The Homemaker · Part III · Chapter 17 (1/2)

XVII

Old Mrs. Anderson, having borne seven children and raised three to maturity (not to speak of having made a business of guiding Mrs. Knapp by neighborly advice through the raising of her three), knew what was brewing with Stephen the moment she stepped into the kitchen. She had been expecting Stephen to have one of his awful tantrums again any day. The only reason he hadn’t so far was because poor crippled Mr. Knapp was so weak and so indifferent to what the children did that Stephen was allowed to have his own way about everything. But foolish indulgence wore out after a while and only made things worse in the end. All the regulation signs of an advancing storm were there. She noted them with a kindling eye. Stephen’s face was clouded; he gave her a black look and did not answer her “How do, Stevie dear?” And as she took a chair, he flung down his top with all his might. A moment later, as he lounged about the kitchen with that insolent swagger of his that always made her blood boil, he gave a savage kick at his blocks.

Now was the time to give Mr. Knapp some good advice that would save him trouble in the end. She never could stand hunchbacks and cripples and had not liked Mr. Knapp very well even before he was so dreadfully paralyzed; but she felt it her duty to help out in that stricken household. “You’ll have trouble with that child today, Mr. Knapp,” she said wisely; “he’s spoiling for a spanking. Anybody with experience can see that by looking at him. My! what a relief ’twill be when he’s out of the house and goes to school with the others.”

It had been her habit thus to diagnose Stephen to his mother. And as for the remark about the relief it would be to have Stephen go to school, it was threadbare with repetition. She scarcely knew she had said it, so familiar was it. It astonished her to have Mr. Knapp look at her as though she had said something which shocked him. She was nettled at his look and replied to it resentfully by a statement of her oft-repeated philosophy of life, “The only way to manage children, Mr. Knapp, is never to let them get ahead of you. If you watch for the first signs of naughtiness and cut it short”⁠—her gesture indicated how it was to be cut short⁠—“it doesn’t go any further.”

To illustrate her point she now addressed Stephen’s listening, stubborn back in a reproving tone of virtue, “Stephen, you mustn’t kick your blocks like that. It’s naughty to.”

Stephen instantly kicked them harder than ever and continued to present a provocatively rebellious back to the visitor.

Mrs. Anderson turned to his father with the gratified look traditionally ascribed to the Teutonic warlords when they forced Serbia into a corner. She tapped the fingers of one hand rapidly in the palm of the other and waited for the father of the criminal to take action. He continued to draw his needle in and out of the stocking he was darning. His face looked like Stephen’s back.

What a disagreeable man Mr. Knapp was! She was not surprised that he had been so disliked by all the sensible people at the store. And how ridiculous for a man to be darning a stocking! He might at least look ashamed of it! Mrs. Anderson disliked him so much at this moment that she felt herself trembling and burning, “Well, Mr. Knapp, you’re not going to pass over a wilful disobedience like that, I hope,” she said, her voice shaking with anger as much at Stephen’s father as at Stephen.

“I didn’t tell Stephen not to kick his blocks,” he said dryly.

Her sense of extravagant rightness in the face of insane wrongness flamed over her so hotly that she could scarcely speak. “Well⁠ ⁠… but⁠ ⁠… but⁠ ⁠… oh, I understand! I understand!” she finally brought out bitterly. “I understand. You think it is all right and perfectly proper for Stephen to kick things around as much as he pleases.”

Mr. Knapp stooped to look into the oven where a rice pudding was cooking. How ridiculous for a man to be cooking a rice pudding! “I’m sure I don’t know why you think you understand anything about it because I have not told you what my opinion on the subject is,” he said, over his shoulder.

Stephen’s back became more acutely listening. He did not understand the big words and he could not make out his father’s tone, except that, unlike Mother, he did not get mad at Stephen and begin to pick on him whenever Mrs. Anderson had been there a little while.

Mrs. Anderson did not make out Mr. Knapp’s tone very well herself, except that it was all part of his intense disagreeableness. A weak poor creature Lester Knapp was, a perfect failure at everything, and without even the poor virtue of knowing it. Besotted in self-conceit into the bargain, though she had never suspected that before. Poor Mrs. Knapp! And those poor children! Her mother’s heart ached for them, left in such hands.

Mr. Knapp went on drawing his thread to and fro silently. Little by little, out of the air, Mrs. Anderson drew the information that she had been insulted, though she had not perceived exactly when. She felt rasped to the bone. With dignity, she drew her cape up around her shoulders and prepared to go.

“Take the advice of an old woman who was bringing up children before you were born,” she said solemnly, her voice shaking with the depth of her feeling. “You’ll find out when it is too late that they must be made to mind! Everything depends on that. Mrs. Knapp, their poor mother, understood that perfectly.”

“Good afternoon,” said Mr. Knapp, very distinctly.

The door closed behind her ungently enough, and with its slam Lester Knapp felt himself transported by an invigorating wave of anger such as he had rarely felt in his life, simple, hot, vivifying rage as good as a drink of whiskey. It made him feel twice as alive as usual. “Strange thing, the human mind,” he thought rapidly. “When I ran into Mrs. Andersonism in business, it only made me sick, sort of hamstrung me with disgust. Anything they’d put their filthy hands on I’d rather let them have than touch them enough to fight them. But when it threatens Stephen.⁠ ⁠… God! I love to fight it! I’d enjoy strangling that old harpy with my two hands. She thinks she can bully me by threatening my vanity, does she? She thinks she can get her damned old hands on my little boy, does she? I should say it was enough to have killed four of her own.”

He looked over at Stephen’s brooding back and set his stirred and sharpened wits to the problem of switching Stephen off from the track that was taking him towards one of his explosions. He had discovered that Stephen’s salvation at such times was something hard to do, something Stephen could struggle with, but not quarrel with. He thought fast, almost excitedly. Would he think of something first, or would Stephen blow up first?

Stephen turned away from the pile of his toys and began to wander about the kitchen, casting a somber eye on the too familiar things. “Alexander, Alexander, what new world can I get for you?” asked his father, unleashing his inventiveness and sending it leaping forward on the trail.

In a moment, “Say, Stephen, how’d you like to beat up a pretend egg?” he asked.

Stephen glowered at him suspiciously, but with a spark of unwilling curiosity in his dark eye.

“Like this,” said his father. He wheeled himself to the shelf, took down a tin basin, filled it with warm water, put a bit of soap into it and began to whip it to a froth with an eggbeater.

Stephen’s face lightened. Ever since he could remember he had seen his mother playing with that fascinating toy; ever since he could remember he had put his hand out for it; ever since he could remember his mother had said, “No, no, you’d only make a mess,” and had hung it up out of reach.

He had gone too far towards a nervous explosion to be able to say “Oh, goody!” or “Give it to me!” but he held out his hand silently. His father took no notice of his sullen expression and did not offer to show him how it worked.

Stephen set the eggbeater in the water and with perfect confidence began to try to turn the handle. He always had perfect confidence that he could do anything he tried. At once the eggbeater slipped sideways and fell to the floor. Stephen frowned, picked it up and held it tighter with his left hand. But he found that when he put his attention on his left hand to make it hold tight, his right hand refused to make the round-and-round motion he so much admired. He had never before tried to do two different things with his two hands. He took his attention off his left hand and told his right hand to make the circular motion. Instantly the whole thing began to slip. As instantly he flashed his mind back on his left hand and caught the beater before it fell. But at once his right hand, left to itself, stopped turning.

“For him, it’s just like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach,” reflected Lester.

Stephen was disconcerted by the unexpected difficulty of the undertaking. He stood still a moment in the mental attitude of a man who has caught a runaway pig by the ear and a hind leg and does not dare let go. He breathed hard and frowned at the perverse creature of steel in his hand.

His father felt as the spectators at a prizefight feel when the second round begins. He prayed violently that nothing might interrupt the rest of the bout. Especially did he pray that the old Anderson imbecile might not come in. If she did, he would just throw the stove-lid at her head. What was he for, if not to protect Stephen from marauding beasts of prey? He himself did not make a motion for fear of distracting Stephen’s attention.

The little boy went at it again, but with none of his first jaunty cocksureness, cautiously, slowly, turning the handle a little at a time. He made no progress whatever. The combination of the two dissimilar motions was too much for him. If someone had held the eggbeater still, he could have turned the handle, he knew that. But he would never ask anyone to do it. He would do it himself. Himself! He tried again and again without the slightest success and began to put on the black, savage look he had for things that displeased him.

His father followed with sympathy as he toiled forward into the unmapped jungle of his own mind. How he stuck at it, the little tyke! And how touching was his look of outraged indignation at his own unruly right hand! His father said to himself, half-laughing, half-wistful, “Poor old man! We’ve all been there! That painful moment when we first realize that our right hands are finite and erring!”

He shook with silent mirth over the sudden, hot-tempered storm which followed in a tropical gust, when Stephen stamped his feet, ground his teeth, and, turning red and purple with rage, tried by main strength to master the utensil. He turned his eyes discreetly down on his darning when Stephen, with a loud “Gol darned old thing!” threw the eggbeater across the kitchen. He felt Stephen suddenly remember that his father was there and glance apprehensively up at him. He chose that moment to stoop again to the oven door and gaze fixedly in at the bland face of the rice pudding.

But he did not see it. He saw Stephen’s fiery little nature at grips with itself, and inaudibly he was cheering him on, “Go to it, Stevie! Get your teeth in it! Eat it up!” He was painfully, almost alarmingly interested in the outcome. Would Stephen conquer, or would he give up? Was there real stuff behind that grim stubbornness which had given them such tragic trouble? Or was it just hatefulness, as the Mrs.-Anderson majority of the world thought it? He held a needle up to the light and threaded it elaborately. But he was really looking at Stephen, standing with his stout legs wide apart, glowering at the prostrate but victorious eggbeater. In spite of his sympathetic sense of the seriousness of the moment Lester’s diaphragm fluttered with repressed laughter. Cosmic Stephen in his pink gingham rompers!

He took up another stocking and ran his hand down the leg. Stephen sauntered over towards the beater, casually. He glanced back to see if he need fear any prying surveillance of his private affairs, but his father’s gaze was concentrated on the hole in the stocking. Carelessly, as though it were an action performed almost absentmindedly, Stephen stooped, picked up the beater, and stood holding it, trying experiments with various ways of managing that maddening double action. His clumsiness, his muscular inexpertness with an unfamiliar motion, astounded his father. How far back children had to begin! Why, they did not know how to do anything! Not till they had learned.

This did not seem to him the trite platitude it would have been if somebody else had said it to him. It cast a new light into innumerable corners of their relations with Stephen which had been dark and pestilential. They hadn’t begun to be patient enough, to go slow enough. Stephen was to the eggbeater, to all of life, as he himself would be, put suddenly in charge of a complicated modern locomotive.

No, Stephen was not! Painlessly, with the hard-won magnanimity of a man who has touched bottom and expects nothing out of life for himself, not even his own admiration, Lester recognized in Stephen’s frowning, intent look on his problem a power, a heat, a will-to-conquer, which he had never had. He had never cared enough about either locomotives or eggbeaters to put his mind on them like that. Stephen got that power from his mother. From his other world of impersonality Stephen’s father saw it and thrilled in admiration as over a ringing line in a fine poem. If only Stephen could be steered in life so that that power would be a bright sword in his hand and not a poison in his heart.

The clock ticked gravely in the silence which followed. For Lester the pause was full of grave, forward-looking thoughts about Stephen. Presently the little boy come back purposefully to the basin of water. He put the beater in, and once more tried to turn the handle. The perverse thing did all that perversity could imagine, slipped sideways, stuck, started too suddenly, twice fell to the floor clattering. Each time Stephen picked it up patiently and went back to work. Lester ached with fatigue at the sight of his perseverance. Heavens! Nothing was worth such an effort as that!

“Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke?”

But Stephen did not flinch. He felt he almost had it. Once he turned the wheel three-quarters of the way around! His heart leaped up. But after this it balked continuously. Stephen fetched a long quavering sigh of discouragement and fatigue. But he did not stop trying. He could not have stopped. Something more potent than fatigue held him there. The tough fibers of his passionate will were tangled about his effort. He could not stop till he dropped. He was very near dropping. He scarcely knew what he was doing, his attention was so tired. But his hands, his brave, strong little hands kept on working. His back and legs ached. His shoulders bowed themselves. But he did not stop.

“Under the bludgeonings of chance.⁠ ⁠…”

murmured Lester to himself.

And then, all at once, it was as though Stephen had turned a corner. Something rearranged itself inside his head. Instead of toiling uphill he felt himself begin to glide down easily. Why, he could do it! That rebellious right hand of his was suddenly tamed. Whir‑r‑r! went the steel spokes flashing in the white suds. They sang like music in Stephen’s ears! Whir‑r‑r! He could hardly believe it!

Once in a while it stuck or jerked, but he had only to take thought⁠—Stephen could feel the thinking place in his head draw together hard⁠—and command his hand to turn regularly. How it hated to, that old hand! And how Stephen loved the feeling of bossing it around!

He turned and turned. The foamy suds frothed higher and higher! Whir‑r‑r! The kitchen was full of the sound.