PART THREE
Chapter 11
IN the hurly-burly of the rearrangement of life, nobody had been able to pay much attention to Stephen, and he had reveled in this freedom from supervision. He had always steered his small, hard life on a line of his own, a line he strove to make parallel to the course of the rest of the family, and never intersecting. Contact with others always meant trouble in Stephen’s experience—except with Henry and Helen. Now that the grown-ups had almost forgotten his existence, he was enjoying life as never before, under his dirty, crumpled rompers, stiff with spilled egg-yolk and cold bacon grease.
His father’s accident had made no impression on his emotions. Events that did not touch Stephen personally never made any impression on his emotions. The only element in the new situation which interested him was that Mother seemed to have forgotten all about Teddy. This was important. It made Stephen very glad that Father had fallen off the roof and broken his legs all up, or whatever it was. As long as Father stayed in bed, he couldn’t bother anybody, even when he and Stephen were left alone.
For, after a time, they were left alone. When the sick man began to improve so that he was conscious, and later, occasionally out of pain, there were hours when the round of volunteer neighbors and helpers thinned out, when he was left in his bed in the dining-room, a glass of water, a book, something to eat and the desk-telephone on a table by his side, with instructions to telephone if he needed anything.
“Don’t you hesitate a minute now, Mr. Knapp,” said old Mrs. Hennessy heartily; “if it’s no more than to put a shovelful of coal on the kitchen fire, you call fourteen ring thirty-two and I’ll be right over.”
“And when Stephen gets to acting up, just shake the window-curtain real hard and I’ll drop everything to come over and settle him,” said Mrs. Anderson zestfully.
So far Stephen had not “acted up.” Probably, so Mrs. Anderson told Mrs. Knapp, “because as things are now he’s let to do just what he pleases and goodness knows what that is!” Stephen had even been a stimulating element in his father’s days when they first began to emerge from the endless nightmare of pain and to become, once more, successive stages in a human life.
Lester never spoke to any one about those first weeks after his fall and thought of them himself as little as possible. The mere casual mention of them afterwards brought the cold sweat out on him. No circle in any hell would have contained more concentrated suffering than was crowded into his every conscious moment—horrible, brute, physical suffering, tearing at every nerve, suffering that degraded him, that left him no humanity. When this was deadened for an instant by opiates or exhaustion, there were terrible hallucinations—he was again on the steep, icy roof, turning, death in his heart, to throw himself down into cold nothingness—he was falling, falling, endlessly falling ... and now he knew what intolerable anguish awaited him at the end of his fall. He screamed out dreadfully at such times and tore at the bedclothes as if to save himself. These moments of frenzy always ended by his coming to himself with a great start and finding himself burning and raging once more in unendurable physical pain.