Mothers to Men. Zona Gale

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СКАЧАТЬ had run a few steps on and stood with his nose against the misty pane of Abagail Arnold's Home Bakery. Covered with pink mosquito-netting were a plate of sugar rolls, a fruit cake, a platter of cream puffs, and a tall, covered jar of shelled nuts.

      "Hustle up—you!" said the man roughly, and took him by the arm again.

      "I was comin'," said the little boy.

      Why not leave the child at the bakery? No—a house. It must be a house, with a porch and a front stair and big upstairs rooms and a look of money-in-the-bank. He was giving care to the selection. It was as if he were exercising some natural paternal office, to be scrupulously discharged. Music issued from the wooden saloon building with the false two-story front and the coloured windows; from a protesting piano a dance tune was being furiously forced, and, as the door swung open, the tap and thud of feet, the swell of voices and laughter, the odour of the spirits caught at the cold and weary man. "Hurry along—hurry along!" he bade the boy roughly. That was where he would come back afterward, but first he must find the right place for the boy.

      Vaguely he was seeking for that section of the village which it would call "the residence part," with that ugly and naked appropriation of the term which excludes all the humbler homes from residence-hood at all. But when he had turned aside from the main street he came upon the First Church, with lights streaming from the ground-glass windows of the prayer-meeting room, and he stood still, staring up at it.

      She had cared a good deal about that sort of thing. Churches did good—it was a church that had buried her when he could not. Why not there? Why not leave the child there?

      He turned aside and mounted the three wooden steps and sat down, drawing the boy beside him. Grateful for a chance to rest, the child turned sidewise and dropped his head heavily on his father's arm. There was light enough for the father to see the thick, wet hair on the babyish forehead.

      "I did walked all the way, didn't I?" the child said triumphantly.

      "You bet you did," said his father absently.

      Since the boy's mother had died only three months had passed, but in that time had been crowded for the child a lifetime of physical misery. Before that time, too, there had been hunger and cold and the torture of the continual quarreling between that mother, sickly, half-fed, irritable, and this father, out of work and drunken. Then the mother had died, and the man had started out with the boy, seeking new work where they would not know his old vice. And in these three months, for the boy's sake, that old vice had been kept bound. For the boy's sake he had been sober and, if the chance had come, he would have been industrious. But, save for odd jobs, the chance never came; there seemed to be a kind of ineffectualness in the way he asked for work which forbade him a trial. Then one day, after almost three months of the struggle, he had waked to the old craving, to the need, the instant need, for liquor. He had faced the situation honestly. He knew, or thought he knew, his power of endurance. He knew that in a day or two he would be worsted, and that there would follow a period of which, afterward, he would remember nothing. Meanwhile, what of the boy? He had a fondness for the boy, and there remained to the man some shreds of decency and even of tradition. He would not turn him over to the "authorities." He would not cast him adrift in the city. He resolved to carry him to the country, to some near little town where, dimly it seemed to him, the people would be more likely to take him in. "They have more time—an' more room—an' more to eat," he sought to explain it to himself. So he had walked, and the child had walked, from the City to Friendship Village. He must find a place to leave him: why not leave him here on the church steps, "outside the meetin'?"

      "Don't you go to sleep, kiddie," he said, and shook him lightly.

      "I was jus' restin' my eye-flaps. Eye-things. What are they, daddy?"

      "Eye-lids."

      "Yes. Them. They're tired, too," said the child, and smiled—the sleepy smile which gave his face a baby winsomeness. Then he snuggled in the curve of arm, like a drowsy, nosing puppy.

      The father sat looking down on him, and in his breast something pulled. In these three months he had first become really acquainted with the boy, had first performed for him little personal offices—sewed on a button or two, bought him shoes, bound up a hurt finger. In this time, too, he had first talked with him alone, tried to answer his questions. "Where is my mamma, an' will she rock somebody else?" "Are you going to be my daddy till you die, an' then who'll be?" "What is the biggest thing everybody knows? Can I know it too?"... Also, in these three months, at night he had gone to sleep, sometimes in a bed, oftener in a barn, now and again under the stars, with the child breathing within his reach, and had waked to keep him covered with his own coat. Now he was going to end all this.

      "It ain't fair to the kid not to. It ain't fair to cart him around like this," he said over and over, defending himself before some dim dissenter.

      The boy suddenly swung back from his father's arm and looked up in his face. "Will—will there be any supper till morning?" he asked.

      You might have thought that the man did not hear, he sat so still looking down the wet road-ruts shining under the infrequent lamps. Hunger and cold, darkness and wet and ill-luck—why should he not keep the boy from these? It was not deserting his child; it was giving him into better hands. It did not occur to him that the village might not accept the charge. Anything would be better than what he himself had to give. Hunger and cold and darkness....

      "You stay still here a minute, sonny," said the man.

      "You goin' 'way?" the child demanded.

      "A minute. You stay still here—right where you are," said the man, and went into the darkness.

      The little boy sat still. He was wide awake now that he was alone; the walls of the dark seemed suddenly to recede, and instead of merely the church steps there was the whole black, listening world to take account of. He sat alert, trying to warm each hand on the cold wrist of its fellow. Where had his father gone? To find them a place to stay? Suppose he came back and said that he had found them a home; and they should go to it; and it would have a coal stove and a bedstead, and a pantry with cookies and brown sugar in the jars. And a lady would come and cook molasses candy for him....

      All this time something was hurting him intolerably. It was the foot, and the biggest toe, and the hole that was "choking" him. He fumbled at his shoe laces, but they were wet and the shoes were wet and sodden, and he gave it up. Where had his father gone? How big the world seemed when he was gone, and how different the night was. And when the lady had the molasses candy cooked, like in a story, she would cool it at the window and they would cut it in squares....

      As suddenly as he had gone, his father reappeared from the darkness.

      "Here," he said roughly, and thrust in the child's hands a paper bag. And when he had opened it eagerly there were sugar rolls and cream puffs and a piece of fruit cake and some shelled nuts. Fifteen cents' worth of food, badly enough selected, in all conscience, but—fifteen cents' worth. The fifteen cents which the man had been carrying in his pocket, wrapped in paper.

      "Now set there," said his father, "an' eat 'em up. An' listen, son. Set there till folks come out from in there. Set there till they come out. An' here's somethin' I'm puttin' in your coat pocket—see? It's a paper. Don't you look at it. But when the folks come out from in there—an' ask you anything—you show 'em that. Remember. Show 'em that."

      In the prayer-meeting room the reed organ sent out some trembling, throaty chords, and the little group in there sang an old melody. It was strange to the man, as he listened—

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