solicitudes of a people with no natural health nor appetite left in

them…

Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted

if it sweeps away illusion and lights the road to a plan.

6

Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these

give the quality of all my Bromsteadmemories. The crowning one of

them all rises to desolating tragedy. Iremember now the wan spring

sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stifffeeling of best clothes

and aggressive cleanliness and formality, when I and my mother

returned from church to find my father dead. He had been pruning

the grape vine. He had never had a ladder long enough to reach the

sill of the third-floor windows-at house-painting times he had

borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paint-and he had in his

own happy-go-lucky way contrived a combination of the garden fruit

ladder with a battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd

purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up this arrangement by means

of the garden roller, and the roller had at the critical moment-

rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with his head queerly

bent back against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an expression

of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo curtain rod with a

tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had

been rapping for some time at the front door unable to make him

hear, and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into

the garden and so discovered him.

"Arthur!" Iremember my mother crying with the strangest break in

her voice, "What are you doing there? Arthur! And-SUNDAY!"

I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her

<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>