The Cinder Buggy (25 page)

He got out of the carriage and stood for an instant hesitating whether to let Agnes go on to the house alone or have her wait. Suddenly a scream of mindless, futile fury kanted through the air. Everybody shuddered.

“Him,” said the puddler, answering Thane’s startled look.

Deciding then not to let Agnes go on alone he took her out, led her to an iron bench in the shade, and returned to hear what the men were so anxious to tell him.

“You heard him,” said the tall puddler. “That’s at us. We ain’t a going to do it. Nary if nor and about it, we ain’t. It’s against God, man and nature. It’s irreligious. What’s moreover the men won’t have it. They got to work there, don’t they? No sir. They won’t have it.”

“What does he want?” Thane asked.

“He takes on that a way and says as he can’t die until’s we promise. But we ain’t a going to promise.”

“What does he want you to promise?” Thane asked, patiently.

“No sir,” the puddler went on. “Nobody’s a going to. Not so as you could notice it. Ain’t it bad enough to have him always on our necks alive?”

“You ain’t told him yet,” said the second puddler.

“‘Tain’t Christian,” said the tall one, walking off by himself. “It’s heathen,” he mumbled. “It’s unbelieving. It’s....”

“You tell me,” said Thane to the second puddler. “What does Enoch want?”

“Wants us to burn him up in a puddlin ‘furnace,’” said the second puddler. Trying to say it calmly, even lightly, and all at once, he lost control of his voice. It squeaked with horror on the last word.

“Is that all?”

The puddler recoiled. The group behind him fell back a step.

“Is that all he wants?” Thane asked again.

“That’s what he’s a screaming at us for,” said the puddler, sharply.

Thane went back to Agnes. He had time to tell her before they reached the mansion.

“If he wants it, and you have no will to the contrary, I’ll promise to do it,” he concluded.

“It strikes one with terror,” she said. “If he wants it that’s enough.”

Just as they were admitted they heard the dreadful scream again. The door, closing, seemed to cut it off. Inside there was no sound of it.

The family doctor anxiously received them. He talked rapidly, addressing Agnes in a manner tactfully to include Thane, whom he had never seen before. The two best consulting physicians in Wilkes-Barre were present, he said. There had arrived within the hour also an eminent alienist from Philadelphia. Four men nurses had been provided. Everything possible to be done had been thought of almost at once.

“But what is it?” Agnes asked. “What has happened?”

The doctor was sympathetic. Naturally she would want to know what it was and how it happened. Those were questions anyone would ask. Alas! who could answer them? He, the doctor, had attended the late Mrs. Gib; it had been his happiness to know Agnes before she could possibly know herself; but Mr. Gib, as they all knew, lived to himself. He had, so to speak, no pathological history. Three days before it happened he had begun to behave strangely at the mill. The men noticed it. He interfered with their work by having them hold the furnace doors open while he committed papers, bundles and various unidentified objects to the fire, thereby spoiling several heats of good iron. It was not a doctor’s business to know these things. He had taken it upon himself, nevertheless, to make inquiries.

On the third day there had been a conference between Mr. Gib and his lawyers. What took place at this conference a doctor would probably not understand if he were told; however, he had not been told. The lawyers were reticent to the point of being rude, not knowing, of course, how important it was for a doctor to be able to reconstruct the events that have immediately preceded the seizure. Mr. Gib, he had learned, never returned to the mill from that conference with his lawyers. The notice of the mill’s closing was posted by the lawyers; it was signed by them with power of attorney. Mr. Gib went straight home and was next seen in a state of frenzy. When the doctor arrived he was in a paroxysm of rage, very dangerous to himself but otherwise harmless, since it seemed to vent itself upon imaginary objects. This state was followed by others, in rapid, alarming alternation—despair, exultation, terror. It had been necessary, as they could realize, to put him under restraint. Two men nurses were by him constantly.

What was it? The Wilkes-Barre consultants had agreed upon one diagnosis. The patient, they said, had been attacked by delusional mania. If the attack subsided he would recover; if not he would die of exhaustion. That might be a matter of weeks. The Philadelphia alienist had only just now seen the patient; yet his mind was made up. He pronounced it a kind of progressive disintegration of the brain matter, with sudden, catastrophic lesions. Death would take place in a few hours. And it certainly was true that all the symptoms grew worse.

“What is your opinion?” Agnes asked.

“My own?” said the doctor, casting glances around. He lowered his voice to a nonprofessional tone. “We have different names for it,” he said. “That is scientific. No matter. We are all talking about the same thing.... He... is... possessed.”

Agnes shuddered.

“What does he want from these mill workers outside?” Thane asked.

Yes, yes. The doctor was just coming to that. Mr. Gib had lucid, coherent intervals. They were decreasing in frequency and duration and that was an ominous sign. In the very first of these intervals he seemed to be facing the thought of death and revealed an extreme horror of natural interment. He had in one such interval either conceived a way or remembered one of cheating the earth, which was to be cremated in one of his own furnaces. Thereupon he began to call for certain old puddlers and heaters by name and when they were brought up to him he demanded of them a promise to dispose of his body in that extraordinary way. While he looked at them they had not the strength to say outright they would not; but he could not make them promise, and each time he failed it was very bad for him. The state of terror returned, and if this continued the consequences would be fatal.

“Would it relieve him if I promised?” Thane asked.

“Promised what?” the doctor asked moving uneasily.

“To do what he wants done with his body,” said Thane.

“But who would do it?” the doctor asked.

“I would,” said Thane.

The doctor looked away in all four directions. “Certainly it would relieve him now,” he said, vaguely, as if that were not the point.

Thane suggested that Agnes be permitted to see him in the next lucid interval, and that afterward, in the same interval if possible, and if not, then in the next one, they should try letting him promise to carry out the old man’s cremation wish.

The doctor agreed. However, he was not to be held responsible for the consequences. He had been responsible until now for everything because there was no one else. He could not be unaware of the fact that there had been an unfortunate family episode. No one could tell how Mr. Gib would be affected by the unexpected sight of his own daughter. He had not asked to see her. However, she
was
his daughter and there Was no one else,—no one. How extraordinary!

He left them to ascertain and report.

Agnes, putting off her hat and gloves, sat facing the window. Thane took several turns about the room, came up behind her chair, laid his hand gently on her head. She sat quite still and reached over her shoulder for his other hand. They did not speak. The doctor returned in haste, saying: “If Mrs. Thane will come now, at once, very softly, we may try.” Agnes and the doctor walked up the staircase together, Thane following. Her feet were as steady as his own. He was suddenly swept with a feeling of great tenderness for her.

The Philadelphia alienist and the Wilkes-Barre consultants made a group in the front hall window. They had been arguing technically and stopped to stare a little at Agnes and then at Thane, who fell back and stood leaning against the wall as Agnes and the doctor went on. The doctor opened the door carefully and peered in. Standing aside he motioned Agnes to enter.

Her father lay in a great four-poster on his back, extended to his full length, his feet together and vertical, his head slightly raised on pillows,—and their eyes met as she crossed the threshhold. He recognized her instantly. She was sure of it,—sure he was in his right mind. Yet he gave not the slightest sign of his feelings. She was surprised that he was not more shrunken. His bulk was intact. But he was the color of sand. His aspect was sepulchral. She advanced slowly, holding his gaze, hardly aware of two men standing alert at the head of the bed, just outside the line of vision, ready to seize him.

When she was half way to him he began to sit up, lifting his whole trunk from the hips without the use of his arms, his feet at the same time rising a little, under the lower part of the sheet.

“Go away 1” he said hoarsely, and she stopped. “Go away!” he meant to say again, but as his voice rose he became inarticulate and made guttural sounds. He began to repel her with excited gestures. The doctor interfered. “Come,” he whispered. She half turned to go, but faced her father again. In a clear, loud voice, she uttered the three words he had once with all his strength demanded and could not make her say. “I am sorry.” Their effect was to excite him all the more. He continued to wave her away. When the door had closed behind her he collapsed.

Thane was waiting outside the door. She leaned on him heavily and seemed about to go under. He took her in his arms and bore her downstairs. She revived at once and sharply declined to be made about, even by the doctor, whose smelling salts she put aside. Thane walked with her in the air.

Presently the doctor joined them. The idea of bringing Mr. Thane to Mr. Gib’s notice as one who would promise to do the strange thing he desired,-—this idea, he said, had been discussed with the alienist; and it was the alienit’s notion first to put the patient under the suggestion that a puddler named Thane had been sent for, the point being that Mr. Gib might remember Mr. Thane as a puddler and forget him as a son-in-law. This seemed to the doctor too subtle altogether; still, as it couldn’t do any harm he had consented. It had in fact been done with such success that Mr. Gib now lay in a fever of hope. Would Mr. Thane, the puddler, please come at once?

Thane had never been in a sick room. He had never seen death transacting. He had known two idiots and had an idea of imbecility; insanity he could not imagine. The doctor’s long medical discourse on Enoch’s disorder had filled him with a vague sense of resentment; and the doctor’s private conviction that Enoch was possessed had made him angry. He did not believe in devils. That flash of superstition threw the professional manner into grotesque relief and he was contemptuous of it. His feelings went over and stood with Enoch against these self-important outsiders who by some law of their own had established themselves above him in his own house, were permitted to restrain him in his own bed, who stood about in his hallway disputing as to how and why he should die.

As Thane entered the room the two nurses were leaning over the old man from opposite sides of the bed, and the sight of them deepened his antagonism. They stood back as he approached. Enoch, slowly opening his eyes, gazed at Thane with a look of tense recognition. Otherwise he lay perfectly inert until Thane stood looking down at him. Then his lips began to move as if he were talking. No sound was audible. Thane, bending lower and lower, dropped on his knees and put his ear very close. Enoch was whispering. His words, though faint, were distinct, almost fluent, and dramatically intentional.

What he said was that worse puddlers and lesser men than Thane, men he had known all his life, had refused to do for him that service one cannot perform for oneself and must therefore be permitted to ask as a favor. This service was to dispose of his remains agreeably to a certain wish, which was to be cremated. There was no physical difficulty whatever. It was feasible to be done in a puddling furnace!—his own furnace!—his own mill!—his own body! Why not?

“I will do it,” said Thane, removing his ear and meeting the old man’s eyes. Enoch’s lips continued to move. Thane returned his ear.

It was to be done in Number One Furnace.

Thane met his eyes again, saying: “All right. In Number One. I understand.”

Enoch’s lips were still moving. Thane listened.

There was one thing more, Enoch said. He had no right to ask it except as a favor for which he would be deeply grateful. Would Thane listen very carefully? In that walnut secretary by the door, in a secret drawer of it that would come open when the moulding above the pen rack was pressed downward—there he would find the key to a room upstairs, directly above the one they were in. He wished to die in that room opstairs,—
by himself.
He knew better than to ask the nurses or the doctors. They already thought him mad. Anyhow they would ask questions and he couldn’t tell them why he wished to die in that room alone. He had been saving his strength against an opportunity to give them the slip, intending to lock himself into it. Once in it he would be safe. But his strength had suddenly departed forever. No one knew this yet. It had just happened. The nurses supposed he was resting. The fact was he could not move foot, hand or finger. So now he was utterly helpless and hopeless except for Thane,—and the end was so near.

Would Thane get the key?—carry him over all obstacles to that room above?—set him in a certain chair, taking care not to move it?—then retire and lock the door and keep them all off for an hour? An hour would do it. In one hour he would be out of their reach.

Thane did not pause to reflect. The old man’s appeal to be permitted to die as he would in his own house was irresistible. It moved him dynamically. He strode to the walnut secretary, discovered the key, dropped it in his pocket and returned to the bedside.

The nurses were dumfounded! scandalized! to see him suddenly take the old man up in his arms, sheet and all, and start off with him toward the door.

They followed, exclaiming and chattering. They were too amazed to act. At the door occurred a scene of pure confusion. As Thane pulled it open the four doctors, having heard the commotion within, were there in a group on the momentum of entry. At sight of Enoch in Thane’s arms they recoiled and stood blankly aghast. The two nurses behind Thane became hysterically vocal, trying all in one breath to exculpate themselves and explain an inconceivable thing.