It was after the March fairs, twelve years ago, that he had gone to
America. He had taken over a drove of cattle to Liverpool for his
father and uncles, had delivered them and received the purchase money.
There was one small venture of his own among the lot--a calf that he
had raised to be a personable heifer, and that brought him in nine
pounds. Along the docks he saw a liner bound for New York, a great
leviathan, like a city. The thing hypnotized him by its vastness.
"I 'm going to America," he said out loud on the pier; and in a great
glow he took his passage and sent home the purchase money for the
cattle.
He did not know at the time what the impulse was that sent him abroad,
and he did not trouble to analyze it. Later he found a motive, and it
was a false one. He might have asked his father, who had gone in an
ancient high moment to fight as a Papal Zouave against the onrush of
the Neapolitan cohorts on Rome. He might have asked his red- and
curly-headed brother Joe, who had once shipped from Newry to Iceland,
and to Archangel, in Russia, and to Vladivostok, coming home by way of
the China Seas. And, again, he might have asked the downy young of the
barnacle goose, who wing their way down southward when the first black
frost comes. All these could have told him.
He had very little difficulty in finding something to do in New York,
for a stocky, healthy man, with honesty written all over a clean-cut
face and looking unabashed from clear gray eyes, is an acquisition to
any employer. They put him to work on a street-car, conducting and
taking in the fares with assiduous honesty. The ten or twelve dollars
a week he made, and what he got for them, compared very unfavorably
with the healthful comfort and clean sea air of home. But the
adventure of the New World held his attention until home became an
affectionate and dull memory. And letters to and from Ireland were
rare.
He stood, in his stocking feet, as fine a specimen of strength and
health as there is outside the ranks of professional athletes; he was
good-looking in an impersonal way; to doubt his honesty was impossible
against the evidence of those gray eyes; but he had been allotted no
more than the usual share of brains. Wherefore, it took three years
for the New York idea to get home, which was to put money in his purse.
He went about it in the way one should expect of him. He sought a
position that gave reasonable promise of advancement. A great chain of
grocery stores gave him an assistantship in one of its shops.
"Hard work, and saving your money," he said to himself, "that's the way
you get on in the world."
And he got on, with his dogged persistence. Six years of that, with
the money he had saved, and he had set himself up in business on his
own account, in an out-of-the-way avenue, on the road to Coney
Island--a squat two-story building with an apartment upstairs and his
shop below. A long, bare street, newly bedded, with grayish-white
apartment-houses on each hand, so new that the mortar still lay in ugly
flecks about the sidewalk.
Opposite him a newly fitted chemist's shop showed garishly with its
green and red lights. A valet's store was beside him, and here and
there in the avenue gaps showed where the real-estate men had not yet
found capitalists to erect stores or flats. It was very bleak and new,
and somehow lonely; but in his own store he was happy and busy all day
long. He had had his name put on the glass window--William J.
Grant--in angular gold letters; and inside he and his assistant, a
sallow Scotch boy, attended customers, a lean but constant string.
They took loaves from the glass case on the counter, or dug butter from
the cool, moist vat, or ground coffee in the red mill that suggested a
ceremonial vessel in a Hindu temple. He wished the people in Ireland
could see him now.
"Ay!" he would say. "I think this would open their eyes."
He had heard much about Ireland and talked much about it since he came
to America--a great deal more than he had ever heard or talked about it
at home. And in his eyes now it had taken on a dim, distorted shape
and spirit. The physical contours of it he had forgotten--the lush
green hillsides, the fruitful orchards, the kine heavy with fat, the
dim, warm houses--all these were to him as though they had never been.
Instead of them, he saw a frail, worn country, with a vague spiritual
light emanating from it, like the light from the face of a man who
knows that death is near him and is resigned to it. The people about
him mentioned it with sympathetic voices. They spoke of the poverty of
it, with a sort of contemptuous affection. And little by little Grant
came to think of it in that way, too, as one thinks of a poor but
worthy relative.
"There 's no doubt to it," he would say to himself; "a man doesn't get
a chance there. He has to come over here." And he would look about
his store with proud satisfaction.
He began to think even of his own home as a place that the poisonous
finger of poverty had touched; and for a year now, and more, he had
thought of returning to see it. Maybe he could do something for the
people at home. A few pounds would come in useful. And, apart from
that, he could tell them some things that would help them along. He
would make them "get a move on," as the New York phrase went. Perhaps
he would take Joe, his brother, out and give him a chance to show what
he had in him. Perhaps they might all come out with him--the father
and mother too.
"Ay! Why not!" he would argue. "Why shouldn't they? What's there for
them in Ireland?"
He ruminated over the idea every day as he came from work to the brown
stone boarding-house where he lived, in Schermerhorn Street, a dingy,
unpalatable sort of place that had become a home to him. There were
employees of department-stores there; and an occasional theatrical
couple stayed a week in it, a week electric with criticism. In the
summer evenings the boarders sat on the stoop, and in the winter they
congregated inside to be played to in insufficient light on a tinkling
piano. For Grant the place had a metropolitan quality that others
sought in the great hotels.
And, with the same care he had used in mapping out his business career,
he watched for somebody to marry.
He found her in the boarding-house--a trim and rather pale girl, who
acted as though she were twenty and looked twenty-eight, but whom the
Vital Statistics Bureau had registered as having been born thirty years
before. Her hair was black and glossy, and her eyes were big and black
and lustrous; her face, outside those features, was the face of a
hundred others. But what captivated Grant about her was her chicness,
her quality of being up-to-the-minute in dress and deed and word.
Grant liked the flare of her wide skirts and the gray suede shoes
lacing up the sides. He liked the faint powder on her face, and her
carefully cultured eyebrows. He liked her talk of skating and of the
new theatrical pieces, and her ability to do the latest twirls in the
one-step. Her name was Miss Levine--Ada Levine.
"It's not every man could have a wife like that!" he told himself; and
he thought of the awe in which his people in Ireland would behold her.
She talked to him interestedly of his prospects and the trend of
business in his direction; and that pleased him, for, what with that
interest and with the training she received in the department-store
where she worked, she would be exactly what he needed to get on in the
world. He told her of his intention of going back home for a month, of
putting the store in the care of a friend of his from the old business
where he had worked.
"And when I come back," he said, "I 'd like to say something to you."
She sat on the steps quietly and lowered her eyes demurely. "That is,"
he continued, "if nobody gets there before me."
She looked up at him and smiled.
"That's a date," she agreed.
His heart expanded blithely. Everything was settled now. Life showed
in front of him like a straight line. A wife like that! And his
thriving business! Now he would go back to Ireland and show them
something!