The Crocodile | Page 3

For three weeks they talked foolishly about foolish things.
"Then they were married. Nine months later a son was born to them, and the girl died. The man mourned for her. At first he mourned because he missed her. Then because he respected her memory. Then because he liked to pose as one everlastingly unhappy and faithful till death. He made everybody about him mourn, including the little child, his son, and finally he died and was put in the vault with the girl, and no one in the world was the better by one jot for any act of the man's life... Let me hear you laugh...."
I looked up at him, much puzzled.
"Not at the anecdote," he said, "which isn't funny -- but just laugh."
I delivered myself of a soulless and conventional ha-ha. My uncle put back his head and roared. At first I thought he must be sick, for until that moment I had never heard anyone laugh. I had read of it in books. And as a dog must have a first lesson in digging, so a child must have a first lesson in laughing. My uncle never stopped. He roared harder and louder. Tears ran down his cheeks. Something shook me, I did not know what. I heard a sound like that which my uncle was making, but nearer me and more shrill. I felt pain in my sides. My eyes became blurred and stinging wet. With these new sounds and symptoms came strange mental changes a sudden knowledge that blue was the best color for the sky, heat the best attribute of the sun, and the act of living delightful. We roared with laughter, my uncle and I, and the legended door of the tomb gave us back hearty echoes. In the desert of my childhood I look back upon that oasis of laughter as the only spot in which I really lived. When my uncle went away he said: "For God's sake, Dickie, try to be cheerful from now on. I wish I could take you with me. But your father says no. Remember that the business of living is with Life. And let Death mind his own business."
The door closed behind that ruddy, cheerful man, and left us mourners facing each other across the supper table.
"Papa," said I presently, "haven't we a picture of Mama?"
"I had them all destroyed," said my father. "They were not like her. The last picture of her --" here he tapped his forehead "will perish when I am gone. Ay, but laddie," he said, "she is vivid to me."
"Tell me about her, please, Papa," I said.
"She was a tall, stately woman, laddie," he said, "and bonny -- ay, bonny. Life without her has neither breadth nor thickness only length."
"What color was her hair?" I asked.
"Boy," he said, "you will choke me with your questions. Her hair was black like the wing of a raven. Her eyes were black. She moved in beauty like the night."
Here my father buried his white face in his white hands, and remained so, his supper untasted, for a long time. Presently he looked up and said with pitiful effort:
"And what did you with your Uncle Richard?"
"We sat on the wall of the vault," I answered, "and laughed."
It was a part of my father's melancholy pose to renounce anger together with all the other passions, but at the close of my thoughtless words he sprang to his feet, livid.
"For that word," he cried, "ye shall suffer hellish."
And he dragged me, more dead than alive, to the library. But what form of punishment he would have inflicted me with I do not know. For a circumstance met with in the library, a circumstance trivial in itself and, to my mind, sufficiently explicable shook my father into a new mood. The circumstance was this: that one of the servants (doubtless) had opened the carved box in the center of the table, taken out the crocodile, probably to gratify curiosity by a close inspection, and forgotten to put it back. But I must admit that at first sight it looked as if the inanimate and horrible little creature had of its own locomotion thrust open the box and crawled to the edge of the table. To instant and searching inquiry the servants denied all knowledge of the matter, and it remained a mystery. My father dismissed the servants from the library, returned the crocodile to its box, and remained for some moments in thought. Then he said, very gravely and earnestly;
"The possession of this dead reptile is supposed to bring misfortune upon a man. For me that is impossible, for I am beyond its longest and wildest reach. But with you it is different. Life has in store for you the possibility of many misfortunes. Take care that