To Tom Whitelaw this was the conclusion of the whole matter. A son must
have a mother as well as a father. If there was no mother there was no
son. The inference brought him a relief in which there were two strains
of regret.
He would be farther away from Hildred. They would have more trials to
meet, more bridges to cross. Very well! He was not accustomed to having
things made easy. For whatever he possessed, which was not much, he had
longed and worked and worked and longed till he got it. But he got it
in the end. In the end he would get Hildred. Better win her so than to
have her drop as a present in his arms. If not wholly content, he was
sure.
In the matter of his second regret he was only sorry. It began to grow
clear to him that a father needs a son more than a son needs a father.
Of this kind of need he himself knew nothing. He was what he was,
detached, independent, assured. He never asked for sympathy, and if he
craved for love, he had learned to stifle the craving, or direct it
into the one narrow channel which flowed toward Hildred. The paternal
and filial instinct, having had no function in his life, seemed to have
shriveled up.
But the instinct of response to the slightest movement of goodwill, to
the faintest plea for help, was active with daily use. It leaped forth
eagerly; if it couldn't leap forth something within him fretted and
cried like a hound when the scent leads to earth. As Paul the Apostle,
he could be all things to all men, if by any means he might help some.
If Henry Whitelaw needed a son, he could be a son to him. The tie of
blood was in no small measure a matter of indifference. His impulse was
like Honey's "next o' kin." He remembered, as he had learned in school,
that kin and kind were words with a common origin. Whitelaw's truest
kinship with himself was in his kindness. His kinship with Whitelaw
could as truly be in his devotion. Devotion was what he could offer
most spontaneously.
If only that could satisfy the father yearning for his son! It could
do it up to a point, since the banker identified kindness and kinship
much as he did himself. But beyond that point there was the cry of the
middle-aged man for some one who was part of himself on whom he could
lean now that his strength was beginning to decline. That his two
acknowledged children were nothing but a care sent him groping all the
more eagerly for the son who might be a support to him. The son who was
not a son might be better than no one, as he himself confessed; and yet
nothing on earth could satisfy his empty soul but his own _son_. Not to
be that son made Tom sorry; but without a mother, how could he be?
Otherwise, to remain as what life had made him was unalloyed relief.
He was himself. In his own phrase, he was more himself than most men.
But to enter the Whitelaw family, _and belong to it_, would turn him
into some one else. He might have a right there; an accident such as
happens every day might easily make him the head of it; and yet he
would have to put forth affections and develop points of view which
could only come from a man with another kind of past. To be the son of
that mother, and the brother of that sister, sorry for them as he was,
would mean the kind of metamorphosis, the change in the whole nature,
of which he had read in ancient mythology. He would make the attempt if
he was called to it; but he shrank from the call.
Nevertheless, he took up his job as assistant to the great man's
confidential secretary. This was a Mr. Phips whom Tom didn't like, but
with whom he got on easily. He easily got on with him because Mr. Phips
himself made a point of it.
A rubicund, smiling man, he had to be seen twice before you gave him
credit for his unctuous ability. There was in him that mingling of
honesty and craft which go to make the henchman, and sometimes the
ecclesiastic. While he couldn't originate anything, he could be an
instrument accurate and sharp. Always ready to act boldly, it was with
a boldness of which some one else must assume the responsibility. He
could be the power behind the throne, but never the power sitting on it
publicly. With an almost telepathic gift for reading Whitelaw's mind,
he could carry out its wishes before they were expressed. From sheer
induction he could, in a secondary way, direct affairs from which he
never took a penny of the profits over and above his salary.
Again like the ecclesiastic and the henchman, he had neither will
nor conscience beyond the cause he served. A born factotum, with no
office but to carry out, he accepted Tom without questioning. Without
questioning he set him to those duties which, as a beginner, would be
within his grasp. He didn't need to be told that when a message or a
document was to be sent to the most private of all offices, it should
be through the person of this particular young man. Without having
invented for Tom the soubriquet of the Whitelaw Baby, he didn't frown
at it on hearing it pass round the office, as it did within a few days.
Tom found Whitelaw welcoming, considerate, but at first a little
distant. He might have been conscious of the anomalies in the
situation; he might have been anxious not to rush things; he might even
have been shy. Except to ask him, toward the end of each day, how he
was getting along, he didn't speak to him alone.
Then, on the fourth morning, Whitelaw sent for him. As Tom entered he
was standing up, a packet in his hand.
"I want you to take a taxi and go up to my house. Ask for my wife, and
give her this." He made the nature of the errand clearer. "It's the
anniversary of our wedding. She thinks I've forgotten it. I've only
been waiting to send this--by you."
The significance of the mission came to Tom while he was on the way.
The thing in the packet, probably a jewel, was the token of a marriage
of which he was the eldest born. It was to mark his position in the
husband's mind that he was made the bearer of the gift. He had no
opinion as to this, except that in the appeal to the wife there was an
element of futility.
In the big dim hall he met the second born. To answer the door Dadd had
left the task of helping the one-armed fellow into his spring overcoat.
As Tom came in the poor left arm was struggling with the garment
viciously. Tad broke into a greeting vigorous, but non-committal.
"Hello, by Gad!"
Tom went straight to his business. "Your father has sent me with a
message to Mrs. Whitelaw. I understand she's at home."
"So you've got here! I knew you'd work it some day."
"You were very perspicacious."
"I was. And there's another thing I'll tell you. You've got round the
old man. Well, I'm not going to stand for it. See?"
"I see; but it's got nothing to do with me. Your father's given me a
job. If you don't want him to do it you ought to tackle him."
Whatever war had done for Tad it had not ennobled him. The face was old
and seamed and stained with a dark red flush. It was scowling too, with
the helpless scowl of impotence. Tom was sorrier for him than he had
ever been before.
Having taken his hat and stick, Tad strode off, turning only on the
doorstep. "But there's one thing I'll say right now. If you've got a
job at Meek and Brokenshire's I'll damn well have a better one. I'm
going to keep my eye on you."
Tom laughed, good-naturedly. "That's the very best thing you could do.
Nothing would please your father half so well. You'd buck him up, and
at the same time get your knife into me."
As the door closed behind Tad Miss Nash came forward from somewhere in
the obscurity. She was in that tremulous ecstasy which the mere sight
of Tom always roused in her. She was so very sorry, but Mrs. Whitelaw
wasn't able to receive him. If Tom would leave his package with her she
would see that it was delivered.
On the next afternoon as Tom was leaving the office Whitelaw offered
him a lift uptown. In the seclusion of the limousine the father spoke
of Tad.
"He's a great care to me, but somehow I feel that you might do him
good."
"He wouldn't let me. I can't get near him, except by force."
"But force is what he respects. In the bottom of his heart he respects
you."
"What he needs is a job--the smallest job you could offer him in the
bank. If you could put it to him as a sporting proposition that he was
to get ahead of me...."
"That's what I'll try to do."
In the course of a few days the lift uptown had become a custom.
Though he had never received instructions to that effect, Mr. Phips so
shaped Tom's duties that he found himself leaving the office at the
same moment as the banker. Once or twice when things did not so happen
Whitelaw came into the room where Tom was at work to look for him. If
no one else saw it Mr. Phips did, that the lift uptown was the big
minute of the banker's day.
"I've got a son," the secretary pondered to himself, "but I'll be
hanged if I feel about him like that. I suppose it's because I never
lost him."
"Tad's applied to me for a job," the father informed Tom in the
limousine one day. "The next thing will be to make him stick to it."
"I believe I could manage that, once we get him there," Tom said
confidently. "I can't always make him drink, but I can hold his head to
the water. I did that at college more than once."
"I know you did. I can't tell you...."
A tremor of the voice cut short this sentence, but Tom knew what would
have been said: "I can't tell you what it means to me now to have some
one to fall back upon. The children have given me a good deal of worry
which their mother couldn't share because of her unhappiness. But
now--I've got you." Tom was glad, however, that it had not been put
into words.