arrived in Chicago, Baldy found that his former partner was getting on
and wished for some help. So they rented a house on Cottage Grove Avenue,
and Baldy went back to that grocery.
“This is something like!” cried Baldy, and his wife thought so too.
Five years later he saw in the mirror an aging man, with dead eyes, who
spoke in a dead voice. His partner was old, his wife was an icy shadow;
and if only they could go somewhere for a vacation or could afford a
radio or a piano player....
“We had it nice in Chelsea,” said his wife.
“We did,” he agreed, thought of the greengrocery, Brighton Beach and the
cinema, and said: “Ella, I can’t stand ten years more of this.”
They were sitting on the side porch and Baldy stood up and shook his fist
at the evening sky.
“What’s it _for_?” he shouted. “That’s what I don’t sense. It ain’t in
the game to give a man a brain and then not tell him what it’s _for_.” He
looked at his wife, his dead eyes unchanging, and said in his flat voice:
“Ain’t there _anything_ that could tell a person what it’s for?” But she
had no answer.
That evening Alex unexpectedly arrived. Baldy never had liked Alex, a
little man, with an eager manner and no great respect for business.
“I dropped in,” said Alex, “to take you both over to my camp for Sunday.
Can you go?”
“_Your_ camp?” said Baldy, and felt a new respect for Alex. Had he struck
a good thing?
They drove to a corner of the forest reserve where were lines of gray
ghostly tents and a living eye of fire in the midst. Around the fire were
fifty boys, one boy standing before them. Alex and Baldy Michelson and
Ella Michelson sat on the edge of the company and listened:
“We’ve all had the week here, fellows,” came the hesitant voice, “and we
could have another one. But there’s fifty that ain’t going to get to camp
at all, ’count not money enough. What do you say we start going back and
give the other fifty their chanst?”
There came groans and hisses. But they took the vote, counted hands, and
the vote was to let the other fifty come out.
“Nice kids,” said Alex to Baldy. “Never had a thing, either. But they’ve
got the gang sense—the whole gang, I mean. They never saw one of these
fifty boys they’re giving up their week for, you understand.”
“The whole gang,” Baldy repeated. “What’s that?”
Sitting among them on the Sunday, their last day in the camp, Baldy
said to his wife: “Ella, they’re got hold of something or other. So has
Alex....”
She returned vaguely: “Do you think so?”
That night, as they were falling asleep, Baldy said: “Ella! I’ll bet Alex
staged that, thinking I’d put up for the extra two weeks of camp for
those boys. I never thought of that....”
She said sleepily: “Oh, surely not, Baldy. Alex isn’t crazy.”
“All the same, he’s got hold of something or other,” Baldy muttered.
He went to his grocery. Mrs. Michelson tidied the house. At night they
went to a picture show. In time they bought a piano player and a radio.
They often sat on the side porch at evening and Baldy would shake his
head and say: “What’s it all for? That’s what I don’t sense.”
But when he died, he left his money to Alex. “Because,” Baldy explained
to his lawyer, “I think he seems to have got hold of something....”
THE VOICE
Basset had engaged passage on the _Titanic_, for her first crossing. Any
one sailing at that time would have done the same, providing he could
still get passage. Basset was delighted at the promise of the swift
luxurious voyage, and he said to his friends:
“I’m off—on the _Titanic_—yes. Better come along.”
He cabled his fiancée and his firm, said his farewells and did his final
shopping.
He was walking in Regent Street when he first became aware of a faint
impulse within him, less than a force, more than a fragrance; an impulse
to cancel his passage. At first he did not notice, and when his urge
did break through to his consciousness, he understood that it had been
beating at him for a long time. As soon as it was definitely noticed, it
became a clear and clamorous command.
He argued the matter with this inner disturber. Cancellation was
impossible. His arrangements were all made, invitations had been refused,
his cables had been sent, and Marie would be counting the days. There was
now no earlier boat and he was averse to all postponements. In reply to
all this came three distinct words:
“Cancel your passage.”
Now Basset was accustomed to obey this inner impulse. He hadn’t an idea
what it was, and in general he thought if you classified a thing you had
disposed of it. But though he called this voice the subconscious, he
continued to obey it, secretly and blindly, but pretty consistently. And
the more often he obeyed it the more pressing it became, until, as now,
having listened, he could not dismiss it.
So he canceled his passage, sent off two more cables, and tucked himself
into the cabin of an old liner sailing a day later. He was on the deck
of this old liner when he was told of the message from the _Carpathia_,
crying the _Titanic’s_ fate.
Shaken by the disaster, he was yet kindled by the memory of what had
occurred. He had been saved—but how? Unquestionably he could not be the
only one to whom this saving voice had spoken. There must be people on
this very boat....
He went among the passengers and asked them, nakedly, if they had had a
like experience. From a passenger list of seventy, he found six who had
taken passage and given it up for a similar reason and eleven who had
thus been prevented from taking passage at all.
“Then why,” he shouted to a woman who had held her _Titanic_ passage for
a month, “why were _they_ not given this impulse—the people who sailed?”
“Perhaps they were,” said this woman, “and they didn’t listen.”
When his boat had docked and he kissed Marie, exceedingly smart and very
tender, she cried: “Oh, my darling—thank God you changed your passage.
How did you come to do that?”
Basset told her, reluctantly, feeling a sense of exposure. At once
upon her arrival at home she repeated the story to her family, in his
presence. At dinner that night she made him tell it again. The newspapers
came and interviewed him on it, and then his firm associates questioned
him minutely—“No, but, just exactly how did the voice sound?”—and at his
club they made him tell it again and again, and there they began to joke
to him about it.
A woman’s association asked him to come and speak informally on his
wonderful, wonderful metaphysical experience, and he was drawn into an
acceptance; and goaded too far by their awe, he informed them that this
was the most usual thing in the world; that he had been obeying this
inner voice for years, and that they could all do the same if they were
not too battered by—“by tea and cakes,” he told them rudely.
“But what _is_ it?” they wanted to know.
“It’s conscience,” he said bluntly, “working as it was intended to work.
Also, it’s electricity. If we could raise our consciousness high enough,
we’d always have this kind of thing....”
Now the scientists attacked him and demanded to know what on earth he
meant by electricity, and the psychologists what on earth he meant by
higher consciousness and universal substance, and the theologists what
on earth he meant by dragging conscience into the routine of the market
place? The weekly reviews and the daily headlines took up and tossed
about Basset and his inner voice. He thought: “I shall lose my power. It
is not that they have cut my hair. All the same, they have shorn me.”
He fled to a mountain camp and one day went out alone in a canoe on
a mountain lake. As he pushed off, he distinctly divined an agonized
command not to step into the canoe. It upset, in the green and glossy
water. A guide heard his cries and came running and shouting as the
waters closed over Basset’s head.
THE WOMAN
Walking one day in a suburb, Bellard, wearing clothes in the extreme of
the fashion, was torn by the look of a house on whose mean little porch
near the street sat a shabby man of sixty, without a coat, and reading
a newspaper. The man’s fate seemed terrible: the unpainted house, the
disordered hall, the glimpse of a woman in an apron. But the man looked
up, and smiled at Bellard as brightly as if he himself had been young.
Bellard meant to be a financier. Instead, he shortly endured his father’s
bankruptcy, left college, found uncongenial employment, observed the
trick of a girl’s eyes, married her and lived in a little flat.
But this girl had the quality of a flower. Bellard could not explain it,
but she was silent and fragrant, and hopeful like a flower. Once in April
when he saw a pot of lilies of the valley blooming on the pavement, he
thought: “They’re like Lucile. They’re all doing their utmost.” In her
presence it was impossible to be discouraged. He would go home from work
hating his office, his routine, his fellows, his street; but as soon as
he entered the flat, there would be some breath of that air for which
he saw other men dying. Her welcome, her abstraction, her silence, her
confidences were all really heavenly. Bellard wondered at her, did not
comprehend her, adored her. He worked hard, and went home on the subway
with a sense of happiness.
He longed to give her beautiful things, but she said: “How did people get
like that, my dear—to want expensive things and to have people look up
to them? Isn’t it foolish?” He wondered how she knew that, and he wished
that he knew it himself.
Their two children were like all agreeable children, and Bellard and
Lucile went through the reverence, anxiety and joy of their upbringing.
And whether the moment yielded a torn frock or a hurt knee, croup or a
moral crisis, Lucile seemed to put the event in its place and not to be
overwhelmed by it. “She has a genius for being alive,” Bellard thought.
As she grew older, she was not so beautiful, and he saw many women both
beautiful and young. But when they chattered, pouted and coquetted, when
they were cynical, bored, critical, or hilarious, he thought about Lucile
and her silences, her fragrance, her hope. Hope of what? She knew that
they would in all probability never have any more than they had now. When
he asked her wistfully what kept her so happy she replied with an air of
wonder: “You.”
One day he overheard her talking about him with a friend. Lucile was
saying: “Other men live in things and events and emotions and the future.
But he seems to know that living is something else....” “What else?” this
friend interrupted curiously. And he heard Lucile say: “Well, of course
every one knows, really. But he lives it too.” “I’m not good enough for
her,” Bellard thought, and tried his best to prove that he was.
They went on like this for years; the children grew up, married, came
home and patronized them. Then Bellard, who had established a little
business, failed. His son tried to straighten things out, found it
impossible, and assumed control, frankly berating his father. His
daughter came home with her three children, and filled the flat with
clamor and turbulence. This woman said: “Mother, sometimes I think it’s
your fault. You’re so _patient_ with him.” “I’m glad he’s out of that
business,” said Lucile absently. “He never liked it.” Her exasperated
daughter cried: “But what are you going to live on?” Bellard heard her
say: “Your father was responsible for three of us for a quarter of a
century you know, dear.” At this Bellard rose on strong wings and felt
himself still able to breast the morning and the night.
Lucile and Bellard moved to a suburb. There they rented a little house
and Bellard went into a real estate office. All day he showed land and
houses to men who wanted something better for less money. At night he
went home and there was Lucile—less like a flower, but still silent,
fragrant, hopeful. He said to her: “You’ll never have anything more than
you have now, Lucile, do you realize that?” She replied: “I don’t want
anything more to dust and take care of!” Once he said: “When you were a
girl you dreamed that you’d have things different, didn’t you, Lucile?”
She said: “My dear, all that poor girl knew how to dream was just about
having things!” He cried: “What do you want most of anything in this
world?” She considered and answered: “I want you to be as happy as I am.”
He thought of his own early dream of being a great financier, and said:
“I’m the happy one, you know.” He thought: “This is what the world is
dying for.”
One day, when he was sixty, he was sitting on his mean little porch near
the street. The house was small and unpainted, the hall was disordered
with house cleaning, Lucile in an apron was in the doorway. Bellard,
without a coat and reading a newspaper, lifted his eyes, and saw walking
by the house, and wearing clothes in the extreme of the fashion, a youth
who looked up at him with an excess of visible compassion.
On this youth Bellard looked down and smiled, a luminous smile, a smile
as bright as if he himself had been young.
A FAR CRY
Among the red porch chairs Elmer Dasher sat in a denim swing which
leniently dissented. He did not seem like a man who would sit and swing;
such a molested-looking man.
Hands parted the curtains of a window behind him and hung there a pink
card on which was printed “Ice.” It was evening, but to-morrow morning’s
slumber must not be flawed by this task. Immediately the hands appeared
upon the porch. Mrs. Dasher’s hands wore all the expression that she had.
They seemed to have done so much. Her face had experienced so little.
“Hot,” said she.
“Why shouldn’t it be? It’s summer time,” said Elmer Dasher.
He tilted the swing, and the spirited disclaimer of the frame did not
annoy them. She rocked and they did not hear the creaking board. Near
the cement pavement the sprinkler fizzed and spurted; they did not
observe that in order to avoid it, passers were obliged to make a detour
under the maples.
Elmer Dasher took his watch and held it. The last bright cloud hung on
Patch Hill and stained the air. Shadow floated and fell. For five minutes
while airy dissolution ran upon the light, Mr. Dasher eyed the dial. Then
he descended the steps and turned off the city water. Unconscious that it
was a triumph of social evolution for a community to be organized like
that, and without a casual glance at the elemental glory of the sunset,
he returned to his swing.
Ludlow, his neighbor, crossed the connecting lawns and desired to know
how everything was. Ludlow had a woman’s eyes. Elmer Dasher held him in
subconscious contempt, for he made disconcerting observations, such as
he made now to Dasher’s inevitable reply that everything was complete,
complete:
“Sometimes I wonder why Patch Grove doesn’t collapse and slide down
Patch Hill and pile up in the valley.”
Dasher inquired why on earth it should do that. He knew his town;
“hard-boiled business, hard-boiled recreation, hard-boiled family life,”
he had once summed it up; but he could not imagine why business blocks,
houses, garages, and folk should ever give way, of their own futility,
and slide down to the valley of the Patch, the brown river. Ludlow’s long
harangue only confused him.
“You won’t find any better place to live,” he indignantly defended. “I’m
afraid not,” said Ludlow, sighed, mentioned the thunder heads in the
west, and went home.
“Queer duck,” Elmer Dasher thought.
Abruptly, distinctly, he heard a cry. He could not divine its direction
nor tell whether it was the voice of man or woman. It might have been a
signal, very clear, though from a distance. He looked at his wife but
she, with moving lips, was counting something and had heard nothing. He
thought that the boys must be playing ball on the school grounds, and he
tilted the swing again.
The hall gas flared up. Over her who had lighted it the warm tide surged,
showed her pointed face, her thin arms—Geraldine Dasher, a name to which
her faint self of forty bore no relation. She emerged, announced a
destination, was met by “Why not ever sit down here at home with us?” and
pregnable, without resentment, sank to the top step.
Within the houses, behind the dying brilliance of the brick walls, girls
were dressing. In Patch Grove no one dressed before dinner. The virginity
of the toilette was preserved for its main purpose. On the porches sat
those who did not dress for the evening any more. In many of these the
desire to give life had changed to a dynamic hostility to those already
alive. As with the Dashers:
“Hot.” “Why shouldn’t it be? It’s summer time.” “That isn’t funny.” “My
dear, nothing is funny to you.” “My clothes are—they’re so funny I don’t
like to go to church.” “The churches have gone to the dogs. Best keep
out of them.” “You would insult my religion!” And so on to: “I’m rather
sick of this whole thing.” Whereon Geraldine cried abruptly: “How do you
think I feel about that?” and laughed harshly, so that a silence fell.
In their silence a telegram was given over the telephone in the hall.
Dasher took the message, came back, his face sagging with concern, and
said:
“Mamma, Katy’s sick. She wants us to go to the city and bring the boy
home with us.”
Mrs. Dasher asked for details which had not been given, made and rejected
fractions of plans, objected. Dasher said: “Nonsense. Katy’s the only
niece I’ve got in the world. Going, too, Jerry? Don’t keep us waiting.”
The enormous night received the little car. Ten miles of dusky cornland,
warm with the breath of the day; eight miles of city streets, sleepy with
heat, nervous with light, washed by a thin black stream of beings, Pearl
City traffic formed the veins of some vast undivined body. That body
seemed to have a voice, raucous, unresting. The powers of that body were
evident—to give death, to give life, to sin, to rejoice, to agonize. Was
there no more to that unknown being? Could it only bellow with its body
while its veins flowed with the traffic?
Katy was at a hospital and with her the little boy, wondering, frail.
The ward was shared with a woman, a Bohemian, red and black. Katy was a
yellow shadow on a pillow. Old in cell and in spirit she said: “Don’t
bother to stay. He’ll be here. But he can’t work and see to the boy, too.
Me? I don’t know and I don’t care.” She lay like a little animal left too
long in a trap to be watching any more.
Elmer Dasher was shaken, said, “But my God, Katy”; and Katy, turning her
head fretfully from him, was caught by the aspect of the Bohemian woman,
and cried out. The Bohemian woman was sitting erect and trying terribly
for breath. No nurse was there, the passages were quiet. The Dashers,
always lax, uncentered, were thrown into distraction. Elmer ran and
rang and called. It was Mrs. Dasher who reached the woman and, in some
deep impulse to physical contact, held her as she died. Mrs. Dasher kept
saying: “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand this.”
Jerry caught up the terrified little boy, ran by the nurse who was moving
upon the room, crouched in the tonneau, and hugged the child. He wept,
was stilled, and later roused to faint interests. She was stirred by his
quiet, then by his motion. While they waited, she sought for ways to give
him protection. Passers glanced at them and it flashed to her: They think
he’s mine. She adjusted his collar and said in an admirably imitated
abstraction: “Yes, darling.”
At last her father and mother came crossing the street. To Jerry they
seemed detached and of a familiarity strange and passionate, such as she
felt in saying over her own name.
“I don’t understand that,” Mrs. Dasher was still saying weakly. In the
seat beside her husband she wept and seemed rapt, unaware of anything
save that which had just happened. Elmer Dasher was silent, but wholly in
the body, as was clear when he cursed in a traffic crisis.
This crisis he assumed to have been imagined: He heard a car, with a
strange siren, a faint melodious siren; a car seeking, he thought,
to pass him, and nearly succeeding. Dasher could hear the silver
alternation, a cadence such as three pipes might give, softly blown. When
had a man ever devised a siren like that? “Some music hound,” thought
Dasher. And when a tight place narrowed in before him and the light cry
of insistence followed close, he drew far to the right to let the fellow
pass. The fellow did not pass. Amazed, as he looked back, Dasher saw
the street momentarily empty. “Must have been the fire whistle,” Dasher
thought, swore, and slid back into the channel.
They drew into the country, into the tender vacant air of fields. Now
emerged the sky, which in town they had forgotten. The sky was void of
stars. To the southwest were thrusts of lightning, incessant, at innocent
play, unconcerned with any fruit of death. A faint huskiness came
deepening, of thunder.
“What’s that?” the child asked and, grown shyly accustomed, questioned of
fireflies, of miasma, of the smell of honey and hay. These questions gave
Jerry rapture. His breath and his brushing eyelash gave her rapture. The
child fell asleep, and in dear discomfort Jerry held him; for mile upon
mile she held him and dreaded the ride’s end.
She felt a lift of pleasure when the car was stalled. At the foot of a
sharp slope up to a roadbed the car stopped. Elmer Dasher, who could
not so much as set a hinge on a door, was helpless. He lifted the hood,
produced tools, said names of parts; but it was plain that he was
helpless. No farmstead light was near and they set themselves to wait for
passers. It was a road little frequented. And now the high black clouds
were shot with flame.
They faced a meadow made limitless by night. The life of the dark was
there, the dark peopled by rustle, breath, odor. In the stillness these
influences came confidently to the car. The night breathed, and along its
vast invisible veins coursed some faint fluid, tincturing the darkness,
flowing through the little bodies of men.
Suddenly Elmer Dasher felt a frightful nostalgia. Home, home! He wanted
to be at home. But when he thought of his house, his porch with red
chairs, it was not these that he wanted. Home. Some core of the world
seemed to emerge and demand him. Where did he want to go?
Far away, as if from another meadow under another night, there came a
call, of no remembered bird. A bird call which fused with the rising
wind, threaded the thunder, haunted the ear, and died. It voiced his
nostalgia, it was pure and pleading. It bore an echo of unbearable
sweetness. Or was it a bird call? He thought now that it might have been
a wavering engine whistle.... Far down the curve of the railroad across
the distant swamp, a yellow eye outrayed in the first rain.
“The ’way freight,” said Elmer Dasher. “It’s none too good for us. We’ll
signal them, and if they row we’ll report them to the directors!”
The highway was level with the fields. To the fields’ edge they rolled
their car, an ancient servant, and left it locked in darkness; with
its lamps they lighted their way and flagged the freight train. In
magnificent languor, like a train of the Orient, the thundering thing
rolled indolently down and stopped. A blown torch brushed out a little
pool of light. A Patch Grove voice hailed them, exclaimed, bade them
climb aboard. Received into the warm cave of the cab, these four blinked
at the red throat of the firebox and felt the rich reprieve of some
convalescence.
The enormous night held the little train. The enormous sky held the
little storm. Standing in the gangway Elmer Dasher threw back his head
and took the hour. Motion, roar, electricity blue on the metal, thunder
of wheel and of cloud, and he in their midst. He felt in flight over
farther spaces. They swept by a steel plant, saw the belch and glare,
made out men and mounds of slag. One of the sheds stood drenched in the
red beauty of the pouring, and naked figures flowered from wild color.
In that flash were the tumult of farther industry, roar of innumerable
trains, glitter of all the cities, their veins flowing with men and women
in sin, joy, anguish. He was feeling all that there was to feel! He could
have cried a challenge as the engine went challenging the lit blackness.
But why did the engineer blow the whistle, running through open country?
Or _did_ he blow the whistle? He was sitting quietly on the seat,
his attention on the track. One hand lay on his knee and one on the
windowsill. The engine whistle was not blown! That insistent call that
seemed like the voice of their flight, it came toward them from some
horizon. What horizon? Who was calling? Calling whom? Beauty and anguish
flowed together in Elmer Dasher. He felt drunkenness, incredibly enhanced.