Heart's Kindred

“You meet my father,” he said, and named them. “And you meet,” he said, “Mr. Bunchy Haight.”

Mrs. Folts stared. Not one of all her gifts was a gift for diplomacy.

“Why, ain’t that the man – ain’t that the name – ” she recalled it, and met the Inger’s nod, and saw the look on Lory’s face, and instantly reacted in her own way. “My gracious,” she said, “have you had your suppers?”

Bunchy, replying with labored elegance, fain to be his gallant best to Lory’s aunt, fain to look beseechingly and reproachfully at Lory, and fain to glower heartily at his enemy, became a writhing Bunchy, demeaning himself with ample absurdity.

The Inger was merely silent. In a moment, he took his leave and, as he went, he turned to Lory.

“If you want me,” he said, “send for me. I’ll be waitin’ there in the room I got.”

She made no answer. She had been like some one stricken since first she had seen who was in the room.

“You’ll do it?” he persisted, grateful for Hiram Folt’s nervous fire of questions at his new guest.

She met his eyes and, for an instant, it seemed to him that she gave him her eyes, as she had done that morning on the desert.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

The last sound that he heard as he went down the passage with his father was the fretful whining of the madman:

“Kill ’im – kill ’im – kill ’im…”

Out on the street the Inger looked at the stretch of asphalt pavement, the even fronts of the houses, the lights set a certain space apart, and he looked in the faces of men and women walking home with parcels. All these were so methodical and quiet that they made it seem impossible that he had just wanted to kill a man. All this scene was arranged and ordered, and what he had done had been – disorderly. He thought of the word as he had often seen it in the Inch Weekly: “arrested for being disorderly.” That was it, of course; and here the buildings were as they had been appointed, and the lights were set a certain space apart… But he had not killed the man! And he was doing the way all the others were doing. He and his father were walking here, like all the others. This seemed wonderful. He looked at the lights and at the buildings as if he understood them.

He noticed that his father was trembling. At a crosswalk he caught gropingly at his son’s arm.

“We’ll have some victuals,” said the Inger, and led him to a little restaurant. His father followed obediently; but the food they set before him remained untouched. He sat there weakly, drank cold water, and assented eagerly when the Inger suggested that he go to bed.

In the Inger’s little room he sank on the edge of the single bed, and the Inger was unspeakably shocked to see him cry.

“What, Dad?” he could only say over uncomfortably. “What?”

“I wish’t I could ’a’ settled with him,” his father said. “I wish’t I could ’a’ settled one varmint before I die.”

“What’d you want to muss with him for?” he inquired impatiently.

“Because I ain’t never done much of anything that was much of anything,” the old man said. He straightened himself. “An’ I could of did this!” he added with abrupt energy.

The Inger studied him intently. The great rugged bones of the older man and the big, thick, ineffectual hands suddenly spoke to him, out of the deep of this undirected life. They had wanted to act – those bones and those hands!

“He wasn’t worth the powder,” the Inger said, but he was not thinking of what he said. He was staring at the tears rolling down the old man’s face. “Get to bed – get to bed, Dad,” he kept insisting.

But first his father would tell him, in fragments, disjointed, pieced together by the Inger’s guesses, how his presence there had come about.

Before daylight on the night of the Inger’s departure, his father had been roused by Bunchy and two of his friends arriving at the hut. Questioned, the old man had had nothing to tell them. His son had gone to the wedding, that was all he knew. Still, his son was unmistakably missing now, and the absence was the clue on which Bunchy had worked all that day. On the morning of the second day, the messenger had come riding over from the ticket agent beyond Whiteface, and had spread in the bars of Inch the tale of the manner of the Inger’s purchase of two tickets to Chicago. As soon as he heard, the old man, having done his son’s bidding at the bank in Inch, had sought out Bunchy, found him leaving on the Limited, and abruptly resolved to travel with him – “So’s to keep my eye on the bugger,” he said. Here he began to retell it all, and to fit, in wrong places, some account of Bunchy’s doings on the journey and of their half day in Chicago. “He’s a bugger – a bad bugger,” the old man repeated fretfully, “only he’s worse’n that, if I could think…”

By all this and by the nerveless movements and the obvious weakness of his father, a fact gradually returned to the Inger:

“Dad!” he cried. “You said you was sick the night you come to the hut. Ain’t that over?”

It appeared that it was by no means “over” – the sickness of which the older man had complained. To the Inger, sickness meant so little in experience that he was unable to take it seriously in any one else. In all these days, he had not once recalled his father’s mention that he was ailing. He was swept by his compunction. Against the old man’s protest, he called a doctor. And the doctor, after his examination, left what he could, and, when the Inger emphatically refused to have a nurse sent, unexpectedly announced that he would look in again toward morning.

When, almost at once, his father had fallen asleep in the little single bed, the Inger turned out the light, drew the shade to the top of the window, and stood staring across the roofs. Against the sky rose the dome of the Capitol, pricked with a thousand lights.

He breathed deep, and abruptly he understood that here in the darkness, alone, he was feeling an elation which was to him unaccountable. Something tremendous seemed to have happened to him. What was it? He did not know. His father was ill – Bunchy was here – Lory Moor was in trouble – he was haunted by the image of that mad old man. And yet his whole being was pervaded by a sense of lightness, of gratification, of sheer energy such as he never had known. For an hour he stood there, and he could not have told what he had been thinking. Only something unspeakable seemed to have occurred, which kept him from sleep.

He did sleep at last, rolled in his blanket and lying on the floor. But he was awake, and had ministered to his father, and below, on the doorstep, stood stretching prodigiously, when in the crisp morning, the doctor came back. As the doctor left, he drew the Inger down the stairs again. They spoke together in the little passage, in the light that came through the orange glass over the door. His father had, by a miracle, lived to reach him. Any hour of that day might be his last hour.

The Inger went back upstairs, and stared at his father. Impossible. He had been living for so long. There was so much that he himself remembered having been told of this man’s youth and young manhood. It was incredible that now he should die, and no one would remember these things any more… There had been one story about his buying an eagle somewhere, and setting it free. The Inger had always liked to hear that story. Now it would close over, and no one else would know. This alone seemed intolerable.

He went downstairs, and out on the street. At the next house a blind man lived. This man took his little walk every day. The walk consisted of six paces from the house to the street, and six paces back again. On the street he dared not go. Here in the yard he could encounter nothing. To guide his course he dragged his stick on the edge of the bricks. In this way he could walk very briskly, almost as a man might walk on a street. The Inger watched him. Something in himself seemed to go out of him and to make its way to that blind man.

“Sometime,” he thought, “I’ll go and take him for a walk – afterward.”

That day all Washington, and with it all the country, stood on its doorstep, awaiting the newspapers. But when the boys first came crying the headlines, the Inger let them go by. He had a vague sense of wishing not to be interrupted. Toward noon, however, a phrase caught from a street call lured him down. One of the newspapers which batten on bad news, playing it up, making it worse, contradicting it for another price, came to his hand. This paper announced that the United States would that day positively declare war on the offending nation. Even then the newspaper’s presses were methodically at work on a denial, but this the Inger did not know. He sat staring at what he read. So, then, it had come. So, then, he was really to go to war… There was something, too, about a great meeting of women in the Capitol. To this, save the headlines and the snapshots of women which covered an inside page, he did not attend. “Sob Session Probable,” he read, and wondered what it meant.

His father still slept, and, watching by his bed, he himself grew drowsy. He lay down on his blanket on the floor. This was a strange thing, to lie down to sleep in the day time. He looked up at the high walls of his tiny room. The side walls were larger than the floor – as the walls of a grave would be – he thought. His father stirred and whimpered.

“Oh my God – my God – my God…” he said, but he did not wake. This he said over many times.

At last the Inger dozed, with a preliminary sense of sinking, and of struggling not to let himself go. In his dream he went with his father on an immense empty field. There they were looking for the others, and they could see no one. They walked for a long way, looking for the others. Then these others were all about them, and they were marching, and it seemed very natural that there should be war. At any moment now, there would be war. So they marched and stood face to face with those whom they were sent to fight. And a sense of sickening horror shook him in his dream – for those whom they faced were women. The women were coming, and they had only their bare hands. Tossed by a tide of ancestral fear, he understood that among those women was Lory Moor. He shouted to her to go away – but instead they all came on, steadily, all those women – and he could not tell where she walked, and every one said that the orders were to fire. Caught and wrenched by the fear that never lives, any more, among waking men, he lived the dead passion of fear in his sleep, and woke, wasted by his horror.

He struggled up and looked at his father.

“Oh my God … my God … my God,” his weak voice was going on.

And from the floor beside him the black headlines of the lying paper stared:

“U. S. To Declare War To-Day.”

The Inger slept again, and this time the clamor and crashing of the thing were upon him. This now was war – but not as he had imagined it. He was in no excitement, no enthusiasm, even no horror. He was merely looking for a chance to kill – keenly, methodically, looking for a chance to kill. In the ranks beside him was that old madman from the kitchen – but there was no time even to think of this. They were all very busy. Then it grew dark, and the field went swimming out in stars, and many voices came calling and these met where he was:

“God – God – they’ve killed God…” the voices cried.

Again the nameless terror shook him. What if he had been the one to kill God? He sought wildly among piles of the dead to find God, and he was not found. Then many came and touched him and stared in his face, and he understood them. God had not been killed at all. He himself was God and he had been killing men…

At this the terror that was on him was like nothing that he had ever known. It took him and tore him, and he writhed under a nameless sense of the irreparable, which ate at him, living. When he awoke, he lay weakly grateful that the thing was not true. Something swam through his head, and he tried to capture it – was it true? Was he God? He struggled up and sat with his head in his hands. There were things that he wanted to think, if he had known how to think then.

It was late in the afternoon when the end came to his father, quietly, and with no pain. His father knew him, smiled at him, and with perfect gentleness and without shyness, put out his hand. Save in a handshake, he had never taken his hand before since he was a little boy. But now they took each other’s hands naturally, as if a veil had gone. Afterward, the Inger wondered why he had not kissed him. He had not thought of that.

Before he called any one, the Inger stood still, looking at his father, and looking out the window to the City. So much had happened. A great deal of what had happened he understood, but there was much more that seemed to be pressing on him to be made clear. He had a strong sense of being some one else, of standing outside and watching. What great change was this that had come to his father and to him?

By dark they had taken his father away. The Inger went with him and did what he could. His father lay in an undertaker’s chapel. From the street the Inger stared at the chapel. It looked so strangely like the other buildings.

He took back to his room some poor belongings of his father’s, and when he saw the little room, and the empty unmade bed, he was shaken by a draining sense of loneliness – the first loneliness that he had ever known. Then he let his thought go where all day it had longed to go. He wanted Lory Moor.

He let himself go round by the little house of the Folts’s. It was quite dark, save for that watching light in the kitchen window. He waited on the other side of the street for a long time. No one came. There seemed to be no one in the neighborhood. A little dog came by, looked up at him, and stood wagging a ragged tail. The Inger stooped, then squatted beside the dog, and patted his head.