Part 12

"It's biting me that you've got to work so hard."

"If it don't bite me none, why not let it go at that?"

"Because I don't seem able to. I've taken so much from you."

"Well, I've had it to 'and out, ain't I?"

"But I don't see why you do it."

"A young boy like you don't have to see. There's lots o' things I didn't understand at your age."

"You don't seem specially--" he sought for words less direct, but without finding them--"you don't seem--specially fond of me."

"I never was one to be fond o' people, except it was a dog. Always had a 'ankerin' for a dog; but a free life don't let yer keep one. A dog'll never go back on yer."

"Well, do you think I would?"

"I don't think nothink about it, Kid. When the time comes that you can do without me...."

"That time'll never come, Honey, after all you've done for me."

"I don't want yer to feel yerself bound by that."

"I don't feel myself bound by it; but--dash it all, Honey!--whatever you feel or don't feel about me, I'm fond of _you_."

He was still imperturbable. "Well, Kid, you wouldn't be the first, not by a lot."

"But if I can never be anything _for_ you, or _do_ anything for you...."

"There's one thing you could do."

"What is it? I don't care how hard it is."

"Well, when you're one o' them big lawyers, or bankers, or somethink--drorin' yer fifty dollars a week--you can have a shy at this 'ere lor o' proputty. It don't seem right to me that some people should have all the beef to chaw, and others not so much as the bones; but I can't git the 'ang of it. If nothink don't belong to nobody, then what about all your dough in the New York savin's bank, and mine in the one in Brooklyn? We're keepin' it agin yer goin' to college, ain't we? And don't that belong to us? Yes, by George, it do! So there you are. But if when yer gits yer larnin' yer can steddy it out...."

XXIII

The boy was adolescent, sentimental, and lonely. Mere human companionship, such as that which Honey gave him, was no longer enough for him. He was seeing visions and dreaming dreams. He began to wish he had some one with whom to share his unformulated hopes, his crude and burning opinions. He looked at fellows who were friends going two and two, pouring out their foolish young hearts to each other, and envied them. The lads of his own age liked him well enough. Now and then one of them would approach him with shy or awkward signals, making for closer acquaintance; but when they learned that he lived in Grove Street with a stevedore they drew away. None of them ever transcended the law of caste, to stand by him in spite of his humble conditions. Boys whose families were down wanted nothing to hamper them in climbing up. Boys whose families were up wanted nothing that might loosen their position and pull them down. The sense of social insecurity which was the atmosphere of homes reacted on well-meaning striplings of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, turning them into snobs and cads before they had outgrown callowness.

But during the winter of the year in which he became sixteen there were two, you might have said three, who broke in upon this solitude.

In walking to the Latin School from Grove Street he was in the habit of going through Louisburg Square. If you know Boston you know Louisburg Square as that quaint red-brick rectangle, like many in the more Georgian parts of London, which commemorates the gallant dash of the New England colonists on the French fortress of Louisburg in Cape Breton. It is the heart of that conservative old Boston, which is now shrinking in size and importance before the onset of the foreigner till it has become like a small beleaguered citadel. Here the descendants of the Puritans barricade themselves behind their financial walls, as their ancestors within their stockades, while their city is handed over to the Irishman and the Italian as an undefended town. The Boston of tradition is a Boston of tradition only. Like the survivors of Noah's deluge clinging to the top of a rock, they to whom the Boston of tradition was bequeathed are driven back on Beacon Hill as a final refuge from the billows rising round them. A high-bred, cultivated, sympathetic people, they have so given away their heritage as to be but a negligible factor in the State, in the country, of which their fathers and grandfathers may be said once to have kept the conscience.

But to Tom Whitelaw Louisburg Square meant only the dignified fronts and portals behind which lived the rich people who had no point of contact with himself. They couldn't have ignored him more completely than he ignored them. He thought of them as little as the lion cub in a circus parade thinks of the people of the city through which he passes in processions. Then, one day, one of these strangers spoke to him.

It was a youth of about his own age. More than once, as Tom went by, and the stout boy stood on the sidewalk in front of his own house, they had looked each other up and down with unabashed mutual appraisal. Tom saw a lad too short for his width, and unhealthily flabby. He had puffy hands, and puffy cheeks, with eyes seeming smaller than they were because the puffy eyelids covered them. The mouth had those appealing curves comically troubled in repose, but fulfilling their purpose in giggling. On the first occasion when Tom passed by the lips were set to the serious task of inspection. They said nothing; they betrayed nothing. Tom himself thought nothing, except that the boy was fat.

They had looked at each other some two or three times a week, for perhaps a month, when one day the fat boy said, "Hullo!" Tom also said, "Hullo!" continuing on his way. A day or two later they repeated these salutations, though neither forsook his attitude of reserve. The fat boy did this first, speaking when they had hullo'ed each other for the third or fourth time. His voice was high and girlish, and yet with a male crack in it.

"What school do you go to?"

Tom stopped. "I go to the Latin School. What school do you go to?"

"I go to Doolittle and Pray's."

"That's the big private school in Marlborough Street, isn't it?"

The fat boy made the inarticulate grunt which with most Americans means "Yes." "I was put down for Groton, only mother wouldn't let me leave home. I'm going to Harvard."

"I'm going to Harvard, too. What class do you expect to be in?"

The fat boy replied that he expected to be in the class of nineteen-nineteen.

Tom said he expected to be in that class himself.

"Now I've got to beat it to the Latin School. So long!"

"So long!"

Tom carried to his school in the Fenway an unusual feeling of elation. With friendly intent someone had approached him from the world outside. It was not the first time it had ever happened, but it was the first time it had ever happened in just this way. He could see already that the fat boy was not one of those he would have chosen for a friend; but he was so lonely that he welcomed anyone. Moreover, he divined that the fat boy was lonely, too. Boys of that type, the Miss Nancy and the mother's darling type, were often consumed by loneliness, and no one ever pitied them. Few went to their aid when other boys "picked" on them, but of those few Tom Whitelaw was always one. He found them, once you had accepted their mannerisms, as well worth knowing as other boys, while they spared him a scrap of admiration. It was possible that in this fat boy he might find the long-sought fellow who would not "turn him down" on discovering that he lived in Grove Street. Being turned down in this way had made him sick at heart so often that he had decided never any more to make or trust advances. In suffering temptation again he assured himself that it would be for the last time in his life.

On returning from school he looked for the boy in Louisburg Square, but he was not there. A few hundred yards farther, however, he came in for another adventure.

The January morning had been mild, with melting snow. By midday the wind had shifted to the north, with a falling thermometer. By late afternoon the streets were coated with a glaze of ice. Tom could swagger down the slope of Grove Street easily enough in the security of rubber soles.

But not so a girl, whose slippers and high French heels made her helpless on the steep glare. Having ventured over the brow of the hill, she found herself held. A step into the air would have been as easy as another on this slippery descent. The best she could do was to sway in the keen wind, keeping her balance with the grace of one of the blue spruces which used to be blown about at Bere. Her outstretched arms waved up and down, as a blue spruce waves its branches. Coming abreast of her, Tom found her laughing to herself, but on seeing him she laughed frankly and aloud.

"Oh, catch me! I'm going to tumble! Ow-w-w!"

Tom snatched at one hand, while she caught him by the shoulder with the other.

"Saved! Wasn't it lucky that you came along? You're the Whitelaw boy, aren't you?"

Tom admitted that he was, though his new sensations, with this exquisite creature clinging to him like a drowning man to his rescuer, choked the monosyllable in his throat. Though he had often in a scrimmage protected little boys, he had never before been thrown into this comic, laughing tussle with a girl. It had the excuse for itself that she couldn't stand unless he held her up. He held her firmly, looking into her dancing eyes with his first emotional consciousness of a girl's prettiness.

His arm supporting her, she ventured on a step. "I'm Maisie Danker," she explained, while taking it. "I see you going in and out the house."

"I've never seen you."

"Perhaps you've seen me and not noticed me."

"I couldn't," he declared, with vehemence. "I've never seen you before in my life. If I had...."

Her high heels so nearly slipped from under her that they were compelled to hold each other as if in an embrace. "If you had--what?"

He knew what, but the words in which to say it needed a higher mode of utterance. The red lips, the glowing cheeks, had the vitality of the lively eyes. A red tam-o'-shanter, a red knitted thing like a heavenly translation of his own earthly sweater, were bewitchingly diabolic when worn with a black skirt, black stockings, and black shoes.

As he did not respond to her challenge, she went on with her self-introduction. "I guess you haven't seen me, because I only arrived three days ago. I'm Mrs. Danker's niece. Live in Nashua. Worked in the woolen mills there. Now I've come to visit my aunt for the winter."

For the sake of hearing her speak, he asked if she was going to work in Boston.

"I don't know. Maybe I'll take singing lessons. Got a swell voice."

If again he was dumb it was because of the failure of his faculties. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for the give-and-take of a badinage in which the surface meanings were the less important. Foolish and helpless, unable to show his manly superiority except in the strength with which he held her up, he got a lesson in the new art there and then.

"Ever dance?"

"I'm never asked."

"Oh, it's you that ought to do the asking."

"I mean that I'm never asked where there's dancing going on."

"Gee, you don't have to be. You just find a girl--and go."

"But I don't know how to dance."

"I'll teach you."

Slipping and sliding, with cries of alarm on her part, and stalwart assurances on his, they approached their own doorstep.

"Ow-w-w! Hold me! I'm going!"

"No you're not--not while I've got you."

"But I don't want to grab you so hard."

"That's all right. I can stand it."

"But I can't. I'm not used to it."

"Then it's a very good time to begin."

"What's the use of beginning if there's nothing to go on with?"

"How do you know there won't be?"

"Well, what can there be?"

Had Miss Danker always waited for answers to her questions Tom would have been more nonplussed than he was. But the game which he didn't know at all she knew thoroughly, according to her lights. She never left him at a loss for more than a few seconds at a time. Her method being that of touch-and-go, reserving to herself the right of coming back again, she carried his education one step farther still.

"Don't you ever go to the movies?"

He replied that he had gone once or twice with Honey, but not often. To be on the same breezy level as herself, he added in explanation: "Haven't got the dough."

"But the movies don't take dough, not hardly any."

"They take more than I've got."

"More than you've got? Gee! Then you can't have anything at all."

It was not so much a taunt as it was a statement, and yet it was a statement with a little taunt in it. For once driven to bravado, he gave away a secret.

"Well, I haven't--except what's in the bank."

"Oh, you've got money in the bank, have you?"

"Sure! But I'm keeping it to go to college."

She stared at him as if he had been a duck-billed rabbit, or some variety of fauna hitherto unknown.

"Gee! I should think a fellow who had money in the bank would want to blow some of it on having a good time--a fellow with any jazz."

Once more she spared him discomfiture. Slipping into the hallway, she said over her shoulder as he followed her: "How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

She flashed round at him. "Sixteen! Gee! I thought you was my age if you was a day. Honest I did. I'm eighteen, an old lady compared with you."

"Oh, but boys are always older than girls, for their age."

"You are, sure. Anyways, you saved me on that slippery hill, and I think you ought to have a kiss for it. Come, baby, kiss your poor old ma."

Though the hallway was dark, the kiss had to be given and taken furtively. Whatever it was to Maisie Danker, to Tom Whitelaw it was the entrance to a higher and an increased life. The pressure of her lips on his sent through his frame a dynamic glow he had not supposed to be among nature's possibilities. Moreover, it threw light on that experience as to which he had mused ever since he had first talked confidentially to Bertie Tollivant. Though instinct had taught him something in the intervening years, he had up to this minute gained nothing in the way of practical discovery. Now an horizon that had been dark was lifting to disclose a wonderland.

With her light laugh Maisie had run into her aunt's apartment, and shut the door. Tom began heavily, pensively, to climb the stairs. But halfway up he paused to mark off another stage in his perceptions.

"So that's what it's like! That's why they all think so much about it--and try to hush it up!"

XXIV

He himself found something to hush up when he recounted the incident to Honey in the evening. He told of meeting Mrs. Danker's niece on the ice-coated hill, and helping her down to the door. Of his sensations as she clung to him he said nothing. He said nothing of the kiss in the dark hallway. During the rest of the evening, and after he had gone to bed, he wondered why. They all hushed these things up, and he did as the rest; but what was the basic reason?

As his first emotional encounter the subject was sufficiently in his mind next day to make him duller than usual at school. On his way home from school it so preoccupied his thought that he forgot to look for the fat boy. It was the fat boy who first saw him, hailing him as he approached. There was already between them that acceptance of each other which is the first stage of friendship.

"What's your name?"

"Tom Whitelaw. What's yours?"

"Guy Ansley. How old are you?"

"Sixteen. How old are you?"

"I'm sixteen, too. What's your father do?"

"I haven't got a father. I live with--" it was difficult to explain--"with a man who kind o' takes care of me."

"A guardian?"

"Something like that. What does your father do?"

"He's a corporation lawyer. Makes big money, too." As Tom began to move along the fat boy went with him, keeping step. "What's your guardian do?"

"He does anything that'll give him a job. Mostly he's a stevedore."

"What's a stevedore? Sounds as if it had something to do with bull-fighting."

"It's a longshoreman. He loads and unloads ships."

They stopped at the corner of Pinckney Street The puffy countenance fell. Tom could follow his companion's progression of bewilderments.

"Where do you live?"

"I live in Grove Street."

It was the minute of suspense. All had been confessed. The countenance that had fallen went absolutely blank. To himself the tall, proud, sensitive lad was saying that his future life was staked on the response the fat boy chose to make. If he showed signs of wriggling out of an embarrassing situation he, Tom Whitelaw, would range himself forever with the enemies of the rich.

The fat boy spoke at last.

"So you're that kind of fellow."

"Yes, I'm that kind of fellow."

This was mere marking time. The decision was still to come. It came with an air on the fat boy's part of heroic resolution.

"Well, I don't care."

Tom breathed again, breathed with bravado. "Neither do I."

In the stress of so much big-heartedness the girlish voice became a croak. "I know guys who think that if another guy isn't rich they must treat him as so much dirt. I'm not that sort. I'm democratic. I wouldn't turn down a fellow just because he lived in Grove Street. If I liked him I'd stick to him. I'm not snobbish. How do you know you couldn't give him a peg up, and he'd be grateful to you all his life?"

Thinking this over afterward, Tom found it hard to disengage the bitter from the sweet; but he had not much chance to think it over. Any spare minute he found pre-empted by Maisie Danker, who seemed to camp in the dark hallway. If she was not there when he entered, she appeared before he could go upstairs. The ice having melted in the street, she had other needs of protection, an errand to do in the crowded region of Bowdoin Square, a shop to visit across the Common which was so wide and lonesome in winter twilights, a dance hall to locate in case they ever made up their minds to visit it. She was always timid, clinging, laughing, adorable. The embodiment of gayety, she made him gay, which was again a new sensation. Never before had he felt young as he felt young with her. The minutes they spent swamped in the throngs of the lighted streets, between five and seven on a winter's afternoon, were his first minutes of escape from a world of care. Care had been his companion since he could remember anything; and now his companion was this exquisite thing, all lightsomeness and joy.

He was later than usual in returning from school one afternoon, because a teacher had given him a commission to carry out which took some two hours of his time. As it had sent him toward the south end of the city, he had the Common to traverse on his way home. Snow had recently fallen; but through the main avenues under the trees the paths had been cleared. On the Frog Pond the drifts had been swept up, so that there could be a little skating. As Tom passed by he could hear the scraping and grinding of skates, and the hoarse shouts of hobbledehoys. At any other time he would have stopped, either to look on peacefully, or to take part in some bit of free-for-all, rough-and-tumble skylarking in the snow. But Maisie might be waiting. She might even have given up waiting, which would take all his pleasure from the afternoon.

To reach home more quickly he followed a short cut, scarcely shoveled out, on the slope of the Common below Beacon Hill. Here there were no foot passengers but himself. Neither, for some little distance, were there any trees. There was only the white shroud of the snow, freezing to a crust. A misty moon drifted through a tempest of scudding clouds, while wherever in the offing there was a group of elms the electric lights danced through their tossing branches as if they were wind-blown lanterns.

In spite of his hurry, the boy came to a standstill. It was a minute at which to fancy himself lost in Moosonee or Labrador. His _voyageur_ guides had failed him; his dog team had run away; his pemmican--he supposed it would be pemmican--had given out. He was homeless, starving, abandoned, alone but for the polar bears.

It was not a polar bear that he saw come floundering down the hillside, but it might have been a black one. It was certainly black; its nature was certainly animal. It rolled and tumbled and panted and grunted, and now and then it moaned. For a few minutes it remained stationary, with internal undulations; then it scrambled a few paces, as an elephant might scramble whose feet had been sawn off. A dying mammoth would also have emitted just these raucous groans.

Suddenly it squealed. The squeal was like that of a pig when the knife is thrust into its throat. It was girlish, piercing, and yet had a masculine shriek in it. Tom Whitelaw knew what was happening. It had happened to himself so often in the days when he was different from other boys that his fists seemed to clench and his feet to spring before his mind had given the command. In clearing the fifty odd yards of snow between him and the wallowing monster, he chose a form of words which young hooligans would understand as those of authority.

"What in hell are yez doin' to that kid? Are yez puttin' a knife in him? Leave him be, or I'll knock the brains out of every one of yez."

He was in among them, laying about him before they knew what had landed in their midst. They were not brutal youngsters; they were only jocose in the manner of their kind. Having spied the fat boy coming down to watch the skating, it was as natural for them to jump on him as it would be for a pack of dogs who chanced to see a sloth. With the courage of the mob, and also with its rapidity of thought-transfer, they had closed in silently and rushed him. He was on his back in a second. In a second they were clambering all over him. When he staggered to his feet they let him run, only to catch him and pull him down again. So staggering, so running, so coming down like a lump of jelly in the snow, he had reached the top of the hill, his tormentors hanging to him as if their teeth were in his flesh, at the minute when Tom first perceived the black mass.

The fat boy had not lacked courage. He had fought. That is, he had kicked and bitten and scratched, with the fury of vicious helplessness. He had not cried for mercy. He had not cried out at all. He had struggled for breath; he had nearly strangled; but his pantings and gruntings were only for breath just as were theirs. Strong in spite of his unwieldiness, he was not without the moral spunk which can perish at a pinch, but will not give in.

None of them had struck him. That would have been thought cowardly. They had only plastered him with snow, in his mouth, in his ears, in his eyes, and down below his collar. This he could have suffered, still without a plea, had not their play become fiercer. They began to tear open his clothing, to wrench it off the buttons. They stuffed snow inside his waistcoat, inside his shirt, inside his trousers. He was naked to the cold. And yet it was not the cold that drew from him that piglike squeal; it was the indignity. He was Guy Ansley, a rich man's son, in his native sanctified old Boston a young lordling; but these muckers had mauled the last rag of honor out of him.

They were good-natured little demons, with no more notion of his tragedy than if he had been a snowman. As soon as the strapping young giant had leaped in among them, they ran off with screams of laughter. Most of them were tired of the fun in any case; a few lingered at a distance to "call names," but even they soon disappeared. Tom could only help the lumbering body to its feet.