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.