“George is what I came to see you about.”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me, Judge. I guess matters have proceeded pretty fast with our young people. Mrs. Lockwood had a letter from George day before yesterday.”
“Saying?”
“Saying that he’d proposed to your daughter and been accepted.”
“Is that the first you heard of it?”
“The first I knew that it had gotten to that stage. The young people today seem to take things into their own hands more than we ever did.”
“Some do, some don’t.”
“Yes, I guess that’s true. George does. I always encouraged George to be self-reliant, and he is. That makes it easier for me, in a way. Because when I pull in the reins he knows I mean it, and we have no arguments about it. I don’t often have to speak to him twice.”
“I see. Then maybe that makes things easier all around. My daughter was taught to obey but we didn’t do it the same way you did. We gave her her orders every day of her life.”
“Well, that was your way, and we had ours, and both ways work,” said Lockwood. He suddenly leaned forward. “The question is, Judge, what is it that’s made easier all around?”
“Uh-huh. You’re a clever man, Mr. Lockwood.”
“A busy member of the bar doesn’t just accidentally pay a call on a business man sixty miles away. Clever? Well, I inherited some horse sense from my father.”
“What else? I don’t mean money.”
“What else did I inherit? Is that what you came to see me about?”
“Partly.”
Abraham Lockwood got up and stood at the window. “You don’t like clever men, do you, Judge?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Very well, since you’ve already called me clever, I have nothing to lose, so I’ll be clever. You want to stop this marriage because you’ve been digging into our family history.” He turned around and faced Fenstermacher. “All right. I’ll stop it.”
“How?”
“That’s none of your damn business, Judge. Your business is to go back to your little pile of shit in Lebanon and crow like a rooster.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that, you—”
“What will you do? Fine me for contempt of court? Get out before I kick you out, you dumb Dutch bastard. And keep your distance or I’ll brain you with this poker.” Lockwood balanced the poker from his fireplace.
“You got already two murders in your family,” said Harvey Fenstermacher. “I found out what I want to know.” He shook his fist at Abraham Lockwood. “Set foot in Lebanon County once, Mister,” he said, and left.
“You’ll never get the truth out of your old man,” said Ned O’Byrne. “Neither will Lalie out of her old man. But it stands to reason that Judge Fenstermacher went there with a chip on his shoulder. He’s the one that went to Swedish Haven, not your old man to Lebanon.”
“My father’s pretty clever sometimes. He could outfox the judge, if he wanted to. But I wonder if he wanted to.”
“Oh. You think your old man was against this marriage?” said O’Byrne. “Why?”
“Ah, that’s where he’s clever, my father,” said George Lockwood. “He never lets anybody know what he’s thinking, or why he does anything.”
O’Byrne looked quickly at his friend; it was the first time in their four years’ acquaintance that he had heard George Lockwood speak of anyone in such tones of innocent admiration. It silenced O’Byrne’s ready irreverence.
Agnes Wynne was not a member of the main, Thomas Wynne line, but as a second cousin and the only living female of her generation she partook of the benefits and protection that went with the name. Her father was always taken care of with some job in the Wynne Coal Company that did not require a technical knowledge of coal mining. He was paymaster at one colliery, purchasing agent at another, assistant superintendent in charge of outside—surface—work at two of the larger operations. Before he was thirty years old he realized that the name Wynne, that had got him his jobs, also kept him from enjoying the complete trust of the men he worked with. The company spy was to be found in all grades of coal mining personnel, and while the employes he dealt with were not actively hostile to this gentle, amiable man, they never could forget that he was a Wynne. This, of course, was understandable when the jobs he held kept him in daily contact with the men who worked with their hands, but conditions did not greatly change when he became assistant superintendent. A superintendent always had his eye on the colliery next above, and the superintendents of the largest collieries were ambitious for general managerships and vice-presidencies. Every superintendent’s secretary always knew more about a colliery than Assistant Superintendent Theron B. Wynne, the cousin of Old Tom. But there was no place else to go, and Theron Wynne knew it, and so he went fishing at the company dams and wherever he could find an unpolluted stream; he painted his pictures of the breakers and the culm banks, and once or twice a year he would be off to Wilkes-Barre or Gibbsville for a three-day drunk. One advantage of being a Wynne was that he could tell his boss beforehand that he was taking a few days off on private business, and since he was not indispensable, no questions were asked. On his return he would always have nice presents for his wife and for Agnes, and Bessie Wynne would thank God that no harm had come to this defeated man, with his frail body and his awkward efforts to make people fond of him. He could tell Bessie, and no one else, that in college he had wanted to become a missionary, but his older cousin was footing the bills for his education and expected him to go to work for the Wynne Coal Company. He had failed Cousin Tom while still in college, when a physician said he could never work inside a mine and should therefore abandon the thought of studying to be a civil engineer specializing in mining. The defeat of Theron Wynne was accomplished early in life, for he had also failed himself for the same reason, health, that prevented his fulfilling his secret ambition to bring Christianity and the Presbyterian doctrines to the black man in Africa. Sometimes, watching the men quitting the mine at the end of a shift, Theron Wynne sardonically observed that the faces and hands of the miners were blackened as dark as any he would have preached to in the jungles; their faces were as black and their resistance to his preaching would have been as firm; but Theron Wynne made no attempt to convert the Irish and Lithuanians and Poles. His own faith was shaky, as frail as his body. As the years passed and he did not die, he discovered that his constitution had acquired the habit of staying alive and become equal to the few demands he put upon it. He could walk many miles through the woods if he did not hurry, and his semi-annual debauches in Wilkes-Barre and Gibbsville seemed to exact no more than a temporary distress. Even his conscience ceased to trouble him two days after he got home and was once again in the routine of respectability. He loved Bessie and was gratefully fascinated by her love for him and for her having made him a fully functioning man. But his love for Bessie was not comparable to the love he breathed for his daughter.
The mystery of Agnes Wynne had no beginning; he accepted as fact the evidence that by making love to Bessie he had started a life that grew until it was ready to be expelled from Bessie’s body, but from his first sight of this thing that was his child he understood that the changes in himself had already begun; he did not know when. Nor care. In a little while his first sight of her was also lost in the past, as had been the love-making, as had been Bessie’s uncertainty and then conviction that she was carrying a child. The presence of his daughter in his life enabled him to admit that he had not wanted a son; he had been ashamed to admit that even to himself while Bessie was carrying Agnes, but he could confess to himself after Agnes was born that he had been afraid his child would be a boy. When a boy grew up he would expect his father to be strong and forceful and talented in ways that Theron B. Wynne was not. That boy would have been embarrassed by his father. The possibility that a second child would be a male was less frightening to Theron Wynne; Agnes would be there to stand between her father and the critical, disappointed glances of her brother. But the breeding capacities of Bessie and Theron Wynne were exhausted in Agnes, and she remained unique in her father’s experience.