Life and Gabriella Part 40

"Come, Archibald, I want you," she said gravely. "You went off without seeing your gifts." She had invaded the sitting-room of a strange man, but her purpose was a righteous one, and there was no embarra.s.sment in her manner.

"Oh, mother, are they upstairs? I'll run up and see them!" cried, Archibald delightedly. "I thought they were all in the trunks."

Darting past her in a flash, he bounded up the staircase, while Gabriella stood facing O'Hara, who had risen and thrown away his cigar at her entrance. The room was still fragrant with tobacco; there was a light cloud of smoke over the mignonette in the window box, and beyond it, she could see the dim foliage of the elm tree waving over the flagged walk to the gate. With an eye trained to recognize the value of details, she saw that the sitting-room was furnished with the same deplorable taste which had selected the golden-oak hatrack and the a.s.sortment of ornamental walking-sticks. The woodwork had been stained to match the oak of the barbarous writing-table, which held a distorted bronze lamp, with the base composed of a heavily draped feminine figure, a ma.s.sive desk set, also of bronze, a pile of newspapers, a dictionary, and several dull-looking books with worn covers and dog's eared pages.

She noticed that the chairs were all large and solid, with deep arms and backs upholstered in red leather, which looked as if it would never wear out, that the rug was good, and that, except for a few meretricious oil paintings on the greenish walls, the room was agreeably bare of decoration. After her first hesitating glance, she surmised that a certain expensive comfort was the end sought for and achieved, and that in the furnishing beauty had evidently been estimated in figures.

"Mr. O'Hara," she began firmly, "I wish you would not take my son away from me."

He did not lower his gaze, and she saw, after an instant in which he appeared merely surprised, a look of amus.e.m.e.nt creep into his expressive eyes. Within four walls, in his light summer clothes, with the gauzy drift of tobacco smoke over his head, he looked larger and more irrepressibly energetic than he had done out of doors.

"I am sorry you feel that way," he returned very slowly after a pause.

Already she had discovered that he had great difficulty with his words except when he was stirred by excitement into self-forgetfulness. At other times he seemed curiously inarticulate, and she saw now that, while she waited for his answer, he was groping about in his mind for a suitable phrase in which to repel her accusation.

"I appreciate your interest in him," she resumed smoothly, "but he is with you too much. I do not know you. I know nothing in the world about you."

"Well--" Again he hesitated as if over an impediment in his speech.

Then, finding with an effort the words he needed, he went on more easily: "If there's anything you'd like to know, I guess you can ask me."

She frowned slightly, and leaving the door moved resolutely to the writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of newspapers. Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head, with its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after the Parisian fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching. In her blue summer gown she looked almost girlish in spite of the imperious dignity of her carriage; and from her delicate head to her slender feet, she diffused an air of fashion which perplexed and embarra.s.sed him, though he was unaware of the conscious art which produced it.

"The only thing I'd like to know about you," she answered, "is why you have taken so sudden a fancy to my son?"

At this he laughed outright, with a boyish zest which dispelled the oppressive formality of her manner. He was completely at his ease again, and while he ran his hand impatiently through his hair, he answered frankly:

"Well, you see, when it comes to that, I didn't take any sudden fancy, as you call it--I didn't take any fancy at all--it was the other way about. The boy is a nice boy--a bully good boy, anybody can see that--and I like boys, that's all. When he began trotting round after me, we got to be chums in a way, but it would have been the same with any other boy who had come to the house--especially," he added with a clean blow given straight from the shoulder, "if he'd been a decent chap that a parcel of women were making into a m.u.f.f."

For a minute anger, righteous anger, kept her silent; then she responded with stateliness: "I suppose I have a right to decide how my son shall be brought up?"

He met her stern gaze with a smile; and in the midst of her resentment she was distinctly aware of the impeccable honesty of his judgment. The peculiar breeziness she had always thought of as "Western" sounded in his voice as he answered:

"By George, I'm not so sure that you have!"

Before his earnestness she felt her anger melt slowly away. The basic reasonableness of her character--her pa.s.sion to investigate experience, to examine facts, to search for truth--this temperamental att.i.tude survived the superficial wave of indignation which had swept over her.

"So you think I am making a mistake with Archibald?" she asked quietly; and growing tired of standing, she sank instinctively into one of the capacious leather-covered chairs by the table. "But the question is--are you able to judge?"

"Well, I'm a man, and I hate to see a boy coddled. It's going to be devilish hard on the kid when he grows up."

"Perhaps you're right"--her manner had grown softer--"and because I've thought of this, I am going to send him away to school this autumn--in a few weeks. Much as it will hurt me to part with them, I am going to send both of my children away from me. I have made the arrangements."

Insensibly the note of triumph had crept into her voice. By the simple statement of her purpose she had vindicated her motherhood to this man.

She stood clear now of his aspersions on her wisdom and her devotion.

"I don't know much about girls," he replied, seating himself on the opposite side of the table, where the green light from the shaded lamp fell directly on his features. "I can't remember ever noticing one until I grew up, and then I was afraid to death of them, particularly when they were young--but I've been a boy, and I know all about boys. There isn't a blooming thing you could tell me about boys!" he concluded with animation.

"And you think that all boys are alike?"

"More or less under the skin. Of course some are washed and some are dirty--I was dirty--but they're all boys, every last one of them, and all boys are just kids. With the first money I made out West, I started a lodging-house for them--the dirty ones--down in the Bowery," he added.

"They can get a wash and a supper and a night's lodging in a bed with real sheets any night in the year."

She was suddenly interested. "Do you care for boys just because you were a boy yourself?" she asked.

"Because I was such a G.o.d-forsaken little chap, I guess. You were never down in a cellar, I suppose, the kind of cellar people live in? Well, I was born in one, and my father had killed himself the week before because he was ill with consumption, and couldn't get work. He'd been a teamster, and he lost his job when he came down with pneumonia, and after they let him out of the hospital, he looked such a scarehead that n.o.body would employ him. After he died, my mother struggled on somehow, taking in washing or scrubbing floors--G.o.d knows how she managed it!--and by the time I was five, and precious big for my age, I was in the street selling papers. I used to say I was seven when anybody asked me, but I wasn't more than five; and I remember as plain as if it was yesterday, the way mother used to take me to a corner of Broadway, and put a bundle of papers in my arms, and how I used to hang on to the coppers when the bigger boys tried to get 'em away from me. Sometimes I'd get an extra dime or nickel, and then we'd have Irish stew or fried onions for supper. After my mother died, when I was about eight, I still kept on selling papers because I didn't know what else to do, but I didn't have any place to sleep then so I used to crawl into machine shops or areas (he said 'aries') or warehouses, when the watchmen weren't looking. In summer I'd sometimes hide under a bush in the park, and the policeman would never see me until I slipped by him in the morning. There was one policeman I hated like the devil, and I used to swear that I'd get even with him if it took me all the rest of my life."

For a moment he paused, brooding complacently. "I did get even with him, too," he added, "and it didn't take me more than twenty years."

"You never forget anything?"

"Forget?" he laughed shortly. "When you find a thing I forget, it'll be so small you'll have to put on spectacles to recognize it!"

She nodded comprehendingly. "And after that?"

"After that they caught me and sent me to school, and I learned to read and write and do sums--I always had a wonderful head for figures--but after school I went on selling papers so I'd have something to eat---"

The door burst open, and Archibald rushed in to show the evening clothes Gabriella had brought him from Paris.

"They are jolly, mother! May I keep them on?"

"If you like, dear, but they'll have to be altered a little. The coat doesn't quite fit across the shoulders."

"You're a dandy, kid, a regular dandy," observed O'Hara, with humorous gravity.

After a few moments Archibald rushed off again, and Gabriella made an uncertain movement to follow him. "I must go," she said, without rising, and added abruptly: "So you got on in spite of everything?"

"Right you are!" He leaned back in his chair and regarded her with benevolent optimism. "You can always get on if the stuff is in you. I meant to get on, and a steam engine couldn't have kept me back. It's the gospel truth that I believe I came into the world meaning to get out of that cellar, and it was the same thing with areas and ash-bins. I knew all the time I wasn't going to keep grubbing a living out of an ash-bin.

I was always growing, shooting up like one of those mullein stalks out there, and eating? Great Scott! I used to eat so much when I was a kid that mother starved herself near to death so as to give me a square meal. By the time I was twelve I had grown so fast that I got a job at cleaning the streets--my first job from the city. But I never went hungry. As far as I recollect I never went hungry except the time I beat my way out to Chicago--"

Without moving, without lowering her eyes from his face, Gabriella listened, while she clasped and unclasped the hands in her lap. There is a personality that compels attention, and she realized for the first time that O'Hara possessed it. A new vision of life had opened suddenly before her, and she felt, with the illuminating intensity of a religious conversion, that the world she had been living in was merely a fiction.

In spite of her experience she had really known nothing of life.

"Yes, a lot of 'em went hungry, but I never did," he resumed in a tone of frank congratulation. "Sometimes, of course, I'd go without supper or breakfast, but that was nothing--that was not being really hungry, you know. I always managed, even when I was at school, to make enough to keep satisfied. What I minded most," he added musingly, "was not having a regular place to go home to at night, and that's why I started that lodging-house. When you've slept in holes and on benches, and under freight cars, and hidden away in machine shops, you know there's nothing on G.o.d's earth--not a blessed thing--that can take the place of a real sure enough bed with real sure enough sheets and pillow cases on it."

"But how did you come out of it? How did you succeed? For you have succeeded beyond your dreams, haven't you?"

"Beyond my dreams?" He threw back his big, bright head, laughing happily. "Did any man alive ever succeed beyond his dreams? Why, I used to dream of being President, and I guess I shan't be President this side of the Great Divide, shall I? But I made money, if that's what you mean. Why, I have a million to-day to every dollar I had when I was twenty. Do you mind my smoking? I can't talk unless I've got hold of a cigar."

While he struck a match, she noticed with surprise how very neat and orderly he was about the ashes of his cigars, which lay in an exact gray heap in the ma.s.sive bronze ash-tray. What a pity, she thought, moved by a feeling of compa.s.sion, that he had had no advantages!

"I'll tell you how I got on," he pursued after a minute, leaning forward with the cigar in his hand--it was a good cigar, she knew from the smell of it. "Do you see this room?"--he glanced proudly about him--"do you know why I keep this place even when I am in the West?" She shook her head, and he went on with a kind of half-ashamed, whimsical tenderness: "Well, a man lived here once you never heard of--a common Irishman--just a common Irish politician--the Tammany sort, just the sort the newspapers are so down on. I guess he wasn't strong on civic morality as they call it, and the social conscience and all the other new-fashion catchwords, but he found me out there in the snow one night selling newspapers without any overcoat, and he brought me in and gave me one of his. He was a little fellow--not big as the Irish usually grow--and I could wear his clothes, though I wasn't thirteen at the time. The coat wasn't an old one, either," he explained with retrospective complacency; "no, sirree, he had just bought it, and he made me take it off after I'd tried it on and sit down at the table in that back room there--it's all just as he left it--and eat supper with him--the best supper I ever had in my life before or since, you may take my word for it. Then when I'd finished he gave me a dollar and told me to go out and rent a bed--" He broke off, glanced about the room with the pride of ownership, and added softly: "Who'd ever have thought on that night that this place would one day belong to me?"

"Did you see him again?"

"After that he never lost sight of me. He got me a room, he sent me to school--not that he thought much of education, the more's the pity--and when I was through with school he got me into the Mechanics' Inst.i.tute, and gave me a job at engineering. But the job was too small for me, and so was New York--there ain't room enough here to get on without stepping on somebody's toes--and when I was twenty I set out to beat my way to Chicago, and went clean out to Arizona. That's a long story--I'll tell you that some day, for I've been everything on earth you can be in order to keep alive, and done pretty much everything you can do with two hands that will earn you a square meal. I've cut corn and ploughed fields, and greased wheels, and chopped wood, and mended machinery, and cleaned the snow away, and once out in some little town in Arizona, I even dug a grave because the s.e.xton was down with pneumonia. I've been brakesman, and freightman, and, after that, freight agent. That was just before I struck it rich in Colorado. I was one of the first men at Bonanza City, and when I went there with the railroad--I was on the very first train that ever ran there--the whole town was just a row of miners' shacks near the foot of old Bonanza. It's the richest mineral streak in the State, and yet twenty-five years ago, before the C.A. & F.W. tapped it, there wasn't even a saloon out there at Bonanza. City. When you wanted a drink--and that didn't worry me, for I haven't tasted anything but water since I was twenty-five--you had to go all the way to Olympia to get it; and what was worse, all the ore had to go to Olympia, too, on a little no account branch road to be shipped over the main line. Well, as soon as I discovered Bonanza City I said that had to change, and it did change. I guess I did as much to make that town as any man out there, and to-day I own about two thirds of it. I've got a house on Phoenix Avenue, and I gave the town a church and a theatre and the ground for a library. We've got one of the handsomest churches in the State," he proclaimed with his unconquerable optimism, "and we've just begun growing. Why, in ten years more Bonanza City will be in the race with Denver."

"And what about your friend?" she asked, finding it difficult to become enthusiastic over the most progressive town in Colorado, a State which she always pictured imaginatively as a kind of rocky desert, inhabited by tribes of gregarious invalids, which one visited for the sake of the scenery or the climate, when one had exhausted the civilized excitements of Europe.

"I am coming back to him," he responded with a manner of genial remonstrance. "You just give me time. But I'd honestly like you to see Bonanza City. Why, it would take your breath away if I told you it hadn't even begun to grow twenty years ago. You people in New York don't know what progress means. Why, out there in Bonanza City we do things while you're thinking about doing them. But to come back to Barney--that was his name, Barney McGoldrick--after I made my pile out of Bonanza, I used to strike here once in a while to see how he was getting along, and when he died I took these rooms just as he left 'em.

There wasn't a chick or a child to come after him, but he had a string of pensioners as long as the C.A. & F.W. His money--it must have been half a million--all went to charity, but I kept on in the rooms."

"What kind of man was he?" she asked, sincerely interested.