The boys brought up in a mighty crash against a wall, causing the fall of a picture. They rose, dusting themselves off, roaring threats at each other. Reginald was more dishevelled than Guy, for his dignity had suffered much and his coat much more, and though he laughed as did Guy, there was a sullenness about his expression when he stopped laughing.
The three young people were in Guy’s and Reginald’s bedroom, a large old-fashioned room with sturdy walnut furniture and a large hooded fireplace in which a hearty fire burned. Outside, the gray and snowy December day loomed in shadows through a slow blizzard.
The two boys were exceedingly fond of their sister, whose marriage had secretly shocked them. Guy had a light regard for his brother Godfrey; Reginald had contempt for him. Guy disliked young Joey; Reginald ignored him. Both were continually surprised and offended at Gertrude’s love for Godfrey. In this was mixed a little jealousy.
It was an old habit of Gertrude’s to spend hours with the boys in their room, listening to Guy’s eager, malicious and amusing stories, sympathizing with the uneasy gloominess of Reginald. Sometimes they would have their tea there together, sitting before the fire, Guy dropping crumbs all over the sturdy but shabby carpet.
Each year the sprightly Guy had a new and passionately enthusiastic ambition. This year he had decided he must go West. The Eastern world, he remarked airily, had become effete and enervating. It was all cravats and decorum, silk dresses and sentimental songs, carriages rolling sedately down smooth streets and old gentlemen strolling with gold-headed canes. The East was dull and dead; the life had gone out of it. Safety had eroded it and it was acrid as dust.
Tea had been brought in, and Guy gestured lavishly with a piece of cake. He was going West, where one could see the simple aborigine, see the wide stars at night, ride a horse over endless prairies, feast one’s eye on color in the Painted Desert, rub shoulders with the raw shoulders of Nature, know life again, exuberant, and strong-flavored, and where—“—Men are men,” cut in Reginald with a short laugh that had in it something suggestive of a snort.
“Papa wouldn’t consent to that, Guy,” said Gertrude, after the short tussle resulting from Reginald’s words had come to an end.
“Oh, I’ll manage him,” said Guy loftily. “I’ll just tell him I’m tired of dull life in the East, among a lot of cut-throat, blood-sucking industrialists—”
“Those are just words.” Gertrude shrugged and sipped her tea with more relish than she had had for weeks. “Just name me one of those cut-throat, blood-sucking industrialists—”
“The old man,” replied Guy blandly. “Didn’t you know he was nothing but an old pirate? Oh, he’s no worse than the rest of them, but he’s pretty bad.”
Reginald was silent. Gertrude, uncertain whether to be amused or annoyed, looked at him tentatively. He had a long dark face, which later on would become cadaverous; his long upper lip fell from his short nose to a mouth that was a straight and uncompromising line. His eyes, dark and slow and inclined to sullenness, moved under heavy and hooded lids. He had thick straight black hair sleekly combed and longish. Ernest had once said his second son was as lively as a corpse, and this was no very great exaggeration. Reginald disliked loudness and sprightliness in clothing, and in pleasure or study, at church, school, the homes of friends, summer or winter, he wore sober black broadcloth and simply tied black cravats. His body was long and thin, somewhat slat-like, his boots always well polished on long thin feet. His air was invariably decorous and dignified, cold and reserved, and, at times, censorious.
Guy was startlingly different from his favorite brother. His coloring was Godfrey’s, but he had none of Godfrey’s classic beauty of feature and austerity of expression. “Impish” best described his blond flushed face with its deeply indented dimples on each side of a smiling mouth. Even in rare repose, or sleep, or anger, the dimples cleft his cheeks deeply. His lively blue eyes lost much comeliness because they were rather slit-like, tilting upward at the outer corners, from which sprayed deep laughter-wrinkles. This gave him a slightly Oriental look, and added its share to a somewhat cunning expression. His fair hair curled luxuriously all over his head in shining waves and ripples, an asset of which he was frankly vain. His good looks, added to a disposition malicious and gay, boisterous and fun-loving, generous and apparently frank, endearingly untrustworthy, made him legions of friends. Incorrigible and time-wasting at school, blithely managing to get through his classes without learning anything, he was yet far more intelligent than Reginald, who was the joy of his professors.
Before Gertrude could protest at Guy’s light sketch of their father, Joey came in. (“He always smells food,” Guy would say disgustedly.) However, upon seeing his young brother, Guy became quite animated and friendly.
“Just in time for the last of the cake!” he exclaimed. “God, that kid gets bigger and heavier every time you see him! I bet he weighs as much as I do!” Guy, though he might have wished for a few more inches in height, was more than a little proud of his slight gracefulness and agile dancer’s body.
Joey surveyed the remainder of the cake with a sullen and cunning look. But without commenting, he picked up a slice and munched it. Guy, affectionately smiling, thought his young brother exceptionally repulsive. He knew that Reginald at times was deeply antagonistic to the ten-year-old boy, and that this antagonism took the form of indifference and avoidance. His own antagonism was apparently more good-natured, but in reality it was tainted with malice and smiling detestation. He watched the boy eat; the heavy jaw and mouth moved slowly, almost sensually, as he rolled each delicate morsel of cake over his tongue and against his palate, savoring it. The pleasure in his expression was almost obscene, thought Guy behind his indulgent smile. There was also cruelty in that expression, as though the cake were a living thing that he was crushing between his teeth. While he ate, his eyes, small and shrewd and gleaming, studied his brothers and his sister, slowly and separately. He gulped, and the cake slid down his throat. He glanced at the last slice. Gertrude put her hand over it.
“No, Joey. You know what Mama said. Not so near dinner time.”
He pushed her hand away, pinching it as he did so with abstracted brutality. “Shucks! Why shouldn’t I?” He stuffed the other piece in his mouth. But before he could swallow it Reginald fetched him a blow across the back of his head that flung him forwards like a stuffed pillow, and he would have sprawled headlong had not Gertrude caught him with her thrown-out arm. “Reggie!” she cried protestingly.
“That’ll teach the young scoundrel to pinch you,” said Reginald, glowering, and nursing his stinging hand. “Head like a paving stone!”
Joey, rescued from a landing in the fireplace, roared, thrusting his sister backwards from him. “I’ll tell Papa, see if I don’t!” he screamed. “You’re nothing but a white-livered, shamblin’, pious yokel, with a heart like mashed potato and no guts!” He aimed a kick at his brother’s long thin legs. “You’re a corpse, but you don’t know enough to lie down!”
Gertrude stared at Reginald blankly and indignantly. The youth colored violently, made a feint at Joey which the latter ducked dexterously. But Guy laughed with delight, slapping his shapely thighs. “Papa’s little echo, Reg!” he exclaimed. “He must have been listening to the Old Man behind curtains. I’ve heard him say that about you half a dozen times.” He gloated upon them all with relish, even malice. But there was something even in that malice that did not arouse antagonism and anger. “Look here, Joey, stop yelling. You’ll have the maids sweeping in here in a body. I’ve got something capital for you for Christmas.”
Joey ceased his roaring abruptly, like a stream of water shut off with great suddenness. Instantly he eyed his younger brother with that narrowed and gleaming stare, full of cunning and unchild-like contempt. “‘Capital!’” he snorted, moving away from Reginald’s purple-faced proximity. “Bet it didn’t cost twenty-five cents! You never have any money. Just fritter it away on nonsense. You’ll come to no good; end up in t
he gutter. You’re a natural-born blackguard and ne’er-do-well!”
“Papa’s little echo, Guy!” reminded Reginald with a short and unpleasant laugh.
Guy laughed with some discomfiture. But he seemed determined not to take umbrage today.
“Joey, you have no right to repeat things,” said Gertrude, sad for her young brothers. “Papa doesn’t always mean what he says. Fathers sometimes have a lot of worries and say things they do not mean—”
The boy regarded her disagreeably. He finished chewing the cake that had precipitated all this, and swallowed it audibly. “Well, Pa don’t think so very well of you either, Miss Gertie! I heard him telling Ma it was a wife’s duty not to look like a sick cat most of the time, and that you weren’t adding anything to Paul’s joy in life. Not that I think much of that couch-cushion, but—”
Guy and Reginald glanced swiftly at Gertrude, and for one moment, in the ashen dusk, they saw her face. What Reginald saw made him rise with sinister swiftness, bent on Joey’s annihilation. But Guy, with his dancer’s dexterity, waltzed the lad behind him and rushed him toward the door. “I’ll take care of him,” he cried, over his shoulder, and the door banged after them, leaving Reginald, darkly flushed and breathing heavily, standing on the hearth, and trying not to look at his sister. “Vicious little brute!” he muttered. He straightened his black cravat. “I suppose I ought not to have called him that. No one has the right to call any one else violent names. But sometimes he makes me forget myself—” He sat down, peeped furtively at Gertrude. She sat in rigid silence, her head bent a little, her hands clasped in her lap. Something in her attitude made him ache intolerably, forced him to say with unnatural impulsiveness: “Trudie, did Pa—did any one—force you to marry Paul?”
Gertrude lifted her head slowly. He could feel, rather than see, the hollowness and pain in her eyes. “Force me, Reggie?” she repeated gently. “What a strange idea!” She reached over and laid her hand for a moment on his knee. His dark, saturnine face was quite miserable. “Dear Reggie, everything is just as I wanted it, believe me. I admit things have been—confusing, and I have been so lonely. I’m glad, so very glad, that you and Guy are home, and perhaps we’ll bring Frey back with us, and then we’ll all be together again.”
He was silent. Her colorless gentleness frightened him. This was not the spirited, somewhat erratic young girl of last summer, with her sweet wild jerkiness of movement and gesture, sudden lifting of lids to show eyes of uncertain brilliance and amusement, quick irritability of tongue and nervous impatience. He put his hand over the cold little fingers on his knee, and could not say a word for some time. When he did speak, his voice was restless and somber, and though he did not speak again of herself, she gathered, from his words, that what he was saying had stemmed from his unquiet fears for her.
“Trudie, I haven’t told any one this, but now I’m going to tell you. Pa, as you know, wants Guy and me to go into the business with him when we leave college. But I’m not going. I don’t want his money; I don’t want anything he has to give. I’ve heard rumors in the family that Uncle Martin wouldn’t have anything more to do with the business, finally, because he thought munitions making was wicked. I understand how he felt, but I don’t feel just like that. It’s just that I’m not interested in money. I don’t want it. A lot of money, millions, from any source, seems wrong to me. I can’t believe that God meant any man to have great wealth, such as Pa has. You can’t get it honestly. But even that isn’t the important thing. I believe it was intended for us to live simply and frugally, quietly and nobly, not in great cities and congested areas, but in country places, on the land, meditating and working, and literally earning one’s bread with the sweat of one’s brow.” He studied her uncomfortably and suspiciously, afraid of ridicule. But the little fingers on his knee were steady, and conveyed to him nothing but love and sympathy.
“I want to go back—to the Amish people, Trudie,” he almost whispered, with a glance over his shoulder which betrayed the instinctive fear all Ernest’s children felt for him.
Gertrude did not speak for some moments. Her thoughts had run unwillingly to her father, and automatically, as in her childhood, her loyalty to him, her adoration for him, turned her from Reginald. “The Amish people, Reggie? But what extraordinary people they are. Impossible; truly they are. Aren’t they something like those awful Quakers? This all comes from that frightful Amish woman who used to teach you prayers and frighten you half to death with stories of hell-fire.” Involuntarily, she remembered her father’s sarcastic comments after the “Amish woman’s” dismissal, and his tormenting question: “Where are your buttons, Reginald?” She disliked herself for smiling in the darkness. But really, poor Reggie was quite absurd, thought her loyalty to her father. “Money, dearest, is not to be despised. You’ve never done without it. You’re just a boy, and can’t understand yet what money means. You’ve always had everything you wanted, and I assure you you wouldn’t enjoy working on the land, as you call it, at all. Aunt Amy has told me what she suffered when Uncle Martin took her to the farm, and how horrible it all was, and how lonely—”
Reginald was bitter with disappointment in her. “Lonely!” he cried. “What else am I now?” He stopped abruptly. He had no words to go on. His inarticulate tongue turned thick in his mouth, and he felt like crying. She fixed her eyes searchingly on his face; the fire had risen a little, and its rosiness touched his mouth, dark and somber and tormented and bleak. Bleak like the faces of the stony farmers who lived in the Pennsylvania hills, having a quality of gauntness in it that was more of the spirit than of any bodily hunger. She saw, all at once and with a kind of shock, that Reginald was of such stuff as those dour farmers; he was of the frugal, stripped gauntness of the Amish folk, to whom money meant nothing at all, neither a thing of power nor the purchaser of luxuries and ease. For they were constitutionally unable to realize what power and luxuries and ease could mean; it was beyond the comprehension of their particular turn of mind. Their happiness, their fulfilment in living, their peace, lay in other things. She sensed these things dimly, but they seemed distasteful and gloomy and acrid to her. Nevertheless, she understood that Reginald was driven, not by an ideal, but by his peculiarity of temperament. And she understood that a man might change his ideal, but never his personality. So she said, not with sympathy, but with comprehension: “However, dearest, you know best what you wish. Of course, Papa will be very disappointed. Frey—it was quite a blow. He has hoped you and Guy would make it all up to him. But if you can’t, you can’t. It will be quite difficult, however, to convince Papa that it will be impossible for you, not because of some freakish idea, but because you are just naturally unable to do what he wishes. I’ll help, if you want me to.”
His thin and gloomy face, still young and not yet entirely rigid, flashed into a relieved and grateful smile. “You do understand, don’t you, Trudie? Do you really want to help me? Well, help me to convince Pa I don’t want to go to New York with all of you this time. I—there’s someone I want to see upstate. I practically promised—”
Guy, in the meantime, had taken Joey into the hall, and had succeeded in calming him to some extent with soothing flattery and humor. He implied, without actual words, that Reginald was something of an ass. No one, except Ernest, ever felt affronted by the boy’s gay hypocrisies: he never meant them to be taken seriously, for they were utterly without viciousness, if tinged with malice and self-seeking. Joey, however, was not to be taken in by such gaudiness, and his surliness returned.
“Oh, I know what you’re after, Mister Guy!” he said contemptuously. “You want me to lend you some money.”
“That’s it!” agreed Guy with disarming good temper and effrontery. “You’re a clever little chap, Joey.”
“Never mind that stuff,” said the preternaturally adult Joey. “You can’t get around me with your smooth tongue. You can get around Mama and little old Gertie with it, but not me. No, sir! I’m not going to lend you any money. I lent you
two dollars last Thanksgiving for Gertie’s birthday present, and you haven’t even paid me the interest on it yet, though you promised it all to me on December 1st, when you got your allowance.”
“On my honor, Joey, I forgot it—”
“Your honor? You ain’t got any. Besides, I don’t care a fig for honor, yours or any one else’s. What I care about is the money I saved out of my allowance, and from birthdays and Christmas. Money’s what counts. And you’ve got two dollars of my money.”
“Don’t I always pay it back, Joey?” Guy still smiled, but his gorge, quick and deadly, was rising, and his slender white hands became fists, for all they rested negligently on his hips. “This is the first time I ever forgot.”
“I want my two dollars,” replied Joey with contempt. “If I don’t get it back on January 1st, I’ll ask Papa to get it for me.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“Wouldn’t I, though! Well, that’s all I got to say. You can borrow money from any one else for Christmas presents, but not from me. And I don’t want none of your measly presents. Just give me my two dollars, and fifty cents, for interest, and forfeit for not paying back on time. After this, I’ll know better than to lend my money to rascals and spendthrifts like you—”
Reginald was just in the midst of trying to enlarge on his reasons for going to live with the Amish people when there was an anguished roar from the hallway. Gertrude, startled, started to get up, but Reginald laughed. “It sounds as though Guy didn’t succeed in getting a loan from Joey,” he said. “In a way it serves Guy right. I’ve been giving him practically all my own allowance, and he got rid of it and his, too. For his own sake, I’m not going to give him any more. It just encourages him in his prodigal ways—”
Dynasty of Death Page 79