Within a few days Honey, whose strength was his skill, was working as a stevedore on the Charlestown docks. Tom was picking up small jobs about the markets. By September he had passed his examinations and had entered the Latin School. A new life had begun. From the old life no pursuit or interference ever followed them.
The boy shot up. In the course of a year he had grown out of most of his clothes. To the best of his modest ability, Honey was generous with new ones. He was generous with everything. That Tom should lack nothing, he cut down his own needs till he seemed to have none but the most elemental. Of his "nice times" in New York nothing had followed him to Boston but a love of spirits and tobacco. Of the two, the spirits went completely. When Tom's needs were pressing the supply of tobacco diminished till it sometimes disappeared. If on Sundays he could venture over the hill, to listen to the band on the Common, or stroll with the boy in the Public Gardens, it was because the Sunday suit, bought in the days when he had no one to provide for but himself, was sponged and pressed and brushed and mended, with scrupulous devotion. The motive of so much self-denial puzzled Tom, since, so far as he could judge, it was not affection.
He was old enough now to perceive that affection had inspired most of his good fortune. People were disposed to like him for himself. There was rarely a teacher who did not approve of him. By the market men, among whom he still picked up a few dollars on Saturdays and in vacations, he was always welcomed heartily. In school he never failed to hold his own till the boys discovered that his father, or uncle, or something, was a stevedore, after which he was ignored. Girls regarded him with a hostile interest, while toward them he had no sentiments of any kind. He could go through a street and scarcely notice that there was a girl in it, and yet girls wouldn't leave him alone. They bothered him with overtures of friendship to which he did not respond, or tossed their heads at him, or called him names. But in general the principle was established that he could be liked.
But Honey was an enigma. Love was apparently not the driving power urging him to these unexpected fulfillments. If it was, it had none of the harmless dog-and-puppy ways which Tom had grown accustomed to. Honey never pawed him, as the masters often pawed the boys, and the boys pawed one another. He never threw an arm across his shoulder, or called him by a more endearing name than Kiddy. Apart from an eagle-eyed solicitude, he never manifested tenderness, nor asked for it. That Tom would ever owe him anything he didn't so much as hint at. "Dooty o' next o' kin" was the blanket explanation with which he covered everything.
"But you're not my next of kin," Tom, to whom schooling had revealed the meaning of the term, was bold enough to object. "Next of kin means that you'd be my nearest blood relation; and we're not relations at all."
Honey was undisturbed in his Olympian detachment. "Do yer suppose I dunno that? But I believes as Gord sees we're kin lots o' times when men don't take no notice. You was give to me. You was put into my 'ands to bring up. And up I'm goin' to bring yer, if it breaks me."
It was a close Sunday evening in September, the last of the summer holidays. Tom would celebrate next day by entering on a higher grade at school. He had had new boots and clothes. For the first time he was worried by the source of this beneficence. As night closed down they sat for a breath of fresh air on the steps of the house in Grove Street. Grove Street held the reeking smell of cooking, garbage, and children, which only a strong wind ever blows away from the crowded quarters of the cities, and there had been no strong wind for a week. Used to that, they didn't mind it. They didn't mind the screeching chatter or the raucous laughter that rose from doorways all up and down the hill, nor the yelling of the youngsters playing in the roadway. Somewhere round a corner a group of Salvationists, supported by a blurting cornet, sang with much gusto:
Oh, how I love Jesus!
Oh, how I love Jesus!
Oh, how I love Jesus!
Because He first loved me.
They didn't mind it when Mrs. Danker, their landlady, a wiry New England woman, sitting in the dark of the hall behind them, joined in, in her cracked voice, with the Salvationists, nor when Mrs. Gribbens, a stout old party who picked up a living scrubbing railway cars, joined in with Mrs. Danker. From neighboring steps mothers called out to their children in Yiddish, and the children answered in strident American. But to Honey and Tom all this was the friendly give-and-take of promiscuity which they would have missed had it not been there.