“We go in here,” she said, pointing to a door.
He took her into the room. “You get to sleep,” he said, and going out closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.
Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by the table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.
Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back at him self-consciously.
“Which of you two puts Mary to bed?” he asked, and then, without waiting for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. “Let Tom do it,” he said. “I will help you here.”
Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him dry wiping towels. Sam’s coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.
The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within Sam’s breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though the lash of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old memories began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood, his mother at work among other people’s soiled clothes, his father Windy coming home drunk, and the chill in his mother’s heart and in his own. There was something men and women owed to childhood, not because it was childhood but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any question of fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.
In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam’s spirit. The boy Joe went quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves. Somewhere on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The backs of the hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and competent the hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled, unshaken by life. Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He had always wanted quickness and firmness within his own body, the health of the body that is a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an American and down deep within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had brought him to nothing and had only left him more shaken and uncertain then ever.
The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to escape the shy silent presence of the boy. “Has life quite gone from me? Am I but a dead thing walking about?” he asked himself. The presence of the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad. Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?
The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two boys said good night to the strange man in their mother’s house. Joe, the bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook it solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.