Read Online The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter - Free Book Online

the rug whose pattern was like the face of an old friend. In the hall he kept peering up over the banister. How well he knew what lay beyond. How many times had he raced those stairs, his hand never touching the rail!
    “Could I go up for a minute? Just in the hall?” he pleaded.
    Had he said it or hadn’t he? Uncle Dick did not reply. It was dim up there but he could see the open door to Aunt Jess’s bedroom, could feel the very shape of her bright red bureau with its bits of veneer missing, the still brighter red blanket usually folded at the foot of the bed, the polished window board that raised level with the sill. You could sit onthe bed and play solitaire looking out at the Machamers next door. You had to go through Aunt Jess’s bedroom to get to the back bedroom which had been added to the house when the schoolroom was built. The floor slanted like a ship’s deck in a storm so that as a boy sleeping in this room with Matt he had the pleasant feeling of being adrift at sea. The front bedroom at the other end of the hall was Aunt Teresa’s, a severe, anciently furnished cell with grim ancestors looking down from the walls. He had stayed away from that but by day and night he knew the attic. He had been sent there to sleep when the house was full, once as a small boy with Polly. He remembered waking in the middle of the night and reaching out to touch his sleeping cousin, curious to find out how a girl’s flesh felt, since he had only brothers. She must have been nine or so, and he five or six.
    He felt his face grow cruel with ties and memories.
    “I wish I could see Matt and Polly,” he said.
    “Supper over and they’re gone,” Uncle Dick told him. “The devil knows where.”
    John Donner listened. They weren’t here. The house was silent.
    He scarcely moved, consuming every minute, hoping the absent might come. At the door to the parlor he halted. Therewas no light except from the hall but even in the gloom he knew every object intimately, the black marble fireplace that carried through to the sitting room, Aunt Jess’s tall frosted-glass parlor lamp painted with blue flowers, the brass sconces on the wall that she had promised many a time should go to him when she died but never had, and the dark hulk of the piano. It was the piano that next to Aunt Jess he had felt closest to in this house, the carved Chinese monster, half idol, half alive, the pedals its feet, the gnarled and broken jacks, as Aunt Jess called them, its fingers, the golden rods and the hammers that struck the strings its arms. Most alive of all was its voice. The hard tight treble sang very clear. The deep bass reassured that the foundations of the earth were still standing. He had hoped when he came down the street that there might be a child taking lessons, the pleasant background of faltering humility and industry. He could still pick up books that he had first read in Aunt Jess’s house and hear along with the taste of words and smell of the paper the sound of Aunt Jess’s piano.
    He wished now he had asked her to play for him before she went. No one else had her “touch.” He would know it anywhere. Once when he asked she would have smiled with her particular kind of half-make-believe pleasure. In lateryears she grumbled that her fingers were stiff as pokers; she couldn’t play a note. Sooner or later she would go to the piano all the same, seat her bulk dangerously on the tipping, creaking horsehair stool, run her hands up and down the keyboard to warm and limber them up, shake her head with disgust from time to time, although those double and triple runs were like the wind blowing first one way and then another. He had once asked her how she did it, and she said, “I don’t. They just go.” Sometimes she sat for a while as at a bowl washing her hands, tasting the water, throwing up tinkling and rippling drops until satisfied. “Now what do you want?” she would say and if he’d brought her a new Schirmer book, she