Warning Hill Read Online Free Page A

the paper. “Alf!” he said. “My God, Alf!”
    Alfred Michael looked straight at him and his eyes were no longer weary. His face had lines upon it too, crinkly little lines about the eyes.
    â€œAlf, what are you going to do now? Don’t you understand?”
    â€œDo?” Tommy’s father asked as he played gently with his watch chain.
    Mr. Cooper drew a handkerchief from his coat pocket and mopped his forehead.
    â€œYou don’t know how this hurts me,” he began.
    â€œThanks,” answered Alfred Michael. “I’m not asking you for anything.”
    â€œI know you’re not. Of course not, Alf.”
    â€œYou didn’t,” said Alfred Michael, “but you know it now.”
    For a while when they were alone, Tommy’s father stood very still and stared out of the window. When Tommy spoke, he gave a start, though Tommy did not speak loudly. Tommy looked at him round-eyed, with his hands upon the arms of that yellow wooden chair. Something had happened, Tommy knew, though of course he could not tell what.
    â€œDaddy?”
    Alfred Michael coughed and gave a tug at his cravat. There still were those wrinkles about his eyes, deeper than they had ever been before.
    â€œDaddy, what’s that other thing?”
    â€œEh?” said Alfred Michael. “What’s that?”
    â€œThe other thing—the one that doesn’t tarnish?”
    â€œGod bless my soul!” said Alfred Michael. The wrinkles around his eyes were not so deep. “I’d forgotten about that.” He sat himself down again in his swivel chair, pulling carefully at the creases in his trousers.
    â€œHow you take a licking is the other thing,” he said. “Do you follow me, Tom? It isn’t like a chair or a house, because it’s an idea, but the paint never comes off you altogether, if you take your licking like a gentleman. Remember that. Try to, will you, Tom?”
    Of course Tommy remembered, for it all seemed so very strange. Even when everything shimmered in a white remorseless light, Tommy remembered still—his father leaning forward in his swivel chair by the dark old desk in that dusty office.
    â€œTom,” Alfred Michael hesitated and drew a deep breath as though he was very tired, though of course he was not tired at all, “that boy—Spurius—that make-believe boy? Was he Spurius Lartius? Do you know the poem?”
    Of course Tommy knew it, every one of the rolling verses, that sounded like the waves on the beach by the summer house when the tide was running high.
    â€œSay it can you, Tom?”
    Tommy was glad to say it. Although of course there was no one else in the room, you might almost have thought there was, when he began the lines. You might almost have thought, if you set your mind on it, that some one else was speaking who had come from a long way off.
    Then out spake Spurius Lartius,
    A Rumnian proud was he:
    â€œLo, I will stand at thy right hand,
    And keep the bridge with thee:”
    â€œDaddy?” Tommy paused and stared. “What’s the matter, Daddy?”
    And he had a reason for asking, for Alfred Michael had leaned his elbows on the desk. His face was buried in his hands, and, though he said nothing was the matter, of course there must have been.

III
    As Alfred Michael walked home, with Tommy trotting at his side, no one could have guessed that anything was wrong. The sun glanced from his shoes and twinkled from his watch chain. His heels clicked upon the brick walks sharply, and like a period between each click, his stick descended to the ground. He even contrived to hum a tune, as they neared the bridge by Welcome River. Tommy stumbled now and then, because his eyes were not in the direction of his toes. Across the bridge of Welcome River, soft in the haze of the morning, like an arm guarding the harbor mouth, Tommy could see Warning Hill, somehow larger and more beautiful than it had ever been