Mother, I think we’ll keep him guessing. If anybody wants to buy the house, we are going to do the selling, see? It’s worth more to us than to anybody else, and we have nine days yet to pay the demand.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said his mother with a sigh. “We might lose even the fifty dollars, you know.” But she turned away satisfied that she had given her son something else to think about besides the girl who sailed away from him.
Thurlow went to bed at once, but he did not go to sleep. Neither did he spend all the time thinking about beautiful Barbara Sherwood. Instead, he was racking his brain for ways and means to save as much from the wreckage of the family fortune as he possibly could, and about the middle of the night he arose, turned on his light, and searched through the newspaper he had tried to read on the train until he found a paragraph that he had scarcely noticed when he first read it but that had come back to him with strange significance as he lie thinking. He read it twice through.
“It has been definitely decided to build a new schoolhouse in the Seventeenth Ward. The present school is overcrowded, and the capacity of the new school will have to be doubled.”
His eyes had skimmed over the page as he read it and it had meant nothing to him, but now it suddenly took on new meaning. Their home was in the Seventeenth Ward, a sort of a suburb yet counted as in the city. Perhaps there was a way out of this maze of trouble after all!
CHAPTER II
Thurlow went early the next morning to the president of the board of education and presented his suggestion that the site of the Reed home would make a central location for the new school that was proposed.
But he found to his dismay that while his suggestions were received with a degree of interest, they were put on file to be laid before the board at its regular meeting, which did not occur until five days later, too near to disaster to be counted upon. And though Thurlow urged haste and a special meeting to consider his proposition, with a ridiculously low price if the cash could be had within the requisite eight days, he found that nothing he could do or say would move that august body, the board of education, to come together before their regularly appointed time.
He went on his way sadly disappointed, yet he felt that this incident had given him an idea. There was to be a new post office in the near future. Why not try the government authorities? The Reed lot would be a splendid place. Not centrally located in the business part of the suburb yet near enough for business to grow that way. He would try.
He spent another busy day hunting up officials, gaining interviews, being sent from this one to that one, making longdistance telephone calls, and anxiously watching his small supply of cash dwindle thereby. The wasted day stretched into three at last before he gave up the post office idea, convinced that the closely woven meshes of politics were too much for his inexperience. Perhaps there might have been ways of accomplishing his aim if he had only known how and had a little more experience and influence and a little less pride. Mr. Sherwood would have known how to do it, would have had influence enough to bring it about. But Thurlow Reed felt a thrill of almost fierce satisfaction that Guerdon Sherwood was on the high seas, and that there was no way possible for even a morbid conscience to persuade him that perhaps after all for his mother’s sake he ought to consult the father of Barbara Sherwood.
He was on a suburban train, coming back from his last fruitless effort to persuade a political boss to take interest in buying the house for the new post office site. He was dog weary and discouraged. He had that same stinging sensation in his eyes and throat that he had experienced the time he had fumbled a ball and lost a game for his college, that first time he had been put on the varsity team. Of course he hadn’t been put off after all, but he had been covered with shame and humiliation and felt desperate at the time. He had wanted to hide. He had wanted to crawl away and never be seen again.
Just so he felt now, utterly beaten! He had perhaps even been wrong in preventing his mother from signing over the property at once and getting that fifty dollars. But he had been so sure that he could find a purchaser, so sure, even that morning when he had gone out, that he was on the right track and was going to win. As he settled back in the dusty plush seat and pulled his hat down over his smarting eyes, he had a feeling that the whole world was against him.
“Oh, God!” his heart cried out, “I’m up against it! I ought to be able to protect my family! They are all I’ve got, and I can’t do it.“
Thurlow Reed believed in God. He had always gone through the outward forms of prayer, though he had never seemed to be in any particular position of need before, either spiritual or physical. But now the habit of his lifetime came to his lips in a kind of despairing prayer, although he didn’t really look upon it as prayer. Just a blind crying out of his soul to the universe that things had gone wrong.
He drew a deep sighing breath of defeat and let his weary muscles relax. He had walked a long way in that suburb he had just left, hunting the man who lived in the third big estate from the station, behind twelve-foot iron grillwork, padded with thick impenetrable forests of rhododendron and hemlock and flowering shrubs. He had toiled up one long leisurely drive after another until he found the right place, only to discover the man for whom he searched was at the country club three miles away. He had walked a hole in the sole of his shoe and acquired a pebble or two inside, and he hadn’t the money now to purchase new shoes. He lifted one foot across his knee and surveyed the limp sole despairingly. He had never had to consider small things like repairs before. Shoes had always been plenty. But there were going to be a lot of things like this presently. The thought startled his tired consciousness with amazing revelation. He had grown up overnight, and to this! It came to him that he was as far from the life that had been his, in name at least, when he had gone down to New York to bid good-bye to Barbara as one could possibly be. He had not yet sensed that there were still depths of life that he had not even imagined.
He drew another deep sighing breath and put the perforated sole quickly down on the floor where he could not see it. He couldn’t think about it anymore. He couldn’t stand another thing till he got rested. He had to get rested before he got home, or his mother would suffer just looking at his face. That was the trouble: Mother sensed everything and suffered so. One couldn’t hide anything from her. Even if outwardly he seemed to have succeeded in camouflaging the state of things, she sensed it. Smiled with him and tried to let him think he had deceived her, yet all the time she was suffering with him just as if she had known exactly how things stood. What was the use? Why try any further? There were only four days, and what more could he do than he had done? “Oh, God!” It was just a weary exclamation, showing his limit of despair. Yet how he hated to give up and let that swine of a lawyer beat him. Let him fix that throttling hold on him for life unless he paid that enormous sum. His indignation rose, but his weariness rose also, and he sank back in the seat with his eyes closed and wished he might go to sleep and forget it all.
In front of him sat two women garbed in afternoon outfitswhite gloves, delicate garments, tricky hats that seemed simple yet made their wearers look years younger than their ages. Their voices were low and well modulated; their speech was cultured and refined. They were talking of social affairs. By their conversation, he learned vaguely that they had been to a tea or bridge party or some affair of that sort and were on their way back to their homes in his own part of the city. He paid no more heed to them than if they had been the paneling on the ceiling of the car above him. They were just a part of the place where he was sitting for the time.
Then suddenly with a single sentence their words came alive as astonishingly as if the paneling above him had spoken to him and shown an interest in his problems.
“Oh,
