§ i
THERE was a very great deal that young Stephens didn’t know about himself, some of it that was obvious to other eyes. He did not go away the next morning; Edna met him after breakfast and entreated him not to do so.
“We’re so dull and miserable here,” she said. “And you’re the only hope. Do you know what Mother calls you? The Breath of Life! Now after that you can’t go, can you?”
He smiled, a little inattentively. There she stood, so pretty and serene, one of those women who considered it their right to make outrageous demands upon men.... He saw suddenly how difficult it must be to withstand their demands. He did not want to refuse Edna; he liked her very much, because she was frank and friendly; he didn’t suspect that her frankness held a hundred times more reserve than Andrée’s silences, that she, so smiling and affable, was infinitely more aloof, more mysterious, more unknowable, than her dark sister.
“The Breath of Life!” he said. “Why?”
“Because we’re all very nearly dead, and you’re so much alive,” she said, tranquilly. “Can’t we have one more nice day together?”
“I don’t see ...” he said, doubtfully. “After—well—your father, you know....”
He had no clear conception of Gilbert’s position; he had certainly seen many husbands and fathers who were bullies, but in a more primitive society this bullying carried weight and was not defied. He knew little of the civilized expedients of women; he didn’t imagine that Claudine would stoop to deceive. Yet he didn’t think her quite capable of independence.
“Oh, Father!” said Edna, carelessly. “He’s just melodrama.... And we won’t tell Mother, and she’ll pretend not to know where we’ve gone. We can—”
“But I don’t like it!” he protested. “It’s a humiliating position for me.”
“It really isn’t, Mr. Stephens. We’re the humiliated, deceitful ones, and we don’t care. Do you know the country round here?”
“I was born a few miles down the river,” he answered, soberly. “In Brownsville Landing.”
Andrée came sauntering out of the house, and caught his words.
“I’d like to hear about you,” she said, but he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “That’s a mistake. What used to be me isn’t me now. It’s—well, it’s like these books—they start off when the fellow’s a baby, and they tell you all the things he thought and all the ways he grew and changed, until you can’t see him at all. I’m darned glad you never saw me or heard of me before, and you’ve got to see only what I am now.” He smiled ingenuously. “It’s not much,” he said, “but it’s what I’ve worked twenty-eight years on, anyway.”
“Come on; let’s start somewhere,” said Edna. “Or Mother’ll come out and have to not ‘countenance’ it. Let’s take a ‘ramble’; that’s what Father calls a walk.”
“It is a ‘ramble,’ too, with him,” said Andrée.
“Well,” said Stephens, “there’s a nice place up the road five or six miles—nursery for all kinds of evergreens, and a little hotel. If you think you can do it—? It’s a steep climb.”
Edna ran in to leave a message for her mother with Mrs. Dewey, and they set off. It was a sultry, hazy morning; it seemed unaccountably oppressive to Stephens. He felt unpleasantly like a new toy to these greedy children; they looked to him to provide amusement; they weren’t interested in his ideas, which were his life, and they had no faint idea of the wonder of him. He glanced down at his white flannel legs and buckskin shoes; he thought of his appearance in general, his immaculate cleanliness, the comfort of fine raiment, of himself strong, confident, carrying a cigarette case of purest gold and walking by these fabulous girls. And he thought of a sallow youth, ten years ago, lounging outside a pool room in Brownsville Landing, in a dirty grey flannel shirt and a villainous cap, dazed and stupid with incessant cigarettes, engaging in candid persiflage with the mill girls who passed. He had bridged that gulf all alone....
The making of his money he regarded as a minor achievement. It was the regeneration of his spirit that was so remarkable; that, he felt, was little less than a miracle; he would have liked to tell that.
He had been in the hospital with a broken head, justifiably got in a saloon brawl; he had lain in the ward two days, suffering and resentful because he couldn’t smoke. No one came to see him; who was there to come? His father, who worked in the brick yards, was always drunk when he wasn’t busy, and he had no other relatives; he didn’t know what a friend was. He went about in a pack, a gang of youths of his own age, bound by no other tie than that of the pack instinct, all of them more or less vicious, in a pitiful way. They lacked ambition, that is, at eighteen or so, they showed a lamentable disinclination to work every day and all day in mill or factory. They wanted something better, and even now Stephens fancied that their sordid distractions were better, had a little more of the stuff of life in them.
In his restlessness and misery, he had turned his attention to the man in the next bed, a portly, pallid fellow of forty-five or so, with a black beard and a severe and dignified manner. He looked like a physician, some sort of professional man; he was actually a mill hand, an Englishman named Simms, a Manchester Socialist of the old school, austere and fanatic. He sat propped up in bed reading Huxley, but he was very willing to talk. And in five days he had expounded the world to the sallow “corner boy.” Gesturing forcibly with his bandaged hand—he had been badly mangled at his machine—he set forth his Quixotic and beautiful doctrines. He had little humanity, no flexibility; he was uncompromising and stern as a Calvinist.
They had lived together for two years. It was Simms who had shown young Stephens the charm of cleanliness; he had a bare little room on the outskirts of the town which he scrubbed himself; his habits were fastidious and ascetic. He taught young Stephens sobriety and continence and his own worth, and he taught him to read. His pupil was not docile; he joined the Y. M. C. A., which was anathema to Simms; he took courses in everything, he frequented the gymnasium. He made use of what the older man disdained; his ideas were more practical and less sublime.
He felt now that he was justified and he wished poor Simms were alive, to be argued with. He stole a glance at Andrée, and he felt a curious mixture of despair and defiance. He was good enough—but she would never think so.