Part 11

Randolph and the gawky boy fell at once to tossing a baseball, Jimmie rolled delightedly about the lush grass, still grappling with his insoluble problem of rolling up a slope and still perplexed as to why it should be easier to roll down. Laura ran to his aid and Alicia sat beside me and laughed.

"That is the whole problem of life that Jimmie is facing," I observed gloomily.

"No, it isn't, Uncle Ranny," she put her hand on my arm as she contradicted. "That is only the law of gravitation. There is a lot more to life than that!"

"Yes, Alicia," I lowered my voice, "but when that man comes, how it will hurt to think of little Jimmie, of all those children of my sister's in the care of that man who's really her--her murderer!"

"Please, please, don't think of that!" she begged, with imploring eyes. "That hasn't happened yet. And we'll--we'll manage it somehow. Maybe he's a good man, after all--and, oh; we'll watch him--we'll watch him! Besides, he mayn't come. If he is what you think, then I am sure he won't come!"

That proved a very cheering thought.

Before I knew it, I was myself tossing a ball with Alicia and romping with the rest of them.

It was only after the lunch had been eaten under the trees and the egg shells and papers were gathered and stowed away, and the gawky boy proceeded clumsily to monopolize Alicia, who has not the heart to snub anybody, that my depression returned.

Whereupon Alicia gayly proposed that it was time to think of going home, because Jimmie was drowsy and must not forego his nap.

Was it adroitness or spontaneity? I cannot tell, but it is marvelous how that girl anticipates and understands.

It was a happy, tired, air-steeped company that returned home.

A telegram has just arrived. Dibdin and Pendleton have landed in San Francisco!...

*CHAPTER XIV*

Pendleton is here. He has been here a week. Like one in the dazed excitement of some dream, the sort of farrago that leaves you limp and weakly smiling when you wake up and see the sun, I have been going about with numb limbs, strangely galvanized, not so much into activity as the expectation of activity.

What is it I have been expecting to happen? I hardly know. But perhaps I have been expecting melodrama. And I am overcome by the obvious truism that genuine melodrama is anything but melodramatic. That is why melodrama on the stage, with its ranting and strutting and flourishes, disgusts one by its bathos.

The presence of Pendleton in my house, occupying my bedroom while I have withdrawn into my little study, is the essence of melodrama.

Yet every one and everything is in a tacit conspiracy to make it seem natural. There is a tension in the atmosphere, without doubt, but we are all of us madly, energetically ignoring it, hiding it.

The man's conduct has been astounding, unimpeachable, unexceptionable.

He out-Enochs Enoch Arden. Yet--why should I disguise the fact to myself--I hate him. That, too, I suppose, is melodrama. But do what I will, he remains detestable to me. I cannot trust him. I try, however, not to show it. Dibdin has acquired a deep furrow between the eyes, due doubtless to his sense of responsibility in having resuscitated Pendleton. He carries the air of some magician or sorcerer who has evoked a demon and is overwhelmed with terror by the problem of what to do with him.

But I must in decency acknowledge that Pendleton's behavior has been without blemish.

Dibdin had sent me a long night letter from San Francisco saying he would remain there a few days, "to give the fellow chance to bolt if he wants to." There had been other telegrams. I was not to meet them at the train but to give explicit directions. It was as well. I could not have met Pendleton at the train even if he were coming from the dead. A week ago, when Dibdin telephoned from the city, I went so far as to order a cab to meet them.

There again the histrionics of the situation were at a hopeless disadvantage. For what I remember most vividly of that Saturday evening was the sickness of my soul as I sat awaiting their arrival. Again and again I had steeled myself to tell the children of their father's coming. I framed words and sentences in my mind until the cold perspiration moistened my forehead, but I could not face the ordeal. I had thought I knew myself--that I was steeled to the tests of life. But I saw I was still a reed. It came to within a couple of hours before their arrival and still I had not told them. I found myself on my two-inch terrace and a stream of profanity was breaking from my lips. On a sudden I saw Jimmie standing beside me. Shame and chagrin overtook me and I bent down to him and begged him to forgive me.

"Don't you mind me, Uncle Ranny," he put his hand in mine. "I'm a man, and I know a man has got to swear sometimes."

"No, Jimmie--not if the man has brains enough with which to think."

That contact with the child, however, seemed to release something in my clamped and aching skull.

"Run, Jimmie," I said, "and send Alicia out to me. I wish to speak to her."

Jimmie, to whom commissions are delight, was off like an arrow.

Some moments elapsed before Alicia could come to me and during that time I had a mad impulse to fly from it all, to, seize my hat and steal away, to take a train to the city and not to return, until it was all over. But I waited nevertheless and Alicia, who had been helping Griselda, came running out flushed, with concern in her eyes.

"Alicia," I began miserably, "I have tried to screw up my courage to tell the children about the coming of--of their father. But I simply can't do it, Alicia; it's--it's beyond me. I--I want you to tell them," I faltered like a guilty schoolboy. The girl winced perceptibly but--

"All right," she answered; "do you mean now?"

"About half-past six--the train gets here at six thirty-five. You take them into the garden--and keep them there until after the men come, and--I call you."

"Yes--Uncle Ranny," she whispered--"but, oh, please don't worry about it so much!"

"No, my dear," I murmured and at that moment I felt closer to her than to any other living being. To take the children out of the house upon the coming of their father--it sounded like a funeral. And it was at that moment--my funeral. And the rest of the afternoon was a blur and the encompassing world was a shadow. It was broken; no, it was too insubstantial for breaking. It kept thinning and receding away from me and I was left a dully throbbing entity in the primal chaos before Creation.

I was startled at last by hearing the wheezy groan of an aged taxi outside and like the galvanized corpse I was, I felt my members heavily stirring and propelling me to the door.

On the path in the curiously sickly light of a premature dusk under a clouded, lifeless sky I saw Dibdin and Pendleton, slightly stooping forward to the slope, walking toward me. That moment of poignant joy at seeing Dibdin, of exquisite pain on beholding Pendleton--I shall never forget it!

"Dibdin!" I cried, rushing at his hand and clinging to it to defer as long as possible touching the other's. Then, after ages it seemed, my eyes slowly turned to the tall figure of Pendleton and rested on the fleshy face, somewhat loose and pendulous, smooth-shaven and purplish, with eyes that fell before my own. Finally I disengaged my hand and held it out to him. I could not do otherwise.

"Jim," I murmured and my voice had labored over a universe of barriers to achieve that. But I could utter no more.

He peered at me from his protruding eyes as though he also were struggling, struggling with memory and with memories, with a teeming past, with all that he had been and committed, and for an instant I felt sorry for him.

"Come in," I breathed deeply, and we made our way into the house and into my study.

"Randolph," Pendleton finally uttered with a profound sigh, and then I recalled that he was playing a part. To me the appalling reality of the whole episode had been so excruciating that momentarily I forgot that he was in all likelihood playing a part. But was he? How could he? In the face of these children, in the face of all he is guilty of, how could he play a part, when the truth would raise him almost to a kind of manhood? I cannot give him the benefit of the doubt and yet I cannot wholly doubt him. Some idiotic simplicity or imbecility inside me makes it impossible for me to envisage any creature in human form as so consummate a villain. Perhaps--perhaps there is something--

"Randolph," he murmured in a deep guttural--"I know you--I remember you--yes, you are--you are--" and he paused. We hung for a moment like things dangling by threads, like marionettes motionless. Then, with a prickling sensation of sweat over all my body, I broke the spell by fumbling with a box of cigarettes and with a hand spasmodically quivering like the needle of a seismograph, I held them out.

"Have a good voyage?" I heard myself saying, as we all smoked and covertly stole glances at one another. I was not flying at his throat. Dibdin puffed heavily with the crease deepening between his eyes and Pendleton's gaze roved questing and unsteady about the room. Melodrama! There never was any except on the stage! In life there is only drama--and pain.

"How are the kids?" Dibdin asked abruptly.

"Fine!" I exclaimed automatically, in an unnatural voice, like a pistol shot. "They are out in the garden there," and Dibdin nodded. I felt certain that his mind also was seeing the analogy to a funeral. And now my brain seemed to be shaking off its dull lethargy. From somewhere in Maeterlinck the haunting memory of a phrase came glimmering through my consciousness, like a dim light through a fog, to the effect that if Socrates and Christ had been in the palace of Agamemnon, the tragedies of the house of Atreus could not have happened. I longed for a little wisdom to deal with the situation.

"Would you like," I turned to Pendleton, "to see the children?"

"The children," he repeated dazedly. "Yes--yes--I'd like to see them. But--just a moment. The children," he repeated piteously, "but no Laura!"

Sharp, sharp was the stab at my heart when he spoke her name. But either he is a supreme master in deceit or I am the dullest of simpletons. For the struggle through clouds of memory that his features expressed seemed real to me.

"I told you she was dead!" snapped Dibdin gruffly, without turning to him.

"You told me? Ah, yes." And he sighed heavily. "Of course you told me." And his chin sank weightily to his breast. We remained thus silent for a space. Then--

"Come," I said, standing up. "I'll take you to the children."

He rose ponderously, his great frame limp and leaden, and followed me somberly. He seemed sincere enough in his grief, I must own that. Dibdin did not move.

I led him into the garden toward the spot where the children were huddled about Alicia. She was talking to them in low tones and they were listening in dead silence. Never again, I hope, shall I experience that sense of going to my own execution that I experienced at that instant. Execution--no! I could have walked to a gibbet or a guillotine smiling, I am quite sure. What is my life to me? I was walking rather to the execution of those four young souls under the gnarled old apple tree.

Alicia, too! By Heaven! Like a lightning stroke that fact crashed into my soul. He would take Alicia also. No--no! He had no claim upon her, thank God!

"Not Alicia!" my voice broke out from the turmoil of my thoughts like the voice in a dream breaking the barriers of sleep.

"Eh?" said Pendleton faintly.

"Did you call, Uncle Ranny?" Alicia turned and asked in a clear, steady voice.

"Yes, Alicia," I struggled for control. "Here is Mr. Pendleton--come to see the children." I meant to say "his children," but I could not.

The whole sickly-colored evening seemed to shudder at my words. The children seemed like wraiths under the tree to shudder away from the intruding material world.

In a moment--what a tragic moment--Pendleton was bending toward them, peering, peering into their white, frightened faces. Then his gaze settled on Alicia and hung there for a space.

"This must be Randolph," he finally turned to the eldest boy, "grown--grown up--isn't it?" and his arms stirred forward.

"Yes, sir," the boy answered hoarsely and put out his hand.

"And this--can this be baby Laura?" Laura hung her head then raised it bravely and with shy resolution held out her hand. Pendleton took it and kissed her clumsily on the cheek.

Jimmie, hanging back, clung to Alicia's skirt and watched the proceedings with troubled stealth from behind her.

"And this is Jimmie," I said, taking the child by the shoulder--"the youngest of them."

As Pendleton was stooping toward him, Jimmie uttered a wild scream of heartbreaking terror, wrenched himself from my hold and fled like some little wounded animal toward the house. Pendleton gave a short, mirthless laugh.

My throat was parched, my heart Was thumping like a rabbit's, but how I loved Jimmie at that moment!

"He is only a baby," put in Alicia softly.

Again Pendleton looked at her--obliquely.

"And this is--" he murmured.

"Alicia Palmer," I supplied hastily, "who has been looking after them."

"Ah, Alicia--a little deputy mother--" and he held out his hand with shamefaced suavity.

The scene was over--the incredible episode--commonplace enough as I write it down. But I lived a dozen melodramas in that eternity that a clock would tick off in three or four minutes of time.

*CHAPTER XV*

Walking about as I do under sentence, I am like a man of my acquaintance, a stodgy, a terrible Philistine, who cherished for years a fancy that he could write Gilbert and Sullivan operas. In all his life he had probably never rhymed anything more subtle than love, above and dove. Since any fool, in his opinion, could supply the music, he aspired only to the Gilbertian librettos. Incessantly and hopelessly out of key he went about humming the Sullivan tunes to the lyrics he alleged to have in his mind.

Similarly, I go about with a sense of mendacious buoyancy,--like a shipwrecked passenger bobbing helplessly in a troubled sea, but still alive; a flickering glimmer of hope, like a desperate man facing a tiger, but still undevoured.

Brazenly I still expect happiness to emerge, somehow, out of hopelessness.

It is easy, of course, to lapse into moods of despondency, into wishing I were dead, since I cannot live in happiness,

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh.

But such moments pass. There is a sort of tonic in the rough of life when the smooth is absent, and the wits, my poor dull wits, brace themselves for the shock of action. I feel certain now that in all my years of tranquillity it is the salt of suffering that was lacking. Yet who would seek suffering for its own sake? I know, however, that I feel younger and more energetic to-day than ever I felt five years ago.

Even Pendleton has his uses. He is the thorn in the side, the fox gnawing at my vitals under the cloak, but here he is in my house as its guest.

He goes with me to the city of a morning on his quest for work, "a connection" as he calls it, and often I find him at home before me when I arrive, in my room, smoking, or out in the garden with the children. I wince inwardly, but I hope I do not show it.

I spoke of hating him, but that is untrue. You cannot persistently hate any man, notably a guest in your house. You can only suspect him. Yet, when I see the children still shy of him, why does it give me a throbbing sense of triumph? I do not know, but so it is. Randolph alone seems to approach him nearer as the days go by. They go on walks together and Randolph confides to Alicia that he is fascinated by the tales of his father's experiences in the tropics, of ships and islands and pearl-fishing and native customs. I fancy Pendleton must be selectively on the alert in his narratives with his young son as the listener. His past must contain many things that none of us in this quiet haven will ever hear recounted.

But I am indifferent to his past. I could listen and even tolerate him as my guest, if only the children were not passing to his care. He talks of "relieving" me of the burden.

"Don't hurry, old man," I answer casually, "they are no burden to me."

He gazes at me and lowers his eyes.

"I tell you, Randolph, you're a revelation to me. I never knew a man like you before. They don't make them like that these days."

"Praise from Sir Hubert," occurs to me, but I don't say it. I am in reality at his mercy, I suppose, but I often feel as though he were at mine. The glossing over of his atrocious conduct, the taking him at his word on the subject of his lapsed memory, which we either slur or don't refer to at all, seem to give me a tremendous advantage over him,--the commonplace advantage of simple honesty over mendacity. Not for a moment do I now believe in his lapsed memory story. I cannot deny, however, that his air is one of repentance and, as Dibdin has said, who in this world is so hard but he wouldn't give a fellow man a second chance?

Jim Pendleton, now that he has been to a New York tailor's, appears as impressive and debonair as ever. He must be in the middle forties and he is not ill-looking. It is chiefly his eyes that seem changed to me. Do what I will, I cannot look at them. There is a certain disturbing obliqueness about his gaze that makes me turn mine away in a sort of vicarious shame.

But, again, _C'est un mauvais metier que celui de medire_. And conscious of that truth, I mean to speak or think no more ill of Jim Pendleton. After all, his large contact with the world has given him something that I lack.

Last evening at dinner he was regaling us with an experience of his of spearing fish in the Marquesas.

"I was in the back of the boat," he was saying, "with a torch in my hand, and my islander, who was an expert at it, held his spear ready for the first fish that leaped. Several of them leaped and fell again into the water round us churning it up, so that we were wet with spray. Suddenly I saw a huge mass glistening in the torchlight, falling, it seemed, right on top of us.

"The native buried his spear upward in the thing as it fell. I tell you that man was quick! But it was too late. The huge fish flopped into the boat with its great head on my knees and the full weight of his body on the man, sending him overboard and splintering the side of the boat. In just about a second we were in total darkness, floundering in the water, with an overturned boat. I was badly bruised and the native had both legs broken.

"In spite of his broken legs, however, he offered to swim ashore, to the nearest projecting rock. But I was sure he couldn't make it and very certain I couldn't. It was a job, I can tell you, righting that boat, helping that man into it and scrambling in myself; and then with a piece of splintered oar rowing ourselves in. The fellow with his broken legs, worked just as hard as I did and never uttered so much as a groan. It did me up for some time. But that fellow was spearing fish again in ten days or so."

Jimmie, who is sometimes allowed to take his supper with us, sat gazing at his father, fascinated by the narrative until the last word. Then seemingly jealous that any one, even this strange father, should exceed me in prowess, his little face clouded and he demanded:

"Uncle Ranny, didn't you ever spear a big fish?"

"No, Jimmie," I laughed, "but maybe you and I will go there one day and spear some together."

"Well, anyway," he retorted stoutly, "you took us on a picnic."

Whereat we all laughed, albeit my own laugh was rueful. The thought flashed through my mind that Pendleton was certain to win them to himself the moment he decided to do so. The very memory of me would become ridiculous to them.

"Uncle Ranny," spoke up Laura, "has been too busy feeding us and buying us clothes to go traveling."

Alicia smiled radiantly at Laura across the table, and Griselda, who had just come in with the dessert, nodded her head with somber emphasis as she placed the bowl before me.

I could have hugged them all three in gratitude, but nevertheless I pressed Pendleton to narrate more of his experiences.

"No," he shook his head, evidently taking the children's comment to heart. "That's yarn enough for one evening."

That seemed to me very decent of Pendleton.

I could not help laughing at Dibdin to-day. I called him up on the telephone and demanded what he meant by coming from devil knows where after more than two years' absence and virtually cutting me.

"Come to lunch at the Salmagundi Club," he growled.

"Does it pain you as much as that to ask me?"

"Don't be a damn fool," he retorted.

"Don't be so wickedly witty," I replied.

"At twelve-thirty," he muttered and hung up the receiver. From which I gathered that he was out of sorts.

In the hall of the Club where he was waiting, I greeted him with,

"'Is it weakness of intellect, birdie,' I cried, 'Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?'"

He stared at me.

"How you can be so light and idiotic in the face of circumstances," he began, "passes my comprehension."

"Circumstances, my dear fellow, are all there is to life."

"Want to wash your paws?"

"No--I am as clean as I shall ever be."

I put my arm through his and allowed him to lead me to a quiet table in the rear of the billiard room, softly illumined by a shaded lamp at midday.

"What a delightful place!" I exclaimed. "Residence of Q.T. tranquillity."

"Tranquillity be blowed," he grunted, as he sat down facing me. "What are you going to do about that Old Man of the Sea of yours?"

"You mean Pendleton?"

"Whom the devil else can I mean?"

"Why, nothing of course, but give him a leg up if we can. What else is there to do? I just received a letter this morning from an insurance company asking for confidential information about him. He's given me as a reference and they're evidently considering him."

"The Danbury and Phoenix?" he asked.

"Yes. How did you know?"

"I got one, too."

"I suppose we are really his only two possible sponsors at present."

"I'd as soon recommend a convict from Sing Sing," he muttered.

"Oh, no!" I protested. "Not as bad as that. Besides, sometimes you have to recommend even a convict."

"I'd much rather recommend a convict. I hate to lie about this man. I've been asked whether I would trust him and I have to say yes. But you know dashed well I wouldn't. Give me a cigarette," he ended savagely.

"I think he'll go straight now," I murmured dully, passing my case to Dibdin and looking away. "The children will no doubt have an influence on him."

"You judge everybody by yourself."

"How d'ye mean--myself?"

"The long and the short of it is," he declared, putting both elbows on the table, "I had no idea what the children would do to you."

"What did they do to me?" I queried, mystified.

"Made you over--that's all."

"Explain," I said, gazing at him stupidly.

"What is there to explain?" growled Dibdin, when the waiter was out of earshot. "You were always a decent sort of idiot--bookworm, muddler, dilettante, whatever it was--afraid of real life, fit only to collect pretty little books or old musty volumes that nobody really cares to read in--a drifter, with about as much knowledge of the problems of existence as a stuffed owl in a glass.