _Amber_. Now it was too late for scruples. He might as
well sleep there, with the rest of his kind.
But the night grew colder and the pavement pressed through his flesh
to the bone. He was not tired enough to sleep in spite of everything;
besides, he was younger than anyone else there. So he rose and spent
the rest of the night on foot.
He watched the city get up, trade by trade; the sun push through the
smoke, a crooked, bloody thing; and parties of soiled pigeons revolve
over the chimneys like flower pots, from which the smoke budded, and
opened, and dropped large petals of soot. He ate breakfast in a coffee
stand, and about nine o’clock wandered down an alley toward the Pool.
The _Amber_ had left the wharf; it was nowhere to be seen; and Evan was
well pleased.
He found the charwoman mopping up the hall of the lodging house. “Your
mate was wild,” she said, in her strong, snarling voice. “Said you’d
had your neck broke. Said if you’d given them the slip, you was out of
your head.” He slept all the rest of the day, glad to shut his eyes to
his premonitions of what was going to happen to him that winter.
It was harder even than he had foreseen. He found work on the docks
by the day or week, under abusive foremen, among lazy and suspicious
men. There were days when he had little or nothing to eat. If he had
foreseen this in Cuba, he would not have deserted; if he had not
foreseen it in mid-Atlantic, he would have fallen ill or thrown himself
in the Thames.
He grew gaunt, and smiled continually at all the reasons he saw never
to smile again. He bought a Bible, read it from beginning to end,
drew lines through many cruel chapters which he wanted to forget, and
all but memorized the life of Jacob, the life of David, the death of
Christ. But there was not a story of a deserter in the Bible.
One day in January he was hurrying through Soho in a fog inlaid with
particles of snow. Just as he passed an antique shop a girl darted
out of the door with a broom in her hand. Evan started back to avoid
a collision, and slipped in the slush; his whole weight struck the
windowpane, which cracked in a great star. The girl and he faced each
other; he took off his hat. In his embarrassment he stared through the
glass he had broken: there was a yellow satin chair, a fat gilt cupid
with no nose, a tray of old rings....
Then the girl said hastily, but without excitement, speaking with a
pinched, rough accent: “You run away. Fast. I’ll tell my father I
broke the window.” She waved her broom as if she intended to break it
again.
Evan hoped she would laugh at what had happened; she did not. This was
a girl who was too proud to laugh when embarrassed. She was exceedingly
brown of skin; extraordinary eyes, the lids equally heavy above and
below; the whole face pointed downward to the willful mouth and the
chin. Evan asked himself what her nationality was.
“But run away,” she repeated, impatiently.
Evan remembered that he could come back again; so he went. He did not
see the stamping crowds that night, nor the gas flares, nor the snow
tossed here and there like dirty confetti. These things had lost their
charm; even the convulsive movement in his empty stomach had lost its
terrible novelty, and he did not mind having had no supper.
He was out of work on the three succeeding days, and suffered from
hunger. He slept in a room below the level of the street, and had to
cover his face with the bedclothes because of the rats which came
hunting for crumbs and failed to find any--he was as hungry as they.
He measured his misery by the dreams which ravished him in the damp,
sagging bed--dreams of baking day in Wisconsin, of oranges and apples,
of trumpets which sounded like small, southern roosters and woke him up.
As soon as he had money he returned to Soho and went bravely into the
shop of G. Orfeo, Antiquary. But the girl was not there. An older woman
came forward very quietly: the same heavily framed brown eyes, the
same reddish-brown locks of hair; it must be her sister, Evan thought.
But her eyes were gentle, too gentle, and her mouth drooped as if she
had a habit of sacrifice. “What do you wish to see, sir?”
Evan swept the shop with his eyes, to discover what was there in the
greatest number, so it would take him a long time to choose. “A ring,
if you please,” he said.
The woman watched his tar-stained fingers on the signets, intaglios,
and semiprecious stones, with anxiety, even with suspicion. In great
embarrassment Evan asked their prices, having only one pound in the
world. There was one which he could have paid for, a silver band
engraved with banal flowers. But just as he laid the pound note on the
glass counter the other sister came down the staircase at the back of
the shop.
“_Mais_, Gabrielle,” she cried, “it is the one who broke the window!
Good afternoon.” She put out her pointed hand over the glass, over his
money, the garnets, and the silver-gilt, and examined him steadily with
her large eyes which seemed to be veiled, her eyes in mourning....
“But what, this is your money?” she asked, lightly. “I think you are
poor. I think it is all you have got. And the ring is nothing, very
bad.” She slipped it back into the showcase and handed him the pound
note. Apparently the sister did not understand why; Evan was not sure
that he did. “Now our father is gone to Paris, so you will take some
tea with us, and tell us what you are, for example.”
Her name was Susanne Orfeo. Their father was Italian, their dead
mother French; they had been born in Paris, where the father kept
another shop on a quay of the Seine; they had lived in London for eight
years.
For no particular reason Evan told them that his name was John Craig.
The fact that he was an American pleased and excited them, even the
timid Gabrielle, who sighed continually, as if all the good things
of this world were denied her in advance; for as far as they knew,
America was a land of nothing but preposterous wealth and liberty and
pleasure. Susanne said she could not understand why he had ever left
it. Evan explained that he had run away from home to see the world, and
naturally said nothing about the war.
He returned again and again to the shop, at first rather
surreptitiously because the father, having committed the shop and
Susanne for several weeks to Gabrielle’s care, had come back. Gabrielle
was alarmed and manageable, like a mother who loves her children too
much to say no to them. A devout Catholic, she insisted only that
nothing should take place which would have to be confessed, and did not
mind tricking her father because he never communicated.
Evan saw by her questions as to his present earnings, his prospects,
and the attitude and position of his family in America, that she was
hoping to arrange a marriage for Susanne. His answers were ridiculous,
as he well knew; but she smiled approvingly, no matter what he said,
her judgment distorted in his favor, as if, with pent-up yearning, she
herself were to be the bride.
Ostensibly Susanne did not approve of this indirect but repeated
proposal of marriage, made in her name. Her indolent eyes would lose
themselves in the grate fire, or be fascinated by a bit of brocade
or the accidental spark of a well-cut stone, as if these things
represented by a sort of code the face of another lover. Or she would
seem to be tired of his presence, hiding her discontented face in a
black-and-white feather boa which she wore. Or she would make fun of
him with cruel good nature until her sister felt obliged to come to his
defense. Gabrielle lent herself to this sincere and insincere play with
tremulous intensity.
If the two sisters had seemed to have determined together that Evan
should marry the younger, he would have been alarmed. It was a good
thing, he thought, that he did not want to marry, for no girl in her
right mind would accept a deserter, anyway. But the girl’s seeming lack
of interest promised him independence, gave him courage, and doubled
his desire. He had lost his innocence since he had come to England, but
was only sufficiently acquainted with love to feel its brute force;
he did not know it well enough to recognize the profound, perhaps not
wholly instinctive cunning of the sisters.
Then their father fell ill, and Susanne said: “If you please, come and
work for us. We have told our father that we are afraid to keep here
alone all this value,” making a gesture of reference to the jewels, the
carvings, the velvet, which included her lovely body in a circle of the
damp, snowy light which came in from the street.
They took him upstairs to their father’s bedroom. Gabrielle said,
“_Voilà, mon petit_, the American we have engaged to help in the shop.
His name is John Craig.”
Evan saw a man in a skullcap who ruffled the linen under his bearded
chin with his weak hands, a withered man with a large, sharp nose.
“_Comme tu veux_.... Good morning, sir. I do not keep the shop much
longer. You see, I become old. We shall retire to Genoa. But for the
time it is very well that you should work here.”
His expert eyes estimated the young man’s value, swung sideways in
their sockets to glance at Gabrielle suspiciously, and rested upon his
marriageable daughter’s face with almost evil irony.
For a moment Evan, a deserter still, was afraid that he would pity him
and smile--in other words, warn him that love was a trap.
But the old man was too sick to pity anybody or to attach any
importance to the discoveries made by his aged penetration. He closed
his eyes very slowly. “I do _not_ care,” he murmured, “what you do.”
Susanne blushed, and they left the room.
Gabrielle nursed her father as she would have to do until the end of
his life. Susanne kept the shop. There was nothing for Evan to do.
The sudden well-being changed him overnight; a clean body and clean
clothes, warmth, good food, friendliness.... Pride in having endured
hardships all alone, and as it were by choice, made of the memory of
his misery the rarest sort of pleasure. Then he told himself that he
had been happier since he had come to London than hunger, cold, and
fatigue had permitted him to realize; he was certainly happier than he
had ever been in Wisconsin. He wanted never to have a home again, or
to be surrounded by a family. People of his own kind provoked him to
be unlike them--that is, unlike himself; but among those whom he might
never understand, he understood himself and was his own best friend. He
liked not having to give an account of himself to anyone; it was good
luck to be so disgraced that little or nothing could be expected of
him, that he need not expect much of himself. His only ambition was to
escape the ambitions which others might have for him and oblige him to
fulfill; and when he thought of his brothers at all, he pitied them.
No one cared what he did nor what happened to him; he did not care
himself, he believed, if only it were not what had always happened. He
told himself that this must be the way his old uncle Leander had wanted
him to live, when he had talked to him as a boy so incomprehensibly.
Back there in Cuba, in despair and foolishness, by accident, he had
chosen the life which suited him; he enjoyed being a deserter.
But he had fallen in love. Day after day the girl’s beauty was half
denied, half given to him. His enjoyment of what he had mingled
with longing for what he could not have, and produced in his heart
a childish irresponsibility and an intoxicating pain. At the end of
two weeks of it, involuntarily--uttering the words at random in place
of other words of love-making which her proud bearing forbade him to
use--he asked Susanne to marry him.
But a mere proposal meant no more to her than love-making without a
proposal means to many girls. She seemed to be waiting for a contract
to be drawn up and signed by her lover, his parents, and her own,
before giving her consent. In any case, she wanted plans to be made,
a home chosen, and sums of money with which to begin life secured and
counted. So she merely smiled, shook her head, and ran away.
Evan heaved a sigh of relief. What a confession he would have had to
make if she had stayed to listen to it! And she less than any girl
would want Evan Tower, an outlaw, for a husband. But she did not know
that Evan Tower existed, and it had not occurred to him as yet that
John Craig--a new man without a disgraceful past, without, indeed, any
past--could exist. So he did not dare to say anything more about his
confused desires. If he did, he might ask her again to be his wife,
as it were against his will; she might refuse him, she might accept
him--he would not know what to do in either case. His yearning gave him
no rest; and it was not licensed, could never be licensed, by anything,
perhaps not even by love on her part. Passion is lonely at best
(hopeless or not, requited or not); he was lonelier in the pleasant
shop than he had ever been sleeping in the cellar bedroom, working on
the docks. He thought of going back to them.
Finally Susanne saw how humble and stupid passion may make a young
man: he had not even realized that she loved him.... So she began to
make plans herself, and the day came when she was able to make this
announcement: “Father has sold the shop. He will give us a thousand
pounds now, and more when he sells the Paris business.”
Did that mean that she would marry him without asking any questions?
He hoped at least to see a somber warmth like his own kindle in her
heavy eyes, but was baffled by her self-possession, mystified by her
air of waiting; and she said nothing more. As time went by, he learned
something of the power of the Church, the sources of the strength of
women, and the character of the girl who, it seemed, was willing to
marry him, but unwilling to give him any proof of love.
One evening in June they came out of Hyde Park, where the mist had
rolled off the lagoons like ribbons unwinding from great spools,
and lamps had already been lighted in the leaves not yet soiled by
the summer. Evan clung to Susanne’s elbow, trying to substitute the
delicate muscles curving along the upper arm and the forearm to the
little pointed bone, for the untouched beauties which burdened his
imagination like a mania. They came to the dingy, stately, crowded
street.
Then Susanne swung her hand outward in a circle (a familiar gesture)
and said, “There is no future here. I am not like the others, most
other girls. I have some ambitions.”
Evan stared wistfully at the knots of self-possessed, unscrupulous
people so unlike Americans; the mysterious closed carriages; a square
opening out at the end of the long stem of a street like a large, old,
gray rose and pouring smoky perfume in their faces. He compared London
with the hard, poor farms which were all that he had seen of the New
World. Europe had given him maturity in exchange for his painful youth;
it might give him Susanne as well; and he wanted to stay there and
become a part of its old age. “You know,” the girl continued, “I made a
vow long ago--never to marry a European. That is, not unless he would
promise to take me to your country. We will go there. They will go to
Genoa to grow old; we will be in your home. And we will get rich on the
other side.”
Evan stumbled at the end of every one of the short sentences. So that
was what she had been waiting for.... It was America she wanted,
America she loved in him. The deserter had become an ambassador, as
deserters often do. Ambassador or not, he was still an outlaw--he could
not go back. He would have to tell her. She would despise him--despise,
blame, and scold him. He might as well desert again, go back to the
docks and say nothing.
No.... A soldier’s honor and promises to a friend had rested lightly
on his impatience; love was heavy. So they returned through the hasty
dusk, in silence, to the shop.
There Susanne struck a match under the paper and wood he had laid in
the grate for the next morning, and pushed a sofa in front of it, and
sank into the faded cushions. She was aware of his distress; she was
waiting for an explanation. He himself waited for the purring and
snapping of the fire to cease, unable to lift his voice above them.
At last he said, “You must know, Susanne, that I can’t go back to
America.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I deserted from the army. My real name is Evan Tower.”
“That makes no difference--”
“If they caught me I’d be put in jail.”
To his amazement, she did not reproach him; she did not seem to hold
him responsible; she blamed the government of his country--which
meant that she had already accepted him, accepted him in secret. Evan
understood no more than this, and stared at her in stupid, passionate
delight.
She had sprung out of the cushions and was pacing up and down the room.
“No! No! They shall not! Fools! It is nonsense! We will show them!”
She glared into the corners of the room as if they were occupied by
uniformed enemies. “No! I hate your government!” Even in her anger she
was thinking of what could be done, practically. “There must be an
amnesty. You will have a beard. In the West ... Mexico ...”
Clearly she was saying: He is mine, he is mine; America is mine.
His mind on fire because of her angry beauty, Evan rejoiced without
thinking of the consequences.
Then she stood quietly in the center of the room and wrung her hands.
“We _will_ go back to America. We will hide. We, we alone, will not
get caught. The army is nothing. No one will know. We dare to do it.
You love me; you do not dare be afraid. Tell me. Tell me if you are
afraid. Tell me, if you ...” She began to weep angrily, and clutched at
his hands and shoulders.
Evan wondered why Gabrielle did not hear her weeping and come down; he
did not know how to defend himself. So at last he heard his own voice
saying that he would go, promising not to be afraid, promising to grow
rich and respected in his own country--a land as unfriendly and as far
away as if it had not yet been discovered.
Susanne lifted her head, drew back against the arm of the sofa, and
smiled--a smile not of faith, but vigilance; not of contentment, but
violent firmness and courage; not of an end, but a new, unwelcome
beginning.
Her lover’s heart beat heavily, heavy as never before with fear, simply
because he had promised not to be afraid. He half regretted that
he had comforted her, because he had reëstablished the wall of her
ambition and willful virtue between them. But love went on speaking
for him, saying what he did not believe: that America would be kind,
that every law could be set at naught, that she should rule over the
circumstances of their lives and over his heart, and that he would give
her everything she wanted.
Then, by way of an appeal to her imagination and still more to his own,
he took out of a showcase necklaces of garnets and slippery chains,
thrust a comb like a studded shell into her hair, and folded about her
an embroidered cope smelling of incense. The fire turned these hard
ornaments into drops of water and disembodied sparks. But Susanne
shook her head. These were old things; she wanted new. They were
already hers; she wanted that which was his.
As he removed them, his cold fingers accidentally touched her cold
throat and mechanically caressed her shoulders. So he gave her all he
actually had to give--his kisses--brutally, softly, without asking
leave, but not without seeing her face, upon which a girl’s emotions
could be seen in conflict with a woman’s--terror with relief, distaste
with satisfaction, the humility of the abdication of a girl’s power
with a woman’s powerful vanity. But he covered her unwilling movements
with his arms; they climbed the stairs together, and did not separate
in the flickering hall.
When at last Evan came down into the shop alone, he found Gabrielle
there. She was weeping. “Now you have committed the sin,” she
whispered. “Now you will leave me alone and go to America. I will never
see you--” She fled to her room.
Evan settled his body, suddenly heavy, into the sofa cushions. The
fire throbbed in an enviable exhaustion. He was not even tired enough
to sleep, but felt instead that false weariness by virtue of which, in
the midst of passion, one is able to consider the next step. The next
step according to Gabrielle: “Now you will marry and go to America
...” He had promised; and as a lover, like a fool, he had sealed his
promise. Now that it was too late, he could think--of the short past
and the long future ahead. It was as if he had been talking to himself
for a long time, and had not been able to hear because of his pounding
lover’s heart; now its music had ceased for a few hours....
He would marry Susanne, that was certain. He did not want to marry,--he
could not help it. Then they would go back to America, venture across
an inconspicuous border, and establish themselves in some half-deserted
place. Suddenly, surprisingly, his love of his country caused him
pain (he had not known that he loved it). But he would have to be an
Englishman over there; he could be an American only in Europe. And
he would have to work, and seem to think what others thought, and do
what others did, and grow prosperous and worthy of respect--join the
regiment and march with the rest....
He thought of the leave-taking in Wisconsin before he had gone off
to join that other, actual regiment; for now he was taking leave of
himself--he was going to be married and return to America as John
Craig, and John Craig was saying good-by to Evan Tower. “Don’t make
promises,” his uncle Leander had said in Wisconsin, “that’ll be your
trouble. Don’t get started doing what you don’t like to do, because
you’re not the kind of man who keeps at it. You needn’t, as long as
you’re alone in the world. You’d better keep alone....” Evan wondered
if he were still in California with Timothy Davis. What had he thought
of his having run away from the war? What would he think of his
marriage and the new promises? He had such strange ideas.... He would
probably be frightened about what would happen--after they were married.
Susanne and John Craig, man and wife. To all intents and purposes
their marriage was over before it had begun; love had run its course.
The rest of their lives would be a monument to it--a monument having
on the outside an appearance of solidity, but hollow within, where,
like the few breaths of air which are imprisoned inside a bronze, the
bitter-sweet of youth, passion, and disgrace would be secreted....
Outside in the fog London drew up its enormous knees and shifted its
enormous shoulders.
Youth and passion--he saw more clearly than before what they were; he
could see through them to the future, which would not be young and
in which there would not be much passion; and he understood Susanne
as if they had already been married for years. She would never cease
to reproach him for having endangered her immortal soul by his love
before marriage, nor forget why she had married him, nor overlook any
of his failures. Others would excuse him for being a deserter--by
never discovering the fact, or by forgetting it. She would go through
the motions of forgiveness, and as long as he loved her keep him from
forgiving himself. Perhaps she would not blame him, but instead think
of him as a fool, not worldly-wise enough to deserve her respect. A
man’s madness, nipped in the bud; love itself was a man’s madness....
The small, naked flames in the hearth began to clothe themselves in
ashes. He sought in his memory for a clear picture of her face, and
found it--at once the face of a flower and a shopkeeper. How it had
had its way with him--and it was not done with him yet. At that moment
there was more premonition than passion in his heart; there would not
always be. Passion would be born again and again, but it would be
weakened like this by each rebirth; and the day would surely come when
he would wonder why he had given himself up. He was glad that it had
begun only in fact, for it had been as if, bending over a rose, he had
been prevented from taking a deep breath. Could one ever take a full
breath, and have enough of love?
He was infinitely tired. Sitting in the antique shop where love had
begun, he seemed to look back even upon its future, knowing what he
would have to give in return for what Susanne had given or would
give, the reparation that would be required of him for what he would
take or had taken, as if it were by force: responsibility, secrecy,
half-hearted hard work, fatigue....
Hitherto apparently lazy, he had “worked harder to keep from working
than anyone else ever worked,” as his mother would say. Apparently
a coward, he had run away from several kinds of tyranny; but now,
it seemed, he had chosen to play the tyrant to himself. He went on
enumerating the differences between the past and the future. He had
evaded common responsibilities--little good it had done him; for now he
would have to keep to the letter all these fantastic rules which life
(or perhaps he himself) was making up as he went along. For example,
he would have to learn never to hide his face, so that no one should
discover that he had anything to hide. To obtain forgiveness for his
youth, of which, like a fool, he had hoped to make others envious as he
grew older. To give no one cause to be ashamed of him again, but to be
ashamed of himself, in order to be able to be discreet mechanically.
To make more friends than he wanted, and not to like any of the sort
of people who resembled him, lest he should have to live down their
disgraces as well as his own. To fulfill every expectation, to promise
too much and keep his word. To condemn the man he would have liked to
be to increasing obscurity, and make a self he did not like more and
more prominent. To strip his genuine character little by little of its
reality, and turn a disguise into an actual man....
This meant the total disappearance of Evan Tower, that happy, unhappy
boy who had done as he liked, and the rise of John Craig, an Englishman
married to a French wife, neither happy nor unhappy, but growing rich
in America. So with the passage of time, the soul of a man loses itself
in his life.
His life in disguise; and when he died, only the disguise would lie
quiet on the deathbed and be buried; he himself would have been dead a
long time. No--not dead, merely condemned to death.
For he would always be a deserter. A boy hiding inside a man, an
outlaw hiding inside a man who at last, at least, would abide by the
law. If he liked, a homeless, lonely man in a foreign land might wear
his disgrace as if it were nothing more than a shirt or a coat out of
fashion. A lonely man surrounded by friends and family, a naturally
homeless man at home, an expatriate resident in his own country,
would have to wear it next the skin, like a tattooed rose, or star, or
Marbury’s blue heart in a circle. That was all....
The fire sank. His excitement kept him warm, but his hopelessness was
putting him to sleep.
More than ever a deserter, then.... The exile was returning home,
which was inexcusable; the outlaw was going to avoid punishment--that
is, break the law again. He was skeptical (his uncle had taught him
that); but his own impulses were speaking to him as an angel speaks
to a madman, a mother to a child; and when that angel spoke (with its
limited vocabulary of passion, fatigue, homesickness, fear), he had no
ears for his skepticism or for other men.
So he regarded himself with admiration and disdain, comparing the past
with the present--for he seemed to have been young a moment ago--and
comparing himself with other people and other things. The wooden
saints in the shop, covered with flakes of gilt, sick with gold sores;
the gaping showcases (for Gabrielle had not forgotten to lock up the
jewels); the crystal ball in which he had never seen anything but a
flaw shaped like Susanne’s mouth; that dark-red, disastrous mouth
itself--they had lost most of their charm. They were old things; he
wanted new. Shining, unsatisfying, they belonged to his youth and were
like it; and he was tired of being young. His uncle’s warnings also
belonged to it; all he would have to do with them from now on would
be to prove that they had been mistaken; and it occurred to him that
his uncle had come to be an old man without ever having grown up. He
felt a great hunger for the evasions, the hypocrisies, the calculated
movements, the disappointments, of middle age.
And there was the London dawn, strong and soiled as a man’s middle age,
crawling over the window sills, pushing between the plush curtains. He
would not have time to go to bed. Before he crept upstairs he took off
his shoes, unwilling that anyone should know that he had sat up all
night, determined that no one should ever discover the madness of his
thought.
The rest of his life was very much as he had expected it to be. He
and Susanne were married at the end of the summer. Gabrielle took the
invalid father to a small villa outside Genoa. The young couple went
to Mexico City, and during the winter crossed into the United States
without difficulty, and bought a ranch near Taos, New Mexico.
He wrote to his mother and received a long letter in reply, full of
embarrassment and eagerness to be proud of him in one way or another,
proud of his courage at least. In it, with later family news, she told
how Leander had died on his way west. She added, “He did not live to
hear of your trouble in the army”; evidently she was glad.... Leander
might not have minded that particular disgrace, but now, if this new
adventure ended still more shamefully, as it might, the old bachelor
would not be alive to be embittered by it; and Evan said to himself, It
is just as well. But the new adventure was not to end badly.
Susanne gave birth to a son who was christened Leander Orfeo Craig.
The desert and the mountains were little more than a place of exile
for her--exile less from Europe, which she did not love, than from
the brilliant life she had looked forward to; but she recognized the
danger of residence in a more law-abiding part of the country. She
grew strangely devout and wanted her son to become a priest; but Orfeo
adored his father, who grimly and patiently counteracted her influence.
In 1906 the antiquarian G. Orfeo died in Genoa, and Gabrielle came
to live with her sister, bringing the rest of her father’s fortune.
Friends of a bishop and a sinister old ex-governor, the two women came
to be powerful figures in the public life of the State, and more and
more independently, at one end of the great adobe house, led the life
of wealthy Mexican devotees.
John Craig lived in the other wing, near the goats and horses, among
the cowboys, the firearms which were less and less useful as time
passed, the carved saddles and faded saddle blankets, the star-shaped
spurs. He saw his wife only a few minutes a day, but never loved
another woman even for a night. His life was that of the chief of a
band of hard men--his cowboys--all of whom, like himself, had secrets,
vices, great strength, and skill, whether with animals or enemies;
and among whom he enjoyed the lonesome prestige of an officer or a
criminal--like soldiers or accomplices, they did not believe him but
believed in him. Many of his neighbors as well were suspicious of his
past, but it seemed as natural in the Far West for a man to be followed
by an unpleasant story as by a shadow. He kept out of politics, and
made those who did not wish him well fear him, stopping their mouths
at first by well-chosen threats, and then good-naturedly letting them
forget why they did not gossip about him any more. Gradually he became
an influential citizen, with whom even his wife’s powerful friends had
to reckon. The years went by, as much alike as cattle marked with the
same brand, his brand--a heart inside a circle. He did not make so much
money as Susanne wished nor even as he had expected, but was able to
put aside slowly a certain small fortune for Orfeo.
The boy looked somewhat like his mother, very little like an American.
Thinking of him, his father thought of his own boyhood: thus Orfeo
seemed not merely precious as a son, but of unique importance, as to
a weary regent, the sole heir to great wealth or a throne. For he
was the only living relative, John Craig thought, of the boy who had
died (at least seemed to die) within himself; and thus entitled to
everything in manhood which he imagined that boy might have enjoyed.
So John Craig watched Orfeo with a certain fear--fear of his evident
mortality, of his lack of discontent which was like indifference; a
royally lovely child because of whose gentleness an illusory kingdom
(of irresponsibility, candor, and truancy) might get out of control or,
by someone, be taken away.
The child carried messages back and forth across the patio between
his parents; and because he resembled his mother as a girl, it seemed
to his father that he also bridged another distance--that between his
own heartbreaking youth and the rather heartbroken satisfaction of
the later years. His imagination followed the tiny boy’s solitary,
symbolical footsteps back and forth in his life and across it, and
wished that the years would bring him back where he had begun. Smiling
mechanically, he wished that, as soon as he had saved enough money to
insure his son’s independence, John Craig, the rancher, might die,
and his soul pass into Orfeo’s life, and Evan Tower, the deserter, be
disguised by nothing more than that fearless childhood, and begin all
over again....
And because he thought idly of beginning his life again, he thought how
it actually had begun, and wanted to see Wisconsin, his parents, his
brothers and sister, once more. They must have forgiven him by this
time; one or another of them might understand him at last.
It would be a long journey--and then explanations, embarrassment, a
certain amount of scandal, irreparable resentments that he had had
the luck to have forgotten about.... A grown man had no business to
seek to be understood. He was a fool, mysteriously a fool, he told
himself--without caring in the least. He might as well set out; he
always had, once he had thought of a place to go. In the court Orfeo
was playing with a jet of water which balanced over a stone tub,
balanced as it were in the very center of Taos Valley, that huge,
hollow stone--balanced, lost its balance, straightened again, but
could never be quite still, like a human life in the great hollow of a
lifetime.... His life had lost its balance again, that was all.
So he went back to Hope’s Corner. Wisconsin was less pretty than he
had thought. His father, as he might have remembered, never forgave
anything, and would not see him. His mother told him about all the
relatives; he found little to tell her, for she was not even interested
in his treason, his hardships, his marriage, his good and bad luck;
it was as if she had brought him into the world to be a deserter--he
had been one, and there was nothing more to be said. His presence
seemed merely to remind Ralph of his resentment at having been deserted
by both his brothers, left behind with their old father and the
unprofitable farm and no opportunities. He did not have the courage to
stop in Chicago to visit his luckier brother, the minister; and he told
himself afterward that for lack of courage he had not stayed with his
people long enough to accomplish what he had come for, whatever that
was....
So a few years later he went home again, and found himself no less a
stranger than before. He could not share his mother’s almost formal
enthusiasm for the early days. He did not understand his brother’s
sensual, virtuous life. His sister-in-law Marianne, wistfully
opinionated and brilliant like a saint, intimidated him. Flora, his
little sister, laughed, wept, and liked everyone absent-mindedly,
tremulously afraid to do wrong, but less like a saint than a nun. John
Craig felt as if he had wandered backward (or forward) into an epoch
peopled by wise children, troubled or at peace--even their trouble
was a kind of peace--and he did not understand the games that, with
touching solemnity, such children played.
But what had he expected? What could his family have meant to him
then? His uncle Leander, who more than anyone had encouraged him to be
the stranger that he was, had been dead so many years, and was not even
buried there. Was Evan Tower dead as well? Certainly he spoke of him to
his mother as one speaks of a boy who has not lived to grow up; and if
he was, his tomb was not in Wisconsin, except when and because he, John
Craig, was there--in whose heart he was buried, dead or alive.
Leander and Evan, those two were his real family, and their souls had
passed into his life--that is, John Craig’s life. He had thought that
he was tired of it; but he was a strong man, and had no other to live.
So in Wisconsin he realized how precious it was--perhaps that was what
he had come for. The spirits of his uncle and his boyhood having passed
into it, he ought to be content with their dwelling place.
Having passed into his life; perhaps into Orfeo’s after him.... There
was also Ralph’s eldest boy, Alwyn, a colorless youngster with raised
eyebrows who was going to resemble Leander when he grew up. He seemed,
childishly, to be trying to think his way into everything that came to
his attention--John Craig imagined a key trying to fit every lock--and
thus to hurt himself and keep himself in a slight but almost continual
bad temper. It appeared, furthermore, that he and his father did not
understand each other. So John Craig said to Alwyn, “You and my boy
will be friends. You must come out and live with us for a while, before
long. I’ll raise up a colt or two for you to ride.”
It was on the last day of that second visit that, intending to ask his
aunt a question as an excuse, Alwyn slipped into his grandmother’s
sitting room in order to look at his uncle for the first time after
his mother had told him who and what he was. They were looking out of
the window, his grandmother with her large arms folded, his uncle,
the stranger, resting one hand on his aunt Flora’s shoulder. His
grandfather had refused to come to the house while his son was there.
Every night his grandmother reproached him, but he did not even trouble
to answer; every afternoon they hoped he would change his mind. Alwyn
tiptoed to the window, and no one spoke to him.
They could see his grandfather coming down the lane, coming toward the
house at his usual stubborn pace. His head was thrown back; over his
shoulder he carried a long thistle-hoe. He was coming toward the house;
he had changed his mind at last....
But just as he put out his hand to open the garden gate, he turned
around and slowly, stubbornly, went back, out of sight.
The tears came to Flora’s vague, affectionate eyes, and Alwyn’s
grandmother clapped her hands together. “I declare,” she cried, “he
does beat all! Evan, your father is a hard man.”
“I guess, mother,” John Craig said, “hardness runs in the family. At
any rate, it ought to--we need it, the way we live.” And as he spoke he
smiled, but only about his mouth, rather lifelessly.