And also at this minute Teddy was standing in his cage at the bank in a very peculiar situation. At least it struck him as peculiar, because for the first time he perceived its opportunities.
For Teddy, too, six months had been a period of development, just as it is for a green fruit when you pick it and lay it in the sun. It ripens, but it ripens green. When you eat it, it has a green flavor, or a flat flavor, or none at all. Teddy was a fruit to be left on the tree to take its time. He was now twenty-one, with the promptings of sixteen. At his own rate of progress, he would probably have reached twenty by the time he was twenty-two, but thirty at twenty-five.
As it was, he had been called on to be thirty when his growth was just beginning. Not merely the circumstances had made this demand on him, but the dependence, more or less unconscious, of the members of the family. They looked to him to do something big because he was a young man. Having heard of other young men who had been financially heroic, they expected him to be the same. The possibilities, open to a bank clerk of twenty-one had no relation to their hopes. Even his mother, chiefly because of her adoration, seemed to feel that he should spring from eighteen to a hundred dollars a week by the force of inner flame.
She didn't say so, of course. She only revealed her sentiments as Pansy revealed hers, by an inextinguishable look. The father did no more than throw emphasis on the boy's responsibility. Jennie and Gladys never said anything at all, but Gussie was quite frank.
"A great big fellow like you and only making eighteen per! Look at poor momma, working her fingers to the bone. I'd be ashamed if I were you. Why, Fred Inglis orders his clothes at Love's and keeps his own Ford."
It was all there in a nut shell—his inability to rise to the occasion in a land where everyone else who was worth his salt had only to shake the money tree and pick up coin. How Fred Inglis did it Teddy couldn't think, when your value by the week was so definitely fixed and a raise lay so far ahead. If he had developed during the past six months, it was mainly through a carking sense of inefficiency.
Meanwhile, he had to do what Gussie told him—watch his mother work her fingers to the bone. In spite of a tendency to squabble, the Folletts were an affectionate family, and the mother was the center of their love. Teddy didn't stop to analyze what she was to them; he only knew that there was nothing he wouldn't be to her. If he could only have compassed it, she would have had a bar-pin like their neighbor, Mrs. Weatherby; she would have worn the skunk neckpiece for which he had once heard her utter a desire; she would have gone out in his Ford oftener than Fred Inglis's mother in his. These things he would have done for her and more, had he but been the financial Titan all American example called on him to become. Between Gussie's taunts and his own What lack I yet? he was reaching a condition of despair.
And now, on this particular afternoon, when nearly everyone had left the bank and Mr. Brunt, to whom he was specially attached, was working later than usual, there was the fruit of the money tree piled up on the ground. Mr. Brunt had gone to the other end of the main office, and would return presently to stow these piles of bills in the safe. These bills were money. Teddy had never consciously dwelt on that fact before. He had been in this same situation a thousand times, when he had nothing to do but put out his hands and stuff his pockets with food and fuel and gas and the interest on the mortgage, and all the other things of which there was such a lack at home, and had never considered that the needed things were here.
He remembered that as a child in Nova Scotia he would occasionally swipe an apple from a cart-load, knowing that the owner couldn't miss it, and had the same sensation now. Here were the piles of bills, all arranged in rows according to their values—a pile of hundreds, a pile of fifties, a pile of twenties, and so on down. Mr. Brunt would come back, as he had done at other times, and put them away without counting them. Having counted them already, he would accept this reckoning for the day. He, Teddy, was left there to see that nothing happened to this treasure.