There was a dazzle of light around all the windows of the first floor, reflecting itself back and forth in mirrors, so that every room was pervaded with a white glare; there followed a sound as of a million matches struck at once, so loud and terrible that the thunder rolling down seemed secondary; then a splintering noise separated itself out, and Bess’ voice:
“That struck!”
Once again came the sickening lightning, and through a rolling pandemonium of sound they groped from window to window till Jean cried: “It’s William’s room! There’s a tree on it!”
In a moment, Lew had flung wide the kitchen door and saw, in the next glare, what had happened: The great tree, in falling, had divided the lean-to from the house proper.
“Is William there?” he demanded.
“Probably. He should be.”
Gathering up his courage, Lew dashed across the twenty feet of new marsh, and with a waffle iron smashed in the nearest window. Inundated with sheet rain and thunder, he yet realized that the storm had moved off from overhead, and his voice was strong as he called: “William! You all right?”
No answer.
“William!”
He paused and there came a quiet answer:
“Who dere?”
“You all right?”
“I wanna know who dere.”
“The tree fell on you. Are you hurt?”
There was a sudden peal of laughter from the shack as William emerged mentally from dark and atavistic suspicions of his own. Again and again the pealing laughter rang out.
“Hurt? Not me hurt. Nothin’ hurt me. I’m never better, as they say. Nothin’ hurt me.”
Irritated by his melting clothes, Lew said brusquely:
“Well, whether you know it or not, you’re penned up in there. You’ve got to try and get out this window. That tree’s too big to push off tonight.”
Half an hour later, in his room, Lew shed the wet pulp of his clothing by the light of a single candle. Lying naked on the bed, he regretted that he was in poor condition, unnecessarily fatigued with the exertion of pulling a fat man out a window. Then, over the dull rumble of the thunder he heard the phone again in the hall, and Bess’ voice, “I can’t hear a word. You’ll have to get a better connection,” and for thirty seconds he dozed, to wake with a jerk at the sound of his door opening.
“Who’s that?” he demanded, pulling the quilt up over himself.
The door opened slowly.
“Who’s that?”
There was a chuckle; a last pulse of lightning showed him three tense, blue-veined fingers, and then a man’s voice whispered: “I only wanted to know whether you were in for the night, dear. I worry—I worry.”
The door closed cautiously, and Lew realized that old Gunther was on some nocturnal round of his own. Aroused, he slipped into his sole change of clothes, listening to Bess for the third time at the phone.
“—in the morning,” she said. “Can’t it wait? We’ve got to get a connection ourselves.”
Downstairs he found Jean surprisingly spritely before the fire. She made a sign to him, and he went and stood above her, indifferent suddenly to her invitation to kiss her. Trying to decide how he felt, he brushed his hand lightly along her shoulder.
“Your father’s wandering around. He came in my room. Don’t you think you ought to—”
“Always does it,” Jean said. “Makes the nightly call to see if we’re in bed.”
Lew stared at her sharply; a suspicion that had been taking place in his subconscious assumed tangible form. A bland, beautiful expression stared back at him; but his ears lifted suddenly up the stairs to Bess still struggling with the phone.
“All right. I’ll try to take it that way… P-ay-double ess-ee-dee—’p-a-s-s-e-d.’ All right; ay-double you-ay-wy. ’Passed away?’” Her voice, as she put the phrase together, shook with sudden panic. “What did you say—’Amanda Gunther passed away’?”
Jean looked at Lew with funny eyes.
“Why does Bess try to take that message now? Why not—”
“Shut up!” he ordered. “This is something serious.”
“I don’t see—”
Alarmed by the silence that seeped down the stairs, Lew ran up and found Bess sitting beside the telephone table holding the receiver in her lap, just breathing and staring, breathing and staring. He took the receiver and got the message:
“Amanda passed away quietly, giving life to a little boy.”
Lew tried to raise Bess from the chair, but she sank back, full of dry sobbing.
“Don’t tell father tonight.”
How did it matter if this was added to that old store of confused memories? It mattered to Bess, though.
“Go away,” she whispered. “Go tell Jean.”
Some premonition had reached Jean, and she was at the foot of the stairs while he descended.
“What’s the matter?”
He guided her gently back into the library.
“Amanda is dead,” he said, still holding her.
She gathered up her forces and began to wail, but he put his hand over her mouth.
“You’ve been drinking!” he said. “You’ve got to pull yourself together. You can’t put anything more on your sister.”
Jean pulled herself together visibly—first her proud mouth and then her whole body—but what might have seemed heroic under other conditions seemed to Lew only reptilian, a fine animal effort—all he had begun to feel about her went out in a few ticks of the clock.
In two hours the house was quiet under the simple ministrations of a retired cook whom Bess had sent for; Jean was put to sleep with a sedative by a physician from Ellicott City. It was only when Lew was in bed at last that he thought really of Amanda, and broke suddenly, and only for a moment. She was gone out of the world, his second—no, his third love—killed in single combat. He thought rather of the dripping garden outside, and nature so suddenly innocent in the clearing night. If he had not been so tired he would have dressed and walked through the long-stemmed, clinging ferns, and looked once more impersonally at the house and its inhabitants—the broken old, the youth breaking and growing old with it, the other youth escaping into dissipation. Walking through broken dreams, he came in his imagination to where the falling tree had divided William’s bedroom from the house, and paused there in the dark shadow, trying to piece together what he thought about the Gunthers.
“It’s degenerate business,” he decided—“all this hanging on to the past. I’ve been wrong. Some of us are going ahead, and these people and the roof over them are just push-overs for time. I’ll be glad to leave it for good and get back to something fresh and new and clean in Wall Street tomorrow.”
Only once was he wakened in the night, when he heard the old man quavering querulously about the twenty dollars that he had borrowed in ’92. He heard Bess’ voice soothing him, and then, just before he went to sleep, the voice of the old Negress blotting out both voices.
III
Lew’s business took him frequently to Baltimore, but with the years it seemed to change back into the Baltimore that he had known before he met the Gunthers. He thought of them often, but after the night of Amanda’s death he never went there. By 1933, the role that the family had played in his life seemed so remote—except for the unforgettable fact that they had formed his ideas about how life was lived—that he could drive along the Frederick Road to where it dips into Carroll County before a feeling of recognition crept over him. Impelled by a formless motive, he stopped his car.
It was deep summer; a rabbit crossed the road ahead of him and a squirrel did acrobatics on an arched branch. The Gunther house was up the next crossroad and five minutes away—in half an hour he could satisfy his curiosity about the family; yet he hesitated. With painful consequences, he had once tried to repeat the past, and now, in normal times, he would have driven on with a feeling of leaving the past well behind him; but he had come to realize recently that life was not always a progress, nor a search for new horizons, nor a going away. The Gunthers were part of him; he would not be able to bring to new friends the exact things that he had brought to the Gunthers. If the memory of them became extinct, then something in himself became extinct also.
The squirrel’s flight on the branch, the wind nudging at the leaves, the cock splitting distant air, the creep of sunlight transpiring through the immobility, lulled him into an adolescent trance, and he sprawled back against the leather for a moment without problems. He loafed for ten minutes before the “k-dup, k-dup, k-dup” of a walking horse came around the next bend of the road. The horse bore a girl in Jodhpur breeches, and bending forward, Lew recognized Bess Gunther.
He scrambled from the car. The horse shied as Bess recognized Lew and pulled up. “Why, Mr. Lowrie! … Hey! Hoo-oo there, girl! … Where did you arrive from? Did you break down?”
It was a lovely face, and a sad face, but it seemed to Lew that some new quality made it younger—as if she had finally abandoned the cosmic sense of responsibility which had made her seem older than her age four years ago.
“I was thinking about you all,” he said. “Thinking of paying you a visit.” Detecting a doubtful shadow in her face, he jumped to a conclusion and laughed. “I don’t mean a visit; I mean a call. I’m solvent—sometimes you have to add that these days.”
She laughed too: “I was only thinking the house was full
