"Oh, I get along."
"Guy says you live with a guardian."
"You may call him a guardian if you like, but the word is too big. You
only have a guardian when you've something to guard, and I haven't
anything."
"Yes, but how did you ever ...?"
Once more Tom said to himself, "It's the way she looks at you." He knew
what she was trying to ask him, and in order to be open and aboveboard,
he gave her the few main facts of his life. He did it briefly,
hurriedly, throwing emphasis only on the point that, to keep him from
becoming a State ward the second time, his stevedore friend had brought
him to Boston and sent him to school.
"He must be an awfully good man!"
He was going to tell her that he was when the brother gave the talk
another twist.
"What are you going to do in your holidays?"
"Work, if I can find a job."
"What kind of job?"
He explained that for the last two summers he had worked round the
Quincy and Faneuil Hall markets, but that he had outgrown them. A
two-fisted, he-man's job was what he would look for now, and had no
doubt that he would get it.
"After you've left Harvard what are you going to be?"
"Banking's what I'd like best, but most likely I'll have to make it
barbering. What are you going to be yourself?"
"Oh, I've got to be a corporation lawyer. My luck! Just because dad'll
have the business to take me into."
"But what would you like better?"
The piggy face broke into one of its captivating grins. "Hanged if _I_
know, unless it'd be an orphan and an only child."
The meeting was important because of what it led to. A few days later
Tom heard the wheezy girlish voice calling behind him in the street:
"Tom! Tom!"
He turned and walked back. During the winter the fat boy had expanded,
not so much in height as in girth and jelliness. He came up, puffing
from his run.
"Can you drive a car?"
Tom hesitated. "I don't know that you'd call it driving a car. I can
drive--after a fashion. Mr. Quidmore used to let me run his Ford, when
we were alone in it, and no one was looking. Since then I've sometimes
driven the market delivery teams for a block or two, nothing much, just
to see what it was like. I know I could pick it up with a few lessons.
I'm a natural driver--a horse or anything. Why?"
"Because my old man said that if you could drive, he might help you get
your summer's job."
"Where? What kind of job?"
"I don't know. He said that if you wanted to talk it over to come round
to our house this evening at nine o'clock."
At nine that evening Tom was shown up into another of those rooms
which marked the gulf between his own way of living and that of people
like the Ansleys, and at the same time woke the atavistic pang. His
impression was only a blurred one of comfort, color, shaded lights,
and richness. From the many books he judged that it was what they
would call the library, but any judgment was subconscious because the
human presences came first. A man wearing a dinner jacket and scanning
an evening paper was sunk into one deep armchair; in another a lady,
demi-décolletée, was reading a book. It was his first intimation that
people ever wore what he called "dress-clothes" when dining only with
their families.
He was announced by Pilcher, who had led him upstairs. "This is the
young man, sir."
Having reached something like friendly terms with the son and
daughter, Tom had expected from the parents the kind of courtesy shown
to strangers when you shake hands with them and ask them to sit down.
Mr. Ansley only let the paper drop to his knees with an "Oh!" in
response to the butler, and looked up.
"You're the young fellow my son has spoken of. He tells me you can
drive a car."
Repeating what he had already said to Guy as to his experience with
cars, Tom expressed confidence in his ability to obtain a license, if
it should become worth his while.
"It wouldn't be difficult driving such as you get in the crowded parts
of a city. It would be chiefly station work, over country roads."
He explained himself further. In the New Hampshire summer colony where
the Ansleys had their place, the residents were turning a large country
house into an inn which would be like a club, or a club which would be
like an inn. It would not be open to ordinary travelers, since ordinary
travelers would bring in people whom they didn't want. The guests would
be their own friends, duly invited or introduced. He, Mr. Ansley, was
chairman of the motor-car committee, but as he was going to Europe he
was taking up the matter in advance. On general grounds he would have
preferred an older man and one with more experience, but the inn-club
was a new undertaking and not too well financed. More experienced men
would cost more money. For the station work they could afford but
eighty dollars a month, with a room in the garage, and board. Moreover,
the jobs they could offer being only for the summer, the promoters
hoped that a few young men and women working for their own education
might take advantage of the scheme.
Eighty dollars a month, with a room to himself, even if it had only
been in a stable, and board in addition, glittered before Tom's eyes
like Aladdin's treasure house. Having thanked Mr. Ansley for the kind
suggestion, he assured him he could give satisfaction if taken on. All
the chauffeurs who had let him have a few minutes at the steering-wheel
had told him that he possessed the eye, the nerve, and the quickness
which make a good driver, in addition to which he knew that he did
himself.
"How old are you?"
It was a question Tom always found difficult to answer. He could
remember when his birthday had been on the fifth of March; but his
mother had told him that that had been Gracie's birthday, and had
changed his own to September. Later she had shifted to May, to a day,
so she told him, when all the nurses had had their children in the
Park, and the lilacs had been in bloom. He had never asked her the
year, not having come to reckoning in years before she was taken from
him. Though latterly he had been putting his birthday in May, he now
shifted back to March, so as to make himself older.
"I'm seventeen, sir."
Mrs. Ansley spoke for the first time. "He looks more than that, doesn't
he?"
Tom turned to the lady who filled a large armchair with a person
suggesting the quaking, flabby consistency of cornstarch pudding. "I
suppose that's because I've knocked about so much."
"The hard school does give you experience, doesn't it, but it's a cruel
school."
He remembered his promise to Guy, if ever he got the opportunity. "Boys
can stand a good deal of cruelty, ma'am. Nine times out of ten it does
them good."
"Still there's always a tenth case."
He smiled. "I think I ought to have made it ten times out of ten. I
never saw the boy yet who wasn't all the better for fighting his way
along."
Mrs. Ansley's mouth screwed itself up like Guy's when it looked as if
he were going to cry. "Fight? Why, I think fighting's something horrid.
Why _can't_ boys treat each other like gentlemen?"
"I suppose, ma'am, because they're not gentlemen."
The cornstarch pudding stiffened to the firmness of ice-cream. "Excuse
me! My boy couldn't be anything but a gentleman."
"He couldn't be anything but a sport. He _is_ a fighter, ma'am--when he
gets the chance."
"Then I hope he won't often get it."
"But, Sunshine," Mr. Ansley intervened, "you don't make any allowance
for differences in standards. You're a woman of forty-five. Guy's a boy
of sixteen--he's practically seventeen, like Whitelaw here--your name
is Whitelaw, isn't it?--and yet you want him to have the same tastes
and ways as yourself."
"I don't want him to have brutal tastes and ways."
"It's a pretty brutal world, ma'am, and if he's going to take his
place he'll have to get used to being hammered and hammering back."
"Which is what I object to. If you train boys to be courteous with each
other from the start...."
"They'll be quite ladylike when they get into the stock exchange or the
prize ring. Look here, Sunshine! The country's over feminized as it
is. It's run by women, or by men who think as women, or by men who're
afraid of women. Congress is full of them; the courts are full of them;
the churches--the churches above all!--are full of them; and you'd make
it worse. If Guy hadn't the stuff in him that he has...."
Mrs. Ansley was more than ever like a cornstarch pudding, quivering and
undulating, when she rose. "You make it very hard for me, Philip. I was
going to ask Whitelaw, here, if when he's anywhere where Guy is--I know
Guy will have to go among young men, of course--he'd keep an eye on
him, and protect him."
"He doesn't need protection, ma'am. He can take his own part as easily
as I can take mine. If there's a row he likes to be in it; and if he's
licked he doesn't mind it. If he only had a chance...."
She raised her left hand palm outward, in a gesture of protest. "Thank
you! I'm not asking advice as to my own son."
Sailing from the room with the circumambient dignity of ladies when
they wore the crinoline, she left Tom with the crestfallen sense of
presumption. Half expecting to be ordered from the room, he turned
toward his host, who, however, simply reverted to the subject of the
summer. He told Tom where he could have lessons in driving, adding that
he would charge them to club expenses, as he would the uniform Tom
would have to wear. When Mr. Ansley picked up his paper the young man
knew the interview was over. With a half-articulate, "Good-night, sir,"
to which there was no response, he turned and left the room.
* * * * *
The occasion left him with much to think of, chiefly on his own
account. It marked his status more clearly than anything that had
happened to him yet. He had not been shaken hands with; he had not
been asked to sit down. He had not been greeted on arriving; his
"good-night" had not been acknowledged when he went away. Mr. Ansley
had called him Whitelaw, which was all very well; but when Mrs. Ansley
did it, the use of the name was significant. This must be the way in
which rich people treated their servants.
Here he had to reason with himself as to what he had been looking for.
It was not for recognition on a footing of equality. Of course not!
He had no objection to being a servant, since he needed the money.
He objected to ... and yet it was not quite tangible. He didn't mind
standing up; he didn't mind the absence of a greeting; he didn't mind
any one thing in itself. He minded the combination of assumptions, all
fusing into one big assumption that he was in essence their inferior.
Having this assumption so strongly in their minds, they couldn't but
betray it when they spoke to him.
With his tendency to think things out, he mulled for the next few days
over the question of inferiority. Why was one man inferior to another?
What made him so? Did nature send him into the world as an inferior, or
did the world turn him into an inferior after he had come into it? Did
God have any part in it? Was it God's will that there should be a class
system among mankind, with class animosities, class warfares?
Of the latter he was hearing a good deal. In Grove Street, with its
squirming litters of idealistic Jews and Slavs, class warfare was much
talked about. Sometimes Tom heard the talk himself; sometimes Honey
brought in reports of it. It was a rare day, especially a rare night,
when some wild-eyed apostle was not going up or down the hill with a
gospel which would have made old Boston, only a few hundred yards away,
shiver in its bed on hearing it. To a sturdy American like Tom, and
a sturdy Englishman like Honey, these whispered prophecies and plans
were no more than the twitter of sparrows going to roost. But now that
the boy was working toward man's estate, and had always, within his
recollection, been treated as an inferior, he found himself wondering
on what principle the treatment had been based. He would listen more
attentively when the Jew tailor next door to Mrs. Danker began again,
as he had so often, to set forth his arguments in favor of dragging
the upper classes down. He would listen when Honey cursed the lor of
proputty. He had long been asking himself if in some obscure depth of
Honey's obscure intelligence there might not be a glimmer of a great
big thing that was Right.
He had reached the age, which generally comes a little before the
twenties, when the Right and Wrong of things puzzled and disturbed him.
No longer able to accept Rights and Wrongs on somebody else's verdict,
he was without a test or a standard of his own. He began to wander
among churches. Here, he had heard, all these questions had been long
ago threshed out, and the answers reduced to formulæ.
His range was wide, Hebrew, Catholic, Protestant. For the most part the
services bewildered him. He couldn't make out why they were services,
or what they were serving. The sermons he found platitudinous.
They told him what in the main he knew already, and said little or
nothing of the great fundamental things with which his mind had been
intermittently busy ever since the days when he used to talk them over
with Bertie Tollivant.
But one new interest he drew from them. The fragments of the gospels
he heard read from altar or lectern or pulpit roused his curiosity.
Passages were familiar from having learned them at the knee, so to
speak, of Mrs. Tollivant. But they had been incoherent, without
introduction or sequence. He was surprised to find how little he knew
of the most dominant character in history.
On his way home one day he passed a shop given to the sale of Bibles.
Deciding to buy a cheap New Testament, he was advised by the salesman
to take a modern translation. That night, after he had finished his
lessons, and Honey was asleep, he opened it.
It opened at a page of St. Luke. Turning to the beginning of that
gospel, he started to read it through. He read avidly, charmed,
amazed, appeased, and pacified. When he came to an incident bearing on
himself he stopped.
"Now one of the Pharisees repeatedly invited Him to a meal at his
house. So He entered the house and reclined at the table. And there
was a woman in the town who was a notorious sinner. Having learnt that
Jesus was at table in the Pharisee's house she brought a flask of
perfume, and standing behind, close to His feet, weeping, began to wet
His feet with her tears; and with her hair she wiped the tears away
again, while she lovingly kissed His feet, and poured the perfume over
them.
"Noticing this the Pharisee, His host, said to himself:
"'This man, if He were really a prophet, would know who and what sort
of person this is who is touching Him, for she is an immoral woman.'
"In answer to his thoughts Jesus said to him: 'Simon, I have a word to
say to you.'
"'Rabbi, say on,' he replied.
"'Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You gave me no water
for my feet; but she has made my feet wet with her tears, and then
wiped the tears away with her hair. No kiss did you give me; but she,
from the moment I came in, has not left off tenderly kissing my feet.
No oil did you pour even on my head; but she has poured perfume on
my feet. This is the reason why I tell you that her sins--her _many_
sins--are forgiven--because she has loved much."
He shut the book with something of a bang. "So they used to do that
sort of thing even then!... The water for the feet, and the kiss, and
the oil, must have corresponded to our shaking hands and asking people
to sit down.... And they wouldn't show Him the courtesy.... He was
their inferior.... I wonder if He minded it.... It looks as if He did
because of the way He had it in His mind, and referred to it.... If the
woman hadn't turned up He would probably not have referred to it at
all.... He would have kept it to Himself ... without resentment.... The
little disdains of little people were too petty for Him to resent....
He could only be hurt by them ... but on their account."
He sat late into the night, thinking, thinking. Suddenly he thumped
the table, and sprang up. "I _won't_ resent it. They're good people
in their way. They don't mean any unkindness. It's only that they
think like everybody else. Honey would call them orthodocks. They're
courteous among themselves; they only don't know how far courtesy can
be made to go. They're--they're little. I'll be big--like Him."