IT was Fergus who first called Gramp The Everlasting. The name was not original; he found it in one of the seed catalogues which his father brought into the apartment; for Charles Tolliver, shut up all day in a government office and all night in a city flat, led vicariously a life which in happier times had been a reality. The living room was cluttered with the catalogues of gardening houses and journals which dealt with agriculture, stock breeding and horses. The outward life of the gentle man was scarcely more than an illusion; a man with Charles Tolliver’s face and dressed in Charles Tolliver’s clothes lived at an address in the east Seventies of New York City; the same man worked at the Customs House, eating his lunch modestly in one of the little restaurants where Clarence and Mr. Wyck had once taken their gloomy meals. But the real Charles Tolliver was not to be found in any of these places. He lived perpetually among the farms of a county in the Midlands, or in the hotel bars and parlors of the Town, talking endlessly of the Grand Circuit races. And sometimes he was to be found seated with a fishing rod on the banks of a clear stream a thousand miles from the greasy current of the North River. When he was not in such places, he could be found among the catalogues which displayed gay colored pictures of gigantic beets and ears of sweet corn, or in the pages of journals which had splendid pictures of prize cows and great herds of cattle grazing knee deep in alfalfa. Sometimes he found pictures of his old friend Judge Wilkins’ prize shorthorns and on such occasions he grew sentimental and talked of the county as an old man talks of the love affairs of his youth. One would have thought that the triumph of each new blue ribbon won by Judge Wilkins’ prize bull, Herkimer Sextant, was a personal triumph of Charles Tolliver. The city had for him no reality; it was a dreary episode, a nightmare from which he would in time awake as he awaked reluctantly from the pleasant dreams he had when, carefully tucked in on the divan by Hattie’s capable hand, he escaped for a little while from the ugliness of the hard, unreal city. Since he had come from the Town, the habit of sleep had grown upon him: it was a drug ... hashish or opium.
It was in one of his garden catalogues that Fergus found the name. Seizing the booklet in hilarious triumph, he bore it to his mother and, holding it open, he showed her a large picture in color of a gigantic raspberry advertised as bearing throughout the season. Underneath in bold letters there stood forth in an amazing coincidence the name—TOLLIVER’S EVERLASTING. The name stuck and from then on the family referred to Gramp with humorous disrespect by that name. At length the old man himself overheard it and was delighted. He resolved then to see his hundredth birthday. In the solitude of his room, he felt amazingly brittle and young. Time rushed past him; tremendous things happened to the family, but he remained passive, unchanged because he had no emotions left to exhaust him.
The war that trapped Ellen and Rebecca Schönberg somewhere in the neighborhood of Trieste dawned upon the Tollivers in the most conventional fashion. At first they talked of it as impossible and absurd, and for the first time in years Gramp emerged from his seclusion to discuss with Robert (for whom he had an intense dislike) the Siege of Paris, which he had lived through in his youth. Indeed his interest attained such a magnitude that he very nearly revealed a secret hope that one day he might be taken, a millstone about his daughter-in-law’s neck, back to the city where he had spent what she would have called “a profligate youth.” But he took care not to mention the wish for fear that Hattie, in revenge for so many defeats over so many years, would do all in her power to thwart it. At ninety he wanted to see Paris again. He developed a passion for the military maps which appeared in the newspapers and used up all the pins in the house tracing the advance of the Germans toward the Marne.
As for Hattie, she gave small heed to his eccentricities, for she was occupied with other things. Her son, her best-beloved, was in England; she could not trust him. He might join in the war. She knew him well enough to know that he would not stop to weigh the chances of death; such a spectacle would fascinate him. And she knew that her daughter, in the company of an unearthly creature called Rebecca Schönberg (whom she had come to regard darkly as a sort of procuress), was lost somewhere in Austria. Until now, these foreign nations had meant little to her save that they were in the part of the world from which came the hordes of aliens who jostled her in the street. But now all was changed; a great war was no longer a distant affair to be treated with indifference. Her children were involved. She fancied Fergus already ill and wounded. She saw Ellen taken for a spy and immured in the sort of a dungeon one saw in the lurid pictures of the Sunday papers.
The news that came at last into the midst of her frantic anxiety brought her no peace. The two letters arrived by the same mail. The one from Fergus contained the information that he had gone to France, that vaguely he was trying to find a place where he might see the war. He was all right, he wrote. She must remember his excellent luck. It was all terrible, tragic, incredible ... the sights he had already seen, the things he had already heard. Yet it was magnificent too; somehow between the lines of a letter which he had meant to be reassuring and a little cold, she caught a sense of his reckless enthusiasm. She understood that he saw the war as a great spectacle. She remembered him as a little boy, wild with excitement at the glitter and pomp of a circus parade, intoxicated by the splendor, captured by the romance.
And she knew that she could not stop him. She knew that all the ink in the world and all the words she might write with it would not hold him back. It was all so clear in his letter. The image returned to her again and again ... a little boy, running recklessly, wildly toward the gaudy parade.... Only this time the parade was tragic and wound its length half way across the face of Europe. And because it was so gigantic, it was all the more powerful, all the more glamorous. What could she do against it?
Sometimes she cursed Gramp, The Everlasting, for the wandering spirit he had passed on to her children, and sometimes she reproached her own people for their strength and energy. If her children had been poor weak things she would never have lost them; she could have guarded them always. Sometimes when her worry and despair became overwhelming, she had a terrible premonition that in the end she would be left, alone, with that terrible sardonic old man, her father-in-law.
But Ellen was coming home! Ellen was coming home! She wrote from a place called Genoa to say that she was sailing in two days with Rebecca Schönberg, whom Hattie pictured as sallow, dark and sinister. Ellen had escaped from Austria, out of the midst of the war! She had been arrested with the dangerously international Miss Schönberg, but in the end, due to Miss Schönberg’s Aunt Lina and Uncle Otto, everything had been set right and they were allowed to go by boat from Pola into Italy. It was a wretched experience. The police, the soldiers ... every one was stupid and a little insane. Ellen would, she wrote, be thankful to get away from such a madhouse as Europe had become. Damn them! she wrote, for starting a war just when I had planned a tour of Austria and Germany!
There was hardness in that one line, of a new and amazing kind.
The entry into New York was made, due to Rebecca’s shrewdness, the proper sort of event. Two women straight (as the newspaper men managed to make it seem) from the front line! Two women who had been detained as spies! Two women who were good for at least two columns of space, paid for at so much a line, not to speak of the large photograph showing them on the deck of the Giuseppe Verdi with a great black Swiss shepherd dog that belonged to Lilli Barr! Two women with (almost) the dust of the trenches on their shoulders! The papers were full of Lilli Barr, and Miss Rebecca Schönberg, her manager. Every one got something out of it. Lilli Barr got a vast amount of attention. Rebecca Schönberg found herself in the newspapers and rose correspondingly in the eyes of all the relatives and acquaintances, (there were Bettelheims and Czelovars and Schönbergs in New York as well as in London and Paris and Vienna) to whom she had been known until now as Raoul Schönberg’s eccentric niece. The newspaper men earned extra money on space and the public had a first hand account of the war. It was all arranged magnificently. Lilli Barr got in under the line before the hundreds of other musicians who likewise damned the war and turned their faces toward a new world that had suddenly acquired an enormous importance.