The Road | Page 5

had gained a moment for breath. While he pondered on time's changes,
I prepared the finishing touches of my story.
"You remember the custom-house at Bombay?"

He remembered it.
"Burned to the ground," I announced.
"Do you remember Jim Wan?" he came back at me. "Dead," I said; but
who the devil Jim Wan was I hadn't the slightest idea.
I was on thin ice again.
"Do you remember Billy Harper, at Shanghai?" I queried back at him
quickly.
That aged sailorman worked hard to recollect, but the Billy Harper of
my imagination was beyond his faded memory.
"Of course you remember Billy Harper," I insisted. "Everybody knows
him. He's been there forty years. Well, he's still there, that's all."
And then the miracle happened. The sailorman remembered Billy
Harper. Perhaps there was a Billy Harper, and perhaps he had been in
Shanghai for forty years and was still there; but it was news to me.
For fully half an hour longer, the sailorman and I talked on in similar
fashion. In the end he told the policemen that I was what I represented
myself to be, and after a night's lodging and a breakfast I was released
to wander on westward to my married sister in San Francisco.
But to return to the woman in Reno who opened her door to me in the
deepening twilight. At the first glimpse of her kindly face I took my
cue. I became a sweet, innocent, unfortunate lad. I couldn't speak. I
opened my mouth and closed it again. Never in my life before had I
asked any one for food. My embarrassment was painful, extreme. I was
ashamed. I, who looked upon begging as a delightful whimsicality,
thumbed myself over into a true son of Mrs. Grundy, burdened with all
her bourgeois morality. Only the harsh pangs of the belly-need could
compel me to do so degraded and ignoble a thing as beg for food. And
into my face I strove to throw all the wan wistfulness of famished and
ingenuous youth unused to mendicancy.

"You are hungry, my poor boy," she said.
I had made her speak first.
I nodded my head and gulped.
"It is the first time I have ever... asked," I faltered.
"Come right in." The door swung open. "We have already finished
eating, but the fire is burning and I can get something up for you."
She looked at me closely when she got me into the light.
"I wish my boy were as healthy and strong as you," she said. "But he is
not strong. He sometimes falls down. He just fell down this afternoon
and hurt himself badly, the poor dear."
She mothered him with her voice, with an ineffable tenderness in it that
I yearned to appropriate. I glanced at him. He sat across the table,
slender and pale, his head swathed in bandages. He did not move, but
his eyes, bright in the lamplight, were fixed upon me in a steady and
wondering stare.
"Just like my poor father," I said. "He had the falling sickness. Some
kind of vertigo. It puzzled the doctors. They never could make out what
was the matter with him."
"He is dead?" she queried gently, setting before me half a dozen
soft-boiled eggs.
"Dead," I gulped. "Two weeks ago. I was with him when it happened.
We were crossing the street together. He fell right down. He was never
conscious again. They carried him into a drug-store. He died there."
And thereat I developed the pitiful tale of my father -- how, after my
mother's death, he and I had gone to San Francisco from the ranch; how
his pension (he was an old soldier), and the little other money he had,
was not enough; and how he had tried book-canvassing. Also, I
narrated my own woes during the few days after his death that I had

spent alone and forlorn on the streets of San Francisco. While that good
woman warmed up biscuits, fried bacon, and cooked more eggs, and
while I kept pace with her in taking care of all that she placed before
me, I enlarged the picture of that poor orphan boy and filled in the
details. I became that poor boy. I believed in him as I believed in the
beautiful eggs I was devouring. I could have wept for myself. I know
the tears did get into my voice at times. It was very effective.
In fact, with every touch I added to the picture, that kind soul gave me
something also. She made up a lunch for me to carry away. She put in
many boiled eggs, pepper and salt, and other things, and a big apple.
She provided me with three pairs of thick red woollen socks. She gave
me clean