It was two o"clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and that the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past like living things upon the floor.
Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy with sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.
"Mother! O Mother!" called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could hear the little body moving restlessly in bed.
Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed to him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for hours been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing for which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in the corridor of the hospital.
In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her shoes and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A cool morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened doors as he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them sat at the table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His tongue was heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange questioning eyes. "Why are you here?" their eyes asked.
For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had gone away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the porch outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she went to sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly and sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw the country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came into his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the tears but evidence of self pity? He wondered.
One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard, had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too went up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands awkwardly.
Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on the couch. "I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now," he said to himself.
When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car and went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft cashed. Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and buying clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night clothes, and books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All these things he had sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there to pack the trunks and suit cases, and get them to the station. A large, motherly-looking woman, an employe of the hotel, who pa.s.sed through the hall, offered to help with the packing.
After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to the house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large bills. He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the past.
"I will see what it will do here," he thought.
In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked at him.
"There"s a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen," she said. "Get me a drink. Why do you hang about here?"
Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.
"What was your husband like?" he asked.
"Who? Jack?" she said. "Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He stood for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and went away." She looked at Sam and laughed.
"I didn"t care much for him," she added. "He couldn"t make money enough for a live woman."
Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.
"The children will be a bother, eh?" he said.
"I have an offer for the house," she said. "I wish I didn"t have the kids. They are a nuisance."
"I have been figuring that out," Sam told her. "I know a woman in the East who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I should like to do something to help you. I might take them to her."
"In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away," she laughed, and took another drink from the bottle.
Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown attorney.
"Get a neighbour in here to witness this," he said. "The woman will want things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and puts it on her."
She looked at him suspiciously. "What"s the graft? Who gets stuck for the fares down east?"
Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.
"Sign here," he said, putting the paper before her. "Here is your neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent."
The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle lay down again on the couch.
"If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed,"
she declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but at the moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take an advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in life, for purpose to come into his own life.
Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at the brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came out.
He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride of them.
At two o"clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of the boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York flyer--bound for Sue.
CHAPTER II
Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money, that he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does not mean much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy Americans than is commonly believed. Something has happened to him that has happened to the others also, to how many of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies and quick brains, men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what they had thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing weary they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have leaned the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a little. Strong convictions have become weak. Old G.o.ds are dying.
"It is only when you are torn from your mooring and drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come near to you."
The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with determination.
What is inscribed on it?
It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we must build now, in a lifetime.
In our father"s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land.
When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls the wolves still howl.
There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three children, when he thought he had s.n.a.t.c.hed success out of the very jaws of failure.
But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still there. It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New England roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it looked down at him from the stars.
Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept.
Perhaps his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it began then.
The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was a house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam"s breast there was a feeling of something alive, growing.
Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night, coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children--a little inclined toward tears and homesickness--she was fl.u.s.tered and nervous.
Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate to the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe and Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come out at the front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little frightened. Her hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam thought her figure almost boyish in its slenderness.
With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question she did ask.