There came the black day when he cracked—the blue black, the purple black, the green black of those unused to it. In the morning the grocer’s wife came; she said loud in the living room that she and her husband did not care to carry the account any longer.
“Be quiet!” Jason warned her. “Wait till the little girl gets off to school.”
“Your little girl! What about mine. One hundred ten dollar—”
Jo’s feet sounded on the stairs.
“Morning Daddy. Oh! Morning Mrs. Deshhacker.”
“Good morning.”
Temporarily, Jo’s imperturbability disarmed Mrs. Deshhacker, but after she had gone into the dining room, she delivered her ultimatum more firmly. Jason could only say:
“I’ll try… Middle of next week… Anyhow a partial payment.”
There was the silver: Certain pieces were inviolate—the Supreme Court Bowl, the Lee spoons with the crest of his grandfather—
Jason had seen the sign many times. Mr. Cale would take any security—was most generous, most reliable.
“How do you do, sir?”
With the infallible good manners of the Marylander, even of the humbler denominations, he stood waiting. His venality scarcely showed through his mask.
Jason mumbled something with a shamed face. Mr. Cale was used to that and stopped him.
“You want to raise some money?”
“Yes—on some silver.”
“What kind?”
“Table silver. Some goblets that have been a long time—” He broke off—the indignity was intolerable— “and a coffee set.”
“Well naturally you have to show me.”
“Of course. There may be other things—some furniture. A few pieces—I’ll redeem them in a month or so.”
“Oh, I’m sure you will.”
Big chance he will, he added from his own experience…
At the hospital Jason was stopped in the hall and made to sit down by the floor nurse. Doctor Keyster was finishing his rounds and wanted to talk to him before he went into his wife’s room.
“About what?”
“He didn’t say.”
“She’s worse?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Davis. He just wants to talk to you—”
She was cleaning thermometers as she talked.
Half an hour later in a little reception room Dr. Keyster spoke his mind.
“She doesn’t respond. There’s nothing before her but years of rest, that’s all I can say—years of rest. We’ve all got fond of her here but there’d be no service to you in kidding you.”
“She’ll never get well?”
“Probably never.”
“You don’t think she’ll ever be well?” Jason asked again.
“There have been cases—”
……Then the spring was gone out of life, April, May and June. That was all gone.
…April when she came to him like a rill of sweetness. May when she was a hillside. June when they held each other so close that there was nothing more except the lashes flicking on their eyes…
Dr. Keyster said:
“You might as well make up your mind to it, Mr. Davis.”
Going home once more from one of the many pietas to his love, Jason’s taxi passed through an agitated meat market; a labor agitator was addressing the crowd; when he saw Jason in his taxi he shifted the burden of his discourse to him.
“Here is one! And here we are! We’ll turn them upside down and shake them till the dimes and quarters roll out!”
Jason wondered what would roll out of him. He had just enough to pay the taxi.
Up in his bedroom he felt for the third time the balance of the thirty-eight revolver—life insurance all paid up.
“Help me to kill myself!” he prayed. “No fooling now. Put it in the mouth.”
——The phone rang sharp and he tossed the gun onto the empty twin bed.
A woman’s voice said: “Is this Mr. Davis? This is Principal McCutcheon’s secretary. Just one moment.”
Then came a man’s voice, level and direct.
“This is Mr. McCutcheon at the High School. It’s an unfortunate matter, Mr. Davis. We have to ask you to withdraw your daughter Josephine from school.”
Jason’s tense breath caught in his throat.
“I thought you’d rather know before she reached home. I tried your office. We’re compelled, much against our sensibilities, to expel three of the girls for conduct that can’t be condoned. When a pupil falls below the tone of the school the individual must be sacrificed to the good of the majority. I called a committee of teachers, Mr. Davis, and they saw eye-to-eye with me.”
“What was the nature of the offense?”
“That I don’t care to go into on the phone, Mr. Davis. I shall be glad to see you by appointment any afternoon except Thursday between two and four. I must add that we were more than surprised to find Josephine linked up to this matter. She’s held herself—well, I must say, a little aloof; she hasn’t ingratiated herself with her teachers, but—well, there we are.”
“I see,” Jason said dryly.
“Good afternoon, sir.”
Jason reached for the revolver and began taking the cartridges out of the magazine.
——I’ve got to stick around—a little longer, he thought.
Jo arrived in half an hour, her usually mobile mouth tight and hard. There were dark strips of tears up and down her cheeks.
“Hello.”
“Hello, darling.” He had been waiting for her downstairs; he waited till she had taken off her coat and hat.
“What’s it all about anyhow?”
Furiously she turned to him.
“I won’t tell you! You can shake me, Daddy! You can beat me!”
“For God’s sake—what’s this all about? When did I ever beat you?”
“They wanted to this morning because I wouldn’t say what they wanted.”
Jo flung herself into a corner of the big couch and wept into it. He walked around the room, concerned and embarrassed.
“I don’t want to know, Jo. Whatever you do is all right with me. I trust you, Baby, all the way. I’m not even making any inquiries.”
She turned tired eyes up at him.
“You won’t? You promise, word of honor?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got an idea, a real hunch. Unless—or say till I get the Gehrbohm account, I have lots of time in the afternoon. Suppose I be your private tutor for awhile. I was pretty good once in Latin and Algebra. For the languages we’ll get a reading list from the library.”
She sobbed again deep into the big cushions.
“Oh Baby! Stop that. We’re not defeatists, you and me. Take a bath and then we’ll get up some dinner.”
When she had gone into her room Jason tried to think of something outside himself. Then he remembered what Annie Lee had said in their short quarter hour this morning.
“I can’t understand about the farm—it was all so simple. There was the seasoning—nine tablespoons of salt, then nine of hickory ash, then the pepper and sage. And of course always the tenderloin—”
“Hickory ash?” Jason had exclaimed. “Tenderloin?”
Stirred by his surprise she lifted herself up in bed, so that he had to ease her gently down again. “Don’t tell me Young Seneca isn’t using tenderloin—isn’t putting in the tablespoons of hickory ash?”
——In the living room of the apartment Jason sat down and wrote Young Seneca.
When Jo came downstairs he said, “Take this over to the post office, will you? It’s about the farm.”
After examining the address Jo demanded:
“Father—do you mean seriously you’re going to teach me?”
“Am I? You bet! Teach you all I know.”
“All right.”
But in the grey dusk he was still bent over the ragged text-book.
“Caesar,” he said over the first text. “It’s addressed to the damn Swiss!”
He translated:
“In Switzerland they necked the Gods and the men—”
”What, Daddy?”
“Wait now: In Switzerland they necked the men and then they necked the Gods—This is difficult now—Latin didn’t seem like that in my day.”
Jason turned to Jo with exasperation. “Don’t they give you sentences to construe? Helvetii qui nec Deos nec homines verebantur—That means quiver I think—magnum dolorem. That means it all ends up very sad. Why did you ask me to translate it in the first place?”
“I didn’t ask you. I knew that part. It means the Helvetians who feared neither Gods nor men came to great grief because they were restrained on all sides by mountains.”
He read again: “Patiebantur quod ex omnibus partibus, and that means a rampart of ten feet,” he cried exultantly across the lamplight.
“Yah! You saw that in a footnote.”
“I did not,” he lied.
“Give me your word of honor?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“You fancy yourself as a teacher.”
That was the end of the first night’s Latin.
Thumbing over the book Jo found her place and read aloud slowly:
“If the government revenue from taxes increased from one billion dollars in 1927 to five hundred billion dollars in 1929, what was the increased percent?”
“Go on,” said Jason.
“Go on yourself, Daddy. You’re this wonderful mathematician. And try this one!”
“Let me read it myself:
‘If the sum of the reciprocals of two consecutive even numbers is zero. Then the sum of two other consecutive numbers is 11/60. What are the numbers?’”
Jason said, “There’s always for the X an unknown quantity. You have to have some system—haven’t you?”
“Swell system.”
“Got to start somewhere.” He bent over it again: “If the government revenue increased from five billions in 1927 to—”
He was temporarily at the end of his resources.
“Darling,” he said. “In a week I’ll know more about this—”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Time for you to go to bed.”
There was a pregnant silence between them.
“I know.”
She came over to him and pecked briefly at an old baseball scar on his forehead.
VI
To keep the chronicle going one must skip through the days when Annie Lee’s farm came to life again—when Young Seneca realized that Mr. Davis actually wanted tenderloin put into the sausage—the day he recalled that an important appendage was nine tablespoons of hickory ash.
Orders for the buckets began to increase. From merely paying for itself, the farm began to dribble a trickle
