She swept the soldiers flat. “There!” she cried in a fond, bright voice, “see?” For a moment longer the child sat. Then it began to cry. She took it up and sat on the bench, rocking it back and forth, glancing up at the Judge. “Now, now,” she said. “Now, now.”
“Is he sick?” the Judge said.
“Oh, no. He’s just tired of his toys, as children will get.” She rocked the child with an air fond and unconcerned. “Now, now. The gentleman is watching you.”
The child cried steadily. “Hasn’t he other toys?” the Judge said.
“Oh, yes. So many that I don’t dare walk about the house in the dark. But he likes his soldiers the best. An old gentleman who has lived here a long time, they say, and is quite wealthy, gave them to him.
An old gentleman with a white mustache and that kind of popping eyes that old people have who eat too much; I tell him so. He has a footman to carry his umbrella and overcoat and steamer rug, and he sits here with us for more than an hour, sometimes, talking and breathing hard. He always has candy or something.”
She looked down at the child, her face brooding and serene. It cried steadily. Quizzical, bemused, the Judge stood, looking quietly down at the child’s scarred, dirty feet.
The woman glanced up and followed his look. “You are looking at his scars and wondering how he got them, aren’t you? The other children did it one day when they were playing. Of course they didn’t know they were going to hurt him. I imagine they were as surprised as he was. You know how children are when they get too quiet.”
“Yes,” the Judge said. “I had a son too.”
“You have? Why don’t you bring him here? I’m sure we would be glad to have him play with our soldiers too.”
The Judge’s teeth glinted quietly. “I’m afraid he’s a little too big for toys.” He took the photograph from the briefcase. “This was my son.”
The woman took the picture. The child cried steady and strong. “Why, it’s Howard. Why, we see him every day. He rides past here every day. Sometimes he stops and lets us ride too. I walk beside to hold him on,” she added, glancing up. She showed the picture to the child.
“Look! See Howard on his pony? See?” Without ceasing to cry, the child contemplated the picture, its face streaked with tears and dirt, its expression detached, suspended, as though it were living two distinct and separate lives at one time. She returned the picture. “I suppose you are looking for him.”
“Ah,” the Judge said behind his momentary teeth. He replaced the picture carefully in the briefcase, the unlighted cigarette in his fingers.
The woman moved on the bench, gathering her skirts in with invitation. “Won’t you sit down? You will be sure to see him pass here.”
“Ah,” the Judge said again. He looked at her, quizzical, with the blurred eyes of the old. “It’s like this, you see. He always rides the same pony, you say?”
“Why, yes.” She looked at him with grave and tranquil surprise.
“And how old would you say the pony is?”
“Why, I. . . . It looks just the right size for him.”
“A young pony, you would say then?”
“Why . . . yes. Yes.” She watched him, her eyes wide.
“Ah,” the Judge said again behind his faint still teeth. He closed the briefcase carefully. From his pocket he took a half dollar. “Perhaps he is tired of the soldiers too. Perhaps with this. . . .”
“Thank you,” she said. She did not look again at the coin. “Your face is so sad. There: when you think you are smiling it is sadder than ever. Aren’t you well?” She glanced down at his extended hand. She did not offer to take the coin. “He’d just lose it, you see. And it’s so pretty and bright. When he is older, and can take care of small playthings. . . . He’s so little now, you see.”
“I see,” the Judge said. He put the coin back into his pocket. “Well, I think I shall—”
“You wait here with us. He always passes here. You’ll find him quicker that way.”
“Ah,” the Judge said. “On the pony, the same pony. You see, by that token, the pony would have to be thirty years old. That pony died at eighteen, six years unridden, in my lot. That was twelve years ago. So I had better get on.”
And again it was quite unpleasant. It should have been doubly so, what with the narrow entrance and the fact that, while the other time he was moving with the crowd, this time he must fight his way inch by inch against it.
“But at least I know where I am going,” he thought, beneath his crushed hat, his stick and briefcase dragging at his arms; “which I did not seem to know before.” But he was free at last, and looking up at the clock on the courthouse, as he never failed to do on descending his office stairs, he saw that he had a full hour before supper would be ready, before the neighbors would be ready to mark his clocklike passing.
“I shall have time to go the cemetery,” he thought, and looking down at the raw and recent excavation, he swore with fretful annoyance, for some of the savage clods had fallen or been thrown upon the marble slab beside it. “Damn that Pettigrew,” he said. “He should have seen to this.
I told him I wanted the two of them as close as possible, but at least I thought that he. . . .” Kneeling, he tried to remove the earth which had fallen upon the slab. But it was beyond his strength to do more than clear away that which partially obscured the lettering: Howard Allison II. April 3, 1903. August 22, 1913, and the quietly cryptic Gothic lettering at the foot: Auf Wiedersehen, Little Boy.
He continued to smooth, to stroke the letters after the earth was gone, his face bemused, quiet, as he spoke to the man who Mothershed had said was Ingersoll, “You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because of it.
I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of death, I know that I am. And that is all the immortality of which intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to have lost him.” His face broke, myriad, quizzical, while his hand moved lightly upon the quiet lettering. “No. I do not require that.
To lie beside him will be sufficient for me. There will be a wall of dust between us: that is true, and he is already dust these twenty years. But some day I shall be dust too. And—” he spoke now firmly, quietly, with a kind of triumph: “who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?”
Now it was late. “Probably they are setting their clocks back at this very moment,” he thought, pacing along the street toward his home. Already he should have been hearing the lawn mower, and then in the instant of exasperation at Jake, he remarked the line of motor cars before his gate and a sudden haste came upon him.
But not so much but what, looking at the vehicle at the head of the line, he cursed again. “Damn that Pettigrew! I told him, in the presence of witnesses when I signed my will, that I would not be hauled feet first through Jefferson at forty miles an hour. That if he couldn’t find me a decent pair of horses. . . . I am a good mind to come back and haunt him, as Jake would have me do.”
But the haste, the urgency, was upon him. He hurried round to the back door (he remarked that the lawn was freshly and neatly trimmed, as though done that day) and entered. Then he could smell the flowers faintly and hear the voice; he had just time to slip out of his overcoat and pajamas and leave them hanging neatly in the closet, and cross the hall into the odor of cut flowers and the drone of the voice, and slip into his clothes. They had been recently pressed, and his face had been shaved too.
Nevertheless they were his own, and he fitted himself to the olden and familiar embrace which no iron could change, with the same lascivious eagerness with which he shaped his limbs to the bedclothes on a winter night.
“Ah,” he said to the man who Mothershed had said was Ingersoll, “this is best, after all. An old man is never at home save in his own garments: his own old thinking and beliefs; old hands and feet, elbow, knee, shoulder which he knows will fit.”
Now the light vanished with a mute, faint, decorous hollow sound which drove for a fading instant down upon him the dreadful, macabre smell of slain flowers; at the same time he became aware that the droning voice had ceased. “In my own house too,” he thought, waiting for
