How Like a God

II

Not halfway up the first flight, he stopped and listened. That was the basement street door closing. Mrs. Jordan putting out the milk bottles. He almost called to her. She would have called back, what d’ye want, in a tone that advised him to want as little as possible.

His right hand left his overcoat pocket and took hold of the rail; when it left the handle of the revolver it felt as if it were letting go of something sticky and very warm. The wires hummed and buzzed in his head.

Just what is it you expect to accomplish? You, who have all your life been tied to your sister’s apron strings. The fact is, Jane has always been the woman for you; all the security and peace you have ever known.

You’ve never thanked her for it; it has always been futile. The time you went home from Cleveland for your things, having definitely agreed with Dick, Jane listened quietly to your grandiose plans along with the rest of the family.

The following morning Jane came into your room while you were packing.

“Bill, I’m afraid you’re being driven into this by your feeling that you’ve got to do something for the family. You shouldn’t. The store’s doing better than ever and the way this town’s growing we can sell it for a lot of money in a few years. Meanwhile it can keep all of us nicely. What if you don’t make much by your writing for two or three years?”

Futile. In your pocket was the five hundred dollars Dick had advanced, more than you had ever seen before.

She tried again four years later, when the store was sold and you went down to help take the sucker off the hook, as Jane put it in her letter. In reality there was nothing for you to do but sign papers; Jane had made an impeccable deal.

“I’m going to New York and take Rose and Margaret along. Mother wants to stay here with Aunt Cora. Thanks to your generosity Larry can go to college next month without anything to worry about.”

As neat as that. And you longed inexpressibly to say: “Take me to New York with you. Let’s be together. I’ll write of I’ll get a job or I’ll do anything. Maybe some day you will be proud of me.” But you did not.

Even more to the point by way of futility have been your own efforts at Larry, who bounded out of the West into New York one day like a calf arrogantly bumping its mother for a meal.

Larry was pleasantly impressed but not at all overawed by your elaborate office. “Have you decided where I’m to start blowing up the buildings?” he laughed.

He was leaving it all to you, and you were thrilled by this, unaware that it was only because to his youthful eagerness and ardor details were unimportant. Also it has already been decided. Dick had been extremely decent about it.

He spent six months in the plant in Ohio, six more in the Michigan ore mines, some few weeks in New York. He proved himself. Young as he was he rose in importance by his own ability and force, but during all those months that became years you felt a vague uneasiness about him.

The explosion came at a difficult moment, and unexpectedly. Only the previous week Larry had won new laurels by bringing to a successful close the Cumberland bridge negotiations, down in Maryland. The difficulty though had come through Erma, whose pretty teeth had shown themselves for the first time the night before in a most inelegant snarl. When, immediately after you and he had been seated at the usual corner table in the Manufacturers’ Club, he announced that he was going to leave the Carr Corporation, you were at first merely irritated.

“Of course you don’t mean it. What’s the joke?”

“There’s no joke. I’m going to chuck it. This is not the life for me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a good deal saved, thanks to your and Dick’s generosity, and I may buy the Martin place out in Idaho where I went last summer. He’ll sell cheap.”

“Going to raise cattle?”

“Perhaps. Or get a job in the forest service. I don’t know.”

Evidently he had been considering it for some time.

That evening you went to see Jane, at the house on Tenth Street where you expected to find the usual crowd. You intended to take Jane off somewhere and persuade her to bring Larry to his senses. But when you arrived the rooms on the ground floor were dark, and proceeding brusquely upstairs, you found Jane and Larry alone in Jane’s room.

“I suppose Larry’s told you of his contemplated renascence,” you said to Jane.

“Yes.”

“We’ve just been talking about it,” Larry said. “Jane thinks it’s all right.”

Jane put her hand on yours. “You run away, Larry,” she said, “and let Bill and me talk. Please. Go on.”

He went, observing that he would see you in the morning at the office. “Meanwhile that you’ll smooth out my childish irritation,” you observed.

“Yes,” she agreed unexpectedly, pressing your hand. “It’s a darned shame. This was bound to hurt you. I told Larry so the first time he spoke to me about it.”

“So it’s been cooking for a long while. I like the picture of you and Larry calculating the chances of my eventual recovery.”

There was no reply. You looked up, and saw tears in Jane’s eyes.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever cried about,” she said finally. “I seem to feel more touched by what things mean for you than by what they mean even for myself, let alone anybody else.”

A month later Larry was on his way West. If Jane had been futile with you, how much more futile had you been with him!

You could dance around in that cage forever. Futility begins where? With you, though, it has almost certainly arrived by the time you went to the home of Mrs. Davis. You were fifteen, seventeen, no matter.

One winter Monday afternoon found you on her porch with an umbrella which she had left on some previous day at old Mrs. Poole’s on the other side of town. She herself opened the door.

“How do you do, William. Thank you so much.” Then, as you flushed and twirled your cap, “Won’t you come in a little while? Mother is spending the week in Chicago and my husband won’t be home for hours.”

You had several times previously crossed the moat of the lawn and advanced as far as the pure white portal, but never before inside the castle itself.

“We can sit here on the couch and go over next Sunday’s lesson.” She was probably watching your face, for she added almost at once, “Or would you rather just talk?”

You blurted out, “just talk,” and sat down on the edge of the couch beside her.

The second time you went, invited without the excuse of an errand, she told you all about her husband. It seemed that although he was a fine man, he had more or less deceived her into marriage by concealing from her girlish ignorance some of its more difficult and profound aspects.

You nodded, trembling; no word would come.

“Sit down by me. Here, put your head in my lap, like that. Don’t you like to be near me and put your head in my lap? You are a very dear boy, only you are nearly a man. Why not pretend you are a man, and kiss me?”

You discovered then that the girls at school knew very little about kissing, and you yourself, as a matter of fact, knew less.

Granting all your neat formula of futility, it is strange that you were never curious as to the nature and depth of Mrs. Davis’s attachment to you. Was it for her an episode among a hundred, or was it all that her avowals declared?