grown-up life began at once. his chief care hitherto had been as to what others would do for him; now he was preoccupied with what he could do for some one else. it was a matter of watching, planning, cheering, comforting, and as he expressed it to himself, of bucking up. of bucking up especially he was prodigal. the man had become as limp as on the day when he had thrown himself face downward in the grass. mad once with desire to act, he was terrified now at what he had done. though, as far as tom could judge, no one blamed or suspected him, there was hardly a minute in the day in which he did not betray himself. he betrayed himself to the boy even if to no one else, though betraying himself in such a way that there was nothing definite to take hold of. "i'm sure—and yet i'm not sure," was tom's own summing up. he stressed the fact that he was not sure, and in this he was helped by the common opinion of the countryside.
toward the bereaved husband and his adopted son this was sympathetic. the woman had always been neurasthenic, slipshod, and impossible. with a wife to help him, martin quidmore could have been a success as a market gardener as easily as anybody else. as it was, he would get over the shock of this tragedy and find a woman who would be the right kind of mother to a growing boy. here, the mention
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of bertha was with no more than the usual spice of village scandal, tolerant and unresentful.
of all this tom was aware chiefly through the observations of blanche, the colored woman who came in by the day to do the housework.
"law, mr. tom, yo' pappa don't need to feel so bad. nobody in this yere town what blame him, not a little mite. po' mis' quidmo', nobody couldn't please her nohow. don't i know? ain't i wash her, and iron her, and do her housecleanin', ever since she come to this yere community, and mr. quidmo' he buy this yere lot off old aaron bidbury? no, suh! nobody can't tell me! them there giddy things what nobody can't please 'em they can't please theirselves, and some day they go to work and do somefin' despe'ate, just like po' mis' quidmo'. a little cup o' tea, she take. no mo'n that. see, boy! i keep that there brown teapot, what look as innocent as a baby, all the time incriminated to her memo'y."
nevertheless, tom found his father obsessed by fear, with nothing to be afraid of. the obsession had shown itself as soon as they entered the house on their return from harfrey. he was afraid of the house, afraid of the kitchen especially. when gimlets barked he jumped, cursing the dog for its noise. when a buggy drove up to the door he peeped out at the occupant before showing himself to the neighbor coming to offer his condolences. if the telephone rang tom hastened to answer it, knowing that it set his father shivering.
as evening deepened on that first wednesday, they kept out of doors as late as possible, the boy chatter
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ing to the best of his ability. when obliged to go in, quidmore tried to say with solicitude on tom's behalf:
"expect you'll be lonesome now with only the two of us in the house. better come and sleep in the other bed in my room."
the boy was about to reply that he was not lonesome, and preferred his own bed, when he caught the dread behind the invitation.
"all right, dad, i'll come. sleep there every night. then i won't be scared."
about two in the morning tom was wakened by a shout. "hell! hell! hell!"
jumping from his own bed, he ran to the other. "wake up, dad! wake up!"
ouidmore woke, confused and trembling. "wha' matter?" his senses returning, he spoke more distinctly. "must have had a nightmare. god! turn on the light. hate bein' in the dark. now get back to bed. all right again."
the next day both were picking strawberries. it was not quidmore's custom to pick strawberries, but he seemed to prefer a task at which he could crouch, and be more or less out of sight. happening to glance up, he saw a stranger coming round the duck pond.
"who's that?" he snapped, in terror.
tom ran to the stranger, interviewed him, and ran back again. "it's an agent for a new kind of fertilizer."
"tell him i don't want it and to get to hell out of this."
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"you'd better see him. he'll think it queer if you don't."
it was the spur he needed. he couldn't afford to be thought queer. he saw the agent, tom acting as go-between and interpreter.
to act as go-between and interpreter became in a measure the boy's job. being so near the holidays, he did not return to school, and freed from school, he could give all his time to helping the frightened creature to seem competent in the eyes of his customers and hired men. not that he succeeded. none knew better than the hired men that the place was, as they put it, all in the soup; none were so quick to fall away as customers who were not getting what they wanted. when the house was tumbling about their heads one little boy's shoulder could not do much as a prop; but what it could do he offered.
he offered it with a gravity at which the men laughed good-naturedly behind his back. they took his orders solemnly, and thought no more about them. for a whole week nothing went to market. the dealers whom they supplied complained by telephone. billy peet and himself got a load of "truck" into town, only to be told that their man had made other arrangements. to meet these conditions quidmore had spurts of energy, from which he backed down gibbering.
taking his courage in both hands, the boy went to see bertha. never having been face to face with her before, he found her of the type of beauty best appreciated where the taste is for the highly blown. she received him with haughty surprise and wonder, not
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asking him to sit down. having prepared his words, he recited them, though her attitude frightened him out of the man-of-the-world tone he had meant to adopt. humbly and haltingly, he asked if she wouldn't come out and help to stiffen the old man.
"so he's sent you, has he? well, you can go back and say that i've no reply except the one i've given him. all is over between us. tell him that if he thinks that that was the way to win me he's very gravely mistook. i know what's happened as positive as if i was a jury, and i shall never pardon it. silence i shall keep, but that is all he can ask of me. he's made me talked about when he shouldn't ought to ov, ignoring that a woman, and especially a widow—" her voice broke—"has nothing but her reputation. go back and tell him that if he tries to force my door he'll find it double-barred against him."
tom went back but said nothing. there was no need for him to say anything, since his life began at once to take another turn.
school holidays having begun, he was free in fact as well as in name. it was on a thursday that his father came to him with the kind of proposal which always excites a small boy.
"say, boy, what you think of a little trip down to wilmington, delaware, you and me? go off to-morrow and get back by tuesday. i'd see my sister, and it'd do me good."
the prospect seemed to have done him good already. a new life had come to him. he went about the place giving orders for the few days of his absence, with particular instructions to diggory and
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blanche as to geraldine, and the disposal of the milk. they started on their journey in the morning.
it was one of those mornings in june when every blessed and beautiful thing seems poured on the earth at once. as between five and six billy peet drove them over to take the train at harfrey, light, birds, trees, flowers, meadows, dew, would have thrilled them to ecstasy if they had not been used to them. for the first time in weeks tom saw his father smile. it was a smile of relief rather than of pleasure, but it was better than his look of woe.
the journey wakened memories. not since mrs. crewdson had brought him out to place him as a state ward with mrs. tollivant had he gone into the city by this route. he had gone in by the motor truck often enough; but this line that followed the river was haunted still by the things he had outlived. he was not sorry to have known them, though glad that they were gone. he was hardly sorry even for the present, though doubtful as to how it was going to turn out. vaguely and not introspectively, he was shocked at himself, that he should be sitting there with a man who had done what he felt pretty sure this man had done, and that he should feel no horror. but he felt none. he assured himself of that. he could sleep with him by night, and work and eat with him by day, with no impulse but to shield a poor wretch who had made his own life such a misery.
"i've got to do it," he said to himself, in a kind of self-defense. "i don't know he did it—not for sure, i don't. and if nobody else tries to find out, why should i, when he's been so awful nice to me?"
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he watched a steamer plowing her way southward in the middle of the stream. he liked her air of quiet self-possession and of power. he wondered whence she was coming, whither she was going, and what she was doing it for. he couldn't guess.
"that'd be like me," he said, silently, "sailing from i don't know where—sailing to i don't know where——"
ten years later he finished this thought, repeating exactly the same words. just now he couldn't finish anything, because there was so much to see. little towns perched above little harbors. fishermen angled from little piers. a group of naked boys, shameless as young mermen, played in the water. on a rock a few yards from the shore a flock of gulls jostled each other for standing room. a motor boat puffed. yachts rode sleepily at anchor. the car which, when they took it at harfrey had been almost empty, was beginning to fill with the earlier hordes of commuters. soon it was quite full. soon there were cheery young people, most of them chewing gum, standing in the passageway. having rounded the curve at spuyten duyvil, they saw the city looming up, white, spiritual, tremulous, through the morning mist.
up to this minute he had not thought of plans; now he began to wonder what they should do on reaching the grand central, where they would arrive in another quarter of an hour.
"do we go straight across to the pennsylvania station, to take the train for wilmington, or do we have to wait?"
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"i'll—i'll see."
the answer was unsatisfactory. he looked at his father inquiringly. looking at him, he was hurt to observe that his confidence was departing, that he was again like something with a broken spring.
"well, we're going to wilmington to-day, aren't we?"
"i'll—i'll see."
"but," the boy cried in alarm, "where can we go, if we don't?"
"i—i know a place."
it was disappointing. the choking sensation which, when he was younger, used to precede tears, began to gather in his throat. having heard so much from mrs. quidmore of the glories of wilmington, delaware, he saw it as a city of palaces, of exquisite, ladylike maidens, of noble youths, of aristocratic joyousness. moreover, he had been told that to get there you went under the river, through a tunnel so deep down in the earth that you felt a distressful throbbing in the head. the postponement of these experiences even for a day was hard to submit to.
in the grand central his father was in a mood he had never before seen. it was a dark mood, at once decided and secretive.
"come this way."
this way was out into forty-second street. with their suitcases in their hands, they climbed into a street car going westward. westward they went, changing to another car going southward, under the thunder of the elevated, in ninth avenue. at fourteenth street they got out again. tom recognized the neighbor
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hood because of its nearness to the great markets to which they sometimes brought supplies. but they avoided the markets, making their way between drays, round buildings in course of demolition, through gangs of children wooing disaster as they played in the streets. in the end they turned out of the tumult to find themselves in a placid little backwater of the "old new york" of the early nineteenth century. reading the sign at the corner tom saw that it was jane street.
jane street dates from a period earlier than the development of that civic taste which gives to all new york north of fourteenth street the picturesqueness of a sum in simple arithmetic. jane street has atmosphere, period, chic. you know at a glance that the people who built these trim little red-brick houses still felt that impulse which first came to manhattan from the hague, to be fostered later by william and mary, and finally merged in the georgian tradition. jane street is dutch. it has dutch quaintness, and, as far as new york will permit it, dutch cleanliness. it might be a byway in amsterdam. instead of cutting straight from the hudson river docks to greenwich avenue, it might run from a canal with barges on it to a field of hyacinths in bloom.
but tom quidmore saw not what you and i would have seen, a relief from the noise and fetidness of a hot summer's morning in a neighborhood reeking with garbage. when his heart had been fixed on that dream-city, wilmington, delaware, he found himself in a dingy little alley. not often querulous, he became so now.
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"what are we doing down here?"
the reply startled him. "i'm—i'm sick."
looking again at the man who shuffled along beside him, he saw that his face had grown ashy, while his eyes, which earlier in the day had had life in them, were lusterless. the boy would have been frightened had it not been for the impulse of affection.
"let's go back to bere. then you can have the doctor. i'll get a cab and steer the whole business."
without answering, quidmore stopped at a brown door, level with the pavement, in a big, dim-windowed building, with fire escapes zigzagging down the front. jane street is not exclusively clean and trim and dutch. it has lapses—here a warehouse, there a dwelling tumbling to decay, elsewhere a nondescript structure like this. it looked like a lodging house for sailors and dock laborers. in the basement was a restaurant to which you went down by steps, and bearing the legend pappa's chop saloon.
while quidmore stood in doubt as to whether to ring the bell or to push the door which already stood a little open, two men came out of the chop saloon and began to mount the steps. in faded blue overalls the worse for wear, they had plainly broken a day's work, possibly begun at five o'clock, for a late breakfast. the one in advance, a sturdy, well-knit fellow of forty or forty-five, got a sinister expression from a black patch over his left eye. his companion was older, smaller, more worn by a bitter life. all the twists in his figure, all the soured betrayals in his crafty face, showed you the habitual criminal.
none of these details was visible to quidmore,
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because his imagination could see only the bed for which he was craving. to the boy, who trusted everyone, they were no more than the common type of workman he was used to meeting in the markets. the fellow with the patch on his eye, making an estimate of the strangers as he mounted the steps, spoke cheerily.
"i say, mate, what can i do for yer?"
the voice with a vaguely english ring was not ungenial. not ungenial, when you looked at it, was the strongly-boned face, with a ruddiness burnt to a coarse tan. the single gray-blue eye had the sympathetic gleam which often helps roguery to make itself excusable to people with a sense of fun.
quidmore muttered something about wanting to see mrs. pappa.
"right you are! come along o' me. i'll dig the old gal out for yer. expects you wants a room for yerself and the kid. hi, pappa!"
pappa came out of a dim, musty parlor as the witch who foretells bad weather appears in a mechanical barometer. she was like a witch, but a dark, classic witch, with an immemorial tradition behind her. her ancestors might have fought at marathon, or sacrificed to neptune in the temple on sunium. in jane street she was archaic, a survival from antiquity. her thoughts must have been with the nymphs at delphi, or following the triremes carrying the warriors from argolis to troy, as silent, mysterious, fateful, she led the way upstairs.
they followed in procession, all four of them. the doorstep acquaintances displayed a solicitude not less
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than brotherly. the hall was without furniture, the stairs without carpet. the softwood floors, like the treads of the stairs, were splintered with the usage of many heavy heels. where the walls bulged, through the pressure of jerry-built stories overhead, the marbled paper swelled into bosses. tom found it impressive, with something of strange stateliness.
"yer'll be from the country," the one-eyed fellow observed, as they climbed upward.
"yes, sir," tom answered, civilly. "we're on our way to wilmington, delaware, but my father felt a little sick."
"well, he's struck a good place to lay up in. i say, pappa," he called ahead, "seems to me as the big room with two beds'd be what'd suit the gent. it's next door to the barthroom, and he'll find that convenient. mate," he explained further, when they stood within the room with two beds, "this'll set ye' back a dollar a day in advance. that right, pappa, ain't it?"
pappa assenting with some antique sign, quidmore drew out his pocketbook to extract the dollar. with no ceremonious scruples the smaller comrade craned his neck to appraise, as far as possible, the contents of the wallet.
"wad," tom heard him squirt out of the corner of his mouth, in the whisper of a ventriloquist.
his friend seemed to wink behind the patch on his left eye. tom took the exchange of confidence as a token of respect. he and his father were considered rich, the effect being seen in the attentions accorded them. this was further borne out when the genial
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one of the two rogues turned on the threshold, as his colleague was following pappa downstairs.
"anythink i can do for yer, mate, command me. name of honeybun—lemuel honeybun. honey lem some of the guys calls me. i answers to it, not takin' no offense like." he pointed to the figure stumping down the stairs. "my friend, mr. goodsir. him and me been pals this two year. we lives on the ground floor. room back of pappa."
the door closed, tom looked round him in an interest which eclipsed his hopes of the tunnel. this was adventure. it was nearly romance. never before had he stayed in a hotel. the place was not luxurious, but never, in the life he could remember, having known anything but necessity, necessity was enough. moreover, the room contained a work of art that touched his imagination. on the bare drab mantelpiece stood the head of a red indian, in plaster painted in bronze, not unlike the mummified head of rameses the great. the boy couldn't take his eye away from it. this was what you got by visiting strange cities more intimately than by trucking to and from the markets.
quidmore threw himself on his bed, his face buried in the meager pillow. he was suffering apparently not from pain, but from some more subtle form of distress. being told that there was nothing he could do for the invalid, tom sat silent and still on one of the two small chairs which helped out the furnishings. it was not boring for him to do this, because he swam in novelty. he recalled the steamer he had seen that morning, sailing from he didn't know where,
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sailing to he didn't know where, but on the way. he, too, was on the way. he was on the way to something different from wilmington, delaware. it would be different from bere. he began to wonder if he should ever go back to bere. if he didn't go back to bere ... but at this point in tom's dreams quidmore dragged himself off the bed.
"let's go down to the chop saloon, and eat."
