Warning Hill

by John P. Marquand

  XIII

  Mr. Cooper was right when he said that no one would give Tommy work in Michael’s Harbor,—not the butchers, nor the grocers, whose business was growing large, nor Mr. Green, the druggist with his brand-new soda-water fountain, nor any one at all. That was how Tommy became a servant, as his mother chose to call it; his mother was as proud as Sarah Michael in her way.

  The sequel to that Sunday afternoon stood out as another of those moments which have the property of remaining clear in spite of time. The recollection of it sometimes made a lump rise in Tommy’s throat, because he had been such a very little boy. There was the veranda of the Harbor Country Club, and laughing talk and a clattering of dishes. And there he was, in dirty shoes and stockings, plodding up the wide front steps from the carriage block, too innocent to know those steps were not for him. A thin man in black was hastening forward.

  “Get to the caddy house where you belong,” said the thin man. “Don’t you know the rules?”

  “Wait a minute, Charles,” said a voice, and ever afterwards it seemed to Tommy the kindest voice that he ever knew. “Never be too hasty, Charles. Come here, boy. Don’t you remember me?”

  Tommy remembered surely enough. It was Mr. Simeon Danforth, sitting heavily before a round table on which were some teacups and some tall glasses. Mr. Danforth did not smile and Tommy liked him for it.

  “Charles is always officious,” said Mr. Danforth. “Don’t mind Charles. Sit down, boy, and don’t think any one is looking at you. Catch your breath. There isn’t any prison sentence for walking up those steps. Have a cup of tea? Charles, pour out some tea for Mr. Michael.”

  Mr. Danforth did not laugh or even smile, but looked at Tommy soberly, with a weary, urbane countenance.

  “Drink your tea,” said Mr. Danforth, “and you’ll be doing more than I’ve done for a long, long time. You don’t think I’m making fun of you, do you, boy?”

  “No, sir,” Tommy said.

  “That’s right,” said Mr. Danforth. “I don’t want anybody to think I’d do that—and no one else will either, while you’re sitting at this table—understand?”

  Everywhere there were voices and a clattering of dishes in the kitchen. Mr. Danforth’s hair was gray, but his eyebrows were very black, and they moved together as he spoke.

  “Yes, sir,” Tommy said.

  “That’s right,” said Mr. Danforth. “Treat everybody decently. It won’t do any harm. Now, boy, do you want to talk? What brought you here besides your shoes?”

  “I’m looking for a job,” said Tommy. “They won’t give me one downtown.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Danforth, “so that’s the game? Come on this way.”

  Mr. Danforth rose from the table and walked slowly down the steps. They walked down a path past a row of automobiles and then by a carriage shed, where horses were waiting and coachmen lounged smoking in the sun.

  Everywhere there were voices and a clattering of dishes in the kitchen. As early as that the Harbor Club had risen in all its gigantic shape from out of a hard-working farming land to stand as a monument of something, rather beyond one’s grasp. For those were the days when one still wondered what such things were all about; and the idea of play was novel enough to set the vulgar laughing. Tommy could imagine what his Aunt Sarah would have said, if she could have seen that enormous building of decorated shingles surrounded by broad piazzas.

  “Do you know what this place is for?” inquired Mr. Danforth.

  “No, sir,” Tommy said.

  “Well,” said Mr. Danforth, “perhaps the less one knows the better. Come along.”

  Beside the path was a small house, like one of the fishing houses on Welcome River, standing in a grove of yellow pine trees. The door was open and Mr. Danforth walked inside, with Tommy following; and they were in a room not unlike Mr. Street’s carpenter shop, where he sat whittling duck decoys in the winter. In the full light of a window was workbench with a vise and tools, and along the wall were a great many of those sticks that gentlemen carried in bags. A tiny little man in short trousers with a hard red face was looking over a driver, whistling between his teeth.

  “Morning,” said Mr. Danforth. And that was Tommy’s first sight of Mr. Duncan Ross, as good a hand as ever took a rich man’s money. “How are the fairways?”

  “Only moderate,” said Mr. Ross, “and the greens is thick enough with worm casts so a good hoe couldn’t clear them.”

  Mr. Ross wrinkled his face and winked in a way that made you want to laugh, without knowing what there was to laugh about.

  “Always give the members an excuse,” said Mr. Ross, “and then they’ll keep on trying.”

  “Here’s a boy for you, Ross,” Mr. Danforth slapped his hand on Tommy’s shoulder, “to work in the shop; and Ross, if anybody doesn’t like him working here, you let me know.”

  Mr. Ross rubbed his hands on the side of his trousers, and the muscles rippled in his forearms.

  “Very good, sir,” said Mr. Ross.

  “That’s all,” said Mr. Danforth, “but let him loose on Monday afternoon. I want him to come sailing with me. Three o’clock sharp, boy. Walk right through the gate and ask for my house. The man’ll let you through. And now, Michael, keep your tail up. Keep it up and wagging.”

  Without another word, Simeon Danforth turned and strode out the door, and not until he was gone did Tommy remember that he had not thanked him. Curiously enough, through one of those odd complexities of a boy’s mind, Tommy never thanked him in open words, but it may have been as well. He did not know till later that the finest deeds are the ones for which no thanks are given or expected, such as the careless help of tired men for boys in dusty shoes.

  Tommy stood alone in the professional’s shop. Duncan Ross looked at him with narrow eyes.

  “Well, laddie,” said Mr. Ross, “I’m hoping you’re not lazy—because I’ll work it out of you if you stay here.”

  “No, sir,” said Tommy, “I’m not lazy.”

  “That’s it,” said Mr. Ross. “Mind your manners and your ‘sirs,’ understand, when the toffs come to the links.” Mr. Ross screwed his face into a little knot, and winked his eye. “Have you ever read now ‘The Legend of Montrose’?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Tommy. And when he answered a lump rose in his throat. A picture of the room in the Michael house had come before him, with the rain pattering on the windowpanes, a friendly quiet room where even his mother seldom called him, where everything was dingy and yet still bright. “Yes, sir. We’ve got a library at home.”

  “Have you so?” said Mr. Ross. “Well, maybe, I’m not promising, but maybe we’ll agree. Take hold of this, now. No—no—with the thumbs around it so—”

  And for the first time in his life Tommy held a golf club in his hand. For the first time without his knowing it, Tommy had walked with bowed head beneath a yoke of spears. But his mother knew it, with an illogical intuition all her own, when Tommy told her at supper, and her face grew very hard.

  “Tommy,” she said, “hold your spoon right and sit up straight.” But she looked across the table at Aunt Sarah, who was stirring her cup of tea. It was a cloudy look like smoke above a heap of wood before the flames burst through.

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” she said.

  “Hey?” said Aunt Sarah, peering through her spectacles.

  “I said,” and suddenly his mother’s face was like the flames, “I hope you’re satisfied to see your grandnephew turned into a servant.”

  “Hey?” said Aunt Sarah. “Nonsense! Blessed are the meek. Don’t you forget that, Estelle. Ho-ho-ho—why can’t you be meek like me?”

  Those were the days when one’s elders could quote the Scriptures and do them up in cross-stitch suitable for framing.

  It was all a background of words in Tommy’s mind. For Tommy seldom listened. Aunt Sarah and his mother were forever wrangling; words were clashing in that house like broken china, fierce words of his mother’s and Aunt Sarah’s answers, calm and biti
ng, springing from a wrack of shattered hopes. It was just as well that Tommy took it all as part of every day, and that his mind was on something else. Sitting at the table in the lamplight he was thinking of Warning Hill, and the garden, and the waves of Michael’s Harbor danced before his eyes. There was a brightness to it, too different from his life for Tommy to forget, and Marianne had waved to him and smiled.

  “Where are you going, Tom?” said his mother.

  “Downtown,” said Tommy. But he was not. It was the first time he did not tell her the truth.

  Looking back, it was so inevitable that Tommy wondered why he was so surprised at what happened that very morning when he was trudging up the road after looking for work in town. If he had known Marianne better, he would have known it would not be the end, for Marianne was used to getting what she wanted. Ever since she was five years old Marianne knew how to skip gracefully along the pathways of deceit, if they led her where she wished.

  Tommy remembered as he trudged along the road in the morning that there was a sound of hoofs and wheels behind him which made him step aside. A buggy with one of those shining horses drew up beside him to stop. A man in brass buttons was driving it.

  “I say,” he called in a singular voice, “I say, are you Master Michael? ’Ere then, catch ’old of this. It’s from Miss Marianne. And don’t say I delivered it. Don’t say nothing, if you please.”

  The man in buttons gathered up the reins and the whip went—snap. Tommy did not know till later he was Henry, one of the Jellett grooms, and probably Henry never realized that for once in his life he drove a chariot of destiny. Tommy was holding an envelope with his name—Thomas Michael—written across it in uncertain little letters.

  For a long time Tommy kept that note safe beneath the paper in his upper bureau drawer, and later he kept it in his pocket until the paper parted where it folded. Whenever he read it, he could think that Marianne was speaking through the dancing little letters, it was so like Marianne.

  DEAR TOMMY MICHAEL:

  I think you’re very strong and very nice. I believe I love you. I know I don’t love anybody else. I want to play with you because there isn’t anyone else to play with. Come down to that old house where you came in the boat tonight, and I’ll steal some nuts and candy off the table. I can come down after bed time, because Meachey won’t dare stop me, or I’ll tell Mamma about her. I didn’t mean to be mad. Here’s a piece of my hair. Ladies give away their hair in books. Don’t be afraid of Papa. He won’t catch you because he’ll be with Meachey. Perhaps I can steal some ginger ale from the pantry, so please come, if you’re not afraid.

  Yours truly,

  MARIANNE.

  And that was why Tommy came back to Warning Hill, in spite of all he said. Those last words—“if you’re not afraid—” would have been enough to fetch him. Tommy Michael had enough of Alfred Michael’s spirit to take a dare.

  “It sort of looked,” said Tommy Michael once, “as if it was always intended. I guess I was bound to forget.”

  He meant that he forgot in time that he was different from Marianne in the fair republic of adolescence. Everything was possible when they were a boy and girl, whispering in the dark, on evenings when the wind was fair and the sky was clear. What would Grafton Jellett have said if he had heard them.

  “Hello, I knew you’d come,” said Marianne.

  “How’d you know?” said Tommy.

  “Because people always do what I want. That’s why,” said Marianne.

  Now every one can guess what Marianne would want, for even as a little girl it was written in her eyes and lips. Marianne wanted ponies and dresses then, and caramels and little dogs with flapping ears and yelping barks. That providence which guides the destiny of restless little girls was bound to change the dogs to beings more exciting to control, both of fickle and faithful breeds, and Tommy would be one.

  XIV

  The trouble was that it was all too vague to put your finger on it, but Tommy knew that he was different from all those other boys and girls who plodded to the high school when the autumn came. His life was as hard as theirs, exactly as penurious and as devoid of grace. It was his thoughts that made him different, his life of thought like a foreign land, glittering and unattainable. It was to grow always more distant with the years, though he did not know that it would grow more distant then. How could he know any more than any boy has known, that all life was a struggle against reality until acceptance of it came?

  It might have been better if Mr. Danforth had not been kind in that careless way of his which never regarded consequences. He had forgotten, which was not strange, that all things seemed possible in that gay period when boyhood changed to youth.

  There was Mr. Danforth’s sailboat. Tommy never forgot that day altogether, for its very contrast with his life gilded with exaggeration times like that, until the folly and the grandeur of them were scattered into distorted, prismatic lights of memory. The sails of that boat were like the sides of great white barns. Her deck was like a ballroom floor. Sailors in white duck stood by the side, and even a steward in a white starched coat. There was a table in the cockpit and easy wicker chairs.

  “Whisky, James,” said Mr. Danforth, “and tea for Master Michael.”

  Somehow it did not seem strange to Tommy that he should be there. It was Mr. Danforth’s fault, or grace if you wished to call it that, but Simeon Danforth should have known that there was danger in it. Perhaps he had an intuition when that day was nearly over.

  “James,” he said, “call the dogcart to take Master Michael home.” And then he looked at Tommy with a slow weary smile. “And now you’ve seen it all,” he said; “and all this isn’t much. I’m the one who ought to know. It ain’t worth a continental unless you use it right, and no one knows just how.”

  He should have known better than to say that, for everything seemed possible to Tommy Michael then.

  Mary Street was the one who knew. Long afterwards he wondered at the clarity of her vision, for it seemed to him sometimes that the whole story had lain before her always, the story of Warning Hill. She was ever in the background, a silent wide-eyed girl, and it sometimes seemed to him that she had been watching always.

  The Street house was a pleasant place to visit. There was an aura of adventure about it in those days, when anything might happen. There were always guns and rubber boots and fishing tackle in the kitchen, and a dog beneath the table. You could take your coat off in the Street house, and sprawl languidly in the chairs.

  “Make you easy,” Mr. Street would say; “make you easy, Tom.”

  “Yep,” Mal Street would say, “leave your manners at the door.”

  Mary was the only one who did not speak. She would brush her hair from her eyes and smile, and that was all.

  Life was easy at the Street house, even when he grew older, and when Mal grew tall and lank and scornful. It seemed to Tommy that nothing changed there ever, and it startled him the night he found that he and Mary Street were changing. It was when he had turned seventeen, and he remembered it was a November night, rainy with wind squalls from the northeast; often that night came back to him with the rattle of the rain, as the last of those scenes to be etched clearly on his memory, before he was caught in the tide of life, when all recollections became jumbled in struggle and hope and fear.

  He was going to the Street house to pass the night, which was a common incident enough, because he and Mal and Mr. Street were leaving for the duck blinds before daylight. There was a light burning in the kitchen when he arrived, dripping from the rain, and a kettle was simmering on the stove, filling the place with warm moist air that brought out the smells of grease and rubber. Mary Street was sitting at the table, her chin cupped in her hands, and her arms were bare and white.

  “They’ve gone to bed,” said Mary Street. “I’ve been waiting for you, Tom.”

  Now he never knew why it was that the first thought which should come to him was that they were all alone. Though he could
not tell why, he was startled by the thought, half startled, half elated. He could see himself standing there, already growing tall, and there was nothing but that hissing kettle and the rain and wind, and he and Mary Street. It seemed to him that he had never looked at her before, that he had never seen her white throat and her bare white arms. All the room was the same as it had been always, but Mary Street seemed different, filled with a new radiance, mysterious and bright.

  “We’re all alone,” said Mary Street. The same thought must have been upon her. “Every one’s asleep.”

  A shutter went crashing against the wall outside and he heard the rain come down like a million hurrying steps.

  “Yes,” said Tommy, “and it’s an awful stormy night.”

  Then there was a catch in her voice that made him start.

  “Tom,” she said, “did you ever think—you and I—we’ve always been alone?”

  All at once he understood. They both were lonely, as lonely as the wind.

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s so. I guess we’re always wanting things.”

  She nodded, and her eyes were on him wide and deep, as though she could see everything.

  “Yes,” she said, “we don’t want what we’ve got. We want all sorts of other things. Tommy, isn’t it awful always to be alone?”

  “Yes,” Tommy said. “Yes … I guess I know what you mean.”

  Yes, Mary was the one who saw. He always remembered that.

  “Tommy,” she said, “I wish we weren’t—”

  “Weren’t—what?” he said.

  “Weren’t always thinking about other people—other things that aren’t like us. I see it from my window. I always see it now.”

  “See what?” he asked, but even when he asked it, he knew what she saw, and perhaps even then the vision of it lay somewhere behind her dark still eyes.

  “You know,” she said. “It’s Warning Hill.”