Six
JUNIUS MALTBY was a small young man of good and cultured family and decent education. When his father died bankrupt, Junius got himself inextricably entangled in a clerkship, against which he feebly struggled for ten years.
After work Junius retired to his furnished room, patted the cushions of his morris chair and spent the evening reading. Stevenson’s essays he thought nearly the finest things in English: he read Travels with a Donkey many times.
One evening soon after his thirty-fifth birthday, Junius fainted on the steps of his boarding house. When he recovered consciousness, he noticed for the first time that his breathing was difficult and unsatisfactory. He wondered how long it had been that way. The doctor whom he consulted was kind and even hopeful.
“You’re by no means too far gone to get well,” he said. “But you really must take those lungs out of San Francisco. If you stay here in the fog, you won’t live a year. Move to a warm, dry climate.”
The accident to his health filled Junius with pleasure, for it cut the strings he had been unable to sever for himself. He had five hundred dollars, not that he ever saved any money; he had simply forgotten to spend it. “With that much,” he said, “I’ll either recover and make a clean, new start, or else I’ll die and be through with the whole business.”
A man in his office told him of the warm, protected valley, the Pastures of Heaven, and Junius went there immediately. The name pleased him. “It’s either an omen that I’m not going to live,” he thought, “or else, it’s a nice symbolic substitute for death.” He felt that the name meant something personal to him, and he was very glad, because for ten years nothing in the world had been personal to him.
There were, in the Pastures of Heaven, several families who wanted to take boarders. Junius inspected each one, and finally went to live on the farm of the widow Quaker. She needed the money, and besides, he could sleep in a shed separated from the farmhouse. Mrs. Quaker had two small boys and kept a hired man to work the farm.
The warm climate worked tenderly with Junius’ lungs. Within the year his color was good and he had gained in weight. He was quiet and happy on the farm, and what pleased him more, he had thrown out the ten years of the office and had grown superbly lazy. Junius’ thin blond hair went uncombed; he wore his glasses far down on his square nose, for his eyes were getting stronger and only the habit of feeling spectacles caused him to wear them. Throughout the day he had always some small stick protruding from his mouth, a habit only the laziest and most ruminative of men acquire. This convalescence took place in 1910.
In 1911, Mrs. Quaker began to worry about what the neighbors were saying. When she considered the implication of having a single man in her house, she became upset and nervous. As soon as Junius’ recovery seemed sure beyond doubt, the widow confessed her trepidations. He married her, immediately and gladly. Now he had a home and a golden future, for the new Mrs. Maltby owned two hundred acres of grassy hillside and five acres of orchard and vegetable bottom. Junius sent for his books, his morris chair with the adjustable back, and his good copy of Velasquez’ Cardinal. The future was a pleasant and sunshiny afternoon to him.
Mrs. Maltby promptly discharged the hired man and tried to put her husband to work; but in this she encountered a resistance the more bewildering because it presented no hard front to strike at. During his convalescence, Junius had grown to love laziness. He liked the valley and the farm, but he liked them as they were; he didn’t want to plant new things, nor to tear out old. When Mrs. Maltby put a hoe in his hand and set him to work in the vegetable garden, she found him, likely enough, hours later, dangling his feet in the meadow stream and reading his pocket copy of Kidnapped. He was sorry; he didn’t know how it had happened. And that was the truth.
At first she nagged him a great deal about his laziness and his sloppiness of dress, but he soon developed a faculty for never listening to her. It would be impolite, he considered, to notice her when she was not being a lady. It would be like staring at a cripple. And Mrs. Maltby, after she had battered at his resistance of fog for a time, took to sniveling and neglecting her hair.
Between 1911 and 1917, the Maltbys grew very poor. Junius simply would not take care of the farm. They even sold a few acres of pasture land to get money for food and clothing, and even then there was never enough to eat. Poverty sat cross-legged on the farm, and the Maltbys were ragged. They had never any new clothes at all, but Junius had discovered the essays of David Grayson. He wore overalls and sat under the sycamores that lined the meadow stream. Sometimes he read Adventures in Contentment to his wife and two sons.
Early in 1917, Mrs. Maltby found that she was going to have a baby, and late in the same year the wartime influenza epidemic struck the family with a dry viciousness. Perhaps because they were undernourished the two boys were stricken simultaneously. For three days the house seemed filled to overflowing with flushed, feverish children whose nervous fingers strove to cling to life by the threads of their bed clothes. For three days they struggled weakly, and on the fourth, both of the boys died. Their mother didn’t know it, for she was confined, and the neighbors who came to help in the house hadn’t the courage nor the cruelty to tell her. The black fever came upon her while she was in labor and killed her before she ever saw her child.
The neighbor women who helped at the birth told the story throughout the valley that Junius Maltby read books by the stream while his wife and children died. But this was only partly true. On the day of their seizure, he dangled his feet in the stream, because he didn’t know they were ill, but thereafter he wandered vaguely from one to the other of the dying children, and talked nonsense to them. He told the eldest boy how diamonds are made. At the bedside of the other, he explained the beauty, the antiquity and the symbolism of the swastika. One life went out while he read aloud the second chapter of Treasure Island, and he didn’t even know it had happened until he finished the chapter and looked up. During those days he was bewildered. He brought out the only things he had and offered them, but they had not potency with death. He knew in advance they wouldn’t have and that made it all the more terrible to him.
When the bodies were all gone, Junius went back to the stream and read a few pages of Travels with a Donkey. He chuckled uncertainly over the obstinacy of Modestine. Who but Stevenson could have named a donkey “Modestine”?
One of the neighbor women called him in and cursed him so violently that he was embarrassed and didn’t listen. She put her hands on her hips and glared at him with contempt. And then she brought his child, a son, and laid it in his arms. When she looked back at him from the gate, he was standing with the howling little brute in his arms. He couldn’t see any place to put it down, so he held it for a long time.
The people of the valley told many stories about Junius. Sometimes they hated him with the loathing busy people have for lazy ones, and sometimes they envied his laziness; but often they pitied him because he blundered so. No one in the valley ever realized that he was happy.
They told how, on a doctor’s advice, Junius bought a goat to milk for the baby. He didn’t inquire into the sex of his purchase nor give his reason for wanting a goat. When it arrived he looked under it, and very seriously, asked; “Is this a normal goat?”
“Sure,” said the owner.
“But shouldn’t there be a bag or something immediately between the hind legs?—for the milk, I mean.”
The people of the valley roared about that. Later, when a new and better goat was provided, Junius fiddled with it for two days and could not draw a drop of milk. He wanted to return this goat as defective until the owner showed him how to milk it. Some people claimed that he held the baby under the goat and let it suck its own milk, but this was untrue The people of the valley declared they didn’t know how he ever reared the child.