If you like, take him with you to-night, to the hotel or wherever and think about it and make up your mind and bring him back to-morrow or come yourself and tell me what you have decided.”
“I have decided now,” she said.
“That you leave him here of your own free will. That we give him the home and care and affection which is his right both as a helpless child and as our gra — grand — and that in return for this, you are to make no attempt to see him or communicate with him as long as we live. That is your understanding, your agreement? Think well.”
“Yes,” she said. “I have to do it.”
“But you do not. You can take him with you now; all this to-night can be as if it had never happened. You are his mother; I still believe that any mother is better — better than — How do you have to?”
“Because I don’t know whether I can buy him enough food to eat and enough clothes to keep him warm and medicine if he is sick,” she said. “Do you understand that?”
“I understand that this — your — this other man does not earn as much in his line as Roger did in his. But you tell me Roger did not always earn enough for the four of you: nevertheless you never thought while Roger was alive of leaving the boy with us. And now, with one less mouth to feed, you try to tell me that you—”
“I’ll tell you, if you will listen a minute,” she said. “I’m going to have another child.”
Now he did not speak at all; his unfinished sentence seemed to hang between them. They stood face to face but they could not see one another: just the two vague shapes with the snow falling between them and upon them, though since her back was to the street lamp she could see him the better of the two. After a while he said quietly:
“I see. Yes. And you know that this other child is — is not—”
“Not Roger’s. Yes. Roger and I were — But no matter. I know, this time. Roger and I both know. So we will need money and that’s what Roger was trying to do in that meet. The ship he won a prize with the first day was too slow, obsolete.
But that was all we could get and he outflew them, beat them on the pylons, by turning the pylons closer than the others dared for that little money. Then Saturday he had a chance to fly a ship that was dangerous, but he had a chance to win two thousand dollars in the race.
That would have fixed us up. But the ship came to pieces in the air. Maybe I could have stopped him. I don’t know. But maybe I could have. But I didn’t. I didn’t try, anyhow. So now we didn’t get that money, and we left most of the first day’s prize to send his body here when they get it out of the lake.”
“Ah,” Dr. Shumann said. “I see. Yes. So you are giving us the chance to — the opportunity to—” Suddenly he cried:
“If I just knew that he is Roger’s! If I just knew! Can’t you tell me? Can’t you give me some sign, some little sign? Any little sign?”
She didn’t move. The light came through the snow, across her shoulder, and she could see him a little — a small thin man with untidy, thin, iron-grey hair and the snow whispering in it, standing with his face turned aside and his hand not before it exactly but held palm out between his face and hers. After a while she said:
“Maybe you would rather take a little time to think about it.
To decide.” She could not see his face now: only the lifted hand; she seemed to be speaking to the hand: “Suppose I wait at the hotel until to-morrow, so—” The hand moved, a faint motion from the wrist as though it were trying to push her voice away.
But she repeated, once more, as though for a record: “You mean you don’t want me to wait?” But only the hand moved again, replied; she turned quietly and went down the steps, feeling for each step beneath the snow, and went on down the walk, vanishing into the drowsing pantomime of the snow, not fast. She did not look back. Dr. Shumann did not watch her.
He heard the engine of the car start, but he was already turning, entering the house, fumbling at the door for a moment before he found the knob and entered, his hair and shoulders (he was in his shirt-sleeves) powdered with snow. He went on down the hall; his wife, sitting beside the bed in the darkened room where the boy was asleep, heard him blunder against something in the hall and then saw him come into the door, framed against the lighted hall, holding to the door frame, the light glinting in the melting snow in his untidy hair.
“If we just had a sign,” he said. He entered, stumbling again. She rose and approached him, but he pushed her aside, entering. “Let me be,” he said.
“Shhhhhh,” she said. “Don’t wake him. You come on and eat your supper.”
“Let me alone,” he said, pushing with his hand at the empty air now since she stood back, watching him approach the bed, fumbling at the foot-board. But his voice was quiet enough. “Go out,” he said. “Leave me be. Go away and leave me be.”
“You come on and eat your supper and lay down.”
“Go on. I’m all right, I tell you.” She obeyed; he stood holding to the bed’s foot-board and heard her feet move slowly up the hall and cease. Then he moved, fumbling until he found the light-cord, the bulb, and turned it on.
The little boy stirred, turning his face from the light. The garment in which he slept was a man’s shirt, an old-fashioned garment with a once-glazed bosom, soft now from many washings, pinned about his throat with a gold brooch and with the sleeves cut recently off at his wrists.
On the pillow beside him the toy aeroplane rested. Suddenly Dr. Shumann stooped and took the boy by the shoulder and began to shake him. The toy aeroplane slid from the pillow; with his other hand Dr. Shumann flipped it to the floor, still shaking the little boy. “Roger,” he said, “wake up. Wake up, Roger.”
The boy waked; without moving he blinked up at the man’s face bending over him.
“Laverne,” he said. “Jack. Where’s Laverne? Where’m I at?”
“Laverne’s gone,” Dr. Shumann said, still shaking the boy as though he had forgot to tell his muscles to desist. “You’re at home, but Laverne is gone. Gone, I tell you. Are you going to cry? Hey?” The boy blinked up at him, then he turned and put out his hand towards the pillow beside him.
“Where’s my new job?” he said. “Where’s my ship?”
“Your ship, hey?” Dr. Shumann said. “Your ship, hey?” He stooped and caught up the toy and held it up, his face twisted into a grimace of gnome-like rage, and whirled and hurled the toy at the wall and, while the boy watched him, ran to it and began to stamp upon it with blind maniacal fury.
The little boy made one sharp sound: then, silent, raised on one elbow, his eyes a little wide as though with curious interest alone, he watched the shabby wild-haired old man jumping up and down upon the shapeless trivial mass of blue-and-yellow tin in maniacal ludicrousness.
Then the little boy saw him pause, stoop, take up the ruined toy and apparently begin to try to tear it to pieces with his hands. His wife, sitting beside the living-room stove, heard his feet too through the flimsy walls, feeling the floor shake too, then she heard him approaching up the hall, fast now.
She was small — a faded woman with faded eyes and a quiet faded face sitting in the stuffy room containing a worn divan and fumed oak chairs and a fumed oak revolving bookcase racked neatly with battered medical books from whose bindings the gilt-embossed titles had long since vanished, and a table littered with medical magazines on which lay at the moment a thick cap with ear-muffs, a pair of mittens and a small scuffed black bag.
She did not move: she was sitting there watching the door when Dr. Shumann came in, holding one hand out before him; she did not stir even then: she just looked quietly at the mass of money. “It was in that aeroplane!” he said. “He even had to hide his money from her!”
“No,” the wife said. “She hid it from him.”
“No!” he shouted. “He hid it from her. For the boy. Do you think a woman would ever hide money or anything else and then forget where she put it? And where would she get a hundred and seventy-five dollars, anyway?”
“Yes,” the wife said, the faded eyes filled with immeasurable and implacable unforgiving; “where would she get a hundred and seventy-five dollars that she would have to hide from both of them in a child’s toy?” He looked at her for a long moment.
“Ah,” he said. He said it quietly: “Oh. Yes. I see.” Then he cried, “But no matter! It don’t
