The Wide House

by Taylor Caldwell

  She said, in a suddenly quiet and ominous voice: “Sit down, Angus.”

  He sat down obediently, for obedience was his cardinal sin.

  He looked at his mother attentively. His inexplicable devotion and passion for her had increased rather than decreased, with the years. His stern and austere egotism made it still impossible for him to believe ill of those on whom he had cast his love like a glittering mantle.

  He knew all about “sin,” did this poor and wretched youth, but he knew nothing about the world of men, and their immortal wickedness. He was ripe to become a great Messiah, or a great villain. It was Janie’s intention that he become this villain, in order that he might serve her. She was very clever. She knew his devotion to her, and though it amused her, filled her with loathing derision, she understood what a weapon it was to be used against Angus, against those she hated.

  What a booby it was, to be sure! She smiled at him, and her pale and sallow cheeks wrinkled like canvas, in the afternoon sunlight.

  “How are the shops, my love?” she purred, with a sudden change of tone.

  He moved on his stiff chair, and answered her eagerly: “Splendid, Mama. We can hardly take care of the orders.” And then his thin tongue licked his lips, furtively, and his gray eyes glimmered. Janie smiled to herself, satisfied.

  “You were quite right to speak as you did to Stuart, my pet,” she said, in a considering manner. She frowned thoughtfully. “I am proud of you. To think that he dared try to persuade you to disobey your poor mama, who has suffered so all these years! But let’s not speak of that. I hold no grudge against him. My own papa always said that it was impossible for me to hold a grudge.” She laughed a little. “It is so tedious, Angus. And one must have the most prodigious memory, you know!

  “Let it be, then. You know my own secret little plans for you, that some day you shall be the owner of the shops. We must leave the way in God’s hands. One of these days, I hope, I shall be able to buy a larger share in the shops, and the shares, of course, will belong to my children.”

  She sighed. Angus was rigid on his chair. He gazed at her with passionate intensity.

  Janie was silent a moment. Then, in a firm and resolute tone, she said: “My love, I have always told you that money is everything in this wicked old world. You believe your mama, don’t you, your mama who has lived so much longer than you, and who has had experience of life? Thank you, my love. I see that you understand.

  “And that is why I must, even though perhaps accused of indelicacy, come to the subject of Miss Gretchen Schnitzel.”

  It was then that Angus turned quite white, and he looked aside, even his lips pale. He said, in a strained faint voice: “But Mama, Miss Schnitzel, though no doubt very exemplary and worthy, does not appeal to me.”

  Janie, shocked at this folly, lifted herself upright on her lounge and glared at him, the shawl slipping from her shoulders. She cried, with hoarse outrage: “‘Does not appeal to you,’ you puppy! How odious of you, how indelicate, how improper! What do you mean by it? Answer me at once, you fool!”

  Angus cringed. He pressed his back against the chair. His long white hands trembled, those hands which bore the fingers of a surgeon. He moistened his parched lips, and whispered: “Please, Mama. Your heart, you must remember. Mama, I don’t like Miss Gretchen. She—she is repulsive to me. She—she is fat and white, like lard, and short, like a keg. Her hair—it’s like coarse flax, and her little hard blue eyes are like a pig’s. She—she is a German, Mama. You never liked Germans, you know.”

  Janie, still glaring at him, slowly lowered herself again. A muscle twitched in her dry cheek. Her eyes were vicious.

  But she said, quietly and brutally: “I like everyone who has money. Have you so easily forgotten my lessons? I’ve looked, with you, into the Bible, which assures us that God loves the man of wealth and property, and despises the poor. Did not that convince you? A dog, or a German, who has money, is respected both by God and the world. I shall not repeat all that to you. You know it, and you are a fool if you’ve forgotten it.”

  She laughed abruptly, and the sound was ugly. “Miss Gretchen is her father’s heir, the heir to his tanneries, his bank accounts, and his property. She is the catch of Grandeville. God knows why she ever looked with favor at you, Angus! And God knows why her respected papa and mama have not turned you out of doors whenever you called upon the family! I am not one, however, to quarrel with the smiles of fortune. Miss Gretchen favors you; her papa and mama favor you. That is enough, it seems.”

  All at once she uttered a loud sob, and covered her face with her jewelled and corded hands. Angus started to his feet, and took a step towards her. She flung aside her hands. Her eyes were authentically wet. She clenched a fist and beat upon a cushion with it. She cried out, savagely:

  “You would destroy all my hopes, you, my son! Is money to be plucked out of the air? Is the sustenance of a poor mother to be denied? Are your brothers, and your sister, to starve? Are we to be the butt of the laughter of idiots and scoundrels? How are we to rise above our enemies, without money?

  “Don’t you understand, you young blackguard, that if my ambitions for my children are to be accomplished we must have money, not a niggardly few pounds, but thousands of them? The shops! How are we to inherit them, to make them our own, unless we have money? And the money is there for you, in the person of Miss Gretchen Schnitzel, and you have the audacity to tell me that she does not ‘appeal’ to you!”

  “Mama!” he cried.

  But she regarded him with noble detestation, and elaborately shrank away from him. “Do not touch me, Angus! You, my undutiful son, whom I have brought up in tenderness and love, building all my hopes upon you, praying for the day when you will avenge the slights put upon us! Go away, Angus. Go from the sight of your afflicted mother; spurn her love and devotion. Laugh at her sorrows and her dreams. Turn your back on Miss Gretchen, and her money, which could save us!”

  He gazed at her with the hopeless and awful despair which would have stricken a less resolute woman. But she, seeing it, looked at him only with righteous anger and inconsolable grief. She cowered on her lounge, as if very cold and completely abandoned. She shook her head, sighed, leaned back, and closed her eyes.

  “Go, Angus, I implore you,” she said, in a fainting voice. “Send Daisy to me. No, send Laurie, my daughter, my little daughter. There must be one in this house who is not insensible to my sufferings.”

  But Angus sat down on the edge of his chair. His hands were spread open on his knees. He shivered, quite violently. His head was bent. Suddenly he thought of Miss Gretchen Schnitzel, and a vast retching sickness filled him. But he subdued it with fanatical sternness. He swallowed the salt water that oozed into his mouth.

  And then, all at once, for the strangest and most mysterious of reasons, he heard the far echo of a heroic song, and for one blinding instant he saw the wild white face and glowing black eyes of a young man he had been taught for many years to hate. It had been years since he had heard that song, had seen that face, and his heart suddenly rose and expanded in him involuntarily, like a bird rising from a dark pit into the light.

  And then, so twisted had he become, so lost, so bedevilled and distorted, it seemed to him that that face and voice were evil, and the vision a warning to him. Ah, it must be so, he thought. There was no other explanation. The last time he had seen and heard them with his mystic inner eye and ear was when, at the age of fourteen, he had made his final plea to his mother to be allowed to study medicine. How loud the voice had been then, how wicked and triumphant! He had fled from his raging mother to his minister, who had solemnly assured him that his first duty was obedience to his poor mama, who was wiser than he, who had “sacrificed” so much for him. It was God’s command that parents were to be honored, and obeyed. Whatsoever, or whosoever, seduced a child into contrary behavior had been visited of the devil.

  That old rising and expanding of his heart, then, had been subdued and crushed by him,
in righteous exaltation. It had never come again, until this day.

  He straightened himself in his chair. The face and the voice faded, as on a last glimmer, a last faint echo, sinking back into the abysses of despairing forgetfulness. He had conquered his own inner sinful self again. He was whitely exultant.

  “Mama,” he said, clearly, “please, please listen to me. You are right. I was wrong. Forgive me.”

  But Janie did not stir. She lay, as if broken and lost. But, slowly, her eyes opened. She looked at Angus. She saw his strained and ghastly face, his feverishly burning gray eyes. She saw his humility, his exaltation, his love for her, his conquest of his deepest and most profound instincts, his violation of himself. She saw his innocence, which—strangely for Janie—now seemed to her a terrible and pathetic thing.

  She had no conscience. But there was a sick and curious churning in her, which for several moments she could not control. She had never loved Angus. She had always despised and derided him. Nevertheless, as she stared at him, unblinkingly, the churning invaded all her flesh, and there was a choking in her throat. She had the most ridiculous impulse to shout at him: “Oh, go away from me, you fool! Go away, but never look at that fat white tub of lard again, and be damned to you!”

  But fortunately, as these incredible words trembled on her shaking mouth, her reason and her commonsense returned. She forced a tender and forgiving smile to her face. She held out her languid hand to him.

  “My darling lad,” she murmured, feebly. “Do forgive your mama if she was too stern, and too stricken by her emotions. I should have known that my love would always see his duty.”

  She was trembling, and for the first time this trembling was not assumed for effect It was genuine. How close she had been to ruin, then! How grateful she was that she had been silenced before the foolish and dreadful words had left her lips! What had possessed her? What folly, what stupidity!

  Angus rose swiftly, and took her hand. He looked down at her, smiling tremulously. “Oh, Mama. It is I who should ask forgiveness, not you.” He drew a deep breath, and said, strongly: “Tomorrow I shall ask Mr.—Schnitzel—if I may press my suit with Miss Gretchen.”

  She smiled at him with that liveliness and animation of hers which was so fascinating, all her white teeth sparkling, her eyes dancing vivaciously. She patted his hand, and said with anticipatory joy: “We shall see! We shall make them bow down to us! They’ll rue the day they made fools of us! We’ll show them!”

  She sprang quickly to her feet, moving like a young girl. She walked quickly up and down the room, chuckling gleefully, throwing back her spirals of reddish hair. She was all vitality and life, her skirts swirling about the low heelless black sandals which covered her tiny feet, and sometimes, as they swirled and tilted, her little calves, in their white silk stockings, were fully revealed. She appeared quite pretty in her gay vehemence, and Angus watched her.

  She had forgotten him. But when she finally did see him, she almost loved him for the triumph he was about to give her. She stopped before him, and patted the arm in the black broadcloth sleeve, and laughed aloud. If she was aware of the thinness of the arm in that sleeve, she did not show it.

  “You are a good lad, my love,” she said fondly, and sighed. “What should I do, a lone and abandoned widow, if I did not have such a man about the house?”

  Then her face became pinched and uneasy. She glanced about, as if looking for something. “Where is Bertie? Where has he been these days? I never see him.”

  Angus hesitated; his expression darkened. He had become quite adept in protecting his mother from knowledge of his brother’s drinking bouts, until the final day of extremity when he collapsed. So it was that Janie was still unaware that this collapse was the finale to the days of drinking. Incredible though it seems, she as yet believed that the day of collapse was the first day, and that Bertie, though a “toper,” could not carry his liquor like a man.

  When Angus still hesitated, picking his painful way between truth and evasiveness, she glared at him. “Where is he?” she demanded, in a loud hectoring voice. “He isn’t drinking again, is he?”

  Angus said, weakly: “I believe he spoke of visiting Miss Alice Cummings this afternoon, Mama.”

  The glare faded from Janie’s eyes. She smiled. “So that is it, eh? Well, then. But it is only a chit, still. How old is the lass, Angus?”

  He turned away. He said faintly: “I believe she is fifteen, Mama.”

  “Yes, yes, so her mama told me. I had forgotten.” Janie looked pleased. “Not a chit, after all. Bertie could go far and do worse, it is true. There is money there.” She chuckled again. “Trust Bertie to use his head, the rascal!”

  She mused on her Benjamin, and a look almost of sweetness softened her eyes. “He does well in his classes, too, I am told. And with ease, though the wretch never studies. Mr. Braithe assures me he has never had a cleverer lad.”

  “He does well,” said Angus, mechanically.

  “Next year,” said Janie happily, “he will go into the shops, also. No nonsense about Bertie.”

  Angus glanced down at his hands. He said nothing. Janie stared at him impatiently. She made a dismissing gesture. “My head aches, Angus. Send Laurie to me to brush my hair. She never remembers, the little besom, until reminded. What it is to have a neglectful daughter!”

  Silently, Angus turned and walked slowly to the door, erect, almost emaciated in his black broadcloth. “Like a damned undertaker,” thought Janie, viciously, and with nasty amusement. Perhaps she should have apprenticed him to the grave-diggers, after all. Her Bertie, and even that disgusting “black one,” Robbie, would have served her better in the shops. But no, she reflected, neither of her younger sons had that inherent rapacity and greed which stirred so strongly under Angus’ pious and dutiful and gentle exterior. What was it that that damned Stuart had said to her about Angus, which had so surprised her with its unexpected subtlety? “He has substituted duty for the love of God and man.” His Scots rigidity of character was still unshaken, though Stuart had called it “terribleness.” Yes, the lad was dour, but he was weak. Janie, watching him leave the room with his noiseless and stiff tread, laughed in herself. Trust the virtuous and the stiff-necked to be the greatest scoundrels of them all!

  She threw herself again on her couch, and gave herself up to pleasant meditations. The December afternoon was paling and darkening. The firelight was more vivid in the room. She could feel its warmth on her feet. She hummed a little, hoarsely, under her breath.

  She had done well for herself. That she knew. She had come far, in a strange land, with no help from anybody. She was enjoying herself, and she had vivacious plans for the future. She felt in herself a sense of power and invincibility, very agreeable sensations.

  CHAPTER 30

  Angus made his way down the narrow slit-like corridor towards his sister’s room. It was very dark and dank here, smelling of wax and chill airlessness. The servants were sleeping in their quarters on the third floor, after the arduous labors of the big Sunday dinner. In an hour they would arise and prepare the evening tea. But now the house was silent except when gloomy hollow echoes reverberated through it, like echoes coming down long and empty tunnels.

  Angus could hear those disembodied echoes, that roamed through all the corridors and rooms seemingly without human origin. They boomed and dwindled, enhancing the dark, cold and crepuscular melancholy of the day and the house. Angus stopped suddenly, and his hand reached out and leaned against the wall. He felt the paper dampness of it, its chill. Its very texture impinged itself with a curious intensity on his palm, so that, as he stood there in the semidusk of the hall, he felt himself surrounded by living entities that gazed at him with immobility. It had always been this way with him: from his earliest childhood he had been suddenly seized, at intervals, by the strangest and most affrighting sense of awareness in the most ordinary objects about him, and his heart had risen on an arc of confused terror and dread. A slight shift of plane had come
to him, and with it a sensation of disorientation, of nameless fear, of lostness, and he would look about him with the eyes of a frightened and bewildered alien. He never could understand the horrible despondency which would come to him then, the hopelessness, the iron weight which would replace the slow quiet beat of his heart.

  Now he slowly rubbed his thin palm on the paper, and looked about him, too burdened even to sigh. He could not see the design of dull red roses on the wallpaper, or their coiling green leaves. He could see nothing but the dim shallow light that Altered through the small window at the end of the corridor, where it made a bend at right angles to the part in which he stood. He could hear nothing but those long running echoes that traversed the corridors of the house like drifting ghosts. He could feel nothing but the agony of his despondency and dread and unidentified anguish, and the texture of the wall under his chilled hand.

  But all at once he wished for death with an overwhelming intensity. This desire, too, was a familiar one to him. It had in it a black urgency, a will to flight. It was an agony that cooled his lips and set his lungs to laboring. For, by then, terror would take him, though his despondency was none the less. A battle would rage in him, with hopelessness and despair and grief on one side, and fear and the will-to-live on the other.

  During all this time, he stood as silent and motionless as a ghost himself, there in the dusky hall with the little window a rectangle of pale light in the gloom. He looked steadfastly at the window; its wan illumination lay on his features, which were rigid and white, and in his eyes, which were empty and distended. He could not move. His stiff arm, with the hand pressing against the wall, upheld him. He was petrified with his suffering.

  Finally, as if breaking free of chains, he stirred, and said simply, and aloud: “Oh God.” In the past this had been the word to free him from the horrible enchantment. It did not free him now. It was like a heavy stone hurled into black and bottomless depths, into which it sank without a trace, with not even an echo of its passage. He said it again, over and over, and again it was like falling stones, cold and shapeless and without meaning.