Randall thought he detected a note of strain or bitterness in Seymour’s last words, a long-familiar suspicion which the gaiety of Seymour’s life made inconsistent. So once again he dismissed it. He only said, “By the time I’m thirty-one we’ll have quite a handsome income between us, won’t we?”
“Something over eight thousand. But it’s not likely to stay between us. Suppose you marry, Ran?”
“Oh,” said Randall, startled, “that’s not likely! You’re much more apt to marry.”
“I shouldn’t think so, you know. Since you ask me I don’t think either of us is a good bet to marry. But particularly not me. I’ve got bored with correctness and convention and the romantic marriages that are part of it all. I suppose it depends on how you start out.” His face was moody. “I’ve seen too much, I remember Papa too well and poor Mama. Good God, look at Dorothy Parsons after eight years. Stuffy as a duchess. That’s cured me of romance.”
“It’s a pity to hear you talk like that.”
“Lots of things are a pity. Well, we’re settled anyway: we stay in the house. Do we spend any money on it—or ask the estate to? Frankly, I don’t think it’s worth it.”
“But suppose the roof falls in?”
“Let’s gamble that it won’t for another year. After that we’ll probably move anyway. The old woman made that preposterous will and I’d rather let the house stew in its juice. If we never ask to have any of the trust money spent on the house we’ll be as rich as Croesus by the time the trusts terminate. And probably too old to enjoy it, too,” he added.
Stilton cheese and celery were brought for Seymour and a meringue glacé for Randall. Seymour peered at it, holding his pince-nez towards the tip of his nose. He shuddered delicately and said, “How can you!”
“But I like it. The way you like that horrible bleeding meat.”
“You picked up the tastes of a poule in Vienna. Sweets and chocolate and whipped cream.”
“Then you should thoroughly enjoy dining with me.” Randall grinned with uncharacteristic mischief. Seymour chuckled. “I’d not have thought it of you,” he said. “Are you seeing your new toy again tomorrow?”
“Brother, I told you—”
“Tush. She sounds delightful.”
“I haven’t said a word about her, except for answering your tactless questions. You’re determined to imagine things.”
“Perhaps I am. For some reason she piques my curiosity.”
“Not mine.”
“You haven’t enough. But you will, child, you will. It will be thrust upon you.”
Randall walked home alone after parting from Seymour on the steps of the Club. Almost always Seymour had some late engagement which was kept a discreet blur, and Randall would not have dreamed of inquiring about it. Habit was so strong in him, and any departure from it such an effort that he went home automatically to the empty house without volition or intention. Once in a great while Seymour or some circumstance forced him to consider an alternative; perhaps a concert to which Randall knew he ought to go, or a careless suggestion from Seymour to come along and make a fourth at a late supper at Jack’s or Mouquin’s. There would be a pretty companion for him and if Seymour brought up the question, he had to scold Randall into joining such a party. Randall rarely did.
He walked through the gritty front yard, grateful for the dark which hid its pathetic efforts to respond to early spring. Last autumn in an impulse of protest against the increasing ugliness of the surroundings he had planted some hyacinth and tulip bulbs, and the hyacinths had come into bud during the past week. Their willingness and their optimism put him to shame; how could he have asked them to bloom in such a spot! He let himself into the dark house and lit the sputtering gas jet in the hall. He hung his hat and his light topcoat on the branching hatrack and turned to climb the stairs. The banister felt grimy under his right hand. Who knew how thoroughly the woman cleaned in the mornings?—nobody was there to check up on her and neither brother cared enough to involve himself in a matter that would surely be disagreeable. It was easier to ignore the question, like everything else in the house. Randall stood there looking up the dark stairwell. I wonder, he thought, if Seymour has ever been upstairs above the second floor since—since—his mind veered away from the memory of the days after his mother’s death. More than two years had passed since he had stopped Seymour from turning out her room. Randall had never intended such a length of time to slide by, he had only not felt ready for the ordeal so soon after her dreadful death. But once Seymour locked the door it had stayed locked. Randall stood thinking about that now. He was quite ashamed. All their ways, his and Seymour’s, were habits into which they had drifted without really noticing it. If he stood and thought about this house, room by room, he would be counting off more rooms locked and unused than he and Seymour ever entered. That was not their fault, they had not asked to be saddled with this cumbersome old pile. The only way they could live in it was to ignore the existence of the space that they could not use. But it must be an awful mess, Randall thought, with a twinge of uneasiness. We really ought to do something about it, I suppose. In fact, I guess I ought to go and look at those top-floor rooms where the roof has leaked. He only knew about it from Mrs. McBane, the charwoman; he had not been up there to look.
Why go now? he asked himself. He could not remember where the gas jets were; he would be stumbling and tripping all over the place. I could take a candle, he thought. You could also wait until morning. But I don’t want to go up there in the morning. I want to—I am going out in the morning. It was a nice thought, a pleasant one, somewhat dampened by Seymour’s teasing and his own disapproval of Signorina Tosi’s laziness and flippancy, but still pleasant enough so that he did not want to dim it by tackling a disagreeable task beforehand. No, I’d better go now, he decided. He went to his own room, the small one beside Seymour’s which had once been their grandmother’s bedroom, and which, with the library at the back of the house, completed the second floor where the brothers lived entirely. The only other space they used was the ground-floor drawing-room where Randall practised; and Seymour’s workshop in the cellar where nobody went except himself. It was a queer arrangement, Randall reflected, now that he had begun to think about it; but it was the natural outcome of their obligatory occupancy of the house.
He lit his bedside candle in its china holder, picked it up, and climbed the stairs to the third floor. On the landing he lit the gas. He stood for a moment looking at the closed door of his mother’s room. We must open it, he thought; but he shrank with a twinge from imagining the dim pathetic clutter in which she had maundered out her life. He preferred to remember her young, as young as he could remember, and fixing his mind on that easier memory he went on to climb the next flight of stairs. He did not think he had been up to the fourth floor since he and Seymour, graduated from the nursery, had moved downstairs from it. By the light of his candle he found the hall gas-jet and turned it on to light it. He jumped, startled by a shrill squeal like the cry of a small animal. The gas-jet was full of air, it would not take the flame. He turned it off and holding his candlestick high, he climbed the steep flight of steps to the servants’ garret under the mansard. It was pitch dark up here except for the feeble circle of yellow light thrown by his candle. He moved slowly to the rear of the house where he had been told the dampness had got in. He put his hand on a doorknob and was just turning it when he stopped. Inside the room, instead of the dead silence which held the rest of the empty house, he heard noise; scratching, scuffling. His hand felt clammy on the cold porcelain doorknob; a lump rose in his throat. It can’t be rats, he thought, trying to reassure himself. Oh my God, I can’t go in there if it’s rats.
Somewhere he remembered having read that one could frighten them. He raised his foot in its strong boot and stamped heavily on the bare floor. He kicked the bottom of the door a couple of times. Then drawing a long breath he burst into the loudest shout he could utter, and threw open the door with a crash. His flicke
ring candle showed only barren ugliness, but he also kept his eyes away from the floor. He moved with so much noise that he could not have heard them if they were there, scurrying away. He stood in the centre of the room, turning round in a circle with his candle high, to examine the ceiling and the walls. His nostrils clenched as if to shut out the evil and mouldy smell of the room, compounded of damp and dirt and something related to the noises whose cause he had been determined not to see. The roof, he decided, had not leaked so badly after all. People like that McBane woman always exaggerated such things. There was one corner where the ceiling and the wall were stained and streaked, but the plaster seemed intact and it would be a long time before anything worse happened. Long before it did, he thought, flinching from the vile air, he and Seymour would be gone. He turned towards the door, shutting out the sight of the two narrow iron cots and the thin, ragged mattresses on them, their stained ticking full of holes from which the dirty stuffing stuck out in hanks and bunches. Randall did not want to understand what had got them into that condition. He moved quickly to leave the room, slamming the door behind him. He hurried downstairs, washed his hands, changed his coat for the brown velvet lounging-jacket which Seymour had given him last Christmas and his boots for a pair of slippers, and settled down in the library with a motet of Palestrina which he was preparing for the choir to sing next week. Studying this should be the most calming of occupations and efface from his mind the impression of what he had seen upstairs. That was not important, he assured himself; he need only forget it. Usually he studied a score with reliable and effortless concentration. But tonight that did not come easily. His thoughts seemed to wander and run in every direction. Some of them were amusing, reflections of his morning with Renata Tosi. Others were less pleasant. He wished now that he hadn’t gone upstairs, it had proved to be unnecessary. He sat with his eyes on the score, reading but not digesting it, and with his pencil he scribbled absent-mindedly on the margins.
CHAPTER 9
Seymour woke late the next morning, gloomy and unrested. He lay in bed in his darkened room, vexed by fragmentary impressions of last night’s diversion. He was not repelled by his thoughts, but he was bored. When he had really enjoyed himself he was apt to sleep well and wake in good humor, but such moments were becoming increasingly infrequent. Without looking at his watch he knew that it must be about ten o’clock. He had a very sharp sense of time in all its phases, the result, he believed, of the fate which challenged him to get the most out of every hour and every day while he could still see. He measured all things by the tenuous span of his eyesight. And much of his secretiveness had grown from the habit of silence about his eyes. He had never told Randall the truth about this; and he had parried every remark or question which could have led up to the subject. Sometimes he wondered how well he had succeeded; not so well, he feared, as he could have wished. Often he caught Randall looking at him with anxiety, and at his many pairs of eyeglasses with uneasy curiosity.
Well, he thought, rolling over and lying face down, the less I say now the less there will be to say in the end. He could have said more than he had at dinner last night. But why burden Randall yet? The coming years would tell their story fast enough. He would go on, getting as much pleasure as he could until he could have no more at all. A poor show, the better side of his mind sometimes reproved him; after you are blind will this kind of life be anything worth living in retrospect? Could you do better? He turned tense and depressed in the grip of such thoughts. Presently he pulled himself up, sat for a few minutes accustoming his eyes to the dim light filtering about the edges of the curtains, and then swung himself out of bed. Shuffling across the room in his nightshirt he looked even taller and bonier than when he was dressed. Cautiously he parted the curtains just enough to see that the spring morning was sunny and brilliant; so he left the curtains drawn. Strong light was distressing to him, especially in contrast to the dark. He moved about the room, shaving and dressing almost entirely by touch. He was not very meticulous about it, he was in fact becoming careless except at moments when he wanted to make a particularly fine appearance. He was learning how to do these things without looking; a strange, almost perverse secret now as if in practice for the future when he would have to depend on the habit.
When he was dressed he went to the library, where he and Randall took their coffee and rolls every morning. They had fixed up a shelf hidden by a screen, and put on it the gas-ring from the kitchenette upstairs where Mrs. Gerrity had cooked their mother’s food. Here Randall made their morning coffee and boiled the kettle for an occasional cup of tea. They never used the abandoned basement kitchen at all. Seymour cautiously raised the dark blinds on the four bay-window sashes, running them up only a few inches to keep the room dim. He lit the gas-ring to re-heat the coffee that Randall had left for him, and putting on the special spectacles which he needed, he sat down with the morning’s Times. He had grown accustomed to rationing his failing sight; he used it mostly for such work as he could still do and then, able to read only a little, he gave preference to the daily newspaper because a sense of knowing what was happening in the world helped him to ward off the stronger sense, the looming fear of the time when he would be cut off from everything. Today the news was not interesting. He sat sipping his coffee, eating bits of dry crust from a roll, and scanning the columns of print which he realized presently were telling him nothing. He let the paper slide to the floor. These mornings when he rose late and did not go to work were demoralizing. Like so many other things about himself, he kept them as much as possible a secret. Last year he had had to make one exception to his rule and tell Wilfred Minturn the truth about his condition. He had met kindness and sympathetic understanding, but important firms could not maintain their staffs upon partial charity. Upon learning that four or five years was the maximum possible time that Seymour could hope to continue working, Mr. Minturn had arranged that so long as Seymour remained with the firm he would receive no increases of salary but should have freedom to come and go, and be absent from the office as much as was necessary to rest his eyes.
Seymour sighed. He was learning by degrees to live with his fate, but protest and the instinct to strike back were powerful in his nature. Perhaps it was silly to buy an automobile, but he wanted one passionately. He felt confident of seeing well enough to drive easily, and his fingers itched at the thought of such a machine to tinker with. Then, the fun he might have! He knew nobody who would not be twice as amusing when he had the excitement of motoring to offer. This idea grew more intriguing every minute. Why not go out right now and see the Stevens-Duryea people and find out how long they would require to deliver him a car?
He had left their catalogue, along with a stack of others which he had been studying, down in the cellar in his workshop. He wanted another look at them all for a final comparison before he went out to order his car. On his way downstairs he encountered Mrs. McBane listlessly flapping at the tiled floor of the front entry. He bade her good morning and she answered sullenly. “Are you through in the library, sir?” she asked. She was always sour when he stayed in his rooms all morning and made her wait to finish her work.
“Yes,” he said. “You can finish up now.”
He passed her slatternly bulk, kneeling on the hall rug, and went towards the back hall and the cellar stairs.
“Mr. Holt, sir,” she said.
“Yes?” He paused.
“Them rooms up at the top,” she said. “I told yer brother, sir, how the roof’s leaked and made a mess up there. It had ought to be fixed.”
“We will attend to it when we wish to.”
“I could get ye a price for the roofing work, sir. Me brother-in-law—”
“I told you we will see to this for ourselves.” His tone was sharp. “What difference does it make to you?—do you get a commission for jobs that you give your brother-in-law?”
The woman squatted there scowling, with her eyes narrowed. Seymour was discomfited. Why had he given way to a flash of ir
ritability, and why be scathing? He could not back down now, the thing was said. He heard some muttered remark as he turned away, something that sounded like ‘crazy-house’. He swung round on his heel and snapped; “What were you doing up on the top floor anyway? You know your orders.”
“Me orders is to clean the halls and stairs. If I get up there and smell wet plaster—and mildew—and—and—other things, I’ll not need your insults to know I’m in me right mind!” She flung her scrubbing-rag into the pail of dirty water and heaved herself clumsily to her feet. She advanced towards Seymour, wiping her hands on her apron, and said, “If ye’ll give me me money to Saturday I’ll be quitting now. And well out of it too.” She sniffed.
He took a bill from his wallet and held it out to her with the tips of his fingers.
“Give me your key to the house,” he said. She lifted her calico skirt to display a red flannel petticoat and a black pocket-book hanging from her waist. She took the key from her purse and dropped it into his outstretched hand. She tossed her head with another sniff. Then she said, “Look close at the key, Mr. Holt. Be sure it’s the right one.” She gave a queer nasal laugh. “That’s the right one, eh? Feel better now?” She walked away, untying her apron.
Seymour went on to the cellar. He was trembling with temper. His rage at the slut was only less violent than his annoyance with himself. The woman knew the house too well, she had been about for a long time. She lived in a tenement the other side of Tenth Avenue, only half a block away, and she would fill the whole neighborhood with snide gossip about the Holts. The hell with her, he thought, remembering his decision last night with Randall to move to a nice flat next year. Next year … any year … anything which had to do with the future … such thoughts, at times when he felt oppressed and upset, were the overture to a sense of panic. He stood in the middle of his workshop surrounded by the massed and stacked collection of objects which had been accumulating here for nearly twenty years. Each of them by itself was a perfectly sensible thing. It was actually or potentially useful for some purpose of Seymour’s, something interesting, mechanical, creative. What was the matter with that?
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