"Go and ask him."
Simmons went, and came back triumphantly. "I tole him. He didn't say
nothin'. So it's all right"
The visitor went ponderously up-stairs. On the first landing he caught
his breath, and stood still.
Directly opposite him, across the window of the upper hall was a
horsehair-covered sofa, with great, shiny, slippery mahogany ends.
Samuel Wright put his hand up to his throat as if he were
smothering.... He used to lie on that sofa on hot afternoons and study
his declensions. It had no springs; he felt the hardness of it in his
bones, now, and the scratch of the horsehair on his cheek. Instantly
words, forgotten for a generation, leaped up: Stella Stellae Stellae Stellam-Mechanically his eyes turned to the side wall; an old secretary stood
there, its glass doors curtained within by faded red rep. He had kept
his fishing-tackle in its old cupboard; the book of flies was in a
green box on the second shelf, at the left. Samuel looked at those
curtained doors, and at the shabby case of drawers below them where
the veneer had peeled and blistered under the hot sun of long
afternoons, and the sudden surge of youth into his dry, middle-aged
mind, was suffocating. Something not himself impelled him on up the
half-flight from the landing, each step creaking under his heavy
tread; drew him across the hall, laid his hand on the door of the
secretary.... Yes; there they were: the green pasteboard box, the
flannel book to hold the flies. He put out his hand stealthily and
lifted the book;--rust and moth-eaten rags.
The shock of that crumbling touch and the smell of dust made him gasp-
and instantly he was back again in middle age. He shut the secretary
quietly, and looked around him. On the right side of the hall was a
closed door. His door. The door out of which he had rushed that
windy March night thirty-two years ago. How hot with passion he had
been then! How cold he was now. On the other side of the hall a door
was ajar; behind it was his father. He looked at it with sombre
indifferent eyes; then pushed it open and entered. He saw a little
figure, sunk in the heap of pillows on the big bed; a little shrunken
figure, without a wig, frightened-eyed, and mumbling. Samuel Wright
came forward with the confidence of apathy. As he stood at the foot of
the bed, dully looking down, the thick tongue broke into a whimpering
stammer: "M-m-my f--"
And at that, something seemed to melt in the poor locked heart of the
son.