When they told Marcia Van Meter (Mrs. Horace Flack) that her little boy
would always be lame, that not one of the great surgeon-wizards on
either side of the Atlantic--not all the king's horses and all the
king's men could ever weight or wrench or force the small, thin left leg
down to the length of the right, she vowed to herself that she would
make it up to him. She was a pretty thing, transparently frail and
ethereal-looking, who had always projected herself passionately into the
lives of those about her--her father's and mother's--the young husband's
who had died soon after her son was born--and now her boy's. While he
was less than ten years old it seemed to her that she compassed it; if
he could not race and run with his contemporaries he rode the smartest
of ponies and drove clever little traps; if he might not join in the
rough sports out of doors he had a houseful of brilliant mechanical
toys; he lived like a little Prince--like a little American Prince with
a magic bottomless purse at his command. But when he left his little
boyhood behind she discovered her futility; she discovered the small,
pitiful purchasing power of money, after all. She could not buy him
bodily strength and beauty; she could not buy him fellowship in the
world of boys; he was forever looking out at it, wistfully,
disdainfully, bitterly, through his plate glass window.
She spent herself untiringly for him,--playmates, gifts, tutors,
journeys. Her happiest moments were those in which he said, "Mother, I'd
like one of those wireless jiggers,"--or a new saddle-horse, or a new
roadster--and she was able to answer, "Dearest, I'll get it for you!
Mother'll get it for you to-morrow!"
But the days when she could spell omnipotence for him were fading away.
He wanted now, increasingly, things beyond her gift. He was a clever
boy, proud, poised. He learned early to wear a mask of indifference
about his lameness, to affect a coolness for sports which came,
eventually, to be genuine. He studied easily and well; he could talk
with a brilliancy beyond his years. He learned--astonishingly, at his
age--to get his deepest satisfactions from creature comforts--his
quietly elegant clothes, his food, his surroundings. Mrs. Van Meter had
high hopes of the move to Los Angeles; he was to be benefited, body and
brain. She was a little anxious at finding they had moved into a
neighborhood of boys and girls; Carter was happier with older people,
but he seemed to like these lively, robust creatures surprisingly.
Weeks, months, a year, went by. Carter, less than a year older than
Jimsy King but two years ahead of him in his studies, was doing some
special work at the University of Southern California, but his time was
practically his own--to spend with Honor and Jimsy. Honor and Jimsy
showed, each of them, the imprint of their association with him. They
had come to care more for the things he held high ... books ... theaters
... dinners at the Crafts Alexandria ... Grand Opera records on the
victrola ... more careful dress.
"Carter has really done a great deal for those children," Mildred
Lorimer told her husband, complacently.
"Yes," Stephen admitted. "It's true. He has. And"--he sighed--"they
haven't done a thing for him."
"Stephen dear,--what could they do--crude children that they are, beside
a boy with his advantages? What could they do for him?--Make him play
football? What did you expect them to do?"
"I don't know," he said, moodily, "but at any rate they haven't done
it."
Jimsy King was going--by the grace of his own frantic eleventh hour
efforts and his teachers' clemency and Honor Carmody--to graduate.
Barring calamities, he would possess a diploma in February. Honor was
tremendously earnest about it; Carter, to whom learning came as easily
as the air he breathed, faintly amused. She thought, sometimes, for
brief, traitorous moments, that Carter wasn't always good for Jimsy.
"You see," she explained to her stepfather, "Carter doesn't realize how
hard Jimsy has to grind for all he gets. Even now, Stepper, after being
here a year, he actually doesn't realize the importance of Jimsy's
getting signed up to play. It's a strange thing, with all his
cleverness, but he doesn't, and he's always taking Jimsy out on parties
and rides and things, and he gets behind in everything. I think I'll
just have to speak to him about it."
He nodded. "That's a good idea, Top Step. Do that."
She grew still more sober. "Another thing, Stepper ... about--about Mr.
King's--trouble. Of course, you and I have never believed that Jimsy
_had_ to inherit it, have we?"
"No. Not if people let him alone. His life, his training, his
environment, are very different--more wholesome, vital. The energy which
his grandfather and his uncles and his father had to find a vent for in
cards and drink Jimsy's sweated out in athletics."
"Yes. But--just the same--isn't it better for Jimsy to keep away
from--from those things?"
"Naturally. Better for anybody."
She sighed. "Carter doesn't think so. He says the world is full of
it--Jimsy must learn to be near it and let it alone."
"That's true, in a sense, T. S...."
"I know. But--sometimes I think Carter deliberately takes Jimsy places
to--test him. Of course he thinks he's doing right, but it worries me."
Stephen Lorimer smoked in silence. He had his own ideas. "Better have
that talk with him," he said.
Honor found the talk oddly disturbing. Carter was very sweet about it as
he always was with her, but he held stubbornly to his own opinion.
"Look here, Honor, you can't follow Jimsy through the world like a
nursemaid, you know."
"Carter! I don't mean----"
"He's got to meet and face these things, to fight what somebody calls
'the battle of his blood.' You mustn't wrap him up in cotton wool. If
he's going, to be bowled over he might as well find it out. He must take
his chances--just as any other fellow--just as I must."
"Oh, but, Carter, you know you're strong, and----"
Suddenly his pale face was stung with hot color. "Honor," he leaned
forward, "you think I'm strong, in _any_ way? You don't consider me
an--utter weakling?"
She looked with comprehending tenderness at his crimson face. "Why,
Carter, dear! You know I've never thought you that! There are more ways
of being--being strong than--than just with muscles and bones!"
He reached out and took one of her firm, tanned hands in his, and she
had never seen him so winningly wistful, so wistfully winning. "I
thought," he said, very low, "that was the only kind of strength that
counted with you. Then--I do count with you, Honor? I do?"
She was a little startled, a little frightened, wholly uncomfortable.
There was something in Carter's voice she didn't understand ... something
she didn't want to understand. She pulled her hand away and managed her
boyish grin. "Of course you do,--goose! And you'll count more if you'll
help me to look after Jimsy and have him graduate on time!" She got up
quickly as her stepfather came into the room, and Carter went home,
crossing the street with the rather pathetic arrogance of his halting
gait, his head held high, tilted a little back, which gave him the
expression of looking down on a world of swift striders.
He found his mother reading before a low fire. "Well, dearest?" She
smiled up at him, yearningly.
He stood looking down at her, his face working. "Mother, I want Honor
Carmody."
"Carter!"
"I want Honor Carmody." He rode over her murmured protests. "I know I'm
only nineteen. I know I'm too young--she's too young. I'd expect to
wait, of course. But--_I want her_."
Marcia Van Meter's heart cried out to her to say again as she had said
all through his little-boy days, "Dearest, Mother'll get her for you!
Mother'll get her for you to-morrow!" But instead her gaze went down to
the page she had been reading ... the last scene in "Ghosts," where
Oswald Alving says:
"_Mother, give me the sun! The sun!! The Sun!!!_" She shivered and shut
the book with emphasis and threw it on a near-by chair. She spoke
brightly, reassuringly. "I'm sure she's devoted to you, dear. You are
the best of friends, and that's enough for the present, isn't it?"
"No."
"Dearest, you've said yourself that you realize you're too young for
anything serious, yet. Why can't you wait contentedly, until----"
"There's some one else. There's Jimsy."
"Carter, I'm sure they're like brother and sister. They have been
playmates all their lives. That sort of thing rarely merges into
romance."
"Doesn't it?" His voice was seeking, hungry. "Honestly?"
"_Very_ rarely, dear, believe me!" She sped to comfort him. "Besides,
her people, her mother, would never want anything of that sort ... the
taint in his blood ... the reputation of his family.... Mrs. Lorimer
says they've always been called the 'Wild Kings.' Of course Jimsy seems
quite all right, so far, and I hope and pray he always may be--he's a
dear boy and I'm very fond of him--but, as he grows older and is beset
by more temptations----"
The boy relaxed a little from his pale rigidity and sat down opposite
his mother. He held out his hands to the fire and she saw that they were
trembling. "Yes," he said, "I've thought of that. I've thought of that.
Perhaps, when he gets to college--up at Stanford, away from Honor--I've
thought of that!" He bent his head, staring into the fire.
His mother did not see the expression on his face. "Besides, dear,
Honor's going abroad next year, for her voice. She'll meet new people,
form new ties----"
"That doesn't cheer me up very much, Mother."
"I mean," she hastened, "it will break up the life-long intimacy with
Jimsy. And perhaps you and I can go over for the summer, and take her to
Switzerland with us. Wouldn't that be jolly? You know, dear," she
hesitated, delicately, "while we know that money isn't everything, you
are going to have far more to offer a girl, some day, than poor Jimsy
King."
"And less," said Carter Van Meter.
He found Honor a little constrained at their next meeting and he hurried
to put her at her old time ease with him. He steered the talk on to the
coming football game and Honor was herself. Los Angeles High School,
champion of Southern California, was to meet Greenmount, the northern
champion, and nothing else in the world mattered very much to her and to
Jimsy.
"It's so perfect, Carter, to have it come in Jimsy's last year,--to win
the State Championship for L. A. just before he leaves."
"Sure of winning?"
"It will be pretty stiff going. They're awfully good, Greenmount. Not as
good as we are, on the whole, but they've got a punter--Gridley--who's a
perfect _wizard_! If they can get within a mile of our goal, he can put
it over! But--we've got to win. We've simply got to--and 'You can't beat
L. A. High!'"
She went to watch football practice every afternoon and Carter nearly
always went with her. In the evenings Jimsy came over for her help with
his lessons. He had studied harder and better, this last year; his fine
brain was waking, catching up with his body, but he was busier than
ever, too, and his "Skipper" had still to be on deck. He was discovered,
that last year, to have an unsuspected talent, Jimsy King. He could act.
His class-play was an ambitious one, a late New York success, a play of
sport and youngness, and Jimsy played the lead. "No," the pretty Spanish
teacher said, "he didn't play that part; he _was_ it!" It was going to
be fine for him at Stanford, Honor's mothering thought raced ahead. The
more he had to do, the more things he was interested in....
He came in grinning a few nights before the championship game. "Say,
Skipper, what do you think they gave me on that essay? A _B_. A measly
_B_. Made me so sore I darn near told 'em who wrote it!"
"Jimsy! You wrote it yourself, really. I just smoothed it up a little."
"Yep, just a little! Well, either they're wise, or they just figured it
couldn't be a top-notcher if I'd written it!" He cast himself on the
couch. "Gee, Skipper, I can't work to-night! I'm a dying man! That
dinner Carter bought me last night----"
"Jimsy! You didn't--break training?"
"No. But I skated pretty close to the edge. You know, it's funny, but
when I'm out with Carter I feel like such a boob, not daring to eat this
or that, or smoke or--or anything." Heresy this, from the three years'
captain of L. A. High who had never considered any sacrifice worth a
murmur which kept him fit for the real business of life. "Somehow, he's
so keen, he makes me wish I had more in my head and--and less in my
heels! You know what I mean, Skipper. He does make me look like a simp,
doesn't he?"
"No," said Honor, definitely. "Why, Jimsy, you're a million times
bigger person than Carter. Everybody knows that. _Knowing_ things isn't
everything--knowing what to wear and how to order meals at the
Alexandria and reading all the new books and having been to Europe.
Those things just fill in for him; they make up--a little--for the
things you've had."
"Do you mean that, Skipper? Is that straight?"
"Of course, Jimsy--cross my heart!" It was curious, the way she was
having to comfort Jimsy for not being Carter, and Carter for not being
Jimsy.