The Street Called Straight

by Basil King

He had been standing then on the deck of his steam-launch gazing beyond the river, with its crowding, outlandish junks, beyond the towns and villages huddled along the banks, beyond walls gay with wistaria, beyond green rice-fields stretching into the horizon, to where a flaming sunset covered half the sky—a sunset which itself seemed hostile, mysterious, alien, Mongolian. He was thinking that it was on just this scene that his father and mother had looked year upon year before his birth. He wondered how it was that it had had no prenatal influence on himself. He wondered how it was that all their devotion had ended with themselves, that their altruism had died when Corinna Meecham's soul had passed-away and Rufus Hallett, like another Stephen, had fallen on his knees beneath the missiles of the villagers to whom he was coming with relief. They had spent their lives in the service of others; he had spent his in his own. It was curious. If there was anything in heredity, he ought to have felt at least some faint impulse from their zeal; but he never had. He could not remember that he had ever done anything for any one. He could not remember that he had ever seen the need of it. It was curious. He mused on it—mused on the odd differences between one generation and another, and on the queer way in which what is light to the father will sometimes become darkness in the son.

It was then that he found the question raising itself within him, "Is that what's wrong with me?"

The query took him by surprise. It was so out of keeping with his particular kind of self-respect that he found it almost droll. If he had never given himself to others, as his parents had, he had certainly paid the world all he owed it. He had nothing wherewith to reproach himself on that score. It had been a matter of satisfaction amounting to pride that he had made his bit of money without resorting in any single instance to methods that could be considered shady. If complaint or criticism could not reach him here, it could not reach him anywhere. Therefore the question as to whether there was anything wrong in his attitude toward others was so patently absurd that it could easily be dismissed.

He dismissed it promptly, but it came again. It came repeatedly during that spring and summer. It forced itself on his attention. It became, in its way, the recurrent companion of his journey. It turned up unexpectedly at all sorts of times and in all sorts of places, and on each occasion with an increased comprehension on his side of its pertinence. He could look back now and trace the stages by which his understanding of it had progressed. There was a certain small happening in a restaurant at Yokohama; there was an accident on the dock at Vancouver; there was a conversation on a moonlight evening up at Banff; there was an incident during a drive in the Yosemite; these were mile-stones on the road by which his mind had traveled on to seize the fact that the want of touch between him and his fellow-men might be due to the suppression of some essentially human force within himself. It came to him that something might, after all, have been transmitted from Hupeh and Hankow of which he had never hitherto suspected the existence.

It cannot be said that his self-questioning had produced any answer more definite than that before he found himself journeying back toward Boston. The final impulse had been given him while he was still loitering aimlessly in Chicago by a letter from Mrs. Temple.

"If you have nothing better to do, dear Peter," she wrote, "we shall be delighted if you can come to us for a week or two. Dear Drusilla is with us once again, and you can imagine our joy at having her. It would seem like old times if you were here to complete the little circle. The room you used to have in your college vacations—after dear Tom and Sarah were taken from us—is all ready for you; and Drusilla would like to know you were here to occupy it just as much as we."

In accepting this invitation Davenant knew himself to be drawn by a variety of strands of motive, no one of which had much force in itself, but which when woven together lent one another strength. Now that he had come, he was glad to have done it, since in the combination of circumstances he felt there must be an acknowledged need of a young man, a strong man, a man capable of shouldering responsibilities. He would have been astonished to think that that could be gainsaid.

The feeling was confirmed in him after he had watched the tip of his smoked-out cigarette drop, like a tiny star, into the current of the Charles, and had re-entered Rodney Temple's house.

"Here's Peter!"

It was Drusilla's voice, with a sob in it. She was sitting on the stairs, three steps from the top, huddled into a voluminous mauve-and-white dressing-gown. In the one dim light burning in the hall her big black eyes gleamed tragically, as those of certain animals gleam in dusk.