Part 6

When Grandma Imlay first came in town, in April, and went to call at her old home, she trembled with delight to be there again, where she had lived for sixty-five years. Here her seven children had been born, and one had died, here her husband had lived and died; and she had baked much food and washed many clothes, had seen her daughters courted and married, and some of their children born. There had been little animals that she had loved, long-ago meetings of her society, boat rides on the pond, and merry times of house-cleaning and of holiday. She loved the smell of the linoleum and the bare washed boards and the dining-room table oilcloth.

She entered now upon that oak sideboard and extension table, the Wilton rug and the overstuffed rocker and divan. “It’s not the same, no more,” said Grandma Imlay.

She went back to her daughter Emmy’s. At first she had been dazed, but when later she talked of it, her eyes flashed. “I gave them my house. They took—I don’t know what. No stuff—no. But somethings. It’s not the same, no more.”

The young people invited her to come back and eat with them. She asked, “On _that_ table?” and said no more. But when they invited her to come for her birthday, she went. Some of her old neighbors were there, young and old. She moved for a time about the rooms, then went to the door, crying: “Let’s go out!” They all sat about on the platform of the clothes reel and on the wash bench and on an overturned tub. She made them bring out there the ice cream and the sunshine cake.

On a day in May they told her that Emmy’s grandchild would be born that night, they thought. She said capably: “I will go down there and see what’s to be done.” When they tried to dissuade her, she said so much that they were obliged to take her there. She went in, and began doing in the old way, and when the nurse and the doctor put her aside, she went out to the platform of the clothes reel and sat there for a long time, not replying. It grew late, and they tried to take her home, but she crept into her kitchen where things were not much changed; and there she waited in the darkness. After a long time she heard the cry of the child. When they brought the baby to the kitchen she sat quiet, and when they showed him to her, she said with no show of feeling: “Has he got all his arms and legs?” “Yes, Grandma,” they said. “And he’s your first great grandchild.” At that she stared up at them. They left her, counting something on her fingers.

When they were ready to go home she was not in the kitchen. Emmy thought of the pond and began to cry: “She’s jumped in the water—she feels she’s not needed and she’s jumped in the water!” But then she opened the door of the bedroom off the kitchen. There on her old yellow bedstead Grandma Imlay was lying asleep. “I believe,” said Emmy, “she’s going to stay here now. What on earth changed her?”

THE QUESTION

Becoming aware that he had no idea what his life was about, Baldy Michelson thought that he must end it. How could he go on with his little grocery and his cement house on Cottage Grove Avenue, his small car and his wife? If he had a radio or a piano player or a child, life might be interesting, or if he could afford to go anywhere for his two weeks’ vacation. As it was, he went for a few days to the Dunes, then sat at home with his wife or went to the picture show; and dug in his languid garden. In the beveled mirror too large for the bedroom, he saw a man with dead eyes, expressionless face which did not change when he spoke. In all his day there was nothing that he liked to do. Sometimes he looked at his wife and wondered what she made of it. But she was a shadow with a sharp tone.

One day he said to her: “Ella, I can’t stand twenty years more of this.”

She replied: “Neither can I.” It was the first time that they had agreed in years.

He looked at her with new sympathy, saying: “What can we do?”

She said: “Let’s sell the house and the business and go abroad.”

He cried: “What would we do when our money was all gone?”

She replied: “I don’t know, but it would be more interesting than to turn on the gas and leave the money to Alex.”

Baldy did not like his nephew Alex either. They sold house, furniture, and business. From the time the hatrack was carried out of the hall, Baldy began to revive.

They bought new clothes, sailed away, saw three capitals, visited the seat of the Michelsons—it was _probably_ the same family—and one night were walking in Chelsea when Baldy said:

“How’d it be to buy a nice villa over here and settle down? I was talking with the greengrocer yesterday. He needs a partner....”

They bought the villa in Chelsea, a small car, and hoped to have a radio or a piano player, but not yet. When vacation came they went for three days to Brighton. When they returned Baldy dug in a languid garden, went to the cinema and sat at home with his wife. In five years he looked in their beveled mirror and saw himself with dead eyes and unchanging face; and in a voice which did not change either he said to his wife: “Ella, how would you like to go back to the States?”

She replied with emotion: “Let’s go, let’s go!”

They sold the villa and the greengrocery partnership, and when they arrived in Chicago, Baldy found that his former partner was getting on and wished for some help. So they rented a house on Cottage Grove Avenue, and Baldy went back to that grocery.

“This is something like!” cried Baldy, and his wife thought so too.

Five years later he saw in the mirror an aging man, with dead eyes, who spoke in a dead voice. His partner was old, his wife was an icy shadow; and if only they could go somewhere for a vacation or could afford a radio or a piano player....

“We had it nice in Chelsea,” said his wife.

“We did,” he agreed, thought of the greengrocery, Brighton Beach and the cinema, and said: “Ella, I can’t stand ten years more of this.”

They were sitting on the side porch and Baldy stood up and shook his fist at the evening sky.

“What’s it _for_?” he shouted. “That’s what I don’t sense. It ain’t in the game to give a man a brain and then not tell him what it’s _for_.” He looked at his wife, his dead eyes unchanging, and said in his flat voice: “Ain’t there _anything_ that could tell a person what it’s for?” But she had no answer.

That evening Alex unexpectedly arrived. Baldy never had liked Alex, a little man, with an eager manner and no great respect for business.

“I dropped in,” said Alex, “to take you both over to my camp for Sunday. Can you go?”

“_Your_ camp?” said Baldy, and felt a new respect for Alex. Had he struck a good thing?

They drove to a corner of the forest reserve where were lines of gray ghostly tents and a living eye of fire in the midst. Around the fire were fifty boys, one boy standing before them. Alex and Baldy Michelson and Ella Michelson sat on the edge of the company and listened:

“We’ve all had the week here, fellows,” came the hesitant voice, “and we could have another one. But there’s fifty that ain’t going to get to camp at all, ’count not money enough. What do you say we start going back and give the other fifty their chanst?”

There came groans and hisses. But they took the vote, counted hands, and the vote was to let the other fifty come out.

“Nice kids,” said Alex to Baldy. “Never had a thing, either. But they’ve got the gang sense—the whole gang, I mean. They never saw one of these fifty boys they’re giving up their week for, you understand.”

“The whole gang,” Baldy repeated. “What’s that?”

Sitting among them on the Sunday, their last day in the camp, Baldy said to his wife: “Ella, they’re got hold of something or other. So has Alex....”

She returned vaguely: “Do you think so?”

That night, as they were falling asleep, Baldy said: “Ella! I’ll bet Alex staged that, thinking I’d put up for the extra two weeks of camp for those boys. I never thought of that....”

She said sleepily: “Oh, surely not, Baldy. Alex isn’t crazy.”

“All the same, he’s got hold of something or other,” Baldy muttered.

He went to his grocery. Mrs. Michelson tidied the house. At night they went to a picture show. In time they bought a piano player and a radio. They often sat on the side porch at evening and Baldy would shake his head and say: “What’s it all for? That’s what I don’t sense.”

But when he died, he left his money to Alex. “Because,” Baldy explained to his lawyer, “I think he seems to have got hold of something....”

THE VOICE

Basset had engaged passage on the _Titanic_, for her first crossing. Any one sailing at that time would have done the same, providing he could still get passage. Basset was delighted at the promise of the swift luxurious voyage, and he said to his friends:

“I’m off—on the _Titanic_—yes. Better come along.”

He cabled his fiancée and his firm, said his farewells and did his final shopping.

He was walking in Regent Street when he first became aware of a faint impulse within him, less than a force, more than a fragrance; an impulse to cancel his passage. At first he did not notice, and when his urge did break through to his consciousness, he understood that it had been beating at him for a long time. As soon as it was definitely noticed, it became a clear and clamorous command.

He argued the matter with this inner disturber. Cancellation was impossible. His arrangements were all made, invitations had been refused, his cables had been sent, and Marie would be counting the days. There was now no earlier boat and he was averse to all postponements. In reply to all this came three distinct words:

“Cancel your passage.”

Now Basset was accustomed to obey this inner impulse. He hadn’t an idea what it was, and in general he thought if you classified a thing you had disposed of it. But though he called this voice the subconscious, he continued to obey it, secretly and blindly, but pretty consistently. And the more often he obeyed it the more pressing it became, until, as now, having listened, he could not dismiss it.

So he canceled his passage, sent off two more cables, and tucked himself into the cabin of an old liner sailing a day later. He was on the deck of this old liner when he was told of the message from the _Carpathia_, crying the _Titanic’s_ fate.

Shaken by the disaster, he was yet kindled by the memory of what had occurred. He had been saved—but how? Unquestionably he could not be the only one to whom this saving voice had spoken. There must be people on this very boat....

He went among the passengers and asked them, nakedly, if they had had a like experience. From a passenger list of seventy, he found six who had taken passage and given it up for a similar reason and eleven who had thus been prevented from taking passage at all.

“Then why,” he shouted to a woman who had held her _Titanic_ passage for a month, “why were _they_ not given this impulse—the people who sailed?”

“Perhaps they were,” said this woman, “and they didn’t listen.”

When his boat had docked and he kissed Marie, exceedingly smart and very tender, she cried: “Oh, my darling—thank God you changed your passage. How did you come to do that?”

Basset told her, reluctantly, feeling a sense of exposure. At once upon her arrival at home she repeated the story to her family, in his presence. At dinner that night she made him tell it again. The newspapers came and interviewed him on it, and then his firm associates questioned him minutely—“No, but, just exactly how did the voice sound?”—and at his club they made him tell it again and again, and there they began to joke to him about it.

A woman’s association asked him to come and speak informally on his wonderful, wonderful metaphysical experience, and he was drawn into an acceptance; and goaded too far by their awe, he informed them that this was the most usual thing in the world; that he had been obeying this inner voice for years, and that they could all do the same if they were not too battered by—“by tea and cakes,” he told them rudely.

“But what _is_ it?” they wanted to know.

“It’s conscience,” he said bluntly, “working as it was intended to work. Also, it’s electricity. If we could raise our consciousness high enough, we’d always have this kind of thing....”

Now the scientists attacked him and demanded to know what on earth he meant by electricity, and the psychologists what on earth he meant by higher consciousness and universal substance, and the theologists what on earth he meant by dragging conscience into the routine of the market place? The weekly reviews and the daily headlines took up and tossed about Basset and his inner voice. He thought: “I shall lose my power. It is not that they have cut my hair. All the same, they have shorn me.”

He fled to a mountain camp and one day went out alone in a canoe on a mountain lake. As he pushed off, he distinctly divined an agonized command not to step into the canoe. It upset, in the green and glossy water. A guide heard his cries and came running and shouting as the waters closed over Basset’s head.

THE WOMAN

Walking one day in a suburb, Bellard, wearing clothes in the extreme of the fashion, was torn by the look of a house on whose mean little porch near the street sat a shabby man of sixty, without a coat, and reading a newspaper. The man’s fate seemed terrible: the unpainted house, the disordered hall, the glimpse of a woman in an apron. But the man looked up, and smiled at Bellard as brightly as if he himself had been young.

Bellard meant to be a financier. Instead, he shortly endured his father’s bankruptcy, left college, found uncongenial employment, observed the trick of a girl’s eyes, married her and lived in a little flat.

But this girl had the quality of a flower. Bellard could not explain it, but she was silent and fragrant, and hopeful like a flower. Once in April when he saw a pot of lilies of the valley blooming on the pavement, he thought: “They’re like Lucile. They’re all doing their utmost.” In her presence it was impossible to be discouraged. He would go home from work hating his office, his routine, his fellows, his street; but as soon as he entered the flat, there would be some breath of that air for which he saw other men dying. Her welcome, her abstraction, her silence, her confidences were all really heavenly. Bellard wondered at her, did not comprehend her, adored her. He worked hard, and went home on the subway with a sense of happiness.

He longed to give her beautiful things, but she said: “How did people get like that, my dear—to want expensive things and to have people look up to them? Isn’t it foolish?” He wondered how she knew that, and he wished that he knew it himself.

Their two children were like all agreeable children, and Bellard and Lucile went through the reverence, anxiety and joy of their upbringing. And whether the moment yielded a torn frock or a hurt knee, croup or a moral crisis, Lucile seemed to put the event in its place and not to be overwhelmed by it. “She has a genius for being alive,” Bellard thought.

As she grew older, she was not so beautiful, and he saw many women both beautiful and young. But when they chattered, pouted and coquetted, when they were cynical, bored, critical, or hilarious, he thought about Lucile and her silences, her fragrance, her hope. Hope of what? She knew that they would in all probability never have any more than they had now. When he asked her wistfully what kept her so happy she replied with an air of wonder: “You.”

One day he overheard her talking about him with a friend. Lucile was saying: “Other men live in things and events and emotions and the future. But he seems to know that living is something else....” “What else?” this friend interrupted curiously. And he heard Lucile say: “Well, of course every one knows, really. But he lives it too.” “I’m not good enough for her,” Bellard thought, and tried his best to prove that he was.

They went on like this for years; the children grew up, married, came home and patronized them. Then Bellard, who had established a little business, failed. His son tried to straighten things out, found it impossible, and assumed control, frankly berating his father. His daughter came home with her three children, and filled the flat with clamor and turbulence. This woman said: “Mother, sometimes I think it’s your fault. You’re so _patient_ with him.” “I’m glad he’s out of that business,” said Lucile absently. “He never liked it.” Her exasperated daughter cried: “But what are you going to live on?” Bellard heard her say: “Your father was responsible for three of us for a quarter of a century you know, dear.” At this Bellard rose on strong wings and felt himself still able to breast the morning and the night.

Lucile and Bellard moved to a suburb. There they rented a little house and Bellard went into a real estate office. All day he showed land and houses to men who wanted something better for less money. At night he went home and there was Lucile—less like a flower, but still silent, fragrant, hopeful. He said to her: “You’ll never have anything more than you have now, Lucile, do you realize that?” She replied: “I don’t want anything more to dust and take care of!” Once he said: “When you were a girl you dreamed that you’d have things different, didn’t you, Lucile?” She said: “My dear, all that poor girl knew how to dream was just about having things!” He cried: “What do you want most of anything in this world?” She considered and answered: “I want you to be as happy as I am.”

He thought of his own early dream of being a great financier, and said: “I’m the happy one, you know.” He thought: “This is what the world is dying for.”

One day, when he was sixty, he was sitting on his mean little porch near the street. The house was small and unpainted, the hall was disordered with house cleaning, Lucile in an apron was in the doorway. Bellard, without a coat and reading a newspaper, lifted his eyes, and saw walking by the house, and wearing clothes in the extreme of the fashion, a youth who looked up at him with an excess of visible compassion.

On this youth Bellard looked down and smiled, a luminous smile, a smile as bright as if he himself had been young.

A FAR CRY

Among the red porch chairs Elmer Dasher sat in a denim swing which leniently dissented. He did not seem like a man who would sit and swing; such a molested-looking man.

Hands parted the curtains of a window behind him and hung there a pink card on which was printed “Ice.” It was evening, but to-morrow morning’s slumber must not be flawed by this task. Immediately the hands appeared upon the porch. Mrs. Dasher’s hands wore all the expression that she had. They seemed to have done so much. Her face had experienced so little.

“Hot,” said she.

“Why shouldn’t it be? It’s summer time,” said Elmer Dasher.

He tilted the swing, and the spirited disclaimer of the frame did not annoy them. She rocked and they did not hear the creaking board. Near the cement pavement the sprinkler fizzed and spurted; they did not observe that in order to avoid it, passers were obliged to make a detour under the maples.

Elmer Dasher took his watch and held it. The last bright cloud hung on Patch Hill and stained the air. Shadow floated and fell. For five minutes while airy dissolution ran upon the light, Mr. Dasher eyed the dial. Then he descended the steps and turned off the city water. Unconscious that it was a triumph of social evolution for a community to be organized like that, and without a casual glance at the elemental glory of the sunset, he returned to his swing.

Ludlow, his neighbor, crossed the connecting lawns and desired to know how everything was. Ludlow had a woman’s eyes. Elmer Dasher held him in subconscious contempt, for he made disconcerting observations, such as he made now to Dasher’s inevitable reply that everything was complete, complete:

“Sometimes I wonder why Patch Grove doesn’t collapse and slide down Patch Hill and pile up in the valley.”

Dasher inquired why on earth it should do that. He knew his town; “hard-boiled business, hard-boiled recreation, hard-boiled family life,” he had once summed it up; but he could not imagine why business blocks, houses, garages, and folk should ever give way, of their own futility, and slide down to the valley of the Patch, the brown river. Ludlow’s long harangue only confused him.

“You won’t find any better place to live,” he indignantly defended. “I’m afraid not,” said Ludlow, sighed, mentioned the thunder heads in the west, and went home.

“Queer duck,” Elmer Dasher thought.

Abruptly, distinctly, he heard a cry. He could not divine its direction nor tell whether it was the voice of man or woman. It might have been a signal, very clear, though from a distance. He looked at his wife but she, with moving lips, was counting something and had heard nothing. He thought that the boys must be playing ball on the school grounds, and he tilted the swing again.

The hall gas flared up. Over her who had lighted it the warm tide surged, showed her pointed face, her thin arms—Geraldine Dasher, a name to which her faint self of forty bore no relation. She emerged, announced a destination, was met by “Why not ever sit down here at home with us?” and pregnable, without resentment, sank to the top step.

Within the houses, behind the dying brilliance of the brick walls, girls were dressing. In Patch Grove no one dressed before dinner. The virginity of the toilette was preserved for its main purpose. On the porches sat those who did not dress for the evening any more. In many of these the desire to give life had changed to a dynamic hostility to those already alive. As with the Dashers:

“Hot.” “Why shouldn’t it be? It’s summer time.” “That isn’t funny.” “My dear, nothing is funny to you.” “My clothes are—they’re so funny I don’t like to go to church.” “The churches have gone to the dogs. Best keep out of them.” “You would insult my religion!” And so on to: “I’m rather sick of this whole thing.” Whereon Geraldine cried abruptly: “How do you think I feel about that?” and laughed harshly, so that a silence fell.

In their silence a telegram was given over the telephone in the hall. Dasher took the message, came back, his face sagging with concern, and said:

“Mamma, Katy’s sick. She wants us to go to the city and bring the boy home with us.”

Mrs. Dasher asked for details which had not been given, made and rejected fractions of plans, objected. Dasher said: “Nonsense. Katy’s the only niece I’ve got in the world. Going, too, Jerry? Don’t keep us waiting.”

The enormous night received the little car. Ten miles of dusky cornland, warm with the breath of the day; eight miles of city streets, sleepy with heat, nervous with light, washed by a thin black stream of beings, Pearl City traffic formed the veins of some vast undivined body. That body seemed to have a voice, raucous, unresting. The powers of that body were evident—to give death, to give life, to sin, to rejoice, to agonize. Was there no more to that unknown being? Could it only bellow with its body while its veins flowed with the traffic?

Katy was at a hospital and with her the little boy, wondering, frail. The ward was shared with a woman, a Bohemian, red and black. Katy was a yellow shadow on a pillow. Old in cell and in spirit she said: “Don’t bother to stay. He’ll be here. But he can’t work and see to the boy, too. Me? I don’t know and I don’t care.” She lay like a little animal left too long in a trap to be watching any more.