Windy McPherson's Son Part 38

"I drove him crazy," she said, laughing quietly. "He wanted me to stay at home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me down town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn't come he would go away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn't a man. He would do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids on my hands."

In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in an open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place, eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.

"We will go to my house. I want to have you alone," said the woman.

They drove through street after street of workingmen's houses, where children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their bare legs flas.h.i.+ng in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after them, holding to the back of the carriage.

The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of the running boys.

"Run, you little devils," she cried.

They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under the lights.

"Give me a silver dollar," she said, turning to Sam, and when he had given it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp.

The two boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.

Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps, striking Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black crawling thing, alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she crept forward and dropped it down the neck of the driver.

In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam's head was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran back over the years he had pa.s.sed since breaking his word to Sue, and a scorn of all effort burned in him.

"It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth," he thought. "He comes to a fine end in life."

On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood climbed through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half hope awoke in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing, intoxicated woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot through him. He began thinking of what she had said before the laughing crowd on the steamer.

"I have borne three children and can bear more."

His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain, and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him.

He thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of life unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command and direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.

"Else why am I here?" he muttered, looking away from the vacant, laughing face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver on the seat in front. "Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why went I about seeking Truth?"

His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her hand.

"Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have been," he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he thought, was being tossed about by life.

Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped.

Through the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before a bar drinking foaming gla.s.ses of beer, the hanging lamps above their heads throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell came out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and shouted. "O Will, come out here."

A man clad in a long white ap.r.o.n and with his s.h.i.+rt sleeves rolled to his elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.

"Will you run it?" he asked.

"Sure," she said. "The kids can take care of themselves."

At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got out of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk skirting a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a tangled ma.s.s of bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and in the distance the grey body of the river showed faint and far away.

The undergrowth was so thick that, looking down, one saw only the tops of the growth, with here and there a grey outcrop of rocks that glistened in the moonlight.

Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the houses facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily on Sam's arm, her feet groping for the steps. They pa.s.sed through a door and into a long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the room went up to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the end one looked into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at the k.n.o.b of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his face and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown eyes, was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and black eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him so that his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and with yellow hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another chair, her head hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would have said, seven, the black-haired boy ten.

The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman; the sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired boy straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.

"h.e.l.lo, Mother," he said heartily.

The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.

"Come here, Joe," she said.

The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside, supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he pa.s.sed she struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him reeling into the dining-room.

"Now you, Tom," she called to the black-haired boy. "I told you kids to wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten and nothing done and you two reading books again."

The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she winced and twisted in his grasp.

"You come with me," he said.

He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned heavily on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.

At the top of the stairway he stopped.

"We go in here," she said, pointing to a door.

He took her into the room. "You get to sleep," he said, and going out closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.

Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by the table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.

Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back at him self-consciously.

"Which of you two puts Mary to bed?" he asked, and then, without waiting for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. "Let Tom do it," he said. "I will help you here."

Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him dry wiping towels. Sam's coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.

The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within Sam's breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though the lash of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old memories began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood, his mother at work among other people's soiled clothes, his father Windy coming home drunk, and the chill in his mother's heart and in his own.

There was something men and women owed to childhood, not because it was childhood but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any question of fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.

In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam's spirit. The boy Joe went quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves.

Somewhere on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The backs of the hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and competent the hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled, unshaken by life. Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He had always wanted quickness and firmness within his own body, the health of the body that is a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an American and down deep within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had brought him to nothing and had only left him more shaken and uncertain then ever.

The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to escape the shy silent presence of the boy. "Has life quite gone from me?

Am I but a dead thing walking about?" he asked himself. The presence of the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.

Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?

The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two boys said good night to the strange man in their mother's house. Joe, the bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook it solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.

"I'll be around here to-morrow I think," Sam said huskily.

The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a new journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body wis.h.i.+ng it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day when he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for Truth, he let his mind go so that it played freely over his past life, reviewing and a.n.a.lysing.

For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where the lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted good on his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought back to him the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had given him herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.