“What did the doctor say?”
“He said you weren’t to do anything at all. And you said you wouldn’t. What’s more, you said you didn’t want to.”
Darius sneered.
“I reckon I can sign cheques,” he said. “And I reckon I can endorse cheques... So it’s got to that! I can’t sign my own name now. I shall show some of you whether I can’t sign my own name!”
“You know it isn’t simply signing them. You know if I bring cheques up for you to sign you’ll begin worrying about them at once, and—and there’ll be no end to it. You’d much better—”
“Shut up!” It was like a clap of thunder.
Edwin hesitated an instant and then went towards the house. He could hear his father muttering “Whipper-snapper!”
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” Darius bawled across the garden—assuredly his voice would reach the street. “It was like your impudence to go to the Bank like that without asking me first! ‘They tell you at the Bank!’ ‘They tell you at the Bank!’ Anything else they told you at the Bank?” Then a snort.
Edwin was humiliated and baffled. He knew not what he could do. The situation became impossible immediately it was faced. He felt also very resentful, and resentment was capturing him, when suddenly an idea seemed to pull him by the sleeve: “All this is part of his disease. It’s part of his disease that he can’t see the point of a thing.” And the idea was insistent, and under its insistence Edwin’s resentment changed to melancholy. He said to himself that he must think of his father as a child. He blamed himself, in a sort of pleasurable luxury of remorse, for all the anger which during all his life he had felt against his father. His father’s unreasonableness had not been a fault, but a misfortune. His father had been not a tyrant, but a victim. His brain must always have been wrong! And now he was doomed, and the worst part of his doom was that he was unaware of it. And in the thought of Darius ignorantly blustering within the walled garden, in the spring sunshine, condemned, cut off, helpless at the last, pitiable at the last, there was something inexpressibly poignant. And the sunshine seemed a shame; and Edwin’s youth and mental vigour seemed a shame.
Nevertheless Edwin knew not what to do.