It was a Sunday night. Tom had taken his troubles to bed with him, because he had nowhere else to take them. In bed you struck a truce with life. You suspended operations, at least for a few hours. You could sleep; you could postpone. He slept as a rule so soundly, and so straight through the night, that, hunted as he was by care, he had once in the twenty-four hours a refuge in which the fiendish thing couldn't overtake him.
It had been a trying Sunday because Maisie had tempted him to a wilder than usual extravagance. There was enough snow on the ground for sleighing. She had been used to sleighing in Nashua. The singing of runners and the jingling of bells, as a sleigh slid joyously past her, awakened her longing for the sport. By coaxing, by teasing, by crying a little, and, worst of all, by making game of him, she had induced him to find a place where he could hire a sleigh and take her for a ride.
Snow having turned to rain, and rain to frost, the landscape through which they drove was made of crystal. Every tree was as a tree of glass, sparkling in the sun. A deep blue sky, a keen dry wind, a little horse which enjoyed the outing as briskly as Maisie herself, made the two hours vibrant with the ecstasy of cold. All Tom's nerves were taut with the pleasure of the motion, of the air, of the skill, acquired chiefly at Bere, with which he managed the spirited young nag. The knowledge of what it was costing him he was able to thrust aside. He would enjoy the moment, and face the reckoning afterward. When he did face the reckoning, he found that of his fourth ten dollars he had spent six dollars and fifty-seven cents. Only three days earlier he had had the crisp clean bill unbroken in his hand....
He had been hardly able to eat his supper, and after supper the usual two hours of study to which he gave himself on Sunday nights were as time thrown away. Luckily, Honey's consideration left him the room to himself. Honey was like that. If Tom had to work, Honey effaced himself, in summer by sitting on the doorstep, in winter by going to bed. Much of Tom's wrestling with Virgil was carried on to the tune of Honey's snores.
This being Sunday evening, and Honey less tiredthan on the days on which he worked, he had gone to "chew the rag," as he phrased it, with a little Jew tailor, who lived next door to Mrs. Danker. Tom was aware that behind this the motive was not love for the Jew tailor, but zeal that he, Tom, should be interfered with as little as possible in his eddication. Tom's eddication was as much an obsession to Honey as it was to Tom himself. It was an overmastering compulsion, like that which sent Peary to find the North Pole, Scott to find the South one, and Livingstone and Stanley to cross Africa. What he had to gain by it had no place in his calculation. A machine wound up, and going automatically, could not be more set on its purpose than Lemuel Honeybun on his.
But to-night his absenting of himself was of no help to Tom in giving his mind to the translation from English into Latin on which he was engaged. When he found himself rendering the expression "in the meantime" by the wordsin turpe tempore, he pushed books and paper away from him, with a bitter, emphatic, "Damn!"
Though it was only nine, there was nothing for it but to go to bed. In bed he would sleep and forget. He always did. Putting out the gas, and pulling the bedclothes up around his ears, he mentally waved the white flag to his carking enemy.
But the carking enemy didn't heed the white flag; he came on just the same. For the first time in his life Tom Whitelaw couldn't sleep. Rolling from side to side, he groaned and swore at the refusal of relief to come to him. He was still wide awake when abouthalf past ten Honey came in and re-lit the gas, surprised to see the boy already with his face turned to the wall. Not to disturb him, Honey moved round the room on tiptoe.
Tom lay still, his eyes closed. He loathed this proximity, this sharing of one room. In the two previous years he hadn't minded it. But he was older now, almost a man, able to take care of himself. Not only was he growing more fastidious, but the self-consciousness we know as modesty was bringing to the over-intimate a new kind of discomfort. Long meaning to propose two small separate rooms as not much dearer than the larger one, he had not yet come to it, partly through unwillingness to add anything to their expenses, and partly through fear of hurting Honey's feelings. But to-night the lack of privacy gave the outlet of exasperation to his less tangible discontents.
He rolled over on his back. One gas jet spluttered in the antiquated chandelier. Under it a small deal table was heaped with his books and strewn with his papers. Beside it stood an old armchair stained with the stains of many lodgers' use, the entrails of the seat protruding horribly between the legs. Two small chairs of the kitchen type, a wash-stand, a chest of drawers with a mirror hung above it, two or three flimsy rugs, and the iron cots on which they slept, made a setting for Honey, who sat beneath the gaslight, sewing a button on his undershirt. Turned in profile toward Tom, and wearing nothing but his drawers and socks, he bent above his work with the patience of a concentrated mind. He was really a finefigure of a man, brawny, hairy, spare, muscled like an athlete, a Rodin's Thinker all but the thought, yet irritating Tom as the embodiment of this penury.
So not from an impulse of confession, but to ease the suffering of his nerves, Tom told something about Maisie Danker. It was only something. He told of the friendship, of the dancing lessons, of the movies, of the sleigh-ride that afternoon, of the forty dollars drawn from the bank. He said nothing of their kisses, nor of the frenzy which he thought might be love. Honey pulled his needle up through the hole, and pushed it back again, neither asking questions nor looking up.
"I guess we'll move," was his only comment, when the boy had finished the halting tale.
This quietness excited Tom the more. "What do you want to move for?"
"Because there's dangers what the on'y thing you can do to fight 'em is to run away."
"Who said anything about danger? Do you suppose ...?"
In sticking in his needle Honey handled the implement as if it were an awl. "Do I suppose she's playin' the dooce with yer? No, Kid. She don't have to. You're playin' the dooce with yerself. It's yer age. Sixteen is a terr'ble imagination age."
"Oh, if you think I'm framing the whole thing...."
"No, I don't. Yer believes it all right. On'y it ain't quite so bad as what yer think. It don't do to be too delikit with women. Got to bat 'em away as if they was flies, when they bother yer too much.Once let a woman in on yer game and yer 'and can be queered for good."
"Did I say anything about letting a woman in on my game?"
"No, yer on'y said she'd slipped in. It's too late now to keep her out. She's made the diff'rence."
"What difference?"
Honey threaded his needle laboriously, held up the end of the thread to moisten it with his lips, and tied a knot in it. "The diff'rence in you. Yer ain't the same young feller what yer was six months ago. You and me has been like one," he went on, placidly. "Now we're two. Been two this spell back. Couldn't make it out, no more'n Billy-be-damned; and now I see. The first girl."
Tom lashed about the bed.
"It was bound to come; and that's why—yer've arsked me about it onst or twice, so I may as well tell yer—that's why I never lets meself get fond o' yer. Could'a did it just as easy as not. When a man gits to my age a young boy what's next o' kin to him—why, he'll seem like as if 'twould be his son. But I wouldn't be ketched. 'Honey,' I says to meself, 'the first girl and you'll be dished.'"
"Oh, go to blazes!"
Having finished his button, Honey made it doubly secure by winding the thread around it. "Not that I blame yer, Kiddy. I ain't never led no celebrant life meself, not till I had to take you on, and cut out all low company what wouldn't 'a been good for you. But I figured it out that we might 'a got yer through college before yer fell for it. Well, we ain't. Maybenow we'll not git yer to college at all. But we'll make a shy at it. We'll move."
"If you think that by moving you'll keep me from seeing her again...."
"No, son, not no more'n I could keep yer from cuttin' yer throat by lockin' up yer razor. Yer could git another razor. I know that. All the same, it'd be up to me, wouldn't it, not to leave no razors layin' round the room, where yer could put yer 'and on 'em?"
This settling of his destiny over his head angered Tom especially.
"I can save you the trouble of having me on your mind any more. To-morrow I'll be out on my own. I'm going to be a man."
"Sure, you're going to be a man—in time. But yer ain't a man yet."
"I'm sixteen. I can do what any other fellow of sixteen can do."
"No fella of sixteen can do much."
"He can earn a living."
"He can earn part of a livin'. How many boys of sixteen did yer ever know that could swing clear of home and friends and everythink, and feed and clothe and launder theirselves on what they made out'n their job?"
"Well, I can try, can't I?"
"Oh, yes, yer can try, Kid. But if you was me, I wouldn't cut loose from nobody, not till I'd got me 'and in."
Tom raised himself on his elbow, his eyes, beneaththeir protruding horizontal eyebrows, aglitter with the wrath which puts life and the world out of focus.
"Iamgoing to cut loose. I'm going to be my own master."
"Are you, Kid? How much of yer own master do yer expect to be, on the ten or twelve per yer'll git to begin with—ifyer gits that?"
"Even if it was only five or six per, I'd be making it myself."
"And what about college?"
"College—hell!"
The boy fell back on his pillow. Feeling he had delivered his ultimatum, he waited for a reply. But Honey only stowed away his sewing materials in a little black box, after which he pulled off the articles of clothing he continued to wear, and set about his toilet for the night. At the sound of his splashing water on his face Tom muttered to himself: "God, another night of this will kill me."
Honey spoke through the muffling of the towel, while he dried his face. "Isn't all this fuss what I'm tellin' yer? The minute a girl gits in on a young feller's life there's hell to pay. That's why I'd like yer to steer clear of 'em as long as yer can hold out."
Tom shut his eyes, buried his face in the pillow, and affected not to hear.
"They don't mean to do no harm; they're just naterally troublesome. Seems as if they was born that way, and couldn't 'elp theirselves. There's a lot of 'em as is never satisfied till they've got a man like a jumpin'-jack, what all they need to do is to pullthe string to make him jig. This girl is one o' them kind."
Tom continued to hold his peace.
"I've saw her. Pretty little thing she is all right. But give her two or three years. Lord love you, Kid, she'll be as washed out then as one of her own ribbons after a hard rain. And yet them is the kind that most young fellers'll run after, like a pup'll run after a squirrel."
Tom was startled. The figure of speech had been used to him before. He could hear it drawled in a tired voice, soft and velvety. It was queer what conclusions about women these grown men came to! Quidmore had thought them as dangerous as Honey, and warned him against them much as Honey was doing now. Mrs. Quidmore had once been what Maisie was at that minute, and yet as he, Tom, remembered her.... But Honey was going on again, spluttering his words as he brushed his teeth.
"It can be awful easy to git mixed up with a girl, and awful hard to git unmixed. She'll put a man in a hole where he can't help doin' somethink foolish, and then make out as what she've got a claim on him. There's a lot o' talk about women bein' the prey o' men; but for one woman as I've ever saw that way I've saw a hundred men as was the prey o' women. Now when a girl of eighteen gits a young boy like you to spend the money as he's saved for his eddication...."
The boy sprang up in bed, hammering the bedclothes. "Don't you say anything against her. I won't listen to it."
With that supple tread which always made Tom think of one who could easily slip through windows, Honey walked to the closet where he kept his night-shirt. "'Tain't nothink agin her, Kid. Was on'y goin' to say that a girl what'll git a young boy to do that shows what she is. And yer did spend the money a-takin' her about, now didn't yer?"
Tom fell back upon his pillow. Putting out the gas, Honey threw himself on his creaking cot.
"You're a free boy, Kiddy," he went on, while arranging the sheet and blanket as he liked them. "If yer wants to beat it to-morrer, beat it away. Don't stop because yer'll be afraid I'll miss yer. Wasn't never no hand for missin' no one, and don't mean to begin. What I'd 'a liked have been to fill yer up with eddication so that yer could jaw to beat the best of 'em, if yer turned out to be the Whitelaw baby."
Tom had almost forgotten who the Whitelaw baby was. Not since that Sunday afternoon nearly three years ago had Honey ever mentioned him. The memory having come back, he made an inarticulate sound of impatience, finally snuggling to sleep.
He tried to think of Maisie, to conjure up the rose in her cheeks, the laughter in her eyes; but all he saw, as he drifted into dreams, was the quaint Cambodian face of little Hildred Ansley. Only once did Honey speak again, muttering, as he too fell asleep:
"We'll move."
XXVII
Theydid not move for the reason that Maisie did. Not for forty-eight hours did Tom learn of her departure. As Mrs. Danker kept not a boarding house but a rooming house, and her guests went days at a time without seeing their landlady, he had no sources of information when Maisie, as she sometimes did, kept herself out of sight. Watching for her on the Monday and the Tuesday following his Sunday night talk with Honey, he thought it strange that she never appeared in the hallway, though he had no cause to be alarmed. He was going to leave Honey, get a job, and be independent. When he had added a little more to his fund in New York, he would propose to Maisie, and marry her if she would take him. He would be eighteen, perhaps nineteen by the time he was able to do this, an early, but not an impossible, age at which to be a husband.
On both these days he had gone to school from force of habit, but on the Wednesday he was surprised by a letter. Though he had never seen Maisie's writing, the postmark said Nashua. Before tearing the envelope he had a premonition of her flight.
A telegram on Monday morning had bidden her come home at once, as her stepmother was dying. She had died. Till her father married again, which she supposed would be soon, she would have to care forthe four little brothers and sisters. That was all. On paper Maisie was laconic.
Since his mother's death no revolution in his inner life had upset the boy like this. The Tollivant experience had only left him a little hard and skeptical; that with the Quidmores had passed like the rain and the snow, scarcely affecting him. With Honey his need for affection had always been unfed, and for reasons he could not fathom. Maisie had made the give and take of life easy, natural. She had her limitations, her crude, and sometimes her cruel, insistences; but she liked him. He loved her. He was ready to say it now, because of the blank her loss had hollowed in his life. For the unformed, growing hot-blooded human thing to have nothing on which to spend itself is anguish. Sitting down at his deal table, he wrote to her out of a heart fuller and more passionate than poor Maisie could ever have understood.
All he had been planning in rebellion against fate he poured out now as devotion. He had meant to cut loose, to go to work, to live on nothing, to save his money, and be ready to marry her in a year or two. And yet, on second thoughts, if he went through college, their position in the end would be so much better that perhaps the original plan was the best one. He thought only of her, and of what would make her happiest. He loved her—loved her—loved her.
Maisie wrote back that she saw no harm in their being engaged, and she wouldn't press him for a ring till he felt himself able to give her one. For herself she didn't care, but if she told the girls she wasengaged to a fellow, and had no ring to corroborate her word, she wouldn't be believed. In case he ever felt equal to the purchase she was sending him the size in the circlet of thread inclosed.
Tom was heroic. He had never thought of a ring, and a ring would mean more money. Be it so! He would spend more money. He would spend more money if he mortgaged his whole future to procure it. Maisie should not be shamed among her friends in Nashua.
Giving all his free hours to wandering about and pricing rings, he found them less expensive than he feared. Maisie having once confided to him her longing for a diamond, a diamond he meant to make it if it cost him fifty dollars. But he found one for twenty, as big as a small pea, and flashing in the sunshine like a lighthouse. The young Jew who sold it assured him that it would have cost a hundred, except for a tiny flaw which only an expert could detect. On its reception Maisie was delighted. He felt himself almost a married man.
The rest of the winter went by peaceably. With Honey he declared a truce of God. He would go to college, and live up to all that had been planned; but Honey must look on his own self-sacrifice as of the nature of a loan which would be repaid. Honey was ready to promise anything, while, in the hope of getting through college in three years instead of four, Tom worked with increased zeal. Then, one day, when spring had come round, he stumbled on Guy and Hildred Ansley.
It was in Louisburg Square, as usual. Havingarrived from the south the night before, they were sailing soon for Europe.
"Rotten luck!" the fat boy complained. "Got to trail a tutor along too, so that I shan't fall down on the Harvard exam when it comes. Wish I was you."
"If you were Mr. Whitelaw, Guy," his sister reminded him, "you'd find something else to worry you. We all have our troubles, haven't we, Mr. Whitelaw?"
"She's got nothing to worry her," the brother protested. "If she was me, with mother scared all the time that I'll be too hot or too cold or too tired or too hungry, or that some damn thing or other'll make me sick...."
"All the same," Tom broke in, "it's something to have a mother to make a fuss."
The girl looked sympathetic. "You haven't, have you?"
"Oh, I get along."
"Guy says you live with a guardian."
"You may call him a guardian if you like, but the word is too big. You only have a guardian when you've something to guard, and I haven't anything."
"Yes, but how did you ever ...?"
Once more Tom said to himself, "It's the way she looks at you." He knew what she was trying to ask him, and in order to be open and aboveboard, he gave her the few main facts of his life. He did it briefly, hurriedly, throwing emphasis only on the point that, to keep him from becoming a State ward the second time, his stevedore friend had brought him to Boston and sent him to school.
"He must be an awfully good man!"
He was going to tell her that he was when the brother gave the talk another twist.
"What are you going to do in your holidays?"
"Work, if I can find a job."
"What kind of job?"
He explained that for the last two summers he had worked round the Quincy and Faneuil Hall markets, but that he had outgrown them. A two-fisted, he-man's job was what he would look for now, and had no doubt that he would get it.
"After you've left Harvard what are you going to be?"
"Banking's what I'd like best, but most likely I'll have to make it barbering. What are you going to be yourself?"
"Oh, I've got to be a corporation lawyer. My luck! Just because dad'll have the business to take me into."
"But what would you like better?"
The piggy face broke into one of its captivating grins. "Hanged ifIknow, unless it'd be an orphan and an only child."
The meeting was important because of what it led to. A few days later Tom heard the wheezy girlish voice calling behind him in the street: "Tom! Tom!"
He turned and walked back. During the winter the fat boy had expanded, not so much in height as in girth and jelliness. He came up, puffing from his run.
"Can you drive a car?"
Tom hesitated. "I don't know that you'd call it driving a car. I can drive—after a fashion. Mr. Quidmore used to let me run his Ford, when we were alone in it, and no one was looking. Since then I've sometimes driven the market delivery teams for a block or two, nothing much, just to see what it was like. I know I could pick it up with a few lessons. I'm a natural driver—a horse or anything. Why?"
"Because my old man said that if you could drive, he might help you get your summer's job."
"Where? What kind of job?"
"I don't know. He said that if you wanted to talk it over to come round to our house this evening at nine o'clock."
At nine that evening Tom was shown up into another of those rooms which marked the gulf between his own way of living and that of people like the Ansleys, and at the same time woke the atavistic pang. His impression was only a blurred one of comfort, color, shaded lights, and richness. From the many books he judged that it was what they would call the library, but any judgment was subconscious because the human presences came first. A man wearing a dinner jacket and scanning an evening paper was sunk into one deep armchair; in another a lady, demi-décolletée, was reading a book. It was his first intimation that people ever wore what he called "dress-clothes" when dining only with their families.
He was announced by Pilcher, who had led him upstairs. "This is the young man, sir."
Having reached something like friendly terms withthe son and daughter, Tom had expected from the parents the kind of courtesy shown to strangers when you shake hands with them and ask them to sit down. Mr. Ansley only let the paper drop to his knees with an "Oh!" in response to the butler, and looked up.
"You're the young fellow my son has spoken of. He tells me you can drive a car."
Repeating what he had already said to Guy as to his experience with cars, Tom expressed confidence in his ability to obtain a license, if it should become worth his while.
"It wouldn't be difficult driving such as you get in the crowded parts of a city. It would be chiefly station work, over country roads."
He explained himself further. In the New Hampshire summer colony where the Ansleys had their place, the residents were turning a large country house into an inn which would be like a club, or a club which would be like an inn. It would not be open to ordinary travelers, since ordinary travelers would bring in people whom they didn't want. The guests would be their own friends, duly invited or introduced. He, Mr. Ansley, was chairman of the motor-car committee, but as he was going to Europe he was taking up the matter in advance. On general grounds he would have preferred an older man and one with more experience, but the inn-club was a new undertaking and not too well financed. More experienced men would cost more money. For the station work they could afford but eighty dollars a month, with a room in the garage, and board. Moreover, the jobs they could offer being only for the summer,the promoters hoped that a few young men and women working for their own education might take advantage of the scheme.
Eighty dollars a month, with a room to himself, even if it had only been in a stable, and board in addition, glittered before Tom's eyes like Aladdin's treasure house. Having thanked Mr. Ansley for the kind suggestion, he assured him he could give satisfaction if taken on. All the chauffeurs who had let him have a few minutes at the steering-wheel had told him that he possessed the eye, the nerve, and the quickness which make a good driver, in addition to which he knew that he did himself.
"How old are you?"
It was a question Tom always found difficult to answer. He could remember when his birthday had been on the fifth of March; but his mother had told him that that had been Gracie's birthday, and had changed his own to September. Later she had shifted to May, to a day, so she told him, when all the nurses had had their children in the Park, and the lilacs had been in bloom. He had never asked her the year, not having come to reckoning in years before she was taken from him. Though latterly he had been putting his birthday in May, he now shifted back to March, so as to make himself older.
"I'm seventeen, sir."
Mrs. Ansley spoke for the first time. "He looks more than that, doesn't he?"
Tom turned to the lady who filled a large armchair with a person suggesting the quaking, flabbyconsistency of cornstarch pudding. "I suppose that's because I've knocked about so much."
"The hard school does give you experience, doesn't it, but it's a cruel school."
He remembered his promise to Guy, if ever he got the opportunity. "Boys can stand a good deal of cruelty, ma'am. Nine times out of ten it does them good."
"Still there's always a tenth case."
He smiled. "I think I ought to have made it ten times out of ten. I never saw the boy yet who wasn't all the better for fighting his way along."
Mrs. Ansley's mouth screwed itself up like Guy's when it looked as if he were going to cry. "Fight? Why, I think fighting's something horrid. Whycan'tboys treat each other like gentlemen?"
"I suppose, ma'am, because they're not gentlemen."
The cornstarch pudding stiffened to the firmness of ice-cream. "Excuse me! My boy couldn't be anything but a gentleman."
"He couldn't be anything but a sport. Heisa fighter, ma'am—when he gets the chance."
"Then I hope he won't often get it."
"But, Sunshine," Mr. Ansley intervened, "you don't make any allowance for differences in standards. You're a woman of forty-five. Guy's a boy of sixteen—he's practically seventeen, like Whitelaw here—your name is Whitelaw, isn't it?—and yet you want him to have the same tastes and ways as yourself."
"I don't want him to have brutal tastes and ways."
"It's a pretty brutal world, ma'am, and if he's goingto take his place he'll have to get used to being hammered and hammering back."
"Which is what I object to. If you train boys to be courteous with each other from the start...."
"They'll be quite ladylike when they get into the stock exchange or the prize ring. Look here, Sunshine! The country's over feminized as it is. It's run by women, or by men who think as women, or by men who're afraid of women. Congress is full of them; the courts are full of them; the churches—the churches above all!—are full of them; and you'd make it worse. If Guy hadn't the stuff in him that he has...."
Mrs. Ansley was more than ever like a cornstarch pudding, quivering and undulating, when she rose. "You make it very hard for me, Philip. I was going to ask Whitelaw, here, if when he's anywhere where Guy is—I know Guy will have to go among young men, of course—he'd keep an eye on him, and protect him."
"He doesn't need protection, ma'am. He can take his own part as easily as I can take mine. If there's a row he likes to be in it; and if he's licked he doesn't mind it. If he only had a chance...."
She raised her left hand palm outward, in a gesture of protest. "Thank you! I'm not asking advice as to my own son."
Sailing from the room with the circumambient dignity of ladies when they wore the crinoline, she left Tom with the crestfallen sense of presumption. Half expecting to be ordered from the room, he turned toward his host, who, however, simply reverted tothe subject of the summer. He told Tom where he could have lessons in driving, adding that he would charge them to club expenses, as he would the uniform Tom would have to wear. When Mr. Ansley picked up his paper the young man knew the interview was over. With a half-articulate, "Good-night, sir," to which there was no response, he turned and left the room.
The occasion left him with much to think of, chiefly on his own account. It marked his status more clearly than anything that had happened to him yet. He had not been shaken hands with; he had not been asked to sit down. He had not been greeted on arriving; his "good-night" had not been acknowledged when he went away. Mr. Ansley had called him Whitelaw, which was all very well; but when Mrs. Ansley did it, the use of the name was significant. This must be the way in which rich people treated their servants.
Here he had to reason with himself as to what he had been looking for. It was not for recognition on a footing of equality. Of course not! He had no objection to being a servant, since he needed the money. He objected to ... and yet it was not quite tangible. He didn't mind standing up; he didn't mind the absence of a greeting; he didn't mind any one thing in itself. He minded the combination of assumptions, all fusing into one big assumption that he was in essence their inferior. Having this assumption so strongly in their minds, they couldn't but betray it when they spoke to him.
With his tendency to think things out, he mulledfor the next few days over the question of inferiority. Why was one man inferior to another? What made him so? Did nature send him into the world as an inferior, or did the world turn him into an inferior after he had come into it? Did God have any part in it? Was it God's will that there should be a class system among mankind, with class animosities, class warfares?
Of the latter he was hearing a good deal. In Grove Street, with its squirming litters of idealistic Jews and Slavs, class warfare was much talked about. Sometimes Tom heard the talk himself; sometimes Honey brought in reports of it. It was a rare day, especially a rare night, when some wild-eyed apostle was not going up or down the hill with a gospel which would have made old Boston, only a few hundred yards away, shiver in its bed on hearing it. To a sturdy American like Tom, and a sturdy Englishman like Honey, these whispered prophecies and plans were no more than the twitter of sparrows going to roost. But now that the boy was working toward man's estate, and had always, within his recollection, been treated as an inferior, he found himself wondering on what principle the treatment had been based. He would listen more attentively when the Jew tailor next door to Mrs. Danker began again, as he had so often, to set forth his arguments in favor of dragging the upper classes down. He would listen when Honey cursed the lor of proputty. He had long been asking himself if in some obscure depth of Honey's obscure intelligence there might not be a glimmer of a great big thing that was Right.
He had reached the age, which generally comes a little before the twenties, when the Right and Wrong of things puzzled and disturbed him. No longer able to accept Rights and Wrongs on somebody else's verdict, he was without a test or a standard of his own. He began to wander among churches. Here, he had heard, all these questions had been long ago threshed out, and the answers reduced to formulæ.
His range was wide, Hebrew, Catholic, Protestant. For the most part the services bewildered him. He couldn't make out why they were services, or what they were serving. The sermons he found platitudinous. They told him what in the main he knew already, and said little or nothing of the great fundamental things with which his mind had been intermittently busy ever since the days when he used to talk them over with Bertie Tollivant.
But one new interest he drew from them. The fragments of the gospels he heard read from altar or lectern or pulpit roused his curiosity. Passages were familiar from having learned them at the knee, so to speak, of Mrs. Tollivant. But they had been incoherent, without introduction or sequence. He was surprised to find how little he knew of the most dominant character in history.
On his way home one day he passed a shop given to the sale of Bibles. Deciding to buy a cheap New Testament, he was advised by the salesman to take a modern translation. That night, after he had finished his lessons, and Honey was asleep, he opened it.
It opened at a page of St. Luke. Turning to the beginning of that gospel, he started to read it through.He read avidly, charmed, amazed, appeased, and pacified. When he came to an incident bearing on himself he stopped.
"Now one of the Pharisees repeatedly invited Him to a meal at his house. So He entered the house and reclined at the table. And there was a woman in the town who was a notorious sinner. Having learnt that Jesus was at table in the Pharisee's house she brought a flask of perfume, and standing behind, close to His feet, weeping, began to wet His feet with her tears; and with her hair she wiped the tears away again, while she lovingly kissed His feet, and poured the perfume over them.
"Noticing this the Pharisee, His host, said to himself:
"'This man, if He were really a prophet, would know who and what sort of person this is who is touching Him, for she is an immoral woman.'
"In answer to his thoughts Jesus said to him: 'Simon, I have a word to say to you.'
"'Rabbi, say on,' he replied.
"'Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You gave me no water for my feet; but she has made my feet wet with her tears, and then wiped the tears away with her hair. No kiss did you give me; but she, from the moment I came in, has not left off tenderly kissing my feet. No oil did you pour even on my head; but she has poured perfume on my feet. This is the reason why I tell you that her sins—hermanysins—are forgiven—because she has loved much."
He shut the book with something of a bang. "Sothey used to do that sort of thing even then!... The water for the feet, and the kiss, and the oil, must have corresponded to our shaking hands and asking people to sit down.... And they wouldn't show Him the courtesy.... He was their inferior.... I wonder if He minded it.... It looks as if He did because of the way He had it in His mind, and referred to it.... If the woman hadn't turned up He would probably not have referred to it at all.... He would have kept it to Himself ... without resentment.... The little disdains of little people were too petty for Him to resent.... He could only be hurt by them ... but on their account."
He sat late into the night, thinking, thinking. Suddenly he thumped the table, and sprang up. "Iwon'tresent it. They're good people in their way. They don't mean any unkindness. It's only that they think like everybody else. Honey would call them orthodocks. They're courteous among themselves; they only don't know how far courtesy can be made to go. They're—they're little. I'll be big—like Him."
XXVIII
Theresolution helped him through the summer. It was a pleasant summer, and yet a trying one. It was the first time he had ever done work of which the essence lay in satisfying individuals. In his market jobs the job had been the thing. Even if done at somebody's order, it was judged by its success, or by its lack of it. His work at the inn-club brought him hourly into contact with men and women to whom it was his duty to be specially, and outwardly deferential. He sprang to open the door for them when they entered or left the car; he touched his hat to them whenever they gave him an order. His bearing, his manner of address, formed a part of his equipment only second to his capacity to drive.
To this he had no objection. It only seemed odd that while it was his business to be courteous to others it was nobody's business to be courteous to him. Some people were. They used toward him those little formalities of "Please" and "Thank you" which were a matter of course toward one another. They didn't command; they requested. Others, on the contrary, never requested. If their nerves or their digestions were not in good order, they felt at liberty to call him a damn fool, or if they were ladies, to find fault foolishly. Whatever the injustice, it was his part to keep himself schooled to the apologetic attitude, ready to be held in the wrong when he knew he was in the right. Though he had never heard of the English principle that you may be rude if you choose to your equals, but never rude to those in a position lower than your own, he felt its force instinctively. His humble place in the world's economy entitled him to a courtesy which few people thought it worth their while to show.
Apart from this he had nothing to complain of. He made good money, as the phrase went, his wages augmented by his tips. He took his tips without shame, since he did much to please his clients beyond what he was paid for. His relation with them being personal, he could see well enough that only in tips could they make him any recognition. With the staff in the house he got on very well, especially with the waitresses, all six of them girls working their way through Radcliffe, Wellesley, or Vassar. They chaffed him in an easy-going way, one of them calling him her Hercules, another her Charlemagne because of his height, while to a third he was her Siegfried. When he had no work in the evenings, and their dining-room duties were over, he took them for drives among the mountains. Writing to Honey, he said that what with the air, the food, the fun, and the outdoor life, he was never before in such splendid shape.
Honey was his one anxiety, though an anxiety which troubled him only now and then.
"Go to it, lad," had been his response when Tom had told him of Mr. Ansley's proposition. "With eighty dollars a month for all summer, and yer keep throwed in, yer ought to save two hundred."
"You're sure you won't be lonesome, Honey?"
Honey made a scornful exclamation. "Lord love yer, Kid, if I was ever goin' to be lonesome I'd 'a begun before now. Lonesome! Me! That's a good 'un!"
And yet on the Sunday of his departure Tom noticed a forced strain in Honey's gayety. It was a Sunday because Tom was to drive the car up to New Hampshire in the afternoon to begin his first week on the Monday. Honey was in clamorous spirits, right up to an hour before the boy left.
Then he seemed to go flat. Pump up his humor as he would, it had no zest in it. When it came to the last handshake he grinned feebly, but couldn't, or didn't, speak. Tom drove away with a question in his mind as to whether or not, in Honey's professions of a steeled heart, there was not some bravado.
In driving through Nashua he saw Maisie. It had been agreed that she should meet him by the roadside, at the end of the town toward Lowell, and go on with him till he struck the country again. They not only did this, but got out at a druggist's to spend a half hour over ice-cream sodas.
Picking up the dropped threads of intercourse was not so easy as they had expected. It was hard for Tom to make himself believe that in this pretty little thing, all in white with pink roses in her hat, he was talking to his future wife. Since the fervor of his first love letter there had been a slight shift in his point of view. Without being able to locate the change, he felt that the new interests—the car, the inn-club, the variety of experience—had to some smalldegree crowded Maisie out. She was not quite so essential as she had seemed on the afternoon when he had learned of her departure. Neither was she quite so pretty. He thought with a pang that Honey's predictions might be coming true. Because they might be coming true, his pity was so great that he told her she was looking lovelier than ever.
"Gee, that's something," Maisie accepted, complacently. "With four brats to look after, and all the cooking and washing, and everything—if my father don't marry again soon I'll pass away." She glanced at his chauffeur's uniform. "You look swell."
He felt swell, and told her so. He told her of his wages, of the economies he hoped to make.
"Gee, and you talk of goin' to college, a fellow that can pull in all that money just by bein' a shofer. Why, if you were to go on bein' a shofer we could get married as soon as I got the family off my hands."
He explained to her that it was not the present, but the future for which he was working. A chauffeur had only a chauffeur's possibilities, whereas a man with an education....
"Just my luck to get engaged to a nut," Maisie commented, with forced resignation. "Gee, I got to laff."
Some half dozen times that summer, when errands took him to Boston, they met in the same way. Growing more accustomed to their new relation to each other, he also grew more tender as he realized her limitations and domestic cares. With his first month's wages in his hand, he could bring her little presents on each return from Boston, so helping out her never-failing joy in the flash of her big diamond. That at least she had, when every other blessing was put off to a vague future.
In August, the Ansleys came flying back, driven by the war. It had caught them at Munich, where their French chauffeur, Pierre, had been interned as a prisoner. While taking driving lessons Tom had made Pierre's acquaintance, and that he should now be a prisoner in Germany made the war a reality. For the first few weeks it had been like a battle among giants in the clouds; now it came down to earth as a convulsion among men.
The Ansleys had come to the inn-club because their own house was closed. With Guy and Hildred Tom found his relations changed by the fact that he was a chauffeur. Guy talked to him freely enough, as one young fellow to another, but Hildred had plainly received a hint to mark the distance between them. If she passed him in the grounds, or if he opened the car door for her, she gave him a faint, self-conscious smile, but never spoke to him. Mrs. Ansley freely used the car and him, always calling him Whitelaw.
Philip Ansley was much preoccupied by the international situation. A small, dry man of slightly Mongolian features, and a skin which looked like a parchment lampshade tinted with a little rose, he had made a specialty of international law as it affected the great corporations. New York and Washington both had need of him. When he couldn't go there, those who wished his opinion came to him. Not a little of Tom's work lay in driving him to Keene, the stationfor New York, to meet the important men seeking his advice. Thus it happened that Tom brought over from Keene, so late one night that he got no more than a dim glimpse of the visitor, the man who was to leave on him the most disturbing impression of the summer.
Having delivered his charge at the inn-club door, he drove his car to the garage, climbed the stairs to his room, and turned into bed. Before six next morning he was up for a plunge in the lake, this being the only hour he could count on as his own.
It was one of those windless mornings late in summer which bring the first hint of fall. The lake was so still that each throw of his arms was like the smashing of a vast metallic mirror. Only a metallic mirror could have had this shining dullness, faintly iridescent, hardly catching the rays of the newly risen sun. Not leaden enough for night, nor silvery enough for day, it kept the aloofness from man, as well as from Nature's smaller blandishments, of its mighty companion, Monadnock. It was an awesome lake, beautiful, withdrawn, because it gave back the mountain's awesomeness, beauty, and remoteness.
Tom's thrust, as he paddled the water behind him, broke for no more than a few seconds that which at once reformed itself. You would have said that the darting of his body, straight as a fish's, clave the water as a bird cleaves the air. After he had gone there was hardly a ripple to tell that he had passed. Built to be a swimmer, loose limbed, loose muscled, and not too bonily spare, he breathed as a swimmer, deeply, gently, without spluttering or loss of his control. In the limpid medium through which another might have sunk like a stone he had that sense of natural support which helps man to his dominion. Now on his right side, now on his left, he could skim like an arrow to its mark for the simple reason that he knew he could.
He turned over on his back and floated. The quiet was that of a world which might never have known the velocity of wind, the ferocity of war. Above him the inviolate sky; around him the mountains nearly as inviolate! And everywhere the living stillness, vibrating, dramatic, with which Nature alone can quicken a dead calm!
Turning over again, he was abandoning the crawl for the forearm stroke, to make his way back to the bathing cabins, when over the water came a long "Ahoy!" Nearer the shore, and a little abeam, there was another man swimming toward him. Tom gave back an "Ahoy!" and made in the direction of the stranger. It was perhaps another chauffeur. Even if it were a resident, or some resident's guest, the informality of sport would put them on a level.
The newcomer had the sun behind him; Tom had it on his face. His features were, therefore, the first to become visible. A strong voice called out, in a tone of astonishment:
"Why, Tad! What areyoudoing up here in New Hampshire?"
Tom laughed. "Tad—nothing! I'm Tom!"
The other came nearer. "Tom, are you? Excuse me! Took you for my son."
"Sorry I'm not," Tom laughed again. "Somebody else's."
Coming abreast, they headed toward shore. Each face was turned toward the other. Adopting his companion's stroke, Tom adjusted himself to his pace. Though conversation was not easy, the one found it possible to ask questions, the other to answer them.
"Look like my son. What's your name?"
"Whitelaw."
A light came into the eyes, and went out again. "Where do you live?"
"Boston."
"Lived there all your life?"
"Only for the last three years or so."
"Where'd you live before that?"
"New York some of the time."
"Where were you born?"
"The Bronx."
"What was your father's name?"
"Theodore Whitelaw."
There was again that spark in the eyes, flashing and then dying out. "How did he get that name?"
"Don't know. Just a name. Suppose his mother gave it to him."
"Lots of Theodore Whitelaws. Have come across two or three. Like the Colin Campbells and Howard Smiths you run into everywhere. What did your father do?"
"Never heard. Died when I was a kid." Tom felt entitled to ask a question on his own side. "What do you want to know for?"
The other seemed on his guard. "Oh, nothing!Was just—was just struck by the resemblance to—to my boy."
The swerve which took them away from each other was as slight as that which a ship gets from her rudder. Tom continued to play round in the water till he saw the older man reach the bathing cabins, dress, and go away.
That afternoon he was told to drive back to Keene both Mr. Ansley and the guest whom he, Tom, had brought over on the previous evening. As the latter came out to enter the car it was easy to recognize the swimmer of the morning.
Tom held the door open, his hand to his cap. The gentleman gave him a swift, keen look.
"Oh, so this is what you do!"
"Yes, sir; this is what I do. Mr. Ansley got me the job."
"Young fellow whom Guy has befriended," Mr. Ansley explained, as he took his place beside his friend.
But in the Pullman, when Tom had carried in the gentleman's valise, there was another minute in which they were alone. The car was nearly empty; there were still some five minutes before the departure of the train. While the colored porter took the suitcase the traveler turned to Tom. He was a tall man, straight and flexible like Tom himself, but a little heavier.
"How old are you?"
"Seventeen, sir."
A shadow flew across the face. "Tad is seventeen, too. That settles any—" Without stating what wassettled by this coincidence of ages, he went on with his quick, peremptory questions. "What do you do when you leave here?"
"I go back for my last year in the Latin School in Boston."
"And then?"
"I go to Harvard."
"Putting yourself through?"
"Only partly, sir."
"Friends?"
"Yes, sir."
The questions ceased. The face, which even a boy like Tom could see to be that of a strong man who must have suffered terribly, grew pensive. When the eyes were bent toward the floor Tom took note of a pair of bushy, outstanding, horizontal eyebrows, oddly like his own.
The reverie ended abruptly. Some thought seemed to be dismissed. It seemed to be dismissed with both decision and relief. But the man held out his hand.
"Good-by."
"Good-by, sir."
It was not the questions, nor the interest, it was the last little act of farewell that gave Tom a glowing feeling in the heart as he went back to his car and Mr. Ansley.
XXIX
Itwas late that evening before Tom found an opportunity to ask Miss Padley, who kept what the inn-club knew as the office, the name of the guest who had questioned him so closely. Miss Padley was a red-haired, freckled girl, putting herself through Radcliffe. Unused to clerical work, she was tired. When Tom put his query she gazed up at him vacantly, before she could collect her wits.
"The name of the gentleman who left this afternoon?" She called to Ella, one of the waitresses, in her second year at Wellesley. "What was it, Ella? I forget."
As the house was closing for the night some informality was possible. Ella sauntered up.
"What was what?"
Tom's question was repeated.
"Oh, that was the great Henry T. Whitelaw. Big banker. Partner in Meek and Brokenshire's. They say that he and a few other bankers could stop the war if they liked, by holding back the cash. Don't believe it. War's too big. And, say! He was the father of that Whitelaw baby there used to be all the talk about."
Miss Padley looked up, her cheek resting on her hand. "You don't say! Gee, I wish I'd known that. I'd 'a looked at him a little closer." She turned hertired greenish eyes toward Tom. "Your name is Whitelaw, too, isn't it?"
He grinned nervously. "My name is Whitelaw, too, only, like the lady's maid whose name was Shakespeare but was no relation to the play-actor of that name, I don't belong to the banking branch of the family."
Ella exclaimed, as one who makes a discovery. "But, Siegfried, you look as if you did. Doesn't he, Blanche? Look at his eyebrows. They're just like the banker man's."
"Oh, I've looked at them often enough," Miss Padley returned, wearily. "Got his mustaches stuck on in the wrong place. I'm off."
Yawning, she shut her ledger, closed an open drawer, and rose. But Ella, a dark little thing, kept her snappy black eyes on Tom.
"You do look like him, Siegfried. I'd put in a claim if I were you. I'm single, you know, and I've always admired you. Think of the romance it would make if the Whitelaw baby took home as his bride a poor but honest working girl!"
Dodging Ella's chaff, Tom escaped to the garage. It was queer how the Whitelaw baby haunted him. Honey!—Ella!—and the Whitelaw baby's own father!
But the haunting stopped. Neither Ella nor Miss Padley took it as more than a passing pleasantry, forgotten with the morning. The tall man who had asked him questions never came back again. The rest of the summer went by with but one little incident to remain in his memory.
It was a very little incident. Walking one day in the road that ran round the lake he came face to face with Hildred Ansley. She had grown since the previous winter, a little in height, and more in an indefinable development. She was fifteen now; but, always older than her age, she was more like seventeen or eighteen. Her formal manner, her decided mind, her "grown-up" choice of words, made her already something of that finished entity for which we have only the word lady. Ella had said of her that at twenty she would look like forty, and at forty continue to look like twenty. Tom thought that this might be true—an early fullness of womanhood, but a long one.
She had been playing tennis, and swung her racket as she came along. He was sorry for this direct encounter, since she might find it awkward; but when she waved her racket to him, it was clear that she did not. She felt perhaps the more independent, released from her mother's supervision and the inn. Her smile, something in her way of pausing in the road, an ease of manner beyond analysis, put them both on the plane on which their acquaintance had begun. The slanting yellowish-brown eyes together with the faint glimmer of a smile heightened that air of mystery which had always made her different from other girls.
"How have you been getting along?"
He said he had been doing very well.
"How have you liked the job?"
"Fine! Everybody's been nice to me—"
"Everybody likes you. All the same, I hope, if they ask you to come back next year, that—you won't."
"Why not?"
"Oh, just—because!"
Slipping away, she left him with the summer's second memory. She hoped he wouldn't take the place again—because! Because—what? Could she have meant what he thought she must have meant? Was it possible that she didn't like to see him in a situation something like a servant's? Though he never again, during all the rest of the summer, had so much speech with her alone, it gave him a hint to turn over in his mind.
Driving the car back to Boston, after the inn-club had closed, he saw Maisie for the last time that year. Uncertain of his hours, he had been unable to arrange to have her meet him, and so looked her up in her home. A small wooden house, once stained a dark red, weather-worn now to a reddish-dun, it stood on the outskirts of the town. In a weedy back-yard, redeemed from ugliness by the flaming of a maple tree, Maisie was pinning newly washed clothes to a clothes-line stretched between the back door and a post. Two children, a boy of six and a girl of eight, were tumbling about with a pup. At sound of the stopping of the car in the roadway in front of the house Maisie turned, a clothes-pin held lengthwise in her mouth. Even with her sleeves rolled up and her hair in wisps, she couldn't be anything but pretty.
She came and sat beside him in the car, the children and the pup staring up at them in wonder.
"Gee, I wish he'd get married; but I daresay he won't for ever so long. Married to the bottle, that's what he is. It was six years after my mother diedbefore he took on the last one. That's what makes me so much older than the four kids. All the same I'd beat it if you'd take a shofer's job and settle down. I'm not bound to stay here and make myself a slave."
It was the burden of all Maisie's reasoning, and he had to admit its justice. He was asking her to wait a long four years before he could give her a home. It would have been more preposterous than it was if among poor people, among poor young people especially, a long courtship, with marriage as a vague fulfillment, was not general. Any such man as she was likely to get would have to toil and save, and save and toil, before he could pay for the few sticks of furniture they would need to set up housekeeping. Never having thought of anything else, she was the more patient now; but patient with a strain of rebellion against Tom's whim for education.
She cried when he left her; he almost cried himself, from a sense of his impotence to take her at once from a life of drudgery. The degree to which he loved her seemed to be secondary now to her helpless need of him. True, he could get a job as chauffeur and make a hundred dollars a month to begin with. To Maisie that would be riches; but a hundred and fifty a month would then become his lifelong limit and ambition. Even to save Maisie now he couldn't bring himself to sacrifice not merely his future but her own. Once he was "through college," it seemed to him that the treasures of the world would lie open.
Arrived in Grove Street, he found one new condition which made his return easier. Honey, who, for the sake of economy, had occupied a hall-bedroomthrough the summer, had reserved another, on the floor above, for Tom. The relief from the sharing of one big room amounted to a sense of luxury.
On the other hand, Honey, for the first time since Tom had known him, was moody and tired. He was not ill; he was only less cast-iron than he used to be. He found it harder to go to work in the morning; he was more spent when he came back at night, as if some inner impulse of virility was wearing itself out. The war worried him. The fact that old England had met a foe whom she couldn't walk over at once disturbed his ideas as to the way in which the foundations of the world had been laid.
"Anything can happen now, kid," he declared, in discussing the English retreat from Mons. "Haven't felt so bad since the bloody cop give me the whack with his club what put out me eye. If Englishmen has to turn tail before Germans, well, what next?"
But to Tom's suggestions that he should go to Canada and enlist in the British army Honey was as stone. "You're too young. Y'ain't got yer growth. I don't care what no one says. War is for men. Yer first business, and yer last business, and yer only business, is yer eddication."
It must be admitted that Tom agreed with him. He had no longing to go to war. Europe was far away while life was near. Education, Maisie, the future, had the first claim on him. It began to occur to him that even Honey had a claim on him, now that he was not so vigorous as he used to be.
There were other interests to make war remote. On returning to town, after a summer amid the spaciousness, beauty, and comfort which the few could give themselves, he was oppressed by the privations of the many. Never before had he thought of them. He had taken Grove Street for granted. He had taken it for granted that life was hard and crowded and bitter and cold and ugly, and couldn't be anything else. Now he had seen for himself that it could be easy and beautiful and healthy. True, he had always known that there were rich people as well as poor people; but never before had he been close enough to the rich to see their luxuries in detail. The contrasts in the human scheme of things having thus come home to him he was moved to a distressed wondering.
What brought these differences about? If all the rich were industrious and good, while all the poor were idle and extravagant, he could have understood it better. But it wasn't so. The rich were often idle and extravagant, and didn't suffer. The poor were nearly always industrious—they couldn't be anything else—and were as good as they had leisure to be, but suffered from something all the time. How could this injustice be endured? What was to be done about it? Wasn't it everybody's duty to try to right such a wrong?
Because he had only now become aware of it he supposed that nobody but the Slav and Jewish agitators had been aware of it before. Louisburg Square, and all that element in the world which Louisburg Square represented, could never have thought of it. If it had, it couldn't have slept at night in its bed. That it should lie snug and soft and warm while all the rest of the world—at least a good three-fourths—lay cold and hard and hungry, must be out of the question. If the rich people only knew! It was strange that someone hadn't told them. What were the newspapers and the governments and the churches doing that they weren't ringing with protests against this fundamental evil?
More than ever Honey's rebellion against the lor of proputty seemed to him based on some principle he couldn't trace. Honey was doubtless all wrong; and yet the other thing was just as wrong as Honey. He started him talking on the subject as they strolled to their dinner that evening.
"Seems as if this 'ere old human race didn't have no spunk. Yer can put anything over on them, and they'll 'ardly lift a kick. It's like as if they was hypnertized. Them as has got everything is hypnertized into thinkin' they've a right to it; and them as have got nothink'll let theirselves believe as nothink is all that belongs to 'em. Comes o' most o' the world bein' orthodocks. Lord love yer, I'd rather think for meself if it landed me ten months out'n every twelve in jail, than have two thousand a year and yet be an old tabby-orthodock what never had a mind."
They were seated at the table in Mrs. Turtle's basement dining-room, when, looking up and down the double row of guests, Honey whispered, "Tabby-orthodocks—all of 'em."
At his sixteen or eighteen fellow-mealers Tom looked with a new vision. With the aid of Honey's epithet he could class them. Mostly men, they sat bowed, silent, futile, gulping down their coarse food with no pretense at softening the animal processes ofeating. These, too, he had hitherto taken for granted. In all the months they had "mealed" at Mrs. Turtle's—in the years they had "mealed" at similar establishments in Grove Street—he had looked on them, and on others of their kind, as the norm of humanity. Now he saw something wrong in them, without knowing what it was.
"What's the matter with them?" he asked of Honey, as they went back across Grove Street to Mrs. Danker's.
Honey's reply was standardized. "Bein' orthodocks. Not thinkin' for theirselves. Not usin' the mind as Gord give 'em. Believin' what other blokes told 'em, and stoppin' at that. I say, Kiddy! Don't yer never go for to forget that yer'll get farther in the world by bein' wrong the way yer thinks yerself than by bein' right the way some other feller tells yer."
Having reached their own house they stood, each with a foot on the doorstep, while Tom smoked a cigarette and Honey enlarged on his philosophy.
"I don't believe as Gord put us into this world to be right not 'arf so much as what He done it so as we'd find out for ourselves what's right and what's wrong. One right thing as yer've found out for yerself'll make yer more of a man than fifty as yer've took on trust. Look at 'em in there!" He nodded backward toward Mrs. Turtle's. "They've all took everythink on trust, and see what it's made of 'em. Whoever says, 'I'm an orthodock, and I'm goin' to live and die an orthodock,' is like the guy in the Bible as was bound 'and and foot with grave-clothes. Mygenius was always for thinkin' things out for meself; and look at me to-day!"
It was another discovery to Tom that Honey felt proud and happy in his accomplishment. Honey to Tom was a machine for doing heavy work. He was a drudge, and a dray-horse. He was shut out from the higher, the more spiritual activities. But here was Honey himself content, and in a measure exultant.
"Been wrong in a lot o' things I have; but I've found it out for meself. I ain't sorry for what I've did. It's learned me. There ain't a old jug I've been in, in England or the State o' New York, that didn't learn me somethink. I see now that I was wrong. But I see, too, that them as tried and sentenced me wasn't right. When they repents of the sins what their lors and gover'ments and churches has committed against this old world, I'll repent o' the sins I've committed against them."
This ability to stand alone, mentally at least, against all religion and society, was, as Tom saw it, the secret of Honey's independence. He might have been a rogue, a burglar, a convict; and yet he was a man, as the orthodocks at Mrs. Turtle's were not, and never had been, men. Having allowed themselves to be hammered into subjection by what Honey called lors, gover'ments, and churches, in subjection they had been trapped, and never could get out again. There was something about Honey that was strong and free.
XXX
Tomake himself strong and free was Tom Whitelaw's ruling motive through the winter which preceded his going to Harvard. He must be a man, not merely in physical vigor, but in mental independence. Convinced that he was in what he called a rotten world, a world of rotten customs built on a rotten foundation, he saw it as a task to learn to pick his way amid the rottenness. To rebel, but keep his rebellion as steam with which to drive his engine, not as something to let off in futile raging against established convictions, was a hint of Honey's by which he profited.