He recoiled from it with terror. “You have to be a superman to be equal to it.”
In the silent room he heard it echoing solemnly, “That’s what it is to be a parent.”
He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it. He looked over the edge of his bed at Stephen and abased himself silently.
The child sat motionless, clasping Teddy, his face bent and turned away so that Lester could not see its expression. His attitude was that of someone thinking deeply.
Well, reflected Lester, there was certainly good reason for the taking of thought by everybody concerned! He let his head fall back on the pillow and, staring up, began for the first time since his fall to think connectedly about something other than his own wretchedness. For the first time the ugly blemishes on the ceiling were not like blotches in his own brain. Presently he forgot them altogether.
That sudden contact with Stephen’s utterly unsuspected suffering had been like dropping his fingers unawares upon red-hot iron. His reaction had been the mere reflex of the intolerable pain it gave him. Now, in the long quiet of his sickroom, he set himself to try to understand what it meant.
So that had been at the bottom of Stephen’s fierceness and badness in those last days of the old life. So it had been black despair which had filled the child’s heart and not merely an inexplicable desire to make trouble for his mother. For Heaven’s sakes, how far off the track they had been! But however could they have guessed at the real cause of the trouble? What possessed the child to keep such a perverse silence? Why hadn’t he told somebody? How could they know if he never said a word.
He thought again of the scene in the bathroom that last morning and saw again Stephen’s wistful face looking up into his. Stephen had tried to tell him. And those sacred itemized accounts of Willing’s Emporium had stopped his mouth.
But Evangeline was always on hand. Why hadn’t Stephen. …
Without a word, with a complete perception that filled all his consciousness, Lester knew why Stephen had never tried to tell his mother.
And yet—his sense of fairness made him take up the cudgels for Eva—it hadn’t been such an unreasonable idea of hers. Teddy was certainly as dirty as it was possible for anything to be. You have to keep children clean whether they like it or not. Suppose Teddy had been played with by a child who had scarlet fever? They’d have to have him cleaned, wouldn’t they? He’d gone too far, yielded to a melodramatic impulse when he’d promised Stephen so solemnly they’d never have anything done to Teddy that he didn’t like.
But as a matter of fact Teddy never had been near scarlet fever or anything else contagious. And even if he had, weren’t there ways of dry-cleaning and disinfecting that would leave the personality of the toy intact? You didn’t have to soak it in a tub of soapy water. What was the matter with wrapping it in an old cloth and baking it in the oven, as you do with bandages you want to sterilize. If anybody had had the slightest idea that Stephen felt as he did. … But nobody had! And that was the point.
He saw it now. Nothing turned on the question of whether Teddy should or should not be cleaned. That purely material matter could have been arranged by a little practical ingenuity if it had occurred to anybody that there was anything to arrange. The question really was why had it not occurred to anybody?
What was terrifying to Lester was the thought that the conception of trying to understand Stephen’s point of view had been as remote from their minds as the existence of the fourth dimension.
And even now that the violent shock of this little scene with Stephen had put the conception into his brain, how under the sun could you ever find out what was felt by a child who shut himself up so blackly in his stronghold of repellent silence?
Why had Stephen so shut himself up?
The question was as new to Lester as a question of the cause of the law of gravity. It had never occurred to him that perhaps Stephen had not been born that way.
But even a sullen stronghold of badness was better than that dreadful breakdown of human dignity. Lester felt he could never endure it again to have Stephen look into his face with that slavish, helpless searching of his eyes. No self-respecting human being could bear that look from another.
Could there be human beings—women—mothers—who fattened on it, fought to keep that slave’s look in the eyes of children? He turned from this thought with a start.
Well, what good did all this thinking do him? Or Stephen? What could he do now, at once, to escape out of this prison and take Stephen with him?
With a heat of anger, he told himself that at least he could start in to make Stephen feel, hour by hour, in every contact with him, that he, even a little boy, had some standing in the world, inviolable by grownups, yes, sacred even to parents.
He breathed hard and flung out his arm.
For the first time he desired to get well, to live again.
XII
Helen and Henry Knapp were skipping home from school, hand in hand, to the tune of
“Skippety hop to the barbershop
To buy a stick of candy.
One for you and one for me
And one for …”
They were interrupted by their Aunt Mattie Farnham, who ran out of the house and pounced on them. “For goodness’ sakes, Helen ’n’ Henry, tell me about your folks! I’ve been worried to death about you all.”
She stopped, looked down at the new black dress she wore and said, with a decent sigh, “Poor Aunt Emma passed away a week ago, you know. The funeral was day before yesterday. I just got home this morning.”
The children
