“We’ll take him with us to our home, of course, Jim. He’d be lost anywhere else. He knows no more than a child.”
“Pretty husky child, some ways,” said Haddon. “Well, all right, all right! I suppose you’re glad he’s different from me. You don’t seem to have a lot of use for me any more, some way—you’ve been like a clam ever since we left New York, and you’re more like a clam now that we’re getting back. There’s worse fellows in the world than Jimmy Haddon, and maybe you’ll live to see it yet. I’ll show you, if this deal goes through—and it will if your wild friend makes good.
“But now here we are getting into the tube—I’d better catch the wild man, or he may get scared and jump off the train. All right—we’ll take him up home.”
The rushing whirl of the city received them—the city, a place occupied, so it seemed to this stranger, with sad-faced madmen hurrying here and yon without purpose. Mad—mad—hopelessly mad—so it all seemed to David Joslin as, himself frightened with the noise, the clamorings, the uncertainty of it all, he finally emerged from the gates of the railway station and stood close to the side of the woman who now made his main reliance in this new world of the great Outside.
A deferential man in livery came toward them and led them to a long, shining limousine car which stood at the curb. A moment later they were whirling away through the crowded streets, escaping death every instant, so it seemed to the newcomer, by the miracle of a second’s fraction. He held his peace, as he had now for five days in a new, mad world of which he had not dreamed. They passed on out through the crowded traffic street until they reached paved ways leading to the north, and so, after a long and steady flight of the car, drew up at the entrance of a great apartment building on the river drive.
Joslin followed in. He never in his life before had been in a passenger elevator. He felt a strange sinking at the pit of his stomach, and caught instinctively at the bars of the gate. He was still less at ease when they led him into the silent and dim apartments where Haddon and his wife lived, as luxurious as any of the Riverside, the rent of which each month was more than any farm in all the Cumberlands would bring in a year.
But Joslin was now in the home of a gentlewoman. Quietly she took him in hand, relieving his embarrassment, setting him at his ease, showing him where he might live, and telling him kindly what might be expected of him. He looked about him at his own room with awe. These furnishings to him were so unbelievably luxurious that he dared not sit down upon a chair. He gazed upon the bed, with its yellow coverlet of silk, with but one resolve—he would sleep upon the floor, but never venture further—nor did he. And when presently they called him to table he felt his heart sink yet further in these strange surroundings, so that he could not eat. He had accosted as “Mister” the servant who went to his room with him—he saw the same man now, and wondered that he stood, and did not eat with the others—wondered that no one noticed him nor the white-capped maid who passed. Surely it was all a strange, mad world.
“Well,” said Haddon, after his hurried finishing of his own meal, “I’ve got to get down to the little old shop right away, Marcia. They’ll not be expecting me, of course, but it’s a good piece of business that I’m back when I am, and just the way I am.”
“I presume you’ll have plenty to do,” commented his wife.