Читать книгу Unsought Adventure - Howard Angus Kennedy - Страница 15

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If wishes could kill, John Galt would not have had one week’s board to pay at Palm Beach. His executors might.

The germs of occult “science” floating thick in the light of modern America as in the dark of medieval Europe, and swallowed as greedily by the unreasoning and the hysterical, had never given John more than passing amusement. Tales of telepathic suggestion, baleful or boonful, shot from one mind to another on waves of mental radio, to him were only fairy tales, or he might have withered away under the spell of intense desire for his death now burning in the minds of Cousin Jack and honest Sam.

Immune to such waves of deadly influence, never dreaming that two of his fellow-men grudged him the common boon of life, unaware indeed of any great possession capable of kindling envy in the sourest soul, John marched serenely up the road to health.

“I can’t make you out, John Galt,” said the doctor, striding along the moonlit seashore road with his patient. “Here you’ve been putting on weight faster than any other sick man on my list; and I never knew such consuming energy on the road. I can hardly keep up with you. Physically there’s scarce a thing the matter with you. You never had what your old doctor thought you had, and now we’ve found the real trouble we’ve disposed of it. I haven’t the conscience to charge you for attendance now; you do me more good than I can do you, taking me these tremendous walks. Yet the stronger you get in body, the more depressed you seem in mind.”

“Not exactly depressed, doctor, but somehow—. I did enjoy myself a little down here at first, but now I reckon I’m just homesick.”

“I think I understand. As long as you felt under sentence of death, you just let yourself drift, enjoying anything pleasant that might come your way while it lasted. Now that you feel returning strength, you want to plunge into all the activities of your old life. But you’d better be careful. You’re not out of the woods yet. The activities of a young man about town, at loose ends, with no responsibilities, are just what you’ve got to avoid. I quite agree that this won’t be the place for you much longer, with summer upon us. But New York City’s not the ideal summer resort either. A bit farther north, now—”

John laughed. “You’re the sort of doctor I like. You give the patient his own prescription. It’s up in the north I want to go; back to the old farm where I was born! I had planned a long summer hike up there, if ever I got away from here on my own legs. And now I know it was more than just a vagabond hankering after an outdoor life. It’s the old farm up there I’m homesick for.”

“Curious,—I’ve been thinking of you as the genuine town-bred article.”

“A pretty thick veneer of the town I suppose I’ve laid on, but that’s all. If I lived anywhere else for a century I’d always feel, way down inside, that the real home was where I lived those first seven years. The country-side. And what a country! For sheer delight—! My word, to think of it! Why, it all comes back to me as bright and clear as the moonlight shining on that sea—and as it shone on Lake Memphremagog. It wasn’t so much the beauty, though, that charmed me then. A child’s eyes find too much of interest in all the little things close to his feet. Oh, the berrying, and the sugaring-off,—and cutting a path through deep snow from house to barn after a storm,—and THE CHILD AND THE CLOUD

the sleigh bells,—and the first time they lifted me on to the old mare’s back, long before I had a pony of my own,—and old Jean B’teest the French-Canadian with his ‘Marche donc!’—plowing in and out among the stumps with a walking plow.

“One time I trod on a chicken, and hid behind the cordwood pile, feeling as I think a driver must in those deadly city streets when he has crushed the life out of a child. Oh yes, there was some tragedy mixed with it all, but what sticks in my mind is the sheer delight—till the final tragedy that took us away from it all .... To think I had almost forgotten that!”

John fell silent. The doctor wondered what the tragedy had been, but asked no question.

“Let’s sit down a bit, if you don’t mind,” said John. They sat on a moss-grown log, a little back from the road, and looked out from the shadows over the moonlit sea. The breeze was off shore, and hardly perceptible where they sat. The lamb-like ripples gently rose and fell, whispering to the beach as if in dreams; but far out, where wind struck water, the “white horses” shook their flashing manes.

“It was this way,” John began after a pause. “Mother—I’ve never spoken of it to a soul till now—it has only come up in my own mind now and then in a shadowy sort of way. The little that father said, that first night,—I suppose he felt obliged to tell me something, to explain her not being there, and he could hardly lie, even to shelter her,—but that was all I ever knew. He never spoke of it again, and I never dared to ask. When I grew up, I could imagine enough to fill in the gaps, but it wasn’t a pleasant subject to think of, and it seemed like something finished and gone like a piece of ancient history,—past and gone for ever,—nothing to be done about it. As if she was—dead. Yet when it comes back to me now I wonder—if she is dead, and, if not, whether there’s really nothing for me to do about it.

“You must have been up against lots of family tragedies, doctor, and perhaps when you know, you might—well, will you let me tell you? I feel as if I must.” John faintly smiled, as he added. “Sort of ‘Ancient Mariner’ feeling, you know, only I haven’t a glittering eye to hold you with if you want to get away, you may thank your stars.”

“Now you’ve started,” the doctor said, “you couldn’t drive me away with a club, till you’ve finished.”

“Thanks, doctor. Well then—Dad met her when he was a student in Canada. She was the German professor’s daughter. They were both very young, but they fell in love—. Stupid to say ‘but’. That seems the right time to fall in love, isn’t it?”

“It’s the time they all do it, anyway.”

“I never did. Something left out of my composition, eh? Or maybe when the parents have it too—too powerfully, there’s nothing of it left for the children. Sort of pendulum effect.

“My parents must have swung as far as the pendulum could go, in that direction. Father was intense about everything he took up. As for the love of women, he must have shut down on it hard, after—afterwards; but from the very strength of the effect the tragedy had upon him, I guess he had plunged into love as desperately as he plunged into business when nothing else was left him.

“As for mother, poor woman, there’s no doubt about it.

“Father was in training for a lawyer, but both his brothers died, and he was the only one left to carry on the farm, which he loyally did. His parents were old,—they must have married late in life. Dad wasn’t going to follow their example. He wanted to marry as soon as possible, and mother did too. If he stuck to the farm, of THE MISTRESS OF THE HOUSE

course he would have a home ready-made to take her to, without waiting to work his way up in a city profession.

“He was barely twenty-one when they married, and she was only eighteen. They came to live at the farm, but—it was the old story, you know. She wanted to be mistress, and the old lady wouldn’t be put on the shelf. Mother wasn’t the typical sort of German hausfrau at all,—more of a southern or Celtic type, I gathered,—dashing, quick-tempered, passionate to a degree. But she wanted to run things all the same.

“To please her, though he hated to quit the old folk, Dad left his father to carry on with a hired man, and brought us to New York. His uncle had a wholesale grocery, and gave him a good job. I was just a baby, about six months old, and I’ve no reason to suppose she neglected me,—but something must have happened pretty soon to scare father. The old folk died, almost together, before I was a year old. Instead of looking for a tenant, or getting a neighbor to run the place on shares, father at once gave up his job in town and went off to run the place himself, of course taking us with him. He ‘ought to have gone before,’—he let out that much, and I’ll never forget his agonized tone when he said it.

“Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. But I guess he thought mother might settle down happily enough when she could run things to suit herself. Honestly, I think she must have run the house pretty well. It was clean and tidy compared to most of the old farm houses around, I remember thinking, as soon as I was old enough to notice.

“Maybe I’d be three or four then. I could read by the time I was five, and used to read Grimm’s fairy tales aloud to her, sitting on a little wooden stool covered with a scrap of red carpet, while she knitted and darned our stockings. She knitted beautifully.

“ ‘That’s good, little Jack, that’s good,’ she’d say, patting my head with her hand in a stocking, when I finished up with ‘They lived happily ever after.’

“All the same, one of the first things I remember was her going off on a visit to the city. She had been particularly cheerful for some days before that, and even singing at her work,—singing the old German songs with that rich voice of hers, when we were alone together,—so I felt the change miserably the first day or two without her.

“Father and Jean Baptiste, one or other, would try to keep an eye on me, but couldn’t keep me on a string, and when I got tired toddling along in a furrow after the plow I’d stray off into the bush hunting berries.

“Once I remember wandering on and on till I came out on the other side of the bush. I squeezed through an old snake fence, and found myself in a new world. There was a neat little log shack, with about a dozen kiddies playing around. I wasn’t used to other children of any sort, and these were chattering in a strange language, so I got scared and started to cry.

“The biggest girl,—a dainty black-eyed beauty she was, washing clothes in a tub and keeping all her brothers and sisters in order at the same time,—wiped her hands and ran and picked me up and cuddled, me, and carried me off to the house, talking all the time.

“It was ‘O le joli bébé,’ and ‘O mon petit tête rouge.’ I didn’t understand a word of it at the time, but that didn’t matter, it was all mighty comforting. It might have been Chinese, it would have been just as sweet and musical, coming from her motherly little heart.

“Her own mother was scrubbing the floor—they’d as soon leave out the daily prayer as the daily scrub, those Canadian habitants—but she looked up and smiled and told Félice to give the ‘petit tête rouge,’ a ‘croquinole,’ which turned out to be a doughnut.

STRAYING INTO HAPPINESS

“They knew who I must be, and Félice took me back home at once in case mother would be getting anxious. Finding nobody at our house, Félice waited and played with me till Dad came in from the field. Then she was going to leave me, but I clung to her, and when she had gone I cried and wouldn’t eat my supper. I’d had more than one of Madame Thoreau’s doughnuts, I guess.

“In the evening Monsieur Thoreau himself appeared,—a big round-faced jolly giant of a French-Canadian. He smoked a pipe with Dad, and talked about crops and cows and children,—he spoke English as fast as French, sixteen to the dozen,—and at last he let out that his wife had sent him over to ask if they couldn’t keep little tête rouge till madame the maman came home. They had all fallen in love with ‘le bébé anglais’,—Félice especially was ‘toute éprise.’

“That was the tactful way he put it, as if they were asking a favor. Dad of course knew it was the other way round. They just wanted to do us a kindness, out of the goodness of their hearts. He agreed, because there seemed no other way to keep me out of danger. He fought hard to make Thoreau take something for my board,—there were twelve mouths to fill, big and little, in that French-Canadian family. Bless you, Thoreau was as stubborn as a mule on the point of hospitality. ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘she’ll dicker for half an hour to beat down a pedlar one sou in the price of a handkerchief, but she’d never forgive her man if he took a sou from a little visitor. Eleven children are just as easy to feed as ten. Anyway, Monsieur Galt, we are farmers, not hotel-keepers. Et voilà!’ That was that!

“How long mother was gone, I’ve no idea. Why should I think of time, with those ten children to play with, and all treating me as an honored guest? At last, one evening Dad came over to fetch me. When we got home, there was mother washing up the supper dishes. She put down her face to kiss me, but didn’t wipe her hands to pick me up, like Félice, and when she had finished and put me to bed she hardly said a word. I pulled the sheet over my head and cried myself to sleep, for Félice.

“As the days went by her old affection for me seemed to come back, and her old high spirits at the same time, as if she was more and more contented with her lot. But it didn’t mean that at all. I suppose it was something in her working up to a state of excitement—looking forward to another adventure, whether she was consciously planning it or not. Don’t you think so?”

“Very likely,” the doctor said.

“She went off again, and again I found myself among the Thoreaus. They were delighted and I fell into my old niche as one of themselves. Their little tête rouge, madame always called me. Félice, though she had given me the name at first herself, took a notion it sounded disrespectful, almost insulting, from her young brothers and sisters, and wouldn’t let them use it.

“ ‘Tais-toi!’ she cried when little Joseph ran shouting to meet me,—‘you know what the postmaster’s boy got for calling Billy Brown “carrots”—a box on the ears. And tête rouge is the same as carrots.’

“They couldn’t call me Jean because they had a Jean of their own, so they compromised on ‘le roux’, ‘the ruddy one.’ I got to be so much a member of the family, bye and bye all the neighbors were calling me that. Later on, when I grew up and went back there visiting, it was ‘Com’ se va, Monsieur Leroux,’ ‘Bon jour, Monsieur Leroux,’ never anything else. I’m sure that’s how they’ll welcome me when I go up there now.

“There’s a strong French settlement just over the line, not far from our place, a solid block of them up in the hills, shepherded by a good old curé who prides himself on having “MADAME LA VA-ET-VIENT”

not one ‘anglais’ holding land in his parish,—though the district was settled entirely by our people a hundred years ago.

“That’s neither here nor there,—but these folk were so kind to me when I needed kindness most, I’ve loved the French-Canadians ever since. My happiness with them was so dovetailed and linked up with mother’s desertion, I can’t think of her without thinking of them.”

“They were the silver lining of the cloud she cast,” the doctor said.

“That’s so,—and frankly, there seemed more silver lining than cloud.

“Mother came back, and the same thing happened—it must have been three or four times. She always came home quiet and depressed, but that soon wore off, and then her eyes began to flash and she started singing at her work,—the same old German songs.

“If she patted my curly head oftener than usual, or spread herself in the cookery way, making all sorts of iced cakes and sugar bread, and even candy for us—I don’t suppose it meant any increase of affection for us in particular but just a rising tide of restless energy, and affection in general, that would soon carry her off her feet. Young as I was, when she got like that I came to know the signals, and quite expected her to vanish and let me turn into a little Frenchman again—which didn’t worry me the least bit.

“The last time, when she’d been gone about a week, I suppose she must have written. I was playing with the Thoreaus one Sunday afternoon,—I was on the swing, under a great old elm, Félice pushing me higher and higher, when I spied father coming out of the bush and climbing over the snake fence. He looked very grim. He went into the house for a while, then came out, and took me off home with him.

“On the way through, the woods, he said: ‘Mother isn’t coming back here, Johnnie, and we’re going to the city to live.’

“That was all. If I asked any questions, father put me off,—he evidently didn’t want to talk,—and the excitement of going to the city for the first time drove out of my head even the grief of leaving Félice and the rest of her family.

“I took for granted we were going to mother and would all live in the city together. But we just went to a single room in a down town street. There was no mother to welcome us,—no mother ever again. Father got back his job with his uncle, and used to leave me with a family in the same house while he was away at the store, till he worked his way up and got a little house of his own.

“Presently uncle died, and father had the whole business. He must have done well at it, for by the time I had left college he had sold the business and given himself up to a hobby of book-collecting. He certainly never neglected me. In fact, he watched over my education and helped me at it in a way few fathers do. He made me a real companion.

“Every summer he took me off with him on his holiday, always to the old place in Canada on the shore of Lake Memphremagog, and left me there when he had to go back to business. The farm was rented but it was the old home all the same, with a second home among the Thoreaus close by.

“They welcomed me like a son and a brother. I had a delightful time, helping in all the farm work, and Sundays hiking among the hills around the lake with one of the boys or driving with a bunch of them to visit Félice. She had married young, to a farmer, and every summer she seemed to have a new baby. She must have a dozen by now,—and just managing them all as happily as she used to manage her brothers and sisters.... And here am I, WHAT HAS BECOME OF HER?

thirty years old, with neither chick nor child, neither father nor mother!

“So that’s where I’m going now. It just seems drawing me like a magnet,—the old home in Canada. I haven’t been up there since father died, and now that I’m going for the first time alone it won’t seem quite the same place.... Curious, too,—as long as he was with me I hardly ever thought of mother,—I was so young when she passed out of my life, and he so filled the place of both. But now I feel—at any rate as if I ought to know what became of her.”

“Did your father leave no word—no reference to her in his will?”

“Not a word. But he left a private note for me. I remember its very words: ‘If ever you should meet your mother, tell her I fully forgave her long ago, and if she thinks I ever did anything she had a right to complain of—though she never even suggested such a thing—then say I beg her forgiveness too. I wish for nothing but her happiness.’ ”

“Then it looks as if he was pretty sure she was not in actual want.”

“Not in want of money. He may have settled something on her. Or—I’m sure he would never stir a finger to divorce her, but she may have got a divorce somehow, somewhere else, and married again. When father died and I found that note I asked his lawyer about it. Father had said, when he made his will, that mother was otherwise provided for,—and that was all.”

“Her people? You spoke of her father the professor.”

“He was her only relation, over here at any rate, and he resigned and went back to Germany soon after she left us. I found a letter from him to father, written just as he was sailing. He was terribly cut up about it,—his daughter had brought disgrace on three honorable names, he said. He thought father had been too easy with her, ‘letting her have too much her own way’—the professor evidently had strict old-fashioned ideas about discipline for wives and daughters—but he had no other fault to find with the husband, who, he said, had been ‘extremely generous’ to her.

“Whether grandfather ever forgave her as father did, I can’t say. I hope he did. But I know one thing—he willed his library to his son-in-law. He had been living on a small pension, that died with him, and he had no savings. The residue of his estate, as they called it, was left to his daughter, but it hardly amounted to anything,—whatever the old sticks of furniture would fetch, and her mother’s personal jewels. These turned out to be only a few trinkets, not worth a hundred dollars. Dad put them in the bank, with the trifle coming from the furniture, and there they are still. She never claimed them. The professor had hardly anything to leave, except his books.”

The doctor thought a while. “There’s more than one form of temptation she may have fallen into,” he said, “without imagining the worst. Drink, for instance.”

“Or a mania for gambling,” added John. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Only—what was that the letter said,—‘Disgrace on three honorable names,’ not two. If she had led away some man belonging to a decent family, that would explain, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m very much afraid,” said John. And then, defiantly,—“But suppose that was it? Suppose a woman has that side of her nature so—so abnormally developed that she can’t control it, have we nothing to do but throw stones at her? That’s what society does, it stones her out, if it can’t stone her to death as the Pharisees used to. And whatever other people may do—good Lord, I’m her son after all, and if I met her to-morrow—”

“That’s all very well,” said the doctor, “and it does you FATHER AND SON

credit. Only—I hate to suggest unpleasant possibilities, but you’ve asked my advice, and a doctor often has to seem cruel when he’s asked for the candid truth. She may have settled down to live a virtuous life, but she may not. She’s not an old woman yet, remember, if she’s alive. If you came upon her in circumstances you can easily imagine, it would be an awful shock to you, and I doubt whether you could do her any good. A young man suddenly reforming a—a mother, even, hardened by twenty years of the life she may have been leading,—well, I’ve heard of such things in a novel, or a film, but nowhere else.”

John shuddered. “We won’t say any more about it, doctor. If I ever happen to find her, I hope I’ll be man enough, and son enough, to lend her a hand, if she’s arm-in-arm with the devil himself. I was going to say I wouldn’t actually try to look for her,—it would be a wild-goose chase, likely enough,—and yet I don’t know. It would be an object in life, and I’ve got none now.”

“That’s the worst confession any man can have to make, or any woman either.”

“I suppose you’re right. I know you’re right, now, though it never occurred to me before. You’ll wonder my father, being the sort of man he was, never set me to work or made me strike out some line for myself. The fact is, though he liked his business well enough to make a success of it, he hadn’t enough enthusiasm for it to keep him at it when he’d made a fair pile, still less to shove me into it too. And there was another thing,—he was very sensitive, and I can imagine how he must have shrunk from mixing all the time with people who knew his wife had left him. Though of course they wouldn’t say a word, he’d know they were either pitying or blaming him. I could see it was a great relief when he retired to the company of his books,—his silent and best friends, he called them. He had few others. He never joined clubs or societies of any sort.

“He was my best friend, I know that, and not an unnaturally silent one either. When I got through college, we travelled all over the world together, seeing everything. When we came back and settled down in the old house, he’d start now and then talking about my future, as if he felt it his duty; but he wasn’t a bit keen, and I really think he dreaded losing me as a companion. We were real pals.

“He tried to interest me in his old book hobby, but I never took to that. We just drifted along till—till he died, after a petty operation that went wrong.

“It was an awful shock to me, as you can imagine—he’d been so much to me. When I’d sort of got over that, I found myself with more money than I needed, and I’ve just gone on drifting ever since. I haven’t so much now, but enough to live on, as I’ve no intention of marrying.”

“Any man that doesn’t have to work for a living is to be pitied,” said the doctor, decidedly. “And if it’s only marrying that’ll make you work, then for heaven’s sake marry!”

John smiled. “It’s a good thing you’re only a man and not a pretty girl sitting beside me here, with the rippling sea and the moonlight to back up your argument, or there’s no saying how fast I might give in. As it is—let’s time ourselves back to the hotel, and I bet you won’t have any breath left for more advice.”

The glamor of that vision, the old home up in the north, was irresistible. John started next morning, and lingered not by the way. He had said something to Isobel about stopping off in New York, just to pick up the companion dog and raincoat, but on the whole he thought he had better not. It would only break in upon the even tenor of his cousin’s way, and perhaps bring up again the unpleasant BACK TO THE NORTH

question of her leaving. She was so thin-skinned about that. Her cheerful letters showed she was getting on quite happily,—Olga and Bridget were behaving like angels,—and he would not disturb her. No, let sleeping dogs lie—even the dog he had meant to drag out with him on the tramp.

It was only a dog in the abstract, no particular dog he had thought of, and he could pick one up anywhere,—wherever he left the railway for the road. He would certainly not start walking at the foot of Manhattan Island and walk right up through the State of New York, with a dog or without one. He studied the map, and picked out the little town of South Vernon, on the very border of Vermont. He would write asking Isobel to send what clothes he needed to the station there.

No again,—it would of course be a very fine picturesque walk, right up the whole length of Vermont, but he had a hunch it would be lonely, however companionable a dog he might pick up at South Vernon. Yes, or even at Brattleboro, a little farther on.

A craving for human comradeship, especially for those who loved him, had taken possession of his mind. He would get to the old home as fast as steam would take him, and enjoy himself among the friends of his youth for a spell. Then he could start off on his hike and cover infinite distances. The roads would be better then. Spring was apt to come late, in the hills!