The arrival of Mrs. Bagley changed James Holden's way of life far more
than he'd expected. His basic idea had been to free himself from the
hours of dishwashing, bedmaking, dusting, cleaning and straightening
and from the irking chore of planning his meals far enough ahead to
obtain sustenance either through mail or carried note. He gave up his
haphazard chores readily. Mrs. Bagley's menus often served him dishes
that he wouldn't have given house-room; but he also enjoyed many meals
that he could not or would not have taken the time to prepare.
He did have some faint notion that being freed from the household toil
would allow him sixteen or eighteen hours at the typewriter, but he was
not greatly dismayed to find that this did not work.
When he wrote himself out, he relaxed by reading, or sitting quietly
planning his next piece. Even that did not fill his entire day. To take
some advantage of his time, James began to indulge in talk-fests with
Mrs. Bagley.
These were informative. He was learning from her how the outside world
was run, from one who had no close association with his own former life.
Mrs. Bagley was by no means well-informed on all sides of life, but she
did have her opinions and her experiences and a fair idea of how things
went on in her own level. And, of course, James had made this choice
because of the girl. He wanted a companion of his own age. Regardless of
what Mrs. Bagley really thought of this matter of rapid education, James
proposed to use it on Martha. That would give him a companion of his own
like, they would come closer to understanding one another than he could
ever hope to find understanding elsewhere.
So he talked and played with Martha in his moments of relaxation. And he
found her grasp of life completely unreal.
James could not get through to her. He could not make her stop
play-acting in everything that she did not ignore completely. It worried
him.
With the arrival of summer, James and Martha played outside in the fresh
air. They made a few shopping excursions into town, walking the mile and
more by taking their time, and returning with their shopping load in the
station-master's taxicab mail car. But on these expeditions, James hung
close to Martha lest her babbling prattle start an unwelcome line of
thought. She never did it, but James was forever on edge.
This source of possible danger drove him hard. The machine that was
growing in a mare's-nest on the second floor began to evolve faster.
James Holden's work was a strangely crude efficiency. The prototype had
been built by his father bit by bit and step by step as its design
demanded. Sections were added as needed, and other sections believed
needed were abandoned as the research showed them unnecessary. Louis
Holden had been a fine instrumentation engineer, but his first models
were hay-wired in the breadboard form. James copied his father's
work--including his father's casual breadboard style. And he added some
inefficiencies of his own.
Furthermore, James was not strong enough to lift the heavier assemblies
into place. James parked the parts wherever they would sit.
To Mrs. Bagley, the whole thing was bizarre and unreasonable. Given her
opinion, with no other evidence, she would have rejected the idea at
once. She simply did not understand anything of a technical nature.
One day she bluntly asked him how he knew what he was doing.
James grinned. "I really _don't_ know what I'm doing," he admitted. "I'm
only following some very explicit directions. If I knew the pure theory
of my father's machine I could not design the instrumentation that would
make it work. But I can build a reproduction of my father's machine from
the directions."
"How can that be?"
James stopped working and sat on a packing case. "If you bought a
lawn-mower," he said, "it might come neatly packed in a little box with
all the parts nested in cardboard formers and all the little nuts and
bolts packed in a bag. There would be a set of assembly directions,
written in such a way as to explain to anybody who can read that Part A
is fastened to Bracket B using Bolt C, Lockwasher D, and Nut E. My
father's one and only recognition of the dangers of the unforeseeable
future was to drill deep in my brain these directions. For instance," and
he pointed to a boxed device, "that thing is an infra-low frequency
amplifier. Now, I haven't much more than a faint glimmer of what the
thing is and how it differs from a standard amplifier, but I know that it
must be built precisely thus-and-so, and finally it must be fitted into
the machine per instructions. Look, Mrs. Bagley." James picked up a
recently-received package, swept a place clear on the packing case and
dumped it out. It disgorged several paper bags of parts, some large
plates and a box. He handed her a booklet. "Try it yourself," he said.
"That's a piece of test equipment made in kit form by a commercial outfit
in Michigan. Follow those directions and build it for me."
"But I don't know anything about this sort of thing."
"You can read," said James with a complete lack of respect. He turned
back to his own work, leaving Mrs. Bagley leafing her way through the
assembly manual.
To the woman it was meaningless. But as she read, a secondary thought
rose in her mind. James was building this devilish-looking nightmare, and
he had every intention of using it on her daughter! She accepted without
understanding the fact that James Holden's superior education had come of
such a machine--but it had been a machine built by a competent mechanic.
She stole a look at James. The anomaly puzzled her.
When the lad talked, his size and even the thin boyish voice were negated
by the intelligence of his words, the size of his vocabulary, the clarity
of his statements. Now that he was silent, he became no more than an
eight-year-old lad who could not possibly be doing anything constructive
with this mad array of equipment. The messiness of the place merely made
the madness of the whole program seem worse.
But she turned back to her booklet. Maybe James was right. If she could
assemble this doodad without knowing the first principle of its
operation, without even knowing from the name what the thing did, then
she might be willing to admit that--messy as it looked--the machine could
be reconstructed.
Trapped by her own interest, Mrs. Bagley pitched in.
They took a week off to rearrange the place. They built wooden shelves to
hold the parts in better order. These were by no means the work of a
carpenter, for Mrs. Bagley's aim with a saw was haphazard, and her
batting average with a hammer was about .470; but James lacked the
strength, so the construction job was hers. Crude as it was, the place
looked less like a junkshop when they were done. Work resumed on the
assembly of the educator.
Of course the writing suffered.
The budget ran low. James was forced to abandon the project for his
typewriter. He drove himself hard, fretting and worrying himself into a
stew time after time. And then as August approached, Nature stepped in to
add more disorder.
James entered a "period of growth." In three weeks he gained two inches.
His muscles, his bones and his nervous system ceased to coordinate. He
became clumsy. His handwriting underwent a change, so severe that James
had to practically forge his own signature of Charles Maxwell. To avoid
trouble he stopped the practice of writing individual checks for the
bills and transferred a block sum of money to an operating account in
Mrs. Bagley's name.
His fine regimen went to pieces.
He embarked on a haphazard program of sleeping, eating and working at odd
hours, and his appetite became positively voracious. He wanted what he
wanted when he wanted it, even if it were the middle of the night. He
pouted and groused when he didn't get it. In calmer moments he hated
himself for these tantrums, but no amount of self-rationalization stopped
them.
During this period, James was by no means an efficient youngster. His
writing suffered the ills of both his period of growth and his upset
state of mind. His fingers failed to coordinate on his typewriter and his
manuscript copy turned out rough, with strikeovers, xxx-outs, and gross
mistakes. The pile of discarded paper massed higher than his finished
copy until Mrs. Bagley took over and began to retype his rough script
for him.
His state of mind remained chaotic.
Mrs. Bagley began to treat him with special care. She served him warm
milk and insisted that he rest. Finally she asked him why he drove
himself so hard.
"We are approaching the end of summer," he said, "and we are not
prepared."
"Prepared for what?"
They were relaxing in the living room, James fretting and Mrs. Bagley
seated, Martha Bagley asprawl on the floor turning the pages of a
crayon-coloring book. "Look at us," he said. "I am a boy of eight, your
daughter is a girl of seven. By careful dress and action I could pass for
a child one year younger, but that would still make me seven. Last summer
when I was seven, I passed for six."
"Yes, but--?"
"Mrs. Bagley, there are laws about compulsory education. Sooner or later
someone is going to get very curious about us."
"What do you intend to do about it?"
"That's the problem," he said. "I don't really know. With a lot of
concentrated effort I can probably enter school if I have to, and keep my
education covered up. But Martha is another story."
"I don't see--?" Mrs. Bagley bit her lip.
"We can't permit her to attend school," said James.
"You shouldn't have advertised for a woman with a girl child!" said Mrs.
Bagley.
"Perhaps not. But I wanted someone of my own age and size around so that
we can grow together. I'm a bit of a misfit until I'm granted the right
to use my education as I see fit."
"And you hope to make Martha another misfit?"
"If you care to put it that way," admitted James. "Someone has to start.
Someday all kids will be educated with my machine and then there'll be no
misfits."
"But until then--?"
"Mrs. Bagley, I am not worried about what is going to happen next year. I
am worried about what is going to happen next month."
Mrs. Bagley sat and watched him for a moment. This boy was worried, she
could see that. But assuming that any part of his story was true--and it
was impossible to doubt it--he had ample cause.
The past years had given Mrs. Bagley a hard shell because it was useful
for survival; to keep herself and her child alive she had had to be
permanently alert for every threat. Clearly this was a threat. Martha was
involved. Martha's future was, at the least, bound to be affected by what
James did.
And the ties of blood and habit made Martha's future the first
consideration in Janet Bagley's thoughts.
But not the only consideration; for there is an in-born trait in the
human race which demands that any helpless child should be helped. James
was hardly helpless; but he certainly was a child. It was easy to forget
it, talking to him--until something came up that the child could not
handle.
Mrs. Bagley sighed. In a different tone she asked, "What did you do last
year?"
"Played with Rags on the lawn," James said promptly. "A boy and his dog
is a perfectly normal sight--in the summer. Then, when school opened, I
stayed in the house as much as I could. When I had to go out I tried to
make myself look younger. Short pants, dirty face. I don't think I could
get away with it this year."
"I think you're right," Mrs. Bagley admitted. "Well, suppose you could do
what you wish this year? What would that be?"
James said: "I want to get my machine working. Then I want to use it on
Martha."
"On Martha! But--"
James said patiently: "It won't hurt her, Mrs. Bagley. There isn't any
other way. The first thing she needs is a good command of English."
"English?" Mrs. Bagley hesitated, and was lost. After all, what was wrong
with the girl's learning proper speech?
"Martha is a child both physically and intellectually. She has been
talked to about 'right' and 'wrong' and she knows that 'telling the
truth' is right, but she doesn't recognize that talking about fairies is
a misstatement of the truth. Question her carefully about how we live,
and you'll get a fair approximation of the truth."
"So?"
"But suppose someone asks Martha about the Hermit of Martin's Hill?"
"What do you fear?"
"We might play upon her make-believe stronger than we have. She play-acts
his existence very well. But suppose someone asks her what he eats, or
where he gets his exercise, or some other personal question. She hasn't
the command of logic to improvise a convincing background."
"But why should anybody ask such personal questions?" asked Mrs. Bagley.
James said patiently: "To ask personal questions of an adult is 'prying'
and is therefore considered improper and antisocial. To ask the same
questions of a child is proper and social. It indicates a polite interest
in the world of the child. You and I, Mrs. Bagley, have a complete
picture of the Hermit all prepared, and with our education we can
improvise plausible answers. I've hoped to finish my machine early enough
to provide Martha with the ability to do the same."
"So what can we do?"
"About the only thing we can do is to hide," said James. "Luckily,
most of the business is conducted out of this place by mail. Write
letters to some boarding school situated a good many miles from here.
Ask the usual routine questions about entering a seven-year-old girl
and an eight-year-old boy for one semester. Robert Holmes, our
postmaster-taxicab driver-station-master, reads everything that isn't
sealed. He will read the addresses, and he will see replies and read
their return address."
"And then we'll pretend to send you and Martha to boarding school?"
James nodded. "Confinement is going to be difficult, but in this climate
the weather gets nasty early and that keeps people out of one another's
hair."
"But this station-master business--?"
"We've got to pull some wool over Robert's eyes," said James. "Somehow,
we've got to make it entirely plausible. You've got to take Martha and me
away and come back alone just as if we were in school."
"We should have a car," said Mrs. Bagley.
"A car is one piece of hardware that I could never justify," said James.
"Nor," he chuckled, "buy from a mail-order house because I couldn't
accept delivery. I bought furniture from Sears and had it delivered
according to mailed instructions. But I figured it better to have the
folks in Shipmont wondering why Charles Maxwell didn't own a car than to
have them puzzling why he owned one that never was used, nor even moved.
Besides, a car--costs--"
Mrs. Bagley smiled with real satisfaction. "There," she said, "I think I
can help. I can buy the car."