"Delighted," replied his father-in-law.
And a half hour later in Bruce's new car, which was the pride and joy of his life, they were far up the river. On a long level stretch of road Bruce "let her out to show what she could do." And Roger with his heart in his mouth and his eye upon the speedometer, saw it creep to sixty-three.
"Almost as good as a horse," remarked Bruce, when the car had slowed a little.
"Almost," said Roger, "but not quite. It's—well, it's dissipation."
"And a horse?"
"Is life," was the grave reply. "You'll have a crash some day, my boy, if you go on at your present speed. It gets me worried sometimes. You see you're a family man."
"I am and I'm glad of it. Edith and the kiddies suit me right down to the ground. I'm crazy about 'em—you know that. But a chap with a job like mine," Bruce continued pleadingly, as he drove his car rushing around a curve, "needs a little dissipation, too. I can't tell you what it means to me, when I'm kept late at the office, to have this car for the run up home. Lower Broadway's empty then, and I know the cops. I swing around through Washington Square, and the Avenue looks clear for miles, nothing but two long rows of lights to the big hump at Murray Hill. It's the time between crowds—say about ten. And I know the cops."
"That's all right," said Roger. "No one was more delighted than I when you got this car. You deserve it. It's the work that I was speaking of. You've got it going at such a speed—"
"Only way on earth to get on—to get what I want for my family—"
"Yes, yes, I know," muttered Roger vaguely. Bruce began talking of his work for the steel construction concern downtown.
"Take it from me," he declared at the end, "this town has only just begun!"
"Has, eh," Roger grunted. "Aren't the buildings high enough?"
"My God, I wish they were twenty times higher," Bruce rejoined good-humoredly. "But they won't be—we've stopped going up. We've done pretty well in the air, and now we're going underground. And when we get through, this old rock of Manhattan will be such a network of tunnels there'll be a hole waiting at every corner to take you wherever you want to go. Speed? We don't even know what it means!"
And again Bruce "let her out" a bit. It was quite a bit. Roger grabbed his hat with one hand and the side of the car with the other.
"They'll look back on a mile a minute," said Bruce, "as we look back on stage coach days! And in the rush hour there'll be a rush that'll make you think of pneumatic tubes! Not a sound nor a quiver—just pure speed! Shooting people home at night at a couple of hundred miles an hour! The city will be as big as that! And there won't be any accidents and there won't be any smoke. Instead of coal they'll use the sun! And, my God, man, the boulevards—and parks and places for the kids! The way they'll use the River—and the ocean and the Sound! The Catskills will be Central Park! Sounds funny, don't it—but it's true. I've studied it out from A to Z. This town is choking itself to death simply because we're so damn slow! We don't know how to spread ourselves! All this city needs is speed!"
"Bruce," said Roger anxiously, "just go a bit easy on that gas. The fact is, it was a great mistake for me to eat those crabs to-night."
Bruce slowed down compassionately, and soon they turned and started home. And as they drew near the glow of the town, other streets and boulevards poured more motors into the line, until at last they were rushing along amid a perfect bedlam made up of honks and shrieks of horns. The air grew hot and acrid, and looking back through the bluish haze of smoke and dust behind him Roger could see hundreds of huge angry motor eyes. Crowding and jamming closer, pell mell, at a pace which barely slackened, they sped on, a wild uproarious crew, and swept into the city.
Roger barely slept that night. He felt the city clamoring down into his very soul. "Speed!" he muttered viciously. "Speed—speed! We need more speed!" The words beat in like a savage refrain. At last with a sigh of impatience he got up in his nightshirt and walked about. It was good to feel his way in the dark in this cool silent house which he knew so well. Soon his nerves felt quieter. He went back to his bed and lay there inert. How good it would be to get up to the farm.
The next Saturday evening, with Deborah, he started for the mountains. And Bruce came down to see them off.
"Remember, son," said Roger, as the two walked on the platform. "Come up this year for a month, my boy. You need it." The train was about to start.
"Oh, I'll be all right," was the answer. "My friend the Judge, who has hay fever, tells me he has found a cure."
"Damn his cure! You come to us!"
"Hold on a minute, live and learn. The Judge is quite excited about it. You drink little bugs, he says, a billion after every meal. They come in tall blue bottles. We're going to dine together next week and drink 'em till we're all lit up. Oh, we're going to have a hell of a time. His wife left town on Tuesday."
"Bruce," said Roger sternly, as the train began to move, "leave bugs alone and come up and breathe! And quit smoking so many cigarettes!" He stepped on the car.
"Remember, son, a solid month!" Bruce nodded as the train moved out.
"Good luck—good-bye—fine summer—my love to the wife and the kiddies—" and Bruce's dark, tense, smiling face was left behind. Roger went back into the smoker.
"Now for the mountains," he thought. "Thank God!"
CHAPTER XIV
A few hours later Roger awakened. His lower berth was still pitch dark. The train had stopped, and he had been roused by a voice outside his window. Rough and slow and nasal, the leisurely drawl of a mountaineer, it came like balm to Roger's ears. He raised the curtain and looked out. A train hand with a lantern was listening to a dairy man, a tall young giant in top boots. High overhead loomed a shadowy mountain and over its rim came the glow of the dawn. With a violent lurch the train moved on. And Roger, lying back on his pillow, looked up at the misty mountain sides all mottled in the strange blue light with patches of firs and birches and pines. In the narrow valley up which the train was thundering, were small herds of grazing cattle, a lonely farmhouse here and there. From one a light was twinkling. And the city with its heat and noise, its nervous throb, its bedlam nights, all dropped like a fever from his soul.
Now, close by the railroad track, through a shallow rocky gorge a small river roared and foamed. Its cool breath came up to his nostrils and gratefully he breathed it in. For this was the Gale River, named after one of his forefathers, and in his mind's eye he followed the stream back up its course to the little station where he and Deborah were to get off. There the narrowing river bed turned and wound up through a cleft in the hills to the homestead several miles away. On the dark forest road beside it he pictured George, his grandson, at this moment driving down to meet them in a mountain wagon with one of the two hired men, a lantern swinging under the wheels. What an adventure for young George.
Presently he heard Deborah stirring in the berth next to his own.
At the station George was there, and from a thermos bottle which Edith had filled the night before he poured coffee piping hot, which steamed in the keen, frosty air.
"Oh, how good!" cried Deborah. "How thoughtful of your mother, George. How is she, dear?"
"Oh, she's all right, Aunt Deborah." His blunt freckled features flushed from his drive, George stood beaming on them both. He appeared, if anything, tougher and scrawnier than before. "Everything's all right," he said. "There ain't a sick animal on the whole farm."
As Roger sipped his coffee he was having a look at the horses. One of them was William, his cob.
"Do you see it?" inquired his grandson.
"What?"
"The boil," George answered proudly, "on William's rump. There it is—on the nigh side. Gee, but you ought to have seen it last week. It was a whale of a boil," said George, "but we poulticed him, me and Dave did—and now the swelling's nearly gone. You can ride him to-morrow if you like."
Luxuriously Roger lit a cigar and climbed to the front seat with George. Up the steep and crooked road the stout horses tugged their way, and the wagon creaked, and the Gale River, here only a brook, came gurgling, dashing to meet them—down from the mountains, from the farm, from Roger's youth to welcome him home. And the sun was flashing through the pines. As they drew near the farmhouse through a grove of sugar maples, he heard shrill cries of, "There they come!" And he glimpsed the flying figures of George's brothers, Bob and Tad. George whipped up the horses, the wagon gained upon the boys and reached the house but a few rods behind the little runners. Edith was waiting by the door, fresh and smiling, blooming with health. How well this suited her, Roger thought. Amid a gay chorus of greetings he climbed down heavily out of the wagon, looked about him and drew a deep breath. The long lazy days on the farm had begun.
From the mountain side the farm looked down on a wide sweeping valley of woods and fields. The old house straggled along the road, with addition after addition built on through generations by many men and women. Here lay the history, unread, of the family of Roger Gale. Inside there were steps up and down from one part to another, queer crooks in narrow passageways. The lower end was attached to the woodshed, and the woodshed to the barn. Above the house a pasture dotted with gray boulders extended up to a wood of firs, and out of this wood the small river which bore the name of the family came rushing down the field in a gully, went under the road, swept around to the right and along the edge of a birch copse just below the house. The little stream grew quieter there and widened into a mill pond. At the lower end was a broken dam and beside it a dismantled mill. Here was peace for Roger's soul. The next day at dawn he awakened, and through the window close by his bed he saw no tall confining walls; his eye was carried as on wings out over a billowy blanket of mist, soft and white and cool and still, reaching over the valley. From underneath to his sensitive ears came the numberless voices of the awakening sleepers there, cheeps and tremulous warbles from the birch copse just below, cocks crowing in the valley, and ducks and geese, dogs, sheep and cattle faintly heard from distant farms. Just so it had been when he was a boy. How unchanged and yet how new were these fresh hungry cries of life. From the other end of the house he heard Edith's tiny son lustily demanding his breakfast, as other wee boys before him had done for over a hundred years, as other babies still unborn would do in the many years to come. Soon the cry of the child was hushed. Quiet fell upon the house. And Roger sank again into deep happy slumber.
Here was nothing new and disturbing. Edith's children? Yes, they were new, but they were not disturbing. Their growth each summer was a joy, a renewal of life in the battered old house. Here was no huge tenement family crowding in with dirty faces, clamorous demands for aid, but only five delightful youngsters, clean and fresh, of his own blood. He loved the small excitements, the plans and plots and discoveries, the many adventures that filled their days. He spent hours with their mother, listening while she talked of them. Edith did so love this place and she ran the house so beautifully. It was so cool and fragrant, so clean and so old-fashioned.
Deborah, too, came under the spell. She grew as lazy as a cat and day by day renewed her strength from the hills and from Edith's little brood. Roger had feared trouble there, for he knew how Edith disapproved of her sister's new ideas. But although much with the children, Deborah apparently had no new ideas at all. She seemed to be only listening. One balmy day at sunset, Roger saw her lying on the grass with George sprawled by her side. Her head upon one arm, she appeared to be watching the cattle in the sloping pasture above. Slowly, as though each one of them was drawn by mysterious unseen chains, they were drifting down toward the barn where it was almost milking time. George was talking earnestly. She threw a glance at him from time to time, and Roger could see how intent were her eyes. Yes, Deborah knew how to study a boy.
Only once during the summer did she talk about her work. On a walk with her father one day she took him into a small forlorn building, a mere cabin of one room. The white paint had long been worn away, the windows were all broken, half the old shingles had dropped from the roof and on the flagpole was no flag. It was the district schoolhouse where for nearly half his life Deborah's grandfather had taught a score of pupils. Inside were a blackboard, a rusty stove, a teacher's desk and a dozen forms, grown mouldy and worm-eaten now. A torn and faded picture of Lincoln was upon one wall, half hidden by a spider's web and by a few old dangling rags which once had been red, white and blue. Below, still clinging to the wall, was an old scrap of paper, on which in a large rugged hand there had been written long ago a speech, but it had been worn away until but three words were legible—"conceived and dedicated—"
"Tell me about your school," she said. "All you can remember." Seated at her grandfather's desk she asked Roger many questions. And his recollections, at first dim and hazy, began to clear a little.
"By George!" he exclaimed. "Here are my initials!"
He stooped over one of the benches.
"Oh, dearie! Where?" He pointed them out, and then while he sat on the rude old bench for some time more she questioned him.
"But your school was not all here," she said musingly at last, "it was up on the farm, besides, where you learned to plough and sow and reap and take care of the animals in the barn, and mend things that were broken, and—oh, turn your hand to anything. But millions of children nowadays are growing up in cities, you see."
Half frowning and half smiling she began to talk of her work in town. "What is there about her," Roger asked, "that reminds me so of my mother?" His mind strayed back into the past while the low quiet voice of his daughter went on, and a wistful expression crept over his face. What would she do with the family name? What life would she lead in those many years?... "What a mother she would make." The words rose from within him, but in a voice which was not his own. It was Deborah's grandmother speaking, so clearly and distinctly that he gave a start almost of alarm.
"And if you don't believe they'll do it," Deborah was saying, "you don't know what's in children. Only we've got to help bring it out." What had she been talking about? He remembered the words "a new nation"—no more. "We've got to grope around in the dark and hunt for new ways and learn as we go. And when you've once got into the work and really felt the thrill of it all—well, then it seems rather foolish and small to bother about your own little life."
Roger spent much of his time alone. He took long rides on William along crooked, hilly roads. As the afternoon drew to its end, the shadows would creep up the mountain sides to their summits where glowed the last rays of the sun, painting the slate and granite crags in lovely pink and purple hues. And sometimes mighty banks of clouds would rear themselves high overhead, gigantic mountains of the air with billowy, misty caverns, cliffs and jagged peaks, all shifting there before his eyes. And he would think of Judith his wife. And the old haunting certainty, that her soul had died with her body, was gone. There came to him the feeling that he and his wife would meet again. Why did this hope come back to him? Was it all from the glory of the sun? Or was it from the presence, silent and invisible, of those many other mortals, folk of his own flesh and blood, who at their deaths had gone to their graves to put on immortality? Or was this deepening faith in Roger simply a sign of his growing old age?
He frowned at the thought and shook it off, and again stared up at the light on the hills. "You will live on in our children's lives." Was there no other immortality?
He often thought of his boyhood here. On a ride one day he stopped for a drink at a spring in a grove of maples surrounding a desolate farmhouse not more than a mile away from his own. And through the trees as he turned to go he saw the stark figure of a woman, poorly clad and gaunt and gray. She stood motionless watching him with a look of sullen bitterness. She was the last of "the Elkinses," a mountain family run to seed. As he rode away he saw in the field a boy with a pitchfork in his hands, a meager ragged little chap. He was staring into the valley at a wriggling, blue smoke serpent made by the night express to New York. And something leaped in Roger, for he had once felt just like that! But the woman's harsh voice cut in on his dream, as she shouted to her son below, "Hey! Why the hell you standin' thar?" And the boy with a jump of alarm turned back quickly to his work. At home a few days later, George with a mysterious air took his grandfather into the barn, and after a pledge of secrecy he said in swift and thrilling tones, "You know young Bill Elkins? Yes, you do—the boy up on the Elkins place who lives alone with his mother. Well, look here!" George swallowed hard. "Bill has cleared out—he's run away! I was up at five this morning and he came hiking down the road! He had a bundle on his back and he told me he was off for good! And was he scared? You bet he was scared! And I told him so and it made him mad! 'Aw, you're scared!' I said. 'I ain't neither!' he said. He could barely talk, but the kid had his nerve! 'Where you going?' I asked. 'To New York,' he said. 'Aw, what do you know of New York?' I said. And then, by golly, he busted right down. 'Gee!' he said, 'Gee! Can't you lemme alone?' And then he beat it down the road! You could hear the kid breathe, he was hustling so! He's way off now, he's caught the train! He wants to be a cabin boy on a big ocean liner!" For a moment there was silence. "Well?" the boy demanded, "What do you think of his chances?"
"I don't know," said Roger huskily. He felt a tightening at his throat. Abruptly he turned to his grandson.
"George," he asked, "what do you want to be?" The boy flushed under his freckles.
"I don't know as I know. I'm thinking," he answered very slowly.
"Talk it over with your mother, son."
"Yes, sir," came the prompt reply. "But he won't," reflected Roger.
"Or if you ever feel you want to, have a good long talk with me."
"Yes, sir," was the answer. Roger stood there waiting, then turned and walked slowly out of the barn. How these children grew up inside of themselves. Had boys always grown like that? Well, perhaps, but how strange it was. Always new lives, lives of their own, the old families scattering over the land. So the great life of the nation swept on. He kept noticing here deserted farms, and one afternoon in the deepening dusk he rode by a graveyard high up on a bare hillside. A horse and buggy were outside, and within he spied a lean young woman neatly dressed in a plain dark suit. With a lawn mower brought from home she was cutting the grass on her family lot. And she seemed to fit into the landscape. New England had grown very old.
Late one night toward the end of July, there came a loud honk from down the hill, then another and another. And as George in his pajamas came rushing from his bedroom shouting radiantly, "Gee! It's dad!"—they heard the car thundering outside. Bruce had left New York at dawn and had made the run in a single day, three hundred and eleven miles. He was gray with dust all over and he was worn and hollow eyed, but his dark visage wore a look of solid satisfaction.
"I needed the trip to shake me down," he pleaded, when Edith scolded him well for this terrific manner of starting his vacation. "I had to have it to cut me off from the job I left behind me. Now watch me settle down on this farm."
But it appeared he could not settle down. For the first few days, in his motor, he was busy exploring the mountains. "We'll make 'em look foolish. Eh, son?" he said. And with George, who mutely adored him, he ran all about them in a day. Genially he gave everyone rides. When he'd finished with the family, he took Dave Royce the farmer and his wife and children, and even both the hired men, for Bruce was an hospitable soul. But more than anyone else he took George. They spent hours working on the car, and at times when they came into the house begreased and blackened from their work, Edith reproved them like bad boys—but Deborah smiled contentedly.
But at the end of another week Bruce grew plainly restless, and despite his wife's remonstrances made ready to return to town. When she spoke of his hay fever he bragged to her complacently of his newly discovered cure.
"Oh, bother your little blue bugs!" she cried.
"The bugs aren't blue," he explained to her, in a mild and patient voice that drove Edith nearly wild. "They're so little they have no color at all. Poor friendly little devils—"
"Bruce!" his wife exploded.
"They've been almighty good to me. You ought to have heard my friend the Judge, the last night I was with him. He patted his bottle and said to me, 'Bruce, my boy, with all these simple animals right here as our companions why be a damn fool and run off to the cows?' And there's a good deal in what he says. You ought to be mighty thankful, too, that my summer pleasures are so mild. If you could see what some chaps do—"
And Bruce started back for the city. George rode with him the first few miles, then left him and came trudging home. His spirits were exceedingly low.
As August drew toward a close, Deborah, too, showed signs of unrest. With ever growing frequency Roger felt her eagerness to return to her work in New York.
"You're as bad as Bruce," he growled at her. "You don't have to be back," he argued. "School doesn't begin for nearly three weeks."
"There's the suffrage campaign," she answered. He gave her a look of exasperation.
"Now what the devil has suffrage to do with your schools?" he demanded.
"When the women get the vote, we'll spend more money on the children."
"Suppose the money isn't there," was Roger's grim rejoinder.
"Then we'll act like old-fashioned wives, I suppose," his daughter answered cheerfully, "and keep nagging till it is there. We'll keep up such a nagging," she added, in sweet even tones, "that you'll get the money by hook or crook, to save yourselves from going insane."
After this he caught her reading in the New York papers the list of campaign meetings each night, meetings in hot stifling halls or out upon deafening corners. And as she read there came over her face a look like that of a man who has given up tobacco and suddenly sniffs it among his friends. She went down the last night of August.
Roger stayed on for another two weeks, on into the best time of the year. For now came the nights of the first snapping frosts when the dome of the heavens was steely blue, and clear sparkling mornings, the woods aflame with scarlet and gold. And across the small field below the house, at sunset Roger would go down to the copse of birches there and find it filled with glints of light that took his glance far in among the slender, creamy stems of the trees, all slowly swaying to and fro, the leafage rich with autumn hues, warm orange, yellow and pale green. Lovely and silent and serene. So it had been when he was a boy and so it would be when he was dead. Countless trees had been cut down but others had risen in their stead. Now and then he could hear a bird warbling.
Long ago this spot had been his mother's favorite refuge from her busy day in the house. She had almost always come alone, but sometimes Roger stealing down would watch her sitting motionless and staring in among the trees. Years later in his reading he had come upon the phrase, "sacred grove," and at once he had thought of the birches. And sitting here where she had been, he felt again that boundless faith in life resplendent, conquering death, and serenely sweeping him on—into what he did not fear. For this had been his mother's faith. Sometimes in the deepening dusk he could almost see her sitting here.
"This faith in you has come from me. This is my memory living on in you, my son, though you do not know. How many times have I held you back, how many times have I urged you on, roused you up or soothed you, made you hope or fear or dream, through memories of long ago. For you were once a part of me. I moulded you, my little son. And as I have been to you, so you will be to your children. In their lives, too, we shall be there—silent and invisible, the dim strong figures of the past. For this is the power of families, this is the mystery of birth."
Suddenly he started. What was it that had thrilled him so? Only a tall dark fir in the birches. But looming in there like a shadowy phantom it had recalled a memory of a dusk far back in his boyhood, when seeing a shadow just like this he had thought it a ghost in very truth and had run for the house like a rabbit! How terribly real that fright had been! The recollection suddenly became so vivid in his mind, that as though a veil had been lifted he felt the living presence here, close by his side, of a small barefoot mountain lad, clothed in sober homespun gray, but filled with warm desires, dreams and curiosities, exploring upon every hand, now marching boldly forward, now stealing up so cautiously, now galloping away like mad! "I was once a child." To most of us these are mere words. To few is it ever given to attain so much as even a glimpse into the warm and quivering soul of that little stranger of long ago. We do not know how we were made.
"I moulded you, my little son. And as I have been to you, so you will be to your children. In their lives, too, we shall be there."
Darker, darker grew the copse and the chill of the night descended. But to Roger's eyes there was no gloom. For he had seen a vision.
CHAPTER XV
On his return to the city, Roger found that Deborah's school had apparently swept all other interests out of her mind. Baird hardly ever came to the house, and she herself was seldom there except for a hasty dinner at night. The house had to run itself more or less; and though Annie the cook was doing her best, things did not run so smoothly. Roger missed little comforts, attentions, and he missed Deborah most of all. When he came down to his breakfast she had already left the house, and often she did not return until long after he was in bed. She felt the difference herself, and though she did not put it in words her manner at times seemed to beg his forbearance. But there were many evenings when her father found it difficult to hold to the resolve he had made, to go slowly with his daughter until he could be more sure of his ground. She was growing so intense again. From the school authorities she had secured a still wider range and freedom for her new experiment, and she was working day and night to put her ideas into effect.
"It's only too easy," she remarked, "to launch an idea in this town. The town will put it in headlines at once, and with it a picture of yourself in your best bib and tucker, looking as though you loved the whole world. And you can make a wonderful splurge, until they go on to the next new thing. The real trouble comes in working it out."
And this she had set out to do. Many nights in the autumn Roger went down to the school, to try to get some clear idea of this vision of hers for children, which in a vague way he could feel was so much larger than his own, for he had seen its driving force in the grip it had upon her life. At first he could make nothing of it at all; everywhere chaos met his eyes. But he found something formless, huge, that made to him a strong appeal.
The big building fairly hummed at night with numberless activities. Fathers, mothers and children came pouring in together and went skurrying off to their places. They learned to speak English, to read and write; grown men and women scowled and toiled over their arithmetic. They worked at trades in the various shops; they hammered and sawed and set up type; they cooked and sewed and gossiped. "The Young Galician Socialist Girls" debated on the question: "Resolved that woman suffrage has worked in Colorado." "The Caruso Pleasure Club" gave a dance to "The Garibaldi Whirlwinds." An orchestra rehearsed like mad. They searched their memories for the songs and all the folk tales they had heard in peasant huts in Italy, in hamlets along rocky coasts, in the dark old ghettos of crowded towns in Poland and in Russia. And some of these songs were sung in school, and some of these tales were dramatized here. Children and parents all took part. And speakers emerged from the neighborhood. It was at times appalling, the number of young Italians and Jews who had ideas to give forth to their friends on socialism, poverty, marriage and religion, and all the other questions that rose among these immigrants jammed into this tenement hive. But when there were too many of these self-appointed guides, the neighborhood shut down on them.
"We don't want," declared one indignant old woman, "that every young loafer should shout in our face!"
Roger was slowly attracted into this enormous family life, and yielding to an impulse he took charge of a boys' club which met on Thursday evenings there. He knew well this job of fathering a small jovial group of lads; he had done it before, many years ago, in the mission school, to please his wife; he felt himself back on familiar ground. And from this point of vantage, with something definite he could do, he watched with an interest more clear the school form steadily closer ties with the tenements that hedged it 'round, gathering its big family. And this family by slow degrees began to make itself a part of the daily life of Roger's house. Committees held their meetings here, teachers dropped in frequently, and Roger invited the boys in his club to come up and see him whenever they liked.
His most frequent visitor was Johnny Geer, the cripple. He was working in Roger's office now and the two had soon become close friends. John kept himself so neat and clean, he displayed such a keen interest in all the details of office work, and he showed such a beaming appreciation of anything that was done for him.
"That boy is getting a hold on me lately almost like a boy of my own," Roger said one evening when Allan Baird was at the house. "He's the pluckiest young un I ever met. I've put him to work in my private office, where he can use the sofa to rest, and I've made him my own stenographer—partly because he's so quick at dictation and partly to try to make him slow down. He has the mind of a race horse. He runs at night to libraries until I should think he'd go insane. And his body can't stand it, he's breaking down—though whenever I ask him how he feels, he always says, 'Fine, thank you.'" Here Roger turned to Allan. "I wish you'd take the boy," he said, "to the finest specialist in town, and see what can be done for his spine. I'll pay any price."
"There won't be any price," said Allan, "but I'll see to it at once."
He had John examined the same week.
"Well?" asked Roger when next they met.
"Well," said Baird, "it isn't good news."
"You mean he's hopeless?" Allan nodded:
"It's Pott's disease, and it's gone too far. John is eighteen. He may live to be thirty."
"But I tell you, Baird, I'll do anything!"
"There's almost nothing you can do. If he had been taken when he was a baby, he might have been cured and given a chance. But the same mother who dropped him then, when she was full of liquor, just went to the druggist on her block, and after listening to his advice she bought some patent medicine, a steel jacket and some crutches, and thought she'd done her duty."
"But there must be something we can do!" retorted Roger angrily.
"Yes," said Baird, "we can make him a little more comfortable. And meanwhile we can help Deborah here to get hold of other boys like John and give 'em a chance before it's too late—keep them from being crippled for life because their mothers were too blind and ignorant to act in time." Baird's voice had a ring of bitterness.
"Most of 'em love their children," Roger said uneasily. Baird turned on him a steady look.
"Love isn't enough," he retorted. "The time is coming very soon when we'll have the right to guard the child not only when it's a baby but even before it has been born."
Roger drew closer to John after this. Often behind the beaming smile he would feel the pain and loneliness, and the angry grit which was fighting it down. And so he would ask John home to supper on nights when nobody else was there. One day late in the afternoon they were walking home together along the west side of Madison Square. The big open space was studded with lights sparkling up at the frosty stars, in a city, a world, a universe that seemed filled with the zest and the vigor of life. Out of these lights a mighty tower loomed high up into the sky. And stopping on his crutches, a grim small crooked figure in all this rushing turmoil, John set his jaws, and with his shrewd and twinkling eyes fixed on the top of the tower, he said,
"I meant to tell you, Mr. Gale. You was asking me once what I wanted to be. And I want to be an architect."
"Do, eh," grunted Roger. He, too, looked up at that thing in the stars, and there was a tightening at his throat. "All right," he added, presently, "why not start in and be one?"
"How?" asked John alertly.
"Well, my boy," said Roger, "I'd hate to lose you in the office—"
"Yes, sir, and I'd hate to go." Just then the big clock in the tower began to boom the hour, and a chill struck into Roger.
"You'd have to," he said gruffly. "You haven't any time to lose! I mean," he hastily added, "that for a job as big as that you'd need a lot of training. But if it's what you want to be, go right ahead. I'll back you. My son-in-law is a builder at present. I'll talk to him and get his advice. We may be able to arrange to have you go right into his office, begin at the bottom and work straight up." In silence for a moment John hobbled on by Roger's side.
"I'd hate to leave your place," he said.
"I know," was Roger's brusque reply, "and I'd hate to lose you. We'll have to think it over."
A few days later he talked with Bruce, who said he'd be glad to take the boy. And at dinner that night with Deborah, Roger asked abruptly,
"Why not let Johnny come here for a while and use one of our empty bedrooms?"
With a quick flush of pleased surprise, Deborah gave her father a look that embarrassed him tremendously.
"Well, why not?" he snapped at her. "Sensible, isn't it?"
And sensible it turned out to be. When John first heard about it, he was apparently quite overcome, and there followed a brief awkward pause while he rapidly blinked the joy from his eyes. But then he said, "Fine, thank you. That's mighty good of you, Mr. Gale," in as matter of fact a tone as you please. And he entered the household in much the same way, for John had a sense of the fitness of things. He had always kept himself neat and clean, but he became immaculate now. He dined with Roger the first night, but early the next morning he went down to the kitchen and breakfasted there; and from this time on, unless he were especially urged to come up to the dining room, John took all his meals downstairs. The maids were Irish—so was John. They were good Catholics—so was John. They loved the movies—so did John. In short, it worked out wonderfully. In less than a month John had made himself an unobtrusive and natural part of the life of Roger's sober old house. It had had to stretch just a little, no more.
CHAPTER XVI
But that winter there was more in the house than Deborah's big family. Though at times Roger felt it surging in with its crude, immense vitality, there were other times when it was not so, and the lives of his other two daughters attracted his attention, for both were back again in town.
Laura and her husband had returned from abroad in October, and in a small but expensive apartment in a huge new building facing on Park Avenue they had gaily started the career of their own little family, or "ménage," as Laura called it. This word had stuck in Roger's mind, for he had a suspicion that a "ménage" was no place for babies. Grimly, when he went there first to be shown the new home by its mistress, he looked about him for a room which might be made a nursery. But no such room was in evidence. "We decided to have no guest room," he heard Laura say to Deborah. And glancing at his daughter then, sleek and smiling and demure, in her tea-gown fresh from Paris, Roger darkly told himself that a child would be an unwelcome guest. The whole place was as compact and sparkling as a jewel box. The bed chamber was luxurious, with a gorgeous bath adjoining and a dressing-room for Harold.
"And look at this love of a closet!" said Laura to Deborah eagerly. "Isn't it simply enormous?" As Deborah looked, her father did, too, and his eye was met by an array of shimmering apparel which made him draw back almost with a start.
They found Harold in the pantry. Their Jap, it appeared, was a marvellous cook and did the catering as well, so that Laura rarely troubled herself to order so much as a single meal. But her husband had for many years been famous for his cocktails, and although the Jap did everything else Hal had kept this in his own hands.
"I thought this much of the house-keeping ought to remain in the family," he said.
Roger did not like this joke. But later, when he had imbibed the delicious concoction Harold had made, and had eaten the dinner created by that Japanese artist of theirs, his irritation subsided.
"They barely know we're here," he thought. "They're both in love up to their ears."
Despite their genial attempts to be hospitable and friendly, time and again he saw their glances meet in an intimate gleaming manner which made him rather uncomfortable. But where was the harm, he asked himself. They were married all right, weren't they? Still somehow—somehow—no, by George, he didn't like it, he didn't approve! The whole affair was decidedly mixing. Roger went away vaguely uneasy, and he felt that Deborah was even more disturbed than himself.
"Those two," she remarked to her father, "are so fearfully wrapt up in each other it makes me afraid. Oh, it's all right, I suppose, and I wouldn't for worlds try to interfere. But I can't help feeling somehow that no two people with such an abundance of youth and money and happiness have the right to be so amazingly—selfish!"
"They ought to have children," Roger said.
"But look at Edith," his daughter rejoined. "She hasn't a single interest that I can find outside her home. It seems to have swallowed her, body and soul." A frowning look of perplexity swept over Deborah's mobile face, and with a whimsical sigh she exclaimed, "Oh, this queer business of families!"
In December there came a little crash. Late one evening Laura came bursting in upon them in a perfect tantrum, every nerve in her lithe body tense, her full lips visibly quivering, her voice unsteady, and her big black eyes aflame with rage. She was jealous of her husband and "that nasty little cat!" Roger learned no more about it, for Deborah motioned him out of the room. He heard their two voices talk on and on, until Laura's slowly quieted down. Soon afterwards she left the house, and Deborah came in to him.
"She's gone home, eh?" asked Roger.
"Yes, she has, poor silly child—she said at first she had come here to stay."
"By George," he said. "As bad as that?"
"Of course it isn't as bad as that!" Deborah cried impatiently. "She just built and built on silly suspicions and let herself get all worked up! I don't see what they're coming to!" For a few moments nothing was said. "It's so unnatural!" she exclaimed. "Men and women weren't made to live like that!" Roger scowled into his paper.
"Better leave 'em alone," he admonished her. "You can't help—they're not your kind. Don't you mix into this affair."
But Deborah did. She remembered that her sister had once shown quite a talent for amateur theatricals; and to give Laura something to do, Deborah persuaded her to take a dramatic club in her school. And Laura, rather to Roger's surprise, became an enthusiast down there. She worked like a slave at rehearsals, and upon the costumes she spent money with a lavish hand. Moreover, instead of being annoyed, as Edith was, at Deborah's prominence in the press, Laura gloried in it, as though this "radical" sister of hers were a distinct social asset among her giddy friends uptown. For even Laura's friends, her father learned with astonishment, had acquired quite an appetite for men and women with ideas—the more "radical," the better. But the way Laura used this word at times made Roger's blood run cold. She was vivid in her approval of her sister's whole idea, as a scheme of wholesale motherhood which would give "a perfectly glorious jolt" to the old-fashioned home with its overworked mothers who let their children absorb their days.
"As though having children and bringing them up," she disdainfully declared, "were something every woman must do, whether she happens to like it or not, at the cost of any real growth of her own!"
And smilingly she hinted at impending radical changes in the whole relation of marriage, of which she was hearing in detail at a series of lectures to young wives, delivered on Thursday mornings in a hotel ball-room.
What the devil was getting into the town? Roger frowned his deep dislike. Here was Laura with her chicken's mind blithely taking her sister's thoughts and turning them topsy-turvy, to make for herself a view of life which fitted like a white kid glove her small and elegant "ménage." And although her father had only inklings of it all, he had quite enough to make him irate at this uncanny interplay of influences in his family. Why couldn't the girls leave each other alone?
Early in the winter, Edith, too, had entered in. It had taken Edith just one glance into the bride's apartment to grasp Laura's whole scheme of existence.
"Selfish, indulgent and abnormal," was the way she described it. She and Bruce were dining with Roger that night. "I wash my hands of the whole affair," continued Edith curtly. "So long as she doesn't want my help, as she has plainly made me feel, I certainly shan't stand in her way."
"You're absolutely right," said her father.
"Stick to it," said Bruce approvingly.
But Edith did not stick to it. In her case too, as the weeks wore on, those subtle family ties took hold and made her feel the least she could do was "to keep up appearances." So she and Bruce dined with the bride and groom, and in turn had them to dinner. And these dinners, as Bruce confided to Roger, were occasions no man could forget.
"They come only about once a month," he said in a tone of pathos, "but it seems as though barely a week had gone by when Edith says to me again, 'We're dining with Laura and Hal to-night.' Well, and we dine. Young Sloane is not a bad sort of a chap—works hard downtown and worships his wife. The way he lives—well, it isn't mine—and mine isn't his—and we both let it go at that. But the women can't, they haven't it in 'em. Each sits with her way of life in her lap. You can't see it over the tablecloth, but, my God, how you feel it! The worst of it is," he ended, "that after one of these terrible meals each woman is more set than before in her own way of living. Not that I don't like Edith's way," her husband added hastily.
Edith also disapproved of the fast increasing publicity which Deborah was getting.
"I may be very old-fashioned," she remarked to her father, "but I can't get used to this idea that a woman's place is in headlines. And I think it's rather hard on you—the use she's making of your house."
One Friday night when she came to play chess, she found her father in the midst of a boisterous special meeting of his club of Italian boys. It had been postponed from the evening before. And though Roger, overcome with dismay at having forgotten Edith's night, apologized profusely, the time-honored weekly game took place no more from that day on.
"Edith's pretty sore," said Bruce, who dropped in soon afterwards. "She says Deborah has made your house into an annex to her school."
Roger smoked in silence. His whole family was about his ears.
"My boy," he muttered earnestly, "you and I must stick together."
"We sure must," agreed his son-in-law. "And what's more, if we're to keep the peace, we've got to try to put some punch into Deborah's so-called love affair. She ought to get married and settle down."
"Yes," said Roger, dubiously. "Only let's keep it to ourselves."
"No chance of that," was the cheerful reply. "You can't keep Edith out of it. It would only make trouble in my family." Roger gave him a pitying look and said,
"Then, for the Lord's sake, let her in!"
So they took Edith into their councils, and she gave them an indulgent smile.
"Suppose you leave this to me," she commanded. "Don't you think I've been using my eyes? There's no earthly use in stepping in now, for Deborah has lost her head. She sees herself a great new woman with a career. But wait till the present flare-up subsides, till the newspapers all drop her and she is thoroughly tired out. Until then, remember, we keep our hands off."
"Do you think you can?" asked Roger, with a little glimmer of hope.
"I?" she retorted. "Most certainly! I mean to leave her alone absolutely—until she comes to me herself. When she does, we'll know it's time to begin."
"I'm afraid Edith is hurt about something," said Deborah to her father, about a month after this little talk. "She hasn't been near us for over three weeks."
"Let her be!" said Roger, in alarm. "I mean," he hastily added, "why can't you let Edith come when she likes? There's nothing the matter. It's simply her children—they take up her time."
"No," said Deborah calmly, "it's I. She as good as told me so last month. She thinks I've become a perfect fanatic—without a spare moment or thought for my family."
"Oh, my family!" Roger groaned. "I tell you, Deborah, you're wrong! Edith's children are probably sick in bed!"
"Then I'll go and see," she answered.
"Something has happened to Deborah," Edith informed him blithely, over the telephone the next night.
"Has, eh," grunted Roger.
"Yes, she was here to see me to-day. And something has happened—she's changing fast. I felt it in all kinds of ways. She was just as dear as she could be—and lonely, as though she were feeling her age. I really think we can do something now."
"All right, let's do something," Roger growled.
And Edith began to do something. Her hostility to her sister had completely disappeared. In its place was a friendly affection, an evident desire to please. She even drew Laura into the secret, and there was a gathering of the clan. There were consultations in Roger's den. "Deborah is to get married." The feeling of it crept through the house. Nothing was said to her, of course, but Deborah was made to feel that her two sisters had drawn close. And their influence upon her choice was more deep and subtle than she knew. For although Roger's family had split so wide apart, between his three daughters there were still mysterious bonds reaching far back into nursery days. And Deborah in deciding whether to marry Allan Baird was affected more than she was aware by the married lives of her sisters. All she had seen in Laura's ménage, all that she had ever observed in Edith's growing family, kept rising from time to time in her thoughts, as she vaguely tried to picture herself a wife and the mother of children.
So the family, with those subtle bonds from the past, began to press steadily closer and closer around this one unmarried daughter, and help her to make up her mind.
CHAPTER XVII
But she did not appear to care to be helped. Nor did Allan—he rarely came to the house, and he went to Edith's not at all. He was even absent from her Christmas tree for the children, a jolly little festivity which neither he nor Deborah had missed in years.
"What has got into him?" Roger asked. And shortly after Christmas he called the fellow up on the 'phone. "Drop in for dinner to-night," he urged. And he added distinctly, "I'm alone."
"Are you? I'll be glad to."
"Thank you, Baird, I want your advice." And as he hung up the receiver he said, "Now then!" to himself, in a tone of firm decision. But later, as the day wore on, he cursed himself for what he had done. "Don't it beat the devil," he thought, "how I'm always putting my foot in it?" And when Baird came into the room that night he loomed, to Roger's anxious eye, if anything taller than before. But his manner was so easy, his gruff voice so natural, and he seemed to take this little party of two so quietly as a matter of course, that Roger was soon reassured, and at table he and Allan got on even better than before. Baird talked of his life as a student, in Vienna, Bonn and Edinburgh, and of his first struggles in New York. His talk was full of human bits, some tragic, more amusing. And Roger's liking for the man increased with every story told.
"I asked you here," he bluntly began, when they had gone to the study to smoke, "to talk to you about Deborah." Baird gave him a friendly look.
"All right. Let's talk about her."
"It strikes me you were right last year," said Roger, speaking slowly. "She's already showing the strain of her work. She don't look to me as strong as she was."
"She looks to me stronger," Allan replied. "You know, people fool doctors now and then—and she seems to have taken a fresh start. I feel she may go on for years." Roger was silent a moment, chagrined and disappointed.
"Have you had a good chance to watch her?" he asked.
"Yes, and I'm watching her still," said Baird. "I see her down there at the school. She tells me you've been there yourself."
"Yes," said Roger, determinedly, "and I mean to keep on going. I'm trying not to lose hold of her," he added with harsh emphasis. Baird turned and frankly smiled at him.
"Then you have probably seen," he replied, "that to keep any hold at all on her, you must make up your mind as I have done that, strength or no strength, this job of hers is going to be a life career. When a woman who has held a job without a break for eleven years can feel such a flame of enthusiasm, you can be pretty sure, I think, it is the deepest part of her. At least I feel that way," he said. "And I believe the only way to keep near her—for the present, anyhow—is to help her in her work."
When Baird had gone, Roger found himself angry.
"I'm not in the habit, young man," he thought, "of throwing my daughter at gentlemen's heads. If you feel as calm and contented as that you can go to the devil! Far be it from me to lift a hand! In fact, as I come to think of it, you would probably make her a mighty poor husband!" He worked himself into quite a rage. But an hour later, when he had subsided, "Hold on," he thought. "Am I right about this? Is the man as contented as he talks? No, sir, not for a minute he isn't! But what can he do? If he tried making love to Deborah he'd simply be killing his chances. Not the slightest doubt in the world. She can't think of anything but her career. Yes, sir, when all's said and done, to marry a modern woman is no child's play, it means thought and care. And A. Baird has made up his mind to it. He has made up his mind to marry her by playing a long waiting game. He's just slowly and quietly nosing his way into her school, because it's her life. And a mighty shrewd way of going about it. You don't need any help from me, my friend; all you need is to be let alone."
In talks at home with Deborah, and in what he himself observed at school, Roger began to get inklings of "A. Baird's long waiting game." He found that several months before Allan had offered to start a free clinic for mothers and children in connection with the school, and that he alone had put it through, with only the most reluctant aid and gratitude from Deborah—as though she dreaded something. Baird took countless hours from his busy uptown practice; he hurt himself more than once, in fact, by neglecting rich patients to do this work. Where a sick or pregnant mother was too poor to carry out his advice, he followed her into her tenement home, sent one of his nurses to visit her, and even gave money when it was needed to ease the strain of her poverty until she should be well and strong. Soon scores of the mothers of Deborah's children were singing the praises of Doctor Baird.
Then he began coming to the house.
"I was right," thought Roger complacently.
He laid in a stock of fine cigars and some good port and claret, too; and on evenings when Baird came to dine, Roger by a genial glow and occasional jocular ironies would endeavor to drag the talk away from clinics, adenoids, children's teeth, epidemics and the new education. But no joke was so good that Deborah could not promptly match it with some amusing little thing which one of her children had said or done. For she had a mother's instinct for bragging fondly of her brood. It was deep, it was uncanny, this queer community motherhood.
"This poor devil," Roger thought, with a pitying glance at Baird, "might just as well be marrying a widow with three thousand brats."
But Baird did not seem in the least dismayed. On the contrary, his assurance appeared to be deepening every week, and with it Deborah's air of alarm. For his clinic, as it swiftly grew, he secured financial backing from his rich women patients uptown, many of them childless and only too ready to respond to the appeals he made to them. And one Saturday evening at the house, while dining with Roger and Deborah, he told of an offer he had had from a wealthy banker's widow to build a maternity hospital. He talked hungrily of all it could do in co-operation with the school. He said nothing of the obvious fact that it would require his whole time, but Roger thought of that at once, and by the expression on Deborah's face he saw she was thinking, too.
He felt they wanted to be alone, so presently he left them. From his study he could hear their voices growing steadily more intense. Was it all about work? He could not tell. "They've got working and living so mixed up, a man can't possibly tell 'em apart."
Then his daughter was called to the telephone, and Allan came in to bid Roger good-night. And his eyes showed an impatience he did not seem to care to hide.
"Well?" inquired Roger. "Did you get Deborah's consent?"
"To what?" asked Allan sharply.
"To your acceptance," Roger answered, "of the widow's mite." Baird grinned.
"She couldn't help herself," he said.
"But she didn't seem to like it, eh—"
"No," said Baird, "she didn't." Roger had a dark suspicion.
"By the way," he asked in a casual tone, "what's this philanthropic widow like?"
"She's sixty-nine," Baird answered.
"Oh," said Roger. He smoked for a time, and sagely added, "My daughter's a queer woman, Baird—she's modern, very modern. But she's still a woman, you understand—and so she's jealous—of her job." But A. Baird was in no joking mood.
"She's narrow," he said sternly. "That's what's the matter with Deborah. She's so centered on her job she can't see anyone else's. She thinks I'm doing all this work solely in order to help her school—when if she'd use some imagination and try to put herself in my shoes, she'd see the chance it's giving me!"
"How do you mean?" asked Roger, looking a bit bewildered.
"Why," said Baird with an impatient fling of his hand, "there are men in my line all over the country who'd leave home, wives and children for the chance I've blundered onto here! A hospital fully equipped for research, a free hand, an opportunity which comes to one man in a million! But can she see it? Not at all! It's only an annex to her school!"
"Yes," said Roger gravely, "she's in a pretty unnatural state. I think she ought to get married, Baird—" To his friendly and disarming twinkle Baird replied with a rueful smile.
"You do, eh," he growled. "Then tell her to plan her wedding to come before her funeral." As he rose to go, Roger took his hand.
"I'll tell her," he said. "It's sound advice. Good-night, my boy, I wish you luck."
A few moments later he heard in the hall their brief good-nights to each other, and presently Deborah came in. She was not looking quite herself.
"Why are you eyeing me like that?" his daughter asked abruptly.
"Aren't you letting him do a good deal for you?"
Deborah flushed a little:
"Yes, I am. I can't make him stop."
Her father hesitated.
"You could," he said, "if you wanted to. If you were sure," he added slowly, "that you didn't love him—and told him so." He felt a little panic, for he thought he had gone too far. But his daughter only turned away and restlessly moved about the room. At last she came to her father's chair:
"Hadn't you better leave this to me?"
"I had, my dear, I most certainly had. I was all wrong to mention it," he answered very humbly.
From this night on, Baird changed his tack. Although soon busy with the plans for the hospital, to be built at once, he said little about it to Deborah. Instead, he insisted on taking her off on little evening sprees uptown.
"Do you know what's the matter with both of us?" he said to her one evening. "We've been getting too durned devoted to our jobs and our ideals. You're becoming a regular school marm and I'm getting to be a regular slave to every wretched little babe who takes it into his head to be born. We haven't one redeeming vice."
And again he took up dancing. The first effort which he made, down at Deborah's school one evening, was a failure quite as dismal as his attempts of the previous year. But he did not appear in the least discouraged. He came to the house one Friday night.
"I knew I could learn to dance," he said, "in spite of all your taunts and jibes. That little fiasco last Saturday night—"
"Was perfectly awful," Deborah said.
"Did not discourage me in the least," he continued severely. "I decided the only trouble with me was that I'm tall and I've got to bend—to learn to bend."
"Tremendously!"
"So I went to a lady professor, and she saw the point at once. Since then I've had five lessons, and I can fox-trot in my sleep. To-morrow is Saturday. Where shall we go?"
"To the theater."
"Good. We'll start with that. But the minute the play is over we'll gallop off to the Plaza Grill—just as the music is in full swing—"
"And we'll dance," she groaned, "for hours. And when I get home, I'll creep into bed so tired and sore in every limb—"
"That you'll sleep late Sunday morning. And a mighty good thing for you, too—if you ask my advice—"
"I don't ask your advice!"
"You're getting it, though," he said doggedly. "If you're still to be a friend of mine we'll dance at the Plaza to-morrow night—and well into the Sabbath."
"The principal of a public school—dancing on the Sabbath. Suppose one of my friends should see us there."
"Your friends," he replied with a fine contempt, "do not dance in the Plaza Grill. I'm the only roisterer you know."
"All right," she conceded grudgingly, "I'll roister. Come and get me. But I'd much prefer when the play is done to come home and have milk and crackers here."
"Deborah," he said cheerfully, "for a radical school reformer you're the most conservative woman I know."