The Boy Grew Older Part 21

"I said wrong, Peter. I am sorry. Both of us we must wait. It will be all right. I know G.o.d won't be silly."

Presently Maria said, "I do not know him. That is what you have said.

Tell me about him--about Pat."

Peter did. It was mostly things about when Pat was a small boy. He remembered G.o.d's ankle and told Maria, and about the blind giant. She was enormously interested to hear of how Pat had picked out phonograph records. "And mine," she said eagerly, "did he like that?"

Peter lied a little. "It was the one he asked for first all the time,"

he answered. It surprised Peter that he remembered so much about Pat.

All sorts of little things which he hadn't thought of for years welled up in his mind. Some of them were things that he had hardly noticed at the time.

"And of course you never heard about Judge Krink," he said. "He was a man Pat invented when he was about five years old. He used to tell me that he wrote letters to Judge Krink and Judge Krink wrote letters to him. 'What did he say?' I'd ask him. 'Nothing,' said Pat. I remember Judge Krink had dirty fingernails. He never went to bed. I don't know just where he lived, but it was some place in a garden. He sat there and dug dirt. All the things that Pat couldn't do, Judge Krink did. Maybe I got asking him about Judge Krink too much because one day he said, 'I don't have Judge Krink any more. He's got table manners.'"

"You see," broke in Maria, "it is not the truth when you said I do not even know him--my son. I have seen him many times. I have played with him."

"Where?" asked Peter, puzzled.

"At the house of the Judge Krink."

Later they talked about themselves. Peter told Maria about Vonnie.

Somehow he could not bear to have her think that he had been altogether desolated by her flight seventeen years ago or that he had spent his life entirely in persuading Pat to eat spinach. Certainly Maria was not displeased by the story. She smiled cheerfully when told of the devastation wrought by her phonograph record but she said, "Oh, Peter, you should not have let her go. I did not teach you enough or you would have broken the record of the song." Maria met confession with confession and rather overtopped Peter.

"How about this G.o.d you were telling me about. Do you think he liked that?" he inquired.

"Oh," said Maria, "it is not such little things about which he bothers."

"Didn't you ever love me?" Peter protested.

"Not after the baby," said Maria. "It was not your fault but in my heart I blamed you. It seemed to me the thing mean and silly. To be hurt so much, that cannot be good. Now I am not so sure. If he is to sing it cannot be too much. Nothing. Not even that."

She moved to the piano and ran over an air which sounded familiar to Peter. "You remember?" she said.

On a chance he guessed. "That's what you danced to in 'Adios'."

"That is smart. You remember. It is the Invitation to the Waltz. All these years you have remembered."

"When do you go back to the war?" she asked suddenly.

"Tomorrow," said Peter.

"It is seventeen years and you go away tomorrow." She came across the room and bending across the back of the chair in which Peter sat she kissed him on the eyes. "There is something more I want you to remember," she said.

Peter was swept as he had been years ago by a gust of emotion. He started to get up but his legs were a little unsteady. Maria moved across the room to the piano.

"Maybe," she said, "you will remember me for the seventeen years more if I sing 'Depuis Le Jour.'"

CHAPTER III

Maria went to the Argentine a month later but Peter heard from her every now and then. Her letters were mostly brief, acknowledging the letters from Pat which Peter forwarded to her. Occasionally he would supply a footnote to something which Pat had written if it touched upon things which were known only to himself and the boy and could not be understood by an outsider without explanation. Or it might be that some sporting reference, simple enough in itself, seemed to require clarification for the sake of Maria. For instance when Pat wrote, "He tried a forward pa.s.s but I managed to grab it on the two yard line and ran all the way for a touchdown," Peter added the note, "A football field is a hundred yards long. Pat's feat was most unusual."

But sports did not figure quite so large in the letters as they had done before. Rather often the boy wrote about books. In one letter he outlined the entire plot of "Mr. Polly" for Peter. In another somewhat to Peter's astonishment he wrote "Heard Galli again last Sat.u.r.day. She does not excite me so much as she used to." Maria returned this letter with her acknowledgment and Peter found that this time she was supplying a footnote. "Galli," she wrote, "is Galli Curci, an opera singer with the voice and nothing else."

When the letter came in which Pat announced that he had entered the officer's training school at Harvard, Peter cabled to Maria. She replied almost immediately, "Have broken my contract, coming back to Paris."

Before she arrived the armistice was signed. Peter went to see her almost immediately. He wanted to explain to her why her schemes about Pat were wholly impossible and he felt that now with the war issue removed it would be easier to discuss the matter calmly and rationally.

He plunged into the question immediately.

"Now let's both make a solemn promise, Maria, to tell nothing but the truth without letting emotion or anything like that come in."

"But then," objected Maria, "it would not be the truth."

"Oh, you know what I mean. When I showed you Pat's picture that night you got very much excited. You said he had a nose just like yours and that it meant he was all cut out to be a singer. A great singer you said. Well, we're not excited now. Be honest with me. You can't really tell anything about whether he could be a singer or not just by looking at his nose in a picture. That was a little far-fetched, wasn't it? I mean it wasn't plain, cold, common-sense."

"What you ask me is a little hard, Peter. This common-sense you talk to me about, for that I care nothing. It is no good. It is not so that I see things. I was excited when I see the picture. That is true but it makes no difference. To have the much sense it is necessary for me to get excited. It is so I see things. If you mean can I write it down on the piece of paper like the contract, Pat he will be the singer, the great singer, I must say no. That I cannot promise. But contracts too I do not like."

"Yes," said Peter, "I've observed that."

"But I feel it, Peter. That is so much more. Can you not understand? You have sometimes maybe look into the crystal. It is so when I look at the picture. Here is my nose again in the world. It is for something."

"Maybe," suggested Peter, "it's a nose for news."

Maria paid no attention. "Do you not see? If it is the failure that does not matter. Just so long as it is the possibility it is necessary that we try.

"You don't begin to understand how far apart we are, Maria. I'll tell you frankly where I stand. Even if I knew Pat could be the greatest singer in the world I'd rather have him a newspaperman. That's my angle."

"You are not serious."

"But I am. Newspaper work's real. It's got roots into life. It is life.

It makes people in the world a little different. Singing is just something you go and hear in the evening."

"For you it is enough that he should go to the baseball and the football and perhaps the next war and write the book 'Lafayette Voulez Vous.'"

Peter flushed. "I think there's more sense to it," he said. "And it's pretty probable that Pat'll think something like I do. We were together and you weren't there. And we went around together and talked about Matty and Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker."

Maria looked a little puzzled.

"You wouldn't know," said Peter a little bitterly, "they're none of them singers."

"I didn't mean to be rotten," he added hastily. "I'm just trying to tell you the truth."

Maria smiled. "It is all right. You tell me, Peter, the truth---- your truth."

"Well, you see, Maria, he is like me. The nose may be you, but the rest is me. It's just got to be. In the beginning he wasn't anything but just sort of red clay or he was like a phonograph record before you cut the tune on it. He's been brought up around baseball games and newspaper offices. He knows, and everybody knows, that he's coming on the Bulletin and will take my place. In fact the job's been promised him. I'm not trying to lay down the law. It's just the way things are. I don't see what I could do about it even if I wanted to. He's all made by now.

What's the use of my saying, 'Yes, let him go over and learn to be a singer.' It just hasn't been put in him."

Peter paused.