He sat up in his cot. The breathing came and came. If only Jonas—. A thought flashed, and the child looked toward the bed. There it stood, huge, looming above the shadows. And in it, a lack of precision, then a sense of form, a concrete sense of breathing. Jonas was there. The mystery of how, did not distress him. Quincy accepted the glad wonder without question. For a long time, he sat up, drinking it in, basking in his new sure dominion of the room. And then, he sank back upon his pillow into sleep....
Still, there were disquieting things to be observed in Jonas. His attitude toward the family was in one case at least radically wrong. He and father seemed on the point of becoming chums! That autumn, already, Jonas had been allowed to follow on a snipe-shooting expedition. He was full, even now, of his father’s prowess—big, burly, muscular man that he was—in laying low the little sand-skipping creatures that seemed less bird than insect. And now, not long after Quincy’s eighth birthday, when the weather was still a grumbling discord of cold and ice and when still, one went to bed in the dark, Jonas was taken on a trip to New York. He was away an interminable time—from early breakfast until bed-time. And he returned inarticulately stuffed with wonder and importance. What had transpired and in what respect New York was dissimilar to Harriet, Long Island, Quincy could not ascertain.
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand,” said Jonas. “It’s all a holler and a racket and a lot o’ stone towers where people live and you’re jigged up and down in elevators.”
For his superiority, Quincy forgave him. But when he observed: “Dad and me ’tended to business together,” Quincy disliked the association. Nor could his remark, couched in a prophetic voice: “We are goin’ to be rich, we are. Dad tol’ me,” wipe out the evil taste. The announcement indeed meant far less than the promise of half an orange.
With the spring, Josiah’s interest in the boy that resembled him grew ostentatiously. One Sunday afternoon, Jonas was accorded a puff of the paternal pipe. Gloatingly, he came over to Quincy, who sat sulking on the sofa, and blew into his face. Quincy observed that now Jonas’ breath was like his father’s. It hurt him. A favorite place for Jonas came to be his father’s knee. He would sit there and they would have long, mumbled converse together. Quincy would seek out his mother if she was present, and talk to her. Or if she was busy, he would press his face against the back of his chair and hold rival conversation with himself, biting the upholstery or punching it with emphatic fists—eager above all to appear indifferent. But all that he would be really conscious of was his father’s low chuckle and the shrill peal of Jonas’ laughter.
“Do you like Dad?” the child asked his brother one evening, as Jonas stumbled noisily into their room.
“He’s great!” came the answer.
“I like mother,” said Quincy.
“Do you, molly-boy?”
And Quincy turned away his head in a flood of shame, tempered with pride.