Well, there was the furnace fire to fix. He thrust his feet into slippers, put his dressing-gown over his pyjamas and shuffled downstairs, hearing behind him the firm, regular step of Evangeline as she went from the bathroom to the bedroom. On the way down he woke up enough to realize what made life look so specially intolerable that morning; the return of Jerome Willing and his own definite failure to make good in the new organization of the store. The significance of that and all that it foretold stood out more harshly than ever in the pale, dawn-gray of the cold empty kitchen. Oh, hell!
He flung open the cellar door and ran downstairs to run away from the thought. But it was waiting for him, blackly in the coal-bin, luridly in the firebox.
“It looks just about like the jumping-off place for me,” he thought, rattling the furnace-shaker gloomily; “only I can’t jump. Where to?”
Well, anyhow, in the few minutes before breakfast, while his stomach was empty, he was free from that dull leaden mass of misery turning over and over inside him at intervals, which was the usual accompaniment of his every waking hour. That was something to be thankful for.
He strained his lean arms to throw the coal from his shovel well back into the firebox, and leveled it evenly with the long poker. Evangeline always found time to go down to see if he had done it right before he got away after breakfast.
Then he stood for a moment, struck as he often was, by the leaping many-tongued fury of the little pale-blue pointed flames. He looked at them, fascinated by the baleful lustfulness of their attack on the helpless lumps of coal thrown into their inferno.
“The seat of desolation, void of light
Save what the glimmering of those livid flames
Casts, pale and dreadful. Yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible,
Serves only to discover sights of woe.”
He heard the words crackle in the flames. He said to himself gravely: “Sights of woe it surely is.”
He heard Evangeline begin to rattle the shaker of the kitchen stove and started from his hypnotized stare at the flames. It was time for him to beat it back upstairs if he didn’t want to be late. How he loathed his lifelong slavery to the clock, that pervasive intimate negative opposed to every spontaneous impulse. “It’s the clock that is the naysayer to life,” he thought, as he climbed the cellar stairs. He hurried upstairs, dressed and began to shave.
In the midst of this last operation he heard lagging, soft little footsteps come into the bathroom behind him, and beyond his own lathered face in the glass he saw Stephen enter. Unconscious of observation, the little boy was gazing absently out of the window at the snow-covered branches of the maple tree. His father was so much surprised by the expression of that round baby face and so much interested in it that he stopped shaving, his razor in the air, peering at his little son through the glass darkly. Stephen was looking wistful! Yes, he was! Wistful and appealing! Wasn’t his lower lip quivering a little as though. …
Stephen caught his father’s eye on him and started in surprise at being seen by somebody whose back was towards him.
“Hello there, Stevie,” said his father in an inviting tone. “How’s the old man today?”
Yes, Stephen’s lower lip was quivering! He came closer now and stood looking up earnestly into the soapy face of his father. “Say, Father,” he began, “you know my Teddy-bear—you know how. …”
From below came a clear, restrained voice stating dispassionately, “Lester, you have only twelve minutes before it’s time to leave the house.” And then rebukingly, “Stephen, you mustn’t bother Father in the mornings when he has to hurry so. Either go back to bed this minute and keep warm or get dressed at once. You’ll take cold standing around in your pyjamas.”
The tone was reasonable. The logic unanswerable. But unlike Henry, Stephen did not shrink to smaller proportions under the reason and the logic. With the first sound of his mother’s voice, his usual square-jawed, pugnacious little mask had dropped over his face. “I’ll get dwessed when I get a-good-a-weady!” he announced loudly and belligerently, refreshed by his night’s sleep and instantly ready to raise an issue and fight it out.
“Stephen!” came from below in awful tones. Stephen sauntered away back into the bedroom with ostentatious leisureliness, his face black and scowling. Mother had once more stolen Teddy away from him during the night.
Lester finished shaving in three or four swipes of his razor, put on his collar at top speed and tied his necktie as he ran downstairs, cursing the clock and all its works under his breath. Stephen had been on the point of saying something to him, something human, Stephen who never asked a question or made an advance towards anyone, Stephen who lived in a state of moral siege, making sorties from his stronghold only to harry the enemy. And the accursed matter of punctuality had once more frozen out a human relationship. He never had time to know his children, to stalk and catch that exquisitely elusive bird-of-paradise, their confidence. Lester had long ago given up any hope of having time enough to do other things that seemed worth while, to read the books he liked, to meditate, to try to understand anything. But it did seem that in the matter of his own children. …
“I didn’t think you’d need your overshoes this morning, Lester. I didn’t get them out. But if you think you would better. …”
“Oh, no, no, dear, I won’t. I hate them anyhow.”
His breakfast, perfectly cooked and served, steamed on the white tablecloth. What a wonder of competence Eva was! Only it was a pity she let the children get on her nerves so. Lester never doubted that his wife loved her children with all the passion of her fiery heart, but there were
