He had heard much about Ireland and talked much about it since he came to America--a great deal more than he had ever heard or talked about it at home. And in his eyes now it had taken on a dim, distorted shape and spirit. The physical contours of it he had forgotten--the lush green hillsides, the fruitful orchards, the kine heavy with fat, the dim, warm houses--all these were to him as though they had never been. Instead of them, he saw a frail, worn country, with a vague spiritual light emanating from it, like the light from the face of a man who knows that death is near him and is resigned to it. The people about him mentioned it with sympathetic voices. They spoke of the poverty of it, with a sort of contemptuous affection. And little by little Grant came to think of it in that way, too, as one thinks of a poor but worthy relative.
"There 's no doubt to it," he would say to himself; "a man doesn't get a chance there. He has to come over here." And he would look about his store with proud satisfaction.
He began to think even of his own home as a place that the poisonous finger of poverty had touched; and for a year now, and more, he had thought of returning to see it. Maybe he could do something for the people at home. A few pounds would come in useful. And, apart from that, he could tell them some things that would help them along. He would make them "get a move on," as the New York phrase went. Perhaps he would take Joe, his brother, out and give him a chance to show what he had in him. Perhaps they might all come out with him--the father and mother too.
"Ay! Why not!" he would argue. "Why shouldn't they? What's there for them in Ireland?"
He ruminated over the idea every day as he came from work to the brown stone boarding-house where he lived, in Schermerhorn Street, a dingy, unpalatable sort of place that had become a home to him. There were employees of department-stores there; and an occasional theatrical couple stayed a week in it, a week electric with criticism. In the summer evenings the boarders sat on the stoop, and in the winter they congregated inside to be played to in insufficient light on a tinkling piano. For Grant the place had a metropolitan quality that others sought in the great hotels.
And, with the same care he had used in mapping out his business career, he watched for somebody to marry.
He found her in the boarding-house--a trim and rather pale girl, who acted as though she were twenty and looked twenty-eight, but whom the Vital Statistics Bureau had registered as having been born thirty years before. Her hair was black and glossy, and her eyes were big and black and lustrous; her face, outside those features, was the face of a hundred others. But what captivated Grant about her was her chicness, her quality of being up-to-the-minute in dress and deed and word. Grant liked the flare of her wide skirts and the gray suede shoes lacing up the sides. He liked the faint powder on her face, and her carefully cultured eyebrows. He liked her talk of skating and of the new theatrical pieces, and her ability to do the latest twirls in the one-step. Her name was Miss Levine--Ada Levine.
"It's not every man could have a wife like that!" he told himself; and he thought of the awe in which his people in Ireland would behold her.
She talked to him interestedly of his prospects and the trend of business in his direction; and that pleased him, for, what with that interest and with the training she received in the department-store where she worked, she would be exactly what he needed to get on in the world. He told her of his intention of going back home for a month, of putting the store in the care of a friend of his from the old business where he had worked.
"And when I come back," he said, "I 'd like to say something to you." She sat on the steps quietly and lowered her eyes demurely. "That is," he continued, "if nobody gets there before me."
She looked up at him and smiled.
"That's a date," she agreed.
His heart expanded blithely. Everything was settled now. Life showed in front of him like a straight line. A wife like that! And his thriving business! Now he would go back to Ireland and show them something!
III
He had been home for a month and he had made no move toward returning--not that it was ever out of his mind for an instant, but it pleased him to stay there and savor the ripe mellow ness of everything as he might savor a fruit. Summer was fairly in and the yellow blossoms had fallen from the gorse, but roses were blooming in every garden, great creamy ones and others with the vivid red of an autumn sunset.
The horse-chestnuts were heavy with balloons of white flowers, and every evening the bees returned drowsy from the heather of the purple mountains. There was something in it all that he had missed for years and that he was greedy for.
At first he had gone about, a splendid figure, in the clothes he had brought with him from America: suits of fine broadcloth, and buttoned shoes, and a watch that was held in place by a fob. But nobody seemed impressed by this splendor and a few were covertly amused; and suddenly he had discarded it in a sort of shame, returning to the rich tweeds of his own people. He had helped a little about the farm, finding again a lost aptitude in milking a cow and in handling a horse in a dog-cart. He had gone to the fairs and put in a shrewd word here and there on the price of a colt. He had gaped in wonder at the antics of the Punch-and-Judy show and had listened to the croon of the ballad-singer. He lost sixpences with the trick-of-the-loop man and with the artist of the three cards. All through it he tried to keep in his mind and on his face the attitude of a grown-up who is playing a child's game, a patronizing superiority.
"If they could only see this at Coney Island," he thought, "they would laugh their heads off."
And he tried to remember as enjoyable the days he had spent there in search of amusement, returning in the evening a battered and limp and irritated rag.
It was the evening of the Newry Fair when he began to think seriously of returning. They were all sitting in the great stone-flagged kitchen of the farm-house. From the long deal table in the middle of the room a huge lamp filled the space with creamy light, and in the lighted fireplace a kettle purred, hanging from its crane. The kitchen rafters were black and amber from the smoke of four generations, and below them hung at intervals long flitches of bacon. Over the mantel were the guns he remembered from his boyhood--his father's double-barreled fowling-piece with the long, true barrels; his grandfather's old musket; and the flintlock his great-grandfather had borne when he went out with Lord Edward in '98.
His father sat by the table, reading a paper diligently, and he was surprised to see how hale the old man looked; he was sixty now and looked fifteen years younger. His mother fussed about with a pannikin of milk, followed by three mewing kittens, while in a corner of the room Joe was binding whipcord about the handle of a fishing-rod, occasionally making it swish through the air with a keen sibilant sound like the hiss of a snake.
"I think I 'll be going back soon," Grant said suddenly. "I think I 'd better be getting along."
His mother looked at him sharply, but said nothing. Joe lowered his rod. His father raised his eyes from his paper.
"And what would you be doing that for?" he asked slowly. "Sure, I thought you were going to stay with us."
"I can't be doing that," Grant answered easily. "I 've got my business over there. And I 've got to be making my way in the world."
"And why can't you stay and do it here?" the old man went on.
"Ah, sure, what would I be doing here?" Grant began impatiently. "There 's nothing for a man here. On the other side I 've got a place of my own, made by my own hands in twelve years. That's something, is n't it?"
"There 's no use talking to you," his father said resignedly. "If you must go, you must go. But if you were wise, Willie John, you would take whatever money you 've made in America and buy that place of Peter McKenna's down the road. You 'd get it cheap now. And after I 'm gone the farm goes to you and Joe. If you have n't got enough money I 'll lend it to you."
"No, thank you," Grant replied a little surlily. "I 'll get back to my own place."
"Ah, well--" his father turned back to his paper--"have it your own way."
Joe sent the rod swishing through the air a couple of times. He turned to Grant with a quick smile.
"It's not back to your business you want to be getting, Willie John," he laughed. "You want to be getting back to where the good times are. In a week or two you 'll be walking up Broadway, looking at the big buildings you do be telling about. Or going down Fifth Avenue, maybe, riding in a motor-car. Or hanging round all day drinking highballs with the millionaires. That's what you will be after. Business!"
Grant turned on him with a sudden gust of anger.