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The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, a novel by Sinclair Lewis |
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Chapter 14 |
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_ CHAPTER XIV Sometimes they were feted 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. It is earnestly recommended to all uncomfortable or dissatisfied men over sixty that they take their wives and their mouth-organs and go tramping in winter, whether they be bank presidents or shoe-clerks or writers of fiction or just plain honest men. Though doubtless some of them may have difficulty in getting their wives to go. * * * * * It was early March, a snowy, blustery March, and the Applebys were plodding through West Virginia. No longer were they the mysterious "Smiths." Father was rather proud, now, of being Appleby, the pedestrian. Mother looked stolidly content as she trudged at his side, ruddy and placid and accustomed to being wept over by every farm-wife. At an early dusk, with a storm menacing, with the air uneasy and a wind melancholy in the trees, they struck off by a forest road which would, they hoped, prove a short cut to the town of Weatherford. They came to cross-paths, and took the more trodden way, which betrayed them and soon dwindled to a narrow rut which they could scarcely follow in the twilight. Father was frightened. They would have to camp in the woods--and a blizzard was coming. He saw a light ahead, a shifting, evasive light. "There's a farm-house or something," he declared, cheerily. "We'll just nach'ly make 'em give us shelter. Going to storm too bad to do much work for 'em, and I bet it's some cranky old shellback farmer, living 'way out here like this. Well, we'll teach the old codger to like music, and this time I _will_ play my mouth-organ. Ain't you glad we're young folks that like music and dancing--" "How you run on!" Mother said, trustingly. From the bleakness ahead came a cracked but lusty voice singing "Hello, 'Frisco!" "Man singing! Jolly! That's a good omen," chuckled Father. "All the folks that are peculiar--like we are--love to sing." "Yes, and talk!" However much she enjoyed Father's chatter, Mother felt that she owed it to her conscience--which she kept as neat and well dusted, now that they were vagrants, as she had in a New York flat--to reprove him occasionally, for his own good. "Say, this is exciting. That's a bonfire ahead," Father whispered. They slowed their pace to a stealthy walk. Behind them and beside them was chilly darkness lurking in caverns among black, bare tree-trunks. Before them they could see a nebulous glow and hear the monotonous voice singing the same words over and over. Mother shrieked. They stopped. A vast, lumbering bulk of a man plunged out from the woods, hesitated, stooped, brandished a club. "Tut, tut! No need to be excited, mister. We're just two old folks looking for shelter for the night," wavered Father, with spurious coolness. "Huh?" growled a thick, greasy voice. "Where d'yuh belong?" "Everywhere. We're tramping to San Francisco." As he said it Father stood uneasy, looking into the penetrating eye of an electric torch which the man had flashed on him. The torch blotted out the man who held it, and turned everything--the night, the woods, the storm mutters--into just that one hypnotizing ball of fire suspended in the darkness. "Well, well," gasped the unknown, "a moll, swelp me! Welcome to our roost, 'bo! You hit it right. This is Hoboes' Home. There's nine 'boes of us got a shack up ahead. Welcome, ma'am. What's your line? Con game or just busted?" "I'm sure I don't know what you mean, young man," snapped Mother. "Well, if you two are like me, nothing but just honest workmen, you better try and make 'em think you're working some game--tell 'em you're the Queen of the Thimble-riggers or some dern thing like that. Come on, now. Been gathering wood; got enough. You can follow me. The bunch ain't so very criminal--not for hoboes they ain't." The large mysterious man started down the path toward the glow, and Father and Mother followed him uncomfortably. "It's a den of vice he's taking us into," groaned Father. "And if we go back they'll pursue us. Maybe we better--" "I don't believe a con game is a nice thing, whatever it is," said Mother. "It sounds real wicked. I never heard of thimble-rigging. How do you rig a thimble?" "I don't know, but I think we better go back." They stopped. The large man turned on them and growled, "Hustle up." Obediently the Innocents trailed after his dark, shaggy back that, in his tattered overcoat, seemed as formidable as it was big. The glow grew more intense ahead of them. They came into a clearing where, round a fire beside a rude shanty, sat several men, one of whom was still droning "Hello, 'Frisco!" "Visitors!" shouted the guide. The group sprang up, startled, threatening--shabby, evil-looking men. Father stood palsied as grim, unshaven faces lowered at him, as a sinister man with a hooked nose stalked forward, his fist doubled. But Mother left his side, darted past the hook-nosed man, and snapped: "That's no way to peel potatoes, young man. You're losing all the best part, next to the skin. Here, give me that. I'll show you. Waste and carelessness--" While Father and the group of circled hoboes stared, Mother firmly took a huge jack-knife away from a slight, red-headed man who was peeling potatoes and chucking them into a pot of stew that was boiling on the fire. "Well--I'll--be--darned!" said every one, almost in chorus. "Who are you?" the hook-nosed man demanded of Father. But his voice sounded puzzled and he gazed incredulously at Mother as she cozily peeled potatoes, her delicate cheeks and placid eye revealed in the firelight. She was already as sturdily industrious and matter-of-fact as though she were back in the tea-room. "I'm Appleby, the pedestrian," said Father. "Wife and I went-- Say, ain't she the nicest-looking woman in that firelight! Great woman, let me tell you. We went broke in New York and we're tramping to 'Frisco. Can you take us in for the night? I guess we're all fellow-hoboes." "Sure will," said the hook-nosed man. "Pleased to have you come, fellow-bum. My name's Crook McKusick. I'm kind of camp boss. The boys call me 'Crook' because I'm so honest. You can see that yourself." "Oh yes," said Father, quite innocently. "The lad that the madam dispossessed is Reddy, and this fish-faced duck here is the K. C. Kid. But I guess the most important guy in the gang is Mr. Mulligan, the stew. If your missus wants to elect herself cook to-night, and make the mulligan taste human, she can be the boss." "Bring me the salt and don't talk so much. You'll have the stew spoiled in about one minute," Mother said, severely, to Crook McKusick, and that mighty leader meekly said, "Yes, ma'am," and trotted to a box on the far side of the fire. The rest of the band--eight practical romanticists, each of whom was in some ways tougher than the others--looked rather sullenly at Mother's restraining presence, but when the mulligan was served they volunteered awkward compliments. Veal and chicken and sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes and carrots and corn were in the stew, and it was very hot, and there was powerful coffee with condensed milk to accompany it. Father shook his head and tried to make himself believe that he really was where he was--in a rim of bare woods reddened with firelight, surrounding a little stumpy clearing, on one side of which was a shack covered with tar-paper fastened with laths. The fire hid the storm behind its warm curtain. The ruffians about the fire seemed to be customers in a new "T Room" as Mother fussed over them and kept their plates filled. Gradually the hoboes thawed out and told the Applebys that they had permission from the owner of the land to occupy this winter refuge, but that they liberally "swiped" their supplies from the whole countryside. Mother exclaimed: "You poor boys, I don't suppose you know any better. Father, I think we'll stay here for a few days, and I'll mend up the boys' clothes and teach them not to steal.... You boys--why, here you are great big grown-up men, and you can jus' as well go out every day and work enough to get your supplies. No need to be leading an immoral life jus' because you're tramps. I don't see but what being tramps is real interesting and healthy, if you jus' go about it in a nice moral way. Now you with the red hair, come here and wipe the dishes while I wash them. I swear to goodness I don't believe these horrid tin plates have been washed since you got them." As Mother's bland determined oration ended, Crook McKusick, the hook-nosed leader, glanced at her with a resigned shrug and growled: "All right, ma'am. Anything for a change, as the fellow said to the ragged shirt. We'll start a Y. M. C. A. I suppose you'll be having us take baths next." The youngster introduced as the K. C. Kid piped up, truculently: "Say, where do you get this moral stuff? This ain't a Sunday-school picnic; it's a hoboes' camp." Crook McKusick vaulted up with startling quickness, seized the K. C. Kid by the neck, wrenched his face around, and demanded: "Can that stuff, Kid. If you don't like the new stunt you can beat it. This here lady has got more nerve than ten transcontinental bums put together--woman, lady like her, out battering for eats and pounding the roads! She's the new boss, see? But old Uncle Crook is here with his mits, too, see?" The Kid winced as Crook's nails gouged his neck, and whimpered: "All right, Crook. Gee! you don't need to get so sore about it." Unconscious that there had been a crisis, Mother struck in, "Step lively now, boys, and we'll clean the dishes while the water's hot." With the incredulous gentry of leisure obeying her commands, Mother scoured the dishes, picked up refuse, then penetrated the sleeping-shack and was appalled by the filth on the floor and by the gunny-sacking mattresses thrown in the crude wooden bunks. "Now we'll tidy this up," she said, "and maybe I can fix up a corner for Mr. Appleby and me--sort of partition it off like." The usual evening meditations and geographical discussions of the monastery of hoboes had been interrupted by collecting garbage and by a quite useless cleaning of dishes that would only get dirty again. They were recuperating, returning to their spiritual plane of perfect peace, in picturesque attitudes by the fire. They scowled now. Again the K. C. Kid raised his voice: "Aw, let the bunk-house alone! What d'yuh think this is? A female cemetery?" Crook McKusick glared, but Reddy joined the rebellion with: "I'm through. I ain't no Chink laundryman." The bunch turned their heads away from Mother, and pretended to ignore her--and to ignore Crook's swaying shoulders and clenching fists. In low but most impolite-sounding voices they began to curse the surprised and unhappy Mother. Father ranged up beside her, protectingly. He was sure there was going to be a fight, and he determined to do for some one, anyway. He was trapped, desperate. Crook McKusick stood with them, too, but his glance wavered from them to the group at the fire and back again, and he was clearing his throat to speak when-- "Hands up!" came a voice from the shadows beyond the fire. _ |
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