For, if the boy was a little afraid of her, he also cared more for her
than he ever had for any of the family except his mother.
He was only the average boy, stumbling blindly, almost savagely
through the maze of adolescence, with no guide, nobody to warn or
counsel him, nothing to stimulate his pride, no anchorage, no
experience.
Whatever character he had he had been born with: it was environment
and circumstance that were crippling it.
"See here, Athalie," he said, "you're a little girl and you don't
understand. There isn't any harm in my smoking a cigarette or two or
in drinking a glass of beer now and then."
"Isn't there, Jack?"
"No. So don't you worry, Sis.... And, say! I'm not going back to
school."
"What?"
"What's the use? I can't go to college. Anyway what's the good of
algebra and physics and chemistry and history and all that junk? I
guess I'll go into business."
"What business?"
"I don't know. I've been working around the garage. I can get a job
there if I want it."
"Did you ask papa?"
"What's the use? He'll let me do what I please. I guess I'll start in
to-morrow."
* * * * *
His father did not interfere when his only son came slouching up to
inform him of his decision.
After Jack had gone away toward the village and his new business, his
father remained seated on the shabby veranda, his head sunken on his
soiled shirtfront, his wasted hands clasped over his stomach.
For a little while, perhaps, he remembered his earlier ambitions for
the boy's career. Maybe they caused him pain. But if there was pain it
faded gradually into the lethargy which had settled over him since his
wife's death.
A grey veil seemed to have descended between him and the sun,--there
was greyness everywhere, and dimness, and uncertainty--in his mind, in
his eyesight--and sometimes the vagueness was in his speech. He had
noticed that--for, sometimes the word he meant to use was not the word
he uttered. It had occurred a number of times, making foolish what he
had said.
And Ledlie had glanced at him sharply once or twice out of his sore
and faded eyes when Greensleeve had used some word while thinking of
another.
When he was not wandering around the house he sat on the veranda in a
great splint-bottomed arm-chair--a little untidy figure, more or less
caved in from chest to abdomen, which made his short thin legs hanging
just above the floor seem stunted and withered.