The Boy Grew Older

"Maybe women are all right for children when they get a little older," was the way Peter expressed it to himself, "but they haven't imagination enough to handle a little one like Pat. That's a man's job."

CHAPTER XVIII

Pat was six years old when he saw his first ball game up at the old hill top park of the New York Yankees who were then the Highlanders. The Red Sox were the visiting team.

"That's Sea Lion Harry Hall," said Peter, pointing to a man in a gray uniform who was throwing the ball. Pat tried to follow the direction in which Peter pointed.

"I don't see no sea lion," he complained.

"Right over there," replied Peter, "the pitcher. Don't you see the man that's throwing the ball. That's his name, Sea Lion Harry Hall."

Pat was enormously disappointed. He had thought that maybe it was some sort of circus which they were going to see in this great open park. The sea lion had sounded like a promise of elephants to come. He tried to beat back his grief, but presently tears rolled out of his eyes. The best he could do was to make no sound. Eventually Peter noticed the damp tracks across his face.

"What are you crying about?" he asked in surprise.

"You said it was a sea lion," sobbed Pat, "and it isn't any sea lion."

"Oh, that's it. Don't you understand: his name's Sea Lion. Just as they call you Pat."

"Why do they call him a Sea Lion?"

"Well," said Peter, "to tell the truth I don't know exactly. It's just one of those things. I've been writing about Sea Lion Harry Hall a couple of years and now I never stopped to think up any reason for it. It was smart of you to ask me, Pat. That's right. Don't you go taking in things people tell you without asking why. That's the first thing a newspaperman ought to learn. You just wait here a minute and I'll go and find out why they call him Sea Lion Harry Hall."

Peter went over to the wire screen which ran in front of the press box and called to a short little man who was sitting on his heels and balancing himself with his bat which he had dug into the ground. The player straightened up and came over. Peter conversed earnestly with him for a moment. Then he came back. "Now," he said, "I know all about it. Kid Elberfeld – that was Kid Elberfeld I was talking to – he says they call him Sea Lion Harry Hall because he roars so – just like a sea lion."

For the next half hour Pat abandoned all thought of the game. Peter rattled off words and the meaning of them. There were hits and errors and flies and grounders. Once everybody in the park shouted and stood up and Peter said it was a home run, but Pat gave very little heed to this. He paid no more attention to the rooting than if it had been Peter talking to him. It was another sound for which he was waiting. He couldn't be burdened with learning about hits and errors or even the thing called a home run. What he wanted was to hear Sea Lion Harry Hall roar like a sea lion. For hours Pat heard nothing. The man just did his exercises and threw the ball. Then something happened which made him mad. He threw the ball and after it was thrown he walked straight up to a man in blue who had on a false face. And he talked at him. Very loud and hoarse he said, "Jesus, Tim, call 'em right."

"There goes the Sea Lion," said Peter who had been busy with something else and had caught no more than the rumble. "Didn't that sound just like a sea lion?"

Pat scorned to cry. He did not even bother to say "No." By now he knew that the baseball park was the land of disappointment. It was a place where things were cried up with words which were not so. Peter had said he would roar like a sea lion. And he didn't. He was just a man who said "Jesustim" pretty loud.

Pat heard a seal lion once. "Jesustim" didn't sound anything like a sea lion.

Interesting inquiry might have centred around "Too hot to handle" if Peter had used it earlier in the day, but by the time it came Pat knew that it was just a grown up way of talking big. When Peter said, "That's Birdie Cree," Pat did not look or even ask any questions. He knew there was not a birdie.

Only one romantic concept came to Pat from the game.

"That's Tris Speaker, that kid in centre field," said Peter.

Of course, Pat knew that he really wouldn't be a kid. It didn't surprise him to find that Tris was a man but he was quite a lot different from pretty nearly all the other grown-ups that Pat had ever seen. They didn't run like Tris. Probably they couldn't. The other men in this baseball park ran, but Tris was the fastest. But it wasn't just looking at him that Pat liked. He said the name over to himself several times. "Tris Speaker, Tris Speaker." There was fun in the sound of it. Not quite enough for a whole afternoon, to be sure. This was a park without sandpiles or a merry-go-round. And there were no policemen to make everybody keep off the grass. Pat wished they would.

"I want to go home," he said at last.

"Tired already?" asked Peter. "Well, there's only half an inning more. It wasn't much of a game, was it? Too one-sided. But we're not going home right off. I've got to go straight to the office and I'm going to take you with me."

In another ten minutes the game was over. "You didn't like it, did you?" asked Peter. The formula nettled Pat.

"Yes, I did," he said.

After a long trip in the subway they came to the big building where Peter worked. Pat had never been there before. At the end of a long corridor was a small office and Peter opened the door and went in. "I've got to write the paper," he said. "You keep quiet till I'm done. Here's the funny section for you."

Upon examination Pat found that it was last Sunday's pictures. He had already seen the one about how the kids put dynamite in the Captain's high hat. Still he followed the adventure again. When Kate read it to him on Sunday it had made him a little sad. It seemed to him that it must have hurt the Captain when Maude, the mule, kicked him in the head. Now he found a new significance in the last picture. Maude and the Captain were floating in the air high above the roof. Coming out of the Captain's mouth were marks like this, "! – !!!" And yet it must be pleasant to go floating away in the sky like that. Pat looked out of the window and he could see the river and the great bridge. He would like to have a high hat and some dynamite and a mule. Then he could float through the window like Davey and the Goblin. That would be better than sitting there in the little office so quietly while Peter pounded the keys of his typewriter. Peter kept taking sheets of paper out of it and tearing them up.

"Whatch you doing?" Pat asked when he could keep silent no longer.

"Hush," said Peter very sternly, "you mustn't ask questions now. I'm doing a story for the Bulletin. That's very important, I must do it right away."

"Why?"

"Well, pretty soon they're going to put the paper to bed." Pat knew that must be some sort of joke. Papers didn't go to bed. They didn't have any pajamas or nightgowns.

Somebody knocked at the door and before Peter could say anything Charlie Hall came in. "Is that your kid?" he asked.

"Yes," said Peter, "He's my son. Say hello to Charlie Hall, Pat."

"Well, what's your name?" said Hall just as if he was very much interested.

"My name's Pat."

"Tell him your big name," prompted Peter. "Go ahead."

"Peter Neale, second."

"I suppose you'll be down here doing baseball yourself pretty soon now that you're getting to be such a big boy," said Hall.

Pat picked up the funny paper again and pretended to become engrossed in it. Charlie Hall was diverted back to the first of the Peter Neales.

"I guess he's a little older than my youngest," he said. "Let me see, Joe – no, that's not the one I mean – Bill must be about four or five now. Just around there."

"Pat's older than that. He was six a couple of days ago."

"Getting pretty near time to begin figuring what to do with him."

"I know that already," said Peter, "he's going to be a newspaper man. He's going to be 'by Peter Neale'."

"I'd drown mine, all six of 'em, before I'd let 'em go into the newspaper business."

"What's the matter with it?"

"It don't get you any place. Now if I was in business I'd be just getting ready to be a president of the company or something. And as it is I'm just an old man around the shop. Forty-two my last birthday. In a couple of years more I'll be on the copy desk."

"That's mostly bunk, Charlie. But even if it was so, haven't you had a lot of fun?"

"What do you mean, fun?"

"Going out where things are happening and writing pieces and seeing them in the paper the next day. Just writing a baseball story seems sort of exciting to me."

"Hell," said Charlie, "they're all faked, those baseball games. I wouldn't go across the street to see one."

He paused, but went on again before Peter could protest.

"It's a funny thing, but the longer you stay in newspaper work the more it gets to seem as if everything's faked. After a while you find out that all the murders are just alike. Somebody sleeps with somebody and somebody else don't like it and then you have what we call a 'mystery' and we get all steamed up about it. Railroad accidents – the engineer disregarded the signal – fires – somebody dropped a cigarette in a pile of waste. My God, Pete, there's only about ten things can happen any place in the world and then they must go on repeating themselves over and over."

Peter rushed in pellmell. "But don't you see, Charlie. It's the writing about them makes them different. A piano player might as well say, 'I haven't got anything but the same notes.'"

"Well," said Charlie, "I'd drown all five of them if they wanted to be piano players. Maybe there is some fun in writing. I don't know anything about that. But if a man wants to write why put it down some place where it's going to be swept up by the street cleaner the next day. At eleven o'clock tomorrow morning all that stuff you were writing before I came in will be dead and rotten. It'll have to make room for the home edition and on top of that'll come another. And so on all day long. Writing for a newspaper's like spitting in Niagara Falls. Anybody that can write ought to get on a magazine and do something that'll last anyway from breakfast to dinner time."

"It's no good for me," said Peter. "I've written for magazines a little – just sport stuff, you know. You do something and maybe you like it, but that's the last you hear about it for a month. By the time it comes out you've forgotten all about it and maybe by that time it isn't true anyway. It's like writing for posterity."

"All right," said Charlie, "go on with your story. If you make it a good one maybe there'll be somebody around the office'll remember it clear into next week."

Left alone, Peter proceeded at a furious rate. Even Pat was frightened out of interrupting by the beat and pace of the noise which came from the typewriter. If there had been a steam whistle it would have sounded a good deal like a locomotive. Soon Peter called a copy boy and gave him the pages. It had grown almost dark now, but he did not switch on the electric light immediately. From the next room came the clicking sound of telegraph keys.

"Do you hear that," said Peter. "That's magic. Some place there's a war, or a king's just died, or maybe he's only sick and those clicks are telling us about it."

"Did he eat too much ice cream and cake?" asked Pat.

"I don't know. I can't tell till somebody writes it down. You have to make a b c's out of it before anybody except just the man in the room understands about it."

"Come here," said Peter, suddenly getting up from his chair, "you sit down there, Pat."

"I don't want to," said Pat.

"All right, I won't let you sit in my chair."

Pat got up and took the seat.

"Now," said Peter earnestly, "I don't want you to grow up to be a newspaper man, and I don't want you to come into this office after I'm gone."

He put his arm around Pat's shoulder and drew him close. Then he took the boy's hand, the left one, and moved it forward near the typewriter.

"This is the desk," said Peter, "that I don't want you to use."

Book II

CHAPTER I

Peter was coming back to America. He had been through the war and then the peace and he was very tired. The tension of it all was still upon him. Even though he lay back in his steamer chair and looked over the rail at a wide and peaceful ocean the jangle within him continued. For him there was no friendship in the sea. Probably there never would be any more. He had come to hate it that afternoon on the Espagne when they ran from the submarine. That was almost four years ago, but Peter had not forgotten. He had been playing poker in the card-room when the little gun on the forward deck went "bang!" The man across the table had his whole stack of chips in his hand. He was just about to say, "I'll raise you, Neale." And then he said nothing. He just sat there holding the chips and grinning. Some of them trickled out of his hands and a yellow one fell on the floor. The man stooped down and rummaged for it under his chair. Yellow chips represented five dollars. Peter couldn't stand the comedy of it. His capacity for irony was limited.

"Don't do that," he said sharply. "Maybe it's going to sink us. Come on. We can look for the chips afterwards."

Still the man didn't come. His right hand was trembling but he held on to the cards.

"Oh," said Peter, "you win if that's what you're waiting for. For God's sake, come on."

Peter didn't have the courage to be the first man out of the smoking-room. He walked slowly enough to let two players pass him. Going to his room he found a life preserver and put it on clumsily. Outside in the hall a very white-faced steward was saying over and over again, "There is no danger. There is no danger." Coming out on deck a passenger almost ran into Peter. He was dashing up and down the deck shouting, "Don't get excited." Peter saw his poker friend standing beside the rail and took his place alongside him.

"There she is," said the man, pointing to a thing about a mile away which looked like a stray beanpole thrust into the ocean. "It's the periscope," he explained. The gun on the Espagne went "bang!" once more.

"If we don't get her, she'll get us, won't she?" asked Peter.

The man nodded. The beanpole disappeared. "She'll come up some other place," he told Peter.

They both stared at the ocean, looking for the sprouting of the weed. Peter kept silent for at least two minutes. He held on to the rail because his right leg was shaking. The man must not know that he was afraid.

"What did you have?" asked Peter. "What did you have?" he repeated.

"How's that?"

"A minute ago when I dropped. What did you have?"

"A king high flush."

Peter was just about to confess his full house, but thought better of it. "I guess the submarine didn't hurt me any," he said. "Mine was only aces and eights."

His companion turned and looked at him. He was a little white, too. There was a growing horror in his face. Peter wondered and then realized the reason for the curious look. Somehow it cheered him enormously to find terror in another. The man had shamed him by sticking to the card room and looking for the yellow chip. Now Peter could pay him back. Even the huskiness was gone from his voice. "Yes," he said slowly, "aces and eights. That was queer, wasn't it? The dead man's hand."

The beanpole never did come up again and now in the year 1919 there would be none in this pleasant glassy ocean and yet Peter couldn't look at it very long without seeing black stakes rise up against him. In the twenty minutes of watching which followed the remark about aces and eights Peter planted firmly and deeply in himself another abiding fear. He wondered idly now whether the man who stood with him, the name was Bentwick, would ever enjoy ocean travel again.

Peter found that it was not physically possible to be afraid of everything which he encountered in the war. Everybody had his pet fear. Peter specialized on submarines, which was convenient since, after arriving in France, he saw nothing more of warfare on the water. He never liked shells, particularly the big ones, airplanes or machine guns and yet he could stand them well enough to do his work. Before going he had assumed that he would be unable to endure the strain of getting under fire. Indeed he told Miles, "You mustn't expect a lot of stuff from me about how things look in a front line trench."

Miles had said, "All right. Give us the news and we won't kick."

The news had been enough to take Peter into hell and keep him there. Miles had been smart. Dying for his country might very likely have been an insufficient ideal for Peter, but there never was any place he refused to go to get a story for the Bulletin. He never knew why. There wasn't any person on the Bulletin whom Peter idolized. The owner lived in Arizona and Peter had never seen him. The paper itself was a person. That was what Miles had seemed to say that afternoon in the office when he asked Peter to go over as a war correspondent. "I think you ought to go for the paper," he said. First, of course, he teetered back and forth on his chair three times. "Sport don't look so important now," he began. "This thing is much bigger than baseball. It's going to get bigger. The syndicate's selling you to one hundred and ten papers now but that doesn't make any difference, Neale. There's no good waiting for the bottom to drop out of a thing. We've got to beat 'em to it."

"I don't know anything about war," suggested Peter.

"We don't want war stuff. I wouldn't give a damn for the regular war correspondent stuff. You can humanize all that. You've got a light touch. Some of this is going to be funny. Most of the papers are overlooking that. And mark my words, by and by we're going to get in it."

"Maybe it won't be so funny then," said Peter.

Miles paid no attention. "Don't you see the big start you'll have if you're already over there when America comes in. You'll have the hang of the thing. You'll know a lot more about it than most of the generals. You'll be on the spot to jump right into it."

Miles did not foresee that by the time America came into the war there wouldn't be much jump left in Peter. Blood and, more than that, a desperate boredom fell upon the light touch. Almost all of Peter's romantic enthusiasm was spent in his first two years on the fighting line of the English and the French. The American war correspondents used to tell with wonder and amusement of the afternoon upon which Peter started off to join the American army with the other correspondents. They just filled the compartment, but a minute before the train left the Gare du Nord, a Y. M. C. A. man who had reserved his seat bustled in. He picked out Peter and slapped him on the back. "I'm very sorry, old scout," he said, "but you've got my seat."

Peter got up. "You can have the seat, you son of a – ," he answered, "but don't you 'old scout' me."

Whatever romantic feeling might have been left in Peter about America and the war broke on the military bearing of John J. Pershing. Peter was with him the day he inspected the newly arrived First Division. Aides and war correspondents without number trailed at his heels. They followed him into a stable which had been transformed into a company kitchen. Just inside the door stood a youngster only a year or so older than Pat. He was peeling potatoes but when the General entered he dropped his work and stood at attention. Pershing went on to the far end of the stable and, as he passed by, the boy who had never seen the commander-in-chief of all the American expeditionary forces, stole just a fleeting look over his shoulder. Pershing saw him and strode back, followed by all the war correspondents and his aides.

"What's the matter with you?" he shouted at the boy. "You don't know the first thing about being a soldier." Turning to a lieutenant he said, "Take this man out and make him stand at attention for two hours." Not even the dead men upon the wire ever moved Peter to the same violent revulsion against the war. Nor did he have a chance to write it out of himself. His cable dispatch which began, "They will never call him Papa Pershing," did not get by the censors.

Censorship was among the horrors of war which Peter never thought of as he stood in the office of Miles. He was a little hesitant about accepting the assignment and the managing editor misunderstood him somewhat.

"You'll find your war stuff will sell in time just as well as sports," he said.

"I've got enough money, almost enough," Peter told him. "I don't know what to do about Pat, that's my son. He's here in school. He's fourteen. There isn't a soul to look after him."

"Yes," said Miles, "that makes it hard. I tell you what I'll do. Will you let him come and live with me and Mrs. Miles? Next year he can go to boarding-school. This thing can't last forever. You'll be back in a little while."

"Well," said Peter, "that's nice of you but I don't know how it'll work out."

"What are you planning for the boy?"

"Why, I've always figured that as soon as he got old enough I'd try to get him on the paper. I want him to be a newspaper man."

Miles broke in so eagerly that he even neglected to do his three preliminary tilts. "That's fine. Don't you see how that all fits in? You go to France for us and I'll promise you a job for the boy on the Bulletin. You won't have to just think about it. The thing's done. He's nominated for the Bulletin right now. And you can start him off the minute you think he's old enough. Don't fret about that. I'll give him an ear full of shop. Is it a bargain?"

"All right," said Peter, "I'll go over for the paper for a little while."

The little while lasted almost five years.

CHAPTER II

It was a June night in the fourth year of the war when Peter saw Maria Algarez. He was walking up the Avenue de l'Opera when a woman cut across in front of him, turning into a side street. The street was crowded with soldiers and women, sauntering and peering, but this woman was walking fast. She almost bumped into Peter. They were under a shaded light which fell on her face as she looked up. Peter looked at her without much curiosity. He did not want to invite friendliness. Hospitality had been hurled at him all the way down the avenue. He knew instantly that it was Maria. When she left him she had seemed a child. After seventeen years there was the same youthful quality in her face. The only change was, it was much more tired. And there was paint.

"Hello," said Peter.

Maria smiled at him without obvious recognition, but made no answer.

"I'm Peter Neale."

Maria's smile grew broader. "I thought I have made a conquest," she said, "and it is a husband."

She held out her hand. Peter took it, but his eager surprise at seeing her was chilled by a sudden thought.

"You're not – ," he said, but he could not phrase it. He tried again. "You're not walking here alone?"

Maria's smile became a laugh. "And what then?" she asked.

"Good God!" said Peter in horror. And then almost to himself, "And it might have been any other soldier on the avenue."

"There, there," said Maria, checking her laughter and patting him on the arm. "It is not right for me to laugh at you. I should not forget to remember that you are the worrier. You think that maybe it is my living to walk in L'avenue de L'Opera and to look for the good-looking soldier. It should please that it is you I have selected, Peter. But no, there, it is not so. Come with me. My car it is around the corner. Do not let us stand here where maybe you will be compromised. We will drive to my studio. There we can talk."

Peter followed Maria around the corner where a limousine was waiting and got in.

"How do you manage to have a car in war time?" he asked.

"It is because I am the important person. Yes, that is true. You have not heard of me, Peter? Really? That is so extraordinary. You do not know that I am the singer?"

"Well," said Peter, "of course I heard that phonograph record you sent for Pat but that was fifteen years ago. I never heard from you again. Sometimes I went to the shops and asked if they had records of Maria Algarez but none of them had ever heard of you."