He handed Father a bundle. Father thought of throwing it at him, but simultaneously he thought of keeping it and consuming its contents. He gasped with the insult. He became angrier and angrier as he realized that the insult applied to Mother also. But before he could think of a smart, crushing, New-Yorkish reply the farmer grumped away into the house.
The Applebys dragged themselves back to the highroad. Father was blaming himself for having brought her to this.... "But I did try to get a job first," he insisted, and remembered how he had once begged the owner of a filthy shoe-store on Third Avenue for a place as porter, shoeblack, anything.
Their road led them by a clump of woods.
"We'll have a fire here and camp!" cried Father.
He had never made a fire in the open, and he understood it to be a most difficult process. But he was a young lover; his sweetheart was cold; he defied man and nature. Disdaining any possible passer-by, he plunged into the woodland. With bare hands he scooped the light fall of snow from between two rocks, and in the darkness fumbled for twigs and leaves. Gruntingly he dragged larger boughs, piled the wood with infinite care, lighted it tremblingly.
They sat on the rocks by the fire and opened the farmer's bundle. There were cold, gristly roast beef, bread and cheese, and a large, angry-looking sausage.
"Um!" meditated Father; then, "I'll heat up the roast beef." Which he grandly did, on little sticks, and they ate it contemplatively, while their souls and toes relaxed in the warmth, and the black tree-trunks shone cozily in the glow.
"No cockroaches and no smell of fried fish here, like there is on Avenue B," said Father. "And we don't have to go home from our picnic. I wonder why folks let themselves get all old and house-bound, when they could be like us?"
"Yes," said Mother, drowsily.
He hadn't nerved himself to play the mouth-organ, not all day, but now, with the luxury of fire and solitude, he played it, and, what's more, he tried to whistle a natty little ballad which touchingly presented a castaway as "long-long-longing for his Michigan, his wish-again ho-o-ome."
Yet Father wasn't altogether satisfied with his fire. The dry twigs he kept feeding to it flared up and were gone. The Innocents huddled together, closer and closer to the coals. Father gave little pats to her shoulder while she shivered and began to look anxious.
"Cold, old honey?"
"Yes, but it don't matter," she declared.
"Come on, I guess we'd better go look for a place to sleep. I'm afraid-don't know as I could keep this fire up all night, after all."
"Oh, I can't walk any. Oh, I guess it will be all right when I get going again." She tried to smile at him, and with the slowness of pain she reached for her bundle.
He snatched it from her. "I can carry all our stuff, anyway," he said.
Leaning on him, moving step by step, every step an agony of soreness and cold, lifting her feet each time by a separate effort of her numbed will, she plodded beside him, while he tried to aid her with a hand under her elbow.
"There! There's where we'll go!" he whispered, as the shapes of farm-buildings lifted against the sky. "We won't ask permission. We mightn't get it! Like that last farmer. And I won't let you go one step farther. We'll butt right into the barn and sleep in the hay."
"But-do you-think we'd better?"
"We will!"
The mouse-like Father was a very lion, emboldened by his care for her. He would have faced ten farmers terrible with shot-guns. Without one timorous glance he led her to the small side-door of the barn, eased down the latch, lifted her over the sill, closed the door. In the barn was a great blackness, but also a great content. It seemed warm, and was intimate with the scent of cows and hay, alive with the quiet breathing of animals. Father lit a match and located the stairs to the haymow.
Mother was staggering. With his arm about her waist, very tender and reverent, he guided her to the stairs and up them, step by agonized step, to the fragrant peace of the haymow. She sank down and he covered her so deep with hay that only her face was left uncovered.
"Warm, Mother?"
She did not answer. She was already asleep.
Through a night haunted by vague monsters of darkness-and by sneezes whenever spears of hay invaded his indignant city nose-Father turned and thrashed. But he was warm, and he did sleep for hours at a time. At what must have been dawn he heard the farmer at the stalls in the stable below. He felt refreshed, cozily drowsy, and he did a shameless thing, a trick of vagrants and road-wallopers: he put his thumb to his nose, aimed his hand toward the supposititious location of the farmer below, and twirled his outspread fingers in a flickering manner. It is believed that he intended to convey spirited defiance, or possibly insult, by this amazing gesture. He grinned contentedly and went to sleep again.... Fortunately Mother was asleep and did not see him acting-as she often but vainly defined it-"like a young smart Aleck."
Father awakened from an agitating dream of setting the barn afire, and beheld Mother sitting up amid the hay-an amazing, a quite incredible situation for Mrs. Seth Appleby. She mildly dabbled at her gray hair, which was still neat, and looked across in bewilderment. Like a jack-in-the-box, Father came up out of the hay to greet her.
"How do you like your room in the Wal-dorf-As-torya?" he said. "Sleep well, old honey?"
"Why-why, I must have!" she marveled. "I don't hardly remember coming here, though."
"Ready to tramp on?"
She swore that she was. And indeed her cheeks were ruddy with outdoors, the corners of her eyes relaxed. But she was so stiff that they had hobbled a mile, and Father had shucked several tons of corn in return for breakfast, before she ceased feeling as though her legs were made of extraordinarily brittle glass.
CHAPTER XIV
Sometimes they were fêted adventurers who were credited with having tramped over most of the globe. Sometimes they were hoboes on whom straggly women shut farm-house doors. But never were they wandering minstrels. Father went on believing that he intended to play the mouth-organ and entertain the poor, but actually he depended on his wood-chopping arm, and every cord he chopped gave him a ruddier flush of youth, a warmer flush of ambition.
Most people do not know why they do things-not even you and I invariably know, though of course we are superior to the unresponsive masses. Many people are even unconscious that they are doing things or being things-being gentle or cruel or creative or parasitic. Quite without knowing it, Father was searching for his place in the world. The New York shoe-stores had decided that he was too old to be useful. But age is as fictitious as time or love. Father was awakening from the sleep of drudgery in the one dusty shop, and he was asking what other place there was for him. He was beginning to have another idea, a better idea, which he pondered as he came to shoe-stores in small towns.... They weren't very well window-dressed; the signs were feeble.... Maybe some day he'd get back into the shoe business in some town, and he'd show them-only, how could he talk business to a shoeman when he was shabby and winter-tanned and none too extravagant in the care of his reddening hands?
But he was learning something more weighty-the art of handling people, in the two aspects thereof-bluffing, and backing up the bluff with force and originality. He came to the commonplace people along the road as something novel and admirable, a man who had taken his wife and his poverty and gone seeing the world. When he smiled in a superior way and said nothing, people immediately believed that he must have been places, done brave things. He didn't so much bluff them as let them bluff themselves.... He had never been able to do that in his years as a foggy-day shadow to the late J. Pilkings.