With the broken window-pane stuffed up, the gas lighted, and the fire started, the Applebys faced life again, and were very glad. They couldn’t have been long under the gas; Father’s eons of drowning struggle must have been seconds. Propped up in bed, Mother refused a doctor and smiled—though confusedly, with the bewilderment of one who had felt the numbness of death.
“I’ll tell you how it is,” cried Father. “We— Lord! how glad I am to have you again! It’s like this: We felt as if we’d gone the very limit, and nothing ever would come right again. But it’s just like when we were a young married couple and scrapped and were so darn certain we’d have to leave each other. That’s the way it’s been with us lately, and we needed something big like this to get our nerve up, I guess. Now we’ll start off again, and think, honey, whatever we do will be a vict’ry—it’ll be so much bigger than nothing.
“Let’s see. New York doesn’t want us. But somewhere there must be a village of folks that does. We’ll start out right now, walking through New York, and we’ll hunt till we find it, even if we have to go clean out to San Francisco. Gee! think, we’re free, no job or nothing, and we could go to San Francisco! Travel, like we’ve always wanted to! And we won’t have any more pride now to bother us, not after—that. I’ll play the mouth-organ for pennies! Come on, we’ll start for Japan, and see the cherry-blossoms. Come on, old partner, we’re going to pioneer, like our daddies that went West.”
And he struck up “Susanna” on his mouth-organ.
CHAPTER XIII
THE Applebys didn’t start for Japan on Christmas Eve. Also, they didn’t go defiantly with pack on back through the streets of New York, like immigrants to youth. It took Mother Appleby two days to recover from gas and two more to recover from lifelong respectability, to the end that she should become a merry beggar, gathering pennies while Father piped upon that antic instrument, the mouth-organ.
Father labored with her, and cooked beans for her. She made him agree to get as far from New York as their nine dollars would take them before they should begin to be vagrants. It’s always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are.
The train took them about eighty miles into New Jersey. They debouched rather shyly, and stood on the station platform in a town consisting of a trust, a saloon, a druggist’s, and a general store. The station loafers stared at them. Father would no more have dared play the mouth-organ to these gangling youths than he would have dared kiss a traffic policeman at Forty-second and Fifth Avenue.