It was before this seductive phenomenon that the three paused. The crowd was breathlessly watching the struggles of a very fat, very red-headed woman who chewed gum in exact rhythm with the bucking of the staircase, while she firmly marked time on the top of the stairs.
Sara gave a chuckle and, closely followed by Jim and Pen, he mounted the stile. He was balked by the red-headed woman who towered high above him. Sara reached up and touched her broad back.
"Walk right ahead, madam," he urged. "You're holding us back."
The fat woman obediently took a wild step forward, the stair bucked and she stepped firmly backward and sat down violently on Sara's head. Pen and Jim roared with the crowd. The red-headed woman scrambled to the topmost stair again, then turned and shook her fist in Sara's face.
"Don't you touch me again, you brute!" she screamed. Then she summoned all her energies and took another dignified step upward. Again the stairs bucked. Again the fat woman sat down on Sara's hat. Again the onlookers were overwhelmed with laughter. Pen and Jim feebly supported each other as they rode up and down on the lower step. Sara pushed the woman off his head and again she turned on him.
"There! You made me swallow my gum! And I'll bet you call yourself a gentleman!"
Sara, red-faced but grinning, took a mighty step upward, gripped the woman firmly around the waist and lifted her down the opposite side of the stile. Pen and Jim followed with a mad scramble. For a moment it looked as if the red-headed woman would murder Sara. But as she looked at his young beauty her middle-aged face was etched by a gold-toothed smile.
"Gee, that's more fun than I've had for a year!" she exclaimed and she melted into helpless laughter.
Coney Island is of no value to the fastidious or the lazy. Coney Island belongs to those who have the invaluable gift of knowing how to be foolish, who have felt the soul-purging quality of huge laughter, the revivifying power of play. Lawyers and pickpockets, speculators and laborers, poets and butchers, chorus girls and housewives at Coney Island find one common level in laughter. Every wholesome human being loves the clown.
Spent with laughing, Pen finally suggested lunch, and Jim led the way to an open-air restaurant.
"Let's," he said with an air of inspiration, "eat lunch backward. Begin with coffee and cheese and ice cream and pie and end with clam chowder and pickles."
"Nothing could be more perfect!" exclaimed Pen enthusiastically, and as nothing surprises a Coney Islander waiter, they reversed the menu.
When they could hold no more, they strolled down to the beach and sat in the sand. The crowd was very thick here. Nearly everyone was in a bathing suit. Women lolled, half-naked in the sand, while their escorts, still more scantily clad, sifted sand over them. Unabashed couples embraced each other, rubbing elbows with other embracing pairs. The wind blew the smell of hot, wet humans across Jim's face. He looked at Pen's sweet face, now a little round-eyed and abashed in watching the unashamed crowd. It was the first time that Mrs. Manning had allowed Pen to go to Coney Island without her careful eye.
Jim said, with a slow red coming into his cheeks, "Let's get out of here, Sara."
"Why, we just got here," replied Sara. "Let's get into our suits and have some fun."
"Pen'll not get into a bathing suit with these muckers," answered Jim, slowly.
Pen, who had been thinking the same thing, immediately resented Jim's tone. "Of course I shall," she replied airily. "You can't boss me, Jim."
"That's right, Pen," agreed Sara. "Let old Prunes sit here and swelter. You and I will have a dip."
Pen rose and she and Sara started toward the bath house. Jim took a long stride round in front of the two.
"Sara, do as you please," he drawled. "Penelope will stay here with me."
* * *
CHAPTER V
THE SIGN AND SEAL
"The river forever flows yet she sees no farther than I who am forever silent, forever still."
Musings of the Elephant.
"Jim Manning, you've no right to speak to me that way," said Penelope.
Jim returned her look clearly. "You are to stay here, Pen," he repeated slowly.
"You've got your nerve, Still!" exclaimed Sara. "Pen's as much my company as she is yours. Quit trying to start something. Pen, come along."
Jim did not stir for a moment, then he jerked his head toward the bath house. "Go ahead and get into your suit, Sara. Penelope and I will wait here for you."
Sara had seen Jim in this guise before, on the football field. For a moment he scowled, then he shrugged his shoulders. "You old mule!" he grunted. "All right, Pen. You pacify the brute and I'll be back in a few minutes."
Pen did not yield so gracefully. She sat down in the sand with her back half turned to Jim and he, with his boyish jaw set, eyed her uncomfortably. She did not speak to him until Sara appeared and, with an airy wave of the hand, waded into the water.
"I think Sara looks like a Greek god in a bathing suit," she said. "You'd know he was going to be a duke, just to look at him."
Jim gave a good imitation of one of Uncle Denny's grunts and said: "He isn't a duke—yet—and he's gone in too soon after eating."
"And he's got beautiful manners," Pen continued. "You treat me as if I were a child. He never forgets that I am a lady."
"Oh, slush!" drawled Jim.
Pen turned her back, squarely. Sara did not remain long in the water but came up dripping and shivering to burrow in the hot sand. Pen deliberately sifted sand over him, patting it down as she saw the others do, while she told Sara how wonderfully he swam.
Sara eyed Jim mischievously, while he answered: "Never mind, Pen. When I'm the duke, you shall be the duchess and have a marble swimming pool all of your own. And old Prunes will be over here coaching Anthony Comstock while you and I are doing Europe—in our bathing suits."
Penelope flushed quickly and Sara's halo of romance shone brighter than ever.
"The Duchess Pen," he went on largely. "Not half bad. For my part, I can't see any objection to a girl as pretty as you are wearing a bathing suit anywhere, any time."
Pen looked at Sara adoringly. At sixteen one loves the gods easily. Jim, with averted face, watched the waves dumbly. It had been easy that morning to toss speech back and forth with the boat crowd. But now, as always, when he felt that his need for words was dire, speech deserted him. Suddenly he was realizing that Pen was no longer a little girl and that she admired Saradokis ardently. When the young Greek strolled away to dress, Jim looked at Pen intently. She was so lovely, so rosy, so mischievous, so light and sweet as only sixteen can be.
"Cross patch. Draw the latch! Sit by the sea and grouch," she sang.
Jim flushed. "I'm not grouchy," he protested.
"Oh, yes you are!" cried Pen. "And when Sara comes back, he and I are going up for some ice cream while you stay here and get over it. You can meet us for supper with Aunt Mary and Uncle Denny."
Jim, after the two had left, sat for a long time in the sand. He wished that he could have a look at the old swimming hole up at Exham. He wished that he and Uncle Denny and his mother and Pen were living at Exham. For the first time he felt a vague distrust of Sara. After a time he got into his bathing suit and spent the rest of the afternoon in and out of the water, dressing only in time to meet the rest for supper.
After supper the whole party went to one of the great dancing pavilions. Uncle Denny and Jim's mother danced old-fashioned waltzes, while Sara and Jim took turn about whirling Penelope through two steps and galloping through modern waltz steps. The music and something in Jim's face touched Pen. As he piloted her silently over the great floor in their first waltz, she looked up into his face and said:
"I was horrid, Still Jim. You were so bossy. But you were right; it was no place for me."
Jim's arm tightened round her soft waist. "Pen," he said, "promise me you'll shake Sara and the rest and walk home from the boat with me tonight."
Pen hesitated. She would rather have walked home with Sara,
but she was very contrite over Jim's lonely afternoon, so she promised. Sara left the boat at the Battery to get a subway train home. When the others reached 23rd street, it was not difficult for Jim and Pen to drop well behind Uncle Denny and Jim's mother. Jim drew Pen's arm firmly within his own. This seemed very funny to Penelope and yet she enjoyed it. There had come a subtle but decided change in the boy's attitude toward her that day, that she felt was a clear tribute to her newly acquired young ladyhood. So, while she giggled under her breath, she enjoyed Jim's sedulous assistance at the street crossings immensely.
But try as he would, Jim could say nothing until they reached the old brownstone front. He mounted the steps with her slowly. In the dimly lighted vestibule he took both her hands.
"Look up at me, Pen," he said.
The girl looked up into the tall boy's face. Jim looked down into her sweet eyes. His own grew wistful.
"I wish I were ten years older," he said. Then very firmly: "Penelope, you belong to me. Remember that, always. We belong to each other. When I have made a name for myself I'm coming back to marry you."
"But," protested Pen, "I'd much rather be a duchess."
Jim held her hands firmly. "You belong to me. You shall never marry Saradokis."
Pen's soft gaze deepened as she looked into Jim's eyes. She saw a light there that stirred something within her that never before had been touched. And Jim, his face white, drew Penelope to him and laid his soft young lips to hers, holding her close with boyish arms that trembled at his own audacity, even while they were strong with a man's desire to hold.
Penelope gave a little sobbing breath as Jim released her.
"That's my sign and seal," he said slowly, "that kiss. That's to hold you until I'm a man."
The little look of tragedy that often lurked in Pen's eyes was very plain as she said: "It will be a long time before you have made a name for yourself, Still Jim. Lots of things will happen before then."
"I won't change," said Jim. "The Mannings don't." Then with a great sigh as of having definitely settled his life, he added: "Gee, I'm hungry! Me stomach is touching me backbone. Let's see if there isn't something in the pantry. Come on, Pen."
And Pen, with a sudden flash of dimples, followed him.
It was not long after Pen's birthday that the college year ended and Jim and Sara went to work. Jim had spent his previous vacations with the family at the shore. Saradokis was planning to become a construction engineer, with New York as his field. He wanted Jim to go into partnership with him when they were through college. So he persuaded Jim that it would be a good experience for them to put in their junior vacation at work on one of the mighty skyscrapers always in process of construction.
They got jobs as steam drillmen. Jim liked the work. He liked the mere sense of physical accomplishment in working the drill. He liked to be a part of the creative force that was producing the building. But to his surprise, his old sense of suffocation in being crowded in with the immigrant workman returned to him. There came back, too, some of the old melancholy questioning that he had known as a boy.
He said to Sara one day: "My father used to say that when he was a boy the phrase, 'American workman' stood for the highest efficiency in the world, but that even in his day the phrase had become a joke. How could you expect this rabble to know that there might be such a thing as an American standard of efficiency?"
Sara laughed. "Junior Economics stick out all over you, Still. This bunch does as good work as the American owners will pay for."
Jim was silent for a time, then he said: "I wonder what's the matter with us Americans? How did we come to give our country away to this horde?"
"'Us Americans!'" mimicked Saradokis. "What is an American, anyhow?"
"I'm an American," returned Jim, briefly.
"Sure," answered the Greek, "but so am I and so are most of these fellows. And none of us knows what an American is. I'll admit it was your type founded the government. But you are goners. There is no American type any more. And by and by we'll modify your old Anglo-Saxon institutions so that G. Washington will simply revolve in his grave. We'll add Greek ideas and Yiddish and Wop and Bohunk and Armenian and Nigger and Chinese and Magyar. Gee! The world will forget there ever was one of you big-headed New Englanders in this country. Huh! What is an American? The American type will have a boarding house hash beaten for infinite variety in a generation or so."
The two young men were marching along 23rd street on their way to Jim's house for dinner. At Sara's words Jim stopped and stared at the young Greek. His gray eyes were black.
"So that's the way you feel about us, you foreigners!" exclaimed Jim. "We blazed the trail for you fellows in this country and called you over here to use it. And you've suffocated us and you are glad of it. Good God! Dad and the Indians!"
"What did you call us over here for but to make us do your dirty work for you?" chuckled the Greek. "Serves you right. Piffle! What's an American want to talk about my race and thine for? There's room for all of us!"
Jim did not answer. All that evening he scarcely spoke. That night he dreamed again of his father's broken body and dying face against the golden August fields. All the next day as he sweated on the drill, the futile questionings of his childhood were with him.
At noon, Sara eyed him across the shining surface of a Child's restaurant table. Each noon they devoured a quarter of their day's wages in roast beef and baked apples.
"Are you sore at me, Still?" asked Sara. "I wasn't roasting you, personally, last night."
Jim shook his head. Sara waited for words but Jim ate on in silence.
"Oh, for the love of heaven, come out of it!" groaned Sara. "Tell me what ails you, then you can go back in and shut the door. What has got your goat? You can think we foreigners are all rotters if you want to."
"You don't get the point," replied Jim. "I don't think for a minute that you newcomers haven't a perfect right to come over here. But I have race pride. You haven't. I can't see America turned from North European to South in type without feeling suffocated."
The young Greek stared at Jim fixedly. Then he shook his head. "You are in a bad way, my child. I prescribe a course at vaudeville tonight. I see you can still eat, though."
Jim stuck by his drill until fall. During these three months he pondered more over his father's and Exham's failure than he had for years. Yet he reached no conclusion save the blind one that he was going to fight against his own extinction, that he was going to found a family, that he was going to make the old Manning name once more known and respected.
It was after this summer that the presence of race barrier was felt by Jim and Sara. And somehow, too, after Pen's birthday there was a new restraint between the two boys. Both of them realized then that Pen was more to them than the little playmate they had hitherto considered her. Jim believed that the kiss in the vestibule bound Pen to him irretrievably. But this did not prevent him from feeling uneasy and resentful over Sara's devotion to her.
Nothing could have been more charming to a girl of Pen's age than Sara's way of showing his devotion. Flowers and candy, new books and music he showered on her endlessly, to Mrs. Manning's great disapproval. But Uncle Denny shrugged his shoulders.
"Let it have its course, me dear. 'Tis the surest cure. And Jim must learn to speak for himself, poor boy."
So the pretty game went on. Something in Sara's heritage made him a finished man of the world, while Jim was still an awkward boy. While Jim's affection manifested itself in silent watchfulness, in unobtrusive, secret little acts of thoughtfulness and care, Saradokis was announcing Pen as the Duchess to all their friends and openly singing his joy in her beauty and cleverness.
For even at sixteen Pen showed at times the clear minded thoughtfulness that later in life was to be her chief characteristic. This in spite of the fact that Uncle Denny insisted on her going to a fashionable private school. She read enormously, anything and everything that came to hand. Uncle Denny's books on social and politica
l economy were devoured quite as readily as Jim's novels of adventure or her own Christina Rossetti. And Sara was to her all the heroes of all the tales she read, although after the episode of the Sign and Seal some of the heroes showed a surprising and uncontrollable likeness to Jim. Penelope never forgot the kiss in the vestibule. She never recalled it without a sense of loss that she was too young to understand and with a look in her eyes that did not belong to her youth but to her Celtic temperament.
She looked Jim over keenly when the family came up from the shore and Jim was ready for his senior year. "You never were cut out for city work, Jimmy," she said.
"I'm as fit as I ever was in my life," protested Jim.
"Physically, of course," answered Pen. "But you hate New York and so it's bad for you. Get out into the big country, Still Jim. I was brought up in Colorado, remember. I know the kind of men that belong there. I love that color of necktie on you."
"Have you heard about the Reclamation Service?" asked Jim eagerly. Then he went on: "The government is building big dams to reclaim the arid west. It puts up the money and does the work and then the farmers on the Project—that's what they call the system and the land it waters—have ten years or so to pay back what it cost and then the water system belongs to them. They are going to put up some of the biggest dams in the world. I'd like to try to get into that work. Somehow I like the idea of working for Uncle Sam. James Manning, U.S.R.S.—how does that sound?"
"Too lovely for anything. I'm crazy about it. Sounds like Kipling and the pyramids and Sahara, somehow."
"Will you come out there after I get a start, Pen?" asked Jim.
"Gee! I should say not! About the time you're beginning your second dam, I'll be overwhelming the courts of Europe," Pen giggled. Then she added, serenely: "You don't realize, Still, that I'm going to be a duchess."
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