The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter Page A

it possibly have been something not in him but in his mother’s experience, something she had passionately wanted and never got, a wound which beforebirth or in their close sympathetic relationship afterward had been transmitted from mother to son? The old feeling about his father came back to him, and he remembered now certain clues in his mother. Scores of times he had looked up and found her staring into space, her sewing quiet on her lap. “What is it, Mamma?” he would ask and she would come back to the present. “Oh, nothing, Johnny,” she would say, give him the tender smile he knew so well and go back to her sewing. What troubled her she had never revealed, but he recalled now that the poem that affected her most was “Maud Muller,” the last words of which were, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” Suddenly for the first time these things and his own doubts about his father came together, and they fitted perfectly. Ask! Ask! something inside of him kept urging. You’ll never have the chance again.
    “I wonder, would you tell me something, Mrs. Ryon?” he began. “Do you know or could you tell me if there was someone else Johnny’s mother cared for before she married Harry Donner?”
    Aunt Jess’s eyes opened.
    “That, sir, is none of your business.”
    “But it is my business,” he insisted slowly. “Although I can’t explain. Someday Johnny might want to know who he is.”
    “He is Johnny Donner,” she said.
    “I know that’s his name. But is he really a Donner?”
    He saw incredulity, then indignation, on his aunt’s face.
    “I don’t know what you mean, but if you mean what you are saying, then you have the gall of an ox to come in this house and ask insulting questions. I’ll have to ask you never to show your face here again.”
    “Aunt Jess!” he begged her.
    “I am not your Aunt Jess,” she told him witheringly. “And thank God I never will be.” She stood there for a moment, a picture of magnificent wrath and contempt. She glanced at her husband. “You can be tolerant to him as you like, Dick Ryon. I just hope to heaven I won’t have him to contend with when I get back. Now I’m going.” With great dignity she limped majestically out of the room.
    There was no other sound except the slow ticking of the clock until the front door closed behind her. The caller was aware of his Uncle Dick’s eyes on him, dark, distant, a little annoyed and with something else around the mouth he couldn’t quite name.
    “You took her at a bad time with the funeral tomorrow,” he said coldly.
    “I’m sorry,” John Donner said.
    His Uncle Dick leaned forward and the something the other couldn’t quite name turned into a kind of amused weakness under the mustache.
    “You said, or at least you gave the impression,” he began, “that you believed Johnny’s father wasn’t Harry Donner. Do you have any basis for that statement?”
    “Nothing anybody but I would understand,” the caller admitted.
    Richard Ryon whistled.
    “Well,” he said sarcastically, “you certainly jump in with both feet where angels fear to tread.”
    John Donner wished he hadn’t spoken. Why had he? All he knew was that in this house he felt very close to the secret and mysterious source, as in the old game when they called out, “You’re warm.” This was where he felt “warm,” where he had been brought into the world, the house he had been coming back to all his life. His father’s and mother’s house had constantly changed, a few years in a parsonage here, a few years there. Aunt Jess’s house had stayed the same.
    He returned to his Uncle Dick. On the shelves above theRayo lamp were the first books of Florida he had ever known. He could still feel the sensation they had given him, of a primal land, of the strange Seminoles and stranger Everglades. There was one red book in particular that had left its flavor with him. He could still almost taste