BETTER ANGEL By Richard Meeker New York, NY : Greenberg, 1933 Production Note – This copy was reproduced from an imperfect original by a double-key process. Pagination does not match that of the original. Historical Note – Richard Meeker was the pseudonym of Forman Brown, 1901-1996. Better Angel 2 PART ONE Better Angel 3 I Kurt Gray was thirteen years old, but as he sat in the broad chair pulled close to the square front window, he seemed still a little boy. Partly it was the light; partly it was the way in which one thin leg was tucked under him, and his chin dug into his fist. Folded together over his book he seemed smaller than he was. It was early March. Patches of graying snow thatched the earth outside; and a gray sky, tarnished with gold from a sun gone down behind the grove of oaks opposite, gave to the light a pale, cold, honey-colored translucence that was thin and clear and yet liquid and winey. The room was in deep shadow, and the boy, his head bent almost to the pages of the book, strained his eyes over it with such a silent intentness that he seemed grown to the heavy chair and to the dim and aqueous atmosphere of the room. The faint sounds of rattling dishes and his mother's step in the kitchen could not break through into his consciousness. "Now Herakles," he read, "though his warriors were ready and urging him to be off on the long-awaited quest for the fleece, refused to set sail until Hylas was found. For Hylas, famed among all the youths of the country for his beauty, was the hero's favorite. In spite of the impatient grumblings of the princes and of the warriors, Herakles sought his young friend. Through field and woodland he went, calling aloud Hylas! Hylas!' but Hylas was nowhere to be found." "Kurt!" It was his mother. He started as she entered the room behind him, thrusting the book between his thigh and the oaken arm of the chair in a vain attempt at concealment. "Reading again! And in this light! Don't you know you'll ruin your eyes? If you must read, do put on the light!" Better Angel 4 "I was just --" he began, justifying himself. "I was just — " "Oh, it's all right. Run now and get me a pail of water, like a good boy. Your dad will be home for supper before we know it. Hike!" She gave him a good-natured shove as he shuffled through the door, rubbing his eyes. Kurt Gray had reached the age of thirteen in a state of unusual seriousness, unusual loneliness, and unusual innocence. He had no brothers or sisters, and his parents were already in middle age. They worshiped him, yet he escaped, somehow, being the proverbial spoiled child. A certain pliability which made him popular with the older people he was thrown with — a pliability which was partially a lack of self-assertiveness and partially a shrinking from disagreement — was in reality his greatest fault. This pliability came from his father, a mild, good-humored man who had set out to be a lawyer; and who, because of this same gentleness which prevented his pushing and elbowing his way through the rough and tumble competition of the Nineties, had ended by becoming a furniture dealer in Barton, Michigan — a town only a few miles from the farm on which he was born. Kurt liked his father, and Elmer Gray had for his son the sort of devotion that borders on the religious, since it contains an admixture of fear. Not that he was afraid of Kurt — it was not that. But there was, even when the boy was very young, an unaccountable feeling on the part of the father that in this small body and brain there was a latent superiority, a tenuous spirituality of some sort which he could never have analyzed, or understood, but which, when the two were alone together, as they were so infrequently, made the man slightly reticent; slightly and inexplicably fearful that he would not please the boy, that his son would be ashamed of him. It was a feeling Kurt certainly did not share, consciously at least, but it created between them a wall not to be penetrated. From his mother Kurt got, in multiplied measure, the love of beauty and the sensitiveness that set him apart from his companions — so apart that sometimes he wished himself violently otherwise. Mrs. Gray loved her son better than anything else in life. She had been married ten years when he was born. He came at a time when life in the little town was beginning to set her on edge. She had never fitted in very well. There was something of the aristocrat in her that made the women of the town regard her enviously as a snob, or deferentially as a truly superior being. She had come to Barton with her husband after two years of married life. She had been something of a beauty — slender, with blue eyes, pale brown hair, soft and fine, and a clear cool skin. She had never had much of an education, but her mind was alert and objective — the sort of mind that was quick to see the shallowness and dullness of the life about her, and, although it had never known anything much brighter or Better Angel 5 deeper, to be contemptuous of it. She had had her dreams. As a girl her passion for color and the feel of things, coupled with a modest talent, had led her to drawing. She had sketched, she had done a few promising water colors, she had longed vaguely to improve her- self, and not known how. The people in the town where she lived thought her talented, and flighty; flighty particularly when she had proposed going off, alone, to Boston to study art. Her father was not rich — a harness maker with his own shop and three other daughters to support. So she had not gone. She had put away her dreams with her brushes. She had married Elmer Gray because she loved him. She had seen that he was good and kind. She was now seeing that he was ineffectual, and she was beginning to envision herself doomed to the drab life that her neighbors lived; she saw life stretching ahead of her like a gray and barren prairie, with a rebelliousness that, kept so rigorously in check, made her unhappy and discontent. Her unquestioned leadership in the meager social life of Barton appeared to her a petty and unsatisfactory compromise. Then Kurt had come, and she knew that in him, if ever, her dreams must flower and bear fruit. So she had been glad that he was nice- looking. She had been glad that his eyes were brown, like Elmer's, that his hair was soft like her own, that his skin was smooth and white, that he was straight and without blemish. She had nursed him jealously through illnesses when her lips constricted with fright for the fragility of his little life. She had seen to it that he was well- mannered, clean, that he knew his letters and his Bible stories, that he went to school as soon as he was old enough. And how proud she had been when he did the work of two grades in one year, and when he brought home his monthly report cards with the high grades that seemed to give him so little trouble. She was not unequivocally pleased with him, however. As he grew older, as he started going to school, she noticed in him more and more the pliability that she felt was her husband's greatest stumbling-block. It frightened her. Was her dream, that promised so richly, to be frustrated by this softness that Kurt displayed? It frightened her because she did not know how to combat it. She had never known how, in Elmer's case. To him she had talked until she realized it did no good, urging him to be less lenient, to be more belligerent in his business dealings, to stand up for his rights. She had wheedled, she had scolded, she had even at times dared to be flamingly contemptuous — and had invariably regretted it when she saw how it hurt him. So, when Kurt would come home, as he too often did, white-faced and trembling, to stand silently by the big front window looking off to the river and the ragged line of oaks over which the stacks of the Better Angel 6 paper mills rose — when she would put her arms around his narrow shoulders — when she would kiss his cheek and he would shake her off, ashamed that she should see his racking bitterness — when, at last, hesitantly, perhaps in a flood of tears, he would admit that the boys at school had teased him about his fair skin: "Where'd ya buy yer paint, sissy? Sissy! Sissy!" — when, with body shaking and hands clenched, eyes strangely dark in his white face, he would sob, "Why — Mom — why, why, why? Why can't they leave me alone?" — when she would see him starting nervously to school a full half-hour early to avoid the boys congregating around the door — she was worried and frightened. She and Elmer talked it over together. They tried in every way they knew to interest him in things other boys of his age liked. They bought him a cowboy suit, a football, baseball mitts, boxing gloves.