The sentence of silence

Front matter

I

.

OTHER BOOKS B\

II AND a boy it was

r\ There was a tremendous howdydo about it, even more of a howdydo than the baby him¬ self — though no baby ever born underestimates his own importance — seemed to think either wise or fit¬ ting. On the eve of his arrival, which was some months after the night when Mrs. Barnes evinced her terrifying and wholly unwarranted misgiving, Dr. Ireland was sent for, by a breathless messenger, on three futile occasions, until even the doctor’s good nature — he was one of the old sort of physicians, who died with one-third of their bills outlawed and an¬ other third uncollected and uncollectable — until even Dr. Ireland’s temper was severely strained. So it happened that when, at dawn, the fourth messenger panted the summons, the physician rose leisurely and took time to remember his rheumatism before he drew on the high boots that he always wore under his trousers, and came upon the tumultuous household in Front Street not a moment before he was really needed. And then he joked with Tom Barnes and creaked up the stairs and calmed Mrs. Barnes with a word or two of quiet assurance and scolded Mrs. Fanny Fanistock, who was always “ called in to help ” on birthdays in Americus, and, after what seemed to be time without end, creaked down the stairs to Barnes — who had been tramping the parlor and holding his long breaths at the sound of the footsteps overhead — and commanded:

“ Tom, you rascal, get up there and see how much better a son God’s given you than you deserve.”

It was then that there began the howdydo to which this son objected. Mrs. Fanny bathed him, which process he hated immediately. His pale-faced mother, weakly smiling, held out her arms and raised her tired head just an inch from the pillow to kiss him — which he resented as a too sudden familiarity. Mrs. Kent and Mrs. Fry, because they were friends and neighbors, came in to scrutinize and praise him, to declare that his eyes, which were opaque, exactly matched his mother’s, and that, though he had no nose worthy of notice, it was the image of his fa¬ ther’s; to say what ought to be done that had not been done, and to point out how wrong was every¬ thing that had been essayed. Mrs. Fry, who was al¬ ready the mother of a boy several months old, com¬ pared her sturdy Lysander with this small “ new¬ born,” and, from her long experience, advised Mrs. Barnes to wean her child “ before seven months.” Against all these remarks as to his appearance and counsels as to his bathing and nourishment, the baby lustily protested; and when, finally, his big father, after much hovering in the background, where the women had left him to a fine sense of his masculine inutility, and after many awkward approaches and considerable sheepish grinning — when, finally, his big father drew near and tried not really to fondle him, you know, but just to heft him — then, with the four women for chorus, the baby screamed and kicked and denounced the universe louder than ever.

§ 2. Thus it was that, on a certain raw Novem¬ ber morning in the year of grace 1871, after many more difficulties and dangers than Tom had antici¬ pated, and before what the dramatic critics damn as “ a small but appreciative audience,” Daniel Webster Barnes made his entrance upon the stage of a busy and only limitedly commending world. That century of darkness which we call the nineteenth had, you observe, spent scarcely two-thirds of its strength. The baby’s immature country still bled from the wounds of the war that freed, for a time, the negro slaves, and still groaned in the agonies of that period of reconstruction which freed a goodly number of other things. The first air that the little lungs breathed was an air of uncertainty and muddle and transition. When the land was but awakening to a new existence; when the eyes of the cunning were be¬ ginning to see; when competition still stood upright in the prize-ring of commerce; when the town of Americus still believed in the future — entered Daniel Webster Barnes.

For Daniel Webster was the name that Tom Barnes had chosen.

“ I believe in the good influence o’ good names, said Tom. “ Yes, sir. It teaches respect an’ imita¬ tion, an’ it keeps the lesson always right there before ’em.”

Mrs. Barnes, who had not read “ Ichabod, had nevertheless harbored a fearful fondness for Cyril or Percival; but she said nothing.

“ Dani-el Webster Barnes,” repeated Tom. “ Sounds good, don’t it? Well, Dan’l, you’ve got to make Americus sit up an’ take notice.”

§ 3. Americus was neither then nor later a town to notice anything, save with a jeer, that was in any wise different from the few things to which Americus was used. Babies, however, were well enough within the boundaries of its experience, if not its understand¬ ing, to be received as a matter for questionable jokes among the men and for indiscriminate kissing by the women; and so the town expected to receive Master Barnes.

The forty-odd years that have passed since then have changed Americus in every respect except in its customs and its intelligence. The place has grown old and has retained intact the liberalism of yesterday that is the conservatism of to-day. The lumberlooters have cut away the timber of the Alleghanies until the rafts that once blackened the river-front and crowded the shops of the town with spike-shod, money-spending men are remembered only by the mid¬ dle-aged. The canal, fallen in, has dried up. The railroad, accustomed to getting all that it asked for, has been offended at an amazing refusal by the voters to give it yet another “ right ” that it had no right to, and has removed its roundhouse and five hundred citizens. The main line has been laid four miles be¬ yond the hills “ back in the country,” and, with the coming of the Steel Trust, the furnaces have been deserted, and the rolling-mills, after crawling along on half-time for a dozen years, have shut down for¬ ever. The only forces that keep Americus from death are a few brave little independent industries, and the only forces that keep the people from admitting this dissolution are the twin local superstitions that to speak the truth would be to display disloyalty to the town and that to talk about the certainty of better times will bring them.

In the early seventies, however, when the land be¬ gan to react from the stagnation of the previous de¬ cade, those appearances which we call realities vastly differed in Americus. All spring long the town was full of logmen; all summer a slow procession of canalboats drew up at the chutes, received their cargoes of coal, and were towed across the broad Susque¬ hanna to the other arm of the canal on the York County side. The Three Mounts House and the Adams Hotel had almost as many persons in their bedrooms as they had at their bars; the banks thrived; the shops flourished; the insurance agents laid aside cozy “ futures ”; and from January to De¬ cember the flour-mills ground the wheat that the shovel-hatted Mennonite farmers had driven into town; the furnaces and the rolling-mills were a cloud of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, and the railway trains were stopped and broken and made and remade and dispatched; and they hauled away what Americus produced, and brought back gold in return.

But at heart, Americus was then just what it is in 1912. Every citizen was sure that this was the best possible world, that the United States composed the best nation in the world, that Pennsylvania was the best state in the nation, that Doncaster County was the best county in Pennsylvania, and that Amer¬ icus was the best town in Doncaster County. Yet mark the paradox: Americus hated Doncaster, which was the county-seat; Doncaster County as a whole ridiculed all the other counties of the state ; the state as a whole scoffed at all the other states of the Union, and the Union — as we all know — looks upon any foreigners-born with a blending of amusement and apprehension. The result was those sister virtues which we call Patriotism, State-Loyalty, and Local- Pride — not Progress.

The town was so used to itself that it could never tolerate anything different. Let an Englishman at¬ tempt its streets in walking-costume, and he might be permited to escape with a few verbal insults as an obvious alien and therefore inevitably insane. But let a citizen try the same feat, and he would simply have to leave the town. How bicycles ever became possible in Americus is still a mystery; how they have again become impossible is inexplicable.

Not that the citizens ever were consciously, as a class, either evil or malicious. Not that they are at present any more to blame for remaining contented with what they are : Americus was what hundreds of other American towns were : it is what they are now. But all that is economics and not narra¬ tive. . . . |

Every person in Americus knew every other per¬ son. Every person in Americus went to day-school and Sunday school, or to work and to church, with meritorious regularity. It was then, and is to-day, quite too terrible for any of the “ old families ” (ear¬ liest date, A.D. 1700) to do anything or be anything characteristic of the “ newer crowd ” ; and the newer crowd were just as careful not to do anything or be anything that was characteristic of the newest; and as for the newest, there being nothing lower, they .were free to do and be what they pleased — and for the most part they pleased to imitate the old fam¬ ilies and climb back toward them. With a few shin¬ ing exceptions, such people as read books at all read

the novels of - Well, you probably would not so

much as know the authors’ names, but the legitimate descendants of those authors are Miss Marie Corelli and Mr. Hall Caine. And so, finally, everyone was solemnly satisfied with his ready-made opinions, po¬ litical, economic, and religious.

There is no mistake impossible to any of us and no mistake not worth the pains of correcting. The great mass of mankind can give no reasons for their moral standards; right is right because it is right; they let it go at that: consequently, the great mass of mankind are bitterly faithful to an inherited moral code and possess absolutely no apprehension of moral values— the people of Americus were but a part of the mass. Parenthood in particular moved there, as elsewhere, with its finger perpetually on its lips, its eyes perpetually commanding silence. The average citizen there was the average citizen of that period everywhere : a mental coward whose intellectual land¬ scape was plentifully dotted with those Cities of Refuge, the platitudinous generalities of past genera¬ tions; a contemporary of Gladstone, but an anachron¬ ism in that time when man will be sufficiently edu¬ cated to think less of the past and more of the future.

§ 4. So Danny Barnes came to Americus and in Americus passed through the croup and the perambu¬ lator, the measles and the mothering, the scarlet fever and the first spanking; ran all that gauntlet of dis¬ eases and dispensations then considered requisite and necessary as well for the childish body as for the childish soul — and came at last to the age when memory gains tenacity.

He has always, of course, been rather uncertain about the start of this. What he recalls as experi¬ encing mingles imperceptibly, at the farther end, with what he recalls merely as having been told that he experienced. But he is almost sure that he remem¬ bers gripping his father’s big index finger and being led to his first circus, where he was frightened by a caged lion and enchanted by a spangled lady on the horizontal-bar: and he is quite certain that he recollects his mother’s ill-concealed grief on the joy¬ ous occasion when he took his blond curls to the bar¬ ber’s and returned without them.

For Danny’s hair, though it grew brown enough as Danny grew older, was tow-colored at first, and Danny, according to the enduring maternal creed, was a child good to look upon. His mother has told him that he was beautiful, but of that he has his mis¬ givings. Indeed, there is a much-rubbed cabinetphotograph of Daniel, made at this time, which shows a pug-nosed little fellow in kilts, large-footed, broad¬ faced, with eyes abashed by the pointing camera and head held stiff by the photographer’s frame behind. But this picture is not a fair criterion. In it the sub¬ ject’s unruly hair is il slicked,” his cheeks shine from a rigorous application of home-boiled soap, and his whole natural being has plainly been washed away by a preparatory bath. The fact is that Danny, though in no sense extraordinary, was a bright-eyed child that, if not beautiful, was pretty, and that re¬ tained, so long as his conditions— the average condi-

Lons — made it possible, the charm and wonder of a pure heart.

Dan does not remember going to the photog¬ rapher’s, unpleasant as that ordeal must have been, but he does remember, though probably only because it was repeated throughout his childhood and became the foundation of his whole education, the sort of teaching that he at this time received. He would hear from Thomas Barnes of Thomas’ youth — of that Golden Age when father was a boy — of his par¬ ent’s own happinesses and struggles, and of the War and how splendid it was to be a soldier and to be brave and fight. Tom would tell the child of the great men that he had read of, or seen, or even, some¬ times, spoken to. And when the little fellow’s eyes glowed with envy and the passion for emulation, Tom would point out how the chief virtue of the soldier was the chief virtue of the child — obedience — and how it is the duty of us all to respect unquestioningly those whom it is a virtue to obey.

Respect — that was cardinal: respect for the ac¬ cepted, for success as Americus counted success, for greatness as Americus esteemed greatness, for the glorious company of the things that are. The self-made man was the national hero; political power was the token of personal ability (that is, if it was power in Tom’s party; in a member of the other party it was a sign of sin) ; wealth (Tom called it “ means ”) possessed an inherent rectitude, and all these things commanded deference. Therefrom, indeed, Tom re¬ ceived a reflected glory, for did he not know Mr. Richardson, the rich merchant in Philadelphia, and had he not, but recently, eaten a meal with Simon

Cameron? Not that this second-hand greatness w;iS needed: the parents soon assumed, in the child’s eyes, Olympian proportions. The father was a Jove, the mother a Minerva. It went without saying, but with much more force than specific mention, that age knew all and youth nothing, and that therefore fresh ideas are bound to be wrong ideas, except as they were not really fresh at all, but only the old ideas adapted to new opportunities.

“ So you see,” said Tom, “ when you’re a man, Danny, you must make your own way, an’ then folks’ll respect you.”

Danny was playing with his tin soldiers on the floor. The handful of blue-coats had just conquered five times their number in red — with tremendous slaughter.

“ You’re a self-made man, ain’t you, pop? ” he proudly inquired.

Thomas caught a blush in time to stop it.

“ So far as I’ve gone,” he admitted.

“ An’ you’re rich, ain’t you? ” persisted Danny.

“Not yet,” said Tom; “but if honesty an’ hard work an’ no grumblin’ bring what they had ought to bring, I guess I’ll be fairly well-to-do one o’ these days.”

For honesty also these parents insisted upon. Danny remembers his stern-lipped father’s long and rather dry talks to him on honesty; and he remem¬ bers his mother’s briefer, but more impressive, cau¬ tions to the same end, these latter made embarrassedly and only when mother and son were alone together; when he had just said “ Now I lay me ” at her knee or prevailed upon her to lie down on the bed for a while and keep the bears away: cautions that, though they were based on the assumption that no offense had been committed, always somehow made him want to weep. Danny would as soon have thought of the sun dropping from the heavens or the apple falling skyward as of either of his parents tell¬ ing a lie.

§ 5. One of his earliest recollections is connected with an anecdote of his father’s bravery, but it was not until long afterward that Danny appreciated the full meaning of the comment that ended the narra¬ tive so abruptly.

The family sat at its six o’clock supper, and Danny was so busy trying to secure more molasses than his slice of bread would hold that he did not note the beginning of the conversation. The first thing that he realized was that his father was in the midst of a story of some adventure of the day.

“ Yes, sir,” Tom was saying, “ that Freddie Fry come right in the store, an’ he was fightin’ drunk — fightin’ drunk. I told him to get out, an’ he wouldn’t go. Then I went to the door an’ seen Constable Kautz over by the Adams Hotel, an’ I called him in.

“ ‘ Come on, Fred,’ says he; ‘you git out o’ here an’ go home peaceable.’

“ An’ what do you think, mother? ” Tom’s voice lowered as he approached his first climax. “ That fellow Fry picked up one o’ them stools alongside o’ the counters an’ waved it over his head an’ hit Kautz an’ knocked him flat down so’s I thought he’d knocked his brains out.”

He paused. Mrs. Barnes was pale with the sense of her husband’s escaped danger; Danny, arrested by the story, sat with the piece of bread, the mo¬ lasses from which trickled disregarded over his fingers and down to his tucked-in napkin, suspended halfway to his open mouth.

“ What on earth did you do, Tom? ” asked Mrs. Barnes.

“ Do? I just walked up to him,” said Barnes, “ an’ took him by the collar. ‘ Git out ! ’ I says. An’ just as I come at him, he ups with that stool ag’in an’ waves it over his head, an’ I thought he was goin’ to knock my brains out, too.”

Once more he paused for a climax.

But Danny, his eyes big with admiration for his father, could endure no longer the suspense.

“ He — he couldn’t knock any brains out’n you, pop, could he? ” asked the child.

§ 6. And Danny remembers one or two glimpses of a tea-party that his mother gave to the members of the Dorcas Society. It is among his first memories, so that the party must have occurred at about the time of his father’s heroic casting-out of Lysander Fry’s parent; but whether it occurred before or after that battle, he has never been able precisely to deter¬ mine. Also, the child must have been permitted to be present during the whole of the decorous festivi¬ ties, yet he can recall only that pair of pictures.

Of these the former is merely the entrance of Mrs. Kent, whom Danny immediately considered as, next of course to his mother, the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. He recalls the sense of dis¬ loyalty with which her appearance forced him to admit her as, if not quite so beautiful as Mrs. Barnes, at any rate more radiant. She had splendid black hair and great brown eyes, and the carriage of a person accustomed to deference, so that the child knew instantly that she must have “ means.” He

had heard, too, his father insist that she be invited because of something that the elder Barnes called her “ position,” and the child learned that she was not a member of the Dorcas Society, but an Epis¬ copalian; arid he wondered what an Episcopalian might be and whether all Episcopalians were radiant. For a long time thereafter that word Episcopalian suggested to him a superior order of being.

Then — it must have been half an hour afterwards — while Danny was sitting on the floor in a corner, his young nostrils first inhaled the smoke of gossip, which is the incense that the respectable burn to vice. Two of the guests were discussing some mem¬ ber of the Society that was not present, and Danny listened.

“ Of course Martha’s not here,” said one of the gossips — Dan remembers the speaker as a hatchet¬ faced woman of enormous age, perhaps quite forty years — “ of course she’s not here. Sallie Barnes is the kind that’s always on the safe side, and she knows there’s bound to be trouble about Martha some day soon.”

The other woman, whom Dan’s recollection, here confused, pictures as the twin sister of the first speaker and whose rapid sibilant voice he associates still with the voice of the Gossipmonger as a class, nodded.

“ The way Martha throws herself at the pastor’s head,” said this one, “ is a scandal. At least that’s what / say.”

“ Me, too,” rejoined the first gossip. “ I always did say there was somethin’ very queer about Mar¬ tha s first baby. You know they was married in May - ”

“ Wasn’t it June, dear? ”

Mighty early in June, then — an’ next thing we know, along about Christmas — — ”

The second woman’s sharp eyes detected Danny glancing in her direction.

I d be a little careful, dear,” she said to her companion, without lowering her tone. “ Little pitchers have big ears. Are you goin’ to Martha’s party next Tuesday? ”

The first woman accepted the warning.

“ yes,” she said; “ aren’t you? ”

Certainly; I wouldn’t hurt her feelin’s for the world.”

Danny moved away. He knew that he had over¬ heard something that he was not intended to over¬ hear; but he did not understand it or why he should not listen to whatever was said by his mother’s guests in his father s house. He wondered why they had called him a pitcher, and the next time that he alone with a looking-glass he measured his ears.

was

Ill

PERHAPS a year lies between this event and the next just here in order. Dan thinks it does. At any rate, he had in the meantime been taught to address his parents as “ Father ” and “ Mother,” always with capitals, so that it must have been after Tom Barnes’s store was moved north of Second Street and the family were talking of that dignified process known as “ building.”

The event now in question is his discovery of the genus Girl. He had known, of course, in a general way, that girls existed; he had seen some and talked to a few; but he had never yet realized that there was an essential difference between his own kind and theirs. Now he met a little girl on the front pave¬ ment and challenged her to a foot race, which he won in a mere canter, whereupon the little girl cried and Danny found himself, even in the glow of his victory, moved almost to tears at the sight of her unmanly grief.

“ Mother,” he announced, snuggling into Mrs. Barnes’s arms when, that night, his mother lay down beside him in his little bed, “ I don’t like girls.

Mrs. Barnes smiled magnanimously.

“ I was a girl once,” she said.

“ Oh ! ” said Danny. He had not thought of that. He saw instantly the necessity of a synthesis between his detestation of girls and the fact that his mother had been one. He studied the problem and presently solved it. “ But that was a long time ago,” he said.

“ Yes ” — and Mrs. Barnes sighed — “ it seems a long time ago, Danny.”

“ I guess they’re not the same now, mother.”

“ I don’t know, Danny. Perhaps they aren’t. I sometimes think they aren’t. But you oughtn’t to not like anybody.”

“ Well, I do. I don’t like girls.”

The moment was not guarded. She asked him why he did not like girls.

“ They cry,” said Danny. “ They wear dresses like me when I was a baby. They’re babies just got big.” Then, after a pause, he added: “They are different, ain’t they? ”

“ From what they were when I was little, Danny? I say I don’t know. I sometimes think they are.”

“ I mean different from boys. Ain’t they different, mother? ”

“Yes, Danny, I dare say. But you must go to sleep now.”

“ Mother, why are they different? ”

Mrs. Barnes saw that she had let this cross-exam¬ ination go too far.

“ Go to sleep, dear,” she commanded.

It was not for nothing that Danny had been in¬ structed in obedience. He flung his tiny arms about his mother’s neck and kissed her.

“ All right,” he said “ good-night. I know you wasn’t ever no girly girl, mother.”

But the last question on his lips that evening was the first there on the morning following, and, with a realization that his mother would tell him no more, Danny bore it to his father.

Tom Barnes was struggling into his last winter’s overcoat to start for the store. The lining of the overcoat sleeve was torn, and Tom’s day therefore began with a physical effort.

“ Father,” said Danny, watching his parent’s con¬ test with admiration for its masculinity, “ what is Girls?”

Barnes stood there with one extended arm half in the sleeve and half out of it.

“ What’s what? ” he demanded.

“ Girls,” repeated Danny.

“ You’re too young to think about such fool things,” replied Barnes. “ Wait till you’re growed up. Don’t ask questions you’ve no business to ask an’ tell your mother to not forget to sew up this here linin’ when I come home for dinner.”

§ 2. It seems quite a long time after this that another important puzzle presented itself to Danny. The former “ Philadelphia Notion Store ” on Elm Avenue had so far grown in size and grace as to bear the simple sign :

Thos. L. Barnes

dry goods

The mighty process of u budding had been accom¬ plished, and the Barneses lived in a new, large, gray house on Oak Street in the rarified atmosphere of most of the newer Old Families.

“Won’t you please lay down with me for a little while, mother?” pleaded Danny, when Mrs. Barnes kissed him and tucked the covers about his neck up to his curly head.

“ Not ‘ lay,’ Danny,” Mrs. Barnes corrected. “ Only chickens lay. You mean ‘ lie.’ ”

“Well, you used to say it, didn’t you?” pouted Danny — and: “Won’t you lie down with me a little while, mother? ”

“ Why, Danny,” she told him, “ your father thinks — he— he thinks you’re getting to be too big a boy to be afraid to go to bed nowadays.”

“Ain’t afraid! ” declared Danny.

“ Then why do you want me? ”

“ I dunno, only — I guess I’m just afraid I’ll be afraid.”

“ That’s the quickest way to be afraid, my boy. No, I guess I’d better go downstairs now.”

“ But, mother - ”

“Yes, dear?”

“ I wanted to ask you somepin’.”

“ Will it take long, boy? ”

“ I dunno. That’s what you’ll know, mother.”

“Well, what is it, Danny? ”

“ Oh — lots o’ things. Please lay — lie down, mother.”

“ No, I mustn’t. Just tell me what it is you want to ask me, Danny.”

“Sit down, anyhow; won’t you please, mother?”

The room was in nearly complete darkness. For some months she had been lowering the light farther and farther every evening. Now she could not see her little boy’s face. Nevertheless, she felt the pleading that strained there, and it was hard for her not to grant him his wish.

“ Tell me what you want to ask, Danny,” she said.

“ It’s - Oh, I can’t talk to you ’way off there,

mother! Honest Injun, I can’t.”

Mrs. Barnes sat upon the side of the narrow bed. She had promised her husband not to lie there, so she compromised with her conscience by sitting on the extreme edge and making herself uncomfortable.

“ Now, then,” she said. “ Just a minute, you know.”

There was a flash of silence.

“Well,” said Danny at last, “ it’s about that lady ’cross the street.”

The mother had a chill of premonition.

“ What lady? ” she asked.

“ Oh, you know,” said Danny. “ That lady what used to be so thin an’ ain’t. Mother, what’s the matter with her? ”

Mrs. Barnes drew a long breath. She wished that she had not sat down. How under the sun could children come to think of such things? She wished that she knew how to execute some retreat that would forbid pursuit; but she was seated and did not know how, in the circumstances, properly to rise; she had advanced so far that she had been hopelessly am¬ bushed. For the first time, she began to feel toward Danny something of the deference that she felt to¬ ward his father. For the first time she effectively realized that, though this was a child, it was a manchild. Even in her little son she was confronting the might and mystery of the Other Sex.