The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Happy Isles, by Basil King

THE HAPPY ISLES

BOOKS BY BASIL KING

The Happy Isles
The Dust Flower
The Thread of Flame
The City of Comrades
Abraham's Bosom
The Empty Sack
Going West
The Side of the Angels

Harper & Brothers
Publishers

"THEY'LL SAY I STOLE HIM. IT'LL BE TWENTY YEARS FOR ME"

THE
HAPPY ISLES

By BASIL KING

Author of

"THE EMPTY SACK," "THE INNER SHRINE,"
"THE DUST FLOWER," ETC.

With Illustrations by

JOHN ALONZO WILLIAMS

Publishers

Harper & Brothers

New York and London

MCMXXIII

THE HAPPY ISLES

Copyright, 1923 By Harper & Brothers Printed in the U.S.A.

First Edition

K-X

ILLUSTRATIONS

[They'll Say I Stole Him. It'll Be Twenty Years for Me]
[That's a Terr'ble Big Wad for a Boy Like You to Wear]"
[Get Up, I Tell You]
[Mrs. Ansley Took Him as an Affliction]

The Happy Isles

Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on,
Day and night, and night and day....
—Shelley.

I

At eight months of age his only experience of life had been one of well-being. He was fed when hungry; he slept when sleepy; he woke when he had slept enough. When bored or annoyed or uneasy he could cry. If crying brought him attentions it was that much to the good; if the effort was thrown away it did no one any harm. Even when least fertile of results it was a change from the crowing and gurgling which were all he had to distract him when left to his own company.

Though his mind worked in co-operation with the subconscious more than with the conscious, it worked actively. In waking minutes there was everything to observe and register.

His intimate needs being met, there were the phenomena of light and darkness. He knew not only the difference between them, but in a general way when to expect the turn of each. He knew that light brought certain formalities, chiefly connected with his person, and that darkness brought certain others. The reasons remained obscure, but the variety was pleasing.

Then there was the room, or rather the spectacular surroundings of his universe. The nursery was his earth, his atmosphere, his firmament, the ether in which his heavenly bodies went rolling away into the infinite. And, just as with grown-up people, the nearness and distance of Mars or Sirius or Betelgueuse have gone through experimental stages of guesswork first and calculation afterwards, so the exact location of the wardrobe, the table, or the mantelpiece, was a subject for endless wonderment. At times they were apparently so close that he would put out his hand to touch them from his crib; but at once they receded, fixing themselves against the light-blue walls, home of a menagerie of birds and animals, with something between him and them which he was learning to recognize as space.

There was also motion. Certain things remained in place; other things could move. He himself could move, but that was so near the fundamental necessities as hardly to call for notice. True, there were discoveries even here. The day when he learned that once his legs were freed he could lie on his back and kick was one of emancipation. In finding that he could catch his foot with his hands and put it in his mouth he made his first advance in skill. But there was motion superior to this. There were beings who walked about the room, who entered it and left it. Merely to watch their goings and comings sent spasms through his feet.

Little by little he had come to discern in these creatures a difference in function and personality. Enormous in size, irresistible in strength, they were nevertheless his satellites. One of them supplied his wants; another worshipped him; the third lifted him up, carried him about, tickled him deliciously with his mustache or his bushy outstanding eyebrows, and otherwise entertained him. For the first his tongue essayed the syllables, Na-Na; for the second his lips rose and fell with an explosive Ma-Ma; the last sent his tongue clicking toward the roof of his mouth in the harsher sound of Da-Da; and yet between these efforts and the accomplishment there was still some lack of correspondence.

Of his many enthralling interests speech was the most magical. In his analysis of life it came to him early that these coughings and barkings and gruntings were meant to express thought. He himself had thoughts. What he lacked was the connection of the sounds with the ideas, and of this he was not unaware. They supposed him a little animal who could only eat and sleep, when all the while he was listening, recording, distinguishing, defining, correlating the syllable with the thing that was evidently meant, so that later he should astonish his circle by uttering a word. It was a stimulating game and in it his daily progress was not far short of marvelous.

If the nursery was his universe, his crib was his private domain, cushioned and soft, and as spotless as an ermine's nest. It was a joy to wake up in it, and equally a joy to go to sleep. Joy, Tenderness, and Comfort, were the only elements in life with which he was acquainted. Thriving on them as he throve on the carefully prepared formulas of his food, he grew in the spirit without obstacles to struggle with, as his body grew in the sunlight and the air.

By the time he had reached the May morning on which his story begins he had come to take Comfort, Tenderness, and Joy, as life's essentials. Never having known anything else, he had no suspicion that anything else would lurk within the possible. The ritual that attended his going out was as much a matter of course to him as a red carpet to tread on is to a queen. He took it for granted that, when he had been renewed by bottle and bath, she for whom he tried to say Na-Na would be in a flutter of preparation, while she whose sweet smile forced the Ma-Ma to his lips would put a little coat on his back, a little cap on his head, little mittens on his hands, and smother him with adoration all the time she was doing it.

On this particular morning these things had been done. Nestled into a canopied crib on wheels, he was ready for the two gigantic ministrants whom he could not yet distinguish as the first and second footmen. These colossi lifted his vehicle down the steps, to set it on the pavement of Fifth Avenue, where for the time being dramatic episodes were at an end. The town didn't interest him. Moreover, a filmy curtain, to protect him against flies as well as against too much sun, having shut him in from the vastness of the scene, he had nothing to do but let himself be lulled to his customary slumber.

II

Miss Nash, the baby carriage in front of her, furrowed a way through the traffic of the avenue, relatively scant in those days, and reaching the safety of the other side passed within the Park. She was a trained child's-nurse, and wore a uniform. England being at that time the only source of this specialty, examples in New York were limited to the heirs-apparent of the noble families. Between a nursemaid and a trained child's-nurse you will notice the same distinction as between a lady's maid and a princess's lady-in-waiting.

Having entered the Park, Miss Nash stopped the carriage to lift the veil protecting her charge. He was already beyond the noises and distractions of the planet in his rosy, heavenly sleep. Miss Nash smiled wistfully, because it was the only way in which she could smile at all. A superior woman by nature, she clung to that refinement which best expresses itself in something melancholic. Daughter of a solicitor's clerk and niece to a curate, she felt her status as a lady most fittingly preserved in an atmosphere delicate, subdued, and rather sad.

And yet when she looked on her little boy asleep she was no longer superior, and scarcely so much as a lady. She was only a woman enraptured before one of those babies so compact of sweetness, affection, and intelligence that they tug at the heartstrings. She was on her guard as to loving her children overmuch, since it made it so hard to give them up when the minute for doing so arrived; but with this little fellow no guard had been effective. Whether he crowed, or cried, or kicked, or snuggled in her arms to croon with her in baby tunelessness, she found him adorable. But when he was asleep, chubby, seraphic, so awesomely undefiled, she was sure that his spirit had withdrawn from her for a little while to commune with the angels.

"No," she confessed one day to her friend, Miss Etta Messenger, the only other uniformed child's nurse among her acquaintance in New York, "it won't do. I must break myself. I shall have to leave him some day. But I do envy the mother who will have him always."

"It don't pay you," Miss Messenger declared, as one who has had experience. "Anyone, I always say, can hire my services; but my affections remain my own. Now this little girl I'm with while I'm in New York, I could leave her to-morrow without a pang if—but then I've got something to leave her for."

"And what does he say to things now?" Miss Nash inquired, with selfless interest in her friend's drama.

Miss Messenger answered, judicially, "I've put it to him straight. I've told him he must simply fix a date to marry me, or give me up. As I know he simply won't give me up—you never knew a fellow so wild about a girl as he is about me...."

The fortnight which had intervened between that conversation and the morning when our little boy's story opens had given time for Miss Messenger's affairs to take another turn. In the hope of learning the details of this turn Miss Nash sought a corner of the Park, not much frequented by nursemaids, where she and Miss Messenger often met, but Etta was not there. Drawing the carriage within the shade of a miniature grove of lilacs in perfumed flower, Miss Nash once more lifted the veil, wiped the precious mouth, and adjusted the coverlet outside which lay the mittened baby hands. Since there was no more to be done, she sat down on a convenient bench to her reading of Juliet Allingham's Sin.

In the scene where the lover drowns she became so absorbed as not to notice that on a bench on the other side of a lilac bush Miss Messenger came and installed herself and her baby carriage in the shade of a near-by fan-shaped elm, bronze-green in its young leafage. Miss Nash looked up only when, her emotions having grown so poignant, she could read no more. She was drying her eyes when, through the branches of the lilac, the flutter of a nurse's cape told her that her friend must have arrived.

"Why, Etta!"

On going round the barrier she found herself greeted by what she had come to call Etta's fighting eyes. They were fine flashing black eyes, set in a face which Miss Nash was further accustomed to describe as "high-complexioned." Miss Messenger spoke listlessly, and yet as one who knew her mind.

"I saw you. I thought I wouldn't interrupt. I haven't very good news."

Miss Nash glided to a seat beside her friend, seizing both her hands. "Oh, my dear, he hasn't——?"

"That's just what he has." Etta nodded, drily. "Bring your baby round here and I'll tell you."

But Miss Nash couldn't wait. "He's all right there. He's sound asleep. I'll hear him if he stirs. Do tell me what's happened."

"Well, he simply says that if that's the way I feel perhaps we'd better call it off."

"And are you going to?"

Etta's eyes blazed with their black flames. "Call it off? Me? Not much, I won't."

"Still if he won't fix a date...."

"He'll jolly well fix a date—or meet me in the court."

"Oh, but, Etta, you wouldn't...."

"I don't say I would for choice. There are two or three other things I could do, and I think I'll try them first."

"What sort of things?"

In the answer to that question Miss Nash was even more absorbed than in Juliet Allingham's sin. Juliet Allingham was after all but a creature of the brain; whereas Etta Messenger's adventures might conceivably be her own. It was not merely some one else's love story that held her imagination in thrall; it was the possibility that one of these days she, Milly Nash, might have a man playing fast and loose with her heart's purest offering....

III

Anyone closely watching the strange woman would have said that her first care was not to seem distraught; but then, no one was closely watching her. On a rapturous May morning, with the lilac scenting the air, and the tulip beds in only the passing of their glory, there were so many things better worth doing than observing a respectably dressed young woman, probably the wife of an artisan, that she went unobserved. As there were at that very minute some two or three hundred more or less like her also pushing babies in the Park, the eye that singled her out for attention would have had more than the gift of sight.

What she did that was noticeable—again had there been anyone to notice her—was to approach first one little group and then another, quickly sheering away. One would have said that she sheered away from some queer motive of strategy. Her movements might have been called erratic, not because they were aimless, but because she didn't know or didn't find the object of her search. Even if that were so, she neither advanced nor receded, nor drifted hither or yon, more like a lost thing than many another nursemaid giving her charge the air or killing time.

There was nothing sinister about her, unless it was sinister to have moments of seeming dazed or of muttering to herself. She muttered to herself only when sure that there was no one to overhear, and with similar self-command she indulged in looking dazed only when she knew that no eye could light on her. As if aware of abnormality, she schooled herself to a semblance of sanity. Otherwise she was some thirty years of age, neatly if cheaply clad, and too commonplace and unimportant for the most observant to remember her a second after she had passed.

At sight of a little hooded vehicle, standing unguarded where the lilac bushes made a shrine for it, she paused. Again, the pause was natural. She might have been tired. Pushing a baby carriage in a park is always futile work, with futile starts and stops and turnings in this direction or in that. If she stood to reconnoiter or to make her plans there was no power in the land to interfere with her.

Her further methods were simple. Behind the bench on which Miss Nash and Miss Messenger were by this time entering on an orgy of romantic confidence there rose a gentle eminence. To the top of this hill the strange woman made her way. She made it with precautions, sauntering, dawdling, simulating all the movements of the perfect nurse. When two women, wheeling young laddies strapped into go-carts, crossed her path she walked slowly till they were out of sight. When a park attendant with a lawnmower clicked his machine along to cut a distant portion of the greensward, she waited till he too had disappeared. A few pedestrians were scattered here and there, but so distant as not to count. A few riders galloped up or down the bridle-path near Fifth Avenue, but these too she could disregard. Except for Miss Nash and Miss Messenger, turned towards each other, and with their backs to her, she had the world to herself. Softly she crept down the hill; softly she stole in among the lilacs.

"My little Gracie! my little Gracie!" she kept muttering, but only between closed lips. "My little Gracie!"

"Oh, don't think, Milly," Miss Messenger was saying, "that I shan't give him the chance to come across honorable. I shall. You say that an action for breach doesn't seem to you delicate, and I don't say but what I shrink from it. But when you've a trunkful of letters simply burning with passion, simply burning with it, what good are they to you if you don't?... And he's worth fifty thousand dollars if he's worth a penny. Don't talk to me! A fishmonger, right in the heart of East Eighty-eighth Street, the very best district.... If I sue for twenty-five thousand dollars I'd be pretty sure of getting five ... and with a sympathetic jury, possibly six or eight ... and with all that money I could set up a little nursing home in London ... say in the Portland Place neighborhood ... with a specialty in children's diseases ... and put you in charge of it as matron. You and me together...."

"Oh, but, Etta, I couldn't leave my little boy, not till he's able to do without me. By that time there may be other children for me to take care of, so that I could keep near him. I've thought of that. He being the first, and his father and mother such a fine healthy young couple, with everything to support a big family...."

During the minutes which marked his transfer from one destiny to another, Miss Nash's little boy remained in the sweet, blest country to which little babies go in dreams. When a swift hand raised the veil, lifting him with deft gentleness, he knew nothing of what was happening. While the cap was peeled from his head and pulled over that of a big, featureless rag doll shaped to the outlines of a baby's limbs, he was still on the lap of Miss Nash's angels. On the lap of these angels he stayed during the rest of the exchange. The strange woman's hand was tender. Lightly it drew over the little boy's head the soiled, cheap bonnet worn by the big rag doll; lightly it laid the little warm body into its new bed. Where he had nestled the big rag doll with his cap on its head gave a fair imitation of his form, unless inspected closely. By the time the veils were lowered on the two little carriages there was nothing for the most suspicious eye to wonder at. A respectable woman of the humbler classes was trundling her baby back to its home. The infant rested quietly.

The rag doll, too, rested quietly when Miss Nash returned to her charge, as Miss Messenger to hers. Miss Nash had heard so much within an hour that she was not quite mistress of herself. Nothing was so rare with her as to neglect the due examination of her child, but this time she neglected it. Etta had given her so much to think of that for the minute her mind was over-taxed. Because the love theme had become involved with the compelling dictates of self-interest, which even a sweet creature like Miss Nash couldn't overlook, she laid her hands absently on the push-bar, beginning to make her way homeward. There was no question as to Etta's worldly wisdom. The choice lay between worldly wisdom and the warm, glowing, human thing we call affection. In Milly Nash's experience it was the first time such a choice had been put up to her.

"Don't talk to me!" Miss Etta pursued, as they sauntered along side by side. "I simply love my children up to every penny I'm paid for it, not a farthing more; and if you'll take my advice, Milly Nash, you'll follow my example."

Miss Nash felt humble, rebuked. Through fear of disturbing her little boy, she pushed as gently as a zephyr blows.

"I'm not sure that I could measure it out, not with this little fellow."

"This little fellow, fiddlesticks! He's just like any other little fellow."

"Oh, no, he isn't. There's character in babies just as there is in grown-up people. This child's got it strong, all sweetness and loveliness, and so much sense—you'd never believe it! Why, he knows—there's nothing that he doesn't know, in his own dear little way. I tell you, Etta, that if you had him you'd feel just like me."

"Just like you and be out of your heart's job—your heart's job, mind you—as soon as he's four years old, and they want to put him with a French girl to learn French. Oh, I know them, these aristocrats! When I get my alimony, or whatever it is, I'm simply going to provide for the future, and you'll be a goose, Milly Nash, if you simply don't come with me, and do the same."

While Miss Nash was shaking her head with her gentle perplexed smile, the strange woman was crossing Fifth Avenue. Having accomplished this feat, she entered one of the streets running from that great thoroughfare toward the East River. Squalor being so much the rule in New York, the wealthier classes find it hard to pre-empt to themselves more than a long thin streak, relatively trim, bearing to the general disorder the proportion of a brook to the meadow through which it runs. The strange woman had left Fifth Avenue but a few hundred yards away before she and her baby were swallowed up in that kind of human swarm in which individuals lose their identity. Afraid of betraying some frenzy she knew to be within her by mumbling to herself, she kept her lips shut with a fierce, determined tightness. She was a little woman, and when you looked at her closely you saw that she had once possessed a wild dark prettiness. Even now, as she pushed her way between uncouth men and women, or screaming children at play, her wild dark eyes blazed with sudden anger or swam with unshed tears by fits and turns.

The house at which she stopped was hardly to be distinguished from thousands of others in which a brief brownstone dignity had fallen, first to the boarding-house stage, and then to that of tenements. From the top of a flight of brownstone steps a frowzy, buxom, motherly woman came lumbering down to lend a hand with the baby carriage.

"So you've brought your baby, Mrs. Coburn. Now you'll be able to get settled."

The reply came as if it had been learned by rote. "Yes, now I'll be able to get settled. I've got her crib ready, though all my other things is strewed about just as when I moved in. Still, the crib's ready, which is the main thing. She's a fretful baby by nature, so you mustn't think it funny if you hear her cry. Some people thought I'd never raise her, so that if you ever hear say that my little girl died...."

"I'll know it's not true," the buxom woman laughed. "She couldn't die, and you have her here, now could she? Do let me have a peep."

By this time they had lifted the carriage over the steps and into the little passageway. Seeing that there was no help for this inspection, the strange woman trembled but resigned herself. The neighbor lifted the veil, and peered under it.

"My, what a love! And she don't look sick, not a little mite."

"Not her face, she don't. Her poor little body's some wasted, but then so long as I've got her...."

"I believe as it'd be too much lime-water in her milk. She's bottle-fed, ain't she? Well, them bottle-fed babies—I've had two of 'em out of my five—you got to try and try, and ten to one you'll find as it's that nasty lime-water that upsets 'em."

Having unlocked her door, which was on the left of the passageway, the strange woman pulled her treasure into a room stuffy with closed windows, and dim with drawn blinds. Turning the key behind her, she was alone at last.

She fell on her knees, throwing the veil back with a fierceness that almost tore it off. She strained forward. Her breath came in racking, panting sobs.

"My Gracie! my Gracie! God didn't take you! God wouldn't be so mean! I just dreamed it, and now I've waked up."

Suddenly she changed. Drawing backward, she put her hands to her brow and pressed them down the whole length of her face. Her eyes filled with horror. Her face turned sallow. Her lips fell apart.

"I'll get twenty years for this. Perhaps it'll be more. I don't think they hang for it, but it'll be twenty years anyhow, if they find it out." She sprang up, still muttering in broken, only partly articulated phrases. "But they'll never find it out. What's there to find? It's my baby! My precious only baby!" She was on her knees again, dragging herself forward by the sides of the little carriage, her eyes strained toward the infant face. "My little Gracie! I've missed you all the time you've been away. My heart was near broke. Now you've come back to me. You're mine—mine—mine!"

He opened his eyes. It was his usual hour for waking up. For the first time in his history amazement gave an expression to his face which it was often to wear afterward. Instead of being in his own nest, downy, clean, and scentless, he was in a humpy little hole unpleasant to his senses. Instead of the Na-Na with her tender smile, or the Ma-Ma with her love, he saw this terrifying woman's stormy eyes, rousing the sensation he was later to know as fear. Instead of his nursery, spotless and gay, he was dumped amid the forlorn disarray of furniture that has just been moved into an empty tenement. Without getting these impressions in detail, he got them at once. He got them not as separate facts, but as facts in a single quintessence, distilled and distilled again, till no one element can be told from any other element, and held to his lips in a poisoned draught.

All he could do was to wail, but he wailed with a note of anguish which was new to him. It was anguish the more bitter because of the lack of explanation. His only awareness hitherto had been that of power. He had been a baby sovereign, obeyed without having to command. Now he had been born again as a baby serf, into conditions against which his will, imperious in its baby way, would beat in vain. Once more, he knew this, not by reasoned argument, of course, but by heartbroken instinct. It was not merely the distress of the present that was in his cry, but dread of the future. There was something else in the world besides Comfort, Tenderness, and Joy, and he had touched it. Without knowing what it was he shrank back from the contact and sobbed.

And yet such is the need for love in any young thing's heart, that when the strange woman had lifted him up, and cradled him on her bosom, he was partly soothed. He was not soothed easily. Though she held him closely, and sang to him softly, seated in the low rocking-chair in which she had rocked her baby-girl, he went on sobbing. He sobbed, not as he had sobbed in his old nursery, for the sport or the mischief of the thing, but because his inner being had been bruised. But his capacity for sobbing wore itself out. Little by little the convulsions grew calmer, the agony less desperate. Love held him. It was not the love of the Ma-Ma or the Na-Na, but it was love. It had love's embrace, love's lullaby. Arms were about him, he was on a breast. The shipwrecked sailor may be only on a raft, but he is not sinking. Little by little he turned his face into this only available refuge. A dangling embroidery adorned it, and in his struggle not to go down his little hands clutched at that.

IV

His first conscious recollection was of sitting on a high chair drawn up to a table at which he was having a meal. He could never recall whether this was in Harlem, Hoboken, Brooklyn, Jersey City, or the Bronx. Because they moved so often he had little more memory of places than he had of clouds. Tenements, streets, and suburbs of New York melted into one big sense of squalor. It was not squalor to him because he was used to it. It only obscured the difference between one dwelling and another, as monotony always obscures remembrance. Wherever their wanderings carried them, the background was the same, crowded, dirty, seething, a breeding place rather than a home.

What marked this occasion was a question he asked and the answer he got back.

"Mudda, id my name Gracie, or id it Tom?"

The mother spoke sharply, as she whisked about the kitchen. "What do you want to know for?"

The question was difficult. He knew what he wanted to know for, and yet it wasn't easy to explain. The nearest he could get to it in language was to say: "I'm a little boy, ain't I?"

"Yes, you're a little boy, but you should have been a little girl. It was a little girl I wanted."

"But you want me, don't you, mudda?"

She dropped whatever she was doing to press his head fiercely against her side. "Yes, I want you! I want you! I want you!"

He remembered this paroxysm of affection not because it was special but because it was connected with his gropings after his identity. Paroxysms were what he lived on. They were of love or of anger or of something which frightened him and yet was nameless. He thrummed to himself, beating time on the table with his spoon, while he worked on to another point.

"Wadn't there never no Gracie, mudda?"

She wheeled round from the gas-stove. "For goodness' sake, what's putting this into your head? Of course there was a Gracie. You're her. You don't suppose I stole you, do you?"

He ceased his thrumming; he ceased to beat on the table with his spoon. The mystery of being grew still more baffling.

"Mudda!"

"What's it now?"

"If I wad Gracie I'd be a little girl, wouldn't I?"

She stamped her foot. "Stop it! If you ask me another thing I'll slap you."

He stopped it, not because he was afraid of being slapped. Accustomed to that he had learned to discount its ferocity. A sharp stinging smart, it passed if you grinned and bore it, and grinning and bearing had already entered his life as part of its philosophy. If for the minute he asked no more questions it was in order not to vex his mudda. She was easily vexed; she easily lost her self-control; she was easily repentant. It was her repentance that he feared. It was so violent, so overwhelming. He loved love; he loved caressing; he loved to sit in her lap and sing with her; but her tempests of self-reproach alarmed him.

As she washed the dishes or switched about the kitchen, he watched her with that trepidation which makes the children of the poor sharp-witted. Though under five years of age, he was already developing a sense of responsibility. You could see it in the gravity of a wholly straightforward little face, which had the even tan of a healthy fairness, in keeping with his crisp ashen hair. He knew when the moment had come to clamber down from his perch, and snuggle himself against her petticoats.

"Mudda, sing!"

"I can't sing now. Don't you see I'm busy! Look out, or this hot dish-water'll scald you."

Nevertheless, a few minutes later they were settled in the rocking chair, he on her knee, with his cheek against her shoulder. She was not as ungracious as her words would have made her seem, a fact of which he was aware.

"What'll I sing, Troublesome?"

"Sing 'Three Cups of Cold Poison.'"

So she sang in a sweet, true voice, the sort of childish voice which children love, her little boy joining in with her whenever he knew the words, but with only a hit-or-miss venture at the tune.

"Where have you been dining, Lord Ronald, my son?
Where have you been dining, my handsome young man?"
"I've been dining with my true love, mither, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon."
"And what did she give you, Lord Ronald, my son?
And what did she give you, my handsome young man?"
"Three cups of cold poison, mither, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon."
"What'll you will to your mither, Lord Ronald, my son?
What'll you will to your mither, my handsome young man?"
"My gowd and my silver, mither, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon."
"What'll you will to your brither, Lord Ronald, my son?
What'll you will to your brither, my handsome young man?"
"My coach and six horses, mither, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon."
"What'll you will to your truelove, Lord Ronald, my son?
What'll you will to your truelove, my handsome young man?"
"A rope for to hang her, mither, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I fain would lie doon."

His next conscious memory was more dramatic. He had been playing in the street, in what town he could never remember. They had recently moved, but they had always recently moved. A month in one set of rooms, and his mother was eager to be off. Rarely did they ever stay anywhere for more than the time of moving in, giving the necessary notice, and moving out again. When they stayed long enough for him to know a few children he sometimes played with them.

In this way the thing happened. The boy's name was Frankie Bell, a detail which remained long after the larger facts had escaped him. Frankie Bell and he had been engaged in scraping the dust and offal of the street into neat little piles, with the object of building what they called a "dirt-house." The task was engrossing, and to it little Tom Coburn gave himself with good will. Suddenly, as each bent over his pile, Frankie Bell threw off the observation, casually uttered:

"My mother says your mother's crazy."

Tom Coburn raised himself from his stooping posture, standing straight, and looking straight. The expression in his dark blue eyes, over which the eyebrows even now stood out bushily, was of pain, and yet of pain that left him the more dauntless. Though knowing but vaguely what the word crazy meant, he knew it was insulting.

"She ain't."

Frankie Bell, a stout young man, lifted himself slowly. "Yes, she is. My mother says so."

"Well, your mudda id a liar."

One rush and Frankie Bell lay sprawling with his head in the cushioned softness of his own dirt-heap. The attack had taken him so much by surprise that he went down before he could bellow. Before he could bellow his enemy was upon him, filling his mouth with the materials collected for architectural purposes. Victor in the fray, Tom Coburn ran homeward blinded with his tears.

He found his mother at the stove, stirring something with a tablespoon.

"Mudda, you're not crazy, are you?"

His reply was a blow on the head with the spoon. The woman was beside herself.

"Who said that?"

Rubbing his head, he told her.

"Don't you ever let them say no such thing again. If you do I'll kill you." She threw back her head, her arms outstretched, the spoon in her right hand. "God! God! What'll they say next? They'll say I stole him. It'll be twenty years for me; it'll be forty; it may be life. I won't live to begin it. I know what'll end it before they can...."

He was terrified now, terrified as he had never been in all his terrifying moments. Throwing himself upon her, he clutched at her skirts.

"Don't, mudda, don't! I'm your little boy! You didn't steal me. Don't cry, mudda! Oh, don't cry! don't cry!"

When, in one of her sudden reactions, she sank sobbing to the floor, he sank with her, petting her, coaxing her, wiping away her tears, forcing himself to laugh so that she should laugh with him; but a few days afterward they moved.

V

Mudda, can I have a book and learn to read?"

The ambition had been inspired in the street, where he had seen a little boy who actually had a book, and was spelling out the words. Tom Coburn was now nominally six years old, though it was in the nature of things that of his age no exact record could be kept. His mother had changed his birthday so many times that he observed it whenever she said it had come round.

Bursting into the room with his eager question, he found her sitting by a window looking out at a blank wall. Given her feverish restlessness, the attitude called attention to itself. The apartment was poorer and dingier than any they had lived in hitherto, while it had not escaped his observation that she was living on the ragged edge of her nerves. This made him the more sorry for her, and the more loving. He put his hand on her shoulder, tenderly.

"What's the matter, mudda?"

It was one of the minutes when a touch made her frantic. "Get away!"

He got away, not through fear, but because she pushed him. He didn't mind that, though the rejection hurt him inside. He stood in the middle of the floor, pity in his young countenance, wondering what he could do for her, when she spoke again.

"I've got hardly any money left. I don't know what to do."

It was the first time his attention had been called to finance. He knew there was such a thing as money; he knew it had purchasing value; but he had not known its relation to himself.

"Why don't you get money where you got it before?"

"Because I ain't got a husband to die and leave me another five thousand dollars of insurance."

"And did you have, mudda?"

"Of course I had. What did you think?"

The question voiced his inner difficulty. He had not known what to think. Having observed that a fundamental social unit was formed of husbands and wives, he had also understood that husbands and wives could, in the terms which were the last to hang over from the lingo of his babyhood, be translated into faddas and muddas. They in turn implied children. The methods were mysterious, but the unit was so composed. The exception to this rule seemed to be himself. Though he had a mudda, he could not remember ever to have heard of a fadda. He had pondered on this deficiency more times than anyone suspected. The effort to link himself up with the human family was far more important to him now than the ways and means of getting cash. Standing pensive, he peered into the blinding light, or the unfathomable darkness, whichever it may be, out of which comes human life.

"Mudda, did Gracie have a fadda?"

She snapped peevishly, her gaze again turned outward to the stone wall. "Of course she did."

He came nearer to his point. "Did I?"

"I—I suppose so."

He approached still nearer. "Did I have the same fadda what Gracie had?"

"No, you hadn't." She caught herself up hurriedly, rounding on him in one of her fits of wrath. "Yes, you had."

The inconsistency was evident. "Well, which was it, mudda?"

She jumped to her feet, threateningly. "Now you quit! The next thing you'll be saying is that your name is Whitelaw, and that I stole you. Take that, you nasty little brat!"

A smack on the cheek brought the color to his face, and the tears to his eyes. "No, I won't, mudda. I won't say you stole me, or that my name is—" oddly enough he had caught it—"or that my name is Whitelaw. My name is Tom Coburn, and I'm your little boy."

Rushing at her in the big outpouring of his love, he threw his arms about her and cried against her waist. He cried so seldom that his grief drove her to one of her paroxysms of repentance. Her self-reproaches abating, all she could do to comfort him was to promise him a book, and begin to teach him to read.

The book was procured two days later, and by a method new to him. Doubtless some other means could have been adopted, but the necessity for sparing pennies had become imperative. Moreover, she had never willingly looked at print since the day when she opened a paper to find that, without knowing who she was, all the forces of the country had been organized against her.

They went out together. After traversing a series of streets he had never been in before they stopped in front of a little shop, in the window of which stationery, ink, wallpaper, rubber bands, and books were arranged in artistic confusion. The impression on the fancy of a little boy already groping toward the treasures of the mind was like that made on the tourist in Dresden by the heaped up riches of the Grüne Gewölbe.

The geography of the shop was explained to him before entering. The stationery counter was on the right as soon as you passed the door. The children's books were opposite, on the left. Books forming a cheap circulating library were back of that, and opposite these, where the shop was dark, were the wallpapers, in small, tight rolls on shelves. She was going to inspect wallpapers. The woman in the shop would exhibit them. He would remain alone in the front part of the shop, and close to the counter with the children's books. He was to keep alert and attentive, waiting for a sign which she would give him. When she turned round in the dark part of the shop, and called out, "Are you all right, darling?" he was to understand it as permissible to slip from the counter any small work on which he could lay his hands, and button it up inside his overcoat. He was to do it quickly, keeping his booty out of sight, and above all saying nothing about it. The plan was exciting, with a savor of adventure and manly incentive to skill.

If in the Grüne Gewölbe you were told you could take anything you pleased you would have some of Tom Coburn's sense of enchantment as he stood by the book counter, waiting for the sign. He could see his mother dimly. More dimly still he could follow the movements of the shop-woman eager for a sale. Sample after sample, the wallpapers were unrolled, and hung on an easel where their flowers lighted the obscurity. Even at a distance he could do justice to their beauty, but more captivating than their glories were the wonders at his hand. Pages in which children and animals disported in colors far beyond those of nature were piled in neat little rows, and so tempting that he ached for the signal. He couldn't choose; there was too much to choose from. He would put out his hand without looking, guided by fate.

"Are you all right, darling?"

Curiously to the little boy, the question came just when he himself could perceive that the shop-woman had dived beneath the counter for another example of her wares. All the conditions were propitious. No one was entering the shop; no one was looking through the window. Without knowing the moralities of his act, he understood the need for secrecy. He stretched forth his arm. His fingers touched paper. In the fraction of a fraction of a second the object was within his overcoat, and pressed to his pounding heart.

A few minutes later his mother came smiling and chatting down toward the exit, giving her address, which the shop-woman jotted in a notebook. "I think it will have to be the pale-green background with the roses. The room is darkish, and it would light it up. But I'll decide by to-morrow, and let you know. Yes, that's right. Mrs. F.H. Grover, 321 Blaisdel Avenue. So much obliged to you. Good morning."

Having bowed themselves out they went some yards up the street before the little boy dared to express his new wonderment.

"Mudda, what did you say you was Mrs. F.H. Grover for? And we don't live on Blaisdel Avenue. We live on Orange Street."

"You mind your own business. Did you get your book? Well, that's what we went for, isn't it?"

The expedition having proved successful, it was tried on other planes. Now it was in the line of groceries; now in that of hardware; now in that of drygoods; now in that of fruit. Needed things could be used; useless things could be sold, especially after they had moved to distant neighborhoods. While the procedure didn't supply an income, it eked out very helpfully such income as remained.

It furnished, moreover, a motive in life, which was what they had lacked hitherto. There was something to which to give themselves. It was like devotion to an art, or even a religion. They could pursue it for its own sake. For her especially this outside interest appeased the wild something which wasted her within. She grew calmer, more reasonable. She slept and ate better. She had fewer fits of frenzy.

With but faint pangs of misgiving the little boy enjoyed himself. He enjoyed his finesse; he enjoyed the pride his mother took in him. In proportion as they grew more expert they enlarged their field, often reversing their rôles. There were times when he created the distraction, while she secreted any object within reach. They did this the more frequently after she became recognized as his superior in selection.

For a superior in selection the great department stores naturally offered the widest field for operation. They approached them, however, cautiously, going in and out and out and in for a good many days before they ventured on anything. When they did this at last it was amid the crowding and pushing of a bargain day.

The system evolved had the masterly note of simplicity. The little boy carried a satchel, of the kind in which school-boys sometimes carry books. He stood near his mudda, or farther away, according to the dictates of the moment's strategy. On the first occasion he kept close to her, sincerely admiring a display of colored silk scarves conspicuously marked down to the price at which it was intended, even before their importation, that they should be sold. Women thronged about the counter, the little boy and his mudda having much ado to edge themselves into the front to where these products of the loom could be handled.

The picking and choosing done, the mother still showed some indecision.

"I'll just ask my sister to step over here," she confided to the saleswoman. "Her judgment is so much better than mine. Run over, dear, to your Aunt Mary," she begged of the boy, "and ask her to come and speak to me." Holding the scarf noticeably in her hands, she smiled at the saleswoman affably. "I'll just make room for this lady, who seems to be in a hurry."

She did not step back; she merely allowed herself to be crowded out. From the front row she receded to the second, from the second to the third. Keeping in sight of the saleswoman, she looked this way and that, plainly for Aunt Mary to appear. At times she made little dashes, as Aunt Mary seemed to come within sight. From these she did not fail to return, but on each occasion to a point more distant from that of her departure. With sufficient time the poor saleswoman, who had fifty other customers to attend to, would be likely to forget her, for a few minutes if no more.

The moment seemed to have come. With the scarf thrown jauntily over her arm where anyone could see it, the mother forced her way amid the crowds in search of her little boy. If intercepted she had her explanation. He had gone on an errand, and had not come back. When she had found him she would return and pay for the scarf, or decide not to take it. Her story couldn't help being plausible.

"Aunt Mary" was a spot agreed upon near one of the side doors, and far from the center of interest in silk scarves. Agreed upon was also a little bit of comedy, for the benefit of possible lookers-on.

"Oh, my dear, I've kept you waiting so long. I'm so sorry. Tell your mother this is the best I could do for her. I knew you were waiting, so I didn't let the lady wrap it up. Open your bag, and I'll put it in."

The bag closed, the little boy went out through one door, and his mother through another. The point where she was to rejoin him was not so far away but that he could walk to it alone.

VI

It's all right, mudda, isn't it?"

He asked this after their campaign had been carried on for a good part of a year, and when they were nearing Christmas. He was now supposed to be seven. For reasons he could not explain the great game lost its zest. In as far as he understood himself he hated the sneaking and the secrecy. He hated the lying too, but lying was so much a part of their everyday life that he might as well have hated bread.

"Of course it's all right," his mother snapped. "Haven't I said so time and again? We get away with it, don't we? And if it wasn't all right we shouldn't be able to do that."

Silenced by this reasoning, even if something in his heart was not convinced by it, he prepared for the harvest of the festival. Christmas was an exciting time, even to Tom Coburn. Perhaps it was more exciting to him than to other boys, since he had so much to do with shops. As long ago as the middle of November he had noted the first stirrings of new energy. After that he had watched the degrees through which they had ripened to a splendor in which toys, books, skis, skates, sleds, and all the paraphernalia of young joyousness, made a bright thing of the world. Where there was so much, the profusion went beyond desire. One of these objects at a time, or two, or three, might have found him envious; but he couldn't cope with such abundance. He could concentrate, therefore, all the more on the pair of fur-lined mittens which his mother promised him, if, as she expressed it, they could haul it off.

By Christmas Eve they had not done so. They had hauled off other things—a purse, a lady's shopping bag, several towels, a selection of pen-trays, some pairs of stockings, a bottle of shoe-polish, a baby's collapsible rubber bathtub, a hair-brush, an electric toaster, with other articles of no great interest to a little boy. Moreover, only some of these things were for personal use; the rest would be sold discreetly after the next moving. It was in the nature of the case that such grist as came to their mill should be more or less as it happened. They could pick, but they couldn't choose, at least to no more than a limited degree. Fur-lined mittens didn't come their way.

The little boy's heart began to ache with a great fear. Perhaps he shouldn't get them. Unless he got them by Christmas Day the spell of the occasion would be gone. To get them a week later wouldn't be the same thing. It would not be Christmas. He couldn't remember having kept a Christmas hitherto. He couldn't remember ever having longed for what might be called an article of luxury. The yearning was new to him, and because new, it consumed him. Whenever he thought that the happiness might after all elude him he had to grind his teeth to keep back a sob, but he could not prevent the filling of his eyes with tears.

It was not only Christmas Eve but late in the day before the mother found her opportunity. At half-past five the counter where fur-lined mittens were displayed was crowded with poor women who hadn't had the money or the time to make their purchases earlier. In among them pressed Tom Coburn's mother, making her selection, and asking the price.

"Now where's that boy? His hands grow so quick that I can't be sure of anything without trying them on."

With a despairing smile at the saleswoman, she followed her usual tactics of being elbowed from the counter, while she looked about vainly for the boy. At the right moment she slipped into the pushing, struggling mass of tired women, where she could count on being no more remarked than a single crow in a flock. The mittens were in the muff which was the prize of an earlier expedition. At a side door the boy was waiting where she had left him. Without pausing for words she whispered commandingly.

"Come along quick."

He went along quick, but also happily, projecting himself into the "surprise" to which he would wake on Christmas morning.

They had reached the sidewalk when a hand was laid on the mother's shoulder.

"Will you come back a minute, please?"

The words were so polite that for the first few seconds the boy was not alarmed. A lady was speaking, a lady like any other lady, unless it was that her manner was quieter, more forceful, more sure of itself, than he was accustomed to among women. But what he never forgot during all the rest of his life was the look on his mother's face. As he came to analyze it later it was one of inner surrender. She had come to the point which she had long foreseen as her objective. She had reached the end. But in spite of surrender, and though she grew bloodlessly pale, she was still determined to show fight.

"What do you want me for?"

"If you'll step this way I'll tell you."

"I don't know that I care to do that. I'm going home."

"You'd better come quietly. You won't gain anything by making a fuss."

A second lady, also forceful and sure of herself, having joined them they pushed their way back through the throng. At the glove counter a place was made for them. The saleswoman was beckoned to. The woman who had stopped them at the door continued to take the lead.

"Now, will you show us what you've got in your muff?"

She produced the mittens. "Yes, I have got these. I bought and paid for them."

The saleswoman gave her account of the incident. Women shoppers gathered round. Floorwalkers came up.

"It's a lie; it's a lie!" the boy heard his mother cry out, as the girl behind the counter told her tale. "If I didn't pay for them it was because I forgot. Here's the money. I'll pay for them now. What do you take me for?"

"No; you won't pay for them now. That's not the way we do business. Just come along this way."

"I'm not going nowheres else. If you won't take the money you can go without it. Leave me alone, and let me take my little boy home."

Her voice had the screaming helplessness of women in the grasp of forces without pity. A floorwalker laid his hand on her shoulder, compelling her to turn round.

"Don't you touch me," she shouted. "If I've got to go anywheres I can go without your tearing the clothes off my back, can't I?"

For the little boy it was the last touch of humiliation. Rushing at the floorwalker, he kicked him in the shins.

"Don't you hit my mudda. I won't let you."

A second floorwalker held the youngster back. Some of the crowd laughed. Others declared it a monstrous thing that women of the sort should have such fine-looking children.

Presently they were surging through the crowd again, toward a back region of the premises. The boy, not crying but panting as if spent by a long race, held his mother by the skirt; on the other side one of the forceful women had her by the arm. He saw that his mother's hat had been knocked to one side, and that a mesh of her dark hair had broken loose. He remembered this picture, and how the shoppers, wherever they passed, made a lane for them, shocked by the sight of their disgrace.

They came to an office, where their party, his mother, himself, the two forceful women, and two floorwalkers, were shut in with an elderly man who sat behind a desk. It was still the first of the forceful women who took the lead.

"Mr. Corning, we've caught this woman shop-lifting."

"I haven't been," the boy heard his mother deny. "Honest to God, I haven't been."

"We've been watching her for some time past," the forceful woman continued, "but we never managed before to get her with the goods."

The elderly man was gray, pale-eyed, and mild-mannered. He listened while the story was given him in detail.

"I'm afraid we must give you in charge," he said, gently, when the facts were in.

"No, don't do that, don't do that," she implored, tearfully. "I've got my little boy. He can't do without me."

"He hasn't done very well with you, has he?" the elderly man reasoned. "A woman who's taught a boy of that age to steal...."

He was interrupted by the coming in of a policeman, summoned by telephone. At sight of him the unhappy woman gave a loud inarticulate gasp of terror. All that for seven years she had dreaded seemed now about to come true. The boy felt terror too, but the knowledge that his mother needed him nerved him to be a man.

"Don't you be afraid, mudda. If they put you in jail I'll go to jail too. I won't let them take me away from you."

"You'd better come with me, missus," the policeman said, with gruff kindliness, when the situation was explained to him. "The kid can come too. 'Twon't be so bad. Lots of these cases. You'll live through it all right, and it'll learn you to keep straight. One of these days you may be glad that it happened."

They went out through a dimly lighted passageway, clogged with parcels and packing-cases which men were loading into drays. It was dark by this time, the streets being lighted as at night. The police-station was not far away, and to it they were led through a series of byways in which there were few foot-passengers. The policeman allowed them to walk in front of him, so that the connection was not too obvious. The boy held his mother's hand, which clutched at his with a nervous loosening and tightening of the fingers. As the situation was beyond words they made no attempt to speak.

"This way."

Within the police-station the officer turned them to the right, where they entered a small bare room. Brilliantly lighted with unshaded electrics, its glare was fierce upon the eyes. At a plain oak desk a man in uniform was seated with a ledger in front of him. Another man in uniform standing near the door picked his teeth to kill time.

"Shoplifting case," was the simple introduction of the party.

They stood before the man at the desk, who dipped his pen in the ink, and barely glanced at them. What to the boy and his mother was as the end of the world was to him all in the day's work.

"Name?"

She gave her name distinctly, and less to the lad's surprise than if she hadn't often used pseudonyms. "Mrs. Theodore Whitelaw."

"Address?"

She gave the address correctly.

"Boy's name?"

She spoke carefully, as one who had prepared her statements. "He's been known as Thomas Coburn. He's really Thomas Whitelaw. His father was my second husband."

"If he's your second husband's child why is he called by your first husband's name?"

She was prepared here too. "Because I'd given up using my second husband's name. I was unhappily married."

"Is he dead?"

"Yes, he is."

Never having heard before so much of his private history, the boy registered it all. It was exactly the sort of detail for which he had been eager. It explained too that name of Whitelaw, allusions to which had puzzled him. He was so engrossed by the fact that he was not Tom Coburn but Tom Whitelaw as hardly to listen while it was explained to his mother that she would spend the night in the Female House of Detention, and be brought before the magistrate in the morning. If the boy had no friends to whom to send him he would be well taken care of elsewhere.

The phlegm to which she had for a few minutes schooled herself broke down. "Oh, can't I keep him with me? He'll cry his eyes out without me."

She was given to understand that no child above the nursing age could be put in prison even for its mother's sake. From his reverie as to Tom Whitelaw he waked to what was passing.

"But I won't leave my mudda," he wailed, loudly. "I want to go to jail."

The kindly policeman put his arm about the boy's shoulder.

"You'll go to jail, sonny, when your time comes, if you set the right way to work. Your momma's only going to spend the night, and I'll see to it that you——"

In a side of the room a door opened noiselessly. A woman, wearing a uniform, with a bunch of keys hanging at her side, stood there like a Fate. She was a grave woman, strongly built, and with something inexorable in her eyes. Even the boy guessed who she was, throwing himself against her, and crying out, "Go 'way! go 'way! You won't take my mudda away from me."

But the folly of resistance became evident. The mother herself understood it so. Walking up to the woman with the keys, she said in an undertone:

"For God's sake get me out of this. I can't look on while he breaks his little heart. He's always been an angel."

That was all. She gave no backward look. Before the boy knew what was about to happen, she had passed into a corridor, and the door had closed behind her.

She was gone. He was left with these strange men. The need for being brave was not unknown to him. Not unknown to him was the power of calling to his aid a secret strength which had already carried him through tight places. He could only express it to himself in the words that he mustn't cry. Crying had come to stand for everything cowardly and babyish. He was so prone to do it that the struggle against it was the hardest he had to make. He struggled against it now; but he struggled vainly. He was all alone. Even the three policemen were talking together, while he stood deserted, and futile. His lips quivered in spite of himself. The tears gathered. Disgraced as he was anyhow, this weakness disgraced him more.

The room had an empty corner. Straight into it he walked, and turned his back, his face within the angle. The head with an old cap on it was bowed. The sturdy shoulders, muffled in a cheap top-coat, heaved up and down. But the legs in their knickerbockers were both straight and strong, and the feet firmly planted on the floor. Except for an occasional strangled sound which he couldn't control, he betrayed himself by nothing audible.

The three policemen, all of them fathers, glanced at him, but forbore to glance at one another. One of them tried to say, "Poor kid!" but the words stuck in his throat. It was the kindly fellow who had brought the lad and the woman there who recovered himself first.

"All right, then, boys. The Swindon Street Home. One of you can 'phone that we're on the way." He went over and laid his hand on the child's shoulder. "Say, sonny, I'm goin' to take you out to see the Christmas Tree."

The thought was a happy one. Tom Coburn had never seen any Christmas Trees, though he had often heard of them. He had specially heard of the community Christmas Tree which was new that year in that particular city. It was to be a splendid sight, and against the fascination of splendor even grief was not wholly proof. He looked shyly round, an incredible wonder in his tear-stained, upturned face.

In the street they walked hand in hand, pausing now and then to admire some brightly lighted window. The boy was in fairyland, but in spite of fairyland long deep sighs welled up from the springs of his loneliness and sorrow. To distract him the policeman took him into a druggist's and bought him a cone of ice-cream. The boy licked it gratefully, as they made their way to the open space consecrated to the Tree.

The night was brisk and frosty; the sky clear. In the streets there was movement, light, gayety. At a spot on a bit of pavement a vendor was showing a dancing toy, round which some scores of idlers were gathered. The dancing was so droll that the little boy laughed. The policeman bought him one.

When they came to the Christmas Tree the lad was in ecstasy. Nothing he had ever dreamed of equalled these fruits of many-colored fires. A band was playing, and suddenly the multitude broke into song.

O come, all ye faithful,
Joyful and triumphant,
O come ye, O come ye, to Bethlehem!

Even the policeman joined in, humming the refrain in Latin.

Venite, adoremus;
Venite, adoremus;
Venite, adoremus,
Dominum.

Passing thus through marvels they came to the Swindon Street Home. The night-nurse, warned by telephone, was expecting them. She was a motherly woman who had once had a child, and knew well this precise situation.

"Oh, come in, you poor little boy! Have you had your supper?"

He hadn't had his supper, though the cone of ice-cream had stilled the worst pangs of hunger.

"Then you shall have some; and after that I'll put you in a nice comfy bed."

"He's a fine kid," the policeman commended, before going away, "and won't give you no trouble, will you, sonny?"

The boy caught him by the hand, looking up pleadingly into his face, as if he would have kept him. But the policeman had children of his own, and this was Christmas Eve.

"See you again, sonny," he said, cheerily, as he went out, "and a merry Christmas!"

The night matron knew by experience all the sufferings of little boys homesick for mothers who have got into trouble. She had dealt with them by the hundred.

"Now, dear, while Mrs. Lamson is getting your supper we'll go to the washroom and you'll wash your face and hands. Then you'll feel more like eating, won't you?"

Deprived of his policeman, despair would have settled on him again, had it not been for the night matron's hearty voice. The deeper his woe, and it was very deep, the less he could resist friendliness. Just as in that first agony, when he was only eight months old, he had turned to the only love available, so now he yielded again. He was not reconciled; he was not even comforted; he was only responsive and grateful, thus getting the strength to go on.

Going on was only in letting the night matron scrub his face and hands, and submitting patiently. As they went from the washroom to the dining room he held her by the hand. He did this first because he couldn't let her go, and then because the halls were big and bare and dark. Never had he been in any place so vast, or so impersonal. He was used to strangeness, as they moved so often, but not to strangeness on so immense a scale. It was a relief to him, because it brought in a note of hominess, to hear from an upper floor a forlorn little baby cry.

His supper toned him up. He could speak of his great sorrow. While the night matron sat with him and helped him to porridge he asked, suddenly:

"Will they let me go to jail and stay with my mudda to-morrow?"

"You see, dear, your mother may not be in jail to-morrow. Perhaps she'll be let out, and then you can go home with her."

"They didn't ought to put her in. I'm big. I could work for her, and then she wouldn't have to take things no more."

"But bless you, darling, you'll be able to work for her as it is. They won't keep her very long—not so very long—and I'll look after you till she comes out. After that...."

"What's your name?" he asked, solemnly, as if he wished to nail her to the bargain.

"Mrs. Crewdson's my name. I'm a widow. I like little boys. I like you especially. I think we're going to be friends."

As a proof of this she took him to her own room, instead of to a dormitory, where she gave him a bath, found a clean night-shirt which, being too big, descended to his feet, and put him to sleep in a cot she kept on purpose for homeless little children in danger of being too lonely.

"You see, dear," she explained to him, "I don't go to bed all night. I stay up to look after all the little children—there are a lot of them in this house—who may want something. So you needn't be afraid. I'll leave a light burning, and I'll be in and out all the time. If you wake up and hear a noise, you'll know that that'll be me going about in the rooms, but mostly I'll be in this room. Now, don't you want to say your prayers?"

He didn't want to say his prayers because he had never said any. She suggested, therefore, that he should kneel on the bed, put his hands together, and repeat the words she told him to say, as she sat on the edge of the cot.

"Dear God"—"Dear God"—"take care of me to-night"—"take care of me to-night"—"and take care of my dear mother"—"and take care of my dear mudda"—"and make us happy again"—"and make us happy again"—"for Jesus Christ's sake"—"for Jesus Christ's sake"—"Amen"—"Amen."

"God's up in the sky, isn't He?" he asked, as he hugged his dancing toy to him and let her cover him up.

"God's everywhere where there's love, it seems to me, dear. I bring a little bit of God to you, and you bring a little bit of God to me; and so we have Him right here. That's a good thought to go to sleep on, isn't it? So good-night, dear."

She kissed him as she supposed his mother would have done. He threw his arms about her neck, drawing her face close to his. "Good night, dear," he whispered back, and almost before she rose from the bedside she knew he was asleep.

Somewhere toward morning she came into the room and found him sitting up in his cot.

"Will it soon be daytime, Mrs. Crewdson?"

"Yes, dear; not so very long now."

"And when daytime comes could I go to the jail?"

"Not too early, dear. They wouldn't let you in."

"Oh, but I don't want to go in. I only want to stand outside. Then if my mudda looks out of the window, she'll see her little boy."

Throwing herself on her knees, she clasped him in her arms. "Oh, you darling! How I wish God had given me a little son like you! I did have one—he would have been just your age—only I—I lost him."

Touched by this tribute to himself, as well as by his friend's bereavement, he brought out a fine manly phrase he had long been saving for an adequate occasion.

"The hell you did, Mrs. Crewdson!"

Having thus expressed his sympathy, he nestled down to sleep again, hugging his dancing toy.

VII

He woke to his first Christmas. That is, he woke to find a chair drawn up beside his cot and stocked with little presents. He had never had presents before. It had not been his mother's custom to make them. Since she gave him what she could afford, and they shared everything in common, presents would have seemed to her superfluous.

But here were half a dozen parcels done up in white paper and tied with red ribbon, and on them he could read his name. At least, he could read Tom, while he guessed from the length of the word and initial W that the other name was Whitelaw. So he was to be Tom Whitelaw now! The fact seemed to make a change in his identity. He stowed it away in the back of his mind for later meditation, in order to feast his soul on the mystic bounty of Santa Claus.

He knew who Santa Claus was. He had often seen him in the windows of the big stores, surrounded by tempting packages, and driving reindeer harnessed to a sleigh. He knew that he drove over the roofs of houses, down chimneys, and out through grates. Somewhere, too, he harbored the suspicion that this was only childish talk, and that the real Santa Claus must be a father or a mother, or in this case Mrs. Crewdson; only both childish talk and fact simmered without conflict in his brain. It was easier to think that a supernatural goodwill had brought him this profusion than that commonplace hands, which had never done much for him hitherto, should all of a sudden be busy on his behalf.

Raising himself on his elbow, his first thought came with the bubbling of a sob. "My mudda is in jail!" His second was in the nature of a corollary, "But she'll like it when I tell her that Santa Claus took care of her little boy." The deduction gave him permission to enjoy himself.

At first he only gazed in a rapture that hardly guessed at what was beneath these snowy coverings. What he was to get was secondary to the fact that he was getting something. For the first time in his life he was taken into that vast family of boys and girls for whom Christmas has significance. Up to this morning he had stood outside of it wistfully—yearning, hoping, and yet condemned to stand aloof. Now, if his mudda hadn't been in jail....

The parcels were larger and smaller. Beginning with the smallest, he arranged them according to size. Merely to touch them sent a thrill through his frame. The smallest was round like an orange and yet yielded to pressure. He was almost sure it was a rubber ball. He could have been quite sure, only that he preferred the condition of suspense.

It was long before he could bring himself to untie the first red ribbon bow, his surprise on finding a rubber ball being no less keen than if he hadn't known it was a rubber ball on first taking it between his fingers. A handkerchief laid out flat, making the second parcel seem bigger than it was, sent him up in the scale of social promotion. By way of candies, nuts, a toothbrush with tooth paste, he came to the largest of all, a History of Mankind, written in words of one syllable, and garnished with highly-colored pictures of various racial types. If only his mother hadn't been in jail....

That his mother was no longer in jail was a fact he learned later in the day. It was a day of extremes, of quick rushes of rapture out of which he would fall suddenly, to go away somewhere and moan. When he begged, as he begged every hour or two, to be taken to the jail, he could be distracted by rompings with the other children, most of them in some such case as his own, or by some novelty in the life. To eat turkey and plum pudding at the head of one of three long tables, each seating twelve or fourteen, was to be raised to a point of social eminence beyond which it seemed there could be nothing more to reach. But in the midst of this pride the hard facts would recur to him, and turkey and plum pudding choke him.

That something had happened he began to infer when his beloved policeman appeared at the home in the afternoon. Having seen him enter, the boy ran up to him.

"Oh, mister, are you going to take me to the jail?"

Mister patted him on the head, though he answered, absently, "Not just now, sonny. You know you're goin' to have a Christmas Tree. I've come to see Miss Honiton."

Miss Honiton, one of the day matrons, having appeared at the end of the hall, the policeman turned him about by the shoulders.

"Now be off with you and play. This has got to be private."

He took himself off but only to the end of the hall, where they didn't notice that he lingered. He lingered because he knew that, whatever the mystery, it had something to do with him.

He caught, however, no more than words which he couldn't understand. Cyanide of potassium! Only his quick ear and retentive memory enabled him to lay hold of syllables so difficult. His mother had taken something or hadn't taken something, he couldn't make out which. All he saw was that both of his friends looked grave, Miss Honiton summing up their consultation,

"I'll let him enjoy the Christmas Tree before saying anything about it."

The policeman answered, regretfully: "Do you think you must?"

"I know I must. He ought to be told. He has a right to know. He might resent it later if we didn't tell him now."

"Very well, sister. I leave it to you."

The door having closed on this friend, Tom Whitelaw, so to call him henceforth, made his way into the room where the Christmas Tree was presently to be lighted up. But he had no heart for the spectacle. There was something new. In the grip of the forces which controlled his life he felt helpless, small. Even his companions in misfortune, as all these children were, could be relatively light-hearted. They could clap their hands when the Tree began to burn with magic fires, and take pleasure in the presents handed out to them. He could not. He was waiting for something to be told to him—something he had a right to know.

One by one, the presents were cut from the Tree; one by one the children went up to receive this addition to what Santa Claus had brought them in the morning. His own name was among the last. When it was called he went forward perfunctorily at first, and then with a sudden inspiration.

His package was handed him, not by one of the matrons but by a beaming young lady from outside. As she bent to deliver it he had his question ready.

"Please, miss, what's cyanide of potassium?"

He had repeated the words to himself so often during the half hour since first hearing them that he pronounced them distinctly. The young lady laughed.

"Why, I think it's a deadly poison." She turned to the matron nearest her. "What is cyanide of potassium? This dear little boy wants to know."

But the dear little boy had already walked soberly back to his seat. While the other children made merry with their presents he sat with his on his lap, and reflected. Poison was something that killed people. He knew that. In one of the houses where they had lived a woman had taken poison, and two days later he had seen her carried out in a long black box. The impression had remained with him poignantly.

He had no inclination to cry. Tears could bring little relief in this kind of cosmic catastrophe. If his mother had taken poison and was to be carried out in a long black box, everything that had made up his world would have collapsed. He could only wait submissively till the thing he ought to know was told to him.

It was told when the giving of the presents was over, and the children flocked out of the room to get ready for their Christmas supper. Miss Honiton was waiting near the door.

"Come into my office, dear. I want to ask you a few questions."

Miss Honiton's office was a mixture of office and sitting room, in that it had business furniture offset by photographs and knicknacks. Sitting at her desk, she turned to the lad, who stood as if to attention, a long thin sympathetic face, stamped with practical acumen.

"I wanted to ask you if besides your mother you have any relations."

His dark blue eyes, deep set beneath his bushy brows, she thought the most serious and earnest she had ever seen in any of the hundreds of homeless little boys she had had to deal with.

"No, miss."

"No brothers or sisters, no uncles or aunts?"

"No, miss."

"Didn't your mother ever take you to see anyone?"

"No, miss."

"Well, then, didn't anyone ever come to see her?"

"No, miss."

To the point she was trying to reach she went round by another way. Where did they live? How long had they lived there? Where had they lived before that? How long had they lived in that place? He answered to the best of his recollection, but when it came to their flittings from tenement to tenement, and from town to town, his recollection didn't take him very far. Miss Honiton soon understood that she might as well question a bird as to its migrations.

For a minute she said nothing, turning over in her mind the various ways of breaking her painful news, when he himself asked, suddenly:

"Is my mudda dead?"

The question was so direct that she felt it deserved a direct answer.

"Yes, dear."

"Did she"—he pulled himself together for the big words—"did she take cyanide of potassium?"

"Yes, dear; so I understand."

"Will they take her away in a long black box?"

"She'll be buried, dear, of course. There'll have to be a funeral somewhere."

"Can I go to it?"

"Yes, dear, certainly. I'll go with you myself."

He said nothing more, and Miss Honiton felt the futility of trying to comfort him. There was no opening for comfort in that stony little face. All she could suggest to break the tension was to ask if he wouldn't like his supper.

He went to his supper and ate it. He ate it ruminantly, speechlessly. What had happened to him he could not measure; what was before him he could not probe. All he knew of himself was that he had become a clod of misery, with almost nothing to temper his desolation.

Two big tears rolled down his cheeks without his being aware of it. They did not, however, escape the eyes of a little girl who sat near him.

"Who's a cry-baby?" she shrieked, to the entertainment of the lookers-on. She pointed at him with her spoon. "A grea' big boy like that cryin' for his momma!"

He accepted the scorn as a tonic. "A grea' big boy like that cryin' for his momma," were the words with which he kept many a pang during the next few days from being more than a tearless anguish.

Miss Honiton was as good as her word as to going with him to the rooms which housed the long black box. This he understood to be all that now represented his mudda. She had tried to explain the place as an "undertaker's parlor," but the words were outside his vocabulary. In the same way the why and the wherefore of the ceremony were outside his intelligence. He and Miss Honiton went into the dim room, and stood near the thing he heard mentioned as "the body." After some mumbled reading they went out again, and back to the Swindon Street Home.

Back in the Swindon Street Home he was still without a wherefore or a why. He got up, he washed, he dressed, he ate, he went to bed again. He was in a dormitory now with three other little boys, all of them too deep in the problems of parents in jail or in parts unknown to offer him much fellowship. They cried when they were left alone in bed, or they cried in their sleep; but they cried. It was his own pride, and in no small measure his strength, that he didn't cry, unless he cried in dreams.

Everyone was good to him, Mrs. Crewdson and Miss Honiton especially, but no one could give him the clue to life which instinctively he clutched for. That one didn't stay forever in the Swindon Street Home he could see from observation. The children he had found there went away; other children came. Some of these stayed but a night or two. None of them stayed much longer. By those sixth and seventh senses which children develop when they are in trouble he divined that conferences were taking place on his behalf. Now and then he detected glances shot toward him by the matrons in discussion which told him that he was being talked about. It was easy to deduce that he was in the Swindon Street Home longer than was the custom because they didn't know what to do with him. He inferred that they didn't know what to do with him from the many questions which many people asked. Sometimes it was a man, more times it was a woman, but the questions were always along the lines of those of Miss Honiton as he came out from the children's Christmas Tree. Had he any relatives? Had he any friends? If he had they ought to look after him. It was hard for these kindly people to believe that he had no claim whatever on any member of the human race.

He began to hear the words, a State ward. Though they meant nothing to him at first, he strove, as he always did, with new words and expressions, to find their application. Then one evening, as Mrs. Crewdson was putting him to bed, she told him that that was what he had become.

"You see, darling, now that your father and mother are both dead, the whole country is going to adopt you. Isn't that nice? And it isn't everything. You're going to have a home—not a home like this—what we call an institution—but a real home—with a real father and mother in it, and real brothers and sisters."

He took this stolidly. He was not to be moved now by anything that could happen. A waif on the world, the world had the right to pitch him in any direction that it chose. All he could do with his own desires was to beat them into submission. He mustn't cry! His fears and his griefs alike focussed themselves into that resolve. It was the only way in which he could translate his stout-hearted will to endure.

VIII

To conduct him to his new home, Mrs. Crewdson gave up the whole of the morning she was supposed to spend in sleep after her all-night vigil. The home was in a little town a short distance up the Hudson. Though the railway journey was not long, it was the longest he had ever taken, and, once the river came within view, it was not without its excitements. His spirits began to rise with a sense of new adventure. There were things to look at, bridges, steamers, a man-o'-war at anchor, lumber yards, coal sheds, an open-air exhibit of mortuary monuments, and high overhead the clear cold blue of a January sky. On the other side of the river the wooded heights made a bold brown bastion, flecked here and there with snow.

As he had not asked where they were going, or the composition of the family with whom the Guardian of State Wards was placing him, his protectress permitted him to make his own discoveries. New faces, new contacts, new necessities, would help him to forget the old.

They got out at the station of Harfrey. Mrs. Crewdson carried the suitcase containing the wardrobe rescued when they had searched the rooms which he and his mother had occupied last. In front of the station they got on a ramshackle street car, which zigzagged up the face of the bank, rising steeply from the river, so reaching the little town. They turned sharply at the top of the ridge to run through the one long street. It was a mean-looking street of drab wooden dwellings and drab wooden shops, occupied mostly by people dependent on the grand seigneurs of the neighboring big "places." An ugly schoolhouse, an ugly engine house, two or three ugly churches, further defied that beauty of which God had been so generous.

Having got out at a corner at which the car stopped, they walked to a small wooden house with a mansard roof, standing back from the street. It was a putty-colored house, with window and door frames in flecked, anæmic yellow. Perched on the edge of the ridge, it had three stories at the back and but two in front. What had once been an orchard had dwindled now to three or four apple trees, the rest of the ground being utilized as a chicken run. As the day was sunny, a few Plymouth Rocks were scratching and pecking in the yard.

Having turned in here, they found themselves expected, the front door opening before they reached the cement slab in front of it. The greetings were all for Mrs. Crewdson, who was plainly an old friend. The boy went in only because Mrs. Crewdson went in, and in the same way proceeded to a cheery, shabby sitting room. Here there were books and magazines about, while a canary in a cage began to sing as soon as he heard voices. To a homeless little boy the haven was so sweet that he forgot to take off his cap.

The first few minutes were consumed in questions as to this one and that one, relatives apparently, together with data given and received as to certain recognized maladies. Mrs. Crewdson was getting better of her headaches, but Mrs. Tollivant still suffered from her varicose veins. Only when these preliminaries were out of the way and Mrs. Crewdson had thrown off her outer wraps, was the introduction accomplished.

"So I've brought you the boy! Tom, dear, this is Mrs. Tollivant who's going to take care of you. Your cap, Tom! I imagine," she continued, with an apologetic smile, "you'll find manners very rudimentary."

Obliged to take an early train back to New York, Mrs. Crewdson talked with veiled, confidential frankness. A boy of seven could not be supposed to seize the drift of her cautious phraseology, even if he heard some of it.

"So you know the main features of the case.... I told them it wouldn't be fair to you to let you assume so much responsibility without your knowing the whole.... With children of your own to think of, you couldn't expose them to a harmful influence unless you were put in a position to take every precaution against.... Not that we've seen anything ourselves.... But, of course, after such a bringing up there can't but be traces.... And such good material there.... I'm sure you'll find it so.... Personally, I haven't seen a human being in a long time to whom my heart has gone.... Only there it is.... An inheritance which can't but be...."

He didn't feel betrayed. He had nothing to resent. Mrs. Crewdson had proved herself his friend, and he trusted her. Without knowing all the words she used, he caught easily enough the nature of the sentiments they stood for. These he accepted meekly. He was a bad boy. His mother and he had been engaged in wicked practices. Dimly, in unallayed mental discomfort, he had been convinced of this himself; and now it was clear to everyone. If they hadn't known what to do with him it was because a bad boy couldn't fit rightly into a world where everyone else was good. A young evildoer, he had no rôle left but that of humility.

He was the more keenly aware of this after Mrs. Crewdson had bidden him farewell, and he was face to face with his new foster mother. A wiry little woman, quick in action and sharp in tongue, she would be kind to him, with a nervous, nagging kindness. He got this impression, as he got an odor or a taste, without having to define or analyze. Later in life, when he had come to observe something of the stamp which professions leave on personalities, he was not surprised that she should have worn herself out in school-teaching before marrying Andrew Tollivant, a book-keeper. As he sat now, just as Mrs. Crewdson had left him, his overcoat still on his back, his cap in his hand, his feet dangling because the chair was too high for him, she treated him as if he were a class.

"Now, little boy, before we go any farther, you and I had better understand each other."

With this brisk call to his attention, she sat down in front of him, frightening him to begin with.

"You know that this is now to be your home, and I intend to do my duty by you to the best of my ability. Mr. Tollivant will do the same. If you take the children in the right way I'm sure you'll find them friendly. They were very nice to the last little boy the Board of Guardians sent to us."

Staring in fascinated awe at the starry brightness of her eyes, and the wrinkles of worry around them, he waited in silence for more.

"But one or two things I hope you'll remember on your side. Perhaps you haven't heard that the Board has found it hard to get anyone to take you. You're old enough to know that where there are children in a family people are shy of a boy who's had just your history. But I've run the risk. It's a great risk, I admit, and may be dangerous to my own. Do you understand what I mean?"

"No, ma'am," he said, blankly.

"Then I'll tell you. There are two things children must learn as soon as they're able to learn anything. One is to be honest; the other is to tell the truth. You know what telling the truth is, don't you?"

He did know, but paralyzed by her earnestness, he denied the fact. "No, ma'am."

"So there you are! And I don't suppose you've been taught anything about honesty."

"No, ma'am."

"Then you must begin to learn."

He began to learn that minute. Still treating him as a class, she delivered a little lecture, such as a child of tender years could understand, on the two basic virtues of which he had pleaded ignorance. He listened as in a trance, his eyes fixed on her vacantly. Though seizing a disconnected word or two, fear kept him from getting the gist of it all, as he generally did.

"It's your influence on the children that I want you to beware of. Arthur is older than you, but he's only ten; and a boy with your experience could easily teach him a good deal of harm. Cilly is eight, and Bertie only five. You'll be careful with them, won't you? Do you know that if we lead others astray God will call us to account for it?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well, He will; and I want you to remember it, and be afraid. Unless you're afraid of God you'll never grow into the good boy I hope we're going to make of you."

The homily finished, he was instructed in the ways of the upper floor, where, in the sloping space under the eaves, he was to have his room. After this he came back to the sitting room, not knowing what else to do. He was in a daze. It was as if he had dropped on another planet where nothing was familiar. Whether to stand up or sit down he didn't know. He didn't know what to think, or what to think about. Cut loose from his bearings, he floated in mental space.

As standing seemed to commit him to least that was wrong, he stood. Standing implied looking out of the window, and looking out of the window showed him, about half past twelve, a well-built boy, rosy with the cold, noisy from exuberance of spirit, swinging in at the gate and brandishing a hockey stick. From her preparation of the dinner his mother ran to meet him at the door. She spoke in a loud whisper that easily reached the sitting room.

"Now be careful, Arthur. He's come. He's in there."

Arthur responded with noisy indifference. "Who? The crook?"

"Sh-h-h, dear! You mustn't call him that. We must help him to forget it, and to grow into being like ourselves."

Arthur grunted noncommittally. Presently he strolled into the sitting room, whistling a tune. With hands in his pockets, his bearing was that of an overlord. He made a circuit of the room, eying the new guest, as the new guest eyed him back.

"Hello?" the overlord said at last, with a faint note of interrogation.

Still whistling and still with his hands in his pockets, he strolled out again.

Tom Whitelaw's nerves had become so many runlets for shame. He was the crook! He knew the word as one which crooks themselves use contemptuously. If he should hear it again.... But happily Mrs. Tollivant had put her veto on its use.

The gate clicked again. Coming up the pathway, he saw a girl of about his own age, with a boy much younger who swung himself on crutches. All his movements were twisted and grotesque. His head was sunk into his shoulders as if he had no neck. His feet and legs wore metal braces. His face had the uncannily aged look produced by suffering. Without actually helping him, the little girl kept by his side maternally. She was a dainty little girl, very fair, with shiny yellow hair hanging down her back, like a fairy princess in a picture book. The boy looking out of the window fell in love with her at sight. He was sure that in her he would find a friend.

On entering she called out in a whiny voice, very musical to Tom Whitelaw's ear:

"Ma! Bertie's been a naughty boy. He wouldn't sing 'Pretty Birdling' for Miss Smallbones. I told him you'd punish him, and you will, won't you, ma?"

As there was no response to this, the young ones came to the door of the sitting room and looked in. They stared at the stranger, and the stranger stared at them, with the unabashed frankness of young animals. Having stared their fill, the son and daughter of the house went off to ask about dinner.

To Tom that dinner was another new experience. For the first time in his life he sat down to what is known as a family meal. Attempts had sometimes been made by well-meaning women in the tenements to rope him to their tables, but his mother had never permitted him to yield to them. Now he sat down with those of his own age, to be served like them, and on some sort of footing of equality. The honor was so great that he could hardly swallow. Second helpings were beyond him.

The afternoon was blank again. "You'll begin to go to school on Monday," Mrs. Tollivant had explained; but in the meantime he had the hours to himself. They were long. He was lonely. Having been given permission to go into the yard, he stood studying the Plymouth Rocks. Presently he was conscious of a light step behind him. Before he had time to turn around he also heard a voice. It was a whiny voice, yet sharp and peremptory.

"You stop looking at our hens."

The fairy princess had not come up to him; she had paused some two or three yards away. Her expression was so haughty that it hurt him. It hurt him more from her than from anybody else because of his admiration. He looked at her beseechingly, not for permission to go on studying the Plymouth Rocks, but for some shade of relenting. He got none. The sharp little face was as glittering and cold as one of the icicles hanging from the roof behind her. Heavy at heart, he turned to go into the house by the back door.

He had climbed most of the hill when the clear, whiny voice arrested him.

"Who's a crook?"

At this stab in the back he leaped round, fury in his dark blue eyes. But the fairy princess was used to fury in dark blue eyes, and knew how best to defy it. The tip of the tongue she thrust out at him added insolence to insult. He turned again, and, wounded in all his being, went on into the house.

Near the back door there was a sun parlor, and in it he saw Bertie, squatting in a small-wheeled chair built for his convenience. Bertie called to him invitingly.

"I've got a book."

"I've got a book, too," he returned, in Bertie's own spirit.

"You show me your book, and I'll show you mine."

The proposal being fair, he went in search of his History of Mankind. In a few minutes he was seated on the floor beside Bertie's chair, exchanging literary criticisms. He liked Bertie. He had a premonition that Bertie was going to like him. After the disdain of the fairy princess, and the superciliousness of the overlord, this was comforting. Moreover, he could return Bertie's friendliness by doing things for him which no one else had time to do. He could push his wheeled chair; he could run his errands; he could fetch and carry; he would like doing it.

"I've got infantile paralysis."

"I've got a rubber ball."

"I've got a train."

"I've got a funny little man what dances."

Coming into the house, Cilly found them the best of friends, in the best of spirits. Without entering the sun-parlor, she spoke through the doorway, coldly.

"Bertie, I don't think momma would like you to act like that. I'll go and ask her."

Mrs. Tollivant hurried from the kitchen, scouring a saucepan as she looked in on them. Seeing nothing amiss, she went away again. Then as if distrusting her own vision, she came back. She came back more than once, anxiously, suspiciously. Bertie was enjoying himself with this boy picked out of the gutter. That the boy had been picked out of the gutter was not what troubled her, but that Bertie should enjoy himself in the lad's society. Wise enough not to put notions into Bertie's head, she stopped her ward later in the day, when she had the chance to speak to him alone.

"I saw you playing with Bertie. Well, that's all right. Only you'll remember your promise, won't you? You won't teach him anything harmful?"

"No, ma'am," the boy answered, humbly, as one who has a large selection of harmful things to impart.

IX

He had looked forward to Monday and school. After four days in the Tollivant household he was eager for relief from it. Except for Cilly's occasional, and always private, taunts, they were not unkind to him; they only treated him as an outcast whom they had been obliged to succor because no one else would do so. He had the same food and drink as they; his room was good enough; of whatever was material he had no complaint to make. There was only the distrust which rendered his bread bitter and the bed hard to lie upon. They didn't take him in as one of them. They kept him outside, an alien, an intruder.

It was again a new experience in that for the first time in his life he was doing without love. When he was Tom Coburn he had had plenty of it at the worst of times. The Swindon Street Home was full of it. In the Tollivant house it was the only thing weighed and measured and stinted. He couldn't, of course, make this analysis. He only knew that something on which his life depended was not given him.

He hoped to find it in the school. In any case the school would admit him to the larger life. It would bind him to that human family which he had so long craved to enter. In addition to that, it was at school you learned things.

He was the more eager to learn things for the reason that Mrs. Tollivant had declared him backward. In the primary school Cilly was in the second grade; he must go into the first. He would be with children a year younger than himself. But the humiliation would be an incentive to ambition. He had already decided that only by "knowing things" should he be able to lift himself out of his despised estate.

The school session was all he had hoped for. Miss Pollard, the teacher, put in touch with his story by Mrs. Tollivant, kept him near to her, and watched over him. He learned to discriminate between his, has, and had, as matters of orthography, as well as between cat, car, and can. That twice two made four and twice four made eight added much to his understanding of numbers. He sang Roving the Old Homeland, while Miss Pollard pointed on the map to the places as they were named.

From Plymouth town to Plymouth town
The Pilgrims made their way;
The Puritans settled Salem,
And Boston on the Bay.

The air had a rhythm and a lilt which allowed for the inclusion of any reasonable number of redundant syllables.

The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam,
Where the blue waters fork;
The English came and conquered it,
And turned it into New York.

A little history, a little geography, being taught by the simple method of doggerel, much pleasure was evoked by the exercise of healthy lungs. Listening to her new pupil, Miss Pollard discovered a sweet treble that had never before been aware of itself, with a linnet's joy in piping. A linnet's joy was his joy throughout the whole morning, with no more than a slight flaw in his ecstasy in the thought of two hours in the Tollivant home before he came back for the afternoon.

As Cilly called for Bertie at the kindergarten, he walked homeward by himself. Happy with a happiness never experienced before, he had not noticed that his school-mates hung away from him, tittering as he passed. To well-dressed little boys and girls his worn old cap, his frayed knickerbockers, and above all his cheap gray overcoat with a stringy sheepskin collar, naturally marked him for derision. They would have marked him for derision even had his story not been known to everyone.

He went singing on his way, stepping manfully to the measure.

The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam,
Where the blue waters fork;
The English came and conquered it,
And turned it into New York.

They massed themselves behind him, convulsed by his lack of self-consciousness. The little girls giggled; the boys attempted to make snowballs from snow too powdery to hold together. One lad found a frozen potato which he hurled in such a way as to skim close to the singing figure while just missing it. Tom Whitelaw, unsuspicious of ill-will, turned round in curiosity. He was greeted by a hoot from the crowd, but from whom he couldn't tell.

"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jail?"

The hoot became a chorus of jeers. By one after another the insult was taken up.

"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jaaa-il?"

As far as he was able to distinguish, the voices of the little girls were the louder. In their merriment they screamed piercingly.

"Gutter-snipe! Gutter-rat! Crook! Crook! Crook! Who's the boy what his mother was put in ja-aa-ail?"

Crimson, with clenched fists, with gnashing teeth, with tears of rage in his eyes, he stood his ground while they came on. They swept toward him in a semicircle of which he made the center. Very well! So much the better! He could spring on at least one of them, and dash his brains out on the ground. There was no ferocity he would not enjoy putting into execution.

He sprang, but amid the yells of the crowd his prey dodged and escaped him. The semicircle broke. Instead of advancing in massed formation, it danced round him now as forty or fifty imps. The imps bewildered him, as banderilleros bewilder a bull in the ring. He didn't know which to attack. When he lunged at one, the charge was diverted by another, so that he struck at the air wildly. Shrieks of mockery at these failures maddened him, with the heartbreaking madness of a loving thing goaded out of all semblance to itself. He panted, he groaned, he dashed about foolishly, he stumbled, he fell. When pelted with pebbles or scraps of ice, he was hardly aware of the rain upon his head.

But the mob swept on, leaving him behind. At gates and corners the boy baiters disappeared, hungry for their dinners. Most of them forgot him as soon as they had turned their backs. It was easy for them to stop for awhile since they could begin again.

He was alone on the gritty, icy slope surrounding the schoolhouse. There was no comfort for him in the world. Faintly he remembered as a satisfaction that he hadn't cried, but even this consolation was cold. He wondered if he couldn't kill himself.

He did not kill himself, though he pondered ways and means of doing it. He came to the conclusion that it would be foolish to kill himself before killing some of his tormentors. He prayed about it that night, his first prayer, except for the one taught him on Christmas Eve by Mrs. Crewdson.

To the family devotions, for which all were assembled about eight o'clock, before the younger children went to bed, Mr. Tollivant had begun to add a new petition.

"And, O Heavenly Father, take pity on the little stranger within our gates, even as we have welcomed him into our home. Blot out his past from Thy book. Give him a new heart. Make him truthful and honest especially. Help him to be gentle, obedient...."

But savagely the boy intervened on his own behalf. "O Heavenly Father, don't! Don't give me a new heart, or make me gentle and obedient, till I kill some of them fellows that called me a crook, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen."

X

He killed none of the fellows who called him a crook, though during the first two years of his schooling he was called a crook pretty often. Whatever grade he was in, he was always that boy who differs from other boys, and is therefore the black swan in a flock of white ones. Whatever his progress, he made it to the tune of his own history. He was a gutter-snipe. His mother had killed herself in jail! Before she had killed herself both he and she had been arrested for thieving in a shop! There was not a house in Harfrey where the tale was not told. There was never a boy or girl in the school who hadn't learned it before making his acquaintance.

Besides, they said of him, he would have been "different" anyhow. Being "different" was an offense less easily pardoned than being criminal. Dressed more poorly than they, and with no claims of a social kind, he carried himself with that bearing which they could only describe as putting on airs. It was Cilly Tollivant who first brought this charge home to him.

"But I don't, Cilly," he protested, earnestly. "I don't know how to be any other way."

Cilly was by this time growing sisterly. She couldn't live in the house with him and not feel her heart relenting, and though she disdained him in public, as her own interests compelled her to do, in private she tried to help him.

"Don't know how to be any other way!" she exclaimed, indignantly. "Tom Whitelaw, you make me sick. Don't you know even how to talk right?"

"Yes, but...."

"There you go," she interrupted, bitterly. "Why can't you say Yep, like anybody else?"

He took the suggestion humbly. He would try. His only explanation of his eccentricity was that Yep and Nope didn't suit his tongue.

But adopting Yep and Nope, as he might have adopted words from a foreign language, adopting much else that was crude and crass and vulgar and noisy and swaggering and standardized, according to schoolboy notions of the standard, he still found himself "different." For one thing, he looked different. Debase his language as he might, or coarsen his manners, or stultify his impulses, he couldn't keep himself from shooting up tall and straight, with a carriage of the head which was in itself an offense to those who knew themselves inferior. It made nothing easier for him that his teachers liked and respected him. "Teacher's pet" was a term of reproach hardly less painful than crook or gutter-snipe. But he couldn't help learning easily; he couldn't help answering politely when politely spoken to; he couldn't help the rapture of his smile when a friendly word came his way. All this told against him. He was guyed, teased, worried, tortured. If there was a cap to be snatched it was his. If there was one of a pair of rubber shoes to be stolen or hidden it was his. If there was an exercise book to be grabbed and thrown up into a tree where the owner could be pelted while he clambered after it, it was his. Because he was poor, friendless, defenseless, and yet with damnable pride written all over him, it became a recognized law of the school that any meanness done to him would be legitimate.

But in his third year at the Tollivants the persecution waned, and in the fourth it stopped. His school-mates grew. Growing, they developed other instincts. Fair play was one of them; admiration for pluck was another.

"You've got to hand it to that kid," Arthur Tollivant, now fourteen, had been heard to say in a circle of his friends. "He's stood everything and never squealed a yelp. Some young tough, believe me!"

This good opinion was reflected among the lads of Tom Whitelaw's own age. They had never been cruel; they had only been primitive. Having passed beyond that stage, they forgot to no small degree what they had done while in it. The boy who at seven was the crook was at eleven Whitey the Sprinter. He walked to and from school with the best of them. With the best of them he played and fought and swore privately. If he put on airs it was the airs of being a much sadder dog than he was, daring to smoke a cigarette and go home with the smell of the wickedness on his breath.

So, outwardly, Tom Whitelaw came in for two full years of good-natured toleration. If it did not go further than toleration it was because he was a State ward. On the baseball or the football team he might be welcomed as an equal; in homes there was discrimination. He was not invited to parties, and among the young people of Harfrey parties were not few. Girls who met him at the Tollivants' didn't speak to him outside. When Cilly, now being known as Cecilia, had her friends to celebrate her birthday, he remained in his room with no protest from the family at not joining them. None the less, it was a relief to be free from jeering in the streets, as well as from being reminded every day at school of his mother's tragedy. It was a relief to him; but it was no more.

For more than that the wound had gone too deep. Outwardly, he accepted their approaches; in his heart he rejected them, biding his time. He was biding his time, not with longings for revenge—he was too sensible now for that—but in the hope of passing on and forgetting them. By the time he was twelve he was already aware of his impulse toward growth.

It was in his soul as a secret conviction, the seed's knowledge of its own capacity to germinate. Most of the boys and girls around him he could judge, not by a precocious worldly wisdom, but by his gift for intuitive sizing up. Their range was so far and no farther, and they themselves were aware of it. They would become clerks and plumbers and carpenters and school-teachers and shoe dealers and provision men, and whatever else could reach its fulfillment in a small country town. He himself felt no limit. Life was big. He knew he could expand in it. To nurse resentments would be small, and would keep him small. All he asked was to forget them, to forget, too, those who called them forth; but to that end he must be far away.

XI

The road to this Far-away began in the summer vacation of the year when he was supposed to be twelve. It was the year when he first went to work, though the work was meant to last for no more than a few weeks.

Mr. Quidmore, a market gardener at Bere, in Connecticut, some seven or eight miles eastward toward the Sound, had come over to ask Mr. Tollivant for a few hours' work in straightening out his accounts. Straightening out accounts for men who were but amateurs at bookkeeping was a means by which Mr. Tollivant eked out his none-too-generous salary.

It was a Sunday afternoon in June. They were in the yard, looking at the Plymouth Rocks behind their defenses of chicken-wire. That is, Mr. Quidmore was looking at the Plymouth Rocks, but Tom was looking at Mr. Quidmore. Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant were giving their guest information as to how they raised their hens and marketed their eggs.

It was a family affair. Mrs. Tollivant prepared the food; Cecilia fed the birds; Art hunted for the eggs; Bertie and Tom packed them. Mr. Quidmore was moved to say:

"I wish I had a fine boy like your Art to help me with the berrypicking. Good money in it. Three a week and his keep for as long as the strawberries hold out."

Tom saw Mrs. Tollivant shake her head at her husband behind Mr. Quidmore's back. This meant disapproval. Disapproval could not be disapproval of the work, but of Mr. Quidmore. Art already gave his holiday services to a dairy for a dollar less than Mr. Quidmore's offer, and no keep. It was the employer, then, and not the employment that Mrs. Tollivant distrusted.

And yet Mr. Quidmore fascinated Tom. He had never before seen anyone whose joints had the looseness of one of those toys which you worked with a string. He was so slim, too, that you got little or no impression of a body beneath his flapping clothes. Nervously restless, he walked with a shuffle of which the object seemed the keeping of his shoes from falling off. When he talked or laughed one side of his long thin face was screwed up as if by some early injury or paralysis. The right portion of his lips could smile, while the left trembled into a rictus. This made his speech slower and more drawling than Tom was accustomed to hear; but his voice was naturally soft, with a quality in it like cream. It was the voice that Tom liked especially.

In reply to the suggestion about Art, Mr. Tollivant replied, as one who sees only a well-meant business proposal,

"We'd like nothing better, Brother Quidmore; but the fact is Art has about as much as he can do for the rest of his vacation." He waved his hand toward Tom. "What do you say to this boy?"

At the glorious suggestion Tom's heart began to fail for fear. He was not a fine boy like Arthur Tollivant. The possibility of earning three dollars a week, to say nothing of his board, was too much like the opening up of an Aladdin's palace for the hope to be more than deceptive. It was part of his daily humiliation never to have had any money of his own. The paternity of the State paid for his food, shelter, and education; but it never supplied him with cash, or with any cash that he ever saw. To have three dollars a week jingling in his pocket would not only lift him out of his impotent dependence, but would make him a man. While Mr. Quidmore walked round him, inspecting him as if he were a dog or pig or other small animal for sale, he held himself with straightness, dignity, and strength. If he was for sale he would do his best to be worthy of his price.

Mr. Quidmore nodded toward Mr. Tollivant. "State ward, ain't he?"

Mr. Tollivant admitted that he was.

"Youngster whose moth—"

Mrs. Tollivant interrupted kindly. "You needn't be afraid of that. He's been with us for five years. I think I may say that all traces of the past have been outlived. We can really give him a good character."

Tom was grateful. Mr. Quidmore examined him again. At last he shuffled up to him, throwing his arm across his shoulder, and drawing him close to himself.

"What about it, young fellow? Want to come?"

Entirely won by this display of kindliness, the boy smiled up into the twisted face. "Yes, sir."

"Then that's settled. Put your duds together, and we'll go along. I guess," he added to Mr. Tollivant, "that you can stretch a point to let him come, and get your permit from the Guardians to-morrow."

Mr. Tollivant agreeing that after five years' care he could venture as much as this, they drove over to Bere in Mr. Quidmore's dilapidated motor car. Mrs. Quidmore met them at the door. Her husband called to her:

"Hello, there! Got a new hand to help you with the strawberries."

She answered, dejectedly. "If he's as good as some of the other new hands you've picked up lately—"

"Oh, rats! Give us a rest! If I brought the angel Gabriel to pick the berries you'd see something to find fault with."

That there was a rift within the lute of this couple's happiness was clear to Tom before he had climbed out of the machine.

"Where's he to sleep?" Mrs. Quidmore asked in her tone of discontent.

"I suppose he can sleep in the barn, can't he?"

"I wouldn't put a dog to sleep in that barn, nasty, smelly, rotten place."

"Well, put him to sleep where you like. He'll get three a week and his keep while he's here, and that's all I'm responsible for." Mrs. Quidmore turned and went into the house. Her husband winked at Tom as man to man. "Can you beat it? Always like that. God! I don't know how I stand it. Get in."

Tom got in, finding an interior as slack as Mrs. Quidmore herself. The Tollivant house, with four children in it, was often belittered, but with a little tidying it became spick and span. Here the housekeeping wore an air of hopelessness. Whoever did it did it without heart.

"God! I hate to come into this place," its master confided to Tom, as they stood in the hall, of which the rug lay askew, while a mirror hung crooked on the wall. "You and me could keep the shack looking dandier than this if she wasn't here at all. I wish to the Lord...."

But before the week was out the boy had won over Mrs. Quidmore, and begun to make her fond of him. Because he was eager to be useful, he helped her in the house, showing solicitude, too, on her personal account. A low-keyed, sad-eyed woman who did nothing to make herself attractive, she blamed her husband for perceiving the loss of her attractiveness.

"He's bound to me," she would complain, tearfully, to the boy, as he dried the dishes she had washed. "It's his duty to be fond of me. But he ain't. There's fifty women he likes better than he does me."

This note of married infelicity was new to Tom, especially as it reached him from both parties to the contract.

"God, how she gets my goat! Sometimes I think how much I'd enjoy seeing her stretched out with a bullet through her head. I tell you that the fellow who'd do that for me wouldn't be sorry in the end...."

To the boy these words were meaningless. The creamy drawl with which they were uttered robbed them of the vicious or ferocious, making them mere humorous explosions. He could laugh at them, and yet he laughed with a feeling of discomfort.

The discomfort was the greater because in kindness to him lay the one point as to which the couple were agreed. Making no attempt to reconcile elements so discordant, all he could do was to soften the conditions which each found distasteful. He kept the house tidier for the man; he did for the woman a few of the things her husband overlooked.

"It's him that ought to do that," she would point out, in dull rebellion. "He's doing it for some other woman I'll be bound. Who is that woman that he meets?"

Conjugal betrayal was also new to Tom, and not easily comprehensible. That a man with a wife should also be "going with a girl" was a possibility that had never come within his experience while living with the Tollivants. He had heard a good many things from Art, as also from some other boys, but this event seemed to have escaped even their wide observation. It would have escaped his own had not Mrs. Quidmore harped on it.

"I do believe he'd like to see me in my grave. I'm in their way, and they'd like to get me out of it. Oh, you needn't tell me! Couldn't you keep an eye on him, and tell me what she's like?"

For Mrs. Quidmore's sake he watched Mr. Quidmore, but as he didn't know what he was watching him for the results were not helpful. And he liked them both. He might have said that he loved them both, since loving came to him so easily. Mrs. Quidmore washed and mended his clothes, and whenever she went to Harfrey or some other town she added to his wardrobe. Mr. Quidmore was forever dropping into his ear some gentle, honeyed confidence of which Mrs. Quidmore was the butt. Neither of them ever scolded him, or overworked him. He was in the house almost as a son. And then one day he learned that he was to be there altogether as a son.

XII

He never knew how and when the question as to his adoption had been raised, or whether the husband or the wife had raised it first. Here, too, the steps were taken with that kind of mystification which shrouded so much of his destiny. He himself was not consulted till, apparently, all the principal parties but himself had decided on the matter. One of the Guardians, or a representative, asked him the formal question as to whether or not he should like it, and being answered with a Yes, had gone away. The next thing he knew he had legally become the son of Martin and Anna Quidmore, and was to be henceforth called by their name.

The outward changes were not many. He had won so much freedom in the house that when he became its son and heir there was, for the minute, little more to give him. His new mother grew more openly affectionate; his new father drove him round in the dilapidated car and showed him to the neighbors as his boy. As far as Tom could judge, there was general approval. Martin Quidmore had taken a poor outcast lad and given him a home and a status in the world. All good people must rejoice in this sort of generosity. The new father rejoiced in it himself, smiling with a twisted smile that was like a leer, the only thing about him which the new son was afraid of.

It was August now. The picking of the strawberries having long been over, the boy had been kept on for other jobs. He still worked at them. He dug potatoes; he picked peas and beans; he pulled carrots, parsnips, and beets; he culled cucumbers. The hired hands did the heaviest work, but he shared in it to the limit of his strength. Sometimes he went off early in the morning on the great lorry, loaded with garden-truck, which his father drove to the big markets.

On these journeys the new father grew most confidential and lovable. His mellifluous voice, which was sad and at the same time not quite serious, was lovable in itself.

"God, how I'd like to give you a better home than you've got! But it's no use, not as long as she's there. She'll never be anything different. She'd not make things brighter or cleaner or jollier, not even if she was to try."

"Well, she is trying," the boy declared, in her defense; but the only answer was a melancholy laugh.

And yet now that he had the duties, of a son, he set to work to improve the family relationships. He petted the mother, he cajoled the father. He found small ruses of affection in which, as it seemed to him, he gained both the one and the other, insensibly to either. His proof of this came one morning as once more they were driving to one of the big markets.

"Say, boy, I'm beginning to be worried about her. I don't think she can be well. She's never been sick much; but gosh! now I'll be hanged if I don't think I'll go and see a doctor and ask him to give her some medicine."

As this thoughtfulness, in spite of all indications to the contrary, implied a fundamental tenderness, the boy was glad of it. He was the more glad of it when, on a morning some days later, and in the same situation, the father drawled, in his casual way:

"Say, I've seen that doctor, and he's given me something he wants her to take. Thinks it will put her all right in no time."

"And did you give it to her?" he asked, eagerly.

The honeyed voice grew sweeter. "Well, no; that's the trouble. You can't get her to take doctor's stuff, if she knows she's taking it. Got to get her on the sly. Once when she needed a tonic I used to watch round and put it in her tea. Bucked her up fine."

"And is that what you're going to do now?"

"Well, I would, only she'd be afraid of me. Watches me like a cat, don't you see she does? What I was thinking of was this. You know she makes a cup of tea for herself every day in the middle of the afternoon while we're out at work. Well, now, if you could make an excuse to slip into the kitchen, and put one of these powders in her teapot—" he tapped the packet in his waistcoat pocket—"she'd never suspect nothing. She'd take it—and be cured."

The boy was silent.

"You don't want to do it, hey?"

"Oh, I don't say that. I was—I was—just wondering."

"Wondering what?"

"Whether it's fair play to anyone to give them medicine when they don't know they're taking it."

"But if it's to do them good?"

"But ought we to do good to people against their wills?"

"Why, sure! What you thinking of? Still if you don't want to...."

The tone hurt him. "Oh, but I will."

"Say I will, father. Why don't you call me that? Don't I call you son?"

He braced himself to an effort. "All right, father; I will."

"Good! Then here's the powder." He drew one from the packet. "Don't let none of it fall. You'll steal into the kitchen this afternoon—she generally lays down after she's washed the dinner things—and just empty the paper into the little brown teapot she always makes her tea in. Then burn the paper in the stove—there's sure to be a fire on—so that she won't find nothing lying around to make her suspicious. You understand, don't you?"

He said he understood, though in his heart of hearts he wished that he hadn't been charged with the duty.

XIII

If you had asked the boy who was now legally Tom Quidmore why he was reluctant to give his mother a powder that would do her good he would have been unable to explain his hesitation. Reason, in the main, was in favor of his doing it. In the first place, he had promised, and he had always responded to those exhortations of his teachers which laid stress on keeping his word. Not to keep his word had come to seem an offense of the nature of personal defilement.

Then the whole matter had been thought out and decreed by an authority higher than himself. The child mind, like the childish mind at all times, is under the weight of authority. The source of the authority is a matter of little moment so long as it speaks decidedly enough. It is always a means by which to get rid of the bother of using private judgment, which as often as not is a bore to the person with the right to it.

In the case of a boy of twelve, private judgment is hampered by a knowledge of his insufficiency. The man who provides food, clothing, shelter, is invested with the right to speak. The child mind is logical, orderly, respectful, and prenatally disposed to discipline. Except on severe provocation it does not rebel. Tom Quidmore felt no impulse to rebellion, even though his sense of right and wrong was, for the moment, mystified.

He lacked data. Such data as came to his hearing, and less often to his sight, lay morally outside his range. Like those scientifically minded men who during the childhood of our race registered the phenomena of electricity without going further, he had no power of making deductions from what eyes and ears could record. He knew that there was in life such an element as sexual love; but that was all he knew. It entered into the relations of married people, and in some puzzling way contributed to the birth of children; but of its wanderings and aberrations he had never heard. That man and wife should reach a breaking point was no part of his conception of the things that happened. There was nothing of the kind between the Tollivants, nor among the parents of the lads with whom he had grown up at Harfrey. That which at Harfrey had been clear unrelenting daylight was at Bere a gloaming haunted by strange shapes which perplexed and rather frightened him.

Not until he was fourteen or fifteen years of age, and the Quidmore episode behind him, like an island passed at sea, did the significance of these queer doings and sayings really occur to him. All that for the present his mind and experience were equal to was listening, observing, and wondering. He knew already what it was to have things which he hadn't understood at the time of their happening become clear as he grew older.

An illustration of this came from the small events of that very afternoon. On going back from his midday dinner to work in the carrot patch he fixed on half past two as the hour at which he would make the attempt to force on his mother the prescribed medicine. That time having arrived, he rose, brushed the earth from his knees, dusted his hands against each other, and started slowly for the house. A faraway memory which had been in the back of his mind ever since his father had made the odd request now began to assert itself, like the throb of an old pain.

He was a little boy again. In the dim hall of the Swindon Street Home he was listening to the friendly policeman talking to Miss Honiton. He recaptured his own emotions, the dumb distress of the young creature lost in the dark, and ignorant of everything but its helplessness. His mother had taken something, or had not taken something, he wasn't sure which. The beaming young lady handed him his present from the Christmas Tree, and told him that cyanide of potassium—the words were still branded on his brain—was a deadly poison. Then he stood once more, as in memory he had stood so many times, in the half-darkened room where words were mumbled over the long black box which they spoke of as "the body."

Now that it was all in far perspective he knew what it had meant. That is, he knew the type of woman his mother had been; he knew the kind of soil he had sprung from. The events of five years back to a boy of twelve are a very long distance away. So his mother seemed to Tom. So did the sneaking through shops, and the flights from tenement to tenement. So did the awful Christmas Eve when he had lost her. He could think of her tenderly now because he understood that her mind had been unhinged. What hurt him with a pain which never fell into perspective was that in trying to create in his boyish way some faint tradition of self-respect, he worked back always to this origin in shame.

While seeing no connection between such far-off things and the task put upon him by his father, he found them jostling each other in his mind. You took something—and there was disaster. It was as far as his thought carried him. After that came the fact that, his respect for authority being strong, he dared not disobey.

He could only dawdle. A delay of five minutes would be five minutes to the good. Besides, dawdling on a hot, windless summer afternoon, on which the butterflies, bees, and humming-birds were the only nonhuman living things not taking a siesta, eased the muscles cramped with long crouching in the carrot beds. There being two ways of getting to the house, he took the longer one.

The longer one led him round the duck pond, whence the heat had driven ashore all the ducks and geese with the exception of one gander. For no particular reason the gander's name was Ernest. Between Ernest and Gimlets, the wire-haired terrier pup, one of those battles such as might take place between Bolivia and Switzerland was in full swing of rage. Gimlets fought from the bank; Ernest from the pond. When Ernest paddled forward, with neck outstretched and nostrils hissing, Gimlets scampered to the top of the shelving shore, where he could stand and bark defiantly. When Ernest swung himself round and made for the open sea, Gimlets galloped bravely down to the water's edge, yelping out challenges. This bloody fray gave the boy a further excuse for lingering. Three or four times had Ernest, stung by the taunts to which he had tried to seem indifferent, wheeled round on his enemy. Three or four times had Gimlets scrambled up the bank and down again. But he, too, recognized authority, and a call that he couldn't disobey. A long whistle, and the battle was at an end! Gimlets trotted off.

The whistle came from the grove of pines climbing the little bluff on the side of the duck pond remote from the house. It struck the boy as odd that his father should be there at a time when he was supposed to be cutting New Zealand spinach for the morrow's market. Not to be caught idling, the boy slipped down the bank to creep undetected below the pinewood bluff. Neither seeing nor being seen, he nevertheless heard voices, catching but a single word. The word was Bertha, and it was spoken by his father. The only Bertha in the place was a certain beautiful young widow living in Bere. That his father should be talking to her in the pinewood was another of those details difficult to explain.

More difficult to explain he found a little scene he caught on looking backward. Having now passed the bluff, he was about to round the corner of the pond where the path led through a plantation of blue spruces which hid the house. His glancing back was an accident, but it made him witness of an incident pastoral in its charm.

Bertha, being indeed the beautiful young widow, the boy was astonished to see his father steal a kiss from her. Bertha responded with such a slap as nymphs give to shepherds, running playfully away. His father shambled after her, as shepherds after nymphs, catching her in his arms.

Tom plunged into the blue spruce plantation where he could be out of sight. Hot as he was already, he grew hotter still. What he had seen was so silly, so stupid, so undignified! He wished he hadn't seen it. Having seen it, he wished he could forget it. He couldn't forget it because, unpleasant as he found it, he was somehow aware that it had bearings beyond unpleasantness. What they were he had nothing to tell him. He could only run through the plantation as if he would leave the thing as quickly as possible behind him; and all at once the house came into sight.

With the house in sight he remembered again what he had come to do. He stopped running. His steps again began to lag. Feeling for the powder in his waistcoat pocket, he reminded himself that it would do his mother good. The house lay sleeping and silent in the heat. He crept up to the back door.

And there at the open window stood his mother rolling dough on a table. She rolled languidly, as she did everything. Her head drooped a little to one side; her expression was full of that tremulous protest against life which might with a word break into a rain of tears.

Relieved and delighted, he stole round the house, to enter by another way. She was now lifting a cover of the stove, so that she didn't hear his approach. Before she knew that anyone was there he had slipped his arm around her, and smacked a big kiss on her cheek. She turned slowly, the lifter in her hand. A new life seemed to dawn in her, brightening her eyes and flushing her sallowness.

"You bad little boy! What did you come home for?"

He replied as was true, that he had come for a drink of water. He had meant to take a drink of water after putting her powder in the teapot. "I thought," he ended, "you'd be lying down asleep."

"I was lying down, but something made me get up."

He was curious. "Something—like what?"

"Well, I just couldn't sleep. And then I remembered that it was a long time since I'd made him any of them silver cookies he used to be so fond of."

He liked the name. "Is that what you're baking?"

"Yes; and you'll ..." she went back to the table, picking up the cutter—"you'll have some for supper if you'll—if you'll call me ma."

"But I do."

Her smile had the slow timidity that might have been born of disuse. "Yes, when I ask you. But I want you to do it all the time, and natural."

"All right then; I will—ma."

While he stood drinking a first, and then a second, cup of water, she began on the memories dear to her, but which few now would listen to. She had been born in Wilmington, Delaware, where Martin also had been born. His father worked in a powder factory in that city. It was owing to an explosion when he was a lad that Martin's frame had been partially paralyzed.

"He wasn't blowed up or anything; he just got a shock. He was awful delicate, and used to have fits till he grew out of them. I think the crook in his face makes him look aristocratic, don't you?"

The boy having said that he didn't know but what it did, she continued plaintively, cutting out her cookies with a heart-shaped cutter.

"I was awful pretty in those days, and that refined I wouldn't hardly do a thing for my mother in the house, or carry the tiniest little parcel across the street. I was just born ladylike. And when Martin and I were married he let me have a girl for the first two years to do everything. All he ever expected of me was to get up and dress, and look stylish; and now...."

As she paused in her cutting to press back a sob, the boy took the opportunity to speak of getting back to work.

"I think I must beat it, ma. I've got all those carrots—"

"Oh, wait a little while. He can spare you for a few minutes, can't he? Anyhow, nothing you can do'll save him from going bankrupt. This place don't pay. He'll never make it pay. His work was to run a hat store. That's what he did when he married me, and he made swell money at it, too."

The family history interested the boy, as all tales did which accounted for the personal. He knew now how Martin Quidmore's health had broken down, and the doctor had ordered out-of-door life as a remedy. Out-of-door life would have been impossible if an uncle hadn't died and left him fifteen thousand dollars.

"Enough to live on quite genteel for life," his wife complained, "but nothing would do but that he should think himself a market-gardener, him that couldn't tell a turnip from a spade. Blew in the whole thing on this place, away from everywheres, and making me a drudge that hardly knew so much as to wash a dish. Even that I could have stood if he'd only gone on loving me as his marriage vows made it his duty to do, but—"

"I'll love you, ma," the boy declared, tenderly. "You don't have to cry because there's no one to love you, not while I'm around."

The new life in her eyes was as much of incredulity as of joy. "Don't say that, dearie, if you don't mean it. You don't have to love me just because I'm trying to be a mother to you, and look after your clothes."

"But, ma, I want to. I do."

They gazed at each other, she with the cutter in her hand, he with the cup. What he saw was not a feeble, slatternly woman, but some one who wanted him. He had not been wanted by anyone since the night when his mudda—he still used the word in his deep silences—had gone away with the wardress who looked like a Fate. In the five intervening years he had suffered less from unkindness than from being shut out of hearts. Here was a heart that had need of him, so that he had need of it. The type of heart didn't matter. If it made any difference it was only that where there was weakness the appeal to him was the greater. With this poor thing he would have something on which to spend his treasure.

"You'll see, ma! I'll bring in the water for you, and split the kindlings, and get up in the morning and light the fire, and milk the cow, and everything."

Straight and sturdy, he looked at her with the level gaze of eyes that seemed the calmer and more competent because they were hidden so far beneath his bushy, horizontal eyebrows. The uniform tan from working in the sun heightened his air of manliness. Even the earth on his clothes, and a smudge of it across his forehead where a dirty hand had been put up to push back his crisp ashen hair, hinted at his capacity to share in the world's work. To the helpless woman whose prop had failed her, the coming of this young strength to her aid was little short of a miracle.

In the struggle between tears and laughter she was almost hysterical. "Oh, you darling boy!" she was beginning, advancing to clasp him in her arms. But with old, old memories in his heart he dreaded the paroxysm of affection.

"All right, ma!" he laughed, dodging her and slipping out. "I've got to beat it, or fath—" he stumbled on the word because he found it difficult to use—"or father will wonder where I am." But once in the yard, he called back consolingly, though keeping to the practical, "Don't you bother about Geraldine. I'll go round by the pasture and drive her home as I come back from work. I'll milk her, too."

"God bless you, dearie!"

Standing in the doorway, shading her eyes with her hand, her limp figure seemed braced to a new power, as she watched him till he disappeared within the plantation of blue spruces.

XIV

When a whistle blew at five o'clock the hired men on the Quidmore place stopped working. As a son of the house, Tom Quidmore paid to the signal only enough attention to pile his carrots into a wheelbarrow and convey them to the spot where they would help to furnish the market lorry in the morning. In fulfillment of his promise to his adopted mother, he then went in search of Geraldine.

Of all the tasks that he liked at Bere he liked most going to the pasture. It was not his regular work. As regular work it belonged to old Diggory; but old Diggory was as willing to be relieved of it as Mrs. Quidmore of the milking. Brushing himself down, and washing his hands at the tap in the garage after a fashion that didn't clean them, he marched off, whistling. He whistled because his heart was light. His heart was light because his mother having been in the kitchen, he had escaped the necessity for giving her the medicine as to which he felt his odd reluctance.

Leaving the garage behind him, he threaded a tiny path running through the beet-field. The turnip-field came next, after which he entered a strip of fine old timber, coming out from that on the main road to Bere. Along this road, for some five hundred yards, he tramped merrily, kicking up the dust. He liked this road. Not only was it open, free, and straight, but along its old stone walls raspberries and blackberries grew ripe in a tangle of wild spirea, meadow-rue, jewel weed, and Queen Anne's lace. He loved this luxuriance, this summer sense of abundance. To the boy who had never known anything but poverty, Nature at least, in this lush Connecticut countryside, seemed generous.

The pasture was on the edge of a scrubby woodland in which the twenty acres of the Quidmore property trailed away into the unkempt. Eighty or a hundred years earlier, it had been the center of a farm now cut up into small holdings, chiefly among market gardeners. In the traces of the old farmhouse, the old garden, the old orchard, the boy found his imagination touched by the pathos of a vanished human past.

The land sloped from the hillside, till in the bottom of the hollow it became a little brambly wood such as in England would be called a spinney. Through the spinney trickled a stream which somewhere fell into Horseneck Brook, which somewhere fell into one of those shallow inlets that the Sound thrusts in on the coastline. Halfway between the road and the streamlet, was the old home-place, deserted so long ago that the cellar was choked with blackberry vines, and the brick of the foundation bulging out of plumb. A clump of lilac which had once snuggled lovingly against a south wall was now a big solitary bush. What used to be a bed of pansies had reverted to a scattering of cheery little heartsease faces, brightening the grass. The low-growing, pale-rose mallow of old gardens still kept up its vigor of bloom, throwing out a musky scent. There was something wistful in the spot, especially now that the sun was westering, and the birds skimmed low, making for their nests.

In going for Geraldine Tom always stole a few minutes to linger among these memories of old joys and sorrows, old labors and rewards, of which nothing now remained but these few flowers, a few wind-beaten apple trees, and this dint in the ground which served best as a shelter for chipmunks. It was the part of the property farthest from the house. It was far, too, from any other habitation, securing him the privilege of solitude. The privilege was new to him. At Harfrey he had never known it. About the gardens, even at Bere, there were always the owner, the hired men, the customers, the neighbors who came and went. But in Geraldine's pasture he found only herself, the crows, the robins, the thrushes singing in the spinney, and the small wild life darting from one covert to another, or along the crumbling stone wall hung with its loopings of wild grape.

He was not lonely on these excursions. Companionship had never in the Harfrey schools been such a pleasure that he missed anything in having to do without it. Rather, he enjoyed the freedom to be himself, to wear no mask, to have no part to play. It was only when alone like this that he understood how much of his thought and effort was spent in dancing to other people's tunes. In the Tollivant home he could never, like the other children, speak or act without a second thought. As a State ward it was his duty to commend himself. To commend himself he was obliged to think twice even before venturing on trifles. He had formed a habit of thinking twice, of rarely being spontaneous. By himself in this homey pasture he felt the relief of one who has been balancing on a tight rope at walking on the ground.

When he had climbed the bars Geraldine, who was down the hill and near the spinney, had lifted her head and swung her tail in recognition. Not being impatient, she went on with her browsing, leaving him a few minutes' liberty. Among the heartsease and the mallows he flung himself down, partly because he was tired and partly that he might think. With so much to think about thought came without sequence. It centered soon on what he was to be.

Of one thing he was certain; he didn't want to be a market gardener. Not but that he enjoyed the open-air life and the novelty of closeness to the soil. Like the whole Quidmore connection, it was good enough for the time. All the same, it was only for the time, and one day he would break away from it. How, he didn't ask. He merely knew by his intuitions that it would be so.

He was going to be something big. That, too, was intuitive conviction. What he meant by big he was unable to define, beyond the fact that knowledge and money would enter into it. He was interested in money, not so much for what it gave you as for what it was. It was a queer thing when you came to think of it. A dollar bill in itself had no more value than any other scrap of paper; and yet it would buy a dollar's worth of anything. He turned that over in his mind till he worked out the reason why. He worked out the principle of payment by check, which at first was as blank a mystery as marital relations. When newspapers came his way he studied the reports of the stock exchange, much as a savage who cannot read scans the unmeaning hieroglyphs which to wiser people are words. He did make out that railways and other great utilities must be owned by a lot of people who combined to put their money into them; but daily fluctuations in value he couldn't understand. When he asked his adopted father he was told that he couldn't understand it, though he knew he could.

Long accustomed to this answer as to the bewilderments of life, he rarely now asked anything. If he was puzzled he waited for more data. Even for little boys things cleared themselves up if you kept them in your mind, and applied the explanation when it came your way. The point, he concluded, was not to be in a hurry. There were the spiders. He was fond of watching them. They would sit for hours as still as metal things, their little eyes fixed like jewels in a ring. Then when they saw what they wanted one swift dart was enough for them. So it must be with little boys. You got one thing to-day, and another thing to-morrow; but you got everything in time if you waited and kept alert.

By waiting and keeping alert he would find out what he was to be. He had reached his point when he saw Geraldine pacing up the hill toward the pasture bars. She was giving him the hint that certain acknowledged rites were no longer to be put off.

He had lowered the bars, over which she was stepping delicately, when he saw his father come tearing down the road, going toward Bere, with all the speed his shuffling gait could put on. Used by this time to erratic actions on Quidmore's part, he was hardly surprised; he was only curious. He was more curious still when, on drawing nearer, the man seemed in a panic. "Looks as if he was running away from something," was the lad's first thought, though he couldn't imagine from what.

"Is anything the matter?"

From panic the indications changed to those of surprise, though the voice was as velvety as ever.

"Oh, so it's you! I thought it was Diggory. What did you—what did you—do with that powder?"

The boy began putting up the bars while Geraldine plodded homeward.

"I couldn't give it to her. She was in the kitchen baking." He thought it wise to add: "She was making silver cookies for you. You'll have them for supper."

There followed more odd phenomena, of which the boy, waiting and keeping alert, only got the explanation later. Quidmore threw himself face downward on the wayside grass. With his forehead resting on his arm, he lay as still as one of those drunken men Tom had occasionally seen like logs beside some country road. Geraldine turned her head to ask why she was not followed, but the boy stood waiting for a further sign. He wondered whether all grown-up men had minutes like this, or whether it was part of the epilepsy he had heard about.

But when Quidmore got up he was calm, the traces of panic having disappeared. To a more experienced person the symptoms would have been of relief; but to the lad of twelve they said nothing.

"I'll go back with you," was Quidmore's only comment, as together they set out to follow Geraldine.

Having reached the barn where the milking was to be done, Quidmore was proceeding to the house. In the hope of a negative, Tom asked if he should try again to-morrow.

Quidmore half turned. "I'll leave that to you."

"I'll do whatever you say," Tom pleaded, desperate at this responsibility.

Quidmore went on his way, calling back, in his creamy drawl, over his shoulder: "I'll leave it entirely to you."

XV

Left to him, Tom saw nothing in the duty but to do it. He was confirmed in this resolution by Quidmore's gentleness throughout the evening. It was a new thing in Tom's experience of the house. As always with those in the habit of inflicting pain, merely to stop inflicting it seemed kindness. Supper passed without a single incident that made Mrs. Quidmore wince. On her part she played up with an almost brilliant vivacity in making none of her impotent complaints. Anything he could do to further this accord the boy felt he ought to do.

He hung back only from the deed. That made him shudder. He was clear on the point that it made him shudder because of its association in his mind with the thing which had happened years before; and that, he knew, was foolish. If it would please his father he should make the attempt. He should make it perhaps the more heartily since he was free not to make it if he chose.

It was the freedom that troubled him. So long as he did only what he was told he had nothing on his conscience. Now he must be sure that he was right; and he was not sure. Once more he didn't question the fact that the medicine would do his mother good. The right and wrong in his judgment centered round doing her good against her own will. With no finespun theories concerning the rights of the individual, he was pretty certain as to what they were.

A divine beauty came over the evening when, after he had gone to bed about half-past eight, his mother, in the new blossoming of her affection, came to tuck him in, and kiss him good night. No such thing had happened to him since Mrs. Crewdson had last done it. Mrs. Tollivant went through this endearing rite with all her own children; but him she left out. Many a time, when from his bed beneath the eaves he heard her making her rounds at night, he had pressed his face into the pillow to control the trembling of his lips. True, he had come to regard the attention as too babyish for a man of twelve; but now that it was shown him he was touched by it.

It brought to his memory something Mrs. Crewdson had said, and which he had never forgotten. "God's wherever there's love, it seems to me, dear. I bring a little bit of God to you, and you bring a little bit of God to me, and so we have Him right here." Mrs. Quidmore, too, brought a little bit of God to him, and he brought a little bit of God to Mrs. Quidmore. They showed God to each other, as if without each other they were not quite able to see Him. The fact suggested the thought that in the matter of the secret administration of the medicine he might pray.

One thing he had learned with some thoroughness while in the Tollivant family, and that was religion. Both in Sunday school and in domestic instruction he had studied it conscientiously, and conscientiously accepted it. If he sometimes admitted to Bertie Tollivant, the cripple, that he "didn't see much sense in it," the confession applied to his personal inabilities. Bertie was the cynic and unbeliever in the Tollivant household. "There's about as much sense in it," he would declare secretly to Tom, "as there is in those old yarns about Pilgrim's Progress and Jack and the Beanstalk. Only don't say that to ma or pop, because the poor dears wouldn't get you." On Tom this skepticism only made the impression that he and Bertie didn't understand religion any more than they understood sex, which was also a theme of discussion. They would grow to it in time, by keeping ears and eyes open.

Now that he was away from the Tollivants, in a world where religion was never spoken of, he dismissed it from his mind. That is, he dismissed its intricacies, its complicated doctrines, its galloping through prayers you were too sleepy to think of at night, and too hurried in the morning. Here he was admittedly influenced by Bertie. "If God loves you, and knows what you want, what's the good of all this Now I lay me? It'd be a funny kind of God that wouldn't look after you anyhow." Tom had given up saying Now I lay me, partly because that, too, seemed babyish, but mainly on account of Bertie's reasoning. "It's more of a compliment to God," was his way of explaining it to himself, "to know that He'll do right of His own accord, than to suppose He'll do it just because I pester Him." So every night when he got into bed he took a minute to say to himself that God was taking care of him, making this confidence serve in place of more explicit petition. When he had anything special to pray about, he said, he would begin again.

And now something special had arisen. He got out of bed. He didn't kneel down because, being anxious not to mislead God by giving Him wrong information, he had first to consider what he ought to say. Stealing softly across the floor, lest the creaking of the boards should betray the fact that he was up, he went to the open window, and looked out.

It was one of those mystic nights which, to a soul inclined to the mystical, seem to hold a spiritual secret. The air, scented by millions of growing things, though chiefly with the acrid perfume of the blue spruces on which he looked down, had a pungent, heavenly odor such as he never caught in the daytime. There was a tang of salt in it, too, as from the direction of the Sound came the faintest rustle of a breeze. The rustle was so faint as not to break a stillness, which was more of the nature of a holy suspense because of the myriads of stars.

Seeking a formula in which to couch his prayer, he found a phrase of Mr. Tollivant's often used in domestic intercession. "And, O Heavenly Father, we beseech thee to act wisely in the matter of our needs." What constituted wisdom in the matter of their needs would then be pointed out by Mr. Tollivant according to the day's or the season's requirements. Accepting this language as that of high inspiration, and forgetting to kneel down, the boy began as he stood, looking out on the sanctified darkness:

"And, O Heavenly Father, I beseech thee to act wisely in the matter of my needs." Hung up there for lack of archaic grandiloquence, he found himself ending lamely: "And don't let me give it to her if I oughtn't to, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen."

With his effort he was disappointed. Not only had the choice of words not taken from Mr. Tollivant been ludicrously insufficient, but he had forgotten to kneel down. He had probably vitiated the whole prayer. He thought of revision, of constructing a sentence that would balance Mr. Tollivant's, and beginning again with the proper ceremonial. But Bertie's way of reasoning came to him again. "I guess He knows what I mean anyhow." He recoiled at that, however, shocked at his own irreverence. The thought was a blasphemous liberty taken with the watchful and easily offended deity of whom Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant had begged him always to be afraid. He was wondering if by approaching this God at all he hadn't made his plight worse, when the rising of the wind diverted his attention.

It rose suddenly, in a great soft sob, but not of pain. Rather, it was of exultation, of cosmic joyousness. Coming from the farthest reaches of the world, from the Atlantic, from Africa, from remote islands and mountain tops, it blew in at the boy's window with a strong, and yet gentle, cosmic force.

"And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind."

Tom Quidmore had but one source of quotation, but he had that at his tongue's end. The learning by heart of long passages from the Bible had been part of his education at the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant. Rightly or wrongly, he quoted the Scriptures, and rightly oftener than not. He quoted them now because, all at once, his room seemed full of the creative breath. He didn't say so, of course; but, confusedly, he felt it. All round the world there was wind. It was the single element in Nature which you couldn't see, but of which you received the living invigoration. It cooled, it cleansed, it strengthened. Wherever it passed there was an answer. The sea rose; the snows drifted; the trees bent; men and women strove to use and conquer it. A rushing mighty wind! A sound from heaven! That it might be an answer to his prayer he couldn't stop to consider because he was listening to the way it rose and fell, and sighed and soughed and swelled triumphantly through the plantation of blue spruces.

By morning it was a gale. The tall things on the property, the bush peas, the scarlet runners, the sweet corn, were all being knocked about. In spots they lay on the earth; in other spots they staggered from the perpendicular. All hands, in the words of old Diggory, had their work cut out for them. Tom's job was to rescue as many as possible of the ears of sweet corn, in any case ready for picking, before they were damaged.

But at half-past two he dragged himself out of the corn patch to fulfill the dreaded duty. Nothing had answered his prayer. He had not so much as seen his father throughout the day, as the latter had gone to the markets and had not returned. The gale was still raging, and he might be waiting for it to go down.

Since the scene by the roadside on the previous afternoon he had taken a measure of his father not very far from accurate. He, Quidmore, wanted something of which he was afraid. He was too much afraid of it to press for it urgently; and yet he wanted it so fiercely that he couldn't give it up. What it was the boy could not discover, except that it had something to do with them all. When he said with them all he included the elusive Bertha; though why he included her he once more didn't know.

In God he was disappointed; that he did not deny. In spite of the shortcomings of his prayer, he had clung to the hope that they might be overlooked. He argued a little from what he himself would have done had anyone come with a request inadequately phrased. He wouldn't think of the manners or the words in his eagerness to do what lay within his power. With God apparently it was not so.

There was, of course, the other effect of his prayer. He had only asked to be stopped if the thing was not to be done. If he was not stopped the inference was obvious. He was to go ahead. It was in order to go ahead that he left the corn patch.

The kitchen when he got to it was empty. Both the windows, that in the south wall and that in the west, were open to let the wind sweep out the smell of cooking. Creeping halfway up the stairs, he saw that his mother had closed her bedroom door, a sign that she was really lying down. There was no help now for what he had to do.

He stole back to the kitchen again. On the dresser he saw the brown teapot in which she would presently make her tea. He would only have to take it down, and spill the powder into it. The powder was in his waistcoat pocket. He drew it out. It was small and flat, in a neatly folded paper. Opening the paper, he saw something innocent and white, not unlike the sugar you spread on strawberries. Laying it in readiness on the table by the west window, at which his mother baked, he turned to take down the teapot.

The gale grew fiercer. It was almost a tornado. With the teapot in his two hands he paused to look out of the south window at the swaying of the blue spruces. They moaned, they sobbed, they rocked wildly. You might have fancied them living creatures seized by a madness of despair. The fury of the wind, even in the kitchen, blew down a dipper hanging on the wall.

There was now no time to lose. The noise of the falling dipper might have disturbed his mother, so that at any minute she might come downstairs. With the teapot again in his hands he turned to the table where he had left the thing which was to do her good.

It was not there.

Dismayed, startled, he looked for it on the floor; but it was not there. It was not anywhere in the kitchen. He searched and searched.

Going outside, he found the paper caught in a rosebush under the window, but the something innocent and white had been blown to the four corners of the world.

The rushing mighty wind had done its work; and yet it was not till two or three years later, when the Quidmores had passed from his life, that he wondered if after all his prayer had not been answered.

XVI

Of helping his mother against her will he never heard any more. When his father returned that evening he had the same look of panic as on the previous day, followed by the same expression of relief at seeing the domestic life going on as usual. But he asked no questions, nor did he ever bring the subject up again. When a day or two later Tom explained to him that the powder had been blown away he merely nodded, letting the matter rest.

Autumn came on and Tom went to school at Bere. He liked the school. No longer a State ward, but the son of a man supposed to be of substance, he passed the tests inflicted by the savage snobbery of children. His quickness at sports helped him to a popularity justified by his good nature. With the teachers he was often forced to seem less intelligent than he was, so as to escape the odious soubriquet of "teacher's pet."

On the whole, the winter was the happiest he had so far known. It could have been altogether happy had it not been for the tragic situation of the Quidmores. After the brief improvement that had followed on his coming they had reacted to a mutual animosity even more intense. Each made him a confidant.

"God! it's all I can do to keep my hands off her," the soft drawl confessed. "If she was just to die of a sickness, and me have nothing to do with it, I don't believe I'd be satis—" He held the sentence there as a matter of precaution. "What do you think of a woman who all the years you've known her has never done anything but whine, whine, whine, because you ain't givin' her what you promised?"

"And are you?" Tom asked, innocently.

"I give her what I can. She don't tempt me to do anything extra. Say, now, would she tempt you?"

Tom did his best to take the grown-up, man-to-man tone in which he was addressed. "I think she's awful tempting, if you take her the right way."

To take her the right way, to take him also the right way, was the boy's chief concern throughout the winter. To get them to take each other the right way was beyond him.

"So long as he goes outside his home," Mrs. Quidmore declared, with an euphemism of which the boy did not get the significance, "I'll make him suffer for it."

"But, ma, he can't stay home all the time."

"Oh, don't tell me that you don't know what I mean! If you wasn't on his side you'd have found out for me long ago who the woman is. Just tell me that—"

"And what would you do?"

"I'd kill her, I think, if I got the chance."

"Oh, but ma!"

She brandished the knife with which she was cutting cold ham for the supper. "I would! I would!"

"But you wouldn't if I asked you not to, would you, ma?"

The knife fell with a despairing movement of the hand. "Oh, I don't suppose I should do it at all. But he ought to love me."

"Can he make himself love you, ma?"

The ingenuous question went so close to the point that she could only dodge it. "Why shouldn't he? I'm his wife, ain't I?"

The challenge brought out another of the mysteries which surrounded marriage, as a penumbra fringes the moon on a cloudy night. When his father next reverted to the theme, while driving back from market, the penumbra became denser.

"Say, boy, don't you go to thinking that the first time you fall in love with a pretty face it's goin' to be for life. That's where the devil sets his snare for men. Eight or ten years from now you'll see some girl, and then the devil'll be after you. He'll try to make you think that if you don't marry that girl your one and only chance'll come and go. And when he does, my boy, just think o' me."

"Think of you—what about?"

The sweetness of the tone took from the answer anything like bitterness. "Think how I got pinched. Gosh, when I look back and remember that I was as crazy to get her as a pup to catch a squir'l I can't believe it was me. But don't forget what I'm tellin' you. No fellow ought to think of bein' married till he's over thirty. He can't be expected to know what he'll love permanent till then."

It was the perpetual enigma. "But you always love your wife when you're married to her, don't you?"

The answer was in loud satirical laughter, with the observation that Tom was the limit for innocence.

Quite as disturbing as questions of love and marriage were those relating to the fact that the man who had done very well as a hatter was a failure as a market gardener.

"A hell of a business, this is! Rothschild and Rockefeller together couldn't make it pay. Gosh, how I hate it! Hate everything about it, and home worst of all. Know a little woman that if she'd light out with me...."

In different keys and conjunctions these confidences were made to the boy all through the winter. If they did not distress him more it was because they were over his head. The disputes of the gods affect mortals only indirectly. When Jupiter and Juno disagree men feel that they can leave it to Olympus to manage its own affairs. So to a boy of twelve the cares of his elders pass in spheres to which he has little or no access. In spite of his knowledge that their situation was desperate, the couple who had adopted him were mighty beings to Tom Quidmore, with resources to meet all needs. To be so went with being grown up and, in a general way, with being independent.

Their unbosomings worried him; they did not do more. When they were over he could dismiss them from his mind. His own concerns, his lessons, his games, his friends and enemies in school, and the vague objective of becoming "something big," were his matters of importance. Martin and Anna Quidmore cared for him so much, though each with a dash of selfishness, that his inner detachment from them both would have caused them pain.

And yet it was because of this detachment that he was able, in some sense, to get through the winter happily. Whatever might have hurt him most passed on the kind of Mount Olympus where grown-up people had their incredible interests. Told, as he always was, that he couldn't understand them, he was willing to drop them at that till they were forced on him again. As spring was passing into summer they were forced on him less persistently; and then one day, quite unexpectedly, he struck the beginning of the end.

It was a Saturday. As there was no school that day he had driven in on the truck with his father, to market a load of lettuce and early spinach. On returning through Bere in the latter part of the forenoon, Quidmore stopped at the druggist's.

"Jump down and have an ice cream soda. I'll leave the lorry here, and come back to you. Errand to do in the village."

The words had been repeated so often that for these excursions they had come to be a formula. By this time Tom knew the errand to be at Bertha's house, which was indirectly opposite. Seated at a table in the window, absorbing his cool, flavored drink through a pair of straws, he could see his father run up the steps and enter, running down again when he came out. Further than the fact that there was something regrettable in the visit, something to be concealed when he went home, the boy's mind did not work.

The tragedy of that morning was that, as he was enjoying himself thus, the runabout, driven by one of the hired men, glided up to the door, and Mrs. Quidmore, dressed for shopping, and very alert, sprang out. As she rarely came into Bere, and almost never in the morning when she had her work to do, Tom's surprise was tinged at once with fear. Recognizing the lorry, Mrs. Quidmore rushed into the drug store. Except for the young man, wearing a white coat, who tended it, the long narrow slit was empty. As he peeped above his glass, with the two straws between his lips, Tom saw the wrath of the wronged when close on the track of the wrong-doer. Wheeling round, she caught him looking conscious and guilty.

"Oh! So you're here? Where is he?"

Tom answered truthfully. "He said he had an errand to do. He didn't tell me what it was."

"And is he coming back for you here?"

"He said he would."

"Then I'll wait."

To wait she sat down at Tom's side, having Bertha's house within range. Whether she suspected anything or not Tom couldn't tell, since he hardly suspected anything himself. That there was danger in the air he knew by the violence with which she rejected his proposal to refresh herself with ice cream.

"There he is!"

They watched him while he came down the steps, hesitated a minute, and turned in the direction away from where they were waiting. Tom understood this move.

"He's going to Jenkins's about that new tire."

As she jumped to her feet her movements had a fierceness of activity he had never before seen in her.

"That's all I want. I'm goin' back. Don't you say you seen me, or that I've been over here at all."

Hurrying to the street and springing into the car, she bade the hired man turn round again for home.

What happened between that Saturday and the next Tom never knew exactly. A few years later, when his powers of deduction had developed, he was able to surmise; but beyond his own experience he had no accurate information. That there were bitter quarrels he inferred from the sullenness they left behind; but he never witnessed them. Not having witnessed them, he had little or no sense of a strain more serious than usual.

On the next Saturday afternoon he was crouched in the potato field, picking off the ugly reddish bugs and killing them. Suddenly he heard himself called. On rising and looking round he found the runabout car stopped in the road, and Billy Peet, one of the hired men, beckoning him to approach. Brushing his hands against each other, he stepped carefully over the rows of young potatoes, and was soon in the roadway.

"Get in," Billy Peet ordered, briefly. "The boss sent me over to fetch you."

"Sent you over to fetch me—in the machine? What's up?" His eye fell on a small straw suitcase in the back of the car. "What's that for?"

"Get in, and I'll tell you as we go along." Tom clambered in beside the driver. "Mis' Quidmore's sick."

"What's the matter with her?"

"I'd'n know. Awful sick, they say."

When they passed the Quidmore entrance without turning in Tom began to be startled. "Say! Where we going?"

"You're not going home. Doctor don't want you there. Boss telephoned over to Mrs. Tollivant, and she's goin' to keep you till Mis' Quidmore's better—or somethin'."

The boy was not often resentful, but he did resent being trundled about like a package. If his mother was sick his place was at home. He could light the fire, bring in the water from the well, and do the score of little things for which a small boy can be useful. To be shunted off like this, as if he could only be an additional care, was an indignity to the thirteen years he was now supposed to have attained to. But what could he do? Protest was useless. There was nothing for it but to go where he was driven, like Geraldine or the dilapidated car.

And yet at Harfrey he settled down among the Tollivants naturally. No State ward having succeeded him, his room under the eaves was still vacant. Once within its familiar shelter, he soon began to feel as if he had never been away. The family welcomed him with the shades of warmth which went with their ages and characters—Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant overcoming their repugnance to a born waif with that Christian charity which doubtless is all the nobler for being visibly against the grain; Art, now a swaggering fellow of sixteen, with patronizing good nature; Cilly, who affected baby-blue ribbons on a blond pigtail, with airs and condescension; Bertie, the cripple, with satiric cordiality. If it was not exactly a home-coming, it was at least as good as a visit to old friends. He was touched by being included almost as a member of the family in Mr. Tollivant's evening prayer.

"And, O Heavenly Father, take this young wanderer as Thy child, even as we offer him a shelter. Visit not Thine anger upon him, lest he be tempted overmuch."

At the thought of being tempted overmuch Tom felt a pleasing sense of importance. It offered, too, a loophole for excuse in case he should fall. If God didn't intervene on his behalf, easing temptation up, then God would be responsible. And yet, such was the lack of fairness he was bidden to see in God, He would knock a fellow down and then punish him when he tumbled.

In the midst of these reflections a thought of the Quidmore household choked him with unexpected homesickness. The people who had been kind to him were in trouble, and he was not there! He wondered what they would do without him. He could sometimes catch the man's cruelties and turn them into pleasantries before they reached the wife. He could sometimes forestall the wife's complaints and twist them into little mollifying compliments. Would there be anyone to do that now? Would they keep the peace? He wished Mr. Tollivant would pray for them. He tried to pray for them himself, but, as with his effort of the previous year, the right kind of words would not come. If only God could be addressed without so much Thee and Thou! If only He could read a little boy's heart without calling for fine language! For lack of fine language he had to remain dumb, leaving God, who might possibly have helped Martin and Anna Quidmore, with no information about them.

Nevertheless, with the facile emotions of youth, a half hour later he was playing checkers with Bertie, in full enjoyment of the game. He slept soundly that night, and on Sunday fell into the old routine of church and Sunday school. Monday and Tuesday bored him, because for most of the day school claimed the children; but when they came home, and played and squabbled as usual, life took on its old zest. Only now and then did the thought of the sick woman and the lonely man sweep across him in a spasm of pain; after which he could forget them and be cheerful.

But on Wednesday forenoon, as he was turning away from watching the Plymouth Rocks pecking at their feed, his father arrived in the old runabout. Dashing up the hill, Tom reached the back door in time to see him enter by the front.

"How's ma?"

He got no answer, because Quidmore followed Mrs. Tollivant into the front parlor, where they shut the door. In anticipation of being taken home, the boy ran up to his room and packed his bag.

"How's ma?"

He called out the question from halfway down the stairs. Quidmore, emerging from the parlor with Mrs. Tollivant, ignored it again. Bidding good-by to his hostess and thanking her for taking in the boy, he went through these courtesies with a nervous anxiety almost amounting to anguish to convince her of the truth of something he had said.

"How's ma?"

They were in the car at last so that he could no longer be denied.

"She's—she's—not there."

All the events of the past year focussed themselves into the question that now burst on Tom's lips. "Is she—dead?"

The lisping voice was sorrowful. "She was buried yesterday."

With his habit of thinking twice, the boy asked nothing more. Having asked nothing at the minute, he felt less inclined to ask anything as they drove onward. Something within him rejected the burden of knowing. While he would not hold himself aloof, he would not involve himself more than events involved him according as they fell out. His reasoning was obscure, but his instincts, grown self-protective from necessity, were positive. Whatever had happened, whatever was to be right and wrong to other people, his own motive must be loyalty.

"I've got to stick to him," he was saying to himself. "He's been awful good to me. In a kind of a way he's my father. I must stand by him, and see him through, just as if I was his son."

It was his first grown-up resolution.

XVII

Grown-up life began at once. His chief care hitherto had been as to what others would do for him; now he was preoccupied with what he could do for some one else. It was a matter of watching, planning, cheering, comforting, and as he expressed it to himself, of bucking up. Of bucking up especially he was prodigal. The man had become as limp as on the day when he had thrown himself face downward in the grass. Mad once with desire to act, he was terrified now at what he had done. Though, as far as Tom could judge, no one blamed or suspected him, there was hardly a minute in the day in which he did not betray himself. He betrayed himself to the boy even if to no one else, though betraying himself in such a way that there was nothing definite to take hold of. "I'm sure—and yet I'm not sure," was Tom's own summing up. He stressed the fact that he was not sure, and in this he was helped by the common opinion of the countryside.

Toward the bereaved husband and his adopted son this was sympathetic. The woman had always been neurasthenic, slipshod, and impossible. With a wife to help him, Martin Quidmore could have been a success as a market gardener as easily as anybody else. As it was, he would get over the shock of this tragedy and find a woman who would be the right kind of mother to a growing boy. Here, the mention of Bertha was with no more than the usual spice of village scandal, tolerant and unresentful.

Of all this Tom was aware chiefly through the observations of Blanche, the colored woman who came in by the day to do the housework.

"Law, Mr. Tom, yo' pappa don't need to feel so bad. Nobody in this yere town what blame him, not a little mite. Po' Mis' Quidmo', nobody couldn't please her nohow. Don't I know? Ain't I wash her, and iron her, and do her housecleanin', ever since she come to this yere community, and Mr. Quidmo' he buy this yere lot off old Aaron Bidbury? No, suh! Nobody can't tell me! Them there giddy things what nobody can't please 'em they can't please theirselves, and some day they go to work and do somefin' despe'ate, just like po' Mis' Quidmo'. A little cup o' tea, she take. No mo'n that. See, boy! I keep that there brown teapot, what look as innocent as a baby, all the time incriminated to her memo'y."

Nevertheless, Tom found his father obsessed by fear, with nothing to be afraid of. The obsession had shown itself as soon as they entered the house on their return from Harfrey. He was afraid of the house, afraid of the kitchen especially. When Gimlets barked he jumped, cursing the dog for its noise. When a buggy drove up to the door he peeped out at the occupant before showing himself to the neighbor coming to offer his condolences. If the telephone rang Tom hastened to answer it, knowing that it set his father shivering.

As evening deepened on that first Wednesday, they kept out of doors as late as possible, the boy chattering to the best of his ability. When obliged to go in, Quidmore tried to say with solicitude on Tom's behalf:

"Expect you'll be lonesome now with only the two of us in the house. Better come and sleep in the other bed in my room."

The boy was about to reply that he was not lonesome, and preferred his own bed, when he caught the dread behind the invitation.

"All right, dad, I'll come. Sleep there every night. Then I won't be scared."

About two in the morning Tom was wakened by a shout. "Hell! Hell! Hell!"

Jumping from his own bed, he ran to the other. "Wake up, dad! Wake up!"

Ouidmore woke, confused and trembling. "Wha' matter?" His senses returning, he spoke more distinctly. "Must have had a nightmare. God! Turn on the light. Hate bein' in the dark. Now get back to bed. All right again."

The next day both were picking strawberries. It was not Quidmore's custom to pick strawberries, but he seemed to prefer a task at which he could crouch, and be more or less out of sight. Happening to glance up, he saw a stranger coming round the duck pond.

"Who's that?" he snapped, in terror.

Tom ran to the stranger, interviewed him, and ran back again. "It's an agent for a new kind of fertilizer."

"Tell him I don't want it and to get to hell out of this."

"You'd better see him. He'll think it queer if you don't."

It was the spur he needed. He couldn't afford to be thought queer. He saw the agent, Tom acting as go-between and interpreter.

To act as go-between and interpreter became in a measure the boy's job. Being so near the holidays, he did not return to school, and freed from school, he could give all his time to helping the frightened creature to seem competent in the eyes of his customers and hired men. Not that he succeeded. None knew better than the hired men that the place was, as they put it, all in the soup; none were so quick to fall away as customers who were not getting what they wanted. When the house was tumbling about their heads one little boy's shoulder could not do much as a prop; but what it could do he offered.

He offered it with a gravity at which the men laughed good-naturedly behind his back. They took his orders solemnly, and thought no more about them. For a whole week nothing went to market. The dealers whom they supplied complained by telephone. Billy Peet and himself got a load of "truck" into town, only to be told that their man had made other arrangements. To meet these conditions Quidmore had spurts of energy, from which he backed down gibbering.

Taking his courage in both hands, the boy went to see Bertha. Never having been face to face with her before, he found her of the type of beauty best appreciated where the taste is for the highly blown. She received him with haughty surprise and wonder, not asking him to sit down. Having prepared his words, he recited them, though her attitude frightened him out of the man-of-the-world tone he had meant to adopt. Humbly and haltingly, he asked if she wouldn't come out and help to stiffen the old man.

"So he's sent you, has he? Well, you can go back and say that I've no reply except the one I've given him. All is over between us. Tell him that if he thinks that that was the way to win me he's very gravely mistook. I know what's happened as positive as if I was a jury, and I shall never pardon it. Silence I shall keep, but that is all he can ask of me. He's made me talked about when he shouldn't ought to ov, ignoring that a woman, and especially a widow—" her voice broke—"has nothing but her reputation. Go back and tell him that if he tries to force my door he'll find it double-barred against him."

Tom went back but said nothing. There was no need for him to say anything, since his life began at once to take another turn.

School holidays having begun, he was free in fact as well as in name. It was on a Thursday that his father came to him with the kind of proposal which always excites a small boy.

"Say, boy, what you think of a little trip down to Wilmington, Delaware, you and me? Go off to-morrow and get back by Tuesday. I'd see my sister, and it'd do me good."

The prospect seemed to have done him good already. A new life had come to him. He went about the place giving orders for the few days of his absence, with particular instructions to Diggory and Blanche as to Geraldine, and the disposal of the milk. They started on their journey in the morning.

It was one of those mornings in June when every blessed and beautiful thing seems poured on the earth at once. As between five and six Billy Peet drove them over to take the train at Harfrey, light, birds, trees, flowers, meadows, dew, would have thrilled them to ecstasy if they had not been used to them. For the first time in weeks Tom saw his father smile. It was a smile of relief rather than of pleasure, but it was better than his look of woe.

The journey wakened memories. Not since Mrs. Crewdson had brought him out to place him as a State ward with Mrs. Tollivant had he gone into the city by this route. He had gone in by the motor truck often enough; but this line that followed the river was haunted still by the things he had outlived. He was not sorry to have known them, though glad that they were gone. He was hardly sorry even for the present, though doubtful as to how it was going to turn out. Vaguely and not introspectively, he was shocked at himself, that he should be sitting there with a man who had done what he felt pretty sure this man had done, and that he should feel no horror. But he felt none. He assured himself of that. He could sleep with him by night, and work and eat with him by day, with no impulse but to shield a poor wretch who had made his own life such a misery.

"I've got to do it," he said to himself, in a kind of self-defense. "I don't know he did it—not for sure, I don't. And if nobody else tries to find out, why should I, when he's been so awful nice to me?"

He watched a steamer plowing her way southward in the middle of the stream. He liked her air of quiet self-possession and of power. He wondered whence she was coming, whither she was going, and what she was doing it for. He couldn't guess.

"That'd be like me," he said, silently, "sailing from I don't know where—sailing to I don't know where——"

Ten years later he finished this thought, repeating exactly the same words. Just now he couldn't finish anything, because there was so much to see. Little towns perched above little harbors. Fishermen angled from little piers. A group of naked boys, shameless as young mermen, played in the water. On a rock a few yards from the shore a flock of gulls jostled each other for standing room. A motor boat puffed. Yachts rode sleepily at anchor. The car which, when they took it at Harfrey had been almost empty, was beginning to fill with the earlier hordes of commuters. Soon it was quite full. Soon there were cheery young people, most of them chewing gum, standing in the passageway. Having rounded the curve at Spuyten Duyvil, they saw the city looming up, white, spiritual, tremulous, through the morning mist.

Up to this minute he had not thought of plans; now he began to wonder what they should do on reaching the Grand Central, where they would arrive in another quarter of an hour.

"Do we go straight across to the Pennsylvania Station, to take the train for Wilmington, or do we have to wait?"

"I'll—I'll see."

The answer was unsatisfactory. He looked at his father inquiringly. Looking at him, he was hurt to observe that his confidence was departing, that he was again like something with a broken spring.

"Well, we're going to Wilmington to-day, aren't we?"

"I'll—I'll see."

"But," the boy cried in alarm, "where can we go, if we don't?"

"I—I know a place."

It was disappointing. The choking sensation which, when he was younger, used to precede tears, began to gather in his throat. Having heard so much from Mrs. Quidmore of the glories of Wilmington, Delaware, he saw it as a city of palaces, of exquisite, ladylike maidens, of noble youths, of aristocratic joyousness. Moreover, he had been told that to get there you went under the river, through a tunnel so deep down in the earth that you felt a distressful throbbing in the head. The postponement of these experiences even for a day was hard to submit to.

In the Grand Central his father was in a mood he had never before seen. It was a dark mood, at once decided and secretive.

"Come this way."

This way was out into Forty-second Street. With their suitcases in their hands, they climbed into a street car going westward. Westward they went, changing to another car going southward, under the thunder of the elevated, in Ninth Avenue. At Fourteenth Street they got out again. Tom recognized the neighborhood because of its nearness to the great markets to which they sometimes brought supplies. But they avoided the markets, making their way between drays, round buildings in course of demolition, through gangs of children wooing disaster as they played in the streets. In the end they turned out of the tumult to find themselves in a placid little backwater of the "old New York" of the early nineteenth century. Reading the sign at the corner Tom saw that it was Jane Street.

Jane Street dates from a period earlier than the development of that civic taste which gives to all New York north of Fourteenth Street the picturesqueness of a sum in simple arithmetic. Jane Street has atmosphere, period, chic. You know at a glance that the people who built these trim little red-brick houses still felt that impulse which first came to Manhattan from The Hague, to be fostered later by William and Mary, and finally merged in the Georgian tradition. Jane Street is Dutch. It has Dutch quaintness, and, as far as New York will permit it, Dutch cleanliness. It might be a byway in Amsterdam. Instead of cutting straight from the Hudson River Docks to Greenwich Avenue, it might run from a canal with barges on it to a field of hyacinths in bloom.

But Tom Quidmore saw not what you and I would have seen, a relief from the noise and fetidness of a hot summer's morning in a neighborhood reeking with garbage. When his heart had been fixed on that dream-city, Wilmington, Delaware, he found himself in a dingy little alley. Not often querulous, he became so now.

"What are we doing down here?"

The reply startled him. "I'm—I'm sick."

Looking again at the man who shuffled along beside him, he saw that his face had grown ashy, while his eyes, which earlier in the day had had life in them, were lusterless. The boy would have been frightened had it not been for the impulse of affection.

"Let's go back to Bere. Then you can have the doctor. I'll get a cab and steer the whole business."

Without answering, Quidmore stopped at a brown door, level with the pavement, in a big, dim-windowed building, with fire escapes zigzagging down the front. Jane Street is not exclusively clean and trim and Dutch. It has lapses—here a warehouse, there a dwelling tumbling to decay, elsewhere a nondescript structure like this. It looked like a lodging house for sailors and dock laborers. In the basement was a restaurant to which you went down by steps, and bearing the legend Pappa's Chop Saloon.

While Quidmore stood in doubt as to whether to ring the bell or to push the door which already stood a little open, two men came out of the Chop Saloon and began to mount the steps. In faded blue overalls the worse for wear, they had plainly broken a day's work, possibly begun at five o'clock, for a late breakfast. The one in advance, a sturdy, well-knit fellow of forty or forty-five, got a sinister expression from a black patch over his left eye. His companion was older, smaller, more worn by a bitter life. All the twists in his figure, all the soured betrayals in his crafty face, showed you the habitual criminal.

None of these details was visible to Quidmore, because his imagination could see only the bed for which he was craving. To the boy, who trusted everyone, they were no more than the common type of workman he was used to meeting in the markets. The fellow with the patch on his eye, making an estimate of the strangers as he mounted the steps, spoke cheerily.

"I say, mate, what can I do for yer?"

The voice with a vaguely English ring was not ungenial. Not ungenial, when you looked at it, was the strongly-boned face, with a ruddiness burnt to a coarse tan. The single gray-blue eye had the sympathetic gleam which often helps roguery to make itself excusable to people with a sense of fun.

Quidmore muttered something about wanting to see Mrs. Pappa.

"Right you are! Come along o' me. I'll dig the old gal out for yer. Expects you wants a room for yerself and the kid. Hi, Pappa!"

Pappa came out of a dim, musty parlor as the witch who foretells bad weather appears in a mechanical barometer. She was like a witch, but a dark, classic witch, with an immemorial tradition behind her. Her ancestors might have fought at Marathon, or sacrificed to Neptune in the temple on Sunium. In Jane Street she was archaic, a survival from antiquity. Her thoughts must have been with the nymphs at Delphi, or following the triremes carrying the warriors from Argolis to Troy, as silent, mysterious, fateful, she led the way upstairs.

They followed in procession, all four of them. The doorstep acquaintances displayed a solicitude not less than brotherly. The hall was without furniture, the stairs without carpet. The softwood floors, like the treads of the stairs, were splintered with the usage of many heavy heels. Where the walls bulged, through the pressure of jerry-built stories overhead, the marbled paper swelled into bosses. Tom found it impressive, with something of strange stateliness.

"Yer'll be from the country," the one-eyed fellow observed, as they climbed upward.

"Yes, sir," Tom answered, civilly. "We're on our way to Wilmington, Delaware, but my father felt a little sick."

"Well, he's struck a good place to lay up in. I say, Pappa," he called ahead, "seems to me as the big room with two beds'd be what'd suit the gent. It's next door to the barthroom, and he'll find that convenient. Mate," he explained further, when they stood within the room with two beds, "this'll set ye' back a dollar a day in advance. That right, Pappa, ain't it?"

Pappa assenting with some antique sign, Quidmore drew out his pocketbook to extract the dollar. With no ceremonious scruples the smaller comrade craned his neck to appraise, as far as possible, the contents of the wallet.

"Wad," Tom heard him squirt out of the corner of his mouth, in the whisper of a ventriloquist.

His friend seemed to wink behind the patch on his left eye. Tom took the exchange of confidence as a token of respect. He and his father were considered rich, the effect being seen in the attentions accorded them. This was further borne out when the genial one of the two rogues turned on the threshold, as his colleague was following Pappa downstairs.

"Anythink I can do for yer, mate, command me. Name of Honeybun—Lemuel Honeybun. Honey Lem some of the guys calls me. I answers to it, not takin' no offense like." He pointed to the figure stumping down the stairs. "My friend, Mr. Goodsir. Him and me been pals this two year. We lives on the ground floor. Room back of Pappa."

The door closed, Tom looked round him in an interest which eclipsed his hopes of the tunnel. This was adventure. It was nearly romance. Never before had he stayed in a hotel. The place was not luxurious, but never, in the life he could remember, having known anything but necessity, necessity was enough. Moreover, the room contained a work of art that touched his imagination. On the bare drab mantelpiece stood the head of a Red Indian, in plaster painted in bronze, not unlike the mummified head of Rameses the Great. The boy couldn't take his eye away from it. This was what you got by visiting strange cities more intimately than by trucking to and from the markets.

Quidmore threw himself on his bed, his face buried in the meager pillow. He was suffering apparently not from pain, but from some more subtle form of distress. Being told that there was nothing he could do for the invalid, Tom sat silent and still on one of the two small chairs which helped out the furnishings. It was not boring for him to do this, because he swam in novelty. He recalled the steamer he had seen that morning, sailing from he didn't know where, sailing to he didn't know where, but on the way. He, too, was on the way. He was on the way to something different from Wilmington, Delaware. It would be different from Bere. He began to wonder if he should ever go back to Bere. If he didn't go back to Bere ... but at this point in Tom's dreams Quidmore dragged himself off the bed.

"Let's go down to the chop saloon, and eat."

XVIII

He was not too ill to eat, but too ill when not eating to stay anywhere but on his bed. He went back to it again, lying with his face buried in the pillow as before. The boy resumed his patient sitting. He would have been bored with it now, had he not had his dreams.

All the same, it was a relief when about four o'clock, just as the westering sun was beginning to wake the Red Indian to an horrific life, Mr. Honeybun, pushing the door ajar softly, peeped in with his good eye.

"I say, mate!" he whispered, "wouldn't you like me to take the young gent for a bit of a walk like? Do him good, and him a-mopin' here all by hisself."

The walk meant Tom's initiation into the life of cities as that life is led. Not that it went very far, but as far as it went it was a revelation. It took him from one end of Jane Street to the other, along the docks of the Cunard and other great lines, and as far as Eighth Avenue in the broad, exciting thoroughfare of Fourteenth Street. New York as he had seen it hitherto, from the front seat of a motor truck, had been little more entertaining than a map. Besides, he was only developing a taste for this sort of entertainment. Games, school, scraps with other boys, had been enough for him. Now he was waking to an interest in places as places, in men as men, in differences of attitude to the drama known as life. In Mr. Honeybun's attitude he grew interested especially.

"I don't believe that nothink don't belong to no one," Tom's guide observed, as the wealth of the city spread itself more splendidly. "Things is common proputty. Yer takes what yer can put yer 'and on."

"But wouldn't you be arrested?"

"Yer'd be arrested if yer didn't look out; but what's bein' arrested? No more'n the measures what a lot of poor, frightened, silly boobs'll take agin the strong man what makes 'em tremble. At least," he added, as an afterthought, "not when yer conscience is clear, it ain't."

Fascinated by this bold facing of society, Tom ventured on a question. "Have you ever been arrested, Mr. Honeybun?"

Mr. Honeybun straightened himself to the martyr's pose. "Oh, if yer puts it that way, I've suffered for my opinions. That much I'll admit. I'm—" he brought out the statement proudly—"I'm one o' them there socialists. You know what a socialist is, don't yer?"

Tom was not sure that he did.

"A socialist is one o' them fellers who whatever he sees knows it belongs to him if he can get ahold of it. It's gettin' ahold of it what counts. Now if you was to have somethink I wanted locked up in yer 'ouse, let us say, and I was to make my way in so as I could take it—why, then it'd be mine. That's the law o' Gord, I believes; and I tries to live up to it."

Enjoying a frankness which widened his horizon, Tom was nevertheless perplexed by it. "But wouldn't that be something like burglary?"

"Burglary is what them may call it what ain't socialists; but it don't do to hang a dog because yer've give him a bad name. A lot o' good people's been condemned that way. When I'm in court I always appeals to justice."

"And do you get it?"

"I get men's. I don't get Gord's. You see that apple?" They stopped before a window in Horatio Street where apples were displayed. "Now, do yer suppose that apple growed itself for any one man in partic'lar? No! That apple didn't know nothink about men's laws when it blossomed on a apple tree. It just give itself generallike to the human race. If you was to go in and collar that big red one, and git away with it, it'd be yours. Stands to reason it'd be. Gord's law! But if that there policeman, a-squintin' his ugly eye at us this minute—he knows Honey Lem, he does!—was to pull yer in, yer might git thirty days. Man's law! And I'll leave it to you which is best worth sufferin' for."

In this philosophy of life there was something Tom found reasonable, and something in which he felt a flaw without being able to detect it. He chased it round and round in his thoughts as he sat through the long dull hours with his father. It passed the time; it helped him to the habit of thinking things out for himself. His mind being clear, and his intuitions acute, he could generally solve a problem not beyond his years. When, on the morrow, they walked in the cool of the day down the length of Hudson Street till it ends in Reade Street, Tom brought the subject up from another point of view.

"But, Mr. Honeybun, suppose someone took something from you? What then?"

"He'd git it in the nut," the socialist answered, tersely. "Not if there'd be two of 'em," he added, in amendment. "If there's two I don't contend. I ain't a communist."

"Is that what a communist is, a fellow who'll contend with two?"

"A communist is a socialist what'll use weepons. If there's somethink what he thinks is his in anybody's 'ouse, he'll go armed, and use vi'lence. They never got that on me. I never 'urt nobody, except onst I hits a footman, what was goin' to grab me, a wee little knock on the 'ead with a silver soup ladle I 'ad in me 'and and lays 'im out flat. Didn't do him no 'arm, not 'ardly any. That was in England. But them days is over, since I lost my eye. Makes yer awful easy spotted when yer've lost a eye."

"How did you lose it, Mr. Honeybun?"

"I lost it a-savin' of the life of a beautiful young lady. 'Twas quite a tale." The boy looked up expectantly while his friend thought out the details. "I was footin' it onst from New Haven to New York, and I'd got to a pretty little town as they call Old Lyme. Yer see, I'd been doin' a bit o' time at New Haven—awful 'ard on socialists they was in New Haven in them days—and when I gits out I was a bit stoney-broke till I'd picked up somethink else. Well there I was, trampin' it through Old Lyme, and I'd got near to the bridge what crosses the river they've got there—the Connecticut I think it is—and what should I see but a 'orse what a young lady was drivin' come over the bridge like mad. The young lady she was tuggin' at the reins and a-hollerin' like blazes for some one to save her life. I ain't no 'ero, kid. Don't go for to think that I'm a-sayin' that I am. But what's a man to do when he sees a beautiful young lady in danger o' bein' killed?" He paused to take the bodily postures with which he stopped the runaway. "And the tip of the shaft," he ended, "it took me right in the eye, and put it out. But, Lord, what's a eye, even to a Socialist, when yer can do somethink for a feller creeter?"

Tom gaped in admiration. "I suppose it hurt awful."

"Was in 'orspital three months," the hero said, quietly. "Young lady, she visits me reg'lar, calls me her life-saver, and every name like that, and kind o' clings to me. But, Lord, marriage ain't never been much of a fancy to me. Ties a man up, and I likes to be free, except when I'm sufferin' for socialism. Besides, if I was to marry every woman what I've saved their lives I'd be one o' them Normans by this time. When yer wants company a good pal'll be faithfuller than a wife, and nag yer a lot less."

"Mr. Goodsir's your pal, ain't he, Mr. Honeybun?"

"Yes, and I'm sick of him. He don't develop. He ain't got no eddication. Yer can see for yerself he don't talk correct. That's what I've took to in yer gov'nor and you, yer gentleman way o' speakin'. Only yer needn't go for to tell yer old man all what I've been a-gassin' of to you. I can see he's what they call conservative. He wouldn't understand. You're the younger generation, mind more open like. You and me'd make a great team if we was ever to work together."

With memories of his mother in his mind, Tom answered sturdily, "I wouldn't be a socialist, not for anything you could offer me."

They left it at that. Mr. Honeybun was content to point out the historic sites known to him as they turned homeward. There was the house where a murder had been committed; the store where a big break had been pulled off; a private detective's residence.

"Might go out agin some day, if yer pop don't mind it," he suggested, when they had reached their own hallway. "I gits the time in the late afternoon. Yer see, our job at the market begins early and ends early, and lately—" there was a wistful note—"well, I feels kind o' fed up with the low company Goodsir keeps. Every kind o' joint and dive and—and—Chinamen—and—" Out of respect for the boy he held up the description. "You'd 'ardly believe it, but an innercent little walk like what we've just took, why, it'll do me as much good as a swig o' water when you wake up about three in the mornin', with yer tongue 'angin' out like a leather strap, after a three-days' spree."

Unable to get the full force of this figure, Tom thanked his guide politely, and was bounding up the stairs two steps at a time, when the man who stood watching him spoke again.

"If I'd ever a-thought that I'd 'a had a kid like you, it'd 'a' been pretty near worth gittin' married for."

Tom could only turn with one of those grins which showed his teeth, making his eyes twinkle with a clear blue light, when adequate words for kindness wouldn't come to him.

XIX

The days settled into a routine. When they rose in the morning a colored woman "did" their room while they went down to the chop saloon for breakfast. Returning, Quidmore threw himself on his bed again. He did this after each meal, poking his nose deep into the limp pillow. Hardly ever speaking, he now and then uttered a low moan.

Tom watched patiently, ready to tell him the time or bring him a drink of water. When the day grew too hot he fanned him with an old newspaper.

"Why don't we go home, dad?" he asked anxiously on the third day. "I could get you there as easy as anything."

"I'm not well enough."

"You don't seem very sick to me. You don't have any pain and you can eat all right."

"It isn't that kind of bein' sick. It's—" he sought for a name—"it's like nervous prostration."

More nearly than he knew he had named his malady. In his own words, he was all in; and he was all in to the end of the letter of the term. Of that moral force which is most of what any man has to live upon some experience had drained him. He had spent his gift of vitality. All in was precisely the phrase to apply to him. He had cashed the last cent of whatever he had inherited or saved in the way of inner strength, and now he could not go on.

"What's the good of it anyhow?" he asked of Tom in the night. "There's nothin' to it, not when you come to think of it. You run after something as if you couldn't live without it; and then when you get it you curse your God that you ever run."

Tom shuddered in his bed, but he was used to doing that. There was hardly a night when he was not wakened by a nightmare. If it was not by a nightmare, it was by the soft complaining voice.

"Are you awake, Tom?"

"Yes, dad. Can I get you anything?"

"No; I only wanted to know if you was awake."

Tom kept awake as long as he could, because he knew the poor wretch was afraid of lying sleepless in the dark. To keep him awake, perhaps for less selfish reasons, too, the soft voice would take this opportunity of giving him advice.

"Don't you ever go to wanting anything too much, boy. That's what's done for me. You can want things if you like; but one of the tricks in the game is to know how to be disappointed. I never did know, not even when I was a little chap. If I cried for the moon I wouldn't stop till I got it. When I was about as old as you, not gettin' what I wanted made me throw a fit. If I couldn't get things by fair means I had to get 'em by foul; but I got 'em. It don't do you no good, boy. If I could go back again over the last six months...."

For fear of a confession Tom stopped his ears, but no confession ever came. The tortured soul could dribble its betrayals, but it couldn't face itself squarely.

"Look out for women," he said, gently, on another night. "You're old enough now to know how they'll play the Dutch with you. When I was your age there was nothing I didn't understand, and I guess it's the same with you. Don't ever let 'em get you. They got me before I was—well, I don't hardly know what age I was, but it was pretty young. Look out for 'em, boy. If you ever damn your soul for one of 'em, she'll do you dirt in the end. If it hadn't been for her...."

To keep this from going further, the boy broke in with the first subject he could think of. "I wonder if they'll remember to pick the new peas. They'll be ready by this time. Do you suppose they'll ...?"

"I don't care a hang what they do." After a brief silence he continued: "I'd 'a left the place to you, boy, only my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, has a mortgage on the place that'd eat up most of the value, so I've left it to her. That'll fix 'em both. I wish I could 'a done more for you."

"You've done a lot for me, as it is."

"You don't know."

There was another silence. It might have lasted ten minutes. The boy was falling once more into a doze when the soft voice lisped again,

"Tom."

He did his best to drag himself back from sleep. "Yes, dad? Do you want to know what time it is? I'll get up and look."

"No, stay where you are. There's somethin' I want to say. I've been a skunk to you."

"Oh, cut it, dad...."

"I won't cut it. I want to say it out. When I—when I first took you, it wasn't—it wasn't so much that I'd took a fancy to you...."

"I know it wasn't, dad. You wanted a boy to pick the berries. Let's drop it there."

But the fevered conscience couldn't drop it there. "Yes; at first. And then—and then it come into my mind that you might be—might be the one that'd do somethin' I didn't want to do myself. I thought—I thought that if you done it we might get by on it. We got by on it all right—or up to now we've got by—but I didn't get real fond of you till—till...."

"Oh, dad, let's go to sleep."

"All right. Let's. I just wanted to say that much. I was glad afterward that...."

The boy breathed heavily, pretending that he was asleep. He was soon asleep in earnest, and for the rest of the night was undisturbed. In the morning his father didn't get up, and Tom went down to the chop saloon to bring up something that would serve as breakfast. He did the same at midday, and the same in the evening. It was a summer's evening, with a long twilight. As it began to grow dark Quidmore seemed to rouse himself. He needed tooth paste, shaving cream, other small necessities. Sitting up on the bed, he made out a list of things, giving Tom the money with which to pay for them. If he went to the pharmacy in Hudson Street he would be back in half an hour.

"All right, dad. I know the way. I'm an old hand in New York by this time."

He was at the door when Quidmore called him back.

"Say, boy. Give us a kiss."

Tom was stupefied. He had kissed his adopted mother often enough, but he had never been asked to do this. Quidmore laughed, pulling him close.

"Ah, come along! I don't ask you often. You're a fine boy, Tom. You must know as well as I do what's been...."

The words were suspended by a hug; but once he was free Tom fled away like a small young wild thing, released from human hands. Having reached the street, he began to feel frightened, prescient, awed. Something was going to happen, he could not imagine what. He made his purchases hurriedly, and then delayed his return. He could be tender with the man; he could be loving; but he couldn't share his secrets.

But he had to go back. In the dim upper hall outside the door he paused to pump up courage to go in. He was not afraid in the common way of fear; he was only overcome with apprehension at having a knowledge he rejected forced on him.

The first thing he noticed was that no light came through the crack beneath the door. The room was apparently dark. That was strange because his father dreaded darkness, except when he was there to keep him company. He crept to the door and listened. There was no sound. He pushed the door open. The lights were out. In panic at what he might discover, he switched on the electricity.

But he only found the room empty. That was so far a relief. His father had gone out, and would be back again. Closing the door behind him, he advanced into the room.

It seemed more than empty. It felt abandoned, as if something had gone which would not return. He remembered that sensation afterward. He stood still to wonder, to conjecture. The Red Indian gleamed with his bronze leer.

The next thing the boy noticed was an odd little pile on the table. It was money—notes. On top of the notes there was silver and copper. He stooped over them, touching them with his forefinger, pushing them. He pushed them as he might have pushed an insect to see whether or not it was alive.

Lastly he noticed a paper, on which the money had been placed. There was something scribbled on it with a pencil. He held it under the dim lamp. "For Tom—with a real love."

The tears gushed to his eyes, as they always did when people showed that they loved him. But he didn't actually cry; he only stood still and wondered. He couldn't make it out. That his father should have gone out and forgotten all his money was unusual enough, but that he should have left these penciled words was puzzling. It was easy to count the money. There were seven fifty-dollar bills, with twenty-eight dollars and fifty-four cents in smaller bills and change. He seemed to remember that his father had drawn four hundred dollars for the Wilmington expenses, with a margin for purchases.

He stood wondering. He could never recall how long he stood wondering. The rest of the night became more or less a blank to him; for, to the best of the boy's knowledge, the man who had adopted him was never seen again.

XX

To the best of the boy's knowledge the man who had adopted him was never seen again; but it took some time to assume the fact that he was dead. Visitors to New York often dived below the surface, to come up again a week or ten days later. Their experience in these absences they were not always eager to discuss.

"Why, I've knowed 'em to stay away that long as yer'd swear they'd been kidnapped," Mr. Honeybun informed the boy. "He's on a little time; that's all. Nothink but nat'rel to a man of his age—and a widower—livin' in the country—when he gits a bit of freedom in the city."

"Yes, but what'll he do for money?"

There was this point of view, to be sure. Mr. Goodsir suggested that Quidmore had had more money still, that he had only left this sum to cover Tom's expenses while he was away.

"And listen, son," he continued, kindly, "that's a terr'ble big wad for a boy like you to wear on his person. Why, there's guys that free-quents this very house that'd rob and murder you for half as much, and never drop a tear. Now here I am, an old trusty man, accustomed to handle funds, and not sneak nothin' for myself. If I could be of any use to you in takin' charge of it like...."

"Me and you'll talk this over, later," Mr. Honeybun intervened, tactfully. "The kid don't need no one to take care of his cash when his father may skin home again before to-night. Let's wait a bit. If he's goin' to trust anybody it'll be us, his next of kin in this 'ere 'ouse, of course. That'd be so, kiddy, wouldn't it?"

Tom replied that it would be so, giving them to understand that he counted on their good offices. For the present he was keeping himself in the non-committal attitude natural to suspense.

"You see," he explained, looking from one to another, with his engaging candor, "I can't do anything but just wait and see if he's coming back again, at any rate, not for a spell."

The worthies going to their work, the interview ended. At least, Mr. Goodsir went to his work, though within a few minutes Mr. Honeybun was back in Tom's room again.

"Say, kid; don't you let them three hundred bucks out'n yer own 'and. I can't stop now; but when I blow in to eat at noon I'll tell yer what I'd do with 'em, if you was me. Keep 'em buttoned up in yer inside pocket; and don't 'ang round in this old hut any more'n you can help till I come back and git you. Yer never knows who's on the same floor with yer; but out in the street yer'll be safe."

Out in the street he kept to the more populous thoroughfares, coasting the line of docks especially. He liked them. On the façades of the low buildings he could read names which distilled romance into syllables—New Orleans, Savannah, Galveston, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma. He had always been fond of geography. It opened up the world. It told of countries and cities he would one day visit, and which in the meantime he could dream about. Over the low roofs of the dock buildings he could see the tops of funnels. Here and there was the long black flank of a steamer at its pier. There were flags flying from one masthead or another, while exotic seafaring types slipped in and out amid the crush of vehicles, or dodged the freight train aimlessly shunting up and down. The movement and color, the rumble of deep sound, the confused world-wide purpose of it all, the knowledge that he himself was so insignificant a figure that no robber or murderer would suspect that he had all that money buttoned against his breast, dulled his mind to his desolation.

He tried to keep moving so as to make it seem to a suspicious populace that he was an errand boy; but now and then the sense of his loneliness smote him to a standstill. He would wonder where he was going, and what he was going for, as he wondered the same thing about the steamer on the Hudson. Like her, he seemed to be afloat. She, of course, had her destination; but he had nothing in the world to tie up to. He seemed to have heard of a ship that was always sailing—sailing—sailing—sailing—with never a port to have come out of, and never a port in view,

The Church of the Sea!

He read the words on the corner of a big white building where Jane Street flows toward the docks. He read them again. He read them because he liked their suggestions—immensity, solitude, danger perhaps, and God!

"THAT'S A TERR'BLE BIG WAD FOR A BOY LIKE YOU TO WEAR"

It was queer to think of God being out there, where there were only waves and ships and sailors, but chiefly waves and a few seabirds. It recalled the religion of crippled Bertie Tollivant, the cynic. To the instructed like himself, God was in the churches that had steeples and pews and strawberry sociables, or in the parlors where they held family prayers. They told you that He was everywhere; but that only meant that you couldn't do wrong, you couldn't swear, or smoke a cigarette, or upset some householder's ash-barrels, without His spotting you. Tom Quidmore did not believe that Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant would have sanctioned this Church of the Sea, where God was as free as wind, and over you like the sky, and beyond any human power to monopolize or give away. It made Him too close at hand, too easy to find, and probably much too tender toward sailors, who were often drunk, and homeless little boys. He turned away from the Church of the Sea, secretly envying Bertie Tollivant his graceless creed, but not daring to question the wisdom of adult men and women.

By the steps of the chop saloon he waited for Mr. Honeybun, who came swinging along, a strong and supple figure, a little after the whistle blew at twelve. To the boy's imagination, now that he had been informed as to his friend's status, he looked like what had been defined to him as a socialist. That is, he had the sort of sinuosity that could slip through half-open windows, or wriggle in at coal-holes, or glide noiselessly up and down staircases. It was ridiculous to say it of one so bony and powerful, but the spring of his step was spiritlike.

"Good for you, lad, to be waitin'! We'll go right along and do it, and then it'll be off our minds."

What "it" was to be, Tom had no idea. But then he had no suspicions. In spite of his hard childhood, it did not occur to him that grown-up men would do him wrong. He had no fear of Mr. Honeybun, and no mistrust, not any more than a baby in arms has fear or mistrust of its nurse.

"And there's another thing," Mr. Honeybun brought up, as they went along. "It don't seem to me no good for a husky boy like you to be just doin' nothink, even while he's waitin' for his pop. I'd git a job, if you was me."

The boy said that he would gladly have a job, but didn't know how to get one.

"I've got one for yer if yer'll take it. Work not too 'ard, and' ll bring you in a dollar and a 'alf a day."

But "it" was the matter in hand, and presently its nature became evident. At the corner of Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue Mr. Honeybun pointed across to a handsome white-stone building, whose very solidity inspired confidence. Tom could read for himself that it was a savings bank.

"Now what I'd do if it was my wad is this. I'd put three hundred and twenty-five of it in that there bank, which'd leave yer more'n twenty-five for yer eddication. But yer principal, no one won't be able to touch it but yerself, and twice a year yer'll be gettin' yer interest piled up on top of it."

Tom's heart leaped. He had long meditated on savings banks. They had been part of his queer vision. To become "something big" he would have to begin by opening some such account as this. With Mr. Honeybun's proposal he felt as if he had suddenly grown taller by some inches, and older by some years.

"You'll come over with me, won't you?"

Mr. Honeybun demurred. "Well, yer see, kid, I'm a pretty remarkable character in this neighborhood. There's lots knows Honey Lem; and if they was to see me go in with you they might think as yer hadn't come by your dough quite hon—I mean, accordin' to yer conscience—or they might be bad enough to suppose as there was a put-up job between us. When I puts a few dollars into my own savings bank—I'm a savin' bird, I am—I goes right over to Brooklyn, where there ain't no wicked mind to suspeck me. So go in by yerself, and say yer wants to open a account. If anyone asks yer, tell him just how the money come to yer, and I don't believe as yer'll run no chanst of no one not believin' yer."

So it was done. Tom came out of the building with his bank book buttoned into his breast pocket, and a conscious enhancement of life.

"And now," Mr. Honeybun suggested, "we'll make tracks for Pappa's and eat."

The "check," like the meal, was light, and Mr. Honeybun paid it. Tom protested, since he had money of his own, but his host took the situation gracefully.

"Lord love yer, kid, ain't I yer next o' kin, as long as yer guv'nor's away? Who sh'd buy yer a lunch if it wasn't me?"

Childhood is naturally receptive. As Romulus and Remus took their food from a wolf when there was no one else to give it them, so Tom Quidmore found it not amazing to be nourished, first by a murderer, and then by a thief. It became amazing, a few years later, on looking back on it; but for the moment murderer and thief were not the terms in which he thought of those who had been kind to him.

Not that he didn't try. He tried that very afternoon. When his next o' kin had gone back to his job of lifting and heaving in the Gansevoort Market, he returned to the empty room. It was his first return to it alone. When he had gone up from his breakfast in the chop saloon both Goodsir and Honeybun had accompanied him. Now the emptiness was awesome, and a little sinister.

He had slept there the previous night, slept fitfully that is, waking every half hour to listen for the shuffling footstep. He heard other footsteps, dragging, thumping, staggering, but they always passed on to the story above, whence would come a few minutes later the sound of heavy boots thrown on the floor. Now and then there were curses, or male voices raised in a wrangle, or a few bars of a drunken song. During the earlier nights he had slept through these signals of Pappa's hospitality, or if he had waked, he knew that a grown-up man lay in the other bed, so that he was safe. Now he could only lie and shudder, till the sounds died down, and silence implied safety. He did his best to keep awake, so as to unlock the door the instant he heard a knock; but in spite of his efforts he slept.

This return after luncheon brought him for the first time face to face with his state as a reality. There was no one there. It was no use going back to Bere, because there would be no one there. Rather than become again a State ward with the Tollivants, he would sell himself to slavery. What was he to do?

The first thing his eye fell upon was his father's suitcase, lying open on the floor beside the bed, its contents in disorder. It was the way Quidmore kept it, fishing out a shirt or a collar as he needed one. The futility of this clothing was what struck the boy now. The peculiar grief of handling the things intimately used by those who will never use them again was new to him. He had never supposed that so much sorrow could be stored in a soiled handkerchief. Stooping over the suitcase, he had accidentally picked one up, and burst into sudden tears. They were the first he had actually shed since he used to creep away to cry by himself in the heart-lonely life among the Tollivants.

It occurred to him now that he had not cried when his adopted mother disappeared. He had not especially mourned for her. While she had been there, and he was daily face to face with her, he had loved her in the way in which he loved so easily when anyone opened the heart to him; but she had been no part of his inner life. She was the cloud and sunshine of a day, to be forgotten in the cloud and a sunshine of the morrow. Of the two, he grieved more for the man; and the man was a murderer, and probably a suicide.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, he used these words in the attempt to work up a fortifying moral indignation. It was then, too, that he called Mr. Honeybun a thief. He must react against these criminal associations. He must stand on his own feet. He was not afraid of earning his own living. He had heard of boys who had done it at an age even earlier than thirteen, and had ended by being millionaires. They had always, however, so far as he knew, had some sort of ties to connect them with the body politic. They had had the support of families, sympathies, and backgrounds. They hadn't been adrift, like that haunting ship which never knew a port, and none but the God of the Sea to keep her from foundering. He could have believed in this God of the Sea. He wished there had been such a God. But the God that was, the God who was shut up in churches and used only on Sundays, was not of much help to him. Any help he got he must find for himself; and the first thing he must do would be to break away from these low-down companionships.

And just as, after two or three hours of meditation, he had reached this conclusion, a tap at the door made him start. Quidmore had come back! But before he could spring to the door it was gently pushed open, and he saw the patch over the left eye.

"Got away early, son. Now, seems to me, we ought to be out after them overalls."

The boy stood blank. "What overalls?"

"Why, for yer job to-morrow. Yer can't work in them good clo'es. Yer'd sile 'em."

In a second-hand shop, known to Honey Lem, in Charles Street, they found a suit of boy's overalls not too much the worse for wear. Honey Lem pulled out a roll of bills and paid for them.

"But I've got my own money, Mr. Honeybun."

"Dooty o' next o' kin, boy. I ain't doin' it for me own pleasure. Yer'll need yer money for yer eddication. Yer mustn't forgit that."

The overalls bound him more closely to the criminal from whom he was trying to cut loose. More closely still he found himself tied by the scraps of talk he overheard between the former pals that evening. They were on the lowest of the steps leading up from the chop saloon, where all three of them had dined. Tom, who had preceded them, stood on the sidewalk overhead, out of sight and yet within earshot.

"I tell yer I can't, Goody," Mr. Honeybun was saying, "not as long as I'm next o' kin to this 'ere kid. 'Twouldn't be fair to a young boy for me to keep no such company."

Mr. Goodsir made some observation the nature of which Tom could only infer from Mr. Honeybun's response.

"Well, don't yer suppose it's a damn sight 'arder for me to be out'n a good thing than it is for you to see me out'n it? I don't go in for no renounciation. But when yer've got a fatherless kid on yer 'ands ye' must cut out a lot o' nice stuff that'll go all right when yer've only yerself to think about. Ain't yer a Christian, Goody?"

Once more Mr. Goodsir's response was to Tom a matter of surmise.

"Well, then, Goody, if yer don't like it yer can go to E and double L. What's more, I ain't a-goin' to sleep in our own room to-night, nor any night till that guy comes back. I'm goin' to sleep in the kid's room, and keep him company. 'Tain't right to leave a young boy all by hisself in a 'ouse like this, as full o' toughs as a ward'll be full o' politicians."

Tom removed himself to a discreet distance, but the knowledge that the other bed in his room would not remain so creepily vacant was consciously a relief. He slept dreamlessly that night, because of his feeling of security. In the morning, not long after four, he was wakened by a hand that rocked him gently to and fro.

"Come, little shaver! Time to git up! Got to be on yer job at five."

The job was in a market that was not exactly a market since it supplied only the hotels. Together with the Gansevoort and West Washington Markets, it seemed to make a focal point for much of the food on the continent of America. Railways and steamers brought it from ranches and farms, from plantations and orchards, from rivers and seas, from slaughter-stockades and cold-storage warehouses, from the north and the south and the west, from the tropics and farther than the tropics, to feed the vast digestive machine which is the basis of New York's energies. Tom's job was not hard, but it was incessant. His was the duty of collecting and arranging the empty cases, crates, baskets, and coops, which were dumped on the raised platform surrounding the building on the outside, or which cluttered the stalls within. Trucks and vans took them away full on one day, and brought them back empty on another. It was all a boy could do to keep them stacked, and in order, according to sizes and shapes. The sizes in the main were small; the shapes were squares and oblongs and diminishing churnlike cylinders. Nimbleness, neatness, and goodwill were the requisites of the task, and all three of them the boy supplied.