Strange Yesterday (2 page)

The younger John Preswick stood before his father looking down at him. The younger John Preswick was twenty-nine; the older John Preswick was seventy. And they had not seen each other for seven years. Now they were of an age, and they both understood it. Old John Preswick was smiling, striving to keep his eyes from the empty blue sleeve. “Johnny,” he said. “Johnny, sit down over here and tell me—”

First placing his cocked hat upon it, his son took a turn about the desk, seating himself in the chair the old man had occupied just before he entered. He looked over to his father, smiling reassuringly. Then he dropped his eyes to the desk, which was bare of papers.

“You no longer have your business here?” he inquired, seeking for something commonplace to speak of.

“There is no business since the occupation. They confiscated the ships.”

“I had forgotten. That would be so. It must have been difficult.”

“Yes.” The old mail wondered that he could consider anything as difficult—now.

“I would have written before, only—”

“I understand,” said old John.

They looked at each other. If for a moment they had forgotten the bond of breed that held their emotions expressionless, they recalled it now.

“I am glad to be back,” the younger man said.

“Your room is ready for you. I took the liberty to have Inez over here this evening.”

“Inez—?”

“Yes, you would have preferred—”

“I see. Well, if you have sent for her, let her come. It is seven years.”

He rose, and he went to the open window, the breeze that rustled his hair turning the flag in his direction. His father came over and stood beside him; their hands crept together, the old man closing his tightly over his son's.

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evening Inez came. Inez was of the old Spanish Marannos. There was a swing to her stride, and glossy black hair lay in a pile where her neck met her shoulders. Her eyes were deep brown; her lips were good; her nose was small and fine. From the Netherlands, her forbears had come, by the way of Brazil, under the leadership of Asser Levy, in the year of sixteen hundred and sixty-four. And in the manner of her tribe, they had not bred out. New blood filtered in slowly, and the dark skin and eyes, part Castilian, part Moorish, part Semite, held.

But old John Preswick loved her very much, and he had been determined—in the years past—to have her for his daughter. Then John Preswick, ivory Portuguese lace flowing from the cuffs of his coat, all dark velvet with mother-of-pearl buttons, was an iconoclast and a dandy. He was sneeringly superior, in the broadest city of the colonies. When his son fell in love with a Jewess, whom he had loved, too, in the twenty years he had known her, for she had grown up on Cherry Street, he said: “Marry her, and be damned. She is worth it.” That was in seventeen hundred and seventy-five. He had not married her, for a year later, on August 27th, he had stacked his musket on Harlem Heights, and the day afterwards ferried himself across to Brooklyn, not to see New York again for seven years.

Now he was back, a sleeve of his coat pinned up to his shoulder, his face haggard with fever, his hair streaked with gray. Old John, his father, had called for Inez, and she came, knowing neither that he was back nor that a sleeve of his coat hung empty.

Black she wore, for her lover had died—black gown of smooth silk, black shoes, and a lace shawl of black about her head; and Sam, seeing her face standing forth from the dark frame of black hair and black cloth, had not the courage to tell her of what had been.

Her chair brought her the short distance to the Preswick door. Leaving it, she entered the house alone, following the shambling figure of Sam to the dining-hall. The dining-hall was lit with twenty-eight long candles, in four seven-socketed candelabras. Their flame was smooth and dazzling, so that for the first her eyes were bewildered by the lights.

Then she saw.

The men rose and came towards her. There was old John Preswick, and there was another in the uniform of an American officer—only his left sleeve was empty and pinned up to his shoulder. In her eyes there was no hesitation. As quickly as she recognized old John, she recognized the other. And she saw his sleeve, realizing what it meant. All this she realized, and she knew it with possession, but the restraint was not hers, nor the control of emotion. Just for a moment, she stood rigid, mouthing the single word Johnny; then she sprang forward.

“Johnny!” she cried. “Johnny, Johnny!”

With his single arm, he caught her to him, and she lay against him, her face in his breast, her hands on his neck. She was sobbing into his white waist-coat, and he had his mouth pressed to the top of her hair. When they stood apart, she was half laughing, half crying.

“Johnny—I knew you would come. They tried to tell me that you were dead, dead, Johnny. But I knew. I knew that if I only waited, you would come; It has been so long—seven years. But that does not matter!”

“What does matter?”

“That you are here—alive. God help me, I am so happy.”

But with his face suddenly sober, he glanced down at the empty sleeve. “You see—my arm.”

She went close to him, and she laid her hand against his cheek. “How you must have suffered,” she whispered.

“A part of me is gone. It will be different.”

“You child—you strange old man of a child.”

“A part of me is gone,” he repeated; and then, finding her at his very breast, he crushed her to him again, forgetting everything in the fragrance of her hair.

And old John Preswick, the years fallen from him, stood and watched it. He was in pearl-gray, old John Preswick, with a white flower in his buttonhole, with a clump of worked silk at his chin, with lace dangling from the cuffs of his coat covering his hands. He leaned upon the frog-headed stick with the gold bands, and he twirled the ends of his long white mustache.

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Now, they were married in the Methodist meeting house in John Street, which John Preswick had given liberally to for the building. And Inez looked towards the strange, dark, one-armed man, wondering only now that she was to take him for her husband.

She was all in white lace that was over a hundred years old, and he in his blue and ivory uniform, and she stood by him proudly, her chin in the air. Very proudly, she stood by him, her chin tilted like the bowsprit of a ship without cargo. And as the words made her his wife, she stood silent, unmoving. Then he kissed her, crumpling the old lace, drinking in her scent. She took his arm, and they went out of the church, old John Preswick following after, smiling and strutting like a turkey cock, waving Sam from him, disdaining even to use his frog-headed stick with the bands of gold.

After that, to old John Preswick, it seemed that a flame came to light up the house; and when he sat at his great mahogany desk in his office, the place was no longer dead and still, but alive—with life. For the first time in twenty-nine years a woman ruled the house in Cherry Street.

She was such a woman as old John Preswick would have taken upon himself to love, had it ever been his to love again. Old John's heart longed after women, and he throbbed to see the curve of her breast and the long fine sweep of her thigh. She was as young as his son was old, and the fullness of life in her contrasted strangely with the dull lethargy of his son. He wondered, sometimes, that the man who was back could not share his happiness. He knew it was his son, and yet it was not his son. It was a dark, moody creature with a single arm, who walked slowly, shoulders curved, head bent until the chin touched the breast. His skin had a yellow tinge which never disappeared, and the lean hollowness of his face gave his head the look of a skin-covered lifeless skull. Very little did he speak—hardly at all unless addressed. They took to calling him Captain. Sam called him Captain; even his father began to use the name; only Inez called him Johnny.

Inez had a way with him. Inez could smile, and only Inez could make him smile, and she rarely. At times Inez could open him up, so that he told her things; yet much there was he never spoke of. He would lay his head upon her breast—fine breast, firm and warm—and he would talk to her. He would attempt to convey what was upon his brow. He would say:

“They come back. I counted of those I knew, and there were exactly eighty men that I killed. Realize that, eighty men in five years, and of the eighty, I ran through twelve with my sword. That is why they took my arm. The others did not hate me. I killed them, but when a soldier dies by a bullet, he is only resentful, not bitter. He expects that. Only a sword is different. It is cold steel, and when it slides into you, it carries bits of flesh along. And it hurts!—how I know that! It is a ghastly feeling. My left was my sword arm. I am left-handed, but everything else I learnt to do with my right. Only in fence it was different. You remember old Pierre, the dried-up Frenchman who used to live along the Bowery; he taught me my fence, and he taught me saber play with my left hand. He insisted “that with my left arm I would have an indisputable advantage. He said that when they face a left-handed person, men forget all their parries and thrusts and strokes. He was right. That is why there were twelve of them, and never once I. Once they had me with the steel, through the arm at the shoulder. The second time they took no chances. They used a ball, and they shattered the bone at the socket into splinters. But perhaps they are not through yet; perhaps they will want more.”

Holding his head close to her, she would say: “You are a child, and I would to God that I could suffer for you. I have lived so little, and you have lived so much. It has not been fair. If only I could have shared it. If only I could have felt some of it. If only it could have hurt me as it hurt you …”

He would never know that seven years could be as long as seventy, and that death hurts, even when you do not die. Nor would he ever know how self-pity had hardened him.

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the second year after they were married, a child was born to Inez, a girl, brown of eye, and with her mother's shadow to her skin. They called the girl Inez. Had it been a boy, they would have called it John Preswick. But since it was a girl, they gave it the name of Inez. Old John Preswick was a grandfather, and he was proud. He considered it a very wonderful and remarkable thing to be a grandfather; and, that thought in his mind, the very next day after it was an accomplished fact, he took his frog-headed stick, took his long coat, and took his pearl-colored cocked hat, and, in spite of the cutting wind and flaky snow, strutted down the Bowery Lane that all the world might know the extent of his satisfaction and pride.

The world knew, but he caught a chill, of which he never got the better. For a month, he lingered, and then, his son and his son's wife at his bedside, he died. They dressed his body as he himself would have dressed it; they laid it in a coffin, and they laid over it a red, white, and blue flag, and as they laid him into his grave, twelve rifles were discharged into the air, in recognition of the fact that his son had been a captain in the New York militia, that many, many years ago, he had marched with a boy named Hamilton upon the common, training other boys into a ragged squadron.

But as the younger John Preswick stood there, his wife at his side, alien thoughts were coursing through his mind. It occurred to him that, after all, this man was his father, and that the man was dead. There would be no reprieve, as there had been in his case, for with his own eyes he had seen the body laid out, had seen it dressed for the coffin, had seen it bolted in, as salted fish are bolted into a crate. He should have felt pity, and he should have felt grief, but he did not experience a great deal of either. And that puzzled him, as he was puzzled by the sobs that racked the form of his wife. Just why should it mean so much more to her than it did to him? Perhaps all of that had been in the seven years. Many things must have been in those seven years, things he would never quite understand. Realizing that for the first time, he realized, too, that his wife was a very strange person, and that he had never known her. All of it piled up upon him, and made his brow ache, so that he was glad when at last they turned away from the new grave and went back to their house.

Now he, the captain, was master of that house, and the great mahogany desk and the frog-headed stick was his. He went to the window, from which he could see the flag tossing over the Battery. For a long while he remained in the cold on the balcony staring at the flag. Then he turned his back, reentered the room, and bolted the window.

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was so very old!—and the house made him older. For every year that his wife grew, for every year that his daughter grew, he grew two and three and even four. He would have denied that he was like his father, but his wife saw it, and Sam, the ancient negro butler, saw it too. He took to spending long hours behind the great black desk, and he would keep his chin on his palm, after the manner of his father. When he walked, he would take the frog-headed stick—not for any need of it, but because some impulse he could not explain threw it towards him.

The house was old, and the servants were old, and the master, who was less than forty, was very old, but there was youth in the house for all of that. Not his wife; his wife was bending beneath the pressure. She became staid, and her breasts flattened almost imperceptibly, and her fine chin became sharp. She wore much black, and she had a way of walking softly. It was not she; it was her daughter. In her daughter there was a flashing o brightness that was irrepressible. When she was seven, she was a wisp of ivory flesh with a crowning shock of red-brown hair. At first her eyes had promised the almost-black of her mother's; but later a sea color came into them, and they glowed and sparkled and flashed. She was beautiful. Even at seven she had that half-sensuous sort of beauty that sends little shivers along men's spines, beauty for which men do not hesitate to kill. And even at seven, she was conscious of that beauty, and how with it she could have slaves innumerable. She flashed about the gloomy old house, and no one dared deny that it was hers.