Oh, God--and I must send him and the others, Laura's children, away,
away among strangers!
There seems to be no other way out.
I have been turning idly the pages of books in a way bookish people
have, seeking for inspiration, for some word of guidance. Brunetto
tells me on the word of St. Bernard, that tarnished gold is better than
shining copper; and that the wild ass brays once every hour and thus
makes an excellent timepiece for his savage neighborhood. But nothing
of this casts a glimmer of light upon my dilemma. Rabelais keeps
shouting from his yellow page, "_fais ce que vondras_." But what is it
that I desire to do?
Ah, I know what I desire to do! There is counsel in the old books,
after all.
I will have in the girl Alicia, and see what I can glean. She was
brought up without kith or kin of her own. And though an institution is
more of a machine than a good school, still those who had the rearing of
her were total strangers. There might be some gleam of suggestion in
that.
Alicia has been here.
"Come, child, sit down," I invited her, observing that she still
displayed a tendency to stand in awe of me. "I wish to ask you some
questions." But her tense little face was still haunted by a vague
fear. "It's about the children," I added, and she seemed somewhat more
at ease on the edge of her chair.
"How long were you at that Home--in Sullivan County?" I began, grinning
by way of ingratiating myself.
"Ever since I can remember, sir," she answered.
"Were they kind to you?"
"Oh, yes, sir."
"How kind?--What did they do for you?"
"They gave us food and--and medicine when we were sick. And on
Christmas we had a tree. Only nobody ever came to see me. I always
looked out of the window for somebody to come. But no one came."
"Yes, yes, I know," I pursued. "But did they show you
affection--sympathy?"
Alicia was silent.
"Don't you know what I mean?" I pressed.
"Yes, sir, I think I do."
"Then why don't you answer?"
"I--it's hard to explain," and she laughed a frightened little laugh.
"There is no one there to--to do those things you said. There were five
hundred of us there. If you're not sick you just go on like all the
rest. If you're sick they give you oil or something. Sometimes a child
pretends it's sick just so the matron or a nurse might take it in her
lap and make a fuss over it. And some are naughty--for the same reason."
I nodded gravely, but my heart was gripped by a poignant aching. I saw
Laura's children compelled to feign illness or delinquency in order to
receive a touch of individual attention which, I suppose, every child
spontaneously craves.
"Were you glad to leave there?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, sir!" she answered eagerly.
"Tragic, my poor sister dying," I said, half to myself. "She was an
ideal mother. Now--I hardly know what to do."
Alicia leaped from her chair and came yearning toward me. Her little
face tremulous and working, she cried out:
"Oh, Mr. Byrd, you won't send us away--to a Home--will you?"
"No, no!--Not to a Home," I replied defensively. "But schools--there
must be good places for children--"
"They'd feel terribly," she stifled a sob. "They love it so here--Even
here Laura cries for her mother every night--and little Jimmie--"
"Never mind," I took her up hastily, "nothing is decided yet, my dear
child. I'm glad I spoke to you. You see," I ran on, "there's so little
room here, and I--I know nothing about children--"
"But there's nothing to do," she protested, sobbing.
"Nothing?" I smiled vaguely in an effort to cheer her and laid my hand
upon her thin shoulder.
"Nothing except just love them," she said. "I'll take care of them--all
I can." How simple!
"Well, well, we shall see," I aimed to be reassuring.
"Do I have to go--back to the Home?" she asked brokenly, with an arm
hiding her face.
"Oh, no, certainly not," I answered hastily. "We'll find a better way
than that. Now," I added, "be a good girl, dry your eyes; run along and
don't say a word about--our conversation."
"No, sir," she murmured obediently. And still gulping, she left me.
It is obvious that the girl Alicia has been of decisive help to me!
Yet it is equally obvious that I cannot keep the children here.
Dibdin has been here and he has left me in a state of distraction, worse
if possible than that I had been in before.
The good fellow endeavored to be vastly and solidly cheering.
"All nonsense," he growled, "about children being hostages to fortune.
They are the only contribution a human being really makes to the world.
All the digging that burrowing animals such as I do in the four corners
of the earth, all the fuss that fellows in laboratories make over test
tubes and microscopes and metals and germs, all the stuff that people
sat up nights to put into those damned books of yours--all of that is
done for them--for the next generation and the generations they will
beget."
"Eloquent!" I flippantly mocked him; "but how is it you've elected to be
what you call a tramp?"
"Elected?" he grunted disdainfully. "I didn't elect. It elected me.
Besides," he continued, lowering his voice, "I would have given it up
like a shot--given up anything, changed my life inside out, done
anything if I had been able to marry the one woman I wanted. I'm one of
those strange beasts for whom there is only one woman in the world--no
other:
'If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I'd not have sold her for it,'
he quoted, and added with a hoarse laugh, "you ought to know your
Othello."
"Then why on earth didn't you marry her?" I could not help marveling.
"Too late," he murmured, with a whimsical smiling twitch to his head,
that is very engaging. "She was already married to somebody else when I
first saw her. Too late," he repeated with ruminative sadness. "But
don't let us talk about that," he broke off abruptly. "Have the kids
begun to go to school yet?"
"What is the use?" I answered him gloomily. "I haven't formed any plans
for them yet."
"Plans? What do you mean?" he inquired, puzzled. Like the girl Alicia
he seemed to think there was nothing to do that required any thought.
And I wondered if the simple souls in life are only the improvident or
the very young.
"Do you see this place," I demanded irritably, "as a home for a family
with three children, to say nothing of a fourth in attendance upon
them?"
"Have to have a larger place--farther out--of course," he answered
glibly, puffing at his pipe.
"And am I a person to take care of and bring up three or four children?"
"Why the devil not?" he demanded.
"Why the devil yes?" I retorted fiercely. "What do I know about
children? What experience have I had? Do you see me as a wet nurse to
a lot of babies?"
"Wet nurse be hanged," he responded gruffly. "Here's your first chance
to be of use in the world and--you talk like that--"
"Easy to talk," ruefully from me.
"Well, what the blazes do you mean to do?"
"That is what I am trying to work out," I fell upon him bitterly.
"D'you think it's easy? I've got to work out some plan--find homes for
them--the right kind of schools--with a home environment. Oh, it's
easy, I assure you! Besides," I ran on savagely, "you seem to forget
I'm to be married in two weeks."
"I did forget that," growled Dibdin, with a semblance of contrition.
"What does the lady say?"
"Well, what should she say? Could you expect a girl on her wedding day
to become the harassed mother of three children not her own?"
Dibdin jumped from his chair, ground an oath between his teeth and his
forehead was a file of wrinkles.
"Listen, Randolph," he began in another voice. "It's damnably tough,
and I know it. But you can't, you simply can't disperse your sister's
children to God knows where. You are the only relation they've got.
Put yourself in their place. It would be damnation. If you need--more
money," he stammered in confusion, "why, dash it--I'm an old enough
friend of yours to--to advance you some, eh?"
And he laughed raucously, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.
"You are a good sort--of tramp," I grinned sheepishly, seizing his hand.
"But it isn't that. I don't know as yet what Laura left them. But it
isn't that. I feel like--like hell about it--but what can I do--what
with Gertrude and--and everything else. Oh, it's the easiest thing in
the world, I assure you.--But I wish to God I could see my way to
keeping them!"
"Easy or not," said Dibdin huskily, "if you send those children away,
I'll break every bone in your body."
I laughed almost hysterically. I know Dibdin. When he is most moved
and most sympathetic, he is at his most violent.
"Don't go," I clung to him as with sunken head he shouldered toward the
door.
"Must," he growled. "I've got to think, too."
"I wish you had married, Dibdin, and had children of your own," I all
but whispered with my hand on his shoulder. "And I'm sorry for the
woman. You're a good devil, Dibdin. I wish I knew who the woman is."
"I'll tell you," murmured Dibdin, with a queer throatiness of tone.
"I'll tell you who she was. It can't matter now. She was--No, by God!
I can't--not now!"
And he shuffled out, leaving me gazing after him speechless and
open-mouthed.
*CHAPTER V*
The girl Alicia keeps watching me like some bewildered household animal
dimly aware of the breaking up of its household. Always I am conscious
of her great eyes upon me. To her, I presume, I am a Setebos who can
inflict pain and torture, like Death himself; who can disrupt her little
world of clinging affections by the merest movement of my hand.
I am in that process of turning things over to which Gertrude has
indulgently consigned me and I am if anything farther away from a
decision than I was twenty-four hours ago. I finger my books and open
at random a volume of Florio's "Montaigne" in an edition that is as
fragrant of good ink and paper as the Tudor English is rich, and the
first line that falls under my eye is that of Seneca, "_He that lives
not somewhat to others, liveth little to himself._" Does this mean that
my long absorption in my own small concerns has made me incapable of
decision in anything of importance--that I live too little?
I stole into the bedroom last night where the children were sleeping,
while Griselda was making up my couch in the study.
With their flushed faces they lay there almost visibly glowing before my
eyes with that perfect faith that children seem to have in the grown-up
world about them. Heine somewhere speaks of angels guarding the child's
couch, and it is not sheer poetry. Their faith and trust, still
illusioned, brevets, I suppose, to angelic rank every one about them.
Randolph, with a slight frown and moving lips, dreaming seemingly of
something active and strenuous, as befits his ripe age of eleven; Laura,
serene with her mother's countenance and straying curls, and little
Jimmie with his tumbled hair like that of some child by Praxiteles or
Phidias--they slept--secure in their trust, despite their recent
shattering bereavement.
No one can really know anything about children until he has seen them
sleeping. Like fortune, they are always trustfully in the lap of the
gods. Never before had they touched me as they seemed to touch the
hidden springs in me at that moment. It was so, I pictured, that Laura
was wont to steal into their dormitory of nights before going to bed;
and that vision, no doubt, was a potent help to her courage to continue
uncomplainingly and brave in the face of sorrow, humiliation and her
self-effacing loneliness. Would I had been able to picture such things
more clearly while she was living.
Griselda surprised me emerging from the room and she smiled, the
austere, inscrutable Griselda, with such a smile as Michelangelo might
have depicted on the face of one of his Sistine Sybils, those weird
sisters who seem to know all things because they have suffered all.
I muttered a casual good night to Griselda and brushed by her
nonchalantly, as a boy whistles with apparent carelessness when he feels
most awkward or uneasy.
I slept upon my problem in the way old wives advise you, but to-day I am
no nearer the solution.
I keep trying coolly to imagine them in appropriately chosen schools and
homes, and yet some tugging at my heart strings, some strange alchemy of
the brain, wipes out those images before they are formed and replaces
them with the vision I saw last night in my invaded bedroom.
Who is to help me make a choice? And before I have put down these words
I realize that no one will help me. My dining room is at this moment
vocal with their laughter--but something within me is more loudly
clamorous yet against the treachery I am planning them. Treachery! That
is nonsense, of course. I have a perfect right to decide what I choose.
But already that word keeps recurring in my brain whenever I envisage
their dispersal.
My decision is taken.
I can hardly say who made it. In reality, I suppose it has made itself.
But however it came about, there--heaven help me!--it is.
Gertrude telephoned that she was coming this afternoon. I offered to go
to her, but she would drop in, she graciously insisted, now that I was a
family man, after lunching with a friend at the Brevoort.
Gertrude's entry is always breezy and cheerful.
"Hello, Ranny," she murmured lightly, sinking on the sofa and holding
out both hands. I took them, kissed them and held them in mine. I was
well aware that for her these were days of tension.
"That's nice," said Gertrude with a laugh. "But what I want is a
cigarette, a match and an ash tray."
"Of course, how stupid of me!" I mumbled and supplied her with her
wants.
"Those books, Ranny," she puffed, scanning my laden shelves, "they
terrify me afresh every time I see them--when I think you've read them
all."
"They needn't alarm you," I deprecated quite sincerely. "The more I read
them the less I seem to know--as you will agree." And I sat facing her.
"No room for the brains to turn round in?" she laughed. "Oh, come, dear
boy, it's not so bad as that. I really think," she added more soberly,
"you have a very wise old bean on your shoulders."
"What sudden and startling discovery leads you to words so rash?" I
inquired.
"I've made the discovery all right," she nodded with emphasis. "Anybody
who can handle a situation like this the way you're handling it is no
piker."
Gertrude often affects the slang of the day as a humorous protest
against what she terms my purism. But the truth is, I like the
vernacular myself.
"Impart it," I urged her, whereat she smiled.
"Regular street Arab you are," she declared with arch satire, "but what
I mean is this. I am always one for quick action--and I don't know much
about children. I urged you to send them away at once. But I realize
now that so soon after poor Laura's passing away that would have been
cruel--and it wouldn't have looked well, besides. Now I see it more
your way, Ranny."
"You do!" I could not help exclaiming.
"Yes," she continued firmly. "I see your way is best. I see that we can
be quietly married and have our little trip just the same. Then, when
we come back, in the natural course of events and rearrangement, we can
look up places for them and settle it all right as rain. That's what
you had in your clever old head, Ranny, I'm quite sure--and I admire you
for it."
"I see," I gasped, wondering what words or acts of mine had conveyed
this elaborate strategy to Gertrude. For the space of a minute perhaps I
was sunk in thought. The vision of the children asleep in their innocent
faith in me suddenly arose vividly and smote me to the heart. The
nestling image of Jimmie--the girl Alicia with her great, wistful eyes
telling me that there was nothing to do "but just love them"--all this
was throbbing in my brain with every heartbeat. And had I in reality
schemed out the intricate design with which Gertrude now credited me?
By no cudgeling of my poor brains could I recall any such devising. It
was impossible. It was new to me. Then something in me that is either
better or worse than myself took the reins of the occasion and, like the
auditor of another's speech, I heard myself saying with solemn firmness:
"No, Gertrude--you must have mistaken me. I had no such plan. We shall
be married, of course, but our marriage can make no difference. I
cannot turn these children, Laura's children, out of the house. Not
now, at all events, not until they're older. They have no one in the
world but me and I mean to keep them."
"Mean to keep them! You mean that?" she gasped. And it pained me to be
the cause of a deep flush on Gertrude's face and neck.
"I've never meant anything more certainly in my life," I told her.
"Then we can't marry," said Gertrude in a low tone, still scrutinizing
me as though she were wondering whether she had ever met me before.
"Why not?" I cried. "Why should they make so great a difference? In
any case, didn't you have an idea that we would each keep our separate
flats?"
"Don't talk rot," flared Gertrude in an exasperation which I still
deplore, for the steely glitter in her eyes was not pleasant. "I am not
going to make myself ridiculous by marrying a houseful of kids for whom
my husband is the nurse. Do you really stick to that, Ranny?"
"Yes, Gertrude," I nodded. "I must."
Gertrude gazed at me searchingly for a moment, then to my amazement she
laughed in my face, a trifle louder than her wont. Laughter was at that
instant far from my thoughts.
"Oh, well," she resumed her earlier lightness of tone, "then we'll
simply postpone our marriage a while. You'll get tired of this maternity
game, Ranny, depend on it. We've postponed it three years--a few months
more can't make much difference, can it?"
Then she approached me and took my hand.
"Little boy's tender conscience must be given its fling, mustn't it?"
she began mockingly, in imitation of a child's speech, in which she does
not excel. "Never mind, give its little whim its head."
A remarkable woman, is Gertrude.
"Perhaps it's only proper," she concluded more seriously, "that we
should postpone it, since you are just now in mourning."
"Nonsense," I answered her. "Laura would certainly never have desired
any such thing. Our marriage will not be a thing of pomp and orange
blossoms. We could just as well get married now as any other time."
"No, Ranny," she replied decisively. "Now it's my turn to be firm. I
think I am right."
I should honestly have preferred, in spite of the conditions that
surrounded me, to have married Gertrude then and there without further
delay. We are neither of us young things full of ineffable inanities on
the subject of romance and I experienced a sober desire for all possible
finality in the midst of the jumbled and painful confusion into which
Fate had seen fit to cast me. But Gertrude was obdurate.
Just as she was about to go there was a gentle tap on the door.
Gertrude, whose hand was already on the knob, opened it. It was the
girl Alicia.
With a downward quizzical glance Gertrude fixed the girl so that for a
moment she stood fascinated, unable to detach her eyes from Gertrude's.
She turned them in my direction finally and they were troubled and
imploring.
"Please, Mr. Byrd," she said, "the children want to go for a walk now,
instead of lessons. The sun is out. Can I take them?"
"Yes, yes," I said hastily. "By all means."
"Wait a minute," commanded Gertrude, smiling mechanically. "What is
your name, child?"
"Alicia, ma'am."
"Alicia what?"
"Alicia Palmer," and the child's voice was tremulous with trepidation.
"And do you give the children lessons?"
"Yes, ma'am," she answered, lowering her eyes as though a crime had
found her out.
"And how old are you?" asked Gertrude not unkindly.
"Going on fourteen, ma'am." The girl looked up at once, responsive to
the gentler tone. But wishing to relieve her of the interrogatory, I
lamely put in a word urging that she take the children out at once
before the sun had disappeared. The girl glided away like a shadow.
"Why, she's quite attractive--the little thing," murmured Gertrude.
"You'll have quite a menagerie." Then, laughingly turning to me, she
cried, "Oh, Ranny, Efficiency ought to be your middle name."
"Perhaps I'd better adopt it?" I murmured.
"Do," said Gertrude. "Well, so long, old boy, I must be running." And
in her haste she even forgot to let me kiss her good-by.
So after all the alderman at the City Hall was not to sing his song over
us yet. For no reason that I can help I seem to be in disgrace with
fortune, Gertrude and aldermen's eyes.
A nameless melancholy, a kind of humorous sadness, has taken possession
of me.
It is not my lost tranquillity that I regret now, nor does Gertrude's
taunt of inefficiency disturb me. But at bottom I have always realized
the type of man that I am not. The type of man who stands four-square
in face of all the shocks and emergencies of life, who can meet all
changes and events with equal courage, who can take any situation
smilingly by the hand as though he were its indisputable and indulgent
master, that is the sort of man I should wish to be. But all my own
defects clamorously accuse me of embodying the exact opposite of such an
ideal. I have shrunk away from life until it fits me like a coarse
ill-cut garment rather than a glove. It takes a vast deal of living to
be alive, and the dread obsession haunts me that I have become as one
mummified in this dim catacomb of books.
I have been to Carmichael's office at his request and the blow that he
has dealt me is heavier than any since Laura's death.
Laura, it appears, in her desperate desire to increase her income, had
been speculating in the lying promises of oil and mining stocks which
offered fabulous returns. One after another her substantial railway and
steel bonds went to her brokers for "margins" and some were sold for
current livelihood. No wonder she was compelled to resort to an
orphanage for a "mother's helper", who is herself a child. The result
is that something less than two thousand dollars of Laura's capital
remains for her three motherless and fatherless children, the oldest of
whom is eleven.
I have no doubt but that her tortured and silent anxiety on this score
hastened my poor sister's death. Carmichael himself, her lawyer and
adviser, was ignorant of her acts until it was too late. The dread
goddess Fortune plainly does nothing by halves. If it were not for my
grief over the suffering that poor Laura must have endured so
uncomplainingly, I should be moved to uproarious laughter. Job, I feel
sure, must have had his moments when the comforters were not there, when
he laughed until the tears bedewed his dejected old beard.
And I, incompetent recluse that I am, have undertaken the care and the
rearing of three children! I should at least admire the completeness
with which Fate plays her hands or produces her situations, were I not
at this moment utterly and stonily impervious to all thought and all
emotion--unless an inert and deadly sense of disaster be an emotion.
No, that was not enough. What a glutton is that same Fate! Dibdin has
been here to say a hasty good-by.
He has heard of a ship that sails from San Francisco in a week and that
will touch at his particular group of islands, so that he will not have
to trans-ship at Papeete, as had been his earlier plan. I have never
before in my life felt so utterly alone!
He laughed a curious laugh, that seemed foolish yet exulting, when I
told him I had decided to keep the children. His eyes glittered and he
turned away for an instant to hide them.
"Look here," he muttered hoarsely, with the assumption of his most
matter-of-fact manner, "let me advance you a thousand dollars or so--in
case you should have a use for it. Be an investment for me," he added,
with a short laugh. "What use is it to me in the Marquesas or Solomon
Islands, eh?"
"No, thanks, Dibdin," I told him. "I can mention one or two good banks
on the Island of Manhattan--if you don't know of any."
"Don't be an ass, Randolph," he came back with severity. "I'll write
you a cheque."
"No, you won't," I replied with equal obstinacy. "I won't take it. If
I need it, I'll cable you."
"Devil you will," he growled irritably. "Cables don't run where I'll
be. You're an ass, after all."
"Thanks. Would you like to see the children before you go?"
"H'm, yes," he answered meditatively. "No, by gosh!" he added in sudden
confusion. "No, I can't. Got to run. Slews of things still to do."
Inscrutable devil, Dibdin! Who would have supposed him such a bundle of
oddly-assorted emotions?
"By the way," he said abruptly, as he was starting, "Carmichael--heard
from him--everything all right?"
Inwardly I felt a tug as though some one had pulled violently upon some
cord inside me.
"Oh, yes," I lied as urbanely as I was able, "everything quite all
right. You'll keep me in addresses, I suppose?"
He scrutinized me for an instant so searchingly that with a tremor I
feared he would see through me.
"Oh, yes, of course," he finally answered. "The Hotel de France,
Papeete, is a good address until you hear of another. They know me
there."
"Good," I tapped him on the back. "Write a fellow a word whenever you
can. Pretty lonely here after you're gone."
"Lonely!" he repeated. "And you--oh, by George, and I'd almost
forgotten--and you to be married in a few days--lonely!"
"That's--off," I faltered--"for the present."
"Off!" he exclaimed aghast. "Did she break it off?"
"Put it off," I corrected.
"When you told her of keeping the kids?"