They Came Like Swallows (16 page)

James sighed. He had been along with them that day. It was just after Elizabeth and he were married. He had gone into the dirty ramshackle house on Tenth Street when they did. But Irene didn’t remember. She was talking about Elizabeth for the pain it caused her, and possibly to keep from saying something she couldn’t bring herself to say. They had always been friends, and with friends you oughtn’t to have to say what both of you understand without its being said. Probably this was as near as she could come
to speaking about that abrupt change of plans that had thrown them all into such an uproar. If it hadn’t been for Clara, who, with all her faults, and she had plenty of them, nevertheless …

“And there’s something else, James … something I have to tell you. At the last when she was so terribly sick she motioned with her hand. As if she wanted to write. I said ‘Tell me what it is you want done, Bess, and I’ll do it …’”

James got up and went to the window and threw it wide open, and small white papers that he had stuffed into the cracks to keep the drafts out were scattered across the room.

“‘It’s about my baby,’ she said. ‘I don’t want the Morisons to have my baby.’”

The air was not as cold as James had expected, but dark and full of snow.

When he opened the door from the butler’s pantry into the kitchen, he found only darkness. It was no more than reasonable, he told himself, that Karl should have got tired waiting and gone home. For it was after eleven, and he had promised to come out as soon as dinner was over.

The scene at the table had driven everything else out of his mind. And people began coming….
There was no need to say that to Ethel. She was a fine woman and he was fond of her. But if there was one thing that he could not stand, it was having somebody step in and tell him how to run his affairs…. He groped his way past the table to the light cord. Sophie had left the kitchen just as she always did, in perfect order. He was about to turn and go back to the front part of the house when he heard a scratching sound outside, and as he opened the door, there were two eyes shining at him out of the darkness. Old John hobbled across the sill.

“Did they forget you, old fellow?” James said.

The dog looked at him reproachfully.

It was beginning, James thought to himself—the final and complete disintegration of his house. Wherever he turned he would find it. Elizabeth was gone, and things would not be done which should be done…. He put his face down and buried it (for there was no one here to see him) in the cold fur of the dog’s side. Old John whined softly.

Why,
James thought, why am I doing this? And straightened up immediately and stood there waiting until the dog had made himself comfortable beside the stove. Then he turned the light out and went back the way he had come—through the butler’s pantry and the dining-room and around the library to the front hall. Mr. Koenig had come over from next door, and he was in the library alone. And on the fifth step of the stairs James paused, remembering why people sat up all night with the dead.

Then he went on up the stairs and across the upstairs
hall to the bedroom which Elizabeth and he had shared, and saw her dresses hanging in the closet, and was struck blind and almost senseless. When he could, he shut the closet door quickly, and pressed his forehead into the long cool mirror which was on the other side.

Satin
and lace
and brown velvet
and the faint odor of violets.

—That was all which was left to him of his love. In anger then (for she could have sent some word to him and she had not—only that message about the baby, which he didn’t entirely believe) he went about the room picking up her brush or her ivory mirror or the tiny bottle of smelling-salts, and putting them down again. One after another he opened drawers, gathering small intimate things—hairpins, sachet-bags, a sponge soaked in powder, a score-card, a tassel, a string of amber beads—and made a pile of them on the dresser. For she had put him aside, he said to himself, casually with her life.

He stood in the center of the room, rocking forward and back; and in his ears heard that terrible last hour of her breathing…. He would sell the house, he thought over and over like a lesson to be memorized. A lesson that he would recite tomorrow when the time came. And Clara could take the children since she wanted them. And everything else—Elizabeth’s clothes, her amethysts and pearls (he dumped them out on the dresser), her engagement ring, her enameled
watch—he would give to Ethel, to Irene, to Sophie, to anybody with the kindness and mercy to have them. Because she was gone now. And when he had finished, there would be no trace of her anywhere. No one would know there had ever been such a person, he said to himself. And turned to the doorway, and saw Bunny staring at him with Elizabeth’s frightened eyes.

When he had given Bunny a drink of water and tucked him in bed, James went downstairs and out of the house. The wind had fallen. There was an inch of snow on the front walk and more of it coming down steadily on James’s coat sleeve and on his gloved hands and whirling in a silent frenzy about the street lamp. The crotches of trees were white with it, and each separate branch outlined. When James looked up he could see the night sky all dark, and the moist snow dropping into his face, into his open mouth.

He had come down the stairs and out of the house as he had done every day of his life, but with this difference—he was not going back. He would not enter that empty house again. Here on the sidewalk (with snow falling so thick that a man ten feet away would hardly know him) he was alone.

He turned to the left, as the snow turned, and
walked past the first house, which was the Koenigs’, and past the second, which was the Mitchells’, and the third…. They were all asleep in their beds, with no knowledge of him, or that he was here on the sidewalk looking at their darkened houses.

The house of Elizabeth’s father was on the other side of the street and occupied by strangers. He had nothing to fear from it…. He and Elizabeth lived there when they were first married, with her father and mother and with Irene. Elizabeth’s father read Ingersoll and questioned every accepted idea on religion and morality, so that it was an education for a young man to be with him. But during his last illness he changed his mind about things, and he stopped questioning.
It’s like this, James,
he would say.
There’s the earth—the continents and the seas, and the moon revolving around the earth, and the sun beyond that, and all the constellations. And beyond the constellations are stars without number or name, millions of them, whirling in space. You know that, James, without my telling you….
But for time or the passage of time they might be there now, talking—James himself, only younger, and an old man dying of a horrible blood infection in his head.

James leaned against a tree. The snow was all about him like a curtain. And he could almost believe that they were still in that house across the street.
Somebody made it—some power—according to laws that can’t be changed or added to…. The same now as they were thousands of years ago…. It’s got to be like that. Otherwise it wouldn’t work….

When James put both hands behind him, he felt the rough bark of the tree through his leather gloves. His fingers were getting cold and stiff.

“But to what purpose?” he said aloud, and hearing the words, he lost their meaning and all connection with what had gone before.

He knew only that there was frozen ground under his feet, and that the trees he saw were real and he could by moving out of his path touch them. The snow dropping out of the sky did not turn when he turned or make any concession to his needs, but only to his existence. The snow fell on his shoulders and on the brim of his hat and it stayed there and melted. He was real. That was all he knew.

He was here in this night, walking across the corner of a yard, over a sidewalk, down a vacant street. When he stopped to get his bearings, he saw that without knowing it he had turned up the alley. There were deep frozen ruts along each side of the road, and telephone poles one after another leaning against the sky. Ahead of him he heard wheels creaking and the placing (muffled and delicate) of hoofs. The placing of hoofs on snow. And knew suddenly that it was all a mistake … everything that he had thought and done this day.

He was alive, that was the trouble. He was caught up in his own living and breathing and there was no way possible for him to get out. Elizabeth knew that, and she had come after him in the pony cart. She had come to take him home.

He was glad. He was immensely excited. His
hands shook and his knees. He began to run along the alley, stumbling and falling and picking himself up again. He ran until he was stopped by the lean shape of a horse, and a wagon with a lantern on it. The lantern shone upward into a man’s face that was thin and patient and crazy.

With the last of his strength gone out of him, James leaned against the firm lattice-work of his own back fence.

James awoke late into a room that was bright with the morning sun. On the dresser were Elizabeth’s things lying in a heap as he had left them. When he looked outside the snow blinded him. He stretched his legs under the covers until they touched the foot of the bed, and wondered how many mornings of his life he had lain here—awake and watching the curtains blow in from the open window. And whether the lightness he felt inside him was grief. Or if he would ever be capable of any emotion again.

Slowly and with care he bathed and shaved and dressed himself in clean clothes. He staggered slightly when he went from the closet to the dresser to comb his hair. But his head was clear, and when he put his hands to his eyelids, they no longer felt cracked and hard…. There were formalities and customs, there
was the funeral to be got through with somehow this day.

Ethel was in the guest-room, making her bed. He lingered at the door until she noticed him.

“You look rested, James,” she said. “Did you sleep?”

He looked into her eyes and saw nothing but kindness there—kindness and a veiled sympathy. It had never been easy for her to express her feelings.

“Yes, I think I did.”

“That’s what you needed more than anything else.”

For the first time it occurred to him that Ethel might keep from Irene what Bunny said last night at the table—that she had, in fact, no intention of telling her.

“Thank you,” he said, and hoped that she would understand what for.

“Irene is off on some errand. With Boyd, I think. But your mother is here and Clara, too. You’ll find them in the sewing-room.”

At the head of the stairs James listened and heard their voices. They were arguing over which card had come with which flowers.

“I don’t care what you say, Clara, the yellow roses were from the men in James’s office. The carnations were from Bunny’s class at school.”

“If you’d only waited, Mother, and let me open them. I’m trying to write them down in this little book as they come. Otherwise we’ll never know who sent what.”

Though it was nearly ten o’clock, there was no one in the front hall or the living-room or the library. And James’s place was still set at the dining-room table. He went on to the kitchen, which was warm and bright. Karl sat with his overcoat on and the sweat running down his face. Bunny was beside him at the kitchen table. And Sophie, rattling the breakfast dishes, created such a cheerful noise that none of them heard James, or knew that he was there.

Bunny was making a wreath of ferns. And it was hardly the thing, James thought. Bunny ought not to be making a game of flowers that had been sent to his mother’s funeral. As James started forward he could have sworn, almost, that he felt a slight restraining pressure on his arm. And he turned, in spite of himself—in spite of the fact that he knew positively no one was there.

With his coffee James smoked a cigarette—the first since he had been sick. Irene came in before he had finished.

“I’ve been out driving,” she said, and sat down beside him at the dining-room table. “With Boyd?”

“Yes. Did Ethel tell you?” Irene unbuttoned her left glove and then buttoned it again. “I’ve made up
my mind, James—or rather I’ve had it made up for me. Boyd has to live in New York and I’d have to live there, too, it seems, if I went back to him.”

“What are you going to do, then?”

“Stay here and help you look after the children.”

From her expression it was impossible to tell whether the choice had been easy.

“Boyd is fonder of little Agnes than he is of me. I don’t think he knows that, but he is. After he carried her off that time, I knew it. And I was afraid to have him see her. But I don’t feel like that any more. He’s so frightfully lonely. And there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have her part of the year. If I could be sure that I might be a different person, or that he could—but what has happened once can happen again. No matter what it is or how hard you try to avoid it. And where the going hasn’t been too good it seems better not to double back on my own trail.”

“No,” James said, “I suppose not.” But sooner or later she must do something. As it is, she has no life at all.

He put out his right hand and produced a chord—G, D flat, and F—on the dining-room table. Then he took a final drag at his cigarette.

“About the children, Irene—”

“It won’t be easy, of course.”

“I know that,” he said.

“At first I wasn’t at all sure that it could be done. Bunny was so close to his mother, you know. She seemed almost to be aware of every breath he took. And when they were in the same room together, he
was always turning his face toward her. Last night when he came in and looked at me that way, I felt that there was nothing that you or I or anyone else could do for him. But this morning it’s entirely different The house is so bright, James, and so full of sunlight.”

James leaned forward in his chair.

“I came in through the kitchen just now,” Irene said, “and when I saw Bunny making wreaths, I knew somehow—”

Don’t say it, James implored silently.
Don’t say