CHAPTER XVI
Miracles—miracles are common as blackberries!
Pendleton is once again a faithful worker in the vineyard of the insurance company.
A commonplace miracle enough, but all miracles, I suppose, are commonplaces that happen to surprise us or that we don't understand.
The abstract office, I am sure, has more joy over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine—but I do not wish to be blasphemous. Like Death, it claims us all in the end. A voluptuary, an idler like myself, or a renegade who broke from it indefensibly like Jim Pendleton—all, sooner or later—turn or return to its yoke like starved runaway slaves—the unrelenting office! What a change it must be to Jim after the beaches and the barrooms of the gorgeous East! But for one closely relevant circumstance I could find it in my heart to be sorry for him.
What a strange and wonderful institution is the family! Another of those commonplace miracles so charged with mystery, like birth and death. If I were a classical writer or a Sir Barnes Newcome I might expatiate at length upon the subject. The things we swallow and condone and cover up for the sake of its ties!
Suffice it, however, that Jim Pendleton is quietly working out his salvation, a salary and plans for re-creating his dismembered home.
The children are becoming quite used to him. Randolph seems to be the nearest to him and Jimmie remains stubbornly farthest away. It is painful to think however that Jimmie's youth will the more certainly and completely detach him from me in the end.
When is it all to happen? I for one dare not fix the fateful day which, with every passing hour, draws nearer. No one fixes the day. It is left dangling in the air by an invisible thread of uncertain length and strength—
There are times when I could cry out in my anguish, my agony of nameless pain, fear, apprehension. But what a spectacle I should make of myself if I gave vent to emotion! We humans are not so much whited sepulchers as masked and silent volcanoes.