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| - From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 The house in which daniel was born was the kind of which we say, as we drive past it in the elmpillared margin of some New England village: "What a monstrosity! " One day, when the Antique has caught up with the Eighties, perhaps we shall say: "What a beauty! What noble bays and airy cupolas and richness of brown scrollwork! They knew how to build their houses in those days." Perhaps, too, we shall have matured enough to say of men like Dan Kinsman, who was Daniel's father: "They knew how to build their lives." When the young Daniel came home from his first year away to prep school and saw with his changed eyes the unchanging house, the weighing cornices and flying towers, squared bays, rounded bays, porte-cochere, all cocoa brown in the shadows of the chestnuts "That's it," he thought, "it's not like other fellows' houses." And when he studied this man, his father, it seemed for a while he had found the answer to the riddle as old in its secret wretchedness as the very beginnings of his memory. "And he, he's not like other fellows' fathers." Other fellows' fathers, Daniel had found in his year, were men who arrived cheerfully from lifting their incomes and departed grimly to lower their medal scores. Forward-moving, tomorrowthinking young elders, eager, industrious, mobile fellows fearful of nothing but of seeming to stand still. But here was a father apparently content to be one year where he had been the year before, possessed of but the same possessions, the same small-town friendships, the same leisurely, half-patriarchal judgeship, the same pedestrian pleasures, books and dogs, pruning hooks and garden hoes and fishing rods. And he a strong, straight man alive, not yet fifty, with black hair thick on his head, and lungs to laugh with when he wanted. Strange! Now it came to Daniel it must be because his father was so wanting in— that's to say, so strange this way— that he had always seemed to his son so— so— Daniel groped for a word for a thing he'd never been able to give a shape or name, and had to finish lamely— seemed so "strange." Daniel could have laughed for joy to discover, now he was grown up, that the trouble about his father was so little a one as this. For all the weight of his fifteen years, he could have skipped for lightness, to know that here was a difference from other fathers he now could grasp, even learn to condone, yes, even admire, even fight for, with fellows with more— well— say— money-grabbing dads. Yes, Daniel could have skipped for lightness on the deep cavegreen turf of the hydrangea alley, where they walked and talked that first June afternoon at home, he and his father, while Mother watched them with her pale smile from her long chair in her high window. It was curious; Daniel had always loved his ailing, beautiful mother, easily, and been near her and told her everything tellable, easily, and not thought much about it. The one he would have given his life to be able to love as easily, to be close to, friends with, whole of heart, was this other, this darkly handsome man whom he himself was so absurdly like to look at, his father. So today it was as if the year of forgetting had worked a good miracle. It was a dream come true to find himself sauntering and chatting with Dan Kinsman as affectionately at ease as though they had been but two fellows gravely estimating the apple yield in the west yard and the hay chances in the back mowing, chuckling together over the antics of Spot's pups on the barn floor, waving answer to the view halloo of Doc Martin racketing by in the antique twin-six, and, wonder of wonders at last, arm in arm, man and man, marching indoors prepared to mount and demand of Mother if supper were ever to be ready— as if she, poor fragile chatelaine, could know anything about that. But, day of marvels! An elixir must have run in the air. For here in their sight came Mother down the stairs to meet them, walking by herself, suddenly, subtly revivified, the flush on her cheeks and the shine in her eyes not more for their astonishment than for her own. So tonight there were three at table in place of two, and it was like the sort of dream in which one wakes from an interior nightmare to find everything finished that was horrid, and everything at its beginning that is right and bright. Nor did it end with the supper table; afterward she would go out abroad with them, as if greedy to share in the marvel of those two men of hers who walked of a sudden as one, and by their walking so, seemed so suddenly to have made her walk again. What a sight it was for the evening sun to see, level and bloody rose beneath the eaves of the chestnuts! Dan Kinsman, bemused, commencing words and swallowing their ends on half-choked chuckles, even as his eyes, quick for once, kept slant track of Vivian's every oddly exuberant gesture. Daniel, beatified, accepting wonders with a new omnivorous trust. And Vivian Kinsman, unbelievable, a princess freed from some evil enchantment in exile, returned to her kingdom, leading them. In the east yard, hidden for years, the low, excited laugh was on her lips continuously. For this border, it was: "They're too gorgeous, Dan; I love them!" For that bed: "But there never ivere such flowers!" When she came in view of Father's season's pride, the bastion of man-high crimson poppies, all she could do was put her hands to her heart. Only when she caught sight of Spot and her puppies taking the last of the sun at the barn door was there a shadow of change in the exclamation of discovery. "You're going to keep them all, Dan!" She drew Father's eyes. "All, Dan!" He would have temporized, laughingly: "Spot got away this time, and — " "You're not going to drown them, Dan. I couldn't bear to think — " The sharpness in her voice brought quickness to his. "Why, no, of course not, Vivian. I shall keep them, of course— unless someone should want them very much— who'd give them a good home." The sun touched distant woods. Father dared worry aloud at last. "It'll be chilly in another second now, Vivian." She turned back with a queer, mercurial docility, asking only, when they came to the porch steps, that she might have some of the crimson poppies for her room tonight. "I should so love to see them in the morning, Dan, just three or four." "You'll have an armful, that's what you'll have, dear; I'll go and get them now." Daniel took her in on his arm, feeling tall, now his father was gone. She would go only as far as the living room for the moment, where a slender summer fire was laid, ready for the match. When Daniel had lighted it he studied the white figure lying back deep in Dan Kinsman's chair. He said: "You're happy tonight, Mother." She needn't answer. Her eyes, fixed on the fire, were alight with all its beginning, playing flames. And before he knew why, "Have you always been happy here with Father," he demanded, "and with me?" This must have seemed to need no answer, at first. But then she sat up and fixed the boy with her straight gaze. "Always, yes!" From vehemence it changed to mirth. "What ever put it in your head, sonny?— yes, yes, yes!" And sinking back, with a little gasp at the end of her laughter: "He's an angel, sonny, your father is, but he's an awful slow-poke; won't you go and hurry him along?" Father had meant it when he said an armful; he had gathered a whole great sheaf of the poppies, and rather a pity, for the blooms were closed. But what matter if Vivian wanted them; they'd open again at day. So he seemed to be thinking as he stood there, laden and bemused, in the falling night. And so it was that Daniel, his son, came upon him, deep in a preoccupation of his own, halted a rod away, and, without lifting his gaze from the ground, said: "Has Mother liked it here in Kennelbridge, Father?" Dan Kinsman had had a day of astonishments. Without turning anything but his head, and that slowly, he studied his dim questioner. "It has liked your mother here," he said quietly. The boy, given a riddle, raised his eyes to the man, who was no more than a shadow shape in the dusk now— and, as shadows may be, something distorted and magnified— between the blackening blood of the poppies he carried and the dike he had torn them from. And Daniel forgot his riddle and widened his eyes. The father knew the sign of old. All afternoon he had been waiting for it, pulled between dread and the beginnings of an incredible hope. Now he wheeled, cried, "Ah, Daniel, son!" and held out his arms, careless of their sanguinary burden. And his son turned and ran. What good is it to be fifteen and a man, instead of ten and a boy, or five and a child? When Daniel, fleeing, needles in his legs and an icicle up his backbone, reached the firelight where he had left his mother sitting, it was on the knees of veriest childhood he tumbled down, to hide his face in the chair bottom beside her, wind his fingers in her skirts, and sob it out in words aloud, at last: "Mother— why am I— why am I sometimes— sometimes so fr-frfrightened of my— my fa-fa-father?" Mother had always answered his questions, till he asked this question. Her failure now, her complete, unstirring silence, doubled the magnitude of a terror till now his own shamed secret. And the doubled was redoubled by the sound of that man's feet on the piazza, coming toward the door. He groveled. "Mother, please, hurry— hurry and tell me, tell me, Mother! What— what's there about my father— what's he done that's such a— a horror? " Still, for answer, no word, no gesture. And it was too late; a quiet door had opened and the feet were in the room. As Daniel scrambled up and wheeled, a defending courage suffused him. He stood his ground, and, not knowing why, spread his arms across the man's way, and not knowing what, cried: "No! Don't! Don't come!" Through the water in his eyes he began to see his father's face hung there before him, oddly gray, the stare of it fixed, not on him, but on her behind him. And he grew aware of two things fighting in that stare, the greater one like a stunned sorrow, the lesser like a reawakening hope. As sometimes in crisis, it was of the lesser one the man spoke now. "This, then, Daniel, is why you said what you said out there, and sobbed, and ran away back here? It wasn't that old queerness of yours coming back then, after all?" The husband's shock was gentler than the son's, for all evening he had had in his mind as he watched Vivian the thought of a candle when it gutters, how it will flame to its old brightness for an instant at the last. Not so with Daniel. When he turned and knew that the reason his mother had sat there and not answered him was that all the while she had sat there in the deep chair dead, he fainted. Doc Martin had to mop his bald head with a troubled handkerchief many times in the following days. On the third, the afternoon after the funeral, stopping in at the Kinsmans' by right of the oldest and closest friend and finding Dan there all alone, he asked: "Where's Daniel hiding himself?" And if it sounded casual, and was meant to, already in the soil of the doctor's mind uneasy little roots of wonder had begun to set. "Don't know; not far off, I guess." The answer was given with an averted face. Why shouldn't it be? Men's faces, when they've just buried their wives of twenty years— why may they not wish to keep what's written on them to themselves? The physician mocked himself for a worrying idiot as he went on home. But he had his head to mop again when he got to his own house and found Daniel fidgeting up and down the piazza, inarticulate and miserably mantling. It was all mysterious and awkward. He didn't know what he was to do or say, and especially was this so when the boy's dumbness, laboring, brought forth some mouse of words about the weather or the baseball standings. But finally, "Dr. Martin," it came at a rush, "was my mother happy, living here in Kennelbridge, with Father— and me?" It is unfortunate that at such moments men seem to think they have to speak in the manner of oracles. As Dan Kinsman, three days before, now Doc Martin: "Well, son, she lived here in Kennelbridge, with you and your father, almost exactly ten years longer than I gave her to live. Does that mean anything?" And thereafter he wondered why the boy's eyes, savagely troubled, followed him slantwise everywhere. He wondered more. Seeing the sun go and the dusk come, he wondered why the sensitive, naturally unobtrusive lad stayed on, apparently aimless and plainly wretched, and stayed, and made no move to go. It was after dark when Doc Martin appeared at the Kinsman place, to find Dan out in the east yard, standing, chin down, hands locked behind him. "I thought, Dan, you might wonder where the kid was. He's over at my house. I'm afraid I've been— uh— keeping him." Dan listened, stock-still, without comment. It became an ordeal. "I don't know just how to say it, Dan. The boy seems badly upset. He has a lot of his mother in him, Dan— a lot of the thing that made us all love her— and— want to spank her, sometimes. That sentimental def enselessness— it went with her ailment, I've no doubt. That making a mountain of emotion out of a molehill of— not that I mean this is a molehill— but— damn it, old man! The boy— this house— this night after the funeral— I've a hunch he'd more than half like to stay over with me. Thought I'd ask you." "Yes." The one syllable, it sounded rough in the throat. As he went away the doctor turned twice to study the figure posted there in darkness, head heavy, face hidden. Anger? Sorrow? What? Headless, tailless business! He told himself he wished he were dead and well out of it. He wasn't. After that night, any half plans there may have been of father and son going off for a summer of travel together were dropped. There was a camp in the Green Mountains where Daniel's school went, and he was packed for it by the second morning. Dan came to Doc Martin, unhappy, unused to lying. "I wonder if you'll do something for me, old man? Drive Daniel over to the main line this noon. I shall be busy." The doctor did it. What their parting was he never knew, for the boy had his bags out at the gate when he drove by, and the father was "busy." If the friend of them both was profanely troubled he kept it quiet and set himself for a gallant hour of cheer and small talk. The problem of a book for the journey seemed a godsend. They went over the newsstand's library with a mutual pretense of care, but as if it were not bad enough that all the novels were detective novels, Daniel discovered after brief browsings that there was none he could be certain he hadn't read. As he accepted one at last —entitled Murder!— the physician had to stare. "Lord, son! To look at you anybody'd think you were as mild as a lamb. And here you turn out a glutton for crime. Don't you ever read anything else?" Daniel went red— even redder, the doctor thought, than was asked for. "Oh, I forget 'em faster'n I read 'em. If you asked me one single thing that had happened, a week after, I couldn't any more remember it than I could " He got no further. He had touched by chance on a pet dogma of the other's; and Doc Martin, figuratively, squared off. "Couldn't remember? Bosh! Ever tried?" "Tried?" Daniel was confused by this vehemence. "Really tried, I mean. Rolled up your mental sleeves and taken pick and spade to the humus of memory, to try and turn up some one particular thing that's buried there? It's surprising. There are authenticated records of long-term prisoners, men in solitary confinement, who, simply for something for their minds to do . . ." And here they came, the classic cases, served up with a zealot's gusto; the aged criminals reconstructing verbatim the nursery tales of infanthood; the old fellows repainting in minutest detail places passed through as children and thereafter wholly forgotten. And so forth. And so on. The man with a hobby is not to be held accountable. Doc Martin, who had toiled to make talk— now his one fear was that the belated train would make up time. "Can't remember! Actually, you can't forget! Nothing you've ever felt, heard, seen, no matter how tiny— you may mislay the record, but you can't lose it. No matter how dim, it's here in your cranium somewhere, indelible, forever." The bent ear and big eye of his audience it was cruel to give up. The train was in, but there was still the moment on the platform. "Theoretically, Daniel, you ought to be able to remember the day of your birth. But it would probably take you as many as a thousand years, in a dark cell, and after all — " After all, after the boy was up the step Doc Martin recollected something he had been two days thinking on. "Daniel, listen! Your mother was happy. Her life here was a clear, quiet, happy life, with those she loved deeply. Believe me, Daniel." It was good for Daniel he liad the book called Murder! At the end of his emotional tether he must have escape, and the surest escape was here between these covers; he knew the taste of it beforehand, as the eater of drugs knows the taste of his drug. Escape, yes. And a curious, helpless, rather horrid surrender. Never remember? "Bosh!" For a little while yet he left the book unopened, and thought of the mild old doctor and his ferocious expletive. But was it true, even a half of what he had claimed, about digging up buried things? ... If you tried hard enough? . . . Took a pick and spade ... to buried things? There were five hours to ride, more than enough for the book. Let it wait. To remember things forgotten! By dim footprints in the mold of old fantasies, by broken twigs of sensation— this sort of sound disliked for no reason, that odor as inexplicably agreeable— by clues so thinner-than-air to be able to track back relentlessly— what? "Bosh!" It was Daniel's own bosh this time. But the light in the deeps of his abstracted eyes burned no less steadily, nor did the color of a strange excitation retreat from his cheeks and temples. There was a station. Express, the train only slowed, going through. On the flickering platform stood an elderly woman, back to, a stoutish figure glimpsed for a split second, gray-clad, with a purple hat with a tulle quill. "Emma!" But then the boy lay back and derided himself. It was that purple, forward-tilted hat. Emma, his old nurse, had been dead three— no, two— years. It was three years ago she came to see him, from Albany, and that was the year before she died. Yes, yes. She came in her nephew's car and brought Daniel a sweater she had knitted for him. He could see her now, when he tried to get into it, there on the big circular side piazza, and her chagrin. "Mercy, when I was here last I never looked to see you grow so in two years. Remember when I was here last time, Dannie?" "Course I do; what d'you think? And you said I used to be a caution when I was little, and you hoped I'd got over it." "Bless you, Dannie, and have you?" Had he? Got over what? Three years ago he'd known what, because three years ago he'd remembered what she'd said two years before that. Something about: "I declare, you always were a caution, Dannie. The first day ever I saw you . . . saw you . . . first day ever I saw you . . ." Concentrate on it! Try harder! ". . . first day ever I saw you, do you know what you said . . . what you . . ." In the Pullman, but unconscious of the Pullman, Dannie knotted his brows. Don't give up. Go at it some other way. . . . Well, they'd been in his room; he was ready for bed, and Emma had come up— she'd stayed overnight that next-to-last visit— and she'd sat there in the blue rocker and talked and talked. Talked so long that Mother had called: "Daniel, Emma's tired, so you must stop asking her so many . . ." But now he had it— the other thing— it was "question." It wasn't "what you said." It was, complete: "First day ever I saw you, do you know the question you asked me? Well, most threeyear-olds, they'll ask you like, 'What's a zebra?' or 'What's a airplane?' But the first thing you asked me was . . . thing you asked me was . . ." No, after all, not quite complete. Why did the light of recollection close again, just there? Especially when, by thinking on it, that bedtime visit of Emma's had grown as vivid as a thing today. The expression of the boy in seat No. 5 was a set scowl. A flush colored it, like anger. A "Bosh!" trembled on his lips. He had a book to read, and, by hang, he'd read it now. A book called Murder! "Murder!" Why, now he'd got that too! "The first thing you asked me— I was trying to get you to go into the summerhouse and you were howling and pulling— and you asked me, 'What is murder?' And if you don't call that funny for a threeyear-old to be asking . . ." Murder? Three-year-old? Funny? . . . But leave those, for the moment. Summerhouse! Latticework, probably. Light through it in squares or diamonds, probably. Unless— ugh, it was chilly in the Pullmanthere were vines. Vines? The train carried the corporeal weight of Daniel Kinsman to the White River Junction that summer afternoon. But the part of him that weighed nothing at all had started on an immensely longer journey, an incalculably stranger quest. At camp, for the first while, they let him go his own gait, without nagging him or themselves. Aware of his shocking loss, they even let down the rules a little— rules, fundamentally, of good f ellowshiD— in his case. Daniel, with his shut mouth, little appetite, and eyes fixed habitually on nothing, was no good fellow for anyone. This was all right for a certain period. But when a week and another week had gone, and a normal youngster should have been getting some hold on healthy life, and Daniel was still not less separate, but if anything more so, physically torpid, colorless of expression, unmistakably if incomprehensibly not among those present, the responsible began to think of doing something about it. At length the Head sat down and wrote a letter to the boy's father, who had shut up house on Doc Martin's plea and gone off with him to the Canadian woods. But that letter was destined not to be posted. Before a stamp was on it, word came in that young Kinsman had not been seen since lights-out the night before. At the end of a day and night of combing the woods, beating the hills, a telegram was despatched to Canada. Locked, bolted, and shuttered though the house was, Daniel knew a boy's way into it. One of the cellar windows was loose enough to let a lock-pick wire in. Of all that Daniel had done, of all he was yet to undertake, this one act was the hardest. That he could, in the night, enter into that sealed, empty, pitch-black habitation, of which anyone might be nervous— and he, with his mother dead and his imagination whipped keen by a fortnight's flagellation, was horribly, icily afraid— gives the measure of the thing that was stronger than the house's terror, its pull. If he were only in the house, only on the scene there, only at home! Day by day, night by night, the brown house of home had kept the dragline taut on him, by innuendo, by promise, by command. Whenever a peephole, opened in memory, had closed again before the glimpsed stage could set itself with half the properties of old actuality, "Ah, yes, but if you were there it might be different," something had seemed to whisper. And now that he was here? Now that he was actually in, his feet weighing on sightless stairs, hands guiding him along blind walls? Now what was he to do? Nothing. When he had reached his own room, at the end of gropings that brought sweat out of his neck, he pawed for his bed, found it, and laid himself down along the middle of the mattress. There, inert— almost as inert for hours at a time as a cataleptic— he remained. How long? By calendar it came to four days. In his consciousness the lapse of time was not measurable, it was as well a dream's forty winks as a dungeon's forty years. Of his rare actual moves he was to all intents unconscious. Luckily it was summer, and the water not turned off; from time to time he drank. Once he bolted raw oatmeal from a box in the pantry and was ill with it. The electric current was cut, but there was the oil lantern he might have lighted long before he did, had he cared. Rather, perhaps, had he dared. Perhaps, more simply, had he felt the need. After all, his eyes were no longer concerned with this shuttered Here and Now. They were concerned with the half-open door of a summerhouse. Relatively, it may have been little more than a scratching of the topsoil; actually, in that blank-eyed fortnight away at camp, he had penetrated a surprising depth into the leaf mold of his fallen memories. Most important, he had caught the trick of it, learned the heft and balance of his tools, pick and spade, a dogged mental concentration working at one with a reserveless mental surrender. So it had become child's play, literally, by fastening on some fag end of sensuous recollection— a barked shin of escapade, sting of a punishment, taste of the sweetmeat of some reward— to restore the outlines of whole episodes in the comparatively recent years of his sixes, fives, even his fours; to relive whole days, repeople whole scenes with shapes which began by having no names, or with names wanting shapes, and watch these phantasmal beings take on identities and lineaments— and lo! Auntie Prichard, of course, the doughnut woman! Or Mary Belle— who could forget the girl with wire on her teeth! He had learned a lot about the creature of pranks and bush beatings that is the mind. He learned, at a price, that no lead can be too paltry to follow. So it was, retrieving a boy's face plastered with freckles and banged with red hair, he had given three long hours of his last camp morning to trying to find the face a name. A dozen times he nearly had it; the muscles of his tongue knew the feel of it, yet couldn't get the sound. It made him mad. "I won't give it up, not if it takes all day!" And, "day," there it was. Georgie Day! Who could forget Georgie Day? Accident? In the weird business Daniel was about, there's no such thing. Georgie Day. Well, well! Immediately, fruitless hours fruited magically. A house suddenly sprang up around the freckled rascal, and around the house a tin-can-littered yard, and in the yard a tumbling barn, and in the barn, rabbits. Rabbits? What about rabbits? Look! Here's a rabbit running, bounding high with fright across a greensward in sunshine. No, none of Georgie's; he and his have vanished from the scene. This is a wild one, cottontail, surprised among berry bushes behind the home garden, retreat cut off, scuttling across the west lawn for all its worth, and Daniel running after it. Run, cottontail! Run, boy! Bounce, bunny! Whoop, Dannie! "Here, Daisy! Where are you, Daisy? Where's that dog?" Daisy? Why, Spot's mother, of course, elderly, sleepy, all setterred. Yellow sunshine, green grass, little wild blue shadow, hunting, praying, for some hole. And a hole, a hole at last! Squarish aperture among massed leaves. Dive for it, bunny! Stop, boy! Into it, rabbit! Boy, stop dead! Don't go near there, youngster! Frown if you please, stamp, mutter; yes, you know you don't want to go near there. You know you don't. Why not? Pandemonium. Out comes rabbit, out comes Daisy, the lazy, surprised asleep in there. And the two of them, fleeing, pursuing, flicker past the transfixed Dannie, and away, into limbo. For it's the squarish aperture in massed woodbine leaves, Crosshatch of lattice in their gaps, lattice door ajar— it's this he's staring at. So it was, by uttering the irrelevant words "if it takes all day," Daniel had found the way back to the summerhouse. Two weeks it had taken him to reach its viny exterior, those two weeks away at camp. Had he had a hundred years, real ones, in place of the hundred hours he could command, who knows but that he might actually have succeeded in covering the rest of the journeymight have crept or leaped at last across that one remaining rod of grass, gravel, and doorsill, and been inside? Now he started sanguinely. Only a rod left— the last dash— home stretch. Pooh! Thrown back from it, confused, he started again with the same assurance, only again to be set on his heels by a wall, impalpable as air, but impenetrable as glass. How many times did he relaunch the attack? In one hour of the clock he could live a score in recollection, a hundred toward the end, when hunger and fever had whipped the pace. No longer sanguinely, but desperately, he tried one breach after another. For now there were several; he had multiplied his points of attack. To the rabbit day he had added quickly the Emma day. It was no task by now to reconstruct that episode entire. He could commence with the breakfast table, where the new nurse was first introduced into the scheme of his cosmos. He could mount then to his room with her, suffer the change into denim play pants, come down, come out, and go towing around the yard at her arm's end, dazzled by the sudden wealth of her "What shall we play? Anything on earth you like, Dannie?" So, not once, but dozens of times, he came to the spot where something in him balked, he began to howl, cleared Emma's grasp, let her go on. He could see her face in all its mystification now— and see it, more was the wonder, across the width of the rod he couldn't cross— in the doorway of the summerhouse. And he could hear her expostulating still: "What is it, Dannie? Nothing but a toad here. You're not afraid of a toad!" And he could feel something in his stomach's pit, that came up, and was words. "What is murder, Emma?" Why on earth that? What was it in him, cold and hot— not shame, not rage, not terror, alone, but like a misery of all three compounded? Or like the feeling Daniel had to this day, immensely diluted, whenever anyone in his hearing spoke of cycles or sickles or Seckles. And, coming to that, why on earth that? Did it all come from "Seckle"? And did that come from the pear tree, down past the east corner of the barn, which, since he was recollecting, he recollected he had never liked? Recollected, in fact, that when they used to play hide-and-seek at his house, and Daniel himself was "it," and one of the boys hid behind that Seckle pear below the barn, he wouldn't go there to spy him, not if he stayed "it" forever. So? Why wouldn't he? Time and time again he made an effort to follow that trace, but it was of no use; there was nothing there that was important, he had to tell himself; much better buckle down to business with the shovel day. The shovel day he had added to the rabbit day and the Emma day now. Where it came in the chronology he couldn't say; though he judged from the longer time it had taken him to dig it out it must have been earlier. At any rate, it was the farthest back he could remember being frightened by his father. He had to work on it. Again, again, stubbornly again, he would stand in a flushed twilight on the perimeter of that arc whose radius was a rod, and watch the woodbine leaves put aside, and see his father emerge from the dark interior, carrying a spade. Well, what about it? What so fearful was his father doing? Going gardening, probably, in the evening's cool; tools may have been kept in the summerhouse. So, what? Look more deeply into this! But try as Daniel would, he couldn't. Each time, at sight of man and shovel, the child gulped, turned, ran, with goblins grabbing after him, for the house and Mother. Why? Why, oh, why, oh, why? And now at last, time lost all count of— grown to months and years, it seemed, in the black house— now at last, let down by the caving of the body beneath it, Daniel's mind began to surrender to exhaustion. Daylight— what was actually the fourth daylight— creeping through the shutter cracks in slim fans of grayness, did not waken him for a long time from the sleep into which he had sunk near midnight. When it did he failed to fall immediately, as his habit was, into his reminiscent reverie. Lying supine, staring at the ceiling, it was the ceiling he saw this morning. He raised himself on the mattress, intending to go downstairs, but with the act a dizziness took hold of him. He lay back again and listened to his teeth knocking together. It is one thing for a man, adult and idle, to starve himself for a while; for a growing boy it is another thing. It was the first time there had been room in Daniel's brain for a thought of failure. Was it not possible that the end of the time he could hide and have solitude was approaching? No sooner the idea than he repelled it. With a strength of panic he drove himself back to his task. Dig or die, now! But the pick and spade, till now so docile, developed the balkings and crotchets of a curious sabotage. Today, when he summoned the old face of a playmate, straightway the features began to twist in the weirdest fashion, magnify, diminish, like the grotesque faces that dissolve in dreams. Or, coming on a new trail of old adventure unexplored, he found it leading him into extraordinary places, out of all color with the rest of his past— and realized with a start that it was something he had read, not lived. And presently, frustrated, he slept again. Each other day had been an age; this was but a dozen blinks long, a day wasted. How could Daniel know the incalculable value of that day his mind lay fallow? It was night once more when he arose, went into his mother's room, and lay down on the bed there. It was nearly, if not quite, somnambulism. Certainly he was unaware of any reason for the move. Whether he fell asleep and woke up, whether he slept at all, or waked at all, whether at any time he was actually, bodily, in the summerhouse, it would be now impossible to say. It can only be said that the thing till the end had all the stigmata of true nightmare. The will to terror, to begin with. Terror sprung of its own seed, an effect wanting a cause, a shadow condemned to create the object that casts it. And with this, alternately, a weightless, boundless mobility, and a sense of being held from moving, arms pinioned, legs bound. Nothing was ever clear. Such moments as were lighted— less than pictures; mere rags of sight vignetted on the dark— were whisked away too quickly to be comprehended whole. Nor were these many. The pervading scene was a blackness in which blacknesses moved, giving forth but muffled sounds. Acts witnessed and no more, shadowy, separate, retreating rather than ever coming nearer. "They're going away from the summerhouse, ma'am," or, "carrying him away"— that adverb, "away," was forever recurring. And generally, somewhere near it, whether before or after, blacknesses moved on blackness with a black burden; heavy breathing, soft feet. It must be understood there was never an attempt at sequence. No act revealed itself whole at any one time; at divers times divers fractions of it would repeat themselves, mingled with stray fractions of other acts or utterances. Take the one set of sounds. Sometimes it ran, out there— door creak, oath, blow, scuffle. Sometimes quite reversed. Sometimes— oath, blow, scuffle, door creak. And that querying cry, coming from close above, thrown downout of a window?— into the dark, now it would be, "Dan, what are you doing? Tom!" Then, like as not, next time it would be: "Tom, what are you doing? Dan!" It is impossible to tell it, by a tenth, adequately. For by the very mechanics of telling, nine tenths of the formlessness is lost; fragments, released from the peculiar bedevilment of nightmare, inevitably fly together. Detached words, fractional phrases, flickering by, flitting back again; before they can be written here they must needs have formed themselves by some degree into sentences, no matter if the sentences are forever changing something of the forms. As, for instance, in the one, "Dan (Tom), what are you doing " followed by, "Tom/ (Dan!)" There's the other sentence, into which at last the word "murder" has come. By the time it has crystallized itself into the sequence, "It was murder, Dan; I saw it; murder in cold blood!"— by that time the light around it has crystallized, too, in a pattern, a pattern of diamondshaped pencils striking in through gaps of latticework. And the strait jacket of nightmare around one's limbs has taken the shape of the arms of the crier-out. And the crier-out is Mother. "Don't come in that door; I'm afraid of you, Dan! The blood on your hands is blood of brutal murder. Why? Don't tell me. Was it because I loved him? I love my child, here in my arms. Must I be afraid for him then? Must he be afraid of his father, now, as long as the two of you live?" And this cry, too, vibrant with hysteria, has a vision to go with it, a peephole vision of a close lantern, a red-flecked hand, a spade with earth spots on it, and the tight, white, terrible mask of Father's face. So, in telling, already this big, close lantern light has extricated itself from the little lantern light at a distance. But in the dream, if it was a dream, this very separation of the two became from the first the thing, intuitively, the dreamer fought for. Wrestled for with tied hands, ran after with hobbled feet; cried to with stopped mouth. In the beginning it was equally the one or the other that might start it; toward the end of an aeon a kind of rule was established; it was the little light far off that began, and the big one then, too soon, that came and swallowed it, only to be swallowed in its turn by that blackness with black things moving in it, or the door-creak sequence, containing the scuffle, the oath, and the blow. Perhaps it was because of this that the desire of the boy's dread centered more and more fiercely on that weakling spark, and he told himself it was there that whatever was hidden was hidden, and awaited its recurrence impatient of the other shadow plays. And when it came, and the voice of the second woman in the bedroom— a nurse?— began, "It's digging they are, ma'am, down there — ," and with that the light began to swell, irresistibly, and stripe itself in the pattern that meant the summerhouse, Daniel fought with all his bitter, puny power against the re-enwrapping arms, the relifting hysteria of Mother's "Don't come in that door! I'm afraid of you!" and the reopening peepshow of the red hand and the white face. And he cried: "Yes, but go on with the other! Digging down where, down where?'''' till in the nightmare the lees of the sweat of his exhaustion ran in icy dribbles down his skin. It was not till he gave up, beaten by weariness, that it suddenly gave in. "It's digging they are, ma'am, down there under " "Under what?" "—under that pear tree " "Pear tree?" "—with the little pears, below the barn. By the light of the lantern, ma'am " Lantern! By the way, where is a lantern? Now, quick! "—they're digging in the " Digging! Pick and spade? Where are they? "—ground, burying something " A thing that is buried! "—under the pear tree, ma'am." Ever tried? Rolled up your sleeves, taken pick and spade— to turn up something that is buried there? When Dan Kinsman and Doc Martin reached the house late that night, and found it black, the one last hope, which neither had dared to confess to, seemed to have followed all its fellows. Red-lidded with sleeplessness, jaws ill-shaven, clothing long worn, they looked the men they felt now, as, unlocking the front door, they went in. "What's the good?" It was the doctor that saw it, through one of the living-room windows. "Hey! What's up out there? Somebody with a lantern, down there behind the barn." They started out of the door at a walk, but then ran. They found a lantern, a spade, and a garden mattock under the Seckle-pear tree, and a sprawling trench dug, and a weazen-faced, wide-eyed boy to his knees in it, holding out toward them two brown bones. Dan spoke. "For God's sake, what are you doing here?" Daniel spoke. "For God's sake, what are these doing here?" Doc Martin spoke. "For God's sake!" That was all. It wasn't that Dan was obstinate; it was simply that he was dazed. "What are you doing here, son? Tell me!" It wasn't that Daniel was sullen; it was simply that his legs were going to go out from under him at any moment now. "What are these, Father? You tell me!" "Son— sonny— you're sick." "I am sick. Who was Tom?" "Good lord alive! Dan, look here! Be quiet, Daniel; wait till I get through with him. Dan, how long ago was it— I mean, how old would this kid have been, that night?" "What night do you mean? " "Come out of it, man! That night when you heard where Tom had been the week before, and called me, and I brought the chloroform over, thinking maybe, perhaps, the dog might — " "Dog!" High in the roof of a boy's mouth, the one syllable, echoing. "—and you, Dan, no maybe or perhaps about it, you got him in the head with the spade, thank God, in time. What I asked you— how old was Daniel then?" "Not old enough to remember anything. . . . Daniel, who's been telling you — " But Doc Martin wouldn't have it. "No, man, you talk to me. How old?" "Two, perhaps. Not three. A baby. A babe in arms, actually, come to think of it. Vivian had him there in her arms." "Where?" "There in the summerhouse." "Vivian— in the summerhouse?" "Afterward. She— she had come there." "You've never told me." "No. I— it's something I Look here, Daniel, son, you'd best be — " "No you don't, Dan. Talk! What's this about Vivian, and Daniel, and the summerhouse afterward? Tell it, and tell it straight." "She was ill, that's all. Frightened. And— and you know how she was about animals and things— and she didn't understand. Couldn't expect her to, not knowing anything. Hysterical. Went to the summerhouse to see— and bolted herself in." "But when you explained?" "That's it. I was a fool, I suppose. I tried to lie, at first. The mastiff was hers, from a pup; she adored him; it was all so sudden; I couldn't bring myself to say the word— hydrophobia. A fool." "Yes, and a damned one." "She said she was afraid of me, Doc. She said it was— it was — " "She said it was murder, Father. And— it was only — Father!" "Son! Lord! What's the Hey! Catch him, Doc, or he'll fall." "Catch him yourself, he's yours. Pick him up, fool. Starvation; don't worry too much. Bring him along." "But if he should come to, and me carrying him. I'm afraid — " "Don't be. Not any more."
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