The Innocents Part 10

Much they talked, possibly for hours, but the talk was as confused as the spatter of furniture in that ill-lighted room--lighted by a gas-jet.

All that they said was but repet.i.tion of her first demand.

While he lay on the bed, flat, his arms out, like a prisoner on a rack, wondering why all his thoughts had become a void in which he could find no words with which to answer her, she slowly stood up, turned out the gas, then again opened the gas-c.o.c.k.

She hastily stripped off her overcoat and fitted it over the crack at the bottom of the door, where showed a strip of light from the slimy hall without. She caught up the red cotton table-cloth and stuffed it along the window, moving clumsily through the room, in which the darkness was broken only by pallid light that seeped through the window from cold walls without. She staggered over and lay down beside him. Her work was done, and in the darkness her worried frown changed to a smile of divine and mothering kindliness which did not lessen as a thin, stinging, acid vapor of illuminating gas bit at her throat and made her cough.

Father raised his head in stupefied alarm. She drew him down, put his head on her shoulder. She took his hand, to lead him, her little boy, into a land of summer dreams where they would always be together. The Innocents were going their way, asking no one's permission, yet harming no one.... His hand was twitching a little; he coughed with a sound of hurt bewilderment; but she held his hand firmly, and over this first rough part of the road the mother of tenderness led him pityingly on.

CHAPTER XII

Out of a black curdled ocean where for ages he had struggled and stifled, Seth Appleby raised his head for an instant, and sank again.

For longer ages, and more black, more terrible, he fought on the bottom of the ocean of life. He had reached the bottom now. He began to rise.

His coughing was shaking him into a half-consciousness, and very dimly he heard her cough, too. He feverishly threw out one hand. It struck the mouth-organ he had thrown upon the bed, struck it sharply, with a pain that pierced to his nerve-centers.

He had the dismaying thought, "I'll never play the mouth-organ to her again.... We won't ever sit in the rose-arbor while I play the mouth-organ to her. Where is she? Yes! Yes! This is her hand." He was trying to think now. Something said to him, sharply, "Suicide is wicked."

Yes, he reflected, in the tangles of a half-thought, he had always been told that suicide was wicked. Let's see. What was it he was trying to think--suicide wicked--blame the cowards who killed themselves--suicide wicked-- No, no! That wasn't the thought he was trying to lay hold of.

What was it he was trying to think? Suicide wicked-- G.o.d, how this cough hurt him. What was it-- Suicide? No! He violently pushed away the thought of suicide and its wickedness, and at last shouted, within himself: "Oh, that's what I was thinking! I must play to Mother again!

Where is she? She needs me. She's 'way off somewhere; she's helpless; she's calling for me--my poor little girl."

He hurled himself off the bed, to find her, in that cold darkness. He stood wavering under the gas-jet. "Why--oh, yes, we turned on the gas!"

he realized.

He thrust his hand up and reached the gas-jet. Then, staggering, feeling inch by inch for leagues along the edge of the cupboard, raising his ponderous hand with infinite effort, he touched a plate, feebly fitted his fingers over its edge, and with a gesture of weak despair hurled it at the window. The gla.s.s shattered. He fell to the floor.

Strained with weeks of trying to appear young and brisk in the store, Mother had become insensible before the gas could overcome him, and he awoke there, limp on the floor, before she revived. The room was still foul with gas-fumes, and very cold, for they had not rekindled the fire when they had returned after dinner.

He feebly opened the window, even the door. A pa.s.sing woman cried, "Gas in the room! My Gawd! my old man almost croaked himself last year with one of them quarter meters." She bustled in, a corpulent, baggy, unclean, kindly, effectual soul, and helped him fan the gas out of the room. She drove away other inquisitive neighbors, revived Mother Appleby, and left them with thick-voiced words of cheer, muttering that "her old man would kill her if she didn't get a hustle on herself and chase that growler."

With the broken window-pane stuffed up, the gas lighted, and the fire started, the Applebys faced life again, and were very glad. They couldn't have been long under the gas; Father's eons of drowning struggle must have been seconds. Propped up in bed, Mother refused a doctor and smiled--though confusedly, with the bewilderment of one who had felt the numbness of death.

"I'll tell you how it is," cried Father. "We-- _Lord!_ how glad I am to have you again! It's like this: We felt as if we'd gone the very limit, and nothing ever would come right again. But it's just like when we were a young married couple and sc.r.a.pped and were so darn certain we'd have to leave each other. That's the way it's been with us lately, and we needed something big like this to get our nerve up, I guess. Now we'll start off again, and think, honey, whatever we do will be a vict'ry--it'll be so much bigger than nothing.

"Let's see. New York doesn't want us. But somewhere there must be a village of folks that does. We'll start out right now, walking through New York, and we'll hunt till we find it, even if we have to go clean out to San Francisco. Gee! think, we're free, no job or nothing, and we could go to San Francisco! Travel, like we've always wanted to! And we won't have any more pride now to bother us, not after--that. I'll play the mouth-organ for pennies! Come on, we'll start for j.a.pan, and see the cherry-blossoms. Come on, old partner, we're going to pioneer, like our daddies that went West."

And he struck up "Susanna" on his mouth-organ.

CHAPTER XIII

The Applebys didn't start for j.a.pan on Christmas Eve. Also, they didn't go defiantly with pack on back through the streets of New York, like immigrants to youth. It took Mother Appleby two days to recover from gas and two more to recover from lifelong respectability, to the end that she should become a merry beggar, gathering pennies while Father piped upon that antic instrument, the mouth-organ.

Father labored with her, and cooked beans for her. She made him agree to get as far from New York as their nine dollars would take them before they should begin to be vagrants. It's always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are.

The train took them about eighty miles into New Jersey. They debouched rather shyly, and stood on the station platform in a town consisting of a trust, a saloon, a druggist's, and a general store. The station loafers stared at them. Father would no more have dared play the mouth-organ to these gangling youths than he would have dared kiss a traffic policeman at Forty-second and Fifth Avenue.

They edged around the corner of the station and gingerly stepped off into an ocean of slush, deaf to the yells of the bus-driver who hopefully represented that he would take them practically anywhere in the world for fifty cents.

They were an odd couple. Father had no need of an overcoat, now. He was wearing three shirts, two waistcoats, two pairs of trousers, and three pairs of socks, to say nothing of certain pages of an evening newspaper cunningly distributed through his garments, crackly but warm. He waddled chubbily and somewhat stiffly, but he outfaced the winter wind as he had not done for many weeks. In this outfit he could never have gone the rounds of offices looking for work, but in the open he had the appearance of a hardy woodsman--or at least the father of a woodsman. He wore defiantly the romantic wreck of that plaid cap which he had bought for Cape Cod, which his daughter had sequestered at Saserkopee, and which he had stolen back from her. Also he had a secret joy in the fact that his shirt--that is, his outer and most visible shirt--was a coa.r.s.e garment of blue flannel, a very virile and knightly tabard with large white b.u.t.tons, which Mother had never let him wear in public. It was such a n.o.ble habiliment as a fireman might have worn, or a longsh.o.r.eman, or Dan'l Boone.

Mother was almost equally bulky, with an una.s.sayed number of garments, but over them all she wore a still respectable Raglan town coat.

They both carried bundles, and in Father's right hand was a red pasteboard case which protected the mouth-organ. This, as they modestly trotted through the village, he tried to conceal in the palm of his hand, and he glared at a totally innocent pa.s.ser-by whom he suspected of wanting to hear the mouth-organ.

Mother didn't know of his mental struggles. She was thinking more about her feet. She looked up with mild astonishment when, as they left the town by the highroad southward, Father burst out, "I'll play if I want to, but I can't stand the gawping gumps here."

"Why, Father!" she said, trustingly.

The noontime sun came out. To conceal from his stomach the fact that it was hungry, Father grew boyishly enthusiastic about going Southward.

"Gee!" he burbled, "we'll hit down toward Florida--palms and alligators and--and everything--Land of Flowers! What's this hotel?--the Royal Points de Anna? Play the mouth-organ there. Make a hit. Then we'll strike New Orleans and jump to San Francisco.... Gee! it's a long way between houses along here!"

They approached a farm-yard. Father was tremendously urging himself to play the mouth-organ there, to skip and be nimble, and gain a minstrel's meed. Meaning lunch.

Frowning with intentness, he stopped before the house. Mother meekly halted beside him. She had not lost quite all of the training in self-dependence she had got from a business life, these last weeks, but she looked to him for leadership in the new existence.

Father swung his shapeless pack from his shoulders, set it down on the ground, reluctantly drew his mouth-organ from its case. He became aware that a large, astonished woman was staring from the kitchen window. He stared back. The mouth-organ was left suspended in air. Hastily he stuck it in his pocket and, as though hypnotized, moved toward the kitchen door. He had to give the woman some explanation for encamping in her yard.... Why! She might have thought that he had intended to make a fool of himself by playing the mouth-organ there!

The woman opened the door curiously, stared over Father's head at Mother, then back at the little man with his pink, cheery face and whiff of delicate silver hair.

"I--uh--I-- Could I cut some wood or something for you?" said Father.

"Mrs.--uh--Mrs. Smith and I are tramping across the United States--San Francisco and New Orleans and so on--and--"

"Why, you poor things, you must be terribly cold and tired! Think of it!

San Francisco! You tell Mrs. Smith to come right in and warm herself by the fire, and I guess I can find some dinner for both of you."

Father scuttled out, informed Mother that she had become Mrs. Smith, and before her slightly dazed mind could grasp it all she was in at a kitchen table near the stove, and eating doughnuts, salt pork, beans, apple pie, and vast cups of coffee. Not but that Father himself was also laying in the food with a l.u.s.tiness that justified his lumberjack's blue-flannel shirt. From time to time he dutifully mentioned his project of cutting wood, but the woman was more interested in him as a symbol.

In a dim, quite una.n.a.lytic way Father perceived that, to this woman, this drab prisoner of kitchen and woodshed, it was wonderful to meet a man and woman who had actually started for--anywhere.

She sighed and with a look of remembering old dreams she declared: "I wish my old man and I could do that. Gawd! I wouldn't care how cold we got. Just get away for a month! Then I'd be willing to come back here and go on cooking up messes. He goes into town almost every day in winter--he's there now--but I stay here and just work."

Father understood that it would have desecrated her vision of the heroic had he played the mouth-organ for pay; perceived that she didn't even want him to chop wood. Mother and he were, to this woman, a proof that freedom and love and distant skies did actually exist, and that people, just folks, not rich, could go and find them.

When she had warmed Mother's feet and given them her wistful good wishes, the woman let them go, and the Smiths recently Applebys, went comfortably and plumply two more miles on their way to j.a.pan.

Father's conscience was troubling him, not because he had taken food from the woman--she had bestowed it with the friendly and unpatronizing graciousness of poor women--but because he had been too cowardly to play the mouth-organ. When Mother had begun to walk wearily and Father had convinced himself that he wouldn't be afraid to play, next chance he had, they approached a crude road-house, merely a roadside saloon, with carriage-sheds, a beer sign, and one lone rusty iron outdoor table to give an air of _al fresco_.

"I'm going over there and play," said Father.

"I won't have you hanging around saloons," snapped Mother.