V. V.'s Eyes Part 91

Garland. Then, when Pond was gone, the other two had thought to make ready against the arrival of Bloom. However, they were soon brought to pause here, finding nothing to make ready with. There was an overcoat hung in the clothes closet, but otherwise it was entirely bare; hangers dangling empty. The men had found the sight somewhat sad.

But Mr. Dayne, who had been a parson before he was a Secretary, had said no matter. Let him go in his patches upon his great adventure....

It had seemed natural to these two to be doing the last small services.

There was no family here; friends' love was needed. But now there was only waiting....

Mr. Dayne, in Ca.n.a.l Street in his own business, had been at the Heth Works in the first uproar. At intervals, he had told the story to the others: a story of one machine too many unloaded on a strained floor; of a dry beam breaking with a report like a cannon; of men and women stampeding in the wild fear that the building was about to collapse. On the second floor, but two had kept their heads; and the young doctor, for all his bad foot, had been the quicker. It was supposed that the base of the machine itself had struck him, glancing. Mr. Heth, found two feet away, was buried by a litter of debris; his escape from death was deemed miraculous. And when they brought him round, it was told that his first word had been: "Vivian hurt?..."

Much remained puzzling: in chief the strange amiability of the master of the Works toward the man he had once threatened to break for libel. They had stood there chatting like friends, laughing.

But here Commissioner O'Neill could give little light. Last night his friend had told him, indeed, with evidences of strange happiness, that there was to be a new Heth Works at once. But he was mysteriously reserved as to how this triumph for the O'Neill administration had been brought to pa.s.s, saying repeatedly: "It's a sort of secret. I can't tell you that, old fellow." But O'Neill remembered now one thing he had said, with quite an excited air, which might be a sort of clue: "Don't you get it, Sam?... It's all good. Everybody's good ... Why, I've known it all the time."...

Now the two men had fallen silent. They were in the old waiting-room, with the office door fast shut between. Royalty had slept in this room once. It was decaying now, and bare as your hand but for the row of kitchen chairs along the wall. The minister kept walking about; kept humming beneath his breath. Once Sam O'Neill caught a line of that song: _The victory of life is won._ A strange sentiment at this time certainly; thoroughly clerical, though. It was a professional matter with Dayne; only he, O'Neill, had been really close to V.V. And he was continually burdened with a certain sense of personal responsibility for it all....

"I'd like to have the doctor for that little girl in there," said Mr.

Dayne.

The Commissioner, who was getting really stout these days, cleared his throat.

"How's she goin' to get on without him?"

"Ah, how?" said the clergyman, musing.

The stillness was like the silence before the dawn. Oppressive, too, was the sense of emptiness. Two men in this chamber; one small watcher beyond the door; otherwise emptiness, sensed through all the two hundred rooms of the deserted pile. Life died from the world. People forgot.

Stillness, death, loneliness, and dest.i.tution. They had picked him to the bone, and left him....

And then, as thoughts like these saddened the thoughts of the two men, there was heard as it were the whir of wings in his old hotel. And the crows came.

I say the crows came. They came in their own way; but so they had always come. Came in the guise of an elderly tramp, vacant-eyed and straggly-bearded, soiled, tentative, and reluctant. But what mattered things like this: since in his wings, which were only hairy arms that needed soap, he brought the raiment? Such a pile of them, too, such royal abundance. A fine black cutaway coat, a handsome pair of "extra"

trousers, s.h.i.+rts, and shoes, and, peeping beneath all, glimpses of a pretty blue suit quite obviously as good as new.

There stood the wonder, silent and uncouth, in the doorway. Do you doubt that Sam O'Neill and Mr. Dayne knew, the moment their eyes saw, that here were the crows come? How they gazed and gazed, and how poor Mister Garland, ever retiring of habit, squirmed and s.h.i.+fted over an uneasy heart....

He did not care to talk with gentlemen, did not Mister; gentlemen of that cloth particularly. Doubt not that in inst.i.tutions men wearing such vests as this had had their cleanly will of him on winter nights. So he asked his question dumbly, with a movement of matted head and eyebrow; and when Mr. Dayne answered in a curious voice, "Yes ... he's gone," the last expectancy faded from the rough vague face. He sidled in, timid and unwilling; laid his burden, speechless, upon a chair. And then he was shambling furtively out the door again, when the parson's hand took his shoulder.

"Why are you bringing them back now? He gave them all to you, didn't he?"

The visitor spoke for the first time, suddenly, low and whining.

"'S a Gawd's truth, Reverend, I never hooked nothin' off him, an' I was goin' to bring 'em back anyways. Nothin' wore at all, gents, you can see yourself, cep a time or two mebbe outen that there derby...."

The man himself could see no point in it all except that gents had him in charge; a threatening predicament. But Mr. Dayne's gentle suasion prevailed. Out, gradually, came the little story which he was to tell sometimes in after years, and think about oftener....

Mister was bringing back Doctor's things because he had never felt right about taking them.

The cutaway coat had been the beginning of it all, it seemed. The gift of so fine a Sunday coat had bewildered the recipient; he had been on the point of handing it back right there. However, nature had conquered, then and subsequently; there had acc.u.mulated a collection of clothing secretly laid away in a place he had. The man had kept asking, he said, out of habit--"more jest to see if he'd give 'em to yer like." But he seemed to feel, in a certain dim way, that there was a sort of contest on between him and Doctor.

"The innercent look he had to him, yer might say," he said, groping for words to answer the high-vested inquisitor. "Like a child like. Never scolded yer wunst.... Just up and give yer all yer wanted...."

The blue suit, given yesterday, seemed to have been conceived as a kind of test case. The man appeared to feel that, once refused, a sort of spell on him would be broken; he would then get out all his store and wear them freely. So he had told a tall story in the office: how he was surely going to settle down and be respectable this time, and was obliged to have him a good nice suit fer to git started in.... And Doctor had given him such a funny look that for a minute he thought sure he had him. But no, the young man had laughed suddenly, as at a joke, and said: "Well, you sit there, Mister, till I take these off...." Only not to tell Mrs. Garland. Took him right back, sure did....

"So then I thinks," said Mister, the professional quaver returning to his voice, "it's no better'n thievin' for to take off an innercent like him, and thinks I, I'll git the lot of 'em, and give him like a surprise. 'S a Gawd's truth, gents, like I'm tellin' yer. Nothin' at all wore but mebbe that there derby, like I up and tole yer...."

His word had never been doubted: this pa.s.sed invention. And he was thanked, not chidden for his narrative, and Reverend said:

"He shall wear that suit for his burial...."

So the crows flitted out of the door again, their errand done; and behind them was a deeper stillness than they had found.

The old waiting-room, a little dark at best, grew dimmer. Sunlight faded from the ruined floor. The glorious afternoon was drawing in. The men did not speak. And then in the lengthening silence, there floated up small noises: a door creaking open; quiet feet upon the stairs; a faint swis.h.i.+ng as of a skirt.

The parson was standing by the half-open door.

"D'you think, sir," he spoke suddenly aloud, "there's any way to preach to a man, like just being better than he is?"

O'Neill roused, but made no answer. He had been thinking of the day he had seen this fellow Garland dodging down the hall with those trousers there. Then, becoming aware of the footsteps, he said:

"Pond back ... Is it?"

But Mr. Dayne, looking out down the corridor, said no. After a pause, he added, in a yet lower voice:

"It's young c.o.o.ney, from the Works ... And a lady."

A change had gone over the parson's kind face, making it still kinder.

His sense of surrounding desolation ebbed from him. People acknowledged their heavy debt; paid as stoutly as they could. On the stairs there he saw, coming, the daughter of the man whose negligence had taken to-day a young life not easily to be spared.

"They're both friends of mine," added Mr. Dayne, gently. "Perhaps you will excuse me a moment?"

And he stepped out into the hall, shutting the door quietly behind him.

So Mr. Dayne thought. But under the heavy veil she wore, this was less a daughter than a woman: Cally, who had loved for a day and in the evening heard that her love was dead.

The thought behind the venture had been Chas's. Nothing required him at the House of Heth; he was for getting his sister and going to see what help the Dabney House might need. And at the last minute, she had put on her hat again, and gone too. Nothing that Mr. Dayne had felt about the loneliness of this end could touch what Cally had felt. Of whom, too, was help more required than of her, now or never any more? So they had driven three from Saltman's to the old hotel, where she had thought to come to a meeting to-day. And then Henrietta, who had come out from her typewriter strong and white as ice, methodically sticking in hatpins as she crossed the sidewalk; Hen, the iron-hearted, had quite suddenly broken down; laying her cold face in Cally's lap, weeping wildly that she would not bear it....

So Cally must brave the stairs without her, must speak to who might be here. But she did not mind. Strength had come to her with the consciousness that had returned all too quickly: the dead strength of the inanimate. She was dark and cold within as the s.p.a.ces between the worlds....

And now the two cousins met Mr. Dayne in this strange endless corridor; and knew that no services were asked of them.

They greeted with little speech. Mr. Dayne told of the simple dispositions they were making. Chas explained how Mr. Heth had tried to communicate with Mrs. Mason,--whom Mr. Dayne had quite overlooked, it seemed,--but found that she was out of town; had telegraphed; how he would have come down with them now, but had had to stop for the setting of his arm. Uncle Thornton would come this evening....

"Ah, that's kind of him," said Mr. Dayne. "He must be in much pain...."

Then silence fell. There seemed nothing to say or do. How think that she could serve--mitigate these numb horrors of pain and self-reproach?

All was over.

"Where is he?" said Cally, her voice so little and calm.