“Your mother has no authority.” Not for nothing had the Professor been Randall’s teacher for ten years. “Now already since last year can your brother give permission. You send him here, say I vish to talk vit’ him.”
“He’s very busy just now,” said Randall uneasily. “He’s graduating from Columbia next month and grinding for his final exams.”
“Doch! Und you? Also taking by your school das Diplom, auch you practise goot enough to play your lesson like today? You send your brother.”
Seymour did begrudge Randall’s affairs the necessary time and attention. No problem, he knew, was ever made less irksome by putting it off, but this one pushed its tentacles into so many different questions that he wished he could somehow chop it all down with one sharp blow. He knew perfectly well that Randall’s plans must be made before the summer. Summers had been a nagging difficulty ever since the loss of the Hare Island house and all that went with it. There had been temporary expedients for Lily and Randall of summer boarding-houses at mountain or seaside resorts cheap enough to meet the stingy limitations of the Trustees, while Seymour stayed in town working as an unpaid apprentice in the offices of Grew and Minturn, the leading firm of naval architects. Beginning with this summer, after taking his degree, he had been offered a permanent post with the firm. The negligible salary did not much trouble him for he also received the small portion of his income stipulated after he should reach the age of twenty-one. In different circumstances, he often thought, with a quick effort to reject the creeping insinuations of disloyalty, he could now begin to make a thoroughly agreeable life for himself. A young bachelor could do very nicely on his means … with his mother and Randall away he could close this ugly, burdensome, oversized house and take a couple of rooms over on Murray Hill … join a pleasant club where he could dine and find agreeable company … go out on cruises with clients of the firm whose yachts had problems to be solved … the prospect was so attractive that he had decided, on the hope of making it possible, to abandon the idea of graduate study in engineering, which Mr. Minturn had thought unnecessary … all he needed now was freedom. And walking slowly home from his talk with Professor Mundt he circled mentally round and round the core of the matter: freedom. It was within his grasp. And what was he to do about it?
He had begun to feel actual loathing for the bleary prospect of Twenty-fourth Street. Nowadays he had to make a conscious effort to remember what it had been like in the days when the block-long row of deep front yards had all been green and grassy, with bright beds of red and yellow flowers, and neatly painted wrought-iron urns on fancy pedestals, full of geraniums and trailing ivy. The street was not entirely and finally run down even yet; some places like their own were kept in a decent sort of order, but city smoke made good lawns and pretty flowers impossible. One thing led to another; that condition and the changing times made it difficult to find the old-fashioned sort of visiting gardener who kept the place up; makeshifting there meant makeshifting otherwise. Seymour scowled as he walked past the former Willetts house two doors from their own. In a couple of years it had gone utterly to pot. The unwashed windows were haphazardly curtained or not curtained at all; the front yard had lost the last of its grass to a crust of cinders; a broken bicycle stood rusting against the areaway where it had been for months; and the final degradation was proclaimed by a sign reading ROOMS, fixed in a front window. Seymour turned his head in revulsion as he passed the place and went along to his own low front gate. He had given up the struggle to keep flowers blooming in the two round beds on either side of the walk, but the lawn survived in some protest against the onslaught of grit. Seymour thought with a grimace of the dead hand which had saddled him with this incubus, after planning for years to tie him up in the maze of inexorable responsibilities which his mother and Randall personified.
He climbed the front steps slowly, and with a sigh let himself into the house. Professor Mundt’s demands on behalf of Randall were right and necessary. But their price would have to be paid by Seymour, and this, he thought, was a bitter time to exact that price of him. He laid his hat on the hall table and stood for a moment outside the closed door of the drawing-room. Randall was practising as usual, his drilling, dogged repetition of a short difficult passage grating on Seymour’s nerves. It was dark in the hall, and seemed even darker on coming in from the brilliant spring sunshine outside. Seymour put his fingers to his eyes for a moment because the sudden change of light had caused them to twitch and an illusion of sparkling beads to dance before them.
“Oh, Lord,” he muttered, and started up the stairs. He found his mother sitting as usual on the cluttered divan in her stuffy, shadowy room, her lap full of the contents of some box she had turned out on it, and beside her an open old-fashioned valise into which she was dropping things as she pawed them through. She looked up at Seymour with an unnaturally bright smile, for more often than not she was vague and drooping, and she said, “Oh, Seymour darling, it’s you.” He kissed her cheek and stood for a moment watching her hands hover among the things in her lap. “I thought I’d start getting ready, you know,” she said.
“Ready, Mama?” He smiled. “I hadn’t quite thought about the summer yet.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that!” said Lily eagerly. “I shall have so much to do getting ready for Vienna. I thought I could try to get started while you—”
He was actually surprised that his silence conveyed his chagrin to his mother. Her voice trailed away and she raised her face to him with a frightened stare; then her eyes filled with the inevitable tears. But she said, “Of course we ought to be leaving as soon as Randall—”
Seymour went through the awkward motion which had become a habit; he looked about for a place to sit down, then he lifted a mass of indeterminate objects from the divan, placed them on the floor, and sat down slowly beside his mother. He put his hand gently on her shoulder and drawing a breath said, “Mama dear, you aren’t going to Vienna with Randall, you know.”
She only looked at him with bewilderment. “Why,” she mumbled, “why of course I’m to go. I’ve always—it was—”
“That was long ago,” said Seymour, groping for kind and simple words in which to put this cruel statement. “It used to be a nice kind of dream for you and Randall to make together while Grandmama was alive and we all—” He touched his mother’s cheek and tried in every way, with his eyes, the tone of his voice, to give her comfort while he spoke. “While we all needed to dream of something that would mean escape from her. I had my dreams too, you know.”
“But it wasn’t a dream,” said Lily. “Randall and I are to go to Vienna and live in a nice little flat and go to the—”
For a moment Seymour turned away and there passed through his mind the swift and daring thought: suppose I let them go? Suppose I just do the easy thing? The life which he would then be free to make for himself opened like a prospect of Paradise before him; it was as if he could stand on the hilltop of his own freedom and look all about him, forward and as far as vision could reach, at the joys of all that he had always longed to do. Then the queer dead odor of the room bored at his nostrils; his throat caught in a dry knot, his head felt leaden. He looked at the windows with their perpetually drawn shades, a thing which had come about of Lily’s imaginary headaches and become permanent nobody quite knew when. He looked again at his mother, whose features in her ageing, infantile face were blurred by the dimness in which she existed and now, he felt, somehow by his own eyes too. He thought, she is forty-four years old. She looks sixty—seventy—how do I know? She is an old woman but she can live on for half my lifetime. What shall I do? His was not a mind to muddle in a futile treadmill round that awful question. He knew and he gave himself the answer, aloud. While he did so he could feel the vitality drain out of him, he felt cold and presently, putting his hand to his forehead he found that his fingers really were frigid.
“Mama,” he said, speaking slowly and he hoped with tenderness. “You must try to understand. Things are altogether differen
t now. You dreamed of going to Vienna with Randall when he was a little boy and you couldn’t imagine him as a man and able to be on his own. And we all, I just said so, we all had our dreams of getting away from Her.” He paused. His mother was sniffling. He said, “But now you don’t have to be afraid of Her any more. You are safe here, don’t you see?”
He bent forward to see his mother’s face and draw if possible a response of some kind from it, but she was already dissolving into high, whining tears, weeping into the handkerchief that hid her eyes and her nose which always reddened at the first sob.
“You have so much confidence in Professor Mundt,” said Seymour, groping for some rational way of reinforcing his own opinion. “He feels that Randall should go, the sooner the better, we all know that. And he says that Randall must go alone.”
Lily shuddered and Seymour heard her whimpering, “No, no, no” into her handkerchief.
He said “I’m terribly sorry to disappoint you, Mama dear. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want to be the one who puts his foot down. We’ve all had enough of that to last us the rest of our lives. But this is important. Somebody’s got to decide.”
Lily only wept in treble squeaks and after a series of gulps and chokes she got out, “He—he—he’s too young. He needs me.” After that Seymour thought he discerned, “—little boy. Can’t go all alone.”
He stood up suddenly, driven to make some quick motion to release a wave of irritation. He shoved his hands into his pockets and said, “Mama, stop crying and look at me.” His voice was cold and lashing. Lily gave a gasp of astonishment and jerked up her head. Seymour stood there frowning. With that long downward pull of his mouth he bore sufficient resemblance to the source of all terror, for her, to make her crouch there, her mouth fallen open and her chin quivering below it. He said, “I’m sorry to be so hard about this, Mama, but you’ve got to understand once for all. Randall is not only not a little boy or a child any longer, he is a young man. He’s got to get away from—from us and live the life of a music student since a musician is what he’s going to be.”
“But—but—he—doesn’t know—” Lily’s mouth moved up and down like that of a fish out of water, and Seymour knew all too well what she was trying to say.
“You don’t have to talk about it, Mama. I know what you mean. And I am telling you that Randall is to go to Vienna alone and that is the end of it.”
Lily crumpled again into noisy tears. Seymour said abruptly, “In case you think this is my own decision you’d better know that Professor Mundt feels even more strongly about it than I do.”
“He always knew,” wailed Lily. “He knew we were going together.”
“Whatever he knew years ago, he knows now that Randall is to go alone.”
“He can’t go alone,” Lily’s silly voice rose and fell in reedy waves. “He’s too little, he’s too-”
“He is going alone,” said Seymour, in a tone of voice that she had never heard before. “He is going alone or he isn’t going at all.”
Seymour turned to leave the room and found Randall just opening the door. The two stood face to face. Randall shut the door behind him and said, “I heard you.”
“Well,” said Seymour, “you can’t be much surprised.”
“No.”
“There it is, then. You can start the day after you finish school.”
Randall stood dumbstruck, looking at Seymour but listening to his mother. He moved as if to go over and comfort her and make the sort of affectionate fuss which was the only quick way to quiet Lily when she went into a state like this. But Seymour, standing with his arms folded and that alarmingly familiar look on his face, was a silent restraint. Randall moved his feet uneasily but did not go farther towards his mother. Lily’s gasping ululations were all the sharper for the dead silence between the brothers. Finally Randall said, “I don’t see how I can go,” making a gesture at Lily.
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Seymour was finding in himself a capacity for hardness which he had never measured before.
“But,” said Randall.
Seymour stared at him. “You heard what I said, Ran. I didn’t think there was going to be any ‘but’ business from you. I thought you wanted to be a pianist.”
“Well, I do.”
They both looked at their mother, aware that this was no kind of talk to be conducting in her presence. Then Seymour shrugged as if to inform Randall that he had gone so far in telling Lily the truth that there would be no use in withholding anything further. One could not be quite sure anyway just how much she really understood.
“Then you’ve got to strike out and be one.”
Randall’s fair head drooped and he stood, unconsciously, in an attitude of weakness such as to rouse in Seymour a real sense of alarm. “He iss too soft,” Professor Mundt had said this afternoon. “Too kindlich.” The thick voice echoed in Seymour’s ears. “So goot he iss, so gentle, ja, that makes sensitif the artist. But it iss not enough. Kraft muss er auch haben. He should struggle.” Seymour had conveyed by a glance how much struggle had already been imposed on his brother and himself, but the old man who knew them well had shaken his head and said, “Nein, I mean different. Avay from you, from his Mama, weit weg must he go. He finds trouble, so auch he finds strength. Vidout diss iss no Künstler.”
Seymour for a moment weighed the bitter contemplation of what it would mean to him should life somehow reverse his position and Randall’s. To be sent away from all this, to be forced out upon the world, to be driven to act a man and to reckon with the consequences of a man’s actions! Instead he stood here committed by his own conscience and the dead hand of an old woman, by the appalling spectacle of the ruin she had wrought, to responsibility whose limits he could not discern. All the responsibility, he thought bitterly, and none of the privileges. He watched Randall, as plainly swaying in the inner winds of uncertainty as a tree in a storm; and he looked at his mother, helpless and for all the problems she personified, curiously inert. There was nothing more to say now. He gave Randall a look of cogent meaning, and turned to leave the room. He went downstairs to the library and flung himself into the chair at his desk; he had hours of studying to do and nothing could so have unfitted him for it in mind and mood as the scene he had just left. He sat scowling at the difficult diagram on the open page before him, champing the stem of his pipe in his teeth. There was a quiet knock on the door and Seymour snapped, “Come in!” He had expected Randall.
“What do you want?” he asked brusquely as Randall closed the door. “You know I’ve got all this cramming to do.”
“Of course I know.” Seymour almost winced at the timidity in Randall’s voice. “But I thought—I guess I thought—”
“What?”
“Oh—I don’t know.” Randall leaned across the desk and looked at Seymour with a pleading expression. “It’s awfully hard on Mama, Brother. Can’t you see?”
“Of course I can see! What do you take me for, a fool?”
“Then, why—”
“Because there’s no sense doing any more damage around here after all that’s been done already. Mama is—you know what she is. Give it any name you like. The point is she will never be any less childish and helpless than she is now, and if one of us is going to be saddled with her—” Seymour ignored the shocked expression which crossed Randall’s face—“it had better be me. I don’t have to go to Europe on account of my work and you do.”
“Maybe,” said Randall uncertainly, “I wouldn’t have to go either.”
Seymour scowled. “What do you mean? You mean you’re afraid to go?”
“Oh, no,” said Randall quickly.
“Then what are you talking about? I’ve made it as plain as aces. You’re going and you’re going alone.”
“I’d be perfectly willing to have her along.” Randall was not looking at Seymour as he spoke. “She wouldn’t be in my way.”
Seymour slammed his book shut and met Randall’s startled eyes with the col
d stare which meant the rousing of his temper. “I’m getting sick of this,” he said. “The whole point is that she is not to go with you, she is not going anywhere. She’s going to stay here, damn it, where she’s my responsibility, and you are either going to Vienna and make sense, or you are not. The choice is up to you. You are going to make the choice, and make it today. And once it’s made it’s going to stay made.”
Randall turned slowly and went over to the bay window and stood looking out at the back yard. He had dreaded this issue for so long that now in the midst of it he felt as if he had already been through it in some past time and was dreaming and re-dreaming all that he had feared. He knew that Seymour was right. He wanted to agree with him; all his life he had drawn his strongest satisfactions from agreement with Seymour, or from acting together with him; most of all from letting Seymour make choices and take decisions for them both. Suddenly this strong framework appeared to be collapsing beneath Randall’s feet. In its place there was nothing solid, nothing except the quivering tentacles of a question on which Randall knew he had always been insecurely impaled. Seymour in his place would face the veiled, wavering difficulty, square off at it, and close with it, resolving the issue once for all. But Randall, twisting a tassel of the heavy curtain-pull, only stood at the window looking at the drab back yard, acutely aware of Seymour’s irritated impatience behind him.
“I’m going to—I want to—” Randall paused. Seymour gave him no help. “I’ll tell you after dinner,” Randall finished, forcing out the words.
“I won’t be here.”
“You won’t?” Randall’s tone asked the rest of the unspoken question.
“I’m going to take a woman to supper at Jack’s,” said Seymour, so harshly that he was almost shouting. “And afterwards I’m going to her flat with her. See? And it would be damned good for you if you did something of the sort yourself.”
CHAPTER 6
“And you should never have come in the first place.” Steingruber was a sour, sickly man with a wry expression and meaty hands thrusting from his soiled cuffs. He was pacing the end of the room while Randall sat mute at the piano. “More than a year already you study by me and first I think, well, yes, good enough. You learn good, work is good. You can play. But something is not there.” He paused and scratched his short bristle of dusty grey hair. “Then I think, nein, hoffnungslos, he is like all the other English, he is too—too—”
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