During the night the little boy slept on the seat facing the woman and the parachute jumper, the toy aeroplane clutched to his chest; when daylight came the train was running in snow. They changed trains in snow too, and when in mid-afternoon the train-man called the town and looking out the window the woman read the name on the little station, it was snowing hard.
They got out and crossed the platform, among the milk-cans and the fowl-crates, and entered the waiting-room where a porter was putting coal into the stove. “Can we get a cab here?” the jumper asked him.
“There’s one outside now,” the porter said. “I’ll call him.”
“Thanks,” the jumper said. The jumper looked at the woman; she was buttoning the trench-coat. “I’ll wait here,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “All right. I don’t know how—”
“I’ll wait. No use standing around anywhere else.”
“Ain’t he coming with us?” the little boy said. He looked at the jumper, the toy aeroplane under his arm now, though he still spoke to the woman. “Don’t he want to see Roger’s old man too?”
“No,” the woman said. “You tell him good-bye now.”
“Good-bye?” the boy said. He looked from one to the other. “Ain’t we coming back?” He looked from one to the other. “I’ll stay here with him until you get back. I’ll see Roger’s old man some other time.”
“No,” the woman said. “Now.” The boy looked from one to the other. Suddenly the jumper said:
“So long, kid. I’ll be seeing you.”
“You’re going to wait? You ain’t going off?”
“No. I’ll wait. You and Laverne go on.” The porter came in.
“He’s waiting for you folks,” he said.
“The cab’s waiting,” the woman said. “Tell Jack so long.”
“O.K.,” the boy said. “You wait here for us. Soon as we get back we’ll eat.”
“Yair; sure,” the jumper said. Suddenly he set the bag down and stooped and picked the boy up.
“No,” the woman said; “you wait here out of the—” But the jumper went on, carrying the little boy, swinging his stiff leg along. The woman followed him, into the snow again. The cab was a small touring car with a lettered sign on the wind-shield and a blanket over the hood and driven by a man with a scraggly greyish moustache.
The driver opened the door; the jumper swung the boy in, stepped back and helped the woman in, and leaned again into the door; now his face wore an expression which anyone who had seen very much of the reporter lately would have recognized — that faint grimace (in this instance savage too) which would have been called smiling for lack of anything better.
“So long, old fellow,” he said. “Be good now.”
“O.K.,” the boy said. “You be looking around for somewhere to eat before we get back.”
“O.K.,” the jumper said.
“All right, mister,” the woman said. “Let’s go.” The car moved, swinging away from the station; the woman was still leaning forward. “Do you know where Doctor Carl Shumann lives?” she said. For an instant the driver did not move.
The car still swung on, gaining speed, and there was little possible moving for the driver to do. Yet during that moment he seemed to have become caught in that sort of instantaneous immobility like when a sudden light surprises a man or an animal out of darkness. Then it was gone.
“Doctor Shumann? Sure. You want to go there?”
“Yes,” the woman said. It was not far; the town was not large; it seemed to the woman that almost at once the car had stopped, and looking out through the falling snow she saw a kind of cenotaph, penurious and without majesty or dignity, of forlorn and victorious desolation — a bungalow, a tight flimsy mass of stoops and porte-cochères and flat gables and bays not five years old and built in that coloured mud-and-chicken-wire tradition which California moving-picture films have scattered across North America as if the celluloid carried germs.
It was not five years old, yet it wore already an air of dilapidation and rot; a quality furious and recent as if immediate disintegration had been included in the architect’s blueprints and inherent in the wood and plaster and sand of its mushroom growth. Then she found the driver looking at her.
“This is it,” he said. “Or maybe you were thinking about his old place? or are you acquainted with him that well?”
“No,” the woman said. “This is it.” He made no move to open the door; he just sat half-turned, watching her struggling with the door handle.
“He used to have a big old place out in the country until he lost it a few years back. His son took up av-aytion and he mortgaged the place to buy his son a flying machine and then his son wrecked the machine and so the doctor had to borrow some more money on the place to fix the machine up.
I guess the boy aimed to pay it back but he just never got around to it maybe. So he lost the old place and built this one. Prob’ly this one suits him just as well, though; womenfolks usually like to live close to town—” But she had got the door open now and she and the boy got out.
“Do you mind waiting?” she said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’ll pay you for the time.”
“Sure,” he said. “That’s my business. What you do with the car while you are hiring it is yours, not mine.” He watched them enter the gate and go on up the narrow concrete walk in the snow. “So that’s her,” he thought. “Only she don’t look a whole lot like a widow. But then I hear tell she never acted a whole lot like a wife.”
He had a robe, another horse-blanket, in the seat beside him. He bundled himself into it, which was just as well because dark had come and the snow drifted and whirled, funnelled now by the down-glare of a street-lamp nearby before the door opened and he recognized against the light the silhouette of the trench-coat and then that of Doctor Shumann as they came out and the door shut behind them. He threw the robe off and started the engine.
But after a while he cut the switch and drew the robe about him again, though it was too dark and the snow was falling too fast for him to see the two people standing on the stoop before the entrance of the house.
“You are going to leave him like this?” Dr. Shumann said. “You are going to leave him asleep and go away?”
“Can you think of any better way?” she said.
“No. That’s true.” He was speaking loudly, too loudly. “Let us understand one another. You leave him here of your own free will; we are to make a home for him until we die: that is understood.”
“Yes. I agreed to that inside,” she said patiently.
“No; but let us understand. I” He talked in that curious, loud, wild, rushing manner, as though she were still moving away and were at some distance now: “We are old; you cannot understand that, that you will or can ever reach a time when you can bear so much and no more; that nothing else is worth the bearing; that you not only cannot, you will not; that nothing is worth anything but peace, peace, peace, even with bereavement and grief — nothing! nothing!
But we have reached that stage. When you came here with Roger that day before the boy was born, you and I talked and I talked different to you. I was different then; I meant it when you told me you did not know whether or not Roger was the father of your unborn child and that you would never know, and I told you, do you remember?
I said, ‘Then make Roger his father from now on.’ And you told me the truth that you would not promise, that you were born bad and could not help it or did not think you were going to try to help it; and I told you nobody is born anything, bad or good, God help us, any more than anybody can do anything save what they must: do you remember? I meant that then. But I was younger then. And now I am not young. And now I can’t — I cannot — I”
“I know. If I leave him with you, I must not try to see him again until you and she are dead.”
“Yes. I must; I cannot help it. I just want peace now. I don’t want equity or justice, I don’t want happiness; I just want peace. We won’t live very much longer, and then—”
She laughed, short, mirthless, not moving. “And then he will have forgotten me.”
“That’s your risk. Because, remember,” he cried; “remember! I don’t ask this. I did not ask you to leave him, to bring him to us. You can
