Part + 

III + 

XI + 

In the hurly-burly of the rearrangement of life, nobody had been able to pay much attention to Stephen, and he had reveled in this freedom from supervision. He had always steered his small, hard life on a line of his own, a line he strove to make parallel to the course of the rest of the family, and never intersecting. Contact with others always meant trouble in Stephen’s experience⁠—except with Henry and Helen. Now that the grownups had almost forgotten his existence, he was enjoying life as never before, under his dirty, crumpled rompers, stiff with spilled egg-yolk and cold bacon grease. + 

His father’s accident had made no impression on his emotions. Events that did not touch Stephen personally never made any impression on his emotions. The only element in the new situation which interested him was that Mother seemed to have forgotten all about Teddy. This was important. It made Stephen very glad that Father had fallen off the roof and broken his legs all up, or whatever it was. As long as Father stayed in bed, he couldn’t bother anybody, even when he and Stephen were left alone. + 

For, after a time, they were left alone. When the sick man began to improve so that he was conscious, and later, occasionally out of pain, there were hours when the round of volunteer neighbors and helpers thinned out, when he was left in his bed in the dining-room, a glass of water, a book, something to eat and the desk-telephone on a table by his side, with instructions to telephone if he needed anything. + 

“Don’t you hesitate a minute now, Mr. Knapp,” said old Mrs. Hennessy heartily; “if it’s no more than to put a shovelful of coal on the kitchen fire, you call fourteen ring thirty-two and I’ll be right over.” + 

“And when Stephen gets to acting up, just shake the window-curtain real hard and I’ll drop everything to come over and settle him,” said Mrs. Anderson zestfully. + 

So far Stephen had not “acted up.” Probably, so Mrs. Anderson told Mrs. Knapp, “because as things are now he’s let to do just what he pleases and goodness knows what that is!” Stephen had even been a stimulating element in his father’s days when they first began to emerge from the endless nightmare of pain and to become, once more, successive stages in a human life. + 

Lester never spoke to anyone about those first weeks after his fall and thought of them himself as little as possible. The mere casual mention of them afterwards brought the cold sweat out on him. No circle in any hell would have contained more concentrated suffering than was crowded into his every conscious moment⁠—horrible, brute, physical suffering, tearing at every nerve, suffering that degraded him, that left him no humanity. When this was deadened for an instant by opiates or exhaustion, there were terrible hallucinations⁠—he was again on the steep, icy roof, turning, death in his heart, to throw himself down into cold nothingness⁠—he was falling, falling, endlessly falling⁠ ⁠… and now he knew what intolerable anguish awaited him at the end of his fall. He screamed out dreadfully at such times and tore at the bedclothes as if to save himself. These moments of frenzy always ended by his coming to himself with a great start and finding himself burning and raging once more in unendurable physical pain. + 

Later, once in a while, there were fleeting instants almost of lucidity during which, as he was flung through space by the whirlwind of that inhuman, impersonal agony, he yet caught glimpses as it were of his own personality lying there prone, waiting for him to come back to enter it. This half-consciousness always brought the same thought to him.⁠ ⁠… “Poor weak wretch! He had not even force enough to kill himself!” He thought it as of someone else, half-pityingly, half-contemptuously. + 

Then came periods of freedom from pain, incredulous, breathless bliss, poisoned by his horrified apprehension of being touched; for the slightest touch, even of the bed, plunged him again into the abyss. + 

During one of those respites when he lay, scarcely daring to breathe, there came to him the first personal sensation since his fall. He chanced to lie with his head turned towards the room, and for a moment he saw it, as it was, a part of human life, and not merely the background for this endless dying of his! On the floor sat Stephen, very dirty and uncared for, playing with his Teddy-bear! The expression on his face reminded Lester of something⁠ ⁠… something, it seemed, which had begun, something with which he had wanted to go on. But just then Eva had brushed his pillow, and this glimpse back into the human life out of which he had hurled himself vanished in the molten lava of his physical pain. + 

Little by little, some unsuspected and implacable vitality hidden in his body slowly pushed him, groaning and unwilling, out of the living death which he still so passionately desired to make dead death. The weeks passed, he suffered less. He lay passive and empty, staring up at the ceiling, counting and cataloguing all the small blemishes and stains in the plaster. A little strength seeped slowly back into his body. One day he found that he could read for a few moments at a time. He became aware of the life that went on about him. Chiefly it was Stephen’s life, because Stephen was generally in the foreground of the room. + 

Lester began to look down at the child as he played about the floor, watched languidly the expression on his round, pugnacious face, almost always dirty now, but, so it seemed to his father, not always so darkly grim as he remembered it. But then, he thought again (one of the slow thoughts which occasionally pushed their way up to his attention), he had never seen Stephen except in active conflict with authority. + 

“I never saw one of my children just living before,” he meditated. As he lay in bed, a book was usually open before him, but he looked over it at the far more interesting spectacle of his undiscovered little boy. + 

His first voluntary move back towards life was on the day when he had his talk with Stephen about his Teddy. + 

It began by his remembering suddenly what it had been which had begun, and with which he had wanted to go on. The little memory, presenting itself so abruptly out of his subconsciousness, startled him into saying impulsively, “Oh, Stephen, come here a minute. What was it you started to tell me that day⁠—up in the bathroom, when I was shaving⁠—about your Teddy?” + 

The moment he had spoken he realized how foolish the question was. The day seemed like yesterday to him because there had been only blackness for him ever since. But it was two months ago; and two months for a little boy⁠—how could he have thought that Stephen would remember? + 

But, as a matter of fact, Stephen looked as though he remembered very well indeed. He had started at the word “Teddy,” had turned instantly suspicious eyes on his father and had made a clutch at the stuffed bear over whose head he now stared at the man in bed, silently, his mouth a hard line, with the dogged expression of resistance which was so familiar. + 

Lester’s enforced observation of Stephen made this pantomime intelligible to him, in part. Stephen was afraid something would happen to Teddy. Why in the world should he be afraid? + 

On this question he put his attention, watching Stephen closely as he said laughingly, “What’s the matter with you, old man? Do you think I want to take Teddy away to play with him myself?” + 

Stephen’s face relaxed a very little at this. His eyes searched his father’s, deeply and gravely, with an intense wary seriousness, as a white traveler, lost in a jungle amongst savages, might search the eyes of one of the tribe who offered a friendly aspect. Could he be trusted? Or was this just another of their cannibalistic wiles? + 

“I like your Teddy fine,” continued Lester, conversationally. “I always liked the way he snuggles up to you in your bed. I used to wake up and look over at him sometimes. But I’m afraid I’m too old to play with him, myself.” + 

At the mention of Teddy’s sleeping beside him, Stephen looked away and down into the bright, opaque eyes of his fetish, and as he did this, his father felt an acute shock of surprise. The child’s face was passionately tender and loving. He looked as his own mother had looked when she held her first baby in her arms. Lester was so astonished that he was obliged to wait a moment before he could command his voice to casual negligence. + 

“So you don’t remember what it was you were going to ask me about Teddy?” he said, presently. “Well, it was quite a while ago.” + 

So far he had not induced Stephen to say a single word. That was always Stephen’s way of resisting talk, and persuasion, and attempts to reach him. + 

Lester held his book up again and waited. + 

He waited a long time. + 

But waiting was one thing which circumstances made easy for him. There was little else a paralyzed man could do. Stephen sat motionless, his face a blank, staring into space. His father felt the uncertainty and questioning going on under that self-protective front of stolidity. Presently, a long time afterwards, the little boy got up and came slowly towards his father’s bed. “Yes, I ’member what it was,” he said in a low tone, keeping his eyes fixed intently on the expression of his father’s face. “I wanted to ask you⁠ ⁠… to ask you not to let Mother⁠ ⁠…” his voice dropped to a solemn, quavering whisper, “… not to let Mother wash Teddy.” + 

Lester survived the entire and grotesque unexpectedness of this with no more sign of his amazement than a flicker of his eyelids. He considered a dozen different ways of advancing into the undiscovered country and rejected them all in favor of the neutral question, “Was Mother going to wash Teddy?” + 

At this it all came out in a storm, the visit to the lady, the horrible, misshapen, shrunken Teddy there, Mother’s stealing Teddy away at night, the devouring dread in Stephen’s mind, a dread so great that it now overcame even his fierce pride and his anger, as he sobbed out at the last, “Don’t let him be washed, Father! Don’t let him!” He raised his streaming eyes agonizingly towards his father, his whole face quivering. + 

Lester was so horrified that for a moment he could not speak. He was horrified to see Stephen reduced so low. He was more horrified at the position in which he found himself, absolute arbiter over another human being, a being who had no recourse, no appeal from his decisions. It was indecent, he thought; it sinned against human dignity, both his and the child’s.⁠ ⁠… “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master!” he cried to himself, shamed to the core by Stephen’s helpless dependence on his whim, a dependence of which Stephen was so tragically aware, all his stern bulwarks of anger and resistance broken down by the extremity of his fear⁠—fear for what he loved! Fear for himself would never so have transfigured Stephen, never! + 

Lester understood this. More, he felt it himself, felt himself ready to fight for Stephen as Stephen had been ready to fight for Teddy; he, Lester, who had never felt that he had the right to fight for anything of his own. + 

His gaze on the child had passion in it as he said firmly, weightily, “I’ll never have anything done to your Teddy that you don’t want, Stephen. He’s yours. You’ve got the right to have the say-so about him.” + 

Stephen looked at his father blindly, as if he did not understand these strange words. But though they were unfamiliar, though he could not understand them, they gave him hope. “You won’t have him washed?” he asked, clinging to the one point he understood. + 

“Not washed or anything else if you don’t want it,” said his father, reiterating his own point. It seemed to him he could not live another day if he did not succeed in making Stephen understand that. + 

To his astonishment, again to his shame, Stephen burst out with a phrase which had never before passed his lips except under protest, “Oh, thank you, Father! Oh, thank you!” he cried loudly, his lips trembling. + 

Lester found the child’s relief shocking. It made him sick to think what a dread must have preceded it, what a fathomless blackness of uncertainty in Stephen’s life it must represent. He spoke roughly, almost as he would to another man, “You don’t have to thank me, Stevie,” he said. “Great Scott, old boy, it’s none of my business, what you do with your own Teddy, is it?” + 

Even as he spoke⁠—like a lurid side-glimpse⁠—was it possible that there were people who would enjoy thanks extorted on those infamous terms? Were they ever set over children? + 

His insistence seemed to have penetrated a little way through Stephen’s lifelong experience of the nature of things. The little boy stood looking at him, his face serious and receptive, as if a new idea were dawning on him. It was so new that he did not seem to know what to do with it, and in a moment turned away and sat down on the floor again. He reached for his Teddy and sat clasping him in his lap. + 

The two were silent, father and son. + 

Lester said to himself, shivering, “What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings! Absolute, unquestioned power! Nobody can stand that. It’s cold poison. How many wardens of prisons are driven sadistically mad with it!” + 

He recoiled from it with terror. “You have to be a superman to be equal to it.” + 

In the silent room he heard it echoing solemnly, “That’s what it is to be a parent.” + 

He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it. He looked over the edge of his bed at Stephen and abased himself silently. + 

The child sat motionless, clasping Teddy, his face bent and turned away so that Lester could not see its expression. His attitude was that of someone thinking deeply. + 

Well, reflected Lester, there was certainly good reason for the taking of thought by everybody concerned! He let his head fall back on the pillow and, staring up, began for the first time since his fall to think connectedly about something other than his own wretchedness. For the first time the ugly blemishes on the ceiling were not like blotches in his own brain. Presently he forgot them altogether. + 

That sudden contact with Stephen’s utterly unsuspected suffering had been like dropping his fingers unawares upon red-hot iron. His reaction had been the mere reflex of the intolerable pain it gave him. Now, in the long quiet of his sickroom, he set himself to try to understand what it meant. + 

So that had been at the bottom of Stephen’s fierceness and badness in those last days of the old life. So it had been black despair which had filled the child’s heart and not merely an inexplicable desire to make trouble for his mother. For Heaven’s sakes, how far off the track they had been! But however could they have guessed at the real cause of the trouble? What possessed the child to keep such a perverse silence? Why hadn’t he told somebody? How could they know if he never said a word. + 

He thought again of the scene in the bathroom that last morning and saw again Stephen’s wistful face looking up into his. Stephen had tried to tell him. And those sacred itemized accounts of Willing’s Emporium had stopped his mouth. + 

But Evangeline was always on hand. Why hadn’t Stephen.⁠ ⁠… + 

Without a word, with a complete perception that filled all his consciousness, Lester knew why Stephen had never tried to tell his mother. + 

And yet⁠—his sense of fairness made him take up the cudgels for Eva⁠—it hadn’t been such an unreasonable idea of hers. Teddy was certainly as dirty as it was possible for anything to be. You have to keep children clean whether they like it or not. Suppose Teddy had been played with by a child who had scarlet fever? They’d have to have him cleaned, wouldn’t they? He’d gone too far, yielded to a melodramatic impulse when he’d promised Stephen so solemnly they’d never have anything done to Teddy that he didn’t like. + 

But as a matter of fact Teddy never had been near scarlet fever or anything else contagious. And even if he had, weren’t there ways of dry-cleaning and disinfecting that would leave the personality of the toy intact? You didn’t have to soak it in a tub of soapy water. What was the matter with wrapping it in an old cloth and baking it in the oven, as you do with bandages you want to sterilize. If anybody had had the slightest idea that Stephen felt as he did.⁠ ⁠… But nobody had! And that was the point. + 

He saw it now. Nothing turned on the question of whether Teddy should or should not be cleaned. That purely material matter could have been arranged by a little practical ingenuity if it had occurred to anybody that there was anything to arrange. The question really was why had it not occurred to anybody? + 

What was terrifying to Lester was the thought that the conception of trying to understand Stephen’s point of view had been as remote from their minds as the existence of the fourth dimension. + 

And even now that the violent shock of this little scene with Stephen had put the conception into his brain, how under the sun could you ever find out what was felt by a child who shut himself up so blackly in his stronghold of repellent silence? + 

Why had Stephen so shut himself up? + 

The question was as new to Lester as a question of the cause of the law of gravity. It had never occurred to him that perhaps Stephen had not been born that way. + 

But even a sullen stronghold of badness was better than that dreadful breakdown of human dignity. Lester felt he could never endure it again to have Stephen look into his face with that slavish, helpless searching of his eyes. No self-respecting human being could bear that look from another. + 

Could there be human beings⁠—women⁠—mothers⁠—who fattened on it, fought to keep that slave’s look in the eyes of children? He turned from this thought with a start. + 

Well, what good did all this thinking do him? Or Stephen? What could he do now, at once, to escape out of this prison and take Stephen with him? + 

With a heat of anger, he told himself that at least he could start in to make Stephen feel, hour by hour, in every contact with him, that he, even a little boy, had some standing in the world, inviolable by grownups, yes, sacred even to parents. + 

He breathed hard and flung out his arm. + 

For the first time he desired to get well, to live again. + 

XII + 

Helen and Henry Knapp were skipping home from school, hand in hand, to the tune of + 

“Skippety hop to the barbershop + 

To buy a stick of candy. + 

One for you and one for me + 

And one for⁠ ⁠…” + 

They were interrupted by their Aunt Mattie Farnham, who ran out of the house and pounced on them. “For goodness’ sakes, Helen ’n’ Henry, tell me about your folks! I’ve been worried to death about you all.” + 

She stopped, looked down at the new black dress she wore and said, with a decent sigh, “Poor Aunt Emma passed away a week ago, you know. The funeral was day before yesterday. I just got home this morning.” + 

The children tried, not very successfully, to put on a decent soberness to match her sigh, and were silent, not knowing what comment to make. They had, as a matter of fact, heard (although they had long since forgotten it) that Aunt Mattie had been called away clear up to Maine by a telegram announcing the sickness of her husband’s old aunt. Usually they missed Aunt Mattie fearfully when she was away from town. But this time the two months of her absence had been filled far too full with other events. + 

Due respect to the abstract idea of death having been paid, after their fashion, by each of the three, they reentered ordinary life with the exclamation from Aunt Mattie, “Now do tell me how ever in the living world you’ve managed! How do you get along? I haven’t heard a thing, not really to say heard. Mr. Farnham means to do all right, but he’s no hand to write letters. I’d write and write and ask him about a million questions about you all, and all he’d write back would be some little smitch of news and a lot about the weather! He did tell me that your Momma has got a job down at Willing’s and is doing fine. She would! She’s a wonderful woman, your Momma is. Everybody knows that. But however do you manage with your poor Momma away all day and your Poppa the way he is. How is he? Awful bad?” Her kind fair face bent anxiously towards them. + 

It was again as if the children tried, not very successfully, to put on a decent soberness to match her expression. They hesitated as if they did not know exactly what was decorous to say. Then Helen murmured, “Father was awfully bad at first, they said. Mother sent us children off to Brandville to stay with Gramma and Grampa Houghton so we didn’t know anything about that first part. But Gramma got sick, and we had to come home. And Father was lots better by that time.” + 

“But how do you manage?” queried Aunt Mattie again. “How can you, with your poor Momma away? I never thought that house could run a minute without her. She did everything!” + 

“Oh, we manage all right,” said Helen. “Father and us children keep the house.” + 

“Your father! I thought he was in bed!” + 

“No, he’s able to be up in a wheel chair now. The janitor of the store’s old father had a wheel chair and they didn’t sell it after he died and it was up attic and he brought it to Father. He said Father had helped him out at the store when his little boy was sick. Oh, lots of the folks from the store have come to help out. The delivery driver, he said he couldn’t ever forget what Father did for him one time. He won’t tell what it was because he’s ashamed. Only he wanted to help out, too, and as long as we had to have a furnace fire he came in every morning and night to look out for the furnace. And he steps in daytimes now, when he’s going by, to see if everything is all right. And old Mrs. Hennessy, she’s the cleaning woman, she kept coming all the time to help and bring in things to eat, pies, you know! She came in nights and mornings when Father was so bad to do up the work and wouldn’t take any pay for it. She doesn’t have to now, do the work, I mean. But she still does the washings. Only we pay her, of course.” + 

Aunt Mattie’s look of bewilderment sharpened to distraction. “You have only got me more mixed up than ever!” she cried vacantly. “Mercy me! the furnace, the washings.⁠ ⁠… Yes, I see about those. But all the rest! The meals! The housework! Stephen! When I think of how your poor mother slaved to.⁠ ⁠…” She looked at them almost sternly as if suspecting them of levity. + 

Henry said, “Father and all of us get along. You see Father’s all right now, only his legs. He can do anything except walk. And Helen and I do the walking for him.” + 

Mrs. Farnham made an exasperated gesture at their refusal to take in her meaning. “Who does the cooking?” she shouted desperately, getting down to bedrock. + 

“Father does. We all do,” said Helen. “Father’s a lovely cook. He’s learning out of the cookbook. And so am I⁠—learning, I mean. We’re learning together.” + 

Aunt Mattie’s face instantly smoothed into comprehension of everything. She had wondered how they managed without a woman to keep house for them. Now she knew. They didn’t manage. + 

“Oh⁠ ⁠…” she said, and, “Well.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She looked at them compassionately. “I’ll have to get over to your house as fast as ever I can,” she said as if to herself. + 

As her eyes dwelt half-absently on the children, she observed aloud, “Seems to me Henry’s looking better. Not so peaked. Did that pepsin treatment of Dr. Merritt’s really do him some good? I never thought much of pepsin, myself.” + 

The children looked at each other as if surprised by something they had not noticed before. + 

“Why, Henry, that’s so. You haven’t had one of your sick spells for ever so long, have you?” said Helen. To her Aunt Mattie she explained, “We’ve had so much else to think about we haven’t noticed.” + 

Mrs. Farnham rejected pepsin for another diagnosis. “I know what ’tis. The visit to your Gramma and Grampa Houghton! I always told your Momma that what Henry needed was country air. There’s nothing like a change of air, nothing!” + 

Helen said now, “We’ve got to run along, Aunt Mattie. We help about lunch. Father gets it ready, but we clear off and take Stephen out to play a while.” + 

“Oh, that reminds me. How about Stephen? What does.⁠ ⁠… Is he.⁠ ⁠… How does your.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Her ingenuity was not enough to contrive a presentable form for her inquiry, but the child came to her rescue understandingly, “Why, Stephen seems to be growing out of those naughty streaks,” said Helen. “He’s lots better, somehow. He still has a tantrum once in a while, but not nearly so often, nor so bad. You see, he likes Father’s being sick!” She knew how shocking this was on Stephen’s part, and added apologetically, “He’s so little, you know. He doesn’t understand how terrible it is for poor Father. And Father tells him stories. All the time, almost. Stephen loves them. Mother was always too busy to tell stories, you know.” + 

“Well, I should say so indeed!” cried Aunt Mattie, outraged at the picture, even hypothetical, of poor Evangeline’s attempting to tell stories on top of everything else she had to do. + 

“Step along with you, children,” she said now. “I hadn’t ought to have kept you so long, as ’tis. But I’ve been worrying my head off about you all. Tell your Poppa that I’m coming right over there this afternoon to see him just as soon as I get my trunk unpacked and things straightened around a little.” + 

XIII + 

“He that is down need fear no fall, + 

He that is low, no pride,” + 

said Lester Knapp aloud to himself. It was a great pleasure to him to be able to say the strong short Saxon words aloud. For years he had been shutting into the cage of silence all the winged beautiful words which came flying into his mind! And beautiful words which you do not pronounce aloud are like children always forced to “be quiet” and “sit still.” They droop and languish. + 

But before this it would have been too foolish to repeat the lovely lines that came into his mind. What would Harvey Bronson have thought to hear “the army of unalterable law” pronounced in the office of Willing’s Emporium? Lester Knapp smiled to himself at the idea! And if it hadn’t been Harvey Bronson at hand it would have been someone else just as scandalized. + 

But now there was no one to hear, no one but little Stephen playing with his toy train on the newspapers spread out over the floor. A blessed healing solitude lay about Lester as he sat in his wheel chair in the sunny kitchen peeling a panful of potatoes. It had been when he looked down at the gingham apron spread over his paralyzed knees that the song of the little shepherd had come to his mind. A gingham apron on a man! And peeling potatoes! + 

He supposed that Harvey Bronson would die of shame if anybody put a gingham apron on him and expected him to peel potatoes. And yet there was nobody who talked louder than he about the sacred dignity of the home which ennobled all the work done for its sake⁠—that was for Mrs. Harvey Bronson of course! + 

Lester Knapp smiled again, his slow, whimsical smile which Harvey Bronson especially detested and feared. Then he stopped thinking about his old associate at the office. The lines which had come into his mind brought with them all the world to which they belonged, the strong-hearted, simple, passionate world of the old cobbler-pilgrim. Where were those lines? Towards the end of the book, wasn’t it, just below that quaint marginal note of Men thrive in the Valley of Humiliation. It was where the pilgrims were going⁠—yes, now he remembered the very words with that exactitude of memory which had been such a golden thing in his life, “They were going along talking and espied a boy feeding his father’s sheep. The boy was in very mean clothes, but of a fresh, well-favored countenance; and as he sat by himself he sang. ‘Hark!’ said Mr. Greatheart, ‘to what the shepherd’s boy saith.’ So they harkened.” + 

Lester Knapp, peeling his potatoes, harkened with them as he said aloud again, + 

“He that is down need fear no fall, + 

He that is low no pride. + 

He that is humble ever shall + 

Have God to be his guide. + 

I am content with what I have + 

Little be it or much.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He perceived that Stephen had stopped playing and was looking at him steadily as he said the words aloud. With a flourish of his paring knife he went on, smiling at the little boy, “Then said the guide, ‘Do you hear him? I will dare to say that this boy lives a merrier life and wears more of that herb called heart’s ease in his bosom than he that is clad in silk and velvet!’ + 

“Silk and velvet!” he said with a humorous scorn, lifting a fold of his gingham apron. + 

“Is it a ’tory?” asked Stephen, coming up beside his father’s chair. + 

“You bet your life it is a story, a crackajack of a story.” + 

“Tell it to me,” said Stephen. He leaned both elbows on the arm of the chair, put his round chin in his hands, tipped his head to one side and turned his shining dark eyes up towards his father’s face. + 

A phrase came to Lester’s mind, the description of the day when Bunyan had first seen the great invisible world henceforth to be his heart’s home, and how it had begun by his seeing in one of the streets of Bedford, “three or four poor people sitting at a door in the sun talking of the things of God.” He and Stephen were poor people too, sitting in the sun⁠—such golden sunshine as came through the window into the quiet room and fell on the head of his little boy. + 

“Well, Stephen, once upon a time there was a man,” he began, deciding that the rolling off of the burden and the fight with Apollyon were most in Stephen’s line. He wondered if he could find in the old story stuff to interest a modern little boy, and in a moment was carried away by it. What a tale it was! How full of pith and meat and savor! + 

The potatoes were all peeled before he finished the story of the fight, so that he laid down his paring knife and turned entirely to Stephen as they came to the climax. They had adventured down the terrible Valley of Death and were now in the hand-to-hand combat, cut! slash! forward! back! “Then Apollyon began to gather up close to Christian and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall; and with that, Christian’s sword flew out of his hand!” + 

He paused dramatically. Stephen’s wide eyes grew wider! His lips were parted. He did not seem to breathe, all his being suspended on his father’s words. It was plain he had forgotten where he was, or who. “Then said Apollyon, ‘I am sure of thee now!’ ” said Lester, and Stephen shivered. + 

“But Christian reached out quick, quick and snatched up his sword and ran it deep into that horrible old Apollyon and made him stagger back to get his breath! And then Christian scrambled up on his feet and ran at the dragon, shouting! And with that Apollyon spread out his dragon wings and sped him away and Christian saw him no more.” + 

Stephen drew a long breath. “Golly!” he said fervently. + 

“Yes, I should say as much,” agreed his father, pushing his chair over to the stove and dropping the potatoes into the boiling water. How exciting it was, he thought, how absorbing, to see those first impressions of power and courage touch a new human soul. And when it was your own little boy.⁠ ⁠… To share with him one of the immortal fine things created by the human spirit! + 

He sat still for a moment, remembering the book, soaking himself in its flavor and color, tasting some of the quaint, posy-like phrases, + 

“Some things are of that nature as to make + 

One’s fancy chuckle while his heart doth ache!” + 

Harvey Bronson for instance. + 

And, “Some people are never for religion until it walks with silver slippers in the sunshine.” Was that Mr. Prouty? + 

Still musing, he wheeled himself into the dining-room and began to set the table for lunch. Through the clicking of the silver, Stephen could hear him say, “His daughter went through the Dark River, singing, but none could understand what she said⁠ ⁠… none could understand what she said.” + 

It sounded like a song to Stephen, although Father was only talking to himself. + 

When he came out again into the kitchen and began to slice the bacon, he was saying in a loud, strong voice, “So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side! All the trumpets sounded.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The words rang in Stephen’s ears. He said them over to himself in a murmur as he handled his top absently. “All the twumpets sounded. All the twumpets sounded on the other side.” + 

After a time he asked, “Father, what’s a twumpet?” + 

A question from Stephen! + 

His father turned his head from the frying-pan from which the bacon sent up its thin blue wreaths of smoke. “What’s a trumpet? It’s a great, gleaming brass horn which always, always has been blown where there has been a victory⁠—like this!” He flung up his arm, holding an imaginary trumpet to his lips, “Taranta! Taranta!” He sounded it out ringingly! “That’s the way they sounded when Mr. Valiant crossed the Dark River.” + 

“Taranta!” murmured Stephen to himself. “And all the twumpets sounded.” + 

He sat in the sun on the kitchen floor, looking up at his crippled father frying bacon. For both of them the kitchen was ringing with the bright brazen shout of victory. + 

Men thrive in the Valley of Humiliation. + 

XIV + 

Lester was glad to see Mattie Farnham come bustling in the very afternoon of the day she returned from Maine. He liked Mattie⁠—indeed he almost loved her⁠—in spite of the fact that so far as he had been able to ascertain she had never yet understood anything he ever said to her. They did not use at all the same vocabulary, but they held friendly communication by means of sign-language, like a dog and cat who have grown up in the same house and have an old affection for each other. + 

“Hello there, Mattie,” he welcomed her, as she entered. “How are the potatoes in Maine? Ours have spots in them.” + 

It amused him with Mattie to disconcert her decent sense of what was the suitable attitude to strike. He knew that both she and her husband were relieved to have their ninety-year-old, bedridden aunt safely and painlessly in the next world. Blessed if he’d go through the motions of condoling with her. + 

But he saw at once that he had shocked not her sense of the proper attitude about Aunt Emma but about himself. She had come over prepared to “sympathize” with him. Mattie always had to go through the proper motions. + 

“How are you getting on, Lester?” she asked earnestly, with her best Ladies’ Guild flatness of intonation. “You can’t imagine how I have worried about you and poor Eva and the dear children. I’ve been sick to think I wasn’t here to help out in this sad time. Now I’m back you must let me do everything I can.” + 

“You might come and call on Stephen and me once in a while and bring us some of your famous home-cooking,” he suggested mischievously. She laughed, in spite of herself, at his jibe over her weakness for delicatessen potato salad. “You miserable sinner!” she cried, in her own voice, dropping for an instant into their old joking relationship. She sobered at once, however, into what Lester called to himself the “mourners-waiting-for-the-benediction manner” and said, “I was planning as I walked over how I could arrange my own work to have two hours free every afternoon and come here to do for you.” + 

“You’ll find it all done,” he told her genially. “You can’t beat me to it. Come along all the same, and we’ll play cribbage.” She was perplexed as well as shocked by his levity and at last simply threw herself on his mercy, “Lester, do tell me all about things,” she said in an honest, human tone of affection and concern which brought from him an answer in kind. + 

“Well, Mattie, I will. It was hell at first⁠ ⁠… all the kinds of hell there are. But you know how folks are, how you get used to everything. And I got better, got so it didn’t make me faint away with pain to have somebody touch the bed. And then little by little I settled down to where I am now. Both legs incurably paralyzed, I’m told, but the rest of me all right. In the meantime, Eva⁠—you know how Eva never lies down and gives up⁠—as soon as I could be left, hustled right out and got a job. She’s in the Cloak-and-Suits at Willing’s now, and making good money. What with her commissions on extra sales, she’s making just about what I did. With the promise of a good raise soon. The Willings have treated her very white, I must say. And I imagine she is the wonder of the world as a saleswoman.” + 

“She would be, at anything!” breathed Mattie devoutly. + 

“She surely would,” agreed her husband heartily. “Well, here at the house we’ve shuffled things around into a new pattern, and we’re getting on. I can do anything that needs to be done on this floor with Henry and Helen’s help, and the doctor says I’ll soon be on crutches and able to get upstairs once a day. It seemed queer to be doing housework, but there isn’t another mortal thing I can do but to keep things running. So I do.” + 

“Poor Lester!” said Mattie, just as he knew she would. + 

“Not on your life!” he told her. “I don’t mind the work a bit, now I’ve got used to the idea. I can’t say it is exactly enlivening to be tied up to half your body that’s dead but not buried, but I haven’t got anything else to complain of. As to the housework, I haven’t had such a good time in years. You know what an absentminded scut I am, with my head always full of odds and ends of book-junk I like to mull over. Well, housework doesn’t interfere with thinking as account-keeping does, believe me! I can start my hands and arms to washing dishes or peeling potatoes or setting the table, and then leave them to do the job while I roam from China to Peru. Every time I tried that at the office⁠—the bottom dropped out. Here I’ve more time for thinking and for reading too in the evenings! The children bring the books to me from the Library.” + 

“Well, it’s very brave of you to take it that way, I’m sure,” said Mattie with a decent sigh of sympathy. + 

He thought to himself with exasperation that Mattie’s mental indolence was invincible. She never made the slightest effort of her own accord to escape from the rubber-stamp formula in which she had been brought up. By lively joshing you could occasionally jolt her into a spontaneous perception of her own, but the minute you stopped, back she sank and pulled the cover of the Ladies’ Guild mummy-case over her. And she was so human under it⁠—one of the most human people he had ever met. As he was thinking all this, by no means for the first time in his life, she caught out of the corner of her eye a glimpse of something in the kitchen over which she now exclaimed in amazement “What in the name of time is all that litter of papers on the kitchen floor?” + 

“All that litter?” he protested. “That’s not litter, that is an original exercise of the human intelligence in contact with real life. You encounter so few of those you don’t recognize one when you meet it. That is one of the patented inventions of the Knapp Family, Incorporated.” + 

She looked at him dumbly with the patient expression of bewilderment which always brought him to time. He began to explain, literally and explicitly, “We have executive sessions, the children and I, to figure out ways and means to cope with life and not get beaten by small details. We all got together on this floor proposition. We put it to ourselves this way: the kitchen floor has to be scrubbed to keep it clean. None of us are smart enough to scrub it. What’s the answer? Of course Eva must simply do nothing whatever about the house. The doctor issued an ultimatum about that. She has all she can do at the store. Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but Stephen got the answer. He said, ‘When I paint with my watercolors, Mother always ’preads papers down on the floor.’ + 

“Done! The attic was piled to the eaves with old newspapers. Every day Helen or Henry brings down a fresh supply. We spread them around two or three thick, drop our grease on them with all the peace of mind in the world, whisk them up at night before Eva comes in, and have a spotless floor to show her. What’s the matter with that?” + 

“Why, I never heard of such a thing in my life!” cried Mattie. + 

“People seemed to think,” reflected Lester, “that they make an all-sufficient comment when they say that.” + 

She got up now and walked to the kitchen door to gaze down on the paper. + 

“That’s a sample of the way we do business,” said Lester to her back. He wheeled himself over to the table and took out of a workbasket a pair of Stephen’s little stockings which he prepared to darn. + 

Mattie turned, saw what he was doing and pounced on him with shocked, peremptory benevolence. “Oh, Lester, let me do that! The idea of your darning stockings! It’s dreadful enough your having to do the housework!” + 

“Eva darned them a good many years,” he said, with some warmth, “and did the housework. Why shouldn’t I?” He looked at her hard and went on, “Do you know what you are saying to me, Mattie Farnham? You are telling me that you really think that homemaking is a poor, mean, cheap job beneath the dignity of anybody who can do anything else.” + 

Mattie Farnham was for a moment helpless with shock over his attack. When she slowly rose to a comprehension of what he had said she shouted indignantly, “Lester Knapp, how dare you say such a thing! I never dreamed of having such an awful idea.” She brought out a formula again, but this time with heartfelt personal conviction, “Homemaking is the noblest work anybody can do!” + 

“Why pity me then?” asked Lester with a grin, drawing his needle in and out of the little stocking. + 

“Well, but.⁠ ⁠…” she said breathlessly, and was silent. + 

There was a pause. Then she asked meekly, climbing down with relief from the abstruse and unfamiliar abstract to the friendly concrete, “However in the world did you learn to darn, Lester?” + 

“Out of a book,” he told her tranquilly. “While I was still in bed I sent to the Library for any books they had on housekeeping. They sent me some corking ones⁠—as good reading as ever I saw.” + 

“Why, I didn’t know they had books about housekeeping at the Library!” said Mattie, who was a great reader of novels. + 

“I bet I know more about cooking than you do, this minute,” he said, laughing at her. “Why do you put your flour for a cream sauce into the butter and cook it before you add the milk?” + 

“I don’t,” she said, astonished. “I heat my milk and mix my flour with a little cold water and.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Well, you’re wrong,” he said authoritatively. “That’s not the best way. The flour isn’t thoroughly cooked. Fat can be heated many degrees hotter than water.” + 

Mattie Farnham felt herself sinking deeper and deeper into a stupid bewilderment. Was it really Lester Knapp with whom she sat discussing recipes? She had come over to sympathize and condole with him. However in the living world had she been switched off to cream sauce? She got up, shook herself and took a step or two around the room. + 

“Don’t go looking to see if the furniture is dusted or the floor polished,” said Lester calmly. “We concentrate on the important things in our house and let the non-essentials go.” + 

“I wasn’t thinking about dust!” she told him, exasperated (although she had been). And then, struck by a sudden thought, “Where’s Stephen?” + 

“Out in his sandpile.” + 

“Why, I thought he ran away if he was left out of anybody’s sight for a minute. I thought you didn’t dare let him be by himself for.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Oh, Stevie’s all right,” said Lester carelessly; “he’s coming along like a house afire.” + 

He wheeled himself to the door, opened it and rolled his chair out on the porch. A blue-denimed little figure rose up from the other end and showed a tousled head, bright dark eyes and a round dirty face with a calm expression. “I got my tunnel fixed,” he announced. + 

“Did you?” asked Lester, with interest. “That can business did work?” To Mattie he explained, “Stephen is fixing up a railway system, and the sand kept falling in on his tunnel. We finally thought of taking the bottom out of an old baking-powder can. That leaves it open at both ends.” + 

“It works dandy,” said Stephen. He now added of his own accord, with a casual look at Mrs. Farnham, “Hello, Aunt Mattie.” + 

It was the first time Mrs. Farnham could remember that she had ever had a friendly greeting from Stephen. Eva’s conscientious attempts to make him perform the minimum of decent salutations, to come and shake hands and say “How do you do?” usually ended in a storm of raging stamping refusals. + 

“Hello, Stephen,” she answered, feeling quite touched by his friendly tone. He looked very quiet and good-natured, too. Well, of course, all children do grow out of their naughty ways if you can only live till then. She had always said that Stephen would outgrow his. But she had never believed it. It was a good idea to have a sandpile for him. Children always like them. Of course it brought sand into the house something terrible. Children never would wipe their feet. But now that any attempt at real housekeeping had been given up in poor Eva’s house, a little more or less dirt didn’t matter. She had as a matter of fact (although she had denied it) noticed that the corners of the room were very dusty. And those preposterous papers on the floor! What a ridiculous idea! + 

No more ridiculous than having the sandpile on the porch! Whoever heard of such a thing! + 

“I should think you’d find it hard to keep the porch clean,” she said to Lester. + 

“We don’t,” he said bafflingly. + 

“Why not have it out in the yard?” + 

“Some of the playthings would get spoiled by the rain.” He advanced this as conclusive. + 

Stephen had squatted down again to his sand. She went cautiously towards the wide plank to see what he was doing, prepared to have him snarl out one of his hateful catchwords: “Go ’way! Go ’way!” or the one he had acquired lately, the insolent, “Who’s doing this anyhow?” + 

But what she saw was so astonishing to her that before she could stop to think, she burst out in an impulsive exclamation of admiration, “Why, Stephen Knapp, did you do all that yourself?” + 

Beyond the board lay a tiny fairy-world of small, tree-lined, pebble-paved roads, moss-covered hills, small looking-glass lakes, white pasteboard farmhouses with green blinds, surrounded by neat white toothpick fences, broad meadows with red-and-white paper cows and a tiny farm wagon with minute, plumped-out sacks, driving to the railroad. + 

A large area of her own simple consciousness was still sunny with child-heartedness, and it was with the utmost sincerity of accent that she cried out, “Why, I’d love to play with that myself!” + 

Stephen looked proudly up at her and lovingly down at his creation. “You can if you want to.” He conceded the privilege with lordly generosity. + 

She got stiffly down on her middle-aged knees, to be nearer the little world, and clasped her hands in ecstasy over the “sweet little barn” and the “darling locomotive.” Why, she remembered now that she herself had given that toy train to Stephen. The last time she had noticed it was when, unsurprised, she had seen Stephen kicking it down the stairs. Lucky it was made of steel. + 

“It fits in just great,” said Stephen, also remembering who had given it. “I never had any way to play with it before. See, it carries the corn from this farm to the city. I’m going to start in on the city tomorrow, over there in that corner, as soon’s I get the track fixed. Mother is going to bring me some little houses from the ten-cent store. Mother brought me the little wagon and horses. She brings me something ’most every night. Those bags are filled with real cornmeal.” + 

“Oh, see the real grade-crossing with the little ‘Look out for the engine’ sign,” cried Mrs. Farnham rapturously. + 

They had both entirely forgotten Lester. He smiled to himself and wheeled his chair back into the house. Mattie was a fat old darling, that’s what she was. + 

He went on darning the little stocking and murmuring to himself, + 

“She wars not with the mystery + 

Of time and distance, night and day: + 

The bonds of our humanity. + 

Her joy is like an instinct joy + 

Of kitten, bird, or summer fly. + 

She dances, runs without an aim; + 

She chatters in her ecstasy.” + 

When Mattie came in, not dancing at all but walking rather rheumatically as though her knees creaked, she closed the door behind her and said in an impressive way, “Lester Knapp, that is a very smart thing for Stephen to do. I don’t believe you appreciate it. There’s not one five-year-old child in a hundred with the headpiece to do it.” + 

He answered with an impressive manner of his own, “Appreciate it! I’m the fellow who does appreciate it! Stephen Knapp is a very remarkable child, I’d have you to know, Mrs. Farnham. I bet you a nickel he will amount to more than anybody else in this whole town if he only gets the right chance.” + 

As she walked home, Mattie thought how funny it was to hear a man going on like a mother, standing up for the least promising of the children! + 

But all the same, perhaps there was more to Stephen than just his cussedness. + 

How cheerful Lester had seemed! It must be that his food had set better than usual today. + 

XV + 

Saturdays were great days for “the Knapp Family, Incorporated.” They were together at home all day, and always with a great variety of schemes on hand. In the morning Henry usually relapsed from his eleven-year-old dignity back into younger days and played with Stephen, especially since the sandpile settlement had been started, and since they had a brood of chickens to care for. Old Mrs. Hennessy came to give the house the weekly, thorough, cellar-to-garret cleaning which Lester had found was the best way to keep Evangeline from spending Sunday with a mop and broom. In the kitchen Helen and her father, foregathering over the cookbook, struggled fervently with cookery more ambitious than that of the usual weekday. + 

Helen loved these Saturday morning cooking-bees as she called them. She and Father had such a good time together. It was so funny, Father not knowing any more than she did about it all and having to study it out from the book. Lots of times she, even she, was able to give him pointers about things the cookbook didn’t tell. + 

For instance, at the very beginning, that historic first day, long ago, when they had first cooked together and timorously tried to have scrambled eggs for lunch, it had been Helen who conquered those bomb-like raw eggs. Lester had gingerly broken off the top of one, and was picking the shell carefully away, when Helen said informingly, “That’s not the way. Mother gives them a crack in the middle on the edge of the bowl and opens them that way.” + 

“How? Show me,” said her father docilely, handing her another egg. Feeling very important, Helen took it masterfully and, holding it over the edge of the bowl, lifted her hand with an imitation of Mother’s decisive gesture. But she did not bring it down. She shuddered, rolled her eyes at her father and said miserably, “Suppose I hit it too hard, and it all spurts out?” + 

Her father felt no impulse to cry out bitterly on her imbecile ineptitude. Rather he sympathized with her panic, “Yes, raw eggs are the dickens!” he said, understandingly. + 

Intimidated, they both looked at the smooth, oval enigma. + 

“You do it,” said Helen, with her self-distrusting impulse to shift responsibility to someone else. + 

Her father refused with horror to assume it. “Not on your life!” he cried. “You were the one who’d seen Mother do it.” + 

“Doesn’t the cookbook say how to do it anywhere?” asked Helen, trying to fall back on someone else. “There is a chapter at the end that tells you how to take out ink-stains and what to do for people who have got poisoned, and all sorts of things. Maybe it’ll say there.” + 

They laid down the egg to search, but found nothing in the four hundred pages of the big book that told them how to break a raw egg. + 

“Perhaps you could lay it down on a plate and cut it in two with a knife,” suggested Lester. + 

Even Helen knew better than this. She knew better than that when she was born, she thought, suppressing a pitying smile, “Gracious no! You would get the shell all mixed up with the insides,” she explained. They stared again at the egg. + 

To Helen came the knowledge that responsibility must be assumed. + 

“Somebody’s got to,” she said grimly. “I’ll try again.” + 

She took the egg in her hand and resolutely struck it a small blow on the edge of the bowl. The shell cracked a little. + 

“That sounds good,” said Lester; “give it another whack.” + 

She repeated the blow and, holding the egg up above her head till she could see the under side, reported that there was a perceptible crack and some wetness oozing out. + 

But that was not enough. She must go on and see it through. How queer not to have somebody tell her what to do and make her do it. “I’m going to try to pull it apart,” she announced courageously, feeling like a heroine. She got the tips of her fingers into the tiny crack and pulled, shutting her eyes. + 

Something happened. A gush of cold sticky stuff over her fingers, a little glass-like tinkle of breaking eggshell in her hand, and there in the bowl were the contents of the egg, the golden yolk swimming roundly in the transparent white. + 

“Hurrah! Good for you!” shouted her father admiringly. + 

But Helen found in her heart a new conscience which made her refuse to accept too easily won praise. “No, that’s not right,” she said, frowning at the crushed, dripping shell in her hand. “When Mother does it, the stuff comes out nice and clean, with each half of the shell like a little cup.” + 

She closed her eyes, summoned all her willpower and thought back to the times when she had watched Mother cook. + 

Mother held it so (Helen went through the pantomime), she brought it down with a little quick jerk, so, and then.⁠ ⁠… “Oh, goody! goody! I know!” she cried, hopping up and down. “I know. She turns it over after she’s cracked it, with the crack on the upside, and then she pries it open. Give me another egg.” + 

Well, it certainly was a far cry from those early fumbling days, wasn’t it, to now, when both she and Father could crack and separate an egg with their eyes shut and one hand tied behind their backs, so to speak; when they thought nothing of turning out in a Saturday morning a batch of bread, two pies, and enough cookies to last them a week. They didn’t even talk about their cooking much any more, just decided what they were going to make and went ahead and made it, visiting together as they worked like a couple of magpies chattering. + 

Father often told her poetry as she stepped to and fro; the kitchen seemed to her just chock-full of poetry. Father had said so much there the walls seemed soaked with it. Sometimes in the evening when she went in just before she went to bed to get a drink of water or to see that the bread sponge was all right, it seemed to her, especially if she were a little sleepy, that she could hear a murmur of poetry all around her, the way a shell murmurs when you put it to your ear.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Now all away to Tir na n’Og are many roads that run,” + 

“Keen as are the arrows + 

Of that silver sphere.” + 

“Waken, lords and ladies gay! + 

To the greenwood haste away!” + 

“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea + 

But sad mortality o’ersways their power, + 

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea.⁠ ⁠…” + 

It was not water that Helen Knapp drank out of the tin dipper hung over the sink. It was ambrosia. + 

And Father told her stories, too, all kinds, lots of funny ones that set them into gales of laughter! + 

And they talked, talked about everything, about her writing, and what she was reading in school, and the last book she had got out of the Library, and once in a great while Father would tell her something about when he went to the State University and what an exciting time he’d had finding out how much he loved books and poetry. Helen had never heard Father speak of those years till now. He seemed to feel, the way she did, that it was easier to talk about things you cared awfully about when you were working together. Helen often wondered why this was, why she didn’t feel so queer and shy when she was doing something with her hands, buttering a cake-tin, or cutting animal-shaped cookies out of the dough that Father rolled so beautifully thin. She even found that she could talk to Father about “things.” + 

By “things” Helen meant all that she had always before kept to herself, what she had never supposed you could talk about to anybody⁠—the little poems that sprang up in your head; what you felt when the spring days began to dapple the sidewalks with shadows from the baby leaves; what you felt when you woke up at night and heard the freight-trains hooting and groaning to and fro in the yards⁠—Helen loved living near the railroad⁠—what you thought about growing up; what you thought about God; what kind of a husband you would like to have when you were big; what kind of children you hoped you’d have. “I’d kind of like a little baby boy with curly yellow hair,” she said thoughtfully one day, as she bent her head over the butter and sugar she was creaming together. + 

“Henry was like that when he was little,” her father said reminiscently. “It was nice. You were an awfully nice baby, too, Helen. Of course, being the first, you made the biggest impression on me. You had ideas of your very own from the time you began to creep. You never would go on your hands and knees like other babies. You always went on your hands and feet, with your little behinder sticking up in the air like a ship’s prow.” + 

Helen laughed over that. She loved to have her father tell all about when she had been a baby, and how much he had loved her, and how smart she had been, and sometimes how funny, as on the day when she had thought Mrs. Anderson had stayed long enough and had toddled over to her, putting out a fat little hand and saying firmly, “Bye-bye, Mis’ Anderson. Bye-bye!” + 

Gracious! How long ago that seemed to Helen, and how grown-up it made her feel, now that she was such a big girl, thirteen years old, helping to do up the week’s baking and all. She felt old and ripe and sure of herself as she listened to those baby-stories and wrung out the dishcloths competently. (She and Father had wrestled with the question of how to hold the dishcloths when you wrung them out, as they had wrestled with the method of breaking an egg, and had slowly worked it out together.) + 

She came to feel that talking to Father, when they were alone together, was almost like thinking aloud, only better, because there was somebody to help you figure things out when you got yourself all balled up. Before this Helen had spent a great deal of time trying to figure things out by herself, and getting so tangled that she didn’t know where she had begun nor how to stop the wild whirl racing around in her head. But now, with Father to hang on to, she could unravel those twisted skeins of thought and wind them into balls where she could get at them. + 

One day, as she washed the breakfast dishes for Father to wipe, she noticed how the daffodils Aunt Mattie had brought were reflected in a wet milk-pan. It made her think a poem, which she said over in her head to make sure it was all right, and then repeated to Father, + 

“The shining tin usefulness of the milk-pan + 

Is glorified into beauty + 

By the presence of a flower.” + 

Father listened, looked at the golden reflection in the pan, said appreciatively, “So it is,” and added, “That’s quite a pretty poem, especially the last phrase.” + 

Helen knew it was pretty. She had secretly a high opinion of her own talents. Why had she said it aloud except to make Father think what a remarkable child she was? She washed the dishes thoughtfully, feeling a gnawing discomfort. It was horrid of her to have said that just to make Father admire her. It was showing off. She hated people who showed off. She decided ascetically to punish herself by owning up to her conceit. “I only told that poem to you because I thought it would make you think what a poetic child I am,” she confessed contritely. “It wasn’t really that I thought so much about the flower.” + 

She felt better. There now! Father would think what an honest, sincere child she was! + 

Oh, dear! Oh, dear! That was showing off too! As bad as the first time! She said hastily, “And I only owned up because I thought it would make you think I’m honest and didn’t want to show off!” + 

This sort of tortuous winding was very familiar to Helen. She frequently got herself into it and never knew how to get out. It always frightened her a little, made her lose her head. She felt startled now. “Why, Father, do you suppose I only said that, too, to make you.⁠ ⁠…” She lifted her dripping hands out of the dishwater and turned wide, frightened eyes on her father. “Oh, Father, there I go! Do you ever get going like that? One idea hitched to another and another and another; and you keep grabbing at them and can’t get hold of one tight enough to hold it still?” + 

Lester laughed ruefully. “Do I? Nothing but! I often feel like a dog digging into a woodchuck hole, almost grabbing the woodchuck’s tail and never quite getting there.” + 

“That’s just it!” said the little girl fervently. + 

“I tell you, Helen,” said Lester, “that’s one of the reasons why it’s a pretty good thing for anybody with your kind of mind, or mine, to go to college. If you try, you can find out in college how to get after those thoughts that chase their own tails like that.” + 

“You can?” said Helen, astonished that other people knew about them. + 

“I suppose you think,” conjectured Lester, hanging up the potato-masher, “that you’re the only person bothered that way. But as a matter of fact, lots and lots of people have been from the beginning of time! You’ve heard about the Greek philosophers, haven’t you? Well, that is really about all they were up to.” + 

There was a pause, while Helen wiped off the top of the kitchen table. + 

Then she remarked thoughtfully, “I believe I’d like to go to college.” + 

It was the first time she had ever thought of it. + 

Oh, no, it was not always recipes they talked about on Saturday mornings! + 

And on Saturday nights, as he reached for some book to take to bed with him, Lester’s hand not infrequently fell on an old, rubbed, shabby volume which fell open at the passage, + 

“The thought of our past years in me doth breed + 

Perpetual benediction: not indeed + 

For that which is most worthy to be blest⁠— + 

Delight and liberty, the simple creed + 

Of childhood whether busy or at rest, + 

But for those obstinate questionings + 

Of sense and outward things, + 

Fallings from us, vanishings; + 

Blank misgivings of a creature + 

Moving about in worlds not realized, + 

High instincts, before which our mortal nature + 

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised: + 

But for those first affections, + 

Those shadowy recollections, + 

Which, be they what they may, + 

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, + 

Are yet the master-light of all our seeing; + 

Uphold us⁠—cherish⁠—and have power to make + 

Our noisy years seem moments in the being + 

Of the eternal silence: truths that wake, + 

To perish never: + 

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, + 

Nor man, nor boy, + 

Nor all that is at enmity with joy, + 

Can utterly abolish or destroy!” + 

From here on, Lester always felt a great tide lift him high.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Hence, in a season of calm weather, + 

Though inland far we be, + 

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea + 

Which brought us hither, + 

Can in a moment travel thither + 

And see the children sport upon the shore, + 

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.” + 

It was to the shouts of those children, to the reverberation of those mighty waters that the paralyzed accountant often slipped quietly from his narrow, drudging life into the “being of eternal silence.” + 

XVI + 

One of the most embittering elements of Lester’s old life had been the absence of any leisure when he could really think⁠—consider things consecutively enough to make any sort of sense out of them. He seemed to himself to live perpetually in the mental attitude of a man with his watch in one hand and a heavy valise in the other running for a train which was already overdue. How much value would the judgment of such a man have? + 

He had always thought he would like to be able to sit right down quietly to think out a thing or two. Now he certainly had all the sitting down quietly that anybody could want. Well, he liked it as much as he had thought he would. And more! He brought under his consideration one after another of the new elements of his new life, holding them firmly under the lens of his intelligence, focusing on them all his attention, and to his astonished relief saw them one by one yield to his analysis, give up their tortured, baffling aspect of mystery and tragedy, and lie open to his view, open to his hand, open to his forward-looking planning. He had never lived with his family before, he had never seen more of their lives than the inexplicable and tangled loose ends over which they all stumbled wretchedly. Now that for months he had had the opportunity for continuous observation, he perceived that there was nothing so darkly inexplicable, after all, nothing that resisted a patient, resourceful attempt to follow up those loose ends and straighten out some of the knots. + 

Even in the tragic tangle of Stephen’s strange little nature, Lester felt he had begun to find his way. He had found out this much: Stephen had more vitality than all the rest of them put together (except Eva, of course). And when it did not find free outlet it strangled and poisoned him, made him temporarily insane, in the literal sense of the word, like a strong masterful man shut up by an accident deep in a coal-mine, who might fall insanely to work with his bare hands to claw away the obstructing masses of dead, brute matter that kept him from the light of day! That was what Stephen made him think of; that was, so Lester divined, the meaning of the wild, fierce flame in Stephen’s eyes which had always so shocked and grieved them. They were of another breed, the kind who would sit down patiently and resignedly to die, not fight till the last minute with bleeding hands. + 

All but Eva⁠—oh, poor darling Eva! How much better Lester understood his wife after those few months of observing her in a life that suited her than after fourteen years of seeing her grimly and heroically enduring a life that did not. Was this Eva the same as the old one? This Eva who came in every evening tired, physically tired as he had never seen her, but appeased, satisfied, fulfilled, having poured out in work she loved the furious splendor of her vigor. + 

His heart ached with remorse as he thought of the life to which he had condemned her. Why, like Stephen, she had been buried alive in a shaft deep under the earth, and she had not even had Stephen’s poor passionate outlet of misdirected fury. What she thought was her duty had held her bound fast in a deathlike silence and passivity. He remembered the somber, taciturn, self-contained woman who had sat opposite him, year after year, at the supper-table. Could that be the same Eva who now, evening after evening, made them all gay with her accounts of the humors of her profession; who could take off a fussy customer so to the life that even Stephen laughed; who could talk with such inspired animation of the variations of fashion that even he listened, deadly as was his hatred for fashion and all that it stood for! He had never even suspected that Eva had this jolly sense of humor! Could it be the same Eva who so briskly dealt the cards around every evening and took up her hand with such interest? + 

Those evenings of whist had been an inspiration of his, in answer to two questions he had set himself: What could he invent that would keep Eva’s mind off the housekeeping in the evenings? And what could he and Eva and the children do together, which they would all really and truly enjoy⁠—what was some natural manner in which to make a civilized contact between the two generations and the widely differing temperaments? It was delightful to him to see how Eva enjoyed it, how she liked to win (just think of her caring to win! How young in nature she remained! She made him feel like Methuselah!). How cheerily and heartily she coached Henry along, how the children admired her skill and luck, and how she enjoyed their admiration. + 

Heavens! How unhappy she must have been before, like a Titan forced to tend a miniature garden; forced to turn the great flood of that inherited, specialized ability of hers into the tiny shallow channels of the infinitely minute detail of childcare; forced, day after day, hour by hour, minute by minute, with no respite, into a life-and-death closeness of contact with the raw, unfinished personalities of the children, from which her own ripe maturity recoiled in an ever-renewed impatience. Eva always hated anything unfinished! And nothing around her ever stayed unfinished very long. How she put through any job she undertook! She had sat up all one night to finish that sofa she had so wonderfully refurbished. + 

But you couldn’t put through the job of bringing up children. No amount of energy on your part, no, not if you sat up all night every night of your life, could hurry by a single instant the slow unfolding from within of a child’s nature.⁠ ⁠… + 

Eva dropped out of Lester’s mind whenever he thought of this, and he was all flooded with the sweet, early-morning light that shone from his daughter’s childhood. He always felt like taking off his hat when he thought of Helen. + 

Sometimes when they were working together and Helen was moved to lift the curtain shyly and let him look at her heart, he held his breath before the revelation of the strange, transparent whiteness of her thoughts. That was the vision before which the greatest of the poets had prostrated themselves. And yet the best that had been done by the greatest of them was only a faint shimmer from the distant shrine. He understood now how Blake, all his lifelong, had been shaken when he thought of children, “Thousands of little boys and girls, raising their innocent hands.” Through all the leaping, furious, prophetic power of Blake, there ran, like a sun-flooded stream, this passion of loving reverence for little girls and boys. + 

And under his quaintly formal rhymed words, how Wordsworth’s deep heart had melted into the same beatitude, “… that I almost received her heart into my own.” “Into my own!” Helen’s father knew now how literally a man could feel that about a little girl. + 

And yet this did not mean that he thought Helen was perfect. No, poor child, with her too flexible mind, her too sensitive nerves, her lack of power and courage, Helen needed all the help she could get if she were not to be totally undone by life. He knew a thing or two about how ruthless life is to anyone who lacks power and courage! Helen must learn how to stand up to things and not lie down and give up. He would find ways to teach her⁠ ⁠… yes, he knew wincingly what sarcastic people would ask, “How could he teach her what he had never learned himself?” But the fact that he had never learned himself was the very reason for his understanding the dire need for it. Perhaps it might come from athletics. She must learn to play on a team, how to take rough, careless, good-natured knocks, and return them and pass on her way. As soon as he could get about on crutches, somehow⁠—perhaps he would go to the physical-training teacher at school and have a talk about Helen. Perhaps he could get up an outdoor basketball team of the children here on the street. He had plans, all sorts of plans. Above all, Helen must go to college. It wasn’t so much, going to college; he had no illusions about it. For a strong personality like Stephen’s it might very well not be worth while. But for a bookish, sensitive, complicated nature like Helen’s, the more her intelligence was shaped and pointed and sharpened and straightened out, the better. She would need it all to cope with herself. She was not one for whom action, any action provided it were violent enough, would suffice. + 

Would it for Henry? How about Henry, anyhow? How everybody always left Henry out! That was because there wasn’t anything unusual about the nice little boy. He was a nice little boy, and if he grew to his full stature, he would be a nice man, a good citizen, a good husband. No leader of men, but a faithful common soldier⁠—well, perhaps a sergeant⁠—in the great army of humanity. + 

But he had a right to his own life, didn’t he, even if he weren’t unusual? You didn’t want everybody to be unusual. There were moods in which Lester Knapp took the greatest comfort in Henry’s being just like anybody else. So much the better for him! For everybody! There would never be tragedy in his life, no thwarted, futile struggling against an organization of things that did not fit him. At times, too, there was something poignant to Lester about Henry’s patient, unrebellious attitude. He never fought to get what he wanted. He stood back, took what others left, and with a touching, unconscious resignation, made the best of it. All the more reason for Henry’s father to stand up for him, to think of how to get him more of what he wanted. + 

He began to plan for Henry now. What would Henry naturally want? Just what any little boy wanted. The recipe was well known: Playmates of his own age, a “gang”; some kind of shack in the woods to play pirate; games, lots and lots of games; a pet of his own; perhaps a job at which he could earn real money of his own to spend on a baseball mitt or a bicycle. + 

Why, Henry didn’t have a single one of those things, not one. And he was eleven years old. + 

That afternoon when the children came home, he waited till they had unpacked their minds of the school-news, and then asked casually, “Say, Henry, wouldn’t you like to have a puppy to bring up? I used to think the world of my dog when I was your age.” + 

A quick startled look passed between Henry and Helen, a look rather wild with the unexpectedness of their father’s question. Henry flushed very red and looked down dumbly at his piece of bread and butter. + 

Helen spoke for him, placatingly, “You see, Father⁠ ⁠… you see⁠ ⁠… Mother never wanted Henry to⁠ ⁠… but⁠ ⁠… well, Henry has a puppy, sort of.” + 

Seeing nothing but expectant interest in her father’s face, she went on, “Old Mrs. Hennessy’s Laura had puppies about six weeks ago, and Mrs. Hennessy said Henry could have one. Henry always did want one, so. And Henry”⁠—her accent was increasingly apologetic⁠—“Henry sort of did pick out one for his. It’s white with black spots. Awfully cunning. Noontimes Henry runs over from school to the Hennessys’ to play with it. Mrs. Hennessy and Laura are weaning the puppies now. He’s beginning to lap milk. Oh, Father, haven’t they got the darlingest little red tongues! Henry’s named him Rex. Mrs. Hennessy said Henry could keep it at her house, because Mother.⁠ ⁠…” + 

A new possibility opened before her like the horizon lifting, “Oh, Father, do you suppose she would let Henry have it now?” + 

The “now” referred to the change in Mother which they all noticed, but never mentioned, even in so distant a manner as this “now.” It had slipped out in Helen’s excitement. Lester took no notice of it. + 

“Do you s’pose she would?” asked Henry, in an agitated voice. He was now quite pale. + 

“Heavens, what a sensitive little chap he is!” thought Lester. “How worked up he does get over little things.” Aloud he said, “Well, she might. Let’s ask her this evening.” + 

So they did. She came in rather late and pretty tired. Her feet ached a good deal by nighttime, now it was warm weather, and Helen usually had a good hot bath waiting for her when she came. Mother kissed her and said what a comfort she was before shutting the door of the bathroom. Helen jumped happily downstairs, two steps at a time, to help Father get the supper on. + 

It was steaming on the table when Mother came down in the pretty, loose, red-silk house-dress which she’d bought at the store at such a bargain⁠—for nothing, as she said. She looked relaxed and quiet and said she was starved and so glad they had veal cutlets. It was a joy to watch Mother eat after her day’s work. + 

They never washed the dishes in the evenings now, because, Mother getting her breakfast downtown, it was no matter how the kitchen looked in the morning. Henry and Helen piled them on the new wheeled tray which Mr. Willing had so kindly sent up, pushed that into the kitchen and put them to soak, while Father and Mother got Stevie to bed and lighted the little bedside candle, at which Stephen loved to stare himself to sleep. + 

Then they hurried into the living-room for the evening rubber of whist. Mother’s luck was especially good that evening, a fact in which they all took an innocent satisfaction. Mother liked it when her luck was good. + 

Then, all of a sudden, the opening was there, and Father was taking advantage of it in a masterful way. Mother said something about the two little Willing girls who had been down at the store that day with their dog, and Father put in at once, “By the way, Eva, old Mrs. Hennessy wants to give Henry one of a litter of puppies her dog has. What would you say? It’s springtime. It could be out of doors mostly.” (How they admired him for being able to speak so casually. “By the way, Eva.⁠ ⁠…” He was wonderful. Under the table Helen’s hand squeezed Henry’s hard.) + 

Mrs. Knapp still had before her eyes the picture of the two fashionably dressed children and their fashionably accoutred dog with his studded collar and harness and the bright tan braided leather of his leash. She had never thought of dogs in terms of smartness before. “He’d make a lot of trouble for you,” she said, looking over at her husband. + 

“Oh, I’d manage all right. I like dogs,” said Lester carelessly. + 

“You’d have to promise, Henry, to keep him out of this room. I don’t want dog-hairs all over everything.” (It was the old formula, but not pronounced with the old conviction. After all she would not be there to see. She was often surprised that she worried so little about the looks of the house nowadays.) + 

“Oh, I’d never let him in here,” promised Henry in a strangled voice. + 

“Well⁠ ⁠…” said his mother. She looked down at the cards in her hand. + 

There was a silence. + 

“Who took that last trick?” she asked. + 

“You did,” said her husband (although he had). + 

They began to play again. + 

It had been as easy as that. + 

Lester had quite forgotten about the dog that evening as he pottered around the kitchen over some last tasks. He heard the bathroom door shut and knew that Eva had gone in for her evening toilet. At once afterwards his ear caught the stealthy sound of bare feet on the stairway. He turned his head towards the door and saw Henry come hurrying in on tiptoe. + 

He opened his lips to make some joking inquiry about whatever it could be that kept Henry up so late, but the expression on the child’s face silenced him. Good heavens! Had he cared so much as that about owning a dog! + 

Henry came up to him without a word and leaning over the wheel of the invalid-chair, put his arms around his father’s neck, leaning his cheek against his father’s shoulder. + 

“Oh, Father!” he said in a whisper, with a long, tremulous breath. He tightened his arms closer and closer, as though he could never stop. + 

Lester patted the little boy’s back silently. He was thinking, “I hope he’ll come like this to tell me when he’s in love and has been accepted. I don’t believe he’ll be any more stirred up.” The child’s body quivered against his breast. + 

After a time Lester said quietly, “Better get to bed, old man. You’ll take cold, with your bare feet.” + 

Docilely and silently Henry went back upstairs to bed. + 

XVII + 

Old Mrs. Anderson, having borne seven children and raised three to maturity (not to speak of having made a business of guiding Mrs. Knapp by neighborly advice through the raising of her three), knew what was brewing with Stephen the moment she stepped into the kitchen. She had been expecting Stephen to have one of his awful tantrums again any day. The only reason he hadn’t so far was because poor crippled Mr. Knapp was so weak and so indifferent to what the children did that Stephen was allowed to have his own way about everything. But foolish indulgence wore out after a while and only made things worse in the end. All the regulation signs of an advancing storm were there. She noted them with a kindling eye. Stephen’s face was clouded; he gave her a black look and did not answer her “How do, Stevie dear?” And as she took a chair, he flung down his top with all his might. A moment later, as he lounged about the kitchen with that insolent swagger of his that always made her blood boil, he gave a savage kick at his blocks. + 

Now was the time to give Mr. Knapp some good advice that would save him trouble in the end. She never could stand hunchbacks and cripples and had not liked Mr. Knapp very well even before he was so dreadfully paralyzed; but she felt it her duty to help out in that stricken household. “You’ll have trouble with that child today, Mr. Knapp,” she said wisely; “he’s spoiling for a spanking. Anybody with experience can see that by looking at him. My! what a relief ’twill be when he’s out of the house and goes to school with the others.” + 

It had been her habit thus to diagnose Stephen to his mother. And as for the remark about the relief it would be to have Stephen go to school, it was threadbare with repetition. She scarcely knew she had said it, so familiar was it. It astonished her to have Mr. Knapp look at her as though she had said something which shocked him. She was nettled at his look and replied to it resentfully by a statement of her oft-repeated philosophy of life, “The only way to manage children, Mr. Knapp, is never to let them get ahead of you. If you watch for the first signs of naughtiness and cut it short”⁠—her gesture indicated how it was to be cut short⁠—“it doesn’t go any further.” + 

To illustrate her point she now addressed Stephen’s listening, stubborn back in a reproving tone of virtue, “Stephen, you mustn’t kick your blocks like that. It’s naughty to.” + 

Stephen instantly kicked them harder than ever and continued to present a provocatively rebellious back to the visitor. + 

Mrs. Anderson turned to his father with the gratified look traditionally ascribed to the Teutonic warlords when they forced Serbia into a corner. She tapped the fingers of one hand rapidly in the palm of the other and waited for the father of the criminal to take action. He continued to draw his needle in and out of the stocking he was darning. His face looked like Stephen’s back. + 

What a disagreeable man Mr. Knapp was! She was not surprised that he had been so disliked by all the sensible people at the store. And how ridiculous for a man to be darning a stocking! He might at least look ashamed of it! Mrs. Anderson disliked him so much at this moment that she felt herself trembling and burning, “Well, Mr. Knapp, you’re not going to pass over a wilful disobedience like that, I hope,” she said, her voice shaking with anger as much at Stephen’s father as at Stephen. + 

“I didn’t tell Stephen not to kick his blocks,” he said dryly. + 

Her sense of extravagant rightness in the face of insane wrongness flamed over her so hotly that she could scarcely speak. “Well⁠ ⁠… but⁠ ⁠… but⁠ ⁠… oh, I understand! I understand!” she finally brought out bitterly. “I understand. You think it is all right and perfectly proper for Stephen to kick things around as much as he pleases.” + 

Mr. Knapp stooped to look into the oven where a rice pudding was cooking. How ridiculous for a man to be cooking a rice pudding! “I’m sure I don’t know why you think you understand anything about it because I have not told you what my opinion on the subject is,” he said, over his shoulder. + 

Stephen’s back became more acutely listening. He did not understand the big words and he could not make out his father’s tone, except that, unlike Mother, he did not get mad at Stephen and begin to pick on him whenever Mrs. Anderson had been there a little while. + 

Mrs. Anderson did not make out Mr. Knapp’s tone very well herself, except that it was all part of his intense disagreeableness. A weak poor creature Lester Knapp was, a perfect failure at everything, and without even the poor virtue of knowing it. Besotted in self-conceit into the bargain, though she had never suspected that before. Poor Mrs. Knapp! And those poor children! Her mother’s heart ached for them, left in such hands. + 

Mr. Knapp went on drawing his thread to and fro silently. Little by little, out of the air, Mrs. Anderson drew the information that she had been insulted, though she had not perceived exactly when. She felt rasped to the bone. With dignity, she drew her cape up around her shoulders and prepared to go. + 

“Take the advice of an old woman who was bringing up children before you were born,” she said solemnly, her voice shaking with the depth of her feeling. “You’ll find out when it is too late that they must be made to mind! Everything depends on that. Mrs. Knapp, their poor mother, understood that perfectly.” + 

“Good afternoon,” said Mr. Knapp, very distinctly. + 

The door closed behind her ungently enough, and with its slam Lester Knapp felt himself transported by an invigorating wave of anger such as he had rarely felt in his life, simple, hot, vivifying rage as good as a drink of whiskey. It made him feel twice as alive as usual. “Strange thing, the human mind,” he thought rapidly. “When I ran into Mrs. Andersonism in business, it only made me sick, sort of hamstrung me with disgust. Anything they’d put their filthy hands on I’d rather let them have than touch them enough to fight them. But when it threatens Stephen.⁠ ⁠… God! I love to fight it! I’d enjoy strangling that old harpy with my two hands. She thinks she can bully me by threatening my vanity, does she? She thinks she can get her damned old hands on my little boy, does she? I should say it was enough to have killed four of her own.” + 

He looked over at Stephen’s brooding back and set his stirred and sharpened wits to the problem of switching Stephen off from the track that was taking him towards one of his explosions. He had discovered that Stephen’s salvation at such times was something hard to do, something Stephen could struggle with, but not quarrel with. He thought fast, almost excitedly. Would he think of something first, or would Stephen blow up first? + 

Stephen turned away from the pile of his toys and began to wander about the kitchen, casting a somber eye on the too familiar things. “Alexander, Alexander, what new world can I get for you?” asked his father, unleashing his inventiveness and sending it leaping forward on the trail. + 

In a moment, “Say, Stephen, how’d you like to beat up a pretend egg?” he asked. + 

Stephen glowered at him suspiciously, but with a spark of unwilling curiosity in his dark eye. + 

“Like this,” said his father. He wheeled himself to the shelf, took down a tin basin, filled it with warm water, put a bit of soap into it and began to whip it to a froth with an eggbeater. + 

Stephen’s face lightened. Ever since he could remember he had seen his mother playing with that fascinating toy; ever since he could remember he had put his hand out for it; ever since he could remember his mother had said, “No, no, you’d only make a mess,” and had hung it up out of reach. + 

He had gone too far towards a nervous explosion to be able to say “Oh, goody!” or “Give it to me!” but he held out his hand silently. His father took no notice of his sullen expression and did not offer to show him how it worked. + 

Stephen set the eggbeater in the water and with perfect confidence began to try to turn the handle. He always had perfect confidence that he could do anything he tried. At once the eggbeater slipped sideways and fell to the floor. Stephen frowned, picked it up and held it tighter with his left hand. But he found that when he put his attention on his left hand to make it hold tight, his right hand refused to make the round-and-round motion he so much admired. He had never before tried to do two different things with his two hands. He took his attention off his left hand and told his right hand to make the circular motion. Instantly the whole thing began to slip. As instantly he flashed his mind back on his left hand and caught the beater before it fell. But at once his right hand, left to itself, stopped turning. + 

“For him, it’s just like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach,” reflected Lester. + 

Stephen was disconcerted by the unexpected difficulty of the undertaking. He stood still a moment in the mental attitude of a man who has caught a runaway pig by the ear and a hind leg and does not dare let go. He breathed hard and frowned at the perverse creature of steel in his hand. + 

His father felt as the spectators at a prizefight feel when the second round begins. He prayed violently that nothing might interrupt the rest of the bout. Especially did he pray that the old Anderson imbecile might not come in. If she did, he would just throw the stove-lid at her head. What was he for, if not to protect Stephen from marauding beasts of prey? He himself did not make a motion for fear of distracting Stephen’s attention. + 

The little boy went at it again, but with none of his first jaunty cocksureness, cautiously, slowly, turning the handle a little at a time. He made no progress whatever. The combination of the two dissimilar motions was too much for him. If someone had held the eggbeater still, he could have turned the handle, he knew that. But he would never ask anyone to do it. He would do it himself. Himself! He tried again and again without the slightest success and began to put on the black, savage look he had for things that displeased him. + 

His father followed with sympathy as he toiled forward into the unmapped jungle of his own mind. How he stuck at it, the little tyke! And how touching was his look of outraged indignation at his own unruly right hand! His father said to himself, half-laughing, half-wistful, “Poor old man! We’ve all been there! That painful moment when we first realize that our right hands are finite and erring!” + 

He shook with silent mirth over the sudden, hot-tempered storm which followed in a tropical gust, when Stephen stamped his feet, ground his teeth, and, turning red and purple with rage, tried by main strength to master the utensil. He turned his eyes discreetly down on his darning when Stephen, with a loud “Gol darned old thing!” threw the eggbeater across the kitchen. He felt Stephen suddenly remember that his father was there and glance apprehensively up at him. He chose that moment to stoop again to the oven door and gaze fixedly in at the bland face of the rice pudding. + 

But he did not see it. He saw Stephen’s fiery little nature at grips with itself, and inaudibly he was cheering him on, “Go to it, Stevie! Get your teeth in it! Eat it up!” He was painfully, almost alarmingly interested in the outcome. Would Stephen conquer, or would he give up? Was there real stuff behind that grim stubbornness which had given them such tragic trouble? Or was it just hatefulness, as the Mrs.-Anderson majority of the world thought it? He held a needle up to the light and threaded it elaborately. But he was really looking at Stephen, standing with his stout legs wide apart, glowering at the prostrate but victorious eggbeater. In spite of his sympathetic sense of the seriousness of the moment Lester’s diaphragm fluttered with repressed laughter. Cosmic Stephen in his pink gingham rompers! + 

He took up another stocking and ran his hand down the leg. Stephen sauntered over towards the beater, casually. He glanced back to see if he need fear any prying surveillance of his private affairs, but his father’s gaze was concentrated on the hole in the stocking. Carelessly, as though it were an action performed almost absentmindedly, Stephen stooped, picked up the beater, and stood holding it, trying experiments with various ways of managing that maddening double action. His clumsiness, his muscular inexpertness with an unfamiliar motion, astounded his father. How far back children had to begin! Why, they did not know how to do anything! Not till they had learned. + 

This did not seem to him the trite platitude it would have been if somebody else had said it to him. It cast a new light into innumerable corners of their relations with Stephen which had been dark and pestilential. They hadn’t begun to be patient enough, to go slow enough. Stephen was to the eggbeater, to all of life, as he himself would be, put suddenly in charge of a complicated modern locomotive. + 

No, Stephen was not! Painlessly, with the hard-won magnanimity of a man who has touched bottom and expects nothing out of life for himself, not even his own admiration, Lester recognized in Stephen’s frowning, intent look on his problem a power, a heat, a will-to-conquer, which he had never had. He had never cared enough about either locomotives or eggbeaters to put his mind on them like that. Stephen got that power from his mother. From his other world of impersonality Stephen’s father saw it and thrilled in admiration as over a ringing line in a fine poem. If only Stephen could be steered in life so that that power would be a bright sword in his hand and not a poison in his heart. + 

The clock ticked gravely in the silence which followed. For Lester the pause was full of grave, forward-looking thoughts about Stephen. Presently the little boy come back purposefully to the basin of water. He put the beater in, and once more tried to turn the handle. The perverse thing did all that perversity could imagine, slipped sideways, stuck, started too suddenly, twice fell to the floor clattering. Each time Stephen picked it up patiently and went back to work. Lester ached with fatigue at the sight of his perseverance. Heavens! Nothing was worth such an effort as that! + 

“Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke + 

The years to bring the inevitable yoke?” + 

But Stephen did not flinch. He felt he almost had it. Once he turned the wheel three-quarters of the way around! His heart leaped up. But after this it balked continuously. Stephen fetched a long quavering sigh of discouragement and fatigue. But he did not stop trying. He could not have stopped. Something more potent than fatigue held him there. The tough fibers of his passionate will were tangled about his effort. He could not stop till he dropped. He was very near dropping. He scarcely knew what he was doing, his attention was so tired. But his hands, his brave, strong little hands kept on working. His back and legs ached. His shoulders bowed themselves. But he did not stop. + 

“Under the bludgeonings of chance.⁠ ⁠…” + 

murmured Lester to himself. + 

And then, all at once, it was as though Stephen had turned a corner. Something rearranged itself inside his head. Instead of toiling uphill he felt himself begin to glide down easily. Why, he could do it! That rebellious right hand of his was suddenly tamed. Whir‑r‑r! went the steel spokes flashing in the white suds. They sang like music in Stephen’s ears! Whir‑r‑r! He could hardly believe it! + 

Once in a while it stuck or jerked, but he had only to take thought⁠—Stephen could feel the thinking place in his head draw together hard⁠—and command his hand to turn regularly. How it hated to, that old hand! And how Stephen loved the feeling of bossing it around! + 

He turned and turned. The foamy suds frothed higher and higher! Whir‑r‑r! The kitchen was full of the sound. + 

Stephen threw back his head and, laughing proudly, looked up at his father. His face was ruddy and glowing with his effort, with his triumph. All his fatigue was gone. Whir‑r‑r! + 

His father drew a long breath. He felt like clapping his hands and shouting “Hurrah!” It had been nip and tuck there for a while. Talk about the caveman who had invented the bow and arrow! If Stephen had been a caveman he would have invented the telephone. What a stirring spectacle it had been. He felt as though he had been reading some Emerson. Only it was lots better than any Emerson! + 

“Well, sir,” he exclaimed to the child, “I certainly will hate to have you begin going to school!” + 

The rice pudding was done. He took it out and put some coal on the fire and glanced at the clock. Why, it was almost time to expect the other children in from school. How the afternoon had flown! It was hard to put your mind on anything but the absorbing spectacle of Stephen’s advance into life. He must get out the milk and cookies with which he welcomed the others in. They always burst in as soon as possible after four. Sometimes Lester wondered what they had done before, in the old days, in the interval between four and six, when he usually found them waiting for him at the door of the store. Evangeline used to say that they were “playing ’round” with their schoolmates. + 

He had not noticed that Stephen had stopped turning the eggbeater and was now looking up hard into his face, until the little voice asked, “What will you hate to have me going to ’chool for?” + 

Lester had to think for a moment before he could remember what he had said. Then, “Great Scott, Stevie, why wouldn’t I? I’ll miss you⁠—what do you think? I’ll be lonesome without my funny, nice, little boy to keep me company.” + 

He wondered what made Stephen ask such a question. The child usually was quick enough to catch your meaning. He wheeled himself into the pantry and did not see that Stephen, after standing for a moment, turned away and went quietly out of the room. When he came back and found him gone, Lester thought that probably he had gone upstairs to look for another toy. + 

Stephen felt very queer inside, sort of shaky and trembly. He had never felt like that before. And the queerness went all over him so that he couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t making up a queer face that Father would ask him about. The first thing to do was to get away where nobody would see him. He turned away, trying to pretend to walk carelessly and went into the empty dining-room. + 

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 of a clock could scarcely be anything but a trumpet-call to action. Different from her father’s personality too. The clock always said to him, + 

“But at my back I always hear + 

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Ah, what a second-rater he was! How he always thought of everything in terms of what somebody else had said! In earlier days when he was a boy and still thought he might perhaps amount to something this had been an affliction to him, a secret shame. But now he did not grieve over it. Since he had died and come back to this other life, he took everything and himself, too, more simply, with little concern for the presentability of the role he was to play. If, honestly, that was the sort of nature he had, why rebel against it? The only people who got anywhere by rebelling were rebels to begin with. And he was not. Why wasn’t it enough, anyhow, to love the beauties other men had created? + 

He heard Stephen come back into the kitchen. He had been gone quite a while after that toy. + 

“Father,” said Stephen softly, behind him. + 

Lester started at the color of the little voice. There was something queer about it. + 

Cautiously, with his ever-present dread of intruding, he glanced at Stephen not curiously, but with a casual air. + 

The little boy came up to his chair and stood there, looking up at him with a strange expression of shining-quiet in his eyes. He had evidently been crying hard, for his cheeks were covered with the smeary marks of black where he had wiped off the tears with his dirty hands. But what on earth could he have been crying about? There had not been a sound. + 

And he did not look like a child who has been crying. He looked⁠ ⁠… he was smiling now⁠ ⁠… he looked like a little golden seraph hovering around the golden gates. + 

“Father,” said Stephen in a small, clear voice. He hesitated, evidently trying to think of something to say, his shining eyes fixed on his father’s. Finally he brought out, “Wouldn’t you like me to bring you a drink of water?” His smile, as he said this, was dazzling, his voice sweet, sweet with loving-kindness. + 

“Why, yes, Stevie,” said his father over a lump in his throat, “I do believe I am thirsty without realizing it.” + 

Stephen pushed a chair before him to the sink, climbed up on it, took down the dipper and held it under the faucet. The bright water gushed out, spattering over him, over the floor. He caught half the dipper full, turned off the faucet, and carried the dipper awkwardly back to his father, who took a long drink appreciatively. + 

“Thank you, old man,” he said as he handed it back. + 

Stephen set it back on the table and returned to hover near his father, smiling up at him speechlessly. + 

Lester felt the room filled with the flutter of airy, unseen wings and ached with his helpless wonder at them. What could have happened? What could have happened? He held his breath for fear of saying the wrong thing in his clumsy ignorance. All he dared do was to smile silently back at Stephen. + 

“Father,” said Stephen again, although he evidently had nothing to add to the word, “Father.⁠ ⁠…” He could think of nothing else to say to express the mysteriously born fullness of his heart. + 

“Yes, Stevie,” said his father, his own heart very full. + 

“Father⁠ ⁠… would it hurt your sick legs very much if I sat in your lap for a while?” + 

Lester reached out hungrily and pulled the child up into his arms. “There’s just one good thing that can be said about my sick legs, Stephen,” he said, trying to be whimsical, “they positively cannot be hurt any more.” + 

Stephen laughed a little, nestled, turned himself, and then with a long sigh as though he were very, very tired, with a sudden relaxation of all his warm little body, was asleep, his round dark head falling back limply on his father’s shoulder. + 

Lester was almost frightened. Had the child fainted? Was he sick? But the expression on Stephen’s face was of complete calm. It looked like a smooth, closed bud, secret and serene, close-wrapped, all the personality at rest, nothing left but the tender mask of flesh. + 

Lester stirred involuntarily a hair’s breadth. Stephen felt the movement and his eyes flew open wide for an instant. At first they were shallow and meaningless in a mere physical opening. Then, before sleep took him wholly, he recognized his father, and all that made the little boy Stephen shone out of his eyes like a candle leaping up brightly before it goes out. That look was for Lester. Without stirring, in the exquisite smile of his eyes, his lips, all his transfigured little face, Stephen gave himself lovingly to his father. + 

Long after the burning little spirit had gone elsewhere, leaving the inert, deep-breathing, warm, small body on the paralyzed knees, his father sat there, his lips quivering. + 

Presently he said to himself, “And I am the man who, three months ago, was so eager to get out of life.” + 