“Mr. and Mrs. Tam McTab—not so well but unfortunately more correctly known asMr. and Mrs. Leslie Watson—” (Tam had written facetiously).“Miss Emily Frere”—(in a small impudent writing).“Master Stone W. Ponting.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Tam McTab—not so well but unfortunately more correctly known as
Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Watson—” (Tam had written facetiously).
“Miss Emily Frere”—(in a small impudent writing).
“Master Stone W. Ponting.”
The clerk said that they had left some weeks ago—here was the date—all except the young gentleman, Master Ponting, he was over there—the one drinking a lemon squash.
Stone W. Ponting was about thirteen years old; his thick, upstanding hair seemed gray with dust; dirt and freckles obscured his complexion; his hands were dark with dirt.
“You’re Stone Ponting, aren’t you?” said Edward nervously. “Mrs. Melsie Ponting’s boy?”
“Yump,” said Stone, speaking into a glass of lemon squash.
Edward was afraid of him. He never really believed that boys of thirteen had no longer the power to twist his arms.
“Have you heard your mother speak of me—Edward R. Williams?”
But Stone, who had an abnormally long tongue, was using it to explore the outside of his lower cheek, in the hope of prolonging by a second or two the taste of lemon squash. Apparently failing in this he peeled the paper from a strip of chewing gum and inserted the contents. He did not answer Edward but, on the other hand, did not destroy hope of an answer by shutting his mouth. The chewing gum, though active, remained in the public gaze.
Edward felt helpless but, in such a cause, dared not cease his efforts.
“What’s happened to Emily and her friends?” he asked. “Didn’t you come here with them?”
“Yump,” said Stone. “Hey, boy, gimme my check. I must hustle. Going out horseback riding with the Doc.”
A shower of money fell from his pockets as he rose and the re-assembling of this gave Edward an opportunity to speak again.
“No, but truly, I want awfully to know about Emily and the others. I say, if you’ll stay and give the Doc a miss for today, we’ll go somewhere and find a real American soda fountain.”
He thought Stone might strike him. Or perhapsStone would simply walk away, dwindle through the door and be lost in the sunlight forever.
“Sure I’ll stop,” said Stone W. Ponting, putting out his tongue meditatively and sitting down again. “We kin get a dandy nut sundae right here. Nut sundae’s mine.”
“Why Emerly’s went up the Yangtze Ki-yang,” he told Edward in reply to three or four more questions. “So’s Tam and Lucy. Peking fer mine, I said, when they wanted to have me go withum. My dad’s sent me plenty of dough, so I should worry. My dad’ll be tickled to death to have me withum. He and Mom bin fighting for the custody of me. Dad won. But he had to go toJapanor some place on business. He’s a financier.”
Edward was neither acute enough nor sufficiently interested to notice the sad bleak defences the child had put up for himself against a hard world. Edward thought, “A detestable child. He has too little imagination and too much horse-sense to help me.”
“Wasn’t Emily supposed to be looking after you?”
Stone gave a sharp cracked laugh. “I guess Mom thought so. Mom’s kinda soft. Emerly knows I’m a feller kin look out for himself. Dad wouldn’t give a whoop. He don’t know yet, but he should worry. He’s a financier. He sent me a thousand bucks to blow—till he could come back from Japan. I got the letter, that is to say, it was addressed to Emerly.There was a thousand bucks for her to blow on me insidum. Emerly’s a sport, I’ll say. She acted like she was leaving me in charge of a dame here—so’s Mom wouldn’t get mad at her for piking. But there was nothing to that. The other dame don’t worry me any.”
“She is shameless,” thought Edward. “Loving Emily is like loving a tigress.” He felt a better man because he loved the shameless Emily. It was like a romance among supermen, he thought.
“Your mother askedmeonce to take care of you and bring you to your father. I had business at the time that prevented me. But she was very anxious that I should. Perhaps she told you——”
“Mebbe,” said Stone indifferently. The nut sundae nearly oozed out of his mouth, but was checked by sleight of suction. “She’s kinda soft, is Mom.”
“You oughtn’t to be here by yourself.”
“I’m sicka being handed around,” said Stone. “Hey, boy, another nut sundae. And then some. I’m a shark for nut sundaes.”
“Well, we can be friends anyway,” said Edward shyly. “A man can be friends with another man.”
Stone took no notice of this. He lifted up the corner of his jacket and licked from it a lump of nut sundae which had accidentally fallen there. Then he walked away, whining a little song.
Edward had not slept at all. The hope he had nursed a few hours earlier seemed divorced from reality. He remembered suddenly something thathis mental cowardice had swept from his mind. “Emily loves Tam,” he thought, trying to hurt himself as much as possible. “Emily has never thought of me again. She loves Tam. She wants to steal Tam from Lucy. She is shameless. She is full of fury because she has not got Tam. I am to her the least of the people she met over there somewhere in America, while she was engaged in pursuing Tam.” He was determined to throw himself into an agony, he was revelling in fatigue and despair. He imagined his next meeting with Emily. Her fierce eyes would detach themselves reluctantly from Tam’s face. They would turn cold as they rested on Edward’s own face. Edward’s face would look dull and pale; he felt very conscious of the lifelessness of his face. He saw himself so grey as to be almost invisible. Near him now there was an arrangement of mirrors that showed him his own rarely seen profile. It was detestable that life— even the mean allowance of life that was his—should be given to so poor a body. His upper lip was too long, it sloped forward without the curve that enlivens most human lips; his chin was thin and fleshless as though made of paper. His face seemed to him hardly a human face. His shoulders were very round. Out of the corner of his eye he watched his reflection in profile present a cocktail glass to that slack sad mouth. Cocktails at least were left to him. Everything that requires only weakness was left to him. “If all this were not so, this is what I woulddo.” The intensity of his despair was, with the help of the cocktail, defeating its own ends ... “if love perhaps gave me life ... if I were as shameless as she is ... and if shamelessness could give me a little of the splendour that it has given her, this is what I would do ... I would get control of that thousand dollars ... I would travel night and day, in fury and certainty ... I would find her on the banks of the river, the high reeds as high as her head ... I would walk to her with a new tread, a heavy, sure, new tread, and when she looked she might love me or hate me ... but she would remember me then.” And now, though he tried again superficially to revive his luxury of despair, he could not really think himself despicable. His coward mind leapt at the accuser from behind, and in the dark and the dust the accuser was strangled. Edward smiled at the boy who brought him a fresh cocktail. When he smiled he saw now that his upper lip curved after all.