Chapter 20

Hugo had three hours to wait for a Chicago train. His wages purchased his ticket and left him in possession of twenty dollars. His clothing was nondescript; he had no baggage. He did not go outside the Grand Central Terminal, but sat patiently in the smoking-room, waiting for the time to pass. A guard came up to him and asked to see his ticket. Hugo did not remonstrate and produced it mechanically; he would undoubtedly be mistaken for a tramp amid the sleek travellers and commuters.

When the train started, his fit of perplexed lethargy had not abated. His hands and feet were cold and his heart beat slowly. Life had accustomed him to frustration and to disappointment, yet it was agonizing to assimilate this new cudgeling at the hands of fate. The old green house in the Connecticut hills had been a refuge; Roseanne had been a refuge. They were, both of them, peaceful and whimsical and they had seemed innocent of the capacity for great anguish. Every man dreams of the season-changed countryside as an escape; every man dreams of a woman on whose broad breast he may rest, beneath whose tumbling hair and moth-like hands he may discover forgetfulness and freedom. Some men are successful in a quest for those anodynes. Hugo could understand the sharp contours of one fact: because he was himself, such a quest would always end in failure. No woman lived who could assuage him; his fires would not yield to any temporal powers.

He was barren of desire to investigate deeper into the philosophy of himself. All people turned aside by fate fall into the same morass. Except in his strength, Hugo was pitifully like all people: wounds could easily be opened in his sensitiveness; his moral courage could be taxed to the fringe of dilemma; he looked upon his fellow men sometimes with awe at the variety of high places they attained in spite of the heavy handicap of being human--he looked upon them again with repugnance--and very rarely, as he grew older, did such inspections of his kind include a study of the difference between them and him made by his singular gift. When that thought entered his mind, it gave rise to peculiar speculations.

He approached thirty, he thought, and still the world had not re-echoed with his name; the trumps, banners, and cavalcade of his glory had been only shadows in the sky, dust at sunset that made evanescent and intangible colours. Again, he thought, the very perfection of his prowess was responsible for its inapplicability; if he but had an Achilles’ heel so that his might could taste the occasional tonic of inadequacy, then he could meet the challenge of possible failure with successful effort. More frequently he condemned his mind and spirit for not being great enough to conceive a mission for his thews. Then he would fall into a reverie, trying to invent a creation that would be as magnificent as the destructions he could so easily envision.

In such a painful and painstaking mood he was carried over the Alleghenies and out on the Western plains. He changed trains at Chicago without having slept, and all he could remember of the journey was a protracted sorrow, a stabbing consciousness of Roseanne, dulled by his last picture of her, and a hopeless guessing of what she thought about him now.

Hugo’s mother met him at the station. She was unaltered, everything was unaltered. The last few instants in the vestibule of the train had been a series of quick remembrances; the whole countryside was like a long-deserted house to which he had returned. The mountains took on a familiar aspect, then the houses, then the dingy red station. Lastly his mother, upright and uncompromisingly grim, dressed in her perpetual mourning of black silk. Her recognition of Hugo produced only the slightest flurry and immediately she became mundane.

“Whatever made you come in those clothes?”

“I was working outdoors, mother. I got right on a train. How is father?”

“Sinking slowly.”

“I’m glad I’m in time.”

“It’s God’s will.” She gazed at him. “You’ve changed a little, son.”

“I’m older.” He felt diffident. A vast gulf had risen between this vigorous, religious woman and himself.

She opened a new topic. “Whatever in the world made you send us all that money?”

Hugo smiled. “Why--I didn’t need it, mother. And I thought it would make you and father happy.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps. It has done some good. I’ve sent four missionaries out in the field and I am thinking of sending two more. I had a new addition put on the church, for the drunkards and the fallen. And we put a bathroom in the house. Your father wanted two, but I wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Have you got a car?”

“Car? I couldn’t use one of those inventions of Satan. Your father made me hire this one to meet you. There’s Anna Blake’s house. She married that fellow she was flirting with when you went away. And there’s our house. It was painted last month.”

Now all the years had dropped away and Hugo was a child again, an adolescent again. The car stopped.

“You can go right up. He’s in the front room. I’ll get lunch.”

Hugo’s father was lying on the bed watching the door. A little wizened old man with a big head and thin yellow hands. Illness had made his eyes rheumy, but they lighted up when his son entered, and he half raised himself.

“Hello, father.”

“Hugo! You’ve come back.”

“Yes, father.”

“I’ve waited for you. Sit down here on the bed. Move me over a little. Now close the door. Is it cold out? I was afraid you might not get here. I was afraid you might get sick on the train. Old people are like that, Hugo.” He shaded his eyes. “You aren’t a very big man, son. Somehow I always remembered you as big. But--I suppose”--his voice thinned--”I suppose you don’t want to talk about yourself.”

“Anything you want to hear, father.”

“I can’t believe you came back.” He ruminated. “There were a thousand things I wanted to ask you, son--but they’ve all gone from my mind. I’m not so easy in your presence as I was when you were a little shaver.”

Hugo knew what those questions would be. Here, on his death-bed, his father was still a scientist. His soul flinched from giving its account. He saw suddenly that he could never tell his father the truth; pity, kindredship, kindness, moved him. “I know what you wanted to ask, father. Am I still strong?” It took courage to suggest that. But he was rewarded. The old man sighed ecstatically. “That’s it, Hugo, my son.”

“Then--father, I am. I grew constantly stronger when I left you. In college I was strong. At sea I was strong. In the war. First I wanted to be mighty in games and I was. Then I wanted to do services. And I did, because I could.”

The head nodded on its feeble neck. “You found things to do? I--I hoped you would. But I always worried about you. Every day, son, every day for all these years, I picked up the papers and looked at them with misgivings. ‘Suppose, ‘ I said to myself, ‘suppose my boy lost his temper last night. Suppose someone wronged him and he undertook to avenge himself.’ I trusted you, Hugo. I could not quite trust--the other thing. I’ve even blamed myself and hated myself.” He smiled. “But it’s all right--all right. So I am glad. Then, tell me--what--what--”

“What have I done?”

“Do you mind? It’s been so long and you were so far away.”

“Well--” Hugo swept his memory back over his career--”so many things, father. It’s hard to recite one’s own--”

“I know. But I’m your father, and my ears ache to hear.”

“I saved a man pinned under a wagon. I saved a man from a shark. I pulled open a safe in which a man was smothering. Many things like that. Then--there was the war.”

“I know. I know. When you wrote that you had gone to war, I was frightened--and happy. Try as I might, I could not think of a great constructive cause for you to enter. I had to satisfy myself by thinking that you could find such a cause. Then the war came. And you wrote that you were in it. I was happy. I am old, Hugo, and perhaps my nationalism and my patriotism are dead. Sides in a war did not seem to matter. But peace mattered to me, and I thought--I hoped that you could hasten peace. Four years, Hugo. Your letters said nothing. Four years. And then it stopped. And I understood. War is property fighting property, not David fighting Goliath. The greatest David would be unavailing now. Even you could do little enough.”