Peewee/Chapter 12
Very clean as to his hands and face, and dressed in the clothes his father had bought in Chicago, Peewee sat on the haircloth sofa in the small, formal parlor of the farmhouse. His arrayal in these unaccustomed garments for a week day, and his lonely isolation in the parlor presaged another change in his existence. No indication of the nature of this change had been given him, and the uncertainty filled him with anxiety. He studied at times the brilliantly colored pictures on the parlor walls and the wax flowers under a glass ball on the round table, but for the most part he merely listened. The reason for this was that he had been told not to get off the sofa, and that from it he could not see out at the window. He appreciated that whatever was now about to happen to him would be preceeded by some arrival along the road, and in default of sight there would be only sound to warn him of this coming.
He had grown, in the three weeks which he had spent upon the farm, very familiar with the road. It came to him, a dusty track, over the top of the hill, it descended to a level sandy stretch, and in the distance it ascended another hill and vanished. Few vehicles passed along the road; there was occasionally an automobile and a little more frequently a springless farm-wagon. His soul abhorred the farm-yard where the chickens nestled in the dust, but the road gave him a sense of horror. The definite disappearance of its two ends over the hills epitomized his loneliness. By day, he sat against the house wall, concealed by a laburnum bush, and watched for someone to come past on it; by night, when darkness settled on the little farmhouse and no light blinked anywhere in sight, it was the recollection of the empty road which would not let him sleep. It made him think of streets where high buildings stood closely side by side, of pavements thundering with vehicles, and of sidewalks crowded with people. He envied happier boys who sold newspapers among those people and listened to what they said to one another.
He stiffened now, as he heard the chug-chug of a motor car on the road. The sound grew louder and then ceased. The car had been stopped, then, at the house. He strained uneasily in his seat as the farmer's wife passed through the hall, and listened for some other voice than hers. Then he braced himself suspiciously, for the voice which came to him was Sallet's.
It was plain that the conjunction of Sallet's arrival and his own dressed-up condition indicated that he was to be taken somewhere else. Why? Had Beman discovered where he was, or Lampert? In that case, Sallet had come to take him somewhere still further from Chicago, and Peewee's imagination shrank in horror from trying to imagine what a place still further from the city would be like.
"Ready, young man?" Sallet inquired, appearing at the door.
"Yes, sir," Peewee replied guardedly.
"Go out and get into the car."
Peewee halted in the hall to look after Sallet. The lawyer had gone in into the kitchen and was talking with the farmer there and giving him money. As Peewee descended the three steps in front of the house, the large red hen which he detested more than any of the other chickens was throwing dust over her back beside the door-step. He stopped, considering a final vindictive assault upon the hen. The lowness of his spirits prevented this and he went on to the motor. The car, he observed by the tracks in the road, had been turned around in the direction from which it had come, but there was neither additional threat nor any promise in this. He did not dare to ask any questions of the driver, or of Sallet when he came out carrying Peewee's small suitcase.
Peewee had observed that wagons usually were loaded when going in the direction the motor was headed, and empty when they came back. This seemed to predicate something important at the end of the road; it proved, however, to end in a small, uninteresting village. They traversed a street flanked on each side by farm wagons and stopped at the railway depot. Having paid the driver, Sallet left Peewee on a settee in the waiting room while he bought the tickets. This meant, Peewee lugubriously decided, that they were going very far indeed. Directions were not known to him, and in his nervousness, when the train finally thundered in, he could not tell the way that it was going. Seated beside Sallet in the car, he looked uneasily out of the window whenever they passed through villages, but looked about the car when there were only fields outside.
At the end of some two hours, it became plain that the villages were getting closer together. After looking at one of them Peewee only had time to take one or sometimes two bites of the sandwich with which Sallet had provided him, before they came to another. They passed presently a wide-spread factory with many little houses grouped about it; then a whole string of factories. He put his sandwich down upon the windowsill and, forgetting it, stared out continuously. He trembled as he saw finally a street where children were playing between unbroken rows of red brick houses. Other streets succeeded. They were unquestionably entering some large city. But what city Peewee could not yet tell.
The train rolled slowly into a long, covered train-shed and his recognition of it filled him with nostalgia. He saw, as they descended, a policeman whom he remembered having seen before. He wanted, as they passed through the station, to run away from Sallet out into the streets, but now the lawyer held him firmly by the hand. He shook violently as he was put into a taxicab. The thronging faces of people, the roar of vehicles, the clang of street-car bells and the rumble of the elevated stirred him with delight. He would have been perfectly happy, he thought, if the lawyer had let him get out and sit down on the edge of the sidewalk with his feet in the gutter, but his opinion of Sallet showed him the impossibility of the lawyer's doing that.
The cab stopped before an office building. They got out and ascended in an elevator to a corridor where there were several doors marked with Sallet's name. The lawyer unlocked the furthest of these doors and pushed Peewee ahead of him into a small, carpeted private office. Peewee grew tense with resentment as he recognized his father awaiting them within.
"Had there been anyone at the farm?" Markyn asked of Sallet.
"They'd noticed no one."
The question confirmed Peewee's idea that it was most probably Beman who had discovered where he was, and he wondered what more than merely discovering Beman had done.
"Would you mind leaving us alone?" Markyn said to the lawyer.
Sallet went into the next office and closed the door, and Peewee surveyed his father antagonistically. It seemed to him that his father appeared more than usually troubled.
"Sit down."
Peewee drew himself up onto the nearest chair. His father paced up and down in front of him.
"Did you like it on the farm?" Markyn asked abruptly.
Peewee shook his head.
"But you would have stayed there?"
"Yes, sir."
"Why?"
Sallet, Peewee reflected, had undoubtedly told his father of their conversation on the train.
"So she wouldn't find out who I am," he answered.
Markyn was staring queerly down at him. "That's what I understood. You seem to have an appreciation that it's going to be a grief to Mrs. Markyn to learn about you. I don't know how you've come to realize that. I don't know how much more you're capable of understanding. You know a lot of things which you ought not to know, I imagine. The things you ought to know, it's probable, you don't. Have you ever loved anyone?"
"No, sir," Peewee replied indignantly. Love, in his definition of it, was something soft. It connected itself vaguely in his mind with tears, which he considered shameful. He did not give any name to what he felt toward Mrs. Markyn.
"I don't know how to approach you," his father said. "You're as incomprehensible to me as, I suppose, I am to you."
What, Peewee wondered, was his father getting at? He drew up a chair and sat down facing Peewee and took both his small hands. He seemed embarassed and uncertain.
"Son, when you saw your mother before she died, did she tell you her name?"
"No, sir," said Peewee.
"You know it, though?"
"Yes, sir. Helen Lampert." There could be, Peewee felt, no object to be gained by not being open with his father. "She changed her names," he offered.
"I know she changed her names. But Helen Lampert was her real one. Did she—," his father hesitated. "Did she speak as though she had ever changed her name the way women usually change their names—by being married?"
The question was a little deep for Peewee. "No," he decided finally.
"Did she tell you she had not been married?"
"No, sir."
"Did she say anything about marriage at all?"
"No, sir."
She had not been married. Peewee knew that and knew that his father knew it too. Why was his father asking this?
"When she gave you my name, what did she say to you about me?"
Peewee considered. "She said I wasn't to tell people the name. She said she and I were the only ones who knew that it was you."
"She didn't speak as if she had been married to me?"
"No, sir."
The answer seemed to satisfy his father. "Son," he said, "I think we've come, all of us, to what is called a show-down. Do you know what that means?"
"Yes, sir," said Peewee. He knew the phrases of the streets.
"I've had to send for you to ask you to help me." He drew Peewee's hands together, holding them between his own. "Will you listen to me and try to understand?"
Peewee nodded. But he looked at his father with suspicion.
"Your mother had never told me about you; she'd kept that secret from me just as my name had been kept from you. She'd kept it from all others, too. Her own family, her father, did not know. But her father, Ben Lampert, long before had known about her and me. He put together what he'd known before and what he had just learned and made me give him money to keep him from telling Mrs. Markyn. He came several times and each time I gave him money, but not, he thought, enough. I couldn't give him all he asked. So finally I stopped."
Peewee understood about this blackmail. Wasn't it Beman, then, who had made this present trouble? It appeared to have been Peewee's grandfather, Ben Lampert, who had done it.
"Now Lampert has done something else," his father continued. "A shyster lawyer came to me two days ago and told me that, unless I give them more money than I possibly can give, they're going to bring suit in court to prove that you're legitimate. Do you know what that means?"
"No, sir," said Peewee.
"They claim your mother and I were married. They say Lampert found evidence of that among the things left by your mother in her trunk."
Peewee felt inconsequential interest in the trunk. He recalled it, and the strong perfume that came from it, and the disordered, gorgeous, spotted dresses it had contained.
"Do you understand? Whatever they have by which to try to prove that that was so they have made up by themselves. But I shall have to show it is untrue in court, where it all will be public. To give them more money is only to put all this off. Sooner or later I shall have to stop, and they will do it then."
"Tell her," Peewee offered, "that what they say isn't true."
"I'm afraid it will do no good to tell her that. Whatever else they may fail to prove in court, they can at least prove that you are my son."
Peewee reflected. Something that Beman once said to him recurred to him. "If a boy does you dirt," Beman had advised, "hit him in the eye."
"Why don't you do something to Lampert?" he suggested.
"There's nothing effective I can do to Lampert. Son, I have decided that the time has come when I must tell Mrs. Markyn about you. If she must know, I would rather she learned it all from me.
"After I have told her, I want her to see you. It may make it more possible for her to forgive me."
Peewee stared upward at him, startled. So this was why he had been brought here!
"Are you going to tell her now?" he asked uneasily.
"Not to-night. To-morrow will be the time, I think. Sallet will take care of you until I need you. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"You're sure?"
"Yes, sir."
His father gazed down at him a moment as if to assure himself of Peewee's comprehension, then went to the door and called the lawyer. They talked inaudibly together and went out. Sallet came back.
"You'll have to wait here a little while," he said. "Then I'll look after you."
He closed the door on Peewee and the boy sat staring gloomily. He was not directly thinking about what his father had said. He was thinking about Mrs. Markyn. When he saw her again his father would have told her all about him. He did not hope, as his father seemed to hope, that her liking for himself would make her forgive them both. People, he thought, did not forgive other people who had destroyed their happiness. Whatever her feelings toward his father might become, she would have only hate for himself. He remembered how, the last time he had seen her, she had talked long and kindly with him; she had put her cool, slim fingers against his cheek; finally moved by his friendliness, she impulsively kissed him. She would never now do that again. He regretted that he had let them send him to the farm. If he had not done that he might have seen her on those days. He wished that he could see her once more before she hated him.
The day was pleasant and it was three o'clock in the afternoon. On pleasant days he had seen her often between three and four walking upon the esplanade besides the children's bathing beach. Would she walk there to-day? The desire to see her once more before she knew was overwhelming in him.
He got up, shaking excitedly, and examined the lock upon the door. He went to the other door and listened and heard Sallet speaking to a clerk. He sped noiselessly back to the first door, turned the knob of the spring lock and darted out into the corridor. The elevator by which he had ascended with Sallet was in the front. There was, he perceived, a stairway in the rear. He tumbled breathlessly down four flights of stairs into a hallway at one end of which he saw a door that opened on the alley. He rushed out and ran down the alley across Dearborn Street to State and then turned north. The street was crowded; boys were selling papers. He observed with satisfaction the mud which had splashed his Sunday shoes.
When he had reached the river he stopped for several minutes in deep thought, but reconsidered the idea which had come to him. First he would see Mrs. Markyn. When he had done that, it would be time to do the other things he had been thinking of. Had some other boy taken the post upon the street where he had sold his papers? If that was so, he would find great satisfaction in taking summary revenge upon him—provided always that the boy did not prove too big. There was an alley where the boys pitched pennies which he would then revisit, and he would call on the old woman in whose cellar he formerly had slept.
Meanwhile, he had crossed the bridge, and at Chicago Avenue the curved esplanade of the Lake Shore Drive appeared before him. He halted, studying nervously Beman's huge stone house, with its driveway and garages on his left. Beman did not often leave his house or look out of its windows, but one of his many servants might be looking out and recognize Peewee. He retraced his steps to the first cross street, went west to Astor, walked north a block past Beman's house and returned to the drive. There he sat down to wait upon the breakwater.
It was almost certain Mrs. Markyn would take her walk upon such a sunny day.