Free A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories by Glenway Wescott

than this, she will have to find some-where else to live. For I won’t be made miserable another minute, with your modern principles.”
    “You and her husband have made yourselves ridiculous, that is all. Under the circumstances he should hold his peace. You know it as well as I do. It is not a matter of principle. Sister is sick. She can scarcely hold her baby, much less walk up and down with him until he has had enough of it and falls asleep. Who is there to do it? Mother is tired.”
    “Well, I won’t hear him crying during meals. I’m going to eat in peace. She is stubborn. She always was, when she was little; it’s nothing new. You agree with her, of course, because you are like that yourself. But I won’t stand it. I’m going to be master in my own house. I tell you, she will have to go.”
    “Very well, sir. She shall go then. You took her in because they are poor and have no other place to go. Of course your home is your own. And when you’ve had enough of charity to your children, you’ve only to say so.”
    Oh, indeed the past had come back—all of it in disorder. A moment ago it was with his infant nephew that he had identified himself; now as he spoke he was confusing himself with himself as he had been years before, a small boy. Thus his father had provoked him; then, too, there had been talk of youngsters’ deserving to be driven from home, of whether or not a father was master in his own house—the poor great-hearted man! Then, as now, unhesitatingly he had replied, the most logically insulting phrase after phrase. He remembered vividly how he had been: slight and pallid, detestably afraid, fighting back in barking tones like some small animal instinctively inspired. So also the babe in his turn, to his father, a few more years having passed, would speak.
    But this time the real desperation of father and son did not wake. Their hearts were not in the quarrel; it was not the same. Somehow in the interval they had exchanged a general pardon. Into affectionate indifference their reproaches trailed away. The son noticed how they placed themselves in the automobile, their shoulders in contact, unshrinking.
    The father spoke again. “Well, your sister hasn’t anywhere else to go. They haven’t a cent of money.”
    “I’ll attend to that.”
    “But you must not burden yourself with their problems. We’ll get along. You have your own way to make.”
    They drove away out between the farms. Now it was night. There were shooting stars, ever falling but not landing; certainly somewhere a hundred adolescent wishes leaped up vainly to meet each one. On porches and in orchards, at pianos here and there, in dimmed automobiles, in impoverished privacy of all kinds, couples were coming together. They passed a number of them. Without doubt, in hopeful tones as if they had been cures for illnesses, marriages were being discussed by these strangers; and chances of people’s dying being speculated upon, as if illness were a betrothal with death; and the futures of children fixed, incidentally. Innumerable as bubbles in a restless flood, family circles were being formed or broken—a sighing embrace, a breaking pain. The sounds in the night did not seem appropriate to these grave though common events—only music would have been. Hoarse and faint were the cries of air and water; and the soul’s all too quavering.
    But recalling the scene at the supper table, the young man thought that utterances more radically tragic had been made there than those in any book or play. When gentle ambitious poor men and women broke down, when domestic pain and want were thus exposed by mistake—were there not dialogues more desperate, reproaches more courageous and opener avowals, than any ever designed by great lyric intellects to reveal evil heroes, or the condemned to death, or saints in ecstasy? Was not existence then stripped more nearly naked? No writer could put these humbler griefs in print. They might in great part be