But it didn’t stop. He could feel it, making him tremble and shake inside. And yet he didn’t feel sick—oh, no! It was a strange good feeling that was almost too much for him. It was too big for him. He was too little to hold it. It seemed to overflow him, so that he could scarcely breathe, in a bright, warm, shining flood. And Stephen was such a little boy! He had never felt anything like it before. It frightened him and yet he loved it. He must get off somewhere by himself where he would be safe—and alone—with the new, strange, bright, drowning feeling.
Under the stairs—always his refuge—he crept in on his hands and knees, not noticing the dust which flew up in his face as he crept. Those corners were not clean as they had been when Mother kept the house, but Stephen thought of nothing but that now the quivering was all over him, even his face … the way it was when he was going to cry. He and his new feeling crept farther and farther in, as far as he could go. He sat down then, cross-legged, his face turned towards the safe, blind wall. He was safe. He was all alone. It was dark. He said to himself so low that there was no sound, “Father will miss me when I go to school.” Then, lower still, “Father likes to have me around.”
And suddenly Stephen’s eyes overflowed and his cheeks were wet, and hot drops fell down on his dusty hands.
But he was not crying. He knew that. It hurt to cry. And this did not hurt. It helped. The water ran quietly out of his eyes and poured down his cheeks. It was as though something that had ached inside him so long that he had almost forgotten about it were melting and running away. He could feel it hurting less and less as the tears fell on his hands. It was as though he were being emptied of that ache.
The tears fell more and more slowly and stopped. And now nothing hurt Stephen at all. There was no ache anywhere, not even the old one, so old he had almost forgotten about it. Stephen felt weak and empty without it and leaned his head faintly against the dusty dark wall.
He sat there a long time, it seemed to him, till little by little he felt the weakness going out of his legs and the emptiness out of his body. He must go back to Father now, or Father would wonder where he was.
But Father would think he had been crying and would ask him why. How could Father tell the difference if he saw the wet on his cheeks? Stephen would have died rather than try to tell anyone what had been happening to him. He did not know at all what had been happening to him. He would rub the wet off his cheeks with his hands. Yes, that would do. Then Father would never know. He scrubbed vigorously at his eyes and his cheeks with his fists, and when he felt that there was no dampness left, he backed out on his hands and knees into the dining-room again. Was it the same room it had been when he had crept in? It didn’t seem possible! It looked so different. And Stephen felt so different. Like another Stephen altogether. So light! So washed! So clear! He didn’t seem to weigh anything at all, but to float through the air as he walked. Nothing looked to Stephen as it had. The walls and furniture had a sprightly, cheerful expression. He waved his hand to them as he floated out to the kitchen.
Lester had been busy at first getting the four o’clock lunch ready for the children. He had taken down from the pantry shelf a paper bag of cookies, yes, the boughten kind; they happened to be out of homemade ones. He ought to have been making some instead of hanging fascinated over Stephen’s hand-to-hand battle with the universe.
But it was, glory be, no longer such a tragic matter, the sort of food Henry had! It certainly was a special provision of Providence that Henry and Helen were so much stronger than they had been; that just when they fell into his inexpert hands, they had begun to outgrow their delicate health. However could he have managed the care of them if they had been sick so often as when poor Eva had been struggling with the care of them? Wasn’t it all a piece of her bad luck to have had them during that trying period and turn them over to him just as her wonderful cooking and nursing had pulled them through. What a splendid nurse she was!
He poured out a glass of milk apiece for the children and looked impatiently at the clock. He loved the moment of their noisy arrival, loved the clatter of their feet on the porch, the bang of the door thrown open. Why were they late today?
Oh, yes, he remembered. They were due at a rehearsal of the school-play—Helen’s play—the one they had worked out together. What fun it was to have her bring him her little experiments in writing! He began to think that perhaps she might have a little real talent. Of course most of what she set down was merely a copy of what she had read, but every once in a while there was a nugget, something she had really seen or felt. This, for instance, which he had found scrawled across the flyleaf of her arithmetic—poor Helen and her hated arithmetic!
“The measured beats of the old clock
Bring peace to my heart
And quiet to my mind.”
That was the real thing, a genuine expression of her own personality. How different from the personality of her mother, to whom the ticking
