DOGGONIT, I liked that cap. It was a good one,” said Father, in a tone of settled melancholy.
“Well, it wa’n’t much of a cap,” said Mother, “but I do know how you feel.”
They sat in their tremendously varnished and steam-heated room on the second floor of daughter Lulu’s house, and found some occupation in being gloomy. For ten days now they had been her guests. Lulu had received them with bright excitement and announced that they needn’t ever do any more work, and were ever so welcome—and then she had started to reform them. It may seem a mystery as to why a woman whose soul was composed of vinegar and chicken feathers, as was Lulu Appleby Hartwig’s, should have wanted her parents to stay with her. Perhaps she liked them. One does find such anomalies. Anyway, she condescendingly bought them new hats. And her husband, a large, heavy-bloodedman, made lumbering jokes at their expense, and expected them to laugh.
“The old boy still likes to play the mouth-organ—nothing like these old codgers for thinking they’re still kids,” Mr. Hartwig puffed at dinner, then banged his fist and laughed rollingly. He seemed surprised when Father merely flushed and tightened his tie. For all his gross body, Mr. Hartwig was sensitive—so sensitive that he was hurt when people didn’t see the humor of his little sallies.
The Hartwigs’ modest residence was the last word in cement and small useless side-tables and all modern inconveniences. The furnace heat made you sneeze, and the chairs, which were large and tufted, creaked. In the dining-room was an electrolier made of seven kinds of inimical colored glass, and a plate-rack from which were hung department-store steins. On the parlor table was a kodak album with views of Harry in every stage of absurdity. There was a small car which Mr. Hartwig drove himself. And there was a bright, easy, incredibly dull social life; neighbors who went out to the country club to watch the tennis in summer, and played “five hundred” every Saturday evening in the winter.
Like a vast proportion of the inhabitants of that lonely city, New York, the Applebys were unused to society. It is hard to tell which afflicted them more—sitting all day in their immaculate plastered and varnished room with nothing useful to do or being dragged into the midst of chattering neighbors who treated them respectfully, as though they were old.
Mother begged daughter to be permitted to dust or make beds; Father suggested that he might rake the lawn. But Lulu waggled her stringy forefinger at them and bubbled, “No, no! What would the neighbors think? Don’t you suppose that we can afford to have you dear old people take a rest? Why, Harris would be awfully angry if he saw you out puttering around, Father. No, you just sit and have a good rest.”
And then, when they had composed to a spurious sort of rest the hands that were aching for activity, the Applebys would be dragged out, taken to teas, shown off, with their well-set-up backs and handsome heads, as Lulu’s aristocratic parents.
“My father has been a prominent business man in New York for many years, you know,” she would confide to neighbors.
While the prominent business man longed to be sitting on a foolish stool trying shoes on a fussy old lady.
But what could he do? In actual cash Mother and he had less than seven dollars in the world.
By the end of two weeks Father and Mother were slowly going mad with the quiet of their room, and Lulu was getting a little tired of her experiment in having a visible parental background. She began to let Mother do the sock-darning—huge uninteresting piles of Harris Hartwig’s faded mustard-colored cotton socks, and she snapped at Father when he was restlessly prowling about the house, “My head aches so, I’m sure it’s going to be a sick headache, and I do think you might let me have a nap instead of tramping and tramping till my nerves get so frazzled that I could just shriek.”
With this slight damming of her flowing fount of filial love, Lulu combined a desire to have them appear as features at a musicale she was to give, come Saturday evening. Mother was to be in a “dear ducky lace cap” and Father in a frilled shirt and a long-tailed coat which Harris Hartwig had once worn in theatricals, the two of them presiding at the refreshments table.
“Like a prize Persian cat and a pet monkey,” Father said.
Against this indignity they frettingly rebelled. Father snarled, “Good Lord! I’m not much older than your precious dumpling of a Harris.” It was the snarl of a caged animal. Lulu had them; she merely felt misunderstood when they protested.
Friday morning. The musicale was coming next day, and Lulu had already rehearsed them in their position as refreshment ornaments. Father had boldly refused to wear the nice, good frilled shirt and “movie-actor coat” during the rehearsal.
“Very well,” said Lulu, “but you will to-morrow evening.”
Father wasn’t sure whether Lulu would use an ax or chloroform or tears on him, but he was gloomily certain that she would have him in the shameless garments on Saturday evening.
There was a letter for him on the ten o’clock morning mail. He didn’t receive many letters—one a month from Joe Tubbs relating diverting scandal about perfectly respectable neighbors, or an occasional note from Cousin George Henry of Stamford. Lulu was acutely curious regarding it; she almost smelled it, with that quiveringsharp-pointed nose of hers that could tell for hours afterward whether Father had been smoking “those nasty, undignified little cigarettes—why don’t you smoke the handsome brier pipe that Harris gave you?” She brightly commented that the letter was from Boston. But Father didn’t follow her lead. He defensively tucked the letter in his inside coat pocket and trotted up-stairs to read it to Mother.
It was from the Boston agency in whose hands he had left the disposal of the tea-room lease and of their furniture. The agency had, they wrote, managed to break the lease, and they had disposed of the tables and chairs and some of the china. They inclosed a check for twenty-eight dollars.
With the six dollars and eighty-three cents left from their capital the Applebys were the possessors of almost thirty-five dollars!
“Gee! if we only had two or three times that amount we could run away and start again in New York, and not let Lulu make us over into a darned old elderly couple!” Father exulted.
“Yes,” sighed Mother. “You know and I know what a fine, sweet, womanly woman Luluhas become, but I do wish she hadn’t gone and set her heart on my wearing that lace cap. My lands! makes me feel so old I just don’t know myself.”
“And me with a granddaddy outfit! Why, I never will dast to go out on the streets again,” complained Father. “I never did hear of such a thing before; they making us old, and we begging for a chance to be young, and sitting here and sitting here, and—”
He looked about their room, from the broad window with its resolutely stiff starched net curtains to the very new bureau and the brass bed that looked as though no one had ever dared to sleep in it. He kicked at one of the dollar-ninety-eight-cent rugs and glared at the expanse of smirkingly clean plaster, decorated with an English sporting print composed by an artist who was neither English nor sporting.
“Say,” continued Father, “I don’t like this room. It’s too—clean. I don’t dast to wear slippers in it.”
“Why, Father, it’s a nice room!” marveled Mother. Then, with an outburst of frankness: “Neither do I! It feels like I never could loosen my stays and read the funnies in thelast night’s paper. Oh, you needn’t to look at me so! Many’s the time I did that when you were away at the store and I didn’t have to sit up and look respectable.”
They laughed, both of them, with tender tears. He came to sit on the arm of her rocker and pat her hand.
He said, quietly, very quietly indeed: “Mother, we’re getting to be real adventurous. Nothing very old about us, I guess! We’re going to sneak right smack out of this house, this very day, and run away to New York, and I’ll get a job and we’ll stick right there in little old New York for the rest of our lives, so help me Bob!”
“Yes,” she said, “yes. I’d like to. But what—uh—what lie could we tell Lulu?”
“Why, Mother, how you talk! Do you know what St. Peter would say to you if he heard you talk about lying? He’d up and jam his halo down over his ears and he’d say, ‘You can’t come in here, Sarah Jane Appleby. You’re a liar. And you know what you can do, don’t you? You can go—’”
“Now you see here, Seth Appleby, I just won’t have you cursing and swearing and being sacrilegious. I sh’d think you’d beashamed, man of your age that ought to know better, acting up like a young smarty and cursing and swearing and—”
“And cursing and swearing. Don’t forget to put that in, Mother.”
He was delighted. It was the first time since September that Mother had scolded him. She was coming back to life again. He tickled her under the chin till she slapped viciously at his finger, then he crowed like a rooster till a shame-faced smile chased away her lively old-dame wrath and, shaking her head with a pretense of disgust, she said, comfortably, “I declare I never did see such a man, not in all my born days.” She let him take her hand again, and their expression, half smiles, half musing, was like the sunshine of a calm late afternoon. They were happy. For they knew that, as soon as they should have debated and worried and planned and fussed in a manner appropriate to the great event, they would run away from the overheated respectability of “Lulu’s pretty little home.”
With enough agony of literary effort to have composed a war article and a column of Household Hints, they sinfully devised a letter for Lulu in which they stated that “a dear oldfriend, you would not remember him as we have met him since you were married, writes us from Boston that he is sick, and we are going to him, we are stealing out this way because we don’t want you to trouble about it, with party coming on to-morrow even’g, know you are so kind you would take all sort of trouble if knew we were going, so just slip away & hope party is great success, Your loving Father & Mother. P.S., May not be back for some time as friend may need us.”
In the wreck of their fortunes the Applebys had lost their own furniture, down to the last beloved picture. They had only a suit-case and a steamer-trunk, the highly modern steamer-trunk which Father had once bought for a vacation trip to West Skipsit and the Tubbses. But it required man[oe]uvering to get even this light baggage to the station.
Mother went nosing about till she discovered that Lulu was going calling that afternoon. Father hired an expressman, who was to be ready to come the instant he telephoned.
Lulu went out at three, and Father stole down-stairs to telephone. But the maid had taken a fancy to dusting the living-room, where the telephone lived. In all her domestic historythe maid had never done that before—attest many sarcastic remarks of Lulu.
They had planned to catch the four-o’clock train for New York. Half-past three now. The maid was polishing the silver in the dining-room, which was separated from the living-room only by an open arch. Father dared not telephone, lest she instantly send for Lulu.
Mother tiptoed down and the runaways plotted in whispers. Upon which conspiracy Lulu brightly entered through the front door.
For a second Father had a wild, courageous desire to do the natural thing, to tell Lulu that they were going. But he quailed as Lulu demanded: “Have you tried on the coat and frilled shirt for to-morrow evening yet, papa? You know there may have to be some alterations in them. I’m sure mama won’t mind making them, will you, mama! Oh, you two will be so cute and dear, I know everybody will love you, and it will give such a homey, old-fashioned touch that—”
“No, I haven’t tried it on yet, and I ain’t sure I’m a-going—” Father gallantly attempted.
Lulu glared at him and said, in a voice of honey and aloes, “I’m sure, papa dear, I don’t ask very much of you, and when I do ask justthis one little thing that I’m sure anybody else would be glad to help me with and me doing my very best to make you happy—”
No! No, no! Father didn’t tell her they were going to New York. He was glad enough to escape up-stairs without having the monkey coat tried on him by force.
Their suit case and steamer-trunk stood betrayingly in the middle of the room. With panting anxiety, heaving and puffing, the two domestic anarchists lifted the steamer-trunk, slipped it under the bed and kicked the suit-case into the closet, and sat down to wait for the next train to New York, which left at elevenP. M.
At dinner—such a jolly family dinner, with Mr. Hartwig carving and emitting little jokes, with Harry whining about his homework and Lulu telling the maid what an asphyxiated fool she was to have roasted the lamb too long— Father was highly elaborate in his descriptions of how he had tried on the tail-coat and found it to be a superb fit. As the coat was the personal theatricals-equipment of Mr. Harris Hartwig, who was shaped like the dome of the county court-house, Lulu looked suspicious, but Harry was discovered making bread pills, and she wasso engaged in telling him what she thought—Lord, what a thinker the little woman was!—that she forgot to follow the subject.
Out of this life of roast lamb and lies, domesticity and evasions, the Applebys plunged into a tremor of rebellious plotting. They sat in their room, waiting for the Hartwigs to go to bed. Every five minutes Father tiptoed to the door and listened.
At five minutes past ten he shook his fingers with joy. He heard the Hartwig family discursively lumbering up to bed. He stood at the door, unmoving, till the house was quiet, while Mother nervously hung their farewell note on the electric light, and slipped into her overcoat and the small black hat that was no longer new and would scarce be impressive to Matilda Tubbs now.
They had decided to abandon the steamer-trunk, though Mother made a bundle of the more necessary things. The second the house was quiet Father was ready. He didn’t even have to put on an overcoat—he hadn’t any worth putting on. His old overcoat had finally gone to seed and was the chief thing abandoned with the steamer-trunk. He turned up his coat-collar and slung his muffler about his neck,put his brown slouch-hat impudently on one side of his white head, and stood rejuvenated, an adventurer.
Just below their window was the roof of the low garage, which was built as part of the house. Father opened the window, eased out the suit-case, followed it, and gave his hand to Mother, who creakingly crawled out with her bundle. It was an early November evening, chilly, a mist in the air. After their day in the enervating furnace heat the breeze seemed biting, and the garage roof was perilously slippery. Mother slid and balanced and slid on the roof, irritably observing, “I declare to goodness I never thought that at my time of life I’d have to sneak out of a window on to a nasty slippery shed-roof, like a thief in the night, when I wanted to go a-visiting.”
“H’sh!” demanded Father. “They’ll hear us and lug us back.”
“Back nothing!” snapped Mother. “Now that I’ve been and gone and actually snook out of a window and made a common gallivanting old hex out of myself this way, I wouldn’t come back not if Lulu and Harry and that lump of a Harris Hartwig was all a-hanging on to my pettiskirts and trying to haul me back.”
“Oof-flumpf.”
This last sound was made by the soft mud beside the garage as Mother landed in it. She had jumped from the roof without once hesitating, and she picked up her bundle and waited quite calmly till Father came flying frog-like through the mist.
They hadn’t many minutes to wait for the New York train, but they were anxious minutes. Lest Lulu or the lordly Harris Hartwig descend on them, they nervously lurked in the dark doorway of the baggage-room. With no overcoat, Father shivered—and hid the shiver.
The engine came, glaring in through the mist; the train seemed impatient, enormous, dwarfing the small station. The prodigal parents hastily tugged suit-case and bundle aboard. They found a seat together. They fussily tucked away their luggage. He held her hand firmly, concealing the two hands with a fold of her overcoat.... You have seen old folk, quite simple and rustic old folk who are apparently unused to travel, sit motionless for hour after hour of train-travel, and you have fancied that they were unconscious of life, of speed, of wonder? So sat Father and Mother, but they were gloriously conscious of each other,and now and then, when he was sure that no one was looking, he whispered: “Old honey, there’s nothing holding us apart now no more. We’re partners again, and Lord! how we’ll fight! I’ll go in and I’ll take Pilkings’s business clean away from him, I will! Old honey, we’re free again! And we’re going to see—New York! Lord! I just can’t believe it!”
“Yes—why—why, it’s our real honeymoon!”
Not till they had ridden for an hour did she demand, “Seth, whatarewe going to do in New York?”
“Why, fiddle! I swear I don’t know! But—we’ll find something. I guess if we can bamboozle a modern fash’nable daughter we won’t be afraid of just New York.”
“No!”
Till four in the morning the Applebys sat unmoving, awake and happy. When the train passed the row on row of apartment-houses that mean New York no youngster first seeing the infinitely possible city, and the future glory it must hold for him, was ever more excited than the invading Innocents.
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WITH twenty-seven dollars as capital, and a bundle of garments of rather uncertain style as baggage, and the pawn-ticket for a rather good suit-case as insurance, Mr. and Mrs. Seth Appleby established themselves in a “furnished housekeeping room” on Avenue B, and prepared to reconquer New York. It was youth’s hopeful sally. They had everything to gain. Yet they were irretrievably past sixty.
You may for many years have been a New-Yorker, yet not know Avenue B, where Jewish apartment-houses and bakeries are sullenly held back by the gas-house district and three-story houses of muddy halls and furtive people who have lost ambition. The genus “furnished housekeeping room” is a filthy box with a stove, a table, a bed, a few seats, many cockroaches, and from one to twenty people, all thrown in and shaken up, like a grab-bag. Here in this world of tired and beaten slinkers the Innocents,with their fresh faces and kindly eyes, excitedly made themselves another home.
With carbolic acid and soap Mother cleaned away much of the smell of former inhabitants, while Father propped up the rusty stove with a couple of bricks, and covered the drably patternless wall-paper with pictures cut from old magazines, which he bought at two for five cents on Fourteenth Street. One of them was a chromo of a child playing with kittens, which reminded him of the picture they had had in more prosperous days. Mother furiously polished the battered knives and forks, and arranged the chipped china on shelves covered with fresh pink scalloped paper. When she was away Father secretly pursued the vulgar but socially conscious sport of killing cockroaches with a slipper.
As the Applebys passed along the hopeless streets, past shops lighted with single gas-jets, or through halls where suspicious women in frowsy wrappers peered at them, they were silent. But in their one room they were hopeful again, and they celebrated its redecoration with music energetically performed by Father on the mouth-organ. Also they ventured to go out to dinner, in a real restaurant of the greatcity, their city. On Fourteenth Street was a noble inn where the menu was printed in English and Hungarian, where for thirty-five cents each they had soup and goulash and coffee and pudding in three colors, chloroformed beets and vast, pale, uneasy-looking pickles, electric lights in red globes and a tinseled ceiling hung with artificial flowers, the music of a violin and the sight of eager city faces.
“I’m as excited as a boy with his first pair of red-top boots,” declared Father. “Pretty fine to see people again, heh? And pretty soon we’ll be dining at the Wal-dorf-As-torya, heh?”
“How you do run on!” said Mother, mechanically, placid dreaminess in her face as she listened to the violin that like a river bore the flotsam of Hungarian and Jewish voices.
Alone, jobless, yet they were so recklessly happy that they went to a ten-cent movie and watched the extreme heroism of a young district attorney with the motionless eager credulity of the simple-hearted.
As soon as they had installed themselves, Father edged shyly into his old haunt, the shoe-store of Pilkings & Son.
He found Son brusquely directing the cleaning out of an old stock of hunting-bootswhich Pilkings,père, had always believed would sell.
Pilkings,fils, was bald, and narrow between the eyes. He looked at Father and nodded as though it hurt him.
“I— Is your father around, Mr. Edward?” Father inquired. “I didn’t hear from you again—been waiting—thought maybe I’d get a letter—I hope he has recovered—I know how bad the grippe—”
While he was talking he realized that Edward Pilkings was in mourning.
Young Pilkings looked shallowly grieved and muttered, “The old gentleman passed beyond, a week ago Thursday.”
“Oh, Mr. Edward, I can’t tell you— It’s a blow to me, a very great blow. I was with your father for so many, many years.”
“Yes—uh— Yes.”
“Is there— I wonder if I couldn’t send a letter or some flowers or something to your mother?”
“Why, yes, I guess there’s nothing to prevent.... Boy, you be careful of those boxes! What the deuce do you think you’re trying to do? There, that’s a little better. Try to show some sense about your work, even if you ain’tgot any.” Edward Pilkings’s voice crackled like wood in a fireplace.
Desperately Father tried again. “Fact is, Mr. Edward, I’ve given up my tea-room on Cape Cod. Didn’t go so very well. I guess my forty, like the fellow says, is sticking to selling shoes. Mrs. Appleby and I have just got back to town and got settled down and— Fact is, I’d be glad to go back to work.”
His hesitant manner invited refusal. It was evident that Mr. Edward Pilkings was not interested.
Shyly Father added, “You know your father promised to keep a place open for me.”
“Well, now, I’ll tell you, Appleby; it ain’t that you aren’t a good salesman, but justnowI’m—well, kind of reorganizing the business. I sort of feel the establishment ought to have a little more pep in it, and so— You see— But you leave your address and as soon as anything turns up I’ll be mighty glad to let you know.”
For years Father had pityingly heard applicants for jobs disposed of with the request to “leave their addresses.”
“No,” he said; “no, maybe I’ll come in and see you again some day. Good day. Good luck to you, Mr. Edward.”
He greeted his old acquaintances among the clerks. They were cordial, but they kept an eye on Mr. Edward Pilkings.
He shivered as he walked out. It was warm and busy in the shoe-store, but outside it was rather chilly for a man with no overcoat—or job. It seemed incredible that he should have found his one place of refuge closed to him.
He walked from shoe-store to shoe-store, hopelessly. “Old-fashioned place,” the shoe-men said when he mentioned his experience with Pilkings & Son’s. “Be glad to do what we can for you, Mr. Appleby, but just now—”
He had reached the department-store section. Already the holiday rush had begun. Holly was in the windows; Salvation Army solicitors tinkled irritating bells on every corner.
Department stores had always rather bewildered this man of small business, but he inquired for the help-employment bureau in the largest of them, and his shyness disappeared as he found a long line of applicants filling out blanks. Here he did not have to plead with some one man for the chance to work. He was handled quickly and efficiently. On a blank he gave his age, his experience, how much he expected;and a brisk, impersonal clerk told him to return next day.
On that next day the world became wonderful for Father, wonderful and young again, for some one did actually want him. He had a temporary holiday-help job in the leather-goods department, at eight dollars a week.
Father’s first day of work in the leather-goods department was the most difficult he had ever known. His knowledge of shoes and leather had become purely mechanical; a few glances at new stock and at trade journals had kept him aware of changing styles. Now he had suddenly to become omniscient in regard to hand-bags, portfolios, writing-cases, music-rolls; learn leathers which he had never handled—cobra-seal, walrus, écrasé, monkey-skin. He had to appear placidly official, almost pontifical, when vague ladies appeared, poked clippings from holiday magazines at him, and demanded, “I want something like that.” “That” usually depicted articles of whose use he had the most indefinite notions. Other ladies, ponderous ladies, who wanted vast quantities of free advice before purchasing Christmas presents, desired encyclopedic information about sewing-cases,picnic-sets, traveling pillow-cases, telephone-pads, guest-books, and “a cover for my Social Register, and I want you to be sure it’s the very latest thing.”
He was defenseless. He could not dodge them. Anybody could come up and ask him anything—and did. And while he could learn something about the new leathers, still it was difficult for him to remember the Long Island Railroad time-table well enough to reply instantly when an irate shopper snapped at him, “Do you know what’s the next train for Hempstead?”
The mostdifficilewoman in a shoe-store has at least a definite, tangible foot to fit. But the holiday crowd were buying presents for persons of whom Father knew nothing—though the shoppers expected him to know everything, from the sizes of their wrists to their tastes in bill-folds. They haggled and pushed and crowded; they wanted it to be less expensive, as well as more blessed, to give than to receive. He spent twenty minutes in showing the entire line of diaries to one woman. She apparently desired to make sure that they were all of them moral or something of the sort. At the end of the time she sighed, “Oh dear, it isn’t time forthe matinée even yet. Shopping is so hard.” And oozed away into the crowd.
Father had started his first day with a superior manner of knowing all about leather and the ways of cranky customers. He ended it with a depressed feeling that he knew nothing about anything, that he couldn’t keep up the holiday pace of the younger clerks—and that the assistant buyer of the department had been watching him. He walked home with strained, weary shoulders, but as he turned into the gloomy hallway leading to their room he artificially brightened his expression, that he might bring joy home to Mother, who would have been lonely and anxious and waiting all day.
He pictured her as sitting there, hunched up, depressed. He would bounce in with news of a good day. He tried the door carefully. Mother stood in the middle of the floor, in a dream. In the dimness of the room the coal fire shone through the front draught of the stove, and threw a faint rose on her crossed hands. Taller she seemed, and more commanding. Her head was back, her eyes sparkling. She was clean-cut and strong against the unkempt walls.
“Why, Mother! You look so happy! What is it?”
“I’m going to help! I’m not going to be a lazybones. I’ve got a job, too! In the toy-department at Regalberg’s. And they are going to pay me nine dollars a week. How’s that for your stupid old woman?”
“Why—why—you don’t need— I don’t know as I like—” began the conventional old Father to whom woman’s place was in the home whether or not there was a home in which to have a place. Then the new Father, the adventurer, declared, “I think it’s mighty fine, Mother. Mighty fine. If it won’t be too hard on you.”
“I’m going to take you to dinner to-night, instead of you taking me. That is, if you’ll lend me a dollar!”
Laughing till they nearly cried, with Father shamelessly squeezing her arm on public thoroughfares, they again plunged into the Roman pleasures of the little tinsel restaurant. And like two lovers, like the telephone-girl in your office and the clerk next door, they made an engagement to meet at noon, next day, in a restaurant half-way between Regalberg’s and Father’s store.
When she came breathlessly into that beef-stew and paper-napkin restaurant at noon,Mother already had something of the busy, unself-conscious look of the woman who can compete with men. Her cheeks were flushed with walking. Her eyes were young. She glanced about the room, found Father, smiled quickly, and proceeded to order her own lunch in a business-like way.
“They told me to be back in half an hour,” she said, “but I don’t mind a bit. It’s been nice all morning. This is the first time in my life I ever did have all the children to talk to that I wanted. And the sweet toys! Think of me gadding around like this, and enjoying it! I swear to goodness I don’t know myself. And what do you think I’m going to do if either of us gets a raise? I’m going to buy you an overcoat!”
Father felt that he didn’t know her, either. She did most of the talking at lunch, and hurried cheerfully back to her job, while Father plodded wearily away, speculating as to whether he could keep bustling on tired, stinging feet till six, like the younger holiday help with whom he was in competition.
He couldn’t seem to please the assistant buyer of the department at all, that afternoon, though in his eager way he tried to be the perfect salesman.
On Saturday morning there was a little note for him in which the superintendent was obsequiously Father’s servant, and humbly informed Father that his services wouldn’t be needed after that day. Would he, if it was quite convenient, call for his pay the following Tuesday, and not fail to turn in his locker-key before leaving the establishment?
The assistant buyer came around and unhappily told Father that they were letting him go because the department was overstocked with younger, liver men. “I’m mighty sorry, and I wish you good luck,” he said, with flash of the real man under the smooth, steely exterior.
Father scarcely heard him, though he smiled faintly. He read the note many times as he stumbled home. But he couldn’t get himself to show it to Mother till Sunday afternoon, so proud was she of helping him and proving herself a business woman—succeeding in a nine-dollar job while Father, who had once been worth twenty-two good dollars a week, hadn’t been able to keep an eight-dollar job. Being quite human, Father felt a scornful envy of her for a minute, when she repeated all the pleasant things that had been said to her. But she wasso frank, so touchingly happy, that he could not long harden his heart.
When he told her of his ill-fortune she put her hand to her breast and looked desperately afraid. It was only with a dry gasp that she could say: “Never mind, Seth, you’ll find something else. I’m glad you don’t have to handle all those silly card-cases and all. And so—so—oh, I do hope you find something.”
“You won’t think I’m entirely a failure?”
“I won’t have you use that word! Don’t I know—haven’t I seen you for years? Why, I depend on you like—it sounds like a honeymoon, but you’re just about my religion, Seth.”
But she went to bed very early, to be absolutely certain of being on time at Regalberg’s Monday morning.
So began for Seth Appleby the haunted days when, drifting through the gray and ghostly city of winter, he scarce knew whether he was a real man or a ghost. Down prison corridors that the city calls streets, among Jewish and Italian firms of which he had never heard, he wandered aimlessly, asking with more and more diffidence for work, any kind of work. His shoes were ground down at the heel, now, andcracked open on one side. In such footgear he dared not enter a shoe-store, his own realm, to ask for work that he really could do. As his December drifted toward Christmas like a rudderless steamer in a fog, the cold permitted him to seek for work only an hour or two a day, for he had no overcoat and his coat was very thin. Seth Appleby didn’t think of himself as one of the rank of paupers, but rather as a man who didn’t have an overcoat.
He had the grippe, and for a week he never left the house. While Mother proudly carried on the money-earning he tried to do the house-work. With unskilled hands he swept—leaving snags of dirt in the corners; he washed—breaking a dish now and then; he even got down on protesting sore knees and sloshed around in an attempt at scrubbing the knotty, splintery floor. He tried to cook dinner and breakfast, but his repertoire consisted of frying—fried eggs, fried bacon, fried bread, fried pork chops, which Mother pretended to like, though they gave her spasms of indigestion. In the richest city in the world he haggled with abusive push-cart peddlers over five cents’ worth of cabbage. He was patient, but wrinkled with hopelessness.
With two warm days in succession, and the grippe gone, Father found work as a noontime waiter in a piggery on Third Avenue, where contractors’ workmen devoured stew and sour coffee, and the waiters rushed gaspingly about in filthy white aprons. After the lunch hour he washed dishes in soapy water that quickly changed from white to grease-filmed black. For this he received fifty cents a day and his lunch. He hid the depressing fact of such employment from Mother, but religiously saved the daily fifty cents to give to her at Christmas. He even walked for an hour after each lunch, to get the smell of grease out of his clothes, lest she suspect.... A patient, quiet, anxious, courteous, little aging man, in a lunch-room that was noisy as a subway, nasty as a sewer excavation.
Without admitting it to himself, he had practically given up the search for work. After Christmas—something would happen, he didn’t know what. Anyway, they wouldn’t go back to their daughter’s prison-place unless Mother became ill.
He discovered the life of idle men in New York—not the clubmen, but those others. Shabby, shuffling, his coat-collar turned up andsecured with a safety-pin, he poked through Tompkins Square, on sunny days, or talked for hours to hoboes who scorned him as a man without experience of brake-beam and rods, of hoboes’ hangouts and the Municipal Lodging House.
When it was too cold to sit in the park, he tried to make himself respectable of aspect, by turning down his coat-collar and straightening his streaky tie, before he stalked into the Tompkins Square branch of the public library, where for hours he turned over the pages of magazines on whose text he could concentrate less each day that he was an outcast accepting his fate. When he came out, the cold took him like the pain of neuralgia, and through streets that were a smear of snow and dust and blackened remains of small boys’ bonfires he shuffled off with timorous rapidity, eying shop windows full of cheap bread, cheap cakes, cheap overcoats, cheap novels on the joy of being poor, all too expensive for him.
Clean and upright and longing to be merry in a dour world, he sank down among the spotted, the shiftless, the worthless. But perhaps when he struck bottom—
He was not quite beaten. He never variedin the wistful welcome he gave to Mother when she dragged herself home from work. But with an increasing humbleness he accepted her as the master of the house, and she unconsciously took the rôle. She petted him and comforted him and worked for him. She announced, with the gaiety that one uses with a dependent small boy, that they would have a wonderful party on Christmas Eve, and with the animation of a dependent child he begged her to tell him about it.
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THE day before Christmas—an anxious day in Regalberg’s department store, where the “extra help” were wondering which of them would be kept on. Most of them were given dismissals with their pay-envelopes. Mother’s fate was not decided. She was told to report on the following Monday; the toy-department would be reduced, but possibly they would find a place for her in the children’s dresses department, for the January white sale.... At the very least, they would be glad to give her an excellent recommendation, the buyer told her. More distraught than one stunned by utter hopelessness and ruin, she came home and, as Father had once been wont to do for her, she made her face bright to deceive him.
Under her arm she carried a wonderful surprise, a very large bundle. Father was agitated about it when she plumped gaily into their housekeeping room. At last she let him openit. He found an overcoat, a great, warm, high-collared overcoat.
He had an overcoat—an overcoat! He could put it on, any time, and go about the streets without the pinned coat-collar which is the sign of the hobo. He could walk all day, looking for a job—warm and prosperous. He could find work and support Mother. He had an overcoat! He was a gentleman again!
With tears, he kissed her, lingeringly, then produced his own present, which he had meant to keep till Christmas Day itself. It was seven dollars, which he had earned as waiter at the piggery.
“And we’re going out and have dinner on it, too,” he insisted.
“Yes, yes; we will. We’ve been economizing—so much!”
But before they went they carefully cached in the window-box the cabbage he had cooked for dinner.
With a slow luxurious joy in every movement he put on the overcoat. Even in the pocket in which he stuck the seven Christmas dollars he had a distinct pleasure, for his undercoat pockets were too torn, too holey, to carry anything in them. They went prancing to theHungarian restaurant. They laughed so much that Father forgot to probe her about the overcoat, and did not learn that she had bought it second-hand, for three dollars, and had saved the three dollars by omitting lunch for nearly four weeks.
They had a table at the front of the restaurant, near the violin. They glowed over soup and real meat and coffee. There were funny people at the next table—a man who made jokes. Something about the “Yiddisher gavotte,” and saying, “We been going to dances a lot, but last night the wife and I wanted to be quiet, so I bought me two front seats for Grant’s Tomb!” It was tremendous. Father and Mother couldn’t make many jokes, these days, but they listened and laughed. The waiter remembered them; they had always tipped him ten cents; he kept coming back to see if there was anything they wanted, as though they were important people. Father thanked her for the overcoat in what he blithely declared to be Cape Cod dialect, and toasted her in coffee. They were crammed with good cheer when Mother paid the check from a dollar she had left over, and they rose from the table.
Father stood perplexedly gazing at the hat-rackbehind them. He gasped, “Why, where—Why, I hung it——”
He took down his old hat with a pathetic, bewildered hesitancy, and he whispered to Mother, “My overcoat is gone—it’s been stolen—my new overcoat. Now I can’t go out and get a job—”
They cried out, and demanded restitution of the waiter, the head-waiter, the manager. None of these officials could do more than listen and ask heavy questions in bad English and ejaculate, “Somebody stole it from right behind you there when you weren’t looking.”
One of the guests dramatically said that he had seen a man who looked suspicious, and for a moment every one paid attention to him, but that was all the information he had. The other guests gazed with apathetic interest, stirring their coffee and grunting one to another, “He ought to watched it.”
The manager pointed at one of the signs, “This restaurant is not responsible for the loss of hats, coats, or packages,” and he shouted, “I am very sorry, but we can do nuttin’. Somebody stole it from right behind you there—no one was looking. If you leaf your name and address—”
Father didn’t even hear him. He was muttering to himself, “And the seven dollars that I saved for Sarah was in it.”
He took Mother’s arm; he tried to walk straight as he turned his back on the storm of windy words from the manager.
Once they were away from spectators, on dark Fifteenth Street, Father threw up his hands and in a voice of utter agony he mourned, “I can’t do anything more. I’m clean beaten. I’ve tried, and I’ve looked for work, but now— Be better if I went and jumped in the river.”
She took his arm and led him along, as though he were a child and helpless. She comforted him as well as she could, but there was nothing very convincing to say. As she grew silent her thoughts grew noisy. They shouted separate, hard, brutal sentences, so loudly that she could not hear even the scraping feet of the stooped man beside her. They clamored:
“I can’t do anything more, either.
“I don’t believe I will be kept on at the store, after all. Only through January, anyway.
“All the money we’ve got now is the nine dollars they gave me to-day.
“Suppose that’s been stolen, too, from our room.
“Suppose I died.
“What would happen to Father if I died? He’d have to go—some dreadful place—poor-house or some place—
“What would happen to me if he died? I’d be so lonely I couldn’t stand it. He’s always been so dear to me.
“That clerk in the book-department that died from asphyxiation—I wonder if it was accident, after all. They said so, but she was so unhappy and all when she talked to me at lunch.
“‘Better jump in the river.’ That would be cold and he hasn’t got an overcoat. No, of course, that wouldn’t make any difference—
“I wonder if gas suicide hurts much?
“If we could only die together and neither of us be left—
“God wouldn’t call that suicide—oh, He couldn’t, not when there’s two people that nobody wants and they don’t ask anything but just to be together. That nobody really wants—my daughter don’t—except maybe the Tubbses. And they are so poor, too. Nobody needs us and we just want to find a happy way to go off together where we can sleep! Oh, I wouldn’t think that would be wrong, would it?”
They were at home. She hastened to burrow among the pile of stewpans for the nine dollars, her week’s salary, which she had hidden there. When she found that it was safe, she didn’t care so much, after all. What difference would it have made if the money had been gone?
Father staggered like a drunkard to one of the flimsy, straight, uncomfortable chairs. But he got himself up and tried to play on the mouth-organ a careless tune of grassy hills and a summer breeze. While he played he ridiculed himself for such agony over the loss of an overcoat, but his philosophizing didn’t mean anything. He had lost the chance of finding work when he had lost the overcoat. He couldn’t really think, and the feeble trickle of music had a tragic absurdity. He petulantly threw the mouth-organ on the bed, then himself slumped on the coverlet. His face was grayly hopeless, like ashes or dust or the snow of great cities.
Mother had been brooding. She was only distantly conscious of his final collapse. She said, suddenly, bluntly: “Let’s go away together. If we could only die while we are still together and have some nice things to remember—”
Hers was the less conventional mind of thetwo. He protested—but it was a feeble mumble. The world had come to seem unreal; the question of leaving it rather unimportant.
Much they talked, possibly for hours, but the talk was as confused as the spatter of furniture in that ill-lighted room—lighted by a gas-jet. All that they said was but repetition of her first demand.
While he lay on the bed, flat, his arms out, like a prisoner on a rack, wondering why all his thoughts had become a void in which he could find no words with which to answer her, she slowly stood up, turned out the gas, then again opened the gas-cock.
She hastily stripped off her overcoat and fitted it over the crack at the bottom of the door, where showed a strip of light from the slimy hall without. She caught up the red cotton table-cloth and stuffed it along the window, moving clumsily through the room, in which the darkness was broken only by pallid light that seeped through the window from cold walls without. She staggered over and lay down beside him. Her work was done, and in the darkness her worried frown changed to a smile of divine and mothering kindliness which did not lessen as a thin, stinging, acid vapor ofilluminating gas bit at her throat and made her cough.
Father raised his head in stupefied alarm. She drew him down, put his head on her shoulder. She took his hand, to lead him, her little boy, into a land of summer dreams where they would always be together. The Innocents were going their way, asking no one’s permission, yet harming no one.... His hand was twitching a little; he coughed with a sound of hurt bewilderment; but she held his hand firmly, and over this first rough part of the road the mother of tenderness led him pityingly on.
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OUT of a black curdled ocean where for ages he had struggled and stifled, Seth Appleby raised his head for an instant, and sank again. For longer ages, and more black, more terrible, he fought on the bottom of the ocean of life. He had reached the bottom now. He began to rise. His coughing was shaking him into a half-consciousness, and very dimly he heard her cough, too. He feverishly threw out one hand. It struck the mouth-organ he had thrown upon the bed, struck it sharply, with a pain that pierced to his nerve-centers.
He had the dismaying thought, “I’ll never play the mouth-organ to her again.... We won’t ever sit in the rose-arbor while I play the mouth-organ to her. Where is she? Yes! Yes! This is her hand.” He was trying to think now. Something said to him, sharply, “Suicide is wicked.”
Yes, he reflected, in the tangles of a half-thought,he had always been told that suicide was wicked. Let’s see. What was it he was trying to think—suicide wicked—blame the cowards who killed themselves—suicide wicked— No, no! That wasn’t the thought he was trying to lay hold of. What was it he was trying to think? Suicide wicked— God, how this cough hurt him. What was it— Suicide? No! He violently pushed away the thought of suicide and its wickedness, and at last shouted, within himself: “Oh, that’s what I was thinking! I must play to Mother again! Where is she? She needs me. She’s ’way off somewhere; she’s helpless; she’s calling for me—my poor little girl.”
He hurled himself off the bed, to find her, in that cold darkness. He stood wavering under the gas-jet. “Why—oh, yes, we turned on the gas!” he realized.
He thrust his hand up and reached the gas-jet. Then, staggering, feeling inch by inch for leagues along the edge of the cupboard, raising his ponderous hand with infinite effort, he touched a plate, feebly fitted his fingers over its edge, and with a gesture of weak despair hurled it at the window. The glass shattered. He fell to the floor.
Strained with weeks of trying to appear young and brisk in the store, Mother had become insensible before the gas could overcome him, and he awoke there, limp on the floor, before she revived. The room was still foul with gas-fumes, and very cold, for they had not rekindled the fire when they had returned after dinner.
He feebly opened the window, even the door. A passing woman cried, “Gas in the room! My Gawd! my old man almost croaked himself last year with one of them quarter meters.” She bustled in, a corpulent, baggy, unclean, kindly, effectual soul, and helped him fan the gas out of the room. She drove away other inquisitive neighbors, revived Mother Appleby, and left them with thick-voiced words of cheer, muttering that “her old man would kill her if she didn’t get a hustle on herself and chase that growler.”
With the broken window-pane stuffed up, the gas lighted, and the fire started, the Applebys faced life again, and were very glad. They couldn’t have been long under the gas; Father’s eons of drowning struggle must have been seconds. Propped up in bed, Mother refused a doctor and smiled—though confusedly, with the bewilderment of one who had felt the numbness of death.
“I’ll tell you how it is,” cried Father. “We—Lord!how glad I am to have you again! It’s like this: We felt as if we’d gone the very limit, and nothing ever would come right again. But it’s just like when we were a young married couple and scrapped and were so darn certain we’d have to leave each other. That’s the way it’s been with us lately, and we needed something big like this to get our nerve up, I guess. Now we’ll start off again, and think, honey, whatever we do will be a vict’ry—it’ll be so much bigger than nothing.
“Let’s see. New York doesn’t want us. But somewhere there must be a village of folks that does. We’ll start out right now, walking through New York, and we’ll hunt till we find it, even if we have to go clean out to San Francisco. Gee! think, we’re free, no job or nothing, and we could go to San Francisco! Travel, like we’ve always wanted to! And we won’t have any more pride now to bother us, not after—that. I’ll play the mouth-organ for pennies! Come on, we’ll start for Japan, and see the cherry-blossoms. Come on, old partner, we’re going to pioneer, like our daddies that went West.”
And he struck up “Susanna” on his mouth-organ.
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THE Applebys didn’t start for Japan on Christmas Eve. Also, they didn’t go defiantly with pack on back through the streets of New York, like immigrants to youth. It took Mother Appleby two days to recover from gas and two more to recover from lifelong respectability, to the end that she should become a merry beggar, gathering pennies while Father piped upon that antic instrument, the mouth-organ.
Father labored with her, and cooked beans for her. She made him agree to get as far from New York as their nine dollars would take them before they should begin to be vagrants. It’s always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are.
The train took them about eighty miles into New Jersey. They debouched rather shyly, and stood on the station platform in a town consisting of a trust, a saloon, a druggist’s, and a general store. The station loafers stared atthem. Father would no more have dared play the mouth-organ to these gangling youths than he would have dared kiss a traffic policeman at Forty-second and Fifth Avenue.
They edged around the corner of the station and gingerly stepped off into an ocean of slush, deaf to the yells of the bus-driver who hopefully represented that he would take them practically anywhere in the world for fifty cents.
They were an odd couple. Father had no need of an overcoat, now. He was wearing three shirts, two waistcoats, two pairs of trousers, and three pairs of socks, to say nothing of certain pages of an evening newspaper cunningly distributed through his garments, crackly but warm. He waddled chubbily and somewhat stiffly, but he outfaced the winter wind as he had not done for many weeks. In this outfit he could never have gone the rounds of offices looking for work, but in the open he had the appearance of a hardy woodsman—or at least the father of a woodsman. He wore defiantly the romantic wreck of that plaid cap which he had bought for Cape Cod, which his daughter had sequestered at Saserkopee, and which he had stolen back from her. Also he had a secret joy in the fact that his shirt—thatis, his outer and most visible shirt—was a coarse garment of blue flannel, a very virile and knightly tabard with large white buttons, which Mother had never let him wear in public. It was such a noble habiliment as a fireman might have worn, or a longshoreman, or Dan’l Boone.
Mother was almost equally bulky, with an unassayed number of garments, but over them all she wore a still respectable Raglan town coat.
They both carried bundles, and in Father’s right hand was a red pasteboard case which protected the mouth-organ. This, as they modestly trotted through the village, he tried to conceal in the palm of his hand, and he glared at a totally innocent passer-by whom he suspected of wanting to hear the mouth-organ.
Mother didn’t know of his mental struggles. She was thinking more about her feet. She looked up with mild astonishment when, as they left the town by the highroad southward, Father burst out, “I’ll play if I want to, but I can’t stand the gawping gumps here.”
“Why, Father!” she said, trustingly.
The noontime sun came out. To conceal from his stomach the fact that it was hungry,Father grew boyishly enthusiastic about going Southward. “Gee!” he burbled, “we’ll hit down toward Florida—palms and alligators and—and everything—Land of Flowers! What’s this hotel?—the Royal Points de Anna? Play the mouth-organ there. Make a hit. Then we’ll strike New Orleans and jump to San Francisco.... Gee! it’s a long way between houses along here!”
They approached a farm-yard. Father was tremendously urging himself to play the mouth-organ there, to skip and be nimble, and gain a minstrel’s meed. Meaning lunch.
Frowning with intentness, he stopped before the house. Mother meekly halted beside him. She had not lost quite all of the training in self-dependence she had got from a business life, these last weeks, but she looked to him for leadership in the new existence.
Father swung his shapeless pack from his shoulders, set it down on the ground, reluctantly drew his mouth-organ from its case. He became aware that a large, astonished woman was staring from the kitchen window. He stared back. The mouth-organ was left suspended in air. Hastily he stuck it in his pocket and, as though hypnotized, moved toward thekitchen door. He had to give the woman some explanation for encamping in her yard.... Why! She might have thought that he had intended to make a fool of himself by playing the mouth-organ there!
The woman opened the door curiously, stared over Father’s head at Mother, then back at the little man with his pink, cheery face and whiff of delicate silver hair.
“I—uh—I— Could I cut some wood or something for you?” said Father. “Mrs.—uh—Mrs. Smith and I are tramping across the United States—San Francisco and New Orleans and so on—and—”
“Why, you poor things, you must be terribly cold and tired! Think of it! San Francisco! You tell Mrs. Smith to come right in and warm herself by the fire, and I guess I can find some dinner for both of you.”
Father scuttled out, informed Mother that she had become Mrs. Smith, and before her slightly dazed mind could grasp it all she was in at a kitchen table near the stove, and eating doughnuts, salt pork, beans, apple pie, and vast cups of coffee. Not but that Father himself was also laying in the food with a lustiness that justified his lumberjack’s blue-flannel shirt.From time to time he dutifully mentioned his project of cutting wood, but the woman was more interested in him as a symbol.
In a dim, quite unanalytic way Father perceived that, to this woman, this drab prisoner of kitchen and woodshed, it was wonderful to meet a man and woman who had actually started for—anywhere.
She sighed and with a look of remembering old dreams she declared: “I wish my old man and I could do that. Gawd! I wouldn’t care how cold we got. Just get away for a month! Then I’d be willing to come back here and go on cooking up messes. He goes into town almost every day in winter—he’s there now—but I stay here and just work.”
Father understood that it would have desecrated her vision of the heroic had he played the mouth-organ for pay; perceived that she didn’t even want him to chop wood. Mother and he were, to this woman, a proof that freedom and love and distant skies did actually exist, and that people, just folks, not rich, could go and find them.
When she had warmed Mother’s feet and given them her wistful good wishes, the woman let them go, and the Smiths recently Applebys,went comfortably and plumply two more miles on their way to Japan.
Father’s conscience was troubling him, not because he had taken food from the woman—she had bestowed it with the friendly and unpatronizing graciousness of poor women—but because he had been too cowardly to play the mouth-organ. When Mother had begun to walk wearily and Father had convinced himself that he wouldn’t be afraid to play, next chance he had, they approached a crude road-house, merely a roadside saloon, with carriage-sheds, a beer sign, and one lone rusty iron outdoor table to give an air ofal fresco.
“I’m going over there and play,” said Father.
“I won’t have you hanging around saloons,” snapped Mother.
“Now, Mother, I reckon I wouldn’t more than drink a couple of horses’ necks or something wild like that.”
“Yes, and that’s just the way temptation gets you,” said Mother, “drinking horses’ necks and all them brandy drinks. I wish I’d never tasted that nasty cocktail you made me take last year. I wish I’d joined the White-Ribboners like Mrs. Tubbs wanted me to.”
“Well, we’ll organize a Hoboes’ Chapter ofthe W. C. T. U. and have meetings under the water-tank at the depot—”
They were interrupted by a hail from the road-house. A large man with a detective’s mustache and a brewer’s cheeks, a man in shirt-sleeves and a white apron, stood on the porch, calling, “Hey! Mr. and Mrs. Smith! Come right in and get warm.”
Father and Mother stared at each other. “He means us,” gasped Father.
Mechanically the Innocents straggled across the road.
The saloon-keeper shook hands with both of them, and bellowed: “Lady telephoned along the line—great things for gossip, these rural telephones—said you was coming this way, and we’re all watching out for you. You come right into the parlor. No booze served in there, Mrs. Smith. Make yourselves comfortable, and I’ll have the Frau cut you up a coupla sandwiches. How’d you leave San Francisco? Pretty warm out there, ain’t it?”
He had, by this time, shooed them into the plush and crayon-enlargement parlor behind the barroom. His great voice overawed them—and they were cold. Mother secretively looked for evidences of vice, for a roulette-table or ablackjack, but found nothing more sinful than a box of dominoes, so she perched on a cane chair and folded her hands respectably.
“How’s San Francisco?” repeated the saloon-keeper.
“Why—uh—um—uh—how do you mean?” Father observed.
“Yes, I heard how you folks ’ve tramped from there. How is it, nice climate out there?”
“Why, it’s pretty nice—orange groves ’most everywhere. Nice climate,” said Father, avoiding Mother’s accusing look and desperately hoping she wouldn’t feel moved to be veracious and virtuous.
“Hey, Mamie, here’s the old couple that ’ve tramped clear from San Francisco,” bawled the saloon-keeper.
A maternal German woman, with a white apron of about the proportions of a cup defender’s mainsail, billowed into the room, exclaimed over Mother’s wet feet, provided dry stockings and felt slippers for her, and insisted on stuffing both of them with fried eggs and potato salad. The saloon-keeper and a select coterie of farmers asked Father questions about San Francisco, Kansas, rainy seasons, the foot-and-mouth disease, irrigation, Westernmovie studios, and the extent of Mormonism. Father stuck pretty closely to a Sunday-newspaper description of the Panama-Pacific Exposition for answers to everything, and satisfied all hands to such an extent that they humbly asked him how much danger there was of a Japanese invasion of the Philippines, and how long did he think the great European war would last.
Abashed, prickly with uncomfortableness, Father discovered that the saloon-keeper was taking up a collection for them. It was done very quietly, and the man slipped a dollar and fifteen cents into his hand in so casual a manner, so much as though he were merely making change, that Father took it and uneasily thrust it into his pocket. He understood the kindly spirit of it because he himself was kindly. He realized that to these stay-at-homes the Applebys’ wandering was a thing to revere, a heroism, like prize-fighting or religion or going to war. But he didn’t psychologize about it. He believed in “the masses” because he belonged to the masses.
As a matter of fact, Father had very little time to devote to meditation when they hit the road again. He was busy defending himselfwhile Mother accused him of having lied scandalously. He protested that he had never said that he had been to San Francisco; they had made that mistake themselves.
“Now don’t you go trying to throw dust in my eyes. I just won’t have this lying and prevaricating and goings-on. I’m just going to— What’s the matter, Seth? You’re limping. Are your feet cold?”
And that was the end of Mother’s moral injunctions, for Father, with a most unworthy cunning, featured the coldness of his feet till she had exhausted her vocabulary of chiropodal sympathy, after which he kept her interested in the state of his ears, his hands, and the tip of his nose. She patted him consolingly, and they toiled on together, forgetting in the closeness of their comradeship the strangeness of being on an unknown road, homeless, as a chilly sunset spread bands of cold lemon and gray across the enormous sky, and all decent folk thought of supper.
Then everything went wrong with the wandering Innocents.
About supper-time Father made another attempt to get himself to play the mouth-organ,at a mean farm-house which came in sight after a lonely stretch. Mother was sinking with weariness. He hitched the mouth-organ out of its case, but again he shrank, and he feebly said, to a tumble-haired farmer in overalls, “Can I split some wood for you? Mrs. Smith and I are tramping—”
The farmer ungenerously took him at his word. For an hour he kept Father hacking at a pile of wood, while Mother crouched near, trying to keep warm, with his coat over her feet. Father’s back turned into one broad ache, and his arms stung, but he stuck to it till the farmer growled: “I guess that’ll do. Now don’t hang around here.”
He handed Father a bundle. Father thought of throwing it at him, but simultaneously he thought of keeping it and consuming its contents. He gasped with the insult. He became angrier and angrier as he realized that the insult applied to Mother also. But before he could think of a smart, crushing, New-Yorkish reply the farmer grumped away into the house.
The Applebys dragged themselves back to the highroad. Father was blaming himself for having brought her to this.... “But I did try to get a job first,” he insisted, and rememberedhow he had once begged the owner of a filthy shoe-store on Third Avenue for a place as porter, shoeblack, anything.
Their road led them by a clump of woods.
“We’ll have a fire here and camp!” cried Father.
He had never made a fire in the open, and he understood it to be a most difficult process. But he was a young lover; his sweetheart was cold; he defied man and nature. Disdaining any possible passer-by, he plunged into the woodland. With bare hands he scooped the light fall of snow from between two rocks, and in the darkness fumbled for twigs and leaves. Gruntingly he dragged larger boughs, piled the wood with infinite care, lighted it tremblingly.