remorselessly crushed out of him.
He groped wildly after the bottle of amyl nitrate pearls that sat on the little stand beside his chair, and overset it. Pain flooded through his chest and ran out terrifyingly along his left arm. He couldn’t stand it. His chest was turning to a brittle box which they—the forces that tormented his elderly body so wantonly—were splintering inward with the reverberating turns of a fiery vise. With his last strength he tried to cry out, to get help. He was going to die.
When Hoppler came to himself again, he was lying flat in bed with a hot water bottle over his heart. The doctor, looking very serious, was folding up his stethoscope. Mrs. Dean, pale and distracted, hovered in the background.
“That was a near thing, young fellow,” Dr Simms said severely when he saw Edwin’s eyes fixed on him. “If I’d got Mrs. Dean’s call five minutes later—well! Have you been putting any strain on yourself?”
Hoppler searched his memory. From the knowledge he had painfully acquired of his disease, he didn’t honestly think his momentary uneasiness at Timmy’s “listening” could be classed as strain. And he had been getting up a good deal lately. Today he’d been sitting up almost the whole day.
“You’ll have to learn to take this seriously.” Dr. Simms said when he had finished his confession. “Angina’s no picnic. I should think your first attack would have taught you that. But there’s no use crying over spilt milk. I want you to go back to bed for at least a week, and then I’m going to try a new treatment on you. The clinical report on it is encouraging. You mustn’t worry. Keep in a pleasant frame of mind.”
He went out. There was an inaudible colloquy in the hall between him and Mrs. Dean. The landlady came back and began tidying up the disordered room. Hoppler watched her quick movements with a touch of jealousy. She was older than he, and she was on the go all day. Heart trouble? She didn’t know she had a heart. Simms had told him once that angina preferred its victims male.
She felt the water bottle for warmth and drew the cover up more snugly about his neck. “You know, Mr. Hoppler,” she said impressively, “Timmy saved your life. He really did. He came running down the stairs while I was putting the silver away, and began pulling at my arm. I tried to shake him off—you know how children are—but he held on and jabbered away at me until I realized something was wrong. You were all slumped over in your chair, fainted, when I found you. Of course I called the doctor then. But you heard what he said about five minutes more.”
Edwin Hoppler nodded. “Timmy’s a good boy, a very good boy,” he said faintly. He wished Mrs. Dean would finish and go. He wanted to rest.
Timmy poked his head around the door jamb. He was pale and subdued. His eyes were so large they seemed to have eaten up his face. As he caught sight of his friend he smiled uncertainly, but his expression slipped back quickly into anxiousness.
Hoppler looked away from him and then up at the ceiling. He was grateful to Timmy, he was fond of him, but he didn’t want to see him now. In a sense, he didn’t want ever to see him again. The child—why make any bones about it?—frightened him. Timmy himself was quiet, touching, innocent. The dark faculty for which he appeared to be the vehicle, which he embodied, was otherwise. It was impossible to think of Timmy’s “listening” without a flutter of uneasiness. And the doctor had told him to keep in a pleasant frame of mind. Perhaps he ought to ask Mrs. Dean to keep the boy out of his room, at least for a while. Hoppler licked his bluish lips.
But was that sensible? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Timmy actually was able, in some super- normal way, to hear the approach of… of death (Edwin thought grimly). Wouldn’t the sensible thing be to keep Timmy with him as much as possible? If he had realized that Timmy’s uncanny listening this evening portended a heart attack, he could have had the amyl nitrate pearls in readiness for the first pangs. The attack need not have been serious. And he was fond of the boy.
Hoppler looked toward the door where Timmy was still patiently standing. He raised one hand and beckoned to him. When the child was within reach he gave the grimy little hand a squeeze.
Dr. Simms’ new treatment did Hoppler a great deal of good. He put on weight, rapidly at first and then more slowly, until he had gained eighteen pounds. Mrs. Dean told him he looked ten years younger.
Dr. Simms explained carefully that, though he was more than pleased with the progress his patient was making, the treatment itself was rather in the nature of a palliative. Physicians weren’t sure yet how much of its effect was permanent. Hoppler listened without being much impressed. He was able to be up all day now and even, as the weather improved, to get outside.
There was no question, of course, of his going back to his work as an accountant. The firm had pensioned him off, not too illiberally, after his first attack. As Mrs. Dean said, he had nothing to do now but enjoy himself.
Enjoying oneself at sixty-three is apt to prove a quiet business. Hoppler began to spend most of the daylight hours in the pocket-sized neighborhood park, reading the paper, watching the graceful evolutions of the sea gulls or listening to their raucous, undignified squawking.
Timmy, meantime— he was almost constantly with Hoppler after school hours—bounced a rubber ball, drew pictures, or rather half-heartedly climbed on the rails or swung from the rungs of the playground equipment. He had grown so much in the last few months that even Mrs. Dean had been forced to see the unsuitability of dressing him any longer in home-made clothes. She had bought him jeans and little checked flannel cotton shirts. In this costume he looked quite modish and contemporary. He lost, at least obviously, most of the wispiness, the pathos, which Hoppler had found in him at first. But it gave Hoppler a strange numbed feeling to see how formidable a barrier his deafness was between him and the other children who played in the park. Timmy was a sociable child, but the others greeted him with stares and then uneasily drew away from him. The boy was always glad to return from his excursions among the swings and trapezes to his grown-up friend.
When noon came Hoppler would write a note and send Timmy with it and money to a restaurant in the neighborhood to buy sandwiches and milk. Watching the boy’s quick intelligence, his constant unselfconscious attempts to make bricks without straw, Hoppler began to feel that he was failing in his moral obligation to him.
Mrs. Dean was certainly fond of her grandson, but she was too occupied with the constant petty demands of the boarding house, too harrassed, to pay much attention to him. Perhaps Timmy ought to have a private teacher. He hadn’t learned to lip-read yet with any facility. Private instruction might help him to faster progress. Hoppler must talk to Timmy’s teacher at the deaf school and find out what was possible for him.
The boy’s disturbing “listening”, except for one notable exception, had ceased. The exception had occurred when Timmy had “listened” vividly and disconcertingly, just before one of the older boys had fallen headlong from the slippery top piece of one of the swings to which he had illegitimately climbed. The fall itself would not have been serious. But the boy had hit his head as he fell on the wooden seat of one of the swings. He had been knocked unconscious, there had been a great deal of blood, an ambulance had been called.
But the unpleasant incident fixed even more firmly in Hoppler the conviction that Timmy was a reliable barometer. He was rather ashamed of the relief he found in his confidence in the boy’s uncanny ability. During these quiet months—the happiest, after all, of Hoppler’s life—Dr. Simms examined him at two-week intervals. He expressed himself as gratified with Hoppler’s progress, but he always warned him to go slow, to take things easily, to be careful. Hoppler listened to these counsels seriously, but with a certain inner complacency. He had channels of information which weren’t open to Simms.
One fine warm day late in summer he decided to take Timmy to the beach. He contemplated getting Simms’ permission—the expedition would involve streetcars, transferring, a good deal of exertion in one way or another— and than decided against it. Simms might after all tell him not to go, and Hoppler had been feeling unusually well. Timmy had never seen the ocean, never been to the beach. It was a part of his education which ought to be attended to.
They reached the amusement park, at the end of the car line, just at noon. Edwin bought hot dogs for Timmy and a hamburger for himself from one of the stands. Timmy bit into his bun a little doubt fully; Hoppler thought it must be the first time he had eaten one. His hesitation soon vanished. He ate three hot dogs and finished off with an Eskimo pie. Hoppler, meantime, indulged himself in a glass of beer.
After lunch they rode on the merry-go-round. Edwin wondered rather sadly what blurred effect the amusement park was making on Timmy, locked within the confines of his perpetually silent world. A merry-go-round without the music! But Timmy plainly found his spotted wooden mount enchanting and loved the motion it had. When he had at last tired of riding, Edwin took him to a penny arcade. After that they explored novelty and curio shops, and Edwin bought Timmy a ring with a blistered pinkish abalone pearl. Late in the afternoon they went down
