The days that followed were the golden days of Mr. Petersen’s life, the happiest he was ever to have.
Minnie was angelic. Her worry, her preoccupied air had gone; she was gentle, gay, affectionate. She didn’t get well very fast and had to stay in bed for some weeks, but that was no burden; she liked it. With her tiny son beside her and little Sandra quietly playing nearby, she was contented and blissful for hour after hour.
She developed a great fondness for being read aloud to; all evening and part of the afternoon one of the two men could be seen sitting by the bed with a book. Her taste was astoundingly catholic; as a matter of fact, she didn’t care in the least what was read, or pay much heed to it, so long as she could secure the uninterrupted companionship of one of her men. She only wanted to see them there, safe and happy.
Mrs. Hansen managed the house and Sandra to perfection. There wasn’t a bother or an annoyance from one day’s end to another. Except that Mr. Petersen felt a bit disturbed about the brother’s state of health. He had taken a great liking to the fellow, and he hated to see him so despondent.
Theirs was a most curious companionship. He realised how curious some time later. Mr. Petersen had never before met a man of this class and type; he had been wont to despise them, to look upon them as hindrances to the Socialist scheme, and useless from any point of view. Now he revised his ideas, in his open-minded fashion. Alec’s education he couldn’t admire; he really knew nothing at all, nor was he particularly intelligent. But his ideas were fine. They were not personal to him, they were nothing more than traditions, and yet Mr. Petersen was forced to admit that such traditions were quite as good, if not a great deal better, than anything which most men would have been able to work out originally. Principles of honour, of fidelity, of endurance. No matter that he didn’t live up to his principles very well; who did, anyway? Mr. Petersen himself was aware of many betrayals of his own faith. The thing was to aspire.
What is more, he liked the personality of the fellow; his simplicity, his infinite gentleness with Sandra. Certainly he would have liked to see him more cheerful, still, he could very well understand this depression in a man well over thirty who had failed to make a living for himself. He proposed looking about for some opening for him, but Alec said, no thanks, he was going away in a day or so. He was reserved to the point of mysteriousness. Mr. Petersen used to discuss him with Minnie and ask her advice.
“You know him better than I do,” he said. “What do you think would suit him?”
Minnie, as always incapable of answering a question, would say:
“But let’s keep him here, anyway, Chris. It’s the best place for him.”
She had the greatest devotion for her brother, a devotion which Mr. Petersen fancied was not quite appreciated. He was so formal with the affectionate little soul. If she succeeded in kissing him good-night or good-morning, he would turn scarlet and actually frown at her. He never returned a caress, never spoke a tender word to her. He seemed rather to avoid her. He was willing enough to read aloud, but if she interrupted him, and wanted to chat a bit, he lost his temper.
“Do you want me to read or not?” he would ask, menacingly.
Sombre and inscrutable, he withdrew into himself, disregarding even Mr. Petersen’s always renewed offers of friendship. He treated Mr. Petersen with a respectful deference which would have been grotesque if he had not been so obviously sincere.
Sandra he loved passionately. It surprised Mr. Petersen to hear him upbraiding Minnie for her carelessness with the child. Her food, her clothes, her manners. He was always saying that she should be taken to church, and taught what he called “decent ideas,” and Minnie always promised to comply when she grew stronger. She was invariably propitiating toward her brother, as toward someone she had wronged....
The War broke out. With very little effect upon Brownsville Landing. “Let them fight it out,” was the prevailing opinion; it was also stated positively that none of the nations had any clear idea of its aims or why it was involved. Even the Belgians were fools, who had rushed into war for no reason. There was a certain amount of awfully sentimental sympathy for the “Belgian babies,” but it wasn’t very effective. The Brownsville Landing natives looked upon the whole affair as a colossal folly, in which all the participants were equally guilty; the British perhaps a bit more reprehensible than the others. The old families, brought up on flamboyant traditions of “1776,” looked upon the British with scorn and dislike, the Irish element with positive hatred, and the great mass of aliens, with their obscure and vague affiliations, swallowed docilely the German propaganda fed to them. There was a wide-spread conviction that the Germans were invincible, if not superhuman, with amazing scientific devices impossible to resist. A sort of laboratory witchcraft, “secrets” and “discoveries” without limit. France was degenerate and vitiated; England gross, slothful, devoid of patriotism, Russia a farce; the whole affair wouldn’t last long.
To Mr. Petersen, the European, the outbreak was of immense significance; it was the falling of Damocles’ sword. He read the papers avidly. He was not partisan; he felt nothing but the passionate interest of an onlooker observing a mortal struggle between equally unpleasant adversaries. A struggle among capitalists. With the poor man dying, bleeding, suffering, whether victor or conqueror. He shook his head over the fate of the Continent.
It surprised him that Minnie’s feelings were so vehement. She was absolutely furious that there should be a war. All those men should have known better. She didn’t know or care what it was about; she declared it was shameful and wicked for so many people to be killed. She went so far as to weep over it. He knew Minnie well enough to guess at something personal in this fervour; an abstract interest was not possible for her.
Sure enough, it was a personal matter. It concerned her adored brother. He had evidently been telling her that he wanted to enlist, for one morning Mr. Petersen heard them at it, taking it up again with incredible obstinacy and indirectness on both sides.
“I won’t let you!” cried Minnie. “I won’t have it!”
“Good God! What do you want to make of me? Can’t you see, even you, that it’s the only way to rehabilitate myself? My only chance. I shan’t lose it, no fear!”
“Don’t you dare!” she cried hysterically. “I’ll die! It would kill me!”
Mr. Petersen entered after Alec had gone out angrily, banging the door.
“Minnie, my dear,” he said, mildly, “don’t you think you’re wrong to try to influence your brother in such a”
“Oh, do stop!” she interrupted rudely. “You don’t understand.” And suddenly grew angry with him. “I should think you could see he’s not fit for a military life. So thin and sensitive. How can you be so heartless.”
Mr. Petersen remarked that if he weren’t fit for a military life, he wouldn’t be accepted, but Minnie said she knew all about that; they’d take anyone they could get hold of, even in a dying condition.
This marked the end of her period of sweetness. With her characteristic scorn for doctor’s orders, she refused to stay in bed any longer. In a wrapper, thinner, pallid, and untidy, she pervaded the house, for the sole purpose of keeping her eye on Alec. She followed him about, scolding him, crying, tormenting him. He stopped arguing, he absolutely refused to answer her. He would sit, with a cigarette in his mouth, quite unmoved by her tirades.
It was undoubtedly a unique opportunity for the poor fellow to “rehabilitate” himself, as he put it, and Mr. Petersen couldn’t understand why he hesitated. Surely no man owed so immoderate a duty to a sister. If he wanted to go, if he saw it as his duty to go, why in Heaven’s name, didn’t he go, and at once?
All of poor Minnie’s loves were so inordinate. She was to Alec as she was to her children, utterly and blindly devoted, without the least discretion or scruple. He knew that she didn’t love him in that way, but he felt it was because he was independent, didn’t need her so. Her whole life consisted in service for those weaker ones. The most superfluous services, that instead of helping hindered. She annoyed Alec by her futile and insistent attentions, by counting his cigarettes and deploring their number, by bringing him special dishes which were intended to fatten him. She denied Sandra nothing, no matter how injurious and stupid. She served her little son by carrying him in her arms continually, never let him alone in peace. Only to Mr. Petersen she did nothing but her duty, and not always that, though she didn’t realise it.
The old disorder was re-established, on account of trouble with Mrs. Hansen.
Minnie came into his little room one morning, frowning.
“Chris,” she said. “You’ll have to tell that woman to go at once!”
“Who, my dear?”
“You know very well! That Hansen woman! This time she’s surpassed herself. I never heard of such impudence. Never! There she was, the old—creature—snooping round in Alec’s room. Snooping!”
Now Mr. Petersen had long been aware of this sole failing in an otherwise classically lofty character. He knew that Mrs. Hansen snooped. But, having no secrets, her snooping hadn’t particularly disturbed him. He realised, too, that for one of Minnie’s secretive nature, snooping must seem a crime; he knew by this time that she had plenty of things to hide, queer little magpie stores, money she imagined she was saving, clothes she had ruined in the making, bills she didn’t wish seen. He thought it rather humorous.
“That’s too bad,” he said, soothingly. “Still—perhaps if you speak to her”
“Indeed I shan’t. You engaged her and you can get rid of her. I will not have her in the house. Poking her nose into everyone’s affairs. She’s got to go at once!”
She heard the baby crying and turned to go.
“I never did trust that woman,” she said, turning back at the door. “I always felt there was something queer when we missed all that food last autumn.”
Mr. Petersen was stricken dumb. To accuse poor Mrs. Hansen of that!
And such was the plausibility, the fatal assurance of Minnie’s manner, that he was almost inclined to disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes, to deny the facts known to him, and to put his faith in her words....
She got another servant, a silly young girl, and between them they produced a masterpiece of discomfort and disorder. They quarrelled, too, in a distressing way; but were nevertheless conscious of a sort of bond. Mr. Petersen would hear Minnie in the kitchen preparing food for the baby and talking to Addie with interest, with animation, as she had never talked to Mrs. Hansen, who was so much more worth talking to. And Addie would reply as one woman to another. They used to discuss the war sometimes with deep indignation. Their opinions were identical. Addie’s young man, who was a German with American citizenship, hankered after the Fatherland, and wanted to go home and fight, but Addie had told him firmly that if he did, she was done with him. He could find one of those fat German girls.
Minnie’s housekeeping annoyed her brother very much. In fact, Mr. Petersen thought him unnecessarily fault-finding with the anxious little woman. She used to cry sometimes but she never resented anything he said. She would excuse herself by saying that the baby took up so much of her time. And that was a new cause of offense. He accused her bitterly of favouritism, and even Mr. Petersen was obliged to admit a basis of truth in the accusation. She had an absolutely frantic passion for her little son; she was ready enough to be sharp and unjust to Sandra if she disturbed his inordinate demands for quiet slumber.
It was a beautiful, a wonderful baby, a lusty, blonde little Petersen with serene blue eyes and a sort of debonair quality; a baby no woman could be blamed for adoring. But she was so immoderate, so inordinately proud of having a son anyway. And when, combined with its superior sex, it possessed the attractions of this son, how withstand it? She expected Sandra to worship as she did, and Sandra refused. Sandra was annoyed with this superfluous child. As far as she was concerned it was useless, too young for a playmate and not docile enough for a toy. Moreover it received attentions which properly belonged to her. Uncle Alec alone confined his devotion to her.
He didn’t want the little girl out of his sight. He spent many hours walking through the garden, holding her hand, listening to her, touching her misty hair. He couldn’t play with her or amuse her as Mr. Petersen did, but she was able to love him even more. They had between them a rare and touching sympathy.
Mr. Petersen thought it charming. He often watched the grave little girl, sitting on the sofa beside the wretched man, reading aloud to him from her funny little books, which she knew by heart, sometimes stopping to run her little hand over his cheeks, or his beard, which amused her.
“Isn’t that a nice one?” she would ask, ending some story about bears or wolves or fairies.
“Rather!” he would answer. “You’re a very clever, good kid to read to me like that.”
Mr. Petersen came home one day at noon, and found no trace of lunch. Addie was not in the kitchen, nor Minnie. The latter he could always trace by means of his son’s voice, and he went up to the bedroom, to find her lying on the bed, exhausted, sobbing, while Addie bathed her forehead with cold water while she dandled the baby.
“Well, well!” he asked. “What’s wrong now?”
“He will enlist!” cried Minnie wildly. “You’ve got to stop him! I won’t have it. I’ll die!”
“Pshaw!” said Mr. Petersen mildly. “This won’t do!”
He was a little annoyed.
“You must let a man do as he thinks right,” he said.
“Right!” cried Minnie. “He’s not thinking of that! He wants to get away He’s made up his mind to get away from me!”
“Come, come! This isn’t very sensible, my dear!”
“Neither are you!” she answered, unexpectedly. “You’re the biggest fool in the world, Christian Petersen!” And began to laugh.
In the course of time she was calmed, and Mr. Petersen went downstairs to look for a bite to eat. He discovered Alec in the kitchen with Sandra, boiling eggs.
“Minnie been at you?” he asked.
Mr. Petersen admitted that she had.
“She’ll have to get over it, that’s all,” said Alec. “I’m going! About Sandra—I’ve got something ... a small income.... It isn’t clear now; I’ve drawn against it for some time to come ... but what there is, is for her. I.... You’ll look out for her, won’t you, in case I? She’s—Minnie doesn’t altogether understand her. Not so well as you do.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Mr. Petersen, who was too kindly even to hint that he didn’t need to be shown his duty toward Sandra by this poor failure. “You’ve really made up your mind then?”
“All the mind she’s left in me!” he answered with sudden passion. “Good God! What does the woman want! She wants to own a man, body and soul. Wants me to hang about here a disgraced, ruined man, not even trying to—stand alone The most disgusting, despicable object under the sun—so that she won’t be separated from me. Good God! If I’d ever thought I’d come to this, Petersen...!”
“Now then, my boy,” said Mr. Petersen gently, “don’t blame your sister too harshly. She’s too much a woman to understand these things. And don’t be bitter. You’re a young man yet. You can”
“No!” said Alec, “It’s too late. You’ve only to look at me to see I’m done for. In every way. Physical as well as—moral. No good. Rotten all the way through. My only chance is to get into the army. If they won’t have me, I’m finished.”
He was so obviously excited that Mr. Petersen did not remonstrate.
“If I can help you,” he said, “with your outfit, for instance, let me know. I’d be very glad. Or ... if you need ready money?”
Alec looked at him sombrely.
“Petersen,” he said, “some day you’ll understand. And I hope you’ll But I can’t expect it.... Only, before I go, I’d like you to know that—I’m not so bad as I seem.—I—I realise.... I hope I’m going to be killed. Perhaps that’ll wipe out—this. You might—in that case—not judge me so—you might—have mercy....”