Of Time and the River Read Free

miserably. “I knew it! . . . I don’t want to hear it.”
    “K, k, k, k, k,” the younger woman snickered derisively, prodding him in the ribs again.
    “No, sir,” the older woman went on strongly—“and that’s not all either!—Now, boy, I want to tell you something that you didn’t know,” and as she spoke she turned the strange and worn stare of her serious brown eyes on him, and levelled a half-clasped hand, fingers pointing, a gesture loose, casual, and instinctive and powerful as a man’s.—“There’s a lot I could tell you that you never heard. Long years after you were born, child—why, at the time I took you children to the Saint Louis Fair—” here her face grew stern and sad, she pursed her lips strongly and shook her head with a short convulsive movement—“oh, when I think of it—to think what I went through—oh, awful, awful, you know,” she whispered ominously.
    “Now, Mama, for God’s sake, I don’t want to hear it!” he fairly shouted, beside himself with exasperation and foreboding. “God- damn it, can we have no peace—even when I go away!” he cried bitterly, and illogically. “Always these damned gloomy hints and revelations—this Pentland spooky stuff,” he yelled—“this damned I-could-if-I-wanted-to-tell-you air of mystery, horror, and damnation!” he shouted incoherently. “Who cares? What does it matter?” he cried, adding desperately, “I don’t want to hear about it—No one cares.”
    “Why, child, now, I was only saying—” she began hastily and diplomatically.
    “All right, all right, all right,” he muttered. “I don’t care—”
    “But, as I say, now,” she resumed.
    “I don’t care!” he shouted. “Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace,” he muttered in a crazy tone as he turned to his sister. “A moment’s peace for all of us before we die. A moment of peace, peace, peace.”
    “Why, boy, I’ll vow,” the mother said in a vexed tone, fixing her reproving glance on him, “what on earth’s come over you? You act like a regular crazy man. I’ll vow you do.”
    “A moment’s peace!” he muttered again, thrusting one hand wildly through his hair. “I beg and beseech you for a moment’s peace before we perish!”
    “K, k, k, k, k,” the younger woman snickered derisively, as she poked him stiffly in the ribs—“There’s no peace for the weary. It’s like that river that goes on for ever,” she said with a faint loose curving of lewd humour around the edges of her generous big mouth—“Now you see, don’t you?” she said, looking at him with this lewd and challenging look. “You see what it’s like now, don’t you? . . . YOU’RE the lucky one! YOU got away! You’re smart enough to go way off somewhere to college—to Boston—Harvard—anywhere— but YOU’RE away from it. You get it for a short time when you come home. How do you think I stand it?” she said challengingly. “I have to hear it ALL the time. . . . Oh, ALL the time, and ALL the time, and ALL the time!” she said with a kind of weary desperation. “If they’d only leave me ALONE for five minutes some time I think I’d be able to pull myself together, but it’s this way ALL the time and ALL the time and ALL the time. You see, don’t you?”
    But now, having finished, in a tone of hoarse and panting exasperation, her frenzied protest, she relapsed immediately into a state of marked, weary, and dejected resignation.
    “Well, I know, I know,” she said in a weary and indifferent voice. “. . . Forget about it . . . Talking does no good . . . Just try to make the best of it the little time you’re here. . . . I used to think something could be done about it . . . but I know different now,” she muttered, although she would have been unable to explain the logical meaning of these incoherent and disjointed phrases.
    “Hah? . . . What say?” the mother now cried sharply, darting her glances from one to another with the quick, startled, curiously