Strange Yesterday (23 page)

Frank wore the same clothes every day, and his hands looked like two curiously shaped pieces of turf; his face was flat, wrinkled and dark as an old leather wallet; except when he was among his beloved flowers, his feet shuffled; and his eyes could not be other than the color of the earth.

He never spoke, for to him speech was forgotten, or, perhaps, had never existed; after the manner of a huge and intelligent dog, he would communicate his desires. As he would have accepted some unasked-for gift, he accepted the boy, registering neither approval nor disapproval. But he taught John Preswick; and the manner of his teaching John Preswick hardly knew. But he learnt to love the flowers and the ground, and to love the house—as perhaps he had all along. He said to himself that he would be almost content, were all of the future this, to be here with the garden and the house—and the girl.

But though he often spoke with the girl, though he saw her daily, though he came to know her better and better, her attitude towards him did not change. He was not a servant; but neither was he a friend; but perhaps that was because the two of them had known for so long—

Surely he was not a servant; for one day in the library he forgot himself and his work of dusting the books, and old Mrs. Vetchen came in and found him there. He turned to her and, acting upon an impulse, held out the book in his hand. “Could I read it?” he inquired. “I will take care of it.”

She did not smile; she never smiled—her face was cream-colored china, and it would have tinkled into small pieces had she smiled. But from behind her glasses her blue eyes laughed heartily, preserving all the while her staid fixedness. She was a small person, but, as with the house, she had immense dignity, which came to naught when put to the test, as proved by the repeated practice of denying supper to Inez for one reason or another, and then taking it quietly up to her as she lay abed.

“No,” she replied and added: “But if you wish to read, you can come in here—at any time. I no longer read because of my eyes. And Inez will not trouble you. But, mind you, I will not have my carpets tracked up by mud, so you will ask Mary for a rag and clean those shoes of yours! Now come with me.”

Into the sitting room he followed her, which was dark and foreboding as an airless chamber in some donjon keep. She drew the portieres from the long windows facing to the opposite wall, where there was a fireplace under an ornate mantel. A small Chippendalish sofa stretched before the fireplace, and they went almost to it, where they both stood. Before them, on either side of the mantel, were two oils, dusky, lurking in their mighty gilt frames and frowning down upon the room in somber self-consciousness. One was the work of Master John Copley—a pretty penny it must have cost too—and the other, while without a signature, suggested Stuart in a dismal moment; and upon the little brass plates tacked under each was the name John Preswick.

“Well—?” she said to him.

“Yes,” answered John Preswick, “I have seen them before. But is it so strange that my name should be the same? But—”

The two portraits were looking down into his face, and he could have sworn that in such a manner the living men themselves had looked down upon him. One was little more than a boy, his hair yellow, his eyes gray and sparkling, as though the painter had forgotten for a moment the ochers and purples upon his palette. It was a boy with full round lips that seemed eager to laugh.

Noticing his intent gaze, she said: “He was the father of the other. But it would seem the other way.”

And, indeed, the portrait upon the opposite side was of a person immeasurably older, a man so weary with life that it burnt out of his eyes in a tired dream. The portrait halted above the waist, but there was enough to give off his lean haggardness and to show clearly the sleeve that hung empty upon his left side. He wore the blue and white of a Continental, a bunch of incongruously gay lace at his chin, and a small, roundish medal upon his breast. But John Preswick could not take his gaze from the empty sleeve and the eyes: gray, too, but not as the boy's. Gray they were, but not with the gray of sunlight seeking through the branches of a tree; they were gray as the clouds of a storm. And such sad eyes they were!—and such longing eyes! All of the man was there, but the eyes were not; they were back, far back, in a place where he had left them, a place which he often thought of. Perhaps his soul was there too. Almost uncanny it was to see in the picture a man's soul, and to wonder what it ached for. His brow was lined and creased; his cheeks were hollow; his mouth was a thread of pinkish flesh; and he was weary, so terribly weary.

“If he could only sleep,” John Preswick thought aloud.

“Yes,” old Mrs. Vetchen agreed, her voice low and far, “if he could only sleep. You see, then, that he wants only to sleep, while that boy next to him—his father, the irony of it—wants life. He wants to live, and to laugh, and to dance, and to drink, and to be happy, and to hold women in his arms. He wants everything—whether it be good or not. I wonder, had that picture been painted thirty years later, whether the mouth would still have been so round and girlish, and whether the eyes would have sparkled in that manner. He lived, and he suffered, which was the lot of the Preswicks, until their women lost the power to reproduce of the male; after that, life fell into a groove, and it has been there ever since, unable to crawl from it, degenerating. That is a horrible word, degeneration, but it is nature's cure for undesirables. First she destroys the virility; then the mind; and then, with a gesture of disgust, she sweeps away the stock itself. That is nature's way, and it is not wrong; it is only—hard. The boy fought for the King in the last Indian war, and after him, his son fought that the King might lose what little power remained him upon this side of the sea. But it was not so much what they fought for—all that has been forgotten—as that they fought, and that they were strong and bright with life. But the war did something to each of them. In his eyes you can see it, as though he never could but be conscious of that sleeve hanging so empty. Afterwards it was always downwards. We have not multiplied; we have only managed to perpetrate ourselves upon a world that has no use for the decadent. Inez is the last—the last Preswick, though that is not her name. Preswick. It is rather a splendid name, is it not?”

But before he could answer, she said whimsically: “Why am I telling all of this to you? But perhaps it is because your name is John Preswick. Yes, if that were not your name, I should have known. But it is. John Preswick. It is a name that rolls upon your tongue, like good and old wine. He is John Preswick. Do you know, years ago—so many years that you would be startled were I to tell you, I was a girl in this same house. I used to be in love with that picture; and I would sit in front of it on that funny little sofa—it is funny, is it not?—and dream. Sometimes if I were good and if I were to plead hard enough with Frank, who was only a slip of a boy then, he would build me a fire in the grate, and I would curl up before it—alone. And now and again a wisp of flame would dart out, sending its light up over the rim of the mantelpiece, lighting up the face of the boy. It would seem that he was smiling at me,' or that he had parted those lips of his to say something. That is how I came to love him, and how I promised myself that always I would wait him—I did—until I was married.”

Such simple implication was there in her voice that he turned to look more closely at the old lady, unconscious of his rudeness. But she had quite forgotten him. She was smiling.

“Let me see you,” she said sharply and suddenly. “Come over here by the light!”

He did as she directed, and she put a thumb under his chin, tilting up his head, brushing back his auburn hair with a movement that made it sparkle in the sun. Slowly she nodded, lifting a withered, blue-veined hand and touching his cheek. “It is so; it is very wonderful, and it is much like one of those romances you were holding in your hand a moment ago, but it is so, nevertheless. The boy's face is yours. And his name is yours. His hair is yellow, and yours is a reddish sort of a brown; but he is like you. Do you see, now, why I took you when you asked at the door? Somehow, the thing is natural; it should not be.”

“I think—I almost understand,” he said thoughtfully. So many months had he been here that he was taking the thing for granted, and all of the other was dead. But it occurred to him now, strange thought, but lovely still, that this little old woman was in love with him; and it warmed him, making him desire to take her thin face between the palms of his hands and kiss the lips connected to nose and chin by innumerable fine lines. She was so old, and small, and frail, and so definitely of a past that could not be again; she was so wistful and attemptedly sharp at the same time; she was, in her pertness, so much of a fraud.

He bent—a long way he had to bend—and he kissed her, and she told him briskly that he was an indecent young rascal taking unheard-of liberties, but a moisture was beneath her spectacles perched upon the thin, sharp nose.

“Leave the room,” she told him. “You are a scamp, and intolerably ill-bred!”

But he smiled at her before he left to show her that he understood, and then he blundered through the library into the garden, where he stood taut and silent, taking in the air with great, unrestrained gulps. All of it, he felt, was too large for him, and now he was a little afraid.

He saw Inez then. From the road she came through the high hedge, opening and closing the little gate, turning to see him. “Hello,” she smiled.

Going to a concrete-cast bench that stood against the hedge, he said: “Inez, would you come over and sit here? I want to speak with you.”

As she sat beside him, he went on quickly, as if he would say it and have it over with: “Inez—the garden. Tell me, Inez, do you ever notice what the garden does?”

“What does the garden do, John Preswick?” she inquired lightly, half mocking him with the name.

“I have been here for more than a year,” he reflected. “And in that time I have learnt many things. Do you know, Inez, that this garden is alive?”

“But of course. All growing things are.”

“No, Inez. All growing things are not. But this garden is. Inez, do you know what the garden thinks?”

“Tell me what the garden thinks, John Preswick,” she laughed.

“It thinks that it has won—because it always has won.

“And it may be that it has won,” he added.

“John Preswick,” she scolded, “you will prate and prate of nonsense. Now tell me something that I can understand. Will you cut me an armful of beauties?—and one of roses?”

“I will.”

“And put them in my room in water. I love roses, John Preswick.

“I love roses, John Preswick….”

But she was no longer there; like the flickering of a light she had vanished into the house, and he was alone in the garden, the humming of insects about his head, the thick scent of flowers in his nostrils, and the distant call of a crow in his ears. Stirring the turf with his foot, he smiled thoughtfully. Over beyond the Steer's Head the sun was dropping, making of the hill a blackish blur.

5

P
ASSING
between the hedge and the house, he went out of the garden, emerging in the tree-studded field that sloped up to the stone wall. There, under an apple-tree, Frank the gardener was standing, his hatless head almost touching a heavy branch that wriggled out horizontally from the main trunk. At his feet, the brown of his trousers blended with soft ease into the tops of the grass, making it seem that the branch had continued itself and returned again to the earth. Head tilted, he stared away from John Preswick into the round globe of the setting sun. Where his dirt-colored shirt left off, his skin took up the brown, no line of difference being visible. His hair was a few strands of gray.

After regarding him for a moment, John Preswick walked over and took a place at his side. “What do you see, old Frank?” he asked him.

The man turned a parchment face, glanced at the boy, and then looked back, as though he had given all the answer that was necessary.

“You have seen so many sunsets,” John Preswick said. “Are they all different, old Frank? Do you always believe, Frank, that the sun will rise again? Suppose that it did not rise, and that never again there was a sunset? Then all would be dark, Frank, and it would be of us were dead. But of course that is impossible. The sun always rises. But what if we set—and then live in darkness? Do you believe in God, old Frank? Do you believe that man is like a good bulb that will come from the earth again and again? But it is never exactly the same bulb. Tell me, old Frank, because you have been here for more years than one can count, and you were born here, and you will die here. Every year you watch the life come—and then go again. Tell me, old Frank.”

But as the old man looked at him, there was nothing in the sun-dried face to say that all this talk was more than a meaningless jumble of words—which perhaps it was.

He said, John Preswick, after a moment's hesitation: “You are so old, Frank, and I am just beginning to live. She showed me the picture, and to-night I shall look into my mirror and see whether she was right, though I am quite confident that she was. I do not understand it. But she does not know of Lucille Croyden, Frank, or of my mother. Nor of the garden. Do you know what the garden says, Frank?”

The old man shook it away as one shakes away a dog that would romp at an indiscreet time.

“That is because it has won, Frank; and you will never again have either the courage or the desire to deny it. Did you ever climb the Steer's Head and look at the sea?”

Hastily he added: “But that is irrelevant—and yet it is not. When one looks at the sea, Frank, one—” He broke off as the man turned and began to shamble away. Shrugging his shoulders, John Preswick walked in a broad circle that would eventually take him back to the kitchen.