He called the waiter and signed the card. Then he turned as if to look around the room. He located the door by which they had entered, drew his hands strangely across his eyes. Effusive gratefulness was seeking his ears from the young man in the chair. Bellair lifted his hand as if to cut off the voice, and then started for the door, his step hastening.
8
It was truly a tenement quarter in which Davy and his mother lived. The fact awed Bellair somewhat. Had he been a cripple in a wheeled-chair, confined to one side of one block, he could have found a life’s work.... Little faces that choked him everywhere. One might toss coins at their feet, but the futility of that was like a cry to God.
Davy’s mother was making his room ready. By some chance it faced the east; between ten and noon, there was sunlight. Forty years ago it had been the kitchen of a second-floor apartment, doubtless respectable. Only the scars of the kitchen fixtures remained, like organs gone back to a rudiment in swift involution. Water now was to be had in but one place on each floor—in the hall, and the natives came there with their pitchers and cans as tropical villagers, morning and evening to the well.
Mrs. Acton had spared a bit of carpet, which looked as if it had been scrubbed; and just below the window the tip of a heaven-tree waved. It was thin as his single bed, but even that growth seemed miraculously attained, as if the seed must have held all the nourishment. Bellair stared down through shadows and litter, and could discern no more than a crack in the stone pavement, from which this leafy creature had come to him. Quite as miraculously it was, with the myriad children in the streets and halls. Certainly this was a place to keep tender. Davy had gone forth on an errand.
“What was he interested in especially when he was little?” Bellair asked.
“Boats—boats,” said the mother.
It struck the man queerly that he had not noted this. Davy had devoured his little list of sea stories, and had listened as no one else to the open boat narrative, but the man fancied it just the love of adventure. Bellair’s mother might have said the same thing.
“Did he draw them, you mean?” he asked.
“Yes, and played with them. His father was a seaman, Mr. Bellair.”