by Howard Fast
She was such a woman as old John Preswick would have taken upon himself to love, had it ever been his to love again. Old John’s heart longed after women, and he throbbed to see the curve of her breast and the long fine sweep of her thigh. She was as young as his son was old, and the fullness of life in her contrasted strangely with the dull lethargy of his son. He wondered, sometimes, that the man who was back could not share his happiness. He knew it was his son, and yet it was not his son. It was a dark, moody creature with a single arm, who walked slowly, shoulders curved, head bent until the chin touched the breast. His skin had a yellow tinge which never disappeared, and the lean hollowness of his face gave his head the look of a skin-covered lifeless skull. Very little did he speak—hardly at all unless addressed. They took to calling him Captain. Sam called him Captain; even his father began to use the name; only Inez called him Johnny.
Inez had a way with him. Inez could smile, and only Inez could make him smile, and she rarely. At times Inez could open him up, so that he told her things; yet much there was he never spoke of. He would lay his head upon her breast—fine breast, firm and warm—and he would talk to her. He would attempt to convey what was upon his brow. He would say:
“They come back. I counted of those I knew, and there were exactly eighty men that I killed. Realize that, eighty men in five years, and of the eighty, I ran through twelve with my sword. That is why they took my arm. The others did not hate me. I killed them, but when a soldier dies by a bullet, he is only resentful, not bitter. He expects that. Only a sword is different. It is cold steel, and when it slides into you, it carries bits of flesh along. And it hurts!—how I know that! It is a ghastly feeling. My left was my sword arm. I am left-handed, but everything else I learnt to do with my right. Only in fence it was different. You remember old Pierre, the dried-up Frenchman who used to live along the Bowery; he taught me my fence, and he taught me saber play with my left hand. He insisted “that with my left arm I would have an indisputable advantage. He said that when they face a left-handed person, men forget all their parries and thrusts and strokes. He was right. That is why there were twelve of them, and never once I. Once they had me with the steel, through the arm at the shoulder. The second time they took no chances. They used a ball, and they shattered the bone at the socket into splinters. But perhaps they are not through yet; perhaps they will want more.”
Holding his head close to her, she would say: “You are a child, and I would to God that I could suffer for you. I have lived so little, and you have lived so much. It has not been fair. If only I could have shared it. If only I could have felt some of it. If only it could have hurt me as it hurt you …”
He would never know that seven years could be as long as seventy, and that death hurts, even when you do not die. Nor would he ever know how self-pity had hardened him.
4
IN the second year after they were married, a child was born to Inez, a girl, brown of eye, and with her mother’s shadow to her skin. They called the girl Inez. Had it been a boy, they would have called it John Preswick. But since it was a girl, they gave it the name of Inez. Old John Preswick was a grandfather, and he was proud. He considered it a very wonderful and remarkable thing to be a grandfather; and, that thought in his mind, the very next day after it was an accomplished fact, he took his frog-headed stick, took his long coat, and took his pearl-colored cocked hat, and, in spite of the cutting wind and flaky snow, strutted down the Bowery Lane that all the world might know the extent of his satisfaction and pride.
The world knew, but he caught a chill, of which he never got the better. For a month, he lingered, and then, his son and his son’s wife at his bedside, he died. They dressed his body as he himself would have dressed it; they laid it in a coffin, and they laid over it a red, white, and blue flag, and as they laid him into his grave, twelve rifles were discharged into the air, in recognition of the fact that his son had been a captain in the New York militia, that many, many years ago, he had marched with a boy named Hamilton upon the common, training other boys into a ragged squadron.
But as the younger John Preswick stood there, his wife at his side, alien thoughts were coursing through his mind. It occurred to him that, after all, this man was his father, and that the man was dead. There would be no reprieve, as there had been in his case, for with his own eyes he had seen the body laid out, had seen it dressed for the coffin, had seen it bolted in, as salted fish are bolted into a crate. He should have felt pity, and he should have felt grief, but he did not experience a great deal of either. And that puzzled him, as he was puzzled by the sobs that racked the form of his wife. Just why should it mean so much more to her than it did to him? Perhaps all of that had been in the seven years. Many things must have been in those seven years, things he would never quite understand. Realizing that for the first time, he realized, too, that his wife was a very strange person, and that he had never known her. All of it piled up upon him, and made his brow ache, so that he was glad when at last they turned away from the new grave and went back to their house.
Now he, the captain, was master of that house, and the great mahogany desk and the frog-headed stick was his. He went to the window, from which he could see the flag tossing over the Battery. For a long while he remained in the cold on the balcony staring at the flag. Then he turned his back, reentered the room, and bolted the window.
5
HE was so very old!—and the house made him older. For every year that his wife grew, for every year that his daughter grew, he grew two and three and even four. He would have denied that he was like his father, but his wife saw it, and Sam, the ancient negro butler, saw it too. He took to spending long hours behind the great black desk, and he would keep his chin on his palm, after the manner of his father. When he walked, he would take the frog-headed stick—not for any need of it, but because some impulse he could not explain threw it towards him.
The house was old, and the servants were old, and the master, who was less than forty, was very old, but there was youth in the house for all of that. Not his wife; his wife was bending beneath the pressure. She became staid, and her breasts flattened almost imperceptibly, and her fine chin became sharp. She wore much black, and she had a way of walking softly. It was not she; it was her daughter. In her daughter there was a flashing o brightness that was irrepressible. When she was seven, she was a wisp of ivory flesh with a crowning shock of red-brown hair. At first her eyes had promised the almost-black of her mother’s; but later a sea color came into them, and they glowed and sparkled and flashed. She was beautiful. Even at seven she had that half-sensuous sort of beauty that sends little shivers along men’s spines, beauty for which men do not hesitate to kill. And even at seven, she was conscious of that beauty, and how with it she could have slaves innumerable. She flashed about the gloomy old house, and no one dared deny that it was hers.
John Preswick would watch her and wonder. Not quite did he understand her. She was beyond him, and he never attempted to pierce into her. He watched her, and he wondered about her, accepting the fact that he was part of her, or, if such a thing were conceivable, she a part of him.
And so, in such a way as you might understand, in a soft, unnoticeable way, nine years went past, each one creeping through the old house, leaving small trace that it had come by that path. In a quiet, sodden way, he lived; his wife fell in with that. They moved slowly while their daughter dashed about them.
She was not unhappy, Inez, nor yet was she happy. He, John Preswick, was lost in a dream. For seven years as his wife, she did not know what his dreams were. Those were dying years. Some small pretense he made at managing his father’s business, but he was more content to put it into other hands. He was not a business man; he was a relic. He was living the years of the Revolution over, totally unconscious of the new country forming from it. He was living everything over. One night, nine years after he had come back, he told her.
“I must return,” he said.
“Return?—but to where? I do not understand
.”
“No,” he continued. “I have never told you. But I have been thinking. It has been nine years, and now I must go back.”
“But to where?” She did not understand. She stared at him, a small smile struggling at her lips.
“It is this.” Unemotionally, he began the thing, but as he went on, his voice lost its possession, and he lost himself in the words.
“It is this. After I escaped from the prison-ship, I was shot through the arm at the shoulder. It was a terrible wound from a large musket-ball, but I could not attend to it. I had to keep on. A night, and then a whole day, I walked, my arm bound poorly, the blood seeping forth, the entire member smarting and burning. I remember noticing before me a curiously shaped hill; then I fainted in the road. When I awoke, I was in the room of an inn. They had picked me up from the road and carried me there. The innkeeper was beside my bed, his daughter with him. She was very young, his daughter, not much more than nineteen, a wistful, slim girl with yellow hair and eyes like blue flowers. But I cannot tell you of those eyes. I must go back…. They nursed me there. They nursed me for a month, and all that time my wound festered. I was dying slowly. Then they had a surgeon come from Charleston. He told me that my arm would have to come off. I said I would rather die. After that, things became vague, indistinct. There was pain, and sometimes I was living, and sometimes I was dead. But when I was again able to realize the world about me, I saw that I had only one arm—my left was gone. And for a long while, I could see nothing but that—that I had only one arm. It made me go a little mad; it made me long to die. But I didn’t die. Very slowly, I became well. It took some time, for there was still poison in the wound, and it was festering. Months went by before it came together and remained fresh. Then there were weeks more before I could stand upon my feet and walk. And in all of that time the innkeeper and his daughter cared for me, and paid the surgeon, and protected me—whom they did not know, whom they had picked up in the middle of a dusty road in a pool of blood. You see, she loved me, and she had loved me from the moment they brought me to the inn. It is something I cannot explain. I loved her too.
“You must not look at me like that. I could not help it. It was something outside of me. I tried not to. I hurt her. I never saw another person hurt like that—like a wounded bird. For long I held out—and for so long I hurt her. But at last I was beaten. She had me, and I was not sorry. Then there were more months. Always she was with me, and I spoke to her, and I taught her things. I was tired—so tired, and she gave me what I asked, what my body needed. I was starved, had been for years. I used to tell her of New York, of you—because always she seemed to understand. She would sit by my bed, and I would speak to her as I have been able to speak to no other person. I told her of the war…. She kept me from going mad. That you must realize. But at last I had to go. It happened when I was alone upon the hill, but I cannot explain that to you. When I told her I must go, there was a look of death in her face. But she did not try to keep me there. She helped me. And when I went, she knew that I would not come back. But now I see that I cannot go on. I must go there. But I shall return to you, Inez.”
With a deadened voice, she said: “If you go, you can-not return.”
“I thought you would understand,” he pleaded.
“I—do understand.” Then she broke, turned, and left the room.
The following day he took coach south.
6
IT was a long coach trip, over incredibly bad roads, with many changes. But at last he arrived, tired and worn. He arrived at the inn, and immediately as he got off the coach, the wonderful familiarity of the place returned. Behind it, he could see the fields through which they had so often wandered. He stood by the hedge, over which he could just see, and sought out the places. There was the stile which marked the midway point in their first walks, and upon which they used to make a point of resting, he sitting awkwardly, she swinging her bare legs. And beyond that the stone wall roamed in a circle back to the hedge, and a little further on was the hill called Steer’s Head, from the top of which one could see a thin strip of the ocean. It was all as he remembered it, and he was glad that it had not changed.
After the coach left, a man whom he did not know came through the opening in the hedge, a man in an apron, with all the unmistakable bearing of an innkeeper. But he, John Preswick, would speak with a Mr. Todde, who was the keeper of this inn.
“Todde’s dead. Been dead these five years now,” the man explained.
John Preswick shook his head. Shaking his head, he raised a hand to wipe his brow. He should not be dead—people did not just die.
“But he had a daughter. She was a girl with yellow hair—”
“Uh-huh, I remember the lass, though I only saw her once or twice. You see, I used to farm back across the line of wood, until old Todde paid me to care for the place, paid better than my farm, too. The girl?—died in childbirth, I think. Nine years now or soon. Some sort of an affair with an officer—never could make head or tail of it. Anyway, she never married, and no one ever turned up to claim the lad. The inn’s his, when he comes of age. A smart lad, too. I’ll call him, if you’d like to see him.” Without waiting an answer, he called: “Johnny! Come out here!” And to John Preswick: “Johnny’s his name. John Preswick. His mother wanted he should be called that.”
The older John Preswick stared with glazed eyes that saw nothing. Heavily, he leaned upon the frog-headed stick he held in his hand, and he stared off into space. The innkeeper wondered what he saw. Surely those eyes must see something!
“If you are sick—” he said hastily, seeing that the man was like to fall.
“No. It is nothing. It will pass. Only—if I could be alone for a while now. You may take my bags.”
As he took the bags, a boy of eight or nine, yellow of hair, dusty and burnt by the sun, bolted into the yard, dragging behind him a huge military musket. “Peter,” he cried, “did you want me? I brung my gun, case there was any trouble.”
“No,” the innkeeper replied quickly. “Run off, Johnny, and put back that gun. One of these days it will fire itself and blow you to pieces. You know it’s loaded. Now go. The gentleman wants to be alone.”
“But you said I could have it—”
“Johnny, we’ll talk of that another time.”
“But let him stay,” John Preswick put in; and for the first time the innkeeper noticed that one of the sleeves of his coat was empty.
“Yes, stay,” he added, as the innkeeper walked off with his bags. “So you are Johnny Preswick. Look at me. Your face is your mother’s. But again it is mine. The eyes are mine. But the hair, the features—Come, here, boy.”
The child edged away, half afraid. The man with one arm, his yellow face lean and drawn, his eyes gleaming, his mouth quivering a little, was not an inviting figure. Something about him was repulsive.
He held out the frog-headed stick with the gold bands. The curiously carved head, the sparkle of it, caught the child, and he came closer, still dragging the gun. As he moved, the large, ornate hammer of the musket caught in his pantaloons. He jerked away, and the hammer fell. There was a flash, and a roar in his ears that made him scream aloud.
The older John Preswick saw the gun flame in his face. It was the last thing he ever saw, and, scarcely had it time to register in a fleeting instant upon his consciousness, than he felt the charge tearing into his breast, hurling him backwards and into a bottomless well of ebony.
PART II
1808–1823
THE INNKEEPER
THE INNKEEPER
1
WHEN John Preswick was five and twenty years, he looked down in vague dissatisfaction upon his inn. This was how the thing came about. Near to the inn, so near that in a few minutes one could walk the distance to its foot, there was a hill. The name of the inn was the Steer’s Horn; the name of the hill was the Steer’s Head. When one climbed to the top of the Steer’s Head, one looked down not only upon the inn, but upon all of the surroundin
g countryside. The inn was a spot below with a red-tiled roof; the road was a ribbon of yellow dust, bending off to the north. There were other hills, but they were low and scarcely worthy of the name. They were hardly more than mounds of grass-sown dirt. In between and around them, the road took its way, twisting, turning, pausing even, but always directing itself back to the south and east. Somewhere, over the horizon, it found the sea. When one was upon, the hill—the Steer’s Head—and it was a very clear day, some of the sea might be visible—not a great deal, but a suggestion of blue-green that caught on to the sky, bearing to it with only the faintest line of demarcation.
On a sparkling day in April, with the sun high and solid in the sky, John Preswick set out to walk away the effects of his dinner. In no manner was the beginning of this different from all those other walks he was accustomed to take after eating plentifully and washing down the meat with powerful draughts of ale. Only when he noticed the hill of the Steer’s Head, and set out to climb it, was he conscious of discontent. As he climbed, he puffed, and as he climbed he began to regret that he had not eaten more temperately. He felt that his uncomfortably tight stomach should agree with the day, as his yellow hair, waving in his face, agreed with it. There was a strong, cutting wind that blew in from the sea; it whipped about him, and it whipped his clothes to him. It made him glad as the sun itself, but it made him unhappy, too, and in a manner he could not understand.
As he climbed the hill, the hill climbed away from him, and things below drew themselves together and became small and insignificant. The inn turned itself about until he saw only the red-tiled roof and the impertinent chimneys. The sun glanced off the roof, as disdaining it; the chimneys stood up, rude and uncomely. There were fields around, their pattern rough and irregular.
He felt sick with himself, sick with it all, and he wondered what it meant, and that for so long he had endured it. But he shook his yellow hair from his face and climbed still further…. Then he saw how far the road went, and how it curved in and out, how it played with itself, and how it lost itself, bending down to the sea.
