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?"