if you had asked the boy who was now legally tom quidmore why he was reluctant to give his mother a powder that would do her good he would have been unable to explain his hesitation. reason, in the main, was in favor of his doing it. in the first place, he had promised, and he had always responded to those exhortations of his teachers which laid stress on keeping his word. not to keep his word had come to seem an offense of the nature of personal defilement.
then the whole matter had been thought out and decreed by an authority higher than himself. the child mind, like the childish mind at all times, is under the weight of authority. the source of the authority is a matter of little moment so long as it speaks decidedly enough. it is always a means by which to get rid of the bother of using private judgment, which as often as not is a bore to the person with the right to it.
in the case of a boy of twelve, private judgment is hampered by a knowledge of his insufficiency. the man who provides food, clothing, shelter, is invested with the right to speak. the child mind is logical, orderly, respectful, and prenatally disposed to discipline. except on severe provocation it does not rebel. tom quidmore felt no impulse to rebellion,
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even though his sense of right and wrong was, for the moment, mystified.
he lacked data. such data as came to his hearing, and less often to his sight, lay morally outside his range. like those scientifically minded men who during the childhood of our race registered the phenomena of electricity without going further, he had no power of making deductions from what eyes and ears could record. he knew that there was in life such an element as sexual love; but that was all he knew. it entered into the relations of married people, and in some puzzling way contributed to the birth of children; but of its wanderings and aberrations he had never heard. that man and wife should reach a breaking point was no part of his conception of the things that happened. there was nothing of the kind between the tollivants, nor among the parents of the lads with whom he had grown up at harfrey. that which at harfrey had been clear unrelenting daylight was at bere a gloaming haunted by strange shapes which perplexed and rather frightened him.
not until he was fourteen or fifteen years of age, and the quidmore episode behind him, like an island passed at sea, did the significance of these queer doings and sayings really occur to him. all that for the present his mind and experience were equal to was listening, observing, and wondering. he knew already what it was to have things which he hadn't understood at the time of their happening become clear as he grew older.
an illustration of this came from the small events of that very afternoon. on going back from his
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midday dinner to work in the carrot patch he fixed on half past two as the hour at which he would make the attempt to force on his mother the prescribed medicine. that time having arrived, he rose, brushed the earth from his knees, dusted his hands against each other, and started slowly for the house. a faraway memory which had been in the back of his mind ever since his father had made the odd request now began to assert itself, like the throb of an old pain.
he was a little boy again. in the dim hall of the swindon street home he was listening to the friendly policeman talking to miss honiton. he recaptured his own emotions, the dumb distress of the young creature lost in the dark, and ignorant of everything but its helplessness. his mother had taken something, or had not taken something, he wasn't sure which. the beaming young lady handed him his present from the christmas tree, and told him that cyanide of potassium—the words were still branded on his brain—was a deadly poison. then he stood once more, as in memory he had stood so many times, in the half-darkened room where words were mumbled over the long black box which they spoke of as "the body."
now that it was all in far perspective he knew what it had meant. that is, he knew the type of woman his mother had been; he knew the kind of soil he had sprung from. the events of five years back to a boy of twelve are a very long distance away. so his mother seemed to tom. so did the sneaking through shops, and the flights from tenement to tenement. so did the awful christmas eve when he had lost her. he could think of her tenderly now because
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he understood that her mind had been unhinged. what hurt him with a pain which never fell into perspective was that in trying to create in his boyish way some faint tradition of self-respect, he worked back always to this origin in shame.
while seeing no connection between such far-off things and the task put upon him by his father, he found them jostling each other in his mind. you took something—and there was disaster. it was as far as his thought carried him. after that came the fact that, his respect for authority being strong, he dared not disobey.
he could only dawdle. a delay of five minutes would be five minutes to the good. besides, dawdling on a hot, windless summer afternoon, on which the butterflies, bees, and humming-birds were the only nonhuman living things not taking a siesta, eased the muscles cramped with long crouching in the carrot beds. there being two ways of getting to the house, he took the longer one.
the longer one led him round the duck pond, whence the heat had driven ashore all the ducks and geese with the exception of one gander. for no particular reason the gander's name was ernest. between ernest and gimlets, the wire-haired terrier pup, one of those battles such as might take place between bolivia and switzerland was in full swing of rage. gimlets fought from the bank; ernest from the pond. when ernest paddled forward, with neck outstretched and nostrils hissing, gimlets scampered to the top of the shelving shore, where he could stand and bark defiantly. when ernest swung himself
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round and made for the open sea, gimlets galloped bravely down to the water's edge, yelping out challenges. this bloody fray gave the boy a further excuse for lingering. three or four times had ernest, stung by the taunts to which he had tried to seem indifferent, wheeled round on his enemy. three or four times had gimlets scrambled up the bank and down again. but he, too, recognized authority, and a call that he couldn't disobey. a long whistle, and the battle was at an end! gimlets trotted off.
the whistle came from the grove of pines climbing the little bluff on the side of the duck pond remote from the house. it struck the boy as odd that his father should be there at a time when he was supposed to be cutting new zealand spinach for the morrow's market. not to be caught idling, the boy slipped down the bank to creep undetected below the pinewood bluff. neither seeing nor being seen, he nevertheless heard voices, catching but a single word. the word was bertha, and it was spoken by his father. the only bertha in the place was a certain beautiful young widow living in bere. that his father should be talking to her in the pinewood was another of those details difficult to explain.
more difficult to explain he found a little scene he caught on looking backward. having now passed the bluff, he was about to round the corner of the pond where the path led through a plantation of blue spruces which hid the house. his glancing back was an accident, but it made him witness of an incident pastoral in its charm.
bertha, being indeed the beautiful young widow,
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the boy was astonished to see his father steal a kiss from her. bertha responded with such a slap as nymphs give to shepherds, running playfully away. his father shambled after her, as shepherds after nymphs, catching her in his arms.
tom plunged into the blue spruce plantation where he could be out of sight. hot as he was already, he grew hotter still. what he had seen was so silly, so stupid, so undignified! he wished he hadn't seen it. having seen it, he wished he could forget it. he couldn't forget it because, unpleasant as he found it, he was somehow aware that it had bearings beyond unpleasantness. what they were he had nothing to tell him. he could only run through the plantation as if he would leave the thing as quickly as possible behind him; and all at once the house came into sight.
with the house in sight he remembered again what he had come to do. he stopped running. his steps again began to lag. feeling for the powder in his waistcoat pocket, he reminded himself that it would do his mother good. the house lay sleeping and silent in the heat. he crept up to the back door.
and there at the open window stood his mother rolling dough on a table. she rolled languidly, as she did everything. her head drooped a little to one side; her expression was full of that tremulous protest against life which might with a word break into a rain of tears.
relieved and delighted, he stole round the house, to enter by another way. she was now lifting a cover of the stove, so that she didn't hear his approach. before she knew that anyone was there he had slipped
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his arm around her, and smacked a big kiss on her cheek. she turned slowly, the lifter in her hand. a new life seemed to dawn in her, brightening her eyes and flushing her sallowness.
"you bad little boy! what did you come home for?"
he replied as was true, that he had come for a drink of water. he had meant to take a drink of water after putting her powder in the teapot. "i thought," he ended, "you'd be lying down asleep."
"i was lying down, but something made me get up."
he was curious. "something—like what?"
"well, i just couldn't sleep. and then i remembered that it was a long time since i'd made him any of them silver cookies he used to be so fond of."
he liked the name. "is that what you're baking?"
"yes; and you'll ..." she went back to the table, picking up the cutter—"you'll have some for supper if you'll—if you'll call me ma."
"but i do."
her smile had the slow timidity that might have been born of disuse. "yes, when i ask you. but i want you to do it all the time, and natural."
"all right then; i will—ma."
while he stood drinking a first, and then a second, cup of water, she began on the memories dear to her, but which few now would listen to. she had been born in wilmington, delaware, where martin also had been born. his father worked in a powder factory in that city. it was owing to an explosion when he was a lad that martin's frame had been partially paralyzed.
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"he wasn't blowed up or anything; he just got a shock. he was awful delicate, and used to have fits till he grew out of them. i think the crook in his face makes him look aristocratic, don't you?"
the boy having said that he didn't know but what it did, she continued plaintively, cutting out her cookies with a heart-shaped cutter.
"i was awful pretty in those days, and that refined i wouldn't hardly do a thing for my mother in the house, or carry the tiniest little parcel across the street. i was just born ladylike. and when martin and i were married he let me have a girl for the first two years to do everything. all he ever expected of me was to get up and dress, and look stylish; and now...."
as she paused in her cutting to press back a sob, the boy took the opportunity to speak of getting back to work.
"i think i must beat it, ma. i've got all those carrots—"
"oh, wait a little while. he can spare you for a few minutes, can't he? anyhow, nothing you can do'll save him from going bankrupt. this place don't pay. he'll never make it pay. his work was to run a hat store. that's what he did when he married me, and he made swell money at it, too."
the family history interested the boy, as all tales did which accounted for the personal. he knew now how martin quidmore's health had broken down, and the doctor had ordered out-of-door life as a remedy. out-of-door life would have been impossible if an
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uncle hadn't died and left him fifteen thousand dollars.
"enough to live on quite genteel for life," his wife complained, "but nothing would do but that he should think himself a market-gardener, him that couldn't tell a turnip from a spade. blew in the whole thing on this place, away from everywheres, and making me a drudge that hardly knew so much as to wash a dish. even that i could have stood if he'd only gone on loving me as his marriage vows made it his duty to do, but—"
"i'll love you, ma," the boy declared, tenderly. "you don't have to cry because there's no one to love you, not while i'm around."
the new life in her eyes was as much of incredulity as of joy. "don't say that, dearie, if you don't mean it. you don't have to love me just because i'm trying to be a mother to you, and look after your clothes."
"but, ma, i want to. i do."
they gazed at each other, she with the cutter in her hand, he with the cup. what he saw was not a feeble, slatternly woman, but some one who wanted him. he had not been wanted by anyone since the night when his mudda—he still used the word in his deep silences—had gone away with the wardress who looked like a fate. in the five intervening years he had suffered less from unkindness than from being shut out of hearts. here was a heart that had need of him, so that he had need of it. the type of heart didn't matter. if it made any difference it was only that where there was weakness the appeal to him was
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the greater. with this poor thing he would have something on which to spend his treasure.
"you'll see, ma! i'll bring in the water for you, and split the kindlings, and get up in the morning and light the fire, and milk the cow, and everything."
straight and sturdy, he looked at her with the level gaze of eyes that seemed the calmer and more competent because they were hidden so far beneath his bushy, horizontal eyebrows. the uniform tan from working in the sun heightened his air of manliness. even the earth on his clothes, and a smudge of it across his forehead where a dirty hand had been put up to push back his crisp ashen hair, hinted at his capacity to share in the world's work. to the helpless woman whose prop had failed her, the coming of this young strength to her aid was little short of a miracle.
in the struggle between tears and laughter she was almost hysterical. "oh, you darling boy!" she was beginning, advancing to clasp him in her arms. but with old, old memories in his heart he dreaded the paroxysm of affection.
"all right, ma!" he laughed, dodging her and slipping out. "i've got to beat it, or fath—" he stumbled on the word because he found it difficult to use—"or father will wonder where i am." but once in the yard, he called back consolingly, though keeping to the practical, "don't you bother about geraldine. i'll go round by the pasture and drive her home as i come back from work. i'll milk her, too."
"god bless you, dearie!"
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standing in the doorway, shading her eyes with her hand, her limp figure seemed braced to a new power, as she watched him till he disappeared within the plantation of blue spruces.
