Time Will Darken It (49 page)

“You’re always welcome here,” Martha said quietly. “I oughtn’t to have to tell you that.”

“I know I am,” Mr. Ellis said. “I saw your lights and so I thought I’d just drop in for a minute. Bud and Mary don’t want me to go anywhere. They’re afraid I can’t take care of
myself, but I’m just as able to take care of myself as I ever was. I was out sprinkling ashes on the walk this morning and you’d have thought——You folks weren’t going any place?”

“No,” Martha said. “I don’t go out much in this weather.”

“I don’t want to keep you if you’ve got to go someplace,” Mr. Ellis said. “And they’re always keeping things from me. Things I have a right to know. Nelson Streuber died and they didn’t tell me. I didn’t get to the funeral.”

“They probably didn’t want to upset you,” Martha said, avoiding Austin’s eyes.

“He was five years younger than I am, and I never expected to outlive him.… That nice young girl—what’s her name?—from Mississippi?”

“Nora Potter,” Martha said.

“I saw her the other day,” old Mr. Ellis said. “I saw her on the street with some children and stopped to talk to her. She’s always nice to old people. ‘You don’t belong here,’ I said to her. ‘You ought to go home. You don’t look happy like you did when you come out to the farm that day with your folks,’ and she said, ‘Mr. Ellis, I’m going soon. I’ve learned my lesson.’ ” Old Mr. Ellis nodded solemnly. “ ‘I’ve learned my lesson,’ she said. I always enjoy hearing Southerners talk. It’s softer than the speech you hear ordinarily, and it seems to belong to them.”

Austin examined his hands as if they contained the terribly important answer to some riddle like
As soft as silk, as white as milk, As bitter as gall, a thick wall, And a green coat cover me all
.

“Mr. and Mrs. Potter will be sorry that they missed you,” Martha said.

“Are they still here?” Mr. Ellis asked in surprise. “Why, I thought they’d gone home long ago.… Austin … Martha … There’s something I want to say to you. I’m an old man. You may not see me many times more. I’ve seen a
great many things happen. I’ve had almost as much experience as it’s possible to have in a lifetime, and people ought to value it. Because that’s all there is to growing old. You just gradually accumulate a store of experience. But nobody wants it. Nobody cares what I’ve seen or what I think. Times have changed, they say, but that’s where they’re wrong. There’s nothing new. Only more of the same. Gradually you accumulate a store of experience—but I said that, didn’t I? Bud gets so annoyed with me when I repeat myself. In the summer it’s all right. I can go out to the farm every day, and I’m not under foot. But now I have to stay pretty close to home, on account of the ice and snow, and I don’t want to catch cold and have it turn into pneumonia. An old man like me, I could go off just like that. I wouldn’t mind too much. I’ve outlived my usefulness, but dying isn’t something you can do whenever you have a mind to. You have to wait out your time. My father lived to be almost ninety. The last two years he was bedridden, but his mind was clear. And when he died we were all there around the bed and saw him go.…”

Mr. Ellis stayed a long while—long enough for Austin to surrender his last hope of restoring the atmosphere of trust that had been broken in upon. What he had to say he would say, but it would not be the same now, and neither would it have the same effect, in all probability.

He helped Mr. Ellis on with his coat and handed him his muffler. In repayment for this courtesy, old Mr. Ellis said with a twinkle in his eyes, “The greatest hardship in the old days was courting the girls. There was only one room in the house and the old folks would sit and watch the proceedings. It was exceedingly hard on a bashful young man like me. But I managed. We all did, somehow or other.”

He would have gone off without his hat, if Austin hadn’t forced it on him, and he refused to be helped down the icy steps. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’ll just hang onto the railings.” And slowly, a step at a time, as if it were the grave
he was descending to, he made it and said one last good night, quite cheerfully for one so old and so tired out by waiting.

Austin shut the door upon the cold, and turned around in time to see Martha start up the stairs.

“Don’t go up just yet,” he said. “I haven’t told you why it’s so important that I see Nora right away.”

“I understand that it
is
important and that’s enough,” Martha said.

“You don’t understand a damn thing,” Austin said. The sound of footsteps on the porch made him turn. Mr. Potter and Randolph had come home from the hospital.

6

The waiting room on the ground floor of the hospital had a tile floor, cream-coloured walls, a mission table, three hard straight chairs and a wooden bench. The one window looked out on the back wing of the hospital—a red brick wall with a double row of windows that were green-shaded, curtained, quiet, and noncommittal. The grey day had been warm. There were bare patches in the snow. The trees had here and there a trace of their white outline, and from the icicles hanging along the gutters, drops of water fell at regular intervals as if from a leaky faucet. The light was failing, the afternoon all but over when Austin put his hat and coat and muffler on a chair and sat down to wait for Dr. Seymour.

Over the bench was a sepia print of Sir Galahad with his young head bent, brooding, and his arm thrown over his charger’s neck. There was also a wall vase with artificial flowers in it. The flowers were made of crêpe paper dipped in wax. They did not resemble any actual flowers and there had
been no attempt to convey a general truth, such as what a flower is or why there are such things as flowers, but merely to make one more disconcerting object. There were no magazines on the mission table. It was not part of the hospital’s intention to offer entertainment or to make the time pass more quickly for visitors who, more often than not, stayed too long and ran the patients’ fever up and were a nuisance, all around.

Austin crossed and uncrossed his legs impatiently and waited for Dr. Seymour to appear in the doorway. Nora’s letter he had put off answering until it was too late for anything but remorse because he hadn’t answered it. He wasn’t, as she thought, indifferent to her feelings or to what happened to her, and never had been. He didn’t despise her and there was no reason for her to feel that she had forfeited all claim to his approval and friendship. She had done nothing wrong. If anyone was to blame, he was, for not realizing sooner that there was no way he could guide her through an emotional crisis that he himself was the cause of. But to think of her lying there day after day, in pain, not wanting to live because she thought the one person in the whole world that she loved had no use for her, that she was nothing, that there was no place for her anywhere … 
You’re young, Nora. This won’t go on forever. And I do love you, in a way.… No, that isn’t right. It’s not love exactly but tenderness and concern. I want you to be happy and to have everything that life has to offer. I don’t want you to lose hope or think that you have to compromise. I want you to go on fighting for the things you believe in. The feeling I have for you isn’t like the feeling I have for Martha or for anybody else. It’s somehow different and unlimited, and whether we see each other or not …

When Dr. Seymour walked in, he brought with him the hurry of an orchestra conductor arriving late with the audience already seated and impatient and the musicians
waiting in the pit. He was a clean-shaven man in his sixties, small-boned, brusque, with mild blue eyes that had a certain vanity in them (his treatment of chronic nephrosis had been published recently in the monthly bulletin of the American Medical Association) and very little interest in or patience with people who were walking around on their two legs.

“How’s everything at home?” he asked.

“All right,” Austin said.

“Nothing happening yet?”

Austin shook his head.

“It will shortly,” Dr. Seymour said. “If it doesn’t we’ll make it happen. Her pains should have started by now.… About this visit upstairs—I don’t want you to tire her out, do you understand? If it had been anybody else, I wouldn’t have let them come, but I know I can depend on you not to stay too long. Terrible thing that was. I don’t know why people can’t learn not to pour kerosene on a fire. Remember now—five minutes and no more.”

7

If everything I do is wrong
, Austin said to himself as he paced the length and breadth of his office overlooking the courthouse square,
then I will not do anything. I will not raise my hand
.

The meeting with Nora in Room 211 of the hospital had not come off the way he had hoped it would. Instead of putting her mind at rest, he had had to go searching from room to room, all up and down the corridor, looking for a nurse to come and quiet Nora’s hysterical weeping, and then he had to stand, shamefaced and humiliated, while the nurse gave him a piece of her mind.

He would not try to help anybody in trouble ever again. There was no help, and even if there were, he was in no position to offer it. He could only make things worse—unbearable trouble out of what was no greater and no less a calamity than being born. After this he would keep out of it, let them sink or swim.

It was a pity Martha wasn’t at the hospital. She ought to have seen that performance. If he told her about it now, she wouldn’t believe it. Nobody would, in their right mind, but it was the last show of that kind he would ever put on. He knew now what it was and why he did it. Other men were vain of their appearance or their clothes or because they were attractive to women or because they could drive a four-in-hand, but he had to be better than anybody else; he had to distinguish between right and wrong.

She came to his office that day all dressed up in a long white dress and a big hat with red roses on it, but that was all the good it did her. He was incapable of doing anything that wasn’t upright and honest. He couldn’t carry on behind his wife’s back with some girl who threw herself at him because that wouldn’t be Austin King. He didn’t laugh at Nora or treat her like a child (which was what she was) or lose his temper or do anything that would have made it easier for her to forget him or him to forget her. He sent her away thinking of him as a sincere, high-minded man who wouldn’t allow himself to fall in love with her because he was already married to somebody else. For that she admired him, naturally, because she was young and didn’t know any better. But he knew better. And so did Martha. After they were married, he expected Martha to be to him what his mother was to his father—unquestioning, loyal, bound by a common purpose. He waited to hear her say to Ab
Your father says
 … in the same tone of voice his mother used with him, and Martha never did and never would. He had made her marry him against her will, or if not against her
will, then before she was ready. He rushed her into it. Later he said
If she won’t work with and beside me, then I will do it for both of us
 … In his pride he said
I can do everything that is necessary. I can make a marriage all by myself.…
Well he hadn’t, and the only thing that seemed at all strange was that he had tried so hard, that it was so hard for him to stop trying, even when he no longer cared what happened unless possibly something inside him didn’t want to try, didn’t want their marriage to work out.