UPON the first day of January in the year eighteen hundred and seventy-six, just a hundread years after Thomas Jefferson's virile if erroneous statement of man's inalienable rights and equalities, there was born into this vale of tears and laughter and buncombe, and more particularly into the family of the Reverend Mr. Eaton, of Bartow-on-the-Sound, Westchester County, New York, a male child who was promptly christened Edward, in honor of the Confessor—from whom Mrs. Eaton, the child's mother, was able to trace her descent—with whose life, so far as it has been lived, this narrative will chiefly concern itself.
Generally speaking, the life of any man born in the year 1876 and surviving to the present day is a history of that man's relations to women; particular women, and woman in the mass. And it will be found that the history of Edward Eaton has been no exception to the rule.
In more than one way he owed the fact that he was born at all to his mother. For if she had not wanted another child to make a round half-dozen in all, she wouldn't have had one.
The first face which Edward learned to distinguish from other faces resembled the face of a horse. It was long, narrow and Roman. The upper teeth projected in a kind of shelf and gave the face an extraordinary air of command and self-satisfaction. The face surmounted a long, bony, awkward, strong, tireless body. And it was the dwelling place of a highly cultivated voice which, without being raised or forced in any way, could be made to penetrate into the most remote fastnesses of the house and grounds.
Though Mrs. Eaton would have called herself a Christian gentlewoman, it is probable that in her heart of hearts she took more pleasure and pride in her pedigree than in her religion. Oddly enough, she had swallowed both upon hearsay evidence; but she had caused the pedigree to be emblazoned and fine writ on parchment, and it was a thing of beauty and carried conviction in every leaf and twig of the design. Mrs. Eaton's pedigree—she had been Harriet Burton before her marriage—so far as it could be made visible, took the form of an extraordinarily gnarled, aged oak, and so im perishable that Edward used to wonder why, if the roots were not buried in loam, the top did not wither.
Tangled among the roots of the oak were lozenges—not the kind sold in drug stores to amend sore throats, but heraldic lozenges—on which were printed the names of remote ancestors. Ordinary ancestors were printed in black, more than ordinary ancestors were printed in black with the capital letter in red. But the lozenge of Edward the Confessor was red and larger than the others, and the lettering was gold. Almost every crest, motto and device known to heraldry was represented somewhere in or about the tree.
But there was one notable exception. There was not even one sniveling abortive example of the bar sinister.
Above religion and above pedigree, Mrs. Eaton maintained the sanctity and all the privileges of motherhood. She always spoke of her own mother as "dear mother," and even when speaking hurriedly she never failed to tremolo the words. As soon as her own children were old enough to speak at all, they were taught the "dear mother" formula. And they were taught to speak of their grandmother as "dearest" grandmother, and of their mother's many sisters, living and dead, as "dearest" Aunt So-and-so. They were taught not only the preciousness and sanctity of their own mother, but of everything in any way related to her or connected with her.
She seldom punished them. She didn't have to. Without lifting her voice to rage or her hand to strike, she could inspire unreasoning terror, almost instantaneously in almost anyone.
A day came when Edward's brother John—the oldest of the children—a brave, likable boy of eighteen, did not come home from Mr. Harrington's school in Westchester. He had, it seems, failed in a trivial examination and durst not bring the report of that failure home to his mother. So when he came to Westchester station with the Bartow, Pelham Manor and New Rochelle children, and saw that the up train and the down train were pulling in at the same time, he slipped around the rear end of the up train and boarded the other. When the down train got to Van Nest and nobody was looking, he flung his school-books out of an open window; while it stopped at West Farms he rose and marched boldly forward until he came to the smoker. Here he breathed deeply the perfume which is dearest to the persecuted American male—tobacco smoke.
It is curious that the boy John left his brothers and sisters, his father, his school and his schoolmates, but most especially his mother, with a passion of regret. He had a tender and sentimental nature; and as the train pulled into Harlem his world seemed to have contained an infinite number of things which it was going to be next to impossible to leave behind forever.
He was without a plan. He had less than fifty cents in his pocket. He was a country boy without any knowledge of city ways. There was only one thing certain. He could not go home and face his mother. He had to go on, on into that dusk which was so quickly turning into dark. But there was good breeding in John, and his face presented a fine calm.
There had come to him in his homesickness and desperation thoughts of ships and the sea. If he went to work in the city, big as it was, his mother was sure to have him found. And possibly she might have him committed to some institution for the wayward and incorrigible.
He left the elevated at the Battery and made his way by a kind of instinct to Front Street, which had upon one side ships tied to wharves and upon the other the offices of the ship companies, the stores of ship chandlers, and innumerable saloons and lodging houses for sailors.
Here under a lamp-post were two sailors in altercation. They were a little gone in liquor, and there was one who tempted and one who refused.
"I tell you," said the latter, "I'm going to sleep on board. She can't follow me past the guard, and we sail at daybreak . . ."
"She'd never think to look for you in Ratsey's, she wouldn't," said the other. "So come on."
But the refuser continued to refuse.
"Much obliged just the same," he said, "but enough's enough. She's wearing the same old hatpin she dipped into the Fleming's eyeball, and she's full of the same old juice. I'm through."
"Shore," said the tempter, "would be a 'eavenly place, Bill, if it weren't for the women. Whenever you see a man in a desperate hurry to get somewhere else, it's a ten to one shot he's running away from some woman or other."
The latter half of the phrase was lost to John Eaton, who had approached and passed as inconspicuously as possible. And of the snatches of loud spoken conversation which he had overheard he remembered only one succinct statement:
"Shore would be a 'eavenly place, Bill, if it weren't for the women."
That he remembered until his dying day; that and something about a hatpin that had been dipped into an eyeball.
Probably the first event which made a strong and unshatterable impression upon Edward Eaton was the fact that upon a certain afternoon in December his brother John had not come home from school.
James had come home and Mark had come home. Ruth had come home, and so also had Sarah. Everybody and everything had come back home except John.
At the precise time that the other children came home, and John didn't, the Reverend Mr. Eaton was in his church setting the altar, as a clerk dresses a window, for a special Friday morning service. Mrs. Eaton had lighted a lamp and was making an elaborate pattern of red and purple cross-stitching upon a large rectangle of coarse hand-woven linen. This was to be a Christmas present for "dearest" grandmother.
At the precise time that John didn't come home and the door opened and the others did, Edward Eaton was going on six years of age. And he was sitting on a stool at Dear Mother's feet, practising self-control. A dozen times a day he would be told to stop whatever he was doing and to keep perfectly still for five or ten minutes. For Mrs. Eaton believed that in this way children are best taught poise and self-control. She began with them when they were nursing. So many minutes' milky indulgement, and then an enforced rest of one minute.
Edward's brothers and sisters came with an opening and a closing of the heavy front door—an arched door of thick oak, bound with iron and studded with nails—that was hardly seemly. The door had been flung open and it had been slammed shut. Following a blast of cold outdoor air appeared the comely faces of Ruth and Sarah, and behind them the less colorful and noticeable faces of James and Mark.
"Your train must have been a few minutes late, my darling," said Mrs. Eaton, whose eyebrows, threateningly raised upon the slamming of the front door, had settled to their normal position. "And perhaps that was why you were in such an indecorous hurry to get into the house."
"Dear Mother," said Ruth, who, now that John was gone, was the eldest, "it must have been very late, because we ran all the way from the station. We are all here except John. He was with us at Westchester in plenty of time to catch the train, but we think that somehow he must have missed it."
Mrs. Eaton continued her untroubled and rapid stitching.
"It is difficult to understand," she said, "how, if you were all at the station in plenty of time to catch the train, John could have missed it. But there is another train in half an hour, so that we shall not have to wait dinner for him. I shall speak to him about his carelessness, however, and the evils which carelessness leads to."
Ruth had been dying to interrupt this speech. But she knew better. She knew that dutiful, well brought up daughters never interrupt their dear mothers—"Unless, my dear, it should happen that the house had caught fire, or something like that." But now, since Dear Mother had finished, it was obviously Ruth's turn to speak. The turns of daughters always came before the turns of sons, and of elder daughters before younger daughters.
"But we don't think he missed the train," said Ruth. "Charlie Buck said that he saw John dodging around the end of our train and boarding the other."
"What other?" asked Mrs. Eaton.
"The down train."
"But what in the name of common sense!" exclaimed Mrs. Eaton, "would John be doing on board the down train?"
"We don't know, Dear Mother. We have no idea," said Ruth. "At least Sarah and I have no idea. But perhaps you had better question the boys. Mark has been acting mysteriously."
Ruth did not like to get Mark into trouble. But she had been taught that, when the brother of a dutiful daughter acts mysteriously, it is that daughter's duty to report the fact to her dear mother. And she had merely put her teachings into effect.
Mrs. Eaton dropped her embroidery in her lap and gave the uncomfortable Mark a look which seemed to draw him toward her. He came forward until he stood in the middle of the room.
"And so, my son," said Mrs. Eaton, "you have been acting mysteriously. What am I to understand by that? . . . And don't twiddle your hat." There was nothing mysterious about Mark at that moment. He was at the most awkward period of mental and vocal adolescence, and he was badly frightened. "And what light, my son, are you going to throw for us upon the extraordinary conduct of your brother John?"
Mark sincerely hoped that he wasn't going to throw any light on anything. He didn't feel up to it, and he didn't know what would happen to him if he did.
"I don't know what you mean, D-D-Dear Mother," he said, with a piteous mixture of bass and falsetto sounds.
Mrs. Eaton raised her eyebrows. And shot a question at the young ruin before her. "Did John say anything to you?"
Mark swallowed hard and nodded.
"What did John say to you?"
The girls came forward a little so as not to miss any gasp, gurgle or octave leaps of Mark's possible answer. "He flunked in geometry, Dear M-M-Mother. And he said he didn't dare come home a-a—and f-f-face the music."
"Do you mean to tell me that my son John has Tun away from home? Ruth? James? Sarah?"
"Dear Mother," said Ruth, "that is what we are afraid of."
"Children," said Mrs. Eaton, and anger was getting the better of her, "I call Heaven to witness that I have done nothing to deserve this . . . Your father! What will your father say? James, Tun to the church as fast as your legs will carry you. But don't breathe a word of what has happened. Tell your father that I must speak with him at once. Tell him that it is upon a matter which will not brook delay . . . What are you staring at, Edward? Don't sit shake like a ninny with your mouth wide open."
Edward recalls that he was able to close his mouth, and that if he had known just how a ninny sits he would have tried to stop sitting like one. He knew that something terrible had happened to his brother John and that his Dear Mother was going to do something about it.
The Reverend Mr. Eaton was slender and clearly featured. He had an intellectual head and was swift and graceful. Physically the children resembled him. Their mother's long horse face and protruding teeth would perish with her.
Having received James's message just as he was giving the final touch to the altar, the Reverend Mr. Eaton had come home at once. The faithful indeed might have seen their pastor flitting through the dusk at a gait which strongly resembled running. The Reverend Mr. Eaton would, as a matter of fact, have run his legs off at any time for the sake of peace.
Presently then, alert, quick stepping, unaffected and accompanied in an easy familiarity by his son James, the Reverend Mr. Eaton entered the room and perceived upon the instant that something peculiarly awful had happened and that he was going to be blamed for it.
He had a pair of very black and tragic eyes. In the lamplight, contrasting with his extraordinary white and smooth chin, they resembled pools of ink. His perceptions were very quick and from the group he missed, almost instantly, his son John.
Then Mr. Eaton said simply and quietly, "Where's John?" And the storm broke.
"Where indeed?" said Mrs. Eaton. "You may well ask. He has run away. He has run away from a mother who would have given her life for his, who would have worked her hands to the bone forhim. And that is your work. You were weak with him. Weak as you are with the other children, as you are with the servants and with your parishioners. You are spoken of as that easy-going, tolerant Mr. Eaton, you who would always rather procrastinate, temporize and beat about the bush than face a duty which seems in any way unpleasant to you. You who have been known to side with your own children in their occasional rebellions against what is known the world over to be best for children. You who let them pull you and maul you and romp with you, as if you had no respect for your cloth, and the eyes of Him Who sees all were not upon you. So that "now your son, profiting by the example you have set him, fails in the face of duty, turns tail and Tuns away. What have you to say? What are you going to do?"
"Try to find him," said Mr. Eaton simply.
"You had better find him," said Mrs. Eaton ominously; "you had better find him, Mr. Eaton. And when you have found him you had better talk to him, for once in your life, as a priest and a father ought to talk to a sinful and erring son. There institutions for the wayward and incorrigible; let us hope that no one of our children, owing to bad example, shall ever live to see the inside of one. And when you find him, Mr. Eaton, if you do find him, don't baby him, don't spare him. The making or the breaking of my boy's character is in your hands. I have done my duty to him. My whole duty. Now do yours."
"Does anybody know?" asked Mr. Eaton miserably, "which way John ran?"
"He boarded the train for New York."
"I'll catch the next train," said Mr. Eaton. "I had best put some things in a valise. I may be gone all night. New York is a big city. I wonder where the boy would go."
And he kept on wondering until far into the night.
It was not the most miserable night that the Reverend Mr. Eaton had ever spent. To begin with, he was not in the least worried about John's personal safety, and in the second place it was one of the few nights since his marriage which he had been allowed to spend anywhere by himself. Whatever feelings had impelled John to run away from home were understandingly shared by his father. He would have liked to run away himself.
And if he had been a son instead of a husband and father he would have run away. For the Reverend Mr. Eaton had pretty well concluded—and this would have shaken his congregation to the soul—that he had at best one life to live, and knew beyond peradventure that he was not being allowed to live it in any way but miserably.
Having the heart of a runaway, it was not difficult for the Reverend Mr. Eaton to think with the mind of one, and by two o'clock in the morning he had pretty well decided what course he himself would have undertaken if he had been actually instead of imaginatively wearing his runaway son's shoes.
Seven o'clock found the Reverend Mr. Eaton stamping his cold feet in front of the recruiting station which was just outside the gates of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At eight o'clock the recruiting station opened for the day, and the Reverend Mr. Eaton went in. He stated his business to the recruiting officer and helped this hard-boiled seafarer to establish a fire in a little sheet-iron stove. Thereafter he sat on a wooden bench and waited. He had not long to wait. For the very first applicant to appear in the recruiting station on that cold December morning was John Eaton himself.
"Hello, John," said his father.
"Hello, father," said John.
"Had breakfast?"
"Yes, sir."
"So have I."
John was uncertain what he should do or say next. So was his father. They had always been on easy and pleasant terms with each other. John had always seemed a very satisfactory kind of son to the Reverend Mr. Eaton, and to John the Reverend Mr. Eaton had always seemed a satisfactory kind of father. But to meet as runaway and pursuer was a situation for which neither had a precedent in actual experience. Presently Mr. Eaton said:
"It seems best for you to be in communication with some one member of the family. You wouldn't want us not to know where you were or how you were getting on."
John drew closer to his father and spoke in a lowered, anxious voice. "Then you aren't going to order me back home?"
"Would you go if I did order you to?" The Reverend Mr. Eaton was smiling a little tremulously.
"I don't know," said John.
"Well," said his father, "I don't believe I ever ordered anybody to do anything, and I'm not likely to begin now. It may be that you are planning to do what is best for you. Travel and the companionship of men wouldn't have hurt me any at your age. But it is better for you to go to sea with my consent and approval than without it."
"Of course it is," said John. "It—it's wonderful. But mother won't consent and approve, will she?"
"Your mother has yet to approve of anything which she did not herself originate."
"That's just it," said John, nodding his head. "I couldn't have put it that way, but that's just where all the trouble is. If I'm ever going to amount to a row of pins, father, I've simply got to do my own thinking, and do what I think is right—even if it isn't always just what mother would think was right . . . And I couldn't go home now, could I? You know how it would be. I'd never be allowed to forget that I'd failed in an examination and that I had run away. I've never been allowed to forget any of the wrong things I've ever done. They are all held up against me, and of course there gets to be more of them, and—and what's the use of being sorry when you've done wrong if it don't get you a new start and if you are never allowed to forget? I'll bet that after God has forgiven sinners and let 'em into Paradise, He don't keep on nagging them."
"Let's not criticize your mother," said the Reverend Mr. Eaton. "After all, she's your mother. And if she weren't, you wouldn't be in a position to complain about her. Write to her; write to her whenever you get a chance."
"You know the kind of letter she'd write back," said John. "I'll write to you. After all, you are the head of the family . . ."
"I don't like to see you so bitter, my boy. I don't like it."
"Who made me bitter?"
"Don't you love your mother, John?"
The Reverend Mr. Eaton received a reply which he did not expect.
"Do you?" said John. And he added, "If you do you're the biggest saint since Christ."
"S-s-sh! S-s-sh!" said his father, in an agony of embarrassment.
John turned to the recruiting officer.
"I want to be in the navy," he said. "What do I do?"
"Fill out this blank," said the officer, and in about half an hour John was a servant of the Government and could not have gone back home if he had wanted to.
"John," said the Reverend Mr. Eaton, "when you write, don't say that you had my consent and approval to the step you are taking. Don't mention that you even saw me. But write, write now, so that I will get the letter in the morning."
With his enlistment there seemed to have come over John a kind of aging and ripening. He had sworn allegiance to his Government. And this had made him feel that his allegiance was wanted and that he himself was no longer a schoolboy, but a man grown.
"What," said he, "are you going to tell mother?"
"I shall tell her that I was too late," said the Reverend Mr. Eaton. "I shall tell her that you had already enlisted. If I told her the truth, there would be no living with her . . . You are going to find that, in this world, a great many honest men have to tell a great many little lies for the sake of peace. I hate lies, John. I hope I do. But I hate some things worse."
Edward remembers that the telegraph agent himself paid them a visit, that he came in a buggy drawn by a white horse, and that he brought a yellow envelope for Dear Mother, and that that was how she got the word that brother John had become a sailor.
Then father came, and with him the first real snowfall of the year. He was not allowed to come into the house until Martha, the housemaid, had brushed the snow from his hat and shoulders and from his shoes. He submitted very patiently to this process. He looked tired, and it didn't seem as if he wanted to come into the house.
There wasn't much said about John in Edward's hearing. Only this:
Edward's father: "They'll make a man of him in the navy."
Edward's mother: "We could have made a man of him in his own home if you hadn't been so weak."
Edward's father: "Yes, my dear, you are probably right, and if you wish me to admit that it's all my fault I do admit it here and now."
That was all that was said at that time in Edward's hearing. And it did not make a strong impression on him. Father was always admitting that he was at fault about something or other, and Edward himself often had to do the same thing, because when Dear Mother began to find fault it was the only way to stop her.
And it was the only way to stop Ruth and Sarah when, acting as their mother's duly accredited agents, they found fault with him, or when Martha the parlormaid did, or Ann the cook.
Fortunately for the boys, and for the Reverend Mr. Eaton himself, Mrs. Eaton was a great visitor. She believed it to be her duty to call on every one of her husband's parishioners at least once a month. The sight of the surrey at the door with the two long-tailed and long-maned black horses, Darkness and Shadow, George, the coachman, in the front seat holding the whip and reins, and Mrs. Eaton, with her long horse face, her protruding teeth, her immense bustle and her large tortoiseshell card-case, about to disappear for an entire afternoon, was a pleasant sight for all the persons at the rectory who loved a little freedom of speech and action. Usually Mrs. Eaton took her two dear, beautiful daughters with her. To the very moment of departure her mouth was filled with directions and admonitions.
Poor Mr. Eaton had long since come to the conclusion that a man's hell is not hereafter, but here, and that some woman, or a combination of them, make it for him. His own mother had hounded him into Holy Orders. His marriage had been another case of special pleading. He loved beauty, music, colors, flowers, and it had not been his natural instinct to marry a woman with a face like a horse and a shelf of projecting teeth. But politeness and courtesy and consideration were natural to him. These'he had exhibited to her, and they had been magnified into marked and even compromising attentions. The first thing that he knew he was going to be married to a woman whom he did not love. He tried to make her a good husband.
Well, when the Reverend Mrs. Eaton and her two handsome daughters went visiting, the males of the family were free from care and happier than at any other time.
So that there should be more time for play, Mr. Eaton would energetically help those who had lessons to do, would get his own sermon finished, and then be ready to go on expeditions with his boys to the shores of Pelham Bay or into the heart of Pelham Wood.
But one day that was damp under foot, Edward had a cold and had been forbidden to go out of the house and was left to his own devices. He was a good little boy and trustworthy. Mischief was comparatively unknown in the Eaton family. Nobody anticipated that he would set the house on fire, or do anything that he shouldn't do. And he didn't. Nevertheless, he got into a great trouble, which was to affect his character and his future life.
While he sat curled in a great chair before the library fire with an illustrated history of the world in his lap, he happened to look up and notice that one of the Dresden china urns which graced the mantelpiece had been cracked.
A curious sense of unrest and foreboding filled him. Presently he climbed down out of his chair and went into the servants' part of the house and asked the cook and the parlormaid if either of them had broken the Dresden china urn. They said that they had not, but that if by any chance he, Edward, had, he would certainly catch it when his mother came home.
His mother was always boasting about those urns, and showing them off to visitors. She could not possibly have known that it had been cracked, or there would have been an uproar. Edward was so filled with dubiety and vague forebodings that he could by no means return to a perusal of the pictures in the history.
He set up a watch at one of the front windows, and when toward dark the family surrey hove in view with one dear sister on the front seat and the other dear sister on the back seat alongside Dear Mother, he became frightened and ran back into the library.
Then he became more frightened. If Dear Mother found him in the same room with the broken urn she would at once suspect him of having broken it. So he ran out into the hall. Then it occurred to him that if he were not found in the same room with the broken urn the fact would be remembered against him when at length the break was discovered.
A clear conscience is supposed to transcend all evil. Edward's conscience was clear as a bell, but he had had clear consciences before now and they had availed him nothing.
He stood irresolute, a tiny figure in the dark old fashioned hallway—a brightly colored, a robust piece of life against the dead black walnut furnishings and the ponderous draperies.
There was a scuffing of feet on the porch. Edward ran to the heavy door, turned the knob and pulled it open.
Dear Mother stooped from the awful heights of her dignity and kissed Edward on the forehead; at the same time she shooed him before her toward the library, and told Sarah to shut the door, and remarked that if little boys with colds in their heads didn't know enough to keep out of draughts, older and wiser people must so manage as to keep them out of them.
Edward, his eyes on the cracked urn, entered the library. His Dear Mother and the girls followed.
She advanced toward the fire, her heavy silks rustling and creaking, her hands held out to the warmth, and perceived that one of the two Dresden china urns had been cracked. She stopped short as if she had been stabbed. Then she said in a very quiet voice:
"One of my priceless Dresden china urns has been broken. Somebody has been touching one of my priceless Dresden china urns, which I do not allow anybody to touch, and has broken it."
By what mental process Mrs. Eaton fastened the guilt upon Edward is unknown. But from the very first it was for his benefit that she spoke.
"Somebody," she said, "is going to be very sorry—very sorry that this ever happened and that my orders were disobeyed. Somebody is going to suffer for this."
And now she fixed her eyes on Edward's and held him thus for a long time. The little boy broke under the strain. Crimson crept up from his neck and spread over his face and into the roots of his hair. His eyes turned slowly away from his mother's face. They resembled two gentle and timid animals which had been wounded.
"I didn't do it, Dear Mother," he said, "truly I didn't."
"I had rather," she said, "that a thousand Dresden china urns were broken than that my little son should speak a single word that was not true."
"Really and truly I didn't," said Edward.
His dear mother lifted a finger not to her lips but to her shelf of projecting teeth, and said:
"Stay where you are, and do not speak to anybody."
Then she sailed majestically out of the room.
Convinced of Edward's guilt, the questions which Mrs. Eaton asked the domestics were perfunctory and leading. They were of this nature: "You didn't by any chance break one of my Dresden china urns, did you? Of course not. I am asking you merely as a matter of form."
She returned to the room in which Edward waited for her, as a condemned man waits for his executioner.
"The servants," she said, "know nothing about the urn. It was not broken when I went away. I come back and find it broken. No one has been in this room, my little son, but you."
She seated herself and beckoned him to approach.
"It will be best for you," she said, "to tell the truth—the whole truth now."
Once more the gentle, wounded eyes were lifted to hers. And in a voice half strangled with fear, Edward once more denied all knowledge of how the urn came to be broken.
There was "One Above" with whom Mrs. Eaton was often in communication and always on terms of perfect understanding. To that One she now lifted her hands and her face. It was as if she were entreating Him not to miss, not to miss for one moment the horrible trial to which she was being subjected, and the more than human patience with which she was supporting it.
In a paroxysm of fear Edward had crept close to his mother. He now flung his arms about the crinkling silks which covered her lower extremites and protested in a small and shaking voice that he hadn't done it, that really and truly he hadn't done it.
A pure woman contaminated by the touch of an evil man could not have shaken herself free with a greater show of injured virtue than the mother now shook herself free from the child. She sent him reeling. And as he reeled she smote him with words.
"A liar—my son, a liar—don't touch me—don't speak to me. And don't you dare speak to your father, or your brothers, or to your dear sisters, who will be so grieved when they hear of this. Don't you speak a word to anyone. For if you spoke you would probably lie, and there is enough falsehood on your conscience now. Quite enough. And no one will speak to you... Not I, nor your father, nor your brothers, nor your dear sisters, and perhaps in that way the truth will be wormed out of you, and you will repent, and be forgiven. Even now the way to forgiveness lies open. Did you or did you not break the urn?"
At that moment Edward resembled a little ghost. But the fear that was in him was now mixed with a nobler emotion—the righteous anger of the witness who, speaking the truth under oath, and nothing but the truth, is not believed by the court.
"I did not," he said. And his shrill treble had a certain ring of defiance.
"Silence!" cried his mother.
In winter the little bedroom at the north end of the attic was a cold and dark room. And since when little boys had sinned no thought was taken for their health or comfort, it was to this room that Edward was exiled until such a time as he should see fit to confess his faults.
He had no toys and no books to keep him company. Nobody spoke to him, and he dared not speak to anybody. His meals were brought to him in silence, and in silence they were taken away. He was intolerably washed and roughly helped with his dressing and his undressing.
He stood his exile with an extraordinary stoicism. At times the loneliness and the strange sounds in the attic terrified him but he managed to keep silent. His heart, when it didn't simply ache, for he was only a baby, was sullen and resentful.
When you have been brought up to believe that speaking the truth is always rewarded, and find that it isn't, you begin to wonder what would happen if you lied once in a while. Dear Mother always spoke the truth. She said so. But it was Dear Mother who had pointed out to him that truth-telling was always rewarded, and here he was being punished for telling the truth, and it began to look as if Dear Mother had
Edward dared not even think the short and ugly word in connection with Dear Mother.
Still, something had happened which obviously could not be explained.
His cold got worse, and his nose ran terribly, especially at meal times. There was a register in the attic up which came an insufficiency of warm air. When he was not in bed he kept the register company.
Twice a day the silence was broken. Twice a day his mother creaked up to the attic and told him to let her know when he was ready to tell the truth. And twice a day he said to her, "I didn't do it, Dear Mother, really and truly I didn't." And saw her turn away, cold and contemptuous. He wondered if all mothers hated sin as much as his did.
One night his throat tickled so that he couldn't help coughing. After a long time he heard a cautious step coming up the attic stair. Presently the door opened and a kind voice spoke in the dark: "It's father, Eddie. Mother is having a meeting with some ladies in the vestry. I've brought you something for your cough."
It was a paste made of sugar and lemon juice. One ate it with a teaspoon. It didn't stop the cough, but it tasted splendid.
The Reverend Mr. Eaton seated himself on the edge of the bed and, defying the thunder and lightning, began a conversation,. The Reverend Mr. Eaton talked to children very much as he talked to grown people, without contempt or patronage, in a simple, easy, confidential way. "Eddie," he said, "what's the truth about this urn anyway?"
"I never touched it in my life, father," said Edward. "Not once."
"Of course," said his father, "your mother has convinced herself that you did. She won't even entertain a reasonable doubt."
"She wants me to tell her that I did when I didn't. And I won't."
"I wish you were a little older. I'd like to give you a piece of good advice, but I don't know how you'd take it . . . But if I were you, I believe I'd find some way of making peace with your mother. When men and women live together, the men, in order to keep the peace, have to say and do lots of things that aren't necessary for men when they only have to keep the peace among themselves. You've been brought up to believe that people who speak the truth are never punished, and you've discovered that that isn't the truth. You are going through a pretty upsetting experience. I'm so sorry for you that I could cry. And yet I hardly know how to help . . . I don't think women mean to be unjust or cruel; but if they can't get their way about everything, they are not above using any weapon they can lay their hands on."
Edward did not understand the half of what his father was saying; but he knew that he was being treated as an equal, and the knowledge comforted him and made him very proud.
"You don't think I broke it, do you, father?"
"Why should I? I have your word for it that you didn't. Men don't have to lie to each other to get along."
A hint could hardly have been stronger.
"Do men?" asked Edward, "ever have to lie to women?"
"I'm afraid so, Eddie," said his father. "It's the only way sometimes . . . I've tried to reason with your mother about this business. But she's taken her position. And—well, you know as well as I do what that position is. You have told her the truth, and there is no power on earth which can make her believe you. There's the whole miserable matter in a nutshell. . . . I've tried prayer, old man, but here you are."
Edward clung to his father's hand.
"I prayed God to make mother believe me," he said, "but He's known mother so much longer than He's known me that I guess He'd take her side."
"I must go now." The Reverend Mr. Eaton smiled in the dark. Then he said: "I promised your mother that I wouldn't come up. I've broken my promise, of course; but for the sake of peace, I'd rather she didn't know. But if she asks you—tell her the truth. A man can't afford to have too many fibs on his conscience."
The next day at the first opportunity Edward, who had always spoken the truth to his mother, lied to her. He confessed to having broken the Dresden china urn. And after that things were better; but never the same. The confidence which Dear Mother had once had in her little boy had been badly shaken. There would always now be the unpleasant thought that since he was not naturally truthful he might be lying to her.
But she did not despair in the long run of winning him over to a love of truth for its own sake.
Wherefore at ten or eleven years of age there was probably not to be found in the whole of Westchester County a child more experienced and astute in formulating and speaking those untruths which tact, good manners and the fear of hurting other people's feelings demanded.
Edward Eaton had no especial gift for jealousy. But he could not help noticing that when anything really important was done for anybody it was always for some female or other—for one of his sisters, or for one of his dear aunts, or for dearest grandmother.
"Men," as Mrs. Eaton often said, "are selfish creatures and may be counted on to take care of themselves, but girls must be guarded against their own generous impulses and their genius for self-sacrifice."
In the case of Edward's sisters this guarding must have been successfully performed at an extremely early age. For by the time that his first clear recollection of them begins, their generous impulses seem to have been pretty well immolated and their genius for self-sacrifice nipped in the bud.
They were comely girls, except during adolescence when, as was the custom at that time, they were encouraged to hang their heads and look ashamed of themselves, and they were able girls with their heads and hands. Months after the Eaton boys, including the youngest, had spent the last penny of their Christmas money, the Eaton girls still had funds tucked away in safe places. They were always saving up for something "really worth while." In addition, whatever money Mr. and Mrs. Eaton were able to save was put aside for them.
"Give a boy a sound education, teach him the difference between right and wrong, give him a fair chance in life and let him stand on his own feet," Mrs. Eaton would say, "and you may feel that you have done your duty by him—your whole duty."
It was a principle with her. She would not have left her boys well off if she had been able to. They might have been tempted to lead idle lives of enjoyment.
Mrs. Eaton knew perfectly well just who was going to Heaven when they died and just who wasn't. It seemed sometimes as if the Lord God had made her His special deputy on earth to keep a precise watch upon her neighbors' chances and prospects.
That family of Ruggleses, for instance, who lived in the outskirts of New Rochelle, would find the going very different after their deaths. Unless for a wedding or a funeral, they were never known to step inside a church, and Mr. Ruggles was said to believe only that man was descended from an ape.
Once at dancing school the master caused Edward to waltz drunkenly with the Ruggles girl. She was named Alice and wore a velvet dress which was delicious to touch. She had slim black legs and tiny patent leather pumps with silver buckles. It was Edward who made her dancing look a little drunken. She was really a graceful child with a fine sense of rhythm.
While they staggered about the room, and Miss Bent thumped upon the piano, and Mr. Bent beat upon a xylophone, Alice teased Edward and shocked him and infatuated him.
"You're Doctor Eaton's little boy, aren't you?" Edward mumbled that he was. "Are you pious? Do you go to church every Sunday?"
"Twice."
"We never go. Father don't believe in it. And he says it's a horrible bore. Your brother John ran away from home and went to sea, didn't he? That's what I'd do if I was a preacher's son and they made me go to church."
"What do you do on Sunday?"
"Father's almost always home on Sunday. We go boating and fishing and play ball in the back yard. And at night he reads Walter Scott and Cooper out loud to us. Do you know what father believes? He believes that we were once monkeys and lived in trees."
"My mother says that people who don't keep the Sabbath will go to Hell when they die."
"Do you believe that?"
"Of course," said Edward.
"Shucks!" said Alice. "And anyway I'd rather go to Hell than play a harp, wouldn't you?"
Edward recalled that he had once made an effort to play on dearest grandmother's harp, that had been hers when she was a girl, and had been rapped over the knuckles for touching it. He didn't know.
"Once upon a time," said Alice, "there were gods and goddesses who danced and sang and got drunk and played tricks on people and each other. But they're all dead, and my father says that the new God will die too."
"When?" asked Edward.
"Of course father don't know exactly. But he sees signs and gives Him about seventy-five or a hundred years. Then there'll be another new God, and perhaps He'll approve of everything that the one we've got now disapproves of."
Edward had been taught to believe that for saying less than Alice had said people were sometimes struck dead right where they stood, as a lesson for them and for other people. And he finished the number nervously. To have the girl you were dancing with hit by a bolt from the blue would be altogether too close for comfort.
If he had repeated any of his conversation with Alice to Mrs. Eaton he would not have been allowed to dance with her any more, and Mrs. Eaton might have taken steps to have her expelled from the dancing school. But Edward kept the conversation to himself, and he also kept to himself the fact that the mere touching of her velvet dress had caused him to like her better than any other girl he knew. It was a pity that she would have to go to Hell later on.
He longed to save her, and while he was in that spell the missionary which is in all of us was born, lived unpracticably, and died.
They met at dancing school, and at a class for wood carving and modeling in clay. Of all the children gathered together to be cultivated in the arts, Alice alone had talent. She sat next to Edward in the modeling class, and under her compulsion a lump of clay would actually get to looking like the head of a sheep or a dog without any intervention by the teacher. One day she made a thing that had a long tail and looked less like a man than a monkey. She said it was an ancestor, everybody's ancestor—Edward's and Edward's father's and mother's, and the ancestor of the people who invented Heaven and Hell. The teacher scolded Alice for making something that she had not been told to make, but he couldn't help laughing at what Alice had made. He kept it and had it baked and gave it to Alice's father.
Edward's infatuation grew. It is probable that little boys love as ardently as grown men. And in order to please her, he took risks of Hell and joked about going to church and the descent of man. Nothing terrible happened.
Birthdays, since they reflected glory on Mrs. Eaton who had done the bearing, were always celebrated at the Rectory. Each child had its especial friends to a spread of ice cream and cake, and when Edward's day came around he asked to have Alice and was surprised and delighted beyond measure when his mother gave her consent.
"The Christian atmosphere of this house," said Mrs. Eaton, "can't fail to impress her. And it may be, my little son, that you may be the instrument by which a brand is to be snatched from the burning."
In the years which had elapsed since that memorable day when brother John had not come from school, Ruth Eaton had graduated from school and grown up and was very busily engaged in annexing to herself a young man. He was a graduate of Harvard College, and he was one of America's first apostles of the outdoor sporting life.
Bruce Armitage had inherited an income of nearly a thousand dollars a month. In the days when a dollar could hold up its head and not only look like a dollar, but be a dollar, this was a large income. There were young men even then who had larger incomes, but there weren't many. And there was certainly not another within the periphery of Ruth Eaton.
Of idlers, of young men who did not work at anything, she had been taught to disapprove. Her mother disapproved of such men, and so did God. But Bruce Armitage was different. His income made the difference.
Between them, Mrs. Eaton and her daughter created a virtue out of no better material than Armitage's idleness itself. He had enough, more than enough. To work for more would be to show greed, one of the seven deadly sins, and would be to take money out of the way of someone who really needed it. Wherefore it was noble in young Armitage not to work, and to be contented with what he had.
Westchester was a small world in those days and everybody knew everybody.
Ruth and Armitage were first thrown together, literally thrown, at a coasting party. But they had met before, in a more formal fashion, and Ruth's comely, brightly colored face had made a deep impression upon the fortunate youth.
Edward remembered the night of the coasting party.
Young Mr. and Mrs. Warren, who were very rich and fond of outdoor life, had hitched a pony to their bobsled and driven about the neighborhood collecting neighbors and packing them on to the sled. When enough neighbors had been collected they would drive to a place called Prospect Hill and coast.
Laughing and shouting, and with room for just one more, this gay party had stopped in front of the rectory in the frosty moonlight, and young Armitage had run up to the door and called out that he couldn't come in because he was covered with snow, but that they were all going coasting to Prospect Hill, and couldn't Miss Ruth be persuaded to come along too?
Edward now learned for the first time that his mother had always rather believed in coasting as a wholesome outlet for youthful spirits. As a girl she herself had been something of a coaster.
Edward learned also that to his mother a little snow tracked into the house now and then was more of a joke than a crime.
No matter how much Armitage protested, Mrs. Eaton succeeded in bringing him into the library to wait while Ruth ran upstairs and put on her snow clothes. She made him stand close to the fire, and laughed as the snow melted from his boots and made pools of water on the rug.
With the exception of Mr. Eaton, who was at the church, and John, who was somewhere at sea, the entire family was present and took an immense liking to Armitage. His face was glowing and winning. He was at once embarrassed and natural.
Sarah even forgot that she was fourteen, and ashamed of it, and, when he spoke to her, lifted her fine eyes to his and smiled at him. Mark and James noted the cut of the young man's blue and white blanket clothes—an importation from the wilds of Canada—and envied him his coonskin hat with the coon's tail hanging down behind for a tassel.
But Edward, a close student of curious matters since the episode of the Dresden china urn, marveled less at Mr. Armitage and his outfit than at his own mother.
She looked positively amiable and sport-loving. You would have thought that she lived entirely, in a big, wholesome, understanding way, for the profit of young people, especially men. You would have thought that rugs damaged by snow water meant nothing in the even, generous tenor of her life.
"But Mr. Armitage, I assure you that it doesn't matter in the least. It doesn't matter that" Here Mrs. Eaton actually and quite loudly snapped her thumb and forefinger. Edward had never seen her do this before. "First, last, and always youth must be served. I haven't raised six children without learning to look tracked snow in the face."
Then, five minutes having passed, Edward's dear sister Ruth, who usually spent an hour at the simplest toilette, could be heard coming down the hall stair, and appeared presently at the library door, completely dressed for coasting.
Today at a costume revue on Broadway not even Ruth's comely face could down the laugh which would be provoked by her coasting costume. Her waist, laced to the size of a wasp's, made her bust and hips look enormous. Her hat of black velvet and squirrel was pulled down over her forehead and was shaped like a dice box. And her bustle, no longer the threat of a schoolgirl, but the full-fledged bustle of a mature and fashionable woman, stuck out a foot and a half behind.
It is perhaps enough to know that to Bruce Armitage she looked graceful and beautiful. His heart turned over at the sight of her.
"That's the quickest change I ever heard of," he exclaimed.
"Life's too short to waste any of it on dressing," said Ruth. "Isn't that true, mother?"
Mother said that it was, and rising, and sailing awkwardly forward, she shooed the young people before her.
"You mustn't waste another moment of this beautiful moonlight."
As Ruth and Armitage passed out of the rectory they were welcomed by shouts from the bobsled.
Then Mr. Warren, who drove, clucked to the pony. But the runners of the sled had stuck, so that when it did start forward it was with a violent jerk, and everybody nearly fell off backward.
Later, it seemed, everybody did fall off.
Prospect Hill that night was "fast" to begin with, and as sleds traveled down it, it got faster. There is a turn half-way down the hill, and Mr. Warren made a mistake in steering, and his whole party, locked tightly in each other's arms and legs, were thrown off sideways into soft snow.
Nobody was hurt except Ruth. And she told only Armitage that she was hurt.
"It's nothing," she said. "Just my back—just a little twist. Don't say a word to the others and spoil their fun."
And she wouldn't let him say a word to the others, and she went right on coasting down the hill and walking back up it as if nothing was the matter, and she laughed and shrieked just as the other women did, and was altogether brave and admirable.
But she allowed Armitage to gather that the little twist hurt her a good deal, and she allowed his admiration for her fortitude to grow as much as it wanted to. What he admired most was pluck—especially in a woman. This girl from the rectory certainly had it. She wasn't the kind who complains and lets her own grief spoil the joy of others.
On the way home she confessed to him that she could not have walked up that hill even one more time without screaming. Yes, the pain was pretty bad, but it would be all right in a day or two.
The very next day he called to see how she was. She made light of her twist, but she lay in a long chair with many cushions and begged him to excuse her for not rising to welcome him.
Somehow the young man, as innocent young men will, believed that the accident was all his fault.
"It wasn't your fault a bit," she said rather sharply, "and you know it. If you had been steering it wouldn't have happened."
Mrs. Eaton smiled upon the pair and left the room. And she took Edward with her, though he would have liked to stay, and saw no reason why he shouldn't. Just as Mrs. Eaton and Edward left the room, Ruth said:
"But I had a grand time, and this is nothing."
And Armitage said, with much concern in his voice: "Have you seen the doctor? Backs are serious."
Now backs are serious. And a young man cannot take unto himself any problem that is more serious. But in the hands of an able woman a twisted back is one of the most tremendous weapons in the world.
Edward soon perceived that when she wanted it to his sister's back hurt her and laid her down flat in the long chair with the cushions, and that when she didn't want it to hurt her it didn't. He perceived that it was an obstacle in the way of the things that she didn't want to do, but an obstacle which a little cheerful courage could always overcome in the case of things that she did want to do.
Bruce Armitage became a constant visitor at the rectory. He loved courage.
And he loved children, so that when he learned that Edward was to have a birthday party he announced that he proposed to be among those present, and upon the word present he laid a peculiar accent, and discovered a wink for Edward's benefit.
It was a wonderful present—a knife with a pearl handle and four blades. The knife itself was in a purse-like case of chamois. This was in a neat box of pasteboard, the box was wrapped in green paper held by an elastic, and this in turn was wrapped in a white paper tied with a red ribbon, and written on by the donor, "For Edward, with the affection of Bruce Armitage."
All the children and grown-ups had watched while Edward unwrapped the Armitage present. And when, having dropped the white paper on the floor, he dropped the green paper after it and began to fumble with the pasteboard box, some of them began to laugh, and some to cry out with excitement.
It was Edward's mother who picked up the piece of green paper and smoothed it out and said:
"Oh, my little son—what riches!"
The piece of green paper was a ten-dollar bill. The knowledge excited Edward, but not so much as the discovery that the four blades of his knife were of Sheffield steel. He has three of them left—worn very slender with much sharpening. He does his nails with them to this day. But the real wonder was not in the knife or in the ten-dollar bill.
On this his eleventh birthday he had begged his mother for a knife, and she had said that he was too young to have one, that he was too young and unformed in character to be trusted with a sharp instrument of any kind.
Well, now here she was facing right about and saying that a knife was just what her little boy had always wanted, but it had taken Mr. Armitage, who always knew what everybody wanted, to think of it, and Edward must be a good boy and not cut himself. His mother's facing about in the matter of the knife and allowing—him to keep it was the real wonder.
Then Alice Ruggles—"that agnostic's child"—put her pert face and voice into evidence and caused everybody to laugh by saying: "Say, Edward, what are you going to do with the ten?"
He did not know. He would have liked to put it in his pocket, but he handed it over instead to his Dear Mother for safe keeping.
Ruth had never been a child's child, and she had not grown up to be a child's woman. But on the present occasion, in spite of her "poor back," she laid herself out for the entertainment and amusement of Edward and his small guests.
In spite of her wasp waist and her fashionable bustle, she was a lovely creature to the eye, and seeing her among the children, gracious and full of fun, young Armitage's mind swam, and he: thought of her as his wife, and of the children as their children. These thoughts made him very happy.
And when, the party not quite over, she suddenly confessed to him, her face adorably composed and courageous, that she had reached the end of her tether, that her "wretched back" was "really a little too much," all his sympathy, chivalry and love became hers.
The children were forming two and two for a march into the dining-room. There was ice cream yet to be eaten, and Edward's cake to be cut.
Ruth took a step toward the piano and made a slight grimace of pain, which caught her mother's all-seeing eye.
"Don't play them in, darling—if your back hurts you."
"But Mother Dear!" exclaimed Ruth with the smile of a suffering angel, "how can the blessed little angels march without music?" And she seated herself at the piano and played a jolly little four-square march that put a sense of time even into the least musical pair of feet. Edward himself became transfigured.
Suffocated all this time with repressed love for Alice Ruggles and her black velvet dress, he suddenly threw his right arm around her waist, seized her right hand in his left, and polkaed her out of the library, across the hall and into the dining room . . . Ruth's fingers lingered on the keyboard, slipped off and dropped listlessly to her lap. She closed her eyes, and straightend her hurt back. She made a little frown of pain.
"You're going to think me an awful baby," she said, "but I'm not really up to waiting on them. Sarah will help mother."
"Won't you please lie down?" said Armitage.
"Must I?"
It was wonderful that she should leave the decision to him.
"Please!"
So she left the piano and lay down on the long chair with the cushions. "I know," she said, "that it's fashionable to have aches and pains, but this is my first and I don't quite know how to manage it."
"You know how to manage so that it doesn't spoil anybody else's fun. I think you're perfectly wonderful about it."
"I'm not," she said simply, and then:
"Edward will be disappointed if we don't have a piece of his cake."
"Like some ice cream too?"
"Just a spoonful."
Armitage smiled upon her and hurried to the dining room. He returned after a short interval with two helpings of ice cream and two slices of the birthday cake.
"Don't swallow recklessly," smiled Ruth. "There's a thimble somewhere in this cake, a ten cent piece, and a ring."
A shout of laughter reached them from the dining room.
"That," said Armitage, "sounds as if somebody had drawn the thimble."
The next moment Ruth, crumpling the cake, had found the ring. Lovers make much of symbols.
"Do you," said Armitage, and his voice trembled a little, "believe in omens?"
Ruth's eyes, serious and inquiring, met his frankly. "Do you?" she asked.
"Oh, yes," he said, "I do! I—I have to."
He knelt suddenly and took her in his arms and began to kiss her rosy face.
At that moment an all-seeing pair of eyes set in a long horse face appeared in the doorway.
To Mrs. Eaton kissing among the unmarried was no less than a deadly sin. Were the heavens about to fall? No. Armitage found Ruth's lips—she had never been kissed before—at the same moment that Ruth found his.
And Mrs. Eaton merely waited until that long kiss was about half over. And then she smiled showing her whole shelf of projecting upper teeth, and—vanished.
Very young lovers also place reliance on symbols and omens. Alice Ruggles' piece of cake had harbored the thimble, symbol of spinsterhood, and young Edward's heart had sunk to a very low position in his breast. The dime, indicative of riches, had fallen to his own lot, but there was no comfort in that. If Alice were never going to marry anybody, why, then, of course she was never going to marry him, and he felt very miserable about it. But she did her best to comfort him—and to shock him at the same time. She leaned close and whispered in his ear:
"My father says that marriage is all poppycock anyway."
Oddly enough, at that very moment Alice's father arrived to fetch her home.
Edward, who had never seen him before, expected an abnormal, perhaps a monstrous parent, with a malicious and rather diabolic face, the laugh of an ogre and a loud assertive voice. But Ruggles was unimpeachably quiet and easy. He was not even big. It was not possible to believe that the smooth, untroubled forehead concealed so many sardonic and outrageous thoughts.
One saw before one a man who by not believing in God had defied Him, who by not attending church had defied Edward's own father, who believed man to be only a superior monkey, who would go to Hell when he died and burn in everlasting fire, and to whose arms his little daughter now flew with a cry of love and delight.
No child of Mrs. Eaton's would ever have been permitted to fly at a parent like that. And this knowledge brought Edward to the conclusion that real goodness is inseparable from offishness and condescension. Whereas there seemed to be something in the wickedness of Ruggles and the inherited wickedness of his little daughter which permitted them to love each other without reticence, and to converse together like two rational human beings of the same age.
Edward accompanied them to the door.
"I've had a dandy time," said Alice. She turned upward to her father a pair of brilliant dark eyes, swimming with affection. "Did you know I got the thimble, daddy? But what do I care if I don't get married in a million years, so long as I've got you?"
Mr. Ruggles' eyes twinkled and narrowed so that crows' feet appeared at the outer corners of them.
"When we get home," he said, "we'll file off the top of your thimble and what you'll have left will be a ring—if that's what you want."
At the next dancing class, Alice, when she perceived Edward, swept down upon him, dancing as she went and holding her hands behind her back.
"I got thinking of you," she said demurely, "and I decided that I would not be an old maid after all. Look!" She showed him her hand. On the little finger of the left hand was a broad silver ring. "Father," she said, "made it out of the thimble." She laughed and added: "He said that it was probably the first time in history that anybody had ever been clever enough to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."