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Vol. 93

FEBRUARY, 1917

No. 4

The Brothers

By THOMAS BEER
Illustrations by W. M. Berger

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was shot, it is not forgotten, by a progressive Filipino gentleman of Manila in October, 1898. His widow did not hear of this disaster. She died before the War Department found time to inform her, and left the twins to the care of Edgar Harland. He had no experience in paternal duties even of a vicarious sort, but he shrugged his thin shoulders, administered his brother's estate, and put his charges in a highly recommended school for boys under fourteen near Philadelphia. The estate yielded exactly four thousand dollars a year, quite ample provision for the twins, and the school seemed to please. them. Edgar testified to his relief by despatching a twelve-pound box of chocolates, and went abroad. He lived abroad as much as possible, collecting books and curious prints. In New York his friends were principally women. He did not care for men; they were apt to require response and a warmth he was not able to feign. Consistently, he rather disliked his

wards, who were egregiously male. However, he treated them with an impartial. courtesy during their holidays, sent them to such matinées as seemed suitable, and hired, from their income, a healthy young tutor who looked after their summer diversions at Edgar's agreeable cottage close to Gloucester. Edgar was an excellent guardian to this extent.

As an observer of life, he noted the twins from time to time, in no inquisitive manner, but with calm amusement at the faithful repetition of the human comedy they were enacting. Eben, the one-hour precursor of Judson, was, he saw, the less variable of the two and a trifle the more perceptive. He made friends slowly, lost them slowly, clung to Judson with a methodical devotion in times of trouble, and possessed a vague talent for drawing, which Mr. Chase, the tutor, encouraged. His behavior was entirely normal save that he inclined toward silence.

Judson was talkative, mildly mischievous, easily fickle in social relations, and a wretched mathematician. He had a loudly expressed desire to be a soldier, and was full of interest in Captain Harland's honorable career. He had a few physical tricks which differentiated him from his twin brother, a certain grace

Copyright, 1917, by THE CENTURY CO. All rights reserved.

in motion, and an odd habit of smiling when he was most angry, with the perfect smile of pleased childhood. Also he had a small mole on his left shoulder, which identified him as the cadet.

For the boys were minutely similar in every other way. Seen in bed, no one could tell them apart; but as they were perpetually together, it did not afflict their acquaintance. They could be addressed collectively as "Twin" if one was not sure as to which was Ben or Jud. Their devotion entertained Edgar. They loved each other with what he regarded as a foolish fervor. He considered them drugged in mirrored self-admiration. Eben believed Judson the most charming society earth afforded, and Judson's Mosaic law was contained in the phrase "Ben says."

Given a wet summer day, they would isolate themselves in some corner and converse or drowse peaceably for the complete period between meal and meal. They never quarreled, they seldom argued, they defended each other against the world with savage simplicity. Edgar profited by this state; it got him a quiet house, a reputation for domestic mastery. Handsome ladies consulted him as to their offspring and the vagaries of infancy. He replied in scented English modeled upon that of Walter Pater, his particular idol, of whose works he possessed a complete first edition, bound in peacock leather by Rivière. It somewhat fretted his spirit that the twins admired his books. He would have preferred an entire barbarism.

Time passed. They agonized his ears one summer by a cacophony of changing throats. Young Chase called his attention to the fact of growth, and kissed them. good-by in September with ludicrous, honest tears. He was going to Alaska.

"They're more to me than any one but my mother," he told Edgar. Edgar noted that the twins excited love. They emerged from Philadelphia at Christmas with pleasant barytone voices, and demanded. long trousers. Next autumn he sent them to St. Paul's School. An old classmate, now an instructor in that place, wrote

Edgar a letter of fervid enthusiasm, and the twins' bedroom became decorated with photographs of athletic groups. They liked St. Paul's. Several ladies rather gushed to Edgar about his splendid nephews. He assumed that the juxtaposition of sea-gray eyes and curling bronze hair drew the female soul. Personally these embellishments did not retrieve, for him, jaws that were somewhat heavy and noses a trifle too short. The long, compact bodies he conceded, and the clear smooth skins were all he could ask. He was a very ugly man, but he did not envy these belongings, since they cloaked a spirit so obsolescent.

Time passed. He did not endeavor to deflect their purpose from Yale. He believed that the alleged crudities of that university would suit their lack of temperament. They played foot-ball, he understood, with some success and rowed in the Shattuck Club crews. Eben began to produce drawings that were not free of merit. Judson's deficiencies in mathematics were recorded in letters to Edgar, who wrote the lad, civilly advising application. He fancied that the failing would correct itself. They became seventeen in April.

In June the head-master of St. Paul's informed Edgar that since the school could not possibly recommend Judson for the Yale entrance examinations in second algebra or even plane geometry, the headmaster feared that it would also be impossible to graduate him. Edgar went immediately abroad and returned in late August, to avoid possible unpleasantness. The twins, however, did not worry him with their patent tragedy. The headmaster of St. Paul's declined to allow Eben an idle year with his brother. Eben had selected a substitute room-mate for him at Yale, Arthur Letellier of St. Louis. He told Edgar this in a subdued manner when Judson was elsewhere, and added miserably:

"Perhaps it's a little better this way. I can sort of help Jud along next year-advice and that sort of thing."

"Quite possibly," said Edgar, observing the droop of the too wide mouth.

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"Judson, who lounged on the table, clad in a dry bath-suit"

But the boys' reticence angered the cold depth of his heart. He wanted a display of emotional stupidity and went hunting for it. Thin references got him nothing; he grew sarcastic.

"One might think," he remarked to Judson, "that Ben could be fearfully wroth with you, disgusted."

Judson glanced at Eben across the dinner-table and went on paring a late peach.

"He's got a right to be," he said curtly. "Just so. He could regard it as a species of disloyalty, what?"

Judson lifted. his head and stared at Edgar out of eyes contracted to blackness. His big hands shook a little, and the blood receded from his lips. Presently he smiled, precisely as if he were closing an enjoyed book. The smile produced a faint sensation of needles in Edgar's stomach. After

this he said no more about the mathemati

cal episode.

The

Summer drew to a close. The neighboring cottages shut one by one. crescent beach emptied of brown-shouldered lads, and the day of Eben's going appeared on the calendar piteously near. The twins swam and played tennis stoically. Edgar watched their tall figures dwindle down the lane, arm in arm, after meals and heard their slow voices by night. He kept out of their path with delicate zeal. The smile remained in his thought. He had seen it before, but never turned on himself. Now that Judson stood sixtynine inches barefoot, the oddity was not amusing. He did not pretend even to women that he was a brave man. The last night of the united existence Edgar went to his up-stairs library after dinner and read "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." reveled in high emotions, printed.

He

Eben sat by the table of the white-andyellow living-room, adorned with Gillray cartoons, doing a sketch of Judson, who lounged on the table, clad in a dry bathsuit. Under the clean candle-light he was very good to look at, and Eben ached as he sketched. They could find nothing to say except weary repetitions. The matches. lit by Edgar above for his French cigarettes were quite audible, and the lunge of surf on the rocks.

"Will you start smokin' now?" Judson asked.

"Guess not. Not for a while, anyhow. Hold your head up a little, Brother." "Does Arthur smoke?"

"Better than havin' to eat with a bunch of left-overs and fifth-formers all winter," grunted Judson, selecting his second.

"Oh, shucks! Won't be so awful. There 's Walter and Colin and Mark Dines, anyhow. They 're all right. So's Hollister. Brace up, Jud. 'T won't be so long and-"

"Algebra, geom, algebra, geom. No; that 'll be slick!"

"All you 've got to do is swallow the stuff and get it over with. You can as well as any one," Eben argued.

"Can't teach a cow the violin. I'm a dub at math, always was, always will be," wailed Judson through his third doughnut, his chin powdered with sugar.

"I know you are," said Eben, with all kindness, "but you can do it, as I did Greek. Oh, I 've said all this before." He flung the half-circle of sweetness into the warm night. He was in dreadful pain. There seemed no excitement, less pleasure, in the new adventure without Jud to share it.

"Don't talk about it," muttered Judson, who was in pain quite as mordant, "or I'll cry or somethin'."

Eben sat up and watched Judson eat the fourth doughnut. He was aware that the sheen of the model's eyes was not natural. By and by Judson wiped his mouth and spat an appalling oath.

"When I think of hearin' Mutrie say: "This is one of the simpler problems. Angle A is'-it makes me sick."

He clutched the fifth doughnut, the beautiful muscles of his arm contracting.

"Yes. His people let him. I'm nearly And he smiled, tilting back his round done. It's pretty rotten."

The old cook came in with a plate of hot and sugary doughnuts for excuse, really to see Eben's picture. She planted her burden at Judson's elbow and withdrew, after cackling. Judson ate a doughnut mournfully. He had always been fond of pastry.

"They say the grub at New Haven 's awful," said Eben, finishing his work of art, which was extremely well done, and taking a doughnut in turn. He said this to cheer Judson.

head, staring at the sheer curtains of the hall, his body stiff with wrath. Then he chuckled drearily and began to eat.

"You'll make yourself sick if you go on eating those," said Eben, anxiously. They had excellent apparatus in their lean abdomens, but five large doughnuts seemed enough.

"Well, there's one left. Might as well finish the lot."

"I would n't, Brother."

"Watch me. Compliment to Maggie." He engulfed the thing in the manner

of a young anaconda and slid off the table.

"It 's eleven, an' your train goes at nine. Let's go to bed."

Eben flinched. They had slept in one room for seventeen years, for the first seven in one bed, and passing Edgar's cigarette-oozing door, it beat upon him. that they had but one kinsman, no friend of theirs.

Night passed. A sea-gull yelled and woke Judson into a pitifully bright morning, cool and clear. He lay, getting his fogged brain to work, leaden between the sheets. The string of his pajama breeches hurt acutely, caught somehow, but he was too dull to loosen it. Sorrow smote him, half roused, and weighted his breathing. as he scowled at the flowered ceiling. The gay tints darted at his hot eyes, and his head buzzed. His mouth was full of sourness that rose from his deeper being, and he felt decayed inside, unclean outside, at pariah, a martyr, an imbecile, and a butt of the coarse universe. He closed his eyelids to analyze these feelings and heard Eben getting up, the slump of falling night-gear, the pad of bare feet pausing beside him a second, the splutter of the shower-bath, the click of a tooth-brush on an enamel stand. He could see Eben going the round of the bath-room, alert and methodical, collecting his sponge, his tooth-paste, his nail-brush, an ancient friendly bottle. They would be gone when he went to bathe at night, and Eben also, leaving him, leaving him, leaving him! The continuing sea-gull made a refrain. of this, and it seemed to echo back on the pit of Judson's stomach like the bump of a boxing-glove. He opened his eyes, but the flowers stabbed him, and he relapsed into red shadow, a great rage hardening his gorge. Desolations of chalky blackboard, eons of lonely bedtime, snow-chilled morning, plangent hockey hours with not Eben, the naked shells in spring, and no brother to powder his sun-scarred back. Eben was leaving him, was dressing now in a duplicate blue serge that would cover him that night in the tumult of York Street, in a shirt that only fat, nonchalant

Arthur Letellier would see him strip. To new life, new friends, new tables. Leaving him! Going off, not glad perhaps, but thrilled, expectant, sure to succeed,Eben must, to come back in quiet triumph, to be a new Eben. The phantasm swelled and wavered, spurring his rage. He hated all men; he hated himself. He sat up and felt sicker still.

Eben, entirely clad, was selecting his ties from the cord stretched between their dressers. He had several on his wrist, and was looking at the plentiful fringe with fixed attention; so he did not hear Judson's movement, did not turn. Judson felt hurt. He wanted that consolatory morning grin. Then Eben put his hand on a green striped scarf and lifted it into the light, whistling gently the just-arrived "Merry Widow Waltz." It was ghastly that Eben should whistle looking at a tie, his tie.

"Here," said Judson, "that 's mine!"

Eben looked round with a frown. He had not heard Judson sit up. It bothered his misery that he should have neglected this. He wanted to be normal, casual, kinder than ever. But the tie was his. "Why, no it is n't, Juddy."

"That? It certainly is." Judson got out of bed, his intestines like hot metal, dizzy, mad.

"This thing? Brace up! Here's the tear from that rotten pin Mrs. Alin gave me," said Eben, lightly, patting the silk.

"Get out! I 've worn that three years. You've got enough of your own; let alone mine," gasped Judson. "Brace up, your self! You've been telling me to brace up all summer!" The hypnotism of wrath. was upon him; the room danced. "Brace up! Be a good kid an' go back to school an' study algebra an' geom,' and you go off to college! You get the fun out of the thing. Damn you!"

Breath failed him. The blood called in his ears like high surf. He could not see Eben's horror, begotten of that smile. He could hear him say:

"Why, Juddy, you never spoke to me that way before!"

Judson's rage shriveled, the surf ceased.

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