a few days after his rescue of guy ansley from the snow tom whitelaw found himself addressed by that young gentleman's sister, aged fourteen. she had plainly been watching for him as he went through louisburg square on his way from school. he had almost passed the ansley steps before the tall, slight girl ran down them.
"oh, mr. whitelaw!"
as it was the first time he had ever been honored with this prefix, he felt shocked and slightly foolish.
"yes, miss ansley?"
a little breathless, she was, as he had noticed during their previous meeting, oddly grown up for her age, as one who takes responsibilities because there is no one else to bear them. she had the manner and selection of words of a woman of thirty.
"i hope you won't mind my waylaying you like this, but my brother would so much like to see you. you've been so awfully kind that i hope you'll come up. he's in bed, you know."
"when does he want me to come?"
"well, now, if it isn't troubling you too much. you see, my father and mother are coming home to-night, and he'd like to have a word with you before then. he won't keep you more than a few minutes."
what tom obscurely felt as an honor to himself she put as a favor he was doing them. it was an
[pg 210]
honor in that it admitted him a little farther into privacies which to him seemed tapestried with privilege and tradition. his one brief glimpse of their way of living had not made him discontented; it had only appealed to his faculty for awe.
awe was what he was aware of in following his young guide up the two red staircases to the room where the fat boy lay in bed. it was a mother's-darling's room, amusingly out of keeping with the pudgy, fleshy being whom it housed. flowered paper on the walls, flowered hangings at the windows, flowered cretonnes on thickly upholstered armchairs, flowered silk on the duvet, garlands of flowers on the headboard and footboard of the virginal white bedstead, made the piggy eyes and piggy cheeks, bolstered up by pillows of which some were trimmed with lace, the more funnily grotesque. tom whitelaw saw neither the fun nor the grotesqueness. all he could take in was the fact that beauty could gild the lily of this luxury. he knew nothing of beauty in his own denuded life. the room with two beds which he still shared with honey at mrs. danker's was not so much a sanctuary as a lair.
the fat boy's giggles were those of welcome, and also those of embarrassment.
"after the scrap the other night got sick. bronchitis. sit down."
tom looked round to see what miss ansley was doing, but slipping away, she shut the door behind her. he sank into the flowered armchair nearest to the bed. the cracked girlish voice, which now had a wheeze in it, went on.
[pg 211]
"they've wired for dad and mother, and they're coming home to-night. thought that before they got here i'd put you wise to something i want you to do."
waiting for more, tom sat silent, while the poor piggy face screwed itself up as if it meant to cry.
"dad and mother think that because i'm so fat i'm not a sport. but they're dead wrong, see? i am a sport; only—only—" he was almost bursting into tears—"only the damn fat won't let me get it out, see?"
"yes, i see. i now you're a sport all right, old chap. of course!"
"well, then, don't let them think the other thing, if they were to ask you."
"ask me what?"
"ask you what the row was about the other afternoon. if they do that tell 'em we were only playing nigger-in-the-henhouse, or any other snow game. don't say i was knocked down by a lot of kids. make 'em think i was having the devil's own good time."
tom whitelaw knew this kind of humiliation. if he had not been through guy ansley's special phase of it he had been through others.
"i'll tell them what i saw. you and a lot of other fellows were skylarking in the snow, and i went by and got you to knock off. as i had to pass your door we came home together; but when i found you were wet to the skin i advised miss ansley to see that you hit the hay. that's all there was to it."
in the version of the incident the strain of truth was sufficiently clear to allow the fat boy to approve
[pg 212]
of it. he didn't want to tell a lie, or to get tom whitelaw to tell a lie; but sport having been the object with which he had stolen away on that winter's afternoon, it was easy to persuade himself that he had got it. before tom went away guy ansley understood that he would figure to his parents not as a victim but as something of a tough.
"gee, i wish i was you," he grinned at tom, who stood with his hands on the doorknob.
"me!" tom was never so astonished in his life. his eyes rolled round the room. "how do you think i live?"
"oh, live! that's nothing. what i'd like to do is to rough it. if they'd let me do that i shouldn't be—i shouldn't be wrapped up in fat like a mummy in—in whatever it is they're wrapped up in. you can get away with anything on looks."
sincere as was this tribute, it meant nothing to tom whitelaw, looks being no part of his preoccupations. what, for the minute, he was thinking about was that nobody in the world seemed to be quite satisfied. here he was envying guy ansley his down quilt and his comfortable chairs, while guy was envying him the rough-and-tumble of privation.
"i shouldn't look after him too much," he said to the young sister whom, on coming downstairs, he found waiting at the front door. "there's nothing wrong with him, except that he's a little stout. he's got lots of pluck."
her face glowed. the glow brought out its intelligence. the intelligence set into action a demure, mysterious charm, almost oriental.
[pg 213]
"that's just what i always say, and no one ever believes me. mother makes a baby of him."
"if he could only fight his own way a little more...."
"oh, i do hope you'll say that if they speak to you about him."
"i will if i ever get the chance, but...."
"oh, you must get the chance. i'll make it. you see, you're the only boy guy's ever taken a fancy to who didn't treat him as a joke."
tom assured her that her brother was not the only fellow who had a hard fight to put up during boyhood. he had seen them by the dozen who, just because of some trifling oddity, or unusual taste, were teased, worried, tormented, till school became a hell; but that didn't keep them from turning out in the end to be the best sports among them all. very likely the guying did them good. he thought it might. he, tom whitelaw, had been through a lot of it, and now that he was sixteen he wasn't sorry for himself a bit. he used to be sorry for himself, but....
seeing her for the second time, and in daylight, her features grew more distinct to him. he mused on them while continuing his way homeward. to say she was not pretty, as he had said the other night, was to use a form of words calling for amplification. it was the first time he had had occasion to observe that there are faces to which beauty is not important.
"it's the way she looks at you," was his form of summing up; and yet for the way she looked at you he had no sufficient phraseology.
that her eyes were long, narrow, and yellow-brown,
[pg 214]
ever so slightly mongolian, he could see easily enough. that her nose was short, with a little tilt to it, was also a fact he had no difficulty in stating. as for her coloring, it was like that of a russet apple when the brown has a little gold in it and the red the brightness of carmine. her hair was saved from being ugly by running to the quaint. straight, black—black with a bluish gloss—it was worn not in the pigtail with which he was most familiar, but in two big plaits curved behind the ears, and secured he didn't know how. she reminded him of a colored picture he had seen of a cambodian girl, a resemblance enhanced by the dark blue dress she wore, straight and formless down the length of her immature, boylike figure, and marked at the waistline by a circle of gold braid.
but all these details were subordinate to something he had no power of defining. it was also something of which he was jealous as an injustice to maisie danker. if this girl had what poor maisie had not it was because money gave her an advantage. it was the kind of advantage that wasn't fair. because it wasn't fair, he felt it a challenge to his loyalty.
nevertheless, he could not accept maisie's offhand judgments when between five and six that afternoon he told her of the incident.
this was at the cherry tree, one of those bowers of refreshment and dancing recently opened on their own slope of beacon hill. bower was the word. what had once been the basement-kitchen and coal cellar of a small brick dwelling had been artfully converted into a long oval orchard of cherry trees, in
[pg 215]
paper luxuriance of foliage and blossom. within the boskage, and under chinese lanterns, there were tables; out in the open was a center oval cleared for dancing. somewhere out of sight a cracked fiddle and a flat piano rasped out the tango or some shred of "rag." with the briefest intervals for breath, this performance was continuous. the guests, who at that hour in the afternoon numbered no more than ten or twelve, forsook their refreshments to take the floor, or forsook the floor to return to their refreshments, just as the impulse moved them. they were chiefly working girls, young men at leisure because out of jobs, or sailors on shore. except for an occasional hoarse or screechy laugh, the decorum was proper to solemnity.
it was the fourth or fifth time tom and maisie had come to this retreat, nominally that tom should learn to dance, but really that they should commune together. to him the occasions were blissful for the reason that he had no one else in the world to commune with. to talk, to talk eagerly, to pour out the torrent of opinions boiling within him, meant more than that maisie should understand him. maisie didn't understand him. she only laughed and joked with pretty inanity; but she let him talk. he talked about the books he liked and didn't like, about the advantages college men possessed over those who weren't college men, about what he knew of the banking system, about the good you conferred on the world and yourself when you saved your money and invested it. in none of these subjects was she interested; but now and then she could get a turn to talk of the movies,
[pg 216]
the new dances, and love. that these subjects made him uneasy was not, from maisie's point of view, a reason for avoiding them.
each was concerned with the other, but beyond the other each was concerned most of all with the mystery called life. to live was what they were after, to live strongly and deeply and vividly and hotly, and to do it with the pinched means and narrow opportunities which were all they could command. in his secret heart tom whitelaw knew that maisie danker was not the girl out of all the world he would have sought of his own accord, while maisie danker was equally aware that this boy two years younger than herself couldn't be the generous provider she was looking for. they were only like shipwrecked passengers thrown together on an island. they must make the best of each other. no other girl, hardly any other human being except honey, had entered the social isolation in which he was marooned, and as for her....
she was so cheery and game that she never referred to her home experiences otherwise than allusively. from allusions he gathered that she was not with her aunt, mrs. danker, merely for pleasure or from pressure of affection. her father was living; her stepmother was living too. there was a whole step-family of little brothers and sisters. her father drank; her stepmother hated her; there was no room for her at home. all her life she had been knocked about. even when she worked in the woolen mills she couldn't keep her wages. she had had fellows, but none of them was ever any good. the best of
[pg 217]
them was a french canadian who made big money, but he wouldn't marry her unless she "turned catholic." "if he couldn't give up his church for me i couldn't give up mine for him; so there it was!" there was another fellow.... but as to him she said little. in speaking of him at all her face grew somber, which it did rarely. either because he had failed her, or to get her out of his clutches, tom was not sure which, her aunt had offered her a home for the winter. "gee, it makes me laff," was her own sole comment on her miseries.
as tom had dropped into the habit of telling her the small happenings of his uneventful life, he gave her, across the ice-cream sodas, an account of what had just occurred between himself and guy and hildred ansley.
she listened with what for her was gravity. "you've got to give some of them society girls the cold glassy eye," she informed him, judicially. "if you don't you'll get it yourself, perhaps when you ain't expecting it."
"oh, but this is only a little girl, not more than fourteen. she just seems grown up. that's the funny part of it."
"not more than fourteen! just seems grown up! why, any of that bunch is forwarder at ten than i'd be at twenty. that's one thing i'd never be, not if men was scarcer than blue raspberries—forward. and yet some of them society buds'll be brassier than a knocker on a door."
"oh, but this little miss ansley isn't that sort."
"you wouldn't know, not if she was running up
[pg 218]
and down your throat. any girl can get hold of a man if she makes him think she needs him bad enough."
"it wasn't she who needed me; it was her brother."
"a brother'll do. a grandmother'd do. if you can't bait your hook with a feather fly, you can take a bit of worm. but once a fella like you begins to take a shine to one of them...."
"shine to one of them! me?"
"well, i suppose you'll be taking a shine to some girl some day. why shouldn't you?"
"if i was going to do that...."
the point at which he suspended his sentence was that which piqued her especially. her eyes were provocative; her bright face alert.
"well, if you were going to do that—what of it?"
the minute was one he was trying to evade. as clearly as if he were fifty, he knew the folly of getting himself involved in an emotional entanglement. though he looked a young man, he was only a big boy. the most serious part of his preparation for life lay just ahead of him. if he didn't go to college....
and even more pressing than that consideration was the fact that in bringing maisie to the cherry tree that afternoon he had come down to his last fifteen cents. at the beginning of their acquaintance he had had seven dollars and a half, hoarded preciously for needs connected with his education. maisie had stampeded the whole treasure. to expect a man to spend money on her was as instinctive to maisie as it is to a flower to expect the heavens to send rain.
[pg 219]
she knew that at each mention of the movies or the cherry tree tom squirmed in the anguish of financial disability, and that from the very hint of love he bolted like a colt from the bridle; but when it came to what she considered as her due she was pitiless.
no epic has yet been written on the woes of the young man trying, on twenty-five dollars a week, let us say, to play up to the american girl's taste for spending money. his self-denials, his sordid shifts, his mortifications, his sense at times that his most unselfish efforts have been scorned, might inspire a series of episodes as tensely dramatic as those of spoon river.
tom had had one such experience on maisie's birthday. she had talked so much of her birthday that a present became indispensable. to meet this necessity the extreme of his expenditure could be no more than fifty cents. to find for fifty cents something worthy of a lady already a connoisseur he ransacked boston. somewhere he had heard that a present might be modest so long as it was the best thing of its kind. the best thing of its kind he discovered was a toothbrush. it was not a common toothbrush except for the part that brushed the teeth. the handle was of mother-of-pearl, with an inlay in red enamel. the price was forty-five cents.
maisie laughed till she cried. "a toothbrush! a toothbrush! for a present that's something new! gee, how the girls'll laff when i go back to nashua and tell them that that's what a guy give me in boston!"
the humiliation of straitened means was the more
[pg 220]
galling to tom whitelaw, first because he was a giver, and then because he knew the value of money. with the value of money his mind was always playing, not from miserly motives, but from those of social economy. each time he "blew in," as he called it, a dollar on the girl he said to himself: "if i could have invested that dollar, it would have helped to run a factory, and have brought me in six or seven cents a year for all the rest of my life." he made this calculation to mark the wastage he was strewing along his path in the wild pace he was running.
there was something about maisie which obliged you to play up to her. she was that sort of girl. if you didn't play up, the mere laughter in her eye made you feel your lack of the manly qualities. it was not her scorn she brought into play; it was her sense of fun; but to the boy of sixteen her sense of fun was terrible.
it was terrible, and yet it put him on his guard. he couldn't wholly give in to her. if she could make moves he could make them too, and perhaps as adroitly. her tantalizing question was ringing in his ears: if he was going to take a shine to any girl—what of it?
"oh, if i was going to do that," he tossed off, "it would be to you."
"so that you haven't taken a shine to me—yet?"
"it depends on what you mean by a shine."
"what do you mean by it yourself?"
"i never have time to think." this was a happy
[pg 221]
sentiment, and a safeguard. "it takes all i can do to remember that i've got to go to college."
"damn college!"
he was so unsophisticated that the expression startled him. he hadn't supposed young ladies used it, not any more than they sneaked into barns or under bridges to smoke cigarettes.
"what's the use of damning college, when i've got to go?"
"you haven't got to go. a great strong fella like you ought to be earning his twenty per by this time. if you've got money in the bank, as you say you have...."
he trembled already for his treasure. "i haven't got it here. it's in a savings bank in new york."
"oh, that's nothing! if you got it anywheres you can get at it with a check. gee, if i had a few hundreds i'd have ten in my pocket at a time, i'll be hanged if i wouldn't. i don't believe you've got it, see. i know a lot o' guys that loves to put that sort of fluff over on a girl. makes 'em feel big. but if they only knew what the girl thinks of them...." she jumped to her feet, allowing herself a little more vulgarity than she generally showed. "all right, old son, c'me awn! let's have another twist. and for gawd's sake don't bring down that hoof of yours till i get a chance to pull my cinderella-slipper out of your way."
