The day the Rainbow Division swept up Fifth Avenue in farewell, she could see the rank and file from the roof of the Forty-second Street office building, as if the avenue were running a clayey stream, and she was torn between the ache and the thanksgiving of having no one to give.
But, for the most part, war kept its talons off Lilly. Twice, and as if his exemption from the draft lay heavily, Harry Calvert had tried to enlist, his grandmother, with a zeal that was hardly accountable, exerting every effort toward that end.
It was almost as if war had revived her somewhat fainting faith in
Harry's ultimate justification.
But he was underweight and still in a weakened condition from an operation for an adenoidal complaint. This last he had undergone before the war and at Lilly's urgent instance. She had read, in the mass of books on child hygiene, psychology, and physiology she was constantly accumulating, the debilitative effects that adenoidal breathing might exercise upon an entire constitution and mentality.
Poor Harry, and his cancerous predilection for the kind of thievery that almost invariably stacked up to not even petty larceny! He could withstand a jewel chest, but not a tool chest. Would steal the robe from an automobile, provided it was not a luxurious one. Once, when his grandmother at great difficulty had procured for him a clerkship, he confiscated the nickel-plated faucets out of the wash room, barely escaping prosecution. Only the utter triviality of his thievery and the fight in Mrs. Schum saved him from the law. She was as indomitable in her protection of him as the granite flesh of rocks.
Quiet, sensitive, with rather a girlish face, slow to beard and quick to quiver, Harry was invariably liked during the period he held a position, but month to month saw him from a clerkship in a real-estate office to window decorator for a retail paper-flower concern, salesman in the novelty and stationery department of a bookstore, and once in the children's book section of a department store.
He was rarely apprehended, usually abandoning his position, with his absurd loot already under cover, and the loss leaking out later, if at all.
Invariably, as if by way of confession, he brought home to his grandmother the proceeds from these petty sales, effected by who knows what device, dropping down into her lap, almost sadly and with a shrinkage from what was sure to follow, either the few dollars or the bauble of a bit of jewelry.
She would cry up at him and wring her poor hands, and then he would go off into his little room adjoining the kitchen, originally intended as maid's room, and sit with his head down in his hands, back rounded, and all his throat-constricting capacity for meekness out in his attitude.
And, presently, her sobs subsided, Mrs. Schum would creep in after him, and behind that closed door there was no telling what long hours of pleading and abjuration took place. But, next morning, in her little black bonnet, the rust out in her black dress and the "want ad." sheet cockily enough beneath her arm, Mrs. Schum would set out with him to combat, by the decency of her presence, some of the difficulties of seeking a new position with only one or two time-and thumb-worn references.