Читать книгу The Second Generation - David Graham Phillips - Страница 13

When Hiram had so far improved that his period of isolation was obviously within a few days of its end, Adelaide suggested to Arthur, somewhat timidly, "Don't you think you ought to go to work at the mills?"

He frowned. It was bad enough to have the inward instinct to this, and to

fight it down anew each day as a temptation to weakness and cowardice.

That the traitor should get an ally in his sister—it was intolerable.

The frown deepened into a scowl.

But Del had been doing real thinking since she saw her father stricken down, and she was beginning clearly to see his point of view as to Arthur. That angry frown was discouraging, but she felt too strongly to be quite daunted. "It might help father toward getting well," she urged, "and make such a difference—in every way."

"No more hypocrisy. I was right; he was wrong," replied her brother. He had questioned Dr. Schulze anxiously about his father's seizure; and Schulze, who had taken a strong fancy to him and had wished to put him at ease, declared that the attack must have begun at the mills, and would probably have brought Hiram down before he could have reached home, had he not been so powerful of body and of will. And Arthur, easily reassured where he must be assured if he was to have peace of mind, now believed that his outburst had had no part whatever in causing his father's stroke. So he was all for firm stand against slavery. "If I yield an inch now," he went on to Adelaide, "he'll never stop until he has made me his slave. He has lorded it over those workingmen so long that the least opposition puts him in a frenzy."

Adelaide gave over, for the time, the combat against a stubbornness which was an inheritance from his father. "I've only made him more set by what I've said," thought she. "Now, he has committed himself. I ought not to have been so tactless."

Long after Hiram got back in part the power of speech, he spoke only when directly addressed, and then after a wait in which he seemed to have cast about for the fewest possible words. After a full week of this emphasized reticence, he said, "Where is Arthur?"

Arthur had kept away because—so he told himself and believed—while he was not in the least responsible for his father's illness, still seeing him and being thus reminded of their difference could not but have a bad effect. That particular day, as luck would have it, he for the first time since his father was stricken had left the grounds. "He's out driving," said his mother.

"In the tandem?" asked Hiram.

"Yes," replied Ellen, knowing nothing of the last development of the strained relations between her husband and her "boy."

"Then he hasn't gone to work?"

"He's stayed close to the house ever since you were taken sick, Hiram," said she, with gentle reproach. "He's been helping me nurse you."

Hiram did not need to inquire how little that meant. He knew that, when anyone Ellen Ranger loved was ill, she would permit no help in the nursing, neither by day nor by night. He relapsed into his brooding over the problem which was his sad companion each conscious moment, now that the warning "Put your house in order" had been so sternly emphasized.

The day Dr. Schulze let them bring him down to the first floor, Mrs. Hastings—"Mrs. Fred," to distinguish her from "Mrs. Val"—happened to call. Mrs. Ranger did not like her for two reasons—first, she had married her favorite cousin, Alfred Hastings, and had been the "ruination" of him; second, she had a way of running on and on to everyone and anyone about the most intimate family affairs, and close-mouthed Ellen Ranger thought this the quintessence of indiscretion and vulgarity. But Hiram liked her, was amused by her always interesting and at times witty thrusts at the various members of her family, including herself. So, Mrs. Ranger, clutching at anything that might lighten the gloom thick and black upon him, let her in and left them alone together. With so much to do, she took advantage of every moment which she could conscientiously spend out of his presence.

At sight of Henrietta, Hiram's face brightened; and well it might. In old-fashioned Saint X it was the custom for a married woman to "settle down" as soon as she returned from her honeymoon—to abandon all thoughts, pretensions, efforts toward an attractive exterior, and to become a "settled" woman, "settled" meaning purified of the last grain of the vanity of trying to please the eye or ear of the male. And conversation with any man, other than her husband—and even with him, if a woman were soundly virtuous, through and through—must be as clean shorn of allurement as a Quaker meetinghouse. Mrs. Fred had defied this ancient and sacred tradition of the "settled" woman. She had kept her looks; she frankly delighted in the admiration of men. And the fact that the most captious old maid in Saint X could not find a flaw in her character as a faithful wife, aggravated the offending. For, did not her devotion to her husband make dangerous her example of frivolity retained and flaunted, as a pure private life in an infidel made his heresies plausible and insidious? At "almost" forty, Mrs. Hastings looked "about" thirty and acted as if she were a girl or a widow. Each group of gods seems ridiculous to those who happen not to believe in it. Saint X's set of gods of conventionality doubtless seems ridiculous to those who knock the dust before some other set; but Saint X cannot be blamed for having a sober face before its own altars, and reserving its jeers and pitying smiles for deities of conventionality in high dread and awe elsewhere. And if Mrs. Fred had not been "one of the Fuller heirs," Saint X would have made her feel its displeasure, instead of merely gossiping and threatening.

"I'm going the round of the invalids to-day," began Henrietta, after she had got through the formula of sick-room conversation. "I've just come from old John Skeffington. I found all the family in the depths. He fooled 'em again last night."

Hiram smiled. All Saint X knew what it meant for old Skeffington to "fool 'em again." He had been dying for three years. At the first news that he was seized of a mortal illness his near relations, who had been driven from him by his temper and his parsimony, gathered under his roof from far and near, each group hoping to induce him to make a will in its favor. He lingered on, and so did they—watching each other, trying to outdo each other in complaisance to the humors of the old miser. And he got a new grip on life through his pleasure in tyrannizing over them and in putting them to great expense in keeping up his house. He favored first one group, then another, taking fagots from fires of hope burning too high to rekindle fires about to expire.

"How is he?" asked Hiram.

"They say he can't last till fall," replied Henrietta; "but he'll last another winter, maybe ten. He's having more and more fun all the time. He has made them bring an anvil and hammer to his bedside, and whenever he happens to be sleeping badly—and that's pretty often—he bangs on the anvil until the last one of his relations has got up and come in; then, maybe he'll set 'em all to work mending his fishing tackle—right in the dead of night."

"Are they all there still?" asked Hiram. "The Thomases, the Wilsons, the

Frisbies, and the two Cantwell old maids?"

"Everyone—except Miss Frisbie. She's gone back home to Rushville, but she's sending her sister on to take her place to-morrow. I saw Dory Hargrave in the street a while ago. You know his mother was a first cousin of old John's. I told him he ought not to let strangers get the old man's money, that he ought to shy his castor into the ring."

"And what did Dory say?" asked Hiram.

"He came back at me good and hard," said Mrs. Fred, with a good-humored laugh. "He said there'd been enough people in Saint X ruined by inheritances and by expecting inheritances. You know the creek that flows through the graveyard has just been stopped from seeping into the reservoir. Well, Dory spoke of that and said there was, and always had been, flowing from every graveyard a stream far more poisonous than any graveyard creek, yet nobody talked of stopping it."

The big man, sitting with eyes downcast, began to rub his hands, one over the other—a certain sign that he was thinking intently.

"There's a good deal of truth in what he said," she went on. "Look at our family, for instance. We've been living on an allowance from Grandfather Fuller in Chicago for forty years. None of us has ever done a stroke of work; we've simply been waiting for him to die and divide up his millions. Look at us! Bill and Tom drunkards, Dick a loafer without even the energy to be a drunkard; Ed dead because he was too lazy to keep alive. Alice and I married nice fellows; but as soon as they got into our family they began to loaf and wait. We've been waiting in decent, or I should say, indecent, poverty for forty years, and we're still waiting. We're a lot of paupers. We're on a level with the Wilmots."

"Yes—there are the Wilmots, too," said Hiram absently.

"That's another form of the same disease," Henrietta went on. "Did you know General Wilmot?"

"He was a fine man," said Hiram, "one of the founders of this town, and he made a fortune out of it. He got overbearing, and what he thought was proud, toward the end of his life. But he had a good heart and worked for all he had—honest work."

"And he brought his family up to be real down-East gentlemen and ladies," resumed Henrietta. "And look at 'em. They lost the money, because they were too gentlemanly and too ladylike to work to hold on to it. And there they live in the big house, half-starved. Why, really, Mr. Ranger, they don't have enough to eat. And they dress in clothes that have been in the family for a generation. They make their underclothes out of old bed linen. And the grass on their front lawns is three feet high, and the moss and weeds cover and pry up the bricks of their walks. They're too 'proud' to work and too poor to hire. How much have they borrowed from you?"

"I don't know," said Hiram. "Not much."

"I know better—and you oughtn't to have lent them a cent. Yesterday old

Wilmot was hawking two of his grandfather's watches about. And all the

Wilmots have got brains, just as our family has. Nothing wrong with

either of us, but that stream Dory Hargrave was talking about."

"There's John Dumont," mused Ranger.

"Yes—he is an exception. But what's he doing with what his father left him? I don't let them throw dust in my eyes with his philanthropy as they call it. The plain truth is he's a gambler and a thief, and he uses what his father left him to be gambler and thief on the big scale, and so keep out of the penitentiary—'finance,' they call it. If he'd been poor, he'd have been in jail long ago—no, he wouldn't—he'd have done differently. It was the money that started him wrong."

"A great deal of good can be done with money," said Hiram.

"Can it?" demanded Mrs. Fred. "It don't look that way to me. I'm full of this, for I was hauling my Alfred over the coals this very morning"—she laughed—"for being what I've made him, for doing what I'd do in his place—for being like my father and my brothers. It seems to me, precious little of the alleged good that's done with wealth is really good; and what little isn't downright bad hides the truth from people. Talk about the good money does! What does it amount to—the good that's good, and the good that's rotten bad? What does it all amount to beside the good that having to work does? People that have to work hard are usually honest and have sympathy and affection and try to amount to something. And if they are bad, why at least they can't hurt anybody but themselves very much, where a John Dumont or a Skeffington can injure hundreds—thousands. Take your own case, Mr. Ranger. Your money has never done you any good. It was your hard work. All your money has ever done has been—Do you think your boy and girl will be as good a man and woman, as useful and creditable to the community, as you and Cousin Ellen?"

Hiram said nothing; he continued to slide his great, strong, useful-looking hands one over the other.

"A fortune makes a man stumble along if he's in the right road, makes him race along if he's in the wrong road," concluded Henrietta.

"You must have been talking a great deal to young Hargrave lately," said

Hiram shrewdly.

She blushed. "That's true," she admitted, with a laugh. "But I'm not altogether parroting what he said. I do my own thinking." She rose. "I'm afraid I haven't cheered you up much."

"I'm glad you came," replied Hiram earnestly; then, with an admiring look, "It's a pity some of the men of your family haven't got your energy."

She laughed. "They have," said she. "Every one of us is a first-rate talker—and that's all the energy I've got—energy to wag my tongue. Still—You didn't know I'd gone into business?"

"Business?"

"That is, I'm backing Stella Wilmot in opening a little shop—to sell millinery."

"A Wilmot at work!" exclaimed Hiram.

"A Wilmot at work," affirmed Henrietta. "She's more like her great grandfather; you know how a bad trait will skip several generations and then show again. The Wilmots have been cultivating the commonness of work out of their blood for three generations, but it has burst in again. She made a declaration of independence last week. She told the family she was tired of being a pauper and beggar. And when I heard she wanted to do something I offered to go in with her in a business. She's got a lot of taste in trimming hats. She certainly has had experience enough."

"She always looks well," said Hiram.

"And you'd wonder at it, if you were a woman and knew what she's had to work on. So I took four hundred dollars grandfather sent me as a birthday present, and we're going to open up in a small way. She's to put her name out—my family won't let me put mine out, too. 'Wilmot & Hastings' would sound well, don't you think? But it's got to be 'Wilmot & Co.' We've hired a store—No. 263 Monroe Street. We have our opening in August."

"Do you need any—" began Hiram.

"No, thank you," she cut in, with a laugh. "This is a close corporation.

No stock for sale. We want to hold on to every cent of the profits."

"Well," said Hiram, "if you ever do need to borrow, you know where to come."

"Where the whole town comes when it's hard up," said Henrietta; and she astonished the old man by giving him a shy, darting kiss on the brow. "Now, don't you tell your wife!" she exclaimed, laughing and blushing furiously and making for the door.

When Adelaide, sent by her mother, came to sit with him, he said: "Draw the blinds, child, and leave me alone. I want to rest." She obeyed him. At intervals of half an hour she opened the door softly, looked in at him, thought he was asleep, and went softly away. But he had never been further from sleep in his life. Henrietta Hastings's harum-scarum gossiping and philosophizing happened to be just what his troubled mind needed to precipitate its clouds into a solid mass that could be clearly seen and carefully examined. Heretofore he had accepted the conventional explanations of all the ultimate problems, had regarded philosophers as time wasters, own brothers to the debaters who whittled on dry-goods boxes at the sidewalk's edge in summer and about the stoves in the rear of stores in winter, settling all affairs save their own. But now, sitting in enforced inaction and in the chill and calm which diffuses from the tomb, he was using the unused, the reflective, half of his mind.