to tom whitelaw this was the conclusion of the whole matter. a son must have a mother as well as a father. if there was no mother there was no son. the inference brought him a relief in which there were two strains of regret.
he would be farther away from hildred. they would have more trials to meet, more bridges to cross. very well! he was not accustomed to having things made easy. for whatever he possessed, which was not much, he had longed and worked and worked and longed till he got it. but he got it in the end. in the end he would get hildred. better win her so than to have her drop as a present in his arms. if not wholly content, he was sure.
in the matter of his second regret he was only sorry. it began to grow clear to him that a father needs a son more than a son needs a father. of this kind of need he himself knew nothing. he was what he was, detached, independent, assured. he never asked for sympathy, and if he craved for love, he had learned to stifle the craving, or direct it into the one narrow channel which flowed toward hildred. the paternal and filial instinct, having had no function in his life, seemed to have shriveled up.
but the instinct of response to the slightest movement of goodwill, to the faintest plea for help, was
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active with daily use. it leaped forth eagerly; if it couldn't leap forth something within him fretted and cried like a hound when the scent leads to earth. as paul the apostle, he could be all things to all men, if by any means he might help some. if henry whitelaw needed a son, he could be a son to him. the tie of blood was in no small measure a matter of indifference. his impulse was like honey's "next o' kin." he remembered, as he had learned in school, that kin and kind were words with a common origin. whitelaw's truest kinship with himself was in his kindness. his kinship with whitelaw could as truly be in his devotion. devotion was what he could offer most spontaneously.
if only that could satisfy the father yearning for his son! it could do it up to a point, since the banker identified kindness and kinship much as he did himself. but beyond that point there was the cry of the middle-aged man for some one who was part of himself on whom he could lean now that his strength was beginning to decline. that his two acknowledged children were nothing but a care sent him groping all the more eagerly for the son who might be a support to him. the son who was not a son might be better than no one, as he himself confessed; and yet nothing on earth could satisfy his empty soul but his own son. not to be that son made tom sorry; but without a mother, how could he be?
otherwise, to remain as what life had made him was unalloyed relief. he was himself. in his own phrase, he was more himself than most men. but to enter the whitelaw family, and belong to it, would
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turn him into some one else. he might have a right there; an accident such as happens every day might easily make him the head of it; and yet he would have to put forth affections and develop points of view which could only come from a man with another kind of past. to be the son of that mother, and the brother of that sister, sorry for them as he was, would mean the kind of metamorphosis, the change in the whole nature, of which he had read in ancient mythology. he would make the attempt if he was called to it; but he shrank from the call.
nevertheless, he took up his job as assistant to the great man's confidential secretary. this was a mr. phips whom tom didn't like, but with whom he got on easily. he easily got on with him because mr. phips himself made a point of it.
a rubicund, smiling man, he had to be seen twice before you gave him credit for his unctuous ability. there was in him that mingling of honesty and craft which go to make the henchman, and sometimes the ecclesiastic. while he couldn't originate anything, he could be an instrument accurate and sharp. always ready to act boldly, it was with a boldness of which some one else must assume the responsibility. he could be the power behind the throne, but never the power sitting on it publicly. with an almost telepathic gift for reading whitelaw's mind, he could carry out its wishes before they were expressed. from sheer induction he could, in a secondary way, direct affairs from which he never took a penny of the profits over and above his salary.
again like the ecclesiastic and the henchman, he
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had neither will nor conscience beyond the cause he served. a born factotum, with no office but to carry out, he accepted tom without questioning. without questioning he set him to those duties which, as a beginner, would be within his grasp. he didn't need to be told that when a message or a document was to be sent to the most private of all offices, it should be through the person of this particular young man. without having invented for tom the soubriquet of the whitelaw baby, he didn't frown at it on hearing it pass round the office, as it did within a few days.
tom found whitelaw welcoming, considerate, but at first a little distant. he might have been conscious of the anomalies in the situation; he might have been anxious not to rush things; he might even have been shy. except to ask him, toward the end of each day, how he was getting along, he didn't speak to him alone.
then, on the fourth morning, whitelaw sent for him. as tom entered he was standing up, a packet in his hand.
"i want you to take a taxi and go up to my house. ask for my wife, and give her this." he made the nature of the errand clearer. "it's the anniversary of our wedding. she thinks i've forgotten it. i've only been waiting to send this—by you."
the significance of the mission came to tom while he was on the way. the thing in the packet, probably a jewel, was the token of a marriage of which he was the eldest born. it was to mark his position in the husband's mind that he was made the bearer of the gift. he had no opinion as to this, except that
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in the appeal to the wife there was an element of futility.
in the big dim hall he met the second born. to answer the door dadd had left the task of helping the one-armed fellow into his spring overcoat. as tom came in the poor left arm was struggling with the garment viciously. tad broke into a greeting vigorous, but non-committal.
"hello, by gad!"
tom went straight to his business. "your father has sent me with a message to mrs. whitelaw. i understand she's at home."
"so you've got here! i knew you'd work it some day."
"you were very perspicacious."
"i was. and there's another thing i'll tell you. you've got round the old man. well, i'm not going to stand for it. see?"
"i see; but it's got nothing to do with me. your father's given me a job. if you don't want him to do it you ought to tackle him."
whatever war had done for tad it had not ennobled him. the face was old and seamed and stained with a dark red flush. it was scowling too, with the helpless scowl of impotence. tom was sorrier for him than he had ever been before.
having taken his hat and stick, tad strode off, turning only on the doorstep. "but there's one thing i'll say right now. if you've got a job at meek and brokenshire's i'll damn well have a better one. i'm going to keep my eye on you."
tom laughed, good-naturedly. "that's the very
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best thing you could do. nothing would please your father half so well. you'd buck him up, and at the same time get your knife into me."
as the door closed behind tad miss nash came forward from somewhere in the obscurity. she was in that tremulous ecstasy which the mere sight of tom always roused in her. she was so very sorry, but mrs. whitelaw wasn't able to receive him. if tom would leave his package with her she would see that it was delivered.
on the next afternoon as tom was leaving the office whitelaw offered him a lift uptown. in the seclusion of the limousine the father spoke of tad.
"he's a great care to me, but somehow i feel that you might do him good."
"he wouldn't let me. i can't get near him, except by force."
"but force is what he respects. in the bottom of his heart he respects you."
"what he needs is a job—the smallest job you could offer him in the bank. if you could put it to him as a sporting proposition that he was to get ahead of me...."
"that's what i'll try to do."
in the course of a few days the lift uptown had become a custom. though he had never received instructions to that effect, mr. phips so shaped tom's duties that he found himself leaving the office at the same moment as the banker. once or twice when things did not so happen whitelaw came into the room where tom was at work to look for him. if
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no one else saw it mr. phips did, that the lift uptown was the big minute of the banker's day.
"i've got a son," the secretary pondered to himself, "but i'll be hanged if i feel about him like that. i suppose it's because i never lost him."
"tad's applied to me for a job," the father informed tom in the limousine one day. "the next thing will be to make him stick to it."
"i believe i could manage that, once we get him there," tom said confidently. "i can't always make him drink, but i can hold his head to the water. i did that at college more than once."
"i know you did. i can't tell you...."
a tremor of the voice cut short this sentence, but tom knew what would have been said: "i can't tell you what it means to me now to have some one to fall back upon. the children have given me a good deal of worry which their mother couldn't share because of her unhappiness. but now—i've got you." tom was glad, however, that it had not been put into words.
