Next morning he saw with revulsion the breakfast, in chipped kitchen dishes slung upon a dented tray, which a giantess of a Negro woman, slatternly and insolent, brought to Seymour. She did not offer Randall anything and he went down to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. The filth that he saw there, the long-accumulating traces of rats and mice, the cockroaches, the rotten boards under the leaking sink, drove him away shuddering and thinking of the bare clean sunny kitchen, the little morning cup of strong coffee, the beckoning garden outside. Of John and of Renata he would not think, not now, not yet; that was his vow and he had sworn to keep it. He went to Seymour to say he intended to get rid of the woman. He had no chance because Seymour spoke first. Lying in bed, he said, “You may as well begin, Randall. If you don’t know what to do, I’ll tell you.”
“Why, of course. You mean, do something for you?”
“Quite. Now I’m used to being up in that damned chair all day, I suppose I might as well continue. But I mean to boot out that twaddling doctor the way I did his nursemaid.”
“Oh. The man from the hospital?”
“Yes. I fired him last night. Why should I pay anyone to do something you can do?”
“That’s so,” said Randall slowly. “Of course I want to take care of you, Brother. Didn’t I say so last night?”
Days had no meaning as time wheeled slowly by, and months rolled in the wake of days, and years seemed infinitely less noteworthy than the least of momentary concerns. Any day was the pattern of a thousand others, the year in which it fell of utter insignificance. Any morning saw the same drab sights, echoed the same querulous, drilling monotone:
“Randall!”
“Yes, Brother.”
“Where are you?”
“Just in my room. I’m coming.”
“I called you before.”
“I’m coming.” Randall shuffled to the library where ten minutes before he had pushed the wheelchair into the bay window when Seymour said he was cold, he wanted to feel the sun. It was May; several Mays had gone before; it was quite hot.
“I’m too warm here,” said Seymour.
“Then we’ll move you.” Randall took the bar of the chair and drew it back into the dusky room. All the blinds were down except the one that had been raised a little to the sun.
“Not too far!” Seymour put out his right hand and felt expertly in the spaces round him. “Not by the table.”
“Yes, Brother.”
“And draw that blind again.”
“Very well.”
“What were you doing?”
“Why—oh, nothing. I don’t know.”
“Isn’t it time for my orange?”
“Not quite. Not unless you want it now.”
“No.” Seymour sniffed in an aggrieved way. “But I shouldn’t have to think of it before you do.”
“I—” Randall shut his mouth again. “You can have it any time you want it.”
“I want it when it’s time for it. You can see the clock.”
When the clock struck eleven Randall was ready with the orange, peeled, carefully freed of every shred of white rind and filament, separated into segments. Seymour ate the pieces nervously, his mouth working in small twitches which agitated the shaggy shanks of his unkempt ash-colored moustache; had his nose been shorter, Randall often thought, he would have resembled a hairy rabbit. He spat out the seeds into the palm of his withered left hand, then brushed them anywhere on the theory that most of them would land in the plate on his lap. They fell, in fact, on the floor and Randall did not always bother to sweep them up.
“How much did you pay for them this time?” asked Seymour, nibbling.
“Twenty-one cents the dozen.”
“That’s a penny more than before.”
“I must have gone to fifteen places, Seymour. I got these off a stand down near Mulberry Street somewhere.”
“You’d get better ones if you went for them early in the morning. Of course if you go in the middle of the night you have to take what you can get and I—” the voice rose shrilly “—have to pay for it. Like everything else.” The blind eyes which held no expression gave the illusion of glaring palely.
“Thank you. I’m willing to walk anywhere I have to go to find the cheapest oranges in New York for you but I’m going when I want to. Do you hear me?”
“Yes. I never hear anything else.”
“All right. I’m not going out except at night and that’s the end of it.”
“Why?” asked Seymour, as if he had never heard of the subject before.
“Do you want me to explain? If I start-”
“Oh, no.” Suddenly the spate of ill-humor was spent. “I understand. In fact I don’t blame you.”
After a time Randall came back from upstairs where he had been doing whatever it was that sometimes echoed in a thick, but distant dragging sound, interspersed with an occasional thump. He asked, “Would you like me to read the newspapers today, Brother?”
“What are the headlines?”
“Oh, a lot more about all that palavering at Versailles.”
“Peace Conference,” sniffed Seymour. “Good God, the greatest brain since Plato wouldn’t be able to make head or tail of all that gabble. I’m sick to death of it.”
“Well, then, I’ll just put the papers with all the others.”
“That’s right. We’ll always have a file of them, at least. God knows there’s room enough for them.”
“Of course there is. And oh, Brother, wouldn’t it be wonderful—” At moments the pale shadow of Randall’s present haggard face reflected the warmth and hopefulness of long ago. “It would be a miracle, but—”
“It wasn’t written up as a miracle. The man you went to talk to didn’t claim it to be a miracle. He just proved the cases where it had worked.”
“Yes,” said Randall. “He certainly had the proofs. Three different cases, where he fed them the oranges and their sight came back. Oh, if it does that for you, I’d walk a hundred miles every night to buy the oranges!”
“You are a good soul, Randall. Look here, I’m cold.”
The wheelchair was moved back to the bay window. There was not much space to manoeuvre it, the room was very crowded with all the appurtenances of their daily existence, which Randall had been moving into it by degrees, partly to put them all within Seymour’s reach, partly to save himself the trouble of going elsewhere in the house to fetch them. Fetching anything meant a long, patient, exhausting search. Even with the top floor completely blocked off now, the job of packing and stacking it solidly with newspapers neatly finished, there were so many other rooms to deal with if something had to be found. The things already in them were very important. Randall did not want to move them or change anything. So he had been assembling everything here which Seymour might ever need. Seymour was here all of the time except the brief span of the night when Randall pushed him into his bedroom, and by a process of skill and ingenuity, partly lifted, partly slid him onto his bed. In the morning the procedure, with greater difficulty, was reversed, and the chair cautiously steered along the cluttered hall and through the crowded library back to the corner between the windows and the fireplace where Seymour spent his days.
“By the way,” said Seymour after they had finished their midday meal of tinned soup, bread, a piece of cheese for Randall and another orange for Seymour, “you said there was a letter this morning.” He had been in a temper at the time and had not wanted to have it read to him.
“Yes.” This year there were a good many letters for Seymour, as the result of his becoming forty years of age. His grandmother’s trust had terminated and he had received his inheritance outright. He had immediately severed all connections with the successors to the original Trustees, and chosen a lawyer of his own, whom he had known at his club long ago. He never saw the man, whose name was Cullom; everything was attended to by letter, with Randall writing Seymour’s dictated instructions, and reading him Cullom’s replies and other communication
s. Until Seymour’s securities, to which he paid the most minute attention, were all reinvested and his affairs arranged as he wished them, there would be a good deal of this correspondence with Cullom. Several times a week there were letters from him to Seymour. But there had not been a letter for Randall for quite a while, not since … he was hazy about dates. Italy had entered the war a considerable time before, there had been infrequent brief notes, opened by the censor, and after a space they had stopped.
Randall did not know why; nor when he had stopped answering the notes, nor how long it had been since he had written at all. But it was much longer than he would have believed if some keeper of records had been able to tell him. Perhaps he thought he had always continued to write; in his mind he had, the secret compartment of his mind which was the counterpart of his other secrets guarded under this roof. One did not leave one’s things unlocked, accessible to accident or prying eyes; one did not write one’s closest, deepest thoughts on paper, only to cast them to the glaring exposure of a world at war. A censored letter was a picked lock, a terrible assault on the treasure-house of his secrets; somebody might as well smash the locks on his desk, the doors of the rooms where his things were safe. No, he would not write; or if he did he would not dream of committing his letters to the dangers of censorship and the possibility that they might not reach their destination at all. Letters became by slow degrees integral with all other sorts of paper, something to be hoarded, hidden, guarded, locked. It was better for the link to lie safe and cherished in his mind; he would not violate it by any exposure.
Six years had blunted the spike of memory. It became steadily more difficult to go about, like the paper-collector in the Park, spearing this or that, lifting it up, looking it over to trace beyond the dust and the rain and the evanescence of paper itself, whatever had been printed or written upon it when it was new. He had become better satisfied not to try. He had made one sharp, concrete effort when the daily newspapers, sometimes read aloud to Seymour, oftener put aside for the promised day when he should be able to read them for himself, forced the violent reality of war upon Randall’s attention. By a means whose details he could not understand, he had made sure that his money would still reach its destination, routed in some complicated way through Switzerland. He felt safe about that. He liked the feeling that the money was going there. He had liked it even more since 1914, when his income had doubled and he had been as choleric as Seymour himself with the Trustees when they had remonstrated against sending every penny of it abroad. All his intensity spent itself in that outburst. Thereafter the subject began to fade, back, back, a recession into a dream where he had left in good care the greatest treasure of his heart, which had no place in the house here with Seymour.
He read Cullom’s letter aloud to Seymour, and they had some acrimonious discussion about their daily expenses, which Seymour doled out from the steel strongbox locked in the bottom drawer of his desk. Randall was required to stay at the far end of the room whenever Seymour had the box open, while his long grey fingers, the right hand an acutely sensitive instrument, the left feeble and atrophied, slowly felt and counted and re-counted the money. If Seymour suspected that Randall could see into the box there was a burst of temper. He would place the few bills that he had chosen on the edge of his desk, carefully close and lock the box and replace it in the drawer, which he also locked, and then propel himself to the corner of the desk again, using his right hand to turn the wheels of the chair and his left to guide himself. That manoeuvre, from the locked drawer to the corner of the desk, was the only one he negotiated by himself. Otherwise Randall must always push and move the chair.
Randall had grown used to Seymour’s interminable, drilling sarcasm about money; his meanness was a fact like his blindness and his paralyzed legs. They had had one tremendous quarrel in the beginning, when Randall first came back from Italy. It bore the strange perversion of reversing the situation of former days, when Randall had paid all their expenses and Seymour had dragged and weaseled with his debts. Now Seymour had held out a few dollars to Randall and said, “Here, this is what it costs me to live …”
“And me?”
“Why, you pay for yourself, of course.”
“No, Seymour, I can’t. I have no money.”
“You—what?” The long, bony face had twisted and grimaced.
“I tell you, I have no money.”
“What do you mean? What have you done with it?”
“None of your damned business.”
“I know what you’ve done! You imbecile!” Seymour had screamed, “You bloody, blathering, sentimental—”
“Shut up. I came back here to take care of you, and a fine state I found you in. If you want me to stay, you can pay for everything. If you don’t, I’ll leave.”
“You—”
“It’s no use calling me names. Take it or leave it.”
Seymour had gone into a tantrum of the utmost frenzy, screaming a tirade of protest and rage. Randall had not stayed nearby to hear it. But all the way upstairs in the fourth-floor room where he locked himself when he wanted to be alone with his papers, he could hear the stream of monstrous imprecations. They did not speak for several days after that. In the interval Seymour contrived by means of the telephone, which he later had removed, to learn that Randall upon returning from Europe, had closed his account with the Seaboard Trust Company, and ordered the Trustees to send all his income abroad, depositing nothing in New York. Seymour had to choose. If he wanted Randall to stay, he must pay for everything, support him entirely. He paid with grudging, taunting bitterness, nagging, carping, droning a stream of the pettiest possible abuse. Every imaginable way to pinch a penny was pursued with avidity more than preposterous in a man of his means. The second removal of the telephone was followed by a refusal ever to buy any coal, except for the grate in the library, so that hot water became altogether a thing of the past. One could shave in cold, if one troubled occasionally to shave. Seymour had not been able to have a tub bath since his accident; gradually Randall too had lost the habit of using the old tin behemoth in its mahogany wainscot. Why plunge into that much cold water all at once? Easier, he thought, to wash himself if he cared to, in patches as he sometimes washed Seymour, using a dribble of cold water from the hand-basin tap. The whole idea became steadily less important. There was no longer any tiresome charwoman to demand hot water for scrubbing; the last of a succession of brutal slatterns who had come in to do housework was dismissed and after that Randall did any housework that was done.
“I’d rather,” he said, not meaning to take the wind out of Seymour’s sails, but doing so. “I don’t want anybody rooting about in here. I don’t want any intruders.”
“Neither do I.” Seymour was surprised to find himself wholly in agreement, and approving of Randall’s view. “We’re much better off by ourselves.”
His inconsistencies did not seem extraordinary to Randall, nor difficult to accept. Occasionally after he had made a frenzied scene while counting out money for food from his strongbox, the whole paroxysm collapsed; he would sit for a moment bowed in his chair with the closed box clutched on his insensible knees; Randall would hear the slow snorts of his diminishing passion; finally his bony, greyish right hand, its fingers tactile as antennae, would feel the quarter-folded paper which meant a ten-dollar bill, and hold it out towards Randall. “Here,” Seymour would say, his head turned sharp the other way, “take it …”
Why refuse? Pride had no more meaning than money itself, a thing of distant import, confusing, vaguely shelved. Randall did not thank Seymour, the words would have implied an importance that the subject did not have. He walked about for weeks on end with forgotten ten-dollar bills in his pockets, then sometimes in his nocturnal searches for oranges he saw a thing in the basement lair of an old-iron or other second-hand dealer, and sometimes he bought it. In certain parts of town there seemed little distinction between night and day: poor parts, queer parts, foreign parts. Their inhabitants lived
the whole clock round, working at the times they could get work, buying when they had the price of an article or the time to haggle over it. He drifted to those parts of town, not knowing why, but drawn beyond his knowledge by the fact that nobody looked at him. Nobody noticed straggling uncut hair, days of beard, a threadbare coat, soiled linen, cracked shoes: everybody looked the same. If he saw a broken trombone sticking out of a pile of old brass at a junk dealer’s in Essex Street, and thought, “There! when Seymour feels like tinkering with something, I’ll get him to fix that; I might try to play it,” nobody cared or remarked that he went in and bought it for ninety-six cents. He took it home and laid it away in case Seymour should ever feel like tinkering.
One hot summer night-was it ten summers that he had been back here?—twelve?—he let himself out of the house after Seymour was settled in bed. It was about half past nine, a dark, moonless night when he faced his hours of prowling and searching with a sense of refuge in the heavy blackness of the sky. Here in Chelsea where the last traces of respectability had vanished in the wake of ragtag rooming-houses, the street lamps were far apart and dimly lit. Downtown in the directions where he usually walked, there was more or less illumination, depending upon the neighborhood and the extent of its nocturnal activity. Where shops were open and the streets crowded with noisy people escaping the foetor of their tenement rooms, bargaining with pushcart vendors for trashy articles and decaying fruit, nobody noticed him and he did not shrink from such light as there was. On his long, maundering walks down to such districts the streets were very dark, echoingly empty, almost abandoned, as if recovering from the daytime assaults of traffic and commerce. He liked the feeling of their belonging to him when they were of no use to anyone else.
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