The Boy Grew Older

"Who are you looking at?" said the girl.

"Elaine."

"I told you that people that liked me called me Red. Why don't you call me that? Why don't you like me?"

"I like you a lot."

Elaine made a face at him. In her no barriers seemed to have been set up against the potency of drinking. Already she was in the babbling stage.

"I'm not like the rest of the girls around here. You don't need to be ashamed of me. I've had a good education. I can prove it to you. Ask me about the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle."

"What about it?"

"It's equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. You see, if it wasn't for hard luck I wouldn't be in a place like this. I'm a lady. I know Latin too. Amo, that's love. Amo, I love. Amas, you love."

"Don't," said Peter crossly. The spell was broken. The woman was making him think. Now he could hear the drums again. This was the meanest trick of many which the fate of the day had played him. With all the evil women of a great city to choose from it had been Peter's misfortune to happen upon an educated harlot. He had drugged himself steadfastly to be rowdy and here was a lady who talked about Latin and right angles.

Elaine sensed a mistake in technique. "Come away from here, Peter," she said. "Come on. You're just a tired little baby. You don't want to talk any more. You're my little baby."

Peter got up and had to catch the table to keep from falling over. "My name's Otto Schmaltz," he said and did a silly imitation of the accent of the comedian in "The Joy Girls." But the possibility of a revision of the material came to him. "My baby's bes' lil' baby in the world."

He would have gone away at once, but a man came down the stairs at that moment and approached the table. "Red," he said, "if you ever stand me up again I'll bust your face."

"Honest, Jim," said the girl, "I waited half an hour. I thought you weren't coming."

"Let that lady alone," said Peter. "She's with me."

He didn't like Elaine any more, but he knew that the code demanded that he should show resentment of the intrusion.

"Keep your face out of this," said the newcomer. "What damned business is it of yours?"

There was a ready-made answer for that in the code.

"You come outside and I'll make it my business," said Peter.

"Don't waste your time on the big souse, Jim," said Elaine clutching at the arm of the man who had threatened her. But the fact that the girl absolved Peter from all the cares of guardianship did not remove his responsibilities according to the code. "Come on outside," he repeated. He went slowly up the stairs but when he reached the sidewalk and turned around there was no Jim. Peter waited. He wanted very much to hit somebody and Jim seemed wholly appropriate. After a few seconds the man came out. He walked up close to Peter but he held his hands behind his back. According to the code nothing could be done until each had extended an arm.

"Come on," said Peter impatiently, "put up your hands and I'll punch your head off."

Jim suddenly drew his right arm from behind his back and clipped him sharply over the head with a bottle. Peter stared at him wonderingly for almost a second. Surprise seemed to halt the message to his brain. Slowly he crumpled up on the sidewalk. The blow was not painful, but the swinging arc of all things visible was now longer than ever before. The lights, the lamp-posts and the buildings slowly turned end over end in a complete circle. Peter put one hand to his head. It was wet and sticky. For a second or so he considered that and wondered. Finally he realized that it was blood. Lifting himself up on his hands and knees he saw Jim and Elaine scrambling into a taxicab.

"I'll bet she doesn't talk about right angles to him," thought Peter. For a moment he considered pursuit, but before he could make up his mind the taxicab had started. It swept past him no more than ten feet away. He could see the red head of the woman in the window. One week later he decided that he should have cupped his hands and shouted, "You hypotenuse hussy!" That night he could think of nothing. The fragments of glass lay about him. Peter examined them and found it had been a champagne bottle. After a bit he called a taxicab for himself and said, "Go to some hospital that's near." He had begun to feel a little faint.

A doctor in the reception room dug the glass out of Peter's scalp bit by bit and hurt him dreadfully. Every stab of pain cut through the fumes and left him clear-headed. Nothing was forgotten any more. He was able to compare the relative poignancy of two sorts of pain and decided that he did not care much how long the doctor kept it up. At last the job was finished and Peter's head bandaged.

"You were drunk, weren't you?" said the doctor.

"Yes," said Peter, "I was."

There was no other comment. Nobody would call Peter Sir Galahad on account of this fight and yet it was honorable enough he thought, even if the issues were a little mixed. Nor was it entirely unsatisfactory. At least he had been able to taunt Fate into an overt act. He knew a poem by a man who wrote, "My head is bloody but unbowed." Peter had often used that line in prizefight stories. Still he was a little sick now and perfectly sober. He looked at his watch. In an hour or so it would be dawn. There didn't seem to be anything to do but go home.

Opening the door of his apartment, Peter tripped over something in the dark and fell with a bang. Kate woke and called out in obvious terror, "Who's there?"

"It's only me," said Peter, "Mr. Neale. I decided not to stay out after all. I'm sorry I woke you up. I fell over the baby carriage."

CHAPTER IX

Somebody at the office must have heard about the flight of Maria Algarez, for when Peter returned from Goldfield he had found at his flat a telegram which said, "Lay off a couple of weeks. Longer if you like – Miles, managing editor." That was an extraordinary thing because the material for Peter's column – "Looking Them Over with Peter Neale" – was only up one week ahead. A two weeks' vacation would mean not only that there would be no Peter Neale in the Bulletin, but that in thirty-one other papers throughout the country the feature would be missing. Peter wondered how Miles could suggest a thing like that so calmly. Maria's running away ought not to wrench a whole chain of newspapers in that fashion. In daydreams Peter had often pictured himself dying from flood, or earthquake or a stray bullet in some great riot. When the rescuers picked him up and bent over to hear what he might say his lips framed the words, "Send a story to the Bulletin!"

The Bulletin couldn't be bothered about people's dying or running away. The Bulletin was bigger than that. The newspaper yarn of Rusk's which had impressed Peter the most was about a man named O'Brale in San Francisco. O'Brale was secretly engaged to a girl in Alameda and then a week or so before they were to be married she had eloped with a man who said he was a Polish Count. According to Rusk by some strange coincidence O'Brale received the assignment to cover the story. He didn't beg off. He sat down to write it and he finished up his story with: "And when the news of Miss Lee's elopement drifted into the office of the Chronicle a reporter on the city staff sighed and said, 'Scooped again.'"

Miles must be a fool not to know that even after Peter Neale had been smashed that part of him which was the Bulletin would go on. A picture suddenly came to Peter. That was the way he did his thinking. "I can go on wriggling," he said to himself, "until the first edition."

Peter felt that it was up to him to go down to the office and show them that. He would have to show Miles. Miles was new to him. The managing editor traffic through the office of the Bulletin was prodigious. After all Peter had been away for two weeks and it was only natural that there should be a new man in charge. Peter wasn't a veteran, but he had seen five managing editors in his time and probably a couple of hundred copy readers. "Looking Them Over" was different. That was something vital and rooted in the Bulletin. It wasn't so much that Peter Neale was a part of the Bulletin as that the Bulletin was a part of Peter Neale. "This other thing," thought Peter, "is just my private life."

He felt pretty rocky when he got up. During the night the bandages had turned bloody. It made him shaky to look at himself. Something of the rhythm of the buildings as they swung in the long arc and turned over was still in the pulse of Peter. All right, but he had seen Gans get up when his legs would barely hold him. Not only get up but walk deliberately across the ring to meet the charge of Battling Nelson.

Neale went down town. There was no one else in the elevator when he went up to the ninth floor to the office of the Bulletin, but Sykes, the head office boy, was in the hall outside the city room. He looked up and said, "Hello, Mr. Neale."

So far it was all right. Nelson had knocked out Gans and Maria had run away since Peter and Sykes had last seen each other. Sykes had been able to take all that in his stride. Peter wondered if Miles would be as smart. There was a man at the desk, a fat placid man, in the office of the managing editor. Peter knocked at the door and went in before the man looked up. "My name's Peter Neale," he said. "You're Mr. Miles, aren't you? I got your telegram. It was nice of you, but I don't want any time off. There's a whole batch of stuff due for the syndicate tomorrow."

Miles nodded. He tilted his chair back three times without saying anything. It was like a pitcher's wind-up. Peter found Miles always spoke just after the third tilt. "Have a cigarette," he said. He also provided a match. Then letting the chair rest on the floor he sat looking at Peter. There wasn't any surprise or inquiry in his face. Peter felt acutely conscious of his bloody bandages. He sat waiting to hear, "Have an accident?" or something like that, but Miles seemed to take it as a matter of course that Peter was all cut up. Apparently the managing editor accepted it as something inevitable in an out-of-town assignment. Peter dreaded the question so long that he would have felt easier if Miles had asked him about the bandages. He was prepared to say something about a taxicab. After all it wasn't fair that Miles should assume that he had been drunk just because he had. Presently the tilting began again. One, two, three, Peter counted to himself. "I want you to do baseball in addition to your column," said Miles. "Monday isn't too soon to start in, is it?"

"Monday's all right," said Peter.

"All right," said Miles. "You need a match," he added. "Your cigarette's gone out."

Neither of them said anything then for a minute. Miles continued to look at him and ignore the bandages.

"All right on Monday," said Peter and went across the hall to his own office. Putting the catch on, he closed the door. Miles hadn't talked about his private life, but Peter felt that he must know about it. Probably he was thinking about it every time he quit tilting. That was the trouble.

Out there in the City Room they were talking about it too. They must be. Nothing happened to anybody on the Bulletin that didn't get talked about in the City Room. No district in the town was covered so perfectly as the reporters covered the lives of each other. When Woolstone, the Sunday editor, started living with that little girl, Miss Gray, the one who wrote the piece about the Haymarket, it was common gossip within a week. Woolstone hadn't told anybody. Indeed he hadn't said a word except that the Haymarket story was the finest piece of English prose since De Quincey. But somehow after that everybody knew that Woolstone was living with Miss Gray.

Peter put a sheet of paper into his typewriter and rapidly wrote at the top of the upper right-hand corner Neale – Sports – Syndicate. Then he turned half of the sheet through the machine and wrote "Looking Them Over With Peter Neale – (Copyright)." There he stuck.

The sheet of paper had not been blemished but after a while Peter took it out and wrote the same thing on another. After that he sharpened a pencil. He wanted to get a drink of water but that was out in the City Room. It was foolish of him not to have brought cigarettes. Miles had cigarettes, but Peter didn't want to face that scrutiny any more. "Gans," he wrote, "was not outboxed but he was outfought." That wouldn't do. There had been a line almost like that in his fight story. Of course he might do some sort of prediction story about how long Battling Nelson would hold the title. A man who took all that punishment couldn't last so very long. But suddenly Peter realized that he didn't give a damn about Gans or about Nelson. The Bulletin didn't make so much difference either. Maria was more than all this. He'd ask Miles to send him to Africa or China or some place. Sedition seeped in. Baseball wasn't exciting enough to make him forget. He tried to make his mind do him a picture of Matty bending back and then shooting over his fast one. Instead he saw Maria Algarez standing in the middle of the big stage.

That wouldn't do. Peter gripped the edge of his desk. If his mind was only something that would stand up to him and fight like a man. He could heave it back all right if only he could get a hand on it. Instead he pushed against the desk. Very slowly the picture began to fade. Maria was taller and broader. Now it was Matty. Dim but unmistakably Matty. But the figure stood in the centre of the big stage. He must get him out of there. If he was to hold the thing it would have to move and take on life. Suddenly Peter realized the trick. The picture ought not to be Matty throwing his fast one. The fadeway! That was the thing which marked Matty in his mind above all others. He closed his eyes in order to help. The figure bent back. The arms came up over the head. The left leg kicked. No, it was not Maria kicking. This was a huge clumsy leg which moved slowly, ever so slowly, grinding power for the swing of back and shoulders which was to come. Then there was the lunge forward. Matty had thrown the ball straight at his head. He conquered the impulse to duck. This was the slow ball. He could see the seams. Now it was slower and growing bigger and bigger all the time. It would walk past him shoulder high. Peter swung at it and the ball wasn't there. A sudden decision had come upon it. Down it swooped and out. It had passed him. Peter opened his eyes. He didn't want to go to China or Africa after all. Honus Wagner and the Pirates would be at the Polo Grounds on Monday.

Peter got up and started for his drink of water. There were only three men in the City Room. Charlie Hall was sitting at his desk right beside the ice cooler. Perhaps Charlie had had a lot of fun out of that story of Maria Algarez running away. Women didn't run away from Charlie. Peter remembered the time Charlie was marooned in the Press Club. He stuck in the poker game for two days not daring to leave the building. The elevator man had told him of the woman who kept coming in every half an hour or so and asking for Mr. Hall. According to the elevator man she was very much excited. Charlie said it sounded a lot like Ethel. He wouldn't be surprised if she wanted to shoot him. She had often threatened to do that. Twice during those two days Peter had volunteered to go down and scout around. Both times he had seen a woman pacing the sidewalk just across the street from the Press Club. It looked like the same woman. Charlie said probably it was. Ethel was very determined. Finally they had to get a policeman to come and tell Ethel to go away. Nobody ever seemed so glamorous to Peter as Charlie during those two days. Peter wondered if any woman would ever want to shoot him.

There was no way of getting to the ice cooler without passing Charlie. Peter did it slowly. Charlie looked up. "Have any fun at the fight?" he asked.

"No, it was too hot. Anyhow I wanted to see Gans win."

"It was a great story you wrote."

"I'm glad you liked it."

"Too bad about the nigger – he was the smartest of the lot, wasn't he?"

"Yes, and don't forget he could hit too. Nelson wouldn't have had a chance with him five years ago."

Peter was turning to go back to his office when Charlie Hall thrust out a hand and slapped him on the shoulder. "I hear you've had some hard luck," he said. "I'm sorry."

Peter couldn't answer for a second. "I guess nobody ever is happy so very much," Charlie continued, sensing that Peter was stumped for the moment. "Now you take me. I suppose you'd say I was happily married. I've been married fifteen years and I've got five children. Well, sometimes when I sit down at home I wonder, 'What's the use of all this anyway?' There ought to be a law that reporters can't get married. It's bad for them and it's bad for the paper."

"I guess you're right," said Peter.

"The thing to do is not to take women seriously. They'll bust hell out of you if you do."

Peter brightened perceptibly. "Do you remember that time you got stuck up in the Press Club and the girl was waiting downstairs to shoot you?" he inquired with a certain eagerness.

"Oh yes, sure, Gracie."

"No, that wasn't the name. It was Ethel."

"Ethel? – I remember now. I had it mixed up with a business in Chicago. Ethel! Oh yes, indeed. She was a wild one. She was just about the most dangerous woman south of Fifty-ninth Street. That was a couple of years ago. I can't stand so much excitement now."

"Go on," said Peter, "I suppose you'll be telling me you've reformed."

"That wouldn't be so far off the truth. Anyhow where do you get off. Who beaned you?"

Another burden of reticence was snatched away. At last Peter had a chance to tell somebody about the bandages.

"I was with a woman up at the Eldorado. You know the Eldorado. And a big fellow comes over and tries to butt in. I bawled him out and we went up on the sidewalk. I made a couple of passes at him and he hauled off and clipped me with a bottle – a champagne bottle. I guess I was pretty drunk."

Charlie Hall nodded his head. "You're all right. I'm glad. Some of the boys around here have been telling me that you were all busted up about that girl you married. I'm glad it's not so. I knew you had too much sense for that. There isn't a one of them in the whole world that's worth getting busted up over. Don't take 'em seriously. That's what I say. I ought to know. I've been married fifteen years. Well, almost fifteen years. It'll be fifteen years in October."

"I'm all right, Charlie. You tell that to the rest. I'm back on the job, you know."

"That's good. It wouldn't seem like the Bulletin without you."

Charlie turned to the story in front of him and put one second of energy into pounding the space bar before coming back to conversation.

"Where is this Eldorado?" he asked.

"Fiftieth Street and Seventh Avenue."

"Does it stay open all night?"

"Well, it's open all night but after one there's a man on the door and he won't let you in unless he knows you."

"Are they strict about it?"

"Pretty strict, lately," said Peter, "but that's all right, Charlie. Any time you want to go up late you let me know. I'll be glad to show you round. I'm always free nights. Any night at all – That is any night except Sunday."

CHAPTER X

THE baby carriage was kept in the kitchen thereafter and Peter did not see it again until Sunday, his first Sunday at home. Kate left the flat very early. Peter could not very well object to that because she said she was going to mass. He wished that she might be converted to one of the eleven o'clock denominations, but he supposed at her age there was small hope of that. She would be gone, she told him, until nine or ten o'clock in the evening. Her niece, the one who lived in Jamaica, had a new baby five weeks old. Kate was going there right after church. Peter thought that if he had Kate's job he would prefer to spend his day off at an old folks' home or some other spot exclusively mature.

Still he could understand the psychology of it. Out in Jamaica, Kate could sit around and when the baby cried she need not move hand or foot. She could watch other people bustle around and fulfill its needs. And then every now and then she might give advice and see it carried out. He himself had spent many a day off in the office of the Bulletin sitting on the desk of somebody who was working and interrupting him.

Before Kate left she gave Peter a complete list of directions for the baby's day and also a problem for him to ponder over. "What will I be calling the boy?" she wanted to know. "I find it hard to be talking to him and him with no name."

"I'll think it over," Peter told her. After she left he did think it over. He went into the baby's room and looked at him as he lay there to see if the child suggested any name in particular. Being asleep he seemed a little more impersonal than usual. Of course, Peter Neale was a pretty good name, but there didn't seem to be any point in calling him that unless in some way or other he seemed to be Peter. He did sleep with his head buried face down in the pillow but that was an insufficient bond. Perhaps there were millions of people in the world who slept that way. Probably there were no statistics on the subject.

Maybe one Peter Neale was enough. It did mean something. After all it was Peter Neale who had written in the Bulletin: "If Horace Fogel goes through with his plan of making a first baseman out of Christy Mathewson he will be committing the baseball crime of the century. Mathewson, or Matty as his team mates call him, is still green, but he has in him the makings of one of the greatest pitchers the world has ever known. He has the speed and control and more than that he has a head on his shoulders. Horace Fogel hasn't."

And they didn't switch Matty to first base after all and now everybody was beginning to realize that he was a great pitcher. But Peter Neale knew it first of all. More than that it was Peter Neale who had begun his round by round story of the Gans-Nelson fight, only two weeks ago, with the memorable line, "The Dane comes up like thunder." He had invented the name of "Hooks" for George Wiltse and had written that "Frank Bowerman runs the bases like somebody pulling Grover Cleveland in a rickshaw." And Peter was still progressing. He would go on, years hence, to make the most of McGraw's practice of starting games with Rube Schauer and finishing them with Ferdie Schupp by contriving the lead, "It never Schauers but it Schupps." Perhaps he had prevision enough to realize that it was he, Peter Neale, who would eventually ascribe to Jack Dempsey the motto, "Say it with cauliflowers" and write after a Crimson disaster on the Thames, "Harvard's most perplexing race problems appear to be crewish and Jewish."

He looked at the sleeping child and wondered if there were any leads like that in the little head. By and by, of course, the baby would grow up and in some newspaper there would be articles under his name. Peter would like to see the articles before he was willing to have them signed "By Peter Neale." Every now and then somebody wandered into his office at the Bulletin and asked him to use his good influences with the managing editor. Peter always said, "Will you let me see something you've written." Here in front of him was a candidate not only for a job but for his job. And the applicant had nothing to show.

It was a hot bright Sunday and Kate had recommended that the baby go out. The carriage was deplorable. Peter had not bothered to look at it before, but now he examined it and found it wholly lacking in distinction. It could not be that all the things which were wrong with it had resulted from his falling over it a few mornings back. That had hurt him much more than the carriage. The paint was splotchy and all the wheels squeaked. Kate must have seized the first available vehicle in the neighborhood. What with that carriage and his heavily bandaged head he felt that the caravan which he was about to conduct would be disreputable. The numerous chin straps which held the bandages in place made it difficult for Peter to shave. In order to avoid that difficulty Peter hadn't shaved. He only hoped that nobody in the Park would stop the procession and ask him to accept a quarter. Peter practised an expression of scorn in front of a mirror in order to be ready for some such contingency. Nature had endowed him with a loose scalp. He could wiggle both ears, together or separately. So far this had never been of much use although he found that it helped him enormously to qualify as a nursery entertainer. But there was another manœuvre which he used habitually and successfully to indicate utter disagreement and contempt. He could elevate his right eyebrow without disturbing the other. This never failed to strike terror to all observers. Peter had that so well in hand that he needed no mirror practice to perfect it. He worked on curling his lip, a device which was new to him.