Part 1 (2/2)

There was neither quiver nor glow about the place where Father finally stopped of his own accord. In a wide part of the street, huge piles of lumber were stacked. Father would walk slowly along these, looking at them very hard, and then he would go into a tiny, stuffy little wooden clap-boarded house--just one room, with men in s.h.i.+rt sleeves writing at desks--and there he would talk incomprehensible grown-up talk with one of the men, and the man would write at his desk, and Father standing up, would write in a note-book with a fountain pen ... and that was all the fun there was to the lumber business!

Left to himself, Neale sat on the door-step and watched the fascinating life on the docks. Once he slipped across the street and tried to follow a truck in, but a big man with a red face yelled at him so loudly to ”get out of there” that Neale ran back again, furiously angry but not knowing how to get around the big watchman. All he could do was to sit just inside the door, hating the watchman, and stare at the tantalizing activity so far away, and wish with all his heart that Father's business were more romantic.

Mother meant more to Neale than Father did. He knew her better ... a little better. He had even some abstract ideas about her, that she was beautiful when she dressed up to go out in the afternoon. Mother fussed about his clothes more than was convenient, and insisted on baths, and was.h.i.+ng hands before meals, but when he was sick, Mother read him stories, and let him leave the gas turned on in his room when he went to bed. Mother gave him pennies, too, and when Father was away on a business trip, he and Mother would eat alone together, and she would talk to him and ask him questions about school and play, and his boy friends. Neale didn't mind telling her things ... he liked Mother ...

but he couldn't seem to manage to think of a great deal to tell her. It sounded foolish to talk about games to grown-ups.

And games were really all that Neale cared about, almost all that he ever thought about. As to telling Mother other things, the few other things he did occasionally think about, why, there didn't seem to be anywhere to start. He'd have to begin ”way back at the beginning” and now that Neale was ten years old, the beginning was too far back for him to lay hold of.

As a matter of fact, she did not often ask about any of it, even in her distant careful way of asking. She just took good care of him, and had what he liked for supper, and put the kind of books he liked up in his room, and kept his b.u.t.tons sewed on, and every night, till he was a big, big boy came into his room to kiss him good-night in his bed. She didn't say anything much then; just, ”Have you enough covers?” maybe; or, ”I believe I'd better open that window wider,” and then, with the kiss, ”Good-night, Neale.”

”Good-night, Mother.”

Then he turned over and nearly always went instantly to sleep.

When Father was at home, mostly Father and Mother talked together at table, and read together after supper in the sitting-room, while Neale ”did” his lessons upstairs. Or else Mother would dress up in one of her pretty dresses and Father would put on a clean s.h.i.+rt and his dark suit and they would go across the river to a theater in New York, leaving Neale to Katie, the good-natured, middle-aged Irish cook who had been with them since before Neale's birth. Or sometimes they had ”company”; other ladies in pretty dresses and other husbands in clean s.h.i.+rts and dark suits. Then they had a specially good supper, the sort of expensive things that were usually reserved for Sunday dinner, planked shad and roast chicken and ice-cream, and coffee in the little gold-lined cups that Mother always washed herself. Neale didn't mind company since n.o.body paid much attention to him, and he liked the extra Sunday eatables on a week-day, but one of his few impressions about his father and mother was that, although they always talked and laughed a great deal more when there was company, and seemed to have a lively time, they really liked it better when there were only the two of them talking over Neale's head at the table, and settling down afterwards to read and talk to one another around the drop-light.

Another of those impressions was the tone of his father's voice when looking up from his book, he said, ”Oh, Mary!” Neale always knew just the look there would be in Mother's eyes as she laid down her own book and asked, ”Yes, what is it, dear?”

CHAPTER III

Among the many things which Neale never thought of questioning was the fact that he did not go to a public school as all his play-mates did. If he had asked, he would have found that his father and mother had an answer all ready for him, the completeness and thoroughness of which might have indicated that they had perhaps silenced some questionings of their own with it. He would have heard that of course they approved of public schools, and that if they had continued to live in Ma.s.sachusetts, even if they had gone to live in a nice part of New York City, they would certainly have sent their son to a public school. But here at Union Hill, with the public schools so thickly populated by foreign children, the conditions were really different. What could a little American boy learn in a cla.s.s-room with forty foreign children, whose constant study must needs be English?

There was no flaw in the reasoning they were prepared to present to their son when he should ask the natural question about his schooling.

But Neale never asked it. By the time he was old enough to think of it, habit had made him incapable of conceiving it. He no more wondered why he went every morning to the Taylors' house on Bower Street, instead of to Public School Number Two, than why he had two eyes instead of one.

That was the way things were. Neale was slow to question the way things were.

Dr. Taylor was another transplanted New Englander like Neale's father, with another college-graduate wife (rarer in those days than now), like Neale's mother. His ideas on children and the public schools would have been exactly like those of the Crittendens, even if they had not been fortified by the lameness of his only son. Jimmy's crutches made Public School definitely out of the question, and since Jimmy must have instruction at home, why, his two sisters, Elsie and Myrtle, might as well profit by it. Dr. Taylor was glad enough to have the expense of paying Miss Vanderwater shared by Mr. Crittenden, and to let Neale share in the benefits of Miss Vanderwater's instruction.

Hence it happened that every morning Neale rang at the Taylors' front door, and when the maid let him in, went upstairs to the big front room on the top floor and there did whatever Miss Vanderwater told him to do.

He was under her command from nine in the morning till noon, when he went home and had lunch with Mother, who always asked how school had gone, to which question Neale always made the same truthful answer that he guessed it was all right. At one he returned for two more hours with Miss Vanderwater. In this way he went through a series of Appleton's Readers, filled copy-books with thin Spencerian script, copied maps in colored ink with the coast-line shaded with scallops, did arithmetic on a slate and made very fair progress in learning German. German was much in the air in that locality.

Of course he did not spend all those years of his life, side by side with three other children without becoming intimately acquainted with them. But one of the instinctive watertight compartments in Neale's Anglo-Saxon mind was the one in which he kept his school separate from his life. He studied with the Taylor children, but he never dreamed of staying after hours to play with them. And yet he knew them infinitely better than any of the innumerable chance street-acquaintances with whom he flew kites or played one-old-cat. He knew instinctively, knew without thinking of it, knew to the marrow of his brutally normal bones that Jimmy Taylor was lame not only in his legs but in his character. Jimmy's delicacy, the great care taken of him, the fact that he always played in the house or back-yard with his sisters, made a sissy of him. That was the plain fact, and Neale was not one to refuse to admit plain facts. He was always kind to Jimmy, at least not unkind, but he was always secretly relieved when the front door shut behind him, hiding from him Jimmy's too-white hands, thin neck and querulous invalid's voice.

Of the two girls, Elsie was only a little kid, so much younger than Jimmy and Neale that they were barely aware of her existence. Myrtle, on the contrary, was very much there, a little girl whose comments on things never failed to arouse in Neale the profoundest astonishment. How could anybody think of such dotty things to say? You never had the least idea how anything was going to strike her, except that it was likely to strike her so hard that she made an awful fuss about it.

Myrtle lived in mortal terror of any little dirt, it seemed to Neale.

One day in May, when they had had a picnic-lunch out in the back-yard of the Taylors' house, Myrtle carried on perfectly wild about a little flying white thing that had fallen into her gla.s.s of lemonade. Holy smoke! thought Neale, if she was afraid to get it out, _he_ wasn't. So he fished it out with a spoon, and handed her back the gla.s.s. And what did she do? She made up an awful face and threw the lemonade on the ground! Neale was horrified at the waste.

And the day when Miss Vanderwater in their ”natural history lesson” told them about angle-worms and how they keep the ground light and open, didn't Myrtle go off in another fit, with her eyes goggling and her fingers all stretched apart as though she felt angle-worms everywhere.

She insisted that Miss Vanderwater must be wrong, that such an awful thing could not be true.

”Why, what do you mean?” asked Miss Vanderwater, for once, Neale noticed with satisfaction, as much at a loss as he.

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