Chapter 9

This place was to them what old slippers are to tired feet. Here they put off the manners and the dignities their servants expected of them, and lapsed into shabby clothes and colloquialisms, such as they had been used to when they were first married, long before he became the master of a thousand acres, of cattle upon a hundred hills, of blooded thoroughbreds and patriarchal stallions, of town lots and a bank, and of a record as Congressman for two terms. This pilgrimage had become a sort of annual elopement, the mischief of two white-haired runaways. Now that the graveyard or the city had robbed them of all their children, they loved to turn back and play at an Indian-summer honeymoon.

This year, for the first time, Maw had consented to the aid of a "hired girl." She refused to bring one of the maids or the cook from the big house, and engaged a woman from the village nearest at hand--and then tried to pretend the woman wasn't there. It hurt her to admit the triumph of age in her bones, but there was compensation in the privilege of hearing some one else faintly clattering over the dish-washing of evenings, while she sat on the porch with Paw and watched the sunset trail its gorgeous banners along the heavens and across the little toy sky of the pond.

It was pleasant in the mornings, too, to lie abed in criminal indolence, hearing from afar the racket of somebody else building the fire. After breakfast she made a brave beginning, only to turn the broom and the bedmaking over to Susan and dawdle about after Paw or celebrate matins in the green aisles of the garden. But mostly the old couple just pretended to do their chores, and sat on the porch and watched the clouds go by and the frogs flop into the pond.

"Mail come yet, Maw?"

"Susan's gone for it."

He glanced up the road to a sunbonneted figure blurred in the glare, and sniffed amiably. "Humph! Country's getting so citified the morning papers are here almost before breakfast's cleared off. Remember when we used to drive eleven mile to get the _Weekly Tribune_, Maw?"

"I remember. And it took you about a week to read it. Sometimes you got one number behind. Nowadays you finish your paper in about five minutes."

"Nothing much in the papers nowadays except murder trials and divorce cases. I guess Susan must have a mash on that mail-carrier."

"I wish she'd come on home and not gabble so much."

"Expectin' a letter from the boy?"

"Ought to be one this morning."

"You've said that every mornin' for three weeks. I s'pose he's so busy in town he don't realize how much his letters mean to us."

"I hate to have him in the city with its dangers--he's so reckless with his motor, and then there's the temptations and the scramble for money. I wish Stevie had been contented to settle down with us. We've got enough, goodness knows. But I suppose he feels he must be a millionaire or nothing, and what you've made don't seem a drop in the bucket."

The old man winced. He thought how often the boy had found occasion to draw on him for help in financing his "sure things" and paying up the losses on the "sure things" that had gone wrong. Those letters had been sent to the bank in town and had not been mentioned at home, except now and then, long afterward, when the wife pressed the old man too hard about holding back money from the boy. Then he would unfold a few figures. They dazed her, but they never convinced her.

Who ever convinced a woman? Persuaded? Yes, since Eve! Convinced? Not yet!

It hurts a man's pride to hear his wife impliedly disparage his own achievements in contrast with his son's. Not that he is jealous of his son; not that he does not hope and expect that the boy will climb to peaks he has never dared; not that he would not give his all and bend his own back as a stepping-stone to his son's ascension; but just that comparisons are odious. This disparagement is natural, though, to wives, for they compare what their husbands have done with what their sons are going to do.

It was an old source of peevishness with Paw Coburn, and he was moved to say--answering only by implication what she had unconsciously implied, and seeming to take his theme from the landscape about them:

"When my father died all he left me was this little--bungalow they'd call it nowadays, I suppose, and a few acres 'round it. You remember, Maw, how, when the sun first came sneakin' over that knob off to the left, the shadow of those two oaks used to just touch the stone wall on the western border of father's property, and when the sun was just crawlin' into bed behind those woods off yonder the shadow of the oaks just overlapped the rail fence on the eastern border? That's all my father left me--that and the mortgage. That's all I brought you home to, Maw. I'm not disparaging my father. He was a great man. When he left his own home in the East and came out here all this was woods, woods, woods, far as you can see. Even that pond wasn't there then. My father cleared it all--cut down everything except those two oak-trees. He used to call them the Twin Oaks, but they always seemed to me like man and wife. I kind o' like to think that they're you and me. And like you and me they're all that's left standin' of the old trees. They were big trees, too, and those were big days."

The greatness of his thoughts rendered him mute. He was a plain man, but he was hearing the unwritten music of the American epic of the ax and the plow, the more than Trojan war, the more than ten years' war, against forests and savages. His wife brought him back from hyper-Homeric vision to the concrete.

"Thank Heaven, Susan's finished gossipin' and started home."

The mail-carrier in his little umbrellaed cart was vanishing up the hill, and the sunbonnet was floating down the road. The sky was an unmitigated blue, save for a few masses of cloud, like piles of new fleece on a shearing-floor. Green woods, gray road, blue sky, pale clouds, all were steeped in heat and silence so intense it seemed that something must break. And something broke.

Appallingly, abruptly, came a shattering crash, a streak of blinding fire, an unendurable noise, a searing blast of blaze as if the sun had been dynamite exploded, splintering the very joists of heaven. The whole air rocked like a tidal wave breaking on a reef; the house writhed in all its timbers. Then silence--unbearable silence.

The old woman, made a child again by a paralytic stroke of terror, found herself on her knees, clinging frantically to her husband. The cheek buried in his breast felt the lurch and leap of his pounding heart. Manlike, he found courage in his woman's fright, but his hand quivered upon her hair; she heard his shaken voice saying:

"There, there, Maw, it's all over."

When he dared to open his eyes he was blinded and dazed like the stricken Saul. When he could see again he found the world unchanged. The sky was still there, and still azure; the clouds swam serenely; the road still poured down from the unaltered hills. He tried to laugh; it was a sickly sound he made.

"I guess that was what the fellow calls a bolt from the blue. I've often heard of 'em, but it's the first I ever saw. No harm's done, Maw, except to Susan's feelings. She's pickin' herself up out the dust and hurryin' home like two-forty. I guess the concussion must have knocked her over."

The old woman, her heart still fluttering madly, rose from her knees with the tremulous aid of the old man and opened her eyes. She could hardly believe that she would not find the earth an apocalyptic ruin of uprooted hills. She breathed deeply of the relief, and her eyes ran along the remembered things as if calling the roll. Suddenly her eyes paused, widened. Her hand went out to clutch her husband's arm.

"Look, Paw! The oaks, the oaks!"

The lightning had leaped upon them like a mad panther, rending their branches from them, ripping off great strips of bark, and leaving long, gaping wounds, dripping with the white blood of trees. The lesser of the two oaks had felt the greater blow, and would have toppled to the ground had it not fallen across its mate; and its mate, though grievously riven, held it up, with branches interlocking like cherishing arms.

To that human couple the tragedy of the trees they had looked upon as the very emblems of stability was pitiful. The old woman's eyes swam with tears. She made no shame of her sobs. The old man tried to comfort her with a commonplace:

"I was readin' only the other day, Maw, that oaks attract the lightning more than any other trees," and then he broke down. "Father always called 'em the Twin Oaks, but I always called 'em you and me."

The panic-racked Susan came stumbling up the steps, gasping with experiences. But the aged couple either did not hear or did not heed. With old hand embracing old hand they sat staring at the rapine of the lightning, the tigerish atrocity that had butchered and mutilated their beloved trees. Susan dropped into Mrs. Coburn's lap what mail she brought and hurried inside to faint.

The old couple sat in a stupor long and long before Mrs. Coburn found that she was idly fingering letters and papers. She glanced down, and a familiar writing brought her from her trance.

"Oh, Paw, here's a letter from the boy! Here's a letter from Stevie. And here's your paper."

He took the paper, but did not open it, turning instead to ask, "What does the boy say?"

With hands awkwardly eager she ripped the envelope, tore out the letter, and spread it open on her lap, then pulled her spectacles down from her hair, and read with loving inflection:

"MY DARLING MOTHER AND DAD,--It is simply heinous the way I neglect to write you, but somehow the rush of things here keeps me putting it off from day to day. If remembrances were letters you would have them in flocks, for I think of you always and I am homesick for the sight of your blessed faces.

"I should like to come out and see you in your little old nest, but business piles up about me till I can't see my way out at present. I do wish you could run down here and make me a good long visit, but I suppose that is impossible, too. There are two or three big deals pending that look promising, and if any one of them wins out I shall clean up enough to be a gentleman of leisure. The first place I turn will be home. My heart aches for the rest and comfort of your love.

"Write me often and tell me how you both are, and believe me, with all the affection in the world,

"Your devoted son, "STEPHEN."

She pushed her dewy spectacles back in her gray hair and pressed the letter to her lips; she was smiling as only old mothers smile over letters from their far-off children. The man's face softened, too, with the ache that battle-scarred fathers feel, thinking of their sons in the thick of the fight. Then he unfolded his paper, set his glasses on his big nose, and pursed his lips to read what was new in the world at large. His wife sat still, just remembering, perusing old files and back numbers of the gazettes of her boy's past, remembering him from her first vague thrill of him to his slow youth, to manhood, and the last good-by kiss.

Nothing was heard from either of them for a long while, save the creak of her chair and the rustle of his paper as he turned to the page recording the results in the incessant Gettysburgs over the prices of corn, pork, poultry, butter, and eggs. They were history to him. He could grow angry over a drop in December wheat, and he could glow at a sign of feverishness in oats. To-day he was profoundly moved to read that October ribs had opened at 10.95 and closed at 11.01, and depressed to see that September lard had dropped from 11.67 to 11.65.

As he turned the paper his eye was caught by the head-lines of an old and notorious trial at law, and he was confirmed in his wrath. He growled:

"Good Lord, ain't that dog hung yet?"

"What you talkin' about, Paw?"

"I was just noticin' that the third trial of Tom Carey is in full swing again. It's cost the State a hundred thousand dollars already, and the scoundrel ain't punished yet."

"What did he do, Paw?"

The old man blushed like a boy as he stammered: "You're too young to know all he did, Maw. If I told you, you wouldn't understand. But it ended in murder. If he'd been a low-browed dago they'd have had him railroaded to Jericho in no time. But the lawyers are above the law, and they've kept this fellow from his deserts till folks have almost forgot what it was he did. It's disgraceful. It makes our courts the laughing-stock of the world. It gives the anarchists an excuse for saying that there's one law for the poor and another for the rich."

After the thunder of his ire had rolled away there was a gentle murmur from the old woman. "It's a terrible thing to put a man to death."

"So it is, Maw, and if this fellow had only realized it he'd have kept out of trouble."

"He was excited, most likely, and out of his head. What I mean is, it's a terrible thing for a judge and a jury to try a man and take his life away from him."

"Oh, it's terrible, of course, Maw, but we've got to have laws to hold the world together, ain't we? And if we don't enforce 'em, what's the use of havin' 'em?"

Silence and a far-away look on the wrinkled face resting on the wrinkled hand and then a quiet question:

"Suppose it was our Steve?"

"I won't suppose any such thing. Thank God there's been no stain on any of our family, either side; just plain hard-workin' folks--no crazy ones, no criminals."

"But supposing it was our boy, Paw?"

"Oh, what's the use of arguin' with a woman! I love you for it, Maw, but--well, I'm sorry I spoke."

He returned to his paper, growling now and then as he read of some new quibble devised by the attorneys for the defense. As softly and as surreptitiously as it begins to rain on a cloudy day, she was crying. He turned again with mock indignation.

"Here, here! What you turning up about now?"

"I want to see my boy. I'm worried. He may be sick. He'd never let us know."

The old man tried to cajole her from her forebodings, tried to reason them away, laugh them away. At last he said, with a poor effort at gruffness:

"Well, for the Lord's sake, why don't you go? He's always askin' us to come and see him. I'm kind o' homesick for a sight of the boy m'self. You haven't been to town for a month of Sundays. Throw a few things in a valise and I'll hitch up. We'll just about make the next train from the village."

She needed no coercion from without. She rose at once. As she opened the squeaky screen-door he was clumping down the steps. He paused to call back:

"Oh, Maw!"

"Yes, Paw!"

"Better tuck in a jar of those preserves you been puttin' up. The boy always liked those better 'n most anything. Don't wrap 'em in my nightshirt, though."

She called out, "All right," and the slap of the screen-door was echoed a moment later by a similar sound in the barn, accompanied by the old man's voice:

"Give over, Fan."

II

The elevator-boy hesitated. "Oh, yes-sum, I got a pass-key, all right, but I can't hahdly let nobody in Mista Coburn's 'pahtment 'thout his awdas."

"But we're his mother and father."

"Of co'se I take yo' wud for that, ma'am, but, you see, I can't hahdly let nobody--er--um'm--thank you, sir--well, I reckon Mista Coburn might be mo' put out ef I didn't let you-all in than ef I did."

The elevator soared silently to the eighth floor, and there all three debarked. The boy was so much impressed with the tip the old man had slipped him that he unlocked the door, put the hand-baggage into the room, snapped the switch that threw on all the lights, and said, "Thank you, sir," again as he closed the door.

Paw opened it to give the boy another coin and say: "Don't you let on that we're here. It's a surprise."

The boy, grinning, promised and descended, like an imp through a trap.

The old couple stood stock-still, hesitating to advance. So many feelings, such varied timidities, urged them forward, yet held them back. It was the home of the son they had begotten, conceived, tended, loved, praised, punished, feared, prayed for, counseled, provisioned, and surrendered. Years of separation had made him almost a stranger, and they dreaded the intrusion into the home he had built for himself, remote from their influence. Poor, weak, silly old things, with a boy-and-girlish gawkishness about them, the helpless feeling of uninvited guests!

"You go first, Paw."

And Paw went first. On the sill of the drawing-room he paused and swept a glance around. He would have given an arm to be inspired with some scheme for whisking his wife away or changing what she must see. But she was already crowding on his heels, pushing him forward. There was no retreat. He tried to laugh it off.

"Well, here we are at last, as the fellow doesn't say in the circus."

There was nothing to do but sit down and wait. The very chairs were of an architecture and upholstery incongruous to them. They knew something of luxury, but not of this school. There was nowhere for them to look that something alien did not meet their eyes. So they looked at the floor.

"It gets awful hot in town, don't it?" said Paw, mopping his beaded forehead.

"Awful," said Maw, dabbing at hers.

Eventually they heard the elevator door gride on its grooves. All the way in on the train they had planned to hide and spring out on the boy. They had giggled like children over the plot. It was rather their prearrangement than their wills that moved them to action. Automatically they hid themselves, without laughter, rather with a sort of guilty terror. They found a deep wardrobe closet and stepped inside, drawing the door almost shut.

They heard a key in the lock, the click of a knob, the sound of a door closed. Then a pause. They had forgotten to turn off the lights. Hurrying footsteps, loud on the bare floor, muffled on the rugs. How well they knew that step! But there was excitement in its rhythm. They could hear the familiar voice muttering unfamiliarly as the footsteps hurried here and there. He came into the room where they were. They could hear him breathe now, for he breathed heavily, as if he had been running. From place to place he moved with a sense of restless stealth. At length, just as they were about to sally forth, he hurried forward and flung open their door.

Standing among the hanging clothes, the light strong on their faces, they seemed to strike him at first as ghosts. He stared at them aghast, and recoiled. Then the old ghosts smiled and stepped forward with open arms. But he recoiled again, and his welcome to his far-come, heart-hungry parents was a groan.

They saw that he had a revolver in his hand. His eyes recurred to it, and he turned here and there for a place to lay it, but seemed unable to let it go. His mother flung forward and threw her arms about him, her lips pursed to kiss him, but he turned away with lowered eyes. His father took him by the shoulders and said:

"Why, what's the matter, boy? Ain't you glad to see your Maw--and me?"

For answer he only breathed hard and chokingly. His eyes went to the revolver again, then roved here and there, always as if searching for a place to hide it.

"Give that thing to me, Steve," the old man said. And he took it in his hands, forcing from the cold steel the colder fingers that clung as if frozen about the handle.

Once he was free of the weapon, the boy toppled into a chair, his mother still clasping him desperately.

The old man knew something about firearms. He found the spring, broke the revolver, and looked into the cylinder. In every chamber was the round eye of a cartridge. Three of them bore the little scar of the firing-pin.

Old Coburn leaned hard against the wall. He looked about for a place to hide the horrible machine, but he, too, could not let go of it. His mouth was full of the ashes of life. He would have been glad to drop dead. But beyond the sick, clammy face of his son he saw the face of his wife, an old face, a mother's face, witless with bewilderment. The old man swallowed hard.

"What's happened, Steve? What's been goin' on?"

The young man only shook his head, ran his dry tongue along his lips, tore a piece of loose skin from the lower one with his teeth, and breathed noisily through nostrils that worked like a dog's. He pushed his mother's hands away as if they irked him. The old man could have struck him to the ground for that roughness, but the prayers in the mother's eyes restrained him.

"Better tell us, Steve. Maybe we might help you."

The young man's head worked as if he were gulping at a hard lump; his lips moved without sound, his gaze leaped from place to place, lighting everywhere but on his father's waiting, watching eyes, and always coming back to the revolver with a loathing fascination. At last he spoke, in a whisper like the rasp of chafed husks:

"I had to do it. He deserved it."

The mother had not seen the nicks on the cartridges, but she needed no such evidence. She wailed:

"You don't mean that you--no--no--you didn't k-kill-ill-ill--"

The word rattled in her throat, and she went to the floor like a toppling bolster. It was the old man that lifted her face from the rug, ran to fetch water, and knelt to restore her. The son just wavered in his chair and kept saying:

"I had to do it. He was making her life a--"

"Her life?" the old man groaned, looking up where he knelt. "Then there's a woman in it?"

"Yes, it was for her. She's had a hard time. She's been horribly misunderstood. She may have been indiscreet--still she's a noble woman at heart. Her husband was a vile dog. He deserved it."

But the old man's head had dropped as if his neck were cracked. He saw what it all meant and would mean. He would have sprawled to the floor, but he caught sight of the pitiful face of his old love still white with the half-death of her swoon. He clenched his will with ferocity, resolving that he must not break, could not, would not break. He laid a hand on his son's knee and said, appealingly, in a low tone, as if he were the suppliant for mercy:

"Better not mention anything about--about her--the woman you know, Steve--before your mother, not just now. Your mother's kind of poorly the last few days. Understand, Steve?"

The answer was a nod like the silly nodding of a toy mandarin.

It was a questionable mercy, restoring the mother just then from the bliss of oblivion, but she came gradually back through a fog of daze to the full glare of fact. Her thoughts did not run forward upon the scandal, the horror of the public, the outcry of all the press; she had but one thought, her son's welfare.

"Did anybody see you, Steve?"

"No. I went to his room. I don't think anybody s-saw me--yes, maybe the man across the hall did. Yes, I guess he saw me. He was at his door when I came out. He looked as if he sus-suspected-ed me. I suppose he heard the shots. And probably he s-saw the revol-ver. I couldn't seem to let it drop--to le-let it drop."

The mother turned frantic. "They'll come here for you, Stevie. They'll find it out. You must get away--somewhere--for just now, till we can think up something to do. Father will find some way of making everything all right, won't you, Paw? He always does, you know. Don't be scared, my boy. We must keep very calm." Her hands were wavering over him in a palsy. "Where can he go, Paw? Where's the best place for him to go? I'll tell you, Steve. Is your--your car anywhere near?"

"It's outside at the door. I came back in it."