SPRING lay gently and softly over Springham. The town was fresh with green and fragrant grass, and the scent of early flowers filled the air. The season meant the beginning of warm and settled weather—bare-footed time. But Springham, having passed out of the era of dirt sidewalks, had at the same time grown away from bare feet; and Bill Harrison, squirming hot toes within their confines of hot leather, leaned forlornly across a picket gate.
"'Lo, Herbie," he called.
Herbert Quinby, his back propped against the support of a porch pillar, raised one hand to his mouth and went through the motions of swallowing something from a glass.
Bill brightened. "'Nother party?"
Herbert nodded, and Bill pushed open the gate and came up the cinder walk. Whenever the Woman's Improvement Association gathered at Mrs. Quinby's home, there were always lemonade and cake left over. Bill dropped down upon the porch.
"What kind of cake?"
"Almond."
"Last time we had two pieces each. Think we'll get two pieces to-day?"
Herbert rose, leaned across the porch railing and peered through the curtained window. "One piece and a half, anyway," he said, and came back to his place. "Mrs. Busher's inside."
Bill Harrison sighed. A spider hung from a thread at one corner of the porch, and he fished through his pockets, found the stump of a pencil, and began to sketch the dangling insect on the porch floor. "She more than likes almond cake, doesn't she?"
"I don't know why you're always trying to draw bugs," Herbert complained.
A murmur of voices, a low laugh, came from the house.
"Pretty babies," said Mrs. Quinby with mock gravity in her voice, "always make me think of the time when people used to stop me on the street, and look inside the carriage at Herbie and tell me what a pretty baby he was."
A grin spread across Bill Harrison's face. "Herbie," he drawled, "they'd have a hard time proving that on you now."
Herbie shrugged his shoulders against the pillar. At fourteen his face ran mostly to freckles. His hair, thick and clustering, was honestly red, and his neck seemed to have stretched out a little too fast for his body, so that his head looked like a great, flaming knob stuck upon a spindle.
"Can you imagine Herbie as a pretty baby?" Mrs. Quinby said with amusement.
"Ah, let's take a walk," Herbie said sulkily.
It was not that his mother's talk bothered him. He had all of a fourteen-year-old boy's contempt for looks. But the name "Herbie" had begun to rankle. It sometimes sent a shadow to his eyes and a droop to his mouth. More than once, of late, he had found himself picturing his companions addressing him as "Red." That would have had a manly, real-fellow sound. But Herbie. . . . He kicked a pebble from his path and trudged down the walk.
They walked through the warm spring sunshine, turning corners aimlessly, until their wandering steps carried them to Washington Avenue, the main street of the town. A burst of laughter drew their attention to a group of boys clustered halfway up the block. Bill's eyes lighted.
"Something's up," he said with satisfaction, "and we're just in time to see it."
They pushed forward, reached the fringe of the crowd and craned their necks.
A great, tawny man, his beard and head a wild tangle of hair, sat in a chair that was tilted back against the wall of a building. A crutch lay across his lap, and a stump—all that was left of his left leg—stood out stiff and straight.
"How about the time, Peg," one of the boys cried, "that you put the kerosene down Mr. Perriwinkle's well?"
Peg Scudder threw back his head and the thick muscles of his neck shook with his mirth. His rough bursts of merriment, the uncertain qualities of his temper, had more than once been told in Herbie's hearing; and so, though Bill Harrison pressed forward through the gathering, he himself held back.
"Blast me, but that was a lark," Peg cried. "Perriwinkle hopped about like a sparrow. 'You're a rowdy,' he said. 'And, mark me, you'll come to no good end.' 'Go on, you,' I said, 'or I'll drop you down the well, too.' He went tearing around to my house and told my Old Man."
"Did you get a hiding, Peg?"
"Oh, he was a hard one, was my Old Man," Peg answered in accents of admiration. "He lambasted me with the buckle end of a strap. That was the night before he got killed, and he lammed me good. 'That will hold you until I get back in the morning,' he said, but he never came back. Blast me, but that was a joke on the Old Man. And this Perriwinkle—his name was Herbie—stopped me on the street and said, 'Well, I suppose you'll go to the devil now.' Oh, he was a sweet one, this Herbie Perriwinkle. All he needed was a petticoat and ribbons in his hair. Regular little ninny."
Bill Harrison and the others were laughing, but Herbie drew back with a shudder. The brutality of the man's speech chilled his blood. He walked away. "Bill," he called once; but his chum did not hear him. He moved on. Another thought had taken possession of his mind. Herbie! Petticoats! Ribbons! His walk became a dispirited slouch.
A group of girls of his class, coming toward him on the other side of the street surveyed his slow progress and the patent dissatisfaction that sat upon him. Moved by some imp of mischief they began to chant in chorus:
"Herbie, Herbie—o! Herbie, Herbie—o!"
The treble of their united voices galled him. Cried thus aloud in the streets his name sounded unmistakably girlish. He quickened his steps; the shameful sing-song followed him. He ran, timing his steps and making each one a leap, as though this were some new game.
On fire with mortification he at last reached home. The visitors were gone. Evidently Mrs. Busher's appetite had failed her; there was more cake left than he had anticipated.
"Herbie," his mother called from the kitchen, "there's cake and lemonade there for you and Bill Harrison."
Herbie stared gloomily at the pitcher and the platter. His silence, with such a treat at hand, was unusual. Mrs. Quinby came to the doorway.
"Why, Herbie, what is the matter?"
"I hate it."
"You hate what?"
"My name."
"Herbie! What has happened to you? You were named after your uncle, and he was governor. . . ."
"Why wasn't I named after somebody who had a decent name?" he demanded recklessly.
The good humor left Mrs. Quinby's face. "Herbie Quinby, I don't know what in the world has been coming over you of late. You had better attend to the garden until your father comes home. We'll see what he has to say about this."
Gone was the prospect of lemonade and cake. Even while he was taking the gardening tools from the cellar he heard Bill Harrison whistling at the front gate, but gave no sign that the sound reached his ears. Through the hours that were left of the afternoon he hoed among the vegetables, working doggedly, not because the labor held a charm, but because the exercise gave an outlet to his tumult of emotions. The sun went down behind Camel-back Hill. The shadows of the growing crops lengthened toward the east. And then a step sounded behind him, and a longer, broader shadow stood beside his own.
"What's this Mother's been telling me, Herbie?"
Bitterness welled into his voice as he answered and passionately recited his wrongs. Yet even as he spoke he felt that his father would say, "Nonsense, nonsense; there must be no more of this."
There was an interval of silence after he had finished.
"About those girls calling after you . . ." Mr. Quinby began.
The tone caused him to lift his head.
"I wouldn't give it a thought, Bert. That's just girl stuff. A fellow never pays any attention to girls."
"Bert!" The sound of it was sweet. There and then his father became a gorgeous personage, a king among men, and the seeds of hero worship were sown in the boy's soul.
In the days that followed a rich and fine intimacy sprang up between them. He learned things that were new, strange and romantic. His father had once been a baseball pitcher of great skill; there were newspaper clippings, yellow with age, in a scrapbook to proye it. Bert read these clippings time and again, and then took them out to Bill Harrison and to Dolf Muller.
"Your father was some pitcher," Dolf said admiringly, and found a remnant of a cracker in his pocket and ate it.
Bert's heart was filled with a glowing pride. When school reopened in September and he entered the eighth grade, a new world seemed at the same time to open to him. As soon as the study lamp was lighted and his father would open the evening newspaper, he would bring his books to the same table. Together they would sit there, and often the paper would be laid aside so that the man could help him through his problems—mostly problems in arithmetic.
That winter some miracle of transformation worked its spell upon him. Suddenly his shoulders broadened, and he shot up a good two inches and graduated into long trousers. Yet, for the most part, he was unmindful of his growth; nor was he aware that the little town of Springham was spreading out and stretching its limbs. The weekly newspaper was sold by its aged proprietor to younger men, and blossomed as a four-page daily. The trolley line, long promised, at last came through from the big city twenty miles to the west. A power plant lifted a high, sooty smokestack over by the swift rush of the Springham River. The feeble street lamps at the corners gave place to electric lights. The railroad established a junction point and a roundhouse on the Camel-back Hill plateau. A contractor bought a block of ground on Washington Avenue and began to build brick stores.
And then came a time when the stretching growth of the town reached out and touched the boy's own hearthstone. No longer now did his father relax and scan the evening newspaper. The evenings were given over to letter writing, and each day the mail man left letters and packages at the door. Bert felt obscurely that some change was impending. Night after night he went to sleep lulled by the indistinct murmur of his father's and his mother's voices from downstairs; and twice, in the morning, he found the dining-room table littered with papers closely covered with figures. Once he studied one of the sheets. Here and there, all over it, were dollar signs.
"Mother?" he asked, "what's this?"
His mother took the papers and informed him, jestingly, that curiosity had once killed a cat. But he noticed that she put the papers away carefully. Something was afoot, and he was being barred from the secret. He resented it.
That night a problem in algebra baffled him. He appealed to his father for help.
"I'm busy," Mr. Quinby said absently. "You'll have to paddle your own canoe to-night, Bert."
There was no reason for him to be hurt; yet this was the first time he had come for help and had failed to find it. First, secrets from which he was barred, and now—this. A stubborn line formed around his mouth. He went back to his chair, closed his book and pushed it aside. The man, frowning over a letter he was writing, did not observe what the boy had done. Bert went sullenly to bed.
For two days the sullen mood marked him for its own. Then at the breakfast table, he found that his father was to go into business for himself.
The boy sat up straight. "Going to open a store, Dad?"
"Yes. I've leased one of those new Washington Avenue places; I'll open as a men's furnisher. I've sold goods for other people long enough. I'm going to try my hand at selling for myself."
The announcement had an important sound, and the boy forgot the hurt he had been nursing. He had always envied boys whose fathers owned stores. Dolf Muller's father conducted a bakery, and Dolf's crumby pockets were always filled with cakes that he dispensed lavishly. Bill Harrison's father ran a grocery, and Bill never lacked for apples, and raisins, and prunes. Once they had all looked at a raw prune through a magnifying glass, and the glass had revealed walking things hidden from the naked eye. They had eaten prunes that day with the feeling that they were doing a desperate and hazardous deed. He remembered, too, the respect that had gone out to Bill the day he had taken them behind the counter and had let them dip their hands into the brine of the pickle barrel and fish about for the largest pickles. These things had the mark of power and affluence.
And now his own father was to open a store! He gave the news to Bill and to Dolf.
"I wish my father had a clothing store," Dolf said enviously. "Then I would always have new ties, and new shirts, and new suits."
Bill Harrison grinned. "Wouldn't make much difference in you, Dolf. You'd still look like a bursting barrel."
"I don't look like a half-starved chicken," Dolf cried indignantly.
Bill's smile broadened. "Neither do I. I lack the feathers."
Bert experienced a greater sense of the importance of the undertaking. Washington Avenue began to see more of him than it had ever seen before. Flanked by Dolf and Bill he critically inspected the workmanship of the sign-painter who lettered "H. V. Quinby, Men's Outfitter," on the store windows.' He counted the boards the carpenters built into shelves, and saw them fashion the chestnut rods for the clothes hangers. And he saw, too, through a window across the street, the moonish, inscrutable face of Old Man Clud surveying every step of the progress that was made.
"What's he so interested in?" Bert wanted to know.
Bill Harrison glanced at the window. "Who? Old Man Clud? Maybe he thinks your father'll be coming to him for money sometime."
The remark made no impression on Bert; he was absorbed in watching expressmen carry in the glass-topped show cases. In fact, he knew nothing of the man across the street save that people said he slept in his office so that he would save the rent of lodgings and that sometimes, for weeks at a time, he was not seen at all.
He was still watching the expressmen when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dolf and Bill nudge each other and draw away a step. A panting, asthmatic voice spoke at his elbow.
"Hello, boys. I see you're watching the creation of a new enterprise. That is good. Always be interested in business. The more business, the more prosperity. Everybody wants prosperity."
Bert looked around and saw Old Man Clud—it was the only name the town as a whole gave him. He was short and amazingly fat, and his skin had the sick yellow color that one sees on sour cream. His face was a tremendously smooth circle of smooth flesh—no mustache, no sign of a beard, no eyebrows; and though the day was chilly and raw, he was sweating an unhealthy sweat.
"Your father's business, is it not?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
The man wheezed an exclamation of pleasure. "I like to see a lad 'sir' his elders. It's a sign of politeness. Show me a polite lad and I'll show you one who will go far. It is easy seen that your manners have been taken care of. And might I inquire when this store will be opened?"
"In about ten days."
"Business," he panted, "is the life blood of a community. It is good to see it flowing so energetically. No business, no money; no money, no progress. Let me see churches and business. Then you know that everything is all right. Men's souls and men's pocketbooks are being taken care of."
As abruptly as he had begun the conversation he ended it, and waddled across the roadway to the other side of the street. Bert saw him pass into the doorway of a frame building. A few minutes later he appeared at one of the windows. One fat hand reached out and drew down the shade.
"I wonder what he wanted?" Bert asked suspiciously.
"He gives me the creeps," Dolf shivered. "My father says that he's seen him on the coldest winter days and that he's always sweating. I guess he's got a lot of money."
"What business is he in?" Bert demanded. "There's no sign on his window."
"He lends money," Bill answered.
"My father says that people who lend money never need signs," Dolf said wisely. "There's always a lot of people trying to borrow."
Next day stock began to arrive in bewildering array, and Bert forgot Old Man Clud in the excitement of showing the treasure to his friends. They clambered about the store prying into boxes, cases and bales. His father, forever sorting, checking and counting, more than once had to order them out of the way. And then Bill Harrison, stumbling, lurched into a carefully dressed dummy destined for one of the windows and sent it crashing to the floor.
"Bert," his father said sharply, "I'll have to ask you to do your playing in the street."
Bert reddened, and after a moment walked out of the store with Dolf at his heels. Bill, before following them, brushed the dummy with a whisk broom.
"I don't blame your father for getting sore," he told Bert.
"Your father doesn't get sore when we're in his store."
"N—no," Bill admitted honestly; "but we don't go running around knocking things over."
Bert's sensitive nature was not salved. He had been censured before his friends. He went home. At supper that night his father said:
"You'll have to stop fooling around the store, Bert. It doesn't look businesslike."
Fooling! And he had been so proud to display its wonders to Dolf and to Bill. He scowled down at his plate. Later, when his father had gone back to business, his mother tried to soothe him.
"Dad is having unaccustomed worries just now, Bert. You should be more considerate."
"He needn't have any worries about me," the boy said sourly. "I'll keep away. I know when I'm not wanted."
His mother tousled his hair. "Don't be a mule, Bert," she counseled.
Nevertheless, he did not go back; and Mr. Quinby, absorbed in the work, did not seem to miss him. The days passed and finally came the time when the store was to open. Leather souvenirs were to be given away that night, and Bert had promised Dolf and Bill that they should each have one. Early in the evening they came looking for him.
"Going down to Washington Avenue?" Dolf asked.
"No," Bert said shortly. He hoped they would not mention the souvenirs and was relieved when they avoided the subject. Yet, after they were gone, he felt that he had been belittled intheir eyes.
Night came, and he rebelliously choked his natural desire to see the store in the glory of its new lights. Long after he should have been in bed he sat up in his darkened room, waiting. Between 10 and 11 o'clock his father came in.
"How was business?" his mother asked anxiously.
"Not what I expected." His father's voice was tired. "I wonder if I opened this store before the town was ready for it?"
The boy experienced a queer, baffling sense of satisfaction. "That's what he gets for chasing me," he told himself, and went to bed.
He was young, and moody—and he did not understand.