He stood on the top step of the stoop, his basket on his arm, deciding in which direction to go. The basket was the same rather odd and invariable shape as several others which he used; the shape of the basket, which was carefully stowed away in a safe place on the fourth floor. He saw fewer and fewer baskets of this shape; oblong, with rounded corners, the willow bent as if to puff them out, in contrast with the commoner square corners that most baskets had. Whenever he saw another basket of his own sort, he acquired it, acting upon some impulse which was deeply urgent in him, like the physical necessity to relieve himself. He was compelled, but the habit was so long established that he never recognized it as a compulsion; it functioned of itself. If the basket were for sale, he bought it; if it could be had for the taking, he took it. He always carried one of the baskets on his arm when he went out at night. In it he brought home Seymour’s oranges and whatever other food he bought, and anything else that he acquired, if it was of a size to fit in the basket.
He was just beginning to descend the sandstone steps, some of which were jagged like broken teeth at the edges, when a figure leaped from the shadow of the areaway, uttering a long, shrill howl. Randall gasped, clutched his basket, and sank down terrified on the steps. There was a second howl, a snarling noise which could be the caterwaul of an alley-cat but was not.
“Yanh,” shrilled the voice. “Looney! Loo—oo—ney!” It hooted like an owl.
“Yanh! Shame! Shame on you!” A second voice joined the caterwauling. Figures began to creep towards the steps, dark figures, undiscernible.
“Go away!” Randall’s voice broke high. “Get out of here!”
“Loo—oo—ney!” The wailing rose and fell. Randall cowered on the broken step, hiding his face from the skulking figures.
“Crazy house … Looney people … Bughouse … Yanh … Yoooooooooh …” Two voices, three, four… .
“Stop it!” Randall tried to stand, shaking so helplessly that he dropped the basket and it rolled down the steps. Something jumped on it. He heard crackling, splintering, loutish laughs.
“You stop that,” he screamed. “Get out of here. Leave that alone.”
“Aw, come off,” roared a hoodlum’s voice. “Lay off, Smitty. Leava poor nut alone.”
“Looney! Bughouse!”
“Sharrup. Getta hell out. C’mon, Skinnay.”
“Whooo—ooo—”
“No,” sobbed Randall, cowering on the step. “No … no.”
“Dat’s enough, getta hell out. Hey you, McBane, scram …”
“No!” screamed Randall again. The figures swarmed in the yard. One approached the steps, he saw two hands, the forefinger of one brushing the forefinger of the other. “Shame!” chanted a hooligan’s voice. “Shame on a loon! Shame on you … yanh … yanh!”
“Lay off, ya hear? Ya done it, beat it.”
“Yanh … yanh … shame on you, shame on you …” The hoots and calls moved off, there were shambling figures out by the gate, a hoarse bass snigger, rough guffaws, shuffling steps, obscenities. Randall sat still, bent into a trembling ball, his face buried in his hands. He cowered there for a long time, long after he had heard the last of the dragging footsteps, the coarse bawling voices. Then, still crouched, looking neither right nor left, he crept by inches down the steps, picked up the splinters of his basket, slowly climbed the steps again and let himself into the house. With a groan he slammed the door behind him and stood with his back against it, panting. From upstairs he heard the high tremor of Seymour’s voice, frantic, panic-ridden. He too was crying, “No, no … stop. McBane, I heard them yell McBane…”
Randall went up to him and found him shaking, his hands beating the air, his face contorted. He said, “It’s me, Brother, I came back. I—”
Seymour began to whimper. “They said McBane,” he cried again. “That woman, that terrible—”
“Oh, she’s dead,” said Randall in a strange matter-of-fact voice at which he himself was astonished. “That hoodlum must be her son.”
“They said McBane,” whined Seymour again. “You’ve got to keep them out, Randall. You mustn’t let them near us. They’re devils, they want to—” he choked and chattered incoherently. “Keep them out, keep them away …”
“Yes,” said Randall, smoothing Seymour’s forehead. “Yes, Brother. You’re perfectly right. We’ve got to keep them out. We’ve got to be safe.”
“Oh, how can we do it … what will you do?”
“Try to be quiet, Seymour,” said Randall gently. “Try to get calm. I’ll find ways to do it, stop worrying about that. I won’t let them in here.”
“Don’t let them in,” said Seymour, lost in his fear. “Don’t let them in. They’ll get my box, they’ll steal my money.”
“No, Brother.” Randall sat on the edge of the bed, gently stroking Seymour’s tangled hair. “Try to stop worrying now. They shan’t get in.”
He had no box, he had no money. But he had his things. He could not endure the thought of intruders either.
If it had not been for the newspapers they might have had no idea at all of the passage of years, instead of the crepuscular impression that they received but did not retain. The seasons had more reality, the necessity to buy more kerosene when the weather was cold, less bread when it was hot, because bread went mouldy so fast. They had not used gas for years. After they knew that nothing would ever again induce them to allow a person to enter their house, they said they could as well get along without gas, meaning more exactly, that they would never again admit the man who came to read the meter. After that Randall found a second-hand two-burner kerosene cookstove, which he put behind the screen in the corner of the library; and two old-fashioned kerosene lamps, which with occasional candles were all the light they wanted anyway. One day they asked one another why they should bother any longer with coal for the library grate. If they did not want the man from Tony’s in Tenth Avenue even to enter the yard to bring small sacks of coal and dump them down the chute in the areaway, Randall would have to carry them himself. He was not strong enough. Besides, it was becoming too difficult to get through the blockade of massed stuff to get to the coal-bin in the front of the cellar. He said it was much easier to carry home the filled gallon can of kerosene whenever they needed it. He bought a couple of round sheet-iron kerosene room-heaters with which they managed, they said, perfectly well. He was pleased to be able to find them in a junk shop for less than two dollars apiece.
But the newspapers came regularly, morning and evening, the full complement of every daily paper published in New York. The brothers never asked each other why they had no objection to the newsboy’s approaching the house to fling his bundle of folded papers at the disused side door. Randall used the front door when entering or leaving the house, but the newsboy had always brought the papers to the side door; he must continue to do so. It was years since Randall had unlocked and opened that door. Morning and evening he waited in the ground-floor hall, hovering behind the glass-paned ebony curio cabinet that he had dragged from the drawing-room and set against the door. When he heard outside the thump that meant the landing of the bundle of newspapers against the door, he waited a moment until the boy should have reached the street again; then he ran quickly out the front door, down the steps, round to the side, seized the armful of papers, and hurried into the house, bolting and chaining the front door behind himself.
In actual fact he seldom read the papers aloud to Seymour. The promised day when Seymour should have recovered his sight and become able to read for himself was so cogent a talisman that they felt, and sometimes said, they did not want to impede it by the least doubt of its eventuality. So they clung doggedly to the cure, which meant Seymour’s eating about a hundred oranges every week, and Randall’s keeping very busy supplying them.
It was only when Seymour was unusually restless, late on the nights when he refused to be moved into his bed, and stayed instead in his chair in the library, that he asked Randall to read a newspaper aloud to him. T
he rest of the time Randall assembled the papers downstairs in the old dining-room and at regular intervals bundled and tied them and methodically continued what he had long termed in his own mind, his work. What had begun as a means of obstructing the attic rooms to the passage and the audible presence of rats was continuing because it seemed so practical a way to effect other results that he wanted. After filling up, blocking absolutely solid the entire attic floor, rooms, hall, and stairs, he had found that the front rooms of the next lower floor, the fourth, were mildewing, peeling, moulding, and giving very disagreeable evidence that the upper front wall, or the roof over the front of the house, was leaking badly. It did not even occur to him to bring up the question of repairs. Seymour with his violent tantrums at any demand for money, would only go into one of his bad states, and Randall was too hazy about the notion of any money of his own to think of a use for it. The mere idea of any repair to the house ruled itself out because only once in all his life had there been a reason for doing such a thing. Now the reason did not exist. He took the place as it was, and he felt capable of dealing with it in his own way. He felt secure and satisfied with the solid soundproof block he had made of the top floor; he would start in the front of the fourth floor to make another such block. The papers would absorb the slimy damp that greased the walls and must be the reason for that nasty smell. His own special place, the old day nursery on the same floor at the back of the house, seemed to be just the same as ever. Of course his accumulation of papers had long since become too much for his small hidden desk. He had sorted them all through and put in the desk the very most important, most secret, most treasured of his things. The rest he kept in the wardrobe, the bureau, and various other pieces of furniture which he had dragged to the room, each thing supplied with its own lock and key. He carried a very large bunch of keys in his trousers pocket and it took a long time to find the right key when he wanted to open something. Once in a while he stood in the remaining space, little enough, in the centre of the room, estimating how much more place there was for his papers as he accumulated them. He had years ago used up the last of his music-manuscript paper, and, already fixed in the habit of buying nothing blank or new, he had simply moved to the room his collection of printed music, whose margins provided enough space for jottings in his miniscule hand. It was when he had no further pieces of furniture in which to lock up the sheets and volumes of scribbled-over printed music that he took to finding suitcases, valises, any sort of old luggage, in which to keep them. Nothing was easier to pick up at junk shops or in rubbish dumps than old luggage. He required only that it have locks. If the keys were lost he was always sure of finding some key in his enormous bunch which would fit.
What year was it now? If Seymour asked him—and occasionally Seymour did—he had only to look at a newspaper. When he read out such a date as November 19th, 1925, they murmured in dull surprise at the passage of time, but actually the span had little meaning. They had never been given to talk about time, the past, the assembled identities which hovered in the dusk of intentional oblivion. From the first days of Randall’s return to share this life with Seymour, his brother had maintained a silence concerning the interval of Randall’s absence, and all that had brought it about, as dogged as the avarice which dictated every detail of their lives. And, with the same sharp breaks of inconsistency that tossed at Randall an occasional sop of pocket-money, Seymour at rare intervals ruptured the crust of silence with a question about the past.
On such an evening, when Randall that day had done him some particular kindness, Seymour sat on in his chair past the hour when he ordinarily went to bed and Randall ventured out on his nightly errands. Randall said something about its growing late; Seymour put him off, asking if there were not enough oranges on hand to last through tomorrow? Randall had found a special bargain last night and bought an extra quantity.
“Yes,” he answered, “I guess there are.”
“I don’t feel like going to bed,” said Seymour. “It might be like last night again. I got to—thinking.”
“You did?” Randall did not ask what Seymour had thought about. But Seymour said uneasily, “Yes. About you. And—all that.” “There’s nothing to think about me.”
“Rot. You mean you never think about it yourself?”
“About what, Brother?” Randall’s eyes at a moment like this could glow as blue and innocent as ever, even though they shone from a pale, stubbled face, rising from a dirt-encrusted neck and a soiled paper collar.
“About that life you lived in Italy. And her, and the boy.”
Randall’s lips trembled for a moment; his muscles tensed, his face worked. He swallowed, twisted his hands uneasily and felt weak and dizzy; but Seymour could not see him; a good deal of calm could be achieved in the face of that.
“Well,” he said slowly, after a time, “I don’t believe I think about it very much. I don’t believe I have,” he said, “ever since I came back here.”
“Twelve years,” said Seymour, drawling. “Don’t you ever wonder what’s—what’s—happened?”
“I know what’s happened,” said Randall, very quiet.
“Oh. So they write to you.”
Panic swept Randall for an instant, a sense of being spied upon. But Seymour cannot spy, he cannot see. They do not write. Why don’t they write? I must have told them not to. But they’re all right. He knew that, he had never had any doubt about it. “It’s just that I know,” he said.
“Strange,” said Seymour slowly. They sat silent for a long time. At last he said, “Don’t you ever think about that place over there? It must have been to say the least a lot different from this.”
“It was, of course. But you know, Brother, I never have been able somehow to think much about it since I came back here. I don’t remember it very well. It’s queer. It was beautiful.” Randall’s voice turned very soft, much softer than the quiet tone in which he usually spoke. “It was so beautiful that I feel as if I didn’t think it was real while I was there. Ever since I left, when I’ve tried to reach back and touch the memories of it I’ve scarcely ever been able to do it … I get all sort of hazy. Much more as time goes on.”
Seymour did not comment. Suddenly Randall said, “But the curious thing is that when I was there, I used to get—” he waved his hands as if to draw the words he sought from the air. “Sort of waves, fits, I don’t know how to say it.”
“Of what?”
“Of remembering about here. I can remember being there and having all these feelings about here. But after I came here—well, I guess I just lost the power to remember about it over there. Anyway, it’s always seemed so very far away, like something I dreamed.”
“It wasn’t too much of a dream for you to do something concrete about the boy. And I suppose, her.”
Randall sat swallowing, breathing hard, relieved that Seymour could not see him. He said, with great effort, “Let’s not talk about that.”
“Why?” Seymour leaned forward, his narrow shoulders hunched, his gaunt hairy face peering between them like something reptilian. The lids twitched over his blind eyes. “Why?” His voice was sliding, veiled in the faintest hint of a snarl. “Why? Isn’t it as much my business as yours?”
“Please.” Randall turned away and sat swallowing the sick feeling, the lump in his throat which he did not want Seymour, in the form of choked words, to hear.
“Isn’t it?” asked Seymour again. Randall did not answer. Suddenly Seymour said, cruel and swift, “Randall, did you marry her?”
“No!” It was almost a scream.
“Well …” The bony body sank back slowly in the cripple’s chair. “Why not?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Randall. “After all these years, this is no time to bring it up. Let it be.”
“I have a right to know,” said Seymour abruptly.
Randall sat crushed with miserable surprise. Seymour repeated, “I have a right to know,” and Randall said, unendurably goaded, “Why?”
>
Horribly, Seymour gave a short, nasal laugh. He said slowly, “Could you prove he was yours? Could you prove he wasn’t mine?”
“Oh … Oh …” Randall buried his face in his hands and spoke from behind them. “Be still. Stop talking about it.”
“Now that I’ve started? I don’t see why. I’d like to know I’d had a son,” he reflected. “She ought to be able to say.”
“Seymour, I can’t bear it! Will you be still!”
“You always were a sentimental fool.” Seymour ignored Randall’s agonized protest. “I wouldn’t have married her for all the rice in China but I suppose you asked her to marry you. It would be just like you.” He leaned forward again, the slow movement which reminded Randall of a turtle thrusting its head from its shell. His sense of place and sound and contact was so acute that he had at moments the power to fix his sightless eyes as if they were staring hard. He did that now, leaning straight towards Randall. He asked, “Why wouldn’t she marry you?”
“I didn’t say I ever asked her to,” said Randall through his teeth.
“But you did. Why did she refuse?”
“Oh, Brother,” cried Randall, in a frenzy, “why are you tormenting me?”
“Because I want to know. I have a right to know. Why did she refuse?”
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