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 Bromstead memories. The crowning one of
them all rises to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring
sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling 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!" I remember 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