During the night the little boy slept on the seat facing the woman and the parachute jumper, the toy aeroplane clutched to his chest; when daylight came the train was running in snow. They changed trains in snow too, and when in midafternoon the trainman called the town and looking out the window the woman read the name on the little station, it was snowing hard. They got out and crossed the platform, among the milkcans and the fowlcrates, and entered the waitingroom where a porter was putting coal into the stove. “Can we get a cab here?” the jumper asked him.
“There’s one outside now,” the porter said. “I’ll call him.”
“Thanks,” the jumper said. The jumper looked at the woman; she was buttoning the trenchcoat. “I’ll wait here,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “All right. I dont know how——”
“I’ll wait. No use standing around anywhere else.”
“Aint he coming with us?” the little boy said. He looked at the jumper, the toy aeroplane under his arm now, though he still spoke to the woman. “Dont he want to see Roger’s old man too?”
“No,” the woman said. “You tell him goodbye now.”
“Goodbye?” the boy said. He looked from one to the other. “Aint we coming back?” He looked from one to the other. “I’ll stay here with him until you get back. I’ll see Roger’s old man some other time.”
“No,” the woman said. “Now.” The boy looked from one to the other. Suddenly the jumper said,
“So long, kid. I’ll be seeing you.”
“You’re going to wait? You aint going off?”
“No. I’ll wait. You and Laverne go on.” The porter came in.
“He’s waiting for you folks,” he said.
“The cab’s waiting,” the woman said. “Tell Jack so long.”
“O.K.,” the boy said. “You wait here for us. Soon as we get back we’ll eat.”
“Yair; sure,” the jumper said. Suddenly he set the bag down and stooped and picked the boy up.
“No,” the woman said; “you wait here out of the——” But the jumper went on, carrying the little boy, swinging his stiff leg along. The woman followed him, into the snow again. The cab was a small touring car with a lettered sign on the windshield and a blanket over the hood and driven by a man with a scraggly grayish moustache. The driver opened the door; the jumper swung the boy in and stepped back and helped the woman in and leaned again into the door; now his face wore an expression which anyone who had seen very much of the reporter lately would have recognised—that faint grimace (in this instance savage too) which would have been called smiling for lack of anything better.
“So long, old fellow,” he said. “Be good now.”
“O.K.,” the boy said. “You be looking around for somewhere to eat before we get back.”
“O.K.,” the jumper said.
“All right, mister,” the woman said. “Let’s go.” The car moved, swinging away from the station; the woman was still leaning forward. “Do you know where Doctor Carl Shumann lives?” she said. For an instant the driver did not move. The car still swung on, gaining speed, and there was little possible moving for the driver to do. Yet during that moment he seemed to have become caught in that sort of instantaneous immobility like when a sudden light surprises a man or an animal out of darkness. Then it was gone.
“Doctor Shumann? Sure. You want to go there?”
“Yes,” the woman said. It was not far; the town was not large; it seemed to the woman that almost at once the car had stopped and looking out through the falling snow she saw a kind of cenotaph, penurious and without majesty or dignity, of forlorn and victorious desolation—a bungalow, a tight flimsy mass of stoops and porte-cochères and flat gables and bays not five years old and built in that colored mud-and-chickenwire tradition which California moving picture films have scattered across North America as if the celluloid carried germs, not five years old yet wearing already an air of dilapidation and rot; a quality furious and recent as if immediate disintegration had been included in the architect’s blueprints and inherent in the wood and plaster and sand of its mushroom growth. Then she found the driver looking at her.
“This is it,” he said. “Or maybe you were thinking about his old place? or are you acquainted with him that well?”
“No,” the woman said. “This is it.” He made no move to open the door; he just sat halfturned, watching her struggling with the doorhandle.
“He used to have a big old place out in the country until he lost it a few years back. His son took up av-aytion and he mortgaged the place to buy his son a flying machine and then his son wrecked the machine and so the doctor had to borrow some more money on the place to fix the machine up. I guess the boy aimed to pay it back but he just never got around to it maybe. So he lost the old place and built this one. Probly this one suits him just as well, though; womenfolks usually like to live close to town——” But she had got the door open now and she and the boy got out.
“Do you mind waiting?” she said. “I dont know how long I’ll be. I’ll pay you for the time.”
“Sure,” he said. “That’s my business. What you do with the car while you are hiring it is yours, not mine.” He watched them enter the gate and go on up the narrow concrete walk in the snow. “So that’s her,” he thought. “Only she dont look a whole lot like a widow. But then I hear tell she never acted a whole lot like a wife.” He had a robe, another horseblanket, in the seat beside him. He bundled himself into it, which was just as well because dark had come and the snow drifted and whirled, funneled now by the down-glare of a streetlamp nearby before the door opened and he recognised against the light the silhouette of the trenchcoat and then that of Doctor Shumann as they came out and the door shut behind them. He threw the robe off and started the engine. But after a while he cut the switch and drew the robe about him again though it was too dark and the snow was falling too fast for him to see the two people standing on the stoop before the entrance of the house.
“You are going to leave him like this?” Dr Shumann said. “You are going to leave him asleep and go away?”
“Can you think of any better way?” she said.
“No. That’s true.” He was speaking loudly, too loudly. “Let us understand one another. You leave him here of your own free will; we are to make a home for him until we die: that is understood.”
“Yes. I agreed to that inside,” she said patiently.
“No; but let us understand. I.……” He talked in that curious loud wild rushing manner, as though she were still moving away and were at some distance now: “We are old; you cannot understand that, that you will or can ever reach a time when you can bear so much and no more; that nothing else is worth the bearing; that you not only cannot, you will not; that nothing is worth anything but peace, peace, peace, even with bereavement and grief—nothing! nothing! But we have reached that stage. When you came here with Roger that day before the boy was born, you and I talked and I talked different to you. I was different then; I meant it when you told me you did not know whether or not Roger was the father of your unborn child and that you would never know, and I told you, do you remember? I said ‘Then make Roger his father from now on.’ And you told me the truth, that you would not promise, that you were born bad and could not help it or did not think you were going to try to help it; and I told you nobody is born anything, bad or good God help us, anymore than anybody can do anything save what they must: do you remember? I meant that then. But I was younger then. And now I am not young. And now I cant—I cannot——I——”
“I know. If I leave him with you, I must not try to see him again until you and she are dead.”
“Yes. I must; I cannot help it. I just want peace now. I dont want equity or justice, I dont want happiness; I just want peace. We wont live very much longer, and then.……”
She laughed, short, mirthless, not moving. “And then he will have forgotten me.”
“That’s your risk. Because, remember,” he cried; “remember!
I dont ask this. I did not ask you to leave him, to bring him to us. You can go up now and wake him and take him with you. But if you do not, if you leave him with us and turn your back on this house and go away——Think well. If you like, take him with you tonight, to the hotel or wherever and think about it and make up your mind and bring him back tomorrow or come yourself and tell me what you have decided.”
“I have decided now,” she said.
“That you leave him here of your own free will. That we give him the home and care and affection which is his right both as a helpless child and as our gra—grand——and that in return for this, you are to make no attempt to see him or communicate with him as long as we live. That is your understanding, your agreement? Think well.”
“Yes,” she said. “I have to do it.”
“But you do not. You can take him with you now; all this tonight can be as if it had never happened. You are his mother; I still believe that any mother is better—better than…… How do you have to?”
“Because I dont know whether I can buy him enough food to eat and enough clothes to keep him warm and medicine if he is sick,” she said. “Do you understand that?”
“I understand that this—your——this other man does not earn as much in his line as Roger did in his. But you tell me that Roger did not always earn enough for the four of you: nevertheless you never thought while Roger was alive of leaving the boy with us. And now, with one less mouth to feed, you try to tell me that you——”
“I’ll tell you, if you will listen a minute,” she said. “I’m going to have another child.” Now he did not speak at all; his unfinished sentence seemed to hang between them. They stood face to face but they could not see one another: just the two vague shapes with the snow falling between them and upon them, though since her back was to the streetlamp she could see him the better of the two. After a while he said quietly,
“I see. Yes. And you know that this other child is——is not——”
“Not Roger’s. Yes. Roger and I were——But no matter. I know, this time. Roger and I both know. So we will need money and that’s what Roger was trying to do in that meet. The ship he won a prize with the first day was too slow, obsolete. But that was all we could get and he outflew them, beat them on the pylons, by turning the pylons closer than the others dared for that little money. Then Saturday he had a chance to fly a ship that was dangerous, but he had a chance to win two thousand dollars in the race. That would have fixed us up. But the ship came to pieces in the air. Maybe I could have stopped him. I dont know. But maybe I could have. But I didn’t. I didn’t try, anyhow. So now we didn’t get that money, and we left most of the first day’s prize to send his body here when they get it out of the lake.”
“Ah,” Dr Shumann said. “I see. Yes. So you are giving us the chance to—the opportunity to.……” Suddenly he cried: “If I just knew that he is Roger’s! If I just knew! Cant you tell me? Cant you give me some sign, some little sign? Any little sign?” She didn’t move. The light came through the snow, across her shoulder, and she could see him a little—a small thin man with untidy thin irongray hair and the snow whispering in it, standing with his face turned aside and his hand not before it exactly but held palmout between his face and hers. After a while she said,
“Maybe you would rather take a little time to think about it. To decide.” She could not see his face now: only the lifted hand; she seemed to be speaking to the hand: “Suppose I wait at the hotel until tomorrow, so——” The hand moved, a faint motion from the wrist as though it were trying to push her voice away. But she repeated, once more, as though for a record: “You mean you dont want me to wait?” But only the hand moved again, replied; she turned quietly and went down the steps, feeling for each step beneath the snow, and went on down the walk, vanishing into the drowsing pantomime of the snow, not fast. She did not look back. Dr Shumann did not watch her. He heard the engine of the car start, but he was already turning, entering the house, fumbling at the door for a moment before he found the knob and entered, his hair and shoulders (he was in his shirtsleeves) powdered with snow. He went on down the hall; his wife, sitting beside the bed in the darkened room where the boy was asleep, heard him blunder against something in the hall and then saw him come into the door, framed so against the lighted hall, holding to the doorframe, the light glinting in the melting snow in his untidy hair.
“If we just had a sign,” he said. He entered, stumbling again. She rose and approached him but he pushed her aside, entering. “Let me be,” he said.
“Shhhhhh,” she said. “Dont wake him. You come on and eat your supper.”
“Let me alone,” he said, pushing with his hand at the empty air now since she stood back now, watching him approach the bed, fumbling at the footboard. But his voice was quiet enough. “Go out,” he said. “Leave me be. Go away and leave me be.”
“You come on and eat your supper and lay down.”
“Go on. I’m all right, I tell you.” She obeyed; he stood holding to the bed’s footboard and heard her feet move slowly up the hall and cease. Then he moved, fumbling until he found the lightcord, the bulb, and turned it on. The little boy stirred, turning his face from the light. The garment in which he slept was a man’s shirt, an oldfashioned garment with a onceglazed bosom, soft now from many washings, pinned about his throat with a gold brooch and with the sleeves cut recently off at his wrists. On the pillow beside him the toy aeroplane rested. Suddenly Dr Shumann stooped and took the boy by the shoulder and began to shake him. The toy aeroplane slid from the pillow; with his other hand Dr Shumann flipped it to the floor, still shaking the little boy. “Roger,” he said, “wake up. Wake up, Roger.” The boy waked; without moving he blinked up at the man’s face bending over him.
“Laverne,” he said. “Jack. Where’s Laverne? Where’m I at?”
“Laverne’s gone,” Dr Shumann said, still shaking the boy as though he had forgot to tell his muscles to desist. “You’re at home, but Laverne is gone. Gone, I tell you. Are you going to cry? Hey?” The boy blinked up at him, then he turned and put out his hand toward the pillow beside him.
“Where’s my new job?” he said. “Where’s my ship?”
“Your ship, hey?” Dr Shumann said. “Your ship, hey?” He stooped and caught up the toy and held it up, his face twisted into a grimace of gnomelike rage, and whirled and hurled the toy at the wall and, while the boy watched him, ran to it and began to stamp upon it with blind maniac fury. The little boy made one sharp sound: then, silent, raised on one elbow, his eyes a little wide as though with curious interest alone, he watched the shabby wildhaired old man jumping up and down upon the shapeless trivial mass of blue-and-yellow tin in maniacal ludicrosity. Then the little boy saw him pause, stoop, take up the ruined toy and apparently begin to try to tear it to pieces with his hands. His wife, sitting beside the livingroom stove, heard his feet too through the flimsy walls, feeling the floor shake too, then she heard him approaching up the hall, fast now. She was small too—a faded woman with faded eyes and a quiet faded face sitting in the stuffy room containing a worn divan and fumed oak chairs and a fumed oak revolving bookcase racked neatly with battered medical books from whose bindings the gilt embossed titles had long since vanished, and a table littered with medical magazines and on which lay at the moment a thick cap with earmuffs, a pair of mittens and a small scuffed black bag. She did not move: she was sitting there watching the door when Dr Shumann came in, holding one hand out before him; she did not stir even then: she just looked quietly at the mass of money. “It was in that airplane!” he said. “He even had to hide his money from her!”
“No,” the wife said. “She hid it from him.”
“No!” he shouted. “He hid it from her. For the boy. Do you think a woman would ever hide money and or anything else and then forget where she put it? And where would she get a hundred and seventy-five dollars, anyway?”
“Yes,” the wife said, the faded eyes filled with immeasurable and implacabl
e unforgiving; “where would she get a hundred and seventy-five dollars that she would have to hide from both of them in a child’s toy?” He looked at her for a long moment.
“Ah,” he said. He said it quietly: “Oh. Yes. I see.” Then he cried, “But no matter! It dont matter now!” He stooped and swung open the door of the stove and shut it again; she did not move, not even when, glancing past him as he stooped, she saw in the door and looking in at them, the little boy in the man’s shirt and carrying the battered mass of the toy in one hand and the clothes which he had worn wadded in the other, against his chest and his cap already on. Dr Shumann had not seen him yet; he rose from the stove; it was the draft of course, from the opening and closing of the door, but it did seem as though it were the money itself passing in flame and fire up the pipe with a deep faint roar into nothing as Dr Shumann stood again, looking down at her. “It’s our boy,” he said; then he shouted: “It’s our boy, I tell you!” Then he collapsed; he seemed to let go all at once though not hard because of his spareness, onto his knees beside the chair, his head in her lap, crying.
When the city room began to fill that evening a copyboy noticed the overturned wastebasket beside the reporter’s desk and the astonishing amount of savagely defaced and torn copy which littered the adjacent floor. The copyboy was a bright lad, about to graduate from highschool; he had not only ambitions but dreams too. He gathered up all the sheets, whole and in fragments, from the floor and emptied the wastebasket and, sitting at the reporter’s desk he began to sort them, discarding and fitting and resorting at the last to paste; and then, his eyes big with excitement and exultation and then downright triumph, he regarded what he had salvaged and restored to order and coherence—the sentences and paragraphs which he believed to be not only news but the beginning of literature: