The family were at supper. The dining room was exquisitely neat. The Lithuanian girl shoved the dishes in hot through the slide and set them down on the table without noise: Grandpa always said his youngest daughter could have taught an Eskimo to wait on table. The faces under the hanging lamp reflected something of the comfort and satisfaction of the scene. Pearl had got an advance of salary, and Mr. Weston had put through the sale of an old business building at a price even he had not hoped for.
“I guess we’ll take that vacation at the Lakes you girls are always talking about,” he said, and glanced about the table for approval. But Mrs. Weston wrinkled her mouth (she frowned with her mouth as other people do with their foreheads), and said, wouldn’t they better let the Lakes alone this year and put in that new electric cold-storage affair the drummer had called about day before yesterday, and taken the measures for? He said they’d get it at a big reduction if they gave the order now, and paid down a third of the amount when he called back.
Pearl, the eldest daughter, who was small and brisk, with a mouth like her mother’s, said, well, she didn’t much care, only she’d like to know sometime soon what they’d decided, because if they didn’t go to the Lakes she thought she’d go camping with a friend at the School of Hope, in Sebaska County; but the younger, Mae, who was taller and less compact, with an uncertain promise of prettiness, murmured that the other girls’ folks all got away to the Lakes for August, and she didn’t see why they shouldn’t without such a fuss.
“Well, we’ve got you and Vance to fuss about, for one thing,” Mrs. Weston replied. “Here you are, seventeen and nineteen, and not knowing yet how you’re going to earn your living, or when you’re going to begin.”
Mae, in an irritated tone, rejoined that she knew well enough what she wanted to do; she wanted to go to Chicago and study art, like Leila Duxberry —
“Oh, Chicago! There’ll be an art school right here next year, in connection with the college, just as good, and nothing like as expensive,” said Mrs. Weston, who was always jealous of any signs of independence in her flock.
Mae shrugged, and cast her eyes toward the ceiling, as if to say that conversation on any lower level had no further interest for her.
Mr. Weston drummed on the table, and took a second helping of pickles. “Well, and what about Advance G. Weston, Esq.? Got any idea what YOU planning to specialize in, sonny?”
Vance opened his lips to answer. He had always known that his father wanted him to be a real estate man, not only wanted but meant him to be, indeed could not conceive of any other career for him, whatever the women said, or the boy’s own view of his vocation was, any more than a king on a well-established throne could picture any job but kingship for his heir. The Free Speaker had once headlined Mr. Weston as the King of Drake County Realtors and Mr. Weston had accepted the title with a modest dignity. Vance knew all this; but the time for temporizing was over. He meant to answer his father then and there, and to say: “I guess I’d better go on a newspaper.” For he had made up his mind to be a writer, and if possible a poet, and he had never heard of any way to Parnassus save that which led through the columns of the daily press, and ranged from baseball reports to the exposure of business scandals. But as he was about to speak, something hot and choking welled up into his throat, and the brightly lit definite table with the dull definite faces about it suddenly melted into a mist.
He pushed back his chair uncertainly. “I’ve got a headache — I guess I’ll go upstairs,” he muttered to the whirling room. He saw the surprise in their faces, and became aware of Pearl vaguely detaching herself from the blur and moving toward him, anxious, inquisitive; but he pushed her back, gasping: “All right . . . don’t fuss . . . Oh, just leave me alone, can’t you, all of you?” and got himself out of the room, and upstairs to his own, where he fell on his bed in a storm of dry sobs without a tear . . . .
Two of the doctors said it was a malarial microbe; possibly he’d been bitten by an anopheles mosquito in those marshy fields out toward Crampton, or down by the river. The third doctor, a bacteriologist from the college laboratory, thought it was walking typhoid, and he might likely as not have picked it up drinking the river water, if he was in the habit of going out to Crampton — family living there? Oh, that it? — Well, the Crampton water was rank poison; they had a good many cases of the same sort every spring and summer. . . . That doctor was never sent for again; and the family noticed that Lorin Weston suddenly began to move once more in the matter of carrying the Euphoria water out to Crampton. The question was always a troublesome one; whenever it was raised it stirred up a hornet’s nest of other matters connected with municipal and state politics, questions of the let-sleeping-dogs~lie sort; and it had been a relief to Mrs. Weston when her husband, the previous year, told her he had asked the Euphoria Free Speaker (the leading morning paper) to drop the Crampton Water Supply Investigation. The Free Speaker had done so, and the next week Mr. Weston had bought a new Buick, and remarked at table that he didn’t know any greater waste of time than muckraking. Now the affair was all to be gone into again, and Mrs. Weston knew it was because of what that other doctor had said, the one who had not been asked to come back. But she kept her own counsel, as she always did where business or politics were concerned, and nursed her son, and told her husband not to be so nervous or he’d only make the boy worse . . . .
Vance caught a confused echo of this through the blur of those indistinct weeks — weeks of incessant tossings of the body, incessant gropings of the mind. The doctors said if it had been anybody but Mrs. Weston they’d have taken him right off to the fever ward of the hospital; but with Mrs. Weston they knew everything would be done just as well as if he’d been in the ward, that the disinfection would be attended to, and the fever chart accurately kept, and folks not allowed to barge in. . . . So he had been moved into the sepulchral spare room, which was the pride of Mrs. Weston’s heart because nobody had ever inhabited it, or ever would, and because it had taken the place of that awful sanctuary of her youth, the unused “best parlour.”
A month passed before Vance was strong enough to be moved back into his own room. He looked at it with alien eyes. He had been “down to normal” for some days, and that morning the doctors had told Mrs. Weston that she could unpin the chart from the foot of the bed, and give him a bit of broiled chicken. He ate it hungrily, and then lay back in the unutterable weariness of recovery.
He had begun to see the family again: his father first, awkward and inarticulate with the awe of a sorrow just escaped; Pearl concise and tactful, Mae as self-engrossed as ever, and having to be dragged away by her mother because she stayed too long and talked too much. Grandma was laid up with rheumatism, but sent messages and fresh eggs, and the announcement that she had been in constant communication with one of her household prophets, who was conducting a “Spirit of Service” meeting at the neighbouring town of Swedenborg, and that Vance had been remembered there daily in the prayers of the assistants.
Vance listened to it all as though he were dead and the family chatter came to him through his mound in the Cedarcrest cemetery. He had not known for how long, after recovery from illness, the mind continues in the airless limbo between life and death.
He was still drowsing there when his door opened, and he heard his grandfather’s booming voice: “Say, old fellow, I guess you’ve had enough of the women praying over you by this time, haven’t you, and it’ll buck you up some to swap stories again with a man of your own age.”
There he was, in the room, close to the bed, powerful, impending, the black-and-white mane tossed back boldly from his swarthy forehead, the white teeth flashing through the straggling drop of his dyed moustache, the smell of tobacco and eau de cologne emanating from the folds of his sagging clothes, from the tip of the handkerchief in his breast pocket and his long dark hands, which the boy saw spreading out over him as Mr. Scrimser bent paternally to the bed.
“Oh, Grandfather, don’t — I say DON’T!” Vance raised himself on the pillows, the sweat breaking out over his weak body, his arms defensively outstretched. “Don’t — don’t! Go away — GO AWAY!” he repeated with the weak cry of a child, covering his eyes with his hands.
He heard Mr. Scrimser’s movement of recoil, and bewildered stammer, and knew that in another moment Mrs. Weston or the girls would be summoned, and he would be hemmed in again by fever charts, thermometers, and iced compresses. He lowered his hands, and sitting upright looked straight into his grandfather’s evasive eyes.
“You — you damned old lecher, you,” he said in a low but perfectly firm voice. Mr. Scrimser stared, and he stared back. Gradually the grandfather lowered his piebald crest, and retreated across the narrow little room to the door.
“You’re — you’re sick yet, Vanny. Of course I won’t stay if you don’t want me to,” he stammered. As he turned Vance said to himself: “He understands; he won’t bother me anymore.” His head fell back on the pillows.
For a few days he was less well. The doctor said he had seen too many people, and Mrs. Weston relieved her nerves by lecturing her husband and Mae on their thoughtlessness in tiring the boy out. It occurred to no one to incriminate Mr. Scrimser, who had just popped his head in and made one of his jokes. Mrs. Weston could have certified that her father had not been more than two minutes in the room. Mr. Scrimser was noted in Euphoria as a professional brightener-up. He was full of tact in the sickroom, and in great request to cheer the long hours of convalescence. As he left the house his daughter said: “You must pop in again tomorrow, Father, and get a laugh out of Vance”; and Mr. Scrimser rejoined in his rolling voice: “You can count on me, Marcia, if he’s not too busy receiving visitors.” But he did not return, and Mrs. Scrimser sent word that he had his sciatica back on him, and she was trying to see what prayers at the “Spirit of Service” meetings would do.
On the third day after his grandfather’s visit, Vance, who was now sitting up in an armchair, asked his mother for paper and his fountain pen. Mrs. Weston, to whom all literary activities, even to the mere writing of a letter, represented untold fatigue, said protestingly: “What do you want to write for? It’ll just make your head ache.” But Vance said he was only going to jot down something, and she gave him what he wanted. When she was gone he took the pen, and wrote across the paper: “Damn him — I hate him — I hate — hate — hate — ” He added a long line of obscene and blasphemous denunciation.
His hand was still unsteady, but he formed the letters slowly and carefully, with a sort of morbid satisfaction in the doing. He had fancied that writing them out would in some mysterious way dispel the awful sense of loneliness which had repossessed him since he had come back to life. But after his first burst of anger he felt no relief, and dropped back again into the solitude which had isolated him from his kind ever since the afternoon when he had leaned against the fence and looked across the maple grove to the river. Yet relief he must have — and at once — or chuck up this too hideous business of living. He closed his eyes and tried to picture himself, when he was well again, taking up his usual pursuits and pleasures; and he turned from the vision, soul-sick. The fair face of the world had been besmirched, and he felt the first agony of youth at such profanation.
The oppression was intolerable. He was like a captive walled into a dark airless cell, and the walls of that cell were Reality, were the life he would in future be doomed to. The impulse to end it all here and now possessed him. He had tried out the whole business and found it wanting; been the round of it, and come back gorged with disgust. The negativeness of death would be better, a million times better. He got to his feet and walked unsteadily across the room to the door. He knew where his father’s revolver was kept. Mrs. Weston had only one weakness: she was afraid of burglars, and her husband always had a revolver in the drawer of the night table between their beds. Vance made his way along the passage, resting his hand against the wall to steady his steps. The house was silent and empty. His mother and the girls were out, and the Lithuanian would be downstairs in her kitchen. He reached his parents’ room, walked feebly to the table between the beds, and opened the drawer. The revolver was not there . . . .
Vance’s brain reeled. He might have looked elsewhere, might have hunted . . . but a sudden weakness overcame him and he sat down in the nearest chair. Was it the weakness of his state, or a secret reluctance to pursue his quest, the unconfessed fear that he might find what he was looking for? He asked himself the question, and could not answer. But as he sat there he became conscious that, even in the halting progress from his room to the spot where he had supposed death waited — even during that transit, so short in space, so long in time, he had felt the arms of Life, the ancient mother, reaching out to him, winding about him, crushing him fast again to her great careless bosom. He was glad — he knew now he was glad — that he had not found the weapon.
He crawled back to his room and his armchair, pulled the blanket over his knee, and sat there, faint and frightened. His heart was still beating convulsively. It was incredible, what a coward illness had made of him. But he was resolved not to be beaten, not to accept any makeshift compromise between his fear of life and his worse fear of death. If life it was to be, well — he’d live!
The writing paper lay on the table at his side. He turned over the page on which he had scrawled his senseless curses, and sat with his pen over the blank paper; then he wrote out, slowly and carefully, at the top of the page: “One Day.” Yes — that was the right title for the story he meant to tell. One day had sufficed to dash his life to pieces . . . .
He began hastily, feverishly, the words rushing from his pen like water from a long-obstructed spring, and as the paragraphs grew it seemed to him that at last he had found out a way of reconciling his soul to its experiences. He would set them down just as they had befallen him in all their cruel veracity, but as if he were relating the tragedy of somebody else.