Gilbert had got the cigarette packet and he had said, “Eric, you threw away a cigarette,” and Harold would not be expected to say anything, so I must say, “What is concussion?”
Gilbert was sitting there again and I said, “What is concussion?”
I heard my words and the way I said the word which I had never heard before and now we would know. It would be something that made him stare at the glass door of the bookshelf and not say anything. It was something to do with his head, “Concussion of the brain,” Mr. Evans had said. Maybe, it meant that he would be crazy and never speak any more, or maybe it meant that he would die.
Mr. Evans turned round as if he had not seen us. “What are you waiting for?” Mr. Evans said.
What did he think we were waiting for?
“Isn’t it time you went to bed?” Mr. Evans said. We were there in a row, and Eric was twirling the cigarette round in his fingers, then he dropped the cigarette. I waited for Gilbert to pick it up but he did not.
“Ah-er-er—” said Eric, that way he talks, “it’s not—it’s not—” He did not say, “It’s not dangerous,” he did not say, “It isn’t anything,” because he did not tell lies. He did not tell lies to us, he bought us Puck and Judge which are funny-papers and Mama would say, “You must not spend all your salary the first of the month on the children, you need some new socks,” but he went on buying us Puck and Judge and a bound volume of Saint Nicholas though it wasn’t Christmas or anybody’s birthday.
He bought me a big Little Women that had more in it about how they grew up and he took us for long walks and we found a violet-farm near Overbrook. The people there were French and they let us pick all the violets we wanted, though we couldn’t talk to them. We tried to understand and they tried to understand and they said, “pere?” to Eric and Eric told us he did know that that was French for father and he said, “No, no,” which we found was the same in French.
They asked us to have coffee in their little house and they had flat wooden trays for the violets. Then Mama said we must get some more violets and she was very happy and she gave us a dollar to buy them next time; it was too far for her to walk, but she kept telling the university ladies that called, “Think of it, it’s several miles, you can see the glass frames from the front porch when the sun is shining on them, and the children came on it quite by accident—it’s a violet-farm, they have double Parma violets, the children bought me almost a dozen different kinds of single and double violets, they can hardly talk any English but they got the children to understand they could come back and pick violets to take away.”
Those were the sort of big bunches that are very expensive in florists’ windows on Walnut and on Chestnut Street in the city and they sell them in tight bunches on the street, with silver paper round the stems and wires, but Mama said “Look they’re all loose, such long stems, I really never saw such lovely violets.”
It was like that, and she said violets were her favorite flower but roses were hers too, because June sixth was her birthday.
I had thought of birthdays and that they were a long way off and so they were, but Mama’s birthday was in June and so would come sooner than ours. The baby’s birthday was the second of May, but I was thinking of Gilbert and Harold and me when I thought of how we always had a white cloth on the round table where the paintbox was, and spread the presents on it.
Mama’s table was easy because we covered her presents with roses.
Eric said, “We don’t know exactly, I mean concussion of the brain is—is if someone gets hit very hard or—er—falls down, then when the head is struck very hard—.” I wanted to know exactly what it was and I could see that Gilbert’s shoe was kicking at the edge of the rug that wasn’t lying quite flat on the floor. If we wanted to get the rug flat, we would have to get off the sofa and lift the sofa, so the little wheel that was fastened in the sofa leg to push it around with would go straight on the rug. We could not get off the sofa, we could not move.
We were frozen stiff to the sofa, in a row, but Gilbert was showing that he could move, if he wanted, by scuffing with his heel at the rug, where it bumped a little, where it had not been pushed quite flat when Ida or Annie had moved the sofa in the morning when they did the sweeping. It was easier, anyhow, for Gilbert to scuff at the floor because his legs were two years’ longer. Harold’s feet were straight out and he was sitting straight up, as if he were having his picture taken.
I could not scuff at the carpet though my feet reached the carpet, but I pushed myself back so that maybe Harold would feel that I wasn’t really waiting so hard, and then maybe Harold would sit back.
“It’s like that,” said Eric, “if a man falls down—”
“Did he fall down, then?” I was the one that was doing the talking. Gilbert was too busy fastening the leather pad over the knee of his black stocking, that didn’t need fastening.
“We—we—don’t know—”
Then the clock sort of hammered like a hammer with nails, and Mr. Evans said, “Probably your father slipped, as he was getting off the car, or the car may have backed unexpectedly—there should have been a lamppost set up at the gate, in the beginning. It’s quite obvious that your father slipped, that his foot slipped.”
Papa wasn’t like that. He wasn’t the sort of person whose foot slipped.
Mr. Evans walked to the window, then he walked back. Gilbert slid oft the sofa.
Mr. Evans said, “I’ll take the lantern and go out and see if—” he stopped and Gilbert said, “I’ll come with you. He lost his hat.”
Mr. Evans said, “No, you wait with the children. I’m only going out to see if I can find any traces—I mean, do you know, Eric, if his wallet and his watch were taken?”
“I didn’t look,” said Eric.
“His wallet is in the inside of his coat, or sometimes his overcoat,” Gilbert said, “and his watch is in the little watch-pocket.”
Mr. Evans said, “Did you see them there?” How could Gilbert have seen them?
“No, no,” said Mr. Evans, “you stay here,” because Gilbert went to the door and was out in the hall, but he came back.
“They put his overcoat on the bench in the hall,” Gilbert said, and Mr. Evans went out and Mr. Evans came back with Papa’s black wallet and he laid it on the top of the piano and he said, “That’s all right.”
He was thinking, and we knew he was thinking, “Then well, it wasn’t robbers,” but did that make it any better? It would be almost better to think it was robbers, that they had hit Papa for something, that there was some kind of a reason for it, not just this waiting and wondering what concussion was. Mr. Evans went into the hall again, then he opened the front door, then we heard his feet go down the porch steps.
His feet went down the steps, the lantern was in the hall of the wing. He could go to the hall in the wing by walking through Papa’s study that had that door that opened into the wing.
He did not go through Papa’s study. He had gone down the porch steps. Then he would turn round the rockery, in the corner between the porch and the path to the wing that led off the drive. If we listened, we might hear when he opened the wing door, but we did not hear.
Gilbert walked round as if nothing were happening and then he took off the lid of the shoebox that his paper soldiers were piled up in. He just took off the lid and shook the box, the way he does to get the paper soldiers in flatter, and he pressed them down with his hands, like he does to make them not take up so much room, and I got up and walked a little.
We were going to walk around the room and we were going to take a book out of the bookshelf, that Papa had made. The bookshelf was on the wall over the sofa. Papa had his workbench and his saw and hammer and tools in the cellar now; “But it’s a perfect workroom,” the ladies from the university said when they were being shown around the house, “and so warm with that huge furnace.” There were high little windows in the cellar and it was like a big room with the windows small and high up. The floor was cement,
Eric said the floor was cement. It was hard, but the cellar was not dark like the cellar in the old house and there were the rakes and the hoe there, and we had the same big box with the lid, with our shoe-blacking things in it.
Papa made the shelf over the sofa, it was varnished too. It was William Morris furniture, Mrs. Schelling said, whatever that was, and he made me a bench for my room like that, and he made a wooden table for the porch.
We were going to walk around the room. Gilbert had begun it, and we were going to do things like we always did, so I said, “Harold, you dropped your paintbrush on the floor, did you know?” And Harold slid off the sofa and picked up his paintbrush and he picked up Eric’s cigarette.
He stood looking at the cigarette, as if he did not know what to do next, but Gilbert had picked up the shoebox and was shaking it to get the paper soldiers to take up less room, because the lid bulged when it was on and would fall off if he did not tie it up with string or get a big elastic band from Papa’s table. He would go and ask Papa for a big rubber band for his box of paper soldiers, everything would be just like that, but Harold would have to say something or do something, because just to stand there was not doing what we were doing.
I mean, we were doing a charade or a game we called dumb-crambo, when you act words. But Harold would have to be pushed like you do Laddie and Georgine when they make us have them in our games. Only Harold is older and Harold is not a dumb child, though Mama still says she is worried because he talks so little. But why should Harold talk?
“What’s that?” I said to Harold as if I did not know. “Oh, it’s that cigarette,” I said, “Oh Eric, it’s that cigarette you lost. We found the cigarette you lost.”
Now Eric would come in too and we would play this charade like we did in this room, with the audience sitting in the other room that was the parlor, or people called the parlor a reception room now. The double doors could be shut, so when we played charades we shut the double doors and worked out the word, then we opened them.
Then we left them open where the Rosa Bonheur Horse Fair was on an easel and the picture Mama painted of Willow Eddy—that was a place on the old river, where she used to go with trips with Cousin Ed and Cousin Ruth and where she once went to see a gypsy fortune-teller.
That was a long time ago and that was before Mama married Papa.
Eric took the cigarette.
Then Eric looked at the cigarette.
I often wondered what the fortune-teller told Mama, all of it I mean; Mama said the fortune-teller said, she would have a child who would have a gift, but Mama always said to the university ladies when they talked about Uncle Fred and the Bach Choir at Bethlehem, “It’s funny that the children are not gifted.”
Now, if Eric were playing a charade, he would light his cigarette. Now I could not tell everyone what to do, but I waited and he saw I was waiting.
The fortune-teller said Cousin Ruth would not marry Sammy Martens and Cousin Ruth was cross, Mama said, and Sammy Martens went away to Pittsburgh where his uncle was in the steel works there, and Cousin Ruth never married anybody. The fortune-teller, Mama said, had told her she would marry someone; it would be someone with a gift (or there was something about a gift) or it would be a foreign person who was rich but I do not know who that was, and Mama did not tell us about any foreign people she knew who had come to Bethlehem who were rich, and who had gone away; maybe it was someone from the steel mills there, because people were always coming to talk to Uncle Hartley from Pittsburgh.
Eric put his hand in his coat pocket and he found his box of matches. Gilbert got up and got the flat green saucer ash tray, from the mantelpiece.
There are the Boy and the Girl there; in the hall, is the Old Man and the Old Lady; Mama brought the Boy and the Girl back, too, from her honeymoon. The Girl has her skirt tucked up and they both have bare legs and they are fisherboy and fishergirl. The Boy has a net on a stick, like for catching butterflies, over his shoulder, and the Girl has a basket and there are two blue fish-heads poking out of the lid of the basket.
Eric dropped the match in the flat green saucer ashtray, and Gilbert put the ashtray on the table and Gilbert said, “Where’s the new copy of Saint Nicholas, Hilda, where did you put the new Saint Nicholas?”
I was watching Eric to see if his cigarette was really lighted, but it was and he was smoking, and he looked at Harold as if he had just seen him and he looked at Gilbert, then he took a pull on his cigarette and looked around the room, then he said, “Thank you, Harold,” then he said, “Thank you, Gilbert, thank you”; he said, “Yes, yes, yes,” like he does, all in one word and said, “What are you doing? What are you painting, Hilda?”
I said I wasn’t painting, it was Harold, and Harold came and stood by me and Eric turned over the pages of the paint-book.
“Oh,” said Eric and he turned back the pages and he said, “Maybe that painting isn’t dry yet, I don’t want to smudge your painting, Harold.”
He pressed the middle of the book flat with his other hand and we were back at the picture of the dog with the collar and the clown with the hoop and the lady who was standing on a horse on one toe and who would jump through the hoop. This was a circus and we had been to a circus; when we first came to Philadelphia, Papa took us to a circus; there was a lady in a cage with lions, dressed like the prince in my old Grimm and she shot off a pistol and she said “hi-hi” and cracked a whip and shot off the pistol again and the lions jumped around the cage but Papa said they couldn’t possibly eat her, they were old lions, he guessed and he laughed because we thought the lady would be eaten.
“It’s dry,” Harold said.
“Yes, yes,” said Eric, “Oh yes, I see.”
I said, “He did that a long time ago, he did that before—” and then I remembered the bump on the front porch and the way Gilbert had put back the desk shears and the way I was thinking I was glad that Annie had not come in and told us to go to bed.
Gilbert was watching Eric turn over the pages, now Eric turned over to the boys fishing on the bridge and the mill with the boat and he said, “That’s a nice boat—I— er—we must take a trip on the river sometime, I mean the Delaware river,” he said. “We could take one of those steam-boats at the wharves at the end of Market Street, we could take a whole day trip. There is a steamboat, Mr. Evans told me, that runs right down the river to Cape May.”
I said, “What is Cape May?” and he said, “Oh, it’s the name of a place, it’s in New Jersey, it’s the seashore.”
Gilbert said, “Like Point Pleasant where we went once,” and Eric said yes, it was; he hadn’t been to Point Pleasant but that is what it was like, there was lots of sand and shells and you could walk for miles along the ocean and there was always a place where you could buy balloons, he thought, but he was sure we could get peanuts, he said. He said peanuts grew in New Jersey and they had farms of peach trees and he said things grew in New Jersey like melons because it was so sandy, we would find a place and get a watermelon; he dropped the ash off into the green saucer.
“Let me see,” he said. “We can’t go yet, we’ll go as soon as the excursion boats start; we could even,” he said, “take a boat to Baltimore.”
I had a girl in Baltimore was a song we sang.
Nellie was a girl that Eric was going to marry, but when we said, when he was shaving in the bathroom in the old house, “How’s Nellie, how’s Nellie?” and sat on the edge of the bathtub, he said “I wouldn’t—” and he turned his face to get the light on the side from the window, where he was shaving.
We waited for him to get off the soap from his chin, and we waited for what he would say, but he didn’t say anything so “I had a girl in Baltimore, Nellie, Nellie, Nellie,” Gilbert went on with it, to the wrong tune, he was just singing anything.
Then Eric turned round with the soap off his face and he was wiping the razor on a towel and he took up another towel and dabbed at his face and we saw blood on the towel.
“You cut yourself,” Gilbe
rt said.
Eric said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and then he said, “Confound it,” which isn’t real swearing but Mama said we must not say it. Gilbert kicked his heels on the bathtub, holding on by his hands, we put our tin duck, tin fish, small tin boat that was no bigger than the fish, tin swan, tin frog in that tub. We had the window open and we floated our soap bubbles out of the window till someone wanted to come in, “I told you children you must not lock the door and play games in here,” Mama said, so we were not to lock the door.
Eric held his handkerchief to his face now as if he had the toothache; we said “Nellie, Nellie” at him again, and he looked at the handkerchief and did not put it back and there was the cut on his chin, but it was not bleeding very much now, and he said in a different voice, “I would be very glad if you wouldn’t—make games about Nellie anymore or—or say Nellie to me anymore.”
Then he went and got his coat and went out to wherever it was he was going.
Eric was leafing through the book and he came to the orchard and the cow in the orchard. It was spotted like the pony in the circus picture. It was like that terrible time, that we never told anybody about, when we were going to a farm in the country and it was a big farm with an old lady and a barn and pigs and about six cows and a bull tied up and hens, and the old lady said we could feed the hens.
What it was, was that Papa and Mama were going to the World’s Fair, but they said we must have a happy time too; so we talked about it and talked about it and they thought Point Pleasant was too far and it would be better if Ida took us near, where her cousin had a house; there was a big farm, Cousin Clarence wrote, he had a little church near there, Mama said, and he would look after us.
So we went and looked at the farm and the old lady said it would be nice to have children and we would all help her feed the hens.
Then we went back to the station, where Ida’s cousin had a little hot brick house near the station rails. And Ida said, “I don’t think we want to go to that farm, it’s dirty, we don’t want to go there. Here is this nice place and Gilbert can play with Fritzie and you and Harold will be so happy. Now this is a nice place, Mrs. Schneider says we can stay here,” and it was terrible, and I do not know what happened that we were so hot and the lady was always cross and went and sat with Ida on rocking chairs and always said, “Run away, don’t bother me,” and Gilbert went off with Fritzie, who would not let us ride his rocking horse, to get frogs and Harold and I were so hot and there was no one to talk to, but Cousin Clarence came and took us to see nice people who let us sit on their porch and they had apple trees.
The Gift: Novel Page 12
