"Are they strict about it?"
"Pretty strict, lately," said Peter, "but that's all right, Charlie. Any time you want to go up late you let me know. I'll be glad to show you round. I'm always free nights. Any night at all—That is any night except Sunday."
CHAPTER X
THE baby carriage was kept in the kitchen thereafter and Peter did not see it again until Sunday, his first Sunday at home. Kate left the flat very early. Peter could not very well object to that because she said she was going to mass. He wished that she might be converted to one of the eleven o'clock denominations, but he supposed at her age there was small hope of that. She would be gone, she told him, until nine or ten o'clock in the evening. Her niece, the one who lived in Jamaica, had a new baby five weeks old. Kate was going there right after church. Peter thought that if he had Kate's job he would prefer to spend his day off at an old folks' home or some other spot exclusively mature.
Still he could understand the psychology of it. Out in Jamaica, Kate could sit around and when the baby cried she need not move hand or foot. She could watch other people bustle around and fulfill its needs. And then every now and then she might give advice and see it carried out. He himself had spent many a day off in the office of the Bulletin sitting on the desk of somebody who was working and interrupting him.
Before Kate left she gave Peter a complete list of directions for the baby's day and also a problem for him to ponder over. "What will I be calling the boy?" she wanted to know. "I find it hard to be talking to him and him with no name."
"I'll think it over," Peter told her. After she left he did think it over. He went into the baby's room and looked at him as he lay there to see if the child suggested any name in particular. Being asleep he seemed a little more impersonal than usual. Of course, Peter Neale was a pretty good name, but there didn't seem to be any point in calling him that unless in some way or other he seemed to be Peter. He did sleep with his head buried face down in the pillow but that was an insufficient bond. Perhaps there were millions of people in the world who slept that way. Probably there were no statistics on the subject.
Maybe one Peter Neale was enough. It did mean something. After all it was Peter Neale who had written in the Bulletin: "If Horace Fogel goes through with his plan of making a first baseman out of Christy Mathewson he will be committing the baseball crime of the century. Mathewson, or Matty as his team mates call him, is still green, but he has in him the makings of one of the greatest pitchers the world has ever known. He has the speed and control and more than that he has a head on his shoulders. Horace Fogel hasn't."
And they didn't switch Matty to first base after all and now everybody was beginning to realize that he was a great pitcher. But Peter Neale knew it first of all. More than that it was Peter Neale who had begun his round by round story of the Gans-Nelson fight, only two weeks ago, with the memorable line, "The Dane comes up like thunder." He had invented the name of "Hooks" for George Wiltse and had written that "Frank Bowerman runs the bases like somebody pulling Grover Cleveland in a rickshaw." And Peter was still progressing. He would go on, years hence, to make the most of McGraw's practice of starting games with Rube Schauer and finishing them with Ferdie Schupp by contriving the lead, "It never Schauers but it Schupps." Perhaps he had prevision enough to realize that it was he, Peter Neale, who would eventually ascribe to Jack Dempsey the motto, "Say it with cauliflowers" and write after a Crimson disaster on the Thames, "Harvard's most perplexing race problems appear to be crewish and Jewish."
He looked at the sleeping child and wondered if there were any leads like that in the little head. By and by, of course, the baby would grow up and in some newspaper there would be articles under his name. Peter would like to see the articles before he was willing to have them signed "By Peter Neale." Every now and then somebody wandered into his office at the Bulletin and asked him to use his good influences with the managing editor. Peter always said, "Will you let me see something you've written." Here in front of him was a candidate not only for a job but for his job. And the applicant had nothing to show.