The Great Accident

by Ben Ames Williams

Amos laughed at him and said Wint would not be living on any one’s bounty. “I aim to charge you board and keep,” he said. “And that’s velvet for me, because I’d keep the house going anyway. Got to, to keep old Maria. If I ever let go of her, somebody’d grab her in a minute.”

Wint knew it was Amos’s habit to keep the house open and Maria in it, even when he and Agnes were both away; so he accepted the proposition. The board which Amos required him to pay was nominal; and Wint wanted to pay more. Amos shook his head.

“First thing you want to learn, Wint, is never to pay a man more than he asks, for anything. He’ll think you’re a blamed fool.”

So Wint had been comfortable. Maria knew how to cook, she kept the house neat, she picked up after Wint’s disorderliness. And she mothered Wint as her kind know how to do.

He was comfortable, but he was lonely, desperately lonely. Wint was a convivial young man. He liked to be with people. He had never been much in his own exclusive company. Some one said that it is not good for man to be alone; but it is equally true that it is not good for a man never to be alone. Solitude is good for the soul. It gives an opportunity for a certain amount of thought, for taking stock of one’s self. If every one could be persuaded to an hour’s solitary self-consideration each day, the world would be bettered thereby. It is hard to deceive yourself. Wint found out the truth of this in his solitary evenings that winter. He found himself forced to face facts, and face them squarely; he found himself forced to recognize his own mistakes.

Thus his loneliness did him no harm; but it did make him uncomfortable. The fact that he was much alone resulted from two or three circumstances and causes. His father had cast him out; so he saw his father and mother not at all. And he had been accustomed to see them every day, all his life. It is true there had usually been little pleasure for him in these encounters. His father’s harshness, his mother’s garrulous tongue had irked and angered him. They had worked at cross-purposes, as families are apt to do. There had been little obvious sympathy and understanding between them. Nevertheless, Wint found that he missed them; that he missed his father’s overbearing accusations, and he missed his mother’s interminable talk. Once or twice, when he met her on the street, he stopped to talk with her; and he took a certain comfort from the flow of breathless reproaches which poured out upon him at these times. Mrs. Chase was as unhappy that winter as a mother must be when her son is set apart from her; but she was loyal to her husband, and reproached Wint for his disloyalty.

Wint missed Joan, too. He missed her enormously. There was never any doubt that Joan was half the world to him. He had longed for her desperately at times; he had wanted to go and abase himself before her. But he would not; he was strong enough to keep to his own path. And Joan kept to hers.

The fact that Wint and Joan were thus at odds made Wint an awkward figure in any group of young people, because Joan was almost sure to be there. He knew this as well as any one. So when Dick Hoover asked him to go to the dances, he refused because Joan would be there; and when Elsie Jenkins asked him to a card party, he refused again, and for the same reason. But he did not tell Dick and Elsie what this reason was. As a consequence, people stopped asking him to the festivities of Hardiston, and Wint was left solitary.

Solitary, and lonely. He was so lonely, that night of Elsie’s party, that he walked past her house for the sheer, hungry joy of looking in through her windows at the throng inside. He often walked about the town in the evenings, thus. Sometimes it was to pass Joan’s home.... And he did a deal of thinking, and of wondering; and he made a resolution or two....

When Joan spoke to him, asked him to come and see her, Wint experienced a strange revulsion of feeling. He was unhappy, and he told himself he would never go; and he went uptown and dropped in on B. B. Beecham and had that innocuous and idle talk with the editor, which never touched on his troubles at all. Nevertheless, Wint emerged from the Journal office in a more cheerful frame of mind. People were apt to be more cheerful, and more optimistic, and more resolved, after talking with B. B. This was one of the virtues of the man.