The Innocents Part 11

"Now, Mother, I reckon I wouldn't more than drink a couple of horses'

necks or something wild like that."

"Yes, and that's just the way temptation gets you," said Mother, "drinking horses' necks and all them brandy drinks. I wish I'd never tasted that nasty c.o.c.ktail you made me take last year. I wish I'd joined the White-Ribb.o.n.e.rs like Mrs. Tubbs wanted me to."

"Well, we'll organize a Hoboes' Chapter of the W. C. T. U. and have meetings under the water-tank at the depot--"

They were interrupted by a hail from the road-house. A large man with a detective's mustache and a brewer's cheeks, a man in shirt-sleeves and a white ap.r.o.n, stood on the porch, calling, "Hey! Mr. and Mrs. Smith! Come right in and get warm."

Father and Mother stared at each other. "He means us," gasped Father.

Mechanically the Innocents straggled across the road.

The saloon-keeper shook hands with both of them, and bellowed: "Lady telephoned along the line--great things for gossip, these rural telephones--said you was coming this way, and we're all watching out for you. You come right into the parlor. No booze served in there, Mrs.

Smith. Make yourselves comfortable, and I'll have the Frau cut you up a coupla sandwiches. How'd you leave San Francisco? Pretty warm out there, ain't it?"

He had, by this time, shooed them into the plush and crayon-enlargement parlor behind the barroom. His great voice overawed them--and they were cold. Mother secretively looked for evidences of vice, for a roulette-table or a blackjack, but found nothing more sinful than a box of dominoes, so she perched on a cane chair and folded her hands respectably.

"How's San Francisco?" repeated the saloon-keeper.

"Why--uh--um--uh--how do you mean?" Father observed.

"Yes, I heard how you folks 've tramped from there. How is it, nice climate out there?"

"Why, it's pretty nice--orange groves 'most everywhere. Nice climate,"

said Father, avoiding Mother's accusing look and desperately hoping she wouldn't feel moved to be veracious and virtuous.

"Hey, Mamie, here's the old couple that 've tramped clear from San Francisco," bawled the saloon-keeper.

A maternal German woman, with a white ap.r.o.n of about the proportions of a cup defender's mainsail, billowed into the room, exclaimed over Mother's wet feet, provided dry stockings and felt slippers for her, and insisted on stuffing both of them with fried eggs and potato salad. The saloon-keeper and a select coterie of farmers asked Father questions about San Francisco, Kansas, rainy seasons, the foot-and-mouth disease, irrigation, Western movie studios, and the extent of Mormonism. Father stuck pretty closely to a Sunday-newspaper description of the Panama-Pacific Exposition for answers to everything, and satisfied all hands to such an extent that they humbly asked him how much danger there was of a j.a.panese invasion of the Philippines, and how long did he think the great European war would last.

Abashed, p.r.i.c.kly with uncomfortableness, Father discovered that the saloon-keeper was taking up a collection for them. It was done very quietly, and the man slipped a dollar and fifteen cents into his hand in so casual a manner, so much as though he were merely making change, that Father took it and uneasily thrust it into his pocket. He understood the kindly spirit of it because he himself was kindly. He realized that to these stay-at-homes the Applebys' wandering was a thing to revere, a heroism, like prize-fighting or religion or going to war. But he didn't psychologize about it. He believed in "the ma.s.ses" because he belonged to the ma.s.ses.

As a matter of fact, Father had very little time to devote to meditation when they hit the road again. He was busy defending himself while Mother accused him of having lied scandalously. He protested that he had never said that he had been to San Francisco; they had made that mistake themselves.

"Now don't you go trying to throw dust in my eyes. I just won't have this lying and prevaricating and goings-on. I'm just going to-- What's the matter, Seth? You're limping. Are your feet cold?"

And that was the end of Mother's moral injunctions, for Father, with a most unworthy cunning, featured the coldness of his feet till she had exhausted her vocabulary of chiropodal sympathy, after which he kept her interested in the state of his ears, his hands, and the tip of his nose.

She patted him consolingly, and they toiled on together, forgetting in the closeness of their comradeship the strangeness of being on an unknown road, homeless, as a chilly sunset spread bands of cold lemon and gray across the enormous sky, and all decent folk thought of supper.

Then everything went wrong with the wandering Innocents.

About supper-time Father made another attempt to get himself to play the mouth-organ, at a mean farm-house which came in sight after a lonely stretch. Mother was sinking with weariness. He hitched the mouth-organ out of its case, but again he shrank, and he feebly said, to a tumble-haired farmer in overalls, "Can I split some wood for you? Mrs.

Smith and I are tramping--"

The farmer ungenerously took him at his word. For an hour he kept Father hacking at a pile of wood, while Mother crouched near, trying to keep warm, with his coat over her feet. Father's back turned into one broad ache, and his arms stung, but he stuck to it till the farmer growled: "I guess that'll do. Now don't hang around here."

He handed Father a bundle. Father thought of throwing it at him, but simultaneously he thought of keeping it and consuming its contents. He gasped with the insult. He became angrier and angrier as he realized that the insult applied to Mother also. But before he could think of a smart, crushing, New-Yorkish reply the farmer grumped away into the house.

The Applebys dragged themselves back to the highroad. Father was blaming himself for having brought her to this.... "But I did try to get a job first," he insisted, and remembered how he had once begged the owner of a filthy shoe-store on Third Avenue for a place as porter, s...o...b..ack, anything.

Their road led them by a clump of woods.

"We'll have a fire here and camp!" cried Father.

He had never made a fire in the open, and he understood it to be a most difficult process. But he was a young lover; his sweetheart was cold; he defied man and nature. Disdaining any possible pa.s.ser-by, he plunged into the woodland. With bare hands he scooped the light fall of snow from between two rocks, and in the darkness fumbled for twigs and leaves. Gruntingly he dragged larger boughs, piled the wood with infinite care, lighted it tremblingly.

They sat on the rocks by the fire and opened the farmer's bundle. There were cold, gristly roast beef, bread and cheese, and a large, angry-looking sausage.

"Um!" meditated Father; then, "I'll heat up the roast beef." Which he grandly did, on little sticks, and they ate it contemplatively, while their souls and toes relaxed in the warmth, and the black tree-trunks shone cozily in the glow.

"No c.o.c.kroaches and no smell of fried fish here, like there is on Avenue B," said Father. "And we don't have to go home from our picnic. I wonder why folks let themselves get all old and house-bound, when they could be like us?"

"Yes," said Mother, drowsily.

He hadn't nerved himself to play the mouth-organ, not all day, but now, with the luxury of fire and solitude, he played it, and, what's more, he tried to whistle a natty little ballad which touchingly presented a castaway as "long-long-longing for his Michigan, his wish-again ho-o-ome."

Yet Father wasn't altogether satisfied with his fire. The dry twigs he kept feeding to it flared up and were gone. The Innocents huddled together, closer and closer to the coals. Father gave little pats to her shoulder while she shivered and began to look anxious.

"Cold, old honey?"

"Yes, but it don't matter," she declared.

"Come on, I guess we'd better go look for a place to sleep. I'm afraid--don't know as I could keep this fire up all night, after all."

"Oh, I can't walk any. Oh, I guess it will be all right when I get going again." She tried to smile at him, and with the slowness of pain she reached for her bundle.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed it from her. "I can carry all our stuff, anyway," he said.

Leaning on him, moving step by step, every step an agony of soreness and cold, lifting her feet each time by a separate effort of her numbed will, she plodded beside him, while he tried to aid her with a hand under her elbow.

"There! There's where we'll go!" he whispered, as the shapes of farm-buildings lifted against the sky. "We won't ask permission. We mightn't get it! Like that last farmer. And I won't let you go one step farther. We'll b.u.t.t right into the barn and sleep in the hay."

"But--do you--think we'd better?"

"We will!"

The mouse-like Father was a very lion, emboldened by his care for her.

He would have faced ten farmers terrible with shot-guns. Without one timorous glance he led her to the small side-door of the barn, eased down the latch, lifted her over the sill, closed the door. In the barn was a great blackness, but also a great content. It seemed warm, and was intimate with the scent of cows and hay, alive with the quiet breathing of animals. Father lit a match and located the stairs to the haymow.

Mother was staggering. With his arm about her waist, very tender and reverent, he guided her to the stairs and up them, step by agonized step, to the fragrant peace of the haymow. She sank down and he covered her so deep with hay that only her face was left uncovered.

"Warm, Mother?"

She did not answer. She was already asleep.

Through a night haunted by vague monsters of darkness--and by sneezes whenever spears of hay invaded his indignant city nose--Father turned and thrashed. But he was warm, and he did sleep for hours at a time. At what must have been dawn he heard the farmer at the stalls in the stable below. He felt refreshed, cozily drowsy, and he did a shameless thing, a trick of vagrants and road-wallopers: he put his thumb to his nose, aimed his hand toward the supposit.i.tious location of the farmer below, and twirled his outspread fingers in a flickering manner. It is believed that he intended to convey spirited defiance, or possibly insult, by this amazing gesture. He grinned contentedly and went to sleep again....

Fortunately Mother was asleep and did not see him acting--as she often but vainly defined it--"like a young smart Aleck."