Warning Hill (3 page)

His father's office was in the building of the Summer County Bank. It was a brown wooden building with shingles set in a wavy pattern along the front. A door to the side led up a steep flight of wooden stairs to a hall lighted by ground-glass windows in doors set along it. Upon one door a name was printed. T. JEFFERSON MICHAEL. It was his grandfather's old office. It was very dusty inside. Even the panes of the window, looking out upon the street, were thick with dust. Near the window was a desk of dark wood, of the same wood as the furniture in Aunt Sarah's room at home, and there were two chairs, one before the desk, which you could turn around like a piano stool, and another of yellow wood with a leather cushion on the seat.

Tommy perched himself upon the yellow wooden chair. His father sat down before the desk.

“There's no mail,” he said; “no mail, after all.”

“Daddy,” said Tommy. (In those days he thought of the strangest things.) “Daddy, did there used to be a time when things weren't so old?”

You could see his father did not understand. He looked at Tommy and fumbled with his watch chain.

“What things, Tom?”

“All sorts of things,” said Tommy. “Our house and everything.”

His father nodded. “Yes,” said he, “there was a time, but why?”

“I was just wondering,” said Tommy, and then he saw that his father was no longer looking at him as though he were a little boy.

“Are there any things that don't look old when they get old?”

“That don't look old when they get old?” his father repeated. But he was not making fun. “Yes, but not the kind that you can touch and see. Those all grow devilishly shabby.”

Of course Tommy did not exactly understand, but there were so many things he did not.

“I'll tell you some things that stay bright. Would you like to have me tell you?”

Oh, there was no one as fine as his father. Surely no one else could speak as well as he, for it seemed to Tommy that his words were like the wind playing in the Michael's Harbor elms, and they lingered like that wind in Tommy's memory. And all the events of that day grouped themselves around them like a pattern.

“A good name's one of them. We've got a good name. A Michael has always lived in Michael's Harbor and no one has had much fault to find with any of them. They may have been foolish, but they've never been unkind. That's something, more than you may think, until you've lived much longer.”

All the while his father was speaking, Tommy's mind moved on. He seemed to be back on the road again and there were rumbling wheels and slapping hoofs.

“Lord help me!” his father was laughing softly. “I never thought I'd be a sanctimonious prig. It's your fault, Tom. It's the way all fathers are. But there's another thing I've noticed doesn't tarnish, just one more and the sermon will be over.”

Just then there was a knock on the door. It was opened before the knock was finished by a flushed and genial gentleman in a blue serge suit. Tommy knew who he was, because he had been often lately at their house. It was Mr. Cooper, the president of the bank downstairs.

“Excuse me, Alfred,” said Mr. Cooper, “I didn't know you had a business caller.”

Alfred Michael rose from his swivel chair. As he stood before Mr. Cooper he seemed to Tommy as different from Mr. Cooper as—as what? Tommy never exactly knew.

“You're sure I'm not interrupting?” Mr. Cooper said again.

“I was preaching,” said Alfred Michael, “but it can wait.”

For some reason, Mr. Cooper thought this was very funny. “Preaching!” he cried. “Don't you believe a word he says, Tommy. You ask him about the scrapes his daddy used to pull him out of, and I'll bet he wishes he had a daddy still.”

“For heaven's sake, Joe!” Tommy's father shrugged his shoulders. “Can't we avoid the ant and the grasshopper motif? Do you want to see me about something, or what is it?”

Mr. Cooper did not seem as pleasant as before. “There's a telegram, Alf,” he said. “It came early, and they left it at the bank. When they told me you'd come in, I thought I'd bring it myself.”

Alfred Michael took the envelope without opening it.

“Very kind of you, Joe!” he said. “Especially when it would have been so easy to send some one else.”

“Oh, it's no trouble, Alf,” said Cooper. “I've always liked to do little things, always have.”

“Get to the point, Joe,” said Tommy's father suddenly, “and say you came to see what's in the telegram.”

Of course it was all grown-up talk which Tommy could only understand in snatches. Yet he could feel that something was happening. His father was holding the envelope, turning it softly, but Mr. Cooper's fingers moved in curious jerks.

“Considering everything,” Mr. Cooper's voice had grown thick, “you've got a nerve to speak to me like that. You may be smarter than I am, but what good has it done you, I want to know? Gad, if you'd only had to work when you were young, you might be something now instead of—of—”

“Instead of what?” said Alfred Michael.

“Instead of a common gambler, if you want to know.”

Alfred Michael took a penknife from his pocket and slit open the envelope in his hand.

“All right,” he said, “it doesn't make me angry. I'm under no illusions about myself, under none at all.”

Alfred Michael pulled the telegram delicately from the envelope, stepped closer to the window and leaned his elbow on the dark top of the desk. Tommy always remembered one thing. His father read the telegram carefully and folded it again. Then he looked out of the window for a moment at the elms across the street. Then he handed the telegram to Mr. Cooper just as though it was an amusing letter.

“Winter's come,” said Alfred Michael. “The grasshopper has finished dancing. Look it over, Joe. The whole list has dropped twenty points, and they sell me out to-morrow.”

Mr. Cooper stared for a second, first at Tommy's father, and then at the paper. “Alf!” he said. “My God, Alf!”

Alfred Michael looked straight at him and his eyes were no longer weary. His face had lines upon it too, crinkly little lines about the eyes.

“Alf, what are you going to do now? Don't you understand?”

“Do?” Tommy's father asked as he played gently with his watch chain.

Mr. Cooper drew a handkerchief from his coat pocket and mopped his forehead.

“You don't know how this hurts me,” he began.

“Thanks,” answered Alfred Michael. “I'm not asking you for anything.”

“I know you're not. Of course not, Alf.”

“You didn't,” said Alfred Michael, “but you know it now.”

For a while when they were alone, Tommy's father stood very still and stared out of the window. When Tommy spoke, he gave a start, though Tommy did not speak loudly. Tommy looked at him round-eyed, with his hands upon the arms of that yellow wooden chair. Something had happened, Tommy knew, though of course he could not tell what.

“Daddy?”

Alfred Michael coughed and gave a tug at his cravat. There still were those wrinkles about his eyes, deeper than they had ever been before.

“Daddy, what's that other thing?”

“Eh?” said Alfred Michael. “What's that?”

“The other thing—the one that doesn't tarnish?”

“God bless my soul!” said Alfred Michael. The wrinkles around his eyes were not so deep. “I'd forgotten about that.” He sat himself down again in his swivel chair, pulling carefully at the creases in his trousers.

“How you take a licking is the other thing,” he said. “Do you follow me, Tom? It isn't like a chair or a house, because it's an idea, but the paint never comes off you altogether, if you take your licking like a gentleman. Remember that. Try to, will you, Tom?”

Of course Tommy remembered, for it all seemed so very strange. Even when everything shimmered in a white remorseless light, Tommy remembered still—his father leaning forward in his swivel chair by the dark old desk in that dusty office.

“Tom,” Alfred Michael hesitated and drew a deep breath as though he was very tired, though of course he was not tired at all, “that boy—Spurius—that make-believe boy? Was he Spurius Lartius? Do you know the poem?”

Of course Tommy knew it, every one of the rolling verses, that sounded like the waves on the beach by the summer house when the tide was running high.

“Say it can you, Tom?”

Tommy was glad to say it. Although of course there was no one else in the room, you might almost have thought there was, when he began the lines. You might almost have thought, if you set your mind on it, that some one else was speaking who had come from a long way off.

Then out spake Spurius Lartius,

A Rumnian proud was he:

“Lo, I will stand at thy right hand,

And keep the bridge with thee:”

“Daddy?” Tommy paused and stared. “What's the matter, Daddy?”

And he had a reason for asking, for Alfred Michael had leaned his elbows on the desk. His face was buried in his hands, and, though he said nothing was the matter, of course there must have been.

III

As Alfred Michael walked home, with Tommy trotting at his side, no one could have guessed that anything was wrong. The sun glanced from his shoes and twinkled from his watch chain. His heels clicked upon the brick walks sharply, and like a period between each click, his stick descended to the ground. He even contrived to hum a tune, as they neared the bridge by Welcome River. Tommy stumbled now and then, because his eyes were not in the direction of his toes. Across the bridge of Welcome River, soft in the haze of the morning, like an arm guarding the harbor mouth, Tommy could see Warning Hill, somehow larger and more beautiful than it had ever been before; and nearer, much nearer, he could see the weathered cupola of his own house, rising solitary above the fields around it.

Before they reached the bridge, however, Alfred Michael paused, still humming that same tune over and over, and turned down a narrow walk toward the river, where the houses were no longer neat. At the end of the path he came to another stop before a battered frame house with a broken chimney. There was a pile of wood beside the house, over which a lank brown-skinned man was bending. Walking past him was a dignified row of dark-colored ducks, led by a drake with a magnificent green head and neck, who exhorted his flock in a monotonous singing whisper. “Whisper, whisper,” went the drake, “whisper, whisper.” Two corpulent water spaniels sprang barking from behind a stack of eelpots.

As the man with the ax looked up, Tommy knew who he was. It was Jim Street who sometimes appeared at the house in the gunning season, clad in high rubber boots.

There had been a cloud about Mr. Street as long as Tommy could recollect. Mr. Street was a carpenter when he chose to work, but Tommy had heard his Aunt Sarah say that Mr. Street never chose. Mr. Street was handsome then, bright-eyed with straight dark hair—too handsome for his own good, or anybody else's, Aunt Sarah often said; and what that girl had seen in Jim, his Aunt Sarah never could see, nor Tommy's mother, nor anybody else. She could have married any one. She probably wished she had before she died. She must have seen that you could get nowhere by flying in the face of things. What the face of things meant, Tommy could not tell, but he sometimes could think of her flying on soft whispering wings toward those banks of clouds that looked like faces now and then, when the sun went down.

“Hi, Alf!” said Jim Street. “You, Spot, you, Spy, lay off that noise before I bust a lath acrost you.”

“Come over to the barn, Jim,” said Alfred Michael, “I want to talk.”

They left Tommy standing near the woodpile. For a minute or two he watched them as they stood by the door of a rickety building, whose opened door revealed lofts filled deep with hay. Mr. Street was so tall that Tommy's father was obliged to look up at him as he talked. Mr. Street was dressed in a pair of black trousers and a blue shirt opened at the neck. Now and then he would raise his hand and scratch his head. From where Tommy stood, he could hear what they were saying in snatches carried on the wind—strange, unrelated strings of words. First it would be like the green-headed drake, who was walking slowly toward the river—whisper, whisper—and then a string of words.

“Whisper, whisper,” went Jim Street; “whisper, if you say so, Alf.”

“Whisper, whisper,” replied his father, flicking at a hay wisp with his stick. “Whisper—and damn the consequences.”

He pulled some money from his pocket, for of course he was very rich, and handed it to Mr. Street.

“Put the jot on Jessica's nose,” Tommy's father said.

“Whisper,” said Mr. Street. “You don't want to—whisper—the whole pile?”

“Daddy,” called Tommy, “who is Jessica?”

His father raised a hand to his hat, to which the wind had given an unexpected tilt.

“Go down to the river, Tom,” his father said, “and watch the ducks. I'm talking business with Mr. Street, that's not meant for little boys.”

“You bet it ain't,” Mr. Street said. “Alf, ain't you got no sense? Go and see Jellett. Ain't he still after you to buy that gun shack and the acre? Hell, Alf, see him before he hears you're strapped and shake him down. Go and see Jellett!
Go and see him!”

“Tom, did you hear me?” his father said. “Nonsense—Joe Cooper's let him know by this time. I'm bottoms up. You don't know the world, Jim, because you're much too near Arcadia.”

They were saying something which Tommy could not understand about the man in the carriage, who drove four horses with the silver-trimmed harness. Tommy could still seem to see the way he jerked his head.

“But the boy,” said Jim Street. “You gotta give a try, Alf!”

“Whisper,” said Tommy's father. “Whisper, whisper.”