They Came Like Swallows (15 page)

James looked at her in bewilderment. She pronounced her words precisely the way a school-teacher would.

“I always do the serving,” he said.

“Yes, but I thought that perhaps if you weren’t feeling well—”

“I’m all right,” James said. “I’m quite all right.”

They sat down together—Ethel in Elizabeth’s place at the end of the table. When James was with
her he found himself on guard for fear that he would make some mistake in his English. He spoke as well as the average person, he supposed. As well as anyone ought to speak. But Ethel had gone East to school. She had gone to Bryn Mawr and she never seemed to want to marry. When she was younger and before her hair turned grey, she was attractive enough. James knew of several men that she could have had. But she was too well educated for a woman and she didn’t want any of them.

“For Miss Blaney,” he said. And when Sophie took the plate that he handed her, James noticed that she was self-conscious on account of her mouth.

“How much are they going to cost, Sophie?” he said when she returned to his end of the table.

“What, Mr. Morison?”

“Your teeth.”

“I don’t know, exactly,” she said, with the color mounting upward into her face, “About fifty dollars.” She set Bunny’s plate in front of him. “But if I’d known how much it would take, I don’t guess I’d of had them out. But they were hurting me so, night and day—”

“You did the right thing, I’m sure,” Ethel said. “And Robert needs more water.”

James wondered if he had said something that he shouldn’t have, if he had said something unkind. “When the time comes to get your new teeth, let me know, Sophie. I might be able to help you with them.” He took up the carving-knife and began sharpening it.
And Sophie beside him pulled the hem out of her apron in an access of gratitude.

When Robert had been served, she returned once more to the head of the table.

“That Karl is here …”

James unfolded his napkin.

“Tell him I’ll be out as soon as we’re through dinner,” he said.

Sophie disappeared through the swinging doors, and James took up his knife and fork. When he tried to eat, the food turned solid in his throat and would not go down. There was nothing to do but sit with his plate untouched before him, and watch his sons, who were still too young to confuse grief with a good appetite.

When Robert passed things it was always without speaking and without looking up—as if the interruption were barely tolerable. With Bunny it seemed to be largely a matter of making him hear, for he ate with his eyes on some object (the corner of a dish now) and there was no telling where his mind was.

“How is Irene?” James said,

“Resting. I put cold cloths on her head. That’s about all anybody can do, you know, after she’s had one of those spells.”

When Ethel was a little girl, Elizabeth had said, she could not bear to get dirt on her clean white stockings.

Bunny was recalled from wherever it was that he had been.

“Is it true, Aunt Eth—Is it true that Irene married Uncle Boyd Hiller for his money?”

In the silence that followed this question they could all hear the big clock ticking sullenly in the front hall, two rooms away.

“No, son, it isn’t true,” James said. “And you mustn’t say things like that, do you hear?”

Bunny nodded, and would have gone on eating if Ethel had not leaned forward in her chair with hard blight eyes.

“Who told you that, Bunny?”

“It’s something he’s made up,” James said.

I didn’t either make it up—it’s what Grandmother Morison told Amanda Matthews.”

Robert put his fork down with a clatter.

“Who is Amanda Matthews?” Ethel asked.

“She’s a girl in Aunt Clara’s Sunday-school class that was at Aunt Clara’s house night before last.”

James saw that Ethel was smiling at him queerly.

“Well, however it was,” she said, “you misunderstood. Your grandmother wouldn’t say such a thing.”

“But she did, Aunt Eth. She said there was somebody else that Irene wanted to marry but Grandmother Blaney kept after her night and day, saying what a fine young man Uncle Boyd was, because he had been to Princeton and—”

“Bunny, that’s enough.”

The interurban was drawing alongside the train, on the other tracks. And James had to wait for a minute before he could go on speaking.

“Suppose you tell us, son, what you were doing all this time?”

“He was on the couch,” Robert volunteered, “in the sitting-room, pretending like he was asleep.”

“When I want information from you, Robert, I’ll ask for it…. Go up to your room now, both of you.”

They had made trouble enough for one evening—trouble that would last for months and months, and when Irene found out about it, breed more and more trouble.

“Well,” he said, “what are you waiting for?”

As soon as they had gone—Robert looking injured and Bunny in tears again—James set about to deal with the image that obsessed him. With so much sickness, with the epidemic everywhere, it stood to reason that someone with influenza might have been on that interurban, too. They might have been exposed to the flu there, just as they were on the crowded train. And what point was there in torturing himself like this? What good did it do?

“You might have let them stay and have their dessert,” Ethel said, from the other end of the table.

“They’re my children, Ethel,” James said, “and I’ll do with them as I think best.”

Wilfred returned with Clara almost immediately after dinner.

“It doesn’t seem possible,” Clara said. “I say it just doesn’t seem possible! She was so young, and with so much to live for!”

James had no idea what to say, or what was expected of him. But as the evening progressed, more and more people came—Lyman and Amelia Shepherd, Maud Ahrens, the Hinkleys, the McIntyres, the Lloyds—until the library was filled with them. And by that time James had adjusted his mind to the rhetoric of the occasion. What bewildered him was not the set phrases, and not the repetition, but the fact that they were sincerely spoken.
Such a loss,
people said to him with tears in their eyes.
So tragic that she should have to be taken.
… Then because there were so many that they could not all talk to him, they fell back upon one another politely, as if that were why they had come. They discussed the peace terms and the price of meat. They talked about the weather, which was severe for December—only the beginning of the cold months.

James tried to take a suitable interest in the conversation, but he could not keep from glancing up when each new person came into the room, and
strange ideas ran through his head. It seemed to him that except for an unwillingness to interrupt one another, people acted very much as if they had come here to a party. The house had taken possession of them—Elizabeth’s house—and they were having a good time.

Clara and Wilfred went home, and then the Shepherds, and then the McIntyres, almost without James’s noticing it. The air grew heavy with smoke. And after a while he discovered that it was not necessary for him even to seem to be listening. He was glad when eleven o’clock came and one by one they stood up to leave—all except young Johnston, who had brought his mail out to him from the office and did not know apparently how to go home.

While Johnston talked about the office and about the adjustment of a certain loss, James sat with his hand over his left side. It was something that he had never thought about until now, and there was no reason why it should occur to him particularly, except that he felt very wide awake after not having slept for days and days. But the strange thing was that he could hear his own heart ticking under his vest—keeping time there like a clock.

“I’ve come down from Chicago,” a voice said—an unmistakable voice. James sprang up and went to the front hall, but he was too late. Boyd Hiller was there. He was inside the door, talking to Ethel, and there was that same tired handsomeness about him. He had not changed, except that it seemed to be an effort for him to carry himself so well. As Ethel
started up the stairs, he turned and saw James in the doorway.

“Good evening,” he said.

Once upon a time James met Boyd Hiller with Robert unconscious in his arms. And later (years later) James had shut the front door in his face. The extreme courtesy of Boyd’s manner implied that he remembered both incidents.

In any family, James thought, it was like that. Nothing was ever forgotten.

There were no chairs in the front hall—only a sofa beside the window. Both men remained standing. When the tension became uncomfortable, James said, “Are you living in Chicago now?”

“For a short while.”

Boyd cleared his throat.

“New York is my headquarters, though, and has been the last two years. I’m on the stock exchange.”

“That must be interesting,” James said, and thought grimly of the time Boyd put soap in the minnow-bucket for a joke,

“You get used to it.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

Irene was coming down the stairs in a green flowered kimono.

“You get used to anything,” James said.

When Irene reached the bottom step, she waited, and Boyd waited at the edge of the dark red rug. “I can’t tell you how shocked and how sorry I am!”

Irene stepped down and shook hands with him gravely.

“You’ve been sick,” she said.

Boyd nodded.

“Flu?”

“It was a light case. When I was able to go back to the hotel I found your note, and here I am.”

James understood now what had happened—why Irene had gone off to Chicago when they were counting on her to stay and look after the boys. Actually, there had never been much doubt in his mind. He knew her almost as well as he knew Elizabeth. She was very impulsive by nature, and excitable, and decided everything on the spur of the moment, and then had all the rest of her life to regret it in. It didn’t take any great intelligence to see by the look on her face that she was about to run through that whole unhappy business with Boyd Hiller all over again. If they wanted to do that, James thought, it was all right with him. He turned and went back into the library.

The flowers in Irene’s kimono were almost but not quite the color of her hair. And James decided that no matter what people said, it was not money. Irene had not married Boyd for that, nor would she go back to him for any such reason. There was no telling how she felt about Boyd now, but at one time, before they
began quarreling so, she had been fond of him. On her wedding day she broke a mirror and perhaps it was that which ruined their marriage—bad luck as much as anything.

Somehow it was impossible to think of her leading a calm, ordinary life. Wherever Irene was, there was excitement. Now when she gathered the folds of her kimono and leaned toward the fire, her eyes glittered. Her hair gave off light.

“I think we know sometimes what is going to happen to us,” she said. “I remember things that didn’t seem to have any meaning till now, and they fit…. We were upstairs, James, in your bedroom, and Elizabeth was doing her hair. I was sitting on the bed, watching her, and I said, ‘It’s so complicated, the way you are doing your hair now,’ and she stopped and looked at me in the mirror, and said, ‘I know. I was just thinking that nobody will be able to do it for me when I am dead.’ I said for her not to talk like that, because it was wrong and silly and there was no telling how long anybody would live. But she took the hairpins out of her mouth and said, ‘Within three years.’”

James got up out of his chair and began to walk. He could not and would not believe what Irene was saying. He could not believe that Elizabeth had lain awake at his side, planning and arranging things for a time when she would not be there. With other people she sometimes covered up her true feelings, though not with him. Nobody had any idea, for instance, how deeply she still felt about Robert’s accident; how at
night she turned into his arms and wept. But if her life had been overshadowed by the anticipation of dying, he would have known it. She could not have kept it from him.

“It’s the kind of thing that people remember,” he said, “after some one is dead. You might never have thought anything more about it except for that. It’s like any common superstition—thirteen at the table or a dog howling or a bird in the house.”

“You know there was one,” Irene said. “There was a bird in Bunny’s room while he was sick. I didn’t tell you afterward because I knew it would worry you—Not the bird, but something that it was too late to do anything about. It was my fault, really. Elizabeth sent Robert for a broom. Then in our excitement we both forgot and went into the room where Bunny was. When Robert came back he saw her sitting on the edge of Bunny’s bed…. And ever since, he’s been thinking that if anything happened to his mother, he’d be responsible. You didn’t know that, did you, James? … Tonight when they were both in bed I went to see them. I talked to them for a while about their mother, and to my surprise Robert broke down and told me what was on his mind. You have to watch him, James, and talk to him more than you do, and find out what is back of what he’s saying. Because he’s at the age to get notions…. I explained to him that people caught the flu within three days after they were exposed to it. What he was worrying about happened weeks before his mother took sick. I don’t know whether he believed me or not. I guess he did.
It’s things like that—don’t you see? Now that his mother isn’t here to keep an eye on him … And each of us has his private nightmare. Robert isn’t the only one.”

James looked at her oddly to see whether by some mischance she knew about the interurban.

“I keep remembering,” she said, “how selfish I was those last weeks—always thinking about Boyd and whether I could bring myself to go back to him. And I sort of took what was happening to her for granted. That was the way it always was. As a person, James, I could never hold a candle to her. Nobody could…. I remember once we went, the two of us, to see a woman who had cooked for my mother, and who was very sick. She lived in an old house on Tenth Street, and it was filthy dirty. And after we left, Bess was furious with me. She said ‘Irene, I
saw
you gather up your skirts so they wouldn’t touch anything! How
can
you be like that?’ … She went over to the bed where the woman lay, and sat down, and took her hand.”