Larry was still gazing at where Maggie had stood, flashing her defiance
at him, when Hunt came thumping down the stairway.
“Hello, young fellow; what you been doing to Maggie?” demanded the
painter.
“Why?”
“Her door was open when I came by and I called to her. She didn't
answer, but, oh, what a look! What's in the air?”
And then Hunt noted the Duchess apart in her corner. “I say,
Duchess--what were Larry and Maggie rowing about?”
“Grandmother!” Larry exclaimed with a start. “I'd forgotten you were
here! You must have heard it all--go ahead and tell him.”
“Tell him yourself,” returned the Duchess.
Larry and Hunt took chairs, and Larry gave the gist of what he had said
about his decision to Barney and Old Jimmie and Maggie. The Duchess,
still motionless at her desk as she had been all during Larry's scene
with Old Jimmie and Barney, and then his scene with Maggie, regarded
her grandson with that emotionless, mummified face in which only the
red-margined eyes showed life or interest.
“So you're going to go straight, eh?” queried Hunt. The big painter sat
with his long legs sprawling in front of him, a black pipe in his mouth,
and looked at Larry skeptically. “You certainly did hand a jolt to your
friends who'd been counting on you. And yet you're sore because they
were sore at you and didn't believe in you.”
“Did I say that I was sore?” queried Larry.
“No, but you're acting it. And you're sore at Maggie because she didn't
believe that you could make good or that you'd stick it out. Well, I
don't believe you will either.”
“You're a great painter, Hunt, and a great cook--but I don't give a damn
what you believe.”
“Keep your shirt on, young fellow,” Hunt responded, puffing
imperturbably. “I say I believe you won't win out--but that's not saying
I don't want you to win out. If that's what you want to do, go to it,
and may luck be with you, and may the devil stay in hell. The morals of
other people are out of my line--none of my business. I'm a painter, and
it's my business to paint people as I find them. But Maggie certainly
did put her finger on the tough spot in your proposition: for a crook to
find a job and win the confidence of people. It's up grade all the way,
and it takes ten men's nerve to stick it out to the top. Yep, Maggie was
sure right!”
And then the Duchess broke her accustomed silence with her thin croak:
“Never you mind Maggie! She thinks she knows everything, but she doesn't
know anything.”
Larry looked in surprise at his grandmother. There was a flash in her
old eyes; but the next moment the spark was gone.
“Sure you're up against it--but I'll be rooting for you.” Hunt was
grinning. “But say, young fellow, what made you decide to vote the other
ticket?”
Larry was trained at reading faces; and in the rough-hewn, grinning
features of Hunt he read good-fellowship. Larry swiftly responded in
kind, for from the moment he had pulled the mask of being a fool from
the painter and shown him to be a real artist, he had felt drawn toward
this impecunious swashbuckler of the arts. So he now repeated the
business motives which he had presented to Barney and Old Jimmie. As
Larry talked he became more spontaneous, and after a time he was telling
of the effect upon him of seeing various shrewd men locked up and
unexercised in prison. And presently his reminiscence settled upon one
prison acquaintance: a man past middle age, clever in his generation,
who had already done some fifteen years of a long sentence. He was, said
Larry, grim and he rarely spoke; but a close, wordless friendship had
developed between them. Only once, in an unusually relaxed mood, had
the old convict spoken of himself, but what he had then said had had a
greater part in rousing Larry to his new decision than the words of any
other man.
“It was a queer story Joe let out,” continued Larry. “Before he was
sent away he had a kid, just a baby whose mother was dead. He told me
he wanted to have his kid brought up without ever knowing anything about
the kind of people he knew and the kind of life he'd lived. He wanted it
to grow up among decent people. He had money put away and he had an
old friend, a pal, that he'd trust with anything. So he turned over his
money and his baby to his friend, and gave orders that the kid was to
be brought up decent, sent to school, and that the kid was never to
know anything about Joe. Of course the baby was too young then ever to
remember him; and when he gets out he's going to keep absolutely clear
of the kid's life--he wants his kid to have the best possible chance.”
“What is his whole name, and what was he sent up for?” queried the
Duchess, that flickering fire of interest once more in her old eyes.
“Joe Ellison. He was an old-time confidence man. He got caught in
a jam--there had been drinking--there was some shooting--and he had
attempted manslaughter tacked on to the charge of swindling. But Joe
said everybody had been drinking and that the shooting was accidental.”
“Joe Ellison--I knew him,” said the Duchess. “He was about the cleverest
man of his day. But I never knew he had a child. Who was this best
friend of his?”
“Joe Ellison didn't mention his name,” answered Larry. “You see Joe
spoke of his story only once. But he then said that he'd had letters
once a month telling how fine the kid was getting on--till three or
four years ago when he got word that his friend had died. The way things
stand now, Joe won't know how to find the kid when he gets out even if
he should want to find it--and he wouldn't know it even if he saw it.
Up in Sing Sing when I had nothing else to do,” concluded Larry, “I
tell you I thought a lot about that situation--for it certainly is some
situation: Joe Ellison for fifteen years in prison with just one big
idea in his life, the idea being the one thing he felt he was really
doing or ever could do, his very life built on that one idea:
that outside, somewhere, was his kid growing up into a fine young
person--never guessing it had such a father--and Joe never intending to
see it again and not being able to know it if he ever should see it.
I tell you, after learning Joe's story, it made me feel that I'd had
enough of the old life.”
Again the Duchess spoke. “Did Joe ever mention its name?”
“No, he just spoke of it as 'his kid.'”
Larry was quiet a moment. “You see,” he added, “I want to get settled
before Joe comes out--his time's up in a few months--so that I can give
him some sort of place near me. He's all right, Joe is; but he's too
old to have any show at a fresh start if he tries to make it all on his
own.”
“Larry, you haven't got such a tough piece of old brass for a heart
yourself,” commented Hunt. “What are your own plans?”
“I know I've got the makings of a real business man--I've already told
you that,” said Larry confidently. He had thought this out carefully
during his days as a coal-passer and his long nights upon the
eighteen-inch bunk in his cell. “I've got a lot of the finishing
touches; I know the high spots. What I need are the rudiments--the
fundamentals--connecting links. You see, I had part of a business
college training a long time before I went to work in a broker's office,
stenography and typewriting; I've been a secretary in the warden's
office the last few months and I've brushed up on the old stuff and
I'm pretty good. That ought to land me a job. Then I'm going to study
nights. Of course, I'd get on faster if I could have private lessons
with one of the head men of one of these real business schools. I'd mop
up this stuff about organization and management mighty quick, for that
business stuff comes natural to me. A bit of that sort of going to
school would connect up and give a working unity to what I already know.
But then I'll find a job and work the thing out some way. I'm in this to
win out, and win out big!”
Once more the rarely heard voice of the Duchess sounded, and though thin
it had a positive quality:
“You're not going to take any job at first. First thing, you're going to
give all your time to those private lessons.”
Larry gazed at the Duchess, surprised by the tone in which she spoke.
“But, grandmother, these lessons cost money. And I didn't have a thin
dime left when my lawyers finished with me.”
“I've got plenty of money--and it's yours. And the money you get from me
will be honest money, too; the interest on loans made in my pawnshop
is honest all right. It'll be better, anyhow, for you to be out in the
world a few days, getting used to it, before you take a job.”
“Why, grandmother!”
The explanation seemed bald and inadequate, but Larry did not know what
else to say, he was so taken aback. The Duchess, as far as he had been
able to see, had never shown much interest in him. And now, unless he
was mistaken, there was something very much like emotion quavering in
her thin voice and shining in her old eyes.
“I don't interfere with what people want to do,” she continued--“but,
Larry, I'm glad you've decided to go straight.”
And then the Duchess went on to make the longest speech that any living
person had ever heard issue from her lips, and to reveal more than
had yet been heard of that unmysterious mystery which lived within her
shriveled, misshapen figure:
“That's what made me interested in Joe Ellison's story--his wanting to
get his child clear of the life he was living; though I didn't know he
had any such ideas till you told me. Larry, I couldn't get out of this
life myself; I was part of it, I belonged to it. But I felt the same as
Joe Ellison, and over forty years ago I got your mother out of it, and
your mother never came back to it. I did that much. After she died it
made me sick when you, all I've got left, began to go crooked. But I had
no control over you; I couldn't do anything. So I'm glad that at last
you're going to go straight. I'm glad, Larry!”
The emotion that had given her voice a strange and increasing vibrance,
was suddenly brought under control or snuffed out; and she added in her
usual thin, mechanical tone: “The money will be ready for you in the
morning.”
Startled and embarrassed by this outbreak of things long hidden beneath
the dust in the secret chambers of her being, and wishing to avoid
the further embarrassment of thanks, the Duchess turned quickly and
awkwardly back to her desk, and her bent old body became fixed above
her figures. In a moment the ever-alert Hunt had out the little block
of drawing-paper he always carried in a pocket, and with swift, eager
strokes he was sketching the outline of that bent, shrunken shape that
had subsided so swiftly from emotion to the commonplace.
Larry gazed at the Duchess in silent bewilderment. He had thought he had
known his grandmother. He was now realizing that perhaps he did not know
his grandmother at all.