Still Jim

by Morrow, Honore

  Jim looked at the stranger in astonishment, then answered awkwardly, "Can you wait? I've got to referee this fight."

  "You will have to come now," said the man. "Your mother said to come back at once, with me."

  Jim walked into the ring, between the two combatants. "Drop it, fellows. I've got to go home. We'll finish this fight tomorrow. Fatty can tackle me then, too."

  There were several protests but Fatty had had enough. He was glad of the opportunity to dive into the pond. One after the other the boys ran up the springboard until only Jim and the stranger were left. The man walked back into the grove and in a moment Jim, in his knickerbockers and blouse, joined him.

  "I'm glad to see you can obey, as well as boss, me boy," said the man. "Your mother says you don't know that a few days ago she advertised in the N. Y. Sun for a position as housekeeper. I liked the ad and came up to see her. I'm a lawyer in New York, a widower. I like your mother. She's a lady to the center of her. But when she told me she had a boy your age, I felt dubious. She wanted to send for you but I insisted on coming meself. I wanted to see you among boys. Me name is Michael Dennis."

  Jim flushed painfully. "I don't want my mother to work like that. I can support her."

  "I'm glad that you feel that way, me boy. But on the other hand, you're not old enough to support her the way she can support herself and you, too."

  "I'll never let my mother support me!" cried Jim.

  "What can you do to prevent it?" asked Mr. Dennis. "Wouldn't you like to live in New York?"

  Jim hesitated. Dennis put his hand on Jim's shoulder. "I like you, me boy. I never thought to want another child about me house. Come, we'll talk it over with your mother."

  Jim followed into the cottage sitting room, where his mother eyed the two anxiously.

  "I thought something must have happened," she said. "Did you have trouble finding the pond?"

  Mr. Dennis smiled genially. "Not a bit! I was just getting acquainted with your boy. He's quite a lad, Mrs. Manning, and I'm going to tell you I'll be glad to have him in me house. Now I'll just tell you what me house is like and what we'll have to expect of each other."

  After an hour's talk Dennis said: "I will give you fifty dollars a month and board and lodging for the lad."

  Mrs. Manning flushed with relief. Jim, who had not said a word since coming into the house, spoke suddenly in his father's own drawl:

  "I don't want anyone to give me my keep. I'll take care of the furnace and do the work round the house you pay a man to do, and if that isn't enough to pay for keeping me, I'll work for you in your office Saturdays."

  Mr. Dennis looked at the tall boy keenly, then said whimsically, "Well, I thought you'd been smitten dumb."

  "He's very still, Jim is, except when he's fearfully worked up. All the Mannings are that way," said his mother.

  Mr. Dennis nodded. "The house takes lots of care. Your mother will get a maid to help her and I'll let the man go who has been doing janitor service for me. With this arrangement, I'll make your mother's salary $65 a month."

  And so the decision was made.

  It was the last week in September when Jim and his mother left Exham. The day before they left the old town, Jim tramped doggedly up the street toward the old Manning mansion. He had not been there since his father's death.

  When he reached the dooryard he stopped, pulled off his cap and stood looking at the doorway that had welcomed so many Mannings and sped so many more. The boy stood, erect and slender, the wind ruffling his thick dark hair across his dreamer's forehead, his energetic jaw set firmly. Now and again tears blinded his gray eyes, but he blinked them back resolutely.

  Jim must have stood before the door of his old home for half an hour, a silent, lonely young figure at whom the quarry men glanced curiously. When the whistle blew five Jim made an heroic effort and turned and looked at the derrick, again spliced into place. He shuddered but forced himself to look.

  It was after sunset when Jim finally turned away. It was many years before he came to this place again. Yet Exham had made its indelible imprint on the boy. The convictions that had molded his first fourteen years were to mold his whole life. Somehow he felt that his father had been a futile sacrifice to the thing that was destroying New England and that old New England spirit which he had been taught to revere. What the thing was he did not know. And yet, with his boyish lips trembling, he promised the old mansion to make good for his father and for Exham—poor old Exham, with its lost ideals!

  * * *

  CHAPTER III

  THE BROWNSTONE FRONT

  "Coyote, eagle, Indian, I have seen countless generations of them fulfill their destinies and disappear. I wonder when my turn will come."

  Musings of the Elephant.

  Jim and his mother did not feel like strangers when they reached New York. Mrs. Manning knew the city well and Jim, boy-like, was overjoyed at the idea of being in the great town.

  Mr. Dennis' brownstone front was one of the fine old houses on West 23rd street that are fast making way for stores. It was full of red Brussels carpets and walnut furniture of crinkly design. It had crayon enlargements of Mrs. Dennis and the two small Dennises in the parlor and in the guest room and in Mr. Dennis' room. Jim wondered how Mr. Dennis could be so genial when he had lost so much.

  The third floor had two large rooms opening off a big central room, and this floor, comfortably furnished, was for the use of Mrs. Manning and Jim and the maid. Mrs. Manning solved the maid question by sending back to Exham for Annie Peyton. Annie was about forty. Her mother had been housekeeper for Mrs. Manning's mother and Annie was the domestic day worker for the village. Up in Exham English customs still obtained among the old families. Annie was "Peyton" to Mrs. Manning.

  Jim guessed from his own feelings how her position as a servant hurt his mother. She herself never said anything, but Jim noticed that she made no friends. Mr. Dennis treated her with a very real courtesy and basked in her perfect housekeeping.

  Jim entered school at once. In his own way, he was a brilliant student. He had the sort of mind that instinctively grasps fundamental principles, and this faculty, combined with a certain mental obstinacy and independence, made him at once the pride and terror of his teachers. He was a very firm rock on which to depend for exhibition purposes, but whenever he asked questions they were of a searching variety that made his teachers long to box his ears.

  It was rather a pity that all Jim's spare moments when not in school had to be spent in janitor service. He missed the companionship of the boys in the public school which, in America, is an almost indispensable part of a boy's education. In his adult life he must meet and understand men and methods of every nationality. New York public schools are veritable congresses of nations and a boy who plans to go into business gets far more than mere book learning from them. Jim's poverty cut him out of athletics and clubs so that all his inherent New England tendency to mental aloofness would have been vastly increased if it had not been for his summer vacations.

  The first day of his summer vacation, Jim applied for a job. A steel skyscraper was being erected in 42nd street and Jim asked the superintendent of construction for work. The superintendent looked at the lank lad, who now, fifteen, would have appeared eighteen were it not for his smooth, almost childish face.

  "What kind of work, young fella?" asked the Boss.

  "Anything to start with," replied Jim, "until we see what I can do."

  "You're as thin as a lath. Ye can get down there with Derrick No. 2 and get some muscle laid on you. A dollar fifty a day is the best I can do for you. Get along now."

  Jim's brain reeled with joy at the size of his prospective income. He nodded, pulled off his coat, leaving it in the superintendent's office and found his way to Derrick No. 2.

  The structure was a big one, so big that the exigencies of New York traffic were forcing the company to build in sections. A steel frame nearly eighteen stories high was nearly finished at one edge, while blasting for
another portion of the foundation, five stories deep, was going on at the other edge.

  Derrick No. 2 was in the new foundation. Jim's foreman was a Greek. His companion, with whom he guided the rock that the derrick lifted was a Sicilian. The steam drillman whom Jim had to help was a negro. There were ten nationalities on the pay roll of the company. Jim had grown accustomed to feeling in school that New York was not in America, but in a foreign country. Down in the five-story hole in the ground, with the ear-shattering batter of the steam riveters above him, the groaning of the donkey engines, the tear and screech of the steam drills beside him, with the never ending clatter and chatter of tongues that he could not understand about him, Jim often got the sense of suffocation of which his father had complained. He detested foreigners, anyhow. There was in Jim the race vanity of the Anglo-Saxon which is as profound as it is unconscious.

  Now, with his boyish sweat mingling with that of these alien workers on the great new structure, Jim wondered how he was going to stand this, summer after summer, until he had his education. They seemed to him so dirty, so stupid, like so many chattering monkeys. To get to know them, to try to understand them, never occurred to him.

  Jim liked the darky, Hank, better than he did the others. To Hank the others were foreigners as they were to Jim.

  "Don't talk so much. I can't hear ma drill!" yelled Hank in Jim's ear one afternoon when the din was at its height.

  Jim flashed his charming smile. "I talk English, anyhow," he shouted back, "when I do talk."

  "You'se the stillest white man I ever see. I'se callin' you Still Jim in my mind. Pretty quick whites and colored folks can't get no jobs no more in this country. Just Bohunks and Wops and Ginnies. Can you watch the drill one minute while I gits a drink?"

  Jim nodded and glanced up at the red spider web that was dotted clear to the eighteenth floor with black dots of workmen. He looked up at the street edge of the gray pit. Black heads peered over the rail, staring idly at the workmen below. Jim felt half a thrill of pride that he was a part of the great work at which they gazed, half a hot sense of resentment that they stared so stupidly at his discomfort.

  Far above gray stone and red ironwork was the deep blue of the summer sky. Jim wondered if the kids in the old swimming hole missed him. He wished he could lie on his back and talk to Phil Chadwick again. As he stared wistfully upward, a girder on the 18th floor twisted suddenly and swept across a temporary floor, brushing men off like crumbs. Jim saw three men go hurtling and bounding down, down to the street. He could not hear them scream above the din. He felt sick at his stomach and lifted his hand from the drill, expecting the steam to be shut off. But it was not.

  Hank came back, the whites of his eyes showing a little. "Killed three. All Wops," he said. "Morgue gets a man a day outa this place. They just sticks 'em outside the board fence and a policeman sends fer a ambulance. The blood on these here New York buildings sure oughta hoo-doo 'em. There, you Still Jim, you get a drink o' water. You look white. The iron workers quit fer the day. They always does when a man gits killed."

  That evening Jim did an errand to the tobacco shop for Mr. Dennis. On his return to the library with the cigars, Dennis looked at the boy affectionately. Jim interested him. His faithfulness to his mother, his quiet ways, his unboyish life, touched the Irishman.

  "You look a little peaked round the gills, Still Jim. Better cut this work you're doing and come to me office. I can't pay you so much but I'll make a lawyer of you."

  Jim shook his head. "The work is good for me. The gym teacher said I was growing too fast and to stay outdoors all summer."

  "What's the matter with you, then?" insisted Dennis.

  "I saw three men killed just before quitting time," said the boy. Then suddenly his face flushed. "Sometimes I hate it here in New York. Seems as if I can't stand it. They don't care anything about human beings. I can't think of New York as anything but a can full of angle worms, all of them crawling over each other to get to the top."

  "Sit down, me boy," said Dennis. "If little Mike had lived, he'd have been just your age, Still Jim. I don't like to think of you as having so little of a boy's life. Jim, take the summer off and I'll take you to the seashore."

  Jim smiled a little uncertainly. "I can't leave mama, and the money I'll get this summer will buy my clothes for a year and something for me to put in the bank. I'm all right. It's just that since—since you know I saw Dad——" and to his utter shame Jim began to sob. He dropped his head on his arm and Dennis' florid face became more deeply red as he looked at the long thin body and the beautiful brown head shaken by sobs.

  "Good God, Jimmy, don't!" he exclaimed. "Why, you're all shot to pieces, lad. Hold on now, I'll tell you a funny story. No, I won't either. I'll tell you something to take up your mind. Still, do you think your mother would marry me?"

  This had the desired effect. Jim jumped to his feet, forgetting even to wipe the tears from his cheeks.

  "She certainly would not!" he cried. "I wouldn't let her. Has she said she would?"

  "I haven't asked her," replied Mr. Dennis meekly. "I wanted to talk to you about it first. Much as I think of her, Jim, I wouldn't marry her if you objected. You've been through too much for a kid."

  Jim eyed Mr. Dennis intently. The Irishman was a pleasant, intelligent-looking man.

  "I like you now," said the boy, his voice catching from his heavy sobbing, "but I'd hate you if you tried to take my father's place. Anyway, I don't think mama would even listen to you. What makes you want to get married again, Mr. Dennis, after—after that?"

  Jim looked toward the crayon enlargement above the mantel.

  Dennis answered quickly. "Don't think for a minute I'd try to put anyone in her place." He nodded toward the sweet-faced woman who was looking down at them. "And I wouldn't expect to take your father's place. I guess your mother and I both know we gave and got the best in life, once, and it only comes once. Only it's this way, Still Jim, me boy. When people pass middle age and look forward to old age, they see it lonely, desperately lonely, and they want company to help them go through it. I admire and respect your mother and I think as much of you as if you were me own. But you'll be going off soon to make your own way. Then your mother and I could look out for each other. I leave the decision to you, me boy."

  "I can't stand thinking of anybody in my father's place," repeated Jim huskily. "I'm—I'm going out for a walk." And he rushed out of the house and started north toward 42nd street, his mind a blur of protest.

  The same instinct that sends the workman back to look at the shop on his Sunday afternoon stroll, urged Jim up to the new skyscraper. The night watchman was for driving the lank boy away until Jim explained that he worked in the foundation, and was just back to see how it looked at night.

  "If you want to see a grand sight," said the old man, "get you up to the top floor and look out at the city. Take the tile elevator at the back. Tell the man Morrissy sent ye."

  The work in the foundation was going on but not on the steel structure. No one heeded Jim. He reached the 18th floor, where there was a narrow temporary flooring. Jim sat down on a coil of rope. The boy was badly shaken.

  No one, unless for the first time tonight, Mr. Dennis, realized how hard a nerve shock Jim had had in seeing his father killed. He had kept from his mother the horror of the nights that followed the tragedy. She did not know that periodically, even now, he dreamed the August fields and the dying men and the bloody derrick over again. She did not know what utter courage it had taken to join the derrick gang, not for fear for his own safety, but because of the dread association in his own mind.

  At first, the sense of height made Jim quiver. To master this he fixed his mind on the details of structure underneath. Line on line the delicate tracery of steel waiting for its concrete sheathing was silhouetted below him. The night wind rushed past and he braced himself automatically, noting at the same time how the vibration of the steel cobweb was like a marvelous faint tune. The wonder of conception
and workmanship caught the boy's imagination.

  "That's what I'll do," he said aloud. "I'll build steel buildings like this. In college, that's what I'll study, reinforced concrete building. I've got to find a profession that'll give me a bigger chance than poor Dad had, so I can marry young and have lots and gob-lots of kids."

  The wind increased and Jim slid off the coil of rope and lay flat on his back, looking up at the sky. It was full of stars and scudding clouds. Jim missed the sky in New York. He lay staring, sailing with the clouds while his boyish heart glowed with the stars.

  "I'm not in New York," he thought. "I'm—I'm out in the desert country. There isn't any noise. There aren't any people. I'm an engineer and I'm building a bridge across a canyon where no one but the birds have ever crossed before. I'm making a place for people to come after me. I'm discovering new land for them and fixing it so they can come."

  For half an hour Jim lay and dreamed. He often had wondered what he was going to be as a man. He had planned to be many things, from a milkman to an Indian fighter. But since his father's death and indeed for some time before, his mind had taken a bent suggested by Mr. Manning's melancholy. What was the matter with Exham and the Mannings? Why had his father failed? What could he do to make up for the failure? These thoughts had colored the boy's dreams. No one can measure the importance to a child of taking his air castles away from him. Tragedy scars a child permanently. Grown people often forget a heavy loss.

  But tonight, inspired by the wonder of the building and the heavens, Jim's mind slipped its leashings and took its racial bent. Suddenly he was a maker of trails, a builder in the wilderness. He completed the bridge and then sat up with an articulate, "Gee whiz! I know what I'm going to be!"

  It seemed a matter of tremendous importance to the boy. He sat with clenched fists and burning cheeks, sensing for the first time one of the highest types of joy that comes to human beings, that of finding one's predilection in the work by which one earns one's daily bread. The sense of clean-cut aim to his life was like balm and tonic to the boy's nerves. Something deeper than a New York or a New England influence was speaking in Jim now. For the first time, his Anglo-Saxon race, his race of empire builders, was finding its voice in him.