They found a lodging, cheap, humble, but sufficient, on that northern slope of Beacon Hill which within living memory has more than once changed hands with the silent advance and recession of a tide coming in and going out. There are still old people who can remember when some of the worthiest of the sons of the Puritans had their windows, in these steep and narrow streets, brightened by the rising or the setting sun. Then, with an almost ghostly furtiveness, they retired as the negro came and routed them. The negro seemed fixed in possession when the Hebrew stole on silently, and routed him. At the time when George Honeybun and Tom Whitelaw came looking for a home, the ancient inhabitant of the land was beginning to creep back again, and the Hebrew taking flight. In a red-brick house of forbidding expression in Grove Street they found a room with two beds.
Within a few days Honey, whose strength was his skill, was working as a stevedore on the Charlestown docks. Tom was picking up small jobs about the markets. By September he had passed his examinations and had entered the Latin School. A new life had begun. From the old life no pursuit or interference ever followed them.
The boy shot up. In the course of a year he had grown out of most of his clothes. To the best of his modest ability, Honey was generous with new ones. He was generous with everything. That Tom should lack nothing, he cut down his own needs till he seemed to have none but the most elemental. Of his "nice times" in New York nothing had followed him to Boston but a love of spirits and tobacco. Of the two, the spirits went completely. When Tom's needs were pressing the supply of tobacco diminished till it sometimes disappeared. If on Sundays he could venture over the hill, to listen to the band on the Common, or stroll with the boy in the Public Gardens, it was because the Sunday suit, bought in the days when he had no one to provide for but himself, was sponged and pressed and brushed and mended, with scrupulous devotion. The motive of so much self-denial puzzled Tom, since, so far as he could judge, it was not affection.
He was old enough now to perceive that affection had inspired most of his good fortune. People were disposed to like him for himself. There was rarely a teacher who did not approve of him. By the market men, among whom he still picked up a few dollars on Saturdays and in vacations, he was always welcomed heartily. In school he never failed to hold his own till the boys discovered that his father, or uncle, or something, was a stevedore, after which he was ignored. Girls regarded him with a hostile interest, while toward them he had no sentiments of any kind. He could go through a street and scarcely notice that there was a girl in it, and yet girls wouldn't leave himalone. They bothered him with overtures of friendship to which he did not respond, or tossed their heads at him, or called him names. But in general the principle was established that he could be liked.
But Honey was an enigma. Love was apparently not the driving power urging him to these unexpected fulfillments. If it was, it had none of the harmless dog-and-puppy ways which Tom had grown accustomed to. Honey never pawed him, as the masters often pawed the boys, and the boys pawed one another. He never threw an arm across his shoulder, or called him by a more endearing name than Kiddy. Apart from an eagle-eyed solicitude, he never manifested tenderness, nor asked for it. That Tom would ever owe him anything he didn't so much as hint at. "Dooty o' next o' kin" was the blanket explanation with which he covered everything.
"But you're not my next of kin," Tom, to whom schooling had revealed the meaning of the term, was bold enough to object. "Next of kin means that you'd be my nearest blood relation; and we're not relations at all."
Honey was undisturbed in his Olympian detachment. "Do yer suppose I dunno that? But I believes as Gord sees we're kin lots o' times when men don't take no notice. You was give to me. You was put into my 'ands to bring up. And up I'm goin' to bring yer, if it breaks me."
It was a close Sunday evening in September, the last of the summer holidays. Tom would celebrate next day by entering on a higher grade at school. He had had new boots and clothes. For the first time he wasworried by the source of this beneficence. As night closed down they sat for a breath of fresh air on the steps of the house in Grove Street. Grove Street held the reeking smell of cooking, garbage, and children, which only a strong wind ever blows away from the crowded quarters of the cities, and there had been no strong wind for a week. Used to that, they didn't mind it. They didn't mind the screeching chatter or the raucous laughter that rose from doorways all up and down the hill, nor the yelling of the youngsters playing in the roadway. Somewhere round a corner a group of Salvationists, supported by a blurting cornet, sang with much gusto:
Oh, how I love Jesus!Oh, how I love Jesus!Oh, how I love Jesus!Because He first loved me.
They didn't mind it when Mrs. Danker, their landlady, a wiry New England woman, sitting in the dark of the hall behind them, joined in, in her cracked voice, with the Salvationists, nor when Mrs. Gribbens, a stout old party who picked up a living scrubbing railway cars, joined in with Mrs. Danker. From neighboring steps mothers called out to their children in Yiddish, and the children answered in strident American. But to Honey and Tom all this was the friendly give-and-take of promiscuity which they would have missed had it not been there.
Each was so concentrated on his own ruling purpose that nothing external was of moment. Honey was to give, and Tom was to receive, an education. Thatthe recipient's heart should be fixed on it, Tom found natural enough; but that the giver's should be equally intense seemed to have nothing to account for it.
He glanced at the quiet figure, upright and muscular, his hands on his knees, like a stone Pharaoh on the Nile.
"Why don't you smoke?"
"I don't want to drop no ashes on this 'ere suit."
"Have you got any tobacco?"
"I didn't think to lay in none when I come 'ome yesterday."
"Is that because there was so much to be spent on me?"
"Oh, I dunno about that."
Tom gathered all his ambitions together and offered them up. "Well, I guess this can be the last year. After I've got through it I'll be ready to go to work."
"And not go to college!" The tone was one of consternation. "Lord love yer, Kiddy, what's bitin' yer now?"
"It's biting me that you've got to work so hard."
"If it don't bite me none, why not let it go at that?"
"Because I don't seem able to. I've taken so much from you."
"Well, I've had it to 'and out, ain't I?"
"But I don't see why you do it."
"A young boy like you don't have to see. There's lots o' things I didn't understand at your age."
"You don't seem specially—" he sought for words less direct, but without finding them—"you don't seem—specially fond of me."
"I never was one to be fond o' people, except it wasa dog. Always had a 'ankerin' for a dog; but a free life don't let yer keep one. A dog'll never go back on yer."
"Well, do you think I would?"
"I don't think nothink about it, Kid. When the time comes that you can do without me...."
"That time'll never come, Honey, after all you've done for me."
"I don't want yer to feel yerself bound by that."
"I don't feel myself bound by it; but—dash it all, Honey!—whatever you feel or don't feel about me, I'm fond ofyou."
He was still imperturbable. "Well, Kid, you wouldn't be the first, not by a lot."
"But if I can never be anythingforyou, ordoanything for you...."
"There's one thing you could do."
"What is it? I don't care how hard it is."
"Well, when you're one o' them big lawyers, or bankers, or somethink—drorin' yer fifty dollars a week—you can have a shy at this 'ere lor o' proputty. It don't seem right to me that some people should have all the beef to chaw, and others not so much as the bones; but I can't git the 'ang of it. If nothink don't belong to nobody, then what about all your dough in the New York savin's bank, and mine in the one in Brooklyn? We're keepin' it agin yer goin' to college, ain't we? And don't that belong to us? Yes, by George, it do! So there you are. But if when yer gits yer larnin' yer can steddy it out...."
XXIII
Theboy was adolescent, sentimental, and lonely. Mere human companionship, such as that which Honey gave him, was no longer enough for him. He was seeing visions and dreaming dreams. He began to wish he had some one with whom to share his unformulated hopes, his crude and burning opinions. He looked at fellows who were friends going two and two, pouring out their foolish young hearts to each other, and envied them. The lads of his own age liked him well enough. Now and then one of them would approach him with shy or awkward signals, making for closer acquaintance; but when they learned that he lived in Grove Street with a stevedore they drew away. None of them ever transcended the law of caste, to stand by him in spite of his humble conditions. Boys whose families were down wanted nothing to hamper them in climbing up. Boys whose families were up wanted nothing that might loosen their position and pull them down. The sense of social insecurity which was the atmosphere of homes reacted on well-meaning striplings of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, turning them into snobs and cads before they had outgrown callowness.
But during the winter of the year in which he became sixteen there were two, you might have said three, who broke in upon this solitude.
In walking to the Latin School from Grove Street he was in the habit of going through Louisburg Square. If you know Boston you know Louisburg Square as that quaint red-brick rectangle, like many in the more Georgian parts of London, which commemorates the gallant dash of the New England colonists on the French fortress of Louisburg in Cape Breton. It is the heart of that conservative old Boston, which is now shrinking in size and importance before the onset of the foreigner till it has become like a small beleaguered citadel. Here the descendants of the Puritans barricade themselves behind their financial walls, as their ancestors within their stockades, while their city is handed over to the Irishman and the Italian as an undefended town. The Boston of tradition is a Boston of tradition only. Like the survivors of Noah's deluge clinging to the top of a rock, they to whom the Boston of tradition was bequeathed are driven back on Beacon Hill as a final refuge from the billows rising round them. A high-bred, cultivated, sympathetic people, they have so given away their heritage as to be but a negligible factor in the State, in the country, of which their fathers and grandfathers may be said once to have kept the conscience.
But to Tom Whitelaw Louisburg Square meant only the dignified fronts and portals behind which lived the rich people who had no point of contact with himself. They couldn't have ignored him more completely than he ignored them. He thought of them as little as the lion cub in a circus parade thinks of the people of the city through which he passes in processions. Then, one day, one of these strangers spoke to him.
It was a youth of about his own age. More than once, as Tom went by, and the stout boy stood on the sidewalk in front of his own house, they had looked each other up and down with unabashed mutual appraisal. Tom saw a lad too short for his width, and unhealthily flabby. He had puffy hands, and puffy cheeks, with eyes seeming smaller than they were because the puffy eyelids covered them. The mouth had those appealing curves comically troubled in repose, but fulfilling their purpose in giggling. On the first occasion when Tom passed by the lips were set to the serious task of inspection. They said nothing; they betrayed nothing. Tom himself thought nothing, except that the boy was fat.
They had looked at each other some two or three times a week, for perhaps a month, when one day the fat boy said, "Hullo!" Tom also said, "Hullo!" continuing on his way. A day or two later they repeated these salutations, though neither forsook his attitude of reserve. The fat boy did this first, speaking when they had hullo'ed each other for the third or fourth time. His voice was high and girlish, and yet with a male crack in it.
"What school do you go to?"
Tom stopped. "I go to the Latin School. What school do you go to?"
"I go to Doolittle and Pray's."
"That's the big private school in Marlborough Street, isn't it?"
The fat boy made the inarticulate grunt which withmost Americans means "Yes." "I was put down for Groton, only mother wouldn't let me leave home. I'm going to Harvard."
"I'm going to Harvard, too. What class do you expect to be in?"
The fat boy replied that he expected to be in the class of nineteen-nineteen.
Tom said he expected to be in that class himself.
"Now I've got to beat it to the Latin School. So long!"
"So long!"
Tom carried to his school in the Fenway an unusual feeling of elation. With friendly intent someone had approached him from the world outside. It was not the first time it had ever happened, but it was the first time it had ever happened in just this way. He could see already that the fat boy was not one of those he would have chosen for a friend; but he was so lonely that he welcomed anyone. Moreover, he divined that the fat boy was lonely, too. Boys of that type, the Miss Nancy and the mother's darling type, were often consumed by loneliness, and no one ever pitied them. Few went to their aid when other boys "picked" on them, but of those few Tom Whitelaw was always one. He found them, once you had accepted their mannerisms, as well worth knowing as other boys, while they spared him a scrap of admiration. It was possible that in this fat boy he might find the long-sought fellow who would not "turn him down" on discovering that he lived in Grove Street. Being turned down in this way had made him sick at heart so often that he had decided never any more tomake or trust advances. In suffering temptation again he assured himself that it would be for the last time in his life.
On returning from school he looked for the boy in Louisburg Square, but he was not there. A few hundred yards farther, however, he came in for another adventure.
The January morning had been mild, with melting snow. By midday the wind had shifted to the north, with a falling thermometer. By late afternoon the streets were coated with a glaze of ice. Tom could swagger down the slope of Grove Street easily enough in the security of rubber soles.
But not so a girl, whose slippers and high French heels made her helpless on the steep glare. Having ventured over the brow of the hill, she found herself held. A step into the air would have been as easy as another on this slippery descent. The best she could do was to sway in the keen wind, keeping her balance with the grace of one of the blue spruces which used to be blown about at Bere. Her outstretched arms waved up and down, as a blue spruce waves its branches. Coming abreast of her, Tom found her laughing to herself, but on seeing him she laughed frankly and aloud.
"Oh, catch me! I'm going to tumble! Ow-w-w!"
Tom snatched at one hand, while she caught him by the shoulder with the other.
"Saved! Wasn't it lucky that you came along? You're the Whitelaw boy, aren't you?"
Tom admitted that he was, though his new sensations, with this exquisite creature clinging to him likea drowning man to his rescuer, choked the monosyllable in his throat. Though he had often in a scrimmage protected little boys, he had never before been thrown into this comic, laughing tussle with a girl. It had the excuse for itself that she couldn't stand unless he held her up. He held her firmly, looking into her dancing eyes with his first emotional consciousness of a girl's prettiness.
His arm supporting her, she ventured on a step. "I'm Maisie Danker," she explained, while taking it. "I see you going in and out the house."
"I've never seen you."
"Perhaps you've seen me and not noticed me."
"I couldn't," he declared, with vehemence. "I've never seen you before in my life. If I had...."
Her high heels so nearly slipped from under her that they were compelled to hold each other as if in an embrace. "If you had—what?"
He knew what, but the words in which to say it needed a higher mode of utterance. The red lips, the glowing cheeks, had the vitality of the lively eyes. A red tam-o'-shanter, a red knitted thing like a heavenly translation of his own earthly sweater, were bewitchingly diabolic when worn with a black skirt, black stockings, and black shoes.
As he did not respond to her challenge, she went on with her self-introduction. "I guess you haven't seen me, because I only arrived three days ago. I'm Mrs. Danker's niece. Live in Nashua. Worked in the woolen mills there. Now I've come to visit my aunt for the winter."
For the sake of hearing her speak, he asked if she was going to work in Boston.
"I don't know. Maybe I'll take singing lessons. Got a swell voice."
If again he was dumb it was because of the failure of his faculties. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for the give-and-take of a badinage in which the surface meanings were the less important. Foolish and helpless, unable to show his manly superiority except in the strength with which he held her up, he got a lesson in the new art there and then.
"Ever dance?"
"I'm never asked."
"Oh, it's you that ought to do the asking."
"I mean that I'm never asked where there's dancing going on."
"Gee, you don't have to be. You just find a girl—and go."
"But I don't know how to dance."
"I'll teach you."
Slipping and sliding, with cries of alarm on her part, and stalwart assurances on his, they approached their own doorstep.
"Ow-w-w! Hold me! I'm going!"
"No you're not—not while I've got you."
"But I don't want to grab you so hard."
"That's all right. I can stand it."
"But I can't. I'm not used to it."
"Then it's a very good time to begin."
"What's the use of beginning if there's nothing to go on with?"
"How do you know there won't be?"
"Well, what can there be?"
Had Miss Danker always waited for answers to her questions Tom would have been more nonplussed than he was. But the game which he didn't know at all she knew thoroughly, according to her lights. She never left him at a loss for more than a few seconds at a time. Her method being that of touch-and-go, reserving to herself the right of coming back again, she carried his education one step farther still.
"Don't you ever go to the movies?"
He replied that he had gone once or twice with Honey, but not often. To be on the same breezy level as herself, he added in explanation: "Haven't got the dough."
"But the movies don't take dough, not hardly any."
"They take more than I've got."
"More than you've got? Gee! Then you can't have anything at all."
It was not so much a taunt as it was a statement, and yet it was a statement with a little taunt in it. For once driven to bravado, he gave away a secret.
"Well, I haven't—except what's in the bank."
"Oh, you've got money in the bank, have you?"
"Sure! But I'm keeping it to go to college."
She stared at him as if he had been a duck-billed rabbit, or some variety of fauna hitherto unknown.
"Gee! I should think a fellow who had money in the bank would want to blow some of it on having a good time—a fellow with any jazz."
Once more she spared him discomfiture. Slipping into the hallway, she said over her shoulder as he followed her: "How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
She flashed round at him. "Sixteen! Gee! I thought you was my age if you was a day. Honest I did. I'm eighteen, an old lady compared with you."
"Oh, but boys are always older than girls, for their age."
"You are, sure. Anyways, you saved me on that slippery hill, and I think you ought to have a kiss for it. Come, baby, kiss your poor old ma."
Though the hallway was dark, the kiss had to be given and taken furtively. Whatever it was to Maisie Danker, to Tom Whitelaw it was the entrance to a higher and an increased life. The pressure of her lips on his sent through his frame a dynamic glow he had not supposed to be among nature's possibilities. Moreover, it threw light on that experience as to which he had mused ever since he had first talked confidentially to Bertie Tollivant. Though instinct had taught him something in the intervening years, he had up to this minute gained nothing in the way of practical discovery. Now an horizon that had been dark was lifting to disclose a wonderland.
With her light laugh Maisie had run into her aunt's apartment, and shut the door. Tom began heavily, pensively, to climb the stairs. But halfway up he paused to mark off another stage in his perceptions.
"So that's what it's like! That's why they all think so much about it—and try to hush it up!"
XXIV
Hehimself found something to hush up when he recounted the incident to Honey in the evening. He told of meeting Mrs. Danker's niece on the ice-coated hill, and helping her down to the door. Of his sensations as she clung to him he said nothing. He said nothing of the kiss in the dark hallway. During the rest of the evening, and after he had gone to bed, he wondered why. They all hushed these things up, and he did as the rest; but what was the basic reason?
As his first emotional encounter the subject was sufficiently in his mind next day to make him duller than usual at school. On his way home from school it so preoccupied his thought that he forgot to look for the fat boy. It was the fat boy who first saw him, hailing him as he approached. There was already between them that acceptance of each other which is the first stage of friendship.
"What's your name?"
"Tom Whitelaw. What's yours?"
"Guy Ansley. How old are you?"
"Sixteen. How old are you?"
"I'm sixteen, too. What's your father do?"
"I haven't got a father. I live with—" it was difficult to explain—"with a man who kind o' takes care of me."
"A guardian?"
"Something like that. What does your father do?"
"He's a corporation lawyer. Makes big money, too." As Tom began to move along the fat boy went with him, keeping step. "What's your guardian do?"
"He does anything that'll give him a job. Mostly he's a stevedore."
"What's a stevedore? Sounds as if it had something to do with bull-fighting."
"It's a longshoreman. He loads and unloads ships."
They stopped at the corner of Pinckney Street The puffy countenance fell. Tom could follow his companion's progression of bewilderments.
"Where do you live?"
"I live in Grove Street."
It was the minute of suspense. All had been confessed. The countenance that had fallen went absolutely blank. To himself the tall, proud, sensitive lad was saying that his future life was staked on the response the fat boy chose to make. If he showed signs of wriggling out of an embarrassing situation he, Tom Whitelaw, would range himself forever with the enemies of the rich.
The fat boy spoke at last.
"So you're that kind of fellow."
"Yes, I'm that kind of fellow."
This was mere marking time. The decision was still to come. It came with an air on the fat boy's part of heroic resolution.
"Well, I don't care."
Tom breathed again, breathed with bravado. "Neither do I."
In the stress of so much big-heartedness the girlish voice became a croak. "I know guys who think that if another guy isn't rich they must treat him as so much dirt. I'm not that sort. I'm democratic. I wouldn't turn down a fellow just because he lived in Grove Street. If I liked him I'd stick to him. I'm not snobbish. How do you know you couldn't give him a peg up, and he'd be grateful to you all his life?"
Thinking this over afterward, Tom found it hard to disengage the bitter from the sweet; but he had not much chance to think it over. Any spare minute he found pre-empted by Maisie Danker, who seemed to camp in the dark hallway. If she was not there when he entered, she appeared before he could go upstairs. The ice having melted in the street, she had other needs of protection, an errand to do in the crowded region of Bowdoin Square, a shop to visit across the Common which was so wide and lonesome in winter twilights, a dance hall to locate in case they ever made up their minds to visit it. She was always timid, clinging, laughing, adorable. The embodiment of gayety, she made him gay, which was again a new sensation. Never before had he felt young as he felt young with her. The minutes they spent swamped in the throngs of the lighted streets, between five and seven on a winter's afternoon, were his first minutes of escape from a world of care. Care had been his companion since he could remember anything; and now his companion was this exquisite thing, all lightsomeness and joy.
He was later than usual in returning from school one afternoon, because a teacher had given him a commission to carry out which took some two hours of his time. As it had sent him toward the south end of the city, he had the Common to traverse on his way home. Snow had recently fallen; but through the main avenues under the trees the paths had been cleared. On the Frog Pond the drifts had been swept up, so that there could be a little skating. As Tom passed by he could hear the scraping and grinding of skates, and the hoarse shouts of hobbledehoys. At any other time he would have stopped, either to look on peacefully, or to take part in some bit of free-for-all, rough-and-tumble skylarking in the snow. But Maisie might be waiting. She might even have given up waiting, which would take all his pleasure from the afternoon.
To reach home more quickly he followed a short cut, scarcely shoveled out, on the slope of the Common below Beacon Hill. Here there were no foot passengers but himself. Neither, for some little distance, were there any trees. There was only the white shroud of the snow, freezing to a crust. A misty moon drifted through a tempest of scudding clouds, while wherever in the offing there was a group of elms the electric lights danced through their tossing branches as if they were wind-blown lanterns.
In spite of his hurry, the boy came to a standstill. It was a minute at which to fancy himself lost in Moosonee or Labrador. Hisvoyageurguides had failed him; his dog team had run away; his pemmican—he supposed it would be pemmican—had given out. Hewas homeless, starving, abandoned, alone but for the polar bears.
It was not a polar bear that he saw come floundering down the hillside, but it might have been a black one. It was certainly black; its nature was certainly animal. It rolled and tumbled and panted and grunted, and now and then it moaned. For a few minutes it remained stationary, with internal undulations; then it scrambled a few paces, as an elephant might scramble whose feet had been sawn off. A dying mammoth would also have emitted just these raucous groans.
Suddenly it squealed. The squeal was like that of a pig when the knife is thrust into its throat. It was girlish, piercing, and yet had a masculine shriek in it. Tom Whitelaw knew what was happening. It had happened to himself so often in the days when he was different from other boys that his fists seemed to clench and his feet to spring before his mind had given the command. In clearing the fifty odd yards of snow between him and the wallowing monster, he chose a form of words which young hooligans would understand as those of authority.
"What in hell are yez doin' to that kid? Are yez puttin' a knife in him? Leave him be, or I'll knock the brains out of every one of yez."
He was in among them, laying about him before they knew what had landed in their midst. They were not brutal youngsters; they were only jocose in the manner of their kind. Having spied the fat boy coming down to watch the skating, it was as natural for them to jump on him as it would be for a pack ofdogs who chanced to see a sloth. With the courage of the mob, and also with its rapidity of thought-transfer, they had closed in silently and rushed him. He was on his back in a second. In a second they were clambering all over him. When he staggered to his feet they let him run, only to catch him and pull him down again. So staggering, so running, so coming down like a lump of jelly in the snow, he had reached the top of the hill, his tormentors hanging to him as if their teeth were in his flesh, at the minute when Tom first perceived the black mass.
The fat boy had not lacked courage. He had fought. That is, he had kicked and bitten and scratched, with the fury of vicious helplessness. He had not cried for mercy. He had not cried out at all. He had struggled for breath; he had nearly strangled; but his pantings and gruntings were only for breath just as were theirs. Strong in spite of his unwieldiness, he was not without the moral spunk which can perish at a pinch, but will not give in.
None of them had struck him. That would have been thought cowardly. They had only plastered him with snow, in his mouth, in his ears, in his eyes, and down below his collar. This he could have suffered, still without a plea, had not their play become fiercer. They began to tear open his clothing, to wrench it off the buttons. They stuffed snow inside his waistcoat, inside his shirt, inside his trousers. He was naked to the cold. And yet it was not the cold that drew from him that piglike squeal; it was the indignity. He was Guy Ansley, a rich man's son, in his native sanctifiedold Boston a young lordling; but these muckers had mauled the last rag of honor out of him.
They were good-natured little demons, with no more notion of his tragedy than if he had been a snowman. As soon as the strapping young giant had leaped in among them, they ran off with screams of laughter. Most of them were tired of the fun in any case; a few lingered at a distance to "call names," but even they soon disappeared. Tom could only help the lumbering body to its feet.
Cleaning him of snow was more difficult, and since it was melting next his skin, it had to be done at once. The shirt and underclothing being wet, and a keen wind blowing, his teeth were soon chattering. Even when buttoned tightly in his outer clothes he was dank and clammy within. It helped him a little that Tom should strip off his own overcoat and exchange with him; but nothing could really warm him till he got into his own bed.
They would have run all of the short distance to Louisburg Square only that young Ansley was not a runner at any time, and at this time was exhausted. Tom could only drag him along as a dead weight. Except for the brief observations necessary to what they had to do, they hardly spoke a word. Speech was nearly impossible. The only aim of importance was covering the ground.
The old manservant who admitted them in Louisburg Square went dumb with dismay. Having brought his charge into the hall, Tom was obliged to take the lead.
"He's been tumbling in the snow. He's got wet. He may have caught a chill. Better call his mother."
The fat boy spoke. "Mother's in New York. So's father. Here, Pilcher, help me up to my room."
As the two went up the stairs, Tom was left standing in the hall. A voice at the head of the stairs arrested his attention because it was a girl's. Since knowing Maisie Danker, all girls' voices had begun to interest him. This voice was clear, silvery, peremptory, a little sharp, like the note of a crystal bell. Pilcher explained something, whereupon the owner of the voice ran down. On the red carpet of the stairs, with red-damasked paper as a background, her white figure was spiritlike beneath a dim oriental hall light.
"I'm Hildred Ansley," she said, with a cool air of self-possession. "I see my brother's had an accident. Pilcher is putting him to bed. I'm sure we're very much obliged to you."
She was only a child, perhaps fourteen, but a competent child, who knew what to say. Not pretty, as Maisie was, she had presence and personality. In this she was helped by her height, since she was tall, and would be taller, and more by her intelligence. It was the first time he had ever had occasion to observe that some faces were intelligent, though it was not quite easy to say why. "Little Miss Ansley knows what's what," he commented silently, but aloud he said that if he were in her place he would send for a doctor. Though her brother had had no bones broken, he might easily have caught a bad cold.
"Thank you! I'll do it at once."
She made her way to a table, somewhat belittered with caps and gloves, behind the stairs, at the back of the hall. Taking up the receiver, she called a number, politely and yet with a ring of command. While she was speaking he noticed his surroundings.
If to him they seemed baronial it was because his experience had been cramped. Louisburg Square is not baronial; it is only dignified. For the early nineteenth century its houses were spacious; for the early twentieth they are a little narrow, a little steep, a little lacking in imaginative outlet. But to Tom Whitelaw, with memories that went back to the tenements of New York, to whom the homes of the Tollivants and the Quidmores had meant reasonable comfort, who found the sharing of one room with George Honeybun endurable, these walls with their red paper, these stairs with their red carpet, this lofty gloom, this sense of wealth, were all that he dreamed of as palatial.
When Miss Ansley returned from the telephone, he asked if he might have his overcoat. Her brother had worn it upstairs on going to his room. "That's his," he explained, pointing to the soggy Burberry he had thrown down on a carved settle.
"Oh, certainly! I'll run up and get it. I won't ask you to go upstairs to the drawing-room; but if you don't mind taking a seat in here...."
Throwing open the door of the dining room, which was on the ground floor, she switched on the light. Tom entered and stood still. So this was the sort of place in which rich people took their meals!
It was a glow of rich gleaming lights, lights from mahogany, lights from silver, lights from porcelain.In the center of the table lay a round piece of lace, on which stood a silver dish with nothing in it. He knew without being told, though he had never thought of it before, that it needed nothing in it. There were things so beautiful as to fulfil their purpose merely in being beautiful. From above a black-marble mantelpiece a man looked down at him with jovial eyes, a man in a high collar and huge black neckerchief, who might have been the grandfather or great-grandfather of Guy and Hildred Ansley. He had the fat good humor of the one and the bright intelligence of the other, the source in his genial self of types so widely different.
Young Miss Ansley tripped in with the coat across her arm. "I'm sure my father and mother will want to thank you when they come back. Guy's been very naughty. He's always forbidden to leave the Square when he goes out of doors. He wouldn't have done it if papa and mamma hadn't been away. I can't make him mindme. But you must come back when everybody's here, so that you can be thanked properly. I suppose you live somewhere near us?"
Tom found it easiest to answer indirectly. "Your brother knows everything about me. I've seen him once or twice in the Square, and I've told him who I am."
"That'll be very nice."
She held out her hand, and he accepted his dismissal. But before having closed the door behind him, he turned round to her as she stood under the oriental lamp.
"I hope your brother will soon be all right again.I think they ought to give him a hot drink. He's—he's got big stuff in him when you come to find it out. He'll make his way."
The transformation in her was electric. She ceased to be starched and competent, with a manner that put a thousand miles between him and her. The intelligence he had already noted in her face was aflame with a radiance beyond beauty.
"Oh, I'm so glad you can say that! No one outside the family has ever said it before. He's alamb!—and hardly anybody knows it."
She held out her hand again. As he took it he saw that her eyes, which he thought must be dark, were shining with a mist of tears.
Going down the hill he repeated the two names: Maisie Danker! Hildred Ansley! They called up concepts so different that it was hard to think them of a common flesh. Though Maisie Danker was a woman and Hildred Ansley but a child, there were points at which you could compare them. In the comparison the advantages lay so richly with the girl in Louisburg Square that he fell back on the fact, stressing it with emphasis, that Maisie was the prettier. "After all," he reflected, with comfort in the judgment, "that's all that matters—to a man."
XXV
Afewdays after his rescue of Guy Ansley from the snow Tom Whitelaw found himself addressed by that young gentleman's sister, aged fourteen. She had plainly been watching for him as he went through Louisburg Square on his way from school. He had almost passed the Ansley steps before the tall, slight girl ran down them.
"Oh, Mr. Whitelaw!"
As it was the first time he had ever been honored with this prefix, he felt shocked and slightly foolish.
"Yes, Miss Ansley?"
A little breathless, she was, as he had noticed during their previous meeting, oddly grown up for her age, as one who takes responsibilities because there is no one else to bear them. She had the manner and selection of words of a woman of thirty.
"I hope you won't mind my waylaying you like this, but my brother would so much like to see you. You've been so awfully kind that I hope you'll come up. He's in bed, you know."
"When does he want me to come?"
"Well, now, if it isn't troubling you too much. You see, my father and mother are coming home to-night, and he'd like to have a word with you before then. He won't keep you more than a few minutes."
What Tom obscurely felt as an honor to himself she put as a favor he was doing them. It was anhonor in that it admitted him a little farther into privacies which to him seemed tapestried with privilege and tradition. His one brief glimpse of their way of living had not made him discontented; it had only appealed to his faculty for awe.
Awe was what he was aware of in following his young guide up the two red staircases to the room where the fat boy lay in bed. It was a mother's-darling's room, amusingly out of keeping with the pudgy, fleshy being whom it housed. Flowered paper on the walls, flowered hangings at the windows, flowered cretonnes on thickly upholstered armchairs, flowered silk on the duvet, garlands of flowers on the headboard and footboard of the virginal white bedstead, made the piggy eyes and piggy cheeks, bolstered up by pillows of which some were trimmed with lace, the more funnily grotesque. Tom Whitelaw saw neither the fun nor the grotesqueness. All he could take in was the fact that beauty could gild the lily of this luxury. He knew nothing of beauty in his own denuded life. The room with two beds which he still shared with Honey at Mrs. Danker's was not so much a sanctuary as a lair.
The fat boy's giggles were those of welcome, and also those of embarrassment.
"After the scrap the other night got sick. Bronchitis. Sit down."
Tom looked round to see what Miss Ansley was doing, but slipping away, she shut the door behind her. He sank into the flowered armchair nearest to the bed. The cracked girlish voice, which now had a wheeze in it, went on.
"They've wired for dad and mother, and they're coming home to-night. Thought that before they got here I'd put you wise to something I want you to do."
Waiting for more, Tom sat silent, while the poor piggy face screwed itself up as if it meant to cry.
"Dad and mother think that because I'm so fat I'm not a sport. But they're dead wrong, see? Iama sport; only—only—" he was almost bursting into tears—"only the damn fat won't let me get it out, see?"
"Yes, I see. I now you're a sport all right, old chap. Of course!"
"Well, then, don't let them think the other thing, if they were to ask you."
"Ask me what?"
"Ask you what the row was about the other afternoon. If they do that tell 'em we were only playing nigger-in-the-henhouse, or any other snow game. Don't say I was knocked down by a lot of kids. Make 'em think I was having the devil's own good time."
Tom Whitelaw knew this kind of humiliation. If he had not been through Guy Ansley's special phase of it he had been through others.
"I'll tell them what I saw. You and a lot of other fellows were skylarking in the snow, and I went by and got you to knock off. As I had to pass your door we came home together; but when I found you were wet to the skin I advised Miss Ansley to see that you hit the hay. That's all there was to it."
In the version of the incident the strain of truth was sufficiently clear to allow the fat boy to approveof it. He didn't want to tell a lie, or to get Tom Whitelaw to tell a lie; but sport having been the object with which he had stolen away on that winter's afternoon, it was easy to persuade himself that he had got it. Before Tom went away Guy Ansley understood that he would figure to his parents not as a victim but as something of a tough.
"Gee, I wish I was you," he grinned at Tom, who stood with his hands on the doorknob.
"Me!" Tom was never so astonished in his life. His eyes rolled round the room. "How do you think I live?"
"Oh, live! That's nothing. What I'd like to do is to rough it. If they'd let me do that I shouldn't be—I shouldn't be wrapped up in fat like a mummy in—in whatever it is they're wrapped up in.Youcan get away with anything on looks."
Sincere as was this tribute, it meant nothing to Tom Whitelaw, looks being no part of his preoccupations. What, for the minute, he was thinking about was that nobody in the world seemed to be quite satisfied. Here he was envying Guy Ansley his down quilt and his comfortable chairs, while Guy was envying him the rough-and-tumble of privation.
"I shouldn't look after him too much," he said to the young sister whom, on coming downstairs, he found waiting at the front door. "There's nothing wrong with him, except that he's a little stout. He's got lots of pluck."
Her face glowed. The glow brought out its intelligence. The intelligence set into action a demure, mysterious charm, almost oriental.
"That's just what I always say, and no one ever believes me. Mother makes a baby of him."
"If he could only fight his own way a little more...."
"Oh, I do hope you'll say that if they speak to you about him."
"I will if I ever get the chance, but...."
"Oh, you must get the chance. I'll make it. You see, you're the only boy Guy's ever taken a fancy to who didn't treat him as a joke."
Tom assured her that her brother was not the only fellow who had a hard fight to put up during boyhood. He had seen them by the dozen who, just because of some trifling oddity, or unusual taste, were teased, worried, tormented, till school became a hell; but that didn't keep them from turning out in the end to be the best sports among them all. Very likely the guying did them good. He thought it might. He, Tom Whitelaw, had been through a lot of it, and now that he was sixteen he wasn't sorry for himself a bit. He used to be sorry for himself, but....
Seeing her for the second time, and in daylight, her features grew more distinct to him. He mused on them while continuing his way homeward. To say she was not pretty, as he had said the other night, was to use a form of words calling for amplification. It was the first time he had had occasion to observe that there are faces to which beauty is not important.
"It's the way she looks at you," was his form of summing up; and yet for the way she looked at you he had no sufficient phraseology.
That her eyes were long, narrow, and yellow-brown,ever so slightly Mongolian, he could see easily enough. That her nose was short, with a little tilt to it, was also a fact he had no difficulty in stating. As for her coloring, it was like that of a russet apple when the brown has a little gold in it and the red the brightness of carmine. Her hair was saved from being ugly by running to the quaint. Straight, black—black with a bluish gloss—it was worn not in the pigtail with which he was most familiar, but in two big plaits curved behind the ears, and secured he didn't know how. She reminded him of a colored picture he had seen of a Cambodian girl, a resemblance enhanced by the dark blue dress she wore, straight and formless down the length of her immature, boylike figure, and marked at the waistline by a circle of gold braid.
But all these details were subordinate to something he had no power of defining. It was also something of which he was jealous as an injustice to Maisie Danker. If this girl had what poor Maisie had not it was because money gave her an advantage. It was the kind of advantage that wasn't fair. Because it wasn't fair, he felt it a challenge to his loyalty.
Nevertheless, he could not accept Maisie's offhand judgments when between five and six that afternoon he told her of the incident.
This was at The Cherry Tree, one of those bowers of refreshment and dancing recently opened on their own slope of Beacon Hill. Bower was the word. What had once been the basement-kitchen and coal cellar of a small brick dwelling had been artfully converted into a long oval orchard of cherry trees, inpaper luxuriance of foliage and blossom. Within the boskage, and under Chinese lanterns, there were tables; out in the open was a center oval cleared for dancing. Somewhere out of sight a cracked fiddle and a flat piano rasped out the tango or some shred of "rag." With the briefest intervals for breath, this performance was continuous. The guests, who at that hour in the afternoon numbered no more than ten or twelve, forsook their refreshments to take the floor, or forsook the floor to return to their refreshments, just as the impulse moved them. They were chiefly working girls, young men at leisure because out of jobs, or sailors on shore. Except for an occasional hoarse or screechy laugh, the decorum was proper to solemnity.
It was the fourth or fifth time Tom and Maisie had come to this retreat, nominally that Tom should learn to dance, but really that they should commune together. To him the occasions were blissful for the reason that he had no one else in the world to commune with. To talk, to talk eagerly, to pour out the torrent of opinions boiling within him, meant more than that Maisie should understand him. Maisie didn't understand him. She only laughed and joked with pretty inanity; but she let him talk. He talked about the books he liked and didn't like, about the advantages college men possessed over those who weren't college men, about what he knew of the banking system, about the good you conferred on the world and yourself when you saved your money and invested it. In none of these subjects was she interested; but now and then she could get a turn to talk of the movies,the new dances, and love. That these subjects made him uneasy was not, from Maisie's point of view, a reason for avoiding them.
Each was concerned with the other, but beyond the other each was concerned most of all with the mystery called Life. To live was what they were after, to live strongly and deeply and vividly and hotly, and to do it with the pinched means and narrow opportunities which were all they could command. In his secret heart Tom Whitelaw knew that Maisie Danker was not the girl out of all the world he would have sought of his own accord, while Maisie Danker was equally aware that this boy two years younger than herself couldn't be the generous provider she was looking for. They were only like shipwrecked passengers thrown together on an island. They must make the best of each other. No other girl, hardly any other human being except Honey, had entered the social isolation in which he was marooned, and as for her....
She was so cheery and game that she never referred to her home experiences otherwise than allusively. From allusions he gathered that she was not with her aunt, Mrs. Danker, merely for pleasure or from pressure of affection. Her father was living; her stepmother was living too. There was a whole step-family of little brothers and sisters. Her father drank; her stepmother hated her; there was no room for her at home. All her life she had been knocked about. Even when she worked in the woolen mills she couldn't keep her wages. She had had fellows, but none of them was ever any good. The best ofthem was a French Canadian who made big money, but he wouldn't marry her unless she "turned Catholic." "If he couldn't give up his church for me I couldn't give up mine for him; so there it was!" There was another fellow.... But as to him she said little. In speaking of him at all her face grew somber, which it did rarely. Either because he had failed her, or to get her out of his clutches, Tom was not sure which, her aunt had offered her a home for the winter. "Gee, it makes me laff," was her own sole comment on her miseries.
As Tom had dropped into the habit of telling her the small happenings of his uneventful life, he gave her, across the ice-cream sodas, an account of what had just occurred between himself and Guy and Hildred Ansley.
She listened with what for her was gravity. "You've got to give some of them society girls the cold glassy eye," she informed him, judicially. "If you don't you'll get it yourself, perhaps when you ain't expecting it."
"Oh, but this is only a little girl, not more than fourteen. She justseemsgrown up. That's the funny part of it."
"Not more than fourteen! Justseemsgrown up! Why, any of that bunch is forwarder at ten than I'd be at twenty. That's one thing I'd never be, not if men was scarcer than blue raspberries—forward. And yet some of them society buds'll be brassier than a knocker on a door."
"Oh, but this little Miss Ansley isn't that sort."
"You wouldn't know, not if she was running upand down your throat. Any girl can get hold of a man if she makes him think she needs him bad enough."
"It wasn't she who needed me; it was her brother."
"A brother'll do. A grandmother'd do. If you can't bait your hook with a feather fly, you can take a bit of worm. But once a fella like you begins to take a shine to one of them...."
"Shine to one of them! Me?"
"Well, I suppose you'll be taking a shine tosomegirlsomeday. Why shouldn't you?"
"If I was going to do that...."
The point at which he suspended his sentence was that which piqued her especially. Her eyes were provocative; her bright face alert.
"Well, if you were going to do that—what of it?"
The minute was one he was trying to evade. As clearly as if he were fifty, he knew the folly of getting himself involved in an emotional entanglement. Though he looked a young man, he was only a big boy. The most serious part of his preparation for life lay just ahead of him. If he didn't go to college....
And even more pressing than that consideration was the fact that in bringing Maisie to The Cherry Tree that afternoon he had come down to his last fifteen cents. At the beginning of their acquaintance he had had seven dollars and a half, hoarded preciously for needs connected with his education. Maisie had stampeded the whole treasure. To expect a man to spend money on her was as instinctive to Maisie as it is to a flower to expect the heavens to send rain.She knew that at each mention of the movies or The Cherry Tree Tom squirmed in the anguish of financial disability, and that from the very hint of love he bolted like a colt from the bridle; but when it came to what she considered as her due she was pitiless.
No epic has yet been written on the woes of the young man trying, on twenty-five dollars a week, let us say, to play up to the American girl's taste for spending money. His self-denials, his sordid shifts, his mortifications, his sense at times that his most unselfish efforts have been scorned, might inspire a series of episodes as tensely dramatic as those of Spoon River.
Tom had had one such experience on Maisie's birthday. She had talked so much of her birthday that a present became indispensable. To meet this necessity the extreme of his expenditure could be no more than fifty cents. To find for fifty cents something worthy of a lady already a connoisseur he ransacked Boston. Somewhere he had heard that a present might be modest so long as it was the best thing of its kind. The best thing of its kind he discovered was a toothbrush. It was not a common toothbrush except for the part that brushed the teeth. The handle was of mother-of-pearl, with an inlay in red enamel. The price was forty-five cents.
Maisie laughed till she cried. "A toothbrush! Atoothbrush! For a present that's something new! Gee, how the girls'll laff when I go back to Nashua and tell them that that's what a guy give me in Boston!"
The humiliation of straitened means was the moregalling to Tom Whitelaw, first because he was a giver, and then because he knew the value of money. With the value of money his mind was always playing, not from miserly motives, but from those of social economy. Each time he "blew in," as he called it, a dollar on the girl he said to himself: "If I could have invested that dollar, it would have helped to run a factory, and have brought me in six or seven cents a year for all the rest of my life." He made this calculation to mark the wastage he was strewing along his path in the wild pace he was running.
There was something about Maisie which obliged you to play up to her. She was that sort of girl. If you didn't play up, the mere laughter in her eye made you feel your lack of the manly qualities. It was not her scorn she brought into play; it was her sense of fun; but to the boy of sixteen her sense of fun was terrible.
It was terrible, and yet it put him on his guard. He couldn't wholly give in to her. If she could make moves he could make them too, and perhaps as adroitly. Her tantalizing question was ringing in his ears: If he was going to take a shine to any girl—what of it?
"Oh, if I was going to do that," he tossed off, "it would be to you."
"So that you haven't taken a shine to me—yet?"
"It depends on what you mean by a shine."
"What do you mean by it yourself?"
"I never have time to think." This was a happysentiment, and a safeguard. "It takes all I can do to remember that I've got to go to college."
"Damn college!"
He was so unsophisticated that the expression startled him. He hadn't supposed young ladies used it, not any more than they sneaked into barns or under bridges to smoke cigarettes.
"What's the use of damning college, when I've got to go?"
"You haven't got to go. A great strong fella like you ought to be earning his twenty per by this time. If you've got money in the bank, as you say you have...."
He trembled already for his treasure. "I haven't got it here. It's in a savings bank in New York."
"Oh, that's nothing! If you got itanywheres you can get at it with a check. Gee, if I had a few hundreds I'd have ten in my pocket at a time, I'll be hanged if I wouldn't. I don't believe you've got it, see. I know a lot o' guys that loves to put that sort of fluff over on a girl. Makes 'em feel big. But if they only knew what the girl thinks of them...." She jumped to her feet, allowing herself a little more vulgarity than she generally showed. "All right, old son, c'me awn! Let's have another twist. And for Gawd's sake don't bring down that hoof of yours till I get a chance to pull my Cinderella-slipper out of your way."
XXVI
Itwas after he had spent the first ten dollars he drew from his fund in New York that Tom felt the impulse to tell Honey of the way in which he was becoming involved with Maisie Danker. The ten dollars had melted. In signing the formalities for drawing the amount, he expected to have enough to carry him along till spring, when Maisie's visit was to end. He dreaded its ending, and yet it would have this element of relief in it; he would be able to keep his money. At a pinch he could spare ten dollars, though he couldn't spare them very well. More than ten dollars....
And before he knew it the ten dollars had vanished as if into air. Once Maisie knew what he had done her caprices multiplied. To her as to him ten dollars to "blow in"—she used the airy expression too—was a small fortune. It was only their instincts that were different. His was to let it go slowly, since the spending of a penny was against the protests of his conscience; hers to make away with it. If Tom could "draw the juice" for a first ten, he could draw it for a second, and for a third and a fourth after that. It was not extravagance that whipped her on; it was joy of life.
Tom's impulse to tell Honey was not acted on. It was not acted on after he drew the second ten; norafter he drew the third. After he had drawn the fourth his unhappiness became so great that he sought a confidant.
And yet his unhappiness was not absolute; it was rather a poisoned bliss. Had Maisie been content with what he could afford, the winter would have been like one in Paradise. But almost before he himself was aware of the promptings of thrift, she vanquished them with her ridicule.
"There's nothing I hate so much as anything cheap. If a fella can't give me what I like, he can keep away."
Time and time again Tom swore he would keep away. He did keep away, for a day, for two or three days in succession. Then she would meet him in the dark hallway, and, twining her arms around his neck without a word, would give him one of those kisses on the lips which thrilled him into subjection. He would be guilty of any folly for her then, because he couldn't help himself. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty dollars, all the hoarded inheritance from the Martin Quidmore who was already a dim memory, would be well thrown away if only she would kiss him once again.
He lost the healthy diversion which might have reached him through the Ansleys because they had taken the fat boy to Florida. Tom learned that from little Miss Ansley a few days after the return of the father and mother from New York. One afternoon as both were coming from their schools they had met on their way toward Louisburg Square. Even in her outdoor dress, she was quaintly grown-up andCambodian. A rough brown tweed had a little gold and a little red in it; a brown turban not unlike a fez bore on the left a small red wing tipped with a golden line. Maisie would have emphasized the red; she would have been vivid, eager to be noticed. This girl didn't need that kind of advertisement.
Seeing her before she saw him, he wondered whether she would give him any sign of recognition. At Harfrey the girls whom he saw at the Tollivants, and who proclaimed themselves "exclusive," always forgot him when they met him on the street. This had hurt him. He waited in some trepidation now, fearing to be hurt again. But when she saw him she nodded and smiled.
"Guy's better," she said, without greeting, "and we're all going off to Florida to-morrow. Guy and I don't want to go a bit; but mother's afraid of his catching cold, and father has to be in Washington, anyhow. So we're off."
Though he walked by her side for no more than a few yards, Tom was touched by her friendliness. She was the first girl of that section of the world for which he had only the term "society" who had not been ashamed to be seen with him in a street. Little Miss Ansley even paused for a minute at the foot of her steps while they exchanged remarks about their schools. She went to Miss Winslow's. She liked her school. She was sorry to be going away as it would give her such a lot of back work to make up. She might go to Radcliffe when Guy went to Harvard, but so far her mother was opposed to it. In these casual observations she seemed to Tom tolose something of her air of being a woman of the world. On his own side he lost a little of his awe of her.
The snuffing out of this interest threw him back on the easing of his heart by confidence. It was not confidence alone; it was also confession. He was deceiving Honey, and to go on deceiving Honey began to seem to him baser than dishonor. Had Honey been his father, it would have been different. Fathers worked for their sons as a matter of course, and almost as a matter of course expected that their sons would play them false. There was no reason why Honey should work for him; and since Honey did work for him, there was every reason why he who reaped the benefit should be loyal. He was not loyal. He had even reached the point, and he cursed himself for reaching it, at which Honey was an Old Man of the Sea fastened on his back.
He told himself that this was the damnedest ingratitude; and yet he couldn't tell himself that it wasn't so. It was. There were days when Honey's way of speaking, Honey's way of eating, the smell of Honey's person, and the black patch on his eye, revolted him. Here he was, a great lump of a fellow sixteen years of age, and dependent for everything, foreverything, on a rough dock laborer who had been a burglar and a convict. It was preposterous. Had he jumped into this situation he would not have borne it for a week. But he had not jumped into it; it had grown. It had grown round him. It held him now as if with tentacles. He couldn't break away from it.
And yet Honey and he were bound to grow apart.It was in the nature of the case that it should be so. Always of a texture finer than Honey's, schooling, association, and habits of mind were working together to refine the grain, while Honey was growing coarser. His work, Tom reasoned, kept him not only in a rut but in a brutalizing rut. Loading and unloading, unloading and re-loading, he had less use for his mind than in the days of his freebooting. Then a wild ass of the desert, he was now harnessed to a dray with no relief from hauling it. From morning to night he hauled; from night to morning he was stupefied with weariness. In on this stupefaction Tom found it more and more difficult to break. He was agog with interests and ideas; for neither interests nor ideas had Honey any room.
Nor had he, so far as Tom could judge, any room for affection. On the contrary, he repelled it. "Don't you go for to think that I've give up bein' a socialist because I got a soft side. No, sir! That wouldn't be it at all. What reely made me do it was because it didn't pay. I'd make big money now and then; but once I'd fixed the police, the lawyers, and nine times out o' ten the judge, I wouldn't have hardly nothink for meself. If out o' every hundred dollars I was able to pocket twenty-five it'd be as much as ever. This 'ere job don't pay as well to start with; but then it haven't no expenses."
Self-interest and a vague sense of responsibility were all he ever admitted as a key to his benevolence. "It's along o' my bein' an Englishman. You can't get an Englishman 'ardly ever to be satisfied a'mindin' of his own business. Ten to one he'll do that andmind somebody else's at the same time. A kind o' curse that's on 'em, I often thinks. Once when I was doin' a bit—might 'a been at Sing Sing—a guy come along to entertain us. Recited poetry at us. And I recolleck he chewed to beat the band over a piece he called, 'The White Man's Burden.' Well, that's what you are, Kid. You're my White Man's Burden. I can't chuck yer, nor nothink. I just got to carry yer till yer can git along without me; and then I'll quit. The old bunch'll be as glad to see me back as I'll be to go. There's just one thing I want yer to remember, Kid, that when yer've got yer eddication there won't be nothink to bind me to you, nor—" he held himself very straight, bringing out his words with a brutal firmness—"nor you to me. Yer'll know I'll be as glad to go the one way as you'll be to go the t'other, so there won't be no 'ard feelin' on both sides."