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The Three Black Pennys by Joseph Hergesheimer

J >> Joseph Hergesheimer >> The Three Black Pennys




The heat subsided in the hearth, with the nightly ebbing of steam in the
radiator; the hickory, disintegrating into blocks, faded from cherry red
to pulsating, and finally dead, ash. Lost in the bitterness of his
thoughts he made no movement to replenish the fire.

He wondered if the explored histories of other families would show such
scarring records as his own. Were there everywhere, back of each heart,
puddles, sloughs, masked in the deceiving probity maintained for public
view? And now--Mariana! Yet, somehow, her affair did not appear as ugly
as these others. Stated coldly, in conventional terms, it was little
different. Why, in plain words she had ... but Mariana evaded plain
words, her challenging courage forbade them. Here was more than could be
arraigned, convicted, by a stereotyped judgment. Or perhaps this was
only his affection for her, blinding him to the truth.

The first Howat and Jasper, striking contemptuously across the barriers
of social morals, lived in Mariana, alone with James Polder in
illegitimate circumstance, and in himself--an old man without family,
without the supporting memory of actual achievement; the negative decay
of a negative existence. His mind, confronted by a painful complexity of
unanswerable problems, failed utterly. He was conscious of his impotence
chilling his blood, deadening his nerves. Thin tears fell over his
hollow cheeks; and he rose shakily, fiercely dragging at his bandanna.

But he discovered that his hand was numb with cold. The fire lay black
and dead. The shrilling wind, ladened with snow, wrenched at the
shutters. The room was bitter. He must get up to bed ... warm blankets.
A chill touched him with an icy breath. It overtook him midway on the
stair, and he clung to the railing, appalled at its violence in his
fragile being. He got, finally, to his room, to the edge of his bed,
where he sat waiting for the assault to subside. He wanted Rudolph, but
the effort to move to the door, call, appeared insuperable. The chill
left him; and blundering, hideously delayed, he wrapped himself in the
bed covering.

Not all the wool in the world, he thought, would be sufficient to drive
the cold from his body. He fell into a temporary exhaustion of sleep;
but was waked later by sharp and oppressive pains in his chest,
deepening when he breathed. The suffering must be mastered, and he lay
with gripping hands, striving by force of will to overcome what he
thought of as the brutal play of small, sharp knives. He conquered, it
seemed; the pain grew less; but it had left an increasing difficulty in
his breathing; it was a labour to absorb sufficient air even for his
small, aged demands. Sleep deserted him; and he waited through seeming
years for the delayed appearance of dawn. He had hoped that the new day
would be sunny, warm; it was overcast, he could see the snow drifted in
the lower window panes.

Rudolph usually knocked at the door at half past eight; but, apparently,
to-day he had forgot. Howat Penny's watch lay on the table, at his hand,
yet it was far distant; he couldn't face the heavy effort of its
inspection. At last the man came in with his even morning greeting.
Howat was so exhausted that he could make no reply; and Rudolph moved
silently to the bedside. His expression, for an instant, was deeply
concerned. "I have a cold, or something of the sort," the other said. He
raised his head, but sank back, with a thin, audible inspiration. "It
would be best, sir, to have the doctor from Jaffa," the servant
suggested. Howat, in the midst of protest, closed his eyes; the pain had
returned. When he had again defeated it Rudolph was gone.

The room blurred, lost its walls, became formless space; out of which,
to his pleasurable surprise, he saw the carefully garbed figure of
Colonel Mapleson walking toward him. He never forgot that tea rose!
Confound him--probably another benefit for one of his indigent song
birds. As Howat was about to speak the Colonel disappeared. It was
Scalchi, in street dress, a yellow fur about her throat, warm,
seductive. He had sent the divine Page the bouquet in paper lace. But
she too vanished. He heard the strains of an orchestra; lingering he had
missed the overture, and it might be the first duet--with Geister in
superb voice. He was waiting for Mariana, that was it ... always late.
Then her hand was under his arm. But it was the doctor from Jaffa.

Rudolph was at the foot of the bed, and the two men moved aside,
conversed impolitely in hushed tones. I'm sick, he thought lucidly. One
word reached him--oxygen. It all melted away again, into a black lake
with ghostly swans, a painted mouth and showering confetti; one of the
supreme waltzes that Johann Strauss alone could compose. Later a woman
in a folded linen cap was seated beside him, a chimera. But she laid
cool fingers on his Wrist, held a brownish, distasteful mixture to his
lips. A draught of egg nog was better, although it wasn't as persuasive
as some he had had: Bundy Provost's, for example.

Bundy was a galliard youth, but he was clear as ice underneath. He
wouldn't have let them put that thing over his, Howat's, face. He tried
to turn aside, but a cap of darkness descended upon him. Afterward his
breathing was easier. A blue iron tank was standing nearby, and the
nurse was removing a rubber mask attached to a flexible tube. The latter
led from a glass bottle, with a crystal pipe into the tank; the bottle
held water; and the water was troubled with subsiding, clear bubbles.
More of the dark, unpleasant mixture, more egg nog. Why did they trouble
and trouble him--already he was late getting to Irving Place.

The opera, as he had feared, had commenced; and it was at once strange
and familiar. The chorus and orchestra were singing in a deep ground
tone; the stage was set with a row of great, seething furnaces; glaring
white bars of light cut through vaporous, yellow gases and showered
steel sparks where coppery figures were labouring obscurely in a flaming
heat that rolled out over the audience. There was a shrilling of
violins, and then a deafening blare of brass, an appalling volume of
sound pouring out like boiling metal.... But here was Rudolph; the
performance was at an end; it was time to go home.

"I took the liberty of searching for--for Miss Jannan's address," the
other told him. Well, and why not! "Mr. Provost and Mrs. Jannan are away
for a week." Howat hoped that Kingsfrere would not turn up with his
flat face. He was conscious of smiling at a memory the exact shape of
which escaped him--something humorous that had happened to the pasty
youth. A refreshing air came in at the open windows, and he struggled
for a full, satisfying breath. The relief of what he dimly recognized as
oxygen followed. The nurse moved to the door and Mariana entered.

"Howat," she exclaimed, sitting beside him, "how silly of you! A cold
now with winter done. The snow is running away. And these soda-watery
tanks." He felt a warmth communicated by her actual presence. "It's just
my breathing," he told her; "it gets stopped up. A damned nuisance! Did
Honduras meet you?"

She assured him that she had been correctly received, and vanished to
remove her hat. Mariana must not sit in here, with the windows open, he
told the nurse; but then, he added, it was no good giving Mariana
advice. She wouldn't listen to it, except to do the opposite. She came
back, in one of her eternal knitted things, this one like a ripe banana,
and sat in the nurse's place. There was a great deal he wanted to know,
in a few minutes, when he felt less oppressed. The night came swiftly,
lit by his familiar lamps; Rudolph moved about in the orderly
disposition of fresh white laundry. A coat needed pressing. It would do
to-morrow. The doctor hurt him with a little scraping stab at the
bottom of his ear.

"Mariana," he at last made the effort of speech, questioning: "I have
been bothered about your--your temporary arrangement. That Harriet, you
know ... make trouble."

"Why, Howat," she replied, admirably detached; "you don't read the
important sheets of the papers! Harriet has made a tremendous success
with what was supposed to be a small part. A New York manager has
engaged her in letters of fire, for an unthinkable amount. James and I
sent her our obscure compliments, but we were virtuously rebuked by a
legal gentleman. Harriet, it seems, is going to cast us off."

Of all that she had said only the word obscure remained in his mind; and
it roused in him an echo of his old, dogmatic pride. "Mariana," he
demanded, "didn't the reorganization come about; isn't James Polder
superintendent?"

She hesitated, then replied in a low, steady voice. "Yes, Howat, it did;
but they didn't move Jim up. An older, they said steadier, man was
chosen." It was the oranges, he told himself, the oranges and brandy;
the cursed young fool. "You must come away, Mariana," he continued more
faintly; "fair trial, failure--something to yourself, our family."

"Leave Jimmy because he wasn't made superintendent!" she replied in an
abstracted impatience. Then, "I wonder about a smaller plant? Won't you
understand, Howat," she leaned softly over him; "I need Jim as badly as
he needs me; perhaps more. If I had any superior illusions they have all
gone. I can't tell us apart. Of course, I'd like him to get on, but
principally for himself. Jim, every bit of him, the drinking and
tempers, and tenderness you would never suspect, is my--oxygen. I can
see that you want to know if I am happy; but I can't tell you, Howat.
Perhaps that's the answer, and I am--I have a feeling of being a part of
something outside personal happiness, something that has tied Jim and me
together and gone on about a larger affair. You see, Howat, I wasn't
consulted," she added in a more familiar impudence; "whether I was
pleased or not didn't appear to matter. In a position like that it's
silly to talk about happiness as if it were like the thrill at your
first ball."

He drifted away from her through the nebulous haze deepening about him.
An occasional, objective buzzing penetrated to his removed place; but
all the while he realized that he was getting farther and farther from
such interruptions of an effort to distinguish a vaguely familiar,
veiled shape. He saw, at last, that it was Howat, a black Penny. It was
at once himself and that other Howat, yes, and Jasper. All three
unremarkably merged into one. And the acts of the first, a dark young
man with an erect, impatient carriage, a countenance and gaze of
vigorous scorn, accumulated in a later figure, hardly less upright,
slender, but touched with grey--a man in the middle of life. He paid
with an anguished spirit for what had taken place; and at last an old
man lingered with empty hands, the husk of a passion that had burned out
all vitality.

Mariana, too, had been drawn into the wide implications of this mingled
past and present. But now, clearly, he recognized in her the meeting of
spirit and flesh that had been denied to him. That was life, he thought,
that was happiness. In the absence of such consummation he had come to
nothing. In Jasper, in Susan Brundon who had married him over late, the
two had warred.

Life took the spirit to itself, mysteriously; wove the gold thread into
its design of scarlet and earth and green, or else ... a hearth soon
cold, the walls of a Furnace crumbled and broken, a ruin covered from
memory by growing leafage and grass throbbing with the song of robins,
the shrilling of frogs in the meadow.

The doctor and nurse, Rudolph and Mariana, moved about him in a far, low
stir. At times they approached on a lighter flood of oxygen. Mariana
wiped his lips--an immaterial red stain. But what was that confounded
opera the name of which he had forgot? It would be in his albums; in the
first, probably. Downstairs. He had a sudden view of Mariana's face as
she returned with the volume. An expression of piercing concern
overwhelmed the reassuring smile she had for him.

Howat understood at last, he was dying. An instinctive shuddering
seized him; not in fear of the obliterating fact; but from a physical
revulsion bred by his long years of delicate habit.

Yet it wouldn't do to expose Mariana to the terrors; and, after a sharp,
inward struggle, he said almost fretfully, "Further on." She turned the
pages slowly; but no one could read without a decent light. He moved his
head, in an infinity of labour, toward the clear, grey opening of the
window, and saw a pattern of flying geese wavering across the tranquil
sky.




THE END

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