WHEN Alwyn was seven years old a man came to visit his grandmother, a rancher from New Mexico whose name was John Craig. He ran his brown finger in and out of the small boy's hair and along his eyebrows, saying, "I had an uncle whose forehead was like that."
Alwyn's grandmother bent over him to see. "So it was," she said.
He came again just before the death of Alwyn's grandfather, and spent four or five afternoons at the farm, during which the old man stayed in the garden, not even coming to the house for his medicine or hist usual nap on the sofa: apparently he did not like the stranger. Alwyn's father seemed to have known him a long time, but not well; and they both seemed embarrassed, as if, under circumstances unknown to the boy, they ought to have liked each other perhaps more, perhaps less.
The stranger brought the children expensive presents. He was well dressed, and wore two rings on hist delicate but calloused hands—one silver Indian ring and one set with a piece of onyx on which was carved a cupid astride a fish. His face had an appearance of weariness and controlled excitement: lean and smiling, but smiling only around his mouth—the eyes, with brown upper lids drawn tight across them, never ceased moving about the room or over the countryside, watchfully but without anxiety. He walked with a loose-jointed motion, and Alwyn's grandmother said, "That is a regular horseback walk!"
Late in the afternoon she took her guest to the cemetery to see the new headstone on the grave of her two dead little girls. Alwyn stayed behind with his mother. "Who is Mr. Craig?" he asked.
His mother hesitated for a moment. "I don't know why you shouldn't be told. You are old enough now to keep the family secrets. You have heard us all speak of your father's younger brother Evan—he is Mr. Craig. He changed his name."
The small boy had never in his life been so astonished. He stared in the direction his grandmother and the stranger had gone, down the road toward the cemetery, staring over the head of the little old man in the garden who was the stranger's father, but would not speak to him. "Why did he change his name?" he cried.
His mother told him the little that she had been told; but he did not understand it very well, and years were to pass before he actually found out why. After his grandmother's death he went to New Mexico, and his uncle John Craig became a more intimate friend than his father had been able to be. This fact amused and touched the lonely, extraordinary man, for he himself had loved his uncle Leander more than his father.
During Evan's boyhood—before anyone had dreamed of such a man as John Craig, though his father often prophesied for him a disgraceful future—Leander Tower, in the "old bachelor's wing" of the house, led an idle and, to everyone but his youngest nephew, insignificant existence. Because he knew that the family would have been suffering extreme poverty but for his financial assistance, his brother's evident scorn of his way of life did not embarrass him. His sister-in-law was devoted to his comfort—it was a long-established habit to love him; but the shadow that was left of his character, if she had met him then for the first time, would scarcely have attracted her attention, as in the community it attracted no attention at all. Only Evan took refuge in that shadow from the pain of being misunderstood, the fatigue of adolescence which is more painful though less serious than a man's fatigue, and from his other troubles as they arose.
When Evan entered his room, interrupting his melancholy recollections, the old bachelor looked up with tender interest but no more eagerness. Another unhappy boy coming into the room, a third youngster coming into his life—he wanted neither to shut this one out nor to keep him there. "Sit down, my boy. What's the trouble now?"
"He called me a loafer because I came in from the field half an hour before supper."
"He" always meant his father. The relations between these two were going from bad to worse. The angrier Evan became the keener were his retorts, and there was something insulting about his eyes. He spoke in defense of things his father feared, criticized things which were all but sacred, and never wanted to go to church. The farm work always made him unhappy, and sometimes made him sick; he had to run away to the woods, for example, at butchering time. Whenever he spoke of running away altogether, he was pleased and tempted by the fact that his father looked afraid, grew more gentle, and talked of the evil and hardship of great cities. Their anger sobered the whole family for days at a time, as if it were sickness in the house. His mother whipped him once or twice, but he would not cry out, and said, "Why don't you let him do his own whipping?" which took away her courage.
"He called me a lazy rascal," the boy complained to his uncle with an air of resentful satisfaction, as if, detail by detail, he were giving evidence to convict his father of a crime—the usual crime of fathers. "I plowed all day and my head ached. Ma wouldn't listen when I told her."
"Yes, yes, I see. Your mother is the finest woman I ever knew. Your pa. . . . You'll find out some day, whether you like it or not, that you're a chip off the old block. He always thought I was good for nothing. Maybe I was."
He did not reproach the boy nor tell him what, on a given occasion, he ought to have done; a boy's ignorance was a sort of wisdom, to which an unsuccessful old man could add nothing that would be useful. But little by little, as if his disappointment spoke with its own voice, against his will, he told Evan how he himself had lived and what he thought about life. He did not imagine that anyone could profit by that story, but it would distract the boy's attention for a few hours from his monotonous, half-imaginary, immature troubles.
In this way Evan came to know the young Rose Hamilton better than he knew his mother, Hilary and his cousin Timothy better than his own brothers. As an adolescent invariably does, he envied Leander his distress and disappointment—they were experience at least; and there was no place for them in present day Wisconsin so far as he could see. His lucky brother Jim had had a chance to get away, the only chance there was in that family. . . . And he felt himself drawn, as a lover to a series of rendezvous, toward the places where his own life must have been waiting for him, though he had no idea where they were and scarcely cared what it was to be.
Thus Leander shaped this boy's character as he had wanted to shape Timothy's, as he might have shaped Hilary's. But he had failed so often to exercise the power of his affection that he scarcely realized what was happening; in any case, he was now too old to take pleasure in it. He scarcely took notice of the breakdown in Evan's mind of certain moral principles—for example, superstitious respect of law and order, love of work for its own sake, and, in a measure, the fear of God; but the boy's father grew more and more suspicious of them both. Henry Tower had no power over his weak brother, but he had a right to determine that, while Evan was a minor living in his house, he should not have his own way about anything.
Then the newspapers brought to Wisconsin an account of the sinking of the Maine. Evan's mother flung out her arms with a curious gesture, and cried, "Now we'll have another war!"
She saw her son sitting round-shouldered over the papers every night and knew what he was making up his mind to do, but was afraid to speak of it, since he was a Tower—lest opposition give him the courage she hoped he would lack. War against Spain was declared.
Evan did not yet know what it was to be afraid. He came in to dinner one day after the others were seated, and stood behind his chair. "I'm going to enlist," he said.
His hands gripped the chair-back as if it were a weapon, as if he might have to fight his way out of the room. His brother Ralph sighed, thinking perhaps of the harder work that would be left for him to do. His mother covered her face with a corner of her apron.
His uncle muttered, "Don't you let him go, Henry."
His father answered, "You ought to be ashamed, Leander. A boy can't do a finer thing than serve his country. We need him on the farm, but we'll have to get along."
Evan did enlist. He enjoyed the months of novelty and excitement before they disembarked in a Cuban harbor. There the stale-smelling sea splashed over rocks and rotten wood. The large vegetation which was on top kept swelling while that which was underneath rotted. The sun was very yellow. He was lonely, but avoided the other men half involuntarily, and wanted to sleep more than ever before. At first he thought it was a fever about to begin, drank whisky, and took large doses of quinine, as he was advised to do; but he learned that he was sick only at heart.
One night he stood just above the level of the sea which glittered in front of the moon, at the corner of two roads full of ruts, between a high wall and a low wall, both crumbling away. He was thinking, it is time to get back to the barracks.
There was a lump in his throat as he remembered the leave-taking in Wisconsin.
Henry Tower had placed his hard hands on Evan's shoulders, which were well above his own. "Don't you forget," he had said, "that five of your folks fought in the last war. You're a strong boy; it won't hurt you. Never turn back, whatever happens." The light in his eyes had resembled, but had been too shining to be, that of affection.
Evan's mother had come out of the kitchen where she had been crying quietly, and embraced him with great dignity, as if sending a son away to war were a ceremonial part of her womanly destiny, like a wedding or a funeral. Her air of pride and resignation. had made him feel the impersonality of maternal love—he was only one of her sons, doing what she had given him birth to do. That night in Cuba, in the weak moonlight, Evan smiled a little bitterly, as one who has scarcely known his own mother smiles at mothers in general. "Be a good soldier," she had said.
He wondered what his uncle was doing. Perhaps watching that same three-quarters moon, which looked full of milk like a breast; all alone in his room, perhaps, scribbling letters that he never mailed, or pretending to read. Evan's mother had written that he had been sick in bed after the boy's departure, and now planned to go to California; perhaps he was already on his way.
On that last morning in Wisconsin, Leander had preferred not to stand with the others around the horse and buggy; so Evan had gone to his room to say good-by. "Well, my boy," he had said, "now you're a soldier, as I was. It's a good thing that you're going alone, not with one of your brothers, the way I did. Write to your father sometimes as well as to your mother; it'll be hard on him while you're away, thinking maybe he hasn't been a good father to you. . . ."
A palm tree which leaned over one of the walls made a gesture of blessing Evan with its many-fingered hands. Over the other wall in regular breaths. came the air of a garden, and up from the seashore, now loud and now faint, as it were a concertina in drunken hands, the singing of sailors. . . .
Leander had talked a long time, somewhat like an old schoolmaster. Before going back to the barracks, Evan wanted to remember all he had said. "Well, maybe it's good-by altogether for us. I'm getting old and my usefulness is over. You'll live to see great days, the twentieth century—maybe everything will be different then. Be friendly, but not too friendly, and keep strong. And don't get to doing things you don't really want to do. And when you've made a mistake, and things go against you, and you can't help it, don't be ashamed to run away and leave them. Don't be ashamed to do whatever you've got to do. . . ."
Those were the words he had used, or very nearly his words. "Start all over again. You can, as long as you're alone in the world. That's my advice."
No more time to remember. The barracks. . . . For a moment Evan thought he was homesick; no, it could not be that. He was not lonesome for Ralph or his mother; he was glad to be far away from his father. All his old uncle could give him was advice: how to live when he was away from his family, how to live by himself. "Don't be ashamed to run away and leave things. . . ." He wondered what he ought to do, what he genuinely wanted to do, and what he was going to be able to do.
For he had begun to hate the war, though he had seen nothing of it but barracks, horse stables to be cleaned, unemployed guns, and saloons—no horror, no rage, and no death. Why did he hate it? He tried desperately to think, but his mind, like a little mirror, only reflected its own desperation, ridiculous desperation. . . . He smiled at himself, but bit his lips until they bled.
The Americans, he thought, had no business to be there: it was a foreign country; it was the South. He had been told that they were there only to help in a war for liberty, because they loved liberty. But even if that were true, it meant interfering in a family quarrel, as if a stranger had come to his home in Wisconsin to help him hurt and defy his father.
Then he had heard newspaper men say that America wanted Cuba for the sugar and tobacco, and that ammunition had been smuggled in to the rebels before our government had had any reason to take sides. One who had been drinking had declared that the Maine had been blown up from the inside, blown up by Americans to make America declare war. Evan did not know what to believe, but he was sick with suspicion.
Coming as a soldier to a foreign land, he learned, as soldiers often do, how little he loved his own. He imagined the profitable monotony of Wisconsin, where he had been so miserable as a boy, taking the place of Cuba's lattices, the shade of blossoming trees embossed on the dust, the pallid masonry, the gardens and flower markets, the scalloped water which became an ocean only at a certain distance from the island, beyond coral reefs which were like a fence—the work of the mysterious race they were there to wipe out, Spanish work. Out of the small churches came gusts of incense, mystery, and muttering—God was not worshiped like that in Wisconsin. He wanted to steal inside them and lose himself in the music which laughed and cried at the same time; but he could not overcome his timidity, and in fact was half ashamed of being a foreigner and a Protestant.
His imagination was aroused, not by the young, hot-headed American army, but by the natives; not by the natives who were rebels, but by their oppressors, the enemy. He had seen them as prisoners being pushed into the damp citadel—handsome, sallow men with the unabashed faces of eagles whose wings have been broken. The rebels were blacker, dirty fellows, weaklings with excited eyes like those of dogs, already jealous of the Americans. To fight a war of independence, they had had to become dependent on a new set of masters.
Then he began to believe that the Americans would lose the war. There were three spells against them—Spanish blood, the Church, and the heat. Sooner or later the rebels would prefer to be governed by their own kind rather than by foreigners; their mothers and sweethearts would have preferred it then. Handsome women who seemed to have been fasting came to look at the lists of dead and wounded; they shuddered in their fine veils without making a sound; and Evan believed that they wept not only because their sons were dead, but because they had died as rebels. Old mothers were behind the crumbling walls, praying to the God of Spain for the Spanish army, and kneeling beside them perhaps there were rows of black-eyed girls. All hating the Americans—hating him. In dilapidated carriages or in carts drawn by velvety burros he saw certain ones with brown, parrotlike faces who understood something of which men, above all young American men, were ignorant. He heard talk of spies and plots, of women dynamiting the town; men said, "They are tiger cats."
The Church was an enemy—innumerable priests in league with that Spanish God. Evan was afraid of the black-magic prayers whose precise meaning no one knew, going up among the organ pipes and bright images. The Americans did not pray. . . .
The heat was an enemy. Mimosa, magnolia, and oleander—the sweetness of these Cuban lives was poison to Americans, at least to him. The country boy had never dreamed of such a host of doctors as there were, to keep them from falling sick—sick of the canned food, of the moist filth, of the women along the quays. In spite of them, the whole army would come down with a fever, and be driven out. Evan was astonished that no one saw what was going to happen; perhaps no one cared. He tried to tell another soldier, a dull giant named Hodge, who said that he was plain crazy—after which he was afraid to open his mouth.
Sooner or later, in any case, his company would be sent up in the hills to fight. Bushes and vines lay all over those hills to entangle them, bushes and vines like masses of green hair. He thought he would suffocate without the little coolness that puffed in to the seaport from the sea. War in tight, high, hot valleys in the heart of the island. Soldiers running back and forth, shooting in the sunlight. Somebody's blood, perhaps his own, soaking through a uniform like sweat, with sweat. . . . It was not the fear of death which overcame him when he thought of these things, but the fear of a loathsome disease—from time to time the fear of going mad. His mother had often said that the Towers were a nervous family. . . .
A month passed, in drill, in drinking, in caring for horses, and in other menial tasks such as he had had to do all his life. He had been unhappy before, almost always, in fact, but now his unhappiness was mixed with a wilder emotion. One afternoon he was told that his company would be moved the next day or the day after. Suddenly he realized that he was not going mad—it was much simpler than that. He was a traitor.
That night he sat by himself in a bar on the quay; he felt stupid and almost happy, and asked himself, not what a traitor ought to do when ordered to the front, but whether or not he had fallen in love with the girl who ran the bar. Her old father picked a guitar and tried to make her sing—she had sung at least once every evening. But she shook her head and walked back and forth with an air of preoccupation—three steps to the right, two to the left, and a turn upon her heels, as if walking were a difficult dance. At first two grizzled Cubans and a young rebel sergeant were there; they paid and went out, leaving the door open. The night scented the low room with leaves and the sea. The old man fell asleep and dropped his guitar, which murmured a little for a moment, on the floor.
The girl sat down beside Evan, and he tried to talk to her. She said the war would last many years. Unable to remember any more Spanish words, he touched (but no more than touched) her wrist with his mouth, and laid one hand on her knee, pretending to do so by accident. Parting her lips and lifting one eyebrow, she smiled—it was hardly a smile. Evan had no experience of love, and all the sensibility in his body gathered in his hand. The old man in the corner ground his teeth and sighed in his sleep.
Then someone came down the road, singing drearily, There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night. It was Hodge, the soldier who had called Evan "plain crazy." He stumbled over the threshold, a great, swaying body which smelled of rum and the cavalry stables. He did not speak to Evan—he had not done so, in fact, since he had heard what Evan thought about the war. The girl rose to serve him.
He laid six one dollar bills on the table in a row, and counted them drunkenly with his forefinger. Evan saw the girl's eyes glitter at the sight of so much money; and when she brought Hodge's whisky she spread out her flowered shawl on one arm, swept four of the bills to the floor, and perched on the table. At once Hodge began to make love to her. Then she dropped her shawl, swung backward in his arms, adroitly gathered up the bills with it, and slipped them inside her dress as she folded it about her shoulders. Then she picked up the two bills which were left and tucked them in his pocket, saying: "Put away your money. You'll lose it."
Hodge did not seem to have seen what she had done. Evan asked for another drink. The girl served him indifferently, closed the door as if to discourage other customers, and went back to Hodge's knee. Evan could not look away from the drugged motions of the other soldier's head as he tried to kiss her—as mechanically, seductively, she avoided his mouth. An ignorant boy, he could not say to himself, This is not love. So he shut his eyes, confused at once by disgust and desire.
Suddenly the girl slapped Hodge and tried to get away. But he caught one of her ankles in his large right hand and continued to fondle her clumsily with the other. She gnashed her teeth, fluttered like a heavy bird in a trap, and cried out. Her father sat up jerkily, trotted behind the bar, came back waving a broomstick, and stumbled around the table—still half asleep and trying to wake up. The girl kept muttering to him, between hisses of anger, to let them alone. With fatuous patience, Hodge pushed her red skirt above her knee. She struck him again.
Evan did not dare to interfere; to all intents and purposes Hodge knew that he was a traitor. Furthermore, he saw that in the tussle a corner of one of the stolen dollar bills had appeared between the girl's breasts. He wanted to go, but if he did, it would be his turn to be chased by the old man with his broomstick, because he had not paid for his drinks.
Now the other soldier was furious; he shook the girl, and cursed at the top of his voice: "Damn dirty dogs! We'll fix you! Half nigger! Look out, I'll break every bone in your body."
He was weak because he was drunk; the girl was strong with anger, so the struggle was equal. She kicked him, and stood up on one leg; he still held the other in his fist like a trap. She screamed in Spanish: "You wait! you wait! Before this war is over. . . "
Hodge wrenched her ankle, and she sank to the floor.
Evan understood some of her words, and was glad that the other did not. She was chanting, chattering about the war, about relatives and friends in the Spanish army, about hideous revenges. "Stick you like pigs. Pigs, all you foreigners!" she cried.
Terrified by what she was saying, her old father dropped his broomstick, waved his arms, and tried to make her keep still.
Then the door opened, and a lieutenant and a sergeant came in. There was a sudden silence. Hodge relaxed his great fist. The girl stumbled away behind. the bar. The small, red-faced lieutenant glanced at Evan, glared at Hodge, and said to the sergeant, “Smith, take this drunken bastard away and lock him up."
Smith saluted, with a look of disappointment at having work to do. Hodge was sober now. "Sir, that bitch stole some of my money."
"Shut up!" snapped the officer. "Hell! Get out of here!" They went. The officer settled into a chair, sighed, grinned, and asked for whisky.
Tossing back her hair and looking ashamed, the girl served him. He took her hand. She smiled, half closing her eyes, biting her lower lip—scarcely a smile. It was beginning all over again.
The officer said in bad Spanish, "Now, you little devil, give me that money." He lifted his index finger and brought it down firmly on the paper money between her breasts. The girl began to cry, and behind the bar the old man shook his head idiotically, and called on the Virgin Mother under his breath.
The officer pulled out the dollar bills one after another. Then he whispered something to the girl, putting the money in her small, red hand. She smiled, and sat on his knee.
Evan sulked on the bench at the other side of the room. He paid the old man what he owed, saw the tumbler of rum which he had not finished in front of him, and drank it at one gulp. Then he thought he was going to be sick.
The old man fell asleep again. The girl nestled in the officer's armpit. The officer kept looking at Evan as if to tell him to go.
Evan's arms lay very heavily on the dirty table; inside his stiff boots his heels were asleep, and tingled. He foresaw, with the extravagance of an innocent mind, the rest of the night on the narrow bed without sheets in the back room. Disgusted at the way another man succeeded in doing what he had wanted to do, he realized that his disgust was jealousy and his jealousy was mixed with shame. Shame of Americans—he was an American; this was war—he was a soldier; love—an hour ago he had been making love to the same girl. "Stuck like pigs, all you foreigners," she had said.
Time to get back to the barracks. . . .He loathed everything he could think of. To-morrow he was going up among the hills—the sweat, the flies, the pus running out of sores—to fight for what he loathed. "A boy can't do a finer thing than serve his country." To-morrow—he would not; better jump in the sea. To-morrow—he would if he could; he could not. So he stumbled out of the place and down the street.
A week later, about the time that his company went into action, Evan lay on the deck of a British freighter off the coast of Florida. He was still seasick. There had been a violent storm, and on the slopes of the waves nodded great masses of rust-colored seaweed in the shape of chrysanthemums. The ropes cried and were drawn in or loosened by barefoot men, working all around him. The full canvas, stiffly inflated, stood out over his head in a relief as hard as marble. The deserter lay on a pile of wet blankets, still dazed at what he had done.
A sailor named Marbury came with something to eat. It was he who had brought Evan away from. Cuba, away from the war, away, indeed, from a whole life well begun, or badly begun. . . . Marbury called him John. He had said, back there in Cuba that night, whenever it was: "I don't want to know your name. I'll call you John—John . . . oh, let's say . . . Craig. You'll need a new name if you come with me." Evan had stumbled out of the saloon on the waterfront. He had not known what to do with himself. He had stopped and stared into the dark space where the sea was making a loud noise. He had thought of running, jumping, and getting out of sight under the waves; that had been a gauge of his misery, not of his intentions he had not had any intentions. He had stumbled down the road, and looked into another saloon, and seen another soldier; whereupon he had thought only of finding a place where there were no soldiers.
Then he had met a man who had touched his elbow and said: "See here, mate, what's happened? You come along with me."
Evan thought now that there must have been a dangerous look on his face, and when they had met under one of the lanterns the Americans had put up along the sea, the sailor must have seen it. He himself had seen a short young man wearing a jacket and no shirt, a sharp, ragged fellow; even his upstanding hair and his red face had looked ragged.
Very humbly, as if he had been arrested, Evan had followed the sailor. "Find a pub," he had muttered. "You need a stiff drink."
Evan could not remember drinking it. He had wondered why he had followed this man, and wished he would go away and let him alone so he could jump into the sea or whatever it was he had thought he had to do. He must have said something there in the saloon. about jumping into the sea, since the Englishman had asked, "What ails you, damn it?"
Probably Evan had answered that he hated the war, that he was sick of the heat, and the Americans were going to lose the war, anyway—answered not very intellibly; for Marbury admitted now that he had not believed him. A man would be crazy to desert just because he wanted to; there must have been some trouble that he would not talk about.
Marbury had interrupted him. "Damn! You'd better come with me. Come to sea. Make an English sailor of you." He had continued to drink, wiping his mouth (which looked younger than the rest of his face) on the back of his hand, and watching Evan.
Evan had noticed that the back of his hand was marked with a blue heart in a circle, and that he wore what seemed to be a pair of old bedroom slippers.
Then the sailor had murmured, looking round to be sure that he was not being heard, "You see, a man came on shore with me. Name's Pigeon. He got in a fight. Some bones broken. Lying upstairs in one of these houses. Some woman's taking care of him. He can't go back to the ship; she's the Amber, freight, for London. Can't even sit up. And we sail tonight. Hard luck. He's to blame. Drunk, he was. A man hadn't ought to fight with foreigners. That Eye-talian put his knee on his chest and hammered him. . . ."
Evan had laughed a little. A Cuban, scarcely human, kneeling on a man named Pigeon—a Cuban rather like an angel, Jacob's angel in the Bible. . . . Marbury had given a long, foolish account of the affair at least twice. Evan had listened with great interest, without realizing as yet that he was going to desert.
Then Marbury had said: "Damn it! Your soldiers. there in the port will let you go with me in the boat because two of us came in. Not in that uniform. So I'll go back and see Pigeon and I'll steal his clothes. We'll put a stone in your uniform and pitch the blasted thing in the sea. Come along now."
Marbury had stood up; Evan had stood up; and to his amazement he had followed meekly. He had not been frightened; he had not been arrested.
To Evan, on board the Amber, all this seemed to have taken place a long time ago. He staggered to his feet and began to be initiated into the mysteries of life on a ship. There were a number of them; that of Marbury's affection in particular, because of which he learned, he had been brought away from Cuba. "You're a crazy lubber," Marbury said, "but I like you. If I hadn't liked you, you could have jumped in the sea and be damned. I wouldn't have took the trouble with you I took."
In the beginning this affection seemed merely comic, like that of a dog which tries one's patience by leaping up, scratching with its paws, and breathing close to one's face. Later Evan had to take it seriously, and it warned him of the extreme limits of the outcast individualism in which he had taken the first step. He was a deserter, and Marbury was the only friend he had.
There was also a young sullen boy, miserably jealous of the attention the American was receiving. He said to Marbury: "You're always talking with that Yankee. You're not my mate any more."
This reminded Evan of his uncle Leander's story of Hilary, who of course was his uncle, too, though even younger than he, being dead. . . .
And because he remembered how Hilary had disappeared in the Civil War, he wrote a letter to his mother, to be mailed as soon as the ship touched land:
DEAR MOTHER,
I have run away from the army. I can't explain it. I will be in a foreign country by the time you get this. I don't know when I can come back to America, if I ever can. I suppose you'll be ashamed of me. Try to think that I am still the same.
Your loving son.
And as the four-master staggered with infinite patience toward Europe, a sharp sadness took possession of him. Wisconsin with its crops of every color, its hickory-nut trees, its white sunrises and red sunsets—he would never see them again; no one would love him so faithfully, so intimately, as even his hard father had done. But it was something more than homesickness which hurt him; it was the keenest of regrets, that of a young man who has made his choice, for the infinite possibilities he has given up, when at last it is too late. to change his mind.
So after dark, when he could steal away from Marbury and the rest, he crept into a corner of the boat, and clenched his teeth, and hid his face in a piece of wet canvas. They ran into a heavy mist one night; at regular intervals a bell was rung, and it had the tone of a dinner bell at home, deepened and made sadder by the sea. Over the taffrail, in the light of a number of lanterns which were hung up in case they should draw near another boat, each wave lifted its broad shoulders and its head covered with foam—lifted its head, and fell; but there was always another to take its place. And between one wave and another he put away the troubles of his youth: his family's broken hearts, and the shameful riddle of being a deserter, and indeed, his youth, which was a trouble in itself. They had served their purpose; he wondered what it was; soon he would not have time to wonder. He could not regret what he had done, any more than a dead man can regret having died. He said to himself, "It can't be helped; I'll have to make the best of it, and the best will be bad enough"; and by thinking that he had made peace with the past—in a measure, and in the manner of young, ignorant, unlucky men—he made his peace with the future.
The Amber went up the Thames to the city of London, and docked in the Pool. The sailors emptied the hold; the captain secured a cargo for Rio de Janeiro, and they put it on board.
Evan shared a bed with Marbury in a lodging house in Wapping. He had signed for the next voyage, not knowing what else to do. The night before they were to sail, Marbury went to bed at seven o'clock. Evan wanted to be alone, so he pretended to have lost his pipe, and said he was going out to buy another.
He thought he might never be there again, so he determined to set out on foot to see the whole of London. It was cold, and he walked briskly, as if he had a long way before him and a definite destination. The angry, dim autumn in the largest city in the world; a beast of a city, crouching in the smoke, never moving but seeming to move, because of the agitated swarms of its parasites. The vomit of chimneys and the back-wash of the sea. . . . Striped above the shop windows, with holes burned in it here and there by the short street lamps, the fog was like a dirty woolen blanket, but it gave no warmth at all. Evan shivered and walked faster, thinking of the Cuban summer, that heat full of sleeping dogs, bottle-flies, and flowering bushes. Scarcely remembering the weeks at sea, he felt as if he had fallen out of Cuba through a trapdoor into a cellar containing millions of people.
He went into a pub to get warm, wondered what his father would say if he came through the swinging door and found him there drinking whisky, and was amused as if it were an idle fancy, as if in reality he had no father. When he went out again, his sense of direction told him that he was going away from the lodging house in Wapping; but he thought of Marbury as if he were a man he had known years ago, as if, that night, he had not a friend in the world.
He was in no hurry to return to the lodging house; indeed, he was curiously unwilling to. A few hours more, and the long voyage would begin. The sailors. were a family, a large male family; in a few weeks on the intimate sea they would know him well; he was a deserter and should have no intimates. His place was there on the blackish pavement which extended for miles in every direction, or no direction at all; in the yellow fog where everyone, not only himself, had a secret, if only that of his identity; in the horde of men and women not keeping step, streaming through the darkness, stumbling, hurrying, limping. . . . A sore, sorry mob which no one would take the trouble to count—wearing secondhand clothes, bitten by fleas—in which he was safe. The light of the shops lit up only their ragged bodies, so that they seemed to have no feet; the light of the lamps poured upon their hats and folded shawls, so that they seemed to have no faces. There, when he met a slight, middle-aged man. who lifted his elbows like his father, he could cross the road and never see him again; and when, under a street light, a man stared at him sympathetically as Marbury had done on the Cuban waterfront, he could turn quickly down a side street. On the Amber bound for Rio he would not be able to escape from anything or anybody.
The great, squat city grew still. Only half-mad creatures without occupation, and a few others mysteriously, perhaps criminally busy, were left on the pavement. He crossed the river and came to the City. He knew that the powerful, the trustworthy, those who had parents, wives, children, and nothing to be ashamed of, lived and worked there. He would have had no business among them, but not one of them was to be seen. Footsteps and a shadow—a watchman; another—a policeman. Here and there a bit of paper revolved like a little skirt worn by an invisible body, and pairs of cats in areaways made music.
He came to the river again. There on the Embankment lay many men, wrapped in rags, in newspapers, in one another's arms; and a few women lean and shameless as men. Evan was comforted by the sight of that painful bed full of derelicts, equality and sleep their only comforts. They were his countrymen; his fatherland, like theirs, was disgrace, and this was its very capital. He could not cross the boundaries of that country however far he traveled so why take passage on a ship for Rio? The Thames passed indifferently, and carried off a rowboat which winked its eye. He sat down beneath a coping and drew his knees up under his jacket. Near by, an enormous man rolled over and recited something in his sleep; to Evan's amazement, it was Spanish—a love song or a prayer, he could not determine which; for sounder sleep quickly laid its hand over the great mouth, which was apparently toothless.
Evan wondered if Marbury were asleep and what he thought of his absence. It was time to start back toward Wapping. Then he realized that he was not going back, not clambering aboard early next morning, not sailing to Rio. He smiled; yes, deserting again.
If he had not run away from an army and his family and a whole country, he might have been troubled by his bad faith toward Marbury, perhaps even toward the captain of the Amber. Now it was too late for scruples. He might as well sleep there, with the rest of his kind.
But the night grew colder and the pavement pressed through his flesh to the bone. He was not tired enough to sleep in spite of everything; besides, he was younger than anyone else there. So he rose and spent the rest of the night on foot.
He watched the city get up, trade by trade; the sun push through the smoke, a crooked, bloody thing; and parties of soiled pigeons revolve over the chimneys like flower pots, from which the smoke budded, and opened, and dropped large petals of soot. He ate breakfast in a coffee stand, and about nine o'clock wandered down an alley toward the Pool. The Amber had left the wharf; it was nowhere to be seen; and Evan was well pleased.
He found the charwoman mopping up the hall of the lodging house. "Your mate was wild," she said, in her strong, snarling voice. "Said you'd had your neck broke. Said if you'd given them the slip, you was out of your head." He slept all the rest of the day, glad to shut his eyes to his premonitions of what was going to happen to him that winter.
It was harder even than he had foreseen. He found work on the docks by the day or week, under abusive foremen, among lazy and suspicious men. There were days when he had little or nothing to eat. If he had foreseen this in Cuba, he would not have deserted; if he had not foreseen it in mid-Atlantic, he would have fallen ill or thrown himself in the Thames.
He grew gaunt, and smiled continually at all the reasons he saw never to smile again. He bought a Bible, read it from beginning to end, drew lines through many cruel chapters which he wanted to forget, and all but memorized the life of Jacob, the life of David, the death of Christ. But there was not a story of a deserter in the Bible.
One day in January he was hurrying through Soho in a fog inlaid with particles of snow. Just as he passed an antique shop a girl darted out of the door with a broom in her hand. Evan started back to avoid a collision, and slipped in the slush; his whole weight struck the windowpane, which cracked in a great star. The girl and he faced each other; he took off his hat. In his embarrassment he stared through the glass he had broken: there was a yellow satin chair, a fat gilt cupid with no nose, a tray of old rings. . . .
Then the girl said hastily, but without excitement, speaking with a pinched, rough accent: "You run away. Fast. I'll tell my father I broke the window." She waved her broom as if she intended to break it again.
Evan hoped she would laugh at what had happened; she did not. This was a girl who was too proud to laugh when embarrassed. She was exceedingly brown of skin; extraordinary eyes, the lids equally heavy above and below; the whole face pointed downward to the willful mouth and the chin. Evan asked himself what her nationality was.
"But run away," she repeated, impatiently.
Evan remembered that he could come back again; so he went. He did not see the stamping crowds that night, nor the gas flares, nor the snow tossed here and there like dirty confetti. These things had lost their charm; even the convulsive movement in his empty stomach had lost its terrible novelty, and he did not mind having had no supper.
He was out of work on the three succeeding days, and suffered from hunger. He slept in a room below the level of the street, and had to cover his face with the bedclothes because of the rats which came hunting for crumbs and failed to find any—he was as hungry as they. He measured his misery by the dreams which ravished him in the damp, sagging bed—dreams of baking day in Wisconsin, of oranges and apples, of trumpets which sounded like small, southern roosters and woke him up.
As soon as he had money he returned to Soho and went bravely into the shop of G. Orfeo, Antiquary. But the girl was not there. An older woman came forward very quietly: the same heavily framed brown eyes, the same reddish-brown locks of hair; it must be her sister, Evan thought. But her eyes were gentle, too gentle, and her mouth drooped as if she had a habit of sacrifice. "What do you wish to see, sir?"
Evan swept the shop with his eyes, to discover what was there in the greatest number, so it would take him a long time to choose. "A ring, if you please," he said.
The woman watched his tar-stained fingers on the signets, intaglios, and semiprecious stones, with anxiety, even with suspicion. In great embarrassment Evan asked their prices, having only one pound in the world. There was one which he could have paid for, a silver band engraved with banal flowers. But just as he laid the pound note on the glass counter the other sister came down the staircase at the back of the shop.
"Mais, Gabrielle," she cried, "it is the one who broke the window! Good afternoon." She put out her pointed hand over the glass, over his money, the garnets, and the silver-gilt, and examined him steadily with her large eyes which seemed to be veiled, her eyes in mourning.
"But what, this is your money?" she asked, lightly. "I think you are poor. I think it is all you have got. And the ring is nothing, very bad." She slipped it back into the showcase and handed him the pound note. Apparently the sister did not understand why; Evan was not sure that he did. "Now our father is gone to Paris, so you will take some tea with us, and tell us what you are, for example."
Her name was Susanne Orfeo. Their father was Italian, their dead mother French; they had been born in Paris, where the father kept another shop on a quay of the Seine; they had lived in London for eight years.
For no particular reason Evan told them that his name was John Craig. The fact that he was an American pleased and excited them, even the timid Gabrielle, who sighed continually, as if all the good things of this world were denied her in advance; for as far as they knew, America was a land of nothing but preposterous wealth and liberty and pleasure. Susanne said she could not understand why he had ever left it. Evan explained that he had run away from home to see the world, and naturally said nothing about the war.
He returned again and again to the shop, at first rather surreptitiously because the father, having committed the shop and Susanne for several weeks to Gabrielle's care, had come back. Gabrielle was alarmed and manageable, like a mother who loves her children too much to say no to them. A devout Catholic, she insisted only that nothing should take place which would have to be confessed, and did not mind tricking her father because he never communicated.
Evan saw by her questions as to his present earnings, his prospects, and the attitude and position of his family in America, that she was hoping to arrange a marriage for Susanne. His answers were ridiculous, as he well knew; but she smiled approvingly, no matter what he said, her judgment distorted in his favor, as if, with pent-up yearning, she herself were to be the bride. Ostensibly Susanne did not approve of this indirect but repeated proposal of marriage, made in her name. Her indolent eyes would lose themselves in the grate fire, or be fascinated by a bit of brocade or the accidental spark of a well-cut stone, as if these things represented by a sort of code the face of another lover. Or she would seem to be tired of his presence, hiding her discontented face in a black-and-white feather boa which she wore. Or she would make fun of him with cruel good nature until her sister felt obliged to come to his defense. Gabrielle lent herself to this sincere and insincere play with tremulous intensity.
If the two sisters had seemed to have determined together that Evan should marry the younger, he would have been alarmed. It was a good thing, he thought, that he did not want to marry, for no girl in her right mind would accept a deserter, anyway. But the girl's seeming lack of interest promised him independence, gave him courage, and doubled his desire. He had lost his innocence since he had come to England, but was only sufficiently acquainted with love to feel its brute force; he did not know it well enough to recognize the profound, perhaps not wholly instinctive cunning of the sisters.
Then their father fell ill, and Susanne said: "If you please, come and work for us. We have told our father that we are afraid to keep here alone all this value," making a gesture of reference to the jewels, the carvings, the velvet, which included her lovely body in a circle of the damp, snowy light which came in from the street.
They took him upstairs to their father's bedroom. Gabrielle said, "Voilà, mon petit, the American we have engaged to help in the shop. His name is John Craig."
Evan saw a man in a skullcap who ruffled the linen under his bearded chin with his weak hands, a withered man with a large, sharp nose. "Comme tu veux. Good morning, sir. I do not keep the shop much longer. You see, I become old. We shall retire to Genoa. But for the time it is very well that you should work here."
His expert eyes estimated the young man's value, swung sideways in their sockets to glance at Gabrielle suspiciously, and rested upon his marriageable daughter's face with almost evil irony.
For a moment Evan, a deserter still, was afraid that he would pity him and smile—in other words, warn him that love was a trap.
But the old man was too sick to pity anybody or to attach any importance to the discoveries made by his aged penetration. He closed his eyes very slowly. "I do not care," he murmured, "what you do."
Susanne blushed, and they left the room.
Gabrielle nursed her father as she would have to do until the end of his life. Susanne kept the shop. There was nothing for Evan to do. The sudden well-being changed him overnight; a clean body and clean clothes, warmth, good food, friendliness. . . . Pride. in having endured hardships all alone, and as it were by choice, made of the memory of his misery the rarest sort of pleasure. Then he told himself that he had been happier since he had come to London than hunger, cold, and fatigue had permitted him to realize; he was certainly happier than he had ever been in Wisconsin. He wanted never to have a home again, or to be surrounded by a family. People of his own kind. provoked him to be unlike them—that is, unlike himself; but among those whom he might never understand, he understood himself and was his own best friend. He liked not having to give an account of himself to anyone; it was good luck to be so disgraced that little or nothing could be expected of him, that he need not expect much of himself. His only ambition was to escape the ambitions which others might have for him and oblige him to fulfill; and when he thought of his brothers at all, he pitied them. No one cared what he did nor what happened to him; he did not care himself, he believed, if only it were not what had always happened. He told himself that this must be the way his old uncle Leander had wanted him to live, when he had talked to him as a boy so incomprehensibly. Back there in Cuba, in despair and foolishness, by accident, he had chosen the life which suited him; he enjoyed being a deserter.
But he had fallen in love. Day after day the girl's beauty was half denied, half given to him. His enjoyment of what he had mingled with longing for what he could not have, and produced in his heart a childish irresponsibility and an intoxicating pain. At the end of two weeks of it, involuntarily—uttering the words at random in place of other words of love-making which her proud bearing forbade him to use—he asked Susanne to marry him.
But a mere proposal meant no more to her than love-making without a proposal means to many girls. She seemed to be waiting for a contract to be drawn up and signed by her lover, his parents, and her own, before giving her consent. In any case, she wanted plans to be made, a home chosen, and sums of money with which to begin life secured and counted. So she merely smiled, shook her head, and ran away.
Evan heaved a sigh of relief. What a confession he would have had to make if she had stayed to listen to it! And she less than any girl would want Evan Tower, an outlaw, for a husband. But she did not know that Evan Tower existed, and it had not occurred to him as yet that John Craig—a new man without a disgraceful past, without, indeed, any past—could exist. So he did not dare to say anything more about his confused desires. If he did, he might ask her again to be his wife, as it were against his will; she might refuse him, she might accept him—he would not know what to do in either case. His yearning gave him no rest; and it was not licensed, could never be licensed, by anything, perhaps not even by love on her part. Passion is lonely at best (hopeless or not, requited or not); he was lonelier in the pleasant shop than he had ever been sleeping in the cellar bedroom, working on the docks. He thought of going back to them.
Finally Susanne saw how humble and stupid passion may make a young man: he had not even realized that she loved him. . . . So she began to make plans herself, and the day came when she was able to make this announcement: "Father has sold the shop. He will give us a thousand pounds now, and more when he sells the Paris business."
Did that mean that she would marry him without asking any questions? He hoped at least to see a somber warmth like his own kindle in her heavy eyes, but was baffled by her self-possession, mystified by her air of waiting; and she said nothing more. As time went by, he learned something of the power of the Church, the sources of the strength of women, and the character of the girl who, it seemed, was willing to marry him, but unwilling to give him any proof of love.
One evening in June they came out of Hyde Park, where the mist had rolled off the lagoons like ribbons. unwinding from great spools, and lamps had already been lighted in the leaves not yet soiled by the summer. Evan clung to Susanne's elbow, trying to substitute the delicate muscles curving along the upper arm and the forearm to the little pointed bone, for the untouched beauties which burdened his imagination like a mania. They came to the dingy, stately, crowded street.
Then Susanne swung her hand outward in a circle (a familiar gesture) and said, "There is no future here. I am not like the others, most other girls. I have some ambitions."
Evan stared wistfully at the knots of self-possessed, unscrupulous people so unlike Americans; the mysterious closed carriages; a square opening out at the end of the long stem of a street like a large, old, gray rose and pouring smoky perfume in their faces. He compared London with the hard, poor farms which were all that he had seen of the New World. Europe had given him maturity in exchange for his painful. youth; it might give him Susanne as well; and he wanted to stay there and become a part of its old age.
"You know," the girl continued, "I made a vow long ago—never to marry a European. That is, not unless he would promise to take me to your country. We will go there. They will go to Genoa to grow old; we will be in your home. And we will get rich on the other side."
Evan stumbled at the end of every one of the short sentences. So that was what she had been waiting for. . . . It was America she wanted, America she loved in him. The deserter had become an ambassador, as deserters often do. Ambassador or not, he was still an outlaw he could not go back. He would have to tell her. She would despise him—despise, blame, and scold him. He might as well desert again, go back to the docks and say nothing.
No. . . . A soldier's honor and promises to a friend had rested lightly on his impatience; love was heavy. So they returned through the hasty dusk, in silence, to the shop. There Susanne struck a match under the paper and wood he had laid in the grate for the next morning, and pushed a sofa in front of it, and sank into the faded cushions. She was aware of his distress; she was waiting for an explanation. He himself waited for the purring and snapping of the fire to cease, unable to lift his voice above them.
At last he said, "You must know, Susanne, that I can't go back to America."
"Why can't you?"
“I deserted from the army. My real name is Evan Tower."
"That makes no difference-"
"If they caught me I'd be put in jail."
To his amazement, she did not reproach him; she did not seem to hold him responsible; she blamed the government of his country—which meant that she had already accepted him, accepted him in secret. Evan understood no more than this, and stared at her in stupid, passionate delight.
She had sprung out of the cushions and was pacing up and down the room. "No! No! They shall not! Fools! It is nonsense! We will show them!" She glared into the corners of the room as if they were occupied by uniformed enemies. "No! I hate your government!" Even in her anger she was thinking of what could be done, practically. "There must be an amnesty. You will have a beard. In the West . . . Mexico . . ."
Clearly she was saying: He is mine, he is mine; America is mine. His mind on fire because of her angry beauty, Evan rejoiced without thinking of the consequences.
Then she stood quietly in the center of the room and wrung her hands. "We will go back to America. We will hide. We, we alone, will not get caught. The army is nothing. No one will know. We dare to do it. You love me; you do not dare be afraid. Tell me. Tell me if you are afraid. Tell me, if you . . ." She began to weep angrily, and clutched at his hands and shoulders.
Evan wondered why Gabrielle did not hear her weeping and come down; he did not know how to defend himself. So at last he heard his own voice saying that he would go, promising not to be afraid, promising to grow rich and respected in his own country—a land as unfriendly and as far away as if it had not yet been discovered.
Susanne lifted her head, drew back against the arm of the sofa, and smiled a smile not of faith, but vigilance; not of contentment, but violent firmness and courage; not of an end, but a new, unwelcome beginning.
Her lover's heart beat heavily, heavy as never before with fear, simply because he had promised not to be afraid. He half regretted that he had comforted her, because he had reëstablished the wall of her ambition and willful virtue between them. But love went on speaking for him, saying what he did not believe: that America would be kind, that every law could be set at naught, that she should rule over the circumstances of their lives and over his heart, and that he would give her everything she wanted.
Then, by way of an appeal to her imagination and still more to his own, he took out of a showcase necklaces of garnets and slippery chains, thrust a comb like a studded shell into her hair, and folded about her an embroidered cope smelling of incense. The fire turned these hard ornaments into drops of water and disembodied sparks. But Susanne shook her head. These were old things; she wanted new. They were already hers; she wanted that which was his.
As he removed them, his cold fingers accidentally touched her cold throat and mechanically caressed her shoulders. So he gave her all he actually had to give—his kisses brutally, softly, without asking leave, but not without seeing her face, upon which a girl's emotions could be seen in conflict with a woman's—terror with relief, distaste with satisfaction, the humility of the abdication of a girl's power with a woman's powerful vanity. But he covered her unwilling movements with his arms; they climbed the stairs together, and did not separate in the flickering hall.
When at last Evan came down into the shop alone, he found Gabrielle there. She was weeping. "Now you have committed the sin," she whispered. "Now you will leave me alone and go to America. I will never see you" She fled to her room.
Evan settled his body, suddenly heavy, into the sofa cushions. The fire throbbed in an enviable exhaustion. He was not even tired enough to sleep, but felt instead that false weariness by virtue of which, in the midst of passion, one is able to consider the next step. The next step according to Gabrielle: "Now you will marry and go to America ." He had promised; and as a lover, like a fool, he had sealed his promise. Now that it was too late, he could think—of the short past and the long future ahead. It was as if he had been talking to himself for a long time, and had not been able to hear because of his pounding lover's heart; now its music had ceased for a few hours. . . .
He would marry Susanne, that was certain. He did not want to marry, he could not help it. Then they would go back to America, venture across an inconspicuous border, and establish themselves in some half-deserted place. Suddenly, surprisingly, his love of his country caused him pain (he had not known that he loved it). But he would have to be an Englishman over there; he could be an American only in Europe. And he would have to work, and seem to think what others thought, and do what others did, and grow prosperous and worthy of respect—join the regiment and march with the rest. . . .
He thought of the leave-taking in Wisconsin before he had gone off to join that other, actual regiment; for now he was taking leave of himself—he was going to be married and return to America as John Craig, and John Craig was saying good-by to Evan Tower. "Don't make promises," his uncle Leander had said in Wisconsin, "that'll be your trouble. Don't get started doing what you don't like to do, because you're not the kind of man who keeps at it. You needn't, as long as you're alone in the world. You'd better keep alone. . . ." Evan wondered if he were still in California. with Timothy Davis. What had he thought of his having run away from the war? What would he think of his marriage and the new promises? He had such strange ideas. . . . He would probably be frightened about what would happen—after they were married.
Susanne and John Craig, man and wife. To all intents and purposes their marriage was over before it had begun; love had run its course. The rest of their lives would be a monument to it—a monument having on the outside an appearance of solidity, but hollow within, where, like the few breaths of air which are imprisoned inside a bronze, the bitter-sweet of youth, passion, and disgrace would be secreted. . . .
Outside in the fog London drew up its enormous knees and shifted its enormous shoulders.
Youth and passion—he saw more clearly than before what they were; he could see through them to the future, which would not be young and in which there would not be much passion; and he understood Susanne as if they had already been married for years. She would never cease to reproach him for having endangered her immortal soul by his love before marriage, nor forget why she had married him, nor overlook any of his failures. Others would excuse him for being a deserter—by never discovering the fact, or by forgetting it. She would go through the motions of forgiveness, and as long as he loved her keep him. from forgiving himself. Perhaps she would not blame him, but instead think of him as a fool, not worldly-wise enough to deserve her respect. A man's madness, nipped in the bud; love itself was a man's madness. . . .
The small, naked flames in the hearth began to clothe themselves in ashes. He sought in his memory for a clear picture of her face, and found it—at once the face of a flower and a shopkeeper. How it had had its way with him—and it was not done with him yet. At that moment there was more premonition than passion in his heart; there would not always be. Passion would be born again and again, but it would be weakened like this by each rebirth; and the day would surely come when he would wonder why he had given himself up. He was glad that it had begun only in fact, for it had been as if, bending over a rose, he had been prevented from taking a deep breath. Could one ever take a full breath, and have enough of love?
He was infinitely tired. Sitting in the antique shop where love had begun, he seemed to look back even upon its future, knowing what he would have to give in return for what Susanne had given or would give, the reparation that would be required of him for what he would take or had taken, as if it were by force: responsibility, secrecy, half-hearted hard work, fatigue.
Hitherto apparently lazy, he had "worked harder to keep from working than anyone else ever worked," as his mother would say. Apparently a coward, he had run away from several kinds of tyranny; but now, it seemed, he had chosen to play the tyrant to himself. He went on enumerating the differences between the past and the future. He had evaded common responsibilities little good it had done him; for now he would have to keep to the letter all these fantastic rules which life (or perhaps he himself) was making up as he went along. For example, he would have to learn never to hide his face, so that no one should discover that he had anything to hide. To obtain forgiveness for his youth, of which, like a fool, he had hoped to make others envious as he grew older. To give no one cause to be ashamed of him again, but to be ashamed of himself, in order to be able to be discreet mechanically. To make more friends than he wanted, and not to like any of the sort of people who resembled him, lest he should have to live down their disgraces as well as his own. To fulfill every expectation, to promise too much and keep his word. To condemn the man he would have liked to be to increasing obscurity, and make a self he did not like more and more prominent. To strip his genuine character little by little of its reality, and turn a disguise into an actual man. . . .
This meant the total disappearance of Evan Tower, that happy, unhappy boy who had done as he liked, and the rise of John Craig, an Englishman married to a French wife, neither happy nor unhappy, but growing rich in America. So with the passage of time, the soul of a man loses itself in his life.
His life in disguise; and when he died, only the disguise would lie quiet on the deathbed and be buried; he himself would have been dead a long time. No—not dead, merely condemned to death.
For he would always be a deserter. A boy hiding inside a man, an outlaw hiding inside a man who at last, at least, would abide by the law. If he liked, a homeless, lonely man in a foreign land might wear his disgrace as if it were nothing more than a shirt or a coat out of fashion. A lonely man surrounded by friends and family, a naturally homeless man at home, an expatriate resident in his own country, would have to wear it next the skin, like a tattooed rose, or star, or Marbury's blue heart in a circle. That was all. . . .
The fire sank. His excitement kept him warm, but his hopelessness was putting him to sleep.
More than ever a deserter, then. . . .The exile was returning home, which was inexcusable; the outlaw was going to avoid punishment—that is, break the law again. He was skeptical (his uncle had taught him that); but his own impulses were speaking to him as an angel speaks to a madman, a mother to a child; and when that angel spoke (with its limited vocabulary of passion, fatigue, homesickness, fear), he had no ears for his skepticism or for other men.
So he regarded himself with admiration and disdain, comparing the past with the present—for he seemed to have been young a moment ago—and comparing himself with other people and other things. The wooden saints in the shop, covered with flakes of gilt, sick with gold sores; the gaping showcases (for Gabrielle had not forgotten to lock up the jewels); the crystal ball in which he had never seen anything but a flaw shaped like Susanne's mouth; that dark-red, disastrous mouth itself—they had lost most of their charm. They were old things; he wanted new. Shining, unsatisfying, they belonged to his youth and were like it; and he was tired of being young. His uncle's warnings also belonged to it; all he would have to do with them from now on would be to prove that they had been mistaken; and it occurred to him that his uncle had come to be an old man without ever having grown up. He felt a great hunger for the evasions, the hypocrisies, the calculated movements, the disappointments, of middle age.
And there was the London dawn, strong and soiled as a man's middle age, crawling over the window sills, pushing between the plush curtains. He would not have time to go to bed. Before he crept upstairs he took off his shoes, unwilling that anyone should know that he had sat up all night, determined that no one should ever discover the madness of his thought.
The rest of his life was very much as he had expected it to be. He and Susanne were married at the end of the summer. Gabrielle took the invalid father to a small villa outside Genoa. The young couple went to Mexico City, and during the winter crossed into the United States without difficulty, and bought a ranch near Taos, New Mexico.
He wrote to his mother and received a long letter in reply, full of embarrassment and eagerness to be proud of him in one way or another, proud of his courage at least. In it, with later family news, she told how Leander had died on his way west. She added, "He did not live to hear of your trouble in the army"; evidently she was glad. . . . Leander might not have minded that particular disgrace, but now, if this new adventure ended still more shamefully, as it might, the old bachelor would not be alive to be embittered by it; and Evan said to himself, It is just as well. But the new adventure was not to end badly.
Susanne gave birth to a son who was christened Leander Orfeo Craig. The desert and the mountains were little more than a place of exile for her—exile less from Europe, which she did not love, than from the brilliant life she had looked forward to; but she recognized the danger of residence in a more law-abiding part of the country. She grew strangely devout and wanted her son to become a priest; but Orfeo adored his father, who grimly and patiently counteracted her influence. In 1906 the antiquarian G. Orfeo died in Genoa, and Gabrielle came to live with her sister, bringing the rest of her father's fortune. Friends of a bishop and a sinister old ex-governor, the two women came to be powerful figures in the public life of the State, and more and more independently, at one end of the great adobe house, led the life of wealthy Mexican devotees.
John Craig lived in the other wing, near the goats and horses, among the cowboys, the firearms which were less and less useful as time passed, the carved saddles and faded saddle blankets, the star-shaped spurs. He saw his wife only a few minutes a day, but never loved another woman even for a night. His life was that of the chief of a band of hard men—his cowboys—all of whom, like himself, had secrets, vices, great strength, and skill, whether with animals or enemies; and among whom he enjoyed the lonesome prestige of an officer or a criminal—like soldiers or accomplices, they did not believe him but believed in him. Many of his neighbors as well were suspicious of his past, but it seemed as natural in the Far West for a man to be followed by an unpleasant story as by a shadow. He kept out of politics, and made those who did not wish him well fear him, stopping their mouths at first by well-chosen threats, and then good-naturedly letting them forget why they did not gossip about him any more. Gradually he became an influential citizen, with whom even his wife's powerful friends had to reckon. The years went by, as much alike as cattle marked with the same brand, his brand—a heart inside a circle. He did not make so much money as Susanne wished nor even as he had expected, but was able to put aside slowly a certain small fortune for Orfeo.
The boy looked somewhat like his mother, very little like an American. Thinking of him, his father thought of his own boyhood: thus Orfeo seemed not merely precious as a son, but of unique importance, as to a weary regent, the sole heir to great wealth or a throne. For he was the only living relative, John Craig thought, of the boy who had died (at least seemed to die) with—in himself; and thus entitled to everything in manhood which he imagined that boy might have enjoyed. So John Craig watched Orfeo with a certain fear—fear of his evident mortality, of his lack of discontent which was like indifference; a royally lovely child because of whose gentleness an illusory kingdom (of irresponsibility, candor, and truancy) might get out of control or, by someone, be taken away.
The child carried messages back and forth across the patio between his parents; and because he resem bled his mother as a girl, it seemed to his father that he also bridged another distance that between his own heartbreaking youth and the rather heartbroken satisfaction of the later years. His imagination followed the tiny boy's solitary, symbolical footsteps back and forth in his life and across it, and wished that the years would bring him back where he had begun. Smiling mechanically, he wished that, as soon as he had saved enough money to insure his son's independence, John Craig, the rancher, might die, and his soul pass into Orfeo's life, and Evan Tower, the deserter, be disguised by nothing more than that fearless childhood, and begin all over again.
And because he thought idly of beginning his life again, he thought how it actually had begun, and wanted to see Wisconsin, his parents, his brothers and sister, once more. They must have forgiven him by this time; one or another of them might understand him at last.
It would be a long journey—and then explanations, embarrassment, a certain amount of scandal, irreparable resentments that he had had the luck to have forgotten about. . . . A grown man had no business to seek to be understood. He was a fool, mysteriously a fool, he told himself—without caring in the least. He might as well set out; he always had, once he had thought of a place to go. In the court Orfeo was playing with a jet of water which balanced over a stone tub, balanced as it were in the very center of Taos Valley, that huge, hollow stone—balanced, lost its balance, straightened again, but could never be quite still, like a human life in the great hollow of a lifetime. His life had lost its balance again, that was all. So he went back to Hope's Corner. Wisconsin was less pretty than he had thought. His father, as he might have remembered, never forgave anything, and would not see him. His mother told him about all the relatives; he found little to tell her, for she was not even interested in his treason, his hardships, his marriage, his good and bad luck; it was as if she had brought him into the world to be a deserter—he had been one, and there was nothing more to be said. His presence seemed merely to remind Ralph of his resentment at having been deserted by both his brothers, left behind with their old father and the unprofitable farm and no opportunities. He did not have the courage to stop in Chicago to visit his luckier brother, the minister; and he told himself afterward that for lack of courage he had not stayed with his people long enough to accomplish what he had come for, whatever that was.
So a few years later he went home again, and found himself no less a stranger than before. He could not share his mother's almost formal enthusiasm for the early days. He did not understand his brother's sensual, virtuous life. His sister-in-law Marianne, wistfully opinionated and brilliant like a saint, intimidated him. Flora, his little sister, laughed, wept, and liked everyone absent-mindedly, tremulously afraid to do wrong, but less like a saint than a nun. John Craig felt as if he had wandered backward (or forward) into an epoch peopled by wise children, troubled or at peace—even their trouble was a kind of peace and he did not understand the games that, with touching solemnity, such children played. But what had he expected? What could his family have meant to him then? His uncle Leander, who more than anyone had encouraged him to be the stranger that he was, had been dead so many years, and was not even buried there. Was Evan Tower dead as well? Certainly he spoke of him to his mother as one speaks of a boy who has not lived to grow up; and if he was, his tomb was not in Wisconsin, except when and because he, John Craig, was there—in whose heart he was buried, dead or alive.
Leander and Evan, those two were his real family, and their souls had passed into his life—that is, John Craig's life. He had thought that he was tired of it; but he was a strong man, and had no other to live. So in Wisconsin he realized how precious it was—perhaps that was what he had come for. The spirits of his uncle and his boyhood having passed into it, he ought to be content with their dwelling place.
Having passed into his life; perhaps into Orfeo's after him. There was also Ralph's eldest boy, Alwyn, a colorless youngster with raised eyebrows who was going to resemble Leander when he grew up. He seemed, childishly, to be trying to think his way into everything that came to his attention—John Craig imagined a key trying to fit every lock—and thus to hurt himself and keep himself in a slight but almost continual bad temper. It appeared, furthermore, that he and his father did not understand each other. John Craig said to Alwyn, "You and my boy will be friends. You must come out and live with us for a while, before long. I'll raise up a colt or two for you to ride."
It was on the last day of that second visit that, intending to ask his aunt a question as an excuse, Alwyn slipped into his grandmother's sitting room in order to look at his uncle for the first time after his mother had told him who and what he was. They were looking out of the window, his grandmother with her large arms folded, his uncle, the stranger, resting one hand on his aunt Flora's shoulder. His grandfather had refused to come to the house while his son was there. Every night his grandmother reproached him, but he did not even trouble to answer; every afternoon they hoped he would change his mind. Alwyn tiptoed to the window, and no one spoke to him.
They could see his grandfather coming down the lane, coming toward the house at his usual stubborn. pace. His head was thrown back; over his shoulder he carried a long thistle-hoe. He was coming toward the house; he had changed his mind at last.
But just as he put out his hand to open the garden gate, he turned around and slowly, stubbornly, went back, out of sight.
The tears came to Flora's vague, affectionate eyes, and Alwyn's grandmother clapped her hands together. "I declare," she cried, "he does beat all! Evan, your father is a hard man."
"I guess, mother," John Craig said, "hardness runs in the family. At any rate, it ought to—we need it, the way we live." And as he spoke he smiled, but only about his mouth, rather lifelessly.