Warning Hill (22 page)

If a bitterness always lingered like the aftermath of an ugly taste, he never complained when the taste was strongest. It was always Marianne, always, always Marianne. That was why Tommy Michael went there in the first place, because, though they told him it was a rich man's college, Marianne had told him she was fond of Harvard men. It may have been that very warning that Harvard was a rich man's college which sent him on his way. Only when it was all over did Tommy realize it was a fallacy. Harvard was no more a rich man's college than the world was a rich man's world. There were the same gradations, and in the end there was hardly any one who did not find his level. Only later did he realize it was not a rich man's world, but a world of spirit, which lingered in the cloudiest day, untouched by the clanging of the surface cars on Harvard Square. It was the tolling of the college bell, in the clattering of dishes, in the voices and the shuffling feet. It was in the coldest autumn night, and in the languor of the spring. There was something of the past which had never died, far older than the Michael house and yet as bright as new.

Back in the strange region, known only to the serious, where Cambridge nearly touches the dead level of three-deck tenements, was where Tommy Michael landed. It was a street of lean frame houses, all of them unbeautiful in line and nearly all painted in stone-grays and drabs. It was a lean and dusty street, even in the sun of an autumn afternoon. The leaves were falling from the trees, making hissing futile noises as the wind eddied them on a concrete sidewalk. The shrubbery upon small patches of lawn was already bare of leaves. Tommy, a straw suitcase in his hand, clad in a rumpled suit, was standing on a front porch. A thin lady in a sensible woolen dress, with a face made acid by plain living, was looking at Tommy. He remembered that she held a copy of the
Atlantic Monthly
, the place marked by her forefinger.

“Yes,” she said, “I'm Mrs. Schoule. So you're the boy they sent? You don't look very strong.”

“No,” said Tommy, “but I'm strong enough, I guess.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Schoule, “you may be strong, but you don't look sturdy. I don't want anybody who gets sick.”

“Don't worry,” said Tommy. “I won't get sick.”

Mrs. Schoule fetched a deep sigh, which sounded like the autumn wind.

“Of course you won't mean to get sick,” said Mrs. Schoule, “but you probably will, and then I'll be the one to fix the furnace. I'll have to show you about it myself. I don't want more than one shovel of coal on it in the morning and two at night. That will be more than enough to keep the pipes from freezing.”

Mrs. Schoule paused and sighed again.

“Your room's upstairs—two flights up,” she said, and sighed once more.

He followed her up two narrow flights of stairs. Here and there a photograph of an Italian primitive stared at him sadly from the shadows and spoke of higher things. Mrs. Schoule halted at a room beneath the eaves. It was more of a prism than a cube, because the roof cut it nearly in two. There was a cot bed, a bureau and a small table with a gas lamp upon it, whose green rubber pipe ran like a serpent towards the wall. Out of a single window jutting from the eaves, Tommy could see the roofs of more houses and small back yards.

“The lamp will keep you warm,” said Mrs. Schoule. “Here's your towel and I don't want you to use the bathtub. When you fix the furnace you're to light the kitchen fire for the maid. Then you can get your own breakfast—your dinner and supper will be outside.”

“Yes,” said Tommy.

“And I don't want any carryings on,” sighed Mrs. Schoule. “I had a girl who got into trouble once.”

“No,” said Tommy, “you needn't worry, Mrs. Schoule.”

Mrs. Schoule looked at him. He followed her glance. Mrs. Schoule was now looking at a great gold watch chain that hung across his vest.

“You must be in by ten,” said Mrs. Schoule, “or you can't get in at all. Is that your watch chain?”

The bleakness of the room closed upon him, and the bleakness of Mrs. Schoule.

“Yes,” said Tommy, and he tried to smile. “My father gave it to me.” A terrible loneliness had seized him, filled with a longing as sharp as knives. He hated the street and the gray houses. He hated Mrs. Schoule. Back at home the elms would be whispering in Michael's Harbor, whispering in the autumn breeze, and the sun would be setting, giving the water a softness which was never in the sky. The automobiles would be in a long line at the station platform to meet the evening train. There would be people at the post office waiting for the mail, while the sky grew a darker blue. “Hey, Tom!” he could hear them saying, “Evenin', Tom!” And instead, like some caricature in a Dickens novel, Mrs. Schoule was speaking.

“I think,” said Mrs. Schoule, “I'll ask you to let me keep that chain for the next two weeks.”

“Keep it?” Tommy started. “Why?”

Mrs. Schoule fetched another sigh.

“Until I'm sure you're honest,” she explained. “I dare say you are. I don't mean to be personal—but I have to be careful with strangers in the house.”

Then Tommy was alone in that bare room. His straw suitcase was slumped on the floor. His overcoat lay across the bed like the skin of an aged animal; Tommy Michael's face was red as fire. For a moment he stood motionless, looking out the window and then he raised his fist and shook it toward the sky, a hackneyed gesture, yet as full of pathos as when the world was new.

“I'll show you!” muttered Tommy between his teeth. “I'll show you before I'm through.”

Already Tommy Michael was becoming as hard as nails; he was not speaking of Mrs. Schoule. He was speaking to the world that hemmed him in, and if it had been a wordless thought it would have been as plain, as it mingled with the other thoughts and prayers above the city's smoke.

“You wait!” muttered Tommy. What would Marianne have thought if she could have seen him there, his whisper stumbling across a sob? “You wait—I'm not started yet.”

Then Tommy was on his knees, wrenching open his suitcase. He rose with a photograph which he propped up against the wavy mirror of his bureau, in a silly way perhaps, cheapened by a million repetitions. It was a picture of Marianne, looking at him with a half smile on her full red lips. For it was Marianne with Tommy, always Marianne.…

XX

Now why they ever took to Tommy Michael, he could never guess, but they were good boys. Though it required months for Tommy to understand them, he always knew they were good boys. Sometimes it rather frightened him when he realized he might never have known it, if he had not been an assistant to Duncan Ross at the Harbor Club, where there were other boys like them, to whom life seemed entirely amusing. They were emerging from a tobacco shop, when he saw them first, five or six of them in winter coats, bowing beneath the dejection of early morning. Tommy looked at them as he might at foreigners, and they did not look at him at all. First there came a tall boy with very black hair and a placid languid face and deep blue half circles beneath his eyes.

“I don't know why,” he was saying. “My head doesn't seem to stand the strain as it did when I was younger. Sherwood, just as a friend, a schoolboy friend, will you please stop blowing in my face?”

The name made Tommy stop, and there, sure enough, was Sherwood Jellett, shorter, with sandy hair. A glow of friendliness made Tommy smile. Sherwood's was the only face among a whole new world that he had ever known before. It made Tommy think of a hundred different things.

“Why—hello!” said Tommy Michael.

Every one had stopped. Tommy felt their eyes upon him, languid and indifferent, but Sherwood knew him. The peculiarly elaborate indifference of Sherwood left no doubt of that.

“Hi!” said Sherwood. “Come on, boys, what are you stopping for?”

He walked by Tommy without another word, and all the rest walked too. Their overshoes made a flapping sound, like wings, as they walked, leaving Tommy to look after them. That was something which Tommy never forgot, because he was not the sort to laugh, or philosopher enough to understand the eccentricity of youth, that revels in its arrogance. Sherwood was not the man to guess that many a night Tommy Michael would awake with a vision of Sherwood's pale and erupted face. Every inflection of Sherwood's voice would come back through a hundred nights. For Sherwood had added a remark in loud clear tones which Tommy had to hear.

“Well, why do I have to be nice to everybody? Do you know who he is? He's the professional's assistant at our golf club.”

Tommy Michael was not the boy to laugh. He did not have the balance or the thickness to his skin. Yet, if it had not been for Sherwood, those others would never have given him a thought. If it had not been for Sherwood, they would never have been his friends.

The very next morning Tommy saw the tall one coming towards him,—the one with the dark circles under his eyes whose head could not stand the strain. Though Tommy wanted to run away, there was no place to run, and the tall boy remembered him. Tommy could see him smile.

“Hello,” he said, “I hear you teach golf.”

Tommy stopped and looked at him and started to move on. No one ever needed to snub him more than once.

“Is it any business of yours if I do?” he asked.

The tall boy shrugged his shoulders.

“I knew it,” he sighed. “I knew that you'd be mad. I'm the one who always gets the blame. Why is it I should always get the blame? I wish you'd tell me why. I can't. My head won't stand the strain.”

Tommy paused. Tommy was rapidly forgetting what it meant to laugh.

“What's the matter with your head?” he asked. The tall boy made a weary gesture.

“It's the responsibility,” he said. “I continually have to straggle beneath a burden of responsibility—not that I'm not glad nor proud to straggle, but sometimes it's a little hard. Do you find it so?”

“Find what so?” asked Tommy.

“Don't!” The tall boy raised his hands pleadingly. “Don't ask me questions. I never can answer questions in the morning. That's my trouble. My head won't stand the strain.”

“Then what do you want?” and Tommy had begun to laugh, without knowing exactly why. It seemed to Tommy suddenly that something dark had left him.

“I want you to know,” said the tall boy, “that we're not all like Sherwood, just as a matter of pride, you understand, just pride. Between you and me, Sherwood isn't quite—what shall I say?—not quite. He never was—at St. Swithin's or any other school—not quite. And there's another thing. I don't know why the burden always comes to me, but it does. I want you to give me golf lessons. It's purely my own idea. There must be recreation, mustn't there?”

“Don't you get enough?” asked Tommy.

“No.” The tall boy shook his head again. “Not of the proper kind. We all of us need something to keep us out of trouble in the afternoons—purely my own idea. My name's Milburn and I want you to teach me golf. I've got a net to put on front of the windows and a jute mat. Will you come down this afternoon?”

That was how Tommy Michael met Winthrop Milburn, whose head could not stand the strain, and all those others who gathered about him. That was how Tommy learned to look any one in the eye before he was finally through and how to wear a hat and coat. Of course it was luck, as Tommy often said, all luck, which might not have occured again in a hundred years, for Tommy was no fool. He had learned long ago that the answer for everything lay inside himself. They liked him for what he was, and that was all. It was astonishing to think of it, but somehow it was true that Tommy Michael more closely resembled the graduates of St. Swithin's School than he did those other boys who tended furnaces and struggled towards a goal.

Tommy wondered sometimes why he never lost his head, in those hours he spent in warm soft rooms. It had nothing to do with his will. Rather everything that went before seemed to keep him moving, regardless of what happened, so that all that time, whenever he looked back, had an unreality which was something like a dream, and all those times which were so much more distant seemed more real. The slamming of a blind upon the Michael house at night was louder than the breaking furniture in Winnie Milburn's room. The sound of his Aunt Sarah's voice was more distinct than all those others, when everything was done. Though Tommy could shut his eyes and call off the names, they were like the shades that Dante and Virgil saw beside the Styx. He could understand them but their lives were so far from his, and their thoughts were all so far. Winnie Milburn, with his dark hair and his pale face, and Charley Lothrop Jones, who drove his car into the river, and Percy Wright who was arrested for fighting a policeman,—he could go on for fifteen minutes calling their names, and they would only be like the names on a plaque of bronze commemorating something which was past.

“Hey!” said Aunt Sarah. “Hey? Who's that?”

“Jones!” said Tommy in a louder tone, “Charlie Lothrop Jones. He's asked me to spend a week with him. That's what I was saying.”

It was one of the last times he ever saw her. She was seated in her bedroom in that black walnut chair he remembered when he was a boy. It seemed to him even that last time that neither Aunt Sarah nor the chair had changed, though everything else was changing. Mrs. Jiggs had wrapped her shawl tight about her shoulders. Aunt Sarah's stick was still close beside her chair.

“Hey?” said Aunt Sarah. “Charley Lothrop Jones.… Well, what's that you said about him?”

It was growing harder to make Aunt Sarah understand. Tommy could almost suspect that Aunt Sarah took a pleasure in making it difficult.

“He asked me to spend a week with him—and play golf.”

“He did, hey?” said Aunt Sarah. “Well, you needn't shout about it.”

“I'm sorry,” said Tommy. “I didn't mean to shout.”