He paused dramatically. Stephen’s wide eyes grew wider! His lips were parted. He did not seem to breathe, all his being suspended on his father’s words. It was plain he had forgotten where he was, or who. “Then said Apollyon, ‘I am sure of thee now!’ ” said Lester, and Stephen shivered.
“But Christian reached out quick, quick and snatched up his sword and ran it deep into that horrible old Apollyon and made him stagger back to get his breath! And then Christian scrambled up on his feet and ran at the dragon, shouting! And with that Apollyon spread out his dragon wings and sped him away and Christian saw him no more.”
Stephen drew a long breath. “Golly!” he said fervently.
“Yes, I should say as much,” agreed his father, pushing his chair over to the stove and dropping the potatoes into the boiling water. How exciting it was, he thought, how absorbing, to see those first impressions of power and courage touch a new human soul. And when it was your own little boy. … To share with him one of the immortal fine things created by the human spirit!
He sat still for a moment, remembering the book, soaking himself in its flavor and color, tasting some of the quaint, posy-like phrases,
“Some things are of that nature as to make
One’s fancy chuckle while his heart doth ache!”
Harvey Bronson for instance.
And, “Some people are never for religion until it walks with silver slippers in the sunshine.” Was that Mr. Prouty?
Still musing, he wheeled himself into the dining-room and began to set the table for lunch. Through the clicking of the silver, Stephen could hear him say, “His daughter went through the Dark River, singing, but none could understand what she said … none could understand what she said.”
It sounded like a song to Stephen, although Father was only talking to himself.
When he came out again into the kitchen and began to slice the bacon, he was saying in a loud, strong voice, “So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side! All the trumpets sounded. …”
The words rang in Stephen’s ears. He said them over to himself in a murmur as he handled his top absently. “All the twumpets sounded. All the twumpets sounded on the other side.”
After a time he asked, “Father, what’s a twumpet?”
A question from Stephen!
His father turned his head from the frying-pan from which the bacon sent up its thin blue wreaths of smoke. “What’s a trumpet? It’s a great, gleaming brass horn which always, always has been blown where there has been a victory—like this!” He flung up his arm, holding an imaginary trumpet to his lips, “Taranta! Taranta!” He sounded it out ringingly! “That’s the way they sounded when Mr. Valiant crossed the Dark River.”
“Taranta!” murmured Stephen to himself. “And all the twumpets sounded.”
He sat in the sun on the kitchen floor, looking up at his crippled father frying bacon. For both of them the kitchen was ringing with the bright brazen shout of victory.
Men thrive in the Valley of Humiliation.
XIV
Lester was glad to see Mattie Farnham come bustling in the very afternoon of the day she returned from Maine. He liked Mattie—indeed he almost loved her—in spite of the fact that so far as he had been able to ascertain she had never yet understood anything he ever said to her. They did not use at all the same vocabulary, but they held friendly communication by means of sign-language, like a dog and cat who have grown up in the same house and have an old affection for each other.
“Hello there, Mattie,” he welcomed her, as she entered. “How are the potatoes in Maine? Ours have spots in them.”
It amused him with Mattie to disconcert her decent sense of what was the suitable attitude to strike. He knew that both she and her husband were relieved to have their ninety-year-old, bedridden aunt safely and painlessly in the next world. Blessed if he’d go through the motions of condoling with her.
But he saw at once that he had shocked not her sense of the proper attitude about Aunt Emma but about himself. She had come over prepared to “sympathize” with him. Mattie always had to go through the proper motions.
“How are you getting on, Lester?” she asked earnestly, with her best Ladies’ Guild flatness of intonation. “You can’t imagine how I have worried about you and poor Eva and the dear children. I’ve been sick to think I wasn’t here to help out in this sad time. Now I’m back you must let me do everything I can.”
“You might come and call on Stephen and me once in a while and bring us some of your famous home-cooking,” he suggested mischievously. She laughed, in spite of herself, at his jibe over her weakness for delicatessen potato salad. “You miserable sinner!” she cried, in her own voice, dropping for an instant into their old joking relationship. She sobered at once, however, into what Lester called to himself the “mourners-waiting-for-the-benediction manner” and said, “I was planning as I walked over how I could arrange my own work to have two hours free every afternoon and come here to do for you.”
“You’ll find it all done,” he told her genially. “You can’t beat me to it. Come along all the same, and we’ll play cribbage.” She was perplexed as well as shocked by his levity and at last simply threw herself on his mercy, “Lester, do tell me all about things,” she said in an honest, human tone of affection and concern which brought from him an answer in kind.
“Well, Mattie, I will. It was hell at first … all the kinds of hell there are. But you know
