“How is Irene?” James said,
“Resting. I put cold cloths on her head. That’s about all anybody can do, you know, after she’s had one of those spells.”
When Ethel was a little girl, Elizabeth had said, she could not bear to get dirt on her clean white stockings.
Bunny was recalled from wherever it was that he had been.
“Is it true, Aunt Eth—Is it true that Irene married Uncle Boyd Hiller for his money?”
In the silence that followed this question they could all hear the big clock ticking sullenly in the front hall, two rooms away.
“No, son, it isn’t true,” James said. “And you mustn’t say things like that, do you hear?”
Bunny nodded, and would have gone on eating if Ethel had not leaned forward in her chair with hard blight eyes.
“Who told you that, Bunny?”
“It’s something he’s made up,” James said.
I didn’t either make it up—it’s what Grandmother Morison told Amanda Matthews.”
Robert put his fork down with a clatter.
“Who is Amanda Matthews?” Ethel asked.
“She’s a girl in Aunt Clara’s Sunday-school class that was at Aunt Clara’s house night before last.”
James saw that Ethel was smiling at him queerly.
“Well, however it was,” she said, “you misunderstood. Your grandmother wouldn’t say such a thing.”
“But she did, Aunt Eth. She said there was somebody else that Irene wanted to marry but Grandmother Blaney kept after her night and day, saying what a fine young man Uncle Boyd was, because he had been to Princeton and—”
“Bunny, that’s enough.”
The interurban was drawing alongside the train, on the other tracks. And James had to wait for a minute before he could go on speaking.
“Suppose you tell us, son, what you were doing all this time?”
“He was on the couch,” Robert volunteered, “in the sitting-room, pretending like he was asleep.”
“When I want information from you, Robert, I’ll ask for it…. Go up to your room now, both of you.”
They had made trouble enough for one evening—trouble that would last for months and months, and when Irene found out about it, breed more and more trouble.
“Well,” he said, “what are you waiting for?”
As soon as they had gone—Robert looking injured and Bunny in tears again—James set about to deal with the image that obsessed him. With so much sickness, with the epidemic everywhere, it stood to reason that someone with influenza might have been on that interurban, too. They might have been exposed to the flu there, just as they were on the crowded train. And what point was there in torturing himself like this? What good did it do?
“You might have let them stay and have their dessert,” Ethel said, from the other end of the table.
“They’re my children, Ethel,” James said, “and I’ll do with them as I think best.”
5
Wilfred returned with Clara almost immediately after dinner.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” Clara said. “I say it just doesn’t seem possible! She was so young, and with so much to live for!”
James had no idea what to say, or what was expected of him. But as the evening progressed, more and more people came—Lyman and Amelia Shepherd, Maud Ahrens, the Hinkleys, the McIntyres, the Lloyds—until the library was filled with them. And by that time James had adjusted his mind to the rhetoric of the occasion. What bewildered him was not the set phrases, and not the repetition, but the fact that they were sincerely spoken. Such a loss, people said to him with tears in their eyes. So tragic that she should have to be taken. … Then because there were so many that they could not all talk to him, they fell back upon one another politely, as if that were why they had come. They discussed the peace terms and the price of meat. They talked about the weather, which was severe for December—only the beginning of the cold months.
James tried to take a suitable interest in the conversation, but he could not keep from glancing up when each new person came into the room, and strange ideas ran through his head. It seemed to him that except for an unwillingness to interrupt one another, people acted very much as if they had come here to a party. The house had taken possession of them—Elizabeth’s house—and they were having a good time.
Clara and Wilfred went home, and then the Shepherds, and then the McIntyres, almost without James’s noticing it. The air grew heavy with smoke. And after a while he discovered that it was not necessary for him even to seem to be listening. He was glad when eleven o’clock came and one by one they stood up to leave—all except young Johnston, who had brought his mail out to him from the office and did not know apparently how to go home.
While Johnston talked about the office and about the adjustment of a certain loss, James sat with his hand over his left side. It was something that he had never thought about until now, and there was no reason why it should occur to him particularly, except that he felt very wide awake after not having slept for days and days. But the strange thing was that he could hear his own heart ticking under his vest—keeping time there like a clock.
“I’ve come down from Chicago,” a voice said—an unmistakable voice. James sprang up and went to the front hall, but he was too late. Boyd Hiller was there. He was inside the door, talking to Ethel, and there was that same tired handsomeness about him. He had not changed, except that it seemed to be an effort for him to carry himself so well. As Ethel started up the stairs, he turned and saw James in the doorway.
“Good evening,” he said.
Once upon a time James met Boyd Hiller with Robert unconscious in his arms. And later (years later) James had shut the front door in his face. The extreme courtesy of Boyd’s manner implied that he remembered both incidents.
In any family, James thought, it was like that. Nothing was ever forgotten.
There were no chairs in the front hall—only a sofa beside the window. Both men remained standing. When the tension became uncomfortable, James said, “Are you living in Chicago now?”
“For a short while.”
Boyd cleared his throat.
“New York is my headquarters, though, and has been the last two years. I’m on the stock exchange.”
“That must be interesting,” James said, and thought grimly of the time Boyd put soap in the minnow-bucket for a joke,
“You get used to it.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
Irene was coming down the stairs in a green flowered kimono.
“You get used to anything,” James said.
When Irene reached the bottom step, she waited, and Boyd waited at the edge of the dark red rug. “I can’t tell you how shocked and how sorry I am!”
Irene stepped down and shook hands with him gravely.
“You’ve been sick,” she said.
Boyd nodded.
“Flu?”
“It was a light case. When I was able to go back to the hotel I found your note, and here I am.”
James understood now what had happened—why Irene had gone off to Chicago when they were counting on her to stay and look after the boys. Actually, there had never been much doubt in his mind. He knew her almost as well as he knew Elizabeth. She was very impulsive by nature, and excitable, and decided everything on the spur of the moment, and then had all the rest of her life to regret it in. It didn’t take any great intelligence to see by the look on her face that she was about to run through that whole unhappy business with Boyd Hiller all over again. If they wanted to do that, James thought, it was all right with him. He turned and went back into the library.
6
The flowers in Irene’s kimono were almost but not quite the color of her hair. And James decided that no matter what people said, it was not money. Irene had not married Boyd for that, nor would she go back to him for any such reason. There was no telling how she felt about Boyd now, but at one time, before they began quarreling so, she had been fond of him. On her weddin
g day she broke a mirror and perhaps it was that which ruined their marriage—bad luck as much as anything.
Somehow it was impossible to think of her leading a calm, ordinary life. Wherever Irene was, there was excitement. Now when she gathered the folds of her kimono and leaned toward the fire, her eyes glittered. Her hair gave off light.
“I think we know sometimes what is going to happen to us,” she said. “I remember things that didn’t seem to have any meaning till now, and they fit…. We were upstairs, James, in your bedroom, and Elizabeth was doing her hair. I was sitting on the bed, watching her, and I said, ‘It’s so complicated, the way you are doing your hair now,’ and she stopped and looked at me in the mirror, and said, ‘I know. I was just thinking that nobody will be able to do it for me when I am dead.’ I said for her not to talk like that, because it was wrong and silly and there was no telling how long anybody would live. But she took the hairpins out of her mouth and said, ‘Within three years.’”
James got up out of his chair and began to walk. He could not and would not believe what Irene was saying. He could not believe that Elizabeth had lain awake at his side, planning and arranging things for a time when she would not be there. With other people she sometimes covered up her true feelings, though not with him. Nobody had any idea, for instance, how deeply she still felt about Robert’s accident; how at night she turned into his arms and wept. But if her life had been overshadowed by the anticipation of dying, he would have known it. She could not have kept it from him.
“It’s the kind of thing that people remember,” he said, “after some one is dead. You might never have thought anything more about it except for that. It’s like any common superstition—thirteen at the table or a dog howling or a bird in the house.”
“You know there was one,” Irene said. “There was a bird in Bunny’s room while he was sick. I didn’t tell you afterward because I knew it would worry you—Not the bird, but something that it was too late to do anything about. It was my fault, really. Elizabeth sent Robert for a broom. Then in our excitement we both forgot and went into the room where Bunny was. When Robert came back he saw her sitting on the edge of Bunny’s bed…. And ever since, he’s been thinking that if anything happened to his mother, he’d be responsible. You didn’t know that, did you, James? … Tonight when they were both in bed I went to see them. I talked to them for a while about their mother, and to my surprise Robert broke down and told me what was on his mind. You have to watch him, James, and talk to him more than you do, and find out what is back of what he’s saying. Because he’s at the age to get notions…. I explained to him that people caught the flu within three days after they were exposed to it. What he was worrying about happened weeks before his mother took sick. I don’t know whether he believed me or not. I guess he did. It’s things like that—don’t you see? Now that his mother isn’t here to keep an eye on him … And each of us has his private nightmare. Robert isn’t the only one.”
James looked at her oddly to see whether by some mischance she knew about the interurban.
“I keep remembering,” she said, “how selfish I was those last weeks—always thinking about Boyd and whether I could bring myself to go back to him. And I sort of took what was happening to her for granted. That was the way it always was. As a person, James, I could never hold a candle to her. Nobody could…. I remember once we went, the two of us, to see a woman who had cooked for my mother, and who was very sick. She lived in an old house on Tenth Street, and it was filthy dirty. And after we left, Bess was furious with me. She said ‘Irene, I saw you gather up your skirts so they wouldn’t touch anything! How can you be like that?’ … She went over to the bed where the woman lay, and sat down, and took her hand.”
James sighed. He had been along with them that day. It was just after Elizabeth and he were married. He had gone into the dirty ramshackle house on Tenth Street when they did. But Irene didn’t remember. She was talking about Elizabeth for the pain it caused her, and possibly to keep from saying something she couldn’t bring herself to say. They had always been friends, and with friends you oughtn’t to have to say what both of you understand without its being said. Probably this was as near as she could come to speaking about that abrupt change of plans that had thrown them all into such an uproar. If it hadn’t been for Clara, who, with all her faults, and she had plenty of them, nevertheless …
“And there’s something else, James … something I have to tell you. At the last when she was so terribly sick she motioned with her hand. As if she wanted to write. I said ‘Tell me what it is you want done, Bess, and I’ll do it …’”
James got up and went to the window and threw it wide open, and small white papers that he had stuffed into the cracks to keep the drafts out were scattered across the room.
“‘It’s about my baby,’ she said. ‘I don’t want the Morisons to have my baby.’”
The air was not as cold as James had expected, but dark and full of snow.
7
When he opened the door from the butler’s pantry into the kitchen, he found only darkness. It was no more than reasonable, he told himself, that Karl should have got tired waiting and gone home. For it was after eleven, and he had promised to come out as soon as dinner was over.
The scene at the table had driven everything else out of his mind. And people began coming…. There was no need to say that to Ethel. She was a fine woman and he was fond of her. But if there was one thing that he could not stand, it was having somebody step in and tell him how to run his affairs…. He groped his way past the table to the light cord. Sophie had left the kitchen just as she always did, in perfect order. He was about to turn and go back to the front part of the house when he heard a scratching sound outside, and as he opened the door, there were two eyes shining at him out of the darkness. Old John hobbled across the sill.
“Did they forget you, old fellow?” James said.
The dog looked at him reproachfully.
It was beginning, James thought to himself—the final and complete disintegration of his house. Wherever he turned he would find it. Elizabeth was gone, and things would not be done which should be done…. He put his face down and buried it (for there was no one here to see him) in the cold fur of the dog’s side. Old John whined softly.
Why, James thought, why am I doing this? And straightened up immediately and stood there waiting until the dog had made himself comfortable beside the stove. Then he turned the light out and went back the way he had come—through the butler’s pantry and the dining-room and around the library to the front hall. Mr. Koenig had come over from next door, and he was in the library alone. And on the fifth step of the stairs James paused, remembering why people sat up all night with the dead.
Then he went on up the stairs and across the upstairs hall to the bedroom which Elizabeth and he had shared, and saw her dresses hanging in the closet, and was struck blind and almost senseless. When he could, he shut the closet door quickly, and pressed his forehead into the long cool mirror which was on the other side.
Satin
and lace
and brown velvet
and the faint odor of violets.
—That was all which was left to him of his love. In anger then (for she could have sent some word to him and she had not—only that message about the baby, which he didn’t entirely believe) he went about the room picking up her brush or her ivory mirror or the tiny bottle of smelling-salts, and putting them down again. One after another he opened drawers, gathering small intimate things—hairpins, sachet-bags, a sponge soaked in powder, a score-card, a tassel, a string of amber beads—and made a pile of them on the dresser. For she had put him aside, he said to himself, casually with her life.
He stood in the center of the room, rocking forward and back; and in his ears heard that terrible last hour of her breathing…. He would sell the house, he thought over and over like a lesson to be memorized. A lesson that he would recite tomorrow when the time came. And Clara could take t
he children since she wanted them. And everything else—Elizabeth’s clothes, her amethysts and pearls (he dumped them out on the dresser), her engagement ring, her enameled watch—he would give to Ethel, to Irene, to Sophie, to anybody with the kindness and mercy to have them. Because she was gone now. And when he had finished, there would be no trace of her anywhere. No one would know there had ever been such a person, he said to himself. And turned to the doorway, and saw Bunny staring at him with Elizabeth’s frightened eyes.
8
When he had given Bunny a drink of water and tucked him in bed, James went downstairs and out of the house. The wind had fallen. There was an inch of snow on the front walk and more of it coming down steadily on James’s coat sleeve and on his gloved hands and whirling in a silent frenzy about the street lamp. The crotches of trees were white with it, and each separate branch outlined. When James looked up he could see the night sky all dark, and the moist snow dropping into his face, into his open mouth.
He had come down the stairs and out of the house as he had done every day of his life, but with this difference—he was not going back. He would not enter that empty house again. Here on the sidewalk (with snow falling so thick that a man ten feet away would hardly know him) he was alone.
He turned to the left, as the snow turned, and walked past the first house, which was the Koenigs’, and past the second, which was the Mitchells’, and the third…. They were all asleep in their beds, with no knowledge of him, or that he was here on the sidewalk looking at their darkened houses.
The house of Elizabeth’s father was on the other side of the street and occupied by strangers. He had nothing to fear from it…. He and Elizabeth lived there when they were first married, with her father and mother and with Irene. Elizabeth’s father read Ingersoll and questioned every accepted idea on religion and morality, so that it was an education for a young man to be with him. But during his last illness he changed his mind about things, and he stopped questioning. It’s like this, James, he would say. There’s the earth—the continents and the seas, and the moon revolving around the earth, and the sun beyond that, and all the constellations. And beyond the constellations are stars without number or name, millions of them, whirling in space. You know that, James, without my telling you…. But for time or the passage of time they might be there now, talking—James himself, only younger, and an old man dying of a horrible blood infection in his head.
They Came Like Swallows Page 12
