by Howard Fast
Noticing his intent gaze, she said: “He was the father of the other. But it would seem the other way.”
And, indeed, the portrait upon the opposite side was of a person immeasurably older, a man so weary with life that it burnt out of his eyes in a tired dream. The portrait halted above the waist, but there was enough to give off his lean haggardness and to show clearly the sleeve that hung empty upon his left side. He wore the blue and white of a Continental, a bunch of incongruously gay lace at his chin, and a small, roundish medal upon his breast. But John Preswick could not take his gaze from the empty sleeve and the eyes: gray, too, but not as the boy’s. Gray they were, but not with the gray of sunlight seeking through the branches of a tree; they were gray as the clouds of a storm. And such sad eyes they were!—and such longing eyes! All of the man was there, but the eyes were not; they were back, far back, in a place where he had left them, a place which he often thought of. Perhaps his soul was there too. Almost uncanny it was to see in the picture a man’s soul, and to wonder what it ached for. His brow was lined and creased; his cheeks were hollow; his mouth was a thread of pinkish flesh; and he was weary, so terribly weary.
“If he could only sleep,” John Preswick thought aloud.
“Yes,” old Mrs. Vetchen agreed, her voice low and far, “if he could only sleep. You see, then, that he wants only to sleep, while that boy next to him—his father, the irony of it—wants life. He wants to live, and to laugh, and to dance, and to drink, and to be happy, and to hold women in his arms. He wants everything—whether it be good or not. I wonder, had that picture been painted thirty years later, whether the mouth would still have been so round and girlish, and whether the eyes would have sparkled in that manner. He lived, and he suffered, which was the lot of the Preswicks, until their women lost the power to reproduce of the male; after that, life fell into a groove, and it has been there ever since, unable to crawl from it, degenerating. That is a horrible word, degeneration, but it is nature’s cure for undesirables. First she destroys the virility; then the mind; and then, with a gesture of disgust, she sweeps away the stock itself. That is nature’s way, and it is not wrong; it is only—hard. The boy fought for the King in the last Indian war, and after him, his son fought that the King might lose what little power remained him upon this side of the sea. But it was not so much what they fought for—all that has been forgotten—as that they fought, and that they were strong and bright with life. But the war did something to each of them. In his eyes you can see it, as though he never could but be conscious of that sleeve hanging so empty. Afterwards it was always downwards. We have not multiplied; we have only managed to perpetrate ourselves upon a world that has no use for the decadent. Inez is the last—the last Preswick, though that is not her name. Preswick. It is rather a splendid name, is it not?”
But before he could answer, she said whimsically: “Why am I telling all of this to you? But perhaps it is because your name is John Preswick. Yes, if that were not your name, I should have known. But it is. John Preswick. It is a name that rolls upon your tongue, like good and old wine. He is John Preswick. Do you know, years ago—so many years that you would be startled were I to tell you, I was a girl in this same house. I used to be in love with that picture; and I would sit in front of it on that funny little sofa—it is funny, is it not?—and dream. Sometimes if I were good and if I were to plead hard enough with Frank, who was only a slip of a boy then, he would build me a fire in the grate, and I would curl up before it—alone. And now and again a wisp of flame would dart out, sending its light up over the rim of the mantelpiece, lighting up the face of the boy. It would seem that he was smiling at me,’ or that he had parted those lips of his to say something. That is how I came to love him, and how I promised myself that always I would wait him—I did—until I was married.”
Such simple implication was there in her voice that he turned to look more closely at the old lady, unconscious of his rudeness. But she had quite forgotten him. She was smiling.
“Let me see you,” she said sharply and suddenly. “Come over here by the light!”
He did as she directed, and she put a thumb under his chin, tilting up his head, brushing back his auburn hair with a movement that made it sparkle in the sun. Slowly she nodded, lifting a withered, blue-veined hand and touching his cheek. “It is so; it is very wonderful, and it is much like one of those romances you were holding in your hand a moment ago, but it is so, nevertheless. The boy’s face is yours. And his name is yours. His hair is yellow, and yours is a reddish sort of a brown; but he is like you. Do you see, now, why I took you when you asked at the door? Somehow, the thing is natural; it should not be.”
“I think—I almost understand,” he said thoughtfully. So many months had he been here that he was taking the thing for granted, and all of the other was dead. But it occurred to him now, strange thought, but lovely still, that this little old woman was in love with him; and it warmed him, making him desire to take her thin face between the palms of his hands and kiss the lips connected to nose and chin by innumerable fine lines. She was so old, and small, and frail, and so definitely of a past that could not be again; she was so wistful and attemptedly sharp at the same time; she was, in her pertness, so much of a fraud.
He bent—a long way he had to bend—and he kissed her, and she told him briskly that he was an indecent young rascal taking unheard-of liberties, but a moisture was beneath her spectacles perched upon the thin, sharp nose.
“Leave the room,” she told him. “You are a scamp, and intolerably ill-bred!”
But he smiled at her before he left to show her that he understood, and then he blundered through the library into the garden, where he stood taut and silent, taking in the air with great, unrestrained gulps. All of it, he felt, was too large for him, and now he was a little afraid.
He saw Inez then. From the road she came through the high hedge, opening and closing the little gate, turning to see him. “Hello,” she smiled.
Going to a concrete-cast bench that stood against the hedge, he said: “Inez, would you come over and sit here? I want to speak with you.”
As she sat beside him, he went on quickly, as if he would say it and have it over with: “Inez—the garden. Tell me, Inez, do you ever notice what the garden does?”
“What does the garden do, John Preswick?” she inquired lightly, half mocking him with the name.
“I have been here for more than a year,” he reflected. “And in that time I have learnt many things. Do you know, Inez, that this garden is alive?”
“But of course. All growing things are.”
“No, Inez. All growing things are not. But this garden is. Inez, do you know what the garden thinks?”
“Tell me what the garden thinks, John Preswick,” she laughed.
“It thinks that it has won—because it always has won.
“And it may be that it has won,” he added.
“John Preswick,” she scolded, “you will prate and prate of nonsense. Now tell me something that I can understand. Will you cut me an armful of beauties?—and one of roses?”
“I will.”
“And put them in my room in water. I love roses, John Preswick.
“I love roses, John Preswick….”
But she was no longer there; like the flickering of a light she had vanished into the house, and he was alone in the garden, the humming of insects about his head, the thick scent of flowers in his nostrils, and the distant call of a crow in his ears. Stirring the turf with his foot, he smiled thoughtfully. Over beyond the Steer’s Head the sun was dropping, making of the hill a blackish blur.
5
PASSING between the hedge and the house, he went out of the garden, emerging in the tree-studded field that sloped up to the stone wall. There, under an apple-tree, Frank the gardener was standing, his hatless head almost touching a heavy branch that wriggled out horizontally from the main trunk. At his feet, the brown of his trousers blended with soft ease into the tops of the grass, mak
ing it seem that the branch had continued itself and returned again to the earth. Head tilted, he stared away from John Preswick into the round globe of the setting sun. Where his dirt-colored shirt left off, his skin took up the brown, no line of difference being visible. His hair was a few strands of gray.
After regarding him for a moment, John Preswick walked over and took a place at his side. “What do you see, old Frank?” he asked him.
The man turned a parchment face, glanced at the boy, and then looked back, as though he had given all the answer that was necessary.
“You have seen so many sunsets,” John Preswick said. “Are they all different, old Frank? Do you always believe, Frank, that the sun will rise again? Suppose that it did not rise, and that never again there was a sunset? Then all would be dark, Frank, and it would be of us were dead. But of course that is impossible. The sun always rises. But what if we set—and then live in darkness? Do you believe in God, old Frank? Do you believe that man is like a good bulb that will come from the earth again and again? But it is never exactly the same bulb. Tell me, old Frank, because you have been here for more years than one can count, and you were born here, and you will die here. Every year you watch the life come—and then go again. Tell me, old Frank.”
But as the old man looked at him, there was nothing in the sun-dried face to say that all this talk was more than a meaningless jumble of words—which perhaps it was.
He said, John Preswick, after a moment’s hesitation: “You are so old, Frank, and I am just beginning to live. She showed me the picture, and to-night I shall look into my mirror and see whether she was right, though I am quite confident that she was. I do not understand it. But she does not know of Lucille Croyden, Frank, or of my mother. Nor of the garden. Do you know what the garden says, Frank?”
The old man shook it away as one shakes away a dog that would romp at an indiscreet time.
“That is because it has won, Frank; and you will never again have either the courage or the desire to deny it. Did you ever climb the Steer’s Head and look at the sea?”
Hastily he added: “But that is irrelevant—and yet it is not. When one looks at the sea, Frank, one—” He broke off as the man turned and began to shamble away. Shrugging his shoulders, John Preswick walked in a broad circle that would eventually take him back to the kitchen.
6
AFTER that, there was another day, and, in an effortless manner, another—so that one never looked ahead, but often looked back and wondered whether time had been at all. Summer rounded off into autumn, and after that the short winter, and after that spring again; and suddenly—so suddenly—it was two years.
And knowing it, he said to himself that it could not have been two years, that surely he had been here no more than days, and that if he were taller, and broader, and browner, and she, Inez, was a woman, it was insidious witchery, and nothing that one might rightly know. All of it was very curious.
Unless—he were in the garden, and then he knew that it was two years, and he knew the way of its being so. And it was because of the garden that he set off one morning in late April to the main road, that he might flag an automobile and ride into Charleston. Before noon he arrived in Charleston. Until the sun was overhead he walked about, finding that his footsteps led him always to the docks, where he sat for a while dangling his legs above the water. But by and by he tired of that, and he sought his destination, a shop before which a chocolate-clad soldier stood, bayonet fixed, and before which there was a large, flamboyant poster of a robust woman clad in an outlandish conglomeration of red, blue, and white, having abundant hips and good breasts, and bearing in hand a torch streaming instead of flame the word liberty. There was reading to some length beneath her low skirt, but he scarce gave the details a glance, though he allowed his eyes to shine with genuine admiration for the hips and breasts of liberty. Then he said to the soldier, who was studying him appraisingly:
“Is this where I enlist?”
“How old are you, kid?” the man with the rifle inquired.
“Nineteen.”
“You don’t look it. Go inside and talk to the officer at the desk.”
He went in, and, in a bit less than an hour, he came out, brushed back his hair, and started off down the street. Gazing after him, the soldier shook his head.
Almost immediately, he got a lift, returning to the house in time for a late lunch, during which Mary scolded petulantly. But, somehow, he did not mind her scolding, even when she called him the poorest white trash; and, as he ate, he glanced often at Mary, noticing that after all her yellow face was more pleasant than unpleasant. She fitted in well with the kitchen, which had the same scornful air, saying, in the same petulant manner, that there was not another such kitchen, as perhaps there was not.
And, looking about, he knew that he loved the kitchen more than any room in the house. It was warm, the kitchen, in spite of its bare stone walls, laughing often, smiling more. There was a stove, but it was an innovation which the rest of the room regarded with distinct hostility, especially the hearth. The hearth was large, commanding the kitchen. Into the wall it curled, and under the chimney to the receding fireplace. And to the very edge of the fireplace there was a narrow bench, curving in on either side, upon which one could sit while gazing into the flames. There were smoke-blackened iron hooks above the hearth, used rarely now, except when there was an extra large roast to be made, or an extra large pot of apples or peaches to be stewed. And across the very center of the hearth-space swung an old and mighty beam, dry, worm-holed, dusky with the smoke of a thousand fires; when one came in from a rain, wet, cold and tired, one pulled off one’s coat and slung it across that beam, and then sat upon the bench underneath it breathing in the pungent steam. And before the hearth, the flagstoned floor was black, a blackness no amount of rubbing could remove.
There were other beams, and they flung themselves from one side of the kitchen to the other, and all sorts of pots and hams and netted pork hung from them.
In the kitchen there were three windows, set as high as one’s head, broad, and draped with starched blue curtains. And the door was small and old and weathered as the beams. Altogether, it was a good kitchen, brown and oldish, very much the commoner, and, indeed, the only commoner in the place. Warm in winter, cool in summer, it was a spot to sympathize with a troubled heart or a troubled body. He would be rather more o sorry to leave it than any other part of the house. Perhaps if there were more of this, and the garden were not so sure of itself—
But one does not think of that now.
Finished with his lunch, he had the woodpile. He went out and laid his ax to the logs, feeling a tense satisfaction in the way the chips flew, in the spring of the ash handle, in the sweat that was gathering and running down his brow. As he finished and began to pile the split kindling, Inez appeared, standing by, and regarding him in that half-humorous, knowing manner of hers.
“Don’t go way,” he cried to her. “I’ll be through in a moment.”
He was staring at Inez, noticing her with new and curious interest, and thinking to himself that her blue eyes were the bluest he had ever seen in a face so dark. For a few weeks she had been north, and, strange to say, he had not missed her or wished for her return. But now that he was looking at her, it occurred to him that she was different, and yet, much the same. Her bosom was fuller, but she was still slim, with the same illusion of translucency about her. On another, her face would have been lean and haggard, for there were slight hollows in the cheeks, and the lips were rounded, but not full. Her color was more of a faint violet than pink, a violet that reflected much of the blue in her eyes. And the massed, unbound hair that fell to her shoulders in a broad circle intensified the narrowness of her countenance. Were it not for her eyes, the slope of her face would have been almost feline.
Small and frail she was; and he thought that there might be much in her of what her grandmother had been.
Through with the wood, he went over to her, a new and rath
er eager expression upon his face, a self-confidence that he could not always bring to bear in her presence. “Come, let’s walk,” he said to her.
“And where?” she asked him.
“Steer’s Head.”
A quick, quizzical smile broke over her lips as she turned and looked at him; and she nodded eagerly. “Yes. I haven’t been up there for—ever so long.”
Hesitantly he said: “I want to look at the sea—again.”
And as though she understood, she walked by his side without answering. They walked until they came to the stone wall that made a great semicircle with the hedge, and they turned onto it, going alongside of it to, the green height of the hedge. Now they went slowly, their shoulders brushing, turning, as the road upon the other side did, with every movement of the hedge; and, keeping in that direction, they came at last to the hill called Steer’s Head. Up the same path they went, climbing without haste, and at last they came out on the smooth top where the oak tree stood in lone splendor. In the cool shade of its branches, they paused, letting the breeze whisper to them. Straight they stood, and taut, listening, and both of them gazing to the faint difference of blue that told of the sea.
Then, without speaking, as by common and known consent, they turned and walked down the hill. Through the grass they went, and through the brush, following the windings of the trail, returning finally to the level ground. With measured lack of haste they crossed back to the house.
When they were opposite the stone wall, they stopped, and with what was almost a burst of laughter at the sameness of their thoughts, they sank to the grass beneath a tree.
“I am tired,” she said.
They were sitting at the brink of the last slope; from where they were, in gentle, scarcely perceptible movement, the ground swept down to the house, and they could just look over the hedge and into the garden. The house itself was cut into a pattern by trees—the trees nearest them, that is, for those puff-balls of blossom at the side of the house seemed upon a level with the ground. And upon the other side was the pasture, dropping to the hedge and the road; and on the side opposite that the strip of brush that hid them from their nearest’ neighbor, giving them a sort of isolation.