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.