Basil King

“ If in the Grüne Gewölbe you were told you could take anything you pleased you would have some of Tom Coburn's sense of enchantment as he stood by the book counter, waiting for the sign. He could see his mother dimly. More dimly still he could follow the movements of the shop-woman eager for a sale. Sample after sample, the wallpapers were unrolled, and hung on an easel where their flowers lighted the obscurity. Even at a distance he could do justice to their beauty, but more captivating than their glories were the wonders at his hand. ”

“ With Honey his need for affection had always been unfed, and for reasons he could not fathom. Maisie had made the give and take of life easy, natural. She had her limitations, her crude, and sometimes her cruel, insistences; but she liked him. He loved her. He was ready to say it now, because of the blank her loss had hollowed in his life. For the unformed, growing hot-blooded human thing to have nothing on which to spend itself is anguish. Sitting down at his deal table, he wrote to her out of a heart fuller and more passionate than poor Maisie could ever have understood. ”

“ A well-behaved Tom Whitelaw, living with his next of kin, and attending school in Boston according to the law, would have the best chance of going unmolested.
They found a lodging, cheap, humble, but sufficient, on that northern slope of Beacon Hill which within living memory has more than once changed hands with the silent advance and recession of a tide coming in and going out. There are still old people who can remember when some of the worthiest of the sons of the Puritans had their windows, in these steep and narrow streets, brightened by the rising or the setting sun. ”

“ For the early nineteenth century its houses were spacious; for the early twentieth they are a little narrow, a little steep, a little lacking in imaginative outlet. But to Tom Whitelaw, with memories that went back to the tenements of New York, to whom the homes of the Tollivants and the Quidmores had meant reasonable comfort, who found the sharing of one room with George Honeybun endurable, these walls with their red paper, these stairs with their red carpet, this lofty gloom, this sense of wealth, were all that he dreamed of as palatial. ”

“ He emerged from that blank into consciousness sitting on a high chair in a kitchen, beating on the table with a spoon, and asking the question: "Mudda, id my name Gracie, or id it Tom?" The memory was both vague and vivid. It was vague because it came out from nowhere and vanished into nowhere. It was vivid because it linked up with that bewilderment as to his identity which haunted his early childhood. The discovery that he was a little boy forced on a woman craving for a little girl was the one with which he first became aware of himself as a living entity. ”

“ I'm crazy about you, Hildred, more than any fellow ever was before."
"And that's the way I feel about you, Tom. I don't care a bit about the things dad and mother think so important. You're you; you're not your father or your mother, whoever they may have been. I shouldn't love you any the better if you became the son of Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw. It would only make it easier."
It was a windy afternoon in April, with the trees in new leaf. All along the Fenway the bridal-veil made cascades of whiteness whiter than the hawthorns. Pansies, tulips, and forget-me-nots brightened all the foot-paths. ”

“ Long usage had enabled Tom to translate these sentiments into terms of eagerness. Guy really wanted him. He was Guy's haven of refuge as truly as when they had been growing boys. Every few weeks Guy turned from his "bunch of sports," or his "bunch of sports" left him in the lurch, so that he came back like a homing pigeon to its roost. Tom was fond of him, was sorry for him, bore with him. Moreover, beyond these tactless invitations there was Hildred.
They fell to talking of Tad Whitelaw. Guy swung round to the piano, beating out a few bars of throbbing, deep-seated grief. ”

“ All the longing for love of a fellow on the edge of twenty, but for him made shamefaced by his fat, found voice in that joyousness.
Tom had not supposed that in the whole round of the universe there was such expression for his nameless ecstasies. It was not Guy whom he heard, nor [Pg 374] the piano; it was the morning stars singing together; it was the sons of God shouting for joy; it was all the larks and all the thrushes and all the nightingales that in all the ages had ever trilled to the sun and moon. ”

“ Flowered paper on the walls, flowered hangings at the windows, flowered cretonnes on thickly upholstered armchairs, flowered silk on the duvet, garlands of flowers on the headboard and footboard of the virginal white bedstead, made the piggy eyes and piggy cheeks, bolstered up by pillows of which some were trimmed with lace, the more funnily grotesque. Tom Whitelaw saw neither the fun nor the grotesqueness. All he could take in was the fact that beauty could gild the lily of this luxury. He knew nothing of beauty in his own denuded life. ”

“ Every tree was as a tree of glass, sparkling in the sun. A deep blue sky, a keen dry wind, a little horse which enjoyed the outing as briskly as Maisie herself, made the two hours vibrant with the ecstasy of cold. All Tom's nerves were taut with the pleasure of the motion, of the air, of the skill, acquired chiefly at Bere, with which he managed the spirited young nag. ”

“ Like the survivors of Noah's deluge clinging to the top of a rock, they to whom the Boston of tradition was bequeathed are driven back on Beacon Hill as a final refuge from the billows rising round them. A high-bred, cultivated, sympathetic people, they have so given away their heritage as to be but a negligible factor in the State, in the country, of which their fathers and grandfathers may be said once to have kept the conscience.
But to Tom Whitelaw Louisburg Square meant only the dignified fronts and portals behind which lived the rich people who had no point of contact with himself. ”

“ As Honey stood looking down at him there was a light in his blue-gray eye like the striking of a match. Tom knew that the same thought was in both their minds. Why should a woman have uttered such a warning if she had not been afraid of a suspicion? A flush that not only reddened his tanned cheeks, but mounted to the roots of his bushy, horizontal eyebrows, made him angry with himself. ”

“ As Paul the Apostle, he could be all things to all men, if by any means he might help some. If Henry Whitelaw needed a son, he could be a son to him. The tie of blood was in no small measure a matter of indifference. His impulse was like Honey's "next o' kin." He remembered, as he had learned in school, that kin and kind were words with a common origin. Whitelaw's truest kinship with himself was in his kindness. His kinship with Whitelaw could as truly be in his devotion. Devotion was what he could offer most spontaneously. ”

“ Christmas was an exciting time, even to Tom Coburn. Perhaps it was more exciting to him than to other boys, since he had so much to do with shops. As long ago as the middle of November he had noted the first stirrings of new energy. After that he had watched the degrees through which they had ripened to a splendor in which toys, books, skis, skates, sleds, and all the paraphernalia of young joyousness, made a bright thing of the world. ”

“ It was the future!—Hildred!—happiness!—honor!—the big life!—the conquest of the world! He could have them all by sitting still, by saying nothing, by letting it be implied that he renounced his loyalties, by being passive in the hand of this goodwill. He would be a fool, he told himself, not to yield to it. Everyone in his senses would consider him a fool. The father of the Whitelaw baby believed that he had found his child. Why not let him believe it? How did he, Tom Whitelaw, know that he wasn't his child? ”

“ To a sturdy American like Tom, and a sturdy Englishman like Honey, these whispered prophecies and plans were no more than the twitter of sparrows going to roost. But now that the boy was working toward man's estate, and had always, within his recollection, been treated as an inferior, he found himself wondering on what principle the treatment had been based. He would listen more attentively when the Jew tailor next door to Mrs. Danker began again, as he had so often, to set forth his arguments in favor of dragging the upper classes down. He would listen when Honey cursed the lor of proputty. ”

“ In walking to the Latin School from Grove Street he was in the habit of going through Louisburg Square. If you know Boston you know Louisburg Square as that quaint red-brick rectangle, like many in the more Georgian parts of London, which commemorates the gallant dash of the New England colonists on the French fortress of Louisburg in Cape Breton. It is the heart of that conservative old Boston, which is now shrinking in size and importance before the onset of the foreigner till it has become like a small beleaguered citadel. ”

“ Guy had rushed into his flowered room from whatever errand had taken him away. "If I have been tenderly brought up, I'm as tough to-day as any mucker down where Tom lives."
"The dear boy!"
She smiled at Tom, as at one who like herself understood this extravagance, moving away with the stately lilt that made her skirts flounce up and down.
"It's Hildred that's sicking the old lady on to her little song and dance in your favor," Guy declared, when they had the room to themselves again. "Hildred likes you. Always has. She's democratic, too, just like me. ”

“ The dining room, on the north side of the house, was vast, sunless, and somber. Tom was vaguely aware of the gleam of rich pieces of silver, of the carving of high-backed chairs as majestic as thrones. One of these thrones Dadd drew out for Mrs. White [Pg 447] law; a footman drew out a second for Lily; another footman a third for himself.
"Sit there, will you?" Mrs. Whitelaw said, in her offhand, breathless way, as if speaking caused her pain. "This room is chilly." ”

“ October found him a freshman. The new life was beginning.
He had slept his first night in his bedroom in Gore Hall, where his quarters had been appointed. He had met the three fellow-freshmen with whom he was to share a sitting room. The sitting room was on the ground floor in a corner, looking out on the Embankment and the Charles. Never having had, since he left the Quidmores, a place in which to work better than the narrow squalid room at the end of a narrow squalid hall, his joy in this new decency of living was naïve to the point of childishness. ”

“ Before the sheer weight of Tom's body he yielded an inch or two, but not more. Freeing his left hand, as he bent backward, he dealt Tom a bruising blow on the temple. Tom disregarded it, pinning Tad's left arm as he had already pinned the right. His object now was to get the boy down, to force him to his knees. It was a contest of brutal strength. When it came to brutal strength the advantage was with the bigger frame, the muscles toughened by work. The fight was silent now, nearly motionless. Slowly, slowly, as iron gives way to the man with the force to bend it, Tad was coming down. ”

“ Tom ran now to Westmorley Court, where he knocked at Tad's door. To a growling invitation he went in. The room was a cloud of tobacco smoke, through which the shapes of half a dozen fellows loomed dimly in the deepening winter twilight. Tad tilted back in the revolving chair before the belittered desk which held the center of the room. His coat was off, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his feet on the edge of the desk. A cigar traveled back and forth from corner to corner of the handsome, disdainful mouth. ”

“ She might have been tired. Pushing a baby carriage in a park is always futile work, with futile starts and stops and turnings in this direction or in that. If she stood to reconnoiter or to make her plans there was no power in the land to interfere with her.
Her further methods were simple. Behind the bench on which Miss Nash and Miss Messenger were by this time entering on an orgy of romantic confidence there rose a gentle eminence. To the top of this hill the strange woman made her way. She made it with precautions, sauntering, dawdling, simulating all the movements of the perfect nurse. ”

“ Besides, we knew, of course, that some of the young people helping us at the inn-club were studying in colleges, and that they didn't mean to stay in those positions permanently." She grew arch. "But I'm not democratic, Mr. Whitelaw. Guy knows I'm not. It's his way of teasing me. He's perfectly aware that I consider democracy a failure. There never was a greater fallacy than that all men were born free and equal. As to freedom I'm indifferent; but I've never pretended that any Tom, Dick, or Harry was my equal, and I never shall." ”

“ No epic has yet been written on the woes of the young man trying, on twenty-five dollars a week, let us say, to play up to the American girl's taste for spending money. His self-denials, his sordid shifts, his mortifications, his sense at times that his most unselfish efforts have been scorned, might inspire a series of episodes as tensely dramatic as those of Spoon River.
Tom had had one such experience on Maisie's birthday. She had talked so much of her birthday that a present became indispensable. ”