“Did she go alone?” The question dropped unintended from his lips.
“No.” The woman turned to go into the house. “She go with a Signor Baldini.”
Seymour made his way down to his workshop in the cellar. He was so familiar with the walls, the banisters, the number of steps in each flight of stairs, that he went quickly and surely. He had spent more time down here in the past six weeks than ever in his life before. His quarrel with Randall was still bitter and open, though largely silent. He acted as if the child were not in the house, nor any of the innovations that had come with it. His habits were disrupted, and he ignored Randall’s efforts to get back on their previous footing. Every morning Randall asked in the same gentle tone if Seymour would not like him to read the newspapers aloud, and every morning Seymour snapped, “No, thank you,” and stalked away to the cellar.
“Very well, then,” Randall said many times. “I’ll just keep the papers in case something ever comes up that you want to ask about.”
This day was like all other days, a yawning void, and Seymour heard the tombstone clock in the drawing-room striking nine as he went through the hall. Nine o’clock, he thought, and shuddered as he started down the cellar stairs. Nine o’clock and the day is over—but never over. Fourteen, fifteen hours to drag through, to count off when the clocks strike, to guess at between: this blank was twenty minutes, that lump of dead time forty-five. He never slept soundly because he was never physically tired; he was resigned to any mess they gave him to eat because he had no appetite. He reached the bottom of the stairs and felt his way between the stacked and jammed objects which filled most of the space between the stairs and his workbench under the window. He had told himself, and he had in past months told Randall, that he was able to do a good deal with his hands; he could experiment and begin to make mechanical things, working by touch.
“But it’s a lie,” he thought now. “I could, if I cared enough. But I cannot care enough about anything—not even enough to want to die. Why don’t I want to die?”
He climbed into the driver’s seat of the Stevens-Duryea, where he spent hours of his time, and sat there with his hands on the steering-wheel, touching from time to time the gear-lever and the other instruments as if for reassurance. “Why don’t I want to die? Why don’t I commit suicide?”
He often thought of a talk that he had had with Doctor Willingdon in the latter days of his failing sight, before he had put himself beyond reach of the man’s confidence by his behavior about the bill. Panic-stricken, and in spite of years of reluctant preparation, unbelieving that this fate was really to befall him, he had asked the doctor what people actually did when they found themselves blind. Did they not immediately decide that death was preferable? Did not many of them resort to suicide almost automatically? He would, he said; he could not conceive of dragging out an existence, a burden to himself or anyone else.
“You will not feel like that when it happens,” Willingdon had said. “Blindness is a strange thing, like many other permanent handicaps. There is sometimes terrible despair and panic in the beginning—but most people make the adjustment and very few indeed, almost none, in my experience, ever try to end their lives.”
“But they should,” Seymour had cried. “I know I shall feel like that. How can I become an incubus upon my brother all the rest of his life? And my God! what a horror my own life would be.”
And so it was, a horror beyond anything he had imagined. He could hear his own voice in retrospect, protesting to Willingdon that he would feel it his duty to free Randall of this burden; protesting too that a man could not accept such an ignominy and drag out a lifetime, cluttering up the earth. Well, he thought, that was so, it made sense then and it makes sense still. But why do I do nothing about it? He had no answer. He sat there in his ghostly motor car, abandoned to his darkness and indifferent to the tragic absurdity of the spectacle he must be, and wondered whether a time would ever come when any propellent would make a change in his present state of living death. Something might make him resolve it, one day he might really decide to end it. And, he thought, on the other hand, when I get past this immediate financial jam it will not make much difference to my life, but it might make some. In September, only six weeks from now, he would have his income again—he ignored the fact that he would owe all of it for a long time to come. In three years he would have twice as much. Nine years after that he would be a rich man. It might make a difference, he thought. Perhaps one can hire somebody to read to one, to go about, possibly even to find some lovely and benign place to live. From the corner where his soundest instincts lay hidden much as once-functioning objects now rusted and mouldered in this cellar, his best sense asked him where he could ever expect to hire devotion like Randall’s, rendered so warmly with such genuine love? Would anything less be other than repellent?
Nonsense, he answered himself brusquely. I will have to change my ways and my habits because Randall has forsaken me anyway for that blasted infant, that insult to our decency and our privacy. Has he forsaken you? Well, it amounts to that, he almost shouted aloud. I have no other choice anyway. I shall have to fill my shadow-world with something else, something I can have by cultivating the use of my other senses. If I do that, will the loss of my sight mean I must always be what I am now?
His other senses: what were they? Nothing, he thought, sitting there gripping that dead steering-wheel, driving to nowhere; nothing that is not a mockery. Taste and smell? He had already lost interest in food. Touch? What should he touch for the sake of human consolation which would not shrink from the thing he had become? His ears? They had never contributed markedly to his pleasure. And now he thought of women, a thought once sufficiently challenging to give a sense of life even to a blind man; but that had been before the nightmare of this past year. Now it meant this grotesque thing that had overtaken him and his brother, this exaggeration of all preposterous insistences that the price of pleasure could be too high. But nobody except a sentimental fool like Randall would have insisted on paying this price. A sentimental fool! Seymour had nothing but scorn for that. And the other side of his nature was desolate for the care and tenderness and companionship that Randall had lavished upon him.
He put his head down upon his crossed arms on the steering-wheel and sat there in his cellar, in his darkness.
The contractor had done the roofing work without entering the attic rooms at the rear of the house. When he saw how dampness had rotted spots of the plaster in the third-floor back rooms which he was to repair, he had suggested to Randall also putting the rest of the rear rooms in order. But Randall had put him off by saying that this much work was all he could afford now, and as the other rooms were never used, they could be left alone to dry out by themselves once the roof was sound again. So he got a good clean room for John and his nurse without anybody having intruded either on the fourth floor where his things were, or the attic where he had not brought himself to go since that eerie night a year and a half ago. Almost completely he had succeeded in his will to forget those attic rooms and the smells and the sounds up there which could give one the horrors if one were so susceptible as to think about them. He had had plenty of other things to think about in the intervening time. Less than ever was there reason to worry about all that now, except that Maggie Quinn was living in the house. She appeared to take it for granted as willingly as her mother that there was no need ever to enter any of the disused rooms. “They are just storage rooms,” Randall told her truthfully enough. “And it would be a lot of wasted work to try to clean them. So we just keep them locked.” She was pleased enough to have no stairs to climb beyond the third floor; she was a nice decent girl anyway, understanding of his problems which he had once for all frankly stated, saying that her mother knew as much as was necessary about the place and everybody in it.
But once the new nursery was ready and Maggie Quinn settled in it with John, Randall thought a good deal about those attic rooms. Sometimes late at night he went up to the
fourth floor, to shut himself in the old day nursery and stay there, listening carefully, to see if he heard any of those small scuffling sounds overhead. He heard none, to his relief. Maybe it was my imagination in the first place, he thought. And maybe if there was anything there, it—they—would long since have gone away, because there was nothing for them to eat. But there was nothing at any time, and they were there. Or was it my imagination? Rather than build up any further picture of what might be there now, he began to think what he might do to insulate the two small rooms in such a way that nothing inside them, nothing of any kind, could make itself known to anybody elsewhere in the house. Suppose, he thought, they were solidly filled up with something heavy and inert, something like paper, for instance, which would deaden any sound and obstruct any passageway across them. It seemed a good idea. And, wondering where to find a lot of paper, he thought of the daily newspapers which he had kept for a long time, day by day, as Seymour refused to have them read to him. He had been putting them each day in the old dining-room downstairs, which they never used, and now a good many of them had accumulated.
He waited until mid-afternoon when Maggie Quinn had John out in the back yard, pushing him slowly back and forth in his pram. Her mother had gone home for the day. Randall took a ball of strong twine and tied the newspapers tightly in bundles, so as to make good solid packs like blocks. He carried these up to the top floor and when he had them all up there, he unlocked one of the attic rooms and, beginning at the back wall, stacked the bundles of newspapers as tightly as he could. There were not nearly enough papers to finish the job as he meant to, but he would simply go on keeping them and tying them up in bundles like this until he had filled up both these nasty little rooms so that they ceased in fact to be rooms and were solid cubes in which there was no space for anything. He felt much better.
“Why, of course, Mr. Holt!” Maggie Quinn set John down on a blanket on the nursery floor and watched him proudly while he thrashed his sturdy arms and legs. Lying on his stomach he could brace himself by his arms, and now he was trying to pull his legs up until he could rest on his knees. He turned his head from Maggie to Randall and back to Maggie again, each time with a delighted toothless smile. “Of course he’s old enough to enjoy a Christmas tree. They love shiny things and all the pretties. He’s smart, he is, sir; he’ll be crawling in no time.”
“Is that so remarkable?” asked Randall. He knelt down and rolled a ball across the blanket into John’s hands and John collapsed on top of the ball, squealing with pleasure.
“It is that, indeed, Mr. Holt. He’s not seven months old yet. Many’s the one won’t try to crawl till it’s nearly a year.”
“Well, Maggie, I guess that’s pretty smart, if you think so. So we’ll have a real Christmas for him.”
“I wouldn’t get him any fancy toys yet, sir—just soft things he can toss around. Excuse my mentioning it—but usually the—the gentlemen—they want to get such comical things for a boy baby—toy trains and hobby-horses and I wouldn’t know what all.”
Randall laughed a little wryly. “I don’t think you need worry about that this year, Maggie,” he said. He went down to find Seymour. He had been trying for a week to make up his mind to tell Seymour what the Trustees had been writing to both of them during these last two weeks of November. Randall had asked Seymour every morning if he did not want to have his mail read to him; and Seymour, after asking from whom the letters had come, curtly said, “No, thank you.” But the first of December was tomorrow and Seymour really ought to be told before the news reached him as a shock. Randall found him in the library, gloomily sitting with his chin in hands. It wrung his heart to see Seymour like this, frozen and bitter and visibly tortured by loneliness. He was feeding on his own spleen; sometimes Randall suspected that he had actually forgotten much of the reason for this bitterness, but was wallowing in the habit of it. Something ought to push him out of it.
Randall went over to Seymour and for a moment put his hand on his shoulder. Seymour flinched; this was sheer stubborn pride, for in the past year an occasional caress from Randall’s hand had come to take the place of the smile that Seymour could not see. Randall stood still and said gently, “Seymour, I’ve been trying for over a week to tell you something you really ought to know, and you just won’t let me. But I’m afraid if you have to find it out some other way—”
“Is it about—about—that child?”
“No, Brother. It’s about money.”
“What about money?” Seymour’s voice was sullen; he knew perfectly well that he owed Randall a lot of money. Why remind him? But Randall said, “It’s those letters that they’ve been writing us, that you didn’t want me to read. They’ve told me that my income is to be drastically cut this quarter and I suppose—I’m afraid—”
“God damn it, why?”
“Well, you know about the panic. Even with my scarcely ever reading the papers to you any more, nobody could help knowing about that.”
Seymour clenched the arms of his chair. “Are you trying to tell me that those mealy-mouthed walking corpses have lost all our money?”
“No, Brother. That’s what they’ve been writing about. I don’t understand enough to know all the ins and outs of it—but they say they’re very pleased because they saved the basic capital value of what we’ve got. But most of the stocks are passing their dividends—and except for a few things, we’re not going to have much income. At least that’s what they’ve written me—I suppose your letters say the same.”
“Well, get them out and read the damned things.”
Randall glanced through the letters and said, “They’re just the same as mine.”
“Wouldn’t you know it? As soon as I begin to get my money again.” Seymour swore.
Randall shook his head slowly. It was like Seymour to have expected to keep all his money, even though he owed it to Randall. What was the use of reminding him now? But there was nothing else to do. Randall had spent every evening for days past figuring, adding, dividing, and trying to budget the next three months’ money over the expenses which were so much larger on account of John. He had expected that Seymour would pay some of his heavy accumulated debt. Now he could not see how to manage unless he could add nearly all of Seymour’s reduced income for this quarter to his own. Reluctantly, and anxiously feeling his way, praying to avoid a new outburst, he told Seymour. For a while there was silence. Then Seymour said, “I could almost say you’re as determined to keep on punishing me as Grandmama would have been.”
“Oh, Brother, can’t you try to be a little bit fair? You know me. You know perfectly well that if we were going to get our regular income I would have spread those payments to Doctor Willingdon and all—all the rest—over any length of time you wanted. I can’t help this, Seymour. Truly I can’t.”
“Running a household for a—”
“Seymour, I implore you to stop saying such things. And thinking them, too.” Randall put his hand against Seymour’s cheek as if to try to fix his attention, as he would do by looking him deep in the eyes if Seymour could see. “I know how you feel. But John is here now, and if you could only know how I feel about him you’d realize he has nothing to do with everything that happened before. He makes you forget it if you get attached to him the way I am. Whatever happened, whatever we all did—it’s not his fault, Brother.” Randall got down on his knees and took Seymour’s hands and held them tightly and said, “Please. Please, Seymour. Listen to me. You’re good, you know. Good and generous and much wiser about life than I am. Be your own self, Brother. Ask yourself if it’s right to take out your bitterness on that little boy. Don’t make him pay for our mistakes, Brother. He can’t know your reasons, he shouldn’t know them. All he knows is that there is some big tall stranger here who never takes any notice of him. He’s old enough to realize that. It’s going to be bad for him. Seymour, if you’d only let him know you the way he does me—and Maggie, and even Mrs. Quinn—it would give you happiness. Believe me.” Rand
all put his face down on Seymour’s clasped hands. “Please believe me. If only for your own sake.”
Seymour sat silent. His face, as Randall raised his head and saw its leathery pallor, was drawn and rigid. His grey eyes which in recent months had lost their power of expression and turned into blank symbols of hopeless tragedy, were quite as blank now, but as Randall watched them, a film of moisture spread slowly across their pitiful imperturbability. Randall knew sharply that he must not sear this open wound by the humiliation of watching it quiver. He got to his feet and with his fingertips gently closed Seymour’s eyes and, more gently, bent over and put his lips upon the lids, one and then the other. Seymour sat tense, grasping Randall’s hands. Presently he said hoarsely, “You call him John.”
“Yes. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes.”
“Take your time, Brother. I haven’t asked for anything—only for you to be yourself.”
“No,” said Seymour. “Time is a mistake. Now or never. Bring him here.”
Randall went and fetched John and carried him to the library. “I won’t put him on your lap,” he said. “Wait until he wants to sit there himself. We’re right here.” He sat down on the hassock close to Seymour’s chair and reached over and took Seymour’s forefinger and put it in John’s hand. The fat fingers closed tightly and John shook the hand up and down, gurgling cheerfully. Seymour leaned forward slowly and put his other hand on John’s head. He felt it gently, with the butterfly lightness that was teaching his fingers to see. The hand passed softly over John’s hair, across his broad forehead, down one fat cheek and then the other. John liked that. He crowed.
“What color is his hair, Randall?”
“Brown. Sort of bright shiny brown. Maggie says it’s going to be curly.”
“And his eyes?”
“Well—I think that depends on the light. Sometimes they seem rather blue and sometimes they’re grey.”
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