“Alone!” she exclaimed. “You have more friends than I ever heard of.”
“I haven’t a real friend, anywhere, except you.”
She was silent.
“Where are you going this summer?” she asked suddenly. “Would you care to come down to our place?”
This was surprising; it hadn’t occurred to you even in your numerous fancies; but now that she said it, it was so natural and obvious that it almost seemed as if you had deliberately planned it.
“But I couldn’t,” you protested. “Your folks never heard of me.”
“Oh, I’ve told them all about you. There won’t be anyone there except Father and Mother. They’d love to have you.”
You knew that of course you were going. It meant nothing to you but that you would be with Lucy, which was enough. You took her in your arms and kissed her.
“That’s the first time anyone has ever kissed me,” she said quietly.
“Not really?”
“Of course.” Her grave grey eyes shone a little humorously. “I guess it’s the first time anyone ever wanted to.”
When you told Dick you would like to take a month away from the office he was completely indifferent to your intentions until their specific probabilities amused him.
Dick’s eyes opened wide. “The hell she did! Why you old Romeo. You’d better watch out, Bill. She’s the kind that gets chronic.”
“Maybe she already is. I’ve told her I’ll come.”
“You’ll go all right. I’m not so sure I wouldn’t like to go there myself, if I were asked but I’d get sick of it in a week.”
He grinned, and went on: “You know, she turned me down flat. Out at the Hampton Club, about a month ago, you remember, you brought her of course, I asked her to go to dinner and a show, and she said flatly she just didn’t want to. She handed the same package to Charlie Harper.”
So Dick had tried to take her away. And that big bum Harper... well, that was all right. Nor was there any code which warranted the resentment you felt against Dick, but you felt it.
“It will be all right then for the first of July?” you said.
“God bless you. If you ask me I think you’re hooked. Not that she’d insist on your marrying her. That’s just the way it works.”
That evening, the eve of her departure, you told Lucy you would come for the entire month of July.
V
He was still conscious of an irritation at Mrs. Jordan’s persistent noises below, but he found that he had mounted another step, and another. His eyes were now level with the first landing, one flight up, the floor where the two art students lived. Another step, and he could see the grey plaster figure in the niche in the curved wall, beside the flimsy little electric lamp that always got knocked off when he passed it with his overcoat flapping.
He looked at it, really looked at it, as if he had never seen it before, and yet he did not now see it. His ears acutely registered the movements of Mrs. Jordan, and yet he did not hear them. He did hear himself, in his brain somewhere. Do you realize that you are going on, going ahead? Do you realize that you don’t at all know what you are doing?
You have felt like this before, less acutely, that day for instance you ate dinner at the club with your son more than two years ago. Paul, his name is. You called him Paul.
That didn’t seem real either. Nor did that note, on a square piece of blue paper, which you found on your office desk one morning in the pile of personal mail.
“Dear Mr. Sidney,” it said, “if you can spare me an hour, some day this week, I would like very much to ask you about something. It was a long time ago, but I believe you will remember my name. Sincerely, Emily Davis.”
At the top was an address and telephone number.
When she was shown into your office, you were genuinely shocked. She was an old woman now. As she looked at you pleasantly, you could see anxious years in her eyes, and a present anxiety too.
“Little Will Sidney,” she smiled. “Now that I see you, I know I was foolish to take so long to make up my mind.”
You escorted her to the big leather seat in the corner, and took a chair in front of her. She seemed to know a good deal about you, the year you had come to New York, the date of your marriage with Erma, the fact of your having no children. She told you, briefly but completely, of her own journey through the many days. Mr. Davis had practiced law in Cleveland, never very successfully, for seven years, then they had moved to Chicago. There it was even worse, he never squeezed more than a scanty living out of it; and there was nothing but a modest insurance payment for her and her little son when one winter he took pneumonia and died. Mrs. Davis managed to get a position as a teacher in the Chicago public schools, which she still held; she was in New York only for a visit, having come, it appeared, expressly to see you. She had somehow kept her son Paul fed and clothed to the end of high school, and he had worked his way through the University of Chicago.
“It’s Paul really I came to see you about. He graduated from the university two years ago; he’s twenty-four now. He’s a good boy and I thought you might help.”
“Where is he?”
“In New York. He has a job now and then, but he thinks he wants to be a sculptor. He studied in Chicago a while and won a prize; now he works at it so hard, he can’t keep a job very long. What he wants more than anything else is to go abroad for two or three years.”
You considered.
“If he has real talent he certainly should be encouraged,” you agreed judiciously. “I might speak to Dick — Mr. Carr — about it.”
“I thought you might do it yourself,” she said. “You see, you’re his father.”
You stared at her.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she went on, “but after all, why shouldn’t I? Jim’s dead, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. He was born a few months after we got to Cleveland. That was really why we went away.”
You stammered, “Can you — that is — I don’t see how you can know—”
“I know well enough.”
“What does he look like?”
“Not much like anyone.” She smiled. “You’ll just have to take my word for it; it’s funny, it never occurred to me that you might doubt it.”
“Well.” You got up from your chair.
You walked to the window and looked down into the street. “Of course he doesn’t know?”
“Good heavens no! There’s no reason why he should.”
“None at all,” you reassured her. “It was a foolish question. Of course he mustn’t know. As for helping him — yes, of course. I’d like—” You hesitated. “I’d like to see him,” you said.
She agreed at once. Two days later you met him in the lobby of your club. You knew him at once, and hastened over and extended your hand.
“Mr. Davis? I’m Mr. Sidney.”
Later, seated in the dining-room with soup in front of you, you examined him critically. He was rather poorly dressed; his hands were big and strong and not too clean, and his coat-sleeves were too short. His hair and eyes were dark. You thought that he resembled you a little, particularly in structure.
“Your mother tells me you would like to study abroad,” you observed.
“Yes, sir. I would like to. It’s almost essential.”
“Are there better teachers over there than in New York?”
He explained that it wasn’t so mud a matter of teachers, it was the stimulation, the atmosphere, the tradition, the opportunity to see the great works of the masters. He talked of all this at length, in a sensible and straightforward manner.
“I suppose,” you observed, “you could make out over there on three thousand a year.”