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Page 5
The immediate happenings need not be set down. After events again became
coherent he was choking back sobs and listening to the minister pray for
those of unclean lips. And the minister prayed especially for one among
them that he might cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord. He knew
this to mean himself, for his mother glared over at him where he knelt;
he was grateful for the kneeling posture at that moment; he would not
have cared to sit. But all he had learned was that if you are going to
use words freely it had much better be when you are alone; this, and
that the minister had enormous feet, kneeling there with the toes of his
boots dug into the carpet.
No sooner was this language spectre laid than another confronted him;
that of class distinction. Certain people were "low" and must be shunned
by the high, unless the high perversely wished to be thought equally
low. His mother was again the arbiter. Her rule as applied to children
of his own age wrought but little hardship. She considered other
children generally to be low, and her son feared them for their deeds of
coarsely humorous violence. But he was never quite able to believe that
his father was an undesirable associate.
In all his young life he had found no sport so good as riding on the
seat beside that father while he drove the express wagon; a shiny green
wagon with a seat close to the front and a tilted rest for one's feet,
drawn by a grand black horse with a high-flung head, that would make
nothing of eating a small boy if it ever had the chance. You drove to
incoming trains, which was high adventure. But that was not all. You
loaded the wagon with packages from the trains and these you proceeded
to deliver in a leisurely and important manner. And some citizen of
weight was sure to halt the wagon and ask if that there package of stuff
from Chicago hadn't showed up yet, and it was mighty funny if it hadn't,
because it was ordered special. Whereupon you said curtly that you
didn't know anything about _that_--you couldn't fetch any package if it
hadn't come, could you? And you drove on with pleased indignation.
Yet so fine a game as this was held by his mother to be unedifying. He
would pick up a fashion of speech not genteel; he would grow to be a
"rough." She, the inconsequent fair, who had herself been captivated by
the driver of that very wagon, a gay blade directing his steed with a
flourish! To be sure, she had found him doing this in a mist of romance,
as one who must have his gallant fling at life before settling down. But
the mist had cleared. Alonzo Bean, no longer the gay blade, had settled
down upon the seat of his wagon. Once he had touched the guitar, sung an
acceptable tenor, jested with life. Now he drove soberly, sang no more,
and was concerned chiefly that his meals be served at set hours.
Small wonder, perhaps, that the mother should have feared the Bean and
laboured to cultivate the true Bunker strain in her offspring. Small
wonder that she kept him when she could from the seat of that wagon and
from the deadening influence of a father to whom Romance had broken its
fine promises. Little Bean distressed her enough by playing at
express-wagon in preference to all other games. He meant to drive a real
one when he was big enough--that is, at first. Secretly he aspired
beyond that. Some day, when he would not be afraid to climb to a higher
seat, he meant to drive the great yellow 'bus that also went to trains.
But that was a dream too splendid to tell.
In the summer of his seventh year, when his mother was finding it
increasingly difficult to supply antidotes for this poison, she even
consented to his visiting some other Beans. Unfortunately, there were no
Bunkers to harbour the child of one who had made so palpable a
m�salliance; but the elder Beans would gladly receive him, and they at
least had never driven express wagons.
To the little boy, who had no sense of their relationship, they were
persons named "Gramper" and "Grammer" whom he would do well to look down
upon because they were not Bunkers. So much he understood, and that he
was to ride in a stage and find them on a remote farm. It was to be the
summer of his first feat of daring since he had reached years of moral
discretion.
He was still so timid at the beginning of the wonderful journey that
when the kind old gentleman who drove the stage stopped his horses at a
point on the road where ripe red apples hung thickly on a tree, climbed
the fence and returned with a capacious hat full of the fruit, he was
chilled with horror at the crime. He had been freely told what was
thought of people, and what was done with them, who took things not
their own. Afraid to decline the two apples proffered by the robber, who
resumed his seat and ate brazenly of his loot, the solitary passenger
would still be no party to the outrage. He presently dropped his own two
apples over the back of the stage, and later, lacking the preacher's
courage, averred that he had eaten them--and couldn't eat another one,
thank you. He was not a little affected by the fine bravado with which
the old man ate apple after apple along miles of the road, full in the
gaze of passersby, to whom he nodded in open-faced greeting, as might an
honest man; but he was disappointed that there was no quick dragging to
a jail, nor smiting by the hand of God, which quite as often occurred,
if his mother and the minister knew anything about such matters. He
decided that at least the elderly reprobate would wake up in the dark
that very night and cry out in mortal agony under the realization of his
sin.
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