But it was not always the weather. Sometimes as he opened his eyes, his chosen comrade for the day was there beside him before he had taken in anything more of the visible world than the white vacancy of the ceiling with those familiar blemishes, which were by this time a part of his brain. He did not always welcome the companion of the day, especially when the unseen spirit but repeated and intensified the color of his own temperament, from which he was so glad to escape by following the trumpets and fanfare of a temperament more brightly, more vividly alive. But he had found it was of little use to try to alter the day’s destiny. He could indeed, easily enough, bring to mind mechanically many others of the blessed company of articulate human beings who sang for him what he could never say for himself; but he could hear, really hear in his deep heart’s core, nothing but the appointed voice.
So he resigned himself to a brooding, astringent day when he woke up one morning and even before he opened his eyes, heard,
“But ‘falling, falling, falling’ there’s your song,
The cradle song that sings you to the grave.”
That was no longer meant for him, Lester reflected, as he struggled with the fatiguing, humiliating problem of getting himself dressed without help. He had spent years in falling, falling, falling—and, tiring of it, had fallen once for all—fallen all anybody could fall, so completely that there was no more to say about it. That job was done.
With a straining pull on his arms, he managed to swing and claw himself into his wheel chair, and sat quiet for a moment to get his breath. Whoever would think that dead human legs could be so infernally hard to get from one place to another! They seemed to weigh more than all the rest of his body put together, he thought, as he lifted one with both hands and changed it to an easier position.
He sat panting, losing for an instant his firmly held self-control, succumbing to what was always near the surface, a shamed horror of his mutilated, strengthless body. It came upon him that day with such poisonous violence that he was alarmed and aroused himself to resist.
“The thing to remember,” he told himself sternly and contemptuously, “is that it concerns only me, and what concerns me is not of the slightest importance. I’m done for, was really done for, long ago. Nothing that can happen to me matters now.” He heard as if it were a wistful voice saying,
“But neither parted roads, nor cent percent
May starve quite out the child that lives in us,
The Child that is the Man, the Mystery.”
And he replied bitterly to this, “That’s all you know about it! Cent percent can starve it dead, dead! It turned the trick for me, all right.”
“Well, no funeral orations over it anyhow,” he told himself. “If it got starved, that’s a sign it deserved to starve, that it didn’t have the necessary pep to hustle around and get its food.
“All that can be annihilated must be annihilated
That the children of Jerusalem may be saved from slavery.”
But he knew that he did not really believe this clean, trenchant ruthlessness, and cursed himself out for the sniveling sentimentality which he could not kill.
Then Stephen turned over and opened his eyes. Why, there was Father up and dressed already! He scrambled hastily to his knees, “You didn’t lace your shoes, did you?” he cried roughly and threateningly. That was a service to Father which he had taken for his very own. He would have killed Henry or Helen if they had dared to do it.
“No, old man, I didn’t lace my shoes,” said Father, smiling at him, “for the very good reason that I can’t. I couldn’t get along without the services of my valet.”
Stephen looked relieved, slid out of bed, sat down on the floor and began to pull the laces up. Once he looked up at his father and smiled. He loved to do this for Father.
That evening was the second time in succession that Evangeline went to bed directly after supper. She said she was trying to stave off an attack of influenza with extra sleep and doses of quinine. Lester and the children did not play whist when Mother was not there, neither when she was tired and went to bed early nor when she stayed down in the store evenings, taking stock or working over newly arrived goods with Mr. and Mrs. Willing. Whist was connected with Mother, and although she often told them they need not lose the evenings when she could not be there, and would enjoy playing with dummy for a change, they never got out the cards unless she was with them.
Father usually read aloud to them on such evenings, and they wouldn’t have missed that for anything. That evening he read a rhymed funny story about a farmer who got blown away from his barn one winter night, and, with his lantern waving, slid two miles down the mountain before he could stop himself. This was a great favorite of theirs and made them laugh harder every time they heard it.
“Sometimes he came with arms outspread
Like wings, revolving in the scene
Upon his longer axis and
With no small dignity of mien.
Faster or slower as he chanced,
Sitting or standing as he chose,
According as he feared to risk
His neck, or thought to spare his clothes.”
And Helen liked the end, too, that Father always brought out with a special accent, the way the farmer didn’t give up. As he started silently and doggedly back the long way around, miles and miles in the cold, she walked along beside him, sharing something of his quiet resistance
