Athalie. Chambers Robert William
had become weak and red-rimmed, and he blinked continually except in the stale semi-darkness of the house.
Always, now, he was muttering and grumbling his disapproval of the children – "Eatin' their heads off I tell you, Pete! What good is all this here schoolin' doin' 'em when they ought to git out some'rs an' earn their vittles?"
But if Greensleeve's attitude was one of passive acquiescence, he made no effort to withdraw the children from school. Once, when life was younger, and Jack, his first baby, came, he had dreamed of college for him, and of a career – in letters perhaps – something dignified, leisurely, profound beyond his own limits. And of a modest corner somewhere within the lustre of his son's environment where he and his wife, grey-haired, might dream and admire, finding there surcease from care and perhaps the peace which passes all understanding.
The ex-"professor" of penmanship had been always prone to dream. No dull and sordid reality, no hopeless sorrow had yet awakened him. Nor had his wife's death been more real than the half-strangled anguish of a dreamer, tossing in darkness. As for the children, they paid no more attention to Ledlie than they might have to a querulous but superannuated dog.
Jack, now fifteen, still dawdled at school, where his record was not good. Perhaps it was partly because he had no spending money, no clothing to maintain his boyish self-respect, no prospects of any sort, that he had become sullen, uncommunicative, and almost loutish.
Nobody governed him; his father was unqualified to control anybody or anything; his mother was dead.
With her death went the last vestige of any tie that had held the boy to the home anchorage – of any feeling of responsibility concerning the conduct expected and required of him.
He shirked his studies, came home only to eat and sleep, remained out late without explanation or any home interference, except for the constant disputes and quarrels with Doris and Catharine, now aged respectively fourteen and thirteen.
To Athalie he had little to say. Perhaps he did not realise it but he was slightly afraid of her. And it was from her that he took any pains at all to conceal his irregularities.
Once, coming in from school, she had found the house deserted, and Jack smelling of alcohol just slouching out of the bar.
"If you do that again I shall tell father," she said, horrified.
"What do I care!" he had retorted sullenly. And it was true; the boy no longer cared what anybody might think as long as Athalie already knew and detested what he had done.
There was a garage in the neighbouring village. He spent most of his time hanging around it. Sometimes he came home reeking of oil and gasoline, sometimes his breath was tainted with tobacco and alcohol.
He was so much bigger and older than Athalie that the child had never entirely lost her awe of him. His weakness of character, his failings, and the fact that he was a trifle afraid of her opinion, combined to astonish and bewilder her.
For a long while she tried to understand the gradual but certain reversal of their relations. And one night, still more or less in awe of him, she got out of bed and went softly into his room.
He was not asleep. The sudden apparition of his youngest sister considerably startled him, and he sat up in his ragged night-shirt and stared at her where she stood in the moonlight.
"You look like one of your own spooks!" he said. "What's the matter with you?"
"I wanted to talk with you, Jack."
"What about?"
"You."
For a moment he sat there eyeing her uneasily; then:
"Well, go ahead!" he said ungraciously; and stretched himself back on the pillows.
She came and seated herself on the bed's edge:
"Jack, please don't drink beer."
"Why not? Aw, what do you know about men, anyway? Don't they all smoke and drink?"
"Mamma asked you not to."
"Gee-whiz! I was a kid then. But a man isn't a baby."
Athalie sighed. Her brother eyed her restlessly, aware of that slight feeling of shame which always invaded his sullen, defiant discontent when he knew that he had lowered himself in her estimation.
For, if the boy was a little afraid of her, he also cared more for her than he ever had for any of the family except his mother.
He was only the average boy, stumbling blindly, almost savagely through the maze of adolescence, with no guide, nobody to warn or counsel him, nothing to stimulate his pride, no anchorage, no experience.
Whatever character he had he had been born with: it was environment and circumstance that were crippling it.
"See here, Athalie," he said, "you're a little girl and you don't understand. There isn't any harm in my smoking a cigarette or two or in drinking a glass of beer now and then."
"Isn't there, Jack?"
"No. So don't you worry, Sis… And, say! I'm not going back to school."
"What?"
"What's the use? I can't go to college. Anyway what's the good of algebra and physics and chemistry and history and all that junk? I guess I'll go into business."
"What business?"
"I don't know. I've been working around the garage. I can get a job there if I want it."
"Did you ask papa?"
"What's the use? He'll let me do what I please. I guess I'll start in to-morrow."
His father did not interfere when his only son came slouching up to inform him of his decision.
After Jack had gone away toward the village and his new business, his father remained seated on the shabby veranda, his head sunken on his soiled shirtfront, his wasted hands clasped over his stomach.
For a little while, perhaps, he remembered his earlier ambitions for the boy's career. Maybe they caused him pain. But if there was pain it faded gradually into the lethargy which had settled over him since his wife's death.
A grey veil seemed to have descended between him and the sun, – there was greyness everywhere, and dimness, and uncertainty – in his mind, in his eyesight – and sometimes the vagueness was in his speech. He had noticed that – for, sometimes the word he meant to use was not the word he uttered. It had occurred a number of times, making foolish what he had said.
And Ledlie had glanced at him sharply once or twice out of his sore and faded eyes when Greensleeve had used some word while thinking of another.
When he was not wandering around the house he sat on the veranda in a great splint-bottomed arm-chair – a little untidy figure, more or less caved in from chest to abdomen, which made his short thin legs hanging just above the floor seem stunted and withered.
To him, here, came his daughters in their soiled and rusty black dresses, just out of school, and always stopping on impulse of sympathy to salute him with, "Hello, papa!" and with the touch of fresh, warm lips on his colourless cheek.
Sometimes they lingered to chatter around him, or bring out pie and cake to eat in his company. But very soon his gaze became remote, and the children understood that they were at liberty to go, which they did, dancing happily away into the outer sunshine, on pleasure bent – the matchless pleasures of the very young whose poverty has not as yet disturbed them.
As the summer passed the sunlight grew greyer to Peter Greensleeve. Also, more often, he mixed his words and made nonsense of what he said.
The pain in his chest and arms which for a year had caused him discomfort, bothered him at night, now. He said nothing about it.
That summer Doris had taken a course in stenography and typewriting, going every day to Brooklyn by train and returning before sunset.
When school began she asked to be allowed to continue. Catharine, too, desired to learn. And if their father understood very clearly what they wanted, it is uncertain. Anyway he offered no objections.
That winter he saw his son very