Chapter IV

He was immediately perceived and the crowd with a single voice shouted him a welcome. Through the shifting gossamer of smoke that filled the room he distinguished many familiar faces.

"Come over here, old man," he heard some one call, and turned. He stared without sign of recognition at a young man, who, with many gestures, indicated a vacant chair at a near-by table. He saw the smoke, the waiters gliding noiselessly through it, the littered floor, the wet, glistening table-tops. These misty details he saw mistily, as one sees things in a dream.

His face was pale; there were unfamiliar lines about his mouth, and an unnatural glitter was in his eyes.

He saw the dancer, a man of age who wore the clothes of a laborer, fling himself heavily upon a frail chair at the nearest table, across which he leaned unsteadily, wagging his head and muttering incoherently.

Adams strode over to him and laid a hand upon his shoulder.

"Come," he said, quietly.

With an effort the man balanced his head and lifted his heavy eyes.

"Come," Adams repeated.

It was as though the youths at the other tables knew it to be a psychological moment. The noise subsided. Every eye in the room was intent upon Adams, strong in his splendid youth, and the man beside whom he stood and who was weak in his age.

Adams was seen to encircle the man's shoulders with one arm and fairly lift him from the chair. On his feet he was unsteady. Adams supported him to the door of the restaurant, which swung back noiselessly as the ill-mated couple disappeared.

Then were exchanged many glances among those who had watched the little play in silence.

"What's he going to do with the old guy?" some one asked.

A general, half-forced laugh of relief ensued, which broke the tension, and immediately the company relapsed into its previous state of conviviality. The songs were resumed. The noise developed swiftly and the strangely incongruous incident of Adams' disappearance with the drunken moulder was forgotten straightway.

No one even took the trouble to go to a window to see if developments had occurred outside. And if one had been thus sufficiently interested, he would merely have observed Adams hail a passing cab, into which, as it drew up at the curb, he thrust the man, hesitating an instant with his hand on the door to mutter a certain address to the cabman leaning from his box.

The driver touched his horse, and the vehicle swung into Woodward Avenue. Of a sudden, from the dark patch of pavement that the restaurant faced, Adams felt himself flung into a maelstrom of light.

The façades of two theatres were all a-glitter; an immense confectionery across the street was ablaze, and, looking down at the pavement through the window in the cab door, Adams noted the weird, distorted reflections in the asphalt ooze that gives the city streets at night the uncertain quality of a looking-glass wantonly smeared with pitch.

He blinked in the yellow glare of the street illumination. It was as though he were passing through a tunnel of brilliance. A car whirred by, with clanging gong. He caught a fleeting, swift glimpse of the several passengers.

As the cab proceeded, his attention was attracted now and then to groups of young men loitering at various corners as though in contemplation of some deed, very secret, if not very terrible. The lilting chorus of a college song that he recognized was brought to him in the noiselessly rolling cab. Before the last store-lights in the business district were passed, he had obtained such an impression of the city as he had never had before.

Through the window in the door he saw the skeleton trees in Grand Circus Park as the cab cut the circle of its area, and he shivered at the prospect of the winter they suggested.

A sound very close to him caused him to start. He smiled, looked down, and the smile went out of his eyes and left them cold and hard.

The man beside him had succumbed to the comfort of the cab, and, asleep, was snoring gently. Passing beneath an electric lamp, the light fell an instant on his face--pale beneath the stubble beard and the splotches of grime. His knees were high and his hands, broad, work-hardened, lay limp upon them.

Adams turned again to the window.

The cab was passing through a residence district now. He noted with a shifting, vague interest, the houses--big, shapeless for the most part, and set far back in broad yards. The lights in the lower stories glared yellow like the earth-close eyes of crouching monsters.

Suddenly Adams pulled himself together. He began to experience a livelier interest in the dark picture of the street, with its broad curbs, its iron fences, dark hedges, and wide yards. He pressed his face against the window in the cab door, and now and again twisted his neck to gaze as far back down the street as the swift motion of the vehicle would permit.

He remembered definitely, vividly, certain landmarks of his young boyhood, as he was whirled on, noiselessly, save for the rythmic _clackety-clack_ of the horse's hoofs on the echoing asphalt. There was the house from the side yard of which he had once, as a tiny lad, stolen a great armful of roses. There, again, was the house with the smoke tree near the porch behind which Pauline, his little sister, and he had once hidden until the policeman passed, indolently swinging his night stick.

Adams smiled at the recollection.

The cab came opposite a tall apartment house at the junction of a cross-town car line. On the ground now occupied by the ungainly, rambling pile of stone, he remembered vividly, had stood, when he was a very small boy--hardly big enough to push his cart--a little shack occupied by an old cobbler, deserted in his age by a son who had robbed him. Very many were the hours he had spent in that little shop. He recalled certain of those hours with a momentary pang of sadness. The cobbler had been a soldier in Poland, in his time, and was wont to tell great stories of his own valor, to which the yellow-headed lad, all forgetful of his mission and his cart, had listened wide-eyed and open-mouthed. The memory came swift and certain and distinct in detail and in the richness of it Adams shrank from the ugly stone pile in passing, as though it were a horrid thing thus to thrust itself upon a young man's memory of his little boyhood.

As he dreamed thus the cab turned a corner, suddenly. The rich residential thoroughfare vanished like the palace in the pantomime, and Adams, his face still close to the glass, saw a row of little, squat, mean houses, set regularly behind low white picket fences. Only here and there a light shone from small, square windows. The street seemed totally deserted, save for a single dog that he saw crawl under one of the low latched gates and vanish behind a house that was like all the others in the little squalid street. And as he noted these things, the cab pulled up before such another house, and, mechanically, he passed his hand over his forehead, as a child does when awakened.

A brief parley ensued with the burly driver of the cab, comical in his bristling fur cape.

"Kin yeh git 'im out?" he asked.

"Yes."

One of the windows in the second story of the cottage before which the cab had stopped, was aglow, and across the drawn shade a shadow passed, and passed again.

Adams shook the sleeper in the cab. Finally after a series of muffled grunts and grumblings that were like remonstrances, the man was gotten out.

"All right?" inquired the driver, gathering up the reins.

"All right," Adams replied; whereat the driver spoke to his horse, turned, and drove back down the squalid street.

Adams supported the tottering figure of the man to the door of the house and fumbled for the knob, which, when his fingers found it, turned in his hand and the door swung open. On a table in the room at the end of the narrow, bare, unlighted hallway, stood a lamp, turned low. As he half carried, half led the man into the room, Adams heard footsteps overhead. And as he cast his burden down upon a carpet-covered lounge, pushed back against the wall at the further end of the room, he heard a voice from above call:

"Iss dat you?"

"Come down," he answered.

There was a little frightened, feminine "Oh!" followed by quick, heavy footfalls on the bare stairs. The next instant the short, thick figure of a woman was framed by the doorway. The light of the lamp struck her face which was broad and kindly.

"Chon!" she exclaimed.

His eyes met hers and he smiled faintly. Then his gaze wandered to the lithograph of the Christ tacked to the wall, and to the couch beneath, and he said:

"There's father; I brought him home."

The woman uttered a little cry and bent over the prostrate figure.

"Ah," she muttered. Then, glancing back over her rounded shoulder, she asked: "Where you git heem?"

"Down town," the boy replied, quietly.

"So." And the woman sat down again, and as long as her son was with her she kept her eyes upon him, oblivious, seemingly, of the unfeeling body on the couch.

"Ven you come in?" she asked.

"This morning," he replied. "I played football to-day."

"Och, yes," she murmured, nodding. "I heard dee noise. Yes."

There ensued a moment's silence that was complete, save for the heavy breathing of the sleeper on the couch.

"Chon," the woman said, calmly, "you don't do dat?" And she indicated with a gesture the prone shape on the lounge.

The boy laughed forcedly, and shook his head.

"No," he said.

"Och, yes, no," his mother muttered.

"How's Pauline?" he asked.

"She's vell; she's to a dance."

He shivered as with cold.

"Isn't it late?" he asked.

"No," his mother replied. "She be home maype a hour; maype two hour."

Each seemed conscious of the infinite labor of the conversation.

"Well," John said after half an hour, "I guess I'd better be going."

"So soon!" his mother exclaimed. "Vy not in de morning? We go to church, you ant me."

He shook his head, sadly.

"No," he said. "I must go back to-night. The train leaves before long."

"All right," she muttered.

At the gate in the low fence he turned. His mother's figure was silhouetted against the light of the room at the end of the hall.

"Good-bye," he said, "and tell Pauline to take care."

"Goot-pye," she called to him softly.

She turned back into the house at once and he heard the door shut.

Passing beneath an electric light he examined his watch. The train was due to leave in an hour. He decided to walk to the station. The cold felt good on his face.

He straightened his shoulders and walked with long, even strides, looking neither to right nor left.

He found Janet waiting in the shadow of the baggage-room doorway. The station was thronged with a shouting, jostling crowd. Taking her arm, he guided her through the gate and assisted her to the platform of the last coach.

"You hold the seat, will you?" he asked. "I want to smoke. We broke training to-night, you know."

She nodded, smiling.

And until the porter's call he paced up and down the long train shed. As the train pulled out he swung himself to the platform of the rear coach and entered.