“Darn you, Grandpa!” he muttered. “Darn you! I’ll get even with you some day. You see if I don’t!”
He jumped on the bottom bar of the farm gate and swung it shut, savoring the instant’s swift motion and the powerful clang of the closing. He hung on the gate for a space, sulkily contemplating the long walk up the lane. If the house had been near the road the action of his grandfather would not have been so mean, but—a mile to trudge, with his dinner waiting—
“I’ll get even with you, see if I don’t!” he repeated.
But by the time he had trudged halfway to the house his resentment had softened to self-pity and he heard himself whimpering—“Nice cold dinner I’ll have! I bet the girls will have finished the pie by the time I get there.”
He did not see the white and mauvy pink of the wood lilies that trooped on either side of the lane or the late yellow violets that hugged the shelter of a tiny hollow or smell the fragrance of a clover field. He resolutely nursed his grievance against his grandfather, keeping it as a barrier between him and the loss of his mother.
He grew so hot that he pulled off his jacket and his big hat. He wore braces over a cotton shirt that was wet with sweat. Now that his head was bare his full white forehead was noticeable, and his fine light brown hair. As he neared the house he began to run. He was breathless when he slid into his place at the table.
His uncles and aunts had finished their meal and were already about their work, but his grandfather was drinking a cup of tea and his grandmother sat behind the teapot, ready to pour him another cup if he wanted it. Neither of them looked at Shaw, whose eyes disconsolately took in the empty plates, the single piece of bread on the board, but his grandmother, without appearing to open her mouth, said, out of the side of it:—
“Beatrice!”
Her youngest daughter appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Yes, Ma?”
“Shaw’s dinner.”
In a moment Beatrice came in, carrying a plate mounded with dark-looking boiled potatoes on which gravy had congealed and a piece of salt pork. He awaited it with his knife and fork grasped in his hands.
“You don’t deserve any,” she said, “being so late.”
He filled his mouth to its capacity, a pink flush overspreading his face in the effort of swallowing. Beatrice carried the empty plates to the kitchen, where the clatter of dishwashing began. Roger Gower pushed his cup and saucer away from him and rose. Shaw lifted his eyes as far as the heavy grizzled beard and saw the hairs glistening with a dribble of tea. The old man walked solemnly to the door and looked at the weather out of his speculative blue eyes.
“Cristabel get away all right?” ventured his wife.
“Yes. She got away.”
“I hope they’ll meet her at the other end.”
“They’ll meet her.” He turned to Shaw. “Your grandmother’s got something for you to do. See that you’re smart about it.”
Shaw nodded, gulping a fresh mouthful. He watched his grandfather take his hat from its peg and stump out. He breathed freer. He saw the blue sky, the lilac tree, where had loomed the stocky figure.
He cut himself a piece of dried-apple pie and assisted its solidity down his throat with drinks of tepid green tea. The question that had been troubling him was at last given words.
“Grandma, am I going to sleep in the same room?”
Jane Gower turned from the cupboard where she was placing the sugar bowl and spoonholder and faced him. Her snow-white hair and clear light eyes, her delicate pink skin, gave her a look of benignity, denied by her stern features and heavy upper lip which was seldom lifted in a smile.
“Beaty’s going to have that room,” she said. “You’ll take hers.”
“Beaty!” he stared. “Am I to sleep in the attic now?”
“That’s what I said.”
He was glad. He did not want to sleep alone in the room he had shared with his mother since he was three years old. He was glad to have a little room under the eave. . . . But his treasures—his books—Beaty must not have them!
His grandmother went to the kitchen and he slid from his chair and went up the narrow linoleum-covered stairs. He softly opened the door of the bedroom and stood there transfixed.
Surely his mother was in the room! Surely she was there! She was hiding somewhere! She had made herself invisible—but she would show herself in a moment, her blue eyes, her brown hair, her fresh pink cheeks! She could not have left him alone!
He stared at the dingy brown and drab of the wallpaper, at the washstand, the heavy white basin and ewer with the nicked spout, at the bed—why, there was only one bed! His little iron bedstead was gone!
The separation of the two beds made clear to him, as nothing else had done, the cutting of the bond between him and his mother. On his mother’s bed some of Beaty’s clothes were strewn. Beaty had taken the bed! Beaty had taken the room! This was no longer his place.
A pine wardrobe stood in one corner of the room. He opened the door and found what he wanted—a pile of books, neatly arranged at one end, in a corner. He gathered as many as he could into his arms and crept up the stairs into the attic room.
The ceiling was so low that even he could touch it, and sloped from the gable to within a foot of the floor. It had never been papered and smelt of damp plaster, but he had always liked the thought of the little attic, its privacy and its isolation.
Beaty’s bed had been taken away and his own installed in its place. His few belongings had been carried there. There was one empty drawer in the bottom of the chest of drawers and in it he laid the first armful of books. He tiptoed eagerly down the stairs to fetch the rest.
Beatrice appeared on the stairs just as he secured the last armful.
“This is my room now,” she said. “What are you doing in it?”
“Jus’ getting some books,” he muttered. “Some old school books.”
“Well, keep out after this,” she warned, but not unkindly. . . .
Now he had the books secure! His treasures! His delight! Not his grandfather, his grandmother, or any of their thirteen children had, so far as Shaw knew, ever opened one of them. They had belonged to Roger Gower’s father, who must have been a very different sort of man. Shaw always drank in any stray words that were spoken of him. In the secrecy of his mind he loved him and set him on a pedestal of learning and distinction.
Shaw knew little of him but that he had been a soldier and a student. To prove the first his epaulets and his sword hung above the dresser in the living room. And here, safe in Shaw’s keeping, were his books! Most of Shakespeare, Milton’s Poems, Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, Chapman’s Homer, Livingstone’s Travels, Doctor Syntax, Tom Jones—these were the grandest, the most impressive, to the little boy. He had pored over these books ever since he could read. He had cast his small personality into them, as a raindrop into the sea. He had never had a toy! What were toys? He scarcely knew. They did not enter into the pioneering calculations of his grandparents or the narrow possibilities of his mother’s purse. That purse of his mother’s! How well Shaw knew it! How proud and important he had felt when, for a moment, she would let him hold it in his hand! He knew every line of its worn brown surface, its clasp once silvered over but now showing the yellowish metal beneath, its extreme smoothness, as though it had been handled much, in foreboding and anxiety, the compartments inside where the big copper coins, the smaller silver coins, lived, the part fastened by an extra clasp where were hidden the scarce dollar bills; most precious of all, the pocket under the flap where there was a small photograph of the young doctor, Shaw’s father, who had died four years after his marriage, and a lock of his fair hair.