“Oh, God.” Seymour was convulsed again. “Out of the mouths of babes! And you’ve never paid a dime of income-tax.”
“No,” said Randall, genuinely innocent. “Why should I?”
As time went on, Seymour slept less and less. He had taken a dislike to being wheeled to his bedroom and moved into bed for the night. Randall was concerned because he always felt a bit reluctant to go out on his errands, leaving Seymour sitting up in his chair in the library. But Seymour had other matters on his mind, he could not imagine why Randall thought he was any better off in bed than here in his chair. Sometimes they argued about it. At other times Randall put off his nightly expeditions and sat quietly in the library with Seymour. He kept the day’s newspapers handy in case Seymour wanted them read aloud, and on rare occasions Seymour shrugged, sighed, and said, “Oh, all right. Read if you want to. If there’s anything worth reading …”
Then Randall would turn the pages slowly, looking for something interesting. The front pages were full of war news, but this war had no reality compared to the other one. It was dispersed and diffused, happening all over the world in places that had no meaning to the brothers. Randall would read this headline and that, watching to see if it caught Seymour’s attention; but Seymour sat with his head sunken between his shoulders like a turtle half-retracted in its shell, his eyelids nearly closed over the sightless eyes, again in the manner of a dozing tortoise. He would sit in this way while Randall murmured along, fragments of this and that; only occasionally would Seymour’s eyebrows go up grudgingly in a suggestion of response. Now and then something caught his interest sufficiently to evoke a snappish, “Well, go on. What are you stopping for?”
So Randall read, one night, about a fire in a house somewhere near Hoboken, which had been occupied by a solitary aged man, who died of suffocation while the firemen were pouring tons of water into the structure.
“ ‘That water,’ ” Randall read, ” ‘dug into the old man’s secrets, flushed them out of their hiding-places, and exposed them for all to see. Today police and fire crews, on hand to drain ten feet of water from the cellar, found floating on the surface bills of $10, $20, and $50 denominations. When the water was pumped out they discovered heavier wads of money that had stuck to the cellar floor.’ ”
“Damned fool,” observed Seymour. “Well—go on.”
“ ‘That money was not the end of Mr. Fayer’s wealth. Searchers found stocks and bonds too … the bills and securities are being turned over to the Coroner … so far a total of well over $100,000 …’ ”
“Damned fool,” said Seymour again.
“But Brother, listen to this:
“ ‘Money and securities were not all that Mr. Fayer had hidden squirrel-like in nooks and crannies. From floor to ceiling all seven rooms of the house were piled with what the recluse must have considered precious possessions, saved for some distant date or awful emergency known only to him… . Perhaps most inexplicably of all … towers of popsicle sticks, some as high as ten feet …’ ”
“What the devil are popsicle sticks?” barked Seymour, listening intently.
“Why—those little sticks that come in ice-cream—like lollipop sticks. You remember, we used to have those when we were boys. Well, now they make ice-cream lollipops, on a stick. I see the children eating them downtown.”
“And what did this chap do with them?”
“Why, he seems to have collected them.” Randall looked through the article again. “That entire house was crammed full of these towers he had built of popsicle sticks. Millions of them, probably. He had been doing it for years.”
They were silent for a time. Then Randall said, “Brother, do you suppose there are really people like that? Do you think somebody made this story up?”
“Well, you’ve just read it in the New York Times. I don’t suppose they made it up.”
“How queer,” said Randall, in his gentle, thoughtful voice. “It does seem hard to believe, doesn’t it.”
Seymour shrugged. His momentary interest in the story had already evaporated because he thought he heard a noise downstairs. He sat forward in his chair, sharply concentrated, his face intent. Randall watched him, listening too.
“I don’t hear anything, Brother,” he said presently.
“Go down and see anyway.”
“But-”
“Don’t ‘but’! Are you paralyzed too? God damn it, go down and see!”
Randall came back to report that everything was absolutely all right. But Seymour was excited; it was a long time before Randall got him quiet enough to settle down for the night. He had been brooding incessantly ever since the intrusion of the policeman; he was obsessed with the possibility that such a thing might happen again. Day by day he questioned Randall minutely about the progress of his work, and about every detail, many of which were Seymour’s ideas. Randall thought they made a fine team, Seymour doing the planning and Randall carrying it out. By now the work had advanced both upstairs and down, to the extent that the entire fourth floor, like the attic one, was solidly packed except for the room where Randall kept his things. Most of the third floor was finished too; so far Randall had left just enough unfilled space to be able to worm his way up the stairs to the old day nursery. Downstairs, the old basement kitchen and service rooms were partly done. The dining-room, of course, was Randall’s workroom and the place where he stored the newspapers until enough had accumulated at a time to be bundled. On the ground floor he had to leave a certain amount of space for passage past the blocked doors of the finished drawing-room. And he had to leave the stairs clear enough to go up and down to the second floor, where they lived.
Seymour mused about all this to the exclusion, at that time, of speaking about anything else. He often said he could think better sitting up in his chair than lying in bed, and with increasing frequency he never went to bed all night, but stayed in his wheelchair in the library.
“But doesn’t your back get very tired, Brother?” asked Randall on one of these nights.
“Your solicitude is touching,” replied Seymour. “You so easily overlook the reason why I am in this condition at all. Paralysis,” he snapped, “usually means that the affected parts are insensible …”
“Oh, forgive me, Brother.” Randall put his hand on Seymour’s arm, and touched his cheek gently. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Oh, you can’t hurt me. I just told you—”
“I only meant,” said Randall, fumbling for words, “I thought it rested you a little to be p— to be in a different position for the night.”
“Well, sometimes it does,” said Seymour. He flapped his hands nervously to dismiss the subject. “But just now I’m too busy thinking, I don’t want to be distracted. Look here—about those tunnels.”
And he began to talk slowly, intently, with the unhesitating exactitude that had never left him in any degree, and least of all when the subject was a technical one. Step by step he set forth what for months he had been designing in his mind with infinite precision of detail. At moments, keeping a block of paper on his lap and a pencil in his hand, he even drew a crude but intelligible diagram of his design.
“It’s a question of leverage,” he said. “And of balance. Do you see?”
He had explained so explicitly that a ten-year-old boy could have understood him, and Randall had been accustomed for years to working with the materials of this plan. “Yes,” he said, nodding slowly and pausing to confirm that he felt perfectly capable of carrying out each step of Seymour’s design. “Yes. I follow you exactly.”
“Well, then, if you stack the bundles in the remaining unfilled spaces in the way we have been talking about, and plan about four of these traps at equal distances through the tunnels, there isn’t a chance in heaven or hell that anybody who did break in could ever get as far as this room. They’d be killed on the way.” Seymour chuckled through his nose. “About twenty of those bundles of yours—heh heh heh—” He seemed delighted. “It would squash �
��em flatter than a bedbug.”
“I wish you’d invent something as smart that would squash our bedbugs right now.”
“Why, Randall! Why Brother—dear! Surely you don’t—” Seymour wriggled the upper half of his body with mischievous pleasure.
“You mean they don’t bite you?”
“I don’t know,” said Seymour carelessly. “I’m much more comfortable since I stopped that damnfool washing you used to try to put over on me. Clothes are clothes.” He sat thinking for a moment. “By the way,” he said, “what’s the use of that bathroom down the hall?”
“Why—nothing, I guess.”
“You’ve been bringing in water from the hose-tap in the back yard for a long time now.”
“Yes. Ever since that pipe burst to the washbasin. After that I took one of your wrenches and turned them all off-the kitchen sink too. So we wouldn’t have them leaking on us if anything happened again.”
“That’s right,” said Seymour, nodding agreement. “Absolutely right. Well, then, you might as well start work in the bathroom too. Sooner or later you’ll have the rest done, above and below this floor. And we’ll finish it off with whatever space we don’t really need here. Then let ‘em try to get in here again!”
“Well,” said Randall. He was thinking about his things on the fourth floor. He had more or less intended to leave that room as it was, and the means of access to it. But if he did that, and then wanted to go up to the room at times, Seymour would hear him and begin to nag. He wondered now why he had not thought of the disused bathroom sooner. If he moved to his own room the things that he might ever want to look at, and hid safely in the bathroom the most private things like his desk, he would feel that they were near enough so he could protect them, and he could go ahead and finish all the space upstairs. A great deal of music and other stuff would still remain on the fourth floor, of course. But he would not worry about it.
“That’s fine,” he said to Seymour. “Just fine, Brother. I’ll keep right on working.”
“Good. And you know, you’ll have to buy some good strong rope. New rope. I don’t mind paying for that,” Seymour added hastily, and slewed himself round in his chair to get at his box in its drawer. He still kept to his old system of identifying his cash, but the messenger from the bank for years past had not come into the house. Randall met him at the front gate on the first of every month, and took in to Seymour the sealed package from the Seaboard. “New rope,” said Seymour again, and told Randall exactly where to go to get it, a ship-chandler’s in South Street. “Tell him I sent you. And tell him just what I have specified.” He sat and thought for a moment. “But Randall, for God’s sake don’t start rigging the rope until I’ve thought a little more about this. It’s got to be foolproof, and safe for you. And not too much trouble for you to move and put back whenever you want to go through.”
“Oh, it won’t be too much trouble, Brother!”
Nothing seemed too much trouble because each thing he did had such a compelling reason. Although Randall himself really never read the newspapers, there were moments when words caught his eye, either when he was stacking and tying the bundles, or on the rare evenings when he read aloud to Seymour. Once in turning a page he had seen a small item at the bottom; something about a blind woman miraculously cured. She ascribed her restored sight to a certain sort of whole-wheat bread which she had been told to eat. Randall determined to find out where this bread could be had, and after weeks of inquiry, he found that it was baked by a German over in Brooklyn. He walked that night downtown, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and then, patiently asking his way in the maze of strange streets, he tramped a couple of miles, sometimes circling back on himself, until he found the bakery. Only as he approached the dark, closed shop, a long time past midnight, did it occur to him that it would be closed; but he sat down on the step and waited until he saw a light go on behind the barred basement window. He smiled happily; he had not wasted his time. Bakers got up in the small hours to do their baking. He banged on the window until the man came and opened it and listened, dumbfounded, to Randall’s request.
Thereafter, he walked every Tuesday night all the way to the bakery in Brooklyn to buy a week’s supply of the bread which was cheaper than any bread he had bought before, and cost still less when he took it stale. Seymour was inclined to scoff, but Randall begged so hard that he eat it! It was impossible to refuse. Like everything else, the whole-wheat bread gradually became a habit and Seymour would have been indignant had it not been there. He never asked why Randall did not take the subway to Brooklyn and back; the question would have had no meaning. Randall had not gone anywhere except on foot for something approaching thirty years, a span of time that he had long ago lost the ability to count. The immeasurable miles and hours of his nocturnal walks were lost in the mazes of habit. His only tangible concern in that realm was shoes: he wore out an increasingly alarming quantity of them. Leather, he told Seymour sadly, was not what it used to be. Very often the cobbler told him crossly that the uppers of his shoes were not worth the repeated re-solings upon which he insisted. At intervals he actually had to go and buy shoes, a detestable ordeal. He knew a block down on the East Side where vendors sold shoes from pushcarts. Those cost less than any others and suited him better. He had not bought any other article of clothing since he could remember. The house seemed to be an inexhaustible reservoir of trousers and jackets and other perfectly useful things. Seymour had once been a real dandy, and had accumulated a large wardrobe before his sight failed. And Mama of course had carefully treasured every stitch of Papa’s clothing. Randall had always found something he could wear. But his favorite clothes were a pair of striped oxford-grey trousers and the brown velvet smoking-jacket that Seymour had given him one Christmas long ago. He did not like hats. They were uncomfortable. He preferred caps, and one particularly, a peaked tweed cap which Seymour had used for motoring. Randall had found that if he turned it round and wore it backwards it kept his hair from straggling and floating over his forehead, and held it down snugly on the back of his neck.
It was quite satisfying, Randall thought, how much less effort he seemed to have to make about things as the end of his work drew in sight. The tunnels were almost finished, and Seymour, when Randall described the workings of the noise-alarms and the delicately-balanced booby traps, was delighted. He took so much satisfaction in the plan that he decided finally to abandon his bedroom altogether. If he should stay day and night in the library, snug in his corner between the bay-window and his desk, he would be more comfortable and Randall could go on and finish the work in Seymour’s bedroom. Everything that Seymour needed was at hand in the library, where he could touch it or Randall could give it to him. And Seymour felt safer, for some reason, if he never had to be moved to the front of the house. That was where intruders had come whenever they had threatened. Let us, he said, finish it off, block it entirely: we shall never have to worry again. In the library they blocked up all the sashes of the bay-window except the one beside which Seymour was accustomed to sit. Sometimes if the sun shone he liked to feel it for a few moments on his shoulders; and once in a great while on a summer night he even asked to have the sash raised an inch or two. But most of the time he wanted it shut and latched and the three layers of tattered blinds drawn down.
He appeared to have developed an even acuter degree of hearing than in all his life before. “I need it,” he explained, when Randall remarked about it. “Now that you’ve got the papers right into this room, and the tunnel all rigged with the booby-trap, the papers deaden sound, of course, and I must listen extra carefully to be sure of what I hear. Fortunately,” he said, with one of his rare smiles, “it’s always you.”
The summer was very hot, that year that Randall’s work was finished. He had no idea how long he had been at it, nor of any other measure of time. But he supposed he must be growing old because he did not find his long nightly walks so easy any more. On days after he had walked to Brooklyn for the bread he fel
t quite tired. He was content to stay in the library with Seymour all day, and not make the effort of setting and upsetting the big booby-trap, a nerve-racking procedure which was necessary whenever he went in or out. Once inside, it was effortless to peel Seymour’s orange, or open a tin of baked beans or tomato soup, which was all they cared to eat, along with the whole-wheat bread. In hot weather they did not like their food warmed. They ate it with spoons right from the can. After a time they grew so used to this that they never thought to heat the food again at all.
Then at night, because he had so long been fixed in the habit of going out after dark, Randall sometimes took the trouble to clear his way through the big booby-trap and past the two noise-traps in the library tunnel, and then through the other traps of various depths and sorts, all the way out through the barricaded entry to the front stoop. He would come out slowly, carrying his basket, having conscientiously blocked the entry behind himself; and if it were a very hot night, or he felt unusually tired, he would lower himself stiffly to the top step and sit there, not thinking about anything, not deciding whether he would later go on and walk; just resting.
The neighborhood was more crowded than it used to be, but the faces, if he raised his eyes to look at them, were all strange, and there was a feeling of safety in that. Any person who had ever troubled or tormented him and Seymour, those hoodlums of long ago, anybody who had ever known them before, had vanished in the flux of slum life. He never heard a catcall now, he never heard the hissed and snickered words which long ago had set him quaking. He knew that people stood, two or three at a time, down at the bottom of the steps, sometimes staring, sometimes venturing a remark about the heat or the rising rents or some other commonplace. He wondered why they dared come through the gate out by the pavement and then found without surprise that the gate, he had no idea when, had disappeared. The low iron picket fence lay any-which-way between the bare black yard and the broken sidewalk. Well, he thought—and thought no more about it.
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