It was late that evening before Tom found an opportunity to ask Miss
Padley, who kept what the inn-club knew as the office, the name of the
guest who had questioned him so closely. Miss Padley was a red-haired,
freckled girl, putting herself through Radcliffe. Unused to clerical
work, she was tired. When Tom put his query she gazed up at him
vacantly, before she could collect her wits.
"The name of the gentleman who left this afternoon?" She called to
Ella, one of the waitresses, in her second year at Wellesley. "What was
it, Ella? I forget."
As the house was closing for the night some informality was possible.
Ella sauntered up.
"What was what?"
Tom's question was repeated.
"Oh, that was the great Henry T. Whitelaw. Big banker. Partner in Meek
and Brokenshire's. They say that he and a few other bankers could stop
the war if they liked, by holding back the cash. Don't believe it.
War's too big. And, say! He was the father of that Whitelaw baby there
used to be all the talk about."
Miss Padley looked up, her cheek resting on her hand. "You don't say!
Gee, I wish I'd known that. I'd 'a looked at him a little closer." She
turned her tired greenish eyes toward Tom. "Your name is Whitelaw,
too, isn't it?"
He grinned nervously. "My name is Whitelaw, too, only, like the lady's
maid whose name was Shakespeare but was no relation to the play-actor
of that name, I don't belong to the banking branch of the family."
Ella exclaimed, as one who makes a discovery. "But, Siegfried, you look
as if you did. Doesn't he, Blanche? Look at his eyebrows. They're just
like the banker man's."
"Oh, I've looked at them often enough," Miss Padley returned, wearily.
"Got his mustaches stuck on in the wrong place. I'm off."
Yawning, she shut her ledger, closed an open drawer, and rose. But
Ella, a dark little thing, kept her snappy black eyes on Tom.
"You do look like him, Siegfried. I'd put in a claim if I were you. I'm
single, you know, and I've always admired you. Think of the romance
it would make if the Whitelaw baby took home as his bride a poor but
honest working girl!"
Dodging Ella's chaff, Tom escaped to the garage. It was queer how the
Whitelaw baby haunted him. Honey!--Ella!--and the Whitelaw baby's own
father!
But the haunting stopped. Neither Ella nor Miss Padley took it as more
than a passing pleasantry, forgotten with the morning. The tall man who
had asked him questions never came back again. The rest of the summer
went by with but one little incident to remain in his memory.
It was a very little incident. Walking one day in the road that ran
round the lake he came face to face with Hildred Ansley. She had
grown since the previous winter, a little in height, and more in an
indefinable development. She was fifteen now; but, always older than
her age, she was more like seventeen or eighteen. Her formal manner,
her decided mind, her "grown-up" choice of words, made her already
something of that finished entity for which we have only the word lady.
Ella had said of her that at twenty she would look like forty, and at
forty continue to look like twenty. Tom thought that this might be
true--an early fullness of womanhood, but a long one.
She had been playing tennis, and swung her racket as she came along. He
was sorry for this direct encounter, since she might find it awkward;
but when she waved her racket to him, it was clear that she did not.
She felt perhaps the more independent, released from her mother's
supervision and the inn. Her smile, something in her way of pausing in
the road, an ease of manner beyond analysis, put them both on the plane
on which their acquaintance had begun. The slanting yellowish-brown
eyes together with the faint glimmer of a smile heightened that air of
mystery which had always made her different from other girls.
"How have you been getting along?"
He said he had been doing very well.
"How have you liked the job?"
"Fine! Everybody's been nice to me--"
"Everybody likes you. All the same, I hope, if they ask you to come
back next year, that--you won't."
"Why not?"
"Oh, just--because!"
Slipping away, she left him with the summer's second memory. She hoped
he wouldn't take the place again--_because_! Because--what? Could she
have meant what he thought she must have meant? Was it possible that
she didn't like to see him in a situation something like a servant's?
Though he never again, during all the rest of the summer, had so much
speech with her alone, it gave him a hint to turn over in his mind.
Driving the car back to Boston, after the inn-club had closed, he saw
Maisie for the last time that year. Uncertain of his hours, he had been
unable to arrange to have her meet him, and so looked her up in her
home. A small wooden house, once stained a dark red, weather-worn now
to a reddish-dun, it stood on the outskirts of the town. In a weedy
back-yard, redeemed from ugliness by the flaming of a maple tree,
Maisie was pinning newly washed clothes to a clothes-line stretched
between the back door and a post. Two children, a boy of six and a girl
of eight, were tumbling about with a pup. At sound of the stopping
of the car in the roadway in front of the house Maisie turned, a
clothes-pin held lengthwise in her mouth. Even with her sleeves rolled
up and her hair in wisps, she couldn't be anything but pretty.
She came and sat beside him in the car, the children and the pup
staring up at them in wonder.
"Gee, I wish he'd get married; but I daresay he won't for ever so long.
Married to the bottle, that's what he is. It was six years after my
mother died before he took on the last one. That's what makes me so
much older than the four kids. All the same I'd beat it if you'd take
a shofer's job and settle down. I'm not bound to stay here and make
myself a slave."
It was the burden of all Maisie's reasoning, and he had to admit
its justice. He was asking her to wait a long four years before he
could give her a home. It would have been more preposterous than it
was if among poor people, among poor young people especially, a long
courtship, with marriage as a vague fulfillment, was not general. Any
such man as she was likely to get would have to toil and save, and save
and toil, before he could pay for the few sticks of furniture they
would need to set up housekeeping. Never having thought of anything
else, she was the more patient now; but patient with a strain of
rebellion against Tom's whim for education.
She cried when he left her; he almost cried himself, from a sense of
his impotence to take her at once from a life of drudgery. The degree
to which he loved her seemed to be secondary now to her helpless need
of him. True, he could get a job as chauffeur and make a hundred
dollars a month to begin with. To Maisie that would be riches; but
a hundred and fifty a month would then become his lifelong limit
and ambition. Even to save Maisie now he couldn't bring himself to
sacrifice not merely his future but her own. Once he was "through
college," it seemed to him that the treasures of the world would lie
open.
Arrived in Grove Street, he found one new condition which made his
return easier. Honey, who, for the sake of economy, had occupied a
hall-bedroom through the summer, had reserved another, on the floor
above, for Tom. The relief from the sharing of one big room amounted to
a sense of luxury.
On the other hand, Honey, for the first time since Tom had known him,
was moody and tired. He was not ill; he was only less cast-iron than
he used to be. He found it harder to go to work in the morning; he was
more spent when he came back at night, as if some inner impulse of
virility was wearing itself out. The war worried him. The fact that old
England had met a foe whom she couldn't walk over at once disturbed his
ideas as to the way in which the foundations of the world had been laid.
"Anything can happen now, kid," he declared, in discussing the English
retreat from Mons. "Haven't felt so bad since the bloody cop give me
the whack with his club what put out me eye. If Englishmen has to turn
tail before Germans, well, what next?"
But to Tom's suggestions that he should go to Canada and enlist in
the British army Honey was as stone. "You're too young. Y'ain't
got yer growth. I don't care what no one says. War is for men. Yer
first business, and yer last business, and yer only business, is yer
eddication."
It must be admitted that Tom agreed with him. He had no longing to go
to war. Europe was far away while life was near. Education, Maisie, the
future, had the first claim on him. It began to occur to him that even
Honey had a claim on him, now that he was not so vigorous as he used to
be.
There were other interests to make war remote. On returning to town,
after a summer amid the spaciousness, beauty, and comfort which the
few could give themselves, he was oppressed by the privations of the
many. Never before had he thought of them. He had taken Grove Street
for granted. He had taken it for granted that life was hard and crowded
and bitter and cold and ugly, and couldn't be anything else. Now he had
seen for himself that it could be easy and beautiful and healthy. True,
he had always known that there were rich people as well as poor people;
but never before had he been close enough to the rich to see their
luxuries in detail. The contrasts in the human scheme of things having
thus come home to him he was moved to a distressed wondering.
What brought these differences about? If all the rich were industrious
and good, while all the poor were idle and extravagant, he could
have understood it better. But it wasn't so. The rich were often
idle and extravagant, and didn't suffer. The poor were nearly always
industrious--they couldn't be anything else--and were as good as they
had leisure to be, but suffered from something all the time. How could
this injustice be endured? What was to be done about it? Wasn't it
everybody's duty to try to right such a wrong?
Because he had only now become aware of it he supposed that nobody
but the Slav and Jewish agitators had been aware of it before.
Louisburg Square, and all that element in the world which Louisburg
Square represented, could never have thought of it. If it had, it
couldn't have slept at night in its bed. That it should lie snug
and soft and warm while all the rest of the world--at least a good
three-fourths--lay cold and hard and hungry, must be out of the
question. If the rich people only knew! It was strange that someone
hadn't told them. What were the newspapers and the governments and the
churches doing that they weren't ringing with protests against this
fundamental evil?
More than ever Honey's rebellion against the lor of proputty seemed to
him based on some principle he couldn't trace. Honey was doubtless all
wrong; and yet the other thing was just as wrong as Honey. He started
him talking on the subject as they strolled to their dinner that
evening.
"Seems as if this 'ere old human race didn't have no spunk. Yer can
put anything over on them, and they'll 'ardly lift a kick. It's like
as if they was hypnertized. Them as has got everything is hypnertized
into thinkin' they've a right to it; and them as have got nothink'll
let theirselves believe as nothink is all that belongs to 'em. Comes o'
most o' the world bein' orthodocks. Lord love yer, I'd rather think for
meself if it landed me ten months out'n every twelve in jail, than have
two thousand a year and yet be an old tabby-orthodock what never had a
mind."
They were seated at the table in Mrs. Turtle's basement dining-room,
when, looking up and down the double row of guests, Honey whispered,
"Tabby-orthodocks--all of 'em."
At his sixteen or eighteen fellow-mealers Tom looked with a new vision.
With the aid of Honey's epithet he could class them. Mostly men, they
sat bowed, silent, futile, gulping down their coarse food with no
pretense at softening the animal processes of eating. These, too, he
had hitherto taken for granted. In all the months they had "mealed" at
Mrs. Turtle's--in the years they had "mealed" at similar establishments
in Grove Street--he had looked on them, and on others of their kind,
as the norm of humanity. Now he saw something wrong in them, without
knowing what it was.
"What's the matter with them?" he asked of Honey, as they went back
across Grove Street to Mrs. Danker's.
Honey's reply was standardized. "Bein' orthodocks. Not thinkin' for
theirselves. Not usin' the mind as Gord give 'em. Believin' what other
blokes told 'em, and stoppin' at that. I say, Kiddy! Don't yer never go
for to forget that yer'll get farther in the world by bein' wrong the
way yer thinks yerself than by bein' right the way some other feller
tells yer."
Having reached their own house they stood, each with a foot on the
doorstep, while Tom smoked a cigarette and Honey enlarged on his
philosophy.
"I don't believe as Gord put us into this world to be right not 'arf so
much as what He done it so as we'd find out for ourselves what's right
and what's wrong. One right thing as yer've found out for yerself'll
make yer more of a man than fifty as yer've took on trust. Look at 'em
in there!" He nodded backward toward Mrs. Turtle's. "They've all took
everythink on trust, and see what it's made of 'em. Whoever says, 'I'm
an orthodock, and I'm goin' to live and die an orthodock,' is like the
guy in the Bible as was bound 'and and foot with grave-clothes. My
genius was always for thinkin' things out for meself; and look at me
to-day!"
It was another discovery to Tom that Honey felt proud and happy in his
accomplishment. Honey to Tom was a machine for doing heavy work. He
was a drudge, and a dray-horse. He was shut out from the higher, the
more spiritual activities. But here was Honey himself content, and in a
measure exultant.
"Been wrong in a lot o' things I have; but I've found it out for
meself. I ain't sorry for what I've did. It's learned me. There ain't a
old jug I've been in, in England or the State o' New York, that didn't
learn me somethink. I see now that I was wrong. But I see, too, that
them as tried and sentenced me wasn't right. When they repents of the
sins what their lors and gover'ments and churches has committed against
this old world, I'll repent o' the sins I've committed against them."
This ability to stand alone, mentally at least, against all religion
and society, was, as Tom saw it, the secret of Honey's independence. He
might have been a rogue, a burglar, a convict; and yet he was a man,
as the orthodocks at Mrs. Turtle's were not, and never had been, men.
Having allowed themselves to be hammered into subjection by what Honey
called lors, gover'ments, and churches, in subjection they had been
trapped, and never could get out again. There was something about Honey
that was strong and free.