Part 2 (1/2)
A fist, now, was softly pounding him; and Gregory's voice threatened tears. ”What is it?” Lee Randon asked. ”You will have to excuse me, I was thinking.”
The narrative which followed, the confused history of a two and a half dollar gold-piece finally taken from Gregory by his mother, was broken into by Helena's irrepressible contempt at his youthfulness.
”He thinks the money is gone,” she explained, ”because Mother put it in the bank for him. I told him when he got it there would be a lot more, but he just wouldn't listen to me. No matter what anybody said it was no good.”
”Well,” Gregory inquired, ”how much more?”
”I don't know, silly; but packs.”
”Seventy-seven dollars?”
”That depends on how long you leave it in the bank,” Lee instructed him.
”If you didn't ask for it for twenty years--”
”But I want it next Thursday,” Gregory hotly interrupted; ”won't it be any bigger then?”
”He does nothing but ask and ask questions,” Helena added. Lee patted Gregory's cheek:
”Don't let Helena discourage you. If I don't put the light out your mother will make me go to bed.”
There were breathless delighted giggles at the thought of that absurdity. He leaned over his son. ”Kiss me!” Helena cried. ”Now kiss me,” Gregory echoed. ”Kiss me back again--”
The light went out with a sharp click, and the room was once more a glimmering darkness, blanched and cold. The ruddy faces of the children, their bright hair, even their voices, were subdued. f.a.n.n.y, apparently, hadn't moved; the light at her shoulder was reflected in the cut steel buckles of her slippers; she had slight but graceful ankles. He recognized this, drawing a sheaf of reports from his brief-case; but, after a perfunctory glance, he dropped them beside him on the floor.
”Really, Lee, your condition is getting dreadful,” f.a.n.n.y observed; ”you are too nervous for words. Go in and look at that doll you brought from New York. She ought to teach you repose even if I can't.” A swift concern shadowed her eyes. ”Are you doing too much, do you think? It isn't necessary, you know. We have plenty. I don't understand why you will go so hard at all those fool concerns of yours. There might be a mortgage on us, from the way you work.”
The latter part of her speech he forgot in the calling of his attention to Cytherea. f.a.n.n.y had said that the doll might tranquilize him. The opposite was more probable--Cytherea, what could be more disturbing?
f.a.n.n.y hadn't noticed her smile, the long half-closed eyes, the expression of malicious tenderness, if such a thing were possible, the pale seductiveness of her wrists and hands, the finger nails stained with vermilion. He tried to imagine a woman like that, warm, no--burning, with life. It seemed to Lee the doll became animated in a whisper of cool silk, but he couldn't invent a place, a society, into which she fitted. Not Eastlake, certainly, nor New York ... perhaps Cuba. What a vanity of nonsense his thoughts had led him back into: Cytherea, a thing of wax, was on the over-mantel beyond the hall; Cuba beyond the sea.
The smoke of another cigar, precisely in the manner of the one before, hung between him and the piano. His wife settled contentedly in the curly maple rocker, her rings flas.h.i.+ng in the swift drawing of threads from a square of linen.
Early in the morning Lee Randon drove himself, in a Ford sedan, to a station on the main line of a railway which bore him into the city and his office. It was nine miles from Eastlake to the station, where he left the car for his return; and, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, he accomplished the distance in twenty minutes. The road was good and lay through open rolling country, grazing and farmed land; he knew its every aspect thoroughly, each hill and turning and old stone house, in the pale green of early spring with the flushed petals of the apple blossoms falling on the dark ploughed ground; yellow with grain; a sweeping stubble with the corn shocked in which rabbit hunters, brown like the sheaves, called to their dogs.
Now it was sombre and, in the morning and evening, wrapped in blue mist; the air had the thick damp coldness usually precipitated in snow; the cattle, gathered about the fodder spread in the fields, were huddled against the rising winds. The smoke of a chimney was flattened on a low roof; and Lee, who had sometimes wished that he were a part of the measured countryside life, had a sudden feeling of revolt from such binding circ.u.mstances. He wasn't surprised, this morning, that it was difficult to get men to work in the comparative loneliness of the farms, or that farmers' sons went continually to the cities.
When they couldn't get there they crowded into their borough towns, into Eastlake, at every opportunity, attracted by the gaiety, the lights, the stir, the contact with humanity. Before prohibition they had drunk at the hotel bars, and driven home, with discordant laughter and the urged clatter of hoofs, to the silence of star-lit fields. The buggies had gone; High Street, on Sat.u.r.day night, was filled with automobiles; there was practically no drunkenness; but there was no lessening in the restless seeking stream of men, the curiosity of the women with folded hands and tightly folded lips.
They all wanted a mitigation of a life which, fundamentally, did not fill them; they had an absorbing labor, love and home and children, the church, yet they were unsatisfied. They were discontented with the primary facts of existence, the serious phases, and wanted, above everything, tinsel and laughter. If a girl pa.s.sing on the street smiled boldly at such youths they were fired with triumph and happiness; they nudged each other violently and made brazen declarations which, faced by the girls, escaped in disconcerted laughter. Their language--and this, too, was a revolt--was like the sweepings of the cow barns.
Life, it occurred to Lee Randon, in this connection, was amazingly muddled; and he wondered what would happen if the restraint, since it was no better than sham, should be swept away, and men acknowledged what they so largely were? A fresh standard, a new set of values, would have to be established. But before that could be accomplished an underlying motive must be discovered. That he searched for in himself; suppose he were absolutely free, not tomorrow, that evening, but now--
Would he go to the office, to the affairs of the Zenith cigarette, and, once there, would he come home again--the four thirty-seven train and the Ford in the shed by the station? Lee couldn't answer this finally. A road led over the hills on the right, beyond a horizon of trees. He knew it for only a short distance; where ultimately it led he had no idea.
But it was an enticing way, and he had an idiotic impulse to turn aside, follow it, and never come back any more. Actually he almost cut in, and he had to swing the car sharply to the left.
If he had been in trouble or debt, if his life had been a failure, he would have understood his impulse; but as it was, with f.a.n.n.y and Helena and Gregory, all his flouris.h.i.+ng affairs--why, it was insanity! However, what absorbed him in his present state of mind, of inquiry, was its honesty; nothing could be served by conventional protests and nice sentiments. Lee had long wanted to escape from life, from the acc.u.mulating limiting circ.u.mstances. Or was it death he tried to avoid?
What became clearest was that, of all the things which had happened to him, he would not, at the beginning, have deliberately chosen any. One, it seemed, bred by the other, had overtaken him, fastened upon him, while he was asleep. Lee knew a man who, because of his light strength and mastery of horses, had spent a prolonged youth riding in gentlemen's steeplechases for the great Virginia stables; a career of racing silk and odds and danger, of highly ornamental women and champagne, of paddocks and formal halls and surrept.i.tious little ante-rooms. That he envied; and, recalling his safe ignominious usefulness during the war, he envied the young half-drunk aviators sweeping in reckless arcs above the fortified German cities.