Page:O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories for 1919.pdf/62

40 younger, or fifteen years older, it would have been easier for him to look at his mother. You must remember what his mother had meant to him, and what, bound up still in the fierce and sombre battle of adolescence, she must mean to him now.

As for Agnes Kain, she did not look at him, either. Through the changing hours her eyes rested on the transparent hands lying crossed in her lap. She seemed very tired and very white. Her hair was not done as tidily, her lace cuffs were less fresh than they had used to be. About her whole presence there was a troubling hint of let-down, something obscurely slovenly, a kind of awkward and unlovely nakedness.

She really spoke to him for the first time at the Junction, when he stood before her, slim and uncouth under the huge burden of “Ugo,” fumbling through his leave-taking.

“Christopher,” she said, “try not to think of me—always—as—as—well, when you’re older, Christopher, you’ll know what I mean.”

That was the last time he ever heard her speak. He saw her once again, but the telegram was delayed and his train was late, and when he came beside her bed she said nothing. She looked into his eyes searchingly, for a long while, and died.

That space stands for the interval of silence that fell after Christopher had told me the story. I thought he had quite finished. He sat motionless, his shoulders fallen forward, his eyes fixed in the heart of the incandescent globe over the dressing-table, his long fingers wrapped around the neck of the ’cello.

“And so she got me through those years,” he said. “Those nip-and-tuck years that followed. By her lie.

“Insanity is a queer thing,” he went on, still brooding into the light. “There’s more of it about than we’re apt to think. It works in so many ways. In hobbies, arts, philosophies. Music is a kind of insanity. I know. I’ve got mine penned up in the music now, and I think I can keep it there now, and save my soul.”

“Yours?”