"Wondering what?"
"Whether it's fair play to anyone to give them medicine when they don't know they're taking it."
"But if it's to do them good?"
"But ought we to do good to people against their wills?"
"Why, sure! What you thinking of? Still if you don't want to...."
The tone hurt him. "Oh, but I will."
"Say I will,father. Why don't you call me that? Don't I call you son?"
He braced himself to an effort. "All right, father; I will."
"Good! Then here's the powder." He drew one from the packet. "Don't let none of it fall. You'll steal into the kitchen this afternoon—she generally lays down after she's washed the dinner things—and just empty the paper into the little brown teapot she always makes her tea in. Then burn the paper in the stove—there's sure to be a fire on—so that she won't find nothing lying around to make her suspicious. You understand, don't you?"
He said he understood, though in his heart of hearts he wished that he hadn't been charged with the duty.
XIII
Ifyou had asked the boy who was now legally Tom Quidmore why he was reluctant to give his mother a powder that would do her good he would have been unable to explain his hesitation. Reason, in the main, was in favor of his doing it. In the first place, he had promised, and he had always responded to those exhortations of his teachers which laid stress on keeping his word. Not to keep his word had come to seem an offense of the nature of personal defilement.
Then the whole matter had been thought out and decreed by an authority higher than himself. The child mind, like the childish mind at all times, is under the weight of authority. The source of the authority is a matter of little moment so long as it speaks decidedly enough. It is always a means by which to get rid of the bother of using private judgment, which as often as not is a bore to the person with the right to it.
In the case of a boy of twelve, private judgment is hampered by a knowledge of his insufficiency. The man who provides food, clothing, shelter, is invested with the right to speak. The child mind is logical, orderly, respectful, and prenatally disposed to discipline. Except on severe provocation it does not rebel. Tom Quidmore felt no impulse to rebellion,even though his sense of right and wrong was, for the moment, mystified.
He lacked data. Such data as came to his hearing, and less often to his sight, lay morally outside his range. Like those scientifically minded men who during the childhood of our race registered the phenomena of electricity without going further, he had no power of making deductions from what eyes and ears could record. He knew that there was in life such an element as sexual love; but that was all he knew. It entered into the relations of married people, and in some puzzling way contributed to the birth of children; but of its wanderings and aberrations he had never heard. That man and wife should reach a breaking point was no part of his conception of the things that happened. There was nothing of the kind between the Tollivants, nor among the parents of the lads with whom he had grown up at Harfrey. That which at Harfrey had been clear unrelenting daylight was at Bere a gloaming haunted by strange shapes which perplexed and rather frightened him.
Not until he was fourteen or fifteen years of age, and the Quidmore episode behind him, like an island passed at sea, did the significance of these queer doings and sayings really occur to him. All that for the present his mind and experience were equal to was listening, observing, and wondering. He knew already what it was to have things which he hadn't understood at the time of their happening become clear as he grew older.
An illustration of this came from the small events of that very afternoon. On going back from hismidday dinner to work in the carrot patch he fixed on half past two as the hour at which he would make the attempt to force on his mother the prescribed medicine. That time having arrived, he rose, brushed the earth from his knees, dusted his hands against each other, and started slowly for the house. A faraway memory which had been in the back of his mind ever since his father had made the odd request now began to assert itself, like the throb of an old pain.
He was a little boy again. In the dim hall of the Swindon Street Home he was listening to the friendly policeman talking to Miss Honiton. He recaptured his own emotions, the dumb distress of the young creature lost in the dark, and ignorant of everything but its helplessness. His mother had taken something, or had not taken something, he wasn't sure which. The beaming young lady handed him his present from the Christmas Tree, and told him that cyanide of potassium—the words were still branded on his brain—was a deadly poison. Then he stood once more, as in memory he had stood so many times, in the half-darkened room where words were mumbled over the long black box which they spoke of as "the body."
Now that it was all in far perspective he knew what it had meant. That is, he knew the type of woman his mother had been; he knew the kind of soil he had sprung from. The events of five years back to a boy of twelve are a very long distance away. So his mother seemed to Tom. So did the sneaking through shops, and the flights from tenement to tenement. So did the awful Christmas Eve when he had lost her. He could think of her tenderly now becausehe understood that her mind had been unhinged. What hurt him with a pain which never fell into perspective was that in trying to create in his boyish way some faint tradition of self-respect, he worked back always to this origin in shame.
While seeing no connection between such far-off things and the task put upon him by his father, he found them jostling each other in his mind. You took something—and there was disaster. It was as far as his thought carried him. After that came the fact that, his respect for authority being strong, he dared not disobey.
He could only dawdle. A delay of five minutes would be five minutes to the good. Besides, dawdling on a hot, windless summer afternoon, on which the butterflies, bees, and humming-birds were the only nonhuman living things not taking a siesta, eased the muscles cramped with long crouching in the carrot beds. There being two ways of getting to the house, he took the longer one.
The longer one led him round the duck pond, whence the heat had driven ashore all the ducks and geese with the exception of one gander. For no particular reason the gander's name was Ernest. Between Ernest and Gimlets, the wire-haired terrier pup, one of those battles such as might take place between Bolivia and Switzerland was in full swing of rage. Gimlets fought from the bank; Ernest from the pond. When Ernest paddled forward, with neck outstretched and nostrils hissing, Gimlets scampered to the top of the shelving shore, where he could stand and bark defiantly. When Ernest swung himselfround and made for the open sea, Gimlets galloped bravely down to the water's edge, yelping out challenges. This bloody fray gave the boy a further excuse for lingering. Three or four times had Ernest, stung by the taunts to which he had tried to seem indifferent, wheeled round on his enemy. Three or four times had Gimlets scrambled up the bank and down again. But he, too, recognized authority, and a call that he couldn't disobey. A long whistle, and the battle was at an end! Gimlets trotted off.
The whistle came from the grove of pines climbing the little bluff on the side of the duck pond remote from the house. It struck the boy as odd that his father should be there at a time when he was supposed to be cutting New Zealand spinach for the morrow's market. Not to be caught idling, the boy slipped down the bank to creep undetected below the pinewood bluff. Neither seeing nor being seen, he nevertheless heard voices, catching but a single word. The word was Bertha, and it was spoken by his father. The only Bertha in the place was a certain beautiful young widow living in Bere. That his father should be talking to her in the pinewood was another of those details difficult to explain.
More difficult to explain he found a little scene he caught on looking backward. Having now passed the bluff, he was about to round the corner of the pond where the path led through a plantation of blue spruces which hid the house. His glancing back was an accident, but it made him witness of an incident pastoral in its charm.
Bertha, being indeed the beautiful young widow,the boy was astonished to see his father steal a kiss from her. Bertha responded with such a slap as nymphs give to shepherds, running playfully away. His father shambled after her, as shepherds after nymphs, catching her in his arms.
Tom plunged into the blue spruce plantation where he could be out of sight. Hot as he was already, he grew hotter still. What he had seen was so silly, so stupid, so undignified! He wished he hadn't seen it. Having seen it, he wished he could forget it. He couldn't forget it because, unpleasant as he found it, he was somehow aware that it had bearings beyond unpleasantness. What they were he had nothing to tell him. He could only run through the plantation as if he would leave the thing as quickly as possible behind him; and all at once the house came into sight.
With the house in sight he remembered again what he had come to do. He stopped running. His steps again began to lag. Feeling for the powder in his waistcoat pocket, he reminded himself that it would do his mother good. The house lay sleeping and silent in the heat. He crept up to the back door.
And there at the open window stood his mother rolling dough on a table. She rolled languidly, as she did everything. Her head drooped a little to one side; her expression was full of that tremulous protest against life which might with a word break into a rain of tears.
Relieved and delighted, he stole round the house, to enter by another way. She was now lifting a cover of the stove, so that she didn't hear his approach. Before she knew that anyone was there he had slippedhis arm around her, and smacked a big kiss on her cheek. She turned slowly, the lifter in her hand. A new life seemed to dawn in her, brightening her eyes and flushing her sallowness.
"You bad little boy! What did you come home for?"
He replied as was true, that he had come for a drink of water. He had meant to take a drink of water after putting her powder in the teapot. "I thought," he ended, "you'd be lying down asleep."
"I was lying down, but something made me get up."
He was curious. "Something—like what?"
"Well, I just couldn't sleep. And then I remembered that it was a long time since I'd made him any of them silver cookies he used to be so fond of."
He liked the name. "Is that what you're baking?"
"Yes; and you'll ..." she went back to the table, picking up the cutter—"you'll have some for supper if you'll—if you'll call me ma."
"But I do."
Her smile had the slow timidity that might have been born of disuse. "Yes, when I ask you. But I want you to do it all the time, and natural."
"All right then; I will—ma."
While he stood drinking a first, and then a second, cup of water, she began on the memories dear to her, but which few now would listen to. She had been born in Wilmington, Delaware, where Martin also had been born. His father worked in a powder factory in that city. It was owing to an explosion when he was a lad that Martin's frame had been partially paralyzed.
"He wasn't blowed up or anything; he just got a shock. He was awful delicate, and used to have fits till he grew out of them. I think the crook in his face makes him look aristocratic, don't you?"
The boy having said that he didn't know but what it did, she continued plaintively, cutting out her cookies with a heart-shaped cutter.
"I was awful pretty in those days, and that refined I wouldn't hardly do a thing for my mother in the house, or carry the tiniest little parcel across the street. I was just born ladylike. And when Martin and I were married he let me have a girl for the first two years to do everything. All he ever expected of me was to get up and dress, and look stylish; and now...."
As she paused in her cutting to press back a sob, the boy took the opportunity to speak of getting back to work.
"I think I must beat it, ma. I've got all those carrots—"
"Oh, wait a little while. He can spare you for a few minutes, can't he? Anyhow, nothing you can do'll save him from going bankrupt. This place don't pay. He'll never make it pay. His work was to run a hat store. That's what he did when he married me, and he made swell money at it, too."
The family history interested the boy, as all tales did which accounted for the personal. He knew now how Martin Quidmore's health had broken down, and the doctor had ordered out-of-door life as a remedy. Out-of-door life would have been impossible if anuncle hadn't died and left him fifteen thousand dollars.
"Enough to live on quite genteel for life," his wife complained, "but nothing would do but that he should think himself a market-gardener, him that couldn't tell a turnip from a spade. Blew in the whole thing on this place, away from everywheres, and making me a drudge that hardly knew so much as to wash a dish. Even that I could have stood if he'd only gone on loving me as his marriage vows made it his duty to do, but—"
"I'll love you, ma," the boy declared, tenderly. "You don't have to cry because there's no one to love you, not while I'm around."
The new life in her eyes was as much of incredulity as of joy. "Don't say that, dearie, if you don't mean it. You don't have to love me just because I'm trying to be a mother to you, and look after your clothes."
"But, ma, I want to. I do."
They gazed at each other, she with the cutter in her hand, he with the cup. What he saw was not a feeble, slatternly woman, but some one who wanted him. He had not been wanted by anyone since the night when his mudda—he still used the word in his deep silences—had gone away with the wardress who looked like a Fate. In the five intervening years he had suffered less from unkindness than from being shut out of hearts. Here was a heart that had need of him, so that he had need of it. The type of heart didn't matter. If it made any difference it was only that where there was weakness the appeal to him wasthe greater. With this poor thing he would have something on which to spend his treasure.
"You'll see, ma! I'll bring in the water for you, and split the kindlings, and get up in the morning and light the fire, and milk the cow, and everything."
Straight and sturdy, he looked at her with the level gaze of eyes that seemed the calmer and more competent because they were hidden so far beneath his bushy, horizontal eyebrows. The uniform tan from working in the sun heightened his air of manliness. Even the earth on his clothes, and a smudge of it across his forehead where a dirty hand had been put up to push back his crisp ashen hair, hinted at his capacity to share in the world's work. To the helpless woman whose prop had failed her, the coming of this young strength to her aid was little short of a miracle.
In the struggle between tears and laughter she was almost hysterical. "Oh, you darling boy!" she was beginning, advancing to clasp him in her arms. But with old, old memories in his heart he dreaded the paroxysm of affection.
"All right, ma!" he laughed, dodging her and slipping out. "I've got to beat it, or fath—" he stumbled on the word because he found it difficult to use—"or father will wonder where I am." But once in the yard, he called back consolingly, though keeping to the practical, "Don't you bother about Geraldine. I'll go round by the pasture and drive her home as I come back from work. I'll milk her, too."
"God bless you, dearie!"
Standing in the doorway, shading her eyes with her hand, her limp figure seemed braced to a new power, as she watched him till he disappeared within the plantation of blue spruces.
XIV
Whena whistle blew at five o'clock the hired men on the Quidmore place stopped working. As a son of the house, Tom Quidmore paid to the signal only enough attention to pile his carrots into a wheelbarrow and convey them to the spot where they would help to furnish the market lorry in the morning. In fulfillment of his promise to his adopted mother, he then went in search of Geraldine.
Of all the tasks that he liked at Bere he liked most going to the pasture. It was not his regular work. As regular work it belonged to old Diggory; but old Diggory was as willing to be relieved of it as Mrs. Quidmore of the milking. Brushing himself down, and washing his hands at the tap in the garage after a fashion that didn't clean them, he marched off, whistling. He whistled because his heart was light. His heart was light because his mother having been in the kitchen, he had escaped the necessity for giving her the medicine as to which he felt his odd reluctance.
Leaving the garage behind him, he threaded a tiny path running through the beet-field. The turnip-field came next, after which he entered a strip of fine old timber, coming out from that on the main road to Bere. Along this road, for some five hundred yards, he tramped merrily, kicking up the dust. He liked this road. Not only was it open, free, and straight, but along its old stone walls raspberries and blackberries grew ripe in a tangle of wild spirea, meadow-rue, jewel weed, and Queen Anne's lace. He loved this luxuriance, this summer sense of abundance. To the boy who had never known anything but poverty, Nature at least, in this lush Connecticut countryside, seemed generous.
The pasture was on the edge of a scrubby woodland in which the twenty acres of the Quidmore property trailed away into the unkempt. Eighty or a hundred years earlier, it had been the center of a farm now cut up into small holdings, chiefly among market gardeners. In the traces of the old farmhouse, the old garden, the old orchard, the boy found his imagination touched by the pathos of a vanished human past.
The land sloped from the hillside, till in the bottom of the hollow it became a little brambly wood such as in England would be called a spinney. Through the spinney trickled a stream which somewhere fell into Horseneck Brook, which somewhere fell into one of those shallow inlets that the Sound thrusts in on the coastline. Halfway between the road and the streamlet, was the old home-place, deserted so long ago that the cellar was choked with blackberry vines, and the brick of the foundation bulging out of plumb. A clump of lilac which had once snuggled lovingly against a south wall was now a big solitary bush. What used to be a bed of pansies had reverted to a scattering of cheery little heartsease faces, brightening the grass. The low-growing, pale-rose mallow of old gardens still kept up its vigor of bloom, throwing out a musky scent. There was something wistful in thespot, especially now that the sun was westering, and the birds skimmed low, making for their nests.
In going for Geraldine Tom always stole a few minutes to linger among these memories of old joys and sorrows, old labors and rewards, of which nothing now remained but these few flowers, a few wind-beaten apple trees, and this dint in the ground which served best as a shelter for chipmunks. It was the part of the property farthest from the house. It was far, too, from any other habitation, securing him the privilege of solitude. The privilege was new to him. At Harfrey he had never known it. About the gardens, even at Bere, there were always the owner, the hired men, the customers, the neighbors who came and went. But in Geraldine's pasture he found only herself, the crows, the robins, the thrushes singing in the spinney, and the small wild life darting from one covert to another, or along the crumbling stone wall hung with its loopings of wild grape.
He was not lonely on these excursions. Companionship had never in the Harfrey schools been such a pleasure that he missed anything in having to do without it. Rather, he enjoyed the freedom to be himself, to wear no mask, to have no part to play. It was only when alone like this that he understood how much of his thought and effort was spent in dancing to other people's tunes. In the Tollivant home he could never, like the other children, speak or act without a second thought. As a State ward it was his duty to commend himself. To commend himself he was obliged to think twice even before venturing on trifles. He had formed a habit of thinking twice, ofrarely being spontaneous. By himself in this homey pasture he felt the relief of one who has been balancing on a tight rope at walking on the ground.
When he had climbed the bars Geraldine, who was down the hill and near the spinney, had lifted her head and swung her tail in recognition. Not being impatient, she went on with her browsing, leaving him a few minutes' liberty. Among the heartsease and the mallows he flung himself down, partly because he was tired and partly that he might think. With so much to think about thought came without sequence. It centered soon on what he was to be.
Of one thing he was certain; he didn't want to be a market gardener. Not but that he enjoyed the open-air life and the novelty of closeness to the soil. Like the whole Quidmore connection, it was good enough for the time. All the same, it was only for the time, and one day he would break away from it. How, he didn't ask. He merely knew by his intuitions that it would be so.
He was going to be something big. That, too, was intuitive conviction. What he meant by big he was unable to define, beyond the fact that knowledge and money would enter into it. He was interested in money, not so much for what it gave you as for what it was. It was a queer thing when you came to think of it. A dollar bill in itself had no more value than any other scrap of paper; and yet it would buy a dollar's worth of anything. He turned that over in his mind till he worked out the reason why. He worked out the principle of payment by check, which at first was as blank a mystery as marital relations. Whennewspapers came his way he studied the reports of the stock exchange, much as a savage who cannot read scans the unmeaning hieroglyphs which to wiser people are words. He did make out that railways and other great utilities must be owned by a lot of people who combined to put their money into them; but daily fluctuations in value he couldn't understand. When he asked his adopted father he was told that he couldn't understand it, though he knew he could.
Long accustomed to this answer as to the bewilderments of life, he rarely now asked anything. If he was puzzled he waited for more data. Even for little boys things cleared themselves up if you kept them in your mind, and applied the explanation when it came your way. The point, he concluded, was not to be in a hurry. There were the spiders. He was fond of watching them. They would sit for hours as still as metal things, their little eyes fixed like jewels in a ring. Then when they saw what they wanted one swift dart was enough for them. So it must be with little boys. You got one thing to-day, and another thing to-morrow; but you got everything in time if you waited and kept alert.
By waiting and keeping alert he would find out what he was to be. He had reached his point when he saw Geraldine pacing up the hill toward the pasture bars. She was giving him the hint that certain acknowledged rites were no longer to be put off.
He had lowered the bars, over which she was stepping delicately, when he saw his father come tearing down the road, going toward Bere, with all the speed his shuffling gait could put on. Used by thistime to erratic actions on Quidmore's part, he was hardly surprised; he was only curious. He was more curious still when, on drawing nearer, the man seemed in a panic. "Looks as if he was running away from something," was the lad's first thought, though he couldn't imagine from what.
"Is anything the matter?"
From panic the indications changed to those of surprise, though the voice was as velvety as ever.
"Oh, so it's you! I thought it was Diggory. What did you—what did you—do with that powder?"
The boy began putting up the bars while Geraldine plodded homeward.
"I couldn't give it to her. She was in the kitchen baking." He thought it wise to add: "She was making silver cookies for you. You'll have them for supper."
There followed more odd phenomena, of which the boy, waiting and keeping alert, only got the explanation later. Quidmore threw himself face downward on the wayside grass. With his forehead resting on his arm, he lay as still as one of those drunken men Tom had occasionally seen like logs beside some country road. Geraldine turned her head to ask why she was not followed, but the boy stood waiting for a further sign. He wondered whether all grown-up men had minutes like this, or whether it was part of the epilepsy he had heard about.
But when Quidmore got up he was calm, the traces of panic having disappeared. To a more experienced person the symptoms would have been of relief; but to the lad of twelve they said nothing.
"I'll go back with you," was Quidmore's only comment, as together they set out to follow Geraldine.
Having reached the barn where the milking was to be done, Quidmore was proceeding to the house. In the hope of a negative, Tom asked if he should try again to-morrow.
Quidmore half turned. "I'll leave that to you."
"I'll do whatever you say," Tom pleaded, desperate at this responsibility.
Quidmore went on his way, calling back, in his creamy drawl, over his shoulder: "I'll leave it entirely to you."
XV
Leftto him, Tom saw nothing in the duty but to do it. He was confirmed in this resolution by Quidmore's gentleness throughout the evening. It was a new thing in Tom's experience of the house. As always with those in the habit of inflicting pain, merely to stop inflicting it seemed kindness. Supper passed without a single incident that made Mrs. Quidmore wince. On her part she played up with an almost brilliant vivacity in making none of her impotent complaints. Anything he could do to further this accord the boy felt he ought to do.
He hung back only from the deed. That made him shudder. He was clear on the point that it made him shudder because of its association in his mind with the thing which had happened years before; and that, he knew, was foolish. If it would please his father he should make the attempt. He should make it perhaps the more heartily since he was free not to make it if he chose.
It was the freedom that troubled him. So long as he did only what he was told he had nothing on his conscience. Now he must be sure that he was right; and he was not sure. Once more he didn't question the fact that the medicine would do his mother good. The right and wrong in his judgment centered round doing her good against her own will.With no finespun theories concerning the rights of the individual, he was pretty certain as to what they were.
A divine beauty came over the evening when, after he had gone to bed about half-past eight, his mother, in the new blossoming of her affection, came to tuck him in, and kiss him good night. No such thing had happened to him since Mrs. Crewdson had last done it. Mrs. Tollivant went through this endearing rite with all her own children; but him she left out. Many a time, when from his bed beneath the eaves he heard her making her rounds at night, he had pressed his face into the pillow to control the trembling of his lips. True, he had come to regard the attention as too babyish for a man of twelve; but now that it was shown him he was touched by it.
It brought to his memory something Mrs. Crewdson had said, and which he had never forgotten. "God's wherever there's love, it seems to me, dear. I bring a little bit of God to you, and you bring a little bit of God to me, and so we have Him right here." Mrs. Quidmore, too, brought a little bit of God to him, and he brought a little bit of God to Mrs. Quidmore. They showed God to each other, as if without each other they were not quite able to see Him. The fact suggested the thought that in the matter of the secret administration of the medicine he might pray.
One thing he had learned with some thoroughness while in the Tollivant family, and that was religion. Both in Sunday school and in domestic instruction he had studied it conscientiously, and conscientiously accepted it. If he sometimes admitted to BertieTollivant, the cripple, that he "didn't see much sense in it," the confession applied to his personal inabilities. Bertie was the cynic and unbeliever in the Tollivant household. "There's about as much sense in it," he would declare secretly to Tom, "as there is in those old yarns about Pilgrim's Progress and Jack and the Beanstalk. Only don't say that to ma or pop, because the poor dears wouldn't get you." On Tom this skepticism only made the impression that he and Bertie didn't understand religion any more than they understood sex, which was also a theme of discussion. They would grow to it in time, by keeping ears and eyes open.
Now that he was away from the Tollivants, in a world where religion was never spoken of, he dismissed it from his mind. That is, he dismissed its intricacies, its complicated doctrines, its galloping through prayers you were too sleepy to think of at night, and too hurried in the morning. Here he was admittedly influenced by Bertie. "If God loves you, and knows what you want, what's the good of all this Now I lay me? It'd be a funny kind of God that wouldn't look after you anyhow." Tom had given up saying Now I lay me, partly because that, too, seemed babyish, but mainly on account of Bertie's reasoning. "It's more of a compliment to God," was his way of explaining it to himself, "to know that He'll do right of His own accord, than to suppose He'll do it just because I pester Him." So every night when he got into bed he took a minute to say to himself that God was taking care of him, making this confidence serve in place of more explicit petition. When he had anything special to pray about, he said, he would begin again.
And now something special had arisen. He got out of bed. He didn't kneel down because, being anxious not to mislead God by giving Him wrong information, he had first to consider what he ought to say. Stealing softly across the floor, lest the creaking of the boards should betray the fact that he was up, he went to the open window, and looked out.
It was one of those mystic nights which, to a soul inclined to the mystical, seem to hold a spiritual secret. The air, scented by millions of growing things, though chiefly with the acrid perfume of the blue spruces on which he looked down, had a pungent, heavenly odor such as he never caught in the daytime. There was a tang of salt in it, too, as from the direction of the Sound came the faintest rustle of a breeze. The rustle was so faint as not to break a stillness, which was more of the nature of a holy suspense because of the myriads of stars.
Seeking a formula in which to couch his prayer, he found a phrase of Mr. Tollivant's often used in domestic intercession. "And, O Heavenly Father, we beseech thee to act wisely in the matter of our needs." What constituted wisdom in the matter of their needs would then be pointed out by Mr. Tollivant according to the day's or the season's requirements. Accepting this language as that of high inspiration, and forgetting to kneel down, the boy began as he stood, looking out on the sanctified darkness:
"And, O Heavenly Father, I beseech thee to actwisely in the matter of my needs." Hung up there for lack of archaic grandiloquence, he found himself ending lamely: "And don't let me give it to her if I oughtn't to, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen."
With his effort he was disappointed. Not only had the choice of words not taken from Mr. Tollivant been ludicrously insufficient, but he had forgotten to kneel down. He had probably vitiated the whole prayer. He thought of revision, of constructing a sentence that would balance Mr. Tollivant's, and beginning again with the proper ceremonial. But Bertie's way of reasoning came to him again. "I guess He knows what I mean anyhow." He recoiled at that, however, shocked at his own irreverence. The thought was a blasphemous liberty taken with the watchful and easily offended deity of whom Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant had begged him always to be afraid. He was wondering if by approaching this God at all he hadn't made his plight worse, when the rising of the wind diverted his attention.
It rose suddenly, in a great soft sob, but not of pain. Rather, it was of exultation, of cosmic joyousness. Coming from the farthest reaches of the world, from the Atlantic, from Africa, from remote islands and mountain tops, it blew in at the boy's window with a strong, and yet gentle, cosmic force.
"And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind."
Tom Quidmore had but one source of quotation, but he had that at his tongue's end. The learning by heart of long passages from the Bible had been part of his education at the hands of Mr. and Mrs.Tollivant. Rightly or wrongly, he quoted the Scriptures, and rightly oftener than not. He quoted them now because, all at once, his room seemed full of the creative breath. He didn't say so, of course; but, confusedly, he felt it. All round the world there was wind. It was the single element in Nature which you couldn't see, but of which you received the living invigoration. It cooled, it cleansed, it strengthened. Wherever it passed there was an answer. The sea rose; the snows drifted; the trees bent; men and women strove to use and conquer it. A rushing mighty wind! A sound from heaven! That it might be an answer to his prayer he couldn't stop to consider because he was listening to the way it rose and fell, and sighed and soughed and swelled triumphantly through the plantation of blue spruces.
By morning it was a gale. The tall things on the property, the bush peas, the scarlet runners, the sweet corn, were all being knocked about. In spots they lay on the earth; in other spots they staggered from the perpendicular. All hands, in the words of old Diggory, had their work cut out for them. Tom's job was to rescue as many as possible of the ears of sweet corn, in any case ready for picking, before they were damaged.
But at half-past two he dragged himself out of the corn patch to fulfill the dreaded duty. Nothing had answered his prayer. He had not so much as seen his father throughout the day, as the latter had gone to the markets and had not returned. The gale was still raging, and he might be waiting for it to go down.
Since the scene by the roadside on the previousafternoon he had taken a measure of his father not very far from accurate. He, Quidmore, wanted something of which he was afraid. He was too much afraid of it to press for it urgently; and yet he wanted it so fiercely that he couldn't give it up. What it was the boy could not discover, except that it had something to do with them all. When he said with them all he included the elusive Bertha; though why he included her he once more didn't know.
In God he was disappointed; that he did not deny. In spite of the shortcomings of his prayer, he had clung to the hope that they might be overlooked. He argued a little from what he himself would have done had anyone come with a request inadequately phrased. He wouldn't think of the manners or the words in his eagerness to do what lay within his power. With God apparently it was not so.
There was, of course, the other effect of his prayer. He had only asked to be stopped if the thing was not to be done. If he was not stopped the inference was obvious. He was to go ahead. It was in order to go ahead that he left the corn patch.
The kitchen when he got to it was empty. Both the windows, that in the south wall and that in the west, were open to let the wind sweep out the smell of cooking. Creeping halfway up the stairs, he saw that his mother had closed her bedroom door, a sign that she was really lying down. There was no help now for what he had to do.
He stole back to the kitchen again. On the dresser he saw the brown teapot in which she would presently make her tea. He would only have to take it down,and spill the powder into it. The powder was in his waistcoat pocket. He drew it out. It was small and flat, in a neatly folded paper. Opening the paper, he saw something innocent and white, not unlike the sugar you spread on strawberries. Laying it in readiness on the table by the west window, at which his mother baked, he turned to take down the teapot.
The gale grew fiercer. It was almost a tornado. With the teapot in his two hands he paused to look out of the south window at the swaying of the blue spruces. They moaned, they sobbed, they rocked wildly. You might have fancied them living creatures seized by a madness of despair. The fury of the wind, even in the kitchen, blew down a dipper hanging on the wall.
There was now no time to lose. The noise of the falling dipper might have disturbed his mother, so that at any minute she might come downstairs. With the teapot again in his hands he turned to the table where he had left the thing which was to do her good.
It was not there.
Dismayed, startled, he looked for it on the floor; but it was not there. It was not anywhere in the kitchen. He searched and searched.
Going outside, he found the paper caught in a rosebush under the window, but the something innocent and white had been blown to the four corners of the world.
The rushing mighty wind had done its work; and yet it was not till two or three years later, when the Quidmores had passed from his life, that he wondered if after all his prayer had not been answered.
XVI
Ofhelping his mother against her will he never heard any more. When his father returned that evening he had the same look of panic as on the previous day, followed by the same expression of relief at seeing the domestic life going on as usual. But he asked no questions, nor did he ever bring the subject up again. When a day or two later Tom explained to him that the powder had been blown away he merely nodded, letting the matter rest.
Autumn came on and Tom went to school at Bere. He liked the school. No longer a State ward, but the son of a man supposed to be of substance, he passed the tests inflicted by the savage snobbery of children. His quickness at sports helped him to a popularity justified by his good nature. With the teachers he was often forced to seem less intelligent than he was, so as to escape the odious soubriquet of "teacher's pet."
On the whole, the winter was the happiest he had so far known. It could have been altogether happy had it not been for the tragic situation of the Quidmores. After the brief improvement that had followed on his coming they had reacted to a mutual animosity even more intense. Each made him a confidant.
"God! it's all I can do to keep my hands off her," the soft drawl confessed. "If she was just to die ofa sickness, and me have nothing to do with it, I don't believe I'd be satis—" He held the sentence there as a matter of precaution. "What do you think of a woman who all the years you've known her has never done anything but whine, whine, whine, because you ain't givin' her what you promised?"
"And are you?" Tom asked, innocently.
"I give her what I can. She don't tempt me to do anything extra. Say, now, would she tempt you?"
Tom did his best to take the grown-up, man-to-man tone in which he was addressed. "I think she's awful tempting, if you take her the right way."
To take her the right way, to take him also the right way, was the boy's chief concern throughout the winter. To get them to take each other the right way was beyond him.
"So long as he goes outside his home," Mrs. Quidmore declared, with an euphemism of which the boy did not get the significance, "I'll make him suffer for it."
"But, ma, he can't stay home all the time."
"Oh, don't tell me that you don't know what I mean! If you wasn't on his side you'd have found out for me long ago who the woman is. Just tell me that—"
"And what would you do?"
"I'd kill her, I think, if I got the chance."
"Oh, but ma!"
She brandished the knife with which she was cutting cold ham for the supper. "I would! I would!"
"But you wouldn't if I asked you not to, would you, ma?"
The knife fell with a despairing movement of the hand. "Oh, I don't suppose I should do it at all. But he ought to love me."
"Can he make himself love you, ma?"
The ingenuous question went so close to the point that she could only dodge it. "Why shouldn't he? I'm his wife, ain't I?"
The challenge brought out another of the mysteries which surrounded marriage, as a penumbra fringes the moon on a cloudy night. When his father next reverted to the theme, while driving back from market, the penumbra became denser.
"Say, boy, don't you go to thinking that the first time you fall in love with a pretty face it's goin' to be for life. That's where the devil sets his snare for men. Eight or ten years from now you'll see some girl, and then the devil'll be after you. He'll try to make you think that if you don't marry that girl your one and only chance'll come and go. And when he does, my boy, just think o' me."
"Think of you—what about?"
The sweetness of the tone took from the answer anything like bitterness. "Think how I got pinched. Gosh, when I look back and remember that I was as crazy to get her as a pup to catch a squir'l I can't believe it was me. But don't forget what I'm tellin' you. No fellow ought to think of bein' married till he's over thirty. He can't be expected to know what he'll love permanent till then."
It was the perpetual enigma. "But you always love your wife when you're married to her, don't you?"
The answer was in loud satirical laughter, with the observation that Tom was the limit for innocence.
Quite as disturbing as questions of love and marriage were those relating to the fact that the man who had done very well as a hatter was a failure as a market gardener.
"A hell of a business, this is! Rothschild and Rockefeller together couldn't make it pay. Gosh, how I hate it! Hate everything about it, and home worst of all. Know a little woman that if she'd light out with me...."
In different keys and conjunctions these confidences were made to the boy all through the winter. If they did not distress him more it was because they were over his head. The disputes of the gods affect mortals only indirectly. When Jupiter and Juno disagree men feel that they can leave it to Olympus to manage its own affairs. So to a boy of twelve the cares of his elders pass in spheres to which he has little or no access. In spite of his knowledge that their situation was desperate, the couple who had adopted him were mighty beings to Tom Quidmore, with resources to meet all needs. To be so went with being grown up and, in a general way, with being independent.
Their unbosomings worried him; they did not do more. When they were over he could dismiss them from his mind. His own concerns, his lessons, his games, his friends and enemies in school, and the vague objective of becoming "something big," were his matters of importance. Martin and Anna Quidmore cared for him so much, though each with a dashof selfishness, that his inner detachment from them both would have caused them pain.
And yet it was because of this detachment that he was able, in some sense, to get through the winter happily. Whatever might have hurt him most passed on the kind of Mount Olympus where grown-up people had their incredible interests. Told, as he always was, that he couldn't understand them, he was willing to drop them at that till they were forced on him again. As spring was passing into summer they were forced on him less persistently; and then one day, quite unexpectedly, he struck the beginning of the end.
It was a Saturday. As there was no school that day he had driven in on the truck with his father, to market a load of lettuce and early spinach. On returning through Bere in the latter part of the forenoon, Quidmore stopped at the druggist's.
"Jump down and have an ice cream soda. I'll leave the lorry here, and come back to you. Errand to do in the village."
The words had been repeated so often that for these excursions they had come to be a formula. By this time Tom knew the errand to be at Bertha's house, which was indirectly opposite. Seated at a table in the window, absorbing his cool, flavored drink through a pair of straws, he could see his father run up the steps and enter, running down again when he came out. Further than the fact that there was something regrettable in the visit, something to be concealed when he went home, the boy's mind did not work.
The tragedy of that morning was that, as he wasenjoying himself thus, the runabout, driven by one of the hired men, glided up to the door, and Mrs. Quidmore, dressed for shopping, and very alert, sprang out. As she rarely came into Bere, and almost never in the morning when she had her work to do, Tom's surprise was tinged at once with fear. Recognizing the lorry, Mrs. Quidmore rushed into the drug store. Except for the young man, wearing a white coat, who tended it, the long narrow slit was empty. As he peeped above his glass, with the two straws between his lips, Tom saw the wrath of the wronged when close on the track of the wrong-doer. Wheeling round, she caught him looking conscious and guilty.
"Oh! So you're here? Where is he?"
Tom answered truthfully. "He said he had an errand to do. He didn't tell me what it was."
"And is he coming back for you here?"
"He said he would."
"Then I'll wait."
To wait she sat down at Tom's side, having Bertha's house within range. Whether she suspected anything or not Tom couldn't tell, since he hardly suspected anything himself. That there was danger in the air he knew by the violence with which she rejected his proposal to refresh herself with ice cream.
"There he is!"
They watched him while he came down the steps, hesitated a minute, and turned in the direction away from where they were waiting. Tom understood this move.
"He's going to Jenkins's about that new tire."
As she jumped to her feet her movements had a fierceness of activity he had never before seen in her.
"That's all I want. I'm goin' back. Don't you say you seen me, or that I've been over here at all."
Hurrying to the street and springing into the car, she bade the hired man turn round again for home.
What happened between that Saturday and the next Tom never knew exactly. A few years later, when his powers of deduction had developed, he was able to surmise; but beyond his own experience he had no accurate information. That there were bitter quarrels he inferred from the sullenness they left behind; but he never witnessed them. Not having witnessed them, he had little or no sense of a strain more serious than usual.
On the next Saturday afternoon he was crouched in the potato field, picking off the ugly reddish bugs and killing them. Suddenly he heard himself called. On rising and looking round he found the runabout car stopped in the road, and Billy Peet, one of the hired men, beckoning him to approach. Brushing his hands against each other, he stepped carefully over the rows of young potatoes, and was soon in the roadway.
"Get in," Billy Peet ordered, briefly. "The boss sent me over to fetch you."
"Sent you over to fetch me—in the machine? What's up?" His eye fell on a small straw suitcase in the back of the car. "What's that for?"
"Get in, and I'll tell you as we go along." Tom clambered in beside the driver. "Mis' Quidmore's sick."
"What's the matter with her?"
"I'd'n know. Awful sick, they say."
When they passed the Quidmore entrance without turning in Tom began to be startled. "Say! Where we going?"
"You're not going home. Doctor don't want you there. Boss telephoned over to Mrs. Tollivant, and she's goin' to keep you till Mis' Quidmore's better—or somethin'."
The boy was not often resentful, but he did resent being trundled about like a package. If his mother was sick his place was at home. He could light the fire, bring in the water from the well, and do the score of little things for which a small boy can be useful. To be shunted off like this, as if he could only be an additional care, was an indignity to the thirteen years he was now supposed to have attained to. But what could he do? Protest was useless. There was nothing for it but to go where he was driven, like Geraldine or the dilapidated car.
And yet at Harfrey he settled down among the Tollivants naturally. No State ward having succeeded him, his room under the eaves was still vacant. Once within its familiar shelter, he soon began to feel as if he had never been away. The family welcomed him with the shades of warmth which went with their ages and characters—Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant overcoming their repugnance to a born waif with that Christian charity which doubtless is all the nobler for being visibly against the grain; Art, now a swaggering fellow of sixteen, with patronizing good nature; Cilly, who affected baby-blue ribbons on a blond pigtail, with airs and condescension; Bertie, thecripple, with satiric cordiality. If it was not exactly a home-coming, it was at least as good as a visit to old friends. He was touched by being included almost as a member of the family in Mr. Tollivant's evening prayer.
"And, O Heavenly Father, take this young wanderer as Thy child, even as we offer him a shelter. Visit not Thine anger upon him, lest he be tempted overmuch."
At the thought of being tempted overmuch Tom felt a pleasing sense of importance. It offered, too, a loophole for excuse in case he should fall. If God didn't intervene on his behalf, easing temptation up, then God would be responsible. And yet, such was the lack of fairness he was bidden to see in God, He would knock a fellow down and then punish him when he tumbled.
In the midst of these reflections a thought of the Quidmore household choked him with unexpected homesickness. The people who had been kind to him were in trouble, and he was not there! He wondered what they would do without him. He could sometimes catch the man's cruelties and turn them into pleasantries before they reached the wife. He could sometimes forestall the wife's complaints and twist them into little mollifying compliments. Would there be anyone to do that now? Would they keep the peace? He wished Mr. Tollivant would pray for them. He tried to pray for them himself, but, as with his effort of the previous year, the right kind of words would not come. If only God could be addressed without so much Thee and Thou! If only He couldread a little boy's heart without calling for fine language! For lack of fine language he had to remain dumb, leaving God, who might possibly have helped Martin and Anna Quidmore, with no information about them.
Nevertheless, with the facile emotions of youth, a half hour later he was playing checkers with Bertie, in full enjoyment of the game. He slept soundly that night, and on Sunday fell into the old routine of church and Sunday school. Monday and Tuesday bored him, because for most of the day school claimed the children; but when they came home, and played and squabbled as usual, life took on its old zest. Only now and then did the thought of the sick woman and the lonely man sweep across him in a spasm of pain; after which he could forget them and be cheerful.
But on Wednesday forenoon, as he was turning away from watching the Plymouth Rocks pecking at their feed, his father arrived in the old runabout. Dashing up the hill, Tom reached the back door in time to see him enter by the front.
"How's ma?"
He got no answer, because Quidmore followed Mrs. Tollivant into the front parlor, where they shut the door. In anticipation of being taken home, the boy ran up to his room and packed his bag.
"How's ma?"
He called out the question from halfway down the stairs. Quidmore, emerging from the parlor with Mrs. Tollivant, ignored it again. Bidding good-by to his hostess and thanking her for taking in the boy, he went through these courtesies with a nervous anxietyalmost amounting to anguish to convince her of the truth of something he had said.
"How's ma?"
They were in the car at last so that he could no longer be denied.
"She's—she's—not there."
All the events of the past year focussed themselves into the question that now burst on Tom's lips. "Is she—dead?"
The lisping voice was sorrowful. "She was buried yesterday."
With his habit of thinking twice, the boy asked nothing more. Having asked nothing at the minute, he felt less inclined to ask anything as they drove onward. Something within him rejected the burden of knowing. While he would not hold himself aloof, he would not involve himself more than events involved him according as they fell out. His reasoning was obscure, but his instincts, grown self-protective from necessity, were positive. Whatever had happened, whatever was to be right and wrong to other people, his own motive must be loyalty.
"I've got to stick to him," he was saying to himself. "He's been awful good to me. In a kind of a way he's my father. I must stand by him, and see him through, just as if I was his son."
It was his first grown-up resolution.
XVII
Grown-uplife began at once. His chief care hitherto had been as to what others would do for him; now he was preoccupied with what he could do for some one else. It was a matter of watching, planning, cheering, comforting, and as he expressed it to himself, of bucking up. Of bucking up especially he was prodigal. The man had become as limp as on the day when he had thrown himself face downward in the grass. Mad once with desire to act, he was terrified now at what he had done. Though, as far as Tom could judge, no one blamed or suspected him, there was hardly a minute in the day in which he did not betray himself. He betrayed himself to the boy even if to no one else, though betraying himself in such a way that there was nothing definite to take hold of. "I'm sure—and yet I'm not sure," was Tom's own summing up. He stressed the fact that he was not sure, and in this he was helped by the common opinion of the countryside.
Toward the bereaved husband and his adopted son this was sympathetic. The woman had always been neurasthenic, slipshod, and impossible. With a wife to help him, Martin Quidmore could have been a success as a market gardener as easily as anybody else. As it was, he would get over the shock of this tragedy and find a woman who would be the right kind of mother to a growing boy. Here, the mentionof Bertha was with no more than the usual spice of village scandal, tolerant and unresentful.
Of all this Tom was aware chiefly through the observations of Blanche, the colored woman who came in by the day to do the housework.
"Law, Mr. Tom, yo' pappa don't need to feel so bad. Nobody in this yere town what blame him, not a little mite. Po' Mis' Quidmo', nobody couldn't please her nohow. Don't I know? Ain't I wash her, and iron her, and do her housecleanin', ever since she come to this yere community, and Mr. Quidmo' he buy this yere lot off old Aaron Bidbury? No, suh! Nobody can't tell me! Them there giddy things what nobody can't please 'em they can't please theirselves, and some day they go to work and do somefin' despe'ate, just like po' Mis' Quidmo'. A little cup o' tea, she take. No mo'n that. See, boy! I keep that there brown teapot, what look as innocent as a baby, all the time incriminated to her memo'y."
Nevertheless, Tom found his father obsessed by fear, with nothing to be afraid of. The obsession had shown itself as soon as they entered the house on their return from Harfrey. He was afraid of the house, afraid of the kitchen especially. When Gimlets barked he jumped, cursing the dog for its noise. When a buggy drove up to the door he peeped out at the occupant before showing himself to the neighbor coming to offer his condolences. If the telephone rang Tom hastened to answer it, knowing that it set his father shivering.
As evening deepened on that first Wednesday, they kept out of doors as late as possible, the boy chattering to the best of his ability. When obliged to go in, Quidmore tried to say with solicitude on Tom's behalf:
"Expect you'll be lonesome now with only the two of us in the house. Better come and sleep in the other bed in my room."
The boy was about to reply that he was not lonesome, and preferred his own bed, when he caught the dread behind the invitation.
"All right, dad, I'll come. Sleep there every night. Then I won't be scared."
About two in the morning Tom was wakened by a shout. "Hell! Hell! Hell!"
Jumping from his own bed, he ran to the other. "Wake up, dad! Wake up!"
Ouidmore woke, confused and trembling. "Wha' matter?" His senses returning, he spoke more distinctly. "Must have had a nightmare. God! Turn on the light. Hate bein' in the dark. Now get back to bed. All right again."
The next day both were picking strawberries. It was not Quidmore's custom to pick strawberries, but he seemed to prefer a task at which he could crouch, and be more or less out of sight. Happening to glance up, he saw a stranger coming round the duck pond.
"Who's that?" he snapped, in terror.
Tom ran to the stranger, interviewed him, and ran back again. "It's an agent for a new kind of fertilizer."
"Tell him I don't want it and to get to hell out of this."
"You'd better see him. He'll think it queer if you don't."
It was the spur he needed. He couldn't afford to be thought queer. He saw the agent, Tom acting as go-between and interpreter.
To act as go-between and interpreter became in a measure the boy's job. Being so near the holidays, he did not return to school, and freed from school, he could give all his time to helping the frightened creature to seem competent in the eyes of his customers and hired men. Not that he succeeded. None knew better than the hired men that the place was, as they put it, all in the soup; none were so quick to fall away as customers who were not getting what they wanted. When the house was tumbling about their heads one little boy's shoulder could not do much as a prop; but what it could do he offered.
He offered it with a gravity at which the men laughed good-naturedly behind his back. They took his orders solemnly, and thought no more about them. For a whole week nothing went to market. The dealers whom they supplied complained by telephone. Billy Peet and himself got a load of "truck" into town, only to be told that their man had made other arrangements. To meet these conditions Quidmore had spurts of energy, from which he backed down gibbering.
Taking his courage in both hands, the boy went to see Bertha. Never having been face to face with her before, he found her of the type of beauty best appreciated where the taste is for the highly blown. She received him with haughty surprise and wonder, notasking him to sit down. Having prepared his words, he recited them, though her attitude frightened him out of the man-of-the-world tone he had meant to adopt. Humbly and haltingly, he asked if she wouldn't come out and help to stiffen the old man.
"So he's sent you, has he? Well, you can go back and say that I've no reply except the one I've given him. All is over between us. Tell him that if he thinks thatthatwas the way to win me he's very gravely mistook. I know what's happened as positive as if I was a jury, and I shall never pardon it. Silence I shall keep, but that is all he can ask of me. He's made me talked about when he shouldn't ought to ov, ignoring that a woman, and especially a widow—" her voice broke—"has nothing but her reputation. Go back and tell him that if he tries to force my door he'll find it double-barred against him."
Tom went back but said nothing. There was no need for him to say anything, since his life began at once to take another turn.
School holidays having begun, he was free in fact as well as in name. It was on a Thursday that his father came to him with the kind of proposal which always excites a small boy.
"Say, boy, what you think of a little trip down to Wilmington, Delaware, you and me? Go off to-morrow and get back by Tuesday. I'd see my sister, and it'd do me good."
The prospect seemed to have done him good already. A new life had come to him. He went about the place giving orders for the few days of his absence, with particular instructions to Diggory andBlanche as to Geraldine, and the disposal of the milk. They started on their journey in the morning.
It was one of those mornings in June when every blessed and beautiful thing seems poured on the earth at once. As between five and six Billy Peet drove them over to take the train at Harfrey, light, birds, trees, flowers, meadows, dew, would have thrilled them to ecstasy if they had not been used to them. For the first time in weeks Tom saw his father smile. It was a smile of relief rather than of pleasure, but it was better than his look of woe.
The journey wakened memories. Not since Mrs. Crewdson had brought him out to place him as a State ward with Mrs. Tollivant had he gone into the city by this route. He had gone in by the motor truck often enough; but this line that followed the river was haunted still by the things he had outlived. He was not sorry to have known them, though glad that they were gone. He was hardly sorry even for the present, though doubtful as to how it was going to turn out. Vaguely and not introspectively, he was shocked at himself, that he should be sitting there with a man who had done what he felt pretty sure this man had done, and that he should feel no horror. But he felt none. He assured himself of that. He could sleep with him by night, and work and eat with him by day, with no impulse but to shield a poor wretch who had made his own life such a misery.
"I've got to do it," he said to himself, in a kind of self-defense. "I don'tknowhe did it—not for sure, I don't. And if nobody else tries to find out, why should I, when he's been so awful nice to me?"
He watched a steamer plowing her way southward in the middle of the stream. He liked her air of quiet self-possession and of power. He wondered whence she was coming, whither she was going, and what she was doing it for. He couldn't guess.
"That'd be like me," he said, silently, "sailing from I don't know where—sailingtoI don't know where——"
Ten years later he finished this thought, repeating exactly the same words. Just now he couldn't finish anything, because there was so much to see. Little towns perched above little harbors. Fishermen angled from little piers. A group of naked boys, shameless as young mermen, played in the water. On a rock a few yards from the shore a flock of gulls jostled each other for standing room. A motor boat puffed. Yachts rode sleepily at anchor. The car which, when they took it at Harfrey had been almost empty, was beginning to fill with the earlier hordes of commuters. Soon it was quite full. Soon there were cheery young people, most of them chewing gum, standing in the passageway. Having rounded the curve at Spuyten Duyvil, they saw the city looming up, white, spiritual, tremulous, through the morning mist.
Up to this minute he had not thought of plans; now he began to wonder what they should do on reaching the Grand Central, where they would arrive in another quarter of an hour.
"Do we go straight across to the Pennsylvania Station, to take the train for Wilmington, or do we have to wait?"
"I'll—I'll see."
The answer was unsatisfactory. He looked at his father inquiringly. Looking at him, he was hurt to observe that his confidence was departing, that he was again like something with a broken spring.
"Well, we're going to Wilmington to-day, aren't we?"
"I'll—I'll see."
"But," the boy cried in alarm, "where can we go, if we don't?"
"I—I know a place."
It was disappointing. The choking sensation which, when he was younger, used to precede tears, began to gather in his throat. Having heard so much from Mrs. Quidmore of the glories of Wilmington, Delaware, he saw it as a city of palaces, of exquisite, ladylike maidens, of noble youths, of aristocratic joyousness. Moreover, he had been told that to get there you went under the river, through a tunnel so deep down in the earth that you felt a distressful throbbing in the head. The postponement of these experiences even for a day was hard to submit to.
In the Grand Central his father was in a mood he had never before seen. It was a dark mood, at once decided and secretive.
"Come this way."
This way was out into Forty-second Street. With their suitcases in their hands, they climbed into a street car going westward. Westward they went, changing to another car going southward, under the thunder of the elevated, in Ninth Avenue. At Fourteenth Street they got out again. Tom recognized the neighborhood because of its nearness to the great markets to which they sometimes brought supplies. But they avoided the markets, making their way between drays, round buildings in course of demolition, through gangs of children wooing disaster as they played in the streets. In the end they turned out of the tumult to find themselves in a placid little backwater of the "old New York" of the early nineteenth century. Reading the sign at the corner Tom saw that it was Jane Street.