In the hurly-burly of the rearrangement of life, nobody had been able
to pay much attention to Stephen, and he had reveled in this freedom
from supervision. He had always steered his small, hard life on a line
of his own, a line he strove to make parallel to the course of the rest
of the family, and never intersecting. Contact with others always meant
trouble in Stephen’s experience--except with Henry and Helen. Now that
the grown-ups had almost forgotten his existence, he was enjoying life
as never before, under his dirty, crumpled rompers, stiff with spilled
egg-yolk and cold bacon grease.
His father’s accident had made no impression on his emotions. Events
that did not touch Stephen personally never made any impression on his
emotions. The only element in the new situation which interested him
was that Mother seemed to have forgotten all about Teddy. This was
important. It made Stephen very glad that Father had fallen off the
roof and broken his legs all up, or whatever it was. As long as Father
stayed in bed, he couldn’t bother anybody, even when he and Stephen
were left alone.
* * * * *
For, after a time, they were left alone. When the sick man began to
improve so that he was conscious, and later, occasionally out of pain,
there were hours when the round of volunteer neighbors and helpers
thinned out, when he was left in his bed in the dining-room, a glass of
water, a book, something to eat and the desk-telephone on a table by
his side, with instructions to telephone if he needed anything.
“Don’t you hesitate a minute now, Mr. Knapp,” said old Mrs. Hennessy
heartily; “if it’s no more than to put a shovelful of coal on the
kitchen fire, you call fourteen ring thirty-two and I’ll be right over.”
“And when Stephen gets to acting up, just shake the window-curtain real
hard and I’ll drop everything to come over and settle him,” said Mrs.
Anderson zestfully.
So far Stephen had not “acted up.” Probably, so Mrs. Anderson told Mrs.
Knapp, “because as things are now he’s let to do just what he pleases
and goodness knows what _that_ is!” Stephen had even been a stimulating
element in his father’s days when they first began to emerge from the
endless nightmare of pain and to become, once more, successive stages
in a human life.
Lester never spoke to any one about those first weeks after his fall
and thought of them himself as little as possible. The mere casual
mention of them afterwards brought the cold sweat out on him. No circle
in any hell would have contained more concentrated suffering than was
crowded into his every conscious moment--horrible, brute, physical
suffering, tearing at every nerve, suffering that degraded him, that
left him no humanity. When this was deadened for an instant by opiates
or exhaustion, there were terrible hallucinations--he was again on the
steep, icy roof, turning, death in his heart, to throw himself down
into cold nothingness--he was falling, falling, endlessly falling ...
and now he knew what intolerable anguish awaited him at the end of
his fall. He screamed out dreadfully at such times and tore at the
bedclothes as if to save himself. These moments of frenzy always ended
by his coming to himself with a great start and finding himself burning
and raging once more in unendurable physical pain.
Later, once in a while, there were fleeting instants almost of lucidity
during which, as he was flung through space by the whirlwind of that
inhuman, impersonal agony, he yet caught glimpses as it were of his own
personality lying there prone, waiting for him to come back to enter
it. This half-consciousness always brought the same thought to him....
“Poor weak wretch! He had not even force enough to kill himself!” He
thought it as of some one else, half-pityingly, half-contemptuously.
Then came periods of freedom from pain, incredulous, breathless bliss,
poisoned by his horrified apprehension of being touched; for the
slightest touch, even of the bed, plunged him again into the abyss.
During one of those respites when he lay, scarcely daring to breathe,
there came to him the first personal sensation since his fall. He
chanced to lie with his head turned towards the room, and for a
moment he saw it, as it was, a part of human life, and not merely the
background for this endless dying of his! On the floor sat Stephen,
very dirty and uncared for, playing with his Teddy-bear! The expression
on his face reminded Lester of something ... something, it seemed,
which had begun, something with which he had wanted to go on. But just
then Eva had brushed his pillow, and this glimpse back into the human
life out of which he had hurled himself vanished in the molten lava of
his physical pain.
* * * * *
Little by little, some unsuspected and implacable vitality hidden in
his body slowly pushed him, groaning and unwilling, out of the living
death which he still so passionately desired to make dead death. The
weeks passed, he suffered less. He lay passive and empty, staring up
at the ceiling, counting and cataloguing all the small blemishes and
stains in the plaster. A little strength seeped slowly back into his
body. One day he found that he could read for a few moments at a time.
He became aware of the life that went on about him. Chiefly it was
Stephen’s life, because Stephen was generally in the foreground of the
room.
Lester began to look down at the child as he played about the floor,
watched languidly the expression on his round, pugnacious face, almost
always dirty now, but, so it seemed to his father, not always so darkly
grim as he remembered it. But then, he thought again (one of the slow
thoughts which occasionally pushed their way up to his attention), he
had never seen Stephen except in active conflict with authority.
“I never saw one of my children just living before,” he meditated. As
he lay in bed, a book was usually open before him, but he looked over
it at the far more interesting spectacle of his undiscovered little boy.
* * * * *
His first voluntary move back towards life was on the day when he had
his talk with Stephen about his Teddy.
It began by his remembering suddenly what it had been which had
begun, and with which he had wanted to go on. The little memory,
presenting itself so abruptly out of his subconsciousness, startled
him into saying impulsively, “Oh, Stephen, come here a minute. What
was it you started to tell me that day--up in the bathroom, when I was
shaving--about your Teddy?”
The moment he had spoken he realized how foolish the question was. The
day seemed like yesterday to him because there had been only blackness
for him ever since. But it was two months ago; and two months for a
little boy--how could he have thought that Stephen would remember?
But, as a matter of fact, Stephen looked as though he remembered very
well indeed. He had started at the word “Teddy,” had turned instantly
suspicious eyes on his father and had made a clutch at the stuffed bear
over whose head he now stared at the man in bed, silently, his mouth
a hard line, with the dogged expression of resistance which was so
familiar.
Lester’s enforced observation of Stephen made this pantomime
intelligible to him, in part. Stephen was afraid something would happen
to Teddy. Why in the world should he be afraid?
On this question he put his attention, watching Stephen closely as he
said laughingly, “What’s the matter with you, old man? Do you think I
want to take Teddy away to play with him myself?”
Stephen’s face relaxed a very little at this. His eyes searched his
father’s, deeply and gravely, with an intense wary seriousness, as a
white traveler, lost in a jungle amongst savages, might search the eyes
of one of the tribe who offered a friendly aspect. Could he be trusted?
Or was this just another of their cannibalistic wiles?
“I like your Teddy fine,” continued Lester, conversationally. “I always
liked the way he snuggles up to you in your bed. I used to wake up and
look over at him sometimes. But I’m afraid I’m too old to play with
him, myself.”
At the mention of Teddy’s sleeping beside him, Stephen looked away
and down into the bright, opaque eyes of his fetish, and as he did
this, his father felt an acute shock of surprise. The child’s face was
passionately tender and loving. He looked as his own mother had looked
when she held her first baby in her arms. Lester was so astonished that
he was obliged to wait a moment before he could command his voice to
casual negligence.
“So you don’t remember what it was you were going to ask me about
Teddy?” he said, presently. “Well, it _was_ quite a while ago.”
So far he had not induced Stephen to say a single word. That was always
Stephen’s way of resisting talk, and persuasion, and attempts to reach
him.
Lester held his book up again and waited.
He waited a long time.
But waiting was one thing which circumstances made easy for him. There
was little else a paralyzed man could do. Stephen sat motionless, his
face a blank, staring into space. His father felt the uncertainty and
questioning going on under that self-protective front of stolidity.
Presently, a long time afterwards, the little boy got up and came
slowly towards his father’s bed. “Yes, I ’member what it was,” he said
in a low tone, keeping his eyes fixed intently on the expression of his
father’s face. “I wanted to ask you ... to ask you not to let Mother
...” his voice dropped to a solemn, quavering whisper, “... not to let
Mother _wash_ Teddy.”
Lester survived the entire and grotesque unexpectedness of this with no
more sign of his amazement than a flicker of his eyelids. He considered
a dozen different ways of advancing into the undiscovered country and
rejected them all in favor of the neutral question, “Was Mother going
to wash Teddy?”
At this it all came out in a storm, the visit to the lady, the
horrible, misshapen, shrunken Teddy there, Mother’s stealing Teddy away
at night, the devouring dread in Stephen’s mind, a dread so great that
it now overcame even his fierce pride and his anger, as he sobbed out
at the last, “Don’t let him be washed, Father! _Don’t_ let him!” He
raised his streaming eyes agonizingly towards his father, his whole
face quivering.
Lester was so horrified that for a moment he could not speak. He was
horrified to see Stephen reduced so low. He was more horrified at the
position in which he found himself, absolute arbiter over another human
being, a being who had no recourse, no appeal from his decisions. It
was indecent, he thought; it sinned against human dignity, both his
and the child’s.... “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a
master!” he cried to himself, shamed to the core by Stephen’s helpless
dependence on his whim, a dependence of which Stephen was so tragically
aware, all his stern bulwarks of anger and resistance broken down by
the extremity of his fear--fear for what he loved! Fear for himself
would never so have transfigured Stephen, never!
Lester understood this. More, he felt it himself, felt himself ready
to fight for Stephen as Stephen had been ready to fight for Teddy; he,
Lester, who had never felt that he had the right to fight for anything
of his own.
His gaze on the child had passion in it as he said firmly, weightily,
“I’ll never have anything done to your Teddy that you don’t want,
Stephen. He’s yours. You’ve got the right to have the say-so about
him.”
Stephen looked at his father blindly, as if he did not understand these
strange words. But though they were unfamiliar, though he could not
understand them, they gave him hope. “You won’t have him washed?” he
asked, clinging to the one point he understood.
“Not washed or anything else if you don’t want it,” said his father,
reiterating his own point. It seemed to him he could not live another
day if he did not succeed in making Stephen understand that.
To his astonishment, again to his shame, Stephen burst out with a
phrase which had never before passed his lips except under protest,
“Oh, thank you, Father! Oh, _thank_ you!” he cried loudly, his lips
trembling.
Lester found the child’s relief shocking. It made him sick to think
what a dread must have preceded it, what a fathomless blackness of
uncertainty in Stephen’s life it must represent. He spoke roughly,
almost as he would to another man, “You don’t have to thank me,
Stevie,” he said. “Great Scott, old boy, it’s none of _my_ business,
what you do with your own Teddy, is it?”
Even as he spoke--like a lurid side-glimpse--was it possible that there
were people who would _enjoy_ thanks extorted on those infamous terms?
Were they ever set over children?
His insistence seemed to have penetrated a little way through
Stephen’s life-long experience of the nature of things. The little boy
stood looking at him, his face serious and receptive, as if a new idea
were dawning on him. It was so new that he did not seem to know what
to do with it, and in a moment turned away and sat down on the floor
again. He reached for his Teddy and sat clasping him in his lap.
The two were silent, father and son.
Lester said to himself, shivering, “What a ghastly thing to have
sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human
beings! Absolute, unquestioned power! Nobody can stand that. It’s cold
poison. How many wardens of prisons are driven sadistically mad with
it!”
He recoiled from it with terror. “You have to be a superman to be equal
to it.”
In the silent room he heard it echoing solemnly, “That’s what it is to
be a parent.”
He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it. He
looked over the edge of his bed at Stephen and abased himself silently.
The child sat motionless, clasping Teddy, his face bent and turned away
so that Lester could not see its expression. His attitude was that of
some one thinking deeply.
Well, reflected Lester, there was certainly good reason for the taking
of thought by everybody concerned! He let his head fall back on the
pillow and, staring up, began for the first time since his fall to
think connectedly about something other than his own wretchedness. For
the first time the ugly blemishes on the ceiling were not like blotches
in his own brain. Presently he forgot them altogether.
That sudden contact with Stephen’s utterly unsuspected suffering had
been like dropping his fingers unawares upon red-hot iron. His reaction
had been the mere reflex of the intolerable pain it gave him. Now, in
the long quiet of his sick-room, he set himself to try to understand
what it meant.
So that had been at the bottom of Stephen’s fierceness and badness in
those last days of the old life. So it had been black despair which had
filled the child’s heart and not merely an inexplicable desire to make
trouble for his mother. For Heaven’s sakes, how far off the track they
had been! But however could they have guessed at the real cause of the
trouble? What possessed the child to keep such a perverse silence? Why
hadn’t he told somebody? How could they know if he never said a word.
He thought again of the scene in the bathroom that last morning and saw
again Stephen’s wistful face looking up into his. Stephen had _tried_
to tell him. And those sacred itemized accounts of Willing’s Emporium
had stopped his mouth.
But Evangeline was always on hand. Why hadn’t Stephen....
Without a word, with a complete perception that filled all his
consciousness, Lester knew why Stephen had never tried to tell his
mother.
And yet--his sense of fairness made him take up the cudgels for Eva--it
hadn’t been such an unreasonable idea of hers. Teddy was certainly as
dirty as it was possible for anything to be. You have to keep children
clean whether they like it or not. Suppose Teddy had been played with
by a child who had scarlet fever? They’d have to have him cleaned,
wouldn’t they? He’d gone too far, yielded to a melodramatic impulse
when he’d promised Stephen so solemnly they’d never have anything done
to Teddy that he didn’t like.
But as a matter of fact Teddy never had been near scarlet fever or
anything else contagious. And even if he had, weren’t there ways of
dry-cleaning and disinfecting that would leave the personality of the
toy intact? You didn’t have to soak it in a tub of soapy water. What
was the matter with wrapping it in an old cloth and baking it in the
oven, as you do with bandages you want to sterilize. If anybody had had
the slightest idea that Stephen felt as he did.... _But nobody had!_
And that was the point.
He saw it now. Nothing turned on the question of whether Teddy should
or should not be cleaned. That purely material matter could have been
arranged by a little practical ingenuity if it had occurred to anybody
that there was anything to arrange. The question really was why had it
not occurred to anybody?
What was terrifying to Lester was the thought that the conception of
trying to understand Stephen’s point of view had been as remote from
their minds as the existence of the fourth dimension.
And even now that the violent shock of this little scene with Stephen
had put the conception into his brain, how under the sun could you ever
find out what was felt by a child who shut himself up so blackly in his
stronghold of repellent silence?
Why _had_ Stephen so shut himself up?
The question was as new to Lester as a question of the cause of the law
of gravity. It had never occurred to him that perhaps Stephen had not
been born that way.
But even a sullen stronghold of badness was better than that dreadful
breakdown of human dignity. Lester felt he could never endure it
again to have Stephen look into his face with that slavish, helpless
searching of his eyes. No self-respecting human being could bear that
look from another.
Could there be human beings--women--mothers--who fattened on it, fought
to keep that slave’s look in the eyes of children? He turned from this
thought with a start.
Well, what good did all this thinking do him? Or Stephen? What could he
do now, at once, to escape out of this prison and take Stephen with him?
With a heat of anger, he told himself that at least he could start in
to make Stephen feel, hour by hour, in every contact with him, that
he, even a little boy, had some standing in the world, inviolable by
grown-ups, yes, _sacred even to parents_.
He breathed hard and flung out his arm.
For the first time he desired to get well, to live again.