Part 9

Jane Street dates from a period earlier than the development of that civic taste which gives to all New York north of Fourteenth Street the picturesqueness of a sum in simple arithmetic. Jane Street has atmosphere, period, chic. You know at a glance that the people who built these trim little red-brick houses still felt that impulse which first came to Manhattan from The Hague, to be fostered later by William and Mary, and finally merged in the Georgian tradition. Jane Street is Dutch. It has Dutch quaintness, and, as far as New York will permit it, Dutch cleanliness. It might be a byway in Amsterdam. Instead of cutting straight from the Hudson River Docks to Greenwich Avenue, it might run from a canal with barges on it to a field of hyacinths in bloom.

But Tom Quidmore saw not what you and I would have seen, a relief from the noise and fetidness of a hot summer's morning in a neighborhood reeking with garbage. When his heart had been fixed on that dream-city, Wilmington, Delaware, he found himself in a dingy little alley. Not often querulous, he became so now.

"What are we doing down here?"

The reply startled him. "I'm--I'm sick."

Looking again at the man who shuffled along beside him, he saw that his face had grown ashy, while his eyes, which earlier in the day had had life in them, were lusterless. The boy would have been frightened had it not been for the impulse of affection.

"Let's go back to Bere. Then you can have the doctor. I'll get a cab and steer the whole business."

Without answering, Quidmore stopped at a brown door, level with the pavement, in a big, dim-windowed building, with fire escapes zigzagging down the front. Jane Street is not exclusively clean and trim and Dutch. It has lapses--here a warehouse, there a dwelling tumbling to decay, elsewhere a nondescript structure like this. It looked like a lodging house for sailors and dock laborers. In the basement was a restaurant to which you went down by steps, and bearing the legend Pappa's Chop Saloon.

While Quidmore stood in doubt as to whether to ring the bell or to push the door which already stood a little open, two men came out of the Chop Saloon and began to mount the steps. In faded blue overalls the worse for wear, they had plainly broken a day's work, possibly begun at five o'clock, for a late breakfast. The one in advance, a sturdy, well-knit fellow of forty or forty-five, got a sinister expression from a black patch over his left eye. His companion was older, smaller, more worn by a bitter life. All the twists in his figure, all the soured betrayals in his crafty face, showed you the habitual criminal.

None of these details was visible to Quidmore, because his imagination could see only the bed for which he was craving. To the boy, who trusted everyone, they were no more than the common type of workman he was used to meeting in the markets. The fellow with the patch on his eye, making an estimate of the strangers as he mounted the steps, spoke cheerily.

"I say, mate, what can I do for yer?"

The voice with a vaguely English ring was not ungenial. Not ungenial, when you looked at it, was the strongly-boned face, with a ruddiness burnt to a coarse tan. The single gray-blue eye had the sympathetic gleam which often helps roguery to make itself excusable to people with a sense of fun.

Quidmore muttered something about wanting to see Mrs. Pappa.

"Right you are! Come along o' me. I'll dig the old gal out for yer. Expects you wants a room for yerself and the kid. Hi, Pappa!"

Pappa came out of a dim, musty parlor as the witch who foretells bad weather appears in a mechanical barometer. She was like a witch, but a dark, classic witch, with an immemorial tradition behind her. Her ancestors might have fought at Marathon, or sacrificed to Neptune in the temple on Sunium. In Jane Street she was archaic, a survival from antiquity. Her thoughts must have been with the nymphs at Delphi, or following the triremes carrying the warriors from Argolis to Troy, as silent, mysterious, fateful, she led the way upstairs.

They followed in procession, all four of them. The doorstep acquaintances displayed a solicitude not less than brotherly. The hall was without furniture, the stairs without carpet. The softwood floors, like the treads of the stairs, were splintered with the usage of many heavy heels. Where the walls bulged, through the pressure of jerry-built stories overhead, the marbled paper swelled into bosses. Tom found it impressive, with something of strange stateliness.

"Yer'll be from the country," the one-eyed fellow observed, as they climbed upward.

"Yes, sir," Tom answered, civilly. "We're on our way to Wilmington, Delaware, but my father felt a little sick."

"Well, he's struck a good place to lay up in. I say, Pappa," he called ahead, "seems to me as the big room with two beds'd be what'd suit the gent. It's next door to the barthroom, and he'll find that convenient. Mate," he explained further, when they stood within the room with two beds, "this'll set ye' back a dollar a day in advance. That right, Pappa, ain't it?"

Pappa assenting with some antique sign, Quidmore drew out his pocketbook to extract the dollar. With no ceremonious scruples the smaller comrade craned his neck to appraise, as far as possible, the contents of the wallet.

"Wad," Tom heard him squirt out of the corner of his mouth, in the whisper of a ventriloquist.

His friend seemed to wink behind the patch on his left eye. Tom took the exchange of confidence as a token of respect. He and his father were considered rich, the effect being seen in the attentions accorded them. This was further borne out when the genial one of the two rogues turned on the threshold, as his colleague was following Pappa downstairs.

"Anythink I can do for yer, mate, command me. Name of Honeybun--Lemuel Honeybun. Honey Lem some of the guys calls me. I answers to it, not takin' no offense like." He pointed to the figure stumping down the stairs. "My friend, Mr. Goodsir. Him and me been pals this two year. We lives on the ground floor. Room back of Pappa."

The door closed, Tom looked round him in an interest which eclipsed his hopes of the tunnel. This was adventure. It was nearly romance. Never before had he stayed in a hotel. The place was not luxurious, but never, in the life he could remember, having known anything but necessity, necessity was enough. Moreover, the room contained a work of art that touched his imagination. On the bare drab mantelpiece stood the head of a Red Indian, in plaster painted in bronze, not unlike the mummified head of Rameses the Great. The boy couldn't take his eye away from it. This was what you got by visiting strange cities more intimately than by trucking to and from the markets.

Quidmore threw himself on his bed, his face buried in the meager pillow. He was suffering apparently not from pain, but from some more subtle form of distress. Being told that there was nothing he could do for the invalid, Tom sat silent and still on one of the two small chairs which helped out the furnishings. It was not boring for him to do this, because he swam in novelty. He recalled the steamer he had seen that morning, sailing from he didn't know where, sailing _to_ he didn't know where, but on the way. He, too, was on the way. He was on the way to something different from Wilmington, Delaware. It would be different from Bere. He began to wonder if he should ever go back to Bere. If he didn't go back to Bere ... but at this point in Tom's dreams Quidmore dragged himself off the bed.

"Let's go down to the chop saloon, and eat."

XVIII

He was not too ill to eat, but too ill when not eating to stay anywhere but on his bed. He went back to it again, lying with his face buried in the pillow as before. The boy resumed his patient sitting. He would have been bored with it now, had he not had his dreams.

All the same, it was a relief when about four o'clock, just as the westering sun was beginning to wake the Red Indian to an horrific life, Mr. Honeybun, pushing the door ajar softly, peeped in with his good eye.

"I say, mate!" he whispered, "wouldn't you like me to take the young gent for a bit of a walk like? Do him good, and him a-mopin' here all by hisself."

The walk meant Tom's initiation into the life of cities as that life is led. Not that it went very far, but as far as it went it was a revelation. It took him from one end of Jane Street to the other, along the docks of the Cunard and other great lines, and as far as Eighth Avenue in the broad, exciting thoroughfare of Fourteenth Street. New York as he had seen it hitherto, from the front seat of a motor truck, had been little more entertaining than a map. Besides, he was only developing a taste for this sort of entertainment. Games, school, scraps with other boys, had been enough for him. Now he was waking to an interest in places as places, in men as men, in differences of attitude to the drama known as life. In Mr. Honeybun's attitude he grew interested especially.

"I don't believe that nothink don't belong to no one," Tom's guide observed, as the wealth of the city spread itself more splendidly. "Things is common proputty. Yer takes what yer can put yer 'and on."

"But wouldn't you be arrested?"

"Yer'd be arrested if yer didn't look out; but what's bein' arrested? No more'n the measures what a lot of poor, frightened, silly boobs'll take agin the strong man what makes 'em tremble. At least," he added, as an afterthought, "not when yer conscience is clear, it ain't."

Fascinated by this bold facing of society, Tom ventured on a question. "Have you ever been arrested, Mr. Honeybun?"

Mr. Honeybun straightened himself to the martyr's pose. "Oh, if yer puts it that way, I've suffered for my opinions. That much I'll admit. I'm--" he brought out the statement proudly--"I'm one o' them there socialists. You know what a socialist is, don't yer?"

Tom was not sure that he did.

"A socialist is one o' them fellers who whatever he sees knows it belongs to him if he can get ahold of it. It's gettin' ahold of it what counts. Now if you was to have somethink I wanted locked up in yer 'ouse, let us say, and I was to make my way in so as I could take it--why, then it'd be mine. That's the law o' Gord, I believes; and I tries to live up to it."

Enjoying a frankness which widened his horizon, Tom was nevertheless perplexed by it. "But wouldn't that be something like burglary?"

"Burglary is what them may call it what ain't socialists; but it don't do to hang a dog because yer've give him a bad name. A lot o' good people's been condemned that way. When I'm in court I always appeals to justice."

"And do you get it?"

"I get men's. I don't get Gord's. You see that apple?" They stopped before a window in Horatio Street where apples were displayed. "Now, do yer suppose that apple growed itself for any one man in partic'lar? No! That apple didn't know nothink about men's laws when it blossomed on a apple tree. It just give itself generallike to the human race. If you was to go in and collar that big red one, and git away with it, it'd be yours. Stands to reason it'd be. Gord's law! But if that there policeman, a-squintin' his ugly eye at us this minute--he knows Honey Lem, he does!--was to pull yer in, yer might git thirty days. Man's law! And I'll leave it to you which is best worth sufferin' for."

In this philosophy of life there was something Tom found reasonable, and something in which he felt a flaw without being able to detect it. He chased it round and round in his thoughts as he sat through the long dull hours with his father. It passed the time; it helped him to the habit of thinking things out for himself. His mind being clear, and his intuitions acute, he could generally solve a problem not beyond his years. When, on the morrow, they walked in the cool of the day down the length of Hudson Street till it ends in Reade Street, Tom brought the subject up from another point of view.

"But, Mr. Honeybun, suppose someone took something from you? What then?"

"He'd git it in the nut," the socialist answered, tersely. "Not if there'd be two of 'em," he added, in amendment. "If there's two I don't contend. I ain't a communist."

"Is that what a communist is, a fellow who'll contend with two?"

"A communist is a socialist what'll use weepons. If there's somethink what he thinks is his in anybody's 'ouse, he'll go armed, and use vi'lence. They never got that on me. I never 'urt nobody, except onst I hits a footman, what was goin' to grab me, a wee little knock on the 'ead with a silver soup ladle I 'ad in me 'and and lays 'im out flat. Didn't do him no 'arm, not 'ardly any. That was in England. But them days is over, since I lost my eye. Makes yer awful easy spotted when yer've lost a eye."

"How did you lose it, Mr. Honeybun?"

"I lost it a-savin' of the life of a beautiful young lady. 'Twas quite a tale." The boy looked up expectantly while his friend thought out the details. "I was footin' it onst from New Haven to New York, and I'd got to a pretty little town as they call Old Lyme. Yer see, I'd been doin' a bit o' time at New Haven--awful 'ard on socialists they was in New Haven in them days--and when I gits out I was a bit stoney-broke till I'd picked up somethink else. Well there I was, trampin' it through Old Lyme, and I'd got near to the bridge what crosses the river they've got there--the Connecticut I think it is--and what should I see but a 'orse what a young lady was drivin' come over the bridge like mad. The young lady she was tuggin' at the reins and a-hollerin' like blazes for some one to save her life. I ain't no 'ero, kid. Don't go for to think that I'm a-sayin' that I am. But what's a man to do when he sees a beautiful young lady in danger o' bein' killed?" He paused to take the bodily postures with which he stopped the runaway. "And the tip of the shaft," he ended, "it took me right in the eye, and put it out. But, Lord, what's a eye, even to a Socialist, when yer can do somethink for a feller creeter?"

Tom gaped in admiration. "I suppose it hurt awful."

"Was in 'orspital three months," the hero said, quietly. "Young lady, she visits me reg'lar, calls me her life-saver, and every name like that, and kind o' clings to me. But, Lord, marriage ain't never been much of a fancy to me. Ties a man up, and I likes to be free, except when I'm sufferin' for socialism. Besides, if I was to marry every woman what I've saved their lives I'd be one o' them Normans by this time. When yer wants company a good pal'll be faithfuller than a wife, and nag yer a lot less."

"Mr. Goodsir's your pal, ain't he, Mr. Honeybun?"

"Yes, and I'm sick of him. He don't develop. He ain't got no eddication. Yer can see for yerself he don't talk correct. That's what I've took to in yer gov'nor and you, yer gentleman way o' speakin'. Only yer needn't go for to tell yer old man all what I've been a-gassin' of to you. I can see he's what they call conservative. He wouldn't understand. You're the younger generation, mind more open like. You and me'd make a great team if we was ever to work together."

With memories of his mother in his mind, Tom answered sturdily, "I wouldn't be a socialist, not for anything you could offer me."

They left it at that. Mr. Honeybun was content to point out the historic sites known to him as they turned homeward. There was the house where a murder had been committed; the store where a big break had been pulled off; a private detective's residence.

"Might go out agin some day, if yer pop don't mind it," he suggested, when they had reached their own hallway. "I gits the time in the late afternoon. Yer see, our job at the market begins early and ends early, and lately--" there was a wistful note--"well, I feels kind o' fed up with the low company Goodsir keeps. Every kind o' joint and dive and--and--Chinamen--and--" Out of respect for the boy he held up the description. "You'd 'ardly believe it, but an innercent little walk like what we've just took, why, it'll do me as much good as a swig o' water when you wake up about three in the mornin', with yer tongue 'angin' out like a leather strap, after a three-days' spree."

Unable to get the full force of this figure, Tom thanked his guide politely, and was bounding up the stairs two steps at a time, when the man who stood watching him spoke again.

"If I'd ever a-thought that I'd 'a had a kid like you, it'd 'a' been pretty near worth gittin' married for."

Tom could only turn with one of those grins which showed his teeth, making his eyes twinkle with a clear blue light, when adequate words for kindness wouldn't come to him.

XIX

The days settled into a routine. When they rose in the morning a colored woman "did" their room while they went down to the chop saloon for breakfast. Returning, Quidmore threw himself on his bed again. He did this after each meal, poking his nose deep into the limp pillow. Hardly ever speaking, he now and then uttered a low moan.

Tom watched patiently, ready to tell him the time or bring him a drink of water. When the day grew too hot he fanned him with an old newspaper.

"Why don't we go home, dad?" he asked anxiously on the third day. "I could get you there as easy as anything."

"I'm not well enough."

"You don't seem very sick to me. You don't have any pain and you can eat all right."

"It isn't that kind of bein' sick. It's--" he sought for a name--"it's like nervous prostration."

More nearly than he knew he had named his malady. In his own words, he was all in; and he was all in to the end of the letter of the term. Of that moral force which is most of what any man has to live upon some experience had drained him. He had spent his gift of vitality. All in was precisely the phrase to apply to him. He had cashed the last cent of whatever he had inherited or saved in the way of inner strength, and now he could not go on.

"What's the good of it anyhow?" he asked of Tom in the night. "There's nothin' to it, not when you come to think of it. You run after something as if you couldn't live without it; and then when you get it you curse your God that you ever run."

Tom shuddered in his bed, but he was used to doing that. There was hardly a night when he was not wakened by a nightmare. If it was not by a nightmare, it was by the soft complaining voice.

"Are you awake, Tom?"

"Yes, dad. Can I get you anything?"

"No; I only wanted to know if you was awake."

Tom kept awake as long as he could, because he knew the poor wretch was afraid of lying sleepless in the dark. To keep him awake, perhaps for less selfish reasons, too, the soft voice would take this opportunity of giving him advice.

"Don't you ever go to wanting anything too much, boy. That's what's done for me. You can want things if you like; but one of the tricks in the game is to know how to be disappointed. I never did know, not even when I was a little chap. If I cried for the moon I wouldn't stop till I got it. When I was about as old as you, not gettin' what I wanted made me throw a fit. If I couldn't get things by fair means I had to get 'em by foul; but I got 'em. It don't do you no good, boy. If I could go back again over the last six months...."

For fear of a confession Tom stopped his ears, but no confession ever came. The tortured soul could dribble its betrayals, but it couldn't face itself squarely.

"Look out for women," he said, gently, on another night. "You're old enough now to know how they'll play the Dutch with you. When I was your age there was nothing I didn't understand, and I guess it's the same with you. Don't ever let 'em get you. They got me before I was--well, I don't hardly know what age I was, but it was pretty young. Look out for 'em, boy. If you ever damn your soul for one of 'em, she'll do you dirt in the end. If it hadn't been for her...."

To keep this from going further, the boy broke in with the first subject he could think of. "I wonder if they'll remember to pick the new peas. They'll be ready by this time. Do you suppose they'll ...?"

"I don't care a hang what they do." After a brief silence he continued: "I'd 'a left the place to you, boy, only my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, has a mortgage on the place that'd eat up most of the value, so I've left it to her. That'll fix 'em both. I wish I could 'a done more for you."

"You've done a lot for me, as it is."

"You don't know."

There was another silence. It might have lasted ten minutes. The boy was falling once more into a doze when the soft voice lisped again,

"Tom."

He did his best to drag himself back from sleep. "Yes, dad? Do you want to know what time it is? I'll get up and look."

"No, stay where you are. There's somethin' I want to say. I've been a skunk to you."

"Oh, cut it, dad...."

"I won't cut it. I want to say it out. When I--when I first took you, it wasn't--it wasn't so much that I'd took a fancy to you...."

"I know it wasn't, dad. You wanted a boy to pick the berries. Let's drop it there."

But the fevered conscience couldn't drop it there. "Yes; at first. And then--and then it come into my mind that you might be--might be the one that'd do somethin' I didn't want to do myself. I thought--I thought that if you done it we might get by on it. We got by on it all right--or up to now we've got by--but I didn't get real fond of you till--till...."

"Oh, dad, let's go to sleep."

"All right. Let's. I just wanted to say that much. I was glad afterward that...."

The boy breathed heavily, pretending that he was asleep. He was soon asleep in earnest, and for the rest of the night was undisturbed. In the morning his father didn't get up, and Tom went down to the chop saloon to bring up something that would serve as breakfast. He did the same at midday, and the same in the evening. It was a summer's evening, with a long twilight. As it began to grow dark Quidmore seemed to rouse himself. He needed tooth paste, shaving cream, other small necessities. Sitting up on the bed, he made out a list of things, giving Tom the money with which to pay for them. If he went to the pharmacy in Hudson Street he would be back in half an hour.

"All right, dad. I know the way. I'm an old hand in New York by this time."

He was at the door when Quidmore called him back.

"Say, boy. Give us a kiss."

Tom was stupefied. He had kissed his adopted mother often enough, but he had never been asked to do this. Quidmore laughed, pulling him close.

"Ah, come along! I don't ask you often. You're a fine boy, Tom. You must know as well as I do what's been...."

The words were suspended by a hug; but once he was free Tom fled away like a small young wild thing, released from human hands. Having reached the street, he began to feel frightened, prescient, awed. Something was going to happen, he could not imagine what. He made his purchases hurriedly, and then delayed his return. He could be tender with the man; he could be loving; but he couldn't share his secrets.

But he had to go back. In the dim upper hall outside the door he paused to pump up courage to go in. He was not afraid in the common way of fear; he was only overcome with apprehension at having a knowledge he rejected forced on him.

The first thing he noticed was that no light came through the crack beneath the door. The room was apparently dark. That was strange because his father dreaded darkness, except when he was there to keep him company. He crept to the door and listened. There was no sound. He pushed the door open. The lights were out. In panic at what he might discover, he switched on the electricity.

But he only found the room empty. That was so far a relief. His father had gone out, and would be back again. Closing the door behind him, he advanced into the room.