LITMIR.BIZ

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I do now?"

      Fortunately, the conduct of the baby was more admirable than anything Peter had yet known. He put it in the middle of the bed where it promptly went to sleep. Peter sat in a chair close by and watched. Suddenly something happened which startled him. Without waking the child rolled over and buried its head in the pillow face downward. Peter knew that it would not smother. He had slept exactly that way himself for twenty-five years.

      There was no clock in the house and Peter had no notion of how long he waited. Presently the child woke and began to cry petulantly. A search for pins was resented and the wailing took on its characteristic vigor.

      "Don't do that," said Peter. He picked the child up, carried it to the window and back again without good results. Then he said, "Listen!" Peter cleared his throat. "Rockabye, baby, on the tree top," he began but to no avail. He wasn't very sure of the tune. There was only one song of which he was confident. "Oh, Harvard was old Harvard when Yale was but a pup," struck up Peter. "And Harvard will be Harvard still when Yale is all gone up, And if any Eli son of a – ."

      Instinctively Peter began to hum the rest. It did not seem to him just the sort of song he should sing to his baby. And yet it proved exactly right. The child went off to sleep again and remained that way while Peter disentangled it. A few minutes later Kate came in. "I was thinking, Mr. Neale," she said, "that there was no clothes for the child." She stepped across to the bed. "Oh, the little angel. Now the deep sleep does be on him. I found some old things and brought them. I hope he was no trouble to you."

      "No," said Peter, mopping his forehead. "He wasn't so much trouble. Have you got everything you need? I'm going to leave you some money for milk and food and things. Can you stay with him right along now till your day off?"

      "I can that."

      "Well, let's see. This is Tuesday. I'm going out for awhile. I won't be back tonight. Maybe I won't be back tomorrow. Anyhow I'll be back before Sunday. Take good care of him."

      Peter had to steady himself going down the stairs to the street. He was shaky and wringing with perspiration. He felt as if he had pitched a nine inning game with the score nothing to nothing all the way. He just had to get out of the house. The ache which had died down the night before was back again. "I guess I've got to get drunk," thought Peter.

      CHAPTER VII

      When Peter reached the corner he found that it was only half-past twelve. It was much too early to get drunk. Daylight drinking had always seemed to him disgusting. As a matter of fact, he was contemplating the spree merely as a means to an end. In order to forget Maria he must think of someone else and it would suit his purpose that the other person should be someone rowdy and degraded. He would rub himself with mud to ease the numbness of his spirit. He knew that he could never do it without drinking. First many gates must be unlocked. Maria had been right when she said that Peter was afraid of sex. When he was quite a small boy somebody had told him about flowers and it meant nothing to him. It had seemed merely a fairy story rather more dull than usual. Much later a red-haired boy who lived five houses away had talked to Peter and frightened and disgusted him. After that he had run away when other boys tried to tell him anything about these mysteries. Of course his squeamishness had been marked and he became the butt of every youngster with any talent for smut. Finding that flight was useless Peter adopted a new system and fought fiercely with anyone who taunted him. He was bigger and stronger than most of the other boys and he soon piled up an imposing list of victims to his prowess. He fought so well that his ignorance remained almost unimpaired. Once when he was in the act of belaboring a companion who had tried to outline for him the plot of a book called "Only A Boy," a woman passing by had interrupted the fight. She wanted to know if Peter was not ashamed of himself. Defensively he answered that the other boy had been "talking dirty." Immediately the passerby deluged Peter with admiration. She took down his name and address and later he received by mail a Bible, leather bound, and on the flyleaf was the inscription "To a young Sir Galahad." Peter never took any particular pride in this gift.

      He knew in his heart that his purity rested solidly on fear. He burned with curiosity. At times he actually invited lewd confidences though making every pretence of anger when they were imparted to him. Respite came to him for a year or two before he went to college because athletics became his god. He excelled all competitors in school and was generally rated the best right-handed pitcher in the metropolitan district. Baseball filled all his thoughts waking and sleeping, and in the autumn it was football, although in this branch of sport he was by no means as proficient. Indeed when he went to Harvard at the age of seventeen he was dropped from the varsity squad in the first cut and later from the freshmen.

      At this particular time, when he was much more foot-loose than usual, the annual medical lecture to the Freshmen was delivered. It was known in unofficial circles as Smut One and attendance was compulsory. Very gravely and severely the old doctor unfolded his tale of horrors. The spirit was not unlike that of a traditional hell-fire sermon. Peter heard the man half through and then fainted, toppling over from his seat across an aisle. He was carried downstairs into the fresh air and did not come back. But he had heard enough to be convinced that this sex business was even worse than it had seemed in the crude and rowdy flashes which had come to him from his companions. And yet the fact that it was horrible by no means served to keep his thoughts clear of the subject. The doctor had talked entirely of the dangers and disgraces of immorality. Peter could not escape the only partially conscious surmise that unspeakable delights and wonders must lie within this circle of leaping flames. This impression was confirmed when he happened in the college library to come across a poem by Carew called "The Rapture." Sex seemed to him now by far the most romantic and adventurous thing in life. The fact that there were monsters and dragons to be dared made it all the more a piece with the unforgotten tales of childhood concerning giant killers and knights-errant.

      Peter was no longer satisfied to be Galahad. He wanted to be Launcelot. And still he was afraid. He found out that Columbus Avenue in Boston was a street largely given over to women and night after night he used to slink about dark corners hoping and dreading that somebody would speak to him. Whenever a "Hello dearie" came to him out of the darkness Peter trembled. "No," he would say, "I'm sorry. I've got a very important engagement. I've got to go right along. I must go right along. Sure, I'll be here at this same time tomorrow night."

      Often he would carry on some such dialogue a dozen times in an evening and then one night a woman, more stalwart and audacious than any he had yet encountered, seized him by the arm. "Sonny," she said, "I'm not going to let you waste my time. You're not going any place except with me. Now march along."

      Peter marched. That was why he told Maria Algarez that he was not quite a good man himself.

      For a time disillusion supplanted turmoil in the mind of Peter. He found that the romanticists were just as fraudulent as the moralists. Don Juan seemed to him as great a fake as Galahad. Besides in the spring the call for baseball candidates came along and Peter surprised the college world by being the only Freshman to win a place on the varsity nine. He pitched the second game against Yale and won by a score of 2 to 0. Life meant something after all. Bending a third strike across the knees of a man with a Y on his chest gave a dignity to existence which it had never before possessed. Peter was done with hot thoughts and cold ones. Unfortunately he was also done with thoughts about examinations. French was his most abject failure, but he did badly enough in everything else to be told that his college days were over.

      Still he was bereft of romance for no more than a month. He caught on with the sporting department of the Bulletin early in August and made an almost instantaneous hit. Here again he found satisfaction in the gait and color of life. Women were not rigorously excluded from the scheme of things, but they were not important. He saw them in the dance halls where he went after hours and talked to them and drank with them, but they served merely as minor characters. The talk which animated this existence for Peter was all of the shop. A reporter from San Francisco, named Rusk, suddenly discovered to his amazement and delight that here was a man eager to hear his tales of newspaper work along the waterfront in the days when the coast towns were still unregenerate. Everybody else on the Bulletin was in the habit of groaning loudly whenever Rusk began, "In the old days on the waterfront – ," but Peter listened with the most intense sort of interest to Rusk's entire stock of anecdotes. By and by Rusk had to make

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