Read Online A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories by Glenway Wescott - Free Book Online Page B

said. “I swear, I believe a woman could be put in jail for it.”
    The unfortunate young mother could not stand that. Her eyes ran and her cheeks whitened. “Father—” she cried.
    Nor could the elder mother endure any more. Long since she had learned never to deny the man she so happily loved, but her heart was not old. She looked shamefacedly at her children. She stood up. “I will not go in. I will just look in. To be sure that he is all right.” She fled.
    Then the visiting son lost his temper. All his life he had been calculating and, though malicious, mild up to a point—when suddenly, two or three times a year, he would be possessed. Suddenly emotion would break forth, with a sort of harmful brilliance. Then his self-possession was good for nothing but to hurt someone. He could not think and could not say what he thought. All was inspiration and he merely heard himself speak. This began to happen now, with a warning jerking in some nerve or muscle at the back of his head.
    The young husband said to his wife, “Your father is right. Your baby is still crying up there. Listen to him. It sounds like a tied-up dog. You don’t care what he suffers so long as your relatives say it’s all right.”
    With her napkin she wiped her tears.
    The other young man, feeling the worst answers all ready but unchosen, tingling on the tip of his tongue, ran to the door like one taken sick. He could not be sure what the words on his lips were or what they would lead to; he had to reach the door before they could be heard. On the way he stammered aloud, “It does not matter what is the best thing to do, your wife is my sister, your wife is too ill, if the child must be put to sleep, someone else will have to take charge—”
    He stood on the porch alone. No one could have understood all that he had said, nor guessed all he meant—what a blessing! His judgment of his brother-in-law (just and pitiful enough in theory, though accompanied by questionable feeling) in any such torrent of instinctively chosen words, would have had no result but to make more nightmarish everyone’s distress. Only getting out of doors in time could have checked it; and along with it a parallel plaint, less detailed, less reasonable, in defiance of his father. It was not clear in his mind now. What was most clear was that his own childhood had somehow come back to him, in him. His heart was beating like a child’s.
    His feeling had not been in logical order and was not yet; some mystery of mistaken identities, or crossed strands of time, lay at the bottom of it. Several persons had figured in the scene as one and the same; he himself had experienced as more than one. He was the grown son and brother, but he had felt like a child. He was also, being so like the weeping child, its real father—not in reality but in truth. And his sister and his mother were the same woman; then his sister’s husband might as well have been his father—no, what nonsense! He passed his hand across his face as if to brush away an optical illusion.
    This was the trouble: suddenly he had lost all sense of independent personalities, and recognized only composite categories of souls: all the sensitive, brutal, and tragic men, all women fumbling in the spell of love as best they could, and all the children. It seemed to him that there were no real differences of age, but mere subdivisions of one eternally unfledged soul—in infancy, for other’s pleasure, accustomed to pleasure; deprived when others were powerless to provide; forming habits by mistake; all to be paid for in due time, and broken. All of them were evidently too poverty-stricken to act upon intelligence. The impotent abandoned what they coveted; the fertile harmed what they begot.
    His father joined him, very angry, but with the new dignity of his age. They had planned to pay a visit together miles away in the country that evening. They walked across the soft-sounding lawn. “If your sister cannot do better