“I’ll be glad to,” he said, without emotion. But he remembered that in the days of Jennie it was different. They would never have receded from their position regarding her. “Well,” he thought, “perhaps I can’t blame them. Let it go.”
They talked on about other things. Finally Lester remembered an appointment. “I’ll have to leave you soon,” he said, looking at his watch.
“I ought to go, too,” said Robert. They rose. “Well, anyhow,” he added, as they walked toward the cloakroom, “we won’t be absolute strangers in the future, will we?”
“Certainly not,” said Lester. “I’ll see you from time to time.” They shook hands and separated amicably. There was a sense of unsatisfied obligation and some remorse in Robert’s mind as he saw his brother walking briskly away. Lester was an able man. Why was it that there was so much feeling between them—had been even before Jennie had appeared? Then he remembered his old thoughts about “snaky deeds.” That was what his brother lacked, and that only. He was not crafty; not darkly cruel, hence. “What a world!” he thought.
On his part Lester went away feeling a slight sense of opposition to, but also of sympathy for, his brother. He was not so terribly bad—not different from other men. Why criticize? What would he have done if he had been in Robert’s place? Robert was getting along. So was he. He could see now how it all came about—why he had been made the victim, why his brother had been made the keeper of the great fortune. “It’s the way the world runs,” he thought. “What difference does it make? I have enough to live on. Why not let it go at that?”
CHAPTER LXI
The days of man under the old dispensation, or, rather, according to that supposedly biblical formula, which persists, are threescore years and ten. It is so ingrained in the race-consciousness by mouth-to-mouth utterance that it seems the profoundest of truths. As a matter of fact, man, even under his mortal illusion, is organically built to live five times the period of his maturity, and would do so if he but knew that it is spirit which endures, that age is an illusion, and that there is no death. Yet the race-thought, gained from what dream of materialism we know not, persists, and the death of man under the mathematical formula so fearfully accepted is daily registered.
Lester was one of those who believed in this formula. He was nearing sixty. He thought he had, say, twenty years more at the utmost to live—perhaps not so long. Well, he had lived comfortably. He felt that he could not complain. If death was coming, let it come. He was ready at any time. No complaint or resistance would issue from him. Life, in most of its aspects, was a silly show anyhow.
He admitted that it was mostly illusion—easily proved to be so. That it might all be one he sometimes suspected. It was very much like a dream in its composition truly—sometimes like a very bad dream. All he had to sustain him in his acceptance of its reality from hour to hour and day to day was apparent contact with this material proposition and that—people, meetings of boards of directors, individuals and organizations planning to do this and that, his wife’s social functions Letty loved him as a fine, grizzled example of a philosopher. She admired, as Jennie had, his solid, determined, phlegmatic attitude in the face of troubled circumstance. All the winds of fortune or misfortune could not apparently excite or disturb Lester. He refused to be frightened. He refused to budge from his beliefs and feelings, and usually had to be pushed away from them, still believing, if he were gotten away at all. He refused to do anything save as he always said, “Look the facts in the face” and fight. He could be made to fight easily enough if imposed upon, but only in a stubborn, resisting way. His plan was to resist every effort to coerce him to the last ditch. If he had to let go in the end he would when compelled, but his views as to the value of not letting go were quite the same even when he had let go under compulsion.
His views of living were still decidedly material, grounded in creature comforts, and he had always insisted upon having the best of everything. If the furnishings of his home became the least dingy he was for having them torn out and sold and the house done over. If he traveled, money must go ahead of him and smooth the way. He did not want argument, useless talk, or silly palaver as he called it. Every one must discuss interesting topics with him or not talk at all. Letty understood him thoroughly. She would chuck him under the chin mornings, or shake his solid head between her hands, telling him he was a brute, but a nice kind of a brute. “Yes, yes,” he would growl. “I know. I’m an animal, I suppose. You’re a seraphic suggestion of attenuated thought.”