14. Nearing The Sea

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_ It was Sunday evening. Evil-weather threatened. The broad window of top floor rear looked out upon a lowering sky--everywhere gray and thick: turning black beyond the distant hills. An hour ago the Department wagon had rattled away with the body of Mr. Poddle; and with the cheerfully blasphemous directions, the tramp of feet, the jocular comment, as the box was carried down the narrow stair, the last distraction had departed. The boy's mother was left undisturbed to prepare for the crucial moments in the park.

She was now nervously engaged before her looking-glass. All the tools of her trade lay at hand. A momentous problem confronted her. The child must be won back. He must be convinced of her worth. Therefore she must be beautiful. He thought her pretty. She would be pretty. But how impress him? By what appeal? The pathetic? the tenderly winsome? the gay? She would be gay. Marvellous lies occurred to her--a multitude of them: there was no end to her fertility in deception. And she would excite his jealousy. Upon that feeling she would play. She would blow hot; she would blow cold. She would reduce him to agony--the most poignant agony he had ever suffered. Then she would win him.

To this end, acting according to the enlightenment of her kind, she plied her pencil and puffs; and when, at last, she stood before the mirror, new gowned, beautiful after the conventions of her kind, blind to the ghastliness of it, ignorant of the secret of her strength, she had a triumphant consciousness of power.

"He'll love me," she thought, with a snap of the teeth. "He's got to!"

Jim Millette knocked--and pushed the door ajar, and diffidently intruded his head.

"Hello, Jim!" she cried. "Come in!"

The man would not enter. "I can't, Millie," he faltered. "I just got a minute."

"Oh, come on in!" said she, contemptuously. "Come in and tell me about it. What did you do it for, Jim? You got good and even, didn't you? Eh, Jim?" she taunted. "You got even!"

"It wasn't that, Millie," he protested.

"Oh, wasn't it?" she shrilled.

"No, it wasn't, Millie. I didn't have no grudge against you."

"Then what was it? Come in and tell me!" she laughed. "You dassn't, Jim! You're afraid! come in," she flashed, "and I'll make you lick my shoes! And when you're crawling on the floor, Jim, like a slimy dog, I'll kick you out. Hear me, you pup? What you take my child in there for?" she cried. "Hear me? Aw, you pup!" she snarled. "You're afraid to come in!"

"Don't go on, Millie," he warned her. "Don't you go on like that. Maybe I will come in. And if I do, my girl, it won't be me that'll be lickin' shoes. It might be you!"

"Me!" she scorned. "You ain't got no hold on me no more. Come in and try it!"

The man hesitated.

"Come on!" she taunted.

"I ain't coming in, Millie," he answered. "I didn't come up to come in. I just come up to tell you I was sorry."

She laughed.

"I didn't know you was there, Millie," the man continued. "If I'd knowed you was with the Forty Flirts, I wouldn't have took the boy there. And I come up to tell you so."

Overcome by a sudden and agonizing recollection of the scene, she put her hands to her face.

"And I come up to tell you something else," the acrobat continued, speaking gently. "I tell you, Millie, you better look out. If you ain't careful, you'll lose him for good. He took it hard, Millie. Hard! It broke the little fellow all up. It hurt him--awful!"

She began to walk the floor. In the room the light was failing. It was growing dark--an angry portent--over the roofs of the opposite city.

"Do you want him back?" the man asked.

"Want him back!" she cried.

"Then," said he, his voice soft, grave, "take care!"

"Want him back?" she repeated, beginning, now, by habit, to tear at her nails. "I got to have him back! He's mine, ain't he? Didn't I bear him? Didn't I nurse him? Wasn't it me that--that--made him? He's my kid, I tell you--mine! And I want him back! Oh, I want him so!"

The man entered; but the woman seemed not to know it. He regarded her compassionately.

"That there curate ain't got no right to him," she complained. "He didn't have nothing to do with the boy. It was only me and Dick. What's he sneaking around here for--taking Dick's boy away? The boy's half mine and half Dick's. The curate ain't got no share. And now Dick's dead--and he's all mine! The curate ain't got nothing to do with it. We don't want no curate here. I raised that boy for myself. I didn't do it to give him to no curate. What right's he got coming around here--getting a boy he didn't have no pain to bear or trouble to raise? I tell you I got that boy. He's mine--and I want him!"

"But you give the boy to the curate, Millie!"

"No, I didn't!" she lied. "He took the boy. He come sneaking around here making trouble. I didn't give him no boy. And I want him back," she screamed, in a gust of passion. "I want my boy back!"

A rumble of thunder--failing, far off--came from the sea.

"Millie," the acrobat persisted, "you said you wasn't fit to bring him up."

"I ain't," she snapped. "But I don't care. He's mine--and I'll have him."

The man shrugged his shoulders.

"Jim," the woman said, now quiet, laying her hands on the acrobat's shoulders, looking steadily into his eyes, "that boy's mine. I want him--I want him--back. But I don't want him if he don't love me. And if I can't have him--if I can't have him----"

"Millie!"

"I'll be all alone, Jim--and I'll want----"

He caught her hands. "Me?" he asked. "Will you want me?"

"I don't know."

"Millie," he said, speaking hurriedly, "won't you want me? I've took up with the little Tounson blonde. But she wouldn't care. You know how it goes, Millie. It's only for business. She and me team up. That's all. She wouldn't care. And if you want me--if you want me, Millie, straight and regular, for better or for worse--if you want me that way, Millie----"

"Don't, Jim!"

He let her hands fall--and drew away. "I love you too much," he said, "to butt in now. But if the boy goes back on you, Millie, I'll come--again. You'll need me then--and that's why I'll come. I don't want him to go back on you. I want him to love you still. It's because of the way you love him that I love you--in the way I do. It ain't easy for me to say this. It ain't easy for me to want to give you up. But you're that kind of a woman, Millie. You're that kind--since you got the boy. I want to give you up. You'd be better off with him. You're--you're--holier--when you're with that child. You'd break your poor heart without that boy of yours. And I want you to have him--to love him--to be loved by him. If he comes back, you'll not see me again. I've lived a life that makes me--not fit--to be with no child like him. But so help me God!" the man passionately declared, "I hope he don't turn you down!"

"You're all right, Jim!" she sobbed. "You're all right!"

"I'm going now," he said, quietly. "But I got one more thing to say. Don't fool that boy!"

She looked up.

"Don't fool him," the man repeated. "You'll lose him if you do."

"Not fool him? It's so easy, Jim!"

"Ah, Millie," he said, with a hopeless gesture, "you're blind. You don't know your own child. You're blind--you're just blind!"

"What you mean, Jim?" she demanded.

"You don't know what he loves you for."

"What does he love me for?"

The man was at the door. "Because," he answered, turning, "you're his mother!"

It was not yet nine o'clock. The boy would still be in the church. She must not yet set out for the park. So she lighted the lamp. For a time she posed and grimaced before the mirror. When she was perfect in the part, she sat in the rocking-chair at the broad window, there to rehearse the deceptions it was in her mind to practice. But while she watched the threatening shadows gather, the lights on the river flash into life and go drifting aimlessly away, her mind strayed from this purpose, her willful heart throbbed with sweeter feeling--his childish voice, the depths of his eyes, the grateful weight of his head upon her bosom. Why had he loved her? Because she was his mother! A forgotten perception returned to illuminate her way--a perception, never before reduced to formal terms, that her virtue, her motherly tenderness, were infinitely more appealing to him than the sum of her other attractions.

She started from the chair--her breast heaving with despairing alarm. Again she stood before the mirror--staring with new-opened eyes at the painted face, the gaudy gown: and by these things she was now horrified.

"He won't love me!" she thought. "Not this way. He--he--couldn't!"

It struck the hour.

"Nine o'clock!" she cried. "I got to do something!"

She looked helplessly about the room. Why had he loved her? Because she was his mother! She would be his mother--nothing more: just his mother. She would go to him with that appeal. She would not seek to win him. She would but tell him that she was his mother. She would be his mother--true and tender and holy. He would not resist her plea.... This determined, she acted resolutely and in haste: she stripped off the gown, flung it on the floor, kicked the silken heap under the bed; she washed the paint from her face, modestly laid her hair, robed herself anew. And when again, with these new, seeing eyes, she looked into the glass, she found that she was young, unspoiled--still lovely: a sweetly wistful woman, whom he resembled. Moreover, there came to transform her, suddenly, gloriously, a revelation: that of the spiritual significance of her motherhood.

"Thank God!" she thought, uplifted by this vision. "Oh, thank God! I'm like them other people. I'm fit to bring him up!"

It thundered ominously. _

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