But Hattie could not go with her. Hattie’s triumph was spoiled. On the night of the concert when The Everlasting had appeared without warning, it was necessary for some one to see that the old man was returned safely to the apartment, so to Charles Tolliver the task had been assigned. Gramp, Heaven knows, could easily have found his way back; he knew more of the world than any of them, but he chose never to interfere with such plans lest he seem too active, too spry to require any attention. To guard his security, he encouraged their assumption that he was feeble and a bit childish. He had not forgotten the security which comes of being a possession.
It is impossible to have known what thoughts passed through the crafty, old mind as he walked by the side of his son through the dark streets. They did not speak; they were as strange to each other as they had always been, as remote as if there had been not the slightest bond between them. Perhaps the old man scorned his son for his gentle goodness, so misplaced in a world where there was so little use for that sort of thing. Perhaps he understood that Ellen was after all much closer to himself than to her father. Perhaps he knew that Charles Tolliver, in his heart, had been saddened by the triumph, because it stood as a seal upon his daughter’s escape. Perhaps he noticed the faint weariness in the step of his son, the dark circles beneath his eyes, the listlessness of his manner, as if he had grown weary of the confused, tormented life all about him.
It was the old man ... the father ... whose step was light, whose eye was shining as they entered the flat. It was the old man too who sat up reading until he heard Hattie and Miss Ogilvie, returning from the Ritz, come in at three in the morning. For Charles Tolliver had gone quickly away to his bed and to the dreams that were his reality.
In the morning Hattie had called Ellen to say that her father was ill. He had been drowsy. It was almost impossible to keep him awake. The doctor had been there.
“He says,” Hattie told her, “that he must have been ill for a long time without speaking of it. He has never complained. I don’t understand it. And now he’s too drowsy to tell me anything. The doctor says he is badly run down. He is worried because Papa seems to have no resistance.”
He had grown no better with the passing of time. Indeed, the drowsiness seemed to increase, and there were times when he talked irrationally, as if he had never left the Town at all. He held long, fantastic conversations with Judge Wilkins and talked too of the Grand Circuit races and Pop Geers.
And when Ellen left for the Midlands, Hattie remained behind to sit in the rocking chair at her husband’s side caring for him and for Gramp who had since the night when he ran away to the concert become troublesome again as if there were something in the air.
53
IN the Town the new concert hall of which Cousin Eva Barr and May Biggs had written with such enthusiasm and detail raised its white Greek façade a score of yards from the main street. Erected to the twin worship of the muses of Music and the Theater it supplanted the dismal opera house of an early, less sophisticated period, and so left the late U. S. Grant architecture of that shabby, moth-eaten structure in an undivided dedication to the bastard sister of Music and the Theater, a shabby, commonplace child known as the Movies, whom Sabine had once said should be christened Pomegranate. Though the new temple was barely finished and the names of Shakespeare, Wagner (who would probably be left out now that there was a war and the Germans, who were the very backbone of the Town, had become blond beasts, professionally trained ravishers, and other things), Beethoven (who would slip by the committee because he had been dead so long), Verdi (whose Aïda many supposed to be the high water mark of all opera), Molière (suggested by Eva Barr but unknown to most of the committee), Racine (likewise), Weber (who was so dead as to be a natural history specimen and therefore unlikely to ravish any one, even spiritually), Goethe and Schiller (likewise, though still under suspicion)—were not yet carven upon its limestone pediment, the building was already streaked by the soot which drifted perpetually over the city from the remote flats where the mills now worked all day and all night in making shells. Yet the handsome temple could have had no existence save for the soot; the very smudges upon its virgin face were each one a symbol of the wealth which had made it possible. The Town had known four stages in its development. In the beginning there had been but a block house set down in a wilderness. Before many years had passed this was succeeded by a square filled with farmers and lowing cattle and heavy wagons laden with grain. Then in turn a community, raw and rankly prosperous which grew with a ruthless savagery, crushing everything beneath a passion for bigness and prosperity. And now, creeping in toward its heart, stealthily and, as many solid citizens believed, suspiciously, there came a softness which some called degeneration—a liking for beauty of sound, of sight, and of color. It stole up from the rear at the most unexpected moments upon men like Judge Weissmann. The wives of leading manufacturers and wholesale grocers had traitorously admitted lecturers and musicians into a fortress dedicated hitherto to the business of making money. And then with a sudden rush, the new forces had swept out of their hiding places on every side and saddled upon the noble citizenry a concert hall, a temple erected in the very heart of the citadel to the enemy.