On the table in his room, when he re-entered it that night, he saw a telegram; but he left it lying. Whoever it was from, whatever it contained, could hardly matter at that moment. He dropped into a chair and sat staring ahead of him down a long tunnel of darkness. Nothing mattered — nothing would ever again matter. He felt like a man who has tried to hang himself because life was too hideous to be faced, and has been cut down by benevolent hands — and left to face it. He thought of the day when he had staggered into his parents’ room at Euphoria to find his father’s revolver and make an end — and the revolver had not been there, and he had been thrown back on life as he was thrown back on it now. He felt again the weakness of his legs, the blur in his sick brain, as he staggered down the passage from one room to the other, groped about among the familiar furniture like a thief in a strange house, found the drawer empty, and crawled back again to his own room. It was dreadful, the way old memories of pain fed their parasitic growth on new ones, and dead agonies woke and grew rosy when the Furies called. . .
The winter daylight came in at the window before he thought of the telegram again. Then something struck him about the way it lay there, alone, insistent, in the smoky dawn, and he reached out and tore it open. The message was from his sister Mae and read: “Grandma has pneumonia wants you badly come as soon as you can.”
In the train that was hurrying him homeward it occurred to him for the first time that the telegram might have been from Halo. He wondered why that possibility had never presented itself to his mind before; but in the moral wreckage of the last hours he had not seen her struggling and sinking. She seemed to be hidden away in some safe shelter, like the Homeric people when a cloud hides them from mortal peril. But now the thought of her stole back, he felt her presence in his distracted soul. He seemed to lie watching her between closed lids, as a man on a sick bed watches the gliding movements of his nurse, and weaves them into the play of light on the ceiling. . .
At the door of the Mapledale Avenue house, where Mae and his father met him, some one said: “She’s conscious . . . she’ll know you . . .” and some one added: “You’d better come into the dining~room and have some coffee first — or did you get it on the train?”
On the landing upstairs he met his mother. Mrs. Weston was a desiccated frightened figure. They were not used to death at the Westons’, it did not seem to belong to the general plan of life at Euphoria, it had no language, no ritual, no softening conventions to envelop it. Mrs. Weston’s grief was dry and stammering. “The minister’s been with her, but he’s gone away. She says she won’t see anybody now but you,” she whispered.
Mrs. Scrimser’s room was full of crisp winter sunlight and its brightness lay across her bed. She sat up against her smooth pillows, small but sublime. All her great billowing expanse of flesh seemed to have contracted and solidified, as though everything about her that had roamed and reached out was gathered close for the narrow passage. She was probably the only person in the house who knew anything about death, and Vance felt that she had already come to an understanding with it. He knelt down and pressed his face against the bed. “Van,” she said, “my little boy. . .” Her fingers wandered feebly through his hair. He remembered that only two nights before he had been kneeling in the same way, his arms stretched out to snatch at another life that was slipping from him, not into death but into something darker and more final; and that other scene lost its tragic significance, became merely pitiful and trivial. He put away the memory, pressing his lips to the wise old hands, trying to exclude from his mind everything but what his grandmother had been, and still was to him. For a long time they held each other in silence; then she spoke softly. “I’ve been with you so often lately. At Crampton, on the porch. . .”
Yes; to him too those hours were still living. In some ways she had been nearer to him than any one else, though he knew it only as their souls met for goodbye. He buried his face in those tender searching hands, feeling the warm current of old memories pass from her body to his, as if it were she who, in some mystical blood~transfusion, was calling him back to life. A door opened, and some one looked in and stole away. The clock ticked quietly. She lay still. “Van,” she said after a while, in a weaker voice. He lifted his head. “There’s something I wanted to say to you. Stoop over, darling.” He stood up and bent down so that his ear was close to her lips. “Maybe we haven’t made enough of pain — been too afraid of it. Don’t be afraid of it,” she whispered.
Apparently it was her final message, for after that she lay back, quiet and smiling, and though he knew she was conscious of his presence the only sign she gave him was, now and then, the hardly audible murmur of his name. Gradually he became aware that even he was growing remote to her. She began to move in the bed uneasily, with the automatic agitation of the dying, and he rose to call his mother. He ............