Father read another one after that about a bonfire, which, although she did not quite understand it all, always made Helen tremble with excitement. Henry did not understand any of it and did not try to. It never bothered him now when he did not understand the poems Father read to Helen. He just stopped listening and played with his puppy’s ear, and lost himself in the warm, soft heaviness of the puppy’s little sprawling body on his knees. Sometimes he put his face lovingly down on the little dog’s head, his heart melting with tenderness. He needed no poetry out of a book.
“It will have roared first and mixed sparks with stars,
And sweeping round it with a flaming sword,
Made the dim trees stand back in wider circles.”
“Oh,” cried Helen, loving the sound of the words as Henry loved his puppy, “isn’t that just scrumptious!”
“The breezes were so spent with winter blowing
They seemed to fail the bluebirds under them
Short of the perch their languid flight was towards;
And my flame made a pinnacle to heaven.”
“Oh, Father,” said Helen, wriggling on her chair with delight, “isn’t it too lovely!” And then, in a passion of longing, “Oh, I wish I could write like that!”
Something in the expression of her father’s face struck her. She was only thirteen, but an older intuition from her coming womanhood made her say impulsively, with all her heart, “Father, you love it so … why don’t you … didn’t you ever try to write poetry, too?”
To her confusion, a slow, deep flush mounted all over her father’s face. He looked down at the book in silence.
Helen was as horrified as if she had flung open the door of a secret sanctuary in a temple. She jumped up from the sofa, and not understanding her father, nor herself, nor what she was doing, “Oh, Father, dear,” she murmured, her arms around his neck.
Henry and his puppy looked up at them sleepily. “Is it bedtime?” asked Henry.
Helen went to sleep that night, still feeling the great hug Father had given her. She had never felt Father love her so much before.
Downstairs before he went to bed her father, turning over the pages of a book, was reading,
“And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope.”
“Come, come!” he said to himself. “Terence, this is stupid stuff, you eat your victuals fast enough. We’ll have to call this day one of our failures. I’d better get it over with and start another.” His heart was still bleeding to the old wound he had thought healed and forgotten for years, which Helen’s sudden question had torn open. Good Heavens, weren’t you safe from those old buried griefs until you were actually under the sod?
And yet mingled with the old bitterness was a new sweetness, Helen’s sympathy, Helen’s understanding. It had never occurred to him before that children could give something as well as take all—the all he was so thankful to give them. Why, he thought wistfully, Helen might be the companion he had never had. He shook his head. No, that would not be fair to her. No dead-hand business! She must find her companions in her own generation. He must be ready to stand aside and let her pass on when the time came. That new sweetness was offered to him only that he might learn to make another renunciation.
He looked about him to see if there was anything to be done for the house before he went to bed. “Shall I close that window over there?” he thought to himself. “No, the night is warm. It will give us more air.”
He wheeled himself to the closed door of the dining-room, opened it and perceived that the wind was blowing hard from the other direction, for a strong draught instantly sucked past him between the open window back of him and the open window at the head of Stephen’s bed. He felt the gust and saw the long, light curtain curl eddying out towards him over the flicker of Stephen’s bedside candle.
It caught in an instant. It flared up like guncotton, all over its surface. It came dropping down … horribly dropping down towards Stephen’s unconscious, upturned face … flames on that tender flesh!
Stephen’s father found himself standing by the bed, snatching the curtain to one side, crushing out the flames between his hands. His wheel chair still stood by the open door.
The draught between the two open windows now blew out the candle abruptly. In the darkness the door slammed shut with a loud report.
But the room was not dark to Lester. As actually as he had seen and felt the burst of flame from the curtain, he now felt himself flare up in physical ecstasy to be standing on his own feet, to know that he had taken a dozen steps, to know that he was no longer a half-man, a mutilated wreck from whom normal people averted their eyes in what they called pity but what was really contempt and disgust.
He was like a man who has been shut in a cage too low for him to stand, who has crouched and stooped and bowed his shoulders, and who suddenly is set free to rise to his full stature, to throw his arms up over his head. The relief from oppression was as rending as a pain. It was a thousand times more joyful than any joy he had ever known. His self, his ego, savagely, grimly, harshly beaten down as it had been, sprang up with an exultant yell.
The flame of its exultation flared up like guncotton, as the curtain had flared.
And died down as quickly, crushed and ground to blackness between giant hands that snatched it to one side as it dropped down towards Stephen’s unconscious upturned face … flames on that tender flesh. …
Lester knew nothing but that there was blackness within
