Читать книгу Man of Strife - Grove Wilson - Страница 12

Table of Contents

MILLIE, Bruce’s sister, came from her home in Wadena County to accompany her mother East. She was married to Gene Minor and lived on a quite worthless farm, fifteen miles from the nearest town. Gene was no farmer, but he was as nearly a farmer as he was anything else. He was nothing. Good-natured, lazy, improvident, he faced calmly an impossible future, not through stoicism, but simply because his mentality could not understand the darkness that impinged. The youngest son of a woman old when he was born, but who, toothless and incredibly thin, still lived, he expected always to be cared for, protected, made comfortable. He must long since have starved or gone to work, had not his mother possessed a small property, which she handled so shrewdly that the income from it kept the family alive. She was a hard, talkative old woman who spent her days sitting by the kitchen fire nursing a wrist, broken some years before but never rightly mended, and smoking a short, black clay pipe. It was impossible to induce her to smoke anything less objectionable in appearance and odor. The clay stem set well in her hardened gums.

With such a husband and such a mother-in-law, Millie’s married life left something to be desired. As a child she had been a spitfire, passing from the extreme of good nature to the extreme of screaming rage in the flash of an eyelash, and running this bewildering gamut of emotion half-a-dozen times an hour. She was impulsively, but whole heartedly, generous and passionately sympathetic. She had the instincts of a lady and the irresponsible temper of a fishwife. Her devotion and her enmity were exuberant, like tropical vegetation. She loved with complete abandon or hated with a bitterness that found relief only in the most envenomed expressions. She was as tactless as Mary Tudor, as candid as Rabelais. She adored George Eliot and held Romola as the greatest of all novels. She was a paradox, an anomaly; that is to say, an uncontrolled woman, touched with brains.

At thirty-six her hair was iron gray, the flash of her hazel eyes was subdued, her vivacity had tamed itself. These were the results of ten years’ existence with Gene and his mother’s clay pipe and garrulity. She was subdued, but undaunted; her head was gray—but unbowed. She could still speak her mind. Surprisingly, she sided with Bruce. This position was against nature. Clarence was her favorite and her judgment always ran with her affection. For once she was lifted out of herself and got a glimpse of the meaning of the treatment proposed for her mother. “Dunce,” “born fool,” “heartless wretch,” were the mildest epithets she applied to Clarence. Her tirade was endless. It was useless. She talked against a stone wall, against a man with a sense of duty. Clarence’s attitude under the ordeal reminded Bruce of the mule lying down in the mud. His brother had the same air of determination to stick. Out of breath and unable, at the moment, to lay her tongue to a new opprobrium, Millie ceased, and Clarence again asked his terrifying question:

“You don’t want her to be told, do you?”

At that she screamed at Clarence. It was the first touch that seemed genuine to Bruce. It was the old Millie revivified. Now her work became classic, her denunciation was an epic. No disreputable word or act of Clarence’s life escaped. His past was thrown in his face. Splash. A pailful of icy water. It was beyond endurance. Unable to quiet her, Bruce left the room.

When he rejoined them they were at peace. Clarence had won by negative resistance, by lying still in his mud, by saying nothing. Millie was smiling, her eyes dreamy. She was thinking of the Hudson, of the far places in the East—the new life she would see, the strangers she would meet. She was not ill; it was not she who was to undergo horrible treatment. At the last gasp her imagination had failed.

Bruce sighed, realizing that he had held the raveling of a hope and that now the thread had slipped from him. There was something awful to him in the composure with which Clarence looked forward to this experiment. An unfathomable stupidity. Clarence had always been so. Even as a child Bruce had recognized appalling limitations in his brother....

“Why don’t you let Bruce go alone, Clarence, if he likes?”

Bruce, already a hundred yards away, heard his mother’s question addressed to the brother who had in himself no resources.

“ ’Cause I want to go with him.”

“But can’t you go a way of your own? May be you could find a better patch than Bruce.” The quest was for wild strawberries.

“I can’t. He might just as well let me go with him.”

“You should be the leader, Clarence. You’re older than he.”

“I ain’t.”

“Clarence!—Bruce, can’t you let Clarence go with you?”

“Sure, mother. But what’s the crybaby always got to tag for? Don’t he know a feller likes to be alone oncit in a while?”

It was always like that. There were things a feller wanted to think and you couldn’t think right if somebody kept talkin’ and askin’ questions. There were stories a feller wanted to tell himself and you couldn’t always be bothered sayin’ ’em out loud. They moved quicker just inside you. It was hard to escape the pertinacious Clarence. One could run away from him—he was solid and heavy on his feet, but there wasn’t much fun in that because you remembered how he looked and kept wishin’ you hadn’t run away and so after all couldn’t think much.

The day was hot, the berries elusive. The idea for a story with a new heroic rôle for himself occurred to him. If he could get away for a few minutes he could work it out. He strolled off, casually. Deceitfully, he pretended to be looking for berries, but ever he moved farther and farther away, thinking all the time of his new idea.

The vigilant Clarence became suspicious. He had, perhaps, learned by experience.

“Where you goin’?”

“Nowhere. Just lookin’.”

“Here’s a good patch. Come back here.”

“All right.” But Bruce continued to edge away.

“Hi, there. You’re tryin’ to run away from me. You wait now.”

Deception having failed, Bruce broke into a run. The next instant he was lying on the ground. Something hard and unexpected had hit him over the ear. He sprang up, but the world had gone crazy and was running around and up and down, agonizingly. He flopped down again. Clarence joined him, a little alarmed at his efficiency but on the whole satisfied, complacent.

“That’ll learn you,” he said coolly.

“Did you bust me with a rock?”

“Well, what yo’ tryin’ to run away for? I told yo’ ’nough times I’d do it.”

Bruce looked at this amazing brother, whose hot, round face was empty of all concern. He could imagine himself, in a rage, heaving a stone, but he went limp at the thought of his horror if the missile accidentally found its objective.

“I got a notion to larrup you good for that.”

Clarence wisely drew back. “Yo’ better not.”

“I would, only you’re such a awful fool it wouldn’t do no good.”

“You know what the Bible says about fool callin’.”

“Pooh. The Bible was wrote a awful long time before you was born, or it would have been wrote different.” ...

“I’ll go to Chicago with you, and put you on the New York Central,” Clarence was saying. “You don’t change again. It’ll be an easy trip.”

“It’ll be wonderful,” sighed Millie.

The Pioneer Limited left Minneapolis at 7:30 in the evening for its twelve-hour run to Chicago. On that last fateful evening the sky was overcast, but brightened by a moon, hidden or exposed as the wind drove the clouds along. A cab (in Minneapolis in 1908 they called it a hack) stood at the curb, the horses drooping dejectedly at the end of a long day. Within doors there were the hurry and bustle of last-minute preparation. Only Mrs. Darton remained calm. Beneath her widow’s bonnet, which she had worn for nearly twenty years, her white face, as yet undrawn by pain, was placid, composed. In that dark moment her thoughts were hidden. What did she feel, what did she hope? Was her going a mere friendly compliance? Had she failed correctly to diagnose her illness? Was she buoyed by expectations of relief or was she, consciously, a martyr to her son’s sense of the proper thing to do?

Bruce fought for an appearance of cheerfulness, of confidence, though he knew her clear eyes read his secret thought. He could not face her. She paused in the act of pulling on her gloves to lay her hand on his arm and whisper,

“It’s all right, Bruce. Every one will be happier.”

He caught the hand feverishly and held it to his cheek, smiling at her. It was the bravest deed of his life.

“Of course. You’ll come home right as a daisy.”

Her eyes held to his face for a moment; then she sighed as she turned them away. Bruce flushed. It was as though in that final minute she had looked to him for candor, for heroic truth—and he had failed her.

The ceremony of departure was, for Bruce, like the last rites and sacrament. She was alive and strong, yet he was assisting at her burial. She spoke to him while he was in the act of hurling earth upon her coffin. She would die a thousand deaths and he was powerless to save her one agony.... In a moment she would leave the room, descend, enter the cab, drive away, vanish. It would be too late. It was already too late. He looked at his brother who was hurrying the departure. He was invincible, unmoved, flushed with self-approval. Millie fluttered, excited. Her eyes shone. She was enjoying herself. Cora was there, agitated, aimlessly helpful, frightened. There was something terrifying in Bruce’s eyes. She dreaded the moment when they should be alone. Yet she wanted Mrs. Darton to go. She thought Clarence entirely in the right. But her nerves were beyond her control. She passed anxiously from one to another. She picked up parcels without motive and laid them down without heeding what she did. She was not thinking: She was only alarmed. At what? At nothing, at every thing.

Clarence called out, standing at the door, a grip in either hand, “All ready, folks?”

They were ready. Millie dashed in from the bedroom, her nose white with powder; she screamed something about a package that must not be left behind. Cora was talking, they were all talking. It was a babel in Bruce’s ears, they were a constantly moving blur before his eyes. His mother put her arms around him. Her lips were on his. Her lips were warm and soft, full of life, gentle, caressing. He clung to them. They moved to his cheeks, they were pressed against his closed eyes, they rested on his forehead, they came again to his lips. They moved away. He had already told his sister good-by. Now he shook hands with his brother. They went out, Bruce following. They entered the black vehicle. A handkerchief fluttered, a white face was turned to him. The horses’ hoofs, iron shod, rapped the stones; the wheels rattled; the cab dwindled, turned the corner, disappeared. Sinister effacement!

Bruce, leaning his head against the corner of the house, wept. His soul, lacerated, sobbed out its pain.

Cora put her arms around him. “Dear Bruce,” she whispered.

He cried to her fiercely, “Go in, go in. I’m all right.”

She withdrew her hand, hurt, bewildered, and entered the house.