"For They Know Not What They Do"
BY WILBUR DANIEL STEELE
From Pictorial Review
When Christopher Kain told me his story, sitting late in his dressing-room at the
Philharmonic I felt that I ought to say something, but nothing in the world seemed
adequate. It was one of those times when words have no weight: mine sounded like a fly
buzzing in the tomb of kings. And after all, he did not hear me; I could tell that by the
look on his face as he sat there staring into the light, the lank, dark hair framing his
waxen brow, his shoulders hanging forward, his lean, strong, sentient fingers wrapped
around the brown neck of "Ugo," the 'cello, tightly.
Agnes Kain was a lady, as a lady was before the light of that poor worn word went out.
Quiet, reserved, gracious, continent, bearing in face and form the fragile beauty of a rose-
petal come to its fading on a windless ledge, she moved down the years with the stedfast
sweetness of the gentlewoman--gentle, and a woman.
They knew little about her in the city, where she had come with her son. They did not
need to. Looking into her eyes, into the transparent soul behind them they could ask no
other credential for the name she bore and the lavender she wore for the husband of
whom she never spoke.
She spoke of him, indeed, but that was in privacy, and to her son. As Christopher grew
through boyhood, she watched him; in her enveloping eagerness she forestalled the hour
when he would have asked, and told him about his father, Daniel Kain.
It gave them the added bond of secret-sharers. The tale grew as the boy grew. Each night
when Christopher crept into his mother's bed for the quiet hour of her voice, it was as if
he crept in to another world, the wind-blown, sky-encompassed kingdom of the Kains,
Daniel, his father, and Maynard, his father, another Maynard before him, and all the
Kains--and the Hill and the House, the Willow Wood, the Moor Under the Cloud, the
Beach where the gray seas pounded, the boundless Marsh, the Lilac hedge standing
against the stars.
He knew he would have to be a man of men to measure up to that heritage, a man strong,
grave, thoughtful, kind with the kindness that never falters, brave with the courage of that
dark and massive folk whose blood ran in his veins. Coming as it did, a world of legend
growing up side by side with the matter-of-fact world of Concord Street, it never
occurred to him to question. He, the boy, was not massive, strong, or brave; he saw things
in the dark that frightened him, his thin shoulders were bound to droop, the hours of
practise on his violin left him with no blood in his legs and a queer pallor on his brow.
Nor was he always grave, thoughtful, kind. He did not often lose his temper, the river of
his young life ran too smooth and deep. But there were times when he did. Brief passions
