Saying nothing, he dived for sanctuary and healing into books. He went to college. He escaped .flaming with the youth of that time because he was older than, and a little out of' step with, his classmates. Besides, he was busy healing his invisible wounds in his own way.
His father died the year he got his Master's. His mother was left in straitened circumstances, so Kenneth helped support her in her own place. He did not transport her, for he knew this would not be kind. But he took the burden. It never occurred to him, while he worked at his first meagerly paid teaching job, sent money to his mother, and even helped his younger sister Ethel on her way through college at the same time, that all this was any sacrifice. It simply seemed that his own life, as he saw it, had hit one of those backwaters. To clerk through the war was such, surely. To be a young teacher with family responsibilities was only another. He hewed to the line. He had to. No giddy young days for him.
In 1932 his mother, after an expensive illness, died, and he mourned her, but the depression was on the land and whoever had forborne to fire him from his job while his mother was alive, forbore no longer.
Ethel, eight years his junior, was out of school by this time, of course, and she was earning, and she helped him, for she too had a sense of responsibility and was reliable. He was deep in debt while he scrambled for odd jobs during those bad times.
When, at last, he got another modest teaching job he went into this backwater thankfully. It was a long grind
to work off his debts, lean quiet years. But he did it. He learned to take a good deal of pleasure in seeing the old obligations melt slowly away as he satisfied them. When at last he was free and moderately prospering, the world was into the tense months after Munich.
He was thirty-seven by now, a bachelor. Of course a bachelor. He had never had enough to offer a woman of his own. Security. Prestige. Whatever. Before he got around to risking any personal alliance came 1941, and he went to war the second time.
Naturally, he clerked. Well-seasoned, perfectly at home with paper, he spent the war years in an office in a backwater—bearing this and indeed glad of it—for his soul could still wince. But never quite understanding what he was doing there that mattered at all. He only knew that somebody thought it was his duty, which he, of course, did.
In 1945 he emerged from this and met his sister Ethel in New York and said goodbye. Ethel, his only kin, had never married either. (Was it something about the mother and father?) She was a grown woman—getting along herself, in fact—thirty-seven years old. Never a beauty, Ethel, but clever and industrious, and well established in a good job. Ethel did not need him. In fact, she frightened him a little, at that time, by her ease in the turbulent business world, her blunt courage, her perfect independence.
He admired her for it very much. But he said an affectionate, but not woeful, goodbye and came to California to a job in the English Department of a small liberal arts college in a little city that sprawled and spilled over a sunny valley. His permanent backwater.
Here, for ten years, without even a glimpse of his only kin, he taught about poetry—to football players, coeds, and all variety of young people—by a kind of moral supremacy. Kenneth Gibson was obviously no Bohemian wretch with wild eyes and rebellious ideas and, equally obviously, no silken aesthete looking down a haughty nose upon the bourgeoisie. He was, rather obviously, a nice decent well-contained little man, five feet eight, still taut and compact, by no means showing his age, although his fair hair had inconspicuous threads of white in it—a most respectable man, with fine gray eyes, with a nice mouth that often wore a touch of humor on it.
The young were rocked by the fact that this man
actually took this stuff seriously. It behooved them to look into it themselves and see what it was worth, then.
So he did his work well, quite often succeeding in communicating his own conviction that poetry was not necessarily sissy . . . which was an achievement greater than he realized, poetry having the repute it has today.
He had his books, his acquaintances, his solitude, his work, his cozy room, and the beauty of trees, the magnificence of sky, the lift of the mountains on the horizon, and the music of men's ancient thoughts, to sustain his spirit. He had his life and he thought he foresaw how it would end. But then he met Rosemary James at her father's funeral.
Chapter II
R. Gibson sat decorously with his colleagues in the gloomy little chapel and endured the cruel, but necessary, ceremony by a little trick he had of deliberately disengaging a lot of his attention. When it was over he realized, with a pang of outrage, that off at the side, behind the curtain in the "family room," Rosemary James had been sitting through it all alone. If he had known! He had never met the girl—poor thing—but if he had known, he would have churned up the community to find somebody —anybody—to be with her. Or he would have sat in there himself. He hated a funeral—anybody's funeral—and he found himself imagining her ordeal, and furious that it had been.
When he took her hand, beside the grave, he felt the vibration of her lonely anguish. He knew in the marrow of his bones that she was exhausted and in despair and had to have hope. Had to have something, however trival, ahead of her. She could die without it.
So standing in the sunshine, on the sad turf, with the flowers heaped behind them, he said to her, "Your father must have many papers. I wonder if any of them should be published."
"I don't know," said Rosemary.
"I wonder," said Mr. Gibson. "Would you like me to go through them for you? We can't tell. There may be valuable things."
"Oh," she said, "I suppose there might. I wouldn't know." She seemed timid, poor thing.
"I'd be very glad to help if I can," he said gently.
"Thank you, Mr.—Gibson?"
"Then may I come over . . . perhaps tomorrow?"
"Please do," she said tremulously. "It's very good of you. Won't it be a trouble?"
"It will be a pleasure," he said. The word was deliberate. To speak of pleasure at the graveside was rough, was shocking. But she needed to have inserted into her imagination such a word.
She thanked him once more, stumblingly. A shy young woman, too upset, too bewildered, to have any poise. Not a child, of course. In her late twenties probably. Slim ... in fact a pitifully thin body, trembling now with strain and fatigue but standing up to it somehow. A white face. Frightened blue eyes, with little folds of skin at the upper outer edges that came down sadly. A lined white brow. Limp, lifeless brown hair. An unpainted mouth, pathetically trying to smile and yet not smile. Well, she could Jook forward now, if ever so little, to tomorrow.
"We'll see," said Mr. Gibson, and he smiled in full. "Who can tell?" he added cheerfully. "We might find some treasure."
Her eyes changed shape and he saw the flicker of wonder, of hope, and he was quite pleased with himself.
On his way home, he fumed. Poor thing! Looked as if a vampire bat had been drinking her blood. And perhaps he had. The arrogant angry old man whose" brain had betrayed him and who lived out his final decade flubbing about helplessly hunting his own thoughts, which kept eluding him. Mr. Gibson was so very sorry for the girl. Poor, unattractive, tired, beaten creature—terrible ordeal shouldn't have been there all alone!