The little shop was closed. The fruit-trays had been carried in and the
shutters put up, and from an upper window a line of light gleamed on the
deserted street. Achilles glanced at it and turned into an alley at the
side, groping his way toward the rear. He stopped and fumbled for a knob
and rapped sharply. But a hand was already on the door, scrambling to
undo it, and an eager face confronted him, flashing white teeth at him.
“You come!” said the boy swiftly.
He turned and fled up the stairs and Achilles followed. A faint sense
of onions was in the air. Achilles sniffed it gratefully. He remembered
suddenly that he had not eaten since morning. But the boy did not
pause for him--he was beckoning with mysterious hand from a doorway
and Achilles followed. “Alcie--got hurt,” whispered the boy. He was
trembling with fear and excitement, and he pointed to the bed across the
room.
Achilles stepped, with lightest tread, and looked down. A boy, half
asleep, murmured and turned his head restlessly. A red-clotted blur ran
along the forehead, and the face, streaked with mud, was drawn in a look
of pain. As Achilles bent over him, the boy cried out and threw up a
hand; then he turned his head, muttering, and dozed again.
Achilles withdrew lightly, beckoning to the boy beside him.
Yaxis followed, his eyes on the figure on the bed. “All day,” he said,
“he lie sick.”
Achilles closed the door softly and turned to him. “Tell me, Yaxis, what
happened,” he said.
The boy’s face opened dramatically. “I look up--I see Alcie--like
that--” his gesture fitted to the room--“He stand in door--all covered
mud--blood run--cart broke--no fruit--no hat.” The boy’s hands were
everywhere, as he spoke, dispensing fruit, smashing carts and filling up
the broken words with horror and a flow of blood. Achilles’s face grew
grave. The Greeks were not without persecution in the land of freedom,
and his boy had lain all day suffering--while he had been lost in the
great house by the lake.
He took off his coat and turned back his sleeves. “You bring water,” he
said gently. “We will see what hurts him.”
But the boy had put his supper on the table and was beckoning him with
swift gesture. “You eat,” he said pleadingly. And Achilles ate hastily
and gave directions for the basin of water and towels and a sponge, and
the boy carried them into the room beyond.
Half an hour later Alcibiades lay in bed, his clothes removed and the
blood washed from his face and hair. The clotted line still oozed a
little on the temple and the look of pain had not gone away. Achilles
watched him with anxious eyes. He bent over the bed and spoke to him
soothingly, his voice gentle as a woman’s in its soft Greek accents;
but the look of pain in the boy’s face deepened and his voice chattered
shrill.
They watched the ambulance drive away from in front of the striped
awning. Achilles held a card in his thin fingers--a card that would
admit him to his boy. Yaxis’s eyes were gloomy with dread, and his
quick movements were subdued as he went about the business of the shop,
carrying the trays of fruit to the stall outside and arranging the
fruit under the striped awning. He was not to go out with the push-cart
to-day. There was too much work to do--and Achilles could not let the
boy go from him. Later, too, Achilles must go to the hospital--and to
the big house on the lake, and someone must be left with the shop.
So he kept the boy beside him, looking at him, now and then, with deep,
quiet eyes that seemed to see the city taking its toll of life--of
children--the children at play and the children at work. This land that
he had sought with his boys--where the wind of freedom blew fresh from
the prairies and the sea... and even little children were not safe! He
seemed to see it--through the day--this great monster that gathered them
in--from all lands--and trod them beneath its great feet, crushing them,
while they lifted themselves to it and threw themselves--and prayed to
it for the new day--that they had come so far to seek.
But when Achilles presented his ticket for the boy, at the hospital
door, it was a woman of his own race who met him, dark-eyed and
strong--and smiled at him a flash of sympathy. “Yes--he is doing well.
They operated at once. Come and see. But you must not speak to him.” She
led him cautiously down the long corridor between the beds. “See, he is
asleep.” She bent over him, touching the bandage. Beneath it, the dark
skin was pallid, but the breath came easily from the sleeping lips.
She smiled at Achilles, guiding him from the room, ignoring the tears
that looked at her. “He is doing well, you see. It was pressure that
caused the fever, the bone was not injured. He will recover quickly.
Yes. We are glad!”
And Achilles, out under the clear sky, raised his face and caught the
sound of the city--its murmured, innumerable toil and the great clang
of wheels turning. And he drew a deep, quick breath. A city of power
and swift care for its own. The land of many hands reaching out to the
world. And Achilles’s head lifted itself under the sky; and a mighty
force knit within him--a deep, quiet force out of the soul of the
past--pledging itself.