Stoner

Grace came; and he found that, after all, he had little to say to her. She had been away from St. Louis and had returned to find Edith's letter only the day before. She was worn and tense and there were dark shadows under her eyes; he wished that he could do something to ease her pain and knew that he could not.

'You look just fine, Daddy," she said. "Just fine. You're going to be all right."

"Of course," he said and smiled at her. "How is young Ed? And how have you been?"

She said that she had been fine and that young Ed was fine, that he would be entering junior high school the coming fall. He looked at her with some bewilderment. "Junior high?" he asked. Then he realized that it must be true. "Of course," he said. "I forgot how big he must be by now."

"He stays with his--with Mr. and Mrs. Frye a lot of the time," she said. "It's best for him that way." She said something else, but his attention wandered. More and more frequently he found it difficult to keep his mind focused upon any one thing; it wandered where he could not predict, and he sometimes found himself speaking words whose source he did not understand.

"Poor Daddy," he heard Grace say, and he brought his attention back to where he was. "Poor Daddy, things haven't been easy for you, have they?"

He thought for a moment and then he said, "No. But I suppose I didn't want them to be."

"Mamma and I--we've both been disappointments to you, haven't we?"

He moved his hand upward, as if to touch her. "Oh, no," he said with a dim passion. "You mustn't . . ." He wanted to say more, to explain; but he could not go on. He closed his eyes and felt his mind loosen. Images crowded there, and changed, as if upon a screen. He saw Edith as she had been that first evening they had met at old Claremont's house--the blue gown and the slender fingers and the fair, delicate face that smiled softly, the pale eyes that looked eagerly upon each moment as if it were a sweet surprise. "Your mother . . ." he said. "She was not always . . ." She was not always as she had been; and he thought now that he could perceive beneath the woman she had become the girl that she had been; he thought that he had always perceived it.

"You were a beautiful child," he heard himself saying, and for a moment he did not know to whom he spoke. Light swam before his eyes, found shape, and became the face of his daughter, lined and somber and worn with care. He closed his eyes again. "In the study. Remember? You used to sit with me when I worked. You were so still, and the light . . . the light . . ." The light of the desk lamp (he could see it now) had been absorbed by her studious small face that bent in childish absorption over a book or a picture, so that the smooth flesh glowed against the shadows of the room. He heard the small laughter echo in the distance. "Of course," he said and looked upon the present face of that child. "Of course," he said again, "you were always there."

"Hush," she said softly, "you must rest."

And that was their farewell. The next day she came down to him and said she had to get back to St. Louis for a few days and said something else he did not hear in a flat, controlled voice; her face was drawn, and her eyes were red and moist. Their gazes locked; she looked at him for a long moment, almost in disbelief; then she turned away. He knew that he would not see her again.

He had no wish to die; but there were moments, after Grace left, when he looked forward impatiently, as one might look to the moment of a journey that one does not particularly wish to take. And like any traveler, he felt that there were many things he had to do before he left; yet he could not think what they were.

He had become so weak that he could not walk; he spent his days and nights in the tiny back room. Edith brought him the books he wanted and arranged them on a table beside his narrow bed, so that he would not have to exert himself to reach them.

But he read little, though the presence of his books comforted him. He had Edith open the curtains on all the windows and would not let her close them, even when the afternoon sun, intensely hot, slanted into the room.

Sometimes Edith came into the room and sat on the bed beside him and they talked. They talked of trivial things--of people they knew casually, of a new building going up on the campus, of an old one torn down; but what they said did not seem to matter. A new tranquillity had come between them. It was a quietness that was like the beginning of love; and almost without thinking, Stoner knew why it had come. They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.