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."